Sunday 8 August: There is a fair way to change the unsustainable pensions triple lock

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/08/07/letters-fair-way-change-unsustainable-pensions-triple-lock/

479 thoughts on “Sunday 8 August: There is a fair way to change the unsustainable pensions triple lock”

  1. Good morning all! I was pleased to read late last night that Uncle Bill Thomas’s Fulmodeston’s church fete had raised £681 in just two and a half hours. He added that “a very distinguished NoTTLer from Colchester attended… he also purchased two jars of the MR’s famous lemon curd”. Poor old Bill, he does get confused with the sex of his many friends. For example, he often confuses me (Elsie) with The Master (Harry Lime) and calls me Harry. I have to correct him every time he does it. For the benefit of those who imagined it was maybe Korky who visited Bill and the MR, it was in fact The Master, who is far from being “a very distinguished NoTTLer” and is, instead, a very minor NoTTLer and nowhere as distinguished as I – “devious” is more like it.

    To put the record straight, as my avid followers will be aware, I only learnt of the Fulmodeston “bash” very late on Friday night and regretted that I could not attend because of the late notice (I had lots of ironing to do on Saturday morning, as AWK’s post will show). So I spoke to The Master and asked him if he could attend in my place and take with him a jar of my home-made marmalade to Uncle Bill as a gift. This he did, and also bought several jars of jams, chutneys, lemon curd, etc. which are now sitting in my larder awaiting future use. (I shall donate one of the lemon curd jars to The Pushy Nurse since when she and her Bill drove to Fulmodeston the locals had snaffled the very last jar.)

    To demonstrate just how devious The Master is, after charging me a vast sum for all the produce he brought back (I think he made a 200% profit) he then announced that he had only been able to spend a generous sum at the fete by “borrowing” a £20 note from Bill with the promise that “Elsie will pay you back”. What cheek! Now I will have to cycle over to Bill’s to repay him and it will take me days to make the 200 mile return journey on my push-bike (my car is booked in for its annual service and MOT). Well, at least I have learned of a free BBQ that the locals will be holding so I think that I shall cycle over with dish of rhubarb crumble and maybe the locals will let me join them. Now I shall return to my ironing, but not before wishing you all on this site a very happy Sunday.

  2. What Happens Next?

    In an airport lobby George W. Bush noticed a man in a long flowing white robe with a long flowing white beard and long flowing white hair. The man had a staff in one hand and some stone tablets under the other arm.

    George W. approached the man and inquired, “Aren’t you Moses?”

    The man ignored George W. and stared at the ceiling. George W. positioned himself more directly in the man’s view and asked again, “Aren’t you Moses?”

    The man continued to peruse the ceiling. George W. tugged at the man’s sleeve and asked once again, “Aren’t you Moses?”

    The man finally responded in an irritated voice, “Yes I am”.

    George W. asked him why he was so uppity and the man replied, “The last time I spoke to a Bush I had to spend forty years in the desert“.

  3. This shabby and perilous retreat from Afghanistan could prove to be the West’s worst own goal this century. 8 August 2021.

    The mission was never going to be simple. Afghanistan is a deeply corrupt country paralysed by decades of conflict, proxy interference and internal tribal strife.

    Britain played its part. We helped stabilise Helmand Province in the south, a key region in the ‘Pashtun Belt’ from where the Taliban gets most of its recruits.

    Morning everyone. This is an exercise in What If. Elwood lists a whole series of errors that were made and yet when he was himself Defence Minister he did nothing! It’s interesting that he never mentions the United States here, either to blame them for this retreat or include them in any reversal of policy, yet the UK could do nothing in Afghanistan without them. He can’t even get the Helmand Province fiasco right, which far from being a success, finally put paid to any residual confidence that the American Military had in the UK!

    One suspects the whole of Elwood’s motives. He’s become quite prominent in the media for promoting discredited Middle Eastern adventures and as a spokesman for what is left of Tory Values in the Conservative Party; frequently speaking up for what he imagines to be its members Principles. Like Wallace the present Defence Minister, who also blathers with no concern for the truth, this is almost certainly self-serving, with one eye on promotion, and the other on being re-elected!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9872505/TOBIAS-ELLWOOD-Retreat-Afghanistan-prove-Wests-worst-goal-century.html

    1. Elwood is just another media savvy MP, with a good military voice , but is as hollow as an empty vessel .
      He attracts an audience .. similar to Richard Drax .

      1. Drax voted against extending the covid emergency legislation, so he can’t be all bad.

  5. Animals’ feelings considered in dognappings. 8 August 2021.

    Animals’ feelings could be taken into account by judges when sentencing pet thieves, as proposals for a new offence are drawn up by the Government.

    Dognappers may soon be charged with a new offence of Pet Abduction, which would carry greater penalties than Theft.

    There is no limit to our empathy. No cause we cannot embrace. No emotion we cannot fake! Walt Disney would have approved. Anthropomorphism becomes law!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/08/animals-feelings-considered-dognappings/

    3. The police don’t investigate theft as it is. Why would dog theft be treated differently?

      However, this is a new thing driven by the gimmigrants.

      A long time ago – well, a decade – I’d happily walk Wiggy and leave him outside Tesco where the worst that would happen to him is a surfeit of hugs and fusses where he’d be told how lovely he is.

      Nowadays thanks to the massive number of immigrants who will steal anything that’s not nailed down and don’t care about anyone apart from lining their pockets, with the police not even bothering to investigate I don’t take him with me unless he has his therapy harness on and can come inside with us.

    1. BORIS Johnson almost drowned when he was swept out to sea on a paddleboard during a summer holiday in Scotland, according to reports.

      The PM’s protection officers were forced to step in to save his life after a frightening near-miss in the Highlands.

      Boris had been holidaying with pregnant wife Carrie, their son Wilfred and dog Dilyn when disaster almost struck.

      His protection officers managed to drag him to safety, The Times reports.

      A source told the paper: “He nearly drowned.

      “He was taken out by the current.

      “He got swept away and found himself going further and further out.”

      Mr Johnson had afterward told allies that he would return to Scotland for his summer holidays “over my dead body”, it’s reported.

      The PM had also had security issues on the trip, forcing him to abandon his tent.

      And making matters even worse, he faced an infestation of midges during his travels.

      News of Mr Johnson’s misadventure comes several days after his Government issued an update to its travel traffic light system.

      Earlier this week he scrapped plans for a new amber watchlist travel tier after criticism from industry experts, airlines and MPs.

      ‘HOL IN SCOTLAND? OVER MY DEAD BODY’
      The PM said he hoped to make holiday advice “as simple as possible” for Brits heading abroad.

      Mr Johnson himself will swerve the travel traffic light chaos and “staycation” in Britain this year.

      https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15806733/boris-johnson-sea-paddleboard-protection-officers-rescued-holiday/

    2. I don’t even think they bother about the cost. Heck, we’ve a supposed wealthy banker who thinks that we can tax our way back to recovery. He knows the only option is to cut taxes, yet the treasury only ever hikes taxes. It’s the equivalent of lifting yourself out of a bucket by the handles.

  8. here we go, a few with grand titles with nothing to do:

    SIR – MPs are rightly concerned about how scrapping the triple lock would affect poorer pensioners.

    My husband and I – both less poor pensioners – share this concern. But isn’t this what pension credit is for? The solution is to scrap the part of the triple lock which is inappropriate this year, but significantly increase pension credit to compensate those who are badly affected.

    Dr Judith A Secker
    London SE16

    SIR – I was surprised by Simon Heffer’s claim that pensioners have “enjoyed remarkably good times”.

    The over-75s have just had their net income reduced by £160 due to the withdrawal of the free television licence. Pensioners are also taxpayers, and make a net contribution to the economy of some £60 billion a year. In the last decade we have seen a massive effective transfer of income from pensioners to young house-buyers through low interest rates, which have decimated savers’ incomes. But the greatest unfairness comes from the focus on percentage increases, which give more to those who already have, such as Mr Heffer, and next to nothing to those at the bottom end.

    Many of our members are either on pension credit or just over the limit, which means they get few other benefits. Last year’s increase went entirely on increased council taxes, the TV licence and increased fuel costs.

    Pensioners need a substantial increase just to keep up. This can be paid for by slashing the increases for those at the top.

    Hugh Emerson
    Secretary, South Cheshire Pensioners Association

    SIR – Today’s pensioners have enjoyed a life of free healthcare, free university education, full employment, being the first generation in a century not to see a major war, the highest level of home ownership ever, massive wealth gains from home ownership, triple lock pensions, having a smaller elderly population than working population in early life and dominance as voters in later life. Young people have a right to ask if this isn’t enough.

    Phil Stewart
    London SW14

    SIR – There may be a case for a temporary suspension of the triple lock, so as to discount the anomaly of the v-shaped spike in average earnings due to Covid. But those both inside and outside the Tory party who see this as an opportunity to scrap the lock altogether should think again.

    The rationale for its introduction still holds true: our basic state pension remains one of the most miserly of all comparable economies, and the gap between it and average earnings is still far greater. To suggest that the triple lock perpetuates “inter-generational unfairness” against the young is therefore nonsense. And the zealots should remember that they too will grow old eventually.

    Nigel Henson
    Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

    Travel travails

    SIR – Readers have discussed how difficult, or indeed impossible, it can be to travel to Britain at the moment.

    My son and his wife were born and bred in the UK, and have two lovely children aged eight and five. Their home is in Edinburgh but, due to my son’s work, they currently live in Abu Dhabi (designated red).

    Having not seen them for more than 19 months, it was wonderful to spend a few days with them in Edinburgh recently. How? First they flew to Greece, an amber country, and carried out a 10-day quarantine. They then flew on to Edinburgh and completed a further 10 days of self-isolation.

    There was much Covid-19 testing between the UAE and Edinburgh – all thankfully negative. It can be done, but it does require a lot of effort and planning.

    Keith Taylor
    Colchester, Essex

    SIR – I fully understand the distress of those who are unable to see loved ones abroad, but surely overseas travel is totally foolhardy at present.

    Our middle daughter lives in New Zealand with her young family. We have not seen them for two years, and it is possible that Jacinda Ardern will keep the country closed next year too, but we just have to suck it up.

    She is just trying to protect her wonderful country. This is to be admired, and perhaps our Government should take the same approach, rather constantly swapping from green to amber to red and back again.

    Catherine Shearman
    Stroud, Gloucestershire

    Cost of coffee

    SIR – You report that a frost in Brazil will push up coffee prices.

    I was a coffee merchant when, on the night of August 11 1975, a severe frost destroyed more than half the coffee trees in Brazil. Over the next 12 months the export price of all coffee rose by over 1,000 per cent, causing mayhem in the wholesale and retail trade. Prices increased sharply and sales volumes fell, in some cases to 10 per cent of what they were previously.

    Thankfully it sounds as if this frost will not have such a drastic effect.

    Duncan Rayner
    Sunningdale, Berkshire

    Wild and dangerous

    SIR – The lack of council “pruning” (Letters, August 1) is also affecting the verges of Wimbledon Common, where sightlines from turnings are made almost impossible due to the height of the grasses.

    Any minute now some poor person is going to be mown down because the verges haven’t been.

    Liz Beaumont
    London SW19

    Vetting procedure

    SIR – On my first day at work in 1991, the farmer leaned on a gate and watched in silence as I pulled up in the veterinary practice’s gleaming new 4×4 estate loaded with all the equipment I could ever need, got out in chinos, loafers and a tie (as we’d been required to wear at college), and changed into plastic overalls and wellies. I grabbed my bag and approached him brimming with the cheery confidence of a new graduate.

