Monday 29 June: The Archbishop, the removal of memorials and depictions of Jesus as white

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/06/28/letters-archbishop-removal-memorials-depictions-jesus-white/

798 thoughts on “Monday 29 June: The Archbishop, the removal of memorials and depictions of Jesus as white”

  1. “Florence Pugh apologises for cultural appropriation after admitting wearing cornrows as a teenager
    “At the time I honestly did not think that I was doing anything wrong,” she said.”

    Morning Major.
    Morning Fawlty.

    Before you ask, I dont know who Florence Pugh is. The point is, why the apology for a hairstyle (except for the fact that it looks ridiculosu)?
    Can we expect also, an apology from all the black and coloured women and men who straighten their hair hmmm?

      1. Perhaps her career has stalled a bit? Nothing like a bit of free publicity to get things moving again – hold that band wagon, I need to get on!!

        1. Yo Fizzz

          and to be modern

          with mrs Cuthbert, mrs Dibble and mr wife ofGrump.

    4. Can we expect also, an apology from all the black and coloured women and men who straighten their hair hmmm?

      Can we expect also, an apology from all the black and coloured women and men who use the internet, drive cars, travel in planes and trains, use electricity, watch TV, listen to the radio, use written language, use any European language, western medicine etc?

      Obviously not, as those are just there for everyone to use, like rainfall or sunshine. No one invented them, no culture is responsible.

      But braiding hair, which has almost certainly been practised by every human group in history (and before) oh no, that’s serious.

      As I’ve already written elsewhere today – stepping back here we should note that the whole concept of cultural appropriation is utter BS to it’s very core. Groups of people have always appropriated bits of other people’s cultures whether it be hair styles, clothes, music, recipes, whatever.

      3. Should all black people apologise for wearing suits, trainers or any other western item of clothing?

    5. I seem to remember that at one time there were adverts in Tube stations for hair creams and shampoos to straighten crinkly and fuzzy hair. All the models were black and Negroid.

    6. Can we expect an apology from a certain black comedian turned actor whose start in celeb life was down to him doing a voice impression of white Frank Spencer on a talent show years ago?

  2. Good Morning Folks,

    Bright start here, bit breezy, shouldn’t affect the golf ball to much.

  4. Trump: I was not told about ‘Russian bounties’ plot because it was not credible. 29 June 2020.

    But the White House press secretary, the director of national intelligence (DNI), and now the president himself all denied at the weekend that news of a secret Russian paid assassinations plot against US troops ever made it to Trump’s inner circle.

    “I have confirmed that neither the president nor the vice president were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday,” intelligence director John Ratcliffe said in a statement Saturday. “The White House statement addressing this issue earlier today, which denied such a briefing occurred, was accurate.”

    They were never briefed because it is a stupid idea dreamed up by stupid people for stupid readers!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/28/trump-denies-knowledge-of-russian-bounties-us-troops

    2. I didn’t realise the Taliban need paying for their hobby. I thought they were enthusiastic amateurs.

  5. Good stuff from a Brexit party candidate

    Why does Black Lives Matter only care about black lives when white people are threatening them?

    The movement presents an inaccurate and infantilising view of society, which strips black people of all agency

    IKE IJEH – 28 June 2020 • 3:35pm

    On a muggy night in August 2016, three laughing Dallas police officers pinned 32-year-old Tony Timpa to the ground, pushed his face into the grass, placed a knee on his back and held him there for 14 minutes until he was dead. The parallels with the appalling killing of George Floyd are disturbing and uncanny. Like Floyd, Timpa was unarmed, pleaded for his life, repeatedly called for help and begged policemen to stop.

    But both cases do differ in one significant respect; Tony Timpa was white. The cases and the wildly differing public and political reactions to them expose some disturbing and inconvenient truths for the ascendant Black Lives Matter movement and for society as whole. Timpa’s only crime was calling the police officers (one of whom was black) for help as a result of taking illegal drugs after coming off his medication for depression and schizophrenia.

    Floyd on the other hand had been a criminal who, despite being killed during an extended stretch of apparent probity, had served several long stints in prison for violent crimes including breaking into a pregnant woman’s home in the middle of the night and pressing a loaded gun into her belly. Yet Floyd has been deified by politicians and media outlets across the world while Timpa – whose killers have never faced the justice awaiting Floyd’s – is unknown. Why?

    It would be both foolish and offensive not to acknowledge the horrendous catalogue of suffering and injustice endured by black Americans like Floyd at the hands of US police. But the death of Timpa and the thousands of other Americans of all colours who have died as a result of police brutality exposes the inflammatory Black Lives Matter narrative of a racist police force specifically killing black people as a myth.

    Between 2015 and 2019 black people accounted for 26.4 per cent of all those killed by US police while almost double that figure, 50.3 per cent, were white. Equally, while black Americans account for just 12 per cent of the population they are responsible for 52.5 per cent of all murders, with the vast majority of victims also being black. In London, despite comprising just 13 per cent of the population, almost half of all murder suspects and victims are also black. And of the 163 people killed in British police custody in the past 10 years, just 13 were black.

    Every death inflicted by the police is a tragedy. But does the fact that white people are still 25 per cent more likely to die in British police custody than black people really represent the “pandemic” of black people being killed “every day” that BLM and, on occasion, the BBC and broadcasters, have parroted since Floyd’s death? Why then, if black lives really do matter, is BLM perpetuating a false narrative that black people exist at the mercy of homicidal white persecution, and why are they not exposing the reality that the biggest killer of black people is very often our own community? Where is their outrage at the scores of young black adults killed by other young black adults on the streets of London and Chicago? And why are BLM abetted in their campaign of misinformation and incitement by an irresponsible mainstream media and a supine political class?

    The answer is clear. It is because BLM feeds into the same wretched culture of victimhood and oppression that has been cynically championed by the left for decades. By continually caricaturing black people as perpetual victims of systemic white racism it infantilises them by depicting us as stupid, helpless and impotent cultural punchbags, forever crushed beneath externalised discriminatory forces beyond our control.

    It is a grotesque form of reanimated cultural imperialism that envisages a world in which every black action can only ever be a reaction to white provocation, as if we were little more than flaccid puppet minstrels forever tied to the string of white mastermind omnipotence. In so doing, black people are absolved of our need to take responsibility for our own actions and futures and must instead await salvation by accepting that our own freedom and empowerment are not ours to claim but a white establishment’s to give.

    Oddly, it is a cult enthusiastically energised by successful black personalities, with the likes of John Boyega, Afua Hirsch and Stormzy absurdly claiming that the society in which they gained their own success is somehow systemically inclined to withhold it from all their black peers. And this cult is founded on a toxic crucible: slavery. Martin Luther King talked of freedom far more than he talked of slavery. Yet now the civil rights lexicon has been reversed and slavery is now the historical deadweight from which BLM and its liberal enablers refuse to let black people escape.

    Yes, the Atlantic slave trade was a horrendous evil. But to claim that a 400-year-old event that adapted barbarous Arab and African practices that had already been in place for thousands of years is responsible for unilaterally framing the life choices and experiences of black people today is as preposterous as suggesting that cruise ship bookings are still hampered by the Titanic. It is also a claim that might attain more integrity were it accompanied by even a scintilla of concern for the estimated 40 million people worldwide trapped in slavery today.

    BLM’s twisted narratives have been underscored by a liberal establishment and mainstream media that deploys identity politics to objectify and homogenise black people. In so doing it offensively lumps all black people into a vast cultural tick-box in which, by magical virtue of our pigmentation, we have all been gifted with the telepathic ability to think, eat, act and talk exactly the same way.

    Yet by ignorantly conflating the richness and diversity of the black experience into a single diminished entity, patronising, reductionist terms like the black and dreaded BAME “community” invariably flow and perpetuate an embattled sense of “otherness” that merely succeeds in further separating and marginalising black people from mainstream society.

    And, like all good liberal pogroms, this homogenisation is specifically designed to disenfranchise individuality, sever the links between black people and our brothers and sisters in other racial groups and, most importantly, to achieve the hallowed liberal goal of glorifying difference. And glorifying difference is exactly what BLM and the Marxist junta it seeks to establish is all about.

    True integration – where character matters more than colour and George Floyd could just as easily have become a cardiologist as a criminal – was the utopian vision on which Martin Luther King based his dream, and it should be the goal of all mature Western democracies. But celebrating difference is intolerable to a guilt-ridden liberal elite groggy on the opiate of multiculturalism. Instead it embraced the tyranny of diversity to obscure integration and emphasise what divides us rather than what unites us.

    We now see this tyranny being prosecuted in a McCarthyan culture war that seeks to expunge white post-imperialist liberal guilt and self-loathing by unilaterally imposing its revisionist, puritanical values on society and toppling all ideological dissenters from Gone With the Wind to historical statues. But make no mistake, this naïve identinarian purge could not just incite the odious far right but sow enough resentment and division to set back race relations by years.

    Racism is real and horrific and must be rooted out wherever it is found. But the UK, and England in particular, has offered sanctuary and prosperity to generations of immigrants who in turn have helped to transform it into one of the most welcoming and inclusive societies in the world. Moreover the way to defeat racism is to not through the divisive rhetoric and crass militancy of a movement that seeks to commoditise black suffering to perpetuate the divisive, defeatist myth of white privilege.

    The answer is for black people not to define ourselves by how others may define us but to realise that we and we alone are the key to empowering our lives and claiming the freedom that is everyone’s right. Yes, of course the lives of George Floyd and all black people matter. But so too did the life of Tony Timpa. And the life of the innocent unborn black baby Floyd threatened to execute in its mother’s womb.

    Until black people take responsibility for their role in ending and oppressing the lives of other black people and until the regressive liberal elite realises that sowing division and resentment will lead to genuine systemic inequality, then black lives will only continue to matter on the rare occasions when white people take them.

    Ike Ijeh is an architect and critic

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/28/does-black-lives-matter-care-black-lives-white-people-threatening/

    No comments

    1. I have as much reason as any to take the knee in solidarity with the plight of Tony Timpa, and to fly a WLM banner over a football match where the players are not permitted to wear such slogans on their shirts or to take the knee for Tony.

      My own blond-haired and blue-eyed younger brother is a paranoid schizophrenic who has been in and out of prison and secure mental hospital most of his life. On several occasions he has been in the very position of calling for assistance when having a turn. I remember one time he wandered into hospital reception with a carrier bag. “You’ll never guess what I’ve got in this bag?” he announced to Reception, It was a crossbow he got from a drug-dealing mate in Kings Cross and he was going to get rid of the bad people. Fortunately for him, the receptionist called in some white coats who took him in, rather than a burly copper with a well-worn arresting knee.

      Interestingly, the one group of people he could be trusted with, even in his craziest and most violent state of mind, are children. Children do not try to impose their authority over him, and he feels it his life’s passion to protect them and to do whatever he can for them. He has a son and a daughter who are sane and normal, and both lovely people. His daughter is happily married with a son and is expecting another. She used her experience by becoming a social worker, and is good at it.

      1. When (and why) did the risible American expression “take the knee” replace the more pleasing and apposite English “kneel” or “genuflect”?

        1. English English shows all too clearly what the people are doing.
          The American expression sound ‘positive’ as if it were a voluntary action.

        2. I am grateful that it has. It would add to the offence to confuse it with a genuine sign of humble religious ritual, often done by Christians. I respect those who kneel or genuflect in church and do so myself; I have nothing but contempt for those that “take the knee”.

          It is like the title “Ms” which I use personally to insult a woman, depicting her as a grasping, strident, man-hating harridan. I first heard it used that way by the fictional barrister Horace Rumpole when referring to his feminist junior Ms Liz Probert.

          3. I don’t see Ms as an insult – I tend to use it on an envelope when I don’t know the recipient’s marital status.

          4. I use it for women who are married but who, for one reason or another, have not taken their husband’s surname. They are not Mrs X because they don’t use Mr X’s name, but they are not Miss Y, either, because they are married.

          5. Exacto.
            Why not use it for all women regardless? Not distinguishing males’ marital status seems to work OK.

          7. Saves me bothering them with advances, and more importantly it enables me to make advances, rather than all attempts to engage with the opposite sex romantically to be deemed abusive, as is the case today. I still believe (and this is one reason I became a Catholic back in 2002) that being united in marriage is a different entity to being single. It implies that someone has the emotional, financial and domestic support of a spouse, and is an important indicator of social status and obligation to a family.

            Actually, I’d be quite happy for there to be a male equivalent of Miss and Mrs. At the moment, we just have Master and Mr, which signifies whether we have come of age, and the antiquated title of ‘Esquire’ which depicts a landowner or householder. I’d also be quite amenable to extending the title to those in civil partnerships or gay unions, since the important consideration is social recognition, rather than the narrower and stricter definitions of a marriage.

            The argument against is purely over the awkwardness of getting the title right with strangers and acquaintances where the marital status is unknown. Non-social letters are particularly difficult. I tend to use the full name, rather than the title, where there is doubt, but this feels wrong when a certain formality is required. Face-to-face, it’s easy, since there is the ring, but since a lot of encounters are online or distant, there isn’t that luxury, and not everybody in a bonding is prepared to wear a ring.

          8. But do you feel awkward addressing a male not knowing whether he is married?
            Why not use Ms which is non specific, like Mr.

          9. Not really. I’d feel it a common courtesy to take the trouble to recognise his marital status. Maybe there was not the time or inclination in recent times to do this for women (and feminists rather resent the concept of marriage anyway, since they regard it as a form of slavery).

            I was the best man at the wedding of one of my best friends back in 2016. I have known him since the early 1990s, and he was a bachelor until well into his sixties. It’s a long story, but he has the energy of someone 20 years younger, but is partial to older women. He kept wearing the old dears out until he found someone ten years older with a similar reputation with her men. After several years concerted effort to wear the other out, they called it a draw and got married.

            He is quite a different person married than when he was single. He was always a one-man-band, a master of his own ceremonies and the king of his castle on the hill. Married, I always consider them as a couple with equal status. Sure, it dilutes his own personal power and freedom, but as a couple, with mutual domestic and emotional support, one can get so much more done and if younger, there are children to make and raise, which continues one’s legacy after death.

            She is a plumber by trade and inclination, so set about their central heating with gusto, and then hired a digger one day to make a pond. He then built an arched cloister, so they end up having their morning refreshment in the Taj Mahal, or at least a British approximation of it. He tends to buy the cheapest sausages, but she insisted on premium ones.

