755 thoughts on “Sunday 22 December: The SNP has no mandate to take the whole of Scotland out of the Union”

          1. Your great expectations that I might, for once, avoid repetitions of the themes of some of my posts will probably be disappointed.

    3. Good morning (or rather afternoon) Joseph B Fox. May I take this opportunity to tag on to your first post of the day and thank all those kind NoTTLers who wished me a Happy Birthday yesterday. I had a really great and happy day and am very grateful to you all for your good wishes.

      I wish you all a really great time over the holidays and I hope that the next year will bring you all you desire. For myself, I am now taking a bit of a break until the New Year, although I will pop in from time to time to read your comments.

      Lots of love from Elsie Bloodaxe (Mrs).

  3. Good morning all – a huge gale during the night 75 mph gusts.

    Risking going out for a loaf.

      1. Good grief, am I a man or a mouse?

        Ackshally, the gale has dropped a bit – though still very windy – but ridiculously mild. Just the weather for germs to breed rapidly….as I am beginning to discover. {:¬((

  6. Today’s major issue – dripping teapots.

    Sir,
    Does anyone own a teapot that does not drip?
    All my teapots do, staining my lovingly made tea cosies.
    Jacqueline Davies
    Faversham, Kent

    Well Jacqueline, men of my age understand your problem.

      1. We tested the pouring of quality of teapots before purchase in a French supermaket. The sales assistant was nonplussed.

        1. The French do not understand “tea” and may think the Brits obsess over it. But not so badly as the Japanese. We don’t have formal ceremonies or build Tea houses, even if with Marlon Brando playing playing a Japanese (taboo these days: “Tea House of the August Moon”).
          Personally I regret the passing of the transport cafes where you could always get good strong tea…. I am not sure but there may be one or two left somewhere in the country. There used to be two on the main road near our house, side by side “The Halfway House” and “The Red Arrow”. Long gone and the land redeveloped into one of those mini rural shopping things.

      2. Morning Johnny, My solution is a cheap 50p [ oh dear possible cheeky replies] Sainsbury 2 pint plastic measuring jug and a strip of Kitchen tissue. Makes the job easier and prevents collateral damage.

    3. Doesn’t the letter’s editor like me .. I never manage to have a letter of mine included.

      Perhaps a fellow Nottler could write an equally daft letter similar to the one above , for me … Then I could test the water and see if it gets printed .. I expect my name is too cheeky … I have been cocking a Snook at the DT for too many years ..they probably hate my name!

      1. Morning T-B -I have tried several times over the years but with no success. I need to add Bishop, Wing Commander [retired] or something impressively similar to my title. Perhaps we Nottlers could concoct an erudite letter to the editor with multiple signatures.

        1. Good morning to you..

          Is the weather foul in N Yorks?

          Dry morning down here but not for long.. Water meadows are flooded and some roads a bit of a mess.

          I think a letter from all of us to the DT , Henry Root fashion would be good fun … just to test whether it gets printed .

          I have written letters so many times .. and I am sure they have blacklisted me . I have even used Moh’s Lt Cdr retired…. and Captain( civilian ) .. to no avail . Perhaps the editor hates Dorset folk .

          New year resolution all of us must do that..

          Grizz has had a few printed .. but no one else that I am aware of.

          2. It has stopped raining but very damp outside at the moment. We have escaped the worst of the wet weather but our farmers are struggling. The Romanby Golf Course struggles to keep al 18 holes open as a river which runs through the course, backs up the drains when full and some of the fairways are flooded or sodden.The next few days are promising weatherwise.

          3. The Romanies have a golf course?

            Seems a bit out of character, but its a strange old world.

            Where do they put the caravans, wrecked cars etc.?
            Oh, sorry, that wasn’t a misprint, there really is a Romanby Golf course?

        2. Get someone to post it from Tunbridge Wells.

          Tunbridge Wells, mind, not “Royal Tunbridge Wells”.

      1. Can we claim that Rastafarians have been guilty of “cutural appropriation” when we see them wearing tea cosies on their heads?
        And for a bonus point: why is cultural appropriation such a one way street?

  7. SIR – Before Scotland goes independent, could we ask where the border between Northumbria, Cumbria and Scotland is to be – and are we to resume the Border wars?

    The original kingdom of Northumberland stretched from the Firth of Forth to the Humber (hence the name Northumberland). May we have this land back?

    Barbara Musgrove
    Daventry, Northamptonshire

    2. Her letter might have more weight if she knew the difference between Northumbria (which no longer exists) and Northumberland (which does). There was never a ‘kingdom of Northumberland’.

    3. Bring back the reivers.

      (WTF is up with Disqus? For the second day running it tells me I can’t upload images until I’m logged in. I AM LOGGED IN!!!!! It allows me to upload films and music but not pictures; is it in cahoots with Google in some money making scam?)

    1. ‘Morning, Belle.

      As I am a guest on C. Day I’ve been told I’m having beef or lamb – I hope the latter, as mein Host does it really well.

      That leaves chicken baked with fennel & onions for C. Eve (a recipe brought back from Tuscany) & maiale a latte on Boxing Day.

      Not even a turkey feather in sight. 😉

        1. She had some of my salmon last night. She’ll have some of the chicken & some of the pork. She likes foie gras too.

          2. Nah, I’m ‘aving Prosecco*, so she’ull stick ter wor’ah.

            *Was getting some Champagne in this morning, but discovered while rumaging enough P left over from the Summer to see me through.

      2. Morning Peddy.

        We wondered whether to have lamb , but beef it will be .

        Golf club do will be red mullet for me etc… hope it is cooked nicely .. I couldn’t face the pigs in blanket and stuffing malarky .. Moh is easy to please, but I feel that I could do with a change , and something lighter .

        By the way, I loved your teapot link , what beautiful unusual china ..where and how can I buy things like that ?

        1. There is a shop in Bridge St., Cambridge but if you Google ‘Bunzlau Pottery’ you’ll find a list of British importers.

        2. Morning, Maggie. We have spent the last two Christmases at a dog hotel in Malham Cove with wonderful walks in the Dales. However, after languishing for hours on the M6 car park after Christmas we have had to change plans.

          We are going to stay at a dog friendly hotel in Chagford, Devon. I will report back. We wish you and all Nottlers a very Happy Christmas.
          ☃️🌲🍷😀

          1. Have a good one, Delboy.
            Particularly interested in dog friendly hotels, so please give us a report.

          4. Merry christmas to you and your dear wife and woofle ..

            It is pretty flooded around these parts .. I do hope you have a good journey and a lovely Christmas .

      3. I think turkey is over-rated, but as I also believe in democracy, I bow to the majority opinion.
        I’d rather have goose.
        As it’s only once a year, I go with the flow.

        1. ‘Morning, Anne.

          I detest turkey. My cousin in Norwich used to serve up slices of something resembling balsa wood after it had spent hours in the Aga.

          We sometimes had goose in Dorset, or sometimes a baked salmon.

          1. We get our turkey from a local chap and I always go for the dark meat.
            Turkey breast is the invention of the Devil. It matters not what you do, the meat is tasteless.

        2. I’ve never been keen on turkey. We had it when I was young as there were always a lot of us around the table, what with grandparents, aunts, uncles etc visiting. I don’t think I’ve eaten turkey now since about 1975.
          Duck and beef for us this year (although lamb is my fave)

        4. We’ve had goose for the last two Christmases but this year Best Beloved has found and purchased a giant chicken. It was so fresh that they only cut of the head and feet and gutted it, while she waited in the farm-shop.

          Serving up lamb-shanks for her daughter and grand-children on Christmas Eve. I’m the cook for that ‘cos I have a great recipe that works; I shall start on that tomorrow and allow the browned shanks to marinade over night.

        5. People generally only cook turkey at Christmas. They are also not used to cooking such a large bird. Invariably they overcook it and it becomes dry.

          Brine the turkey for 24 hours and don’t use recommended cooking times. Use a thermometer.

          It also helps to remove the legs and just roast the crown with the stuffing cooked separately.

      1. No , not twin cars … Renault and Passat.. that was taken years ago.. son and Moh’s cars .

        The turkeys appeared from a farm up the drive way .. and they pecked at their reflections causing lots of scratches .. they also pecked away at the garage door.. They were very sweet things .. tame and amiable the cock bird showed his feathers .. he was protective of his ladies. I

        I could easily become vegetarian .. these creatures have such character.

  11. Morning

    SIR – Despite the SNP’s claims at the last Scottish independence referendum that the vote was “a once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity, Nicola Sturgeon wants another one.

    If the SNP believes that those who voted for the party should not be forced to stay in the Union, it must also accept that those areas that did not vote for it should not be wrenched away from the United Kingdom.

    The election results clearly demonstrate that the SNP does not speak for any of the constituencies bordering England, or for many around Aberdeen.

    Ian Wallace

    Whitley Bay, Northumberland

    SIR – The Treaty of Union, passed in 1707, was the start of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

    It has been successful for over 300 years and the SNP must see that we want it to stay that way.

    We’re better together.

    Garth Matley

    Andover, Hampshire

    SIR – Nicola Sturgeon argues that the Prime Minister has “no right” to block a second vote on Scottish independence.

    She is wrong: he has every right. The SNP has 48 seats, but these were achieved with the backing of only 45 per cent of those who voted. The other 55 per cent opted not to vote for nationalism.

    Geoff Hardstaff

    Chichester, West Sussex

    1. ‘Morning, Epi, the Fishwife also assumes that every person who voted SNP wants a second Independence referendum.

      1. Since independence is the SNP’s sole raison d’être, that probably says more about Scottish voters than it does about the Fishwife.

    2. Nicola Sturgeon often claims that Scotland is being dragged out of the EU ‘against its will.’
      She seems to have forgotten that in the run-up to the referendum, she called for what became known as a Triple Lock, whereby all four UK nations would have to vote to leave; otherwise, it could not be enacted.

      So she was advocating a position whereby a Remain-voting Scotland could keep a Leave-voting Rest-Of-The-UK in the EU. Against its will.

      She needs to be reminded of this.

  12. Morning again

    Fairer voting

    SIR – We are writing to show our support for fixing the current, deeply flawed parliamentary constituency boundaries as fast as possible.

    The existing constituencies vary enormously in size – from some in which fewer than 40,000 voters elect a Westminster MP, to others where it takes 90,000 or more. That means votes in some parts of the country are worth more than twice as much as those in others, which is neither right nor fair. Everyone’s vote should be worth the same, which means that constituencies should be equally sized.

    The Boundary Commission produced new proposals to right this wrong several years ago. They are “oven-ready”, but opposition parties have refused to let them through Parliament until now.

    Whether the existing proposals 
are used, or new ones are produced, it is essential for the health and credibility of Britain’s democracy that the current unfairly skewed system is put right, and equal-sized constituencies where everyone’s vote weighs the same are created immediately.

    John Penrose MP (Con)

    Sir Graham Brady MP (Con)

    Chairman, 1922 Committee

    Iain Duncan Smith MP (Con)

    Liam Fox MP (Con)

    Lord Pickles (Con)

    Damian Green MP (Con)

    1. The Electoral Boundaries Commission came up with there final proposal a year ago., We dont want to reinvent the wheel again they should use those proposals

      What could be done after these changes go through rather than constantly having to tinker with boundaries due to population change MP’s should have a weighted vote to say one decimal place. So if the Average UK constituency size is say 70.000 an MP in a Constituency with an electorate of 35,000 would get 0.5 of a vote. On with a constituency of 140.000 would get 2 votes (Note the figures I have used are not real but just used as an example. If the boundary commissions proposes come in the constituency I think would be within +/-5% of the average well at the timer they did it it may be out more now but weighted voted would resolve that

    2. While we are at it, we should consider reducing the number of MPs and reforming the Lords back to the hereditaries (to include only the Law Lords and the Bishops).

      1. The Boundaries commission reports reduce the number of MP’s to 600 that still to many though 400 to 500 is probably nearer the number needed
        The Lords should be between 200 and 300 Peers . Remember the Lords do not get involved in Scottish, NI or Welsh legislation

        The Lords just deals with UK wide and English legislation so it should have shrunk with devolution but is has not

      2. The 2018 boundary commission report does provide for 600 MPs and its implementation is simply via the HoC ticking the box to go ahead. But we should not mix that up with other matters which then simply allow the issues to be kicked back into the long grass via a ‘commission’ for another ten years.
        The reason for the continued feet dragging is that some honourable member’s seats would become marginals, or disappear. I believe that includes Priti Patel’s and possibly the seat of the member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip…

    3. It was Clegg, that spiteful and nasty little fornicator who stopped it passing out if sheer pique.

      Few people understand just how disgusting this inadequate little piece of sub-human excrement really was.

  14. SIR – Having become a great-grandfather (twice) recently, I am at a loss as to how the youngsters should address me when they start learning 
to talk.

    It was easy to be a grandad or grandpa, but can one expect a tiny tot to grapple with “great-grandpa” or “great-grandad”?

    Stanley Grundy

    Porton, Wiltshire

    1. Never fear, Stan – they will find their own name for you – whatever you want.

      My nieces called their grand-father “Granfer”; my sons called him “Guppy”; my grandchildren call me “Bupa” .

      2. Morning Bill

        Bupa?… ha haaaa

        Our dear elderly 85 year old friend still reminiscences about his long long ago Granfie.. may be an old Dorset colloquialism.

        1. Morning, Maggie. Any luck with fooling the DT letters into opening this morning?

          Whatever I did yesterday doesn’t work today!

          1. Me neither … how mean of them and what a nuisance . I was looking forward to being ahead of the game this morning .

            I went back to the letter page yesterday , and guess what .. it had reverted back to premium ..

        2. Morning Maggie. Our generation would agree.

          SIR – It is time to stop contracting out nurse training to universities and re-establish hospital-based training schools.

