Tuesday 13 April: When 140 have already attended a memorial service, why limit the Duke’s funeral to only 30?

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/04/12/letterswhen-140-have-already-attended-memorial-service-limit/

545 thoughts on “Tuesday 13 April: When 140 have already attended a memorial service, why limit the Duke’s funeral to only 30?”

    1. Green Party political broadcast in Scotland, ” Scotland can produce enough green energy to power the whole of Europe”.

      1. Well, you have to hand it to the Wee Pretendy Parliament; no turbines or dams needed.

        1. They are not worried because the EU will protect us, after they welcome us back with open arms and generous gifts.

    1. Morning Rik. The Modern UK is such a fount of Lies, Deception and Propaganda that it makes the old Soviet Union a model of probity!

    1. And she is a little heftier than the flattering image – but I hope she wins the Presidential election, it would turn European politics up-side down.

  8. Men Behaving Badly

    Wife: ‘What are you doing?’
    Husband: ‘Nothing.’
    Wife: ‘Nothing …? You’ve been reading our marriage certificate for an hour.’
    Husband: ‘I’m looking for the expiry date.’
    ——————————
    Wife: ‘Do you want dinner?’
    Husband: ‘Sure! What are my choices?’
    Wife: ‘Yes or no.’
    ——————————
    Stress Reliever
    Girl: ‘When we get married, I want to share all your worries, troubles and lighten your burden.’
    Boy: ‘It’s very kind of you, darling, but I don’t have any worries or troubles.’
    Girl: ‘Well that’s because we aren’t married yet.’
    ——————————
    Son: ‘Mum, when I was on the bus with Dad this morning, he told me to give up my seat to a lady.’
    Mum: ‘Well, you have done the right thing.’
    Son: ‘But Mum, I was sitting on Daddy’s lap.’
    ——————————
    A newly married man asked his wife, ‘Would you have married me if my father
    hadn’t left me a fortune?’
    ‘Honey,’ the woman replied sweetly, ‘I’d have married you, no matter who
    left you a fortune!’
    ——————————
    A wife asked her husband: ‘What do you like most in me, my pretty face or my sexy body?’
    He looked at her from head to toe and replied: ‘I like your sense of humour!’
    ——————————
    Husbands are men after all!

    A man was sitting reading his papers when his wife hit him round the head with a frying pan. ‘What was that for?’ the man asked. The wife replied, ‘That was for the piece of paper with the name Jenny on it that I found in your trouser pocket’.
    The man then said ‘When I was at the races last week, Jenny was the name of the horse I bet on.’ The wife apologized and went on with the housework.
    Three days later the man is watching TV when his wife bashes him on the head with an even bigger frying pan, knocking him unconscious. Upon re-gaining consciousness, the man asked why she had hit him again. Wife replied… ‘Your horse phoned’

  12. The daily offering of DT’s gaggle of trolls rebranded as “Arrested Development”: “Geoff Shaw’s offering confirms he’s run out of weed, mixing “geographical metpahors” and lost his atlas:

    SIR – The coronavirus legislation makes no sense when there were 140 people at a service of remembrance in Canterbury Cathedral, but only 30 will be allowed at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

    Jane Bell
    Fortrose, Ross-shire

    SIR – To allow only 30 guests at the Duke’s funeral is shameful.

    The Prime Minister should take this opportunity, not only as a mark of respect, but also because the data now show the virus has dramatically reduced, to announce that restrictions on funerals are to be lifted.

    Alan Billingsley
    Whitworth, Lancashire

    SIR – It would be a tremendously powerful mark of respect for the extraordinary life and the unstinting service of the Duke of Edinburgh if the BBC were to broadcast his funeral on Saturday without commentary.

    Brigadier Mike Wharmby (retd)
    North Warnborough, Hampshire

    SIR – I can think of no better epitaph than Matthew 25:21: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

    Gp Capt David Greenway RAF (retd)
    Andover, Hampshire

    SIR – The more I hear about the Duke and his activities, the more I realise I was unaware of quite how much he instigated and achieved.

    What an extraordinary man he was.

    Fiona Macfarlane
    Bath, Somerset

    SIR – It has been said that the Duke of Edinburgh was well read. My father told me many years ago of a dinner where the Duke was to reply to the toast to the guests.

    The proposer of the toast remarked on how many different roles Prince Philip succeeded in filling and said that some lines of Dryden seemed apt:

    A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.

    In reply Prince Philip said of these lines that he was sure they had been well meant but that the proposer should have mentioned how the poem went on:

    Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
    Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
    But, in the course of one revolving moon,
    Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon

    John Watherston
    London SW1

    SIR – In the summer of 1961, I was the dental officer on board HMS Tiger and we were the guard ship at Cowes Regatta. We held a cocktail party on the quarterdeck and a royal party came over from the Royal Yacht Britannia, including Prince Philip and Princesses Marina and Alexandra.

    During the evening Prince Philip was meeting some of the officers and, spying the brick-red colour between my lieutenant’s stripes, said: “Oh, here’s a rare bird. I presume you know the motto of this ship?”

    “I certainly do sir,” I replied.

    “Well, you’re the only one who can accomplish that,” he said, and laughed as he walked away.

    The motto of HMS Tiger is Quis eripiet dentes, which means, “Who shall draw my teeth?”

    Malcolm Parrish
    Tetbury, Gloucestershire

    SIR – Ten years ago, my four-year-old daughter was chosen to present a bouquet to the Queen at Canongate Kirk.

    The presentation took place at the end of a long service. When my daughter stepped forward to do her duty, her rather shy twin brother hid behind my skirts. The Queen was all smiles and gentleness as she accepted the proffered bunch. The Duke of Edinburgh, upright and elegant, one step behind, played peek-a-boo with my son.

    Two new young fans. One impressed mother.

    Dominique Davidson
    Edinburgh

    SIR – Perhaps his greatest asset was a talent to be amused.

    Mark Solon
    London E1

    SIR – Until quite recently I would have agreed with Stuart Moss (Letters, April 11) about Prince Harry’s suitability to oversee the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. Now I don’t.

    Barbara Whitaker
    Halton Village, Buckinghamshire

    SIR – Forty years ago I, like many young people before and since, was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive my Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award.

    Recipients were permitted a guest and, as my parents worked overseas, I wanted my sister Rachael to accompany me. This required parental input as we were both still at school.

    I set out to the telegram office for that purpose. “Would love Rachael to come to Buckingham Palace,” was quite expensive, so I shortened it to “Love R come Buck”, and kept some change in my pocket.

    The telegram my parents received from their son, 6,000 miles away, was: “Lover come back”. You can imagine the rest.

    Mark Tyler
    Saint-Quentin-de-Caplong, France

    SIR – As sometime chairman of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal, I have been puzzled by descriptions in the media of that nice man Prince Philip as a foreigner.

    As a direct descendant of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, he was born a British subject. At least one attorney-general was confused by the point but the law was settled by the House of Lords in 1957 in the case of Attorney-General v Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover.

    Presumably the issue was considered before Prince Philip was awarded the King’s Commission.

    Michael Shrimpton
    Andover, Hampshire

    SIR – Readers may be interested to know that the Duke was a follower of letters in The Daily Telegraph.

    As Colonel in Chief of the Queen’s Royal Hussars, he attended our annual dinner on the day that a letter I had written about “poppy etiquette” was published. He leant across at dinner and simply said: “Saw your letter.”

    Lt Col Charles Carter (retd)
    Llanteg, Pembrokshire

    SIR – Surely, an appropriate memorial to the Duke of Edinburgh would be a royal yacht rather than a statue, which might, in the future, offend the politically correct and be defaced or pulled down.

    Patricia Harrison
    Stebbing, Essex

    Standing up to Russia

    SIR – If Russia were to attack Ukraine (report, April 10) it would be like Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939, and I am sure it would be all over within 14 days – before the West had even held a meeting to discuss the matter.

    By amassing troops at the Ukrainian border, Russia is surely testing the resolve of President Biden, and knows that the EU is weak and indecisive. America and the West must be strong. If they fail to show resolve, China will see the weakness and move on Taiwan.

    The free world should be placed on red alert. We should all immediately move troops to defend Ukraine.

    Geoff Shaw
    Theydon Bois, Essex

    Marooned gardeners

    SIR – I am a Northern Irish amateur gardener. Last year I bought seeds, plants and bulbs from a range of mainland UK nurseries. This year not a single one will send things to me.

    Last year I also used Farmer Gracy, a Dutch firm that specialises in bulbs. You would think that my recent order of dahlias would be fine, since the Netherlands and Northern Ireland follow the same agricultural rules, but it has had to refund me because the order has been stopped in customs. The same has happened to friends.

    This means that we in Northern Ireland can’t get any horticultural produce from mainland UK because we’re tied to EU rules, and we can’t get produce from the EU because we’re in the UK. Either individual EU states or the Brussels fiefdom are conducting a spiteful campaign against us and the rest of the UK. I feel completely marooned now, and not enough is being done about it.

    We must retaliate against every petty rule until the EU remembers that we’re all supposed to be allies. It clearly takes loyalists rioting on the streets for anyone to bother taking our plight seriously.

    When I voted for Brexit I wanted the UK to be free from pettiness, but we in Northern Ireland have become the victims of a nonsensical situation that sees us with the worst of both worlds.

    Elaine Allen
    Newtownards, Co Down

    Harebrained Covid guidance for hairdressers

    SIR – The Government’s guidance for hairdressers and others who provide close-contact services says they should keep appointments as short as possible. This will do nothing to reduce risk of transmission. In fact it will increase it.

    Assuming one in 1,000 people has Covid and you have one customer per day, you have a one in 1,000 chance of that person being infected. If
    you make short appointments, and have 20 customers, you have increased your risk twentyfold.

    John Snook
    Sheffield, South Yorkshire

    SIR – Discussing vaccine passports and possible future lockdowns with my son and his friends, it scares me how they see no long-term danger in the abdication without question of personal freedom and responsibility.

    They have heated discussions on politics, gender identity and social deprivation, but see no danger as the Government creeps into the minutiae of their lives with myriad regulations.

    Yes, Covid-19 is a crisis, but let’s not create a tragedy for future generations by depriving them of personal freedom. That freedom was hard-won over centuries by many generations.

    Esther Drewett
    Otley, West Yorkshire

    SIR – We saved the NHS. Can we have our lives back please?

    Frank Jones
    Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

    Film music debts

    SIR – Film composers (Letters, April 8) may be awarded best original score at the Oscars but their art is always a synthesis of existing styles.

    Take Bernard Herrmann. In Citizen Kane he used the exotic operas of Jules Massenet and Richard Strauss to create a kitsch aria for Kane’s second wife. In Psycho, the insistent rhythm of the strings owes something to Béla Bartók, and in his best film score, Vertigo, the passionate surges of the love music cry out their debt to Wagner’s “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde.

    Ian France
    Penrith, Cumbria

    Left-handers taking a pop at the corkscrew

    SIR – As a left-hander myself (Letters, April 9) I can sympathise with all your left-handed readers’ comments.

    My particular bugbear is a traditional corkscrew, which I have always found nearly impossible to use with my left hand.

    I can say that, despite sampling quite a few fine wines, I have hardly pulled a cork in over 30 years. I was lucky enough to marry a rather fine butler.

    Liz Butler
    Llanbedr-y-Cennin, Conwy

    SIR – I am left-handed but hold my fork in the left hand, because that is the one which does the majority of the work in transporting the food from the plate to my mouth.

    Similarly, when in the Army, I shot my rifle off the right shoulder, because the left hand had to do the work of steadying the rifle on the target, while the right had simply to pull the trigger. Is it me or right-handers who are in a muddle?

    Dion Beard
    Sunningdale, Berkshire

    1. 331481+ up ticks,
      Morning AWK,
      In lieu of a statue of the Duke of Edinburgh I do believe a fleet of naval fishing protection vessels
      in his name, constructed in United Kingdom yards
      by indigenous construction workers.
      He would then be seen as carrying on his beneficial
      very pro protector of the realm work.

      PS,
      Each with a plank on the stern solely for politico’s use come the peoples reset.

        1. 331481+ up ticks,
          Morning P,
          Splendid idea, so as we can have a whip round prior to send off to help them on their way, the way they have helped us,
          most fitting.

          You will be mentioned in dispatches, and to those being dispatched.

    1. Thanks to the short sighted Parliamentary sheep who voted for another 6 months of this ’emergency measure’.
      They’ll vote for another 6 month extension in September and, as if by magic, a new variant will appear in early October.
      Don’t bother to order a large turkey.

      1. While chatting to a fellow dog walker this morning, I was asked if I had booked anywhere to go in my camper van. I said I was waiting to see before committing myself to a booking. “Very wise” was the comment.

  14. I see that Harry and his odious wife are getting a BTL pasting on the Letters’ Page. Here is the best:

    MARY LOUGHLIN 13 Apr 2021 1:01AM 49 Like
    so many wonderful letters about the Duke Of Edinburgh and many questioning the limitations of just thirty attending the service.

    In some respects it will be nice for the family to just be a family. Boris rightly declined his invitation. It is now firmly a family affair.

    But what a truly grotesque cloud the Sussex`s have cast over this wonderful family.

    They did not target the Queen and Prince Philip on Oprah because they knew they were known loved figures in the USA. Instead they targeted the Duke’s son, his racist faimly at large, the racist UK and the impoverished and imprisoned Duke of Cambridge. These were all soft tagets. Typical tactics of cheap bullies.

    How Harry is ever going to brazen this out is beyond me.Brash and brazen in the extreme.

    Since birth he has been a very spoilt child. First by two adoring parents and then after Diana`s tragic death, by the entire Royal family, perticularly both grandparents.

