Thursday 22 October: The arbitrary effect of Covid regulations on running a small business

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/10/21/lettersthe-arbitrary-effect-covid-regulations-running-small/

637 thoughts on “Thursday 22 October: The arbitrary effect of Covid regulations on running a small business”

  2. Morning all. Sent this to Telegraph Letters this morning. Bet they don’t publish it.

    Sir,
    I was surprised to see three separate Telegraph letters on October 22nd from Rutland, which my father, an enthusiastic geographer, had always told me was ‘England’s smallest county’ at 147.4 sq miles,

    Before firing off this letter I checked on Google and found ( https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-51120075 ) that (a) the Isle of Wight is smaller at 146.7 square miles, but only when the tide is in; (b) the City and County of Bristol, my home city, is much smaller, at 42 sq miles.

    But it seems that the City of London, as a ceremonial county, trumps them all at 1.15 sq miles.

    I think I will honour my late father by sticking with the Historic Counties Trust, which still champions Rutland as the smallest county in England.

    1. Morning RC.

      Rutland is trumped, in the UK, by Scotland’s “wee county” of Clackmannanshire at 61.4km². I wonder if any of the Scottish isles are their own county area and, therefore smaller?

      1. Oh Grizzly!

        The floor area of my house is 120 square metres. Shirley you mean 61.4 square kilometres?

        And did you notice that I always said smallest county in England, not UK?

      2. Oh Grizzly!

        The floor area of my house is 120 square metres. Shirley you mean 61.4 square kilometres?

        And did you notice that I always said smallest county in England, not UK?

  3. Defunding the police has left the poor defenceless. Spiked. 22 October 2020.

    But the end of policing is far from a universally popular idea. Since the city council’s announcement, things haven’t quite gone to plan. In the weeks following George Floyd’s death, violent crime surged in Minneapolis, and remained high during September and October. In August, the city’s charter commission said it needed more time to consider the council’s proposal for abolition.

    Morning everyone. I caught a clip on one of the channels yesterday where one of the supporters of defunding the police in Minneapolis was berating an official for not protecting them. That she was contradicting herself and asking for two opposing things at the same time was clearly beyond her understanding. I assume she was a BLM supporter.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/22/defunding-the-police-has-left-the-poor-defenceless/

      1. That cartoon is very funny; but scientific nonsense, which shows up the ignorance of the cartoonist.

        Meteors are are a space phenomenon that never land on the planet. Only meteorites fall to earth.

          2. Hi Citroen1 (and Grizzly),

            Hope this isn’t Get Grizzly Day today, after he said that meteors never land and you showed a photo of a Meteor landing (or perhaps taking off).

            I got my Private Pilot’s licence in 1958 and used to teach Aircraft Recognition to RAF cadets. You published a very unusual and unique Gloster Meteor this morning.

            According to http://www.aviation-safety.net

            WA982 was modified to flight test the Rolls-Royce R.B.93 Soar lightweight jet engines. These were mounted at the wing tips so this Meteor was in fact the only four- engined example of the type!

            Converted in 1960 to Meteor U.16: Unmanned drone conversion of Gloster Meteor F.8. Control lost & crashed into Cardigan Bay, 22 miles south west of Llandbedr on 11.5.1961.

          3. Wondered what was going on at the wingtips. Came with two possibilities: Rocket-assisted takeoff, or some kind of large-calibre weapon, rocket-launcher-ish.

          5. Reading about the way Frank Whittle was messed about from a-hole to breakfast by officialdom in trying to get his engine into production is infuriating.
            That aircraft could have been in service several years earlier.

        2. Oh Grizzly again!

          I joined Bristol Astronomical Society in 1956 and I’m afraid I am about to out-pedant you.

          Meteoroids are chunks of space rock that arrive in our atmosphere. Most burn up completely and, whether seen or not when they burn, are meteors. If, and only if, they land on Earth can they be called meteorites.

          Hope this is clear.

          2. Oh, I know that already and I was (clumsily) trying to make that very point, but not nearly as eloquently as you have.

            However, going back to the cartoon which shows a very large meteoroid less than a second from colliding with the earth; semantics aside, I think my description of meteorite, in the circumstances, would be very hard to argue against.

          4. What would you like me to grovel before you for, John?

            That large chunk of rock (meteoroid), depicted in the cartoon, would not burn up prior to striking the planet’s surface with devastating force; therefore it could not possibly be described as a ‘meteor’, which, as roughcommon clearly points out, burn up completely in the atmosphere.

            Or do you have a different take on that, which will require (and oblige) me to take two knees?

          5. Yup Grizz,

            As I hopefully said in my earlier reply, it’s a METEOROID on its way through space, a METEOR as it completely or partially burns up in the atmosphere, and a METEORITE only when it has landed, not having been fully consumed.

            The big rock that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs was a very big meteorite after it landed and buried itself in the planet. Clear now??

        3. The cartoon is more relevant than you think. It is a commentary on the banner carrier’s ignorance. They simply do not know what’s coming.

          1. TBF, John, if it’s in the lower atmosphere and about to land causing global devastation, it is a meteorite!

  4. Scotland’s deplorable smacking ban. Spiked. 21 October 2020.

    The bill was passed some months ago. At the time, teary-eyed politicians and professionals clearly felt a great sense of virtue as they stood in front of the Scottish parliament to celebrate their victory. They also insisted, time and again, that this law was ‘not about criminalising parents’.

    And yet now we find out that the Scottish government is encouraging the public to phone 999 if they see a parent smack their child. Worse still, they have produced leaflets for children, urging them to grass on their parents if they dare to smack them.

    It’s not just Smacking or Scotland though is it? There’s been a whole raft of laws to suppress not simply wrong doing as the PTB see it but wrong thinking! This is of course due to the prevalence of Cultural Marxism among the Liberal Elites where it provides both the motivation and justification for their actions. That it is destroying the West and particularly Europe is of no matter. A new civilisation brimming with Tolerance and Understanding will arise to replace it. All shall be equal in this New Utopia. In actuality it will be a hellhole where none dare speak the truth; where children grass on their parents and every man’s hand will be turned against every other.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/22/scotlands-deplorable-smacking-ban/

      1. you do know that it will be introduced in England when the opportunity arises, this is how all these insane global directives come along, drip by drip .

    3. They are terribly concerned about a parent disciplining their child. Child rape by Pakistani migrants? Not so much.

    5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pavlik-Morozov

      Pavlik Morozov

      Pavlik Morozov, byname of Pavel Trofimovich Morozov, (born Nov. 14, 1918, Gerasimovka, Russia—died Sept. 3, 1932, Gerasimovka), Russian communist youth who was glorified as a martyr by the Soviet regime.

      The son of poor peasants, Morozov was the leader of the Young Pioneers’ group at his village school and was a fanatical supporter of the Soviet government’s collectivization drive in the countryside. In 1930, at age 12, he gained notoriety for denouncing his father, the head of the local soviet, to the Soviet authorities. In court Morozov charged that his father had forged documents and sold favours to kulaks (i.e., rich peasants who were resisting the collectivization drive). Morozov also accused other peasants of hoarding their grain and withholding it from the authorities. As a consequence of his denunciations, Morozov was brutally murdered by several local kulaks.

      Morozov was subsequently glorified as a martyr by the Soviet regime. Monuments to him were erected in several Soviet cities, and his example as a model communist was taught to several generations of Soviet schoolchildren. By the late 20th century, however, his legend had dropped into disfavour with the liberalizing Soviet regime, which viewed him as a tragic symbol of the pressures that Stalinism could exert upon the family.

  5. Scotland’s deplorable smacking ban. Spiked. 21 October 2020.

    The bill was passed some months ago. At the time, teary-eyed politicians and professionals clearly felt a great sense of virtue as they stood in front of the Scottish parliament to celebrate their victory. They also insisted, time and again, that this law was ‘not about criminalising parents’.

    And yet now we find out that the Scottish government is encouraging the public to phone 999 if they see a parent smack their child. Worse still, they have produced leaflets for children, urging them to grass on their parents if they dare to smack them.

    It’s not just Smacking or Scotland though is it? There’s been a whole raft of laws to suppress not simply wrong doing as the PTB see it but wrong thinking! This is of course due to the prevalence of Cultural Marxism among the Liberal Elites where it provides both the motivation and justification for their actions. That it is destroying the West and particularly Europe is of no matter. A new civilisation brimming with Tolerance and Understanding will arise to replace it. All shall be equal in this New Utopia. In actuality it will be a hellhole where none dare speak the truth; where children grass on their parents and every man’s hand will be turned against every other.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/22/scotlands-deplorable-smacking-ban/

  6. Carry On Panicking:

    You’re receiving this email because you signed this petition: “Repeal the Coronavirus Act 2020”.

    Dear Anne Allan,

    The Government has responded to the petition you signed – “Repeal the Coronavirus Act 2020”.

    Government responded:

    With the Coronavirus pandemic still at large, the Coronavirus Act, and the measures within it, remain as important as ever.

    The current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, which began in December 19, presents a significant, unprecedented challenge for the entire world. All of the UK has been touched by the pandemic and the use of the provisions of the Coronavirus Act should be seen in the context of the extensive and ongoing impact across the whole of society.

    The development of an effective response to the pandemic required several actions. Some of these involved the use of new tools and powers that required new legislation. The UK government’s coronavirus action plan, published on 3 March, set out measures to respond to the Coronavirus pandemic that are reasonable, proportionate and were based on the latest scientific evidence. The plan envisaged that changes to legislation might be necessary in order to give public bodies across the UK the tools and powers they need to carry out an effective response to this emergency. On 25 March, the Coronavirus Act 2020 received Royal Assent. The Coronavirus Act gives us the powers we need to take the right action at the right time to respond effectively to the impact of the pandemic and should be seen as part of a wide range of public health measures designed to tackle the pandemic during its life cycle.

    A balance has had to be struck between protecting the public’s health, and safeguarding individuals’ rights; and between acting swiftly to respond to fast moving events, whilst ensuring accountability and transparency. A two-year life span for this Act has been chosen to ensure that its powers remain available for a reasonable length of time, with the option for the provisions in the Act to be extended by the relevant national authority. These provisions are subject to a six-monthly review and renewal vote in the House of Commons. The first of these was held on 30 September 2020, following a debate in the House of Lords on 28 September, in which Parliament decided that the Act should continue. They are also subject to a two-monthly report to Parliament and an annual debate. Many of the provisions can be suspended if the scientific advice is that they are not needed, and revived again if it says that they are. This is a flexible and proportionate response to a major crisis.

    The Act enabled action in 5 key areas:

    1. increasing the available health and social care workforce – for example, by removing barriers to allow suitably experienced people, such as recently retired NHS staff and social workers to return to work (and in Scotland, in addition to retired people, allowing those who are on a career break or who are social worker students to become temporary social workers)

    2. easing and reacting to the burden on frontline staff – by reducing the number of administrative tasks they have to perform, enabling local authorities to prioritise care for people with the most pressing needs, allowing key workers to perform more tasks remotely and with less paperwork, and introducing a power to suspend individual port operations if necessary for the security of the border

    3. containing and slowing the virus – provisions have been introduced to allow the courts and tribunals system to continue to function throughout the pandemic and ensure that more people are able to access justice.

    4. managing the deceased with respect and dignity – by enabling the death management system to deal with increased demand for its services

    5. supporting people – for example, by allowing individuals to receive Statutory Sick Pay from day one, and supporting businesses, for example by providing powers that will ensure the governments of the UK are able to support the food industry to maintain supplies

    The governments of the UK therefore resolved to review and where necessary amend existing legislation, to ensure that the UK’s response is consistent and effective.

    The worst-case scenario has not yet come to pass, but considerable risks remain, and significant challenges still lie ahead of us. The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in one of the largest ever shocks to the UK economy and public finances. The impact of the virus and the measures that have had to be put in place have been far reaching, affecting people’s jobs, livelihoods and wellbeing. Despite the success in reducing the burden of the virus significantly from its peak in the spring, the coming winter will present further challenges. Coinfections between seasonal coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses are common. While interactions between COVID-19 and other viruses are not fully understood, they have the potential to be negative and are likely to be more common in winter. There are also secondary risks. The pressure on the NHS and other health infrastructure is already higher in winder due to other seasonal illnesses, such as flu. As the world’s scientific understanding is still developing, it is too early to say that we know for certain precisely how the pandemic will respond to our efforts to control it in the medium to long term.

    Department for Health and Social Care

    1. On the basis of how the word”evidence” is being used above, this country should be filled with prisons packed with convicts. Moreover, there should be a worldwide shortage of quicklime for disposing of the bodies of the persons who have been hanged.
      Evidence should be irrefutable objective facts, not the guesswork of ivory tower dwellers seeking their few minutes of fame and feeling important.

