Saturday 2 May: It’s no good locking away active 70-year-olds who run small businesses

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be blacklisted.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/05/01/lettersits-no-good-locking-away-active-70-year-olds-run-small/

688 thoughts on “Saturday 2 May: It’s no good locking away active 70-year-olds who run small businesses”

  3. Good Morning from a Saxon Queen with Axe and Longbow

    A sunny but breezy day, not a sound outside. Very quite.

    1. Being a weekend, we’re lacking the stream of Quarry Traffic rumbling down the road with the empties banging and clattering their way back up again.

    2. Bit like the jewellery king who told us his product was “crap”. (Samuels?)

        1. Correct, SB. At my advanced age I don’t always recall the detail.

  6. For all impoverished (=cheap bastards who won’t fork out for a subscription) NoTTLers (and cut the crap about how you won’t pay ‘on principle’)

    Why are we hesitating to demand an international inquiry into China?
    CHARLES MOORE – 1 MAY 2020 • 9:30PM

    Australia has called for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak. Not unreasonable, you might think. The virus was made in China. It has now put paid to the prosperity of almost everyone. We would like to know why it happened.

    Early this week, the Chinese ambassador to Australia reacted angrily. If there was an inquiry, he warned, Chinese tourists “may have second thoughts. Maybe the parents of the students [there are many Chinese students in Australia] would also think whether this place, which they find is not so friendly, even hostile, is the best place to send their kids to … And also, maybe the ordinary people will think why they should drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef.”

    Then, on Thursday, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, an Australian businessman, gave a press conference in Melbourne with the Australian health minister. He announced his procurement of £5 million-worth of Covid-19 testing kits from China. Twiggy is a billionaire because his business, part-owned by, and overwhelmingly dependent on, China, supplies it with iron ore. Without warning the health minister, Twiggy invited the Chinese consul-general to speak at the same press conference.

    The consul-general praised China’s “open, transparent and responsible manner” over Covid-19, adding sweetly: “This project is another testimony of the friendship and the co-operation between our two countries and the two peoples … the virus knows no ideology, border or race … we’re all in this together.” The minister had been set up by his fellow-countryman and by China.

    This sequence epitomises the Chinese Communist Party in its dealings with the West in the era of Xi Jinping. Here is the blatant, brutal threat. Here is the almost equally blatant trick which seems to offer the hand of friendship. And here, I regret to say, is the third key component – a Western prominente who, for reasons of self-interest, takes China’s part.

    In the old days, Communist regimes devoted great energy to winning converts in the West. The Soviet Union succeeded in recruiting some actual traitors and infiltrating trade unions. At the height of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the Sixties, students were deluged with copies of his Little Red Book. Such propaganda had some effect: absolutism always attracts some people. But these efforts were what we nowadays call “clunky”. The Communists – especially the Chinese – were too cut off from us culturally. They were also very short of money.

    From the late Seventies, that began to change. By the 21st century, Chinese influence had become, one might say, pandemic. China opened up to the West and vice versa. People and businesses approved by the Chinese Communist Party started to come here in serious quantities – for tourism, study, investment, houses in Belgravia. There were many benefits for both sides. Many Western countries, however, suspended any sense of strategic vigilance. Under David Cameron and George Osborne, our government scrambled for contracts. Hence, of course, Huawei.

    Universities, desperate for the much larger fees that can be charged to foreign students, sold their services to China. In 2012, for example, Cambridge University set up the Chong Hua chair in Chinese Development with £3.7 million from Wen Ruchun, the daughter of the super-rich then Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Peter Nolan, who had taught her at Cambridge, took up the professorship. He had written a book with her husband, Liu Chunhang, a Chinese banking regulator. In the same year, Professor Nolan published a book called Is China Buying the World?, a question to which his short answer was “No”. But some said it had succeeded in buying a professorship at Cambridge. The Daily Telegraph exposed these connections.

    Professor Nolan stepped down from the Chong Hua chair last year. It remains unfilled, perhaps because, if you want it, you must demonstrate a “research record of international stature in ‘global China’.” In recent months, the concept of “global China” has made millions of people feel sick.

    Professor Nolan remains busy in Cambridge. Based in Jesus College, whose zeal for China’s “national rejuvenation” is expressed on their website (see this column, April 18), he runs the Cambridge China Executive Leadership Programme, which brings leaders of the top 100 Chinese state-owned enterprises to Cambridge. Over many years, Professor Nolan has developed the argument that China, under its present regime is “ethically driven”, with a “tradition of positive sum thinking”. He praises President Xi for his view of China’s relationship with other nations as “the harmony of civilisations”. “In the sharpest contrast to the European powers and their successors [ie, the USA]”, asserts Prof Nolan, China “did not seek to construct an overseas empire.”

    In a speech to Peking University last year, the current Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Stephen Toope, praised Professor Nolan’s work. He declared that the China Development Forum’s theme of “Greater Opening Up for Win-Win Cooperation” “thrilled” him. China and Cambridge are on the same side, he said, wanting openness rather than “angry isolation”, and a “global society” against those who wish to “divide and conquer”. These divisive conquerors were unnamed; but Professor Toope’s openness to the Chinese Communist Party contrasts with his attitude to Brexit. Last year, his university prevented contributions in favour of Brexit on its website while allowing numerous anti-Brexit ones.

    In the professors’ speeches on China, I cannot find the phrase “academic freedom”, perhaps because China permits no such thing. Chinese universities are controlled by the Communist Party. Chinese influence and money threaten academic freedom here in Britain. Scared of Chinese displeasure, otherwise reputable universities try to prevent speakers on campus who criticise the Chinese government. Members of their academic bodies are sometimes controlled by the Chinese embassy in London. I am told by dons that Chinese students nowadays shut up in the presence of other Chinese students, because each fears the other will report them to the embassy.

    I spoke yesterday to Stephen Tsang, Professor of Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. China’s obsession with control, he says, is an eternal problem. The question is how we face it: “The real issue is when British universities do not defend their own intellectual freedoms.” “Self-censorship” is rife. Some universities are held hostage by the campuses they have opened in China itself.

    This week a reader sent me a strange message put out by the Peking University HSBC Business School. Although it perches in Boars Hill, near Oxford, it announced that it was proudly donating “1,000 pieces of PPE clothing, 300 protective medical goggles, and batches of test kits to Cambridge University Hospitals”. The message lauds Professor Toope for all the deals he has done with Peking University. Then the dean of the business school praises his own gift: Cambridge “really needs help” and a “friend in need is a friend indeed”.

    A friend indeed? It seems an odd phrase for a system of governmental, scientific and intellectual control whose secretiveness and mendacity have created the most sudden and widespread health crisis in history. Our politicians, professors and businessmen need to realise that the West has been insulted. Trust has succumbed to the disease. It cannot be restored by the gift of a few thousand (malfunctioning) face-masks. An international inquiry is a necessary start, yet our Government shies away from calling for one.

    1. Morning Michael. On Principle I decided not to read what you have posted – but thank you for trying! 😉

    3. ‘Morning, Citroen (though I gather your name is Michael – may I use that?)

      As I commented yesterday, the only way to deal with China is NOT to deal with China and to seize their assets in reparation for the results of their germ warfare.

      1. You surely may, Tom – it’s one of the nicer things I’ve been called. {:^))

    4. The real issue is when British universities do not defend their own intellectual freedoms. ‘Self-censorship’ is rife.

      But not only on the subject of China.

    5. I’d fork out for Charles Moore, and Allison Pearson. And Norman Tebbit, of course. It’s not principle why I don’t want to pay, it’s just that I know the rest of the DT would wind me up too much with its shoddy journalism and unquestioning following the globalist line.

      Edit: great article as usual. The academic sector is rotten to the core, and not nearly as clever as they think they are.

    6. Enquiry? We don’t need no enquiry. Just bomb them before they do it again.

  7. Morning all

    SIR – I turn 70 in August. My wife and I run a small forestry management business based at our home. I don’t want to retire and I can’t afford to.

    If the Government doesn’t want me to go out, who will pay my VAT and my income tax? If I can’t work, money put aside for these will dwindle away.

    I have been blessed with good health, and my son and I plan to do the Coast to Coast walk again next year. Please don’t lock me away.

    Peter Munford

    Bruton, Somerset

    SIR – Evidently researchers at Warwick University (report, April 30) have a clear understanding of the kinds of discrimination tolerated in modern Britain. Hence their willingness to advise compulsory incarceration of old people but not of fat people.

    Dr Julian Critchlow

    Tregaron, Cardiganshire

    SIR – I too am in awe of the efforts of all the frontline staff. Garrett Emmerson, the chief executive of the London Ambulance Service (report, April 29), says: “It is really important from our point of view to be able to take a little bit of time to stop and remember those who have lost their lives – not just health staff but all those essential workers.” This seems to suggest, though it is probably not intended to, that all those others who have recently died (including my wife of 49 years) were somehow not essential. She was to me.

    Tony Palframan

    Disley, Cheshire

    SIR – I can no longer watch the gloom of the BBC 6pm coronavirus bulletin. For weeks it has been a catalogue of unremitting bad news. No wonder the country is in the grip of hysteria.

    David Palfreyman

    Poynton, Cheshire

    SIR – I am residing in a care home, convalescing from a spell in hospital. I am 96, but have fully recovered and am ready to go home. But the care home is in lockdown and I am not allowed to leave. The Government has made the rules. Will it pick up the bill?

    Peter Fotherby

    Maidenhead, Berkshire

    SIR – For a couple of years, my wife, as a volunteer for the Cinnamon Trust, has been walking a dog for a lady now on the at-risk register.

    The Government has instructed the trust to withdraw volunteers over 70. The result is two sad and irate ladies (voters). My wife continues to walk for an hour each day without her little canine friend. What is the point?

    Dave Alsop

    Churchdown, Gloucestershire

    2. 318796+ up ticks,
      Morning Dave,
      Power display, from a politico’s point of view ours is NOT to reason why ours is but………

    1. SIR – My wife (aged 70) pays short visits to our pregnant daughter, who has three other young children and lives close by. During these visits my wife takes toys and comfort. She chats in the garden, keeping her distance.

      However, we were snitched on, and someone informed the police that a house party was going on. Within 10 minutes of my wife’s arrival a police squad car had drawn up and the occupants were interrogating them both about a possible breach of the law.

      This lockdown is generating division, distrust and fear.

      Michael Willis

      Stirling

      1. Phone the police and tell them your shed has been broken into and you’ve been burgled.

        You won’t see hide nor hair of them.

        1. Unless you say that the culprits are still there and you’ll hold them with your shotgun till the police arrive.

        2. Wait 10 minutes after reporting and then ring again, telling them not to bother as you’ve shot the intruder!

          Worked in Norwich.

        3. Yo sos

          I am Sparkytus

          They did arrive four months late, to reassure themselves i was OK

      2. 318796+up ticks,
        Morning E,
        Michael, then do you not feel it is a successfully run campaign then ?

      3. In our village, a farm was broken into recently and a lot of things stolen. The locks on farm gates were drilled out, and the thieves drove in.
        Probably the usual suspects, who seem to operate with no fear of the police.

    2. Which confirms my belief that, if we had lost the last war, there would have been a queue of willing collaborators lining up to shop their neighbours!

      2. We did lose

        Even though we on the ‘Allies side, repaid a the US for goods etc received under the Marshall Plan

        Germany, ostensably the losers, did not, yet got their country rebuilt, basically for free.

        And do not mention how France led the D Day landings

    3. This is totally disgusting.

      Sneaks were the most despised people – and quite rightly so – when most of us here were at school.

    4. Surely the solution is to flood their reporting systems with so many (alleged) breaches that they give up and close them.

      ‘Morning, Citroen.

  9. SIR – We have a ludicrous situation in which the Church of England forbids the streaming of live or recorded services from a church (Charles Moore, Comment, April 28). Instead we have to watch someone celebrating a service in their living room or, in the case of the virtue-signalling Archbishop of Canterbury, his kitchen.

    How can a lone priest, celebrating Communion in front of a camera in an empty church, possibly be at any risk of communicating Covid-19 to anyone?

    Dr David Pound

    Charwelton, Northamptonshire

  10. SIR – It has been fun to see people taking their exercise in the open air: mothers and fathers, sometimes with a tiny baby tucked close, or with pushchairs or small children on miniature bicycles, as well as older people enjoying the freedom of a ride.

    However, the Lycra brigade still appear, often approaching fast and silent from behind. Unaware of one such approach recently, I stepped aside to avoid a fallen branch, and got a torrent of abuse from the cyclist who swerved to avoid me. The bicycle bell makes such a friendly little ping; I wish it hadn’t fallen out of fashion.