          1. Has the middle bloke got one of those lockdown hair cuts?

            The bloke n the right – what’s wrong with his arm – oh, hang on, he’s slopey shouldered.

  6. Visitors use Balmoral Estate as an outdoor toilet. 28 June 2020.

    Rangers at the Balmoral Estate have found discarded waste and wipes near trails as people have used the grounds as a wild toilet.

    Public toilets at the site have been closed, and rangers tweeted: “Disappointed to see so many wipes discarded on the Estate today. Next to paths and monuments. Please remember there are no public toilets open for miles around at the moment.”

    The estate said the toilets near Loch Muick, managed by Aberdeenshire Council, have been closed but that people had been “breaking into them”.

    When ya gotta go. Yer gotta go!

    https://www.google.com/search?q=balmoral&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjh0rTrrKbqAhUbURUIHQYvDhoQ_AUoA3oECA8QBQ&biw=1318&bih=816

  7. I believe there was another stabbing in Glasgow yesterday. The news flickered on one or two news sites for a few seconds and then disappeared. Can’t possibly think why!

    Anyone know where one can check for any updates?

  8. SIR — We hear of a backlog of about 40,000 trials waiting to be heard in crown courts (Letters, June 24), but the mountain of cases waiting to be dealt with at magistrates’ courts is vastly higher at nearly 500,000, and growing.

    This is worrying when you consider three important issues. First most citizens are far more anxious about criminal activities local to them, such as vandalism, illegal drug taking, thefts, graffiti, anti-social behaviour and so on. These offences are usually dealt with at magistrates’ courts.

    Secondly, 100 per cent of all criminal cases start at magistrates’ courts – where at least 95 per cent are also concluded. (I have often presided on JP benches hearing trials lasting several days.)

    Thirdly, and above all, if citizens lose faith in our judicial process, many will be tempted to take the law into their own hands, as we last saw in 2011 following a series of riots in this country. The maxim “Justice delayed is justice denied” has never been more true.

    Peter Power JP
    Lyndhurst, Hampshire

    It is a lucid and unassailable fact, Your Worship, that when a population becomes unsustainably large then, by continuation, the crime rate rockets.

    This is an incontestable fact of life and one that successive waves of politicians seem to be institutionally impervious to.

    1. This man is living in cloud cuckoo land. Local courts have been systematically closed over the past 10 years or so as Alf will testify. There used to be at least 11 magistrates’ courts in pre 2010 in Surrey and there was indeed local justice for local defendants. Now there are only 2. A feasibility study was carried out in Woking, where Alf was an usher for 10 years, as the PTB were going to close “a court” to “save money”. Out of the 4 that were left in 2010 they closed Woking – the only magistrates’ court that fulfilled all the criteria. They had, of course, already decided Woking was to close. Now there are only 2 courts left, one in Staines and Guildford.

      I might add that, when these courts were taken under the jurisdiction of the Department of Constitutional Affairs in 2005, an enormous hierarchy of HR and other “managers” proliferated at vastly increased cost, eventually morphing into the Ministry of Justice, no doubt at an even higher cost.

      So no more “local” justice and the costs rocketed. What’s not to like!

      The Magistrates’ Courts committee used to run these courts, a very simple structure and inexpensive to run.

      I personally believe that the plan behind all this is to gradually change our judicial system into the continental one. It will again be “to save money”. Peter Power must be aware of the enormous contraction in the number of these local courts else he has been asleep.

      1. The “More chiefs than Indians” syndrome has been the ruin of many British institutions.

        Add to that the epidemic of the Peter Principle that affects most of those “chiefs” then you have a recipe for disaster.

      2. The “More chiefs than Indians” syndrome has been the ruin of many British institutions.

        Add to that the epidemic of the Peter Principle that affects most of those “chiefs” then you have a recipe for disaster.

  9. Morning all

    SIR – Has the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, taken leave of his senses ?

    Yes, indeed, in most British and European churches Jesus is portrayed as white. So what? In African churches he is mostly shown as black. That is surely normal and reasonable. People portray Jesus as one of themselves.

    Archbishop Welby seems to be in the habit of leaping on every passing bandwagon, while failing to perform his primary task, namely of leading the national Church, preferring instead during the pandemic to lock the churches. Is it any wonder that the churches are emptying?

    Dr David Pound

    Daventry, Northamptonshire

    SIR – Those members of the Church of England who, like me, have been feeling let down by a lack of leadership over the past months can console themselves that the Archbishop of Canterbury has been busy in the essential business of cataloguing memorials and monuments of his cathedrals ready for alteration or destruction.

    Charlie Bladon

    Cattistock, Dorset

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    SIR – As a mere layperson, I am puzzled by Archbishop Welby’s statement that “there can be forgiveness, but only if there’s justice”. If this is his understanding of the Christian faith, it is not mine. I seem to recall that Jesus’ words as he hung dying on the cross shed a rather different light on the relationship between justice and forgiveness.

    Perhaps it would be simplest if all effigies of Christ – of whatever race or colour – were removed from churches everywhere. And perhaps the epistles of Paul should be deleted from the New Testament while we’re at it. After all, he was one of the first, and worst, persecutors of the early Christians.

    Church leaders need to get a grip, and quickly. Otherwise Christianity will continue to die from a surfeit of political correctness.

    Dr Ruth Grayson

    Sheffield, South Yorkshire

    SIR – I see there is a move to consider a change of ethnicity for the portrayal of Christ. We do not know, of course, what he looked like, but we have, in Isaiah’s prophecy, the steer that he had no form nor comeliness. So the makeover might incorporate this aspect. Whenever I meet a shortish chap whose wispy beard struggles to cover the bald patches, I see the face of our Saviour.

    Jonathan Ruffer

    Auckland Castle, Co Durham

    1. Not according to Lewis Hamilton who is happy to work for Mercedes Benz which grew rich on the slave labour of Jews in living memory while he objects to other slavery from two centuries ago. There are few subjects which generate as much hypocrisy as racism

    2. Depends how long they spent in the sun. Jesus was only an “appropriate” Jew after he spent 40 days in the desert to top up his tan.

    1. Are there any statues to Ivar the Boneless? Or are they just a heap of concrete on a plinth?

      1. 320754+ up ticks,
        Morning Anne,
        Lets face it Anne as an idle he wasn’t up to much.

  12. There is no such thing as Cultural Appropriation.

    Cultures have always learnt and borrowed from each other. Just look at what’s on your plate

    Honed by months of waiting, my post-lockdown fantasy has now become highly specific. I want a quiet table in the corner of the Kennington Tandoori. I want a nice lamb rogan josh and a bottle of Château Musar. And I want to be left alone. But left alone I will not be, especially if I am foolish enough to take my phone – and thus Twitter – with me. Because the recipe has become the newest battleground over claims of cultural appropriation.

    New York Times food columnist and Bon Appétit magazine writer Alison Roman is the latest to fall foul of the social justice police. She stands accused, among other heinous sins, of making a curry without properly crediting its cultural provenance. Bon Appétit’s research director was forced to step in to apologise for “decontextualising recipes from non-white cultures”. On this side of the pond, meanwhile, BBC Good Food is busy reviewing its vast archive of recipes, removing or amending any exhibiting unacceptable “broadbrush” language, such as “Asian salad”.

    Oh, for goodness sake. What next? Perhaps my love of a good curry and Lebanese red wine – both obvious candidates to be cancelled, both clearly in need of emergency decolonising? After all, it was empire that brought the curry to Britain, and French winemaking to the Beqaa Valley.

    But cultural appropriation is, of course, a nonsense criticism. All cultures weave in and out of each other and that of their neighbours. There are no pure origins, none hermetically sealed to the outside. In their glorious recipe book Jerusalem, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi argue “the complexity and vibrancy of the food in Jerusalem stems from its location as a meeting point between Europe, Asia and Africa and the incredible richness of its history”. Go back far enough and everything is fusion. Cultural appropriation is a weirdly negative way of describing something that is essentially a jolly good thing: learning from each other.

    No, that doesn’t mean that it is fine to take aspects of another culture and hold them up to ridicule. But we need not invent new moral categories to find blackface unacceptable or even to criticise those who borrow from another person’s sacred scriptures to create an exotic looking tattoo. Such things are already covered by the ideas of respect and stupidity, respectively.

    Yet some people just cannot help themselves. Writing in the latest edition of Bon Appétit, Joseph Hernandez turns the lens upon his own magazine, believing some deep moral blasphemy has been committed by the author of a recipe for the Filipino dessert halo-halo that included the very un-filipino ingredients of gummy bears and popcorn. “What it normalises is a white culture,” he writes, “that sees everything foreign to it as a spectacle, something to be tamed and translated to an audience that can’t understand it.” Needless to say, Hernandez argues that these recipes must fall. And that – my translation here – our taste buds require decolonialising.

    Woke is a merciless philosophy. It specialises in sniffing out people’s moral failings in the smallest of things, imagining that the slightest slip must indicate some profound or pernicious inner prejudice. The ludicrous thing is that it often misses – or deliberately seeks to avoid – deeper moral issues. For instance, instead of gummy bears, he could have mentioned that sugar itself was the white gold powering the slave trade; addiction to sweet desserts tempted many of our ancestors to turn a blind eye to the evils of slavery.

    Yet the micro-aggressions of misplaced gummy bears are the least of their worries over at Bon Appétit. Last month, the editor-in-chief resigned after a photograph surfaced on social media showing him dressed up for a Hallowe’en party in some apparently hilarious parody of a Puerto Rican gangster, complete with a heavy fake tan. He had just written an earnest editorial about the need for the food industry to respond positively to the death of George Floyd. A few days later, he was accused by one of the Bon Appétit writers of discriminating against people of colour at work. He resigned soon after.

    If he was treating colleagues badly, then rightly so. But the accusation of cultural appropriation – as opposed to plain disrespect – is such an unhelpful addition to our moral vocabulary. Back in 2001, the then Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook famously praised the way in which chicken tikka masala had not only become our national dish but also “a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences”.

    Isn’t it telling how quickly public morality has shifted? These days, absorbing and adapting external influences is regarded as something shameful, insufficiently respectful of difference. But Cook was right.

    Learning from others is messy and complicated. It flows through war and trade, as well as love, across cultural divides. And an adventurous and free-spirited cultural exchange may get things wrong all the time. But that is precisely how creativity works, and especially in the kitchen.

    Giles Fraser is a columnist at Unherd

    1. Curry is a curious piece of cultural appropriation.

      The dish is unheard of in India. It was developed in Birmingham by Indian migrants, creating something using familiar spices that was more appealing to the taste of the locals, who preferred something with a tasty sauce.

      Some also say that it was Queen Victoria who was largely responsible for the popularity of the curry in the UK. She greatly enjoyed the cooking of her Special Adviser, one Abdul Karim, aka The Munshi. It also enhanced her enthusiasm for being Empress of India, on advise from her PM Benjamin Disraeli, as a distraction from this relentless mourning for Prince Albert.

      So does the curry rightly belong to England? Or to Germany (since Victoria is of German descent)? Or to India? Or to Pakistan (which did not exist in the time of the Munshi, but he was a Muslim from the subcontinent)?

      Can someone please give me some sound advice as to who is being culturally appropriated when eating a curry? Black Americans perhaps?

        1. I thought it came from the French Revolution when they decided that an aristocrat, Suzette de Coursay, should be taken to the guillotine, “Chop Suey” was the cry from the English inhabitants of Paris at the time.

          1. They were invented in Whitby Yorkshire by a William Scott although some reports state they came from India in the 19th cent

          2. Here are a number of different theories about the origins and etymology of Scotch eggs, and no firm conclusion. The OED gives the first instance of the name as 1809, in an edition of Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery. For her, as with most other writers of the time, they were a dinner dish, served hot with gravy. They did not, at that time, have a breadcrumb layer, although by 1861 Isabella Beeton suggested this as an option. The Oxford Companion to Food speculates that the origin may be Indian koftas.

            As a cold item, the London department store Fortnum & Mason claims to have invented Scotch eggs in 1738, as a traveller’s snack, but based this on archival material since lost. They certainly popularised them, including them as part of their various hampers. It is generally believed that they in turn derived from food the British encountered in the Raj, including a Mughlai dish called nargisi kofta (“Narcissus meatballs”).

            Other claims include the name coming from a nickname used by Londoners who lived around Wellington Barracks after Officers of the Scots Guards stationed there, and who developed a taste for the snack. According to Culinary Delights of Yorkshire, they originated in Whitby, Yorkshire, England, in the 19th century, and were originally covered in fish paste rather than sausage meat. They were supposedly named after William J. Scott & Sons, a well-known eatery which sold them. However, the date does not fit with the known use of the term at least 75 years earlier. It has also been suggested that they were originally called “scorch” eggs, as they were cooked over an open flame, though according to surviving recipes they were deep-fried in lard. Scotching as a culinary process is also sometimes cited as the origin, though what scotching was is open to interpretation, from the inclusion of anchovies, to simply mincing meat. Further confusion is added by the large trade in eggs from Scotland in the 19th century, and which sometimes involved dipping eggs in a lime powder – a process (possibly) also known as ‘scotching’.

      3. ‘Morning, Jeremy.

        You are quite right about ‘curry’ not being known in India. It has become in the West a blanket term for almost any South-Asian spicy food, varying very much from region to region.
        When I lived in Germany (until 2002), the Germans were very suspicious of curry, anything like a Korma being described as ‘sehr scharf!’ (very hot).
        That said, there was a very good Indian restaurant in Düsseldorf which did marvellous ‘all you can eat’ buffet lunches at weekends. Those were very popular, but it has to be said that most of the clients were British ex-pats. We made a round trip of about 50 miles to indulge almost every Sunday.

        1. One of the first ethnic delicacies I felt obliged to encounter on arrival in Hamburg last year was Currywurst – a German staple served pretty well everywhere except Indian restaurants. It was frankfurter smothered in a sugary barbecue sauce, but I had to be the valiant tourist and consume the thing before I got arrested for appropriation.

          In Flensburg, I resorted to eating raw fish, only because for the same price you got six fillets for the same price as one cooked. I don’t think it was Japanese appropriation, because the Japanese slice their fish up with great dexterity turning it into a vol-au-vent shaped canapé (is that appropriation to say that?) whereas the Germans just slap it on a plate.

          1. Berlin currywurst is better than Hamburg’s. And, we made a study of the currywurst shacks around Charlottenberg, to find the best.

