Tuesday 22 September: Government threats of lockdown are as unfair as keeping the whole class in school detention

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/09/21/lettersgovernment-threats-lockdown-unfair-keeping-whole-class/

730 thoughts on “Tuesday 22 September: Government threats of lockdown are as unfair as keeping the whole class in school detention”

  3. With a difficult winter ahead, Boris needs all the support he can muster. 21 September 2020.

    That is why a new lockdown would be a catastrophe. The Prime Minister is right to be against it, and he would be justified in resisting a short “circuit-breaking” full lockdown that would break a lot more than a circuit – businesses would be in a stop-go environment that would be devastating for confidence, investment and jobs.

    Yet without such drastic action, Boris Johnson is going to need a high level of public support for, and adherence to, whatever measures he does now announce. He needs a shared sense of national strategy, a common public purpose, sufficient to see the country through some dark months ahead. And for that, whatever measures ministers decide on, they would be wise to change the politics of the Covid crisis at the same time. In a short crisis, rapid rough-and-ready decision making is fair enough. In a longer struggle, requiring the mobilising of a united effort, the way that decisions are made and implemented makes a big difference to the outcome.

    Morning everyone. It is a lockdown in all but name! Since I’m retired I don’t really make any contribution but what I post on this blog, and that is hardly in favour anyway. Nevertheless I shall do my best since only do I not believe what they are saying but am pretty certain that these people are our enemies and wish us ill! There is too ready an acceptance that Boris and his friends are acting out of incompetence; a plot would still be the more likely explanation.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/21/difficult-winter-ahead-boris-needs-support-can-muster/

  4. Good Morning Folks,

    Another clear sky this morning.
    Lots of stars out earlier and satellites going over.
    Keeping watch

  5. SIR – The Government threatens, or intends, wholesale lockdown because of a few alleged irresponsibilities. I am reminded of teachers long ago who kept the whole class in after school because of the misdemeanours of a few.

    Even as children of a tender age, we instinctively felt that this was not only unfair on those of us who’d behaved but also the sign of a bad teacher. Such teachers were usually, and swiftly, replaced.

    Michael Round
    London SW19

    1. SIR – Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, tells us the epidemic is doubling every seven days.

      Thus, he calculates – somewhat frighteningly – that we will have 50,000 new infections a day by mid-October and 200 deaths a day a couple of weeks later.

      Applying exactly the same method, the entire population will have had Covid-19 and 11.5 million of us will be dead before Christmas Day. Shortly after New Year’s Day, all human life in the United Kingdom will have ended.

      Merry Christmas, everyone.

      Chris Kirk-Blythe
      Manchester

      2. Bit pointless designing my Christmas card this year.
        And should I turn down the gas under the sprouts?

  6. Does anyone know about cutting overgrown walnut trees?

    I have a very large one, which was planted too close to the house by previous owners. Its majestic, spreading branches have now reached the roof of the house and are damaging the gutter. It’s also very tall (15+ metres?).
    I’m thinking of getting in a professional tree cutter to pollard it. However, a neighbour has a tree of a similar size that was pollarded about 18 months ago, cut down to 3 or 4 stubs of main branches. The tree now looks like a 7 metre high lollypop, with a crown of very thick green foliage.
    Her tree cutter says he needs to go in again, to cut the excess branches off. This strikes me as rather expensive and not very clever, also not very beautiful at the moment.

    Has anyone had experience with walnut trees? I’m wondering what would happen if I got the tree cutter to cut it low enough for me to be able to handle the resulting foliage.

  7. Sept 22nd the sun rises in between the two house to the left of the back garden from where I’m sitting
    It’s a bit like Stonehenge here.
    Now my eyes have gone all funny

        1. It is still summer until 1431hrs BST, when the sun crosses the equator. Rejoice in the seven hours of summer you have left.

          1. I have read that the obliqueness of the Earth’s axis is decreasing, meaning, I presume, that the difference between the seasons will lessen. Something else to panic needlessly about.

          6. “Earth’s tilt is not always precisely the same. Every 41,000 years the tilt fluctuates between 22.1 degrees and 24.5 degrees from vertical.”

            Are they sure? Do they have reference books going back to 38,980BC and 79,980BC that gives them the unassailable proof?

    2. Our bedroom faces east and the houses opposite funnel the light. During September and March we cannot open the curtains in the early morning, as the sun burns through our eyeballs.

    3. Morning Bob, on the shortest day the sun sets just by the side of the first house coming into the close, on the equinox’s it sets between the 2 houses opposite my kitchen window and on the longest day it sets just to the right of the last house opposite in the close.
      Always a useful guide if my calendar goes missing. 😂

      1. My balcony in Sweden faced due west. So now the sun would be setting straight ahead. In mid-winter it would set extreme left & in mid-summer I had to lean right out & look right to see the sun disappear. On the top floor of a low-rise block perched on a hilltop, I had a glorious view over town & lake & in winter, when the trees were bare, I could see whether the Lidl carpark down below was empty (go shopping) or full (stay at home).

      2. On the shortest day, I usually check to see if any NoTTLers have wished me a Happy Birthday. Usually the answer is very few if any. I am hoping that this year, with Rastus’ recent sterling efforts, things might change (just don’t anyone post the “Once A Year Day” clip from the Doris Day musical, ‘cos I really don’t like it).

        PS – Sounds like I’m a little Grumpy today – blame it on the unco-operative plumbers.)

        1. Good morning, Else.

          You know that I never fail to send you a card and also rejoice at the fact that the days start to get longer again! 😉

  9. Morning all

    SIR – Yesterday I watched two scientists deliver an entirely political briefing. What on earth is going on with our Government?

    Paul Gaynor

    Windermere, Cumbria

    SIR – With the very real prospect of being thrust into lockdown once more, the quotation from an unnamed United States infantry major during the Vietnam War comes to mind. He was interviewed by Peter Arnett after the battle of Ben Tre and said: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

    Simon Edwards

    Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

  10. Morning again. This is becoming threatening and dangerous. The Ministers do not understand False Positivity.

    SIR – The testing system is certainly being ineptly run, but that is not its real flaw. Matt Hancock has stated that the rate of false positive results is only around 1 per cent. Trivial, then? No!

    Out of 100,000 tests you will get 1,000 “cases” that are no such thing. A large percentage of cases reported in shocked tones on the news represent people who do not have the virus. So much for following “the science”.

    Alex Baillie

    Dochfour, Inverness-shire

    SIR – Boris Johnson says he is “fighting the virus” by reimposing restrictions. He isn’t. He is simply inviting the virus to bide its time until an economic meltdown or public rebellion against the lockdown forces a change in policy and allows it to spread again.

    The only way in which it will be defeated is through herd immunity or a vaccine, both of which seem a long way off. We must learn to live with it.

    Dr Mike Ruscoe

    London SW15

    1. Why isn’t this gross ineptitude front page news in the DT? Only Julia H-B seems to have grasped it.

    2. Just how accurate are the tests?
      We here 1% inaccuracy from the Government, but other sources, from real scientists, often quote a much higher figure.

      1. The links posted on this forum led me to a couple of analyses that suggests 2%, and if I have understood things, the false positives may exceed the real positives, disguising the real numbers. As both the real and false are treated as “cases” we need to consider what I have called disposals. The term used in the Karola document, and considered the most important is “outcomes”.
        In short, how many people die?
        Currently the figures for deaths are trivial in the wider context. What the optimum way forward might be is to keep safe all over 65s by restricting them in some form of voluntary lockdown. Everyone else would go back to 2019 conditions, everywhere. They should ignore Covid-19 just as they ignore flu, colds and everything else.
        Hospitals, schools, doctors, dentists, theatres, cinemas, restaurants, shops, pubs, stadiums should go back to how they were a year ago.
        We, the less young, can also take our chances if we choose.

  11. Good morning all.

    Well, the men didn’t turn up yes’day to fill in the hole in the pavement. I wonder if they’ll appear today.

    4. Good morning all.
      They began planing the tarmac off the road last night. The machine trundled past the house at 18:30 to begin work in Cromford. I’m not sure how far they got, but half expecting them to be outside bonsall towers tonight or tomorrow night.
      Then they’ve got the fresh tarmac to lay, so at least another week & a half before they finish.

    5. Yesterday, upon the stair,
      I met a man who wasn’t there!
      He wasn’t there again today,
      Oh how I wish he’d go away!”[5]

      When I came home last night at three,
      The man was waiting there for me
      But when I looked around the hall,
      I couldn’t see him there at all!
      Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
      Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…

      Last night I saw upon the stair,
      A little man who wasn’t there,
      He wasn’t there again today
      Oh, how I wish he’d go away….

    6. We had signs and a groupule of barriers appear in our road the other day. Yesterday evening they folded their plastic supports and vanished.
      I have no idea why they appeared in the first place.

      1. Plain clothes Perlice – waiting for a demo that didn’t happen. After all, you are a known trouble-maker…

      3. For the same reason that I had a canula inserted painfully into my right arm one evening in Addenbrookes. 2 days later it was removed unused.

  12. SIR – I don’t think I have ever seen a more worrying time for free speech and the sanity of the nation. Parliament should insist that rule by ministerial decree ends and that we get back to being a functioning democracy.

    No draconian lockdown measures should be implemented without full debate in Parliament. To learn you could be fined £10,000 for leaving your front door is unacceptable.

    Boris Johnson and the Government need to inspire the country. We are in grave danger of losing the compliant goodwill of the people.

    I consider myself to be a law-abiding citizen but when I hear of proposed changes to restrictions, the first thing I think of is how to circumvent them.

    Robert Taylor

    Ruddington, Nottinghamshire

    SIR – Might I suggest that those of us who disapprove of the Government’s lockdown measures demonstrate our dissent by standing on our doorsteps on Thursday evening and banging a saucepan with a wooden spoon?

    John Moore

    Woolpit, Suffolk

  13. SIR – I’m sorry that some of your readers are suffering from a dry sherry shortage. Here we buy fino in litre bottles at our local Co-op.

    Patricia Rigby

    Ipswich, Suffolk

    1. Morrisons has returned to the Covid Q because of the increasing “cases” so we are back to waiting twice as long to check out. We are being struck down by collective madness.

      1. SHOPPERS have been urged not to panic buy amid fears of a second lockdown as images of shelves stripped of toilet roll and flour began to circulate on social media.

        In scenes reminiscent of the start of the pandemic, shoppers posted pictures of supermarket aisles emptied of popular products as fears of a second wave mount. Hygiene sections and reduced price food aisles were targeted by apparent stockpilers in several shops, raising concern that shoppers might begin buying more than they need.

