647 thoughts on “Saturday 21 December: Genetic male or female sexual identity remains with everyone for life”

  2. The Frog Genie (Updated Version)
    A Woman was out golfing one day when she hit the ball into the woods.

    She went into the woods to look for it and found a frog in a trap. The frog said to her, “If you release me from this trap, I will grant you three wishes.”

    The woman freed the frog, and the frog said, “Thank you, but I failed to mention that there was a condition to your wishes. Whatever you wish for, your husband will get times ten!”

    The woman said, “That’s okay.”

    For her first wish, she wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

    The frog warned her, “You do realize that this wish will also make your husband the most handsome man in the world, an Adonis to whom women will flock and prostrate themselves”.

    The woman replied, “That’s okay because I will be the most beautiful woman and he will only have eyes for me.” So, KAZAM-she’s the most beautiful woman in the world!

    For her second wish, she wanted to be the richest woman in the world. The frog said, “That will make your husband the richest man in the world. And he will be ten times richer than you.”

    The woman said, “That’s okay because what’s mine is his and what’s his is mine.” So, KAZAM-she’s the richest woman in the world!

    The frog then inquired about her third wish, and she answered, “I’d like a mild heart attack.”

    Moral of the story: Women are clever. Don’t mess with them.

    Attention female readers: This is the end of the joke for you. Stop here and continue feeling good.

    Male readers: Please scroll down
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    The man had a heart attack ten times milder than his wife

    Moral of the story: Women are really dumb but think they’re really smart. Let them continue to think that way and just enjoy the show.

    PS: If you are a woman and are still reading this; it only goes to show that women never listen!!!

    Forward this to all the guys for a good laugh, and to all the ladies who have a good sense of humour.

    Puts on Tin hat and builds a mountain of sandbags!

    4. This is what annoys me about the MeToo tosh.

      OK, we get it. You’re now established in your career, either ashamed or want revenge so instead of accepting that you were simply a prostitute you pretend you’re a victim.

      Grow up, accept the consequences of your decisions.

    1. Would one of our wealthier Nottlrs like to put up the article please? Thanks.

      ‘Morning, Rik.

      PS I think Sherelle appeared on a Christmas edition of University Challenge, must find it on iPlayer.

    1. It has morphed from the M23 Motorway to the M23 Canal. I was driving not far from there late yesterday evening, and the rainfall was heavy and relentless. No wonder some of it decided to take a short cut across the road…

    1. We were at a post-election drinkie do last night.
      The reaction was mostly one of being still stunned and unable (so’s to speak) to drink it in.

    1. Morning, Stormy.
      Same here – been watching Youtube on the pad for a while now. Time to get up…

    2. Me neither. And an hour ago I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. Bizarrely the radio was on ….. it had turned itself on at some point during the night ….. as i walked across the living room to ponder this, do I turn it off or leave it on as a vague sort of evidence for pd, it switched itself off.

        1. No! Pd discovered this morning that the wireless has an alarm facility and when dusting at some time I must have accidentally depressed the little button (among many others) on the remote. It went off promptly at 7.00 am., there was a tiny 600 on the screen indicating it had commenced at 6.00 am when we investigated later. Goodness knows for how long it had been doing this – we are owls, rather than larks!

          It reminded me of our younger son’s furby – years after he had lost interest it was still sitting in a shelf in his room. I passed it late one night, suddenly there was a growly ha-ha-ha emitted into the darkness. It made me jump out of my skin – these toys are movement activated and the battery must have had a final burst of energy.

  16. Good morning all. Bizarre dreams. Did you know that the water stop-cock is called “the sploy”? No, neither did I…!!

    I sometimes wonder just what it is in our heads that causes completely weird dreams.

  18. 21st December. We must be getting close to the Shortest Day…{:¬)) (See NoTTL yesterday, passim)

    1. ‘Morning Bill, I think today will still be 23 hours and 56 minutes long. Though with the sky falling in, it might be the end of the world.

  19. It appears the Doomgoblin is soooooooooo last year,meet the latest scientific genius who will save us

    The image of 13-year-old Izzy crying as she was told she could be

    arrested outside Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s Sydney

    residence has become one of the defining images of the country’s

    bushfire crisis.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7ed6004d648a38d820d36b3e5f28fc90f817ff7b/0_333_5319_3191/master/5319.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=711c7916a53a446e68522cc1b12e609a

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2019/dec/21/im-the-13-year-old-police-threatened-to-arrest-at-the-kirribilli-house-protest-this-is-why-i-did-it

    2. Maybe they should use her as a bush fire extinguisher – I understand that drought prone land is short of water…..

    3. Is that her father with his arm around her? If so then this could well be child exploitation?

      PS With apologies to Bill, I must read down before posting.

    5. You’ve already lost kid. You’re ignorant. Yes, look at what a jewel we have left you. Look at the luxury you revel in.

  20. I always had a bad feline about the new “Cats” film
    Now the critics are calling it a Catastrophe

  21. Morning all

    SIR – What on earth is the reasoning behind the ruling of Judge James Tayler, who found that an employee dismissed for asserting that people cannot change their sex had expressed views “incompatible” with the rights of others (report, December 20)?

    Since Adam and Eve walked in the Garden of Eden (and indeed for a considerable period before that time), there have only been two sexes, male and female, designated in nature by the presence and distribution of X and Y chromosomes. The distribution of such chromosomes is inherited when the sperm fertilises the egg and remains with us in unalterable form for the duration of our lives.

    The expression of those sexual characteristics manifest in the distribution of such chromosomes represents gender. British society is not at all unique in having a proportion of its population who choose to express their gender at variance with their chromosomal make-up, but there is no way that a male can be identified in nature as a woman, or a woman identified in nature as a man, however many surgical manipulations, modifications and decorations are carried out in order to express a different gender.

    There is nothing wrong with a genetic male expressing their gender as female or a genetic female expressing their gender as male. There is everything wrong in stating that one is genetically male or female in contradiction of one’s chromosomal make-up. That is a deception. It erodes truth.

    Trevor Crofts FRCS

    Edinburgh

    1. Doubtless the first sacks of hate-mail are about to arrive at Mr Crofts’ gaff.

      ‘Morning, Epi.

    2. Will the scientific community arise en masse and castigate the judge’s opinion or will they, under threat of losing research grants or being no platformed, shrug their shoulders and let the ignorant continue their attacks against truth and common sense?

    4. If I maintained that there were four different sexes – no more , no fewer – would I be thrown out of my sailing club?

      This sort of nonsense turns the whole judicial system into a laughing stock.

      1. You’d be blatantly disregarding the RYA Pervert Yardstick and as such would have your sacrificial anodes torn off and all your winches sabotaged to give you nothing but riding turns.

      2. We can laugh all we want.

        First they came for the jobs.
        Because I was retired I didn’t care.
        Then they came for the householder.
        But my house was in trust, so I didn’t notice …..

        These people have enormous power and can wreak absolute havoc from their ivory towers.

      1. Ah, but if you can control the language, you can control what people can say. If you can control what people say, you control what they can think. If enough lies are told, eventually, with that power you control people.

        That is all the Left care about. There’s men and there’s women. A man can put on a dress. He can pretend he’s a woman. He’s not. He remains male no matter how many bits you chop off. It is time we said, quite clearly that the emperor has no clothes on.

    2. It’s a classy bit of satire, isn’t it? The last verse brings it up to date.

      ‘Morning, Citroen.

      1. Post Script: Dominic Frisby was at St Paul’s School at the same time as Gideon George Osborne. I wonder if they got on?

  23. SIR – Following the ruling on the case of Maya Forstater and her view on transgenderism, I’m afraid I, and others such as J K Rowling, now stand in contempt of court – not in the legal sense, but in finding Judge Tayler’s judgment, in his words, “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

    We members of the public, and all judges and lawyers, need reminding from time to time that many statements made by the legal profession are not matters of law at all but merely the expression of opinion, which in truth carries no more authority than anyone else’s opinion.

    The moral groundwork upon which such opinions are made is often simply the prevailing fashion of the time. In continuing to speak on behalf of these ephemeral fashions, judges themselves are not only unwittingly bringing the law into disrespect but, more seriously, bringing devastating consequences upon otherwise perfectly law-abiding citizens.

    Rev H Beverley Tasker

    Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

    SIR – A court has ruled that voicing a scientific fact can be deemed “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. If this irrationality continues, then either science or the law will become unworkable.

    It is time that this issue was addressed by serious minds.

    Chris Shannon

    Eckington, Derbyshire

      1. Does she have that sort of money behind her?
        Maybe J.K. Rowling would put up the readies.
        I am still gobsmacked at agreeing with her.

      2. I hope so.
        If there is a crowdfunding appeal for her I’d quite happily chip in a fiver.

    2. Rev Tasker’s comment is spot on. The judge in this case has thrown the scientific method out with the bath water when making this judgement that sits so comfortably with this very recent fashionable stance but which denies scientific reality. Are we seeing modern day book burning without the carbon emissions?

        1. For centuries, the great thinkers, especially of radical ideas, were walking on eggshells because of the Church. Currently we are seeing the rise of deniers of science, not driven by the Church, but by vested interests bent on subduing populations and taking control.

          1. Climate Change is the new religion.

            “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
            There is some dispute over whether this quotation is from Chesterton or A.N. Other.

      2. If one takes Judge Tayler’s ruling to its ultimate conclusion, then the ‘Climate Emergency’ must also be deemed “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”…

        …and that I would agree with whole-heartedly!

    3. Let’s do an experiment. Put fifty 3 year-old boys and fifty 3 year-old girls in a big room. Put in loads of gender-stereotypical toys: cars, bricks, guns, dollies, dresses, tea-sets. Tell all the boys and girls that they can play with any toys that they want, and there is to be absolutely no teasing if the boys want to play with the dollies or the girls want to play with cars. Stand back, let them get on with it.