    3. We both received that this morning. They obviously didn’t proof read it before sending it either. “pressure on the NHS and other health infrastructure is already higher in winder“

  8. How does these deaths in the last 28 days for people that have tested positive for covid actually work as a sign that death rates are going up or down?
    The MSM get a nice big number to announce each morning, they don’t actually say if they died of covid or even how many each day.
    It’s all a bit vague to me

  9. Morning all

    SIR – You published a letter from me (August 24) about being unable to work for five months at my small beauty salon due to national, followed by local, restrictions. Having returned to work on September 4, with a flourishing diary, I have now had to close again and isolate for 14 days, after a text message from Test and Trace.

    This is because I spent 20 minutes with a client who has since tested positive for Covid-19. It makes no difference that (as a former dental professional) I was always in a mask, visor, apron and gloves, and had a 40-minute break between all appointments for thorough sanitising of the shop and a change of PPE.

    I have been told by the Covid hotline that nobody I have been in contact with since treating this lady is at risk. My husband, son and father, all of whom I live with, can continue life as normal, unless I show symptoms.

    I will receive no financial assistance, be it personal or for my business.

    Potentially, this is what I have to look forward to now, every two weeks.

    Michelle Tolley

    Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

    SIR – The placing of Greater Manchester in Tier 3 is sad news for hoteliers and the hospitality industry.

    Advertisement

    Because “travel into and out of the area is strongly advised against”, rather than banned, hotels, guesthouses, B&B and self-catering accommodation will not be able to claim on their insurance under the Denial of Access clause common in the trade.

    Kate Graeme-Cook

    Brixham, Devon

    SIR – For Greater Manchester it is a shame that political posturing hindered a deal between its mayor Andy Burnham and Boris Johnson. They could not reach agreement when they were “only” £5 million apart. 
Tier 3 was always a fait accompli. It is easier to play and lose with other people’s money; in this case, the loss to the mayor of Manchester is one of ego.

    Christopher Learmont-Hughes

    Caldy, Wirral

    SIR – I would have had more sympathy with Andy Burnham had he questioned the evidence more for the need for extra restrictions. He seemed to make it all about more money.

    Christopher Hunt

    Swanley, Kent

    SIR – As a Greater Manchester resident, I support Andy Burnham. As a Tory supporter, I despair.

    Carol A Forshaw

    Bolton, Lancashire

    SIR – Chris Green, the MP for Bolton West and Atherton (Comment, October  20), details the unwillingness of No 10 to share the data on which the Government bases its onerous restrictions.

    Where is the “visible justice” here, when decisions that affect the livelihoods and health of millions of citizens are taken behind closed doors, and when even those citizens’ elected representatives are kept in the dark as to the rationale behind them?

    “Power corrupts” and coronavirus emergency legislation has apparently given unbridled power to ministers.

    Dr Claudia Riordan

    Luffenham, Rutland

    SIR – My wife and I may well propose a family lunch at our house on Christmas Day. Family “business” will be discussed.

    Duncan Rayner

    Sunningdale, Berkshire

    1. Come along, Christophet Hunt; little Burnham’s whining was all about making the government look incompetent (a low bar, I’ll admit) and screwing the taxpayer. That all went well, didn’t it? But did we expect any more from an intellectual minnow?

  10. Had an O2 cancellation scam email yesterday.

    SIR – Will Rumsey (Letters, October 21) highlights the failure to deal with telephone scamming.

    Whenever I get a cold call that appears to be fraudulent, I block the number and report it as a scam. However, nothing seems to change.

    The police should threaten the chief executives of the telephone companies with prosecution on the basis that, through their apparent inaction, they are allowing criminality to flourish.

    David McFetrich

    Poole, Dorset

    SIR – We have had all of the threatening calls that Mr Rumsey mentions, along with many claiming that our BT internet account will be cancelled.

    After three in one day, I contacted BT and was assured that all was well. Friends who aren’t even with BT are also getting these calls – so, if you receive one, don’t worry.

    Sue Cameron

    Preston, Lancashire

  11. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/21/manchester-should-mark-beginning-theend-senseless-lockdown-mania/

    “Manchester should mark the beginning of the end for senseless lockdown mania

    A sophisticated public is now questioning the orthodoxy, as sceptical arguments finally enter the mainstream discourse

    21 October 2020 • 9:30pm

    Andy Burnham accuses the Government of using Manchester as “the canary in the coal mine” for an experimental regional lockdown strategy. The Greater Manchester mayor is himself accused of opportunism – stoking up North-South tensions to extract central Government cash.

    But whatever your view of him, Burnham’s spark of defiance has brought into the open a much broader debate about the Government’s Covid-19 strategy – a debate that’s long overdue.

    When arguing for Manchester to enter Tier 3 lockdown, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, warned the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care units was so high the region might run out of ICU beds.

    Downing Street was using “selective statistics”, said Burnham – and it turns out he was right.

    Manchester’s ICU units are at 70 per cent occupancy, Hancock warned, rising to 91 per cent in nearby Salford. These figures sound scary but both appear to be lower than this time last year, reflecting how expensive ICU capacity is managed.

    And with Covid-19 cases in central Manchester down in recent weeks, why put an entire region of 2.8 million people into further lockdown, given the inevitable economic damage?

    The skirmish over Manchester’s lockdown has been about cash and political face – given Labour’s determination to wrestle Northern “Red Wall” seats back from the Tories. But the sight of senior politicians questioning the efficacy of lockdown has thrown the Government’s strategy into question like never before.

    While Government scientists last month warned of 50,000 new Covid cases daily by mid-October, the outcome was one third of that total. As the economic and human costs of lockdown escalate, the public was already becoming impatient with warnings of “a second wave”.

    Salient facts (for example, so far this month the UK weekly deaths from respiratory diseases have been around the five-year pre-Covid October average) are muscling into circulation, not least via social media.

    The occupancy of ICU beds across the country is currently just 60 per cent, suggesting the NHS is in no danger of being overwhelmed. National ICU bed usage is a fraction of what it was in early April, and that’s before we crank up now well-rehearsed emergency measures.

    These are the kind of statistics you increasingly hear on radio phone-in shows, but not the TV news.

    For weeks, some of us have tried to put into context the three-fold rise in new daily “cases” since April. We’ve been pilloried for pointing, repeatedly, to the gap between rising cases and still-low Covid-related hospitalisations and deaths.

    We’re dismissed as “nutters” for analysing historic health data, rather than blindly accepting model-based predictions that justify the pro-lockdown status quo.

    Lockdown has caused the biggest economic collapse in three centuries, generating the largest national debt in peacetime history. It’s imposed untold psychological damage on our population, not least the young. Then there’s the non-Covid health care we’ve denied to countless millions, with so much of the NHS on Covid-19 stand-by.

    The “rule of six” is sinking businesses, just when they were sensing recovery. The three-tier system could soon be a de facto national lockdown with unemployment rising ominously – even before furloughing is curtailed at the end of this month.

    As renewed lockdown bites, serious cracks are appearing in the case for broad restrictive measures. With so many of us missing out on NHS treatment – 1.2  million cancelled breast cancer scans, life-saving treatments delayed – the public now sees that lockdown itself costs lives, probably more than the virus itself.

    The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition launched several weeks ago by leading epidemiologists from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford, questions broad-based lockdown. It favours age-specific shielding, instead, with society helping the vulnerable take precautions, as the rest of us build immunity by getting on with our lives.

    Relentlessly smeared by pro-lockdown politicians, the declaration has anyway been backed by tens of thousands of scientists and medical practitioners, along with hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. Dismissed as a “libertarian charter”, it in fact highlights that lockdown particularly harms the poor – those lacking decent accommodation or who can’t work from home.

    These are exactly the arguments that have been championed by local leaders across the North. Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston this week warned of a “huge growth in depression, suicide, poor health and addiction” given the economic fallout from lockdown.

    Hartlepool councillor Shane Moore said that if Teesside was moved to tougher Tier 3 restrictions, he’d tell Boris Johnson to “sod off”.

    While lockdown had over 90 per cent support in March and April, now we know Covid-19 overwhelmingly harms the elderly, and with the economy itself on life support, the public is more sceptical. Even polls driven by loaded questions, conducted amid a climate of fear, show backing for lockdown has halved.

    Indeed, the public is engaged in a debate far more sophisticated and nuanced than the dogmas being sold by the vast majority of politicians. This Manchester row, by forcing anti-lockdown arguments to the fore, has brought that debate fully into the open ­– and not a moment too soon.

    Manchester has long been a citadel of dissent. The city’s 19th century campaign to secure lower food prices through free trade ultimately overturned the landowner-backed corn laws. Yet again, the capital of the North has unleashed much-needed public discourse.

    Of course, Burnham still backs Sir Keir Starmer’s call for an even more punitive nationwide “circuit-breaker” – an attempt to drive a wedge between Johnson and anti-lockdown Tory backbenchers. But, beyond our political and media class, the arguments traded during this Manchester stand-off have made lockdown scepticism not only socially acceptable but, increasingly, the just cause.

    A wholesale change of strategy must surely be on the cards.”

    Listen to the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, presented by Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson http://www.telegraph.co.uk/planet-normal

    1. A wholesale change of strategy must surely be on the cards.

      One would like to think so but the Government is chained to the present policy since to recant would be an admission of the waste of the last six months and its utter uselessness!

    2. ‘Morning, Anne, “When arguing for Manchester to enter Tier 3 lockdown, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, warned the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care units was so high the region might run out of ICU beds.

      Downing Street was using “selective statistics”, said Burnham – and it turns out he was right.

      Manchester’s ICU units are at 70 per cent occupancy, Hancock warned, rising to 91 per cent in nearby Salford. These figures sound scary but both appear to be lower than this time last year, reflecting how expensive ICU capacity is managed.”

      Why has no one asked the size of the ICUs?

      Percentages are all very fine and nice if one knows what 100% is. I suspect the Manchester ICU may be 10 or 20 beds which means that 7 or 14 people are there. When it gets to the 95% then use the existing ‘Nightingale’ Hospitals. Isn’t that what they’re there for?

  12. SIr – The best way to prevent tailgating (Letters, October 21) is to buy a rear-facing dashcam, with a sign stating that one has been fitted.

    R A Harris

    Croydon, Surrey

    SIR – It is all very well for drivers to have a hand signal to deter tailgaters, but what should pedestrians do when faced with undipped headlights?

    Every dark morning, returning home with my Telegraph, I have to stop until cars driving on main beam have passed, lest I am blinded. Maybe waving the paper would do the trick.

    Paul Ridgway

    Ketton, Rutland

    1. Carry a mirror and flash them back, but be careful the blinded driver doesn’t run you down…

    2. At one time there was an inside mirror that could be darkened to prevent being blinded!

    4. Sod’s Law: If they don’t dip their headlights you will be blinded; if they do dip them they won’t see you and you will be run down.

  13. Foreign rough sleepers face deportation from UK post-Brexit. 21 October 2020.

    Foreign rough sleepers face being deported from Britain under draconian immigration laws to be introduced when the Brexit transition period ends.

    Under the immigration rules to be laid before parliament and due to come into force on 1 January, rough sleeping will become grounds for refusal of, or cancellation of, permission to be in the UK..

    Yes and we are going to stop those dinghy’s crossing the Channel with Flying Pig Patrols as well!

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/21/foreign-rough-sleepers-face-deportation-from-uk-post-brexit

    1. 325846+ upticks,
      Morning AS,
      This could usher in the compulsory lodgering law
      taking them off the streets & out of hotels the governance way of showing they are thinking of the tax payer.

    3. What is happeneing to the discarded dinghies left on the beaches of southern England?

      Has a dynamic Muslim entrepreneur collected them and shipped them back to France so they can be used again and again and again.

  14. UK to bar all foreign criminals after Brexit

    FOREIGNERS with a criminal conviction in the past year could be banned from entering the UK under a postBrexit immigration crackdown on overseas offenders.

    Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has widened her planned UK ban on criminals jailed for more than a year to include people from the EU and non-eu countries with less serious convictions.

    Under the changes to be laid out in Parliament today, the UK will ditch the current EU rules that only allow immigration officials to ban anyone who poses “a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society”.

    The new rules, which take effect on Jan 1, will bar all foreign criminals sentenced to at least a year in jail from entering the UK. A foreigner coming to the UK for first time who has been jailed for less than a year will also be barred.

    Any visitor or new arrival who has a non-custodial sentence in the previous 12 months such as a drink-drive conviction could be denied entry. A foreign criminal with a sentence of under 12 months but who has ties to the UK could still be barred but immigration and border officials will deal with them on a case-by-case basis.

