734 thoughts on “Saturday 26 October: Brexit negotiators on both sides have backed themselves into a corner”

          1. The desired result?
            Here is an argument that a modern form of feudalism has been planned and is being implemented.
            Moves are being formulated to:

            1. Restrict travel – banning diesel is a start and replacing it with short range very expensive electric transport without the infrastructure to support the change

            2. Control the availability of power for essential living e.g. Smart meters and reducing generation capacity. In addition banning the installation of gas boilers and cookers in new homes

            3. Control what food will be available to the masses – XR’s sudden emergence and demands that meat be banned and people become vegetarians.

            All the above being forced through under the guise of saving the Planet from the people.

            4. Mass immigration to create unrest and destroy stable societies

            “It’s control Jim, but not as we’ve known it for centuries.”

            The Establishment will, along with being able to buy houses, farms, property and yachts, be cosy and warm, travel wherever and whenever they desire and eat whatever they fancy, including the finest cuts of meat.
            To enforce this change the Barons are building their Army and, as we are seeing in Paris and Catalonia, their forces of oppression are honing their skills.

            Far fetched? Maybe. Something is happening and it isn’t looking good for the masses.

          2. “To enforce this change the Barons are building their Army and, as we are seeing in Paris and Catalonia, their forces of oppression are honing their skills.”

            Or preventing rioting….

          4. Dear Korky,

            You haven’t pointed out that smart meters can be switched off by the government.

            Objectors to the NWO could very easily have their electricity switched off.

            Be careful what you say and write!

          5. janetjH, perhaps I wasn’t crystal clear in what I wrote but I thought the idea of all manner of controls being available was clear in my comment: I was, after all, putting forward an argument that what appears to be happening is a modern form of feudalism. Feudalism was control of the masses by the powerful few and stifled freedom and free thought. I see all of that happening right now: a classic example being the DCC of Cheshire demanding that we control our use of pronouns, for goodness sake.

          6. If HMG wants to close down the electricity grid, it doesn’t need to use smart meters to so.

          7. You completely missed the point.

            If you have a smart meter the electricity to your own dwelling can be switched off anytime by the Government.

            That’s why so many people have refused smart meters.

          8. HMG can do that right now if it wants to…it simply sends a person round to cut you off and unless you are prepared to kill or maim that person, you’re disconnected…

          10. Ditto with ID cards – they could easily become the sole means of accessing the necessities of life and then be able to be switched off for those who didn’t subscribe to groupthink.

      2. Thank you Sir. I agree with the analysis of the second letter, but not the conclusion. Has the writer not heard of the Lisbon Treaty? It is imperative we escape the political structure of the EU immediately.

      3. Max’s analysis is spot on re Johnson and the immediate short term rationale behind his “deal” – the great failure of the modern Conservative MP, with a few notable exceptions – Party beats everything, except self.
        As 1642again mentions, the Lisbon Treaty is a clear and present danger and suspicions must be aroused that both May’s and Johnson’s end game is to have such a bad deal that we would demand to rejoin and that rejoining would entail being fully absorbed into the EU with no escape. Give Johnson an overall majority and he will sell us out. Our hopes for the Country rest with the ERG coming round from the euphoria induced knock out of Johnson’s killing of the backstop (much exaggerated as the rest of the WA is a trap), a few Labour patriots and of course, Farage and his Party.

        2. “Give Johnson an overall majority and he will sell us out.”

          Perhaps this rings a bell from the ‘olden days’…

          “The Tories have been indulging in their usual double talk.

          When they go to Brussels they show the greatest enthusiasm for political union.

          When they speak in the House of Commons they are most anxious to aver that there is no commitment whatever to any political union.”

          Labour MP Hugh Gaitskell, October 1962.

      4. Disagree about choosing remain. We don’t have any clout at all. There are more of them than there are of us (in other words, we are on our own).

        1. Can’t cut trees down. You’ll need to find a viable alternative. Potato waffles perhaps?

  4. Good morning from the Saxon daughter of Alfred of Wessex with cleaned axe .

    Cicero said politicians were excreted not born, how right the marble headed Roman
    was. Brèxit was always a game of poker played with the same skill,
    best never let the enemy see you cards, Boris Johnson.

          1. The Saxon Queen has her yellow Dragon flag flying vigorously
            no damage to any Saxon roundhouse that protects it’s inhabitants
            My Lord. I trust Gods county isn’t suffer too much due to last night’s
            storms ? And my general has his horse ready for duties .

          2. Her dragon should be white. If yellow she needs to wash it.
            God’s Own County still very stormy.

          4. Aha ! None here have seen her banner of which the Saxon Queen
            flies beneath. I call it yellow but the correct historical term
            Is the gold Dragon of Wessex – England s last flag and the flag
            of the Anglo Saxons. It was the standard of Alfred of Wessex and
            the flag Harold fought beneath at Hastings as well has his own
            personal standard. Indeed it’s very ancient and dusty my Lord,
            upon it is the soiled stains of many a noble battle in defence of
            this land, it’s grubby stains the gold Dragon wears with honour,
            that honour the Saxon holds in her small hand as she charges the
            enemy. Washing afterwards if she survives. As you do after your
            own military pursuits for this kingdom and in the name God you battle.

          7. Sorry if below was somewhat complex, a more placid
            curtsie and glad you survived last night’s storms my Lord .
            At least you can partake in Intelligent and warm debate here instead 🙂

          8. Its syntax was somewhat fractured for a poor Puritan farmer at such an early juncture. For some reason I was thinking of birthday cards.

          9. Apologies but my lord is used those less noble, bright
            and creative then her in the chambers of the lost of which
            a great Puritan feels a need to save whilst on Christian missions-
            she shall lessen her abilities if he prefers 🙂
            Her fingers were removed with a sharp sword as far as the latter
            Is concerned, they might grow back by Christmas.

          11. ” Angel of the North ” oh dear oh dear * gags * 🙂
            Indeed great Puritans Christians are needed amongst the
            damaged, violent, empty of poetic inspiration or joy
            how can he improve others unless he enters the chambers
            of the damned himself . The Saxon Queen but collect
            her Gold Dragon standard and venture forth elsewhere
            herself as she has her own missions of which are noble
            and for England online 😉

          13. More pity then envy 🙂
            The Saxon Queen has her own league of of soldiers, knights and
            even Vikings who place flowers at her feet and are willing to
            die in battle wearing her colours and beneath her standard
            they loyally stand with her.

          15. He has those poor and desperate for attention souls who
            wash his great military feet with dribble amongst the
            ” Comrades ‘ A great Puritan General deserves much greater respect
            as he stands side by side with a Saxon Queen and his equal.
            She of course does travel far and wide with her Dragon Standard
            and where she goes dust flares up in her wake and she digs
            her flag the flag of ancient England in the dust everywhere and
            Isn’t afraid of anything. She is a warrior Queen and you are her
            her great General, My Lord.

          19. Deleted part….
            * Curtsies deeply my Lord * I with my dragon must visit and upset he that
            blew up parliament way back when. A Saxon Queens duty never ends
            and is as deep as true loyalty that will go to battle and fiery ends
            with others. Where the devil have I left my horse which would
            be your horse if you fell in battle, I would walk on foot knowing my fate .
            There are those who shout and dribble faux platitudes and others who
            are pure of spirit and determined in their loyalty and devotion,
            the Greeks and the Saxon Queen.. The same in spirit .

          20. Well that put a Saxon Queen in her lowly insignificant place beneath the masses
            My Noble Lord .She’ll climb upon her horse and wander into battle
            against her enemies with those words branded with irons across her soul,
            and if she dies she’ll take them with her to the afterlife.

          21. Well I must clearly mug up on my history of Saxon Queens, Lord Cromwell and 1642 because I have avidly read your exchanges this morning whilst not understanding a single word. In my ignorance I just assumed that Ethul was Ron Glum’s girlfriend.

            :-))

          22. A humble Saxon Queen was once likened to a diamond and was beyond
            compare, kind and sweet words from a once poet anyway.

          25. Whoops down-voting TROLL, you missed 1642again and hit the queen but then your lack of logical argument means this is all you can resort to.

            Good morning, Ethel. I see your conversations with 1642again are being monitored by the coward, despite which, we shall all enjoy a good day.

            I shall now butt out, having drawn your attention to this execrable, small-minded piece of garbage.

      1. Good Morning Mr Viking, oh blast I left it in Colchester Castle,
        must return and get it forthwith 😉

          1. You should see the traffic at the NSPCC Book Fair today, Annie. (Good morning, btw.) I managed to find a parking space by going early and returning with several books and a DVD. Now I have the much more onerous task of working out which books and DVDs to give away (or donate to charity for next year’s NSPCC Book Fair) since I am in the middle of decluttering the house and am working on the basis of one in, two (or more) out.

          2. I will go to that tomorrow.
            Lovely home made cakes.
            We are togged up ready to go out to lunch.
            (Yes, yes, I know …. it’s my permanent mental state.)

  5. Morning everyone. Just put the news on to catch the headlines. The BBC has four white presenters with no ethnos! Weird!

    1. There was a report the other day bewailing how few ethnos there were in the BBC and that it was still dominated by “whites”.
      Perhaps this is a false-flag to show that the report was true.

      1. ‘Morning, Anne, and the Ethnos deserve the week-end off, in order to mingle with the masses and demonstrate the population diversity for all to see and admire.

        1. All joking aside, that used to be a problem on the wards.
          Ethnics would throw a sickie, which somehow didn’t stop them nipping up to London, while good old Brits plodded on with reduced staff; particularly on psychogeriatric wards as the bed makers didn’t work at weekends.
          If you were working on a long-stay ward, you waited for the 7.15 phone call, moving junior staff to the geriatric wards.

  6. I saw the burial chamber of a Druid doctor the other week,
    Buried in the traditions not of the Iron Age which is to burn and
    smash everything before burial. It was bizarrely more Roman
    In traditions. Druids believed in magic yet strangely there were
    obvious medical equipment buried with him so therefore their
    belief patterns were more complex then thought and there were
    Greeks who arrived on these islands before the Romans arrived .
    We were also fully civilised and not as we have been educated to
    believe we were before they arrived .

    1. Were there lots of Phama Company Freebies littering the grave so they could be absolutely certain the Druid was a Doctor!

