Thursday 7 May: The public must be able to trust those responsible for curbs on liberty

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 blacklisted.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/05/06/lettersthe-public-must-able-trust-responsible-curbs-liberty/

809 thoughts on “Thursday 7 May: The public must be able to trust those responsible for curbs on liberty”

    1. 318946+ up ticks,
      Morning Hj,
      Some characters find the roundabout
      most attractive.

    2. Good morning

      Just to repeat this from last night .

      Britain has already provided at least £50 million to help beef up security in France including drones and other detection equipment but this has still failed to stem the rise in migrants.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk…

      1. Money for old rope. Our government was conned yet again…France keeps waving them through and the cash just goes on rolling in.

        ‘Morning, Belle.

        1. BBC news showed a very interesting clip yesterday of hundreds of stranded African and Asian students being supported by charities here in our big cities . The charities were dispensing bags of food because the students were virtually penniless and unable to return to their own countries , many were unable to pay their student accommodation fees and were experiencing hard times.

          3. Why can’t their countries run rescue missions for them, like we did for our citizens?

            We could supply the planes.

        2. 318946+ up ticks,
          Evening Hj,
          UK politico’s getting a % kickback, there is no attempt being made to stop the flow.

  3. Journalists, politicians and judges to sit on Facebook’s free speech panel. Wed 6 May 2020 18.00 BST

    Our roster includes three former judges, six former or current journalists, and other leaders with backgrounds from civil society, academia and public service,” said Thomas Hughes, the director of the oversight board. “They represent a diverse collection of backgrounds and beliefs, but all have a deep commitment to advancing human rights and freedom of expression.”

    First proposed by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018, the oversight board is Facebook’s attempt to extricate itself from the uncomfortable position of ruling on free speech issues around the world. The board will arbitrate difficult decisions about content moderation, based both on appeals from users, and self-referrals from Facebook itself.

    Morning everyone. The very existence of Censorship however it is staffed, disguised or implemented implies that there is something to be censored; that there are views that cannot be allowed or uttered. So before a single word is scrutinised or opinion examined the parameters have been set. It’s like the jury sitting down to consider a case on its merits, “We know he’s guilty but we’ll listen and then hang him later.” It cannot be otherwise. We can see it here. These are the same people who run the present system. Does anyone seriously believe that they are going to be sympathetic to anything that contradicts that? It is like appointing Cochrane to Moderate Nottl. There would be a short period of brutish Cultural Marxist censorship; mysterious and arbitrary deletions, Polly and Belle blacklisted, “Conspiracy Theorists” outlawed and then everyone who does not subscribe to this evil doctrine would give up and go away and do something else. So it will be here. It is a way of stifling independent voices, of preventing anything being posted online that is contrary to the wishes of the Elites.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/06/facebook-oversight-board-freedom-expression-helle-thorning-schmidt-alan-rusbridger

    1. 318946+ up ticks,
      Morning As,
      Your post details are so bloody true
      that in today’s political climate it will get the go-ahead.

    3. The methodology is tried and trusted. TV “reality” game shows. The contestants are chosen with care in order that the preferred choice is likely to be the winner.

    1. Excellent! The Bonking Boffin deserves nothing less.

      ‘Morning, Citroen and Geoff.

      1. Particularly as the headline said “Mother-in-law speaks up for him” (or suffin).

        3. I thought it was the husband who shared the Prof’s love of Staatistics.

          1. Minty claimed that Branestorm is gay. Not sure how he knows – but he’s usually right…{:¬))

          5. It’s one of the symbols on the key next to 1/! – top left on my kyebroad.

      4. Although Caroline and I have been married for over 30 years some people on meeting us think we are father and daughter. I maintain stoutly that this is not because I look so old but because Caroline looks so young!

    4. Ah, the face that inspired his roadmap for lockdown, including all the B roads.

      1. ‘Morning, Mola, more like the face (his) that launched a thousand shits.

    1. Gondolier versus Gonners ‘ere…..

      Morning Michael

      (PS The Covid Death stats are rubbish)

    2. But they made it sound much worse in Italy for some reason, we haven’t had all those horrific videos of carnage over here, only dancing health workers and police.

  8. Why the Nigel Farage Dover story matters. Spiked 7 May 2020.

    But let us assume for a moment that Farage did, in fact, go against the guidance. We would still be faced with the deeply uncomfortable prospect of a man being visited by police after criticising the action – or inaction – of the government, all because one of his fellow citizens snitched. This is the sort of story we are more used to hearing from dictatorial states. It should worry any lover of liberty. Here we are confronted with the censorious and authoritarian potential of the lockdown policy.

    Don’t all get your hopes up. This is not about stopping illegal immigration into the UK but stopping Nigel Farage talking about it. After a visit to Dover he was visited by the Stasi who reminded him that travel was restricted. This they assured him was on the basis of a complaint from a member of the public.

    Now of course we cannot know if this is true but suspicion haunts any utterance from authority about illegal immigration across the channel which is almost certainly approved by the government. My guess is that this is a “Tommy Robinson” operation. Hinder and harass anyone initiating unwanted comments or inquiries.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/07/why-the-nigel-farage-dover-story-matters/

    1. The same thing happened to some internet radio reporter a few weeks ago, he got a little visit, he intended to travel to report on a mosque where worshipper were ignoring social distancing.
      He had it all on video

    2. 318946+ up ticks,
      As,
      The Tommy Robinson episode coupled
      with the JAY report was enough to
      overwhelm the voting pattern that
      set the corner stone for these issues
      to germinate & thrive, was it changed in any shape or form, was it -uck.

      Party before family, country.
      Currently Submissive, PCism & Appeasement are the order of the day.
      There are those politico’s who adhere
      to the S,PC,A unwritten rulings and will NOT contest the islamic ideology followers.
      Beware of wanna be knights in tarnished armour.

    3. We are living in a dictatorial State. But where are all the lefties writing about people being held under house arrest without charge? They filled the MSM with their whining about some Persian woman working against the Iranian Government. They made a saint out of some female in Burma.
      But poor old Joe Soap, Tommy Atkins and Mrs John Bull – they are banged up in their millions without a word of dissent from the chatterati.

    1. Indeed, Bob3. One of my jobs for today is to do some washing. First lot about to be hung up on the washing line to dry. Two more lots to do today.

      (“To do today” – that has a nice ring to it.)

  11. I think this is very good stuff from ‘Max Bonamy’ BTL@DTletters. During the course of today/tomorrow I expect that we will be hearing more of the shoddy programming in Ferguson’s black box model and, more importantly, some of the hugely biased mathematical algorithms he developed and adopted. It wasn’t an instance merely of ‘garbage-in/garbage-out’; even if perfect data had been input, the output predictions would still have been dangerous skewed garbage. The man was/is a menace at the heart of successive Gov’ts but had attained the dangerous status of ‘protected species’ by fair means or foul. Even now Imperial and others are scurrying around trying to cover his and their tracks. He, and they, need to be blown to smithereens.

    “Max Bonamy
    7 May 2020 5:37AM

    An entire strategy based on the GIGO calculations of a Rasputin scientist with lefty, pro-EU sympathies.
    What possibly could go wrong for a Conservative Govt?

    Toby Young
    “Some people have asked what the relevance of Ms Staat’s politics is. The answer, obviously, is that her politics are likely to be Ferguson’s politics – and we know that he co-authored a paper in 2016 warning of the terrible consequences of leaving the EU and we can see from his Twitter feed that he’s not exactly a Tory.”

    He continues:

    “The mistakes these liberal policy-makers have made are depressingly familiar to anyone who’s studied the breed:

    – overestimating the ability of the state to solve complicated problems as well as the capacity of state-run agencies to deliver on those solutions;

    – failing to anticipate the unintended consequences of large-scale state interventions;

    – thinking about public policy in terms of moral absolutes rather than trade-offs;

    – chronic fiscal incontinence, with zero inhibitions about adding to the national debt;

    – not trusting in the common sense of ordinary people and believing the only way to get them to avoid risky behaviour is to put strict rules in place and threaten them with fines or imprisonment if they disobey them (and ignoring those rules themselves, obviously);

    – arrogantly assuming that anyone who challenges their policy preferences is either ignorant or evil;

    – never venturing outside their metropolitan echo chambers;

    – citizens of anywhere rather than somewhere… you know the rest. We’ve seen it a hundred times before.”

    https://thecritic.co.uk/the-fatal-hubris-of-professor-lockdown/

      1. I agree, JN. You can go to the minus sign on the right and collapse it.

  13. DouglasCarswell.

    Gosh. Sounds like we’re going to be allowed to do stuff, such as sit in parks and have picnics, which we’ve known for weeks carry no risk of spreading the virus, and which should never have been prohibited in the first place. Yah. Sit obediently until Sunday

    2. ‘Morning, Johnny, as I posted yesterday, the Government writ on lockdown expires today. No further pontification until Sunday.

      Three days in which to go wild, celebrate VE Day, unlock churches, have street parties, hold Thanksgiving and Memorial services and ring bells and, best of all, welcome the intrepid party-goers from across the channel in their flimsy rubber boats.

      I’m sure the population at large will welcome this and all Plod can do is look on in impotent fury.

      Hurrah, hurrah, hur…

      Oh shit!

  15. SIR – Has Professor Ferguson lost faith in “the science” and embraced herd immunity?

    Anne Collingswood
    Stockbridge, Hampshire

    No, Anne Collingwood; his position as a media tart – and now a former media tart – has gone to his head.

    1. BTL Comment:-

      Robert Spowart
      7 May 2020 8:07AM
      “Has Professor Ferguson lost faith in “the science” and embraced herd immunity?” asks Anne Collingswood.
      Nah! He just fancied a cormorant*.

      *Other seabirds are available.

      Edit ()

    2. Unlike the vast majority – the little people – he had access to a test which informed him that he had the Covid. He then presumed immunity and safe from being contagious, whilst at the same time repeatedly telling the country that they should not presume that this rendered them safe for contact with others.

      1. He ought to be a politician, really. Obfuscate; lie; cheat; order people about and do the very thing banned himself.

  16. Good morning all.

    Bright & sunny – it promises to be warm today.

  17. A good egg who was extremely rude about the World Bank et alia

    Deepak Lal, economist who became a fervent admirer of the Raj – obituary

    Throughout history, he argued, empires had brought prosperity, and he derided organisations which disagreed, such as the United Nations

    By Telegraph Obituaries 6 May 2020 • 5:11pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2020/05/06/TELEMMGLPICT000230729586_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqlTBVrZ2JsNGN6HUU-SW4MRrXw9kuI__v3FpM-jsEvp8.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Deepak Lal in 2012

    Deepak Lal, who has died aged 80, was an eminent development economist whose uncompromising belief in classical liberal economics was shaped by his experience advising developing countries and working for the Indian government at a time when it was committed to socialist central planning.

    A maternal uncle, Sham Nath, had been imprisoned by the British during the Quit India demonstrations of the 1930s and later became a cabinet minister under Jawaharlal Nehru. Lal himself began his career believing in the socialist and nationalist ideologies of post-independence India.

    By the early 1980s, however, he had aligned himself with the anti-dirigiste thinking of Hayek and Bauer, while his experiences led him to become a fervent admirer of the Raj.

    This was the theme of one of his most controversial books, In Praise of Empires (2005), in which Lal argued that the liberal international economic order imposed by the British in the 19th century had delivered astonishing growth rates in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe.

    Drawing together an impressive array of statistics and sources, he concluded: “Despite nationalist and Marxist cant the British Empire was hugely beneficial for the world, particularly its poorest.”

    Indeed, with one or two exceptions, the order provided by empires throughout history had been “essential for the working of the benign processes of globalisation, which promote prosperity.”

    He poured scorn on those who, he claimed, denied these truths, including the United Nations (a “broken reed” that “merely provides a forum for the weak to unite to tie the US Gulliver down”), the World Bank, and NGOs such as Greenpeace whom he accused of “global salvationism” – projecting Western obsessions on to the developing world.

    Lal went on to call for a “new imperialism” which, he hoped, could be led by the US if only it could shrug off the notion that empires are bad, resist protectionist pressures and refrain from scaring other countries with moralising lectures about freedom and democracy. “The jihad to convert the world to American habits of the heart will be resisted as much as Osama bin Laden’s jihad to convert the world to Islam,” he wrote.

    Deepak Kumar Lal was born in Lahore on January 3 1940 into a “zamindar” (landowner) family whose fortune had been made by his great-grandfather Shankar Lal, an early practitioner of the “new” English law. At Partition, when Lahore fell on the Pakistan side of the border, the family became refugees, and one of Lal’s earliest memories was moving from the house of one relative to another.

    His father, Nand, had trained as a lawyer in England and had tried without success to become a diplomat. The family were often short of money, yet they managed to scrape enough together to send Deepak to the Doon School, Dehra Dun, a boarding school supposedly modelled on Winchester, where he won all the academic prizes.

    He went on to St Stephen’s College, Delhi, where he switched from Mathematics to History. He then won a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, where he read PPE and went on to take a BPhil in Economics.

    Returning to India, Lal trained for the Indian Foreign Service, but during a posting to Japan he decided he was not cut out for diplomacy. He wanted to be an economist, preferably working for the Indian government, but instead took up an offer to return to Oxford.

    There, he lectured at Jesus and Christ Church and spent two years as a resident fellow at Nuffield College before being appointed in 1970 as a lecturer in Economics at University College, London.

    In 1971 he married Barbara Ballis, an American who would herself become a reputed sociologist, and in 1973 he returned with her to India to work for the Indian Planning Commission. He would recall that one of his jobs there was to estimate the direct and indirect demand for oil at different growth rates of GDP.

    At the time, one of the most important uses of oil was in producing fertiliser. But the data being used to run the economy was based on figures from the time when India had no oil-based fertiliser plants.

    A dawning realisation of the defects of what he called, in The Poverty of Development Economics (2000), “the dirigiste dogma”, as well as the impossibility of living on an Indian civil servant’s salary at a time of rocketing inflation and the imposition of a state of emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975, convinced him his future no longer lay in India.

    He returned to UCL, where he was appointed reader in Political Economy in 1979, and Professor of Political Economy at the University of London in 1984. From 1991, as James S Coleman Professor of International Development Studies, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    As well as advising individual governments, Lal worked as a consultant for international bodies including the International Labour Organisation, Unctad and the OECD. In the 1980s he spent four years as research administrator at the World Bank.

    From the mid-1990s he become involved in free-market think tanks, including the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Cato Institute. From 2000 to 2009 he was a member of the UK Shadow Chancellor’s Council of Economic Advisers.

    The author or editor of more than 30 books, Lal delighted in challenging received opinion of the liberal-left variety. In Reviving the Invisible Hand: the Case for Classical Liberalism in the 21st Century (2006), a fiery refresher course on the virtues of the free market, he condemned fashionable ideas of a “third way” between the free market and socialism as the “new dirigisme”.

    He also produced figures to show that multinationals by and large pay higher wages and offer better conditions to employees in developing countries than they would otherwise enjoy, decried attempts to reduce child labour – pointing out that the only sure way of reducing it is through wealth brought by capitalism – and laid into the green movement as being “engaged in a worldwide crusade to impose its ‘habits of the heart’ on the world.”

    He condemned the World Bank for promoting dodgy statistics on poverty compiled by people whose livelihoods depend on proving it to be a serious and continuing problem, and for infrastructure funding programmes which allow governments to waste their own money on armaments and corruption.

