713 thoughts on “Tuesday 21 January: The BBC’s next director-general must find a new funding model”

  2. A little Aussie humour.

    An Italian, a Frenchman and an Aussie were talking about screams of passion.

    The Italian said, “Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with the finest extra virgin
    olive oil, then we made passionate love and I made her scream, non-stop for five minutes.”

    The Frenchman said, “Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with special aphrodisiac oil from Provence and then we made passionate love. I made her scream for fifteen minutes straight.”

    The Aussie said, “That’s nothing! Last night I massaged my wife, y’know, all over her body with a special butter. I caressed her entire body with the butter, and then we made love and I made her scream for two long hours.”

    The Italian and Frenchman, astonished, asked, “Two full hours? Wow! That’s phenomenal. What did you do it to make her scream for two hours?”

    The Aussie replied, “I wiped my hands on the curtains.”

    1. Morning peeps,

      How many of yer blokes on here have heard of POIS?
      We had a chap in clinic yesterday who it turns out is allergic to his own semen. Even if he abstains from SI and masturbation, his nocturnal emissions still cause a reaction.

      Poor fella

      1. Good morning.

        Nope, i had never heard of it. My suggestion would be that he stores his semen for later if he wanted to have children at some time and then have his testes removed. They can be replaced with implants so his genital area looks the same as it did before.

          1. Glad he is being looked after but i think my idea is the better one.

            *Who wants to be a Lab rat…

          2. I agree. A miserable condition made even more miserable by the treatment. Still, he was a young lad – maybe its worth trying Imm before resorting to surgery .

          3. I know surgery should always be the last resort but given the rarity of his condition i think he should consider the prospect.

    2. Would be funny, except for the premise that men take pride in making women ‘scream’ during sex.

        1. If likening noises made during organic pleasure to expression of anger about ruined curtains, yer bloke may want to reconsider his technique.

          3. The pain is only in your mind – the ‘shrieks’ are supposed to be shrieks of delight but, if one has to explain a joke…

          4. Not shrieks, screams.
            I have heard enough similar real conversations over the years to know that for some men that is exactly what they boast to each other about.
            No explanation needed – it is making light of rape

          5. I will never condone rape, in every instance they made love, mostly passionate.

            I can only conclude that you’re seeing what isn’t there, Stormy, but I have to leave you to sort out that problem as I have no intention of following lefty libtard’s ideas of free speech and censuring what might be thought wrong.

            Good morning.

          6. It is a good demonstration of the different way words can affect people. To me, “made her scream” doesn’t describe consenting pleasure.
            If you havent ever been in the company of men talking just like this, boasting to eachother about what they have ‘done to women’ then it won’t provoke the same interpretation

  3. Harry Dunn death: Police chief to fund driver training for US staff at RAF base

    A police chief has said he will fund driver training at an RAF base after the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn.

    Northamptonshire Police Chief Constable Nick Adderley said all new arrivals at RAF Croughton would receive lessons on Highway Code awareness, UK road laws and protocols.

    Without saying it, the whole article gives the impression that traffic on RAF Croughton drives on the right. If this is so it should be remedied pronto, as it obviously puts people’s lives at risk.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/21/harry-dunn-death-police-chief-fund-driver-training-us-staff/

    1. Who told PC Nick that he could spend tax payer money in this way? The onus is on the visitor.

      1. Agreed but my chief concern is, if the personnel on the RAF Station are allowed to drive on the right, it is not only dangerous but appears to cede territory, other than Embassies, to foreigners.

        1. We could just paint big arrows on the roads to highlight the direction of travel. Only problem with that is they would probably use it as a runway.

          *I thought we did drive on the left.

        2. It was ever thus. RAF station near Bedford was a USAF base, and you could see the cars swapping sides the other side of the gatehouse. Weird…

          1. In Gibraltar they take the more pragmatic view and drive on the right. Saves messing about.

          4. In Gibraltar they take the more pragmatic view and drive on the right. Saves messing about.

        3. The bases are occupied by virtue of an agreement. The irony is that many of them were built by the US during wartime, reverting to the RAF afterwards.

    2. None of that will help stop what happened in that accident. What they need to do is warn all their drivers to be extra vigilant when turning out of a one way street, out of a road with no markings, turning out of farm tracks, or starting off having parked on the RH hand side facing the oncoming traffic, especially when there is no other traffic about – think very carefully which side you should be turning onto. I know having experienced such situations, after spending extended periods working in France & holidaying in Spain. It was actually in England that I turned out onto the wrong side, but fortunately managed to rectify the situation before having an accident.

      1. I did the same, near Bideford, after a long period in Italy. It was only the oncoming Mini that alerted me that something was amiss!

      2. We’ve all done it in the days or even the first couple of weeks after returning from holidays that involved a lot of driving.

    3. You can drive in the EU as a tourist on a US drivers license (sic), but if you are resident, you need a local licence – and from the US, that means taking a test. I’m guessing this also applies in the UK, since UK is still in the EU. Whether it applies to US Forces personnel and accompanying family, I don’t know. They seem to have lots of get-out-of-jail cards.

    4. Morning Nan. This woman made a mistake! She was not committing Hari Kiri or attempting culpable homicide!

        1. Thank you, Paul, that’s saved me replying to Minty as that is the whole point of the original post.

          1. One of the things I work with is Safety Barrier management. This aims to prevent – detect – control – mitigate risks. The expense goes up as you go down the list, and the effectiveness of measures in risk management goes down. So, always best to prevent the hazard “Prevention is better than cure” works well.

        2. Morning Oberst. Well they’ve been trying for a hundred years and it hasn’t happened yet!

    5. Morning Nan. This woman made a mistake! She was not committing Hari Kiri or attempting culpable homicide!

    6. ‘Morning, Nanners.

      They do indeed drive on the right, as do US personnel on what are, in all but name, all USAF-occupied bases in this country. I visited RAF Upper Heyford in the late 80s and the experience was a little unnerving at first (I think Upper Heyford closed in the early 90s, but there are other such bases still operating here) but I do recall ‘ drive on the left’ reminders for vehicles leaving the main entrance, rather like the signs we have in Kent for incoming drivers. Usually the only RAF presence on these bases will be an RAF Squadron Leader or Wing Commander, who operates as a liaison officer. Everything else may best be described as a ‘little America’.

  4. Jailed British-Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert rejected Iran’s offer to work as a spy. 20 Jan 2020 .

    In a series of handwritten letters to Iranian authorities seen by the Guardian, Moore-Gilbert alleges her detention is politicised, revealing that last October she was even shown two alternative decisions to her appeal: one for a 13-month sentence (essentially ‘time-served’ and which would have seen her released), another confirming the original sentence of 10 years.

    In a letter to her “case manager”, Moore-Gilbert furiously writes “please accept this letter as an official and definitive rejection of your offer to me to work with the intelligence branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps”.

    “Under no circumstances will I be persuaded to change my decision.

    “I am not a spy. I have never been a spy and I have no interest to work for a spying organisation in any country. When I leave Iran, I want to be a free woman and live a free life, not under the shadow of extortion and threats.”

    Morning everyoneThe Guardian has seen a series of handwritten letters to the Iranian authorities? Really? Assuming that they actually exist and are genuine (which I doubt) how were they smuggled out of a high security political jail? And since the original letters were sent to the Iranian authorities did Moore-Gilbert write duplicates for just this purpose? At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she wrote it in triplicate and sent a copy to her Mum! Why would the Iranians try to recruit someone to be a spy knowing full well that once out of the country they would say drop dead and why didn’t Moore-Gilbert accept knowing this? No one’s going to blame her for it!

    What I think we have here are shades of Novichok idiocy. It has spread to the Australian Security Services! They have manufactured this incident and are milking it. Moore-Gilbert like her UK counterpart Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a low grade agent of some kind and has been setup by her own controllers to be both a distraction and a moral example of Iranian perfidy. The real spies are probably in Mossad and running the Iranians Nuclear Program!

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/21/jailed-british-australian-kylie-moore-gilbert-rejected-irans-offer-to-work-as-a-spy

    1. So that’s why they want HS2! So the lords can get to York or wherever in a twinkling of an eye! Explained!

  8. SIR – The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) crackdown on banter (report, January 15) demonstrates its lack of understanding of British culture.

    Among men, banter is primarily, though generally unconsciously, about the building of trust between individuals, resulting in greater cohesion and, in the workplace, better performance. As trust grows, banter will push boundaries, but the basic questions are always: “Can you take it? Can I trust and rely on you?”

    There is no worse judgment than: “He can dish it out, but he can’t take it”. Our Armed Forces rely on the trust that banter generates to a far greater extent than is acknowledged. If your life depends on the person next to you, you’ve got to be able to trust them.

    Banter is an indigenous male-bonding mechanism, and to criminalise it, as the EHRC is proposing, will be severely damaging to our culture and social cohesion.

    Phil Coutie
    Exeter, Devon

    ********************************************************************
    BTL@DTletters

    David Wainwright 21 Jan 2020 5:04AM

    If – as Phil Coutie writes – the EHRC is to crackdown on banter, workplace conversations will become stiff, formal and guarded. Relaxed workplace relationships and friendships will be conducted outside the working environment but will quite possibly exclude those perceived to be in protected minority groups out of fear that an unguarded comment will be used as a weapon to damage employment and promotion prospects. However, any exclusion from such informal gatherings of workplace colleagues will also be perceived as a microaggression, compelling those who wish to socialise outside the workplace to invite members of protected minorities, replicating the stiff, guarded formality of the workplace, or to abandon informal gatherings as too risky.

    1. “will be severely damaging to our culture and social cohesion”.

      I think that is the point.

      Good morning.

    2. “to criminalise it, as the EHRC is proposing, will be severely damaging to our culture and social cohesion.”

      That’s the general idea.

      1. I remember him being at Kleinwort Benson, I think. He became a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England; I didn’t.

  10. I attended a course yester day in which, during the seven hours of presenting and teaching, the instructor asked “Does that make sense?” at least twenty nine times (it was so irritating I started marking gates every time he said it).

    Here’s what I wrote on his evaluation form…

    ” The instructor asked the class “Does that make sense?” after almost every piece of theory he explained. Forgive me, but is it not an instructor’s responsibility and remit to say things that make sense and to check that the students have understood?”

    1. I get distracted in lectures by counting the number of ‘So’s and stop listening to the content.

      2. ‘Sort of’ and ‘kind of’ inserted gratuitously into every sentence are my bugbears. And women who croak instead of using their vocal cords properly.

          1. There’s an Australian bitch in our German conversation group who intersperses her German with the English ‘yer know’. She also has the most appalling manners.

    2. I hate that! Also, people who end each sentence with “Yes?”.
      Anyhow, if it’s new to you, it’s likely you don’t know if it makes sense until you have a chance to try it out!

    5. Could have been worse. He could have said “Joo no wot I meeen?” at the end every sentence.

  11. I’ve obviously woken up too early today, have already run out of comments to read here and haven’t even finished my cup of tea.

  12. The BBC keep repeating that they are such good value, so trustworthy, and provide good programming that people love it. So, taking that as true (!), they should move to a subscription-only service,as clearly people will be delighted to pay for it directly rather than by force.

    1. If people are prepared to pay, for example, £50pcm for Sky or Virgin tv, the Beeb’s fee is quite low in comparison

      2. Makes it even easier for them.
        Then, BBC can raise the price whenever they like, rather than having to ask the Government.

      3. More money than sense. Subscription AND adverts? No thanks, one or the other but not both.

    2. Maybe everyone, as always, is missing the point.

      It is not the funding model that it the problem, but the dire quality of the output and the lamentable lack of imagination or sense of its renumeration-minded and indoctrinated executives and presenters.

      The same could be said throughout our entire range of institutions – I cannot fathom what benefit all the destruction and hoovering up of public money is provided by the £106 billion and rising we agreed to spend on the HS2 money-generating project for select people. Yet is still goes on relentless.

      2. The funding is important. If people actually have to pay only if they like the product, then better quality or crappier programming (depending on the BBC strategic choice), then the funding will follow – rise or fall, and be closer linked to what people actually want to watch.
        It doesn’t necessarily mean that BBC will get poorer funding – look at Netflix, they make the best programming these days, and are entirely subscription. It does mean that you don’t have to pay for it if you don’t watch – and they will likely bring some sense to superstar remuneration, too.

        2. I don’t want wall-to-wall Premier League or American action movies.

          The only output I am willing to pay for are re-runs of old material produced when Britain still had a public service network of broadcasters it could be proud of. This means Freeview.

        3. What you get for all your taxes is….

          Lots and lots of reports. Reports that will all tell you how great hat they do is and how vitally important they be given more money because they’re doing everything possible to save money and can’t possibly cut back any further.

          The BBC’s output is dire because it doesn’t have to be any good. Same with all those government departments pouring out reports.People only pay for Netflix because it produces content they want. As soon as that stops, so too will their subscriptions. It’s the basics of the market.

        4. Yes, some form of funding related to viewing figures, for example, might have some good features but then what we would get would be dumbed down to the largest possible audience…. nothing but celebrity this or celebrity that, cheapo fly on the wall stuff, wall to wall cookery shows no-talent contests and garden makeover shows, and none of the sort of programs that were once the envy of the world.
          I suspect that the real problem is not the structure or the funding but the people that have infiltrated the upper reaches of the BBC and then populated the entire structure with their clones. It would mean cleaning house in a most drastic way and this may be essential no matter how it is funded or governed. Of course the calibre of those appointed to “run” the BBC has a big part to play and it seems to have been badly played for far too many years.

      3. I suspect that if a fee is necessary to do away with advertising and the selling of its soul to draw more advertising revenue then subscription or licence fees are a good to keep but as you say this is only viable if they deliver what we want and need and not have to pay for a propaganda machine to keep on spewing its bile.
        The alternative would be for it to be directly funded by the government rather than individual fees…. but that may not be such a good idea if they are then subservient to the government in power, its just propaganda under another guise. But then, the fee system, being compulsory, means they are independent of what we want.

  14. Enjoyable advice from The Conservative Woman; yes, yes, I know we’re tired of H&M scuttlebutt.

    …”If this teaches us one thing, and I’m talking to the mothers here, be on guard. Unsuitable girlfriends are ten a penny, but do not let your son marry a woke princess. That means watch out for veganism, girls who look negatively upon the patriarchy and those who say, ‘I’d like to take this household in a new progressive direction’ just as you are about to put the Sunday roast on the table. Show these wimmin the door asap. The best way to do that is probably to keep referring to her as a ‘young lady’ and ask her to help you serve dessert to your husband and son. She’ll be out of the house in a flash.”

    The BTL comments are even more ‘unwoke’.

    “Another that works is “We’ll leave the men to discuss. You can help me bake. You CAN bake, can’t you?”