          Trainee nurses would become part of the ward establishment – and they would get paid. That was the system when I trained, and there was no shortage of nurses or entrants. You can spot the downturn following the introduction of Project 2000.

          Ken Orme

          Liverpool

          1. SIR – The Royal College of Nursing suggests that providing bursaries will encourage school leavers to apply for a nursing degree, but it doesn’t explain why such a degree is necessary in the first place.

            In the Seventies I taught Higher National Certificate physics in a night school. Every one of my pupils was better prepared for industry than someone with a BSc and four years of lolling around campus.

            A trainee nurse should have five GCSEs, compassion, common sense and a willingness to learn. On-the-job training, split between the classroom and wards, should be free and last three years. Nurses could then sit the state-registered exam and, after a year, decide if they want to tackle the extra training needed to specialise. At this stage a degree might be relevant.

            Dr John Cameron

            St Andrews, Fife

    2. Surprisingly well I expect. My grandchildren easily mastered great grandad Freddy for my father in law.

    4. Take a leaf out of the Swedes’ book, Stanley: you’re a farfarfar!

      Far – father
      Farfar – grandfather
      Farfarfar – great grandfather.

  15. December 22 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

    Have I Got Bad News for You, BBC. The paying public reckons your values stink
    Rod Liddle

    Isee that the BBC has decided to make Nish Kumar one of the regular presenters of the Radio 4 comedy programme The News Quiz. I suppose it thinks he ticks a box — not for his ethnicity but because, like seemingly every other comedian employed by the corporation, he is about as funny as kidney stones or gas gangrene of the shin.

    Clearly, his appointment shows that Auntie is not unduly worried by this new Conservative government, with its enormous majority and a prime minister who has hinted that a refusal to pay the licence fee should perhaps be decriminalised — a consequence, at least partly, of his disaffection with the broadcaster’s patent and demonstrable bias.

    Kumar was recently jeered, booed and pelted with a bread roll at a Lord’s Taverners charity event for his asinine pro-remain and anti-Conservative “quips”. But the BBC doesn’t care, or if it does, it thinks it is a bastion of resistance to fascism.

    If the government does decriminalise not paying the licence fee, I — along with about 12m others — will not pay it, and that will be goodbye to Auntie. I watch or listen to it these days only in order to be triggered by Emily Maitlis or Mishal Husain, as a kind of self-flagellation routine when the exercise bike feels too onerous. Get rid, I reckon. Clean out those Augean stables with their 20,000 virtue-signalling metropolitan horses, perpetually whinnying about how horrid Brexit will be and how ghastly the government is.

    The former newsreader Michael Buerk recently observed that the BBC was staffed almost exclusively by public school-educated, middle-class arts graduates who had no time or sympathy for Brexit, industry, business and so on. A current newsreader, Huw Edwards, has pleaded with politicians to cease their “vitriolic” attacks on the BBC over its supposed partisanship. The BBC compliments itself that the attacks upon its breaches of neutrality come from the left as well as the right, suggesting therefore that it must be even-handed.

    Not at all. The culture of the BBC is not left wing, per se. It is instead a kind of vapid, perhaps mindless, liberalism.

    Yes, it is suffocatingly politically correct, happy to swallow every inane shibboleth of identity politics and victimhood, every axiom of liberal overreach — pro-immigration, pro-Islam but also pro every new manifestation of absurd gender politics.

    But this mindset is partly, at least, the consequence of affluence and self-interest. Thus the BBC does not have the appetite for the economic programme Labour put forward at the last election — certainly not for higher taxes. Both the left’s and right’s criticisms of the BBC happen to be correct.

    Though the Beeb may appear oblivious, this election should surely cause it problems. Until the election, we had had more than 20 years of governments that, to a greater or lesser extent, espoused the values of the liberal elite, with little dissent. The assumption at the Beeb was that this must mean we were all signed up to the programme. Not any more.

    There is growing evidence from polls that the massive shift among the working-class voters of the Midlands and the north was not simply a consequence of disdain for Jeremy Corbyn and hunger for Brexit, although Brexit may have been an important catalyst. It goes much deeper than that, into a weariness with the liberal project, not least its unveiled contempt for the values held by middle England, its absolutism when challenged, its abhorrence of patriotism.

    This was one reason, and perhaps the most important one, why Labour lost the election. Nothing to do with nationalising the utilities; it was the rest of the stuff — the stuff the BBC signs up to and disseminates, endlessly, across its enormous output. Never has the corporation been more distanced from the people who pay for its existence.

    Once Boris has sorted out the BBC, maybe he should have a go at Channel 4, which doesn’t even pretend to disguise its bias. In fairness, it was set up precisely to be a countervailing voice to the Establishment: trouble is, since its inception, the Establishment has changed hands. It now is the Establishment.

    Do you know who is giving the Channel 4 Alternative Christmas Message this year? Yup, the former Commons Speaker, John Bercow. Edgy? Exciting? It isn’t really, is it? Just a last cry from a liberal establishment that, one hopes, is in the process of being taken apart, brick by brick.

    Charles and Camilla’s official Christmas card

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Fsundaytimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F34f23f98-2400-11ea-81b4-b78674dd3224.jpg?crop=1500%2C1000%2C0%2C0&resize=600

    A plague on all your houses, Ebbsfleet
    I have a cough for Christmas. It was a present from the kind gentleman who got on my train at Ebbsfleet, sat opposite me and proceeded to hawk his lungs up every 15 seconds, with the sound our dog makes when it has swallowed a large piece of wood.

    I see there is now advice for people on aeroplanes who wish to avoid contracting illnesses: basically, sit in the window seat with the air nozzle thing turned on. Won’t do any good. Anyway, I’m now in my office annexe, barred from the house. That is what we do in our family to people who are ill: they are banished, much as happened in those plague villages in the 1300s. And it works.

    If only we might extend the idea to society. We could send those with flu, coughs and colds to Ebbsfleet — and not let them out until they are better.

    A royal yuletide to make anyone feel ill
    Mystery surrounds the Duke of Edinburgh’s sudden admission to a hospital in London for “observation”.

    We have not been told what’s wrong with the wonderful old chap and, if he is under the weather — a not unlikely scenario at the age of 98 — we wish him a swift recovery.

    But I do wonder a little if it was simply the thought of spending five days with the grandkids, mithering on about their depressions and the horrid intrusion of the media and how the world is going to end next week.

    “Get me a helicopter. Get me out of here,” may be the explanation.

    Singer’s censure is no laughing matter
    The career of the Cuban-born singer Camila Cabello is being destroyed by some social media posts made when she was 15 years old. (She is now 22.) She is accused of hideous racism.

    I had a look at some of the posts and the worst I could find was this: “Mexican and black jokes are pretty much the same. Once you heard Juan you’ve heard Jamal.”

    I can’t hear you guffawing out there, granted.

    But she didn’t even make the joke, just repeated it. At the age of 15.

    She is now doing that disgraced celeb thing and grovelling before the Twitter hordes, insisting she has spent her life fighting injustice etc.

    No, Camila, you’ve spent it making irritating R&B.

    And in any case these apologies will have no effect, because the people you are talking to are utterly beyond reason.

    1. Look at the TV so called Christmas schedule, It is drag the old garbage outt of the bin and put Christmas in front of it. So Christmas Dinner Date, Christmas Chase Christmas East Enders etc

      1. What, a return to all those Christmass specials? Morecome and Wise etc or is it special editions of Celebrity this that and the other, Big Brother etc?

    2. Never,never apologise to the loons,they take as a sign of weakness and they are right
      Like jackals they will tear you to pieces

    3. I note that the MG on Charles’ and Camilla’s Christmas car appears (from the position of their hands) to have two steering wheels.

      1. She’s grabbed the little sticky up bit at the top of MG TDs dashboards in fear of Charles’ driving.

    4. “I have a cough for Christmas. It was a present from the kind gentleman
      who got on my train at Ebbsfleet, sat opposite me and proceeded to hawk
      his lungs up every 15 seconds, with the sound our dog makes when it has
      swallowed a large piece of wood”

      Another excellent argument against HS2, and rail travel in general…

      1. And air travel too, as the cough might be virulent TB. A Xmas present from diversity. Buses? Don’t even go there.

        1. Bring back the old “Smoking or non-smoking?” options on aircraft. Once they banned smoking they did away with the air conditioning and have turned every flight into a massive petrie dish which makes sure everyone is in close proximity to the next, a reason for the diminished seat room perhaps, and thus ensure everyone is exposed. Everytime I fly I end up with some kind of virus or germ and it isn’t helped by the PVC and cholesterol meals they hand out. You pay a fortune for the tickets and they give you the worst meals on the planet. Even all inclusive holidays provide better food on a budget of less than 5 euro per person per day for all the food and drink they can consume…. and they even include Germans and Americans , once icons for over indulgence. So if they can do it for less than 5 euro, how come airlines cannot provide decent meals?

          1. For the same reason that supermarkets drive prices down. Low prices are expected. Quality drops as a result, in order to maintain or improve margins. We now fly abroad to places and the ticket costs nominally the same as it did 30 years ago, that is, it is at about one-tenth of the price we had to pay in the 60s/70s.
            There is a reason that the old newsreels show airline passengers as fairly well off. They had to be to pay the fare.
            I cannot now find it, but I did read somewhere that the cost of a flight from the US mainland to Hawaii on one of the very early flights cost just about as much as the plane.

          2. Meanwhile, in Germany, they are bemoaning the fact that air travel is declining (really?) and they blame the growth of greenie consciences.

            Of course, the real answer could be the Euro Wings (originally German Wings) makes Ryan Air and Easy jet look like luxury services and has been in a race to the bottom for some time. We made the mistake of flying with tme and they contrived for us to miss a connection and have to rebook. technically they have to refund the tax on the missed leg but try getting it from them even with the German Ombudsman involved and don’t ever expect them to reply to emails via their “contact us” web page… much like their GLS Parcel service people, a Distribution Partner of Royal mail who rival each other for who can hold onto a parcel the longest and neither of whom bother to treat their “Customer Service ” claims as anything but management mission statements i.e. never to be taken seriously.

          3. I used to get offers from Eurowings by email. They looked good, but were a bit awkward as everything goes through their German hub. Anyway we were mostly broke so we never flew with them. Luckily, it seems.

    5. Morning Citreon. A while back I thought I would miss some of the BBC’s output if the Licence fee was abolished, especially Radio 3. However, these days much of Radio 3’s output is presented by gushing young things, with grating accents, deeply anxious to know how a particular composer/ musician is feeling. I can’t for the life of me fathom why MOH insists we keep paying for the tosh. I would happy cease my DD today.

        1. Yes, according to one headline the BEEB is persecuting little old ladies with its pursuit of license fees and maybe you will get to watch what you want, even football, if they assume your other half is the guilty one and bang her up for a few years.

          This is, off course, another area, like speeding tickets, where, contrary to the rule of law as it once was, we are now assumed guilty until porven innocent…. they assume everyone has a Tv and target any addresses without a license, so much easier than the old detetcor vans, and where we are required to incriminate ourselves.

          The Beeb needs to get its house in order because these days people can credibly say they don’t watch anyomore, so much comes up on the internet now and they are behind the times…. there was a rumour they would be re-inventing the detetcpr vans top catch people watching on Ipads or watching podcasts…..

    6. R&B like Big Bill Broonzy, Sugarboy Crawford, or even Bo Diddley? Nope. R&B has become “gay”. A total perversion of language.
      Her manager should support her and tell the world to get lost.

        1. I bought a CD called “Rolling Stones beginnings – Vol 1 From Blues Boys to Playing Chess”.
          It has no Stones recordings. It has the original version of the songs that the Stones covered, as for example; “Honest I do” by Jimmy Reed, “Not Fade Away” by the Crickets, and “I’m a King Bee” by Slim Harpo. If you like that sort of thing.

  16. ‘Morning All

    Hodges on form,let;s hope they don’t listen

    “t’s time to clean house. Ditching Corbyn

    will not be enough. They all have to be driven out. He has to go.

    Momentum have to go. The whole viper’s nest has to go. Now is not the

    moment to ‘build a big tent’, it’s the moment to burn the tent to the

    ground. And then draw some clear lines amid the ashes.

    When

    asked if they would use Britain’s nuclear deterrent, the next Labour

    leader needs to say ‘yes’. When asked if they would order police to

    shoot to kill terrorists running amok on the streets of Britain, the

    next Labour leader needs to say ‘yes’. When asked if they would back

    environmental crusaders breaking the law to make their voices heard, the

    next Labour leader needs to say ‘no’.

    Then

    they need to tell their party to shut up. Shut up about the

    Palestinians. Shut up about Greta Thunberg. Shut up about Northern

    Ireland customs forms.

    And start

    listening to what people in Bolsover and Sedgefield and Barrow actually

    care about, rather than what Corbyn and his cultists have spent four

    years telling them they should care about.”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-7818039/DAN-HODGES-Labour-needs-leader-whos-prepared-kill-terrorists.html

    1. Labour is almost split down the middle by a very wide rift. Momentum Labour is London & the South East Predominantly whilst the rest of the UK is traditional Labour. Momentum Labour is probably about 20% of the Labour Electorate and traditional Labour about 80% but when you look at the Labour politicians and the Labour party membership it is the other way around and there lies the problem

    2. Morning Rik,
      These ground rules have surely got to be applied across the political card, that is to the lab/lib/con coalition party
      as is.
      Make the usage of PC / Appeasement a custodial offence.

    3. Most cats do not like to be man-handled like that and have a low-tolerance level for idiots. They also have a robust approach to teaching discipline and making sure that you don’t treat them that way twice.

  18. Mountains of plastic

    SIR – I am sceptical about companies’ attempts to tackle the problem of plastic pollution.

