Saturday 18 July: Tumbleweed blowing down the streets of London and Birmingham

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/2020/07/17/letterstumbleweed-blowing-streets-london-birmingham/

660 thoughts on “Saturday 18 July: Tumbleweed blowing down the streets of London and Birmingham”

    1. Curiosity killing the cat here, not criticism.

      Do you use a voice activated writer?
      Both stocks and stalks would fit the cartoon, I would have chosen stalks before stocks.

      1. Morning sos – I should have gone for stalks. Spell check wasn’t at fault. Thanks for correcting me.

        1. It wasn’t intended as a correction, I’ve never used a voice activated typing application and it made me wonder, because both could fit and both can have similar sounds when spoken.

          1. And, coincidentally, there is at this moment a stork sitting on the footbridge over the stream below my garden. And yes, the stork is stalking the fish stocks. It looks confused.

            Morning hall.

  5. Another 30 peers to be announced including Ian Botham and Frank Field. [BBC Radio 4] The HoL is already overpopulated and extensive culling is urgently required. Frank Field certainly has earned this honour.

      2. Yo B3

        Which side of the great divide will Ken Clarke take up his Two Seats.

        He is certainly not a Tory

    2. Likely to get more sense from Field and Botham than most of the rest put together.

    3. Yo clyde

      I must read morer slowesterer

      I read about Frank Ifield and thought I Remember Yoooooou

  6. Russia unveils deal to make a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford researchers as it denies stealing data. 18 July 2020.

    Russia has denied hacking Oxford University’s Covid-19 data as they have signed a deal with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the college to produce a vaccine.

    Moscow’s sovereign wealth fund publicly announced details of the agreement after the Kremlin was accused of engaging in cyber espionage.
    Britain, Canada and the United States said on Thursday that hackers backed by the Russian state were trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world – allegations the Kremlin denied.

    Morning everyone. No surprise here. The whole hacking business was just a distraction ploy.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8535669/Russia-claims-signed-Covid-19-vaccine-deal-Oxford-University.html

    2. Morning all.
      My Microsoft Wndows 10 😞 is protected by a Kasperky virus checker 🤔.

  8. No daily death figure as they have been overstating them as in America. the left keeps trying to ruin us all.

    1. The only cumulative figures that I would even remotely trust now would be those from crematoria and burials.

      They wouldn’t differentiate between causes, covid or otherwise, but they might give an indication of the so-called excess deaths numbers; although even those are not totally a good guide because the most recent 5 year average, which they use, has been rising off record lows prior to the start of the 5 year period.

      https://www.statista.com/statistics/281478/death-rate-united-kingdom-uk/

      1. Yo sos

        If they only applied the same logic to screen Immigrants before allowing them to colonise UK, as they do to ‘Death By Covid’, we would have 3,000,000 empty houses

  9. You will find the truth from comments by people that work in an area of interest to you ,as you cannot believe the BBC and the MSM.

    2. Morning Bleau,

      Funny enough I weighed myself this morning. Johnson must have sneaked in a new variation of inches and ounces since the start of lockdown.
      I will have to consider it to be my lockdown fighting weight, just a few lbs up from the start of lockdown.
      Note to self, resume swimming when my local pool reopens!

    3. Just before I commenced on my diet I stood on some of those scales that speak your weight.

      They said: GET OFF ME, YOU BAT FASTARD!

  11. SIR – Assuming that not all people return to office-based work, do large cities have a future? What, economically, is break-even for a city?

    If 50 per cent of people return to work in cities, it means 50 per cent less business rates, congestion charges or use of shops, plus a collapse of investment in property or rail projects. I doubt any city could survive this.

    Covid threatens the existence of cities, and no Government exhortation will change this. A dispersed, smaller, more productive workforce is likely.

    As for HS2, who needs a fast service between tumbleweed blowing down the empty streets of Birmingham and London?

    N V Todd FRCS

    Whitburn, Co Durham

    SIR – The Government did a superb job in convincing the public when it imposed the lockdown. Reversing it will not be easy. Speaking with one voice would be a start.

    Desmond Mulvany

    Shepperton, Middlesex

    Advertisement

    SIR – If the Prime Minister is keen on getting people back to the office, especially in London, I suggest he might start by getting the daily congestion charge of £15 reviewed.

    Simon Morpuss

    Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

    SIR – Why are Transport for London and the Mayor of London still encouraging people to avoid public transport when the Government is asking people to go to work?

    Alistair Bishop

    Northwood, Middlesex

    SIR – As someone about to start work as a trainee solicitor, I have been quite alarmed to read that people would prefer never to go back to the office.

    I believe a fundamental part of my training contract will be spent observing, listening and learning from senior lawyers in person through my working day. I struggle to see how this could truly be replicated virtually.

    Never returning to the office but working from home indefinitely may be perfect for people who have been in their job for years and are confident in what to do, but where does that leave anyone who is just starting out?

    Maeve Gillespie

    Radlett, Hertfordshire

    SIR – James Bartholomew (“There’ll be no recovery until we face brutal facts,” Comment, July 17) says tax must rise.

    Perhaps former commuters who work from home could afford a tax at a fraction of their saved travel costs. This could be used to bring life to local communities, shops and eating places. Redundant city offices could be turned into housing.

    John Field

    Trotton, West Sussex

    SIR – It is possible that HM Revenue and Customs will decide that home working means that only a percentage of your main residence qualifies for Capital Gains Tax relief, the remainder being office space.

    John Atkins

    Canterbury, Kent

    2. “… The Government did a superb job in convincing the public when it imposed
      the lockdown. Reversing it will not be easy. Speaking with one voice
      would be a start…. ”

      No, it didn’t. The information provided was muddled and the reasoning built on sand.

      1. HS2 is the the Extinction Revolution way of introducing a national South/North footpath through England

        Dr Beeching did the East/West ones

  12. Morning all

    SIR – I had Covid-19 for two weeks in April. A short time later, I developed a skin rash, and the senior GP at my surgery told me that many post-Covid patients had also reported these symptoms. Today an unexplained rash is considered to be a sign of actually having the virus (report, July 16).

    I still have the rash and I contacted the surgery to ask about a test, but was told that they don’t do them and I should contact NHS 111 or 119 instead. I rang these numbers and was told that the skin rash has nothing to do with Covid-19, yet two hospital consultants have informed me otherwise.

    If many more people become ill, it will surely be because they are not allowed to be tested due to a lack of co-ordination between services.

    Anne Giles

    Croydon, Surrey

    SIR – I am very sorry that Charlie Barrass (Letters, July 11) was refused injections for his painful thumbs.

    Before I retired, I performed hundreds of joint injections. The technique involves very careful attention to hygiene using strict “no touch” techniques. The risk posed by Covid-19 is insignificant to both doctor and patient if both wear masks and the doctor washes his hands carefully before and after touching the patient.

    It is not necessary to wear gloves.

    Dr Michael Blackmore

    Midhurst, West Sussex

  13. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    Guy Gibson’s dog has made it to the DT Letters, but no reference to his name, nor of his master’s inaccurate decorations:

    SIR – Following a review of its “historical assets” – in truth, a response to recent Black Lives Matter protests – the Royal Air Force thought it best to erase the name of 617 Squadron’s mascot, a black labrador, from its gravestone.

    As this serves no real purpose other than to erase an immutable historical fact, it says more about the virtue-signalling of those in charge of today’s Royal Air Force than it ever could about the power of protest.

    Stefan Badham
    Portsmouth, Hampshire

      1. I have a ton of coal stashed away for when it is banned. Should I give it a name?

    3. Black lives do not matter until there’s a public acknowledgement that blacks kill each other and commit more crime in vast disproportion to their population.

      There’s a real problem in that demographic. Until the black looters are mindless yobs publicly accept this and stop blaming others for their own ego and irresponsibility nothing will improve.

  14. Unruly Priests…….

    SIR – The Church of England’s pitiful performance during the coronavirus pandemic has attracted comment.

    Over the past week, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have ruled that – in order to show unity with those who refuse to accept women in positions of authority – neither of them will any longer ordain bishops.

    Perhaps it is time for the secular world finally to ignore anything the bishops say about equality.

    Dr Charlie Bell

    Praelector and Fellow, Girton College

    Cambridge

    2. I’ve worked it out.

      If I stand upside down and look in a mirror behind me will the world make sense? As at the moment it’s completely back to front and upside down.

  15. SIR – Having had the privilege of flying in a Spitfire over the Battle of Britain Memorial near Dover on the 75th anniversary of the start of the battle, I returned by car on Tuesday to pay my respects to “The Few.”

    I was very disappointed to find that the site is open only to pedestrians because of “government guidelines as a consequence of Covid”. Thus I can go the pub, but not honour some of the bravest men in our history.

    Ian Rennardson

    Tunbridge Wells, Kent

    1. Mr Rennardson, couldn’t you have parked your car round the round and then walked back to the entrance as a pedestrian?

      1. It isn’t easy to park at Capel le Ferne. The Memorial car park is about the only one within reasonable walking distance.

  16. SIR – To replace Edward Colston, why not have a statue of Paul Dirac, often described as the British Einstein, who was born and bred in Bristol?

    He was one of the strangest theoretical physicists in the history of science. He won the Nobel prize in physics for his prediction of antimatter (the youngest theoretician ever to win it) and had an extremely complex private life.

    Tony Haworth

    Porthcawl, Glamorgan

    1. A better idea. Replace the statue of Colston, make it even bigger and have a statue of Dirac put up in another location in the city?

      Another society advancing white man would set an example to all.

    2. Would the complex private life over-ride his hideous whiteness?
      Morning, Epidermoid.

  17. Sad indeed…

    SIR – Outside a school, I overheard a five-year-old girl asking another: “Am I allowed to hold your hand?” What a sad reflection of our times.

    Jan Harvey

    London SW11

    1. SIR – I found it refreshing to hear Sir Desmond Swayne speak out against the wearing of face masks (report, July 17). Those of us who agree with him are now seen as being morally deficient in some way.

      I also fail to understand why mask-wearing cannot be a regional decision. As someone living in the South West, it feels like I’m being made to put up an umbrella in Exeter when it is actually raining in Leicester.

      Michelle Taylor

      Lympstone, Devon

  19. SIR – Far from being a “massive infringement of personal liberty”, as Peter Johnson suggests (Letters, July 15), the mandatory wearing of face masks in shops is being implemented to protect society’s most vulnerable.

    I am having treatment for cancer and am happy to wear a mask while in the chemotherapy suite to protect everyone present. I have my oxygen levels measured while there and they are exactly the same with my mask on as they were without (before lockdown).

    To the reader whose pregnant wife is short of breath, this is normal in very late pregnancy and a mask will not reduce her oxygen levels. Her problem might be solved by his doing the shopping while she rests at home.

    I haven’t been in a shop since March 12. Should everyone adopt the selfish attitude that some people have, it will be many more months before I can venture out.

    Eleanor Taylor

    Rugby, Warwickshire

    1. What Eleanor doesn’t realise is that her mask is masking nothing but her face. Her missing hypoxia is an indication of inefficiency.

      1. The analogy of trying to stop a mosquito by erecting chain link fencing is easy to remember.

  20. Pleased that Daily Express is highlighting ‘Defund the BBC’.

    Fundraising has reached just over £35,500 of £100,000 target.

  21. Will Boros tell everyone you can stop wearing a mask if you have the nice Mr Gates’ vaccination ?

    1. Oh, I get it. Now you’re trying to appropriate their culcha into our own, savage barbarian whitey!

        1. Isn’t ‘cultural appropriation’ what Lefties use to have a go at women who wear a sari or something?

  25. Wokery is well embedded within the DT editorial staff, especially those overseeing the BTL comments

    ‘Liberal’ media platforms have been seized by cowardice and militant wokery

    The British equivalent of the New York Times’s weakness masquerading as liberal virtue is the BBC

    CHARLES MOORE – 17 July 2020 • 9:30pm

    This week, Bari Weiss, an editor on the American equivalent of a comment page such as this one, resigned from her post at the New York Times. Not, on the face of it, much of a story, even in the United States, where the media are comically self-important about their own processes. I mean no disrespect to comment editors – we have an excellent young team on these pages – but it is probably fair to say that the world can rub along without being told about their comings and goings.