    He even had a go at Western democracy, which, he noted, was being touted as a panacea for the world’s ills at precisely the time when populism and spin, rather than rational argument, was exerting an ever tighter grip on the democratic process in the West itself.

    As for the poorer citizens of rich countries who, he admitted, were being badly affected by Third World competition, Lal’s advice was bracing: “Get an education.”

    His last book, War or Peace, in which he warned of both the threat and vulnerability of a China run by its Communist Party, was published in 2018.

    Deepak Lal is survived by his wife Barbara and by their daughter and son.

    Deepak Lal, born January 3 1940, died April 30 2020

  18. Gatwick……

    SIR – With BA and Virgin pulling out of Gatwick (Business, May 5),. perhaps it is time for some lateral thinking. A lot of capacity at Heathrow is taken up by commercial freight. This could be transferred to Gatwick, which is closer to the motorway network and thus more suitable for the distribution of freight throughout the country.

    The cost of relocating the logistic centre to Gatwick would be covered by the sale of the land near Heathrow for housing. The landing slots cleared of freight traffic at Heathrow would provide additional passenger capacity, thereby hopefully avoiding the need for expansion there. Gatwick has the capacity for expansion if required, without the excessive environmental impact on the London area.

    Ian Maxwell

    Sidford, Devon

    1. I’ve always been under the impression that Heathrow was just as close to the motorway network and more convenient for freight heading northwards.

      1. ‘Morning, Cynarch, Heathrow is very close to the motorway network – M4 immediately North and M25 immediately to the West – makes for a good snarly traffic jam at most times of the day and night.

        1. And anyone coming from Gatwick just meets the snarly traffic jams an hour or so later.

    2. Call me an old cynic…but I have wondered whether BA and Virgin are just making empty threats with the aim of getting their hands on taxpayers’ cash…pay up or we will take our ball away.

        1. Virgin can’t sell their landing slots because they’re pledged as security for a bond issue….and with both BA and Virgin withdrawing from Gatwick, what are landing slots going to be worth on Monday, Tuesday etc….?

          1. That will be very dependent on what post viral Britain looks like.
            Gatwick used as a hub for Europe, might appeal over some of the regional airports currently available.

    3. Gatwick is only close to the motorway network if your vision does not extend north of London.

      The only time I have flown out of Gatwick was a flight to Marrakech in 2012. After a long drive down I turned onto the M25 with a feeling of ‘almost there’.

      Then I passed beneath a sign that said ‘Gatwick 57 Miles’ and my spirits sank.

  19. Morning again

    Contact-tracing apps

    SIR – The NHS contact-tracing app being trialled on the Isle of Wight is said by some to fail the standards set by the NHS itself (report, May 5) ). It is also incompatible with the Apple and /Google app that is being adopted in parts of mainland Europe and the Republic of Ireland.

    What is the point of rolling out an app that does not allow our citizens to cross international borders – especially that between Northern Ireland and the Republic?

    I, for one, place more trust in the output of Apple and Google than most in most of our Government’s software – a Universal Credit application form being but one example of the latter camp. We have some very clever people working for the Government, but they do not have the resources to compete with the key players – as witnessed by the fact that much of our data is stored on file servers owned by companies such as Amazon and others.

    I urge the Government to adopt an internationally accepted product.

    Dr Jeff Slater

    Kelso, Roxburghshire

    SIR – We readily give tech companies access to our contact lists when using social media. Why, therefore, should we be more concerned – as some privacy campaigners wish us to be – about an app that could actually save lives (“Covid is ushering in a surveillance state that may never be dismantled”, Comment, May 5)?

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy envisaged a marvellous scenario in which the ruling body elects to send non-essential workers off to the nearest planet. In the Guide, that group included hairdressers, but surely today we could more usefully substitute interfering lawyers.

    Stephen Rowden

    Guildford, Surrey

    SIR – The Covid-19 tracing app being trialled in Britain requires the user to leave Bluetooth switched on.

    However, the security advice has always been to switch it off in public places, and especially in airports.

    John Owen

    Gloucester

    SIR – How can a contact-tracing app know whether or not there was a wall, l or screen or personal protective equipment separating an infectious person from anyone nearby?

    William Jupe

    Worcester

    3. I don’t have a full contact list on my social media. Most of my friends aren’t on F/B and I don’t do Twitter.

  20. We have our bunting ready and a big flag too.

    SIR – My father fought with the Royal Norfolk Regiment in Singapore when the Allied Forces surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942.

    He was wounded and had returned to Britain by VE Day. His recollection was that there was little enthusiasm for celebration on May 8 1945 because the remainder of his remaining comrades were either dead or being tortured in Far East prisoner-of-war camps.

    John Catchpole

    Beverley, East Yorkshire

    SIR – As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of VE Day, let us try to remember that the real lessons of the Second World War are not summed up in terms of “Dunkirk spirit” or “We stand alone”. Admirable and brave as these sentiments were, they were the themes of 1940, when the question was how to stay in a war.

    What we need are the themes of 1945: “working with allies”, “international cooperation”, “having a vision for the future”. These are how one wins a war.

    There is a national tendency to over-focus on 1940. It is time that the outlook of 1945 replaced that fixation.

    Martyn Whittock

    Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire

    1. Thanks, Mr Whittock. Bring back the socialism of 1945. Just what the bloody country needs right now.

          1. ..and a general sort of ‘Peace & Love’ activist. His daughter is quite nice…

          2. Always sees the other chap’s point of view, but doesn’t agree with it!

    2. “working with allies”, “international cooperation”, “having a vision for the future”. Oh dear – I sense a rabid Remainer?

    4. Without the spirit of defiance shown in 1940, there would have been no VE-Day in 1945.

    5. The “outlook of 1945” brought us a Labour landslide and a host of nationalisation measures and centralisation which mimicked those taking place under the Soviet half of Europe. Rationing was intensified. You even needed a permit to operate a one-vehicle road-haulage/removals business.

      1. Labour even managed to put bread on ration – even Herr H didn’t manage that!

  21. I wonder if the MSM will wake up to the damage that has been done to Imperial College’s reputation as a World class institution. The Prof’s antics coupled (I use that word advisedly) with the scorn poured on the computer programme used to predict hundreds of thousands of deaths, plus the reports of earlier predictions to materialise are being reported Worldwide. It must be causing grave concern for the College’s executive body.

      1. As I typed the comment I was thinking of the actions of those at UEA fitting data to make the ‘science settled’…..

        1. Using science to fit a political narrative was always going to end badly, I don’t know how they ever thought that they would get away with it.

          1. Once you go further than times tables, you’ve baffled 99% of the population. Hence the mantra of “Believe the Science!”

          3. Well they do – my granddaughter has learnt them, but not by rote, which I suspect is a lot quicker, but doesn’t necessarily ensure an understanding of the computation.

    2. Somehow, I imagine the college’s executive body – and its staff – are all Ferguson clones. And that’s just the women.

    3. Judging by the way that have done san fairy ann about the past “anomalies” – they appear not to give a toss.

    4. Yo Sr

      Ferguson was only living upto the ethos of Imprerial College who brought in a ‘Ringer’ for the 2019-2020 University Challenge contest

      Quiz veteran Brandon Blackwell, a New Yorker who has won more than £375,000 in quiz prize money since he started competing aged 14.

      1. I suppose it’s the same as when Oxford and Cambridge started bringing in pro rowers to aim to win the boat race…

      2. I suppose it’s the same as when Oxford and Cambridge started bringing in pro rowers to aim to win the boat race…

  22. Book burning…….

    SIR – Oxford students have voted to have supposedly “hateful material” removed from their reading lists (report, May 4), and now Michael Gove is being castigated because of the presence of a couple of volumes spotted in his library (“Gove criticised for displaying book by Holocaust denier”, report, May 5).

    Over the past 40 years I have amassed a large collection of old medical books. This is because I am fascinated by changing attitudes and fashions in the practices of doctors and unqualified practitioners (quacks) throughout history. Through my reading, I have been exposed to eugenics, racism, homophobia and anti-vaccination propaganda. Some of my books are extremely patronising towards women; others extol dangerous and even barbaric therapies.

    Nothing is to be gained by blocking out the mistakes of the past and indeed the present. Instead, we must learn from them.

    Dr David Shoesmith

    York

    SIR – Surely a well-balanced library is to be admired, not condemned. I have accounts written by both British and Argentine authors from 1982, and am far better informed as a result.

    Lt-Col Ewen Southby-Tailyour

    Ermington, Devon

    SIR – Were I to post pictures of my bookshelves online, viewers might spot: The Scourge of the Swastika (obviously a fascist), How to Save Property Tax (tax evader), The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower (Francophobe), Food for Free (miser) or Wildlife of Britain (anarchist).

    David Fouracre

    Napton, Warwickshire

    SIR – I have a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It is the most turgid read possible, and anybody could be forgiven for failing to wade through it. However, it contains his vision in detail. If more people had taken it seriously in the Thirties, history might have been very different.

    Michael Clark

    Barrington, Cambridgeshire

    SIR – As Mr Gove is a loyal alumnus of Lady Margaret Hall, I hope that the biography of Napoleon on his bookshelf might be my own.

    Professor Michael Broers

    Fellow and& Tutor in History, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

    1. I’ve got a copy of Food for Free and also Plants for Free (about propagation). Clearly I am a cheapskate.

  23. Think I’ll go for the frantic whirling before it becomes impossible.

    SIR – We seem to have developed an economy and society that are like playing a game of musical chairs, with the music getting ever faster and more frantic. The music has now stopped and we all find ourselves where we are, some without a chair to sit on – although it is gratifying to see that rough sleepers have been found homes.

    Before we restart the music, we might take this opportunity to consider whether society should return to its frantic whirling as before.

    Rev James Mackain-Bremner

    Gillingham, Dorset

    3. BBC Radio 4 this morning – 700 immigrants were released from detention centres since March some were housed, [where?] some returned to the homes they previously stayed in , some were just released to their own devices and about 50 were
      deported. Meanwhile residents of care homes are locked down in their care homes with little protection from the COVID-19 virus and have died in large numbers.

  25. Hi Y’all, here’s a snippet from a btl for todays letters

    “Most people would rather cummunicate than travel” – I rather think Ferguson and his paramour did both.

    2. The most ironic bit of all will be when commercial flights recommence, he will go
      to Sweden or Bolivia or wherever she is and get bonked up with Greta the Bleata

      The after action chat will not be about how f***ing it was, but what the pair of them
      have cost the economies, way of life and future of UK and the rest of what was the
      (First) civilising world

  28. I am sure that the experts in NoTTLand will shoot me down – but I simply do not believe the “death” figures so proudly splashed across the headlines by the anti-government, anti-Brexit, fear-mongering, panic-stirring leftoid meeja.

    Time for my porridge.

    1. How many glasses of wine did she drink?

      Morning Anne ..

      The turbine blade story is terrible , so much for green energy!

      1. Good morning, MaggieBelle,

        The Green energy wagon has a bent axle and all the wheels are about to fall off.

        We have been completely conned. Have you read Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster .

      2. And that’s excluding all the dodgy metals that go into making these monstrosities.
        Morning, Belle.

        1. One wonders what archaeologists in 2,000 years time will make of the “discovery”.

          1. Funnily enough, I sometimes wonder that when I put out the rubbish – particularly the food caddy.
            Middens are an archeologists’ treasure trove.

          3. Ritual – definitely, a ‘special’ deposit possibly involving deliberate destruction marking the ending of some special event. Also possibly sacrifice of significant objects to gods of the underworld to ensure future prosperity of agriculture.

            Of course it could depend on whether any written records have survived the 2000 yrs as well, though ‘ritual’ my still be the conclusion.

            (NB ritual = we haven’t the faintest idea on this one.)

    2. The wind turbines filling landfill was posted on here (I think) quite some time ago. The MSM is very slow in catching up with real news on the www.

  30. Coronavirus: Boris Johnson set to scrap ‘stay home’ advice and ‘ease lockdown limits on work, parks and exercise’. Indy 7 may 2020.

    Boris Johnson is set to scrap the government’s “stay home” slogan and relax advice on work, exercise, and socialising as he announces the first easing of the UK’s lockdown this weekend, according to reports.

    Picnics, sunbathing in parks and unlimited exercise are expected to be put back on the table as the prime minister begins to loosen restrictions he enforced in March to slow the spread of coronavirus.

    I believe this, not because I have any faith in the Government but because he has no choice. The Lockdown is disintegrating of its own accord.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-lockdown-end-uk-boris-johnson-sunday-address-parks-work-exercise-a9502911.html

    3. While they still have the chance will the Police now be having an unrestrained orgy of persecuting as many people needlessly as they can until lock down is lifted? I fear that their zeal will know no bounds.

      1. You could be right. Isn’t Ramdamadingdong due to finish in the next few days?

  31. Because I’m too lazy to retype this posting, here’s wot I writ BTL the Tellygraff letters: in case you hadn’t guessed, I am seriously unimpressed.

    “Are such arcane practices as security vetting now carried out, or are the government and civil service afraid of being sued for causing hurt feelings?

    Ferguson’s ‘inaccuracies’ were well known; he had a twenty year history of getting it wrong. But surely, his views and those of his romantic interests would have been easily discovered by the most half-hearted of checks.

    Who on earth thought he was suitable as an advisor to the British government? Were Cabinet members warned and brushed the knowledge aside?”

    1. A conspiracy theorist. obviously not me, might claim he achieved what the government wanted.

      “Global Government”.

      How do we know this wasn’t the plan all along ?

      1. I would rather put the blame on hubris, ignorance and incompetence by all concerned. The effect could be the same though.

        1. Oh, I would.. but it’s really weird how Johnston has handed control of Britain’s anti C-19 R and D to the World Health Organization, which in practice probably means Gates and Tedros, including what happens next and which nations get new drugs first.

          Thanks to Johnson, it will not be British drugs for British people, but British drugs for whoever Gates and Tedros decide deserves them.

    2. Yo anne

      The plot goes deeper

      Ferguson was the Symptom, the Fault lies with the person/group/committee who selected him for the job

      Changing Ferguson for a Ford or John Deere will not do any good. unless the directions he has been told to follow have been changed

      1. Morning OLT

        If Ferguson was a genuine number cruncher, why didn’t he TELL the government to close our borders and stop all traffic in and out for a month or more . All damage limitation should have been addressed.

    3. 318946+ up ticks,
      Morning Anne,
      If they did NOT give it the brushing aside treatment they would NOT be cabinet ministers in the first place.

    4. Oh it was you, was it? I would never have guessed.

      Here’s the Reply that someone posted

      “Michael Hudson
      7 May 2020 7:43AM
      @A Allan

      The Imperial/Ferguson team were long established as ‘part of the furniture’ and inherited by successive governments. So few of our MPs/ministers of any party have a worthwhile background in STEM subjects or the ability/incentive to call reliance on the Imperial team into question. Being at the heart of HMG no matter which party was in power enabled the team to attract funding from multiple sources including W.H.O.”

      2. Why does anyone bother to vote any more?
        Whoever we vote for, the government still gets in.

    1. Morning Ogga – more appropriate to raise the middle finger – that’s what MPs do every day to us

      1. 318946+ up ticks,
        Morning Fa,
        I am in complete agreement but by the same token ALL of their current followers richly deserve the middle digit.