        The unstoppable increase in stupidity is the world’s biggest threat. We are doomed to be wiped out by this rapidly-spreading malady of brainlessness.

  14. SIR – I’m sorry that some of your readers are suffering from a dry sherry shortage. Here we buy fino in litre bottles at our local Co-op.

    Patricia Rigby
    Ipswich, Suffolk

    They certainly saw you coming, didn’t they, Patty? Most people call it “vinegar”.

    2. Talking of vinegar, in any French supermarket one can buy 5 litre containers of 14º white vinegar – invaluable for cleaning, de-scaling kettles – you name it.

      Foolishly, I imagined that one could do so in Blighty. Wrong!

      2. Funny you should mention vinegar, Billy.

        This morning I am having delivered to my house, from a British online supermarket, two 5-litre containers of vinegar. One standard malt, the other distilled malt. I’ll be having a pickling-fest (red cabbage, onions, beetroot, mixed veg, etc) for Christmas.

        Over here in Sweden, the local vinegar (‘Ättika’) tastes vile, but you can get a 12º and 24º version, which is like sulphuric acid but a must for cleaning jobs (scale on showers, kettles, espresso-makers, etc), and de-rusting tools.

          2. But only a temporary one. It removes foliage but does not attack the roots. The Mairie in Laure wanted to do away with herbicides – and urged everyone to use vinegar to destroy the weeds that grow on he verges of every street. Many locals did that and the weeds all shrivelled up. For about a month – then returned with greater vigour!

          6. Battered cod or haddock, deep-fried in beef dripping; chips, similarly fried; and mushy peas sans vinegar? How very strange.

          7. Try to keep up. Of course I use vinegar for preserving, and in cooking. But NOT the industrial 14º cleaning version.

      3. Wing Yip has (or at least used to have – I haven’t bought any for a while) gallon containers of white vinegar.

    1. Good Morning Grizzly

      This appeared on the Nottlers a week or two ago, The other one that appeared here was that this King and I star was a Liverpool F.C. supporter who had an allergy for after-shave lotion: Yul never wore cologne!

  17. DT Story

    Churchill’s home on National Trust’s BLM list of shame
    The charity published a review of the links between its properties, and empire and slave trade in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests

    The NT should be run by different people – the current lot are set on destroying our heritage and our history.

    Is there any supposedly well-meaning organisation left in Britain that somebody is not trying to corrupt and destroy?

  20. Why won’t the opposition oppose this Covid authoritarianism? Spiked. 22 September 2020.

    The lockdown has destroyed our freedoms, decimated the economy and done extraordinary damage to the public’s health. It represents the single greatest policy failure of the millennium so far. And today the government wheeled out its scientists – equipped with the Covid version of the dodgy dossier – to prepare the ground to do it all over again. The first question that springs to mind is: where is the opposition to this madness going to come from?

    Certainly not from the official opposition, that’s for sure. At the weekend, on The Andrew Marr Show, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said something rather astonishing: ‘Whatever measure the government takes, we will support it.’ You heard that right. Whatever measure the government takes. Even in advance of hearing what they might be. Has a leader of the opposition ever been so trusting and deferential to his supposed opponent?

    Yes. Odd isn’t it? In fact it’s unprecedented! It’s almost like a Hollywood movie where all the functions of Government have been taken over; even the Opposition! It’s impossible of course. You would need to control the MSM, and the Intelligence Agencies would have to be stooges, while a New Order placed its apparatchiks in the administration to disseminate its message to a fearful people.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/21/why-wont-the-opposition-oppose-this-covid-authoritarianism/

    1. More to the point, why do the blasted spiders weave webs in the house where they will catch nothing?
      I thought they were intelligent.
      Morning, Maggie.

      1. Morning Anne

        I have often wondered about the web thing.

        Do spiders have to rid themselves of their store of web making stuff everyday , and are spiders optimists .. hence when colder weather arrives , the more they weave the more chance of a fly becoming entangled in a web in the corner of a room or window!

        I have studied funnel web spiders on heathland , and they have a supply of grasshoppers to catch, funnel webs are so inticate , and are spun the way that a trawlers fish net is constructed or a keep net .. they are deep and inviting then become very narrow at the end , a heartless trp for a poor insect .

        Hence come into my web said the spider to the fly.

        1. I had a funnel web in the garden a few years ago. It was like a vertical trawl net & was big enough to cover 3 rosemary bushes.

  23. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ab0ad56fe5df7cebc976294421215fd8976cfa06/0_0_1500_2000/master/1500.jpg?width=720&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c8705f8e6afa891fd6be2672c5337543

    Hide and seek, Devon, England
    ’As this azure damselfly slowly woke up, he became aware of my presence. I was lined up to take a profile picture of his wings and body, but quite sensibly the damsel reacted to the human with the camera by putting the marsh grass stem between me and it. I took the shot anyway. It was only later that I realised how characterful it was. And how much the damselfly looks like one of the muppets’
    Photograph: Tim Hearn/CWPAs 2020

        1. Hi Belle,
          I’m still hoping to play tennis this year! I have never felt so unfit
          and p*ssed off. NoTTlers have helped pass the time whilst
          incarcerated…In need of some TLC….Maud is hopeless……
          Weather overcast…

  26. Did any one listen to a report on Breakfast TV about the growth of traffic free roads , and how it is better for public health to get out and walk , and how by closing roads that other roads are suffering from traffic congestion .

    A lot of that nonsense is happening everywhere, more control freakery by so called Green twerps .

  28. I get it, I really do , so the government coerce the population to go into Lock down , yet in the mean time , allow hundreds and hundreds of illegals into the country, housing them in old army camps , usually amongst small communities of people .. sounds like permanent residency for illegals , untill the bad weather kicks in, and they object to the local food and demand Mosques are built .

    We are paying through the nose for foreign aid , our prisons are topped up with foreign criminals .

    We are being walked over and taken for absolute idiots, and of course if we object , BLM will cause more idiocy and we will be accused of racism, how can we be accused of that when we are defending our own country.

    1. I cannot believe what our useless government are doing. If even a hint of this had been on the manifesto/agenda leading up to the last election, parliament as we know it would no longer exist, no one in their right mind would have voted for such a disgusting, assertive and forceful attack on our social structure and culture. By our own elected government !
      And it must have been long in advance pre planned, it didn’t happen by accident or as a disguised act of kindness.

      1. You really don’t understand liberalism at all do you. It’s not libertarianism which many assume means the same thing. It doesn’t.

        Liberals like to tell you exactly how you must live. Why do you think since the seventies when liberalism really raised its ugly head that our freedoms have been constantly eroded. We all complain about the nanny state but even the administration promising to roll it back made it a whole lot worse.

        1. Perhaps in the way i had been brought up, I’m too trusting and gullible, as have been far too many people in the UK, especially England. Back in our history we had people in charge that if things weren’t going as they wished they chained up the dissenters tortured them and even hung them or chopped peoples heads off. It sounds as if you might be expecting this to re-occur in our western cultures, due possibly to too much outside influence. And of course the type of people, who due to their diverse education and possibly also due to peculiar to standard upbringing. Appear to think it’s their mission or Raison d’étre to leave a nasty scar on our society. I can tell you now, If i had been in in charge there would be quite a few rotting heads on spikes. And of course the Victorians knew how to deal with people whose soul means of objection is to create discord and to clamber onto yet another contrived none conforming band waggon with such dubious claims of ‘Mental Health issues’.
          Right now even the misnomer of zedlebs and other ‘public figures’ connected with politics are incessantly moaning even on TV programmes.

          1. Classic liberalism was all about small state and freedom, similar to what libertarians want. In modern times liberals have moved away from classic liberalism to neoliberalism ( new liberalism ) which started as economic theory which was put into practice causing deprivation and poverty as the classic line about a rising tide raising all boats and money being able to trickle down have both proven false. To mitigate the economic effects of neoliberalism we’ve had to constantly expand the welfare state. To mitigate the social effects of the new economic system we’ve had to massively expand the government. Then rather than being people the powers that be started treating us as economic work units. They want us healthy so they’ve made smoking extremely expensive, and drinking quite expensive. They want better air quality. So we are forced out of our cars, or into car shares, or forced onto slow public transport. What we want doesn’t matter any more. Now we are almost forced to live a certain way. There’s no real freedom and choice is largely an illusion.
            What’s worse is that every party are now these neoliberals so there’s little real alternatives at elections. It doesn’t matter if you vote Tory or Labour, you end up with very similar government and policies.

          3. In many ways quite true, but like the greens the liberals don’t seem to have any objection to Millions of people traveling from warmer climates where a lot of energy could be supplied at a fraction of the cost it is in northern climates, and moving to northern Europe to increase the carbon foot print of the whole planet. If and when the liberals and greens actually come to their senses, due to their inherent inattention to reality and as you have alluded to, constant and continuous manipulation. It will of course be too late to correct the series of their weighty errors and of course by then it will be everybody else’s fault.
            But the planet is slowly but surely being ruined by corporate greed.
            I’m quite sure that quite a lot of well known ‘liberals’ are very rich people.

    2. Like a cancer, the rot of cultural marxism has been established and is now impossible to eradicate. I despair too.

      1. What you call ‘cultural marxism’ is actually liberalism, the very thing you keep on voting for. Tories haven’t been conservative since the late fifties or early sixties. They are liberals now.

    3. We have to organise, Belle; as a nation we sit and watch it happening. We have to prepare to do the unthinkable.

      1. Why do you think the British have been comprehensively disarmed?
        Now, only government forces and crooks have decent fire arms.

    4. I said that the first lockdown under threats of arrest/fines/jail and criminal record, was so thousands could be flown in at night, then instantly shoved on coaches to be took to their hotels. I haven’t seen anyone commenting that they saw coaches full of dark skinned people being ferried about during the day. Now we are getting closed down slowly again, I can only assume this will be for their families to arrive.

  29. ‘Morning All

    Welcome to #ClownWorld

    These three just about sum it up

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/781bd3083128f8bde755e13c8ecd3d62735deae228507d8c89f90b3fa0afdbc2.jpg
    The last one is spot on,the ‘Rona is certainly brighter than the cretins in government………………

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/dc7ec400147f79e3e1420154d29aab7d5b1fc22fb19b7f551994a95d1be06e4b.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e92ee40388a90ed043d7cd8b1b451435846e246ed363d2582f9688be9d9ea33c.jpg

  30. Dear old Bill, still sticking to ’em at 80. A mongoose in the snake-pit.

    What a nerve Brussels has in telling us to abandon our essential Brexit bill

    The Internal Markets Bill is a necessary insurance policy preventing us from subjection to EU jurisdiction, and ensures our competitiveness

    BILL CASH

    Disraeli, the inspiration of One Nation, predicted in 1838 “the Continent will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world”. He wrote “Sybil – or A Tale of Two Nations” mirroring much today. Our Manifesto in the General Election to level up the more deprived areas in the North, demonstrates why the whole United Kingdom must be freely competitive in global trading, guaranteeing our jobs and businesses and given Covid.