    Looking me up and down, he plucked the pipe from his mouth and said: “You’ll be the small animal vet, then” (Letters, August 1).

    Within three months his prophecy had come true.

    Kevin Jordan
    Woodbridge, Suffolk

    NHS reform

    SIR – Daniel Hannan writes that “NHS reform is off the agenda”.

    The UK has spent 18 months striving to protect the NHS. It has been at the heart of the Government’s justification for the biggest impingement on our liberties in modern times.

    What is extraordinary is that reform is not the Government’s highest priority. The end result will be that, in the not too distant future, we will once again be asked to protect the NHS.

    Thomas Le Cocq
    Batcombe, Somerset

    SIR – It’s difficult to know where to start with Daniel Hannan’s article.

    The NHS was not responsible for the “early procurement decisions”, “testing” or “PPE procurement”. The distinction between vaccine buying and delivery is valid, but if the purchasing programme is worthy of praise, it is absurd not to recognise the success of the NHS delivery programme – the key driver of Britain’s exit from restrictions, with 72 per cent of the population double-vaccinated.

    The trope of NHS doctor and nurse “lions” led by manager “donkeys” is now well past its sell-by date. It was managers and frontline staff working together who created 34,000 beds to treat Covid-19 patients at the drop of a hat last March, delivered a world-class vaccination campaign and led the world in identifying and rolling out new Covid-19 treatments like dexamethasone and remdesivir.

    The NHS is not anti-private enterprise. It made significant use of independent-sector capacity during the crisis and will do so again as we clear the backlog created by Covid-19.

    NHS capacity is fundamentally determined by funding. It’s the last decade of the longest and deepest funding squeeze in NHS history that is primarily responsible for the current mismatch between capacity and demand that the NHS faces.

    Amanda Pritchard is far from a “change averse… continuity candidate”, as her track record as chief executive of Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust, and as Chief Operating Officer of NHS England, demonstrates.

    No one in the NHS would claim that the service gets everything right. The NHS publicly acknowledged in its own long-term plan that it should improve its performance in cancer and cardiac care. But describing its last 18 months as “a woeful crisis”, with “myriad mistakes”, is misleading.

    Adam Brimelow
    Director of Communications, NHS Providers
    London SW1

    A dog you can trust to keep the baddies at bay

    SIR – James Wilson (Letters, August 1) suggests acquiring a dog to thwart burglars.

    My elderly mother-in-law was once accosted by two men intent on a distraction burglary when she was alone in my home. However, they had not reckoned on encountering four German shepherd dogs behind the stable door through which they sought entry. While one of the dogs was fairly placid, the other three would have taken no prisoners.

    When I was renewing my household insurance, I claimed “four GSDs” as “security features”, but the insurer declined to offer a discount for
    this.

    Colin Cummings
    Yelvertoft, Northamptonshire

    SIR – A cheaper alternative to keeping a dog as a burglar deterrent was made to me by a police officer friend. He told me to buy a warning sign with a picture of a large fierce dog and place it prominently in the window because this in itself was enough to warn off burglars.

    I might still do this, since our dog would sleep through any burglary.

    Beverly Cox
    Warminster, Wiltshire

    SIR – Post pandemic, our most valuable assets are our two pedigree dogs, which would follow the burglar down the drive for a piece of cheese.

    Simon Clifton
    Worcester

    SIR – We had two dogs. After a night of incessant barking, we found that all our garden furniture had been stolen.

    We listened to them after that.

    Jane Eyles
    Mahón, Menorca, Spain

    Lifelong Tories left without a political home

    SIR – Your recent Leading Articles (July 25 and August 1) have gone to the heart of this Government’s dysfunction.

    My working-class father offered me just one political nugget: “Labour always leaves the country broke.” He was correct, and I remain a paid-up member of the Conservative Party in my seventies.

    However, I must be one of many – if not a majority – who now fundamentally question their continued membership. I despair of our desperately poor, uncoordinated Government’s leadership, and its moves to entrench liberal-Left idiocies. Nor does there appear to be any serious attempt by our backbenchers to counter this paradigm shift.

    What should Conservative Party members do now? Individual resignations would go unheard. Should we now unite in issuing a final warning?

    Dr Tony Parker
    Ringmer, East Sussex

    1. Some right little whiners amongst the letter writers today [Yes, Catherine and Phil, I’m definitely including you; Dr Tony is a rare example of sense] – my nomination for today’s MRD award however must go Adam Brimelow!

    2. “However, I must be one of many – if not a majority – who now fundamentally question their continued membership.”
      Very good, Dr Parker, but a bit bloody slow in coming to the party.

    3. “It was managers and frontline staff working together who created 34,000
      beds to treat Covid-19 patients at the drop of a hat last March”

      Yes Adam Brimelow, and we know what you did with the previous occupants of those beds.

      Also, Private Hospitals remained seriously under used when they could have been used for those cancer and cardiac patients.

      Director of Communications = Director of saving his own arse and propaganda.

      1. Adrian Brimelow sounds remarkably similar to those NHS apologists who descend on the comment threads of TCW. Nothing is ever the socialist monolith’s fault and Science is always correct – just not your science, that’s purely misinformation spread by cranks!

    4. @Duncan Rayner

      I thought there was an awful lot of coffee in Brazil….

      I’ll get me filter.

    5. “…led the world in identifying and rolling out new Covid-19 treatments like dexamethasone and remdesivir.”

      Pardon? When were anti-viral drugs ever offered to the public?

      1. Never.
        And other drugs, repurposed from their original target diseases and shewn to be effective against the Wuhan Virus, were banned.

  9. Morning all, I see the search for summer is still taking place in Norf Zummerzet, rain and 14C.
    Not to worry, I’m sure Nottlers will bring some sunshine for us.

  10. Good morning, all. Cold, wet and very windy start to Sunday. Thank goodness it was nicer yesterday.

        1. Well, The Master (Mr Lime) was entertained, Uncle Bill. I myself had a lot of ironing to do yesterday morning. (See my earlier post.)

    1. It is all part of the same plot by those in charge to change the demographic of the country. Their programme of assisted invasion is all part of the same stratagem.

      2. 336453+ up ticks,
        G,
        Just posted a reply to AWK, ending with “Tis my belief we ain’t being overrun by a Quaker invasion on the Dover beach”

    2. I do wish – really, really wish – I could be surprised.
      Being genuinely shocked would be a return to the Blighty of my youth.

      2. She certainly looks out of place, by her body language. It looks almost like…oh, a photo opportunity, perhaps?

    5. Quotas.

      Diversity strength! War is peace! Freedom is slavery… and all that tosh.

      Sue her for all the monies paid in salary, then have her pension accrual given as a cash payment to veterans.

      Tar, feather and expel her from this country but first jail her for being out of uniform. If she wants to wear the jabib or whatever it’s called she can do that in her own time, not while a Muslim is serving in the Police force.

  12. World is on the brink of catastrophe, warns Government climate chief. 8 August 2021.

    The world is getting “dangerously close” to running out of time to avert catastrophic climate change, Cop26 President Alok Sharma has said.

    Mr Sharma – who is tasked with making a success of the upcoming climate talks in Glasgow – said failing to limit warming to 1.5C would be “catastrophic”.

    Says he racing off to catch his latest flight! These people clearly don’t believe their own hype. Why should we?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/08/08/world-brink-catastrophe-warns-government-climate-chief/

    1. “… failing to limit warming to 1·5ºC would be ‘catastrophic’.”

      That’s it then, action must be taken and soon. We must cool down the sun. I suggest sending fleets of fire-engine spaceships to the sun to cool it down by hosing it with copious amounts of water. There is plenty of water to spare, after all, from all that Antarctic ice-melt that threatens to engulf and swamp all the big cities.

      Stage two could consist of making an enormous sun-screen to cover the entire planet.

      What are these wankers drinking? I want some!

      1. I mentioned some time ago a madcap idea to disperse millions of tons of fine dust into the atmosphere from aircraft has been mooted. The dust would increase the Earth’s albedo and therefore reflect more light, presumably including infra-red, back into space and hence cool the planet. As damask_rose mentions below, the Earth has more than enough dust spreaders of its own. It doesn’t need intervention from the “Green Lobby” to exacerbate the situation.

        Next up: H bombs at strategic weak points in the Earth’s crust to create massive lava flows and the ejection of dust and gasses into the atmosphere in an attempt to ‘save’ the Planet? Repeating ‘The Great Dying’ doesn’t seem a great idea but who knows what these fools will advocate next.😎

        1. 336455+ up ticks,
          Morning KtK,
          “attempt to ‘save’ the Planet? Repeating ‘The Great Dying’ doesn’t seem a great idea but who knows what these fools will advocate next”.

          Ogga11,
          The answer will only be seen by fully supporting / Voting for the lab/lib/con coalition into the future, or as long as we last.

          2. 336455+ up ticks,
            Afternoon W,
            If that means not funding the lab/lib/con coalition count me in.

            For the politico’s No dougheee No goeee.

        2. “The dust would increase the Earth’s albedo and therefore reflect more light”

          Wouldn’t that lead to even faster population rise?
          What?
          Oh, albedo.

      2. What are these wankers drinking? I want some!

        No you don’t. You really do not want to!

      3. I’m sure that Jim Bezos and Richard Branson could fire up their super-knobs and throw a few buckets of water over the sun.

      5. I’d like to know what part humans and industry played in the warming of the earth which ended the last ice age

        1. Indeed.
          There’s ice scapes in the cliff below my house, as evidence of the ice cap. Where did it all go, and why??

        2. Farting, Spikey. All that fashionable vegan food that those cave men ate when they couldn’t get a decent sabre-toothed tiger steak!

      6. This is what happens when utter tossers have far too much of other people’s money.

    2. Alok Sharma’s power, whether on board a gas-guzzling flying greenhouse emitter or not, is like spitting in the ocean compared to Jair Bolsonaro’s national plan to strip the Amazon of trees and indigenes and replace them with farmers, miners and loggers migrating away from the areas they have already turned to desert.

      1. Morning Jeremy. I am not unsympathetic to the idea of Global Warming (see this morning’s news) but the attempt to attribute it to human activity has seriously damaged its credibility!

        1. Not with me it has. My own sense of logic suggests that 8 billion people worldwide aspiring to American lifestyles, when even the year I was born, the most the Earth had to support was 2.8 billion, and many of these in abject poverty, is a recipe to catastrophe.

          1. I always thought China’s one couple one child policy was a great idea, except for the way it was conducted.

      3. I’ve kind of gone off indigenous rights recently, since they seem to mean that white people always have to apologise, are never given any credit for the good things they brought with them and never get any indigenous rights themselves!

        1. I don’t identify as “white”, even though I am racially Northern European. I do consider myself indigenous though, and consider I have the same rights in my country as the indigenous forest dwellers in the Amazon. The settlers may have different skins (descended from the conquistadors and their African slaves, whereas in the UK they are largely free people from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent), but they are in effect invaders, whether they be in England or Brazil.

          You make a valid point about the good things alien settlers bring with them, and my own country has a long history of invasion and immigration spanning many centuries. Sometimes, these enrich, and sometimes they are very destructive. Sometimes, they bring huge blessings on their hosts, and I would include Jews as a particularly shining example of this (even though Jewish women can be a bit argumentative, especially if they are mothers). Another are Indian corner shopkeepers. Another are Polish plumbers and dentists. And of course restauranteurs from all sorts of places.

