Saturday 26 June: The Government is wasting our vaccine advantage by limiting travel

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/06/25/letters-government-wasting-vaccine-advantage-limiting-travel/

630 thoughts on “Saturday 26 June: The Government is wasting our vaccine advantage by limiting travel”

          1. What am I supposed to have lost, Stormy? I need to know before I open the fridge to see if I have placed it there by mistake.

  2. First again 🙂

    Does anyone know what the silly old fool is on about? Try enunciating his first pronunciation.

    SIR – Your front-page picture […] reminded me of my dismal failure to persuade my colleagues that a rotary-wing aircraft is actually a helico-pter (spiral wing) and not a heli-copter.
    Wg Cdr Stephen Borthwick

    1. The “p” is silent as in ptarmigan, or, only for the crude of mind -so why did I think of it, being refined to the point of decadence?, but I digress, – as in swimming pool.

        1. In one Benny Hill song a cuckolded man hears that his wife is being unfaithful and so he hurries home by plane and by Hell he copped her!

    2. As RAF officers they will all have been trained in Service writing, where pronunciation and spelling are taken as the first in the OED. The regular pronunciation is the correct one for Service use: https://www.oed.com/oed2/00104405. No wonder he failed.

      He’s just showing off by trying to be witty (why anyone would like to be like that balding idiot beats me).

    3. So “Helicopter” comes from the same root at the “Pter” in Pterodactyl?

      1. He ain’t wrong.
        “Etymology. The English word helicopter is adapted from the French word hélicoptère, coined by Gustave Ponton d’Amécourt in 1861, which originates from the Greek helix (ἕλιξ) “helix, spiral, whirl, convolution” and pteron (πτερόν) “wing”.“

  5. Hahahaha – ‘The Government is wasting our vaccine advantage by limiting travel’, does anyone still think that having the vaccination is a way out of this an made false flag pandemic?

  6. 6th, can’t stop, off to snog the hired help, it appears Boris thinks that’s acceptable.

    1. 334805+ up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      That could in ALL truth be applied to the real UKIP building under the Gerard Batten leadership.

  9. 334895+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,

    The Government is wasting our vaccine advantage by limiting travel.

    Truth be told the governance party is on maneuvers with its shiny new manipulative tool.

    What we are witnessing is a political plague of politico’s
    running a stampede / calm campaige on the herd with a multitude of the herd suffering a form of Stockholm syndrome regarding lab/lib/con and are in compliance.

    They are also trying to bring in the child jab using a vaxx
    that has not been timetested whatsoever I personally would see that as a very dangerous form of a mass child abuse action.

    To continue to support / vote lab/lib/con once more after
    regarding the state of the Country currently, and looking at the coalitions past history over the last three decades is an adults choice, innocent kids have NO choice.

    .

    1. 334805+ up ticks,
      O2O,
      May one ask,
      Are the children to be viewed as casualties of so called “friendly fire” regarding the jab ?

      Dt,
      We’ve sacrificed our children on the altar of Covid
      The damage goes beyond lost schooling to all the life experiences they missed that cannot be repeated.

      A point very well worth making.

      1. My mother, 88yo lost a lot of childhood life experiences between 1939 and 1945. She nonetheless managed to go on to have a pretty well adjusted life.

        1. 334805+ up ticks,
          Afternoon SiadC,
          Funnily enough it was more black & white then, we could more easily ID the enemy, nowadays that could very well be the neighbour.

    2. If 7 people are knifed and 4 die, how many are left in hospital? Answer: 1 mark for 3 (less 1/2 a mark if the student is white, thus allowing for white privilege); 2 marks for ‘who cares, they were all snitches’, 3 marks for ‘racist surgeons put their knees on the victim’s necks to kill them’, 0 for other answers.

      If there are 10 knives and 4 are taken, how many are left? Answer: 1 mark for 6, 2 marks for ‘I’m not a snitch’, 3 marks for ‘I dindo nuthin’, 0 for all other answers.

      Meanwhile Asian students learn real maths, take exams from other bodies and take all the top jobs.

      Trebles all round!

      1. We had a delightful Nigerian boy on two of our courses. He became a good friend of our younger son, Henry. He won the French prize at Rugby School, got A grades in all his “A” level subjects and went on to study at Harvard. He was also in his school’s First XV. You would patronise him at your peril!

      2. We had a delightful Nigerian boy on one of our courses. He came on two courses with us and became a good friend of our younger son. He won the French prize at Rugby School, got A grades in all his “A” level subjects and went on to study at Harvard. He was also in his school’s First XV.

    4. Pretty soon, they’ll be uneducated and only able to do menial labour.

      Or perhaps vegetable picking. Or cotton. Because they won’t understand maths, they’ll be exploited.. ph for Goodness sake. Maths is not racist. If they can’t keeep up, they’ve got to improve.

      The Left have got to stop trying to create slaves.

  11. Good Morning! I am ‘the prisoner”. I am number, erm, ah, well it’s a big number anyway.

  12. Good morning Nottlers,
    Sorry if it was discussed yesterday, (I only dip in and out because of work) – does anyone know what Gina Coladangelo was lobbying for?

      1. Well, I hope she was there not begging little Matt for favours. Poor woman.
        She was there as a lobbyist advisor.
        But she is also a Luther Pendragon shareholder and they did have pharma connections a few years ago. Do they now? Or with some other CoViD crisis related industry.

        1. I think her brother is a director of a company awarded a large contract. She obviously benefits on two fronts.

          2. Apparently Gina’s dad is also a Big Pharma boss with links to both Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca too. All very murky.

      2. Well, I hope she was there not begging little Matt for favours. Poor woman.
        She was there as a lobbyist advisor.
        But she is also a Luther Pendragon shareholder and they did have pharma connections a few years ago. Do they now? Or with some other CoViD crisis related industry.

    2. Considering that as soon as the outbreak occured a ministers wife suddenly became a provider of PPE it’s all a bit moot. These peple are simply thieves.

  13. Morning all

    Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, insisted on Friday morning that there would be no “EU-wide policy” on qurantining British travellers

    SIR – On Thursday I needed to make an essential visit to Britain from Belgium. I opted to travel by car through the Channel tunnel for flexibility and to reduce contact with others.

    I complied with the extensive list of requirements, including check-lists, a negative test and a passenger locator form. To my astonishment I was denied boarding because I had not purchased tests for days two and eight of quarantine, despite having a ticket to leave the country later the same day.

    UK Border Force confirmed this policy and, when I suggested that the country was closed for business, the response was: “Not as closed as it should be.” It cost me £130, a missed train and a one-hour delay to purchase two tests that I cannot use.

    Back in Belgium I am now paying for the lax approach that allowed the Delta variant to proliferate in Britain by serving a 10-day quarantine for visiting a “red” country. At least here the government pays for the test I am required to take on day seven.

    ADVERTISING

    Thankfully, I am fully vaccinated and have my EU vaccination passport installed on my phone. Once my quarantine ends I will be able to enjoy almost unrestricted travel in the bloc, which is dispensing with restrictions as fast as possible.

    How did the British Government manage to squander its early successes?

    Mike Sturgeon

    Overijse, Flemish Brabant, Belgium

    SIR – Not only is Boris Johnson losing our vaccine advantage by holding up Freedom Day, he is in danger of losing post-Brexit opportunities by making it impossible for business travellers, such as Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of J P Morgan, to visit for brief business trips (report, June 26).

    Shona Penfold

    Holmfirth, West Yorkshire

    Placeholder image for youtube video: c7CB5ZC4GK4

    SIR – The Prime Minister dangles a carrot of the freedom to holiday abroad without quarantine on return (report, June 25). However, he has broadcast to the country, and indeed the world, that Britain will experience a third wave of Covid, and that, despite over 60 per cent of adults being fully vaccinated, it is not safe to end lockdown because models show up to 500 Covid deaths per day later in the year if we do so.

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    It is thus not surprising that Angela Merkel (report, June 25) is encouraging EU countries to implement a quarantine period for British travellers arriving in Europe, to prevent the more transmissible Delta variant from spreading across the Continent.

    Boris Johnson may offer the freedom to travel, but will any country accept visitors without quarantine from a country where it is not safe to end a long-term lockdown?

    John Martin

    Swarthmoor, Cumbria

    SIR – If Germany wants to ban Britons from visiting Europe because of the Delta variant, then surely it’s too risky for their fans to travel to Wembley for their match on Tuesday.

    Michael Servaes

    Farnborough, Hampshire

    Hancock space

    SIR – I was somewhat surprised by reports of Matt Hancock having been in a close embrace with a colleague on government property in contravention of his own “Hands, face, space” rules.

    I would not normally care what a person gets up to in his personal life. But, given that he is involved in my personal life through imposing legal constraints on where I can sing, eat and go on holiday, he should strongly be encouraged to consider his position as untenable.

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    Nick Hopkins

    Lower Ratlake, Hamphire

    SIR – It is little wonder that the Health Secretary has been looking so tired over the last few months. I thought that he was devoting all his energies to fighting Covid.

    Dr Richard A E Grove

    Isle of Whithorn, Wigtownshire

    SIR – The publication of images of Matt Hancock in a clinch with a member of staff raises serious security issues. How on earth does a paper obtain images from inside a presumably secure government building?

    It is this that should be considered, rather than the salacious aspect.

    Chris Williamson

    Kelstedge, Derbyshire

    SIR – Some commentators think Boris Johnson should sack Mr Hancock. Except the Prime Minister is hardly in any position to criticise, given his romantic entanglements.

    George Kelly

    Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire

    Uncounted migrants

    SIR – The substantial underestimate of EU migration to Britain now belatedly reported (June 25) is a national scandal.

    Many of us have been warning for years that the superficial survey used by the Office for National Statistics was flawed and lacked the rigour to produce gross population numbers, arguably the most important statistic for which the ONS is responsible. This demands structural reform.

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    It is no surprise then, although shocking, that 5.6 million applications for “settled status” have been received, compared with the official estimate, as recently as March 2019, of 3.7 million.

    The ONS has been institutionally blind. It certainly provided cover for the Labour government policy (of mass immigration) that Harry de Quetteville reports “would be smuggled under the noses of the British people”.

    Sadly the same lack of rigour is perpetuated in current population projections, used, among other things, to determine housing targets.

    Robert Smart

    Eastbourne, East Sussex

    A bang not a cypher

    SIR – Eisenhower claimed that cracking the Lorenz code (Letters, June 23) shortened the war in Europe by two years. It did not. Even without the contribution of Bletchley code-crackers, war in Europe would have ended in August 1945 with the Allies’ development of the atomic bomb.

    Barrie Bain

    Wadhurst, East Sussex

    Guardian girls

    SIR – May I recommend to the High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School the title Guardian for head girl (Celia Walden, Comment, June 22)?

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    Guardian and Colour Bearers have been the senior titles at Gordonstoun since the days of Kurt Hahn. Distinguished holders include the present Prince of Wales.

    Robin Bell

    Sparkford, Somerset

    Covid-clear church

    SIR – On July 5 I will have been running a church Covid-test project for a year, ever since services were permitted to restart.

    The four rural churches of which I have the care have conducted 125 indoor services and two outdoors. Congregations have ranged from eight to 74 people indoors and 90 outdoors. We had four weddings, each with 30 people inside, and six funerals. It adds up to about 4,700 attendances by people in person.

    The parochial church councils have met in person when permitted. With Sunday school, toddler groups and Bible study groups, that makes another 360 Covid-safe attendances in church buildings.

    I can report that we have seen zero infections for the year, and no one has had to isolate after attending church.

    My son and his mates sometimes kick a ball around in a clear corner of the churchyard after services. Does this mean that the Government might look at our data?

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    Rev Nick Weldon

    North Tawton, Devon

    Heating a listed house

    SIR – We have a Grade II* listed house (inaccurately described in Pevsner) which, because of its solid walls, depends upon air bricks and draughts to keep the woodwork safe from dry rot. Any attempt to seal it hermetically would be a fungal disaster.

    Such a house is not suitable for air-sourced or ground-sourced heat pumps. We have a Kidd gas boiler – Prince Charles has three at Highgrove. We also have a large expanse of south-facing roof but, apparently, we cannot install solar panels, although they would be invisible from the road. So we do nothing.

    We would happily listen to energy-efficient suggestions. The Government should address the needs of listed buildings.

    Nicholas Bielby

    Bradford, West Yorkshire

    A mockery of crockery

    SIR – For many years we have been dining off Adams Old Colonial crockery (bearing a pattern like that on the mug, right).

    Is this now regarded as “problematic”?

    Mark Marshall

    Woodbridge, Suffolk

    The merits of a Norwich statue of a great stylist

    Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) by H A Pegram (1862-1937), stalwart of the Royal Academy

    Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) by H A Pegram (1862-1937), stalwart of the Royal Academy CREDIT: alamy

    SIR – Ben Lawrence (Arts, June 3) is dismissive of the statue of Sir Thomas Browne in Norwich city centre: “A pretty unremarkable piece … a symbol of Edwardian whimsy; a cultish romanticisation”.

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    Why not grant this perfectly acceptable example of what’s known as the New Sculpture a bit more merit, especially in view of Browne’s place in English literature as one of its pre-eminent prose stylists, author of The Garden of Cyrus and Urn Burial?

    The latter work gives more significance to the broken urn in the statue’s hands than as a generalised allusion to mortality.

    Roger Hudson

    London W8

    Battling against worldwide mispronunciation

    SIR – Your front-page picture (June 25) of the Prime Minister flying in a Wildcat reminded me of my dismal failure to persuade my colleagues that a rotary-wing aircraft is actually a helico-pter (spiral wing) and not a heli-copter.

    I suppose a worldwide mispronunciation (Letters, June 25) is consistent with the difficulty in understanding how they really fly.

    Wg Cdr Stephen Borthwick

    Baldock, Hertfordshire

    SIR – As George Bernard Shaw wrote: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” It is also true that language is not static, but changes with the years. We do not talk today as people did in the days of Chaucer, or in the Tudor period.

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    Nevertheless, I would put forward the following mispronunciations, which are often heard on the radio or television: Febuary, vunerable, ec-cetera, RE-search and for-MID-able.

    Brian Checkland

    Tranmere, Wirral

    SIR – My pet hate is hearing about the plight of hospitaws in the capitaw.

    Nicholas Young

    London W13

    SIR – What about pertickyerlee, now heard so regyerlee and spektackyerlee from MPs and television presenters, who would surely dismiss it jockyerlee as a temperee lapse?

