Thursday 17 December: It is right to trust people to make their own decisions about Christmas

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/12/17/lettersit-right-trust-people-make-decisions-christmas/

743 thoughts on “Thursday 17 December: It is right to trust people to make their own decisions about Christmas”

  2. SIR – You report that two leading medical journals have criticised the Government’s stance on Christmas.

    Readers should understand that the Health Service Journal is actually a magazine for NHS managers. The British Medical Journal, meanwhile, is partly a peer-reviewed publication, but in recent years has also published political comment. Most of this has been critical of government policy (no matter which party is in power), and both journals could be said to share the view that the NHS runs the country.

    Dr Robert Walker
    Workington, Cumbria

    1. That’s an interesting letter!
      If the NHS were anything except a sacred socialist cow, people would have long since got alarmed about its empire, and the implications for Britain.

  3. SIR – Sir Richard Dearlove’s bitterness at the success of John le Carré knows no bounds (report, December 15). Having once described the Smiley novels as having “some quality”, he now accuses Mr le Carré of tarnishing the reputation of MI6 with his books.

    Sir Richard, it should be remembered, was head of MI6 at the time of the invasion of Iraq, an escapade that owed part of its origin to the dossier based on so-called “intelligence”.

    His Honour David Ticehurst
    Winscombe, Somerset

  4. Why does Amnesty want to silence women like me? Spiked. 17 December 2020.

    We do not accept that males, regardless of how they identify, should have access to female toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards or refuges. This is not a conservative viewpoint. This is the fundamental basis on which we order society. Every civilisation across time and space has safeguarded people in the same way. It is necessary for bodily privacy, dignity and safety.

    Trans rights’ do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in direct conflict with women’s rights. We are calling for a grown-up conversation in our country regarding this clash of rights. Our support base is the silent majority who know that you cannot change sex, and that sex matters when it comes to single-sex provision and safeguarding.

    Morning everyone. Though this article is about Ireland its arguments are applicable to the UK. One is surprised that the author does not know that Amnesty like most autonomous pressure groups and public bodies has been captured by the left and now campaigns on their behalf. This said there is some considerable irony in listening to a feminist complaining about a process that they themselves used to manipulate the system. The appeal to traditional values is particularly sickening since feminism has largely destroyed what they are pleased to call the Patriarchal Society. This had led not to a golden land of equality and opportunity for all but a fractured society where all are against all and that finally only tyranny may rule!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/17/why-does-amnesty-want-to-silence-women-like-me/

    2. Pity she doesn’t take her argument to its logical conclusion, which is that not one single identity group’s rights exist in a vacuum. They ALL exist in direct conflict with the rights of another identity group.

      This is why you cannot base a logical and fair society on identity groups.

  5. Why does Amnesty want to silence women like me? Spiked. 17 December 2020.

    We do not accept that males, regardless of how they identify, should have access to female toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards or refuges. This is not a conservative viewpoint. This is the fundamental basis on which we order society. Every civilisation across time and space has safeguarded people in the same way. It is necessary for bodily privacy, dignity and safety.

    Trans rights’ do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in direct conflict with women’s rights. We are calling for a grown-up conversation in our country regarding this clash of rights. Our support base is the silent majority who know that you cannot change sex, and that sex matters when it comes to single-sex provision and safeguarding.

    Morning everyone. Though this article is about Ireland its arguments are applicable to the UK. One is surprised that the author does not know that Amnesty like most autonomous pressure groups and public bodies has been captured by the left and now campaigns on their behalf. This said there is some considerable irony in listening to a feminist complaining about a process that they themselves used to manipulate the system. The appeal to traditional values is particularly sickening since feminism has largely destroyed what they are pleased to call the Patriarchal Society. This had led not to a golden land of equality and opportunity for all but a fractured society where all are against all and that finally only tyranny may rule!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/17/why-does-amnesty-want-to-silence-women-like-me/

  8. Unlike Trump, Europe’s far-right leaders haven’t been damaged by the pandemic. 17 December 2020.

    By now it is almost received wisdom that “populists” (often used as a euphemism for “the far right”) have ignored the threat of Covid-19, that populists have been the electoral victims of the pandemic, and that the pandemic has exposed the political incompetence of populists in government.

    To get a handle on this meandering drivel it is only necessary to point out that the description “far right” (often used as a euphemism for normal) occur 25 times and populism 5 in a text of 789 words.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/trump-europe-far-right-pandemic-covid-19-us-president

  11. And now for Brexit:

    SIR – If the Prime Minister emerges with a Brexit deal (report, December 16), no amount of spin will disguise concessions on fishing, the so-called level playing field or the European Court of Justice.

    There should be a short transition period to allow our fishing industry to rebuild after the disaster of the common fisheries policy. However, any move towards a level playing field must be resisted, particularly if the ECJ were to police such an agreement.

    If taking back control is to mean anything, Britain must be free to make (and amend) its own laws, support industry and control its borders.

    R G Hopgood
    Kirby-le-Soken, Essex

    SIR – Talk of a level playing field has dominated the Brexit negotiations, yet the French government “lent” Renault €5 billion in June 2020 so that it could continue trading.

    Surely, this is just the sort of help that EU law forbids, and its principles are one of the main sticking points of a smooth Brexit.

    Simon Scrutton
    Lesterps, Charente, France

    SIR – You report (December 16) that a trade deal could be agreed by the end of this week, and that MPs have been asked to vote on it on Monday.

    As this deal is said to run to 600 pages, it could not possibly be properly scrutinised by then. If my MP voted for it, I would demand his resignation.

    Sandy Pratt
    Storrington, West Sussex

    Good to see Sandy Pratt again. Sandy Balls will be along shortly…

    1. Oh, for Heaven’s Sake, Mr Scrutton!
      Renault is a French company, not a British one.
      French! Get it? EU governments and businesses are not required to follow EU laws. Hence huge subsidies to all EU shipyards…etc

      1. Rules, as the saying goes, are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of the wise.

        The British have always been regarded as fools by those in the EU and their judgement will be proved completely correct if Boris Johnson capitulates.

    2. Ken Clarke famously said he signed the Maastricht treaty without having read it. Idiot, it didn’t take all that much reading – hell, even I had a copy & read it, and that was in the days of paper and postage stamps.

  12. The Eton Mess rumbles on:

    SIR – Now that the dismissal of the Eton master Will Knowland (report, December 15) has been confirmed, there are questions to be answered.

    It is suggested the legal opinion was that his lecture, The Patriarchy Paradox, breached the Equality Act 2010. Was this opinion shown to Mr Knowland, and was he given the opportunity to delete or amend the allegedly unlawful passages? Will Eton College now publish this opinion, so we may be sure that the dismissal was not an attack on free speech?

    Robert Ashton
    Shrewsbury

    We shall find out in the fullness of time, Robert Ashton, when Mr Knowland puts his £60,000 fighting fund to good use.

    1. BTL Comment

      Robert Spowart
      17 Dec 2020 9:03AM
      Regarding Robert Ashton’s letter, If the legal opinion given to Eton College was that Will Knowland’s video lecture breached the 2010 Equality Act, then surely that is a firm indication that the act is unfit for purpose and needs to be repealed?

  13. Good morning from an Anglo Saxon Queen with longbow fully stretched and arrows sharpened and blooded axe in handbag.

    A cloudy morning but not too chilly. I’m not really a Christmas person, much preferring Easter anyway .

  14. I don’t think many people take notice of personal responsibility and will do as they like regardless of the consequences of which probably others might suffer ( but not them )
    sods law.

    1. 327510+ up ticks,
      Morning A,
      Within reason I cannot find blame, with no symptoms
      it means the whole indigenous race according to
      digit dick will wither & die incarcerated whilst the political overseers complete their replacement campaign, opening up lots more Dover’s.

  15. ‘Morning, all.

    If the disgracefully flawed US Presidential Election results are upheld and China’s “Manchurian Candidate” settles his sorry arse behind the desk in the Oval Office, I’m wondering if SInn Féinn – having become joint-largest party in the Dáil Éireann in 2020 – might decide the time for a final push for Irish Unity has come.

    Imagine if a low-key terrorist campaign were to start-up – nothing so bloody as the Omagh massacre which brought international condemnation – then they’d soon have Paddy O’Biden shilling for them, together with his éminence grise, Brit-hating Baroque O’Banana and the baying “Plastic Paddy” lobby – you know, the sort that dye American waterways green and sing dirges like “Kevin Barry” while crying victims’ tears into their green beer on St Patrick’s Day.

    Should this happen, the UK might find itself under enormous political and economic pressure, from both the US and Europe, to yield to calls to cede Northern Ireland to the Republic. “Operation Banner” – the longest continuous deployment in British military history – will have been a waste of time and all our losses will have been for nothing. What irks me most is that we had those terrorist bastards beaten on the ground which is why they were forced to the negotiating table. Then, having got them there, Bliar gave everything away. Now it looks very much like that spineless, blustering fool Johnson is going to fold and is ready to throw Northern Ireland to the wolves.

    Won’t happen? Well maybe not, but I’m sure the possibility is being considered by the leadership of Sinn Féinn/PIRA.

  16. Not exactly yer average dentist!

    Surgeon Rear Admiral Frank Mathias, director of Naval Dental Services – obituary

    In 1963, from dental records, he helped identify the victims of a catastrophic fire on the Greek cruise ship Lakonia off Morocco

    By
    Telegraph Obituaries
    16 December 2020 • 5:28pm

    Surgeon Rear Admiral (Dentist) Frank Mathias, who has died aged 92, came from a Welsh village to become the Director of Naval Dental Services.

    After two years at Sussex County Hospital, Brighton (1952–53), Mathias was called up for National Service, but soon decided to make the Navy his full career, since there was a variety of challenging appointments available that a civilian dentist would never experience.

    In 1954-55 for instance, while Mathias was serving in Hong Kong, he volunteered to take dental aid to the New Territories, which were considerably more backward than they are today. Dental surgery, mainly emergency extractions, in outlying villages meant working in the open, in temples, and sometimes in schoolrooms.

    At midday on December 23 1963, Mathias was aboard the carrier Centaur when news came that the Greek cruise ship Lakonia had caught fire off Morocco.

    When, after 12 hours steaming at 27 knots, Centaur arrived at the disaster, some 14 ships were involved in search and rescue, and the British cargo ship Montcalm and the Argentine passenger ship Salta had taken on board some 900 survivors.

    An engineering team from Centaur was winched on to Lakonia’s burning hulk but concluded there were no more survivors.

    After numerous corpses were recovered from the sea, Mathias and Centaur’s doctors catalogued the deceased and their effects. Among the mostly elderly passengers were some young children, many in pyjamas.

    Mathias set to work to make a full dental chart of each body, which enabled 39 victims to be identified then, and a further 16 later. The corpses were landed at Gibraltar on Christmas Day.

    On the same deployment, in 1964 Mathias assisted at operations on casualties of the Tanganyika mutiny. Later Centaur also participated in the Radfan crisis and the Indonesian conflict.

    Once, as Command Dental Surgeon (CDS) to the Flag Officer Naval Air Command (1974-76), he arrived by air for a routine visit to RNAS Yeovilton, to be met by a reception committee and a guard of honour after his title had been mistaken for Chief of Defence Staff.

    Frank Russell Bentley Mathias was the youngest of nine children born to a family solicitor in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, on December 27 1927; as a child he remembered pheasants and rabbits being left on the doorstep by poachers whom his father had defended. He was educated at Narberth Grammar School, from where he won a place at Guy’s Hospital.