    The Home Secretary will also reserve the right to bar persistent offenders or anyone whose presence in the UK “is not conducive to the public good”.

    Ms Patel said: “For too long, EU rules have forced us to allow dangerous foreign criminals, who abuse our values and threaten our way of life, onto our streets.

    “The UK will be safer thanks to firmer and fairer border controls where foreign criminals regardless of nationality will be subject to the same criminality rules.”

    The Home Office cited cases of a nonresident EU citizen with jailed in 2010 for eight years for rape, who could be admitted now because they had not offended since. Under the law change, they could be banned.

    Exceptions will be made, of course, for those arriving from destinations in which there is no rule of law and, therefore, no concept of criminality. This especially includes those who arrive on the shores of Kent in inflatable dinghies.

    1. But…but…but without access to the relevant EU and non-EU databases, how are we to determine whether or not yer foreigner has a record?

      ‘Morning, Grizz.

      3. Scotland faced a similar problem some years ago, with an inflow of Irish criminals and ne’er-do-wells. Edinburgh police had a tried and tested method of identifying them, as this ancient ditty illustrates;

        “Well I know ye’re a Pat by the cut o’ yer hair
        Bit ye a’ turn tae Scotsmen as sune as ye’re here
        Ye left yer ain countrie fae brakin’ the law
        An’ we’re seizin’ a’ stragglers frae Erin-go-Bragh”

      4. Even with access to said data bases, it isn’t much help; there are some countries what will not divulge the information.

    2. Morning, Grizz!
      🙂
      “could be” – hmm. Weasel words. Bearing in mind the utter uselessness of the Home Office and the total bollox spouted by the Home Secretary, I would not be surprised if ONLY criminals were allowed after Brexit. The crap she’s spouted over the boatloads coming over the channel is of truly mammoth proportions.

      1. Morning, Paul.

        Diplomatic words, parliamentary dialogue, weasel words, utter bollocks … call it what you will.

    3. “…the UK will ditch the current EU rules that only allow immigration officials to ban anyone who poses “a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society”.
      So there is to be a free pass for muslims then.

  17. Oh no we were all working from home to save the planet, now air pollution could rise because we will have our heating on.

    Better get your winter coms out if you have a smart meter fitted.

    1. Some pillock in our local paper was saying we shouldn’t put the clocks back due to coping with Covid! Then there was an article about some motoring organisation claiming keeping BST will save lots of lives – it didn’t last time it was tried, why will repeating the misery be any different this time round?

  19. SIR – I’m glad that Royal Mail is trying to improve its service, with postmen picking up parcels from customers’ doorsteps (report, October 21).

    However, the greatest change it could make would be to scrap Ssecond C-class mail. There is no reason why any letter should travel quicker than any other; and, with a streamlined service, Royal Mail would surely save a fortune. There would also be shorter queues at post offices, where everybody sending a package currently has a choice between two different rates.

    John Clifton
    Ash, Surrey

    I wonder if John Clifton realises that 2nd class mail is deliberately slowed down, rather than 1st class being speeded up? Problem is – so-called 1st class mail arriving here is very rarely ‘next day’.

    2. I saw more postmen on their rounds yesterday. Do they have to check every doorstep for parcels and can they get there before thieves collect the parcels for them.?

    3. Experience has taught me that there is no practical difference between first and second class, especially at present. The only time I buy first-class stamps is for guiltily late birthday cards – and I’m well aware that writing FIRST CLASS! in big red letters is just a sop to conscience.

      1. That is a delicate balance
        1st. class stamp suggests you’ve forgotten the date.
        2nd. class stamp suggests you are either mean or very organised.

  20. Country faces tens of thousands of deaths in second wave, Sage expert warns. 21 October 2020.

    The UK faces “tens of thousands” more coronavirus deaths in the epidemic’s second wave, Sage expert Professor John Edmunds has warned. The outlook was “gloomy”, the infectious disease specialist told MPs.

    Ferguson MARK 2!

    Edmunds claimed that ‘Covid-19 represents the gravest threat to the health of our nations for 100 years’ and insisted that an unmitigated epidemic would be ‘a disaster’, that ’50 per cent of the population would become ill within … a few chaotic months’, five to ten per cent of the population would require hospitalisation, and a ‘shocking’ 350,000 to 450,000 deaths would result due to Covid-19 alone, not including deaths to other causes.

    To drive home how afraid we should all be (or as he put it, ‘another way of putting it into context’), he claimed that the consequences would be worse than the effects of the Second World War on the UK: ‘About 410,000 people died in the Second World War over the period of six years. This epidemic would cause about the same number of deaths in a period of a few short months unless we do something about it.’

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-news-live-cases-update-lockdown-manchester-tier-3-wales-ireland-test-latest-b1199406.html

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/senseless-certainty-of-professor-lockdown/

    1. God above. What planet is he living on? FFS give it a rest. THERE IS NO SECOND WAVE . This virus will be with us just like the flu virus and the common cold.

      1. Big Brother is determined to control you and every aspect of your life.

        Politicians and political parties come and go; however, we will always continue to vote into power those who wish to control us. We never learn.

      1. I believe the immunologists who are convinced that the worst of the epidemic is over. Their reasoning has been published on this site in recent days. SAGE et al seem to be ignoring their considered opinions, probably because they are not qualified medics.

  21. From the DT:

    Police will not fine people over “confusing” new Covid laws, senior officers said as they blamed ministers for making the rules difficult to understand.

    Police chiefs said the complexity of the three-tier system meant they were targeting blatant breaches such as raves rather than fining people confused about breaking the rules on household mixing.

    They also warned that the public were being further confused by the Government issuing “guidance” advising people against actions such as non-essential travel which, unlike regulations, officers had no power to enforce.

    The disclosures to MPs on the home affairs committee on Wednesday also saw two of the most senior officers in the frontline of the fight against Covid-19 unable to correctly say whether two people from separate households in Tier 2 areas could meet indoors, which is illegal.

    Andy Rhodes, the chief constable of Lancashire, a Tier 3 area, said: “We should not [be] fining people for being confused about whether they can have two people in the house or not. We are focused on clear breaches.”

    He said the force was targeting its officers at high-rate Covid-19 areas and flagrant law-breakers within those areas, such as a wake attended by 150 people the weekend before Lancashire went into Tier 3 status.

    “Handing out more fines to people who are genuinely confused is just going to alienate the public, who are already tired of Covid and tired of being told what to do,” said another senior policing source.

    “There is also a danger, especially in the north of England, that the police are seen as doing the bidding of the Westminster elite, and it is never good when the public begin to see the police as agents of the state.”

    A senior policing source in the North added: “There has been some lip service paid to enforcement, with officers visiting licensed premises to check if people are members of the same household.

    “But the officers have to take on face value, if they say they ‘we were confused’ because there is so much confusion out there. In terms of having a regime that is enforceable, it is not.”

    Owen Weatherill, the second most senior officer in the country in the national Covid-19 policing effort, said: “One of the constant bits of feedback I get from forces is that there is confusion for the public because there are so many variations of this.

    “Take Greater Manchester – it has had five different sets of regulations that are slightly nuanced in different parts of the force area. The complexity of that cannot be understated.”

    Watch Andy Burnham, the Mayor Manchester, respond to the area being put into Tier 3 in the video below:

    Asked by Yvette Cooper, the committee chairman, whether two people from different households in Tier 2 were barred from mixing indoors, he admitted there were so many different variations that he could not answer her.

    Mr Weatherill blamed mixed messaging by the Government for some of the confusion, saying: “One of the challenges through these last few months has been the difference between what is regulatory and you cannot do versus Government guidance.

    “There have been many occasions when guidelines have been somewhat blurred by some of the public narrative put out in the media and sometimes from Government itself which has caused confusion.

    “We had got to a position where regulations were fairly clinically clear, and it was really clear what you could not do and that’s what regulations confined themselves to. What we have seen during this reintroduction is a mixture of both things that you cannot do under regulation, and guidance and the tiering relating to both. Unfortunately, what that has done is confuse the messaging. ”

    Mr Rhodes said that, for example, police have no power to stop people ignoring Government guidance and travelling from Tier 3 areas such as Liverpool to Tier 2 regions to use gyms or leisure centres, which are closed in their own area.

    He said: “Our focus is less about not travelling than what they do when they get there. Are they going to a large gathering? Are they having an unlicensed music event? Are they going to a pub or hotel that has deliberately advertised to have an indoor rave?”

    Asked whether two people from different Tier 2 households could mix indoors, he said he had been discussing it with his daughter and the difference between Tier 3 and Tier 2 was not being able to go out for a meal with people outside your household.

    A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman said:”As throughout the crisis, we are supporting the public in following the regulations by engaging, explaining and encouraging. Where people are knowingly breaching regulations and are not listening to police officers, we will enforce through issuing a fine.”

    BTL comment:

    Private Citizen
    21 Oct 2020 9:17PM
    Four students fined £40,000 for having a party according to Government broadcaster BBC. Was there a trial? Was there proof of guilt?

    This cannot be right or just.

    1. “it is never good when the public begin to see the police as agents of the state.”
      HA HA HA!
      Too bleedin’ late, pal.

    2. “it is never good when the public begin to see the police as agents of the state.”
      HA HA HA!
      Too bleedin’ late, pal.

  24. The triumph of China’s Covid spin offers a terrifying glimpse of the West’s future

    Our singular failure to come up with an alternative to draconian lockdowns will have world-transforming consequences

    SHERELLE JACOBS
    DAILY TELEGRAPH COLUMNIST
    22 October 2020 • 6:00am

    If the prospect of a winter lockdown is nourishing your inner nihilist, I recommend bingeing on the latest Chinese blockbusters. Watching the films that have led Chinese studios to eclipse Hollywood sales for the first time in history is like staring into the Western abyss. Take The Wandering Earth – a sci-fi trending on Netflix about a mission to move our planet to a new galaxy after a spike in Jupiter’s gravity. It is Star Wars scrubbed of its limitless human progress and frontier spirit. In the peculiarly cyclical story – about protecting and reviving humanity on Earth rather than exploring the universe – the European linear conception of time is obsolete. (Unsurprising? Mandarin has neither a past or future tense, nor China a creation myth.)

    Equally disorientating is The Eight Hundred – the world’s highest grossing film of 2020, about a ragtag of soldiers defending themselves against a Japanese siege. Tapping into China’s mania for anti-Japanese movies, the film frames the Second World War era as the start of China’s “rebirth” (note: not “rise”) from victim into victor. It turns the West’s fixation with that period conflict on its head – treating, as we do, the war as the starting gun of the decay and confusion that define our modern era.

    The point of recounting all this is to emphasise that China is not just a rival superpower, but a rival civilisation based on a fundamentally different cosmology, and set of assumptions and ideas. The threat from China is not solely about lab leaks and 5G. A fabulously self-confident civilisation-state with wildly diverging values is on the ascendant just when the West has lost all sense of what it stands for. That is terrifying.

    The zeal with which we have swallowed Beijing’s guff about the superiority of its draconian approach to pandemics is not a good start to the 21st-century clash of civilisations. It is chilling that China has exported a deadly virus to the West. But it is even more scary that China has exported a Chinese model for dealing with it.

    The praise for the Chinese lockdown model across the West is striking. Chunky-cardiganed epidemiologists and gullible commentators have contrasted the “mobilisation powers” of the Chinese state and the “co-operative” temperament of the Chinese people with the dithering of Western governments and the “lethal” appeal of herd immunity among selfish individualists in Europe and the US.

    Beijing’s useful idiots overlook the glaring flaws in the official CCP version of events. How can China be proof of the effectiveness of lockdowns when it took weeks to close off Wuhan after reports of the virus first surfaced? And given that Beijing likely under-reported deaths in its first wave on an industrial scale, how can we take at face value China’s transformation from the source of “Wuhan flu”, to a Covid-zero country zapping isolated cases imported from abroad?

    Particularly as China’s most recent outbreak in Qingdao has been linked to a hospital where Covid and non-Covid patients were reportedly mixing, and cleaners rather than nurses were in charge of infection control. British media has delighted in contrasting Qingdao’s resulting bid to test 10 million citizens with our failing test-and-trace system. No one has questioned whether the city might have better spent its resources on preventing nosocomial outbreaks in third-rate hospitals.

    The inefficiencies of its sledgehammer tactics aside, Beijing’s response may well be suited to China, given its well-developed state bureaucracy and cultural emphasis on rights rather than liberties. Heck, given the Chinese intellectual tradition’s emphasis on the social impact of a statement as well as its objective veracity, perhaps, a relativist might at a stretch even question whether we should hold the Chinese government to Western standards of accuracy. But the point is this: the Chinese model is not suitable for the West, and yet we have singularly failed to come up with an alternative – anchored in values like individual responsibility, freedom and evidence-based science.