    John Benson

    Colchester, Essex

    SIR – Popperler in place of popular on BBC One is high on my annoying list.

    Tim Hadland

    Northampton

    SIR – What annoys me most is verses instead of versus. The worst offenders seem to be sports reporters.

    M E van Rees

    Kendal, Cumbria

    SIR – In my 70s and having served on a number of company boards, I can’t count the number of times I corrected renumeration to remuneration.

    Peter Lawrence

    London SW19

    1. Many of us have been warning for years that the superficial survey used by the Office for National Statistics was flawed and lacked the rigour to produce gross population numbers, arguably the most important statistic for which the ONS is responsible. This demands structural reform.

      It’s not Flawed Robert nor does it lack Rigour. It is deliberate and it is not going to be reformed!

      1. “SIR – Some commentators think Boris Johnson should sack Mr Hancock. Except the Prime Minister is hardly in any position to criticise, given his romantic entanglements.

        George Kelly”

        There is nothing even remotely romantic about Johnson’s string of carnal, sordid and squalid sexual affairs.

    2. Many of us have been warning for years that the superficial survey used by the Office for National Statistics was flawed and lacked the rigour to produce gross population numbers, arguably the most important statistic for which the ONS is responsible. This demands structural reform.

      It’s not flawed Robert nor does it lack Rigour. It is deliberate and it is not going to be reformed!

    2. Lambda variant? Last one I was aware of was the delta variant. What happened to the epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota and kappa variants?

  15. Revenge is A Dish Best Served Cold

    This was a huge wedding with about 300 guests. After the wedding, at the reception, the groom got up on stage at the microphone to talk to the crowd. He said that he wanted to thank everyone for coming, many from long distances, to support them at their wedding.

    He especially wanted to thank the bride and groom’s families for coming and to thank his new father-in-law for providing such a fabulous reception. He wanted to thank everyone for coming and bringing gifts and everything, he said he wanted to give everyone a special gift from just him.

    So taped to the bottom of everyone’s chair was a manila envelope, including the wedding party. He said that this was his gift to everyone, and told everyone to open the envelopes. Inside each manila envelope was an 8 x 10 picture of his best man having sex with the bride. He had become suspicious of the two of them and hired a private detective to trail them weeks prior to the wedding.

    After he stood there and watched the people’s reactions for a couple of minutes, he turned to the best man and said “F— you,” he turned to the bride and said F— you,” and then he turned to the dumbfounded crowd and said, “I’m out of here.”

    He had the marriage annulled first thing that Monday morning. While most of us would have broken off the engagement immediately after finding out about the affair, this guy goes through with it anyway as if nothing was wrong.

    His revenge: Making the bride’s parents pay over $32,000 for a 300 guest wedding and reception. Letting everyone know exactly what did happen. And best of all, trashing the bride and best man’s reputations in front of all of their friends, their entire families, i.e. their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, nieces and nephews, etc. This guy has balls the size of church bells. This is his world; we just live in it.

    1. This must be a very old joke – $32,000 would not provide a very lavish party for 300 wedding guests.

  17. Good Moaning.
    Fraser Nelson in the DT:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/25/matt-hancocks-unfortunate-affair-could-come-symbolise-government/

    “Matt Hancock voted to invade our privacy, yet now he asks that his be respected

    Many people will feeling aggrieved at behaviour of Health Secretary, who has played major part in criminalising vast tracts of everyday life

    25 June 2021 • 9:39pm

    Grant Shapps had doubtless intended to help Matt Hancock, but the defence he offered on Friday made a bad situation worse. The Health Secretary had been filmed in a clinch with one of his advisers, and the pictures had been published in a national newspaper. “He’s been doing a terrific job,” Mr Shapps said. “It’s a matter for him and personal relationships are outside of my remit.”

    The problem is that Mr Hancock and Mr Shapps both voted to put everyone’s personal relationships very much in their remit, legislating for the most intimate aspects of our lives. They did away with the idea that, in a free society, you ought to be able to see and hug who you like. Mr Hancock was one of a tiny number of ministers who decided that self-isolation rules ought to be a matter for the police, not left as a matter of guidance and common sense. Under his emergency laws, personal lives were criminalised.

    Mr Hancock has always been one of the most emphatic for the rules. In internal government debates, he has invariably pushed for the toughest restrictions and wanted 10-year jail sentences as a penalty for trying to dodge draconian quarantine rules. “I make no apologies for the strength of these measures,” he said: they’d target a “minority who don’t want to follow the rules.” Who, presumably, he thinks, deserve everything coming their way. When two women were fined by police for walking together, Mr Hancock was unforgiving. “Every time you try to flex the rules,’ he said, “that could be fatal”.

    Like Neil Ferguson’s tryst with his lover last year and Dominic Cummings’ notorious road trip to Barnard Castle, the Hancock imbroglio will be a bookmark in the Covid-19 story. The first two scandals were broadly forgiven after the vaccine success: a great many mistakes made last year, by every country in the world. But the vaccination programmes were supposed to pave the way back to normality. Things are safe, which is why ministers are acting normally. But the public is not (yet) allowed to carry on as before. Politically, it’s a sensitive mix.

    At the start of the pandemic, ministers were astonished how closely people followed the rules. The first lockdown was delayed, in part, because it was argued that Britons would tire of restrictions after a few weeks. It might not have taken long for “lockdown fatigue” to overcome those making the rules, but the public went through months of sacrifice – even if studies suggested that stay-at-home diktats were far more than was needed to force back the virus. The bans on intimacy, even guidance on hugging: very little of that was based on science.

    Mr Hancock became the face of this deeply personal advice – often delivered as if from a pulpit. “Don’t kill your gran by catching coronavirus and then passing it on,” he warned us. Intimacy, he later opined, was “okay in an established relationship” but, otherwise, not allowed.

    This is the irony in his request on Friday for “privacy for my family on this personal matter” now. There is no doubt his family deserves it. But a great many other families would have been grateful for more privacy over the last 15 months. Instead, the Tory Government decided to legislate for what people do in their own homes. And in so doing, set up a system where people came to worry that they’d be reported to the police – perhaps by their neighbours – if they stretched the rules by inviting children over to play in their back gardens. Greater Manchester Police issued a statement boasting that they had raided a family home to break up a child’s birthday party.

    Sweden managed to fight back two Covid waves while respecting privacy and civil liberty. There are bans on mass gatherings, and a rule of eight for public places. But no rules would apply inside anyone’s property, where they had sovereignty. Government would not come through your front door: in Sweden, your home is your castle. It wasn’t so long ago when this respect for privacy summed up civic life in Britain.

    When Mr Hancock started issuing advice on where we should hug (embracing outside, he said, was better than inside) alarm bells ought to have been ringing in Number 10. It was a sign that the Government machine had gone way out of control, losing any sense of its remit or boundaries. Number 10 should have stepped in, and perhaps asked for a study on the efficacy of the intrusions or work of Project Fear: the blood-curdling posters showing Covid victims on their deathbeds. If there was no proof that the campaign was making a difference, they could have been told to change tack.

    The Prime Minister is itching for normal life to resume, city life in particular. He has told friends that he’s encouraged that most people are now at their normal place of work and wants employers to get their office staff back up and running. But the problem here is rather obvious: it’s his Government that is telling people to “work from home if you can”. It’s his Government that has declined to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the vaccine success.

    On Friday, he was keen to forgive: Mr Hancock apologised for breaking the rules in his embrace and Number 10 said it accepted his apology. But was the apology really owed to Number 10? There are a great many people who will be feeling aggrieved by the Health Secretary’s behaviour asking whether, even now, he has lazily kept emergency rules in place long after the emergency has passed. And has, by his failure to update the rules, ended up criminalising vast tracts of everyday life.

    A dangerous sense of drift is starting to emerge from the Government, a lack of awareness about what it is trying to do. Is the goal to tame Covid so it no longer threatens to overwhelm the NHS? If so, then that has been met – thanks to the vaccines. The delta variant is so far accounting for barely one per cent of NHS beds. There is no need to fear (or quarantine) those arriving from the amber list countries, so travel rules ought to fall in line with rules at home. But even Cabinet members have no idea what the goal now is.

    The danger is that a void now emerges, and is filled by another narrative. Perhaps accusations of hypocrisy: plenty other ministers have been behaving in ways others are not allowed to. Michael Gove, it emerges, is on a VIP scheme where he doesn’t have to self-isolate if he’s pinged by Test and Trace. We may now start to hear about Tory sleaze: there are growing questions about how many people close to Mr Hancock seem to win NHS contracts.

    The Hancock story is embarrassing, not devastating. But unless the Prime Minister can supplant this unfortunate affair with his own story – about how he’s going to use the vaccine success to deal with the web of Covid regulations that are no longer needed – then the affair may come to symbolise a government that is losing control.”

    1. Because of his long and sordid history of adultery Boris Johnson cannot and will not do anything about Hancock. It is not just that it would be hypocritical for him to do so but also, just as there is loyalty amongst thieves, there is a camaraderie amongst those who are treacherous and heartless in their sexual relationships.

      1. And that is precisely why a PM’s moral background is crucial to the leadership of government.

        1. He has none, the attempted deception over decorating the flat in Downing Street and who was going to pay for it was only a small example of his standard of morals.
          The sad thing is, most people in the country doesn’t seem concerned about his lack of morals and integrity.

          1. I wonder how many of our recent prime ministers have chastely adhered to their marriage vows since taking office?

            Major had a sexual fling with Edwina Currie; Blair reportedly had a ‘relationship’ with Rupert Murdoch’s Chinese wife; Gordon Brown ???, Cameron ??? but his sidekick Clegg boasted about having slept with 30 women; May remained strictly virgo intacta and of course Boris Johnson has no integrity about sexual matters or indeed anything else.

          4. Everybody knows he’s a philandering bounder who has never tried to hide that fact – but for some reason he’s forgiven for that.

        2. Morning PM

          John Major was a total cad

          Remember Gordon Brown , son of a church minister , oh yes , he called old ladies bigots.

          His tenure bankrupted the country , and of course Blair preened and posed and never sat at his desk for more than five minutes , just like Cameron who regardeed his premiership an open passport to have jollies around the world , another one who was desk shy .

          Leadership , hmm I cannot think of anyone who qualifies properly to keep our country safe and secure except Rear Admiral Chris Parry who is a brilliant person and blessed with true leadership attributes .

      2. Others in the cabinet may give Halfcock the push he needs to resign. That would let Boris off the hook.

        1. Who would make a better health secretary?

          You know they’ll probably give it to Gove or back to Hunt.

      3. We don’t even know if it was an affair. He’s been caught having a snog and an ass grope.

        Crime of the fecking century it seems.

        1. I take your point.

          Another Nottler asked the most relevant question: who set up the camera, how did he do it, on whose instructions and why?

          And as it was clearly a case of entrapment what is the significance of the fact that they waited until Corimmobile’s birthday to break the story?

        2. According to at least one journalist – the full blown affair has been the talk of the Dept of Illhealth for months.

          Dunno if it is true or not. The real crime (and it IS a crime – created by the arsehole himself) is to snog someone when it is a, er, crime.
          And the total hypocrisy of it all. “Do as I say not as I do”.

        4. It’s not the grope or the affair but the hypocrisy of this squirmy little shit who makes the rules for others to follow and thinks they don’t apply to him.
          All the people who have complied over the last 15 months and not seen their families or gone on holiday or been with their dying loved ones know what a hypocrite this man is.

          3. Most of them do – but some are worse than others. He’s a shit of the first water.

    2. Morning Anne

      This country is heading for hell in a handcart .

      I slightly overreacted to the video of Hancock’s grope .. a lovers tryst.

      I thought he was an innocent serious minded young government minister , he is so much younger than my sons .

      He appears to be no different to anyone now .. I honestly thought he was a priestly type , trying to save us all from the perils of the virus , concerned for our well being , his grim presence and measured words were a total contrast to Boris’s bluster .

      What is done is done now.. he could be ruined.

      One thing bothers me, who sneaked all that film to the media , and who knew, Hancock might just be a naive twerp who ignored the fact that Dominic Cummings has a grudge against everyone ..

      Everyone in government must now be very paranoid about spy cameras stuck into smoke detectors !

      1. I hadn’t forgotten an interview with Halfcock a couple of years back before the last election – he was already health sec under T May – he was shifty and evasive and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. A shifty little squirt and now he’s getting his comuppance – well desrerved.

        He will be forced to resign – Boris won’t push him for obvious reasons but some of the others will.

    4. …a government that is losing control.”

      Losing control? Understatement of the year, Mr Nelson.

      1. The Brits are too well behaved to complain properly, nor would it make any difference.

        I think we’ve had 20 yeas of incompetent, gigantic government that has acted against our wishes, best interests or public need.

  18. Good morning, all. Late on parade. Grey skies and a damp feel – but no rain – yet.

    Morning, Halfcock. Spare room comfy?

  19. In all of the comedy that is Hancock’s Half Hour, I have real concerns: who planted the concealed camera, who leaked the footage and what other concealed cameras have been filming government business?

    It could all be the work of a disgruntled civil servant, but can the government be sure? I know it sounds mad, but could some malevolent force think that getting rid of Hancock will aid a foreign country?

    2. Morning Dale. Any hostile Foreign Country would want to keep Handcock and the rest of these no-hopers in place.

      1. 334805+ up ticks,
        Morning AS,
        Looking at the voting pattern so do a great many of the electorate.

        1. Good morning, ogga

          And always keep a hold of nurse
          For fear of finding something worse.

          (Henry King: Hilaire Belloc)

          I think that you overestimate the voters’ liking of the people for whom they vote; they vote for the less bad option. I would not have voted for either May or Corbyn but if Corbyn had promised to confiscate all my property and murder my wife and family I might have voted for the less horrible option.

          1. 334805+ up ticks,
            Morning R,
            They the electorate have been / still are fighting a war within a war, vote keep in / vote to keep out, tactical voting ( ha ha)
            nasal grippers, best of the worst, ALL supporting / voting for
            the continuance of these sh!te graded close shop parties who’s political input especially over the last three decades have took us DOWN to the basement of the sh!te bog.

            Many of these party voters are all up for digging a cellar under the basement to store more of the same for future use.

            I truly think I underestimate the dangerous stupidity of the
            voting electorate, look at the present state of the UK, taint pretty.

      2. Morning Araminta. That’s why it sounds mad, but then I thought of who’d replace him.

    3. It all looked very staged to me, it didn’t look genuine. It was theatre, a set-up. But why? And if it was filmed on 6 May, why wait until now?