    It is also true that Ms Weiss’s complaint, though eloquent, was not new. One hears comparable stories every day at present – in media, academia, Whitehall, even in business. She was protesting at the intolerant culture which has developed at the paper: “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.” The “digital thunderdome” she speaks of is Twitter.

    Ms Weiss had been brought on to the paper three years earlier, she wrote, to widen its circle of contributors; but in fact what was demanded, she found, was “our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world”. She did not use the word “wokeness”, but that was what she was complaining about. Its effect was that “the coin of our realm – language – is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes.”

    I am sure most readers of this paper will feel a natural sympathy with what Ms Weiss is saying. I certainly do. But something else struck me about it. It triggered a memory.

    When I joined this newspaper in 1979, its circulation was huge but its situation was desperate. This was because the trade unions, especially the print unions, ruled the roost (and feathered their nests). The overmanning was grotesque. Sudden strikes disrupted production. It had even got to the point where the printers demanded the right to influence what appeared in the paper.

    One evening, entering the office of the Editor, the great Bill Deedes, to hand him a page-proof, I found him in conclave with the fathers of the chapel (as these thuggish shop stewards were quaintly known). They did not like something said about trade unions in a leading article which he had ordered. Unless the words were altered, they said, no paper would be printed that night. With no time to spare and a management incapable of managing, the Editor felt he had to give in. The words were removed.

    In the ensuing few years, such things occurred quite often, and the threat of it produced self-censorship. It was wrong. That was obvious. It was also – slightly less obviously – a sign of decay. Without knowing what would happen next, we all felt “Things cannot go on like this.”

    They did not. Mrs Thatcher’s reforms curbed the over-mighty powers of trade union leaders. After a year of literal, physical battles at his Wapping plant where he had installed new printing technology and employed non-print union workers, Rupert Murdoch won. The number of printers needed moved suddenly from hundreds to dozens. Our industry entered a new, open world.

    If one judges by appearances, the persecutors of Ms Weiss at the New York Times could scarcely seem less like those union bullies of 40 years ago. They are a multi-ethnic rainbow of politically correct, deadly earnest, mainly upper-middle class young people, probably more often women than men. This paper’s wreckers were fat, grey-haired, working-class, often jokey, frequently drunken chauvinists – 100 per cent male, 100 per cent white. Yet the two groups are brothers under the skin.

    Both are/were guilty of what economists call “producer capture”, claiming ownership of something they do not own. They are/were not interested in the person for whom the enterprise functions and without whom their wages would not be paid – the reader. The normal logic of a free society suggests that such people eventually lose. Inspired by self-righteous rage (or, in the case of the unions, a combination of Left-wing power urges and blind greed), they cannot stop themselves going too far. In this sense, one should be optimistic.

    The problem, though, is that the rage can take a long time to burn itself out if leaderships are too weak to confront it. The breaking of the print unions came only at the end of 30 years of growing militancy which had produced economic stagnation and consequent unemployment.

    Part of the power of Ms Weiss’s letter came from the fact that it was addressed to the New York Times’s hereditary boss, AG Sulzberger. It directly and rightly reproached this capitalist scion of the paper’s founding family: “I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior [the bullying of unwoke employees] to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you…have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage.” It is in his power to remedy the situation, but it seems he does not dare.

    The British equivalent of Mr Sulzberger’s weakness masquerading as liberal virtue is the BBC. Although the political and cultural biases of the Corporation have been a problem since the 1960s, it is only recently that direct bias has been permitted almost unpunished. This is visible not only in famous cases, like Emily Maitlis’s diatribe against Dominic Cummings, but in decisions about how to cover stories such as vandalism committed in the name of Black Lives Matter.

    The creeping rule of HR in large media organisations has become politicised so that workplace “diversity” forces coverage to tiptoe round possible hurt or offence caused to self-identifying minorities. So, by a paradox George Orwell would have enjoyed, the more diverse the staff, the more uniform the coverage. And at the BBC, as at the New York Times, the bosses dare not order their staff to steer clear of the key exterior weapon they can use to skew coverage and blow up a storm – Twitter. The victim is the BBC viewer, whose role is to pay up or be fined. Now that technology makes the licence fee increasingly unenforceable, how much longer will he or she stand it? Probably for another decade, if the bosses do not act, and the Government does not reform.

    Nowhere is this alliance between militant wokery and management cowardice more obvious than in the civil service. Diversity is a tool of producer capture. It allows aeons of management time to be spent thinking about the composition of the workforce rather than the needs of the “consumer” – the Government and the voters who elect it.

    I was recently informed that a concept called “reverse mentoring” has entered the civil service. Senior staff of 30 years’ experience are each assigned to a young employee in, say, IT, who observes them at work and reports on whether they exhibit “unconscious bias”, “micro-aggressions”, and other sins which cry to Heaven for vengeance.

    It is astonishing that throughout the invasion of the nation by Covid-19 such policies are still absorbing official time. Time, surely, Prime Minister, for some retaliatory macro-aggressions on behalf of the taxpayer.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/17/liberal-media-platforms-have-seized-cowardice-militant-wokery/

    2. This is what I don’t understand. When the green idiots blocked all of London up, the police did nothing.

      When black looters are mindless started vandalising and destroying, the police ran away (that’s actually unfair as many were injured in the line of duty by those thugs).

      The political will seems to be to indulge the already disgustingly spoiled child lest the child complain on twitter. Law exists as ‘common law’ to apply to everyone equally. All these useless groups have shown – and the Muslim prayer meetings, and the divisions of men and women in their mosques, and the daft renaming of our streets – is that it does not.

      If law is not common, then it is not law and merely a loose guidance enforced by thugs – in this case, state sponsored thugs. If those who deign to rule us with their idiotic diktat expect people to do as they stupidly say, then they must stand against those who are against society. For whatever reason they don’t want to do this and I don’t really know why.

      The only such character who, in recent times has done this is the Bristolian chap on R4 who, when the presenter tried to say how great it was that a looters statue had been imposed and began a petty rant about how ‘the slaver Colston’ should be destroyed and more ‘diverse’ drive imposed said no.

      Why, for example, is Khan still in office? Why? He’s a malignant tumor. A nasty, twisted, two faced creep.

  26. The DT shut down comments before 10:00 pm last night. [607 received]

    Shamima Begum’s predictable return shows how feeble our authorities have become

    Dripping with sanctimony, the Court’s decision is an insult to the British public which will have to pay for this outrageous racket

    LEO MCKINSTRY – 17 July 2020 • 2:30pm

    Behind all the sophisticated language about fairness and the rule of law, there is a fundamental decadence about the legal establishment and its progressive supporters.

    This vice not only inspires contempt for our nationhood and security, but also inverts morality, so that innocent are punished and society’s enemies protected. Just as nauseating is the epic hypocrisy. The very people who shriek about the rights of jihadists wilfully ignored for years the serial abuse of vulnerable white girls by predatory Asian gangs in northern towns like Rotherham.

    Similarly, the campaigners who now noisily declare that “the law is the law” never want such judicial rigour applied to drug users or knife wielders or graffiti vandals or statue topplers.

    These twisted values shine through the case of Shamima Begum, who in 2015 fled east London for Syria, where she joined the murderous terror group ISIS and married a Dutch fighter. As a result of these criminal actions, the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of British citizenship, though her migrant parentage means that she is also a of Bangladesh by descent.

    Yet, having rejected Britain so aggressively, she has waged a long legal campaign to be allowed to come back here. This week, predictably, she won a crucial step in this fight, as the Court of Appeal decided that she can return to challenge the removal of her citizenship. Having described the Court’s decision as “disappointing”, the Home Office plans to make its own appeal at the ruling, but there can be little hope of success, given the politically correct culture of the liberal judiciary.

    Dripping with sanctimony, the Court’s decision is an insult to the British public which will have to pay for this outrageous racket, including legal aid for Ms Begum. The leading judge Lord Justice Flaux pronounced that that “fairness and justice outweigh national security concerns,” but there is nothing remotely fair or just about this move.

    Throughout her odyssey to Syria, Ms Begum showed a lethal hatred towards this country and eagerly embraced our most deadly foe. The only word for that conduct is treachery. She abnegated her rights when she signed up to movement that aimed to destroy western civilisation.

    It says everything about the warped priorities of the liberal elite that they should devote such frenzied energy to her case as they prattle about the sanctity of the law If a working-class white teenager joined a far-right terror cell in eastern Europe, they would not dream of battling for him through the courts. But in a perverse way, Ms Begum has become a symbol, not of the evil of Islamist brutality, but of British injustice. Her doleful face and pose of victimhood have made a poster girl in parts of the chattering class that despise everything about our nation.

    With an air of grievance, Ms Begum complains that, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl, she was “brainwashed” into her Syrian adventure because she was “a little bit depressed” and “it was easy to manipulate me. But this will not wash.

    Ms Begum is no oppressed victim. She was not “groomed” against her will, but sought out extremist propaganda. Indeed, it is very revealing of the fundamentalist culture that she inhabited in Tower Hamlets that she should be drawn to such vile material. Moreover, she continued to espouse the dark creed of jihadism when she reached Syria.

    By her own admission, she sewed terrorists into their suicide vests, and was left unfazed by the sight of severed heads belonging to ISIS victims. Shamefully, she even justified the Manchester arena atrocity by claiming that the carnage was “retaliation” for western attacks on ISIS.

    This is the woman that the liberal virtue-signallers want to see back in this country. In view of her record, it is obvious that she will have to be treated as a security risk, requiring expensive surveillance. Even worse, her return will open the way for a further influx of British-born jihadists to the return from Syria.

    Already badly over-stretched, MI5 and the police will have a colossal new burden. More domestic terror attacks will be likely. As the Henry Jackson Society warned yesterday, “with approximately 150 such cases, the UK now faces the prospect of a mass wave of some of our worst exports.”

    Once Ms Begum is back here, it is unlikely she will be deported even if she loses her appeal. Instead, she will be lavishly supported by the state with welfare benefits, accommodation, education and police protection. That is the modern British way.

    Terrorism can be the route to a subsidized lifestyle. When a group of Afghans hijacked a plane and had it flown at gunpoint to Stansted in 2000, they should have been instantly deported. “I would like to see their removal from this country as soon as possible,” said the Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw. But that was wishful thinking.

    The creaking wheels of the criminal justice system ensured that they were allowed to stay here permanently, despite their criminality. Along with Afghan hijackers, the other big winners were the lawyers, who enjoyed a bonanza from the case. With a first hearing that featured 14 QCs and 13 other barristers, the two trials cost at least £12 million.

    As usual, it was the British taxpayer who picked up the tab for the privilege of enabling the courts to insist that a gang of terrorists escape any responsibility for the actions.

    The case of Ms Begum is another depressing indicator of how enfeebled our authorities have become. While order collapses, violence rages and cohesion dies, they play their self-indulgent, destructive games. They no longer have the guts to protect our civilisation or uphold our national identity.

    Even under a Conservative government for the last 10 years, our immigration controls have become a sham, with more than 600,000 new arrivals settling here every year. The Home Office, which remains unfit for purpose, admits that it does not have a clue how many illegal immigrants are living here, though such widespread law-breaking seems a matter of supreme indifference to the liberals who bleat “the law’s the law” when it suits them.

    In the same vein, the serious crime of people smuggling across the English Channel goes unpunished, with the Border agencies acting as a quasi-ferry service rather than an arm of law enforcement. Meanwhile police bosses, marinated in toxic identity politics and the fashionable grievance culture, appear to have given up the fight against real crimes like burglary, anti-social behaviour and shoplifting. Instead, they order crackdowns on tweets that are deemed to offend the woke sensibilities of the social justice warriors. According to a recent study by this paper, the police have recorded 120,000 “non-crime” hate incidents over the last five years, an incredible rate of 66 a day.

    Hostile superpowers like China and Russia must be laughing at the spirit of self-loathing and absence of resolve that now infuses our civic institutions. There is a rot eating away at the fabric of our nation, and Ms Begum’s case exposes the depths it has reached.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/07/17/shamima-begums-predictable-return-shows-feeble-authorities-have/

    1. Morning, CV1.
      At fifteen, I wasn’t the easiest of people to deal with; in fact I was a bolshie horror.
      But …. I would have instinctively known that films of men being burnt alive or having their heads removed with a blunt pen knife was a Bad Thing. Ditto women being raped and slaughtered for belonging to another religion.
      I would also have realised that stealing money – or my parents supplying it – for a flight to the areas where such behaviour was the norm, would have been somewhat iffy. I doubt I’d have even known how to get a passport.
      But hey, according to the modern Labour Party and its offshoots such as the SNP, twelve months later, I would be capable of casting my considered vote.