    The EU pursues a cardinal principle – we must not benefit from Brexit. All of this lies deep in the supranationality of the EU treaties themselves and the Commission and the European Coal and Steel Community. In Sheffield, I witnessed the destruction of our steel and coal industries, thanks to the unfair and discriminatory EU State Aid regime. Recent misconceptions have been generated in Parliament and outside regarding our compliance with international law. It comes in many shapes and sizes and is often 60 percent politics, 40 percent law.

    The Internal Market Bill provides that the Government may need to override Withdrawal Agreement provisions derived from bad early negotiations. There are dozens of documented overrides of international treaties worldwide by democratic countries without penalty. According to the German Federal Constitutional Court in December 2015, international law leaves it to each state to give precedence to national law.

    There are numerous statutory precedents in the UK, such as the Finance Act 2013 relating to anti-abuse tax powers and whether UK prisoners could vote in elections. As the Attorney General stated in her published legal position, Parliament’s capacity to override international agreements was unanimously approved by the Supreme Court in the Miller case and through clear “notwithstanding” provisions in Section 38 of the European Union Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020.

    The famous judge Lord Diplock ruled in 1968 in a Post Office case that Government “has a sovereign right, which the court cannot question, to change its policy, even if this involves breaking an international convention to which it is a party and which has come into force so recently as fifteen days before”. Laying a Bill is not a breach of international law and is privileged. If a treaty is entered into on the reasonable assumption that a state of affairs would exist which does not transpire, the treaty is voidable. This Agreement was written on the basis of recognizing our Sovereignty which has not happened.

    This Bill is a necessary insurance policy preventing us from subjection to EU jurisdiction, and ensures the necessary competitiveness upon which the jobs and businesses of every voter in every constituency depends, with our own state aid rules.

    The EU frequently violates international law, such as its own fishing policies in the waters of occupied Western Sahara. Likewise, the EU’s penchant for instructing member states to defy Security Council rulings. So too sending migrants back to North Africa and Turkey. In 2010 the EU broke the Lisbon Treaty, with Lagarde admitting “We violated all the rules” over the Greek and Irish bailouts. The EU are now unilaterally changing the bilateral Channel Tunnel Treaty without our being able to prevent it.

    The EU has demanded jurisdiction over crucial aspects of UK Sovereignty, despite our lawful exit, as a precondition to concessions on trade. It threatened to use WTO’s “most favoured nation” principle against the UK – contrary to state practice, core principles of world trade and requirements to negotiate “in good faith”.

    Look too at the track record of EU Member States. Germany blatantly breached international law when, during the EMS in the 1970s, it released the Bundesbank from the duty to intervene against the dollar. Chancellor Schmidt stated: “we breached applicable international treaty law, the IMF treaty, in multiple ways. We have neither complied with all the rules, the procedural rules of the treaty, nor have we complied with the substantive provisions.” Chancellor Merkel suspended the Dublin Regulation unilaterally in August 2015, letting in up to 600,000 Syrians. In 2020, Germany’s highest court ruled on the ECB’s public sector purchase programme, subordinating EU law to German law. The EU took no action.

    The undemocratic European Commission threatens to take legal action against the UK for what is not even an established breach of international law. They dare to tell our democratic sovereign Parliament to abandon essential proposals in this Bill. What a nerve.

    Sir Bill Cash MP is former Shadow Attorney General and Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/21/nerve-brussels-has-telling-us-abandon-essential-brexit-bill/

    1. Thank God that even if they have run out of our money at least they have Cash in the House of Commons.

      1. Pity he didn’t stand up to Major over Maastricht when push came to shove. Some of us have long memories.

      2. Again, it’s not your money they spend. All government spending is done by crediting bank accounts at the BoE. It’s all freshly created deposits, just like bank loans create deposits.
        Your money is just burnt to get rid of it, so it’s not sloshing around the economy providing more demand than available supply and creating inflation.
        The government don’t need your money to spend, but they do need to relieve you of some of your purchasing power.

    1. 323869+ up ticks,
      O2O,
      Ere Og after the next General Election ( if allowed) our milkman fred is in for one hell of a shock on being
      awakened, and asked to form the next government.

    2. I can’t look at anything to do with self important repulsive AH, he started the wrecking of this country.

      1. 323869+ up ticks,
        Morning RE,
        It must be said a great many in both political & electoral rolls were not averse to what was coming down the line and supporting the major party’s, regardless.
        I believe you mean EH he did set a pattern that really did enrich the political trough even down to a gold plated “keep your trap shut” eu pension.
        The only dangers the politico’s faced during decades of dealing out treachery was from tennis elbow down to a career of rubber stamping, many still in play, many still finding support.

        1. Heath was an extreme traitor to our nation.
          Other of course followed in his foot steps and continued along his path of destruction of our once proud nation.

  33. Handcock’s Precious

    One virus to rule them all,
    One virus to fine them,
    One virus to isolate them all,
    and in the darkness bind them.

    Bill’s Precious

    One vaccine to rule them all,
    One vaccine to fine them,
    One vacine to isolate them all,
    and in the darkness bind them.

  34. SHADOW EDUCATION SECRETARY CALLS CORONAVIRUS A “GOOD CRISIS” LABOUR CAN EXPLOIT
    https://youtu.be/Yv39DP4NQ0k
    Following The Sun’s scoop of Shadow Education Secretary Kate Green calling Coronavirus a “good crisis” the party can exploit and not let “go to waste”, Guido can now bring you the audio of the incident. Talking to party activists at the “Labour Connected” event on Sunday, Green said:

    “I think we should use the opportunity, don’t let a good crisis go to waste. We can really see now what happens when you under-resource schools, when you under-resource families and communities.”

    All reminiscent of the cynicism of 9/11 being a “good day to bury bad news“. When asked about the incident on Politics Live this morning, Lisa Nandy said, “I’m sorry it came across so badly, that wasn’t the intention at all”. That’s not an apology Lisa…

    https://order-order.com/2020/09/22/listen-shadow-education-secretary-calls-coronavirus-a-good-crisis-labour-can-exploit/#comments

  35. QUOTE OF THE DAY
    Sir Keir was fairly blunt about his party’s prior electoral performance…

    “The Tories have had as many election winners in five years, as we’ve had in 75”

    4. Labour have only had four election winners in their entire history: James Ramsay MacDonald; Clement Richard Attlee; James Harold Wilson and Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

    5. I was sceptical about this so I checked.

      I make it (elections since 1945) Labour=8, Tories=11 with 1 Tory/LD coalition, 1Tory and 1 Labour minority each.

      If he’s talking about election-winning PMs in the same period, then Labour=3, Tories=8 in which case KS is right

  36. Morning, Campers; I received this last night from Melanie Phillips.

    Revolt against coerced conformity

    Some Conservatives are realising what they must conserve

    Melanie Phillips

    Sep 21

    “At long last, some Conservative MPs are raising their standard for conservatism.

    The Times reports today that up to 40 Conservative MPs will refuse to accept the “unconscious bias training” intended to tackle racism in the Commons, accusing the parliamentary authorities of “pandering to the woke agenda”.

    Such training has existed for parliamentary staff since 2016 and is now to be extended to MPs. Said one of the rebel group:

    I would really rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt stick than sit through that Marxist, snake oil crap.

    Well, quite. “Unconscious bias training” doesn’t make any difference to actual racist attitudes. As a black former member of the Commons staff told the paper recently:

    Mandatory unconscious bias training has been in place in parliament for years now and it has not made any difference to the racism experienced by black staff.

    That’s because it’s not intended to address racial prejudice. It’s intended instead to coerce conformity with approved attitudes — in this case, the anti-white racism of Black Lives Matter, which BLM uses to further its openly-stated agenda of undermining and overthrowing western society.

    “Unconscious bias training” is based on the Marxist concept of “false consciousness”. Its sinister, Kafka-esque goal is to persuade people that they are really odious on account of views they don’t even know they have — and the very fact that they don’t know they have these views, or worse still deny having them, is proof of just how odious they are.

    It’s an agenda straight out of the Soviet communist playbook. Nevertheless, this onslaught on freedom, rationality and western cultural identity is being ruthlessly applied in companies, public sector bodies and other institutions around Britain and the west.

    And in Britain, it’s being enforced by a Conservative government.

    It can’t be stated too strongly that if conservatives don’t conserve what is valuable, true and decent about our society they aren’t conservatives at all.

    For decades, however, that unfortunate state of affairs has been the case on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, it gave rise to the phenomenon of RINOs — Republicans In Name Only. In Britain, they were coyly called Tory party “modernisers”. What they actually were was subversion sanitisers.

    This sad confusion started when the Soviet Union imploded. With this great enemy of the west apparently defeated, Conservative politicians thought their fox had been shot. Everyone was now adopting the free market.

    Viewing everything through the prism of economics, they were spitting tacks that the Labour leader Tony Blair, who had replaced the party’s red flag by a red rose, had parked his tanks on the Conservatives’ free-market lawn (along with his chum and fellow tank-parker, Bill Clinton).

    These Conservatives and Republicans never recognised the culture war that was already well under way, under the same free-market loving Blair and Clinton, in destroying western education, the western traditional family and western national identity.

    They never understood that, decades earlier, the left had realised Stalin didn’t really fit the bill as a trendy pin-up. Gramsci and his fellow culture-warriors would bring about the revolution without millions lying dead or rotting in the gulag, simply by playing on the ignorance and idiocy of middle-class idealists instead.

    And so the left marched through the institutions of Britain and America and into the heads of tens of thousands of well-meaning university-educated folk, and persuaded them to hate their countries, hate their culture and hate their hideously white, capitalist, social and moral norm-respecting selves.

    Oblivious to all of this, Conservatives decided to march behind the flag of liberty. That, they decided, defined what a conservative was.

    They didn’t realise that this would line them up on the same sinking patch of ground as the hyper-individualists of the left. They didn’t realise that true liberty only exists within a structure of authority and laws, without which anarchy takes over in a Hobbesian war of the strong against the weak. They didn’t realise that the one thing a conservative has a duty to do is to conserve.

    Hypnotised instead by media projection of the university-based onslaught on core western values, they told themselves that if they didn’t go along with all this cultural change they would make themselves politically extinct.

