Thursday 19 September: Reasons to doubt Labour’s claims on the benefits of working from home

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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482 thoughts on “Thursday 19 September: Reasons to doubt Labour’s claims on the benefits of working from home”

  1. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) story

    WARNING – on Saturday, I reach the last page of the joke book.

    German Sex Joke

    A German guy abroad approaches a local lady of the night.

    "I vish to buy sex viz you." he says.

    "OK," says the girl, "It will be £50 an hour."
    "..ist goot, but I must varn you, I am a little kinky."

    "No problem," she replies cautiously, "I can do kinky, but it will be double the price."

    He agrees and off they go to the girl's flat, where the German produces four large springs and a duck caller from his briefcase.

    "I vant zat you strap ze springs to your hans und kneeses."

    The girl finds this most odd, but complies, fastening the springs as he had said, to her hands and knees.

    "Now you vill get down on your hans und kneeses."

    She duly does this, balancing precariously on the springs.

    "You vill now please to blow zis kwacker as I make love to you."

    She finds it very odd, but figures it's harmless (and the guy is paying.)

    The sex is fantastic, she is bounced all over the room by the energetic German, all the time honking on the duck caller.

    The climax is the most sensational that she has ever experienced and it is several minutes before she has enough breath to say,

    "That was totally amazing, so what do you call that position?"

    "Ah," says the German ….."zat is ze….famous German four-sprung Duck technique"

  2. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) story

    WARNING – on Saturday, I reach the last page of the joke book.

    German Sex Joke

    A German guy abroad approaches a local lady of the night.

    "I vish to buy sex viz you." he says.

    "OK," says the girl, "It will be £50 an hour."
    "..ist goot, but I must varn you, I am a little kinky."

    "No problem," she replies cautiously, "I can do kinky, but it will be double the price."

    He agrees and off they go to the girl's flat, where the German produces four large springs and a duck caller from his briefcase.

    "I vant zat you strap ze springs to your hans und kneeses."

    The girl finds this most odd, but complies, fastening the springs as he had said, to her hands and knees.

    "Now you vill get down on your hans und kneeses."

    She duly does this, balancing precariously on the springs.

    "You vill now please to blow zis kwacker as I make love to you."

    She finds it very odd, but figures it's harmless (and the guy is paying.)

    The sex is fantastic, she is bounced all over the room by the energetic German, all the time honking on the duck caller.

    The climax is the most sensational that she has ever experienced and it is several minutes before she has enough breath to say,

    "That was totally amazing, so what do you call that position?"

    "Ah," says the German ….."zat is ze….famous German four-sprung Duck technique"

    1. Very good, Sir Jasper, it looks like from Sunday you will have to go through the joke book a THIRD time. (Good morning, btw.)

    2. Very good, Sir Jasper, it looks like from Sunday you will have to go through the joke book a THIRD time. (Good morning, btw.)

        1. Not bad, thanks. SWMBO away tonight, so sauerkraut, meat and potatoes for supper.
          All good with you?

          2. My good lady had a troublesome tooth removed yesterday. i asked her if I get her something eat,
            only soup please. I chopped up some butternut squash and new potatoes boiled and mashed salt and black pepper. A knob of butter and a table spoon of soft cheese. Blended and cooled down she said it was delicious. And it was.
            Another one for the winter months.

  3. Wow, chums,I got up early, having done Wordle in just four attempts. And thanks, Geoff, for today's NoTTLE page.

    Wordle 1,188 4/6

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    1. Good morning Elsie! Yes – today was a welcome break after yesterday!
      Wordle 1,188 3/6

      ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
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  7. Reasons to doubt Labour’s claims on the benefits of working from home

    Would that make it all the easier to sack people

    1. Perhaps it's just pressure from lazy people in the trade unions or civil service who want a London salary to work from abroad.
      "Let us keep our working from another country benefit and we won't derail your legislation plans"
      Perhaps I am being too cynical….

      1. People are not going into the office but a good proportion are working elsewhere like in coffee shops and upmarket fitness clubs, not at home.

          2. …to their daughter who is getting benefits to pay the rent whilst working unofficially in the family business.

        1. I never want to hear about "mental health" again! Stupid whiny millennial nonsense!
          In my day we just hit somebody, chopped a few logs, yelled at another driver and got on with it!

      1. My main occupation is PM (Pri-Mordial leader) but his way I can claim attendance and accommodation allowance without having to do anything or go anywhere. My next project is to find a way of exchanging your animal skin dress for a top fashion fur coat and silk knickers at the tribe's expense.

  8. I am trying to watch maneco64 on Youtube and Youtube is telling me "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot. This helps to protect our community" (RUBBISH!)

    I have never had a youtube account and don't want to make one. Can other people still watch youtube videos without signing in?

    1. Seems it was just a problem with a particular VPN address. Changed the server and have access now.
      Dodgy VPN server once resulted in me being banned from Reddit – I have never had a Reddit account…

  9. Rachel Reeves to replace No 11 paintings with art of or by women. 19 September 2024.

    Addressing the all-female gathering, she said: “This is King James behind me, but next week the artwork in this room is going to change.

    “Every picture in this room is either going to be of a woman or by a woman – and we’re also going to have a statue in this room of Millicent Fawcett, who did so much for the rights of women.”

    King James II, who is posing in a suit of armour, with a lustrous head of shoulder-length hair, is likely to be relegated to a storage room. Most other paintings around the large room currently feature men.

    The present portraiture is of men who have served the country in various roles. Not because they are men.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/18/rachel-reeves-to-replace-no-11-paintings-with-art-by-women

      1. What point is she trying to achieve.
        Someone stole some of her smarties when she was three
        years old ?

    3. Hope it includes one of Anne Boleyn.
      She triggered seismic changes in England.
      Oh, and add good Queen Bess who continued the good work.

    4. Sigh. How to prove to the world that you're not up to the job of being Chancellor.

      Anyway James II clearly identified as a woman – just look at that hair…

    5. Rather childish of her.
      Revenge is a dish best served cold.
      And she seems to be living up to a rather old and insignificant precedent.

    6. Will she be putting up pics of and by real women or men in frocks? The likes of Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun were superb artists but not really feminists and Reeves probably hasn’t a clue who they were anyway. (Founder member of the Royal Academy and Marie-Antoinette’s court painter, respectively.)

  10. Morning, all Y'all.
    Sunny. And the hizbollockites had their heads blown off as well as their goolies after their walkie-talkies proved to contain Semtex, too!
    It just couldn't be better!

    1. I wonder if people who were actually forced to work from home and installed a garden office can claim back all the cost's from the people who forced the situation on them ?

    3. Phew. No one had heard from Jeremy Corbyn since Tuesday. Then.. his X account tweeted.

      A shameful chapter in this government's ongoing contempt for international law and the dignity of Palestinians.
      End the occupation. Free Palestine.

  14. Good morning all.
    Another cloudy start, dry, overcast with 8°C on the Yard Thermometer.
    The cloud is forecast to clear later.

  15. Israeli Motto
    Everyone (except perhaps Hamas and Hezbollah) knows that if you attack Israel, you WILL get hurt.

    According to Wikipedia the State of Israel has no official motto. Instead, its unofficial one is ‘If you will it, it is no dream’.

    Perhaps it should adopt the Latin motto of Scotland: ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’ which means ‘No one provokes me with impunity’, or in broad Scots: ‘Wha daur meddle wi' me?’. I can't translate that into Hebrew, but perhaps someone can.

      1. Good Morning and thanks Oberst.
        Just checked it to see what it says (No one provokes me with impunity) and Google Translate says there's a spelling correction for the first word but makes no proposals. Who am I to question your wisdom (or Google's)?

        1. Translating the other way gave "provoke" in English to Hebrew to English as "tease". Not quite what's meant, but better than I can do!

    2. "Everyone (except perhaps Hamas and Hezbollah) knows that if you attack Israel, you WILL get hurt"
      Yes, and H & H count on it. An attack of whatever size on Israel provokes a colossal response, and lots of column inches about "Poor Hamas" and "bastard Israel", so whilst a lot of people get to be dead and maimed, Hamas wins the propaganda battle.
      The exploding comms is an excellent Israel response, in that it targets the terrorists individually and indiscriminately, wherever they are and at all levels, and gets their friends, too (isn't that right, Mr Ambassador?). Now, these bastards will be wary of any electronic device they have close to them, in case it contains bad wishes from Israel… mobile phones, laptops, doorbells…

      1. The Propaganda Battle was the whole point of Oct.7th.
        First, prime the Propaganda Echelon to be ready for a big event, then provoke Israel with a massive terrorist attack.
        Withdraw back to Gaza with hostages.
        Hide in tunnels using the Gazan People as a human shield to await the response.

  18. How the UK government helped the US crush free speech. 19 September 2024.

    BRITAIN was once the envy of the world for our legal right to free speech. However, the tide has turned, and the government’s Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), set up in 2019 and instructed in March 2020 to combat the spread of ‘false coronavirus information online’, has helped the United States establish a dedicated team to crush what it sees as dissent.

    In the name of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’, the CDU focused on coercing social media giants to execute ‘government-wide censorship efforts’. It has now exported its blueprint to the US, despite the fact that America’s prized First Amendment specifically protects citizens’ right to express themselves freely.

    Documents obtained under freedom of information (FOI) by the sovereignty organisation America First Legal (AFL), show that in August 2021 the Biden White House hosted a team from the CDU. They taught the Biden-Harris National Security Council (NSC), an interagency policy committee (IPC), everything they knew about silencing government critics on social media.

    Useful info. A must read.

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/how-the-uk-government-helped-the-us-to-crush-free-speech/

  20. The trouble with Trafalgar Square’s transgender tribute. 19 September 2024.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c2db3c530d45825c40ac696c2b5584f5b462012a903d396bb0e501ff82730164.png

    Seven hundred and twenty-six plaster face casts of transsexual, non-binary or gender non-conforming people were unveiled yesterday in London’s Trafalgar Square. Mil Veces un Instante (A thousand times an Instant) by Mexican artist, Teresa Margolles, sits proudly upon the Fourth Plinth around Nelson’s Column. The casts are arranged in the form of a Tzompantli, or a ‘skull rack’, that exhibited the remains of war captives or sacrifice victims, and the art is intended to draw attention to the rights of trans people worldwide. But is it really necessary? As another Transgender Day of Remembrance approaches on 20 November with its pseudo-religious trappings, this imagery is not what London needs.

    What is this monument to perversion doing in a public place?

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-trouble-with-trafalgar-squares-transgender-tribute/

    1. What rights do Transgender people not have that the rest of us do?
      They seem to have many privileges that we ordinary folk don't – for example, to whine continually about being discriminated and get that in the press.
      Bah!

      1. What they don’t have that you do is the ability to reproduce. They’re whites who’ve been spayed and neutered For Climate Change and we’ve failed to worship them as pagan gods For The Greater Good. As Solzhenitsyn said, don’t participate in the lie.

      1. I expect it was sanctioned by Kahnt.
        But they don't allow St George's day parades now because of stupid H&S regs and public liability insurance BS.

    3. How on earth was that allowed to happen ? A terrible accident waiting to happen.
      Hideously white as well.

    6. Gender non conforming? Dear life.

      Why do the Left keep changing the narrative to excuse this weirdness? I don't care if Bob the 6'2 builder turns up in a dress. I DO care if Bob then starts flapping his bits around and demanding I accept his choices as normal. That's the problem. I don't want this, I don't want them 'endorsed' or promoted. I want them to keep their choices to themselves and to let me make, keep and speak my own opinion.

      If Bob then does a crap job, I pull him up on that and he doesn't get to call the discrimination card.

  21. Morning all 🙂😊
    Not nice outside and surprisingly not what has been forecast from 'presenters' with much arm waving.
    How would labour actually be aware of any particular issues or situations outside of Wastemonster. They quite clearly have never listened or taken notice of public opinion and have never taken action regarding the problems suffered by the general tax paying public.

    1. In a nice chat I had yesterday with a lady ophthalmologist who originally came from Zimbabwe.
      We compared the actions of our current pm (notice not capitals) to that of mugabe who deliberately wrecked his own country and drove away so many hardworking and significantly important people. Now people are finding it difficult to make ends meet because of massive inflation.

    1. From a seaside village in Valencia

      Rainfall Warning State Meteorological Agency 20°C
      Thursday 10:17 Mostly cloudy
      High 23°C

    2. I'm in the Red Lion at Partney, relaxing after an excellent breakfast. A pub lunch is in the offing and the weather will not spoil that.

        1. I’m staying there for a few days, and very nice it is too. I’m an Essex boy, born and bred. Home tomorrow.

  27. Silent Migrant Crisis: EU Will Face Million Asylum Applications This Year

    Over one million applications for asylum will be made in Europe this year, extrapolations from the last figures suggest, as Syrians and Afghans continue to overwhelmingly dominate arrivals.

    Statistics and analysis by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), a body which strives to “bringing greater convergence to asylum and reception practices across the EU”, clearly show the bloc and its ‘EU+’ area neighbours Norway and Switzerland will welcome over one million asylum applications for the second year running.

    Applications in the first six months of 2024 are nearly identical to 2023 at 512,989, the latest figures show. Trends for the past nine years clearly show applications for asylum show a bias towards the second six months of the year, making 2024 a million-plus year all but certain, in line with the 1,143,437 received in 2023.

    While the vast majority of applications will pertain to new arrivals in Europe, a fraction — around nine per cent, according to EUAA — are from repeat-applicants, trying again after a previous unsuccessful bid.
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/09/18/silent-migrant-crisis-eu-will-face-million-asylum-applications-this-year/

    1. Fine. They can, and should make applications. Almost all will be rightly denied. That's how immigration and asylum seeking goes.

