Saturday 2 March: George Galloway’s Rochdale victory reflects the bleak state of British politics

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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420 thoughts on “Saturday 2 March: George Galloway’s Rochdale victory reflects the bleak state of British politics”

      1. I saw Geoff post the newpage, rushed round and opened up… to find I’m third! Bob and Minty must have been poised with the “Comment” button.

        1. I was occasionally first when we used to go to our boat in Turkey which is two hours ahead of UK time. I am seldom at my desk before 9 o’clock French time which is 8 o’clock UK time.

        2. Probably had their comments written and copied to the clip-board ready to paste and press Send.

    1. Change and decay in all around I see
      Oh Lord who changes not Abide with Me.

      I fear that Christianity in becoming so inclusive and woke has changed far more than Islam which has not changed and has no intention of becoming inclusive.

  6. Good morning, chums. Hope you are are all well. Just off to do my daily Wordle. See you all later.

    Wordle 987 3/6

    I managed it in three today!

    🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. Thank you, Ndovu, but – just like my weight – it changes on an almost daily basis.

  7. Enough really has to be enough. 2 march 2024.

    Enough is enough. That was the welcome – albeit belated – sentiment of Rishi Sunak’s address to the nation on Friday afternoon. Drawing on his own experience, the Prime Minister defended the idea of Britain as a “patriotic, liberal, democratic” society, a reasonable country with decent people. But, he warned, that society is being targeted by extremists, who want to pit Briton against Briton and tear this country apart.

    It is true that Britain was once a “patriotic, liberal, democratic, society” No longer. It has been destroyed by the Political Elites with their multicultural agenda. He didn’t say enough immigration is enough or that enough Muslim Terrorism is enough. The only change you are going to see here is increasing pressure on the indigenous population disguised as opposition to the far-right. Nottlers should be aware of this. The new Online Harms Bill will soon become active with the powers of prosecution. At the moment our real names are known only to the Security Services. This one suspects will soon be amended as with the new Spectator comments section. It is possible that we might be banned entirely or Geoff coerced into demanding that we supply them. Just remember when you post! We are entering the end game now into a fully-fledged Police State

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2024/03/01/enough-really-has-to-be-enough/

    1. Ahem…..

      Peter North

      “My problem with that Sunak speech is I can’t be sure that when he
      refers to the “far right” and “far right extremism”, he’s not referring
      to me and my pretty pedestrian majority held views on immigration,
      integration and culture.

      Every time I post a blog I wonder if
      that’s the one that will have the plod knocking on my door. Noticing
      demographic trends is far right. Noticing that “ordinary Muslims”
      sympathise with Hamas and anti-gay messaging is far right. Noticing
      grooming gangs is far right. Having a low opinion of “communities” who
      don’t integrate and bring their third world customs here is far right.
      Speaking openly and honestly about any of these issues is far right.

      I can take to the streets and wave an ISIS flag, hound a Labour MP in the
      street, mob a synagogue, and chant genocidal slogans. I can project
      those slogans up the side of Big Ben and I’m completely safe from
      consequences. But I’m only one miscalculated satirical tweet away from a
      prison sentence.

      The speech, I believe, was intended as a shot
      across the bow of the Gaza hate marchers, and if Sunak serious, the
      police will no longer be passive spectators to public outrages. We shall
      see. But I suspect that speech will invite them to test the waters, and
      the police, through its lack of leadership and cowardice, will fail
      that test. Meanwhile, out of some bogus notion of balance, we’ll see a
      crackdown on the “far right” so ordinarily conservative leaning people
      will have to watch what they say.

      I do not find the PM remotely
      convincing. This is a vacuous outsider wading into something he doesn’t
      understand, merely to deposit his emollient rhetoric, but with
      absolutely no idea how much burning anger is building as *his* party
      trashes the foundations of our society with mass unwelcome immigration,
      pouring petrol on the far left/Islamist bonfire.

      The far right is
      not a meaningful threat. There was no far right candidate in Rochdale.
      The most prominent far right activist in Britain, Sam Melia, has just
      been jailed for the deadly crime on being in possession of stickers with
      an intent to distribute, in the same week Labour MPs need a heavy
      police escort just to walk down the street.

      This centre ground
      Sunak was addressing, simply doesn’t exist outside the politico-media
      bubble. The deep rooted problems caused by mass immigration cannot be
      smoothed over with multiculturalist rhetoric, nor can it be swept under
      the carpet. At this point, the problems can only be solved with muscular
      nationalism; reasserting our borders, scrapping the ECHR, removing
      those with no right to be here, shuttering hate factory mosques, and
      putting those who won’t integrate on notice.

      But this is anathema
      to the modern Tory party, and even advocating such policies puts me more
      in the far right camp as defined by Rishi Sunak. As such, Sunak wasn’t
      speaking to me or for me. His weakness is an enabler of far left and
      Islamist extremism. He’s setting parameters for debate legitimacy by
      equating nationalist views with the Hamas syamptising mob. Polite
      society must steer clear of noticing things!

      Well, Mr Sunak, I’m
      not playing. I’m going to keep noticing things, and I’m going to keep
      saying what I think until the police turn up, and even then they’ll get
      the door in their faces unless they have a specific charge.

      With this speech Sunak underscores my first impression of him. He is not fit
      to lead the country, not because of his Indian heritage as such, but
      because he is a citizen of nowhere with no idea what makes Britain tick,
      or the depth of anger that’s driving contemporary British politics.
      He’s clueless spectator who thinks we can all be corralled back into the
      centrist consensus of yore with a bit of strategic police work. But we
      are far, far beyond all that. The Tories’ failure on immigration has
      uncorked a genie that is not going back in the bottle. The debate the
      establishment has worked so hard to suppress will happen with or without
      them.”
      ‘Morning Minty

        1. Yes. They have all shuffled off to the Left and we have been left on a little island called ‘Sanity’.

      3. Good morning, Rik

        Who is Peter North?

        Please will you give me a link to this?

          1. Nah, Pete North is the son of a polytechnic academic (I forget his name [edit – Richard North, I think] who was much in evidence during the In/Out EU Referendum, and I believe was appointed as a government advisor.) He and his father were (wrongly) convinced that this country could slowly and gradually ease into independence by starting with the Norway option half-way-house.

            Pete could be very brusque to people who didn’t agree with him – I was barred by him from his blog in those days…

  8. Good Moaning.
    A snippet from TCW:

    “I haven’t been able to get over how supporters of Hamas’s terror regime are being allowed to continue their harassment and disruption in the heart of London. Who has been co-ordinating the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) organising the demos and who is paying for it all? Who (in Parliament or the Crown Estates) agreed to their projecting their message on to Big Ben? Someone must have since the Met Police have assured us it was not illegal. At TCW we decided to do some sleuthing and contacted a company that specialises in projecting advertising slogans and the like on to big buildings. And guess what they told us?

    ‘Big Ben is actually the only place in the UK (that we are aware of) where it is illegal to project on to. You have to get written permission from the Speaker of the House otherwise it is an arrestable offence. For this reason it is not a site that we offer to clients.'(my italics)

    So either the Met was wrong and the law was broken, or Sir Lindsay Hoyle (or perhaps the Crown Estates?) to add to his other dreadful decisions, did agree to it. A PMQ or written question to James Cleverly is in order. The Home Secretary might also be interested in doing some further checks on the shadowy PSC and who they are in partnership with. We did some research on that too. According to NGO Monitor, ‘The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign does not include any financial data, donor information, or sources of funding on its website, reflecting a complete lack of transparency and accountability.’ Furthermore, the site reports that in 2015 the Co-operative Bank closed the PSC’s bank account ‘because of fears that money could inadvertently be funnelled to illegal groups in Gaza. Following advanced due diligence checks on the anti-Israel group’s account, the bank said it was not satisfied that it would not be used to aid prescribed [sic] activities in the Palestinian territories’. What did the bank find out that spooked them into this action, I wonder?

    https://mailchi.mp/conservativewoman/kathys-tcw-week-in-review-xosto90xo5-2636420?e=572844d9ca

  9. Herein confirmation of everything one feared. The smug Beeb Dweebs are so in-bred and narcissistic.

    Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya: ‘People say we’re woke – the truth is we’re a mirror for Britain’

    It may be haemorrhaging listeners – and the odd veteran presenter – but the BBC station’s boss says a varied output is needed more than ever

    Peter Stanford
    1 March 2024 • 6:04pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/03/01/TELEMMGLPICT000368387762_17093155859760_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqZObUSHQwN0O2y5oHGGrbtz0qQ8MooBDPg9bRTaNqjL4.jpeg?imwidth=680

    It feels like a particularly appropriate time to be sitting down with Mohit Bakaya, Radio 4’s controller, on the day it is announced that Today programme anchor Martha Kearney is leaving the show. The departure of BBC veteran Kearney, one of the most familiar and loved voices on his station, is adding to a growing sense of unease around not only its flagship morning news show, which has seen a 9 per cent year-on-year drop in numbers tuning in, but also about Radio 4 itself which has been haemorrhaging listeners of late.

    There has been a 10 per cent drop overall in the past 12 months on Bakaya’s watch, creating a perception that it has lost its way. And in a sign of the times, and the problems posed by the BBC’s impartiality rules, after our meeting an internal BBC review found another Today presenter, Justin Webb, had broken impartiality rules by sharing his own opinion that trans women are “in other words males” on air in an item last August. The dividing lines and traps of the culture wars are just one of the challenges that the controller is trying to navigate.

    “They have gone down,” 59-year-old Bakaya confirms of the listening figures, “which is something we are concerned with.” A graduate of the Beeb’s prestigious training scheme that picks the brightest and best to emerge each year from universities (in his case, in 1993, from Keble College, Oxford where he read PPE), he has worked his way up as a producer and editor on arts programmes on Radios 3 and 4, including launching Front Row in 1998, before his appointment in 2019 as controller of Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra.

    If there is any panic at the loss of listeners, he isn’t showing it. His manner is calm and thoughtful, though far removed from the complacency of which BBC senior management is sometimes accused. The slide in audience figures, he argues, is part of a “general phenomenon” affecting all speech radio.

    “There is a bit of news avoidance going on,” he says. “War in the Middle East, the cost of living crisis, climate change, talk about how AI is going to destroy humanity, none is uplifting. So, there can be a rush under duvet moment or a rush to music radio [whose listener numbers are on the up]. Everyone is wrestling with that.”