    So they dug themselves deeper and deeper into the cultural hole, parroting the propaganda of universal “human rights”, identity politics and environmental armageddon.

    And so they were utterly incredulous, these not-conservatives, when millions of ordinary people voted for Brexit and for Trump.

    And still they haven’t understood. Programmed like Pavlov’s dog to signal their virtue whenever racism is mentioned, they signed up to the the BLM analysis of cultural self-loathing without understanding they were signing up to anti-white racism.

    Now some Conservative MPs have broken cover and declared instead for decency, for rationality and for conservatism. Let’s see whether this belated but vital revolt gathers critical mass, or is stamped out by the boot of coerced conformity.”

    1. 323869+ up ticks,
      Morning Anne,
      Currently they are a coalition and have been so for decades, the decades of having brussels as overseers allowing many politico a career of rubber stamping and an easy road to travel.
      That could have been rectified at any General Election during the last four decades.
      Many years ago at an induction on a construction site a safety man said “You are your own safety man” you judge a situation can be safely done or not, then act accordingly
      same as casting a vote.
      In short, supporting / voting for a party that you have evidence of their wrong doings in the past by the very same politico’s again & again is in my book a sign of advanced insanity, also knowing full well the three party’s
      are of the same BENT ilk, ie an anti UK force.
      Maybe a current member / voter will tell me it isn’t so .

  39. After The Two Ronnies of Doom, here’s the speech Boris Johnson SHOULD give today. 22 September 2020.

    Sitting 6ft apart behind a newsreader-style desk, The Two Ronnies of Doom delivered an alarmist prognosis of a rising death toll, backed up by speculative graphs based on ‘the science’ — what most of us would call ‘guesswork’.

    They could have looked at another graph, from Monday’s Daily Mail, which showed that cancer kills around 450 people a day, compared to just 21 from — or should that be with? — coronavirus.

    Five people die daily in traffic accidents. In fact, for those under 50, you’re more likely to be hit by a bus than contract a fatal dose of Covid.
    But using the Government’s better-safe-than-sorry approach to the corona pandemic, that would be enough to justify closing every road in Britain.

    Littlejohn is correct of course. The country is being destroyed over something little worse than the Common Cold. One wonders if the coup has already taken place and we are simply seeing its manifestations. That Boris is just a puppet. That the Channel Crossers are still coming over unhindered; that the Fear program continues in the MSM and the early removal of Her Majesty from Balmoral to a small isolated house in Sandringham. Zenda anyone? There are plenty of other examples. Just suppose that you knew this. Who would you go to? Who would you tell?

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8757429/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Two-Ronnies-Doom-heres-speech-Boris-Johnson-give.html

  42. DT Story

    Churchill’s home on National Trust’s BLM list of shame
    The charity published a review of the links between its properties, and empire and slave trade in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests

    The NT should be run by different people – the current lot are set on destroying our heritage and our history.

    Is there any supposedly well-meaning organisation left in Britain that somebody is not trying to corrupt and destroy?

  44. I read that a distinguished group of thirty-two scientists and academics have penned a letter to Boris, urging him to think twice before inflicting yet more damage on the health and economy of the Nation by ordering any further lockdown restrictions.

    Seems to me that his thinking just once would be a good start.

      1. Gupta has been proven wrong already. We are nowhere near herd immunity.
        Sikora is a world-leading oncologist but also a bit of a fruitcake and epidemiology isn’t his strong suit. He’s campaigned for years for privatisation of the NHS.
        Heneghan trained as a GP and has been working as an editor for the BMJ.

        So only one epidemiologist and she has already been proven wrong on her theory that we reached herd immunity some time back.

        It’s like a bunch of plumbers complaining about electrical regulations because they also happen to be part of the ‘building trade’.

  45. If only; Richard Littlejohn writes the speech Boris should be making.
    I’ll be checking my stock of bog rolls and baked beans while the Vegan Friendly Fraud is pontificating.

    “It could go something like this…

    ‘Friends, Zoomans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come not to appease Covid but to bury it. For too long our great nation has cowered before this vile interloper.

    I promised to run the most open and transparent administration in history. That is why, with this brutally honest and unprecedented progress report, I am determined to level with you.

    For the past six months, we have sacrificed our economy — and indeed our sanity — on the wonky altar of this pandemic. Even old Bojo went a bit doolally after my own brush with the Grim Reaper.

    I would like to believe that what we got wrong, we got wrong for all the right reasons. At the outset, we knew as little about this pestilence as the Chinese know about the Duckworth-Lewis method for deciding cricket matches.

    It was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. And in the words of one of my distinguished predecessors as Prime Minister, we were ‘frit’.

    We relied too heavily on the boffins, who were none the wiser than anyone else. While early precautions were only prudent, we kept the country in lockdown unnecessarily, because we didn’t have a clue about what to do next.

    I confess that most of the time we have been making it up as we’ve gone along, hoping like Micawber that something might turn up.

    If we continue to be guided by ‘the science’, the consequences will be catastrophic. The so-called experts want us to lockdown again because they won’t admit their mistakes.

    ‘Their predictions have turned out to be an inverted pyramid of piffle. They are like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette and who now decides to double down by betting the house as well.

    It is time for me to Take Back Control. As another of my famous predecessors once said: scientists should be on tap, not on top.

    Our overreaction to this fiendish bug has already done to the economy what Vesuvius did to ancient Pompeii.

    The Covid scare has inflicted more damage on London than the Luftwaffe.

    But we beat the Hun and we can beat corona, not by huddling in our air raid shelters but by recapturing our Blitz Spirit.

    As of Tuesday, all restrictions on freedom of movement and assembly are revoked, along with those ridiculous road closures, bike lanes and widened pavements.

    Face masks may be worn by Nervous Nellies, but no one will be fined for not wearing one. Social distance if you wish, but we trust you to use your common sense.

    British people should be able to make their own choices with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.

    On Monday, Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty delivered an alarmist prognosis of a rising death toll (both above) +3

    On Monday, Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty delivered an alarmist prognosis of a rising death toll (both above)

    We will stop lecturing you on the need to lose weight. That is a personal choice. Yours truly has managed to shed a bit of adipose timber, but my policy on cake has always been pro-having it and pro-eating it.

    There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.

    It’s your funeral, and as of Tuesday the number of mourners will no longer be limited to 30. The Rule of Six has been ripped up.

    The Seven Dwarfs are restored to their full complement. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s back to work we go. And any civil servant who refuses to report back to the office on Monday will be dismissed summarily.

    This is the not the end of the beginning, or even the beginning of the end, this is the end of hunkering down and hoping for the best.

    We shall fight Covid in the streets, and in the pubs, and in the theatres.

    We will fight on the beaches, too, once we’ve cleared away all the dinghies arriving from Calais.

    We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Most people stand about as much chance of dying from Covid as finding Elvis on Mars, being decapitated by a Frisbee or reincarnated as an olive.

    Naysayers and doom-mongers may warn this new libertarian approach is reckless and will end in disaster.

    But, my friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

    So let freedom ring out once again. No more timorous Septic Isle. The standing army of Covid marshals has been demobbed. The boffins have been put back in their box.

    The Two Ronnies of Doom have been cancelled. So it’s good night from me, and it’s goodnight to them.

    Goodnight!’ “

      1. 323869+ up ticks,
        Afternoon TB,
        Answering / asking Old Holborn Then what happens when the same happens to the place you
        have newly arrived at ?

        1. Afternoon, Bill!

          The president of Belarus has become the bad guy because he was offered a billion dollars by the World Bank and IMF to impose a Covid19 lockdown and trash his country and he refused.

      2. I’ve just heard on BBC Radio 4 Boris sayingthat “perhaps” the Lockdown will be in place for 6 months. No extra restrictions on “vulnerable people” but penalties on people required to self isolate will be o fined on first offence if they fail to isolate themselves.

        1. When schoolchildren are sent home to self desolate because someone in the school has tested positive, that could result in the whole family being locked down. A lock down of society by other means.

    3. They understand perfectly. The lockdown will drag out until spring, at which time the virus will naturally die out. Rather than accepting that it was a result of the warmer weather, they will claim credit for their brave actions.

    4. 323869+ up ticks,
      Afternoon C,
      To bloody true he does, following the fall back plan if
      “they ” unbelievably lost the referendum, and “they” did.
      We are now going through the readjustment period appertaining to re-set time.
      Next move would not surprise me to see the secret army
      via Dover calling for marshal law under Marshal johnson.

    5. “We will spare no effort in developing vaccines, treatments, new forms of mass-testing but unless we palpably make progress we should assume that the restrictions that I have announced will remain in place for perhaps six months.”

      The BBC’s version, ‘will last’ has omitted the provisos and the word ‘perhaps’. It is not what he said. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5de3bbb30090d398db06a186e5abfe0eb579c67ffbbee40e7629daf3e3b07c1e.jpg

      1. Afternoon Harry – I added that Boris said “”perhaps” it will be for 6 months” in the comment below.

  47. Why the hell is the economy based on boozing and eating out. I can think of nothing more revolting than food that has been delivered to my table cooked by a sweaty tattooed chef.

    If I have upset any one with that comment, well so what .

    This country should be concentrating on its manufacturing industry.

    2. Yeah, not only are they sweaty and tattooed, but they all have fags hanging out of their mouths while cooking.

    3. Yeah, not only are they sweaty and tattooed, but they all have fags hanging out of their mouths while cooking.

    4. I know a tattooed chef. He’s got a michelen star type thingy. I thought it was to do with tyres but he seems proud of it.

      Being honest, I have never seem him sweat despite his kitchen seemingly being a sauna. His whites are immaculate: he’s often front of house. He honestly, genuine can cook – is spiced pastries are staggering, but I can’t get the coronation chicken to come out as well as he does.

  49. You must be doing something right when the Queen follows you to Norfolk. 22 September 2020.

    She’s such a copycat, that Queen Elizabeth. No sooner do I arrive in North Norfolk for a spell of secluded book writing, then she announces she’s abandoning Balmoral, where she’d usually be at this time of year, to come here too. The cheek! Normally, she’d stay in Scotland until October before nipping back south again for a few official duties, and then head to Sandringham in December.

    But this year, almost certainly because she heard I was staying in a house just seven miles away, she’s broken tradition and is holidaying in a farmhouse on the Sandringham estate for a couple of weeks instead. I’ve been keeping a sharp eye out on my walks and preparing to fib, if necessary, and say I can’t possibly have dinner because I’m promised elsewhere. So tiresome when you go away but constantly bump into people and it’s all, “Let’s go to the beach club tomorrow, wouldn’t it be great to get the kids together?”.