      Today, Saturday 26 June, there is another march in London. (Will the media notice it this time? There were estimated one million marching last month. Possibly it will be on Ruptly, Youtube, from 1.00 pm).

      Are these two events significant together in any way?

      Or are they getting rid of Hancock (handsomely paid off) to install nadhim zawahi or gove in his place? Hancock now has a lot of stuff swirling around him that they need to sweep under the carpet.

      1. 334805+ up ticks,
        Morning Pm,
        Certainly fodder for thought, sort of footprints on the floor
        orchestrated,

  20. This is a long read at more than 3,500 words (I haven’t looked for the first part yet). I found this late last night and went to bed feeling as depressed as I do about Covid.

    EU citizens make up a third of the population of some British towns

    In the second part of our series on the EU Settlement Scheme, The Telegraph looks at the impact of migration on communities in the UK

    By Harry de Quetteville • 25 June 2021 • 9:07pm

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5b42d79fffa090894905da873b975477c6a26de5c1339cd7c07b13a9c49820d4.jpg
    The population of some towns is now a third European, new analysis from The Telegraph can reveal, as the full scale of EU migration to Britain in the last decade becomes clear.

    The EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), under which EU citizens resident in Britain before the end of last year can apply to remain permanently post-Brexit, was expected to attract between 3.5 and 4.1 million applications, according to 2019 Home Office analysis.

    But as the scheme’s June 30 deadline approaches, some 5.61 million people have applied, two million more than predicted, with the overwhelming majority approved to live and work permanently in the UK, and eventually become citizens should they choose.

    The Telegraph analysis of the scheme reveals that EUSS applicants comprise some 35 per cent of the populations of the London boroughs of Newham and Brent. Overall, some 1,834,680 people have applied in London, making one in five Londoners an EU citizen.

    Boston, in Lincolnshire, has the highest proportion of EU citizens outside London, at 31 per cent. Peterborough, Leicester, and Corby also have high proportions of EU citizens – more than a fifth.

    The population of Northampton, officially just over 200,000, is now 22 per cent European, putting it 17th on the list. Its Romanian community has grown in a single decade to comprise a tenth of the town, with 22,300 applying to settle.

    The analysis also reveals the startling extent to which official statistics have underestimated EU migration to the UK in the last decade.

    So far, a combined total of 1,116,000 Bulgarians and Romanians have had their applications approved, more than double the latest ONS figure for the entire population of Bulgarians and Romanians in the country, which was thought to stand at 523,000.

    Ignorance about the true numbers over the last decade made planning public services near impossible, according to Professor Alan Manning, chief of the government’s Migration Advisory Committee until 2020.

    “This laissez-faire attitude to migration was one of the problems that the UK got into … this thing about not knowing how many people are in a particular town. If you need to know how much money to give them for their health services you have to know how many people there are, otherwise there’s going to be trouble. I think all governments, going back, were a bit negligent on all of that.”

    The economist Jonathan Portes, Senior Fellow at the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, described the EUSS as “the largest exercise in immigration administration the Home Office has ever done and one of the largest anywhere in the world”.

    He said the influx was comparable only to the immigration from the Caribbean and Asia that followed in the decades after Windrush: “That really is the only comparable migration in our history and the implications for our society will take much longer to work through.”

    Analysis: ‘A lot of Eastern Europeans hold British culture in higher regard than British people do’

    The deadline at the end of this month for EU citizens to apply for “settled status” in post-Brexit Britain marks the conclusion of one of the largest and smoothest immigration exercises conducted by any country in the developed world, ever. Indeed, so smoothly has it gone that many Britons barely know it has been under way. Yet the ramifications for this country – politically, socially, demographically – now and in the decades to come, will be profound. For a start, the numbers are immense.

    The EUSS allows any EU citizen resident in the UK before this year to remain permanently – working, living and ultimately, if they choose, going on to become Britons themselves. In 2019, the Home Office estimated that “between 3.5 million and 4.1 million” would apply, based on ONS population and labour force surveys.

    But as Alan Manning notes: “They obviously got it quite wrong.”

    The actual number of EU citizens wanting to stay, as of the end of May, was 5.61 million. Brexit, far from pushing out immigrant populations, is locking them in, and in far greater numbers than we ever imagined.

    With a last-minute rush, the total may end up approaching six million – about nine per cent of the population.

    Even so, the vast numbers have been processed online with a minimum of fuss, in a process whose scale and impact, says Jonathan Portes, is “comparable over a shorter period of time to the movement of people here from the Caribbean and from South Asia in the 30 years after Windrush. That really is the only comparable migration in our history and the implications for our society will take much longer to work through.”

    So where are the 5.6 million from?

    Detailed Home Office data show who has applied to the EUSS by nationality, and where they are living.

    Both sets of figures are startling, even though they only report as far as the end of March, when there were three months still to apply. On the former, for example, more than 852,000 Romanians have had their applications approved, likewise 264,000 Bulgarians. This combined number – 1.1 million – is surprising because it is more than double the latest ONS estimates for the entire population of Bulgarians and Romanians in the country, which stand at 523,000.

    Yet if their numbers have been most underestimated, they are by no means alone. Vastly more Greeks, Belgians, Swedes, Czechs, Spaniards, Lithuanians, Portuguese and Latvians have successfully applied than were thought to be here. “That’s quite a big deal,” says Portes.

    And where are they now? Obviously, London in particular has drawn a huge number – 1,834,680 at the last count – meaning as many as one in five Londoners is an EU national. “The London numbers are just jaw-dropping,” says Portes.

    Analysis by The Telegraph shows that the borough of Newham has the highest proportion, with EUSS applicants making up 35.57 per cent of the population. Indeed, nine of the top 10 local authorities with the highest proportion of EU citizens are in the capital, with only Boston, in Lincolnshire, fourth highest with 31.34 per cent, interrupting the sequence.

    But, as Frank Furedi, the Hungarian-born demographer and Professor of Sociology puts it, EU immigrants are “surprisingly everywhere”. And it is in smaller towns and cities, such as Boston, Corby and Northampton, that he says they can have “a disproportionate impact”.

    In Northampton, pictured above, for example, 49,360 people, or 22 per cent of the population of just over 200,000, are EU citizens who have applied for settled status, of whom about half are Romanians – a significant demographic development in under a decade.

    The impact on public services

    Inevitably, such swift and dramatic changes, unrecognised by official statistics, have caused problems for those trying to plan school places, say, or GP surgeries.

    “This laissez-faire attitude to migration was one of the problems that the UK got into… not knowing how many people are in a particular town,” says Manning. “If you need to know how much money to give them for their health services you have to know how many people there are, otherwise there’s going to be trouble. I think all governments, going back, were a bit negligent on all of that.”

    Local authorities, says Portes, routinely complained about the disparity between what they were seeing on the ground and official estimates, as it affected the grants coming down to them from central Government. “It’s all about money. We have not been very good at all at measuring our population or population change. That we need to do a lot better in the future,” says Portes.

    The political effect

    Such a large number of people clearly have the capacity to redraw Britain’s political map. How quickly they do so depends on if they go on to become UK citizens, for only citizens can vote in general elections.

    History suggests that immigrants from poorer countries are most determined to do so, even if it’s just to avoid visa hassles going on holiday. More long-term Bangladeshi residents than Americans apply for a UK passport, for example. But EU passports already confer many of the same advantages as UK ones, so the same impetus to acquire British citizenship may not apply. On the other hand, EU immigrants have already proved far more committed to the UK than economists expected, despite being just a low-cost flight away from home.

    “When they first arrived, we thought, of course, these people won’t be ‘sticky’,” says Portes. “We first realised we were wrong about five or six years later when we saw that lots of them were having kids, which is a pretty good indication that you’re likely to stay permanently.”

    His guess is that a very large proportion of EUSS applicants will stay permanently, and that “many of them will end up translating their settled status into citizenship.” Even if they do not, their children will become British citizens. Whenever they do, says Furedi, “politically, they will not be passive”.

    Yet it’s not clear for whom they would cast their ballots. Many Eastern European immigrants, says Furedi, “are completely estranged by Labour’s wokeish identity politics”, while the big government attitude of Conservatives under Boris Johnson is equally alienating to hard-working entrepreneurial types keen on low-taxes and personal freedoms – “the good rule-breakers, as I call them,” says Furedi.

    “If I was a political leader I would take them very seriously. They could definitely shift seats. There are some places where they can really have a big impact on the outcome. But I don’t think any party really has a strategy for them.”

    Northampton’s two constituencies, for example, are both held by the Tories with a roughly 5,000 majority – a 10th of the size of the potential 50,000-strong new voting bloc of EU citizens.

    The social effect

    Furedi also suggests that there is some truth to, and the UK may benefit from, the stereotypical image of the go-getting immigrant bringing with them ambition, hard work, entrepreneurialism and ambition for their children’s education.

    “They’re sort of middle class in that education sense, even though they can be quite poor in a material sense,” adds Manning.

    Furedi tells the story of a school in Faversham where the arrival of a contingent of Polish children was initially greeted with local grumbles, only for them later to comprise the top 15 students despite having to learn English along the way.

    “Not because Polish people are geniuses,” he notes, “but because they have a very strong ethos of working parents who really push the kids. That’s quite prevalent.”

    Of course, the impact of an influx of observant Catholics, including Poles, on religious life in Britain has been well documented. But increased congregations are just one strand in a new tapestry of behaviour.

    “You can certainly identify local social impacts,” says Portes. “London, despite becoming more left-wing, for example, is also becoming more socially conservative in some ways. Fewer people drink alcohol, more people go to church.”

    The economic effect

    Are the EUSS applicants – overwhelmingly of working age – the solution to our ageing population? The answer, largely, is no. “It helps a bit but nowhere near as much as you think,” says Manning.

    Far more powerful a tool in righting the so-called “dependency ratio” of non-workers to workers, he says, is raising the retirement age. And then there’s the fact that immigrants get old too – just like the rest of us.

    The same goes for that other, hotly disputed aspect of immigration’s impact – whether or not it boosts the economy in the long term: the hard-working, do-anything arrival, says Manning, ends up looking like the locals – with a family, turning down grim jobs, sometimes claiming benefits or unemployed.

    “Migrants become like us,” he says. Overall, he adds, “there’s a tendency to dramatise the economic consequences of immigration, both good and bad. The reality is actually it doesn’t have that much of an impact.”

    Quick assimilation

    Such economic assimilation is likely to be reflected more broadly. The first wave of black and Asian MPs entered Parliament in 1987, a quarter of a century after 1962, when freedom of movement from Commonwealth countries to the UK was ended. It is unlikely that EU immigrants will have to wait as long to make their own mark.

    “Britain today is a far more open society,” says Frank Furedi.

    Nor will recent migrants, overwhelmingly white and Christian, have to overcome the barriers of racism and sectarianism that their forebears faced. That has not stopped some suggesting that the EUSS will be the next Windrush scandal, turning long-term residents, including children and the elderly, into illegal immigrants overnight.

    “That’s not terribly helpful talk,” says Jonathan Portes, who acknowledges that tens of thousands will miss the June 30 deadline, but expects the Government to take a “pragmatic” approach.

    Indeed, this week the Home Office announced that from next month, immigration officials would issue 28-day warnings to those still outside the scheme.

    “When I talk to Eastern Europeans, assimilation is not a dirty word for them in the way it is for the multicultural industry that exists in British society,” says Furedi. “They think it’s really good.”

    In any case it will be – for people who feel no qualms about marrying outside their communities – inevitable.

    “As soon as you marry out, things get mixed up pretty quickly,” says Manning. “The first generation born in the UK will still retain strong links with the home country, but then it becomes hard.”

    Migrants often want to pass on their language so their children can talk to grandparents.

    “After that, though, the value of speaking Romanian, say, is close to zero.”

    Languages will disappear. Few Italian Americans today speak Italian. How many British Romanians will speak Romanian in 25 years’ time?

    Conclusion

    Why do we suspect these vast communities will become Britons so easily? Partly because they’ve done it before.

    After the Second World War, Poles were the second biggest immigrant group in Britain and, as Manning says, “they just more or less just blended into British society”.

    “For a lot of people from this part of the world,” says Furedi, talking from Budapest, “Britain is still seen as a frontier, where they can make their mark on the world. And it isn’t just simply monetary, it’s also to do with a belief that they can have a different kind of life, a better one. It’s hard for British people to appreciate, but a lot of Eastern Europeans hold British culture in higher regard than British people do.”

    ‘The country would collapse without Eastern Europeans’

    In Northampton Market Square, the smell of grilled meat and onions fills the air, writes Rosa Silverman.

    “English strawberries, pound a box!” bellows one of the stallholders, over and over, as midweek shoppers drift through in ones and twos. Perhaps it’s the size of the square that makes it feel half empty – it’s one of Britain’s largest, dating back to 1235 – or perhaps it’s because it no longer has the pull it once did.

    “It used to be heaving,” sighs trader Roger Judkins, 70, from behind his collectibles stall. “Now it’s my worst market.”

    But not everyone’s trade has suffered. Further up the square, Eamonn Fitzpatrick, 71, has run his fruit and vegetable stall here for more than half a century. The secret of its longevity? European Union migration. “I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Eastern Europeans,” he says. “They provide at least 40 per cent of my trade. They’re used to shopping in markets. British-born shoppers prefer the supermarkets.”

    Despite this, Mr Fitzpatrick was among the 59 per cent of Northamptonshire voters who chose Brexit in the 2016 referendum. “I didn’t agree with uncontrolled immigration,” he explains.

    Yet with just days to go until the official June 30 deadline for EU citizens in the UK to apply for settled status, he hopes they will opt to stay.

    “The country would collapse without them,” he says, citing a recent visit to the local hospital, where he realised how many of the staff were foreign-born. “We definitely need them.”

    Since the EU expanded in the Noughties, extending the right to freedom of movement and residence to far greater numbers of Europeans, we’ve had only an incomplete picture of how many have settled where in Britain, and from which countries.

    Now, applications to the resettlement scheme provide more clarity. The data shows that outside of London, East Midlands towns have some of the highest proportions of EU citizens among their residents. In Northampton, about 22 per cent of the 2019 population is estimated to be EU-born.

    Of these, Romanians account for the largest share, making up an estimated 9.9 per cent of the town’s population, followed by Poles (3.9 per cent), Lithuanians (1.6 per cent) and Latvians (1.4 per cent).