      I guarantee that 99% of the girls will play with the dollies and dresses, 99% of the boys with the cars and guns. Because little boys and girls like different things. When they become young men and young women, they choose different careers, because they have different interests and priorities. They are different but equal.

      Feminism goes against human nature. The only way to make boys play with dollies and girls with guns is to force them to do so. This is what the State is trying to do, but we will end up with a lot of very unhappy children and grown-ups.

      1. As posted on Conservative Woman (I knew I’d seen your comment somewhere else today, but posted here for the benefit of the Bottlers):
        The feminists and socialists would tell you that they’ve already been brainwashed by their parents, and forced into gender roles.
        As they’ve also conducted the same experiment that you describe, using monkeys rather than children, which produced very similar results to those that you’ve described, I wonder what the feminists, etc, would say to explain that away…Perhaps the monkeys had been forced into gender stereotypes….

    4. This issue certainly needs to be pushed upward, however I fear that no other court would find any differently.

      The ruling is dangerous not solely because of it’s idiocy, but because it says ‘what someone else thinks matters more than what you do’ simply because they have chosen an alternative lifestyle.

      This is the true terrorism of the Left. It refuses to leave people alone in favour of the promotion of ideology. The court should have said ‘either side can say and think what they like, giving due consideration to each other as equal human beings.’

  24. Morning again

    SIR – Scotland is but one part of Great Britain, representing a mere 9 per cent of its population and even less of its GDP. The Conservative Government is therefore lawfully entitled to ignore a request to repeat the last “once-in-a-generation” referendum on the subject, and should do so.

    Tony Jones

    London SW7

    SIR – Why not grant First Minister Nicola Sturgeon the independence referendum that she craves?

    The canny Scots would choose economic reality over national pride and we could put the matter to rest for the foreseeable future.

    Leonard Macauley

    Staining, Lancashire

    1. Except that the matter would not be put to rest. Even if the Fishwife is kiboshed, the SNP would make sure someone of the same ilk is her replacement.

  25. SIR – The difference between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn could not be more stark. Mrs May has shown grace and magnanimity in defeat, whereas Mr Corbyn is petulant and self-pitying.

    P J Carroll

    London SW17

    1. May recognises that the WA & PD are to all intents and purposes “hers” and that in due course the written History may well show that that was the case.

        1. But he is popular. Not as reserved as Mr Cameron or Mrs May, and thus more approachable and good natured. Boris has a fine intellect and has always been ambitious.

          1. If Johnson effects a proper Brexit which delivers us completely from the enslaving shackles of the EU then I shall have nothing but praise for him. If, as I fear, he delivers a BRINO which keeps us enslaved I shall hold him in contempt – in fact in double contempt for deceiving people into thinking he was a real Brexiter.

            Wouldn’t a truly committed ‘Leaver’ have made an accommodation with Nigel Farage?

    2. Although I feel she was promoted well above her level of competence, that is a fair comment.
      I suspect as a local MP and backbencher, she had found her natural level.

  26. Morning again

    SIR – Surely the best way to make the BBC sit up and realise that huge numbers of licence-payers object to its political bias (Letters, December 19) is to cancel one’s direct debit payment for the licence.

    This is what I have just done. It took less than three minutes.

    Robin Thomas

    Exeter, Devon

  27. Good morning all..

    Rain and more rain ..flooded water meadows and roads . Warnings about cliff landslips . I wonder whether the water companies have built any new reservoirs, no? I thought not .

      1. After taking the dogs for a walk yesterday we called into Corfe Castle village station to catch a glimpse of the Santa Special ( steam locomotive ) full of families , packed with happy children wearing Santa hats and having a great experience as the train gently slid through en route from Swanage .

        We then dashed back to the car which we parked near to the village square , Corfe Castle itself still looking brokenly grand .. and one must marvel at the engineering and design of the construction and how on earth was such a place constructed .. the energy and effort involved , and the moat which is sloping and deep and the bridge .. How were such monuments built , goodness only knows .

        Planners and architects these days are not a patch on those over a 1,000 years ago !

        2. ‘Morning, Belle.

          Why weren’t those children in school?

          A moat at Corfe Castle? I don’t remember that.

          1. I spent yesterday doing another batch of chutney which I have still got to jar up.
            Should have done it yesterday, but I ended up having to go into Matlock for some dark brown sugar as it seems the DT had used nearly all of what I had on the Christmas cake.

            I’ve a bag full of next door’s apples left that I must get used up as they are not the best of keepers so I’ll either be doing more chutney or stewing them.

          6. Dull diesels. Too much effort to keep the steam loco unfrozen for a one-day run at Christmas.

        4. I used to drive the Santa Special at the local museum railway. Huge fun, very hard work. I miss it.

        5. Lucky you, Belle. We always ‘marvel’ at Cromwell’s handiwork, and why the bits of broken castle don’t continue their journey downwards…

          Is the little store with the character from Robertson’s marmalade in the window still there, or are the owners now serving time??

    1. I cannot understand why Mrs May hasn’t retired gracefully.

      We shall see: if Johnson delivers a BRINO she will have achieved what she set out to do; if he achieves a proper Brexit there will be nothing she can do about it.

      2. Morning R,
        the may is a confirmed / proven treachery merchant,the only one that would recognise her retiring gracefully would reside in brussels.
        Why has things got to this late stage as in, the country is not sure if the Pm WILL deliver the
        full Brexitexit that the peoples voted for.
        Why is nothing “for sure” why is the Pm viewed
        with suspicion ?

      3. After the colossal ego trip of being PM. That she is now just a nobody takes a while to sink in.

      4. I can’t understand why she was re-elected and not forcibly retired.
        Perhaps she had no competition in her constituency.

  29. The MR celebrated qualifying for her OAP by subscribing to Netflix.

    Last night we watched “The Two Popes”. A very good film – brilliant two-hander. I commend it.

    2. Thanks for the tip, Bill. Saw a write-up and wondered…

      Another fine prog we watched y’day evening – The Cure, recorded from Ch4 Thursday evening. It’s a ‘dramatized documentary’ about the Mid Staffs Hospitals scandal which resulted in the deaths of 1,200+ patients. Very well cast and acted, albeit rather harrowing.

      1. We also watched it at Best Beloved’s behest and I agree, Hugh, it shone a spotlight on what is (still) wrong with the NHS.

    1. Et voila: courtesy of Rich B!!tch.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/20/diversity-obsessed-bbc-now-mortifyingly-touch-modern-britain/

      “The diversity-obsessed BBC is now mortifyingly out of touch with modern Britain

      Boris’s triumph shocked Britain because its main broadcaster no longer speaks for people outside of the M25

      Why did the BBC fail to see a political earthquake coming in the former Labour heartlands? Partly because it spent the election shuddering with revolted pity at Brexit Britain.

      Its vox pops with “victims of austerity” in foodbanks and with Leavers drinking in Wetherspoons on a Tuesday afternoon not only created a huge red herring hot-pokered with the word “victimhood” in an election where the political zeitgeist was hunger for action.

      It also betrayed the BBC’s unconscious bias against the world beyond the metropolitan bubble. This, it seems to perceive as a chronically unwoke dystopia, so run down by austerity that it now lacks immunity from the populist virus. and trenchant xenophobia.

      The BBC’s struggles to report on or speak for millions beyond the M25 are all the more ironic given its fixation with that purring glitterball of a word “diversity”. This trans-Atlantic, Blairite concept – which is all about amplifying neglected voices, from women and “people of colour” to LGBTQ, those with disabilities and vegans – has been central to the Beeb’s neurotic drive to become more reflective of “contemporary Britain”.

      But one cannot help but wonder whether the tokenistic identity politics grand projet has served as a self-gratifying distraction from the BBC’s basic conundrum: it is not an uncorruptibly impartial institution. It is a dank trip through the simpering and limited mind of the metropolitan professional, with all its accompanying prejudices and impulses.

      One such subliminal impulse is to airbrush its imagined audience. Beeb bosses view Brits outside metropolitanland as unmodern and out of touch. This is why, apart from shruggingly running repeats of Only Fools and Horses and Escape to the Country, the BBC prefers to conduct itself as if out-of-Londoners are not the spectators, but rather the spectacle. Its depictions of Brexitland are not merely confined to the 10 o’clock news, but also range from Cheshire sitcoms unblinkingly entitled Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps to documentary series about lippy hairdressers in Tyneside.

      Just as troubling are those surreal moments when you flick to BBC One of an evening and realise that, as a viewer, what you are witnessing is Islington talking to itself. This usually involves 30-something “comedians” cracking jokes about Right-wing Brexit racism and being caught watching porn by their mothers.

      The election has served as a much-needed bucket of cold water on the Beeb’s cosy cosmopolitan club. Its mandarins are no doubt now frantically trying to cobble together some sort of plan to better “engage” with “outside-of-London land”. We can probably look forward to hearing more northeners read the morning news in 2020 and at least one hastily-commissioned Black Country drama with dodgy Brummie accents.

      But the answer is emphatically not to treat the mainstream perspective – which has just endorsed Boris Johnson and Brexit by a landslide – as a token minority. Not only because the BBC’s “diversity” track record betrays its weakness for impressionistic virtue signalling. But because its divisive “diversity” mindset perfectly embodies why the broadcaster has become so alienated from the public. If the desire to “get Brexit done” was the single most important factor that decided this election, exasperation with the Left’s squeaking, Barbie-plastic wokeness came a close second.

      Should the BBC be so bold as to ditch its obsession with diversity, this might also compel its leadership to confront the fact that our country is not a fractious collection of population segmentations, which crack and crackle along the fissures of ethnicity, gender and age, but rather a discrete entity in itself, with a gritty, dry-humoured, hopeful soul. Yes Britain is divided on issues – but as Mr Johnson’s thundering triumph proves, the majority is often unified in its mood.

      One might wonder whether the Beeb’s post-modern fixation with the fragmentary and refusal to engage – to the point where it failed to detect signs of the biggest political upset since the referendum – stems from cowardice. After all, as a journalist, how can you follow your gut on the feeling in “the country” when the idea of where it is heading makes you sick to your stomach?”