    Granted, the centre-Right has been caught particularly off-guard by its failure to clock well-funded healthcare as a prerequisite for any sustainably free society in the era of the global pandemic. But the calls on both Left and Right to blow billions on Big Brother track-and-trace ventures rather than improving healthcare capacity are mind-blowing. So too the unease with which the West has navigated its contradictory values of individualism and collectivism through this crisis. Sweden, whose welfare state aims to strengthen individual responsibility to resolve this tension, is the exception.

    Perhaps most surprisingly, Covid has exposed the West’s collapsing confidence in its empiricist tradition. It is unsettling that mainstream Western science has endorsed the oracle power of modelling over basic medical data. Perhaps in this clash of civilisations worthy of a Hollywood script, while China smothered the evidence by talking down the Covid threat, the West has smothered the evidence by talking it up.

    Speaking of Hollywood, is it not a little eerie that while China cleans up in the 2020 box office, James Bond’s No Time To Die has become the film of the year that never was? Is our time as the hero of the story over? We will all have to stay tuned.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/10/22/triumph-chinas-covid-spin-offers-terrifying-glimpse-wests-future/

    1. But they have nasty habits, I remember refusing to watch that beastly Chinese film about sex with mythological animals. Enter the Dragon, or something.

    2. Rana Mitter
      Xi’s world: Covid has accelerated China’s rise
      From magazine issue: 24 October 2020

      Back in February, the Chinese state appeared to be in trouble. A terrifying virus had infected thousands of people and the country’s social media exploded in anger against the authorities faster than Chinese censors could scrub away the critical comments. Like governments elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turned to the emergency analogy of choice, the second world war. Channelling Mao Zedong’s guerrilla campaign against the Japanese in the 1930s, state media declared that China was fighting a ‘people’s war’ against the virus.

      As in that earlier war, China’s conflict with the virus has shifted from a defiant retreat to a declaration of victory. Nor is this just bluster. The latest economic figures suggest its economy is the only one in the world that will make a full recovery from the virus — growing by 2 per cent while America’s falls by 5 per cent, the eurozone by 8 per cent and Britain by 10 per cent. Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist of the World Bank, thinks China is on track to become the world’s biggest economy by 2030. Beijing can now look forward, while other major economies are still working out how to manage the damage while racking up staggering amounts of debt.

      None of this could have happened had China not dealt so swiftly (often brutally) with Covid-19. This week, Chinese media has been full of images of people queuing for the new anti-viral vaccine — it feels there that the crisis is genuinely over.

      Yet when I call friends in Shanghai, they point out that after the institution of an efficient (and highly intrusive) track-and-trace system and harsh lockdowns, life is pretty much back to normal. China’s middle classes look at news from the locked-down West with bemusement before going out to restaurants, concerts and holidays. Its recent Golden Week vacation saw more than half a billion people take to China’s high-speed railways and new highways.

      Back in the spring, observers queried whether China’s high figures for suppression of the virus could possibly be real. Xi Jinping, China’s president and secretary-general of the CCP, can survey the state of his country and reflect that it is far better off than anyone might have expected when the pandemic started. The regime will have been further encouraged by opinion polling that suggests positive ratings for the government’s performance among Chinese citizens, with one survey suggesting 80 per cent satisfaction rates. The CCP has used this to justify doubling down on surveillance of its citizens, and the pandemic will almost certainly be taken as a pretext to clamp down on dissidence.

      Encouraged by its apparent success in controlling the virus, the CCP have begun to develop new ways of thinking about their economic policies, in particular when it comes to challenging the West more explicitly. The party uses the term ‘dual circulation’, which is a bland-sounding code for China’s unique approach to globalisation. It’s as powerful in its way as ‘America First’ or Brexit. It signifies that China is aiming to create two linked but distinct systems. One is a nationalist domestic economy that relies on another Mao-era term, zili gengsheng, or ‘self–reliance,’ linked to the ‘Made in China 2025’ agenda, which would see much of China’s critical industry brought home. The other is international engagement which expands China’s reach, particularly when it comes to technology.

      China is investing heavily on research and development. The virus has, in fact, given Chinese science a boost in several areas, from biotech to artificial intelligence (including the use of drones to deliver online shopping). This comes at a time when funding for research in the West may be vulnerable due to constrained budgets.

      Not so long ago, it seemed as if Xi’s grand Belt and Road Initiative — designed to bring billions of dollars of infrastructure investment to a swath of territory from western Europe to south-east Asia by way of east Africa — might not live up to his grand ambitions. Had he overreached? But the pandemic has changed the balance of global trade in ways that might now make China seem like an attractive partner for developing nations.

      China’s opportunity is clear. Previously, the western world could dangle the prospect of generous investment to countries such as Pakistan or Myanmar through institutions such as the World Bank, tied as they are to norms of good governance and democracy. In a post-Covid world, in which there will be less trade, less travel, less globalism, how can the West continue to influence such countries?

      There’s less to Beijing’s financial might than meets the eye, however. Some 90 per cent of Chinese funding for Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is not foreign direct investment, but loans from two major Chinese banks and various other institutions. In the United Nations, where Chinese influence is growing in institutions as diverse as the World Health Organisation and the Human Rights Council, the United States is still the biggest payer of dues.

      Perceptions matter. Right now, Xi has a powerful story he wants to tell: about domestic authoritarian stability, effective public health strategy and economic growth. It’s a narrative he’s keen to stand up against the seeming disorder of the democratic world.

      The past few months have also seen China adopt a much more confrontational tone toward its neighbours, including a clash with India in the Himalayas, and displays of military might in the skies near Taiwan. In practice, sabre-rattling is often a sign that China wants to create alarm without a real intention to act. As the imposition of the Hong Kong security law showed, when it really wants to strike fast, Beijing gives little advance warning. But if scaring Asia is the aim, China has succeeded.

      Xi’s China has ended up in a strange position; expecting a lower growth rate than was predicted at the end of 2019, yet relatively stronger than many of its global rivals in terms of capacity to act. Still, there is no clear path from here to the next ‘people’s victory’. The impressive economic figures conceal a longer-term problem, as the economist George Magnus has argued, of an unbalanced economy marked by under–consumption, a rising trade surplus, and debt still rapidly rising.

      The ‘dual circulation’ idea that China can simply separate off its domestic and international economies is unsustainable in the long term; major structural reforms will still be needed. And there are other issues, such as pollution, climate change, and demographic decline — from 2029, there will be five million fewer Chinese per year, and the population will be rapidly ageing.

      China’s higher global status creates new vulnerabilities too. Beijing is having to come to terms with the reality that the oppression of the Uighurs and the constraining of freedoms in Hong Kong are not simply internal matters for a country that wants to achieve global influence through ‘a community of common destiny’, because the result is that Chinese businesses and investment become negatively associated with the authoritarian values of their homeland.

      The single greatest obstacle to the CCP’s power, however, lies not in Beijing but in Washington. A second Trump term, more virus-driven economic panic, and more chaos in the liberal global order, could end up further boosting Beijing’s message of economic success and authoritarian government. A Biden administration may find it easier to bring China-sceptic forces together.

      The fear of a new US administration may be behind the latest war metaphors coming out of Beijing. On VJ day in August, China stressed internationalism when it commemorated its founding role in the UN in 1945. This autumn, however, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 has dominated China’s official media channels. In Chinese, that conflict is known as Kangmei — the ‘Resist America’ war. In Beijing’s mind, the US is down, not out. America remains the only real challenge to China’s global future.

      https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/xis-world-covid-has-accelerated-chinas-rise?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020201024%20%20AL+CID_ce9397fe9ebb00da14156fc018445ab4

      1. It was all part of the plan – when they deliberately let the virus loose. Crucify the rest of the world – (if they are stupid enough to allow themselves to be destroyed) – and China is the new Great Power.

          1. One of our sons is in new real estate. Most of the current buyers are from the far east.
            Same in many parts of Australia they are buying up property wholesale.
            They have had a row with the Aussies over beef, so the Chinese have gone to south America where now large parts of the amazon jungle is being felled to farm cattle for export to China.

    3. Glad you were able to. My dog seems to know when I have to get up early and can’t sleep in; he demands to be let out/have a drink/let out again every thirty minutes or so the night before! I’m lucky if I get five hours sleep 🙁 He, of course, gets up late and sleeps during the day as well.

  26. Last night the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were projected onto the sides of several prominent buildings in France. This was done in order to show people who agreed with chopping the heads off those who ‘dishonoured’ their prophet that Freedom of Speech is as sacred to the ordinary Frenchman as Mohammed is to Muslims. Many French people feel they have had enough.

    Caroline thinks that this sort of gesture will only make matters worse; I feel that it is about me the public’s outrage at Muslim atrocities was completely unequivocal.

    Perhaps Caroline will post her point of view later today.

    1. I think that Caroline is right – but that not to do it capitulates to the slammers.

      At least – for the moment – the French PTB are acting forcefully – unlike the spineless shower posing as a government in the UK.

      I do wonder whether the French “resolve” will last.

    2. I think you’re both right. The opinion of the silent majority needs to be heard, but I’m afraid that Muslims have the blind adulation of Mohammed so deeply ingrained in them that it will just infuriate them, and possibly lead to further acts of violence.

          1. I agree with all three of you on this. Their determined confrontational medieval mindset will destroy western cultures if it’s allowed to. It’s about time our pathetic simpering political classes got a grip on this.

          3. That’s the current program or pogrom.
            I get the impression they are avenging the crusades.

          4. Have you all noticed that when an on street TV reporter is in one of the areas where there is a large islamic community the reporters only ever interview white residents. Although other s are often seen making their way around in the background.
            Perhaps the members of the large communities refuse to speak or simply disagree with being be approached.

          5. And when the police stop a muslim driver in a muslim area the locals all pile out to try and intimidate the police.

          6. Around election time our politicians go into schools and sit with the children. In London, of course, the schools are closer to Westminster than the schools of Cornwall or West Wales. The politicians are seen with thirty or so non-white children. They are happy with schools filled with foreigners.
            They, in their rose-tinted multi cult bubble don’t consider the 70% of the population of the UK who are white natives and who are not at all happy with foreigners taking over.

          7. A school in a small village in county Durham was closed down as it didn’t meet with the current expectations. It was assume by locals as too white.
            Take a look at the video on my post this morning.

          8. The men won’t speak to a female reporter and the women won’t speak to a male reporter.
            And none of them will speak to kuffirs.

        2. Manchester Arena. Apart from the screeching of Areana Grande, what did those who died do to the slammers. As it is written in their operations manual, worldwide jihad will continue until the caliphate is established.

    4. I think you are both right – it’s quite likely to make things worse- but people have to show somehow that they will not be intimidated, otherwise poor Samuel and all the others will have died in vain.

      1. Maybe, J, the time has come to make things worse and let the little shïtheads understand that we’ve had enough.

    5. I think it will make matters worse in the short term, but that might finally wake everyone up to just how dangerous Islam is and how incompatible it is with “Western values”.

      It’s probably far too late to turn the tide and proscribe it, but at the least we should stop importing more.

      1. It’s not only the imports though, is it?
        The home-grown ones seem more fanatical – though the one who killed Samuel Paty was a “refugee”.

        2. The most obvious problems with so called ‘refugees’ nobody really knows who they are, or even the real reason for them turning up.
          With so much unemployment in the UK the vast majority of them have no chance of regular employment.

        3. True, second generation particularly so.

          But why import more who will produce yet more second generation fanatics?

          4. Absolutely correct Conners.
            We had our go at educating the world over almost two centuries.
            That did seem to work very well now they come here to tell us
            what to do.
            Most India people have had respect for our culture, but the rest are bent on destroying it.

    6. I think you are right. Muslims that I have met only understand firm action in this kind of matter. Restraint is seen as weakness.

    1. That’s the kind of idea I used to have at art school and reject for being too trivial. I am delighted to note that Banksy is a crap oil panter as well!

      1. I think you maybe right Obs but i would have thought he’d look a bit older now.
        Back in the day, I use to see him taking his two large dogs for walks near the heath at Hampstead.

          5. Older sisters are a curse. Mine bossed me about rotten but at least when I passed the age of 20 one of them became one of my best friends as she became more human being married a solicitor who could recite the whole of Eskimo Nell by heart..

          6. My sister is 11 years older than me and was more of a second mother than a sister to me until I reached my late teens.

          7. When I see how bossy our granddaughter is to her brother, I almost feel sorry for my brother: almost.

        1. I was about to post He Aint Heavy but you have already done so.

          We have a double Hollies CD which we often play on the long journeys we make from Brittany to UK, Spain or Holland. An electric car would be completely useless for us.