    When I recently ordered a few items from M&S, they arrived with an enormous amount of plastic. Four large, heavy-duty black bags were used to contain five pairs of children’s pyjamas, one polo shirt in an overlong clear plastic bag and numerous plastic coat hangers to display the pyjamas on, which are not practical to reuse.

    The bags were apparently made from recycled plastic, but I wonder how many of them will be recycled again. Multiply this amount worldwide, and what have you got? Mountains of plastic pollution.

    Jane Bloom

    Framlingham, Suffolk

    1. Quite so. We have forgotten how versatile paper can be, how wood can be used for lots of things.
      We could change back and save the planet, or we could just pay the Greta taxes.

      1. Not quite sure on his politics but he seems to be nearer to Corbyn than the typical Labour voter

    4. I hope he becomes Labour leader. We could look forward to hours of fun at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

    5. Bring it on! He can finish the job that Comrade Steptoe started – the total destruction of Labour.

  21. PETER HITCHENS: Ignorant BBC plans to rewrite Charles Dickens and put the f-word into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge – and it has no right to do so

    PUBLISHED: 01:19, 22 December 2019 | UPDATED: 01:50, 22 December 2019

    The BBC plans to rewrite Charles Dickens tonight, complete with the f-word and a scene showing a character urinating on a grave. It has no right to do so.

    It is typical of this increasingly cynical, ignorant organisation that it should put four-letter words into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, and invent gross and disturbing scenes in a drama that is bound to be seen by the young and impressionable.

    Does anyone really think the ‘watershed’ matters any more? Far better to abolish it and ask if the programme concerned deserves to be shown at all, if its makers cannot create proper drama without resorting to pornography, obscenity and violence.

    It may even be that some people will actually switch on A Christmas Carol thinking that they will get – from the modern BBC of all people – a faithful version of this great and powerful drama.

    We know, of course, that this can be done, thanks to Alastair Sim’s marvellous performance in the 1951 film Scrooge. This cleverly adapted Dickens’s story without in any way vandalising its central message or its genius.

    But most of us have been clobbered into submission by the Corporation’s revolutionaries by now. Either we take what we are given, or we know better than to watch in the first place.

    It is as if the Church of England turned St Paul’s Cathedral into a shopping mall, or the National Gallery got some Turner Prize winner to cut up its masterpieces and scrawl slogans over them.

    When we inherit treasures, they are not ours to do with as we wish. We have a duty to preserve them for those who will come after us.

    Charles Dickens invented Christmas, as it is celebrated in the entire English-speaking world. The festival we all hope for, and seldom achieve, is the one which eventually happens in A Christmas Carol.

    We want the clear frosty morning that follows the black and freezing night. We want that transformation of mean-spirited greed into generosity. We want, in short, an earthly British miracle.

    No doubt it is sentimental. Which of us is not ever sentimental? It is the other side of cruelty, and more of us are cruel than like to admit it. Dickens lived a hard and often cruel life. When he wrote A Christmas Carol, he was at a bleak moment in his career.

    He was, beyond doubt, on the receiving end of many filthy curses and saw plenty of squalor and obscenity in the seething, debauched England of the time. Much of his childhood was hellish.

    He knew, if anybody did, the maggoty underside of life. Yet he managed to describe its miseries and terrors without ever resorting to the cheap and easy trick of lavatory-wall language.

    We know in detail the grim taste of the thin gruel in Oliver Twist’s workhouse. We know the weary despair of the child set to work in the blacking factory and the shame of the debtor’s prison.

    With Dickens we go into the minds of thieves and grave-robbers, of cowards and frauds, seducers and their victims, convicts and crooked lawyers.

    He was, I think, the first author to describe that very modern type – the person who is noisily concerned about the problems of the Third World while forgetting those closer to home.

    Those who decide to read him, even now, generally find it easy to do so because of the wonderful flow of language, not academic or grand, just ordinary English rolling like a river.

    He was a genius, of the sort which appears only once in a few centuries. He could make us shout with laughter, or cry, or shock us into astonishment, by reaching into our imaginations with his own.

    As the playwright Alan Bennett once wisely said about great writing, it is as if a hand, belonging to a kind friend, has reached out from the far past and gently clasped our own.

    Dickens did not need to describe every foul detail of squalor to conjure it up. We all know what it is like.

    He needed only to hint at it. But the cultural commissars of our age think it is progress to uncover what our ancestors hid.

    They are like fools who raise some ancient evil spirit, thinking it is only a game, and then run in terror from the thing they have summoned.

    Victorians such as Dickens understood that civilisation is built on restraint, on the things we do not do or say, and on the hiding of ugliness.

    The society they created was so strong, so peaceful and so rich that we still rely on it, though I don’t think it can or will last for ever.

    But the great illusion of 50 years ago, that by removing the restraints on the grubby, the coarse and the violent, we would have a more healthy, open-minded society have turned out to be utterly wrong.

    Don’t watch this poison. Get down the old dusty book and read it instead. Its warnings and its hopes are as good as they ever were, and it will revive, in the most leathery heart, the ancient, redeeming promise of Christmas.

    Never forget that Blair was a Trotskyist too

    Looking more than ever as if he is actually mummified, and has risen from some ancient, richly decorated tomb, the Blair creature appears among us.

    Once again he is here to tell us that in fact he knows better than everyone, despite having made, in Iraq, the worst single mistake in foreign policy of the past half-century.

    Why do people still deal kindly with this person, who veers between being a vague, rambling nonentity and a raging warmonger, when not surrendering to terrorist murderers on shameful terms?

    Generally he returns among us to drivel about the European issue, forgetting that he longed for this country to join the euro, a policy almost every breathing human now realises would have been a disaster.

    But this time he has reappeared to gloat over Jeremy Corbyn’s failure and claim that Mr Corbyn’s revolutionary programme and Marxist past stopped him winning the Election.

    This is very odd. We now know from his own lips, though 99 per cent of the British media have never reported it, that Mr Blair was himself once a Trotskyist.

    He has never revealed which organisation he joined, though a close friend of his belonged to the International Marxist Group, which called for ‘Victory to the IRA’ and urged its student members to infiltrate and take over the moribund Labour Party in the 1970s, when no normal person under the age of 50 would have joined it.

    An astonishing number of Mr Blair’s Cabinet were also ‘former’ Marxists – and these are just the ones we know about.

    And, as it happens, Mr Blair was in a position to give ‘Victory to the IRA’ in his surrender to them in 1998 – the fact that it was a surrender is shown by the continued legal pursuit of British soldiers accused of crimes during the Troubles, and the effective mass pardon given to IRA killers, though people still refuse to see it.

    As for Mr Blair’s other policies – rapid integration in the EU, participation in mad foreign wars, sale of our gold reserves just before the price shot up, a gigantic splurge in welfare and NHS spending way beyond our means, fanatical pursuit of political correctness – they are a mixture of zealotry and stupidity, slightly different from Mr Corbyn’s, but not in fact that different.

    I just wish all those who managed to see the obvious Corbyn threat will one day understand the damage they allowed Mr Blair to do by praising him as the ‘moderate’ he never was.

    1. Good morning

      I think there is a BBC plot afoot to erase mellifluous voices from our memory .. the nation will soon be conversing in a patois similar to Sarth Lunnon rap , no gentleness , softness or stern well modulated tones … our language is being lost.. and sadly it is being Americanised childishly with the aggression of vituperative street speak…

      I really cannot bear what is happening .. these words are becoming everyday words .. I even said bloody hell to someone the other day … We were discussing a lost cat .. it was a distressing conversation .. and I must have said other things too , I cannot remember , but I felt uncomfortable reciprocating .

      Listening to Corbyn gurning on is also killing conversation … I am wondering whether Boris might let the F word slip if he is riled by idiots?

      1. It began, I think, with the sudden affection (affectation?) for regional dialects. OK, so BBC Scotland can have Scots accents but one of the problems in the south is advent of so many dialects intruding into our everyday life and I am sure some even exagerate their accents…. Eliza Doolittle in reverse.

        In its turn it infects the listeners…. like those X Factor contestants who speak with hideous dialects but then sing their chosen songs with an AMerican midwest accent because they are imitating the original versions. And then, one suspects, many are chosen for their dialects alone with no regard for the intellectual needs the jobs demand. One of the worst, it seems to me, is a certain Channel 4 announcer telling us what programs are coming up…. but without subtitles, who understands? Anyone?
        This is the Beeb in full blown PC mode and all around follow suit.

          1. Ah! another of those blank posts Disqus (or Firefox) is so good at.
            Now I will wonder what I have missed and lose sleep over it.

    2. “It is as if the Church of England turned St Paul’s Cathedral into a shopping mall, or the National Gallery got some Turner Prize winner to cut up its masterpieces and scrawl slogans over them.”

      Don’t give the buggers ideas….. They’ve already had a go at Norwich Cathedral….

      3. These days they get Sir Norman Foster to put glass domes over everything… including, it was intended, Notre Dame. That would go well with the glass pyramid at the Louvre.

        One wonders when architecture went wrong. I guess it is the post war era of “Post war manic depressive” architecture though Germany fastidiously rebuilt everything as it once was, where they could…. except the Reichstag where they had that glass roof put in… perhaps to avoid all those dark and dirty spaces where malign policies were once created…. maybe that would work for the EU parliament too? But elsewhere..
        Then, with the widespread use of concrete in the Mediterranean, came the “Planet of the Apes” neo-architectural movement. But on architecture this is one area I can agree with Big Ears (Charlie boy.) He may be wrong about just about everything esle but not modern architecture.
        And why should the CofE be different? Our bishops and ABishops are just about as detatched from reality as the Pope in Rome…
        Poor Betjamen, he is probably trning in his grave and he got upset about Winbledon Mock Tudor….heaven knows what he would make of the inside out Llyods building or the other “carbunkles”.
        Sorry. Just got triggered.

    4. It is a pity the BBC does not stick to producing good programs which is something it used to do well but that is not the case now

      1. The operative term being “Used to do well”. Nowadays they seem to sub contract many of their programs and lack the direct control. Not that they have anyone capable of controlling the quality these days.

    6. “When we inherit treasures, they are not ours to do with as we wish. We have a duty to preserve them for those who will come after us.”
      No one believes that or acts on it. They sell off, they demolish, they make over to something else. Corruption of the State at every level, in every Town Hall. Education and society that favours new gadgets over old glories.

    7. Regarding Dickens, I do get rather fed up with those who refer the conditions he wrote about as “Victorian”. They are not.
      Dickens was using his own experiences in his childhood & youth, more than a decade before Victoria came to the throne.
      By the time he began writing about them, times had changed and, whilst there were still grim conditions about, the Victorians were working hard to identify where the abuses were and enacting legislation to remove them.

    8. The intention is, one suspects, to destroy the Dickens Christmas carol.
      That will be a shame.
      It was not just Alastair SImms, it was Mr Magoo’s Christmas carol that we watched year inb and year out as children followwed, usually, by The Great Escape. never quite knew why.
      The thing is that this is a wonderful vehicle for failing actors/actresses to try and get their careers back on track. For them there are two choices, the Christmass carol or the wonderful teacher in the projects stories. Pretty well every actor/actress has been down this route when they are in the dump. Meryl Streep the music teacher, Danny de Vito teaching Shakespeare to misfit multi-ethnic US army soldiers, always the same plot…. poor neighbourhood, ethnic diversity, brilliant kids waiting their chance to be dancers, singers, musicians spelling bee contestaants.
      Then too we have Woppie as Mrs SCrooge, oh to heck with it. We know there is an endless list of these Xmass Carol fims wwith all sorts of stars and mostly badly done.
      Quite right to single out the Alastair Simms version, better I think than the Star Trek bloke, Patrick Stewart’s version, though not a bad effort.
      So which failing actor gets the job in this Beeb production? Is it an LGBT/immigrant member of the marxist party? Some failed (even by Beeb standards) Comediean? He doesn’t say.
      Speaking of respecting the original, I was just looking at the disaster that was Anna Karena, the version with Jude Law…. in German, which didn’t improve it any,. and thinking about how badly Hollywood does classics…. unlike, once upon a time, the BBC. War and Peace, with hanoir Jane’s dad in it as Piere was a travesty but the 7 1/2hr Russian produced version was truely magnificent…. I saw it at the Odeon leicester Square.
      On the other hand I have never managed more than five minutes of “Master and Commander” with that Australian bloke, no not Mel gibson, Russel thingy in the role of Jack Aubrey…. a role that demanded an actor more like Boris Johnson (but clever) than Russel Crowe. A true Roman Fluevre, this really would have done better with the Hornblower treatment, the whole series of books done as a series of movies faithful to the original and without worrying about who it might upset. Since I only have managed about 5 minutes before switching off in disgust I couldn’t say if they managed to get any car chases in or alien spaceships but it wouldn’t surprise me they drifted so far from the originals they might just as well have gone back to the source material (primarily lord Cochrane) and ignored it just as they ignored everything in the books and not bothered to credit Patrick O’Brien in any way…. he might have thanked them for that.

      Sorry agin. My day to be triggered, I guess. I hope nothing else crops up.

  22. The Trans Issue

    What in reality we have are Biological Woman and Non Biological Woman as well as Biological men & non biological men. The two are not the same
    One also has to consider both sides. The average biological woman is probably not going to be comfortable sharing toilets and changing facilities with non biological woman. I would suspect that girls that had just reached puberty would be very uncomfortable with shared facilities

    To accommodated Non Biological men and woman a Non Gender Specific Toilet cubicle could be provided which is totally separate from the other toilet facilities. This should be reasonably sensible arrangement. Similar arrangements could be made with changing rooms

      1. Well I am not sure they need an asylum but I agree is is mainly a mental health issue. They appear to have a mis match between their physical body and their brain. Their body for example tells them they are male but their brain is telling them they are female
        It gets even more complicate with transmen whose body is female but their brain thinks they are a man as many of them decide they want to have a baby so ho their brain works who knows

      1. In many cases disable toilets are separate so they could use them. They are already non gender specific

    5. “Consider both sides”, or just the front?
      P.S. Until quite recently we had a sensible arrangement; Gents, Ladies and Disabled. Perhaps the trans, unknown, etc should use the disabled toilets?

