728 thoughts on “Thursday 19 December: The BBC feeds its vanity by sending to jail women on low incomes”

  2. Mornings!
    Sunny night with giant moon means chilly start. -13 overnight, warming up to -5 now & snow later.

  3. Morning all

    SIR – Charles Moore (Comment, December 17) writes that most people charged with not paying the BBC licence fee are “poor women, often single mothers”.

    Having sat as a magistrate for some years I was faced regularly with the moral dilemma of sentencing those very women and single mothers he talks about, invariably first on the list in our court.

    I quickly came to the conclusion that it was morally unacceptable for me to sit in judgment on these cases and soon stood aside, as I was entitled to do.

    As Mr Moore says, it is a poll tax, and feeds the excesses and vanities of those running the BBC, expenditure always rising to meet income.

    There can be no justification for this way of funding a public body which sees itself above the need to constrain its spending and which behaves with little humility or understanding of the pain that it can cause.

    Timothy Bizzey

    Romsey, Hampshire

    1. SIR – I cannot agree more with Charles Moore regarding the hounding of persons who do not hold a TV licence.

      From 1987 to 2004 I sat as a lay magistrate in both London and East Sussex. During that time I must have dealt with hundreds of persons prosecuted for not having a licence.

      Most were those on a very low income who saw that food on the table was a priority. I doubt if in those 17 years there were half a dozen who refused to buy a licence.

      Now, from June next year, my wife and I are to have our income reduced by £3 a week in order to finance the BBC. Perhaps its director general would like to recommend what we are to remove from our weekly food shop in order to pay the fee.

      Derrick G Smith JP

      Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

      2. These letters are good ammunition for Boris to make the BBC subscription only. Then, he can say, the poorest can make their own priorities for their money, deciding whether to fund Linaker or buy bread & cheese.
        Keep these letters coming!!

    2. Why stop at the BBC? Why not look at the whole iceberg and not just the bit we see?

      Anyone with experience of public bodies and their associated wastefulness knows that as long as there’s money to be spent, it will get spent. Even with the cuts, I reckon there’s plenty of scope in the public sector for getting the same with less money.

      1. Where they can just open your wallet and take out what they want, then they will. If it’s all spent with no useful effect, then so what? There’s always more where that came from. Ref the NHS.

  6. SIR – Is there the remotest chance that the BBC will support our country’s future trade negotiations with the EU?

    It has already started batting for the other side.

    I am sorry, but I detest the BBC.

    Les Nicks

    Exeter, Devon

    1. Me too. We can no longer bear to listen to Today and even a quick glance at the BBC site has the inevitable lies about some hottest day ever in Australia when there are hundreds of newspaper clippings from way back indicating their error.

  7. SIR – In the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck, we usually view the predictions of Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, as a good reverse indicator.

    His latest pronouncement that “the country is on course for a smooth Brexit” worries us deeply.

    Tim Watson
    St Albans, Hertfordshire

    1. BTL@DTletters

      Max Bonamy 19 Dec 2019 5:07AM
      Best candidate for new Bank of England Governor? >>

      “Dame Helena Morrissey

      “Fund manager, outgoing head of Newton Investment Management
      “A Brexiteer who believes the next BofE Governor must keep interest rates above zero.”

      —-

      Yes please – she is the right person at the right time. She would be an inspired choice. Come on, Boris.

      On the subject of Brexit in May this year she said:

      “Compromise is so overrated. I learned that when I was an investor, where results are king. The middle ground of ‘unity’ isn’t a place where most successful people spend a lot of time.”

      ….
      Dame Helena has previously spoken about the opportunities the UK has after Brexit. In March she said: “I’m trying to counteract the sense that Brexit is automatically a bad thing.

      “My argument is that you’ve got these fast-growing Asian economies, this market driven economy in America, and you’ve got a rather sclerotic economy in Europe, so you don’t want to tie yourself to the wrong mast.”

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/25/leaders-should-not-try-unite-tory-party-warns-leading-financier/

      Love the cut of her jib. I’m going to place a bet on her.

      1. Don’t waste your money, Harry

        John Villiers 19 Dec 2019 6:21AM
        @Max Bonamy

        Yes, Dame Helena looks a good candidate. As explained by Guido Fawkes people at the Treasury and remain-supporting MPs are campaigning hard to ensure there is an anti-Brexit Governor.

        Their candidate is Minouche Shafik, an ardent anti-Brexiteer and supporter of Osborne’s project fear. Shafik believes in a high tax, highly regulated economy; she warned Philip Hammond that otherwise there would be “hugely disastrous consequences for the economy”.

        https://order-order.com/2019/09/10/treasurys-remain-plot-ensure-anti-brexit-governor-bank-england/

    2. So what happened to all the predicted disaster, sky falling on heads crap Carney was peddling earlier? Nowt has changed, so is he lying now or was he lying before?

        1. No meeces. Big Cat seems to have finished them off (until some more get imported). Did notice where the previous nights furry little bugger had chiselled his way through the new pillowcase, though… barsteward!

          1. Have you tried one of those plug-in devices which emit a signal which sends the mice crazy? I used one a few years ago and it worked – one dead mouse drowned in the toilet bowl within the first hour.

            Plugged a couple more in and heard some furious scurrying in the rafters, then nothing since.

          2. Yes, it didn’t help. Best so far is cats, followed by technotraps with a little guillotine that are very sensitive and despatch the meece very efficiently.

  8. SIR – As a former director of the UK Immigration Service (Ports), I was interested to see that Natalie Elphicke, the newly elected Conservative MP for Dover, is seeking urgent talks with the Home Office regarding the continuing problem of illegal immigrants being intercepted in the English Channel (69 on December 16 alone).

    It is high time that more positive action was taken to discourage and curtail this mode of entry to Britain.

    In January 2019 Sajid Javid, then home secretary, said the French had agreed that those intercepted would be returned to France. However, the latest Home Office figures put numbers entering Britain well in excess of 1,500, with fewer than 100 being returned to the Continent.

    Currently, UK Border Force cutters positioned mid Channel collect and taxi those attempting the crossing to our shores. Surely if French cutters intercepted them sooner, and returned them immediately to France, it would negate this form of trafficking – to the mutual benefit of both countries.

    Mrs Elphicke is also right to question what has been done with the millions of pounds Britain has paid to France to prevent this traffic and to investigate the traffickers.

    Peter Higgins
    West Wickham, Kent

    2. It’s clear that Javid, a politician, lied to assuage the concerns of the electorate. So what’s new?

  9. Scientists identify 5,300 year-old sinew bowstring used by Otzi the Iceman. 18 December 2019.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4fe43af461018970333a7b78e72c798ff1c0857ad103fbf3b9a99f997e8bcc98.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8cb752ec0e25aeebed47c4c7bcf240632cb7365a832182a850af8618652681ff.jpg

    The cord, which was found tucked into a quiver used by the 5,300-year-old Iceman for keeping his arrows, is made of animal sinew – ideal material for producing a strong, powerful bow.

    It is two metres long, almost exactly the same length as the bow that was found beside the mummified body of the hunter when he was discovered by a pair of hikers on the Schnalstal glacier in 1991.

    Morning everyone. I read this in the hope of finding out the origin of the sinew but alas the article does not see fit to tell us. There is however something to be gleaned from it. Otzi is portrayed as White in the illustration and is of course so in reality as can be seen from his mortal remains. Contrast this with the recent report on the DNA analysis of an “Ancient Dane” from the same period who is described as having, dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes and is depicted as such in the illustration. Unlike our own Cheddar Man the disparity here between truth and political requirement is irrefutable.

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/17/neolithic-dna-ancient-chewing-gum-denmark
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/18/scientists-identify-5300-year-old-sinew-bowstring-used-otzi/

  10. Morning again

    Repeat prescriptions

    SIR – One way of cutting GPs’ workloads would be to return to issuing 90-day prescriptions.

    When I was first prescribed blood pressure medication I needed repeat prescriptions four times a year. Later, because some confused elderly patients were stockpiling medications, prescriptions were capped at 28 days.

    I now have to request 13 repeat prescriptions a year. Multiply that by the millions who must be on repeat prescriptions for basic drugs and it becomes clear that a sledgehammer was used to crack a nut.

    Christine Szymanski

    Gillingham, Dorset

    3. I do it on line. Next time I am in town, I call in and collect. Very straightforward. AND, better still, it avoids having contact with a medical person for whom I am just a cipher (and called by my wrong name).

  11. SIR – Is there the remotest chance that the BBC will support our country’s future trade negotiations with the EU?

    It has already started batting for the other side.

    I am sorry, but I detest the BBC.

    Les Nicks
    Exeter, Devon

    Why be sorry? Defenestrate the lot of them

    1. SIR – If only the BBC were advert-free (Letters, December 18). Many of us in the building trades listen to the radio for eight or 10 hours a day and have to put up with the same adverts over and over again.

      The fact that the ads are all for its own products make it no less annoying.

      R J P Line
      Brighton, East Sussex

      3. My experience is that chaps in the building trade do NOT “listen” to the radio,.

        They simply have the damned thing switched on. To the fury of their clients.

      1. Yo Aeneas

        May I fiddle

        Several Many of those who appear on the BBC have been batting for the other side for years.

        1. In 1940 we held people like that in jail/internmennt – I’d like to see a few interned until the negotiations are complete.

  12. SIR – Will it ever dawn on Tony Blair, the former prime minister, that his persistence in championing a “second referendum” may have contributed to Labour’s poor showing in the general election?

    Probably not, even when he considers the Sedgefield result.

    Philip Fawkes

    Lyndhurst, Hampshire

    1. Not forgetting John Major who urged the public to vote against Tory candidates in general election. Stupid boy!

      3. Is that a ferret down his trousers? It doesn’t look too happy to be there and neither would I.

  14. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/opinion/2019/12/18/TELEMMGLPICT000211747045_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=1240
    A view of St John’s College in Cambridge, where Heather Hancock, who currently chairs the Food Standards Agency, will take up post as Master next October

    Idiots. That’s Clare College.

    Interesting career path from the Food Standards Agency to Master of St John’s. Much like the spectacularly incompetent Dame Sally Davies’ trajectory from Chief Medical Officer for England to Master of Trinity, Cambridge.

    1. Or the common purpose bint who turned from Chief Nurse into the Bishop of London in 12 years.

    3. Sally Davies, who stood in the streets of Salisbury to tell us that the NHS was leading the fight against Russian terrorism.

  15. Usual comment left in vain on the Potter’s Herbal website:

    Potter’s was an old Wigan company, who for 200 years specialised in herbal remedies. They published an encylopaedia on it, and had a vast knowledge of understanding of the subject. Their ‘Vegetable Cough Remover’ had 14 active ingredients, and was the only cough medicine that has ever worked for me.

    First off, Potter’s removed four of their active ingredients in order to save money. Then, they finally gave up the struggle and agreed to be taken over by a global corporate. These days, all the active ingredients have been removed, and they trade just on brand image. Vegetable Cough Remover has been discontinued.

    Because of the dislike of our London establishment for good old Northern companies, they conspired with lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry (the purveyors of the cough medicines that do not work, but need to sell to keep up bonuses for the directors) to force Potter’s to register every one of their herbal ingredients, paying full whack for consultancy packages and fees to the central regulators at rates negotiated by the lobby (preferential rates for influential corporations, but punitive rates for small competitors).

    My query):

    “Any news about bringing back Potter’s Vegetable Cough Remover?

    It is the only cough remedy that has ever worked. I had bronchial pneumonia a year ago, and a persistent plegmmy cough ever since, which is not clearing with any other product. Over the last few days, I have been singing in a series of concerts at Stanbrook Abbey, but broke down several times with a tickly cough, and once had to walk off the stage to cough away the plegm. Before the regulations first removed the active ingredients, and then the cough remover was discontinued by the takeover company, I could have sorted this out very easily.”

    My GP’s response was to give me a 5-day course of penicillin and never mind that antibiotics are useless against a virus – it gets me out of the surgery within the ten minutes allotted.

    More money for the NHS? Christmas for finance consultants methinks!

          2. That occurred to me too, after an hour or so. Bit slow, I run on solar power these days, and there’s bugger-all sunlight.

  16. Polio vaccination campaign halted again in Pakistan as gunmen kill two. 18 DECEMBER 2019.

    There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s killings, but the campaign to eradicate the crippling virus from Pakistan has long faced violent opposition from militant extremists who accused it of being a Western plot.

    Earlier this month a female polio health worker was shot dead in Bannu district.

    This paranoia unlike the recent antivax movement in the west is religiously inspired. It serves as an example of how in the Islamic world the most innocent and well-meant activities in every sphere will be taken over by extremists as an excuse to promulgate their ideology. It must also be remembered that it is no longer confined to Pakistan.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/polio-vaccination-campaign-halted-pakistan-gunmen-kill-two/

      1. During the 1950s there was an outbreak of polio in Brightlingsea.
        All children from the town were banned for a fortnight.
        I was just soooo jealous of them. Two weeks without school; fourteen days to doss around at home.
        Children are heartless little s0ds.

        2. Late 1950s my aunt from Newbiggin gave birth to her third child after having two others in 1950 and 1951. She somehow came into contact with polio in hospital and almost died as a result. A permanent legacy was that after a long illness bedbound she had to wear a caliper for the rest of her life to help her walk only with great difficulty and spent the last few years in a wheelchair before dying in 2011.

          A horrible, horrible disease.

          1. There was a woman in Colchester who spent her life in an iron lung.
            Student nurses would be trooped round to her adapted bungalow as part of their training.
            Sadly, the patient was anything but patient – in fact, despite trying very hard to be compassionate, the students found her to be an unpleasant person. Their comments on returning to classroom led to the visits being stopped.

    2. Vaccination has eliminated polio in almost all countries in the world. Only three countries still officially have polio circulating in the population: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. However, Syria, which was polio-free for 14 years, was re-infected with the virus from Pakistan.

      Vaccine Knowledge Project

  17. It’s weird how you can almost hear a pin drop from the great and the good when another grooming gang comes to trial.

    1. Police officer among 16 men charged in connection with historical child sexual exploitation in Halifax

    4. Morning B,
      The three monkey mode goes into top gear, other occasions for a great many is when entering a polling booth.
      Fear of being Tommy Robinsoned is
      pretty strong also, plus not forgetting
      PC / Appeasement is a dangerous
      sheltering umbrella, think rotherham
      16 plus year cover up.

  18. Unrising sun: the polar nights of Murmansk – in pictures. 19 December 2019.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a97d09bfe29945e3544e88b27a6e6eba15b36ab4e0c00f816f785ee5b32ff4da.jpg

    A woman waits for her bus in the warmth of a pharmacy.

    There are some beautiful pictures of Murmansk here. One would suspect that its inhabitants are somewhat sceptical of Global Warming!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2019/dec/19/unrising-sun-the-polar-nights-of-murmansk-in-pictures

    2. Smashing pictures.

      Sure puts our moans and groans in perspective.

      P.S. I wonder if they have an Iceland store.

  19. Unrising sun: the polar nights of Murmansk – in pictures. 19 December 2019.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a97d09bfe29945e3544e88b27a6e6eba15b36ab4e0c00f816f785ee5b32ff4da.jpg

    A woman waits for her bus in the warmth of a pharmacy.

    There are some beautiful pictures of Murmansk here. One would suspect that its inhabitants are somewhat sceptical of Global Warming!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2019/dec/19/unrising-sun-the-polar-nights-of-murmansk-in-pictures

  20. Donald Trump is impeached by House of Representatives in historic vote. Thu 19 Dec 2019.

    Trump became the third president to be impeached in US history.

    After a full day of debate, the House voted 230-197 to approve a first article of impeachment charging Trump with abuse of power, with one “present” vote. A second article, charging Trump with obstruction of Congress, was approved 229-198.

