Thursday 13 June: Who’d believe politicians’ tax pledges when Britain is drowning in debt?

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its commenting facility (now reinstated, but we prefer 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.

536 thoughts on “Thursday 13 June: Who’d believe politicians’ tax pledges when Britain is drowning in debt?”

  2. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. Today's (recycled) List
    When You’re Over 70, Who Gives A Damn?

    This asshole Girl looked at my beer belly last night and sarcastically said, "Is that Corona or Bud?"
    I said, "There's a tap underneath. Taste it and find out."
    ***********
    I was talking to a girl in the bar last night. She said, "If you lost a few pounds, had a shave and got your hair cut, you'd look all right."
    I said, "If I did that, I'd be talking to your friends over there instead of you."
    ***********
    I was telling a girl in the pub about my ability to guess what day a woman was born just by feeling her boobs.
    "Really" she said, "Go on then – try."
    After about thirty seconds of fondling her nipples she began to lose patience and said. "Come on, what day was I born"?
    I said, “Yesterday."
    ***********
    I got caught taking a pee in the local swimming pool today.
    The lifeguard shouted at me so loud, I nearly fell in.
    *************
    I went to the pub last night and saw a fat chick dancing on a table.
    I said, "Nice legs."
    The girl giggled and said with a smile, "Do you really think so."
    I said "Definitely! Most tables would have f*****g collapsed by now."

    1. 388481+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      In current times, as bad as things are, still viewed by many in sheer wonderment and joy.

  6. Good morning chums, and thanks to Geoff for today's NoTTLe site.

    Wordle 1,090 4/6

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    1. Sunak, Mr Narrative to those of us awake at this time.

      "Safe and Effective"… then as the truth leaked out, just "Safe"… wishful thinking, "to defeat Russia"

      Hasn't Sunak read/heard the words of a wise and successful soldier re warfare, "Rule 1 is, do not march on Moscow".

      Harsh lessons coming for both Sunak and the Tories who placed him at the head of the table and a much harsher lesson for the British people with Starmer & Co waiting in the wings. Sunak has the wherewithal to run and hide but the British people will be stuck with the consequences of his globalist narrative following policies.

    2. Perhaps he forget that we sent around £250m a few months ago. Gottabe world leaders you know.

  8. Good Morning Folks
    Bright chilly start here
    But we have chem trails in the morning, golfers warning

  10. G7 leaders agree to send $50bn of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine. 13 June 2024.

    The leaders of the G7 have agreed to send Ukraine $50bn (£39bn) by the end of the year by using Russian assets frozen in Europe.The countries came to an agreement on Wednesday after significant pressure from the US, which has argued the profits from Russian assets should be used to secure loans for Kyiv.

    Thieving by anyone else. The West has abandoned all the moral high ground that its history and culture once gave it. It is now a nasty totalitarian tyranny without Freedom or Democracy.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/12/us-train-ukrainian-troops-10-years-security-russia-american/

    1. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Opening the door to nuclear warfare. The despotic agents behind the USA's drive for world domination will take us into a dystopian future even worse than the malignant Schicklgruber and his dreams for the Third Reich.

    1. The usual depressing drivel in response to what I thought was a very good post. You really cannot reason with some people.

  13. SIR – Midsummer’s Day approaches, and the druids are gathering down here in the Pewsey Vale.
    Summer, though, seems far off. Nights are distinctly chilly, and early mornings little better.
    I have resorted to log fires and generous whiskies in the evenings. The winter duvet and heavy tartan rug provide night-time warmth. Gone, it seems, are the joys of garden suppers, bottles of chilled rosé and nothing more than a cool linen sheet.
    English summer – where are you?

    Nick Crean
    Marlborough, Wiltshire

    Summer, you clown, doesn't commence for another week. It starts — where you live — at 9:51 p.m. next Thursday, on June 20.

    Why do people think that warm spring weather in May and June constitutes 'summer'? It doesn't. 'Summer' is simply the term for the quarter of the year between the summer solstice (June 20/21) and the autumnal equinox (September 22/23) … nothing more.

    1. Perhaps Biden was given multiple vaccinations and the effects are being seen now.

  15. I see that last nights tv debate went well

    No dish Rish and Rubber Hammer Starmer produced another blinder
    Unless I blinked neither leader was asked about what they were gong to do about –

    The all pervasive wokery that has spread through all our institutions.
    The relentless surrendering of our sovereignty to supranational institutions
    The net zero insanity.

    All of these issues crept in under the radar during the last 14 years and are preventing our country from functioning as an independent, free democratic nation state.

    So I'm guessing that they are going to do absolutely nothing about them
    All the while they just repeated soundbites and slogans that appear to have been grown in a lab by people that have never had a proper job or know what people really want.

  17. Good morning, all. Sort of sunny. Dry and fairly calm.

    Am taking a break from NoTTL. Back early July, prolly. Play nicely.

    3. Enjoy your break, Bill. I too shall be on a break in a week's time. My best wishes to you and the MR.

  18. Good morning all.
    A dry but overcast start this morning after last night's clear sky and clear view of the moon with a mere 4½°C on the Yard Thermometer.

  19. GAMEOVER.. SOCIALIST UTOPIA ON ITS WAY..
    Hitchens & Starkey review The document, A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy And Rebuilding Our Economy.

    I'm afraid it's game over.. nine centuries of the greatest gift you possessed of the supremacy of Parliament is about to be done over and replaced by a socialist utopia. Starmer & Gorden Brown's sinister plan will withdraw Losers’ Consent, and prevent their ideas ever being undone.

    There's a whole list of dangerous proposals about to be pushed through.. new constitutionally protected social rights.. The new rights would cover health, education, poverty and housing. turning them into a pretext for judges to make and unmake the law. Imagine what they might do with this formula.

    Labour’s Supreme Court will have the power to intervene in the running of the economy. It will, as far as I can see, be able to overrule the economic decisions of the Cabinet in London.

    The House of Lords will go, but be replaced by something even worse, a ‘Chamber of the Nations and Regions’ modelled on the German senate and undoubtedly crammed with nationalists and Leftists.
    All power will removed from Parliament.. and shifted to Edinburgh and Wales, and to big (usually Labour-controlled) local government. Parliament will be forbidden by law to take this power back.

    Voting won't change a thing.

    1. Daily Mail /paywall

      PETER HITCHENS: Disguised in flowery language, Starmer and Gordon Brown's plan to make it impossible for Parliament to overturn their Left-wing revolution
      By PETER HITCHENS FOR THE DAILY MAIL

      PUBLISHED: 02:11, 13 June 2024 | UPDATED: 02:18, 13 June 2024

      Keir Starmer is very much hoping you won’t notice that he plans a revolution in the way Britain is governed.

      He wants to steal power from our ancient, sovereign Parliament and hand it instead to lawyers, the devolved mini-states in Scotland and Wales, and of course to judges.

      1. Expect to hear lots more of the Lefties favourite scweam.. "It's the law, no one is above The Law.."

        1. This is Labour's route to their Nirvana of 'A Post-Democratic Age'. They want to arrive at an EU type of technocratic dictatorship where the forum of elected representatives have no clout and all is originated and decided by an anointed elite. This month's European elections have shown that such a system is none too popular with the peons. Thus Labour see the need to make it immutable. Nasty, very nasty, almost Narzy.

        2. This is Labour's route to their Nirvana of 'A Post-Democratic Age'. They want to arrive at an EU type of technocratic dictatorship where the forum of elected representatives have no clout and all is originated and decided by an anointed elite. This month's European elections have shown that such a system is none too popular with the peons. Thus Labour see the need to make it immutable. Nasty, very nasty, almost Narzy.

        3. <i>The Law and Justice are only very distant cousins, and most of the time, are not on speaking terms.</i>

          1. Using the code doesn't work any more; you have to highlight the words and use the icons at the bottom to underline, strike out, etc.

      2. I have just posted a link to a podcast between Winston Marshall and Prof Matt Goodwin from February where Goodwin talks exactly to this.

      3. Time to call in the army to take action against treason………….hello……hello….
        General, anyone there ?

      4. As a former DPP with responsibility for his part in perverting the course of justice when Vennells was still handing over postmasters for processing, and as Shadow Brexit Secretary who played a pivotal role in the parliamentary anarchy of 2019, Starmer can be relied on to effect the sort of CHANGE he is used to providing.

        It seems the stupid electorate will fall for it as they always do, simply because they are not offered anything better, the political journalists will not ask the right questions, and when a sensible answer does emerge (as a chimp pressing buttons at random will sometimes get a grape) the interviewee gets immediately interrupted with an annoyed impatient voice by the interviewer, hearing over the producer's earpiece "for God's sake shut the fellow up in case he offends someone influential".

    2. This is worth a listen (I think it must be on You Tube or some such as well). I discovered it the other day. It’s The Winston Marshall show. He used to have a podcast on the Speccie called Marshall Matters but that stopped (and now I lnow why: he has his own show). So I am catching up. This one was brilliant (or depressing). The wonderful Matt Goodwin talking to Winston on why the Tories have failed and what the future will be like under Liebour. The programme was released on 21st February this year.

      https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-winston-marshall-show/id1727337401?i=1000646313769

      The blurb:

      “Net immigration to Britain was 700k in 2023. What does this mass migration mean for the country?
      I sat down with Professor Matt Goodwin to unpack Britain's migration crisis. How does it impact the housing crisis, the NHS, the economy? What does it mean for British culture? What do the pro-Palesitne marches say about modern Britain?
      This was a comprehensive conversation about the the biggest issue in Britain today. It affects everything.”

  20. Good morning tootle monde and 77th squaddies,

    Clouding over at Castle McPhee already, wind in the South, 9℃ but just 13℃ later in rain from mid afternoon. Probably not a good day for the chem-trailers to be out because of the complex system of occluded fronts approaching from the West. They'll bring with them stronger medium and upper level winds.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e176886396c01b721d647dac30d956426dfeb6e5091a2b74cc6623351b393f68.png
    Speaking of chem-trailers –

    https://www.youtube.com/wat…

  21. Morning, all Y'all.
    Heavy overnight rain, so damp, chilly and cloudy now.

    1. On my way to a Mudéjar town near Moncayo.

      17°C
      Thursday Sunny High: 28°C Low: 14°C

      Mudéjar were Muslims who became Christian and remained in Iberia in the late medieval period following the Christian reconquest. It is also a term for Mudejar art, which was much influenced by Islamic art, but produced typically by Christian craftsmen for Christian patrons.

  22. Britain is heading for a populist tsunami far greater than anything seen in Europe. Allister Heath 13 June 2024.

    Be in no doubt: the next few years are going to be calamitous for Britain. Almost everything that is bad today will get worse, and everything that, for now, is still working will be vandalised or destroyed. The public is clamouring for change, but there will be no great rupture under Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, no break with the dismal status quo, just a further acceleration in our national decline.

    The only doubt I have about Heath's apocalyptic exposition is that he might have underestimated what is to come. A complete breakdown doesn’t seem an unrealistic possibility.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk…

    1. One good thing about 5 years of a Labour Gov't, means they'll be as dead in the water as the Tories currently are. We might even get a Reform Gov't!

      1. Assuming that, after 5 years, a change of government is permitted.
        Morning, Tom.

        1. Watch it – you might get done for an offensive comment and cancelled by the DBS if you dare to criticise.

          1. Being put on the register for a "non-hate crime" is permanent, I learned today. We live in frightening times.

          2. As soon as the knee-jerk legislation following the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, I warned (and was duly ignored) about mission creep spreading from anti-paedophilia and anti-terrorism suspension of fundamental legal protections into far more nebulous realms, such as political inconvenience (aka “hate crime”).

            It now seems that under authoritarian principles, this is to be extended into the catch-all “non-hate crime”. All we need to go on a blacklist is to offend the wrong people. They call this branch of the law “social justice”.

      2. Remember they are going to leave the 'doors wide open' Tom and even more supporters will be moving here from the shiite holes around the world.