      2. “…the populist virus. and trenchant xenophobia.”

        Have you accidentally cut out part of a sentence there?

        1. I think I cut out an extraneous piece under a photo (which won’t transfer to Discus) but missed the full stop

      3. Thanks Annie.

        This morning I had the misfortune to listen to R4’s Open Country. It is described by the BBC as a “Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles.” It is usually presented by the excellent Helen Mark, but today we were given a special Christmas treat: a BBC journalist of colour who was determined to drag us along on some kind of guilt trip about the slave trade in Bristol by interviewing other people of colour. What a load of carp, given the description of this long-running programme. By all means do a prog about the slave trade, but don’t hijack a series that is usually about matters of nature and our landscape. And don’t forget to say that this country isn’t exactly proud of its involvement in this awful trade…the abolition of which this country was in the forefront (Wilberforce etc, not mentioned of course).

        Clucking bell, yet more sickening virtue-signalling…time for a another broadside, for all the good it will do.

        1. When Sherelle writes about ‘dodgy Brummie accents’, I think back to the old wartime Beeb with its ‘sex is what you keep potatoes in’ accents.
          I doubt Geordies or Moonrakers thought it was unrepresentative of the country in the 1940s.

      4. Morning Anne and thanks for that.

        For me, the key words are “amplifying neglected voices”, although I’d exclude ‘neglected’.

        Take ‘austerity’ as an example. On my walks around town this week, I’ve passed two dumped fridges, two dumped mattresses, a dumped desk and mounds of litter, including the usual three or more black bags full. All a result of people having spent money.

        I’ve seen thousands of cars (but no old bangers), youngsters with expensive tattoos, countless mobile phones, etc. etc.

        1. Austerity these days means not being able to afford putting the latest iPhone on pre-order with Amazon.

        2. Sadly poverty and actual poverty are now completely different things now.

          What disgusts me is there are homeless people in this country. There is genuine need. The problem is those responsible – the wasters troughing away on six figure salaries in town halls – would rather pocket council tax than invest it on necessary services.

          1. I agree. Our local council is never short of enthusiasm when a crackpot scheme passes their window.

      5. It won’t help. The BBC doesn’t understand *why* we want to leave. It doesn’t understand why we have voted for Boris. It doesn’t understand why we reject it.

        It is entrenched. It’s attitude now will be to continue the propaganda and rejection until we do as we are told and learn the right way to behave.

  31. Apropos that Judge James Tayler.

    Years ago, there was a renegade judge at the Brighton County Court. I recall the barrister I instructed opening his case to the Court of Appeal:

    “My Lords, this is an appeal from His Honour Judge X – but there are other grounds of appeal….”

  32. I can actually view the letters today .. amazing

    SIR – There is much to commend in the Queen’s Speech, but I do worry about enshrining spending on the NHS in law. A law enshrined the spending of 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid, and look at the problems around that wasteful £13 billion a year and rising.

    Mike Metcalfe
    Butleigh Wootton, Somerset

    1. I could – briefly – yesterday when I unwittingly clicked something – there they all were. Next time I looked, they had gone.

      2. My 3months worth of full reading is only £4.34 thanks to the current Telegraph startup offer. Of course I need to watch it in March when it’s due to run out and I have to make the decision to continue or cancel.

    2. SIR – The word “convalescence” is not often heard these days, and convalescent homes are hard to find, if indeed they exist at all. Yet they used to provide an invaluable service, as places where people could take time to recover from serious illness and surgery.

      The reintroduction of such places would benefit the NHS by freeing up hospital beds and giving patients time to recover fully before returning home, thereby reducing the likelihood of readmission.

      Sally Hayes
      Mayfield, East Sussex

      1. Many convalescent homes were owned and run by the Unions, particularly those from the Railway and Mining industries.

        1. Thorpe Hall became the Lady Nelson Convalescent Home; it was owned by (I think) the Electricians Union. It has now become a chi-chi spa hotel.
          The big hospitals often ran one from old, rambling seaside houses that their original owners could no longer afford to keep.

    5. The NHS doesn’t need more money, it needs to be paid once it has done the work.

      Same source but forcing efficiencies by making it spend only on what we need. There you go. I have solved the NHS problem.

      Of course, that means no need for the department for health or all those pointless health authorities.

      1. You’d have got on well with my brother, James, a publican of some local repute who, when someone suggested a Happy Hour, he responded, “Happy Hour, Happy Hour, no, we might have a less miserable 15 minutes.”

        1. That’s why I find NYE such a chore.
          I’ve had as much food and drink as I can face, often I have – or am recovering from – some dread lurgy. And on top of that I’m expected to be jolly until well past midnight, theoretically looking forward to twelve months that I know from experience will prove to be a very mixed bag.

  34. Morning, Campers.
    MB and I are just recovering from a Hard Day’s Halo Polishing.
    Took elderly and increasingly confused chum to a local pub for her pre-Christmas lunch.
    Cripes; how the hull did we ever do that for a living?

        1. I am making an inappropriate comment about you and YB!

          Congratulations, anyway, on what you did. A challenge…

          1. Eeyore, the word ‘inappropriate’ doesn’t exist in my lexicon.
            That gives me the freedom to be as rude as I wish.

  36. Averse to the fuss

    I know that you’ll think it quite odd
    And that I’m a mis’rable sod.
    I’ve no decorations and no Christmas tree,
    The sooner it’s over the better for me.
    Too much palaver and too much ado.
    Hustle and bustle and still the EU.
    So here’s to next year when it’s all in the past
    And grouches like me can then cheer up at last.

    E Scrooge
    (batteries included).

      1. Thanks Plum, and you too.

        Surprisingly, since I dropped off the Christmas merry-go-round years ago, I actually enjoy it. No rooting round for last minute prezzies – just cheques or bank transfers, no pushing and shoving at the bar (I stay in Christmas Eve), no stocking up for a fortnight when the shops are only shut one day, no dismanting the gas fire so Father Christmas can get in, etc. etc.

        Umpteen pots of tea on Christmas morning until I feel peckish and then Christmas Dinner (not lunch). A pub I go in will be open Christmas Day night so I’ll be popping in, in lieu of the night before.

        P.S. Although not wanting to count my chickens, my neighbour usually makes me a cake, mince pies and a pud. Icing on the cake as it were.

        2. There’s not many pubs that are busy enough to have to push and shove anymore. Christmas lunchtime at my local (they open for 2 hours) can start like that,but only because your first drink is on the house.

          1. I was in my late teens and when the works shut down at mid-day on Christmas Eve, a gang of us went to a pub in town. Let’s just say the vicar and his missus didn’t go in there.

            The memory of blokes with cauliflower ears and broken noses singing Silent Night has stuck with me all these years.

        3. This year, I’ve not made cake or puddings.
          We are out most of the time, the family are in Denmark; and I know darn well who will eat the goodies (waste not, want not etc….).

          1. Waste not, want not indeed. Apart from a few crumbs for the birds now and again, nothing edible leaves this house.

          2. I may buy a stollen, otherwise no cake or m-pies. To friends for lunch on C Day, figs in Cognac for pud on Boxing Day. (For main course I’m doing maiale a latte with leeks & baked red endive & salmon with asparagus & Hollandaise as a starter).

            Sonst gönnt man sich ja nichts.

        1. Now look here, Grizzly, there is no need to swear at me. I know full well that what you posted is Swedish for “You are a Silly Sausage, Mummy”.

          :-))

      1. Ah, thank you so much issy again. Such happy memories of my dancing youth, making movies with Doris Day and all the gang. Did you spot me shouting “Coo-ee!!!” at 4 minutes and 25 seconds?

    2. Thank you, kind Sir. As I am in a jovial upbeat mood, I shall not correct you by insisting that Major Bloodnok and I are just good friends (although it is true).

        1. Local friends have invited me over for a birthday lunch, TB. And the local weather forecast is for the rain to pause for a few hours over that period. So I am over the moon! (Also, an email from my local library this morning tells me that both of the books I ordered are now ready for collection. And I have just had a phone call from my eldest sister in New Zealand.)

        1. Not really, thank you, Phizee. A good friend of mine has already sent me a Christmas gift with 366 of them – it’s called a 2020 calendar.

      5. Happy Birthday Elsie (even though it’ll be a short day).

        P.S. Wot with Christmas, where do you put all your cards?

        1. Christmas cards in the main living room, Birthday cards on a shelf in the entrance hall so that I see them every time I go out or come back in. And I put both types on display as soon as I receive them, usually in early December. They will be taken down at the end of the year. In previous years I would be “traditional” and wait until Christmas Eve to put up the Christmas cards and only take them down on Twelfth Night (January 6). But this year I have given way and joined the 21st Century.

          1. Speaking of joining the 21st Century, I emailed someone yesterday with some ‘news’. “Yes,” came the reply, “we found out on Monday.”

            I’d also intended telling them that Mafeking had been relieved but didn’t want to show myself up.

      6. Almost belated (I’ve been out visiting my 100 year old aunt and am just catching up) but Happy Birthday! 🍷🎂

  42. Just turned on National Geographic (too wet to go out), and it’s subtitled in Dutch… just to add to the joy of the day.

  43. Good morning all. An interesting article on why ‘our friends in the North’ have voted Conservative for the first time:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/20/behind-red-wall-north-believes-boris-johnson-deliver/

    There are deprived areas of the Midlands and North which have been voting Labour for generations – and what good has it done them? If Boris can show that he can make tangible improvements in their lives then I suspect that Labour will be out of power for a generation or more. We need to re-balance the economy away from London.

    So far, I have to say that I like the cut of PM Johnson’s gib!

    1. Afternoon JK,
      Premature judgement methinks, are we going to receive the FULL Brexitexit
      loaf or just enough to avoid a major
      650 bloody erasure campaign ?
      No good standing outside the Brexitexit
      with the peoples having left their self respect inside, is it ?