    2. This reminds me of a satirical sketch produced by Peter Cook as a Christmas floppy disc (in the days when they had grooves and played on gramophones) for the subscribers of ‘Private Eye’.

      It was a commentary of the first heart transplant by the South African surgeon Christian Barnard. At that time, South Africa had a “Promised Land” policy that gave preferential treatment to settlers over those who had been there for centuries. Their “Two Nations” policy had one set of laws for the good people, and another for the prospective terrorists, who were coralled into their hellholes of their own making, and punished if they got to uppity.

      It started with a spirited rendition of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s hymn ‘Onward Christian Barnard’, followed by an interview with Raymond Baxter, where Cook’s Barnard explained that he was removing the heart from this bleick man because he suffered incurable brain damage. “But he looks perfectly all right to me” exclaimed Baxter. “All bleick men, Raymond, suffer from incurable brain damage; they were born with it. Hold still, Sambo, this might hurt a tiny little bit”.

      Any feminist can tell you that all foetuses suffer from incurable brain damage; they were born with it.

    1. The inference was made a few days ago and nothing to do with the fact that other cultures don’t seem to respect social distancing. The BBC showed ‘hard up’ aisan students with plastic shopping bags filled with goods from food banks. All standing together on a pavement in London. Perhaps the student loans some never they never pay back, are running dry.
      Or conversely perhaps nothing to do with the fact that most people who arrive on our shores unannounced are of African Asian or middle eastern appearance. they are not tested it seems and only the government know where they are placed during assessment. thousands of them must be hidden away somewhere.
      And now we are being told that Africa is suffering from socioeconomic hardships and poaching is on the increase, this is seen as a lack of tourism. I guess predominately of the white European variety but nothing to do with Chinese and other far east cultures that stupidly believe that rhino horn has magic qualities. And I guess elephants tusks are still popular in parts of the world.
      But as usual labour in the form of Lamley will have the answers to all of these problems, but give him around six months and he’ll be banging on about for weeks. I told you I knew best.

      1. I saw the item on the news last night about the increase in poaching due to lack of tourism. The report from Lewa, in Kenya, one of the most expensive and wealthy private conservancies, which still had their rangers patrolling, did not ring very true to me. Bushmeat poaching is always a problem, and it’s in their interests to keep up the patrols to combat it. There are charities like Tusk (which we do support) which invest huge amounts in paying rangers.

        The other point is that in Kenya, at any rate, April and May are low season, many camps and lodges are closed due to the rains, and it is quite normal for the staff to go home to their families. Of course, the drop in tourism, if it goes on for much longer, would certainly lead to problems, as it’s wildlife tourism which keeps [people in work and the animals tracked and monitored each day.

          1. I’ve “adopted” three acres of conservancy in Kenya for a year – the money goes into a fund for the families who lose their income when there’s no tourism. If they lose their income they’re more likely to resort to poaching for the pot.

    2. The Chinese are very racist. The RNA thread was merely absorbing its childhood influences.

    3. Odd that there are fewer cases in African countries than most other parts of the world.

    4. Immunity from viruses is conferred to us all by the sun through uptake of vitamin D.
      According to PHE the BAME community are vitamin D deficient all year round unless they stay at home.

      2. According to PHE the BAME community are vitamin D deficient all year round unless they stay at home.

        I would have thought that they would be even more Vit D deficient if they stayed at home.

          1. It don’t make it clear, man.

            I covered that point in a post 2 days ago.

    6. I suggest, that we move them to a country where they are surrounded by kith, kin and same ethnicity.

      As we whities are causing them to get Covid, if none of us are about, they will soon recover and live with their fellow BAMEs.

      If Lammy is right they will survive, if he is wrong, it is a normal Lammy Lammy from the racist cuckoo

      https://youtu.be/wlR0KElxxVg

      1. Tell them all to stop eating fried chicken , burgers and hot sauce !

        That is an alrming statistic really, it hasn’t hit Africa very hard , so what on earth is going on?

        1. The frontline medical people are probably getting big doses of the virus, in spite of their protective gear, but why are other, ordinary people more vulnerable? Something to do with their diet, other medical conditions?

        2. Lack of obesity in Africa and much poorer hygiene giving immunity to all sorts of diseases possibly.

        3. They are still dying in Africa to all the dangerous things that they regard as part of normal life, such as malaria and cholera and a few thousand extra deaths from a bad chest doesn’t register.

        1. Nearly as bad as that crassly idiotic globalist anthem of the 1970s, “Melting Pot”.

          1. I almost included that very song title in my comment.

            The irony is that last year Melting Pot was being condemned by the morons for being racist, because it uses a word for Chinese that was in common currency in 1970 and didn’t raise an eyebrow at the time.

          2. I always thought it was about the play within the play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where a part of the wall has a great significance.

  35. Just a thought…..before I have to volunteer to cut the grass again, does anyone else think that by keeping older more mature politically savvy and more life experienced people out of harms way for the foreseeable future might be a way of forcing them vote by post. And therefore their votes not being counted due to so called ‘administration errors’ ?

      1. Surely you must have heard that most of the Jewish households in north London didn’t get the relevant paperwork in time for the mayoral election, ….due to an admin error !

        2. 318946+ up ticks,
          Re,
          They should sack him
          straight off.
          Is that a Jewish name
          Admin Error ?

    2. 318946+ up ticks,
      Morning Re,
      Goes without posting, sorry,in a post without saying about posting & voting if you can understand my post be good enough to enlighten me please.

  37. Grrrrrrrrr…..
    I am getting thoroughly, completely, absolutely p!ssed off with emails from travel companies.
    Look, you divvies, we CAN’T GO ANYWHERE!!!!!

    1. The former flood of brochures from Great Rail has thankfully dried up. It used o be 2 or 3 a week, same with emails, but no more.

    2. Calm down, Dear! (© Michael Winner and © David Cameron).

      (How rude of me, Annie, I forgot to say “Good day to you, Ma’am”.)

    3. A couple days ago I had a reminder that my travel insurance is about to expire – as I can’t travel I see little point in renewing for the moment – my nice roadside recovery team have extended my policy, free, for another three months – apparently that was too generous an idea for the insurance wallahs!

      1. We have recently renewed our world wide travel insurance. Alf phoned beforehand and asked a few pertinent questions. Because of his medical history we decided to renew with the same people because, when we’re all back to normal, we get the impression that costs are very likely to go up. It’s a tricky one but if you are fit and healthy it may be worth waiting until travel is OK again. You “pays your money and you takes your chance”!

      1. We got emails from our bank saying that they would help us in any way they could, blah, blah. Unctious, fawning, lying. Then last week they sent us a letter saying that they were going to cut our overdraft facility to nearly nothing. We told them that we needed that facility. Response awaited.

      2. I received a text today from the NHS about the podiatry service and how C19 was affecting appointments. Neither of us has an appointment with the podiatry service!

    1. As he says he can’t make any money out of Vitamin D3 therefore it will be dismissed.

      1. I didn’t mean he couldn’t make money from it and it would have been clearer if I said THEY and that would be the usual suspects.


    2. Bill Gates is behind it all sir you say, pushing for mandatory vaccines for all diseases. You think it’s like something out of 1984. Well, Mr Gates is an expert in viruses sir, is he not…His operating system did allow a massive attack on IT systems in the NHS in 2017 sir. Now, if you will excuse me, I have more snake oil to sell… tatty bye sir, and good luck to you.

      As someone else said, they wouldn’t trust Bill Gates to cure a virus in Windows 10, let alone people…

      1. One day yer Bill Gates will turn round and just say to hell with it. He has invested much of his fortune in encouraging healthcare around the world, he has given to multinational groups that are there to improve everyone’s lot, but all he gets are extremist allegations of malfeasance and his megalomania intent to rule the world.

        PHE (just like many other national health organisations) cannot organise a drunken night out in a brewery, do you really want an organisation that cannot implement a smartphone tracking system on the Isle of Wight to loom after UK interests and come up with a made in the UK solution?

        As for those NHS IT systems in 2017, I assume that you mean that wannacry ransomware. The NHS had plenty of warning but failed to act.

        1. Strange then that his personal fortune hasn’t reduced as he’s been so generous.

  39. Cold and flu season end every year when the weather gets nice enough to be outside.
    This lockdown seems designed to keep the virus circulating in the population.

  40. Good morning, all. Lovely still, sunny day.

    Will the “killing” of professor Branestorm have any effect on the government’s policy, I wonder? Is this a David Kelly moment??

    2. Will he do the decent thing and wander off to the woods and sit under a tree?

      ‘Morning, Bill.

      1. Good day, Hugh.

        I fear not – but he could give you the statistical odds….

        1. Ha! I doubt he could even see the wood for the trees! Good morning all!

        2. What, using his scientific formula of ‘think of a number and add a few noughts’?

  41. Too fat.

    SIR – The letter (May 6) from Professor Roger Williams makes the point that addressing obesity in Britain is crucial for reducing the death rate from the coronavirus. This should be central to government messaging, especially givene the temptation to eat more, and exercise less, during lockdown.

    Britain has the highest obesity rate in Europe, making our population more vulnerable. Put statistically, that means that for any given course of action – all other things being equal – many more British people are likely to die per million than in neighbouring countries.

    There is a risk that the current focus on international comparisons may make the Government reluctant to ease the lockdown in pursuit of the probably unattainable goal of beating the average. Agonising decisions have to be made in the light of actual circumstances.

    Sir Julian Brazier

    Canterbury, Kent

  42. SIR – On my morning walk, I have noticed a new hairstyle. “Lockdown locks” have dual colours at the roots, and curl at the neck as the hair hits the shoulders. Very fashionable, easy to maintain – and free.

    Madeleine Albert

    Mildenhall, Suffolk

  44. Taki

    I salute Professor Neil Ferguson

    From magazine issue: 9 May 2020

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/blt8e8277b5f4c95809/5eb2b07f1671a4258ff73226/9Mayhighlife.jpg?auto=webp&format=jpg&width=50&height=50&fit=bounds
    Prof Ferguson has nothing to feel sorry about. He has proved, in the fine British tradition of Horatio Nelson, that sex conquers all.

    Gstaad

    Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson. The prize is awarded every year to a man who casts convention aside and — lockdown or no lockdown — continues to shag his mistress and to hell with the coronavirus. The professor has apologised but Antonia Staats, the mistress, has not. Neither of them has anything to feel sorry about. When the urge comes, social distancing grows smaller, pardon the reverse pun. We all want to flatten the curve, and Ferguson did just that. He has proved by his rash action that sex conquers all, following in the tradition of England’s greatest hero, Horatio Nelson, and countless others, unsung heroes all. They have been overshadowed by the French and Italians to be sure, but now, with the prof leading the way, there’s hope that Britain can emerge as a nation of shaggers who are fearless in their pursuit of sexual gratification even in the face of Chinese efforts to turn us all into a nation of self-abusers.
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/I-salute-Professor-Neil-Ferguson?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020200509%20%20AL+CID_c6f19a07f0d57c499318c2e1bbf58f70

    2. The moron who wrote that nonsense should have read a bit further about Ferguson’s incompetence before praising him.

      1. Read it again; and remember that Taki is one of the world’s great p-takers.

        1. I usually avoid reading anything by Taki as it never seems to have much point.

        1. Is that supposed to be funny then? I’ve never seen the point of Taki. He and his “humour” appear to be equally pointless.

    1. It certainly is Caroline – I baked 2 GF loaves in the bread machine yesterday. GF bread flour is hard to get at the moment

      1. I used brown rice flour, tapioca starch and potato starch for this little lot. Fortunately I have stocks but these rather out-of-the-way flours are generally always available in the organic food shops here. Can’t get them at the local supermarket, unfortunately!

    2. Caroline, The Master (Mr LIme) says that he is neither a Government adviser, recently resigned from SAGE, nor is he a philanderer who takes pleasure in wooing married ladies away from their husbands and inviting them back to his pad during the lockdown. But he would very much like you to take a rubber dinghy from France, paddle it in the direction of Dover, then visit him at his pad and start baking him lots of loaves. He seems to have gone off my rhubarb crumble these days!

      :-))

    3. Make sure you don’t get a drugs test, as you’ll be positive for cocaine with all those poppy seeds…

      1. It’s actually heroin, not cocaine, that comes from poppy seeds, but we get the drift. :•)

          4. Maybe it does but when I put poppy seeds on my bread, like … er … Wow, man, that’s trippy stuff.

          1. I might be wrong but I think that cocaine is an extract of South American Coca leaves, and they were once used in the original recipe (along with Cola nuts) of Coca-Cola®, hence the name. The recipe was later changed, to much hoo-haaing from the Yankee public, when the manufacturers realised what their ‘pop’ contained.

        4. And Caroline is a heroine, for being so inventive “in these difficult times”. I think we should open our doors and windows at midnight on Saturday nights and give her the a clap!

          :-))

          2. Could be. However, I’ll have you know that I won several beauty contests in my youth. Mr. Lime just likes the “younger models”.

            :-))

        1. As I suggested yesterday I am sure that Remain in Lockdown supporters are remain in the EU supporters whereas leavers who wanted to leave both the EU and Lockdown do not enjoy being bossed about.

      2. Yo T_B

        My touch screen magnification isn’t terribly clear .

        Not a metaphor, I hope

  47. A coroner was working late one night. It was his job to examine the dead bodies before they were sent off to be buried or cremated.

    As he examined the body of Mr. Schwartz – who was about to be cremated – the coroner made an amazing discovery, Schwartz had the longest, fattest cock the coroner had ever seen.

    “I’m sorry Mr. Schwartz,” said the coroner, “But I can’t send you off to be cremated with a tremendously huge penis like this. It has to be saved for posterity.”

    And with that the coroner used his tools to remove the man’s manhood.

    The coroner stuffed his prize into a briefcase and took it home. The first person he showed it to, was his wife. “I have something to show you that you won’t believe,” he said, and opened his briefcase.

    “Oh my God!” She screamed. “Schwartz is dead!”

      1. Thanks – I’m sure the bpm was right for this tune though…..I’ll check

    3. I thought that was the late Daphne Oram of the old BBC’s Radiophonics workshop…

      1. That was more the effects that could be produced (intro to Dr Who springs to mind) – the synthesiser was introduced to music in the late 60s with the Moog as part of a group set-up but Kraftwerk used synths for everything and brought visual art into the performance too, Vangelis, JMJ soon followed and now there are thousands of performers just using synths to produce music

  49. Funny how Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, both close friends of George Soros, a few weeks ago called for “Global Government”..

    Just by totally unconnected random coincidence, Boris Johnson this week announced “Global Government” !

    Isn’t that sweet.. George, Gordon, Tony, and Boris all happy together !

  50. So if Sherelle is right and lockdown was wrong, what has lockdown achieved ?

    Ummmm…….

    Oh, “Global Government” !

  51. Last night on Radio 4 there was a programme concerning the proportion of the BAME population of Great Brittain having benn found positive with Coro 19.
    It was a consderably higher % than in the non-BAME population.

    It would appear that those areas of the country with high concentrations of the BAME, inner cities, deprived areas etc, are in fact incubating spots for the Coro 19 virus?
    I realise that any mention of the BAME population immediately causes an outcry, but shouldn’t we be isolating these hot spots ?