      3. A touching faith in the march of progress.

        I will list all the prime ministers in my lifetime, and ask which didn't end up dead in the water:

        Eden, Macmillan, Home, Wilson, Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak.

        When More of the Same Starmer speaks of CHANGE, he means of course he is not Corbyn. He doesn't mean he would do any differently than the others in my list, especially the most recent.

        If "bring on the clowns" were the mantra for a real change, then we'd get a coalition between Davey and Farage, who at least would be entertaining.

    2. A glass-half-empty guy doesn't adequately describe Allister somedays. One pities whoever is sharing his breakfast table …. perhaps, nobody, perhaps his dog.

  23. The Norwegian Oil Fund has refused to agree Elon Musk's compensation package for 2023-2024. He wants US$ 56.000.000.000 – fifty six billion!
    Has he generated value for Tesla well ahead of that?
    Naturally, Musk has had a hissy fit, threatening all kinds of vengeance…

        1. I'm just trying to work out the Norwegian Oil Fund 's logic in purchasing such a large quantity of EV shares.

      2. They own a considerable number of Tesla shares. One of the biggest if not the biggest individual shareholder.

  24. Fun fact: Sir Keir Starmer of Rotherham has made it strictly verboten for any image to be published of his family visiting the synagogue every Saturday.

    1. I would guess that there is a substantial portion of the Muslim vote who have great reservations about Starmer.

      1. I'm sure they're perfectly capable of holding their noses and voting for him with the idea of a political assassination and an islamic Prime Minister shortly after the electon.

      2. I would guess that there is a substantial portion of the Jewish vote who have great reservations about Starmer.

    3. I don't blame him for that.

      But I wonder what Mrs Starmer makes of her husband's craven approach to Islam.

  26. 388481+ up ticks,

    Seems to me ALL parties will be satisfied with Golders Green being the hub of the civil war.

    The domestic political lice supported via the polling stations input, allowed /encouraged a strain of rabid foreign lice to enter decent indigenous peoples living space.

    Truth be told, bur currently, sad to say, NOT recognised, ALL politico's in the governing frame are highly toxic.

    https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1801142956696518768

    1. https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/golders-green-kosher-supermarket-knife-attacker-escapes-prison/
      Mental health ishoos, so that's OK then.

      GB News reported on Tuesday that rather than being sent to jail, the judge sentenced Abdullah to 18 months imprisonment, suspended for two years, and 12 months imprisonment, again suspended for two years.

      Alongside the alcohol treatment, he was also ordered to complete a 30 day rehab requirement. At an earlier trial Matthew Ness, Abdullah’s barrister, had told the court that he had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia before the incident – which he reportedly tried to self-medicate with alcohol.

      “Mental health contributed to this offence,” Ness told the court. “Mr. Abdullah said his mental health issues had never caused him to leave the house with a knife before, and he attributed this to a very high alcohol intake.”

      1. "it emerged that police had amended hate crime charges originally planned for him" They wouldn't do that for you or me, I suspect!

        1. I hope you enjoyed your recent birthday.

          Make the most of your remaining time, old white men are an endangered species with scum like this walking the streets, knowing they are essentially free to do as they please.

          1. Old men forget.

            But it is good to remember one's past exploits with advantages!

      2. "it emerged that police had amended hate crime charges originally planned for him" They wouldn't do that for you or me, I suspect!

      3. I heard it was his first day as a job in a halal butchers shop and the knife must have fallen out of his inside pocket.

        1. No, he claimed it was planted on him by a Jewish bus driver when he was paying the fare for some old woman who had forgotten her purse.

      4. When my brother wandered into reception at his local NHS hospital, he was carrying a holdall. "You'll never guess what I've got in here" he announced, before disclosing that he had acquired a crossbow to deal with the bad people.

        They sectioned him sharpish!

  27. Good morning, all. Sunny at the moment with a forecast of cloud building around mid-morning.

    No doubt the purveyors of Avian Flu Armageddon are looking to cash in once more with sales of a "vaccine".

    https://x.com/gaertner_paul/status/1801058401587200185

    However, the judgement from the USA's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal states that the current covid mRNA potion is not a vaccine in the true sense. Therefore it should seen as a treatment. This judgement could very well spoil the investors' plans in the USA market.

    https://x.com/RealDrJaneRub…

    Will the good globalists running the UK try and enforce any WHO diktat despite all the emerging evidence re the mRNA project? The latter has been in existence for decades but wasn't deployed on humanity because it had too many problems. Covid was the excuse for ignoring the known problems, and here we are…

    Little wonder that Tedros wants action to be taken against the rising tide of people opposing his plans for mass inoculation.

    2. Yesterday I received an invitation to have a booster jab, on account of being so old. How many people take them up on these offers?

      1. Same here. Nowhere does it state ‘Safe and Effective’ but it promises to save me from serious illness. I’ve survived 4 years of ‘covid’ without serious illness so why would I jeopardise my health and immune system now?

        Was your invitation as ‘shouty’ i.e. big, bold font, as mine?

  28. Good morning.
    At least, it's not a good morning in Russia, which is on the receiving end of another attack by the US

    Visegrád 24
    visegrad24
    BREAKING:
    Rosbank’s website is down.
    Customers can’t login. Multiple Russian banks are preventing clients from logging in because they don’t have liquidity to give clients their money, due to new US sanctions.
    Is this the start of a Russian bank run?

    —
    These sanctions are so stupid because they're very unlikely to bring Russia down, based on the results from the last time round. Russia wobbled, then steadied itself with gold, its large amount of commodities and India and China's willingness to do business with it.

    edit: and the Burj Khalifa was lit up with Russian colours last night, showing where their sympathies lie. MBS has excused himself from the next G7 meeting.
    The US cannot stop the financial reforms, it's all theatre and looting from a dying system.

    1. Donald Pleasance was good in the televised production of The Barchester Chronicles.

  30. Morning all 🙂😊
    Lovely sunny start and a lot less wind than yesterday.
    Frankly who in their right mind would believe anything a politician says.
    Habitual and pathological lying is the first thing that they take on board and it serves them all in good sted.
    Nigel is talking about 'draining the swamp'. That should win Reform a few thousand more votes.
    Wouldn't it be wonderful if that actually happened. The way things are going we might as well move to another country, at least of choice, before ours becomes completely unrecognisable.

    1. Morning! Alastair Campbell’s book, The Blair Years, was revealing. It was all about what can we say that will go down well with the public. Never about what will we do because they knew that already.

      1. Morning Sue.
        I could never bring myself to touch anything with that lying POS has had anything to do with.

    1. What does Mr Jim Dale have to say about his totally wrong prediction?

      Frankly the innocently naïf Jim Dale in the Carry On films was far more sensible and entertaining than this foring old bart.

    2. A trebuchet and a catapult are both medieval siege engines that launch projectiles. However, a trebuchet uses a counterweight to create the force to fling an object from a sling at the end of a pole. A catapult operates primarily through tension or torsion, using twisted ropes or a flexed arm to launch projectiles.

    1. There is no cure or specific treatment.

      Yet.
      Doubtless there's a vaccination already boxed up and ready to release.

  34. Good morning all

    Dull morning 11c.

    We have a mole travelling through the garden , it is driving MOH mad , tee hee, a busy little creature , and my goodness , the track it is taking is so erratic .

    I had a sweet moment when I noticed a neighbours cat sitting , gazing at a small pile of fresh earth near our driveway hedge , and as I crept closer , I could see a pair of paddles pushing the earth up from a tunnel .. the cat's gaze was so intense and fixed .. the mole must have changed its mind , and turned back ..

    https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1800899987402027097

    1. We have colonies of moles. Forget Kenneth Graham – moles are vicious, nasty animals which are cannibalistic, eat the corpses of other dead moles and, worse than that – they ruin my lawn.

      1. 388481+ up ticks,

        Morning JN,
        Cloud seeded hailstones held in readiness by patriotic peoples squadron call out 24/7.

        The battle of Britain MK2.

    2. Only a 'green' would think that pouring 500 tons of concrete, 100 tons of steel, massive bird, bat and insect killing fibre glass blades, 1000 litres of oil, rare earth metals, miles of copper, aluminium and rubber, plastic and kevlar coated cables across the land is a rational idea.

    1. Cancel the return half of their tickets – only 1,000 or so, but it's a start!

  37. 388481+ up ticks,

    We could be wrongly assuming that all burka plus wearers in the
    United Kingdom are, in the main unemployable when in reality they could very well be potential hit-men.

    Dt,

    Woman flew to UK for contract killing disguised in hijab
    Police hunt American hired for revenge shooting of Birmingham boutique owner

    1. This case is so weird, but the message is clear; you've got to be scared of those white women

  38. 'Allo, 'allo.
    Wordle 1,090 4/6

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    1. That was difficult! Wordle 1,090 4/6

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      1. Took me a while.

        Wordle 1,090 4/6

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      2. Too much for me

        Wordle 1,090 5/6

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    1. One could equally argue that neither Judeo-Christian nor Islamic law is man-made since The Ten Commandments were handed down by God and Shariah Law was offered up by the Devil.

  40. By playing the clown (a profession he is on record for admiring), is Ed Davey playing a canny game, since nobody can criticise him for bad politics when he is falling in the river?

    Mind you, if we are to believe what he says about those running the privatised water businesses, the likelihood is that he will end up in A&E before the election is as strong as the brown stuff offered up to the electorate by all and sundry.

  41. Labour spelling mistake, they are going to double the amount of scanners. How many letters did they actually get wrong ?

  42. 38848+ up ticks,

    When found guiltyvia his services rendered he must surely serve 20 years for each odious comment he uttered, unless to ease the length of sentencing he names his odious colleague involved in the pilot prototype killing, maiming campaign.

    Matt Hancock libelled Andrew Bridgen to ‘devastating extent’, court told
    Former health secretary faces legal action from candidate MP for saying that comparing vaccine deaths to the holocaust was anti-Semitic

    Telegraph Reporters
    12 June 2024 • 5:52pm

    Matt Hancock and Andrew Bridgen in their official parliamentary portraits, composited together
    Mr Hancock (L) is defending a legal suit brought to the High Court by Mr Bridgen (R)
    Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, libelled parliamentary candidate Andrew Bridgen to a “devastating extent” by accusing him of anti-Semitism on social media, the High Court has been told…

  43. Hamas terrorists are playing the West for fools
    The group’s leaders aren’t interested in the lives of Palestinians, only in their own self-preservation
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/hamas-terrorists-are-playing-the-west-for-fools/

    BTL

    The State of Israel wants to exterminate Hamas by military means and not ordinary citizens after having suffered an unprovoked, surprise attack which took hostages, and raped and beheaded its citizens. It tries to warn ordinary people of where it will attack so that they can get out of the way.

    The other side, backs a terrorist group which uses Palestinian people as human shields and rapes, beheads and murders its enemies, wants to exterminate all Jews and get rid of the State of Israel.

    I wish somebody could explain the meaning of the word genocide and explain why they say that Israel is committing genocide while the other group is not.

    1. Morning Rastus, I'm sure no one here needs it; however, it cannot be repeated enough. The meaning of the word genocide:

      "Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands–literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops," wrote Raphael Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

      "We are in the presence of a crime without a name," he wrote and coined the new word, "genocide" a few paragraphs later. Adopted by the UN as a result of his writings, the lie now perpetrated by the same UN is to assert that Israel now commits genocide when even by its own adopted definition, it clearly does not.

      Hence why it cannot ever be repeated enough for the ignorant whom we always have with us. It ought to be repeated as a catechism daily until the blockheads finally get it frankly.

      1. Raphael Lemkin is being disingenuous when redefining genocide to mean only mass killing carried out by Germans and not by anyone else.

        We have seen in recent years how words can be redefined by influential bodies in order to let the guilty off the hook, and this is no exception.