    Happier out of the spotlight, Bakaya rarely gives interviews but has agreed to meet to unveil a brand new daily schedule for Radio 4. If this is his fight-back plan for the station, regular listeners will be relieved to hear that it is more about tweaking than a top-to-bottom shake-up. The word he uses is “replenishment” and that may cause a few more alarm bells. It will, he accepts, impact directly on some of Radio 4’s crown jewels.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/03/01/TELEMMGLPICT000359843589_17093141826970_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqq0hXPkI_GX3QDYmEw99JfKYPjXNdof9ZzFJVcQJcHmc.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Mohit Bakaya’s half-brother Samir Shah is chairman of the BBC CREDIT: Toby Melville/Reuters

    The Archers will get a new, slightly later Sunday slot, Desert Island Discs – DIDs in BBC speak – a longer running time, and there is going to be more prominence for documentaries, more airtime for The Food Programme and The Media Show, but an end to Four Thought and The Listening Project.

    Before picking over it in detail, though, there is more to say about the present predicament the station finds itself in. The Today programme, for example, has already been replenished to make it feel cosier, more magazine-like, especially on Saturdays, but with little impact on listener figures.

    “I wouldn’t call it cosying,” Bakaya replies, gently chastising. “We have tried to make it friendlier. In the past, the two presenters wouldn’t even acknowledge each other’s existence. To my ears they are now trying to make it easier to navigate, especially if you are coming in for the first time, so you know what is coming up.”

    This is, of course, the holy grail, in speech-radio terms: new, younger listeners. “A lot of people are saying, ‘I can get my news from a podcast now. I don’t need to turn on a breakfast show.’ The world is changing fast and we have to recognise those realities.”

    Even if it means potentially alienating the audience they already have? “We also have to remember that there are people listening who have been there since the first programme was broadcast. The one thing I say to programme editors all the time is you have to respect your core audience. If you lose that, then you have lost everything.”

    Reassuring words, but only if they are translated into action. It is, he confesses, suddenly animated and sitting forward in his chair in his very “old BBC” wood-panelled office high up at the bow of the original Broadcasting House in central London, a balancing act between two imperatives.

    The first is “making the daily schedule better serve its audiences’ needs in an age when they have so many alternatives”. And the second is maintaining what he refers to as Radio 4’s “incredible enchanted forest, somewhere you can wander through as a listener and bump into wonderful, strange, exotic beasts that you never thought you would encounter”.

    Martha Kearney and Mishal Husain on the Today programme
    The Today programme has already been replenished to make it feel cosier, while presenter Martha Kearney, pictured left with host Mishal Husain, has announced she is to leave the show

    It was the forest that first drew Bakaya into radio at an early age in the family home in south west London where he was born. His father, Madan, had been a production manager in Bollywood who moved to Britain in the early 1960s to promote Hindi films here, while his mother, Uma, was a software developer at IBM, who also gave sitar recitals, exhibited her paintings and made pottery.

    She died when he was eight.

    “My father brought Indian films to this country, while my mother was an extraordinary polymath. And politics was constantly being talked about in our household. All the genres were there, so it was a little Radio 4 in a funny sort of way.”

    By the time he was 10, he recalls with a warm, self-deprecating laugh, he and a school friend were busy recording music from the radio onto old reel-to-reel tapes to make their own versions of programmes where they talked over the songs. They even made up a radio drama based on The Archers and called it The Starchers.

    He was, it seems, fated from an early age to end up as controller of Radio 4. “It is my tribe,” he says, likening the station’s relationship with its listeners to football supporters at the team matches he now attends regularly with his grown-up sons. “Managers come and go, players come and go, everything changes, but the fans’ commitment to the team is undying and the same is true of our Radio 4 audience. They are so dyed in the wool that you’ve got to take them seriously.”

    His enthusiasm is unmistakable but how awkward is it, I ask, to hold such a senior post at the BBC at the same time as his half-brother – Samir Shah – is chairman? “I don’t feel his appointment makes anything awkward.”

    They have the same mother but different fathers. “We grew up together but he is 13 years older than me,” he says. So by the time Bakaya was taking his first steps into radio with The Starchers, Samir had disappeared off to Hull University.

    The chairman, his younger brother explains, “is far removed from the editorial side of things. If he does his job properly, which I am sure he will do, he’s not going to be getting involved in the weeds, though it is odd when we bump into each other in the corridors.”

    And since Samir is hugely experienced in broadcasting, he adds, he won’t be able to exert any undue influence. “When I joined the BBC, he was already working in news here. We were always going in different directions.”

    That strong family connection with the BBC stretches further. Bakaya’s second wife, Victoria Shepherd, with whom he has a seven-year-old son (who, he reports proudly, has just discovered the joys of Desert Island Discs), was a producer with him on Radio 3’s Night Waves, but now writes books.

    He also has two sons in their 20s with his first wife, Josephine Ryan, an antiques dealer. Being older, their listening habits are more podcast based, he says, but he resists any easy categorisation that presents his linear audience as older and wedded to the daily schedule, while those using the BBC Sounds digital app to access Radio 4 content as young and hard to pin down.

    “Linear and digital are symbiotic. If people find us in Sounds for the first time, the chances are they start to like the content and then you can say to them, ‘there is a place called Radio 4, click the switch on and it is all there.’ Sounds allows us to reach out and bring that other audience in.”

    But does BBC Sounds – where, in his parallel role as Director of Speech, he also oversees all speech-based content – ultimately pose an existential threat to the linear schedule? Some listeners suspect that resources are being redirected away from Radio 4 and into Sounds, and it is rumoured that Bakaya’s predecessor Gwyneth Williams stood down in 2019 in frustration at this trend.

    “I worked closely with Gwyneth and I never heard her say that,” he replies firmly. “When we mention Sounds, it is not because we are trying to drive listeners away from Radio 4. We are telling them you can have your cake and eat it too! You can listen to us when you are at home, but carry on listening on Sounds when you are out.”

    Mention of one high-profile departure brings us back round to the other more recent one. It has been widely reported the Woman’s Hour’s 39-year-old Emma Barnett is pencilled in to replace 66-year-old Martha Kearney on Today as part of the drive to woo a younger audience and push the listener figures back up.

    “I’m not going to get into speculation. This is Martha’s moment. As she has said, she has been getting up at three in the morning for a long time. And she is doing a new show for us, This Natural Life, and will present Open Country.”

    Will her replacement on Today have to be another woman? “I get frustrated by this reductive view of presenters – that it has to be a woman or a brown person. It has to be the best person.”

    He does slip in a qualification. “You have to think about the audience experience, and the team has to be representative of the nation. The whole station has to be. People have to feel when they turn on the radio that some aspect of themselves or their identity is somewhere in the schedule.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/03/01/TELEMMGLPICT000368387722_17093156323740_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Mohit Bakaya: ‘Overall in broadcasting we are seeing people monetise the echo chamber and division, and that is dangerous’ CREDIT: Andrew Crowley

    Quite where that happens will be shaped by the new schedule he is sharing with The Telegraph. It will definitely raise some eyebrows, not least among self-professed Archers addicts. The Sunday omnibus edition is being moved on one hour from its peak-time slot at 10 in the morning so as to bring forward Desert Island Discs. It sounds like a promotion for one and a relegation for another.

    He shakes his head. “I think if on Sunday mornings you are coming out of Broadcasting House with Paddy O’Connell, and then going into DIDs, it is going to feel like a more natural transition. Often the jump between Broadcasting House and The Archers can feel like a strange one.”

    Radio listening patterns, though, show that more people tune in to their radios between 8 and 10 in the morning than later? “But weekends are different,” he corrects me, “because people don’t have to get up for work. If you are making a leisurely Sunday lunch late morning, the change won’t make any difference.”

    The Archers team, he assures me, have told him precisely that. And the pill has been sugared by him finding time on Saturdays to repeat the Friday evening episode, something not currently available.

    His decision to promote Desert Island Discs has a clearer logic if you go by listening figures. “The figures for DIDs have grown really fast,” he enthuses, “partly to do with BBC Sounds and podcasts, and partly to do with the quality of guests, [the mix that includes] people you’ve never heard of with interesting stories.”

    But why give it an extra 15 minutes running time (it’s being extended to one hour)? There are plenty of Radio 4 listeners who compare Lauren Laverne, presenter since 2018, unfavourably with her predecessors Kirsty Young and Sue Lawley. In a much-commented-upon 2019 article, The Spectator’s Melanie McDonagh argued that Laverne’s appointment was one of the worst that Radio 4 has made “in its apparent effort to alienate its listeners”.

    Bakaya vigorously disagrees. “I am sure there are people who don’t like her but I think Lauren has really settled into the role. She gives space for people. The best interviewers are the ones who know when to sit back and let people open up.”

    The accusation most often made against Laverne is that she is not sufficiently curious and doesn’t come back with the follow-up question to a guest’s remarks that would dig just a little deeper. “Let me let you into something here,” Bakaya confides. “They record an awful lot of time and often what happens is those follow-up questions [are edited] out because they have to hit the eight records.”

    The extra 15 minutes will give her more space to reveal this so far unheard skill. “We are not going to play more music,” he promises. “It is about getting more out of the guests. So, I am hopeful.”

    Such positivity will help in some of the wider challenges he faces at the helm of Radio 4. As the Justin Webb case this week demonstrated, it sits uneasily on the front-line of what can and can’t be said and is often accused – by this paper’s readers among others – of having become too woke. “You have to take that seriously,” says Bakaya.

    “You shouldn’t dismiss people’s concerns. We mustn’t make assumptions about what right-minded people think.”

    That is a message he constantly instils in the station’s editorial teams. “I am keen to hear the whole of the UK, with all the various views and beliefs, in all our content – comedy, drama as well as factual programmes.”

    Does that make Radio 4 woke? “There are times when people listen and say that. The truth is that Radio 4 is a mirror. As Britain changes, you are going to bump into change in Britain on Radio 4. If you don’t want change in Britain, or you live in a part of Britain where you don’t see that, Radio 4 can be a rude awakening.”

    In a column in The Telegraph last year, Ben Lawrence, the paper’s Arts Editor, laid another, related charge against Radio 4, that in its rush to attract new, younger listeners, it had “abandoned” Baby Boomers for whom the station is “a familiar and reassuring presence”.

    “Well,” he answers with a broad smile, “if you count Baby Boomers as those born between 1945 and 1964, then I am one.” And he insists that his generation “are the solid core of our audience and incredibly important”.