      1. Then, having been denied there they'll come to UK, and bank on staying. Thus we get all those who have been rejected elsewhere.

      2. Then, having been denied there they'll come to UK, and bank on staying. Thus we get all those who have been rejected elsewhere.

    2. "Norway and Switzerland will welcome over one million asylum applications" – oh they'll welcome them, will they? We'll see.

    2. The problem is now Richard, they have been allowed to and stamped all over culture and customs and social structure.
      If even 40 years ago our useless politicians had stood up to what they were aware of what was happening.
      Riots and plenty of damage would have taken place all over the UK.

      1. They were allowed to be built because we're better than them. Of course, we're not, and we should have said no. Just as we should have said to the individuals – what value do you bring to our society?

        But Blair and Neather wanted o flood the country with foreigners to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'. Odd, I suppose, that they accidentally explained what 'diversity' was analogous to at the time.

        1. They rubbed more than the Right's nose in diversity – they rubbed their own traditional voter base's noses in diversity. For what? – For the reason look higher up the string-pulling chain.

        2. So many of these people even after decades have paid their way in any form or actions since they have arrived here. And because of our idiots it still goes on. But the plonker politicos live in another world they have created.

  29. Thornberry Complains Yet Again About Not Being a Minister on TV

    75 days have now passed since Starmer appointed his army of ministers and reporters are still prompting Emily Thornberry whether she’s upset that she wasn’t put in Cabinet. Or any government job for that matter…

    Most of the country will probably have heard the shtick by now as Kay Burley this morning asks Thornberry how she felt:

    “Oh I was very disappointed, yeah. I was very disappointed. I’d continually been a member of the Shadow Cabinet for eight and a half years so I think I was the longest serving Shadow Cabinet member. So I had expected to be in the Cabinet and I’d spent a long time in Parliament sort of talking and now you’re in government you get a chance to actually do something, and my political heroes are people who actually achieve things, so I was really hoping to have the opportunity of doing that – but it wasn’t to be.“

    Hopefully Emily will be too busy with her new job as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to keep the moanathon going for too much longer. She today offers incisive analysis on the US election by claiming that if Trump became president he would “just say to Putin: ‘Well, okay, you’ve won.’ We can’t allow that to happen, we can’t allow Putin to move into Kyiv.” Heavy-hitting stuff…

    1. 9 years in a form of government and she's still pig ignorant. It must be a sort of record to be that stupid and not be able to articulate the nuances and complexities.

      What does that select committee even do? There's an entire department for managing foreign affairs. Yes, it's run by a gormless oaf but still.

  30. If homosexuals cannot help being homosexual because they cannot control their sexuality then they should not be punished for something beyond their control. But not very long ago homosexuality was a crime and people were sent to prison for it.

    Not a big step to say that paedophiles cannot help being paedophiles because they cannot control their sexuality and they should not be punished.

    The line has to be drawn somewhere! But is the line already being blurred – Huw Edwards has not been sent to prison!

    1. Relatively few of them do get sent to prison.
      It's becoming regarded as a mental illness rather than a perversion.

      1. Isn't a perversion a mental illness? Same as believing if a man puts on a dress he's suddenly a woman.

        The problem comes from the abuse of the children at every step of the chain. We, as a society cannot stamp it out. It's like drug abuse. Is the right approach to raise it, properly and say 'look, this is wrong, but we want to understand you (even if we can't) and then confront it, as we could legalise drugs and control the violence and abuses that causes?

        Do we accept people are different and 'manage' them? The problem arises in 'normalising' the proclivity. It's when society is told using force to accept a given behaviour as normal and punished for saying 'no it isn't' that we get problems.

    2. The difference is Rastus is that people are born as homosexuals, it isn't a learnt trait. Pedophilia is a learnt habit, a perversion. You jail perverts but not people who were born with certain traits they have no control over. In fact there is a theory that homosexuality serves an evolutionary purpose, oddly enough but not, if you accept it serves an evolutionary purpose, the percentage of homosexuals in a society is consistently the same regardless of which society, its beliefs and customs, not so pedophilia.
      https://theconversation.com/homosexuality-may-have-evolved-for-social-not-sexual-reasons-128123

      1. I disagree. Like everything, sexuality is a choice made freely. We are biologically programmed to be heterosexual. If, as you grow up you find that doesn't work for you, fine – but it remains a choice.

        Paedophilia isn't new – the Roman's practiced it, the Greeks did, it sort of wasn't by the Vikings but they would kill children and rape enemy girls. Muslim of course, has it in their book. I don't know enough about Asian or Mayan culture to comment. Britain didn't criminalise it until about the 18th C when we began properly codifying society and who we were.

        1. As I have said before. I lived in Berkeley across the Bay from San Francisco which was then the gay capital of the USA. Inevitably I knew many homosexuals of both sexes. Not one I had conversations with about their sexuality believed or told me it was a choice. In fact you would have discovered that many of them wished otherwise. The majority always said that they were gay from the moment they were aware of both sexes and found they were attracted, even non-sexually, to their own sex and even before they were even aware of sex, they just knew they were different.

          I'm aware that pedophilia isn't new, but as you are pointing out, it was/is a cultural practice and that is a very different thing from an inherent trait.

          1. Honestly I don't know. I just cannot believe that an animal is born with a sexual proclivity that isn't designed at procreation. I am – I'll admit – nervous of the wish that it were biological, as that removes the freedom from the individual, as if we have no choice over our actions.

            The only time I've ever felt I've no ability to stop any biological response was the most intense week's of our married lives..

            I simply don't care about what other adults do in their private lives as long as it doesn't affect me.

          2. Well, the theory is that it has to do with not individual preservation but group preservation. A scenario that has been put forward is that nature evolved so that some men would always stay behind with the women to protect them while the rest of the men hunted. At the same time there had to be a way that the absent men could guarantee that their women were not having it on with the males. So evolution sorted that out via homosexuality. Of course this would have been going on since we were hominids and not fully human, so a long evolutionary trail.

          3. A scenario. In other words, theorising. Perhaps it's back to front (!) and the homosexuals were assigned the task. In reality, there would be so few of them in any population, they wouldn't provide much protection.

      2. There appears to be a correlation between homosexuality and stress as well. Experiments showed that various animals who were in overcrowded conditions turned homosexual, whereas they hadn't been so before.

        1. Which fits in with a theory that it also has to do with hormonal imbalances due to stress with the mother while pregnant.

        2. There are also theories concerning uterine hormone levels during pregnancy. And even the number of older brothers before the boy's conception.

      3. "…there is a theory that homosexuality serves an evolutionary purpose…"

        Of course there is. It's an attempt to justify what is simply an aberration.

        There is no purpose in homosexuality.

        1. Then you have to explain why in terms of percentages, it is a consistent in all societies and throughout history, as far as we know. If it was just an aberration how come the same percentage regardless if it is a primitive culture or advanced and cultures that are unaware of each others existence? Obviously something is going on that is more than subjective to the individual.

          1. Genetic mutations occur also at the same frequency throughout the species e.g. Downs syndrome. Where's the evolutionary purpose in that? DNA is fragile, developmental error in utero is common. The expression of sexuality in the species is certainly not as simple and, dare I say it, as binary as X and Y. The program is simple but the mechanism of its expression is often faulty. Homosexuality and lesbianism are a part of this.

          3. I lived next door to a couple for several years. They confounded your average. Some homosexuals feature prominently in certain areas of public life and there is almost certainly a genetic basis for the condition. However, even to make that observation is to invite hostile comment about 'the gay gene'. There isn't one.

            On the graph of sexual nature with manly men at one end and womanly women at the other there's a sector in the middle where there's a great deal of muddle, a chaotic crossover. The transgender phenomenon lies in there.

            Like 'The Bell Curve' on race and IQ, genetic scientists are very reluctant to get involved.

          4. I would be a little sceptical of information that comes from sources that are desparate to justify homosexuality. In my experience, they will claim black is white to try and justify their sexual preferences.

          5. Why do you assume 'they are desperate' evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists are not eager to 'justify homosexuality' they are simply curious because it another puzzle to do with being human. Would you not be curious as to the why of something when you discovered that was a consistent trait throughout humanity regardless of culture, time, or place? I certainly would like to know simply because it is an interesting phenomena.

          6. There is intellectual curiosity of course, but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the dialogue on homosexuality has been ruled and the agenda set by the militantly political gay rights movement since the 1960s.

          7. Not sure about that. But I spent 40 years on UC Berkeley campus. Curiosity was the norm about everything and anything. We certainly didn’t need prompting.

          8. In my experience the vast majority of gays do not welcome the attention. They simply want to live their lives as quietly as anyone else. Unfortunately, like any other ideology, and I use that word deliberately in order to separate those people from the mundane homosexual minding his own business, rule the roost. the average gay does not welcome them and wishes that they would go away. They distort the picture because they are actually living caricatures of gay men not representing the norm. and thus gain prominence, smearing everyone else with their behaviour and producing an image in the minds of heterosexuals which is not representative at all.

          9. That is entirely consistent with what I said. However, the public discourse and the “research” is driven by the political movement and has been all my life.
            The relationship between gays and the gay rights movement is a bit like that between women and feminists – lots of women have supported feminists long after their actions became unjust and damaging to society as a whole, out of misguided loyalty or because women were still perceived as benefiting from feminism (more privileges).
            One of the more positive things to emerge during the last few years was the Gays Against Groomers movement.
            On the subject of claiming that black is white, the gay rights movement is riddled with lies – I have seen examples of this over and over again – they have tried to build an alternative rainbow reality that they force people to accept as truth, and which is now pervading scientific discourse as well as the arts.

        2. Other than population control.

          But they are tinkering with this and the PTB are more than happy for homosexual couples of both sexes to adopt children – e.g. Elton John and his 'husband' and Sandi Toksvig and her 'wife'!

      4. I am entirely convinced that paedophiles should be locked up for the safety of children but I am not convinced that they are capable of controlling themselves.

        A rather strange man who taught at a school where I taught was sacked under suspicious circumstances in1984 but he managed to get another job in another school where he was caught in flagrante delicto with the adolescent son of the wife he had recently married.

        He quite rightly went to prison in 1990 for about three years. But when he came out he committed another atrocity and went back into prison. I chased this up on the internet and saw that in 2004 he was sentenced to 4½ years of prison for another case of paedophilia with several victims.

        He clearly should never be released because he will doubtless commit the same crime over and over again. He seems incapable of learning from the past or controlling himself.

      5. I am entirely convinced that paedophiles should be locked up for the safety of children but I am not convinced that they are capable of controlling themselves.

        A rather strange man who taught at a school where I taught was sacked under suspicious circumstances in1984 but he managed to get another job in another school where he was caught in flagrante delicto with the adolescent son of the wife he had recently married.

        He quite rightly went to prison in 1990 for about three years. But when he came out he committed another atrocity and went back into prison. I chased this up on the internet and saw that in 2004 he was sentenced to 4½ years of prison for another case of paedophilia with several victims.

        He clearly should never be released because he will doubtless commit the same crime over and over again. He seems incapable of learning from the past or controlling himself.

    3. Sex with another consenting adult is completely different to that with a child. There's a reason children can't vote, own companies and be held responsible for some crimes.

      Although there's a law in America where statutory rape of a child is countered if the two are in a relationship already. I forget the case but there was one of an 18 year old girl bonking a 17 year old boy and the girl was accused by the parents of the boy of rape and the courts overturned it.

      It's a very fine line though.

    4. Oscar was a wiley bird he threw the boy a plumb, as he bent to pick it up……..

      I think as in many cases in the past, it's not just what you know, it's who.

    5. That's the goal, it's pretty clear. Hence "Minor Attracted Persons" to try and whitewash their proclivities.

    1. When we didn't have an oven las Winter having our little air fryer was a god send. We have two now, a big one and the little one.

    2. When we didn't have an oven las Winter having our little air fryer was a god send. We have two now, a big one and the little one.

  32. Time to check my Lotto results:
    Wordle 1,188 3/6

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    1. I just scraped by, today
      Wordle 1,188 6/6

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  33. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/19/companies-forced-offer-staff-contracts-three-months/

    I despair at this sort of backward idiocy. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what ZHC do, what the mitigate and why they exist at all.

    When government rigged the labour market and fixed the price of an employee they forced unemployment. Some roles (and that's the key bit) are just not worth the min wage. If you can't set the pay at the value of the job to the business then the job is destroyed.

    ZHC were a response to that price rigging. The Tories didn't invent them for fun. They were created as a response to the market. This is something Labour just don't seem to understand. Companies do not exist to create jobs. They exist to make money for their owners. A good owner reinvests that money in people and tools. A bad owner usually goes out of business.

    If Labour want to do something positive then they should re-write the tax code to be far simpler and prevent failed companies being bought by a new company and continuing to trade the same way under a new name, leaving a trail of debtors behind them: but that's complicated so beyond Raynor's limited intellect to do – if she even understands it.

      1. Yes, that daft berk added 9000? or something pages to the tax code, all to take as much as possible from as many as possible while favouring tiny groups in incredibly specific ways between 2-3pm on every third Sunday in a month with a half moon – to be decided if the moon is half by one civil servant who only works on a Tuesday every 17th day in Augember, a new month combining August and January – no,, not September, that'd be too obvious! Who has to be facing away from the sun between 2:03 and 2:05 on a Wednesday – when they don't work but still get paid or else the moon cannot be determined and the tax relief not paid.