          The Air That I Breathe was excellent but I also enjoy the original version by Albert Hammond which I post here:

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiL9vO8E6tE

          .

    1. Good morning.

      Wet gales here in Skåne!

      Apropos the “national debt”. Who, precisely, is the money owed to; and what steps will they take to get it back?

        1. I wouldn’t know but I’m sure that their are some lady NoTTLers who could tell you how it is done with decorum.

          1. Nice photo – it must be Mandy Rice Davies, celebrated for the saying “Well he would, wouldn’t he?” at the Profumo trial in 1963.

            In 1953, in our all-boys school before my voice broke, I played the part of a bridesmaid in a school performance of ‘Trial by Jury’ by Gilbert & Sullivan. The three of us wore crinoline dresses (sixth formers stuffed newspaper down the tops to add realism) and the skirts were held out by thick wire hoops tied to our belts with string.

            But in dress rehearsal, when we sat down after our trio song “Comes the Broken Flower, comes the Cheated Maid” we found that the hoops stayed stiff and hoisted the front hems of our satin dresses into the air like a Can-can. On the night, when we sat down we had to press down and deform the wire hoops so that this didn’t give the audience an embarrassing view.

            Apparently the real (historical) crinolines had sliding joints in the hoops so that this wouldn’t happen.

  36. How does these deaths in the last 28 days for people that have tested positive for covid actually work as a sign that death rates are going up or down?
    The MSM get a nice big number to announce each morning, they don’t actually say if they died of covid or even how many each day.
    It’s all a bit vague to me

    1. It was changed a few weeks ago Bob because the old system was not giving the required results. It is as you say incomprehensible!

    2. Mr Vague……

      Roll up your sleeve, Doctor Gates will see you now….

      Through the one way doors, Room 666.

    3. Am I missing something with all these (alleged) Covid deaths? Is it not possible to swab test the deceased to see whether they were infected at the time of death so might have died of it? On the basis that you could be tested positive today and fall under a bus in 27 days’ time but still be a statistic…ah, hang on, silly old me, that would reduce the number of ‘Covid deaths’ and that would mess everything up…

      1. They durst not touch the body in case of infection. No PMs are done either (apparently).

  37. Iraqi Archbishop: Europe Is ‘Naïve’ About Terrorism, Uncontrolled Immigration
    https://media.breitbart.com/media/2020/10/Chaldean-Archbishop-Najib-Michaeel-Moussa-Iraq-file2019-Getty-640×480.jpg
    The archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, said Wednesday that he fears more for Europe than for his native Iraq because Europe is naïve about the dangers of radical Islam.

    “Europe is becoming the sick child of the modern world, because it is moving away from its faith and its cultural and religious roots,” said Archbishop Najeeb Moussa Michaeel in an interview with the European Post. “By dint of turning away from the Church and its heritage, it falls in love with the worst fundamentalist, lax or individualistic ideologies, as long as they are opposed to those who built it.”
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2020/10/21/iraqi-archbishop-europe-naive-terrorism-uncontrolled-immigration/

    1. 325846+ up ticks,
      Afternoon C,
      That is via the political hierarchy, their followers / voters
      but that leaves a multitude who agree with him and acknowledge the truth.
      The party before Country voting pattern WILL show out as a nation slayer.

    2. GK Chesterton said “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
      As we see now. We have politicians who believe in scientific committees.

      1. I won’t believe in anything – unless you want me too
        I’ll scrap the Act of Union – What’s History to you?
        I’ll be so smooth and plausible on me you’ll bet your shirts
        And with New Labour – endlessly – you’ll get your Just Desserts

        {RCT 1998 – satirical song about Tony Blair)

        And as ogga never fails to remind us we have got our Just Deserts not simply for voting for New Labour but for voting for any part of Lib/Lab/Con.

    3. Let’s look at an extract from John Milton’s Lycidas. In his elegy, John Milton, the ardent protestant, is worried about the renewed threat of Catholicism returning. The people are sheep who are improperly nourished and are rotting inside while the grim wolf (then representing the Catholic church but now something far more evil) is allowed to advance without being checked.

      We are nearly all aware of the threat which is unheeded and unchecked in Britain today.

      The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
      But, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
      Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
      Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
      Daily devours apace, and nothing said,

      1. If you remember this elegy was about a young friend of Milton’s called Edward King who was drowned in the Irish sea.

        Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

        One of my weaker pupils did not realise that I was making a pretty feeble joke when I said it was very bad luck for the chap to be drowned before his boat had even left the pier!

        I used to enjoy reading Milton’s poetry aloud and I find it deeply sad that the examiners now seem to consider that he is too difficult for Sixth Formers.

        I used to arrange a Reading Competition each year at Allhallows. The winner one year chose to read Lycidas and won the prize – the previous year he had been runner up reading Rupert Brooke’s poem Jealousy. He is now a QC – a prominent barrister who is one of the best respected barristers in the West of England. I quote from the Bar’s publication:

        Andrew is a criminal silk who regularly appears in cases of homicide, complex fraud and regulatory crime. He has appeared in some of the most notable cases on the Western Circuit including the Bristol trial concerning the murder of Becky Watts.

        Ranked as a ‘Star Silk’ in Chambers 2018 Guide he is reported by them as having “…all the gravitas, demeanour and intellect that one would hope for in a QC. There is no case that he could not handle. He is passionate, persuasive, forensic and delivers in a way that most barristers can only dream of emulating.”

        I like to think that his time doing English in my “A” level set was not was not wasted.

        1. Late reply, Richard but thank you for that.

          I don’t know why Milton is deemed too difficult for sixth-formers when I, as an eight year old, was set Gray’s Elegy in a Churchyard to learn by heart by my Father, together with Portia’s Speech, Henry V at Harfleur, Jacques in As You Like It and a whole host of others. I hated it at the time but what I didn’t realise, was that my Father was not only training my memory but also instilling a love of language (He started us on Latin when I was 7).

          Incidentally, I wonder at the modern penchant for pronouncing Jacques as Jakeways – Sarah Kennedy on early morning Radio 2 would do that.

  38. 325846+ up ticks,
    Currently, underneath the arches, the pavement is my pillow etc,etc.
    The johnson chap is talking of 75 years ago surely,

    Boris Govt Brags UK ‘Resettles More Refugees Than Any Other Country in Europe’ as It Fails to Stop Boats

  39. A double whammy

    Man eaten by shark dies of coronavirus..
    According to CNN (Clinton News Network)

    Sharks have killed 7 people in Australia this year, the most since 1934. Climate change could be a factor.
    https://wattsupwiththat.com…

    There ya go, virus and climate linked.

    1. I don’t often get “art”, but that one really got to me. Most impressive, so it was, and awfully moving.
      Would have liked a poppy, but there weer (fortunately?) not enough to go round.

      1. Even seeing it on screen gave me a sort of shiver. I didn’t get the opportunity to see it in person.

      1. Hi Anne. Any of our wealthy nottlers able to (or maybe already has) post(ed) Rod’s speccie piece?

        1. I’ve just sent an email to the Spekkie’s customer services.
          The delivery has become so erratic that the hard copy for last week only arrived today.
          Normally I kick up a stink by Monday afternoon, but this time I sat it out just to see how long it takes.
          Maybe the distributor needs a boot up the bum or it’s the PO going into covid panic mode.
          p.s. Which Rodder’s article would you like to read?

          1. I wasn’t being pushy (not my forté)! ‘Twas the one someone referenced about BBC1’s new drama: Roadkill.

          2. Et voila.

            “Having not watched television for nine months and already growing bored of the 1,000-piece jigsaw of General Alfredo Stroessner (part of the ‘Vigorous Leaders’ range from Waddingtons), my wife suggested — for a novelty — that maybe we should take in the new political thriller starring Hugh Laurie, called Roadkill.

            We have fond memories of Laurie from previous dramas and are both mildly interested in politics, so it seemed an agreeable idea. ‘What side is it on?’ I asked, with a note of warning. ‘BBC One,’ replied the missus, and we looked at each other glumly and I said: ‘Oh Christ. It’ll be a woke BAME-athon. Isn’t there an old episode of Midsomer Murders on somewhere, one starring John Nettles and with DS Troy being disparaging about homosexuals and gypsies?’ But there wasn’t — I think they’ve all been purged.

            So we watched Roadkill and continued watching even as that dread word appeared in the title sequence, the word which popped up from its form, ears twitching, a look of utter self-righteousness on its face, the word which should have made us turn off immediately, the awful, killer word: Hare. Hare. Hare again. Hare today, Hare tomorrow. Is there a worse playwright in the country?

            And indeed considerable misery stretched out before us — a script devoid of even the slenderest vestiges of wit, nuance, intelligence, tension and truth. Like being harangued for an hour by a needy and not very bright adolescent. Viciously biased, hideously right-on, moronic in its assumptions, devoid of that most crucial thing for a play, drama.

            One of the jobs of a screenwriter or dramatist is surely to challenge the orthodoxies of their time

            How thick does Hare think we are? He clearly believes we need educating about the vileness of the Conservative party and he is the man to do this, from his Hampstead mansion. And each time he dribbles out more of this sub-Marxist guff the BBC is ready and waiting to lap it up. In Roadkill, the lead character — the villain — was a plasticine hybrid of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. A smug ‘populist’ with a filthy past and a dishonest present. Yes, enough already, we get your point. Clunking scene changes to emphasise the point — the switch from the rotten food in a women’s prison to the delightful canapés eaten by vile Tories.

            And the lies, the lies. Yes, such dramas are fiction, a made-up world, and so one should not mind lies. But Hare has no imagination except for that stunted tinplate thing which exists inside all thick lefties: Roadkill is his vision of the world as he would want it to be and also how he kind of thinks it is. And so pretty much the entire judiciary is BAME — the judges, the barristers, the lawyers, the solicitors, as if our legal system had been franchised out to the cast of Porgy and Bess, as well as being largely female.

            But a shot of the Conservative party cabinet showed an ocean of white faces, largely male. That is what I mean by a lie — a deliberate lie. In reality, it is the other way around, of course. There are too few black High Court judges, but plenty of BAME representatives within Boris Johnson’s cabinet. But to show that would go against the essence of Hare’s confection, which is rooted in the absurd notion that Tories dislike black people while the rest of society has somehow ‘moved on’.

            The race element of Roadkill, incidentally, destroyed what little drama existed in the screenplay in the first place. You could tell whether a character was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by either the colour of their skin or their gender. White men bad, black men good. Black women better still. Black transgender woman? Oh yes, tick that box. Positively sainted. And so, as a consequence, there was not much in the way of mystery.

            I am not a Conservative and never have been, even if I did vote for them once, so cannot be accused of taking personal offence. More to the point, I would guess that a good 75 per cent of the films I have watched and the books I have read came from a broadly left-wing perspective and they have been, for the most part, greatly enjoyed. You cannot loathe left-wing literature, film and drama if among your heroes are Auden, Orwell, Turgenev, Mayakovsky, Moravia, Ferlinghetti, the great Norman Jewison, the berserk but always interesting Oliver Stone — oh, and of course Harold Pinter.

            It is only when the political perspective of the writer obliterates everything else — especially the humanity — that the book gets cast away or the film turned off. When the suspicion descends that you have paid good money, perhaps at Waterstones or the Curzon cinema, or through your licence fee, simply to endure a village idiot hitting you over the head repeatedly with a large mallet.

            In truth, I too often feel this way when watching BBC dramas: not an annoyance that their perspective is necessarily wrong as I see it, just that it is utterly ubiquitous and beyond that incontestable, that their view is right and it is the only view. One of the jobs of a screenwriter or dramatist is surely to challenge the orthodoxies of their time, to pick away at the inevitable contradictions, to offer us something of a surprise — and to do all of this with a degree of subtlety so that you believe in the characters to whom you have been introduced. There’s none of that with Hare, ever.

            You have to feel a little for the new director-general, Tim Davie. He inherits an organisation which, almost as one, feels at one with the Hare-brained agenda and, worse still, thinks that the population beyond the North Circular either feel the same or would do if they weren’t all thick.

            Back to the jigsaw, then. It’s Alf’s array of medals which are the biggest problem, and I will have the same problem with the next puzzle, Ariel Sharon.”

      2. That’s a very big, and really not justifiable, claim. There were a lot of rogues out there (indeed some escaped prison by joining up) and as for drugs – well there was plenty of alcohol and some who were sadly reliant on it.

        Have you not read, or seen, Journey’s End?

        Having been a “drug-addled crook” didn’t prevent some of them from dying heroic deaths either. But like Kipling’s “single men in barracks” let’s not pretend that they were plaster saints.

  41. Mail to Lord Wokingham………..

    ”The UK passenger railway had a big business running commuters into and out of cities for their work five days a week.”