    Before he joined Centaur, Mathias also qualified in anaesthetics so that he could assist at operations, but at one of his first operations he was alarmed to see the surgeon put down his instruments and stand in the corner of the operating theatre with his head bowed, with the result that the patient’s condition began to deteriorate.

    Informed that the surgeon was praying, Mathias told him in direct language to get back to the operating table and suggested he do his praying after the patient had been saved.

    Mathias was the first naval dentist to be made an Officer Brother of the Order of St John of Jerusalem (1981) and was the Queen’s Honorary Dental Surgeon (1982–85). He was intending to attend a dinner earlier this year to celebrate the centenary of the Royal Navy dental branch but the event was postponed due to the pandemic.

    Mathias, who retained his Welsh lilt, was always great company. He had a quick wit, sharp mind, and often a full glass, and every meeting with him was spontaneous and warm, spiced up with his fascinating reminiscences, astute and often cynical observations and sage advice.

    Mathias married Joy Daniels in 1954. She died in 2018 and he is survived by a daughter, and a son who became a submariner and a rear-admiral in the Navy.

    Surg RAdm (D) Frank Mathias, born December 27 1927, died November 18 2020 (The correct abbreviation is ‘Rear Adm’, DT.)

    1. The praying story reminds me of the experiences of a nurse with whom I worked.
      She had spent several years nursing in Morocco. During Ramadan, the nurses would just abandon their patients at sundown, regardless of what they were doing or the patient’s condition.

  17. Hungary writes ‘the mother is a woman, the father is a man’ into its constitution as it bans gay couples from adopting children. 17 December 2020.

    Hungary has written ‘the mother is a woman, the father is a man’ into its constitution as the country brings in a ban on gay couples adopting children.
    The country’s MPs approved new measures targeting the country’s beleaguered LGBTQ community yesterday.

    Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government explained the change by saying ‘new ideological processes in the West’ made it necessary to ‘protect children against possible ideological or biological interference’.

    Well that explains all the propaganda against Orban and the EU’s political machinations against Hungary!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9059211/Hungary-writes-mother-woman-father-man-constitution.html

    1. Araminta morning. Was distracted here as nearby neighbour was taking his goats for a walk on what passes for the footpath [ie; edge of murram road], as you do.

      Viz Orban, he’d also had the benefit of practising Johnny Wilkinson kicking as he booted out Soros, all his entities and associates. Neolib globalists don’t like Orban, especially when he outright banned any illegal migrants at inception. No surprise the Daily Snail’s back into its virtual signalling mode again. Orban’s controlling the Visegrad bloc well, the EU don’t like it, but can’t break his hold and he’ll block any neoliberal attempts

      1. Morning, AWK.
        A pity the language is so impenetrable, otherwise it could be good to move to Hungary.
        They also have some spectacularly good-looking lasses, too.

        1. Obl morning, the solid language rule starts with a beer, breaks all the issue of non communication. What’s easy to see, for all the diatribe the EU, UU, US throw “democracy, and all other neolib mantra”, it’s really only the Eastern nations that follow the deomcratic path whereas “Western Nations” [or rather failed capitalis oligarch controlled nations[ are heading, Usain Bolt speed, the other way.

          1. Eastern countries have only recently become free of Communist dictatorships, so freedom is at the front of their minds. The West have been free for so long that they don’t remember what itr’s like to be not free – and with the poverty that goes with it, too.
            I feel a hard lesson coming on.

          2. agree totally that the hard lesson’s on the doorstep. Am sure the people themselves can read the “tea leaves”, as usual the politicos and MSM ingore it thinking it’ll pass over. They’re in for a very rude awakening. The “Western” apparatus has been trialled here, and Kenyans were very quick off the mark squashing initiatives fast

          3. 327510+ up ticks,
            O,
            The “hard lessons” started with major
            onward’s but the three monkeys active in the polling booth denied lessons being learnt.

    2. 327510+ up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      Total agreement, wonder if Hungary is in the market for adopting a Nation ?
      Viktor the victorious.

        1. 327510+ up ticks,
          AS,
          Would be tempting but only a short term answer
          as eventually the same setup will follow.

          Worldwide peoples wanted what we HAD as a nation pre eu & the polling booth obligingly gave
          them it.

          Another planet is sorely needed for current
          lab/lib/con followers / members / voters to inhabit & screw up leaving decent peoples to
          salvage what they can from this one.

    1. 327510 + up ticks,
      Morning A,
      Done, with the proviso life means life & covers multi trades / careers.

        1. #MeToo, Hugh, as is obvious from previous postings of mine, where I think rape should be included.

          1. That’s another issue, which is also valid, but we don’t want to risk diluting things by mission-creep.

    3. The great miscarriage of justice was the result of the odious crime being classified as manslaughter rather than the murder it was.

        1. It’s the straggly beard which makes the face mask a farce. He’d be thrown out of an OP theatre.

        1. Do the “European Art” test – search the images thrown up by each phrase on G and DDG.
          If you must use G, at least use one of the websites that does an anonymous G search for you – StartPage is the name of one such site iirc.

        2. Hugh I also use DuckDuckgo, less tracking and less arrangement of specifically itemised links that Google decide, in order to make from their advert / tracking stream. Add in a VPN, and I’ve found it a better platform. DB3 am sure will have his reasons too

          1. I am finding with Google, Yahoo and Facebook products, I am plagued with these damned popups demanding that I agree with their cookie policies. Popup blockers don’t work with them.

        3. With Google, it’ll be page 103 before you reach any site which is not excoriating Trump and his “baseless” claims of election fraud.

  22. China’s plans for huge embassy on site of former Royal Mint opposite Tower of London.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9060503/Chinese-embassy-plans-London-unearth-bodies-thousands-Black-Death-victims.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field

    Why do the Chinese need such a huge embassy here in Britain? They are communists with a big C and their record on terrible punishments is the stuff of nightmares. Strange really that although Britain will be welcoming thousands of people from Hong Kong, the Embassy plans are very sinister and will probably spy on the new arrivals, and how many Communist Chinese will that embassy accommodate.. quite a few thousand I suspect. Our own security will be threatened because they will KNOW everything that is going on in the UK.

    2. 327510+ up ticks,
      Morning TB,
      Is that so, well we will have to see what
      hassan ava banana ( muslim brotherhood) says about that.

    4. China was just a horse and cart economy when my father joined the Mint in 1946, following his release as a POW and demob. He would be mightily hacked off by this news.

      Manners – ‘Morning Belle.

      1. Especially, Hugh, since its move to Llantrisant in S Wales, now known as, “The hole with a mint in it.”

        1. My father flatly refused to entertain a move to Wales, and accepted a transfer to HM Customs, along with a promotion. Intead of commuting to London by train, with all the chaos and disruption on a clapped out diesel service for some 30 years, he could drive to work in half an hour. He was as happy as Larry.

      2. Morning Hugh

        No one has questioned why they require such a huge embassy on this small island . It looks enormous .. shockingly so !

        “U.S. intelligence officials imply that Huawei, ZTE devices aren’t safe for consumers, but don’t explain why. So we asked some experts. … More than a year later, Huawei has effectively been banned from the U.S. market, and U.S. companies will soon not be able to do business with Huawei.

        Huawei has faced allegations, primarily from the United States and its allies, that its wireless networking equipment could contain backdoors enabling surveillance by the Chinese government. … Huawei exited the U.S. market due to these concerns, which had also made U.S. wireless carriers reluctant to sell its products.”

    6. 327510+ up ticks,
      TB,
      On reflection they do need the embassy in close proximity to parliament as in an advisory capacity ie
      people suppression ” that’s the way to do it “

      1. The Royal Mint moved from the Tower of London to new premises on Tower Hill designed in the neo-classical style by Sir Robert Smirke. The first coins were struck there in 1810. The Mint moved to South Wales in 1968

        The Chinese government bought the Royal Mint site for £250million in 2018, surely to goodness that is a listed historical building .

        What else of historical heritage has been sold to the Chinese .. agricultural land, our forests , our towns , utility companies .. we need to know these things .

        Are they financing the HS2 project and Sizewell?

        1. 1968 was the year they introduced New Money, starting with the 5p and 10p coins. The old pre-1968 penny (1d) had about the same spending power as 20p today.

      2. There’s a goodly reservoir of Black Death buried under the Royal Mint building. I am sure some military lab could make use of it. No.666 from your local takeaway after the pubs shut.

    8. It is somewhat similar to the way that Britain had, and in many cases still has, the most impressive embassies from the days when we were a genuine world power.

  23. DT Story: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/five-honour-crimes-committed-every-day-dozens-women-raped-shaming/

    Five honour crimes committed every day and dozens of women raped for ‘shaming’ their families
    Police have released data for the first time showing the extent of honour-based crimes, including threats to kill and kidnap

    Of course nowhere is it mentioned in the article in which ‘communities’ these crimes are being committed. However the political establishment is all in favour of encouraging this sort of thing by not stopping the illegal hordes of migrants coming into Britain and swelling the ranks of people in these communities.

    1. I, like most Britons of my generation, was brought up believing that the rapist was the one who was shamed and dishonorable, not the unfortunate victim. This community has brought a wholly different set of values to our country.

      1. I wonder if the police and authorities have turned a blind eye to that too as well as the grooming gangs

    2. Soon to be followed by a lengthy report with extremely vague statistical evidence (sic) that concludes most honour crimes are committed by white British people.

    1. Anything to hand was used to beat Trump but human life is cheap to his opponents and worth the price if it can be used to damage him.

      If the election result truly was fraudulent and corrupt and this is proved beyond all reasonable doubt then will mass civil disobedience or even civil war be the result?

  27. Congratulations to one of our occasional NoTTLer friends for having one of her excellent letters published in the DT this morning.

  28. I posted this just now on ‘The Spectator’, in response to some news I picked up in my local paper this morning:

    “The only way we can tackle China’s dominance over productive capacity is to reverse policies since Thatcher of transferring our own productive capacity from the UK to China under Thatcher’s dogmatic policy of global free trade under a croney-led “free” market of casino economists. This policy was perpetuated by Blair, under guidance of Mandelson, and nobody else has had the political courage to provide any alternative.

    Key to this is that we must learn to make things again. This cannot be done in our schools and universities, but in our further education colleges. It will take too long to train children up, and by the time they qualify, the opportunity would be lost, and production taken by others, not least competitors in the EU, especially Visegrad countries. Already Polish builders are better than British builders. The universities are so preoccupied with political indoctrination that they simply do not have the ability to provide vocational training.

    Every town should have its further education college, which provides a full spread of training in those skills upon which we build up all that is needed to provide for our future needs. Not just hairdressing and basket weaving. And not just IT and design skills either. It is making things, engineering, metal bashing, welding, catering, growing food and building. It is also learning the things essential for our well-being, so cruelly lost to the virus. Top of the list is music. No army since the time of Jericho has ever marched to victory without being led by its musicians. It is a shortcut to providing the joy and mental strength to get everything else done.

    So what are our politicians doing? The F.E. colleges have been run down since the time of Thatcher. Since the lockdown, they have ceased to be viable. My own local F.E. college in Malvern, established by the Victorians, is due to be closed in May and its site become yet another retirement home under Jenrick’s deregulated Build! Build! Build! scheme.

    I have mentioned before Tom Wells, the musical director of a choir I sing with, who is also a prominent local politician and stood for parliament in 2005 as a Liberal Democrat. He resigned from the party earlier this year in order to stay in Coalition with the Independents and Greens running Malvern Hills District Council. With the 2019 Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, who also resigned from the party for the same reason, they are attempting a rescue package to buy out the venture capitalists who bought up the county’s colleges with a view to asset-strip the sites, and rescue the college to re-open as soon as virus control permits. The price is way beyond what the district council can afford, after they were deprived of central grant by Whitehall in order to keep Income Tax down for wealthy oligarchs, bonus bankers, footballers and broadcasters in London. The council will probably have to crowd-fund it from a population already weighed down by debt, both personal and public.