      1. There were medical instruments within the grave,
        likened to that the Greeks used and of which in design
        We still use today. But no there wasn’t any paracetamol
        tablets to confuse them into thinking they were tiny
        Stone Henge thingys 🙂

  10. Morning, Campers: A ConWoman article.

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/woke-coppers-skewered-by-steyn/

    “Woke coppers skewered by Steyn

    October 26, 2019

    “IF Mark Steyn is to be remembered for one quote, it will be the aphoristic ‘In Britain, everything is policed except crime’. Today’s politically-correct Plod constantly cause Steyn to dust down his dictum, and Mark’s maxim made an early reappearance during the latest video edition of Mark’s Mailbox.

    Scolded by Steyn for symbolising the ‘utterly useless British constabulary . . . one of the most contemptible institutions in the Western world’ is Julie Cooke, Deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire and the National Police Chiefs’ Lead for LGBT+. Last week TCW reported how DCC Cooke had used International Pronouns Day – which she emphasised is ‘particularly important to those who are transgender and gender nonconforming’ – to tweet: ‘Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing. It can also be used as a form of abuse for somebody and that just isn’t right.’

    DCC Cooke’s vacuous virtue-signalling attracted attention across the Atlantic, from where Mark Steyn offers the scornful slant: ‘If you happen to be the number two police officer in the county of Cheshire, where violent crime is up 50 per cent year-on-year and you’ve got over 3,000 violent crimes a month, I can well understand why you’d just rather make stupid promotional videos about your pronouns.’

    Noting the ‘implied threat’ in Cooke’s message, Steyn is scathing: ‘I can’t stand the woke constabulary . . . I preferred the old-school bent coppers to the woke coppers. Now they’re bent and woke. There’s something unpleasantly coercive about the entirely useless British constabulary now threatening to add one more useless, fake, invented crime that they pursue far more zealously than anything that matters.’

    Moving from pronouns to pigmentation, Mark Steyn salutes ‘the world’s wokest Mammy singer’. Canada’s Prime Minister Jolson – sorry, Justin – Trudeau recently was revealed to have blackened, more often than he can remember, his face, hands, arms, legs and goodness knows what else. Mark muses on how the ‘Prime Minstrel’ might celebrate this week’s re-election: ‘I can’t wait to hear him do the Banana Boat Song – Day-O! – at the next Liberal Party conference and for him to invite all the ladies present to tally his banana. It’d be a lovely scene.’

    More seriously, Ol’ Black Face remains in office despite losing both his parliamentary majority and the popular vote. Mark mourns how Canada’s general election was ‘almost a parodic version’ of voters in a Western democracy again being given the choice of ‘a candidate who’s Left of centre and a candidate who’s ever so slightly Right of Left of centre’. The window of discourse has of course been shrunk by ‘globalists [who] are not happy with people seeking wider choices: the narrower the turf that elections are fought on, the more it suits them’.

    Which is why Brexit, Trump and other maverick movements have so alarmed and annoyed Leftist loathers of the nation state. As Steyn says: ‘If you happen to think that Britain should not be a member of the European Union, you must be a racist, you must be a hater . . . Likewise, if you think the United States ought to have a southern border, you must also be a racist, you must be a white supremacist . . . these labels save the guys on the Left from having to debate you on these issues.’

    One of Mark’s correspondents, recently returned from East Asia, poses an interesting hypothesis: could Western countries, in which so much infrastructure and economic activity – policing, security, criminal justice, social work, and so on – is dependent upon wrongdoing and societal breakdown, actually survive becoming more orderly and having much less crime, like Japan?

    ‘The big difference between Japan and other developed nations is that Japan has minimal immigration. It takes its borders seriously. It takes its citizenship seriously: it just doesn’t give it away to anyone who can get there. If you have a [national] border and that border is seriously enforced, there’s less and less to do inside the border.’

    Envious of ‘the guy who’s got the bollard concession’ for North America and Europe, Mark Steyn sardonically ascribes ‘bollards around everything that matters in the Western world’ to ‘vehicular jihad’: ‘You can have a lot of SUVs that are perfectly moderate. Then the SUV starts going to a radical mosque and becomes radicalised. Next thing you know, that voice telling you to put on your seatbelt is instead saying “Allahu Akbar” and the radicalised Jeep Cherokee has ridden up on to the sidewalk and is mowing people down.’

    Steyn’s solution: ‘Instead of erecting our borders [inside the country] it would simpler to do what the Japanese do. But somehow, that’s never addressed . . . and so we have bollards as a growth industry in our economy, and it’s bonkers.’

    Indeed, but to argue against the interests of ‘Big Bollard’ is to question what Mark Steyn earlier had deplored as ‘the multicultural orthodoxy of the post-World War II Western world’.”

    1. Morning Anne. You beat me to it.

      Where’s Grizzly when he’s needed?

      Here’s an interesting one (link below). When did using personal pronouns become illegal and if it isn’t, why are the police getting involved?

      pronouns day

      1. Our pitiful police farces are vying to be the biggest joke. Political correctness is the only game in town now.

        1. Morning Hugh.

          I’m slightly miffed by this personal pronoun malarky.

          First off, who decrees that it’s Personal Pronoun Day and by what authority?

          Secondly, what gives anyone the right to dictate what language we can use in private conversations?

      2. Practically every time these cases of repressive stupidity come up, it is some moronic female plod, medic or lawyer promoted above her capabilities.
        These bloody women do genuine feminism no favours. They merely reinforce stereotypes.

        1. Also, and as with the Pride and Extinction Rebellion’s antics, they antagonise people.

          Who are these people to tell others how they should speak or behave?

          1. The greatest argument against universal education is that it gives the stupid ideas above their station.
            They become too grand for useful work and end up behind a desk spouting total bollards.

  11. Morning Each,
    Morning greeting from the self confessed down voter.

    “You don’t know me or what I’m thinking. You can fuck off.”
    Surely he who lives by the sword………………

    1. Be like me: so convinced you are right that you never check down votes.
      Am I really interested in the opinions of people lacking the ability to appreciate my wit and wisdom?
      I think not! 🙂

      2. Morning Anne,
        It is not the genuine down voting as such that can be taken as
        strong disagreement to a post.
        This is multiple times a day concerted attack on the ogga
        foundation, ( me) there is no rhyme or reason to their post’s
        other than being malicious, as in no debatable content to their post.
        You could not be a hairy @rsed intercontinental industrial tramp plus north sea tiger as ogga1 without having a sense of humour.

        I repeat I am NOT the instigator of these comments.

      4. Good for you.
        Downvoting is a Disqus provided function & has been reinstated due to popular demand ( democracy ). Whinging about its use is for fragile ‘snowflakes’ and attempts to intimidate / dictate to, those using the function has a starkly familiar ring to it given the current loony left induced climate,

        1. I don’t see the point in just disagreeing. It is only sensible to put a rebuttal to their argument rather than the lazy clicking of an arrow.

          1. That’ a valid opinion, but obviously a majority of Disqus users disagree with it, the majority rules. And I’m sure the majority of NoTTL posters can appreciate the value of upholding a democratic decision.

        2. ‘Morning, Dez, repitition doesn’t make you comment correct.

          As one who has stoically soldiered on in the face of a down-voting bot, I’m of the opinion that the use of down-voting exhibits an unfortunate trait in the down-voter. He/she/it cannot put together a reasoned argument to the poster so it hides behind down-votes.

          For want of a better expression, it’s best described as gratuitous graffiti.

          1. Start a campaign for NoTTL to use a different platform or migrate to a non Disqus forum yourself, I do not succumb to any form of bullying.

          2. I’m English, Dez, so I’ll stand my ground in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

            I’ll leave surrender to those of a cheese-eating, surrendering simian character.

        3. I don’t mind the down voting facility per se but if I can see who gives up votes then why should I not be able to see who gives down votes?

          1. In the survey that Disqus invited all users to take part in a few months ago a majority must have expressed a preference for downvoters to remain anonymous. I didn’t support that option, but I do respect democracy and accept losers consent.

  12. I think the final account for stopping Brexit is looking much more than £100,000,000.

    1. SIR – Many people abandoned the Tories not just because of their ineptitude in delivering Brexit but because of the dishonesty and elitist attitude of many MPs. These people will be reluctant to vote Conservative again. The party would be foolish not to get the Brexit Party on-side.

      John Richards
      Rugby, Warwickshire

      SIR – In a general election, how will we be able to trust that candidates who say they support Brexit will abide by that promise in office? I feel that it’s a case of once bitten, twice shy.

      Clare Byam-Cook
      London SW15

      1. Quite right. Who would have thought that Conservative MPs like Grieve and Hammond could have resurrected the spectre of the ‘nasty party’ by their treacherous conduct? History will not judge them kindly.

        1. If you see a baby playing with a knife taking it away is not nasty. Equally if you see someone who has nothing, you don’t give him a home and food You give him the means to earn it for himself.

          LAbour do the former. The Conservatives used to be there to do the latter – to create the opportunity for success. For that they were labelled the ‘nasty’ party. Of course, no one bothered to consider the poor fellow mugged to pay for the largesse.

          The Right want to grow through effort. The Left just take what they want from one to give it to another.

  13. Morning everyone

    SIR – If the EU won’t make a decision on a Brexit extension until Britain makes a decision on a general election, and Britain won’t make a decision on a general election until the EU makes a decision on an extension, then Brexit is up a cul-de-sac.

    Moira Merryweather
    Worthen, Shropshire

    SIR – The greatest threat to Britain’s leaving the EU is now Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. If its opposition to the Prime Minister’s deal is maintained during a general election campaign, the Brexiteer vote will be split.

    Against the divided Brexiteers will be Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and the Scottish National Party, plus possibly the Democratic Unionist Party. It would be no surprise if these groupings decided to vote tactically to ensure a Remainer coalition government. In this event, there would surely follow a second referendum, with the choices loaded in favour of the status quo.

    As one who was driven by the government of Theresa May and Philip Hammond to sign up to the Brexit Party, I urge Mr Farage to rethink his strategy.

    Henry Wilson
    Alton, Hampshire.

    1. If Mr Henry Wilson looks closely at the May/Johnson surrender deal he should decide that there are three options: to stay in the EU, to have a clean break from the EU, and the May/Johnson surrender deal. Of the three a clean break is the best option which will only be achieved with Farage’s support; the worst option is the May/Johnson capitulation which keeps us shackled as a vassal state.

      Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is essential for the future of democracy and for Britain to continue as a free, independent country.

      1. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  14. Morning again

    SIR – The recent decision by the British Red Cross to cease providing first aid support at public events (report, October 25) is short-sighted.