          2. Ah, I was about to post on Currywurst until I read down. We visited relatives in Berlin and they could not wait to inflict it on us. You must try it! They insisted. Truly horrible…

      4. That is true. “Curry” is simply a British generic name for a whole host of spicy Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi dishes.

      5. “who is being culturally appropriated when eating a curry” – WGAF?? Not me.
        I just eat the stuff, occasionally at our local curry house – to their, and my, delight.

      6. There are curry recipes dating back to the 16th century from the time when spices (very, very expensive at the time) were needed to mask the flavour of dodgy meat, there being no refrigerators.

    2. Why doesn’t Lammy wear tribal dress rather than suits, shirts and trousers?

    5. We see “everything foreign to us is a spectacle, something to be tamed.”
      This is the essence of exploration, learning, travel and foreign holidays. Imagine my astonishment is seeing the bazaars of Bradford and the morris dancers of Stoney Stratford.

    6. Why doesn’t Lammy wear tribal dress rather than suits, shirts and trousers?

  13. Good morning, all. Overcast; gale still blowing. Busy filling in my application to be Cabinet Secretary. Should be a shoo-in. Can’t do shorthand, but I can type quite quickly – though badly.

    No other news, I see – except that The Grimes is starting, this morning, a parallel beeboid radio station with fantastic (sic) presenters, such as our great pal Cathy Newman….

    The good thing about Times Radio is that no one will listen to it – and the loathsome people working on it WON’T be heard in beeboid/sky land.

    1. Yes, I took one look at the list of presenters and felt that I would have to be desperate to tune in. Not quite at that stage yet…

  14. Three confirmed dead after gunmen attack Pakistan Stock Exchange. 28 June 2020.

    Gunmen attacked the stock exchange in the Pakistani city of Karachi on Monday, killing at least three people – two guards and a policeman, according to police.
    Special police forces deployed to the scene of the attack and in a swift operation secured the building, killing all four gunmen.

    This will probably turn out to be something to do with Kashmir. If the attackers came from the Indian side there will trouble though not war. The Indians have problems with the Chinese at the moment.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/29/four-killed-gunmen-attack-pakistan-stock-exchange/

  15. Thanks to the NoTTLer who recommended the PBS America prog about William Marshall. Fascinating – though the presenter was a bit off-putting.

      1. It was called “The Greatest Knight” – and was repeated most days last week.

    2. ‘Morning, Bill. A prog I recorded last November, and watched yesterday, was WW1: The Final Hours:

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0br9xzq

      Have you seen it? I thought it was very well put together and, for once, narrated by a sensible and normal voice. Unfortunately it isn’t currently on iPlayer but, given the forthcoming shortage of new programmes, may well appear again as a repeat.

      1. Thanks, Hugh – and good morning.

        No I didn’t see it. I really don’t like “reconstructions” – just tell the story with film and contemporary material. One (me, that is) does not need actORs (sic) pretending to be historical figures….

    1. Good morning ogga

      Please could you tell me how does one sign up for Parler?

      2. No, Anne, he’s a Nigerian widow who has been left millions by her late husband but needs your bank details to share some of it with you.

  19. Have been scouring the Internet looking for a way to make a small contribution towards helping Jake Hepple now that GoFundMe have ceased involvement.

    Anyone know of an alternative that won’t be a scam?

  21. Arron Banks
    @Arron_banks
    ·
    13h
    Excellent ..
    Quote Tweet

    Sebastian Payne
    @SebastianEPayne
    · 13h
    Collision symbol NEW: The defence establishment is “going apeshit” at David Frost’s appointment as national security advisor.

    “There’s a whole swathe of the mandarin class on the security brief who have had their noses put out of joint. It’s not going down well at all” https://ft.com/content/d9f422a6-b3ed-4be3-aac4-624ae512cc1c

  22. Police release images of 15 people over toppled Colston statue. 29 June 2020.

    Detectives have released images of 15 people they want to trace over the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol in which the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into the harbour.

    Avon and Somerset police published the images of the men and women, arguing that in law, a crime – criminal damage – had been committed and it had no choice but to investigate. The force also said it had consulted with the Crown Prosecution Service about its investigation.

    Morning everyone. This cringeing subservience to the Cultural Marxists is just another nail in the Police coffin.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/29/police-release-images-of-15-people-over-toppled-colston-statue

    1. Didn’t police before say they were inviting those involved to attend voluntarily at a police station for a chat, tea and cakes?

      Pathetic.

    2. It sounds as though they are apologising for doing the job they are supposed to do.

      1. Of course they are. They would much rather get down on one knee and support it rather than uphold the law.

    3. Oh, dear. Better report for re-education. I read that as “ Detectives have released images of 15 people they want to trace trade over the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol ”
      :-((

    4. These saps just stood and smirked, watching as the destruction took place. Up to fourteen years in prison if convicted. I’ll be interested to see how that pans out.

    5. The force also said it had consulted with the Crown Prosecution Service about its investigation.

      1. to see whether there was a suitable charge that could be brought where they could get away with a caution or conditional discharge.
      2. to see whether they would be obliged prosecute

  23. 320754+ up ticks,
    breitbart,
    UK: HALF OF IMPORTED CORONAVIRUS CASES COME FROM PAKISTAN,
    The other half were here already or en route courtesy of the mass uncontrolled immigration lab/lib/con coalition party.

      1. South Chicago is a ghetto, gang and crime hotspot. This is a daily occurrence. It is also a Democrat stronghold, naturally. Like most of the crappy cities in America.

        2. All of those northern (and coastal) cities that lost employment and wealth as manufacturing shifted offshore.

          There is more to it than just being Democrat run, there again they have had a lifetime to make changes.

  25. In further confirmation of the slippery slope down which the UK is gathering speed, there was apparently a “Black Trans Lives Matter” protest in London last Saturday which called for an end to the capitalist system and the abolition of police. It was supported by someone called Nadia Whittome who, believe it or not, is a 23-year-old Labour Party MP. She said: “Thousands marched for #BlackTransLivesMatter today, past a Parliament that currently has zero trans MPs and is eroding trans rights when we must urgently extend them.”

    What’s the betting that she could never hold down another job, paying anything approaching a salary of £81,932, with benefits and expenses so generous that they would put most private companies out of business? By the way, it is the ever-suffering taxpayers who foot the bill for this travesty, something that this vapid ‘MP’ totally ignores.

    1. “eroding trans rights“- really? Seems to me they want more rights than 99.9% of the country and our politicians are giving in to them!

      1. Reality doesn’t matter. They say anything to whip up race hatred / trans hatred / double whammy, with the aim of Marxist anarchy and the death of capitalism.
        Only BLM Lies Matter.

          1. Exactly! But the implication is that they have (or should have) special rights pertaining to their specific situation, over and above the same rights we all enjoy.

    2. How about having a salary scale whereby an MP in his/her 20’s received the average salary of a teacher in his/her 20’s; an MP in his/her 30’s receives the average salary of a teacher in his/her 30’s; an MP in his/her 40’s receives the average salary of a teacher in his/her 40’s and so on. An MP who gets promoted to being a junior minister receives the same average salary as that of a head of academic department; an MP who becomes a cabinet minister receives the average salary of a deputy headmaster and the prime minister receives the same salary as the average headmaster.

      1. Well that would certainly see teachers salaries rise to the level that MPs expect. Will MPs get the same expense allowances as teachers?

      3. Good afternoon, Rastus.

        Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t teachers have to study hard for a number of years in order to gain the qualifications to teach? Whereas MPs receive no formal training in any subject. As the old maxim goes: “You could put a red rosette on a monkey and people would vote for it.”

    3. What’s the betting that she could never hold down another job, paying anything approaching a salary of £81,932,. I think that’s sorted it.

    4. What are the “Black Trans Lives Matter” transitioning to – White? Ha ha ha 😹😹😹😹😹

    5. I can’t think why her constituents voted for her – perhaps she’s what they deserve.

    6. Eroding what trans rights? Does she mean not implementing the proposal to be able to get your stated gender changed without referral to clinical or psychological assessment first?
      Otherwise, what rights do trans want that they don’t have already, the same as the rest of us?

    8. A further thought: Isn’t there something seriously wrong when a vapid, inexperienced, 23-year-old girl, who has been an MP for barely one year, is paid the same as a 75-year-old who has been an MP for 45 years, namely the Father of the House, Sir Peter Bottomley?

  27. The truth about racism in London. Spiked. 28 June 2020.

    As someone from an ethnic minority, Britain does not seem to me to be a ‘systemically racist country’. On the whole, it is a bloody brilliant place for us bloody foreigners. Of course, there are white British racists. Loads of them, in fact. But I’ve received just as much racist abuse from non-whites. And I’ve also suffered racism on my travels, from Egypt to Italy. Racism is a worldwide problem. There are ‘bloody stupid ones’ everywhere, and they come in every colour, hue and shade.

    This is a nice little article that depicts the world and its people as they actually are. They are all casual racist xenophobes trying to get along in world that is difficult and awkward.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/29/the-truth-about-racism-in-london/

    1. ‘Morning, Minty.

      As someone from an ethnic minority, Britain does not seem to me to be a ‘systemically racist country’

      So Britain is a bloody ethnic minority?

  28. SIR – Nicholas Renton (Letters, June 27) says that the only way to get medical treatment at the moment is privately. This is not quite true.

    Private hospitals have since March rented out their facilities to the NHS, as backup for Covid-19. This means that elective surgery such as knee and hip replacements are not currently available even privately.

    Elizabeth Kwantes

    Cookham, Berkshire

    SIR – I have sympathy for Mr Renton, who says he cannot see his GP in person, but I feel compelled to defend primary care.

    Our surgery team has never stopped offering face-to-face appointments. Safety dictates that the surgery front door is locked and patients are triaged by telephone initially, to minimise unnecessary footfall in the building.

    We offer same-day video and telephone appointments and many patients are delighted to have speedy access to their GP without the need to travel to the surgery. However, those that require face-to-face contact (despite the limitations imposed by wearing full PPE) are seen.

    In our practice nurses and healthcare assistants continue to see patients in the surgery and if needed at home. I am enormously proud of the hard work and dedication of my team and would be ashamed to discover this standard of care is not national.

    Dr Andrew Cross

    Guildford, Surrey

    SIR – I have just received notice that my next six-monthly diabetic clinic appointment, 21 months after the previous one, will be a telephone conversation in December.

    The doctor will not have a sight of my records of daily blood sugar readings. There will be no test of blood pressure nor the usual laboratory test of long-term blood sugar. The doctor will not be able to examine my feet.

    Chris Russell

    Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire

    SIR – I had a regular appointment at my local NHS hospital for treatment for arthritis in my fingers. This involves steroid injections.

    My appointment for May this year was cancelled with no prospect of another. I contacted a local private hospital and was told that steroid injections of all types had been suspended. When I phoned the same hospital recently it was to be told that it had been taken over by the NHS on a rolling contract which was due to be reviewed at the end of August.

    I would willingly pay for treatment, as my fingers are becoming increasingly swollen and painful.

    Why are private hospitals being commandeered at, no doubt, great expense and people denied treatment for non-life-threatening but painful and debilitating conditions?

    Ann Brooke-Smith

    Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire

    SIR – My mother is 93 and is in a care home suffering from dementia. She is slowly dying of a broken heart because she thinks I have abandoned her.

    I wonder what they will put on her death certificate if she passes away before I see her again.

    Valerie Neave

    Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

    1. Slightly at a tangent, but apparently steroid injections have been stopped because they weaken the immune system.

        1. Info from the physios in the family. My brother in law does injections, and that’s the reason he’s been given and has to pass on to disappointed patients. Whether it has any basis in reality is not for me to judge, LOL.

    2. My mother is 91 and is in her own home, suffering from dementia. She does not have a broken heart because she thinks I have abandoned her, as she has no idea who I am any more. She is more concerned about her parent’s absence.

      1. How is she coping? And how are you coping with being so far away and unable to do anything to help her?

    3. So many people not getting treatment for their conditions – I’m thankful that we are both well.

      That last letter is so sad.

  29. SIR – I have four children. One has been working from our family home. The other three, who live with their partners in their own households, I have not seen for months.

    From July 4, one of my children can come and stay with me. However, we can all travel on holiday to Europe at the same time, on the same plane, stay in the same place, use the shared washing and changing facilities, dining outlets, bars and pools.

    We can then return to our homes without quarantine and meet other households. I can do none of this in England, let alone my own home.

    If the nation is to continue to follow government guidelines they should provide us with a logical strategy.

    Helen Hayward

    Welwyn, Hertfordshire

    SIR – Until recently I was dissatisfied with having to live in a nanny state.

    Now I am angry that I have to live in a police state.

    Stafford Woods

    Whittle-le-Woods, Lancashire

    2. I think that Stafford should go whittle some wood to take his mind off things.

  30. SIR – All we hear is people moaning about what they cannot do. We have plenty of food and nobody is chucking bombs at us.

    People behaved badly in Bournemouth and even worse in Brixton. The English are not good at obeying rules.

    John M Scott

    Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire

    1. Looks like those plastic balls that some put in their tumble driers.
      Apparently – if you can withstand the relentless clunking noise – they soften the drying items.
      It’s a load of (spiky) bollards.

        1. I have never had a dog that will do that.
          I’ve chucked balls etc… for them to retrieve. And the buggers have always sat there effectively saying “you threw it, you pick it up”.
          I cannot decide whether they’re being dim or rational.

          1. Viv Richards was batting in a test match when he swung at the ball and missed. The bowler glared at him and said, “It’s red, it’s round, and you’re supposed to hit it!”.

            The very next ball was despatched to the boundary. Viv grinned at the bowler and said, “Hey, man. You know what it looks like. You go and fetch it.”

          2. Was it Freddy Trueman who bowled a cracker and hit the batsman on his pad right in front of the stumps, the umpire said “Not out”. His next ball produced an audible snick as it passed the batsmans bat and was caught but the keeper. Again “Not out” said the umpire. His next ball took the batsmans middle wicket out. Freddy said to the umpire “Nearly had him that time!”

          3. It certainly was. Another story has Freddie standing on the boundary near to the gate from the pavilion. When a young cricketer emerged from the pavilion to go out and bat, a steward held the gate open for him. As he passed through Freddie shouted at the steward, “Don’t shut that gate!”

      2. I found one here, amongst Mother’s things, and tried chucking it in with a load of towels. The banging irritated me and I felt no difference. It could have been a massage ball for feet or something anyway.

      3. Should be banned!

        Women should be using proper washboards, in a tub, on their knees. Time to re-install some values.