    I think the billionaire global elite have a ”big business” running certain UK ”officials, politicians, NGOs and other actors” around in their gravy train which unlike the ”UK railway” is highly profitable for all the lucky passengers.

    Sadly, that profitability does not include the British people who have to pay the check of this gravy train in a whole variety of ways. As is very evident in the ongoing protests day by day, week by week, from the readers of your blog. Those readers of yours, in effect, pay for the travel of the officials and politicians and others who are aboard the billionaire gravy train.

    Of course, we know when and from where the billionaire gravy train departed. It was from the Plaza Hotel in New York on April 20 1996 and it’s been running ever since. The engineer, George Soros, welcomed Tony Blair aboard and the train apparently picked up many more lucky UK passengers including Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and maybe Theresa May among them. Was John Major also welcomed aboard through his multi million dollar position at the Carlyle Group of Washington DC from 1998 where, purely by innocent coincidence, the engineer of the gravy train, George Soros, apparently was a star client ? That remains to be seen.

    The UK contingent was in good company because certain Americans were co-travellers including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry and many other Democrat politicians.

    The curious thing about the UK billionaire global elite gravy train is that many innocent UK politicians must, presumably, have known of it’s existence but did absolutely nothing at all to stop it.

    Where and when will the gravy train complete it’s journey ?

    Maybe in the London suburb of Pentonville ?

    Polly

  42. We’ve become desensitised to terror. 22 October 2020.

    It is also difficult because the real issue is not the expulsion of a bunch of hate-preachers or would-be jihadis. It is about how we define and stand up for what politicians are fond of describing as ‘western values’. That means knowing what they are and then communicating them with subtlety, empathy but also pride. And at the heart of this is the question of history. We have allowed a penitential version of our history to prevail in much public discourse which sees it as uniformly oppressive, racist and deeply damaging to the rest of humanity. This is ignorant nonsense. All history is light and shade. Yet this gets lost these days in the mass hysteria on social media, in our universities and other national institutions about race, gender and other bogus Foucauldian constructs of power and oppression beloved of the western academy.

    The people have no problem defining “Western Values” it is the politicians who have the difficulty! It is they that have undermined and denigrated them in the cause of Cultural Marxism. This is why we are defenceless in the face of Islamic Terror. They are on the side of the terrorists!

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-ve-become-desensitised-to-terror

    1. Who decides what are ”Western values” ?

      Clue……

      ”We leverage policy, legislation and political influence and build strong relationships with politicians, officials, NGOs and other actors”.

      Who could it be ?

  43. Comrade Joe? Putin says he could work with Biden despite anti-Russia rhetoric because the Democratic Party is closer to the ‘ideas’ that birthed COMMUNISM. 22 October. 2020.

    Vladimir Putin believes the Democratic Party’s ‘social democratic ideals’ are similar to those that led to the rise of Communism, and that Russia could form an ‘ideological basis’ of a working relationship if Joe Biden wins the November 3 election.

    Here’s Vlad stirring the pot tongue in cheek.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8865957/Comrade-Joe-Putin-says-work-Biden-despite-anti-Russia-rhetoric.html

    2. A diesel fitter?

      Market trader, selling lingerie, waves some knickers and shouts at passing potential lady customers in his loudest costermonger’s voice, “Diesel fitter! Diesel fitter!”

    2. Well I read what appeared in the Daily Wail and it was not exactly earth-shaking – they’ll need to do better than that.

  47. SIR – My daughters received one Malteser for each music scale practised (Letters, October 15). This resulted in two music degrees.

    Andrew Kelland
    Penarth, South Glamorgan

    If my parents had employed this incentive I would have ended up morbidly obese – NOT! My knowledge of music is confined to listening, not playing…my father’s attempt to teach me the piano resulted in many wasted hours, bless him.

    1. Wouldn’t have mattered how many maltesers I was given, I’m still totally talentless where music is concerned. No music degrees for me :-((

      1. I thought the science was settled on this one: Maltesers were advertised as the chocolates with the less fattening centres.

    2. Yo HJ

      My dislike of ‘music’ as a subject began at school, when each pupil in the class was made to stand up in class and sing
      for his/her peers: as I cannot sing in tune was I ridiculed by teachers from then on.

      I ‘like’ jazz, but do not wish to play it.

      Going to a sporting fixture is good for me, if I do not get sent off when joining in the singing of the National Anthem( remember it)

  48. Good Afternoon all, i’ll shortly be off to view “Misbehaving” at the local picture house – it’s a docudrama about the infamous 1970 Miss World contest and the rise of the first wave of Feminists , it’s listed as a comedy , hmmm , I’ll get back to you on that later. Every now and then my little world wobbles on it’s axis as some previously held belief is challenged, today I found one of my childhood books openly and without censure for sale on Amazon :-

    https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Little-Black-Sambo-Helen-Bannerman-ebook/dp/B08LGLZ98T/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=little+black+sambo&qid=1603368063&sr=8-1

    2. My local bookshop has had that on its shelf for years. Apparently it’s a steady seller.

    3. Wasn’t here once a Nottler poster on this site who used the nom de plume of Little Black Censored?

    5. This should be interesting too. Same authoress.

      https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PJwAAOSwKgtcnaf7/s-l1600.jpg

      Helen Bannerman (1862–1946) wrote children’s books, some of them now quite controversial. Among them was the 1904 work The Story of Little Kettle-Head. It’s about a young pyromaniac who sets herself on fire and underwent a crude cybernetic conversion to replace her destroyed head. So it’s sort of like The Six Million Dollar Man, except that it probably didn’t cost more than five dollars. Also, there’s misogynistic mutilation by boys, aided by a father figure. All in all, a freaky work of children’s literature. Enjoy.

  49. Good Afternoon all, i’ll shortly be off to view “Misbehaving” at the local picture house – it’s a docudrama about the infamous 1970 Miss World contest and the rise of the first wave of Feminists , it’s listed as a comedy , hmmm , I’ll get back to you on that later. Every now and then my little world wobbles on it’s axis as some previously held belief is challenged, today I found one of my childhood books openly and without censure for sale on Amazon :-

    https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Little-Black-Sambo-Helen-Bannerman-ebook/dp/B08LGLZ98T/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=little+black+sambo&qid=1603368063&sr=8-1

    2. Back in 2015, all the early polls said Milliband was winning bigly. Just saying.
      Polls these days are worthless. Misleading at best. What do the bookmakers say?

        1. I know you’re banking on your electoral system to save you again when more Americans vote for Harris/Biden than for The Donald.

          1. Jack… what’s up with you ?

            Didn’t you know that over 3 million individuals in 2016 voted Democrat who are not Americans and who consequently did not have voting rights ?

            Add in the deceased and all those who voted several times over and there’s about 5 – 6 million votes at least which are invalid.

            It won’t happen like that this year thanks to Donald’s new program.

          2. Illegals still pouring across your southern border every day, your Texas Border Patrol picking up those struggling to cross the Rio Grande.
            Nowt’s really changed in the four years DT has been in the White House.

          3. “…over 3 million individuals in 2016 voted Democrat who are not Americans…”
            You really are fecked.

            ETA: … and so are we 🙁

          5. You’re mellowing Polly. Last time you replied to me over on Breitbart you said I was “silly & childish.”
            I only asked if John Redwood still replied to your emails 🙂

          6. That in itself si a stupid statement. Why can’t you Lefties behave like adults?

            Why do you take delight in people risking their lives to illegally enter a country to their detriment and to that of the nation they want to get to?

          7. “Why can’t you Lefties behave like adults?”

            Lefties???

            According to the Far-Right, following last years General Election >98% of we who voted are “Lefties”
            The <2% were Nigel, Batten, Tommy Robinson, Anne Marie Waters fans.

    3. Apparently to polls are showing similar positions to when they held the last election, killary was apparently doing quite well………..

        1. In Jan this year she put on a brave smile for this one…

          “Hillary Clinton is to be the new chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB).
          The former US secretary of state is the university’s 11th chancellor and first woman to take up the post.
          In a statement, Mrs Clinton said it was a “great privilege” to become the chancellor of QUB.”

          Almost as good 😉

    4. Most polls favour the left. But on the last day before the election they change and show a more truthful result so they can claim the called it correct. but we know what they are up to.

  51. 325846+ up ticks,
    Now that the French waved a set of bollocks in the face of the submissive pcism & appeasement lab/lib/con coalition party / followers
    with their magic lantern show could we not continue in the same vein by
    stating via a peoples spoke – person ( no politicians) that the next islamic ideology atrocity will result in mass deportation of islamic ideology
    followers and the dismantling of ALL mosque’s.

    The alternative is to continue ALL trying to get into the centre of the herd
    to prevent being raped / abused or decapitated.

    Really if you disagree with this post that is sad but, they may leave you
    until last, rest assured they will get around to you.

  52. 325846+ up ticks,
    Just when peoples thought they were safe, this johnson chap & party could teach the chinks a thing or two about torture / treachery.

    The political testicle with a tentacle to set in place for future use is back in play.

    Brexit Talks Back on Less than Week After Boris Told UK to Prepare for Clean Break

        1. It’s potentially the first and worst hurdle.

          The Republicans have a Senate majority, so in theory she should be home and hosed.

          BUT, some of the Republicans are unhappy it’s being rushed through and no Democrat is likely to vote for her because she’s a Trump nominee.
          St Peter himself, if nominated by Trump, would be rejected by them.

          3. I think he might have been described, by the Romans who were running the place at the time, simply as a Jew. The area was known as Judaea long before it was called Palestine.

        2. They can contest all they want. It is purely political and the Republicans have a majority in the senate.

          The only way they could overturn the appointment would be to kidnap a few senators to take away that majority. The way the US is going, that could be possible.

  54. Iran and Russia are trying to influence the US election, FBI warns. 22 October 2020.

    Iranian intelligence was behind recent emails threatening Democrats ahead of the American election and Russia has also obtained voters’ information, the US government announced.

    The emails warned “You will vote for Trump on election day or we will come after you”, and included the recipients’ addresses.

    No they really aren’t! The quote above tells you that this is an FBI scam. We can tell this because, aside from there being no evidence, it is ineffably stupid as befits the world’s most moronic Intelligence Agency. The only thing the Iranians would want to do is dance on Trumps grave!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/22/us-intelligence-officials-sayiran-sent-emails-intimidating-american/

    2. Is voting information not freely available? Is there not a Register of Electors? Cannot everybody on the planet not access it?

  55. England test and trace reaching fewer Covid contacts than ever. 22 October 2020.

    The success of England’s test-and-trace system has fallen to a new low, with fewer than 60% of the close contacts of people with Covid-19 being reached and people waiting nearly 48 hours for test results – double the target.

    This thing has been a farce from the beginning! What sort of a disease is it that you have to go and have a test to see whether you have it or not? What would they say if I turned up at the surgery tomorrow and said I would like to know if I have the Great Spotted Leprosy? This is by way of saying, I haven’t been tested. I have no intention of being tested and I don’t want to be tested!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/england-test-and-trace-reaching-fewer-covid-contacts-than-ever

  56. Sitting where I do at work, I can hear the constantly repeated refrain of the recorded female voice of the temperature checker stands in Television Centre reception. “Pleez Plath Clotha”.

      1. Please pass closer. Meaning you’re not standing close enough to the checker stand for it to take your temperature but standing closer doesn’t actually make any difference. It seems to fail more often than it works. Removing hats and lifting hair off foreheads mostly helps but not always.

        2. I was told in horsepiddle that unless the temperature “gun” was about an inch from your forehead, the reading was useless.

          1. Oh, it’s never accurate. Sometimes it reads mine as low as 32 degrees and I know from the proper under-the-tongue thermometer at home that it should be nearer 36.8.

  57. This morning during breakfast we receive four telephone calls. We did not answer any of them. After breakfast I checked the numbers using 1471.
    We have two landline phones. One is on the internet system and fails if there is power cut. The other is on a direct landline and so will not fail as long as the exchange is working. We have the second landline in case of power cuts lasting longer than the batteries on our mobiles. The number of this second landline has never been given to anyone and has not been used for outgoing calls. Two of the incoming calls were on this line.
    I looked up the four numbers in search and on the “Who Called Me” website. None of the numbers produced any results. I am aware that scammers are able to put false numbers at the front of their calls, that is, the real number is hidden. I know this from previous scam calls and I am sure that there is not an Indian call centre located in Shetland.
    Because the big telephone network (BT wholesale?) know what the number is that is calling why are fictitious or known spam numbers not intercepted before completion to the target? The technology must be there, as otherwise 1471 would return no information.
    Can they not be bothered? Or are they happy that the population can be relentlessly harassed and preyed on just as long as the scammers pay their bills and contribute to the profits of the phone service suppliers?