    Surely we can do better for those who are at least endeavouring to be good public servants.”

    1. Why did this happen? Why should it change? Would the average young person prefer a degree in “Media Studies” or an apprenticeship as an electrician?
      I am, of course being a Devil’s Advocate here. I wrote to the Scotsman about the need for vocational courses, including examples of jobs, such as bus conductor. This was some time ago.

      1. The rather below-average person may well go for Meeja studies. I have personal experience of some. Those people are tremendously full of themselves, paste on a smile whatever the situation, and lack any real intelligence. However, they are crafty, which I guess passes for intelligence in their circles.

      2. BAE is about to take on over 1000 apprentices spread throughout the country (100 in Scotland). They will be building, effectively, tanks as it’s their land-based sector that is doing it.

    1. Quite. Does it actually have any symptoms that are not already known to be associated with existing diseases? When I first read about it being transmitted via droplets etc, I looked that up and got NHS blurb on tuberculosis.

        1. Then there will be the work from home supplement so that he can buy necessary office supplies to equip a home office.

          I his case benefits will probably include a couple of mature nurses as carers.

  30. Perfect……..
    https://twitter.com/browntoby/status/1339490644264415234?s=20
    Two for Toby
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f0cb86dcafac1d06b6fa746a2192f4fa58342508c3bf5f8db92f4b10af0341a4.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3eebf670aaa10cdf270894e289d5219b29f7d8ac35ca6abd3ab2bdb0f1957944.jpg
    Just clear the decks……..
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e5401411772cc2cb5e80e2bd9fa13a99b5665a1947b9efaede70db56905c4b75.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e1b3c29ebcb578513e2087843a5ec88c1e6813f6f37bbb602c1177522d110e1c.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f52d1b2edf821ad01445db4d574975d84a61e018b2fd7db9f7b9d1ba4c61856f.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/834e5fd2ec3ed962f9d862f549094887092d049e0b9b4e51b2699b3e917d8d91.jpg

    1. Ah, but Boris is assuming that the state will pay for these jobs. Well, he’s not, but that’s where the cash will come from.

    1. It depends on what they are trying to prove. As with statistics you can make the proof or lack of it say anything you want.

      1. See my post earlier today with an article in the DT about rape and honour killing and FGM but somehow the article failed to mention the ‘communities’ in which these crimes were committed. I wonder why.

    3. 327510+ up ticks,
      TB,
      The sunk feeling is when the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration / active paedophile activities
      umbrella coalition party is covered up by governance
      party’s employees, members,voters, using the three monkey mode of voting, using ” taint my kid it’s happening other side of town” or “who else is there to vote for” even “grip your nasal passages” is a beaut.
      It is in reality another extension, in mentally scarring kids for life.

      1. “…or “who else is there to vote for”…”

        Had there been a credible centre-right party to vote for Boris wouldn’t be PM. Cheers your former hero Nige.

    4. It’s tedious, isn’t it? When you read the report it’s almost as if those compiling it were either obtuse, incompetent or so comfortable denying the truth that they’re in a parallel universe.

      Looking at the truth diminishes the problem or worse, pretends there isn’t one. That insults the children these Pakistani Muslims repeatedly raped. It permits and endorses the state’s utter failure to respond to the rape of children by Pakistani Muslims – when the police did nothing, the council did nothing and the social services did nothing about the rape of children by Muslims.

      However the state wants to deny the problem. That lets off the hook all those officials who failed to do anything about the rape of children by Pakistani muslims.

      Has the truth been said enough yet?

  33. Good morrow Gentlefolk. Let’s start with a story:

    Bob & The Blonde

    Bob, a handsome dude, walked into a sports bar around 9:58 pm. He sat down next to a blonde at the bar and stared up at the TV.

    The 10 pm news was coming on. The news crew was covering the story of a man on the ledge of a large building preparing to jump.

    The blonde looked at Bob and said, “Do you think he’ll jump?”

    Bob said, “You know, I bet he’ll jump.”

    The blonde replied, “Well, I bet he won’t.”

    Bob placed a £20 note on the bar and said, “You’re on!”

    Just as the blonde placed her money on the bar, the guy on the ledge did a swan dive off the building, falling to his death.

    The blonde was very upset, but willingly handed her £20 to Bob, saying, “Fair’s fair. Here’s your money.”

    Bob replied, “I can’t take your money. I saw this earlier on the 5 pm news, and so I knew he would jump.”

    The blonde replied, “I did too, but didn’t think he’d do it again.”

    Bob took the money

      1. This will just confirm to many people, the dangerous ‘they’ must be making this up.
        What his means now is people who have been booked in somewhere to be vaccinated, now can’t go to be vaccinated.

        1. Well i’m just about to take my black Lab for a walk in the rather muddy woods and fields. In the sunshine.
          I hope i don’t catch anything on the breeze.

          1. Sun is now shining , Moh still playing golf , and I might visit a farm shop with my older spaniel , and give him a short run at the same time .

            Younger 7 year old dog has had a fantastic gallop with son on the heath near us .

    2. East Sussex is being treated unfairly.

      Brighton has a very high incidence of Covid (no, I can’t imagine why)

      but the rest of East Sussex is being careful and cautious.

    3. Bet it doesn’t include stopping anyone arriving in a rubber dinghy and instantly sending them back to where they came from.

    4. The Home Counties? “Matt Hancock told MPs: “We’ve come so far, we mustn’t blow it now” basically means, “We haven’t yet completely trashed the capitalist infrastructure”. Got to keep trying and try harder.

      1. Sue, Hancock is a slime-ball of the first order and a convert to the WEF’s agenda. Johnson, as acknowledged by many, is weak and vacillating and at times looks really ragged. They’ve dug themselves into a hole and it’s probably fear of the consequences if the WEF’s agenda fails that is keeping them on track.

        1. You could tell Boris was being lead by the nose when the Tory party theme for their conference this year was Build Back Better, taken right out of the WEF playbook, and endorsed by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in the US. Hancock seems to be very chummy with Klaus from his days as Digital Minister.

  35. Reading the newspapers I get the impression that the vast majority of people who write BTL comments under articles are strongly of the opinion that Boris Johnson will cave in on so much that BREXIT will be betrayed and we shall be lumbered with no more than a ‘brilliant, oven-ready BRINO.’

    Does Johnson know this? Does he know that he is thought to be weak and irresolute and not strong in any way?

    Does he care?

    Is he happy to become politically extinct and held in total contempt taking Conservative Party down with him.

    Few former Conservative leaders, except Margaret Thatcher, were still followed faithfully after their fall by a band of loyal friends? Indeed there was great support for Mrs Thatcher after she was betrayed and dumped but have any of following retained any support at all since their fall – indeed who mourns the departure of May, Cameron, Duncan Smith, Howard, Hague or Major?

    On the other hand, if he stands firm and delivers a proud No Deal Brexit Boris Johnson could well be rated as a hero and might even win another general election.

    1. Rastus, the only thing that concerns Johnson and his party is polling figures.
      When the electoral commission stops playing silly buggers and OK’s the name change from the Brexit to the Reform UK party perhaps other options will become available to us. Of course they have had 6 weeks, the legal limit I believe but of course rules only apply to the plebs.

      1. 327510+ up ticks,
        Afternoon VVOF,
        Why does the Zatopek of this political circus
        want to change the name of the group, is there something to hide ?

    2. Richard, the majority of people almost certainly do not support a No Deal Brexit. the result was 52/48 and there were plenty within the 52% who can be described as ‘soft leavers’ who’d have gone along with ETFA membership or some at least a FTA, so I really don’t see how you can make the leap to assuming No Deal would lead to a GE win for Boris.

      1. Surely it depends on the consequences of a NDB. Many are trying to predict them, but nobody can be certain what they will be.

      2. You are at it again. The result was the result and you lost. Take it like a man not a spoilt child.

          2. Oh dear. Abuse. Not nice Johnny. Please grow up and recognise that not all Leaver voters have the same view of how we should leave.

      3. Many people who voted remain are as fed up as leavers and now wish we were out. Your percentages have no basis in reality. Try again.

    3. 327510 + up ticks,
      Afternoon R,
      Tell me, there seems to be a great deal of lack of trust & confidence in this
      johnson chap and the group he is leading was there no gauge could be used regarding their past pedigree, both person & party ?

      Are they the right types to be handling such a lifestyle making / breaking
      issue, why are these Isles in some form of limbo in regards to trust in both person & party at this late stage ?

      Could party before Country regardless of consequence as in mass murder, mass paedophile rape & abuse, mass orchestrated uncontrolled immigration, mass every odious issue. glaringly missing mass decency
      mass common sense & mass self respect, be
      the cause ?

  36. ‘Morning, Peeps. A fine sunny day in prospect. Meanwhile, here are some Covid letters to be going on with:

    SIR – Despite all the criticism of the temporary lifting of social restrictions for Christmas, I am pleased with the Government’s approach (report, December 16).

    At last, I am free to choose what action to take. Based on all the information available, I will not be overtly socialising, and will be spending a quiet Christmas at home.

    I hope that the Government continues to allow individuals to take responsibility for their own wellbeing, instead of attempting to micromanage our lives.

    Alan Belk
    Leatherhead, Surrey

    SIR – Your Leading Article (December 16) is absolutely right.

    Trust in people’s common sense. The vast majority will do what is right. The usual suspects will be irresponsible regardless.

    John Taylor
    Purley, Surrey

    SIR – They break the rules; you bend the rules; I have a very good reason for what I am doing.

    Kate Wylie Carrick
    Ilminster, Somerset

    SIR – I am irritated by the complaints that certain rules risk “cancelling Christmas”. It is not possible to cancel a date in the calendar.

    Alan Finlay
    London NW4

    SIR – Perhaps Covid-19 has given us an opportunity. It is not a question of “cancelling” the festive season, but of rethinking the meaning of Christmas.

    Once upon a time it was a religious holiday. Families would go to Mass, then gather around the table as children unwrapped their presents left by Father Christmas. This concept gradually changed as we all became consumers, encouraged to spend, spend, spend on gifts that would be forgotten, and at restaurants that doubled or tripled their prices.

    In recent years we have seen panic-buying, overcrowded streets, bars, stores, stations and airports, and massive traffic hold-ups as everyone took to the roads at the same time.

    I understand that much of this is good for the economy, which has been affected by the pandemic. But this year we have a chance to avoid the stress. Most of us should be happy to remain at home with family over a special lunch or dinner.

    Peter Fieldman
    Madrid, Spain

    I suspect that I am not alone in being “irritated” by Alan Finley’s letter. He should be “cancelled” immediately!

    2. aftn Hugh, he’s irritated he can’t sell his stock of The Big Issue in Hendon which leads to his “deadline date in the calendar” in not meeting his sales quota. Or he’s quitely upset he can’t meet his mate [Peter Fieldman letter “in Madrid”]

  37. Gordon Bennett, was the Letters Editor short of material yesterday? Words fail…

    SIR – I don’t see how the problem of pronouncing Powell (Letters, December 16) is solved by rhyming it with Noel. Is that as in Noel Edmunds, or as in “The First Noel”?

    Rita Coppillie
    Liskeard, Cornwall

  39. I don’t ‘celebrate’ Pru Leith either, Vicki Hooton, but presumably someone at her GP surgery does otherwise they would not have tipped off the press:

    SIR – I was surprised to see Prue Leith, 80 this year, receiving a coronavirus jab so soon (report, December 16).

