Saturday 20 June: The lockdown is turning back the clock on women’s lives in Britain

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/2020/06/19/lettersthe-lockdown-turning-back-clock-womens-lives-britain/

747 thoughts on “Saturday 20 June: The lockdown is turning back the clock on women’s lives in Britain”

  1. The US and China are entering a new cold war. Where does that leave the rest of us? Sat 20 Jun 2020 06.00 BS

    The first cold war lasted more than 40 years. The People’s Republic of China has huge strengths, including sheer scale, national pride, evolutionary innovation, an entrepreneurial society and a Leninist party that has systematically learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union so as to avoid the same fate. This will be a long haul.

    Morning evryone. The first Cold War was waged by Democratic Free Societies ranged against a Totalatarian Dictatorship. This one will be more a struggle between equals. The West having largely abandoned the beliefs and principles it held during the latter half of the twentieth century, its resemblance to China is now greater that its differences.

    One suspects that the UK and Europe which are in the process of Economic and Social Dissolution will play little part in these hostilities. It will be left to the United States and its Pacific allies to contain a rising China.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/20/us-china-cold-war-liberal-de

    1. The only way to contain China is to stop buying virtually everything we need off of them.

      1. The only way to contain China is to stop buying virtually everything we need off of them.

    1. Farewell, free speech. It was nice knowing you until the new Puritanism put in an appearance.

      ‘Morning, Rik.

    1. They need first to be told that fascism is a left wing construct. It has never, ever been anything to do with the Right minded. That the Nazi’s were arendetly nd obviously Lefties is also something that’s escaped these berks.

      Hate crimes are rising. A bunch of black life bullies are committing them.

    1. The debt mountain will only begin to recover when we force the state to do vastly more with much less.

      I’ve no doubt taxes will soar all round with lots of ‘oh we need it for COVID recovery. This is a lie. What’s needed for the economy is cash. Lots of freely spent, readily available cash. When the state hikes taxes, less money is spent, less is bought, demand falls and so do jobs creating a demand for welfare.

      Combine that with an already utterly obese state and we have a recipe for a decade of recession.

  8. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    A happy Summer Solstice to one and all – well, at 22:43 today, that is.

    1. In my desk diary it says today is the longest day but on Wednesday the 24th it says it is Midsummer Day, so I had to google it

      The longest day in the northern hemisphere is today either the 20th or 21st of June, whilst Midsummer’s Day in Europe is traditionally on 24 June.
      This discrepancy is said to have been caused by the variants of the Julian Calendar and the Tropical Year further confused by the Gregorian Calendar.

  9. SIR – Was Charles de Gaulle (Comment, June 18) a friend of Britain?

    Roger Landes, an Anglo-French agent during the Second World War, organised a successful resistance cell in Bordeaux. He helped delay German reinforcements from heading to Normandy during the D-Day landings.

    Did de Gaulle congratulate him when they met? No. He ordered him home, saying: “You are British. Your place is not here.”

    Neil Mackwood
    Dallington, East Sussex

    How very rude of him. We welcome all comers to our shores ()sarc(/)

    1. To bring the quote up to date:
      “You are Syrian/Afghani/Somalian/Out of Africa. You’re place is not here.”
      But in French, natch.

  10. SIR – A number of people have asked me if there is a memorial to the large number of Royal Naval personnel who lost their lives suppressing the slave trade. I am unaware of one.

    The Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron in 1808 after Parliament passed an Act for the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The squadron’s task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa. At the height of its operations, it employed a sixth of the Royal Navy fleet.

    Known as the Preventative Squadron, it remained in existence until 1867. It captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 slaves.

    Many Royal Navy sailors and Marines lost their lives in this cause. Maybe it’s time a monument stood to commemorate their sacrifice.

    Admiral Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
    London SW1

  11. Good morning all.

    Sunshine, but a load of crap on TV tonight. I have past episodes of “Murder in Paradise” on standby.

    1. Morning, Peddy. Thanks for the giggle. My late mother liked “Murder in Paradise” and forced me to watch an episode once. More ham than in a bacon butty!

      2. That’s 1/2 the fun – the eye-rolling, exchanges of looks, the mock frustration, etc.

  12. One of the ironies of the ‘Take the knee’ footballers, if BLM has its way, is that their mansions would be the first to be ‘repurposed’ for use as accommodation by the then ruling elite.

    Can someone tell them of this?

    1. Which reminds me: have Balls-Cooper or Lily Allen told us how many refugees they are currently housing in their various abodes?

  13. ‘Morning again,

    One might say that transportation to Australia might be preferable to remaining in our dog’s breakfast of a country the way things are going:

    SIR – Only by selective memory can we forget that, at a time when slave trading was taking place, we were transporting our own people to Australia for quite minor crimes at a time of extreme poverty in Britain.

    Nigel Carter
    Devizes, Wiltshire

    PS Today’s letters currently visible.

    1. Did Mr Carter read what I posted yesterday? That transportation to Australia replaced indentured servitude in the Americas after the American Revolution made that impossible.

      1. ‘morning HP, transporting ‘whites’ to the America’s for indentured service was not economical. They could not cope with the heat and disease so ended up dying after a relatively short period. The slave trade in Africa had been supplying slaves to the Middle east and elsewhere for hundreds of years. When the Europeans turned up they were just another ‘customer’ to the African slavers, they got better prices as demand increased making many Africans very wealthy. People tend to forget/ignore the history, especially the facts around Africans taking fellow Africans by force into slavery.

        The slave trade to the Americas was an economic decision not a racist one. Many slaves were owned by Blacks in America.

        1. Those unfortunates sent into indentured service in the Americas were not sent to make the plantation owners wealthy, or even contribute worthwhile work. They were sent to get them out of the way, as they were a nuisance in society.

  14. Black people in China ‘banned from McDonalds and evicted from their homes’ over coronavirus fears

    ‘They treat us like animals,’ says Max, who was forced from his apartment and put into quarantine – despite testing negative for Covid-19

    “Notice: We’ve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant,” reads a sign outside McDonald’s in Guangzhou. It advised that all black patrons “notify the local police” and seek “medical isolation”.

    McDonald’s has since removed the sign, closed the store and issued a statement saying the notice was not representative of the chain’s “inclusive values” – but black people living in Guangzhou have told The Independent it is just one example of the racist abuse they have faced during the coronavirus crisis.

    Max*, who is from Sierra Leone and has lived in the southwest port city for the last five years, says Chinese authorities forced him from his home and put him in quarantine – despite having tested negative for Covid-19. “I waited outside for 14 hours in the rain, and eventually, I had to go to look for other temporary places to stay,” he says.

    They told him he needed to go to the station to get an extension on his visa, but when he arrived, they refused to give him a stamp and said he wasn’t allowed to go back to the apartment.

    “The police asked me to pay for the hotel… but I had no money on me,” Max says.

    When Max tried to go back to his apartment later, he says he and two other friends were pushed to the ground by police and taken to a quarantine centre.

    He told authorities that he had been tested for coronavirus two days ago and the results came out as negative – but the police said the quarantine was “standard procedure” for Africans in the city.

    He was kept there for a few days and had to undergo several coronavirus tests.

    According to Max, dozens of his friends from African countries have all been forced into quarantine, yet none of them have left China since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.

    “To be honest, I feel really uncomfortable in China and I want to go home,” Max says.

    “Some of my friends were kicked out of their apartments and they have nowhere to stay. They were just students and they have test results to prove that they are healthy. But instead, the Chinese just decided to treat us like animals.”

    Like other local residents, Luke* says he has been stringently following protocols rolled out by the Chinese government since the coronavirus outbreak. Originally from Togo, he has been studying Chinese for more than three years.

    He says doctors and police showed up at his apartment unannounced and asked him to test for Covid-19 last week.

    “They told me my result was negative, and I thought I was safe. But two days later, they showed up at my apartment again, and this time, they told me and my roommates to undergo a two-week quarantine,” he says.

    He says some of his friends have been evicted and landlords have told them they no longer wanted to rent our their houses to Africans.

    “I feel rejected by the Chinese people, I am only here to study Chinese,” Luke tells The Independent.

    “When we see how people from Africa are being treated in Guangzhou, I don’t have hope of staying here. I also don’t feel like continuing my study here. It hurts me a lot.”

    There has been growing concern in China over the threat of imported coronavirus cases, which have been on the rise as the number of domestic cases levelled off. Africans living in China say this has led to more racial profiling and abuse against black people.

    On 28 March, the government imposed a ban on all foreigners entering the country, including those with visas and residence permits.

    Fears were raised over the weekend amid a spike in imported cases. On Sunday, China’s national health commission reported 108 new infections – the highest number in more than five weeks – all but 10 of which were from abroad.

    Peter*, who has been living in Guangzhou for more than a decade, runs weekend football training with other foreigners living in the city, including a couple of members of Guangzhou’s African community.

    However, several weeks ago, he started receiving messages from the managers of the local football pitch, informing him that foreigners should not enter until after the Chinese players finished their practice.

    Then on 7 April, the manager told him that black people could no longer play at the pitch.

    “This is purely Chinese people’s fear about a second wave of coronavirus infection after the government repeatedly highlighted the danger of foreigners bringing the virus into China,” he adds.

    Two of Peter’s friends from Africa have also been put in enforced quarantine, he says, despite having not left China for more than a year and having been tested negative for coronavirus.

    Ambassadors from several African countries in China have written to China’s foreign minister, demanding Beijing addresses their concerns about their citizens in the country.

    Nigeria on Tuesday said the treatment of its citizens in China was “extremely distressing” and “unacceptable”.

    In a meeting with Chinese ambassador Zhou Pingjian in his office in Abuja on Tuesday, Nigeria’s foreign minister Geoffrey Onyeama said: “There were videos circulating on social media of very disturbing scenes and incidents involving Nigerians in the city of Guangzhou.

    “We saw images of Nigerians in the streets with their possessions and this was, of course, extremely distressing for us at home.”

    China’s Foreign Ministry has promised to roll out a non-differentiated health service for Africans.

    “All foreigners are treated equally. We reject differential treatment, and we have zero tolerance for discrimination,” it said in a statement.

    On Sunday, China’s state-run tabloid Global Times published a story to refute criticism of the country’s treatment of African nationals.

    Global Times said local authorities in Guangzhou claimed that equal policies were in place for both locals and foreigners, and earlier reports about African nationals being mistreated are “viral reports used by some western media to provoke the problems between China and African countries”.

    However, to Luke, Max and Peter, Guangzhou authorities’ xenophobic treatment of African nationals over the last week is merely a sign of Chinese people’s underlying feeling towards the local African community.

    “There has always been a general suspicion and fear towards Africans in Guangzhou,” Luke says.

    “The coronavirus outbreak only unleashed the underlying feelings that Chinese people have about Africans. We have never been welcomed here.”

    * Names have been changed to protect identities

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-china-mcdonalds-black-people-home-evictions-a9465776.html

    1. I expect theres no kneeling there as they know they’ll be arrested and I dont think Chinese prisons afford the same minor luxuries as ours.

      1. Arrested if they’re lucky.
        Black citizens are being beaten up to an inch of their death.
        And/or of course ‘disappeared’, as other ‘dissidents’.
        PS
        Good morning all.

    2. I look forward to reading news reports of BLM protestors toppling statues in Beijing and multi thousand protestor gatherings in Tiananmen Square. / Sarc meter overload

  15. Morning all

    SIR – We urge the Government to announce a clear plan in the next two weeks outlining how to make it compulsory for all students to return to school in September, on the condition that the spread of coronavirus remains under control.

    It is clear that children do not pose a significant risk of spreading the virus and are at an extremely low personal risk. We believe the further damage done to a generation of pupils by continued school closures is far more serious than the marginal benefits to public safety.

    The actions taken by the Government were, we believe, necessary, to protect many school staff, students and communities across the country.

    However, if the national situation continues to improve, we believe it is vital to reopen schools at the start of the new academic year with significant revisions to social-distancing guidelines.

    As leaders in the education sector and CEOs of a variety of multi-academy trusts, we serve hundreds of thousands of students and their families, including some in the most deprived areas across England. The current situation, where schools are partially open to some of our pupils some of the time, is achieving very little to address the widening attainment gap.

    Physical absence from school has an impact on social, emotional and academic development, and many students from across all age groups have expressed a desire to return to the classroom. The longer we wait, the harder it will be for students to catch up on what they have missed.

    It is of critical importance that face-to-face education is resumed as soon as is possible for all students.

    Hamid Patel

    Chief Executive, Star Academies

    Paul Smith

    Chief Executive, Future Academies

    Sir Michael Wilshaw

    Former HM Chief Inspector of Education

    Sir David Carter

    Former National Schools Commissioner

    Katharine Birbalsingh

    Founder, Michaela Community School

    Benedick Ashmore-Short

    Chief Executive, Astrea Academy Trust

    Simon Beamish

    Chief Executive, Leigh Academies Trust

    Sir Andrew Carter

    Chief Executive, South Farnham School Educational Trust

    Stephen Chamberlain

    Chief Executive, Active Learning Trust

    Gary Chown

    Chief Executive, Ventrus Multi Academy Trust

    Tim Coulson

    Chief Executive, Unity Schools Partnership

    Dame Rachel De Souza

    Chief Executive, Inspiration Trust

    Julian Drinkall

    Chief Executive, Academies Enterprise Trust

    Lucy Heller

    Chief Executive, ARK

    Marc Jordan

    Chief Executive, Creative Education Trust

    Mark Lehain

    Director Parents and Teachers for Excellence

    Sir Dan Moynihan

    Chief Executive, Harris Federation

    John Murphy

    Chief Executive, Oasis Community Learning

    Roger Pope

    Chief Executive, Education South West Trust

    Paul Tarn

    Chief Executive, Delta Academies Trust

    Rob Tarn

    Chief Executive, Northern Education Trust

    Paul Walker

    Chief Executive, First Federation

    Sir Nick Weller

    Chief Executive, Dixons Academies Trust

    Adrian Ball

    Chief Executive, Diocese of Ely Multi Academy Trust

    Robert Campbell

    Chief Executive, Morris Education Trust

    Rob Haring

    Chief Executive, Westcountry Schools Trust

    David Harris

    Chief Executive, Engage, Enrich, Excel Academies

    Jack Mayhew

    Chief Executive, Athena Schools Trust and GEP

    Ian McNeilly

    Chief Executive, The de Ferrers Trust

    Duncan Mills

    Chief Executive, Peterborough Diocese Education Trust

    Dr Karen Roberts

    Chief Executive, The Kemnal Academies Trust

    Dr John Smith

    Chief Executive, University of Brighton Academies Trust

    Chris Tweedale

    Chief Executive, Guildford Education Partnership

    Russell Hobby

    Chief Executive, Teach First

    1. Have you seen the song sung at a rugby club with accompanying gestures?

    2. Let us make a start shall we,
      Jerusalem – religious hotbed
      Roman Cavalry – ah the Romans, slave owners
      My sword and shield – armed thug (obviously extreme right wing)
      Missionaries – white invaders
      etc etc

      Burn the record company goes the cry!