    Harry has now assumed he can throw as much dirt upon them all to make fame and fortune for himself and his manic wife in California. But Harry by so profoundly trashing the Royal family has also trashed all of us. He has trashed his homeland and the prople who reside therein.

    So this is not some insignificant family tiff principally betwen two brothers. William knows his grandfather was fighting for his life in hospital when Harry met Oprah. They proudly made it public that were the Duke to suddenly die, the show would be posponed. How kind and gracious! They all knew the gravity the Queen and her family were facing. The prospect that Charles most certainly was about to lose his father. Yet they thougt it was ethical to take a hatchet to all of them and to all of us.

    Well no, it was not and no it is not. Ethics is something those two narcissistic characters know nothing about.

    The Duchess has told her ‘friends’ to feed to the press that she had a close, special bond with the Duke. She can make what nonsensical claims she likes because she knows the Royal family have too much dignity to respond or to refute her claims publicly. And dignity is the word. They are not trapped. They don`t seek celebrity. They don`t desire personal recognition. As William said in his public message yesterday, they are just all getting on with the job.

    Harrys family may forgive his grotesque actions but this country will never forget or forgive. Total betrayal of the highest order.

    A complete fool who is being led and controlled by a hideous woman.

    1. The only saving grace of this sorry affair is that it is perfectly obvious that Meghan is calling all the shots. Sooner or later Harry will wake up to the fact that he is being manipulated. When that happens, I hope that his family and the country will be able to find enough compassion to forgive him.

      Luke 15:11-32.

      2. 331481+up ticks,
        Morning A,
        I do agree, maybe someone could tell me who has the right to cast the first stone ?

        What he & co did was out of order but by the same token have those doing the condemning checked out the state of the Nation via the polling booth and asked, ” who
        brought this about then”

        1. then they’d be looking at themselves in the mirror and found the mirror cracked. virtue signalling / advertising revenue

      4. I don’t feel the need to forgive him. He has shown no regret or contrition, the prerequisite for forgiveness “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…”
        Up to that moment, and his penitence being done, he is just an immature, prize wanker to whom I wouldn’t give the steam off my pi$$, as he pi$$ed all over his family and his country in gleeful televisual detail.

        1. The parable of the Prodigal Son shows that he was repentant. Likewise, Harry should be forgiven if he seeks forgiveness.

          1. Harry won’t repent – he has done and is doing what he has been told is right, by Meg-Oracle. If he hasn’t seen what she is by now, then he is too stupid ever to see it.

    3. This should be his very last visit to Britain.

      The royal family is better off without him and so are the British people.

    4. Great comment, sums up what so many of us feel. The RF will want to keep a door open for the sake of the children, but the country will never forgive the attack.

  15. Good morning, all. Sun but also frost – getting harder as I write this. Cats love it.

  17. Morning everyone. Considering that the World is in such a Parlous State it’s pretty quiet out there! Perhaps it is the Quiet before the Storm?

    2. Hey! Nothing is happening. No murders or stabbings in London. No kids being raped by muslims all over the UK, no traffic jams, no Covid-19 anymore.
      Must be all quiet for real.

  18. 331481+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,,

    Tuesday 13 April: When 140 have already attended a memorial service, why limit the Duke’s funeral to only 30?

    Manipulating and keeping control, as with the “deal” in the case of the deal a link HAD to be maintained with brussels many politico’s pensions depended on it, and future scams to be considered.

  20. And a Good morning from a gloriously bright & sunny Derbyshire with a bloody cold -4°C in the yard.

    Yes, that’s right. Prevent Licencees from earning a living for a year and then threaten to kick them in the bollocks when you finally condescend to let them open.

    Pubs and bars face being punished for Covid rule-busting queues
    Scores of people lined up outside pubs around the country as they reopened for business in line with second step of lockdown easing

    By
    Tony Diver,
    POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT and
    Claudia Rowan
    13 April 2021 • 12:45am

    Pubs and bars face fines or the removal of their licences over queues on the street after officials threatened to crack down on the most popular venues as they reopened on Monday.

    Scores of people queued outside pubs around the country as they reopened for business in line with the second step of lockdown easing.

    Preliminary figures suggest footfall on British high streets rose by more than 140 per cent, with hospitality venues and hairdressers reporting that they are fully booked for weeks.

    But industry leaders warned against overzealous enforcement of social distancing rules after councils threatened pubs with fines and closure if too many people queue outside on the street.

    At least 100 people queued at the Oak Inn in Coventry to get a seat in its beer garden when it opened at midnight on Sunday. Coventry Council has opened an investigation into the pub, which it said could have breached rules by “having difficulties with large queues or unmanageable amounts of visitors”.

    The council said its licensing team could use a “wide range of powers and possible actions” if the pub was found to have broken any rules despite the queuing forming on the street, off the pub’s premises.

    In Maidstone, where drinkers queued to get into The Brenchley pub, the council said landlords could face a “fixed penalty notice, prohibition notice, license review or a combination” for failing to enforce distancing outside.

    Other long queues were spotted in Manchester, Sunderland, Burnley and Birmingham, and several councils have set up enforcement squads to patrol pubs and restaurants to look for customers breaking the rules.

    Revellers also gathered in the heart of the West End – but some warned of “very little” social distancing.

    Police officers patrolled busy areas in London on Monday night as hordes of people flocked to Old Compton Street and neighbouring areas to enjoy al fresco dining and drinks.

    Pictures and videos being shared online show people packed onto tables laden with food and drinks, while several dozen more stood on the streets cheering the first night of pubs and bars reopening.

    Attila Kulcsar, a media communications manager, said the crowds felt “like a return to the ‘real’ Soho of the 1990s”.

    “Tonight’s atmosphere beats the whole of last summer… it really is like how I imagine VE Day,” the 54-year-old said.

    “It’s almost like watching Hogarth paintings come to life in 2021. There is a wonderfully raucous hysteria everywhere. It’s very celebratory.

    “There is very little social distancing. A distinct sense that people feel the Covid restrictions have ended.

    “There are lots of police around Soho as well as Covid Marshalls, but there is no word from them about social distancing… if anything they seem to be joining in the festivities.”

    The Government’s guidance says pubs should “manage outside queues to ensure they do not cause a risk to individuals, other businesses or additional security risks” and divert them around street furniture such as bollards and benches.

    Pubs are also obliged to encourage customers to follow social distancing guidelines. But industry leaders said on Monday that venues had little choice but to create bottlenecks when they were also required to check in drinkers with NHS Test and Trace at the door.

    Emma McClarkin, the chief executive of the British Beer and Pubs Association, called on ministers and councils to “show some pragmatism” in the face of huge demand from customers.

    “We hope that all councils will approach the guidance in the spirit of assisting us to find a way to open, and open safely, not finding ways to use it to shut us down,” she said.

    The concerns about queues and beer gardens came as scientists predicted that outdoor mixing will have a “relatively modest” impact on the spread of Covid in the UK in the next month. Dr Adam Kucharski, a member of the Spi-M modelling group, which advises the Government, said a rise in hospitalisations was likely only if people began mixing indoors.

    A government spokesman said: “We recognise the huge efforts made by pubs and restaurants to be able to reopen for customers safely today, including helping to ensure that people queueing for their premises do so safely.”

    1. FFS, the minnows in local government want to join Johnson’s et al. power trip. These morons should count their blessing that people are back in town centres looking to spend money. Colchester town centre has been the most depressing place for a year.
      I badly need a haircut but I didn’t visit the town yesterday as I thought it would be packed. The traffic along Southway, Lexden Road and especially Westway just after nine yesterday indicated that my assessment was correct, either that or the A12 was closed between Ardleigh and Lexden.😎

      1. I had to visit Colchester town centre about a fortnight ago; it looked as if The Bomb had dropped.
        It reminded me of all those dystopian films about the future made in the 1950s and 1960s. Who knew ‘B’ feature directors had such insight?

  21. Iran vows revenge against Israel for strike on Natanz nuclear plant. 13 april 2021.

    Iran’s foreign minister on Monday vowed vengeance against Israel for an explosion a day earlier at the Natanz nuclear site that he blamed directly on Tehran’s arch enemy.

    “The Zionists want to take revenge because of our progress in the way to lift sanctions … they have publicly said that they will not allow this. But we will take our revenge from the Zionists,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by state TV.

    Israel has all but claimed responsibility for the apparent sabotage operation that damaged the electricity grid at the Natanz site on Sunday, with multiple Israeli outlets reporting that Mossad carried out the operation, which is believed to have shut down entire sections of the facility.

    Whatever your views about Iran and its Nuclear Ambitions this story tells valuable truths about the reality as opposed to the propaganda of Cyber Warfare. The Iranians after their earlier experience with the Stuxnet Virus must have made (one reasonably assumes) extraordinary efforts to protect this facility and yet the Israelis were able to penetrate these safeguards and inflict catastrophic damage. Contrast this with the milksop activities of the supposed Russian and Chinese activities against targets in the West devoid of any protection whatsoever. What one suspects here is that despite all the Rhetoric and Propaganda that there is a Gentleman’s Agreement between the main protagonists not to exceed parameters that would lead to open warfare. There are probably far more fake accusations and attacks than real!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/12/iran-vows-revenge-against-israel-strike-natanz-nuclear-plant/

  22. 331481+ up ticks,

    How Britons have enjoyed the easing of lockdown restrictions
    From rushing to the nearest pub to seeing loved ones in care homes, the next step on the road back to normal has brought joy to the nation,

    May one ask, in the main do the herd realise these activities are their bloody right and they do NOT have to touch their forelocks at every
    passing politico ?

    We have been on this “road back to normal” since the party I belonged
    to designed and triggered the referendum / Brexitexit on the 24/6/2016.

    The “road to freedom” via the lab / lib / con / greens coalition has taken on the stance of being treacherously unadopted.

    1. To add to that genuine North Korean experience, I’ve read that the police paraded up and down Oxford Street with dogs to keep the queues … um … in line.

  23. The Duke’s death is the right moment to revive the Royal Yacht Britannia. 13 April 2021.

    That has remained the position ever since. From time to time, rather wistful proposals are made for a new yacht, but somehow are never taken seriously.

    Perhaps they should be. Everyone nowadays recognises the importance of “soft power”. Britannia, which was launched in 1954, was a unique floating ambassador for the new reign of Elizabeth II and, by extension, for the country over which she reigned. The yacht’s unshowy craftsmanship expressed the spirit of the age, and something of the spirit of Prince Philip himself. She paid 696 foreign visits before retiring after the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. In every country she visited, guests almost literally fought to get on board. She was royal, well-made, elegant rather than luxurious, distinctively British. She did nothing but good for our world reputation.

    Post-Brexit and making our own way in the world, we are feeling a renewed interest in the sea. “Global Britain” is the current buzz-phrase, but the concept arose because of our maritime prowess, which took us almost everywhere for centuries. It would be an exciting challenge – and a practical benefit – to re-express this tradition in a new royal yacht for the 21st century.

    No it isn’t. The UK armed forces and the Royal Navy in particular are largely a laughing stock and the sight of the Royals, or more likely, Boris and his Pals parading around on the decks of The Good Ship Venal would invite only ridicule!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/13/dukes-death-right-moment-revive-royal-yacht-britannia/

    1. 331481+ up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      I would agree only if it was tooled up with a pair of
      16 inchers & a brace of torpedo tubes regularly
      patrolling the British fishing grounds when not on royal duty, I do believe the Duke of Edinburgh would concur.

    2. Good Moaning.
      Britannia was also a hospital ship and was used to encourage trade and exert ‘soft power’.
      Although too late for the Duke – and, sadly, I expect – for the Queen, we should have have have another Britannia.
      What a pair of shiites Major and Blair are; sadly, in their case, we still have to use the present tense.

      1. Morning Anne. It was never a hospital ship as the Falklands proved, nor actually an instrument of Soft Power though this lack did not in my view invalidate it. The truth is that it was only ever a Private Luxury which I would concede to the Leader of a Powerful State. Sadly we are no longer such and must avoid making ourselves ridiculous!

        1. Apparently, it had a huge effect on business and politics, it being a great boasting point to receive an invite onboard to dinner with HM.
          It also provided a secure location for the Royal party to be quartered, and, of course, there were Bootnecks onboard, fierce fighting men quietly protecting their Sovereign. As well as playing good music, of course.

          1. The Queen Mother would get up early. Go to the galley and cook bacon and eggs for the crew.

            You can see why they loved her.

        2. The reason it was never used in the Falklands was a niggardly decision, made years before, not to upgrade the boilers to use a lighter fuel oil used by the rest of the fleet than the original “heavy” oil.
          This meant that to serve in the Falklands, it would have needed a dedicated tanker for refueling.

    3. Yo Minty

      Royal Navy in particular………………….

      Please explain to me the concept of “The Royal Navy”

      I understood that the RN was a sea-going ‘armed force’ equiped with warships, of various types, which when combined would
      form a Fleet, with trained men to operate them, and be capable of protecting itself and and taking aggresion to an enemy

      The Falklands war was a good example

      Now, we have ships with no engines
      Aircraft Carriers with no ‘Cats and Traps, ie catapults and arrestor wires

      The RN ceased to exist in the Nineties

      1. Morning OLT. I just comment. The situation is, as is, not as I would wish it to be!

    4. Easy solution.
      Crowdfund it. That will show how many people actually approve.
      A long time ago, that’s how Norway funded the Royal Yacht, purely by subscription.