    The decisive local vote for Brexit suggests these demographic shifts have not been wholeheartedly welcomed by long-term Northampton residents. But while those like Mr Judkins take the “send them all back” approach, others hold more nuanced opinions, now that the heat of the Brexit debates has died down.

    “They’re doing things that English people are saying ‘I’m too good to do’,” says Matt Wood, 45, who says he’s made more money busking on the street than he did when working in a local branch of Tesco until it closed down. Now, he plays the Sailor’s Hornpipe on his fiddle outside one of the many empty shops in town. The faded letters spelling Moss remain just visible below the Tudor-style frontage of the building.

    Millie, an 18-year-old student waiting on the square for a friend, blames “fearmongering and xenophobia” for the referendum result. “[People were led to believe] EU migrants would take their jobs,” she says. “But people who come into this country do more than people who were born here.”

    This attitude has proved controversial in the past. In 2014, a row broke out when Greencore Group said it would be recruiting from Hungary most of the 300 workers needed for its new sandwich factory on Northamptonshire’s Moulton Park industrial estate.

    “There aren’t enough people around and it is not always the kind of work people have wanted to do,” said Allyson Russell, the company’s human resources director, at the time.

    “That is the fine line,” says David Mackintosh, the former Conservative MP for Northampton South. “The need for European workers while not creating the feeling of ‘them and us’ with people locally.”

    The town is famous for its shoe trade, which survives to this day thanks to overseas demand for high quality footwear. Between homes on residential terraced streets sit stately Victorian factory buildings – a fair few of which remain operational. On the middle floor of the handsome Tricker’s factory shop on St Michael’s Road, EU migrants are among the staff busy sewing, helping sustain a 192-year-old Northampton brand. While manufacturing endures in the county town, it has also become an important logistics hub. But according to Mr Mackintosh, the EU-born section of the workforce has not always been completely integrated.

    “It always struck me on visits to factories and warehouses how the workers tend to stick to groups of English speakers and those speaking Eastern European languages,” he says. “Unlike the post-War immigrants from Europe, the assimilation was different.”

    “Many had come to Northampton for work and had not intended to stay, so they lived and worked with others from their country. I think this lack of integration caused tension and was a reason for many to vote in favour of Brexit in Northampton. But this did not show any understanding of how much Northampton relies on the logistics sector, which was so dependent on these workers.”

    In common with many other towns and cities, Northampton’s high street has lost a string of big-name retailers lately, among them Marks & Spencer (closed in 2018), Sainsbury’s (closed in March) and Debenhams (closed in May). Not far from the town centre, however, the smaller, foreign-owned grocery stores and mini-markets – with names like Riga International and Krakow Supermarket – are busy.

    Laura Vasnore, 29, moved here 11 years ago from Lithuania and now works in a grocery store called Perestroyka on Wellingborough Road – self-styled purveyor of the “best choice of Eastern European products in Northampton.”

    “It’s a welcoming town,” she says. “There’s a big Lithuanian community but I’m friends with British people, too. The people are nice.”

    She had her son here, has applied for settled status and has no plans to leave. Paulina Kita, 37, who arrived three years ago from Poland and works in another of the Eastern European food stores on the street, agrees the town is welcoming and friendly, but does not plan to stay here long-term. “I’m going back to my family,” she says, adding that this was her plan all along.

    Victoria Miles, chief executive of Northamptonshire Community Foundation, runs some of the citizenship ceremonies for foreign-born residents who feel so at home here they’ve chosen to become British.

    “[They’re] really keen to put their roots down and that feels really positive,” she says. While community cohesion isn’t perfect, she believes Northampton has been generally good at welcoming outsiders. The acceptance of the town’s diversity by those born and bred here is “probably the biggest issue, as anywhere,” she says, admitting integration can take a while.

    “But I do feel there’s good community spirit. A lot of people have embraced EU citizens coming along.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/25/eu-citizens-make-third-population-british-towns/

    Some observations:

    ‘A lot of Eastern Europeans hold British culture in higher regard than British people do’
    Yes – the British people who allowed them in, who despise their own kind.

    Sandwich makers from Hungary. Is this what we’re reduced to?

    How did we create such a vast unemployed, workshy underclass of our own? How long before this disease infects the Europeans?

    The reference to post-WW2 immigrants is utterly bogus. The number of Poles who came here then was about 130,000, along with perhaps 10-15,000 from other countries and they came to very different UK. Today’s Polish community does not appear to feel obliged to become part of the country as did its forebears of 75 years ago through force of circumstance.

    The photo: Moldova?

    This piece could have been written by any Remainer…

    1. I’m fairly relaxed about that, but perhaps it’s because I know that several of my ancestors came from mainland Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

        1. Within a couple of generations, we won’t even know they’re there.
          The only group that will never fit in, because they don’t want to, are followers of islam.

    2. Blair’s Labour government, yet again.
      Small wonder we have such a housing shortage.

      A small crumb of consolation is that their European cultural heritage is much closer to ours than that of the incomers from Asia and Africa, where we will also be grossly underestimating the numbers.

    3. “Migrants become like us,” he says. Overall, he adds, “there’s a tendency
      to dramatise the economic consequences of immigration, both good and
      bad. The reality is actually it doesn’t have that much of an impact.”

      Unless of course they are Muslim.

      1. Dramatise or not, if the population is 1000 people and there are 950 jobs then there are only 50 people unemployed.

        Under Labour, massive immigration occured and instead of 1000 people there were another 500. Now we have 550 people who are unemployed. Worse, because the influx was so fast and so forced, there was no sense of integration. No demand that English be spoken.

        1. Multi-culturalism and translation services meant there was no need for English to be spoken.

    4. I’d prefer 100 Polish settlers over a single slammer. As well as Boston being around 1/3 European, the same is probably true of nearby Spalding. I do wonder how many of those granted settled status are living on benefits though. Probably against the rules but nobody who is not employed should be permitted to stay.

    5. “Populations one third European”? We, the English, are “European”; we aren’t African, Asian, Aboriginals or Native American Indians. We are natives of an island off the mainland of Europe. Clearly we don’t count.

  21. This is a long read at more than 3,500 words (I haven’t looked for the first part yet). I found this late last night and went to bed feeling as depressed as I do about Covid.

    EU citizens make up a third of the population of some British towns

    In the second part of our series on the EU Settlement Scheme, The Telegraph looks at the impact of migration on communities in the UK

    By Harry de Quetteville • 25 June 2021 • 9:07pm

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5b42d79fffa090894905da873b975477c6a26de5c1339cd7c07b13a9c49820d4.jpg
    The population of some towns is now a third European, new analysis from The Telegraph can reveal, as the full scale of EU migration to Britain in the last decade becomes clear.

    The EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), under which EU citizens resident in Britain before the end of last year can apply to remain permanently post-Brexit, was expected to attract between 3.5 and 4.1 million applications, according to 2019 Home Office analysis.

    But as the scheme’s June 30 deadline approaches, some 5.61 million people have applied, two million more than predicted, with the overwhelming majority approved to live and work permanently in the UK, and eventually become citizens should they choose.

    The Telegraph analysis of the scheme reveals that EUSS applicants comprise some 35 per cent of the populations of the London boroughs of Newham and Brent. Overall, some 1,834,680 people have applied in London, making one in five Londoners an EU citizen.

    Boston, in Lincolnshire, has the highest proportion of EU citizens outside London, at 31 per cent. Peterborough, Leicester, and Corby also have high proportions of EU citizens – more than a fifth.

    The population of Northampton, officially just over 200,000, is now 22 per cent European, putting it 17th on the list. Its Romanian community has grown in a single decade to comprise a tenth of the town, with 22,300 applying to settle.

    The analysis also reveals the startling extent to which official statistics have underestimated EU migration to the UK in the last decade.

    So far, a combined total of 1,116,000 Bulgarians and Romanians have had their applications approved, more than double the latest ONS figure for the entire population of Bulgarians and Romanians in the country, which was thought to stand at 523,000.

    Ignorance about the true numbers over the last decade made planning public services near impossible, according to Professor Alan Manning, chief of the government’s Migration Advisory Committee until 2020.

    “This laissez-faire attitude to migration was one of the problems that the UK got into … this thing about not knowing how many people are in a particular town. If you need to know how much money to give them for their health services you have to know how many people there are, otherwise there’s going to be trouble. I think all governments, going back, were a bit negligent on all of that.”

    The economist Jonathan Portes, Senior Fellow at the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, described the EUSS as “the largest exercise in immigration administration the Home Office has ever done and one of the largest anywhere in the world”.

    He said the influx was comparable only to the immigration from the Caribbean and Asia that followed in the decades after Windrush: “That really is the only comparable migration in our history and the implications for our society will take much longer to work through.”

    Analysis: ‘A lot of Eastern Europeans hold British culture in higher regard than British people do’

    The deadline at the end of this month for EU citizens to apply for “settled status” in post-Brexit Britain marks the conclusion of one of the largest and smoothest immigration exercises conducted by any country in the developed world, ever. Indeed, so smoothly has it gone that many Britons barely know it has been under way. Yet the ramifications for this country – politically, socially, demographically – now and in the decades to come, will be profound. For a start, the numbers are immense.

    The EUSS allows any EU citizen resident in the UK before this year to remain permanently – working, living and ultimately, if they choose, going on to become Britons themselves. In 2019, the Home Office estimated that “between 3.5 million and 4.1 million” would apply, based on ONS population and labour force surveys.

    But as Alan Manning notes: “They obviously got it quite wrong.”

    The actual number of EU citizens wanting to stay, as of the end of May, was 5.61 million. Brexit, far from pushing out immigrant populations, is locking them in, and in far greater numbers than we ever imagined.

    With a last-minute rush, the total may end up approaching six million – about nine per cent of the population.

    Even so, the vast numbers have been processed online with a minimum of fuss, in a process whose scale and impact, says Jonathan Portes, is “comparable over a shorter period of time to the movement of people here from the Caribbean and from South Asia in the 30 years after Windrush. That really is the only comparable migration in our history and the implications for our society will take much longer to work through.”

    So where are the 5.6 million from?

    Detailed Home Office data show who has applied to the EUSS by nationality, and where they are living.

    Both sets of figures are startling, even though they only report as far as the end of March, when there were three months still to apply. On the former, for example, more than 852,000 Romanians have had their applications approved, likewise 264,000 Bulgarians. This combined number – 1.1 million – is surprising because it is more than double the latest ONS estimates for the entire population of Bulgarians and Romanians in the country, which stand at 523,000.

    Yet if their numbers have been most underestimated, they are by no means alone. Vastly more Greeks, Belgians, Swedes, Czechs, Spaniards, Lithuanians, Portuguese and Latvians have successfully applied than were thought to be here. “That’s quite a big deal,” says Portes.

    And where are they now? Obviously, London in particular has drawn a huge number – 1,834,680 at the last count – meaning as many as one in five Londoners is an EU national. “The London numbers are just jaw-dropping,” says Portes.

    Analysis by The Telegraph shows that the borough of Newham has the highest proportion, with EUSS applicants making up 35.57 per cent of the population. Indeed, nine of the top 10 local authorities with the highest proportion of EU citizens are in the capital, with only Boston, in Lincolnshire, fourth highest with 31.34 per cent, interrupting the sequence.

    But, as Frank Furedi, the Hungarian-born demographer and Professor of Sociology puts it, EU immigrants are “surprisingly everywhere”. And it is in smaller towns and cities, such as Boston, Corby and Northampton, that he says they can have “a disproportionate impact”.

    In Northampton, pictured above, for example, 49,360 people, or 22 per cent of the population of just over 200,000, are EU citizens who have applied for settled status, of whom about half are Romanians – a significant demographic development in under a decade.

    The impact on public services

    Inevitably, such swift and dramatic changes, unrecognised by official statistics, have caused problems for those trying to plan school places, say, or GP surgeries.

    “This laissez-faire attitude to migration was one of the problems that the UK got into… not knowing how many people are in a particular town,” says Manning. “If you need to know how much money to give them for their health services you have to know how many people there are, otherwise there’s going to be trouble. I think all governments, going back, were a bit negligent on all of that.”

    Local authorities, says Portes, routinely complained about the disparity between what they were seeing on the ground and official estimates, as it affected the grants coming down to them from central Government. “It’s all about money. We have not been very good at all at measuring our population or population change. That we need to do a lot better in the future,” says Portes.

    The political effect

    Such a large number of people clearly have the capacity to redraw Britain’s political map. How quickly they do so depends on if they go on to become UK citizens, for only citizens can vote in general elections.

    History suggests that immigrants from poorer countries are most determined to do so, even if it’s just to avoid visa hassles going on holiday. More long-term Bangladeshi residents than Americans apply for a UK passport, for example. But EU passports already confer many of the same advantages as UK ones, so the same impetus to acquire British citizenship may not apply. On the other hand, EU immigrants have already proved far more committed to the UK than economists expected, despite being just a low-cost flight away from home.

    “When they first arrived, we thought, of course, these people won’t be ‘sticky’,” says Portes. “We first realised we were wrong about five or six years later when we saw that lots of them were having kids, which is a pretty good indication that you’re likely to stay permanently.”

    His guess is that a very large proportion of EUSS applicants will stay permanently, and that “many of them will end up translating their settled status into citizenship.” Even if they do not, their children will become British citizens. Whenever they do, says Furedi, “politically, they will not be passive”.

    Yet it’s not clear for whom they would cast their ballots. Many Eastern European immigrants, says Furedi, “are completely estranged by Labour’s wokeish identity politics”, while the big government attitude of Conservatives under Boris Johnson is equally alienating to hard-working entrepreneurial types keen on low-taxes and personal freedoms – “the good rule-breakers, as I call them,” says Furedi.

    “If I was a political leader I would take them very seriously. They could definitely shift seats. There are some places where they can really have a big impact on the outcome. But I don’t think any party really has a strategy for them.”

    Northampton’s two constituencies, for example, are both held by the Tories with a roughly 5,000 majority – a 10th of the size of the potential 50,000-strong new voting bloc of EU citizens.

    The social effect

    Furedi also suggests that there is some truth to, and the UK may benefit from, the stereotypical image of the go-getting immigrant bringing with them ambition, hard work, entrepreneurialism and ambition for their children’s education.

    “They’re sort of middle class in that education sense, even though they can be quite poor in a material sense,” adds Manning.

    Furedi tells the story of a school in Faversham where the arrival of a contingent of Polish children was initially greeted with local grumbles, only for them later to comprise the top 15 students despite having to learn English along the way.

    “Not because Polish people are geniuses,” he notes, “but because they have a very strong ethos of working parents who really push the kids. That’s quite prevalent.”