      1. At 15 I was old enough to reject the nonsense of religion and realise it was hogwash invented to control people.

        1. Firstly Greta is the same age as that hooker who did a kiss-and-tell on the Duke of York, She is also two years older than that English composer who lectured the Chinese that it is not good enough simply to work hard and do as you are told – you also have to tell a beautiful story, or it is worth nothing.

          I don’t think she is a puppet. If anything, she is the hand more than the puppet, and wants to make the world leaders her puppet. She is of the age when she truly believes this is possible.

          Nor do I think she is exploited or abused. She was getting quite worked up, as many of us are (including myself), about the state of the world, and it was making her ill. What Greta did, in the light that her opera singer mother is well aware of the power of the stage, was a form of talking therapy, and it seems to have sorted out her terminal depression that would have led other teenagers to suicide.

          Whether she is right or not is up to us here to discuss. Greta herself, as she recovers, is becoming all too aware of the gaps in her knowledge and feels it better to go back to school and learn some more, rather than strike and deny herself an education.

          1. Climate change is a matter for scienceand that means continual challenge and data supported evidence.

            More people in a given area generate more heat. Now, does that have any effect on our environment? Probably not.

            We are an overpopulated planet. However, the wrong sort of population. Left alone, markets reach equilibrium. That includes those for population. When the state gets involved to force a particular approach – such as the wine lake and butter mountains of the EU – we get chaos. When government gives away hundreds of billions to promote an agenda in other countries we distort their market.

            The Left’s solution is to force us all back to the stone age where they will be in charge of how we live (as has been their plan for centuries). The debate for them was never about science, facts and information. It’s about them having power over us.

    3. What does a loyal subject do when it loses all confidence in the integrity of our national institutions? Do they want me to become a suicide bomber?

      How does one go about removing Lord Justice Flaux, who is quite unfit to be a judge after making that treasonous pronouncement about national security, from ever practising the law again? Many have been fired and blacklisted for far less, for example daring to suggest that all lives matter.

      1. Rest assured if you did you’d likely get a police escort and protected status.

        Just don’t do black face or state that actually, a man in a dress is still, and always will be a man and that no, he cannot give birth because he is not, and never will be a woman.

      3. Justice Flaux said

        “… Fairness and justice must, on the facts of this case, outweigh the
        national security concerns, so that the leave to enter appeals should be
        allowed….”

        Where was the fairness in her support of ISIS murderers? Where was the justice in the July 7th bombers? She made a choice to leave this country to support those who want to destroy it.

        Nothing outweighs national security. If the nation is not secure, the justice and fairness he prats on about cease to exist.

        Hell, the fact any old has come here shows how utterly poisoned society is by such attitudes. It’s easy to be fair when you’ve nothing to lose from it.

    4. Everything is back to front.

      Honest, law abiding citizens are fined by the police, their homes raided in case they say something someone else might be offended by – and these days, a bunch of weirdos are always offended by something to justify their own moral vaccuum.

      Yet a vicious terrorist, who hates this country and what it stands for, whose barbaric ideology has killed dozens of innocent people is praised and lauded by the state, protected and coddled, given millions in fees no doubt will continue to live off the tax payer for the rest of her life.

      1. A report from HM Prisons

        Sample of Prisoners held and their deeds/law breaking

        TV Tax Nonpayers 23,876

        ISIS Terrorists 0

        2. Morning Triers, nobody has been jailed for non payment of TV licence – they would have been jailed for non payment of the subsequent fine

          1. That is, they have been jailed for taking a principled stand against the BBC…

          2. I want to write to them and say “I have a TV and I’m not paying the licence fee.”

            When their thugs turn up – after binning thousands of their threats – I’ll just tell them I lied and to shove off.

    5. He is not my favourite person but I have some sympathy for Boris Johnson. The list of people and organisations in this country that needs to be sorted out must be daunting to even the best of us, which we know he is not.
      Johnson has had experience with judges and outrageous decisions previously, no excuse for him now not to start to sort them out.

      1. I think you meant to NOT start to sort them out! Or is it Disqus multi-buffering playing up again and you have already corrected it?

        1. Corrected now, my fingers are faster than my brain at times.
          Thank you. 🙂

    1. If it is arson, then whoever set the fire is definitely not responsible……

      1. Oh Boooo! For a glorious moment I thought you were talking about Mr Celia Waldon.

  28. On the radio this morning, the chair-peron of the London BLACK Police Association was being interviewed [ giving it some g*b!] regarding the pictures of the restraining of a man who had been brandishing a knife.
    The 2 policemen were holding him down as he fought against arrest. One of them was kneeling on the man’s shoulder/neck and was accused by said chair-person of behaving like that policeman in the USA who had “murdered” George Floyd. ! !

    Biased? ? – chair-person ? ? – fit for office ? ? – Blk – OK

    1. London Black Police Association? Surely that must be racist? Wouldn’t “London White Police Association” be considered so?

      1. Yes, but it is surely a sign of white privilege that white policemen do not need to have a White Police Association.

        The fault lies entirely with white people for being white and we cannot blame black people for that! The least we can do is to blame white people for being white and maybe showing them that a bit of white guilt and white submissive humility might reduce the way the maltreated and oppressed poor black people feel?

    2. I wonder how many white police are members? There should be some, if only to observe proceedings.

    3. They own London now.

      The London Olympics and football , the Nottinghill carnival and Windrush apologies, cultural declarations and of course the Floyd debacle have given them all status .

      Edit, Footballers and cricket players and of course athletes!

      1. Odd how the country has decided to kowtow to the vocal and violent element of 3% of the population. It seems that the preferences of minority groups trump those of the majority.

        1. Yes if 3% is more important than 97% then it is quite understandable that after any election the minority should be given the victory. Just look at the travesty of the Brexit vote winning when, by getting few votes, the Brexit vote clearly lost!

  29. SIR – The Government did a superb job in convincing the public when it imposed the lockdown. Reversing it will not be easy. Speaking with

    one voice would be a start.

    Desmond Mulvany

    Shepperton, Middlesex

    Speaking withone voice would be a start.

    HMG is speaking with one voice, it comes from the man who has his hand up the back of Boris’ shirt and making his lips move

  30. Good morning all.
    I finally got round to watching the Anthony Brian Logan video I posted t’other day and yes, it was worth watching, so here it is again.
    https://youtu.be/U71Yy5B8ghw
    The Police officer is intelligent, thoughtful and articulates his story very well, explaining how White Black Lies Matter protesters are telling Black Protesters not to speak to Black police officers.

    ABL also has a link to the full video that is also worth watching.
    https://youtu.be/ha-7SETmJD4

  31. YouTuber ‘threatened to cut off EDL founder Tommy Robinson’s head and ranted about Prince William in videos recorded in his bedroom’. 17 July 2020.

    A YouTuber who ‘threatened to cut off the head of the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson’ in a series of home-made videos, appeared in court today.

    Muhammad Abdul Basir, 24, from Mitcham, south London, posted a series of videos on YouTube last year in which he talked about ‘beating up and assaulting’ Mr Robinson, 37, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

    No comments allowed!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8533997/YouTuber-threatened-cut-EDL-founder-Tommy-Robinsons-head.html

    1. Why is it necessary, continually, to mention Tommy Robinson’s real name? Don’t ever recall references to Cliff Richard’s former name as Harry Rodger Webb, or Engelbert Humperdink’s as Gerry Dorsey for example. Of course there are many more.

      4. It’s a less-than-subtle attempt to discredit TR by suggesting having something -to-hide.

    3. As we all know it is everything to do with ………

      The fact that Christians will not retaliate by razing every mosque in the civilised world to the ground shows that perhaps our culture and religion are rather more peaceful, tolerant and less vengeful than the so called religion of peace and its culture.

  33. ♬“You talk like Marlene Dietrich, and you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire…”♬

    Ballet dancer, singer and cabaret artiste, Zizi Jeanmaire has died at the age of 96.

  34. Friends with China

    SIR – The Government would be wise to adopt a new strategy in the Far East (Comment, July 16), but it should not be based on the aggressive approach espoused by the United States.

    China contains one fifth of the world’s population, and to fight with such an old, eminent and now powerful country would be ludicrously dangerous for a small trading nation such as Britain.

    Constructive engagement was once our foreign policy, and a successful way of encouraging other countries into the modern world.

    Openly criticising other countries about their internal affairs is utterly counterproductive and dangerous. We can develop a strategy that protects our national interests while remaining friends with China.

    Tessa Keswick
    The Centre for Policy Studies
    Marlborough, Wiltshire

    While I accept that an openly antagonistic approach might prove to be counterproductive, we are being asked to take on trust that typical Foreign Office quiet diplomacy – constructive engagement – is either effective or actually taking place. We have no idea what’s said behind closed doors or whether it matches what’s said – or not – in public. Do we really want the Foreign Office to remain publicly silent or very polite in the face of China’s long-standing repression of Tibetans, of Falung Gong, of Uighurs, of political dissidents and in Hong Kong? The Foreign Office is supposed to project British values abroad.

    2. A cynical individual might be inclined to think that Labour having opened the gates to immigrants from the Middle East ( noting the other main parties have not bothered to close them) that by supporting this woman HM Leader of the Opposition was merely attempting to secure the future votes of this ethnic group….

    3. That divot would wouldn’t he. He first became ‘famous’ for being a hoomun Riats lawwyeer.
      Now he just doing his absolute best to be just another annoying labour leader.

  36. Good morning NoTTLers! Again, usual apols. if this is a repeat – just scroll down in that case. But I agree with the article:Begum is not the only one who should be tried. That’s one of the problems. Excerpts from Spiked article.

    The People vs Shamima Begum
    If she’s coming back, let’s try her for treason.
    Brendan O’Neill

    So Shamima Begum’s coming back. Or rather the Court of Appeal has ruled that she has the right to come back.

    Understandably, the Court of Appeal’s decision has irritated many people. And no, not because they are Islamophobic, as much of the opinion-forming set would have us believe, but because they take seriously the offence Begum appears to have committed when she left London with two friends in 2015 to join the sworn enemies of the United Kingdom: the supremacist, racist, misogynistic cowboy caliphate of the Islamic State. That crime was treason. Begum is a traitor to this country. And if she is coming back that is what she must be put on trial for – one of the worst crimes a person can commit against their nation and their fellow citizens.

    For now, though, we should say that if Begum comes back then she needs to be treated as a traitor. All the talk right now is of Begum getting justice. ‘Ms Begum has never had a fair opportunity’, said her lawyer today. Perhaps now she will get ‘justice’, said her father. But Begum’s action against the government is, or rather should be, only a small part of the next stage in this story. Far more important is the trial of Shamima Begum for the moral, political and physical support she seems to have given to an implacable foe of the UK and to its deranged project of installing a backward, mass-murdering caliphate in part of Syria.

    [But] I reckon we’re in danger of losing basic principles here. We have a tradition of antifascism in this country; the ideology has never had much traction. You can’t get much more supremacist and fascist than Shamina Begum and the people she set out to join. So she’s is on her way back to trial in the UK; it’s a fait d’accompli and all considerations must deal with this reality. Syria won’t deal with her; the Kurds won’t deal with her. I contend she should be tried on the basis of crimes against humanity as her fellow travellers in the NSDAP were after WW2. I think the charge of treason would be a non-starter; after all, we have the example of Tony Blair and the Labour Party, all of whom are still running free. As apparently guilty as they are, this would open a huge can of worms. However, this is going to be very difficult and I have deep reservations about the coming trial and the outcome. For a start, the difficulties of gathering witnesses in what is still a war zone is logistically mind-boggling. It’s not enough to say that she was unfazed by severed heads; any trial requires clear complicity backed by evidence. Sure, Eichmann was eventually caught and tried 16 years after his crimes and this gave rise to Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil; and my goodness Ms Begum is, to all those with an antifascist moral compass, a modern exemplar of the banality of evil. But this all depends on a fair trial and at the moment she is still innocent of all charges as is right and proper. The evidence of her guilt must be clear and unequivocal.