      1. I’d contribute to it, but I think it would be too little, too late for Her Majesty.

  24. More utter drivel from the “World Talking Shop” by our well known virtue signaller Sonia Farrey https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/addressing-concerns-about-human-rights-violations-in-drc?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications&utm_source=5708e584-5323-4307-9a20-8165517d77d2&utm_content=daily

    “Mr President, The United Kingdom remains deeply concerned about human
    rights violations and abuses, including as a result of increased armed
    group activity in eastern DRC” = The UK remains deeply concerned over falling profits of our mining companies, so we have to recreate non existent armed groups to justify my stipend

  25. Good morning, everyone. Update for those who were kind enough to respond to the illness of our Springer. First visit to the Vet with stomach upset and she received a steroid injection. She was very listless and we were very worried and took her back to the Vet.

    Further examination and another steroid injection. Dog still unwell and not eating her food. More worry. Four days later our happy dog is back. We think she is allergic to steroids.

    1. Good morning to you and the Springer.

      A piece of good pet news, after Plum’s loss.
      I hope your dog continues to be happy and gives you regular exercise.

    4. Good news. It’s only steroids that are keeping my old hound going, I think. He has a half every other day and on the non-steroid days he tends to be rather wobbly.

  26. Good morning, my friends

    Salmond is still full of anti-English bile!

    Alex Salmond ‘stoking anti-English feelings with Braveheart video on breaking spines of oppressors’
    Alba claims endorsement from Robert the Bruce in bizarre video which speaks of breaking “the spine of English superiority”
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/04/12/alex-salmond-stoking-anti-english-feelings-braveheart-video/

    A BTL comment:

    Let us scrap the Barnett formula and get Scotland to pay the same amount to leave the UK as the UK has had to pay to leave the EU!

    1. What is Salmond without that bile? He’ll never stop.

      As for the BTL, great ideas, but impractical. Scrapping or even reducing Barnett is a non-starter as any government fears losing votes and giving the separatists ammunition. How Scotland would agree, take and finance its share of the UK’s debts and liabilities is a nightmare, IMO unsolvable without the English taxpayer remaining on the hook – bad enough for past debts and liabilities but outrageous should a non-U.K. Scotland fail through profligate spending that it then dumps back on the U.K.

      Those debts and liabilities are huge. Now some £70,000 per taxpayer in headline debt and a further minimum of double that in earned but unpaid liabilities (unfunded State pensions, un/under-funded State employee pensions, infrastructure elements of PFI, student loan non-payment etc). No-one in their right mind would lend to Scotland, leaving the BofE to do it, thus dumping it on the English taxpayers’ shoulders.

  27. RAF jets will deploy to Romania to counter Putin’s aggression in Eastern Europe as Russia masses 80,000 troops on Ukrainian border and inches ‘a step from war’

    Six Royal Air Force Typhoon super-jets will fly to eastern Europe in a bid to deter Russian president Vladimir Putin who has sent troops to the Ukrainian border.

    Last night UK defence chiefs confirmed the RAF deployment to Romania to police the skies around the Black Sea.

    Flash news from the Kremlin. Vlad has collapsed laughing!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9463825/RAF-jets-deployed-Romania-patrol-skies-Black-Sea-Russia-masses-troops.html#reader-comments

          1. No. The RAF uses contractors only in safe roles and areas. Civilian technicians get paid a relative pittance, many being ex-servicemen working in something they love supported by their pension. The people that make money out of RAF contracts go nowhere near danger.

          2. I am obliged. There was an element of sarcasm in my post – but easily missed.

          3. Keep on with sarcasm for other areas, but I don’t think I missed it here. Appropriate for many security (men with guns) contracts, but it misses the mark here, not least because RAF contract workers are underpaid and saving the taxpayer money.

            FWIW I’m ex-RAF and worked with contractors on a whole range of projects, many with the wholesale replacement of technicians with civilians on half the pay. These contracts certainly saved the RAF money, but whether they were in the long-term interests of the RAF and the country in general is another matter.

          4. I respect your experience.

            I just have a faint memory of civilian contractors being sent to service RAF aircraft in zones of conflict and being paid shedloads. And declining to work at weekends…

          5. I don’t know of that happening in the RAF and being an aircraft engineer and weapons specialist I like to think I’d of heard of it. I also never saw any issues working up for operations with contractors as they all worked as hard as I did; civil servants were a different matter entirely as most, with the odd exception, were worse than a British Leyland shop steward, albeit many forced against their natural inclinations by bureaucracy and peer pressure (eg one, a team member, was ordered to take his sick leave for the year regardless of not being ill or his work to do as he was making his colleagues look bad and they saw their ‘entitlement’ threatened). I also had excellent support from workers in factories, many times having immediate response to unplanned overnight and weekend working.

            There were issues with British contractors for U.K.-supported overseas air forces such as the Saudi’s, but that was because they had tight contracts with a requirement to be paid for extra work that they previously been shafted on.

    4. Like Hitler, Putin only understands force and appeasement encourages him. Although from what I know of the Ukraine and Romania, I find it hard to decide which is worse, them or Putin and his Russia, only trouble will come from us standing by idly.

      1. Putin is a great deal cleverer than Hitler. Hitler, when confronted by force, responded to it by greater force at whatever cost, even to his blessed Fatherland. Putin is not so stupid. He’s an opportunist, profiting by the weakness of others, but not an aggressor. Aggression is rarely as profitable as picking the low-hanging fruit.

        He’ll keep testing the boundaries for ripeness, and when an opportunity arises, he will take it. Taking Crimea was a no-brainer, since apart from having a lot of Russian military in Sevastopol, most of the locals consider themselves more Russian than Ukrainian. It’s a lot easier softening up the British by getting reliable oligarchs to buy their property than it is mounting an attack. All it needs is a bit of jollop and a jar of face cream to keep the oligarchs sweet.

        Faced with a stand-off though, he’ll wait for a better time. The rule with Putin’s Russia is – never turn your back on the bear. Honey is your friend, as any zoo keeper knows, but don’t let go of the jar!

      1. Yeah, note the large white cloth, so redolent of Klu Klux Klan uniforms, enveloping and strangling the small black lettering.

  29. Good morning from a pleasant (weather-wise) Finland.
    After a quick scan through the UK dailies i can’t believe what i’m seeing……..
    Sheep drinking beer!!!

    1. 331481+ up ticks,
      Morning HM,
      There is a vast difference ask yourself how many genuine sheep go to a Betty Ford clinic, how many
      genuine sheep do you see in a polling booth ?
      NONE, all human ( ino) sheep).

      Genuine sheep are innocent.

  31. 331481+ up ticks,
    Dt,

    I can’t celebrate this token return of freedom
    Trips to the pub have been transformed into highly-regulated episodes in state-sanctioned fun
    Ross Clark.

    High vis jackets will be issued & compulsory on entrance with a number in a back panel, personally I view it as yet another
    BIG white ball…s up on the suppresion of the sensible people’s front.

    7th of May onwards will see the return of a strain of superabnormal.

          2. How do you know they’re also not stealing the giraffe, intending to sell it to London Zoo?

          3. following orders [too big a profile]. If left to themselves they’d have killed it, enjoyed a good meal and sold the skin. Remember Uhuru told Police at weekend no more pay rises [they didn’t get one in the first place, just a new uniform – last election promise] so they’re back to Moi era angle of fending / hassling everyone for themselves

          4. How do you know they’re also not stealing the giraffe, intending to sell it to London Zoo?

      2. No, they’re just having a giraffe.

        P.S.

        Remember that bit of the song The Wild West Show –

        The giraffe is the only animal in the world that can walk into a Manhattan bar and say:

        “The highballs are on me, girls!”

  34. ‘Morning all.

    Had occasion to go to Inverness yesterday and while wandering through the streets, I got to thinking about the street names – as you do – and this set me on another train of thought.

    If Wee Krankie has her way and manages to rip Scotland away from the United Kingdom, what will happen to Union Street? We’d still have the Union of Crowns of course, but will Union Street’s name fall prey to the wave of historical revisionism which seems to be popular amongst race-grifters and left-wing hate-mongers generally? In the rush to ‘de-colonise’ Scotland, would the Scottish National Socialist Party, in a fit of triumph, rename it ‘Independence Street’? I wouldn’t put it past them and I can’t say I care much for that idea, it sounds rather ‘banana republic-ish’ to me.

    And before anybody asks …. “Yes, we have no bananas!”
    ;¬)

    1. Given their fondness for enforcing their views through trade unions, couldn’t the Scots have a ‘Trade’ added? That would have the bonus of being able to get sponsorship money to fund Scotland’s massive fiscal hole.

      Ironically, the Scots contributed more than their fair share to the leaders of the British Empire colonisers back when it was seen as ‘a good thing’ to bring civilisation to the backward world, even if lining your pockets in the process. The Scots even tried to colonise the Americas for Scotland.

      1. Ah yes, you’re speaking of the “Darien Scheme” in Panama, an ill-thought through affair which was a miserable and costly failure, due to deadly outbreaks of fever, Spanish attacks and not least, English mercantilism and the East India Company which wanted no competition in world trade.

        The scheme bankrupted Scotland, leading to an English bail-out which in turn led to the Act of Union in 1707 …… and here we are!

        1. I knew there were several schemes but didn’t know their names. Looking that one up (Wikipedia has some good articles), it seems to be a good metaphor for a Scotland outside the U.K. (I find ‘independent Scotland’ a contradiction in terms when Sturgeon et al want it in the EU instead).

          1. Indeed. If Wee Krankie (and Salmond) think that Scotland would be ‘independent’ as a province of the Evil Empire, governed by diktat from Brussels. they are delusional.

          2. Not really. England were deliberately strangling trade between Scotland and the rest of the world, mainly Europe, of course. Geographically, England was well placed to do that. Scotland was being suffocated by England. See present EU/English borders and Customs operation for a hint of what was going on.

    2. Has anybody here commented on the fact that her words on the death of The Duke of Edinburg gave her the chance to spout feminist nonsense?

      1. I didn’t get beyond the arrogant and patronising ‘thank you for your service’, as if she was addressing a retired flunkey not a man whose boots they’re not fit to shine.

        Then I saw her saying she wasn’t attending his funeral in order to not grab all the attention. At least she gives me a laugh spouting feminism whilst owing her exposure entirely to a privileged white man after being a suitcase dolly and an eye-candy tight-clothed actress on a minor Canadian cable TV series.

        1. Wasn’t that Memeagain, not Wee Crankie?

          She seems to forget the lies she has already told – her doctor (and her mother) tell her not to go. (But she was quite happy to fly at six months for her ridiculously expensive and showy “baby shower”.) Then, she doesn’t want to go because she doesn’t want to be center [sic] of attention. What breathtaking arrogance!

          But she had a really close special relationship with the man who told Harry “one steps out with actresses, one does not marry them”. Sure, sure.

          That woman is seriously sick.

          1. You’re right. Apologies to Rastus, I somehow posted in the wrong place/completely misread the original post. I think I’ll go and lie down in a dark room for a while.

    3. Will the Scots be allowed to play rugby union ( different union, I know).
      More sensible question – will their players be excluded from Lions selections, or will they be included just like yer Oirish.
      I dont think it is fair that the Ireland rugby team is made up from players from two countries. They should form two separate teams. If not necessary, I will advocate Wales to include two countries’ players it its team. Maybe NZ.

  35. Nicola Sturgeon furious at Westminster’s decision to refer Holyrood bills to the Supreme Court.
    The bills are Rights Of the Child [Incorporation] [Scotland] Bill and Local-Self Government [Incorporation] [Scotland] Bill.
    The UK Government Law Officers are concerned that some parts of the new bills are outwith the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.
    ref Kate Devlin in the Independent.

  36. Please, please, please, DT, stop encouraging Prince Harry Hostage with the oxygen of publicity. I am fed up to the back teeth of being reminded of this selfish, arrogant, entitled half-wit insulting and patronising me and the many things I hold dear. More importantly, I am incensed that he and his wife have hijacked the issues of mental health and painted themselves as martyrs, further entrenching the view in many minds that mental health is a lightweight problem and trampling on those suffering real mental health issues. When I think of the 2 friends, one a neighbour and one a close work colleague, who have committed suicide in the last few years and the long-time sufferer of treatment-resistant depression in my family I want to bang his head against the wall until I’ve knocked some sense and awareness into him.

    The same goes for his narcissistic captor and her ‘friends’. As much as I think she is the root cause, MeMeMeAgain at least has the excuse that her character and history were obvious from the outset and she has behaved like so many also-rans of the Pretending Profession given a spotlight.

    1. ‘…entrenching the view in many minds that mental health is a lightweight problem…”

      Just a few days ago in this parish I said mental health should be called what it is, namely mental illness, then it would be treated more seriously for genuine sufferers but the merely self-obsessed would be less keen to associate.

  37. Syrian air force behind 2018 chlorine attack on Saraqeb, OPCW finds. 13 April 2021.

    A Syrian air force helicopter dropped a chlorine bomb on an opposition-held town on 4 February 2018, the chemical weapons watchdog has concluded.

    An investigative team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” at least one cylinder hit Saraqeb.

    It released a toxic gas cloud that affected 12 individuals, they found.

    A contradiction in three paragraphs! It wasn’t a “bomb” but a cylinder such as you can buy from any British Oxygen supplier in the UK. Nevertheless the circumstances, (Large attack. No fatalities) suggest that this report is probably true. The cruel irony here is that this almost certainly came to the attention of the White Helmets who then manufactured the False Flag attack on Douma. Since Chlorine is in normal circumstances non-fatal (people run away) a method had to be found to make it so and this seems to have been to hang the victims up by their feet while alive, chemically suffocate them, and then place the bodies in suitable positions.