    It may be impossible to quantify, but the goodwill generated by its attendance – not to mention the inspiration afforded to potential volunteers – must go some way towards offsetting the stated shortfall between income and the costs of these activities, which have long been a traditional and valued element of Red Cross domestic service. Raise the money and reverse this decision.

    Charles Evans
    Geneva, Switzerland

    2. UK Red Cross report for 2018 shows the eight ‘executive leadership’ staff earn from £100,000 a year up to £173,000. Somehow salaries for these vital people (including ‘Interim executive director of people and learning’, whatever that might be) must be paid. Keep rattling those tins!

    3. I stopped supporting the Red Cross after the way they treated their volunteer Bryan Barkley.

        1. I still support the RNLI but its decision to promote LGBT has very little to do with saving lives at sea and will probably lose them much support.

  15. SIR – My garden is available for continued testing of Edinburgh University’s semi-autonomous gardening robot, Trimbot (report, October 25).

    WD-40 instead of tea on offer.

    Anne Jappie
    Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

    SIR – My garden is available for continued testing of Edinburgh University’s semi-autonomous gardening robot, Trimbot (report, October 25).

    WD-40 instead of tea on offer.

    Anne Jappie
    Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

  16. SIR – After giving birth to a darling daughter in the Royal Navy Hospital Mtarfa in Malta in 1975, I was somewhat disheartened to overhear from staff that “breast-feeders get stout”. Supper arrived with a small bottle and the baby slept like a top.

    Jo Dicks
    Northwood, Middlesex

    1. A bit like the barmaid who was asked for a pint of bitter, pulled the wrong knob and got stout.

      1. There was a young lady of Wantage
        Of whom the town clerk took advantage.
        Said the borough surveyor,
        “Indeed you must pay her,
        You’ve totally altered her frontage!’

        I can never decide if it’s the name of the totally unremarkable town or the idea of local bureaucrats being red blooded that makes this limerick so memorable.

  17. Good morning all. As a change from the madness that is Brexit, how about the madness of a young boy’s life being ruined for making a pass at a girl?

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/the-devastating-price-of-a-teenage-boys-unwanted-advance/

    The outcome of #MetToo is that young women will see young men as potential predators and be afraid of them. And young men won’t bother trying to chat up a girl, because she could ruin his life with a spurious assault claim, either now or many years in the future.

    Men and women becoming fearful and resentful of each other = less Western people having babies!

      2. I’ll post it later. You can register for free with the Spectator and get three free articles a week.

        1. Thanks, JK. Rik told me about the trick to get in via pressing ESC, and Anneallan posted the article here anyway.

      3. Et voila – sez unfeasibly rich woman:

        COFFEE HOUSE

        The devastating price of a teenage boy’s unwanted advance

        Melanie McDonagh
        25 October 2019 3:39 PM

        “Oh God. Is there no end to this madness?

        The fate of Jamie Griffiths is now known: he’s the teenager who touched – not groped – a girl he liked on two separate occasions last November on the arm and hip. The teenager was charged with sexual assault and now he’s been found guilty at Manchester and Salford magistrates’ court; he’s on the sex offenders register for the next five years, he has to pay her £250 and do 200 hours of unpaid community work. Of course, with only a few newspaper reports to go on we can’t be sure we know all the facts of the case, but it seems this is now the price you pay for an unwanted advance to a member of the opposite sex.

        He was, he said, a ‘shy, awkward and anxious’ teenager who approached the girl to make a friend ‘but the words didn’t come out’. He had previously Googled, ‘how to make a friend’. Now his face is all over the papers – which must do him no end of good given he’s a first year undergraduate student now. He’s probably being talked about by everyone who knows him, the latest young face of the #MeToo crusade, or rather, the latest scalp. Meanwhile, the girl he made the mistake of approaching said that she was so traumatised by the whole thing that she was quite put off her revision for exams – she was hoping to apply to Oxford – and said every time she thought about the unwanted touching (she feared he might touch her breast) she started to cry. She, of course, preserves her anonymity; her fragile mental state will be unaffected by publicity.

        Anyone with teenage sons will feel a terrible chill at all this, especially those of us who have to badger them to talk to girls at all. But those of us with daughters may feel a chill too; poor girls, if boys now feel they’ll be labelled a sex offender for making a clumsy pass. Look if teenage boys can’t summon the courage to even make an overture to a teenager girl, the whole human race is going to die out, or at least middle class Brits. IVF can’t do all the work. There are societies in the world where girls can be pounced on and assaulted for so much as showing their hair or wearing a skirt, and where a few prosecutions might do some good, but this case isn’t one of them.

        This case and this verdict is nuts. It’s going to make contact between the sexes more fraught than it would be in the natural course of things; the only possible effect will be to make teenage boys resort to the safe space of online pornography, rather than the dangerous world of face-to-face encounters with actual girls. What hell we’re in for.”

        2. Wouldn’t surprise me if he topped himself. I do hope the girl has a conscience. And that it pains her.

          1. I doubt it. these ghastly women are incapable of seeing things from any angle other than their warped version of feminism.

          2. She is going to have very real problems in having a mutually loving relationship with a man when and if she grows up.

        3. I’d be very interested to know if the girl has both parents still at home, or if her mother is a single or divorced parent….

    2. That’s the whole idea.

      In days past, these kinds of social fads would have eventually been challenged and changed. What one generation does, the next does the opposite. But with the force of law bet brought to cement these abnormal behaviours, it’s going to be very difficult to change them.

  19. I find the Haka entertaining but it must give a small advantage, while they are prancing around keeping warmed up the opposition are standing getting cooler.

  20. Lourdes pilgrims’ faith they will be safe in Catholic town sees pickpocketing double. 24 OCTOBER 2019 •.

    Pickpocketing thefts have more than doubled from 117 in the first nine months of last year to 274 so far this year, according to Philippe Aurignac, the local prosecutor. “It is cash they go for.”

    Most of the thefts occur in the centre of the town in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near the shrine where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared before a peasant girl in a grotto in 1858.

    “The pickpockets are highly organised professionals,” Mr Subercaze said. “They arrive in waves and change all the time. As soon as one is identified or arrested, they are replaced. It’s a game of cat and mouse.”

    As usual no perpetrators are identified to avoid the PC Sh!tstorm that would undoubtedly occur were they to do so. They are of course almost certainly Romanians who have made picking pockets and petty street crime the country’s largest Foreign Currency earner!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/24/lourdes-pilgrims-faith-will-safe-catholic-town-sees-pickpocketing/

    4. Pick pockets, if caught, should have all their fingers and thumbs broken badly and then re-set badly.
      They can still eat and drink but can no longer steal where felxibility of hands is essential.

  21. A Redneck went to the hospital as his wife was having a baby.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a45faa937ebad7c037b6c6d8a953761199277213cd8ef4e2c91393ceb4949d66.jpg

    Upon arriving he sits down, and the nurse says,

    “Congratulations, your wife has had quins, 5 big baby boys.”

    The Redneck says, “I’m not surprised, I have a penis on me like a chimney.”

    The nurse replies, “You might want to consider getting it cleaned, they’re all black.”

  22. ‘Morning All

    A Dexy

    There once lived a Turkish albino,
    For whom politics was a casino,
    For the house always wins
    While the dealer just grins,
    And the punter goes home with his BRINO.

    1. Laminitis – a disease of the feet of horses and other ungulates that can have fatal consequences.
      Lammynitis – a disease of the brain of politicians that renders the individual incapable of rational thought.

      1. “Lammy showing a complete ignorance of internationa law again.”

        Or, rather, Lammy shewing his complete ignorance.

        ‘Morning, Wibbles, Lammy probably doesn’t do International, he’s globally thick.

      1. Agree totally.

        Bill Thomas prediction two weeks ago……….

        So you can say you read it here first (as is often the case with NoTTL).
        England lose to Australia
        Japan beats S Efrica
        Final = Japan v NZ (and – for the first time EVER) there will be a ref who does not yield to the constant cheating and bullying that is the hallmark of the AB.)

        Don’t buy any lottery tickets Bill!

        1. England seem to have learned something from the Japanese: tackle hard and low and don’t keep playng “crash, bash, kick the ball away”.
          I can’t recall a better all round England performance.

  36. Only two doors in the room we need to leave.

    The EU controls one door and would exact a very high price for us to use it. The other door has been locked and barred by a British parliament.

    What a mess.

    1. The second door seems to have huge bungs in the lock..

      I wonder where they came from ?

    1. As the original song says:

      “I close my eyes, draw back the curtain …..”

      Why do so many people have their eyes closed and are completely blind to the fact that the May/Johnson ‘deal’ is an abject surrender.

      Even Remain is better than a deal as bad as the M/J capitulation

  38. Second DT letter

    “The greatest threat to Britain’s leaving the EU is now Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.”

    Correction:

    The greatest threat to Britain’s leaving the EU on their terms and not ours is Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

    1. Supine Surrender is not the proper Brexit that 17.4 million people voted for.

      It is high time people came to grips with the fact that Boris Johnson’s WA is fundamentally the same as May’s and should not be touched with a disinfected barge pole.

  40. Fact or Fiction? You be the judge. (Remember this is C21 Blighty.)

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7616183/Glasgow-University-gives-trigger-warnings-classic-Brothers-Grimm-fairytales.html

    “Glasgow University gives ‘trigger warnings’ about classic Brothers Grimm fairytales

    University students have been given ‘trigger warnings’ about potentially upsetting scenes in classic fairytales.

    Lecturers admitted students were cautioned about ‘violent material’ contained in the famous children’s stories by the Brothers Grimm.

    Their tales include Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood.

    So-called ‘trigger warnings’ are part of a growing trend which sees undergraduates warned about content they could find disturbing.

    Last night Dr Stuart Waiton, a senior sociology lecturer at Abertay University in Dundee, said that ‘the more we make trigger warnings the norm, the more we risk infantilising these adults’.

    Glasgow University gave details of a course it runs in modern languages and cultures in response to a freedom of information request.

    The lecturer in charge said: ‘When I teach my Grimms’ Fairytales class, I always say some of the material includes child abuse, incest and other violent material.

    ‘As we do psychological readings of the tales, this can be important to acknowledge.’ Trigger warnings are given verbally or on an internal website named Moodle so that students know about content that could upset them. Complaints have led to warnings being read out.

    Classics students at Glasgow, studying Greek and Roman culture, said staff ‘frequently flag if we are dealing with certain types of content, both to alert students to what is coming and to make it clear that we are examining a very different culture from our own – and certainly not endorsing the material covered’.