    And, he might add, vital to hold on to, since there is an increasing array of other options for them, with Times Radio’s regular audience of half a million roughly equal to the numbers Today has lost in the past year. Meanwhile, LBC has attracted several disgruntled BBC favourites, including Andrew Marr and Emily Maitlis, and now has a national audience of 2.5 million. Even GB News offers a radio strand alongside its television channel.

    Is there a threat to Radio 4’s survival? “We have a culture where people are straying towards [outlets] that give them the opinions that reflect their own opinion. That for me is an alarming trend.”

    Radio 4, he believes, continues to have an important role to play in standing firm against this drift that sees other broadcasters taking a more relaxed approach to impartiality rules. “I believe profoundly that Radio 4’s job is to help, that it has a civic responsibility to say to people, ‘here is the information you need to the ballot box so you can feel properly informed’. And that is not by telling them all the things they already believe, but also by giving them stuff they don’t agree with, and the context.”

    That for him is why the impartiality rules at the BBC are so precious. “Overall in broadcasting we are seeing people monetise the echo chamber and division, and that is dangerous. If Radio 4 didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it.”

    ***************************************

    Norman Wilson
    12 HRS AGO
    They just don’t get it do they?

    John Mulvany
    12 HRS AGO
    Reply to Norman Wilson
    No, in a metropolitan bubble, where’s the pin ?

    Simon Davies
    12 HRS AGO
    Reply to Norman Wilson – view message
    Nope, even for a BBC employee his utter lack of self awareness is staggering.
    You are a mirror sir, a mirror of a tiny, privileged sub set of Britain.

    Farah Z-H
    12 HRS AGO
    ‘Mirror for Britain’
    Another deluded BBC luvie
    It’s a mirror for the latest edition of the Guardian more like

    Jasper Derbyshire
    12 HRS AGO
    Reply to Farah Z-H – view message
    The BBC certainly doesn’t mirror the attitudes of people where I live – but that’s outside the M25 so I suppose it doesn’t count.

    David Forcey
    9 HRS AGO
    Reply to Jasper Derbyshire
    It doesn’t mirror mine or most of my friends and we live inside the M25!

    1. Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya: ‘People say we’re woke – the truth is we’re a mirror for Britain’

      Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the wokest of them all?

    2. “It was the forest that first drew Bakaya into radio at an early age in
      the family home in south west London where he was born. His father,
      Madan, had been a production manager in Bollywood who moved to Britain
      in the early 1960s to promote Hindi films here, while his mother, Uma,
      was a software developer at IBM, who also gave sitar recitals, exhibited
      her paintings and made pottery.”

      Anyone?

    3. Man’s an eejit. Need to preserve existing audience before spending money to get new listeners to “Sounds”. What crap, frankly.

    5. In mediaeval times the people used to dump their stinking, disease infested effluent into the nearest stream or river. Today it is directed to the nearest BBC or MSM organisation, promoted to high office and showered with gold. We, the taxpayers, are the ones left in the shit!

  11. Good morning, all. Overcast and very soggy.

    Topical.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/93e0c1aedea5762d45c8cb845885b83cd667c2fba32ae1f4a7b4d3a446d55796.png
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    Has pocket-size Sunak been pumping iron?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2578d99f5574d456cfa6a72e633a7e92abd363fb44ffeeb9492fc801e4cf6ec8.png

    1. Perhaps G.G. might be persuaded to visit Palestinian to meet his postal voters.

  12. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0683a9b888caff796566e000a0456285df583951/0_0_8256_5504/master/8256.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=3114ca006d7601ead0a3bf3d5b730c35
    Take a gander … an Egyptian goose keeps an eye on the traffic with her goslings at their Marble Arch home in central London, UK

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b987928daeb4698d96fdde7cd9e914b0de1c422a/0_0_1071_710/master/1071.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=04850dd733f567ae08e17c611339d312
    One of the world’s smallest fish, about as wide as an adult human fingernail, can make a sound as loud as a gunshot, scientists have found. Found in the streams of Myanmar, the fish has the smallest known brain of any vertebrate; its call has been described as equal to an ambulance siren or a jackhammer

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/789bf91393eda888bca7ca5f86bf3a3bb8c2dd34/0_0_2915_1352/master/2915.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=169a450fd89b65f8884248144075d3a7
    In a flap … garden birds squabble around a garden feeder in Aberystwyth, Wales

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b93cdbd796b39e7a630a1216dae70f32e0cb7275/0_0_8256_5504/master/8256.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=1e1d676a03bb4c49dde2dfe893c61ac7
    A fox jumps into the snow as it hunts near Bingöl, Turkey

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6d547e5bb37b4bd8c3c42a4f7f0b914227c5248c/0_0_4000_2666/master/4000.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=1d910e7df1eeffbf62364306bcd864a2
    A polar bear mother takes her cubs out in Baffin Island, Canada, where the weather forecast predicts a high of -21C today

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b522fa4637e983e76279d72297bfb9e8e3248585/0_0_4800_3200/master/4800.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=4563f355199ca905fd83abfbb7db9d4d
    A St Andrew’s cross spider in Assam, India. Not only do their bodies form the diagonal cross that gives them their name, but they also weave a white X into their webs with extra silk. This one has just begun to do so, as you can see at the top right and bottom left

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/faebd3b1002b17786b194eab57d350f526413db8/0_0_2808_1872/master/2808.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=d0650ede12e5dbf3a800c3a43e078ea5
    Four-month-old brown bear cubs play while their mother eats in Finland. Brown bears generally give birth to two to three cubs and they live with their mothers for up to three years

    1. Lovely photos .

      We have attracted a pair of Bullfinches to our feeders .
      All birds are special , but the varieties are diminishing .

      We had green woodpeckers and a lesser spotted woodpecker , not seen for about 4 years .

      Moh says that there were many green woodpeckers on the golf course , he hasn’t seen any for years. Bet it is the dressing used on the grass.

      Silly question , with all this wet weather , were do moles go, are they all drowned underground?

      2. Good morning, Maggiebelle

        Moles are good swimmers and judging from the state of my lawn they seem to be practically immortal.

      4. I’ve never been lucky enough to see the lesser spotted woodpecker but the great spotted one, along with yaffles, are common here and the great spotted comes to the feeder too.

    2. The bullfinches are on the feeder as per usual but the siskins don’t seem to visit us very frequently these last 2 years.

  13. “A notorious transgender prisoner was found dead in their cell a year after a proposed move to a women’s prison was blocked.

    Tiffany Scott, also known as Andrew Burns, had a reputation as one of the UK’s most violent inmates and died on Thursday aged 32, the Scottish Prison Service confirmed.

    Police Scotland said that it had responded to reports of a “32-year-old woman taking unwell” at HMP Grampian in Peterhead on Wednesday morning, who later died in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

    The cause of death is unclear.

    A Police Scotland spokesperson said Scott “was taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where she died. The death is being treated as unexplained and a report will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal”.

    The death of the violent trans inmate who was being held in a male jail comes a year after a planned move to a women’s facility was blocked in the wake of the Isla Bryson scandal.”

    Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.

    4. I note the DT avoids using her him or he in the article and only uses “she” when directly quoting the Police report.

    5. This report still refers to the person as a woman and continues to call the person she.

      Why can they not have a clear rule:

      A transgender woman can only call himself a woman and use female pronouns when he has had all his male genitalia removed;
      A transgender man can only call herself a man when she has had the necessary surgery.

      This is not a very good solution either – at the moment the whole issue is a quagmire of nonsense.

      2. I disagree, Richard.
        A castrated man pretending to be a woman can only ever call themselves eunuchs, though if they have a fine voice in the countertenor range, I will allow castrati.

      4. Actually in female land I would prefer it if all natal men were referred to as “he” even if they have had their bits lopped off and wear a wig and a dress. Because they are NOT women and, importantly, NEVER CAN BE.

        1. And if they need to be referred to as something other than as a man, eunuch and castrato are perfectly adequate.

  15. Think of all the money that Humza Yousef will save by reducing the prison population! I wonder what he will spend it on.

    1. £50,000 smackers per annum – probably more if HE was in some fancy gaol.
      Now winging its way over to Hamas Hardship Fund.

  16. Good morning all.
    0°C and it’s a wet, miserable start to the day.

    Sod all off ERNIE, but the DT got £25. Dr. Daughter’s birthday today so I wonder what she’ll receive.

      1. Morning J,

        I had a dream about visiting Kenya, did you use a travel company / package etc .

        Would it be nicer and safer than South Africa ?

      1. On the Beeb weather last night they said it was the warmest February evvah! Waited till March to snow here.

        1. Unfortunately the BBC forgot to mention that it has been a record breaking cold winter in Alaska and Russia, and

          somewhere in Northern Canada a new world record for cold has happened, at -72.

          2. We had a pretty cold winter too. A few warm days in February was just evening things out!

        2. Lies and statistics. I have found Feb pretty cold overall even though there might have not been so many frosts as usual.

        3. It’s the sorry state that the BBC finds itself in where they will feel the need to announce that every month is the warmest/hottest/boilingest ever. Have to keep the patrons happy.

        4. I can believe that. It’s been very mild, barely a winter at all, although wetter than I can recall for a long time.

    1. It’s a while since she visited us here – but maybe she looks in from time to time.
      Happy birthday Garlands 🎂🥳🎉🎈🎁🥂🍷

    2. Happy Birthday Garlands and of course have 364 Happy Unbirthdays ’til your next one

    3. I usually wait until I see the celebrant on line and then wish them a Happy Birthday, but in this case Happy Birthday, Garlands!
      Hope we see you on here soon.

      1. To remind Nottlers who the birthday girl or birthday boy is I put up the greetings last thing before going to bed the night before the birthday and repeat it as soon as I reach my computer on the day itself.

  20. ‘Morning All

    It would help if the bloody parents would get their noses away from the screen too!!

    Yes this includes my own family!!

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1762893181773885798

    Medley

    Hard drive check needed

    https://twitter.com/stuckgear/status/1763825906601050445?s=20

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1120f335fcedc4a1e8ad72d3775df7c99debd2147b20ea673aba080304692f95.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1d98f216ea001e70fcfce4ed4028f7f5db01af86c3bf56693aa1e150147d7d18.jpg

    We rule now…..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b06ce0d2112d75158ff3b1670160221b1cf997a0abe7c58e208f284f039b2b50.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9730b516b145bfec6ec068f546a2bfb6ff287bed59edfbd2f83c7862fa7a2a73.png

    How it’s going…….