        1. Do we really need to see the world more clearly? Our dirty windows give us a metaphorical filter.

  21. SIR – Was Charles de Gaulle (Comment, June 18) a friend of Britain?

    Roger Landes, an Anglo-French agent during the Second World War, organised a successful resistance cell in Bordeaux. He helped delay German reinforcements from heading to Normandy during the D-Day landings.

    Did de Gaulle congratulate him when they met? No. He ordered him home, saying: “You are British. Your place is not here.

    Neil Mackwood
    Dallington, East Sussex

    “NON…. “

  22. Priti Patel to unveil two-year jail sentences for ‘thugs’ who assault emergency workers. 19 June 2020 • 9:30pm.

    Priti Patel has pledged to unveil plans within weeks to double the sentences for offenders who assault emergency workers to two years to “make these thugs think twice.”

    The Home Secretary’s pledge came as police figures showed assaults on emergency service workers have risen by 24 per cent in the four weeks to June 7, driven by a surge in spitting and coughing attacks on staff.

    BELOW THE LINE

    Martin Cooper20 Jun 2020 6:32AM

    Not condoning it but ‘brave officers’?
    We couldn’t get them to attend burglaries or vandalism or racial abuse of our local shopkeeper on our estate several months ago but as soon as it became illegal for families and friends to get together we had riot vans patrolling and the nightly chokka chokka of the police helicopter keeping us awake

    Brave New World20 Jun 2020 3:01AM

    As far as protesters are concerned that would be the “far right extremists” then as they would appear to be the only people referred to as “thugs”.
    The far left Marxist activists are, according to MSM, virtually all “peaceful protesters”. I suppose that’s why they are bailed after being arrested and not slammed into prison for two weeks following their drunken irresponsibility.

    Brian Reay19 Jun 2020 11:49PM

    Nothing will come of it.
    I doubt any of the thugs who assaulted the police, vandalised statues, etc will see the inside of a jail.
    Strange how enthusiastic the police were to check for Easter Eggs and stop sunbathing but mass brawls are permitted.

    No one believes this stuff any longer!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/19/priti-patel-unveil-two-year-jail-sentences-thugs-assault-emergency/

    1. FFS we are buried under laws that are either not or selectively enforced,we are sick to death of soundbite government
      GET A BLOODY GRIP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

          3. Good wheeze! If they’re fit enough to assault anyone, they’re fit enough for hard labour.

        2. Public Birching on the bare backside by the burliest Police Sergeant available.

          The humiliation would be enough to deter repeats and should also deter other ‘thugs’, of any colour, from continuing in their thuggish ways.

          Good morning Bob.

          1. At half-time on televised football matches perhaps?
            They could also be left at the exits on full display, so that the spectators could see the results, up close and personal.

          2. ‘Morning, Tom.

            I volunteer to administer those birchings [and wield the ‘cat’].

    2. Experience has shown that the “Home Secretary’s pledge” is just more hot air from a law and order fantasist.

      ‘Morning, Minty.

  24. First letter. This is spectacular uneducated drivelling tosh and evidence that all women should be cleaning behind the fridge.

    SIR – We are concerned that the long-term impact on women is being overlooked in the Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis.

    We don’t deny that men have been affected disproportionately by the virus itself, but evidence shows that the damage done to women in Britain during the pandemic could last for years – and set them back decades.

    New research by the Fawcett Society and the Women’s Budget Group has already found that the response to the pandemic has had a disproportionately negative effect on women in all sectors and age groups.

    According to the Resolution Foundation, women are more likely than men to be working in sectors that have shut down during the pandemic. Mothers are almost 50 per cent more likely than fathers to have either lost their job or quit, research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown.

    One in four women who have been pregnant or on maternity leave during the pandemic have experienced unfair treatment at work – singled out for redundancy or furlough. Women are also more likely to be caring for an elderly relative, according to Carers UK. More working mothers are having to take unpaid leave or voluntary furlough in order to care for family members during lockdown.

    The death rate for Covid-19 in black, Asian and minority ethnic women is up to twice as high as for white men.

    Lockdown will long delay closing the gender pay gap. Women are losing out on income and pension contribution. But it’s not only financial hardship. During lockdown, demand for Refuge’s national domestic abuse helpline has risen by 66 per cent.

    Sportswomen, too, face an uncertain future. The last women’s team sport fixture in this country was on March 14. Yet all the focus has been on male-dominated sports.

    The lockdown is turning back the clock on women’s lives in Britain. We call on the Government to take action to halt this reversal.

    We are asking the Government to pledge that, when lockdown policy decisions are being taken, there is meaningful representation of women and that the impact of policy on women’s lives is always fully assessed.

    Signed by lots and lots of wimmin

    1. Well, at least you called us ‘women’ and not ‘females’ Cit.

      Now, about your condemnation of fifty percent of the population…

    2. “ New research by the Fawcett Society and the Women’s Budget Group has already found that the response to the pandemic has had a disproportionately negative effect on women in all sectors and age groups.”

      What a surprise, two organisations that believe women are unfairly treated in society, (by men, probably WHITE men mainly)), come up with research that supports their claims.

      In effect they are that “women’s lives matter’, yet more left wing charities/NGOs that spend more on promoting their political/anti government views than anything else.

      We need the whole charity/NGO sector reforming; if they constantly push their political views on the general public/government de-register them if a charity, disband them if they are a NGO. Imagine how a left wing government would deal with the sector if it was predominantly right wing – they would tax the hell out of them and find ways to shut them up by screams of racism etc. and prosecutions for hate crimes.

      Come on Boris & DC, you have the majority, start fighting back.

  25. Terry Dicks, Right-wing Tory MP notorious for speaking his mind on contentious issues – obituary

    He supported links with apartheid South Africa, attacked the ‘race relations industry’ and advocated the birch for football hooligans

    By Telegraph Obituaries – 19 June 2020 • 12:19pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2020/06/19/TELEMMGLPICT000233364298_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQD_lvq6mq_uCaUPZ98j-IEPc61qhxPAFtcRVj0KgOJ4.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Terry Dicks: even a political colleague accused him of being prone to ‘boneheaded abuse’

    Terry Dicks, who has died aged 83, was Conservative MP for Hayes and Harlington from 1983 to 1997, and one of the most outspoken members of the Commons. He was ready to express publicly views which his Right-wing colleagues only dared mutter privately to their most trusted friends – and did so unrepentantly in language that was forceful, invariably quotable and frequently offensive.

    Criminals, football hooligans and immigrants all felt the lash of his tongue. But the cadaverous Dicks reserved his fiercest attacks for the arts establishment, and government subsidies for such elitist activities as opera. When he spoke on the subject he was one of the few backbenchers able to lure MPs into the chamber from their offices and the bars.

    He acquired the nickname “Phil” by elevating Philistinism to an art form. One colleague said Dicks “was to the arts what ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith is to lepidoptery”. He relished giving the over-sensitive cultural elite the vapours, but he had a serious purpose. He articulated a genuine concern that money was spent on supporting cultural activities for the rich while more popular entertainers, and sport, received virtually nothing.

    Dicks was never a man to adapt his views to prevailing fashion, or to mince his words on even the most sensitive of subjects. He was loved by the press, for whom he kept ready an Aladdin’s cave of quotes, and became increasingly popular with his constituents, who elected him three times in a working-class and traditionally Labour seat.

    When John McDonnell delivered his maiden speech, having recaptured Hayes & Harlington for Labour on Dicks’s retirement, he denounced him as “a stain”, “a malignant creature” and an espouser of racism.

    Many fellow Conservative MPs regarded Dicks with dismay. Even his fellow Right-winger Teddy Taylor said he was inclined to “boneheaded abuse”. According to Labour’s Tony Banks, his speeches were “made additionally entertaining … by the looks of horror on the faces of so many of his colleagues.”

    The robustness and lack of taste with which Dicks voiced his opinions was equalled by his frankness about his own disability: in the House he always referred to himself as a “spastic”.

    Dicks was born with cerebral palsy, which left him unable to put his right foot down until he was nine and gave him a slight limp for the rest of his life. This profoundly affected his attitude to abortion, leading him to support measures to limit the period during which a pregnancy could be terminated.

    He explained: “If the technology that is available now had been available 50 years ago, a doctor may well have said to my mother: ‘You are 40 years old and are carrying a disabled child; please have it aborted.’ ”

    Terence Patrick Dicks was born in Bristol on March 17 1937; he saw little of his father, and his mother died of arthritis after working as a cleaner. Leaving school at 15, he worked as a clerk at Imperial Tobacco until 1959, then at the Ministry of Labour.

    In 1966 he took a Diploma in Economics at Oxford University, following it up with a BSc (Econ) at the LSE. He was an administrative officer at the Greater London Council from 1971 until his election to Parliament, becoming personal assistant to a series of Tory leaders.

    A Hillingdon borough councillor from 1974, he first attracted headlines in 1978 when, as housing committee chairman, he offered hostel accommodation to a white Rhodesian family while sending an Asian family in a taxi to the Foreign Office, even though both had just arrived in Britain. The problems ended on Dicks’s plate because Hillingdon includes Heathrow, leaving the council responsible for accommodating deserving immigrants.

    Reg Freeson, the Labour housing minister, registered his “utmost contempt and deepest repugnance”. Dicks, though, was unrepentant, insisting that the Asians’ case for staying was “unconvincing while the Rhodesians’ case was not.”

    “If their homelessness is genuine,” he added, “they will have all the protection the council can give, whatever their colour happens to be.”

    Dicks’s frankness also got him into trouble at the Greater London Council. In 1982 he was suspended after claiming his party were trying to cover up a possible scandal over the Strongbridge Housing Association’s £786,000 arrears; they had, he alleged, used the offer of a better job, and threats, trying to persuade him not to cooperate with Labour in pressing for a full-blown investigation.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2020/06/19/TELEMMGLPICT000003840051_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqn5NrIXM5AbtXRgqaI5-cuIygw_3EQBFQM2V0J-HLb8M.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Dicks in 1990: he relished upsetting the cultural elite

    Such behaviour led some influential Tories to try to keep Dicks off the candidates’ list. But the party was becoming more egalitarian and Right-wing under Margaret Thatcher, and the social barriers against those like Dicks, who was working-class and lived in a council house, were coming down.

    Dicks first took on Labour’s chief whip Michael Cocks at Bristol South in 1979. He was next selected for Hayes and Harlington, taking the seat in 1983 as the Labour vote split between the sitting MP Neville Sandelson, who had defected to the SDP, and a hard-Left official candidate.

    He struck a chord with his equally working class constituents, building a reputation as the “authentic voice of Heathrow airport”. He increased his majority in 1987, and held on in 1992 when the national trend was against the Conservatives.

    At Westminster Dicks began his crusade to give popular culture and sport equality of treatment with the highbrow arts. He had ill-disguised contempt for many in the subsidised art sector. He described Sir Peter Hall, director of the National Theatre, as “the highest-paid part-time civil servant I have ever had the misfortune to come across.”

    Dicks’s views on the claims of opera and ballet to be part of Britain’s cultural heritage were even more robust. “I refuse to accept a 20-stone Italian pretending to be half his age and weight, or a bloke prancing round in a French box and tights, as part of my heritage.”

    He saw no justification in subsidising (by more than £600 million in the early 1990s) cultural events invariably attended by those could afford to pay the full rate, when popular culture had to stand on its own two feet.

    His own tastes included watching Bristol Rovers (“a 40-yard pass in an FA Cup semi-final is art to me”), Alan Ayckbourn plays, Mario Lanza, Shirley Bassey, the Carpenters, Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka. He declared: “I believe in consumer sovereignty. Theatres, museums and the rest must pay their way or pack up like any other commercial organisation. If they are really good, they will survive.”

    His campaign did not succeed in scrapping the Arts Council and the whole arts bureaucracy, or making the BBC rely on advertising revenue. But, with the major parties arguing only about how much more should be handed out, he was the one MP to oppose the fundamental principle of arts subsidy.

    Dicks’s opinions and language on other issues were equally trenchant. He viewed the Commission for Racial Equality and the rest of the “race relations industry” as “completely unnecessary. They only create more racial conflict. Clearly anyone who does not like the British way of life can always leave and go elsewhere.” In 1987, he said it was appalling that “in some areas race relations is given priority over law and order.” Those were some of his milder observations.

    He supported political and sporting links with South Africa. Attacking the Government’s decision to talk with the African National Congress’s leader, Oliver Tambo, in 1986, he said it was tantamount to talking to the IRA.

    He was in favour of hanging murderers and breaking all contacts with states such as Iran and Libya, which backed terrorism. He called for aid to India to be cut off after he was detained there in 1986 while trying to rescue the Kenyan-born wife of the Anglo-Indian Conservative Association chairman; she had been arrested on suspicion of Sikh terrorist links.

    For football hooligans (including “those pigs from Scotland”) he proposed either the birch or spraying with dye so that “people know they are subhuman”. After one particularly violent outbreak in 1985, he accused the sports minister Neil Macfarlane of “prancing around like a fairy on top of a Christmas tree” instead of taking action.

    Another of his passions was to improve standards of dress in the Commons, which had relaxed somewhat in the 1980s. Dicks urged the Speaker not to call MPs who did not reach certain basic standards. Characteristically, he did not shirk from naming the “scruffiest” Labour MPs.

    Of Dave Nellist he said: “If he wants to go around dressed like a slob off a barrow, he should go off and be a barrow boy.” Jeremy Corbyn – who reckoned Dicks to be “scurrilous and racist” – “sometimes wears a scruffy polo-neck sweater. It is appalling.” When Harriet Harman appeared in sweater and jeans, Dicks said “any resemblance between her and a lady was entirely coincidental.”

    Dicks’s bark was invariably worse than his bite. Except on such direct constituency issues as flights into Heathrow and the Rate Support Grant, he was invariably loyal in the division lobbies.

    This was never more clearly demonstrated than in 1993, when the government faced defeat on a crucial clause of the Bill to ratify the Maastricht treaty. Dicks was by instinct anti-European, but believed Tory Eurosceptics were undermining John Major. Although extremely ill in hospital, Dicks defied doctors’ advice and insisted on voting.

    When the government was none the less defeated, Dicks said: “I have nothing against Labour. I have everything against those bastards, the Tory rebels. I have walked through broken glass to support John Major. If I had been in my hospital bed and we had lost by one vote, I would never have forgiven myself.”