        1. You are going soft, Grizz.
          What is wrong with taking one’s clothes down to a river and beating them on some rocks?

          1. Take one’s clothes? Do I look like a washerwoman to you, Hugh?

            Don’t answer that! 😬

          2. As I said to the Sultana yesterday. The damage has now subsided a little.

    1. It certainly is, and blowing a gale too. Your roses must be a bit blown-about. However, I spy a few breaks in the cloud. I shall take this opportunity to walk the dog. When I return I will be chopping the ends off gooseberries for a purée for, yum, yum, gooseberry icecream.

      Good morning, Peddy.

      1. The roses have almost finished flowering for this year, apart from Sander’s White, R. moschata, Mme Alfred Carrière & Lady Hillingdon.

        Now the Buddleias are taking over; they are huge this year. Severe pruning exercise indicated for Autumn.

  35. Good Morning all – I think there may be a glimmer of hope,there may be the beginning of a rationality and a soupçon of common sense being shown by the normally woke and lefty Bristol City Council in that they’ve assiduously ignored the assortment of crusties and malcontents in the shape of ER activists that have taken residence and have been protesting on the City Hall roof for the last 4 days.

    “She said she has been left ‘surprised and really disappointed’ by a lack of response from Bristol City Council – she said the protesters did not think they would be up there so long” – way to go BCC!!

    https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/extinction-rebellion-key-worker-explains-4272558

    1. I never could work out why Bristol City became cockney rhyming slang for a women’s mammary appendages – would not Preston City have been more appropriate?

      3. It may have something to do with the sherry trade. In the late 17th century, sweetened Oloroso was hugely popular in the UK. It was known as milk sherry or Bristol Milk, because most of the sherry trade to the UK was passing through the port of Bristol. Different types of wines arrived in Bristol and they were blended to create a sweet, smooth mixture. So the rather tenuous connection is, simply, milk.

        Not sure that I buy it.

    2. It’s cold and rainy now… Fair weather protests only. Or is that word misappropriated? Should it be Dark weather protests not allowed?

  36. Good Moaning. Hurrah – normal summer weather and I’m not crouching down in a tent near Aberporth (“Don’t Touch The Roof!!!!).
    A piece by Dominic Lawson in the DM:

    “LESS ICE MAKES P-P-PENGUINS PERKIER!

    Hot news from the Antarctic: the penguins are prospering. And why is that interesting? Because this is the creature which was supposed to be the principal victim of climate change and the consequent loss of sea ice.

    Yet last week, researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research produced a report showing that the Adélie penguin (whose only home is the Antarctic) has been thriving like never before — and it’s because of the changing habitat.

    Having tagged 175 of these endearing birds, the scientists discovered that the penguins caught more krill because of the loss of ice. ‘Counterintuitively for this ice-dependent species, body conditions and breeding success improved in the ice-free environment,’ they explained.

    Yet last week, researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research produced a report showing that the Adélie penguin (whose only home is the Antarctic) has been thriving like never before — and it’s because of the changing habitat

    One of the researchers added: ‘For penguins, swimming is a whopping four times faster than walking’, so they were able to forage in larger areas for shorter periods of time.

    And what of that creature even more loved by humans: the polar bear? Three years ago a National Geographic video of a solitary starving polar bear, its rib cage distressingly visible, became an internet sensation, watched by an estimated 2.5 billion people.

    ‘This is what climate change looks like,’ said National Geographic.

    Well, that particular polar bear was clearly in a bad way. But over the past 15 years, the polar bear population has risen from around 22,500 to as much as 31,000, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

    Meanwhile, the Adélie penguins are loving the climate. Can we be forgiven for driving cars now?”

    2. Believe polar bears are getting to be a pest in Canada, coming into towns more & more, ‘cos there are many more of them.

    3. Perhaps, for centuries, penguins and polar bears have been suffering terribly from the cold – but didn’t know how to get away from their habitats……

      2. Which suggests they’re a bit dim.
        How are you feeling?
        (I said HOW – not WHO)

      3. There are films of penguins having to walk vast distances over the ice from their nest to go fishing, perhaps a shorter walk gives a better outcome. Anyway, Glad to see all that white snow in retreat.

    4. Shouldn’t that final sentence read “Meanwhile, the Adelie penguins (whose only home is the Antarctic) are loving the climate”?

      PS – Manners: Good morning to all NoTTLers.

  37. 320754+ up ticks,
    Any news on the incoming governance sponsored Odessa line on the
    Dover front ?

      1. 320754+ upticks,
        Morning Bob,
        Could be a price war holding things up, discontentment among thieves at governance level.

  40. Morning all! Pleased to report that my sister’s visit was lovely (although I admit it was difficult not to sob when she first hugged me).

    3. Nothing like a hug to make you feel warm inside, is there.
      Pleased for you thst it went so well.

  41. Peers call for tougher regulation of digital and social media in UK. Mon 29 Jun 2020 00.01 BST.

    Ministers are being urged to toughen up the regulation of digital and social media because “a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation” is eroding trust in politics and public institutions.

    A House of Lords committee on democracy and digital technologies, chaired by the film producer and Labour peer David Puttnam, has called on ministers to push ahead with the long-mooted online harms bill and to overhaul rules for online political advertising.

    Rough Translation: The bastards are onto us we need to shut them up!

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/29/peers-call-tougher-regulation-digital-social-media-uk

    1. Good morning, Minty

      A terrorist to some is a freedom fighter to others.

      Likewise fake news and and misinformation to the PTB is the actual truth to those whose views must be suppressed..

      1. A Terrorist fights against a democratic government, legitimately elected.
        A Freedom Fighter against an oppressive or tyrannical regime.

        Obviously, somewhere between those extremes is a lot of grey area.

    2. “a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation” is eroding trust in politics and public institutions.” – nothing to do with the lying bastards in those two categories then?

    3. There is no trust in politicians. Especially when their version of tighter regulation is the supression of free speech.

  42. Well, bye bye summer , Moh not playing golf , really cold wind, not much fun.

    Runner beans are being bashed around and I think the tomatoes will be a failure , one plant snapped in half , sadly had loads of fruit.

    My poor dogs are due for a haircut wih the groomer today, they will really feel the chill once they are done .

  43. There was a big debate in heaven amongst St Peter and most of the apostles so they decided to have a bet on the matter.

    St Peter argued that Rowan Williams was going to go down in history as the worst ever Archbishop of Canterbury as Williams had suggested that there should be Sharia Law in Britain.

    All the angels, cherubim and seraphim stopped their continual crying of Holy, Holy Holy and got wholly behind St Peter and immediately placed their money on his candidate!

    And then St Paul produced Justin Welby and all the angels, all the cherubim and all the seraphim had to dig in their pockets and pay up.

    2. Morning Richard

      “The Archbishop, the removal of memorials and depictions of Jesus as white”

      My very battered old autograph book that I was given when I was a little girl had an entry from a school pal.

      “Some bums are pink
      Some bums are white

      But in Africa where I have been
      All bums are black .”

      1. Good morning, Belle

        An old joke from before independence:

        First Lady: In Africa their soldiers are black
        Second Lady: Do you mean even the officers?
        First Lady: No, only their privates
        Second Lady: How exotic!

      2. Evening, TB.
        In one of my sisters’ autograph albums was written:
        Some albums are red
        Some albums are green
        But in Africa where I’ve been
        Al bums are black.
        Queue much giggling. Pleasures were simpler back then.

    3. A new BTL response to this morning’s 2nd letter:-

      So Charlie Bladon only feels let down by a lack of leadership in the church of England over the past months?
      There are thousands who have felt that way for years.

    1. “Human beings concentrated into human settlement zones, cities”

      Just as CV19 and rioting is making a lot of people move out of cities, or actively look into moving out of them.
      People are leaving NYC and San Francisco by the hundreds each day.

      “The UN’s Global Goals aim to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for everyone by 2030. At Sightsavers, we make sure all our work helps to achieve these goals.”

      https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/pressreleaseandstatementarchive/2020/may/20200514_covid19-vaccine
      World leaders unite in call for a people’s vaccine against COVID-19

      This is the tip of the iceberg. Does it make anyone else feel very nervous about all this stuff, like it sounds nice and fluffy, but they’re not telling us everything?
      “People’s vaccine.” What’s that supposed to mean? Is there a non-people’s vaccine option? One for cats and dogs? And why the urgency for a vaccine that’s highly unlikely to be 100% effective, such as the annual flu vaccine, especially as they also tell us that having antibodies doesn’t mean you’re immune? Plus treatment is now available, i.e. remdesivir, anti-inflammatories plus anti-clotting therapies, which have reduced the death toll (currently 500,000 globally, which are highly suspect numbers, as we know that CV19 has been put on death certificates without a test having been performed in all cases, and where other causes were more likely, eg lethal blood alcohol levels).

      Until recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated the annual mortality burden of influenza to be 250 000 to 500 000 all-cause deaths globally; however, a 2017 study indicated a substantially higher mortality burden, at 290 000-650 000 influenza-associated deaths from respiratory causes alone, and a 2019 study estimated 99 000-200 000 deaths from lower respiratory tract infections directly caused by influenza.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/
      (Dec 2019)

      The UN wants to end poverty, reduce child mortality, vaccinate people against 20 preventable diseases, end hunger…I haven’t seen anything about birth control in their aims.
      Does anyone else think this hasn’t been thought through properly? Or there’s something they’re not saying?
      Plus, the original link is right, in that Covid is all over the UN website, and that didn’t happen overnight. It’s another Trojan horse…

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YDFL3xwEEG8
      The Trojan Horse – Ep. 1: Deconstructing Communities | Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay
      (This is another Trojan horse, i.e. identity politics, white fragility, etc. The original proposition that is discussed also sounds reasonable on the surface, but isn’t)

    2. There are some that will believe that it is the gospel (not according to Welby) truth.

      I saw one little snippet talking about a pandemic modeling exercise that had been run. To be perfectly honest, I would bloody well hope that catastrophic scenarios have been repeatedly modelled.

      1. I always wonder why when something like these strange viruses occur why none of the ‘Top Bods’ catch it.

      2. But….. the exercise took place In October 2019 and…. it was attended by the usual suspects. Then, release the virus! – they cried.

        Edit: 2020 changed to 2019.

  46. Oh goody, it was Toronto pride parade at the weekend but the normal exhibitionist displays were banned because of that wonderful bug. Fear not, they want virtual and in the news programs our blessed CBC decided to broadcast images from their Zoom meeting.

    So what is the + in lgbtq+ ,are they worried about missing some perversion? do I care?

    2. I thought the ‘q’ was added to be “inclusive” of any undefined variations on that theme. I did read though that according to these people their are 64 sexes. The good professors who wrote my biology test books would disagree, but, hey, what do they know?

    1. What is the government-approved definition of terrorism these days, I wonder?

      1. I posted it last week. For your delectation and delight, a reprise:

        What is a terrorist organisation? How is it defined? Here are the official UK Government criteria.

        “”A. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the Home Secretary may proscribe an organisation if he believes it is concerned in terrorism, and it is proportionate to do. For the purposes of the Act, this means that the organisation:• commits or participates in acts of terrorism;
        • prepares for terrorism;
        • promotes or encourages terrorism (including the unlawful glorification of terrorism); or
        • is otherwise concerned in terrorism.

        What is meant by ‘terrorism’ in the proscription context?

        A. “Terrorism” as defined in the Act, means the use or threat of action which: involves serious violence against a person; involves serious damage to property; endangers a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the act); creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or section of the public; or is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system. The use or threat of such action must be designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and must be undertaken for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.””

        The law of unintended consequences as this law, ( just as I mentioned with respect to increased prison sentences for “racially aggravates” offences) was written with only white people in mind, that is, native Britons.

        As I read this is it seems to me to be very clear, incontrovertibly clear, that the BLM is a terrorist organisation, as is Extinction Rebellion, and islam.

        https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/869496/20200228_Proscription.pdf

    2. The event itself now almost completely ignored by MSM. Can’t begin to think why.

      1. White man kills African-American – whole world erupts in riots.

        African kills three white men – people light candles and comfort each other.

  48. The Woke Snooker Association
    (Formerly: The World Snooker Association)
    AGM 17th June, In the Year of Our Floyd 2020
    Following a motion by Mr N’gami Odinga Mau Mau (Kenya South branch) it was agreed (nem con) that, according to the principle of Positive Discrimination, the white ball should be altogether removed from the game and replaced by an additional black ball
    Mr E.C. Dalliance (Brighton Cottages) proposed that the pink ball should be accorded seven points like the black as a mark of respect for the LGBT+ community. The motion was defeated by a small majority on the grounds that the black should always take precedence
    Mr Dmitri Molotov (Hampstead Levellers) proposed that the number of reds should always greatly out-number all the other colours added together. Moreover, and to prolonged cheers, the blue ball is to be repainted red to commemorate the Cultural Revolution and the proletarian struggle worldwide
    While recognising the primacy of blacks at all times, Earl Grey Chapatti (Mumbai Ex-Colonials), proposed that the value of the brown ball should be increased to five points: that is, it should replace the abolished blue. After minor skirmishes between Kenya South and the Ex-Colonials, the meeting agreed that the motion should be approved.
    It was further decreed that from henceforth any player going “in off” the green ball should be found guilty of “Doing a Greta” and be ordered to pay a fine of £100 to Nutters of the Planet Unite
    It was unanimously agreed that the yellow ball should retain its status in honour of all pacifists, appeasers and conscientious objectors
    After the singing of three choruses of The Wokers’ Balls are Deepest Red the meeting was adjourned

    1. 320754+ up ticks,
      Morning JBF,
      Was it L,Dawson or E,Sykes who said to Kenny Lynch
      who was about to sink the black on celebrity snooker,
      “like burying one of your own Kenny” to the great merriment of everyone.

  49. More Welsh bolltau …
    Two households in Wales will be able to form one “extended household” and meet indoors from next Monday, the
    Welsh Government has announced.
    Only one extended household can be formed, and cannot be changed once arranged. Travel restrictions are
    due to be lifted the same day..

    Tell that to Leicester.

  50. Chap on the wireless attempting to educate our children consistently using “BCE”. If my children were still at home, I’d turn him off pronto.

  51. I see many comments in the DT here and elsewhere today about His Grace The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England. But I haven’t seen a single one that supports him!