  46. Daily Brexit Betrayal

    “There will be

    nothing more dangerous for the new future that we want to build than

    extending the implementation period in a torture that came to resemble

    Lucy snatching Charlie Brown’s football [in Peanuts]. Or Prometheus

    chained to the Tartarean crag, his liver pecked out by an eagle and then

    growing back only to be pecked out again in the cycle repeated for

    ever. This bill learns the emphatic lesson of the last parliament and

    rejects any further delay. It ensures that we depart from the EU on

    January 31 and at that point Brexit will be done, it will be over. The

    sorry story of the last three years will be at an end.” (link, paywalled)

    Also in the Times, Quentin Letts remarks on Corbyn’s reply to Johnson are quite delicious:

    “Corbyn was not in

    the mood to collaborate. He wasn’t really in the mood for anything. Who

    can blame him? Towards the end of his contribution he started claiming

    that Brexit could increase the incidence of rat hairs in paprika and

    maggots in orange juice. There, perhaps, lies Labour’s recent problem.

    Islington Person frets about such things. Workington Man regards paprika

    with suspicion, with or without rat hairs.” (link, paywalled)

    And so to my personal observations which you won’t find in the MSM. Firstly, the opposition homed in on this change in the Bill:

    https://independencedaily.co.uk/your-daily-brexit-betrayal-saturday-21st-december-2019/

    1. Rik,
      There can be nothing more dangerous for the future than to continue with the
      same voting pattern of the past.
      The continuation of the lab/lib/con coalition, vote keep out / vote keep in
      party first pattern that took us, as a nation to the bottom of the cesspit, and kept us there for years, costing peoples lives, raping, abusing,maiming, etc,etc.
      Reenactment of that political sh!te would be unacceptable.

    1. Excellent.
      Seen through the eyes of a child it makes good honest sense yet the Remainers still don’t get it….

      Cob blers to Remainers…

    1. We need to dismantle them all.

      To be replaced with…

      Zack Kanter’s dream will be the civilised World’s worst nightmare instigated by the UN, EU and the globalist cabal.

      1. I know. No matter how many times their policies blow up in everyone’s faces, no matter how much their policies are rejected, they just keep coming back, like food poisoning.

        1. Why do these fanatical Lefties never go and live in the country’s espousing the policies they want?

          They could all move to sub Saharan Africa, for example and completely embrace their culture – which is rich and rewarding – but they never do. They just stay here and complain. Endlessly about not getting their own way.

    3. Actually, from reading his twitterfeed further, Zack Kanter is actually being critical of the climate change movement, not endorsing it.

      “But. I thought our house was on fire and we have a short window of opportunity to address climate change?
      Dang. All that was a Trojan horse to implement crazy-pants socialism/communism?
      This is my shocked face.”

    1. Popcorn time. (And I loathe the stuff.)
      Whoever succeeds Jezza has to be equally useless and petulant. I’m not sure that narrows down the field.

      2. My vote is for David Lammy.

        A superb orator, a towering intellect, tremendous warmth and charm. He’d be an asset to the Conservatives for decades.

  52. That’s odd. I just posted a comment about R4 having the swivel-eyed, frothing Heseltine on dribbling away. Balance, you see – if you have a remainiac on, you don’t need another view.

    And it’s gone.

    1. Disqus on fine form Bill had similar problems earlier
      I saw your reply to me in notifications but nothing on the page…………..
      Oh well

    2. Rik,
      Same post I posted late last night by Carl Benjamin, sorry to clash, erased
      most of the top one.

          1. It’s one of the conundrums of geopolitics.
            Does the term “Indian Culture” refer to the whole Indian Subcontinent, including Pakistan & Bangladesh or just the Republic of India?

          2. Depends. I suppose we could split them by whether they live in wigwams or not?
            Mind you, from what we have seen recently, they take it all very seriously and the Indians seem to want nothing to do with the Pakistanis, East or West.

  54. Morning folks

    I wish I was feeling as smug as Noah must have felt. It’s persisting it down, with mighty dread, outside. The Weather Almanac for my locality indicates that we have now received 300% of our historical average monthly rainfall for the month of December and there still another 10 days to go to the end of the month. Looks like I’m going to be heading out to check the mooring lines when it gets light as although the section of the canalised river I’m moored on is protected (to a degree) by flood gates that are designed to divert flood water into the old river course and the surrounding flood meadows) I may need to slacken off the stern line to allow the boat to rise up with any significant rise in the water level in the canal. 🙁

    1. That can’t be right. Greta thunderbug has been telling us we’re all going to burn up, not drown.

      1. Ah, but, yes, but climate change. It covers all the bases. Without it, we’d have no weather or climate. Or something.

      1. Thank you. The River Wey is managed by the National Trust. And where I’m moored is a good 30′ above the the Thames where the Wey enters the Thames at Weybridge. The Thames is in full spate. However, upstream of me is Guildford which is prone to flooding. All that water has to go somewhere so I’m about to don waterproofs and wellies and head off for a 70 mile round trip in the car to check on things….

      2. If the United Kingdom is forced to follow another countries rules on how we are allowed to trade, then we are not a free country making our own decisions.

        So the temporary leader of that failing island, Leo “I’m Irish really and not a placeman” Varadkar, can whistle to himself as he oversees the continued invasion of his country by the foot-soldiers of his EU masters.

      3. Maybe Verucca should button it a bit.
        His exporters and hauliers are not going to be terribly chuffed if he pees off their biggest market and land bridge.

  56. Off to visit the MR’s Loopy Friend (it is not only pushy nurses who have big hearts…{:¬))…)

    Back much later .. in need of medicine…

    Have a fun arvo.

  57. Boris Johnson has just announced that to relieve the pressure on A&E over the Christmas period, drinking will be BANNED from midnight on 22 December to midnight on 31 January. No exemption for NTTLers.

  58. EU braced for ‘harder Brexit

    Boris Johnson appeared to set himself on a collision course with the European Union in trade talks after ruling out adhering to Brussels rules after Brexit.
    A huge majority of 124 votes for the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill at its second reading in the Commons on Friday means the UK is on its way to finalising its divorce from Brussels by the January 31 deadline.

    But opposing views on both sides of the Channel mean that the Prime Minister is set for a combative 11-months of trade talks when UK and EU teams sit down to negotiate from February.

  59. Familiar ground for NoTTLers but well put

    The real challenge to this Government lies in standing up to unelected power
    CHARLES MOORE – 20 DECEMBER 2019 • 9:30PM

    For more than nine years until December 13 2019, Britain was governed by a party without a substantial majority in the House of Commons. This was not always a bad thing. The early days of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition under David Cameron, for example, meant that a wider than normal range of policies could be achieved, with wider than normal support.

    At least one very bad thing did happen, however. We forgot that government is the pre-eminent institution which must decide and act. After Theresa May’s electoral debacle in 2017, this role almost completely collapsed. The space was filled not by a more open and plural democracy, but by other individuals and institutions seeking to grab more power for themselves.

    Most obvious among these was Mr Speaker Bercow, who tried, in effect, to become Prime Minister without ever leaving the Speaker’s chair. He was assisted by parliamentarians such as Dominic Grieve and Hilary Benn in his efforts to prevent government governing and pretend that Parliament could govern instead.

    Less conspicuous, but almost equally injurious, was the trend of officials of various kinds, always described as “independent”, to be put in charge of activities – public appointments, for example – which should be the responsibility of elected governments. It became the golden age of civil servants telling elected representatives how to behave. In the Treasury, there is an entire area known as “ethics corridor”, from which emanate instructions – by officials – ordering the government about. In George Osborne’s time at the Treasury, the “independent” Office for Budget Responsibility was founded, as if it were not for governments themselves to make sure their budgets were responsible. The conceit grew that such unelected officials are unique repositories of wisdom and virtue.

    Nowhere was this feeling of virtue stronger than among the judiciary. The wickedness of Brexit seemed so self-evident to virtually all the members of the Supreme Court that, in the hearing over prorogation last summer, they laid aside the traditional reluctance of the English law to plunge into politics, and tried to take control of a dispute which was raging between the parties within Parliament itself. In order to do this, they even decided – thus overriding Article 9 of our 1689 Bill of Rights – that prorogation was not a “proceeding in Parliament”, though Parliament is where it took place. It was almost as if the judges had walked into the Chamber and emptied the government benches.

    This was only the most extravagant manifestation of the growing trend of judges to take high views on what are essentially political matters. Others are the over-zealous application of judicial review and of the Human Rights Act.

    The ancient doctrine of the independence of the judiciary really means the independence of judges from all exterior influence and from the influence of one another. It is supposed to mean they can bring an independent mind to bear on each individual case. In more recent years, it has been militantly reinterpreted to mean confronting the government of the day. Some judges have seen it as their job to fight politicians, with the courts as the battleground. This has threatened its right to govern, and so undermined the right of voters to make a meaningful difference by their choice in the ballot box. On December 12, that right was magnificently, decisively asserted by the voters. Yesterday, it achieved its logical, climactic consequence in the huge vote for the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in the House of Commons.

    In their manifesto which laid the ground for victory, the Conservatives promised they would ensure that rights will “not be abused to conduct politics by other means or create endless delays”. The Queen’s Speech this week said the Government will set up a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission to correct the imbalance.

    It should not be assumed, unfortunately, that the groups which so strenuously opposed the rights of voters in the referendum will now come quietly. Indeed, they may become even more militant about waging “lawfare” in the courts, since the Tory majority in Parliament leaves them with little opportunity there.

    As if on cue to illustrate the possible difficulties, comes a story about the world of extremism rather than Brexit. Before the recent election, the Government appointed Lord Carlile QC to review the working of its “Prevent” programme – its strategy “for supporting people vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism”. He was an obvious choice for the job since he had previously been the reviewer of terrorism legislation and is an acknowledged expert.