    This savagery was probably what caused James Le Mesurier the Mi6 Station Chief in Istanbul to manifest long held misgivings about UK activity in Syria and which alarmed his superiors to such an extent that they arranged a visit from the same team that carried out the murders. Sentimentalists that they are, the Borg have arranged a romantic movie about his life for his widow!

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-56721409

    1. Chlorine was the first gas weapon used by the Germans in WW1. If true, dropping that gas canister was on a different scale and suggests that it wasn’t approved and was a just an individual’s idea, akin to throwing empty beer bottles out of WW2 bombers.

      Whatever the truth, we should keep well out. We have wasted enough blood and treasure in making Syria, a host of other places (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, . . .) and their people worse off than before even without the massive social and financial problems we face here in recovering from Covid’s aftermath and a hostile EU.

      People who think we have a moral duty to intervene should do so with their money and their families’ lives, not mine.

      1. It ia absolutely no use in going to war,unless you know how to win the Peace.

        The Republican Guards should have been employed to keep the peace in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was executed,

        instead they were disbanded and spread trouble everywhere

        In ”Colonial’ India, the Indian Civil Srvice managed the very large country,with little dissent

        1. Indeed. I have to add that knowing how to win the Peace is just the start; you have to put in the money and effort for a long time afterwards and even then things can go back to Square 1 almost overnight.

          As successful as it was for everyone, Colonial India is IMO no model for our developed world. There is nothing comparable left. Furthermore, although India had a large Muslim population, Muslim countries are now not integrated and their people have very different cultures and structures to ours.

    2. The OPCW who gave their verdict on the Skripals fiasco and on the Navalny fiasco…that OPCW.

    3. thanks for BBC link, this coincided with septic proxies in south Sudan and Chad doing similar. BBC have just been upended [as in gone mute] Snapshot [assorted links sent to me by Stephen Lendman] apologies a tad lengthy post but aside links, summary of mail to BBC advising retract. Le Mesurier had the mute button pushed on him and Jonathon Allen must be on R&R:

      https://www.globalresearch.ca/ex-opcw-chief-jose-bustani-reads-syria-testimony-us-uk-blocked-un/5725936 and https://www.globalresearch.ca/scheme-to-let-opcw-name-perpetrators-of-alleged-syria-chemical-attacks/5639433 and https://www.globalresearch.ca/5-former-opcw-officials-join-prominent-voices-call-out-syria-cover-up/5739875

      “While the United Kingdom has not been present on the ground since 2018, journalist Ian Cobain published official British documents in the Middle East Eye that shed light on how London massively intoxicated https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/revealed-british-government-covert-propaganda-campaign-syria bona fide journalists and then withdrew. He had already published in the Guardian, in 2016, revelations on the organisation of MI6 in this matter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/03/how-britain-funds-the-propaganda-war-against-isis-in-syria.

      Above all, it is important to remember that the British were not pursuing the same objective at all as their US ally. London hoped to regain its influence from the colonial era (as did Paris). The United Kingdom did not believe that the United States intended to destroy the state structures of the broader Middle East as a whole (Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy). That is why it had conceived the “Arab Spring” operation on the model of Lawrence of Arabia’s “Great Arab Revolt” (the Muslim Brotherhood now playing the role of the Wahhabi of World War I). Their propaganda was therefore designed to create New Syria around this Brotherhood and not to divide it as the CIA wanted and still wants.

      As always, the British RICU (Research, Information and Communications Unit) had recourse to a scientist, here an “anthropologist”, to supervise the manipulation. It entrusted its implementation to several subcontractors, including a “former” MI6 officer, Colonel Paul Tilley; the word “former” is important here, as it means that he could deny all responsibility if the operation went wrong. To get closer to the field, three ad hoc offices were opened by MI6 contractors in Istanbul.

      This operation began in the wake of the chemical weapons affair in the summer of 2013, when the House of Commons, scalded by propaganda during the war against Iraq, strictly forbade the Ministry of Defence from deploying troops on the spot. As a result, the initial budget of the Foreign Office was increased and assumed by the British Ministry of Defence and Canadian and American agencies, as the military had no other means of intervention.

      It was placed under the command of an MI6 officer, Jonathan Allen, who became the number two in the British diplomatic delegation to the Security Council at the UN.

      The system of “citizen journalists” was very economical in relation to the £500,000 per month of the British budget ($50-200 for a video, $250-500 for regular freelancers) to find “information” or “evidence” of the regime’s repression against its own population. These materials, once sorted, were sent by MI6 to the BBC, Sky News Arabic, Al-Jazeera (Qatar) and Al-Arabiya (Saudi Arabia), four stations that are fully participating in the Western war effort, in violation of UN resolutions banning war propaganda. The Syrian collaborators had to undertake in writing to remain anonymous, unless expressly authorized, and not to divulge their links with any company.

      Western bona fide journalists, unable to trace Syrian “citizen journalists” and verify the context of videos and other “evidence” – which is the raison d’être of their corporation – were convinced by the noise of the four television stations.

      Ian Cobain’s documents attest that in addition to this international target, there was also a target in Syria. London wanted to provoke a change in the population’s attitude in favour of the “moderates” in the face of the “extremists”. On this point, it does not seem that Middle East Eye realised that these words should not be interpreted in the ordinary sense, but in the light of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decisions. He, during the elaboration of the “Arab Spring” plan, had stated that His Majesty’s administration should consider as allies the “moderately anti-imperialist” leaders such as the Muslim Brotherhood, while the opponents were the “anti-imperialist extremists” such as the nationalist regime of the Syrian Baath https://www.amazon.com/Before-Very-Eyes-Fake-Wars/dp/1615770127 .

      The anthropologist who supervised the programme also indicated the need to create emergency services on the ground (the Free Police and the White Helmets of the ’former’ MI6 officer James Le Mesurier) not so much to help the population, but to give it confidence in the institutions to come once the National Union regime around the Baath is defeated. On this point, he referred to the plan for the total and unconditional surrender of Syria drafted by the German Volker Perthes for the number 2 of the UN, Jeffrey Feltman https://www.voltairenet.org/article190102.htm, which the British therefore misinterpreted.

      According to Ian Cobain’s documents, MI6 subcontractors also trained Syrian opposition spokesmen, developed accounts on social networks and organised press offices operating 24 hours a day. They do not mention the logo design and Hollywood staging that we have reported, such as the military parade in the Ghouta with tanks passing in front of the camera and with extras. https://youtu.be/Bi_DBfq18mc

      The press offices aimed to put Syrian opposition spokesmen in touch with Western journalists and brief them before interviews. In this way, the Western press believed in good faith that it was getting its information from an independent source at low cost. If, at the beginning, during the destabilisation phase (until mid-2012), all the international media sent reporters to the field (which the British manipulated), there are none today. Westerners have become accustomed to believing the news agency set up by MI6 in London with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian Human Rights Observatory, although it does not have the means to know anything about some of the events it reports on.”

      I did get both a delivery and read receipt, so they can”t hide on this

    1. Candace Owen for PM – she has an English husband so she needs to get British nationality, become an MP and get rid of Bonker Johnson and his Bumbling idiots.

      1. I believe they live in Washington DC and she has American political ambitions.
        But yes, she would be a definite asset to the political world.

        1. If more people were like her there would be no justification for being racist.

          Indeed, as I have said here before, the people who make the most relevant and sensible comments about race are intelligent black people like Candace Owens, Trevor Phillips and Thomas Sowell.

  39. Sorry to sound stuck up, but the sight of pub going boozers and people munching in the street is not a very pleasant sight .

    Seems there is social distancing for some and not for others , and I was horrified to observe street sweepers clearing up mounds of cigarette ends and rubbish.

    The British are really a filthy lot.

    1. Some of them are………. g’morning Belle – bright and sunny here so we’re off for a walk shortly.

      1. Morning J,

        Started off so bright and sunny first thing this morning , with a frost , sadly now overcast and gloomy.

        Dogs have had a good walk/ scamper courtesy of Moh, whilst I waited home for a parcel for him, more golf stuff!

        Hope you enjoy your walk , lots of flowers and blossom to enjoy x

    2. The British really are a filthy lot. I’ve lived in several European countries and they put us to shame.

      What makes it worse is that older generations like mine are the most tidy and best recyclers yet are preached at by the young, the worst litterers and the worst recyclers of the lot.

      1. You want to see what the tourists leave behind after visiting the Highlands – and most are from south of the border – and young

        1. Morning FA
          You should see what they leave behind down here ..

          The young and not so young are feral and with out any conscience whatsoever.

          1. Morning Maggie – it’s ironic that it’s the very young up here who form gangs and go out and clean up the area – it’s a competitive scene to see who will fill the most bin bags. Even worse are those dog owners who leave bags of dogshite hanging from trees or those that let them crap everywhere – unfortunately it’s locals as well. There are special bins and gloves, scoops etc provided, we’ve even had people go out and spray a yellow line round turds but the message still doesn’t get through – and it ain’t the dogs fault

    5. Doubleplus agree entirely. However! I would point out that smoking was shrinking in this country to less than 1 in ten. Then the Poles arrived.

      I noticed how disgusting the city was compared to where I came from (out east).

    5. You only need to look at a jar of honey and it gets everywhere. Yer jam is far more well behaved.

      1. Ginger-con-fricken-conserve.

        Can I find it? Can I trousers. You’d think it’d be with jams. Is it? Of course not! Not even with the *other* conserves.

  42. Just in from potting on 60 tomato seedlings. Very agreeable in the greenhouse. Must sow winter greens this coming weekend.

      1. As in many other areas, I have a high failure rate. If I sowed the number of seeds to produce the plants we require – none would come up. So I sow lots. Usually about 50% germinate. This year is exceptional.

        We plant out 24 or so – and give the rest to friends – and provide stuff for the Village Plant Club sale.

        1. I stopped trying to grow veg after I planted about 100 Squ yds of peas, tended them daily watering and removing weeds. Finally harvested them and after shelling they produced about the same as a big bag of frozen peas costing around £1 – not worth the effort. Potatoes always went to water, onions the size of Maltesers, cabbages the size of sprouts, carrots so small we ate them whole. I admire those who grow their own successfully but it ain’t for me particularly now that I live on my own.

          1. The other problem is that when they do grow, they all ripen at the same time. Half a dozen water melons anyone?

            We have a reprieve from gardening at the moment, a pair of lapwings has nested in the veggie patch and are defending it with a vengeance.

          2. The only success I’ve had with veg growing is peas. The buggers went wild while we were on holiday and we came home to a few mingey dried out bullets.
            That’s why God invented greengrocer’s.

          9. I only have two successful crops – laurel grows into excellent firewood after a few years and is impossible to kill even with the most vigorous coppicing; elder is also impossible to kill and its flowers produce an excellent cordial which Caroline makes and also an excellent elderberry rob which wards off colds.

          10. Willow is something else that won’t go away – I have loads which I coppice for firewood and a new tree can be grown anywhere from a twig

          12. Have you tried rhubarb? We just cannot get rid of it. Dig it up and any small piece that you miss will turn into another fully grown plant overnight, throw a piece on the compost heap and it somehow finds a way to burrow down and make itself at home.

            We had a patch where our new neighbours have built their house, I wonder what they will think when their front lawn sprouts stalks of the stuff.

        2. A friend grows my tomato plants – I’ll be collecting some nice, well-grown plants next month for potting out – we have a cup of coffee & a chat & I put some money in the hedgehog account for them.

          I did save some seeds last year from a rather nice geranium that survived two winters outside – I have 24 little plants now.

        3. Good solution!
          This year, less than half my sweet peas germinated, which was very disappointing. One of the ones that did was vetch – but I don’t mind, as I love vetch and currently have none in the garden.
          I buy tomato plants from the garden centre though.

          1. I haven’t bought tomato plants since 1977!

            I have this “thing” about raising veg from seed. Keeps me sane. Saneish.

    2. Watch out for frost. My hairdresser’s husband put his out under poly tunnels and lost the lot.
      BTW – I know this because I have ….. wait for it ….. been to the hairdresser this morning.
      I now look gorg slightly more presentable.

          1. 24 April for me. I did my own roots (probably about 70%, as it’s very hit and miss at the back) on 20 March and I’m normally done every 5 weeks so we decided to keep to that. Of course it hasn’t been cut since December.

          2. Mine hadn’t been cut since November.
            I had a full works appt. booked for early December; then Johnson panicked – again.

          3. I got mine cut half way through the last easing.
            I’ll give it a week or so before I have another to allow the queues to die down a bit.

      5. Better have a box as well to ward off the googlies.

        Several MPs and former MPs – notably, Matthew Parris, Ben Bradshaw and Alan Duncan – have said they welcome dropping wickets in favour of outings. And surprising support has come from Scotland from Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson.

    3. Ad two more wickets , let’s call them bases and have three outs per innings.

      The best thing you can import from baseball is the concept of drinking a beer an innings, it really helps time pass when watching such a boring game.

  44. The Independent reporting that the US has paused the Johnson and Johnson Covid Vaccine over blood clot cases.
    B Johnson reporting that Lockdown is the main reason for drop in Covid deaths and cases, not the vaccines. [Sky News]
    The vaccines are not getting many plaudits at the moment.

    1. Paused J&J and said that they probably will not use AZ. At the same time, the Michigan governor is pleading for more vaccines.

      Ah well mustn’t complain, our inept leaders have managed to get a whopping two percent of Canadians vaccinated.

    2. A third of hospital Covid patients have life-threatening blood clots: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52662065

      Based on figures released so far, The risks of getting a life-threatening blood clot after the OAZ vaccine are far lower than those of getting one through Covid for all but the youngest, assuming that they are equally affected by the vaccine.