    A friend, who thinks that Welby should concentrate on the church rather than meddle in politics, wrote to him (politely) about this. He received a reply from Welby which said, tersely, that he has every right to engage in politics because he is a member of the House of Lords! Yet another reason for HofL reform!

    I wondered why Welby has swung so far to the left and why he seems to despise the heritage of the very Church that he is supposed to represent. Perhaps he has a chip on his shoulder resulting from his parentage. He was born “almost nine months after the marriage of his mother Jane Gillian Portal (born 1929) to Gavin Bramhall James Welby (1910–1977). Jane had served as a personal secretary to Sir Winston Churchill from December 1949 until her marriage to Gavin Welby in April 1955, soon after she had a brief relationship with the private secretary to Churchill, Sir Anthony Montague Browne (1923–2013). Justin believed that Gavin Welby was his biological father until paternity testing in 2016 showed that he was Browne’s son.” The quotes are from Welby’s Wikipedia entry. Of course that is not his fault but it must have had an effect on his psyche.

    In the meantime, the CofE has been on a steep decline in recent years as demonstrated by the appointment of the first woman bishop in my own diocese of Gloucester. Naturally she is a leftist and believes that God should be considered to be neither male nor female and she says that she presides at an ‘LGBTI Eucharist with Inclusive Church’.

    My father, one of the last of a breed of no-nonsense sporting country parsons, presiding over full churches in his parishes, must turn in his grave at every pronouncement from these pseudo clerics. The only people who are laughing are the Muslims!

    1. All we want is the love of God and the comfort that a good oldfashioned church service used to give us.

      The rot came in with the Happy Clappy brigade sometime in the late 1970’s .

      Am I naive?

      2. Not at all. It isn’t just the happy clappy brigade; the wonderful language has been dumbed down because they think people won’t understand it. As a linguist, I strongly object to being forced to vouvoyer God the Father. The whole point of using Thou was to show an intimate, family relationship.

        1. The use of thee and thou were commonly used , our well remembered rural English dialects are still heard and used amongst the older generation.

          2. Wonder if that’s what made those New Englanders refer to the “black Irish” immigrants all those years ago…

          3. That’s just what I thought , unbelievable ..

            No wonder the authorities are getting twitchy about BLM for fear of upsetting any of them and having yet again a fullscale riot!

          6. And he was proved right about blood in the streets.

            Many people did listen, His constituents thought he got it right as did the majority of the country at the time. Twas Heath that did him in.

            “In the aftermath of the “Rivers of Blood” speech, several polls suggested that between 67 and 82 per cent of the UK population agreed with Powell’s opinions.[5][6][7] His supporters claimed that the large public following[8][9] which Powell attracted helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 general election,[10]:568 and perhaps cost them the February 1974 general election,[10]:710–2 when Powell turned his back on the Conservatives by endorsing a vote for Labour, which returned as a minority government in early March following a hung parliament.” Wikipedia.

          7. And he was proved right about blood in the streets.

            Many people did listen, His constituents thought he got it right as did the majority of the country at the time. Twas Heath that did him in.

            “In the aftermath of the “Rivers of Blood” speech, several polls suggested that between 67 and 82 per cent of the UK population agreed with Powell’s opinions.[5][6][7] His supporters claimed that the large public following[8][9] which Powell attracted helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 general election,[10]:568 and perhaps cost them the February 1974 general election,[10]:710–2 when Powell turned his back on the Conservatives by endorsing a vote for Labour, which returned as a minority government in early March following a hung parliament.” Wikipedia.

  54. Just to continue the story from yesterday, it transpires that former Prime Minister May’s series of 8 $1,250,000 plus expenses speeches was arranged by her Washington oriented US speaking agency to which a number of other interesting individuals are also signed up…

    Namely former Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Major, David Cameron and also Alastair Campbell. The agency apparently has links to the Democrats and the former Obama administration, and even employs at least one staffer who worked closely with President Obama himself.

    So given the individuals involved it’s not difficult to see the obvious connection to the top table of the multi billionaire globalist group dedicated to global government, as exampled by David Cameron and his 2017 directorship………

    ”In May 2017 the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) granted Cameron’s appointment as a Director of U2 Frontman Bono’s One Foundation which is also supported by Bill Gates and George Soros’s Open Society”

    Did I mention ”global government” ?

    Oh my goodness me…. what an extraordinary unrelated random coincidence ! Global government is what the UK already has relating to her C-19 R and D medical response, the UN migration compact signed by Prime Minister May in 2019 and will have very soon in relation to billionaire globalist/UN inspired ”Net Zero” and ”Build Back Better” !

    How did the UK get herself into the position of bowing to multi billionaire globalists and their global government ambitions ?

    More about that, and Prime Minister May’s speeches, soon !

    1. But the cops have been defunded, and even the ansafone battery has run out. There’s nobody to replace it.

  56. There is another discussion today in the DT about a new Royal Yacht. Right on cue, someone called Drew Dawson has commented “Not a single penny of taxpayers cash to be wasted on a boat for the Queen. If she wants one, she foots the bill for it, including the staffing and security costs…….if private individuals want to fund a boat…fair enough…no taxpayers cash at all to design, build, run or maintain the vessel…and no RN presence without that being covered by those that want a boat for the Queen.”

    So will Mr. Dawson be happy for the financial benefits of a new yacht to accrue only to the Queen and the private sector? I ask this because,Britannia was used for trade missions with such success that I doubt if there has ever been a single artifact, belonging to any country in the world, that has raised more funds than those generated by Britannia for the UK. It was estimated by the then Overseas Trade Board that events held on board the yacht helped to raise £3 billion for the treasury between 1991 and 1995 alone.

    Our country was the envy of the world of diplomacy when the Royal Yacht was used for state visits. One of many examples was in 1959 when it was used to open the St. Lawrence Seaway and navigated all the way to Lake Michigan where the Queen was greeted in Chicago by President Eisenhower.

    I have taken a particular interest in this because I was involved with the planning for visits of Britannia to the Middle East. In particular, I remember a visit of the Royal Yacht to Jeddah. There was so much interest that it was a sight to behold the undignified squabbling for invitations by princes, billionaires, ambassadors, leaders of industry from many countries, down to humble businessmen!

    It is a pity that such success is undermined by republicans, with their innate and misplaced envy and spite, who are unwilling to acknowledge the benefits of a Royal Yacht, such as Mr. Dawson

    1. I am a republican, but accept the fact that most people in the UK wish to retain the monarchy. The proposal for a new Royal Yacht should be decided on economic, not political grounds. There is a good case to be made for such a ship to showcase the UK to the world. The monarchy is a good advertisement for the UK, so I believe that the money spent on a new Royal Yacht could be justified in the same way that an advertising budget can be by commercial concerns.

      1. 320754+ up ticks,
        Morning A,
        It would certainly give these Isles more scope & benefits than HS2 ever could.

      3. I am always interested in who republicans would like to have as a head of state/president. Who are the sort of people you would like.. i assume you must have a list. I find it is easy for people to say who the dont want but not who they do want. The fact of the matter is it would be someone like Blair.

        1. Every time the question of a President is raised, the same old names keep popping up – usually politicians like Blair. No-one seems to consider a republic based on the Irish model i.e. the President is a figure-head instead of someone with real political power as in France or the USA.

          Who would I vote for as President? The present Queen.

          1. A friend who is a retired member of the Queen’s household described her thus: “A woman who is shrewd, unsentimental, firm and tough when necessary, and liberal, not a prude, ultra-competent, no fool, and has a great sense of humour, and obvious religious faith.”

            She would make an excellent President but I much prefer the system of government that we have, namely a constitutional monarchy!

          3. Why go to all that expense? She’s already there.
            I would imagine the upkeep of a President would be far more costly than the Queen.

      4. it certainly would not have an RN crew, as the RN do not understand the concept of ‘ships’ or have enough matelots to crew it

      5. Where I stand on this is that Her majesty – and the royal family – are the only government department that makes a profit.

        While they continue to do so, keep them. As an individual Brenda is a fantastic example of what a Briton should be. Quiet, dignified, stoic, tough.

        I’m warming to Kate and William as well as they’re showing that same integrity and sense of duty but, at the end of the day they’ve got to return value to the country. I don’t consider myself either monarchist or republican. I just want effective government.

    3. I enjoyed reading stories about the Royal Yacht. The Queen mother would get up early and cook breakfast for the crew. No wonder they adored her.

      Several reviews were enacted where members of the crew and the Royal Family would act out scenes for the entertainment of everyone aboard. I believe Her Majesty thought it just wouldn’t be right for her to cavort around in a pair of coconuts and a grass skirt. I believe she helped back stage with changes of costume.

      Drew Dawson proves himself to be a complete Tit for calling it a boat. Ships carry boats. Not the other way round.

      I agree with everything you say Sguest. However, keeping the Royal Yacht safe at sea would be difficult nowadays. I see no ships.

    4. Another success story for our revered T Bliar! Sadly he never did get his Air Force One plane. That would have saved the U.K. a lot of money .

    5. They are petty, envious and ignorant. It seems to be endemic these days. I blame socialism.

  58. Today’s Ponder

    If the Black Lives Matter cartel wanted a proper discussion on ‘Equality’ they would have not raised the BLM Banner.

    There are ulterior motives and as in most cases, if you follow the money you will find the ‘Mr/Mrs/Mx/?’ running it

    If they had campaigned as All Lives Matter, the majority of the people in the civilised world would have been behind them

    Of course then there would have been harmony, not hate and disruption.

    That would never do

    As an aside, could we not have an exchange scheme, where a group of black BLM organisers go and live for a year in a Somali
    village* and the Somalis take their places ‘over here’. we could then see if it has been an advantage to be the descendant
    of a ‘slave’ and not a free African

    No phones, computers, credit cards, shoes, bedding, liqour, condoms, medical care, bankv accounts etc

    Ponderova ( neat typo)

  59. Summer of the cannibal rats! Hungry, aggressive, highly fertile – and coming to our homes. Mon 29 Jun 2020.

    Bates says rats have become bolder in attempting to enter our homes, competing with the mice that are our more common housemates. Rats crawl up drains and gnaw through plastic piping. They can swim into toilet bowls. Demand is high for “rat flaps” – spiked one-way gates for waste pipes that stop rats coming in while letting, well, stuff flow out.

    Mike Flynn, the boss of Alpha Pest Control in Stoke-on-Trent, remembers a recent call to a house where the father had seen a rat going from the upstairs landing into a toddler’s bedroom. He’d searched the room for the animal’s hiding place without success. “We arrived and did probably the same search, but no one had thought to look in the cot,” Flynn says. “I remember picking up the pillow and being just as horrified as the rat that stared back at me.” A chase ensued – and a decisive blow to the head.

    Don’t read if you want to sleep tonight. It’s worse than mass immigration!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/29/summer-of-the-cannibal-rats-hungry-aggressive-highly-fertile-and-coming-to-our-homes

    1. Moh and I saw a rat run across a country road , we were so shocked by the size of it… I mentioned this probably last week.

      Since lockdown has now been abused, more traffic on the roads, more junk thrown away, more fly tippers because the council tips were closed and I just reckon that the ‘British’ in general are a filthy breed of people .

      1. Decades of ever-more liberal attitudes, coupled with more and more overprotection of ‘entitled’ children, execrable parenting, sub-standard schooling and a complete absence of discipline has bred generations of self-centred scum.

    2. VOM household had rat trouble a year or two ago. Bought chunky, baited, steel-cage traps, sprays, sticky strips and ultrasonic scarers. None of them worked. For sake of completeness bought a bait-free electric trap. Wasn’t convinced it could possibly work as although easy enough to generate high voltages, it didn’t seem likely that 4 AA batteries could provide a lethal-enough current.

      Was a case of ‘imagine my surprise’, therefore, when I saw a tail sticking out of it – see picture. Was wary, though, as could just have been stunned and not dead. Filled a bucket with water, put gardening gloves on and quickly slid rodent into the water. Needn’t have worried, though, as it was stiff as a board, and a fair size, as second picture shows.

      Since then have fitted 1mm gap mesh over air-bricks and had no further problems. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/88df384a4fc3ea648a483bd5929f986ac778552d28aea3a16657c212e38ca318.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/321effb369386a93d87164f04ee073e3099ba10e2ca6bfdfa5de99bd4652d9c8.jpg

          1. A mere childrat. It’s when they get to 12-15inches plus tail that they get annoying.

          2. A mere childrat. It’s when they get to 12-15inches plus tail that they get annoying.

      2. Good result, Oldie. A few years ago I heard a scratching noise in my compost bin. I thumped on the sides and the occupant eventually stuck its head out of the hatch I had previously removed. It only appeared for about a second, but long enough to administer a .22 pellet. It turned out to be a monster.

    3. Oh happy day!

      This morning I caught one of the moles that have been getting rather too close to my vegetable patch.

    4. We found one in the kitchen cupboard once – at head height – not sure which was the most surprised, the rat or the husband. Our old cat, Sam was a good ratter.

      1. Many moons ago my parents found a rat in the house so they pushed our poor cat into the rom with the rat and quickly closed the door.
        I don’t remember any gnashing and wailing but when they finally opened the door, the cat flew out of that room like a real scaredy cat.

        1. Oh goody, I was wondering what we could do for the rest of the year. How about a nice bubonic plague?

          I would have called it black death but in the current environment, one death is as good as another.

    1. My poor cat (13 years old) has gone blind in one eye (detached retina) as well as deaf. No cause for the detached retina was found by the vet. Blood pressure normal, along with other vitals.

      2. Poor old Puss. Hope he’s getting on fine even though.
        Our Magnificat made it to 16 before suffering a lot from diabetes and collapsing, having to be taken for the last visit to the vet. A really sad day. Firstborn, whose cat he was, was in floods of tears – and can you imagine a huge bloke (in the style of Geoff Capes) with Black Metal appearance and enormous motorcycle in floods of tears?

        1. I’ve heard of my guitar gently weeping; it’s good to know enormous motorcycles can do it too 🙂

        2. He’s a she, but otherwise yes, she seems to be ok.
          I go to pieces whenever I lose a cat, so I have total sympathy with your firstborn.

      3. We lost our previous cat Swallow but even after becoming blind she managed to find her way around for a year or so before succumbing to a cancer.

  62. And many, many more…

    Gavin Mortimer
    How the Nazis pioneered ‘cancel culture’
    29 June 2020, 8:30am

    Two well-known women were degraded last week as Britain continues to be ethically cleansed. The first was Nancy Astor, whose statue in Plymouth was dubbed with the word ‘Nazi’.