    Can I just say here as a non-American that contrary to the pronouncements of the BBC and the Guardian Donald Trump has not been impeached any more than someone remanded in custody has been tried and convicted!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/18/trump-impeachment-house-vote-nancy-pelosi-latest

  21. For needy NoTTLers…

    The metro bubble’s bid to rebrand Blairite arch-Remainers as ‘moderates’ is breathtaking
    SHERELLE JACOBS – DAILY TELEGRAPH COLUMNIST – 19 DECEMBER 2019 • 6:00AM

    Labour’s responsibility-shirking centre-Left is just as retrograde as the Corbynite clique

    There are few more pitiful sights than the far-Left scuttling to keep the sacred flame of the Corbynista cult burning, in the debris of their historic defeat. Except, perhaps, the mutant rebirth of Remainers as “the moderates”, rising like a molting, two-headed phoenix from the ashes.

    The attempt by Britain’s retrograde political forces to reinvent themselves as forward-looking is quite something to behold. Teflon Tony has become Bold 2in1 Blair – whitewashing the Remainer rout by warning Labour itself not to “whitewash” the election result. This is, of course, centrist politician code for the urgent need to stage a cover up. Namely ensuring that there is no robust scrutiny of the Left’s disastrous move to back a second referendum, so that, instead, Jeremy Corbyn is scapegoated.

    Diagnosing the fall of the Red Wall from his pulpit in central London yesterday, Mr Blair accused his party of being “marooned on fantasy island” and warned that it “faces being replaced” unless it ditches its proto-Marxist orthodoxies. Naturally, liberal journalists were salivating so profusely in the audience that their write ups slicked effortlessly over the anti-Brexit elephant in the room.

    One almost feels sorry for the Corbynistas, as the London narrative – under the oleaginous hypnotism of Mr Blair – not so much shifts as slithers from Labour’s Brexit betrayal towards more comfortable BBC champagne socialist territory, namely, the far Left’s lack of economic credibility and the unique unpopularity of Steptoe.

    Labour Remainiacs who lost their seats are all too happy to help along this bogus theory. Take former Wakefield MP Mary Creagh. After waging a three-year guerrilla war against democracy – refusing to vote for Article 50 and then campaigning for it to be revoked – she has boasted about giving Jeremy Corbyn “the hairdryer treatment” as if she is a million-pound star manager let down by a bad player. Such are the delusions of grandeur of the Brexit debacle’s political Z-listers.

    What the centrists lack in humility, they fail to make up for in intellectual agility. Stuck on retropolitan loop, the technocrats are proving just as incapable of creative thought as the Trotskyites. Labour’s civil war is like watching a Discman trying to bash a Walkman to death, the Nineties in battle with the Eighties. The Left is doomed to live in the past, whoever triumphs.

    You can hear it in the strangled attempt by “moderate” leadership hopefuls to set out a vision. Not least that clearing of the throat in human form, the pompous and anxious Keir Starmer. The poor man has no words for what Labour should do next. Instead he mumbles tie-constricted progressivism. “There’s no victory without values” apparently; and it is “important not to oversteer” but instead be “bold and radical”.

    Even hot favourite Lisa Nandy – the centrist’s centrist, affiliated with neither the Blairites nor the Corbynites – offers little beyond runny-nosed Fabianism. In her opening leadership gambit, the daughter of Marxist intellectual Dipak Nandy whined that Parliament “reeks of privilege”. Her Blue(-blooded) Labour instincts were also on proud display in a recent Guardian column – in which she wrote off Brexit as the articulation of “anxiety and insecurity” and traced the “wakeup call” about the rise of the “far Right” in Brexitland back to the Ukip resurgence.

    That centre-Left politicians are just as blinkered as the Corbyn mob in their own way is only part of the problem. The Blairites are equally beholden to a backwards and eccentric support base. The latter is emotionally encapsulated by the likes of journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who has admitted the election shock caused her to “suddenly start crying in a shop”, and Hugh Grant who claims that Leavers have “destroyed a country”.

    The unhinged hyperbole of the Remainer grassroots is matched only by its clinical hypocrisy. In particular, those who usually love to virtue-signal about minority rights are in disgusted denial about the fact that their views are no longer mainstream.

    Hence the feverish exchange of bizarre stats by Lefties on social media: while viral graphs suggest the PM’s Brexit landslide somehow proves a majority support for Remain, other infographics demonstrate a Left-wing coalition would have won if Britain had the good sense to use the same voting system as the European Union.

    Understanding this visceral anti-democratic impulse is key to grasping the great paradox that will define the next chapter of British politics – the slightly baffling revulsion of centrist Blairites towards this centrist One Nation Tory government.

    The point is that, for all his proselytising when in office that the public should embrace that metaphysical force “change”, Mr Blair and his acolytes only favour top-down change; if it comes up from the bottom, they lambast it as “populism”. It is this witless tendency to control-freakery which makes the view that the “moderates” are the answer so absurd. It may be their last meal, but the Corbynistas will eat them for breakfast.

    2. Thank you.

      Frankly, does any normal person care two hoots about Liebour and its internal nightmares?

      1. No. They’re all so far up themselves.

        BTW have you seen that the A Allan chappie has been talking dirty again on BTL@DTletters? Everyone is so shocked that nobody has given him an upvote.

        “A Allan 19 Dec 2019 7:58AM
        @W Stevens @Norman Armitage @Paul Gregory

        Dunt.

        Haar.

        Stairheid rammy.

        And I love the US expression ‘get mediaeval on your ass’; doesn’t reward analysis, but you can picture what it means. “

      2. They still received over 10 million votes. They’ll reinvent themselves, carry on brainwashing children, and gain power at some point in the future. I’ll only be happy when they’re down to the Lib Dem level of irrelevance.

      4. Well gratifying as it is to see the marxist party so well rejected by its “tribal” voters, we should remember that democracy, our democracy, works best with opposition politics. An 80 seat majority for the tories… is it an endorsement of Bojo or a rejection of Corbyn? What matters is what Bojo does with his 80 seat majority and the problem is that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
        He has nothing to fear for the next 5 yeras, probably 10 years from labour. That means that he is effectively unaccountable and my be inclined to do what the last several PMs have done which is to treat government as a personal fiefdom accountable only to themselves.
        Now it may help get Brexit done properly, though I have my doubts because Boris doesn’t convince me as a brexiteer. I suspect it was simply the best way for him to get where he is, into number 10.

        What we really truely need is a credible electable opposition party to keep him honest.

        Sadly, though the electorate have rejected Corbyn and his policies, the party hasn’t and the front runner seems to be a Corbynista. This doesn’t bode well. It suggests that labour will require at elast a decade perhaps more to become credible again and only if that is what they attempt to do. At the moment they seem to want to blame everyone but themselves , and of course, Corbyn for being Corbyn and yet he is no different now to when they elected him.
        So what i want to see is a serious credible opposition party and labour don’t seem up for the job. They seem intent on following the Lib dems into obscurity. It could be worse, Blair might slither back into the fray…. but maybe even Bliar would be better than a corbynista… he at least has or had some credibility as an election winner. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want them to actiually win an election, just look likely enough to do so as to make Bojo pay more than lip service to what the electorate wants.

        Of course, the other option is for the Reform Party to regrow itself .

  22. Caroline Flint could have beaten Boris. 21 December 2019.

    The problem for Labour is that it has long been on a dogged march away from its supporter base, a process only exacerbated, rather than begun, by Momentum’s control of the party and Corbyn’s stewardship. It is now in a position where it actively despises the core values of the people it was set up to represent, thinking them regressive as opposed to progressive. And so it is left to fight for electoral territory among a more metropolitan and affluent class, vying with the Lib Dems and the Greens and even the socially liberal Tories. There are not enough votes there to go around.

    At the moment Labour can depend on the votes only of students, who are sometimes remiss in turning up at polling booths. The group who have been most likely to vote Labour in recent years are Muslims (85 per cent did so last time), but for how much longer will Labour be able to take the Muslim vote for granted? A community which is even more conservative, socially, than the white working class? Look at the largely Muslim protests outside those schools in Birmingham, the fury that their children should be indoctrinated with fashionable beliefs in gay and transgender rights. My suspicion is that the Muslim vote will slowly turn away from Labour too. The party will be left with a few hipsters in London and, of course, the kidz.

    Morning everyone. Rod doesn’t actually say in so many words but what he is prophesying here is the end of the Labour Party.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/caroline-flint-could-have-beaten-boris/

    1. When they get sufficient numbers, the Muslims will form their own political party. I doubt they’ll vote Tory.
      And the 18-40 ave group vote overwhelmingly for Labour, and have been so indoctrinated that I don’t see many changing their minds. That’s where Labour’s future lies.

      1. When they get sufficient numbers, the Muslims will form their own political party.

        When politics becomes based on religion (and especially that ‘religion’) then we’re in trouble.

          2. To underline your point…

            “When religion and politics travel
            in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.
            Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put
            aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show
            itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

            Frank Herbert. Dune.

            He was describing a fanatical desert tribe.

            Dune was published in 1965.

    2. Muslims are densely enough packed to easily form a new party and do an SNP-type breakthrough in a number of urban constituencies.

    3. 85% of Muslims? Tut, tut, they’ve been wasting their money on the Rashid Vote Printing Company.
      That figure should be 185%.

      1. Morning Bill.

        I thought to write …the end of the Labour Party as we have known it, but it seemed cinematically clichéd and I assumed that Nottlers would know it anyway!

  26. Calloo callay. My keyboard problems have just been solved by my indoor staff.

    For months I have been unable to cut ‘n paste or get the € sign or any of the shortcuts with the CTRL key, and have had to devise laborious ways and means.

    In a trice, the MR has sorted it. An old keyboard; an old mouse – both with coloured plugs (remember them?) and a USB adapter. BRILLIANT!!

    Almost worth being married….

      1. It’s OK, OLT. I showed her my post – she larfed and cuffed me enthusiastically. I am just back from the doctor.

    2. There was a similar case in Canada where the judge ruled that even if you could prove scientifically that a man cannot be a woman, that is not how the law will view the matter. So we are back to burning those who think that the earth goes round the sun etc. We have reached a state where judges are declaring what reality is, but worst of all, you may not disagree with those judgements. Just wait until we get a substantial number of slammers in the judiciary. What big Al says, big Al will get in law.

        1. Ask those rascally peregrinating types who have a liking for the churches and old buildings of this land: they perform that miracle on a regular basis.

      2. I honestly believe that lawfare is being used as the key to unlock the protections surrounding freedom of speech and ultimately democracy itself.

        We are seeing such actions being taken all over the world to stifle any form of dissent from the politically correct, and a refusal even to listen to opposite views. Trump’s impeachment is a good example. He is being hunted down for his impertinence in beating Hillary and his politics, not his actions.

        Another good example is the way anyone who stands up against unfettered diversity through immigration is vilified as a racist. Look at how the State/EU tramples down dissenting voices, even when the evidence is clear to see that integration and harmony as promised just is not happening.

      3. Morning K,
        Anything said in an argumentative manner regarding islamic ideology is
        considered to be anti
        PC / Appeasement & will be met by a person being
        “Tommy Robinsoned”

    4. “Non induetur mulier veste virili nec vir utetur veste feminea
      abominabilis enim apud Deum est qui facit haec”
      — Deut. 22:5

  29. Iain Dale in the DT:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/18/bbc-trapped-remainer-london-bubble-making/

    “The BBC is trapped in a Remainer London bubble of its own making

    ‘From my experience, about 85 per cent of the BBC news department voted Remain and they’ve created an echo chamber for themselves’

    Stuffed full of middle-class liberals, it’s broadcasting a view of the country most of us don’t recognise

    Adapt or die” is a maxim the BBC would do well to adopt if it is to survive the coming years. Following its questionable coverage of the general election, it is going through one of its occasional periods of introspection, where it feels under attack from politicians from all sides. Instead of complaining about it or piously intoning the value of the licence fee, however, it needs to open its eyes to the scale of its detachment from Britain today.

    For 20 years, the BBC has been told, even by many of its stars, that it is too biased towards the London liberal elites. Andrew Marr was the first to break cover when he admitted that although the BBC might not have a party political bias, it certainly had a “liberal” one.

    Peter Sissons, in his memoirs, railed against the BBC for its addiction to employing producers who had a single world view – one that didn’t include any understanding of free markets, borders or anything which might have even a slight conservative tinge to it. Lately, John Humphrys has joined the fray.

    The problem reached its zenith after Brexit. Like most London middle-class liberals, the BBC couldn’t understand why 17.4 million had voted to leave the EU. But then it has never seemed to make any attempt to do so. After the referendum, it panicked, apparently believing that the Leave vote was a consequence of its failure to dispel politicians’ “lies” or “populism”.

    Thus for the last three years, it has gladly wheeled out its “Reality Check” fact-checkers to pick holes in the case for Brexit, deploying them only occasionally to question the case for Remain. Its ostensibly impartial presenters, meanwhile, feel the need to stand in judgment over the argument, determining what is “true” as if viewers were incapable of making up their own minds.

    But implicit bias is everywhere. When the BBC puts together panels for its shows, for example, it is rare they contain a majority of Brexiteers. Many is the time I have been outnumbered two or even three to one. And on the one occasion there was a 3-3 balance on Question Time, the Remainers were allowed to dominate the discussion to such an extent that in an hour-long programme, the three Leavers, including your humble servant, got all of 15 minutes between us.

    The sycophantic coverage given to “People’s Vote” campaigners (even the use of that absurd moniker to describe people who want to reverse the original people’s vote) when compared to the “look down your nose and sniff” tone the BBC adopts when questioning Brexiteers has been readily apparent to anyone who isn’t aligned to the Remain cause. One of the big stories of the last week is that the campaign for a second referendum is effectively dead. Have you heard that reflected on the BBC in the last week? Me neither.

    Then there is the election. From my experience, about 85 per cent of the BBC news department voted Remain and they’ve created an echo chamber for themselves. Why else did they appear so shocked at Labour Leave seats voting Tory in such numbers last week? Had they made even a cursory effort to talk to these voters instead of subliminally ridiculing them or assuming they had all given up on Brexit, perhaps that air of surprise would not have been so stark.

    And why did the post-election Question Time take place in a London borough which saw the only Labour gain in the country? The story of this election wasn’t in liberal Wandsworth – it was in Workington and Wakefield. The audience was probably the most anti-Tory they’ve had this year on a day when the Conservatives had won an emphatic victory. The BBC is broadcasting a view of the country that most of us do not recognise.

    The dominant mentality in the BBC is not necessarily pro-Labour, but its assumptions are those of middle-class liberals. Look at its coverage of poverty. Judging by its output, anyone would think that Britain is a country solely of billionaires and the very poor: the interests of the majority in the middle are rarely taken into account.

    On food banks, the BBC makes out as if they are a peculiarly British phenomenon, forced on people by a wicked Tory Government. There are food banks in virtually every country in Europe, but you won’t see that pointed out by BBC producers whose middle-class guilt complex permeates every minute of their output.

    Suggest that it’s capitalism that has lifted poor people all over the world out of poverty and it’s a quick, “Sorry Mr Dale, we don’t think that particular documentary idea is right for our audience.” Why? Because they commission programmes for “people like us”. Perish the thought that the kind of person in Bassetlaw who voted Tory last week should be catered for.

    Does the BBC think those of us on the Right haven’t noticed? No minister has appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme this week and that boycott looks likely to continue. Such is the frustration with a programme that seemingly relishes a barney over Brexit or obsessive analysis of niche subjects of interest only to liberal urban types rather than a proper examination of policies which affect real people, No 10 has decided enough is enough.

    The Tories won’t be missing much. If the PM does a series of interviews with a dozen or so local radio stations, he can reach Mr & Mrs Normal in a way the Today programme never can. In this multi-channel world, no one programme has an entitlement any longer. There are other outlets to go to. Yet BBC shows continue to think as they did in the three channel era.

    On my LBC show I’ve been talking to real voters for the last two years. You pick up trends quickly. I realised the flaws in the implementation of universal credit when three grown men in a row broke down in tears during a phone-in. The BBC, however, has been stuck in its bubble, incapable of looking beyond the narrow horizons of the London middle classes.

    It cannot afford to continue the way it is. The media landscape is shifting beneath its feet, and viewers and listeners will not put up with this behaviour indefinitely. Will it adapt to the times and realise the scale of its failures? Might it even be proactive and put forward its own proposals to replace the outdated licence fee, before the Government gets there first? I won’t hold my breath.”