    Janet Robson

    Reading, Berkshire

    1. And I wish the law which demands cyclists install and use bells were more strictly enforced.

    2. And I wish the law which demands cyclists install and use bells were more strictly enforced.

      1. ‘Morning, Elsie

        Plod can’t be everywhere at once. But comprehensive insurance for bikes could be made compulsory.

        1. True, Peddy, but draconian fines and/or imprisonment for not having a bell would concentrate minds wonderfully. As would similar punishments for other illegal and anti-social behaviour.

          1. Perlice are far too busy harassing OAPs for sitting on a bench, or visiting their sick neighbour to deal with CRIME.

        2. First, catch your Lycra-lout…without the means of identification I doubt very much whether the existence of third party cover could ever make any worthwhile difference.

          ‘Morning, Peddy.

          1. Bicycles could be fitted with a transponder with a unique signal. Signal could be received by smartphone app. Smartphone would show name and address.
            Or we could require all cyclists to be preceded by a man with red flag.

          3. But, but, but, Elsie, that would destroy the beautiful aerodynamics of our wonderful machines.

          4. In theory, yes. They would need to be quite large (in relation to the bike) but apart from that can you imagine the bureaucracy, as well as the lack of enforcement action by the police? I don’t know of any country that uses such a system, and they can’t all be wrong.

            ‘Morning, Elsie.

          5. In Cambridge as a student one was allocated letter/s and a number and had to paint them on the bike.

            The letter/s showed which college and the college could identify the student. It worked well, but I doubt anyone would be able to get the number of a speeding rider.

          6. Gosh, really? Gone by my time. I painted my bike fluorescent yellow, and it still got nicked several times. After being mowed down four times, I left it there for someone to steal when I graduated.

          7. Late 60’s early 70’s.
            I don’t think they protected the owner from theft in the slightest.
            I seem to recall that the council had a flatbed truck and used to collect bikes that appeared to have been abandonned and returned them to the approriate college. That probably died out donkey’s years ago.

            Oddly enough, I painted mine bright yellow too.

          8. ‘Morning, Hugh, I’ve seen bikes in Holland with number plates but maybe it’s been discontinued ‘cos the Queen (now a King) wanted to emulate Brenda and have her’s as the only one without a number plate. Bloody royalism raising its ugly head.

          9. That’s partly because of the green scam – cyclists are perceived to be saving the planet, so no government wants to punish them for their anti-social behaviour.

        3. Plod is never there when cyclists are driving recklessly! There should be speed limits for bicycles in cities as well.

      2. By law, a bicycle cannot be sold to the public without a bell attached. However, when riding a bicycle it is not compulsory to have a bell attached. Crazy, isn’t it?

    3. Look behind you, Janet, before you step off the kerb. The cyclist saw you and swerved. He could have been hit by a vehicle. Pedestrians should walk in single file. Very young children should not be out on pavements on bikes on busy roads.I cycle at a sensible pace and see pedestrians obviously not a family group walking with no respect for the 2 metre rule and taking up the full width of a pavement.. Runners seem to need to look at their watches regularly and pedestrians are often engrossed on their mobiles causing oncoming pedestrians to get onto the road to avoid them. The cyclist is also wary of cycling past cars parked on the streets as the driver or passenger could suddenly open the door. In this middle sized town cycling is a worry but in cities it must be a nightmare.By the way Janet I neither wear Lycra nor a crash helmet. If the cyclist you refer to was on the pavement too you can ignore this comment with my apologies.

      1. Not sure she says she stepped off the kerb. My own experience with these pavement-riding ‘silent assassins’ has not been a happy one.

          1. Good morning, Peddy. They tear down our rural tracks here, lifting their bikes over the kissing gates and stiles.

      2. ‘Morning, Clyde, of course you have a bell on your bicycle, which you ring vigourously whenever you are approaching a hazard?

    4. “The bicycle bell makes such a friendly little ping…”

      Modern ones don’t. They’re barely audible. Imagine someone striking two spoons together at a distance of 50 yards.

      Of course, the alternative should not be an airhorn sounded at 10 paces.

      1. They shouldn’t ride so fast when there are pedestrians around. We walked down a pedetrian/cyclist shared path a few weeks ago – it was like walking on the motorway. We had to go single file, with them constantly whizzing past our elbows at top speed. Unpleasant experience.

        1. Exactly. I’ve had a few near-misses of the kind the letter writer describes, with cyclists whistling past silently and fast. The paths are wide and in a park with plenty of ‘run-off’ space except for one, partly enclosed by fences. It also slopes and cyclists reach speeds of 25mph as they hurtle down the hill. The path is used by shoppers returning from the nearby Sainsbury’s. No run-off space here and it’s a miracle there hasn’t been a serious accident.

          1. I have regular near misses with cyclists zooming across the pavement or using it as an overtaking lane on my walk to work.

    1. Morning, Bob.
      Beautiful here, too, but chilly.
      Tree cutting, fence cuttung, scaffolding & moonshining on the bob list for today.

      1. I see what you did there removed the possibility of anyone misinterpreting your “on the job”list…..

        Morning Oberst

          1. ‘Morning, Paul, with a little research, you may find the icon to switch off predictive text. I prefer to be the author of my own typos.

    2. Same here in Derbyshire.
      I might get that wriggly tin put onto the shed roof with a bit of luck.

      1. Good morning, Robert. Watch out with the ladder. It was roofing my woodstore that nearly did for me….

  12. 318796 + up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    Seems like we are being fed DOOM on a daily dosage
    as in being informed by breitbart there are allegedly 200,000″ informers” within our midst with the police even bringing out a “grass up your granny” form.
    Are the political power players using divide & conquer
    between family units ? if so that will certainly bring about community unity within a town, similar to taking petrol to a fire, or maybe in some cases that is ……..

    Surely for every negative there is a positive as in
    News purveyors concerning public welfare,
    Facts or jail time, fast tract, same day, Tommy Robinsoned.

  13. This is a few days old but I missed it at that time.

    The moral infantilism of calling Boris a murderer
    It is naive and backward to blame Covid deaths on government ministers.

    BRENDAN O’NEILL – EDITOR – 27th April 2020

    For a writer, Philip Pullman has a surprisingly poor grasp of the English language. Boris Johnson and his government should be had up on charges of ‘conspiracy to murder’, he says, if it transpires that they refused to seek assistance from the EU in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic for ‘Brexit-related reasons’. Murder, as every schoolchild knows, is the premeditated killing of another. It requires malice aforethought – the intention to kill. Does Mr Pullman seriously believe our government got together and plotted the mass murder of citizens with Covid-19 as the murder weapon?

    If he does, he’s mad. Someone who believes that government officials observed the emergence of Covid-19 in China and started to conspire for the disease to spread in the UK as a means of murdering certain citizens is not far off a conspiracy theorist. I suspect, however, that Mr Pullman doesn’t really believe the government are murderers. Rather, his cynical, imprecise use of that word was probably motored by his own sense of helpless rage at a political era – the Brexit era – that offends his patrician sensibilities and his belief that people like him, not us, should determine the political fate of the UK.

    It is in a new collection of Covid-related essays from Penguin that Pullman misuses the M-word. He declares that the government should be ‘arraigned on charges of conspiracy to murder’ if it is discovered that it refused to take part in the EU’s PPE procurement scheme for Brexit-related reasons. Where to start? First, there’s the fact that this much-vaunted procurement scheme, the only thing the middle classes of this country have talked about for weeks, has yet to deliver a single piece of PPE to any European state. One wonders if the people who demanded that we rely on the scheme might also be charged with conspiracy to murder, given that our doctors and nurses would have been waiting for weeks for masks and ventilators from the sclerotic EU.

    And secondly, even if Boris and Co have fluffed the PPE issue – and can we please wait for some more facts before we decide on that? – that would not be murder. It’s remarkable this needs saying to a best-selling author. But there we are. That’s the world we live in now. Brexit made mush of formerly brilliant minds.

    Pullman is not alone in his moral infantilism, in his illiterate rage against government officials. It has become fashionable to accuse the government of murder. At the weekend it was revealed that, in November, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a Labour MP and a member of Keir Starmer’s front bench, said the Tories had ‘conspired to murder’ British citizens. In this case, the murder weapon was austerity. Reports that the years of austerity led to excess deaths were proof, apparently, that Tory officials literally plotted, with malice aforethought, to murder their fellow citizens. Again, this is genuine conspiracy-theory territory. It is darkly ironic, too, considering that the current lockdown that was so feverishly called for by Labour leftists is already having a detrimental impact on people’s health and some are predicting it will contribute to deaths in the future. Who conspired to murder those citizens? Russell-Moyle’s friends in the lockdown left? Bang em up.

    The ghoulish impulse to depict the impact of Covid-19 in the UK as an act of murder by wicked Tories is becoming more and more widespread. The media have become obsessed with establishing political culpability for Covid, as if a novel virus, still little understood, could have been defeated by government action alone. The Sunday Times’ shoddy report last weekend on ‘the missing five weeks’ in which the government could have held Covid-19 at bay – Moses-like, perhaps, using force of will to command nature – said the government could be responsible for ‘thousands’ of deaths. This thrilled the Corbynista left, which is now entirely in the business of the Socialism of Ghouls, cynically using a pandemic to whip up rage against the government and accuse Boris of being a mass murderer. ‘Tory genocide’ and ‘Boris the Butcher’ have both trended on Twitter, speaking to the moral illiteracy and puerile politicking of so much social-media discussion.

    This hunger to pin blame, this search for Covid culpability, must absolutely be separated from the perfectly rational asking of questions about Britain’s general preparedness for pandemics. Are there flaws in our increasingly bureaucratic health service? Unquestionably. Has the British state lost its sense of mission and become a Balkanised patchwork of bureaucratic kingdoms? Yes. Will this have had an impact on how well we managed when Covid-19 arrived in the country? Almost certainly. These are important issues to address. But something very, very different is taking place in the Boris-as-murderer screech of rage currently emanating from the middle-class left and the disorientated cultural elites. This isn’t a genuine inquiry into the state of the UK and its health service in the early 21st century. Rather, it speaks to an almost medieval urge to discover the demon we can blame our every misfortune on. It is naive, unreasoned, and utterly destructive of the kind of public culture we need moving ahead.

    The Boris-as-murderer nonsense most clearly reveals the moral disorientation of the cultural elites. Their rage against a mass-murdering government tells us very little about the state of governance in Boris’s Britain but a great deal about their state of mind. In their very use of such intemperate, inaccurate language, they reveal that their aim is not to have a reckoning with the potential failures of the British state over the past few weeks, but rather to release their rash, pent-up fury over their own sense of dislocation from the political turn of the past few years and their lack of any sense of how to connect with the public.

    Only people who had given up on the normal business of politics – on the business of articulating their view, of trying to convince others, and of taking part in rational debate – would throw around words like ‘murderer’ and ‘butcher’ and ‘genocide’. Their aim is not to impact on public debate or change people’s minds at all, but rather to give therapeutic vent to their personal sense of political disarray and hopelessness while also re-establishing their credentials among their own like-minded set in the culture wars. It is not remotely surprising that both Pullman and Russell-Moyle were profoundly anti-Brexit – these are people who feel utterly put out by the democratic will of the people and who consequently have abandoned the reason necessary for participation in democratic life. Their wail of ‘MURDER!’ confirms the extent to which they have absented themselves from the rational, democratic sphere in the wake of a public vote that went against their worldview and which called into question the moral authority of the institutions they support.

    Then there is the naivety of the notion that deaths from a novel virus can be blamed on government. This is an infantile inversion of morality. It springs from today’s culture of entitlement and safetyism in which people think they should be safe-spaced from every dangerous idea, unpredictable event and novel illness. This is the opposite of what we need now. We need rational debate about preparedness for pandemics and a society-wide pulling-together to protect the old and the vulnerable from the current pandemic, not this childish, unreal demand that nothing bad should ever happen to any of us, and the notion that if it does then it’s Boris’s fault. Mr Pullman, leave the moralising in your children’s books – the real world is more complex than fantasy.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/27/the-moral-infantilism-of-calling-boris-a-murderer/

    1. “Protect the old” ?

      That’s why Johnson’s useless government is unloading non emergency C-19 patients from hospitals to care homes where they infect the other residents with shocking results.

      1. Care homes can say sod off you know!

        Besides in care homes the biggest vector is the staff (and visitors where they are still allowed).