    And this corker;

    “In this family the women always do the washing up and let the men relax”

    https://conservativewoman.co.uk/meghan-the-daughter-in-law-from-hell/?utm_source=TCW+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=7b1752e7c9-Mailchimp+Daily+Email&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a63cca1cc5-7b1752e7c9-559682581

      1. I’m thinking that when the end comes for this marriage it will turn into something like “The War of the Roses” (Kathleen Turner and Mr Zeta Jones, oh and Danny De Vito.) I hope it shows on Youtube….

    2. Morning Anne

      Sad to say our elder son has had two serious relationships with manipulative women .. resulting in him becoming virtually bankrupt , a nervous breakdown , thus becoming a shadow of his former self.

      1. I am very grateful that my son has found a lovely woman to settle down with after a first less than ideal relationship.

      2. One of our sons who has just got engaged is very manipulative. We have not yet met his fiancée but we do hope that she will not be overwhelmed by him.

        Balance is essential in a good relationship.

  15. Letter today advocating monorails above motorways instead of high speed rail. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, that’ll work!

      1. Can you imagine the slipstream turbulence of a large monorail doing 200mph and the effect on high sided HGVs using the motorway beneath?

        1. Or the disruption whilst they build it? Health and Safety would ensure that no-one would be allowed to use the motorways while the building is going on above, in case something is dropped onto a car, etc.

          1. There would be no ‘distruption while they build it’, for the simple reason that it would be unbuildable.

            These clowns always imagine the monorail magically suspended on slim, elegant posts, just like in the comics, defying the reality of gravity and the weight and loading of the materials that would need to be involved. Putting a train on one rail rather than two is neither here nor there. It might sound clever to the dreamers who believe in magic, but if it had been a good idea, the engineers who really know about stuff would have developed it beyond the novelty statge where it remains to this day before anyone who posts on this site was born.

          2. How about Maglev on a concrete support beside the Motorways – or too damned revolutionary, I’m sure?

      2. What’s so daft about that? In fact, it would be a wonderful use of the proven MagLev technology as trialled successfully in in Earith (Cambs)

        1. Apart from the inherent structural strength of known constriction materials, the space available in the motorway corridors, the many existing bridge crossings to negotiate with changes in vertical alignment, immense static and dynamic loading in the structure of super-fast trains, the astronomic cost of building what is in effect a bridge hundreds of miles long and a host of other insurmountable practical difficulties?

          These ‘solutions’ are always brought up by the sort of person who needs to hire a joiner to chop firewood and can’t hammer in a nail. They get their ideas from the Superman comics they read as kids.

          1. I trained as an engineer, albeit electronics and in the 60s but we always worked on the basis that a solution could be found for most problems with a little thought, rather than just giving up and calling it impossible.

            Time was when it was thought your head would explode if the open railway carriages went more than 30 mph.

          2. Then you’ll know that there are some things that simply can’t or simply shouldn’t be done, and a bridge from London to ‘The North’ fits into that category. If they think that building HS2 is expensive, try costing that out.

            Then consider where they are going to dig the holes for the massive foundations for the supporting piers next to an operating motorway, just supposing the substrate could bear the load in the first place.

            Then you’ve got the overhead masts for the electricity supply.

            That’ll make more heads explode. Just because people were wrong in the past has no bearing upon practicalities now.

          3. “Just because people were wrong in the past has no bearing upon practicalities now.”

            Sorry basset, it has every bearing upon today’s practicalities. Your objections are merely problems to be solved.

            How about my other suggestion of a MagLev train on a concrete base beside the motorway? Also impossible because you think it impractical?

        1. I suppose a more modern version might be possible. They certainly thought so on Tomorrow’s World as we were regularly shown monorails of all sorts, as far as I can recall?

        2. It’s like a fairground ride. We lived not far away & I used to take my boys for a ride on Sundays.

          Unlike with trams & buses, you have to remember to stamp your ticket before boarding – there are no stamping machines on board & there’s a hefty fine if you’re caught with an unstamped ticket.

      2. That is one damned massive construction just to support the weight of something with the weight of a bag of feathers and the carrying capacity of a single-decker bus, travelling at the speed of a donkey cart. Massive steel supports every few yards, just for that fairground ride.

        Where does the motorway go?

        1. Over-engineered in 1903 – ’twas often the case then, look at many bridges from that time and before.

  16. I heard that the purpose of the African trade conference (the last public duty performed by the Duke of Sussex before retiring to the Western Lands) was that the UK has plenty of money, which it can send to Africa, and Africa has plenty of people which it can send to the UK.

    The Africans are not generating money because they are corrupt, and the British are not choosing to breed because they favour feminists and gays who must buy sperm from willing dead people, and it’s antisocial to add any more to the infestation of the world by humanity – better to backfill from the Africans who are free to breed like rabbits and call it “diversity”.

    Africa’s natural resources have already been accounted for by the Chinese and the money can be spent on infrastructure designed by and provided by China in return for access to the last of their rhinos. Arms sales might provide some returns for any British business not already taken over by American venture capitalists.

    I am feeling grumpy this morning – better get up and feed the birds.

    1. I gave up putting out feed for our native bird species years ago as the new wave aggressive Ringneck Parakeets simply mobbed the birds on the feeders and I wasn’t prepared to support their population growth.

      1. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/92d17c0ba5c707db62fe45ac1e196dd9e66cfa565bf4034f943b2f29eb8ce69f.jpg Why don’t you do what I did last year: build a two yard high, and one yard square cage out of timber? It has a door and is covered with a plastic-coated steel mesh of 2″ holes. This means all birds smaller than a blackbird can easily fly through the holes to feed on the fat-balls, seeds and peanuts on the hanging on the feeders within. I built it, primarily, to prevent rooks and magpies gobbling up all the bird food in double-quick time. Now those pests can only look on in jealousy. I situated it inside a copse of mature trees at the bottom of my garden, and in the spring it is concealed by foliage.

      2. .22 Air Rifle would thin their numbers out a bit.
        Then you could try working out recipes for parakeet pie.

        1. It’s been a while since I looked up the possibility of that and would you believe it there are rules in place! I have too many Woke (ie silly) neighbours who wouldn’t hesitate to report a local parakeet massacre! In a decade or two rather than 10s of thousands I reckon there will be 10s of millions of these pests in Southern England.

          1. You can get air rifles with built in receivers & sound suppressors that cut out anything more than a light click.
            Then just make sure your firing point & target area are not overlooked by neighbours or passers by.
            The carcasses, minus breast meat & legs, can, if you have a council garden bin, then get mixed in with the garden rubbish.

      3. A little poison in the feeders would soon thin the numbers. Any collateral damage is unlikely as the surviving ring-necks would prevent access to the poisoned food.

        Incidentally, if they are ring-necked, why don’t you let them live up to their name by (w)ringing their necks.

      4. In my case it’s the fact that that the small birds spent most of the time searching the food for bits they fancied, and in the process threw lots on to the ground, which encouraged rats into the garden. With fat balls hung on string, it was the squirrels who used to grab great chunks, and then the magpies, jays and crows joined in the fun.

    2. the British are not choosing to breed – maybe because we know taht the world is already overfilled with people? Who needs 10 kids?

      2. My grandfather, a doctor in Devon, had eleven children and justified this by saying that world was in need of good quality people.

        He was not far wrong: four of his children became medical doctors, one became a Doctor of Music and a leading musicologist, one (my father) got a Cambridge double first in Classics and was governor of the Northern Sudan, one was a farmer in Kenya, one was a farmer in Rhodesia, one was a horticulturalist and one was a headmistress.

      3. The UK has already pretty much run out of land but still they are piling more people into the UK. The assumption in London is you only need houses and if there is not any houses on land it is spare land.

    3. The only wonderful export we have ever received from Africa were the Ugandan Asians , who were educated personable bright and innovative assets for Britain .

      We have enough Africans who are bringing their head choppy Muslim faith .. the chewers of khat , and the idle ..

      We receive the wrong images when we are exposed to elite African athletes.. and footballers.. The truth is a different matter .. the scammers have our number .

      1. Yes if we have to have imports, a pity we couldn’t have those from the more intelligent ranks of the human species.

        1. A pity we didn’t choose the more intelligent.

          Much of our problem has been that this country’s governments have not wanted to stem the tide of stupidity and illiteracy coming in. They could have done so, in the case of non-EU citizens. They could have done so by limiting benefits. They could have done so by enforcing payments to the NHS by people not entitled. They could have done so by deporting criminals from overseas.

          But they don’t.

          P.S. They could have done so by repealing the atrocious Human Rights Act which gives rights to all and sundry, scum or not – except to the indigenous UK population.

      2. Hugely agree, except for the likes of Alibhai-Brown and Slummy Chuckabutty, they have been a great boon to the UK.

        1. …and the offspring, who are not quite so prepared to work.

          And of course our Parliament would be lacking were it not for the stars like Abbott, Lammy etc. For goodness sake, we have enough pathetic, corrupt, incompetent politicos of our own, enough idlers, enough cheats in our society already without letting in more.

  17. ‘Morning, all.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/43b9764ae257ea894c0ec1312d82fec06cfba924bab64896f40ef9a1a60d697f.jpg

    Came across some figures from last year showing that in 2019, attacks on Christian churches, memorials and cemeteries have become widespread throughout Europe. Here’s one example, reported from Spain.

    Vandals have destroyed the historic Cross of the Inquisition in Seville. Mayor, Juan Espadas, condemned the “absolutely inexplicable vandal destruction of a jewel in our city’s heritage.”

    “No estaba esperando eso ………” he added.

    :¬(

    3. Another mystery. Is it the work of the same uncatchable arsonist who has torched so many churches in France?

      1. A couple of days ago Laurence Fox said he did not date women under the age of 35 any more as too many of them were irredeemably ‘woke’ and incapable of rational discussion.

        I would not go that far but just because a woman is young and pretty it does not follow that she is right just as it does not necessarily follow that a man who is old and ugly is wrong!

        I can understand that Boris Johnson enjoys the company of young attractive women – I have always done so myself – but he must avoid the temptation of becoming uxorious. He must remember that this very fatal character flaw of uxoriousness in Prince Harry has led to the total destruction of his whole life.

          1. I gave up dating women when, at the age Laurence Fox is now (41), I got married to a woman who had just turned 26. She is now even more attractive than she was when I married her nearly 32 years ago.

            Remember what Paul Newman said about his relationship with his wife: ‘Why go out for a hamburger when you can have steak at home’?

    2. Morning JK,
      There is that “hope” commodity again,
      there seems to be very little certainty
      about regarding such an important issue as Brexit.
      Why has the “certainty” commodity rarely been used, if ever, over the last 3.5 years ?
      Could it be an outcome of the party first,keep in / keep out voting mode ?

    3. From the above:

      “BORIS Johnson has appointed the outgoing Bank of England governor Mark Carney as a climate change adviser. According to the Telegraph, his role will be to make climate change a key part of every financial decision, and create a more sustainable financial system to support the bid to end the UK’s contribution to global warming by 2050.”

      Did I or did I not warn you that the Bonking Buffoon would probably prove to be a fraud?

      The only thing that would redeem him in many people’s eyes would be is if he gives Britain a proper Brexit rather than the May Rehash Surrender Fudge. Who honestly believes this is likely? Come on Nottlers. Don’t be shy – what do you think?

      1. Carney was a waste of space as BoE, WTF does he know about Climate? Greta Thunderbox knows more.

        1. He probably knows people who are making a lot of money out of “climate change”. Ergo he knows about climate (sarc). Nuff said.

      2. We should have just left on the 31st October, like Boris repeatedly told us we would. He made no qualification to that statement, no “I’ll do my best but have to be realistic that the Remainer Parliament may prevent me.” He said we would leave on the 31st October, we didn’t, ergo he broke his word.

        As I’ve said before, we cannot trust the Tories on Europe as far as we can throw them. We must keep a close eye on these negotiations and scrutinise very closely whatever is signed up to in our names.

  19. Yo all and ‘good’ morning

    The rain, that we had yesterday evening was just an ‘April Shower’ compared with what we had overnight.

    It persistently, persistently, persistently, poured down and just in case we could not see it , Thor, the God of Thunder (and Lightning) came to call, with all his close and extended family.

    I have just eased the mooring lines for the barge and we are floating level

    Weather things must get better!!!!!!!!

    1. Where are you? No rain here in Wilts/Hants for several days, but sunny days and clear nights and the temperatures progressively colder and mornings frostier -4 degs this morning.

        1. Ah, no wonder the weather is so different. Shouldn’t the God of thunder be Zeus or Jupiter down that way or perhaps the Carthaginian Baal-Hammon (all depending on how close you are to any of Greek and Carthaginian enclaves).

  20. Lie-detector tests planned for convicted terrorists freed on licence. 21 January 2020.

    Convicted terrorists will face lie-detector tests under a raft of measures drawn up in the wake of the most recent London Bridge attack to toughen up the monitoring of offenders in the community.

    The number of counter-terrorism specialist probation officers will double and they will work to a set of updated national standards for managing terrorists on licence, with closer monitoring and reporting requirements including polygraph tests, the Home Office and Ministry of Justice said in a joint announcement.

    Personally I think palm reading and phrenology haven’t received a proper hearing!

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/21/lie-detector-tests-planned-for-convicted-terrorists-freed-on-licence

    1. Morning AS,
      Why must we incur the expense of
      sending peoples overseas to monitor
      these tests, to see if these time served cretins should be allowed back into the UK ?
      They ARE being DEPORTED aren’t they, no country would be silly enough to keep them ,would they ?
      Mind it could be the answer if carried out in a common sense manner..
      Deportation first along with family & close friends, then polly test “over there”.
      Mode of travel on day of release,
      Fast track, feet don’t touch the deck
      Belmarsh / Dover OUT

    2. I don’t think that the Guardian understands the situation.

      On YouTube recently a professor of Psychiatry pointed out that psychopaths cannot be discovered with lie detectors, because they have completely normal reactions to the questions. They believe that killing kuffars is normal and socially acceptable.

      Equating dedicated and determined terrorists to domestic abusers( despite what we think of them) is irrational.

      1. Morning J,
        To add substance to your post
        & I do believe you are right, we must currently have a body count in double figures, treble would be better in trying to get a point across, those three monkey’s weave powerful magic.

  21. I meant to thank everyone for their birthday wishes on the weekend.
    Not the best – worked in the am then mother taken to hospital unable to breathe. At least I’ll remember it.
    (p.s. Anyone’s guess why I’ve suddenly gone back to my old name and Avatar )

    4. Hope your Mum is ok now, StormyKnees. Not the kind of “present” one wants for any day, let alone birthday.

      1. Thanks Obers.
        ‘Stormyknees’ heh heh. That’s quite apt as I never know which avatar is going to show up at the moment.