    It is reported that Shamina Begum was a member of the so-called morality police; that she prepared Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi women for rape, torture, and enslavement. That she stitched and assembled suicide vests. That she was engaged in the theft and appropriation of people’s property. Whether she actually killed anyone is a moot point if all this is proved; she will stand accused of facilitating torture and slaughter and theft, but evidence of murder must be presented and taken into consideration if true. A fair trial must discover the truth of these allegations, judge her, and sentence her accordingly. But the gathering of evidence is going to very hard work and the prosecutors must be up to the task.

    So I hear the various excuses and the shouts from the media and her detractors and supporters who have judged her as innocent or guilty before she has the chance to stand up in a court of law. However I’d like to put forward a serious problem here. If Ms. Begum is guilty of supporting and facilitating the latest fascist incarnation called ISIS, then the British government should be in the dock with her. It’s a matter of record that the Prime Minister at the the time, David Cameron, stood up in the House of Commons and pleaded for support for the destabilisation and destruction of a sovereign nation which posed no threat whatsoever to this country. His foreign secretary, William Hague, echoed this desire to use British forces and British taxpayers’ money on yet another foreign adventure. All this is documented in Hansard – the parliamentary record – wherein PM Cameron attempted to garner support for the “moderate rebels”, in other words, the fascists of Al-Qaeda and its’ supremacist epigones ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the legions of fascism arraigned against the sovereign government of Syria. For the Tories, “moderate rebels” is the equivalent of the Labour Parties’ “weapons of mass destruction” and the “45 minute” untruth.

    In the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi aggression against other sovereign states were judged to be wars of aggression, a legal principle which made a distinction between wars of self defence, and was entered into international law as the supreme crime which must apply to all countries. As Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, stated, “The guilt we should reach is not that of numberless little people, but of those who planned and whipped up the war.” I don’t agree about the little people. They are also culpable. So first in the dock should be the aggressors but this does not exculpate those “little people” like Ms. Begum, as the trials of numerous other fascists illustrate. No, as a supporter of supremacist ideology and an alleged participant in torture and murder Ms. Begum must stand in the dock, but will others stand with her? It has been reported that hundreds of other fascist combatants allied to ISIS and supporters like Ms. Begum have returned to the UK with no oversight. It is only fair that they should be found, exposed, and prosecuted as well, just as their fellow Nazis were hunted down after the untergang. In short, we must hunt these Nazis down.

    In effect, the British government would have to be on trial alongside the supremacists; Cameron, Hague, Blair, Campbell, and all the others who cheered these wars of aggression and supplied material and intellectual support to fascism in the Middle East. The trial of one fascist should not blind us to the existence of hundreds of others running free in our society and those “respectable” parliamentarians who provided them with comfort and support.

    We have a serious problem with fascism and its supporters in this country.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/16/the-people-vs-shamima-begum/

    1. The penalty for treason used to be hanging, drawing and quartering. For a woman it was burning at the stake. I don’t think she would be too keen to come back to this country if the consequences were still the same.

        1. Not now, but back in the 16th/17th centuries, plenty of Catholic priests were willing to return to England and risk being caught and hanged, drawn and quartered.

          2. It wasn’t a burning issue, unlike the Protestant martyrs who were burnt at the stake. Both sides killing each other for choosing the wrong way to practise Christianity. And Christ said “Love your neighbour”, unlike Mohammed, who told his followers to kill anyone who wouldn’t accept Islam.

      2. She enjoyed the video of a Jordanian pilot being burnt alive.
        Let’s hope she has a Joan of Arc complex.

      3. It’s because all of that ilk can do what they like (which they couldn’t in ROP countries) that they come here – and get paid for it. Our governments are in thrall to NWO billionaires – who will never suffer. Just us ordinary people.

    3. Well, travelling to join our enemies, joining our enemies, working with and for our enemies and their bestial aims, talking in praise of our enemies is enough . William Joyce was not spared because “he only spoke on the radio”.

  37. Police launch arson probe over inferno at Nantes cathedral after blaze was sparked near organ inside 1434 gothic church
    Army of 104 firefighters deployed to tackle the major blaze in France and gained control after several hours
    Prosecutor said three fires had been started at the cathedral and the blaze is being treated as a criminal act
    The blaze comes just over a year after a major fire at the Notre Dame in Paris which ravaged its main spire

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8536109/Firemen-battle-blaze-Nantes-cathedral-western-France.html?ito=social-facebook&fbclid=IwAR3zv_Sl9Mcy_I2uCkRx1f7ZWOknHgaqo0u87AOEHbVA_OHsAcGd37FcK0w

    2. I’ve just watched the intro to the BBC 12 o’clock News. The fire does not figure anywhere in their list of priorities!

    1. The spike in the Midlands seemed to come as a complete surprise. Apart from the sweatshops, it was about a month after Eid.

  39. 321455+ up ticks,
    May one ask “do the mosque builders islamic ideology followers know of an
    additive to the concrete / brick binding mix”
    Their places of prayer seem worldover, fireproof.

  40. Tumbleweed may be blowing down the streets of London and Birmingham but the Suffolk holiday park to where our family retreats for breaks is now in full swing after months of lockdown.
    A maintenance worker who replaced a calor gas bottle yesterday apologised for the delay but said everyone was working flat out to keep up with demand on site. He said he hadn’t lost much money but outlook was very promising with letting prices being hiked up to reflect demand in staycations.

    1. ‘Morning, Angie.

      Suffolk holiday park to where our family retreats for breaks is now in full swing after months of lockdown is now back in full swing.

      I see it swings forwards…

      & then it swings back again.

    2. Actually, nobody is saying that this is accidental; there is clear evidence that this is arson and this is being widely reported in the mainstream news. I’m afraid Gerard Batten is wrong on this one.

      1. …this is being widely reported in the mainstream news.

        I have looked for it on TV Sue without success!

          1. 321455+up ticks,
            Afternoon CT,
            Is Gerard Batten still wrong on this one in posing that question keeping in mind the
            lies, deceit & treachery of ALL the governance parties

      2. 321455+ up ticks,
        Afternoon CT,
        “Are we to believe” he is posing a question.
        Gerard Batten has been rarely wrong if ever since 2005 via rhetoric / book form warning of the dangers of islamic ideology.

    1. It’s even more annoying than it used to be as unless you can quickly stop it loading, in order to read an article like this you have to turn off the ad-blocker. then you are forced to wait while all that dross loads.

      1. Turn off adblocker and refresh. Go to desired article and while there turn adblocker back on.

    2. According to the legend, the children got to the shores of the Mediterranean, where a couple of merchants offered them safe passage to the Holy Land.

      You can guess the rest. The children arrived, not in Jerusalem, but in the slave markets of North Africa. There was no escape. Their parents never heard from them again.

      Déjà vu.

      1. Thanks for posting..

        Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.
        speech to the Conservative Group for Europe, 22 April 1993; see Orwell

        2. 321455+ up ticks,
          Afternoon PT,
          Only if the imams condone it & the old maids change their destination to mosque,
          current voting patterns dictate thus.

        3. John Major was a total hypocrite. He also had very little judgement when it came to choosing a mistress.

          2. She was a much better option than he parliamentary neighbour, Margaret Beckett.

        4. I am not sure that beer of any temperature, Holy Communion and keeping dogs as pets will be allowed in 50 years’ time, given the changing demographics and the ideology subscribed to by the fast breeders (and I don’t mean nuclear reactors here).

      2. No question there. I’ve inherited an incredible country.

        However I’ve also seen the wealth, security, culture and attitudes kicked, derided, insulted, abused and wasted by successive, petulant, uncaring governments of venal, petty, arrogant and stupid men.

        1. And women, Wibbling.
          In the end, the crass uselessness, venality and lies drove us away – that, and Gordon Brown’s raid on my pensions was the final straw.
          For uselessness, see the PHE posted here at least twice today as a perfect example. Where do they get such buffoons? Why are they in positions of power, let alone allowed to have a sharp pencil?

  43. “When a man calls himself a liberal, that is the most dangerous thing walking around in the Western Hemisphere”. Malcolm X

    1. I once got into trouble at school when a friend spotted in a history textbook how closely the headmaster E.D.Slynn resembled Mussolini, and we all started chanting “the Headmaster must always be obeyed”. Summoned to his office, a hurt headmaster explained that he was really a liberal and was I an anti-authoritarian? I mumbled something that didn’t increase the detention given out as punishment for my insolence, and then handed over to the Deputy Head to be moaned at about the length of my hair.

      I learnt from his obituary about ten years ago that he was actually a codebreaker in Bletchley, and also knew that he stopped the corporal punishment policy enjoyed greatly by his immediate predecessor and much missed by some of the teachers. He still looked like Mussolini though. Some sixth formers once put his daughter up for sale in the local paper.

      1. I learnt that the maths master whose life I made pretty unbearable, had spent his youth in the Warsaw sewers resisting the N@zis.
        That made me feel bad.

        1. My maths teacher was a tail gunner in Lancasters and lost both his legs. He had 2 wooden ones and would stand on your feet, if your behaviour was wanton,giving the impression he didn’t know. He was a great teacher though.

          1. Must be something about maths teachers, mine was one of the people who developed radar.

        2. The Janitior at Cranfield when I was there, Florrie, was ex-SOE, and Polish. Walked a bit funny due th the Gestapo. A humble man, the nicest guy you could ever meet, always kind and helpful. A great Pole.
          When he retired, it was like the whole University turned out to say goodbye. No Professor ever got that kind of tribute.

      2. Funny you should mention Bletchley. I am currently one-third of the way through a fascinating autobiography by Leo Marks, a talented young code maker who worked for SOE during WWII. Between Silk And Cyanide: A Code Makers’s War 1941–45 was written in the early 1980s but was not approved for publication by the UK Government until 1998.

        For anyone fascinated in the history of cryptography this book is a stonking read.

        1. The life that I have

          Is all that I have

          And the life that I have

          Is yours.

          The love that I have

          Of the life that I have

          Is yours and yours and yours.

          A sleep I shall have

          A rest I shall have

          Yet death will be but a pause.

          For the peace of my years

          In the long green grass

          Will be yours and yours and yours.

          2. That was shown as one of the end of Christmas term films at my Grammar School. Others we watched were Reach for the Sky and Scott of the Antarctic. Good stirring stuff.

        2. And Prof R V Jones’ “Most Secret War” is a remarkable record of the intellectual and scientific battle with the Germans Nazis.

          1. An excellent book.
            Working from first principals of what was known about the weapon during its development, he actually predicted the performance of the V2 before the Germans started firing them.

      1. 321455+up ticks,
        Morning G,
        Bit of a mucking fuddle there, my fault, the link of a prior post repeated itself, now rectified.
        That type of kneeling we never want to witness in a civilised world.

      2. The thread attached to that link is terrifying and horrible.. They were all slaughtered , hundreds. of them, their throats were cut.

        The Begum Isil fanatic must never ever set foot in Britain again.. What sort of message does that give out if she is allowed to return.

        Morning Grizz.

      3. What are you referring to?

        [Edit]Has your comment been misplaced from Ogga’s earlier post? – would make sense now.

    1. I opened the curtains and promptly closed them again when a bolt of searing light burned through my eyes.

      The war queen likes the heat and light. I’m a cave troll. She also gets really annoyed that while it takes her ages to get ‘a tan’ I can walk around for an hour and turn a deep shade of mahogany.

  47. Usual rubbish from BBC Sports website:

    ‘Lewis Hamilton’s statesman-like presence comes to the fore after Styrian
    GP

    Lewis Hamilton stood on the podium after a dominant victory in the Styrian Grand Prix with his fist raised in a black power salute, an
    image emblematic of the twin goals the Mercedes driver has set himself this year.’

    I’m guessing that one of his goals is to be loathed by his former supporters. Any thoughts on what the other might be?

    1. Note that comments are closed and those that criticise BLM have been removed. Typical Bbc.

      1. Better than last week! You couldn’t even comment on the ghastly paean of praise by the chief sports bod!

    2. Mercedes need to have a word. He needs to drive somewhere else or stay out of politics.

    4. The test of his popularity.

      In a race, his car crashes and catches fire: no Fire Engines arrive

      How many spectators will pee on him or the car put the fire out

    5. Stygian?

      (Drinking from the waters of the Styx may have made him feel Letheargic)

      .

    6. He’s just ignorant. A young idiot who knows nothing and assumes he’s the centre of the world and there was nothing before him or after him.