    Rights Watch UK, however, a campaigning organisation with close links to bodies like CAGE – whose research director, Asim Qureshi, described Isil executioner Jihadi John as a “beautiful young man” – demanded judicial review of Lord Carlile’s appointment. He was not independent, they claimed – by which they meant he had strong views that differed from their own. They are obsessed with the idea that a programme to deradicalise young Muslims is a form of state spying on all Muslims.

    Yesterday it was announced that the Government, on its own legal advice, had asked the blameless Lord Carlile to depart, in order to avoid a court clash.

    Intricate process questions are in play here, but the case demonstrates how, even after its famous victory, the Government feels weak when the hard face of extreme politics advances half-concealed by the wig of the law. Before the general election, the Muslim Council of Britain, which always comes down on the politicised side of arguments about the welfare of Muslims, had laid aside any pretence of impartiality and worked flat out for a Corbyn victory. Their great push failed utterly. Now they will do everything they can to use the courts to attack what they call Boris Johnson’s “oven-ready” Islamophobia.

    This is the moment to reverse the trends I describe above. Brexit, as its supporters have always argued, means the restoration of sovereignty. Part of the job of a sovereign parliament is to maintain the balance of the constitution. Under the British system, it is not for MPs to wash their hands of this task and give the power to judges.

    Judges can bring impartiality, legal learning and close reasoning to help make the constitution work, but they are neither its authors nor its controllers. This used to be understood by convention; but one of the many difficulties with universal doctrines of human rights is that they scorn convention in the unattainable pursuit of universal perfection.

    Professor Richard Ekins, of Policy Exchange’s influential Judicial Power Project, is about to publish a paper setting out how this Government should now limit judicial power. Only by limiting it, he believes, can the judiciary regain public confidence.

    His recommendations include limiting the scope of judicial review and allowing Britain to act in ways that conform with domestic law even if they conflict with judgments by the European Court of Human Rights. He also wants to rename the Supreme Court the Upper Court of Appeal to get its work in proper proportion.

    The obvious safeguard for reform – this is me speaking, not Professor Ekins – would be to restore in full the rights of the Lord Chancellor, which Tony Blair, in a careless piece of sofa government one weekend, threw away.

    By a very British paradox, the age when, through the Lord Chancellor, the government theoretically had complete power over appointing judges was also the age in which there was least politicising of those appointments. Judges judged, and politicians did politics. Now we can get back to that.

    1. Good article, thanks for posting. Once again I dislike the use of the word ‘Parliamentarian’. I was taught that this refers to those MPs (or Peers, of course) who served Parliament with distinction. Grieve, Benn and others are/were anything but.

    3. A comment from elsewhere fits

      “BBC
      reporting critically, again, on Poland’s attempts to reform its
      judiciary. And of course the EU and the UN are unhappy with this:

      “And
      a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the law
      “risks further undermining the already heavily challenged independence
      of the judiciary in Poland”.”

      Remember. When the globalists talk
      of the independence of the judiciary they mean independence of any
      democratic accountability. They do not mean independence of
      anti-democratic Marxist infiltration.

      In this country, a judge has
      declared that you can be fired from your job for stating that a man
      cannot become a woman, another set of judges attempted, and succeeded,
      in overturning the decision of a democratically elected government, have
      thwarted a democratic referendum at every opportunity and imprisoned
      people for protesting against a Remainer MP…

      It’s high time we had Polish-style judicial reform and democratic accountability of the judiciary in this country.”

  60. BTL on main article

    Louis-Ferdinand Celine 21 Dec 2019 5:21AM
    The EU is now like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Desperately booming and pulling levers, in a show of bravado that has more to do with its own weakness and imminent demise than anything else.

    It’s full of bluff and bluster but is a busted flush. After nearly 4 years of bullying and cajoling, seeing weak leaders and praying for opposition wins, it has has now seen all those hopes fade to dust. And it is left with a stark choice. Trade on our terms or go whistle.

        1. Afternoon, HP.
          “Once a Catholic” allusion. The play is set in the late 1950s.
          One of the girls at the school picks up a Teddy Boy boy friend who speaks cockney. She cannot accurately remember his rhyming slang; she knows his comment on a sexual practice was something to do with the film industry; the audience are mentally going through C20 Fox etc…..
          Then, in front of nuns and fellow pupils, she recalls his words.
          It was J. Arthur Rank.

          2. In Colchester, during the 1950s, there was a Ted Caff known as The Pink Basin.
            We naice private school girls used to scuttle past this dangerous place – eyes firmly fixed on the pavement.
            A few years ago on the bus, I got talking to a tired pensioner, sporting a thinning DA.
            He had been one of those dangerous youths. He sadly said, “You needn’t have worried. We were nice lads.”

          3. We were in Edinburgh. We had Coffee Joe’s with beatniks. Real intellectchools. All dressed in black. The young ladies would be described as goths today.

      2. There were more conservative votes than liberal votes at the last election although that did not result in Tory seats. There was also a splinter Tory group that cost a few seats.

        But you are right, so many here have never had it so good and have no idea of how the rest of the world works. How else could you justify voting for the boy PM?

      4. Hi, Hatman. I hope that you’re keeping well.
        Scotland’s a conundrum. Does Johnson give Sturgeon a second shot in the hope that the Scots will sensibly reject ‘independence’ and take the wind out of Sturgeon’s sails or does he refuse her request and leave her to stew?

        1. I vote to leave her to stew, get Brexit done & then with his majority strip the Scottish Parliament of powers & budget or if possible abolish all 3 devolved assemblies as they were created by Blair to destroy the union

      1. Funny you should suggest them – this morning when I was adjusting the boat cover, I almost ended up in the canal when lost my footing on the offside gunnel fortunately, unlike a retired professional hereabouts, I was able to cling on and clamber back on board!

    1. After weeping and wailing for over a week in his Synagogue, a thunderous voice from the heavens boomed out: “Rabbi, why are crying out so?”
      The Rabbi, drying his tears replied: “Lord, my son has become a Christian……”
      And the Lord replied: “What do you mean, your son….?”

      [From the Jewish Encylopedia of Jokes].

          1. Obers today I will be posting a Sufganiya – jelly doughnut recipe on the Coconut. Next week is Hanukkah and it will begin in the evening of
            Sunday, 22 December and ends in the evening of Monday, 30 December, this year once again coinciding with Christmas

    5. Thank you for those wishes,Hat. The same to you and your family..

      Enjoy Hanukkah from tomorrow.

  64. I haven’t seen an article by Graeme Archer for ages. This is a corker from Unherd; it may contain one or two hostages to fortune, but enjoy it.

    “Does Labour understand why it lost?

    Corbyn’s party finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class
    Graeme Archer

    I cried twice on Thursday night/Friday morning. Once when Mike Freer held his seat in Finchley and Golders Green, despite one of those algorithmic Leftist pacts to unseat him (wrong target, Luciana Berger; I love you, but that was a tonal mis-step: Mike Freer was never your enemy), and once again when Michael Gove, introducing the Prime Minister on Friday morning, looked Britain’s remaining Labour voters in the eye, and told them “Never again must our Jewish citizens live in fear.” Never again.

    “It is a new dawn, is it not?” Boris in victory couldn’t help himself, regurgitating the 1997 remark with which Blair proclaimed his own era. Laughing at Blair’s messianic pretension, throwing it back in Labour’s shocked, defeated faces.

    Boris has a talent, shared by no other politician, of being able simultaneously to poke fun at his overblown Churchillian rhetorical style, without undermining the seriousness of its message. It’s (one reason) why he drives his opponents to insanity – did you see that sliver of malice, Alastair Campbell, snarling about “Johnson” on Friday morning? He hates that we think of the PM as “Boris”. Snarl away, Campbell, for all the good it’ll do your shrivelled, impoverished politics. Snarl right off, in fact, and close the door behind you.

    Because this was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.

    The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

    The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?

    Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers, and The Guardian closes its doors.

    Could the Left’s future come from the gut, rather than the brain? Perhaps a mission can be discerned within the screech-sheet manifesto of Jess Phillip’s Twitterfeed: Boris-is-a-racist, Boris-hates-women, Boris-eats-your-kids, I’m authentic, me, I care therefore you can’t.

    Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.

    I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.

    Do you think men and women like Keith don’t notice, Jess, when you claim that only socialists like you care about people? That his vote in the Brexit referendum was tarnished, because he doesn’t have a degree? Do you believe him so arithmetically incapable that he couldn’t predict what your policies would do to the savings accrued from decades of average-income work?

    And do you think he was deaf to the anti-Semites in your movement, blind to your party’s tolerance of them? He’s an unexamined Anglican, and the only Jewish people we know are the married couple next door; did you assume, therefore, he would swallow all that guff about Labour being the sole repository of moral virtue, that he couldn’t draw a line between your leader’s “friends” and the fear we could smell on our street?

    Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

    The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.

    But they can, and do, have consequences. On Thursday, without telling me, Keith took time off work. For the first time in his life, he went to the Tory office on the High Street, picked up lists of names, and walked round the homes of our neighbours, in the rain, in the dark, encouraging Conservatives to come out and vote.

    The dramatic irony! Labour finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class: Keith walked 15 miles on Thursday, but he’d have crawled over broken glass to keep people like Corbyn from winning seats like Barnet. Not quite what Hardie had in mind, but there you go. I love Keith, of course: I’m only just beginning to understand why.

    There’s so much more to be written – how to deal with Sturgeon, the BBC, the re-centering of power out of London and into the North, how to renew our misdirected Academy … but that’s not for today, and probably not for me.

    Today, I’m just a guy who’s feeling humble, but proud. Proud to live in a nation where working-class and middle-class, North and South, stood in solidarity against a common threat.

    Humbled to be married to a man called Keith, who saw Corbynism for the wicked filth it is, and so did what he does every day of his life: he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. To keep Barnet, our home, safe. Keith (who will be mad at me if he sees this) would probably call it his “duty”; an inability to comprehend that word is just one more reason why Labour deserves its extinction. “

      1. Thanks, Mr Hat, and a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours in return. I’m glad that you could translate what that woman said because I don’t have a clue.