    1. You can knock me down with a feather! After learning a few minutes ago that Araminta is a he, I now discover that Lionel is a she. Next you’ll be saying that Elsie is a he too. Whatever next?!?!? Grizzly, Bill T and Peddy are shes?!?!?

        1. No, it’s Elsie, King Stephen. The Master (Mr Harry Lime) is currently occupied dictating an email for me to send to Mrs. Rastus!

          :-))

      1. A true gentleman is somebody who has bagpipes and does not play them.

        1. And I thought it was “a bag and pipe and doesn’t play with them…..”

          1. ‘Afternoon, Stephen, my brother-in-law, now deceased, always maintained that there were two types in the world, W⚓s and liars.

        2. Can I correct you slightly, Richard? It’s “can play the bagpipes but chooses not to”.

  54. Yo All

    One for the men, if stuck in Lockdown at home with the wife and is is doing your head in

    In the 1400’s a law was set forth in England that a man was allowed to

    beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb, hence we have

    ‘The Rule Of Thumb

    It still might be legal

    1. I suppose that’s why the cat o’ nine tails was invented, each leather thong less than the legal maximum. See, we’ve had to work our way round bureaucracy since the 15th century.

    4. I suppose that’s why the cat o’ nine tails was invented, each leather thong less than the legal maximum. See, we’ve had to work our way round bureaucracy since the 15th century.

    5. From Wikipedia (OK, I know) – A modern folk etymology holds that the phrase is derived from the maximum width of a stick allowed for wife-beating under English law, but no such law ever existed. This belief might have originated in a rumored statement by eighteenth-century judge Sir Francis Buller that a man may beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb. The rumor produced numerous jokes and satirical cartoons at Buller’s expense, but there is no record that he made such a statement.

      1. Here is the verse from which you quote:

        There was an old queer from Khartoum
        Who took a lesbian to his room
        They argued all night
        Over who had the right
        To do what, with what and to whom.

      2. Here is the verse from which you quote:

        There was an old queer from Khartoum
        Who took a lesbian to his room
        They argued all night
        Over who had the right
        To do what, with what and to whom.

  55. PATHETIC – Which is the more dishonest? China or the EU?

    EU accepts Chinese censorship of joint public letter

    Bruno Waterfield, Brussels | Didi Tang, Beijing
    Thursday May 07 2020, 12.00pm, The Times

    The EU agreed to remove a reference to the coronavirus outbreak originating in China from an op-ed piece published in China Daily

    The European Union has been humiliated for the second time in two weeks after accepting Chinese censorship of a public friendship letter penned by its ambassadors to remove any mention that the coronavirus outbreak originated in China.

    EU ambassadors had written an opinion piece celebrating Sino-European co-operation to mark the 45th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the EU and China.

    Despite the glowing terms of the article, published in China Daily, a state-run newspaper, the Chinese foreign ministry demanded that a reference to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic be cut before publication.

    The opinion piece noted that the “outbreak of the coronavirus in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world over the past three months, has meant that our pre-existing plans have been temporarily side-tracked”, in a reference to a postponed EU-China summit.

    The Chinese foreign ministry refused publication unless the words were deleted, and with “considerable reluctance” the EU’s diplomatic service, the European External Action Service (EEAS) agreed to the censorship to ensure that publication went ahead, to the dismay of some governments.

    “It is regrettable that part of the sentence about the spread of the virus has been edited,” said Nicolas Chapuis, the EU’s ambassador to Beijing today, refusing to comment on why China had asked for the words to be removed.

    China is locked in a war of words with Donald Trump over its handling of the pandemic and is opposing EU efforts to build a compromise at the forthcoming United Nations World Health Assembly because its resolution refers to the virus’s origin in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

    Beijing is a key economic partner as well as rival to European countries, and the incident comes as the EU is trying to deepen its relationship and take advantage of the worsening American relationship with China.

    The article concludes that “the world needs the co-operation of Europe and China” on “climate action, peace and security, sustainable development and upholding the multilateral global order”, all areas of tension with the United States.

    Norbert Röttgen, a senior Christian Democrat and the head of the German parliament’s influential foreign affairs committee, expressed his shock at the glowing tone of the article and acceptance of censorship, and warned the EEAS that it had to stand up for European political values.

    “I am shocked not once but twice,” he said.

    “First the EU ambassadors generously adopt Chinese narratives and then on top of that the EU representation accepts Chinese censorship of the joint op-ed. Speaking with one voice is important, but it has to reflect our shared European values and interests.”

    A spokesman for the EEAS said: “The EU delegation was informed that publication could only take place with agreement of [the] Chinese ministry of foreign affairs.

    “The EU delegation made known its concerns. The EU continues to advocate a free press. On this specific case the EU delegation decided to proceed with publication with considerable reluctance because it considered it important to communicate the key messages.”

    The episode is particularly embarrassing for the EEAS because it follows a row after the diplomatic service censored its own report to remove references to an official Chinese “global disinformation” campaign over the coronavirus pandemic.

    Leaked emails showed that senior advisers to Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief and the head of the EEAS, delayed the report’s publication and removed “key findings” because of “heavy pushback” from China.

    China is attempting to block EU efforts to build a UN consensus at the World Health Organisation (WHO) on an investigation into the pandemic over language that refers to coronavirus’s origins.

    Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said today that Beijing is open to co-operating with the WHO, but not on the basis of blame.

    “China will make its due contribution with a responsible attitude on matters that will help the humankind to better cope with major contagious diseases,” Ms Hua said. “But China is opposed to any international investigation that assumes guilt, as pushed eagerly by some countries, including the United States.”

    She didn’t say when Beijing would allow international experts in, but said “the Chinese side agrees to make a decision on tracing the origin at an appropriate time”.

    Chen Xu, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations at Geneva, said yesterday that China would not invite international experts to investigate the source of the virus until the world wins a “final victory” against the virus.

    “It’s not that we are allergic to any kind of investigations, inquiries or evaluations,” he said.

    “We need to race with time to save lives as much as we can,” Mr Chen said. “For whether or how the invitation will take place, we need to have the right priority setting at this moment, and on the other hand we need the right atmosphere.”

    1. Are not all joint statements a result of negotiation between the parties?
      All of those G7 / G20 type meetings seem to end up with various functionaries running around inserting weasel words or taking out nuances in the wording before they finally get the leaders to sign off on a fluff piece of drivel

      You can hardly expect a celebration of Sino European to include a statement to the effect that the Chinese are lying barstewards.

        1. Oh completely. It is like those climate change meeting declarations, anything agreed between Trump and the doomgoblin is absolutely without meaning.

    2. Two things strike me immediately, the first being a quote by Corporal Jones concerning apportioning blame. “They don’t like it up ’em!”

      Secondly Ms Hua’s comment, “…the Chinese side agrees to make a decision on tracing the origin at an appropriate time”. meaning, this year, next year, sometime, never.

    1. So in a knee-jerk response to intense MEEJAH pressure, the UK has bought a pig-in-a-poke.

      1. Morning Bob

        On Toady just this minute

        “It’s not clear if the government will seek a refund from the Turkish authorities”

        Lessons in running a whelk stall?

      1. Good morning MM

        The media hysteria that pressed the government into making hasty decisions has to stop, and the government must ignore media pressure .

        I feel the gradual release of lockdown is a very bad decision, but that is what the media wants, the fast food and coffee outlets that feed the obese , keep the people fed and watered to keep them happy , and of course fill the Mosques up .. no mention of church bells . Nah, I smell a rat .

    3. Surprise, surprise!

      Why would anyone think that anything sent by Erdogan would be fit for purpose? All he’s interested in, is shipping those refugees, in his ‘safe’ country, out to the EU and thence to Britain.

  57. Under Boris Johnson, Putin and Trump the world has uncanny parallels to 1945. 7 May 2020.

    A row over a top-secret message, known as SCAF-252, sent to Stalin in late March 1945 by Gen Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, shows how fraught the relationship could be. In it, Eisenhower detailed his plans for the final defeat of Nazi Germany – but omitted to first consult or inform his British allies.

    Stalin was determined the Red Army would be the first to get to Berlin and topple Adolf Hitler, attaching great symbolic importance to capturing the capital of the Third Reich and its implications for the future European order. Churchill took a similar view, but Eisenhower and a distracted, ailing FDR were not thinking politically.

    Really? It looks more like 1939 to me. This aside the message Tisdall refers to here was sent by Eisenhower to inform the Russians that the allied forces would not try to take Berlin. A communication that sent Churchill ballistic. While it was politically undesirable I have no doubts that Eisenhower’s decision was correct, this was in accordance with a previous agreement; the Russians were already on the outskirts of the Capital and the battle cost them around 100,000 dead and 400,000 wounded. These would have been Brits or Americans had Churchill had his way.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/under-boris-johnson-putin-and-trump-the-world-has-uncanny-parallels-to-1945

      1. I used to enjoy the Bar at the Piccola Marina!

        (You are too young!!)

        1. Good morning, Bill

          Like Mrs Wentworth-Brewster I discovered in the nick of time that life was for living!

        2. This one Bill ?
          18 Feb 2020
          This restaurant had fake Michelin stickers on its door and the service was terrible. Would NOT recommend. Food is gross and overpriced. Full review
          04 Nov 2019
          Yes, the seafood is good – although beware that when you order crab or fish that it is “whole”, not ready to eat (not mentioned in the English menu translation).Most of the seating has a decent view o… Full review

    2. Not much thought for social distancing there Bill, it would be even worse during lock up and down eh.

    3. That rather makes a mockery of social distancing.

      Good morrow good Sir.

    5. They couldn’t go anywhere, as all the locks are down. Or have I misunderstood?

      1. Actually, most of the locks go up as well. Fiendishly clever design.

        1. Morning Tom – I’ve always though Great Canal Journeys with Michael Portillo was too close for comfort

    8. At first glance I thought it was another rave about someone’s bookshelves.

      Must go and clean my glasses.

  59. My neighbour is going to get a surprise when she emerges from her office. 20 yellow rubber ducks have appeared in her pond. I sneaked in when she wasn’t looking.

      1. Well if the ducks were blue before Phizzee intervened, that would be enough to shock anyone.

      2. Just pranking her. She will see the funny side. She will be even more surprised when she is over run with baby froglets. I collected two jars of frog spawn and the tadpoles are now developing legs. About 200 should do it. 🙂

    2. A friend of ours is an architect who had a difference of opinion over the bill with one of his clients who was especially proud of his lawn. Our friend constructed an ingenious trap which enabled him to capture the moles in his own garden without harming them and he then let them loose in his client’s garden!

  60. ‘Morning All

    How time flies……….

    This is my thousandth post since I was forced to reinvent myself if I wished to comment anywhere but here,many others have done the same while those who only comment here wear their zero with pride,the Leftard censors of free speech suffer another small defeat.Enjoy it while we can I suspect it wont last long

    Am I paranoid?? Are there really dark and shadowy forces out there that mean me and mine harm??

    No,not specifically,they just don’t care who is crushed,killed or disappeared on the way to their goals including whole societies,in fact it is a rare individual that gets the “treatment”

    Someone asked “Why would billionaires want to create a slave society how would that make them richer”

    It’s no longer about money,money isn’t the ultimate aphrodisiac,power is

    Why does a child use a magnifying glass on an ant nest??

    Because it can……………………….

    https://quotlr.com/images/quotes/32d8e26aff3211e2b67922000aaa047d_7.jpg

    1. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. How else could Boris Johnson (who, even his admirers must admit, is physically extremely unattractive) attract the girls as he does? It is more difficult for women – I cannot imagine that Mrs May, who was the most powerful woman in Britain for a time, inspired ardent libido in any men. Men, shallow creatures that we are, are often too heavily influenced by the physical attractiveness of women. It would be a strange man – or we would certainly think him rather unusual – who lusted after Angela Merkel or Golda Meir.

    2. “Why does a child use a magnifying glass on an ant nest??” Because it’s a brutalised, uncivilised little bastard with evil genes, obviously a foreigner.

  61. 318946+ up ticks,
    May one ask, priti patel is going to have words with the french over illegal immigrants leaving their shores for ours, when she fails will PM johnson be willing to emulate his role model W S Churchill, who asked the french ( nicely) to turn their naval fleet over to him and when they didn’t he bombed the sh!te out of them.

  62. I see the press are at it again.

    It was the press that brought us the shortages of toilet rolls and tinned food with their alarmist and prominently-posted headlines, showing us things like empty shelves even before the shelves were empty in this country. Toilet roll panic buying in Australia was used to start the panic here.

    Now, instead of sticking to the facts and limiting their reporting of the fact that Boris will be making and address on Sunday, they had to go further. They began to speculate as always about what Boris might be going to say. Leaks? Who can say? If they don’t have leaks they just make things up anyway.

    But that wasn’t enough. The front page now is giving detailed timetables for events to take us out of lockdown ‘gradually’. Gradually? Rolling on the floor now.

    First of these is the news that as from Monday we will be allowed to sit down on a beach and go into the country.

    From Monday.

    Now that might have been the case if Boris had been allowed to make his pronouncement on Sunday, without the leaks (or inventions), but good luck with that going to plan, with a bank holiday weekend of good weather ahead before it turns cold and damp for the big release on Monday. The Mail probably already has its headlines written for the weekend, telling us about the Covidiots (their favourite new word) taking to the roads ahead of schedule to take the chance after so long locked up to get sand in their egg and tomato sandwiches once more. They don’t report the news. They instigate the events that they then report as if it is news.

    If Boris wasn’t going to tell us we could go back to the beach from Monday, he’s damned well going to have to now.

    Whatever anyone thinks about the recent absurdities of not being allowed to sit down on the grass in a park, after all this is over they should round up all the newspaper editors and put them against a wall for subversion.

    2. It’s amazing that I put up a comment critical of the press and their irresponsible reporting making a national emergency worse and within minutes we’ve got a long list of posts about bread-making and only a couple about the subject.

    3. And I suppose enough people are stupid enough to make their predictions come true.

      1. That is their hope.

        They’ve already written the articles condemning it.

        1. And people still read their rubbish! Perhaps universal literacy is not such a good thing after all.

          1. People only read the words. They don’t know how to read what’s behind the words, which is often more important.

    4. I am also pissed off with constant references to Mr Johnson as a “liar” and a “philanderer”.

      I don’t agree with his choice of private life – but it is irrelevant to his ability as an MP -and the elected PM.

      1. Well Bill, you’ve had three wives, so what’s wrong with that for Boris?

          2. She certainly does, OLT, I got her to arrange the divorce where she is, in Sweden. Much quicker and at £160, much cheaper.

    5. We managed to get the last bag of flour last week it was shoved on a lower shelf right at the back. A you lady bent down and got it out for my wife.
      Sour dough is back on the menu.
      Toasting it is good, but it weaponizes the crust.

        1. #Me Too. I needed something off the top shelf of the food cupboard today and I found loads of yeast! I could (assuming, of course, that it would still be active) have made bread as I do have some flour left over. As I don’t eat bread, I haven’t bothered to bake a loaf.

          1. If you don’t know any different you don’t worry about it. Cooking is one of my least favourite pastimes.

      2. I managed to find some tangerines in Morrisons last week – high up and labelled as apples! the last couple of weeks we’d had to make do with large oranges or insipid satumas, and there were no clementines. We don’t take any vitamin supplements so we do like to have citrus fruit every day.