      Time for some perspective so sadly lacking in the information fed to us. Which would you prefer: a 1 in, say, 4 million chance of dying from the vaccine or a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying with Covid?

        1. Er, no. The OAZ figures from lots of articles. U.K. death rate to date around 1 in 500 (127k deaths, 67m population), but look at deaths of young healthy people because of Covid, rather than just with positive test, then that could easily become 1 in 100,000.

          Now, how about being constructive? What are your figures?

          1. You have no real method of quantifying risk from experimental vaccines that have no medium or long term testing data. The actual data from the Diamond Princess case study shows 80%+ of the population experienced no effects at all from the virus, and that was with an average age of 57. In the first year of Covid, only 220 people under the age of 45 died with Covid, and 98% of those had underlying health conditions.
            The statistical risk from Covid for anyone under 50 is as close to zero as makes no difference. Anyone in that group that voluntarily takes an experimental vaccine licenced only for emergency use, with complete indemnity given to the manufacturers, has been totally brainwashed.

          3. Thank you. I didn’t realise this existed, but it certainly seems a good place to be.

          5. It’s fun, because whilst the debates arising from the letters can be serious, sometimes heated, there is a lot of humour and plenty of off-topic silliness.

          7. No real method? Rubbish. What you mean is that I don’t have a complete picture as effects may occur well beyond the 9 months or so that the vaccine has been used. However, the perfect is the enemy of the good and there is more than enough evidence to compare with earlier vaccines to make a reasonable stab (pardon the pun) at a reasonable prediction.

            I don’t know where you get your figures from but they are much lower than mine (eg https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-reported-sars-cov-2-deaths-in-england/covid-19-confirmed-deaths-in-england-report has substantially more than double your 220 (for 29 June to 31 January)).

            The risk from Covid for people below 50 may be small but it’s not as close to zero as makes no difference to be used as an argument against vaccines. Even your 220 over the population infected over the period is unlikely to be better than my 1 in 100,000. Regardless, the risk of the vaccine is lower than the risk of Covid for all but the youngest ages (we haven’t tried it on sufficient youngsters yet).

            To be clear, this is a discussion over data where I have a particular interest from decades working with mortality and health statistics. It is not a discussion on vaccine ethics other than a wish for people to use facts in their decision and not be influenced by biased, ignorant or malicious inputs (and, to be clear, I’m talking generally eg government, the MSM, other media etc, not you personally).

          8. Its ok, I wouldnt have taken the inference personally. But to suggest you don’t have the complete picture automatically disqualifies definitive statements, and should be qualified as a matter of course. What makes matters worse, and you did allude to this, is that the data we have access to is almost certainly manipulated in some form. Given that I know one man who hanged himself, and another who had 3 negative tests before dying, both included in the death stats, and the wealth of similar anecdotes from others (Bel Mooney for example), it is almost certain that the deaths due to Covid are almost impossible to know. That alone reduces risk analysis to the realms of speculation.
            Then we have to look at the minimal data for the vaccines. As you say, we can learn from prior vaccines, but just to be clear we have NEVER introduced experimental vaccines before in the way we are trying to do now. Even so, the problems with the SARS 1 vaccine did not become known for 4 years. The vaccines themselves are based on an untested mechanism in humans, and are based on computer models of the virus, which has never been fully isolated. Frankly, the whole thing reeks of risk.

            The excess death numbers from last year are far short of the reported Covid deaths, and that does not include the reported increased deaths at home, from diabetes and other ailments. In short, the numbers just do not add up.

            Outside of that general position, I am quite happy with the risk of around 50 well people per 40 million people, so I see no risk to protect against it. The data shows overwhelmingly that the risks are borne by those over 70, and in poor health, and the brutal truth is that most of those will have already been taken. There is no purpose in vaccinating anyone who does not need it.

            Beyond that, the experimental data is just too small to know what the actual risks are. A former Gates PhD virologist Dr P Bosche is reported this month to have severe concerns over the use of vaccines which do not stop transmission either into or out of the vaccinated person. His particular concerns are that these vaccines are making the situation far worse, due to their encouragement of variants. That is a risk that goes beyond the merely personal and into a dystopian nightmare if he is right. The Light paper reports an interview with him this month – it is worth reading.
            Interesting discussion, though. For me it is straightforward – the burden of proof must be on those who want me to take a vaccine to demonstrate that the risks, fully evaluated, are significantly less than those I face from the virus. Given the above, I can so no way in which it can be done.

          9. I have access to a massive amount of data not available to the general public. The abuse of data that you allude to has indeed been appalling and I for one will never forgive those privileged people in government, the media, the NHS and their preferred ‘scientists’ for their cowardly, selfish and heartless behaviour and decisions that have brought so much unnecessary death and misery. Of course, there would have been much death and misery regardless of what Johnson et al did, but by their tunnel vision and indifference they have made a bad situation far worse. I have done several back-of-a-fag-packet calculations based on mortality statistics over the last year (you have to break them down by age and cause, data the ONS tries to hide) and the known links of income and government spending with health and life expectancy; every one shows the quality-adjusted life years lost by Johnson et al’s actions to be many times that from Covid itself, even counting all deaths as due to Covid not with Covid.

            I had a friend who committed suicide because of Covid, my friend’s wife is a teacher in a school where 3 children committed suicide due to lockdown and i had something collected by a woman who’s son, her only child, committed suicide due to lockdown. There were other components, but I am sure that all 5 would be alive without a formal lockdown.

            As for vaccines, I agree there are risks, they have been produced in record time, some eg Pfizer are somewhat experimental, and that the approval process has been somewhat rushed. I was sceptical at first but as a boring and logical risk professional I’m confident that the risk from the vaccine is much less than that from the disease for most people. The disease is impacting younger people less (FGS get schools back to normal) and some select groups such as pregnant women and people with possibly risky health conditions may be more at risk from vaccine side effects. It’s time Johnson et al started to be open and honest with us all, gave us the relevant facts in perspective and left it to us to make the decision on being inoculated. We’ve vaccinated almost all vulnerable people, those that are left are more likely to be killed on the roads than from Covid and anyone refusing the vaccine and ending up in hospital is unlikely to stretch the NHS now.

            Finally, I’ve enjoyed typing away to you. I’ll type on this thread no more. All the Best

  45. Breaking News: Garlands went out on a bender, got pissed and ruptured her Achilles doing the Conga down the High St.

    *This is mostly true. The Beeb taught me everything i know about reporting truth.

      1. Well something is going on over here. Our hospitals and ICU wards are full and reported case counts are increasing. (Not just propoganda statistics, our neighbour is an OR nurse who has been reassigned to ICU support).

        That would suggest that the virus is far from petered out, maybe decanted over here along with its Brazilian and South African cousins.

      2. Last Summer? Misattributed flu over the Winter months? Last October Dr Dolores Cahill reported on 1500 PCR swabs: no sequence for SARS-2 found but either influenza A or B were present on the swabs. Ergo…

        1. 20 March 2020 – even the corrupt WHO declared the covid coronavirus no longer a threat to public health, and downgraded it to the equivalent of a ‘flu outbreak. Three days later the uk government hysteria introduced lock down.

          1. Orders from above to make the most of the outbreak. Johnson, Hancock et al. have to keep going with their CV-19 is bad and ever-present trope because if the pretence fails then they will have some serious questions to answer. In addition there will be a vast number of seriously embarrassed MPs looking for an escape clause: following the science will not wash on this endeavour. A long hot summer with the people out and about ignoring the petty rules is Johnson’s worst nightmare. Will he try and wield the lockdown stick again by claiming another “wave” is imminent and will the population believe him? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…

    2. If true, That’s outrageous. For those that can open their minds and look beyond the trees that so confuse everyone, you could plant many forests with the woods showing that lockdowns have coincided with the natural falls in the virus and that there is little, if any, difference between Western areas where the disease has been endemic with or without lockdown. Sensible voluntary measures work, but government diktats don’t.

      Now, Johnson, how about the deaths, injury and misery from lockdown and how you propose to limit their impact?

      1. The good news is that the virus completely eliminated season ‘flu – and no one died from cancer, heart attacks, pneumonia etc etc.

        A lot to be thankful for.

        1. How they would have loved it, if they could tied the death of DoE into COVID

          The Ivory Tower defeated Boros

      2. Quite – the much-trumpeted claims that the most recent wave was tailing off “thanks to vaccination” completely ignored the fact that the virus was simply petering out – but would return in its own good time and continue to do so until it disappeared or got bored.

        It is the endless lies that get to me. And I am not being sarcastic!

    3. 331481+m up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      Pm, AKA the turkish delight / amnesties R me,

      “It’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic”

      That in reality showed the herd real authority, the sort that even tojo would have had a problem bettering.

      It is good to see a well established stitch up of many facets come together and with a high % of the people’s consent.

      The marvel of,sinse the earth was created, was the way it eradicated flu instantly, marvelous bloody marvelous.

    4. It’s bally staggering – we did something that we shouldn’t have done and need to hide that by… lying.

  47. DE headline..
    ‘Russia’s playing with fire!’ World turns on Putin over Ukraine

    They do have a strange concept of the word “World”

    1. Sky News says that the British taxpayer will have to pay a Billion pounds to bail out Greensill’s various deals that went wrong.

      That annoys us!

    2. Sky News says that the British taxpayer will have to pay a Billion pounds to bail out Greensill’s various deals that went wrong.

      That annoys us!

  51. Typical partial reporting by the Bbc News over the latest police shooting. The reporter claimed the suspect had been pulled over for a ‘minor traffic offence’, conveniently ignoring the fact that there was an outstanding warrant for him on a rather more serious charge, which is presumably why he tried to escape by jumping back into his car.

    1. Followed by Victoria Derbyshire claiming there had been a ‘slight rise’ in UK exports to the EU, which was dramatically undermined by the economics reporter she then spoke to revealing that the increase was 44.6% in February. ‘Slight’, my arriss.

  52. Bring back Darius: £1,000 reward offered after world’s biggest rabbit is stolen. 13 April 2021

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/52ee8774fb8a456642a7927f09969ee306fc9ce961d6e2faf12cd9045857be6a.jpg

    The world’s biggest rabbit has been reported stolen, as his owner offers a £1,000 reward for his safe return.

    Darius, a Continental Giant rabbit who is aged 11, was discovered missing early on Sunday morning by his owner Annette Edwards at her home in Stoulton, Worcestershire.

    Darius holds a Guinness World Record as the world’s biggest bunny, with a length of 4ft and 3in, while weighing in at 35 pounds.

    He’s probably in half a dozen pies by now!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/12/1000-bring-back-darius-reward-offered-worlds-biggest-rabbit/

    1. Ah, Louboutins. The red soles are a reference to the red heels on the shoes worn by men at the court of Louis XIV. It was a sign of their status as royal favourites. Hence, Louis heels.

    2. You don’t often see them in the highlands and legs even less so. Women up here have cloth legs

    3. I have never been able to wear heels that 👠 high (and could never afford them anyway)! Good luck to all those who can.

          1. Seeing how tall you are if you didn’t fall over you would be constantly banging your head in doorways.

      2. In my teens, i bought a pair of bright orange stilettos. A few weeks later, I snapped one of them tottering down Colchester’s steepest hill.
        When dressing posh, I feel happier in 1920’s style Louis heels.

        1. I haven’t worn high heels for over a year now, have trolled around in trainers. Am wondering if my feet will ever fit into heels again!

    4. I hope you only wear those when you are perched on a stool in a Cocktail Bar.

      Court shoes for walking !

  54. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has delivered a sharp rebuke to CNN after the media outlet used a picture of Ukrainian tanks to illustrate an article about Russia’s purported war preparations.

    “Dear CNN TV channel and its staff. We realize that you have no time for fact-checking, since you’re so immersed in ideological struggle for the triumph of liberalism,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “But to present Ukrainian tanks at a Ukrainian train station, with Ukrainian train carriages in the background, as Russia’s preparations for war is a bit too much.”
    She also snarkily suggested that perhaps CNN correspondents in Moscow should devote more time to their professional duties rather than focus on participating in public life in Russia.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CxfmDnpJY&t=16s

  55. After dropping the Dearly Tolerant off at work and pinching her car for the morning, I’m just back from Bradway, just South of Sheffield where I’ve purchased a reconditioned gearbox for the van.
    Made the most of the run by calling in to Border View Farm Shop near there, £38 spent, and the Peak Ales Brewery Shop at Chatsworth, another £30 spent.

    Now sat with a mug of tea!

    2. Should have said down here the local, Hogs Back Brewery, has a bitter called T.E.A. Traditional English Ale and very nice it is too.

      1. 1512 now. Michelangelo is just putting the finishing touches to the Sistine Ceiling.

  57. Have just planted some sweet little violas in the front, 11 of them, has to be an uneven number. Alf thinks I’m 😠 😡 😠 barmy. Hope they’ll be OK but I’d had them a little while and it was a real tussle getting them out of the plastic tray. Not far from flowering.

    We’re on a corner and a lot of people stop and look at the small border. Most people have a hedge or the same flowers/shrubs in the front but I decided to try an herbaceous border after have some sleepers put down, to hold back the soil, and removing an escallonia hedge that wasn’t too happy.

  58. STAY ALERT – STAY ALIVE – PROTECT THE NHS

    As the Islamic ‘holy’ month of Ramavan commences, police advise pedestrians on the pavements of the UK’s major cities not to walk with their backs to approaching traffic.
    :¬(

  59. UNIQUE Behaviour Coaching

    Are you feeling overwhelmed by the increasing demands of living through a pandemic? Did you know that living in a state of persistent stress actually disrupts your physical ability to manage your emotions and access a calm mindset? If so, I can help you to RESET and re-establish your physiological balance.