        I would consider the execution of 35,000 people in reprisal for the sins of a rogue group in their midst to be a form of genocide. It is clear that Israel is making all Palestinians (whom they call "Arabs" and thus a subhuman category of people) pay for the crimes committed by their rulers. It is presumed they are all aggressive Muslims, completely disregarding the plight of the Christians there.

        Warning people to get out of the way and then shelling the places they move to, on the pretext that some Hamas fighters have joined them, is a pathetic attempt to take the moral high ground. It is like the cat sparing the life of the mouse for a while, because it likes to prolong the play.

        Hamas reminds me of the toddler who attacked the big bad neighbour, and then cowered behind mother when the big bad neighbour, enraged, went in to teach the toddler a lesson. Of course mother copped it, but in the end was mother to blame, and was mother actually holding or using the murder weapon?

        I blame the parents.

        1. Morning Jeremy. I get what you mean; however, I wouldn't have said Lemkin was being disingenuous. He was involved recall, having had family exterminated. That tends to attract one's interest in a unique way. In context too of course he was defining something not seen before.

        2. I take genocide to mean the extermination of a whole people as far as the perpetrators can achieve it.
          Israel is not doing that.
          In fact there are far far more "Palestinians" than there were when your hated Israel was formed in 1948.

          1. Etymologically: "genos" Greek – 'race' plus "cide" Latin – 'killing'. Literally the killing of a race.

            It was coined specifically for the extermination of every remnant of a race. Much as the horrors of Pol Pot apply or the fact that Poles found their way into the gas chambers, for example, the intent was not in either case to obliterate a race because they exist. That's genocide and the UN can bloviate as much as it likes. It needs to get its facts straight.

          3. Is it genocide when the target is breeding faster than they can be exterminated?

            The nation of Israel, for better or worse, has existed since 1948 and is generally recognised throughout the world; the nation of Palestine has not, although there have been half-arsed attempts to create one as a form of Israeli “protectorate”.

            For the purposes of this debate, I refer to Israelis as those citizens who recognise the sovereignty of Israel, and Palestinians as those citizens who do not, and wish the place to revert to its former status, or to a new nation not aspiring to be a “homeland for the Jews”. Abroad, it is noteworthy that it is post-apartheid South Africa that is the main supporter of Palestine outside the Arab world.

        3. Though the word had not been coined, pre-WW2 Genocide was very much evident in many conflicts.
          And not just the Armenian Genocide committed by the Turks.

      2. ‘Genocide‘ has become like ‘racist’ , ‘fascist’ and ‘far right’ : just a slur deployed by people who are more likely to be involved in genocide, racism, etc than those they accuse (plus a few of their useful idiots)

        1. Exactly so Lola. Such a serious crime and yet the ignoramuses marching around London don't even know where Palestine is let alone the meaning of the chants they shout out.

          Useful idiots indeed.

    2. Hamas terrorists are playing the West for fools
      The group’s leaders aren’t interested in the lives of Palestinians, only in their own self-      preservation enrichment
      Gosh. Is it that obvious?

  44. The Warqueen got us tickets to London Concourse so we're off to see the finished V8 Vantage I sold to the chap when we moved. He's finished it – no intention of selling it but asked if I wanted to see it so we're off up there and back later.

    Godparents collecting and dropping Junior off at school and looking out for the dogs. When we left Mongo was looking steadfastly at the floor, Oscar was getting a tummy rub. Toodlepip.

      1. 1980, in tourmaline blue. The chap has done a wonderful job on her. Rather than my bodging efforts to restore her the engine is immaculate, the wiring loom even properly clipped, the wheels gleam – and actually turn!

  47. Follow the money.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13524051/ukraine-sell-assets-russia-invasion-shopping-centre-hotel.html

    Ukraine will auction state-owned companies and landmarks this summer in a desperate to raise money to fund its resistance against the Russian invasion.

    The Hotel Ukraine, a confiscated shopping centre and Europe's biggest titanium miner are among 19 large assets set to go up for sale to plug a £3.9bn gap in the country's defence budget.

    Kyiv hopes to be able to bring in £80mn by the end of 2024 by drastically slashing prices – a fraction of the tens of billions recently offered by the United States, or the £31bn ($40bn) already allocated to defence.

    'The budget is in the red,' Oleksiy Sobolev, Ukraine's deputy economy minister, admitted in an interview. 'We need to find other ways to get money to keep the macroeconomic situation stable, to help the army and to win this war against Russia.'

    Kyiv hopes that privatising state assets may also create more jobs and tax revenues for the nation, with the war forcing many business to close and taking employees out of the workforce.

    1. Gosh, I can almost feel myself sobbing at the pathos of Zelensky being forced, just forced to sell off Ukraine's assets.
      I bet the whole thing was agreed in advance between the parasite class and Putin. They probably agreed how much land Russia would get. Then they started the propaganda and all the weak-minded put Ukraine flags in their bio.

  48. Good Moaning.
    If this weather continues, I may have to shed my Liberty bodice……

    Ah. Thank goodness, grey clouds have arrived and the wind's got nippier.
    Back to normal.

    1. Seeing as it hasn't stopped raining for the last 10 months i'm glad i booked a holiday in the Med later in the year.

        1. Malta. Always Malta. Even with the rare rains it's still warm. The sea temperatures are like taking a bath.

          4. Oh my, that looks so good. One of my favourite artists, a Russian emigre, Viktor Koulbak, still lives there I think. You might even see some of his great silverpoint work, but if not the view and food will suffice:- have a lovely time.

          5. Thank you. I just love it there. Always a warm and friendly greeting. On first name terms with everyone too.
            Where out of interest might i see his work?

          6. It’s good while since I was there, I loved it – climate, people, coast-line, food, everything…I don’t know the galleries there now but possibilities are Mark Murray or Stephen Ongpin both Fine Art. (If not, but interested to see his silverpoint it will be online.) It seems there’s a Gozo gallery too. He was a Russian emigre living in Paris at one time, started teaching which lasted just one day… I do silverpoint myself, not sure how long I’d have lasted 😀 Content myself with a couple of his books.

          7. Thanks. Nice to have a different view of a place i love to visit. I did stay on Gozo once. Wasn't overly impressed as i like dining on holiday more than anything.

          8. Welcome, brought to mind some good memories. It's a very long time since I was there, perhaps changed now (or not). It's certain you'll have a great visit. I didn't want to return (home): edit!

          9. That sounds like you were there in difficult times. I have read the history. Have you read the book Strada Stretta? From the Maltese point of view.

          10. I haven’t, will look for that one – sounds interesting. I never really think of times as difficult, just ‘interesting’ 😀

          13. We were there a few years ago – the people we stayed with recommended 2 restaurants, both were excellent! Maybe we were lucky?

          14. I think for me it is about having lots of choices nearby. Gozo for me was a bit of a struggle.

          16. Yes, outdoors, some sun but not strong, parasol, sea breeze if possible. Light meal, light wine, good company..ease into the afternoon. That’s lunch, dinner a little different:-)

          17. My elder son Christo and his wife, Katy, are at present on holiday in Malta. They spent a couple of days in Gozo.

            A friend of ours called Gary has settled in Gozo and plays the guitar and other musical instruments in various bars on the island.

          18. My elder son Christo and his wife, Katy, are at present on holiday in Malta. They spent a couple of days in Gozo.

            A friend of ours called Geoff has settled in Gozo and plays the guitar and other musical instruments in various bars on the island.

    2. My good lady has just spent an hour chatting on face book messenger with her friend in Perth WA. Although they had a very dry summer. Its lovely and sunny green and 20 degs. Right now.

    3. You can ease up on your sexual innuendos for a while, your erstwhile heartthrob has retired from Nottl temporally to recover from the rubber buttons episode.

    5. After a fairly quiet start to the day, unrelenting rain and wind all day. Cold as well, I expect we will be informed by the bbc, it has been the warmest June since records began.
      PS what's a liberty bodice, sounds interesting.

        1. Thanks, I was thinking it was something you smeared with goose fat, to keep the chill off in winter.

    6. I've just got around to reading British Horse; one of the articles was how to cope in the heat and how to recognise signs of heat stress in your horse. Yeah, right.

  49. It hardly ever rains. 300 days of sun a year. When it does rain it tends to be torrential and the roads turn to rivers but it moves off quite quickly. Not like here where it hangs around for days.

      1. When my plane lands the sun will come out. It always does. :@)
        I go at the end of Summer to shorten the effects at home of a long grey Winter.

    1. B on B! That's two off the streets for a while and two of the streets permanently. I agree about the death sentence. A year in solitary confinement, in case of a gross miscarriage of justice, followed by the rope.

      1. Flog them every day until all they know is pain. Then throw them in a lime pit and let them scream.

    2. Vardon Calocane got off with his stabbings in Nottingham last year, claiming mental health issues. I expect he's costing us about a million a year to be looked after.

      1. But don’t you get a warm fuzzy glow knowing we are looking after the rest of the world’s detritus?

      2. I really believe that judges should prosecute and sentence the crime committed. Mental health can be dealt with in secure mental health prisons.

        1. It’s because ‘mental health’ can’t be proven either way these monsters are getting away with their vile crimes.

  51. 388481+ up ticks,

    I mean, as living proof look at what, with me in the leadership position we achieved as a party, incredible.
    With a combination party con / lib / lab under my leadership we could really make Ukraine, in a rebuild campaign, able to twin with any city in the current United Kingdom.

    ALL levelled up as dens of iniquity that cannot be equalled elsewhere.

    https://x.com/David_Cameron/status/1800606146128179659

    1. He forgot to mention that we would also be on the hook for rebuilding Gaza. I expect they will demand a comprehensive underground system as part of the reconstruction.

      1. 388481+ up ticks,

        Afternoon KP,

        Mark my words, he'll have the current lab/lib/con supporter, member /voters singing the underground / overground wombling song as they cough up.

      1. Cameron is no Palmerston.

        Nowadays our geopolitical interest should be in making friends with Russia, distrusting US politicians and not enabling the US to seize the Black Sea and Mediterranean in order to deny trade access to other countries.

      1. 388481+ up ticks,

        Afternoon VW,
        If it was mandatory for them to be first over the top when the whistle blew, their tune would soon change.

  52. Right then, off to Mannington Hall to peruse the roses. Back later this afternoon.

          2. ‘Not bad’ :-)))) I’m due an upgrade soon, may I ask your make and model, please?

          3. It’s old KJ. It’s a Motorola G7 running android. When I upgrade I’m going for another Motorola though. I love them. I used to have a Motorola Razr V3 Blue back in the 2G days, but didn’t everyone 😁

          4. Thanks James going to look into that. Had a Leica one time an old one, many years ago. Prices likely thru the roof now. Keep up the good work ‘night for now, Kate 😊

          1. Yes, badly put isn't it. I think it's meant to say that it includes a turf seat within a layout taken from illustrations. The sign is at the entrance to the "mediaeval rose garden". That one is next to a pergola with a rambling rector. I have a picture but the site won't let me upload as it's greater than 5Mb.

    2. Thank you for the info. Never heard of it, but it looks good.
      Will see if MB is interested as he loves gardens.

      1. About 12-yrs ago it was a regular place we visited when we lived up there. Always good. There’s Wolterton Hall not far away too, which we always meant to visit but still haven’t managed. I remember having a pleasant chat with Lord Walpole when he opened the house on a special day back then. It’s not included in the visit. First time back in a decade.

  53. Now the EU is in trouble: Trudeau suggests democratically elected right-wing politicians in EU elections are a threat to democracy.

    Continuing his ability to be completely wrong and spout BS about everything.

    1. Whereas left wing ones aren’t??????

      the lack of self-insight is of the scale!