          Maybe, rather than being dogmatic about settlers, we need to consider each on their merits?

          1. Good grief! What is this nonsense! Treating people as people rather than labels? Considering worth on the basis of merit and need?

            That’s discrimination! The Left hate discrimination – until they can force it on others.

          2. All that stops me having this opinion is that unfortunately, I would not be allowed to choose which groups I would keep in Britain and which would get the boot…..

  13. Good morning all ,
    It is raining , it is pouring
    The old man is snoring ..

    I am tempted to put the heating on because it is so cold .. but hang on , it is August.

    2. I lit the fire yesterday, Maggie. I was fed up with the cold and damp. I am resisting putting the heating on (or lighting the Rayburn).

  14. ‘Belarus is not using me, I’m using Belarus’: Iraqis happy to become weapon of choice for Europe’s last dictator. 8 August 2021.

    Alexander Lukashenko has been flying migrants directly from the Middle East to pile pressure on EU states harbouring critics of his regime.

    Officials in Lithuania are racking their brains over thousands of asylum seekers the Belarusian regime dropped on its doorstep last month in an apparent act of revenge for the country’s support of Western sanctions.

    I am no fan of Lukashenko; he’s a thug, a Marxist and a moron but he is doing no more here than the French and British governments are doing in the Channel!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/08/belarus-not-using-using-belarus-iraqis-happy-become-weapon-choice/

  15. Good Morning Folks,

    Started off bright and sunny now looking like rain is on it’s way

  16. Anyone noticing a slight retreat away from the climate change and the pandemic project fear narrative on the mainstream media?

        1. Stage managed to gain publicity, sympathy and show that he is human and makes mistakes. My cynicism is driven by the fact that Johnson is a political snake in the grass and a liar. I trust nothing that he either says or does.

          3. Yo KtK

            As with Bliar, if you had to shake hands with either of them, you would count your fingers after doing it

          5. The Masonic Masters roll up their sleeves and grab each other’s lower arms. There was a clip of this distinctive grip when Gordon Brown greeted Mervyn King.

    4. I’ve noticed that the “newspapers” are remarkably thin when one has mentally removed all the propaganda!

      Covid, climate change, meat is bad for you, you love BAME/gay/trans athletes at the Olympics, mental health, euthanasia is good, lose weight like this inspiring person, farming is bad, white males are responsible for crime.

      What’s left after all that’s gone? Mostly just stuff about Meghan and Harry, and perhaps a tiny paragraph tucked away somewhere about the latest gang rape.

    1. Mark Dice for President.

      The number of irredeemably stupid people on the planet is growing exponentially. I may have mentioned this before.

    2. This demonstrates how easy it is to fulminate mass psychosis as illustrated in the ‘A killing of the Mind’ video below.

      Truly frightening.

    3. Terrifying and very funny at the same time. It is entertainment though, as he tries to see how far he can go with these people. Apparently he only got 14 people to sign it, and that was in San Diego, California. I hope the fascists who did put their names on the line are suitably ashamed when they see the video.

    4. Good grief. How easy it has become to manipulate people. Only two showed disgust. All the others meekly sign.

      1. 336455+ up ticks,
        Morning VW,
        We have the majority of the herd been doing it for years
        following bent leaders, not only politically but physically
        take one, anthony charlie lynton for instance how corrupt has that political article been ?

        “it” is a mainstay of the current coalition the herd majority still seemingly has the hots for.

        WE could NEVER/EVER have attained such a high level of sh!te as a nation without the continued input from the
        lab/lib/con coalition.

  19. Good moaning.
    Two days of indoor jobs ahead of us – if the forecasts are to be believed. At least the puddles will be deep enough for Spartie’s liking.

  20. Good morning from a dull & damp Derbyshire with rain forecast for most of the day.
    10° in the yard and it’s looking as if I’ll not be getting anything done to the wall.

    1. Morning Stephen. Tucker has become something of a target recently. Even the BBC took a shot at him the other day!

    1. Looks like the law of unintended consequences.

      The “vaccines” might make it worse. How surprising.

      That’s why Israel appears to be in trouble with worsening data despite near compulsory mass vaccination.

      Meanwhile, Sweden is doing fine and the non vaxed made the right choice 😊

      If Gates, Johnson, Hancock and Blair want you to do something, always do the opposite and you’ll be fine.

  23. Team GB top one Olympic table: winning medals in a record number of events
    While GB have won medals in a broad range of sports, Sport England believes they need to recruit athletes from a wider social spectrum

    DTStory

    The Mayor of London is using his influence to see if Street Stabbing can be introduced as an Olympic event before the next games.

    BTL Comment

    Britain’s success is all down to BREXIT.

    Maybe this will encourage other EU countries to have their own Frexits, Spexits, Gerexits, and Netherlexits (or what have you) before the next Olympic Games!

  24. Another mail to Mr Redwood…

    Realistic planning has been unnecessary in the UK since 1990, and is just so dated now.

    All that has happened since then is to do what billionaires want, and then by magic become extremely rich.

    For further details, please call 📞 Tony Blair and ask him to tell you his George Soros story…..

    It’s a really good one, particularly the bit about QinetiQ, Mr Soros, Mr Major and $7.5 billion….

    Yours sincerely,

    Polly

  25. An article in the Telegraph about Green energy/electricity production . . .
    So we use all this Green electricity, produced by the wind farms, to make the Hydrogen, to make electricity to make the wind turbines used in the wind farms which . . . ??
    Hmm . . ?..??

      1. I’m waiting for the (immigrant usually ) lawyer who works to get more of the same here – to complain that the banning of petrol will stop the illegals getting here by powered rubber dinghy – so they will be unable to get here to freeload, commit crime, be a dangerous burden etc – so it MUST be racist to ban the fuel.. Expecting them to row here is too much – and therefore they should each sue the UK govt for £10 million each. I can actually imagine this happening – there is more chance of this than PP stopping any of them.

  26. Good morning, Nottlers!

    Now, who’d have thunk it?:

    Information Tribunal orders Committee on Climate Change to reveal Net Zero calculations

    7 August 2021

    The Information Tribunal has ordered the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to publish the calculations behind its claim that the UK economy can be decarbonised at modest cost.

    The CCC’s figures were presented to Parliament ahead of the Net Zero emissions target nodded through in June 2019 to enshrine it in law.

    The ruling, which dismisses almost all of the CCC’s arguments, comes after a two-year battle to obtain the cost calculations. Extraordinarily, the CCC’s case centred around a claim that it had erased and overwritten the relevant information by the time of the Freedom of Information request, just six weeks after the publication of the Net Zero report, and indeed changed and lost it further subsequent to the request.

    Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, who asked to see the calculations, commented:
    “By arguing that it has overwritten and erased the spreadsheet data, the CCC has essentially admitted that its internal processes are a shambles. This is not a competent organisation and Parliament needs to investigate as a matter of urgency. If they can’t even manage simple matters of data retention, what hope is there that they can prepare a plausible costing of a multi-trillion pound project such as the decarbonisation of the UK economy?”

    During the case, the CCC revealed that their costing does not include any estimate for spending in 2020-2049, but only considered the residual amounts in 2050, after the bulk of the transition. This was not made clear to the MPs when they agreed to bring the Net Zero target into law, and it is likely therefore that MPs were misled.

    The CCC has 35 days to publish the closest versions of the spreadsheets to those that existed at the time of the request.

      1. It’s entirely feasible. But it won’t be our economy, it will be our entire way of life, bombed back to the middle ages. It won’t be striking unions destroying the country, but the state machine itself.

      2. The cost – there is cost in financial terms, cost in economic terms, and cost in moral terms.

        Prettty big bill.

    4. Not competent? My dear fellow, they sound amazing! ‘Losing’ sensitive, embarrassing information? Over writing it? Absolute genius!

      There is no such document. The state hasn’t bothered with the calculations on cost because they are irrelevant to it. A bunch of morons got together and said ‘this is what we’re going to do, what do we need to do to get there’ and hang the cost to others.

      Soon, when the lights go out and we’re on a 2 day week, when major infrastructure fails, when there’s no fuel or food and we’re basically living in the dark ages the state, in it’s air conditioned, clean, well fed offices will ask why there is a mob outside – but we’ll be fine, as there won’t be fuel for the army or police to mobilise and we can get to these people and tear them limb from limb while they’re still breathing.

          1. Oh dear…….. well he died at least a hundred years ago so not much to do about it now.

    5. Not competent? My dear fellow, they sound amazing! ‘Losing’ sensitive, embarrassing information? Over writing it? Absolute genius!

      There is no such document. The state hasn’t bothered with the calculations on cost because they are irrelevant to it. A bunch of morons got together and said ‘this is what we’re going to do, what do we need to do to get there’ and hang the cost to others.

      Soon, when the lights go out and we’re on a 2 day week, when major infrastructure fails, when there’s no fuel or food and we’re basically living in the dark ages the state, in it’s air conditioned, clean, well fed offices will ask why there is a mob outside – but we’ll be fine, as there won’t be fuel for the army or police to mobilise and we can get to these people and tear them limb from limb while they’re still breathing.

  27. Good morning, Nottlers!

    Now, who’d have thunk it?:

    Information Tribunal orders Committee on Climate Change to reveal Net Zero calculations

    7 August 2021

    The Information Tribunal has ordered the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to publish the calculations behind its claim that the UK economy can be decarbonised at modest cost.

    The CCC’s figures were presented to Parliament ahead of the Net Zero emissions target nodded through in June 2019 to enshrine it in law.

    The ruling, which dismisses almost all of the CCC’s arguments, comes after a two-year battle to obtain the cost calculations. Extraordinarily, the CCC’s case centred around a claim that it had erased and overwritten the relevant information by the time of the Freedom of Information request, just six weeks after the publication of the Net Zero report, and indeed changed and lost it further subsequent to the request.

    Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, who asked to see the calculations, commented:
    “By arguing that it has overwritten and erased the spreadsheet data, the CCC has essentially admitted that its internal processes are a shambles. This is not a competent organisation and Parliament needs to investigate as a matter of urgency. If they can’t even manage simple matters of data retention, what hope is there that they can prepare a plausible costing of a multi-trillion pound project such as the decarbonisation of the UK economy?”

    During the case, the CCC revealed that their costing does not include any estimate for spending in 2020-2049, but only considered the residual amounts in 2050, after the bulk of the transition. This was not made clear to the MPs when they agreed to bring the Net Zero target into law, and it is likely therefore that MPs were misled.

    The CCC has 35 days to publish the closest versions of the spreadsheets to those that existed at the time of the request.

  28. Good morning, Nottlers!

    Now, who’d have thunk it?:

    Information Tribunal orders Committee on Climate Change to reveal Net Zero calculations

    7 August 2021

    The Information Tribunal has ordered the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to publish the calculations behind its claim that the UK economy can be decarbonised at modest cost.

    The CCC’s figures were presented to Parliament ahead of the Net Zero emissions target nodded through in June 2019 to enshrine it in law.

    The ruling, which dismisses almost all of the CCC’s arguments, comes after a two-year battle to obtain the cost calculations. Extraordinarily, the CCC’s case centred around a claim that it had erased and overwritten the relevant information by the time of the Freedom of Information request, just six weeks after the publication of the Net Zero report, and indeed changed and lost it further subsequent to the request.

    Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, who asked to see the calculations, commented:
    “By arguing that it has overwritten and erased the spreadsheet data, the CCC has essentially admitted that its internal processes are a shambles. This is not a competent organisation and Parliament needs to investigate as a matter of urgency. If they can’t even manage simple matters of data retention, what hope is there that they can prepare a plausible costing of a multi-trillion pound project such as the decarbonisation of the UK economy?”

    During the case, the CCC revealed that their costing does not include any estimate for spending in 2020-2049, but only considered the residual amounts in 2050, after the bulk of the transition. This was not made clear to the MPs when they agreed to bring the Net Zero target into law, and it is likely therefore that MPs were misled.

    The CCC has 35 days to publish the closest versions of the spreadsheets to those that existed at the time of the request.

  29. I am reminded of my own Tarmac saga after the events at Brize Norton.

    The main road has been dug up every year for the last four years.
    This year closing my road off to the rest of the world.
    They finished Tarmacing on Thursday.
    Friday they came and dug it all up again around the manhole covers.
    Then they came back Saturday and closed the road again and guess what?
    They have dug the whole lot up again.
    This time they have taken it down to the original road. It has a brick surface.
    The last time that saw the light of day it had horse drawn wagons on it.

    I’m looking forward to when the next water/gas/electrical problem requires it to be dug into again. Not !

    They couldn’t have done a worse/more expensive job than if they had hired Gypoe’s.

    Good morning all.

    1. G’morning Phizzee……..

      Perhaps it’s better to live on a narrow, steep, pot-holed lane like we do. At least the last time our bit was resurfaced was in 2006 – in the middle of a heat-wave so it melted and ran a bit further than they’d intended.

      1. It is indeed better. My 100-yard cul-de-sac became a race track for some after it was made up. Before that it was a lane with plenty of potholes, all cars were slow and rabbits and partridges and their chicks ran back and forth.

        1. Ours is open both ends, and in spite of the potholes is still used as a rat-run by some.

    2. It is called co-ordination. There is a “code of practice” to ensure that all public utilities are notified if one digs up a road.

      You can see just how well it works….

    3. Twas on a Monday morning ths Gas man came to cll
      Twas on the Tuesday morning the tarmaker filled in it all
      Twas on the Wednesday morning, theWater Board came to call
      Twas on the Thusday morning the tarmaker filled in it all
      Twas on the Friday morning the WiFi man came to call
      Twas on the Saturday morning the tarmaker filled in it all

      etc

    4. I am always amazed by how much tarmac is used to build speed ramps, but there is never enough to fill all the potholes and other impact damage. That is often cause by speed ramps/bumps.

      1. All part of the plan to discourage driving. Just like the 20 mile per hour speed limits that incidently create more pollution.

      2. The cheap way would be to treat potholes as negative speed bumps.
        But hey! It’s only taxpayers’ money, extorted with menaces.

    5. Only a sub-normal species with an undeveloped brain would ever consider placing all the utilities beneath the main transport system.

      1. They ruined all our pavements too when they laid cable. Since then BT has been around to make entirely sure they were all lumpy.

      2. The idea is that you know fairly accurately where they are, and it’s unlikely someone will dig through the services without having asked to dig up the road first.

        1. In theory. They still managed to crack a watermain. Causing floods to gardens on the lower stretch.

    6. Our lane is single track with a few passing places. It is very steep in places and has ditches on either side, except where it is cut into the adjoining field. It is so little used that we get grass growing in the middle. The road doesn’t have a name and the only number I am aware of is on a commune map at the Mairie, certainly there are no indications of any numbers on any signs.

      Since we moved here the whole road has been completely and properly resurfaced, not just skimmed twice, the few potholes that appear are repaired promptly, the verges are cut three times a year and in particularly growth spurt years four times. The ditches are cleared every other year. Litter, of which there isn’t a lot, is picked up regularly. This is standard practice throughout the commune. My property taxes and rates etc are less than they were in the UK.

      1. Friends with the Mayor are ya?

        Seriously though. It always comes down to population numbers.

        1. France must have nearly three times as many miles of road as the UK for a similar population so UK roads presumably must get three times as much wear and tear, more in places.

          What I find interesting is that very poor roads are fairly rare here, and when they do do any roadworks they get it over with as fast as they can. You seldom see miles of coned off roads for weeks on end and no obvious signs of men working and out of hours the traffic lights at roadworks are changed from stop and go to flashing amber, indicating two way traffic with care. Drivers (who by and large aren’t great) are treated as sensible adults.

    7. Responsibility for one of our local roads was transferred from the province to the town several years ago. Along came the bureaucrats and planners to upgrade the recently paved road to town standards. Electricity, sewer, gas, stereo lighting, pavement upgrades were all completed serially and all required massive equipment to excavate down below the frost line.

      I think that they have just completed the third paving of the road. It is in pristine condition, maybe there wil be bus tours from outlying regions to view this isolated masterpiece.

  30. The pensions triple lock is NOT unsustainable. Government spending is. It’s a question of proper distribution of funds stolen from the tax payer.

    For example, there are more poeple employed in the home office as administrators than there are employed globally by HP and IBM. Tell me – when those two multinationals can function with 125,000 staff why one government department – not including the front line police, prison officers and so on needs 135,000?

    When there are thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into the country, all no doubt claiming free money, when border farce isn’t protecting the border, when the welfare system is completely absurd and creating a situation of the dross outbreeding the worker at the expense of the worker the country is entirely back to front. We need radical changes to public spending, massive cuts in welfare provision and significant reductions in the civil service to reduce it by 10-25%.

    1. But aren’t all those migrants here to save the NHS? After all – we were told by the govt ( who wouldn’t lie) that they were all doctors and surgeons.

      1. Only a tiny percentage of them are doctors and surgeons. The rest are all children.

        Puberty must commence at 40 in sub-Saharan countries, even though they are capable of breeding by the age of 10.

      2. Only a tiny percentage of them are doctors and surgeons. The rest are all children.

        Puberty must commence at 40 in sub-Saharan countries, even though they are capable of breeding by the age of 10.

    2. You exaggerate, IBM has about 350,000 employees – not that it takes away from your point.

  31. Seeing as I am as Thick as Two Short Planks, can someone explain what “Triple Lock” means in the Boros context.

    This may help all the others who do not have a clue, but will not ask

    4. Don’t worry OLT you are not in that boat alone, Boros doesn’t know either, he only takes advice from ‘experts’. Who seem to appear in some different form on an hourly basis.

    5. What is the pensions triple lock? Introduced in 2011 by the coalition government, the triple lock guarantees that the basic state pension will rise by a minimum of either 2.5%, the rate of inflation or average earnings growth, whichever is largest.

  33. Morning all, back on l kitchen duty today this that and the other. I made a couple of slabs of Focaccia yesterday we were supposed to be having a family BBQ but it seems once again the weather experts got it wrong once more. I think the only thing i seem to remember them scoring pints on was their statements regarding observations, as in……. “yesterday being the hottest day of the year”.

    With reference to earlier comments on ‘climate change’ and carbon emissions etc i saw an article on line in our local paper. It was about the building of 150 new homes in our area, I would imaging over the past 10 years the amount of new dwellings in mid Hertfordshire would exceed so far 5,000. And still it goes on. So I sent them this email yesterday i hope they reply.

    Dear sirs,
    I can not access the letters page, but as we have a much talked about climate crisis and after seeing the article about building more housing on green belt it makes me angry that the land along Harpenden Road has been deemed as ‘ex agricultural’ land. This is another invented phrase just for purpose, there is no such thing as ‘ex agricultural’ land it is either farm land or not farm land. At the moment the land is dormant and has become a habitat for wild life, something that has been a general intention for such areas surrounding housing for many years. Could one of your keen journalist’s please find out what the actual carbon footprint of this land is at this very moment in it’s dormant state and what the estimated carbon foot print will be after the area of land after has been concreted over and newly occupied 150 new dwellings are covering it. As there are no local reservoirs, we are already aware that there might possibly be a water shortage in this area if this sort undertaking continues.

    When calculating It is important to include the carbon worth of the excavations the movement of all the soil and it’s transportation to else where. The laying of new supplies and drainage, plastic piping etc including water supplies electricity supplies, sewage waste and processing. Excavating the thousands of tonnes of ballast and sand etc for the concrete foundations for every dwelling. The energy carbon foot print of all the materials used especially the thousands of tonnes of bricks and concrete block-work. Plaster board, skimming plaster, timber involved, flooring, glass plastic windows, roof tiling, kitchen units and work tops, bathroom suites, metal work interior wall and floor tiling, and of course new road building.

    I think your research will not only surprise you all but also determine that only one newly built two bed home will have a carbon foot print of around 90tonnes Co2e (ongoing) the land even as used for agriculture would be around 8.4 tonnes per acre I expect the developers will make sure there are at least 4-6 dwellings occupying one acre, that is at least 360 Tonnes of carbon footprint per acre as opposed to 8.4. The carbon footprint of ‘Ex agricultural’ land would have less than 8.4.

    So what I am saying is, it seems that money making, AKA ‘Corporate greed’ is exactly what is destroying the planet. Not wild life habitat, or dormant agricultural land. This is being assisted by the UK political classes, right down to local councillors who are readily, willingly and continually allowing this to happen. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there were not also some sort of inducements to allow this dreadful state of grim determination in allowing the growing destruction of our green belt to continue.

    Where will the children of the occupants of the 150 new homes go to school ? Where will they shop where will the parents work ?

    1. Dear Eddy

      Thank you for your communication.

      We have deleted it.

      Kindly do not trouble yourself to write to us again.

      The Developers.

      PS We know where you live……just saying.

      1. PS Eddy

        Your house is at risk from an Arse On Attack, however, New Housing will be available in your area very soon!

        1. I have my Spanish friend Jose Pipe close by and the local fire station is half a mile away.

      2. A bit like the reply from my MP, he didn’t seem to pick up on the links regarding illegal immigration the continuation of building on green belt shoving more people into affordable housing and climate change. They really can’t have it both ways, but they have run out of excuses for their damage they are all doing to our country.

        Here are his last two rather patronising parras.

        The government plan to increase the number of homes will combat the housing shortage. Still no association with unfettered immigration and the crisis mentioned. Vote securing.

        Home ownership is one of the most fundamental Conservative values; people are happier, more secure and more rooted in their communities when they own their own home – and now they can pass it on to future generations. Affordable housing helps people fulfil the dream of home ownership, reduced high rents in the private rented sector and prevent those struggling from being homeless. More vote securing

        1. Affordable housing? – -who is actually affording it? The arrivals have absolutele zero intention of doing so – why bother – whitey pays for everything once they arrive here iilgally.

          1. The affordable housing is not for them – it’s for the people driven out of the city ghettoes.

          2. Here is the main part of the letter.

            Thank you for your recent email about immigration and Housing.
            The united kingdom has a proud record of helping those fleeing persecution, oppression and tyranny from around the world.

            The key objective of the Nationalities and Borders Bill is to deter and prevent illegal entry into our country. By cracking down on illegal immigration, we can prioritise those in genuine need. This will help prevent people making dangerous and unnecessary journeys to the UK through potentially fatal means in small boats or aeroplanes, for example. It also aims to halt the business model of criminal trafficking networks and protect the number of those who are in danger of being trafficked.