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/98e162fe64e9160b80fb3c5fb116e2083d603d25ce1a2585341d4668d6252689.gif

  21. HomeNewsWorld:-

    Szczecin hit and run: Driver intentionally rammed car into crowd injuring 12, say police

    Twelve people are “severely” injured after the horror attack, reports suggest.

    Unfortunately the BBC forgot to mention this in its news programmes. We wonder why?

  22. Good morning all , 3c here and my goodness we had sleet , hail and rain until the early hours of the morning .

    30 Typhoon jets being replaced by… nothing…. just more migrants of undetermined background , costing £millions .

    Those are Moh’s fears and words and don’t we all agree with him.

    We didn’t vote for all the nonsense , and certainly not for a multi cultural country .

    Don’t we have any rights , none of us are being shielded by the tragedy of the demolition of our values , and the disgusting acts of violence .

    This government is against all of us post war babies who worked hard , by getting through frugality and commonsense .

    Britain is cursed .

        1. I might have missed a post, but I take it you got a 2nd opinion on replacing the boiler!

          1. Morning Kaypea.

            We haven’t replaced the boiler .. it is only ten years old .

            The valve needed replacing, it was stuck , so the chap who the insurance company allocated the job , spent yesterday morning sorting it out .

            Everything works now .

  23. Good day all and the 77th,

    The sky has cleared over McPhee Towers having been raining all night. Must be a sucker’s gap. Wind in the Sou’-Sou’-West and a chilly 2C rising to 5C later. Showers forecast.

    I wonder if the Rochdale by-election was a watershed. It seems to have been a filthy, dirty fight with death threats and intimidation of both candidates and voters being dished out. Galloway’s “this is for Gaza” remark is reprehensible and I am at a loss to understand why he should identify so much with Muslims. It doesn’t say much either for his historical knowledge or his intellectual capacity. Nevertheless he has rhetorical skill and charisma that Richard Tice must envy and this following letter is probably the best of the bunch about him today.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/44935622f23a9ad5986fedba680fc111fc25e88fd7aae9ae9ac2bb8cb1fd8bce.png

    This man must be wishing he had some of Galloway’s skills too. He certainly has no sense of irony. What democracy, Wishy-Washy?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4ac0a653d4a0ad3337cebf3b76d3572e97c8f76ef67c8b5d5d950e697050593b.png

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/03/01/poison-extremism-british-democracy-rishi-sunak/

    1. How long has it taken Richie to realise that ?
      My word these people need a massive kick up their proverbials.

      1. RE, he hasn’t just realised that, he’s a politician with a globalist agenda and he has known the score since his early days. This isn’t a Damascene conversion, it’s a duplicitous politician trying to look like a real Prime Minister by lying and making an attempt to deflect attention from his, and his party’s, ruinous agenda.

        1. Deep down I know that KK, but I just wish something nasty might happen to all of them.

          1. Something nasty happened to David Amess MP but that awful event doesn’t seem to have changed the direction of the Sunack government. Sadly, it will take a mass killing event to get the attention of those useless people in Westminster. Individual events, unless it involves someone thought to be very important will be, like Amess’s demise, swiftly brushed aside and forgotten.

          2. All the attacks on London since 7/7 Borough market the road ramming’s etc etc have made no difference what so ever to the way of thinking and planning of our parliament. They are completely useless.

    2. “Highly compelling, articulate and colourful character”

      There was a fella called Adolf who was a compelling, colourful and articulate speaker. He had millions of passionate supporters, promised them the world . . . I wonder what happened to him?

  24. Morning all 🙂😊
    Only peeped out so far not looking good, 4 degs and rain until after lunch.
    Let’s face the facts George Galloway is a nasty piece of work a well practiced opportunist
    and an expert bandwagoner.
    British politics is in one hell of a dark place and needs an enormous kick up its habitually complacent backside. But apart from a retired general or someone like Vlad, whose going to to it. They’re all only interested in how much they can get out of Parliament, not for what they can put in.

    Must get on, sour dough risen over night, knock it back next and place in shaping basket, leave in warm place for 6 hours. I might join it 😉

  25. He’s Right!! More’s the bloody pity

    DM
    “This imam had lived in France since he was 12. But after he
    called the French flag ‘satanic’, he was arrested and deported back to
    Tunisia within eight hours. He tells the Mail: It would never happen in
    Britain!”

    1. France is signed up to all the same shit we are so how can they do it and we can’t?

      2. Whereas the UK obeyed all EU rules religiously, France only ever observed the rules which suited France, and ignored any diktats which were unacceptable to it.

  26. 384156+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    The long campaign to brand Britain Islamophobic has distorted politics
    A drive to ban criticism of Islam or Muslims is fuelling a rise in extremism and endangers the fabric of British society. It is time to act

    More like,
    The continuous supported actions of the political WEF activists is fuelling a rise in extremism, this hindu chap seems to be blaming the peoples yet the electorate majority
    have returned his ” party” to power time after time with proven treacherous leaders on par or worse than him.

    All the indigenous mass can be accused of is being upset ( as the voting pattern shows NOT in the extreme) with mass foreign paedophilia,
    patriots being decapitated, having to suffer the knowledge that sharia courts are operating within the realm, honour killings are taking place, female genital mutilation an everyday occurrence,mass halal foodstuff has flooded the market. etc,etc, etc,etc & much more.

    IMHO,
    The hindu chappie & colleagues should feel extremely lucky that the indigenous peoples
    do not think it is time yet to rectify this odious situation, as in, regarding time it is not so long back when his, and his WEF /NWO mates heads would be adorning pike starves.

  27. Morning all, biggest win from Ernie yet – over £5k – the Milky Bars are on me

    4. Share it out! Well done, Spikey. That’s two NoTTLers getting a decent cheque in two months.

    7. Same as the DT received last month.
      This month a mere £25 for her and SFA for me.

  29. SIR – While serving in the Royal Navy in the early 1980s, I was
    drafted to Chatham. The only quarter I could be allocated was an
    officer’s, though I was a lowly petty officer.

    A few days after I
    had moved in, there was a knock on the door and a lady told me she had
    come to collect the coffee set, to which my rank did not entitle me.

    A week later she returned to collect the card table for the same reason.

    Liam O’Hara
    Plympton, Devon

    Oh FFS

    1. “Shouldn’t have joined the armed forces if you can’t take a joke.”

  30. SIR – Three signs have sprung up in the lanes near my home, warning of frogs in the road – though I have never seen any –
    between February and March.

    The French have to go on holiday somewhere!

      1. Gosh !

        In that case we’re going to be absolutely infested with frogs this Spring.

    1. I learnt, a few days ago, that when wolf packs are on the move they have the oldest and thus more experienced wolves lead. In the middle are the young, the old and vulnerable, and inexperienced. The wolves in the prime of life bring up the rear because from there they can see the entire pack and thus will immediately see trouble and can advance toward the enemy before the others are attacked. It seems that wolves are wiser than human beings in taking care of their own communities.

  32. I loved this comment on the DT letters column

    John Devon
    43 MIN AGO
    As someone observed elsewhere, if Starmer and Sunak are both cheeks of the same backside what does that make Galloway? The aperture in between?

    2. Loud American in British rural pub: This place is the arsehole of the world!

      Barman: Just passing through, are you Sir?“

    1. We are just below a couple of long driveways , one to a farm / small holding and another bungalow below the farm ,

      The closer driveway leads to 2 bungalows .. all long and private .

      3 of the properties have had leaks in their meters , and the nearest property , 50yards away had to fork out £3,000 + to have the pipe and leak repaired .

      The water meters at this end of the road have a sorry history , hence our reluctance to have a meter , we will be 20 yards from the meter if we have one , end of our own driveway.

      1. Our meter is that distance from the house. Well, it is up to you, of course.

      2. If the meter is leaking it’s the responsibility of the water company not the homeowner.
        If you’ve been paying about £1,000 a year than you could have if you had a meter an had one installed 20 years ago you could by £20,000 better off.
        If you’re committed to overpaying there’s nothing to stop you.

        1. My neighbour has a water meter and she pays less than half what i do. I wonder if i can get a rebate.

          1. As a rule of thumb MOH works out our water bill as £5- per person per month.

            If you’re paying more than that you definitely need a meter.

          3. Just in case you ever visit i won’t tell Commander Kristiansen RN what you said. She knows how to deal with naughty boys !

  34. Well – has Fishi’s little foot-stamping tirade stopped the marchers today?

    Just asking

  36. Re the sprout thread on the DT.

    My late loved Grandpa used to refuse the cooked sprouts with his main meal .

    If we had roast beef , the roast pudding would be served first , with delicious juices from the roast beef , usually rib .

    Then on the same plate , the roast meat and vegetables and roast potatoes .

    Grandpa would eat the sprouts as a third course , never with main meal .. He would call it Après .. and his cooked sprouts would be cut up , sprinkled with black pepper and vinegar .

    We would wait patiently for him to finish them , because we were longing for our pudding , Apple Charlotte or something similar .

  39. Most of the roads in Brittany now have obstructions such as bumps and chicanes and more and more are reduced in width to have cycle lanes. All these are designed to reduce the speed of cars.

    When we complain about the multitude of potholes in the lanes leading to our house the Mayor will probably tell us that potholes are being left in place deliberately as they provide a cheaper way of slowing down traffic than the other measures which are costly to install.

    I wonder if it is for the same reason that British roads are awash with potholes that the PTB refuse to repair.

    1. When does slower traffic start to have an economic impact that’s measurable?
      Why would anyone manufacture goods in a location where transport to market is difficult and slow?

      1. But it’s all part of the WEF plan to clear away existing businesses so that we can have uncluttered new foundations and build back better.

    2. I’ve thought for a long time that it’s all deliberate. After all, they want us to stop driving altogether.

    3. The other day I mentioned that the Conservative run Essex County Council are managing the decline of the county’s roads and pavements. Yesterday I found irrefutable evidence of that and that Suffolk County Council appear to be doing the same. I was to meet my chum from our school days, we met in 1960, for lunch at a delightful thatched pub, The Half Moon, situated in Belchamp St Paul, a small village on the Essex Suffolk border.

      What a nightmare journey, the torrential rain causing large areas of standing water, which in some instances hid potholes, on both the main road, the A134, and the country lanes from Long Melford to the pub. My chum, travelling from Bury St Edmunds was forced by flooded roads to take a circuitous route in to Essex before he found a clear route to the pub.