    My name is Lauren Bond.

    I specialise in interpreting what behaviour communicates. I am a Certified Neuro Coach and Somatic Practitioner. Although classically trained as a psychologist and therapeutic practitioner, I lean more towards a coaching style. I support the people I work with to figure out their own answers so that progress is sustainable. I have a strong professional background in learning and behavioural support, working within homes, educational and council settings around the country.

    My work is about guiding and supporting my clients to figure out what works for them. My parent coaching sessions enable parents to build on their skills because parenting is one of the most challenging jobs in the world and doesn’t come with a manual. I also provide conflict management training for households and workplaces.

    A significant focus of my work is the physiological impact of today’s society on our neurodevelopment. My RESET model enables people to self-regulate more effectively to access calmer mindsets and overcome obstacles. We are all UNIQUE, and one size rarely fits all. We all want to be seen and heard and able to express ourselves.

    The strategies that I’ve developed over the years are evidence-based and focus on how to embed practices to enable adults and children to understand what their behaviour is communicating without judgement. We are only able to learn new skills effectively when we are in a regulated mindset, and this takes practice.

    If you need a RESET to maximise limited resources and cultivate calmer mindsets in the household or workplace contact me via my website http://www.uniquebehaviour.co.uk and request a free consultation.

    I imagine there’s a queue (not).

    1. Bergoglio lives in an independent sovereign state enclosed within 40 ft walls and protected by a private army. Like all globalists, he’s a raging hypocrite.

      1. He also could have saved 10’s of thousands of lives in Africa from AIDS if they changed their policy on condoms.

      2. “Quia non est nobis conluctatio adversus carnem et sanguinem sed adversus principes et potestates adversus mundi rectores tenebrarum harum contra spiritalia nequitiae in caelestibus”
        — Eph. 6:12

        1. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, against spiritual wickedness in high places “

    1. I once saw a rear window sticker in a pick up in New England. Unlike the Kennedy’s cars, my gun collection has killed no one !

  64. A drug dealer has been convicted of the murder of his supplier by shooting him dead in a rural layby. D Fail

    Speaking after the trial, Detective Chief Inspector Dave Storey, of Hampshire police, said: “Gurinderjit Rai’s death was a carefully planned assassination. “Our thoughts remain with Gurinderjit’s friends and family.”

    Indeed, Chief Inspector, where are you and your mates going to get your drugs now?

    1. They seem to have abandoned any semblance of a fiscal policy…in the hope of a re-set perhaps?.
      I can think of three major trading nations who will give them short shrift.

  66. DT Story

    Could Prince Philip’s funeral be the catalyst that heals William and Harry’s rift?
    The brothers’ relationship has never been more strained but their shared love of ‘grandpa’ could bring them back together again.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2021/04/12/could-prince-philips-funeral-catalyst-heals-william-harrys-rift/

    BTL Comment from a Mavis Widermerpool

    Has Harry the integrity and courage to admit that he has made a terrible mistake in marrying the woman he has married?

    The choice should be between his wife or his royal family. If he wants to choose his wife then he must stay away from Britain and become completely independent financially from his family. If his wife truly loves him she will accept this – if she does not accept this and has married him just for what she hopes to get out of him then Harry has got rather of lot of thinking to do. Unfortunately for him thinking is not something he is very good at.

    1. Has Harry the integrity and courage to admit that he has made a terrible mistake in marrying the woman he has married?

      Not yet Richard, but public opinion and the more astute public awareness will sink in eventually. Collectively the public have much more experience of such matters.

      1. The more attractive (physically) a couple, the shorter the marriage I have come to observe.

          1. Nah! The polite version I’d say is that you’re a charming and quite presentable lady of a certain age!

      1. Some on sent me a cartoon of the Queen speaking on the phone to Harry and saying “no Harry he’s left you eff all” !

    3. “MEGHAN Markle stayed in the United States instead of attending Prince Philip’s funeral as she reportedly “didn’t want to be the centre of attention”.”

      Has her egotism no bounds?

  67. Afternoon all.
    I had an x-ray appointment at ten am this morning. It takes me 15 minutes to get to the radiology department. I always park away from the hospital car park in a side road layby. I checked in at 9:50 and was back in the car by ten clock. I hadn’t even warmed the seat up in the almost (one lady) empty waiting room before the radiologist called me in. No need to change into a gown as my trouser leg came up past my left knee for the x-ray. A friend had a similar experience at Papworth arrived early to wit and all done by the appointment time.
    And we are led to believe by the long droning media that hospitals are flat out tending to the masses of sick people.
    Same experience at a local A&E last Saturday, more staff than patients.
    It’s madness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJOLwy7un3U

    1. Bit like my trip for a scan at the NNUH on Sunday 28 March. The appt was at 7 30 pm – I got there at 6.50 on the off chance that I might be seen sooner. Checked in , immediately called, all done and dusted by 7 pm. Chap told me how grateful they all were as I was (at 7 30) their last appointment – so they could all go home early.

      Not a soul to be seen – so clearly the NHS has been saved.

      1. I have been waiting for an MRI scan on my hips for over 4 months !!!
        GP’s have been told by NHS management they can;’t request MRI scans.
        A few years ago you could almost walk in for one.

  68. Breaking News – Mattel the company that makes the Scrabble word board game has fallen into line with top Universities and Academics and have changed the rules of their game so that words that are spelt incorrectly can be included in the game and will count the same as a correctly spelt word.

    Gamers have been told that insisting on good written English discriminates against ethnic minorities and those who went to ‘underperforming’ schools.

    The game owners want to reduce the gap between the proportion of white and black students gaining good scores and cut the incidences where thicko’s upend the boards mid-game in fits of bad temper.

    In response, some Scrabble societies have been adopting so-called ‘inclusive spelling, a more flexible woke dictionary first introduced to level the playing field for gamers with conditions such as dyslexia

      3. With a bit of help over two other vertical words i got ‘perjurers’ over two triple word scores. Probably one of my best.

      1. I think it is a good idea, children that go to bog standard comps will now be able to complete with those educated at our finest public schools.

          2. Not if they are playing against me they don’t.

            I got a very sour look from my Grandmother when i beat her when i was 12 years old.

            Not that i’m any sort of prodigy but i played Scrabble constantly.

          3. My late mother-in-law hated losing – she usually won.

            We then discovered that she could “feel” the letters when choosing her replacement tile from the bag……

          5. Err…
            We are looking at a scrabble set where all the tiles are blanks.

            We played it competitively but at the same time always tried to get a big combined score.

            That allowed everyone to leave as many openings as possible.
            I hate those games where people play very defensively.

          6. My play is to open up the board and let my opponent fall into traps.

            The idea of all blank tiles is for illiterate bames so they can smoke ganja, take fentanyl and believe they are Einstein. Twats.

    3. 331481+ up ticks,
      Afternoon B3,
      Makes very little odds because as the voting pattern dictates more arabic words will be added.

      1. Once I played quizzes on a triple letter score, triple word score, all 7 letters.

        It was some time before we played again…

    8. Great. Scrabble Marshalls – coming to a town near you.
      Zkrooble Orf. (Look at that for a score)

  69. Steerpike
    Five of the worst Remain predictions five years on
    13 April 2021, 11:00am

    It is five years today since the official Leave and Remain campaigns won official designation in the EU referendum campaign. Despite David Cameron’s psephological guru Andrew Cooper predicting a ten point win for In on polling day, we all know what happened next as the Vote Leave team of Boris and Cummings trumped the Britain Stronger in Europe’s brigade of Craig Oliver, Will Straw et al. The UK (eventually) went on to leave the European Union and now five years on, Mr S thought it would be instructive to take a look at five of the predictions that never came true.

    Households £4,300 worse off

    The focus of the Remain campaign on Brexit’s economic costs was labelled as ‘Project Fear’ by opponents, with no politician doing more to push that line of argument than Chancellor George Osborne. At one event, the former Tory MP unveiled a poster declaring that households would be poorer by £4,300 in 2030 – a claim that earned a rebuke from the BBC’s fact check: ‘the precise figure is questionable and probably not particularly helpful.’ Regardless of the dubious way in which the Treasury concocted this oddly specific figure, records from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show in the five years since that real disposable income per head has risen from £5,177 in the second quarter of 2016 to £5,354 at the end of 2020.

    Half a million job losses

    Under Osborne, the Treasury produced multiple doomsday scenarios about the consequences for the labour market if Britain left the EU. One suggested that ‘unemployment would increase by around 500,000 with all regions experiencing a rise in rise in the number of people out of work’ with specific job losses by region with London and the South East set for 73,000 and 74,000 redundancies specifically. Five years on and a million jobs were added by the time Covid hit, with the employment rate for those aged between 16 to 64 rising from 74.5 per cent in June 2016 to 76.6 per cent in January 2020 – the highest level since 1971. In March 2016, the month before the Treasury released its analysis, the total number of jobs in the UK was 34.4 million – the same as it is now, having fallen in the pandemic from its high of 35.7 million.

    An inevitable punishment budget

    Osborne also told Radio 4’s Today that leaving the EU would leave the UK ‘with no economic plan’ requiring an urgent response as ‘there would have to be increases in tax and cuts in public spending to fill the black hole.’ In the event, Osborne lost his job when Cameron quit and his successor Philip Hammond, a fellow Remainer, said there would be no such emergency budget. In the event, Hammond’s first budget was described as a ‘low-key package’ that increased national insurance contributions for the self-employed and enjoyed stronger-than-expected tax receipts since the EU referendum. Britain even finished the year as one of the fastest growing economies in the G7.

    The warnings of the big banks

    Forecasting the consequences of a Leave vote did not go well for many of the big banks. Goldman Sachs – which donated half a million pounds to the Remain campaign – claimed the UK would go into recession by early 2017 with Nomura predicting a 1.3 per cent fall in GDP and Credit Suisse a 1 per cent fall. JP Morgan meanwhile wrote to clients days after the vote to say that they expected Scotland to leave the union and change currency. In reality, Scotland is very much still part of the UK with the British economy growing up until the first quarter of 2020 when Covid struck with 1.7 per cent annual GDP growth in both 2016 and 2017 followed by 1.3 per cent in 2018 and 1.4 per cent in 2019. Before the vote accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that up to 100,000 jobs in financial services would go. Rivals EY estimated last month that PWC’s figure had overestimated such losses by a factor of nine, with just 7,600 going overseas as of March 2021.

    The collapse of the West

    One of the more extravagant claims was made by then European Council president Donald Tusk who told German newspaper Der Bild that: ‘As a historian I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilization in its entirety.’ David Cameron issued a similar warning – in admittedly less apocalyptic tones – when he implied a third world war could grip the continent if the UK left the European Union, asking: ‘Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash to make that assumption.’ Five years on and it appears that the greater threat to the EU is in fact its own leaders, given the ongoing debacle of the vaccine rollout in the face of public dismay. Western political civilisation meanwhile has somehow remained intact.

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

    Antony Stone • 3 hours ago • edited
    What the Remainers were very successful at doing was in framing the discussion: making it about economics, the economy, jobs.
    Of course, they had the BBC, most of Parliament and the MSM in general on their side.
    But most people who voted leave knew it was about sovereignty. It was about whether democracy persisted in these isles, or was definitively snuffed out.
    The Nissan car plant workers who were mocked post-Brexit for voting themselves out of a job, were real patriots, because they voted to ensure future generations had a say in how the country was governed.
    As it happens, Project Fear got it completely wrong and Nissan is expanding its product range, but the people in power revealed themselves to be shallow, self-interested and anti-British.
    Cameron has revealed his true colours more fully since 2016, halfwits like Phillip Hammond walked into a lucrative career.

    Captain Detterling • 3 hours ago • edited
    By far the worst outcome was that Jamie Oliver did not leave Britain as he said he would.

    Paul Robson Captain Detterling • 2 hours ago
    Ratbag Alibhai Brown would run a close second.

    1. Credit Suisse is suffering because it’s management are – to quote ” **** **** ********** ********* *** ***** ******ers”

  70. 331481+up ticks,
    Strikes me as concerning harry / co, if the peoples put as much thought & righteousness into their thinking on support & voting
    past / future intentions we might,just might, dig ourselves out of this sh!te bog.

    Well meant advice double the 6′ 6 6/8″s social distancing in regards to lab/lib/con/ green candidates at at future voting opportunities.

    Ps, I know.

    3. “An examination of wastewater in a small area of nearby Southwark also identified the presence of the South African variant, though that has not yet been linked to the outbreak in Lambeth and Wandsworth.

      Targeted surge testing is expected to be put in place in Southwark as a result.”

      So this virus exists in wastewater … and maybe sewerage farms and our water supply?

  73. Biden urges Russia to de-escalate Ukraine tensions in call with Putin. 13 April 2021.

    In a phone call with Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden has called on Russia to de-escalate tensions with Ukraine and proposed a summit between the two leaders amid growing concern over a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border.

    The president emphasized the United States’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and expressed concern about Russia’s military buildup, the White House said.

    “President Biden reaffirmed his goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with US interests, and proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia.”

    Did Joe just blink first?

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/13/ukraine-russia-joe-biden-vladimir-putin-phone-call

      3. Grief, Biden speaking to Putin.

        A lamb to the slaughter. I feel sorry for him actually. The most powerful man in the west is an object of pity.

          1. Economically, tactically. That said though, he’s determined to destroy their economy.

  74. Biden urges Russia to de-escalate Ukraine tensions in call with Putin. 13 April 2021.

    In a phone call with Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden has called on Russia to de-escalate tensions with Ukraine and proposed a summit between the two leaders amid growing concern over a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border.