    They said that this could include ‘sexual assault and rape’, ‘extreme expressions of misogyny’, suicide, and racist language and behaviour.

    In a theology and religious studies course at Glasgow University, students are told ‘we are going to be talking about torture and brutal violence with sexual elements’, adding: ‘Otherwise, no trigger warnings.’

    And a history lecturer, teaching courses on sex and religion in the West, and Christianity and the sexual revolution, reads out a trigger warning which states: ‘Some of the references will be to heterosexual and homosexual activities between adults which were illegal in the mid-20th century, and a few are still illegal. But there will be ‘no display of sexually explicit material, merely discussion of it’.

    Glasgow University’s veterinary college said that in an animal biology course, ‘humorous’ images are used to ‘highlight and illustrate important discussion points’.

    It added: ‘In response to a complaint (before the lecture, not after, and based on the draft slides put on Moodle), a content trigger warning was included on three slides that go up on Moodle.

    ‘The complaint was about what can be summed up as “sexism”. The wording of my warning in the slides is: “Images used here are light-hearted humour intended to illustrate important points being discussed at this point in the lecture”.

    ‘This serves to warn students that the images used in the actual lecture are NOT intended to be taken seriously, they serve to engage the students to think about what the real state of the world is, as opposed to what popular imagination holds it to be.

    ‘The topic being covered at this point in the lecture is the evolution via sexual selection of differences in brain structure and function between males and females of several species, including the idea that this is likely also to be true for humans.’

    The University of Edinburgh said the school of history, classics and archaeology ‘provides a warning for a tutorial in the “Medieval Worlds: A Journey Through the Middle Ages” course that involves discussion of a piece of medieval travel writing that reports acts of sexual violence witnessed by the writer’.

    The school said: ‘Before accessing the document, students are given a warning stating: “Please note that there are details of sexual abuse and violence in the extracts”.’

    In 2017, the Mail revealed that students of religion at Glasgow University were being warned about images of the Crucifixion that could upset them – understood to relate to a screening of the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ.

    Last night, Dr Waiton said: ‘One of the potential dangers of trigger warnings is that they help to elevate the idea that words are harmful.

    ‘The fairytale example is particularly illustrative given the past presumption that children could read these books without the need of therapeutic guidance.’ Glasgow University said the fairytale warning related to a course which ran last academic year, but declined to comment further.

    Universities Scotland previously said there was no sector-wide policy on trigger warnings, but it was ‘monitoring’ the situation.

    Last night, the body said it could not comment on the policies of individual universities.

    A Scottish Tory party spokesman said: ‘This advice seems to be a bit patronising to young adults who have most likely long since stopped reading fairytales. If trigger warnings are throwing up this kind of “concern”, universities have to consider if they are fit for purpose.”

    1. Anne,
      Slightly off your topic, is there a lab fear out there that
      the timing of the GE coincides with the students annual leave, meaning they will only have one vote ?

    2. These Trigger Warnings are a good idea to my mind. I am thinking of publishing a book of my fruit crumble recipes and will need to warn that for most recipes a sharp knife is used, e.g. for slicing rhubarb or stoning plums. This is likely to increase the number of pages by up to 10%, so that my profit margin will be increased when copies of the book are sold. It may even reach 20% extra pages if I issue a Trigger Warning about the danger of burning one’s hands when removing the baked crumble from the oven without using oven gloves.

      :-))

          1. Throw in pot of boiling water and slam the lid on. I’m talking about the whiners not the seafood.

      2. Don’t forget to warn about stray fruit stones, otherwise people will be suing you for dental work (and trauma and depression, natch).

        1. Thanks, Annie, my book is increasing in size by the minute and therefore I will be able to charge a higher price and maybe even quadruple my profits.

          :-))

    3. Der Struwwelpeter, penned by German psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffmann and released in Germany in 1845, is full of tales of children misbehaving—and the awful, bizarre fates they suffered for doing so

      3. “THE TOM-BOY WHO WAS CHANGED INTO A REAL BOY”
      For parents of a certain era, there were few things more horrifying than a little girl who didn’t act like a little girl. That may have been what led to this story from the book Little Miss Consequence, published in 1880. The title is self-explanatory: A little girl (the daughter of an Earl) loves playing with the boys so much that, eventually, she becomes a boy.

      At last she grew so coarse,
      E’en her voice was rough and hoarse,
      And her attitudes became so like a boy’s, boy’s, boy’s,
      That they thought it only right,
      On a certain Summer’s night,
      To change her sex completely, without noise, noise, noise.

      After her transformation, the girl is literally shipped off—a boat’s captain is paid to take her on as a sailor. “And a caution may it prove to you and me, me, me!”

    4. Part of the problem is that the students will only have seen the sanitised Disney versions and the shock of the reality will be too much fo their delicate systems to handle.

      1. There’s certainly a pressing need for government well paid counsellors to be appointed to all universities to help students who feel shocked or distressed after reading fairy stories.

    5. The point about so-called “fairy stories”, and folk tales is that they had didactic content. They warned children of dangers that they might face. They did this without resorting to the mangled lexicon of psychologists, lawyers, psychiatrists, mental health therapists and the like. These professions were relatively unknown in the Middle Ages. As literacy was not very widespread, the handing down of warnings was mainly an oral tradition. The warnings were enlivened by exotic descriptions as families sat by the fireside while, outside, the wolves howled in the night (kind of thing).
      I never fail to be baffled by the complete lack of understanding exhibited by scholars and experts in respect of life before the Victorians. Many art experts presenting TV programmes on the Renaissance and the like simply do not understand Catholicism. Yet the Catholic faith was all pervasive for many centuries. We lived, we breathed, we were born, married, died as Catholics. It was not a coat we put on and off.

      1. You made the point most eloquently that i fumbled and farted my way through when i tried to say it.

      3. No street lighting, no decent roads, no police force (as opposed to ‘service’), no DBS, households and often entire areas were the personal fiefdom of one person….

    6. Those tales were meant to scare children. It reinforced what not to do. Don’t wander into the woods on your own. Now we see promotions for single women to travel to dangerous places as airheaded tourists. They deserve to get their heads chopped off.

      1. Foolishness should not result in being murdered. Being laughed at, yes; that way, one learns.

        2. If all that happened was that you were laughed at, the fairy tales really wouldn’t have been necessary. I think Phizzee makes a good point, though it may seem a little callous.

        3. Sadly, that should be the case.
          However, it often isn’t; so just use your grey cells, darling.
          Not all males on the planet respect human – and particularly female – life.

  42. Mail to Mr R………..

    Polly
    Posted October 26, 2019 at 8:47 am |

    I don’t think your plans have any hope of working if you don’t drain the swamp.

    Polly

    4. The most frightening thing is that they will rig the question in a second referendum.

      The choice will probably be between:

      Remain in the EU or Leave under the Johnson Surrender WA.

      Many people who desperately want Britain to leave the EU would prefer to Remain in the EU than to become a completely powerless vassal state still governed by the EU

      1. Or those who want a complete WTO exit won’t vote, meaning Remain wins hands down.
        The choice should be between WTO and the WA, but it won’t be.

        1. There is NO NEED for a 2nd referendum – we’ve had one and are still waiting for its implementation.

          Only then might we consider another, when at least a generation (25 years) has passed.

          1. We know perfectly well that if those unspeakable plebs vote the wrong way – again – the result will be ignored.

      2. rastus, I assume your comment came from the ITV news when Sir Keir Starmer carefully described the exact wording of the next referendum
        We can’t be the only ones to have seen it, surely?

    1. With apologies to Neil Innes and the late Viv Stanshall, sadly no longer true. The government isn’t at present running things, it’s the Sqeaker and a bunch of anti-UK MPs from various parties.

  47. ” Commemorative Brexit coins bearing 31 October date ‘put on hold’ ”
    They will, I suppose, be melting down huge quantities of already minted coins bearing 31st March, 31st October, and in due course 31st January, 30th April, dates, and using the residue to produce Euro coins for use in the U.K.

    1. If someone working there (Llantrisant – the hole with the mint in it) pockets a few and manages to get them out, they’ll be worth a fortune to numismatics. Especially those who collect mistakes like Edward VIII pennies.

  48. French cheesed off as British cheddar is judged superior to comté or camembert. 25 OCTOBER 2019 • 4:20PM.

    Rogue River Blue, produced in Oregon in the United States, was judged the world’s best cheese by a panel of 260 international experts this week. In fourth place was Pitchfork Cheddar, made by Trethowan’s Dairy, based in Somerset.

    No Stilton in there?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/25/french-cheesed-british-cheddar-judged-superior-comte-camembert/

    1. To really annoy them, remind them of the wine competition where a Canadian wine beat the French entries.

    3. I can’t understand why anyone gives credence to this sort of rubbish.
      It’s all very subjective and you like what you like, not what someone else tells you to.

  50. I missed this, just saw it on a twitter feed,thinking it must be fake news I checked

    Brexiteers have long hailed the “sea of opportunity” that awaits

    British fishermen and women after the UK leaves the EU — but now it has

    emerged that their boats will be monitored by a French company.

    The

    business that won the tender to track UK fishing vessels wherever they

    operate, as well as foreign-licensed boats in British waters, is

    Collecte Localisation Satellites (CLS),

    a French maritime surveillance provider.

    The

    contract was awarded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural

    Affairs (Defra) in late summer having previously been held by a British

    firm, Globavista.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-company-wins-licence-to-monitor-british-fishing-boats-5dk8wp6gr
    What fuckwit agreed this?? Taking back control?? I think not

    1. Afternoon Rik,
      Just doing their job on account that “taking back control was never meant to be “

    3. I’ve emailed your comment to my MP saying we were never going to leave. He normally replies but I’m not sure he will to this.

    2. ‘Morning, Mags, where did your original text go to?

      I read it, clicked on ‘show 1 new reply’ (our Anne) and , whoops, it’d gone.

        1. I find that operating on a VPN gives one the confidence to say it as it is.

          Any tracking plod will be searching for me in Glasgow.

    3. Climbed out of your bunker after last night’s hammering, then. Or has your OH given up on the Saints?

      1. Morning KK

        Still continues this morning . Rugby is a good distraction , but Son and Moh had an almighty barney re last night … son cannot understand why supporting Southampton through all the negatives for over 60+ years is good for mental health .. Moh says they will always be his team !