      The day was saved by the excellent beer, Viking, a golden citrus brew, two other real ales from small breweries were available, and the well prepared and tasty food.

      A major problem adding to the pothole dangers is the lack of maintenance of the ditches and run-offs for the rainwater. This problem is not only affecting country lanes but main roads, including the roads within my home town.

      My concern is that this situation is going to get worse and will not be addressed by those who have the authority, but not the will, to do so. Making driving more difficult, uncomfortable and dangerous is part of the agenda, I fear.

      1. My neck of the woods. The Stour impassable in Wixoe, Stoke by Clare, Clare Priory and flooding in Cavendish. Potholes and collapsed verges are everywhere.

        1. My chum was looking at a route back to BStE and the barmaid insisted that heading to Clare, on the road just opposite the pub would be his best option: fewer potholes and less flood water to contend with. What a state we’re in when we have to navigate away from roads with potholes.

  40. Either the BBC is in need of new editors or something happened in SW1 that we haven’t been told about. From R4’s 9am news headlines:

    The Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer has said the prime minister was right to call for unity in his speech condemning extremism in Downing Street last night.

    1. That’s certainly more prescient than Orwell. Almost spot on with what we are dealing with now. It struck me the other day that the way we are heading, free speech will be curtailed to a certain degree but largely remain intact so that we lesser mortals can use it to out hearts content. It will give the illusion that we are still free, more or less, to say what we please and thus still autonomous human beings. Whilst the “..highly trained elite of soldiers, policeman , thought manufacturers and mind manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.” But, like the inhabitants of Oz, we will largely be oblivious to the wizard behind the curtain. Perhaps we are already there and haven’t cottoned on yet?

      1. As long as we only tut and moan quietly among ourselves we can be comfortably ignored,the slightest whiff of a “call to action” and a bloody great boot will come down on us

        See two years chokey for “It’s all right to be White” stickers for more details……….

        https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-outraged-jailed-far-right-stickers

        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
        Two very different covers of the story
        (Quelle surprise)
        Edit
        More Info
        https://twitter.com/AmalekMax/status/1763873647792439438?s=20

      2. We read Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World with Christo and Henry as we sailed around the Med in Mianda.

        It is sad that young people today seem to read far less than in the past. Even those doing “A” level English seem to have read little beyond their set books.

      3. Free speech will be fine until our comments are deemed as far right and censored by the online safety law. I was watching an episode of Steptoe & Son, the usual warning was made about content but the word poof was bleeped out. Given that American films regularly string F words together from start to finish, the S&S censoring was a bit rich.

      4. I understood that is because Julian Huxley was involved in movements that were aiming for exactly this nightmare, and Aldous Huxley saw their plans. I thought Brave New World was fiction, but he was trying to warn us.
        It’s fairly dispiriting to realise how well they have succeeded up til now.

  43. My wife gets a bit annoyed when people sing Neil Diamond’s best known song at her. Urged on by Christo and Henry I once sang it on karaoke evening in the Marmaris marina bar! My sweet wife was rather less sweet than is her wont!

    Another Neil Diamond song –

    https://www.google.com/search?q=Neil+Diamon+and+Shirley+Bassey&oq=Neil+Diamon+and+Shirley+Bassey&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQABgNGIAEMgkIAhAAGA0YgAQyCQgDEAAYDRiABDIICAQQABgWGB4yDAgFEAAYChgPGBYYHtIBCTEwNDEzajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:eaf84222,vid:i4nYl8sQSd8,st:0

      1. No fellow could ignore,
        The little girl next door,
        She sure looked sweet in her first evening gown.
        Now there’s a charge for what she used to give for free
        In my home town!

        [Tom Lehrer]

  45. I don’t want to brag but . . .
    Wordle 987 2/6

    🟨🟩⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. I cannot brag

      Wordle 987 4/6

      ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
      ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩
      ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. If you’re labelled, you don’t exist. Your individual thoughts, feelings, dreams, ideals, values don’t exist. Labelling allows the Left to erase you and replace you with their own identity of you. Folk don’t understand how insidous this all is.

      If the Left have to deal with you, as an individual they can’t. Thus they label. The label dehumanises. It stops you, being you. They, of course, love labels – because they choose all the virtuous ones that sound good – progressive (when they’re backward), liberal (when they’re authoritarian). But because they chose the labels these are repeated by their favoured agents – the Luvvie press.

      Just look at the branding of ‘far right’. All evil is left wing. All of it. Yet the ‘far right’ has to be proscribed because reality exposes the truth. Te Left desperately want Hitler described as ‘far right’ yet he was a socialist fascist. Their world view of themselves cannot tolerate that fact.

    1. My Grandma used to take the DM – she lived with us when I was five or six. That’s when I met Trog.

      1. My mother was the Baby in her family.

        She had three sisters: Wayway, was the eldest who was married to a doctor in Falmouth. The second sister, Kitty Mum and the third, Aunt Bill, and her husband lived with my mother, my father, my two sisters and me in my mother’s family home in St Mawes when we came back from Africa.

        Kitty Mum was exceptionally beautiful and according to my mother had 17 different proposals of marriage and turned them all down; Aunt Bill and her husband Uncle Rob were not respectable and consequently much loved by the younger members of the family – after failing to make any money in the Far East rubber business Aunt Bill and Uncle Rob ran a seedy club in Soho.

        Aunt Bill took the Daily Mail and that is how I first came across Flook.

        The Thatched House in St Mawes with its uninterrupted view of the sea was a very good place to have spent my childhood when I was not away in boarding schools.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/71d455c335c60812e314b31de63b787ee5e53888a7b40834aae4b43ec28f3c8b.png

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e4ea0c9e36c722abab101aacbe8428e4e47ffe44fb4fd2029f4e119ca69f5ad.png .

      2. My mother was the Baby in her family.

        She had three sisters: Wayway, was the eldest who was married to a doctor in Falmouth. The second sister, Kitty Mum and the third, Aunt Bill, and her husband lived with my mother, my father, my two sisters and me in my mother’s family home in St Mawes when we came back from Africa.

        Kitty Mum was exceptionally beautiful and according to my mother had 17 different proposals of marriage and turned them all down; Aunt Bill and her husband Uncle Rob were not respectable and consequently much loved by the younger members of the family – after failing to make any money in the Far East rubber business Aunt Bill and Uncle Rob ran a seedy club in Soho.

        Aunt Bill took the Daily Mail and that is how I first came across Flook.

        The Thatched House in St Mawes with its uninterrupted view of the sea was a very good place to have spent my childhood when I was not away in boarding schools.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/71d455c335c60812e314b31de63b787ee5e53888a7b40834aae4b43ec28f3c8b.png

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e4ea0c9e36c722abab101aacbe8428e4e47ffe44fb4fd2029f4e119ca69f5ad.png .

  49. Q: It’s Saturday again, and another march for Palestine/Gaza in London. Do you have any particular wish or hope?

    A: Yes, I have. I hope it pisses down all day in London, preferably backed by a stiff wind from the East.

    2. Acid rain from London’s polluted streets. The acid should clear away the human effluent.

      Frankly, if they’re so desperately for Gaza then they should be moved there.

  50. S.S Pacific.
    .
    Complement:
    35 (34 dead and 1 survivor).
    9,000 tons of steel scrap.

    At 00.46 hours on 2nd March 1941 the unescorted Pacific (Master Alan Francis King) was hit on the port side in the engine room by one torpedo from U-95 (Gerd Schreiber) while steaming at 8.5 knots about 105 miles north of Rockall and sank by the stern in less than 90 seconds. The ship had been in station #33 of convoy HX-109, but became a straggler after the steering gear broke down in heavy weather. The U-boat had spotted the vessel about two hours earlier and missed with a first torpedo at 00.44 hours. The only survivor later reported that the ship sank so rapidly that none of the lifeboats could be launched and he just found himself pulled down by the suction of the sinking ship. He managed to reach the surface, clung to a hatch cover for about an hour until swimming to a raft that had floated free. The sinking was observed by the nearby Icelandic fishing trawler Dora, which had been spotted by U-95 shortly before Pacific was sighted and ignored due to the small size of the vessel. A lifeboat launched by the trawler picked up one crew member, who informed them that he had seen another survivor while waiting for rescue, but nobody else was found during an extensive search of the area. The master, 32 crew members and one gunner (the ship was armed with one machine gun) were lost. The survivor was landed at Fleetwood on 5th March.

    Type VIIC U-Boat U-95 was sunk on 28th November 1941 in the Mediterranean Sea south-west of Almeria by a torpedo from the Dutch submarine HrMs O 21. 35 dead and 12 survivors.

    https://uboat.net/media/allies/merchants/br/pacific.jpg

    1. I do wonder how these lone survivors cope mentally in their later lives. Just KBO I suppose.

  51. What price those ‘record’ temperatures now? And it’s worse than giving credence to readings taken at Heathrow and RAF Coningsby. They fret over a 0.5C degree rise but their thermometers may be up to 5.0C in error!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/36822e7de76ca753f98f1c4f786feddbfa7ea61a930f6e96b1cfab3f62ccb60d.png

    https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/01/exclusive-a-third-of-u-k-met-office-temperature-stations-may-be-wrong-by-up-to-5c-foi-reveals/

    1. When we are told the temperature as the default from the one beside Heathrow airport, yes, they are. But don’t let that bother the Met office.

  52. Junior’s tenth, Warqueen’s 43. Or is it 45? I can’t remember. I should.

    Difficult as oven still not operable. Even harder as warqueen isn’t living here (she came back briefly then pootled off again). She asked Junior if he wanted to go with her and his Godparent winced in the background. Cue Junior saying ‘But then Daddy would be all on his own.’ Bless the little fellow but I can see his nails being blue

    1. Children are hardy. Don’t you remember having no heating growing up? Blankets and hot water bottles are your friend. I used to go to bed fully clothed when I was younger.

    1. Definitely worth watching. The plight of the Arab countries described is exactly that which is being promoted in the UK. Import people with different religions and political objectives and it must certainly lead to civil war and tens of thousands, if not millions of deaths of the indigenous folk. There are more than four million potential supporters of Hamas and similar organisations in the UK. The writing is on the wall . . . and it isn’t in vernacular English.

    1. Odin, because this country has been flooded with pollution directly into her clear rivers.

      1. 👍. But – the beliefs, attitude and behaviour of the Muslims is now generating a growing and perfectly rational dislike and distrust of Islam among the general population. Not before time.