    2. Am I alone in thinking that Pullman is a fraud and that his books are rubbish?

      I read Northern Lights, the first the first book in his Dark Materials Trilogy, aloud to my sons – but I let Caroline read the other two as I had had enough.

      He is so violently anti-Christian as to be incapable of any objectivity.

      1. I had a feeling he used to be an English teacher. When I checked, teaching is coyly mentioned, but no real details.
        From Wikipedia: “From 1965, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third class BA in 1968. In an interview with the Oxford Student he stated that he “did not really enjoy the English course” and that “I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn’t – it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I’d have got one of those”…….

        1. They used to say that there were only two respectable degrees: Firsts and Thirds.

          When I was a student about 2% of students were awarded Firsts and about 2% were awarded Thirds rather than the then ubiquitus Desmonds. (Desmond Tutu = 2.2) Now over 20% are given Firsts but Thirds are very rare. Ergo: Now Thirds are still very hard to get and the only respectable degree to have.

          (My father got a First; I got a Third – but my wife and my two sons got humdrum and boring 2.1s.)

        2. In his own words wot he writted…

          About Philip Pullman

          I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales. I received my secondary education at the excellent Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, and then went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read English, though I never learned to read it very well.

          I found my way into the teaching profession at the age of 25, and taught at various Oxford Middle Schools before moving to Westminster College in 1986, where I spent eight years involved in teaching students on the B.Ed. course. I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools. My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.

          My views on education are eccentric and unimportant, however. My only real claim to anyone’s attention lies in my writing. I’ve published nearly twenty books, mostly of the sort that are read by children, though I’m happy to say that the natural audience for my work seems to be a mixed one – mixed in age, that is, though the more mixed in every other way as well, the better.
          *
          *
          *
          https://www.philip-pullman.com/about

    3. “Does Mr Pullman seriously believe our government got together and plotted the mass murder of citizens with Covid-19 as the murder weapon?”

      Does Mr Pullman need reminding that’s a good precis of what Dominic Cummings said in the early CV response before he got sick himself and ran out of Downing Street faster than Linford Christie ever could have.

      1. “Does Mr Pullman need reminding that’s a good precis of what Dominic Cummings said in the early CV response…”

        What?!!! You become more mad by the minute.

  14. Didn’t go for the once a day allowed walk for a few days, that’s probably not too
    good really as it’s one of the very few things allowed.

    1. It loses its charm when you’re seeing the same things day after day and I’m one of the lucky ones, living in a village so I can walk in the open. I haven’t bothered to go for a walk since last weekend.

      1. I forced myself to go out running at 6 am yesterday morning, as we are also sinking into lethargy.

    2. ‘Morning, Ethel, go out now and several other times today, in order to catch up with the backlog. Take a note with you for the benefit of prod-nose plod.

  16. Forgive my cynicism, but I note that the return to work might be 26 May after the bank holiday weekend.

    If so, I’ll bet that the lockdown ends on Saturday 23rd.

    2. I should have been going on holiday on 30 May but that’s scuppered because I was booked on the new P&O whopper and she’s being built in a German shipyard that’s been on a go slow since all this kicked off.
      The “Iona”, won’t now be finished till at least July.
      I’ve been offered a 125% credit against another cruise, to be booked before 31 December for a sailing before 31 March 2021, which should be feasible.

      1. If you’re fed up, might I suggest that you try asking stepenroi very nicely for a trip on his (converted Motor Torpedo Boat that goes like the wind) magnificent vessel. It has all the mod.cons. that you could dream of, a very attentive crew, exquisite cuisine, and a lavish cellar. Next sailing will be ASAP. {:^))

      2. Is that sufficient for an upgrade to a sea view cabin with private balcony for when you get quarantined?

        1. I already had a seaview but yes, might as well pay the balance and have a balcony as well. As for being quarantined, I need a holiday and I’ve had it with flying, so I’ll take the risk.

    3. I’ll just check my islamic calendar. Its 1400 years out of date but as luck would have it, the 23rd would be a great day.

  17. Re: Electoral Commission

    Many NoTTLers will have noticed that “Brexit: Electoral Commission and Arron Banks reach settlement””
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52478574

    This was after Elec.Comm. made a complete horlicks of trying to prosecute Darren Grimes and failing to prosecute Lutfur Rahman for electoral fraud.

    A little dicky bird has told me that in late March Elec.Comm. wrote to UKIP asking that they cook their books to show that some of Arron Banks’s earlier contributions had been used for purposes other than he had stipulated and was asserting in his evidence to the National Crime Agency. Naughty, eh?

    There isn’t a single arm or agency of H.M.Government that hasn’t been corroded and corrupted by the infiltration of the Blair/Brown Cultural Marxists from the Supreme Court on downwards. Our notional ‘rights and civil liberties’ ain’t worth a tinker’s cuss to them.

    1. Not at all surprised and the Leave vote brought more of these bottom feeders into the open, such was their desperation to overturn the electorate’s decision.

      Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading a number of articles by an investigative journalist, one Neil Wilby. His articles are quite long and replete with detail. He has been exposing scandals in a number of Police Services in the North e.g. GMP and NYP: some dealing with run of the mill crimes and others on the moslem rape and trafficking gangs.
      A number of whistle-blowers feed into both his articles and Twitter feed, and their input makes sorry reading. Thought that the ‘Rotten Boroughs’ were a thing of the past? Read about Mayor Burnham, Greater Manchester, Oldham etc. Blair and Co brought them back big-time.
      If you have a bit of spare time he’s worth a read.

      Neil Wilby – Policing Scandals That Shame the Two Faced Mayor of Manchester

    2. On the plus side; it’s given us a valuable insight into life back in the USSR.

      1. ‘Morning, Ethel.

        The last time I had cornflakes was 2 years ago in hospital, even for lunch or supper if the menus were bad.
        I discovered Birchemüsli on my Danube cruise last Sept. & I love it.

      1. Go’morgon, Paul

        I’m looking forward to my next Full English, but I have to go shopping first.

        1. And @ Obers,

          Do your respective SWMBOs refer to you as HWHNS or HWCFO or HWUFPNFPOTOS?

          He Who Has No Spine
          He Who Can F*ck Orf
          He Who Uses Faintly Patronising Nicknames For People Of The Opposite Sex

          2. I’ve made similar comments before.
            Anyway, isn’t ‘obey’ one of the oaths women and men take upon marriage?

  20. Right, my fellow NoTTLers.. Get your rotten tomatoes ready…aim…FIRE!

    SIR – The creative industries are worth £111  billion to the UK economy each year. At their heart lie music and the performing arts, which face ruin as a result of Covid-19.

    At a stroke venues and theatres, large and small, have closed their doors. Festivals and concerts have been cancelled, and all those individuals working in the sector, who are largely self-employed or on precarious contracts, have lost their livelihoods. As mass gatherings are likely to be the last events to be reintroduced after lockdown ends, this will be a devastating lost year for thousands of musicians and artists, and their families.

    Last week, MPs and peers across all parties pressed the Government on the steps being taken to protect musicians, other artists and those running venues who are falling through the cracks and receiving no financial support during the crisis. The message was clear: they need help now.

    Music and the arts help to define the kind of society we are. If we want them to survive this emergency, an urgent sector-specific package of financial support – similar to the €50  billion programme in Germany – is desperately needed. Without significant intervention of this sort, the cultural sector may be irreparably damaged by the time this crisis is over.

    [The DT the wastes numerous column inches listing the following 51? self-important prats with two names each. I have condensed the format and not displayed their ennobled titles in bold just to save time and space]

    Lord Aberdare (Alastair Bruce), Baroness Andrews (Kay Andrews), Earl Attlee (John Attlee), Baroness Bakewell (Joan Bakewell), Baroness Benjamin
    (Floella Benjamin), Lord Berkeley of Knighton (Michael Berkeley), Lord Bilimoria (Karan Bilimoria), Lord Birt (John Birt), Lord Black of Brentwood (Guy Black),
    Lord Blunkett (David Blunkett), Baroness Bonham-Carter (Jane Bonham-Carter), Lord Bragg (Melvyn Bragg), Baroness Bull (Deborah Bull), Lord Caine
    (Jonathan Caine), Lord Cashman (Michael Cashman), Earl of Clancarty (Nick Trench), Lord Clement-Jones (Tim Clement-Jones), Lord Colville of Culross
    (Charles Colville), Lord Cormack (Patrick Cormack), Lord Foster of Bath (Don Foster), Lord Freyberg (Valerian Freyberg), Lord Gilbert of Panteg (Stephen Gilbert), Lord Glendonbrook (Michael Bishop), Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Michael Grade), Lord Harris of Haringey (Toby Harris), Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill
    (Anna Healy), Lord Howarth of Newport (Alan Howarth), Lord Inglewood (William Fletcher-Vane), Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws (Helena Kennedy),
    Baroness Kidron (Beeban Kidron), Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (Jennifer Jones), Lord Lexden (Alistair Cooke), Lord Lingfield (Robert Balchin),
    Lord Lipsey (David Lipsey), Lord Luce (Richard Luce), Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Jenny McIntosh), Lord McNally (Tom McNally), Lord Marland (Jonathan Marland), Baroness Massey of Darwen (Doreen Massey), Lord Moynihan (Colin Moynihan), Baroness Nye (Susan Nye), Lord Puttnam (David Puttnam)
    Baroness Quin (Joyce Quin), Baroness Rawlings (Patricia Rawlings), Lord Smith of Finsbury (Chris Smith), Lord Storey (Mike Storey), Baroness Wheatcroft
    (Patience Wheatcroft), Baroness Whitaker (Janet Whitaker), Lord Williams of Oystermouth (Rowan Williams), Baroness Young of Hornsey (Lola Young)

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

    Does the Nation need so many?

    BTL:

    D Reynolds

    2 May 2020 12:51AM
    The Arty Farty Letter would have carried more weight if the signatories had put their normal names in bold and their ego-bursting titles in brackets.

    1. Maybe, if some of the above “great & the Good” felt that their favourite theatre required an injection of cash they could dig into their own pockets/purses & donate some of their 2019-2020 fees just like “the public” supported the 100 year old soldier’s NHS Charity.

    2. Codswallop. Public money doesn’t produce great art, it produces government-approved art.
      In the case of the arts sector, it might be better to make a clean start with a fresh generation of talent – and without the taxpayers’ money.

    3. “Music and the arts help to define the kind of society we are.” Maybe in their own metropolitan bubble.

      BTW, are these “creatives” these who seem to re-write well-established characters (Sherlock, Dickens etc) with a modern “woke” twist? Isn’t it time that these creatives actually errr… created something new?

  21. Nottlers don’t need to subscribe to read Premium.

    As the page loads, press esc a few times.. and the paywall will open..

  22. Can you believe Boris Johnson’s luck?
    The Prime Minister’s enemies would rather think of him as a chancer than a gifted leader
    BY DOUGLAS MURRAY 1 May 2020
    https://unherd.com/2020/05/does-fortune-favour-boris/

    The news that our Prime Minister has become a father again is the second piece of personal good news he has had in a month. And once again, his opponents have shown that they cannot stand it — or even credit it — when something good happens to him.

    The first piece of unalloyedly positive coverage he received came when he emerged from hospital on Easter Sunday. It was an exceptionally good news story — for the country as well as his family.

    So much so, that his disgruntled opponents could not help but see dastardly practices at work. Chris Lockwood of The Economist managed to make a great virtual fool of himself by tweeting out that the Prime Minister’ appearance after emerging from hospital was “not someone who was at death’s door a few days ago”.

    There seemed, according to the magazine’s Europe Editor (who would of course have no reason to hold a grudge against Boris Johnson) to be “something incredibly fishy about the whole business”. Lockwood subsequently backtracked from this claim, under a certain amount of virtual pressure and presumably some amount of actual, real-life pressure, from the higher-ups at his publication.

    In a similar vein, The Guardian has found it hard to see anything especially positive in the announcement of Carrie Symonds giving birth to a baby boy. Ordinarily, it should be an easy one: “Congratulations to the happy couple on the birth of their child.” Even political opponents used to be able to agree on that sort of line. Not this time at The Guardian, where Martin Kettle announced in a sub-heading so gritted that you worried for his teeth: “It would require a heart of stone not to be moved by such a story of illness and new life. But this is no apolitical birth.”

    As a metaphor for Boris Johnson’s view of Britain, it was, Kettle claimed in his confused argument, “audacious”. “The operation in Downing Street is still a lot smarter than many would like to see it” he warned. And amid the sound of his teeth finally giving in under the pressure, Kettle ground out the sentence, “Let’s acknowledge, if nothing else, that today’s announcement was a brilliantly executed piece of political tradecraft.”