    The president emphasized the United States’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and expressed concern about Russia’s military buildup, the White House said.

    “President Biden reaffirmed his goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with US interests, and proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia.”

    Did Joe just blink first?

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/13/ukraine-russia-joe-biden-vladimir-putin-phone-call

      2. With the greatest of respect – why? He and his lot have spouted tripe for a year, let us down on Brexit by not being tough enough, praticed an open borders policy not only when we must economically reverse it, when we shouldn’t have unknown, illegals arriving here, but by encouraging the swine. Precisely what we wanted to stop with Brexit. Then the total oaf supports tax hikes at a time when the economy is in the toilet.

        Apologies, but very seriously – the whole edifice of state needs burning. The millions of bureaucrats in Whitehall need turfing into the Thames. The politbureau of incompetent gormless fools just make everything worse. They all do. There’s no point voting. Whoever gets elected just makes things worse.

    1. 331481+ up ticks,
      Afternoon A,
      They swear on the instruction manual in parliament
      making lying to non followers permissible not that that will be any problem to governance politico’s.

      1. This is the process of explaining why idiots still think that jihadists can be rehabilitated, rather than executed.

      2. No. He was the sole perpetrator. It is evidence given to the inquest into the deaths of Mr Merritt and Ms Jones, both former Cambridge criminology students.

    3. A religion founded by a liar pervert, based on lies and perpetuated by liars
      And piss be upon him.

      1. I laughed out loud when the tour guide to a Mosque in Morocco said the Prophets Aunt died when she was on Hajj and fell off a donkey.

        2. I couldn’t help laughing when one of my mates said his grandfather had drowned after steering his mobility scooter into a lake.
          I felt awful but I couldn’t help myself.

          1. The juxtaposition of something serious and silly. Makes good comedy.

            Hope the old boy didn’t suffer…………for long.

  77. 331491+ up ticks.
    It is my honest belief that the Duke of Edinburgh would be rather standing on a bridge of a gunboat protecting the shores of England than standing on a plinth outside of a political den of iniquity set on destroying those very shores.

    PROPOSAL FOR DUKE OF EDINBURGH STATUE AFTER MPS VOICE SUPPORT FOR MEMORIAL

          1. 331481+ up ticks,
            Evening Pm,
            It would be a lot more beneficial to these Isles than an inanimate figure on a block staring at the ongoing wrongdoings.
            The governance overseers would NOT want it for the simple reason it would be in opposition to their intended agenda.

    1. Well, I suspect he ain’t a Muslim from Pakistan who arrived just before the flight deadline.

    3. I’m utterly bewildered.

      Slapping a bloke in cuffs for breaking quarantine? Smashing in a window? Bashing a door in? Dear life. Breaking, entering, illegal search, criminal damage – you name it.

  80. That’s me for this very nice day. Sun all day – there was a chilly breeze, but one didn’t really notice it.

    I hope to join you tomorrow. Have a jolly evening washing your masks…

    A demain.

    2. A German teenager told my daughter that she boycotted JK Rowling’s books and films because “she said she hates gay and lesbian people.”

      I’m not a particular fan of JKR who spent years fanning the flames of this kind of witch hunt. I wonder if she realises what she did now.

    2. We pretty much had, then black grievance merchants and hate filled Lefties began perpetuating it.

  84. Apols for not being about to reply, Mongo started growling and barking on Saturday. He doesn’t do either, normally. If he’s in pain he bumps against you and won’t leave you alone. If he’s hungry he brings his bowl – or sits by it.

    Junior came bursting in in floods of tears saying Mongo was growling at him. I went out, called him and he barked at me – and hasn’t stopped except to rumble throat growl with teeth bared. Even commands aren’t working. I’ve tried treats – he leaves them. Put a muzzle on – I borrowed one – and checked his paws and he thrashed like a maniac. I’ve sat with him, talked to him and he turns away from me. He’s going to the vet for a check up tomorrow.

    My best mate won’t speak to me. Usually now he has his head on my leg and drools away happy as anything. He’s in the kitchen ignoring his food. He’s eating, but only once he’s on his own.

    I wondered if it was territory with us all being around all the time, stress but it’s never been a problem before.

      1. He’s going back to the person he knows – the same vet he always sees who’s a bit of an expert in giant dogs.

        He’s not even bally walking. I know they can be stubborn, but he stopped completelyand wouldn’t budge, then started pulling. It took a lot to keep him to heel.

        Normally, he has his lead tucked in to his harness and walks beside junior – all the time.

        1. I am just worried about the behaviour change.

          Dogs tend to also lick their lips when stressed.

          I’m no expert but it sounds to me as if he is in pain. Sorry.

          Glucosamine plus curcumin are good for doggies.

          Hope things turn out well.

          1. That’s my thinking as well, but usually he’d whine.

            The only thinking is that the roof works and my knocking down the coving have properly set him off.

          2. Possibly the loud noises then.

            When firework season comes around i always put on music for Dolly to distract her from the sudden bangs.

    2. Sorry to hear that. It’s worrying when they change their behaviour like that. Hope the vet can sort it.

  85. Just noticed a new TV prog on the Beeb. ‘This is my House’.

    A group of slebs have to pretend it belongs to them and another sleb has to guess who actually owns it.

    Burglars are making notes. lol.

      1. I think the through the keyhole was a bit more subtle. This show uses aerial photo’s from drones and tours of the house.

    2. Didn’t Jilly Cooper suggest that format in one of her novels years ago as a joke?

  86. “Grind the bastards down” is another way of describing the tactics that the writer discusses.

    Janet Daley wrote on the same subject a week or two ago. Her observation was not so much that people had made a great sacrifice for the nation, as some columnists opined, but that they had had the crap frightened out of them and were prepared to give up anything to survive. Remember the recent letter in the DT? “Hooray for lockdown! I’m 80! It saved my life!”

    The fight for liberty is only just beginning

    It’ll be tempting to have a summer of decadence before returning to safe routines instilled by the pandemic. We must resist that temptation

    FRANCIS DEARNLEY • Monday 12th April

    When the pandemic first broke out, all we 20 somethings could talk about was when we would be allowed back in the pub. We imagined the clock hitting midnight on Freedom Day, and our old lives being restored to us in an instant.

    But the question of ‘how long until we’re allowed in the pub?’ has morphed over the last year – and it is now far trickier to answer than back in the heady days of March 2020.

    Today, many pubs across the country technically opened their doors for the first time in four months. But with seating restricted to frosty gardens, strict rules on customer numbers, and no bar service, it is hard to say whether such a reopening really counts.

    Instead of asking when we’ll be allowed back in the pub, my friends and I have now taken to pondering what “being allowed in a pub” even means. Like how things were before? Or just six outside? Does being inside and social distancing count?

    Such questions are symbolic of the lingering uncertainties of our post-pandemic world. It is too early to say which changes will be indelible – the Spanish Flu of 1918/19, which killed 228,000 in Britain, left little mark on our culture. But no one can deny the scale of the change over the past year: sociologists the world over must now be scratching their heads at how it is possible for so many millions to consent to being kept under lock in key so wilfully, and in many cases, so contently.

    The obvious answer for this consent is fear – fear of spreading the disease, and fear of catching it. But at various points – like now – the risk was minimal, and people broadly stuck to the rules. So that answer is incomplete. The next is legal: not wishing to break the law, and an innate respect for the system. But British history is rich with examples of unpopular laws being broken – the Poll Tax, for example. So this cannot be considered a full answer either. Much has been written about the public secretly enjoying the lockdown, but while that may have been true in the early months, it surely rings hollow a year on.

    To me, the unspoken element is more prosaic: we became desensitised. Quentin Crisp – a man not unfamiliar with the pubs of Soho – went further, writing in The Naked Civil Servant: “Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.” He was referring to the growing liberality towards sexuality, which he saw as changing not via “the simple statement of facts” but “the constant repetition of them”. His subtle point was that changes can only occur when novelty becomes wedded to the everyday, the mundane. Today, on our walks through towns and cities, we see the pubs and shops shut, and slowly but surely we adjust – and accept – this new reality. Initial outrage has been tempered by the dulling effect of the daily grind.

    Another factor is that culturally, to be outraged is seen as weakness. As Robert Tombs has described so eloquently, ever since the failures of absolute monarchy and devout republicanism in the seventeenth century, we remain suspicious of hardliners. This explains why our most ‘radical’ Prime Ministers come from the Right rather than the Left: the perception of a sympathy for moderation matters – one has more room for manoeuvre. When drastic change occurs under a Conservative government, the public know it must be necessary. This partly explains the Prime Minister’s continuing popularity.

    For comparison, it is helpful to compare the restrictions with one of the more controversial movements for change active during the pandemic, including last week: Extinction Rebellion. Whatever one thinks of its objectives, as a movement it hardly speaks the language of temperance. Twitter – the medium of the mob, sacrificing debate for placards and platitudes – feeds this anger, yet ironically in doing so it makes the movements who find their voices there less likely to win public consent for their goals. In a country where moderation is seen as a virtue, more often than not outrage stalls rather than stokes change.

    When the outraged seek change without winning over the public, they fail. Those who tried to derail Brexit learnt this to their cost: they thought people would tire of the saga the longer it went on, eventually giving up the fight. They lost, because the public was not allowed to get bored – our ‘civil war without muskets’ raged on for years, stoked by a media frenzy. The difference now is that – albeit for noble reasons – we have largely acquiesced, and boredom is blinding. We are all complicit in this new reality, even if that complicity was necessary.

    For life to return to how it was, we cannot hold back: while the desire is there to restore the old world, traces of the restrictions in our national psyche will remain embedded. It will be tempting for many to have a novel summer of decadence – a splurge of pub crawls and nights out – before returning to safe routines instilled by the pandemic. For life to return, for the old world to survive, it will need to become the new normal; the new boring.

    So go out and enjoy your pints this week, and the week after – the pubs, and our culture, need you now more than ever.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/12/fight-liberty-just-beginning/

    1. It makes me wonder why these people depend so heavily on pubs. Cant they enjoy themselves without drinking?

      3. Er….no.

        I like it when in a Bar that the conversation flows with laughter.

        One doesn’t need alcohol but it does loosen the tongue.

    2. “When drastic change occurs under a Conservative government, the public know it must be necessary.” They think it’s necessary because they mistakenly think we have a Conservative government. They are wrong on both counts.

  87. Latest Breaking News – Dairy farmers have been caught injecting their dairy cattle with the Oxford AZ vaccine, apparently their clotted cream yield has trebled.

      1. Even more reason to restrict numbers coming across the channel – the country is getting smaller by the day

      1. Yes i do. I could send you a gouache copy if you would like. Might take two or three months. Contact Hertslass for my details. No charge except P&P.

        *note…Not brilliant. Not Originals. But nice.

    3. I quoted for a job in Lavenham a few years ago where the owner had several original Jack Vetriano paintings. Big brick house in the centre with extensive grounds.

      I did not secure the work which went to an ignorant builder and concluded that the chap was, shall we say, a cheapskate and a bit odd.

    1. As has been said before, you do learn a lot here! And no, I have not heard his name come up during the black history month, anywhere.

      1. Good evening, Jill.

        I had never heard about him myself. Until he was featured on a TV program as a Scottish inspiration on a cookery program. ‘The Great British Menu’.

        The wrong people are being promoted for a cause. Sickening.

        1. To me he seemed like Nelson Mandela but without the wife from hell with the burning necklaces.

      2. Very good. Now we have to send tax payers copies to David Lammy and Diane Abbot to reassure them they are alone. Er…

    3. There are many unacknowledged black persons who have contributed greatly to our society. Regrettably the Black History Month has been hi jacked by lefty politicians and faux University, aka Polytechnic, ‘professors’ of the woke agenda promoting the notion of ‘white privilege’.

      The left have always pretended to support for blacks whereas they are actually self interested and wishing to retain power will seek to keep blacks down and dependent upon the largesse of the state.

      The same applies in America.

      1. There are many white people who, unacknowledged, have contributed greatly to society, too. That most who were acknowledged were white is perhaps as a result of living in a predominantly white society.

    4. I might have seen him as I went to Highbury County Grammar School for Boys (as it was known) in 1957. I left in 1961 with no academic qualifications but had a very successful working life.

  91. Evening, all. Whoever wrote the lead letter has made the fatal mistake of trying to apply logic to the Covid panic and the government’s headless chicken approach to it.

  93. What lessons did Philip Johnston have at his grammar school that he should write ‘I was once tasked…’?

    The destructive legacy of the grammar school-wreckers lingers on today

    Shirley Williams was an admirable politician, but her education policies hurt poorer bright pupils

    PHILIP JOHNSTON

    I was once tasked as political correspondent with ringing Enoch Powell to obtain a comment on the death of Harold Wilson, the former prime minister. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” was his classicist’s reply. I do not intend to speak ill of Shirley Williams, whose career I observed with somewhat grudging admiration as I did not entirely agree with her political views. I even covered part of her triumphant by-election campaign in Crosby in 1981 and attended the launch of the SDP, of which she was a founding member, on a cold, wet day almost exactly 40 years ago.

    A few months later, the Gang of Four decided to break the mould further with a “rolling conference” which began in Perth and ended in London. They and the accompanying press pack travelled by rail around the country for the best part of a week. So much alcohol was consumed that our chartered locomotive was dubbed the “train of shame”. A songbook was even compiled, with one contribution being If You Were the Only Shirl in the World, to which Williams gamely sang along.

    Lady Williams, as she became, died on Monday, aged 90, and her obituaries are testament to her extraordinary contribution to public life. She was once tipped to be the first woman prime minister, before Margaret Thatcher beat her to it. They were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but had one strand that united them: the abolition of grammar schools.