    He retired from the Commons in 1997. From 1999 to 2009 he served on Surrey county council, and from 2011 on Runnymede district council.

    Terry Dicks was twice married, secondly to Janet Cross, with whom he had a daughter. He also had two daughters and a son in his first marriage.

    Terry Dicks, born March 17 1937, died June 17 2020

    1. In 1987, he said it was appalling that “in some areas race relations is given priority over law and order.”

      Sounds familiar…

      1. And it always will. The more we pander, the more demands they make, the less the issue vanishes into the background.

        It’s time we adopted a zero tolerance policy.

        ‘Oh you’re rioting.’ Off to a chain gang breaking rocks.

        ‘What’s that? Black lives matter? No more than any other life mate. Stop being racist.’

        Let’s stop being afraid of upsetting people with the truth. Let’s state that blacks kill other blacks. Let’s then start resolving *why* that is – and we know why: a lack of responsibility, welfare and state largess. Then let’s talk about Muslim terrorism openly, frankly and stamp it out.

        Let’s push toward a country of Britons united together, not islands of different minorities and indulged egotistical resentment brought on by greed and ignorance.

    2. Good man, except for his lapse of taste in being apparently a fan of Neil Diamond.

    3. My word, couldn’t we do with a few like him today. Even one like him would be good!
      Morning all.

  26. Oxford University’s cowardly surrender is a wilful vandalism of history, writes DANIEL HANNAN, an Oriel graduate who is tearing up his donations to the college

    Yet again, the future of Cecil Rhodes hangs in the balance.

    Intimidated by a delirious mob, the governing body of Oriel – his and my Oxford college – voted to remove the statuette of the 19th-century diamond magnate from its niche high above the city’s high street.

    Yesterday, the inevitable backlash began, as a former universities minister blamed ‘culture wars’ for the decision to topple Rhodes, while the Foreign Secretary warned against ‘airbrushing’ history.

    I’m not sure which is more depressing – the anti-intellectual frenzy of the crowds who gathered outside the College on Thursday or the way Oriel’s Fellows folded so cravenly.

    Universities are supposed to elevate facts over feelings – but that principle sits ill with identity politics.

    Angry protesters have little interest in argument or nuance. Almost no one, in the current climate, wants to point out that by the standards of his era Rhodes was a liberal (as well as a Liberal).

    No one likes to mention that, when Oriel’s own students were polled four years ago, majorities in every ethnic group wanted to keep the statue.

    No one dares correct the campaigners when they describe Rhodes as an ‘architect of apartheid’ – despite the fact that he died in 1902, while that monstrous system of formalised racial categorisation was imposed in South Africa in 1948.

    In fact, far from facilitating apartheid, the wily nabob opposed the attempt to take away the vote from black men in Cape Colony.

    ‘My motto is equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi,’ he wrote, referring to the great African river.

    When Oriel¿s own students were polled four years ago, majorities in every ethnic group wanted to keep the statue (pictured) +4
    When Oriel’s own students were polled four years ago, majorities in every ethnic group wanted to keep the statue (pictured)

    ‘What is a civilised man? A man, whether white or black, who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works.’

    The campaigners, naturally, don’t want to hear this.

    Nor do they want to be told that Rhodes was an early sponsor of Izwi Labantu, the newspaper of what became the African National Congress, the party of the late Nelson Mandela.

    Nor do they care that, when Rhodes endowed the scholarships that have brought thousands of Commonwealth and American students to Oxford, he specified that: ‘No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a scholarship on account of his race’.

    Nor that, within five years, one of those coveted places had been won by a black American.

    Nor that, as Chris Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford University, reminds us, Africa currently supplies a fifth of all Rhodes Scholars.

    They don’t want to hear these things because they are not interested in Rhodes as a human being.

    They want him, rather, to be a target: a symbol of racist oppression that allows them to flaunt their indignation.

    To be clear, Rhodes was no saint. His mines stood on land that he had arguably tricked out of the Ndebele people, who had not understood the implications of the contracts they signed.

    That misunderstanding led to a brutal war.

    Still, it is worth recognising that wars were pretty standard in Africa at that time. The Ndebele themselves, for example, had only recently acquired those lands by waging a far more gruesome campaign against the Shona.

    That is not to excuse anything, simply to point out the difficulty of applying retrospective morality.

    ‘The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history,’ wrote the historian Herbert Butterfield. ‘It is the essence of what we mean by the word “unhistorical”.’

    There is something narcissistic about judging historical figures purely on the basis of how closely their views resemble our own.

    Winston Churchill was in southern Africa at roughly the same time as Rhodes. So was Gandhi. The first opposed Indian independence, while the second viewed black Africans as dirty and savage.

    Should we tear down their statues, too? Of course not.

    Rhodes stands in stone because, having made a lot of money early in life, he did not spend it on himself, but gave it away to what he saw as deserving causes – including Oxford University, which he had first attended in 1873.

    None of this becomes any less true because of a killing in Minnesota that everyone agrees was indefensible.

    How the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer three weeks ago led to the removal of an unrelated statue 4,000 miles away will one day have historians scratching their heads.

    One thing, though, is clear: An institution that treats a benefactor like this – not in the light of new revelations but simply because of the self-righteousness of a pressure group – will struggle to persuade anyone else to donate to it.

    I have, for what it’s worth, cancelled my own small monthly debit to Oriel, and I’m sure others will do the same. Why give to an institution that displays such ingratitude?

    Iconoclasm – the tearing down of graven images – is often a mark of a cult. Early Christians pulled down pagan statues, believing that in doing so, they were cleansing the world.

    The Puritans thought in similar ways, as do Muslim fundamentalists.

    Universities, however, are supposed to uphold the values of the Enlightenment. They are meant to teach people to disagree politely, to use logic rather than intimidation.

    What we are witnessing is not an isolated act of cowardice, but a slow retreat from reason. That should worry us all.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8438021/This-cowardly-surrender-Oxford-University-wilful-vandalism-history-writes-Daniel-Hannan.html

    1. ‘Morning, Citroen.

      On the same subject:

      SIR – Your admonishment of the Oxford dons (Leading Article, June 18) agitating against our country’s imperial past and Cecil Rhodes in particular is well deserved. What specifically do they and the street mobs they are aligned with object to in Rhodes’s life?

      He was Prime Minister of Cape Colony in the 1890s and brought in the common electoral roll well before the Boer War started in 1899, declaring that the only criteria for admission to the roll were income and education. Not many black Africans qualified at the time it is true, but some did.

      It was the principle which mattered, and the common roll provision was carried into the South Africa Constitution Act of 1909, long after Rhodes had died in 1902 as the Boer War ended.

      The colour-blind stipulation is also built into the qualifications for Rhodes Scholarships, which are awarded annually to citizens of all the individual countries of the then British Empire plus the United States of America. These are to the great benefit of the scholars and to Oxford University, to which Rhodes gave a second huge bequest.

      None of Rhodes’s fortune had anything to do with slavery, which had been abolished in the British Empire long before he was born.

      Rhodes Scholarships are perhaps the most generous and far-seeing of any university private provision in the whole world.

      Emeritus Professor Stephen Bush
      University of Manchester

      Presumably Prof Bush is about to become the former Emeritus Professor…

      2. If the mob bothered themselves with annoyances like the truth then they’d all have to go home and realise how lucky they are.

    2. Well, yes. What did he expect? When the mob are allowed their own way we end up with chaos.

      These people are fanatics. They are fascists. They want their way and will destroy everything to get it – and keep destroying. What Oxford should have done of course is to say no, sod off and called the police to disperse these bullies.

      That’s society rejecting the mob. However what we havve now is the police representing the state, and the state is being led by the nutters on the Left after decades of infiltration and infestation.

    1. ‘morning Peddy; good advertisement, it gets the message across with a bit of humour rather than preaching. I’m trying to imagine how it would be viewed by all the ‘special interest’ groups in the UK were an equivalent was made by the UK Government.

      Khan would probably be among the first to call for it to be banned (he wouldn’t know why but would sense another ‘band wagon‘ to jump on). If an all-white cast it would be racist, if people of colour were in it then it would be “labelling all blacks as pornographers”.

  29. Asda

    And this year, to celebrate its 30th birthday, George at Asda is cementing its charity partnership with Diversity Role Models (DRM),

    a charity that works to prevent bullying related to gender/sexuality

    and encourages critical thinking by taking positive role models into

    schools.

    https://www.asdagoodliving.co.uk/community/george-partners-with-role-models-for-pride

    Ah,DRM the charity that promotes a 6 year old performing fellatio on an adult,some role model

    https://twitter.com/Baroness_Nichol/status/1274009527394983936/photo/1
    “Minor Attracted People” you say……………………I prefer an older term,Nonce

    2. Just watched the video of Asdas DRM. I dont think there was one black face it it. Shome mishtake shurely. Interview sans cafe for the director.

    5. I’ve just spent some time trawling through the DRM website. These people should never be allowed anywhere near children – it’s no wonder kids/teenagers are so confused and have so many ‘mental issues’.

      Asda should end this partnership immediately.

    1. ‘Afternoon, Mags,

      Instead it will erect statues to the proud victories of Agincourt and Crecy, while asking the Belgiques to erect one for Napoleon at Waterloo.

      1. There is a large sign on the A16 motorway about the site of the battle of Crecy.

      2. Then the English archers stept forth one pace, and let fly their arrows so wholly, and so thick, that it seemed to snow. Froissart.

    2. Pity no one in government in the UK dare say this…..

      How are the mighty fallen….

    4. I could never ever be considered a fan of le boy, but if he is true to his word, he would rise up in my estimation.
      Of course I’m not sure what one level above turd is.
      Everybody expect Johnson to announce the same commitment……..ha ha ha ha, breath, ha ha ha ha.

  31. A man goes to the doctors complaining that he can’t “get it up” and hasn’t been able to for many years now.

    So after a quick check-up the doctors tells the man to come back next week with his wife. Next week, they are both in front of the doctor.

    The doctor tells the man to step outside whilst he checks out his wife. He asks her to undress and lie on the bed.

    He then asks her to shake her bottom a bit.

    Then he asks her to put some fingers in her vagina. Then, finally, the doctor tells her to get dressed, and he steps outside to speak with her husband.

    “So what’s the problem, Doc?”

    “Well, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with you. She doesn’t turn me on, either!”

  32. SIR – When everyone starts to make the same gesture – or is pressurised into doing so – it becomes oppressive and somewhat sinister.

    Let us return to individual opinion and honest debate.

    Mike Morris

    Old Swinford, Worcestershire

    1. I totally agree. But.
      When was the last time there might have been an honest debate ?
      Certainly not on our TV screens.
      Katie Hopkins has been banned from twitter for her honest and considered opinions.
      In this country right now people who have express opinions have been arrested and jailed.
      Conversely people who deliberately damage property and express stronger more absurd opinions are let off.

    2. Oh Mr Morris. You poor deluded fellow.

      That’s precisely what the Left *don’t* want. The less we can argue with them, the fewer avenues open to allow debate and reason the fewer ways they can be challenged and shown up as imbecilic fools. The less data and fact has to do with the debate the more emotional and unhinged their response can be.

      Individuality and honesty are precisely the things the Left wants to erase. If we all think the same, act the same and speak the same they can then set about controlling what we say, do and think – for the good of all, of course.

      They want the dystopian madness of 1984 with them as ‘The Party’. What’s terrifying is that the state seems to agree with them. Perhaps it thinks it will be Big Brother. Actions are showing that won’t be the case. The malicious, violent thugs are setting the agenda.

  33. Like P..G.Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred (Lord Ickenham) Caroline has decided to bring sweetness and light into our lives with her posts.

    She and Uncle Fred are not the only ones to bring sweetness and light: this is what a friend of mine sent me. How far we have fallen! Our answer to the talent of Hope and Cagney is Ant and Dec?:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28

    1. Never much liked Bop Hope. Never saw much of Jimmy Cagney. He looks a bit like Max Wall when he dances.

      1. Yo Bugs

        Never saw much of Jimmy Cagney.

        There was not much of him to see

        He was only 5′ 5″

  34. Charles Moore
    Oxbridge colleges are terrified of paying reparations
    20 June 2020, 8:41am

    Behind the cowardice and hypocrisy which many institutions are showing as they give obeisance to Black Lives Matter about any connection with the slave trade lies a dread word — reparations. Activists seek to claim actual financial liabilities payable to existing human beings for alleged, centuries-old wrongs. The institutions — Oxbridge colleges, for example — are terrified. They hope to deflect attention by babbling about ‘decolonising’ the curriculum and by ‘taking the knee’. Glasgow University promised last year to pay £20 million. It won’t work. Those who grovel will be made to grovel much, much more.

    Jesus College, Cambridge, has tried to handle these matters quietly. One of its greatest benefactors was Tobias Rustat, a royalist who bravely assisted the escape of the future King Charles II. He remained a courtier to the restored king and made a great deal of money out of the Royal African Company (the slavery link). A devout bachelor philanthropist, he gave money to St John’s College, Oxford, Chelsea Hospital (for which he commissioned Grinling Gibbons’s statue of the king), St Paul’s Cathedral and above all to Jesus, his father’s college.

    Until recently, Rustat had a portrait by Kneller in the Senior Combination Room, and a series of lectures and a great summer feast in his name. Now these have been despatched down the Cantabridgian equivalent of Orwell’s memory hole. The chapel’s fine Rustat monument, probably by Gibbons, might be harder to jettison, unless our heritage laws are purified to remove protection from anyone we now decide was wicked. I notice, however, that the college website’s detailed account of the chapel’s art works omits the Rustat memorial. His name is still on Jesus’s ‘donor wall’, along with such luminaries as Jessica Sainsbury and Peter Frankopan, but I bet he won’t stay there much longer. Some will approve the college’s persecution of a long-dead benefactor who cannot answer back. Others might feel its attention would be better directed at the money it takes from totalitarian China today and the power that China exerts in return.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/oxbridge-colleges-are-terrified-of-paying-reparations

    1. Why do any of the bodies expect that the reparations will stop with paying out to just the present generation, why not the next and the one after that to eternity (except that the money will have long run out). I know logic doesn’t come into it, but I cannot see why anyone alive today should be paid reparations for someone elses suffering hundreds of years ago, except for a one-way ticket to their ancestor’s homeland.

    2. “Those who grovel will be made to grovel much,much more”. The government should be learning that lesson now.

      1. Or, as that exceedingly good cake maker puts it ….

        “IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
        To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
        “We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight,
        Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

        And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
        And the people who ask it explain
        That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
        And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

        It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
        To puff and look important and to say: –
        “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
        We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

        And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
        But we’ve proved it again and again,
        That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
        You never get rid of the Dane.