    It is understandable that Johnson’s opponents keep reacting like this; there is, of course, a reason. They see him as a political chancer who has got through life by being lucky and that if it were not for this, then he would have been exposed by now as a charlatan and a fraud whose copy would not be deemed printable in such august publications as The Guardian or Economist. Time and again his journalist critics ignore the fact that their estimation of the Prime Minister is out of kilter with the public’s.

    And of course there is an inbuilt reason why that might be the case. Which is that Boris Johnson used to be one of them, soared exceptionally high in journalism, earned more than most journalists can ever dream of and then chose to leave the trade and move on to higher office. Some people would spend a life in therapy trying to forgive success and abandonment like that.

    But it means that such journalists ignore the attributes of the Prime Minister which are particularly attractive and might be exceptionally well-suited to the times we are now in.

    Good and bad things happen to all of us in our lives. We all have a chance daily to store up resentment or positivity. And while the storing up of positive sentiment may be exceptionally hard on occasion, in politics – especially during times of political and economic turbulence – it is crucial. Despondency is not a great look in leadership.

    The moment when I saw that there was an unusual type of political leadership in the Prime Minister was back when he was Mayor of London. In 2011, rioting had just broken out in London which spread out across the country. For several nights, Londoners saw the breakdown of law and order as the police failed to intervene and the capital looked very close to chaos. There were all sorts of ways for people in positions of political power to respond to that event, but the most memorable to me came the morning after the rioting began.

    As other dour-faced politicians made their pronouncements and commentators predicted the end of civilisation, Boris Johnson appeared in London with a group of citizen volunteers. Armed with a broom he encouraged Londoners to help him clear up the city. It was the sort of thing that would have occurred to almost no other politician — bunkered down as they would be at such a time. But it showed a number of things about Johnson, most important of which was that he continued to have the capacity to make people feel good about things and take part in improving their collective lot, even at the direst moments.

    It was one of his most serious demonstrations of political nouse, but it is one which comes from his general character. When Boris managed to turn an ‘unlucky’ incident with a zip wire into something rather joyful and very human, the same unusual quality came across to the public and seemed to bypass many of his journalist critics. It wasn’t hard to see even then that he was different from other political beasts. After all, imagine if Gordon Brown or Theresa May had attempted to go on a zipwire and got stuck half way along it? How would the pictures of them dangling in mid-air have gone down?

    Would Gordon Brown have showed a sunny disposition on this occasion? Would he have joked with the crowd about lending him a rope to get down? Would Theresa May have engaged in repartee and badinage? Or might both have hung there fuming at their personal humiliation, wondering who had put them up to this and visibly mulling over who to blame for the lack of zipwire forward-planning?

    The misfortune for Boris Johnson’s opponents is not that everything he does is stage-managed, the result of conspiracy or part of some grand political masterplan. The thing they fail to recognise is the fact that whether personal or global problems come bouncing along at him, Johnson reacts to them, as he does to everything in his life, with a generally sunny and upbeat disposition. And whether bad or good things happen to him — hospitalisation or fatherhood — his response to them is not some elaborate ruse or spin.

    You cannot fake Johnson’s sort of attitude to life. The Prime Minister’s disposition is such that it allows bad things to bounce off him, and the good things make most reasonable people happy along with him. It’s no wonder the Prime Minister’s opponents feel the stars lining up against them at times. But the fault is in their stars, not his.
    https://unherd.com/2020/05/does-fortune-favour-boris/

    1. “There seemed, according to the magazine’s Europe Editor (who would of course have no reason to hold a grudge against Boris Johnson) to be “something incredibly fishy about the whole business”. Lockwood subsequently backtracked from this claim, under a certain amount of virtual pressure and presumably some amount of actual, real-life pressure, from the higher-ups at his publication.”
      And that’s why I cancelled my subscription in 2016, having had it simce 1992.

      1. Ah! We overlapped. I subscribed 1974 to 1994. I got fed up with their enthusiasm for all things ERM, Euro, EU quite some time before I fled.

        1. Circa 1974, one week the Economist’s front cover featured a photo of a young lady wearing a T-shirt with the words “Europe or bust”. I would have voted for the latter.

    2. Johnson was sacked by the Times pretty quickly for making stuff up that people didn’t actually say. He was found out and immediately dismissed then he rang an old Oxford buddy and started at the DT pretty promptly. I certainly wouldn’t say he rose through the ranks of journalism to a high level, he got the job because of nepotism.
      It’s pretty easy to be positive when you have the money to buy your first home fresh out of university in West Kensington then slip into a high paid job for a CV that should have ended up in the bin. He was earning 275k per year for one morning’s work per week. How many journalists are that lucky?

  24. It would be nice if Boris Johnson was a gifted leader as Douglas Murray says, and not a funny bumbler masquerading as a leader.

    Surely a gifted leader would not sell out to the Chinese and would not approve massively wasteful HS2 or dream up weird projects like a bridge to Ireland ?

    Selling out to the Chinese will eventually turn Britain into Greater China.

    Such great leadership..

    Not !

    1. It looks to me like he just obeys world government orders, just like all the other PMs have done, since Thatcher

      1. How does it go ?

        “Hello Prime Minister, it’s your old friend here, George. Do you remember me from Davos ? There’s a little something I’d like you to do.. “

    2. Remember this is the man who wanted to build an airport on a floating island on top of the biggest pile of unexploded WW2 ordnance in the River Thames. The explosive concerned are azides, they all vary from somewhat shock sensitive to extremely shock sensitive, so much so we just avoid the area and leave the explosives in situ.

    3. Who agreed to suppress the report into the Muslim rape gangs? If Boris was involved in this decision and if he does not reverse it he will never be considered a great leader.

    2. Brilliant. We’ve just completed a Monet waterlilies jigsaw that we’ve been working on since February – the children gave up as it was so hard! If I’d seen this photo I would have been tempted to do the same thing.

  27. Dr Mark Porter on BBC Breakfast TV says come and see your GP.
    Don’t be scared of getting COVID – it’s business as usual with patients being triaged over the phone and treatment being given through your car window with surgery staff wearing full PPE kit.

    (Could be problems delivering babies that way though!)

    2. Our local GP surgery is closed for all but dropping off repeat prescription requests.
      For any actual attention, patients have to visit one of the surgeries within the same group which is in the town centre. Car park is closed.
      I dropped off MB a couple of days ago then hovered for a while as he tried to find a door that would actually open. Eventually, he popped into the nearby pharmacy and an assistant took him to the right door. He then had to go through a procedure similar to that in Sing Sing; a series of doors – opened, locked, next one opened, locked …… And in reverse, of course. Oh, and had to deal with an extremely rude receptionist who made yer average head screw seem touchy feely.

  29. Good morning, all. Bright blue sky; gentle breeze.

    There seems to have been a lot of stuff about testing. Can someone knowledgeable explain to me what tests achieve?

    1. Absolutely nothing apart from achieving some sort of target. What do they do with the information?

    2. Oh…. really Eeyore. The tests prove you haven’t got it but you might get it….. Got it!

      1. Reminds me of those lines from the old song with a hauntingly melancholy melody:

        Standing on the bridge at midnight throwing snowballs at the moon,
        She said: “Sir, I’ve never had it.” But she spoke too bleedin’ soon.
        It’s the same the whole world over – it’s the poor wot gets the blame
        It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure – ain’t it all a bleedin’ shame?

        2. It was what the Late Harold Bridger called “working as if” i.e Working as if working properly but avoiding difficult decisions or hard work. Committees do it all the time…..

          Morning Mr. T

    3. Good Morning, Bill. I don’t know anything about the testing protocol but I can reveal verifiable HMG statistics about an emerging National Scandal. Just wait until Emily Mateless gets hold of this one.

      The latest Tory Government data reveal that Covid-19 Death Rates in more deprived areas are running as high as DOUBLE the rates elsewhere.
      *
      *
      *
      *
      *
      *
      *
      *
      *
      As of last night, there had been one Covid case in the MOSA where I live but two in Nagsmans MOSA.

      1. Morning Michael. Six cases in this deprived corner of the Surrey Hills…

        I suspect the presence of at least three care homes may be a factor.

        1. It’s wot they use…

          A Middle Layer Super Output Area is a geospatial statistical unit used in England and Wales to facilitate the reporting of small area statistics. They consist of contiguous Lower Layer Super Output Areas. They are part of the ONS coding system created by the Office for National Statistics. Wikipedia

          1. And what’s more they support a Lower Layer of Super Output data analysts…..

          2. I deal with LSOA codes in the data I have to submit to PHE each month. I would have recognised them if they had been called MSOAs

      3. One can prove all sorts of things by fiddling with the data shown below

        How many people have died of coronavirus in your area? Interactive map reveals fatalities by postcode – and reveals deaths are TWICE as high in poor areas of England and Wales
        *Most deprived areas suffered 55 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people compared to 25 in richest areas
        *Boroughs in London account for all of the top ten worst-hit local authorities, with Newham and Brent worst-hit
        *Hastings, in affluent East Sussex, and Norwich had lowest COVID-19 death rates with less than 10 per 100,000

        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8277273/Coronavirus-deaths-TWICE-high-poor-areas-England-Wales-Official-figures-show.html

    4. If you test +ve,
      a. You can get treated before your Sx worsen thus lessening the neet for hospital care
      b. You will be more conscious of the need to keep your distance from everyone
      c. People you have been in close contact with can be alerted and tested and repat steps a and b.

    5. They change the MSM’s approach from “You can’t even reach the target you set yourself, why should the public trust this government?” to “I don’t believe you’ve reached your target, the figures must be fiddled, you can’t trust this government”. Other than that, I have no idea Bill. (Good morning, btw.)

  30. Russian media claim new Armata tank was destroyed in Syria. 2020-05-02.

    According to The Reporter, the Armata tank was destroyed by a jihadist anti-tank missile during their counter-offensive in northwestern Syria this year.

    However, despite this claim by The Reporter, there has been no actual footage or photos of the allegedly destroyed Armata tank.

    Furthermore, the jihadist rebels lost a great deal of territory this year, and their only major counter-offensives took place in southwest Aleppo and southern and eastern Idlib.

    So the report of its demise was greatly exaggerated then!

    https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/russian-media-claim-new-armata-tank-was-destroyed-in-syria/

    1. 318796+ up ticks,
      Afternoon As,
      With treachery very much in vogue it could have been an inside job.

  31. As some of you may detect, I’m having something of a ‘Let’s give the Electoral Commission a good thumping’ day today.

    Remain’s Media-Blob complex
    How the Electoral Commission and the media nearly de-railed Brexit
    By David Scullion – 1 May 2020
    https://thecritic.co.uk/remains-media-blob-complex/

    Carole Cadwalladr, the Observer’s Orwell Prize winner, is well-known for her Beautiful-Mind-style diagrams linking together all the people she dislikes in politics. But she often neglects the most important connection for a journalist – a link to the truth.

    Over the last few years The Observer has had to publish a slew of corrections in response to stories written by Cadwalladr as she fired off endless missives attempting to prove the 2016 referendum was illegitimate. For example in July 2016 the paper admitted she was wrong to say that Vote Leave’s COO Victoria Woodcock had removed herself and others on a shared Google Drive which Cadwalladr said was an attempt to hide evidence of wrongdoing from the authorities.

    It is therefore unsurprising that she has failed to recognise the significance of the news that the Electoral Commission have admitted there was no evidence that Arron Banks and Liz Bilney, the CEO of Leave.EU had committed any criminal offences after the election regulator had referred them to the National Crime Agency.

    Cadwalladr is known for phoning people and angrily demanding answers but her error-laden diatribes meant lobby journalists quickly became sceptical of her claims. However, over the last few years much of the press often tamely accepted her conspiracy theories. In cynical and lazy pursuit of low-information #FBPE clickbait, as much as to do with any ideological affinity. Her reporting, along with the Electoral Commission’s behaviour, has often sparked a familiar pattern:

    *The Electoral Commission begin an investigation/ Cadwalladr accuses a pro-Brexit group of wrongdoing

    *Outlets like Channel 4 and the Guardian hype-up the accusations without any critical analysis of the motivations of the accuser

    *The accused are eventually exonerated

    *The final conclusions are barely reported if at all

    After the referendum, there were endless investigations as the Electoral Commission attempted to punish both Vote Leave and Leave.EU. When Vote Leave eventually went to court against the Electoral Commission, the regulator recruited the eye-wateringly expensive Sir James Eadie QC along with a host of other taxpayer funded Barristers in a partially successful attempt to force their opposition to fold, rather than risk paying the exorbitant court costs if they lost the case. It was a textbook case of the difference privately and publicly funded pockets can make.