    Yes. Perhaps it was something important like having her handy for the announcement of a Government of National Unity or perhaps she really did want to see Sophia Money-Coutts!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/must-something-right-queen-follows-norfolk/

  50. The reason for the lockdown is to keep up the level of fear and acceptance until such time as a vaccine is ready. if lockdown was abandoned because it is pointless an against Covid-19 and is destroying every aspect of our lives, there would be no need for a vaccine. QED.

    1. If covid is more virulent than your common or garden flu, how low will the number of flu cases be this year?
      Or are these preventative actions only effective against certain diseases?

      1. Australia has been free of the flu coronavirus this winter. Whether that is because they are calling everything Covid-19, or faulty test results, or because the flu virus has been killed by the competition from Covid-19 is not clear.

        1. It’s just a shame about all of the other ailments where lack of medical care will exacerbate the problems.

      2. 323869+ up ticks,
        Afternoon R,
        My post yesterday put the flu count at zero that is what the political mob are holding out for, the winter months.

  51. More police will be on the streets with backup from the army. The government will pay for the extra police on the streets. This is to enforce the Covid-19 regulations. Has Boris got 1 January 2021 in his mind?

    1. Yup. The sun is now crossing the equator and it will now being enjoyed in the wrong hemisphere for the next six months!

  53. 323869+ up ticks,
    There is no doubt about it, the supporter / voters have selected a humdinger of a clutch of governance this time me thinking it was bad ,getting worse, major through cameron / clegg, to may, but NO now sis takes a hand.
    I really thought that mayday was the apex in treachery, silly me, next it will be troops on the streets.

    UK Prime Minister’s Sister Calls For Booze Ban Until Virus Vaccine Found.

    1. Didn’t Boris just promise funding troops on the street? Just to help disinfect and sanitise of course.

      Edited, spell checker preferred trooos to troops!

        1. That song comes from a more innocent era when the Scots didn’t take themselves so seriously, and portraying oneself as the biggest victim wasn’t on the agenda.

          1. Most Scots don’t. They are unfortunately lumbered with a cretinous whelp for a first minister.

            The minority of loud, ignorant ardent nationalists are easily smacked down with basic facts that they dislike but must be reminded of regularly.

    2. Hitler couldn’t close down the pubs, but Bojo’s sister wants to, and stop everyone drinking at home, too.

      1. ……. thus wiping out the one remaining prosperous sector of Scottish industry, the whisky distillers.

        What a propaganda gift to the SNP. Can’t wait to see how Wee Krankie spins this story.

      1. 323869+ up ticks,
        Morning W,
        It is being done quite blatantly & in the face of sane peoples needs.
        A political power play pointing out there is worse to come,
        .Let them come on the understanding NO citizenship will be granted & welfare WILL CEASE on the first of January 2021.

    2. 323869+ up ticks,
      O2O,
      I do beg to differ a wee bit Og, it has been a combined effort by the coalition of lab/lib/con, leaving these make believe tory’s as the closure group.

  56. Corker of a BTL comment in TCW.

    “I reckon the little tinker virus will get bored sitting in an empty pub at five past ten and follow folk home.

    It might not even bother going to the pub and sit on the sofa watching Corrie and Enders whilst it quietly wibbles it’s way up your trouser leg or down your blouse.

    Ooo’er missus!”

    Personally, I will always make sure I’m carrying a bulb of garlic and a crucifix.

  57. Johnson says new restrictions likely to remain in force for six months. 22 September. 2020.

    We will spare no effort in developing vaccines, treatments, new forms of mass-testing but unless we palpably make progress we should assume that the restrictions that I have announced will remain in place for perhaps six months.

    For the time being, this virus is a fact of our lives and I must tell the house and the country that our fight against it will continue.

    Those who have the means or a place to go should flee now while they can!

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/sep/22/uk-coronavirus-live-news-covid-19-latest-updates-politics?page=with:block-5f69e4038f08666918528881#block-5f69e4038f08666918528881

        1. Before you go, the Leckford Estate Brut is on offer: £7 cheaper. I intend to scoop up a load on Friday.

          2. Cremant d’Alsace is on offer too. I bought a case of Cremant de Bourgogne a couple of weeks ago, so I’m OK for the time being.

  58. Good Morning all, 47th wedding anniversary today and the weather’s much the same as it was all those years ago, still it turned out ok at the end. We’re in our tin tent on the Pembroke coast and the weather has been as stunning as is the scenery.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2a48798ce66c963caf7182130a82f4dbfe60ae3bc516d665233aff72fdc9c6e0.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fd127b36a9cd58ad5b12204d2118fc356cf39f5c905a9fd592faa997d584cf35.jpg

      1. Thanks- the weather here is on the turn with rain forecast for tomorrow when we break camp, we’ve had 8 days here and every day has been a scorcher and we’ve been able to use every day to it’s max. Where we are is a small area of Southwest Wales amid some fairly significant industry but in the immediate vicinity there are some breathtaking views and such businesses as are open have welcomed us with open tills.

    12. Congratulations to both. Have a lovely day.
      Lovely pictures make the most of it, it sounds like winter is arriving over night.
      We are waiting for the results of the Cobra meeting to see if our family Tenby Holiday will be the second one cancelled.

    13. Many congratulations and very many more happy years to come.

      Would anyone like to compile a Wedding Anniversary list?

      Caroline and I got married on April 2nd – they tried to persuade us to marry a day earlier but we refused to be fooled!.

  59. Really good speech by Mr Starmer. He got me. I’m all for it…up until he spoke about “cherishing diversity”.

    1. It’s not unusual Nigel all we ever get is an elected dictatorship aren’t there always more people who vote against the incoming government than for it.

  62. Good afternoon, Chums.

    I apologise if this has been discussed.

    Last Saturday a peaceful Rally was held
    in Trafalgar Square, five different groups
    supporting freedom of speech, the ending
    of lockdown and stopping the mass
    immigration of illegal immigrants were some of
    the views represented. Two of the speakers
    were Robin Tilbrook and David Kurten.
    The Police were, allegedly, determined to stop
    the rally, they were in full riot gear, they were
    held off for four hours when they did close down
    the rally. During this ‘closing down’ a man was
    taken ill and, allegedly, has since died of undisclosed
    causes…….except there, allegedly, is video evidence
    showing this man being hit on the head, by a policeman
    using a truncheon, this caused a skull fracture which
    led to the man’s death.
    The video evidence is being examined by Brian Gerrish
    of UK Column.[The video has not been posted on-line
    to spare the family further distress.]

    This, to me, is shocking, the story is true or people are
    deliberately falsely accusing the Police of a heinous act;
    either way it appears that Civil unrest may be here sooner,
    rather than later.

  64. After Fakugees discovered burning down your accom was the fastest route to the lands of milk,honey and bennies it appears MORE camps are going up in smoke…….
    I’m shocked,shocked I tell yoiu………….
    Hmm,on the other hand perhaps there are some lessons to be learned,what’s often the best/only way to fight a fire??
    A backfire,a preventative burning to stop the spread………..
    Now about those dispersal camps and barracks…………………..

  65. Christopher Ives of Woolpit talks bollox – his smartmeter does not tell him how much electricity he sends to the grid, his FiT meter does that and if he needs a meter to tell him how to use his electricity best then he is also thick

    1. Depends on date of installation, and installer. Clients built a new amenities block for their caravan park a couple of years ago (loos, showers, laundry, games room etc) and put a big block of solar panels on the roof. The supply feeds the electricity hook-ups for all the vans on site as well as the block. That building has one meter which records electricity both in and out – simply press different buttons to get the appropriate readings. I suspect that it is two meters in one plastic casing – but to the outward eye it is all one meter. Being a business meter it doesn’t call itself “smart” and because of the location and connectivity it cannot, as yet, be read remotely, but it is certainly one plastic box, with one digital display screen which is used to generate both bills and FiT statements.

  66. And…another thing,
    I have twice rung the Surgery to attempt
    to book a flu jab, each time I have been told
    that the logistics are not in place?!
    This morning I rang the village Chemist Shop
    to ask if I might book an appointment to have
    the jab there……” Of course, would you like to
    come now? Tuesday mornings are reserved for
    ‘drop-ins;’ I went and also spent five minutes
    being told to beware for the next fourteen days
    since my already lowered immune system will be
    further compromised by the flu jab and to bear
    this in mind. I have, for twenty years, received a
    flu jab from a nurse, at the surgery, I have never
    been told this!

  67. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b43e95b022d6129b76eae2c241816ab9a1d5c1b70fe1f183baf171951a730c0e.jpg
    The attempted civilisation of the Swedish populace continues unabated. On Sunday I entertained some Swedes with an English afternoon tea. The looks of confusion were pronounced. I baked two sourdough loaves (one white, one wholemeal) and prepared dainty sandwiches (salmon and cucumber; egg and cress) as well as an amuse bouche of sausage roll decorated with Branston pickle.

    A plate of freshly-baked scones [i.e. to rhyme with “stone”, never “gone”], half plain, half fruit, with butter and home-made seedless raspberry jam were on the third plate. I had thought about making some clotted cream (unavailable over here) but time and labour precluded that.

    On the final plate was a celebration of carbohydrates and sugar in the form of a home-baked Battenburg cake [why was that never altered to “Mountbatten”?], home-made Scottish shortbread, and a home-made vanilla (custard) slice. Both tea and coffee were offered.

    The sandwiches bewildered the guests who thought that a stack of them was a ‘serving’. They then proceeded to remove a stack each from the plate with their knife and fork and eat them with the same implements! It was both bizarre and surreal to watch them.

    However, it must have been a success since no plate was left empty.

    1. “A plate of freshly-baked scones [i.e. to rhyme with “stone”, never “gone”],”

      Bloody posh Southerner!

      1. A bloody posh southerner has just accused me of being a common-as-muck northerner for my pronunciation.

        1. Im good. Got two infected legs from an old woman kicking me and me thinking they’d heal but they haven’t at all. I’ve got to get some antibiotics I think. Still I have a couple of nights work a week so i’m happy. Things have deteriorated with the wife though. Finally had a firm offer on the flat, she’s got to find a new place to live and then i could be homeless if we don’t start getting on like we used to.

    3. It’s a very pretty table and a tea which anyone might delight in. I worked in a hotel many years ago where those exact sandwiches fillings had to be prepared every Sunday – although all sandwiches there had to be entirely crustless… personally I rather like crusts. The ones which didn’t go out for afternoon tea became staff supper so we would have liked a little more variation.

      As anyone who has been to Perthshire (or even close) knows; Scone rhymes with spoon – just to make things slightly more confusing and in the north scone definitely rhymes with gone – but we understand that there are regional variations amongst the “heathen” south (ie south of the border).