        It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
        For fear they should succumb and go astray;
        So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
        You will find it better policy to say: —

        “We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
        No matter how trifling the cost;
        For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
        And the nation that plays it is lost!”

      3. Or, as that exceedingly good cake maker puts it ….

        “IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
        To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
        “We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight,
        Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

        And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
        And the people who ask it explain
        That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
        And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

        It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
        To puff and look important and to say: –
        “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
        We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

        And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
        But we’ve proved it again and again,
        That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
        You never get rid of the Dane.

        It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
        For fear they should succumb and go astray;
        So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
        You will find it better policy to say: —

        “We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
        No matter how trifling the cost;
        For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
        And the nation that plays it is lost!”

    3. If all these people find us so racist we should give them all reparations in the form of repatriation to the villages of their ancestors with a one way ticket and their formal renunciation of their citizenship of this country. Those that want to stay must pledge allegiance to the Crown.

  36. 320360+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    The lockdown doubled up with the burka is most certainly taking a giant step for mankind back into the past.
    To continue receiving these treats in the future the same voting pattern must be adhered to, your input is necessary to keep the lab/lib/con
    coalition party in power.

    2. Flies in my heart. Our children loved their little gollies. Too bad Robertson’s were gutless and cravenly caved in to the Nigro-terrorism.

    4. 320360+ up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      😎
      Good Golly Ms Molly, you could be in a jam with that one.

    5. Hi Rik, looks like quite an old photo – the registration on the vehicle gives no clue but the fact everyone watching are not holding a phone in front of them filming it does.

  38. Good morning, all. Clear blue sky and bright sunshine.

    During the night I had a dream.

    The PM said that the knee bending malarkey was stupid – you could do it if you wanted but no normal person would.
    Any statue that was knocked down or defaced would immediately be replaced.
    All lives matter – not merely black ones.
    That they had made an enormous blunder over the virus – but everything would revert to normal on Monday 22 June.
    All restrictions ended. The government money tree would be felled on Monday, too.

    Then I woke up.

  39. SIR – Did bluebirds ever fly over the white cliffs of Dover?

    John Nelson
    Amesbury, Wiltshire

    In a nutshell: no. This was simply a piece of clueless whimsy by a geographically- and ornithologically-challenged American songwriter.

    There are three species of bluebird, all confined to North America.

    The Mountain Bluebird Sialia currucoides is a partial migrant, the range of which is confined to the western portion of that continent. The Western bluebird S. mexicana occupies a similar overlapping range.

    The only species likely to ever have been blown off course during its migration is the Eastern Bluebird S. sialis which formerly occupied most of the eastern portion of that continent. Unfortunately it has been in serious decline for some time due to fierce competition for nesting sites by house sparrows and starlings which were introduced to the continent as invasive species by settlers.

    Only the male Mountain Bluebird is completely blue, the other two species having bright red frontages. The females of all three species are much drabber.

    1. Does it really matter?
      Like ‘moon’ and ‘June’, ‘over’ and ‘Dover’ are handy rhymes. The song has given great pleasure to millions of people.
      If we wish to go all ornithological, maybe Dover harbours blue titmice (or titmouses).

      1. “Does it really matter?”

        For you, obviously, no. For me, yes. It is as absurd as claiming that there will be pterodactyls flying over Scunthorpe next Tuesday.

        If you are going to write a song, ostensibly, to give people hope in a time of uncertainly (such as the time we are now living in) then give them something they can actually believe in.

  40. Last night, the MR found a podcast from the British Museum about the Pompeii exhibition a few years back. We sat back to enjoy it.

    After some words from the admirable (then) Director, Neil MacGregor, the prog was handed over to the fat tart Hughes, hair-flicking and chest bouncing and the execrable Peter Snow. After ten minutes the tart was joined by the truly awful Mary Beard – and the two of them salivated over all aspects and images of sex for – I kid you not – 15 minutes.

    There was a brief interlude when Andrew Wallace Haddrill spoke and another sensible chap (whose name they didn’t bother to show) – then the tarts and Snow came back. I went and had a deep bath.

    It was a classic example of how NOT to make a documentary about a fascinating subject.

    1. I’ve seen the programmes on Pompeii having been there, what I found interesting was the filmed access to the areas not open to the public.
      And the articles stored out of the public gaze.
      We also visited Herculaneum. Much smaller by contrast but equally as interesting.
      Much of what is still buried has been built over.

      1. There were two the other day – one in Italian. The other was in English – but ruined for me by the slapper Hughes.

        1. I know what you mean.
          Mary Beard can go on a bit.
          I do like watching the history programmes.
          Have seen the recent series on Spain with Sebag Montefiore ?
          Such an insight into the past events.

          1. I find that he grates. His commentary is very good – but there are always too many views of him in his blue shirt and panama hat walking in and out of shot.

      2. That is so frustrating. That awful blank wall with flats stuck on top.
        I assume brown envelopes, the local council and the mafia were involved in the planning.

        1. Have you visited Carthagena where many of the classical structures have been preserved for you to visit them in subterranean museums but there are large office buildings on top of them with foundations on stilts?

          1. If they ever stop killing and blowing each other up, there’s some spectacular Roman towns on the north coast of Libya, and they were remarkably well preserved when I was last there late 2000s. How they are now, I don’t know. Leptis Magna, for example.
            The pictures are pretty well all the important, grand structures, but there are houses, streets and public toilets also worth looking at.
            https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBD_noNO898NO898&sxsrf=ALeKk03SnYiabUQP-yMLmKZIUnqMeGjRqg:1592643144806&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=leptis+magna+ruins&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvqpmHgpDqAhUwxosKHbrfCIoQsAR6BAgFEAE&biw=1368&bih=770

          2. Also been to Sabratha – smaller, but IIRC, an amphitheatre where men fought lions – you can see the grooves where the sliding doors were raised to allow the lions in… shudder
            https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBD_noNO898NO898&sxsrf=ALeKk03SnYiabUQP-yMLmKZIUnqMeGjRqg%3A1592643144806&ei=SM7tXu_mMLCMrwS6v6PQCA&q=libya+roman+ruins+sabratha&oq=libya+ruins&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQARgAMggIABAHEB4QEzIICAAQBxAeEBMyCAgAEAcQHhATMggIABAHEB4QEzIICAAQBxAeEBMyCAgAEAcQHhATMggIABAHEB4QEzIICAAQBxAeEBMyCAgAEAUQHhATMggIABAIEB4QEzoECCMQJzoGCAAQBxAeOgQIABAeOgYIABAIEB46CAgAEAcQBRAeOgcIIxCwAhAnOgQIABATOgoIABAIEAcQHhATOgQIABBDOgIIADoICAAQBxAKEB46CggAEAcQChAeEBM6CggAEAcQBRAeEBNQq2dYjoIBYJ6XAWgBcAB4AIABXYgBiAuSAQIxN5gBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=psy-ab

          5. No, I haven’t. And Herr Oberst speaks for me over the North African remains.

      3. Ostia Antica is worth a visit if you’re ever in Rome (you can hop on the tube – change at Piramide if I remember rightly). Far fewer visitors, and at the edges of what’s been excavated, miles of interesting lumps covered in greenery. The temptation to sneakily start ripping off the ivy is huge!

    2. Hi Bill, my partner purchased tickets for us to go and see the Pompeii exhibition at the British Museum. They were very accommodating and allowed me to park in the grounds by the front steps to the museum. There was an external lift for me and my wheelchair. A fascinating display of artefacts, including a few that could be described as ‘sexual’ in nature but so much more of interest. There is a tendency of all these ‘modern’ presenters to dumb down these programmes or to sensationalise some aspects rather than just present the facts.

      It is as if they are copying the editorial style of the Daily Star or Daily Fail. They annoy the hell out of me.

    3. The new Persia documentary is excellent so far, but A Greek Odyssey with Bettany (Fat Woman) Hughes was atrocious. I turned it, and the series record, off after ten minutes!

    5. Oh Bilty. To use a saying much loved by commanding officers…
      You’ve let your fiends down, you’ve let the regiment down but most of all, you’ve let yourself down.

      You call all the women ‘tarts’ but limit your criticism of the male to an adjective, which is far less personal.

      1. I thought one was entitled to say what one thought on NoTTL.

        I called the two women tarts because they dressed tartily, behaved tartily and went on and on in an obsessive and tarty way about all aspects of sex. There was a huge range of artefacts to be described. Most were ignored by the two women in favour of suggestible (and wholly inappropriate) sniggers and comments. And they fondled each other.

        Snow was just bad. He did not behave suggestively. Had he acted as the women did, I would have included him in the word “tart”.

    1. Antigua do not do peaceful assembly, they turn up masked and armed at every ‘protest’ they attend.

    1. Not allowed to ask truthful but awkward questions. What a state we’re in. It’s like a foreign land. Oh wait…………….silly me.

      1. You can try it next time you tank the car. We’ve all seen the post about why it takes a woman so long from start to finish to fill up.

        (Presses the gas pedal through the floor.)

        1. It’s not so much the time filling the car that grates, it’s the bloody wandering round the shop afterwards in a desultory search for bread rolls, milk and a Mars bar. Just pay the blasted bill and go. Or even park out of the way so others can get to the pump.

          1. Fully agree, but parking the car elsewhere before going to the shop to pay might be construed as attempting to drive off without paying for the petrol.
            At the Tesco pumps where I usually tank, there is nowhere else to park.
            Last time I filled up, about 4 weeks ago & tank still over 1/2 full, I used the ‘pay at the pump’ facility; surprisingly atraumatic.

          2. I was fuming when a woman did exactly that at the petrol station when I was filling up the camper – 21.5ft of vehicle is not easy to squeeze through gaps or reverse when there’s a truck behind me. To add insult to injury, she’d driven the wrong way round the one-way system because she clearly couldn’t work out that you can actually fill the car up even if the filler cap is not on the same side as the pump. When she finally came out to the car, clutching the goods, she then had considerable difficulty reversing to extricate herself from the jam she’d got herself in to leave and let the rest of us get away.

        2. Why don’t women just drive off once the tank’s full?

          Instead they get back in, rummage around in their bags, adjust the mirrors, wiggle in the seat, look in the glove compartment, drink some water and lord help you if you hurry them up.

          I lost patience with the war queen this week – we took the tank to fill up and she potters and putters about endlessly, brushing her hair, fiddling, any old nonsense. Even junior, who is used to my command raid approach to shopping said ‘Why haven’t we gone yet?’ I contrived an excuse such as she’d left a glove behind (I was sitting on it – I can be canny sometimes) and nicked the drivers seat and had the engine going before she’d got in.

    1. Apparently the first argument was ‘she wasn’t trying to burn it’.

      I believe something like £75 fine and a 12 month suspended sentence.

      What we really need to talk about is why 26% of the prison population is black while only representing 3% of the total population. No, it’s not racism. They just commit more crime. More violent crime at that.

      1. It is true; it is a fact but you have to understand that telling the truth is dangerous because it is now a criminal offence. As Enorbarbus remarked : ‘That the truth should be silent I had almost forgot.’

        I am more and more often reminded of the words of Lady Macduff before she and her children are brutally murdered:

        But I remember now
        I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
        Is often laudable, to do good sometime
        Accounted dangerous folly.

        1. As Enorbarbus Enobarbus remarked : ‘That the truth should be silent I had almost forgot.’

          ‘Morning, Rastus.

      2. You have to assault a policeman to get a fine, We know exactly what is going to happen in this case, sod all of any significance.

      3. “She wasn’t trying to burn it” – probably she was actually a member of some government department, concerned for the safety of the public, and just checking that the flags were fire resistant enough?? /sarc

  45. DT article by Charles Moore in today’s DT

    Boris Johnson has the right instincts. It is about time he started following them
    What does a government that won the election so well, so recently, have to be so scared of?

    Jonson’s majority of 80 is irrelevant because he has too many treacherous MPs in his party. He had the chance before the election of having a purge of the vipers but he flunked it because he lacked the necessary testicular strength of character.

    1. 320360+ up ticks,
      Morning R,
      You do not get to oversee a nest of political vipers without being TOP VIPER not in the lookalike, name
      hi-jacking, current tory party anyway
      .
      Dover is pointing out his true stance on a daily basis for
      those that want confirmation.

    3. OK… are they going to address how antifa are the ones who prevent freedom of speech and assembly by forming a mob of hateful thugs?

  48. 320360+ up ticks,
    breitbart,
    BELGIUM: MIGRANT MAYOR DEMANDS BELGIANS REMOVE STATUES OF FORMER KING
    You’ll get the picture when joining all the dots together appertaining to positions of power councils etc,throughout the UK.
    The present voting pattern dictates that in the not to far off future you will
    think it was sheer luxury to get down on one knee, when on a compulsory basis two knees will be in play, five times a day.

  49. Madeleine McCann disappearance remains missing persons inquiry, says Scotland Yard. 19 June 2020 • 10:00pm

    Madeleine McCann’s disappearance is “still a missing persons inquiry”, Scotland Yard said on Friday, as they denied that German police had told her family about evidence that she was dead.

    With relations between officials investigating Christian Brückner continuing to be strained, the Metropolitan Police released an extraordinary statement in which it clarified that it had received one letter from German authorities which “did not state that there was evidence or proof that Madeleine is dead”.

    Over the last four weeks they’ve accused this guy in Germany of everything except the Holocaust and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I’m pretty certain if he has actually done anything he could get off by pleading that it was now impossible for him to have a Fair Trial.

    It was only ever a publicity gimmick designed to distract attention from the Virus.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/19/madeleine-mccann-disappearance-remains-missing-persons-inquiry/

        1. He’s not been locked up for no reason A, a rack would determine if he’s hiding anything. 😊
          I can’t even imagine how the McCanns have been suffering all these years.

          1. Shouldn’t the McCanns get the rack too – there seems to be just as much evidence stacked up against them as some bod in a German prison.

          4. I don’t think innocence is part of the deal. Your refusal (cos you don’t know) to tell them what happened will be seen to justify the need for more torture.

          5. I’m quite sure even in what Britain has become in recent years, if you do nothing violent bad or wrong in the eyes of the law, you are unlikely to be arrested.

          6. 85 year old heckler at Labour conference some years ago. Arrested under anti-terrorism laws.

          7. What you are saying Obs is they are picking on the elderly. 😄
            They’re wasting their time we don’t remember anything.

          8. I’ve got a way to go yet.😊
            I don’t think he was arrested Obs the ‘stewards’ manhandled the old boy outside because the labour hierarchy didn’t like being challenged.

          10. ‘I can’t even imagine how the McCanns have been suffering all these years.’