    5. Hi Bugstorm. Sorry to hear about your birthday visit to hospital and hope your mum is OK.

      Had a similar birthday myself last Wednesday with Alf, who’d had an arthroscopy the previous Thursday. Excruciating pain, extensive impressive (to look at) bruising. Blood tests, xrays etc.etc. All A1 but suffering badly postoperatively. Since then we’ve both been ill! One guy at the hospital was coughing his guts up if you’ll excuse the expression and we reckon we’ve picked up something from him. No hand over mouth. Disgusting.

      Look after yourself.

      1. We’ve picked up a coughing bug from somewhere, too – it’s lingering on, especially at night.

  23. IMF now say UK will benefit from leaving the EU

    Well it did not put it in quite those words

    The globalist International Monetary Fund has enjoyed a spectacular change of tone over Brexit, and is now predicting the British economy to grow faster than Europe’s in the coming years.

    While the IMF cut global growth forecasts, the United Kingdom economy was predicted by the body to continue to grow, fractionally outpacing the European Union’s aggregate rate in 2019, 2020, and 2021, the report said.

  24. IMF now say UK will benefit from leaving the EU

    Well it did not put it in quite those words

    The globalist International Monetary Fund has enjoyed a spectacular change of tone over Brexit, and is now predicting the British economy to grow faster than Europe’s in the coming years.

    While the IMF cut global growth forecasts, the United Kingdom economy was predicted by the body to continue to grow, fractionally outpacing the European Union’s aggregate rate in 2019, 2020, and 2021, the report said.

          1. So does 90% of the population – they have to ‘cos not too many people outside Sweden speak or understand Swedish.

            That is also the main reason why so many Netherlanders are also fluent in English.

            It will be ironic if, after we have left, that English is adopted as the official language of the United States of Europe. That’s when I might die laughing.

          2. They do – but I meant it was remarkable that this young girl had mastered English when she so clearly has learnt very little else in her limited time at school.

          3. Maybe in the big cities, but out in the sticks where I was they hardly speak English at all. More speak German.

      2. The other two know that they are only required to nod enthusiastically and to keep their hands free for clapping.

  26. Farm fears over National Trust plans to plant 20 million trees

    WE dont have enough land as it is and a million trees need a lot of Land. To be fair some of this land would not be use able for most farming

    Plans to plant more than 20 million trees could be damaging for Welsh farmers, a union has warned.
    The National Trust wants to create 18,000 hectares (44,478 acres) of new woodland across Wales, England and Northern Ireland by 2030.
    President of the Farmers’ Union of Wales Glyn Roberts said he feared grazing areas could be lost in order to meet the target.
    The National Trust said it would work with farmers on the project.
    The organisation wants to increase the proportion of its land covered by trees from 10% to 17% in a bid to reach a “carbon net zero” target.
    It is thought between 1,000-2,000 hectares (2,471 – 4,942 acres) of new woodland will be planted in Wales as part of the scheme.

    1. I have long been one of the staunchest supporters of tree planting, and continue to be. At the very least, it buys us a margin of mitigation, whereby we do not have to completely give up our lifestyles in order to save the planet from mass extinction of species. It is not the principle of woodland creation, but how it is best done.

      Before the settlers took to chopping down olive groves out of vengeful spite, or perhaps carefully-fostered paranoia, to make way for their luxury housing estates, Israel had a philosophy going back to Moses of creating a land of milk and honey out of the desert. Maybe their old philosophers have a thing or two to teach us?

      The Scots pine, and its close relative the Mediterranean pine, has a great tolerance to drought, and can actually create farmland out of the desert by recycling moisture in microclimates, by enhancing the soil with their needles, by controlling the wind, and in time supporting an increasing range of life, including humanity. There are many other tree species, most of which are of tremendous service in enhancing the capacity of the landscape to support life.

      However, in order to maximise their benefit, it will require some care. Covering a farm with trees has diminishing value, compared to creating a network of thick hedges to support life, and fields in between to make great use of this enhancement. In short, the traditional farm landscape evolved in England has turned out to be of great benefit and able then to support much more on this island than the global average.

      On my half acre plot, I try to identify pockets of waste ground that could take a few more trees, but I am beginning to run out of places. The same might be true of much farmland in the UK, but I still think there is still a lot of places around that could take some more trees. It should not be treated like a grand infrastructure project, with executives on seven figure bonuses, like HS2. That would be catastrophic.

      Abroad though is another story. Quite apart from preserving the rapidly-depleted great forests in South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, mass reforestation would be of huge benefit to the whole world, and making that a priority for overseas aid is a no-brainer, I would have thought.

      1. Put trees in hedgerows and at the corners of fields, either singly or as small copses, ideally with a boggy/pond bit in the middle. You get the trees, some small patches of wild ground, and places where smaller wildlife can live. Mix quick-growing trees with slower broadleafed trees, for diversity.

      2. What species have gone extinct?? What species, apart from rhinoceros, tigers, elephants, which are endangered because of poaching and hunting not climate change, are endangered?

        https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
        Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds
        From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.

        An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.

        1. Since CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to stimulate growth, and since the weatherati scream about CO2 in the atmosphere, then why would that not also stimulate growth outside of the greenhouse?

        2. The main causes of extinction and endangerment of species (particularly mammals) are man-made – hunting, poaching for bushmeat, deprivation of prey for predators, trafficking for their body parts, eg rhinohorn ivory, skins, pangolin scales and habitat loss caused by too many people encroaching on wild land for farming of cattle, etc.

          2. No – I wasn’t aware of her at all.

            I do have a lot of ancestors buried in Portishead churchyard though.

    3. Also depends on the type of trees they want to plant. Acres of firs will not improve biodiversity.
      They want to plant more trees, build more houses, and put up wind turbines and solar panels everywhere. Won’t leave a lot of room for anything else, like growing food….

  28. Climate Change: Clean energy to power all new Welsh homes from 2025

    Seems to be another half baked idea from the Welsh Assembly

    The cost do not even seem to be accurate. Drilling a 500M hole alone does not come cheap. No costing there for extra insulation . Pumping large quantities of water up 500 Metre need a fair amount of power alone

    They claim it will save 50% on energy bills but that seems unlikely. You have a standing charge on the Bills plus VAT and green taxes also Heating will only account for about 50% of the bill in any case at best I would reckon a saving of about 30% but you need to spend about £80,000 to get that saving

    They claim surplus can be store in batteries. Well you get high losses with energy conversion plus batter storage is very bulky and very expensive . The only time as well there will be any significant surplus of energy would be in the summer and we already have suplus capaity then in any case

    The largest carbon neutral development in the UK is being built outside Tonyrefail, Rhondda Cynon Taff.
    None of the 225 new homes being built are connected to mains gas.

    Instead, water warmed by the earth 500ft (150m) underground and pumped into the house provides heating, as well as solar panels, while batteries store energy which can also be sold back to the National Grid.

    Developers Pobl Group are confident homeowners will save up to 50% on utility bills.

    While the Tonyrefail development has received £7m of funding from the Welsh Government, the private sector faces paying extra buildings costs of about £6,000 per property.

    1. “Pumping large quantities of water up 500 Metre need a fair amount of power alone…” Could unemployed pit ponies be used? With sufficient garden space for grazing they could be almost self-sustaining.

  29. BJ,
    I did comment years ago for every seat to be kitted out with lie detector facilities, and the chamber with large screen, instant TV links.

  30. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aUAO1K_bSTk

    Tucker Carlson on top form last night. In his opening segment, he talks about the gun rights rally in Virginia, where the Democrats are trying to take away those rights. The media breathlessly told their audiences that the rally was attended by “white supremacists” and “neo Nazis”. Sure.
    An unarmed population is defenceless against the tyranny of the government, which is why the far Left is trying to disarm law-abiding Americans.

    I used to be firmly against gun ownership, but seeing the antics of the Left in recent years, Venezuela, etc, I’ve changed my mind.

    1. Once they have taken away the guns that they disapprove of, what next to take away? “Free” speech? Children?

    2. Whenever someone talks about guns being used against the government, I point to the predator drone.

      The US government could destroy you without any effort from across the country, with pin point accuracy. You’ll never even see the weapon coming. No amount of guhnz with protect you from that.

      It can also destroy you far more easily. Invalidate your passport, drivers licence, freeze your bank accounts, stop your phone, take your home from you, collect every single website you visit.

      Government doesn’t need bombs or guns. It can destroy you by deleting everything that identifies you.

      Guns are pointless.

  31. Should the so called Talent on TV and in Films etc be paid on a similar bases to salesmen ire they general get a very low basic rate but make their money by achieving their sales targets

    1. Hollywood works on the basis of high initial fees AND profit shares, Bill. British TV not so much, at least not for talent. For indie producers it’s different.

  32. Weather update

    Thor and his mates have just come back and ‘liquid sunshine’ is falling all around

    1. Hope you’re OK, OLT!

      The mighty Thor, the god of war, went for a ride on his filly.
      “I’m Thor, he cried!”, the horse replied. “Well put the thaddle on thilly”.

    2. Hope you’re OK, OLT!

      The mighty Thor, the god of war, went for a ride on his filly.
      “I’m Thor, he cried!”, the horse replied. “Well put the thaddle on thilly”.

    1. Bright sunshine here but very cold.

      Wish Nagsman a happy birthday from me if she’s not here today.

        1. Naggers is currently horse/dog/house sitting for some Guardian readers who have gone off to Vietnam for three weeks. Spoke to her this morning and will be seeing her after sundown this evening.

    3. Give her my regards, sir.
      I’ll have to send a couple of jars of my chutney for you both!

    3. Surely DNA would do? Chances are it would be on file as most burglars are repeat offenders, despite the Gummint’s ‘three strikes’ sentencing policy.

  35. HS2 workers face jobs cuts amid doubts over project’s future

    On any sensible basis HS2 would be a very low priority. The priority would be to improve the rail infrastructure in the North. It does not need to be the governments idea of HS ie 200 mph. Current mainline standard and the latest generation of trains are capable of 150mph. More than adequate for the distance involved. IT is the links between the Northern town and cities and the commuter services that need to be improved and it is this that will help to improve the economy of the North. Another useful link would be to link the WCML to Heathrow which is quite simple to do. Initially it could be a shuttle service from Watford to Heathrow so it would be a simple crods platform change to get to Heathrow rather than tortures trip across London

    Hundreds of employees at HS2 Ltd, the state-funded body responsible for delivering the contentious high-speed railway line, have been told their jobs may be cut as uncertainty grows over the fate of the troubled project.
    Companies working with HS2 have also been told to slow down work, according to two contractors involved.
    The moves came as the Treasury’s Infrastructure Projects Authority examines how to lower the cost of the high-speed railway line, which has more than doubled since its inception a decade ago to a projected £106bn.

    1. Would never be allowed with the
      unwritten laws of PC / Appeasement firmly in place, and adhered to by a multitude of idiots.

      1. Same thing when the original “hairy chinned boy children” began to arrive. It was suggested that dental checks would reveal the real age of the “children” but that test was vetoed because it would show their real age it would infringe their human rights.

        1. Presumably for the same reason the Manchester child rapists were’t investigated, i.e. it would inflame racial tensions. The trouble is the PTB don’t realise it just stokes up even more anger.

        2. Great. So when the precocious dwarf developed toothache we mustn’t infringe his human rights.

        3. Afternoon EB,
          Why are the cretins that set up these rulings in power ?
          The lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration coalition party
          is riddled with these type political treacherous lice why are they continually voted into power ?
          Do peoples really admit to voting for these parties knowingly ?
          Do peoples really believe in the toxic trios manifesto’s ?
          Do peoples find it more personally comfortable to continue to support these parties in the first instance, then complain ?
          Do the peoples find that the three monkey mode of voting will eventually be the answer to mass knifing’s / killings, mass rape & abuse, mass evil activities, if not why do they employ it along
          with gripping the nostrils, best of the worst, every chance they get to vote ?
          The neglect in all mental health issues IMO can be plainly observed via the ballot booth.

  38. Network Rail being investigated for ‘poor performance’

    Oh dear the nationalized bit of Rail is warned about poor performance. I suppose technically it might be more correct to say it is an arms length government owned business

    Add in train failures which are down to the TOC’s and things are pretty bad

    Network Rail is being investigated over its poor performance on routes used by Northern and TransPennine Express.
    The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said it has put the government-owned company “on a warning” with regards to its performance in the northwest and central regions of England.
    In 2019, 58% of passenger train delays across Britain were on Network Rail trains, down 1.1 percentage points compared to the previous year

  39. Royal review after Meghan ‘given title of divorced woman’

    Who makes these thing up ? Totally ridiculous. I know just remove the comma

    Sky News has been told by palace sources they are continuing to review how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will be referred to in the future.
    It comes after it appeared Meghan was given the style or title of a divorced woman.

    On Saturday, it was said the couple would be referred to as Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex now that they will no longer use the rank of His or Her Royal Highness.

    But the problem relates to the comma, because in the past only divorced women in the family have been styled that way – for example Diana, Princess of Wales and Sarah, Duchess of York.

          2. They had “Cold” on the list but I removed it, in case someone who had never heard of Canada thought it was emotional coldness. Then that strange small circle appeared on the image, next to the words “Ice Hockey” which is not there / visible on the edited file. Is it some sort of identifying mark? I have seen tiny ones appear sometimes on other images, but never that big.

      3. Now that the Mail is edited by that gossip columnist Geordie Whatisname they’ve gone totally overboard with ‘exclusives’ on the female. You have to skip over loads of sycophantic articles to get to any more interesting items. It’s as bad as when the buffoon decided to support remain rather than leave. He should emigrate to Canada.

  40. Jailed British-Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert rejected Iran’s offer to work as a spy. 20 Jan 2020 .

    In a series of handwritten letters to Iranian authorities seen by the Guardian, Moore-Gilbert alleges her detention is politicised, revealing that last October she was even shown two alternative decisions to her appeal: one for a 13-month sentence (essentially ‘time-served’ and which would have seen her released), another confirming the original sentence of 10 years.

    In a letter to her “case manager”, Moore-Gilbert furiously writes “please accept this letter as an official and definitive rejection of your offer to me to work with the intelligence branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps”.

    “Under no circumstances will I be persuaded to change my decision.

    “I am not a spy. I have never been a spy and I have no interest to work for a spying organisation in any country. When I leave Iran, I want to be a free woman and live a free life, not under the shadow of extortion and threats.”