  24. Should we get a choice of Candidates for a Party to give the electorate a better choice?

    At present if n MP for a party gets ensconced in a safe seat the electorate get very little say. If you say had a choice of for Example 3 Labour Party candidates it might improve things at the moment the choice of candidate is down to the local Party. They might still need to do an initial selection if there were a large number of candidates

  25. Australia’s PM Scott Morrison plays down climate link to bushfire crisis as he visits firefighters

    It is summer in Australia and it is the bush fire season. Population growth as also played a part as the town and cities spread out into the bush increasing the fire risk

          1. It would not surprise me if some of these fires are started by climate change activists they are in my opinion stupid enough to do so

        2. Happens in the UK as well , It is surprising how many of these sort of fires we get. Clearly on a very much smaller scale though

    2. Like ‘increased flooding’ in Blighty.
      Look what’s happened to water meadows. (The clue is in the name.)

    3. It appears that smoking after sex accounts for most bush fires in Oz, but not the Brazilian deforestation.

  26. I’m not used to buying stuff on line but I ordered two Ronettes CD’s from Amazon as a Christmas present for the wife,
    When I opened the parcel there were four candles inside.

  27. Seasons Greetings (with Legal Disclaimer)
    Dear All

    Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all;

    PLUS

    A fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset accepted calendar year, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that our country is necessarily greater than any other country), and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or the sexual orientation of the wishes.

    DISCLAIMER:

    By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher who assumes no responsibility for any unintended emotional stress these greetings may bring to those not caught up in the holiday spirit.

    Or, in more non-politically correct terms…

    MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU AND YOURS

    Funnies may be back in the New Year, in the unlikely event that we may need something to laugh at.

  28. BBC radio 4 News reporting that Head transplants could be possible in the next few years. Heads and spinal transplants could be used on people with neurological problems and even on people in cryogenic storage awaiting new techniques such as such transplants. To my mind such a transplant procedure is a step too far.

        1. Eight million?!!? No Mags – it’s the BBC – £87 million and five years late. All these BBC types are so profligate with our money – trombetti seeds cost a fortune.

          1. True. A property developer pointed out it would have been a lot cheaper to build a real street, and then sell off the houses once the series had finished.

          2. Like the soap series they made years ago in Spain, when they built a village . Eldorado.. it failed dismally.. what happened to the properties they built?

          3. In the real world if a project went 8 times over budget and was delivered over 5 years late you would be fired for incompetence but in the public sector it tends to result in promotion

          5. Well, they rewrite the budget. Every project comes in on budget. V&A Dundee original budget £39m. Actual cost £80m. Revised budget £80m. Hurrah! Well done , everybody!

    3. Watching for extreme longevity in Chinese political leaders will be the first sign the techniques work…………….

    4. A full body transplant, shurely. I can’t imagine someone donating their head.

      Perhaps they could practise the op on thems that think they’re the wrong sex.

        1. Pretty good Bilty.
          I haven’t been on here much lately as I’ve been working long hours due to a lack of staff. We interviewed last week though and, fingers crossed, have appointed three.

          I have a day off today and for the first time in ages, have nothing to do 🙂

          I hope all is well chez Thomas.

          1. The MR is decorating Christmas cakes which are to be given to friends. I am extremely busy doing the jigsaw!

    6. Begs the question though – would it be a head transplant or a body transplant? Which bit owns the soul?

    7. I infer from that that they’re already performing this on some poor animal in a lab somewhere.

    1. Ah a careful side wise pose with her bum and boobs being stuck out to make them look bigger then they are

    4. Dear oh dear. I expect the Recruiting Sargent with be pointing to the picture and saying: “How would you like to get your hands on that Butt?”
      The eager recruit is going to be disappointed when he eventually finds out the only butt his going to get is hands on is a rifle butt and not that of a like minded snowflake….

    1. It’s always shining but I can’t see it through 10/10 cloud cover, not to mention the rain. Good morning.

    1. The New York Times refused to send a critic to review Alma Deutscher’s debut concert at the Carnegie Hall on 12th December, at which she played her own violin concerto, her own piano concerto, excerpts from her opera, and a symphonic overture composed this year. The concert sold out in August and got a 10 minute standing ovation.

      Instead they reviewed Stormzy. Clearly he’s more important in “Western” culture.

        1. This is one of the pieces on her latest album ‘From my Book of Melodies’ (released November 2019). It was composed last year.

          As a labour of love, I transcribed the song version from YouTube and sang it in the village and at a family party.

    2. They wonder why blacks dont do so well in society when they promote this git as a role model. Strewth.

  35. The Tory war over Europe is finally over

    Patrick O’Flynn

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8b57cd2fddca2fe27d7763df109b54f310cdd4c7ce80be682b12cc4d002d91d4.jpg

    Happy Christmas (War Is Over). John Lennon probably didn’t have the decades long Conservative dispute over Europe in mind when he wrote that, but the message seems very apt this year after almost the entire Tory parliamentary party trooped through the lobbies in support of its leader’s plan to take Britain out of the EU.

    It was back in 1971 that Lennon released his blockbuster Christmas single. At the time, the Conservatives were largely united behind the idea of joining the European Economic Community. So few could have anticipated that an internecine political war lasting almost half a century was taking hold. In the key Commons division of that year, only 39 Tory MPs voted against joining the EEC; they were more than counterbalanced by 69 Labour MPs who sided with Edward Heath’s administration.

    But take hold the Tory war certainly did. Many people remember the poll tax as the pretext for the bringing down of Margaret Thatcher. In fact, the issue of European integration was the more profound cause, with Tory Europhiles reacting in horror at her famous “no, no, no” denunciation of the idea of transferring more national sovereignty to Brussels and organising to oust her.

    By the time of the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, concerns about the loss of sovereignty inherent in the European project’s pursuit of political and economic union had set in with scores of Tory MPs and millions of Tory voters.

    This was the era of the “whipless wonders” – stripped of the party whip by John Major over their Maastricht rebellions – and of his Cabinet “bastards” who were doing all in their power to stop him signing us up to the looming single currency.

    The European issue certainly led to Major being perceived as a weak and hapless character, of whom Tony Blair remarked stingingly at one PMQs: “I lead my party, he follows his.”

    During these years, the dominant media narrative was as follows; Europe was obviously the future and those Tories who disputed this represented a tiny rump of right-wing “little Englanders” who were to be mocked as unable to come to terms with the modern world. Much commentary was based around the idea of Eurosceptics being mentally ill. This seemed to be the essence of Major’s observation that whenever he heard the name of sceptic MP Sir Richard Body he also heard the sound of “white coats flapping”.

    This narrative took an even stronger grip after Jacques Delors turned the Labour party in a pro-Brussels direction. He did so by selling the idea that the European Project could be used to advance progressive policies that had flopped at the ballot box when tested against the Tories in general elections.

    Out of office, the Tory leadership fell into the hands of a series of Eurosceptics: William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. But their failure to recover sufficiently from the 1997 landslide that Blair inflicted on Major led some of the commentariat to conclude that Euroscepticism was a blind alley for the party.

    Over the last decade the issue of Europe has, of course, consumed two further Conservative PMs, David Cameron and Theresa May. This turmoil cemented for some the view that the Tories would never rule in a stable manner again until they expunged the anti-Brussels brigades from their party.

    And look what has happened. The very opposite. The expunged ones are those who refused to accept the verdict of the British electorate that European integration is not for us. Most are gone from the Commons, many from the party itself. And their departure did not lead to a collapse in Tory electoral fortunes as voters fretted about the party “lurching to the Right”. It led to a landslide victory for Boris Johnson and Brexit. The tiny rump of Tory pro-EU types left in the Commons – the likes of Greg Clark, Stephen Hammond, Vicky Ford and Steve Brine – all signed up to a pledge to back Johnson’s withdrawal deal.

    There is no longer a Tory civil war over Europe. It has been brought to an end by means of a decisive victory for one of the competing sides. And it wasn’t the sensible technocrats and self-styled “liberal Tories” who came out on top.

    No, it was the ones smeared as mentally-ill and bigoted. The ones whose counterparts in UKIP were disparaged by a Tory leader as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly”.

    Doubtless new fault lines will emerge over time within the Conservative parliamentary party. Any entity comprising of a professional politician for every day of the year is bound to involve different factions and people with different lists of priorities.

    There may still be a last flurry of Tory tensions on Europe if we approach the end of next year without a trade deal in place and some begin agitating for an extension to the transitional period. But the brute size of Boris Johnson’s majority means he can swat such an episode away however he chooses.

    This month’s election saw the testing to destruction of the idea that resisting European integration amounted to obsolete right-wing folly. Intervention after intervention in the election debate from the likes of Major, Heseltine, (Chris) Patten and many more – all given widespread coverage – failed to stick.

    Tory EU-philes fought a dirty, personal campaign because they always feared they couldn’t win over the British people on the substance. So John Redwood’s intently staring eyes or Tony Marlow’s stripy blazers or Boris Johnson’s colourful love life were all, at various times, scorned and contrasted with the sane, moderate demeanour of the EU believers.

    That story doesn’t work anymore either.

    In a little over a month a Conservative Government with a landslide majority will execute its primary task: taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union. And it will be done without a single Tory voice in the Commons opposing it. Happy Christmas. This war really is over.

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/the-tory-war-over-europe-is-finally-over/

    https://disqus.com/home/discussion/spectator-new-blogs/the_tory_war_over_europe_is_finally_over/

      1. He doesn’t say the ECA was passed in 1971. It was in the autumn of that year that the debate took place and was, apparently, as nasty as some of more recent times. The vote to join was won by 112 votes so Heath went off and signed the Treaty of Accession on 22nd January 1972. The ECA was presented to the house just four days later. It passed its second and third readings in February and July by only 8 and 17 votes. Had the Commons failed to ratify the ToA (by rejecting the bill), the government would have been in a very difficult position.

    2. Well I would say about 80% of the Conservative MP’s were in favor of Brexit about 15% were slightly against and perhaps 5% were rebels or potential rebels. Boris took decisive action to purge the party of the hard line rebels. There are still a few Conservative MP.s uneasy with Brexit as 11 of them abstained on the vote. I would not expect any of them to vote against the government on Brexit though. I have not checked them but it may be they abstained on the basis their constituencies were pro remain

      https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/737#notrecorded

    3. Boris has already gained the advantage with the EU. They were expecting him to take a soft line instead he has taken a hard line. From a tactical pint of view with negotiation it is sensible. In the negotiations Boris will have to give some ground and he will be expecting that it is normal in negotiations what you dont want to do is to enter negotiations having given all the ground away at the start. WE also now have the £39B ace. If they dont agree to a deal the £39B is off the table. We will still have to pay them some money current estimate is about £9B

      1. No. “Boris”, that is, we in the UK does not need to give any ground. None at all. Nearly four years of the MSM and Europhiles pouring out endless nonsenses that we were at a disadvantage, that the EU had the cards, the whip hand, our world would come crashing down, literally, when the reality is otherwise. We have the whip hand. What we buy from them is what gives their factories their profits. Without us, Peugeot, BMW, Mercedes et al go into the red with no easy options to change things. Nor can they go elsewhere for the things that they buy from us; langoustines, lobsters, fish of all kinds, the best beef and lamb, Scotch whisky, tartan scarves, financial services…
        Do not fall for this ” we need to go easy on them, compromise, negotiate, give away” line of argument. It is complete rubbish.
        (I have negotiated with some of the biggest retail stores in Europe. These people are tough. You don’t go in prepared to compromise. Sometimes you just have to walk away.)

        1. All negotiation involve some compromise on both sides and that will be the case with the trade negotiations

          1. We have done all the compromising, surrender and capitulation, there is no further need to do any crawling. The (Jack)boot is now on the other foot, ours.

          2. “All negotiation involve some compromise on both sides,…”
            No, they do not. Every time you buy something in a supermarket or shop without haggling, you are “negotiating” without compromise.
            A price marked on an item in a shop is an “offer to treat”. You can offer less or more, or ask for a discount for buying two.
            We are certainly well practised at the kind of “negotiation” to which you refer. We gave away everything at the first meeting, it seems. We do not need to do that. We never did.

            We will be discussing trade terms that will make life a bit easier for us than having to set up all new arrangements with the rest of the world, although we will do that too.
            The EU will be trying to save themselves from a complete economic crash, from recession, unemployment, bankruptcies and civil unrest.
            We don’t need their stuff. It is convenient, sure. However we do not need it. We do not need what they produce; cars, wine, olive oil etc.
            They need to sell it. Mercedes makes all of its profit in the UK. Thousands of French farmers depend on selling their wine, milk, butter, and cheese to the UK. They need to sell it.
            They need to sell it to us. They do not have alternative markets. They have no one else to sell to.
            We also need to make absolutely sure that they do not get access to a single UK fish after 2020 without having to pay a high price to UK fishermen.
            Do you not see the difference?
            We are buying for choice. They are selling to stave off utter disaster. We don’t have to give anything away. They will agree to anything. They have to. That is the underlying reality.
            Their bluff is just that.

      2. BJ,
        The only bloody ground this boris chap should give the eu
        is a 6 foot burial cube.
        We leave on the 31st Jan the
        39 b stays in the bank, we accept & negotiate the offers of worldwide nation for six months, then answer the eu phone call, NOT
        BEFORE.