        1. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried including oranges in cooking but here is a tried and tested recipe for Chicken Basque. It’s a bit fiddly but well worth the effort:

          Chicken Basque

          The delicious combination of chicken and rice, olives and peppers is typical of all the regions around the western Mediterranean but, to my mind, this Spanish version, with the addition of spicy chorizo sausage and a hint of paprika, beats the lot. My interpretation of it also uses dried tomatoes preserved in oil to give it even more character. This recipe will provide a complete supper for four from the same pot – it needs nothing to accompany it!

          A firm family favourite.
          Serves 4

          Ingredients

          3½ lbs (1.75 kg) chicken, jointed into 8 pieces
          2 large red peppers
          1 very large or 2 medium onions
          2-3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
          5 oz (150 g) chorizo sausage, skinned and cut into ½ inch (1 cm) slices
          2 oz (50 g) sun-dried tomatoes in oil
          2 large cloves garlic, chopped
          1 level tablespoon sun-dried tomato paste
          ½ level teaspoon hot paprika
          Basmati rice measured to the 7 fl oz (200 ml) level in a glass measuring jug
          10.55 fl oz (300 ml) chicken stock
          7 fl oz (200 ml) dry white wine
          ½ large orange, cut into wedges
          1 level teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
          2 oz (50 g) black olives (pitted if you prefer)
          Salt and freshly milled black pepper

          You will also need a wide, shallow, flameproof casserole preferably with a domed lid, measuring about 9½ inches (24 cm) at the base; or, failing that, any wide flameproof casserole of 8½ pint (4.5 litre) capacity.

          Method

          1. Start by seasoning the chicken joints well with salt and pepper.

          2. Next, slice the red peppers in half and remove the seeds and pith, then slice each half into six strips. Likewise, peel the onion and slice into strips of approximately the same size.

          3. The dried tomatoes should be drained, wiped dry with kitchen paper and then cut into ½ inch (1 cm) pieces.

          4. Now heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in the casserole and, when it is fairly hot, add the chicken pieces – two or three at a time – and brown them to a nutty golden colour on both sides.

          5. As they brown remove them to a plate lined with kitchen paper, using a draining spoon.

          6. Next add a little more oil to the casserole, with the heat slightly higher than medium. As soon as the oil is hot, add the onion and peppers and allow them to brown a little at the edges, moving them around from time to time, for about 5 minutes.

          7. After that, add the chorizo, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic and toss these around for a minute or two until the garlic is pale golden and the chorizo has taken on some colour.

          8. Next, stir in the rice and, when the grains have a good coating of oil, add the sun-dried tomato paste, paprika and chopped thyme.

          9. Pour in the stock and wine and add some seasoning. As soon as everything has reached simmering point, turn the heat down to a gentle simmer.

          10. Add a little more seasoning, then place the chicken gently on top of everything (it’s important to keep the rice down in the liquid).

          11. Finally, place the wedges of orange in among the chicken and scatter with the olives.

          12. Cover with a tight-fitting lid, or aluminium foil and cook over the gentlest possible heat for about 50 minutes-1 hour or until the rice is cooked but still retains a little bite. Alternatively cook in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 4, 350°F (180°C), for 1 hour.

          1. Far too much fiddly detail for my method of cooking (which would probably horrify all the cordon bleu chefs on here) but provides some ideas for using the extra-spicy chorizo we have have lurking in the fridge. I shall probably treat your recipe as I do most – my creation will turn out as something completely different.

          2. Good, but leave out the chorizo for me.

            When draining the tomatoes, save the oil for browning the onions, etc.

          4. Sounds good! Thnkyou – I’ll save that in my recipe folder and try it sometime – only two of us here at the moment. But we’ll have to have more get-togethers eventually.

          7. Thanks , that looks delicious – I’ve printed and passed to recipe on to Chef and apparently we have all the ingredients except the sun-dried tomato paste, she’s off a-hunting right now.

        2. I bought some mandarins this week, they were bland and full of pips. The first one I ate contained 27 pips, yesterday’s was a treat at a mere 16 pips. It made eating them a chore.

      3. Have a shufti at this, Eddy:

        https://www.shipton-mill.com/

        They deliver and “slots” are available if you are patient. My elder son arranged for 16 kg of strong white to be delivered to us – enough for a couple of month’s baking.

        1. Looks as though they are very busy – i guess your son can just walk there. My ex drove for them for a while, years ago.

          1. They are – and he did; but they really do meet orders if one is patient.

          2. Yes – plenty of that. both strong white and wholemeal. But I haven’t made bread for many years.

      5. I can’t wait until I have reached my target weight. I shall celebrate by baking some decent sourdough bread.

        [It will only be a treat since I have no wish to gain weight again. 😄]

        1. Nothing beats a good fresh heavy sourdough, a plate of minced chillis in olive oil, red wine, sunshine and a seat in the garden in the sunshine.
          Dip the bread in the chillies, consume, enjoy the wine…

          1. I shall enjoy a similar delectation when the time comes. I shall mix some extra virgin olive oil with some good quality balsamic vinegar. In the next dish will be some freshly-made Dukkah. I’ll dip the crusty bread first into the emulsion and then into the Dukkah. My tongue will have an orgasm!

            [Dukkah: 1¾ cups sesame seeds, 1½ cups coriander seeds, 1½ cups ground almonds, ½ cup ground cumin, 1 tsp sea salt, ½ tsp freshly-ground black pepper. Toast the sesame seeds on a baking tray in a preheated oven at 175ºC for 8 minutes until aromatic. At the same time, on a second tray, toast the coriander seeds for 4 minutes, and on a third tray toast the ground almonds for 5 minutes. Remove from the oven and, as they are ready, place them into a large bowl with the cumin, salt and pepper. Blend the ingredients together in a food processor until they are finely crushed, but not as fine as powder. The Dukkah should be a crushed dry mixture, so don’t overprocess or the oil from the sesame seeds and almond will turn it into a paste. Store in an airtight jar — it will keep for 3–4 weeks.]

          2. I shall enjoy a similar delectation when the time comes. I shall mix some extra virgin olive oil with some good quality balsamic vinegar. In the next dish will be some freshly-made Dukkah. I’ll dip the crusty bread first into the emulsion and then into the Dukkah. My tongue will have an orgasm!

            [Dukkah: 1¾ cups sesame seeds, 1½ cups coriander seeds, 1½ cups ground almonds, ½ cup ground cumin, 1 tsp sea salt, ½ tsp freshly-ground black pepper. Toast the sesame seeds on a baking tray in a preheated oven at 175ºC for 8 minutes until aromatic. At the same time, on a second tray, toast the coriander seeds for 4 minutes, and on a third tray toast the ground almonds for 5 minutes. Remove from the oven and, as they are ready, place them into a large bowl with the cumin, salt and pepper. Blend the ingredients together in a food processor until they are finely crushed, but not as fine as powder. The Dukkah should be a crushed dry mixture, so don’t overprocess or the oil from the sesame seeds and almond will turn it into a paste. Store in an airtight jar — it will keep for 3–4 weeks.]

        2. With only 3 ingredients, flour salt and water sourdough is probably the least likely to effect weight………But I suppose it depends on how much you enjoy eating it.
          But by golly it takes it’s time eh 24 hours or more. I think I have perfected the problem when it’s tipped from the proving basket. Although it’s dusted very liberally with flour it always seems to stick and ruins the shape. Lightly oiled cling film both sides put into the basket before the dough is left to prove, and you will still get the banneton patterns. Take off the film of course, Dust with flour before baking.
          I’ll get another one underway today for baking tmz afternoon.

          1. It’s the carbohydrate content of the flour that is the problem for me, Eddy. It is only by eschewing carbs (as opposed to chewing them) that I am able to lose weight. For the past 4 months (and probably the next 4 months too) it is high fat, medium protein and low carb that is helping me slim back to my former self.

            What most people don’t realise with bread is that time is more important than the ingredients when baking good bread. My standard overnight (‘sleepless’) loaf is 500g strong white flour, 280g cold water, 2g dried yeast, 10g salt. Mix and knead then leave, covered, in the fridge overnight. Next day bring back to room temperature, form into a cob or loaf, leave for 1½ hours to prove, slash and bake for 25 mins at 230ºC. This has become my bog-standard go-to loaf when I don’t have the time to use a culture.

            I would advise anyone who has their own “favourite” bread recipe to make the dough the day before then leave it in the fridge overnight before resuming the next day. They will be astounded at how much more flavour has developed.

          2. I would advise anyone who has their own “favourite” bread recipe to make the dough the day before then leave it in the fridge overnight before resuming the next day. They will be astounded at how much more flavour has developed.
            Next time, especially sourdough, although well risen, it always collapses just before I want to put It into the oven.

    6. It’s amazing that I put up a comment critical of the press and their irresponsible reporting making a national emergency worse and within minutes we’ve got a long list of posts about bread-making and only a couple about the subject.

      1. You didn’t get much of a rise from your comment then. Sorry, I’m a bit crusty this morning!

      2. ‘Morning, Basset, it could be that starting with the panic buying and the supplies shortages, your post triggered what is uppermost in many minds; being locked down, many have turned to home-baking, hence the diatribes about flour shortages and subsequent remedies.

        1. My point wasn’t shortages, but irresponsible media. A damned sight more dangerous than not being able to make a bap.


    7. they should round up all the newspaper editors and put them against a wall for subversion.

      And whoever employed them…

      I agree with every word.

      And I haven’t made any home-made bread, and have no plans to.

  63. Douglas Murray
    Hugging China hasn’t done us any favours

    From magazine issue: 9 May 2020

    Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the post-fix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair. But back in 2012, flush with recently acquired power and optimism, David Cameron and a man called Nick Clegg went to see the Dalai Lama while he was on a trip to London.

    Whether Cameron and Clegg knew what they were getting into wasn’t clear. The pair had a short meeting with the Lama at St Paul’s Cathedral — or at least in one of those bland conference ante-rooms English cathedrals constructed in the last century to atone for the splendours next door. Looking like a couple of travelling salesmen trying to flog the Dalai Lama a timeshare, Cameron and Clegg had the meeting and moved on.

    Not so Beijing. The British ambassador was immediately called in and given the traditional post-Lama telling off. In the wake of the meeting the Chinese Communist party announced relations with Britain had been damaged. Sure enough, Chinese investment into the UK went on hold. A trip to the UK by Chairman Wu Bangguo was called off. And the CCP talked about how ‘hurt’ the Chinese people had been by the meeting.

    You can do that sort of thing if you are a dictatorship: pretend to act as the mouthpiece of more than a billion people, not one of whom can hold you to account. But Cameron got understandably spooked and — proving himself years ahead of the game — announced plans to socially distance himself from the Dalai Lama. Indeed soon he was declaring that he saw no need ever to meet him again. The British government issued an apology to the Chinese authorities for all the offence caused and normal trade relations were eventually restored.

    It was the account of the first meeting between British and Chinese officials after this affair that was so memorable. I was told that before the meeting could get under way, the CCP officials attended to a bit of old business. A copy of the British apology was pushed across the table towards the British officials, who were then asked to stand up and read it out loud, which they duly did. Sitting down afterwards, the lead Chinese official apparently smiled and said: ‘We just wanted to know you meant it.’

    I doubt there is a British subject whose skin doesn’t crawl at the thought of someone being so abject on our behalf. But there it is. A nadir of the conundrum that Britain — and the wider world — has long known ourselves to be in.

    We always realised that there were price tags attached when dealing with the CCP. And as our politicians have repeatedly learned, the line between receiving the largesse of China and receiving orders from it is a fine one.

    Other countries have been aware of this for years. On a trip to Australia in 2018 I was struck by how much further along the road the public’s understanding of the China conundrum was there compared with in Britain. They had long since passed through their politicians praising the benefits, watched them join the boards of Chinese companies, and then slowly but surely observed the political class back away as they saw what that cooperation entailed.

    Today the Australians have an advantage over us. While we have a vast trade deficit with China (around £20 billion), Australia has a vast trade surplus with the country (around £30 billion). Even so, they remain vulnerable to the CCP’s normal diplomatic routine of extortion and threats.

    Towards the end of last month the Australian government started calling for an international, independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. This followed intelligence leaks suggesting that the virus may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan rather than one of the city’s famously delicious wet markets. The Chinese response was textbook. The country’s ambassador to Australia warned the Australian Financial Review that the Chinese public (there they go again) were ‘frustrated, dismayed and disappointed with what you are doing now. If the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think why we should go to such a country while it’s not so friendly to China. The tourists may have second thoughts.’ Students, parents and consumers were also said to be on the verge of once again choosing bat soup over Aussie beef and Shiraz.

    In other words, the CCP’s response to Australia was the usual mob trick: nice continent you’ve got there. Shame if anything happened to it.

    The editor of the state-run Global Times, Hu Xijin, was less diplomatic. Hu took to Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) to describe Australia as a piece of ‘chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes’. He went on: ‘Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.’ As Britain learned in 2012, the stone that China uses to get rid of us pieces of chewing gum is a familiar one. It involves the full litany of investment threats. And it includes claims — issued from its embassies worldwide — that all criticism of the CCP is motivated by ‘racism’.

    Of course the CCP has no interest in bigotry. A survey of what it has been willing to do to the Uighur people over recent years might go some way to countering that claim. But it knows the West is cowed by such distractions. After all it isn’t very many weeks since Nancy Pelosi was telling Americans to visit their local Chinatown and the mayor of Florence was urging residents of his city to hug a Chinese person to fight racism and coronavirus.

    Yet just as surely as Cameron was ahead of his time, so the Florentine mayor turned out to be behind his. We have been hugging China for years now, and it didn’t make us better. It made us sicker. And not just virally, but psychologically too.

    1. You can do that sort of thing if you are a dictatorship: pretend to act as the mouthpiece of more than a billion people, not one of whom can hold you to account.

      They make a pretty good fist of it here and we only have 65 Million!

    2. I do hope Douglas is well protected. He has an inconvenient habit of publishing the truth.

      1. There’s not many like him left. Many of his compatriots in other countries have been murdered.

    3. It’s strange, isn’t it, that the west did nothing to hold China to account for their invasion and takeover of Tibet, yet they never forget to castigate Israel for the West bank – fair spoils of war.

      1. They kept us occupied in Korea while they were doing that Ndovu.

    4. BTL:

      Demosthenes • an hour ago

      ‘Kow-tow’ is one of the very few words to enter the English language from Mandarin, rather than the reverse. It was a common behaviour in Imperial China towards superiors, where one lies completely prostrate with one’s arms outstretched in an act of total submission. Upon his meeting the Jiaqing Emperor in 1816, British diplomat William Amherst refused to perform the traditional kowtow, as the other European agents had done in order to facilitate trade, an incident that the Qing saw as a severe breach of etiquette. As a representative of the British crown, Amherst could not be seen as subservient to a foreign ruler. He and his party were duly expelled from China, a diplomatic rebuke that angered the British government and ultimately led to the First Opium War.

      “[The opium trade] is a mere incident to the dispute. … The cause of this war is the kow-tow—the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind, not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relation between lord and vassal.” US President John Quincy Adams.

      Not that you’ll learn any of that in any British school, if our schoolchildren are taught anything about that war they are taught that our ancestors were nothing but greedy, racist, old white men, who simply wanted to bully a technologically inferior, but for more noble foreign country. Do you think the Chinese teach their children that their ancestors were all evil? Do you think their media always takes the side of foreign powers? The Chinese understand the importance of symbolism, while we have forgotten it. The truth is we have completely lost confidence in our own civilisation, we don’t believe in ourselves anymore. We have only ourselves to blame for electing such pathetic creatures as Cameron and Clegg, Blair and Brown and May… and sadly it looks like Boris as well.