    “The cards are stacked against those that they regulate” says Jon Moynihan, who was the Chairman of the Finance Committee of Vote Leave and a man who suffered years of investigation and battles with the Electoral Commission. He says the election regulator: “should clearly be abolished and a rigorous review should be made of internal discussions that led to these clearly inappropriate decisions.”

    Given licence by the trumped-up allegations made by the Electoral Commission, the media went to town on the story, linking the idea that the referendum was illegitimate to the clamour from the continuity Remain campaign who at the time were calling for a second referendum.

    In March 2018 Channel 4 produced a special programme where it was alleged Vote Leave ‘cheated’ in the referendum – a rehashing of old claims that they had directed another campaign, BeLeave, run by student Darren Grimes on how to spend money that Vote Leave had given them. Despite the Electoral Commission failing to turn up anything previously, the justification for a whole programme was based almost solely on the new testimony of Shahmir Sanni, a BeLeave activist-turned-whistleblower whose story on a number of occasions was proven to be inaccurate.

    The regulator had already launched two investigations into Darren Grimes and found nothing but the Sanni story quickly led to them launching another one, where they referred him to the police and fined him the maximum amount of £20,000. It was a lead item on all the news channels and Grimes was so inundated with media calls he had to stay at a friend’s house for a week. But in 2019, when he was totally cleared in the High Court of wrongdoing and the £20,000 fine was quashed, there was next to nothing in the UK media and no mention whatsoever on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, despite the fact that a BBC reporter had dutifully recorded his victory statement outside the High Court.

    The silence of the Today programme is significant because when the Commission concluded investigation number 3, almost the first time senior Vote Leave figures heard about it was when Claire Bassett, the then Chief Executive of the Electoral Commission, was being interviewed on Today. Vote Leave were offered a slot by Radio 4 to rebut the allegations but were completely blindsided by the news as the Electoral Commission had informed Vote Leave just minutes before Bassett began speaking. Hoping to win the air war, the EC ignored their regulatory requirement to give 48 hours notice before the media was informed.

    The press hype around Sanni had put the Electoral Commission under pressure to reopen their investigation and find against Grimes – a conclusion which the High Court later found was “wrong in fact and law”. But if there is still any doubt this Quango is easily lent on, consider how they approached the Brexit Party.

    Knowing they would be under intense scrutiny, Nigel Farage’s new outfit approached the regulator a week or so before the 2019 European Elections inviting them to take a look at the Brexit Party donations system. The EC said they were too busy but three days before a predicted Farage victory former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote to the Electoral Commission calling on it to examine whether the party has sufficient safeguards on its website to prevent the contribution of “dirty money”. This led to the Electoral Commission raiding Brexit Party HQ in full view of tipped-off TV crews which had the effect of tying up almost half of the staff on one of the final days of campaigning. (Funnily enough, when Brexit Party staff decided to film the raiding party as it happened, the Commission were furious.)

    In 2018 The Sunday Telegraph found that four of the Electoral Commission’s 10 commissioners, including the chairman, had made pronouncements on Brexit since the referendum – all of them backing Remain. With the Chairman saying that he “regret[ted] the result of the referendum”, and complained about “the panoply of Eurosceptic nonsense about the EU” heard during the campaign.

    Did Theresa May’s Government do anything about this curious version of impartiality? Of course not.

    In October 2018 the former CEO of the Electoral Commission Claire Bassett, who did so much to hound the victors of the referendum was successful in her application to be made the head of the new Trade Remedies Investigations Directorate, a body created to prevent unfair trade practices from foreign competitors in time for Britain’s expected exit from the EU’s Customs Union. Bassett has no known experience of trade policy, and her career in the civil service consists of leading three Quangos with no links to international commerce.

    But rewarding the wrong people with jobs hasn’t just happened on Theresa May’s watch. Simon Walker, Director General of the Institute of Directors and a major advocate of EU membership, was appointed ‘Chair-Designate’ of the same Quango in February 2020. Once the appropriate legislation is passed they will become the Trade Remedies Authority: “an arm’s length body”.

    As the House of Commons’ DCMS Committee piously calls for a regulator in response to its report on disinformation and ‘fake news’ it’s safe to conclude that arm’s length regulators who pursue their own agenda and the agenda of ‘the blob’ are not the solution to Britain’s problems. And Dominic Cummings, a man who suffered at the hands of the Electoral Commission, was targeted by the DCMS Committee, is the subject of perhaps a majority of the Brexit-Cadwalladr stories, and whose narrative of taking on ‘the blob’ in the department for Education has become a Tory myth – now finds himself in No.10. But so far the Blob, as Bassett’s progress exemplifies, have found themselves promoted rather than purged. Taking back control is evidently easier to say than it is to do.

    https://thecritic.co.uk/remains-media-blob-complex/

  32. Excellent article from The Salisbury Review:-

    Grooming Gangs: The Shameful Reality that Awaits after Covid-19

    30th April 2020 Jake Starke – Welch Blog 20

    When Sajid Javid commissioned a study on grooming gangs in 2018, many of us reclined back on our chairs and rejoiced – “finally!”. It felt like a stuffy prep school headmaster came in and shouted “f*ck it” during assembly. People not merely wanted but needed to understand the motivation behind these barbaric acts. But last week, Boris Johnson’s government deprived us of that knowledge.

    The Home Office responded to a petition calling for the release of the review: “Tackling child sexual abuse is this Government’s priority. Any insights gained from our internal work will inform our future action to end this devastating abuse, including forthcoming Strategy”. The keyword here is “internal”. In short, they have chosen not to release it.

    Jonathan Wong created the petition, which attracted over 120,000 signatures. Why it did not attract millions remains a mystery, given the severity and nature of the issue – perhaps online circulation withered. An identical change.org petition garnered 15,000 extra signatures.

    The Independent newspaper reported almost 19,000 child sexual exploitation victims last year. That was up from 3,300 five years before. Lancashire, Birmingham, Surrey and Bradford recorded the highest concentration of cases. Prevalence is not abating.

    If this scandal proved anything, it was that self-censorship because of racial sensitivity is a pervading disease that handicaps authorities from doing their job. Operation Linden exposed as much – hate speech purveyors were shown the extremity of their work. And how did our government react? They self-censored. Johnson’s election signalled a turning point in British politics. A new age where government is forthright, transparent, and bombastic – slightly Trumpian even, or so that’s what I thought.

    Governmental namby-pamby prose caked the response to Wong’s petition. “We continue to support…”, “we continue to look for ways…”, “we will continue to challenge…” and on and on it went. The only concrete promises came in the way of a £4 million increase for specialist local services dealing with victims of sexual violence and a doubling in funding for related charities.

    Refusing to release the review came at a convenient time. Only The Independent, Breitbart and The Spectator covered the news. Everybody else is too busy printing headlines about PPE. Or they dare not touch it.

    No one can stamp out sexual assault for good. There will always be a sick minority who commit sexual abuse. But what we require is transparent investigation to better prevent these crimes. Where the police fail, the community succeeds.

    With Rochdale, the motive related to race. Asian grooming gangs targeted young white girls. A survivor who goes by the pseudonym Ella Hill admitted there was a religious and a racial element to her targeting. This is not to villanise Asians and their religions. Most sexual abusers in the UK are white. But to understand the phenomenon, we must be free to speak, analyse and debate. And how can we do that if our government disables us from doing so?

    Until the government has the temerity to release the review, they will only lend credence to genuine racists motivated by what they see as a coverup. And what message does it send to the perpetrators? Not to mention, what message does it send to the victims who so bravely spoke out?

    One can only imagine the review is so damning that the Home Office can’t release it for fear of public outrage. If the government can’t trust us on this, what do they expect in return?

    https://www.salisburyreview.com/blog/grooming-gangs-the-shameful-reality-that-awaits-after-covid-19

    1. If they ever release the report, that will be proof that it has been fudged. They won’t dare face up to truths like systematic racist child rape. Also the level to which the wives of the perpetrators turned a blind eye and blame the child victims.
      Nobody ever asks about the role of the wives, but the crimes won’t stop while the wives despise white girls.

    2. Even this article about a timid and mendacious government office failing in its statutory duty pulls its punches. No up tick from me. The problem is Islam, a cult that was built around such behaviours. Ban me; I am old and the worse is yet to come after I am gone. But this behaviour and more like it is going to continue and dealing with its inherent offence to a long established open and democratic society will only grow to an even worse problem.

    3. By its concealment, we all now know what the report says. The actions of the government are no less than corrupt in protecting one particular element of society.

      1. 318796+ up ticks,
        Morning Kp,
        It does, in my book also extend to those who still support / vote
        for such parties.
        After the Jay report NOBODY
        should be in any doubt about
        supporting a mass uncontrolled immigration party.
        Self respect should play a big part in selecting a candidate
        prior to the kiss X.

    4. This scandal has been going on for decades, we know perfectly well who the perpetrators are and why they do what they do. It is not because they are ‘Asian’ (how many Sri Lankans, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese were involved?) It is not even because they are Pakistani, as there have been many other nationalities involved, both here and in Europe. The gangs are united almost exclusively by their Muslim faith. They are following the example of their ‘perfect man’ and the commands laid down in their holy book regarding the treatment of non-muslim women.

      Just because a truth is uncomfortable, it does not stop it from being the truth.

    5. “Most sexual abusers in the UK are white. “ Is this a “Get Out of Jail” card? If you say this does it make it OK to actually mention muslims?
      You don’t actually mention muslims though, do you Jake Starke? Your article is a namby-pamby excuse for journalism. More than that it is so wishy-washy, so wide of the target it is a lie.

      1. Something such journalists rely on people not understanding.

        Imagine a town with a population of of 100,000 people of which 90,000 are white and 10,000 are non-white.

        In this town 12 rapes are committed – in which 8 are committed by whites and 4 by non-whites.

        So the journalist can say that twice as many rapes are committed by whites as by non-whites.

        However it would be just as accurate to say that in percentage terms 8 out of 90,000 is rather less that 4 out of 10,000.

        8 out of 90,000 = 0.008%
        4 out of 10,000 = 0.04%

        Ergo: On the same figures non-whites are 5 times more likely to commit rape.

        Choose which conclusion you use from the same set of statistics!

    6. I am convinced that suppressing the report will do far more harm than good and stimulate ‘Islamophobia’ far more than eliminating it.

      This suppression, appeasement, favourable treatment and acceptance of Sharia practices such as halal slaughter of animals (with no objections from Animal Rights’ activists) is going to increase the pressure of the pus of fear building up within a great septic boil of resentment against Muslims.

      The longer the boil is unlanced the greater the explosion and the devastation when the boil finally bursts.

      Where is our knight in shining armour with a lance? I fear it is not going to be Boris.

  34. Al Jazeera have just shown some archive footage released by the North Korean government to show that what’s-his-face is still alive and there is no Covid-19 and no social distancing in North Korea. Thousands of people clapping for the NHS. As for Kim being brain dead, how can they tell?

    1. I thought the heavily mined DMZ between North and South Korea was a fairly effective form of Social distancing….

      1. I’m not sure, step on one, leap 100 feet into the air and scatter yourself over a large area?

    2. Kim jong un-dead looks stuffed and mounted to me. Like their dead Head-of-State, he can be paraded for years after death until decay sets in.

    3. Yo Sue

      Similar Claims

      Madonna is a virgin
      the cheque is in the post
      Of course I will love you in the morning
      No, you backside does not big inthose shorts
      Of course you can trust the NEWS on the BBC

    4. Quite, Our Susan. None of the chaps who write down everything Young Un says are wearing masks.

    1. A body double? I don’t believe it! Nobody else could have such a bad haircut.

          2. Is the one behind him carrying his white stick, ‘cos of blindness caused by onanism?

    5. Gosh; so the NK taxpayer has had to pay for the fattening up of a least four youngish men.

    1. Good morning D
      Our President has made a successful claim to our Council under the BUSINESS RATES GRANT-SCHEME 2A. We don’t pay business rates but that doesn’t matter. It’s to keep the club running and all associated costs. Worth a try.

      1. Indeed! We have applied for a grant of £10,000. Of course, we may not get it.

        1. That’s what we got and it’s in he bank. Fingers crossed for you.

  37. Morning everyone. Can any kind gardening Nottler tell me the name of the containers in which grass and hedge cuttings are deposited for rotting down? It’s for a short story I am writing and I need a place to deposit a body and the name of them I cannot for the life of me recall!