    The second was Baroness Nicholson, honorary vice-president of the Booker Prize Foundation, who was relieved of her duties after her views on trans issues and gay marriage were judged insufficiently respectful. ‘The issues are complex but our principles are clear,’ the Foundation said in justifying their decision. ‘We deplore racism, homophobia and transphobia and do not discriminate on any grounds.’

    Is there any difference between those who defiled Astor and those who demeaned Nicholson? Only, it would appear, that the latter are more civil in their intolerance.

    Astor’s statue was inaugurated only last November, to honour her achievements as a feminist, social reformer and the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament. It was vandalised because of rumours she had been sympathetic to Nazism and hostile to Jews in the 1930s. She had dealt with both accusations in a letter to the press in March 1938.

    Having rubbished suggestions that she was a member of any pro-Hitler ‘Cliveden Set’, Astor then addressed the second charge: ‘I must also refute your accusation that I anti-Jewish,’ she stated. ‘It is quite untrue, and has caused pain not only to me, but to many of my very good friends who are themselves Jews.’

    The blame for these scurrilous rumours, she added, lay in ‘the Communistic propaganda circulated throughout the world’.

    While similar propaganda is driving today’s purge of Britain’s past and present, often the tactics deployed were actually perfected by the Nazis. Within months of Hitler’s power grab in 1933 the German book trade had issued a blacklist of more than 200 authors, and university towns made pyres of their works and joyously set them ablaze.

    Statues and memorials were next. The first to suffer was the expressionist sculptor Ernst Barlach, whose wooden war memorials were a common sight in Germany in the 1920s. The Nazis loathed them because they lacked heroism and, in alliance with an obsequious media, they had Barlach labelled ‘degenerate’. ‘The fawning cowardice of this magnificent era makes one go red up to the ears and beyond to think one is German,’ wrote Barlach to his brother, as one by one his sculptures were withdrawn from public view.

    Barlach avoided execution but his membership of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts was cancelled, and he died a broken man in 1938. Within two years the Nazis had overrun most of western Europe and were so confident of conquering Britain that they compiled another list, this one of 2,800 British residents who would be arrested after the invasion.

    Churchill and his war cabinet were top of an impressive Who’s Who: Lady Astor, described by the Nazis as an ‘enemy of Germany’, was on it too. Literature, academia, religion, entertainment and journalism were also well-represented, with the Spectator one of several publications whose staff would have been carted off by the Gestapo. So, too, would Lord Baden-Powell, who the Nazis believed was using his scout movement to spy on their Reich.

    The list wasn’t discovered until the end of the war, when it was unearthed in the Berlin headquarters of the Reich Security Police. The Guardian reported the list in September 1945 and asked Lady Astor what she thought of her inclusion. ‘It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called “Cliveden Set” was pro-Fascist,’ she replied.

    Noel Coward recorded the news in his diary entry on 14 September 1945. ‘Among the people to be dealt with when England was invaded were Winston, Vic Oliver [a comedian], Sybil Thorndike [an actress], Rebecca West [an author] and me. What a cast!’ West sent a short cable to Coward when she heard of the list: ‘My dear the people we should have been seen dead with.’

    Today, those who now have an iron ideological grip on Britain have published a list of statues they want demolished. As their influence grows a second list will surely be compiled: those who are ‘politically unreliable’, to borrow one of the Nazis’ favourite phrases.

    It doesn’t require a giant leap of imagination to guess who would be top, or that after JK Rowling would be Lionel Shriver, Laurence Fox, Peter Hitchens, Germaine Greer, David Starkey, John Cleese and Trevor Phillips. The list would be unlikely to stretch to 2,800 names, an indication of how effectively the radical left have cowed or converted the political, business and cultural elite this century. How many MPs would feature? Priti Patel and perhaps one or two others.

    This may all seem like a flight of fancy, and it would be impossible for a country at the heart of European civilisation to sleepwalk into tyranny. But totalitarians should never be under-estimated: for what they lack initially in numbers, they make up for in fanaticism.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-nazis-pioneered-cancel-culture-

    1. Good article. I have been to the Barlach Museum on the outskirts of Hamburg; he was an amazing sculptor. If anyone gets the chance they should see his wooden Madonna in the cathedral in Magdeburg, where I spent a very enjoyable weekend in the summer of ’93.

    2. The modern Left are not different to their predecessors.

      Comically they think they’re the good guys. The villain always does. If they had the slightest inkling of history they would realise they are the Nazi’s but then maybe that’s wwhy they want to erase history? If they don’t have to look in the mirror they don’t have to accept that they’re in the wrong.

  63. Language barriers, high levels of diabetes and poverty among Leicester’s BAME residents were today being blamed for the Coronavirus surge in the East Midlands city as it was revealed its 350,000 population may have their lockdown extended for two extra weeks from Saturday.

    City councillor Ratilal Govind told MailOnline that he thought there had been a lack of communication with people who do not speak English as a first language in the city, which has 49 per cent of its population of Asian heritage or from black backgrounds. In the east of Leicester, where the outbreak is at its worst, up to two-thirds of residents are BAME.

    Councillor Govind, who represents the city’s Evington ward where one of the four mobile testing stations for the virus has been sited, said: ‘I have seen young people getting together, having a few drinks and conversation. They are just social gatherings. With these young people there is a language barrier. They are speaking their own language and I tell them to disperse in Gujarati. There is a lack of communication made worse by the language barriers’.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8469725/Leicester-faces-extra-two-week-lockdown-pubs-hairdressers-staying-SHUT.html

      1. 320754+ up ticks.
        Afternoon LTL.
        Agreed, and when in Rome stay there, and all that.

        1. We have the same problem with our south of the border immigrants. These are the people who marched in Washington demanding laxer immigration laws while chanting slogans in Spanish, and waving Mexican flags. Not the best way to attract sympathy to their cause.

        2. We have the same problem with our south of the border immigrants. These are the people who marched in Washington demanding laxer immigration laws while chanting slogans in Spanish, and waving Mexican flags. Not the best way to attract sympathy to their cause.

          1. 320754+ up ticks,
            JTL,
            We have multiple foreign tongues telling us they do not like us in our Country, but if we moved lock, stock , barrel & welfare to their countries they would not like us in their countries either.

          2. They are Catholics. You don’t realise how lucky you are! We’d swap them any day for one of our cities that follows the religion that says people who leave it must be killed.

    2. A recent surge in coronavirus cases in Melbourne was blamed on Slammers celebrating the end of Ramadan.

    3. They’ve only got themselves to blame for language barriers. Whitey has spent millions on translating everything into Lord knows how many different languages. If they can’t be bothered to learn English, employ an interpreter or become literate in their own benighted language, it definitely isn’t our fault.

      1. One of the things that I liked (though it could make life difficult) in France was that all forms etc were ONLY in French.

        If you didn’t understand them – tough. None of this 92 language versions malarky that ensures that millions of bames never learn any more English than, “Where is the benefits office?”

        1. The only English language form I’ve seen is the online one I had to fill in after being clocked at 83kph in an 80 limit.

    4. When I surveyed the former Parr’s Bank building of 1901 in Leicester, which had been wrecked internally by Nat West Bank, I was struck by the preponderance of fat women and children clothed in black and cluttering the footpaths.

      I witnessed a white girl trying to pass a group of them and having to push past them. One of the Muslim women remonstrated with the words “foreigner”.

      Working in the beautiful city of Leicester, founded by the Romans, I have to say I felt a foreigner in my own lands.

      The high incidence of infection of Covid-19 in Leicester is precisely because of its demography viz. overpopulation with Pakistani Muslims and others of their ilk.

    5. How can young people, born & bred in Leicester, have a language barrier? Surely exposure to English their whole lives would mean they have at least some facility in the language? Hell, most people born & bred in India & Pakistan can do English, FFS!

      1. The men have a grasp of English but the women in general do not. Likewise none of the women work and most simply breed and do a spot of cooking.

        1. Even many of the men don’t need English (except for benefits) because they are unemployed (and often, unemployable, even with quotas).

      2. They don’t speak English at home and in school there are so many of them they probably form a ghetto. The teachers might even teach in whatever non-native language is common!

      3. The more professional Indians, yes. Everyone I had to deal with when I was there working on a JV spoke excellent English – including the hotel staff. Some adjustments needed for unique “Indian English” words, like “prepone”, the opposite of postpone (quite logical), and a tendency to use “I am being” instead of a simple “I am”. Ditto for the rest of the verb “to be”.

    1. My father was a career civil servant – of course the service was much smaller then. He would be totally horrified at the politicization that has occurred, being “old school” and believing that the job was to carry out their “political masters” policies without trying to sabotage them. Of course back then, the service was very Conservative in its outlook.

    3. The magic Common Purpose phrase ‘speak truth to power’ is referenced by O’Donnell I see… Whose ‘truth’?

    4. I was a snivel serpent and actually we all worked quite hard to do the best we could for our customers – the unemployed.

      1. I, too, was a snivel serpent for the final 6 years of my working life. An Usher in the Magistrates Court. A fabulous job and we Ushers of the court that closed in 2011 still meet for lunch 3 or 4 times a year, this year being the exception.

          1. It was 2011 they closed the court. The only court in Surrey to comply was all requirements to stay open but was the only one closed. The closure coincided with my 65th birthday so I retired gracefully. Edited

          1. Yes and keep the court going, having the next defendant ready to enter the courtroom as the last one left. Do all the admin as far as fines and bail notices were concerned. Plus many other non specific duties as they arose. Great job.

      2. I too was a snivel serpent, and left after being accused of working too hard (I thought I was idling), plus the embarrassment of bursting into one man’s office after lunch to find him sleeping with his head on the desk! Friday lunch was a 2 hour session down the pub. As a 19-year old, this was rather a shock. Maybe it was just MoD, but that was all my experience.
        Problem is, individuals get (unfairly, sometimes) tarred with the same brush.

        1. For about 5 years, MB was a civilian clerk with REME; by 10.0 am he had done all his work and had to look busy for another 7 hours.
          Far more tiring than actually working.

    6. My father was a career civil servant – of course the service was much smaller then. He would be totally horrified at the politicization that has occurred, being “old school” and believing that the job was to carry out their “political masters” policies without trying to sabotage them. Of course back then, the service was very Conservative in its outlook.

  65. Afternoon, everyone. Been cold and very windy here; I could have done with wearing my thermals when I was out in the garden! As to the headline, I would have preferred it if it had been Memorials, the removal of the Archbishop and bringing Christian morals back into society.

    1. Good day, Conwy.

      I am just going to light the stove! Cold, cheerless and gales blowing. Like living under socialism.

    1. “This coronavirus mutation has taken over the world.”

      That’s what it was designed for …

  67. I have an appointment with my local Barber on the 9th, i was wondering if anyone could lend me a wig for a day, just so i can scare the carp out of him as i walk through the front door. 😂👩‍🦰

      1. Not cat.
        I did have a Davy crocket hat once. And i have a small bale of barley straw and a nice hat my son brought me back from Peru. That might work. Wigzell Gummage style.

  68. MINISTRY OF JUSTICE PERMANENT SECRETARY BRACES FOR SACKING

    https://youtu.be/S22sHYkUGCk

    After Mark Sedwill’s sooner-than-expected departure from Downing Street yesterday, attention is turning to potential further mandarin overhauls instigated by from a bullish No. 10. The Ministry of Justice’s permanent secretary Sir Richard Heaton’s name was immediately floated.

    Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee this afternoon, Heaton confirmed his contract is up for renewal next month after five years in the role, however claimed it is merely “speculation” whether his contract will or won’t be renewed. Guido suspects this is a brave public face from Sir Richard who knows in reality his fate is sealed…

    The Permanent Secretary also threw civil service caution to the wind, saying there was under-investment in prison maintenance from 2010-17 and Britain is now “paying the consequences”. Guido spots this afternoon Heaton’s official Twitter account was quietly deleted. The behaviour of someone expecting to still have their job a month from now?

  69. I see Keir Stamerrerereer has just done a u-turn on bending the knee to Black Lies Matter as more and more evidence comes to light of the anti semitism that lies at the heart of much of what they believe.

    Watch the panic spread round the media as it starts to dawn on them they have been trumpeting the vile dogma of a fascist organisation.

    Not that they will feel any sense of shame, just a sudden need to change the subject.

        1. Thanks. I thought that BA’s post meant that Cur Ikea had changed his mind of the bending the knee malarkey. Sadly not.

    2. Mercedes-Benz have even painted their F1 cars black in sympathy with the anarchists.

    3. Pleased to see him coming unstuck. Perhaps he’ll give more thought in future about jumping on bandwagons that superficially appear to offer advantage to him.

    4. 320754+ up ticks,
      Evening VA,
      That knee bending business is a prelude to the second knee following the first five times a day, mandatory.

    5. Mercedes-Benz have even painted their F1 cars black in sympathy with the anarchists.

      1. Are all German companies run by hypocrites with short memories?

        How much money will Mercedes-Benz be giving the the descendants of the Jews whose slave labour they used in living memory during WW2?

        The State of Israel should be asking the company some very searching questions!

    6. Pleased to see him coming unstuck. Perhaps he’ll give more thought in future about jumping on bandwagons that superficially appear to offer advantage to him.

    7. A lot of back tracking is necessary – especially from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Police Force, and Oxford and Cambridge universities to name but a few.

      Egg on faces all round.

  71. be quick before this is banned, he’s hitting all the nails on the head
    https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=james+david+manning+youtube&refig=1a316853384f455e9717d78c96678ae3&sp=1&ghc=1&qs=AS&pq=james+david+manning+&sk=PRES1&sc=4-20&cvid=1a316853384f455e9717d78c96678ae3&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3djames%2bdavid%2bmanning%2byoutube%26form%3dANSPH1%26refig%3d1a316853384f455e9717d78c96678ae3%26sp%3d1%26ghc%3d1%26qs%3dAS%26pq%3djames%2bdavid%2bmanning%2b%26sk%3dPRES1%26sc%3d4-20%26cvid%3d1a316853384f455e9717d78c96678ae3&view=detail&mmscn=vwrc&mid=5B543EA971E3017AC7275B543EA971E3017AC727&FORM=WRVORC

  74. A message to literary NoTTLers.

    A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Grimes had an article about Isabel Colegate – and how her novels had gone out of fashion (and print).

    During the “great book re-organisation”, when we incorporated 20 boxes of books from Laure into the Fulmodeston collection, I noticed that we had both the “Orlando Trilogy” and “The Shooting Party” – books that I hadn’t read for 3 years.