        The Warqueen, for example, set a window cleaner up as a video games developer and video editor. The chap just records himself cleaning windows and gives himself points for doing so. It is ludicrous, all to save tax when it would be infinitely cheaper, simpler and easier to simplify the tax code.

    2. I would make it a requirement for all politicians to run their own small business for 6 months before being eligible to stand for election. Running their own payroll and VAT. Having to choose between paying someone to do it (off the bottom line) or saving money and doing it oneself. No expense reimbursement!!

      1. Thy wouldn't have a clue. The political class all follow the same route – council/spad/ fake charity worker/wonk/failed mp/mp.

        They explicitly don't want to do anything outside of politics because it disrupts their career. The concept of having to actually produce something is anathema to most of them.

      3. Six years would be better. That way, they'll properly feel the effects of the dead hand of government.

      4. Even working in a company would be a step up for many of them, who come from utterly useless public/charity/university sector careers.

  34. Good Morning to all it is going to be 75f today, doesn't that sound more real, more robust than a limp wristed 23c? Its sunny too.

    So anyway. I thought I would start the day off with a statement by one of the 'far right thugs' that was arrested and jailed, now released for daring to put something on the internet about the recent riots. The real thug here is Starmer.

    Woman Arrested By Starmer During 'UK Riots' Speaks Out
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC87HWiizGM

    1. With no reference of what fahrenheit means in contrast to known elements (such as boiling/freezing point of water) it's a bit of a nonsense term. WE could start using kelvin, I suppose, but starting at absolute zero and saying it's a balmy -100 is a bit odd.

          1. I still only really get imperial measurements: for distance – I don't like silly little centimetres and I just can't conceive of metres. Also, temperature means more to me if in farenheit. In liquid measurements I can get my head around ml and l, only because most recipes use use both. Mine's still a pint, if you're offering, though. OK, I'm just backward…

          2. Having grown up in countries where both the metric and imperial systems were in use, I'm comforable with either. However, the UK is the only place in the world of which I'm aware that uses stones, a measurement which I still find both alien and meaningless.

  36. The BBC has denied that it has increased its anti-Semitic propaganda and disinformation three hundred percent since the wanton and murderous exploding phone attacks on innocent women and children in shopping centres and schools recently. We are doing our best, said a spokesperson, from thems(sic) five star hotel accommodation in the centre of Jerusalem, but it has only reached two hundred and ninety five percent so far. We will be doing our best to improve it over the next few weeks.

    1. You couldn't make it up, but the BBC will nevertheless try its best, Ped. Iran calling Israel "mass murderers" today. Inversion of the truth is a terrible bug and I'm sure Iran feels reassured by the BBC's approach to language and meaning.

  37. 'Morning All
    Medley Time
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/49c68d1468c7c21b332b8e76f75baa6ee904f7c4cf883a518572794cffbe8562.png
    http://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/13a561d88704cf6d22b957dc8356ae68afc65bc4bc543159df4c0c7b325df691.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9fe3b8d52262ec6a169f55a88616e90fa6d3dbcba7520568695dfb2c34b5a284.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2046a9c7bfed60b0558a7fb6dd8f4088282b4dfa56a78979d9dd7278c9291782.jpg
    http://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eeebfd855e4c9f2593c1b492f8f0332950b84998a5be66e29100e1f16130c0d2.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5cabf686476533184d27a40d2762a67451c7b56eeb30e7ad1e1294506c82dbdd.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9f77f8531b62c6e5a82bc276f846b524a32267a3f4d90875056a628f573ed1e4.jpg

  38. Good morning all ,

    Dull morning , 16c, slight breeze .
    Last night was warm , 17c .
    S
    The concert in Weymouth last night was wonderful, huge audience . Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra simply brilliant .

    Fingal's Cave.. (Superb )

    Mozart Piano concerto no 21 (Magnificent , tearfully so)

    Faure, Pavane (Beautiful)

    Dvorak Symphony no 8 ( Full on brilliance .

    Acoustics were terrific , Conductor Enyi Okpara.. his body and arms conveyed passion and emotion to his musicians .
    It was a wonderful evening , when we left the theatre , the full moon was dancing over the sea , because the Weymouth Pavilion is close to the pier and shore , the tide was soft and gentle , and salty air was refreshing after being in the confines of the theatre .

    (Moh fell asleep for a while when Dvorak and all the brilliant brass ensemble were thundering out their score , I had to keep nudging him to stop him snoring ) bless him , but he enjoyed his evening as well.

    1. A lovely evening. The moon was rising as we clambered to the top of the cliff after fishing and shone down on us as we stopped for a beer on the way home.

      1. Hedvig Antoinette Isabella Eleonore Jensen (December 4, 1867 – July 19, 1889), better known by her stage name Elvira Madigan, was a circus performer who performed as a slack rope dancer, artistic rider, juggler and dancer. She is best known today for her romantic relationship with the Swedish nobleman and cavalry officer Sixten Sparre. Their joint death caused great sensation and the event was described in song by, among others, the author Johan Lindström Saxon in a song beginning "Sad things happen".
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvira_Madigan

      3. Hello Sue ,

        The theatre was full, we have to either visit Poole or Bournemouth for more music , but seaside places like Weymouth seem to prefer tribute acts or some comedy for the tourists ..

        So it was so pleasurable to watch and listen to a full Orchestra .

        You are so lucky where you are , the theatres / and serious music venues you visit would be absolute bliss for me as well .

  39. We play a key role in the UK’s support for recovery and reconstruction by investing in the preservation of Ukraine’s culture and educational assets, expanding the use of English, and supporting thousands of Ukrainian English language teachers’ professional development.

    Would not the following be nice:

    We play a key role in the UK’s support for recovery and reconstruction by investing in the preservation of United Kingdom's culture and educational assets, expanding the use of English, and supporting thousands of English language teachers’ professional development.

      1. From Coffee House, the Spectator

        Labour minister: Freebies are ‘part of the job’
        Comments Share 19 September 2024, 9:36am
        Dear oh dear. Things are only getting worse for Sir Keir, as it now transpires that the Prime Minister accepted £40,000 in hospitality gifts, a £4 million donation from a Cayman Islands-registered hedge fund, and regular use of an £18 million penthouse owned by top donor Lord Alli. Alright for some, eh?

        It’s been a rough week for the PM as ‘frockgate‘ continues to rumble on, and the scrutiny on Starmer’s acceptance of some rather extravagant donations is only growing. As reported by the Telegraph, not only did the Labour leader accept clothing and glasses from Lord Alli, he also used Alli’s 5,000 square foot home on election night, as well as for strategy meetings and fundraisers. Sir Keir declared £20,400 for ‘accommodation’ from the Labour peer but didn’t quite manage to include the full detail. How curious…

        More than that, the Labour Party received its biggest donation from Quadrature Capital, a venture with shares worth millions in fossil fuels and arms manufacturers – and accepted a rather lot of tickets for football matches and gigs. It also turns out that the PM accepted £4,000 worth of Taylor Swift tickets, while his wife also accepted two free tickets to see the US singer-songwriter, during her summer tour – which some are viewing as a rather self-indulgent decision. Talk about being the Anti-Hero, eh?

        And Sir Keir (an avid football fan) also received £12,600 of Premier League football tickets and was even given use of a corporate box by Arsenal – a feature advertised as costing at least £8,750 a pop. The cumulative cost of Starmer’s donations mean that the PM has accepted many more freebies than any other MP since becoming Labour leader. Good heavens…

        Yet while some might have expected Labour government ministers to be rather cagey about Starmer’s gift receipts, it appears that the Business Secretary has other ideas. Speaking to Times Radio this morning about the donations received by the PM, Jonathan Reynolds insisted: ‘If people get the chance for a bit of relaxation as part of that then I’ve no problem.’ It’s only the latest questionable broadcast round on the matter featuring Sir Keir’s government, with Angela Eagle, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy all rather putting their feet in it this week too. Talk about tone deaf…

        1. Yep, spot on Rob. I've expanded Reynold's justification in later post. It's typical of Labour. They always spend their time pointing the self righteous holier than thou finger at the "sleazy Torees" then when they get in we begin to see the true depths of sleaze. But then we are in their view to "be governed" and be grateful for it. That has always been the view of your average Lefty.

        2. Yep, spot on Rob. I've expanded Reynold's justification in later post. It's typical of Labour. They always spend their time pointing the self righteous holier than thou finger at the "sleazy Torees" then when they get in we begin to see the true depths of sleaze. But then we are in their view to "be governed" and be grateful for it. That has always been the view of your average Lefty.

        3. Yep, spot on Rob. I've expanded Reynold's justification in later post. It's typical of Labour. They always spend their time pointing the self righteous holier than thou finger at the "sleazy Torees" then when they get in we begin to see the true depths of sleaze. But then we are in their view to "be governed" and be grateful for it. That has always been the view of your average Lefty.

        4. Starmer certainly likes his little outings, doesn't he. Taylor Swift concert, racing, football…

          Can you imagine Mrs Thatcher taking time off to go to a Madonna concert?

  41. Did anyone else have the misfortune to watch an interview with the dim adulterer Little Johnnie Major? His serious views garbage demonstrated very clearly what he is: a remainiac, ecofreak limp dumb. No wonder that the MR (a limp dumb voter – I know, nothing I can do about it) was impressed…..

    1. As I dislike both Major and Amol Rajan in equal measure I studiously avoided raising my blood pressure by watching the "programme".

        1. My Caroline has the wisdom to agree with most of my opinions on political matters so I am very happy to cede domestic control and management to her.

      2. Amol Rajan is a disgrace and John Major is totally pathetic.

        I hope that Mrs Currie will give him a shoulder to cry on and make sure that he keeps out of the limelight.

  42. Good marning Nottlers.

    Free Speech has a new article by Demosthenes on the Huw Edwards saga and the cesspit of perversion that is the BBC.

    freespeechbacklash.com

  43. Talking of "benefits",

    "Sir Keir Starmer is in a "pressure" job and should be allowed to enjoy gifts and hospitality if it is declared correctly, a cabinet minister has told Sky News.

    Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said anyone who is a prime minister "spends pretty much every bit of their waking life working on it" and if they are able to do something important to them "I don't think that's a problem"."

    People perhaps ought to bear that one in mind next time they're arguing with the tax man…

    1. What a load of nonsense! I suppose, having waited so long to get their snouts into the trough into power, Labour MPs can't bear to admit to the whiff around their glorious leader that the rest of us can smell!

  44. Israel's bravery has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer's foreign policy

    The battle Jerusalem faces is not just about defending the Jewish state. It is about upholding civilisation itself

    Allister Heath • 18 September 2024 • 7:36pm

    Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.

    Israel's brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group's walkie-talkies, is a stunning fillip for the forces of civilisation worldwide.

    A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global policeman.

    The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel's side in this existential combat exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration.

    The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing "escalation", even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. All too predictably, America, seemingly determined to ensure the survival of every regional terror group, appeared upset at the successful attack on Hezbollah. David Lammy, our foreign secretary, is delivering speeches claiming climate change is a worse threat than terrorism; in a rational world, Lammy would be privately congratulating his Israeli counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever conducted against a terrorist organisation, with few civilian casualties, and pledging Britain's help.

    Instead, Keir Starmer has turned against Israel, banning the sales of some weapons – a policy that Germany appears intent on following – and refusing to oppose lawsuits against the Jewish state, in an unforgivable moral inversion.

    Labour has placed Britain on the side of those nihilists masquerading as human rights lawyers who negate the essential distinction between victims and aggressors, between rule-bound, democracies desperate to minimise civilian casualties, and bloodthirsty dictatorships for whom their people are pawns to be sacrificed.

    Hezbollah is funded and controlled by the Iranian regime, an obscurantist, fascistic, millenarian tyranny that persecutes minorities, women and dissidents. Violating human rights and plotting war crimes is Hezbollah's raison d'être: its 150,000 missiles point towards civilian centres and, like Hamas and Iran itself, it seeks Israel's liquidation, guaranteeing the massacre, expulsion or subjugation of Jews. Hezbollah has forced some 63,473 Israelis to flee their homes since October 7. This is unsustainable and explains why a major Israeli response is looming; obscenely, this will trigger widespread condemnation of the Jewish state.

    Western foreign policy is a mishmash of cowardice, delusion and contradictions. Iran is a threat to the world; its alliance with Russia is deepening. Turkey, led by the despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened Israel with invasion, yet remains part of NATO. Qatar, which puts up senior Hamas terrorists in luxury hotels, is a major non-NATO ally of the US, home to a crucial Western military base and a major investor in London. Egypt, a recipient of US aid, has tolerated myriad tunnels to southern Gaza, refused to let in any Palestinians and, bizarrely, is not held responsible for supplying Gaza with provisions, that task falling instead to Israel. None of the three latter regimes face sanctions: global ire is reserved for Israel.

    One reason Western elites have become so Israelophobic is that, infected by wokery, they increasingly loathe Europe's and America's history and traditions, and view the Jewish state as a standout example of a Western model they reject.

    Winston Churchill would be convicted for crimes against humanity today, as would Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman. D-Day would be ruled illegitimate because so many French civilians died during the Battle of Normandy.

    Democracies might as well not bother with nuclear weapons, for detonating one, even in retaliation for an unprovoked attack, would be deemed a war crime. I'm in favour of much stricter rules than those governing World War II, of doing everything possible to protect civilians, but this is madness.

    The Just War is a foundational principle. States have the right to defend themselves. Every civilian life lost as collateral damage is a tragedy, but pacifism is a deluded utopia that fails to grasp the reality of the human condition. It is madness to criminalise all warfare, and despicable to focus on that conducted by democracies and ignore that advanced by our enemies.