    2. I’m fed up with hearing David Shukman banging on about “climate change” on every news bulletin.

  30. Lady Hale’s Christmas diary (as told to Quentin Letts)
    Quentin Letts
    https://spectator.imgix.net/content/uploads/2019/12/diary_quentin_heath.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=820&h=550

    They say I must retire next month when I turn 75. Irritating. I have been a member of the Supreme Court since 2009 but its president — a term I do like — only since 2017. There is still much to be done. Julian, my current spouse, indicates he has little desire to have me under his heels at home. I would merely get in the way of his dusting and the Tupperware parties he holds every month with other SW1 house-husbands. Jolyon Maugham QC — a slightly familiar young man, but I am told he has the right views — comes to see me. He proposes challenging the legality of my compulsory retirement, perhaps using the Scottish courts. We could ‘crowd-fund’ the costs, he says. I doubt there are that many fools in the world. ‘You’d be surprised,’ says Mr Maugham. He feels we could pursue the case all the way to the top, i.e. to the Supreme Court. Given tiresome levels of press scrutiny I suppose I might have to recuse myself from any such judgment. Could I rely on my fellow justices to reach the right decision without my helping hand?

    As I once told Barack Obama (I think he was grateful for my advice), a president must be a leader, a strategist and a disciplinarian. At October’s state opening of parliament, one of my colleagues sauntered into the House of Lords with hand in pocket. ‘Wilson!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is not a queue for the bookmaker’s!’ I told him I would sew up his trouser pockets if we had a repeat of that sort of thing.

    Julian points out that I never complain when Lord Pannick QC plunges a hand into his pocket while developing a case before us. Ridiculous. I can hardly say ‘Don’t, Pannick!’ during a Supreme Court hearing. One does not wish to be caricatured as Corporal ‘Jonesy’ Jones.

    Alan rings. My heart goes pit-a-pat. I ask him to hold the line because Julian is outside my study in his pinny, making a din with the Dyson. I close the door and now I can hear Alan’s ravishing voice. A masterly timbre is only appropriate for the principal of Lady Margaret Hall. Alan recently invited me to be one of the college’s visiting fellows. The others include Katie Price, Russell Brand and a Mr Gary Lineker, who used to play association football. I am not sure I have ever met anyone called Gary but there is a first time for everything. Alan says he has the most beautiful thighs. Gary, that is. I suspect Alan’s thighs are no less remarkable.

    One annual chore is organising the Supreme Court’s Christmas jolly. ‘Jolly’ is not an entirely accurate word — I don’t know if you have ever met my fellow justice Lord Carnwath — but ‘outing’ has its difficulties and ‘knees-up’ is unsuitable given the decrepitude of some of them. Anyway: where to go for our party? Most of them like French cuisine but, with the Brexit horrors, this is ruled impolitic. The men hope for the Garrick Club but I cannot abide that chauvinist establishment. Being chased round the bar by Derry Irvine shouting ‘Come to me, lassie’ with a fistful of mistletoe is not my idea of fun. One of our interns says that we should visit a food bank and dine there, but this meets with long faces in the robing room. I finally alight on a suggestion from the Attorney General. He recommends an establishment called McDonald’s — a Scots restaurant, it seems. The Attorney says something about ‘good game, good game’ and exhorts me to ask for its venison, ‘even if the staff say it is not available — they do that to keep the good stuff for their regulars’. McDonald’s it is, then. I am told there is no need to book because the service is so efficient. I am grateful to Geoffrey. It is good of him not to hold a grudge after that prorogation judgment.

    Julian has taken up knitting and is making me a Christmas bobble hat with a pattern saying ‘11-nil’, to mark our comprehensive spanking of Boris Johnson’s ‘government’. I like hats. Julian’s homemade Christmas crackers always contain paper hats and he sometimes makes them resemble those black caps worn by judges in the good old days when we could send the lower orders to the gallows. One of the many good things about the Supreme Court — constitutional heft, European harmonisation, etc. — is that I get to wear a flat squashy hat at ceremonial occasions. My daughter says it looks like a lardy cake, which is something the poor eat on Saturday mornings. Very bad for their waistlines, no doubt.

    Kenneth Clarke pops in for one of his moans. I have not known many Conservatives but as I say to Kenneth, he is not really a proper (i.e. improper) right-winger. He also happens to be a lawyer, though not, I fear, a very hygienic one. He arrives at the door with muddy shoes and I am obliged to remind him of our house rules. We soon have his Hush Puppies covered in our habitual prophylactic: a pair of shower caps. (One of the consolations of staying in three-star hotels, as judges nowadays must, is the regular supply of free shower caps.)

    Sir Keir Starmer — little Keir, such a dear — has asked us to his New Year fancy-dress party. Le tout Holborn will be there. Hilary Benn is going to be a flowerpot man, Diane Abbott is coming as Pierre Trudeau, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are coming as the Blacks and Carole Cadwalladr has an Eliot Ness costume. Alan thinks I should go as Spider-Woman, after that famous brooch I wore, but at present I intend to go as ‘Brenda from Bristol’. I have been listening to The Archers to perfect the accent.

    It should be Justin, not Pierre, Trudeau

    1. I am SOOO looking forward to this woman being taken into custody by the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army…..

  32. An apparently failed comment on the Daily Mail:-

    Right, let me see if I have this correct. PotUS has credible evidence that a senior politician and his son are up to their eyeballs in corrupt practices in The Ukraine, a country known to have a government steeped in corruption, and authorises an investigation which, perhaps due to the Ukraine’s own corruption, has to use “unorthodox” measures. Democrat outrage at those unorthodox measures goes off the scale whilst the original corruption BY THEIR OWN POLITICIAN goes ignored, whilst their outrage inspires them to Impeach the President. And they expect to win next year’s Presidential Election?

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7808321/

    2. ” Celebrities ” rejoicing !! (I’ve even heard of two of them. They woud have been over the moon if Corbyn had won over here.

    2. Just imagine if it got loose and multiplied exponentially, gorging on all plastics, out of control. Aircraft falling from the sky, motorways full of abandoned vehicles and houses with no power. That would please the Greta Doomsayer.

    2. “Anti-Trump Comedian Michelle Wolf Says Having Her Unborn Baby Killed Made Her Feel ‘Powerful’ Like ‘God’” – Good God above. There’s no comment I can make that represents my opinion of that statement, none whatever.

        1. My thoughts, Bill – it would have to be the only way but even so, I wouldn’t wish to contribute my lineage to that – seemingly, it didn’t want it, preferring murder.

    2. Token for the many. It is beyond belief that there were not hundreds of guilty officers and social workers, care home staff, participating, or getting paid, or condoning, or pretending not to know. (In my opinion.)

      1. Afternoon HP,
        IMO millions,after what the JAY report revealed & regarding mass uncontrolled immigration
        parties.
        All the toxic trio have parity with the odious findings, tongues nailed to tables inclusive.

    2. What goes on in these balnk spaces… and it isn’t just me, I see, that has this problem. Is it Disqus? Windows? Firefox?…… Putin?

      1. Things from Twitter take a while to load. If you have a slow connection you might not be able to see them at all.

        1. Twitter? Oh then I anot missing anything except that twitter is probably also on the labour parties “dog eat my homework” list of excuses.

      2. If you use firefox(as I do) you need to go to the top of the page to the red roundel next to your username click on it and select “hide Media”
        Tweets will then appear

        1. Red roundel? User name? You don’t think i let these programs know who I am, do you? But maybe Adblocker is doing something (well I know it is… it annoys all sorts of other sites…. and the EU)

    3. I love the replies under that mad woman’s comments. This one had 1,900 likes:

      “White privilege is…”

      *shuffles deck and pulls a card*

      “Being able to nonchalantly walk in the rain.”

    1. Ironic that labour have blamed just about everyone and every organisation for their defeat except, and one of the only justifiable excuses, Bliar for having slithered out into the daylight and refusing to go back again. Perhaps they fear him more than they hate him? DO please tell me he won’t, in order to restore the party, come permanently into the daylight and resume his UK political career.

      One thing we really need these days is a credible electable opposition party or Boris will be like a kid in a sweetshop.

    2. The little basket was the very picture of happiness as he walked from the Commons to the Lords this morning.

    1. Are the UK prison authorities studying this case very carefully in order to pick up a few tips for when Tommy Robinson is next in gaol?

    1. Another “benefit” from the extensions to the negotiations over Brexit.

      It should give a flavour of how the EU will treat us if we sign up to the WA & PD.

    2. What did we ever expect? The UK representative UK Fisheries Minister George Eustice was there, and was not thrown out of the meeting for screaming, shouting and offering violence.
      Fergus Ewing of the Scottish Government was also there, but he’d be offering them more, much more, as much as they’d like, in an attempt to curry favour for a future independent Scotland.
      It was a lost opportunity to lay down a marker for the future. It certainly did. It said loudly and clearly, that UK fisheries are yours for the asking!

    3. Last straw on the camel’s back?

      The American word for someone whom you can take in and exploit is a ‘patsy’.

      Could this be just the incentive to push Johnson into a WTO Brexit?

      Is Johnson a patsy or is he not? This event may tell us.

        1. Well, there will be any number of unused British trawlers available to be pressed into service.

      2. No. The UK Government and the Scottish Government representatives were present when these cuts to the UK quota were”agreed”.
        It is fairly obvious that all UK fishing will be handed over to the EU as part of trade”negotiations” in the next two years. EU countries now get most of the fish in the UK EEZ. Nothing has been done to prepare to look after our fish when the EEZ “returns to our control”. That is rather a clear indicator of the shape of things to come.
        It would of course be quite iniquitous to suddenly deprive French, Spanish, Danish, Lithuanian, etc, fishermen of the right to catch British fish, sell our fish, process our fish and make lots of money from our fish. Why, that would be just like what happened to UK fisherman at least twice. We cannot have that, can we?

    1. “Work will be taken forward to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act – which would enable the prime minister to call an election without the consent of MPs”

    3. Work will be taken forward to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act –
      which would enable the prime minister to call an election without the
      consent of MPs

    4. You’re mistaken, Bill. See Tony’s post below. (And to confirm it, I watched the entire speech earlier and actually cheered when she announced that Her Government planned to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.)

      1. I know, I know, Harry. I have already said so several times.

        I did NOT listen – I relied on the online press – which made no reference to either matter. Barstewards. Still whinging on…

        1. And I have told you more than once, that my name is Elsie and Mr Lime (Harry) is the Master I work and skivvy for! Now we are even!

          :-))

    3. Isn’t Sir ed a taboo figure with the millennials, SJWs and lefties these days because of the associated patriotism… i.e. slavery and empire and all things bad and nasty? SO much so that the ever impartial BBC did try to drop his works form the Henry WoodsBBC Proms (and just when did the Beeb decide to paint over sir Henry and why?)

    1. Yet almost every sound bite etc seems now to be talking about 2021…. and not just the trade talks but our exit…. if we don’;t get a trade deal we’ll leave in 2021 with the WTO deal… not “if we don’t get a deal then we’ll trade on Wto temrs” but we’ll leave on those terms.

  50. Which kind Nottler will post this in full?

    At a crucial crossroads in Britain’s history, the BBC got it wrong – thank God the people got it right

    ALLISON PEARSON

    “How did we all get it so wrong?” a mournful Andrew Marr asked Huw Edwards on the morning of Friday 13th. Hang on a minute, who did Marr mean by “we”?

    The BBC certainly had a thousand ostrich eggs splattered on its face. Others were not so ready to believe that a hung parliament and a Prime Minister Corbyn (furiously waves garlic and crucifix) were a serious possibility. Last Thursday morning, I’d guessed a Tory majority of 42. Some gut instinct was telling me Boris could get a landslide, but hourly talking up of Labour’s prospects by the BBC and Sky News chipped away at my confidence.

    No wonder, when the historic exit poll was released at 10pm, that many…

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/17/crucial-crossroads-britains-history-bbc-got-wrong-thank-god/

    PS Allison Pearson appears in Christmas University Challenge next Monday, representing Clare College, Cambridge.

    1. In perhaps the cruelest of ironies Labour are blaming the media in general and the BBC in particular for their failure. It makes your heart sing.

    2. Having succumbed to the DT current 3 month bargain offer:
      ”
      How did we all get it so wrong?” a mournful Andrew Marr asked Huw Edwards
      on the morning of Friday 13th. Hang on a minute, who did Marr mean by
      “we”?

      The BBC certainly had a thousand ostrich eggs splattered on its face.
      Others were not so ready to believe that a hung parliament and a Prime
      Minister Corbyn (furiously waves garlic and crucifix) were a
      serious possibility. Last Thursday morning, I’d guessed a Tory majority
      of 42. Some gut instinct was telling me Boris could get a landslide,
      but hourly talking up of Labour’s prospects by the BBC and Sky News
      chipped away at my confidence.

      No wonder, when the historic exit poll was
      released at 10pm, that many of us practically exploded with relief. Who
      says multiple orgasms are off the menu for the over-fifties? One reader
      told me he would have to get a plasterer in; so high was his jump for
      joy that his head smashed the ceiling. The BBC had
      us scared, and quite unnecessarily. Worse than that, at a crucial
      crossroads in Britain’s history, our national broadcaster revealed that
      it barely knew the nation at all.

      Angry allegations of bias, from both sides, have flooded in. Boris
      has hinted that non-payment of the licence fee might be decriminalised.
      Huw Edwards, who ably led the BBC’s coverage on election night, hit back
      at the “toxic cynicism”. “You realise yet again that the real purpose
      of many of the attacks,” he said, “is to undermine trust in institutions
      which have been sources of stability over many decades.”

      It
      genuinely doesn’t seem to occur to Huw that it is the institutions
      themselves that could be responsible for undermining trust. I’ve always
      defended the BBC, and admired much of its output, but for the past five
      weeks it was not making forecasts, it was making wishcasts.

      Jeremy Corbyn, a Trotskyist who presented a clear danger to our
      security, was stroked like a pet chinchilla while Boris was treated as
      marginally less savoury than a child molester. An excoriating Andrew
      Neil interview left a pile of smoking old bones where the Labour leader
      had been; otherwise the presentation of him was foolishly fond.
      Meanwhile, BBC bulletins led with angry Gotcha! stories like the one
      about the Prime Minister failing to respond adequately to a photograph
      of a child on a hospital floor. That wasn’t the most important news item
      of the day; it was spite masquerading as compassion.

      The BBC
      Charter has a requirement of impartiality. But, when you come down to
      it, it’s not really a question of the corporation being biased in favour
      of Labour. This general election was the final battle in the bloody,
      long, drawn-out Brexit War and the BBC has effectively been Remainer
      High Command since June 2016 when the British people shocked the
      establishment by voting to reject the EU.

      So
      ingrained is what the veteran presenter John Humphrys calls the BBC’s
      “institutional liberal bias” that no one thought to question the wisdom
      of using a publicly-funded broadcaster to bombard 17.4 million voters
      with anti-Brexit propaganda. Europe Editor Katya Adler was forever
      telling us what the EU wanted. How about what British people want?
      Globalist BBC types would probably call that “populist nationalism”,
      darlings.

      Humphrys says that BBC bosses were “devastated” by the victory of the
      Leave campaign. He likened their expressions to a football fan whose
      team just missed a penalty. “I’m not sure the BBC as a whole ever quite
      had a real grasp of what was going on in Europe, or of what people in
      this country thought about it.”

      The BBC
      prides itself on “diversity” but it is embarrassingly bad at
      representing the views of millions of normal people. Sure, it loves a
      regional accent, but any working-class presenter must be fully signed up
      to the woke values and metropolitan outlook of their liberal
      superiors.

      Imagine the dismay and astonishment viewers felt when they watched BBC1’s Question Time last
      Friday, following Boris’s magnificent victory, only to find the usual
      panel of doomsters. “Does anybody here want to defend Boris Johnson?”
      asked Fiona Bruce. A lonely hand went up. “I didn’t vote for him but…”

      For crying out loud! Hundreds of thousands of Labour voters had just switched the allegiance of generations for Boris and Question Time couldn’t
      even find one person to admit they’d voted for him? Why not take
      Question Time to Workington or Wrexham where people were bubbling over
      with excitement at this redrawing of the political map? “Why should I
      pay a tax for this biased rubbish?” fumed one Tory viewer, speaking for
      the frustrated millions.