        1. Grown men almost coming to blows over a game of football. Father and son to boot. A bit pathetic.

        2. Your MoH a true supporter despite what happens. Rather someone like that than one who hitches their support to the ‘big’ clubs just to savour success.

        3. One of my best friends who is our Henry’s godfather has an academic doctorate and is a highly talented musician with a profound knowledge of his subject; he was the Director of Music at an academically successful public school. But when he was younger and had to fill in a form he answered the Question: ‘What is your religion? with the reply: ‘Derby County’.

          I pretend not to know which team supports so I always ask him if he still has his season ticket to watch Nottingham Forest. Apparently the supporters of these two clubs detest each other and engage in tribal warfare..

          If I were to support a football team – which is extremely unlikely – I would support La Vicomté-Sur-Rance Village XI. They are not very good but they play the game for fun and are proper amateurs.

          Professional Football is for bovine idiots or oxy morons.

      2. ‘Morning, Korky, I know not of what you speak (last night’s hammering) but it sounds gang contentious and I’ve only ever known Mags to speak truthfully.

          1. Ah, Wendyball, not so much a game as a business, extracting loadsadosh from easily convinced fans, that they’re still watching sport.

          2. At the top level I agree it’s no longer a sport as I knew it in my youth but played well it is still the best team sport for skill and awareness of what is required at a fast pace.

  53. Death knell for fossil fuels? IEA claims offshore wind can power humanity more cheaply than coal or gas

    The arch-sceptics of the International Energy Agency have embraced offshore wind, saying it can meet the world’s entire electricity demand
    11 times over even when zones are set aside for uses such as shipping,defence and fishing. “Its potential is vast,” said the IEA report
    released on Friday.

    And, in the event of a war, how do you stop the enemy from just detroying these Offshore Turbines?

    Can they supply enough power to support Industry, such as Steel Making, car manufacture
    Will the current and power be high enough

    1. Can they supply enough power to support industry………
      Of course not. This is all theoretical and we know from experience that what happens in practice is very different from the theory.

      1. Afternoon GG,
        Cannot think of any offhand in so far as UKIP had no hand in bringing the nation to its knees as in a submitting stance.
        And that stance would never have been achieved without
        the continuing input of the lab/lib/con pro eu coalition party.

        1. What has that to do with a manifesto that bridges the divide between left and right in all political parties. Are you suggesting it doesn’t apply to UKIP?
          I don’t hold a candle for any political party but know there are always various views held by individual members.

          1. GG,
            Being a UKIP member I view the brexit group warily in so far as
            for years a great many of the group make up were busy
            supporting / voting lab/lib/con the very parties that brought about our present odious standing as a nation.
            Having said that I am behind them 100% on the Brexit issue.
            PS, Nothing at all wrong with the exit manifesto some in the
            group make up need a serious coating of looking, ask the
            founder Katherine Blaiklock.

  56. An estimated 6000 women / girls have had their genitals mutilated with seemingly a waiting queue of 3000 is this to be the halal FGM butchers centre ?
    I believe they are at the moment having a meeting, about having a meeting to form a committee when they can find enough
    PC / Appeasement followers, no ones feelings must get bruised.

    1. Food for thought indeed.

      Perhaps my rage at another extension was misplaced in that it gives more time for the light to be shone on Boris’ deal and for it to be unravelled – as it needs to be.

      1. It must be put under the microscope and examined in great detail and all its shortcomings exposed. This should be a job that the MSM undertakes to do but they refuse to do so.

        The BBC is betraying the Nation completely.

        A clean and complete Brexit is the only answer – but even Remain is better than Bonking Boris’s Bullshit Sell-Out which keeps us all as vassals.

    2. This is an extremely good address from Nigel Farage – he makes far more sense and is far more credible than any other politician. He also strikes me as being considerably more honest.

      No wonder they all hate him.

    1. It is quite stunning how computer games have changed as the technology has advanced. We have come a long way since the days of the ZX Spectrum with its massive (for the day) 48K of memory. They managed to do some amazing things with such little to work with.

      Now they can hire some of the best to provide voices and the soundtracks can rival anything you find on the most expensive films. Often because it is the same people writing and performing for both. Here is a gentle song from the end of a slightly older game now that I enjoyed immensely called Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.

      Yes, yes, I know – computer games can be dismissed by those who know little about them, but these days it is similar to watching a film and being able to control what happens. There is some deliciousness to creeping through the night, unseen and unheard by the many guards, to bring a justified end to a murderous tyrant. 🙂

      In this particular game – (set in the Caribbean in 1715 when the Pirates sailed the waves) – you became very close to 6 characters over the span of it. It is similar to liking characters in a good book. Over the game they die, one by one. The last one is a woman that was there from the beginning and it is surprising the emotional feelings it can provoke.

      Then in the final cutscene of the game, when you have “won” and your young daughter is arriving on a ship from England, you are standing on the balcony of the mansion you have built. There are the people of your town dancing and singing around you, and your gaze falls onto one table. Sitting at it are the 6 people who died, they are smiling at you and the woman you were close to raises a tankard and drinks, as this song plays. A fine game.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6h1F9cKCtQ

  59. England were by far the better team!

    If only we had the same quality politicians a clean Brexit would have been achieved a long time ago,

    Fingers crossed for next week’s final.

    And if we win we shall have won two World Cups this year – but our politicians weakly cave in to Luxembourg and Belgium..

    (Not that it matters now but England also had two tries disallowed. I cannot see what was wrong with Ben Young’s try)

    2. Morning R,
      If only these politico’s had not received support & votes
      in the party before country contest time & again & again over the years , if only the referendum / exit designed & activated by UKIP was followed through, if only.

    3. As you may well imagine, my only disappointment in such a match is that both teams can’t lose. England outplayed NZ in every facet of the game.
      The NZ try was a simple error by England. England were immense. Some of the best tackles we have seen, knocking the attacker backs several yards. Such tackles knock back the opposition not just physically, but mentally. NZ were maybe better in the second half but not as much as they usually are. So whatever they take at half-time did not work on this occasion. I suspect that we may see an England /Wales final, and I would pick England to win.

  60. UN Commences flying in Migrants to the EU

    The UN Migration Agency/International Organization for Migration (IOM) has hailed the arrival of its “first” planeload of 154 Somali migrants to Germany, along with dozens of Syrians transported to Romania using European Union funds.

    The IOM, which promotes mass migration as “inevitable, desirable, [and] necessary”, announced the arrival of “its first international charter flight” of 154 Somalis from Ethiopia to Germany — with “An additional 220 refugees [to] depart for Germany on a second IOM-chartered flight in mid-November” — in an official press release.

    The resettlement programme is part of the European Union efforts to increase resettlement in solidarity with hosting countries” and “financed by the European Union through the National Programme – Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF)”, the IOM explains — lending credibility to the warnings of migration sceptics like Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán that the EU establishment is seeking to “solve” the issue of illegal mass migration not by putting an end to the mass movement of people into Western countries, but by regularising it through the establishment of “legal routes”.

    The EU and UN “are serious about legalising illegal migration, contrary to the will of the people” said Prime Minister Orbán’s spokesman Dr Zoltán Kovács in late 2018, shortly after the EU backed the UN Global Compact for Migration.

    1. ‘German Chancellor Angela Merkel says her attempt to create a multicultural society has “utterly failed,” and that too little had been required of immigrants who refuse to integrate into German culture.

      Merkel told an audience of young members of her Christian Democrats (CDU) that allowing people of differing cultural backgrounds to live side by side without such integration was a huge mistake, according to Reuters, which notes that approximately four million Muslims live in the country.’

      Oh well, better luck this time.

      https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/merkel-admits-german-multiculturalism-has-utterly-failed

      1. Somalis are well know for integrating into the host countries culture. I don’t think? We may be certain segments of it

      2. Didn’t Merkel say something along those lines a short while before she opened the floodgates in 2015? Second tsunami of Third Worlders on the way?

    2. Hey, UN, you want them out of their native lands, why not fly them to New York where they can become your personal responsibility?

      See how popular that is with the Yanks.

  61. Might I ask how long are the daily threads open here before they
    are closed? I think it’s 3 or 4 weeks but not sure about that.

    2. I would have thought that it was automatic but I suppose it’s possible that Geoff closes them manually!

  62. Ex-Tower Hamlets councillor faces jail for decade-long housing fraud

    A former east London councillor has been warned he could face jail for a decade-long housing fraud that was uncovered while he was in office.
    Muhammad Harun, 49, remained on the Tower Hamlets social housing list while owning a property within the borough and another in neighbouring Barking.

    Harun, a solicitor, cost the council about £125,000 which could have been spent on housing vulnerable families for the duration of the con.

  63. Sky

    The container in which 39 people were found dead was part of a convoy of three lorries, relatives of the suspected victims say.

    They believe that over 100 migrants were being brought to the UK on the lorries.

    Two of the vehicles are thought to have completed their trips but the
    third, which was carrying the deceased victims, was delayed at an
    unknown location.

    The eventual destinations of the two other containers are not known.
    Hmm a hundred all up at 30k a head 3 miillion a run, now we ask how many successful runs have been made,plenty of “grease” to spread around…………..

    1. Afternoon Rik. Is it my imagination or is there something about this that stinks? Woman rings about Vietnamese daughter when police have only announced they are all Chinese?

      1. There is considerable difference between Chinese & Vietnamese. I doubt the police would have got it that wrong

          1. Is this a case of people without papers; and our current PC police are hardly likely to admit that all easterners look alike to them.
            Instant career death.

          2. Well they could have said they were Vietnamese if they looked so! Why didn’t they? And the finances as Rik has pointed out don’t add up either! One could construct a scenario to explain these anomalies but there is insufficient evidence to make it convincing!

          3. Apparently they travelled from Viet Nam via China so not beyond the realms of possibility that they, or at least some, had forged Chinese papers.

          4. Why would they want to have forged Chinese papers. That doesn’t really make sense to me

    2. At 12.30 0n Wednesday I drove past a large group of adults dressed in dark clothes walking towards Thirsk from the direction of the link road from the M1 to the A19. I told my lunch companion that there was a group of about 30 walking in a bunch. She thought they would be going to lunch from the Industrial Estate but I thought it was unusual and the thought of them being immigrants crossed my mind.

      2. I think I’ve seen similar at the bottom of Hilly Fields near the old by-pass.
        I did phone the borough park wardens on one occasion, but my observations were, apparently not good enough without photos.

  64. The Opposition is filled with wailing, witless inadequates. We need an election to sweep them away. JANET DALEY. 26 OCTOBER 2019.