    I have friends and relatives in their 90s waiting to hear from their surgeries, not to mention nursing staff at our local hospital. Is Miss Leith simply benefiting from her celebrity status?

    Vicki Hooton
    Camberley, Surrey

    SIR – Here in Scotland, we over 80s are going to have to wait until February for our vaccinations. I asked my GP when we would be getting them at the surgery, and he said that he watched the BBC, same as the rest of us.

    Jacqueline McCrindle
    Prestwick, Ayrshire

  40. Hunter Biden in 2017 sent ‘best wishes’ from ‘entire Biden family’ to China firm chairman, requested $10M wire. Fox News. 16 December 2020.

    Correspondence between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming from 2017 shows President-elect Joe Biden’s son extending “best wishes from the entire Biden family,” and urging the chairman to “quickly” send a $10 million wire to “properly fund and operate” the Biden joint venture with the now-bankrupt Chinese energy company.

    Worth a read since you are not going to see it on the BBC! They’ve exchanged a fictional villainous Trump for the dreadful reality of the Biden Presidency who read like an Imperial Family from Suetonious’ The Twelve Caesars!

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-letter-chinese-cefc-chairman-wire-request

  42. Good to see that the DT Leader writer has cobbled something together in good time today:

    Personal responsibility should be for life, not just for Christmas

    The Government is right to trust people to make their own judgments about Christmas week. Unfortunately it is unlikely to last

    TELEGRAPH VIEW
    17 December 2020 • 6:00am

    Christmas has been reprieved, provided it is small, short and local. After talks among the leaders of the UK’s four constituent parts the relaxed Covid rules already agreed for the festive period remain in place though with distinctly frosty caveats. Boris Johnson said cancelling Christmas would be inhuman and the Government did not want to criminalise long-made plans.

    But he urged people to exercise a “high degree of personal responsibility”. In particular, contacts between young family members and their elderly relatives needed to be “sensible and cautious”. The advice in England that three households can meet over five days was intended to be a maximum not a target, Mr Johnson said. In Scotland only two households will be allowed to mix over a shorter period. In Wales a complete lockdown will follow the festive season piling more misery on the principality.

    Relying on people to make their own decisions is a rational approach and one that helps puncture some of the hysteria around this matter. Indeed, throughout the pandemic, we have argued that people should be given greater latitude to make judgments in their own, and the country’s, interests. While it is true that a minority behave recklessly the great majority do not and public policy should be tailored towards the latter not the former.

    A bewildering array of rules, regulations, controls and laws has treated the adult population like infants for 10 months. Now, for a brief period, the Government is prepared to rely on good sense rather than a legal heavy hand, rightly facing down the demands for a Yuletide lockdown. But it won’t last, alas. In our view personal responsibility should be for life, not just for Christmas.

    * * * *

    Unfortunately personal responsibility has slowly but surely been bred out of our way of life…

    1. In our view personal responsibility should be for life, not just for Christmas.

      This used to be the unwritten motto of the Conservative Party. No more alas!

    2. …and here is the leading BTL comment. He sounds a little miffed:

      Jim Easton
      17 Dec 2020 7:26AM
      I have climbed big mountains in winter, sailed in heavy weather conditions, trained in a gym until I could not stand, played several sports at a high level. Served in the military. And, now in my 71 year the Government has decided what I will do, and not do, in my own home with my family.

      They closed my church, my wonderful local pub, and caused serious damage to the economy that seemed unthinkable, my very old neighbours have been mentally distressed by their actions. Unacceptable. I will never vote Conservative again, Reform UK stand up please. Time for a major clean out.

      Oh. And happy Christmas to everyone. May peace and joy fill your home and life. I will skip a new year salutation as they will probably cancel 2021.

      1. Good man, that Jim Easton.
        He doesn’t mention the collaborators, though. The press, the CofE hierarchy, the Welsh & Scottish governments, all competing to be holier-than-thou on the new Covid religion of fear & trembling.

        1. We’re being treated to lunch next week by a couple of friends.
          Originally, it was to be in their home, now it’s at a restaurant in Suffolk.
          He is so compliant with all this carp that, to be honest, I’m dreading it.

    1. 327510+ up ticks,
      Morning KtK,
      The real undisputed virus on the loose countrywide is
      orchestrated treacherous political insanity.

  44. The ‘new’ revisions to the COVID tiers is even more of a joke than the previous revisions, given my district council in Hertfordshire has been ‘upgraded’ from tier 2 to 3 (as all Herts), except that it’s infection rate is BELOW the criteria for tier 3 and is the same as South Northamptonshire, which is still in tier 2. What’s the betting that Herts county council has ASKED to go into tier 3 so they (not businesses) can now get more government (our) cash?

    What a joke.

    1. Take no notice of them. People are driving out of the Stalag 3s into next door Stalag 2s to go out and eat and drink. The whole thing is mental.

  46. Normally I never drink during the day but as it’s so nice out I made the effort to go to ‘Spoons for lunch
    Decent burger,three pints of Doombar,Tim’s newsmag slagging off the lockdown,hisses all round the bar as Mancock appears on Sky………
    A good day so far,now time for a nap,I may be some time…………

    1. This looks like a group of your associates when you go to the Pleudihen Presbytery to organise the music you will be playing at the next Sunday mass!

  48. Back from the Market. Lovely sunny morning. Market very busy. Got everything done by 9.30. VERY satisfying!

    3. 1990 Mid-Staffs by-election Tories had a 14,500 majority, Labour won the seat. Eastbourne had a 16,500 majority, Lib-Dems/IRA won the seat.10,500 majority is nowt, if ex-Tory voters are angry enough.

      EDIT. Adding detail.

    4. Perhaps it’s an omen for Sturgeon that he’ll backstab her?
      Ideally sooner that H did for Thatcher

  50. A little 8 year old girl called Tilly goes missing from Bristol .
    A female neighbour plus a man totally unknown to the little girls family
    pick up the little girl from her home, supposedly to take her to McDonald’s and they
    don’t return . Tell me, who would allow a strange man to enter the home and leave the home with their daughter, regardless of a neighbour being present for this McDonald’s trip, it all is very weird l

    1. The attraction of the poison apple , why do parents stuff their children full of junk food , and allow them to regard that sort of muck as a routine treat?

      The mother probably wanted the child out of the way to satisfy her own selfish requirements.

      2. An occasional visit to McD will not poison you. Eating there every day for every meal would, apart from being dull, be bad for you (as seen on TV), but a few visits ain’t going to harm anyone.

        1. I know, but modern children do not know how to weild a knife and fork properly, neither do their parents ..

          Many of them only know what a knife is for … stabby stabby, but the majority of them are brought up on finger food, imagine the riots if KFC and the rest closed down through lack of chicken!

      1. that was my first thought and was going to post until I saw you beat me to it. they’ll claim some obscure family lineage to Citizen Smith for sure

    3. She has been found.
      I’m not one for generalisations, but her name (Tiolah) may be a guide to the family’s social milieu.

  51. Rod Liddle
    This has been the year of epic derangement
    From magazine issue: 19 December 2020

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/blt083da6f84dbab361/5fd9d47eb08361084bff8bfb/Rod-Liddle-Getty.jpg?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

    I wonder if British universities will follow Cornell’s innovative approach to ensuring students are protected from wretched viruses? The American institution has received plaudits for its rigorous regime. Students who refuse to have the flu vaccine will be barred from the Cornell libraries and other campus buildings — or, at least, they will if they are white. ‘Students of colour’ can decline to receive the vaccine. Why?

    Cornell explains: ‘Students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a Person of Color (BIPOC) may have personal concerns about fulfilling the Compact requirements based on historical injustices and current events.’ The university authorities give a little more detail about what those concerns might be: ‘Recent acts of violence against Black people by law enforcement may contribute to feelings of distrust or powerlessness.’ So, white kids must be tested and vaccinated or face being kicked out, while black students are invited to register their preference for exemption, largely on the grounds that George Floyd was killed by a policemen in a state 1,000 miles away.

    I offer up this little vignette as almost the perfect postscript to 2020, the Year of Epic Derangement, seeing as it brings together the cringing, self-flagellating lunacy of white liberals when faced with people who have a different skin colour, and this virus of ours, under whose suffocating shroud so many other lunacies have been allowed to flourish. I think if I were a black student at Cornell who contracted flu from another black student who had filed for exemption, I would sue the college on the grounds of a failure of duty of care and, indeed, unadorned racism.

    That’s the alternative hypothesis, I suppose — that the college is actually run by the Klan and they want as many black people to die as possible. It is difficult not to feel an enormous sympathy for the US’s black population, as this sort of stuff ratchets up the loathing among genuine white supremacists and meanwhile they are treated as needy infants by the liberal left. One day black Americans will shrug off the yoke of victimhood imposed upon them for reasons of political expediency by the Democrats. This is already beginning to happen, in fact, much as it is with Hispanic voters.

    The Epic Derangement of which I speak coincided almost precisely with the (assumed) advent in our countries of Covid and thus, a little later, lockdown. It was also facilitated by the virus — by the almost absolute absence for ten months of the voice of the ordinary, sane and rational human being. No more clearly was this seen than in professional football. The knee-bending in support of a genuinely odious organisation, Black Lives Matter, was encouraged from the top down by the virtue–signalling idiots in the Football Association, the Premier League and the English Football League.

    It would have lasted precisely one week if fans had been allowed into the grounds — or not have been introduced at all. But when the public is absent, corporate wokeism faces no corrective from the real world, any more than do our advertising agencies, who now think it necessary to have a black face central in just about every single TV advert — always black, almost never Indian, Chinese or Bangladeshi.

    This irks the public, not because they object to seeing black faces but because they understand that they are once again being hammered over the head by patronising and frankly racist corporate wokeism. Viewers are treated to scenarios which appear awkward and forced. Meanwhile, on stage and screen it is perfectly acceptable, according to the current zeitgeist, for a black or Asian actor to play a white man, or a gay actor to play a straight man, or a trans actor to play either gender. But woe betide a white, straight actor who dares to play the part of a black man, or a gay or transgendered person. Beyond derangement, I think.

    The Covid shroud also draped itself over the most comprehensive trashing of our nation’s history and traditions since the dissolution of the monasteries. Those ‘largely peaceful’ (said the BBC) protests on the part of BLM saw statues demolished or defaced with the connivance of the police. Few protestors were arrested, regardless of their infractions of social distancing rules — though other protestors were not treated with such indulgence.

    The authorities — universities, colleges, the British Library, leftish councils — leaped upon this trundling bandwagon of pig ignorance and nihilism and began to expunge from our lives everything which did not conform to the tyranny of ‘now’. A renaming took place, of schools, roads, public buildings, as ever without the assent of the public, that being the only real difference to the similar movement which occurred in Eastern Bloc countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was top down, not bottom up. The public had no recourse to object. Under the guise of that inane term ‘decolonising’, even mathematics and the hard sciences were not immune.

    It was Covid which provided the excuse for the BBC to do what it has long yearned to do and ban the ‘jingoistic’ (as a BBC Music magazine columnist called them) lyrics to ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from the Last Night of the Proms. Only a last-minute intervention from the incoming director-general, Tim Davie, ensured that the decision would be reversed.