      If your shortbread was home-made it must have been Swedish ;-); I’m curious to know your recipe, please, as there are many variants. I am delighted to see that it is truly pale – recipes which tell one that shortbread should be “browned” are anathema as shortbread is probably the easiest thing to scorch, and the one which can least tolerate it, since (as I’m sure you know) the slightest scorch spoils the flavour.

      I’m trying to avoid looking at the custard slice …. just too mouth-watering. They are a favourite of mine too.

      2. Thank you for your kind words. My Swedish shortbread, baked to a Scottish recipe, is here:

        Crumble 150g of room-temperature butter — cut into cubes — into 225g plain white flour to which a pinch of salt has been added, with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs. The stir in 75g white caster or granulated sugar. Collect it into a loose ball (do not roll it) and then press it down to a thickness of around 12–15mm inside a small flat baking tray that has been lined with greaseproof paper. If you roll it out, especially thinly and compact it, you will achieve biscuits not shortbread. Bake it for 35–40 minutes in an oven at 160ºC. Any hotter and it will brown and go too hard. Sprinkle with sugar and cool on a wire rack.

        I cannot source many British favourite cakes here in Sweden (they have their own specialities: most of them too sweet) so I am left with no alternative but to roll my sleeves up and put on the apron. The vanilla slice recipe is simple enough since all it needs is puff pastry baked between two baking trays so that it doesn’t puff up, a thick confectioner’s custard (crème pâtissière) cooled so it thickens, and a topping of plain icing.

        Another favourite of mine is Eccles’ cakes, which I might bake next weekend.

        1. Many recipes call for the replacement of a scant tablespoonful of flour with an equivalent weight of ground rice, semolina or even cornflour. This results in a slightly less dense shortbread without changing the flavour… it is also slightly less temperamental about handling though it still needs to be caressed rather than kneaded. I was surprised to learn that some of the most traditional of home-bakers use this trick.

          My mother and grandmother always made “petticoat tails” so that the dough was pressed into a round baking tin (the sort you would use for a Victoria sponge). “Half an inch” was my Granny’s measure of thickness (but since she lived from 1901 until 1993 imperial measurements came naturally). She also made them for many years in a solid-fuel Rayburn and the fire had to be just right or the dough had to wait in its tins until it had died down a bit.

          I know that vanilla slices are easy – but if made they must be eaten and like you I’m trying to avoid excess carbs. So until I can do so for collective purposes once more I’m not baking sweet things at all.

          Is your 160ºC fan assisted or otherwise. Since acquiring a fan oven a few years ago I’ve learned that one really does need to set it at a lower temperature than a conventional oven – especially with sensitive items.

          1. I might try one or other of the optional additions (rice flour, etc) the next time I bake a batch, in order to compare flavour and texture. My oven is not fan-assisted but seems to be good at keeping the temperature steady. My bread, for example, always comes out looking the same. I know what you mean about fan ovens; they can be capricious and take some getting used to.

            Since I embarked upon my one-meal-a-day diet, I’m not too worried about the odd bit of carb intake every now and then. I find that I can have one day a week when I throw a bit of caution to the wind. As long as I keep to my routine for the rest of the week then I find the scales will not start nudging in an upwards direction.

          3. I certainly shall. As it happens I bought some rice flour, durum semolina, corn meal and corn starch* just the other day. I also received some T55 French bread flour this morning so I can try it out on some batons.

            [*Interestingly, what we call “corn flour” the Americans call “corn starch”; and what we call “corn meal” the Americans call “corn flour”. I fell foul of this when I was much younger. I made a “Tamale Pie” from an American recipe which called for “corn flour”. I used corn starch and the resultant mess resembled wallpaper paste! Another hard lesson learnt in life’s unpredictable journey. 😢]

          4. Yes, I knew about this anomaly, it is found in Canada too. A Scottish friend of my mother went to Canada on a £10 passage in the late 1950s – designed to attract nurses to British Columbia. She met and married a native – and is now buried over there. She told my mother quite early that she had suffered a lot of frustration (buying what she thought she wanted and finding, on getting home, that it wasn’t) and not a few culinary disasters before getting a kitchen “dictionary” from her mother-in-law to enable her to find the right ingredients for her own recipes.

          6. I’ve attacked my weight problem from the other end. I can’t adjust food intake too much so I’m trying to exercise more. I downloaded this stupid pokemon go game that makes you walk a lot to complete tasks, and am doing about 30 miles a week extra walking. Doesn’t seem to be helping as much as I thought it would. I’m getting fitter for sure but still weigh the same.

          7. I thought that a one-meal-a-day régime would never work as I’d be hungry all the time. The reality is that I don’t get hungry. I eat a normal meal, each day, at 1300hrs, then just drink water for the next 23 hours. It was remarkable how quickly my body adapted to this discipline.

        2. Weegie cakes come in two types – some kind of open flan, mostløy with apple (occasionally with a lid) and marzipan & whipped cream over sponge. The latter is far too sweet for a normal person, but I do like the apple cake.
          SWMBO does a marvellous heavy fruit cake – two at Christmas, and we don’t ice them. She’s also good at lemon drizze cake, as is Firstborn (an accomplished cook).
          I have to stir the water in a pan to stop it burning… :-((

          1. My favourite Norwegian recipe is one in a wee book given to me by a university friend whose mother was Norwegian.

            It’s a recipe for bear steaks and reads simply: First catch your bear, the prepare like reindeer.

            Clearly all Norwegian cooks are supposed to have learned how to prepare reindeer at their mothers’ knees.

            I’ve also got a recipe for a very soft sponge-cake with raspberries and whipped cream. It’s lovely as long as you remember not to sweeten the rasps as everything else is very sweet indeed.

          2. We eat reindeer typically as shavings. You can buy the shavings ready-made, or freeze a part of the animal and shave slivers of meat off with a knife.
            Stew with butter, stock, a litle salt, juniper berries, water, and maybe a little brown cheese.
            Goes wonderfully with cranberry sauce (unsweetened) and potatoes. Mushy peas are good too.

          3. Brown cheese. I love brown cheese, but to buy it in the UK you have to have a big block and pay heaps of postage. I’ll just have to wait for that trip to Norway that’s been on my bucket list for about 40 years.

          7. It’s boiled whey, left after the normal white/yellow cheese has been made. Boiled and slightly caramelised, it’s of a sweet and fudgey consistency. Moulded into a form to mature & store. Available as goat, or mixed goat & cow. I like it, but the family don’t.

          8. Swedish cakes are the same. A very limited selection of items all the same, and all much too sweet. I dream of the day when I can walk into a Swedish bakery and buy a sausage roll, an egg custard, a vanilla slice, a mince pie, an Eccles cake … and then I wake up!

            Fruit cake is my favourite cake but I don’t like it to be too heavy (like a Christmas cake, a Dundee cake or a wedding cake). My preference is for a light Madeira cake with currants or sultanas; nothing else.

          9. Drool! I’ll be in the queue behind you Grizz – those of us with cooking ability make these already – nicely, too. (Hat-tip to SWMBO & Firstborn, and you too!)

      3. Did you know that you are the only person to downvote anything in a long time. Are you sure you are in the right place? I know your head isn’t. 🙂

          3. “Just” a Geordie? Don’t let BoB catch you saying that!

            You’ll have him meeting up with Duncan at Scotch Corner and both of them marching on North Norfolk.

          6. It was the second best one I’ve ever tasted.

            The best was a couple of years ago from a bakery in Knaresborough. It transcended ‘delicious’.

      3. Good morning again Grizzly

        We agree on many things but not on how to pronounce scones.

        I call John Betjeman to testify with his ironic pronunciation of the word.

        Milk and then just as it comes dear,
        I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones,
        Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doilies
        With afternoon teacakes and scones.

        1. Good morning, Rastus.

          People will never agree since there is no right way … nor any wrong way … to pronounce many words. A little framed verse I once saw hung on the wall of a little café in Happisburg, Norfolk, once attempted to cut through the snobbery:

          I asked the girl with dulcet tone
          To order me a buttered scone.
          The silly girl has been and gone
          And ordered me a buttered scone.

          One man’s scone is another man’s scone.

          1. I think you’ll find that many “upper crust” southerners pronounce it to rhyme with “stone”.

          2. Blimey my family must be upper crust we’ve always said it’s a scone as in stone and the ones I bake generally turn out like a stone.

          6. As the above map shows, both ways are acceptable. There is no “wrong” way; only wrong dogmatic opinions.

          8. That’s just you being overly judgmental on the natural inclinations and teachings of a large number of the population; both posh and unposh.

            I’m from coal mining stock and, as you can see from the map, we rhyme it with “stone” quite naturally.

            Moreover, standard English usage has most words that end in a ‘e’ being given a long vowel: such as the ‘a’ in mane, the first ‘e’ in mere, the ‘i’ in pine, the ‘o’ in stone, and the ‘u’ in rune. If not, mane would be pronounced “man”, mere would be “mer”, pine would be “pin”, stone would be “ston”, and rune would be “run”.

            Maybe it’s you sarf Cockerneys who are pretentious?

          1. My wife’s maiden name is Schoon. In Holland it is pronounced nearly to rhyme with scone (as I pronounce scone) but in England people called her Caroline Skoon.

            One of the annoying things for Caroline is that now that her married surname has become a popular girl’s first name people think she is called Tracy rather than Mrs Tracey.

            I wonder if Shakespeare expected Scone to rhyme with one. Skun?? I doubt it
            Here are the two rhyming couplets which end his play about the Scottish king who is replaced by Duncan’s son, Malcolm.

            That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
            We will perform in measure, time and place:
            So, thanks to all at once and to each one,
            Whom we invite to see us crown’d at Scone.

          3. Yes, I know, thank you. I lived here briefly. And the cake “scone” is pronounced to rhyme with “con”.

        1. It was, Alf, thanks.

          That was my weekly carb “blow-out”. I’m on strict protein and veg rations the rest of the week.

    6. That looks lovely, Grizz! Very fresh and appealing.
      Wasted on Swedes, despite their eating everything in sight.
      Have you ever tried them on cheese & Branston pickle sandwiches? The Weegies were completely baffled by them (“Why do you put lumpy nutella on cheese??”)!

      1. There used to be a cheese shop in Chesterfield. Apart from selling a variety of cheeses it’s main income came from the simple sandwiches it made. There was a long queue outside its door, every day, for people who were addicted to its limited menu. The choice was one of three sizes of exceptionally delicious, freshly-baked white bread cobs (rolls, baps, etc): small, medium or huge!