            Made worse by the knowledge that their actions led to their daughter being
            abducted?

          11. Yo Gg

            Like water off ducks back

            I have not seen them declare

            It was all our fault

          12. Good morning, Flower.

            Their guilt must be horrendous.

            All over Europe you see children out with their parents very late into the evening. If they didn’t want to take them, then one of them should have stayed behind.

            That isn’t hindsight, you just don’t leave young children alone.

      3. Problem is, people tend to say anything under torture, to get it to stop. Including confessions, even when untrue. That doesn’t help anything at all, especially if he is innocent.
        “The policeman would not have arrested you if you were not guilty” I recall being quoted in relation to an East Block Soviet country.

    2. Plus Plod needs a few more tax payers funded breaks in the sun.
      It would seem that no police force involved in this saga has enhanced its reputation.

  50. Morning all 😊
    Greening up very nicely outside. I’m going to have to get the lawn mower out and trim the edges.

  51. 320360+ up ticks,
    So the suppression rodent claims another victim, to decent right minded peoples such a ban could prove a boon for the banned in so far as “must listen to what caused the banning to take place”
    Currently being judged in most cases as being a far right racist & believer that the world is round to add a ban is no bad thing and moves you up the “must be listened to table”.

    https://twitter.com/GerardBattenUK/status/1274248327274680320

    1. Katie Hopkins tells far too much truth so she has to be banned from Twitter and silenced.

      1. 320360+ up ticks,
        Afternoon R,
        A Gerard Batten in female form, no bandwagon jumper in the Batten character what you see is what you get. honesty.

  54. “You couldn’t make it up files”…………….

    Wow a whole 500 activists

    “Public square named after 16th century slave trader

    Sir John Hawkins will be renamed to commemorate 1920s Plymouth Argyle

    footballer Jack Leslie who was not picked for England because he was

    black”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8439273/Public-square-named-slave-trader-renamed-commemorate-1920s-footballer-Jack-Leslie.html
    Edit
    Forgot to say it’s obvious comments have been blocked

    1. Yo Rik

      That is ageist etc

      I was not picked for England in the1920s either:

      I cannot play football
      I had no wish t oplay for Argyle, even though I was bad enough
      I am White
      I was not born

    3. Yo Rik

      That is ageist etc

      I was not picked for England in the1920s either:

      I cannot play football
      I had no wish t oplay for Argyle, even though I was bad enough
      I am White
      I was not born

  55. I am completely confused as to how lock down affects women more than men.

    The war queen is working, my chums on the Island are working – more than ever, an advertising person continues to work, when I’ve called utilities those answering have been women…

    A very pregnant cousin has seen her midwife – albeit swathed in environmental suit. Most of the shop workers I’ve been served by have been women.

  56. SIR – Was Charles de Gaulle (Comment, June 18) a friend of Britain?

    Roger Landes, an Anglo-French agent during the Second World War, organised a successful resistance cell in Bordeaux. He helped delay German reinforcements from heading to Normandy during the D-Day landings.

    Did de Gaulle congratulate him when they met? No. He ordered him home, saying: “You are British. Your place is not here.

    Neil Mackwood
    Dallington, East Sussex

    “NON…. “

    1. IIRC fake news. The story is covered in books about SOE etc. When France was liberated, General de Gaulle immediately worked to re-frenchify all the machinery of government, and Mr Landes was effectively overstaying his welcome.

        1. She was sweet and lovely at 17 – but like many of us she became rather less so as she grew older! (And she never quite learnt how to sing in tune!)

        1. So it has proven. I have just watched the box sets of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister and the mood in the Civil Service and Politicians
          in the series at the time was not pro the EC.

      2. Churchill gave him an enormous inferiority complex which he could not handle.

    4. Actually, we have no friends. The USA was never our friend and could not wait to bring an end to the Empire. As for Europe, well … it’s obvious.
      The Irish are mealy-mouthed sycophantic leeches. We have seriously, perhaps irreparably, snubbed Australia and New Zealand.
      Only Uruguay maybe …

    6. So what was de Gaule doing spending so much time in Britain during the War? Was his place here?

    7. IIRC fake news. The story is covered in books about SOE etc. When France was liberated, General de Gaulle immediately worked to re-frenchify all the machinery of government, and Mr Landes was effectively overstaying his welcome.

    1. So Dotty Corbyn faces ten years in chokey (joke). What about the thousands of others of color (sic) who also ignored the Plague Law?

      1. As you must be aware, the well-documented actions of those ‘others’ afford Corbyn’s brother a statutory defence to his charges.

    3. Not as bad as I thought. They were running to form another defence line and at the end of the clip they were in line facing the BLM protesters. There was another defensive line of police just some yards behind them. Not an unusual tactic in war time. The retreat was a bit disorderly but I don’t think it was cowardly. There was a big policeman in their midst facing the BLM mob directing the retreating force. The police were doing their duty in a difficult situation.

  60. Morning all. A late entry to the NoTTL site since I had a little lie-in today and have just finished my morning chores. But having just read the Telegraph Letters page I can’t help but comment on the the multi-signature letter concerning the terrible time women have been undergoing during the lockdown. I note that one of the signatories is the Chair of My Wardrobe (she must have a very large wardrobe to keep an entire chair in it!) After a long, long listing of the dozens of ways that women have suffered and continue to suffer, they have only one solution to suggest: that they expect the Government to do something to rectify matters once the pandemic is over (what the Government should do they fail to state). Well, here is my suggestion: since Whitey males – as usual – get a much better deal in life than females, then perhaps they should self-declare themselves to be white men which will instantly improve their lot. In a more serious vein I would like to remind them that, in the words of the famous saying, “It isn’t the cards that Life deals you, but rather the way that you play them that gives you a good result”.

    And now off to have a bit of fun and enjoy the rest of the day. Enjoy Saturday, folks.

    1. “…just finished my morning chores”

      What chores?
      Ooh, Jack Daniel’sand Coke please

      1. We put lemons* in the G&T, and I drink the lemonade. We have it all delivered. Making it is too tiring. (If you expect any sense out of me today, forget it!)
        This insanity has gone far enough, one might well, think, yet up here, now that most of Scotland has no new cases, all travellers on public transport must wear face masks by law.

        *Preferred to limes, – Up The Rebels!

        1. I love lemons – Sicilian, for preference. Sorbetto limone, limoncello – to die for… lemon drizzle cake… drool!
          Lime is good, too, but has to be #2 preference.

    3. Looks like everyone has had a terrible time during lockdown all except for white men and they have to make up for it all for some reason

    4. “It isn’t the cards that Life deals you, but rather the way that you play them that gives you a good result”.

      Can’t trump that…{:¬))

      2. Spose Black Maria (other names available) is being scratched from the card games books.

  61. My Broadband/landline contract with Sky is up soon.

    Can anyone recommend another provider…? Thanks.

      2. Give the poor girl a break. They’ve only just got satellite TV down there.

    2. Virgin seems to be the best bet but you have to try and pretend you have never heard of Richard Branson!

      3. I once phoned Virgin after having a leaflet shoved though my door re their fibre optic service, which as it happened wasn’t available in my area at the time (so why did I receive the leaflet?) & was subjected to a very aggressive attempt to hard-sell me a different package, which I refused. Put me off Virgin products for life.

    3. I got my MiLs flat sorted with BT for just over £30 a month with 50MBit Download. With Sky the best way to get a sensible deal is to tell them that your leaving – I last did that with their chat service which worked surprisingly well. On the other side of the coin my line manager is having no end of trouble with Talk Talk and trying to persuade them to upgrade hime from his current wet piece of string to the 50MBit their website says is available to him…

    8. Virgin’s not bad, as long as you can ignore the fact you’re funding Beardie.

    12. I’ve just got unlimited fibre broadband for £5 a month plus unlimited mobile calls for another £5…..guess who…..BT. Of course there’s the land line but you’d have to pay that whoever you are with

      1. ‘Evening, Spikey, we also use BT on the basis that all the others have to use BT landlines, fibre-optic or not, so when there is a high internet demand BT will ensure that it doesn’t suffer as much as the others. We are also on a £5/month. Best Beloved has just renewed the contract after much haggling.

  62. John Ward

    Let’s just establish something here: 11% of the UK population are

    West Indian/African/Indian/Pakistani “black”. Over the last ten years,

    this roughly 1 in 10 minority has been used as a crude and dictatorial

    battering ram to assert that:

    Islam is the religion of peace

    All Black failure is down to institutional British racism

    Only whites are racist

    Staying with the EU CoHR would protect Blacks

    British involvement with slavery demands an apology

    UK Whites should ‘take the knee’ on behalf of a US negro with a long criminal record

    All veneration of British imperial leaders should cease

    All Statues in their honour must be destroyed

    The police should not interfere with any of this destruction

    Everyone must recognise that the ethnicity issue is far more important than any other.

    Islam has been responsible for more slaughter than every other

    religion put together this century. The educational failure of male

    negroes cannot be put down to educational racism when other ethnicities

    (and female West Indians) do not fail. The Chinese and Indians both look

    down on those with darker skins – indeed, the Indian caste system

    incorporates this in its social structures. The European CoHR can pass

    as many codicils as it wishes, it will not stop Spanish and Italian

    racist chants at football matches that no longer exist in the UK.

    Britain was the first European country to abolish slavery in 1807,

    although Asians and Africans (and even Native Americans) continued the

    practice long afterwards. Admiration for George Floyd is based entirely

    on Antifa propaganda and naive ignorance of his past.

    https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2020/06/20/thus-far-and-no-further/

    1. But where is the politician to shout all this from the rooftops? They are all cowed, too fruit to speak up for the indigenous population. They all are obviously ashamed of British history. The BLM movement is just an excuse for some, including white people, to go on the rampage. And appallingly the police have allowed them to get away with it. It’s like the riots in Tottenham some years ago. If the police had done their job when it first kicked off it would not have been as bad as it ended up. But the police didn’t learn from that. It’s easier to charge a drinking bloke, who handed himself in at the police station, than to do what they’re supposed to.

    2. I notice in the DT “Review” today, most pages have a photo of a person (or more) of color (sic).

    3. Well that list is, I suppose a start. But much further action will need to be taken.

  63. Just in from an hour’s ladder work. Now to sit down wit a coffee and have a bash at the crossword.

  65. Most of you here know that I am a trustee and secretary of our local hedgehog rescue, and that we are currently fundraising for an update to our facilities. As we are unable to attend any local events, we have set up a JustGiving page. Here’s Annie, who founded the hospital 12 years ago, in our local paper.

    https://www.stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/18526535.appeal-launched-help-strouds-sick-injured-orphan-hedgehogs/?fbclid=IwAR2Kx7oqo1WwoV3-9QmgWosXjnLnIQhfB1vFEutU9K_EnARqTIQZtGbfh60

    1. Thanks, Jules, and keep up the good work. Many years ago, when I still lived in north Derbyshire, I joined the local badger protection group. This was set up to deter the huge numbers of badger-baiters who travelled to the area to dig up setts and remove the badgers for their ‘sport’.

      Our prime method was to obtain the permission of the land owner before moving in with mechanical diggers and removing the top metre of soil over the sett. A substantial layer of reinforced concrete was then laid over the top of the sett, which as then re-covered with the excavated soil and the area was then landscaped to fit in as before.

      The badgers had the same access to their sett as before but the concrete layer, right up to the sett entrance, defeated attempts to dig them out. It proved to be a very effective strategy in curtailing the badger-diggers’ activities and the badgers then started to thrive.

      1. ‘Afternoon, George, a pity you didn’t come and do that for the badgers’ cete that continue their digging under the Flowton to Somersham road, thus causing it to be closed every year from March to August.

        Since it’s one of only three single-track roads out of Flowton, it puts a severe crimp on reaching other necessary amenities but the WuFlu has done a better job, so I guess that’s a blessing in disguise.

        1. The council won’t put pipes under the road that the badgers can then use to cross?

        2. The council won’t put pipes under the road that the badgers can then use to cross?

        1. Thanks Phil – and there is a link to the JG page on the website home page and fundraising page.

    1. Auschwitz is situated near Krakow. The Poles won’t put up with any BAME/BLM/Antifa nonsense. We should take a leaf out of their book.

      1. Beautiful city. They still celebrate Jan Sobieski’s victory!

        A former work colleague told me that her mother lived there during WWII and said the stench of burning flesh hung over the city throughout. Those who claimed not to know what was going on lied. (Former colleague both because she’s unwell and had enough of the culture.)

        1. Indeed it is. I spent a few days there during a very hot Summer with my Polish friend when we took a break from working on the hay harvest on his parents’ farm. Visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, the salt mines & Zakopane. That was about ’95/’96.

          We also drove to Prague for a day trip (2 hours away). It rained nonstop.

          5. I must have visited Poland 1/2 dozen or more times during the ’90s, usually in February & July (bloody cold & bloody hot) mainly in the Jelenia Gora region.

    2. Never let the evil happen again – yet it is on British streets under the name ‘black lives matter’ and in americalland with, well, a bunch of morons.

  68. The multiple fiascos presided over by Boris Johnson’s government have made people cynical about its plans. 18 hours ago.

    The exaggerated claims at the daily Downing Street press conferences resemble the ‘Five O’Clock Follies’ in the Vietnam war.

    The ‘Five O’Clock Follies’ was the name given during the Vietnam War to US military press briefings that were infamous for announcing non-existent victories and wildly exaggerated numbers for enemy casualties.

    No I was cynical long before then. In fact when I think back it was the Iraq not the Vietnam War that set me off. I knew it was based on lies before a shot was fired. That repellent as Saddam was he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Twin Towers. In fact the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie was probably the moment when all western governments decided to lie before and not after the fact. It was the turning point where they became pseudocracies; polities founded and run on lies.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-johnson-coronavirus-nhs-contact-tracing-app-statues-black-lives-matter-a9576151.html

    1. “The Tale of the Lazy Dog” by Alan Williams has a wonderful scene of a Press briefing where the casualties after a military encounter with the MVA were being glossed over.

  70. So Lewis Hamilton has called for any statues linked to racism in Britain to be pulled down – from the luxury of his Monaco mansion to avoid paying income tax to the UK.
    What he has forgotten to tell you is that the company that pays his multi-million pound annual salary made a fortune from Jewish slave labour during World War 2 – just 75 years ago. Many of those Jewish slaves were later sent to concentration camps – where they met their deaths in horrific circumstances.

    Hugo Boss made the Nazi uniforms, Volkswagen & Audi both used Jewish slave labour and produced military vehicles during the war. If you want to pick and choose Western history, don’t forget about the individuals and corporations that pay your bloated salary – otherwise you look like an over-privileged hypocrite.