      Like the Labour party, the BBC has displayed remarkable contempt for
      the normal person and is now running out of time to save itself. That
      brand of po-faced, liberal sanctimoniousness is finished. A friend from
      South Wales, who voted Tory, jokes about being patronised by people who
      wouldn’t know a working-class person if they bopped them on the nose.
      “They say I live in a pocket of social deprivation,” she laughs. “So
      bloody what? We know how to enjoy our lives. F**ck ‘em!”

      Unlike Emily Thornberry
      and her snotty ilk, working class people tend to love their country.
      They don’t regard the Union Jack as akin to a Swastika. Asked by a
      reporter why she wouldn’t vote for Corbyn, one Geordie lady replied, “He
      disrespects the Queen.” Broadcasting House may be chock full of
      republicans, but normal people have huge respect for Her Majesty and
      they love Princess Diana’s boys and their beautiful little kids. Normal
      people like the military, with each region having a proud attachment to a
      regiment in which normal people’s sons and daughters serve. (The
      mastermind of this huge demographic shift, Dominic Cummings, had a
      paternal grandfather who served in the Durham Light Infantry)

      Normal
      people don’t believe that they live in a hateful, racist society, as
      they are informed they do on a daily basis by privately-educated BBC
      presenters and Corbynistas. According to the new, 2019 Eurobarometer on
      discrimination, when people were asked “How comfortable would you feel
      if your child fell in love with a black person?” the UK emerged as one
      of the most tolerant countries in the world.

      But we knew that, didn’t we? Not Andrew Marr’s “we”.
      I mean, the normal “we”. The Normals who live outside the metropolitan
      bubble and who haven’t succumbed to the deadly virtue-signalling virus
      which destroys that part of the brain where common sense and humour
      reside.

      Normal people might not be racist, but they’re concerned about
      immigration which has happened far too fast and put huge pressure on
      their public services, whatever the BBC news might say. It’s also
      depressed wages in their communities – ask their builder nephew! – and
      they’re counting on Boris to sort it out. Points-based system and better
      border control? Bring it on! Lest we forget that it is the
      Conservatives which just got the first gay Muslim into Parliament.
      Meanwhile, the Labour party, which thinks it can lecture us all, still
      hasn’t had a woman leader.

      Normal people aren’t the downtrodden victims of the Marxist
      imagination. They have aspirations for their families, every bit as much
      as shadow Cabinet ministers living in three-million-quid Georgian
      houses in Islington. They watch Kirsty and Phil and they plan to knock
      through and create a kitchen-diner on the back of the house. They use
      Ofsted ratings to help them find the best school for their kids. (Corbyn
      said he’d abolish Ofsted.) The Normals’ grandparents put their savings
      towards a small flat in Moraira, on the Med, last year, so that’s summer
      holidays for the whole extended family sorted. They love Ryanair
      because it gets them there cheaply and those who say you have to buy
      trees to offset your flight, well, sorry, but posh people take three
      holidays abroad a year.

      I don’t
      know about you, but my heart rose when I saw that bunch of new
      Conservative MPs leaving their normal homes in the North on Monday and
      heading to Westminster, their normal views and normal values packed
      tight in their pull-along cases. A star-struck Dehenna Davison, the
      first Tory to represent Bishop Auckland, marvelled at “all the famous
      faces”. Another bashful chap confessed it was “like starting big
      school”. Here they came, to set a rotten Parliament back on a decent
      course, these harbingers of hope, the smiley emissaries of the
      Normal.

      As for
      the BBC, yesterday they were still still wheeling out dismal, defeated
      MPs and banging on about the impossibility of Boris getting a trade deal
      with the EU by December 2020.

      Oh, do shut up. We’ve had enough of your wretched Remainer
      gloom. I feel prouder and more optimistic than I have in years. Have
      the grace to admit you lost the Brexit War, as most Labour voters in the
      country already have, and move on. If the BBC can’t capture the public
      mood then the public will rightly ask, why on earth are we paying for
      the BBC?

      “How did we all get it so wrong?” asked a mournful Andrew Marr on the
      morning of a stunning election victory. Put it another way, thank
      goodness the normal people got it so spectacularly right.

      Read Allison Pearson at telegraph.co.uk every Tuesday from 7pm”

      1. Afternoon J,
        By the same token who was at fault over the decades in allowing it to get so bad, and even on the 19 / 12 / 2019 a good deal of uncertainty is still out there.

        1. Could it have been the voters, ogga1? Could it have been, as Pretty Polly believes, Mr Auric Goldfinger?

          1. Afternoon EB,
            I would say most certainly it was the party first brigade, the keep in / keep out contingent turning these Isles over to a very dangerous
            alien breed all to satisfy their continuing voting mode.
            We are currently suffering the effects of that voting mode via the kids of rotherham, halifax,
            plus,plus,plus.

            EB, Goldfinger is make believe, mass uncontrolled immigration, condoning it via the ballot booth is fact.

      3. When the BBC imported a ‘Regional Accent’ to their Breakfast programme a few years ago, doing the Money slot I think, everyone remarked, many complained, about her ‘Regional Accent’ (she’s from Middlesborough, nominally in the same ‘region’ as me, but her accent is nothing, nothing like mine (hence the inverted commas around ‘Regional Accent’).

        Whatever next? A Working class lass from Middlesborough on the BBC News. How diverse and magnanamous of them.

        I’ll tell you whatever next – Middlesborough Lass and her Wife have just had a miracle of nature in the form of a bairn.

        That’s the BBC.

  51. The Queen’s Speech also included:

    Plans for an Australian-style points-based immigration system from 1 January 2021

    New visa to “ensure qualified doctors, nurses and health professionals have fast-track entry to the United Kingdom”

    Hospital car parking charges “will be removed for those in greatest need”

    A plan for “long-term reform” of social care

    Ministers will continue work to reform the Mental Health Act

    New sentencing laws to “ensure the most serious violent offenders, including terrorists, serve longer in custody”

    Those charged with knife possession will face “swift justice”

    New laws to “accelerate the delivery of gigabit capable broadband”

    The government will continue to take steps to meet net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050

    Work will be taken forward to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act – which would enable the prime minister to call an election without the consent of MPs
    Plans for a 50% business rate discount for small firms, including independent cinemas, music venues and pubs

    1. Why has 20211 crept into things?
      The promise was we’d be out by October 31st. This didn’t happen for understandable, even if unacceptable reasons but with an 80 seat majority we cannot now immediately leave, what is going on?
      Well, what doesn’t seem to have been quantified is whether the cross party remainer majority has taken a hit or is intact and whether Boris intends to use his majority to screw a better deal out of the EU. he should. but will he.
      Yet what we see is that the WTO is back on the table and unless we get a good trade deal, we will leave in 2021 on WTO terms. i.e. we will not have already left on whatever terms there are accepted by parliament… which seems to imply the WA Lite but might not.
      Now the European Cummunities act repeal did, apparently come into force on 31stoctober… that was the import of Stephen Barclay signing the commencement order but what that means is anyone’s guess because the only commentarty seems to be that in theory we might now be able to ignore the EU courts…. and that does seem to be what might happen and maybe explains why Lady thing with the spider Broach is warning about “adopting a US Style supreme court”…. what does she know that we don’t? I thought that was exactly what Blair created and it should be dumped as soon as possible. Boris could do this. The EU can hardly punish him if he does as they are trying to punish Poland.

      1. “Why has 20211 crept into things?”

        “the European Cummunities act”

        ” the only commentarty ”

        Thank you for your comments. Now all is klia.

  52. “Asian grooming gang is jailed for more than 22 years
    in total for sexually abusing 12-year-old girl who was ‘passed around
    like a piece of meat'”
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7809589/Members-grooming-gang-jailed-eight-years-sexually-abusing-12-year-old-girl.html#comments
    This sort of mealy mouthed headline really really winds me up on so many levels
    “Asian” The code for Paki-Moslems
    “Grooming” Horrible abuse and rape”
    “22 Years” In fact the ringleader got 8 years IN SPITE OF HAVING PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS FOR SIMILAR
    Keep it up,one of these days there’s going to be a father,brother or uncle around who’ll “sort” these scum properly
    Then get 40 years for a hate crime no doubt
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b3377ab8d462c61bc0dcdef9b79a1ac01632095acde9878113637985a9776924.jpg

    2. Oh for pity sake, we get this every year and when the customary mild wet summer comes, it’s all conveniently forgotten. During the scorcher of 1976 I recall we were told that henceforth this would happen every year and we’ve had what, maybe three or four really hot summers since, though none that went on for quite so long? Or is it my memory playing tricks?

        2. And then we had the best, hottest, driest summer for years. Summer 1975.

          Then an even hotter, drier one came along in 76 and everyone forgot the glory of 1975’s summer.

          1. I spent the four working weeks of that June at the GPO’s training school at Stone in Staffordshire. Air conditioning was one pedestal fan and open windows, although it was debatable whether opening the windows gained us any respite from the heat. Concentrating on the course material and lectures, by a poor lecturer, were hard going, especially after lunch.

      4. 2018 is the hottest one I can recall since 1976. It lasted three months and barely a drop of rain for weeks.

        1. Not to mention the cretinous fire-bugs who think that starting a fire is amusing.

          The loss of wildlife is dreadful, but it will be interesting to see how quickly the bush regrows. The natural environment has adapted to respond to such events and in some cases actually needs such catastropic conflagrations to regenerate.

        2. Usually dry lightning. I think I’ve mentioned before that most Australian native shrubs and trees have developed coping strategies over the aeons. Some need smoke and ash to germinate their seed, and trees like the gums have a layer of protection that allows the outer bark and leaves to be burnt off rapidly, with the inner trunk having buds ready to put out after the fires have flashed through.

    3. It’s The Three Stooges all over again. Larry Fine (with the two stand-out tufts of hair) is on the right, Moe Howard (with the fringe) has self-declared as a woman stands in the centre, and so the one on the left must be Curly Joe and has grown a (curly-haired) beard.

  57. Nothing in Queen’s Speech about stopping in its tracks the persecution of elderly servicemen.

    1. My Government will continue to invest in our gallant Armed Forces. My Government will honour the Armed Forces Covenant, which will be furtherincorporated into law, and the NATO commitment to spend at least two per cent of national income on defence. It will bring forward proposals to tackle vexatious claims that undermine our Armed Forces and will continue to seek better ways of dealing with legacy issues that provide better outcomes for victims and survivors.

      https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/queens-speech-december-2019

        1. As my legally qualified friend will observe, there is an awful lot of wiggle-room in the statement.

      1. Not when I first looked. I expect they have caught on now – several hours later.

        I scanned the first reports and was sorely disappointed at the two omissions. Now I see they are there.

        Well, we’ll see whether Johnson is true to his word.

  58. Some good comments BTL…[and pleeeze don’t be a pedant getting on your high horse about the bracketed segment]

    This Queen’s Speech shows Vote Leave has taken back even more control
    JOE ARMITAGE – PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE EXPERT – 19 DECEMBER 2019 • 10:16AM

    The use of counterfactuals in political discourse can lead to a myriad of butterfly effects. If Ed Miliband hadn’t run against his brother in the 2010 Labour leadership election then David Cameron might not have won the 2015 election. And if former Labour MP Eric Joyce hadn’t resigned his seat over a bar fight – which gave rise to a dispute over the rigging of candidate selection processes – then the changes to Labour’s leadership rules allowing Jeremy Corbyn to win might never have been made.

    Equally, if Michael Gove hadn’t derailed Boris Johnson’s leadership bid in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, it is likely that Theresa May would not have squandered the last three years through indecision and political miscalculation.

    [Her steadfast efforts to negotiate the withdrawal agreement are commendable but agreeing to an arrangement that kept the entire UK firmly inside the EU’s regulatory strictures with no unilateral right to exit them] demonstrated her failure to diagnose why people voted Leave. The new deal’s arrangements for Northern Ireland are far from perfect but at least they involve a democratic consent mechanism – thereby safeguarding sovereignty – and do not apply to the entire UK.

    The Queen’s Speech today – and the overwhelming election victory for Boris Johnson allowing it to happen – signals the end of stasis in British politics. Those who supported the efforts to exit the EU are now, for the first time since the public voted for it, firmly in control of government and Parliament.

    It will no longer be possible for figures like Dominic Grieve to attempt to cut off funding for pensioners and hospital or force the government to publish sensitive papers in order to stymie the government’s efforts to deliver Brexit. The Brexiteers have firmly taken back control. It is only fitting, therefore, that the standout feature of the Speech is additional funding for the NHS that exceeds the £350m on the side of Vote Leave’s bus.

    Many in the commentariat argue that Johnson’s programme for government is threadbare and lacking in its ambition. These same people are often the ones who simultaneously advance the claim that the all-consuming nature of Brexit will require unpicking four decades’ worth of regulatory harmonisation with the EU, amounting to the greatest peacetime challenge for the UK. Determined to have more faces than a town clock, these individuals were also the ones contending throughout the referendum campaign that the EU had a negligible impact on UK law.

    The bills listed in the Queen’s Speech illustrate the reformist nature of the new government. They also demonstrate that Brexit will no longer be treated as a damage limitation exercise and will instead be regarded as an opportunity for the UK to recalibrate its relationship with the world and fashion a new economic model for itself. A relationship with the EU on the same basis as any other self-governing country will allow, for example, the UK to offer greater tax breaks to innovative companies and put an end to the absurdity of small businesses having to comply with the same regulations as large transnational corporations.

    Legislation over this Parliament will undoubtedly negatively affect certain sectors of the economy, particularly those that are acutely reliant on just-in-time supply chains, but the large majority in the Commons and the new fiscal rules at next year’s Budget allow for bold countermeasures. These measures – such as providing significant state aid to businesses and investing heavily in infrastructure – will test the newfound unity in the Conservative party. But the party has a responsibility to protect those who will be impacted by Brexit, many of whom voted for it.

    Ideological purity from those in the party who oppose the slightest dilution of the free market economy will need to be put to one side if the UK is to have any hope of coming out of the 2020s stronger than when it went into them. Even Margaret Thatcher – not often regarded as a Keynesian – subsidised businesses massively in the 1980s through urban development corporations in order to lubricate the UK’s move away from a state owned and run economy. The London Docklands Development Corporation, for example, attracted financial services firms to establish offices in Canary Wharf through investment in transport and significant tax breaks and subsidies. The financial services sector now contributes £132bn to the UK economy a year.

    Delivering Brexit remains an almighty challenge but today’s Queen’s Speech – setting out 40 bills to be delivered over an elongated two-year parliamentary session – suggests that the new government is cognisant of the headwinds to come and is equipping itself to mitigate them. But it also firmly illustrates that the new government appreciates the opportunities that are to be had from Brexit and is gearing up to capitalise on them when the UK leaves the transition period on December 31st 2020.

    Joe Armitage advises on parliamentary procedure at Global Counsel, a political consultancy chaired by Lord Mandelson. He was a parliamentary researcher to Conservative MPs before this.

    2. If I have one great concern it is that the section in the speech relating to transport/infrastructure suggests that HS2 may still be on the cards, certainly it has not been hinted at that it might be scrapped.

  59. Well, the good news seems to be that Boris has had enough of the BBC and will clip their wings. Or threatens to unless they mend their ways.
    I could hope he will also sort out the shambles that is the Royal Mail parcel service.
    In a small post office near Dorking in Surrey, just 30minutes from Gatwick and an hour from Heathrow, both with flights to Athens, tracking my parcel has been an education.
    It was posted on the 7th Dec at 1.25.
    Royal mail does not have direct relations with other national postal services. It has, instead, delivery Partners.

    Its first stop was at the Gatwick Postal centre. It arrived there not 30minutes later but 2 days later and they sent it where? Langley.
    The transfer to Langley took 5 hours. pretty good by comparison.
    However, Langley, who received it on the 9th, sent it on to their delivery partner on the 12th.