    Of course, the impact of an influx of observant Catholics, including Poles, on religious life in Britain has been well documented. But increased congregations are just one strand in a new tapestry of behaviour.

    “You can certainly identify local social impacts,” says Portes. “London, despite becoming more left-wing, for example, is also becoming more socially conservative in some ways. Fewer people drink alcohol, more people go to church.”

    The economic effect

    Are the EUSS applicants – overwhelmingly of working age – the solution to our ageing population? The answer, largely, is no. “It helps a bit but nowhere near as much as you think,” says Manning.

    Far more powerful a tool in righting the so-called “dependency ratio” of non-workers to workers, he says, is raising the retirement age. And then there’s the fact that immigrants get old too – just like the rest of us.

    The same goes for that other, hotly disputed aspect of immigration’s impact – whether or not it boosts the economy in the long term: the hard-working, do-anything arrival, says Manning, ends up looking like the locals – with a family, turning down grim jobs, sometimes claiming benefits or unemployed.

    “Migrants become like us,” he says. Overall, he adds, “there’s a tendency to dramatise the economic consequences of immigration, both good and bad. The reality is actually it doesn’t have that much of an impact.”

    Quick assimilation

    Such economic assimilation is likely to be reflected more broadly. The first wave of black and Asian MPs entered Parliament in 1987, a quarter of a century after 1962, when freedom of movement from Commonwealth countries to the UK was ended. It is unlikely that EU immigrants will have to wait as long to make their own mark.

    “Britain today is a far more open society,” says Frank Furedi.

    Nor will recent migrants, overwhelmingly white and Christian, have to overcome the barriers of racism and sectarianism that their forebears faced. That has not stopped some suggesting that the EUSS will be the next Windrush scandal, turning long-term residents, including children and the elderly, into illegal immigrants overnight.

    “That’s not terribly helpful talk,” says Jonathan Portes, who acknowledges that tens of thousands will miss the June 30 deadline, but expects the Government to take a “pragmatic” approach.

    Indeed, this week the Home Office announced that from next month, immigration officials would issue 28-day warnings to those still outside the scheme.

    “When I talk to Eastern Europeans, assimilation is not a dirty word for them in the way it is for the multicultural industry that exists in British society,” says Furedi. “They think it’s really good.”

    In any case it will be – for people who feel no qualms about marrying outside their communities – inevitable.

    “As soon as you marry out, things get mixed up pretty quickly,” says Manning. “The first generation born in the UK will still retain strong links with the home country, but then it becomes hard.”

    Migrants often want to pass on their language so their children can talk to grandparents.

    “After that, though, the value of speaking Romanian, say, is close to zero.”

    Languages will disappear. Few Italian Americans today speak Italian. How many British Romanians will speak Romanian in 25 years’ time?

    Conclusion

    Why do we suspect these vast communities will become Britons so easily? Partly because they’ve done it before.

    After the Second World War, Poles were the second biggest immigrant group in Britain and, as Manning says, “they just more or less just blended into British society”.

    “For a lot of people from this part of the world,” says Furedi, talking from Budapest, “Britain is still seen as a frontier, where they can make their mark on the world. And it isn’t just simply monetary, it’s also to do with a belief that they can have a different kind of life, a better one. It’s hard for British people to appreciate, but a lot of Eastern Europeans hold British culture in higher regard than British people do.”

    ‘The country would collapse without Eastern Europeans’

    In Northampton Market Square, the smell of grilled meat and onions fills the air, writes Rosa Silverman.

    “English strawberries, pound a box!” bellows one of the stallholders, over and over, as midweek shoppers drift through in ones and twos. Perhaps it’s the size of the square that makes it feel half empty – it’s one of Britain’s largest, dating back to 1235 – or perhaps it’s because it no longer has the pull it once did.

    “It used to be heaving,” sighs trader Roger Judkins, 70, from behind his collectibles stall. “Now it’s my worst market.”

    But not everyone’s trade has suffered. Further up the square, Eamonn Fitzpatrick, 71, has run his fruit and vegetable stall here for more than half a century. The secret of its longevity? European Union migration. “I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Eastern Europeans,” he says. “They provide at least 40 per cent of my trade. They’re used to shopping in markets. British-born shoppers prefer the supermarkets.”

    Despite this, Mr Fitzpatrick was among the 59 per cent of Northamptonshire voters who chose Brexit in the 2016 referendum. “I didn’t agree with uncontrolled immigration,” he explains.

    Yet with just days to go until the official June 30 deadline for EU citizens in the UK to apply for settled status, he hopes they will opt to stay.

    “The country would collapse without them,” he says, citing a recent visit to the local hospital, where he realised how many of the staff were foreign-born. “We definitely need them.”

    Since the EU expanded in the Noughties, extending the right to freedom of movement and residence to far greater numbers of Europeans, we’ve had only an incomplete picture of how many have settled where in Britain, and from which countries.

    Now, applications to the resettlement scheme provide more clarity. The data shows that outside of London, East Midlands towns have some of the highest proportions of EU citizens among their residents. In Northampton, about 22 per cent of the 2019 population is estimated to be EU-born.

    Of these, Romanians account for the largest share, making up an estimated 9.9 per cent of the town’s population, followed by Poles (3.9 per cent), Lithuanians (1.6 per cent) and Latvians (1.4 per cent).

    The decisive local vote for Brexit suggests these demographic shifts have not been wholeheartedly welcomed by long-term Northampton residents. But while those like Mr Judkins take the “send them all back” approach, others hold more nuanced opinions, now that the heat of the Brexit debates has died down.

    “They’re doing things that English people are saying ‘I’m too good to do’,” says Matt Wood, 45, who says he’s made more money busking on the street than he did when working in a local branch of Tesco until it closed down. Now, he plays the Sailor’s Hornpipe on his fiddle outside one of the many empty shops in town. The faded letters spelling Moss remain just visible below the Tudor-style frontage of the building.

    Millie, an 18-year-old student waiting on the square for a friend, blames “fearmongering and xenophobia” for the referendum result. “[People were led to believe] EU migrants would take their jobs,” she says. “But people who come into this country do more than people who were born here.”

    This attitude has proved controversial in the past. In 2014, a row broke out when Greencore Group said it would be recruiting from Hungary most of the 300 workers needed for its new sandwich factory on Northamptonshire’s Moulton Park industrial estate.

    “There aren’t enough people around and it is not always the kind of work people have wanted to do,” said Allyson Russell, the company’s human resources director, at the time.

    “That is the fine line,” says David Mackintosh, the former Conservative MP for Northampton South. “The need for European workers while not creating the feeling of ‘them and us’ with people locally.”

    The town is famous for its shoe trade, which survives to this day thanks to overseas demand for high quality footwear. Between homes on residential terraced streets sit stately Victorian factory buildings – a fair few of which remain operational. On the middle floor of the handsome Tricker’s factory shop on St Michael’s Road, EU migrants are among the staff busy sewing, helping sustain a 192-year-old Northampton brand. While manufacturing endures in the county town, it has also become an important logistics hub. But according to Mr Mackintosh, the EU-born section of the workforce has not always been completely integrated.

    “It always struck me on visits to factories and warehouses how the workers tend to stick to groups of English speakers and those speaking Eastern European languages,” he says. “Unlike the post-War immigrants from Europe, the assimilation was different.”

    “Many had come to Northampton for work and had not intended to stay, so they lived and worked with others from their country. I think this lack of integration caused tension and was a reason for many to vote in favour of Brexit in Northampton. But this did not show any understanding of how much Northampton relies on the logistics sector, which was so dependent on these workers.”

    In common with many other towns and cities, Northampton’s high street has lost a string of big-name retailers lately, among them Marks & Spencer (closed in 2018), Sainsbury’s (closed in March) and Debenhams (closed in May). Not far from the town centre, however, the smaller, foreign-owned grocery stores and mini-markets – with names like Riga International and Krakow Supermarket – are busy.

    Laura Vasnore, 29, moved here 11 years ago from Lithuania and now works in a grocery store called Perestroyka on Wellingborough Road – self-styled purveyor of the “best choice of Eastern European products in Northampton.”

    “It’s a welcoming town,” she says. “There’s a big Lithuanian community but I’m friends with British people, too. The people are nice.”

    She had her son here, has applied for settled status and has no plans to leave. Paulina Kita, 37, who arrived three years ago from Poland and works in another of the Eastern European food stores on the street, agrees the town is welcoming and friendly, but does not plan to stay here long-term. “I’m going back to my family,” she says, adding that this was her plan all along.

    Victoria Miles, chief executive of Northamptonshire Community Foundation, runs some of the citizenship ceremonies for foreign-born residents who feel so at home here they’ve chosen to become British.

    “[They’re] really keen to put their roots down and that feels really positive,” she says. While community cohesion isn’t perfect, she believes Northampton has been generally good at welcoming outsiders. The acceptance of the town’s diversity by those born and bred here is “probably the biggest issue, as anywhere,” she says, admitting integration can take a while.

    “But I do feel there’s good community spirit. A lot of people have embraced EU citizens coming along.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/25/eu-citizens-make-third-population-british-towns/

    Some observations:

    ‘A lot of Eastern Europeans hold British culture in higher regard than British people do’
    Yes – the British people who allowed them in, who despise their own kind.

    Sandwich makers from Hungary. Is this what we’re reduced to?

    How did we create such a vast unemployed, workshy underclass of our own? How long before this disease infects the Europeans?

    The reference to post-WW2 immigrants is utterly bogus. The number of Poles who came here then was about 130,000, along with perhaps 10-15,000 from other countries and they came to very different UK. Today’s Polish community does not appear to feel obliged to become part of the country as did its forebears of 60-70 years ago through force of circumstance.

    The photo: Moldova?

    This piece could have been written by any Remainer…

  24. Police officer who fell seriously ill after being poisoned in Salisbury Novichok attack reveals he wants to meet Sergei and Yulia Skripal because it would be ‘very interesting to speak to them’. 26 June 2021.

    He said: ‘I would, I think I would. (My wife) Sarah and I talked about this a lot as to whether we’d want to speak to them and to meet them. For a long time I was like ‘no, I don’t’, not for any other reason, I just couldn’t cope with that.

    You would think this quite an innocuous article about compensation, and yet the comments; beside being anodyne, are Moderated in Advance, and look to already have been blocked after 10! Why would this be? What could possibly prompt this level of concern about such a mundane matter? Well it’s about the Skripal’s and their fate. A subject that sends the PTB into paroxysms of terror. To mention it on line is to see Hordes of Trolls emerging from beneath Westminster Bridge eager to quash any speculation or the pointing out of the gaping holes in the story. The place of Police Officer Nick Bailey on the day in question for example is not nearly so clear cut as might be supposed. Is in fact a mystery. Theresa May for one placing him at the Park Bench in town. Now here is the man trying to get some cash out of the system and he suddenly starts talking about the Skripals on the telly! A cynic like myself might wonder why he was so suddenly concerned about them after three years! Bailey more than any other participant must know what happened that day and it’s not the Official Story. He’s reminding them and pressuring them to cough up!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9721687/Novichok-police-officer-says-wants-meet-Sergei-Yulia-Skripal.html

  25. Feeling even more gloomy now, after having read the abstract of this new research published a couple of days ago.

    Here is the link for the scientists and medics amongst you. The result of the research is stark:

    For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.

    https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/pdf

    Having – unsuccessfully – tried being a duck (see my earlier post), I think I shall now pretend I’m an ostrich and go away and bury myself in my organ music.

    1. That sounds a very sensible idea when things are beyond your control and you feel so helpless.
      Fingers crossed that you weather this crisis.

    2. 334805+ up ticks,
      Morning CT,
      If one had NO trust in the governance coalition one could almost believe there is a cull operating.

      That would also explain the DOVER incoming campaign as a more pliable electoral top up.

    3. The conclusions of that paper would appear to point to the same conclusion that Yeadon, Bhakti, Cahill and many others have been saying for months – that only the groups at high risk of dying of covid should take the risk of having the vaccine.

      Edit: gosh, this is a really ham-fisted post. I am knackered today. Can’t face even the thought of Monday morning, and have a ton of housework to do….that’s why I am on the computer of course….

    4. Playing the organ can be very relaxing, Caroline…..!!

      And don’t duck the issue.

  26. Good morning all. A bright start at 10°C.
    The expected rain did not materialise yesterday or last night, though the DT, returning from what I hope will be the last clear-out trip to her mother’s said it was pouring down as she went past Leicester.

  28. Sweden’s gun crime epidemic is spiralling out of control. 26 june 2021.

    What is happening in Sweden? Since 2015, deadly violence has spiked in what many still think of as a quiet corner of Scandinavia. This spate of violence is mainly due to the country’s bloody gang wars, in which both perpetrators and victims are often young men of immigrant origin. The period between 2016 and 2020 saw a yearly average of 112 homicides, compared to an average of 87 in the preceding five years.

    We are a little behind Sweden in both time and weaponry. But coming soon!

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-s-the-cause-of-sweden-s-surge-in-gun-crime-

    1. But the upside is that Sweden is far more enriched than it used to be.

        1. No. But the useless bitch that is “running the place”, Stefan Löfven, statsminister, is in fear of losing his job. All the other parties are ganging up on him.

          1. Ah. Thank you. I was reading about some leftie Iranian woman who wants to be in charge.

          2. ALL Swedish politicians are Lefties. Only a few are Right of Centre.

            You have: Centre, Mildish Left, Leftish, Left, Very Left, Bloody Left, F*cking Left; Manic Left, Cretinous Left and Left their Marbles Behind.

        2. No. But the useless bitch that is “running the place”, Stefan Löfven, statsminister, is in fear of losing his job. All the other parties are ganging up on him.

      2. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/763354/Migrants-blame-serious-crimes-Sweden-police-officer-blasts-rant

        and : https://sputniknews.com/europe/201702091050499393-sweden-immigrant-crime-political-correctness/

        for the text version. Notable that Sweden deliberately doens’t keep ethnicity statistics. Either this is deliberate farce to avoid the fact that practicall all crime in Sweden is committed by Muslim foreigners or they’re lazy. I suspect the former. If you can pretend the problem doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist for politicians.

        How they ignore that their crime rate has exploded directly in correlation with gimmigrants is beyond me. But hey. They all refuse to acknowledge the facts. Let’s just have some fothose people squealing refugees (when they’re nothing of the sort) rape and murder them.