    It is generally the case that when the state of the country demands a general election it is because we need a new government. This time it is because we need a new opposition. It is worth spending a moment to examine this unprecedented historical circumstance.

    Actually Janet we need a new Political System because they’ve destroyed the old one and there’s no room in it for any of the present crew Labour, Conservative or Whatever!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/10/26/opposition-filled-wailing-witless-inadequates-need-election/

  65. Yo All

    Richie MacCaw has consulted with Nigel Owens, the Touch Judges, TMO and World Cup Authorities and it has has now been established that the All Blacks won the Semi Final

    MacCaw said that Nigel had totally ignored the input from the All Blacks captain when he made refereeeing decisions: the ABs were totally unused to such a state of affairs. MacCaw stated that over the next 4 years, the ABs will try to get used to the referee being in charge (a state of affairs he never had to endure)

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/article-7487721/Are-Black-cracks-Not-Richie-McCaw-man-lifted-World-Cup-four-years-ago.html

  66. The Independent has this article. Essentially the Remainers are claiming workers rights may be abolished by the UK Parliament after Brexit. Oc course it is quite true. That’s the point of Brexit. Not to reduce workers rights but to bring all, repeat, all legislation in the UK back into UK control, and that includes legislation on labour relations.
    What Remainers do not do is offer an argument as to why a UK Government would wish to do anything at all to reduce hard-won workers rights.
    On the other hand, it is somewhat fatuous to claim the EU as the defender of workers rights. The MSM has been relatively quiet on the subject of demonstrations and street violence in France. Is that because the demonstrations were brought about by the EU-committed, Europhile French Government attempting to reduce workers rights? Without a single word of criticism from EU HQ?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-brexit-deal-workers-rights-labour-withdrawal-bill-tuc-vote-a9165891.html

        1. I don’t think so, Bill, it is about action by what used to be Civil Defence, i.e., actions to be taken by emergency services and the NHS.

          I doubt the NHS will be able to operate on the sickness and the canker that needs to be cut out of our Contemptible Parliament and the infections caused by Common Purpose and the like.

      2. A bit of Blair “modernisation”, which will almost certainly have a sting in its tail that hasn’t been used.

        Yet.

    2. He could possibly declare that we had left the EU on March 29 at 11pm as some judges are telling us and request the army to maintain the peace until matters settled down and he could get an election under way that he could win.

  68. A General Election is the only thing that gives us a clear way forward everything else is just another fudge

    With a General Election you have to have a party capable of forming a government be it alone or in a coalition

      1. Lets say as far as Labour and the Lib-Dems are concerned it is the least preferred option

  69. The UN & EU and Charities and politicians have managed in quite a short time to destabilise most of the world. They have totally lost control of our borders and crime and disorder is increasing at an alarming rate. I think it is only a matter of time before things kick off big time

  70. Aethelfled. • 2 hours ago

    posted @1642again

    and then deleted. When I saw it (2 hours later) I asked the question

    …and you too are ‘private’ why the link?

    I was then notified that I could not reply to a deleted post.

    What is going on? Is NTTL being manipulated/misused?

    1. There are numerous strange things happening on Disqus at the moment, Nottle is just one of many forums being attacked.
      If you have not noticed, your “votes” may well be being manipulated downwards

  72. ‘Evening all. Tonight’s the night for venturing up the church tower staircase (amputations notwithstanding) and putting the clock back by an hour. I’ve been aware that the East facing dial has been out of sync for a while. I had a text message from the chap who lives on that side of the church today, to the effect that his wife has been feeding the pigeons, which, when satisfied, congregate on the minute hand…

    Deep joy…

    1. Oh why o why can the Saxon Queen not have summer time always.

      Seriously why on earth do we still put the clocks back,
      It’s obsurd and old fashioned.

      Sounds like a challenge, God speed

          1. Back to 1970 – before Heath took over.
            Second thoughts – then we’d have Wilson at the height of his powers.
            We’re doooooooooooomed ….

      3. More to the point, why put them forward? There are still the same number of hours of daylight regardless of where the clock hands point. We never fiddled with the time until the Germans started it in 1916 and we followed suit.

      1. That’s the easiest way. but it involves climbing the stairs twice. It’s easier to disconnect the hands from the clock, and wind it back an hour.

        1. Doesn’t that throw the chimes out of synch?
          Find a “youngster” and teach them the tricks of the trade!

          };-)

          1. No youngsters here. It can throw the strike (chimes are the quarters, and ours doesn’t
            do those) out of sync, but I can use the night silencer to keep it quiet while I advance the strike train by eleven hours…

            Besides, I enjoy looking after our venerable old timepiece. :-|))

    3. Watch out Geoff. Think GK Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. Both popular authors at MI5!

      1. But, Minty, that was in the days when MI5 was almost honourable – at least it had OUR best interests at heart.

          1. There must be something about East Anglia.
            Dorothy Sayers lived in Witham. Marjorie Allingham in Tollshunt D’Arcy (she was brought up in Layer Breton). P.D. James had East Anglian links and often set her books in the area. Ruth Rendall was an Essex girl and lived for a long time in Suffolk.
            Thinking about it – female East Anglians are deadlier than the male.

      3. Thanks, Minty. I’m rather fond of GK Chesterton. In a previous incarnation, I used to sneak “O God of Earth and Altar” into civic services. The line “Our earthly rulers falter” was relevant then, and even more so now…

    1. Well, it was discussed earlier, but it’s so far down the page now that thanks for showing it again.
      I remember when I was small, for reasons unknown my parents were horrified when they found me

      reading Grimm and banned the book. From distant memory, Grimms was much harder to read than
      Hans Andersen; in any event in those days young kids would have had little comprehension of what the stories were about.
      These days it’s different, and teenagers brought up on a diet of porn and transgenderism will certainly need a health warning.

    2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
      “Behavioral sink” is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which can result from overcrowding. The term and concept derive from a series of over-population experiments Calhoun conducted on Norway rats between 1958 and 1962.[1] In the experiments, Calhoun and his researchers created a series of “rat utopias” – enclosed spaces in which rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth. Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink” in his February 1, 1962 report in an article titled “Population Density and Social Pathology” in Scientific American[2] on the rat experiment.[3] He would later perform similar experiments on mice, from 1968 to 1972.

      Calhoun’s work became used as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general.[4]

      I always thought that a little deprivation goes a long way. These snowflakes have led too soft and comfortable a life, so they cannot cope with any adversity, real or imagined. If they freak out over fairy tales, they really are no use to society.

  74. Any fool can tell that the clocks are being put back tonight to allow an extra hour to discuss Brexit.

  75. Happy Hour thought for the day.

    In that instant when time stands still and the clocks go back, Boris should declare that we’ve left the EU without a deal.

  77. For mathematicians only-
    On page eleven of today’s Times, there is a poll showing voting intentions of the punters-
    Conservative 36 per cent
    Labour 23 per cent
    Lib Dems 18 per cent
    Brexit 12 per cent

    (Other) 12 per cent

    It doesn’t add up. Or maybe with The Times you always get an extra one percent.

    1. You always get these anomalies on opinion polls! It’s something to do with rounding up the individual scores!

      1. And there was I thinking it was rounding up unacceptable results and making folk vote again….

    2. They asked Mr. Rashid and his whole extended family replied.
      Or possibly they ran it in Peterborough.

  78. I often enjoy reading book reviews; if possible I then choose books for our son that I know he will let me borrow!
    This one told me about a WWI event of which I was in complete ignorance.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/first-world-war-siege-took-800000-lives-havent-heard/

    This First World War siege took 800,000 lives – so why haven’t we heard more about it?
    Julian Evans reviews The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyśl by Alexander Watson

    “A blockade is a time-machine as much as a physical weapon. Time drives unstoppably forwards, but this classic tactic of siege warfare brutally levers that momentum into reverse.

    In January 1915, as the military command of Przemyśl (say “Pshémishluh”) ordered the butchering of another 3,500 horses to keep the city alive, its citizens felt that time itself was in retreat.

    Muffled riders and ragged soldiers huddling around campfires in the snow resembled figures in scenes from the Napoleonic Wars a century earlier. The demise of money, and the spread of barter, inspired some to cast much further back. “At present we live as if in prehistoric times,” observed the town newspaper.

    Yet Przemyśl’s ruin two months later was, inevitably, the result of time’s onward march. A fortress since the 10th century, at the outbreak of the First World War it was Austria-Hungary’s main eastern bulwark against Russia: more than 24 miles in circumference, with 37 stone forts around its perimeter, it was a military jewel, an imperial power-chip, a propaganda behemoth. And, as Alexander Watson shows in his revelatory, haunting account of its seven-month siege, utterly out of date.

    Most anglophone readers will know little about the First World War’s eastern front, with our gaze fixed on the homicidal attrition of the trenches in France and Belgium.

    Yet the war in Galicia, the region that straddled modern south-east Poland and west Ukraine, was a locus of equally savage conflict. The struggle to defend Przemyśl and relieve it cost 800,000 casualties, and arguably contributed as much to the nationalism and totalitarianism that propelled the world into another war 20 years later.

    One of the many strengths of Watson’s book is that by gathering a massive armoury of sources, including German and Polish (a quarter of his book is taken up with notes and bibliography), he brings the suffocating, cataclysmic siege burningly alive. The story is told from both the strategic point of view (Austro-Hungarian and Russian) and the domestic.

    At first, through September and October 1914, the fortress blocked the Russian advance, letting the Habsburg forces recover from early defeat (they were led by generals of swaggering pretension and stupidity). But Przemyśl’s resistance through the harsh winter was doomed to fail: artillery technology had advanced at a speed that its fortifications could not keep up with.

    The garrison’s 130,000 defenders, mainly middle-aged reservists, suffered claustrophobic shock as they sheltered inside the echoing stone forts under the Russians’ carpet bombardment. In the interval trenches between the forts “the value of our lives sunk to zero,” one Hungarian infantry lieutenant wrote.

    Inside the citadel itself, between bombardments, garrison and citizens distracted themselves with sex or fantasies of food. Women of all classes were forced to sell one for the other.

    The city’s children suffered disproportionately from starvation. One Polish boy, 10 years old during the siege, recalled 60 years later the utter elation of coming home with a warm baked loaf and the “great sadness” of returning without.