    Morning everyoneThe Guardian has seen a series of handwritten letters to the Iranian authorities? Really? Assuming that they actually exist and were genuine (which I doubt) how were they smuggled out of a high security political jail? And since the original letters were sent to the Iranian authorities did Moore-Gilbert write duplicates for just this purpose? At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she wrote it in triplicate and sent a copy to her Mum! Why would the Iranians try to recruit someone to be a spy knowing full well that once out of the country they would say drop dead and why didn’t Moore-Gilbert accept knowing this? No one’s going to blame her for it!

    What I think we have here are shades of Novichok idiocy. It has spread to the Australian Security Services! They have manufactured this incident and are milking it. Moore-Gilbert like her UK counterpart Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a low grade agent of some kind and has been setup by her own controllers to be both a distraction and a moral example of Iranian perfidy. The real spies are probably in Mossad and running the Iranians Nuclear Program!

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/21/jailed-british-australian-kylie-moore-gilbert-rejected-irans-offer-to-work-as-a-spy

  41. Right, I have to go with Best Beloved, in two cars, to the local garage in Somersham. Hers to get her spare wheel back with its newly fitted tyre and mine to have a warning that comes on briefly at start-up, checked via computer diagnostics. I do hope that the solution won’t turn out to be impossibly impractical.

    Play nicely, I may be back sometime.

  42. Britain ranks 81st when it comes to home broadband as it lags behind Europe

    No surprise. Outside of the cabled areas BT has a monopoly on the local loop and when 99% of customers use the BT local loop it is tough for competitors to break into the market

    The regulator tried to improve think by breaking Openreach away from the BT group to try to improve competition but that has not worked. May be Openreach needs to be totally removed from BT and perhaps be owned by a consortium of the large internet players

    Whilst BT has this monopoly it is in no rush to invest in full fibre as those customers have no where else to go

    Britain has slipped to 81st place in the world for the value of home internet packages as sluggish broadband speeds fail to keep pace with steadily rising prices, research shows.
    A global study of more than 3,000 fixed-line monthly bundles found the UK lagging “far behind” much of Europe, mainly due to reliance on ageing copper cabling rather than high-speed fibre optic. It was ranked 71st cheapest overall of 206 countries worldwide according to comparison site Cable, and the fifth cheapest of 29 countries looked at in western Europe.

    But due to lower average speeds, it fared worse in terms of value for money, coming 23rd of the 29 countries in Europe and was ranked 81st worldwide.

    1. The ‘local loop’ was unbundled years ago. There is no monopoly. BT exchanges are filled with kit from companies such as Tiscali. As usual you are clueless.
      We don’t like to invest in the UK. We like to rent-seek and cut any corner to keep costs low and profits high.

      3. I suppose that decrying the current fashion for ‘singers’ of (ç)rap these days to appear under silly names (e.g. “Stormzy, Snoop Dogg, 50¢, etc) is negated when you realise that blues legends like Chester Arthur Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf) and McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters) were doing that very same thing over 70 years ago!

  44. A chewy read by Tom Chivers to go with your lunch.

    https://unherd.com/2020/01/why-the-drugs-dont-work/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3

    “Why the drugs don’t work

    Imagine that you’re trying to decide which school you want to send your child to. Of course, your little darling is the most gifted and brilliant child in the world — anyone can see that! That time he set the headteacher’s hair on fire was only because he wasn’t feeling sufficiently challenged. Anyway, it’s time to find somewhere that will really push him. So you’re looking at the exam results of the various schools in your area.

    Most of the schools report that 80% or so of their children achieve A-to-C grades in all their exams. But one school reports 100%. They all appear to be demographically similar, so you assume, reasonably enough, that the teaching is much better in that one school, and so you send little Mephiston there.

    But a year later, his grades have not improved, and he is once again in trouble for dissecting a live cat in biology class. You dig a little deeper into the exam results, and someone tells you that the school has a trick. When a child doesn’t get a result between A and C, the school simply doesn’t tell anyone! In their reports, they only mention the children who get good grades. And that makes the results look much better.

    Presumably, you would not feel that this is a reasonable thing to do.

    It is, however, exactly what goes on a lot in actual science. Imagine you do a study into the efficacy of some drug, say a new antidepressant. Studies are naturally uncertain — there are lots of reasons that someone might get better or not get better from complex conditions like depression, so even in big, well-conducted trials the results will not perfectly align with reality. The study may find that the drug is slightly more effective than it really is, or slightly less; it may even say that an effective drug doesn’t work, or that an ineffective one does. It’s just the luck of the draw to some degree.

    That’s why — as I’ve discussed before — you can’t rely on any single study. Instead, the real gold standard of science is the meta-analysis: you take all the best relevant studies on a subject, combine their data, and see what the average finding is. Some studies will overestimate an effect, some will underestimate it, but if the studies are all fair and all reported accurately, then their findings should cluster around the true figure. It’s like when you get people to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar: some people will guess high, some low, but unless there’s some reason that people are systematically guessing high or low, it should average out.

    But what if there is such a reason? What if — analogous to the school example above — the studies that didn’t find a result just weren’t ever mentioned? Then the meta-analyses would, of course, systematically find that drugs were more effective than they are.
    And that is exactly what happens. For a variety of reasons — not all of them fraudulent, but all of them damaging — studies that find negative results have a tendency not to make it into journals, and thus can’t make it into meta-analyses; so meta-analyses systematically overstate the efficacy of drugs. (And other things, but it’s probably pharmaceutical drugs that we are most immediately concerned about.)

    This doesn’t mean that all research is useless, but it has a measurable effect. When scientists go and ask for unpublished data, and then redo the meta-analyses including it, they find, for instance, that unpublished trials of antipsychotic drugs find much smaller effects than published ones. Similarly, a study reported that only 51% of registered trials into antidepressants find a positive result, but that 94% of published ones do. This bias can make “ineffective and potentially harmful” drugs appear effective.

    (For the record, so that I’m not guilty of an ironic version of publication bias myself, I should note that one analysis I came across found that including unpublished data was just as likely to make results look better as it was to make them look worse.)

    In 2007 the US government realised that this was a terrible situation and passed a law requiring all drug trials to publish their results, positive or negative, on the website clinicaltrials.gov within one year of the trial’s completion. That law came into effect in January 2018. Now, a new analysis in the Lancet, by scientists at the University of Oxford, has looked at how that’s going.

    The answer is: not well. Of the 4,209 trials that have been completed since that date, 1,722 managed to report within one year; a further 964 reported late; and 1,523 haven’t reported at all. Contrary to what you might expect, it’s not (mainly) unscrupulous pharma companies sitting on negative data: industry-sponsored studies were much more likely to report on time. (A similar analysis into compliance with EU publication rules, by the same authors in 2018, found very similar numbers and a similar tendency for industry trials to do better.)

    These researchers are literally breaking the law; if the federal government enforced that law, then billions of dollars of fines would be owed.

    The reasons behind it are pretty obvious. Aside from the “industry wants to sell its drugs” thing, which no doubt is a factor, scientists are incentivised to get their studies published – academia’s model of “publish or perish” means that if you’re not getting your research into journals, you’re not doing well in your career. And journals, for bad but long-standing reasons, are interested in “novel” results – i.e. results that show something interesting and unexpected. So they often won’t publish a study that finds null results, because that isn’t “novel”. Both researchers and journals, therefore, have a tendency to hide boring, didn’t-find-anything results, even though they’re a vital part of the overall picture.

    It’s probably not possible to say accurately what the overall impact of publication bias is. It would amaze me, though, if it’s not of the order of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands of years of life, lost every year, simply because so many people are prescribed ineffective drugs around the world every day. This is a significant social problem.

    People are trying to fix it. One of the authors of the Lancet study, Ben Goldacre, founded the AllTrials initiative a few years ago, calling for all clinical trials to be registered at the start and have all their results reported within one year. Another initiative is Registered Reports, which tries to fix the broken incentive system in science by getting journals to agree to publish studies not on the basis of their results, after those results are in, but on the strength of their methods, before the data is collected. That would avoid the drive for “novelty” and encourage scientists to make null results public.

    I don’t want to overstate the case here and say that science is broken. Science works, and achieves astonishing things. But there are systemic problems which slow down its progress, and since science is the primary driver of the improvement in human lives we’ve seen in the last few hundred years, that means we are not improving lives as fast as we could.

    A school that hid its negative exam results would be obviously cheating the metric. The fact that science has done it systematically, and continues to do it despite literal legal requirements, is no better.”

        1. Indeed.

          Social media allow the false-science to spread very rapidly as the catastrophic man-made climate change zealots take in and pass on their “proofs”.

    2. Afternoon Anne,
      Do you think such a study could be applied to all the years that peoples have be supporting / voting lab/lib/con, and the effects it has had on these Isles.

  45. Norway’s government on precipice as MPs quit over decision to bring home jihadi bride

    Despite being an (almost) Nicola Krankie look alike, she talks sense.

    Ms Jensen told a press conference on Monday: “We don’t compromise with people who have voluntarily joined terror organisations.

    “Many believe she used her child as a shield to come back to Norway. There are many in Norway who are displeased by this, not just in the

    Progress Party.”

    Now, why does UK not behave sensibly and stop importing trouble

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/20/norway-right-wing-party-quits-government-jihadi-spouse-repatriation/

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/01/20/TELEMMGLPICT000221953286_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqaRL1kC4G7DT9ZsZm6Pe3PehAFAI_f6ud569StXyOKH0.jpeg?imwidth=1400

    1. Afternoon OLT,
      Three reasons why the UK don’t,
      lab/lib/con, four if you count current membership.

    3. “Now, why does UK not behave sensibly and stop importing trouble?”

      Because the political classes in the UK are not your elected representatives. They only woo your votes to achieve power so they can then act on their own behalf and chase down any political scenario that helps them maintain that power. Usually this means sucking up to various single interest groups.

      What is good for you, and good for the country, doesn’t concern them. If, however, it enhances their megalomania, personal lucre and vanity, it will get the go ahead.

      [Here endeth political lesson No. 873C]

  46. My then manager once complained about my use of imperial measures, as she had only been taught the metric system. So I asked her how many litres there are in a cubic metre (it’s all tens, should be easy enough).

    Answer came there none, so I made the next challenge easier: given that there are one hundred square metres in an are, how many hectares are there in a square kilometre?

    No reply, so I decided not ask her the difference between hectopascals and millibars.

    (Shouldn’t take NOTTLers more than a milliday to answer all three questions.)

      1. On a more serious note, I recently spoke to a teacher who had moved away from a primary school where years 5 & 6 were good at fractions.

    1. So, because Marx was Jewish, that makes him above any form of criticism whatsoever, otherwise it’s antisemitism??? Is that what the numpty is saying??

      1. Pretty much. That’s why the Left separate out “anti-Zionism”, to reference their hatred of religious Jews.

      2. Actually, as he later “explains” a little more nuanced.
        Because the Institute for Social Research (aka The Frankfurt School) was largely made of of Jewish Marxist academics, it is criticism of them that is antisemitic.

        He misses out the obvious fact, of course, that because Jews were prohibited from political activity in many parts of Europe during the 18th/19th & early 20th Centuries, politically minded Jews would, quite naturally, be attracted to underground and radical political movements.

    2. Why has this person not ended their sentence with a full stop?

      What does sailing have to do with it?

    3. Did you “jib it”?

      Point of order: Since Semites are a tribe of humanity which includes the Jewish people of the middle east as well as the Arab population there (i.e. sharing a similar DNA and physiological features); I propound that to be a white Jew (as in the case of Marx) or a black Jew (as in the case of Sammy Davis Jr, who embraced Judaism), means that no one can be “anti-Semitic” towards you in words or deeds.

    4. There are two types of the left’s “Social Justice Warriors” who type many comments online. The ones whose brains do not work and the ones who know how evil their politics really are and are forced to lie to cover it up.

      There is some hope for the former, as the real world, education and morality seep into their lives. The latter type spends a lifetime in left-wing politics trying to bring the civilised world to its knees.

      1. MM,
        Is the left confined to one party
        of the governance trio then, or
        can it infest all three ?

    5. During the referendum debate, Nigel Farage referred to international financiers and was rounded upon in the same way. It didn’t occur to his critics that by making the criticism it was they who were upholding the idea of Jewish financial ‘control’, not Farage.

  48. The theme of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show is loneliness and mental health, and the society has commissioned Zoe Ball to design their Friendship Garden along with horticulturalist Jo Thompson.

    This garden, which will be a focal point of the show, demonstrates how front gardens can be used. Ms Thompson argues that gardening at the front of your house rather than the back forces you into conversations with neighbours and creates a friendlier community.


    However, it does have its drawbacks. I was working in my front garden when i was accosted by a somewhat aggressive person demanding to know why there wasn’t a label showing the name of the roses planted against the dwarf retaining wall adjoining the pavement. Heavily scented and with a profusion of deep yellow blooms on all 12 plants I told her they were “Arthur Bell”.

    I have also planted some winter Jasmine for some cheer this time of year. Be warned it can lead to depression when one receives a letter from the Council pointing out that it has overgrown the boundary (by approx 4-5 inches) is causing an obstruction and must be cut back. There was just enough growth to topiary a rude sign before clipping that back to the boundary.

    For the benfit of council tax payers I didn’t write back pointing out that several lampposts in an adjoining road had been placed in the middle of the pavement and as such were causing a much more dangerous obstruction.

    PS Does anyone know whether Dwarf Retaining walls are designed to keep Dwarves in or out?

    2. Its to stop them rolling into the road if you are playing dwarf-throwing at yr summer party.

  49. Good Morning all – In chatting to my granddaughter on the subject of Aesop’s fables I realised I knew nothing of the man himself. A few moments Googling reveals there’s speculation that he was an educated slave or the possibility he never even existed, but the consensus is that he met a fitting end in that that Aesop, who was credited with lecturing the good people of Delphi on morals and how to run their lives, met his end by being summarily launched from a cliff by those same good people. A Fable within a Fable no less

    1. My oppo here had a slightly detached retina recently. The cure is to wash out the fluids in the eye and then inject a small air bubble, to give internal pressure, to push the detached bit back into place. Given time, the air bubble is absorbed.
      Two outcomes he noticed were:
      The absence of floaters made his vision very much clearer and brighter :-))
      The air bubble was “upside down” in the eye – since the brain corrects for the lens effect of switching the picture over, it sees the bubble and swaps that over – so the bubble at the top of the eye is seen at the bottom… weird. Worse if you shake your head, you get a foam effect in the eye that’s apparently like looking through a kaleidoscope… :-((

      1. Oh dear, it is very worrying. I had an aneurysm behind this eye last May and it was terrifying. I don’t see out of the other eye as it has Amblyopia so I could not see much at all. I just need it to be okay for the next couple of days then I have an appointment at the eye hospital. Detached retinas do worry me. The aneurysm I had was quite large with several smaller bleeds around the retina. But it fixed itself following BP treatment. I just saw this in my notifs, I wanted to reply to messages left then turning this lappy off…….lol Thank you Obers.