    3. He's desperate. Like all mad Lefties he can't accept that he's finished and so is thrashing about.

  54. I go to Kenya in February to have something to look forward to and escape winter.

      1. Sunak's mum is a pharmacist, he said yesterday he was deprived of Sky in his childhood 😀

    2. That is a late version Sky dish, not in use until 1998 or so, well past Rishi's childhood days.

    3. Burgess Road in Southampton will be remembered by all those who went to Southampton University.

  58. Guido

    LABOUR MANIFESTO REVEALS REJOIN EU PLAN

    Labour have unveiled their manifesto, most of which was reported on before its launch. However, one key detail in it reveals Labour’s true plans to create ever closer ties with the EU:

    “Instead, Labour will work to improve the UK’s trade and investment relationship with the EU, by tearing down unnecessary barriers to trade. We will seek to negotiate a veterinary agreement to prevent unnecessary border checks and help tackle the cost of food; help our touring artists; and secure a mutual recognition agreement for professional qualifications to help open up markets for UK service exporters.”

    Labour’s plan to strike a veterinary agreement with the EU is a recipe for disaster. The UK will be forced into ‘dynamic alignment’ with the EU’s draconian rules on animal health, food safety, and plants. Reducing the UK to mere rule-takers, shackled to EU regulations without any say. Worse still, it will stifle Britain’s ability to adopt cutting-edge technologies like cultivated meat, gene editing, and GMOs. Kiss goodbye to new trade deals with global partners…

    Matthew Lesh, Director of Public Policy and Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:

    “This Labour manifesto commitment is a big deal for the future trajectory of UK-EU relations. It is difficult to imagine the UK getting a veterinary agreement with the EU without a commitment to ‘dynamic alignment’ with the EU’s regulations on animal health, food safety, and plants. This would turn the UK into a rule-taker, limiting our ability to embrace new technologies and sign trade deals. It would be handing significant powers back to the EU, with the UK expected to adopt rules and decisions without any input from Parliament.”

    It’s no secret that the Shadow Cabinet is filled with die-hard Remainers. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he wanted to reject the referendum result, while Starmer has long spoke of his desire to create closer ties with the bloc. This could be just the first step…

    13 June 2024 @ 13:46

    1. TBF, Citroen, the Conparty is also full of Remainers and would not oppose any of these moves.

      1. And the Limp Dims want to take us back into the EU economic area. What price democracy?

  59. Raining here now , I can smell the sweet scent of Petrichor

    Petrichor is the smell of rain. The word comes from the Greek words 'petra', meaning stone, and 'ichor', which in Greek mythology refers to the golden fluid that flows in the veins of the immortals.

    What is Petrichor?
    The phrase was coined by two researchers at the Australian CSIRO science agency in a 1964 article for the journal Nature. In their research, rocks that had been exposed to warm, dry conditions were steam distilled to reveal a yellow coloured oil that had become trapped in the rocks and soil, a substance they discovered was responsible for the smell.

    The source of this oil is a combination of oils secreted by plants during dry weather (which signals to halt root growth and seed germination) and chemicals released by soil-dwelling bacteria.

    How does rain create the smell?
    Many people believe they can smell when it is going to rain, and there is some evidence to support this. When a higher humidity is experienced as a precursor to rain, the pores of rocks and soil become trapped with moisture forcing some of the oils to be released into the air.

    But the strongest smell is released when rainfall arrives. Raindrops landing on dusty or clay soils trap tiny air bubbles on the surface which then shoot upward – as in a glass of Champagne – and burst out of the drop throwing aerosols of scent into the air where they are then distributed by wind.

    Release of the scent is most prominent when light/moderate rain falls on sandy or clay soils. During heavy rain, the speed of the drops represses the creation of bubbles stopping the release of aerosols.

    It is thought by some scientists that our reliance on rain in cultures throughout history may be the reason why so many people enjoy the smell of rain.

    Captured by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using high-speed cameras, the video below shows raindrops landing and the emergence of petrichor aerosols as tiny white flecks.

    ( I can sometimes smell when the tide is turning , yet the coast is 4 miles away, funny really because I can smell the scent of salty air )

    1. Used to get that smell just before the first rain in Nigeria, in April – it would waft up from the south, together with the clouds.
      First, tiny puffy clouds taht vanished before they got to be overhead.
      Then' slightly bigger ones that passed overhead, heading North, before vanishing
      Then bigger ones that headed out of sight north
      Then clouds with some grey
      Then – the smell!
      Then – a roar of violent rain, and 100x the smell!
      This would take between 1 to 2 weeks from first stage to being wet – and we kids would cavort in the rain, cycling through puddles and otherwise being daft. We'd not seen rain since September or so.

      1. Man, it's a long time since I recalled that. But I can still smell it now I can remember!

      2. I have a photo of 10 year old son swooshing down the road in our residential area on a lilo , yes dangerous , but all the children did it .. However the storm drains gave up some interesting occupants , like Igala lizards and the odd snake or two .

        Our bungalow walls used to host giant cockroaches and other beetles and creepy crawlies after a rain storm .

        I agree with you , the smell after and before rain was so unique , and typically African .

    2. Petrichor is a lovely smell but it is quite rare in Western Europe. Despite what the global warming idiots tell you, it is rarely hot enough to produce the right conditions and the rain that follows a dry spell usually comes down in buckets-full, swamping the smell.
      I'm all for global warming, I have suffered more than enough of cold conditions, even in so-called deserts.

  60. Banning the office romance is a dystopian sign of a world gone mad
    BP’s edict that its employees must inform the board of any ‘intimate relationships’ they have with their colleagues is a heartless business
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/06/12/bp-banning-office-romances-dystopian-sign-of-world-gone-mad/

    What a bloody cheek!

    BTL

    I used to teach English in a boarding public school in South West England.

    A pretty young woman, 16 years my junior, arrived to teach French and Spanish. There was an immediate rapport between us; we fell in love.

    Imagine the potential for gossip in a community like a boarding school! We kept our liaison secret from our pupils and our colleagues until we announced our engagement in the Daily Telegraph.

    We have now been very happily married for 36 years and our two sons have left home, found respectively a wife and fiancée, and have successful careers in engineering or computing.

    We certainly wouldn't have dreamt of telling the headmaster of our relationship before it was formalised. It was none of his business.

  62. 388481+ up ticks,

    I mean, as living proof look at what, with me in the leadership position we achieved as a party, incredible.
    With a combination party con / lib / lab under my leadership we could really make Ukraine, in a rebuild campaign, able to twin with any city in the current United Kingdom.

    1. Every time we are shown clips of towns and cities in the vast majority of other countries in the world there are thousands of cars on the roads where ever it's filmed.
      In our own country the amount of cars on the roads has probably more than doubled in 25 years. Every where now there are queues and traffic jams.
      This is because our population is still rising now and has over this period risen massively.
      This is what our moronic politicians have done, they are absolutely useless and terminally stupid.
      Now of course as usual, it's everyone else's fault but theirs and we, the hard done by public are going to have to pay once again for their continuous habitual effing mistakes.
      And now they want us to vote for them and return them to carry out more damage to our lives, income and general well-being.

  64. Sorry to witter on , but we had election fever here for the local elections in May , loads of leaflet drops and nonsense like that .

    The Lib dems took the majority of seats away from the Tories in Dorset Council, and we lost a very decent Tory district councillor in our ward .

    What have we got here now , nothing through the letterbox for a couple of weeks.

    I reckon the Lib dems are confident enough to believe they will have a few MPs in place to replace our Tory blue County . I am certain we will lose our Tory MPs , hence the lack of political leaflets .

    1. Some judges are unfit for purpose; they should be disbarred.

      Disbarment is usually a punishment for unethical or criminal conduct but may also be imposed for incompetence or incapacity.

    2. Well let’s face it, not paying a covid fine is far worse than actually murdering someone, so she jolly well should be jailed.

    1. Binned mine as well.

      I have had too many reactions , and am really bogged down with itchy skin , cough, watery eyes , sneezes, and feeling terrible with IBS, I can't believe how I feel now .. after all the poisons have been pumped into me .

      1. As before, Maggie; I recommend Loratadine (One-a-Day Hay-fever & Allergy Relief) 10mg tablets, One-a-Day.

    3. Snap. Mine was for my Spring jab.
      Since it arrived on 12th. June, I assume it meant Spring 2025.
      Anyway, it's in the bin.

  67. Welcome to the most unpopular G7 summit ever

    As world leaders descend on Puglia, Italy, Rishi Sunak leads a who’s who of global disapproval ratings

    James Crisp,EUROPE EDITOR
    13 June 2024 • 12:48pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/world-news/2024/06/13/TELEMMGLPICT000381574318_17182774889450_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680
    *
    *
    *********************************

    Transit Trucker
    2 HRS AGO
    These are the goons that are literally giving the west away to Islamic hordes that hate our culture! "Unpopular", isn't the right word. Try "despised".

    John Thomas
    1 HR AGO
    The EU has solved the problem of unpopular leaders, by not allowing the public to vote for either the the head of the Commission or the Council.
    Simple.

    3. Surely Turdeau should be a lot more unpopular? Something about length among turds springs to mind [Not you Giorgia!]

    4. Surely Turdeau should be a lot more unpopular? Something about length among turds springs to mind [Not you Giorgia!]

  68. Fear of this silly woke rule has left us walking on eggshells

    Over-sensitive souls have us worrying about causing offence over ‘cultural appropriation’ when there is none to be had

    MICHAEL DEACON, COLUMNIST & ASSISTANT EDITOR
    13 June 2024 • 11:00am

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/columnists/2024/06/13/TELEMMGLPICT000381331833_17182710945220_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqTotciVTuRKMoprHHm1TBpTXaG_3FkRG2WH2SGzlVXbs.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Tartan barmy: Kameron Saunders, a backing dancer for Taylor Swift, models his kilt in Edinburgh

    1. That is not a kilt. That's a skirt.

      Were the iron railings still there when he left?

          1. I wouldn’t know, dearie, I don’t wear them. Don’t you need to wear poils with that?

    2. It looks like Royal Stewart tartan, which can be worn by anyone, so where is the appropriation?

      2. I know the focus isn't great, but it looks insufficiently complex, and I suspect it's a made up one.

    5. Idi Amin Dada called himself the last King of Scotland, saying he was the first leader to fight against Scotland’s oppression

      During an interview with a British Journalist, he asked him if he wasn’t scared to interview the “Conqueror of the British Empire”

      His Excellency, President for life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea and the Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in particular”.

      In 1972, Idi Amin Dada said God told him to expel Asians from Uganda.

      80,000 Asians who owned 90% of Uganda’s businesses, and accounted for 90% of its tax revenues were expelled.

      He accused them of milking Uganda’s economy.

      Idi Amin Dada gave Israel’s Embassy building in Uganda to Palestine.

      He severed diplomatic relations with Israel.

  69. France is descending into chaos – and Macron is no latter day De Gaulle ready to save it. 13 June 2024.

    The next three weeks will witness France plunged into its greatest postwar crisis. It will be no surprise if political passions spill out onto the streets and we hear echoes of the bloodthirsty revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat: “Man has the right to deal with his oppressors by devouring their palpitating hearts.”

    Bring it on. Let this rotten and corrupt gang of traitors meet the fate they deserve.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/france-is-descending-into-chaos/

    1. Why not just bring Madame Guillotine out of retirement. Any concern for civilised values is misplaced at this stage. We know who the guilty are and their guilt is not in question. I'm turning full on medieval. I see no other way.

  71. I see Labour are supporting the Palestinian cause. Never miss a chance to support terrorism do they. Evil to their backbones.

      1. Until such time as it's convenient for said islamics to ditch Labour and take over themselves.

    2. Labour are an alien force operating in our country, trying to win political support by using arguments based on 'emotion' rather than honest straight foreward reasoning.
      If they are supporting Palestine they are supporting the attempted annihilation of a respected tradition and culture, one that the Hitler tried to eliminate.

      1. Agreed, totally alien to the British way of life, unfortunately the Tories are not far behind them in that respect.

  72. A dreich Bogey Five!

    Wordle 1,090 5/6
    ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
    🟩⬜⬜⬜🟨
    🟩⬜⬜🟩⬜
    🟩⬜🟨🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Got lucky again.