        The fillings were: cheddar cheese sliced from an enormous hunk; ham sliced off the bone; or both. The accompaniments were: piccalilli or Branston pickle. These were all made to order as you entered the shop.

        My mouth is watering at the memory.

  68. Just back from doing the rounds. Glorious weather. Had the full works at the Turkish barber’s. The guy was the youngest so far, but the gentlest, even with the nostril & ear waxing (which I don’t like).
    There is always a snag – he jokingly tried to couple me with his Mother-in-Law. At least I think he was joking. I told him I’d been married twice & no way was I going through that again.

  69. Harry Mount
    The National Trust must stop obsessing about colonialism
    22 September 2020, 12:21pm

    When will the National Trust get it into its thick skull that it’s supposed to look after buildings and landscapes? It is not a political organisation. But now, yet again, the Trust has weighed in with its political blunderbuss, attacking its own properties for their connections with colonialism and slavery.

    It has published a document listing 93 properties and places, about a third of the total, with links to colonialism and slavery. Among them are Churchill’s house, Chartwell, thanks to his opposition to self-governance in India. Also there is Lundy island, Devon, once home to prisoners doing unpaid labour and Hare Hill, Cheshire, once owned by a slave-owner. 29 places in all are listed after their owners received compensation for slaves after abolition.

    To begin with, we knew all this. Anyone with any passing interest in history will know that many old fortunes were made through disgusting means. What’s more, the list is sloppy. Already one property, Ham House, has been removed from the list after descendants of its owners complained the Trust had got its history wrong.

    But, much more important than that, this is not what the National Trust should be doing. According to the National Trust Act of 1937, the Trust’s explicit aims are the preservation of buildings of national interest, along with their furniture and pictures, and the preservation of beautiful landscapes.

    That’s all they should be doing. But, over the last 11 years, the Trust has been betraying that original duty. Increasingly, some members among the senior echelons of the Trust have appeared to actively dislike their big houses. At the houses themselves, there is an astonishingly low level of spelling and grammar on the signs and displays, revealing the Trust’s jettisoning of intellect and historical understanding.

    It is entirely typical that, over this latest report, Tarnya Cooper, the trust’s curatorial and collections director, said:

    ‘In the past, we’ve told probably really straightforward stories, possibly from one particular direction. We want to be able to tell more nuanced stories so that we can provide open, honest, accurate and fair assessments of places without feeling anxiety that ‘Gosh…is that the right thing to be saying?’’

    She then went on to contradict herself, saying the Trust doesn’t tell stories but just gives hard facts:

    ‘We are not doing anything more than present the historical facts and data.’

    Not true. Over the past nine years, the Trust has increasingly presented a skewed, one-sided view of history, concentrating on LGBT matters, women’s rights and, now, slavery. To suggest that the Trust is giving an objective view of history is plain crazy.

    It is a tragedy for the Trust to spend millions of pounds presenting its own warped view of history while it is wrecking its once-hallowed curatorial excellence. Last month, there were the Trust’s proposals for ‘Curation and Experience’, as part of its ‘reset’ programme. The Trust plans to junk all the lead curators in the regions and many junior curators. Suddenly, brilliant scholars of architecture, archaeology, historic gardens, paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, silver, and libraries would be sacked. They say that this is because of the £200m loss of income resulting from Covid-19. But why then are they still pouring money into this latest politicised PR exercise?

    Also last month, in a report called ‘Towards a 10-year vision for places and experiences. Version 2.1’, Tony Berry, the Trust’s Director of Visitor Experience, presented his disastrous, warped ideas for the future. He wants to ‘dial down’ the Trust’s role as a big cultural institution and to move away from looking after English country houses. The Trust, he said, also plans to put its collections in storage and hold fewer exhibitions at its properties to prioritise its role as the ‘gateway to the outdoors’.

    Great private country houses, such as Blenheim and Chatsworth, don’t take this dumbed-down, highly politicised approach to their treasures – and they are doing fantastically well. Why has the Trust gone down this disastrous route?

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

    Graham • 2 hours ago
    I love Kipling’s study in Bateman’s and I wonder if the people who drew up this stupid list have ever actually read anything of his. He wrote of India: ‘I’m in love with the country and would sooner write about her than anything else, my own place, where I find heat and smells of oil and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable’. But his experiences, thoughts, works and legacy don’t matter, only the ‘feelings’ of progressive, right thinking twerps.

    Syntactile • an hour ago
    The National Trust Act 1907 states clearly and simply:

    ‘The National Trust shall be established for the purposes of promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest and as regards lands for the preservation(so far as practicable) of their natural aspect features and animal and plant life.’

    Nowhere does it say:

    ‘The National Trust shall be established for the purposes of enabling historically illiterate political activists to pursue their half-baked virtue-signalling whims to the detriment of the nation.’

    Blindsideflanker • 2 hours ago
    Note the NT’s sleight of hand , something that began with slavery has now included colonialism , and in linking the two they are making colonialism synonymous with slavery. Those pursuing a year zero policy to cleanse our country of all culture and history won’t make any differentiation between the 93 NT properties that might have benefited from slavery or colonialism, everything thing will be condemned . For the NT to perpetrate this deceit can only be the product of a political agenda.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-national-trust-should-forget-about-colonialism-and-stick-to-its-day-job

    1. The simple answer is that the NT is identifying those properties that should be looted and destroyed when BLM and other Left-wing ideologues go on their inevitable rampage when they don’t get their own way.

    2. Maybe Gina Miller could be persuaded to take out a prosecution of the NT for not following the legislation that established them.

  70. https://youtu.be/nL3XIgP3rXk

    “I’m not going to deny for a minute that things are going to be tough for our country and our people for months to come. But we will get through it, and we will get through it well.”

    Churchillian rhetoric, Stalinist policies…

    1. Yes, but this is self inflicted. Before the six months is up they will find another reason to further curtail our liberty.

      Good afternoon, Citroen.

      1. Six months is up on Friday of this week.

        I don’t hold out much hope. My MP Peter Bone dismissed my complaint about masks. Is he in a majority? Here’s another:

        Tory MP Bob Blackman says one of the “key concerns” in his constituencies is the failure of the public to comply with the rules on wearing face coverings. He asks the PM how he is going to “make sure the message gets across that failing to comply with these rules is really selfish and potentially places other people at risk”.

        Johnson says Blackman is “spot on”, and wearing masks was about “protecting yourself and protecting other people”. He says this is why the government is doubling the fine for not wearing one from £100 to £200.

        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-54245931

        2. One wonders how much of this nonsense normalises Islamic practice.

          The BBC and Left are trying to normalise paedophilia – the BBC promoted ‘Cuties’ when it should be condemned.

          Destroy the nuclear family, crush Christian values, ruin the moral ethic of society, import a massive population with no root to this nation or culture, eradicate common decency and permanently ruin this country and what it stands for.

          1. Cuties isn’t paedophilia, it’s a coming of age story, and sadly quite a reflection on modern life for young girls trying to find their place in the world and fit in with a group of friends.

    2. He is no leader just a follower, very dissapointing.We are run as a dictatorship over this not a democracy.

    3. Bollox we will.

      Lock up didn’t work. Masks didn’t work. Yet you enforce more lock up and more masks. The things that didn’t work the first time.

      Doing the same thing, the same way is not going to achieve a different result just because you want it to. To think that is the height of stupidity.

  71. One thing that keeps me going, apart from drinking that is, is fishing. Went out on a charter boat yesterday. Saw pods of dolphins all over, a pilot whale and masses of sardines breaking the surface with gannets diving into them. To cap it all we witnessed a shoal of bluefin tuna leaping and chasing smaller fish. They were all a similar size of about 300lb to 400lb. First time I’ve witnessed them so close, 30 or 40 yards away.
    Oh, and the fishing was a red-letter day. The 3 of us caught about 60 bass, no small ones.

  72. No, we should not be giving the NHS a medal

    A significant part of the Covid crisis was caused, not cured, by this huge, lumbering bureaucracy

    CHARLES MOORE

    Lord Ashcroft, Tory peer and billionaire, is an expert on medals for courage. He personally owns a great many Victoria Crosses, and does the medal a public service by retelling the stories of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who displayed the astonishing valour required.

    This week is the 80th anniversary of the George Cross, which is roughly the non-combat version of the VC. It is open, unlike the VC, to civilians. Lord Ashcroft calls for this to be marked by awarding the medal to the National Health Service as a whole.

    There are two precedents for a collective award. The first is the island of Malta, for its stoical endurance of the German siege during the Second World War. The second is the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which well deserved it, but received it as a sort of consolation prize for being abolished following the Good Friday Agreement.

    Many will think that the NHS, which has wrestled with so much during the Covid crisis, would be an ideal recipient. I would respectfully argue they are completely mistaken.

    A significant part of the Covid crisis was caused, not cured, by the NHS. Because it is such a huge, lumbering bureaucracy, it is ill equipped to put patients first.

    This was tacitly acknowledged by the Government with its strange slogan “Protect the NHS”. The point of a national health service is to serve the public: suddenly, this was reversed. We were told to serve it, chiefly by staying away. This has resulted in much anguish, and is beginning to result in otherwise preventable deaths from non-Covid-related illnesses such as cancer. It also led to the second-class treatment of care homes, with literally fatal results. Procurement, too, has been treated monopolistically, and has therefore been defective and slow.

    It has been my misfortune to deal with NHS hospitals several times in the last six months. They are often half-empty, with little sense of urgency about putting things right. The needs of the population have taken a poor second place to the habits of bloated administration.

    Everyone should sympathise with Lord Ashcroft’s desire to celebrate many of the doctors, nurses and other workers who have tried so hard, sometimes risking their lives, to help. The George Cross was founded to honour “acts of the greatest heroism or the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of great danger.” Some have performed such acts. The NHS, as a system, has not.

    A cautionary tale for British politics

    The mourning – mainly, but not only, among liberals – for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice who died last week, is impressive. It is good that a figure of justice should be widely known, respected, even loved in a free society. There seems little doubt that Ginsburg earned that respect. She was a learned, thoughtful and diligent judge. By the example of her own career, she improved the liberties and dignity of women.

    Unfortunately, the “RBG” cult is also a symptom of something wrong with US justice, which is that it has become so political. Because, in modern times, the Supreme Court has so often claimed the right to achieve profound social change by judicial means, it has become a player in political debate. Liberals and conservatives vie with each other about appointments. Confirmation hearings become sometimes appalling partisan battlegrounds. The extreme, often personal denunciations of Donald Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, were an example.