    It is equally stupid to entrust so much power to legal activists. Much historic anti-Semitism has been ratified by kangaroo courts, including during the 1930s. The Trial of the Talmud took place in France in 1240, with rabbis forced to defend religious texts against trumped-up accusations of blasphemy and obscenity.

    Other bigot-fests masquerading as ordinary trials include the Disputations of Barcelona and Tortosa, the Damascus Affair, the Dreyfus affair that prompted Emile Zola's seminal J'accuse, and the trial of Mendel Beilis in Ukraine in 1913. It is a well-established model that hasn't gone out of fashion in far-Left quarters. They no longer explicitly single out religious beliefs or individuals but leverage lawfare to delegitimise what just happens to be the only Jewish state.

    The fact that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have the trappings of a legitimate legal setting does not mean they necessarily embody justice. The fact that their rulings are deemed legitimate by Left-wing elites doesn't automatically make them such. The fact that today's blood libels take on the language of "human rights" doesn't make them less monstrous. The fact that it is possible for a country as unjustly governed as South Africa to lead a genocide case against Israel proves that the entire system is rotten. The case is backed by Iran, Brazil's far-Left president, Ireland and Egypt: we must have been transported into an alternative, Kafkaesque universe.

    Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order implodes and the autocracies triumph.

    The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and allow it to finish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating Hezbollah.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/18/israel-hezbollah-exploding-beepers-devices-war-hamas

    1. When the Left so desperately brand 'Far Right' as Nazis and the media promote this of course kids don't want to support Israel.

      The press – especially the BBC – do not present the truth that Hamas start all the problems. They don't want to accept that Nazi stands for national socialist.

      So the Left get the free ride, avoiding their blood soaked history thanks to a weak, Left wing media that looks for the easy soundbite.

      Israel is demonised because the Left would quite like to finish the job they started in WW2 of exterminating the Jews. The press keeps insisting that it is the 'Far Right' who carry these views. This is a lie, a lie told to assuage the ego, hatred and bigotry of the Left, by the Left.

      If the Left, those nasty characters demanding socialism, the bitter thugs chanting 'Nazi scum off our streets' were told – no, *you're the Nazis' then the public would turn against them with the force of plasma fire and expose the spite, envy, malice intolerance and hatred the Left hold for everyone they cannot control. Then public opinion would shift and the muslim would be properly identified as the aggressor, Israel the defender.

      This is why the Left can't permit the narrative to change. If it does, they're finished.

    2. International communists don't believe that nations have the right to exist. They deny biology because physical reality doesn't support their ideology. They deny that the Jews are a race, though genetics proves that they are. In fact they deny racial differences, period. They deny IQ. The version of the Talmud much quoted on social media is in fact a medieval forgery. Anything to discredit the Jews. Worth remembering that the Jews became bankers because the medieval church didn't want to soil its collective hands with usury and banking is necessary but doesn't function without usury. There has to be profit to pay the overheads. So it was forced on the Jews and they're the bad guys because, having a high average IQ, they turned out to be good at it. Yes, today some of them are corrupt but no more or less than their gentile counterparts.

      One quibble with the above article. If The West up-held Judeo-Christian values and traded with and dealt fairly with Russia, the latter would probably not be consorting with savages for economic survival.

  45. I joined Reform with reluctance, the reluctance being that I do not trust Farage but there is no alternative to them, still less the Conservative Party. This discussion by the 'Lotus Eaters' panel articulates very well why my disquiet. I am convinced that a break between Farage's ego and Reform will take place in the future and, like UKIP, he will go out of his way to destroy it. Something that really worries me because Reform are good people. Farage is out of touch and his attitude to Tommy Robinson is inexcusable, symptomatic, in my opinion, of his egotism. He could, at the very least simple not talk about Robinson, instead of spending time dishonestly slandering the man.

    An interesting observation in this programme, Nigel Farage is a 20th century politician trying to solve a problem that doesn't fit that paradigm anymore. This is the 21st century and the game has changed. What is also disturbing is how Farage evades almost all the questions put to him. He doesn't actually answer but swerves around them and redefines them to give answers. A fundamentally dishonest practice and typical of a politician. If you watch the whole thing you will discover that Farage's answers become worse at the very end and give the appearance that he doesn't really care about saving England at all.

    Nigel Refuses to Lead

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ts1D4JN4Q

    1. Farage needs to be different to Tommy Robinson in his presentation. One is a demagogue, the other a politician.

      As a politician, Farage has to gain office to make the changes that would benefit folk agreeing with Tommy Robinson's beliefs.

      Yes, he should stop going on but he can't. He needs to say 'We am not' to broaden the base.

      Reform needs Farage. He is their figure head and emblem. For his faults, Farage is a well spoken, easy to listen to public figure. When Reform have professionalised themselves with proper regional offices, devolved administration and support networks, a consistent theme and message, proper data analytics and tracking – a political party, not a group – then he can step down as the message will be bigger than the man. Until that happens we – politically, ideologically, commercially need Farage.

        1. I've aid previously that so much more is needed: a properly re-worked tax system. One that's a few dozen pages. One that can be understood and defended in public. It needs publishing now, to get it to people to read it and see the advantages. It needs to set out a plan to dismantle the edifice of the state machine. It needs to produce a properly costed plan for removing welfare – protecting those who need it, but properly unravellign the forced dependence on the state.

          The WFA allowance – they should keep that reduction BUT explain that the market should provide cheaper energy and that they'd do this by scrapping the climate change acts and net zero, ending wind mill subsidy and restoring a market to energy – including revoking the forced buying of unreliables.

          They could say we'll scrap working tax credits as it's unfair to make people dependent on and arrogant state and simply let people keep more of their own money. They could talk to Iain Duncan Smith about his truly phased reductions of welfare so someone working 17 hours loses the other 16.

          This needs to be developed now, publicised and defended down to the details so the Left wing press cannot just attack and demolish it. A 17,000 page tax code, with another 7 thousand pages of explanatory notes is idiotic. reform need to show they've understood this and are prepared to fight as grown ups, with policy, with ideas and truly new thinking.

      3. I am a great supporter of TR but anyone in politics realises that he is toxic to any brand or cause. A bit like UKIP itself, as soon as a story appears about them, the MSM are down like a ton o bricks. TR will have to work with what he has got as a movement, which is quite impressive in itself, but I am pretty certain he is about to be banged up by the state for a considerable time. He is due in court at the end of Oct. The justice system will have been given the same direction as it was for those protesting the Southport murders. It is their chance to nip TRs opposition in the bud. They will not miss this opportunity.

        1. I think you have to ask why he is "toxic", I think it is because he is above the target and can do far more damage to the status que than Farage. Therefore he needs to be detoxified and that process has already began. He now has several prominent supporters, not the least of which is Jordan Peterson. But even Musk appears to be in his corner and Joe Rogan. I think that that process will continue and he will end up as main stream, especially if Herr Starmer drags this country even further to the left. To resist that takes a firebrand as leader, not a politician like Nigel Farage. It used to be that Robinsons support was working class but now he is also capturing the imagination of the middle class. If he is jailed, it will not go easy for the government and god help them if he is murdered in there. At that point all bets would be off.

    2. I disagree with your opinion of Nigel Farage, johnathanrackham.

      As leader of the Reform Party, Nigel Farage is our best hope by far for the future of UK politics.

      1. Nigel is not a team player. He doesn't sweat the small stuff either. I say this having worked with him for some years.

    2. You're misunderstanding the point of the climate change tax scam. It's not about green. It's not about clean energy or energy at all.

      It's a way to control society. To enforce socialism. To remove choice and freedom. To say 'You cannot have but they can'. This is why the standing charge has soared. It's to pay for those who won't/can't pay the massive costs any more.

      It's simply the latest attempt to move money from the earner to the state.

    3. "And the UK Government is still dithering" – no they are not, Bob.

      They – Milipede et al – are using the 'NetZero' myth to reduce reliability of energy supply and increase its cost, thereby killing of any prospect of new energy-intensive industry.

      I reckon that this policy has reached already the point of no return, witness Port Talbot..

  47. Ministers have learnt nothing from lockdown

    Teachers should be more present in schools, not less. So why are politicians promoting the opposite?

    Isabel Oakeshott • 18 September 2024 • 7:39pm

    Oh come on! At the risk of sounding like John McEnroe, you cannot be serious. Does the government really think teachers can work from home and do a proper job?

    Sure, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson's new wheeze to tackle the recruitment crisis in schools by allowing teachers to duck out of the classroom at the beginning or end of each day (or take Fridays off altogether) will appeal to "self care" obsessed younger entrants to the profession. Millennials and Gen Z are notoriously preoccupied with achieving what they see as a healthy work-life balance. They seem to think nothing of sacrificing career advancement to spend more time wild swimming and exploring their inner chi. But what about the kids whose futures depend on a decent education, which requires teachers to show up? Are they again to be sacrificed at the altar of adult expedience?

    To the utter shame of our political leaders, a generation of schoolchildren are still paying the price for the devastating decision to shut schools during the pandemic. Many have since admitted it was a terrible mistake or, as Sir Gavin Williamson (who was education secretary at the time) put it, "a panic decision, made without having children's interests front and centre."

    Locked out of the classroom for weeks on end, hundreds of thousands of children were given the impression that full-time education is optional, and that the occasional online lesson is a reasonable substitute for a proper timetable. Naturally, their academic attainment suffered – as did their other development. After such a long, cruel period of enforced isolation, no wonder so many developed social anxiety and other behavioural problems. More than four years later, many have never returned to school. Indeed, research published earlier this year suggests that one in five kids is still routinely absent: the worst figures on record.

    Against this backdrop, what on earth are ministers thinking encouraging more absenteeism – this time from teachers? All this does is reinforce the very message that has already caused so much damage: that turning up to school every day, from registration in the morning until the bell rings at the end of lessons in the afternoon, is optional – and that what was once a universally accepted routine can be casually altered to suit different lifestyles.

    Granted, the Government is not suggesting that teachers be allowed to conduct lessons from home. The idea is that they should be able to condense their usual free periods into blocks that can be taken at the beginning or end of each day. Instead of spending the time they ordinarily have between lessons working in the staff room or empty classrooms, they will be able to "bank" it to mark homework or prepare lessons from home. Phillipson hopes the measure, to be issued in new guidance for schools, will stem the tide of younger women leaving the profession when they have children.

    Almost certainly so! The prospect of 13 weeks paid holiday a year – including a six-week summer break – and all this flexibility during term time will surely make the job much more attractive to those trying to juggle work and raising a family. The question is whether those who benefit will actually do the work for which they are being paid?

    For the very group of teachers the new policy is designed to help – mothers with young children – are those for whom working from home is most difficult. How on earth are they supposed to mark homework or prepare lessons on the school run? Has Phillipson (who has two children of her own) forgotten what it's like trying to get anything done while looking after a toddler? The idea that the time will genuinely be used in this way is patently preposterous. Once again, it is the children who will suffer.

    For Labour, it is part of a wider pledge to end what Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds calls "the culture of presenteeism" – as if that hasn't already been eroded. The pandemic put paid to that, revolutionising work patterns. Whether more "WFH" will make people more loyal and efficient – as Reynolds claims – or have the opposite effect remains to be seen. Neither common sense, nor UK productivity figures, point to a positive outcome.

    Of course, the mucky fingerprints of trade unionists can be found all over this – just as they were over those catastrophic school closures. Let's not forget that long after the healthcare emergency was over, they were still pushing to keep our children out of the classroom. As Williamson despairingly remarked of the teaching unions at the time, it seems "they really, really do just hate work."

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/18/ministers-have-learnt-nothing-from-lockdown

    1. I've an idea. We just ay unionists and don't demand they do anything.

      Would they be happy with that, or would they complain even then? How about we do the sensible thing and just sack them? Say 'the train/school won't be open'.

      Or, we could do something positive and spin off the railways to a private company as Switzerland does. We could do what Sweden does and remove the state from education. What the Danes [and every other country] do with healthcare and make that privately funded through an insurance scheme – yes, some can't pay. So you have an upper cap and a lower cap but you fundamentally pay your way and you don't get to visit the doctor infinite numbers of times just because you want to.

      It just means removing the state from the service. As soon as teachers go on strike the parent removes the child into a different school . Unionisation could be something parents – as the customers – then check for.

    2. This doesn't just erode self-discipline and being paid for one's time – to be present and available for a specified number of hours regardless of workload. It's also part of the redistribution of wealth from the industrial world to the third world. If a job can be done remotely, it can be done from anywhere in the world. In theory, at least.

    3. "The idea is that they should be able to condense their usual free periods into blocks that can be taken at the beginning or end of each day. Instead of spending the time they ordinarily have between lessons working in the staff room or empty classrooms, they will be able to "bank" it to mark homework or prepare lessons from home." There writes someone who has never taught; so-called"free" periods (in reality, non-scheduled teaching time) are usually taken up filling in for absent staff or "cover" as it's known.

    1. I doubt he was earning £300 a day. The interest is also laughable. Dear life. Would the lass who was jailed for saying something the state didn't like get that sort of absurd remuneration?

  52. Rod Liddle
    The tyranny of lawyers
    From magazine issue:
    21 September 2024

    Ihave spent most of the morning trying to convince people online that Huw Edwards’s conviction does not mean that all, or even a majority, of Welsh people are sexually attracted to children. ‘We thought it was just sheep. It isn’t,’ one furious interlocuter named only as ‘Ned’ posted with what I assume he thought was bitter irony. Another mentioned that Edwards’s supposed ‘friend’, from whom he procured the disgusting photographs, was also Welsh and that there had been recent, very serious paedophilia cases in both Swansea and Cardiff crown courts.