      Wordle 1,090 3/6

      🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
      🟩⬜⬜⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

        1. Definitely. Calm down Susan is a common phrase of mine but it’s easier said than done sometimes.

    2. 4 today.
      Wordle 1,090 4/6

      🟩⬜⬜🟩⬜
      🟩⬜⬜🟩⬜
      🟩🟩🟨🟩⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    3. Dont go there! shocking double bogey here, and it took me bloody ages to see it!

      Wordle 1,090 6/6

      🟨🟨🟨⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
      🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜
      🟩🟩🟨🟩⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    4. Good one for me today.
      Wordle 1,090 3/6

      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜🟨🟨🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  73. The World of Mad Max
    Environment, energy and net zero

    • Clean power by 2030
    • New publicly-owned energy company, Great British Energy
    • End de-facto ban on onshore wind
    • Expand windfall tax on oil and gas producers
    • Upgrade five million homes in five years
    • Extra £23.7 billion spent on green projects over first term
    • End to trail hunting

    Labour initially vowed to borrow £28 billion per year from day one to invest in its flagship green prosperity plan.

    But this pledge has been significantly watered down over time. Rachel Reeves first admitted that the annual sum would not be hit until at least the second half of Labour's first term.

    Then Sir Keir cast further doubt on the scale of the investment, saying it would be subject to the party's fiscal rules. In a major about-turn, he downgraded the spending commitment to just £4.7 billion a year after admitting it was unaffordable.

    Under the new, slimmed down blueprint, public funding for a major home insulation drive was reduced by nearly 80 per cent, from a planned £6 billion a year to just £1.3 billion.

    As a result, Labour says only five million houses would benefit from the scheme over the course of five years, compared to the original plan of 19 million across a decade. This is the only project the party has said would be scaled down as a result of the change.

    The overarching aim is to turn the UK into a "clean energy superpower", with a zero-carbon electricity system by 2030. To help achieve this, Labour would set up Great British Energy, a publicly owned body that would invest in green projects like wind farms, with a budget of £1.7 billion a year.

    The Labour manifesto includes a pledge to end trail hunting, which it claims is being used as a "smokescreen" for illegal fox hunting as well as fixing one million extra potholes a year.

    The manifesto also commits to banning the importation of hunting trophies, puppy smuggling and farming, and the use of snare traps. It also pledges to "work towards the phasing out of animal testing".

    The green plan, which now amounts to £23.7 billion over five years, would be on top of £50 billion already committed by the Tories, which Labour has promised to match.

    Meanwhile, Labour has pledged to overturn the de-facto ban on onshore wind in England, set councils binding targets for how quickly they approve green energy projects, and establish a "British jobs bonus" to incentivise firms to build their supply chains in the UK.

    Before it announced the about-turn on the £28 billion fund, the party had claimed the green reforms would take £1,400 off annual household bills and £53 billion off energy bills for businesses by 2030, while creating over a million jobs in 10 years.

    Sir Keir has also said local councils will be able to continue imposing low-traffic neighbourhoods under a Labour government.

    The Labour leader said that LTNs were a "good idea" in certain areas and that it would be for "local authorities to decide" where they were implemented.

    The party's manifesto also seeks to tackle pollution in Britain's waters. It pledges to put failing water companies in special measures, give regulators new powers to block executive bonuses, and bring criminal charges against "persistent law breakers".

    It also includes a pledge to create "nine new national river walks" and three new national forests in England, as well as planting "millions of trees".

    Elsewhere, the manifesto says Labour will set a target for half of food purchased by the public sector to be "locally produced or certified to higher environmental standards". It says the party will "work with farmers" to eradicate Bovine TB so the badger cull can be ended.

    2. In the meantime, I'm moving away from electrickery as provided by the national grid and have sourced a generator to run the Rayburn pump when we get power cuts.

      1. I did the same, shortly after moving to Seale in 2005. More power cuts in one winter than I'd experienced in the previous 48 years. Cheap Chinese thing from Focus DIY, long since scrapped, but it was enough to keep the lights on, and the CH – which, incidentally, was connected to the mains via a 13A socket. Totally against IEE regs, but perhaps previous tenants had had the same issues.

        I also hauled the thing across the road to the church on more than one occasion, when neither the organ nor the digital piano could be used.

        Currrent home is all-electric, save for the gas combi boiler. I have several fully-charged LED lanterns / torches / whatever, lots of AA batteries in reserve. Cooking / boiling are covered by a gas BBQ (I also have a portable gas camping stove). A wind-up / rechargeable radio. The one potential problem is the Internet. Even if I could power the router with (say) a power bank (I have a substantial one of those as well), I'm doubtful that there'll be anything available on the landline. Digital Voice is apparently coming here. Unlike FTTP, for which there are no plans.

        The local rail station has wi-fi, but it is equally vulnerable to power cuts. During Storm Arwen, I struggled through the wind, and found I could get a distant mobile signal whilst on the footbridge. Otherwise, communications were impossible.

        1. I've got Calor in the motorhome and I'm arranging to have the electric cooker replaced by a Calor one. Water will be heated by oil when the Rayburn isn't lit. I also have lots of candles, night lights (mainly the battery sort, but lit ones, too), torches, a headlamp. I do have a powerbank for the mobile phones. All I need now is a deep well and a reed bed 🙂

        1. I thought that was called drag hunting. Perhaps that conjured up scenes of drag queens being chased around the countryside.

      3. According to the above, it is being used as a "smokescreen" for fixing one million extra potholes a year."

        According to others it is like "kissing your sister".

          1. Stag hunting used to be the sport there. I'm not sure if there is a kissing your sister equivalent across the Tamar.

    4. "The Labour manifesto includes a pledge to end trail hunting, which it claims is being used as a "smokescreen" for illegal fox hunting as well as fixing one million extra potholes a year."

      Why don't they want the potholes fixed, albeit clandestinely?

  74. No mention of an amnesty. Does he think we'll be fooled?

    Migration

    • Treat people smugglers like terrorists
    • New cross-border police unit
    • Extra 1,000 caseworkers to cut asylum backlog
    • Possible returns deal with EU
    • Repeal Rwanda Bill
    • Train unemployed Britons

    Sir Keir's third pledge is to "launch a new Border Security Command with hundreds of new specialist investigators, and use counter-terror powers to smash the criminal boat gangs."

    It draws on Labour's plan to address the small boats crisis, which has two main planks: cracking down on people-smuggling gangs, and reducing the asylum backlog.

    The Labour manifesto says the British economy is "overly dependent on workers from abroad" and includes a commitment to reduce net migration – but there is no specific target.

    It adds that dependence on overseas workers "in some parts of the economy" will be ended by bringing in training plans for homegrown labour in health, social care and construction.

    Sir Keir has also indicated that he would be prepared to do a deal with the EU that would involve taking a quota of migrants who arrive in the bloc in exchange for the ability to return those who illegally cross the Channel to England.

    The Labour leader has said he would treat people smugglers like terrorists by giving the National Crime Agency expanded powers to freeze their assets and place restrictions on their movement. He would also work more closely with Europe, creating a new cross-border police unit to "tackle gangs upstream".

    Meanwhile, Labour would recruit more than 1,000 caseworkers to cut the asylum backlog, fast-track decisions on applications from "safe" countries, namely Albania and India, and create a new returns unit, again backed by 1,000 staff, to speed up removals.

    The party has vehemently opposed the Rwanda deportation scheme and vowed to repeal it.

    But Sir Keir has indicated he would be willing to consider other options to divert migrants abroad. In December, he said he would look at offshore processing, used by countries such as Australia, in a significant hardening of his stance on border controls.

    In his first major election speech, Sir Keir ruled out giving votes to EU citizens, in a U-turn on a previous pledge from his 2020 leadership campaign.

    Labour has also ditched plans to allow asylum seekers to work six months after reaching the UK, a policy previously outlined by Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, in December 2022.

    Keir Starmer will stick with the current one-year time limit in line with the Tories after which asylum seekers can apply to work but only in shortage occupations.

    Unemployed Britons will also be trained to do jobs normally taken by migrant workers to cut net migration, under Labour's plans to curb Britain's reliance on foreign labour in sectors such as care, construction and engineering.

    Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said that the current system, which gives businesses a 20 per cent discount for overseas recruitment, "basically incentivises" employers to recruit from abroad rather than up-skilling domestic workers, despite the nation's worklessness crisis.

    On June 2, Sir Keir unveiled further plans to curb net migration, promising voters: "Read my lips – I will bring immigration numbers down".

    Labour proposals include a ban on "bad bosses" who break employment law by failing to pay staff minimum wage from hiring workers from abroad, while also forcing industries applying for foreign worker visas to train British people to do the jobs first.

  76. Cringe!

    https://youtu.be/VjeGikqLpLQ

    Mr Sunak and Giorgia Meloni were pictured holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes in Bari on Thursday.

    They were also seen affectionately holding each other’s shoulders as Mr Sunak leant towards Ms Meloni.

    It comes as the Prime Minister is set to announce an extra £250 million for Ukraine and urge world leaders to do “whatever it takes” to defeat Russia.

    Another £250M? Fix our potholes, Sunak, stop making more in Ukraine.

    3. Has he got one of those 'buzzer' things in his hand? Meloni looks orgasmic…….

  79. ARRGGHH!
    Got back from Sheffield about 3ish after a shopping pause in Matlock and felt so knackered I went back to bed for 1½h until the DT arrived back from work.
    When I woke up it was raining and the towels I'd hung up the washing line were still outside!

    1. It's just knowing that so many idiots are going to go out and vote for the dismantling of the UK…how can people be so blind to what's going on around them?

    2. I've thought of an election winning slogan for the Conservatives, it might just turn their fortunes around;

      'If you want a Slammer for your neighbour, Vote Labour' – I've mailed it to Rishi and the initial signs are promising……

  81. All my life, I've been completely underwhelmed by honey. People rave about heather honey or linden honey and I've just been thinking "meh!" and feeling guilty for eating this supposedly special food when I didn't really like it.
    All that has changed now though – bread and butter and honey is suddenly one of my favourite foods. I've got a lifetime of eating honey to catch up on. How have I missed this wonderful taste in the past?
    (I am not pregnant by the way!)
    Am I the only one who has such great changes in food preferences, or do other people experience this too?

    1. It's so different, season by season. Firstborn & SWMBO keep bees, I keep away, but the stuff is marvellous.

      1. I'd love to try, but we've already got at least two beekeepers that I know of within a mile of our house. Little blighters come into my garden and take the nectar, and then the beekepers sell it back to me for a tenner a pot!

        1. You have described government in a nutshell, they take your assets and sell them back to you for an extortionate sum.

    2. When I was a child I couldn't stand blue cheese – all I could taste was mould. As I got older I started to appreciate Shropshire Blue and Stilton. Now I prefer them to "ordinary" cheeses.

          2. Hear you, opopanax…but my taste buds are old as am I…we need something to kick us awake….blue stilton the best…yum!

      3. I picked up a taste for Danish Blue (THE CHEESE you filthy minded buggers!!) at 11.

    3. I'm a seriously dedicated honey eater. I always liked it but nearly 30 years ago it was proposed to me as a counter to the debilitating hay fever I used to endure. It worked. I have it every day at breakfast, either on rye bread toast or as a sweetener in porridge. Only local honey from small independent apiaries, though, none of the mass-produced gunk found in super-markets.

      1. I usually squirt some honey on my porridge in the morning.
        But we've run out.
        One of my BiLs use to have a couple of hives as a hobby. He enjoyed it immensely.

      3. There's a theory that local honey is best, because it protects you against local plant allergens.
        Last year, MB was having a bad time and a teaspoon of honey seemed to improve matters during the high pollen season.

      4. Local honey is the only strain to alleviate hay fever, I've been told. Even better to keep your own bees…I wish 🙂

    4. You are not alone. I would never eat chilli con carne because I don’t like red kidney beans. But we discovered cannellini beans and I love it now! OK so just a change in beans but I’m a bit peculiar anyway. Don’t like almonds unless they’re in a delicious amoretto almond cake, I don’t like walnuts and I don’t like dates. But, I like both in a date and walnut loaf! Alf likes and eats anything.