    The delivery partner is a German company so naturally, instead of shipping to Greece, to Athens, it has gone to a small town in German where it arrives on the 16th. Wow. A 4 day flight it seems. I’m pretty sure our bombers made that journey, there and back in a night …. and their’s to flying the ibverse pattern. SO 4 days is pretty impressive.
    There are some discrepancies.
    The UK claims to have handed it over on the 12th and the Germans claim to have received it in the UK on the 16th. They then post various messages about its subsequent fate but thus far it is still trapped in this German parcel centre. They do not, it seems, have any depot’s in Greece (which makes them an ideal shipping partner because….?) and if it follows the same process as previous parcels it will next go to some other “delivery partner” in some east bloc country where, depending on what is in the parcel, it will simply vanish and you try and claim back the value…. keep all receipts for content…..or it may eventually find its way to Greece only for their Greek agent to take a few days to get it on to Rhodes. This is a common problem with anything on the Islands… the excuse offered for long deliveries is always “Its on the ferry from Athens”. but even then the delivery can fail because, unlike the postman who can always find where you are, the courier services seem to use old wartme street maps and can often not find the delivery address and thus embark on a return to sender game. I have had parcels of bits for my car go adrift that way but the return eventually completing. Stuff “lost” on route is gone for good including a pair of brand new hand made shoes…..
    The fate of this parcel hangs in the balance and no new messages have appeared yet.

    Wait, let me check. No. Nothing. The delivry panter has been claiming for some days now that it was on its way to its final parcel centre (Athens? or Rhodes?) but the latest series of messages have it doing various things in the German depot and it hasn’t actually left there yet.and it is now the 19th.
    12 days so far for what should have been a couple of flights, London Thiefrow to Athens, Athens to Rhodes (this excludes the few remaining direct flights out of season) and a 10 km final delivery at the end.
    Now, if Boris doesn’t want to fix the Post Office (wasn’t Wedgie (Anthony Wedgewood Benn) once Postmaster General; do we have a modern equivalent or is it a Bliarite freeloader still in charge?) maybe the sheer inefficiency and environmental impact might interest Saint Greta? Any thoughts?

    1. I can’t remember which one it was, UPS or similar, that sent ALL parcels to a central depot in the USA where they were sorted and returned to the approiate depot for onward transmission. It involved two atlantic flights for parcels sent in the UK to a UK address.
      The whole process was extraordinarily mechanised and highly efficient and parcels generally took 48 to get from order to recipient.

      It was offered as a case-study on MBA courses to demonstrate bulk handling techniques and use of bar codes with little human interferrence.

      1. DHL send all its Euro stuff to Dusseldorf (or Frankfurt?) where it is sorted and sent on (or back to the UK!)

          1. Indeed. One of our pleasures in Laure (before the IB went online) was welcoming the coal black Achille – our local DHL driver. A lovely man with perfect manners and always a smile.

      2. No MBAs in the post office?
        I am not sure that most MBAs are the equivalent of Media studies, PPEs etc, all those clever Blair inspired give everyone a degree courses that in the past addressed the needs of non-academic types by letting them go to art college.

          1. Then how to explain how so many idiots can get them?
            Oh, I am prepared to accept that for some it is valuable and they are competent but so many seem to have acquiesced theirs via some sort of offshore online university por something and can barely manage to put together their socks in pairs.

          2. I can only report on those I have worked with who had the qualification and without exception they were very competent.
            I’ve studied several modules (for non MBA reasons) and they are hard work.

            I’ve also worked with chartered accountants, lawyers and management consultants who were worse than useless.

            I have always regarded accountant as the anagrammatical profession. Hint: a no act …

            I guess that it’s luck of the draw

          3. I guess I have a dim view of those appointed to positions of authority. In all my years in industry I can only recall ever encountering two, possibly three good managers. The rest were mostly rubbish, MBAs or not, and a couple of average.

    2. You should of oughter (sic) gone to Gatwick, accosted someone flying to Athens, given him 20€ and asked him to post on arrival. 24 hours – done and dusted.

      3. Does it have to be packed in a teddy bear or something> I understand that is how some “mules” are enlisted on their return from those wonderful tourist destinations of Indonesia, South AMerica etc?

      1. I did some consulting once for a Colombian engineering firm and as a thank you (Maybe) they sent me a gift of some Columbian coffee.
        They also included a package of milk powder. I wonder to this day if they were having a laugh. Coffee is one of those things included to fool the sniffer dogs, except they they probably find it easier to decide that coffee is as much of a tell as the smell of cocaine. So Customs carefully open the package and find the coffee package and a packet of white powder.
        My only clue that they had been sniffing around in my parcel were a few grains of coffee and milk powder loose in the box and a couple of pin pricks in the packaging, thoughtfully selotaped over.
        I dread to think what might have happened if they had had any association with the drug trade and mixed up the white powder shipments. Some drug lord would have exacted a dire revenge had he discovered he was being shipped milk powder, no doubt. Oh, and I might have ended up in an all diversity prison.

      2. This is the Slough one, from which the early settlers presumably derived the name when they’d felt confident enough to no longer place the covered wagons in a defensive circle, and name their cluster of wooden shacks.

  60. Remake of ‘Cats’

    Pre-judging Cats based on the widely ridiculed trailers wouldn’t be fair, especially once you realise they did it a lot of
    favours.     They hid the big numbers. They silenced the singing. Minimised were James Corden’s wobbly pratfalls into piles of dead fish, Idris Elba’s leering expressions, and the entire role of Ian McKellen as Gus the Theatre Cat.

    The multi culti cast: Judi Dench, James Corden, Idris Elba, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, Francesca Hayward, Jason Derulo, Rebel Wilson

    BTL comments

    Felix Cave 19 Dec 2019 8:57AM

    I do wish that journalists wouldn’t prevaricate around the bush, and just tell us what they really think.

    Couldn’t stand the original, shall certainly give this a miss.

    Willy Eckerslike 19 Dec 2019 8:55AM

    So full of remainer luvvies Im surprised it doesnt have Jean Claude, the Old drunk european cat & Lady Thornberry the aristocratic fat cat who hates white vans, Jeremy the scruffy old leader who now hangs around drain covers looking for rats….

  61. You can now go to jail for insulting Anna Soubry. Spiked. 18 Decmeber 2019.

    You might think this was just part of the political rough-and-tumble. Far from it. The police now have a special unit called PLAIT – the parliamentary liaison and investigations team – dedicated to dealing with ‘attacks’ on MPs. Police intervened and Dalla Mura was arrested and prosecuted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for harassment. In November she was convicted. Despite the fact that she was standing as a candidate in Broxtowe, she was bailed for sentence on condition that she neither visit Broxtowe nor mention Soubry in any of her literature. She won 432 votes despite these handicaps (beating another independent). Last week she was sentenced to 28 days in jail.

    Hmmm. PLAIT, another arm of the Police State though this appears to be more Praetorian Guard than STASI. One for Nottlers to watch out for!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/19/you-can-now-go-to-jail-for-insulting-anna-soubry-2/

    1. To be honest, it must take a superhuman amount of willpower not to insult Anna Soubry.

      The jails will soon be even more overflowing, both with Anna Soubry insulters and people who think that men cannot give birth to babies.

  62. Typical Khan wanting others to pay for TfL mess ups . The sections of Crossrail outside of London are paid by those county councils. The mess ups as well are in the Central TfL section

    Mr Khan said the Government should pay a share of the extra costs as it would boost the national economy by £40 billion-£70 billion and because “Crossrail starts outside London and finishes outside London”.

  63. I posted two comments about the Queen’s Speech. Wise NoTTLers put me right.

    I did not listen to the event; I was relying on newspapers. More fool me.

  66. And now for an ornithological note.

    On Monday, Laure welcomed thousands of starlings. On Wednesday, every phone and electricity cable was sagging under the weight of the birds. Thousands more were swirling overhead.

    Today. Not one to be seen. I assume they have migrated south to Spain.

    2. They’re resident all year round over all of France, and into Northern Spain (Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre), although some Northern European birds do winter in the rest of Spain. Yours were probably a local flock looking for a roost. Sunset is the best time to look for murmurations as they gather after being dispersed through the day.

      1. Not local – well, of course, they might be – we have a small colony (200?) in the village – but this was an enormous quantity.

          1. I think they went to Spain! Or else they have a huge bunker. Because there is not one to be seen!

          2. It only takes one of them to see a man who would make them into a four and twenty pie, and the alarm call goes out and they’ll all scarper.

            Doubly so if what they see is writ large…

          3. So you’re saying, bassetedge, (© Cathy Newman) that Uncle Bill is currently in (normal for) Narfolk?

            :-))

  67. Boris Johnson making photo ID mandatory by law at polling stations, Queen’s Speech reveals

    Boris Johnson has confirmed plans to press ahead with new requirements for photographic ID at polling stations, in the face of accusations that the move is designed to suppress voting by young people and disadvantaged groups.

    A new free-of-charge “local electoral identity document” for those without passports or driving licences will be made avaiilable

          1. I don’t know what evidence you have for that. The fraud takes place before they even get to the station. False registration, false postal votes, altered postal votes, undue influence over postal votes, harvested postal votes

  68. Q: Who wants to be a millionaire?

    A: NOT Sir Keir Starmer

    ————————
    Sir Keir Starmer’s Wikipedia page was edited this week to remove a reference to his being a “millionaire”, ahead of an expected leadership launch.

    The passage was excised from the online encyclopedia in the early hours of Tuesday morning from an internet address traced to Northwest London.

    The shadow Brexit secretary’s team has denied any involvement.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/18/sir-keir-starmers-wikipedia-page-edited-ahead-expected-labour/

    2. Q: Who wants to be Sir Keir Starmer?

      A: NOT Sir Keir Starmer………………..but couldn’t resist a knighthood!

    3. This Starmer?

      LABOUR shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer has pocketed £125,000 from one of the law firms that derailed Brexit – including £25,000 since he became MP.

      Former Director of Public Prosecutions Starmer – who was also involved with a failed witchhunt of Sun journalists – has revealed he was paid up to £750 an hour by Mishcon de Reya.

  70. Queen’s Speech:
    “The government will continue to take steps to meet net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”

    Tiny steps, we hope…

  71. Two thoughts.
    1. There is nothing that the EU can do to hurt us. Nothing. We can only hurt ourselves.
    2. Have the Climate Change/Global Warming Doomsayers ever noticed that the climate changes every year? We survive summer and winter fairly regularly, with extremes of climate commonly occurring. Nothing like that is predicted even in the worst case scenarios.

    2. The climate changes over thousands of years, therefore a one degree change if plotted on the correct timescale is irrelevant. Is merely the noise on the graph. I also can not see how you can measure the temperature of the planet with any accuracy, but some clever person can probably put me right on that.

      1. Is she eating the greenblue haired one from the inside out?

        And how do you know the alien is blonde?

    3. At first glance I thought the blonde had her head on back to front: either that or she’s got owl genes in her DNA.😎

  74. Ed Davey was on ‘Today’ earlier:

    “People voted Tory with clothes pegs on their noses…they were opting to stop Corbyn rather than what they also wanted to stop, which was Brexit.”

    “We had a fantastic set of policies on climate change, one of the issues of our generation…we will be leading the argument for a more radical approach to tackling the emergency than Boris Johnson is likely to adopt.”

    “We are the anti-establishment party.”

    “We are the party for those who want Britain to be at the heart of Europe and leading in Europe. 52% of people voted in the GE for parties who wanted to offer the British people a rethink…we must make the case that Brexit will be bad for the country…the financial and economic cost, the loss of influence that it will inevitably mean.”

    To coin a phrase which will be familiar to the one-time Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in Cameron’s coalition: “You’re a denier!”

    1. ‘Morning, William, someone needs to tell Ed Davey that for over 40 years we were ‘at the heart of Europe’ (I take it he means the EU, as we’re permanently part of Europe, albeit the brain) and we proposed 72 amendments to EU rulings – not one of which was accepted.

      So much for leading, that worked well.

      1. On spot.

        Cameron’s futile pre-referendum trip around the EU for concessions showed the extent of our influence.

        Davey’s comments just won’t wash.
        They only want us for our dosh.

    3. Ed Dave is another of these politicians in the London Elite Bubble world and has no concept of life outside of it

    4. Ah, the old 52% of people voted in the GE for parties who wanted to offer the British people a rethink canard! Even if that were true, why should the 52% be listened to when the 52% who voted Leave in a specific referendum on that one topic were ignored? Davey is a compete ar$e.

    5. I first noticed that Ed Davey is a total tw*t the moment he replaced Chris Huhne in Cameron’s pathetic cabinet. In fact, he is not just a stupid tw*t he is also an exceptionally unpleasant person.

      1. You hear that much in Dordogneshire, while you are out shopping for Marmite and the Daily Mail?

        1. These sort of people have eternal black spaces within, eternal greed. They never stop. Enough is never, ever sufficient. They want yours, theirs and everyone else’s that they can lay their mitts on. They are born like that, with an over-riding sense of entitlement. It is all about them. They are usually sociopathic. My sister-in-law was one such. I say ‘was’ because she is out of our lives now.

          Edit: i will just add a little more. My SIL attempted to ensure my demise to try and get her hands on her brother’s (poppiesdad’s) and my estate. Sowing the seeds of doubt is what these people do. She told poppiesdad that our eldest son looked like me, but our younger son did not look like either of us…. Oh, how we laughed… it was a relentless campaign over nearly thirty years, but eventually comes the dénouement (unpleasant, but it had to be done) and we were free.

          1. You’re lucky you had a denouement. This one got away with it and got everything that both my father (and through him, my mother) owned. All £1.4 million of it. Despite having inherited very nicely from her own mother and stepfather in Italy (large flat in Genoa, chalet in ski resort, investments etc.). Meanwhile I was trying to scrape together money to get my daughter as much therapy (speech and language therapy, music therapy) as I could as as single mother by then, in order to try to give her a good start. Plus guitar lessons for her and her brother, Jiu Jitsu and maths coaching for my son…

            This woman later took someone to Court who she fell out with, over investments she made with him. Not happy with that, she later applied to get him professionally, struck off the medical register (although he had nothing to do with her professionally) .

            Apparently if my name was even mentioned at all, she would scream “The bitch! The bitch!” even though I had done nothing to her except say to my father that I would rather he came to see his grandchildren on his own, as she was obviously bored…

            It has taken me years, for my blood pressure not to go through the roof even thinking of her. The freedom point was the realisation of the fact that she simply isn’t worth it.

  76. Britons have no right to ask whether a transgender person is male or female, says employment judge in landmark ruling against tax expert sacked for tweeting ‘men cannot become women’

    Well now it appear you can be sacked for making a factual statement. . So on this basis of this daft ruling it is presumably an offence to be asked for you gender. So if you are stoppled by the police and they want to search you you just tel them they cannot ask or assume you gender so they will not no whether a female of male officer should search you .

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/britons-have-no-right-to-ask-whether-a-transgender-person-is-male-or-female-says-employment-judge-in-landmark-ruling-against-tax-expert-sacked-for-tweeting-men-cannot-become-women/ar-BBY9n3g?ocid=spartandhp

  77. Potential Labour Leadership Candidates

    Pretty much all very much hard left. unlikely to win back the traditional Labour voter

    Rebecca Long-Bailey
    Emily Thornberry
    Keir Starmer
    Angela Rayner
    Jess Phillips
    Yvette Cooper

    2. How many of the Labour candidates are millionaires? We should be told.
      How many have ever worn overalls to work for wages?

    3. I cannot remember the details but wasn’t there some story about Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and a Mars Bar?

      1. Like many difficult issues, our government has ducked the problem, preferring to ship it overseas.

        Instead of indulging in their playground politics, our rulers need to start engaging the many brains in the country to solve such things. Banning plastic straws seems to be the limit of our elite’s imagination.

        Plastic is here to stay, let’s make the most of it.

    5. When I was in Goa on three occasions in recent years I noticed several things;

      1. The place is lifting with discarded rubbish, just thrown down on the roadside, or into field edges..

      2. Much of this rubbish is plastic water bottles.

      3. Often you’d see one of the poorer-looking locals walking along with a sack that was bigger than him by several times over on his back – think something the size of the bags that builders suppliers deliver sand and gravel in. What was he doing?