      1. Little known fact – Kerberos is Greek for spot.

        Hades had a dog called Spot!

        (However, that’s more likely a hope based upon a literal trandslation. I’d really propose it means ‘death dog of the night’ splitting the ker, bor and ros. But hey, it’s cool that Hades was funky).

  52. Passengers of light’ visit Iran-Iraq war memorials – a photo essay. Anthony Micallef. 20 January 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/84b78777727862a9905fb48cfcf92705dc452c3e22cf2486d6ef6f8b24c98be2.jpg

    In Iran, every spring, thousands of families travel to the battle sites of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). Many of those who make these pilgrimages – called Rahian-e Noor in Persian (the passenger of light) – lost loved ones in the war, which caused more than half a million deaths on the Iranian side.

    But they are also supported and organised by the regime, which sees the opportunity to disseminate its doctrine.

    This is a photo essay about the visitors to the Iran-Iraq war memorials. They are mostly the wives, mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers and sons of those Iranians killed in the war. Don’t bother looking for the photograph above. It isn’t there. This memorial is one erected by the Iranian Government to the Jewish-Iranian soldiers killed fighting Iraq. There are of course still about 9000 Jews resident in Iran with quite a few synagogues. Just so you know; there are no Saudi Arabian Jews and there are no synagogues!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/passengers-of-light-visit-iran-iraq-war-memorials-a-photo-essay

  53. Welsh assembly to vote against Boris Johnson’s bill

    Welsh politicians are expected to vote against Boris Johnson’s Brexit law later.

    It will not stop it from becoming law, but will mean all three of the UK’s devolved law-making bodies will have rejected the EU withdrawal agreement.
    The Welsh Government said the bill could let UK ministers change assembly powers without asking Assembly Members.

    It is expected both Labour and Plaid Cymru will reject the bill – their combined votes forming a majority in the 60-member chamber.

    2. I’m sure their action will be appreciated by Welsh patients waiting to have their cataracts and hips done.

    3. The Welsh Assembly that was voted in in a referendum by a majority of 50.3% to 49.7% on a 50.2% turnout, with a total majority from an electorate of 2.2 million of 6,721, or 0.302% of the electorate.

      They can go and piss up a stick.

  54. Dixons Carphone shares erase gains after error

    Oh dear. Who dropped a big clanger ?

    Dixons Carphone’s shares slipped after it said its earlier report of a rise in sales before Christmas was wrong.
    Sales for the last 10 weeks of 2019 actually fell by 2% rather than going up by 2% as the company told investors earlier on Tuesday.

  55. I notice that the repulsive, scum, slime-ball, robber-baron, Cur Phil Slime-Green, has reached “a compromise” in his sexual assault trial in the US of A and now charges have been dropped against him. Lawyers acting for the c•nt have said that a “deal” has been reached with the complainant and that they cannot reveal if the foul, repulsive multi-billionaire (whose fortune was gained from paying staff starvation-level wages) has paid her a substantial sum to keep her gob shut!

    1. Very good.
      In a toss up between the brush and the fingers of my left hand, the brush would win.😎

  57. Just been to get a loaf of bread at a cost of £1.03p and gave the grumpy looking girl at the till a £20 note.
    She said “have you got anything smaller as that would take all my change.”
    I said “no sorry but I can pay on card if that helps?”
    She sarcastically said ” of course it would help”
    So as a presented my card she said “Cash back?”
    I said “Yes please!”
    “How much?” She asked
    I said “£18.97”

  59. Paddy took 2 stuffed dogs to the Antiques Roadshow.
    The presenter said, “This is a very rare set, produced by the celebrated
    Johns Brothers taxidermists who operated in London at the turn of the
    last century.

    Do you have any idea what they would fetch if they were in good
    condition?”
    “Sticks!” Paddy replied

        3. I expect it is. The aim of the Left and the Democrats is to destroy Capitalism and reduce everyone back to the stone age. I hope it gives St Greta indigestion.

    2. I see the Bbc had to balance his speech with a clip of St Great telling him he was an uncaring barsteward or words to that effect.

    3. Trump understands that advances in civilisation depend upon the freedom of the people to invent and to solve problems with intelligence and research.

      The Greta Thunberg solution would be to abandon every advance and return us to the Stone Age.

      It is the parallel between Muslim Fundamentalism and the Green Movement that I personally find astonishing. The failure of Muslims to embrace technology will necessarily lead to the end of their vicious creed. Thankfully the same applies to the Greta Thunbergs of this world.

      1. They do embrace technology, but selectively – IED’s, mobile phones (make good triggering mechanisms), guns, cranes (for hangings), etc. Now if you had said they don’t create technology (or much else for that matter), you would have been 100% correct

      1. Afternoon AA,
        As with the politico fraternity, an equity card holder specialising
        in roles of treachery.

      1. Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

        When an animal dies that has been
        especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are
        meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play
        together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm
        and comfortable.

        All the
        animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who
        were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them
        in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content,
        except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who
        had to be left behind.

        They all run and play together, but
        the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright
        eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the
        group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and
        faster.

        You have been spotted, and when you
        and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion,
        never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands
        again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of
        your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

        Then you cross Rainbow Bridge
        together….

        Author unknown…

        4. When our cat Swallow was euthanised the vets gave us a copy of that poem and a tuft of her coat.

          My wife is quick to tears at the mention of Rainbow Bridge.

      1. Ezzi was my friends dog. Nikki is bereft. Her sadness is making me very teary. I think everyone is the same when they become attached to a pet.

        1. Firstborn was absolutely heartbroken when his cat, Magnificat, died aged 16 about 3 years CV ago. Magnificat was a fine cat, we were all upset, but nothing like Firstborn.

        2. I had one cat when I was growing up and it went peacefully of old age. Losing one was enough for me and I have not had another since then.

          Fortunately I am a cat-magnet, and unknown ones will come up to me in the street and do that “Lets trip up the human by going in and out of his legs” tactic. My neighbours here have lots of cats, so I have many of them to play with.

          1. My Dolly dog as much as i love her would happily trip me up when i’m in the kitchen carving meat. Just have to work out how to outsmart her. :o(

          2. I find that dogs like me normally as well, once I am within the “Its a friend who is talking to my master” radius, when I bump into them on the beach. The little ones can get quite yappy when this 6 foot figure dressed head to toe in black looms towards their families. Once I am talking to the owner and the dog sniffs my hand, then even those loud ones are fine.

            Cats are easier to pick up in your arms, and they let you know that they are doing you a favour by sprawling all over you.

        1. When we had George, our JR put down, we let his brother see him briefly before the vet took him away.
          When it was Hamish’s turn, we had no others to show him to.
          It is something that horse owning friends recommended, as animals will accept death better than mysterious disappearance.
          However, as Dolly and Ezzi weren’t house mates, it is a different matter.

    3. Afternoon TB,
      I do believe that Sweden would consider herself lucky if she was.
      I do believe we in the UK still lead the pack on murders & rape / abuse, when it comes to paedophilia & murder our governance parties claimed the cream of the crop, you could not select any lower.

      2. Meghan seems intent on imitating the contradictory but chaotic lifestyle of Diana, Princess of Wales. Most intelligent people would have thought such mistakes as made by Diana could never be repeated but there you go.

        As ever we are dealing with prize fools with no self awareness.

        1. Diana’s circumstances were completely different. I have no idea why you dislike her so much.

          1. Inside information old bean.

            Edit: My former employer the late Sir William Whitfield was an eminent architect and member of the Royal Fine Art Commission. He also advised Prince Charles on matters architectural and would meet the Prince in his apartments at Kensington Palace. There the rooms are enfilade by which I mean all rooms are connected by large double doors which left open will allow all rooms to be as one.

            During his many conversations in Charles’ apartments at one end of the Palace he was obliged to listen to the shrieking from the other end viz. Diana’s apartments as she threw tantrums and shouted at her staff.

            Whitfield admired the calm way in which Charles did not react whereas it was obvious that he was uncomfortable. I have met several people who say that Charles was the most reasonable of men and that Diana was not at all she was portrayed.

      3. I saw the photo yes’day, Belle. Actually, if you look closely, you can see that she is carrying the mtoto in a harness (or similar) & not strangling it.
        We used them for our 2 – they are jolly useful.

    2. I would be delighted if all newspapers, television shows and magazines refused to post any pictures or stories about them.
      It would serve them right if they and their product ranges were completely ignored by everyone; they can’t have it both ways..

    3. Harry’s mother could not make up her mind about the press – she loved and craved the adulation it gave her but she used it as a villainous scapegoat when things did not go her own way.

      However much Harry and Meghan protest about the press they love its attention but but they seem to have learnt nothing from Harry’s mother’s experience. The MSM is like the Hydra or the Sirens of Sorrento – they must decide whether to court or shun them – they cannot expect to have it both ways.

    4. Their ‘protest’ which is all over sky news is really of course because they have no royalty fee arrangements with the press. A vile couple.

    5. Easy way to get the press to lose interest – dress down. Stop wearing designer labels and dress like the rest of us.

    2. BJ,
      Get some in while you can before the herd stampedes in a panic buy mode and existing stocks evaporate.

  68. GOOD LORD ! Off with their heads…..

    Sending John Bercow and Tom Watson to the House of Lords is well out of order!
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-7909797/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Sending-two-House-Lords-order.html#comments
    Boris may have difficulty stopping Corbyn’s nominees who also include his chief of staff Karie Murphy, currently subject to the equality commission’s inquiry into Labour anti-semitism. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/36350fa146fe07bbadb0e7b70e9a0ba044eb1a36e38aebd9e0b59a84a2e8a275.jpg

      1. She’s saying…

        “Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

        Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

        Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,

        Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,–

        For a charm of powerful trouble,

        Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”

      1. Arthur moment ….oh, yes, I get what you mean.
        You think the writing is on the wall for PwC ? They should certainly be struck off.

      2. Very complex and I don’t believe that they actually failed.

        A group I once worked for hired their consulting arm. They were absolutely useless.

        1. Partners went to jail over Enron and the company went out of business. I call that a fail.

          1. You really should look at how the firm was completely and utterly stitched up over Enron.

            Even the Supreme Court ruled in their favour.

            Please note, I have and had no time whatsoever for AA< I thought they were useless, but they were crucuified by the US legal system. If there was a failure, it was US justice.

          2. They were the auditors and they got nailed for not doing their job. Peat Marwick somehow got away with the same thing when Penn Central went bust, despite having given them a clean bill of health. “Knew or should have known” was the phrase the SEC used. IMHO, ditto for Andersen at Enron. If a major auditing companies can’t find fraud under their noses at long term clients, they deserve to be out of business. Or worse, they looked at the size of their fees and looked the other way.

            https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/03/archives/charges-of-fraud-at-penn-central-are-filed-by-sec-goldman-sachs-in.html

          3. Auditors, both internal and external, can only do their job if they are not lied to systematically.

            I found that over a long career in internal audit that the first question senior management ever asked when something went wrong was “what did the auditors say?”
            99/100 the auditors had pointed out the problems but it was management that turned the blind eye.

            Look at the EU.

            Enron was crooked to the core.

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

  71. ” Davos: ‘Forget about net zero, we need real zero’ – Greta Thunberg”
    I just watched the short video of this itsy bitsy teen addressing all those important people at Davos.
    I assume she hasn’t gone back to skool yet.
    I am wondering whether it is some kind of a plot – that if all the speeches were made by someone mature and respected, they would have to be taken seriosly ?

    1. I have a theory. Greta Thunberg is a sort of Shirley Temple figure. She appeals to a bunch of ghastly old perverted men who fantasise about pre-pubescent girls.

      Greta Thunberg is quite obviously reading from a script provided by others. That anyone could either entertain or platform her or take her utterances seriously beggars belief. She is an uneducated schoolgirl with mental issues. She has no profound knowledge or understanding of climate science. She is a mere tool of dark forces.

  72. Unwoke, awake! Victimhood is on the wane

    CHARLES MOORE

    The result of our general election last month confirms that the culture war rages, and that the unwoke side is winning. If one had to pick a woke slogan which explains this trend it would be “Believe the victim”.

    Laurence Fox, who shot to fame in political debate last week after neatly repelling claims on the BBC’s Question Time that criticism of the Duchess of Sussex are racist, has identified this as the central false doctrine. Don’t automatically believe, he says. Instead you should “listen to the victim”, and then make up your mind on the basis of the evidence.

    How did we ever get away from this obvious truth? If people know that, by claiming victimhood about anything they will automatically be believed, many of them will be tempted to use the cloak of victimhood for their own purposes. This is not a grown-up state of mind, and it rightly creates a sense of gross injustice in the minds of those falsely accused, whether they be a whole group, such as men, or a named individual.

    There are always millions of people who feel victimised, some with good reason. But it must be doubtful that there will ever be enough to take political power. Eventually, the majority of our culture will turn against those who claim victimhood at their expense, and cry out for a more just approach. I believe this is what is happening now.

    It is important at this moment to repeat that the most “moderate” candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party is the most vulnerable on this score. As Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer led the way in shifting the scales of British justice so that “Believe the victim” became the mantra of the courts, with consequently grotesque wrongs being assumed of the falsely accused. If “Believe the victim” is also the foundation of his politics, he will prove himself a loser.

    Where is the Remainer post-mortem?

    I am still waiting for the big Remainer article or speech which tries to answer the question, “Why did we lose?” Perhaps this sounds sarcastic, but I mean it. It is perfectly possible to continue as a firm believer in the European Union (and in Britain’s eventual return to membership), and yet to express one’s shame at how badly the cause has been promoted. Indeed, it is perfectly logical, and much needed.

    From the day early in 2016 when David Cameron called the referendum to now, the Remainers have got it wrong. Probably their key mistake was to think – and sometimes almost to say – “We know best.” Project Fear was a version of this, deploying what Remainers considered superior knowledge in order to frighten the ignorant. The same attitude led them to disparage the very idea of the referendum and then, once they had lost, to pretend that the democratic way forward was to have another one.

    So who, from the Remainer side, will be the first to start the public self-questioning? The obvious first platform for this debate should be the contest for the Labour leadership, but most of the candidates shear off such discussion lest it lose them votes. Lisa Nandy, the MP for Wigan, is the only one who begins to try wrestle with the issues.

    She has called recently for a form of politics which does not dismiss patriotism as if it were automatically Right-wing. She also emphasises the importance of this country’s history. If our story is seen – as it is by Jeremy Corbyn – as one long tale of atrocities and exploitation perpetrated by white men against everyone else it will never win support.

    Ms Nandy is also right that such a dark approach to our own past does a great injustice to the many radicals and reformers who have succeeded in bringing about change in our own country and, by their example, to the wider world. How, for example, could you properly teach the story of Britain’s involvement with slavery without studying both how we profited by the trade and how we abolished it and then policed its abolition on the high seas?