  36. Brendan O’Neil

    One by one they have fallen. They’ve admitted defeat –

    to varying degrees – and vacated the battlefield that they dominated

    for so long. Michael Heseltine was one of the first. ‘We’ve lost’, said the Tory arch-Remainer. ‘Brexit is going to happen.’

    Tony Blair was close behind. Labour should now accept the referendum

    result, he says, which is ridiculous given he has been at the forefront

    of the anti-democratic campaign to stop Brexit for the past three years.

    The People’s Vote movement has fallen apart. Poor Femi will now have to

    get a job. And even their queen – that moneyed legal agitator against

    the people’s will, Gina Miller – has realised that the rich cannot

    thwart democracy forever. As one headline puts it: ‘Gina Miller FINALLY admits Brexit is happening.’

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/20/the-end-of-remain/#.Xf4L9_IRZJx.twitter

  39. Former Labour MP referred to police over suspected ‘claims irregularities’

    A former Labour MP has been referred to Scotland Yard for suspected “claims irregularities” in Commons payments involving a female employee over whom he had power of attorney.
    Police are “assessing” the referral concerning Geoffrey Robinson after his friend Brenda Price was paid a £30,000-a-year salary for working in his office until the age of 89, the Mail on Sunday reported.
    The paper said leaked emails showed Mr Robinson told the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) that Ms Price, who died last month aged 90, worked 30 hours per week in his Coventry North West consituency office.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/former-labour-mp-referred-to-police-over-suspected-claims-irregularities/ar-BBYeBIF?ocid=spartandhp

    1. What!?! I am sure most NOTTLers -and not just the legal bods – are well aware of what Power of Attorney or Court of Protection involve.

  41. Imran Ahmed

    We are partnering with several organisations, including the Jo Cox

    Foundation and Stonewall, and public figures like presenter Chris

    Packham and Obama fellow Alex Smith, who will help us get our messages

    out there. We invite you to visit our social media channels and get

    involved by sharing stories which have given you hope over the past year

    too.

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/social-media-neednt-be-a-cesspit/
    A muslim partnering up with the fully woke brigade to lecture us all about “Hate”
    Try looking in a mirror matey

  42. Labour: anger, recrimination and bitterness mark fresh battle for party’s soul

    It is clear at least to me that the Momentum types and unions are in full control of the Labour party. Labour has a massive problem. Is leaders and its membership are totally out of line with the people that typically vote Labour , well with the probable exception of London

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/labour-anger-recrimination-and-bitterness-mark-fresh-battle-for-partys-soul/ar-BBYeL1x?ocid=spartandhp

    1. Didn’t she promise to leave the UK as soon as we left the EU?

      I wonder where she will go and if she has booked her plane tickets yet.

      1. R,
        She will probably do a beer run to Calais on the 1st Feb, day return, all as her type say has no substance.

    2. Good morning ogga

      Would it not be possible to bring a charge against the Police for treating white people in a racist manner by not treating them equally?

      2. R,
        Trouble being as I see it is that the defence of the police could come out as winning, as shown by the voting pattern shown over the decades.
        A great multitude of white peoples are satisfied with the status quo nationwide.
        Plus a great multitude of white peoples are
        satisfied with the ongoing scourge of
        PC / Appeasement,otherwise it would have shown via the ballot booth.
        Plus you would need the key to the Queens coffers.
        I would rather ALL establishment employees
        police inclusive were dragged into court charged with aiding & abetting in the long term cover up of pakistani rape & abusers as in rotherham for instance, giving the felons
        carte blanche to continue.

    3. I’ve never heard of this nasty piece of work, but it seems she is just another ordinary member of the London establishment. I had to look her up:

      Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a British
      journalist and author, who describes herself as “a leftie liberal,
      anti-racist, feminist, Muslim”. A regular columnist for the i and the
      London Evening Standard, she is a well-known commentator on immigration,
      diversity, and multiculturalism issues. She is a founding member of
      British Muslims for Secular Democracy. She is also a patron of the SI
      Leeds Literary Prize.Wikipedia

      Gideon Osborne approves then.

      It seems she sets out to be the opposite of much of what she describes herself as, perhaps to bring it into disrepute?

      2. Part of the Ugandan Asian diaspora and the exception to the bulk of those expelled by Idi Amin in that she’s totally useless.

          1. Curiously, Priti Awful does not seem to loathe us.

            I wonder why. Could it be that she is a Hindu and that other woman is a slammer?

            Ponders.

          2. As I’ve said several times before, The Ugandan Asians have, against all expectations at the time, been of great benefit for the UK.
            Sadly Alibhai-Brown is an exception.

      3. Like so many slammers who have found refuge, and kindness and work and money in England – she loathes us.

      4. “I’ve never heard of this nasty piece of work…”

        I’m rather surprised by that, JM.

      5. Good Lord. The woman’s been griping and b!tching about Blighty ever since Idi Amin chucked her family out of Uganda.
        Still, it was probably better for your peace of mind that you weren’t aware of her existence.

      6. She was a Ugandan Muslim and when Idi Amin started chucking out all the Asians, this country provided her with a safe haven. She has responded by hating us.

      7. She’s also barking mad. And if she hates this country so much, we certainly shouldn’t stand in her way if she wants to go.

      8. If you have not heard of her before, then you have led a blessed life. She has been popping up for years with her “anti-white people” racism and pro-eu elitist views. She normally has the exasperated look of someone who knows more than you do and cannot understand why people are too stupid to think the way that she does. But every now and then someone pins her with reality and she suddenly has that look of hate in her eyes that we know so well from people who are not as intelligent as they think they are.

        As for “British Muslims for Secular Democracy” that wins the “pull the other one” award in the category of laughing in your face while dismantling your country.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/39ca67b4bea194f7e15085cf68a08d6b065cea8ee0b010aa6c7989b1841c3e92.jpg

  46. The Future for the Reform Party (Brexit Party)

    In my view there is a big gap in the political space for a new party but with FPTP it is extremely tough to break through. The Labour party is out of touch with most of its voters as are the Lib-Dem’s and the Conservative party has some unhappy voters although t present Boris has won them over as he has a lot of Labour voters. Whether Boris will keep them remains to be seen

    Scotland and Wales have seen some break though of other parties and the catalyst for that seem to be they have their own assemblies which both use PR. England has no devolved assembly which makes it very tough for small parties to win though

    If we take Wales before UKIP fell apart they had 7 seats out of 60 at the Welsh assembly

  47. Control Freaks ᴙ Us continue to make their demands. This situation, where the EU attempt to maintain control over how the UK is governed and runs its international relations will be the bellwether of Johnson’s negotiations and of, “Getting Brexit done.” Barnier & Co have to be put back in their box by Johnson and his team batting for the UK and not doing the opposite, as May did. No surrender!

    https://twitter.com/BrexitCentral/status/1208673888433049600

  49. Just back for a cup of tea and a hand warm after doing a bit on the shed.
    Getting the Cromford end ¼ door done, then it’s wait until the sawmill opens in the new year before I can get the wood for the main door.

    And what a beautiful morning it’s been so far! Lovely bright sunshine and a balmy 4°C when I first went out!

    1. Isn’t it infuriating the way so much in the UK closes from now until well into January.

      At least yer French carry on striking throughout the season.

      For normal commerce, they have Christmas Day off and New Year’s Day – otherwise – business as usual.

  50. I understand that the beeboid screwed-up Scrooge ends with Tiny Timothea saying, “Allah (PBH) bless us, everyone – except the kaffirs, of course.”

    1. After tucking into halal goose and alcohol free Christmas pudding (made with halal suet, natch).
      Does he say it before or after his mother and sisters are allowed to eat the remaining scraps?

    2. I read that he had resigned? Or was that the other one (whose not being a whiter shade of pale we cannot mention?)

      1. He’s due to have some major surgery, but put it off to guide the election.
        It’s been rearranged for February and will need some time off for recuperation.

        From what I can gather, the Independent made a bit of a sensationalist splurge of the story.

        1. Cheers, BoB,

          My answers to you seem to disappear.

          Have a lovely Christmas and a very happy 2020.

      4. Evening HL,
        Do you mean Gerard Batten or Mr Cummings ?
        What & why you cannot mention something in an orderly manner mystifies me.
        ( whiter shade of pale)

        1. Someone not being a whiter shade of pale, means that they are – a person of colour (light, mid- or dark). I was referring to Dominic Cummings in the first place (as the subject of both your post and Gerard Batten’s tweet).

          I understood that someone close to Boris Johnson had resigned, who had a mildly Indian appearance, and who was the “other one” whose name I could not remember.

          There is nothing disorderly about my references. However “What…you cannot mention something in an orderly manner” is plainly ungrammatical. As opposed to merely incomprehensible to you.

          1. Morning HL,
            I was not trying to be offensive in any shape or form, as I tend to call a spade a spade.
            Whiter shade of pale i fully understand, the first part of your post Batten/Cummings left me slightly confused.

      2. Currently saved from being under water by holding the Thames back and flooding Datchet and its environs instead, as they’ve done for 40 years plus.

  57. Tits McGrath has an article in the Times

    https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1208724371965124608

    ”If you must exchange gifts with “loved ones”, it is incumbent on you
    to ensure your choices are ethical. When buying a present for a child,
    why not take the opportunity to educate them about their privilege? Last
    year, for instance, instead of giving my five-year-old nephew a typical
    Christmas gift, I smashed up 20% of his other presents with a hammer to
    teach him how it feels to be a casualty of the gender pay gap. He was
    so grateful he actually cried.”

      1. Careful you don’t break the record:

        https://arynews.tv/en/teen-breaks-world-record/

        ”

        Guinness said Isaac Johnson, 14, of Bloomington, was verified as the
        owner of the world’s largest mouth gape when he was able to open his
        mouth a staggering 3.67 inches.

        Johnson took the record from a German man with a 3.46-inch gape.”

    2. No laughing matter. Society’s objective all the time seems to have turned into ” taking all the fun out of life “.

      1. “She” is a bloke writing a “satirically modern” column. It is supposed to be amusing.

          2. Ration yourself, as you do with figgy pudding. Figgy pudding you ask? It was on the front of a load of M&S Christmas cards I sent this year. I assumed it was some dire American invention like pumpkin pie, but no, it’s ours, though how it’s been resurrected, I don’t know:
            “Medieval cooking commonly employed figs, in both sweet and savoury dishes. One such dish is fygey, in the 14th century cookbook The Forme of Cury, which in Modern English is “figgy”, this dish being known as figgy pudding ”

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

          4. Apparently so. I assumed automatically that the PC folk at M&S couldn’t bring themselves to print the word ‘Christmas’.

  60. A Labour peer writes…

    All hail Good King Boris

    He won decisively, but his Government needs to offer something more than electoral success and some infrastructure projects
    BY MAURICE GLASMAN

    Maurice Glasman is a Labour life peer and the founder of Blue Labour. December 20, 2019

    With one throw of the dice, Boris Johnson broke the Brexit interregnum. After three years of frantic inertia, he resolved the impasse through transforming the class basis of the Conservative Party. In doing so, he has renewed his party for a generation and ripped into the Labour heartlands by aligning Brexit with national renewal and exposing the class divisions within Labour by siding with the poor.

    Although the Conservatives led across every social class, their lead in the skilled and unskilled working class was particularly emphatic. Boris has no equal in cabinet. There is no coherent opposition, his majority is impregnable and all his MPs have signed up to his agenda. Hail Caesar. Meet the new King of Merry England. Good King Boris.

    His goal is to make his domination hegemonic through two measures. The first is to identify the Tories with the working class and the country towns and distance them from London and finance. Putney went Labour and Bolsover went Tory. Look up the difference in house prices between the two. It is a class polarisation against the ruling financial and cultural elite.

    Ministers have been banned from going to Davos. The Conservative vote went down across the home counties, and especially those areas nearest London. That was the logic behind proroguing Parliament and the expulsion of the remain rebels from the Party. The Conservatives were happy for them to vote Lib-Dem and Labour. Instead the party concentrated entirely on the towns and villages of the North and the South, the country shires and the post-industrial working class, the basis of the Brexit coalition. “Fuck business.” The Conservatives will be more northern and proletarian and Boris will drink beer with his new MPs in the many bars in Parliament. The Cavaliers will lord it over the Puritans.

    The second step was to break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris busses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish, while Labour will cleave to the constraints of the single market and the rulings of the ECJ.

    During the election campaign, the Conservatives pledged state aid to small regional businesses while not pointing out that half of Labour’s manifesto would have been illegal under EU Law. They quietly renounced Thatcherism. Boris will be the heir to Keynes while Labour will uphold the rectitude of Hayek forever enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty and its sovereignty over the single market and customs union. While Boris will point out the distinction between free trade and free movement, Labour won’t know the difference between the two. The interregnum has been broken, and as in 1979 its broken to the right.

    Pope Francis said recently that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. This Conservative victory is an important part of defining what the features of the new era are. The previous consensus was defined by four shared assumptions; that the nation state, democracy, the working class and conservatism would matter less. The dominant forces were the educated middle-class, globalisation, written constitutions and liberalism. Blair and Cameron expressed this perfectly.

    Brexit is a sign of the times, a glimpse of the future but the progressive mind can only see it as reactionary, nostalgic and backward looking. The decisive role of the working class in asserting national sovereignty through its democratic vote in order to renew the ancient institutions of Parliament and the common law is incomprehensible to the left. The new era is a foreign country for those who thought the arc of history was with them.

    The scale of Labour’s defeat last Thursday is hard for the progressive mind to comprehend. Like the death of a loved one, who has survived terrible illness before, it is both shocking and predictable. The responses of blame, avoidance, denial, anger, displacement and depression from the Labour family are also shocking and predictable. Labour is like a family from hell. Full of hate and blame and unable to understand how it got here. Labour is no longer a tribe and has lost its homeland. It’s gonna be lonely this Christmas.