      1. The only time in the past that the British properly prostrated themselves was when a postulant to the Church, or a squire on the eve of being knighted, would prostrate themselves before the altar of God.
        Thereafter, it was a matter of “Fear God and Dread Naught.” Too bad we have now abandoned God and fear everything.

  64. Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?

    A. Their birthplace

    Now, if only it were the same for the residents of UK

    1. I was born in Oxford and live a little over 50 miles away, but I’ve never considered myself a native of Oxford as my parents were Australian and it was sheer chance I was born there. Childhood was spent between Norfolk and Australia and from adolescence onwards have been resident in Wiltshire, with which I feel the most affinity. (Ancestors have strong Scottish and West Country origins.)

      1. I hadn’t thought about my own situation – born in Norfolk, now living in Suffolk, I checked with Google maps – I’m now exactly 50 miles from my birth-place but I have wandered far and wide in between, including twice round the world.

        1. I had a few years around the Salisbury Plain area, while my ex was a soldier, but other than that I’ve always lived in Gloucestershire; only travelling for pleasure has taken me to other places.

    3. ‘Morning, OLT, your question concerns half the population but, if I may make so bold, your conclusion might read, “Now, if only it were the same for 95% of the residents of UK

    4. This is the 15th house in which I have lived – and I have been here for nearly 36 years.

      As a war baby, where I was born was a matter of chance. My father was serving in Cardiff at the time I was expected. The house was destroyed by a land mine one week before my EDD and father managed to get my mother to Totnes, where I saw the light of day a few days later.

      So, although I call myself a Devonshire Dumpling – (because my mother’s family had lived within 20 miles of Totnes for several hundred years) – I don’t really have any territorial affinity. “Home” is where I find myself.

        2. We’ve lived in this house for 25 years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere. It’s definitely home, and although perhaps not too easy for infirmities, it will take a lot to get us out of here. We’ve got 11 steps up to the front door but we did have a handrail fitted a couple of years ago – mainly for frail visitors.

          1. I have lived in this house for 38 years. I said they would have to carry me out in a box.

      2. I’m even worse on that score. We seemed to move amost every year when I was a child, with my father’s jobs taking him around the country and overseas.

        I state that home is where I hang my hat, which annoys the Hell out of HG.

        She had lived in two houses before she met me.

        She’s now lived in ten. fourteen if you count rentals.

        1. SWMBO had only ever lived in one house before she met me. Moved around UK, now Norway, a bit of a change for the poor lass.

    5. I was born in a little village called Irkowit in the Red Sea Hills to the North of Khartoum.

      At the time I was the first and only white baby to have been born there and I arrived three weeks early: I should have been born in the hospital. Fortunately a friend of my mother’s, a nurse, was staying with my mother at the time and she delivered me by the light of a torch at 6 am on Monday, July 1st 1946. My father was busy governing the Northern Sudan and so he was not present at the birth – but in those days fathers were encouraged to stay away. By contrast my sons were both born in the hospital in Dinan and I was there to lend support, hold Caroline’s hand, say how much I loved her and add to the confusion..

  65. Morning all.
    Having miraculously managed to log in I am very grateful for Caroline and Richard for posting the content of the email I managed to send with the help of my wife.
    And I thankyou all for the many favourable comments from yesterday.
    I still can’t access the site on my mobile my preferred method, it might be due to the fact that I have stopped all the cookies from accessing my personal data. Who can tell.

  66. Some doctors – including Dr. Anthony Fauci – have expressed the opinion that the Chinese ‘flu may die out, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, with the onset of warmer weather, much like diseases caused by other corona viruses, including ordinary ‘flu and the common cold. A study conducted by a university in Maryland, USA, has suggested that the Covid-19 virus does not do well in hot, humid conditions.

    If this is true, what then are we to make of the fact that Manaus, in Brazil, has been declared a Covid-19 “hot spot”? Manaus isn’t exactly yer Siberian tundra – it’s situated bang in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest, about as hot and humid as it gets, and being only some 3° South of the Equator, experiences almost no seasonality in its climate. The average annual temperature in that neck of the woods is over 80°F.

    1. An Israeli epidemiologist has already suggested that the virus has a time expiry of 60 days I think he said!

    2. Maybe it’s the humidity which keeps it going? Hot and dry may dry it out and kill it off.

    1. Was that because of the Gold Club number, or was the MR the key to success??

      1. The GC number. The MR gave the Business Class cancellation first – sort of suggesting that she was a GC member.

        Oddly, the BA person didn’t ask for her GC number!!

  68. Awkward………………..

    The code. It isn’t the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What’s been released on GitHub

    is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for

    over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase

    is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas

    the original program was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored,

    and it will probably take some kind of legal compulsion to make them

    release it. Clearly, Imperial are too embarrassed by the state of it

    ever to release it of their own free will, which is unacceptable given

    that it was paid for by the taxpayer and belongs to them.

    Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs. They routinely act as if this is unimportant.

    This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given

    that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate

    results.

    https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
    Edit
    Hitchins is on the case,this could be a bumpy ride………..
    https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1258067541613858817

      1. It is a review of code that was an attempt to replicate the original code in a more manageable form. Did any issues arise from this attempted rewrite? Does the new code produce the same results as the original code?

        Apart from that the review is quite shocking. What really gets me is that results could not be replicated even when the same inputs were used.

        Yet the government have acted on these projections for years and no one dared question the validity of the projections even after previous uses were so wrong.

        1. How does anyone know whether the refactoring changed any functionality because they seem to have no way of verifying the original code? I think the comments from Imperial are about the original code, as they’ve had no time to run the refactored version.

    1. From Wiki: “In 2020 Whittome returned to work at the Lark Hill retirement village as a volunteer carer for the elderly to help during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was sacked from this position after an appearance on Newsnight where she voiced concerns over (PPE) shortages and the safety of staff and residents, having claimed that staff were “limited to one mask a day”. The care home, however, stated that they had not had a single death from COVID-19, had always “followed government standards over PPE” and “have over three months’ supply of Personal Protective Equipment”. She was asked by ExraCare “not to return”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Whittome

      Despite that statement by the home most of the re-tweets still have the “sacked for speaking out” line!

  70. Oh my good gawd,I’m seeing reports “We’re going to keep following the science” to try and extend the lockdown further

    After all “Every Life is Precious”

    I have some more science for them (£20 million grant incoming I trust) if we ban all cars,vans,lorries etc road traffic accident deaths will drop to near zero,only near because the cyclists will kill the odd bod obviously…

    Why not?? “Every Life is Precious”

    What do you mean “We’ll all starve to death in short order!!”

    Ah as opposed to all starving to death when when our destroyed economy can no longer buy the food from overseas we can’t survive without??

    http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Conan-OBrien-Pencil-Tap-Facepalm-Reaction-To-The-News.gif

    1. It would have been nice if they’d followed oatmeal science before the lockdown, and not some arbitrary figures produced out of a bug-ridden, fifth-rate piece of amateur programming code.

  71. 318946+ up ticks,
    May one ask, priti patel is going to have words with the french over illegal immigrants leaving their shores for ours, when she fails will PM johnson be willing to emulate his role model W S Churchill, who asked the french ( nicely) to turn their naval fleet over to him and when they didn’t he bombed the sh!te out of them.

  72. Hope this is not a repeat:

    The Government is still allowing politics to lead the science in the shadows

    The biggest political con in modern history has descended into farce. Professor McLockdown, has choked on his own junk science, resigning from Sage after the Telegraph exposed that he flouted the very mass house arrest he advocated for everyone else.

    But his defence – that he broke the rules because he had already caught the virus and recovered from it – is even more revelatory; turns out Britain’s most influential epidemiologist believes that not only can you gain immunity from Covid-19, but that this should release you from lockdown.

    If No 10’s response to coronavirus was really based on “following the science”, of course, these new details about Prof Ferguson’s view might be a game-changer, prompting, at the very least, Downing Street discussions of how to rapidly loosen the rules for those who have had the virus.

    Like with all good farces, though, the most absurd is yet to come. Incredibly, Downing Street shows little sign of learning from the Ferguson Chapter. And, astonishingly, once again, “the science” is being compromised by political hysteria – a scandal that continues to be barely scrutinised.

    But before we get to the meat, let us briefly chew over the cautionary tale that can be cleaved from the career of Prof Ferguson. He has a track record of making wildly inaccurate projections, for example that BSE would kill 150,000 people (the real figure was fewer than 200).

    Reluctance to critique both his previous performance and the robustness of his Imperial College paper, could well go down as the biggest collective political-media failure of our time.

    Prof Ferguson’s study was not peer reviewed. It was flagrantly one-sided and written in Pac-Man era computer coding which, at the time, was unverified and insufficiently documented. Due to the lack of reliable data, the scope for inaccuracy in Mr Ferguson’s modelling was high. Yet still the Government hooked onto it, and nobody held No 10 to account for this decision.

    With a few exceptions, the scientific community – which has learned from climate change that dissenting from politically correct narratives risks career suicide – resisted pointing out that the study’s methodology was questionable. Even less impressive was the media, with the Beeb & co. deciding that interrogating the official version of “the science” was beyond their expertise.

    And now, here we are once more.

    Our Government is yet again pursuing a political strategy in the shadows. One that risks releasing the economy from the deep freeze, only to bludgeon it to smithereens. And one that makes a mockery of “the science”.

    Having petrified the public to the point where it is overwhelmingly against lifting lockdown, keen to avoid ethical arguments over lives versus livelihoods, and mindful of its failure to rapidly create the infrastructure that would allow the immune or the low-risk to return to normal life, No 10 is determined to lift lockdown as little and as slowly as possible. But by failing to open up schools quickly enough and by enforcing an arbitrary two metre rule (stricter than Germany, France and Spain) we risk pursuing the most commercially ruinous social distancing strategy in Europe.

    This is presented to us as necessary to prevent the “second wave”, which most people now believe is inevitable. But is there evidence for that? The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford has found that beyond cyclical theories around influenza we know little about whether pandemics follow distinctive patterns at all, and “making absolute statements of certainty about ‘second waves’ is unwise”.

    Many of our assumptions about a second wave are based on the Spanish Flu in 1918, but partly due to censorship, a great deal of the relevant historical documents for this period are insufficiently reliable.

    In any case, countries that have started to open up, like Germany, have experienced no such resurgence. It may even be the case that so many people have been exposed to the virus that a second wave doesn’t materialise. Although our Government refuses to release full testing data, testing in Iceland suggests that the virus was more widespread in the UK in February than previously thought. The question is: why are we detonating our economy to avoid what science can’t even prove to be probable?

    It all comes down to one thing: in this new dystopia, that which doesn’t feed hysteria is dismissed as poison, a chilling development that our Government is too cowardly to lead against. Economists’ warnings are ignored. The alarming number of non-Covid excess deaths remains uninvestigated.

    Numerical analysis that “doesn’t fit” also gets little attention, with serious consequences. As anyone with a basic grasp of statistics would know, exploring the variability in the weekly death data is potentially far more useful than the comparisons between weekly deaths and a five-year average in the same period that have been widely circulated in the media.

    Omega Analysis, which provides research services based on mathematical advances in probability and statistics, has found that for four weeks of 2020 so far (up to April 24), the weekly death rate exceeded the maximum weekly deaths between 2010 and 2019 (16,237). The average for those four weeks is 19,813. Whether four weeks is proportionally significant is open to interpretation, though it strikes me personally as less proportionally significant than one might assume based on the media delirium and severity of the lockdown.

    Even more crucially, using a statistical method that incorporates Extreme Value Theory, it should have been perfectly possible for Downing Street to predict and allow for all four of those rises in weekly death rates; this tool was available well in advance of the pandemic yet it was not used by Government. Downing Street’s “cutting-edge” Cummings operation is, in reality, still living in the civil service dark ages. But who cares about nailing the methodology, or exposing that this whole fiasco could have been avoided, if the numbers contradict the hysteria narrative?

    The murky intersection between science and politics is the story of our time. Nobody was ready for this – politically, ethically, mentally, intellectually. Huge mistakes have been made. But here we have a chance to start putting things right. Our clever but craven Government must not be allowed to pull the same trick twice.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/07/despite-ferguson-fiasco-no-10-make-second-major-blunder/

    1. And the top BTL comments:

      ian morris 7 May 2020 7:19AM
      Boris has disappointed me, he’s obviously part of the same risk-averse, weakling , liberal ,cowardly, political class that I was hoping he wasn’t part of.

      The good news is that we can learn from this. One thing is that we must lose our dependency on China…another is that the EU really isn’t unified so leaving it isn’t such a big deal.

      Flag444UnlikeReply

      James Robbins 7 May 2020 7:27AM
      Hysteria on a mass scale is surely what this is.

      However, it is not just a U.K. issue, the same is happening around the world.

      Here in Holland my wife, a nurse, burst out laughing at the governments latest instructions. Apparently if you travel on public transport you must wear a face mask. However, if you cannot afford them or find them (as is the case), you must make your own ! I kid you not…..make your own …..from paper or tissue or cloth. Monty Python would have struggled to make a funnier sketch. Apart from having to walk around with a ‘Blue Peter’ style face mask, they will be completely ineffective, put on, taken off, on again, hands on it, in a bag, touching everything again……pointless.

      In years to come we will look back at this episode, where 99.97 percent of the world population did NOT die and yet we reacted like scared children, afraid of our own shadows, destroyed our economies and paid a very heavy price for many many years economically.

      2020, the year that Mass hysteria infected the world and brought it to its knees.

      Flag407UnlikeReply

      John Misselbrook 7 May 2020 7:21AM
      I’m afraid that this is what happens when there are too few politicians with science degrees and too many with Oxbridge PPE’s who are easily led by academics such as Professor “Pantsdown” Ferguson.

      Smart people with science degrees mainly work in pharma. They are used to ignoring over-rated, grant chasing academics and follow good data.

    2. With a few exceptions, the scientific community – which has learned
      from climate change that dissenting from politically correct narratives
      risks career suicide – resisted pointing out that the study’s
      methodology was questionable.

      If nothing else comes out of this debacle, let us hope that climate change can be challenged. They probably use similar crap modeling techniques and methodologies.

    3. I don’t know, but we are open for repeats.
      After all if our BBC can, why can’t we?

      Good afternoon, Lewis.

    1. Interesting that a graph is titled “Death certificates mentioning Covid-19″

      1. The risk graph was quite interesting – showing that the risk is hardly much more than normal life. The comments seem to fall into two camps – the scared and the fed -up-let’s get back to normal.

        1. The trouble is these days the authorities have been trying to remove all risk from life and too many people are unable to judge risk. It’s hard to believe from their graph that there are so many terrified under-65s out there, but perhaps unsurprising in view of the emphasis on H&S these days.

          1. Have you noticed that the Mail is now ramping fear of the effects on small children? Contrary to actual evidence, of course.

    2. Why are people so worried? I certainly don’t particularly want to catch it – if it’s anything like flu, it knocks you for six and is debilitating, but really? It’s only fatal usually to frail, elderly and people with other morbid conditions. For the healthy it’s not really a threat.