      1. Fresh walnuts are lovely – but darn fiddly to peel.
        I only like dried walnuts in cakes.

    5. II hated cheese until I was 24. Now I love it (and live in a country where it is rubbish! 🙄🤣).

      Somewhat more recently, I discovered that whilst my tastebuds recoil from coriander on its own, when combined with fresh lime, I love it!

      Just goes to show that it pays to keep trying. 🙂

      1. Coriander needs to be combined with something I think – it can lift a dish amazingly, but if too strong it’s horrible.

      2. Try coriander with basil and flat leaf parsley. A trinity for wraps and sandwiches.

    7. After school swede – boiled cubes of orange tastelessness – I didn't touch the stuff for about 20 years.
      Then I cooked and mashed it properly with butter and seasoning and discovered a whole new vegetable.

      1. Ugh. Vomit. Worst experience ever, swede. Bitter, nasty, with toenail clippings.

    8. Marmite. Used to hate it….not any more. I am warming to broad beans, too.

      1. er…interesting…
        Since I discovered almond butter, I don’t buy PB any more. It’s v expensive but far better

    10. School meals put me off liver for many years. It was always dry and leathery. I now like it a lot.

    11. Most honey available in supermarkets is adulterated with corn syrup. Buy only from local producers.
      Try honey mixed into greek yogurt.

      1. We’ve aways had honey from small producers, I just didn’t like it! Greek yoghurt needs whipped cream and brown sugar imo

  82. "Be in no doubt," says Alistair Heath in the first line of his piece today (I won't pay to read the rest of this garbage) "the next three years will be calamitous for Britain."

    Well Alistair, if that indeed is the.case you are well and truly an abject part of the reason for that; since 2020 we have witnessed the division of our country and the world of humanity generally into those who lie with evil intent or ignorance, and those of us who are fighting, with all our human faults, to keep Truth alive as the guide of our civilisation. The Telegraph sold out right at the beginning and became a poodle of the globalist parasites, which it remains, as sententious and arrogant as ever.

    if we are spared by the multitude of other psychotics in Washington, Brussels and the "new" Marxism, the British will now have to reconstruct their culture. If we can use the tattered remains of our law to do so, and in doing so restore the death penalty for the wholesale crimes committed, that would be preferred to what has now I consider become an inevitable eclat. The Silent Man is finally seeing that his silence will no longer save the life he had until now. And then the Telegraph will become an even poorer place to hang around than it is today.

        1. He's a journo, for Christ's sake! He's been forthright about the state of the nation.

  83. Evening, all, from a dull, miserable, damp Salop. The Rayburn is doing its job, thankfully.

    Why anyone would believe a politician is beyond me.

          2. Apparently concocted to a recipe provided by a retired Officer of the Indian Army who never returned to pick it up.

          3. When it was first tasted, it was vile, which is why he didn’t come back! It matured with time.

  85. I wish I could post photographs on here. 🦚
    Who amongst you has ever walked out of their front door and have been confronted by a large Peacock?
    As I was this afternoon. I think he was looking for some food. He went off with some other passers-by.

  86. Anyone know when Ukraine became a member of the G7, or perhaps they just needed a comedian for a night.

    2. they have trudeau. His excuses and woke outrages are always good for a laugh.

    1. Ashes posted a reply to BB2 at 7:24pm. All the BA lefties have surrendered to her charms . {:^))

        1. To be fair, I was confined to bed (or so I thought) with a fever and lost great chunks of the day, so anything is possible… 🤣

          2. Yurss, thanks. Fever broke early this morning so just need to get my muscle strength back. Which means no dancing today; and how that saddens me!

            I am just about to head out to a parilla (barbecue restaurant) to replenish my reserves with steak and Malbec. 😈 Cheers! x

    1. Like all effing politicians plenty of Rabbit but no positive action. King useless.

  90. Well, summer frocks are still hanging forlornly in the wardrobe – probably huddled together for warmth.
    It's time those wind mills were put into reverse; they're obviously doing too good a job.

    Friend came round for lunch. Her aged corgi thought she'd investigate the bedrooms – and then froze when faced with descending a twisting staircase. A lot of treats and gentle coaxing eventually got her down.
    The resulting hiatus between main course and pudding made the dessert seem that much sweeter.

    1. I l always volunteer to do the washing up. At it warms my hands up. We had to put a blanket on the summer duvet last week.

      1. I thought it was global warming climate change that was to blame for everything.

  91. Nigel Farage is the Prince Harry of politics – only with cunning
    –
    You might think that the royal and the politician have little in common but they are both perpetually delusional and perpetually vengeful
    –
    PETRONELLA WYATT • 13 June 2024 • 4:30pm

    The allurement that men like Nigel Farage hold out to journalists is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors; they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously exciting. To the average Right-wing columnist, doomed to banal drudgery for most of our lives, they offer the only grand hazard we have ever encountered. Thus it has become customary in recent weeks to refer to Mr Farage as the most consequential politician since Margaret Thatcher.

    I understand that many Telegraph readers have succumbed to his seductive baits, but really? I knew Lady Thatcher, and to compare the two is to compare the Uffizi Gallery to a third-rate auction house.

    Every generation gets the politicians it deserves, and Mr Farage is reality TV's answer to Sunak and Starmer. His career has been a vast, eye-catching way to self-medicate on the drugs of bombast and vanity.

    Farage presents himself as a break with the past, but what he really offers is more chaos without substance. He is not even on the Right. Populists, whatever their claims, never are.

    They are tummy ticklers and shapeshifters, who would promise a one-hour orgasm to a Turkish eunuch.

    Farage has no time for free-market economics or its disciplines. He has no time for discipline, being physiologically incapable of running a team of any kind. It is instructive to remember that he has fallen out with almost every comrade he has ever had, detonated almost every alliance he has ever made, and presided over more rows than anyone in politics.

    His actual achievements hardly bear scrutiny. Here is a man who has tried and failed to be elected as an MP seven times. Here is a man who didn't win Brexit, because Vote Leave did. Here is a man who the generals of Leave, including Johnson and Gove, refused to associate with because they penetrated his bunkum and saw him as a liability. Here is a man who claims that Reform UK will become the official opposition, when psephologists predict it will win one seat. Here is a man who is hoping the Conservatives may be reduced to fewer than 100 MPs, when, as a cursory glance at the texts will tell you, this has never happened in the entire history of the party.

    (Any talk of a Canada scenario is piffle, as you would have to be swivel-eyed to believe the Conservatives will be left with just two seats.) Here is a man who believes he can take over the Tory party, when the majority of its MPs will never forgive him for what he has done to their electoral prospects.

    Readers must know in their hearts that his motive is gainful, with no guilt accruing to it. Here is a man who seeks to give Starmer, a socialist with poisons more deadly than those of the Borgias, a majority of such proportions that the country will never recover; making Farage an enabler of tax rises, unions unleashed, VAT on private schools and the genocide of small businesses.

    Here is a man who claims to be a patriot, but has named Putin as the world leader he most admires. Moscow's rose. Behind the façade of frankness, Farage is as slippery as a peddler's store of unguents. Here is a man who is a master of the venomous insinuation, who knows he will always get off scot-free; hence his remark that Rishi Sunak doesn't get British culture.

    Here is a man whose disciples come from where the grass grows high, and where racism and idiocy still hold their puissance. (Ten Reform UK candidates have been expelled or suspended for remarks both unsavoury and certifiable, including likening black people to "baboons". An eleventh has said we should not have fought Hitler.)

    Here is a man acting not from principle but from pique, because he cannot forgive Vote Leave and the Tories for shunning him and refusing him a Triumph. He is to statesmen what comedians are to great actors, a sort of reductio ad absurdum of them.

    Here is man whose success may seem vast, but is hollow as well, and may yet prove to be a huge and preposterous nothing. Here is a man who is acclaimed by yelling multitudes, but who makes up these multitudes? Homo neanderthalensis. Wherever the flambeaux of bilge smokes and gutters, he sets out his traps. The Reform vote is soft and illusory, less Viagra than Wegovy, and in the week before the election, Farage's party is likely to perform well below the Tories in the most reliable polls.

    Margaret Thatcher would have despised him. She was vehemently against applause-seekers, and her greatest aspiration was to prevent a socialist government with a large majority from ever ruling in Britain again. I spent the election night of 1992 in her company.

    Though she had been ousted by her party, she turned and said to me, when it was clear John Major had won, "Thank God." She would have seen Farage as a traitor to the national interest, and a one-trick phoney at that. Indeed, in some ways, he is the Prince Harry of politics, only with cunning; perpetually delusional, perpetually vengeful. Ask yourself, would you wish your daughter to marry such a person? If the answer is no, do not vote for him. Do not listen to his siren song. For here is a man, who on July 5, is going to look like an ass.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/06/13/thatcher-despise-nigel-farage-general-election-2024-reform/

    You bloody stupid woman. It will be the Conservative Party of Cameron onwards that will have given the country a socialist government. Mrs Thatcher would have despised Call-me-Dave and all that followed with an intensity capable of making steel melt. And to you for writing this she might have said: "My dear Miss Wyatt, do sit down, relax and share a pot of tea with me. You seem a little overwrought."

    2. I wrote to Nigel Farage not too long ago and he replied. I read he replies as much as he can to letters. That tells me more about him than the above article. Actions not words, love.

          3. Thanks Spikey! All is well – fantastic wedding, stunning venue and wonderful Airbnb! We’re now in Porto in a rather lovely apartment! The sun is out and the city is beautiful! Great food and sights! 😘

  94. Farage willing to lead merged Reform-Conservative party after election
    –
    Reform leader says 'Tories may well be dead' and only he can lead a centre-Right party and provide opposition to a Labour government
    –
    Charles Hymas, Home Affairs Editor and Jack Maidment, Politics Live Blog Editor • 13 June 2024 • 9:28am

    Nigel Farage has said he would be willing to lead a merged Reform-Conservative party.

    The Reform party leader said he could not lead the Tories as it "currently is" but predicted a new party is likely to emerge after the general election. Asked if he could rule out leading the Conservative Party one day, Mr Farage told LBC on Thursday morning: "I think something new is going to emerge on the centre-Right, I don't know what it is called. But do I think I am capable of leading a national opposition to a Labour Party with a big majority where I can stand up and hold them to account on issues? Yes."

    Asked if he would be happy to lead a merged party, he replied: "Yes."

    He added: "They [the Tories] may be dead. They may well be dead. This may well be the end of their journey. I would be prepared to lead the centre-Right in this country."

    Opinion polls have put Reform between one and two points behind the Tories since he announced last week he would be taking over as the party's new leader and would run as a parliamentary candidate in Clacton, Essex. Mr Farage said he believes Reform UK will be "very close to a tipping point" when the party overtakes the Conservative Party in the opinion polls.

    He repeated his claim that the "election is over, Labour has won" and the question now was about who would lead the opposition in the House of Commons to Sir Keir Starmer. He believed the "Conservatives will be incapable" of providing that opposition because they "hate each other" and he would be best placed to take on the Labour government.

    It comes after Jacob Rees-Mogg on Wednesday called for Reform voters to join ranks with the Conservatives. He said: "If you divide the Tory family you make it worse for both parts, the in-laws and the outlaws, so to speak, and that what we need is a coalition, a coalescence, of the various parts of the Tory party family."

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/13/farage-willing-to-lead-conservative-reform-merged-party/

    1. Rees-Mogg has gone along with the Tory sea-change. He must have done, otherwise he would have spoken out and denounced Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak.