    3. Not a gardener but I believe they are known as composting bins or composters.

    4. I suspect that you’ll need something a bit larger than a compost bin.

        2. Morning AS – A chain saw – an idea from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Fargo series of films provides the log chipper as another method of sectioning a body for disposal. Is this a friend you’re asking on behalf of?

          2. AS – I have a box of various bones from a selection of individuals passed down from my grandfather and father who both wanted to be doctors. My grandfather had to give up when his dad went broke and my father was stopped by my mother when he returned from WW2. Understandably she said he should concentrate on getting to know his 2 sons. Both my father and his father ended up as headmasters. The skeleton box fortunately has an official label on its lid and I have a handwritten note of the contents. The bones will be about 120 years old, are varnished and in good nick. They originated from Edinburgh where the grave robbers were at work in the early 19th century.

        4. Do you want the body/bones to be found evenually?
          A large scale worm farm might meet the size specifications but the eventual extraction of the teeth and bones will be a problem.
          As Stephenroi notes, a pig sty might be a possibility, but you still have the teeth and bones to contend with.
          You could get some ideas from the FBI body farm

          https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/body-farm-20th-anniversary-032019

          1. A bath of Coca -Cola will dissolve teeth in a week (so I’m reliably informed by a friend who worked in a Lab and witnessed the experiment!)

          5. Thank you Sos. It’s a temporary measure. I intend the body to eventually provide nutrients for two apple trees!

        1. or

          Cannibalism has
          recently been both practiced and fiercely condemned in several wars,
          especially in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was still practiced in Papua New Guinea as of 2012, for cultural reasons and in ritual and in war in various Melanesian tribes.

          Edit: look around Lunnon, there are bound to be some cannibals, as it is ‘cultural’ thing, the law will let them carry on

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

          1. It does of course have a long history. Recent research suggests that it was common practice during the neolithic period and very probably further back than that!

          2. A mark of respect; the funeral guests were hoping to ingest the late one’s good qualities.
            It was also a good way of spreading transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE).
            Darwinism in action.

          3. Two cannibals eating a clown. One says “Does this taste funny to you?”

          4. Cannibal come back from a holiday without his legs. His friend said “What happened to you legs” He replied “I didn’t know it was self catering”

    8. Looking out of the window at ours, a corpse would have to be double jointed to fit in it.

    11. Just asking for a friend is all you had to say. I’m sure it was an accident.

      1. Sorry mola – I hadn’t noted your reply. I made a similar comment below added to some methods I have learnt from reading crime novels.

    12. For what it’s worth, one person heaving a dead adult body in one would take a lot of doing….

      1. Yes. They are much more difficult to move than are shown on TV or in Films!

  38. I had the misfortune to hear the beeboid “news” as I was doing the washing up.

    Some daft old bat from the National Turd was complaining. She said that, “…We lost half our annual income, literally overnight.”

    There is bollox and there is bollox – and that is particular aggravated (a word much loved by the Stasi who make our “laws”) bollox.

      1. Please amend as required

        The New Head Of The National Trust …………………………………… Makes An Idiot Of Him/Herself

    2. £1.300 million in reserves,the poorhouse is imminent poor luvvies
      Afternoon Willum

  42. A little girl was leaning into a lion’s cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the collar of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, all under the eyes of her screaming parents.

    A biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain, the lion jumps back, letting go of the girl, and the biker brings the girl to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.

    A BBC reporter, Laura Kuenssberg, has watched the whole event.

    Laura, addressing the Harley rider says, “Sir, this was the most gallant and bravest thing I’ve seen a man do in my whole life.”

    The Harley rider replies, “Why, it was nothing, really. The lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right.”

    Miss Kuenssberg “Well, I’ll make sure this won’t go unnoticed. I’m a BBC journalist, you know, and tomorrow’s news will run this story. So, what do you do for a living, and what political affiliation do you have?”

    The biker replies “I’m a British Army veteran, a Conservative and I voted for Brexit”. The journalist leaves.

    The following morning the biker turns on BBC News to see if it indeed brings news of his actions.

    BBC Headline: RIGHT WING UK VETERAN ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT & STEALS HIS LUNCH.

    And THAT pretty much sums up the BBC’s approach to the news these days.

    1. You Grizzle

      Phonetically Kuenssberg has an interesting name…

      Kuenss….

      Person of colour, allegedly

      Berg

      Berg Name Meaning.German or Dutch: topographic name for someone who lived on or by a hill or mountain, from Middle High German berc. This name is widespread throughout central and eastern Europe. Scandinavian: habitational name for someone who lived at a farmstead named with Old Norse bjarg ‘mountain’, ‘hill’.

      I am sure we can come up with some good (legal) description of her

      2. Are you suggesting that she ought to be referred to as The Black Mountain? Fan Brycheiniog is the highest in the range (in Powys)

    2. Timing!!!!
      MB turned on the telly to watch the news. I have seriously had enough, so I decamped to another room, opened up the laptop – et voila – your post.
      Ta ever so, Grizz. Copied and posted to like minded bolshie b’stards.

  43. Arts fight for survival
    “[…]
    Music and the arts help to define the kind of society we are. If we want them to survive this emergency, an urgent sector-specific package of financial support – similar to the €50  billion programme in Germany – is desperately needed. Without significant intervention of this sort, the cultural sector may be irreparably damaged by the time this crisis is over.”

    Take a look at the names under this letter. I’m sure if they are so concerned, 10% from each of them would help a lot of the people they’re worried about.

    1. Yo BSK

      Music and the arts help to define the kind of society we are.

      No you left wing luvvies are trying to make our society as you want it to be

      If all do not agree with you, they are liable to be denied membership of Equity, ask Laurence Fox

      I doubt if any of them stray from the Islington line of thought

  44. Morning all. 😊
    With reference to todays title.
    True, but it might be helpful to lockdown ex and still standing MPs over the age. And keep them out of harms way.

    1. 318795+ up ticks,
      Morning Re,
      I do believe lockup the 650 for services
      rendered, especially since the 24/6/2016 would be more apt.

      1. Yeah but those greedy bastards were trying to get 325 a day for staying at home.

  45. Today, my surviving brother is 87. He lives in Totnes on his own. His children cannot visit him. He is hoping to have a Zoom with them this morning.

    He is an honorary NoTTLer – as he believes this whole farrago is blown up out of all proportions.

    2. Similar to my mother in law whose a similar age. She cannot go out for three months,
      and getting very fed up, has reasonably active life in Bath usually. She doesn’t have a computer etc..
      or internet access and regrets that. She sleeps a lot instead to make the days go quicker.

      1. Thanks, Phil.

        He is also very deaf. When I phoned him and began by wishing him many happy returns, his reply was, “What’s that you are saying?”…{:¬))

    4. That is why he has reached 87. The bloodyminded shall inherit the Earth – though possibly not in conformist, timid C21 Blighty.
      Morning, Willum.

      1. Good day to you, young lady. I see your namesake has been banging away BTL on the DT letters.

  46. From Charles Williams’ diary entry for the 1st of May:

    “Touching base with other members of the Great Gardens of Cornwall we
    think it unlikely that any gardens as such will be open much before
    July. The National Trust and those estate businesses with large
    parklands may be able to do something sooner and are planning as such.
    We would normally close the gardens and house on 20th June as we have
    done since 1992. The reasoning for this is that we are a spring garden
    with nothing much in flower after that.
    More importantly, it takes three months for the team to cut the grass
    (or trash as we call it) over 140 acres. Until this is done the
    woodland garden looks pretty unkempt. I suppose we could charge very
    little for a woodland walk but gearing up all the staff, labels etc for a
    week or two seems scarcely worth the effort and would have minimal
    impact on the revenues already lost. Once the beach is open again and
    the cliff walks that is more what families will want. With no tearoom or
    shop either due to social distancing and continuing restrictions on
    catering outlets is there any point? Even if ‘woodland walks’ are to be
    allowed soon.
    We are left with two years marketing costs for our spring season and
    only one year of income. So the undistributed garden leaflets and the
    Great Garden ones can be kept for 2021 to save the large printing and
    distribution costs. PR and social media stuff is on hold probably to
    Christmas and the marketing team will probably have to stay on furlough
    until the end of June while we decide on future revised business plans.
    The holiday lets and The Vean may eventually grab some summer bookings
    but our spring house and garden visitors are gone for this year.
    Guidance from English Heritage says that we should try to catch up
    with the opening days lost ‘if possible’ under our heritage scheme. It
    is not ‘possible’ to ask the plants to flower again before next spring
    so I guess that counts as ‘not possible’! How can you socially distance a
    house tour of 15 to 20 people anyway?”

    http://thediary.caerhays.co.uk/may/1st-may/

      3. That’s what Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Harvey Wallbanger and the like do for sexual kicks.
        Isn’t it?

    2. It really isn’t a problem because I seem to recall Cornwall has put out a strong message of “Keep Out!”

  47. Fine BTL comment:

    Paul Richmond
    2 May 2020 1:55PM
    That’s ironic. These islands seemed less grey and miserable when Emma Thompson went to Venice.

  50. “The French government has announced plans to extend national emergency measures until 24 July.”

    Flying the Yellow Duster until the end of July. M.Macron will be delighted that the yellow vests won’t be flying. Doesn’t the whole of France go on holiday in August?

      1. It is not quite as bad as it looks.

        By extending the “state of emergency” until 24 July, the government has simply made provision to be able to reintroduce “confinement” and “attestations” should there be a third wave.

        The step-by-step “déconfinement” according to the calendar set out by Edouard Philippe last week continues. But can be stopped and reversed by virtue of the powers being extended.

        1. One hopes so, but honestly, when have you ever seen powers once obtained being rescinded willingly?

  51. Quote of the day on Guido

    Ricky Gervais on celebrity virtue signalling during Coronavirus:

    “I think that people are just a bit tired of being lectured to. Now celebrities think: “The general public needs to see my face. They can’t get to the cinema — I need to do something.” And it’s when you look into their eyes, you know that, even if they’re doing something good, they’re sort of thinking, “I could weep at what a good person I am.”

    1. I’m beginning to worry.

      These last couple of weeks that’s two things that Ricky Gervais has said that appeal to me.

      1. He called out the great and the good at the awards ceremony recently. He’s very outspoken against animal abuse as well.

      3. Check out After Life on Netflix – RG’s work, very good. Second series just arrived.

  52. 318796+ up ticks,
    The real reason I do believe is it might give the wrong impression and scare off the daily “good ship welfare”
    boarding parties.

    breitbart,
    UK Border Officials Ordered Not to Routinely Wear Masks.

    1. I actually envy a friend who’s a border control officer. Lockdown has had zero impact on her life. The only disappointment for her this year will be the almost inevitable cancellation of the BBC Proms.

  53. I once met a woman who told me she was “a free-thinker who leans to the Left.”

    I advised her to choose between the two since it’s impossible to be both.

    [With hindsight I ought to have advised her to build up the sole on her left shoe!]

    1. Reflecting on it, anybody I know who would describe themselves using the term ‘free-thinker’ is anything but.

      They have a ‘correct’ view of the world from which no deviation is permitted.

      It’s a bit like ‘Liberal Democrat’, a term which means the opposite to what it says.

      2. A person in this road who (with her husband) are known as the most selfish people you could meet, once described herself on introducing herself to me at a party (some 25 years ago) as “a green, feminist, Conservative”. “Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction in terms?” I asked.

  54. Johnson is a great admirer of Churchill.

    What would Churchill say about selling out and buying a railway from the Chinese ?

    Maybe “if we can’t build our own railway, we deserve to walk”.

    1. It’s only at talks stage but if they can shave 15 years off the completion date then we’ll save at least 15 years of labour costs. The chinese aren’t stupid, they know to play the Tories all they need offer is some sort of value for money to undercut competitors. The big question is why will we take 20 years to build something the Chinese can do in 5?

      1. Because if the Chinese don’t get the contract then our workforce is liable to catch a few more viruses and badly delay the opening.

        Same goes with building nuclear power stations.

      2. Because if the Chinese don’t get the contract then our workforce is liable to catch more viruses and badly delay the opening.

        Same could happen with building nuclear power stations.

        Give the Chinese the contract…after all, we don’t want another virus.

        1. We can’t build nuclear power stations so we had to call in outside help for that, however we can build railways, that’s something we’ve always managed to be able to do, but I have wondered for a long time why it was taking so long to build. The Chinese certainly have the skills, they have built a lot of high speed railway lately and these projects haven’t taken 25 to 30 years from first talks to first train running.
          I’m thinking few jobs for the boys in their 40’s and 50’s trying to stretch them out sucking on the teat of government money until the youngest make pensionable age, then retire on fat pensions and so what if building it took 25 years.