    2. I just do not know how you can call her a bitch. She is much worse than that. Good to see you are still alive Griz.

    3. From what I gather from a couple of sites covering American politics, there are in fact two parallel universes in the US with half the population in one and t’other half in t’other. Given the nature of the allegations against the Clintons and Biden I’m genuinely surprised that the POTUS hasn’t asked their equivalent of the Auditor General to investigate the allegations of corruption.

      1. They’ve been looking into the FBI, for certain.
        And you’re right. I’m surprised that the AG hasn’t investigated further, but maybe he’s still working on it.

    4. I couldn’t bear to watch it, but didn’t need to as they have been repeating the same strategy since they lost the election. If you can call this doomed kamikaze approach to politics a strategy.

      “Our hard-left position has become so against traditional American values, that “normal” people are repelled by us. From telling Americans that they must embrace the Southern invasion of their country, to allowing men to call themselves women and use girls bathrooms, we have lost the plot. We had hoped to have more brainwashed young people and migrants to boost our vote and get elected, but their numbers are not high enough yet.

      So we are using the courts to make this political attack on President Trump to distract attention from the fact that we have no policies that can get us elected. We hope that this will keep our rabid, hate-filled Democratic base satisfied as we cruise to another election defeat. Across the world, real people are saying “enough is enough” after years of being told to shut up and be ashamed of their own skin colour and heritage. Common sense is our enemy and try as we might, we cannot defeat it.”

      1. You might also mention that they’ve been talking about impeaching Trump since before the 2016 election, and certainly 19 minutes after he was sworn in… They’d already decided he was guilty and had to be impeached, they just needed to identify the “high crime and misdemeanor.” Verdict first, crime later.

    5. Just sounds like lots of farting to me. She is talking out of her arse.

      Afternoon, George. Merry Christmas.

    6. I don’t know why they bother, the script is already arranged . They all vote on party lines so just as Democrats in Congress voted to impeach, Republicans in the Senate will vote it down.

      But I suppose that it keeps them from doing real work.

      1. Three Democrats voted against impeachment, I believe, and one is going to switch parties, to join the Republicans.

    7. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N_X0WRAJ7Gg

      Pelosi HUMILIATED as Legal Expert Says Dems FAILED to IMPEACH Trump!!!

      “Alright, everyone, the big news of the day today is that liberals are themselves admitting that President Trump was NOT in fact impeached! I mean, if you thought things couldn’t get worse for the Democrats, now their star witness, a Harvard Law professor, has publicly acknowledged that the Democrats have thus far FAILED to impeach President Trump! We’ll take a look at what’s going on and how it reveals just how clueless Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats really are. You’re going to love it!”

      As they haven’t taken the articles of impeachment over to the Senate, for a full hearing, with witnesses from both sides, etc, etc, as required for impeachment under the US constitution, all that’s happened is that the Democrats forced a vote to impeach the President, like having a hearing to indict someone, but without going to trial to get a guilty verdict or an acquittal.

    8. The unfortunate Pelosi has a speech defect. When she speaks, there’s a time-lag between her teeth and her mouth.

    9. She rambles a bit but it’s all understandable. She would do better to open her mouth wider when she speaks.

    10. That’s a big ask, Grizz!
      Edit: I summarise” She has a spring in her shoe. She will be walking forward over senators. Clinton has passed over and she is proud. The cost of healthcare will impeach millions of dollars. Make your weekend plans because I am a cultured inapprpriator, as is Adolph and the Committees.

  66. For the impoverished and needy such as Uncle Bill, here’s another Premium article in the Season of Goodwill

    Britain is teaching the world a lesson in stability and good governance
    DOUGLAS MURRAY 20 DECEMBER 2019 • 7:00PM
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2019/12/04/TELEMMGLPICT000218068263_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=1240

    ‘Count your blessings’ is a phrase which you don’t hear much these days. Which is a subject in itself. But at this time of year it is something that is especially worth doing. Not just because of the Christmas Season but because of how close our country recently came – however fast we might already have forgotten it – to a very different path.

    Just imagine for a moment where we might have been if events had turned out differently last week. Had Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party won we might all be haggling for basic commodities and flights out right now. Dogs would be starting to eye their owners warily as the nation dug in for the first of five consecutive winters of discontent. It is almost as bad, if not worse, to consider the more likely scenario we were due for which was the endless hung Parliament scenario.

    Just imagine: right now the House of Commons could have been settling in for another five years of debate about the language that should and should not be used in debates. We could be facing another five years of Labour MPs pretending to be absolutely horrified by commonly heard phrases and out-competing each other over their trauma at hearing well established terms. Plus we could have remained in perpetuity in that nightmare world in which every time you turned on the television or radio you were confronted by Dominic Grieve, Sarah Wollaston or (worst of all) Anna Soubry, all busily trying to delay the day they had to return to face the voters that had been serially mislead. Even the idea still has the ability to freeze the soul.

    But none of this came to pass. Such ghosts and ghouls seem to have dissolved into the background and our country appears to be back to something like normal again. Indeed to something rather better than normal.

    On Friday the government brought forth its EU Withdrawal Bill to the House of Commons. Everyone who has lived in the UK over the last three and a half years will have a tiny PTSD-like flicker at the mention of that phrase. “Not another attempt to bring an EU withdrawal bill in front of the House!” the inner voice still cries. Except that of course this time it was not just brought, but voted on and – mirabile dictu – passed. Because that is what you can do when you have a majority. And that is why we no longer have to live in the dysfunctional democracy we inhabited until the 12th of this month.

    Every way you look it is good news. As the result was read out in the House yesterday some of us had another flicker of panic. As the numbers were read out for the first time (358 to 234) and taken around to the Speaker’s Chair who did not emit a groan, as out of habit? There John Bercow would be again – mugging, preening, gurning and otherwise auditioning for a role as celebrity jester somewhere on the fourth-tier of the international speaking circuit. Once again we would be treated to a dilation without the wit, but in the tones of Gilbert and Sullivan, on why the government should not be allowed to do what it wants, whereas any opposition backbencher should. There would then follow an explanation of why repeat votes should never be granted to the government of the day but only to the Speaker’s mates and toadies.

    But of course the results were not read out by Bercow. They were read out by another fellow in the Speaker’s chair. And done in a way that did not seem intended to draw any special attention to the speaker. We could get used to this. Bercow himself was elsewhere than the Commons this week. In the early part of the week he could be found on an Italian gameshow shouting “Ordine” at the request of his hosts for the amusement of his Italian audience. Later in the week he could be found on a London bus shouting “Order” for free, to amuse his fellow passengers who must have been wondering why they weren’t lucky enough to have missed that bus and got to walk home in the rain.

    But it is in matters great as well as small that the change is most apparent. For what is remarkable is that when looking at where Britain now stands on the international stage, everything has changed.

    For three years our friends around the world have been first shy and then flagrant in the laughter they had at our national expense. Britain – a country which had a reputation for order and efficiency – had over recent years come to look like a country stuck in an inescapable rut. The glee of certain EU partners – at the Brussels level in particular – was rarely disguised. Look what happens, they gloated: Britain had voted to leave the European Union and then got into such a comprehensive fix that it should by now be perfectly obvious that it was only British membership of the European Union that had ever held Britain together. A suggestion which at least diverted attention for a time from the other members states’ various woes.

    Yet look across the continent now. In Germany, Chancellor Merkel appears reluctant to accept that anybody other than herself is actually able to run the country, and as the party to her right (the AfD) is characterised as the Nazi party mark 2, the extreme left (Green) movement looks as though it will soon have the country in its low-wattage grip. With street protests in France now into their second year, Emmanuel Macron is having to grandstand on the European stage to gain any admirers. And so he has been doing his bit to ensure that relations between France and Germany sink ever lower, as he plays to part of his base with old French anti-NATO tropes. Tropes which Germany and Merkel in particular find increasingly irritating. Both the great countries of Europe are now led by fractious and fragile leaderships.

    Meantime the EU’s top court has condemned the government of Spain for failing to release one of the Catalan separatist leaders. The Spanish once again learning – as Britain did – how much the EU thinks it can tell nations to do once they have dissolved themselves into the system of Brussels. It does always end like this: with Brussels suggesting it knows better than Spain what should be done about Catalonia.

    Lift your eyes wider and look across the Atlantic and the sight is even worse. There a sitting President has just been subjected to impeachment procedures for only the third time in the history of the republic and almost nobody on the Democrat or Republican side – let alone the subject of the impeachment, Donald Trump himself – seems able to take the process remotely seriously. The transparent reason is that the whole thing is not serious.

    The Democrats and some never-Trumpers in the Republican party planned to impeach this President from before he had been sworn in. Not because they knew he would do something impeachable but because he was Donald Trump. And so the main charge-sheet against him which used to be about Russia has now moved to Ukraine. If it keeps moving Westwards it might reach us in the UK at some point. But nobody believes it. Perhaps the people who brought the proceedings themselves don’t believe it. In a land where the lawyers were always at risk of running the show it seems that the right of the President to govern can be halted if enough people are mad at him. For his part, Trump has of course taken to Tweeting furiously about his persecutors, speculating among other things that one of his chief tormentors – Nancy Pelosi – has dodgy teeth that are at risk of falling out of her mouth.

    Of course we should remind ourselves not to gloat. Of course it could have been us only a couple of weeks ago. But how fast the fortune wheel of global politics spins these days.

    Just a few weeks ago Britain looked in real difficulties. Today we look like perhaps the most stable kid on the international block. So yes, count our blessings this year. By remembering what might have been.

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

    Douglas McCabe 20 Dec 2019 7:39PM
    Yes, what a wonderful country! Since Cameron announced his decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, the people of this country have been assailed from all quarters by a barrage of criticism, denigration, insults, and from Barack Obama, threats to punish us for having the disgraceful audacity to insist on being a free, sovereign, and democratic country.