    This is why Covid-19, that spiky little interloper which we must never refer to as the ‘Chinese virus’, despite the fact that it came from China, has given us a salutary lesson. When the public is masked up and silenced, cowed into the quiescence of one or another tier or a full lockdown, there is nothing our masters will not try to get away with. Let 2021 bring the counter-revolution.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/this-has-been-the-year-of-epic-derangement?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020201219%20%20AL+CID_681a9ede9f9b5ca828fa831c3e1044e7

    1. “I think if I were a black student at Cornell who contracted flu from another black student who had filed for exemption, I would sue the college on the grounds of a failure of duty of care and, indeed, unadorned racism.” – yet again, proof that black lives don’t matter. As in London, failure to address knife crime, because it was carried out by black kids meant that other black kids were allowed to die in preventable criminal acts.
      If black lives did matter, they would be subjected to the same level of protective actions, both active and passive, that whites are.

    2. I feel so tearful witnessing the anti Christian throngs who are trying to destabilise our country .

      Ship them back to their mud huts and palm leaf shacks , we have no need for their type of ingratitude , they should be punished savagely for defacing our national hero(ES).

      They are here courtesy of the British government , nurtured by our health service, educated and allowed to live here securely .

      Let us be rid of their grinning black maws and their hate of our welcoming embrace .

      1. I don’t think it’s the black people doing this to our country, Mags – it’s the Wokery, the BLM brigade, the XR people, the people who think they are above the law, who can crush the normal people of this country and stir up all this racism.

        If you saw the crowd who threw the statue of Colston into Bristol harbour, very few were black, and indeed the black mayor Bristol got the statue retrieved from the water and removed the resin replacement of Jen Whatshername which was only there for a day. He has a fine line to balance.

        These agitators are trying to destabilise our country under the cover of covid lockdowns and restrictions – they have a different agenda to the rest of us and they have set back race relations in this country by decades.

    3. “The authorities — universities, colleges, the British Library, leftish councils — leaped upon this trundling bandwagon of pig ignorance and nihilism and began to expunge from our lives everything which did not conform to the tyranny of ‘now’…..” I refer to this as Twokenism

  52. I see the Royal Collection has fallen victim to the thuggery. The painting of Rorke’s Drift is to be relabeled:

    “The online description of the oil painting, by Elizabeth Thompson under commission from Queen Victoria, now notes: ‘This work is connected to colonialism and imperialism. “

    God knows how they’ll deal with any picture of the Black Prince….

      1. RR – Asante Sana!! I’ve just wasted the last 30 mins with 3 clowns working for UN Habitat in Gigiri [UN HQ]. They were actually trying to promote the relabeling of Rourkes Drift.

        I pointed out to them, they’ve just returned from another extended lunch in Lord Delamare restaurant. Delamare was the titular leader of the white settlement [non Crown appointee] in Kenya in Colonial times. So in attemtping to shout down one element of imperialsim, I took the liberty without asking you first to send them the above pic [and cc’d in their bosses, the UK High Commission and other British people in the area] with one question – “who won the battle?”

        As always with the UN, “they’ve all gone quiet over there”. Asante sana again for the image, appreciated

    2. Everything is “connected to colonialism and imperialism“. I’ve got my school atlas where a quarter of the world is coloured in red. We have little to be ashamed of, and our rough stuff around the world was very little different to our rough stuff here in the UK.

    1. With the swabbing of the nation under Project fear they will soon have nearly everyone’s DNA sample.

      1. To program into Gates’s nano-bots for tracking purposes? Why else would Gates want to give everyone a jab?

    2. Earlier I posted some info re the WHO that may be indicating that they’re becoming a bit edgy and they’re now offering advice on the testing procedure. Rather late in day but arse covering is like that. Drosten will soon be under the spotlight in the German courts.

      1. ‘Afternoon, Korky, ” Drosten will soon be under the spotlight in the German courts.”

        …and not before time – the man’s a fake.

        1. It didn’t take very long for 20 reputable scientists, including Michael Yeadon, to rubbish Drosten’s PCR testing regime when they peer reviewed it. Some people are questioning his real status.

          Everywhere one looks at this CV-19 farce there are large holes appearing. When it crashes there is going to be a huge number of very embarrassed and humbled people around – >600 in the HoC. I do not think that, “I was following the science,” will cut it as an excuse.

  54. Emmanuel Macron tests positive for Covid-19
    The French President travelled to an EU leaders summit last Friday.

    French President Emmanuel Macron has tested positive for Coronavirus and gone into isolation for at least a week. The 42-year-old head of state first showed symptoms of the virus earlier this week, said an Élysée Palace statement released on Thursday.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/17/emmanuel-macron-tests-positive-coronavirus/

    Strong smell of fish? Brexit trade negotiations must be delayed indefinitely until Macron has recovered so that he is not impeded in following his noble defence of his compatriot fisherfolk?

          1. He is not so well buoyed up by the French voting public who are quite likely to vote for Marine Le Pen next time!

          2. I took that as read when he started going on about immigration problems. Not normally a subject matter Micron gives much attention to, but of course it’s bread and butter to Marine Le Pen.

    4. No point in waiting for Macron to recover. He has no say. Despite what the media keep trying to imply, national leaders are irrelevant under the EU.

      1. I wonder what the thousands of our hotel occupying taxpayer funded “guests” will be enjoying over xmas.

      2. MPs or illegal immigrants?

        Surely the solution is to send the gimmigrants back and put mPs on green energy. At least then they wouldn’t be able to work 80% of the time.

    3. The camps were good enough for servicemen so why not these illegals? Why should the taxpayers pay for 4* hotels?

  59. Premier League are polling clubs, asking them if “taking the knee ” should continue. Civil Service are scrapping racial re-education courses saying they serve no useful purpose.
    Reality seems to be kicking back.

    1. Let’s hope so. The Millwall and Colchester booing should have given the Premier League and EFL clubs an idea of what the average fan (and indeed the average man/woman in the street) thinks about BLM and ‘taking the knee’.

  61. Regarding those “random” letters asking people to take part in a NHS/Mori survey and self swab for covid. I have just rung them – after blah blah blah messages and nine options, I actually got a real live person. Told him I didn’t want to take part – OK, took my code off the letter, thanked me for letting them know. End of call. No drama or questions. . . As I walked the 4 yards back to the laptop I heard a little “tring” sound meaning another, unasked for, download has arrived and will make my comp go very jerky until I restart it.
    Coincidence? What has been downloaded? ( I get a LOT of “Skype” updates – just like MS used to use on Win7 to bypass the “no updates” setting ). Was it a genuine download, part of NEW MS Edge? Or is it cynicism . . .or is the paranoia setting in?

    1. Don’t worry. It was only the correction think brain implant beam devised by Andy which will pop out of the camera next time you open the lid..

      1. Nice idea but for one problem – -I have a sticking plaster over the camera. Any hacker who wants to watch me secretly just gets a blur.

          1. Believe me – -If I took the plaster off, then someone DID see me – -they’d want the plaster back on the camera – -sharpish.

      1. as I was laughing at the paranoia, my tablet popped up with a message ‘Downloading Update”.

        Hmm, we shall see.

  62. Putin denies Russia poisoned critic Navalny: ‘We would have finished the job’. Indy 17 December 2020.

    Speaking during his annual end of year press conference, the Russian president said Mr Navalny wasn’t “important enough” to be a target for the Kremlin.
    Instead, he claimed Western security services were more interested in poisoning the “Berlin patient”. Mr Putin continues to refuse to refer to his most prominent opponent by name. “If [we] wanted to poison him, [we’d] have finished the job,” the Russian leader said. “Instead, his wife asked me, and I gave the go-ahead to let him out of the country for treatment.”

    All true of course. None of these people who have supposedly been Novichocked are of any consequence whatsoever to Putin personally or the Russian State. An ex- spy, a Bulgarian businessman, two UK social security dropouts and a third rate opposition leader. Where is the threat here?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-press-conference-speech-navalny-russia-b1775482.html

    2. Bert: “You realise, of course, that the children will be enjoying Christmas because we’re not there.”
      Ada: “Close Bert, the children will be enjoying Christmas because you’re not there.”

    3. Ada – we’re not going to be able to see the grand children this year Bert.

      Bert – good, little brats keep me awake.

    4. “The grandkids said they aren’t coming, Ada, as they don’t want to kill us. So we’ll just be alone again, naturally.”
      “Wasn’t that a song, Bert?”

  64. So I think this is very significant and goes to the heart of Mrs May’s premiership……….

    The chair of George Soros’ ”Best for Britain” promoted Theresa May’s plans on July 5 2018, the day before her plans were announced to ministers and the public at Chequers !

    How did Mr Malloch Brown know what those plans were ? Perhaps because Mr Soros and his closest adviser Mr Brown wrote the Withdrawal Agreement.

    https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/its-time-back-theresa-brexit-12860198

    In reality, that means promoted by Mr Soros himself.

    So were Mr Soros and Mrs May secretly operating together ?

    In view of this, and what happened in general including with other politicians suddenly changing sides for no apparent reason, it’s far from impossible, isn’t it ?

    1. Still think you and ogga should start your own blog. Your posts used to be interesting.
      Does John Redwood still reply to your endless emails? Would be interesting to read them if he does.

    2. I was reading some of the tweets about that this morning – are you on there, Korky? I’m there as Ndovu @hoglet3 and a lioness face if you want to find me. Quite a lot of sceptics there, and some good stats get shared.

        1. The £21bn figure sounds like the amount before we receive anything back, so does anyone know if the UK has been able to receive EU funding since 29/03/19or more to the point since the end of Jan 2020?

      2. Morning, Ndovu. No, I’m not on Twitter but I access timelines through Google. I’ve recently added Tice to my favourites. He is making some credible statements.

  66. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwbL19S8mbE

    I had a replacement metal dectector present a couple of years ago , my old original one snapped but it really was a great one , rather like the one used in the Dectorists .

    Any way I have a collection of things that still haven’t been identified , some tarnished coins , buttons, buckles , stuff from aircraft , bullets and just general rubbish .

    Just before lock down some one lost their little terrier on the heath , so I lent out my detector to see if the collar tags could be detected down burrows , ditches etc .. Well ,since then half a dozen dogs have gone missing in various parts of this big wide area , I haven’t the heart to ask for it back . Dogs go missing , become comfused and usually after 24 hours become frightened and enter a feral mode of behaviour.

    Many people say a dog will return to the spot it goes missing from , and if people were to leave an item of familiar clothing on the spot , the dog usually returns and stays.

    Any way, I haven’t needed my detector for a long while .

    I think the mudlarking link is fascinating , and what a huge amount of amazing stuff she has found .

    I may buy the book from Amazon later.

  67. Had lunch out today, booked this morning, and have just found out that we’re being imprisoned again in Surrey. %#£&@%+*&£#@/;*&£#@%-/;. (Translation – expletives deleted/diluted! Started chatting to a group of 3 fellas just across from us, Scotsman, South African and Englishman. (No, it’s not the beginning of a joke). Boy did we rip the Government to pieces. Extreme enjoyable. Wonderful to talk to strangers with the same opinions as us.

    1. “…have just found out that we’re being imprisoned again in Surrey.”
      Only if you let them vw.

      1. Absolutely. And we do not intend to obey these ridiculous rules. We will just carry on as usual, go out when we wish, not wear a mask (we’ve both printed off exemption badges and I’ve also printed certain government regs to show to any aggressive policemen should they challenge me).

          5. I have a sunflower lanyard. At first I viewed it as a yellow star but I’ve come to see it more as a string of garlic. It keeps the vampires at bay.

          7. First comes the realisation….. then the realisation that others realise. That is what they don’t want us to know. Hence the muzzles and social distancing.

            Good evening, Jack.

  68. So is anything working in the UK?

    The Lawyer just tried submitting MILs estate for probate. The system is down and we don’t know when it will be back online.