      1. We bred a generation that has bred a generation of snowflakes, Missus.

        1. It’s also the non-stop “we’re all going to die!!!” from the media.

          1. We are all going to die………all in good time – not necessarily just yet.

          2. We are all going to die unless we accept the wisdom of world government

      2. But I wasn’t frail and elderly before March, now I am vulnerable and need to be protected.

        To hell with the bug, my ego cannot take such a fall from grace.

        1. A few weeks ago, I had a phone call from a local Conservative lass doing a ring round of members to see if they were all right.
          Eventually, she divined from my monosyllabic replies, a certain lack of appreciation.
          “You don’t want this phone call, do you?” she remarked.
          I pointed out that, although the call was well meant, I didn’t relish being reminded that I was no longer in my first flush of youth.
          She then mentioned that she had a list to go through; since I know most of the people who would be on that list, I suggested she checked through it very carefully before she made any more calls.

        2. A few weeks ago, I had a phone call from a local Conservative lass doing a ring round of members to see if they were all right.
          Eventually, she divined from my monosyllabic replies, a certain lack of appreciation.
          “You don’t want this phone call, do you?” she remarked.
          I pointed out that, although the call was well meant, I didn’t relish being reminded that I was no longer in my first flush of youth.
          She then mentioned that she had a list to go through; since I know most of the people who would be on that list, I suggested she checked through it very carefully before she made any more calls.

        3. It can, Richard, if it means that you get delivery slots from the (GUM) supermarket.

          Best Beloved is acting like a Babushka with her ever-evident shopping basket, whenever she finds a reasonable delivery slot. Who am I to complain when she always puts whisky on the list – hic!

  74. Nicked comment

    This Covid-19 crisis doesn’t pass the smell test on a number of levels.

    The counting of deaths from Covid-19 is at best a vague guess and at worst a

    blatant manipulation of figures to give a higher total.

    The lockdown has been put in place due to an assessment modelled by a far

    left activist playing at being an academic . His past predictions should

    have precluded him from being anywhere close to the seat of power

    during this crisis.

    The media are in lockstep and all singing from

    the very same hymn sheet.,this always sets alarm bells ringing . No

    dissenting voices ? That should rarely if ever occur in a free

    democracy. Even during The Falklands war we had the BBC taking a pro

    Argentinian stance.So…there is something happening which is

    being hidden. A reason why we are being deprived our liberty and our

    voices are stifled and gagged . Whatever it is it bodes no good.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a4a0ce04e64a6e5d1b1ee7396a2c13c94ca1638c1720b1bf5c8ea5b57e64f112.jpg

    1. On the first day of the imprisonment I was talking to a neighbour I met on a walk.

      I said to him than that there was a rabbit off. The reaction seemed to be out of all proportion to the threat described.

      He agreed.

      I still think there’s a rabbit loose.

      1. I couldn’t make sense of the whole thing, i.e. was it another Spanish flu or just a seasonal flu, or something in between. Nothing seemed to make sense early on. Now I think it’s closer to seasonal flu, but some governments, including ours, still seem to be treating it as if it’s like the Spanish flu, or Ebola, or something.

  75. For those interested, the falcons nesting at Nottingham Trent have produced three eggs one of which has hatched.

    Prof Branestorm says that falcons often produce 1,000 eggs in a cluster…..

    1. “Prof Branestorm says that falcons often produce 1,000 eggs in a cluster.”

      Methinks the learned professor is pulling one’s pud!

      2. The prof has been using an eggsaggerated model based on Imperial units!

      1. 318946+up ticks,
        Evening Olt,
        Then what would be the group name of their repeat supporter / voters ?

    1. Sos, why does that remind of Russian tractor-builders rather than the female workforce of 1945?

    2. Popped out to post a letter and noted three houses out of several hundred displaying Union Flag bunting. As a lot of the bunting appeared to be plastic I couldn’t but help wonder where it was made…..?

      1. I haven’t put mine (flag, that is) up yet. I expect it was made in China.

        1. Early tomorrow, I’ll be hoisting the Union Flag on the church flagpole for the VE day celebrations. If Welby doesn’t like it he can come and take it down, if he thinks he’s hard enough…

      2. You might well wonder, Stephen. How many Union Flags were upside-down? After all, we are in distress.

    3. This lionisation of the NHS is getting a bit silly.

      To liken this epidemic to the 6 years of the Second World War is ridiculous. Propaganda even Geobbels would have thought crass in the extreme.

        1. It’s not as if there weren’t doctors and nurses working their pluck out during the war (along with a lot of men with guns and bombs), and if this virus is ‘beaten’, it won’t be by NHS nurses. It’ll be by the much-hated ‘Big Pharma’ coming up with a vaccine or some other treatment, or by the virus itself if it mutates to a less virulent form.

          It’s all distraction tactics to take our minds off the ruin of the country.

          They’ll be telling us HNS nurses won the Battle of Britain next.

          1. Never in the field of human history have so many been locked down by so few….

          2. Never in the field of human history have so many been locked down by so ‘flu….

          5. I find it offensive that certain people are trying to hijack the meaning of VE Day and turning into another NHS clap-fest.

    1. Thanks, but no thanks. The first five minutes were quite enough….{:¬((

    2. Thanks! I’ll give it a try. The lighting effects look fabulous.

      1. Switching on the English captions helps enormously unless you are fluent in French…

        1. I am, as it happens. Thank you the recommendation; I enjoyed it. A soundscape a bit reminiscent of Rautavaara, and the set was beautiful.

          1. Splendid. Having watched at least two dozen of the operas being streamed from the Met I’m almost opera’d out. There have been some wonderful productions including Wagner’s ring Cycle and Jonathan Miller’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ – I quite like seeing the interviews back stage and seeing all the resources used in putting the sets together.

          2. Yes, I’ve seen a few of them. Whilst I’ve never been to the Met, though, the backstage workings of an opera house are, let’s say, not unfamiliar to me …

            Always good to come across real fans – we need those. It’s going to be an appallingly hard time for opera in the near future.

          3. At the end of each production when the camera pans across the audience you see the fans tend to be of the older generations…
            Like many posting on this site I think Sweden’s approach to this pandemic has been the more sensible one and the sooner, the fear mongering stops the better. At this rate I can’t see audience returning to pre-pandemic numbers this side of Christmas 🙁

            Do you have any engagements in the pipeline for the remainder of 2020?

          4. It’s not just an older (more discerning 🙂 ) audience; theatre seats are very close together, pits are not expandable, and we singers are apparently veritable droplet super-spreaders. Can’t quite see masks on stage, either. And it’s not like anyone had massive profit margins before the virus. As I say; hard times ahead.

            My career self-immolated last year as I cancelled everything to care for my dying mother. It’s not a forgiving industry. Many of my friends are going to be very hard hit. The chorus gets paid more than many of us, and force majeure clauses in most solo contracts mean that when things are cancelled you don’t get a penny.

            Thanks for asking!

  79. Breaking News. All the extra Co2 in the atmosphere is helping my plants put on extraordinary growth. If this keeps up we may stand a chance of ending World hunger. Clap your hands for Co2!

      1. No the Co2 is free. HS2 is effing expensive and so C19th technology.

    1. In the days of Hornblower, they would it would have been Target Practice

    2. No chance ………I was under the impression it was part of Boris’ EU Brexit ‘deal’.
      ‘Having a word or two’ with Nigel. The police seem to think that.

      1. 318946+ up ticks,
        Re,
        Those you mention are “ALL in it together”
        My trust is firmly in the
        Tommy Robinson Court as in
        being a tried & tested truth sayer.

  82. A good reason for missing BBC at 7.30 this evening.

    An eccentric leftie remainiac discusses “the role poetry is playing during the pandemic” with poet of colour and a Britain hating “historian” of colour.

    2. I am afraid I was never a very trendy English teacher.

      Christo studied English Literature at the IB Higher level at Gresham’s and was told by Mrs V-H to look at Christina Rosseti’s poetry from a lesbian viewpoint. This maybe explains why he decided to study Aerospace Engineering at university rather than English Literature.

    3. According to my Sunday Times – and my online schedule – we will have ‘We’ll Meet Again’ – Dame Vera Lynn – by (Bill’s fav!) Katie Derham …

  84. Morning all. Let’s get Ferguson letters.

    SIR – Some people are questioning why it was necessary for Professor Neil Ferguson to step down (“The Government’s lockdown adviser guilty of breaking his own rules”, report, May 6).

    Have they no scruples? He cannot advise the whole country to do one thing, then do the opposite and think he can get away with it. I hope being labelled a hypocrite sits well with him.

    Barbara Smith

    Stafford

    SIR – Has Professor Ferguson lost faith in “the science” and embraced herd immunity?

    Anne Collingswood

    Stockbridge, Hampshire

    SIR – As the most high-profile advocate of the lockdown resigns after flouting the rules, can one assume that his claim to have made an “error of judgment” was more than just a euphemism for foolishness?

    His selfish indulgence (the morality of which is immaterial) undermines the value of the advice he has given, making the Government’s exit policy even harder to formulate.

    Charles Holden

    Micheldever, Hampshire

    SIR – Did Professor Ferguson regret his failure to adhere to the rules – or just the fact that he was caught?

    Glyn Rodgers

    York

    SIR – You point out that a number of Professor Ferguson’s predictions have been adrift. Perhaps it is now time for the Government to take some sensible advice and end this crippling lockdown.

    Peter Flesher

    Halifax, West Yorkshire

    SIR – You report (May 6) that a Cambridge research team has found that Britons are more fearful of Covid-19 because of our care for others. While I do not seek to belittle our sense of social responsibility, I suspect this fear has also been stoked by the media, and some television channels in particular.

    Pamela Wheeler

    Shrewsbury

    SIR – David Heathcoat-Amory (Letters, May 6) suggests that those over 70 should stay in lockdown.

    He fails to see that, if they go out, the only extra risk is to themselves, not society, and this is a decision they can make on their own. Many will decide they would rather take the risk than stay in lockdown – myself included.

    If we banned people from doing anything that put them at risk, skiing and mountaineering would have been outlawed years ago. If an 80-year-old can climb Everest, surely someone in their 70s can go out and buy a paper.

    Dr Michael Pegg

    Esher, Surrey

    SIR – Can we assume that Mr Heathcoat-Amory does not live on the top floor of a 15-storey tower block?

    Michael Henry

    Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire

  85. Good morning all.
    Bright, clear & sunny up here in Derbyshire, but a brisk 2°C outside.

    3. He knew of what he was writing as far as skool life was concerned: he was a boy and then a master at Blundell’s. When I was there there was a boy of my age and in my class called Molesworth!

  87. Just been down to the Village. It is an absolutely beautiful day. Big queue at Morrisons and the butchers so I went to Farmfoods. Quite a few families about and the chemist is now open. On my way back I passed a couple who obligingly cringed back into a thorn hedge so that I could pass unmolested by the agents of the Great Dying. I said to the woman. “It’s not Bubonic Plague.” Whereupon she replied with slavish subservience, “We have to do it you know.” There is nothing to be done for these people. I have no doubt that they watch the BBC!

    1. At Sainsbury’s yesterday afternoon, the queue, normally only 20-30 yards and less than 5 minutes, stretched for more than 150 yards, right around the side of the building and almost down the site’s rear entrance. I nearly had a moment: “Bo**ocks to this! Watch my back! I’m going in!” I thought better of it.

      “…a couple who obligingly cringed back into a thorn hedge…”

      There’s plenty of comic material here. I stride purposefully and determinedly along the paths in the park and watch them dive out of the way. Sadly, none have thrown themselves in the lake or the bramble thickets. At the back of my mind there is a memory of an old comedy sketch lurking. Pythons? Two Ronnies?

    2. I did my shopping yesterday. Since the lock-down I moved it a day earlier to avoid Fridays and so far Thursday mornings have been very civilised. I reasoned that with tomorrow being Bank Holiday, today would be the equivalent of Friday, so I gave it a swerve. It worked. No queue at all to get into the shop.

      Standing in the queue (of 3) for the check-out I was behind a man aged about 50. No mask (a few people were wearing masks in the shop, some covering nose and mouth, some only the chin, while one or two wore scarves as if on return from a tooth extraction), but he was wearing those blue rubber gloves that have appeared out of nowhere and which the wearers seem to think act as a talisman to protect them from ill as they use them to transfer bacteria from one surface to another, including their faces, in lieu of bare skin.

      As we waited, someone he knew came past and they exchanged a few words. Blue Gloves Man told his friend that the thing he was finding most stressful was standing in the check-out queue (as small numbers of people passed singly at ranges of 2m or slightly less).

      With all the things that can happen in the world, we’ve come to a state where standing behind a trolley in a shop causes severe anxiety in grown men.

      Fear stalks the land.

      1. I quietly thank God that, being elderly and suffering ‘underlying’ health problems, we are both on the Die quickly list Coronavirus Support Register and, as such and, despite our very rural dwelling, we are able to get delivery slots from most supermarkets (Morrison’s excepted) so there is no queuing either outside or at checkouts. Being somewhat intolerant of sheepish behaviour, I can imagine that I would be constantly trying out my (acerbic?) wit on the population at large and would probably end up hospitalised but not with WuFlu.

  88. Afternoon /evening one and all. Just had our (ssh, don’t tell anyone!) second walk in the sunshine and come back to a date and walnut loaf made by Alf with a cuppa And very nice it was too. So warm that it was difficult to cut. Delish.

    I see the DT headline says “lockdown for another three weeks”. Stuff that. I’m not taking any more notice of what “they” say about this bloody virus I’ve had enough. If they can’t see how ridiculous their “strategy” is they are even more stupid than I thought and that’s saying something.

      1. Oh yes I did, thanks, thought I’d said. I sent it to son and DIL too as they have a cat and I’ve seen them picking out tics from its fur. I thought it was fascinating.

        1. Not to worry.
          I am always concerned that my links don’t work for people when they request something.

        2. Er..yuk… I get my lady friend neighbour to do it. Spiders inserting their heads into flesh makes me gag… 🙁

          1. And, as a nice surprise, you reward her with a flotilla of yellow rubber ducks floating in her pond for when she gets home from work??? You’re a mountebank, fraudster and a quack, Sir!! {:^))

    2. There are those who would argue that anyone disregarding lockdown recommendations are the stupid ones.

          8. No plans over here for getting us back racing, though. I had a video sent today of one of my NH horses. He’s out in a field, wrapped up in anti-fly sheets and mask, stuffing his face and failing to social distance from his pals who are also on furlough.

          10. I’m nursing an ankle injury at present…..due to keeping fit exercises!

          13. If it’s any consolation, I tripped over something in the early hours, a few nights ago, and came out of one of my prostheses. The ankles are fine (being non-existent), but one stump has been excruciating. Ibuprofen has helped, but that prolly (©BT) means I’m more likely to get the bloody virus…

          14. That’s all fine and dandy, Geoff, but what about Succession Planning: who’s going to take over?

            But, seriously, do take of yourself , my friend. We owe you a lot! 🙂

          16. So I am informed, perhaps you should address the question to older, less fortunate Nottlers, content with being incontinent..

      2. All that I have read about the Ferguson methodology of calculating probable deaths together with his previous record of prognostications, well, let’s say I’ve drawn my own conclusions. And I was pretty sceptical about the lockdown right from the start.