    As a mixed-race woman young enough to be Mr Corbyn’s daughter, Ms Nandy is well placed to encourage her party to re-learn these truths.

    How the Church could bring pride to the North

    Boris Johnson wants to move the House of Lords to York. I hope this plan will not be used as a justification for pressing ahead with HS2. The idea should not be to make north and south 15 minutes closer to one another. Rather it should be to give the north more power and pride.

    I wonder if the Church of England should consider something similar. The C of E is divided into the provinces of York and Canterbury. In the Middle Ages, there was a long wrangle about which took precedence. This was eventually settled in the reign of Henry II after the two archbishops engaged in an unseemly tussle in a Westminster garden in front of the papal legate. Canterbury gained first place and has held it ever since.

    Perhaps this precedence should now be reversed. In modern times, the Archbishops of Canterbury have become dreadfully bogged down with trying to manage the worldwide Anglican Communion. This has proved an impossible task and a big distraction from their duties within England.

    This problem could be solved if future Archbishops of York take the lead in England and leave Canterbury with the global role. If the House of Lords were in York, it would be natural for the Archbishop of York to take the lead there as, at present, the Archbishop of Canterbury does in Westminster. “Hills of the north rejoice!” as the old hymn says.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/21/unwoke-awake-victimhood-wane/

    1. WS,
      “Don’t automatically believe” should also be strongly applied when entering a polling booth especially in regards to the lab/lib/con parties.
      The toxic trio are ALL at blame due to mass uncontrolled immigration, lab
      more so on account of the 16 plus year cover up as shown by the JAY report.
      the con / lib,dems are equally to blame for continuing where lab left off.
      The three are ,as proven over the decades to be sh!te, now confirmed to be sh!te.

    2. Rather misses the point that before you can ‘believe the victim’, or even ‘listen to the victim’, there must be a ‘victim’ and these days there often isn’t one, but they are listened to and believed anyway.

      We have entered the age of the victimless crime against the person.

  73. BREAKING NEWS:
    Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal has suffered a further defeat in the Lords as peers backed calls to give reassurance to Scotland and Wales on devolution powers. More follows …

  74. Sainsbury’s to cut hundreds of jobs in latest shake-up

    The retailer blamed continued integration of Argos, which it bought in 2016, into the supermarket chain’s stores.
    It refused to give clarity on the total number of people involved but said the announcement represented the “finalising” of new leadership structures and the merging of its Store Support Centre teams.
    Sainsbury’s announced a year ago that it was offloading a wave of senior in-store and leadership workers – placing thousands of jobs at risk.
    In Tuesday’s update it said: “Since the start of this financial year (March 2019) Sainsbury’s senior leadership team has been reduced by over 20%.
    “Bringing together more teams in Commercial, Retail, Finance, Digital, Technology and HR will lead to a reduction of hundreds of management roles across the business.”

  75. Migrant boat sinks trying to reach UK from Belgium

    Migrants trying to reach the UK in boats have set off from Belgium for the first time, a local mayor believes.
    A group of 14 swam back to shore when their small vessel sank off the coast of the town of De Panne.
    Mayor Bram Degrieck said eight of the group – which may include two children – are unaccounted for, but are believed to have made it back to land.
    “It’s the first time to my knowledge this happens on a beach in Belgium,” he said.
    Prosecutor Frank Demeester said British authorities would be consulted as part of the investigation as it was “rare” for smugglers to try to reach the UK from the Belgian coast.
    Meanwhile, 11 migrants were detained by Border Force at the Port of Dover, with 10 others intercepted in a dinghy in the Channel.

    2. Hard to believe this Channel crossing business is being handled well. They, or the boats carrying the dinghies, must be intercepted before they get halfway and therefore become our responsibility.
      On a lighter note, where did the dinghy go down? De Panne.

  77. Duke and Duchess of Sussex issue legal warning over photos

    Not sure what the law is in Canada but in the UK you can take photographs of anyone in general and you do not need permission unless on private property.

    1. Generally you have the right to photograph anywhere that is public property, including public roads, footpaths, rights of way and between high and low tide at least if not the entire beach areas throughout the UK. No person has the right of privacy of themselves or their property photographed from such a place.

      Linda Macpherson LL.B, Dip. L.P., LL.M

        1. Photography is mentioned in very few Canadian laws. Where it is mentioned, it is usually referenced as “negatives” or “photographic plates”, technologies which are now rather dated. This is from a leaflet I picked up on a visit to Ontario. I don’t know if all Canadian States hold the same view.
          .
          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/38d72e8713f323ce39925bb826b53dddcd780f041b82b0ae1d0bcf9c022b98e8.jpg

          Superintendent Dave Pickford. Windsor Police Dept, Ontario.

    2. Nothing to stop you taking photos in public unless you are not breaking any other laws. Surreptitious recording of someone is a no no, so wave your lens about.

      Or so Mr Google tells me.

  78. Plenty of rousing BTL comments…

    The EU hasn’t twigged yet – we don’t want alignment, we want to break free
    JAKE PUGH – BREXIT PARTY MEP FOR YORKSHIRE AND THE HUMBER
    21 JANUARY 2020 • 12:06PM

    Last week, the Chancellor gave an interview in which he explained that the UK would diverge from EU rules and regulations: “There will not be alignment, we will not be a ruletaker, we will not be in the single market and we will not be in the customs union…”

    This clear position statement has led to predictable howls of anguish and coordinated responses from the usual suspects: Michel Barnier, Phil Hogan and Ursula Von der Leyen.

    Beside being predictable, these responses betray a misunderstanding within the EU regarding the UK negotiating position and commitment not to extend Transition beyond 2020.

    In fact, the UK position to diverge is wholly logical and consistent. Firstly, because all parties know that a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) across all sectors as outlined in the Political Declaration is evidentially not achievable in the time available.

    Secondly, the EU has known since last August that this was clearly the direction of travel for the UK. So the ‘faux’ surprise around regulatory divergence exhibited by the (unelected) EU leaders is nothing more than crocodile tears.

    The one thing we know about the EU is their attention to detail and they have known the UK position for 5 months. From Boris Johnson’s letter to Donald Tusk (19 August 2019) when explaining why the Backstop had to go:

    “Although we will remain committed to world-class environment, product and labour standards, the laws and regulations to deliver them will potentially diverge from those of the EU. That is the point of our exit and our ability to enable this is central to our future democracy. (Author’s emphasis)

    And then, crucially:

    “Accordingly, as I said in Parliament on 25 July, we cannot continue to endorse the specific commitment, in paragraph 49 of the December 2017 Joint Report, to ‘full alignment’ with wide areas of the single market and the customs union.”

    But apart from the constrained timeline and political imperative, the economic rationale for divergence is overwhelming and, in pursuing divergence, it exposes the fundamental weakness of the crumbling EU edifice.

    It is only by diverging from the shackles of EU regulation that the UK economy will grow at a rate fast enough to level-up the regions of the UK. Whilst public expenditure has a role, there are necessary limits to what the public sector can achieve.

    Divergence will open up new and faster growing markets in Asia and the US respectively. A simple but critical statistic: unemployment rates are 3.5% in the US, 3.8% in the UK, 7.4% in the Eurozone. What more does one need to know?

    Full divergence from the single market and customs union will also allow the UK to retain up to £12bn per annum of tariffs based on the substantial current account deficit with the EU27 and adopting WTO schedules.

    But there’s another reason for diverging; that in many key areas of environmental and social laws and industry regulation, the UK has higher standards than the EU.

    Some specific examples: UK minimum wage levels, maternity leave provisions and in certain key areas of financial services regulation: interest rate and credit risk models and MiFID2 venue oversight.

    The simple truth is that the UK gold plates certain EU regulations, adheres to higher standards, achieves higher growth and delivers lower unemployment.

    Aligning with UK standards and growth levels is nigh on impossible for the EU without major supply side reforms. This is why, aside from the significant annual membership contribution, the cost of EU membership has been extortionately high via the lower growth EU membership ensures.

    The misplaced negotiating strategy of the EU is based upon the successful negotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement – namely, control the process, control the outcome. This is why they are focused on agreeing the negotiating mandate with the 27 member states and then defining the sequencing. But they’re in denial.

    The UK should continue with, and further strengthen its current negotiating position: maximum divergence from the EU, pursue high growth markets to the east, prioritise a trade deal with the US and seek the optimum mix of private sector initiatives and public sector funding.

    Where the EU wishes the UK to align and can persuade us of the business case, we should consider it. But any sectoral agreement to align must be conditional on the return of the UK’s £7bn of retained profits at the European Investment Bank and the UK receiving full indemnity from any future Eurozone fracture.

    There were stories over the weekend that the UK has quietly restarted No Deal planning. This should be renamed, it’s now THE Deal planning.

    1. “JAKE PUGH – BREXIT PARTY MEP”

      Well of course he is going to say what this country needs. He belongs to a political party that would take us fully out of the European Union in 10 days time. Only the terminally confused about the realities of the issues say that this could not be done. Or Remainers, they will say it is too difficult as well. They say it would cause economic carnage, but we know the value of their words.

      Many of us have been saying exactly the same things as this Brexit Party MEP has for over 3 years – they are self-evidently the best thing for the United Kingdom. I would have voted for them if I had had the chance, instead of this Liberal wuss wearing a Conservative rosette that we still have here (he was re-elected with an increased majority as people abandoned the Lib Dems and Labour.)

      However, as one lone Pro-Brexit reviewer on the news has said: “The things that Sajid Javid outlined are excellent. The only fly in the ointment is that he is only the Chancellor and Boris Johnson does not want these things. So we might only get half way to this separation.”

      There is nothing we, the citizens of this country, can do now but watch things unfold as our MEP’s leave the EU for the last time, and we wait to see how the Europeans will use the next year. After that, if we are still in the EU in all but name, then the only option will be mass civil disruption to force our way out in the way that the French Yellow Vests have tried.

      They have more experience at “active” protesting than us, but they have not achieved a great deal in the many months that they have been trying. But we British are more inventive, and there will be some very angry people if nothing has changed by 2021 except for a few deflated “We’ve left!” balloons in the corner of the room.

  80. A comment under a DT article today with which I agree:

    “The first thing to do to the House of Lords is to reduce its membership to a maximum of 200. New appointees to the House should not be made if these appointments push the number above 200. More places should only become available when existing members leave: either as the result of death, dismissal, resignation or retirement.

    3. The first thing to do to the House of Lords is clear it completely except for the hereditaries. They at least have a vested interest in the long-term welfare of the Nation as it includes their estates.

      Those other parasites called ‘Life’ peers must be told to go and get a life rather than sponging on the taxpayer @ £300 per day.

  81. Dear Nottlers….good day to you! Many thanks for all yur suggestions for my baskets which I will take on board when I get back from my birthday treat. For now, hubby took each one outside in turn, emptied all the plants into the bin and the soil over on a patch of waste ground. Then we rinsed each one out of doors and have hung them in the outside shed for a few weeks. Hopefully the cold will not help any varmints left behind….then I plan to bring them back indoors one by one, treat them further before adding new soil…a good make….. and plant them up, leaving a couple of weeks between each one to see if anything is affected. Hopefully by summer, I will have at least two or three back in bloom. We have also treated with bacterial cleaner, all the worktops – just to be sure. My friend sent me a lovely potted rose for my birthday and also I have some artificial flowering plants that look okay and have filled a space. My tiny Christmas tree from M and S has also gone onto the sill – I am planting it out in spring. So, we are getting there – oh, and i will be sure to buy some of those sticks when we go for soil.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2004834c0695489a2a476f9d97b256681af5774e52e149310dd621ecc1126850.jpg

        1. Ha ha…I got your message about your cats coming to greet you and when you call….mine too!! All of them over the years. Someone on a forum tried to say I was talking rubbish and hers never did this. Well, speaks and volumes methinks. Lol.

          1. What, I wondered, with my previous cat was how he recognised my car returning or just knew through some sixth sense – I’d often seem go running across to wait at the gate as I arrived back from work.

          4. Probably recognise the sound. I can tell SWMBOs car, mine & Firstborn’s, for example, by the engine sound.

          5. We always thought our 2 Labs were too docile to threaten intruders. We had a large drive-in drive-out driveway & the doggies were used to the sound of either car’s arrival. Then one day we came home & had to reverse in for some reason. Different car noise & all Hell broke loose indoors until they heard our voices.

          8. My old cat Joe (1984 – 2001) knew when my car was coming down the hill – he’d get off his radiator and saunter out to meet me.

      1. I like the “romantic ideal” of no one having walked on it for 300 years, if you can call it that. But the groundsman will have been all over it, mowing it and attending to weeds etc. The drunken students would have been all over it when the Porters were otherwise engaged. I have been in educational establishments that were very similar, although in Oxford so obviously there were fewer Russians hiding in the bushes, and I have walked on them.

        Nice traditions and buildings though. I love the history.

        1. Many of the lawns in the Universities are open to the fellows and their guests.
          I was walking across “legally”

          1. Ahh, the ones that I wandered across were “out of bounds” to staff and pupils. But I was allowed to be there due to a role I was playing in my life at that point. I have done some strange things in my time, but it all worked out in the end. So far, anyway.

            We still have a few bumps on the horizon in the next 30 years, and I might even be around to be fighting through them. Although they will need to prop me up against the wall by then. 🙂

          4. No – they were there next to me though and I knew them. 🙂 It was more of a “That man walking across the Quad is an Old Boy who went on to be a Master here. He spent all his life in the school, but he has retired now and is not fully “there” anymore upstairs. I can’t go over there and guide him away, but you can.”

            That was an awkward conversation to say the least, as I guided the redoubtable gentlemen off of the Quad and walked him around the outside. He had been a Master after all. You must have respect for even those who may have stayed a little too long at the fair. 🙂

          5. Every college has them.
            I recall a “feast” where one of the ancient fellows, who would have made Lady Gaga gaga, stormed into the reception, ranting and raving, no trousers on but very long underpants. He was calmed down and escorted back to his rooms. Nobody batted an eyelid.

        3. I am not religious, but the first time I entered King’s College Chapel and stood beneath Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ huge and magnificent Adoration of the Magi I was nearly moved to tears.

        4. We held our Serjeants’ Mess do in Pembroke College one year. After a few sherbets, one of the Colour Serjeants decided to take a short cut across the quad lawn. The security staff appeared from nowhere and he was escorted out immediately.

          Interview sans coffee with the RSM the next day could be heard across the drill square. 🙂

      3. That story is rubbish. I have walked across it when a resident of Cambridge and afterwards when the Colleges started charging for access to their grounds.