    2. British Cattle Movement Service is still doing OK… or it was 10 minutes ago when I sent a couple of movements through. VAT returns can still be sent – and refunds still seem to be be turning up.

      Those are the ones I use most weeks and whilst they are occasionally offline they do seem to work most of the time.

  69. The lack of British nuclear power plants is one of the great failures of public policy

    Dithering by successive governments has allowed the expertise required to build nuclear power plants to dwindle

    TELEGRAPH VIEW, 15th December 2020

    Given the UK’s commitment to non-carbon energy generation by 2050, nuclear power will be an essential part of the mix if the lights are to stay on. News that the Government has opened talks with the state-owned French company EDF for a power plant in Sizewell, Suffolk, is welcome. EDF is already building a power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset backed by Chinese investment. Another is planned at Bradwell in Essex using Chinese technology.

    Each plant will produce seven per cent of the UK’s energy requirements† and will take up the strain from closing fossil fuel sources. Even so, many of the campaigners who have pressed for the eradication of carbon are perversely opposed to nuclear power as well, imagining that the nation’s needs will be met by renewables such as wind. They will not be, not least when most cars are required to run on electricity.

    There are understandable economic misgivings about nuclear because the massive costs have to be underwritten by the taxpayer since investors will not accept the risk. There are also political considerations in view of the diplomatic froideur with China and the UK’s departure from the EU. Since nuclear power is being provided by state actors in China and France, it must be asked why the British state does not take on the projects and remove the involvement of foreign powers entirely. Part of the reason is that dithering by successive governments has allowed the expertise required to build nuclear power plants to dwindle. The Thatcher government‡ in the Eighties envisaged building eight new stations but only one was ever commissioned. It has been one of the great failures of public policy of the past 40 years.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/12/15/lack-british-nuclear-power-plants-one-great-failures-public/

    † Energy or electricity?
    ‡ I read that the head of the CEGB asked for more nukes but MHT & Co said no because they didn’t want them on the books at the time of the power industry sell-off.

    1. Struggling a bit here, but weren’t Heysham 2 and Torness in the ’80s last of the UK built nuclear power stations?

    2. A quick question..

      Which nation’s design concept was it for the Nuclear Power Plants that COVID COUNTRY 1, aka China is/might/maybe/must going to build for us.

      Hint most of us live in the country

      We gave the plans away

    3. Once upon a time, there was a relatively small island at the NW corner of the continent of Europe.

      It was the most creative and innovative place on the planet since the enlightenment and the reformation.

      Now, it is hated and despised by all the woke-folk, who, but for the existence of that outpost would never have been allowed to appear.

      Ho hum…

      1. The Britons also inhabited that part of Europe now called Brittany. Times have changed. Not for the better.

  70. Drinks for this unusual festive season

    I thought I would have a Tier Maria tonight
    Or maybe a scotch and lockdown ginger

  72. On the plus side, Macron has got it. it might teach him some compassion for the country he is ruining.

  73. No hiding place…

    A few months ago, a company called Capella Space launched a satellite capable of taking clear radar images of anywhere in the world, with incredible resolution — even through the walls of some buildings. Capella can peer right through cloud cover, and see just as well in the daylight as in total darkness. That’s because instead of optical imaging, it uses synthetic aperture radar, or SAR.

    SAR works similarly to how dolphins and bats navigate using echolocation. The satellite beams down a powerful 9.65 GHz radio signal toward its target, and then collects and interprets the signal as it bounces back up into orbit. And because the satellite is sending down its own signal rather than passively capturing light, sometimes those signals can even penetrate right through a building’s wall, peering at the interior like Superman’s X-ray vision.
    “At that frequency, the clouds are pretty much transparent,” Banazadeh told Futurism. “You can penetrate clouds, fog, moisture, smoke, haze. Those things don’t matter anymore. And because you’re generating your own signal, it’s as if you’re carrying a flashlight. You don’t care if it’s day or night.”

  74. Off any topic, and not usually being a conspiracy theorist…

    Why does a simple pedometer app on my phone, which does nothing more than count the number of steps I’ve taken, now require access to everything on my phone, and any linked devices before it will let me download the latest update?

      1. ♫ “If you’re worried and walk in your sleep
        Just count your footsteps instead of sheep” ♫

    3. It probably doesn’t, it’s a try on.
      If the step counter is important a cheap wrist or ankle version might suffice. You could pretend you’ve been ankle-tagged

      Are you absolutely certain that it isn’t a scammer pretending to be from your stepper ap?

      1. I’ve used the app for a couple of years with regular updates, it’s never required access to everything on my phone before now. As I say, I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist but…
        …

        1. I think you’re right to be cautious. Is there no ‘No’ option?

          Google is always asking for my location; I always decline to give it.

          1. I’m fairly savvy when it comes to internet scams, the one which almost caught me out, about to click on the link, was one which used what they call the “distraction technique.”
            The moment I saw the email I assumed it was genuine.

    4. Crappy coding.

      Android, for some reason forces you to turn on location services to use bluetooth. There’s no reason whatsoever for a radio to need a service. A service to need a radio? Yes.

      Internally, Android is designed to make locking it down and using it so difficult that doing so is impossible. iOS is better because it isn’t funded by selling you but internally it’s no better.

  75. Just finished wrapping a Christmas present. What a swine adhesive tape can be: creasing, sticking where not wanted, trapping fingers &, worst of all if you’re not quick enough to fold over the end, rejoining the roll with a seam that is difficult to detect & even more difficult to lift (just like clingfilm, unless you twist a corner).

    1. We tend to go for the easy option, M&S gift cards. Though even they are looking a bit shaky these days.

      1. Practical, but too impersonal for my taste. Fortunately I have only one present to give & I always enjoy selecting something appropriate but unpredictable.

      2. SWMBO has started photographing flora & fauna around here, and getting the pictures made up as greetings cards. This year, we have “fresh” frost pictures.

        1. Any chance of you posting a few of them on NTTL Ob?
          It’s that sort of thing which attracts we irregulars to the site.

          12. Called a stabbur. A storehouse originally, this one from 1632, and one of the best in the valley.
            They were traditionally wedding presents.

          14. A stabbur – storehouse, except this one also had some sleeping quarters. The door has 1632 on it, so it is the second-oldest building on Firstborn’s farm. The oldest is the woodshed, which was the original farmhouse, dating from the late 1500s. The current farmhouse is from about 1650 or so.

      1. I don’t have any except garden twine & kitchen twine. Somewhere I have some synthetic ribbon in various colours which coil up hen teased with the scissors, but GOK where they are. I acquired them over 20 years ago in Germany.

    4. Peddy, you really shouldn’t have bothered. Will the present get to me in time for Christmas?

      :-))

      1. I shall finish over Christmas that jar of marmalade you gave me 2 years ago, Elsie. I had some the other morning & It is still perfect.

        1. Glad you are still enjoying it. My final jar will see me through to mid-January which is when Seville oranges appear in the shops. As usual I shall then make a new batch – as large as I can – and I will earmark one for you.

    5. I have those difficulties, Peddy, so we bought a really heavy (so it doesn’t skid about) office sellotape dispenser – the kind with a roll, you pull out a bit & cut it off by bending it over a series of vicious little teeth. Works a treat – even one-handed.

    6. I stick the edge of the tape, while still on the reel, to the edge of a piece of furniture. I then cut off the required length and repeat the process until I have enough strips. When I’ve cut the last piece I stick the piece of folded surplus tape I’ve previously prepared to act as the folded-over end onto the tape so it’s easy to peel back. I can then use the pre-cut strips to secure the wrapping. Seems to work for me.

        1. Tess of the D’Ubervilles was written in the Manor half a mile from here … Everywhere has the feel of Hardy ..
          Where he walked , drew his narrative and encouraged historical fact, and painted mind pictures of the misery and hardship of rural life .

          1. Yup. I cherish The Trumpet Major amongst other of Hardy’s writings. His poetry is as good as as his books.

            I believe Hardy’s Ale is still available but the Eldridge Pope Brewery site in Dorchester was redeveloped. I designed the retail units of the Carluccio’s there.

            I regret the loss of such a fabulous brewery and buildings in their original use. Fantastic brickwork and design, thankfully mostly preserved, albeit as facades.

        2. I tend to agree with Ol; I had to read Jude the Obscure for university – it was well named (and very depressing).

          1. They are all depressing and make me homesick for a disappearing Britain – and it was disappearing in Hardy’s day too!

          3. The other way round for Christo. Once he had studied FFTMC he decided to read many of Thomas Hardy’s other novels.

          4. I hated and was terrified of most of the books we read at school, because I was simply too young to understand or appreciate them. Also, most teachers are left wing, and give incredibly gruesome and frightening books to teenagers. It has been proven in studies that right wing people tend to react more strongly to horrifying scenes than left wing people. I don’t think commie teachers understand how they are traumatising conservative teenagers.

    5. Christo did Far From the Madding Crowd for GCSE Eng. Lit. and we bougt a DVD of the televised version made in 1998 which showed more respect for the novel than the Julie Christie/Alan Bates/Terence Stamp/Peter Finch version I had seen in the 1960’s. He read the book a couple of times and we chatted about it and he managed to get an A*

    7. The heroine is

      6Ft 6 inches tall
      Male ( a dangly bit)
      black
      loves men
      goes on bended (for his/her its’ mate)

    1. Didn’t they only work 1% of the time and spent the rest of the day watching Netflix? Sounds like shut up money.

      1. I’ve found that anyone commenting on a BBC article on the BBC site is fervently big state, high state, big spend and both economically and sociologically ignorant.

    3. I don’t think the term ‘workers’ should be applied to them. Thumb-twiddlers, perhaps.

      1. It may not be their fault.

        When I did my locums in Germany, most of the contracts were done on a handshake & honoured. Then one young twat in Hannover with a doktor-titel insisted on a written contract for 12 weeks. It turned out that there was bugger all to do. I spent most days doing online jigsaws & cashing in 500DM/day. He didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do.

  78. Has anyone noticed that they started ramping up the pandemic project fear and introduced more stringent measures since the vaccine arrived, especially after most people said they wouldn’t have it.

    1. You are in trouble
      You understand the word “Control”
      Keep quiet or Die (of COVID unnaturally)
      You understand Bib?

  79. Hopes for Brexit deal rise after European Parliament sets Sunday deadline
    MEPs wanted to impose a deadline of Friday for Boris Johnson to cave to EU demands but pushed the date back on the advice of Michel Barnier

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/12/17/hopes-brexit-deal-rise-european-parliament-sets-sunday-deadline/

    The EU MEPs and most of the Nottlers do not want the same result but we are agreed on one thing: Boris Johnson is going to cave in. If he does not cave in by Sunday he will certainly do so before the year is ended

    Please would a fellow Nottler who has an unswerving faith in Mr Johnson tell me I am wrong, that I am too pessimistic and that Boris Johnson has both the integrity and the conviction – added to the strength of character to get Britain completely free of the tyrannical and insulting EU?

    .

      1. 327510+ up ticks,
        Evening B3,

        Been on the cards since 24 / 6 / 16 the the semi re-entry nosecone is over target.

    3. I’m afraid you are asking too much, Rastus, though I would love to be proved wrong. And if there is a “deal” there is nowhere near enough time to scrutinise it properly.

      1. That’s what they are banking on. It will be rushed through on the nod. It won’t even be the small print that won’t be looked at, either, it will be whole chunks of surrender.

        1. I think you’re right although a tiny part of me clings on to the hope that we will tell them to stuff it (some hope!). If they do just nod it through then I hope the Cons are prepared for the consequences as it gradually becomes clear how they have sold us down the river.