  48. Good morning, all. Well, I made it. It was very hot yesterday afternoon AND terrifically humid.

    Anyway, 12 hours rest in bed seem to have helped. I’ll have a quiet day, though.

    Thank you for your kind messages.

    1. Morning Bill, good to hear that. I agree entirely, yesterday was horrible, far too hot.

      1. Hottest I ever worked in was a touch over 55C – in the Kuwaiti desert. In a compound made of shiny corrugated iron… Fortunately, humidity was low. But I was fit then, not the slug I am now. ;-((

    2. Watch your hydration and salt levels, Bill.
      You need to drink enough to pee pale straw colour, and if you feel cravings for salty food (such as crisps) then don’t resist – it’s the body’s way of balancing the blood salts.
      Glad you’re feeling improved. was a tad concerned.

  49. This is the bit that gets me ” … A dispersed, smaller, more productive workforce is likely….” Just like the one we were heading toward in 1996.

    Then Labour reversed that entirely and gave us these delightful characters: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8420017/Machete-wielding-thugs-attack-one-two-lockdown-defying-raves-Greater-Manchester.html

    if business rates and transport ifnrastructure collapse then so be it. They were too high to start with. Why would people want to spend hours in an overcrowded, cramped and unpleasant, expensive metal box just to travel to a different building?

    We’ve too many wasters in this country. Too many unskilled, entitled, unproductive yobs. Yobs who exist only because of the swinging lumps taken from the law abiding, decent worker’s earnings.

    1. Riot police ‘robustly and swiftly’ shut down illegal rave attended by hundreds in north London’s Finsbury park and are pelted with a barrage of bricks and bottles
      Riot police broke up ‘unlicensed music event’ in Finsbury Park, London last night
      Scotland Yard vowed to pour additional officers onto the streets this weekend
      Last night’s rave was the latest illegal party thrown during the Covid lockdown

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8535967/Riot-police-fend-barrage-bricks-bottles-battle-shut-illegal-rave-London.html

      Are these the type of wasters you were referring to?

      I don’t know why the police bother with them, just allow the wasters to stab each other to death and spread the virus!

      1. Morning, Maggie.
        Exactly my reaction.
        Plus, as a woke whitey, how dare I disrespect their cultural norms?

      2. The ‘illegal rave’ – or drug party – usually spills into private property and innocent people get hurt.

        The police simply aren’t allowed to do what needs to be done. why can’t we get out there and just blast them with dyed crash foam? They start to move the already setting foam hardens and they’re stuffed. Drag them away in a hand cuffed conga line behind the police van, lock 40 to a cell for 24 hours with one loo and one loo roll. Jail the last 3 for life.

  50. Spit…ding. Spit…ding. Spit….ding. Spit…..splod. Oops!

    I’m practising for the new spit test for Covid-19.

      1. Had an email from BUPA. They will do an antibodies test at your local BUPA hospital for £65. You don’t have to be a member.

          3. I received this from a friend, it’s American, obviously.

            In George Washington’s days, there were no cameras. One’s image was
            either sculpted or painted. Some paintings of George Washington showed
            him standing behind a desk with one arm behind his back while others
            showed both legs and both arms.

            Prices
            charged by painters were not based on how many people were be painted,
            but by how many limbs were to be painted. Arms and legs
            are ‘limbs,’ therefore painting them would cost the buyer more. Hence
            the expression, ‘Okay, but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.’ (Artists
            know hands and arms are more difficult to paint.)

          1. 30 here at the moment, and it won’t go below 28 until dusk.
            The pool was 25 for my pre-lunch swim and might well hit 27 by the time of my pre-supper swim.

            Expecting 33 tomorrow after overnight lows of 14.

          2. US Eastern, having a heatwave, 31c at 11.30am expected to be 34c by 3 pm and possibly 38c+ on Sun and Mon. Humidity high so not going anywhere for the next few days!!

          3. We sometimes get that, but not too often, thank goodness.

            33/34 for a few days and then back down to high 20’s

  53. I would like a debate on the validity of the legal pronouncement made by Lord Justice Flaux of the Appeal Court “fairness and justice outweigh national security concerns”.

    Firstly, how does one define “fairness and justice”? Are they subjective values, or has anyone got round to defining them satisfactorily?

    More to the point, would we have won the war had Churchill played fair with Adolf Hitler, as he was being pressured to do by a number of people, including a former king?

    I am well aware that compromising justice for the sake of national security is a fast route to tyranny. Pretty well every vile dictatorship around today, and probably through history, has gone down that route. The boundaries to the compromise must be very carefully thought out and rigorously applied, or we lose our civilisation. It’s as basic as that.

    Therefore, perhaps we should think how far we should allow mission creep of those laws designed to safeguard national security, that they are never used against, say, those who put their bins out on the wrong day, or who heckle a Cabinet Minister, or who express an opinion about the universality of the sanctity of life? That way, these laws can be applied where they should be applied, and may well compromise justice by the book. Protecting the country from ISIS mercenaries certainly qualifies here.

    2. Fairness to whom? One terrorist-loving person, or about 75 million ordinary, non-decapitating folk?

  54. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/19720539a805a7f94a011b761e7b7c6179d6d759a2520311f054acb5f88a9b76.png

    Tasnime Akunjee is ISIS’s top lawyer in the UK.

    He’s represented ISIS member Shamima Begum for years and previously defended one of Lee Rigby’s ISIS killers. He claimed that it was MI5’s fault for investigating Michael Adebolajo and trying to stop him committing a terrorist act that caused Adebolajo to commit a terrorist act. He said that “by making his life so difficult” MI5 had caused him to murder a British soldier in cold blood.

    Akunjee has urged Muslims never to co-operate with police.

    WHY IS THIS TERRORIST APOLOGIST NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION?

    1. Because someone has to be given all those millions in legal aid from us taxpayers.

    2. The never co-operate, never speak, mantra was adopted by the Norn terrorists on both sides.

      I think there was a law change because of that, but can’t recall whether silence became something to be used against the defendant.

      1. The change was that the jury should take the silence of the accused into account when reaching a verdict. Prior to that, they shouldn’t.

    3. Does that mean that I could use the ‘he supported the killers of an innocent man. That drove me to kill him’ excuse, or, no doubt would that be ‘different’?

      These people prey on the tolerances of decent people. Perhaps we should offer him and the judges a free ticket to see Begum so they went to her rather than she here? I’d be up for that.

  56. Good morning, my friends

    Charles Moore’s DT article is worth reading. (I post this under my comments). Unfortunately many of his criticisms also apply to the Daily Telegraph and I put up my views late last night which had some support from other DT readers. I post this:

    ‘Liberal’ media platforms have been seized by cowardice and militant wokery
    The British equivalent of the New York Times’s weakness masquerading as liberal virtue is the BBC

    Richard Tracey
    18 Jul 2020 1:01AM
    One of the most shocking things about the Daily Telegraph’s on-line facility to comment on its articles – as I am doing here – is that more and more articles – especially those on ‘sensitive’ issues which need to be discussed – do not offer readers the chance to post their comments.

    This strikes me as extreme cowardice on the part of a once great newspaper.

    40Like
    Reply
    Gareth Davies
    18 Jul 2020 1:02AM
    @Richard Tracey I think there’s been a legal case recently where a newspaper has been held responsible for the statements made by commenters because they are publishers.

    Which of course google and facebook are not for some reason being a hugely obsolete judgement twenty-five years ago.

    Flag7Like
    Reply
    jhon bufton
    18 Jul 2020 4:27AM
    @Richard Tracey ………..regrettably you have hit the nail on the head. After spending some time and effort with other online newspapers I came back to the DT recently but what a shock, no bite to the stories or the certainty that went before. There is a noticeable increase in watered down pandering to wet wokes and the perpetually hurt. Avoiding or blocking readers comments that universally challenge the drivel you sometimes put out WILL adversely affect your readership.

    Flag3Like
    Reply
    Leon Chimerek
    18 Jul 2020 7:40AM
    @Richard Tracey

    ONCE GREAT, now total crap .

    Here’s CM’s article:

    his week, Bari Weiss, an editor on the American equivalent of a comment page such as this one, resigned from her post at the New York Times. Not, on the face of it, much of a story, even in the United States, where the media are comically self-important about their own processes. I mean no disrespect to comment editors – we have an excellent young team on these pages – but it is probably fair to say that the world can rub along without being told about their comings and goings.

    It is also true that Ms Weiss’s complaint, though eloquent, was not new. One hears comparable stories every day at present – in media, academia, Whitehall, even in business. She was protesting at the intolerant culture which has developed at the paper: “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.” The “digital thunderdome” she speaks of is Twitter.

    Ms Weiss had been brought on to the paper three years earlier, she wrote, to widen its circle of contributors; but in fact what was demanded, she found, was “our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world”. She did not use the word “wokeness”, but that was what she was complaining about. Its effect was that “the coin of our realm – language – is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes.”

    I am sure most readers of this paper will feel a natural sympathy with what Ms Weiss is saying. I certainly do. But something else struck me about it. It triggered a memory.

    When I joined this newspaper in 1979, its circulation was huge but its situation was desperate. This was because the trade unions, especially the print unions, ruled the roost (and feathered their nests). The overmanning was grotesque. Sudden strikes disrupted production. It had even got to the point where the printers demanded the right to influence what appeared in the paper.

    One evening, entering the office of the Editor, the great Bill Deedes, to hand him a page-proof, I found him in conclave with the fathers of the chapel (as these thuggish shop stewards were quaintly known). They did not like something said about trade unions in a leading article which he had ordered. Unless the words were altered, they said, no paper would be printed that night. With no time to spare and a management incapable of managing, the Editor felt he had to give in. The words were removed.

    In the ensuing few years, such things occurred quite often, and the threat of it produced self-censorship. It was wrong. That was obvious. It was also – slightly less obviously – a sign of decay. Without knowing what would happen next, we all felt “Things cannot go on like this.”

    They did not. Mrs Thatcher’s reforms curbed the over-mighty powers of trade union leaders. After a year of literal, physical battles at his Wapping plant where he had installed new printing technology and employed non-print union workers, Rupert Murdoch won. The number of printers needed moved suddenly from hundreds to dozens. Our industry entered a new, open world.

    If one judges by appearances, the persecutors of Ms Weiss at the New York Times could scarcely seem less like those union bullies of 40 years ago. They are a multi-ethnic rainbow of politically correct, deadly earnest, mainly upper-middle class young people, probably more often women than men. This paper’s wreckers were fat, grey-haired, working-class, often jokey, frequently drunken chauvinists – 100 per cent male, 100 per cent white. Yet the two groups are brothers under the skin.

    Both are/were guilty of what economists call “producer capture”, claiming ownership of something they do not own. They are/were not interested in the person for whom the enterprise functions and without whom their wages would not be paid – the reader. The normal logic of a free society suggests that such people eventually lose. Inspired by self-righteous rage (or, in the case of the unions, a combination of Left-wing power urges and blind greed), they cannot stop themselves going too far. In this sense, one should be optimistic.

    The problem, though, is that the rage can take a long time to burn itself out if leaderships are too weak to confront it. The breaking of the print unions came only at the end of 30 years of growing militancy which had produced economic stagnation and consequent unemployment.

    Part of the power of Ms Weiss’s letter came from the fact that it was addressed to the New York Times’s hereditary boss, AG Sulzberger. It directly and rightly reproached this capitalist scion of the paper’s founding family: “I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior [the bullying of unwoke employees] to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you…have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage.” It is in his power to remedy the situation, but it seems he does not dare.

    The British equivalent of Mr Sulzberger’s weakness masquerading as liberal virtue is the BBC. Although the political and cultural biases of the Corporation have been a problem since the 1960s, it is only recently that direct bias has been permitted almost unpunished. This is visible not only in famous cases, like Emily Maitlis’s diatribe against Dominic Cummings, but in decisions about how to cover stories such as vandalism committed in the name of Black Lives Matter.

    The creeping rule of HR in large media organisations has become politicised so that workplace “diversity” forces coverage to tiptoe round possible hurt or offence caused to self-identifying minorities. So, by a paradox George Orwell would have enjoyed, the more diverse the staff, the more uniform the coverage. And at the BBC, as at the New York Times, the bosses dare not order their staff to steer clear of the key exterior weapon they can use to skew coverage and blow up a storm – Twitter. The victim is the BBC viewer, whose role is to pay up or be fined. Now that technology makes the licence fee increasingly unenforceable, how much longer will he or she stand it? Probably for another decade, if the bosses do not act, and the Government does not reform.