        I have visited several Fellows’ gardens too and have seen much of interest in university archives. My late father in law was assistant treasurer at Corpus Christi College for decades and had access to all parts of that college.

        Back then the Cambridge residents enjoyed free access to a number of institutions, including the Botanical Gardens.

        1. Agreed.
          I remember that era well.

          In the early 70’s any “member” of the University was usually allowed pretty much free access to college grounds, and even when colleges started charging admission the fact that one was a graduate in residence meant one would not be charged.

          They have certainly tightened up a lot since then. I was even challenged by my own college when I visited last time.
          Corpus was always on my “guided tour for family and friends”. I used to start at the Fitz, then Peterhouse, Pembroke, Corpus, particularly the older parts then Cats and Queen’s, before heading into town via the “railway station” aka King’s College Chapel.

          Much prettier than Oxford to my taste (OK I’m biased), because it’s a little tighter.

          1. Being just a common scumbag I have no connection with either Oxford or Cambridge yet I love both cities. Oxford is an “older” place, architecturally, and Cambridge is much more “modern”.

            I have supported Oxford, though, in the University Boat Race since I was a child for no other reason than I prefer dark blue to light blue.

          2. I’m guessing that you have not been back recently.
            Cambridge is hollowed out from my time, but Oxford is even worse.

          3. Oxford provides us with our Politicians and Cambridge with our Spies. Shame they aren’t working for ordinary people who pay tax.

          5. My wife’s nana had a few of the more famous spies staying with her. She let out a couple of rooms and eventually these were sought after by actors and actresses at Cambridge Arts Theatre. She owned a house in Brunswick Walk.

            Nana tracked the first doodle bug when working for Cambridge Instrument Company. Her husband was an instrument maker and made the model for the earliest radios.

            When a pupil at Technical School I destroyed several ammeters and voltmeters. These had the insignia of Cambridge Instrument Company viz. A Cam over a diagram of a Wheatstone Bridge. Small world.

            Edit: Nana thought the spies were well intentioned, believing that the Russians should have the same weapons information and technology as the West. She believed the resulting equivalence would prevent another war.

          7. Nana was one of the cleverest women I have ever met. In her day her idiot brothers gained preference and went to college.

            Her brothers were not thick but accomplished in technical ability.

            One wrote books on technical draughting, copies of which I retain.

          9. P.S. Cambridge “Blue” isn’t really blue to my eye.

            And I have the Blue’s vest to prove it!

          11. Grizzy – We had a saying when I younger: “Don’t call me Sir, I work for a living.” I am far from “posh” but I have been given access to some interesting places in my career. Anyone who matters knows that Character trumps “class” and I would cross the road to talk to the groundsman from that school before even waving at some of the students who were there.

            Some of the “higher class” ones could be real bas*ards as I recall. Which may be a family trait but is more likely just inbreeding. 🙂

          12. There is an 83 yr old lady who works at a favourite restaurant of mine who would never dream of calling me anything but Sir. Her name is Ina and she is a lovely lady. She jokes about when her friends ask what she is doing she says…’Im getting ready to go to work’. And she does it beautifully. Neither of us feel posh or not.

          13. You were doing so well until that last sentence. I had wonderful times driving around Oxfordshire in my younger days. A beautiful county with some outstanding public houses tucked away. Although, as I have never been to Cambridge that I can recall, it may be a nice county as well.

  83. Just tried an embedded tweet to see how it comes out after listening to Emily’s broadcast today where she narrated her exploits in turning objective scientists into climate activists.

    Whilst she feels a moral duty for the scientific community to scare little girls into fearing an impending global armageddon there was an admission that the green movement may have gone too far in treating legacy energy consumption as the prime historical cause of the panic surrounding recent climatic extremes.

    Super excited to be presenting a BBC Radio 4 Green Originals episode today on James Hansen, and why climate scientists today are increasingly feeling the need to become activists @MarchForScience @ScientistsX @XRLondon @ExtinctionR https://t.co/kWKUGXQQnp— Dr Emily Grossman (@DrEmilyGrossman) January 21, 2020

  84. Ms Allison Pearson on form again on the subject of child rape gangs. The millions spent on police protection for two Potatoes Royale could be diverted to safeguard vulnerable children in British cities.

    3. Not to mention the millions spent of the Met Police Algarve Holiday Fund, aka, the Madelaine McCann investigation.

      1. The child is long dead. We have here parents who have not been prepared to accept the grieving process. What is very strange is that they are still together. Normal behaviour would be for them to separate like Stephen Lawrence parents.

    4. To say nothing of asking the McCanns to refund £12 million of tax payer money from the Madeline McCann fund for a bogus investigation of their daughters disappearance when they are the only possible suspects !

      1. Good evening Mr Hat. What do you think happened to the girl? Difficult to hide a body…Did they sell her? After so much analyses wouldn’t their accounts have been scrutinised? Tell me what you think…Actually, tell me what you think of the body in the sports bag in the bathtub because Mossad was being blamed for that one.

        1. I cant say if they killed her deliberately or accidentally but I’m sure they know she is dead & disposed of her body. She died in that apartment – the 2 blood sniffer dogs proved that beyond a shadow of doubt, the original Portuguese detective squad knew it & so does anybody honest at the Met know it but dare not reveal it!

          https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560443/Madeleine-sniffer-dogs-detect-scent-of-body.html

          Tests are still ongoing on spots of blood and the inside of the bedroom of the apartment and the McCann family have been told that results will only be confirmed next week.

          However, a four-page interim report received by Portuguese police has concluded that the blood is not Madeleine’s. Forensic analysis suggests that there is a 72 per cent chance the sample is that of a white man of “northeast European” origin. The condition of the sample is poor because the wall had been cleaned with detergent.

          Expert handlers said that dogs can only pick up the scent of a body which has been in situ for more than two hours.

          They washed the blood off the wall with detergent – no abductor was in that apartment for over 2 hours & did he arrive conveniently with a bottle of bleach to clean up after murdering the child whilst her siblings slept in their beds & whilst the parents supposedly looked in every so often on the kids ?? a white man of “northeast European” origin could be her Scottish father !

          1. It just all seems unreal. If it was by them and then they had supper with a group of people and then have carried on all these years doesn’t bare thinking about. Where is the body? How …oh dear…i’m now thinking of many diff ways of getting rid of a small bag..

          2. A man with a resemblance to Gerry was supposedly seen by another English family near the beach that night & their statement was not investigated by the Met once that family returned to the UK . Another possibility is the crypt of the church to which the McCanns were given the key & the possibility of the child’s body being placed in a coffin of a deceased person . We are unlikely to ever know the truth unless one of the parents makes a death bed confession !

          3. My skin is crawling now.

            Why on earth were they given a key to the crypt? Normally one would be accompanied.

            I also find it very strange that all the people in contact with them on that holiday were not interviewed and if they were why haven’t we heard their testimony.

            If it were some overt religious thing where body parts were consumed i can’t believe that could be kept secret..someone would break.

          1. The cross dresser, yes

            ♫He was young, he was free♫

            Of course we will never really know. He couldn’t have been at any sort of top level. Just thinking about what i am writing (for a change). Take out some pawns and then queens gambit.

    5. Evening Tim,
      What would also help in a big way would be reminding oneself of the past actions regarding the lab/lib/con coalition party on entering a polling booth, & kicking the three monkey mode of voting into touch.
      Who is it that continues to support & vote for more of the same via the lab/lib/con coalition party ?
      No other political party has had a hand in introducing this odious way of life into our once decent society.

  86. As requested, here is the Allison Pearson article. Incidentally, castrating all found guilty would reduce this grooming gang problem.

    While Prince Harry was making a speech on Sunday night, Himself was in a London cab. The driver was incensed by reports suggesting the Duke and Duchess were abdicating because Meghan had been the victim of racist media coverage. “I didn’t even know she was black until I saw her mum at the wedding,” huffed the cabbie.

    He spoke for millions of Britons who welcomed the beautiful American actress into our Royal family with open arms and had no concerns about her suitability. Well, not until she started writing cringeworthy mottos on bananas destined for sex workers, anyway.

    On Question Time, when the actor Laurence Fox also dismissed the suggestion that Meghan had faced racism and said that, as countries go, we were really quite nice and non-racist, there was uproar in the ‘woke’ echo chamber of social media. The rest of the country simply nodded and said: “Too right, mate.”

    An audience member (naturally, she turned out to be an academic and regular BBC contributor) then accused Fox of “white privilege”. That charge is supposed to intimidate its target into silence. Refreshingly, Fox refused to be cowed. He pointed out that nervousness surrounding the issue of racism meant that “things like the Manchester grooming scandal get ignored”.

    How painfully true that was. In the very week that an excoriating 150-page report revealed that Greater Manchester Police (GMP) knew of grooming gangs sexually exploiting almost a hundred girls, some as young as 12, “in plain sight”, Question Time did not feature a single question on the topic.

    The BBC was keen to indulge the notion that a cossetted multi-millionairess had been a victim of racism, while completely ignoring girls like Victoria Agoglia, who died after having her 15-year-old veins filled with heroin so she could be raped by dozens of “Asian” (Pakistani-heritage) men.

    I ask you, which case is of greater national significance? A duchess who leaves the Royal family after 20 months because it’s “not working for me”, or the revelation that police officers turned a blind eye to scores of children being grotesquely violated because to arrest their tormentors might look like cultural insensitivity?

    Not much “white privilege” for poor Victoria Agoglia, whose grandmother begged in vain for police and social services to help her. Nor for the 11-year-old in Oxford whose buttock was branded with the initial of her British-Pakistani “owner”. On the contrary. The girls being white, and their abusers being non-white, made it much less likely they would be protected.

    At long last, we now have conclusive proof of that. After a five-year investigation, the Independent Office for Police Conduct has just upheld a complaint against a senior Rotherham officer who admitted that his force ignored the sexual abuse of girls by grooming gangs “for decades” because it was afraid of increasing “racial tensions”.

    The copper, who was unable to be identified, told a missing child’s distraught father that grooming was “P—-s—-ing”, and admitted that “what with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”, because the town “would erupt”.

    Keeping the lid on social unrest, not upsetting “the community”, that was the main thing. Young girls pimped, threatened, tortured? Why, they were just collateral damage in the greater project of multiculturalism.

    After Victoria Agoglia died of an overdose administered by an older man in 2003, official denial became a lot harder – although that didn’t stop the coroner at Victoria’s inquest doing his best. He “recognised the multiple concerns”, but pointed out that the girl had a “propensity to provide sexual favours”. Remember that insensitive man was talking about a child who was supposedly in the care of Manchester City Council when she was coerced, before puberty, into prostitution.

    GMP set up Operation Augusta to tackle “the sexual exploitation of a significant number of children in the care system by predominantly Asian men”. Police identified at least 57 child victims and up to 97 suspects. But Augusta was abruptly closed down after just over a year when police turned to less “sensitive” crimes. The report claims there was a lack of resources, but the amazing Maggie Oliver, the retired detective who blew the whistle, said that not only had GMP “deliberately” not investigated child rape, it had tried to get the official report suppressed.

    You may have noticed that I find it extremely hard to write about the despicable behaviour – both by the perpetrators and by the people who were supposed to protect their young prey – without completely losing it. So, just to recap: 27 towns and cities so far where grooming gangs, made up of predominantly Pakistani-heritage males, have plied their foul trade.

    Last year, the NSPCC identified 19,000 victims of gang abuse and admitted the true number is probably much higher. It is, without doubt, the biggest scandal this country has seen in my lifetime, yet still there is a terror on the part of officialdom of conducting the full public inquiry that is so clearly needed.

    Back in December 2018, Sajid Javid, then home secretary, said that it was “wrong to ignore” the ethnicity of abusers. Born in Rochdale to a British-Pakistani family, Javid was ideally placed to insist that he wanted officials researching the causes of gang-based exploitation to “leave no stone unturned”.

    Even Javid, after he spoke out, was asked by a Muslim writer if he worried that his comments “may have fuelled hate crimes”. Thus do perpetrators continue to evade justice because exposing the hateful things men from that background have done to young girls might cause, yes, “hate crimes”. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

    Consider the fate of that Home Office report into grooming gangs commissioned by Javid. Now complete, officials are refusing to make it public. Why?

    We are often told that this is a complex issue. I think it’s horribly simple, actually. As Shaista Gohir of the Muslim Women’s Network told Newsnight last week: “Pakistan is one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman.” If you import Pakistan’s misogynistic attitudes into parts of the UK and they run straight into vulnerable young white girls who look, to a certain type of man, like easy meat, then you have a recipe for sexual abuse.

    Furthermore, if your authorities are afraid to confront and condemn those misogynistic attitudes for fear of appearing racist, then that sexual abuse can flourish on an industrial scale.

    I agree with Maggie Oliver. After the scathing report into GMP was published, she demanded that criminal prosecutions be brought against those at the top of the police. Let the guilty men be named and shamed for leaving so many terrified girls at the mercy of their abusers. Meanwhile, hundreds of victims are suing seven councils and South Yorkshire Police for their part in the Rotherham scandal. Good for them.

    But a scandal of this magnitude calls for remedy at the highest level. Priti Patel has got off to a terrific start, fierce and focused, as Home Secretary. I hope she will call on her considerable reserves of political courage, publish the report into the grooming gangs and announce a public inquiry to put a stop to this toxic epidemic once and for all.

    Laurence Fox was right. We are a remarkably tolerant nation. If anything is going to fuel racism in the UK, it’s the attempt to brush these abhorrent offences under the carpet.

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

    1. Evening LD,
      IMO we should be taking a far harsher
      line with the guilty as in on release same day deportation to country of origin, or parents country of origin along with parents.
      Watch the numbers of rape & abuse drop when kicking into touch the use of PC & Appeasement and taking a strong decent line with this odious issue & protecting these youngsters.
      The political toxic trio has enough sh!te on their collective ( no conscience) plate, let the felons own tribe dish out justice their way if so inclined.
      The thought of dickless paedophiles
      howling at the moon and receiving compo & regular disability welfare fills me with dread, & disgust.

    2. All of the above is correct, but, however negligent the police were in failing these young girls, criticism of them must not be allowed to become the main story here. The central theme to be addressed with no quarter given is the criminal behaviour of a large section of a particular community.

  87. The seven dwarfs always left early each morning to go to work in the mine. As always, Snow White stayed home doing her domestic chores.

    As lunchtime approached, she would prepare their lunches and take them to the mine.

    One day as she arrived at the mine with the lunches, she saw that there had been a terrible cave-in. Tearfully, and fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that the dwarfs had somehow survived.

    “Hello. Hello!” she shouted. “Can anyone hear me? Hello!” For a long while, there was no answer. Losing hope, Snow White again shouted, “Hello! is anyone down there?”