    Hamilton is estimated to make £40 million a year from Mercedes.

    Now that he is aware of the company’s racist past (in living memory rather than centuries ago) shouldn’t he pay the money back?

    1. You, sir, are an optimist!

      Most of the people who make “morality” pronouncements stop short of looking in the mirror, so to speak. For example, you won’t see a mention in the Graun that its founder made his fortune trading American cotton, planted and harvested by slaves. Meanwhile they delight in daily pointing out the motes in the eyes of others.

    2. I still wonder about the provenance of the diamonds in his dinky ear studs.
      And the cobalt in all the whizzy technology he undoubtably uses.

      1. Precisely. His diamond ear studs were almost certainly excavated by slaves in African mines. They will have been cut by a Jew in Amsterdam.

        Much of the technology he enjoys is developed in England. Hamilton is doing himself immense reputational damage by criticising the country which gave him the freedom and resources to succeed. He seems to be thick between the ears and totally lacking in self-awareness.

        1. Making him the perfect representative of this racist movement.

          A spoiled, privileged, rich ignorant idiot with an axe to grind.

        2. I reckon every single racing driver is barmy. Who else would win a contest and then shake a champagne bottle before opening it and spraying it all over the place. If I were a racing driver I would open the bottle carefully and then gently pour a glassful into champagne flutes held by the winner and the two runners-up. (Up-runners, Peddy?)

          1. Me too. I understand that the bottles of Mumm are alcohol free. Thus, this waste is not really as serious as you and I might take it.

            The spectacle remains offensive to me personally.

          2. I didn’t know that it was not champagne, Corrie. But the behaviour is that of hooligans. At least they don’t tell the police to eff off, pull down statues, break shop windows and loot.

    2. Actually, with my child psychologist hat on, it’s more likely those are the ones who were indulged by mummy saying it’s ok, you’ll get what you want, just keep shouting.

  74. Best lunch in 30 degrees weather… fresh sourdough bread, a bowl of minced chillies in olive oil to dip the bread in, and chilled red wine.
    Sheer bliss!

      1. It depends on the red. A light Beaujolais for example, chilled on a hot day, can be quite refreshing.

        Edit: should have scrolled down, sorry ;@(

        1. I know – we often have chilled red. I just thought I’d wind you up, Paul.

          Given that you are enjoying the one fine day allowed in Norway this year!

      3. Valpolicella & Beaujolais Nouveau, to name but 2, are excellent chilled.

          4. Najua tembo mpenzi yangu.

            I was just putting it in the context of ghastly Californian wine.

          2. A cold Bristol Cream goes nicely with one cube of ice. Refreshing, and the strong flavour can cope with the cold.

          3. Yes, of course & sometimes a slice of lemon.

            No, only kidding, but I have been having ice in my white wine recently. Useful if I’ve forgotten to put the wine in the ‘fridge & stops me getting too pissed.

        3. ‘Morning, Peddy (Sunday Morning that is). With regard to Beaujolais Nouveau, I do remember, in my time as the Secretary of Buck’s Club, asking a then well-known wine critic for his critique of Beaujolais Nouveau. His response was along the lines of. “Hmm not bad but a bit like going to bed with a 16 year old.”

          1. Agreed, Tom. I recall a wine snob saying that ” it’s OK, but a bit young”!

      4. It depends on the red. A light Beaujolais for example, chilled on a hot day, can be quite refreshing.

        Edit: should have scrolled down, sorry ;@(

    2. Chilled red ,they used to try and give me that in the Loire. Its fine for the French. Chilled is white or rose.

      1. Cool red is good. It’s worth remembering that the ‘room temperature’ for red rule appliesd before the advent of central heating

    3. ‘Afternoon, Paul, sourdough starter has just been recharged. Baking tomorrow (I hope).

  75. Moh and myself ventured further than we intended this afternoon . We went to Bournemouth via Poole just for the ride and to see what has been built since lockdown . We were quite phased out by the crowds and the traffic . people on buses , not many people wearing masks and loads of foreigners !

    We passed a large Home base store with a huge queue waiting outside and a John Lewis .. everyone socially distancing and a bit further on at Westbourne , a
    M+S Food store with an equally long queue, lots of elderly people waiting patiently .. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining , many of the smaller shops had queues as well. I said to Moh , doesn’t this all remind you of either a Lowry painting or somewhere in Eastern Europe when times were harder .. (my imagination )

    We headed to the East cliff (Bournemouth) where we just tried to find a parking space so we could have a walk .. The roads were packed with cars, lots of families strolling about . Managed to squeeze into a parking slot , didn’t have enough loose change in the car , so crossed fingers , Moh didn’t have the car park app on his phone , so had a quick walk along the top East cliff pavement .. we could see below us the pier , beach and the Purbecks where we live in one direction , and to the left of us ahead was the Isle of Wight and some more cruise liners anchored just off shore .. The weather was lovely , sea blue, sunshine and the beach below was busy with lots of people enjoying themselves . Not much sign of social distancing .

    WHAT was noticeable were the superb looking hotels along the top were devoid of people and cars .. all of them were closed up . The hustle and bustle of traffic and people riding bicycles was there , but the heart of real tourism has been savaged badly .

    People seem somewhat disorientated generally . Tip toeing cautiously is the word . Shopping is queue and social distancing orientated , but sitting on a beach isn’t .. so why is that .

    We were pleased to retreat back to the car and head home, I think we had seen enough ..

    I just want to put the clock back to this time last year , when people smiled and nodded and didn’t seem so anxious.

    Apols for being boring because I guess it is the same everywhere.

    1. So, are Home Base & John Lewis between Poole & Westbourne? If so, that’s new.

      Btw, it’s Moh & I. 😉

        1. Golly, judging by the map that area must be completely different now. The last time I was in the area was 2003 (I think) on a visit from Sweden via Germany to collect my father. We visited former neighbours in Poole, but stayed with friends out at Holt.
          The father of my best friend in the 6th Form was chief engineer at Redland Pipes at Branksome.

    2. Having a lot less people locally, we have not had to queue to get in anywhere. Social distancing is obvious in the stores and most (but not all) customers wear masks. We are in Week 9 of our state’s re-opening plan, so we will soon be “open” but people are being asked to continue being careful – which being certifiably “old” we are.

    3. Afternoon T_B, I’m not sure it is the same everywhere.

      Mrs VVOF expressed a desire for shredded duck tonight so we took a trip to the local supermarket.

      Walked straight in, no queues, no staff on the door controlling entry. Shoppers were keeping a social distance, more like 1m not 2m though and the shelves were as full as normal apart from eggs.

      I never realised that the hens in norf zummerzet have changed employers as it appears our local supermarket (Asda) struggle with stock on a weekly basis. Sainsburys and Tesco must offer the hens better terms and conditions because if we don’t bother with a trip to the farm shop, they always have stock available.

      As you say, times are different this year compared to last year.

      3. Our supermarkets abandoned people on the door a week or so ago. I haven’t had to queue to get in for at least a fortnight. It’s almost (apart from the odd person in a mask and the tendency for people to leap out of the way when they see you coming) back to normal!

      4. The virus has some weird side-effects.
        Cotton clothes have got smaller
        Barmen have become slow & useless
        Restaurants no longer offer salt & pepper at the table, nor did the Italian have limoncello… ARGH!
        Waitresses pour coke all over the table, then wipe it up. A new disinfecting ritual?
        Sigh

    4. I really feel for those whose businesses were just closed, at no notice. It’s a real bummer. Just hope that there can be some recovery – where can people stay if there’s to be no foreign holidays?

    2. If the hairdressers don’t open soon, I may have to adopt one of those fetching hairstyles.

      1. i’m taking scissors to mine. maybe dog clippers. i fear that will end badly though 🙁

  77. I see the Mail has now overtaken the Sun to be the UK’s most popular paper. Murdoch is probably wondering if he can get away with bringing Page 3 back – after all, that’s what propelled it to the top of the heap.

    1. The world has moved on, I don’t think ‘page 3’ would increase circulation today, possibly the opposite.

      1. LGBQTWZY of the day, in a suggestive pose, according to how one might be expected to approach the creature in question would be an absolute winner. They could call it:

        Pin the tail on the donkey

      3. Is it really necessary? The mail seems to have endless photo-ops of near naked celebrities posing forming 90% of their news on their website. I presume it’s much the same at the Sun.

    2. I suspect that the return of football (proper) will have a positive effect on The Sun’s sales figures. It has a reputation for football coverage (apparently). Personally I have no time for either.

      1. Ah… foresight is a fine thing. 20+ years ago I bought a clipper, with combs, and it’s still going (buzz), still clipping hair, beards, and ear-tops. Saved me a fortune, so it has.

  79. 320360+ up ticks,
    Birmingham is another occupied city is it not ? last time I was there was to vote in a new, as it turned out, very successful leader of the then real UKIP, one Gerard Batten, a man for ALL reasons.
    On leaving the venue observed a bearded wonder reading tracts of the
    islamic ideology manual out loud to all & sundry under a submissive pcism & appeasement umbrella.

    https://twitter.com/GerardBattenUK/status/1274096910723362826

        1. I’m not much of a film & telly buff – they didn’t say much about his theatre career on there.

  81. Just watched five minutes of the BBC News. An interview with one of their reporters about the 2 metre rule and how difficult it will be for the public to be weaned off this and onto a lesser one without bringing down western civilisation. From local observation people forgot about this a week ago!

    1. Yes, my local Westfield shopping mall reopened last week with all the walkways divided and arrows all over the floor that people are completely ignoring. I did see some distanced queues which made me smile. Boots, Burberry and Louis Vuitton.

      1. Yesterday, the traffic wardens were out in numbers in Wellingborough’s shopping centre. The pedestrian lanes marked out with safety tape reminded me of my cycling proficiency test in the 1960s. There’s a dog-leg half way down with great opportunities for the daring to cut corners. I heard at least one cry of “Non-compliance!”. I expected to witness a chase but was disappointed. As I left, I smiled nicely at the young woman who came in through the out door. I thought of calling out “Rebels unite!” but the moment passed.

    2. They are still pumping out their “control the masses” agenda. It’s nonsense – we’re having dinner next door tonight.

        1. With our next door neighbour. She came to us the other week and is returning the favour.

      3. We’re out to dinner in Oslo tonight!
        1 metre for us in Europe. You guys must be really toxic!
        ;-))

        1. Ran out of Deo weeks ago. I’m quite fruity now. Everyone obeys the 2 metre rule when i waft passed.

    3. Indeed. Mrs HJ and I spent the day helping out at an NGS garden opening in Kent. Magnificent place and everyone really enjoyed themselves. Apart from the usual sensitization of hands etc no one stood on ceremony. It was just like old times.

  83. Batch of sausage rolls just coming out,yer “finest” sausage meat enhanced with white pepper,mace, sage and seasalt
    Taking them out to share with the awkward squad over a couple of beers
    Later All

    3. I don’t usually eat sausage rolls but those sound really tempting.

      Tonight I’m having a paneer jalfrezi. Well, you have try these things once & I’m sick of murgh. I often give the latter to Missy after I’ve sucked all the spices out of it.

  85. Tonight’s cocktail is a Passionfruit Martini… A Passionfruit Martini.

    1. Finally located Fever Tree tonic, as recommended by a Nottler, so it will be Tanqueray & Tonic for tonight, instead of the usual Schweppes.

      1. I was always sceptical what a surprise over the claims about different tonics, but I have to admit that Fever Tree is excellent..

          4. Firstborn makes the stuff. Rocket fuel, so it is, about 72%. Needs plenty tonic to be drinkable… Hic!

          2. A bottle of gin in this house lasts for years. I might have 2-3 a year and that’s it.

      2. I remember the feeling of sheer panic when I first arrived in Sweden & couldn’t find any brand of tonic water. I asked a German colleague who had been in town already for a few months & she just shrugged and said, “The tastes are different here,” which didn’t help my morale. I finally located Schweppes in one of the 3 supermarkets in town. I didn’t buy my gin in Sweden, but every time I visited my father in Germany, I filled the car with gin from Lidl.

        FT tonic, in several flavours, is always available in my local Waitrose.

          2. Ah, I’m confusing it without with Brewdog Punk AF, which looks very similar.

        2. That’s good! How about organising a brewery visit for a few Nottlers? Once the lockdown has passed of course!

    1. He’s looking well. Well as in well preserved or pickled. I’m sure he has his own private organ bank.

  87. Protesters topple Confederate general statue in Washington DC and set it on fire. Sat 20 Jun 2020.

    Cheering demonstrators jumped up and down as the 11-foot (3.4-meter) statue of Albert Pike – wrapped with chains – wobbled on its high granite pedestal before falling backward, landing in a pile of dust. Protesters then set a bonfire and stood around it in a circle as the statue burned, chanting, “No justice, no peace, no racist police”.

    Eyewitness accounts and videos posted on social media indicated police were on the scene but did not intervene. The president, Donald Trump, quickly tweeted about the toppling, calling out DC mayor Muriel Bowser and writing: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country.”

    The police were of course, from the point of view of self-interest, right not to interfere. If any of the demonstrators were killed or injured they would be the ones charged and no politician (apart from Trump) would ride to their rescue. This is common to all revolutions, first Civil Order breaks down and then there is a stark choice. Do you call in the military and risk all-out Civil War or back down and be swept from office. Trump is in an unenviable position. I think were I he I would do the former and call in the generals and if they didn’t back me I would quit.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/20/protesters-statue-washington-dc-albert-pike-juneteenth-us

    3. He’s up for re-election in November. Quitting now would just hand the country over to the far Left. Unfortunately, November may be too late to turn things around.

      1. There are times when I think that America deserves a hard left government, the problem would be that China and the caliphate would get an even easier ride.

  88. Apropos my comments (NoTTL passim) about telly tarts (of all sexes).

    I have nothing against documentary programmes. But I have one test.

    Is the prog about the subject matter – or about the presenter? If the latter. immediate switch off.

    2. I like documentaries by David Starkey. He’s full of information, and doesn’t make it about him.

  89. I am beginning to fear that America will never solve its racism problem. Janet Daley.

    There certainly is a problem with racial discrimination in Britain – but it is nothing like the problem of racism in the United States. When I say “nothing like”, I don’t mean that in the idiomatic sense of “not on the same scale or degree of importance”. I mean that it is utterly different in its social significance and historical context. Trying to claim that the two phenomena are identical – or that precisely the same analysis can be made of both of them – helps nobody to understand or remedy the problems that exist here or there.