            First reaction not a clue what is actually going on and not able to do do the job the politicians are supposed to be doing. Fleeing persecution. Really ??? Too lazy to try and put their own houses in order. Over seas aid from the UK alone is around 13 billion !!!
            All of the cross channel arrivals are illegal. And……… aeroplanes this is happening as well ??? I know call me Dave was bringing thousands in to RAF bases.

          3. While we were under threats during lockdown how many of the hundreds of illegals were seen being transported by coach to hotels all over the country? NONE ? – – or is that why we were ORDERED to stay indoors and off the roads? They certainly weren’t put in the hotels by Star Trek transporters !!!!

          4. Proud record… really? Have we?

            If someone has deliberately travelled through a dozen safe countries solely to get here they must answer why. The obvious is benefits. Thus they are not asylum seekers nor fleeing war or conflict. They’re just freeloaders.

            The state has no interest in those in genuine need. If it did it would shred taxes and allow people to accrue capital.

          5. Those folk don’t need affordable housing though.

            The people they displace – the kids of those living in the villages do because they can no longer afford to live there.

            It’s insane. The gimmigrants get free housing in cities. All bills paid off the worker.

            The decent folk (and it is typically white people) leave the city now made a hell hole by Left wing politics.

            They go to live in small towns and villages.

            The house prices of homes in those towns and villages then rockets and the children of the people living there can’t afford to any more.

            Where do they go?

            This is something the state refuses to answer. This is the consequence of uncontrolled illegal immigration.

            The MPs answer’s above are typical of Lefty ones. They happily avoid the ‘why’, while demonstrating how good they are by ‘doing something’. It’s the equivalent of giving a patient a blood transfusion from their own arm.

      3. I am here while I still remember.
        Just quiché…………..around 8 years ago i was taking our dog for a walk in the local fields and woods and came across a well a dressed elderly chap (late 70s) with a shopping bag, small milk and a newspaper amongst other items in it. I had not seen him before but it made me wonder why and how he was so far off the beaten track, as it were. He was obviously lost and I asked him where he lived and he said he couldn’t remember. He had a wallet and I found his address, which was not far from where we were. So I led him home to his front door and rang the bell. His wife opened the door and she verbally ripped (she may have felt more anxious than angry) into the poor old guy I felt so sorry for him he had been wondering around for about 3 hours. My eyes started to water as i left him there, as they are now thinking about it. There but for fortune eh !

    1. 336455+ up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      Many of us could see this sh!te being constructed especially over the last three decades, and tried to head it off, but the three monkeys & a large dose of treachery put asunder any acts of
      patriotic loyalty and putting Country before party.

    1. Good morning, Rik. Hope your sister’s condition has improved.

      Thanks for the book recommendation. I raced through it at a page ripping rate. Then started it again but much slower. A bit like sex really.

      1. Excellent,I thought it might be to your taste,can’t beat a good Space Opera

        shame about the wait for the next two,he’s written several other series that may be worth you looking at. see here…

        https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/john-birmingham/
        “Girl In Time” OK

        Sister contines to improve with steroids and antibiotics doing the job

        1. Good news for Sis.

          Next book in January so not that long to wait. Abe books doesn’t have Girl in Time yet so i will wait. Meantime i bought ‘Off one’s Tits’ which will bring back some memories, or not !

    1. I don’t follow wendyball – but are there ANY white players left in England?

    2. The £1,180,000 paid to Birmingham City (my club) for Trevor Francis in 1979, would be worth £6.9 million today. Talk about inflation!

  41. Well, the rain stopped. The sun came out and it looked very promising.
    However, not trusting the weather, I decided to continue ignoring the need to get some blocklaying done, opting instead to clear several years build up of detritus from the verge of the road heading towards Cromford.

    An hour later the heavens opened again! However, clearing the side of the road out, even for just a couple of feet, has shewn just how much the detritus not only builds up, but converts its self into a decent amount of soil that can be used up the garden!

    1. You are very green Bob. Logs from fallen trees and mulch from the side of the road. We shall have to call you Kermit.

    3. Take care that the detritus isn’t polluted, you could be setting up future problems with any plants you may wish to grow.

      1. The area is not intended for planting, it’s more for backfilling the uphill side of the terracing wall.

  42. The Daily Human Stupidity.

    “What is the need for AI? There are already too many ‘artificially intelligent’ people.”

    Talees Rizvi.

    1. ‘Afternoon, LIM, He Said, “… Behold, I am with you always even unto the end of the world.”

      …and maybe that end is not too far away – especially for hate and people-controlling, rhetoric spouting MPs and other ‘virtue-signallers’.

      Bedamned the lot of ’em..

      1. The end of OUR world is certainly not far away. MPs think they are going to be well rewarded for their treachery – I feel it won’t work out to well in the long run – or have they forgotten about Caucescu ( sorry if spelt wrong – one finger typing.)

  44. Afternoon all.

    Just read from TPA that £70million has been squandered on an alternative site for MPs to move to while the HOC is repaired; apparently the MPs are dithering/arguing over whether to move out or not. And the estimate for the royal yacht has increased from £200-£250 million. I’m in favour of the royal yacht. So what’s another £50mill as opposed to £70mill? It’s only money!

    2. Build the royal yacht then put all the MPs on it and send it to sea for five years while the Palace of Westminster is being repaired. With any luck, it will sink.

    3. There was an eminently sensible solution to the RY question. Buy a very good second-hand one for about £25 million. Bit of refurb – job done.

      1. There are any number of cruise ships going cheap. They are complete with rooms, offices theatres and bars, accommodation for 3000 people and a crew of 2000 is the norm. Moor one in the Thames. We’d not have to pay their costs for second homes etc as they could live on board.

        (I have a dim recollection that I suggested this some years ago…)

        1. 336455+ up ticks,
          Afternoon HP,
          Sack em ALL,
          Parliamentwise do a brussels until a new fabricated building is erected then start a new lot under the GREAT CHARTER rulings.
          This lot do NOT deserve traditions, pomp & ceremony so the next lot suffer and get the bare essentials until proving their worth.

    4. When the 1000 of us were having our offices redone for a month the cost was about £100 per person. Maybe we were strange and as we were mostly distributed anyway it wasn’t so difficult, but we hauled our phones, laptops, monitors and furniture ourselves. Maybe MPs have a huge staff, but given the last year, everyone should be used to working from home. There’s no cost to that. It’s just yet more waste.

      1. “ … everyone should be used to working from home”. MPs do sod all, at home and in Parliament. They are a waste of space, time and money. In fact, it’s worse than that – they are absolute parasites and in no way do they work for their pay.

  45. Nicked

    “With India and China steadfastly refusing to join in any Climate Change

    Bollix Convention the rest of the world may as well just not bother and

    carry on as they have done for the last two hundred years. With those

    two countries pumping out the vast majority of whatever warms the

    atmosphere and have no plans to stop it we may as well just come to

    terms with whatever change of weather occurs and live with it.

    Bankrupting your own country and sending the population back to a pre-industrial

    lifestyle (horse and cart) to virtual signal to the vast population of

    China and India is just so incredibly stupid that I find it hard to

    compute any sensible government would even contemplate it.”

    It’s not about the climate any more than ‘vaccinations’ are about a virus.It’s about control

    1. 336455+ up ticks,
      Rik,
      What a great many are not seeing is it takes a great deal of effort to get back into the eu.

    2. If climates changing and we are not just experienced weather, or short term variations, why would anyone actually believe that we can do anything about stopping or slowing any change? If a driver falls off a moving steamroller somebody standing in its path cannot influence the steamroller or slow it or stop it, but they can get out of its way.
      If we really think that climate change is going to be big and serious, the response is not to build windmills. It is to consider what the changes will be and to respond to them sensibly. Siberia is going to get warmer? Fine! We can plant fruit trees and plant wheat.

    3. The Chinese may be preparing biological weapons and deadly viruses but do they need to do so? The West is quite happy to destroy its economy, bankrupt itself and starve all its people without the Chinese having to do anything.

      1. China has interests all around the world , they are asset stripping South America and Africa .. South America is being turned into a desert .

        China is dominating the 3rd world and us here , and no one cares . The Chinese are asset stripping our utilities and no one makes a sound .

    4. Sadly I can’t find the source, but there was a suggestion that even if we completely shut down UK limited and emit absolutely nothing, China and India between them would make up the loss in less than two months? Maybe that’s just fake news but it does sound feasible!

      2. Sounds like an understatement. If the UK shut down any remaining manufacturing, China and India would fill the gap using more traditional, les green processes.

        It might warm the egos of UK politicians but it will not help the global climate.

        1. It’s not even about China and India. Shutting down our economy will simply result in unemployment, poverty, deaths from a lack of medicine, dirty water, cold.

          This demented forcing of Left wing green nonsense is not remotely related to the environment. It’s all about the latest scare for tax.

  46. Army on standby to stock Britain’s shelves. 8 August 2021.

    The Army is on standby to cope with Britain’s food shortages caused by a lack of qualified truck drivers which has left many supermarket shelves bare in recent weeks.

    Some 2,000 HGV drivers from the Royal Logistics Corps and other regiments are reported to be on a five-day notice to help distribute food and other essential supplies, including medicine.

    This is probably just a scare story designed to bring about what it is purporting to cure but I trust all Nottlers are already stocked up!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9873763/Army-standby-stock-Britains-shelves-2-000-HGV-drivers-Royal-Logistics-Corps.html

    2. 336455+ up ticks,
      Afternoon AS,
      I suppose johnson is averse via carrie to incoming airlifts, are there any white
      berets left to crew an Archangel to England convoy run, would they get through the coastguard field guns & coast protection if the lab/lib/con coalition ordered the convoy to be fired on.

      If they did give the order would it change the voting pattern any ?

  47. Mentioned a few days ago of mate’s M/law – 94 – falling and fracturing her shoulder. Instead of the local hospital, she was took to one 25 mile away, because they were “better kitted out for her”. So – a 50 mile round trip for mate – and his disabled wife – to visit. Only she can go in. Hoping to get her nearer home so they can visit easier, the lady is being transported back to home for an assessment later this month.. By ambulance or not ?? Don’t know. If not a good Assessment is she then took back 25 mile to the hospital? – or would they already have put someone else in her bed? Chaos gets worse.

    1. Moh’s mother died five years ago after spending 3 years in a nursing home with vascular dementia .

      This January during the terrible spread of the Virus , an elderly lady was returned to the N/home after a spell in hospital .

      16 elderly people died quickly in that month , because the hospital patient had brought Covid back to the n/home .

      We were so shocked to hear that the kind and gentle comfortable N/home has been closed for good and the lovely Edwardian home overlooking the sea is now on the market .

  48. French marathon runner sparks sportsmanship row by knocking over water bottles – then running off with last one
    Morhad Amdouni ignites social media debate after appearing to deliberately knock over row of water bottles during men’s marathon

    DT Article:

    Is this the worst piece of sportsmanship in Olympic history – or just a serious lack of hand/eye coordination?

    A French athlete has sparked a social media storm after appearing to deliberately knock over a row of water bottles during the men’s marathon, before grabbing the last one for himself.

    Morhad Amdouni finished 14th in the 26-mile event which was won by Eliud Kipchoge, who successfully defended his title from Rio.

    But Amdouni’s actions have been questioned on social media, with Australian long-distance runner Ben St Lawrence tweeting: “Thoughts on Amdouni knocking over an entire row of water before taking the last one?”