      4. Almost every roadside shop or stall had a small table outside with three or four water bottles filledwith an amber-coloured liquid for sale. On our first visit I thought it was maybe some local soft drink made from the sugar cane that other stalls were crushing and selling as soft drinks (didn’t dare try one).

      On our second visit in 2016 one of the mysteries above was solved when we were told that the water bottles outside the shops were filled with petrol to sell to the many tourists who were helping to choke the roads and make them even more unsafe with the mopeds they’d hired for the day for a few coppers.

      In 2018 the whole truth was revealed when one of the sack-carriers laid down his sack on the roadside in front of us and jumped over a wall and started throwing empty plastic bottles onto the road. He then put the bottles into his sack and went on his way.

      That’s how they could carry those huge sacks. They were filled with air – empty water bottles, thrown away by those richer than the sack-carrier. The sack carrier would then collect the bottles and sell them to roadside stall-holders who would fill them with petrol top sell to tourists for their mopeds. The tourists (a lot of Russians amongst them, but British also) would then set off and when they needed to top up their tank they’d throw the empty over a wall where they would lie for a short while until a bloke with a sack happened along.

      Recycling in a land of no dole https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/60c003c8b1a09f73fd7eb68cf8b7294109d03c2ca9759d21d3d82ceea3a08286.jpg

      1. My walks around town take me down the back streets and the litter I see in grass verges and gutters is incredible. Unfortunately, the council and its apologists who forever talk about ‘austerity’ don’t seem able to join the dots and realise that for every dumped item, someone has spent some money. More litter and fly-tipped items equals more money in people’s pockets.

        As for the drinks cans, not for the characters around here mild or even bitter but rather the top of the range lagers and ciders.

      2. I’ve seen this in the Sahara in both western Egypt and Algeria on pipeline projects. A pristine, sometimes beautiful environment. Yet almost every depression in the sand along the route seemed to have a notable number of discarded plastic water bottles.

        As an aside, we had to drain the oil from a transformer rectifier before commissioning so my Egyptian colleagues simply took a length of scaffolding pole, positioned one end under the drain tap and let the oil drain into the sand nearby.

        They were genuinely surprised by my incredulity and protests. Yet we can no longer get plastic straws!

  79. Good morning Fellow Nottlers

    I am late up this morning so I cannot immediately say whether or not Sherelle’s latest has been posted yet. If not I shall post it for you if someone requests.

    My comment under her article refers to a “what if” article yesterday suggesting the if TBP had withdrawn from the election altogether the Conservative victory would have been about 100. I have posted 2 other hypotheses under Sherelle’s article:

    An article in yesterday’s DT suggested that the Conservatives would have had a majority of at least 100 if TBP had withdrawn completely from the general election. One can always hypothesise about other scenarios but I wonder what the election result would have been:

    i) If TBP had refused to stand down in any of the Conservative held constituencies;
    or
    ii) If Boris Johnson had made an electoral pact with Nigel Farage.

    In the event of i) I think that the Conservatives would have been very lucky to have won.

    In the event of ii) I think that not only would the the majority for Con/TBP have been enormous – at least 120 – but that we would also be heading for a proper, NMF (No more Fudge) Brexit rather than a Boris BRINO.

    Boris Johnson owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Nigel Farage but, as he is not a gentleman, I very much doubt if he will even acknowledge the fact let alone pay it.

    1. The Tories won despite a pathetic campaign, think how it might have been if they’d actually tried.

  80. Has anyone come across any packets of gumption on their travels of late?

    The local Aldi has a shelf near the checkouts, the idea being to gallop your stuff through and pack it at your leisure.

    Today, most of the shelf was taken up by customers but there was one ten foot stretch taken up only by six baskets. Fortunately, I had my Beano Book of Rocket Science in my pocket and a quick perusal told me the baskets would stack inside each other.

    I tried it and hey presto, they did.

    I’ll be flashing my new-found knowledge round the pub tonight.

    1. I once had a stand-up row with another bloke in Lidl because he was packing his wares very slowly at the till. It nearly came to blows.

      1. With time on my hands these days, that’s not an issue with me.

        It’s the stoppers (a la Duracell bunny adverts), the blockers and those glued to their trolley which bring a smile to my face. I find it more convenient to park my trolley (when I’m not off it) in a quiet spot and venture round the store.

        1. Amazing how two people, walking abreast – and meandering – can occupy a footpath which is ten feet wide.

        2. I would, Eddy, if I could but I have to use the trolley as a zimmer frame to prevent my back folding up on me in screaming agony.

          However, I’m always conscious of the possibility of blocking the aisle so will park myself out of the way while Best Beloved partakes of her meanderings – unlike those, women especially, who dump their trolley in the middle of the aisle while they saunter up and down, picking stuff up, putting it down and generally being a bluddy nuisance without a thought for others.

          1. I tend to do my supermarket shopping during my (short) lunch (half) hour. What gets me going are those people (typically women – dons steel helmet) who watch their purchases being run up and then seem surprised when asked to pay. Cue much faffing about in bottom of a capacious handbag looking for a purse. And shall we pay by card? No – out comes crumpled notes followed by a search for change. Aagh! Meanwhile my next meeting is in 10 minutes …

          3. You’re a special case, NTN.

            Only in her later life and after she’d been widowed did I find out that a relation of mine was agoraphobic and struggled to go to the post box over the road.

            One Christmas, I took her to the supermarket, stuck her behind a trolley and she moved around the place like Lewis Hamilton. The trolley gave her support and confidence.

  81. “I am so glad that Nancy Pelosi has finally come to her senses and declared — on the floor of the House no less — that impeachment is ‘a hatchet job on the presidency’. Yes, that’s right. The House, said Pelosi, is ‘not judging the president with fairness, but impeaching him with a vengeance’. Nicely phrased! The whole circus, she said, violates ‘fundamental principles that Americans hold dear: privacy, fairness, checks and balances’. Go, Nancy! Not only that, the impeachment process is taking place only because one party is ‘paralysed with hatred’ of the president, and until they ‘free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer’. I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, Pelosi was right again that the spectacle of impeachment is ‘about punishment searching for a crime that doesn’t exist’.

    SCREECH!! The needle goes scudding across the vinyl disk: wrong impeachment!

    That was Nancy Pelosi in 1998 when a Democrat was being impeached, not Pelosi in 2019 when a Republican is in the dock. As recently as last March, Pelosi insisted that impeachment had to be reserved for the most serious sorts of crimes and required bipartisan support, as was the case in history’s two previous impeachments, that of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and that of Bill Clinton in 1998.

    But that was before the impeachment express really got chugging. Now there is no talk of ‘fairness’, ‘checks and balances’, ‘hatred’, or what this nakedly partisan effort to weaponise the instrument of impeachment is all about. Hint: it has nothing to do with exposing any ‘high crimes’ or ‘misdemeanours’. On the contrary, it is merely the action of a bludgeon wielded to destroy a political opponent — it is, as president Trump himself wrote in an historic letter to Pelosi, ‘an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat lawmakers’.”

    More here: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/the-real-impeachment-scandal/

        1. She got in quickly before her mates in Brussels cut the quota by half. A forward looking politico, and Labour to boot, whatever next?

    2. “A young boy was found on the M6 after police responded to reports of a pedestrian on the motorway. The Central Motorway Police Group said they found the child, who had allegedly illegally entered the UK, on Wednesday night. He was found walking on the central reservation towards junction 7 for Great Barr at about 22:00 GMT. In a tweet, CMPG said: “He was split up from his parents a few days ago, and doesn’t know which country they’re in.”

      This does show a lack of basic humanity that is involved with many who are coming here. People who have been dealing with migrants crossing from Africa to Europe have said that it is common to find abandoned children who don’t know where their parents are. They are taken to be “waved at the cameras” in case anyone records their landing on the beaches.

      Once they have served their purpose then they are left at the side of the road to fend for themselves. Just the thought of taking a child to a foreign country and then discarding them is utterly alien to us. Here, if a single child goes missing from a playground then the local community are out en masse searching for them to get them home.

  83. Iain Dale said that three successive male callers to his phone-in broke down in tears over Universal Credit.

    Can anyone explain to me why people are having such difficulties?

    I understand how a five week wait for benefits can be very difficult to manage but i wondered if there were other reasons.

    1. That’s a question that’s puzzled me.

      In 2019, why is it so difficult for the powers that be to get to the root of the problems causing people to be in such dire straits and to use food banks? I suspect it’s because many of the powers that be are fairly useless – but that’s only my opinion.

    2. I have no personal experience, but I have got the impression that where a person’s financial circumstances change, it can take a long time for things to be adjusted. This can mean that suddenly they are told they have been overpaid and have to repay large sums. No doubt it happens the other way round as well. I have never delved into the details but it sounds a bureaucratic created nightmare from the little I’ve heard.

      1. Mentally ill stepson had his PIP payment refused at a reassessment and 10 months later his appeal was successful.
        the back payment was several thousand which, had I allowed him to have access to it, would have been gone in days!
        As it is, with me looking after it for him, he’s got a decent buffer fund for when he needs new clothes, shoes and even white goods.

    3. I’ve an uneasy feeling, not definitively provable and maybe just another manifestation of my prejudices , but I’ve noticed a trend that the most heart rending and egregious examples occur in Labour controlled councils, almost as if they’re doing it on purpose to prove a point.

      1. Oh dear. Though i’m not at all surprised. On reading about the French bureaucrats/Public servants striking because they can’t retire at 50. Many comments were about how lazy they were.

        Just to reinforce your perception….. All the major cities in the U.S.A that are failing are run by the Left/Democrat. Detroit being a good example.

    4. I don’t think anybody can answer your question, UC staff especially seems as confused as everyone else.
      I know of a young single mother who had zero payments for 2 months an a couple months not amounting to over £200.
      As she had access to financial assistance people who took up her case, 5 months later she had a backpayment of over £3000, no explanation just an email stating it was to be paid into her account.

        1. Yes she was very fortunate in that regard.
          After hearing about her situation I had a long chat with her as to what she was about. To be honest my first thoughts were “another scrounger”, but she showed my every time she tried to earn extra to help pay her way, she was penalised financially and trying to resolve it always took months.
          It knocked the stuffing out of her, and I kept thinking she should have rolled up on a beach from a dinghy, she would have been set for life.
          The fact is, trying to get the system to work in a satisfactory manner seems to be an imposible task. Thank the Lord I have not been caught up in its tentacles.

    5. That’s a question that’s puzzled me.

      In 2019, why is it so difficult for the powers that be to get to the root of the problems causing people to be in such dire straits and to use food banks? I suspect it’s because many of the powers that be are fairly useless – but that’s only my opinion.

        1. A very good point, Bill.

          There must be millions of people in this great country of ours absolutely aching to roll up their sleeves, get stuck in and sort out our numerous problems.

          Sadly, they’re held back by the wet blanket of politics and by an elite who think a trip outside the M25 is like a trip to the moon.

      2. The civil servants charged with making the decisions do not like the rules they are asked to follow so put delays and difficulties in place wherever they can. They are out of control and following their own politically motivated agenda. The same thing happened with the ‘poll tax’ and the ‘riots’ that followed. They have to be brought to heel.

      3. The powers that be seem perfectly able to load a bank card for people in Foreign lands to claim a pension because they have a single relative living in the U.K.

        I believe that in the U.k. Poorer areas where people might need the most help are run by the Left/Labour.

        My small town on the South Coast of England has always been run by the Conservatives. It is in no way a ‘posh’ town but we have seen the smallest rise in Council tax than our neighbours in Gosport. Quite a large Majority who are on Benefits.

        Piss ups and Whelk stalls come to mind.

        1. It seem odd that when uniformity and box-ticking blights our lives as it does that many organisations can do their own thing, instead of being forced to conform to best practice.

          Our local authority seems to do what it likes with no one holding it to account.

    6. Good evening, Phizzee.

      I can only explain by knowing of cases In the village where I live.
      We have a support group, consisting of the four Churches, all of which
      have non-discretionary funds available to anyone [regardless of faith,
      or none] who need help; but we found this help, although invaluable,
      did not address problems which required immediate help, ie people on
      zero hours contracts whose work, for whatever reason, stopped; this
      has on occasion caused hardship. We now have an additional facility
      which provides immediate help to anyone. without funds, to ensure they
      and their dependents are fed and watered, without any loss to their
      dignity and pride.
      So far it is working, it has not been abused…..that may or may not be due to
      usually high employment and a native population who believe in paying
      their way.

      1. That goes in some way to explain why Universal Credit is not such a good idea. If people on zero hours contracts hours change then they are likely to be sanctioned. I believe or rather hope that the system was set up to try and remove the bureaucratic monster of administration but as usual there are secondary and tertiary consequences which have been disregarded.

        The model you describe within your village tends not to be available in more urban areas unfortunately.

    7. There is one saving grace in that when an appeal against the removal of a benefit is successful, the full benefit is paid, and it is backdated.
      Though I do agree, in the interim it does cause horrendous problems.

      1. It does. And if the person affected doesn’t have family or friends to help them out then it’s even worse

  84. Just got back from a shopping trip. Pouring with rain & as dark as night, but an amazing number of idiots driving without any lights at all.

    After 3 years in Sweden, I drive on dipped headlights 24/7 regardless of the weather.

  85. Been to Kingston shopping, been to Croydon shopping, even been to North Cheam yet everywhere we go Starbucks has been sold out of festive Eggnog Lattes, the wife is really upset.
    What is happening to Christmas?

    1. hats what happens when you vote for Brexit. A UK wide shortage of Festive Eggnog Lattes and Pigs in Blankets

  89. Is the Netherlands becoming a narco-state?

    “We definitely have the characteristics of a narco-state,” confides Jan Struijs, chairman of the biggest Dutch police union.
    “Sure we’re not Mexico. We don’t have 14,400 murders. But if you look at the infrastructure, the big money earned by organised crime, the parallel economy. Yes, we have a narco-state.”
    His words echo in a society that has been convulsed by a murder that went far beyond the bubble of the criminal underworld.

    The deadly shooting of Derk Wiersum destroyed a common misconception here: that drug cartels only kill their own. A 44-year-old father of two, he was shot dead in front of his wife outside their home in Amsterdam in September.

    Wiersum was the lawyer for a crown prosecution witness, Nabil B, who had turned supergrass in a case against two of the Netherlands’ most wanted suspects.
    The shooting in broad daylight in quiet suburbia was seen as an attack on civil society, democracy and the rule of law.

    Suddenly, the fears of a drug users’ paradise turning into a haven for drug crime and an economy undermined by it had burst into the open.

    How big is the Dutch drug problem?

    The Netherlands has in a sense created the perfect environment for the drugs trade to flourish.
    With its extensive transport network, its lenient drug laws and penalties, and its proximity to a number of lucrative markets, it is an obvious hub for the global narcotics flow.

    There are clans from all over the world, because the Netherlands is one of the most important transit ports. They know whoever controls the Netherlands has one of the arteries of the global drug market,” he told the Volkskrant newspaper.
    Billions and billions of euros are earned on the black market. Synthetic drugs with a street value of €18.9bn (£16bn; $22bn) were produced in the Netherlands in 2017.

    Soft drugs have been imported from Colombia and North Africa for 30 years. Today a significant portion of synthetic drugs – MDMA, LSD, amphetamines, GHB and crystal meth – are produced in the Netherlands. In fact the country is considered a world leader.

      1. Prohibitionists will never learn. It is people like you that have caused the drug problem.

        During US alcohol prohibition thousands of people died or went blind due to alcohol produced with zero quality control. Drug prohibition causes the same issues. Most street drugs are reasonably safe when produced to pharmaceutical company standards. You know what you are taking and exactly how much you are taking. Once you force drugs to be made in unsanitary conditions, in unknown strengths, with all sorts of contaminants added then the problems start.

        Drinking alcohol to excess is a social issue, not a criminal issue, but using recreational drugs is a criminal issue when really alcohol is more deadly than almost all drugs taken recreationally.

        Prohibition is the worst possible policy. It maximises harm. It creates black markets. It creates cartels.