    Just finished them all. Great stuff. I commend them.

    And, to my amazement, the author is still alive and well – aged 88.

  76. Back home from the groomers with the dogs .. They look tidier and trimmed , nails and hairy paws and feathers sorted , so much better for them . Their last trim was 2 days before lockdown in March nearly fourteen weeks ago.. the world was a different place then.. who would have imagined the palavar now.

    The farm where I take them to be trimmed has acres of white poppies waiting to be harvested , the smell is equisite , the poppies are grown every 4 years or so for medicinal use. swathes of poppies , there are also fields of wheat and other crops .. How lovely to hear skylarks singing, swallows swooping and buzzards calling even though it is very windy and quite chilly .

    Driving through Blandford one just assumes that everything should be back to normal, nope , there were queues outside chemists, bakers and smaller stores .

    These small Georgian towns with narrow pavements and neat little specialist shops as with all businesses must be suffering hugely .. no hustle and bustle , the heart has been ripped out of all that we knew .

    Will everything recover .. I am not so certain . Our nation of shop keepers has been dealt a bitter blow.

    1. “These small Georgian towns with narrow pavements and neat little specialist shops as with all businesses must be suffering hugely .. no hustle and bustle , the heart has been ripped out of all that we knew “.

      Tesco did that to Blandford over 20 years ago.

      1. It is on the outskirts of Blandford near the old brewery . The smaller shops like the bookshops gun shops, butchers, antique and cobblers, etc
        were still intact before lockdown .

        I guess you are pretty familiar with the area Harry?

        1. Yes. My inlaws lived at Sturminster Newton and I got to know the whole area.

    2. Just concentrate on the beauty and the good things of life, Maggie. Try not to worry about the future and live in the moment like your dogs.

        1. Every now and then a Batmobile replica goes on sale here. Give me the word – it would be just the thing for Norfolk lanes!

    3. Hamilton announced his intention to live in Switzerland in 2007, stating that this was because he wished to get away from the media scrutiny that he experienced living in the UK. He said on the television show Parkinson that taxation was also a reason.[188] He settled in Luins in Vaud canton on Lake Geneva.[189][190]
      Lewis, my message to you ….

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4VUDgPNkik

      2. Rod Argent has covered his A100 with sticky back plastic. He always was a Valerie Singleton fan.

    1. Hello Ogga,
      are you aware if there is any crowd-funding for Jake Hepple? I gather the one for legal defence was closed, but he doesn’t need legal defence now, does he? Do we know if he’s got another job yet?

      1. 320754+ up ticks,
        Evening BB2,
        I am dependent on Gerard Batten and his take on it
        There does seem to be a lot of interest among Parler posters being as it is, a deserving cause.

  79. Rastus has often commented here on the differences between state and private schools.

    Today we received the letter, copied below, from Henry’s (state) school, including his A level certificates. He sat his A levels there in 2013 – 7 years ago!

    Note – “Dear student” – they can’t even bother to call him by his name, and they can’t even bother to capitalise “student”. And the fact they blame Covid-19 for the delay is just hilarious. The letter was addressed to “Mrs and Mrs H P Tracey” – don’t know who they are; Henry’s not married (yet) and his parents are Mr and Mrs R C Tracey.

    Total inefficiency bordering on total lack of respect.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4f574f02a08ff504092ba287c54b526d1d83cb4b1c0ea90038d62aa4f6f1a04e.jpg

    1. Good afternoon, Caroline,

      Sending this type of “Round Robin” letter is inexcusable at any time but from a school even more so. And being slipshod about the name (and status) of a former pupil only goes to emphasise how much education in the UK is on a downward trajectory.

      If it is not too impertinent of me to ask: was there a specific reason why you chose a school located at such a remote (and apparently random) location for Henry to attend? Did that particular school come recommended for any particular reason?

      Obviously if you do not wish to answer these quite personal questions please rest assured that I shall not be affronted.

      1. Henry did not want to go to a public school, for reasons of his own. At the time, this school was rated as outstanding and one of the best state boarding schools in the country. Also, his godfather happens to live in Oakham, which is nearby. When we visited the school, Henry liked the ambiance and he was happy there, in spite of everything.

    3. Afternoon Caroline

      That is the sort of letter the Conservative party used to write to its party members .

      That is the sort of twaddle the NHS writes to its patients.

      Henry’s old school might just as well have written Dear no 6/ comrade/son of / member / veteran/ number

      We all receive cold empty letters at some point or other, there is just no excuse for bland uncaringness , is there?

      We are all prisoners of the state.. and we all have a number identifying us .

        1. I have just had a cup of tea.

          Years ago things when things were so bad and untidy .. we had to submit an obituary to a regional newspaper . Can you believe the daft newspaper muddled the obituary , and instead of announcing the deceased’s name they announced mine instead . I have died once!

          I still feel very angry , my Moh was amused, but not alot.

          Many muddles similar to that have happened, and even on prescriptions .. so I check everything carefully.

          3. Did you check your pulse when you read your obituary? 🙂 Then, did you send them a letter on cardboard pointing out that reports of your death were greatly exaggerated?

          4. I rang them up, they apologised. It was a real muddle ..My poor late mother in law would have laughed .. should have been her obit!

    4. The letter must have been particularly galling to read with its gobbledegook sentences!

    5. Presumably the secretarial staff will be using the covid time to clear out all the old drawers, and the certificates will have been found there.

      1. Very likely!

        We have sent the headmaster (still the same one as when Henry was there; he’s a good chap) a copy of the letter to see what he says. The last paragraph reads:

        “We might add that Henry was both dismayed and amused by the letter: he jokingly said that if he had been able to make up his A level results, he might have gone to Cambridge; but on a more serious note, he said that although he was tempted to “pen a strongly worded email”, he would not do so because all he would get would be a “mealy-mouthed response”. We sincerely hope that you can do better than that.”

        I will report back to the Nottlers if we get a noteworthy response!

        1. Dear Mr and Ms Tracy
          I is so sorry to get you’re correspondance.
          Please acept my sinserest apoligies.
          It was the secreteries.
          Yours truly,
          The Beak, Ma Oxon.

      1. Gosh, Hugh – you are out of date….{:¬))

        I used to get told off – when the MR was teaching at Gresham’s – for calling them children….

          2. I fully endorse the notice on most types of medication:

            “Keep away from children”

      2. Yes, but most of the time when schools send A level certificates the addressees are university students.

        Our elder son made an interesting distinction between the two: he said that you were a “pupil” if you were at school because you had to be there; and you were a “student” if you were at an educational establishment because you chose to be there.

        1. My distinction is that a pupil is being taught whilst a student teaches themselves, all be it under varying degrees of guidance.

  80. Have a read of this, very interesting.

    They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & Sold to the tannery…….if you had to do this to survive you were “P### Poor”

    But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot……they “didn’t have a pot to pee in” & were the lowest of the low

    The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

    Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . …… . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married.

    Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath water!”

    Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof… Hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

    There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

    The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, “Dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

    In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, “bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.

    Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

    Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

    Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

    England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive… So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

    And that’s the truth….Now, whoever said History was boring?

    2. The stench in the streets was also the reason why Assize judges still carry a nosegay (posy of flowers) when processing.

    3. What a splendid achievement – to love a woman with terrible halitosis. But Shakespeare managed to do it!.

      My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
      Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
      If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
      If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
      I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
      But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
      And in some perfumes is there more delight
      Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
      I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
      That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
      I grant I never saw a goddess go;
      My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
      And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
      As any she belied with false compare.

      And of course another of my favourite versifiers, Tom Lehrer, wrote a song of love about a woman who had nothing at all to commend her.

      Sharks gotta swim
      Bats gotta fly
      I’m gonna love one woman till I die
      To Ed or Dick or Bob
      She may be just a slob
      But, to me oh well,
      She’s my gel, she’s my gel
      And I love her!

      etc.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA-iFKg2s1A

    4. On Barra the men leaving church were expected to piss in the bath tub at the back of the church. The urine was used in the dying process for tartan cloths.

    5. So you’re saying, Maggie, (© Cathy Newman) that in olden times all people were privileged white racists and we should therefore all bend the knee to people of a darker hue?

      Seriously, though, a really fascinating lesson on the derivation of familiar expressions.

  81. The madness has reached our little country town. The statue of Sir John A Macdonald has been desecrated with a lot of paint thrown over it.

    What the hell are they playing at? The lefties are trying to revoke the achievements of Canadas original PM, in the States everyone from Columbus on is being cast as racist. If they succeed what is left beyond a world with no past, no values and no future.

    I am no believer in pollyspiracy theory but honestly the world has gone as lotl fears.

    1. C’mon… you know Pollyspiracy is true…… you just don’t want it to be because I told you !

      After all, look at one of the multi billionaire bag carriers who got a little promotion for doing globalist facilitating……..

      ”In May 2017 the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) granted Cameron’s appointment as a Director of U2 Frontman Bono’s One Foundation which is also supported by Bill Gates and George Soros’s Open Society”

      Also, why is it that Blair, Brown, Cameron and May are all at the same Washington speaking agency aligned to the Democrats and getting vast fees of approx $150 – 200,000 for a half hour speech ? Hired, as they are, by Davos attending investment banks and other institutions where the attendees pay nothing.

      What does that kind of behavior say to you ?

      1. I read that as “I am training to become a muffin”… maybe a trip to specsavers would be a good idea!
        Good evening, Johnny!

      1. … oh, go on then. We know each other a bit better now. I’ll not tell Sans-Cou.

    1. One of our local towns will have a problem if they get rid of the Roman stuff – the sewers are Roman in the centre!

    2. On that basis we can pull down all mosques and anything from Africa, as slavery was practiced continent-wide for thousands of years, and still is.
      These people are complete idiots and should be told to get lost.

    2. Black with gold all over it. All it needs are a few diamond studs and it will be hard to tell the difference between car and driver.

  91. This was sent to me by a very good friend of mine. The video is entiltled:

    The best answer to White guilt pushing I have ever heard,.

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/83gypqz8LIQL/

    It is very hard hitting and I don’t know how this got onto the internet and I cannot believe it will be up for long so PLEASE have a look at it while you can.

    I would be interested to hear some Nottler views on it!

    1. Seems fair enough. A little soft on muslims in respect of the Crusades, but the message is clear.

        2. A lot of NoTTLers are fickle, Rastus, though not all.

          I have played that piece and simultaneously taped it on my dictaphone for later transcription. Thank you for providing it.

        3. Well, we are a little apathetic, having been worn down by the increasingly contradictory nonsense from the governments of our various countries (in the Union) as well as the perhaps needless four months of house arrest*. Moreover while the person in the video is quite vehement, I imagine most Nottlers will agree without dissent or argument.

          *A bit like Abu Quatada who was kept under house arrest, but allowed to go walks with his wives. The dafties in National Action were sentenced to more than that…

    3. On the topic of racism, can anyone guess from which publication these thoughts of the author came:

      We felt pretty sad when the time came to leave. We drank the last exquisite coffee prepared by Señora Soto and boarded the little train for its 12-hour trip back to Cuzco. In these types of trains there are third-class carriages “reserved” for the local Indians: they’re like the cattle transportation wagons they use in Argentina, except that the smell of cow shit is ever more pleasant than the human version. The somewhat animal-like concept the indigenous people have of modesty and hygiene means that irrespective of gender or age they do their business by the roadside, the women cleaning themselves with their skirts, the men not bothering at all, and then carry on as before. The underskirts of Indian women who have kids are literally warehouses of excrement, a consequence of the way they wipe the rascals every time one of them passes wind. Of course, the tourists traveling in their comfortable rail coaches could only glean the vaguest idea of the conditions in which the Indians live, from the fast glimpses they catch as they speed past our train, which has stopped to let them pass. The main task at hand was getting to Iquitos, so we concentrated on that.

      The first person we hit on was the mayor, someone called Cohen; we had heard a lot about him, that he was Jewish as far as money was concerned but a good sort. There was no doubt he was tightfisted; the problem was whether he was a good sort. He palmed us off to the shipping agents, who in turn sent us to speak with the captain, who was kindly enough, promising the huge concession of charging us third-class fares and letting us travel in first. We weren’t happy with this, and went to see the head of the garrison who said he couldn’t do anything for us. Then the second-in-command, after interrogating us (and in doing so demonstrating his stupidity), promised to help. Caracas extends along the length of a narrow valley, enclosing and restraining it on its edges, so that on a short walk you’ll be climbing the surrounding hills, and there, with the progressive city laid out before your feet, you’ll begin to see a new aspect of its multifaceted makeup. The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: the black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.

      At this elevation the concrete houses have totally disappeared and only adobe huts reign. I peer into one of them. It is a room half separated by a partition, with a fireplace and table and a heap of straw on the ground, apparently serving as beds. Various bony cats and a mangy dog play with three completely naked black children. Rising from the fire, acrid smoke fills the room. The black mother, frizzy hair and sagging breasts, is cooking, assisted by a girl of about 15, who is dressed. At the door of the hut we get into a conversation and after a while I ask if they will pose for a photo, which they categorically refuse to do unless I give it to them straight away. In vain I try to explain that I have to develop it first, but no, they want it then and there, or no ball game. Eventually I promise to hand it over straight away, but now they are suspicious and don’t want to cooperate. One of the kids escapes to play with his friends while I continue chatting with the family. In the end, I stand guard at the door, camera in hand, pretending to snap anyone who pokes out their head. We play around like this for a while until I see the little kid returning carefree on a new bicycle; I focus and press the button but the effect is disastrous. To elude the photo, the kid swerves and falls to the ground, bursting into tears. Immediately they all lose their fear of the camera and rush out to hurl abuse at me. I withdraw somewhat apprehensively because they are excellent stone throwers, followed by the insults of the group — including the height of contempt: “Portuguese.”

      Littered along the edges of the road are containers for transporting cars, used by the Portuguese as dwellings. In one of these, where a black family lives, I can just glimpse a brand new refrigerator, and from many of them radios blare music which their owners play at maximum volume. New cars are parked outside the most miserable “homes.”

        1. Correct second time.

          The paragraphs are taken from The Motorcycle Diaries the unexpurgated early autobiography of that scion of the Left: Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, demigod of Socialism, Communism and Marxism-Leninism.

          Any further examples of Lefties shouting “racist”, anywhere remotely close to my direction, will be gleefully shown these passages.