    This is because Labour is out of relationship with its history, traditions and the communities that created and cherished it. So out of touch that it couldn’t see the rejection coming. It now shares the entropic fate of the French, Italian, German, Belgian and Dutch Labour Parties, who have shrunk progressively into irrelevance, replaced by nationalist and Green Parties on the whole. Drained of their national purpose by the constraints of the European Union, social democracy has no conception of the social, or of democracy. Labour now shares their fate which means irrelevance and endless meetings that go nowhere. Just a slow and inexorable decline. It marks the end of British exceptionalism on the Left, just as we leave the EU.

    It could have been so different. In 2017, when Labour said it respected the result of the referendum, it surged through the final two weeks of the campaign. The Conservatives, running on the policy of ‘lose your mind, lose your home’, turned a Brexit election into a discussion of the financial consequences of dementia.

    There were indications of disaffection as Mansfield and North Derby turned blue; but the heartlands believed that Corbyn was a faithful son of Tony Benn and he had spent a lifetime denouncing the EU as a capitalist club where no-one was accountable. Against the current of continental Europe, Labour alone was a vital and renewed social-democratic party committed to nationalisation and the redistribution of wealth. Brexit was a source of socialist renewal and democracy was re-affirmed as the means of resisting the domination of the rich and their decades of relentless plundering. But, then, Corbyn’s Labour renounced Brexit.

    One of the reasons why the election result seemed so shocking was that the working class were supposed to be on the wrong side of history, to not really matter anymore. Despite the result of the Brexit referendum, it was assumed that the task for Labour was to build a coalition of ‘progressive’ voters around a second referendum which they called a ‘people’s vote’. The difference between 2017 and 2019 was that the working class noted that Labour was blocking Brexit and denying the legitimacy of their vote. Corbyn’s Labour sided with global capitalism. It is a minor irony in all this that Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, who prided themselves on their Marxist analysis with a central role for class ran a campaign based on ‘values’ and were trounced by the Conservatives who placed a relentless stress on the working class and transferring their loyalties. Labour Marxists turned out to be Whigs. What a lot of luggage for such a short journey.

    The deep complicity between New Labour and the Corbyn Project was shown here. The progressive certainty that history was going in one direction, towards the free movement of people and things, that technology would dissolve place and borders in an undifferentiated swirl in which only the individual and Treaty law mattered.

    That the future was based on globalisation was unquestioned between them, as was the idea that the nation state and democracy no longer really mattered. This Whig theory of history is as untrue now as it ever was. The working class, the Nation-State and democracy are key features of the new era. Far from being losers, the post-industrial working class has decided the two most significant votes of our time.

    And the Left was the loser. The progressive illness has dissolved the ties that bind because it has no concept of society, of the social, of belonging and inheritance. Trapped in an endless now, it lost the future. The coalition of Peter Mandelson and John McDonnell that tied Labour to a second referendum is the key to understanding the catastrophic defeat because it finally ruptured the connection between the working class and Labour. It said, you didn’t know what you were doing. It said that democracy does not decide issues in our society. It said that it had no faith in our country to decide its future through democratic politics but that it had to be contracted out to an unaccountable system of directives and laws.

    By embracing a second referendum, Labour crossed a line. It no longer supported workers who trusted democracy more than the European Court of Justice when it came to their rights. Labour thought that the consequences would be catastrophic and displayed no confidence that our country could flourish outside frictionless capitalism. The Left suddenly became experts in just-in-time supply chains as if capitalism, the most adaptable economic system ever devised, would not be able to cope. They were not faithful to the marriage and it is now over. There is no evidence that there will be a reconciliation.

    At the last election, Labour lost Mansfield by a thousand votes. Now the majority is more than 16,000. The Scottish working-class have not returned to Labour, but moved to a nationalist party and show no sign of remorse. Once rejected, they move on and don’t look back. In Michael Lind’s recent book, the New Class War, he makes the connection between class and geography, between hubs and heartlands. Labour is the party of the hubs, but the Conservatives now lay claim to the heartlands.

    And beyond the immediate devastation of defeat, is the existential horror of what it means. The severing of the long-term marriage with the working class that created the Labour Party in the first place. It opens the space for the emergence of a genuinely nasty right-wing populist Party as an alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. The Brexit Party is merely a mild taster of what the future portends. The Conservative vote only rose a few percent overall, many former Labour voters went for the Brexit Party. What was clear is that the Labour vote collapsed in the heartlands and the Brexit Party saved more Labour seats than it lost.

    The glory of Labour was its ability to express the Labour interest within the framework of the inherited Parliamentary and legal institutions asserting democratic politics as an alternative to violence. While the rest of Europe did polarise and went Fascist or Communist, Labour retained the affections of the working-class and engaged in the politics of war and peace. Defeating the Nazis in the War Coalition and then creating the National Health Service, nationalising steel, coal and the railways, creating the National Trust and the Green Belt.

    The virtues of civility, generosity, and kindness in the public square are easily dismissed and hard to retain. Labour was the source of that politics and with its departure from the working-class communities it used to represent, a sullen resentful politics looms. Something closer to the Front National or the Afd in Germany.

    The new Government needs to offer something more than electoral success and some infrastructure projects; it needs to build on the politics of earning and belonging, of contribution and civic renewal. Over the past 40 years, the counties and towns of our country have been denuded of its assets and inheritance. None of the building societies that were demutualised in the last 40 years exist any longer as local institutions. The endowment of regional banks so that there is access to capital once more is an essential part of that. The recognition of vocation is also essential and the establishment of vocational colleges for building, maintenance, social care and taxi driving with apprenticeship laws that regulate labour market entry would address the skills required for building homes, caring for the elderly and the 85% of the economy that functions outside globalisation.

    The dignity of labour is the foundation of this. It should be the basis of Labour’s alternative. The central question for the next ten years is whether the Conservatives can recognise that their future now lies with labour.

    3. The plural of bus is buses. A variant plural, busses, is also given in the dictionary, but has become so rare that it seems like an error to many people.

    4. Hmmm. Did he lay all this on the line for the Labour hierarchy a couple of months before the election? Or is this just hindsight?

  62. The media is filled to the brim with highly intelligent people of all parties who got it wrong for three years, spouting off and summarising what has happened over the past three months, and telling Boris Johnson what he has got to do. Don’t they understand from the election results that few people pay the slightest attention to these wise guys any more ? The media should stop paying them for spouting opinionated rubbish.

          2. ‘Whilom’ is the opening word in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. ‘Whilom’ means, once upon a time, but when I first read the opening lines I thought it was going to be a story about a chap called William rather than a story of courtly love and two knights. Arcite and Palamon, who both loved the same woman, the beautiful Emily.

  66. The horror,the horror

    Tesco alleged card prisoner conditions;
    “ They get up around 5:30-6:00am every day they have to go to bed again at about 9.30.”

    Isn’t this called “Having a job”?

    And how convenient that the card was found by a photogenic young middle-class White girl called Florence.

      1. The beeboid news reported that, “…some of them were said to be doing work against their will…”

        Oh dear; how sad.

    2. This does have a whiff of The War of Jennifer’s Ear/No Bed At The Casualty Dept. about it.
      I have no illusions about the awfulness of the Chinese regime, but I did think “h’mmmm”.

    4. We here, in Chateau Pendle, have only recently ceased to rise at 4:30AM to get on with preparing for the day of work after many years of this routine. We still work, but rise later and commute to the home office. Still, an easy life compared to the routine in the Charterhouse in Horsham, where every night sleep is broken by rising for prayer at 2:00AM, and then again at 6:00AM, seven days a week and 52 weeks a year.
      These Chinese prisoners don’t know they’re living!

  67. Julie Burchill in the Sunday Tellygraff;

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/22/boris-opulent-ghost-christmas-present-clobbered-corbyn-scrooge/

    “Boris is the opulent Ghost of Christmas Present – that’s why he clobbered Corbyn the Scrooge

    There is something Dickensian about Boris

    A few weeks back I wrote a column which was perhaps a tiny bit priggish about how I pitied those without faith at Christmas, who feel it necessary to amp up the atmosphere with a non-stop round of partying and present-buying. Well, they say pride comes before a fall and I certainly appear to have been hoist with my own petard as I face the New Year seriously considering being hypnotised for the twin sins of a) spending like a sailor on shore leave and b) partying like it’s 1999.

    I blame Brexit. Getting the very thing one wants most of all in the whole wide world when one had resigned oneself to a brace of bath bombs can have a disorienting effect on the most stoic of souls. Yes, there may be carping ahead, but we face the 2020s with a feeling of vivifying velocity in our wings. At last we’re moving. It would have been dismal enough to go into a new year with a boring old hung parliament preventing us from doing anything but treading water in the shallow end, but plunging into a new decade condemned to repeat Groundhog Day until the last Brexiteer dropped dead would have been like having a permanent hangover.

    Ho, ho, ho – watching the Prime Minister and Jeremy Corbyn walking side by side into the Queen’s Speech reminded me of one of those old time illustrations about the two paths a boy can take, one ending up in benign success and the other in regretful failure. The joke here of course is that Boris took the putative road to hell – promiscuity, boozing, fibbing – while Corbyn was rather more of a hair-shirted sobersides. But somehow, Johnson’s essential good humour pulled him through while Corbyn’s inherent sourness revealed him to be a wrong ’un. Is there any minor character flaw more unattractive in a grown man than sulking?

    There is something Dickensian about Boris; he reminds me of the opulent Ghost of Christmas Present as played by Kenneth More in A Christmas Carol, whereas despite the list of promised presents for all, Corbyn is a natural Scrooge. Johnson is a forgivable sinner; I’m convinced that Corbyn never knowingly lies about all the regrettable incidents that indicate he is a Jew-baiter but that makes him a deluded demagogue, which is far worse.

    This is a parliament to warm one’s heart in the deepest midwinter – diversity as a natural and enjoyable thing rather than a finger-wagging scolding from the Great and the Good to the sullen proles. The Christmas wishlist read out by the Queen was ambitious but not fantastical: it’s amusing to see scorn now being poured on it by the very people who cheerled Corbyn’s promises of a magic money tree and a unicorn in every yard.

    Which brings us back to the issue of whether you can truly enjoy the tenderest of Christian festivals if you’re an atheist. I was wrong; of course you can. If we can’t find a religious meaning, goodwill to humankind comes a close second – but a vital part of that is optimism. The Stoics teach us that when we find ourselves in a situation unpleasing to us, we must change it, remove ourselves from it or endure it without complaint; any other option will just make us more miserable. Remainers would be wise to remember this for their own sanity as much as national unity.

    You certainly won’t appreciate the season of goodwill if you’re still ceaselessly ruminating about how horrid Those People are and trying to scare them with stories about chlorinated chickens infecting generations of post-EU Britons with super-gonorrhoea while the sky falls in upon our hapless heads. Accept with a good grace that you lost the battle – but you can yet win the peace if you accept that your enemy is not evil, just different; that most people mean well and that just because you can pronounce quinoa it doesn’t follow that your vote should count for more.

    Happy Christmas to my bold comrades in Brexit – I knew we’d get there! – and to my Remainer compatriots too. For we are both united in being fortunate enough to be born under a system of government – democracy – which all around the world people are fighting and dying for, and for that, whatever our beliefs, we should be thankful this Christmas.”

    2. Hang on. I’ve just built a stable of silver. Moderately expensive. Nothing like as expensive as the rope woven from gold that matches the blonde hair of the beautiful virgin I’ve hired to look after it.
      Are we not now getting one?

      1. Wifeys impression of the UK will not improve when she hears of yet another murder close to where she was this morning.

    4. “#Breaking: Just in – Two people’s throats have been cut and were stabbed on the streets in the streets of the town of #Crawley in West of #Sussex, the 2 people were dead on the spot and a manhunt has been underway to find the “suspects” all happened in broad daylight. #UK”

      Are we stuck with this illiterate gibberish for ever ?

    6. I once developed some special hardware down there: I thought it was quite nice, but that was in the old town, where IPC used to publish and print the World Airline Timetable, a sort of Bradshaws for airlines. That was in the 1970s..

      1. I lived in Pound Hill (to the east) from 1968 to 1977.

        I saw from Google Earth that the house name sign I put up in 1969 is still there.

        1. I used to get taken by the local team to a restaurant somewhere out in the country there for dinner. Very good and pleasant country side then but it’s probably under concrete now and fully enriched.

  69. Out of the keyboards of babes and journalists;
    a corker of a mospront under a DM photo of Lammy.

    “He set out his stool in today’s Observer, saying that he would decide over Christmas whether to run or back another candidate who might be better suited to beat Boris Johnson in 2024.”

    No shiite, Sherlock.

  70. After 20 years in Brussels, even I feel a bit wistful now about the thought of leaving: DANIEL HANNAN
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/21/20-years-brussels-even-feel-bit-wistful-now-thought-leaving/

    Daniel Hannan has a tinge of sadness at leaving the EU. Does he ask his wife to beat and humiliate him, does he enjoy being subordinate and crushed like a worm under the harrow, is he a masochist? Has he been softened up by his over-generous EU salary, pension and perks?

    He should heed the wise observation John Miton made in Samson Agonistes:

    “But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,
    And by their vices brought to servitude,
    Than to love Bondage more than Liberty,
    Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty    ;”

    He should also remember Caliban’s has had a sort of insular BRINO which makes his paean of joy when he thinks that he has been freed of his servitude to Prospero all the sadder:

    Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom! freedom, high-day, freedom!

    Sadly he is not really free after all and his new ‘masters’, – the drunken butler, Stephano, and the jester, Trinculo, are not fit to be masters of anything – rather like Corbyn and his Lahour Party.