  95. Pay attention, children: what are the salient feature of a Dutch auction?

    1. I would put a cap on that question – especially when it concerns a Dutch treat with a Dutch uncle.

  96. The ‘sordid’ student-teacher sex scene finally banned at Cambridge
    The university has outlawed academics having relationships with undergraduates they’re responsible for – but will it stop them?
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/cambridge-student-teacher-sex-scene-banned-tinder/

    This is the thin end of the wedge. Either a person is an adult at 18 or he or she is not.

    BTL

    We should remember that in the UK the age of sexual consent is 16 which means that at that age a person is deemed old enough to decide for him or herself with whom he or she wishes to sleep.

    If this is too young then the age of sexual consent should be raised to the age of majority. The same rule should apply to everyone.

    It is absurd to think that a criminal drug pusher can legally sleep with a sixteen year old but that a student of 21 cannot decide with whom he or she should sleep if he or she decides to sleep with a university lecturer.

    Once the law decides with whom it is and is not acceptable to sleep then we are in the realms of absurdity.

    1. The problem is that others might think degrees are awarded according to how much sex the professor gets.

      In the outside world it's known as a conflict of interest.

  97. Reform ahead of the Tories. Best start working on my maiden speech. Help me out, guys.

    4. I'd go with;

      Voting Reform is like marrying an ugly woman – if she leaves you nobody will give a fck!

  100. Just posted this on Sheffield Council's Faceache Clean Air Zone Page:-

    I drove from Matlock to Blast Lane in Sheffield this morning and planned my route using the Council's CAZ boundary map to avoid going into the CAZ.
    https://sheffieldcc.maps.ar…
    I followed the A621 via Owler Bar & Abbydale to the A61 and intended to branch off onto the B6071, Shrewsbury Road just short of the CAZ Boundary.
    Unfortunately the road layout did not allow me to do that.
    I was forced to go into the CAZ via Matilda St. Fornham St. and Suffolk Road before I could join my planned route.
    I have just tried to find out if I was picked up by the ANPR Cameras, but found an absolutely unbelievable load of utter shite on the council's page,
    https://www.sheffield.gov.u…
    explaining how, whilst they could use the ANPR data to hammer me with penalty fees, they could not use that same data to advise me if I actually was liable to the charge!
    Unfuckingbelieveable!

    2. As it's only a money-making scam and has nothing to do with clean air, you can pretty much guarantee you'll have been caught and will be fined, unfortunately.

    3. And they will wonder why we will swing them from lampposts. The time is inching nearer.

    4. And they will wonder why we will swing them from lampposts. The time is inching nearer.

  101. Just posted this on Sheffield Council's Faceache Clean Air Zone Page:-

    I drove from Matlock to Blast Lane in Sheffield this morning and planned my route using the Council's CAZ boundary map to avoid going into the CAZ.
    https://sheffieldcc.maps.ar…
    I followed the A621 via Owler Bar & Abbydale to the A61 and intended to branch off onto the B6071, Shrewsbury Road just short of the CAZ Boundary.
    Unfortunately the road layout did not allow me to do that.
    I was forced to go into the CAZ via Matilda St. Fornham St. and Suffolk Road before I could join my planned route.
    I have just tried to find out if I was picked up by the ANPR Cameras, but found an absolutely unbelievable load of utter shite on the council's page,
    https://www.sheffield.gov.u…
    explaining how, whilst they could use the ANPR data to hammer me with penalty fees, they could not use that same data to advise me if I actually was liable to the charge!
    Unfuckingbelieveable!

  102. An honest jornalist:

    An Australian TV host has labelled Justin Trudeau a “neo-Marxist Ken doll” following his comments about the conservative shift in European politics.

    Just love it.

  103. 'Fatties for Palestine' is a new low for the narcissistic, woke West
    –
    Am I alone in feeling uncomfortable that some activists are making the Israel-Hamas War all about them?
    –
    TOM SLATER • 13 June 2024 • 4:11pm

    After a prolonged, deafening silence, the fat community has finally taken a stand on Gaza. Introducing "Fatties for a Free Palestine", the latest woke social-media trend to take the Middle East's most intractable, awful conflict and reduce it to a fashion statement.

    This is the brainchild of Hannah Moushabeck, a Palestinian American author and activist, in collaboration with designer Phoebe Wahl and a lifestyle blog called Fat Girl Flow. Essentially, it looks like a t-shirt design with pretensions to being a political movement.

    For $39 you can get your hands on a standard or a cropped tee, emblazoned with "Fatties for a Free Palestine', surrounded by flowers, watermelons and cutesy cartoon figures. If you're on the larger side of plus-size, you might want to hurry, though. The 4X, 5X and 6X cropped versions are already sold out.

    In an Instagram post, Moushabeck says the war in Gaza "affects people in my life personally". And to be clear, this doesn't seem to be a grift: all of the profits are going to a Middle East children's charity. "This is one small project in a lifetime of work I have been doing for the liberation of Palestine", Moushabeck says.

    But this is also one in a long line of memes and movements that has essentially given woke activists an excuse to take the Palestinian issue and make it all about them: to share the hashtag, cop the t-shirt, fly the flag, feel "seen", be righteous. This is "me, me, me" masquerading as solidarity.

    Alongside raising funds for Gaza, Moushabeck says she also wants to tackle "a lack of protest garments for those in larger bodies". Sure, you can go on the marches and chant all the questionable slogans, but if you can't flaunt your views in an IG snap, are you really pro-Palestine? Woke politics and fashion are now indistinguishable.

    The narcissism doesn't end there. The desperation of Western activists to make every cause about their own identity has provided some grim comic relief during this war. Who could forget the rise of Queers for Palestine, or Chickens for KFC as critics have dubbed it – given the murderous homophobia of Hamas-run Gaza?

    Now the fat activists – yes, this is apparently a thing – are getting in on the act. Fat activism is a subculture of wokedom that sees fat people as both an oppressed group in their own right and as a blast against supposedly "white", Western ideals of beauty. Essentially, being overweight and having the right opinions is radical now – particularly if you are wearing one of those t-shirts.

    To everyone else, of course, all of this looks patently ridiculous – as ridiculous as Gingers for Palestine or IBS Sufferers for Palestine would be. Identity politics has taken the most superficial, unimportant things about us and turned them into opportunities to attention-seek.

    But given this is about Gaza and Israel, Fatties for a Free Palestine isn't just a joke. You don't have to go far down its dedicated Instagram page before you encounter bilious anti-Semitism, including an activist waving a placard railing against "Zio scum" – an anti-Semitic slur.

    The world's oldest hatred and the world's plumpest "pro-Palestine" group naturally go hand-in-hand, it seems.
    –
    Tom Slater is editor of Spiked!
    –
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/fatties-for-palestine-is-a-new-low-for-narcissistic-woke/

    1. Is this Palestinian author and activist a Palestinian in the same sense that Edward Said was a Palestinian author and activist? Said was Egyptian born and bred.

      1. Hannah Moushabeck's website tells us she is 'a second-generation Palestinian American author, editor, and book marketer who was raised in a family of publishers and booksellers in Western Massachusetts and England. Born in Brooklyn into Interlink Publishing, a family-run independent publishing house, she learned the power of literature at a young age. She is the author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine (Chronicle Books, March 2023). She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts on the homelands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc Nations.' Right on, sister!

        However, if she's going to casually toss in the names of 'native American' tribes, she might find it useful to learn the chronology of the tribes of 'Palestine'…if she can get her 'Queer, Fat, Palestinian American' arse into gear.

        https://hannahmoushabeck.com/

  104. 'Fatties for Palestine' is a new low for the narcissistic, woke West
    –
    Am I alone in feeling uncomfortable that some activists are making the Israel-Hamas War all about them?
    –
    TOM SLATER • 13 June 2024 • 4:11pm

    After a prolonged, deafening silence, the fat community has finally taken a stand on Gaza. Introducing "Fatties for a Free Palestine", the latest woke social-media trend to take the Middle East's most intractable, awful conflict and reduce it to a fashion statement.

    This is the brainchild of Hannah Moushabeck, a Palestinian American author and activist, in collaboration with designer Phoebe Wahl and a lifestyle blog called Fat Girl Flow. Essentially, it looks like a t-shirt design with pretensions to being a political movement.

    For $39 you can get your hands on a standard or a cropped tee, emblazoned with "Fatties for a Free Palestine', surrounded by flowers, watermelons and cutesy cartoon figures. If you're on the larger side of plus-size, you might want to hurry, though. The 4X, 5X and 6X cropped versions are already sold out.

    In an Instagram post, Moushabeck says the war in Gaza "affects people in my life personally". And to be clear, this doesn't seem to be a grift: all of the profits are going to a Middle East children's charity. "This is one small project in a lifetime of work I have been doing for the liberation of Palestine", Moushabeck says.

    But this is also one in a long line of memes and movements that has essentially given woke activists an excuse to take the Palestinian issue and make it all about them: to share the hashtag, cop the t-shirt, fly the flag, feel "seen", be righteous. This is "me, me, me" masquerading as solidarity.

    Alongside raising funds for Gaza, Moushabeck says she also wants to tackle "a lack of protest garments for those in larger bodies". Sure, you can go on the marches and chant all the questionable slogans, but if you can't flaunt your views in an IG snap, are you really pro-Palestine? Woke politics and fashion are now indistinguishable.

    The narcissism doesn't end there. The desperation of Western activists to make every cause about their own identity has provided some grim comic relief during this war. Who could forget the rise of Queers for Palestine, or Chickens for KFC as critics have dubbed it – given the murderous homophobia of Hamas-run Gaza?

    Now the fat activists – yes, this is apparently a thing – are getting in on the act. Fat activism is a subculture of wokedom that sees fat people as both an oppressed group in their own right and as a blast against supposedly "white", Western ideals of beauty. Essentially, being overweight and having the right opinions is radical now – particularly if you are wearing one of those t-shirts.

    To everyone else, of course, all of this looks patently ridiculous – as ridiculous as Gingers for Palestine or IBS Sufferers for Palestine would be. Identity politics has taken the most superficial, unimportant things about us and turned them into opportunities to attention-seek.

    But given this is about Gaza and Israel, Fatties for a Free Palestine isn't just a joke. You don't have to go far down its dedicated Instagram page before you encounter bilious anti-Semitism, including an activist waving a placard railing against "Zio scum" – an anti-Semitic slur.

    The world's oldest hatred and the world's plumpest "pro-Palestine" group naturally go hand-in-hand, it seems.
    –
    Tom Slater is editor of Spiked!
    –
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/fatties-for-palestine-is-a-new-low-for-narcissistic-woke/

  105. 'Fatties for Palestine' is a new low for the narcissistic, woke West
    –
    Am I alone in feeling uncomfortable that some activists are making the Israel-Hamas War all about them?
    –
    TOM SLATER • 13 June 2024 • 4:11pm

    After a prolonged, deafening silence, the fat community has finally taken a stand on Gaza. Introducing "Fatties for a Free Palestine", the latest woke social-media trend to take the Middle East's most intractable, awful conflict and reduce it to a fashion statement.

    This is the brainchild of Hannah Moushabeck, a Palestinian American author and activist, in collaboration with designer Phoebe Wahl and a lifestyle blog called Fat Girl Flow. Essentially, it looks like a t-shirt design with pretensions to being a political movement.

    For $39 you can get your hands on a standard or a cropped tee, emblazoned with "Fatties for a Free Palestine', surrounded by flowers, watermelons and cutesy cartoon figures. If you're on the larger side of plus-size, you might want to hurry, though. The 4X, 5X and 6X cropped versions are already sold out.

    In an Instagram post, Moushabeck says the war in Gaza "affects people in my life personally". And to be clear, this doesn't seem to be a grift: all of the profits are going to a Middle East children's charity. "This is one small project in a lifetime of work I have been doing for the liberation of Palestine", Moushabeck says.

    But this is also one in a long line of memes and movements that has essentially given woke activists an excuse to take the Palestinian issue and make it all about them: to share the hashtag, cop the t-shirt, fly the flag, feel "seen", be righteous. This is "me, me, me" masquerading as solidarity.