    1. Scammers – so long as they are abroad – can use computer systems to dial number after number going up 1 at a time to cover every number. As they are abroad they escape our laws and systems.

      1. The call come into our systems and are monitored*. They could be stopped.

        That’s what they do at GCHQ apparently.

    3. Two questions.
      1) 1471 will give you the number of the last ONE incoming call, assuming the number hasn’t been withheld. How did you interrogate multiple incoming calls?

      2) If the number of the 2nd landline hasn’t been given to anyone and hasn’t been used for outgoing calls, one assumes it has never been used. Why do you have it?

      1. 1) I checked immediately after the phones stopped ringing, interrupting my croissants and coffee.
        2) To cover for winter power cuts when we are snowed in.

        1. I wouldn’t interrupt any meal to answer the phone or check on a caller, least of all breakfast.

          4. My landline is defunct, so I operate only on my mobille. Very few people have that number.

          8. It’s when it rings before breakfast that I leap to look at it. Family with bad news always ring before they think you will go out for the day…. and they know how erratic mobile signals are on my patch.

            When one of my clients rang me at 06:45 a few years ago I really tore him off a strip for giving me such a fright, when he understood he was, I must give him credit, suitably apologetic. The trouble with dairy farmers is that they really don’t work to the same timetables as everyone else.

          9. Our phone went about 6:00 one Sunday morning. I leapt out of bed and rushed downstairs (we only had one phone) splatting one bare foot into the catsick half way down the stairs, then treading that across the sitting room carpet. Yep, wrong number.

          10. A friend used to have a number ending in 501. The local taxi firm (there’s only one it’s just a big village) had a number ending in 510.

            She just used to unplug the phone before she went to bed on a Friday or Saturday night, but occasionally it would ring in the small hours in the middle of the week.

          11. When I lived in Thetford, my landline number was very similar to the local Social Services office. The abuse that was left on my answering machine was quite remarkable. Yet there were genuine cases of hardship, who were destined to fall through the net, because they couldn’t manage to dial the correct number. It made one count one’s blessings.

          12. One can only hope that they were able to get the number right at the next attempt. Given how tiresome such departments can be and how they can cut one off for the slightest excuse, I can imagine that there was some relief in venting at an answering machine.

            One of my clients is very deaf and always shouts at the telephone (it seems to be an automatic reaction) – I’ve had to ring back for her and explain that she’s not abusing anyone, she really just wants them to speak up a bit. At least I’ve now been able to equip her with a new phone – one which allows the sound to be turned up enough for her to hear at least most of what is said.

          16. My MiL used to ring us at 5 am on a Sunday morning from Bombay. When I once tore her off a strip, all she said was, “But it 11 o’clock here.” I didn’t get on with her at the best of times, happy she was 5,000 miles away.

          17. I’m something of an owl and have a few friends who are similar. We do speak in the late evening because it’s often the most convenient time, but I’m very careful about who I ring after 21:00.

            Most of my clients being farmers I tend to say “not before 07:30 or even better 08:00” but I don’t expect them to ring before 07:00. And if it does ring earlier my heart certainly speeds up a bit.

          1. OK, it’s badly written. Let me rephrase. “During breakfast I quickly ascertained the callers’ numbers on 1471. This was because, as you say, only one number is retained on the 1471 system. After breakfast I entered the numbers into search engines and reverse look-up sites in an attempt to ascertain some information regarding the callers.”

            Next, please!

      2. I have a 4-handset setup of Panasonic cordless phones. Each of them stores the numbers of the last 50 calls that were received. I just use the down-arrow to scroll back through them to see who called and when. Simples!

    4. Was there a pregnant pause before the caller spoke? I believe they have systems that bulk dial random numbers, which may or may not exist. If there’s an answer, that call is placed on hold until an operator is found.

    5. If Indians named Nigel and Henry waste my time, I am prone to waste theirs, if my chores are complete! 😈

      1. Obesity is a form of starvation, didn’t you know? Away with your thin privilege! (or something like that)

      2. The Story of Augustus who would not have any Soup

        Augustus was a chubby lad;
        Fat, ruddy cheeks Augustus had;
        And everybody saw with joy
        The plump and hearty, healthy boy,
        He ate and drank as he was told
        And never let his soup get cold.

        But one day, one cold winter’s day
        He screamed out-‘Take the soup away:
        Oh, take the nasty soup away!
        I won’t have any soup today.’

        Next day begins his tale of woes,
        Quite lank and lean Augustus grows,
        Yet though he feels so weak and ill,
        The naughty fellow cries out still-
        ‘Not any soup for me I say:
        Oh, take the nasty soup away!
        I won’t have any soup today.’

        The third day comes; oh’ what a sin!
        To make himself so pale and thin.
        Yet, when the soup is put on table,
        He screams as loud as he is able,-
        ‘Not any soup for me, I say:
        Oh take the nasty soup away!
        I won’t have any soup to-day.’

        Look at him, now the fourth’s day’s come!
        He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum;
        He’s like a little bit of thread
        And on the fifth day he was dead!

  59. Off topic
    One lives and learns.

    Logic suggested that the nominal diameter of a pipe was the internal dimension.

    It would appear not to be the case in France.

    3. Err… ND relates to external – it’s easier to measure with a ruler or tape. According to ANSI, the ND is not the same as the OD, as it accounts for flow and pressure rating as well – so a 4″ND pipe is 114,3mm OD…
      complicated, eh?
      From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_Pipe_Size
      “Nominal” refers to pipe in non-specific terms and identifies the diameter of the hole with a non-dimensional number (for example – 2-inch nominal steel pipe” consists of many varieties of steel pipe with the only criterion being a 2.375-inch (60.3 mm) outside diameter). Specific pipe is identified by pipe diameter and another non-dimensional number for wall thickness referred to as the Schedule (Sched. or Sch., for example – “2-inch diameter pipe, Schedule 40″)…”

    4. Not from the anatomical view either. The external dimensions of your pipe should be far greater than the internal ones.

  60. Dem stronghold Palm Beach now down to only a 2300 vote D lead.

    Hillary won this in 2016 by more than 100,000.

    1. Florida? Isn’t that where Jeb Bush rigged the vote to put his brother in the White House?
      Dodgy to say the least.

    2. Any source for this? If official, it does seem odd to release results in advance of main vote, but perhaps it is the American way!

      1. In the US, many individuals are registered Rep or Dem. The stats are based on early voting and mail voting. We don’t know for sure which way registered voters actually vote, but it is assumed mainly following their registration. This election there is much anecdotal evidence many Dems are voting Rep.

        2. “We don’t know for sure…
          …but it is assumed…
          …there is much anecdotal evidence…”

          Comment up to your usual standard Polly. All that was missing was Soros, Gates, Blair, Cameron etc etc 🙂

      2. That sounds like obvious ballot stuffing by your opponents, Sir, I’m sure you really won by thousands !

  63. For those interested in military aircraft, an article in today’s Craven Herald (Skipton area newspaper). Barnoldswick (Barlick to the locals) is 9 miles SW of Skipton in North Yorkshire.

    ROLLS-Royce at Barnoldswick is facing an uncertain future, as the aviation industry worldwide struggles to cope with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

    Hundreds of jobs are at risk as the company plans to reduce activities at its Bankfield site from autumn 2023 and combine its Ghyll Brow site on the border of North Yorkshire, into Bankfield .

    But, 75 years ago, in November, 1945, with people still celebrating Victory in Japan (VJ) Day, it was a very different story – there was a sense of great pride in Rolls-Royce, Barnoldswick, after an aeroplane powered by jet engines built in the town set up a new world speed record.

    The Gloster Meteor was powered by twin jet propulsion gas turbines designed, tested and built at Bankfield Shed – a former cotton mill taken over by the company.

    The Gloster Meteor set up a new world speed record of 606.25 mph at Herne Bay, Kent on November 7,1945. The plane was piloted by Group Captain H J Wilson and over the same course an identical Meteor flown by Eric Greenwood averaged 603mph.

    The Craven Herald reported at the time that both airmen easily beat the previous record of 462.22 mph set up by a German ME109 six years previous. During the flight a velocity of 611 mph was reached, but only the average for four runs which both pilots made received official recognition, reported the paper.

    The Herald sent a reporter along and recorded that news that the record had been broken caused jubilation in Barnoldswick, especially at Bankfield Shed, but that work went on as usual.

    The works manager, a Mr I W Buckler said Rolls-Royce had gained quite a number of speed records in the past and they did not look upon this new one as anything special. Production of the Derwent jet units had been part of their normal work, and he did not think there would be any specific celebrations at Bankfield Shed.

    “We have factories in different parts of the country and we don’t discriminate between one and the other,” he told the reporter.

    Mr Buckler however went on to express his admiration of the adaptability shown by the Bankfield work people, many of who had never been in an engineering factory until a few years previous.

    Asked who the guiding genius behind the new Derwent aero engine, the chief engineer, Dr SG Hooker said credit was due to a number of people. But, he added; “You can’t give too much praise to Air Commodore Frank Whittle. “He was the man who sat down with a blank sheet of paper in front of him and designed the first jet engine. The others have developed from that. They are the same in basic principle. Whittle’ s calculations have been proved absolutely right.”

    Meanwhile, at the monthly meeting of Barnoldswick Urban Council, it was resolved that the hearty congratulations of the council be tendered to Rolls- Royce.

    The meeting also heard of complaints about the noise caused by running aero engines on test at the Bankfield Shed. It was revealed that Rolls -Royce had spent nearly £20,000 on silencers in the previous 18 months.

    Representatives of Rolls -Royce told councillors they had done all in their power to abate or minimise the nuisance complained of.

    They were anxious to do all they could to meet the convenience and comfort of the residents of Coates – surrounding the site – but there would be some noise from time to time and they asked for the indulgence of the residents.

    1. I was proud to receive my Ph.D at the same ceremony as Frank Whittle.
      Just saying; now I’ll get me coat.

  67. Had the chimney sweep here today. Lovely man. Good old Norfolk boy. Not one for the broadsheets.

    He agreed 100% with me that the Plague shambles was all bollocks. Then added, “It’s just a way for them to control us, isn’t it?” Interesting comment from someone who would be dismissed as thick and out of touch by such wunderkind as our totally useless MP.

    Very reassuring that I am not alone…..

    1. Whereas our local vets – who sponsor our calendar and usually sell a few for us – told me today, when I phoned to ask if I could drop some in, the receptionist said that they were “totally locked down” and only seeing patients in the carpark, so nobody would see them or anything else in the waiting room shop.

      2. Different here. My cat has a urinary tract problem and I took him to the vet at 8am today. The vet operates a policy of ‘appointments not necessary’ between 8 and 9.30am but, unknown to me, this system was suspended due to the Chinese virus. Nevertheless we were accommodated immediately and graciously, with a diagnosis and medication to take away. All for 54€. Brilliant service.

        1. We recently discovered that the vet in the village is very well known, and that people come from miles away for the service.

          For such a tiny vilage I was surprised.

          If truth be known, I was even surprised that the village had a vet!

    3. Our sweep came a couple of weeks ago – he sponsors our calendar – but asked me to donate the fee to the hedgehog hospital. People have been very kind to us.

  68. DM Story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8867181/New-hope-Brexit-trade-deal-weeks-talks-resume-EU-climbdown.html#newcomment

    New hope for Brexit trade deal ‘within weeks’ as talks resume after EU climbdown on Boris’s demands – but Brussels officials sneer that they are just ‘making it look like he’s won’

    “Post-Brexit trade talks between the UK and the EU will resume in London today after the UK accepted an olive branch from EU’s Michel Barnier.”

    We don’t need an olive branch we need – for starters – to be completely free of the ECJ, ECHR, other EU countries’ fishing vessels fishing in our territorial waters and with no messing about with our national boundaries in N. Ireland – indeed we need to scrap the Boris Johnson/Thraita May surrender WA completely.

    “When I say no I mean No”

    was what my mother, quite rightly, said to me when I was a child and behaving like a petulant little monster. She meant it and I knew she meant it and she knew I knew she meant it and so I started behaving like a reasonable human being and not like a spoilt brat.

    By saying that he would walk away and then walking back again Boris Johnson has not only shown his weakness – he has also shown his inability to understand basic psychology.

    The main thing that needs scrapping completely is the disastrous WA which keeps Britain under the yoke of the EU.

  69. HAPPY HOUR – ‘I don’t give a sod’…..

    83-year-old who said she ‘doesn’t give a sod’ about Tier 3 lockdown is praised for speaking ‘common sense’ after refusing ‘to be fastened in a house’
    dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8867297/Maureen-PM-Barnsley-lady-83-said-doesnt-sod-praised-loving-life.html
    Go girl…

    2. Any relation to Rochdale’s Gillian Duffy, 65 “Not another one!”
      The old-timers still have some life in them.

      1. Gillian Duffy was Gordon Brown’s bigot, who still voted Labour after all the fuss.
        “Not another one!” was an old girl in Bristol, her name escapes me.