    He is liberated at the end of the play by Prospero who, with great misgivings, leaves him to be the new lord of the Island. This is very like the misgivings the British should have had when colonial administrators like my father left Africa to black tyrants who have destroyed so much of the continent and brought slavery, genocide, famine and civil war in place of good order..

    1. Morning R,
      Well penned,
      IMO in hannans case it would read
      high pay, high pay.
      Milton’s words should be on a LARGE
      plaque above the HOc entry door, as in,
      Listen up bastards we have your number,
      “But what more oft in nations grown corrupt.”……………….

    2. I recall the piece he wrote a couple of years ago saying how much nicer it was to live in Brussels rather than the UK. He sounds depressed now.

          3. “Like the French but without the complexes” according to a Brit who has lived in both countries.

    1. “Give us a consonant…”F”
      Now a vowel…”U”
      Another consonant… “C”
      …….”

    2. I’m glad I don’t do Twitter – it seems as though it’s full of people having a go at each other, with cliques and claques everywhere.

    3. “The clip used to trigger the hashtag attack [On Owen Jones] was of far-right pro-Brexit protesters shouting abuse at him during and after a TV interview on College Green.”

      As I am sure the manchild Jones is aware, it is EVERYONE with a sense of decency and humour who shouts abuse at him in the streets, not just those who support Brexit. Supporting Brexit still seems to make you worthy of the label “far-right” though… These people will never learn, fortunately for our country.

      The more refined individual reaches for the riding crop and chases Mr Jones through the streets shouting “childsnatcher!” to alert the young that this boys ideology will steal their innocence away. A reverse Peter Pan, instead of flying them high through the moonlit night sky he drags them down into the red pits of socialism.

          3. Another champagne socialist who want the UK to take endless migrants and asylum seekers but prefer to live in a tax haven rather than the UK

      1. Yes, i know. They won’t have warp capability but it will have an Ion drive and impulse engines.

        1. I’m surprised they didn’t use the infinite power of the BBC’s Diversity Drive – it is so Warped – way beyond 10….

    3. Was Gordon Brownski involved in awarding the contracts to the Clyde shipyards, or did he stop at ‘aircraft(sic)’ carriers

  73. The Sunday Times also reports Ms
    Long-Bailey, an ally of Mr Corbyn, has over-egged the origins of her
    inspiration to get into politics.

    She has in past interviews, as well as on election leaflets, said her
    political outlook was shaped by watching her father worry about losing
    his job on Salford docks.

    In an election leaflet, she wrote: ‘My dad, Jimmy, worked on the Salford docks
    and I grew up watching him worrying when round after round of
    redundancies were inflicted on the docks.’

    But Ms Long-Bailey, born in September 1979, would only have been two when the docks closed in 1982.

    A spokesman for Ms Long-Bailey told the Sunday Times: ‘Rebecca, like many
    others in the north, saw first-hand the devastation created by
    Thatcher’s brutal economic regime.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c3239d0e60f02996f76c07b186a804c9ad482ee672ab48034ef0f0fac422e6c0.jpg

          5. Explanation:-
            Double Single, each side 2 x panels wide and 1 x panel high.
            Bailey Bridges were built in combinations of up to Triple Triple.

            EWBB; Extra Widened Bailey Bridge.

      3. Ah, I love the delicate expressions one finds on here. I like a glass of wine but keep my intake to a minimum these days. An age thing I assume.

        1. Just the two bottles?

          Good evening, Our Susan.

          When I started at the BBC in 1975, there was a fridge in every producer’s office – well stocked.

          1. Little different when I started in ‘91. The biggest change is that in these open plan set-ups, no one has an office any more!
            On the drinkies subject, I like to go to the Sunday morning concerts at the Wigmore Hall and the ticket price (reduced for over 60’s) includes a small glass of sherry.

          2. Each? Or between the audience??

            I cannot recall the last time I tasted sherry. My late father, to whom I had once – in about 1968 – revealed that I quite liked Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry – used, every sodding year thereafter – to give me a dozen bottles each Christmas. Put me off for life!!…

      4. Lots of these far left types are very imaginative with their stories. I suspect if you got hold of a copy of her CV a bit of investigation would find a lot of disrepencies

      5. Eww. Not sure about that.
        I have an orange and chocolate cream liqueur from Aldi that’s very nice. Currently into my second bottle…

    4. IT was the dockers themselves that were a cause of a lot of the job losses with their constant strikes then later on the docks moved from pretty much manual unloading of the ships to containers ships that needed much lees Labour. Cleary she could have no real memory of her father working the docks. The probability is her father was not even working the docks by the time she was born as they would have been very run down by them

      Data I can find shows just 3000 working in the docks when they closed another problem was the Manchester ship canal. It was simply not built to take containers ships and they could not access the docks

      1. Per Wikipedia – father was a union official. As you say, once containers became the norm, the need for dockers dropped severely. That’s what happened spectacularly in Liverpool where the union vigorously resisted the use of containers. Did not work out well for them, as the container traffic just went elsewhere.

        1. As I recall one of the main objections to containers was that they greatly reduced any chance of dock workers pilfering and pilfering had always been considered one of the most important perks of the job.

          1. The amount of Whisky being exported, as opposed to the actual amount being sent to the docks for onward shipment to the US etc, greatly increased, when the product was loaded into containers at the Distillery by their own staff.

            Pallets were no longer ‘droppable’

          2. When we lived in Liverpool back when the docks were in full swing, pilferage was legendary. Shippers knew a percentage of what got shipped would not “arrive”.

          3. “The dockers disliked containers because they couldn’t find any trousers with 20ft pockets.”

          5. Well the traditional Labour vote was dockers, rail workers. miners, steel workers and factory workers

          6. BJ,
            As we well know, many having fought in the war, with women taking over successfully war production.
            That was when we had proper men / women
            recognised by each other as such.
            The reality today is the governing parties are
            complete sh!te, do you not see the difference ?
            the current rabble have my highest esteem as being top notch name rustlers.

        2. Well Salford dock would not have been suitable in any case as the Manchester Ship canal could not take them and the docks themselves were not deep enough or big enough to take them. The same fate hit the London docks so the traffic moved down to Tilbury which could handle container ships since then the ship have got even bigger so the container traffic went to Felixstowe and more recently the New Lomdon Gateway docks

  74. Cromford end ¼ Door fitted and I’ve made myself a bite to eat and am just about to light the fire.
    It’s been a lovely day today, quite warm for the time of year.

      1. Still need the wood for the main door.
        Basically, I want a fairly wide doorway so have made a ¼ door two T&G boards wide. That will be normally kept bolted shut in normal use, only opened when I need to get something wide into, or through the shed.
        The main door will be 6 T&G boards wide, when I eventually get to the sawmill up in Tansley.

  75. Are they Joking

    Islington & Lambeth are saying they have lots of room to accommodate so called unaccompanied child refuges which is strange as there on reports state they are struggling to cope with the current numbers and farm them out to the rest of the UK just to get rid of them. Why are we taling people from Albania for heavens sake that not a ware zone and does nor even have civil unrest they should have been returned

    Unaccompanied asylum seekers Meeting the needs of asylum seeking children and young people continues to be a challenge. At December 2015, we had 47 unaccompanied asylum seeking children in Islington’s own fostering beds, 39 of whom were seeking asylum from Albania. Although these young people are vulnerable because they are separated from their families and adapting to a different culture, they are not necessarily wanting or needing therapeutic placements for child protection reasons. Recent changes in the children’s asylum system will result in less new unaccompanied children needing Islington placements, except for brief assessment periods.

      1. London exports a lot of their unwanted population on the UK. It is cheaper for them and they let the council outside of London pick up most of the tab. All the London boroughs pay for is the rent which outside of London can be as little as a third of the London costs

    2. And how exactly did all those unaccompanied children make it all the way from Albania on their own, without going through multiple safe countries first?? Swim the entire Mediterranean Sea all the way to the English Channel???

    1. This is one of those curiosities.
      My significant other claims I never buy her flowers but I do, indeed, whenever the supermarket has some and I am shopping alone (so much less stressful) and they are discounted (the discount tags come off easily enough…. just so long as they last through the checkout).
      So clearly she has some memory problems.

      yet how can this be when she can remember every minor infringement from the very beginning of our marriage 20, (23?) years ago. Indeed, i know this because to amuse herself on long journeys, or at any other time, she will happily start a recitation of all my faults that can go on for some considerable time (never travel across Europe by car with sig other unless thoroughly tranquilised… her or you, doesn’t matter, just one of you). And of course there will be frequent queries of “Are you listening to me? What did I just say?” and possibly a quiz at the end though we have never actually reached the end, our destination arriving first.

      Maybe her memory is selective. I can be I suppose?

  77. “According to Alcohol Concern, there are an estimated 595,131 dependent
    drinkers in England, of whom only 108,696 are currently accessing
    treatment. Alcohol misuse is the biggest risk factor for death,
    ill-health and disability among 15-49 year-olds in the UK, and the fifth
    biggest risk factor across all ages. Alcohol abuse is estimated to cost
    the NHS around £3.5bn annually”
    Merry Christmas !!!

    1. A lot of it is down to the non enforcement of the licencing laws and the law. in the past Licencing laws were strictly enforced and any landlord breaking them would find action being taken against them. The police also enforced the law, Anyone drunk and disorderly would be picked up and put in the cell and would be fore the magistrates the next day day it is ignored by the police

      Licenced premises should also not be serving drunks but now as long as they have money and can just about stand up they will serve them. THey also have a duty of care but there idea of that is to just throw drunks out onto the street

      1. Alcoholism is a disease caused by dependency on or over-use of alcohol. It is an expensive and un-necessary menace. Every one here who regards having a drink as a part of life is a potential victim. If you think alcoholics are just yobs who get drunk in pubs, you are very, very,ignorant, Bill. Social drinking is everywhere and is a curse. This is one thing ( perhaps the only thing ) that the Muslims seem to have got right.

        1. It is the big drinking that does the most harm

          I would say things have revered now. People used to drink in Pubs and the heavy drinkers would top up in the of licence on the way home. Now it is younger people drinking before they go out for a night of drinking hence the greater problem in the streets

    2. The big shift from on-sales to off in the last 30 years has been the main cause of heavier drinking in the younger generation.

    6. I never misuse it. I just put in in my mouth and swallow it.

      Can’t think what these other people are doing with it.

  78. One dead and three injured in head-on fireball crash between National Express coach and Zip car in south London

    Had to look it up a ZIP care is some kind of car sharing arrangement

    https://www.zipcar.com/en-gb?utm_id=bing_299426298_1289727234495355_80607977175816_kwd-80608005119831:loc-188_c&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=UK_B_Brand_UK_ENG_%5BE%5D&utm_term=zipcar&utm_content=Zipcar_%5BE%5D&gclid=CJmQvoKTyeYCFQJ1Gwodeo0Paw&gclsrc=ds

    One person is dead and three have been injured after a fireball crash between a National Express coach and Zip car in south London early this morning.
    The two vehicles were destroyed by the blaze after they collided on Queenstown Road, Battersea, at 4.30am.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/51255878043b9f4ae97cf03b440a72155dcc8549825331448a7bcd6c1f7f79bf.jpg

    8. Can I get my order in now, I will have to of them for Christmas. It is always useful to have a spare

  81. Off topic
    Spurs discovering the hard way that Jose Mourhino is a completely over-rated waste of money, unless you can offer him an inexhaustable cheque book.

  84. We had a very pleasant golf club Christmas lunch.. match was called off because course was waterlogged.

    Moh had turkey and all the trimmings and I had … baked red mullet on a bed of linguine flavoured with a light chilli dressing .. and a very tasty cauliflower cheese and seasonal greens … The fish was properly cooked and flavoursome .. There was no choice re the vegetables! The attendance was terrific.. and we all sang the 12 days of Christmas according to table number .. nice touch !

      1. Thankyou Bill .

        It was a refreshing change .. I enjoyed the company of many . There were many happy winners and some lovely silverware for those who did very well ..

        We have many crystal glasses won years ago .. Every golfer has his time .

    3. Jealous. Our club closed at the end of October when a storm ripped out dozens of trees, now it has a nice Christmassy (to some) white dressing.

    5. An excellent start to Christmas. And, I love sprouts. I told our boys that sprouts were baby cabbages, little power houses of energy. Fine, they loved them until they went to school. Then I liquidised them with their gravy…..

    6. An excellent start to Christmas. And, I love sprouts. I told our boys that sprouts were baby cabbages, little power houses of energy. Fine, they loved them until they went to school. Then I liquidised them with their gravy…..

      1. PM

        I don’t mind sprouts these days .. thy are sweeter and not as bitter as they used to be .

        My late grandfather who served during the first world war prefered his cooked sprouts as a separate course .. mashed up , black pepper and a sprinkle of salt and vinegar .. apres sprouts..

        My children didn’t mind their greens in any way shape or form .. I had a Mouli baby .. a sort of hand grinder .. that I would put our cooked food in which I ground up to feed the baby .. no need for jars ..or tins etc.

      1. Ha haa .. yes I had sprouts as well .. when a few bits of purple sprouting broccoli would have been preferable .. I ate a couple so as not to seem too fussy!

        Love sea bass though .

        I was one of a handful who had red mullet .. so I thanked the guys in the kitchen .. they laughed .. and said they were glad I had enjoyed the
        goldfish from the lake .. Goodness I hope they were joking .. I do hope so .

        1. I swapped my sprouts for a Yorkie (pud)

          Also had carrots and roasties and Colly Flower, prawns to start

  85. A Christmas message from the Prime Minister to Brussels.

    Dear Mr Druncker Barnier

    Just a quick line to say that the United Kingdom is leaving your crumbling empire on 31 January. No ifs, no buts. I am not your creature Treason May.