    Just as she was about to give up all hope, she heard a faint voice from deep within the mine, “VOTE FOR Jeremy Corbyn!”

    Snow White fell to her knees and prayed, Oh, thank you, God! At least Dopey is still alive!

  88. I see the media is in mourning as their beloved Jess Phillips has been forced to pull out of the leadership race due to lack of support. Apparently Labour couldn’t handle her truth telling.

    1. Come off it. All Labour Party leadership candidates are inveterate liars and charlatans. They are united only in their ability to dissemble to their constituencies and their voters at large.

      Jess Phillips is a particularly vile example of a lefty woman MP. The remaining candidates are no better. The only one with a bit of common sense is Lisa Nandy, however she is too lightweight to make any significant impact.

    2. Jess Phillips said she was the funniest woman in the Commons when she was on HIGNFY. I didn’t laugh then but i am laughing now. She reminds me of another idiotic Labour woman courting votes from credulous locals…Clare Short.

      Personally, i think all women should be banned from Politics. They should concentrate on what they are best at.

      1. Somehow I do not see you being invited onto Any Questions unless you have a suitably witty explanation for your last paragraph.

        1. We have women on here who have served in our Military. We also have women on here who are excellent at what they do. To fast track individuals into Politics BECAUSE they are women is wrong.

      2. She is similar to Clare Short .. and also very similar to that grim unsmiling ex Labour home sec woman whose name I cannot recall, but has now been invited on to all sorts of TV progs.

  89. I have had a ponder

    why are not the suppliers of Vegan Sauasges, Bacon, Meat Pies etc not treated in accodance with:

    Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures.

    It must equally controversial when members of a minority culture appropriate from disadvantaged majority cultures.

    Sauce for the goose is Vegan Krap for the Gander

    1. That was a good ponder OLT

      I am just wondering who will keep the grass short in the meadows and fields , if there are no grazing animals , Vegans will have to put up with sewerage poo to fertilise their extensive crops .. Once again tomatoes will grow on sewerage farms ..

      We are all being groomed by cultists ..

      2. I like, in the spring, to take a trip along the yellow (unclassified) road that runs along the north side of the river Dee, west of Llangollen. If you time it right, the fields and meadows are all cropped beautifully short by the sheep, as good a job as a fleet of motor mowers.

        Come to think of it, I haven’t done it for a couple of years now. I resolve to do so this spring…

    2. A meat lover was banned from Facebook for ‘hate speech’ – after he praised a butcher’s faggots.

      Paul Lynch posted a review on the social media site encouraging others to go to the Thomas’ of Morriston butchers.

      But he was then banned from the site after Facebook said his post ‘goes against our community standards on hate speech.’

      The post said: ‘If you’re not buying Thomas’s Of Morriston the butchers on Morriston Cross’ faggots on a Tuesday are you even a monkey?’.

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7911927/Meat-lover-banned-Facebook-hate-speech-praising-butchers-faggots.html

      3. I didn’t think there was any meat in faggots. Oh, and that’s not a figure of speech, BTW.

      4. He could have played the historical card.
        Bloody Mary was keen on faggots; especially with stakes.

  90. BBC News and SKY News are obsessed with the impeachment of President Trump; I regard it as an underwhelming and inconsequential charade …

    1. I don’t follow Sky, but the BBC are crying thir eyes out because they hate Trump but realise that he is going to be around for a long, long, time.
      They have heard that Trump will make a favourable trade deal with the U.K. on condition that the B.B.C. is disbanded.

  91. It will be my bedtime in 5 hours, and I have a large number of programs to catch up on, so I am fleeing for the night. As Rik is not back yet, here are some animals and dogs pictures as I cannot remember which cat ones that I have found here. Have a good night.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/afd708786fd86cbbcf0a7f0f5fa9b3f95943b73ac50654fdb4cf2a9776be2dd9.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/77447a8333504e00f7fd7688d90c51b734f08af90c7ab2d688ed543c7a86aa8e.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7dc81fb3d312cef165e1c388f65277765d59f6b31cd29f1c1f9c61ca1e236b89.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/901196bc73deabd8c9f34558af7b98f2d5ca45285763f300fbe835450d3978e4.jpg

      1. Schlaf’ gut, Elsie, obwohl es kann sein, daß ich schlaff bin, wenn ich schlafe. 😉

  93. Apparently Ozzy Osbourne has Parkinsons. I am curious about how doctors were able to diagnose this.

  94. The biggest legacy of Tony Blair with 1. half of the younger age group “graduates” – many with mickey mouse degrees, large debts, and unable to get on the housing ladder. the latter much due to the 2. growth of the immigrant and ethnic population … is the Humpty Dumpty Labour Party – broken, and can’t be put back together again:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBUTu5QRy5c

    1. This looks more realistic and is what Davosites want, as long as it does not affect them

      Boeing has been forced to halt trading in its shares as the commercial aerospace titan warned of yet another delay to its grounded 737 Max fleet.

      The world’s largest planemaker admitted that the Max will not be certified to fly until at least mid-2020, months later than previouslyexpected, as it awaits the green light from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other global regulators.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/01/21/boeing-suspends-shares-warns-yet-another-delay-737-max/

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/business/2020/01/10/TELEMMGLPICT000220683719_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqrpfQw2hJyG_yckwxPAr0go9KzD8cVu9iguqnaKUswZA.jpeg?imwidth=1400

  96. Can anyone tell me briefly how the impeachment process works and who decides ‘guilty or not’, please?

    1. The Democrats decide that you’re a Republican and need to be impeached.
      They start the process to impeach you.
      They form a jury of Democrats to impeach you.
      The jury decides you should be impeached.
      You are impeached.
      Te Democrats celebrate ‘justice’.

      Or summat like that.

        1. The term length for the lower chamber (U.S. House of Representatives) is two years, with elections held every even year. “The House has a representative for every congressional district in the United States. Each district represents about 700,000 people.”

          The US Congress’ other house is the upper chamber, the US Senate. “…members are elected every six years. Elections are staggered over even years. Every state has two senators, regardless of the state’s population.”

          The lower house drafts/ratifies the Articles of Impeachment, then sends them to the upper house for a trial (“Trial of Impeachment”). Only US Senators vote to either 1) set aside the Articles, or 2) remove a judge or executive (including the Chief Executive) from office. In the history of the United States, two US Presidents have been impeached, but none have been involuntarily removed from office.

          https://www.reference.com/world-view/term-length-u-s-house-representatives-4370cbfaaf8bda94
          https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/11/impeachment
          https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/17/trial-of-impeachment

      3. Then the Democrats (House of Representatives) pass the Impeachment Bill to the Senate for ratification.
        Then the Senate (mainly Republicans) throw it out.
        Then Trump is re-elected for a further four years in November of this year.

        2. Yo Elsie

          The Democrats then nominate the ‘Clinton Pair’ + O’banana to put the record straight

        3. If you missed the President Trump speech at the world economic forum that J.Norfolk posted earlier it is worth a listen.

          No one that supports the Democrats or the Left or for that matter Bernie Sanders and his cohorts can stomach this. Yes, i know it is quite long winded but also mind boggling and of course his claims will come under forensic scrutiny unlike the Biden/Clinton/Obamas…

          https://youtu.be/ytYygV347sc

  97. Bit more detail on illegals found at Dover

    Given the weather conditions and it is dark it is pretty certain that larger boats are dropping them off ,. The fact that they turn up in small clusters is further evidence of this. It does not say a lot for our border security

    A total of 21 migrants were found this morning.

    In the first incident 11 were discovered at Dover Eastern Docks just before 5am.

    Just after 6am a small boat carrying 10 people and travelling across the Channel.
    A cutter was sent out and met the vessel near Dover.

  98. God made a beauteous garden, With lovely flowers strewn, But one straight, narrow pathway, That was not overgrown.
    And to this glorious garden, He brought mankind to live, And said “To you, my children, These lovely flowers I give.
    Prune ye my vines and fig trees, With care my flowers tend, But keep the pathway open, Your home is at the end.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6oDTn_ENto

      1. The older gang don’t like newcomers here. They are set in their ways and the ladies especially are averse to competition …:-)
        Veryoldman just downvoted me !!

        1. I welcome anyone with something interesting to contribute. I believe most others on here do too.

          This forum recently exposed and has disposed of the worst Trolls and remains a healthy forum for discussion.

          I admit that I am unable to keep up with the multiple moniker changes brought about by the recent upvotes shenanigans.

          1. My avatar in grey and I’m a bit grumpy at the moment after knee surgery 12 days ago.
            Good evening Corrie.

          2. I will have to write all these names down and do a translation. I can’t keep up.

            I am somewhat offended that my upvote tally has not been tampered with!

          5. I has almost forgotten about the downvote scam. I just looked at my profile, last time I looked it was at -1,700 but now it doesn’t even show upvotes.

            Ah well, maybe I need a new profile, how about Top End of I81?

          8. Richard, I just downvoted you to see if downvotes were still “named” (they were) so i immediately removed my down-vote. I was just checking that down voters are still named, and I am glad that they are. No offence if you (briefly) saw my name.

          11. Keep following the physio’s instructions and you should be fine. I had a full replacement 12 years ago and it gave me a new lease of life, but I’m lucky enough to have a physio on tap (as it were).

            If you are moving from walking aid to no aids I would recommend carrying a stick for a while, just to let people know to give you a slightly wider berth, even if you don’t really need the aid.

            Good luck.

          12. Thank you Sos. I had an arthroscopy but not for arthritis. I had grown additional cartilage that had pieces of bone in it. Some had flipped over and 3 pieces settled behind the kneecap and one very large piece in the notch at the base of the femur. Agonising pain on and off since last August. Originally I was told the recovery period would be 2 weeks but after the op he told me probably 2 months. There was more rubbish to clear our than originally envisaged. Physio starts Thursday morning, 2 weeks after the op, and sutures being removed Thursday evening. Extensive bruising still coming out. Back of thigh purple from knee to buttock. Front and sides of thigh yellow. Very pretty. Still on crutches but knee fully weight bearing. Exhausted by day end.

          13. That all sounds horribly familiar. You have my sympathy.

            After 10+ ops on the right knee alone, I am a bit of an authority on wrecked knees (far too much sport).

            Do as the physio tells you and always report problems, however trivial they may seem, and you should be fine.

          14. Went back to A&E last Wednesday shortness of breath severe pain etc. They called the Ortho team and had blood, BP, X-rays and blood gas all surprisingly normal. Increased pain relief. OKish but still random pain.
            I will follow the Physio advice as I know it’s the way back to fitness.

          16. I did work out GG after he commented about a cruise he had taken with vw. I don’t know if vw has changed her avatar or not.

          19. Ah, one of my favourites. Had a wonderful time visiting Loire and learning about their wonderful wines some years ago but unfortunately we cannot get the one we loved most, Savenniers (not sure if spelling correct) here in the States.

          20. The correction to Savennières is probably on it’s way!

            A bonus for our government owned booze stores, you can order anything and they will bring it in for you before charging a very generous arm and leg for the service.

          21. I am surprised that we do not see many Canadian wines down here. We had some excellent wine when we visited your side of the border a couple of years ago. I even quite enjoyed your ice wine, which is a little sweet.

          22. Our local cider company makes iced cider, also very sweet .

            The biggest issue is getting workers to go out on a nice minus twenty degree day to harvest the little frozen pellets.

          24. That’s me. I thought I would celebrate the birth on England and try to protect our Anglo Saxon heritage.

          27. I feel the same – I am finding it difficult to keep up. I especially miss Korky the Kat, I am old enough to remember the cartoon character and whenever I saw the name I immediately thought of Korky with a huge grin bouncing into our midst (like Tigger, but even more resplendent). I’m so sorry, Korky, The Mekon just doesn’t do it for me. The very sight of Korky brought a smile to my face. Would you consider changing back?

          28. Disqus permitting I do still have KtK available – had some trouble last week with passwords etc but I hope he’s able to be recalled – and the mekon was created to give me some wriggle room after KtK was zeroed by the bot.

          29. I called him the Dandy Front Pager and he did not object.

            I give True Belle various names – all of them complimentary – as she is a lovely lady as are many of the ladies who contribute to this forum..

          30. I’m still trying to whisk off Belle to the Moonfleet for afternoon tea while *wannafight is playing golf.

        3. Dear Tony, I enjoy the company of many , so i hope you weren’t pointing a finger at me..

          The gals on here get along very well, no problems there , even Polly is tolerated !

          1. Heck, no. I was talking tongue in cheek as usual. Mind you, when I first surfaced here. I was jumped on by two of the fair sex who seemed to regard me as an intruder into their space, although since then most people have learned to put up with my sense of humour and cynicism; they have repented their sins and joined my fan club.
            Well, I’ve tried ” social media ” in a number of places, and if my eyesight hadn’t gone down the drain, I would go back to collecting postage stamps !!

        4. Tony, I could not see the vvom’s name on the down vote, so added mine to see if there were 2 names. No joy, so I (obviously) removed my name. Amazingly, now I can see vvom’s name!

        5. Well, that’s not me, I hope you are not throwing nasturtiums in my direction. If I sounded slightly tentative it was because there have been so many name-changes of late.

          Welcome, Joan.

        6. I don’t think that that is true.
          Mostly the Nottle crew welcome anyone new, but they don’t take kindly to trolls.

          Hell’s teeth even you were welcomed initially.

        7. What do you mean by that Tone?
          “the ladies especially are averse to competition …”

    3. Thanks. A few good gardens, but I’m not keen on those stylised ones or the geometrical ones. Give me the more natural garden anytime. Most of those don’t come into ‘most beautiful garden’ category at all, for me at least.

        1. In the spring, Firstborn’s garden (lawn) is filled with tiny wild pansies. Magical, so it is!

          1. That great big Desperate Dan son of yours has pansies in his lawn !

            Another stereotype crushed… *sniffs.

  99. I work with a Chinese guy called Kim and one time at a works function,
    we were having a drink and I said to him “Do you ever get fed up of us
    Westerners saying that all Chinese people look the same”?

    He replied “Kim’s at the bar getting drinks, I’m his wife”

    Safe spaces and the habitually offended rooms are this way >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

          2. Your brain faster than your fingers.

            That is a perfectly acceptable excuse!

            I’ll stick to it in my case, even if it’s wrong.

    2. I have just glanced at that as well, and feel so frustrated .. I thought about dashing out in the car to buy the paper , but car needs defrosting and our local shop won’t have any DTs left anyway

  102. OK. That’s it – I’ve had enough. All hell broke loose on this site last night, and now one of the offenders has the temerity to blame me. Some of us sleep at night; other Mods were run ragged trying to put a lid on things. I’m closing all open pages to comments. Have a taste of life without NoTTL. It might return in due course, but don’t hold your breath.

Comments are closed.