    This is a perfect example of how false news is generated. Long before the end of these lengthy and malevolent exchanges, someone had argued that Owain Glyndwr hung around nursery schools with a bag of sherbet lemons and that our first Welsh king, Henry VII, was born to a woman who was 13 years old. I tried to rebut all this rubbish with hard facts – except the bit about Henry VII, which I discovered is actually true – but nobody would listen. They were borne aloft on an energising collective hatred and the truth was an unwanted interloper at their party. On another site, the thesis was different – namely, everyone who works at the BBC is a paedo, regardless or not of whether they are Welsh. The Marxist Blair Broadcasting Corporation is chock full of them! And so on, interminably.

    We might worry similarly about the propensity of the public to buy into another theory, which is that we have a two-tier judicial system and that Edwards would be in prison right now if he had merely tweeted his approval of an anti-immigration march (if you’re on the right) or climbing gantries on the M25 (if you’re on the left). This theory does not quite hold water, either – the truth here is rather more complex and no less damning of our judicial system. The sentence Edwards received was more or less precisely what legal experts had expected, given his very early guilty plea, repentance and lack of previous convictions. You can argue as long as you like that we should have tougher sentences for sexual perverts but you would be a) marching against the tide of recent history in this country; and b) offering up an irrelevance to the issue at point – which is that Edwards was not afforded special treatment because of who he was. For those of you who are not sufficiently comforted by the complete and utter destruction of his life, at least you might take pleasure from the fact that it has thrown the BBC into another tailspin towards extinction. The irony, really, is that Edwards was the subject of that increasingly rare thing in our courts – a genuine, non-politicised verdict.

    The big lie is that our courts are pristine and above the fray and never beholden to the ephemeral influence of politics. It has always been a downright lie – just ask the striking miners from the 1980s – and never more so than today. It is not so much two-tiered policing, as multi-tiered policing. Instead of operating in a realm which is properly distanced from the political and concerned only with judging each individual case solely on its merits and the evidence provided – which is what is meant to happen – our courts now reflect every political spasm which shudders through the nation at large. Our politicians are partly to blame – not least Yvette Cooper, whose government department decided that all those arrested for participation in those early summer riots were ‘criminals’ – but so too is the gradual politicisation of the police (partly as a consequence of elected crime commissioners who are usually third division party hacks) and the frantic demands of the press. I do not believe for a nanosecond that the lengthy sentences meted out to elderly thugs were a case of blind justice: they were politically motivated sentences beyond any doubt. They were motivated by the insistence of the Labour party and part of the press that this was a dangerous and co-ordinated attempt by a quasi-fascist organisation to take power in the streets, rather than a convocation of a few hundred pissed-up, elderly football hoolies.

    And how about four- and five-year sentences for members of Just Stop Oil – people who had taken part in peaceful, if inconveniencing, protests? I am sure they are ghastly, arrogant, privileged idiots, but I am also tempted to agree with Just Stop Oil’s analysis that the sentences were an ‘obscene perversion of justice’. Those sentences, however, were handed down because of the long clamouring from the press and Tory politicians that the police and courts were not taking these idiots seriously enough. Either way, the process was scarcely pristine.

    You will remember that Black Lives Matter protestors were met by coppers who went down on one knee, rather than wading in with their truncheons held aloft. More political interference – as was, of course, the bizarre exoneration by a court of those BLM morons who threw a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour.

    I suppose you might see all this as the flip side to our country becoming, fairly rapidly, a juristocracy, rather than a democracy. Over the past 25 years, more and more of the governance of our country has been handed over, not to elected members of parliament, but to the lawyers. As we saw with the Rwanda debacle, there is almost nothing a government can do – no matter how huge its majority – if the lawyers and the courts say no. You may remember that the courts tried very hard indeed to stop us leaving the European Union. If the courts are these days ever more involved with politics, then you can expect that to be reflected in the way they deal with ordinary criminals. The person to blame isn’t a Welshman, Huw Edwards, but a Scot – Lord ‘Charlie’ Falconer. I heard him chuckling about this achievement recently, on the BBC, of course.

    ***************************************

    Charlie Falconer was Blair's flatmate

    Spectator User
    3 hours ago
    As you well know from fellow speaker David Starkey the judiciary has become as powerful as the government. Unconstitutionally untethered from the Bill of Rights by Blair.

    It self appoints because he destroyed the power of the Lord Chancellor.

    It was all part of Blair’s plan to ideologically capture in perpetuity the judiciary and dilute democracy beyond measure.

    We need a total restoration of our constitution back to before Blair and even as far as Heath. Starkey is absolutely right.

    J K Browne
    4 hours ago
    Henry VII’s Mum was only 13? Don’t tell Lammy or he’ll start accusing Henry VIII of being a paedophile.

    1. The mother of Henry VII was Margaret Beaufort (1443—1509) great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. Beaufort was the name given to their illegitimate children from their long affair, who were later legitimised when they married. John of Gaunt's mother, Philippa of Hainault was aged 14 when she married Edward III in 1328 and he was just 15. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”?

      1. Times were rather different then – people were "old" at 40 and many died at that age. The same thing was, and is, found in more primitive societies, eg. in Africa

        1. Yes, 15 year old Edward III led an army against the Scots and his 14 year old bride was mistress of her own household at Knaresborough Castle. They matured earlier and as you say, had shorter lives. Our lords and masters want to revive that so that they eliminate "useless eaters".

          1. Children were treated as miniature adults; I believe that the notion of childhood as a completely separate stage first became popular with the Victorians.

            As for the PTB, they ain’t our feudal lords and masters whatever they think. Feudalism was in many cases more ( an unequal, yes) give and take. A decent lord looked after his tenants and other people on his estate.

          2. Just reading a book on the Victorians and you're right; during the mid to late Victorian era there arose "the cult of the child" where they were separated (in the home) by sex and age and had their own area, whereas formerly they had all mixed in together.

      2. I always confuse the author of the Go Between with the author of the book about Fly Fishing!

      3. Henry V's sister-in-law Isabella of Valois married Richard II when she was six and was widowed at ten.

    2. I do not believe for a nanosecond that the lengthy sentences meted out to elderly thugs were a case of blind justice: they were politically motivated sentences beyond any doubt.

      Of course Rod. We all know that.

  55. The late Harrods billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed allegedly raped five female employees and abused more than 20 other women while he was in charge of the luxury London department store.

    A new BBC documentary suggests the Egyptian-born businessman – who died in London aged 94 in August 2023 – carried out the attacks during his time in charge of the outlet between 1984 and its sale in 2010.

    More than 20 female former workers at Harrods have spoken to the BBC, accusing him of sexual abuse and presiding over a 'culture of fear' at the department store. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13867629/Harrods-boss-Mohamed-Al-Fayed-accused-rape-department-store.html

    Just wondering whether the poor late Diana was also a victim .. father like son .. and the plot becomes even more of a mystery .. Dodi was the spider and Diana was the fly .

  56. The late Harrods billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed allegedly raped five female employees and abused more than 20 other women while he was in charge of the luxury London department store.

    A new BBC documentary suggests the Egyptian-born businessman – who died in London aged 94 in August 2023 – carried out the attacks during his time in charge of the outlet between 1984 and its sale in 2010.

    More than 20 female former workers at Harrods have spoken to the BBC, accusing him of sexual abuse and presiding over a 'culture of fear' at the department store. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13867629/Harrods-boss-Mohamed-Al-Fayed-accused-rape-department-store.html

    Just wondering whether the poor late Diana was also a victim .. father like son .. and the plot becomes even more of a mystery .. Dodi was the spider and Diana was the fly .

      2. I seem to recall that Fayed was notoriously litigious, so perhaps the women waited until he was dead and could no longer use his wealth to sue them for the allegations.

        1. Or maybe it's some revenge served cold from the establishment who couldn't stand the Fayeds, now that he's dead and can't answer.

    2. Just imagine if the car hadn't crashed and Lady Diana Spencer had married Dodo Fayed?

      William, the heir to the throne, would have had a rapist as his step grandfather.

  57. They don't even try to hide their corruption and lack of ethics anymore:

    Last week your (not so dearly remembered) past BOE governor Mark Carney was appointed as a Financial Advisor to the Canadinan Liberal party – that's to the party directly, not to the government so no ethics checks required. Carney is also chair of company Brookfield Asset Management.

    Totally unrelated of course, Brookfield announced this week that are in the process of receiving a ten billion dollar grant from the Government. The money will go into a Canadian innovation fund. Not enough moolah – the inept Finance minister is also directing pension funds to invest in Canadian innovation ventures.

    With billions being blatantly directed to Quebec, the separatist MPs have seen that they are onto a good thing and will not be supporting non confidence votes in parliament. We are totally screwed.

  58. Would anyone like a very large lapdog for a month or two? I love my big boy desperately, but he's tried three times to climb into my lap and each time he manages it the chair sinks through the floor.

    He's really low maintenance: you go outside and he'll invariably want to go home again.

    Upsides – is a silly ball of fluff and fur that'll be a wonderful companion. Likes tummy rubs. He doesn't pull, can carry a heavy basket around shops, is properly service dog trained.

    Downsides: he drools, eats everything, farts, drools (yes, that's in twice), needs brushing a lot.

    I recommend a strong skeleton as he'll lean against/lay on you. He still thinks he's a puppy but he's 3 feet at the shoulder.

    Any takers?

    He's currently terrified of flies.

      1. He likes everyone and is good with any other dogs and people.

        We went through a time when he was frightened of rabbits. Cats just seem to see him as a bus service. The Beast used to sit on his back and get carried around.

          1. Does Dobby mind farts? Proper, room clearing farts?

            At the moment the fellow has his head on my desk, putting his paw on my arm as I type – the desk is 75cm high, btw. What he really wants is to be nice and cool as it's a bit hot and to play with his Dad but his Dad is busy procrastinating.

            We had Lucy leap on the bed yesterday. It was already a warm night, suddenly having a very hot dog on there was a bit much.

          3. He'd be very happy there, only… he is two sofa seats long. Folk can't really envisage how big Mongo is. Beside me, he's a biggish dog. Beside the Warqueen he's a BIG dog. With Junior he is huge and Junior's not little any more.

            Good thing the sofa's blue. It'd hide the fluff. Are the cushion's waterproof?

            We've a visit to the children's hospice tomorrow. He must know as he doesn't so much shy away from the service dog big but more 'I don't want to go, Daddy' look. He whines. But he does wear it and is full of beans when we get there but does need time to be on his own afterward.

            It's a very human reaction. Marion didn't expect it when I talked to her about it but that's what he does.

  59. Suits you, Sir….

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-minister-freebies-are-part-of-the-job/?

    "Labour minister: Freebies are ‘part of the job’

    19 September 2024, 9:36am

    Dear oh dear. Things are only getting worse for Sir Keir, as it now transpires that the Prime Minister accepted £40,000 in hospitality gifts, a £4 million donation from a Cayman Islands-registered hedge fund, and regular use of an £18 million penthouse owned by top donor Lord Alli. Alright for some, eh?

    It’s been a rough week for the PM as ‘frockgate‘ continues to rumble on, and the scrutiny on Starmer’s acceptance of some rather extravagant donations is only growing. As reported by the Telegraph, not only did the Labour leader accept clothing and glasses from Lord Alli, he also used Alli’s 5,000 square foot home on election night, as well as for strategy meetings and fundraisers. Sir Keir declared £20,400 for ‘accommodation’ from the Labour peer but didn’t quite manage to include the full detail. How curious…

    More than that, the Labour Party received its biggest donation from Quadrature Capital, a venture with shares worth millions in fossil fuels and arms manufacturers – and accepted a rather lot of tickets for football matches and gigs. It also turns out that the PM accepted £4,000 worth of Taylor Swift tickets, while his wife also accepted two free tickets to see the US singer-songwriter, during her summer tour – which some are viewing as a rather self-indulgent decision. Talk about being the Anti-Hero, eh?

    And Sir Keir (an avid football fan) also received £12,600 of Premier League football tickets and was even given use of a corporate box by Arsenal – a feature advertised as costing at least £8,750 a pop. The cumulative cost of Starmer’s donations mean that the PM has accepted many more freebies than any other MP since becoming Labour leader. Good heavens…

    Yet while some might have expected Labour government ministers to be rather cagey about Starmer’s gift receipts, it appears that the Business Secretary has other ideas. Speaking to Times Radio this morning about the donations received by the PM, Jonathan Reynolds insisted: ‘If people get the chance for a bit of relaxation as part of that then I’ve no problem.’ It’s only the latest questionable broadcast round on the matter featuring Sir Keir’s government, with Angela Eagle, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy all rather putting their feet in it this week too. Talk about tone deaf…"

    1. What a star!!! Clearly he's accepting all these freebies to save Sue Gray from the embarrassment of having an income higher than his.

  60. I was watching Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News last night and while reading out an article in the Times he instinctively corrected what he read saying: " 'owing to' not 'due to.' "

    I remember explaining to my pupils that due to takes an adjectival complement (i.e. often after part of the verb to be) while owing to is usually part of an adverbial complement.

    For example:

    i) It was due to the bad weather that the match was cancelled.
    ii) The match was cancelled owing to bad weather.

    Of course some of my pupils grasped this quite easily while others will probably go to their graves not knowing the difference and not giving a toss!

      1. Fewer v less. Almost all newsreaders don't get it – every day!

        Perhaps they should be advised about collective nouns i.e. less government and fewer politicians . . .