    Nowhere is this alliance between militant wokery and management cowardice more obvious than in the civil service. Diversity is a tool of producer capture. It allows aeons of management time to be spent thinking about the composition of the workforce rather than the needs of the “consumer” – the Government and the voters who elect it.

    I was recently informed that a concept called “reverse mentoring” has entered the civil service. Senior staff of 30 years’ experience are each assigned to a young employee in, say, IT, who observes them at work and reports on whether they exhibit “unconscious bias”, “micro-aggressions”, and other sins which cry to Heaven for vengeance.

    It is astonishing that throughout the invasion of the nation by Covid-19 such policies are still absorbing official time. Time, surely, Prime Minister, for some retaliatory macro-aggressions on behalf of the taxpayer.

    1. Surely ”liberal media platforms” have been seized by various NWO billionaires and that’s why they’re ”liberal media platforms” ?

    2. The comment from Gareth Davies ( not the rugby playing GD presumably) was interesting.
      It might explain why there has been a difference in access recently.

      If it is true and wokiflowers use the precedent to bring private prosecutions we might well see the demise of forums such as this one, as the platforms will be shut down.

      More and more the left are shutting down free speech.

      1. David Cameron’s policies look virtually identical to Open Society policies.. and in 2017 David Cameron was made a director of the One Foundation which is financially supported by Open Society.

    1. I wonder if the cause or perpetrators of that fire will ever be revealed, the same as Notre Dame.

      1. Synagogues are also regularly attacked in France. And yet we do not have extreme Christians and extreme Jews destroying mosques in France.

        How can anybody claim the Mohammedanism is ‘The Religion of Peace’?

        1. Only people who are ignorant of it’s tenets or fail to understand them. The Peace of Islam is the quiet that returns to the earth when Islam triumphs. When it’s enemies have lost their heads, the Jews have finally been disposed of and the infidel bows in submission.

    2. Only because we will be refused entry to a shop without one.

      It’s a form of dress code.

    3. Wearing a mask… shows who is visibly compliant vs who is not. That is its purpose.

    5. What many people don’t understand is that anti-virus masks like the N95 trap minute particulates by attracting them to a multi-layer electrostatic mesh and not by filtration as in the dust filter in vacuum machines.

      N95s are discarded after use as washing them will destroy their electrostic charge and render them as useless as an ear loop face covering. If not disposed of as clinical waste used anti-virus masks will remain an environmental contamination risk.

      No wonder some US governors are not enforcing face coverings in their states.

    6. Masks have been mandatory here in France in a range of places for a while and, as of tomorrow, are becoming compulsory in all public indoor spaces – including all shops. On the basis that we know they are useless anyway, I am currently making really fine silk masks for Rastus and me: at least they’ll be comfortable and we’ll be able to breathe!

      1. They sound very chic. I can’t wait to see pics of Rastus modelling them on the catwalk. {:^))

          1. I have never thought of myself as a catwalker and certainly not a catamite.

          2. Richard, you are the first person I’ve met who knows the word “catamite”.

          3. With the two cats, we have plenty, except over here we know them as “ticks”… Oh!

          4. I also know its meaning…not a word one would normally expect to use on this site;-)

    7. Anyone with access to the internet must surely know this. To quote from a letter I sent to my (Tory/Labour) MSPs a fortnight ago:
      “It is now a legal requirement to wear a mask on public transport. Any mask will do apparently. However, the DM published a review of masks. In summary, they are all useless. Note that surgical masks are only useful to prevent surgeons dribbling into the patients on whom they are operating. ”
      They don’t care. They support the SNP on this. They are all in it together (as Ogga says.)

    8. You can fool some of the people all of the time.
      You can fool all of the people some of the time.
      But it seems, they think, you can fool the British public non-stop.

      2. 321455+ up ticks,
        G,
        This can certainly be applied to ALL lab/lib/con
        supporter / voters, time after time, year after year
        on going.

    1. And that is just cancer. If you include all illnesses, add in suicides from depression and all other side issues, how many excess deaths in total?

      I suppose that we could go back to the line that many of these deaths were to be expected.

    2. A cancer diagnosis is like a COVID-19 test – if you haven’t had it you haven’t got it.

  64. Good morning fellow Nottlers. As we are running courses at the moment (I had almost forgotten what an honest day’s work was like!) I haven’t had time to join you for the last couple of weeks.

    I have just come across a little nugget in Le Figaro which, in itself, is not particularly interesting – just some youngsters fighting in the Asterix amusement park. What is fun is the BTL comments and I would encourage the French speakers amongst you to scroll down to these and read them. You’ll feel at home; it’s just like us Nottlers, but bigger.

    Euphemisms for these youngsters abound – here too, people are reluctant to call a pelle a pelle. But the readers of this newspaper at least are not duped by the reigning political correctness. There’s hope, fellow Nottlers, there’s hope!

    https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/ambiance-deletere-au-parc-asterix-ou-une-bagarre-a-oppose-visiteurs-et-employes-20200717

    1. Would be interested to know how good a ‘fist’ Google Translate makes of it. It comes up with perfectly readable sentences and seems to be vastly improved on just a few years back. However, not having got past my aunt’s pen in French, I’ve no idea how precise it might be. Can anyone check one or two and comment please?

      1. Google Translate has indeed made good progress. It still can’t cope with irony or puns or anything subtle, but it can probably extract about 90% of the meaning if the original was reasonably well-written.

        1. Thanks for the info. 90%(ish) on a good day sounds pretty fair to me. Will keep in mind irony / puns / subtlety warning.

    2. The French papers use the same evasions in their reports as the British MSM.

      When attacks, murder, rape and insurrection have been committed by white people then the fact that they are WHITE is mentioned very clearly and they are deemed to be extreme right wing.

      When the race, religion and political leaning are not mentioned you are left to guess what these are.

      It is not very difficult to make an accurate guess.

    4. Will be a bit diffiult with the Substansive Rates of

      Able SeaMAN

      Leading SeaMAN
      ____________________________________________________-

      Starboard Lookout to mate

      “Someone has just fell overboard, but I cannot declare an Emergency, as I do not know whether it is

      Man
      Woman
      Undecided
      LGBTASDFGH
      Declared itself a monkey

      Let’s amble round the Portside

      1. Gives a new perspective to the line:
        ‘It’s your turn in the barrel’.

      2. . So the RN is becoming more like Village people .. Perhaps the Pusser will be renamed the Pussy next?

        Good morning OLT.

        Moh is frothing .

    1. Give it time.
      I suspect that lots will lose their jobs when the next election comes; I certainly hope so.

    4. 321455+ up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      Is it that the virus is politico friendly ? law of averages says someone / something / somewhere must do, like one that is.

    5. Those whose businesses and personal incomes have been knocked for six by the virus crisis do have a lingering resentment against politicians who gave themselves a £10,000 bonus on top of the fact that they did not lose any income or capital at all.

      For some time I have argued that nobody should enter politics unless they have worked in other occupations for at least ten years and that those aspiring to be Conservative MPs should have worked in the private sector and also have had experience of being self-employed and running their own businesses.

      About half my working life has been spent as an employee and the latter part running a business with my wife, Caroline. The experience of having no salary cheque arriving at the end of the month is an experience that all our politicians should have had.

      3. My investments dropped £40,000 overnight because of the hysterical fearmongering and lies. Mostly regained now thank goodness.

        The ones who eff up should be made to suffer for being total dicks.

        1. But if politicos were liable, they would be even less able to act than they are now.

          With all of the competing expert advice on CV can you imagine the potential liability if they chose the wrong advice.

          1. Maybe it would be best if they didn’t feel the need to do something every time? A bit of advice about staying bug-free, and let people get on with it?

          2. I agree that in many instances just sitting back and doing nothing is the best cure but can you imagine the media if the government did not react quickly.

          4. I agree that in many instances just sitting back and doing nothing is the best cure but can you imagine the media if the government did not react quickly.

          7. They chose the advice of a scientist who has been wrong in his pronouncements every time he opened his mouth. I believe they are following a script which they are not revealing to us. The voters. The tax payers.

          8. But if it wasn’t for the likes of you picking up on how wrong the advice has been, it would have all appeared to be goodness and light.
            If the uK had followed Swedens do nothing lead there would still be arguments about the approach to take and the errors made.

  67. Coronavirus latest news: I won’t hug my grandparents at Christmas, Sage scientist says, as he warns against PM’s optimism

    Just proof that the whole thing is being managed by autistic technocrats. On our last course, on the last day, a boy was told of his grandfather’s death – rules and social distancing be damned, I gave him a hug. Anything less would have been inhuman.

    1. Hello Caroline! My thoughts were that his grandparents may not be around at Christmas,for whatever reason, and that he might regret not having hugged them before they died! But then I saw the photos of him…!

    2. God I hate this hug free world.

      There was a wedding in Canada yesterday. Well only just, it was right on the border with the US so that the brides parents could attend from the other side of the border fence.
      I don’t know if the authorities allowed drinks to be shared for the toast but I wouldn’t be surprised if the spoilsports were out there measuring the flow and charging import duty on the alcohol.

      What a sad world.

        1. I must warn you, Caroline, to be careful: golly is probably no longer an acceptable term of exclamation.

          1. They say that Sage scientists know their onions.

            ….. I’ll get me cookbook …..

        1. All that I’ve trimmed this afternoon, Paul, is the lawn (second time in four days!).

          1. My “lawn” is covered in scaff poles – house repainting outside. Looks like a mangy dog, so it does.
            Doing Firstborn’s with him ‘n me is quicker, cheaper and tidyer.

    4. I heard that fellow on R4, he seemed completely detached from the real world. We seem to have slipped into a dream where everyone is happy to hide under their beds. OK for government workers but it will not be too long before the working taxpayer becomes an endangered species. I believe that economic catastrophe is already in train and social unrest will not be too far away. It now seems a blessing that I was unexpectedly ejected from the workforce last September.

    5. Good on you, Caroline!
      As a youngster, I always seemed to get that kind of news is a situation without a hug. I could have used a hug or two when digesting the loss of a loved family member, I tell you.

      1. As a housemaster if ever I had to tell a boy some bad news I made sure that my desk was not between me and him so that if he needed a shoulder to cry on and a hug I was there.

        A girl who came on a French course with us some years ago later became a primary school teacher. When she was told she must never touch her charges and if they were crying and in distress she must not hug them for fear of being charged with abuse. She decided that under those circumstances not hugging them was a greater abuse and so she resigned as a teacher.

        1. That’s a real pity, Rastus. She would most likely have made a magic teacher. But what pratt comes with inhuman requirements for small children?

  68. Mexican cartel shows its might as president visits its heartland. JULY 18, 2020.

    A video depicting a sprawling military-style convoy of one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels circulated on social networks on Friday just as President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador visited the group’s heartland.

    n the two-minute clip, members of the fearsome Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) stand in fatigues alongside a seemingly endless procession of armored vehicles.

    “Only Mencho’s people,” members of the cartel shout, pumping their fists and flashing their long guns. The cry was a salute to their leader, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera, one of the country’s most-wanted drug lords.

    “They are sending a clear message… that they basically rule Mexico, not Lopez Obrador,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

    It might be thought from this article that the cartels are in opposition to the democratic government of Mexico but the reality is that it also is controlled by the cartels. Mexico is the world’s most complete Narco State. This looks like the pattern for the future where, as Democracy slides into oblivion States will become Corporate or even Private Criminal or Religious Fiefdoms. The people will become serfs to these enterprises.

    https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mexico-violence-idUKKBN24J04Q?utm_source=34553&utm_medium=partner

    1. You mean like, minority elements of the population being a law unto themselves. Can’t possibly happen here, oh, hang on, I’ll get me Kiwi…

      1. I suspect a large number of their bright bunnies are in every lab helping to develop a vaccine….

  72. ” We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me. It’s the only way I’m allowed it. I don’t even get to choose my own mask. My wife keeps several in a cupboard under the stairs. If, when I retire to bed, I see the face of Benito Mussolini or Douglas Murray neatly laid out on my pillow — or, for more exotic excursions, the late President Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon — I know that fun times are ahead.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-I-will-wear-a-face-mask

    3. He states that we were, “desperately slow in closing our borders”. We didn’t close our borders. And yes, Rod, crashing world economies was deliberate. Not one of his better efforts.