    2. I suppose if Britain was truly Islamophobic all Muslims in Britain would be expelled from the country. The fact that the Muslims decided to come here in the first place and stay here suggests that Britain is less Islamophobic than the places from which they came.

      They say that many Jews would like to get out of Britain and go to Israel because of anti-Semitism. I have yet to hear of any Muslims who would like to get out of the UK and settle permanently in the Middle East because of Islamophobia.

    1. Considering the horrific cost of R&D, investing in them further is nigh pointless.

      Late, cataclysmically overbudget, utterly unsuited to modern warfare. Typical MoD project.

      The time when we had a big navy, arym and air force is long gone. Our new enemy is not a nation state. We are not deploying for mass combat – can you imagine if we were? How long the Commons would take to hand over the country?

      We need a far more flexible combat deployment of combined arms that uses much newer but man and vehicle portable weaponry. A squad of twenty can carry portable air defence systems and redeploy far more quickly than a lumbering vehicle.

      I’m just tired of the state fighting the last war, not the next one- and doing an appalling job of both.

      1. Hmmm.

        R&D isn’t necessary. They have only to be brought up to Tranche 2/3 FGR4 standard.

        Four years late in squadron service. What defence project is ever on or under budget?

        True, we don’t have an Empire to defend and we have no territorial ambitions. However, the age of globalism may be coming to an end, the EU will likely disiintegrate, and the nation states will endure. We do need to have enough to defend our vital interests abroad as well as defend the homeland (and the Falkland Islands) at the same time. We don’t in any of the three services.

        Yes, we need to be flexible. But, how has the man- and-vehicle-portable warfare worked out in Ukraine? It’s not going well for them in the face of the Russian armour and air power now brought to bear, is it? The Americans are buying the latest version of the Boeing F15 for the USAF. That jet was designed by McDonnell-Douglas in the 1960s and has been around in service since 1977.

        The best-laid plans rarely survive the first contact with the enemy .

    2. This does at least illustrate the truth of the Russian Threat. There isn’t one!

    4. IIRC they were about to scrap the Vulcans then hastily modified them when the Falklands conflict started, consequently the Black Buck raids ensured the Argies kept most of their combat aircraft back to defend their own country

  58. Furious veterans blast ‘absolutely dreadful’ Royal
    British Legion for refusing to support funeral of soldier, 57, who had
    no family as friends claim they had ‘door slammed in our face’

    Roger Southern was found deceased in his home on February 2

    He had served as an armourer in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers

    The Staffordshire Regiment Association has had to raise money for his funeral

    For confidential support, call Samaritans on 116 123, visit samaritans.org or visit https://www.thecalmzone.net/get-support

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13145067/Furious-veterans-blast-Royal-British-Legion-refusing-support-funeral-soldier-no-family.html

    Bastards.

    1. …To sound the alarm. It will do no such thing. The state refuses to acknowledge there’s a problem with the pollution of this country because much of the state is infested. The solution is very simple but will never be countenanced. If you’re foreign, you don’t get a penny in welfare. That would see most of East London emptied at a stroke.

    1. I’ve seen Mongo driven off by a kitten. Something a twentieth of his body weight, a fraction of his size and if it’s sat in his bed he’ll look forlorn and creep – as much as a bear can creep – past.

    1. Hello Johnathan,
      OT, but have you ever grown poinsettias? The ones in the shops die so quickly at home, but I would like to keep one alive.

      1. Hi BB2. Simple. Lots of sun and keep on the dry side. In the spring they start to go dormant so decrease water until almost completely dry then keep in a cool place. In May cut back to 4 inches. You must do that otherwise you will end up with a tall very ugly straggly plant with small flowers (Bracts actually). Put in a new pot a bit bigger than the last one and add a slow release fertilizer, any potting soil will do. Water the plant very well and place back where there is lots of sun. If it’s warm enough you can keep them outside . In June pinch back stems to around one inch. In August cut back each stem so you have 3 or 4 leaves on each. Now you have to do the same trick that you do with Christmas cacti. You need to give them 12 hours of darkness and 12 hours of sun. Then put them back in the sun, windowsill at this point, not outside and treat them as you would when you buy them from the store.

        In Africa, in Libya. They were one of the few plants that grew. In the summer they would vanish with the intense heat. When the rains came and it started to deluge, then they would pop up again. So that sort of climate gives you a clue about what they prefer.

        Good Luck. Will be curious to know how you do.

        1. Thank you. I kept a Christmas one in a warm room next to the window (we don’t have central heating), and it looks pretty dead at the moment. It obviously had a great shock to the system when it was given to us, as it did nothing but shed leaves from then onwards. But I’ll try your suggestions and see whether it comes back to life.

        1. So sorry Bill to tell you unspeakable things .

          You and your dearly beloved have patience and brilliant mastery of the little bits .

      4. If I remember correctly, Islam claims that it wasn’t Jesus who died on the cross – it was a substitute.

    3. There once was a bishop fom Salisbury
      Whose manners were quite halisbury-scalisbury
      He roamed around Hampshire
      Without any pampshire
      Announcing he just wouldn’t walisbury.

      1. My father used to quote that.
        I learnt to translate it: Olde English place names and a geography lesson in one fell swoop.

        There was a vicar from Sarum,
        Whose manners were quite harum scarum.
        He would run about Hants
        Without any pants,
        Till the Rural Dean told him to wear’em.

    4. I once went to the vestry at Salisbury to borrow some clothing. The woman in charge thought I wanted it for a play (I was a member of a local amateur dramatics club). She gave me the former archbishops robes. She said ” It makes a change, they usually want it for a Vicars and Tarts Night, – of course I refuse”. . . I kept my mouth shut!

    1. Spoon and pusher. Still got the pair I was given as a baby – though I tend not to use them at every meal…

      2. Me too, Uncle Bill! Mine are Lindisfarne silver! People do stare at me a bit!

      3. I wanted a child’s plastic pelican bib with a turned up trough to catch loose chewings that can be enjoyed later rather than lost. Caroline said such a thing would be most undignified for a man of my mature years and so she made me a cloth bib instead but it does not have a reclamation trough to recapture the tasty bits that might have escaped.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/72d20aad62514f8d293b986f79e9be4fd3ab215026fd1b3cd0e081c0bd79bacb.png

  66. I gather that our towns and cities are beset by the ghastly slammer “marchers” yet again.

    Just shows how inept Fishi is. His appeal for “tolerance” and “enough is enough” doesn’t work with fanatics. Still, the perlice will, natch, respond to his begging and arrest thousands……(sarc)

        1. And that petrol bombing Tommy Robinson who is banned inside the M25 under police bail conditions. I expect he has a long throw.

  67. Grow up and bug off, Ashworth

    Lee Anderson applauded by Tory party faithful at fundraising dinner

    Local MP says welcome for former deputy chairman shows the ‘high regard’ in which he is held

    Will Hazell, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
    2 March 2024 • 1:07pm

    A Conservative MP has said that Lee Anderson is “always welcome” in his constituency after he appeared with Liz Truss at a Tory fundraising dinner, despite having the whip removed.

    Brendan Clarke-Smith, the MP for Bassetlaw, said that the ovation received by Mr Anderson at the event showed the “high regard he is held in by the party faithful”.

    Mr Anderson told The Telegraph he was “overwhelmed by the Bassetlaw members who applauded me as I entered the venue,” adding: “After a difficult week that was the perfect tonic.”

    But Labour said that his appearance at the dinner “beggars belief” and he should be banned from Tory fundraising.

    Khan controversy
    Mr Anderson was suspended from the Conservative Party last month after he refused to apologise for claiming that Islamists had “got control” of Sadiq Khan.

    The Labour Mayor of London said that the comments were “anti-Muslim and Islamophobic”.

    On Friday night, Ms Truss spoke at the dinner in Bassetlaw, which was aimed at raising money for Mr Clarke-Smith’s re-election campaign in the Nottinghamshire constituency.

    Mr Anderson made a surprise appearance, with the Daily Express reporting that he received a standing ovation from members and shared a hug with Ms Truss.

    Conservative divisions
    His appearance illustrates Tory divisions over how the former deputy chairman of the party should be treated.

    While a number of Tory MPs condemned his remarks, Mr Anderson has received support from other backbenchers, with some calling for the whip to be restored.

    It also comes amid speculation that he could choose to defect to Reform UK, with Mr Anderson meeting with Reform leader Richard Tice after he was suspended.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2024/03/02/TELEMMGLPICT000368453518_17093843700800_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqibm6wsJdlw8v7nhODwtYPmbQfod64oN5gbs_LrI25-c.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Mr Clarke-Smith is raising funds for his re-election campaign CREDIT: PHIL ROBINSON / ALAMY
    Mr Clarke-Smith told The Telegraph: “Having Liz Truss come to speak at our association was a huge coup for us and it gave us all plenty to think about in terms of how we set a Conservative agenda and tackle the obstacles that stand between us in implementing this.

    “Lee is always welcome in Bassetlaw and it was great of him to come along and support our fundraising efforts for the general election. The reaction he got shows exactly how high regard he is held in by the party faithful.”

    Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s shadow paymaster general, said: “It beggars belief that, far from being suspended from the Tories as Rishi Sunak told us, here he is: Lee Anderson, parading around the North Notts rubber chicken circuit with none other than Liz Truss.

    “Given Rishi Sunak deems Mr Anderson as unfit to be a Tory MP, he now needs to bar him from fundraising for the Tory Party.

    “Unless he takes action, Rishi Sunak will again be exposed as weaker than ever, and out of control of his chaotic, divided party.”

    The Conservative Party was contacted for comment.

    ****************************************

    Guy Farrish
    1 HR AGO
    Surely it’s beginning to dawn on Rishi he [when will DT get an algorithm that recognises this is not a sexual reference?] messed this up big time? Let Anderson back in and ask Khan to explain his lack of control of policing hate marches.

    Amanda Ingram
    1 HR AGO
    “Mr Anderson was suspended from the Conservative Party last month after he refused to apologise for claiming that Islamists had “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
    The Labour Mayor of London said that the comments were “anti-Muslim and Islamophobic”.”
    Why is it assumed Sadiq Khan is NOT under the control of Muslims/Islamists? Has anyone looked into these allegations seriously? As opposed to the immediate knee jerk denial, followed by the prompt disparagement and sacking of Lee Anderson?