    4. Michael Gove told a select committee today that No Deal is the more likely. [BBC Radio 4 Evening News.] BBC of course brought in someone with the different view.

      1. Why did Gove go to Brussels and throw away the clause to the Johnson Disastrous Surrender WA that Bill Cash had had inserted?

    5. Yo Mr t

      Madonna (the singer) will become a virgin, before the EU let us have freedom

      Oh, to have a time machine back in 1939.

      remarkably, the only Frog who was looking after our interests ( but not intentionally) was de galle, who vetoed our joining the
      European Houseparty

  81. Can anyone help a homeless ex-servciceman and his wife

    House sold, caravan sites shut, luckily we have lots of cardboard boxes left over from packing.

    2. Did you get more from your house sale than you paid for it?
      These days, a stay at the Ritz isn’t out of the question.

      1. That is good, we have some big Ritz cardboard boxes, just need a handy lamppost for electricity

      2. That is good, we have some big Ritz cardboard boxes, just need a handy lamppost for electricity

      1. We are driiiivvviinnnnggg very slowly to arrive mid January.

        Tin Tent parks all shut

        Cardboard boxes warm, though

        1. Is Aggie Westons still going strong .. Union Jack club, Royal sailor’s Rest, er oh dear , because I expect every hotel have room fulls of illegals .

          Any National Parks en route , laybyes etc?

          2. “Armament:
            1 × twin 4.5in gun Mark 6
            1 × 40 mm Bofors gun Mark 7”
            That long ago? Seacat replaced the Bofors back in the ’60s

          4. Seacat was made in Belfast in the ’60’s, you had good reason to be worried.
            At the Falklands, 100+ Seacat fired for one, disputed, hit.
            Only plus was the Argies were relying on the same obsolete missile to bring down our Harriers, with as little success.
            Belgrano carried Seacat, that was were it belonged in the ’80s.

    5. There is a retired Dentist called Peddy the Viking , he speaks German , ours is a bit rusty .

      C’mon Charles , hurry up and stop dithering , we didn’t give you a Gordonstone education for nothing , get on with it!

      Say Happy Christmas in German !

    8. “Sorry Charles, One can’t let you hug One’s family at Christmas – but at least you can hug a tree!”

    9. Charles: “I do solemnly swear”
      Phil de Greek: “Don’t be a bullshitting fcuking pillock, swear properly!”

          2. Oddly enough, I think he’s right to be defender of Faith.

            Never met her, but I’m sure Andrew approves.

  89. That’s me for what has been – unexpectedly – a very satisfactory day. Lovely trip to market; the MR sold a Z-bed that has been in the loft for 35 years. My elder son and his wonderful wife have defied orders and sent us presents – which arrived safely. The MR has put up a second lot of festive foliage which is 100% CATPROOF. Unless they get a ladder…which wouldn’t surprise me! Nice bike ride to get eggs from the farm. And sun all day. Glass of medicine in hand…..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/77ee5aeea881a2fffbc0ce0bfc4d147aa85b19e9e3c6dc6e6bb9dc3ae37b41db.jpg

    Pickles looking wistfully at the garden. He and Gus will have such fun out there after they have been “done”.

    I’ll see you tomorrow – which turns out to be Friday – and there was me, all day, thinking it would be Saturday…. Tiers before bedtime.

    A demain…

    2. They don’t need much …just constant attention, and warmth and your chair, and food they like, and toys, and..well they’re jolly well worth it!

        1. We had a wonderful cat who went with us (and back) when I took our elder daughter to primary school. Fells.. not so much!

          1. One of the cats in Germany used to go with my father 1/2way to the shops. He would wait in an archway & then escort my father home.

    5. “One day all this out there will be mine, all mine.” How they’ve grown. It won’t be long now before they take possession of their world, jaunting off for nights on end during the summer months and worrying you near to death.

          2. Honed- from spending half a lifetime in committees achieving the square root of bugger all….

    7. Yo Bill

      Two, of a similar age , but grey, chose us when we visited a farm in West Wales

      They of course ruled us, together with their big Boss, Ginger Charle, who was a Rescue Cat.

      He had to use internet to find us

  90. Goodnight, all. Just started hissing down here again. Roads will be flooded and there will, of course, be a lake outside my studio again (until I can get the drain fixed).

  93. Evening, all. A bit late because the saga of things going wrong on the housekeeping front continues unabated; today I decided to turn the feather bed – for those who are unacquainted with such an accessory (probably the majority of you!), it’s like a duvet, but considerably heavier. You have to shake it and pummel it to even out the feathers. As luck (and mine is rarely good!) would have it, just as I was giving it a good shake, the seam of the ticking split along almost its entire length 🙁 Cue a blizzard of feathers. They were everywhere! On me, naturally, on the blankets, the sheets, the carpets, the bed-hangings (it’s a four-poster) and even, as I discovered when he shook himself, on the dog – who, fortunately for him, slept through most of the swearing. To make it even more interesting, the little gadget that helps one thread a needle was missing from the sewing kit. To make it even more fun, I’d almost completed the sewing up when I discovered a whole heap of feathers that had got caught in a crease. It’s difficult enough stuffing recalcitrant plumage into a large gap; trying to get them into a 1.5 inch gap is a challenge to say the least.

          1. Sinbad is on a less aggressive anti-fit medication and the original medication is being gradually reduced. He is still a little lethargic and takes his walks slowly but he has rediscovered his penetrating bark which is a good sign.

            We just simply treasure every day we have with him. He is a lovely boy and still so sensitive to us.

            We have painters and carpenters about the house at present and they all love him.

    3. Well – if you will sleep into the 18th century!

      What a nightmare! I’m quite glad we havw a modern bed.

      1. I love my four-poster and feather bed. I wouldn’t swap them for modern stuff. Warm and comfortable and when the wind’s howling outside I can draw the curtains and be enclosed and self-contained 🙂

    5. HG and I shared a feather bed/mattress for our first year of marriage.

      I was still a student and we rented a furnished cottage.

      Wonderfully warm, comfortable and worth all the effort taken in plumping, turning, rolling and airing.
      And that was just HG

      4. I guess you must be now what the great late Terry Wogan called TOGGs – what would you say is her TOG rating?

    9. Reminds me of the couple who bought a water bed when they first got married. Alas, they drifted apart.

    10. Man, what a bummer.
      Impressed that you stitched it up again! Maybe you should offer your services to the local NHS?

      1. Because the arthritis in my thumbs is very painful (not helped by stress, cold and wet weather and having to sew the seams), I can’t have a drink and take strong painkillers. Tonight, I’ve opted for the painkillers 🙁

          1. Thank you. The side effect of the drugs is that they make me sleepy, so win-win. Pain relief and a good night’s sleep. I have swapped drink for drugs 🙂

  94. Brussels can smell panicking Britain’s desperation to get a Brexit deal

    Having failed to prepare for no-deal, it seems the Government may lose its nerve

    JONATHAN SAXTY

    For those of us who doubt London’s willingness to go for no deal (why hasn’t the UK walked already?), Sunday’s joint statement by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came as little surprise. Would the British Government really risk the perceived bad public relations of no deal on top of the hit from Coronavirus, now compounded by new restrictions?

    To be fair to Brussels, it is the British Government – and not the EU – which has moved the goalposts. The British Government signed up to the Withdrawal Agreement and all it entails for Northern Ireland. The British Government refused to walk when it should have left the room many times. And, despite news of no deal preparations, it is the British Government which seems ill-prepared for no deal.

    The level playing field has proved a major source of disagreement. While it is suggested that Brussels might drop the ‘ratchet clause’ – which would keep Britain aligned with the EU via Court of Justice of the European Union oversight – it seems Brussels might now be going for a softer version via a mechanism whereby ‘divergence’ would invoke ‘rebalancing’ measures, although so-called ‘lightning tariffs’ appear to now be off the menu.

    This all still looks like the level playing field by the back door. We now hear European companies bidding for public sector contracts in the UK will be treated the same as British firms, although that would apply both ways. That the UK seems to have thrown away the last-minute opportunity to override the most pernicious aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol – alongside news that the EU will have an office in Northern Ireland (permanently, if desired) – compounds the sense that the UK is signing itself into a deal which future generations could pay a heavy price for. Will a deal really fail now over fisheries?

    There may be, as President von der Leyen told the European Parliament “a path to an agreement” – and, according to EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier only the “last stumbling blocks remain” – but we know that any deal will be waived through by virtually all opposition parties and the Remain elements within the Parliamentary Conservative Party. The fact the European Parliament has set Sunday as deadline day – and is ready to convene an emergency session – will put pressure on all sides. For politicians and commentators who wish to scrutinise the particulars of the deal, there simply will not be enough time to do so.

    As reported recently in the Telegraph, MPs and peers could sit next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith however told the Telegraph he feared a trade deal will now be “rammed through at speed”. While MPs are soon to break up for Christmas, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove confirmed they could be called back if a deal is agreed and that he believes there is enough time for the legislation to pass.

    It isn’t that the EU wants no deal (pragmatic Germany certainly wants one and will push France if needed), but any deal Brussels signs up to will likely be one where Britain comes second. The EU has every incentive to make Britain pay for Brexit lest other member states get ideas that leaving the club is the smart choice. How would it look to Hungary and Poland if the UK was perceived to do well out of Brexit, given their recent dust-up with Brussels?

    The UK should understand this and curb its desperation to get a deal. Unshackled from the EU’s clutches, the UK would be free to be the buccaneering deregulated trading superstar we know it can be. The Prime Minister was not elected to sell out on Brexit. The Red Wall did not give him a mandate for BRINO. Nor, through the Northern Ireland Protocol, did Britain give this Government a mandate to partition the United Kingdom.

    A bad deal would leave Britain in effective ‘association’ membership, without a voice in the room (poor consolation though it was, it did afford some say over the direction of the EU) and without the freedom to truly diverge from the bloc. Brexit does not lend itself to a halfway-house, nor to rushed implementation.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/12/17/brussels-can-smell-panicking-britains-desperation-get-brexit/

    1. It’s no surprise that the UK is crawling on its knees to Brussels. Whatever they may pretend, the cabal in Westminster is wholly signed up to the EU project. They’ve had four years to get their house in order and prepare. They spent most of it trying to keep us in. Bojo is all talk and nothing to back it up with (calling him spineless is being generous). Guy Fawkes was the only man to enter Westminster with good intentions!

      2. I still find it hard to forgive Nigel Farage for not holding a gun to Johnson’s head at the last election,

        He should not have not stood his Brexit Party candidates down in all the constituencies where the sitting Tory was a remainer. What an outrage that all remainers were not deselected – if Johnson had had any testicular strength he would have done so – he is about to show us what a complete (or should I say incomplete!) metaphorical eunuch he really is!

        1. Balls are for men to use, the one thing you can say abour Mr Powell (however you pronounce it)

          it was ENOCH, not like boris eunoch

          (sorry P_T )not for playing tennis with

          One lady with power, who avoids balls (unless they go with her name Ms Dick)

        1. Indeed they do. They like to think the EU is Europe when in fact it’s a megalomaniac would-be superstate comprised of a small number of countries. Europe is a continent with a good diversity of languages, cultures and cuisines; a relatively small number of states are imprisoned by the EU.

          1. I agree that the EU deliberately blurs the definition of ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’, but 27 is hardly a small number particularly when it includes nearly all the core continental countries. Sure the total number of countries in Europe is close to twice 27, but the ‘extras’ are skewed by micro-nations and peripheral states many people regard as being barely part of Europe at all.