        1. Bullshit Thayaric, it’s potheads like you that are the consumers who generate the trade.
          ALL the evidence shows that pot is bad long term.
          Time and time again crazies on rampages are shown to have a history of cannabis abuse.
          Alcohol kills through drunk driving, cirrhosis and the like.
          Potheads go mad with knives and also kill while driving under the influence.
          Make it as pure as you like, the outcome is still the same, pot, excstacy and the like, cocaine and heroining. Time and again that route is followed.

          2. With respect that’s 90% garbage.
            The evidence on pot itself is relatively neutral. Some good effects, some bad effects. Nothing that can’t be managed by personal risk management as we do in our choice to drink booze or not.
            Crazies on rampages having a history of cannabis abuse is adding 2 and 2 and getting 22. There’s no evidence of causality.
            Drink enough alcohol you will die. Your liver becomes overwhelmed by alcohol metabolites and shuts down. That isn’t something you can do with weed, although overdose can be a problem with drugs like heroin which is made far more likely by prohibition.
            Most studies show that cannabis impairment on driving is extremely mild to the point where it’s not even something that should worry us. Having a mobile phone in the car is far worse and we all do that.
            Prohibition is the worst possible drug policy. It starts an unwinnable war, gives tax-free income streams to those prepared to risk the wrath of the state. Causes all sorts of problems with quality control. Demand will always exist. Fulfil demand safely with legalisation, or make the situation more harmful by doing what we do now. To most sensible people that haven’t been fed a diet of reefer madness propaganda for 40 + years legalisation is a no-brainer.

    2. Does the EU increase the Netherlands’ contributions to take into account the billions of euros “earned” on the black market? No, thought not – it’s just the UK.

  90. Signing off – almost time for medicine. A delightful Danish lady coming to lunch tomorrow. I must get some pastry….

    Started a fiendish jigsaw. 1938 map of London.

    Have a jolly evening mulling.

    A demain.

    2. That’s naughty of you, Mr Bill, Sir. Fancy opening your jigsaw Christmas present before next Wednesday! If you’re not careful Santa will climb down your chimney on the 24th and, instead of leaving you more presents, he will pinch your jigsaw. (Or worse still, he might just pinch two or three pieces which will frustrate you when you are about to finish the jigsaw.)

      :-))

      1. Buenos tardes, Elsie.

        Who said it was a Christmas present? Last night I started a book, in English for a change (My Country by the Allende woman), but it wasn’t a present.

          1. Ah, there you are.

            Ja, ist heut’ gekommen. Und welch Erstaunen als ich das Packet öffnete! Recht herzlichen Dank.
            Gerade habe ich mein letztes deutsches Buch zu Ende gelesen und sieh mal einer an, hab’ich vier weitere zu lesen.

            So fröhliche Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch wünsche ich Euch!

        2. BuenAs tardes, Peddy! And I have written to Santa to ask for a new wristwatch, on the basis that there is no present like the time.

          :-))

          1. Apropos of nothing at all, I have just acquired a new watch. Well rather, I have just had my grandfather’s 1919 Longines trench watch restored. I find it comforting to know that it still goes more than a century after it was made. Wish I could do as well in 37 years time.

      1. Good morning, Sean. Even with a comprehensive knowledge of London, I have still managed to make serious blunders – and that was just on the edges!

      2. I’ll give you a tip. The image on the cover is almost illegible. If you google “1938 Map of London” you’ll see it. You can download it – and the image can be blown up to a very useful size!!

        Don’t let other puzzlers know!!

  91. WA Bill

    Tomorrow is the second reading of the WA. Corbyn has instructed Labour to vote against although he told them to vote in favour of it for the first reading
    It will be interesting to see if some Labour MP’s defy Corbyn

      1. Fortunately this time it will not happen. On the second reading they can suggest amendments.

  92. The Fisheries Bill will enable us to reclaim control over who can fish in our waters, and under what terms, ensuring the sustainability of our marine life and environment.
    Legislation will be taken forward to capitalise on the opportunities that will come from our newly independent trade policy and deliver for UK businesses and customers.

  93. Zac Goldsmith made life peer and kept on as Environment Minister

    Conservative former MP Zac Goldsmith has been made a life peer and is to stay on as Environment Minister, Downing Street has announced.
    It comes as Boris Johnson shapes his team following his landslide election victory and days after Nicky Morgan was also made a life peer, with her then retaining her role as Culture Secretary.
    In a statement, Downing Street said: “The Rt Hon Zac Goldsmith has been confirmed as a Minister of State (unpaid) at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for International Development.
    “The Queen has been pleased to signify Her intention of conferring a peerage of the United Kingdom for Life on Zac Goldsmith.”

    1. His ex-brother-in-law is the current prime minister of Pakistan and a former test cricketer. After the dissolution of her marriage Zac’s sister was the one-time paramour of Hugh Grant.

      Both Zac and BJ seem to have rather tricky sisters.

  96. Boris reinstates student nurse bursaries two years after taking them away

    Payments of up to £8,000-a-year will be handed out from September next year, in line with one of the Tories’ manifesto pledges.

    Bursaries for student nurses will be restored after they were scrapped as part of the Conservatives’ austerity measures.
    The return of the payments of up to £8,000-a-year – scrapped by former prime minister Theresa May – was one of the central measures of the Tory general election manifesto unveiled last month.

    It formed part of a plan for 50,000 additional nurses for England intended to underline the party’s commitment to the NHS.

    Downing Street confirmed on Monday night that annual payments of £5,000 would be available to all student nurses – as well as some allied health professionals – from September next year.

    It added a further £3,000 would be available for specialist disciplines, such as mental health, which are hard to recruit for.
    At the same time, the government announced it was pressing on with a review of the NHS pensions issue which led some senior doctors to turn down extra shifts because they were being hit by hefty tax bills.

    3. Why not revert to the system that served us well for 150 years?
      Student nurses who trained on the wards, with intervening weeks of school. They earned a small wage as an actual member of the ward team so nobody was burned with life long debt.

      1. Hear, hear, Anne, I’m sure you know my views on the subject and all I know about nursing is that in the late 50s early 60s, as my Mother put it, we were like a couple of tom cats yowling round the Nurses’ home of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Ah, happy days…

  97. Queen’s Speech: Revolutionary changes to the housing market

    New proposals for the housing sector have been unveiled as part of the Queen’s Speech today (Dec 19), promising fairer, more affordable homes for buyers and renters.
    A better deal for renters has been outlined, with a new lifetime deposit, making moving home easier and cheaper for millions of people in the UK and allowing their deposit to move with them from property to property.
    Plans to abolish ‘no-fault’ evictions have also been confirmed, protecting tenants from being evicted at short notice and without good reason.
    The cost of new homes for local people and key workers in the area will also see a reduction of up to a third under the new government plans.
    The government has committed to devolving power, with 37% of residents in England and almost 50% in the North, already served by city region mayors with powers and money to prioritise local issues, drive significant infrastructure projects and level up their areas.
    Smaller cities, towns and counties in the UK will experience a levelling up thanks to the New English Devolution White Paper, which will unlock potential of regions countrywide.
    Also announced was the biggest change to building safety laws for 40 years, ensuring the safety and concerns of its residents.

  98. No hints in the Queens Speech as to what will be in next years Budget, It is expected to take place in January/February

    4. I presume that covers the cost of the land the tree is planted on.
      Not too bad if you actually get title to the plot, but these do a decent deal on Sequoias:-
      https://t.co/R6xAmVDb6L?amp=1
      Coastal Redwood Trees (Sequoia sempervirens) Height 15-30cm **FREE UK MAINLAND DELIVERY + FREE 100% TREE WARRANTY**
      £24.00

      1. We bought back a 8″ Sequoia seedling from the US a couple of years ago. It’s no doing very nicely (about 2′ tall now) in a pot in our garden though it will need repotting soon. I’m expecting our kids will donate it to the stately home across the road when we pop our clogs.

    5. No. I don’t want to erase my lifetime carbon footprint.
      Plants like CO2, and the increased level is making the Earth greener. So I’m burning wood, and using fossil fuel in my car. And I don’t worry about it any more.

  100. Over on John Ward’s The Slog, there is a brief examination of Impeachment, Brexit and it starts with the belief in Father Christmas:
    “Only six days to go now before old St Nick gets on his celestial laptop, and downloads a sack of Christmas presents to every Christian house in the world. Sooner or later during childhood, every kid’s cynical awareness synapse blinks into action and says, “How the blue blazing blithering wotnot can one old guy and four weirdo reindeer get round to every chimney pot in the world?”

    This is, sadly, the way of all things: kids have doubts, and then grownups give up and say oh alright then, it was me in a false beard. I had a black friend from Washington DC many years ago whose son expressed his doubts as follows: “Listen poppa, no way dere can be no Sanna Cloze, ‘cos no white man in his right mind gonna hang around in dis naybohood after dark”. There was real wisdom in that conclusion.

    I’m off shortly to do some carol singing to help raise money for ‘Croydon Vision’ so I’ll leave you with a couple of sights:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e9c7f40ca6d1ffbaeaf2533db8c6515bc37737cae11712d1302425a4ef52e9e0.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/17659565287b770d71db63396cc8e4df3515d5ac6a28df6d1694605f2526742f.jpg

      1. That’s Peter who spent over 20 years as a Lock keeper / lengths-man on a flight of locks the basingstoke Canal. Sadly his employers didn’t value the knowledge he’d gained over those years for example repairing and making new lock gates (which often weigh a couple of tons each). He was made redundant when the work was contracted out and his lock-keeper’s cottage sold. That happened some years’ ago. He now lives permanently on ‘Grey Hare’. Very knowledgeable and affable bloke. You’d like him.

    3. Is that you Stephen? What a fine figure of a man. Have you considered being an extra in the next Tolkien movie? I hear there is a hobbit house available….:o)

    1. They succeeded in changing politic. I suspect we will not get to many MP’s now flitting from Party to Party having seen what happened to this lot

    4. Ha ha ha breath, so you all lost your seats?

      ha HA HAA, breath, what a shame, never mind.

      Hahahahahahahahaha….

      Good riddance to bad rubbish, pissorf and never sully British politics again you treacherous two faced baseturds.

    6. WE have had to close down the Independent Group for Change as all the members have changed jobs

    7. Dear Ms Soubry, you and your colleagues are all that earned the previous Parliament its ‘Contemptible’ name. We can only cheer at your demise.

  102. The bitterness of the losers is something to behold (I shan’t tell you the places I have to go to find these gems…). Here’s one on Bolsover:

    They sold out their own. Skinner put food in the bellies of those miners’ children!

    Still, if any Bolsover Leavers lose their jobs soon they’re not too far from Sports Direct in Shirebrook. There will be hundreds of zero hours contracts when the tax paying Europeans are forced out. Then listen to them moan about shocking working practices and conditions.

    They will deserve all they get!

    I don’t think the dunce understands that companies like Sports Direct only survive because they employ slave-wagers. There’s definitely something rotten in the UK but it’s not the attitude of disillusioned Labour voters. It’s the low-wage economy created by Labour’s two big Bs and never dealt with by their two successors.

  103. What’s new in the Withdrawal Agreement Bill?

    The government has re-published a new version of the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill, which it expects to be given first-stage approval tomorrow.
    With a large majority, the government has changed some provisions it had made under the strains of minority government in the last Parliament.
    Clauses removed

    Workers’ rights: The previous bill had pledged to secure and strengthen workers’ rights. This clause has been removed from the bill. The government says it will instead address workers’ rights in a separate piece of legislation.

    Oversight of negotiations on the future relationship with the EU: The previous draft made it necessary for Parliament to approve the negotiating mandate of the government. It also made it necessary for the mandate to be in line with the negotiated political declaration on a future relationship, as well as compelling ministers to report to Parliament on the progress of negotiations. This is all now gone. The government would be at liberty to negotiate something not in line with the political declaration and to make those changes at very short notice.

    Clauses added

    No use of written procedure in the Joint Committee: This stops UK officials agreeing to use the written procedure in the joint committee governing the Withdrawal Agreement. This means the committee will have to meet to make decisions. This is a procedural change.

    Clauses changed

    Watering down the Dubs’ amendment on refugees: The amendment related to the reunion of child refugees with their family in the UK after Brexit. As an EU member, the UK is obliged to reunite refugee children with family members. This obligation falls away when the UK leaves the EU, so the amendment was designed to replace it by placing a duty on the government to negotiate an agreement with the EU allowing family reunion to continue in future. The new draft sees this duty replaced with a requirement for a minister to make a statement on the issue and the government’s policy.

    Prohibition on extending implementation period: This bars ministers from agreeing an extension to the transition period. In the previous draft, they simply had to seek parliamentary approval to do so.

      1. Actually the article is WRONG. It states the first reading. It is the Second Reading tomorrow

          1. Good evening, J.
            =
            I am certain I read an article about the Withdrawal Agreement which
            stated that; should the proposal be amended by a new Government,
            then the previous act becomes void. I cannot find any reference to this
            but I am sure I did not imagine it.

  104. “Ian Blackford, the SNP leader, said the bill would hurt Scotland’s
    economy and cost thousands of jobs north of the border, taking a
    “wrecking ball to our economic and social foundations”.
    The little man hasn’t gone away yet.

    1. The SNP are doing a good job of wrecking the Scottish economy , The want to use Brexit though as an excuse

      There is a contradiction with the SNP. They want to go all Green but that will destroy the important oil industry

      The Greens will try to claim Green energy will create millions of jobs, That bunk. It creates very few jobs

      1. Should the ScotNats close Faslane they will feel the pinch. If only the Glaswegians would put a stop to their visceral hatred of everything English and try to secure new shipbuilding jobs with bids for Border Control fast Cutters, Corvettes and Frigates.

        We also need to commission new Trawlers and fishery support vessels and warships to protect our fishing fleet as we restore our rights to fish our own territorial waters.

        But no, we again witness the Commons emptying as that pompous prat Blackford puts on the 78 with a stuck needle.

        1. Arn’t they struggling with the shipyard they took over. It has about 2 part complete contracts to finch of two small ferrys for CalMac which are about 3 years late and 2 times over budget and after that the yard has no real work

          2. Opinions vary. The yard claim many late design changes and lack of finance. I suspect a disenchanted and disenfranchised workforce watching the anti-business antics of Sturgeon is also a component.

        3. I’ve been wondering if putting a couple of thousand of my meagre savings into a couple of small trawler yard shares like Parkol Marine Engineering in Whitby might be a good idea.

          1. Why not? The banks pay no appreciable interest and what they do pay is nullified by inflation. I keep 40k in Premium Bonds which return more than a bank savings account.

            I would also wish to see the yards in Tynemouth and Barrow in Furness reactivated with government contracts. We used to build ships in Southampton.

  105. Green Party deputy leader: UK isn’t world leader on climate action

    Typical sort of thing you expect from the Greens. Boris has an achievable target., Putting some arbitrary date in with no plan or realistic chance of achieving it is just daft

    Amelia Womack, deputy leader of the Green Party, says it was “interesting” that in the Queen’s Speech the government said the UK would be “world leaders” in climate action – but is continuing to keep its current net-zero target of 2050.

    “You look around the world and that isn’t leadership,” she says. “We see other countries looking at 2030.”

      1. The Greens just dream up a date and have not a clue as to how they will achieve that date. How do they think every car. lorry. bus etc will cease using diesel by 2030. It is simply impossible and how they will eliminate fossil fuels fro planes by then who knows because there is no solution at present. It is the same with trains it is simply not viable to electrify very minor rural lines

        1. We shouldn’t be taking any notice of the Greens on this subject whatsoever.
          If they turned their attention to real pollution, I’m with them. But not this. We shouldn’t be discussing any dates. It’s like discussing how soon we want to commit suicide.

    2. Ms Womack should know there’s no chance of achieving the net-zero target by half-past eight. The Government’s suggestion of ten to nine is much more realistic.

      Twenty minutes is a long time in politics.

    3. He might have an achievable target with “carbon reduction” but the question still arises whether the target is a sensible one in the first place.
      I don’t believe we should be wasting energy, but the whole aim of going “carbon neutral” is a stupid one, based on the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant rather than a trace gas that’s essential for all life on Earth.

    4. mmmmm

      “We see other countries looking at 2030.”