    Should you chaps wish to trade with us, then I suggest that you pop over to London. Once you have negotiated (see the pun?) Customs and Immigration, tell your hire car driver to put “10 Downing Street” in his satnav. So looking forward to seeing you and your begging bowl.

    Meantime, forget about Brexit and have a really happy Christmas.

  86. That’s me for the day – one spent watching the MR ice and decorate 12 Christmas cakes that she had made and imported – as well as selecting and wrapping Christmas presents, making chocolate ice-cream and doing a smashing supper.

    It’s the training I offer…

    I did put in 20 pieces of jigsaw. And brought in four logs.

    A demain.

    1. Make the very most of these pleasures, you will then look back wistfully at happy memories of Laure.

      2. This is THE Bill Thomas who graces Nottle with his presence.
        He can afford to pay people to be exhausted on his behalf!

  88. I was just putting some Tesco’s Siberian salt on my roast beef when a strange note fell out of the packet.

    4. You may laugh – but I was actually taught writing and spelling on one of these when I went to infants’ school. The spell checker was something called the Teacher. Like all new programmes it took a bit of getting used to. e.g:

      2tephen………….

  90. While living in Greece has much to commend it, there are some problems for the Brit abroad; while in the Uk the supermarkets fill up with charity Christmas cards for sale which you can buy and post and the postal services can either lose them or deliver them well on toward easter, and, in the market saturday, not a single brussel sprout. Funnily enough I quite like them…. at Xmas.

    Oh, and TV will be devoid of the various versions of “A Christmass Carol.” Maybe on satellite but that means watching everything in German. As i think I indicated before, some of the usual Xmass fare doesn’t come across well in German…. if they chose, for example, to show “The Great Escape” it would suffer as did “The Battle of Britain”…. far better they for once show these films in the native language with subtitles…. I am pretty sure Germans can read and many actually speak good English, better than the Brits speak any language, including their own.
    But then, many Germans speak as if they learned German not at school or in the home but from a Berlitz course…… every word separate from the next (except those portmanteau words they are so fond of) and precisely articulated…. you can see I get to watch a lot of German TV…. the wife, German as can be…..I have no choice. But even she sees nothing to be gained by watching German comedians… an axismoron? Couple the manner of speaking, which is possibly funny, with the supposed humour (about the level of humour on the BEEB these days i.e. very very unfunny unless a lefty).

    I could wish they put on Hello hello…. i understand they were one of the purchasers of this and will, of course, have dubbed it…. but dubbed it how? And would the Germans in it be as funny without the absurd accents like Herr Flick of the Gestapo…..

    Oh, and on the question of the post. If Bojo really wants his Churchillian moment he could do no harm by sorting out this fancy the Royal Mail has for sub contracting out overseas parcel deliveries to its “Distribution Partners.”
    Some of you may have seen my comment on this.

    Parecl posted at the post office Dec 7th. It could fly to AThens for onward transmission from either Gatwick or Heathrow, about an hour away. But for some reason it went first to Gatwick sorting and then to langley (The Slough Langley, not the pentagon as someone suggested…. come friendly (German) bombs and fall on …..Langley).
    Langley held it till the 16th before handing it over to GLS, a German company. It apparently got lucky and arrived in Neuenstein the same day and has now been there ever since. They proudly show it as in their store (depot?) and neither the Royal mail nor GLS care to respond to emails, no matter how much they’d like you to think you matter to them.
    Oh, what joy, when I contemplate that GLS has no depots in Greece. They consign it on to their own distribution partner, a Bulgarian company and in the past this has been where some parcels end up “lost”. Of course, there are now only about two days left for them to actually get it here so we can expect it sometime in the new year….. so, for a journey that in this “Global” world the liberals are so fond of, it could have been here quicker had it gone on a reed boat with thor heyadal. So go on Bojo. Do something sueful and sort out the Royal mail and insist they hand over parcels to the relevant parcel service in the country of destination. and if not you, maybe Saint Greta could be interested because of the frightful waste of energy and the carbon emissions associated with so much unnecessary handling and multiple flights.

    1. I’m guessing, and I may be wrong, that you’re getting well into the Christmas spirit?

      Have fun.

      1. Er, well, we have stocked up on Souma… I have a two litre bottle of 45proof and another of 55proof. So a good chance to become wasted.

      1. No. Sig other is addicted to Sturm dem Liebe (the best I can come to describing this is an upmarket “Crossroads” but less credible and no Benny), and Grand Hotel (Spanish but dubbed) which leaves little time for anything else. Otherwise it is Dc Who or Poirot…./Miss Marple…..

        1. H.P. Kerkling? I couldn’t stand Thomas Gottschalk, or Thomas Dieter Heck (?)
          I left Germany in 2002, so TGH is almost certainly no longer around, but the other 2 maybe.

          Don’t forget that the “Dinner for One mass orgy is looming. 😉

          1. TGH died in 2018, so Imdb says, the others? well none of them ring any bells with me, but then while SWBO watches I am on the PC.

    4. Do the Germans still queue up for Dick and Doof films at the weekend? We have had various Germans living with us, (au pair and child swap), and they only found accidents funny, such as when someone spilled a glass of something or fell downstairs.

  92. Just looked at the Garudian (alternative typo) and found this.

    Britain has chosen Boris Johnson…

    … and it’s making huge headlines across Europe. But while Britain is poised to leave Europe, the Guardian is not. We will continue to be there for you with accurate, authoritative, round-the-clock coverage as events unfold. These are turbulent, decade-defining times. We are committed to keeping *readers in Spain, like you, informed, involved and fully up to speed. We will be front and centre, reporting the facts live from the action. Whatever happens next, the Guardian is staying with Europe – investigating, disentangling and interrogating.

    * It is tracking me

    3. Interesting to speculate how many Guardians are purchased each day by Boris’s new non-London voters …. Zero?

      1. I would love to know how many copies of the bogpaper version of the Grauniad get bought by the BBC every day and more importantly how that compares with all other print editions of other newspapers.
        As the BBC is Govt “owned” I wonder if that information might be available under a freedom of information request.

        And yes the is in play!

        1. A few years back it was found that about 95% of spending on the BBC’s job adverts was placed with The Guardian.

          2. Probably an apocryphal tale.

            In the pre-digital age it was suggested that only the BBC and other Government /LA etc. spending on job advertising was keeping the paper afloat.

    4. Curiously, it accused me of being in Sweden, rather than Romford, Greater London, where I live. Have never been to Sweden. For a moment thought Khan had hived us off. Had visions of the Doom Goblin’s face appearing on billboards, apathy towards Abba being a hate crime, and us forced to drive electric Volvos on right-hand side of the road. No sign of this happening yet though, thankfully.

    5. As usual, the Guardian is confused. Britain is not leaving Europe. Britain is leaving the EU. As usual, the Guardian is wrong.

      So much for reporting the facts.

      As for investigating, disentangling and interrogating… who? It’s done no investigation into the EU whatsoever. It’s always been ardently pro EU with no critique whatsoever.

    2. Yes, we need secure institutions to house philosophers “of disturbed mind”. They need a regular “tough love” regime … Grayling could benefit from an outdoor regime, with runs and gardening, and, possibly, some farm work.

    3. Yes, we need secure institutions to house philosophers “of disturbed mind”. They need a regular “tough love” regime … Grayling could benefit from an outdoor regime, with runs and gardening, and, possibly, some farm work.

    4. Ah bless.

      Yes, resist! Fight back! Evil! Hysteria! The constitution will be used to enforce democracy so we can’t keep hindering the public will! Gahhh! wail, squeal…!

      Good grief. Someone kidnap him, shave his head and remind him he is a pathetic piece of ordure.

    1. Idle curiosity here:
      Do you really think that if it looked in a mirror that it would see anything?
      Just askin’.

  96. Sherrelle is a good un:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Top BTL comment:

      William Raaf 20 Dec 2019 7:22AM

      Diversity with one blatant exception; diversity of thought. Only their rigid inhuman dogma allowed ; Political correctness, Identity Politics, Open Borders, Antidemocracy and Victim Culture. The new religion of the fundamentalists. And it’s not only the BBC and 95% of the MSM. This poison is injected in our education system, the civil service, the NGO’s, the judiciary, Big Tech and the police. It’s destroying free speech, freedom of thought,the meritocracy, the Enlightenment and Western civilisation. It is destroying the lives of millions upon millions. They already destroyed a country such as Sweden. They are the Orwellians. The new totalitarians. By far the biggest threat since WO2 and they are everywhere and seemingly unstoppable.

      664 up votes

    2. The BBC like Labour only speak to those inside the M25 bubble as far as they are concerned nothing really exist outside of the m25

        1. It is the first natives they encounter outside on the M25 and it terrifies them as does the other border town of Watford

    2. What we need is for is Vegan to comment on an Omnivore (us) , and then then it be made law that Omnis have rights to

  99. DOI

    I see Jason has departed from the Judging panel

    A lot of the training sessions as well were filmed at Ally Pally

      1. Well the sort of warm up session. It starts properly in January. The program its self is now filmed at RAF Bovingdon

  100. DOI

    I see Jason has departed from the Judging panel

    A lot of the training sessions as well were filmed at Ally Pally

  103. I’ve just watched the first 10mins of the BBC’s take on the Christmas Carol, I have not words enough to express my incandescent fury at this abomination of an adaptation, how could anyone with a shred of decency replace the immortal ““Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it.” with somebody peeing on Marley’s grave? couple this with the equally loathsome Eastenders £87million set and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for the BBC and myself to part company.

    1. DT Headline:

      As the BBC director-general, Lord Hall rejects claims of election bias and says: ‘People trust us’

      They were completely biased in the coverage of Brexit and lost their reputation entirely for political impartiality as a result. They are now determined to wreck their reputation for drama as well.

      (I only lasted five minutes of it)

        1. Just an experiment to find out that the answer truly is 42 which is either 6×7 or 7×6 – It simply proves we will always be at sixes and sevens…….

    2. As a youngster, inspired by Heinlein,Asimov and Poul Anderson I dreamed of the stars

      We decided to support untold billions of useless mouths instead
      Our species ends on this earth

  108. Breaking Franch (sic) news.

    As France remains under the cosh of the communist led unions in their endless struggle against pension reform, Toy Boy has announced that he will forgo the pension he will receive when he stops being President!

    This is known as “gesture politics”….. Vive Macronie.

    1. France will be a patch of land used for feeding German cattle, long before he is due to draw a pension.

      1. France knew that before WWI and WWII. No difference – French governments are opportunistic – and most of all FRIT!

        1. Why do you think they ‘built’ the tunnel

          So the French Underground aka ‘The Resistance’ could escape, until we Brits drove the dastardly Huns back to Merkleland

    3. Retiring on full pension at 50 is and always has been unsustainable in the long term. Greece had the same problem. Clearly people were bought off. You reap what you sow.

      1. My father was one of the lucky ones who retired on a so-called “top hat” pension, long before Gordon Brown ripped the private sector pension schemes apart..
        By the time he died his pension was much, much higher than his final salary.

        1. I mean no disrespect.

          I just feel these conditions were input to keep people quiet. We are now seeing in France that when reality finally hits, the people are revolting. Mostly because they have had it easy.

          There are quite a lot of French bureaucrats on full pay who have done no work for years. They don’t even need to turn up to the office.

          2. And his pension would have been financed by the private sector, not the taxpayer. So no need for any embarrassment.

          3. Yes and no.

            He was in an industry that shrank rapidly in the 70’s and people were being made redundant left right and centre but most of them not young enough to draw their pensions. He always felt a sense of guilt.

            I was in banking when people were offered the early bath at 50/55 on full pensions on years served. Many came back as Compliance officers. Some lasted long enough to get to nearly double pension, plus all the years of earnings.

            Great if you could get it. It was one of those times I rather regretted climbing the career ladder too fast. Too young for the package too old to be part of the so-called new wave.

      2. Good Lord – who’d have thought it?

        In the old days, pre-euro – countries simply printed lots more washer notes, (francs, pesetas, drachma etc etc)

        Now, of course, the Reichsbank in Frankfurt says, “Nein”…

      1. Only the ones from the EU, the banks he worked for….(and Mummy’s pension when she shortly kicks the bucket).

    5. Probably better off not to receive a pension anyway.

      None of my employers ever provided company pensions, they just supported us by matching contributions to private pension savings schemes. Over the long term that do it yourself approach allowed most of us to build sizeable pots.

      1. And if my private QROPS is anything to go by, it remains within the estate and the capital can be passed on to your kin.
        I would happily lose a quarter of my NatWest pension to be able to pass on what was left.

  109. So Lammy has all but confirmed he has enter a race and a new one Rosena Alliin-Khan. I have never heard of her. Neither are likely to attract voters outside the M25 and both are Remainers

  110. Thought I’d have a moment and watched a few minutes of “matlida” by Roald Dahl. Thought the book great fun as an adult, but transposed in the US of A with its twangs and evil Trunchbull speaking English English ( of course) turned me off.

    Likewise the Borrowers, which I had also read with affection as a child – again bloomin’ Americsns. Switched off again. I can see why I never saw those films. All | can say is jolly good for J.K. Rowling (twerp as she may be on some other counts) for insisting that Harry Potter remained British.

    1. Dahl was an unusual and brilliant man. He knew how to express himself –

      ”
      “I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel.”[77]
      Dahl told a reporter in 1983: “There’s a trait in the Jewish character
      that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity
      towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything
      crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them
      for no reason.”

      I suppose Jermy Corbyn belonged to his fan club.

  111. Daft UN Directive

    The UN is demanding we meet strict gender directives for troops we send to Mali. What are they going to do f we cant? Tell us we cannot send troops there?

    4. Yes it takes up to several attempts to posts and the posts are not loading properly. Disqus is far worse than it normally is

    5. It is. Repeating itself and also pretending I’m not logged in, though I never log out. Grrr…

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