  29. Re the hoo-ha about how the picture of Halfcock snogging someone’s wife got into the public arena. And the bollox about MI5 being called in….

    I reckon that someone who has had the misfortune to have to be associated with this arrogant, smug, self-satisfied, dictatorial popinjay came across it – and took his revenge. And well done, that man. (Or trans).

  30. Statistics (or lies): Covid “deaths” yesterday:

    UK 18
    France 34
    Chermany 67
    Spain 13
    Belgium (Plucky Little) 8
    Italy 56

    So – clearly – the UK is a VERY DANGEROUS and DEADLY place. Discuss.

    1. Ahhh but but but…
      We’ve now got the deadly Peruvian lambda variant.

      Probably smuggled in by a bloody bear in marmalizer sand-witcheries

        1. That’s a Brazilian variant.

          You may be thinking of the Hancock Huayno

          This is a traditional Andean dance that is popular in the Peruvian highlands and Andes. Participants wear traditional Andean clothing, with bright and vibrant colours and it is performed by couples who make turns and movements featuring hops and foot stamps which mark the rhythm. Supaypa wasin tusuq (dance of scissors).

  31. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d3c07895839208b0beec9141a963c2954cfac19acb60ce4abd7e30ad85e0f276.png What ho, Wing-Co.

    I say, old chap, you missed a trick in correctly explaining your preferred scientific pronunciation of helicopter. Helico-pter (spiral wing) would only be correctly pronounced if the ‘p’ remained silent (as in pterodactyl). This would give us a more realistic “helicoe-terr”.

    This, though, would be, I fear, a step too much for your fellow crabfats.

    1. Who remembers the tri-colour car stickers from the early ’80s with
      Fly Navy
      Sail Army
      Walk Sideways!?

  32. The Daily Human Stupidity.

    “I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance”

    Alfred de Vigny.

    2. “Can you describe the suspect, sir?”
      “Oh, I couldn’t possibly, constable.”
      “Why? What colour was he?”
      “Colour? I am colour blind. And ‘he’? How can one tell if it was a he, she or an other and if one could, wouldn’t that be prejujdicial to a fair trial? I cannot help you, constable, and nor will any decent, fair-minded person.”

    3. Does that wanker not realise (of course he doesn’t — he doesn’t possess the intellect) that Indians and Pakistanis are caucasian too?

      1. Yes, likewise the Arabs, Persians, North Africans. All genetically caucasoid.

        1. The scary thing, Sue, is that this idiotic bilge is coming from the tiny minds of so-called scientists at Cambridge University and The University College of London.

          Who is responsible for installing such clearly not-fit-for-purpose creatures into our higher seats of “learning”? I think the answer just might be those who are intent on hijacking education, therfore numbing the minds of future generations in order to prosper the continuance of their venomous creed.

        2. The Arabs certainly and probably the Persians are classified as Semites, along with the Israelis.

          I bet that goes down well.

    4. Thank goodness we left. I couldn’t possibly remember all that. British will do nicely (until the day we’re not allowed to say that which, deep down, I fear may not be too far away )

      “European” should be replaced with “The European-associated PCA cluster, which aims to minimise variation in non-genetic factors and genetic factors”.

    1. Reference, as above:

      With designer diseases
      Their functions are gaining,
      Their power and wealth
      Intent on maintaining,
      While concern for the proles
      They’re practiced at feigning,
      Pissing right in our faces
      And saying it’s raining.

  38. Well, I don’t know about my fellow NoTTLers, but I hope that Halfcock is having a TERRIBLE day….{:¬))

    1. He is almost certainly having a worse day than I am – a thought which I find comforting.

          3. Cats out – hunting. Trombetti thriving in the warm damp weather. The MR is doing well, too. Enjoying articles excoriating Halfcock.

        2. Nothing much. Just a bit tired, and stuff to do everywhere. Last week, when I was still in quarantine, I rashly over-estimated my available spare time, and embarked on a major reorganisation of all my books.
          There are still books stacked all the way down the stairs – still on the bright side, I have sorted out three large shopping bags full for the charity shops!

          1. I have to clear my conservatory before it’s replaced. I think it’s going to take a l-o-o-o-ong time!

      1. I expect tomorrow will be even worse – when all his other love interests are exposed.

  42. Both weather radar sites that I look at daily show that it is dry as dry here.

    It is raining……

  43. 334805+ up ticks,
    Det, supt, laura koscikiewicz stated, a few faced charges
    and NO grooming ring has been established.

    Keep in mind it took 16 plus years for the law to eventually recognise the odious rotherham episode.

    Many voters will be surely worried it could maybe upset the regular voting pattern.

    https://twitter.com/NKrankie/status/1408741639607275520

    1. Until the state stops excusing it, it won’t end.

      The issue needs to be raised publicly and for once, not wheeled out as being acceptable, in a minority or otherwise apologised for. The BBC must be forced to confront the direct link between Islam and paedophilia – yes, it will try desperately to say that the Christian Church has the same issues and that must be stopped.

      The explosion in these ocmmunities, the welfare dependency, the huge families, the segregation, the sheer refusal to accept British values all must be highlighted without the usual tedious avoidance.

    2. The “Grooming” of female Infidels is part of Jihad & all the Muslims taking part in it are Terrorists & should be charged as such. One or two rapists even serial rapists are sex offenders but when its based on a religious edict & carried out on a massive scale in the UK & Western Europe then the bigger picture must be seen & it must be recognized for what it is, an act of war against non-Muslims for the purpose of subjugating the native population prior to ultimate goal of Jihad in Europe , the establishment of the Caliphate of the West

      1. 334805+ up ticks,
        Afternoon E&S,
        The lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella close shop coalition member / voters know this and go into three monkey mode on entering the polling booth.

        Party before ALL else.

  45. Just had a thought. When Halfcock goes – replace him with Priti Awful – she has done soooo well over the last two years.

    Lunch.

    1. Considering Hancock and his fling, don’t want to upset anyone , but the promiscous Princess Diana will be ulogised this weekend , and a statue erected to keep her name going for ever , I just don’t quite get it really.

    1. That reminds me of that joke that did the rounds a while ago: “I’m disappointed with my parents. All their adult lives they voted Republican. Now they are dead they’ve started voted Democrat.”

          4. Earlier today I saw a bearded man in town wearing a dress. I say “man” at the risk of misgendering him/her/it.

    1. I certainly do. (Memories of Radio London come flooding back.) Wasn’t it a Jonathan King production?

        1. The Hoppers ceased activity in 1966, Capital Radio came into being in 1973. Radio London, a pirate station, is where
          Kenny Everett started his career.

    2. Of course. They were RAF lads, (hence their name). The song was written and produced by an infamous kiddy-fiddler.

    1. My thinking is there is a lot more to this than meets the eye why only a brief snap of the embrace ? There must have been a lot more footage, my suspicion is that this was deliberately posed for they must have known the camera would pick that up. as in make sure you hand is in the right place and we are the right way around to pick it up………..I don’t have time today i’m helping our middle son and DIL set up their garden for the christening of there son Tmz ……..slayders.

      1. The gossip is that they have been at it for years -= AND that he has at last one other little friend…

        Deliberately posed? To commit political suicide? Er….

        1. His job is done, much needs to be swept under the carpet of his tenure, perhaps?

          1. It’ll be uncovered once he’s gone and he’ll be the fall guy. How are the mighty…………etc.

          2. Definitely from the beginning this whole situation didn’t feel right to me. None of it.
            I had second letter today from UCH, to register on line so I can answer questions about my covid experiences they can send me a testing kit. I think it’s something to do with the fact I suffered with bouts of Afib after both jabs. I went to the local Stevenage A&E on the 10 of April with the problems. latterly had a scan. And my appointment, in the form of a phone call with the cardiology department is on the 4th of August !! That’s not recognised procedure.
            I have to go now, son is here to load tables and chairs.

        2. As i have often said everything the political classes come into contact with they F*ck ……up.
          And Cummings got in the neck for driving his family to County Durham.
          Borros says this recent matter is now closed.
          What a sickening and down right disgusting pile of effluent these people actually are.

          1. Boris may say in his opinion the matter is closed but the long suffering public won’t forget.

        3. I have never had the frame of mind to trust any one in politics Bill.
          None of them reach such a powerful position having been nice to anyone.

  53. I have just arrived back from a lovely walk with the dogs , the thirteen year old is now slowing down , but still enjoys his walk and is stone deaf , and my eight year old is a racing snake and into everything , one just sees a glistening gold streak flash past , the heathland I visited was quiet and no ne around that I could hear and see.

    I was on my own, Moh is playing golf , as I wandered amongst the furze bushes and heather and grass and little areas of birch woodland . I heard a voice shout to me ,” please don’t be fearful, I am going to pass by you now.”

    I turned around to say good morning and okay, and would you believe a very naked middle aged man with a rucksack passed me , he was striding out purposefully and strongly … and I have to say , in my eyes he was absolutely perfect , fit and well proportioned , and he had an Irish accent ..

    Not a horrible sight , and I thought just my luck to cheer me up because no one on here let alone Moh will believe me .

    The dogs ran up to him and I called them in , the deaf one tends to roll on his back for his tummy to be tickled , and the younger one can be very frisky.

    The nudist beach down at Studland is shockingly full of horrors , and woe betide getting caught up there when you are walking along Shell bay , but this experience was different , and I felt happy and not in the least shocked or critical of the naked walker .

    Just so glad that Moh wasn’t with me !

      1. No he had the figure of a Greek statue .. I was so surprised by my reaction .

        I must be getting old , to be so delighted and tickled pink.

        Not a flasher type , just someone enjoying the privacy of a beautiful heath and solitude .

    3. Afternoon Belle. There is actually a branch of the hiking fraternity who do it naked!

      1. Hello Minty,

        I suspect he was one of them then , and good luck to them all .

        I am not prudish, but I know Moh would have said something sarccy .

        1. He’s out at the moment Horace. My personal view is to regard it as a harmless eccentricity but then I usually wore Helly Hansen underwear, breeches and two sweaters with Gore-Tex waterproofs and that was on a good day!

        2. He’s out at the moment Horace. My personal view is to regard it as a harmless eccentricity but then I usually wore Helly Hansen underwear, breeches and two sweaters with Gore-Tex waterproofs and that was on a good day!

    4. Gracious me, Belle! What an exciting life you lead! I’m seriously considering nipping off to the woods…

  54. No Lockdowns at the Tour de France. The crowds are back and in good numbers too.

  55. The hypocrisy of Matt Cockblock. Spiked 26 June 2021.

    What does grate, though, is the hypocrisy. The staggering hypocrisy. More than any other minister, Hancock is responsible for the laws and guidance that have kept us all apart over the past 15 months. Lockdown regulations have been made and unmade, without proper parliamentary scrutiny, at the strike of his pen. Every bit of guidance was pushed by him and his department.

    That said, I don’t think he should be sacked for this. I think he should be sacked for presiding over the carnage in care homes, when Department of Health guidelines meant patients were sent out of hospitals and into care settings without testing them first, seeding outbreaks among the most vulnerable in society. I think he should be sacked for being among the most authoritarian ministers during this pandemic, which really is a crowded field – something we glimpsed in February when he announced a new 10-year prison sentence for lying on your travel form.

    Boris may have given this piece of rubbish the all clear and I wouldn’t underestimate his ability to just keep buggering on but can he really do that? Every piece of legislation, every time he has to stand up in Parliament and say, do this or that, the thought will be. “This is that Dickhead who lied to us last time. Why should we believe him now?” His position looks untenable to me but let us see.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/25/the-hypocrisy-of-matt-cockblock/

    1. To quote from your post:

      “……. I wouldn’t underestimate his ability to just keep buggering on.”

      Well, he might make a better fist of buggery than he has made of heterosexual fornication!

    2. Araminta, it would appear that the UK has entered a period where politicians of the stripe of Hancock and Johnson have become the Untouchables: only this time the Untouchables are the BAD guys.

  56. I am reading Orwell at the moment and i am reminded of one of his quotes.

    He wrote that the members of the Aesthetic Movement between the wars ‘spent on sodomy what they got by sponging’.

    :@)

      1. A dreadful thought but now appears to be true with all this banning of everything. And shouts of white privilege and cultural appropriation.

        Just a joke to cheer you.

        Sir Laurence Olivier’s extravagantly ethnic performance as Othello was known for short in the theatrical world as ‘Hello, Golly’. :@)

      2. Orwell grasped intuitively but with astonishing precision the importance to a totalitarian regime of control over the past. But I said that his conclusion in Nineteen Eighty-Four was nonetheless mistaken: Winston Smith could not be made to love Big Brother, only to pretend that he did. I said that in 1988 I had witnessed a hundred thousand people singing the Latvian national anthem for the first time in nearly half a century, despite its previous total proscription, despite the years of terror, deportation, murder, collectivisation, indoctrination, untruth and destruction. This had convinced me that the annihilation of the human spirit was not possible.

        Theodore Dalrymple. The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World.

        We must hope that Dalrymple is right!

        1. Winston Churchill was immensely careful to distinguish between his admiration for the people of Russia, and his disdain for the Soviet regime.

        2. The Singer Not The Song – 1961 film with Dirk Bogarde and John Mills.

          I was about 14 or 15 and at an impressionable age when this film came out and I was duly impressed.

          Mills played a priest; Bogarde played a very brutal villain. Mills was determined to win Bogarde’s very black soul. Bogarde develops a great respect for the priest at a personal level – but in the end he rejects his Christian message – ergo it is the Singer (Mills) and not The Song (The Christian message.)

          Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) has a very different conclusion. James Cagney is a murdering gangster who exercises a charismatic power and influence over the street boys who see him as a hero. The priest, played by Pat O Brian persuades him to behave like a snivelling coward and scream and whimper as he is dragged to the electric chair so that the boys lose their respect for him and live better lives as a result!

          1. Afternoon Richard. I watched the Singer not the Song only last week on TPTV having read the book some fifty years ago!

          2. I remember the Singer not the Song very well.

            Most girls had huge crushes on Dirk Bogarde..he used to be able to play men with a dark side very well.

      1. 334805+ up ticks,
        Afternoon TB,
        It is now established, how was it ever allowed to start, and why was it NOT stopped via the polling booth ?

    2. If it follows form Oggy there will be an attack on the marchers at the end of the day!

      1. 334805+ up ticks,
        Evening Bob,
        A motley crew if ever, are they real policemen? as for the
        Anti decency & common sense brigade they are suitable material for the likes of the cover up merchants of rotherham council revealed by the Jay report.