    For nearly five years we have withstood the punches thrown at us by the British media, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Supreme Court, the whole of the EU, the IMF, Obama. Our crime? To wish to return to being a self-governing country and making decisions that suit our needs and plans, and not a colony of the new Franco-German Empire of Europe.

    And in that long five years, not a drop of blood spilled, not a building burned down, not a city paralysed by chaos. Nothing but calm determination by a population to fight the war being waged against us using the peaceful tools of democratic methods.

    A wonderful country indeed! Show me another that would demonstrate such commitment to the rule of law in the face of such overwhelming provocation.

    Merry Christmas to all DT readers.

    Janet Warrior 20 Dec 2019 7:31PM
    Spot on. We just dodged a massive bullet, thanks to Nigel Farage (the referendum), JRM (starting off the May disposal process), the ERG (for sticking to their guns), Boris (for being Boris), Cummings (for being a genius) and finally, and spectacularly, the great British voter, who knows what’s best for both themselves and their country. Merry Christmas!

    Dave Thompson 20 Dec 2019 7:48PM
    Yes, for the first time in ages I don’t get up in the morning and open the news sites with a feeling of dread at the reporting of the latest machinations by remainers trying to stop the democratic process. Merry Christmas.

    1. Let us remember, lest we forget again
      that for the last 4 decades ALL of the toxic trio ie, lab/lib/con have been in the main running a pro eu / UK demolition campaign with many of the same political players as is now.
      As for the brexit group under farage then bare in mind that many of those were until of late lab/lib/con supporter / voters, and over the last 4 decades been building a nation fit for aliens and we are witnessing the odious fall out of that currently.
      This is not an anti brexit group post, just fact.

    2. We must also thank Blair. Had he implemented the limits on new member migration that EU law allowed, we wouldn’t have had the mass migration that finally turned indifferent voters against Brussels.

  67. Have you noticed that the BBC has moved Boris off their front page. Not biased of course.

      1. Every time I accidentally have the misfortune to hear his voice on the car radio (never indoors) I am reminded of your comment.

  71. Just in from some ladder work – pruning the Passion-flower shrubs and the wisteria – for the last time….

    Gorgeous sunshine – about 15ºC (around 60ºF for sensible folk).

    2. Have you got a lot of wheelbarrows ready to fill with all those millions of Nouveau Francs your buyer is bringing out from under his mattress?

      1. That photo was taken in one of South Africa’s infamous lion farms – where lions are taken from their mothers at a few days old, bottle fed, petted by exploited volunteers, then eventually they are shot by so-called “hunters” in an enclosure where they have no chance of escape. Their bones are sold to China.

        1. That is grim. Some people will use animals just for profit with no regard to their well-being, from battery raised chickens to veal. It is best not to even mention the cat or dog farms/pens in some cultures.

    7. He’s just the trainer /physio and he’s saying “Come on Leo there’s another five ladies that are waiting their turn….”

    2. The only thing that’s going to put this hysteria to bed is if the forecast ‘Modern Minimum’ chills the Earth over the next decade….

    3. When are they going to ban free migration, which could make those CO2 targets even more impossible to achieve?

    5. Supreme Courts generally seem to be getting involved in matters for what they were not created.
      They could ban all military activities on grounds that they may hurt someone, without having access
      to secret information which would make them necessary.
      Or an African Supreme Court could ban ice-cream because it is white.

    1. Another of the greats.
      I wonder if they will remember to put him up on the lost friends list on next year’s SPOTY

        1. Have you noticed that Premier League teams are not being harangued to get the diversity in their teams that everywhere else seems to require?

    1. 12 years old?

      In their culture she would have been married, probably twice, and had two children.

      2. We will have to wait a while longer for their culture to take up a leading position within the UK.
        No fault of the lab/lib/con coalition party they are doing their best in parliament, they even
        swear by the instruction manual.

          3. Maybe so, wise monkeys that is.
            & then I would only vouch for the genuine UKIP.

            Not treacherous monkeys as in & proven lab/lib/con coalition party.

      1. Evening N,
        I do totally agree, who is responsible for the steady flowing intake of such trash ? if politicians how do these type politicians retain power year on year on year.
        The Jay report told us that in rotherham alone 1400 / 1600 raped & abused was covered up for 16 plus years, any of the concealers held to account ? not to my knowledge.

      1. As the tariff for violent rape can be life imprisonment, one must wonder if judges have been given “secret” guidance.
        It is time for neighbourhood watch to be set up, like the shomrim in London.

    4. But Ogga they are the Labour parties core voting bloc & therefore must by law receive the most preferential & expensive treatment in jail of any ethnicity, religion or creed !

      1. Evening MHMCMB,
        Must beg to differ a little they are the odious consequences of mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella / PC / Appeasement / lab/lib/con pro eu coalition party.

      1. A very slight change:

        For what shall it prophet a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

        I hope the Devil exercises Mo’s Rsoul several times a day.

          1. Dante’s Inferno has Mahomet in the ninth ditch of the eighth circle of Hell, reserved for those who sow discord. He is perpetually disembowelled, the wound healing only to be opened again.

          3. Very like the end of Prometheus. Except that muslim mortals are queuing up to die for him (and his fall-back, Big Al)…evil tw@ts.

      2. Evening A,
        Their belief is their concern but when it infringes on the peoples of a host nation in an odious / dangerous manner it then becomes the concern of the decent peoples of that host nation.
        Why was they introduced to the UK initially ?
        Why have the parties that allowed them in unchecked always found support / votes year on year, regardless of their odious actions ?

        1. The Muslim population of the UK has hugely expanded, whilst immigration of other religions from the subcontinent has been nowhere near the same level. Why?

          1. Evening A,
            They are running a successful concerted effort
            campaign in regards to taking over, aided & abetted by the lab/lib/con uncontrolled immigration coalition party & their members / voters via the ballot booth.
            The political kiss ( X ) does not recognise religion.

          2. “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.”
            — Houari Boumédienne, in a 1974 speech to the UN general assembly, recorded on tape & in the official UN protocol

      1. Or given a new identity, a personal trainer & re-located to a 12 room new build house rented by the council instead of their modest 11 room current house for their wives & kids

      2. Evening C,
        We have been asking that same question more regular since may was in the home office, IMO
        it would fly in the face of PC / Appeasement & them unwritten policies are adhered to by the lab/lib/con coalition party.

      3. Probably born in England or have relatives born in England – right to family and all that BS.

      1. Rik,
        Surely we are going to start as we mean to go on into this new future, as in deploy in every
        high risk jail a detachment of Para’s / SAS on a
        no interference from outside basis, then leave and await improvements.
        Bring in an anti PC / Appeasement law,urgently.

    8. Rough justice, hopefully. But they may well be put amongst other slammers. Once their overly lenient sentences have been served, they should all be deported to their ‘home-land’. Even when these types have been born here, they still tend to refer to their parents’/ grandparents’ original country as their own ‘home’.

      1. Evening MiB,
        Deported along with the parents, grandparents, close friends to country of origin,
        we must remember the victims, who will in a great many cases carry mental scars for life.

    9. Yep, give ’em a taste of their own medicine – 1,000 lashes before hanging them – all publicly ‘pour encourage les autres’

  85. ” The Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, warned that Johnson was
    embarking on a “harder Brexit than we anticipated” and said he feared
    the UK wanted to “undercut” its European rivals on food, health and
    product safety after leaving the bloc”
    Ireland is in the EU. Tough luck. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

    1. It serves him and his country right.
      They did their damnedest to undermine Brexit, at the behest of their rEUlers and if it now comes back to bite them HARD, I will be happy.

      2. I know there are nice people on the Island. I happen to be related to some of them. I do wonder why though that Scotland has produced some of our finest warriors, engineers, entrepreneurs and Ireland mostly produces criminals.

    4. Oh, how we laughed. Not only that, but we no longer buy anything emanating from Ireland. A possible tour of the Emerald Isle has been put on the back burner, for ever.
      Oh, and yes, we will endeavour to undercut your stuff. On the other hand our stuff is better quality. So we will get higher prices, and to suggest that we will cut back on safety, or hygiene, or controls, is just nasty Hindoo savage petulance.

      1. We will not be cutting corners standards or safety but if we are say exporting to the US EU standards are irrelevent so by not applying EU standards to US exports we save money

    5. The Punjabi Paddy can just suck it up
      Another Globalist shill with no generational interest in the future

    7. If the EU wants to negotiate on a sensible basis it can. If it wants to adopt the blackmail approach then they will get a hard Brexit

    8. Tough titty, Varadkar. As you sow, so shall ye reap or, in modern vernacular, “Suck it up, Loser!”

  86. Nice to be listening to Verdi’s Macbeth on Radio 3 from the Met ( with Anna Netrebko). Problem with radio broadcasts is that English language subtitles are out. The plus of course is that I don’t have the other half watching with me and saying ” I can’t believe how fat she has gone ” (since she married that slob and had a baby).

    1. I don’t like the subtitles. The English translation is usually dull, and I prefer to listen to the emotion and music of the singing, rather than the mraning.

    1. Possibly because they will be distributed amongst the great and the good and their rarity will give them an instant profit from collectors?

      The rest of us will not see hide nor hair of them.

    2. Why just put them in circulation ? Why not give them all to O.A.P.’s to spend, a bit like Maundy money ?

          2. My Grandmother sent me a £1 note on my birthday until i was 11 years old. On my 12th there was no money in the card because my brother decided it was his. I then on my next birthday before the postie arrived was to urinate all over his bed.

          3. My grandmother would give my eldest brother a Half Crown, my eldest sister a Florin, my next sister a Shilling, me Sixpence and my younger brother Threepence.

            I have just gifted my eldest brother £1500.00 to help him out. Funny how things resolve themselves in the end.

          4. Very true. The last Christmas my Father was alive he used a sort of somewhat similar metric. My five elder sisters and brothers were not only given double what i was given but also their children. I, as a childless child was considered less relevant. It remains.