      2. There were fewer biscuits left in the tin after our dog, Rumpole, found them; but after our cat, Chaucer, found the bowl of delicious smoked mackerel pâté that Caroline had made there was rather less of it!

      3. There were fewer biscuits left in the tin after our dog, Rumpole, found them; but after our cat, Chaucer, found the bowl of delicious smoked mackerel pâté that Caroline had made there was rather less of it!

  61. Anyone know what David Lammy is up to now? He appears to have put his foot in it by supporting genocide of Armenians.

    3. From Wiki: "Lammy grew up in Tottenham, and went to Downhills Primary School.[11] At the age of 10, he was awarded an Inner London Education Authority choral scholarship to sing at Peterborough Cathedral and attend The King's School, Peterborough.[12]

      Lammy studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, graduating with a 2:1 in law.[13] He was called to the bar of England and Wales in 1994 at Lincoln's Inn. He went on to study at Harvard University, where he became the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School; he studied for a Master of Laws degree and graduated in 1997." Goes to show – education isn't everything!!

      2. I misread the first sentence as Lammy grew up in Tottenham, and went downhill…
        Spent most of my adult life loitering around Berkeley, University of California, I learnt very quickly that the ability to get degrees is not a sign of great intelligence, rather it is often the ability of a certain mindset, on a par with the ability of an idiot savant. An old friend of mine a graduate of both Oxford and Harvard on offering to assist me in potting up seedlings ended up planting them with leaves in the soil and roots in the air. Thus it goes.

  64. EU to send €160m from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine. 19 September. 2024

    The sum of €160m from the proceeds of frozen Russian assets will be allocated to meet Ukraine’s urgent humanitarian needs for this winter, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday.

    These people have absolutely no sense of personal probity or value. Nothing belonging to anyone else is sacred. If it can be seen it can be stolen.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/19/donald-trump-meet-volodymyr-zelenskiy-un-security-council-russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with:block-66ebf8c08f08e9eade6854b7#block-66ebf8c08f08e9eade6854b7

  65. Allister Heath
    Israel’s bravery has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy
    The battle Jerusalem faces is not just about defending the Jewish state. It is about upholding civilisation itself

    Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.

    Israel’s brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group’s walkie-talkies, is a stunning fillip for the forces of civilisation worldwide.

    A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global policeman.

    The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration.

    The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing “escalation”, even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. All too predictably, America, seemingly determined to ensure the survival of every regional terror group, appeared upset at the successful attack on Hezbollah. David Lammy, our foreign secretary, is delivering speeches claiming climate change is a worse threat than terrorism; in a rational world, Lammy would be privately congratulating his Israeli counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever conducted against a terrorist organisation, with few civilian casualties, and pledging Britain’s help.

    Instead, Keir Starmer has turned against Israel, banning the sales of some weapons – a policy that Germany appears intent on following – and refusing to oppose lawsuits against the Jewish state, in an unforgivable moral inversion.

    Labour has placed Britain on the side of those nihilists masquerading as human rights lawyers who negate the essential distinction between victims and aggressors, between rule-bound, democracies desperate to minimise civilian casualties, and bloodthirsty dictatorships for whom their people are pawns to be sacrificed.

    Hezbollah is funded and controlled by the Iranian regime, an obscurantist, fascistic, millenarian tyranny that persecutes minorities, women and dissidents. Violating human rights and plotting war crimes is Hezbollah’s raison d’être: its 150,000 missiles point towards civilian centres and, like Hamas and Iran itself, it seeks Israel’s liquidation, guaranteeing the massacre, expulsion or subjugation of Jews. Hezbollah has forced some 63,473 Israelis to flee their homes since October 7. This is unsustainable and explains why a major Israeli response is looming; obscenely, this will trigger widespread condemnation of the Jewish state.

    Western foreign policy is a mishmash of cowardice, delusion and contradictions. Iran is a threat to the world; its alliance with Russia is deepening. Turkey, led by the despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened Israel with invasion, yet remains part of Nato. Qatar, which puts up senior Hamas terrorists in luxury hotels, is a major non-Nato ally of the US, home to a crucial Western military base and a major investor in London. Egypt, a recipient of US aid, has tolerated myriad tunnels to southern Gaza, refused to let in any Palestinians and, bizarrely, is not held responsible for supplying Gaza with provisions, that task falling to Israel. None of the three latter regimes face sanctions: global ire is reserved for Israel.

    One reason Western elites have become so Israelophobic is that, infected by wokery, they increasingly loathe Europe’s and America’s history and traditions, and view the Jewish state as a standout example of a Western model they reject.

    Winston Churchill would be convicted for crimes against humanity today, as would Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman. D-Day would be ruled illegitimate because so many French civilians died during the Battle of Normandy.

    Democracies might as well not bother with nuclear weapons, for detonating one, even in retaliation for an unprovoked attack, would be deemed a war crime. I’m in favour of much stricter rules than those governing World War II, of doing everything possible to protect civilians, but this is madness.

    The Just War is a foundational principle. States have the right to defend themselves. Every civilian life lost as collateral damage is a tragedy, but pacifism is a deluded utopia that fails to grasp the reality of the human condition. It is madness to criminalise all warfare, and despicable to focus on that conducted by democracies and ignore that advanced by our enemies.

    It is equally stupid to entrust so much power to legal activists. Much historic anti-Semitism has been ratified by kangaroo courts, including during the 1930s. The Trial of the Talmud took place in France in 1240, with rabbis forced to defend religious texts against trumped-up accusations of blasphemy and obscenity.

    Other bigot-fests masquerading as ordinary trials include the Disputations of Barcelona and Tortosa, the Damascus Affair, the Dreyfus affair that prompted Emile Zola’s seminal J’accuse, and the trial of Mendel Beilis in Ukraine in 1913. It is a well-established model that hasn’t gone out of fashion in far-Left quarters. They no longer explicitly single out religious beliefs or individuals but leverage lawfare to delegitimise what just happens to be the only Jewish state.

    The fact that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have the trappings of a legitimate legal setting does not mean they necessarily embody justice. The fact that their rulings are deemed legitimate by Left-wing elites doesn’t automatically make them such. The fact that today’s blood libels take on the language of “human rights” doesn’t make them less monstrous. The fact that it is possible for a country as unjustly governed as South Africa to lead a genocide case against Israel proves that the entire system is rotten. The case is backed by Iran, Brazil’s far-Left president, Ireland and Egypt: we must have been transported into an alternative, Kafkaesque universe.

    Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order implodes and the autocracies triumph.

    The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and allow it to finish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating Hezbollah.

    ***************************************

    British Blue
    19 hrs ago
    You've nailed it there, Allister. The West has forgotten that, to live in peace, you must be prepared to go to war. And that to exhibit weakness is to invite those who project strength to take what you have.

    Ca Ts
    19 hrs ago
    Reply to British Blue
    Years ago a teacher told me that our tolerance will be our undoing because we are too predisposed to let intolerant people do us what should be intolerable harm. If we want to live in a liberal democracy then we have to fight for it in every generation. edited

    Giles Brooks
    18 hrs ago
    Reply to Ca Ts
    Sadly we are run by a metropolitan liberal elite who can see no further than their own noses and compulsion to virtue signal at our countries expense! edited

      2. Yo Bill

        The stupidity is coming from the 'teechas' not the Cub.

        I hope he is just taking them on a long ride

    2. This is the difference beween children and adults. The correct response would be to raise an eyebrow and let them get on with it, but refuse to indulge their fantasy.

      It's this indulgence and promotion of the individual over wider society that is at the heart of so many of our current problems.

    3. No laughing matter.. the cost will be huge as this kid can easily devour 10kg at lunchtime. Also, the other children need to know that he must be first to eat and to keep at a respectful distance.

    4. BTL Comment:
      John Waters
      4 HRS AGO

      I’ve got a date with a woman who identifies as a wheelie bin. Trouble is, I can’t remember whether I’m taking her out on Tuesday or Wednesday.

      1. 393054+ up ticks,

        Evening BB2,
        As in a nightmare & believing you will awaken, only to find in reality
        tis real.

  68. Oh No!!! How very, very sad

    GB Energy’s Founding Recruitment Round Flops

    Last month the government fired off thirteen job adverts for positions that will form the foundation of its flagship state energy investment vehicle GB Energy through DESNZ. £688,805 in taxpayer-funded salaries were up for grabs, including generous work from home provisions and a defined benefit civil service pension. Despite all those goodies it looks like there isn’t much enthusiasm for Miliband’s pet project…

    The applications have now closed and the numbers are far from encouraging. The “Development Lead” position in London was the only one to receive more than a hundred applications. The average number of applications for the other six locations is a pitiful 50. In Aberdeen, the HQ of GB Energy, only 44 people bothered to apply for the job…

    The situation is even worse for GB Energy’s “Engagement Lead”, which has averaged a measly 38 applications across the UK. Applicants should be in the high hundreds for positions like this. The energy’s not there…

      1. Unfortunatley it provides Millipede the means to have total control of the UK energy structure from market control to delivery, and potential control of user's consumption. As Millipede, in his government capacity, is the only shareholder I see it as very very dangerous. It is a total gift for the control freakery of this Government and I do not see any accountability to any external organisation.

      2. Can’t be, Call me Dave promised us a bonfire of quangos.
        I remember 2TK railing against quangos.
        What, you mean politicians do not mean what they say, I’m shocked!

  69. Go Terror – No room for error!

    Lebanon Bans Pagers & Walkie-Talkies On All Flights Leaving Beirut

    THURSDAY, SEP 19, 2024 – 04:00 PM
    The last two days saw so many pagers, two-way radios, and electronic devices explode – literally thousands – that there are fears any electronic with a bomb in it could inadvertently make its way onto a passenger flight. The country's state news broadcaster NNA is reporting that Lebanon’s director general of civil aviation has banned all passengers from carrying pagers and walkie-talkies on board any aircraft.

    2. After their attacks where we have to take our belts and shoes off and not able to carry on a bottle of water i think i enjoy the payback.

    1. I support the FGM clinic, a the world is filled with bastards who do that kind of thing, but the rest of us need attention, too.

        1. He doesn't, but the clinic is there to help the poor girls who are mutilated by their various religious and "other cultures" maniacs.

  72. Today was the final daily print edition of the Evening Standard.
    Not quite 200 years old and to become a printed weekly with a digital daily.

    Another era passes.

      1. There hasn't been one since the Starmer nanny a few weeks ago and the front page of the newsletter hasn't had one for at least a couple of weeks.
        I wonder if he's moving elsewhere.

        1. Google AI says, "Evgeny Lebedev owns the Evening Standard through his company Lebedev Holdings Ltd. Lebedev is a Russian-British businessman and member of the House of Lords".

  73. Katy Balls
    Nigel’s next target: Reform has Labour in its sights
    From magazine issue:
    21 September 2024

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/TASHED_Rebels2_cmyk_FORF1.jpg

    At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of parliament.

    The day after the general election, Reform leader Nigel Farage held his celebratory press conference alongside fellow seat-winners Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe, announcing their new gang of four. Half an hour later, from a Westminster pub, they learned that they would be five – after McMurdock, a supposed ‘paper candidate’, was declared the MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock. ‘It was the first time I’d heard James’s name,’ admits one party insider. ‘The only reason I’d hear about a candidate is because they were in trouble, so therefore this was someone that wasn’t a bad news story.’

    McMurdock’s rise says a lot about where Reform’s success has come from – and where the party is going. He is a 38-year-old Essex banker who signed up to the party on a whim after concluding he liked what it was saying on tax and the £25 membership fee was worth it to ‘teach the [main] parties a bit of a lesson’. A few weeks later, Rishi Sunak called the snap election and Reform emailed possible candidates, asking for another £25 to be vetted. McMurdock complied.

    James McMurdock overturned a 20,000 majority with no serious funding or publicity

    He was interviewed over Zoom, he says, by ‘a Scottish chap’ who was in a car and pressed him on his stance on green issues. ‘I told him that listening to the Reform energy policy is like listening to your granddad give advice. Not especially exciting, but probably good advice,’ he says. ‘Listening to Labour was more like listening to your pal who has just finished his first term at university and is deeply excited by everything that he’s just heard.’ McMurdock passed the Reform test.

    Paternity leave meant he had paid time off to campaign – ‘My wife was happy to have me out the house’ – so he set off trying to win the seat in which he grew up. His was an insurgent campaign with no support from the centre: ‘My patter started with, “Hello mate, can I ask you a question?’’.’ He didn’t know to list a sponsor on his leaflets – a legal requirement for campaign literature – so had to get a special stamp made with Reform on and then manually stamp 20,000 leaflets at home with his wife, who’d recently given birth. ‘What a bloody bugger that was,’ he recalls. ‘I had to set up a bit of a conveyor-belt system on my dining table.’

    McMurdock ran his comms largely on TikTok, amassing 10,000 followers. His biggest donor was a lady called Barbara – whom he’s never met – who gave £50. His second largest donation was £25. In total, he raised £95. On election night, he turned up at the count with his parents. ‘My dad was like, “I don’t have to count, do I?”. No, you don’t have to count. My wife is there with the buggy, my mum, my dad, my sisters, my mother-in-law, it was just the family going, what’s going on here then? Then Labour turn up with their clipboards and iPads and the Conservatives the same.’

    McMurdock overturned a 20,000 majority with no serious fundraising or publicity. But the energy he drew on was exasperation with all of the main parties. This was the case for most Reform candidates, who between them won some 4.1 million votes. According to those on the campaign, 95 per cent of Reform candidates were given no help from the party machine and were not expected to win. After his election, it came out that 20 years ago, McMurdock spent a week in a young offenders’ institution for assaulting a former girlfriend. He describes the incident as the biggest regret of his life.