      2. A friend has finally managed to get on a flight home from Malta to Canada, it took over a month to arrange flights that were not cancelled within hours of booking.

        He is on a flight from Amsterdam to Toronto right now. There are just two passengers in the cheap seats of a large 787.

        If that is typical, there is a lot more freight flying around than passengers. Well for everywhere else that is, since you can supposedly just waltz into the UK without issues, flights to the UK are probably crowded.

    5. I have C&Ped this to the Woking snitch-Portal, along with your real names and asked for action to be taken!

      1. OMG 😮 can you believe that people do that? I’m sure I read the other day that 200,000 calls had been made to yer perlice! BTW Happy VE Day. What do you think our soldiers would have made of this virus fiasco?

        Have a wonderful day – sun is shining, should be lovely.

  89. Listening to many radio phone-ins on LBC, I’m struck by how a majority are NOT in favour of easing the lockdown and, indeed, quite a few are in favour of tightening it. These people seem to have little understanding of risk, nor do they seem to have given any thought to the increase in non-Covid deaths due to the NHS obsession with Covid (and totally risk-averse potential patients) nor how the hell we’re going to pay for the sainted behemoth afterwards. Be a good idea if the government pre-announced a rise in taxes and drop in public-sector pay contingent upon number of weeeks in lockdown.

    1. And my guess would be that they are being paid handsomely for doing nothing.

      They are the real covidiots.

      1. There was an article in my local rag which claimed “Head Teacher [it was actually a Headmaster] says we should not rush to open schools”. Hmm,thought I, if I were still teaching and was at home enjoying my garden on 80% of my salary with no nasty kids, no books to mark and no lessons to prepare, I wouldn’t want to rush to re-open the schools, either.

        1. He’s probably on a six figure salary so unlikely to be getting 80%, but probably quite content as long as he doesn’t have a large mortgage.

    1. Yep.

      The problem is that European and North American bees have not found the adaptation yet.

  91. Evening, all. I had a nasty shock this morning; I got on the scales and had put on a stone! If my life ever does get back to normal, the poor Connemara’s legs will be splayed out like Bambi on ice the first time I get on! It’s a combination of CBA syndrome, no social life and furlough Merlot. I have to get a grip and do something about it. If I am snarly, it will be withdrawal symptoms from going cold turkey. MOH got rebellious today and insisted on being taken into town. We made it and back without being collared by plod. I have started tackling the shrubbery that has turned into a wood through lack of pruning for control. It’s long overdue. Finally, the fridge freezer has arrived. It’s been quite a day!

      1. …and I’m delighted to hear that, peddy. I have just noticed that there is a glass in my hand with something slurpable in it and the oven is on with my sort’a boy scout supper cooking. There are many accomplished chefs on this website (including you, peddy, according to all sources) but I am not one of them. I think it is perfectly splendid that there is so much swapping of information about bread recipes/sources of bread making flour, etc. etc. and everything else culinary. I can’t help noticing that close to 100% of the participants offering guidance are male. My father took up bread making when he became a widower, aged 57. Without wishing to be seen to offend him, we three progeny would do anything to eschew his offerings which would be treasured by any smash-and-grab robber wishing to shatter a jeweller’s plate glass window with a single blow.

      1. Indeed – my first thought. It turns out that it is a heavily pregnant nanny goat…{:¬))

        1. Ah a member of the LGBT fraternity where the LG stands for Lesbian Goat ( I can’t think what BT stands for…)

          1. ‘black t**t?

            Oh! dear……I have washed my mouth out!!

            I hate myself…..very often!!

    3. After an hour, I still can’t think of any puns… just kidding… I’ll get my goat.

  97. Chocolate

    Subject: Chocolate

    Mr Cadbury met Miss Rowntree on a Double Decker.
    It was just After Eight.
    They got off at Quality Street , and had a drink in Mars bar.
    He asked her name. ‘Polo, I’m the one with the hole’ she said with a Wispa.
    ‘I’m Marathon , the one with the nuts’ he replied.
    He touched her Cream Eggs, which was a Kinder Surprise for her.
    Then he slipped his hand into her Snickers, which made her Ripple.
    He fondled her Jelly Babies and she rubbed his Tic Tacs.
    Soon they were Heart Throbs.
    It was a Fab moment as she screamed in Turkish Delight.
    But, 3 days later, his Sherbet Dip Dab started to itch.
    Turns out Miss Rowntree had been with Bertie Bassett and he had Allsorts!

    1. Senior Service took a Player down Park Drive to the Embassy down Piccadilly,
      And laid her on a Gold Leaf.
      He took out his Rothman’s King Size and stuffed it up her Virginia.
      Nine months later out popped a little Cadet.
      This shows that Senior Service satisfies!

          1. You keep telling us how much weight you have lost!!
            Well done………it is not easy is it?

          2. Thanks, Garlands.

            Actually this time it’s not been too difficult. I may eat as much meat, fish, fat, eggs, cheese, dairy, nuts, salads and green vegetables as I wish. As long as I keep away from all carbs, i.e: cereals, root vegetables, bread, pasta, pastry, rice, noodles, potatoes and (most important of all) sugar — in all its forms — then I don’t get hungry. I enjoy one substantial meal a day, do not crave anything and I lose, on average, one kilogram a week. What’s not to like?

          5. ‘What’s not to like?

            Not much…….except taties, I love them in all
            styles!!

    1. I just went for the ‘reply’ icon and hit ‘downvote’ by mistake! It was reversible fortunately. Bon Soir Peddy. Stay safe and kbo.

    1. I’ve always enjoyed the appropriate alternative to ‘snack pot’ – ‘snot pack’. It’s a similar product to ‘pot noodle’ apparently.

  100. Once again the analysis on why Black people in Britain are dying from exposure to the virus.
    What drives their offspring to stab and take drugs .. can we also have analysis on those as well?

    BBC news just now.

    So many questions so few answers .

      1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52574931
        The thing is , how many white victims v black/ people of colour .

        Why has this become a political issue .
        If we whitey’s were to be residents in poor areas of Africa, the chances are we would succumb to malaria, typhoid , yellow fever and some other God aweful disease .
        My father had malaria on and off for years and the nasty little cysts in his liver eventually killed him .

        How many white people in Africa and Asia have suffered hugely from foreign viruses.

          1. ‘Follow the Science’ and it says that all humans emerged from Africa! Je suis Africain

          3. It think it’s just whites. The blacks stayed and have yet to reach the Neanderthal stage of development.

        2. The good news is it cannot be blamed on native medical and nursing staff as a significant proportion (if not majority) of our medical and nursing establishment is drawn from the BAME communities.

    2. ‘Afternoon, Mags, just a couple of words to answer the question(s)

      Culture and genes.

      ‘Nuff said.

      1. They seem to forget that WE are also at risk too.
        I think it is very narrow and self centered of the black / people of colour community to believe they should be immune .
        Many of us are scared , my Moh is built like a racing snake , athletic and a good all rounder , but he inherited Typ e 2 diabetes from his parents .. and he has high blood pressure , as have I .. treated of course . So we are both at risk , and have our eldest son living at home , but who is out to work everyday .

        We are so concerned about mingling .. we cannot get a grocery delivery slot either .
        We both feel so angry that at our time in life , an in particular after spending years looking after elderly relatives and other traumas that one section of society seems to be recieving more sympathy than us who voted for Brexit , paid taxes forever , and have never ever been a strain on the public pocket .

        Now it sounds as if I am being selfish , so sorry for that .
        Any one who suffers with this terrible virus has my sympathy in buckets,

        My other rant is , care homes , dear elderly people in care homes who have this dreadful virus will have a shocking end of life experience , no facilities like oxygen , proper pain killers nor proper nursing attention .

        1. Just practise good hygiene, T_B. Wash your hands regularly and try not to stress. Stress depletes your immune system.

  101. Just suppose.
    What if the model used by Ferguson was not employed in response to the appearance of Covid-19?
    What if Covid-19 was released by the Chinese in order to test the validity of the Ferguson model? That is the model was set up to see if the effects, medical and economic, of a serious epidemic could be predicted with any accuracy. This was pre-planned as part of the Event 201 series of discussions and arrangements.
    Just a thought. Conspiracy theory? You betcha!

    1. My understanding of ‘the model used by Ferguson’ was his neighbour’s wife …

  103. Yet more doom & gloom:

    “One of the patients in the study, at Shagqui Municipal Hospital in Henan Province, tested positive for Covid-19 in his semen 16 days after coming down with the virus and three days after clinical recovery”.

      1. You don’t suppose the Prof was conducting a personal clinical trial?

  107. HAPPY HOUR – Who was sold a turkey…..?

    Coronavirus PPE: all 400,000 gowns flown from Turkey for NHS fail UK standards.

    Hey ho…….

          4. According to his previous prognostications he never had a Best Before Data….

          7. According to his previous prognostications he never had a Best Before Data….

    2. I heard the arms were the wrong size .

      It is similar to the export of condoms to China years ago.

      Someone got the order muddled up and sent African ones to China , and the reverse for Africans.. People were not too happy!

      1. A lot of unwanted babies if there was a chink in every one.
        Edited for ere vs eir.

        1. Chinese-made condoms too small, Zimbabwe’s health minister complains
          One Chinese manufacturer says it is considering making its contraceptives in various sizes after hearing complaint from the African government official

          A Chinese condom manufacturer says it is considering making its products in different sizes after Zimbabwe’s health minister complained that contraceptives made in China and exported to the African nation were too small for its men.
          Health Minister David Parirenyatwa made the comments at an event in the capital Harare last week to promote HIV/Aids prevention, according to the website New Zimbabwe.com.
          “The southern African region has the highest incidence of HIV and we are promoting the use of condoms,” Parirenyatwa was quoted as saying.
          “Youths now have a particular condom that they like, but we don’t manufacture them. We import condoms from China and some men complain they are too small.”

          https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2135243/chinese-made-condoms-too-small-zimbabwes-health-minister

          1. Your average Ch¡nk!e might not be well-endowed in the wedding-tackle stakes, but they still know how to use them.

            1,300,000,000 of them is good enough proof!

      1. We’ve been stuffed…….again!

        Couldn’t be the bumbling incompetence of civil servants could it….?

    5. We are not told what is wrong with them.
      Is it H&S flexing its puny muscles so it gets attention?

  111. While the sentiment is broadly correct, isn’t this DT opinion piece (for tomorrow) a bit anaemic?

    We must protect our freedoms from fear

    TELEGRAPH VIEW

    Today we mark the 75th anniversary of victory in Europe. The defeat of fascism represents the finest qualities of our country: stoic, resourceful, compassionate, free. Whenever we judge how we are doing as a nation, it is inevitably the Greatest Generation that we compare ourselves to, and the question we often ask is, “are we the same people?”

    The response to the coronavirus shows that in many ways we are. There has been heroism on the NHS frontline; the public has pulled together. The Government imposed a draconian lockdown on the assumption that it would be defied, yet compliance has been almost unanimous. Fear plays a part, but it also reflects a very British desire to “do the right thing”. We don’t normally have the kind of intrusive state apparatus commonplace in other countries (there are no ID cards here) because Britain has enough volunteerism and good will to get by without it.

    Unfortunately, not everyone has shown common sense. Not the officials who snubbed private sector help; not the police who harassed citizens trying to obey unclear rules. There was no common sense in the advice that said patients who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 could be discharged to care homes and, in the mad dash to protect the NHS, decisions may well have been taken that put other lives at risk, including members of the war generation. They did their best to save us. Did we do our best to save them?

    And where is the spirit of freedom, the thing for which we were fighting in the Second World War? Of course, sometimes one has to curtail freedom to preserve it, and one could hardly call the wartime restrictions libertarian. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, warned that central planning and the veneration of the state had reached such a degree that Britain was in danger of looking like the enemy. The Conservative Party offered 1.5 tonnes of its precious paper ration to publish an abridged version of the book, but it appeared too late to affect the 1945 election: the British elected Labour in a landslide and six grim years of austerity and bureaucracy followed.

    The novelist Anthony Burgess, who remembered “decaying buildings” and “government slogans on the walls”, was convinced that George Orwell’s 1984 was actually a parody of life in Britain in 1948. “Orwell gave us nothing new,” wrote Burgess, he was only telling us to “hang on to your liberties.” Britain, finally exhausted by building socialism, put Winston Churchill back in No 10 on a pledge to reduce rationing, and the Tories spent the rest of the century trying to push back the frontiers of the state. If we’re not careful, Covid-19 could easily reverse all their achievements.

    Freedom is not guaranteed, it is always being contested, and the most compelling attempts to constrain freedom are those which appeal to public safety. A pandemic is a horrific threat to life and liberty, which is why it must be contained and why the Government had to take strong measures. But the wrong reaction to a pandemic could easily pose a threat to life and liberty too, which is why when the Government proposes an app that can track our movements, we have to demand oversight – and when the state shuts down the economy, we have to ask if this action is proportionate, and how long it will last.

    Boris Johnson, himself a freedom fan, clearly loathes having to play Big Brother, and the test of his liberal instincts will come this Sunday when he lays out his step-by-step plan for easing the lockdown. He will be cautious, and necessarily so, but he must channel some of the optimism of his hero, Churchill. He needs to restore confidence to a nation that, according to the polls, not only backs the lockdown but is now terrified of lifting it.

    At some point, this country needs a new conversation about freedom: it is a case that must be built, a spirit that must be nurtured. Today, however, is the day for saying “thank you” to all those who fought for liberty 75 years ago, who risked everything for their country. Britain wouldn’t be Britain without them.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/05/07/must-protect-freedoms-fear/

    1. ‘We must protect our freedoms from fear,’

      So.….why DT and all other broadsheets,
      half sheets and News sheets have you all,
      without exception chosen to deride our
      Government, in power for less than three months
      which has had to pick up the slack for the last twenty
      years………..Bollops to each and every one of you.

      I hope you all go to the wall!

      [No….. I am not a Conservative voter but I do love
      this Country, for all its foibles and idiosyncrasies]

    2. Wow, man he am so damn diverse, just what we’s wanting to expand our diverse society.

      1. And when dey al de get Covid, dey sue de judge who ensured that each(an evry) child + him and his brood mare, did not each have each have own room for social distancing

    1. I would hope, that the Board of Governers, or whoever manage RHC, will ask for ‘proper’ Death Certficates detailing the actual cause of death

      It is NOT ACCEPTABLE, for the death of these Pensioners, by recording Cpvis19, to be used for political purposes.

      It is bad enough, that some of their compatriots are still being pursued through the courts for events that happend 30/40 years ago, meanwhile known IRA members are Courtproof, thanks t Blair

      1. How typical of politics in this country to turn such a global wrath of God into something political .. especially as we all know that the Chinese have weaponised this evil virus to attack Europeans to destabilise economic prosperity !
        (Said with tongue in cheek with a rising inflection of voice )

    2. As in, “no s***, Sherlock.” Which is what we’ve been saying and the government and its advisors denied. F***wits, all of them.

    1. Yo and Fanx Boss

      I do not know what we Nottlers would do without you

      Respect

        1. Geoff, I mean it.

          We have a way of chatting here, that has no equivalent.

          Even the ‘baddies’ are treated with respect (mostly)

          1. ‘Even the baddies are treated with respect (mostly )

            Tryers……we don’t have any ‘baddies’ here, fortunately
            we all muddle along.

            Yo!!!

Comments are closed.