            Now it’s my turn.

            And people sometimes ask themselves….’Why would all that money be bequeathed to a home for dogs and cats’.

          11. Not my fault i’m only 55. Thank goodness i still have my health…a toned body…and a really big..er…garden. Ahem. :o)

  90. Whats happened to all these Luvies that said they would leave the UK if we left the EU. As usual all hot air from them

    1. We haven’t left yet…..the road to hell is paved with good intentions ….there might be an earthquake or a war that stops us leaving…

      2. All but certain we will leave on the 31st January . The bill has been passed although it still need to go through the committee stage and then get royal assent

        The complex bit will be the trade deal but we have a lot of aces and Boris unlike May is no push over , He is hard nose negotiator, There will though be give and take as thats what negotiations are about

        The concept of a no deal does not exist we have to leave with some kind of deal. What we are aiming at is to leave the Political aspects of the EU and in effect just be a trading partner with the EU

        1. BJ,
          Why do we have to leave with a deal ?
          Why don’t you call it what it is and that is a pilot tie with the eu to build on in the future.

        1. Back up, Bill, despite our leaving the EU, Best Beloved and I, ardent Brexiteers and certainly not luvvies, are planning a move to Lot-et-Garonne as soon as the house is sold, early next year – we hope.

          Purely because this house is too big for us and Best Beloved’s daughter has a gite in Duras. I want to do it in order to seek a bit more winter warmth.

        2. We certainly would if the ungrateful bitch Babbling Brown left as promised,think of the years of bile spewing hate we would be spared

          On hearing her wailing “I broke down sobbing in a shop the day after the election” I ,for one,was praying it was a Travel Agents

  91. Oh, I enjoyed this:

    It was, in a way, completely pointless. Five whole hours had been set aside to debate the new version of the Brexit bill, but five minutes would have been more than enough. Boris Johnson’s election landslide had rendered today’s debate a formality, a walkover, a stroll in the park.

    So, instead of argument, dialogue and scrutiny, what we mostly got was Opposition moping – and Tory gloating.

    Throughout, Labour were miserable. They looked cold, grey and lumpen, like forgotten porridge. When Jeremy Corbyn, still nominally their leader, rose to speak, not one of his colleagues cheered; some of them actually groaned. Mr Corbyn muttered at length about the possible horrors of an American trade deal (“Rat hairs in paprika and maggots in orange juice”), and then resumed his seat to silence from his colleagues, and guffaws from the Tories. Mr Corbyn folded his arms, and sat smouldering like a dragon’s nostril. He must have felt like walking out. At least that might have earned him a cheer.

    For his part, the Prime Minister called for unity and healing. “This bill,” he boomed, “must not be seen as a victory for one party or one faction over another.”

    To judge by the speeches that followed, however, some of his backbenchers hadn’t heard him. Mercy? Magnanimity? Forget it. They had crushed their opponents, and were now jeering them gleefully from the field of play.

    Simon Hoare (Con, N Dorset) derided the Lib Dems for their “smugness” (“Where are they now?” scoffed numerous colleagues; “The job centre!” hooted another). Mark Francois (Con, Rayleigh & Wickford) crowed that Mr Corbyn had been “slaughtered”. Rachel MacLean (Con, Redditch) bragged of winning “the highest ever share of the vote” in her seat. Liam Fox (Con, N Somerset) mocked both “the soon-to-be-forgotten Leader of the Opposition” and the Remain-supporting actor Hugh Grant (“I hope he’ll watch our seasonal offering this year: it’s called Democracy Actually”).

    No one, however, was more triumphant than Sir Bill Cash (Con, Stone), who trumpeted that this was “one of the great moments in British history”, to rank alongside the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Reform Act of 1867, and the defeat of Hitler.

    Some Tory MPs were a touch more reserved. Damian Green (Con, Ashford) reiterated Mr Johnson’s call for national healing, and begged everyone to put these “miserable” years of squabbling behind them. But others strutted and swaggered, or sternly lectured their vanquished opponents on the importance of trust, respect and humble service of the people. For Labour, it all seemed too much to bear. After only an hour and a half, their benches were almost deserted.

    Alyn Smith (SNP, Stirling) cautioned Tory MPs to “beware hubris”. Pride, he warned them, tends to come before a fall.

    True enough, it usually does. But then, victorious Tories can hardly be blamed if they glance across the House, at the forlorn remains of their routed Opposition, and think, “Fall? But who’s left to trip us up?”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/20/brexit-debate-turned-festival-tory-gloating-labour-looked-feebly/

    1. “victorious Tories can hardly be blamed”
      Of course they can’t. They have beaten two enemies – the Labour Party, and Theresa May.

  93. Off you pop to the sunlit uplands of Wankanda then

    https://twitter.com/Sozzinski/status/1208406794952949765
    Oh wait Africa is a corrupt hellhole where your best job opportunity would be carrying polluted water on your head for miles
    Best you stay here and whine about what whitey has created
    Edit
    Another one who can just fuck off,sick of hearing his trash talk,happily I can avoid his trash music
    https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/dec/20/stormzy-uk-is-100-racist-and-boris-johnson-has-made-it-worse

    2. I think we also contributed a language, that usually capitalises the first word of a sentence!?

      2. Was going to say the same thing! We contributed… grammar! Why are these egotistical fruitcakes always so embarrassingly illiterate?

    3. Muna Mire, never heard of it. Googled it and it looks a little too androgynous to be called anything but it.

      Mire: a stretch of swampy or boggy ground.
      Sounds about right.

    1. At whatever stage of construction of a government project, there cannot be any viable supervision. Once it is started you have a theoretical project. If faults are found, there is nobody to blame. You are using someone else’s money, and you kick the can down the road for someone else to sort. Any problems, you have to fight the contractors. You are going to fight Carillon ? More trouble than it is worth. Give them more time. If they go bust, pass it on to someone else. It’s a question of money and responsibility. After an extra ten years of kicking the can down the road, the project will be completed. But it will be no good then, because changes will be required to meet the latest planning and regulation. This ensures a continuous supply of cash to everyome involved. The end purpose of the building is forgotten.It is just a commercial project, whether it is a hospital or a multi-story public lavatory.
      Here we call it ” capitalism “. In foreign countries we call it ” corruption “.

  100. Night All

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/526a4a1a09cb87333f0284e0cf2be4aadfc4fe735afddbe8e166cccb6f66c7bf.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9bf50f85979e07fe60de0b41ac7137a3b00e874cc64255d85a6f55f8be7524d7.jpg

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    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4e054719851a30ea90ed08dd052558679186460b232dd41b3efeb26964a01b76.gif

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6f797c6448305fee33fa78a80b84e73cc1825188783963b37f2d484945a7577d.jpg

  101. It is quite simple. We have among us a multitude of Asians who wish us harm. They are Muslims. They pray in secret and organise their militias in secret.

    Now is the time to sort out these malevolent imports and send them back to their countries of origin. We do not need more Mosques and areas of England where the English are prohibited by virtue of our predominantly Christian religion. We need to expunge these ghastly mediaevalists from our society once and for all.

    They can practice their repulsive religious practices in their countries of origin. We do not need these mongrels in our advanced western society. These imbeciles should instead attend to the issues appertaining in their own countries.

        1. Unfortunately, the country is going through a period of self scourging. The Muslims have a plan, our politicians don’t even know that they have a plan.

        2. We are not a Nation, Cori. If we were, we would never have allowed them a foothold here. How many Mosque have we had opened in the last 10 years? 100’s.

    2. True, but it ain’t going to happen. Islam is not seen as the cancer that it is and it will be too late to react after it has infiltrated all of the organs. The Chinese and the Burmese understand the problem but few in the West will speak out.

      1. Afternoon KP,
        The Gerard Batten chap has tried to point out in book form etc, since 2014 the dangers of
        islamic ideology.
        IMO I am in totally agreement
        with GB & I would say that the
        ideology in many cases linked to PC / Appeasement is & has been a killer.

    3. Hear, bluddy hear, Corim.

      We need to identify Islam as a terrorist organisation and its followers to be returned, as you say, to their shitholes of origin, never to be allowed back into this country and no further immigration of that ideology is to be allowed into the UK. We need to recognise them for the fifth-columnists they are and act appropriately.

    4. I see that only 3 of the 4 upvotes you have, are recording.

      Maybe ‘Cheshire Lad’s ‘private’ status doesn’t allow his upvotes to register. Still, as his profile states, ‘Deal with it’.

    5. You’re saying that there’s “a multitude of Asians who wish us harm. They are Muslims.” I think you have to be careful about categorising Muslims and Asians. Plenty of Muslims ain’t Asian. You don’t have to be Asian to be a Muslim crazy.

        1. Bear in mind that it was the Arabs that spread the filthy ‘religion’. I don’t even believe in any ‘god’.
          Off to bed now.

          1. I do not believe in a God so to speak. I am prepared to accept that Jesus was a good man who taught others to be good.

            His followers wrote of his exploits, each with a different slant on things.

    3. I’m sure many voters were put off by his shenanigans rather than persuaded to Remain in the EU. So his efforts were counter-productive.

      1. I am so pleased that Leave, in the main, just got on with the job of living their lives with their fingers crossed and hoping for the best. And then using the ballot box. We may not get the Brexit we want, despite today’s more promising headlines. But it is the start of the disentanglement. And if Boris, perhaps not a conviction politician, has tested the direction of the winds of change growing ever more strongly, so be it. Such is democracy.

  103. I’m off to my works Christmas do at the urology department tomorrow.

    It’s bring a bottle. :o(

  104. Discussion meeting at a recent mental health conference included a seminar where some of the causes were identified.

    Stress…frequently encountered when the wife is pregnant.
    Anxiety….when the girlfriend is pregnant.
    Panic….when both are pregnant.
    Depression….when they meet at the neo-natal clinic
    Terror….when they walk in the front door together.

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