  58. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e2aba9a9743cf5e21525b7208418e82424d9ead3df6ddaca7a701616a08e6b8c.png Here is an ever-increasing tragic consequence of having to share a planet with the most stupid organism that ever evolved. Randomly discarded disgusting face-nappies (which are as effective at stopping someone breathing-in a virus as a tennis court is at stopping a bullet) will soon match randomly discarded plastic detritus as a means of wantonly killing other species.

    1. Everywhere you go these disgusting things are lying on the pavement. or hanging in the bushes.

      1. Matt “The Vaccinator” Hancock doesn’t want an arm full of blood, he wants the whole 8+ pints.

        1. Afternoon Korky – I am myself fully vaccinated, I see him more as an unsuccessful opportunist rather than a dedicated vaccinator or terminator & going by his personal behavior vis a vis the women in his life then he is more of a Sperminator !

    2. Does that mean that any crimes that I [hypothetically] might have committed in the past are now of no interest to the police, or does that just apply to the new elite??

      1. And that murder I did in 2020 when I was pissed off with some wazzock who shouted at me for not wearing a mask…

        Phew – what a relief. It’ been hanging (geddit) over me…{:¬))

      2. Are you a sleazy government minister that’s given billions in bent contracts to your fuck-toy’s relatives??
        You’re safe…….
        Oh what you’re just a prole (like me)??
        That’ll be ten years of licence free tv at one of one of Her Majesty’s pleasure houses

        1. Let’s be fair to the Met. They have their work cut out harassing elderly persons having the utmost temerity to sit on a park bench. They also ran out of safe spaces to hide when the Tartan Army invaded.

  61. So now we know,watching GB News and the streamer at the bottom of the screen with important stories makes NO mention of the massive Freedom March
    Just another bunch of useless establishment cockwombles,controlled opposition
    Edit
    Andrew Neil on the Wuhan Lab fiasco
    “We finally had journalists doing their jobs”
    Irony died today at1540…………

    3. I’m prepared to give the benefit of the doubt here; I’m not sure it is news until it’s over, unless there are problems.

      I didn’t see it, but what were the stories on the “streamer”

      Once it’s over then report on it.

    4. I was there.. Thousands and thousands of people. Link to pics above.
      The nation is finding out in spite of the news blackout.

  63. I am off.

    Soldier neighbour coming round for a drink. She has a dog which sits in her French window that looks onto our drive.

    Pickles sits outside the window and stares at the dog! Drives dog mad! One can somehow tell that Picks thinks it is very funny!!

    Then Blazing Saddles to watch – then sleep, dreaming how I’ll shake up the NHS when I am Secertery of State (next week – “shock appointment”…)

    A demain.

    1. A cat belonging to my neighbour takes great delight in taunting Dolly.
      Running over the conservatory roof and such like, pausing and then running back. Then sits and licks itself pretending not to know what all the noise is about.

      Have a pleasant evening.

    1. I hope all the deaths he is responsible for come back to haunt him. I hope his marriage is in tatters and that his wife screws him for every penny. And that any children he has hate him. I also hope he is a Catholic and can repent his Sins and lead a productive life. Though i think that highly unlikely because once you have sold your soul to the Devil there is no redemption.

      Good riddance.

      1. Once you have sold your sole to the devil you are qualified to become either the Prime Minister of the UK, President of France or President of the USA !

      2. My impression of Hancock has been that he has no moral compass and is a pathological liar. Events over the last two days merely confirm that impression. He should never be allowed to get his hands on authority again.
        Sadly, I do not think that he will be haunted by all those deaths. They are but collateral damage on the road to what he thinks is the manner in which the little people should be controlled. A devotee of Schwab, Soros and Gates cannot, in my opinion, be a good person.

      3. “Sold his soul to the devil” is the perfect phrase to describe Hancock. I think that is why so many people mistrust him. He has a sort of innocent joy in wrong-doing.

      4. You can bet your life he’s already got another well paid job lined up Phil. These swines are like cats, they always fall on their feet

  67. Taken from a book i am reading at the mo’.

    Some years ago, Private Eye published a story about a businessman named Mr Arkell.

    It brought a solicitor’s letter in the usual loftily threatening form… ‘our client takes a grave view of this defamatory statement…requires a retraction to be printed prominently in your next issue…our attitude to damages and costs will be governed by the nature of your reply.

    Private Eye’s editor replied: ‘Dear sirs, we thank you for your letter on behalf of Mr Arkell. We note that your attitude to damages and costs will be governed by the nature of our reply, and should be interested to know what that attitude will be on discovering that the nature of our reply is as follows – Fuck off’.

    :@)

    1. It was Nora Beloff who sued the Eye. In was during the course of the litigation that the Eye (via its lawyers) made that reply.

      Just saying. I was there at the time.

    1. You have beaten me to it, LD !

      It was announced on GB News at 18.26 …

      ‘Twas inevitable.

      1. Incompetent doesn’t enter the equation, the people deserve someone who has their concerns at the centre of his/her dealings. Should Gove or the arch-jabber Zahawi get the sinecure then we are still on the Titanic and heading for the iceberg.

        1. Unfortunately the Conservative party of 2021 is just a pale impersonation of the party it was under Thatcher. The poison of the Globalist Elites has done its work well & the chance of another Thatcher, Churchill or Disraeli emerging from its ranks is less than Zero.

    3. Usual vomit inducing crap in the letter of resignation and the reply from Hancock’s co-philanderer, Johnson. Good riddance to an awful person, I cannot bring myself to write human being as I do not think someone of Hancock’s stripe deserves to be included with the very many decent human beings who inhabit the Third Rock from the Sun.

  69. Good article … apols if I repeat:

    Matt Hancock voted to invade our privacy, yet now he asks that his be respected
    Many people will feeling aggrieved at behaviour of Health Secretary, who has played major part in criminalising vast tracts of everyday life

    FRASER NELSON
    25 June 2021 • 9:39pm
    Fraser Nelson
    Matt Hancock
    Matt Hancock is the face of the Government’s deeply personal advice – often delivered as if from a pulpit CREDIT: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe

    Grant Shapps had doubtless intended to help Matt Hancock, but the defence he offered on Friday made a bad situation worse. The Health Secretary had been filmed in a clinch with one of his advisers, and the pictures had been published in a national newspaper. “He’s been doing a terrific job,” Mr Shapps said. “It’s a matter for him and personal relationships are outside of my remit.”

    The problem is that Mr Hancock and Mr Shapps both voted to put everyone’s personal relationships very much in their remit, legislating for the most intimate aspects of our lives. They did away with the idea that, in a free society, you ought to be able to see and hug who you like. Mr Hancock was one of a tiny number of ministers who decided that self-isolation rules ought to be a matter for the police, not left as a matter of guidance and common sense. Under his emergency laws, personal lives were criminalised.

    Mr Hancock has always been one of the most emphatic for the rules. In internal government debates, he has invariably pushed for the toughest restrictions and wanted 10-year jail sentences as a penalty for trying to dodge draconian quarantine rules. “I make no apologies for the strength of these measures,” he said: they’d target a “minority who don’t want to follow the rules.” Who, presumably, he thinks, deserve everything coming their way. When two women were fined by police for walking together, Mr Hancock was unforgiving. “Every time you try to flex the rules,’ he said, “that could be fatal”.

    HYPOCRITE!

    Like Neil Ferguson’s tryst with his lover last year and Dominic Cummings’ notorious road trip to Barnard Castle, the Hancock imbroglio will be a bookmark in the Covid-19 story. The first two scandals were broadly forgiven after the vaccine success: a great many mistakes made last year, by every country in the world. But the vaccination programmes were supposed to pave the way back to normality. Things are safe, which is why ministers are acting normally. But the public is not (yet) allowed to carry on as before. Politically, it’s a sensitive mix.

    At the start of the pandemic, ministers were astonished how closely people followed the rules. The first lockdown was delayed, in part, because it was argued that Britons would tire of restrictions after a few weeks. It might not have taken long for “lockdown fatigue” to overcome those making the rules, but the public went through months of sacrifice – even if studies suggested that stay-at-home diktats were far more than was needed to force back the virus. The bans on intimacy, even guidance on hugging: very little of that was based on science.

    Mr Hancock became the face of this deeply personal advice – often delivered as if from a pulpit. “Don’t kill your gran by catching coronavirus and then passing it on,” he warned us. Intimacy, he later opined, was “okay in an established relationship” but, otherwise, not allowed.

    This is the irony in his request on Friday for “privacy for my family on this personal matter” now. There is no doubt his family deserves it. But a great many other families would have been grateful for more privacy over the last 15 months. Instead, the Tory Government decided to legislate for what people do in their own homes. And in so doing, set up a system where people came to worry that they’d be reported to the police – perhaps by their neighbours – if they stretched the rules by inviting children over to play in their back gardens. Greater Manchester Police issued a statement boasting that they had raided a family home to break up a child’s birthday party.

    Sweden managed to fight back two Covid waves while respecting privacy and civil liberty. There are bans on mass gatherings, and a rule of eight for public places. But no rules would apply inside anyone’s property, where they had sovereignty. Government would not come through your front door: in Sweden, your home is your castle. It wasn’t so long ago when this respect for privacy summed up civic life in Britain.

    When Mr Hancock started issuing advice on where we should hug (embracing outside, he said, was better than inside) alarm bells ought to have been ringing in Number 10. It was a sign that the Government machine had gone way out of control, losing any sense of its remit or boundaries. Number 10 should have stepped in, and perhaps asked for a study on the efficacy of the intrusions or work of Project Fear: the blood-curdling posters showing Covid victims on their deathbeds. If there was no proof that the campaign was making a difference, they could have been told to change tack.

    The Prime Minister is itching for normal life to resume, city life in particular. He has told friends that he’s encouraged that most people are now at their normal place of work and wants employers to get their office staff back up and running. But the problem here is rather obvious: it’s his Government that is telling people to “work from home if you can”. It’s his Government that has declined to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the vaccine success.

    On Friday, he was keen to forgive: Mr Hancock apologised for breaking the rules in his embrace and Number 10 said it accepted his apology. But was the apology really owed to Number 10? There are a great many people who will be feeling aggrieved by the Health Secretary’s behaviour asking whether, even now, he has lazily kept emergency rules in place long after the emergency has passed. And has, by his failure to update the rules, ended up criminalising vast tracts of everyday life.

    A dangerous sense of drift is starting to emerge from the Government, a lack of awareness about what it is trying to do. Is the goal to tame Covid so it no longer threatens to overwhelm the NHS? If so, then that has been met – thanks to the vaccines. The delta variant is so far accounting for barely one per cent of NHS beds. There is no need to fear (or quarantine) those arriving from the amber list countries, so travel rules ought to fall in line with rules at home. But even Cabinet members have no idea what the goal now is.

    The danger is that a void now emerges, and is filled by another narrative. Perhaps accusations of hypocrisy: plenty other ministers have been behaving in ways others are not allowed to. Michael Gove, it emerges, is on a VIP scheme where he doesn’t have to self-isolate if he’s pinged by Test and Trace. We may now start to hear about Tory sleaze: there are growing questions about how many people close to Mr Hancock seem to win NHS contracts.

    The Hancock story is embarrassing, not devastating. But unless the Prime Minister can supplant this unfortunate affair with his own story – about how he’s going to use the vaccine success to deal with the web of Covid regulations that are no longer needed – then the affair may come to symbolise a government that is losing control.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/25/matt-hancocks-unfortunate-affair-could-come-symbolise-government/

    1. In his statement, the little sh1t never apologised to, nor even mentioned his wife and children! What a creep!

      2. He reminds me of the most unpleasant type of prefect we used to have at my old school (RGS, N’cle). I reckon there’s quite a mood (judging by my guidance-abiding daughter’s ANGER) to hang him from a lamppost.

          1. Damn! A deceased choir member’s home was being cleared today. There was some debate about the piano, which may at one time belonged to the church. Since it was in poor condition, and we have a half decent grand anyway, the unanimous decision was to junk it. I should have saved the wire…

          3. True, but pianos, if not tuned regularly, can be a nightmare / impossible to restore to good voice. I just feel that at least the wire could have been saved, and introduced to a few lampposts…

        2. You were RGS? So was my Dad, and my sister and I were Central High (the brown jobs!)

      3. Supposedly he left his wife last night. My wife is eagerly waiting for news on his paramour’s marriage.

    2. Not forgetting the day when Moh and I were stopped by the police last year , springtime because we took the dogs 5 miles up the road in the car , out of our village so they could have a jolly good gallop at a place called Five Mary’s. as we were coming home , a NON local policecar with sirens stopped us on a lane and asked us what we were doing , I said we were locals , and the said we should not leave the village apart from shopping .

      We were told if we were seen doing that again we would be fined heavily .. and were let off with a flea in our ear.!

  71. Welsh kneeling football team beaten in the Euros and are out of the competition.

    Are there many ‘kneelers’ left in the tournament?

    2. It’s given him the perfect opportunity to bow out without having to answer for his far greater crimes. Well timed disclosure.

      3. You mean the media allegations that he awarded various contracts to Roberto Coladangelo’s company?

  75. WTF is Stig Abell going on about? Is Abell being deliberately obtuse or is he a hamper short of a picnic? Hancock has been a disaster, authoritarian, rumours of dubious dealing re PPE, at best incompetent when moving the infected aged people into care and then lying to cover his actions etc. If the guy couldn’t cope because the situation was difficult then he should have been removed before more harm was done. Sadly, the indolent incompetent in No 10 kept Hancock in place. One doesn’t have to be a genius to understand why.

    https://twitter.com/AllisonPearson/status/1408844564782358528

      1. He’s a journalist/presenter on Times radio! Quite a surprise to read that tweet!

        1. My cynical mind says “must be a cheater unable to condemn a fellow cheater”
          But I may be maligning him.

          1. Would you be less cynical if I told you he was editor of the Times Literary Supplement?!🙄

      2. I think he thinks he is/was a journalist. He was a regular on Sky News’s newspaper review some years ago.

      3. He wrote a book entitled “How Britain Really Works” – but that title only resonates if you are a rabid lefty remainer.

        1. Ah, a sort of torque wrench designed to tighten nuts to get the right result…..

  77. Latest Breaking News – Boris appoints Bill Gates as health secretary, he says he wants to cut out the middleman.

  78. It’s quite amazing how the MSM are after Handycock’s blood now but didn’t say a dickie bird when he was in office.
    They are no better than him.