    Alongside raising funds for Gaza, Moushabeck says she also wants to tackle "a lack of protest garments for those in larger bodies". Sure, you can go on the marches and chant all the questionable slogans, but if you can't flaunt your views in an IG snap, are you really pro-Palestine? Woke politics and fashion are now indistinguishable.

    The narcissism doesn't end there. The desperation of Western activists to make every cause about their own identity has provided some grim comic relief during this war. Who could forget the rise of Queers for Palestine, or Chickens for KFC as critics have dubbed it – given the murderous homophobia of Hamas-run Gaza?

    Now the fat activists – yes, this is apparently a thing – are getting in on the act. Fat activism is a subculture of wokedom that sees fat people as both an oppressed group in their own right and as a blast against supposedly "white", Western ideals of beauty. Essentially, being overweight and having the right opinions is radical now – particularly if you are wearing one of those t-shirts.

    To everyone else, of course, all of this looks patently ridiculous – as ridiculous as Gingers for Palestine or IBS Sufferers for Palestine would be. Identity politics has taken the most superficial, unimportant things about us and turned them into opportunities to attention-seek.

    But given this is about Gaza and Israel, Fatties for a Free Palestine isn't just a joke. You don't have to go far down its dedicated Instagram page before you encounter bilious anti-Semitism, including an activist waving a placard railing against "Zio scum" – an anti-Semitic slur.

    The world's oldest hatred and the world's plumpest "pro-Palestine" group naturally go hand-in-hand, it seems.
    –
    Tom Slater is editor of Spiked!
    –
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/fatties-for-palestine-is-a-new-low-for-narcissistic-woke/

  108. Went to hear the vocal group Tenebrae at St Barts this evening and the singing was beautiful but the concert started late because they do the front of house stuff themselves and I get the need to cut costs but it was amateurish and chaotic. If I had to wait outside in Wigmore Street because they were so slow checking tickets and getting people seated, I’d get pretty fed up. Reminded me of the time I went to see Kate Rusby, the Yorkshire folk singer, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. She’d hired the hall but not the staff. Her mum was selling programmes.

  109. Starmer's plan for growth is built on a dangerous fantasy
    –
    The world of lockdowns, busybodies, certificates and passes turns out to be Labour's actual inspiration
    –
    DAVID FROST • 13 June 2024 • 6:57pm

    I listened to Sir Keir Starmer claiming the Labour manifesto was about economic growth. Once I'd stopped laughing, I couldn't help thinking of an old episode of Yes Minister in which Jim Hacker is given the job of "transport supremo".

    His first set of ideas, to rationalise and reform Britain's transport system, is spiked by the PM because of the effects on his own constituency. Realising he must get rid of the job, Hacker turns despairingly to Sir Humphrey. "Don't worry, minister. We now produce the other kind of proposal – the high-cost high bureaucracy one. A British National Transport Authority, regional boards, area councils, committees, the lot. Everyone will have a fit. And the job will go back to the Department of Transport."

    And so Labour will behave. Having scorned Liz Truss's attempt to jolt the economy into growth, Labour thinks that it can achieve wealth creation by direction and control instead. One of the many achievements of the Tory governments of the 1980s and 1990s was to ensure that such ideas got the mockery they deserved. But since Gordon Brown's time, they have crept back, and they reached their zenith in the Labour approach announced yesterday.

    In Rachel Reeves' "securonomics" – by the way, a word I confidently predict will be said only with embarrassment or ridicule within six months of the election, if it isn't already – we are told to expect the "dynamic and strategic state", a new industrial strategy with an Industrial Strategy Council, Local Growth Plans, a Council of the Nations and Regions, a National Wealth Fund, a new quango in Great British Energy, and much, more more.

    Labour thinks that this sort of planning and bureaucracy is the same as making things happen. It just isn't. Its Green Prosperity Plan, aka its irrational, damaging, and deranged intention to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, is, how shall we put this charitably, at variance with physical reality. Better start stocking up on blankets and candles.

    In health, there will be a new National Care Service integrated with the NHS, though we also read that the NHS must itself become a "Neighbourhood Health Service". More worrying than either, Labour sees in the world of the Covid-19 pandemic a model for the future: its "strong mission-driven industrial strategy", "government partnering with industry and academia", is "the approach we will take in government". I thought Labour believed Boris's government had handled Covid badly. Now it turns out that the world of lockdowns, busybodying, certificates and passes is the party's actual inspiration.

    All this bureaucracy is, of course, deep in Labour's DNA. Just as the Attlee government was inspired by rationing and control in wartime, so is Starmer's by the biggest expansion ever of state control in peacetime. And no wonder all this is going to require the highest tax burden ever in peacetime to fund it. So, although Labour claims to be the "party of wealth creation", it won't rule out taxing wealth – even though we all know that it is invariably true in economics that, if you tax something, you get less of it.

    The idea that this panoply of process and of permits is going to produce real economic growth is simply a fantasy. Fundamentally, Labour doesn't believe in markets or incentives. In its manifesto, the party says markets are "broken" and need "shaping". Labour doesn't really think anything can happen except through government direction and fiat, it thinks ministers are reliably cleverer in directing economic resources than the people who own those resources, and believes that letting a free people get on with life, to their mutual benefit, is a sign of neglect and indifference.

    In this, of course, Labour is absolutely part of the spirit of the age, indeed its apotheosis. It laughably claims to be the party of change, and it is certainly true that Sir Keir Starmer has changed his opinions several times, but the spirit of the manifesto is one of absolute continuity.

    Labour rightly points out the poor productivity record of the past 15-20 years, seemingly without realising that much of it stems from the distressing attachment of administrations over this period to exactly this "government knows best" philosophy, whether in industry, housing, the NHS, or net zero, and to the tax and spend levels that go with it. Under the Tories, we luckily got a watered-down, half-hearted version of industrial strategy and state control, the political equivalent of the sermonising of the Church of England bishop who doesn't really believe in God. Under Labour, you'll get the red-hot revivalist preacher version. But it won't work any better.

    The truth is, of course, that you don't get growth just by saying you want it, by spending money, or by getting bureaucrats to draw up plans. You get growth by allowing people and companies to invest, spend and invent, as they see fit; by letting them keep what they have earned; and, as far as possible, by staying out of the way.

    Labour's economic plans cannot succeed because they are not based on this fundamental reality. You can't expect Labour politicians to learn from history. But the rest of us should.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/keir-starmer-plan-for-growth-built-on-dangerous-fantasy/

    Tired old reference it may be, but tractor factories come to mind…

    1. It’s all well and good for David Frost to criticise and mock labour’s manifesto. It what have the Cons done for the last 14 years? Pretty much the same. More and more legislation, Net Zero, shut down power stations, halted most North Sea oil and gas development, the highest tax burden for 70 years… and on and on.

      You cannot tax a country into prosperity.

      1. And raised and kept corporation tax high. A cracking article by David Frost, nevertheless.

    2. Pyatiletnii – Five Year Plans. The only reliable growth will be the state bureaucracy. We need less of that.

    1. Josh Hazelwood has already said it would be in Australia's interest to engineer an early England exit when the Aussies play Scotland. The only sanction Australia would face is the prospect of a one match ban in the next stage for their captain, Mitchell Marsh, and losing up to 100% of his match fee if a disciplinary committee judged that Australia had deliberately lost to Scotland.

      What would have avoided this temptation is if points earned in the first group stage were carried forward to the next, incentivising Australia to beat Scotland.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2024/06/12/josh-hazlewood-australia-england-t20-world-cup-exit-scots/

  111. The most dangerous part of Labour's manifesto is the bit no one will read
    –
    Labour's plan for sweeping constitutional changes with entrench their social democratic model of governance for decades
    –
    TIM STANLEY • 13 June 2024 • 1:44pm

    The Labour manifesto is out, and all eyes will be on the economics. But the constitutional stuff, the pages people skip through, is what actually matters. Labour can raise taxes; the Tories can get back in and lower them. But New Labour showed that if you tinker with the constitution cleverly enough, the Left will remain in power forever. Call it "the hidden hand of the administrative state".

    Start with the Lords. Labour's first move is to boot out the hereditary peers and introduce a retirement age at 80 (meaning Joe Biden couldn't serve in it). This will sacrifice good peers on the discriminatory grounds that they're too old, while protecting peers appointed when they were ridiculously young and have zero life experience (Ken Clarke goes, Charlotte Owen stays).

    The trend is towards professionalisation of democracy, including a ghastly-sounding "Modernisation Committee" to reform the Commons. Say farewell to "arcane procedures", which make the place tolerable; hello to clapping. The crackdown on unethical MPs is less toothy than I expected (it looks like the PM still gets final say on firing a minister); the war on second jobs is limited to "paid advisory or consultancy roles". One doesn't want to put doctors and nurses off running for parliament.

    In the long run, "Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations" – signalling that it intends to implement Gordon Brown's 2022 proposals for constitutional reform.

    These were big. They seek to swap the Lords for an elected senate described as an Assembly of the Nations and Regions – i.e. with representatives of devolved areas – embedding devolution so it can never be reversed and handing local power-brokers such as Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan power to scrutinise and amend legislation. This body would be able to veto bills if they are deemed to contradict "constitutional statutes", with input from the Supreme Court.

    Brown pledges to retain the primacy of the Commons, but these plans rebalance power away from MPs and towards courts and regional assemblies: moves that would probably make radical legislation, such as Brexit, impossible. Historically, the motor for government in the UK has always been an executive in parliament, commanding a majority that can more-or-less do what it wants.

    Labour's plan is to replace this with a constitutional framework that guarantees social rights – healthcare, education – policed by judges and committees. I recently heard David Starkey amusingly refer to this as the kind of constitution you'd find in a post-Soviet nation experimenting with democracy for the first time.

    There's also a lot of talk in the manifesto about better collaboration with assemblies, the vibe being that decisions should be made closer to the areas they affect. This does not guarantee better government. Schools are better in non-devolved England than in Scotland; the NHS is at its worst in self-governing Wales.

    All it means is that cadres of socialist politicians get new jobs and powers in a Federal State of Great Britain. Only a politician could say the answer to a failed politics is… more politics. You can look forward to a Council of the Nations and Regions, which sounds like the Harrods of talking shops.

    The Tories deserve some blame for the coming nightmare. They've trashed the reputation of the Lords by packing it with cronies; they endorsed and promoted devolution, even as it became a springboard for Left-wing politicians promising a chicken in every pot.

    Both parties can be accused of a form of gerrymandering – the Conservatives by introducing voting ID requirements, and Labour by now extending votes to 16-year-olds in a bid to tip things in their favour. The Tories did some good in clearing out New Labour's quangos, but they failed to repeal legislation that, once in place, makes it very hard to depart from the social democratic model.

    If Labour wins, they'll expand Tony Blair's constitutional revolution, and it'll be difficult to overturn. Just as no one wants to come out against an Act with the word equality in it, it's tricky to argue against local government ("what? don't you trust the people?"). One would have to repeal this stuff the same way Thatcher painstakingly tore up the postwar economic order. The Tory party in its present form doesn't have the will or wit to do it.

    Just look at how reluctant it was to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, or to institute a domestic bill of rights. Disraeli defined the Tories as the party of the English Constitution. Over a century later, their understanding and affection for it turns out to be skin-deep.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/labour-manifesto-launch-keir-starmer-general-election/

    A Peter Hitchens piece on the same subject was posted earlier. Is it scare-mongering? How could a government with a big majority not be able to unpick such arrangements?

  113. Another day is done so, I wish you a goodnight and may God bless you all, Gentlefolk. Bis morgen früh. If we are spared!

  116. “Palestine” has never been a state. It was an administrative area within the Roman empire.
    Israel has been a state historically and the 1948 construct recognised that.
    The Arabs did their damnedest to wipe it off the map and failed.
    No Arab country wants to take in the so-called Palestinians and give them the rights and freedoms that Israel has granted them, refugee camp is the best they will offer. Why? Because everywhere they go they cause trouble.

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