  55. Let those that want to hide away do so and let the rest go free.

  56. A lady dies and goes to heaven. She arrives at the pearly gates and is greeted by Saint Peter.

    There are a few people waiting, so she strikes up a conversation with him

    Just then, she hears a blood-curdling scream!
    “What was that?” she asks.

    “Oh, don’t worry about that,” says Saint Peter, “It’s just someone getting a hole drilled in their head so they can be fitted for their halo.”

    A few seconds later, she hears another agonised scream, even more terrible than the one before.
    “What was that?!” she asked anxiously.

    “Oh, don’t worry,” says Saint Peter soothingly, “It’s just someone getting holes drilled in their back
    so they can be fitted for their wings.”

    The lady starts to back away.

    “Where are you going?” asks Saint Peter.

    “I think I’ll go downstairs, if it’s all the same to you,” says the lady.

    “But you can’t go there,” says the saint, “You’ll be raped and sodomised!”

    “It’s OK,” says the lady, “I’ve already got the holes for that.”

  57. Apparently a poll has shown that a substantial majority of those asked (in the UK) are “worried about lockdown being lifted”.

    Considering the press, television and radio – and government ministers and their advisers – have been telling the country that we are all going to die very shortly,
    such an outcome is hardly surprising.

    And, of course, said meeja will report the findings – thus making more people even more anxious.

    1. Judging by the increase in road traffic, the number of people in shops and the fact that I see a lot more people out and about, I would say that the poll results are a load of hooey.

        1. I remember at the time that Cameron was proposing to steamroller same-sex marriage through Parliament that Yougov produced a poll which said that most Britons were in favour of it. I didn’t believe it then, and it made me deeply suspicious of subsequent Yougov polls.

          1. I agree. It used to be run by the far-leftoid Peter Kellner (married to the woman who almost caused WW3 single-handed).

            Trouble is, the meeja wll seize on these bogus results and hawk them.

        2. I would love to know the definition of British ie

          Age
          Ethnicity
          religion
          Where they live
          Any Political affiliations
          Gender (if any)
          Can they speak English

    3. Are you sure it wasn’t a Pole, just one person stirring things?

    4. And they will pick very carefully both the question and who they ask; then screen out anyone who dares to say it’s a load of bollards.

  58. Belated ‘Morning All

    Reports from the Covid Wars,Sheltered Housing Front

    Earlier this week members of the Awkward Squad had the temerity to sit around a table in the sun(social distancing observed) drinking a couple of beers and checking we had not totally lost the art of conversation with some pithy political comments and the odd joke.There may have been laughter involved.I provided the extra comedy element when the canvas chair I was sitting on disintergrated at the seams unceremoniously dumping me to the gravel(only minor wounds received)

    Reports to our Court Manager by the Curtain Twitching Platoon have turned this event into a wild drunken party that somehow endangered the whole court……………..

    I am now told there will be “Meetings” (without coffee??) on Monday,this being in these trying times the only day the Court Manager actually shows up for work

    In a delicious irony these meetings will be in the Court communual lounge which has been closed for weeks “For the safety of the residents”

    Cry?? I nearly Laffed

    https://scontent-yyz1-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/c0.36.589.589a/93920780_2018796234924033_8487757756800455955_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent-yyz1-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=109&_nc_ohc=TGk0NVaGvisAX_bnIHX&oh=440ff1bd9b05e65388ee0c26c1dd6c1e&oe=5ED501DB

  59. A very unfortunate graph for the excess deaths brigade using deaths per 1,000 population.
    https://www.statista.com/statistics/281478/death-rate-united-kingdom-uk/

    A few things to note.

    Death rates had been steadily falling and only started to move up at the beginning of the 5 year period the doomsters like to quote.
    The population since the year 2,000 has probably increased by ~10 million
    The number of very elderly people 82+ (chosen because that’s 2020 average life expectancy) has probably risen substantially since 2,000.
    Without crunching the numbers I would suggest that the so-called excess death figure is almost entirely down to population movements and life expectancy becoming static rather than CV and that all that is happening is that the numbers are getting back into synch. CV is a distraction.

    We are being bamboozled and lied to.

    1. Thank you. The only statistics that really count – overall death rate. Which box they tick is meaningless.

      1. When I observe people aged 100 being put into the stats as CV I know it has become meaningless.

        In reality, how long can a person of 100 expect to live if they catch anything remotely nasty?

    2. We went for a walk earlier and saw an elderly neighbour who lives a few doors down from us.
      He’s 87, fit as a fiddle and hasn’t been out for 5 weeks because he’s been told so by the government. His wife died last year and his daughter lives nearby. She also told him he mustn’t go out. She’s and asthmatic and is isolated but waves to home from her car. I suggested he should go for a walk, similar to the one we do, which is about a mile around the 2 roads where we live. I asked him the last time he saw a policeman and, like us, he couldn’t remember. We said if he wanted a chat come and knock on our door and we can stand and have a chat to brighten his day. He’s a really great old boy full of vim and vigour. I hope he comes to see us.

      1. I hope so too, for his sake.

        M i L is 94, she goes out regularly on the basis of “to Hell with it” I need the exercise.

        Walks to and from the shops. Her greatest danger would be a fall and if she doesn’t keep exercising the probability of that happening will increase substatially.

        Any policeman who told her she couldn’t would get very short shrift

    1. “Scary propaganda has proved so successful that most Britons are now too frightened to leave their homes, either with or without a lockdown, an academic has warned.”
      I don’t believe that’s truly the case. Lots of propaganda but surely most people realise it’s not as deadly as early apocalyptic scares.

      1. Those with a propensity to fear – snowflakes, for example – will be fearful.

        Those who have lived a bit and seen life and its ups and downs will be like NoTTLers. Think it is all a catastrophic over-reaction.

      2. Another bloody academic. Brother of Neil a Ferguson? Couldn’t get a proper job.

  61. Wanted someone with a tall ladder and strong arms, to scrape me off the livingroom (only Islingtonistas have Lounges) ceiling

    A .strange car has been parked out side my house for a couple of days, my neighbour thought we had visitor, I thought he had: neither knew the driver

    He had a look around the car and checked on a phone app and found it was not taxed

    I phoned 101, after much toinfgand froing, the police cannot give me ownership details and cannot contact the ‘owner’ by phone

    The disposal of the car is now down to me to pay for.

    Now, if I stood next to by neighbour to speak to him, the whole of West Mercia police would be there.

    Still I could ask them if the caught my shed robber yet

    and they want our support. I wuld not pee on one if he/she were on fire

        1. Well if the functionaires are still at work they should come along and clamp it and then in about 28 days it will be taken away

      1. I will contact them again on Monday and demand to speakto Perlice man

        They must have the address of the last person to tax it

          1. We had a similar problem with an abandoned car on our lane. Plod stuck a “Police aware” notice on it and the council didn’t want to know, as it is an access only lane. For the next week it was vandalised on a daily/nightly basis and the council continued to ignore my phone calls as it “wasn’t their problem”.That was until I told them that the car might find it’s way onto the main road and then it would be their problem! Speedy removal of vehicle followed!

          5. I don’t think Monday is a Bank Holiday, they shifted it to Friday for the VE Day Commemorations.

          7. Checked online and Monday 25 May does appear to be still in the calendar as a national holiday.

    2. Looks scrumptious. Save a bit for us and we’ll be round for a cuppa. 😂

      1. How far from South Hampshire are you? I would consider it an essential journey.

        1. Woking. A bit far unless you’re passing through Woking on a fast train and you can throw to me as you pass. }:^))

          2. Nearly caught it but thankfully I had my mouth open and a got the taste.

    3. Son sent us a cartoon – can’t wait for the pub to open so that I can cut down my drinking.

      Sorry – meant as reply to Phizzee!

    4. Looks wonderful. I have just bought a tatin pan but I think it’s too big – I got a 28 cm size instead of 22 cms. We will be eating it forever.

      1. Thank you.

        That does sound a bit large. With all the caramel it would be difficult to get through.

    5. Drool …..
      Just made creme anglais so I can play with my new ice cream maker tomorrow.
      I’m a nervous wreck, because it’s so easy to end up with sweet scrambled egg.

          1. ******Throws a lifeline to Sos so he can drag himself out of the sewer.

      1. Possibly but I haven’t seen any. There are some parts, like the Kyoto Garden, that are closed.

        1. There was a colony of very noisy green parakeets at the Ken. High St. end last time I was there. Maybe they’ve been ‘moved on’.

      1. I really don’t know. Even though I live close by, I never used to be such a regular visitor but I’ve begun to like the place so much that I’ll keep going and report back!

        1. Good for your peace and mind. You can always go to the pub later…oh no !

    1. Hammer that delete button.
      If item unasked for or I don’t recognise it, it goes into trash and then is wiped completely

    2. Normally, a load of links that lead you past various advertising. What you have actually won (in the small print) is a carriage clock, just send £40 for postage.

    3. Disqus isn’t letting me post screenshots: Virgin Media : has a page How to deal with fraudulent Surveys. However, the site requires you to accept their cookies.

    4. A good friend of mine who ran the bookshop at the school in which I used to teach ordered books for the pupils. He used to tease one boy saying that he had ordered the Pop-Up edition of the Kama Sutra for him.

  65. 318796+ up ticks,
    Have we lost the race in public broadcasting the
    “howling” to the germans ?

    breitbart,
    Merkel’s Party Backs Public Islamic Prayer Broadcasts During Ramadan

      1. 318796+ up ticks,
        S,
        Thin end entering, it will be on the lab/lib/con coalition menu, shortly if not already.
        They’ll swear by it only being temp.

      1. 318796+ up ticks,
        Afternoon As,
        Self inflicted, what is worse is the legacy they are leaving.

  68. Trees & fence dealt with. Chains taken off the tractor, snowblower put away. Scaffolding up the south side of the house, ready for external painting. Firstborns big fuckoff bike out & warmed up ready for the season. Blackberries wrangled, thorns removed from hands, time for a shot of today’s shine. It’s about 60-65%, so pretty good for the first run.
    Time to enjoy a barbie, but nextdoor farmer has sprayer cowpoo all sekund. SWMBO doesn’t like the smell, so no barbie atter all 😢

  69. Question is there any difference between Common Purpose and Common Prostitutes. Which of their respective adherents behave more ethically? Discuss..

    1. I’ve just read that. What a load of hysterical wimps the Brits have become.

    2. I turned 17 in late 1968. This ‘Asian’ or ‘Hong Kong’ flu barely registered on my consciousness. I can’t remember being aware of anyone catching it.

      1. And the population of the United Kingdom was 55 million.

        My maffs skills do not permit me to calculate deaths per million. But I know that someone else here will do it in a trice.

        Then compare with today’s scare-mongering numbers.

      2. MB was training at that time. He remembers a rather full morgue at the hospital, but that was the first time we’d noticed a flu outbreak.

    1. Seems like we are following a scorched earth policy when it comes to the Economy……

      1. I think we’re giving the snowflake kids something real to cry about.

  72. Alex Salmond ‘helps British arm of Russia Today increase turnover by £15million’ with his controversial talk show on Kremlin-backed channel. 2 May 2020.

    Alex Salmond helped to boost the profits of ‘Kremlin TV’ station RT with his controversial talk show, the channel’s accounts suggest.

    The former Scottish First Minister was widely criticised for taking a job with Vladimir Putin’s ‘propaganda’ channel, formerly known as Russia Today, on its English-language service.

    Newly-released accounts show that turnover at the station’s British arm soared by 51 per cent to £15million.

    Well I’m not Scots but I have to say this strikes me as unlikely. Paint drying sounds pretty exciting in comparison.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8279249/Alex-Salmond-helps-British-arm-Russia-Today-increase-turnover-15million.html

    1. I should imagine that the credit for RT’s growth should go to the BBC in the light of the pap it produces…

    2. RT is a damn sight more objective on European matters than our own press. I would not go to it for info on Russia.
      Sputnik is pretty good too.
      I am no fan of Salmond but he was wrongly persecuted by a corrupt establishment and I am glad he has landed on his feet. It shows that others can also stand up for themselves and survive instead of being so craven.

  73. I am off for a well earned drink. I had to water the greenhouse plants. That’s worth a glass or three.

    I’ll join you tomorrow should I be spared. Have a jolly evening.

    1. Dear Bill

      Thank you for your Night Nurse tip . Conked me out completely . I had an undisturbed night sleep .. first time for months .