  73. DT article today https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/17/cornish-village-named-best-seaside-town-beating-better-known/

    Cornish village named best seaside town beating better-known hotspots
    Consumer group Which? ranked seaside towns on a series of measures including food and drink options, beaches and value for money.

    St Mawes – where I was a boy.

    I have posted under the article:

    I was brought up in St Mawes and spent many of my holidays there.

    My maternal grandfather had our house built in the first decade of the twentieth century. It had a thatched roof and an acre of garden and looked directly over the sea out towards Carricknath Point to the left and Pendennis Castle to the right and, on a clear day, the entrance to Helford River seven miles away.

    My mother was a founder member of the St Mawes Sailing Club in 1920 and my boat, Mianda, sports the club burgee even though she is currently berthed in the Mediterranean.

    My parents and one of my sisters were married in the parish church at St Just-in-Roseland where many of my family, including both my parents, are buried. I hope there will be room for a little box with my ashes in it when my time comes.

    1. I have a Godfather buried there.

      My family used to holiday at a farmhouse near Veryan and used the beach to the East of Portscatho.
      Very happy times.

      It was where HG and I spent our honeymoon.

    3. That’s one thing I miss, Rastus, is coming from somewhere. When people ask “Wgere are you from?”, the answer is more like an essay than a sentence. The older I get, the more I miss being rooted somewhere, even if I don’t live there now. I envy those that do come from somewhere.
      We tried to be stable in our living location for our two boys, so they could say that “Jeg er fra Bærum”, but Firstborn is some mix between a mostly forgotten Sussex, and Norway. Second Son is from exactly here, born just across the valley.

      1. I had a similar conversation with a chap who regularly commuted from Brussels to London while I was waiting for the Eurostar. He didn’t belong anywhere, he was completely rootless. He had no idea what I meant when I said I was hefted to the land.

  74. A ‘friend’ of mine is worried about her son’s planned trip to Spain next week.
    He is 17 and looking forward to his first trip abroad with college friends.
    Is she right to be concerned?

    Jeez I could almost write the script…

    1. His biggest risk is getting drunk and falling over a balcony higher than 3 stories……

      1. ‘Fit him up with……’ conjures up pictures of a fitting room in Boots! ‘Would Sir like the next size up?’

    3. STD’s and arrest for drunken behaviour. Drug overdose and falls off balcony. Miraculously hitting a trampoline which had blown in from next door then bouncing into the street where he is narrowly missed by a lycra bandit that dodges out of the way causing a lorry to swerve and run over a gaggle of Nuns.

        2. Aka Shagaluf. The local police have all but shut the place down due to the behaviour of British yob ‘tourists’.

  77. I was raped while working in the music industry. It must finally protect women. Fri 17 Jul 2020.

    I love my exciting job, even though I was traumatised by an assault. But this male-dominated business has some soul-searching to do.

    The idiocy of this woman is beyond description. If you are raped in the woods are the Forestry Commission responsible? If you are glassed in the pub are the brewery at fault? If you are mugged in the Park are the Council answerable? What seems to take place here is the abdication of any personal responsibility. It is always someone else’s fault for allowing it to happen.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/17/raped-music-industry-protect-women

      1. It’s the perpetrators fault. Nobody else’s. Why the whole industry should get the blame, I don’t know.

    1. 321455+ up ticks,
      O2O,
      I tend to keep in mind how a reverse situation played out
      as in Soldier Rigby RIP.
      I would tend to stand back & deal out a stunning shot
      of common sense & electricity.

    2. I would want to spray every fucking one of those scumbag “bystanders” in the face with mace or CS gas. Utter scum the lot of them.

      1. 321455+ up ticks,
        G,
        Currently a taser in police hands
        should be looked upon as being used on health & safety grounds
        on a no comeback basis.

      1. 321455+ up ticks,
        Evening Bob,
        Agreed, IMO during this time of
        hostilities there should be a
        “no comeback on the force” law in place, to be repealed when peace returns.

    2. Passionfruit Martini here……with added Voddie………just to be sure it worked…

    1. Christ!
      (as it were)
      They need to get organised, as do the Jews.

      When the Nazis came for the communists,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a communist.

      When they locked up the social democrats,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a social democrat.

      When they came for the trade unionists,
      I did not speak out;
      I was not a trade unionist.

      When they came for the Jews,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a Jew.

      When they came for me,
      there was no one left to speak out.

      Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a Protestant pastor and social activist.

      1. “The white European should be destroyed and replaced with a race of eurasian-negroids with not clear sense of tradition or identity and therefore easily controlled by the ruling elite”
        Richard von coudenhove kalergi outlines a plan for Europe in his book ‘Praktischer idealismus'(1924)

        1. Did he write why white Europeans (I assume he was one) should be exterminated?

          1. Coudenhove had a white father and Japenese mother. I think this messed around with his sense of identity. I think he was was one of the shadow founders of the eu (from memory). Many years ago I was friendly with a girl who had a Nigerian father and an English mother. She had the appearance of being Mediterranean, straight dark hair, olive skin. Her siblings (five of them) were what she referred to as ‘bush’, dark skinned with frizzy hair. When home in Nigeria she became aggressively English, when in England she wasn’t quite sure who she was. These products of mixed marriages, whatever the tv ads might like us to believe, have seriously disturbed identities.

          2. Understand, PM. Firstborn was born in Sussex, and we moved to Norway when he was six. We kept English at home, since the boys could learn proper Norwegian at school & with friends, but he is still more English that we expected – despite being bilingul, and being able to get by in German, Polish and Italian, Swedish… Second Son was born, and has only ever lived, in Norway. Firstborn got the English early childhood culture, not Norwegian, and the Norwegian later childhood culture, not English, so is a bit confused.

          4. Evening PM

            Hence the idiotic witterings of the Megain woman … seriously disturbed .. White husbands , white father , but she identifies with her black DNA and all the nonsense asscociate with it BLM etc!

          5. These products of mixed marriages, whatever the tv ads might like us to believe, have seriously disturbed identities.

            A feature, not a bug as far as TPTB are concerned. Divided loyalties or none at all. Identity limited to consumption preferences.

    2. Where to start? Myfanwy was written by Joseph Parry in 1875. He’s probably best known for the hymn tune Aberystwyth, associated with the hymn Jesu, lover of my soul.

      He also composed the opera ‘Blodwen’, first performed in Aberystwyth. It is rumoured that, prior to this, no-one in Wales had that name. I had an aunt Blodwen, for what it’s worth.

      Parry’s niece, Elisabeth, was an accomplished singer, lived a few miles from here, and passed away at the age of 95. I played for her funeral. Her book, “Three Men and a Girl”, is worth reading.

      4. Myfanwy by John Betjeman

        Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
        White o’er the playpen the sheen of her dress,
        Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
        Soap scented fingers I long to caress.

        Were you a prefect and head of your dormit’ry?
        Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
        Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
        Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

        Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
        Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge,
        Home and Colonial, Star, International,
        Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.

        Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
        Out of the shopping and into the dark,
        Back down the avenue, back to the pottingshed,
        Back to the house on the fringe of the park.

        Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
        Golden the light on the book on her knee,
        Finger marked pages of Rackham’s Hans Anderson,
        Time for the children to come down to tea.

        Oh! Fullers angel-cake, Robertson’s marmalade,
        Liberty lampshade, come shine on us all,
        My! what a spread for the friends of Myfanwy,
        Some in the alcove and some in the hall.

        Then what sardines in half-lighted passages!
        Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
        You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
        Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

        1. Hmmm.

          1. Pa ham mae dicter, O Myfanwy,
          Yn llenwi’th lygaid duon ddi?
          A’th ruddiau tirion, O Myfanwy,
          Heb wrido wrth fy ngweled i?
          Pa le mae’r wen oedd ar dy wefus
          Fu’n cynnau ‘nghariad ffyddlon ffol?
          Pa le mae sain dy eiriau melys,
          Fu’n denu’n nghalon ar dy ôl?
          2. Pa beth a wneuthym, O Myfanwy,
          I haeddu gwg dy ddwyrudd hardd?
          Ai chwarae oeddit, O Myfanwy
          Â thanau euraidd serch dy fardd?
          Wyt eiddo im drwy gywir amod
          Ai gormod cadw’th air i mi?
          Ni cheisiaf fyth mo’th law, Myfanwy,
          Heb gael dy galon gyda hi.
          3. Myfanwy boed yr holl o’th fywyd
          Dan heulwen disglair canol dydd.
          A boed i rosyn gwridog ienctid
          I ddawnsio ganmlwydd ar dy rudd.
          Aug hofiar oll o’th add ewidion
          A wnest i rywun, ‘ngeneth ddel,
          A rho dy law, Myfanwy dirion
          I ddim ond dweud y gair “Ffarwel”.
          [English]
          1. Why is it anger, O Myfanwy,
          That fills your eyes so dark and clear?
          Your gentle cheeks, O sweet Myfanwy,
          Why blush they not when I draw near?
          Where is the smile that once most tender
          Kindled my love so fond, so true?
          Where is the sound of your sweet words,
          That drew my heart to follow you?
          2. What have I done, O my Myfanwy,
          To earn your frown? What is my blame?
          Was it just play, my sweet Myfanwy,
          To set your poet’s love aflame?
          You truly once to me were promised,
          Is it too much to keep your part?
          I wish no more your hand, Myfanwy,
          If I no longer have your heart.
          3. Myfanwy, may you spend your lifetime
          Beneath the midday sunshine’s glow,
          And on your cheeks O may the roses
          Dance for a hundred years or so.
          Forget now all the words of promise
          You made to one who loved you well,
          Give me your hand, my sweet Myfanwy,
          But one last time, to say “farewell”.

  85. I’ve lost my internet signal and Talk Talk are not talking so I must say an early goodnight! (Using phone data!)

    6. The TT web page (access thro yr phone of course!) has a service checker function. I had cause to use it a few moths ago; it spotted the problem and self reported. I received text msg updates and the problem was sorted overnight.

  86. Yesterday was a lovely warm day, I walk the dogs twice daily, and vary the places where they can gallop freely.

    Dogs and I had a lovely walk on mixture of heathland and grassy scrub, there was another car parked on the sandy track near my car, and a couple had just finished their lunch and were putting stuff away in the boot of their car .. They spoke to me about this and that and how much they enjoyed the Dorset countryside , and would you believe a sand lizard ran between us as we were chatting and hid under my car!

    They were delighted , because they said all they had seen that morning were Green Woodpeckers and Stonechats , there are plenty of those around.

    Sorry it is a boring story , anyway , as I backed the car out the sandy space , the lizard came out of hiding and scuttled into the undergrowth.

    1. I’ve never seen a Green Woodpecker or a Stonechat (probably), nor a sand lizard. Who knew the UK could be so exotic>

    3. A charming cameo – remember many would never see these little wonders of our world even though they are right under their noses and in front of their eyes. You have been blessed with eyes that really see.

      1. A wise man once said: “God gave me eyes that I might see you: He gave you eyes that I might see myself”.

    5. I haven’t seen a sand lizard for years, Belle, an extremely handsome lizard and certainly the best looking lizard in the UK. Shame we don’t have more varieties. Not boring at all.

      1. You should be here in the spring.

        Green, black, greater, middle, lesser spotted, you name them for this part of europe, we get them in the garden; many in abundance.

        I’ve often had six or more greens feeding on the grass within 100 feet of the front door. We get lots of ants here.

        I’ve had the various spotted ones on six peanut feeders simultaneously sometimes two at the same time on the bigger feeders.

        We get through about 100 kg of peanuts a year.We buy in bulk when we’re in the UK, they are very expensive here.

        Really great to see.

        1. Sos

          Good heavens so many woodpeckers , how big is a black one , why don’t we have them over here, we have every other type of black this that and the other.

          I suppose you have plenty of ants.

          Did you have a storm of flying ants recently , as reported in the press.