    1. Paula Summers
      1 HR AGO
      Lee is a dreadful chap, being unkind about that nice Mr Khan.. hold on wasn’t it Khan as a lawyer who represented the radical ‘Nation of Islam’ and its leader Louis Farrakhan; worked on the defence of Al-Queada operative Zacarias Moussaoui; visited whilst in jail terror charged Babar Ahmad found guilty of providing material support to the Taliban (apparently they’d been friends since they were kids); wrote about how to use human rights laws against the police; since mayor has presided over an increase in gun crime, robbery, rape, knife crime and burglary.

    2. Has Sadiq Khan done anything to stop the repulsive outpouring of anti-Semitism on the Streets of London? Has he instructed the police to crack down firmly on anti-Jewish and anti-Israel shouts, slogans and menaces?

      The answer to these questions might give us an indication as to whether or not he is controlled by Islam.

  68. This is rather frightening…
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/01/mob-rule-rishi-sunak-sarah-everard-failed-state/
    Britain is fast becoming a failed state. Faith in the system is beginning to collapse
    From migration to crime, the authorities appear to have given up.

    Rishi Sunak’s warning earlier week of a “growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule” – a theme he returned to this afternoon – is a disturbing and damning indictment of a modern-day Britain that many consider to be “broken”. Ochlocracy or “mob rule” is something we associate with the Gordon Riots or Salem Witch Trials – not life in the UK in 2024.

    The mere notion of the Prime Minister having to tell the police that they should be better protecting the public from what he described as a “pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour… intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job” marks a new low for a nation with a proud tradition as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

    Should he really need to issue a reminder that protecting the “values that we all hold dear” is not only “fundamental to our democratic system” but also “vital for maintaining public confidence in the police”?

    If the mob is ruling, then of course it is for the Prime Minister to do something about it, and we are promised concrete action soon. But sadly the authority of the state is collapsing wherever we look.

    Crime appears to be out of control, with videos circulating almost daily of machete-wielding thugs trying to carve each other to pieces while a bewildered public helplessly looks on. In the old days, anti-social youths used to be given a clip around the ear. Now people are scared of even approaching them for fear of being attacked. The other week, we had reports of a man threatening a bus full of passengers in south London with what was alleged to be acid – as if carrying around corrosive substances has now become a new norm.

    Thieves have effectively been given a licence to shoplift goods up to the value of £200, while we have seen an increase in the number of unsolved crimes – now at around 6,000 per day according to the Home Office’s own figures. The odds clearly seem to be stacked in favour of the criminals.

    If it wasn’t bad enough that law-abiding citizens have to put up with the disruption caused by the virtue-signalling extremists of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, they have been expected to sit back and watch unruly protesters taking to the streets of our capital to call for “jihad” and projecting the anti-Semitic slogan “from the river to the sea” on to Big Ben, one of our most iconic national monuments.

    Such is the level of influence exerted by these vocal minorities – be they Islamists, eco-fanatics, criminal gangs, or far-Right thugs – that the majority is left either massively inconvenienced or fearful in their own neighbourhoods. Little wonder, then, that faith in the police is at an all time low, exacerbated by the Sarah Everard scandal, which has caused officers to be viewed with even more suspicion than they were already.

    Our porous borders are another example of the authority of the state being completely undermined. The revelations of whistleblower David Neal – who has warned of shocking migration system failings, including passport checkpoints left unmanned – are all the more extraordinary given the nonchalance with which the Home Office appears to have allowed complete scandals to fester without doing anything about it.

    We now learn that a flagship humanitarian scheme set up to help Afghans fleeing the Taliban was opened to “individuals who had never been to Afghanistan”; that persistent problems with those pesky passport e-gates mean “protection of the border is neither effective nor efficient”; that Border Force X-ray equipment is failing to detect clandestine migrants hidden in lorries; that British airports have a “lack of anti-smuggling capability”; that Customs channels were repeatedly left unnamed; and that immigration officers conducting raids are relying on Google Maps.

    Amid all this bungling, we also discovered this week that the number of foreign workers handed permission to come to Britain by the Home Office surged to a record high of 616,000 last year – a 46 per cent increase on the year before. Having promised, in its 2019 manifesto, to introduce “an Australian-style points-based system to control immigration”, the Conservative Party is doing the exact opposite of what people voted for, destroying trust in the state to deliver on its promises.

    Not only is legal migration at a record high but the boats haven’t been stopped and no one has been deported to Rwanda despite the deal being set to cost the taxpayer £500 million by 2026. The phrase: “You had one job” springs to mind.
    Defence – or more accurately, our lack of it – also highlights the extent to which the state is giving up on even its most basic duties. The British Army is the smallest it has been since the Napoleonic Wars. The statistics show that, if it continues to lose troops at the current rate, the number of regular soldiers will fall to 67,741 by 2026, an extraordinary decline of 40 per cent since 2010.

    We now learn that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is minded not to increase defence spending, despite Dutch admiral Rob Bauer, chair of Nato’s military committee, warning that the alliance could be at war with Russia within 20 years.
    Who could possibly disagree with General Lord Dannatt, the former chief of the general staff, when he says: “The woeful state of our Armed Forces in the mid-1930s failed to deter Hitler or prevent the Second World War and the Holocaust. There is a serious danger of history repeating itself”?

    With Britain giving every appearance of becoming a failed state, is it any wonder that people are giving up any sort of responsibility, even for themselves and their families? School absence is at crisis levels and severe absence is at record levels. Worklessness is becoming an epidemic, with people in their 20s more likely to claim they are too ill to work than those in their 30s and 40s, according to analysis of Office for National Statistic (ONS) data by the Resolution Foundation and Health Foundation think tanks.

    This is particularly disturbing when you consider that we are going to become increasingly reliant on this younger generation to pull its weight, as the number of retirees continues to grow and will put added strain on our already stretched NHS (waiting list approaching eight million).

    The number of people not seeking employment because of a health condition is now 2.6 million, up by half a million or almost 25 per cent since the pandemic. While there is no doubt that some represented in these figures are indeed unfit to work – there appears to be a growing number of people who are able to work but choose not to. The contract between the state and the people has been broken, possibly beyond all repair.

    1. Our country has been subjected to organised treason instigated and furthered by the very people we pay to look after it.
      Who could possibly disagree with General Lord Dannatt, the former chief of the general staff,
      Lord Dannatt hasn’t been seen on TV since he pulled up a reporter for blaming Vlad for the trouble in Ukraine.

      2. Can’t call them Brownies, that’s racist you know.

        Girl Scouts (not guided) were out selling cookies at the supermarket last night, that must be a far right plot to increase obesity.

        As part of the far right plot, the bar in the supermarket was serving a barrel aged dark beer that claimed a mighty 14.6% alcohol content. The strength was its strong point.

    2. Essentially, he has deemed any patriots and supporters of British values to be far-right and equated them to terrorist supporting groups. Not sure that Fishy quite has the measure of what it is to be British yet.

  70. We have just witnessed the most beautiful double rainbow in the northern sky.
    I can’t post a photo because my PC no longer accepts any connection from my Mobile phone. !!!???
    I’ve been wadding through family tree stuff all day earliest reference 1748……..it’s mind blowing.
    I might have mentioned previously on my first visit to our local ‘Men’s Shed’ I was chatting to a guy and I mentioned Scarborough and we have links.
    I believe his grand mother was the younger sister of my Grandfather. He mentioned a name out of the blue and I remembered seeing the name on the lists.
    I’ll see him next Wednesday at a get together lunch.

    1. 1748? As recent as that…. On both sides of my family keen searchers have gone back to the mid 1600s.

  71. We have just witnessed the most beautiful double rainbow in the northern sky.
    I can’t post a photo because my PC no longer accepts any connection from my Mobile phone. !!!???
    I’ve been wadding through family tree stuff all day earliest reference 1748……..it’s mind blowing.
    I might have mentioned previously on my first visit to our local ‘Men’s Shed’ I was chatting to a guy and I mentioned Scarborough and we have links.
    I believe his grand mother was the younger sister of my Grandfather. He mentioned a name out of the blue and I remembered seeing the name on the lists.
    I’ll see him next Wednesday at a get together lunch.

  72. This afternoon;
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3893b23524785e63ea5d916290adfbdcb1278eca28a3c421be697b907d722460.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a45e1bac6ef9a88e965798ef0a1aaeaf40c9392a3e012e4c6d6458ec70f3bc66.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f6efd59cf001c148b5256050e609e877dfce1d48f048093413a3c5785fd6ca41.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/25610e540b7508677686025ac380f25d8e37ba0d296f51d74a8438aec2cba93e.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2a8b9df2a3854939f6a05a6e970a25f5b781aa9f66097fd2e0b8dc9c6dfa88b2.jpg

      1. I texted ‘white rabbits’ to our younger son yesterday morning about 8.00 am. I received a reply 15 minutes later ‘Are you ok? I don’t understand. Let me know you are all right. X’

        11.00 am I opened the door to the weekly supermarket delivery. March was roaring down the path like a lion, blustery and rainy, the shrubs and branches being pulled this way and that, and cold – oh so cold – but with a brittle, grey brightness that said it certainly was not February any longer with its fill-dyke nonsense. This was a March I remembered from childhood. In like a lion, hopefully out like a lamb.

    3. I’ve planted a load of daffodil and tulip bulbs along part of the verge going down towards Cromford and was chuffed to see two daffodils in full blossom for St. David’s Day yesterday.
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a7aa35fdc9bc0c9a19eec9c42c2f58f365b72811d4ba5afdb74905441fe44ef4.jpg

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e2882369a7dabc93860f4d7c11daf222824a9da6efc9bf1916fa62c2077c6b4c.jpg
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c69612d6b04767adc3c63b1103f06a15bf6b4cef2d15c831bd6378575983c1b4.jpg

    5. Our daffodils are late daffodils so I posted a part of one of Wordsworth’s sonnets yesterday which had nothing to do with daffodils.

    1. So if you re-post or even uptick someone else’s post, you are as equally culpable as the original poster. Gulp.

  74. A Metropolitan Birdie Three!

    Wordle 987 3/6
    ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜⬜🟩🟨
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Par four. By a process of elimination, not positive choices.

      Wordle 987 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
      ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
      ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Me too.

      Wordle 987 3/6

      ⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜
      ⬜🟨🟨🟩🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    3. I was distracted by the possibility of ‘organ’, which was incorrect.

      Wordle 987 4/6

      ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
      🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Sadly I was unable to her the words. Tune didn’t sound like the Horst Wessel song…!!

    3. What a horrible noise. Where is the rapping, auto-tuning, sampling, synth percussion and menacing posse of ghetto dudes?