      1. Glad of that, Mags.

        When I was young, I liked to take a nurse to bed with me…{:¬))

      2. Oh, tell me more….. Is this if you have a virusy ‘cold’, or to knock you out if you can’t sleep? Asking for a friend, of course, Belle! What I would give to sleep as a babe…. or even as I did when I was thirty or forty something and not to wake up instantly worrying about something. The friend would love to know.

        1. I had a bottle in the cupboard , and although cross fingers I am okay , I had a spoonful last night , just to knock me out . Please be careful. I shouldn’t have done it because I am on b/p medication , but I did . Slept like a baby.

          May have been a one off, I don’t know, felt abit groggy untill about 10am .

          I have been sleeping so badly recently , nightmares etc and a horrid mattress that Moh loves .. it was new 3 years ago, memory foam , I hate it , and what with this Covid nightmare and other things , I just needed to relax and sleep .

          Just be careful and be safe okay.

          1. Thank you for the reply, Belle. I will be careful. I am not on any medication. Sometimes one is just desperate for a good night’s sleep, either a) to get off to sleep in the first place or b) not to keep waking up throughout the night or c) getting to 4.00 am and simply not going back to sleep and feeling like a limp rag throughout the next day. A friend asked me if worrying about Covid-19 interfered with my sleep and I replied “not half as much as worrying about being 73 and my days being numbered!”

            Do not worry, I would not take it every night, nor even once a week. Just sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures.

  74. Latest fiction book about pandemics is by Lawrence Wright. – End of October.

    An interview with him was on the radio this week. When asked about how his book is so prescient, his response was that all he had done was talk to a number of the Centre For Disease Control people about their plans for any pandemic, then added a story to their plans.

    Now that is scary, this pandemic has basically followed the plan and still governments were not able to react effectively. Who knows what it would be like if the virus was really different.

    1. I guess part of it is not being able to predict exactly what kind of equipment would be needed. But you’d think that PPE would be the first requirement for any pandemic.
      All these Blairite gravy-train passengers finally exposed – but I bet none of them will get sacked.

  75. I approve of names being kept in the family which is why I applaud Boris Johnson’s and Carrie Symond’s choice of names for their son. Apparently the couples had grandfathers were called Wilfred on Boris’s side and Lawrtie of Carrie’s..

    Our first son is Christopher (my father’s name) Lourens (Caroline’s father’s name)

    Our second son is Henry (My paternal grandfather’s name) Pieter (Caroline’s maternal grandfather’s name)

    Had we had a girl she would have been named after my paternal grandmother – Emily Alice – and Caroline’s favourite aunt, Tante Alice..

    1. One of my given names is Anders … I’ve no idea why. But I guess that is why I had Viking’s finger!

      2. Maybe the Scandinavian humourous equivalent of Donald? Donald Duck in Scandi is Anders And… :o) Anders is quite a usual name in Denmark, by the way.

        That said, there is to my knowledge a real person with the surname McDonald Duck (I’m not sure whether it’s hyphenated or not).

        1. Morning Lass.

          You must think that I’m quackers, so I’ll duck out of that discussion.

    2. There’s been an Alexander in my family since God knows when. My Father, brother, Firstborn.
      Interestingly, we me a Kiwi in Norway some years ago who came from the same clan way back when the Clan divided and scattered, his brandy going to NZ, mine to West Hartlepool. His family have followed the same tradition of an Alexander in every generation.

    1. I would take issue with some of those statements, unless “compliance” has made private ownership impossible.

      Most UK care homes are owned, or backed, by hedge funds.

      Some care home operators making up to £1.5 billion a year.

      I would like to see chapter and verse on those claims.

      I would agree that the larger firms should be looking to their own PPE

      But, for the privately owned, given they are a small business, how would fiona phillips respond if they furloughed their staff and told the state to sort it all out?

      For that matter how would she feel if big business said sod it, we’ll cut our losses and hand the whole lot over to the NHS?

        1. Not necessarily right, but the sweeping statement “most” makes me doubtful.

        1. I was thinking just the other day after lockdown when the pubs finally open nobody will be wanting to get the first round in

  80. Latest breaking News, – Experts have noticed that the fertility rate for women has dropped dramatically under lockdown, they are saying that it has something to do with their furloughedpian tubes

      1. I think you will find that only half of them are ‘fellas’. Most of the other half are dames.

        Those remaining are confused! :•)

        1. Two sperms are swimming madly en route to the egg.

          Sperm 1: “How much further, I’m knackered already?”

          Sperm 2: “Oh, we’ve still got a long way to go yet; we’ve only just passed the tonsils!”

  81. Good night all.

    Last night I started a comedy novel in German about 2 old biddies (sisters) who’ve been at each other’s throats in a genteel way since childhood. If it were made into a film, Maggie Smith would be excellent as one of them. Very funny.

  82. Have just come across this:
    https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/21/the-anti-lockdown-strategy/
    Dr.Malcolm Kendrick: the anti-lockdown strategy.

    21st April 2020

    Unfortunately, it seems that COVID-19 has infected everyone involved in healthcare management and turned their brains into useless mush.

    Lockdown has two main purposes. One, to limit the spread of the virus. Two, and most important, to protect the elderly and infirm from infection – as these are the people most likely to become very ill, end up in hospital, and often die. [In my view, if we had any sense, we would lockdown/protect the elderly, and let everyone else get on with their lives].

    However, the hospitals themselves have another policy. Which is to discharge the elderly unwell patients with COVID directly back into the community, and care homes. Where they can spread the virus widely amongst the most vulnerable.
    This, believe it or not, is NHS policy. Still.

    Perhaps if anyone here is scolded by a neighbour for not joining in the NHS worship every Thursday, you can refer them to this article, and the link to the NHS policy that’s in the article.

      1. https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3886452-The-hospital-I-work-in-is-so-quiet?pg=1&fbclid=IwAR0XWKdyXRodWuf7QrXWVf7-XH8tb9BZG9oZmakv4caL_GjD76-R03oAFcs

        On Mumsnet:
        “I can only speak for my hospital but colleagues in London all saying the same. It feels like a massive overreaction. I’m sure we’ll get other waves of infection but if testing and tracing ramped up and the elderly to social distance until treatment agreed (if not a vaccine) then we should be able to get people back to a sense of normality now really. If we get quick turnaround testing we can work towards covid positive / covid negative hospitals.”

        “Same. Our patients are being denied their regular treatments and interventions so we can all twiddle our thumbs and wait confused”

        20/04/2020 21:08missyB1

        Dh (hospital consultant) is saying the same about where he works – it’s driving him mad! Empty wards, lots of staff, and so many important procedures /operations / treatments cancelled. God knows how they are ever going to catch up!”

        1. In answer to missyB1; how will they catch up? Easy, they’ll blame the government.

        2. How they will catch up? They may find half the patients have died from lack of treatment when this is all over.

    2. If it wasn’t true it might be the sickest of all the jokes that come out of this crisis.

    3. Exactly what happened to my fried who I’ve written on here a few times. He’s home now because, despite trying get him infected, his body refused despite having severe underlying medical problems.

    4. This again has its roots with the multitasking editor of the London Evening Standard.

      When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he made the decision (that has not been reversed by any of his three successors) to terminate the grant to local authorities from central taxation which fund the social care costs burdened on the councils by national legislation.

      As a result, the councils defend their budgets by sending the expensive geriatrics into the hospitals, where their costs are met by the centrally-funded NHS. In retaliation, the Department of Health have been provided with extra money specifically to free up the hospital beds by sending these demented geriatrics back to the care homes, where they are funded by the councils, who must cut all their other services to pay for it.

      I condemn George Osborne for the callous way he violated one essential democratic principle – that taxation, legislation and representation should be matched. It is not right that legislation, for which there is one mechanism for representation should be funded by the budgets of those represented by elected representations who have no responsibility for the legislation they must administer. I continue to condemn Philip Hammond, Savid Javid and Rishi Sunak for not doing anything about this.

      Ultimately, it goes back to Chris Patten’s “Double Whammy” campaign during the 1992 General Election, at which I withheld my vote (the only other time I have felt unable to support any of options open to me was in 2019). John Smith, the Opposition Shadow Chancellor (who went on to become Leader until he died), promoted a policy, long held by the Liberal Democrats, of a modest rise in Income Tax to pay for essential public services, rather than the rather deceitful but popular policy of borrowing from the magic fairy, or simply passing the cost onto numpties unable to defend themselves, such as the councils. Labour lost the election, and no party since has felt able to put up Income Tax to pay for public services.

    2. How it was was indeed wonderful.

      These days, less so, but with better fridges and other electrical goods.

    1. 2018/19 is a bad choice. It only covers part of the period, so only a partial figure, but your point about the age of the victims stands.

    2. Is the government focussing on these figures? Clearly if you don’t test that many folk to establish the presence of the disease and inflate the number of deaths by including anyone with Covid like symptoms (but not actually tested) then you may well find one’s country at the top of the Popping Order. I hope this isn’t being deliberately manipulated to delay our final departure from the EU….

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/df5af95d6fa058631c998862a39ffc91bc27dd066e2b9c2449695d7658540982.png

  87. I have just been reading an article in the NewYorker magazine where a doctor is writing about the number of non white covid19 patients. His big observation is that most of his patients nowadays are lower paid bus drivers, cooks, cleaners and so on, either classified as essential or working poor who cannot afford not to work.

    Surprise, surprise these are your black and Asian people, the affluent whitey is working from home or laid off.

    Could it be that the latest reports on CV19 being racist are not true, just a reflection of how society works.

    https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/the-essential-workers-filling-new-yorks-coronavirus-wards

  88. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/da30c36ca4947ee29e8ee9960cef2003a282092569d153f093991127fe5aeb16.png

    Bet you anything if the UK develops a vaccine and saves the world our media will still call us pricks every day
    This is how it’ll play out if we make the vaccine

    *Hancock calls briefing, says we’ve created world-saving vaccine*

    BBC: Will you apologise for not creating it sooner?

    ITV: Isn’t it true that it contains dead kittens?

    C4: Why didn’t you join an EU vaccination scheme?

    Sky: You said creating a vaccine would be difficult, do you now accept that you weren’t telling the truth?

    Buzzfeed: 37 reasons why the UK is still a shit country

    Independent: Isn’t it true that austerity stopped the vaccine being made sooner?

    Guardian: Vaccines are racist

    Then 12 days later, in what he thinks is a massive scoop, @Peston will tweet that his well-placed sources have informed him that a vaccine may be close

    1. Trump: China stole US vaccine.

      And from PP
      Gates foundation connived with Soros to make billions by moving production offshore.

      1. Not really.
        Trump promotes new vaccine.
        Media: It’s ineffective. He’s making gazillions out of it. He released the virus in the first place. Couple made their own vaccine and husband dies. Wife “don’t listen to Trump. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” (State police investigate Democrat-activist wife for possible homicide)…

        1. We’re here, although I ain’t got much to contribute…..
          “What’s new?”, they all chorused!

  91. Had a lovely chat with daughter and her beau earlier by some app thing on the missus’ phone. He’s an ambulance driver and medic, and says things have got a lot quieter. She reassures people on the phone, working from home now, that it’s not the end of the world.
    ‘Night all.

  92. Wilfred!
    They must have seen my suggestion on here two days ago 🙂

          3. We are indeed. Our WV Gov. has relaxed our orders a little from Monday, us oldies are still suggested to stay at home, wherever possible, but more is opening up as in more supermarkets are opening earlier, just for the seniors along with the healthcare people.
            Overall, we are doing fine, just miss seeing the kids and grandkids!

          4. Quite! Daughter’s birthday tomorrow: no hugs, no contact – will be tough. Only had virtual stuff for Lily’s 21st too.

  93. I have been watching a recording (from TV) of Hornblower: The Examination for Lieutenant

    At the start of it Woolfie/Captain Pellew says

    I can see the day when the whole of Europe hates us

    A bit Late Hornblower had to isolate himself and his crew and the ship, as they encountered a place with The Plague

    Nowt has changed, has it

    1. That’s a good series, even though I don’t rate the books nearly as highly as P O’Brian’s ones.

      1. I have all of O’Brian;s books, basically free, from buying 10,000+ Kindle books for £5.00 fromebay

          3. Just go into ebay

            Think what author you want and make ebay work for you

            I got 19 Jack Reachers, for about £2.00

            Use “e books for Kindle”

            and then say what you are looking for.

          4. It’s a great tip, OLT and one I hadn’t known of before. Ta muchly.

          5. I have about 50,000 books for £20.00

            If they are on Disc, friends can download them too

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