    Racism in the US is a blight that is deeply – I am beginning to fear, ineradicably – embedded in its national consciousness. This is partly due to the terrible bitterness left by the Civil War, about which few Europeans I know have any real understanding. But on an even more pervasive level, it is a consequence of a prevailing anxiety that runs through the larger American experience of life – again, something most Europeans do not understand at all.
    Having grown up in America and lived through the great age of civil rights reform with all its supposedly miraculous “turning points”: the march on Washington where Martin Luther King made his legendary “I have a dream” speech, the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the end of segregation in the schools of the southern states, I find it heartbreaking that this national curse has never been eradicated. Even after two terms of a black president, the agony goes on. (Maybe the death of George Floyd will be, as everybody keeps hoping, a genuine turning point: most people have never actually seen anybody in handcuffs killed by the police on television before.)

    But I am more sure than ever that what is happening here – however much vitriolic imitators would like to pretend – is not like what is happening there. This goes, at its heart, to the nature of the American psyche.

    British racial prejudice is to do with resentment of the outsider: the incomer who might disrupt normal expectations. But in the US, everybody is – or is descended from – an outsider. The thing that made America so utterly different from anywhere else: a “land of opportunity” for migrants fleeing from whatever they needed to escape – persecution, poverty, disadvantage – is precisely the thing that makes it, to this day, so chronically anxious and insecure.
    America is a land of displaced people: its condition is profoundly unlike the common experience of most of the nations of the world, particularly in their poorer or more provincial regions where family roots are likely to go back ten or more generations.

    In truth, most Americans have no such sense of where they belong or who they belong to: they, or their antecedents, chose opportunity and optimism but at a price – in a sense of stability and rootedness – that the country is still paying. (This is a recurrent theme in its popular culture: the longing to go home, to be reunited with long-lost family.)

    Almost everyone born in the US can tell a story something like mine: my father did not speak English until he went to school. His father never spoke it at all. When I was a child in post-war America, most of my friends had at least one set of grandparents who did not speak the language of their new country. Now you may say that this is precisely the condition of many immigrants to Britain, and that perhaps it is more alienating to be among a small minority of incoming foreign-language speakers than in a nation composed entirely of migrants. I can understand this argument but I think that it is, perhaps counter intuitively, wrong.

    A long-standing stable society with its confident community ties is ultimately stronger and more able to absorb, with generosity and patience, the arrival of new people. I know that there are obvious exceptions to this and that bigotry and xenophobia can not be entirely defeated but, having lived under both sets of circumstances, I promise you that the ugliness and hatred of the confused and insecure is far more dangerous than blithely unthinking narrow mindedness.

    Racism in the US is, of course, the precise antithesis of anti-foreigner sentiment: ironically, most African Americans are descended from people who have been in the country at least as long as anybody. And it is that awful historical truth which makes them different from other Americans: they were the only ones whose antecedents did not come to the country by choice. Their fate was the exact opposite of all those millions who (like my grandparents) arrived at Ellis Island in pursuit of a limitless future. They were not participating in the American dream: they are the inheritors of its nightmare.

    Britain may indeed have a historic culpability for the profits of slavery but that history has been repudiated many times over. It is not woven into the contemporary culture in the same way as the antagonisms that remain in American life where the crushing poverty of the South after the Civil War has never been forgotten.

    So how to understand this country of disparate (and sometimes desperately confused) people? Another thing that is (I’m sorry) rarely understood by the British – who are so relaxed about their national identity that they can scarcely be bothered to defend it except when it is under imminent threat – is that patriotism is the only thing that binds Americans together.

    Their sacred documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and the totemic symbols of nationhood – the flag, the oath of allegiance memorised like a ritual prayer, and the national anthem – are the sacraments of a faith which is all that they have in common.

    This is why the emblematic gesture of “taking the knee” by Black Lives Matter protesters is so enormously significant. Refusing to stand when the national anthem is played is a kind of secular mortal sin. It is a rejection, not just of the government or the civil authorities or the economic conditions of the time, but of the very thing that makes Americans one people. There is simply no equivalent of that here – not in political terms or in moral significance.

    It is insoluble. Contrary to the myths of Multiculturalism different races do not mix. They remain separate and across those borders there is always the potential for War and Mutual Hatred.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/20/beginning-fear-america-will-never-solve-racism-problem/

    1. This racism must be on an epic scale.

      I lived in both Birmingham and London and never saw any. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but it was never an issue. I mixed freely with people of African/Asian and Chinese heritage. They never mentioned anything.

      Has anyone else on here witnessed any?

    2. You Minty

      There are many more ‘corners’ to be fought in ‘modern’ countries, by that I mean those give the gereral population

      Internet access,

      Cross border MSM,

      freedom of speech,

      ability to travel freely (no, I do not mean cost free
      Freedom of Religion
      Equal Rights, although it is always catch up
      Tax Bills
      Access to medical treatment

      etc

      If the BLM troubles exist in China, you will never hear
      How many C of E/RC churches are there in the Gulf States or Pakistan
      What white righta are there in South Africa

    3. Even after two terms of a black president, the agony goes on

      If the US had had a black president who had been committed to healing the racial divide, it might not be so bad now, but Obama wasn’t interested in doing that. He made things a lot worse, by talking up supposed racism by the police, giving opinions after a shooting without waiting for the facts and truth to come out.
      The Left and Democrats have stoked up the division within America. They don’t want blacks to succeed because they probably wouldn’t vote for the Democrats in sufficient numbers. The Democrats rely upon the black and immigrant votes, so they keep the country divided.

      1. Obama wasn’t black. He was half white, and it was the white half – mother and maternal grandparents – who brought him up and gave him his ‘privilege’.

      1. That sounds like one of the games played by all the creatures before the flood of tears in Alice in Wonderland.

        Must read that book again.

        1. A good few “British” are descended from Roman soldiers and/or Norse invaders. And the rest from Germans of various sorts.

          2. The numbers of genuine Romans would have been extremely small – the Governor, commanders in charge of the legions and a small civil service, very few of whom would have settled permanently. Some of the legionaries settled on retirement, but they probably came from other provinces not Rome.

      2. The Millwall chap carried to safety by the black guy was an ex-copper, so you may be right.

          1. The photographer reminds me strongly of a mate with whom I used to sail Shearwater cats in Southampton Water & Poole Harbour environs.

    2. How would today’s young men cope?

      I don’t think the vast majority of them would. They would break down and cry. The government could draft them of course but that doesn’t make them soldiers. Look at Mussolini’s, or any Arab army, they couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Armies to quote the old cliché are expressions of the society which they serve and the UK is now a corrupt and decadent shithole which no one would want to fight and die for.

  92. Afternoon all.

    Boudreaux and wife Rose were sitting quietly in bed reading when Rose looked over at him and asked a bold question.

    Rose: “What would you do if I died? Would you get married again?”

    Boudreaux: “Definitely not!” Rose: “Why not – don’t you like being married?”

    Boudreaux: “Of course I do.”

    Rose: “Then why wouldn’t you remarry?”

    Boudreaux “Okay, I’d get married again.”

    Rose: “You would?” (with a hurtful look on her face).

    Boudreaux: (Makes audible groan).

    Rose: “Would you live in our house?”

    Boudreaux: “Sure, it’s a great house.”

    Rose: “Would you sleep with her in our bed?”

    Boudreaux: “Where else would we sleep?”

    Rose: “Would you let her drive my car?”

    Boudreaux: “Probably, it is almost new.”

    Rose: “Would you replace my pictures with hers?”

    Boudreaux: “That would seem like the proper thing to do.”

    Rose: “Would she use my golf clubs?”

    Boudreaux: “No, she’s left-handed.”

    Rose: … silence …

    Boudreaux: “Dang.”

    1. He should have closed his book & concentrated when the questioning started.

    2. Thanks, Issyagain, for stealing my thunder. What you have published though, is only part of the survey/questionnaire. The full one will appear on Monday.

        1. In fairness, Issy, you weren’t to know as I’m sure you don’t have crystal ball! {:¬)

    1. GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF is one of the most-loved programmes across the nation after viewers continue to grow attached to the aspiring Star Bakers year after year.

      It is? I’ve never seen a single episode!

      1. You haven’t missed much.

        And for Gawd’s sake avoid “Extra Slice”, hosted by that dreadful Brand woman.

      2. #MeToo…
        Never watch cookery progs……. I’m seriously considering re-newing my TV licence.

    2. Bert: Why don’t you do any baking, dear?

      Wife*: I was put off when I got caught with a bun in the oven 50 years ago.

      *Can’t remember her name.

    3. This is “in consideration of the olds and wrinklies” so I suppose Prue Leith won’t be there either.

    6. Bert: “They’ve turned down my application to Great British Bake Off”

      Ada: “What did you expect, you’re half-baked and can no longer get it to rise.”

  94. Some thing very nasty has happened with in the last few hours in Reading .. Twitter is twittering , no details , but mass stabbings at a BLM protest .. I do hope it is a case of WLM. Anyway there is a massive kerfuffle .

    1. Three dead, two injured. Being described as ‘random event’. Given the area, it’s possibly drug-related.

      1. Are we getting back to normal then? If drug related murders are back in the news, it would make Bill Jackson so happy.

    2. T-B Incident is taking place in Forbury Gardens. There was a BLM protest earlier today in the park but the police are not convinced there is a connection.

    3. Whoops T-B you already know the details. This country is becoming a third world country because of chronic political negligence.

      1. 320360+ up ticks
        Evening C,
        Who put these political chronical cretins in power time & time again ongoing ?
        Party before Country has a great deal to answer for.

  95. Dear Nottlers.
    I will not be posting for a while and I do not want to cause a search for a reason why, as you good people do, when a Nottler goes offline for a while. My very dear wife was taken ill on Thursday afternoon and died at around13:30 today.
    Late yesterday the ICU consultant informed me that only a miracle would prevent her dying and that those who could get to the hospital should do so. On that advice our son, DiL , my wife’s sister and I said our goodbyes late Friday evening. My wife was in good hands and received the best care possible in her last hours. She was not aware of what was happening and on the odd occasion she opened her eyes she did not recognise who was in the room. I count that as a blessing. I am so glad that we made it to 50 years of married life back in April.
    All the best to you and I hope to be back sometime in the future.
    Korky.

    5. Please accept our deepest condolences Korky, Alf and I are so very sorry to hear your news.

    7. Oh, Korky, I’m so sorry to hear this. I loved the pictures you shared with us of your wedding day; your wife looked so lovely and happy and you were obviously so proud of her. My deepest condolences to you and your family.

      1. I join Caroline in expressing our deepest sympathies. We know from our own happy experience just how important a marriage like yours must have been and how much joy you must have had together over the years.

        We look forward to having you back on the Nottlers again when you are ready. You know you have many good friends here.

        1. Well said, but if the time comes and he looks back at everyone’s comments when he returns, he might not see yours as a reply to his OP. You may wish to post yours separately rather than as a reply to Caroline’s.

    8. Korky, I am so sorry.
      I think I speak for all NOTTLers when I say that we feel touched and honoured that you contacted us at such a heart breaking time.
      Remember that Elsie and I are not a million miles away.

    11. I’m so sorry to hear this. What a sudden shock for you and your family. Take care x

    13. Korky, so, so sorry for you and family. Deepest sympathy and condolences.

    15. Sending g sincere condolences. In due course, may all your memories bring you comfort.

    16. What a terrible shock for you Korky, and so soon after your Golden. Life can be so cruel at times. My deepest condolences to you and your family.

    17. You poor man , you are in a dreadful place at the moment .

      What a dreadful shock .

      Deepest condolences to you and your family .

      Take care x

    18. There are no words Korky so I shall not attempt them. Hope to see you soon.

    19. Oh I am so sorry to hear this, my condolences to you and your family. I remember the lovely photographs you posted on your 50th anniversary of your wedding – a handsome groom and beautiful bride. Take care and be easy on yourself, make allowances for yourself and from a purely practical point of view give yourself more time when you are doing things or going anywhere – your mind will be elsewhere. We Nottlers will be thinking of you.

      1. I am sure that poppies mum is right, all NoTTLers who have read your post will be thinking of you, Korky, as indeed is shown by the number of upvotes to your post. We will see you when you feel ready to return. Take your time and remember that any one of us (including me) will be happy to hear from you if you would like some contact and a listening ear.

    20. My condolences to you, your family and your friends.
      With my best wishes to you all.

    23. So sudden, Korky. My sincere condolences and do try to take good care of yourself while you come to terms with it.

    28. My sincere condolences to you, dear Korky. I hope you find peace after the shock and take care.

    29. I’m always at a loss on these occasions to know what to say for the best so all I will say is I offer my deepest condolences to you and your family, this seems so unfair and untimely and wrong in every way.

      1. Know what you mean, Datz. The event is so overwhelming that I just can’t find the words to sympathize properly – and, God knows, these last few years there’s been plenty of practice.
        Although I’m not overtly religious, I do believe in God, so a prayer for Korky and his wife might be in order. It can’t hurt, at least.

    30. I’m so very sorry to hear that. I send you my condolences.
      If you need any support, you know we’re here.

    32. My sympathy.
      The hole in your life will have raw edges for a long time and, whilst the hole will always be there, the edges will, eventually, heal.
      Don’t stay away too long.

    34. That is terribly sad news KtK. May I, a stranger, offer my sincerest condolences? I am most dreadfully sorry for you and your family. Time to grieve now but in time you’ll be looking back on the fifty wonderful years you spent together.

    36. Oh Korky. I’m so sorry. My deepest condolences.
      You take care, you hear?

    37. Dandy Front Pager

      I have been recommended by some of our fellow Nottlers to repost my comment immediately under yours so you might find it more easily when you return:

      I join Caroline in expressing our deepest sympathies. We know from our own happy experience just how important a marriage like yours must have been and how much joy you must have had together over the years.

      We look forward to having you back on the Nottlers again when you are ready. You know you have many good friends here.

    1. Rule 13

      If no details of the perp are revealed, when incident is reported, it means his Life Matters

  101. The CM article to which Rastus referred to earlier.

    I’m not sure that BJ does have the right instincts.

    Boris Johnson has the right instincts. It is about time he started following them

    What does a government that won the election so well, so recently, have to be so scared of?

    CHARLES MOORE

    In December’s general election, this Government won the biggest mandate for either party since 2001. It was the Conservatives’ best result since 1987. So why does the Government seem to run scared? Under our system, a mandate is defined by the number of MPs returned for each party. Yet the symptoms of that big mandate – backbench Conservative MPs – feel ignored. This week, one of them, Robert Halfon, complained tweetingly that the No 10 Policy Unit saw his colleagues as “hobbits in the shire who are told what to do”.

    The comparison does not quite work, since Tolkien’s snug little polity of Frodo and Sam was no sort of dictatorship; but in suggesting that Downing Street sees Tory backbenchers as small, hairy-footed provincials, Mr Halfon is tapping in to widespread resentment.