      See also

      The Cheque is in the post
      Of course I luvs ya
      Of course I will respect you in the morning
      Of course having a willie does no tstop you bing a woman
      Corbyn would have made a great Prime Minister
      etc

  108. Am I alone in the feeling that the johnson is going to push through a pro eu Velcro type WA, far from total severance ?

        1. Any deal that locks in the neoliberal fiscal system for yet another 10 years is a terrible deal for the UK since most of the UK’s economic issues stem from poor fiscal policy.

          1. Thats not so much down to the EU but to our politicians

            The basic problem is the UK trades at a lost ie we spend more than we earn

            The Conservatives have made a half hearted attempt to deal with it but have not succeeded they pretty much focused only on cutting costs They also tried to grow the UK by importing labour most of which was unskilled so that just kept the loss going. The deficit has come down but a good part of that was down to falling interest rates

            The UK is basically not productive enough and is is over staffed and has low productivity

          2. ‘The basic problem is the UK trades at a loss ie we spend more than we earn ‘

            Good evening, Bill.

            Christmas is just around the corner!

            Please give us all a treat ……and tell us something we don’t already know!!

          4. ‘Does that make me a bad person?’

            Perish the thought, Dear One.

            You a bad person?……….. An impossibility.

            xxx

          6. Low productivity comes from low investment in productive capacity. 85% of taxation comes from the productive side of the economy, from incomes, profits and sales. It’s much more fiscally advantageous to stick money into land and has been now for 30 years about the time our productivity began noticeably lagging behind our continental neighbours. The WA will lock this in for at least another ten years.

    2. That’s not a feeling, ogga1, it is an unsubstantiated belief. Whilst I too have concerns, as I always say: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. Wait until the end of next month, man.

      1. EB,
        Quite sick of devouring puddings over the last 3.5 years, I believe the end of this week should
        tell a story.
        The end of next month will be to late IMO.

        1. You aren’t comparing like with like, ogga1. Most of the puddings were created by Theresa May. Boris has only created two, and the first one was to a recipe dictated by Remainers in Parliament. So waiting for Boris’ pudding Mark 2 is still only 43 days away, and not 3.5 years as you suggest.

          1. EB,
            Most of the odious puddings had the same political chefs most of them of the pro eu ilk.
            I don’t see no change from the last two decades at least plenty of rhetoric broken promises, vows,pledges & pro eu rubber stamping, NO pro UK action.
            Tell me what have you seen that I haven’t ?

          3. Morning EB,
            Same ilk, they change the names to protect the guilty.
            Tell me why do peoples trust in political rhetoric alone, also they depend a lot
            on hope,why ?
            Why have these Isles been allowed to get into such an odious state via the ballot booth over the years ?

          4. The First stage of the WA has been completed. The second stage will be tomorrow and it is possible the Third stage will be be tomorrow and then is just Royal Assent

      2. That’ll be too late. Like it was with waiting months and months for May to show her true colours…

        1. And yet it wasn’t too late. Nigel Farage helped oust May, and Boris has completely changed the composition of the Government.

      3. EB,
        “Unsubstantiated” then how did we get into such a pretty pass as a nation, if you cannot see that then give spec-savers a call…… urgently.

  109. Clive Lewis to stand for Labour leadership

    Labour MP for Norwich South Clive Lewis has announced he is standing for the Labour leadershipin a Guardian article.

    1. Having seen him so many times on ‘Look East’ he strikes me as a typical, vicious, Momentum Lefty.

      Certainly not to be trusted.

  110. Lets Hope Boris is not just throwing money at the NHS. It need reform to ensure we are getting value for money and that it is being run efficiently and that it is being run for the patients and not the staff

    1. The problem isn’t reform, or money exactly. It’s the rapid increase in population by people who haven’t been paying into it. It’s increased demand without a concurrent increase in supply.

    2. Ideally the NHS would be run to the benefit of both patients and staff. Most of the damage of recent years can be placed at the feet of politicians such as Blair and poor executive management.

      The mental health crisis is the result of the closure of Asylums and the gifting of the Buildings and vacated sites to grasping men in suits viz. Estate Agents and Property developers driven by amorphous Health Trusts. When one considers that Lady Mary Archer had control of Addenbrookes, the arrogant quasi-pious and hypocritical wife of a perjurer, it says it all.

    3. My take on it is that Boris has put that in the Queen’s Speech to prevent future Labour politicians from claiming that the Conservatives hate the NHS. Plus, if they play silly sausages beggars in trying to frustrate the passing of the Queen’s Speech, he can argue that it is Labour who hate the NHS.

      1. Corbyns claim that the US wanted to take over the NHS was just a complete lie

        Yes Trump did say everything was on the table including the NHS but that did not mean taking over the NHS. trade deals do not include taking over companies and as the NHS is not a listed company it would be impossible in any case. Trump was referring io the US continuing to be able to bit for NHS contrast as now. Under EU legislation all contracts over £150,000 have to go out to competitive tender

  113. A sad final note from one of the few UKIP officials left that I know, whose mailing list I am still on when I took a 5-year membership to the party before the referendum. Nigel was running it back then and with so many MP’s in Parliament trying to stop us leaving, I wanted to help to fund a party that really wanted the UK to leave. I have removed his name and position. He has suffered enough:

    “Dear All,

    Please see below – just heard that UKIP has had to pay out £40k after the case against Richard Braine and Co to court for contacting members and bad standing issues.

    What with the debacle at conference where they lost money coupled with the new interim leader (Catherine Tates Nan) telling me who I can and cant speak to, I’m done and only staying on until the result of the proposed EGM for a vote of no confidence in the NEC is announced. Once that”s done I’m leaving UKIP and unless anyone comes forward to be xxxx your/our money will be transferred to UKIP HQ as per the rules

    So many good people have left this party – where did it all go wrong? Come to that, ever since the referendum when did it ever go right?

    Kind Regards,”

    So, if something does occur that prevents any real Brexit from happening, such as a Free Trade Agreement in a year that keeps us in a “level-playing field” with the EU (which will stop us being able to strike other meaningful trade deals with anyone) then it looks as if the “Reform” party will be the only ones left in town. If they exist as a party at all.

    If Boris can’t get us free of the EU with an 80 seat majority then there won’t be anybody else to vote for.

    I may not support UKIP anymore, but the members did work hard and I feel for them. The party under Nigel did get us the referendum in the first place, so they have made their mark.

    1. I don’t know if our friend ogga would agree but it seems to me that UKIP’s machiavellian internal obfuscations seem far more important to the UKIP grandees than trivial irrelevancies like actually breaking completely free of the imprisoning EU.

    1. Results so far (8.10 pm Thursday) suggest the answer is YES, the public (or rather Express readers) do trust him.

    4. I don’t trust him to deliver a deal that is in the interests of the United Kingdom. We shall see. But he has no excuses now, not with an 80 majority. He could decide that no realistic progress could be made on a trade agreement in only one year, and then declare that we are leaving the EU with no deal, and avoid all of their bills and them telling us what to do for the next 12 months.

      We could then come to a trade deal with them when the EU is begging us for one, and without the UK funding their lavish expenses anymore while we work out the details. If Boris does deliver a half-in / half-out Free Trade Agreement, with us still bound to staying aligned with the EU for a decade, and without regaining control of our fishing grounds, then we will know that his heart was never in Leaving at all.

      With an 80 seat majority there is no longer any excuse for the United Kingdom not becoming a Sovereign Nation again.

  116. Hmm so a pork chop or a few rashers of bacon may end up more expensive than fillet steak??

    African swine fever has been reported in nearly 50 nations — including

    China, South Korea, the Philippines and Belgium — and it’s causing an

    incredible crisis on a global scale. Alarmingly, more than one-quarter

    of Earth’s pigs have been wiped out by the virulent disease.

    http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/pig-ebola-is-now-running-wild-in-indonesia-and-it-has-already-killed-about-one-fourth-of-the-worlds-pigs
    I wont get my tin foil hat out just yet but……………………

    1. Yup. Strange, that. I have my suspicions also. As I do when they let tree diseases rampage for a few years on what could be valuable building land to some.

    2. Yes, but they aren’t imported here. Let the Chinese, S. Koreans, Phlippinos and Belgians sort it out. They never did anything to help us when we were facing any similar problem.

    1. “Heavy eyelids”. Sleep, being away with the fairies, or too much botox around her eyebrows? Prolly the first two?

      1. I put it like that to reflect a continuous struggle to stay awake rather than a fully achieved sleep, when, heaven forbid, she might be SNORING during her leader’s speech.

  119. DM Headline story

    Local and key-worker first-time buyers will get a discount of AT LEAST 30 per cent under Boris Johnson plan to help young get on the housing ladder.

    Who will pay for this?

    Every time they pump more money into the housing market it just pushes the prices up.

    What young people really need is less money swishing about in the housing market so that prices really do fall.

    When will they ever learn!

    1. Sounds like a good device to channel some money to each of my grandchildren and help them get a chunk of taxpayer-funded largesse – although I’d much prefer simply reducing the numbers of low-skilled and unproductive and UNDOCUMENTED immigrants and, thereby, bringing down the price of accommodation.

    2. They won’t. Basic economics. It’s the last thing they need, but they repeat the same mistake time and time again.

      ‘Help to Buy’ helped nobody but the sellers.

      1. ‘Help to Buy’ helped Barratt, Wimpey, Persimmon…………..add taxpayer money to a deposit & prices go up – anyone could see that apart from HMG.

    3. The number one priority in housing should be to clamp down fast on the Ground Rent and Service Charge racket.

      1. You’ll nevrr save at a rate high enough to keep up wigh house inflation by not smoking, for example.

        2. According to something I read in the DT the other day, not such high deposits are required now as immediately after the financial crash. And prices have not risen as much as they had been.

          It all boils down to supply and demand. There are too many people here.

    5. How many immigrants and others are going to fleece that system? We’ve seen it already with right to buy under Thatcher (although not for some time later). Does being local mean that you can persuade someone that you have lived here legally (and actually paid tax, that is not in amount less than the benefits you receive) for the last 20 years?

      1. There’s probably a magic glass in your bathroom.
        Look deeply into that, and smile.
        If it smiles back, it’s you.

  122. Oi Laffed

    A mother takes her four year old daughter into the bank and the little
    girl goes up to the counter and says ” as I now have a job I would like
    to open a bank account” the manager replies oh what sort of a job do you
    have?” The little girl replies ” I have a job on a building site” the
    mother explains that they have builders working on land at the bottom of
    their garden and the builders have taken a shine to her daughter and
    let her turn the hose on and off and as she has been so helpful have
    given her a proper pay packet. ” well that’s wonderful says the bank
    manager it’s so good to work hard and receive a pay packet, are you
    working next week?” ” yes says the little girl if those cunts from
    Jewson deliver the fucking bricks on time.”

  124. Whilst under a corporate health insurance policy i had to have a referral from my GP if i wanted to see a privately ( me self funded specialist). Now i find myself in the position where that has ended but i can still afford to go private. I can no longer get an appointment with my GP. In my local surgery no appointments are available until the end of January. I could of course pay a private GP to get a referral (£100). Wouldn’t the specialist be able to make the diagnosis themself?

    1. AS far as I kind the GP referral is just a standard requirement of these health insurance schemes, If you are paying yourself to see a specialist you should be able to cut the GP out of the loop.

    1. These sad individuals, with their pseudo-intellectual arrogance, can only exist at all because they are living in a world built from the blood, sweat and tears of real men and women. The same people that they look down on as being too stupid to know what they have been voting for.

      Well those same real people have just delivered a swift knee to their globalist ambitions, and we are going about our day with a smile on our faces, while they lie sobbing on the ground at how unfair it all is.

      1. MM,
        Over the decades these nasty old politico’s found no end of support and votes.
        Some realisation in what they have been putting their names to for years has brought about some change in the voters mindset , but maybe to late.

      1. Try this one…

        You know what it’s like when you post a decent joke, it gets few votes
        and then someone posts a virtual carbon copy of your idea and does
        brilliantly?.

        Imagine how Theresa May must feel.

  127. To make sure residents are safe in their homes, we will take forward legislative measures that put in place new and modernised regulatory regimes for building safety and construction products. We will also ensure that residents have a stronger voice in the system.

  128. Anyone who feels bad about ruining the environment for the next generation hasn’t spent a lot of time around teenagers.

    Ahem…

  129. We will take bold steps to accelerate delivery of fast, reliable and secure broadband networks to millions of homes. This will include the introduction of the Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill to make it easier for telecoms companies to install digital infrastructure when landlords ignore repeated requests for access. We will also bring forward measures to ensure that all new homes are built with reliable and fast internet speeds.

  131. Erm…oh well…i’ll post it.

    Three attractive young women were spending an evening at their place,
    when all the sudden the President of International Monetary Fund knocked
    the door.

    “Why haven’t you paid your debt?”, he demanded to know.

    The women looked at each other and smiled, dropped their clothes and
    started lezzing out.

    “We don’t have money but we thought we could pay some other way”, they
    said seductively.

    Thank you Sanna Marin, Li Anderson and Maria Ohisalo, maybe the new
    government of Finland isn’t that bad after all.

  133. The Genius that is Boris

    Boris can come across as a bumbling clown but he has a brilliant strategic brain. He took over from May and had no majority in the commons but managed to out manoeuvre the opposition parties even after he had kicked out the rebels. He then managed to get the EU in a very short time to get the WA changed. He managed to get the opposition parties to agree to an election
    He managed to read the nation brilliantly and gained a good majority. He even managed to achieve what most would have said would be impossible and that was to convert the North including old mine and steel towns to vote Conservative

    Another good strategic move is he has been ambition with his manifesto but has not over promised, It is deliverable

    I would not underestimate Boris capabilities in negotiation with the EU. HE is most certainly not a May

      2. ” we will end up being fucked up the arse.”
        an indelicate and un-necessary expression ……..
        (There are ladies in the room)

        1. I was not overly impressed by Nigel’s rant at the EU in the chamber. Strategically it is not the most sensible move to get their backs up then we are going to be entering intensive trade talks with them

        2. Yes, Tony. But our Nottl ladies tend to be of a similar mindset. They are not delicate wallflowers. However i do take your point. (please use some vaseline next time).

    3. BJ,
      Are you really serious ? if so I do believe you have a serious worry on your hands and should seek help.

    4. I think we can agree on Boris and his capabilities, the question you should be asking is what intention does Boris have regarding the EU.
      Try to blow away the stardust that is swirling around your head and remember Boris has and will continue to act in a manner that is beneficial to Boris. He is after all an ambitious politician, any benefits the country gets regarding Brexit will only be crumbs falling off his plate.
      Past history of Conservatives and the EU should not be filling anyone too much with confidence, they seem to live by the motto, me before party, before country.

      1. Yes, words are cheap, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But he picked up a band hand when he took over from May and the traitors, and I doubt if anyone else could have done any better so far. He has a thick skin, and knows that after 31 January he will be blamed for EVERYTHING.

      2. Best Beloved and I watched ‘The Cure’ this evening about Julie Bailey’s fight with the the Staffordshire Hospital who were more interested in becoming a ‘Foundation Hospital’ than looking after patients. She started her campaign in 2007 after they allowed her mother to die. She is still fighting in 2019.

        What does that tell us about the bureaucracy that still haunts the NHS?

        Her message was “Less Management, More Nurses”. True then, still true today

        1. I give you ‘ Gosport War Memorial Hospital’…. The Doctor in charge responsible for putting people on morphine auto pumps. They probably think it easier to string it out until she has a natural death than to face up to their own inadequacy.

          On 20 June 2018, the Gosport Independent Panel published a report which found that 456 deaths
          in the 1990s had “followed inappropriate administration of opioid
          drugs”. If similar cases with missing records are taken into account,
          the true number of victims may be up to 650.

          Location: Gosport, Hampshire, England, United …

          Hospital type: District General

          Gosport War Memorial Hospital – Wikipedia

          https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Gosport_War_Memorial_Hospital

  134. Johnson is widely known as someone who can agonise about his decisions, taking his time to fall one way or the other. Even if he is secretly pro-EU, he must be looking at the opportunities the election result has produced, and considering what that could mean for Project Boris…

    I understand those who distrust him, but I also understand the unpredictability of chaos theory.

    I am quietly hopeful.

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