    Most popular
    Paul Wood
    Hezbollah’s exploding pagers are just the start

    All of this raises a question: if McMurdock could fight his way into parliament with no help, what could happen in a future election if Reform has carefully selected candidates and party support? Answering this is what the party is now focused on. For Reform’s leadership, the last election was largely about hurting what they felt was a treacherous and useless Tory party. Now, Farage’s party has Labour in its sights.

    As Reform prepares for its first conference as a serious political force, it is aiming for more Labour upsets between now and the next general election, which is expected in 2029. When Farage theatrically announced his return to the fold a few weeks into the campaign, he did warn that his party would soon be as much of a problem for Labour as the Tories. At the time, however, that did not worry Labour’s Southwark HQ. Instead, aides huddled around the screen and fist-bumped. As one Labour figure put it then: ‘They might take some of our voters but they will hurt the Tories a lot more.’

    ‘At that stage of our development they were right,’ Farage says now. ‘Just like Ukip. We rose on Conservative voters, but in the end reached the big numbers on Labour votes.’

    When this year’s election campaign began, 40 per cent of the country did not know what Reform was – so Farage sees his 4.1 million votes as a fraction of what might come with more awareness. With Labour already polling below 30 per cent, and Keir Starmer’s personal poll ratings plummeting, the opportunity is clear.

    A poll by J.L. Partners suggests that one in four Labour voters is considering backing Reform. ‘If they came to us, that’s half the number needed to win the next election,’ says Farage. Reform’s new chairman, Zia Yusuf, has been tasked with professionalising the party so it can take advantage of these opportunities.

    What of Farage’s target seats? Reform finished second in 98 constituencies, of which 89 are now held by Labour. Farage is looking to make gains in Wales and Scotland and to be the main challenger to Labour in the Red Wall seats of the Midlands and northern England. ‘That’s where we’ll be fighting Labour and of course we’re going to measure our success next year in the county elections.’

    Starmer and his party are eager not to give Reform the publicity it craves. Labour would prefer to keep bashing the Tories rather than raise awareness of what Farage offers. ‘What people need to understand is Labour are in government. That changes everything,’ says a Reform figure of its approach to opposition.

    Ministers insist there is a ceiling on the Reform vote, but they are in no doubt that the threat is real. ‘When Keir says he wants closer ties with Europe but then runs scared of a youth mobility scheme, you just know that is fear of Farage,’ says a Labour insider. Reform’s strategy will be to paint Labour as an out-of-touch metropolitan party of the liberal elite and soak up its working-class vote. Starmer’s proposed outdoor smoking ban is further grist to their mill.

    The first-ever meeting of Starmer’s political cabinet (that is, without the civil servants) focused on understanding the problem posed by Reform. Ministers were told that, in effect, Labour won by winning over anti-EU Tory voters appalled by the inability of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to turn Brexit into a meaningful agenda. These are all prime Reform voters too.

    Some of Labour’s rising stars – the newly elected Josh Simons in Makerfield, for instance – are all too aware that Reform is breathing down their necks. It’s one of the reasons Starmer has this week been willing to ignore howls from the left and praise Giorgia Meloni for her efforts in reducing illegal immigration in Italy. It’s meant to show voters that he’s as serious as she is about tackling the issue.

    Labour would prefer to keep bashing the Tories rather than raise awareness of what Farage offers

    However, Farage intends to attack Labour on more than just immigration. One obvious point for him will be opposing Starmer’s austerity. To the bafflement of economists, Reform promised to slash tax and splash the cash on the NHS. But a smaller party doesn’t need to worry too much about making fiscal sense. Reform MPs say that the winter fuel allowance furore is already moving voters towards Farage. If Rachel Reeves’s Budget next month is as ‘painful’ as Starmer has warned, more could follow.

    Then there’s net zero. Reform figures are keeping a close eye on news of jobs lost or threatened by the so-called green transition. Last week it was announced that Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery, in Grangemouth, is to close. That will lead to 400 job losses. There’s also the recent court decision to axe plans for a Cumbrian coal mine and the closure of two blast furnaces at Port Talbot steelworks, which could all mean 2,500 layoffs.

    To Starmer’s left, the unions recognise the risk. Unite’s Sharon Graham is among those warning Labour that ‘the road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs’. The GMB’s Gary Smith mocks the optimistic idea of ‘green jobs’, saying they consist of London lobbyists and people counting the dead birds killed by wind turbines.

    The trade union rebellion against net zero, from a pro-industrial Labour tradition, is hard to reconcile with Ed Miliband’s promised green revolution. It could make lots of votes for Reform in Scotland, Wales and the Red Wall.

    Inevitably, immigration remains Reform’s cause célèbre. The small boat arrivals have not abated since Starmer took office. Labour has made a considerable fuss over its creation of a new command border force, with an experienced police chief announced this week as its head. But it’s unclear what extra powers, if any, the new agency could use. ‘It is the thing that could really blow us up,’ says a Labour aide of the failure to stop the boats. Farage and his party will push any shortcomings on the issue as evidence that Starmer is not on the side of the Leave-voting masses.

    Farage’s success this time was down to widespread disappointment with the Tory government. Next time, he hopes, his party will win more votes thanks to an even greater sense of disgruntlement with Labour.

    For now, parliament appears to limit Reform’s ambitions – it is hard to make a mark in the House of Commons with only five MPs. Yet campaigning opportunities outside remain strong. The party is already working on candidate selection, to avoid the self-forced errors of the last campaign. The next stop is to win new bases through the locals that will help it build support.

    Could that momentum eventually propel Farage into No. 10? The idea sounds far-fetched. When I ask McMurdock what he thinks, however, he replies: ‘I think the chances of Nigel becoming prime minister are better than the chances were of me becoming an MP.’

    ****************

    Charlieray15
    13 hours ago
    Labour are toast at the next election. The way Starmer is viewed by the public can be summarised by all the disparaging nicknames he has already managed to collect – Sir Beer Korma, free gear 2-tier Keir, Malvolio. Even his wife has been nicknamed Victoria Sponge. And then there's the Cabinet…

    Jimmyjampot Charlieray15
    10 hours ago
    Starmer Chameleon

    Anglomicronesian Jimmyjampot
    9 hours ago
    With apologies to Culture Club:

    Desert loving in your eyes all the way
    If I listen to your lies, would you say
    I'm a man (a man) without conviction
    I'm a man (a man) who doesn't know
    That he’s a contradiction
    You’ll come and go, you’ll come and go
    Starmer, Starmer, Starmer, Starmer, Starmer chameleon
    You’ll come and go, you’ll come and go
    Voting will be easy as your party are like bad dreams
    Tax rises obscene, the new has-been.

    The Observer Anglomicronesian
    9 hours ago
    Every day is like a trial,
    You're my bovver, not my revival.

  74. OT – apropos my glowing report on Monday of our splendid week at La Turballe – one aspect of Global Boiling struck me. The lady who owns the house we rented – and who lives in the village – told us that it had been so cold and wet that she – a keen swimmer – had only been into the sea ONCE this year….

    Thank goodness they are constructing a huge off-shore wind farm to warm the sea a bit…..

    1. A so so par.

      Wordle 1,188 4/6

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

    4. Well done! Boring boring here….

      Wordle 1,188 4/6

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

  76. Hope Not Hate Embeds Itself Into Labour Government

    Leftist campaign group Hope Not Hate has been busy talking about anything except the new Labour government. All since its strenuous efforts campaigning against Labour’s opponents in the election…

    Since Guido revealed Hope Not Hate’s close Labour links – including campaigning specifically against Susan Hall during the mayoral election – it has embedded itself further into government. Two of the six trustees of its charitable foundation have now made their way into Parliament as Labour MPs. It doesn’t stop there…

    Government Whip Anna Turley is both a director and a member of its board of trustees. Covering all bases…
    Labour MP Sarah Owen is vice-chairman of the group’s Parliamentary Group. Made up only of Labour MPs…
    Another of the campaigning organisation’s directors also happens to be prominent Labour MP and TUC communications director Antonia Bance.

    Chairman of its trustee board is newly elected Labour MP Gurinder Singh Josan.
    Guido hopes this coincidence won’t cloud the charity’s strongly-held non-partisan principles…

    1. So no chance of Nick Lowles being fast-tracked to prison for his “disinformative” tweet about Muslim women being attacked with battery acid by “the far right”. Wand now we know why.

  77. After lunching out I cleared another job off the list – cleaned out the cattle grid. Recovering now and after a chicken stew and rice will cut the grass while the weather holds and the evening gets cool
    Got the grass cut – now completely knackered, a cool Guinness beckons

      3. 1 Fit a new spark plug made by NGK.
        2 Use high octane petrol retailed by Esso as 'Synergy'. It has almost none of that ethanol (which caused the ASDA pollution problem in Bramley, Surrey). Ethanol can gum up the carburettor and is hygroscopic.

        1. Thank you Tim , that was an excellent response and hint ..
          Moh listened and will do that..

          He says he doesn’t know how to get to the spark plug on the Mountfield ?

          1. Some Mountfields have a Briggs & Stratton engine, while others have a Honda. YouTube will have a help video if you can identify the model number. He may need to relaese the plastic cover to locate the spark plug.

      1. Hi Phil did you see my plea for the best way to cook 1lb of runner beans (just the beans and not the tough pods)?

        1. 1. Boil in lightly salted water until soft.
          2. Drain water off and cool.
          3. Lift lid of bin and shovel lectin-containing beans inside. Close lid.

          2. In the past, I have tried keeping them to use as seeds next year but the germination rate wasn't very good (NB: I might have mixed up 2022 and 2023).
            So I bought beans for seed this year. I noticed there were some dried up pods hanging on the vines today, too high up for us to reach! so might try again next spring. But it's so annoying to have to replant with a three week delay if they don't work – or if you replant too quickly and then they all come up.

          5. I’ve kept mature seeds to plant next year. Variety – St George (of course) Being do it for at lreast 10 years – no problems with germination….

        2. It is important to prepare runner beans properly to avoid them being stringy and gritty when cooked.

          Firstly you’ll need to wash the beans and then top and tail them. To top and tail cut off a couple of millimeters from each end of the bean. Then use a vegetable peeler or knife to carefully strip off the stringy edges.

          Cut the beans into either oblique shapes by chopping diagonally, or cut lengthways three or four times, to create long strips. To make this task easier you can use a bean slicer tool.

          I would steam them.

  79. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) story

    A heart-warming tale from America

    The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.

    The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.

    There were all the regular types of stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved. But then the teacher realized, much to her dismay, that only Janie was left.

    ‘Janie, do you have a story to share?’ ”Yes ma’am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy. She was a Marine pilot
    in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.

    She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn’t break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.

    She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.

    ”Good Heavens,” said the horrified teacher. “What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”

    “Don’t fuck with Mommy when she’s been drinking.”

  80. Army veteran defends right to silent prayer outside abortion clinic
    ‘I’m entitled to pray silently for my dead son in a free country,’ man who denies breach of public spaces protection order told official.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/19/army-veteran-silent-prayer-abortion-clinic-court/

    Silent prayer is criminal? Should we term it thought crime or holy crime?

    Noisy prayer that blocks highways and clutters up public spaces is quite all right.

    1. Hmmm. If he really WAS praying for his dead son – why stand outside an abortion clinic? Plenty of other places – his own home, a church, a mosque…

      1. He was praying for the soul of the aborted foetus when his wife had an abortion. Human life begins with conception – but when does the soul arrive – at birth or at conception?

        Philosophers, doctors and priests might well give different answers.

        Muslims believe that Allah breathes life into a foetus 120 days after conception so until then abortion is quite permissible.

        1. The web says that a premature baby can survive at 22 weeks, 154 days. However, the UK govt allows foetuses to be 'dealt with' until they are 24 weeks old.

      2. Perhaps because the army veteran and his pregnant partner once chose to abort a male baby/foetus, a decision which he regrets.

        Article 9 of the Human Rights Act protects freedom of thought, belief and religion. Yes, there are restrictions, and there's the rub.
        The irony is that a member of the current Labour Govt , Jess Phillips MP, voluntarily aborted a foetus, and is now empowered as a Minister to safeguard women and girls; except those very, very young and vulnerable ones.
        The no-pray area around an abortion clinic would typically cover seventeen and a half acres (depending on the square footage of the building at the centre of the150 metre radius).

    2. Free country? Has he been fighting for it abroad? It hasn't been free for quite some time, unfortunately.

  81. That's me for today. Good market visit. Some useful watering in the garden. Picked up a barrowload of rotten windfalls. About to risk a drink.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain – one hopes.

  82. Still no charges brought against the brave gentle brothers.. Fahir Amaaz and Muhammad Amaad.

    Meanwhile, over 300 authorised firearms officers quit the force.

    1. Betcha Sir Keir of Rochdale immediately hires recent arrivals.. the irregular tourists.. No training required as they can field strip & disassemble for cleaning an AK-47 in less than 30 seconds. Even the children.

    2. Betcha Sir Keir of Rochdale immediately hires recent arrivals.. the irregular tourists.. No training required as they can field strip & disassemble for cleaning an AK-47 in less than 30 seconds. Even the children.

          1. From Coffee House, the Spectator

            Are Israel and Lebanon already at war?
            Comments Share 19 September 2024, 7:20pm
            This hasn’t been the easiest week for Hezbollah. It started with the terror organisation’s pagers mysteriously exploding, killing 37 people people (according to official reports) and injuring some 3,000 people, mostly members of the group. This has stunned Hezbollah – and the world. A day later, their walkie-talkies starting blowing up too.