          3. You wrote, “a relatively small number of states are imprisoned by the EU”, that’s simply wrong.

          4. Relatively is the operative word – and certainly if we compare the EU with the rest of the world 🙂

          7. In all seriousness though, I completely agree with your argument. The UK is a peripheral European country, like Iceland, Norway, Russia, Turkey, Georgia etc, so we will always have interests in what happens on the Continent, but we equally have strong links beyond Europe. We have always been in Europe’s outer core and should go back to being partly disengaged.

          8. Russia is a
            transcontinental country, a state which is situated on more than one
            continent. Russia spans the northern part of the Eurasian continent,
            77% of Russia’s area is in Asia, the western 23% of the country is
            located in Europe, European Russia occupies almost 40% of Europe’s total
            area.

          9. “almost twice as many states aren’t part of the EU” would mean there are 50ish non-EU European states.

          11. Yes, it’s about 50 i.e. close to twice 27. However, you wrote that “almost twice as many states aren’t part of the EU”, which means that there would be approx 75 European states.

      2. Great Britain never was – and never will be – a European country

        Brexit proves that, even in the 1970s, it was too late to alter the global orientation of our small island nation

        ROBERT TOMBS

        “Britain is a European nation,” Remainers still often say when calling for the closest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit. I’m never sure what they think this means. And do our Continental neighbours agree? It is hard, perhaps impossible, really to feel the subconscious characteristics that stem from geography, history and culture. Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.

        Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.

        Like it or not, we are on the edge, as our eventual relationship with the EU ought to reflect. “Europe” is there, not here. Even the keenest British federalists talk about it as a different place which they wistfully dream of being part of. Semi-detachment runs through our history. We have had shifting relationships with different parts of the continent, so that it is hard even to say with which we have most affinity. Christianity came from Rome. Later we became a southern colony of pagan Scandinavia. Our language is Germanic. We went through a transformative four-century relationship with France. We had a long economic and security relationship with the Netherlands, for a time having the same ruler. For more than a century, after the Hanoverian succession, we were a power in Germany.

        Britain has been both the ally and the enemy of every great Continental state, Catholic and Protestant, monarchy, democracy and dictatorship. Its monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. It has never been tempted or forced to ally with the hegemonic Continental power to share in the spoils of dominating Europe. If national identity was important, 20 miles of sea were certainly no less; and trans-oceanic connections provided global resources to oppose Continental threats and work to create a “balance of power”. So Britain was the only major European state that never became an ally or a willing satellite of either Napoleon or Hitler, but decided to resist them even when the struggle seemed hopeless. Finally, it never made a serious attempt to join a triumvirate with France and Germany to control the EU. Independence has been our watchword.

        The lure of opportunity overseas pulled us away from Continental ambitions. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688 began the “second hundred years war” with France, ending only at Waterloo, the struggle became increasingly global, fought not only on the plains of Flanders, but in India and America. After Waterloo, Britain refused to be part of the Holy Alliance, a Great Power scheme to run the Continent, becoming instead the patron and protector of independent states, including France, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

        Britain made little effort to shape the unification of Italy during the 1850s, and watched with limited concern and negligible influence as the separate German states were turned by Otto von Bismarck into a new and powerful Empire by aggressive wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Even had Britain wished to interfere it could scarcely have done so. It was never a superpower, but always a medium-sized state, sometimes having to punch above its weight but not getting into the ring at all if it could avoid it. Bismarck joked that if the British landed their army in Germany, he would have it arrested, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that Britain “was really more an Asiatic power than a European”.

        Was this a great geopolitical mistake? Many who later supported European integration thought so. But Brexit proves that it was too late to alter it. The millions who emigrated over the last two centuries in search of a better life did not cross the Channel or the North Sea to become Europeans, but went to English-speaking countries across the oceans. Today, two and a half times as many British citizens live in the “Anglosphere” as in the EU, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. Even when we were striving to be “at the heart of Europe”, we were less economically integrated than any other EU member, and for 20 years our trade has been increasingly moving away from the Continent.

        Opinion polling shows that our views of the EU are not very different from those of our Continental neighbours – that is, unenthusiastic or worse. The difference is that they feel that they have no choice but to remain members. Economic calculation weighs. But so do the instinctive feelings that stem from geography and history. The detached or semi-detached countries – Norway, Switzerland, ourselves and the non-Eurozone member-states – are all in different ways outsiders.

        Our peculiarity – or so General de Gaulle thought when he vetoed our entry into the European Economic Community – was that we were too global: “an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries”. It has taken us half a century to realise he was right, and finally to go with the grain.

        Robert Tombs is the author of ‘This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe’, which will be published by Allen Lane in January

        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/great-britain-never-never-will-european-country/

        3. Even those who work in the Strasbourg parliament acknowledge we’re different; when I visited, my “parrain” who took me to the (highly subsidised) café accepted that we weren’t continentals and were alienated from the continent. He told me of a British teacher who took a school party round and who was (naturally) very pro-EU. Even she, he told me, spoke of “you”, rather than “us”. I pointed out we were an island and had a different legal system plus a different history – and we drove on the left; he laughed, but good-naturedly.

        4. Trust the Telegraph – look what is sneaked into the middle of this article:

          “Its (Britain’s) monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. ”

          So that is how the Royal Family are planning to stay in power!

    3. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s concept of an European Union was always, fundamentally flawed – and at variance with the United Kingdom – a world-wide, seafaring, naval and trading nation.

      De Gaulle was right – “Non”.

      Heath lied about fisheries, trade and Sovereignty …

      Its time for the United Kingdom to take it back for once and for all.

    1. General Sir Nick Carter:
      Russia doesn’t need to deploy naval forces;
      lots of RIBs will be sufficient for invasion.
      Further advice from HM Home Secretary …

    2. Russia has naval forces based in four seas; the Artic (Murmansk), the Pacific, the Black Sea and the Baltic. A simple look at the map shows that Russian naval forces travelling to and from the Baltic will need to travel close to British waters. This is nonsense.

      1. It’s not entirely nonsense. 10 ships is far more than could be reasonably justified as simply a transfer between fleets. It is designed to be provocative and is a throwback to the old Cold War days.

        1. It could be, however, the MOD has confirmed that the ships did not enter UK waters (contrary to the headline) and NATO regular does similar close to Russia.

          1. I should hope that they didn’t enter UK territorial waters as that would be an act of war. Yes, it is true that NATO does similar things close to Russia but I am sure that the Russians are notified well in advance. The article does not say if the Russians notified the UK of their plans but I doubt that they did. It was a provocative act of sabre-rattling and was rightly called out by the CDS.

      2. For once I am inclined to agree with you, Andy. However, the bogeyman must be given an airing from time to time as a distraction.

  97. My message to Mr Flynn is that even if the IT systems were fault-free, few would trust the figures.

    Britain’s failing state apparatus already spells misery for the vaccine roll out

    How can we trust a bureaucracy that struggles to generate simple statistics with life and death decisions?

    PATRICK O’FLYNN

    Following several days of growing clamour for the Government to publish statistics on how Covid vaccination was going, the minister in charge of the undertaking, Nadhim Zahawi, did just that yesterday.

    It was a morale-booster for the whole of Britain to learn that 137,897 people had been given their first Pfizer jab in the opening seven days of the programme. Clearly there is an awfully long way to go – it is estimated that there are 20 million people in the priority groups so far set out by ministers and they will all need two doses – but at least a score was on the board and the number could only rise.

    But there was something a little odd about Mr Zahawi’s figures when broken down by individual countries of the UK: 108,000 in England, 18,000 in Scotland, 4,000 in Northern Ireland and 7,897 in Wales.

    What are the chances of three out of four countries in the UK achieving an exact round number of inoculations after the first week? Zilch. So clearly the figures given must be approximations. Apart from in Wales, as nobody would submit an approximation as random as 7,897.

    So it wasn’t all that much of a surprise to read that the IT system which is supposed to ensure a smooth and up to date flow of data about who has been vaccinated where and in what numbers isn’t working properly.

    The system, known as “Pinnacle” (whoever names these things must have a first class honours degree in hubris), is said to be “failing constantly” meaning GPs are having to make paper records before transferring them onto computers later. No wonder Mr Zahawi made clear that his figures were provisional.

    Now in case anyone is thinking that at least Wales deserves a gold star for giving a precise number, well sorry to disabuse you, but no it really doesn’t. Because the Welsh government has just owned up to its own system failure and it makes the imprecise vaccine counts of the other home nations seem a trivial matter by comparison.

    It transpires that the number of new Covid cases occurring in Wales over the past week could be twice as high as previously advertised because 11,000 positive tests were left off the official count. Public Health Wales say that planned IT maintenance had led to “significant under-reporting”. So Welsh people thinking their situation with Covid was serious were wrong. It turns out that it is double serious.

    First Minister Mark Drakeford told BBC Wales: “The data was never missing. It was always there, waiting to be uploaded into the system.” That’s all right then. As explanations go it is up there with “leaves on the line” and “the wrong kind of snow” when the trains don’t run on time.

    Now it is by no means an iron rule that governmental IT systems fail while private sector ones succeed. Anyone who has been caught in the call centre queuing system of a major utility company can testify that purgatory on this score is not confined to the public realm. And indeed there are bits of public sector IT that work rather well. Which of us has not been impressed by the nifty DVLA online system for paying vehicle excise duty, which is so beautifully designed that it almost acts as consolation for the unreasonable sums being extracted from our bank accounts?

    But what is undeniable is that in some areas, notably including public health, the issues that the state is responsible for are so serious that the consequences of “computer says no” very quickly become matters of life and death. So rickety IT systems with poor resilience ought not to be an option.

    When we get to the stage of the official inquiry into the handling of Covid in the UK – or more probably multiple inquiries – it should not only be the decision-making of ministers, scientists and civil servants that comes in for searching scrutiny. The deficiencies in the basic systems of the state when it comes to implementing those decisions merit at least as much attention. One can hardly berate a Secretary of State for pulling the wrong lever if none of the levers in front of him are connected to anything meaningful.

    The United Kingdom was once said to have the world’s Rolls Royce of public administration at its disposal. But the enormous challenges of the coronavirus pandemic have shown how far we have fallen behind on this score.

    The fact that Germany, despite rapidly rising Covid deaths now, still has below a third of the fatalities per 100,000 of population that we do should tell us that we have a lot to learn and much that needs improvement.

    The famous advertising slogan “vorsprung durch technik” (advancement through technology) does not merely apply to the automotive industry. We need to find out how it is that the German public health system starts first time, while ours too often splutters and cuts out in difficult conditions.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/17/britains-failing-state-apparatus-already-spells-misery-vaccine/

    1. From my long career in the software development industry, having dealt with companies from all over the world, I have a league table of countries from which I’d rather buy software, based purely on my own experience:

      Joint top: Germany and India
      2nd: Eastern Europe, Scandinavia
      3rd: UK
      4th: For technical reasons, China. For political reasons, they would be last.
      5th: Rest of Western Europe (France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal)
      50th: The US
      1,0000th: Africa and the Middle East

      Very politically incorrect, but as I said, based on my own experience. German public IT systems tend to be supplied by big German companies, and the standard of their engineers is very high. They don’t play tricks like delivering products that aren’t finished. They take testing seriously. They are usually over-manned compared to British companies, and therefore don’t cut corners.
      I worked on a project for a large German company, that was supplied to a British-based multinational. The customer said that it was one of their most cost-effective products because although they paid German rates, they had hardly any support issues from their millions of end users.

      1. I learned this lesson long ago.

        It’s unwise to pay too much…but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.

        John Ruskin – 1856

    2. On the grounds of safety of the staff we’ve turned all live patients away and replaced them with dummies.

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