    Mrs Thatcher was education secretary in the 1970-74 Heath government and inherited the policy of the previous Labour administration to introduce a fully comprehensive system. A grammar-school girl herself, she tried to protect those that fought council closure decisions and managed to save around 90 of them. But she also approved more than 3,000 comprehensives, a point that Shirley Williams rarely tired of making.

    Williams served in the Education Department from 1967 where Anthony Crosland, as secretary of state, had been evangelical in his determination to destroy the selective system of education. In her biography published in 1982, his widow Susan said he had told her: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f—— grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.”

    In 1976, two years after Labour returned to power, Williams became Education Secretary. During this time the grammar I attended became a comprehensive. It is one of the more galling aspects of this debate over the decades that the greatest opponents of grammar schools invariably attended independent institutions. Crosland was educated at Highgate School and Williams at St Paul’s Girls, which she considered “shockingly rigid”, but from where she won a scholarship to Oxford. Tony Benn, another opponent, went to Westminster. The list goes on.

    Grammar schools’ most ardent supporters are those who went to them and especially those bright working-class children for whom the option of an expensive independent education never existed. Tory politicians who went to private schools have never been great proponents of the return of grammars either. They never needed to be, since getting into a good school was never a problem. Neither Tony Blair (Fettes), David Cameron nor Boris Johnson (both Etonians) ever warmed to the idea. The only recent PM who did was Theresa May, who attended a grammar school until it was also turned into a comprehensive.

    At the heart of this debate for more than 50 years is the question of how to help clever children from less well-off backgrounds achieve their potential. For Labour, wedded to egalitarianism, selection on the grounds of academic prowess is anathema, though they never had the same compunction about special schools for those who are talented musically or outstanding at sports.

    A great deal has been written about “social mobility” and how it has stalled. Yet everyone knows that a good school offers the surest route out of difficult circumstances and, in the state sector, the best performers are the 164 surviving grammars in England. That is hardly surprising, I hear you say, since they select the brightest children. But they comprise just 5 per cent of all schools, whereas before a wrecking ball was taken to the system the proportion was 25 per cent.

    The reason why Crosland and Williams disliked them so much was precisely because they were good schools and therefore gave those attending them a better start than children who didn’t (apart from those at private schools, of course). The fault with the old system was not the grammar schools but the secondary moderns, where those who failed their 11-plus ended up and, understandably, felt abandoned, though it was possible to move to a selective school later.

    That was not an argument for abolishing the best schools, but improving the bad ones. It is astonishing to think that the creation of new grammars is actually forbidden by an Act of Parliament, with only the expansion of existing schools allowed. Only a few have availed themselves of the latter loophole.

    Mrs May sought to get the issue debated once again when she succeeded Cameron in 2016. She wanted to expand the government’s free-school programme and allow them to offer selective education to some 70,000 pupils. She pledged to overturn the Blair government’s statutory ban to allow new schools to choose their entrants on academic merit. However, her failure to secure a majority at the 2017 election scuppered that plan and it has not been resurrected by her successor.

    Given the disaster that the schools’ shutdown during the pandemic has been for pupils from poorer backgrounds, it is time it was revived. If one objection to grammar schools is that middle-class parents are able to get their children disproportionately into the remaining selective schools that’s because there are so few of them. There used to be two in every big town and the more there are the greater the chance that bright kids from less well off families will have of obtaining the education they need.

    Of course the education “blob” would be against it, as would Labour, which seems to me to be two good reasons for going ahead with it. But Boris (OE) won’t. Half a century on, Shirley Williams’s legacy remains a powerful, even malign, influence on modern politics.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/13/destructive-legacy-grammar-school-wreckers-lingers-today/

    1. I thank God that my Headmaster at the City of Bath Technical School was the late FT Naylor, a founder member of the Grammar Schools Association.

      Our school in my year outperformed all other schools in Somerset , Wiltshire and Gloucester when counting ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level results.

      Anthony Crosland and Shirley Williams put back the education of children twenty years with their inane liberal socialist policies. The damage their policies inflicted are ongoing and irreparable.

        1. Arguably, Anthony Crosland was the most destructive force to British Education within my lifetime.

          1. A nasty piece of work who pulled the ladder of opportunity away from bright, working class children.

    2. My niece, Susie, was head girl of Godolphin and Latymer School at the time of Shirley Williams’s advocacy of comprehensive schools. Unfortunately G & L (which became private to avoid being forced into being a comprehensive) was one of the most selective grammar schools in London and Shirley Williams had to sacrifice her own daughter’s education at the school to avoid charges of gross hypocrisy.

    3. Late comment. However, I went to a secondary modern school in the socialist republic of Islington after having an interview for Highbury Grammar school for Girls but being turned down, I suspect, because my knowledge of grammar was not good enough.

      Have to say I never felt “abandoned” or “useless” or “thrown on the scrap heap”. I think this is a myth that those like me ever felt that way. The left like to push this idea to support their destruction of grammar school education. Another instance of being offended on behalf of other people.

      1. Gloucestershire escaped the worst of the wreckers – I went to an all girls’ grammar, and my sons both went to an all boys’ one.

      2. Ditto my experience at Glendale Sec.Mod. in Wooler.

        Yes, there were those who’d never make it, but the staff identified those who might and tried their hardest to ignite that spark.

      3. Ditto my experience at Glendale Sec.Mod. in Wooler.

        Yes, there were those who’d never make it, but the staff identified those who might and tried their hardest to ignite that spark.

    4. I have long been under the impression that Maggie’s hands were effectively tied by existing Labour legislation that Heath, with his preoccupation on the EEC and vandalising the Country structure of the country, would not allow Parliamentary time to repeal.

  94. The judge is a patronising git.

    Older white people who use term ‘coloured’ are not necessarily racist, judge rules

    Those unversed in modern linguistic mores may not have had the benefit of ‘multicultural acquaintances’, an employment tribunal heard

    By Phoebe Southworth

    Older white people who use the term “coloured” are not necessarily racist as they have not had “multicultural acquaintances”, a judge has ruled.

    Judge Robert Clark, adjudicating on a work harassment claim, said those unversed in modern linguistic mores may employ the term when referring to an ethnic minority individual in the belief they are being polite.

    He said they may think the word is acceptable due to the “less polite alternatives” used in the past.

    Or, he suggested, they may not have not benefited from having “multicultural acquaintances”, so use “outdated” language while trying not to cause offence.

    The judge’s comments came after a black cleaner launched a harassment claim against his employer, Atlas Facilities Management Limited, because one of his white colleagues used the term “coloured”.

    Ryan Justin was enraged after another cleaner made a note in the comments book used by Atlas employees to communicate with each other as they changed shifts at the Pure Gym in Derby.

    Markham Pell, 49, wrote that “three coloured guys were messing around (i.e. play fighting and not really training)”. Mr Justin was so angry that he confronted Mr Pell, the tribunal heard.

    Mr Pell immediately apologised and said he hadn’t intended to be offensive or racist, and thought using the word “coloured” was less offensive than “black”.

    Despite the apology, Mr Justin pursued a harassment claim.

    He wrote in his witness statement to the tribunal: “Black people have had to put up with offensive name tags or described with offensive racist slurs for many years, however times have changed and this should not be accepted or considered OK in this current time.”

    However, the tribunal ruled that Mr Justin’s approach to Mr Pell was “confrontational”, and Mr Pell had genuinely tried to use sensitive terminology.

    Dismissing the claim, Judge Clark said: “The fact that this outdated language was once used descriptively by people who genuinely felt it to be a polite term, is only so because of the less polite alternatives that existed in that past era.

    “We accept white people of a certain age who perhaps have not had much opportunity to benefit from multicultural acquaintances in their day to day lives may draw on this outdated language in the mistaken belief it is polite and genuinely descriptive.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/13/older-white-people-use-term-coloured-not-necessarily-racist

    1. My thoughts exactly. I have many “multicultural acquaintances” but oddly enough, the topic of which terms are politically correct does not crop up when I am talking to them. What I particularly disliked about this case was the implication that the white man only escaped punishment because he apologised for his white mistake.

  95. Tell us the news…

    Quarter of Covid deaths not caused by virus, new figures show

    Calls to speed up roadmap as data records people dying ‘with’ disease rather than ‘from’ it

    BySarah Knapton, SCIENCE EDITOR and Ben Riley-Smith, POLITICAL EDITOR • 13 April 2021 • 9:30pm

    Almost a quarter of registered Covid deaths are people who are not dying from the disease, new official figures show, as the Government was urged to move faster with the roadmap in the light of increasingly positive data.

    The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that 23 per cent of coronavirus deaths registered are now people who have died “with” the virus rather than “from” an infection.

    This means that, while the person who died will have tested positive for Covid, that was not the primary cause of their death recorded on the death certificate.

    Other data also shows an increasingly positive picture of the state of the pandemic in the UK.

    Daily death figures by “date of death” reveal that Britain has had no more than 28 deaths a day since the beginning of April, even though the government-announced deaths have been as high as 60.

    This is because the Government gives a daily update on deaths based on the number reported that day, which can include deaths from days or weeks previously and therefore may not reflect the true decline in deaths. On Tuesday, the Government announced that there had been 23 further deaths.

    Likewise, Oxford University has calculated that the number of people in hospital with an active Covid infection is likely to be around half the current published daily figure. Tuesday’s official figure showed there were 2,537 Covid patients in hospital, with 230 new admissions.

    However, despite the positive statistics, Boris Johnson issued a warning over the lifting of lockdown as he said it was the restrictions, not the vaccine rollout, that had predominantly kept Covid numbers low.

    “It is very, very important for everybody to understand that the reduction in these numbers – in hospitalisations and in deaths and in infections – has not been achieved by the vaccination programme,” he said.

    “People don’t, I think, appreciate that it’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing. So yes of course the vaccination programme has helped, but the bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.”

    The Prime Minister cautioned that case numbers will rise in the coming weeks as people gather in pub gardens and visit shops again, with Number 10 carefully watching changes in the data. But he added that “at the moment I can’t see any reason for us to change the road map, to deviate from the targets that we have set ourselves”.

    Tory MPs privately noted that Mr Johnson’s comments on the vaccine struck a more cautious note than those used by Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, in a letter issued on Tuesday to MP colleagues.

    In that letter, parts of which The Telegraph has seen, Mr Hancock said “it is because of the success of the vaccination rollout”, alongside falling infection cases and hospitalisations, that “we are able carefully to lift restrictions” across the UK.

    Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, brought forward the reopening of non-essential shops. The speeding up of her reopening timetable comes after Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, brought forward indoor mixing by a week.

    MPs urged Mr Johnson to also be driven by the positive data. Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Research Group of Tory MPs sceptical about lockdown, told The Telegraph: “I know the Prime Minister is worried about case data in other countries. But we were promised the vaccine would break the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths.

    “We’ve been told repeatedly it has done. So of course we’re looking to the Prime Minister to follow the data so that we can end the other harms that come with restrictions and lockdown. The sooner we’re talking about the crisis in cancer care, the sooner we’ll be solving it.”

    Covid deaths now make up just 4.9 per cent of deaths registered in England and Wales, compared with 45 per cent in mid-January, according to the ONS.

    Prof Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, said: “All the data is highly reassuring. There is becoming a case over the next couple of weeks to bring forward the reopening of hospitality, but that’s offset with caution around big events.

    “The issue is as we go about our daily lives there will be a slight increase in cases, but the key is not to panic. I think this over-cautiousness can be overcome by using a data-driven approach.”

    Experts also said it was clear that vaccination was having a “major” impact, with the death rate for over-60s now close to that of the under-60s despite being 43 times higher at the January peak.

    Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said: “There’s nothing in the death registration data that proves for certain that the differences in trends between older and younger people are caused by the vaccination, but vaccination must surely be playing a very major role.

    “I’m not complacent, and we must still be careful now that restrictions on what we can do are being lifted. But the news so far is good.”

    More than 32 million people have now had a vaccine in the UK, with the Government announcing on Monday that the target of offering a jab to all those over 50, care home residents, those who are classed as vulnerable and those who work in health or social care had been reached.

    However, a new analysis based on the fact that NHS England has said 19 out of 20 of those most at risk have had the jab suggests 1.3 million vulnerable people have not yet taken up the offer of a vaccine.

    It is believed Mr Johnson’s cautious message is being deliberately stressed now so that people will not be overly alarmed if Covid cases numbers begin to rise again throughout April.

    He has said since first announcing his reopening roadmap in February that Covid cases would rise as restrictions eased. Downing Street believes the correct balance has been struck between limiting virus spread and helping businesses.

    A well-placed senior government source downplayed any quickening of the reopening roadmap for England, stressing the current “earliest date” targets remained.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/13/quarter-covid-deaths-not-caused-virus/

    1. Oh dear. Boris the Buffoon is finally on the back foot. His lockdowns did nothing to halt the spread of the Corona virus but achieved the precise opposite.

      The lockdowns, social distancing, stupid quarantine and inhuman closure of businesses actually made matters worse and will have created economic woes which will burden our economy for decades.

      There is now no place to hide you morons: Johnson, Hancock, Vallance, Whitty and Van Tam. You will be prosecuted for fraud and crimes against humanity as sure as night follows day.

      1. Despite the truth of what you say, if people are foolish enough to sleepwalk into vaccine passports the reset will proceed unhindered.

        1. It’s going to be difficult to not have a vac passport, if the things you like to do are closed to you as a result of not having one.
          ravel abroad, with a check at the border is tolerable – hell, I have had that for years with travels to Africa – but entry to pubs and shopping centres, garden centres, restaurants…? Hmm.

Comments are closed.