    Piers Morgan blasted Amdouni as the “biggest d—— of the Olympics”, but other people jumped in to defend the Frenchman – saying it was accidental, and there was another water station slightly further up the road where his competitors could have grabbed a drink anyway.

    Kipchoge obliterated his rivals in brutally hot conditions to triumph in two hours, eight minutes and 38 seconds.

    A number of leading athletes struggled – 31 of the 105 starters failed to finish – and there were dramatic scenes of some collapsing on course, but Kipchoge was a picture of serenity throughout.

    Abdi Nageeye, of the Netherlands, claimed a distant silver in 2hr 9min 58sec, with Belgium’s Bashir Abdi taking bronze.

    Hampered by niggling injuries in the build-up, Britain’s Callum Hawkins – who has finished fourth at the last two World Championships – dropped out soon after halfway. Chris Thompson finished 54th, while Ben Connors also failed to finish.

    BTL

    He is French – but he is not indigenously French – but are his ethnicity and religion relevant?

      1. Stupid would be running and holding out his hand looking forward until he gripped a bottle, not knowing he’d knocked the others over.

        What he’s clearly done is deliberate.

      1. Probably chose their citizenship based on the colour of the team outfits or failing that, the money available for training.

      1. Nah, there was no sign saying dont knock over the bottles. A bit like the effnick recently whose defence was that he didnt realise it was against the law to rape your own young daughter. Well, if its OK with goats …..

      2. If he’d held his hand out to grab one, not looking I’d think, oh, that’s an accident, but he clearly did it deliberately.

        Should be kicked out of the race and beaten with a stick.

      3. Of course it was deliberate .

        Their Presidents and CEO’s snatch the gift aid from the mouths of babies , this is why black countrie are in a mess.

        Black greed matters .

    4. Well, yes. Following on from the success of black American athletes in the last century, more and more countries have obtained darkies who have won medals for them.
      In the marathon mentioned, the winner was Kenyan. The silver medal was won by the Somali bloke running for Belgium. The bronze medal was won by the Somali bloke running for the Netherlands. The Italian winner of the 100 metres was born in the USA to an Italian woman and a black American.

    5. Compare and contrast the names of our contestants with those of the medal winners. Clearly the white and indigenous had no chance.

  49. Good Afternoon all,
    I note that the running around and jumping is now concluded and I find the medal to population ratio interesting.
    I think our chaps, chapesses, and chap-me-nots did rather well all things considered.

    USA 113 Medals / population 350million
    China 88 Medals / population 1.4 billion
    Japan 58 medals / population 120 million
    GB 65 medals / population 65 million

    1. The first post I’ve seen from you for a while, I trust you enjoyed your recent birthday.

      1. Yep, thanks – I’ve been busy with family and tin tenting and will be off next weekend to the music Retrofestival in Reading, the first since 2019 for obvious reasons, perhaps I’m too old for that sort of thing but I might be younger than some of the bands, we will be taking the tintent so none of that Glasto mud and poo nonsense

    2. USA 113 Medals / population 350million: 0,32 medals per million capita
      China 88 Medals / population 1.4 billion:0,062 medals per million
      Japan 58 medals / population 120 million 0,48 medals per million
      GB 65 medals / population 65 million 1 medal per million
      China loses. No coconut for them.

      1. I had assumed that given the size of the Chinese population and their reputation for the intolerable shame of loss of face ( especially to “ghosts”) and ruthless training regimes they would have wiped out all the opposition , perhaps all the fit ones are in the factories.

        1. If the fit ones are In the factories, they are probably being modified ready to win even more medals in six months time at the Beijing winter olympics.

          Politics free Olympics.

        2. There are so many Chinese that their per-capita would never look very good, even if they won every medal going.

      2. I think any competitor with any body modification or drugs should be able to enter any event.

        It would mean though that you would have goal keepers of a size that filled the space between the goal posts.

        2. There is a lot wrong with the Olympic format. Take for example boxing. There are different competitions depending on how heavy you are, so a big woman big male, small woman and a small male can all win medals. Why is there not the same in other sports – e.g. a high jump competition based on height.

          Competitors should be limited to one event. Swimmers, cyclists and rowers all win loads of medals because there are so many different events which really all do the same thing in different formats. What about having five different javelin competitions with differing weights or lengths of javelin, or different discusmcompetitions with different sized circles to spin around in?

    1. That’s unfair. Marx, at the end of his life saw how twisted his work had been interpreted and said he was not a Marxist.

        1. He was ‘of his time’. A time when there was a clearly oppressed worker class, when conditions were truly awful. He wrote of what he knew.

          The Left have taken his ideas and twisted them into some sort of workers idealogue.

      1. Yes, there are. Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Gender is a grammatical concept, not a biological one.

      1. When i lived in Birmingham i had a young Irish lodger come to stay. He couldn’t stop laughing when he saw the label.

      1. Completely, thank you. He is a bit less gung-ho outdoors in the evenings. They have both learned that life can be unexpected and that there are dangers, No bad thing.

    2. Sun has been crackin’ the flags all day – it’s getting unbearable, Mini can’t find anywhere to hang her fur coat

    4. I guess, Plum, when you ordered, you didn’t expect him to arrive dressed like that but more like, phworr!

  58. Another from CW
    COVID-19Just following orders, the Covid curtain-twitchers
    Just following orders, the Covid curtain-twitchers
    By
    Mary McGreechin
    –

    August 7, 2021
    Facebook Twitter

    THEY walk amongst us. They wave a cheery good morning and joke about the British weather. You may have had drinks with them or dined with them. You may even have considered them friends.

    They are the Covid collaborators.

    As essential to the success of any tyranny as the police or the military, they are the cogs which keep the wheels of repression turning smoothly. They comply and they denounce. While the former collaborate because it is their job, the citizen denouncers actively seek out and revel in their volunteer role. Initially tutting at Covid breachers, they now openly castigate those departing from ‘guidance’, and the thought of vaccine passports excluding the mavericks from every area of life fills them with glee. A MailOnline poll found wide support for banning the non-vaccinated from pubs, shops, nightclubs, restaurants and even public transport. Like heat on invisible ink, protracted lockdown has gradually allowed their true character to show through. It is not pleasant.

    Political theorist Hannah Arendt concluded of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. While this provoked controversy in its summation of Eichmann as a functionary obeying orders and following rules, rather than being motivated by a malevolent ideology, we can see the parallels in today’s Covid collaborators. No matter how petty, ridiculous or cruel the order they will follow it. Emboldened by the mass conformity of their peers and the 24-hour propaganda of their government no Covid infringement is allowed to pass unreported. No quarter will be given.

    Within days of the initial lockdown in March 2020 the Island Echo, the Isle of Wight’s ‘breaking news source’, had received a deluge of emails, phone calls and messages from readers eager to report suspected breaches. The Echo could not help. Alas, this was not from ethical concerns or disgust at the snitches in their midst. The Echo, instead, posted a helpful link to police HQ where readers could ‘report an address’ of anybody flouting Covid regulations.

    As it became increasingly apparent that Covid was not a modern-day plague felling everyone in its path, one might have thought that the odious activity of snitching would be firmly discouraged. But no. Instead the ante was well and truly upped. Conservative MP Kit Malthouse encouraged the nation’s growing army of curtain-twitchers. As the ‘Rule of Six’ regulations came into effect, Malthouse exhorted the public to ‘absolutely’ report any breaches to the police.

    In a depressingly predictable outcome the public did not disappoint. Police were flooded with information, so much so that extra manpower was needed to deal with the calls.

    Covid collaborators were kept busy into year two of the three-week lockdown with such wide-ranging breaches as illicit hairdressing and tea drinking. In January 2021 police raced to the Euphoria tanning and hairdressing salon in Cwmbran where they found evidence of ‘tanning beds in recent use’. Despite Sage having confirmed that such salons had contributed a mere 0.05 to the R number a community councillor called the sight of semi-tanned, semi-coiffed women fleeing the scene ‘a low blow’.

    Scarcely had Wales’s boys in blue recovered from the sight of the recently used sunbeds than they were faced with the case of the tea-drinking grandmother. Armed with information that an al fresco, non-socially distanced cuppa had been enjoyed by a group of pensioners, police confronted the prime suspect, an 82-year-old grandmother. Having roused the pyjama-clad miscreant from her bed, they delivered a staunch reprimand and a warning of fines for any future infringements. The complainant was apparently ‘content’ at the outcome. Grannies are not being saved so that they can sit around enjoying tea with friends.

    Whilst one would think this was as low as the quislings could go, worse was to follow. Crownhill crematorium in Milton Keynes was the scene for the callous Covid collaborator award when a staff member moved to prevent Craig Bicknell from comforting his mother at his father’s funeral. As Mr Bicknell placed a reassuring arm around her shoulder a staff member was quick to address this egregious Covid breach. ‘You can’t move the chairs, you were told,’ hectored the staff member in the manner of a bossy child overseeing a party game. Mr Bicknell was left feeling angry, upset and ‘empty’, Bravo. Mission accomplished.

    The list is endless. Fathers prevented from being at the birth of their children. Care-home residents denied family visits. End-of-life patients facing death without the comforting hand of a loved one and a family farewell.

    All the enforcers of these rules were following orders.

    All were morally wrong.

    During this period many have lost sight of their humanity and their decency. One may only hope, if this ever ends, some at least will be rightly ashamed of their behaviour. If this does not end, we face a future peopled by malicious busybodies encouraged to pry ever further into our personal lives with increasingly malign consequences for those who refuse to comply.

    Welcome to your terribly and terrifyingly new normal.

    1. A good, and worrying/disappointing, article – I particularly liked “kept busy into year two of the three-week lockdown“.

    2. I wonder if the ‘covid collaborators’ have ever concerned themselves with the plight of non or anti-vaxxers?

      I have resisted vaccination; yes, because we don’t yet know the long-term effects but also – and very much, also – because I have ischemic heart disease and COPD either of which could possibly be exacerbated by injecting a foreign body into my blood stream but that could also cause a major hiatus with my medication regime.

      No, it’s just, “Fuck you, you are endangering society because you refuse vaccination.” spoken with the tight-lipped and bland face of all the jobsworth virtue-signallers when they try to pull you over for not wearing the yellow star of the mask.

      I sincerely hope that they all rot in a Covid hell of their own making.

      1. Me too. The vaccinated are at great risk to both themselves and the rest of us unvaccinated folk.

        Hopefully most of us, unvaccinated, will have retained our own developed immune system immunity from previous cold viruses and the present touted one.

  60. From the “hard to believe” files…

    Ministry of Defense of Ukraine to meet athlete & armed forces sergeant after she hugged Russian rival who beat her to Olympic gold

    Ukraine’s defense ministry will meet a high jumper “immediately” upon her return from Tokyo, condemning her hug with a Russian because of the civil conflict in the country’s east, which it called the “Russian-Ukrainian war”.
    Bronze medalist Yaroslava Mahuchikh was involved in emotional scenes after beating beaten by champion Mariya Lasitskene at the Olympic Games, with both athletes grinning, hugging each other and draping themselves in their national colors in the arena.

    That provoked an angry response from some viewers, including accusations that the junior sergeant of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had brought shame upon her country by posing with the army athlete from CSKA.

    “Athletes representing Ukraine at international competitions must understand that the Russian-Ukrainian war is ongoing in Ukraine and it imposes certain restrictions and responsibility,” Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said in a public Facebook post, adding that photos of the pair together had “caused an outrageous reaction in society”.