  78. “They seek them here, They seek them there, Those Lefties seek them everywhere. Are they in heaven? —Are they in hell? Where do those demmed, elusive Far Right dwell ?”

    2. The belching out of ash and dust from the Cumbre Vieja a few miles to the south in 2021 couldn’t have helped its chances of sighting the Far Right.

  83. I note that despite Fishi’s pathetic plea for the Muslipolitan Perlice to “act” – they stood by and watched slammers singing their vile songs in Parliament Square this afternoon.

    What now, O Hindoo Chief? Send a stiff note? Pop into a mosque and ask for help??

  84. I note that despite Fishi’s pathetic plea for the Muslipolitan Perlice to “act” – they stood by and watched slammers singing their vile songs in Parliament Square this afternoon.

    What now, O Hindoo Chief? Send a stiff note? Pop into a mosque and ask for help??

  85. That’s me gone fr today. A chilly and rainy day. Managed a mile walk in the brief period of sunshine. Not gardening weather. The ground is completely sodden.

    Have a spiffing evening planning your far-right march to church tomorrow.

    A demain. Prolly.

      1. I must becoming more cynical in my older years…that was my first thought also!

          1. I can believe it, I have certainly seen wonderful acts by bikers, I just thought it looked terribly staged, and why would a fragile lady with a walking stick, try to cross such a busy road, unaided?

          2. Monster !

            We used to laugh at the part time bikers. One i knew used to have a can of Pledge and dusters in his saddle bag.

  87. – Could it be that Rishi is upset that the swift transfer of government within the Westminster Uniparty has been jeopardised by George Galloway’s big win in Rochdale?
    And that the WEF insisted that he make an emergency announcement on Friday?

    2. I’m sure this isn’t recent, Belle. I see they have a Facebook page, but I don’t know about Twitter. Appears to be a very happy school, I can’t think why.

      1. You’re right. It’s not recent. A video was posted on YouTube in July 2018.

  89. Political correctness has suppressed debate on migration we must have
    new
    Fifty years after Enoch Powell and Jonathan Miller debated migration, solutions are as far away as ever
    Matthew Syed
    Saturday March 02 2024, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times     https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/to-beat-extremism-we-must-remove-the-barriers-that-block-integration-spdwqvg3s

    There’s a video circulating on social media involving a debate between two of the most articulate Englishmen of the past half century. Jonathan Miller performed for Beyond the Fringe as a young man and would go on to become one of our nation’s few polymaths: physician, philosopher, director of operas and presenter of a wonderful series on atheism for the BBC, which gripped me and my mum when it came out in 2004.

    Enoch Powell, more infamous these days, was a right-wing Conservative who held ministerial office in the Macmillan government but left the party after his “rivers of blood” speech in 1968. Powell — a prophet to some, a demagogue to others — warned that rapid immigration from what he called “alien societies” could unravel British social fabric and, in time, lead to civil conflict.

    The man interviewing (perhaps observing would be a better word) these two men was Dick Cavett, a softly spoken American chat show host whose own life is fascinating in its own way, but I digress. What was at stake in their conversation from the vantage point of 1971 was the future of Britain, perhaps the future of the West itself. With people on the move, with those from former colonies and beyond wishing to travel to richer nations, what would happen to western civilisation?

    It feels like a poignant moment to revisit the Powell-Miller debate: one that, frankly, never went away even if political correctness suppressed it for far too long. Last week, it took on particular urgency when the prime minister — the Hindu son of Indian-descent immigrants — used the stage of Downing Street to warn against national disunity. Rishi Sunak painted a picture of a nation fraying, pulled one way by right-wing extremism and the other by Islamism and antisemitism.

    Powell would I suspect feel vindicated by Sunak’s address. In that debate with Miller, he predicted that if immigrants continued to arrive in big numbers, they would seek to recreate their own communities in their new home, separated from the wider society. He argued that this would be resented by “indigenous people” and could, if unchecked, lead to a rise in the far right.

    Miller — in perhaps more careful language — acknowledged many of Powell’s premises but disputed his conclusion. He argued that social ­ co-operation is difficult, that ethnic frictions are inevitable, but that in the great arc of human history, it is those civilisations that have encouraged peaceful coexistence that have reaped the rewards. He finished with gentle advice for Powell: “Instead of exciting the notion of future strife, you should encourage the notion of future co-operation on the basis of understanding.”

    I come to this debate — one of the most important we face — with what some might call “baggage”. The interview took place a few months after my birth, the result of a union between a Pakistani immigrant and a red-headed girl from a Welsh farming community. And so for the 53 years of my life, I have had a singular vantage point to witness the evolution of British culture, consciousness and anxiety.

    And perhaps I might say this: I think both Powell and Miller were right, in their own ways. Powell was prophetic in spotting the dangers of parallel lives. The scholar Patrick Nash has written about Islamic communities “concentrated in small geographical areas spread across a few streets or nearby neighbourhoods where there is little need or opportunity to have much to do with wider society or practise the English language”. This has been a disaster for the UK and, indeed, for these groups whose children (particularly daughters) have not experienced the rich opportunities Britain has to offer.

    But Miller was right — so very right — when he talked about the contribution made by immigrants who have integrated: Muslims, Hindus, blacks, browns. When I look at modern Britain, I see this writ large. It is strange that some talk about endemic racism when every report reveals that we are one of the most successful societies on earth and where people from ethnic minority backgrounds lead the government, the home office, the BBC and more.

    Perhaps the key question, then, is: what facilitates integration? What leads to a nation pulling together and shaping the future? And here I think we need to dig a little deeper into history to glimpse an answer. Christianity and Islam are arguably the two religions that have most shaped the world in the past millennium and a half. These creeds differ in theology and iconography but a key difference is in marriage practices.

    In many iterations of Islam, people marry within their tribe or baradari. They worship the same god but their lives are dominated by the kinship group (the Sunni-Shia dispute is, at bottom, a conflict based on which tribe should have taken over from the prophet). This kind of “endogamous” marriage, typically between cousins, maintains a clear demarcation between one’s in-group and everyone else. Your children remain in the clan, creating continuity of property and ideology.

    And this isn’t merely about history and foreign practice. A recent paper by Nash suggests between 38 per cent and 59 per cent of British Pakistanis marry first cousins; Alison Shaw, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford, has noted the rate may be rising. Some have rightly worried about the birth defects caused by “consanguinity” but we have missed how the practice is the fundamental instrument of cultural sequestration. This may benefit the patriarchs who dominate these groups but it impoverishes their communities.

    This, may I suggest, should be our focus. Yes, we should limit immigration and asylum to rational levels that have been consistently breached by this government. But if we want to resolve the dispute between Powell and Miller, we need to understand why some immigrants integrate, excel and become magnificent contributors to British culture while others languish in poverty, cut off from society, their votes collated into blocks controlled by clan leaders (another scandal barely mentioned in polite political debate), and where Islamism and antisemitism fester.

    I have argued in this space before that an answer is to ban cousin marriage, a prohibition that has been shown to increase integration and economic growth in almost every society on earth. A ban issued by the early Christian church (but which lapsed during the Restoration era) forced the tribes of post-Roman Britain to intermarry, dissolving divisions and paving the way for a true national identity. Scholars such as Joe Henrich argue that it was the secret of our rise as a great power.

    You see, when my dad married my mum, he didn’t just start a family; he also built a bridge between two communities — and the closer he came to British society and values, the more he became their champion.

    This, I believe, is the answer to our predicament. We need more bridges, more pathways, more ways to understand each other. We also need greater intolerance towards those who strive to divide us. I am not just talking about Islamic patriarchs (it is one of the great “liberal” failures that this task was ducked due to fear of causing offence) but dog-whistling politicians such as George Galloway and Lee Anderson who inflame ethnic tensions. One also thinks of the London theatre which last week said that it would hold performances solely for “black-identifying” people because of the evils of “white gaze”.

    I suspect that most Brits are sick of this nonsense, sick of the retreat from judging people on character, sick of the trend towards sectarianism in all its guises. We are living through a strange and perilous moment. It’s time for reasonable people from all communities to unite — and call out the growing army of dividers.

    Pete Scott
    7 MINUTES AGO

    It’s absolutely moronic. Our apologist politicians, all of them regardless of party are guilty of decades of idiocy, driving us into decline and squandering our taxes to accommodate nobodies. 15m per day of taxpayer money to house migrants in hotels when defence, health and public services are withering away. We’re at a precipice in politics where the system no longer works

    Marc Lambert
    36 MINUTES AGO

    Too late. This is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Sectarianism and the Balkanisation of Britain is our future now.

    1. “You see, when my dad married my mum, he didn’t just start a family; he also built a bridge between two communities — and the closer he came to British society and values, the more he became their champion. This, I believe, is the answer to our predicament.”

      “Take a pinch of white man…”

    2. As Marc Lambert says, it’s too late I fear. There’s already too much poison in our country’s lifeblood.

    3. Miller to Powell: “Instead of exciting the notion of future strife, you should encourage the notion of future co-operation on the basis of understanding.”

      It’s the understanding of some immigrant habits that prevents co-operation.

  90. Just stumbled across this 2021 video by a professional hypnotist, talking about the government’s covid fear campaign, and what it had in common with his profession.
    I hadn’t seen some of the government ads, and I must say, they are laughably fake with hindsight (they are near the end). But one of the points the narrator makes is how people just carry on doing as they are told if they are in a trance, and that might explain something I hadn’t really understood up til now, which is why I was so reluctant to go out again when the restrictions finally lifted.
    I watched it because I want to arm myself against being duped the next time the government produces some plausible-sounding nonsense.
    He talks quite slowly, so I speeded the video up.
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/k4UU9UTgZO5N/

  94. Why does the Left only use the Celsius temperature scale?

    Because they hate the Fahrenheit

    2. I don’t use either. I stick to Centigrade. (Same with BC and AD instead of BCE and CE.)

    1. That’s not you there with Pip in the first bit of footage near the flooded road is it?

  97. Good night, chums. I’m off to bed now. Sleep well and see you (and your posts) tomorrow.

    1. Love the 2nd one. Gotcha! I remember the (dodgy religious) police in Libya making me walk a straight line. 3 nights in the cells, then court, the company paying for my release and becoming persona non gratis (?). What a relief.

  99. Ave atque vale, amici. I am too late to read the comments, so have only replied to the notifications. Was at a quiz which finished very late and I have to be up early tomorrow.

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