            The attacks, which have been attributed to Israel, are a serious security breech and have humiliated Hezbollah. In response, the organisation’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah conceded today that Hezbollah has suffered a considerable blow and accused Israel of ‘crossing the red line,’ adding that they actions could be viewed as a ‘declaration of war.’

            Israeli officials declared yesterday that a new phase in the conflict against Hezbollah has started. Following from the explosions, today Israel attacked several Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, with Israeli fighter jets flying in the sky over Beirut during Nasrallah’s speech. Hezbollah has also fired into Israel earlier today, killing two soldiers.

            The big question is, has full-scale war now started?

            Israel and Hezbollah have been on the brink of war since 8 October. Soon after Hamas’s invasion into Israel and the brutal killing and kidnapping of some 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals, Hezbollah started attacking Israel with missiles and drones. The attacks have led to widespread destruction in Israel’s northers towns, the evacuation of some 60,000 Israelis and to numerous death and injuries among civilians and soldiers. However, Hezbollah was careful not to cross the line that would make an escalation unavoidable.

            Israel adopted a similar position. Israeli actions have for the most part shown restraint and included limited attacks against key facilities and Hezbollah commanders. The attacks this week were the most widespread since the war. The ability of Israeli intelligence agencies to infiltrate Hezbollah and rig their equipment would’ve had a significant psychological effect. But was the ultimate goal to start a war?

            This seems unlikely. Despite the significant threat posed by Hezbollah, which is larger and more powerful than Hamas, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t seem interested in a full-scale war on a second front, in part due to American pressure. If Israel wanted to start a war, it might have started one following this week’s attacks, while the organisation is in chaos and many of its members are unable to fight or communicate with each other. Today’s strikes were on a very small scale not the beginning of a war.

            It’s more likely that of all this week’s attacks were meant to deter Hezbollah
            It’s more likely that of all this week’s attacks were meant to deter Hezbollah and to convince them to reach a diplomatic solution that will include a ceasefire and the removal of forces away from the border with Israel. Nasarallah has spent the past 11 months insisting that a ceasefire will only happen when Israel reaches a deal with Hamas. Israel is trying to break the link between the two conflicts, and to reach a deal with Hezbollah as fast as possible in order to enable the safe return of civilians to northern Israel.

            Hezbollah’s humiliation was significant, but Nasrallah was very careful in the language he used today. He did not declare a war or claim that Israel has started one. It’s therefore likely that even though Nasrallah still wants to avoid a full scale war, Hezbollah will regroup and retaliate in an attempt to save some its remaining dignity. Although Nasrallah is a cautious man, who likes to take his time when planning attacks, and also to use the time between making threats and acting on them for psychological warfare, he may act quickly this time because all eyes are on him.

            The conflict may escalate in the next few days, but will remain limited. However, just in case things do escalate further, Israel has already amassed significant forces by the border. If Israel’s strikes fail to push Nasrallah to agree to a deal, the standoff between the two sides will continue, and there’s no telling how many more rabbits Israel can pull out of its hat.

          2. Very amusing.
            If you can post utter non sequiturs so quickly after my complaint regarding your irrelevant posts earlier clearly you could post them as separate items.
            Might I suggest that you are a twat?

          3. You don’t have to get so upset. It isn’t a big deal. I publish about 3 snippets a day, and although I realise some people will lose their cool about anything, this is hardly an excuse for using such insults. I think David Cameron was, in his day, reprimanded for using that word.
            Posters publish different things on this site and most people try to enjoy their comments.

    2. Someone who rarely encounters it and automatically assumes it's nonsense because its been posted by someone or something they've never heard of on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Whatsapp, or some such medium, and whose credentials are barely ascertainable. If I see something posted by someone who I've never heard of, why would I automatically and unquestioningly believe it at first encounter? What tells me that their truth is not a lie? Theres no way of knowing. It's like religion. Once you've been indoctrinated, anything to the contrary is automatically and unquestioningly a lie.

      1. 393187 + up ticks,

        Morning DW,

        All down to personal assessment
        currently it is breaking down to two sides, black lies / actions, white lies / actions, ALL peoples involved embroider their news / message either to benefit or damage others,your in built
        head quarters must decide.

        As for religion, another self judgement, to believe or not.

  87. Evening, all. The horses worked well, looked well and are "nice" according to the trainer (but the cynic in me thinks that no trainer will tell his owners that they've bought into a donkey!). At least the weather was good – dry and sunny. I have been on the gallops when the force 9 gale was trying to blow us over and the rain was horizontal. I even managed to do a bit in the garden afterwards.

    There are many reasons to doubt Labour, whatever they are claiming. They wouldn't know truth and objectivity if it jumped up and bit them on the nose.

  88. Canal Boat Diaries with Robbie Cummming is currently on my channel 27 (U&Yesterday). A real treat – Yardley Wood to Netherton.

  89. Canal Boat Diaries with Robbie Cummming is currently on my channel 27 (U&Yesterday). A real treat – Yardley Wood to Netherton.

    1. And of course it would have been impossible for anyone to have introduced an infected animal into the market in the first place……..

    2. The source of covid is Karl Marx, via The Frankfurt School. How to impose communism. Colds and flu didn’t come from China in the 21st century.

  92. If there really is a God, every politician who told a lie knowing full well that it is a lie would be struck by lightning.

    1. BUT, if Allah exists, and Islam is the true religion where adherents can lie for the benefit of Islam, all Muslim politicians would be spared, so how could we tell?

      1. From Coffee House, the Spectator

        McDonald’s did not make Kemi Badenoch working class
        Comments Share 19 September 2024, 2:34pm
        Is it possible to change your class? Not just superficially – in moving up and down the hierarchy of social standing – but change it inwardly so that you transform your very sense of self? Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch seems to think so.

        Speaking on Chopper’s Political Podcast this week, the shadow housing secretary said that although she grew up in a middle-class family, she became working class when she took a job at McDonald’s while studying for her A-levels. Explaining her conversion, she put it baldly: ‘I grew up in a middle-class family, but I became working class when I was 16 working in McDonald’s.’ She elaborates:

        Just understanding how many people there were single parents, and they were working there to make ends meet. There’s a humility there as well. You had to wash toilets, there were no special cleaners coming in. You had to wash toilets, you had to flip burgers, you had to handle money.

        Back up. Now, I came from a middle-class background, but even before the age of 16 I understood the concept of washing toilets. I had working-class friends from Ladbroke Grove, and none of them had special cleaners coming in. I even knew how to handle money. Such aloof language only makes her frank assertion, intimating a transformation of selfhood, appear even more strange.

        Badenoch says that her time at the fast-food restaurant was the ‘first time I ever interacted properly with people who didn’t come from the sort of background that I came from’. That seems fair comment. That no doubt proved valuable experience for later life as a politician. But mingling with another tribe doesn’t make you a member of that tribe. Slumming it with the proles, that venerable middle-class right of passage, is only ever meant to be a temporary indulgence. Sure, you might have mingled with working-class people. But as to literally becoming working class as a consequence? Did she? Can anyone?

        Watching someone feign a proletariat persona or manners is very funny
        Feigning poor origins or humble status has been the holy grail for social acceptance ever since the 1960s, when, during that cultural revolution, no-one seeking credibility wanted to be regarded as posh or privileged any more. Dropped aitches and glottal stops started to be heard on television and radio. Harold Wilson pretended that he smoked a pipe as matter of habit.

        That state of affairs remained and remains. It’s why Tony Blair deliberately altered his speech while appearing on daytime television. It’s why Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch still resonates. It’s why so many people find Jacob Rees-Mogg such a hilarious aberration: he sounds posh, he is posh, and he doesn’t even try to hide it.

        Yet Badenoch’s claim chimes with the times. We live, of course, in an age of identity politics, and what you are and into what social category you fit – or, more importantly, present yourself as – is deemed of great significance. This is why the culture wars show no sign of abating. People still argue over what it means to be man, woman or trans, or quarrel over the importance of racial categories and bicker over pronouns.

        The more downtrodden or oppressed the category to which you belong (or have chosen), the more kudos you will gain. Or that’s what people like Badenoch seem to think. For most ordinary people, watching someone feign a proletariat persona or manners is very funny. Think of the ludicrous middle-class character Rik from the 1980s comedy, The Young Ones, with his revolutionary poetry and appeal for ‘punks, and skins and rastas’ to join together against the fascists. Or the suburban Alan Partridge asking his builders ‘see the match?’, without having the remotest idea what match he was talking about.

        That’s why Badenoch’s intervention has aroused much derision. Sure, you can grow up working class. But no-one becomes working class.

        It’s all the more surprising considering what a stalwart opponent Badenoch has hitherto been of identity politics. It’s ironic that even she should be now have appropriated the language of identity and oppression by proxy. Her unconvincing claim to working-class personhood seems on a par with men identifying as women. It would seem, on the surface, that she has unwittingly become another casualty of the culture wars.

        To her credit, Badenoch has at least recognised that there is such a thing as class difference, and that poor people come in all colours and both sexes. Class has always been the blind spot for the purveyors of identity politics, who forever and exclusively talk of race and gender. In her position, Badenoch could so easily talk about both, but thankfully never does.

        1. Why oh why do you persist in attaching irrelevant Spectator articles as replies to random posts?

          Put them up separately.

          1. Don't waste your time. He claimed he couldn't start a thread for technical reasons. Actually he did – but only once…

          3. I can if I’m at home with my computer in front of me. But since Disqus upgraded the site my IPad doesn’t allow me to start threads.
            At the moment I am on the coast and am using my IPad.
            As I previously indicated I publish maybe 3 snippets a day. It isn’t a big deal
            Apparently sosraboc was enthusiastically searching for a pretext to call me a twat indeed he’s now been able to repeat his little jibe.

          4. Don’t be so mean. I haven’t got my computer here and my IPad is old. Disqus was upgraded and this is the only way I can publish snippets. Lots of posters like them.

          5. In which case, why don't you at least have the courtesy to post them against threads that are remotely relevant?

            Your relatively long "grab and posts" completely destroy any sense of continuity.

        3. If she's feigning to be what she isn't, that puts her down in my estimation, not that it will matter a jot to her, as I will have absolutely no.input into her political future.

          I understand the interest shown here about the Harris-Trump battle, but I have neither say nor influence over the outcome. Therefore I largely abstain from passing comment as I take virtually no interest in it and am willingly and happily under-informed.

  94. As the current government's adgenda seems to be 'Let the punishment fit the crime'. Unless celebrity status etc.
    I wonder how long it will be before the government brings in pay for prescriptions for the elderly. Except for those on benefits and pension credits.
    Oh well I'm not looking forward to winter.
    Tuning in soon.
    Good night all 😴

  96. Far-right riots in Stoke-on-Trent: 'We couldn't leave our home for a week'

    “It was very hard…with my daughters, my son and my wife, we effectively stayed inside our house for a week. "For some kids it must have felt like jail."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxrv2200veo

    Mr Farage (!!!) doesn't offer an opinion on what white girls must have felt like on their cultural exchanges in English towns over the last 40 years, nor how white British people feel as they're told every day that they're reponsible for all human vice.

      2. A part of me felt a little uneasy posting like that because it could be seen to imply a lack of sympathy with people feeling frightened to leave their homes. However, what bothers me is that articles like this never ask how we got here. Sometimes I don't feel safe walking into Wellingborough town centre on a bright sunny afternoon…

          1. You are (presumably) a bloke, though, David. I'm the opposite, and although I cannot speak for Stevenage, here in our little backwater life in the towns and cities is becoming rather threatening for females who refuse a certain alien dress code.

  106. Goodnight, all. The early morning has caught up with me, I'm afraid. I'm out to lunch (literally as well as metaphorically) tomorrow, so I need to be on good form.

  108. The problem I have living here in the countryside , especially so when I was younger when I coped with countryside sports and things like that..is a slight quiver in my heart, the reality of the production and farming of animals hits hard ..

    As I am now older , I am very tender hearted and sensitive to some of the unseen horrible things that the countryside hides .

    Every year we have sheep in the field 100yds away from the house , and the sheep lamb early , usually December / January , and the bleating and baaing is so loud and quite emotional , lambs calling for their mothers.

    We also have factory dairy farms .. very large ones , and the calves are housed in little sheds , row upon row of them .

    This afternoon I was rushing off to an appointment , and the level crossing was down , and I was upset to find myself behind a triple decker lorry full of bleating sheep .

    I knew where they were going .. and that really does upset me .

    My feelings altered when the UK suffered that terrible foot and mouth outbreak .. My cousins are farmers in N Yorkshire , large farm , arable and beef cattle and sheep .

    They were hit badly .. and the cull took place . Labour were in power then .
    The army was called in to shoot the animals .

    Here in Dorset where we are , every country path was out of bounds , another night mare for dog walking ..Our wellies were treated to footbaths virtually every day.

    I pray to God that this Labour party of ignoramuses know what they are doing in the countryside as they expand our villages and fill them with other tribes.

    1. They certainly know what they are doing, Belle. Unfortunately, it's to our detriment, as we all know.

    2. Two Tier Keir will be gone just as Ukraine and his investment in it falls.

      Keir has to be the most unpopular PM in British history. Every single day more and more of his utter hypocrisy and historic misdemeanours are exposed and finally given the light of day.

    3. In our local organic shop, you can buy a brand of milk from a small local dairy that guarantees the calves are left with their mothers. My father used to do this with our house cow, he would separate them for part of the day I think. The cow produced enough milk for the calf (who was also eating solid food) and for our family!

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