  61. My neighbour just came round with some apples and blackberries.
    Guess what i’m having for supper?

    3. In our house, it would be a crumble. We had an apple and peach one today, with windfall apples from the garden.

      1. Very nice. I have prepared the fruits for pudding tomorrow. Too full of rare roast beef and batter pud to eat anything else.

  63. Tom Daleys’ dedication to his sport won’t end when he leaves Japan. He’ll still be getting a few lengths in when he gets home.

    1. Failed miserably. By the way, I know an actual Womble. A former Rector’s wife worked in the same building as Mike Batt, and she and others were pressganged into being backing singers on the original album…

    1. My daughter had her wedding at the Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham. There was a mock-up Spitfire cockpit in one of the reception rooms. Apparently, it had to be covered up a few weeks previously as there had been several German visitors!

  67. I have heard a rumour that a scandal involving Glove is in the offing.

    Anyone got any gen on this? I love a bit of scandal, me…

    4. Gove is very careless of detail (I updated the index card system of guest invitations after his Presidency of the Oxford Union, and methodical, he wasn’t). This makes scandal at some point more or less inevitable.
      I believe that it was he who the Oxford Union’s senior members did not want to pursue over a missing silver trophy after his term as President of the Union, “because it would blight a promising young man’s career”. (note, I have no proof of that, but I know they didn’t want to pursue someone at that time for that reason, because they walked right past where I was sitting, discussing it).

  68. That’s me for this odd day. Cold; strong gales; sunshine – heavy rain – bright sun half hour bike ride – torrential rain – now a calm evening.

    There was almost a “Free home sought for ginger kitten known as Augustus” notice when, after popping up to the veg to get a lunchtime lettuce, returned to find Gus a third of the way through the plate of ham… But the MR made me relent.. Yer gotta larf, innit?

    A demain.

    2. He probably regarded the ham as his consolation prize for not being able to go out n the rain.

        1. There was a man who was obsessed about the wild west. Cowboys and Indians, this guy loved it all. One day he was in his house looking at his already massive collection, and suddenly he gets an idea how to expand it furthermore.

          He calls up a painter and says “I want you to paint me a picture of Custer’s last words.”

          The painter thinks for a moment, agrees, and tells the man to call back in a week. The next week the man gets a call from the painter, inviting him to come over to his gallery. The man quickly drives over to the painter’s gallery, and looks at the painting.

          It was of a fish jumping out of a small pool of water, with a halo on it. And surrounding the pool, there were literally hundreds of native Americans engaged in sexual intercourse. The man admires it for a bit more, then asks the painter, “what does this have to do with Custer’s last thought?”

          The painter says “It does look complex, but the concept is quite simple. Holy mackerel look at all those fucking Indians.”

    2. No mention of giving back automobiles, printing, the internet, anything with microchips in, colour photos, modern medicine, textiles, preserved food etc, I notice.

      Christian traditions are in harmony with the earth, hence various traditions of blessing the plough, Lammas, Harvest festival etc They are not just superficial – they acknowledge that the standard of goodness and morality to which we aspire is firmly bound to our relationship with the earth. But it’s just so much more inspiring when some foreigner says it, and you can have a good old self-flagellating session for being white as well.

  70. Last week I mentioned Foreign Time on the local radio. Now on again.Been on about replacing the torn down statues with “real heroes”??? – Suppose that term depends on the culture – the Grooming Gang statue should raise a few eyebrows. Or rhe drug gang members?

  71. For all you gentlemen nottlers…Remember this…”Tall and tan and young and lovely….” complete the next line, answers on a postcard and dream on!!

        1. Wrong….’and when she passes, each one she passes goes..’aah’….
          (I don’t think we can say that anymore!!)

          1. Not wrong.

            Tall and tan and young and lovely
            The girl from Ipanema goes walking
            And when she passes Each one she passes goes, ah
            When she walks, she’s like a samba
            That swings so cool and sways so gently
            That when she passes Each one she passes goes, ah
            Oh, but he watches so sadly
            How can he tell her he loves her
            Yes, he would give his heart gladly
            But each day, when she walks to the sea
            She looks straight ahead, not at him
            Tall, and tan, and young, and lovely
            The girl from Ipanema goes walking
            And when she passes He smiles, but she doesn’t see
            Oh, but he sees her so sadly
            How can he tell her he loves her
            Yes, he would give his heart gladly
            But each day, when she walks to the sea
            She looks straight ahead, not at him
            Tall, and tan, and young, and lovely
            The girl from Ipanema goes walking
            And when she passes he smiles, but she doesn’t see
            She just doesn’t see, no she just doesn’t see
            But she doesn’t see, she doesn’t see, no she just doesn’t see

          2. Two points, Peter:

            First, I thought it was “Tall and tanned” not “Tall and tan”.

            Secondly, the lines “She looks straight ahead, not at him” do not rhyme with “each day, when she walks to the sea“. It is therefore usually sung (by female singers such as Astrid Gilberto) as “not at he“, which is IMHO a nonsensical solution. I reckon a better solution would be to amend the first line to “each day when she goes for a swim” which would then be followed by “not at him” and make more sense. Also, if the singer is male he could sing “But each day when she walks to the sea, She looks straight ahead not at me.”

            And on that note, I shall wish all NoTTLers a good night and a restful sleep.

          3. You are quite right Elsie on both points. The word was always ‘tanned’.

            ‘Not at he’ for a female singer, ‘not at me’ for a male singer. likewise ‘at she’ & ‘at me’ when the roles are reversed. A bit of Poetic Licence must be tolerated, however.

    2. A processing centre in the UK is not needed. One in France is.

      All we need do is tow the gimmigrants back to France, destroy the boats and let them swim for it.

      1. In the day (as they say) Enoch Powell was said to be offering a £10,000 prize to the first West Indian to swim home.

        1. In a few years time I can see people saying “do you remember Trump saying …” with the same kind of recognition that he was right.

          1. 336455+ up ticks,
            Evening R,
            In a few months time many will acknowledge that Gerard Batten leading UKIP was right on many fronts, not least warning rhetorically and in book form the dangers of islamic ideology.

          6. As Dan Bongino says: “Liberals don’t know anything”.

            There are some seriously deranged people in the States. Trump won the election by 81 million votes to 60 million (at most) for Biden.

            The entire world witnessed the fraud and America is now the laughing stock and on a path to destruction.

          10. No he is not…but Mr Trump did not live up to the expectations of the ordinary American people.

          11. Of the two, Biden and Trump, I think, from what I’ve seen and read, that Trump came (and still comes) closest.

      2. How difficult would it be for the French authorities to find the purveyors of rubber dinghies and outboard motors, monitor their operations and prosecute them as necessary.

        1. Not at all, but the French are lazy and think that as the gimmigrants want to get here, that we should pay for it all.

    3. Surely if the processing centre is kept to the French side of the customs border in Dover then migrants are still in France.
      They can then seek help to fund their stay in France from the French Embassy.

          2. If you read any of the Redtops, John, nearly every photo is captioned ‘adorable this’ or ‘adorable that’.
            One has to keep abreast of what the Proles are reading, otherwise in a few years’ time their ‘English’ will be quite incomprehensible.

  74. Evening, all. Rain has been torrential here most of the day; even my relatively new Barbour waxed coat couldn’t cope with this morning’s downpour! When I went to church, the standing water at the edges of the road was meeting in the middle. No wonder Haydock was abandoned.

    2. Tell you what, Conway, I’ll send some sunshine in exchange for a couple of days of good English rain!!

  75. Hannan admits to the danger of exaggeration in his reference to negativity bias but then goes on to use a quotation about ‘blood and soil’ that is linked to Hungary. The exaggeration here is that peoples who defend their patches are Na*is. Poor stuff.

    The authoritarian temptation is on the rise – from Belarus to the United States

    Britain was spared the worst… Then came Covid, and all at once the country was full of petty dictators

    DANIEL HANNAN

    Around the world, democracy is in retreat. The autocratic slide which began around the middle of the last decade reached a tipping point with the 2020 lockdowns. Authoritarianism is now in the ascendant both geopolitically (as power shifts from the West to China) and internally (as individuals demand the smack of firm government).

    Glance at almost any bit of the map. The generals have taken back power in Burma. Belarus’s malign tyrant, Alexander Lukashenka, insouciant after his airline piracy, is upping the ante: last week, another of his opponents, Vitaky Shishov, was found murdered in Ukraine, his body strung up in a Kiev park.

    President Kais Saied of Tunisia has dissolved parliament, blocked Al Jazeera’s broadcasts and sent troops onto the streets. Tunisia was the last country where the Arab Spring might still be said to have been a success. A decade after those optimistic risings, it was the only state in the region scoring higher than it had before 2011 on measures such as corruption, internet freedom, security of property and the jailing of journalists. Cross Tunisia off the list and not a single Arab state qualifies as an open democracy.

    Latin America, too, is collapsing into dictatorship. In Cuba last month, as in Venezuela in 2019, the soldiers remained loyal to their caudillo. The spasm of protest passed, leaving 500 demonstrators unaccounted for.

    Indeed, the anti-democratic Left is on a regional roll. Daniel Ortega, the sinister, lisping strongman who commanded Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and came back as president following a squalid deal in 2007, has no intention of allowing any more free ballots. He has rounded up and arrested 20 potential opposition candidates, ignoring the squeals of protest from the US and Europe.

    In my native Peru, the new Marxist president, Pedro Castillo, has filled his government with apologists for Shining Path terrorism. (Imagine Jeremy Corbyn somehow making a comeback here and appointing Gerry Adams as Home Secretary.) Peru’s embrace of the totalitarian Left confirms the regional trend: Argentina and Bolivia recently went the same way and, more alarmingly, the continental grown-ups, Colombia, Brazil and Chile, look set to follow.

    I could go on – I haven’t mentioned Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – but you get the picture.

    We should be careful not to pick a few eye-catching cases and infer a global trend from them. A piece of faulty wiring in our brains makes us over-interpret bad news. Reports of a gruesome murder, for example, make us think that crime is far higher than it really is. A single plane crash puts us irrationally off air travel. Psychologists call it “negativity bias,” and it constantly pushes us to needless pessimism.

    Still, there are ways to quantify the global prevalence of liberal democracy. Are opposition candidates disqualified on technicalities? Are independent media able to operate? Are the electoral authorities free from government control?

    Several organisations – Freedom House, International IDEA, the Economist Intelligence Unit and others – publish democratic league tables. Though they use slightly different methodologies, they all reach the same conclusion, namely that, after several decades of improvement, things have started to deteriorate. The Democracy Index, for example, found that just 8.4 per cent of the world’s population lived in full democracies in 2020 while more than a third lived under authoritarian rule. Its global score of 5.37 out of ten was the lowest recorded since it started work in 2006.

    To some extent, these numbers reflect anti-Covid measures. Emergency laws have been passed without proper scrutiny, borders closed, curfews imposed, anti-vax websites taken down. All these things might be seen as temporary. Except that the trend had already set in before the lockdowns.

    In 2017, shortly before his death, the celebrated conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote “The Authoritarian Temptation”, which analysed the way previously open democracies – Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela – had fallen to despotism:

    “And now, in a development once unimaginable, mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethnonationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction – still only an attraction, not yet a commitment – to strongman rule.”