    In mid-January 1915 the fortress’s Hungarian Honvéd units attempted to break out and were beaten back. At the end of the month General Conrad von Hötzendorf, the incompetent, narcissistic chief of the Habsburg general staff, ordered an insane offensive across the Carpathians to relieve the fortress. Soldiers froze to death at 2,500ft in -20ºC (-4F) temperatures as they slept.

    “Religious souls visualise hell as a blazing inferno with burning embers and intense heat,” an artillery colonel commented.

    “The soldiers fighting in the Carpathian Mountains during that first winter of the war know otherwise.”

    The figures are staggering: 670,000 lost in the attempt to relieve Przemyśl. The consequences likewise: in Watson’s words, Conrad actually destroyed his own Habsburg field army. Another of Watson’s strengths is that he shows how the fortress’s total defeat was no accidental fiasco, but a monument to masculine vanity and entitlement: 61 years old at the outbreak of war, General Conrad was besotted with the beautiful, married Gina von Reininghaus, half his age.

    Through four years of war, he visited the front only three times. All his major wartime decisions turned on his desire to impress von Reininghaus. In the effort to do so, he arguably sacrificed an empire. Reading Watson’s book, I realised how much I would love to watch a film version of it, directed by Werner Herzog or Francis Ford Coppola: a salutary on-screen ballet of destruction, a Fitzcarraldian megalomaniac folly which the word “epic” would entirely undersell.

    It will have been clear to anyone observing events in Ukraine in the past decade that central Europe is fated, or damned, to be a buffer between West and East. The 20th century’s “drizzle of empires falling through the air”, to use Churchill’s words, intensified that historic pressure on central Europe’s peoples; The Fortress shows all too depressingly how the war in Galicia’s bloodlands foreshadowed the coming exterminatory violence of Hitler and Stalin against Europe’s mingled Poles, Ukrainians and Jews.
    During the siege, Polish nationalism spiked, Jews were scapegoated and when Russia took the fortress in March – temporarily, before Germany retook it in May for the rest of the war – they ethnically cleansed 17,000 Jews from Przemyśl in the largest forced removal of a population by Russian armies from occupied soil.

    “The sound of shattering”, which the novelist Joseph Roth describes in The Radetzky March, signalling the end of Austria-Hungary, also signalled the start of Europe’s broken faith with its people for the next 30 years.

    British historical perspective on the Great War still tends to be from the Allies’ side. Alexander Watson made his name as a historian with his much-praised Ring Of Steel, viewing the conflict from the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

    Now he has written another superb account of the Central Powers’ war – which by any measure of suffering, savagery and incompetence was no different from the Allies’ – and a rivetingly detailed drama of life under siege (which has deservedly won the Wolfson History Prize).

    It is excellent history, a marvellously readable, though tragic, story of its time and of how the clock can be made to turn backwards under siege conditions; and in its account of the Habsburg commanders’ unshakable vanity, philandering and cockiness it has plenty of modern resonances as a parable of arrogant exceptionalism, imperial conceit and perilous isolationism.’

  80. Mr Johnson insisted Britain could still leave the EU on October 31. He said: ‘We’re in a situation now in which under the terms of the surrender Act which was passed by Parliament, it is up to the EU to decide whether or not we stay in the EU.”

    It has emerged that France is leading calls for the UK to leave within the next two weeks after Boris Johnson lost crucial votes in Parliament, leaving the decision over a delay to EU leaders.

    Maintenant nous avons le tick de l’horloge Française!

    Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/25/france-wants-britain-eu-within-two-weeks-brexit-fatigue-kicks-10979784/?ito=cbshare

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/

    Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/26/opposition-mps-plot-to-force-second-referendum-vote-next-week-10987061/?ito=cbshare

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/

  81. What on earth is the point of copying and pasting great long sections of books or other articles?. Is it to show us that the paster is culurally aware or what ?

    “Julian Evans reviews The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyśl by Alexander Watson”

      1. And you have our thanks, Anne. One doesn’t have to expand the comment. If it looks interesting, I copy the link “share” and paste it in a new tab for later.

    1. Well Monday afternoon is when things may kick off but who knows. Labour & the Lib-Dem’s are in a bit of a catch 22 position. The General Election but the EU will not make a decision until the result of this vote is known. The debate kicks off at 14:30 and we have no idea as to what the EU do., It clearly will make a difference as to what way the EU will play it otherwise they would not need to wait for the result

      It could be an interesting day tomorrow or then again it may not. There are so many twists and turns in this saga anything can happen

  84. Apologies if it has already been posted. The Barclays have put the DT and ST up for sale. [BBC News]

  85. Don’t do what I used to do.

    Read that the clocks go back at 2am.
    Set the alarm for 2am.
    Get up at 2am and reset the clocks, including the alarm.
    Get woken up a second time when the alarm went off again an hour later.

          3. Certainly sounds like one of those overly precise approaches that our Germanic friends seem to delight in – or are required to do.

            Orders, orders vich must be obeyed at all times vitout qvestion!

    2. Ummm, that takes a special kind of oddness.

      Still, it could be worse.

      You might be Bill Thomas.

        1. By that standard you must be one of the sanest people on here, you’re certainly one of the daftest.

          };-O

    3. Yes, but you did not, as I did, turn up for church when everyone else was coming out. Being daft in private is one thing, but being a public idiot in front of dozens of friends, acquaintances and onlookers is something else again.

      1. Surely that must have been in Spring? When the clocks went forward, so that you were late…

      2. The fortunate thing about being of a certain vintage is that there were no i-phones around to capture for posterity the things that make our teeth curl when we think back on them.

        “Whew,” I often say when I reminisce.

    1. If only that clip were true, instead of the reality of the top Civil Servants and MP’s bowing down to do the EU’s bidding.

    2. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, instead the EU has set us against the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish, London against the North, Region against region.

    1. Cracking scripts.
      If only they were compulsory viewing for all EU politicians and heads of state.

      1. Yo sos

        You are making the assumption that politicians can:

        Read
        Comprehend
        Understand Satire
        Care about UK
        Do other than feather their own nests
        Giva a danm about UK

  92. ‘The parents of a Vietnamese woman feared to be among 39 migrants found dead in a lorry in Essex have said she was fooled into paying people smugglers £30,000 for a ‘VIP’ trip to the UK after being told it was “a safe route”.
    A human rights worker in Vietnam in contact with Ms Pham’s family revealed she made the perilous journey because they were in debt and she was desperately trying to help them.
    “She had just returned from Japan where she was working to try and pay off the debt. And that was not enough and so she looked for a better future,” she told the BBC.
    Her family have now said she paid people smugglers £30,000 to travel to the UK via China “in search of a better life”.
    Her father Pham said: “I’ve lost both my loved one and my money. The smugglers said that this was a … safe route, that people would go by airplane, car … if I had known she would go by this route, I would not have let her go.”
    He and his partner, who make around $400 a month between them, scraped together the money to pay for their daughter to travel to the UK.’

    Is it just me, or is something sounding not quite right here?

    3. Something certainly smells,when will we read of the parents arrest for facilitating illegal immigration??

      1. Pham and his partner earn $400 a month between them, yet managed to scrap together 30,000pounds to pay for this? Something certainly smells here.

        1. I haven’t been paying much attention to this as I thought it a simple people smuggling operation but I’m beginning to suspect some sort of Government involvement. The police cannot tell the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese? Really? I’m no orientalist but I would have thought it obvious.

          1. The mobile phones of the corpses would surely supply some clues. If our police thought to look at anything other than the epicanthic fold.

        2. lEts assume they can live on a $150 a month whiCh is unlikely that would take them 10 years

    4. £30,000 @$1.25 = $37,500

      $400/month less say $100 living expenses = $300

      $37,500 / 300 = 125 months = 10.42 years repayment period (and that’s with NO interest)

      Yes, it doesn’t sound anything like quite right.

      1. The daughter, however many punters she would be forced to accept, would never clear that debt.
        Her pimps would make sure of that.
        And she would also be charged for the drugs they would get her hooked on to.

        1. An up vote for the comment that really should be a down vote for the principle.

          Very sad, but very true.

  94. Evening, all. Thank goodness we go back onto proper time early tomorrow morning. We have had lots of flooding here. I wonder whether I’m going to be able to fulfil my commitments tomorrow as I don’t have a 4×4!

      1. Pretty much all over. Whitchurch-Nantwich Rd is closed (and the lake at Nantwich has overflowed), Tilstock is flooded in parts and Wem affected. Battlefield roundabout is a lake, Hadnall is awash, Tenbury’s river has burst its banks, Shrewsbury is expecting flooding overnight and Clun has been cut in two because the river has risen too high. Over the border, the Whitchurch-Wrecsam Rd is barely passable at Bangor-is-y-Coed and in Cheshire the flood on the Bradley-Malpas Rd is too deep to ford. To cap it all, the path in front of my studio turned into a lake and I needed to wear my wellies to wade through. It rained solidly for 24 hours.

          1. Absolutely perfect 🙂 The trains have been cancelled as well. I forgot to mention that the A41 is flooded at Bolesworth and there was a head on at Tern Hill because it seems somebody drove into deep water too fast and lost control. Several cars have been abandoned and the fords (not the cars) are impassable.

          2. Most people have no idea of the power of water. You dont need a lot of water to lose control of a car and if it is flowing water you can get swept away quite easilly

  95. I’ve been thinking of what we might like to see in the next Government’s manifesto (which would be legally binding):

    1. Leave the EU under WTO rules
    2. Remove the Supreme Court and re-instate the Law Lords
    3. Reduce Parliament to 300 seats
    4. Only Hereditaries in the Lords
    5. Strict border controls (commission 500 cutters to enforce and check fisheries)
    6. Australian rules for immigrants (points-based on qualifications (needed and checked) and age)
    7. Strict limits on immigrant families (to be further detailed)
    8. Illegal immigrants returned immediately to the country of origin. If indeterminate to Somalia.
    9. Massive reduction in benefits and only based on contributions
    10. NHS treatment only to contributors
    Oh – 11. Outlaw Common Purpose and harrow the police and education system (no Student Loans)

      1. I wasn’t aware that it had gone away. English law at least, is based on precedence – which the Scots don’t like as they know they have so many old crimes to hide.

        1. The Lisbon Constitution, Maastricht Treaty etc are the introduction of the Napoleonic Code into the U.K. Common enables us to do whatever we like unless there is a law forbidding it. That’s why the US Constitution can be written on 8 foolscap pages and the Lisbon Constitution takes 600 pages.
          I know you know this but I get so bloody annoyed at our Parliament wanting to give it all away.