    4. I’m not sure it’s as good as you claim. I agree with the sentiments but it leaves itself open to the very attacks it is proposing should be challenged. A Judas Goat perhaps.

  92. Here you are – this is the nonsense we’re up against locally. Remember Stroud was the birthplace of XR, and is full of weirdies who dress in a strange manner. Oddly though, it returns some Conservative councillors and a Conservative MP. This is very long-winded but you will get the drift before you give up in despair. The councillor retweeted a tweet from Katie Hopkins and she said “All Lives Matter”. Shock Horror.

    They’ve done a demolition job on her below.

    https://amplifystroud.com/2020/06/29/a-chance-to-learn-our-response-to-the-sdc-monitoring-officers-verdict-on-debbie-young/?fbclid=IwAR2ISK0C_wkKMxEaDWwHUDmsQr_Utm88e_p5TGIoxbZlCAqjLfsLomy3_KQ

      1. Last week we had a piece in the local paper by a black guy moaning about white privilege and how he was always treated badly.

        1. I am going to moan now about blek privilege and the way they are shoe-horned into every possible nook and cranny despite historical anachronism. I just sneaked off to watch Endeavour. It was set in 67/68 and featured Jeu Sans Frontières (It’s a Knockout as we called it). The “audience” in Oxford contained at least half a dozen ethnics. Now I was a fan of JSF at the time and watched it avidly while laughing my socks off. There were no effniks – they would have stood out like a sore thumb seeing as they were very rare, certainly where I lived (Worcestershire) and even on TV.

          1. They did stand out at the time. At school in the 60s there was one black girl – she was a well-respected prefect.
            In the 70s, in our road there was a Chinese family, who ran the local takeaway, and a mixed race couple, whose children were well-liked by mine.
            These people were all noticeable, by their obvious difference – but they were all accepted and well-integrated into the local community.

          2. I’m sure they were accepted because they fitted in. You had a much more cosmopolitan upbringing than I did in my village – the most exotic pupils in my primary school were the children of an Italian and a German POW. They only stood out because of their surnames.

          3. Not sure it was cosmopolitan – there were one or two gypsy children at the village primary school, the black prefect at my grammar school, and the mixed -race families when I had children of my own. But they were few and far between – unlike nowadays.

    3. OMG. What a minefield. Perhaps we should all (whites I mean, obvs) stop talking altogether! How on earth can we navigate our way through all these amazing “you are racist” accusations, whatever we say will be branded racist.

      2. They’ll be monitoring my Parleys next – not Tweets as i’m still suspended there! Good job I’m nobody.

          2. I’m an unimportant somebody – not a famous “influencer” whatever that means. I guess it’s someone who forces their views on others in the knowledge they are always right (and left).

      3. whatever we say will be branded racist.

        Yes. So there’s no point backing down or apologizing. Just say “blx” and carry on.

    4. They obviously speak a different language in Stroud. What a load of gobbledygook a lot of nonsensical words put together drawn from a hat? The biggest non surprise is that these people couldn’t hold down a proper job. Adds credence to the adage that the problem with most political jokes is that they get elected.

      1. I tried, I honestly tried to read that bs but my eyes started glazing over when I got to the convoluted all lives cannot matter until black lives matter argument.

      2. My heart sank when I saw it. It was posted on the village Facebook page. The councillor in question is a well-liked Tory in the next village. I couldn’t read it to the end.

      1. Why would anyone want to be a local councillor? She’s not the first tp be pilloried here – her (late) predecessor was forced to take a reeducation course at her own expense for calling herself a “N- in the woodpile”.

        1. Why, oh why, can’t people grow a pair and say NO, NO, NO.

          No, I will not attend an all whites are bad awareness course
          No, I will not accept that my culture is inferior to every other
          No, I will not kowtow to people who mean me harm.

          3. If only more people did.

            I once attended a compulsory transition course where a department was being told how to work under a new regime. I was clearly annoying the lecturer with my questions.
            He suddenly turned on me and asked what my problem was.

            “Well, Sir, you clearly don’t understand the subject, you’re lecturing us on a topic for which you are totally ill-prepared and I suspect that you don’t even believe what you are telling us, because your lecture has been prepared by someone else.”

            Total silence. A little bit of muttering and end of course.

            Needless to say I got the most almighty bollocking at my annual appraisal; but I was right.

          4. I had to attend a Diversity Course when I worked at the Court. It was run by a black lesbian and N Irish queer. They started with a statement that “There is a problem with part time workers”. I stopped them there and turned to the rest of the people and said, as they knew, that I worked part time and did anyone have a problem with seeing leave at lunch time on some occasions but still at work, on occasions, when they went home. There was a resounding no. They then said that there really is a problem with p-t workers. Stopped them again and reiterated my original question the answer was still no. I then suggested they moved on to their next part.
            Later the I q called me a typical heterosexual. I asked how he came to that conclusion as he had no idea if my sexual preference and he stereotyped me. At that point it was lunch break. The afternoon was quite frosty.

          5. Well done.

            I suspect I’m preaching to the choir here.

            I guess that they were using P-T workers allegorically and that your approach completely queered their pitch, as it were.

            {:-))

            They were hoping to use PT workers as an exercise to approach diversity and thought that using PT people would go unchallenged.

            I always smile when such creatures are forced off script and are incapabe of coping.

          6. Yes I enjoyed it. I also pointed out to them that it was a Diversity course and I was being diverse. What they wanted was conformity to their idea of diversity and I wasn’t going to play by their rules. Great fun seeing them squirm.

    6. The Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat alliance running the council issued a statement expressing their ‘disappointment’ at the judgement, which showed a ‘very limited understanding’ of structural and institutional racism

      The usual suspects talking the usual bllx. It’s all catchphrases and no evidence for their assertions.
      It’s akin to “idea laundering.”
      https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492
      Make up some new terminology, no evidence required. Write lots of papers on it, all full of made up rubbish, get them published in dubious journals, then refer to it as settled science because it’s been published, when it’s nothing of the kind.

      1. I’m afraid I lost the will to live before I’d got to the end of that – absolute blx.

  95. Re my previous post about Henry’s A level certificates:

    We have just had a long and considered reply from the Headmaster, which I cannot copy here in full – he talks about wider issues affecting the school, and airing these publicly could well be detrimental.

    He did not know about the letter and is very upset about it. I can quote one little thing that made me laugh out loud:

    The member of staff is new, which is not an excuse, but she is very enthusiastic…

    God save us from enthusiastic idiots – just think of the potential damage they can wreak!

    1. The necessary question that needs asking as a result of that declaration is this:

      “Who was responsible for hiring that ‘enthusiastic’ woman … and how difficult and examining was the selection process she was put through before the decision was made to employ her?”

      1. I used to enjoy enthusiastic women in my youth. And I was prepared to overlook the occasional naïvetés. ;@)

      2. A better question would be, what training and instruction did she receive after she was hired? I’ve hired a few enthusiastic people in my time, but to expect not to have to train a new employee is naive in the extreme.

        2. Maybe you do need to train recruits; however, it is prudent to ensure that you hire the right calibre of candidate in the first instance. To fail to do so is commercial suicide.

          1. Indeed, Grizz. And the wrong employee in the wrong post is a management failing.
            “No bad soldiers, only bad officers” applies equally to employees and managers.

          2. I liked enthusiastic employees – I just made sure they were properly mentored.

        3. You are both right, Grizzly and Jackthelad.

          I don’t know the answers, but it does seem that education has has become a toxic environment with a dangerous mix of politics, envy and personal ambition. The victims of this system are obviously the pupils, but also the good teachers (and heads) whose only interest is the pupils’ education. Adjectives used by Henry’s headmaster include “bizarre” and “frustrating”. Managing this little lot is akin to walking a tightrope, and many seem to fall off. Sadly, it is the better ones who fall off…

    2. At least she has bothered to try to sort out backlogs of work that should have been done by her predecessors.
      I just hope he doesn’t hold it against her.

      He’ll be sacked if he does. };-O

      1. I thought teaching unions had decreed that no teacher may be sacked, for whatever reason.

      1. Rick’s a good ‘sarf ‘arrow’ boy. He wouldn’t want to live there now. I’m a ‘norf ‘arrow’ boy and I wouldn’t want to live there now either!

    2. HI Paul – I’m afraid that isn’t in my repertoire. These days, I’m not sure anything is. Good performance, though, and a splendid piece. And, for what it’s worth, I know the organ builders responsible for the current version of the organ.

      1. As a young man, my Father played in Durham Cathedral. How cool is that? And I can’t even play a CD… :-((
        Another talent that passed me by.

        1. Boellmann is lovely – my ambition is to be able to play the “Prière à Notre Dame” part of this Gothic Suite but it’s way beyond me at this stage! I’d never heard of Peter Warlock – thanks for the link.

          Strange coincidence that they both died so very young at the age of 35.

          1. Pete Warlock’s real name was Peter Heseltine. His son was Brian Sewell the art historian and protege of Anthony Blunt. He had a love hate relationship with D H Lawrence.

            Another composer who died at age 35 is the American David Russell. Google his Trumpet Tune in D Major.

  98. Headline in the Wail:

    “Post-lockdown wedding rules are unveiled: Father can’t walk his daughter arm-in-arm down the aisle, couples must wash hands after exchanging rings and receptions are banned”

    But Blammers and anarchists and antifa can go out in their tens of thousands, shoulder to shoulder, without let or hindrance..

    WHEN is the effing “government” going to get a grip?

    1. What a bunch of fuckwittery! Good God above, who thinks up this shite? Thank Christ I don’t live anywhere near that bunch of shitforbrains.
      You missed the limit on guests, no singing…

    2. Which tells you everything you need to know. It’s complete rubbish.
      The number of deaths announced today by NHS England was less than 20.
      We’ve seen the huge crowds for BLM protests, and in Birmingham. And they’re writing rules like this???
      F*** them. I’m not voting for this bunch of idiots and liars again. And I wouldn’t be taking any notice of these rules if I was getting married either.
      It’s as if they want people angry and rebellious.

    3. It’s a cunning plan, I tell you.

      The BAMEs, the BLM, and all the antifa will get it and die.

      1. Well, if you will keep sticking those pins into politically incorrect dolls, they may well.

    4. Never mind the fact that the daughter and father may have been in a ‘bubble’ together. Such utter nonsense. What a joyous occasion such a wedding would be; definitely a reason to postpone the wedding.

  100. China keeps giving. Their latest gift to the west is a new flu virus.

    At what point do the Americans reduce part of that evil country to glass. The more I see of Communist China the more I wish to see it eviscerated.

    1. Which is why American and Chinese traders, and their retinue of lobbyists and consultants will be the main beneficiary of the new Spend! Spend! Spend! policy of redistributing what’s left of national collateral (the real money was long sold off cheap by Gordon Brown, on the “bargain basement” model set up by Margaret Thatcher).

  101. Will it appease those who have an obsession with all things black if we put some effort into inventing:

    Torches that emit a beam of black light (a.k.a. ‘shadow’)?
    Washing detergent that makes clothes ‘blacker than black’?
    Black snow?
    Black ice-cream?
    Black foam on top of a pint of Guinness?
    Black noise?
    Egg blacks?
    The Black Ensign?
    A Black herring?
    The Black House?
    Black lines down the centre of the road?
    Black hot?
    Black collar workers?
    Black blood cells?
    Blackhall?
    Black sticks for the blind?
    Black feathers for cowardice?

      1. Trust the Rollong Stones to swim against the tide;

        I see a line of cars and want them panted white
        No coloureds anymore
        I want them to be white.

      1. No English language spoken at home; during lockdown, children have no exposure to English language …

    1. We have had thousands of Asians from the midlands who seek out this area thanks to Bollywood films on the coast and the pilgrimage to Durdle Door all with in the past 2 weeks which have been very warm , and still they come down for the day even today the car parks are full .. We know this because of discarded rubbish and receipts from where they set off from.

      Boris should have told people they couldn’t travel further than 20 miles from their home … and not hundreds of miles… this has caused great alarm.

      1. I thought the colder and windy weather would have kept the ignorant, irresponsible visitors away. The amount of litter that has been dumped at these lovely places is shocking. I’m guessing it’s worse than normal.

      2. Those Indians and Kashmiri’s from
        Leicester I wouldn’t doubt.

        Government policy is in disarray. This is because the government have tried to shield themselves behind supposed scientific advice.

        As others are aware Sir Patrick Vallance was once part of GSK and the scientists such as Whitty and the ‘modelling’ fools at Imperial College London are deeply embedded in China. Imperial are also closely tied to GSK which sponsors their postgraduate students.

        I despair of our politicians for placing reliance on this assortment of self interested ‘husks’ of former scientists, boughten as these scientists have been for decades.

        Edit: I would that these scientific geniuses would find a cure for hay fever. Instead I silently suffer greatly every year at this time.

    3. As far as I can tell a whole new sub-culture has developed in the UK. It is based purely on race whilst purporting to be a movement for social change.

      We whites are not inherently racist. We look to the character of the individual and whether they are able to perform at work and whether they can be taught to do so. We whites have to meet the same measure. We do not in general judge people by the colour of their skin and nor should we.

      In essence it is obvious that young blacks and a lot of immature whites are being manipulated by a popular drug culture, by rappers and an assortment of chancers. The ‘music’ is alien to our culture and the incitement to harm white peoples and assert control over the indigenous population is obvious.

      There is a Cambridge Music Festival held just off the MII at the turn off to Coton most years. The last time I was stuck in traffic there, there was no effective traffic control and there were no Police but a load of blacks carrying heavy holdalls into the event, presumably their drugs for sale.

      Yes, there were silly girls dropped off at the junction with the MII wearing plastic bags over their shoes to confront the churned mud of the field.

      I realised years ago that events such as Glastonbury and other lesser pop events such as Cambridge are merely a cover for drug merchants to ply their wares.

    2. Hello Geoff
      I’ve sent this to Garlands but thought I’d copy you as well if you can assist.

      Good evening G

      Vouvray has had great problems signing in today as it continues to sign in in my name. We’ve now out Firefox on her iPad and everything was going well. Closed down the iPad opened up again signed in but it keeps on saying nttl wants to verify your email. Press the button to do it and the Disqus page keeps on showing error can’t do it. Tried posting but won’t let her. Do you have any suggestions?

      1. Sorry for the late reply. To be honest, I’ve no idea what the solution is. Has she tried logging out of your account, before logging into hers?

        1. Thank you Geoff. Yes we’ve tried all that. I think we’ll have to start afresh. Sorry to have troubled you.

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