    When Krauthammer wrote those words, Trumpism was still a mutant strain that had, almost by accident, infected the Republican Party. Even in 2017, being a conservative usually meant being a Reaganite – a believer in open competition, constitutional propriety and limited government. All that has gone now. Fox News, which fiercely opposed Trump during the primaries, now barely airs any alternative views. The same is true of its mimic, Newsmax. It is true, too, of previously free-market think tanks and of almost every Congressional Republican. Trump himself may have stormed sulkily off the stage, but not before he had shredded the tenets of the previous conservative creed: that character matters; that a bare majority doesn’t mean you can ignore the rules; that you should show restraint in government and generosity in opposition; that free trade makes everyone richer.

    American conservatism has suddenly been transformed into something much closer to European authoritarianism of the kind embodied by, say, Marine Le Pen: interventionist, hostile to globalisation, impatient with parliamentary rule. The guiding text for the new movement is “Why Liberalism Failed” by the Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen. Some of its exponents argue that a benevolent dictatorship is preferable to a market-based democracy. One of their heroes is the Portuguese autocrat, António Salazar.

    In Britain, we have so far been spared the worst of this tendency. Still, the response to the Brexit referendum revealed that a large chunk of the nation was prepared, Trump-like, to disregard process in pursuit of a preferred outcome.

    Luckily for us, Boris Johnson’s Rabelaisian personality, his horror at being bossed about, meant that Britain went into the lockdowns with, by global standards, an unusually liberal political culture.

    But then came Covid, and all at once the country was full of petty dictators, demanding restrictions, raging at non-conformists, opposing any move to lift the prohibitions. The whole world was affected, but the change was especially noticeable in Britain, with its previously individualist culture.

    The worst of it is how few people seem to care. Again, outcome trumps process. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has critics on the Left, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro has critics on the Right. But hardly anyone is disinterestedly making the case for constitutional democracy. The open society is slipping away unmourned and unremarked. By Heaven we’ll miss it when it has gone.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/08/authoritarian-temptation-rise-belarus-united-states/

  76. 336455+ up ticks,
    I do believe swiss justice is somewhat lacking,one wonders have they also a scale table on willy inches
    dic tates length on sentence.

    breitbart,
    Judges Reduce Rapist’s Sentence Because Rape Only Lasted 11 Minutes

    1. I would imagine that Swiss willies are amazingly long, because in times past they would have had to reach into the next valley.

  78. A confused editorial from the DT. Abolishing HS2 should be done without reference to any other policy; it is simply pointless (crikey, even the Guardian agrees). Solar energy isn’t going to power the country, 30 million charging points for a dud technology cannot replace current road transport, and ‘carbon capture’ is bordering on the satirical.

    Is there anyone at the DT with the courage to challenge the worst of the green nonsense?

    Abolish HS2 to pay for Britain going green

    Does anybody in No 10 really believe that the “red wall” voted Tory to see their living standards hammered?

    TELEGRAPH VIEW • 8 August 2021 • 6:00am

    How much will it cost to convert every boiler in Britain to a low-carbon alternative? Will they work as well? Who will pick up the bill? And how about the tens of millions of electric car chargers? Who will pay for those? The Government has not been honest about the price tag for its decarbonisation revolution, either to individual consumers or taxpayers. Just £12 billion has been earmarked thus far, a tiny fraction of the eventual bill. At the same time, fuel duty, which yields some £28 billion each year, will dwindle.

    No wonder the Treasury is panicking: the country is poised for a ruinous cost explosion, not merely because of the green revolution but also because of rising inflation, the prospect (in time) of higher interest rates, higher taxes (many of them already agreed) and a short-term increase in the cost of wholesale energy prices. Does anybody in No 10 really believe that the “red wall” voted Tory to see their living standards hammered?

    The green revolution could be made a lot less painful. Whenever possible, market forces must be harnessed. The cost of solar energy has collapsed: hopefully the market will deliver other cheaper technologies, too. The Government should be doing a lot more to encourage the carbon capture market. Or take HS2, an idiotic project that this newspaper has long campaigned against. Why not take the estimated cost – £106 billion – and spend that on going green instead? Some 10 million green boilers could probably be fitted for that price; a small fraction of the cost would pay for 30 million electric charging points. The reply will be that money has already been sunk into the project, but that is no reason to plough ahead. Support for HS2 hinges increasingly on the fallacy of sunk costs; that once you have invested money in a scheme, you might as well stick with it, even though the vast majority of the cash has yet to be spent.

    The Left’s alternative environmental plan is essentially to shrink the economy and cut living standards. The Tories, instead, should incentivise innovations that don’t kill economic activity, including nuclear power. It is a sure bet that the current blank cheque plan can only end in disaster for the Conservative Party.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/08/08/abolish-hs2-pay-britain-going-green/

    1. The article is hard to read, not the text, just the idea that one stupid idea should be scrapped to pay for another stupid idea.

      HS2 is a waste of time and money. Electric cars are the wrong technology – where does the energy come from in an environment shutting down the power generators?

  79. OT

    There is a bedroom farce in No. 11 Downing Street.

    She wants to be Lady Green.

    Boris wants to be Green Emperor at Cop26, the environmental conference in Glasgow in November.

    Boris has commissioned Greg Nugent and Godric Smith, PR gurus for the 2012 London Olympic Games, to promote the conference and outline how they will reach e goal of producing net zero emissions by 2050.

    The likely outcome will be the downgrading of Rishi Sunak from Chancellor to Health Secretary – and INMHO – the demise of Boris & Co.

  80. Mrs Thatcher may have been ‘thinking of the use of nuclear power’ but her refusal in the late 80s to authorise the building of new power stations showed she was doing just that: merely musing. With the sale of the power industry in the offing she didn’t want a building programme to burden the taxpayer or harm the prospects for the sale. Of course, soon after that she was ousted and Heseltine swanned back into Whitehall to waste our North Sea gas. Our chaotic energy policies cannot be blamed entirely on Milipede’s Climate Change Act.

    And Clark fails to mention that she recanted on emissions and global warming

    Margaret Thatcher isn’t solely responsible for the death of coal mining

    Labour closed more pits under Wilson, while Thatcher built a greener competitive energy market

    ROSS CLARK

    Boris Johnson was wrong to say, on a visit to a wind farm in the Moray Firth on Thursday, that Margaret Thatcher had made an “early start” on tackling climate change by “closing coal mines across the country”.

    The credit belongs less to the Iron Lady than to the prime ministers who came before her, particularly Harold Wilson. Much as the Left still likes to condemn Thatcher for destroying the miners, she merely continued to manage the decline of a coal industry which had already been in retrenchment since the 1920s.

    Wilson’s “white heat of technology” didn’t leave much room for dirty black coal. During his eight years in charge, in the 1960s and 1970s, Britain lost 253 coal mines, as steam trains gave way to diesel and electric, and coal fires were replaced by oil and gas central heating.

    Thatcher, by contrast, oversaw 115 pit closures over 11 years. UK coal production stood at 280 million tonnes in 1923. By the time Mrs Thatcher came to office in 1979 that had already more than halved to 122 million tonnes. Employment was down from 1.15 million in 1923 to around 242,000 in 1979.

    It is true that the Thatcher government put too little thought into the effect on mining communities of losing their only significant employer. The enterprise zones should have been there in 1984, not years later after a sense of hopelessness had set in. But the charge that Thatcher was somehow motivated by callousness is a gross slur. She was guided by the same economic forces and technological developments as were her predecessors. In addition, by 1979 large quantities of much-cleaner natural gas were coming onstream from the North Sea.

    Thatcher was not anti-coal, but she did create an energy market which very soon came to favour gas over coal. Not only did that mean lower bills for consumers, it also meant fewer carbon emissions as, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, gas-fired power stations emit about half as much carbon.

    The switch from coal to gas would have happened under any Prime Minister, but it was far nastier than it needed to be thanks to the behaviour of a National Miners’ Union, dominated by the radical Left, which was determined to exploit the closure of any coal mine for political purposes.

    The Left, of course, has now flipped and regards any coal-burning as environmental vandalism, bitterly opposing the Government’s plan for a new coal mine in Cumbria even though the coal is intended for the steel industry, not electricity generation. Many Labour figures have rejected any suggestion that Thatcher consciously wound down the coal industry in order to reduce carbon emissions.

    Yet she was the first world leader to address climate change, and switching Britain’s energy supply away from dirty coal and towards zero-carbon nuclear energy was very much part of her plan for tackling it.

    Thatcher’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly in November 1989 kicked off the global effort to reduce emissions. “What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate – all this is new in the experience of the Earth,” she said.

    As to how carbon emissions might be cut, she said “I am thinking of the use of nuclear power which – despite the attitude of so-called greens – is the most environmentally safe form of energy”.

    Remarkably, Mrs Thatcher was onto this at the same time as Labour was still pleading for Britain’s coal industry to be preserved if not expanded. In 1992, the year of the Rio Earth Summit, at which Britain formally committed to cutting carbon emissions, the then shadow secretary of state for trade and industry, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that coal should be the future of electricity generation in Britain, and – wrongly – that gas-fired power stations would mean higher bills.

    Boris Johnson is politically naïve not to realise how deeply emotions still run in former mining areas – many of them “red wall” seats to which he owed his general election and which he will need to win again if he is to stay in power beyond 2024.

    But the Conservatives do not need to feel embarrassed that Thatcher closed coal pits. On the contrary, she was the visionary – while Labour were the dinosaurs.

    ‘The Denial’ (‘a satirical novel of climate change’ according to the blurb) by Ross Clark is published by Lume Books

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/07/margaret-thatcher-isnt-solely-responsible-death-coal-mining/

  81. Good night all.

    Pan-fried fillet of hake. Crispy skin, succulent white flesh and a zingy tomato & lemon sauce, accompanied by chopped mini courgettes.

    A delightful custard tart to follow.

  82. Good night, Jolly japers and God bless, I’m sure we will all meet up again in the morning.

  83. Goodnight, all. I’m signing off because I’ve got a busy day tomorrow; the MO is going to telephone me some time between 08.30 and 12.00 to “examine” my hip problem (according to what I’ve been told, my X ray was “normal” and no action was required – quite how it could be normal I have no idea since arthritis has previously been confirmed in it by X ray and it would be a miracle if it had disappeared). I expect it will end up prescribing me more strong painkillers rather than actually doing anything about the problem. Then, in the afternoon, I have the CHC assessment. I shall need lots of luck for that, although I’ve prepared as best I can by reading the guidelines and the checklist and DST documents. To add to my woes, the dishwasher has given up the ghost and I now have backache from standing at the sink washing and drying everything. I shall have to organise a replacement.

    2. A replacement dishwasher or a replacement sink?

      Seriously, have you considered trying Glucosamine for the arthritis in your hip? It works wonders for my knees & I get it from Healthspan. products@healthspan.co.uk or 0800 73 123 77.

      1. I have tried it, thanks, peddy. It doesn’t work for me, unfortunately and neither does turmeric. Green lipped mussels just make me sick so I’m stuck with rosehip and painkillers.

    3. Don’t let them give you the run around. Insist. I’m also near my wits end.

      Goodnight Conway.

  85. Of course, the individual who funded Bright Blue with his green sector financial advisor also funded Greta, also funds Tony Blair, was involved in the QinetiQ 2003 affair, was involved in the 750 buildings sale 2000, the ERM disaster 1992, and poured at least $250,000,000 into London to get what he wanted politically since the 1990s.

    I think he was likely involved in the gold sale 1999.

    Isn’t that a curious, totally innocent, random coincidence, Mr Redwood?

    Obviously it could have happened to anyone.

    Polly

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