  79. Crikey – I see from the ever-helpful Daily Mail that Hancock has left his wife too. What a car crash.
    Perhaps it’s not surprise but still pretty hideous, especially for the children.
    Why can’t people behave themselves like decent adults?

    1. Because, generally, MPs are not decent adults. More like decent adulterers.

      1. Squalid Javid – totally underwhelming! Didn’t he have problems as Chancellor?

        1. His problem if I remember rightly was not jumping high enough when Dominic Cummings shouted Jump.

    2. Another slimeball. I don’t think Javid is quite as bad as Hancock, but I’ve no doubt that the Devil will be opening negotiations on his soul as we speak.

        1. I didn’t get the impression that Javid is a nutjob EU fanatic? I can forgive him worrying about lost opportunities for business. It’s the utter fanatical lust of people like Ken Clarke to subsume British identity into the Brussels monolith that I loathe.

          I think we ought to give Javid a chance as Health Secretary. Poor chap’s just been handed the poison chalice, the least he deserves is a respectful few seconds of silence before he drinks from it.

          3. If Javid immediately stops mass experimental ‘vaccinations’ and lifts all lockdown measures he will get my vote. Then I woke up.

          4. I want compulsory vaccination for care staff stopped. I have to decide to willingly give up work or get an experimental jab i don’t want, twice, just to keep my job.

        2. Johnson’s government have lost more than a decade for British business in just over a year.

          I hoped we had seen the last of this evil prick but they all have something on Johnson so return on the merry go round.

      2. He’s worse. He’s a total bean counter. He hasn’t been any good in any position.

        1. I was talking about as a human being rather than as a minister. But I expect you are right.

  81. Oh frabjous day! That lying, two-faced, narcissistic hand-job has resigned! I don’t hate many people, it is a negative emotion, but in his case I will make an exception. He positively revelled in the power he had over millions of people’s lives.

    I only hope that this fall from grace is the start of investigations into his appalling conduct. Forcing the care homes to take in untested Covid patients condemned thousands of “grannies” (and grandpas) to lonely deaths. Handing out contracts to his mates, the huge waste of public money on test and trace, allowing out of date figures to be used to bounce us into further lockdowns…. Snogging his mistress is the least of his crimes.

    I am only sorry that he was given the dignity of resigning. Johnson badly misjudged the public mood if he thought that a simple apology would have allowed him to draw a line under this sordid episode. He should have sacked him like a leader, rather than allowing the weasel to scurry away on his own terms.

    1. Yes, I fear he will never be held to account for his actions, and there will not even be an investigation into those amazing coincidences that saw people close to him getting financial benefits resulting from government policy.

    2. Yes, I fear he will never be held to account for his actions, and there will not even be an investigation into those amazing coincidences that saw people close to him getting financial benefits resulting from government policy.

      1. I think Johnson would have been better to take the initiative and sack him, especially as he has now gone anyway. We all know he is a philanderer himself, but having a Health Secretary break the rules that he imposed on the rest of us is not a good look. Hancock even said that Neil Ferguson should resign!

        How much of a lying hypocrite do you need to be to get the sack from Boris Johnson’s government?

        1. “Hancock even said that Neil Ferguson should resign!”

          That is the nub of Hancock’s hypocrisy, JK …

    6. In this past year, I have watched a video of a friend’s funeral and seen her lost, bewildered and masked husband being given a furtive hug by his masked son; I have seen another friend, just after her husband’s dementia diagnosis, sitting round a garden table with her family spaced at safe distances making strained conversation; I have watched my frustrated grandchildren, drifting through a wasted year – angry and unmotivated; I’ve visited elderly chum in a care home where she is surrounded by (to her) masked, plastic swathed zombies; when out walking Spartie, I’ve had long conversations with a depressed male nurse whose job at Stansted has been in abeyance for over a year.
      And all because of this bloody government and Chief Hypocrite HandsonCock.

      1. Those are all terrible stories Anne, sadly just a snapshot of the hell that Hancock and the rest were very pleased to put us all through.

        He has simply spat in the face of everyone who made such sacrifices in this last year. People didn’t get to hold the hold the hand of their dying relatives in their last moments FFS!

        Hancock should be in prison, along with the rest of the this despicable government.

      3. Molly died on 27 June 2020, the day after her 91st birthday. She lived in Puttenham from the age of four. She was Brown Owl to the Brownies, involved in everything the village had to offer. She sang in the church choir for nigh on 80 years (in fact, she proudly had a framed certificate from the Royal School of Church Music, marking seventy years of service.

        Her funeral last year was a pretty miserable affair, being limited to 15 mourners, and no singing. Today, we hosted her memorial service – planned in the expectation of “Freedom Day” on 21 June. It was assumed that most of the village would turn out.

        Thanks to our BPAPM (©BT), the service went ahead; maximum 30 in church, though we set up an ‘outside broadcast’ for those in the churchyard. Singing still banned, so all the music was recorded. Same at yesterday’s wedding. Covid (or, more accurately, Hancock) has turned me from an organist to a DJ. I have absolutely no confidence that things will change on 19 July.

      4. One of my friends was lucky enough to be included in the number of funeral attendees for a mutual friend (I didn’t make the cut). There were surreptitious hugs there. I said it was long past time we hugged (they’ve all had their jabs) and got on with life; we need a mass protest. #I’m done.

  82. “Those of us who make these rules have got to stick by them, and that’s why I’ve got to resign.”
    Of course, Handycock, you’d have believed the same thing if you hadn’t been caught.

  83. An adulterer replaced by a slammer.

    I’m like, OMG, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

    1. We’ve been under the guillotine with our knitting for at least five minutes – see below!

  88. Cheerful little piece in the local paper https://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/19400964.people-trapped-m5-without-food-water-six-hours-forced-pee-cups/?ref=ebmpn about a load of people stuck on the smart section of the M5 for six hours to scoop up the remains of what a lorry hit on what was once the hard shoulder. They had to close the other side as well to get emergency vehicles on site, since the CCTV could not clear a way for them.

    In true blitz spirit, an ice cream van caught up in it did a roaring trade in 99s, and someone had taken a gorgeous picture of their golden labrador for the smart users to pat virtually on their mobiles. Stories of peeing in a cup because they weren’t allowed over the barriers put up to stop broken down vehicles getting to safety.

    1. I get fed up of the one-sided reporting of smart motorways.

      I was once stuck for 9 hours after an accident on a motorway with a hard shoulder. Like this one, it was in summer. It was like a mass picnic, with food sharing, football and children’s games. My kids were sad when we got away.

      Yes, smart motorways are dangerous but are less likely to have an accident and push fewer cars onto more dangerous non-motorway roads. People are killed on hard shoulders. Few dual carriageways have refuges let alone hard shoulders. Returning my local stretch to a hard shoulder would be a disastrous return to delays, accidents and the roads near me being rat runs threatening kids on the way to school.

    2. Hancock has gone because of his decisions regarding the emptying of hospitals and consigning ‘bed blockers’ to care homes where their demise was hastened by the use of the anaesthetic drug Midazolam (extra supplies or ‘packets’ of which were organised and authorised by Hancock).

      Hancock has presided over a government campaign akin to the Liverpool Pathway in respect of our elderly. The man remains a sociopathic murderer.

      I am quite sure that his own much touted personal ‘jabs’ were staged and comprised saline solution and that he knows full well that the ‘vaccines’ will
      kill more people than they save.

      1. It’s ridiculous to think care homes are deliberately offing people in their care. You earn nothing from an empty bed, and the staff still have to be paid.

        1. If it’s true that extra supplies of Midazolam were ordered, was it used? if so where? what was the policy change that made this necessary, and who prescribed and dosed it?
          Would be interested to hear any opinions you have on these questions.

    1. Scrap the poof flag. Stop gimmigration. Scrap child benefit so we’re not out bred by Muslims.

      That’s a start.

      2. Google,,,,Too Many White Christian Faces in Britain……D,Cameron…..
        That’ll tell you what they are up to…..

    1. I agree with Gareth. His dad was mobbed by admirers in Oxford Street on the march today. At first I wondered why we’d ground to a halt then I saw who was in the middle of the crowd!

  94. GB News reporting on a statement Dominic Cummings has given belittling Sajid Javid and Hancock and suggesting it may be time for a regime change. I can’t disagree with that

    1. I think we must have the most non-British cabinet in history.

      Now if they’d only start doing their jobs instead of fronting for the incompetence, moronic failure’s of their department’s treachery we might be getting somewhere.

  96. Evening, all. I see Hand on cock has gone – good riddance. Meanwhile here’s Oscar:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fb8bef2e2f445cf12 https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/73894d1d5e33596fe51569d2234073e9ab953a67a66c42e98991859bed2738e8.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4df5215ae01cbefd8392cd80a6265dcce56de459fa4c8a08c2e309e7cf7e2c1a.jpg eb505a13694bf5c46dfa320d958c7c4ce1288082686c53a.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ea95b99c8862ba5201a082f87c0a5f26f02e474a5a07ffc62c805a1ad07ec6a7.jpg

    And a happy Armed Forces Day:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c9ec462a5f772a12eb8723909c983d2a1fa245a3e521df7a8d9f13ec97a78b3e.jpg

      1. Alpha terrierist! 🙂 He does seem happier and brighter of late. The medicine is working, hopefully.

          1. He’s got to have another blood test to check his pancreatic enzyme levels tomorrow or Tuesday. Fingers crossed they will be within limits.

      1. That’s what the nurses said about him at the vet’s – he refused to have the door of his crate closed (barked the place down), but when it was left open, he just sat there, monarch of all he surveyed, they said!

    3. He’s a lovely dog, he’s interested in something going on there, he’s very alert!

      1. He’s contemplating whether to bark at next doors’ dogs (who are noisy little s0ds, both sides). He has a weird bark; grrrrrrrrr uff! uff!

          1. I know. Next doors’ dogs (three Shi Tzus and a Sha Pei) can yap for England (and Wales).

        2. Sounds about right for a wire haired fox terrier, similar to the border terrier’s bark.

        3. Sounds about right for a wire haired fox terrier, similar to the border terrier’s bark.

      1. Really good to know, Connors, that all proceeds as planned. Bluddy good luck to the both of you.

        1. Thank you, John. I hope in time he will become a wonderful dog. It will need time, perseverance, consistency and effort, but I’m sure it will be worth it. After all, he’s nearly 12 and I get the impression he’s ruled the roost before. It was easier with Charlie because he was only 4 months old when I got him (with similar alpha male terrierist attitudes).

    6. He looks very at home, Conway! What a wonderful alert face! I know it’s probably been said, but you were clearly meant for each other and you’ll have happy times together!

      1. He is well on his way to feeling at home, I think. It will be three weeks tomorrow (at 17.30). Today he wanted me to play tug with him and let me pick up the tug toy without trying to take my fingers off! That’s definitely progress 🙂

      1. Thank you, lacoste. I think it’s finally beginning to sink in that he now has a home for life. He just has to learn the new rules, but we’re getting there. He is seeking affection more often and for longer periods.

        1. It’s interesting that the moment he was at the vet’s among people he didn’t know, he started imposing his will and being the boss again!
          You clearly have great Head Dog status in his mind!

          PS Lovely garden….do you paint it?

          1. Thank you. I have in the past, but I don’t seem to find the time to get down the studio these days (it’s the wooden building with a canvas on the side where Oscar is investigating the herb/medicinal garden). I have worked hard since I got him to make myself the alpha dog in the pack. I keep telling him he doesn’t need to worry now about making decisions; I decide everything! I am not entirely sure he’s convinced yet 🙂

        2. It’s interesting that the moment he was at the vet’s among people he didn’t know, he started imposing his will and being the boss again!
          You clearly have great Head Dog status in his mind!

          PS Lovely garden….do you paint it?

    8. Oscar is so handsome , he almost looks as if he could have a good conversation with you.

      So alert and knowing , Just delighted he found a home with you x

      1. Thanks, Maggie. I still miss Charlie terribly, but Oscar makes it easier to cope with.

    9. I am thoroughly jealous of your beautiful garden.

      I hope Oscar’s a happy chappie.

      1. Thank you, wibbles. I hope he’s beginning to realise he’s fallen on his paws.

  97. On Guido Fawkes a number of correspondents have pointed out that Hancock only resigned once he discovered what will be in the Sunday Sun.

    1. Yes, I had heard that The Sun had more on Hancock to reveal. I feel that all this was, and is, a theatre contrived to sweep his ‘relationship’ with Midazolam under the carpet.

        1. But now he isn’t minister any more, it’s much easier to let it just wash into history – and NOBODY will ever answer for the wickedness, as usual!

          1. Cummings for one will make sure it all comes out. There will be others, too, to make sure he’s not let off lightly.

    1. Wouldn’t have been appointed if he wasn’t, I suppose. Thanks for the evidence, Polly!

      1. ”Hello Boris, It’s your old friend, George, here…….

        I’d like Sajid Javid to………… ”

    1. Pah, he’ll just get a slap on the wrist. Not the jail sentence for corruption that he may deserve.

    3. The BBC isn’t interested in the British – especially not those Britons. Those people are not obeying the state.

  101. Final indignity of the brave wife who stood by him for 15 years: Callous Matt Hancock dumped university sweetheart on Thursday night after racing home after learning his affair would be finally exposed
    Matt Hancock told his wife he would be leaving her after learning of CCTV video
    Images and footage showed him kissing aide Gina Coladangelo, 43, last month
    Martha Hancock reportedly had no clue about affair until being told by husband
    Break-up came to light after Mr Hancock handed in his resignation this evening

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9728751/Callous-Matt-Hancock-dumped-wife-Thursday-learning-affair-finally-exposed.html?ito=push-notification&ci=267993&si=26738248&ai=9728751

    1. The poor woman and the children are only 14, 13 and 8! What a horrible man!

    3. Yes indeed. One wonders what she was told on Thursday.
      “Look darling, unfortunately some little sh*t has leaked details of an affair I’ve been having to the press…Boris and I have decided to wait and see what happens. If I manage to hang on in my job, we can salvage our marriage, but if I get sacked or have to resign, I’m leaving you.”

      I hope it’s some comfort to Martha Hancock that everyone in the country thinks her husband is lower than a snake’s belly too.

    1. Not having a TV I’ve no noticed, but as a chum pointed out – it’s the desperate pandering to a minority to feel better about themselves.

      It’s wrong. Nothing more than segregation. Yet again, the Left force back equality decades. When will we get our Rosa Parks moment?

    1. It really is time France was given a kicking.

      We must stop this nonsense and return any criminal invader that’s here.

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