    This week, the Prime Minister met the executive of the backbench 1922 Committee, for what they regarded as too short an encounter at which he talked too much. Such a meeting had been requested by its chairman, Sir Graham Brady, since last September. Normally, it takes place three times a year. Boris Johnson was burnt by the crazed behaviour of some of his party’s anti-Brexit MPs last year, but he swept in a better Parliament at the general election. He should not treat the new one as if it were the old.

    Backbench MPs can be annoyingly self-important, but they make a party leader and can break him. Always – but especially in the time of Covid – their representative function means they report to the centre what is worrying people “out there”. Just now, many such people are very worried indeed; but when their MPs try to talk to central command, they feel they are not listened to. Indeed, they feel that the command is so self-isolating that their usual channels, such as the whips or departmental Cabinet ministers, are themselves cut off from the sources of power. Therefore, the conversation is not worth having.

    My own trade of journalism is also disgruntled. Admittedly, we are never knowingly gruntled, but this is a low point. Colleagues complain of being treated with disdain and threatened with losing sources. They cite occasions when, they believe, they have definitely been told things by Downing Street “comms” which were not true, and had things denied that were.

    Part of the – in my view, unfair – media treatment of the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Dominic Cummings, over his famous family drive north, was the result of the unnecessarily hostile media relations which 10 Downing Street had built up. It does not make sense for Mr Cummings, whose job is too full anyway, to supervise relations with a class of people he likes being rude to. No one can blame him for kicking the BBC, but why hand out the same treatment to virtually everyone whose job is to report what government does? The right model is not of a campaign to be won, but of a country to be governed.

    It is odd – given the introvert nature of Theresa May and the extrovert one of Boris Johnson – that the communication problems of her premiership are being repeated in his. In her case, everything had to be funnelled through two able but controlling aides. In Boris’s case, it is through one – Mr Cummings.

    Mr Cummings is brilliant at fearlessly maintaining central aims. That was why he was key to winning the Leave vote and the December election. But Downing Street lacks a comms team which can pre-empt, rapidly rebut and maintain a direction of travel. In the slow response to Marcus Rashford’s campaign about free school meals in the summer holidays, or to the Black Lives Matter vandalism of statues, or to Mr Cummings’s own embarrassments, you see the absence of these skills.

    Much of the present discontent is caused by the loss of direction over the lockdown. Once the Government decided to lock down, it was fast and fiercely repetitive. In terms of “buy-in”, it worked. The public got the message, and obeyed. Since the Government started trying to unlock, it has seemed to fiddle nervously with the keys, rather than opening the gates and helping people towards freedom.

    Frustrated Tory MPs, reflecting what Mrs Thatcher used to call “our people” across the country, fear the Government is cut off from the right sources on the ground. Having given too central a role to scientists in policy-making, it is too timid about moving without them. Ministers are also surrounded, of course, by civil servants. It is a not insignificant point that all civil servants have been receiving their full salaries throughout the lockdown. They therefore do not feel the desperation of the self-employed and private-sector employees hurtling towards unemployment. A great difference between public and private sectors is that the former feels it has all the time in the world, whereas the latter knows painfully well that time is money.

    In this closed Whitehall world, No 10’s approved method of finding out what people think is to commission lots of opinion polls. These show, apparently, that the lockdown remains very popular.

    That is interesting to know, of course, but is it a guide to policy change? Such polls tend to look backwards. People got a clear direction towards lockdown from the Government. They have not had an equally plain steer to move out of it. Therefore, many stick with the first, stronger impression. They accepted fear, and have still not been offered enough hope to overcome it. The death rate is back to normal, but the mood is not. This is a leadership question. Polls cannot provide leadership any more than a thermometer can change the temperature.

    Certainly, Downing Street’s critics ought to make more allowance for the unique difficulty of the Covid situation. Numerous mistakes are truly inevitable. MPs and ministers have had the greatest difficulty in communicating, because the plague has forbidden direct contact. The ministerial habit of leaking is so ingrained that sensitive issues cannot be discussed in full Cabinet. But the Government’s way of imposing discipline upon itself, its party and supporters has been looking more secretive than leader-like, and much too nervous of public opinion.

    Why, after all, did Boris Johnson’s party win so well, so recently? Because it defied the power and doctrines of largely unelected elites which had tried to reverse the result of a huge popular vote about our national destiny. Boris turned the tables.

    The same elites have seen the uneasy mood of the Covid crisis as a chance to turn them back. What shocks about Black Lives Matter is not the campaign itself – a classic piece of Marxist agitprop, exploiting white feelings of guilt. It is the knife through establishment butter – the readiness of the elites, such as senior civil servants, Oxbridge colleges, the BBC, the Bank of England and famous football teams, to kneel to the great non sequitur that the horrible police killing of one black man in Minneapolis means we must literally dismantle our country’s history. We put Boris in because we believe in that history.

    On this subject – and on others, such as the merging of DFID with the Foreign Office, reopening of schools in September, of pubs much sooner, the promise that we will not lock down again – the Prime Minister has been picking up speed in recent days. His reactions are usually the right ones. What his Government still lacks is the ability to act first rather than react afterwards.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/19/boris-johnson-has-right-instincts-time-started-following/

        1. There’s certainly a lot of money behind it.

          A group that can become a global brand, appearing almost over night, and must have been some time in the making behind the scenes, has to be bad news.

          Nothing I’ve seen so far suggests that it isn’t very bad news.

          1. Especially when so many- be they politicians or corporations have caved in to this opaque organisation.

          2. That is one of the aspects of the whole thing that I find so disturbing.
            They’ve caved in without question.

            An accusation of racism trumps everything, and nobody can question what is going on, even if it will destroy our society.

          3. Yes, it is very disturbing and the speed with which it has steamrollered everything in its way does not bode well for the future. The message is that the ballot box is yesterday’s failed method, today it is wholesale riots that work.

          4. I thank Providence that I almost certainly won’t live long enough to see the worst of it.
            On the downside I’ll miss my:
            “I told you so” , moment.
            };-((

          6. I will be cremated.

            But I’ve hired a Red Indian for the “I told you so” smoke signal.

          7. Oh, I don’t know, Sos. As long as the wine holds out, it could be really quite fun!

          8. You wrote a diatribe the other day, which expressed my feelings, about civil war.
            No amount of wine woud ever deal with that.

            {:-((

          10. Everyone (bar a few) don’t have the balls to push back. Don’t know why. Wimps and pyjamas, the lot of them.

          11. If they don’t feel that what they have is worth any kind of pushback or fight, then best they give up now & hand over to someone who does give a shit.

          13. What – and give up their salary, expenses and gold-plated pensions? Are you mad?? :o)

    3. “Freedom should only be given to a select few and freedom shouldn’t be given to all people.” (Marx, Karl.1847. Die Deutsche Ideologie)
      .
      Is’nt Marxism wonderful?

    4. Clearly a dumb cluck but even a great philosopher might have struggled to give an answer to the ‘question’, a rambling monologue that makes a Robert Peston question sound sharp and incisive.

    5. Wow, how about dumb! She can’t speak, and nothing indicates that she is capable of thinking.

      1. That’s not important, these days, like that AOC woman, it is the people that pull the strings that need to be exposed.

  103. Off topic:

    Newport City Council have published extracts from letters of complaints written by residents:
    1. It’s the dogs mess that I find hard to swallow.
    2. I want some repairs done to my cooker as it has backfired and burnt my knob off.
    3. I wish to complain that my father twisted his ankle very badly when he put his foot in the hole in his back passage.
    4. Their 18 year old son is continually banging his balls against my fence.
    5. I wish to report that tiles are missing from the outside toilet roof. I think it was bad wind the other day that blew them off.
    6. My lavatory seat is cracked, where do I stand?
    7. I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is coming away from the wall.
    8. Will you please send someone to mend the garden path. My wife tripped and fell on it yesterday and now she is pregnant.
    9. I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen.
    10. 50% of the walls are damp, 50% have crumbling plaster, and 50% are just plain filthy.
    11. The next door neighbour has got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just can’t take it anymore.
    12. The toilet is blocked and we cannot bath the children until it is cleared.
    13. Will you please send a man to look at my water, it is a funny and not fit to drink.
    14. Our lavatory seat is broken in half and now is in three pieces.
    15. I want to complain about the farmer across the road. Every morning at 6am his cock wakes me up and it’s now getting too much for me.
    16. The man next door has a large erection in the back garden, which is unsightly and dangerous.
    17. Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two children and would like a third, so please send someone round to do something about it.
    18. I am a single woman l am writing in about the noise made by the man on top of me every night.
    19. Please send a man with the right tool to finish the job and satisfy my wife..
    20. I have had the clerk of works down on the floor six times but I still have no satisfaction.
    21. This is to let you know that our lavatory seat is broke and we can’t get BBC2.
    22. My bush is really overgrown round the front and my back passage has fungus growing in it.

    Edit for formatting

      1. Me too.
        I wonder whether these things are just variations on a theme, with a different fall-guy each time.

        Even so, they raise a smile, and that’s their purpose.

    2. MB’s job in his teens was in the front office of Colchester Borough Council Building Works office recording tenants’ complaints. He had to treat smapthetically requests for back passages to be concreted, complaints about a husband who’d ‘broken his c0ck off in the airing cupboard’ and inevitably women who couldn’t cope with garden/plumbing/rent arrears etc…. because they were under the doctor

      1. Until one comes into contact with that level of the general public, one would never believe how daft they can be.

        1. Tell me about it. You never had to treat a certain category of dental patients.

        2. Tell me about it, having dealt with members of the public nothing surprises me. One of my favourites was the little old lady who had delivered 4 pints of milk every day. There was narrow little paths through her house for walking, everywhere else was covered with bottles of milk ranging from fresh yesterday’s to yellow blobs in bottles. When I asked why so much milk every day, the answer was “ you never know who could call”
          Sad really.

          One day I’ll tell you about the woman whose gas heater blew up and demolished her kitchen wall etc. Nothing I said could convince her it wasn’t the Russians.

  105. Evening, all. I think the lockdown has turned all our lives on their heads, whether it’s turned the clock back or not.

  107. Turned the TV on to watch the live wendyball, and was informed that viewers could turn the canned crowd noise off. What a shame there was no option to turn off the BLM slogans on the players’ shirts.

        2. Never watched football in the first place. I’m not about to start now it’s gone uber woke.

    3. Boris Johnson waded into the Swing Low Sweet Chariot race row yesterday, declaring it should not be banned ‘because no-one knows the words’.

      Nonsense. It was one of our set songs in school.

      1. I think Boris probably looked over Jordan and plenty of other girls before homing in on Carrie Symonds!

  110. The old ones are the best full of common sense and good advice take for instance “knees up mother brown” just oozes good advice and the way to go, as in,
    Under the table you must go
    he hi he hi he hi ho,
    if I catch you bending ( the knee) “i’ll saw your legs right off”
    knees up knees up “DON’T GET THE BREEZE UP” knees up mother brown.
    The decent peoples would only have to get real once maybe twice that the rear exits would be so shocked at not having a leg to stand on.
    As it stands currently the enemas are going to get away with murder only a matter of time.
    Get a token group and Tommy Robinson them, same day incarceration
    loooong term, unless be prepared to suffer as it will get worse daily.

  111. 320360+ up ticks,
    May one ask do these footballers realise that this anti democracy / GB campaign to take us back to the dark ages will take their wages in the same direction and they will have to get a real day job to survive, as was.

  113. I really feel for Korky.
    Going to bed tonight & realising that his lovely wife of 50 years will never be joining him again.
    That’s really hard. I hope he gets some peaceful sleep.

    3. I doubt it, Paul. They were obviously such a devoted and loving couple, who coped with her illness for many years, and achieved 50 years. It will take him some time to come to terms with his loss. No words can change that or, indeed, help. Makes one feel a bit helpless.

  114. Daily Mail.

    Prince Harry backs move to ban Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: Duke of
    Sussex signals his support for review of England rugby anthem linked to
    slavery despite huge backlash from fans

    1. Sorry, Johnny, that’s not quite true. The newspaper’s headline claims that he backs a move to ban. In fact he simply signals his support for a review. (Or has the result of the impending review already been decided?)

        1. Exacto, Peddy. Perhaps I was not too clever in showing that my scorn was not for Johnny but for the newspaper’s headline.

    2. Two options:
      Go to Twickenham & sing it anyway.
      Don’t buy a ticket & stay away.
      Man’s an arsehole.

  115. Help me out here, folks. A few days ago on here someone posted a link to a story about the BBC employing one of its own to examine its virtues of impartiality and factual accuracy (complaints about its ‘full facts’ column come to mind).

    Can someone provide a reference?

    1. https://order-order.com/202…

      Former Director of BBC News and now a lecturer at Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University, Richard Sambrook, has been drafted in by the Beeb to advise on impartiality, specifically on platforms like Twitter. So the BBC have turned to the famously not left wing world of academia…

      Guido’s not sure Sambrook is the most impartial of impartiality advisers, having

      Declared “I’m strongly remain” two years after the referendum

      Tweeted that “Donald Trump and Boris Johnson” are “post-truth politicians”

      Shared a Carole Cadwalladr story, adding the words “more Boris lies – now a man of zero integrity”

      Claimed that “Britain is being led to an epic act of national self-harm over Brexit”

      Criticised a letter from Oliver Dowden to Lord Hall over BBC Bias, arguing “Government tries to extend lockdown to independent journalism and critical views”

      Claimed Brexit is not the “will of the British people” because turnout was just 72%

      Called the Government “Shortsighted” and “stupid” for voting down a Lib Dem wrecking amendment on the Erasmus Programme

      Called it a “disgrace” that eurosceptic MEPs received EU funding

      Tweeted out an Independent article entitled “Brexit is going to be far worse than anyone could have guessed”

      Highly critical of Boris Johnson during the EU referendum

      Tweeted about pro-Brexit “Twitter bots” influencing the EU referendum

      Tweeted “Brexit is utterly, utterly stupid”, and “Brexit is like a Premier League side wanting to be relegated”

      The truth is there is far too much anti-Boris anti-Brexit bias to include in one article. Guido found Sambrook’s Twitter account to be more that of a partisan political commentator than an aspiring impartiality tsar. What a bonkers hire for advice on social media conduct…

  117. Good night and God bless, good Gentlefolk, I’m off to bed after posting Sunday’s funny on the relevant page.

          1. just a touch of mental illness, enough to allow him a comfortable life in Broadmoor etc. Presumably his controller will look after his family in Libya.

        2. security source has told the Press Association that the man who has been arrested is Libyan.

  119. that and the trans movement. we’re all losing civil/human rights, women the most.

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