          1. You mean of course the Lisbon Treaty…

            Lisbon Treaty: Only a Constitutional Document
            The Lisbon Treaty carries within itself several features which firmly indicate that it is not meant to be construed as a formal/defining document of constitution of the EU.
            The Lisbon Treaty v The Constitution of Europe – LawTeacher
            https://www.lawteacher.net › example-essays › the-lisbon-treaty

          2. Yes it was renamed the Lisbon Treaty as it was decided not helpful to call it the constitution as it might frighten people. The result and wording are probably identical.

    4. Hardly any of these illegals are coming from war zones. The UN and EU and charities and politicians are creating a highly dangerous and toxic situation where they are in effect saying anyone is welcome to come to the EU you just hve to make your own way and if you do make it you will be allowed to stay
      The situation now is dangerously out of control and things potentially could kick of big time

  96. Extinction Rebellion tried to protest at Sizewell but security staff stopped them. Pretty daft as well as Sizewell is zero carbon in addition the UK climate change committe say that 40% has to be reilable and avialable on demand and not dependent on wind or sunshine

    1. The good thing, like the MOD Police, those guarding Nuclear sites carry, and are authorised, to us firearms

      Breaking in and saying I am EB/XB will not stop you getting shot

      2. Deep in Silicon Valley there is a facility that manages and “steers” satellites for the government. Not too much overt security, in fact it looks fairly normal except for the “Use of Deadly Force Authorized” signs. And all those satellite dishes of course…

  97. I know it’s early (relatively) and we have an extra hour tomorrow but I’ve been up late for too many nights and I think I need a few early nights to get back into some semblance of normality so, Good night and God bless, one and all.

      1. In Colchester you might lose an hour, being on Roman time but I have gained one, though it matters not because, being retired, I can sleep whenever I like or, as now, answer your post at 03:39 GMT.

        1. NtN: Please see my reply to grumpy grey’s 9 am (GMT) post on Sunday to explain my madness last night. Once again, my apologies for being totally and utterly confused.

          Signed: Elsie Bloodaxe, aka Confused of Colchester.

          1. Dear Elsie, there is no need to apologise, easy mistake to make – and I was only joshing about Roman clocks.

          2. You are in good company, NtN. Even Shakespeare wrote (in Julius Caesar) “Hark, the clock strikes twelve!”. (I may have got the wrong hour but couldn’t be bothered to look it up.)

  98. My main concern, is what is Boris upto, on an extremely good day for England (at the Rugby World Cup) when bad news can be buried by the cart load.

    Thinks back to how SATAN operated

    1. He has a partner years younger than himself, numerous children , a father, brother and sister , nearly an ex wife … I do hope he is reading that enormous manual and dissecting it .. and praying that we don’t have any snow in early December or a flu outbreak.

  99. Now for something different:

    SOMETHING EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW…….

    On July 8, 1947, witnesses claim a spaceship with five aliens aboard crashed on a sheep-and-cattle ranch outside Roswell, New
    Mexico, an incident they say has been covered up by the military.

    On March 31, 1948, almost nine months after that day, Al Gore was born.

  102. HAPPY HOUR – My idea of bliss – What’s yours?

    Curled up on the sofa with a glass of sherry or two, a dish of olives and an old movie….preferably classic film noir.
    Fave ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, playwright Terrence Rattigan starring Vivienne Leigh,Kenneth More and Eric Portman.

    Wot’s not to like on a grey, wet Saturday when the clocks go back and dark evenings beckon……..

    1. After finishing my afternoon swim, getting a glass of red and watching the hares, while the sun is setting on a warm summer evening.
      Yep, definitely bliss.

    2. Today 40 minutes of Bliss occurred when, after a morning rehearsal with 150 choristers, we sang various movements from Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man in St Martin’s in the Field to an audience who’d simply wandered in off the street….

    3. sweetie –

      Are the ‘dark evenings’ very swift in Cornwall?

      Or, is ‘The Deep Blue Sea’ an incredibly short movie?

      Or, do you have incredibly large sherry schooners?

      xx

    5. A relaxing evening, after a nice salmon dinner with a cold bottle of Mersault! plus good conversation with gentle, quiet jazz in the background.

  105. The Saxon Queen is insignificant and of no influence but she
    hopes to keep the history of this great island fresh by her
    presence and she thrashed lefties with that knowledge at every
    moment. The Anglo Saxons will not cower, ever.

  106. The driver of a lorry containing 39 bodies found in Essex has been charged with manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people.

    The Met at their best

    A man kills a policeman on London Bridge and the Asssistant Commissioner locks the doors to his cars and tells his driver “Get us out of here”
    It is not a terrorist attack

    A (white) driver takes over towing a Trailer, drives it for approx 30 minutes and has the book thrown at him.

    If he is guilty of any of the offences ,AC White Feather is guilty of cowardice, deserting a fellow officer, dereliction of duty, malfeasance ib Public Office.

    The driver is the one who reported the ‘occurence’ to the police.

    Go for the little man: do not investigate the real crime.

    I despair

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/26/essex-lorry-deaths-driver-charged-39-counts-manslaughter-conspiracy/

    1. It has the same embarrassment for the establishment as the child grooming gangs, it will all be washed over and we will be fed fake news.

    2. He must have known it was refrigerated..but I still think it is all very odd… I had bad dreams last night .. claustrophobic horror.. The graphic news was so disturbing , it was difficult to not imagine the terrible events that these people had succumbed to .

        1. I remember a group of us at RNH Haslar were invited on board an older submarine at HMS Dolphin .. forget which one , but what an experience … and anyone who moans about cramped STUDENT accommodation as we have read about in the press recently should experience what you have just mentioned .. mess decks.. even Moh slept on a mess deck when he was a cadet officer , in hammocks on HMS Torquay in the year dot !

      3. Remember the trailer came over unaccompanied. Allhe did was pick up the trailer from the port. Whether he was involved or not who knows. The police seemed to have acted with remarcable spped. Have they though got any real evidence he was involved? Who knows

    4. Cynic’s eye view.

      Open the door for them all to run away; they can’t.

      Next best alternative: call the emergency services. Deny everything.

        1. Agreed, up to a point.

          If he really was part of a people smuggling racket then he is most certainly as responsible as everyone in the chain.

          2. Probably so, but I very much doubt this was his first run, unless he really was very unlucky.

          6. But I bet that couple that owns the haulage business, plus some of their “contractors” will be in the dock before too long. The “top dogs” are probably back in the Far East counting their ill-gotten gains.

          7. If the “trail” is true, they sold it on, but if it was my game I might well look at that as a good cover story.

          11. Well if the reports are right he has been charged with manslaughter but I cannot see how that charge will stick. All he did was pick the trailer up from the port and take it to a business park a journey of less than 30 minutes. Now unless they can prove they dies during that 30 minute journey and I doubt they can he cannot be guilty of manslaughter. I suspect they were already dead. I am surprised the police made charges before they have the post mortem results

          12. So the people smugglers will be easy to track down , because the poor bereft parents will be in debt to them.. and they will want their money?

          14. Yose mean a bit like the Concursvative Party with Brexit

            Some are more responsible than others.

            Did he break the TIR seal

            Was there evidence the trailer had already been opened once

            He did wrong, but, the Buck MUST NOT stop with him

      2. Odd that he collected the trailer and drove to a nearby business park and then opened the doors. Job done, except that the occupants did not scarper.

      3. A definite maybe – it certainly fits what facts we know. The charge certainly indicates that his story is suspect at least.

      4. Why though would you choose to let them out at a busy business park that makes no sense

      5. I wonder, if there is any CCTV of the area and if any cars in the area which made a rapid exit left, when the bodies were found

        I just mentioned this, as I doubt if the Met have checked.

        How you 39 ‘incomers’ know where to go?

  107. Ranking New Zealand’s World Cup sides: How this vintage compare to predecessors

    Below the line comments on the above

    A better comparison would have been about their ruthlessness to win tight game, cheating, dirty play, injuring star players on opposite sides (Umaga on Brian O’Driscoll)

    Now the All Blacks have never won a world cup with TV Match Officlals keeping an eye on them, so if the game against England is tight ,

    if you look at the 2011 final with both eyes impartially open. You had it all, cheating, dirty play and injuring star players on opposite sides … some say payback for 2007 but if Barnes then didn’t see a forward pass, Joubert ignored that night constant blatant infringements especially in rucks, with Mc Caw always on the wrong side and even falling fist closed on the face of Parra who had to leave the field permanently.

    As I said earlier Nigel did not follow the script

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-world-cup/2019/10/26/new-zealand-rankings-rugby-world-cup-squads-players-all-blacks/

  109. A people smuggler has laughed off the fate of the 39 migrants found dead in a shipping container, saying: ‘It is the luck of the draw.’ The British-based trafficker made the cruel comment as he offered to sneak an undercover reporter into the UK using the same route which ended in such tragedy last week. Separately, Maurice Robinson, the 25-year-old lorry driver who went to collect the container, was last night charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people.

    Just hours after news of the appalling discovery of the bodies last week, our reporters discovered that a UK-based Albanian using the pseudonym ‘Kace Kace’ was offering to help smuggle migrants into the country.

    The Mail on Sunday has established that he is, in fact, called Kastrijot Ahmati, center, and lives in Walthamstow, North East London. He claims to have been illegally smuggled into the UK in the back of a lorry himself.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7617399/Sickening-people-trafficker-offers-smuggle-undercover-reporter-London-14k.html

    B###dy Albanians!

    1. He cannot (and will not) be charged in a court. in UK with Manslaughter. but if he is, his Legal Aid (paisd by us) lawyer will get him off.

      His bosses will still avoid prosecution, as they are like the Met, bullet proof, well the senior officers are, even in if South American peasants are ordered to be shot (like what Ms Dick did)

    2. Why are illegal immigrants and gang-leaders like this one allowed to stay in the country ? Is it something to do with the EU and ‘uman rites that prevents us from behaving sensibly ?

      2. Some years ago some Albanians escaped from their impoverished country into a prosperous region of Yugoslavia called Kosovo. After a while they caused a bit of a rumpus and managed to expel the local population of Serbs and then they established an EU puppet state.
        Said Albanians then described themselves as Kosovan refugees and spread out across the rest of the EU.

    1. They can’t buy alcohol, tobacco or get married without their parents’ permission. So why should they have the right to vote?

    3. Not long ago in the wake of bearded muslim men coming in as child refugees we were told the brain doesn’t mature until mid 20’s.

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