          1. Yes, the ants were out in huge numbers and have completely thrown the ph of my pool, so the water is cloudy.

          2. The black one is Europe’s largest.

            We first saw one here about four years ago but they are now frequent visitors.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_woodpecker

            https://www.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F2b%2F59%2F81%2F2b59819f523c34d6d705c5d462a58b76.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F388083692860412042%2F&tbnid=K2X6aO4GEDQuPM&vet=12ahUKEwiGxvrQ09fqAhXDwYUKHabfCF0QMygAegUIARCdAQ..i&docid=xyrQG3gq4qSMvM&w=342&h=500&q=black%20woodpecker%20france&ved=2ahUKEwiGxvrQ09fqAhXDwYUKHabfCF0QMygAegUIARCdAQ

            https://www.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oiseaux.net%2Fphotos%2Fyann.cambon%2Fimages%2Fid%2Fpic.noir.yaca.10p.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oiseaux.net%2Fbirds%2Fblack.woodpecker.html&tbnid=cc35nTj8BjK3nM&vet=12ahUKEwiGxvrQ09fqAhXDwYUKHabfCF0QMygZegUIARDUAQ..i&docid=9i5_SCqs9ANWyM&w=300&h=300&q=black%20woodpecker%20france&ved=2ahUKEwiGxvrQ09fqAhXDwYUKHabfCF0QMygZegUIARDUAQ

          4. The flying ants arose from the lawn in our back garden as we were having a ‘socially distanced’ alfresco Sunday lunch with our younger son this last Sunday gone. It was fascinating. In less than an hour it was all over. Swallows and dragon flies had their fill.

      2. Here in my corner of Wellingborough, greens are common. There’s a long stand of crack willow by the brook and lake as well as a couple of copses with tall ash. They’re in and out frequently, dipping across the water. At this time of year they’ll feed on the ants infesting the grass verges less than 40′ from the house, often spending 20-30 minutes on one patch.

    1. Is that suggesting that over 100 people are proud to be associated with that piece of shit?

      Lock them all up, before they decide to repay Britain for taking them in in a similar manner.

      And then deport the bastards.

    1. Gin and tonic for me this evening….. to bring me round after I fell off the pine chest whilst dusting the top of the wardrobe….. I nearly catapulted myself through the open window…. same ankle as last September but fortunately it is not broken this time, just bruised….. I am shaken and stirred.

      4. Oh dear, I hope you’re ok. I didn’t realise the tops of wardrobes got dusty. Normally they’re too tall for anyone to notice so why bother?

      5. Sorry to hear about your injury, pm. Good job it wasn’t any worse. There’s a moral somewhere about letting sleeping dust lie 🙂 I had to change a light bulb last night; I got up okay, but when I wanted to step down, there was nowhere to put my feet – my dog had commandeered the space and wasn’t very inclined to move!

      6. Something similar happened to me a while ago and both shook and stirred me quite profoundly. We have now invested in a couple of stepladders – one two-step, one three-step – and I only ever use these for climbing up. No more rickety furniture for me!

        1. Injuries happen more easily and take longer to heal as you get older… We have a little 3-step steps and an IKEA 2 step stool in the kitchen. So far, fingers crossed, no catastrophes.

        3. Yes, this little incident has persuaded us to finally get some small step ladders, at last. I am not as young as I like to think I am (oh wicked vanity) and my centre of gravity has changed. I am no longer a mountain goat!

        1. Never tried it, William. But I’ll look out for it. Yes, I can see that that’s a classy glass.

        2. A superb beer. Excellent choice!
          My vote for best is the Chimay capsule blanche. A religious experience in a bottle, so it is.

          2. It hits my sweet spot!
            You could send your excess to me & I’ll dispose f it…
            Sorry you weren’t impressed. :-((

          3. Not a problem, perhaps I should persevere with it. One has to try these things….

      2. Kingfisher tastes like cheap lager to me. Brewed in the UK by Heineken I believe. Certainly tastes like it.

        1. We get Indian import here… Heineken brew iron-flavoured beers IMHO. Me no like.

  92. Here’s some good music. Very professionally performed, with a touch of pomposity from the conductor, methinks. EDIT: It would have been an excellent character for the late John Thaw to play!
    But hey, I can’t see him as I’m on Disqus, but YT is still playing… how cool is that?
    https://youtu.be/uj8w0Sm7l-M

  94. Will Khant be unseated next year? Shaun Bailey isn’t making much headway. He doesn’t sound convincing. I can understand him not wishing to be strident of tone but whenever I hear him speak, I can hear faint echoes of Chris Eubank lithping hith way through a thpeeth.

    Sadiq Khan is wrecking London’s revival with an ideological war on motorists

    The mayor is squeezing drivers for cash and damaging the capital to fill the black hole in London’s finances

    KEITH PRINCE

    After months of lockdown, London is desperate to get moving again. Yet amid deserted streets and dwindling economic activity, the mayor threatens to stall the capital’s recovery through an ideological war on motorists.

    Sadiq Khan has argued that a “car-led” recovery would be undesirable, a position that deliberately ignores the fact that many Londoners have no choice but to drive. Thirty per cent of capital-dwellers still rely on their cars to commute and travel. Khan, and others like him, forget that the city stretches far beyond Tooting and Islington and driving remains the norm in much of Greater London.

    As the capital gets back to work, many Londoners will have to change the way they commute. Social distancing measures have significantly reduced public transport capacity in London, meaning that many more journeys will need to be made by foot and bike. However, this gap can’t be closed by walking and cycling alone; cars, taxis and motorbikes must also play a part in reviving the capital.

    While City Hall rightly looks at ways to promote cycling and walking, it must also ensure adequate space for motor vehicles. Yet the mayor has no interest in getting the balance right. His Streetspace plan has limited street lanes and involves shutting entire roads to create cycle lanes and larger pavements. These “temporary” measures have been rushed through without consultation and are already causing problems on London’s streets.

    One of the worst Streetspace changes has been to busy Park Lane in central London, where a three-lane road has been reduced to one to create a new bicycle lane and another for buses. The inevitable result? Massive congestion. Even more ludicrously, Park Lane already has an extensive cycle network on its doorstep; cyclists continue to ride through idyllic Hyde Park while chaos reigns on the road.

    The mayor isn’t alone in making ill-considered changes to London’s roads. Many councils have put forward equally poor plans. Lewisham council is intent on introducing a highly controversial low-traffic neighbourhood in the Oval Triangle area. Other Labour boroughs like Newham and Hackney have been forcing out cars for years with vast numbers of suspension-destroying speed bumps.

    What London desperately needs are sensible, flexible, and responsive plans to promote walking and cycling across the city, which don’t result in gridlock for motorists. If a scheme doesn’t work, TfL must be brave enough to scrap it. If a cycle lane lies empty, it should be axed. And instead of celebrating the 27 per cent reduction in cars and 36 per cent fall in minicabs on weekends due to his congestion charge hike, Khan should consider the livelihoods that hang in the balance.

    These anti-car plans have far more to do with politics than any environmental motive. The mayor is desperately trying to fill the black hole he has created in TfL’s finances. The fact that opposition predominately comes from Conservative-voting outer London boroughs has given Khan free rein to plough on with his flawed plans. The mayor doesn’t design plans fit for beyond Zone 1 because he doesn’t need votes from outside inner London; he has every incentive to penalise Londoners living in outer boroughs with higher road charges.

    That’s why Khan rushed the introduction of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone in central London, giving businesses, charities, and working people less time to prepare. It’s why he plans to extend the ULEZ charge up to the North and South Circulars, despite fears the infrastructure needed could cost £780 million, dwarfing the air quality benefits. And it’s why Khan hiked up the congestion charge by 30 per cent, extending it to evenings and weekends.

    Transport for London is broke. Khan has run it into the ground. In four short years as Mayor, he squandered more than £640 million on a fares freeze which benefited tourists over commuters, maxed out TfL’s credit cards and increased its debt to a record £13 billion. Consequently, TfL couldn’t afford much-needed upgrades, 21 major transport projects had to be delayed or cancelled and the network needed a larger bailout following the pandemic.

    For Sadiq Khan, squeezing every penny out of hard-working Londoners who drive and forcing them off the road is not just a political win, but helps fix a financial mess of his own making . This cynical war on motorists is jeopardising the capital’s recovery. As ever, working Londoners will pay the price.

    Keith Prince is the Conservative London Assembly member for Havering and Redbridge

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/18/sadiq-khanis-wrecking-londons-revival-ideological-war-motorists/

    1. The idea of having supposed representation by mayors has backfired disastrously as has the preposterous attempts at devolution. These constructs are entirely artificial and have merely sown division.

      Add to the mix a pro-European Supreme Court, that sees its role as one of obstructing the elected government on matters well outwith its competence, and the replacement of a Police force with a bunch of common purpose non-entities intent on discriminating in favour of the BAME and LGBQT ‘communities’, we have an almost perfectly constructed platform
      for insurrection of the majority white folk in the UK.

      Time to wake up Boris.

    2. The idea of having supposed representation by mayors has backfired disastrously as has the preposterous attempts at devolution. These constructs are entirely artificial and have merely sown division.

      Add to the mix a pro-European Supreme Court, that sees its role as one of obstructing the elected government on matters well outwith its competence, and the replacement of a Police force with a bunch of common purpose non-entities intent on discriminating in favour of the BAME and LGBQT ‘communities’, we have an almost perfectly constructed platform
      for insurrection of the majority white folk in the UK.

      Time to wake up Boris.

  95. Sleb Mastermind
    OMFG
    Are they ALL famous for being ill educated thickos
    Edit
    Simpering twats as well

      1. I met the charming JM on location in Ireland filming ‘The Blue Max’; he made a point of mixing with the ‘extras’ – I was the leader of the young pilots at the grave scene.

        George P. and Ursula A. isolated themselves in grandiose caravans …

        1. You sound as if you have had an exciting career doing many things L, so much to look back on.

          All of us Nottlers must watch the film again , and find you !

    4. Happy birthday. I have been stocking up on Aussie Shiraz before the nappy muzzles become compulsory.

    6. I can see two people on the roof; is the one on the left James Mason or Vera Miles?

      :-))

    10. 79, eh?

      I always had you down as forever soixante neuf!

      Glad you had a good day.

    11. Happy Birrhday! It looks like a very smart venue…… and hopefully glowing in the afterglow of mellowness….

      1. Its an eighteenth’-century coaching inn – and was a departure point to Canada during ‘The Clearances’, ppm …

    12. Happy birthday, glad you had a good time, will raise my glass to you this evening! Once it has been filled with wine, of course!!

  100. Evening, all. The sweep has been and discovered that one of my chimney pots is loose. More expense 🙁 Still better to discover that than have it come crashing down and have to replace the pot as well.

    2. We had our living room chimney professionally swept last year and a stainless steel tube inserted in it with a stainless steel rain cap on top so we hope this will last us for the foreseeable future and I have been coppicing some very high laurel hedges during lockdown and have amassed a few years’ wood supply which is now drying out and enough of it will be dry enough to be used this coming winter. We fitted another s/s tube a couple of years ago in the library chimney and the woodburning stoves there and in the living room are both working well

      Laurel is an excellent wood for burning in stoves and both of ours have clean burning systems so the glass remains completely clear and we can see the fire burning away merrily. We are very happy with them.

      .

      1. I hope and trust that your stainless steel flues were double walled with insulation between the inner and outer tubes.

        The best wood for burning is ash and elm and oak in that order. The logs should be seasoned or ‘dry’. If they retain sap or other moisture this has to be evaporated during combustion and reduces performance. It also leaves partially burnt tars and other residues which would otherwise have been burnt off. These adhere to the flue walls and pose a fire risk if allowed to build up.

        I relate this because we live under thatch at present and have to be aware of the risks.

      2. I have a conventional open fireplace rather than wood-burners. The Rayburn chimney has a clay lining, I believe. I am going to have wires (as I believe they are called) fitted to all the chimneys to stop birds getting in. There was a dead jackdaw in the chimney when it was swept yesterday, but no nest, fortunately. As the sweep said, it was a kamikaze job.

  102. No mention on the BBC of the deliberate attempts at the destruction of cathedrals and the Christian heritage in France. The same forces will be planning similar assaults on English cathedrals.

    It is about time that our useless political class awoke to the imminent dangers of importing a million or more folk into our country whose aim is to destroy us.

    We still see porous borders allowing escorted boatloads to arrive day in and day out. We see massive enclaves in our northern cities where these imports ignore our laws with impunity and in some god forsaken cities folk are awakened to the imbecilic shrieking and wailing ‘call to prayer’.

    Wake up Boris. The rest of us whiteys are sick of witnessing this shit. Do something about it or face the consequences.

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