        4. “Who still voted Labour”. Unbelievable. “Oh, but our family has always voted Labour, saves us having to think about anything. Now, what time is Corrie on?”

        5. “Who still voted Labour”. Unbelievable. “Oh, but our family has always voted Labour, saves us having to think about anything. Now, what time is Corrie on?”

    3. She is in “protective” custody in the VERY appropriately named “Strangeways”…..

      She’ll not be seen again. Another “covid death”….

  70. Evening, all. Covid regulations are like EU regulations; oppressive and difficult to cope with if you’re a SME.

    1. Noswaith dda, Conwy.

      It’s all part of a Chinese plot to destroy the west. Why else did they release the “killer” virus?

      And, for some reason completely beyond my comprehension, Western (in the broadest sense) governments are going along with it at 100 mph.

      You’d almost think that the shit-filled cabinet of tossers posing as a government are in the pay of yer Chinese.

      Apart from that ………..

    1. “Of the 13 who died, five received products from SK Bioscience, three from Boryung, two each from GC Pharma and Korea Vaccine and one from Sanofi.
      All four domestic firms declined to comment, while Sanofi did not immediately reply to requests for comment.”

      Coming to the UK soon.

    2. South Korea sticks to flu vaccine plan despite safety fears after 13 deaths

      “Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

      13 might suggest there’s a problem. Particularly as Goldfinger employed a Korean odd job man.

      1. “‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

        Hard to believe, but the few remaining Nigel fans are urging him to start his third party. Even ogga wasn’t that dumb.

          1. He talks a good game. So did Nigel back in 2014.

            ETA: If there is to be a credible centre-right party it can only come from the conservatives within the Tory party. They seem to be keeping their heads down.

          3. Nigel and his parties are our less popular/less successful versions of the American’s Ross Perot and his Reform Party. Whatever happened to them?

  73. Nicked from BTL on The Grimes his evening:

    “Dido, Queen of Carnage. Mates in high places have carried her well beyond her capabilities. Corporate failure isn’t usually of interest but Covid is a matter life and death and touches us all. Why is she untouchable?”

    Chap’s obviously a NoTTLer manqué.

    3. Incredible that Boris and his gang keep awarding massive sums to known incompetents. Ferguson was discredited years ago having caused the slaughter of the British herd to no good reason and then predicted that hundreds of thousands would die from KJD.

      Dido Harding is the wife of some non-entity Tory MP, claims to have been a jumps jockey and presided over an enormous data security leak when in charge of Talk Talk. She was friends with Cameron at Oxford and part of his circle. She was trained by McKinsey. The woman is a disaster and costing the taxpayer billions.

  75. As I am going out to ride my bike – I leave you with this thought.

    How soon before they do away with ISAs?

  76. President Obama has hit the campaign trail on behalf of Joe Biden. He is certainly a more forceful speaker and getting plenty of air time on the BBC.
    However, is it not really bad manners for a previous incumbent to stick his oar in? Am I just old-fashioned?

    1. Bad manners and ill advised. Every time Gordon Brown or John Major stick their heads above the parapet they get justifiably ridiculed.

  77. Kanonkop Kadette Cape Blend 2018
    £8 with the pick 6 discount at Tesco,nearly twice the price at several wine merchants……
    A real hostage to fortune,rough round the edges now,needs a bit of time 5/7 years
    Was always a fan of Kanonkop Pinotage back in the day when I could afford it,knowing NoTTlers taste for “Red Medicine” I commend this one to the house

    1. Kanonkop make some heavenly wines. The Kadette, I think, is made with a view to early drinking. The Pinotage (my favourite grape) and the Paul Sauer are big wines that benefit from a long lie down.

      1. Hi Sean. I assume these are all South African wines? For me it’s uncharted waters, wine wise. They are unavailable in France and I don’t recall them having any prominence in England either. But I will note the name ‘Kanonkop’ for future reference!

        1. South African “Port” used to be sublime in the 60’s/70’s. My father was given cases for Christmas by various SA customers. That would probably be illegal now.

          I was introduced to Burmeister’s Port (real Port) in a similar manner. Christmas gifts to my father which he passed on to the children.

          1. Ports from the Swartland, especially Allesverloren (All Is Lost!) are delicious.

          2. I would buy my late father in law Setubal white port 10 years old from Oddbins in Cambridge for Xmas. I had given him more silk ties than he would ever wear in earlier years and realised his passion for dessert wine, including Creme de Menthe.

        2. Yes, Kanonkop is an SA wine. I seldom could afford it when I lived there and it seems to be more plentiful here. I go out of my way to drink SA wines atm as the industry is crippled by the nonsensical Covid restrictions under which the country is labouring these days.

    2. I’m a ‘White Wines Matter’ bloke meself. Morrisons Marqués de Los Rios Rioja Blanco on offer at 6 quid is are going down well, cheers.

      1. I used to drink only white wines for my alcohol intake, but after all the time I’ve spent in France, I’ve been converted to red. Necking a Chilean (owing to the current anti-EU produce policy) Cabernet Sauvignon at the moment. I wasn’t going to have any alcohol today, but that didn’t survive MOH being particularly difficult 🙁

    2. I’ve been reading Dr Mike’s tweets – he’s on the ball. I posted his article here the other day from Lockdown Sceptics.

    1. A friend I met up with a weekend ago said she was concerned for her little boy – phoned for a testing slot. None available. So she decided to go up the road a couple of miles, brisk right turn into an industrial estate, aaaaand…….. there was no-one there, waiting. Empty. Now what does this tell you? It tells me an awful lot of things. Unfortunately friend is a wet academic lefty, we happened to work in the same U of C building.

      Edit: typo due to fat finger, iPad, microscopic print and a glass (or two) of rosé. Oh, and the bacardi and coke to aid recovery after a trip to the dentist late afternoon – recovery to the damage to bank balance.

        1. They were sent away. It raises all sorts of questions. Are these the equivalent of the Nightingale hospitals, their being there simply to impress and manipulate and strike fear into the heart of the public on the very seriousness of it all? And why?

          1. I believe that most if not all of the Nightingale facilities are mothballed. Why? If virus patients are filling regular NHS beds to the exclusion of most others, what the hell is going on?

          2. It is an enormous scam. It involves the transfer of wealth on a gargantuan scale from the taxpayer to the globalist elite. It is obvious and was well rehearsed by Soros, Gates and Co in the last decade or so.

            Their hat stand is, as ever, supposed climate change.

          4. The Nightingale Hospitals remain unused despite continuing to cost millions when established in commercial conference centres and costing yet more to maintain.

            The supposed Testing Centres are closed and protected by monkeys in high vis jackets employed by Serco. The monkeys are there to prevent folk from exposing the scam by threatening the enquiring public (who wonder what the hell is going on).

            I repeat this constructed epidemic (it should never be described as a pandemic) is all about the transference of wealth from the taxpayer to the ultra rich. Their greed and need to insulate their extravagant lifestyles and political control knows no bounds.

            We have witnessed the same in recent history with the Third Reich and its successor the EU.

          5. Half of our leisure centre car park was roped off last Saturday – I had to queue to get into the bottom half to go to play table tennis. The other half was completely empty for the ‘testing centre’.

            Why do people still play along with these ridiculous tests? They tell you nothing. If you have a cough and a sniffle, just stay at home. If you are really ill, go to hospitsl.

          6. Easy enough for you to say from your happy state of retirement. Not so good if you are dealing with the need to keep a child in school, or keep yourself in a job though.

          7. Half the working population seems to be working from home now. the other half are still busy working in supermarkets or trying to keep their cafes and pubs running. One child in a class gets the bug – all the rest are sent home. Test or no test, the result’s the same.

          8. And if that one child has a negative test (because it’s a bug, not the bug) – the whole class goes back to school. Hence the need for testing, because the result isn’t “the same”.

            Care workers have to be tested – they don’t get to go to work otherwise – though most of them are tested at work, not at testing centres, some of the ones who care for people at home do use testing centres.

          9. I refuse to play the government’s game. I cannot understand why people cannot see that they are being played. The less I am in the state’s view, the better. I prefer to remain anonymous. (I feel the same about personalised car number plates as well.)

  83. Ahem
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d0203b89e04df91d375ea9a9e68cde1a8e7577d1de7ad78cc78e6907f5256a6d.jpg
    https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/122194424_1223683058011303_3271302858106690778_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=2&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=A373XEAYPIAAX82K4Ax&_nc_ht=scontent-lht6-1.xx&oh=8ede25b804563f0804d36e96a7612dd3&oe=5FB71280
    Disqus today…………
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e8f4e3bdb1d3e507c296884bb38fccbd739c7e8fa019ae08645312abd45a96f.jpg

  88. Goodnight, everyone. I don’t have to get up early tomorrow – oh joy! Have just finished watching Orlando Furioso, a drab grey production that seemed mostly to take place in the dark! Singing was superb, though.

  89. Sweden’s Chief Epidemiologist is a hero as its citizens lead a more normal life than the UK without enforced lockdowns. There is no hiding of the fact that the elderly took an unfortunate death toll but the Swedish health minister is sticking to the voluntary social restrictions to control COVID-19 on the basis that the world will be living with it for some time to come:

    https://youtu.be/0xLjSMuROgk

  90. Apparently we in Scotland are going to have a “digital Xmas”. (No, I have no idea what the man from nowhere Dr Jason Leitch* means by that.)
    At the end of her usual grim speech about how bad everything is and how we have to make sacrifices etc etc…
    “Christmas this year for no country anywhere is going to be absolutely normal and without any restrictions. I could do what politicians would do in normal times and try to tell you otherwise, and let people down nearer the time, but that’s not the right approach right now.
    “We are not likely to be able to celebrate Christmas with no limits on how many people we have in our homes and on what we do.”
    She said that the “best chance of getting as much normality over the Christmas period as possible is for all of us to abide by these restrictions and all the guidance right now”.</.
    At this point I would remind you, dear reader, that in Scotland we are not allowed to have visits from other people, including our relatives.

    As the law stands at present, it will be illegal for our children to visit us at Christmas. Instead they can stay in their own places, alone.

    Then the First Minister, (or as I call her “childless, insane, megalomaniac expletives and noun deleted) went on to make what must rank as one of the most tasteless, insensitive, off-colour jokes in the history of the world.
    Ms Sturgeon added that “any restrictions would not prevent Santa from delivering presents to children on Christmas Eve, describing him as a “key worker”.”

    * As for Leitch, someone has updated his Wikipedia entry, in the “Honours” section, Probably won’t be there long.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Leitch

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-54643340

      1. Well, he does not comment individual cases. I have a letter from his assistant to that effect.

          1. I reckon the delay is because he is inventing a new Muslim tartan celebrating the immense contribution Muslims have made to the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the Wheel and the development of North Sea Oil exploration and exploitation.

          2. South Carolina’s Citadel Regimental Band can get away with their own tartan
            Singapore Police Band Women’s Pipers are fine. No-one else.

            EDIT: Another typo. Time of the day.

          3. That’s brought back some memories! I saw the first public display of the Singapore Women Pipers at the first National Day celebration of Singapore in 1965. The band was very good – trained by a lady from the old Dagenham Girl Pipers. I must be honest, though, and say that I can’t recall them being part of the Singapore Police.

      1. Delingpole again N. “What France…”

        ETA: Des is downvoting me again over on “Brexit Talks…” Feel free to join in 🙂

          5. Des goes back to the days of the old BT forum. He hasn’t improved since.

            “He’s a thug who used to follow Jenny around.”
            He was the same on the old BT forum. Jenny always got the the better of him 🙂

            Jenny & Phil had their own Disqus channel. Think Phil might have passed away.

          6. i don’t know what happened there – but she didn’t start another when Disqus closed the free channels. she used to let one topic meander along for months…… she was quite prolific on here for a few months then disappeared.

          8. Maybe. She posted some photos of the dolls house and all the little bits of furniture and things she’d made for it. Also pics of her house and garden. Then silence. She’s quite elderly and disabled so perhaps she became more so.

  93. DT Story

    Brexit: Michel Barnier says UK and EU have ‘huge common responsibility’ to avoid no deal.

    A bit rich coming from the man who has done his best to punish Britain and make things as difficult as possible.

    All right then Barnier – finally you must shoulder your responsibility. What we want is:

    i) To bin the WA agreement;
    ii) To have a ‘no strings attached’ free trade deal;
    iii) Complete freedom from all EU jurisdiction.

    And that’s just for starters.

Comments are closed.