    In the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her most ardent followers in recent years were ideological enemies of President Trump, rather than upholders of the rule of law. She herself made an outburst against Mr Trump, for which she subsequently apologised. As she continued on the bench, although in her mid-80s and ill with cancer, the anti-Trumpers willed her to outlast the man they hate, thus preventing him from appointing a conservative to replace her.

    Every bit as crudely political as his opponents, Mr Trump wants to fill the space created by Ginsburg’s death at once, with an appointment that would please the voters he needs in November. The detachment required for real justice is sacrificed to the hustings.

    We are edging the same way here. In the character and melodramatic presentation of the judgment on proroguing Parliament a year ago, Lady Hale, the then president of our Supreme Court, deliberately entered a political battle to stop Brexit. In doing so, she misunderstood the nature of Parliament and overstepped the boundary between unelected judges and elected politicians. This made her a heroine to some, a hate-figure to others: just the polarisation a judicial system does not need.

    This week, now retired, she is at it again. In a new essay, she berates Parliament for surrendering its role in controlling Covid emergency laws. Personally, I sympathise with her on this point, but is this an arena she should be entering, particularly in the terms she chooses to adopt? Provocatively, she reopens the case of Dominic Cummings’s famous journey to Barnard Castle. The judicial mode of speech should always be judicious. Hers isn’t.

    Until Tony Blair invented the Supreme Court, Britain had an unusual but effective system. The top judges (the “law lords”) were truly independent masters of their terrain, but were scrupulously careful not to be political actors. They were not as famous as Lady Hale, but they were fairer. Our system needs to find a way back to such fairness, not to go the way of America.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/22/no-should-not-giving-nhs-medal/

    1. Moore displaying his usual idiocy.

      “This was tacitly acknowledged by the Government with its strange slogan “Protect the NHS”. The point of a national health service is to serve the public: suddenly, this was reversed. We were told to serve it, chiefly by staying away. ”

      Health services are finite. They are not built for pandemics which are rather extraordinary situations which require extraordinary responses.

      “It also led to the second-class treatment of care homes, with literally fatal results.”

      Only right at the start of the pandemic was this an issue. Both the NHS and the local authority have been extremely helpful during the pandemic. The government has also thrown us free money for PPE and to keep staff off public transport. We have covid tests weekly, picked up by couriers and results back generally inside 48 hours. The only significant thing worth mentioning is councils are trying to cut what they pay for residents severely. We took a new resident this week. We wanted 850 a week which is cheap for residential care and they offered us 350 a week which is ridiculous. We settled on 800 and took their client.

      “Procurement, too, has been treated monopolistically, and has therefore been defective and slow.”

      NHS procurement isn’t monopolistic at all.

      “Every bit as crudely political as his opponents, Mr Trump wants to fill the space created by Ginsburg’s death at once, with an appointment that would please the voters he needs in November.”

      As there’s a precedent he shouldn’t be able to fill the position until after he’s re-elected. Remember Obama couldn’t nominate so close to an election, he was stopped by the Republicans, so now they have to uphold the precedent they set.

        1. We had one resident test positive but it turned out to be a false positive.

          We have weekly tests for all staff. We’re all negative. We can’t work if a test comes back positive.

          I’m Ok apart from my shin wounds.

  74. Lord Dubs berates UK ministers over Lesbos refugees. 22 September 2020.

    A Labour peer who masterminded a change in the law that forced the government to give sanctuary to child asylum seekers has branded the UK’s lack of action over a devastating fire at a migrant camp in Greece an “absolute disgrace”.

    Alf Dubs, a former child refugee, called on the government to follow the lead of other European nations and take in some of the thousands of asylum seekers left without shelter following the blaze on the Greek island of Lesbos.

    His calls have been backed by Yvette Cooper, the chair of the influential home affairs select committee.

    Of course no mention here of the inconvenient fact that they burned it down themselves. There is one bright spot in what appears to me to be a future of unrelieved horror and that is when the parties that the likes of Cooper and Dubs espouse, finally decide that they have served their purpose and can be disposed of in the same way as the rest of us!

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/22/we-should-be-ashamed-lord-dubs-berates-uk-ministers-over-camp-fire-refugees

    1. Dubs is an advert for not allowing any refugees at all. We are not the guardian of everyone in the world. Our first duty is to ourselves, our nation.
      For over one hundred years we have expended our fortunes and spent the lives of four generations of our children fighting for the cause of peace in Europe and the wider world. In return our enemies, our allies, and above all those whom we have rescued from tyranny, have done their utmost to destroy us.

      2. No good deed goes unpunished.

        There is some dispute as to the identity of the person who originated that cynical phrase. But there is no dispute about how very accurate it was.

    2. I saw a report on France24 in which the reporter was almost in tears because there are tiny babies and pregnant women now having to sleep in the open, thanks to the arsonists.

      But these so-called ‘migrants’ are supposed to be fleeing poverty and repression, so what are they doing having babies at a time when they are unable even to support themselves?

      Sorry, but my sympathy for them has totally evaporated.

      The UK has no obligation towards these people and would be doing itself yet another disfavour by admitting them.

      As for Dubs and Cooper – I have nothing polite to say!

      1. They are having those children to make it more difficult to refuse their asylum claims and to make it more difficult to expel them.

        1. I expect that you are right. I realise that many of those in the camp are not African, but despite the abject poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and the hopelessness there, people still breed like rabbits.

          I am reminded of what Colonel Gaddafi said in his Green Book: “Black people are poised to dominate the human population because their culture includes polygamy and shuns birth control, and because they live in a climate which is “continuously hot”, with the result that work is less important for them than in other cultures.”

    3. Is the Balls – Ed and Yvette – family building extensions to both their taxpayer subsidised homes so that they can house more illegal immigrants? And has anyone seen the photos of the asylum seeker moving in to Gary Linekar’s home.

    1. That may well be the best explanation I’ve seen for what he is doing.
      When all other possiblities have been eliminated whatever is left, however improbable…

      1. Polly is becoming more credible every day!

        Soon they will have to start a conspiracy to suppress conspiracies that are too true.

        2. Sure. Soros is taking over the world and Bill Gates is his chief enforcer of depopulation. We’re all getting ID-chipped via mandatory vaccinations. And pigs have grown wings.

    3. He really seems to have gone quite mad.
      Has he cracked under the strain?
      Is he one for whom C19 has scrambled his brains?

  77. 323869+ up ticks,
    Tell me, if a General Election is ever allowed again, & one was close at hand would the same voting pattern still be applied ?
    Because the unchecked rate of illegal entry at the establishment condoned beach head at Dover is surely going to make a difference in a short space of time.
    Every one illegally entering is a replacement to an indigenous person as soon as they step foot ashore, whether it be in school, hospital. house, or nick, it takes affect immediately.

    https://twitter.com/TradBritGroup/status/1308342097364344833

    1. Why are border patrol bringing them here?

      Why not border enforcement? What happened to that?

      Also, this spike – coincides interestingly with a massive hike in foreign invaders, doesn’t it? Here’s an idea. Stop the sodding invasion! Send them back. Destroy the damned boats. Make France take the responsibility for this criminality.

      1. 323869+up ricks,
        Evening W,
        This could well be done if you had a pro United Kingdom political party in parliament but….

  78. Boris Johnson’s Covid speech showed little regard for either science or democracy

    A line has been crossed

    JANET DALEY

    The most striking features of Boris Johnson’s address to the Commons were the things he didn’t say. There was no strategic explanation for his decisions and no evidence for why the measures he was (reluctantly, he said) introducing would be more effective than any others. Nor did he make any attempt to deal with the critique that is now widely available in the public discourse of his government’s approach to this crisis.

    And in spite of the sacred promise that he and his ministers had appeared to make – that all significant policy announcements would be made first to Parliament rather than being briefed to the media in advance – we had already learned of the most dramatic change from the weekend press. (Yes indeed, pubs will close at 10pm.)

    The other major new edict was for office staff to work from home if they could – and Michael Gove had given that to the media earlier too. But what was missing was newsworthy: the failure to elaborate on, or explain further, the figures presented by his chief scientific advisors yesterday which have received so much criticism that they surely required some sort of apologia.

    Perhaps the prime minister really believes that the accusations of irresponsible hyperbole and unjustified assumptions which the presentation by Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty has attracted from some very reputable sources, were beneath contempt. Or maybe he just chose to ignore them because the recollection was too painful. At any event, it seemed peculiarly tone deaf – as if he had become utterly out of touch with the heated debate in which the country was now engaged.

    But in the end, there could be something like relief – partly because we had already had most of the bad news about pubs and restaurants. True, the Rule of Six was being extended, the numbers allowed at weddings reduced, and face masks would be required in some new places. But we had been led to believe that it might be much worse: that any mixing of households could be prohibited or that a two-week total lockdown could be called immediately. Maybe the floating of those really terrible options was just an attempt at a clever political move, designed to make us grateful for the less severe restrictions which were, in fact, announced.

    If that is true, then it wasn’t clever at all. The idea that the government could even be considering (which is to say, threatening) such actions is deeply disturbing. Are they oblivious to the fact that prohibiting any social contact between households is in a completely different league from ordering pubs to shut early? We have always accepted the principle of licensing laws: that government can decree the conditions under which alcohol may be sold in a public place. Drinking or eating in a public venue is not an inalienable right.

    But to visit or be in the company of others in the privacy of your own home is a different matter altogether. It is a usurping of personal freedom that is not even invoked in wartime. Local lockdowns which require such interference in private life are already being enforced by law – and it is, in truth, outrageous that this has not been more controversial.

    A line has been crossed here which British constitutional traditions should regard as sacred – only to be transgressed with the fullest possible debate and the most unimpeachable evidence. Unfortunately, this government has shown precious little regard for either of those things.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/22/boris-johnsons-covid-speech-showed-little-regard-either-science/

    1. I remember when TV ended at 10pm due to the three-day week, etc. A baby boom followed nine months later.

  79. 323869+ up ticks,
    I would lay money on the fact that these latest treacherous political actions
    will not be forgotten by even the most hardened party member’s and it will take more than a week to get back into three monkey mode, maybe 8 days will be more realistic.

  80. This morning there are 5 UK Border Force boats out in the channel, the Seeker, Searcher, Safeguard, Hunter & Speedwell, picking up illegal immigrants and ferrying them to Dover. Once there, these illegal immigrants will be taken to hotels where they will be provided with food and accomodation, all at the expense of the UK tax-payer . . . . .

    1. Morning all.

      Is this start of the training programme for the EU army ?

      About 30 migrants were brought into an Army barracks in Kent, which has been repurposed as a migrant camp, on Monday night.

      The Napier Barracks, in Folkestone, will eventually house 400 asylum seekers. The first arrivals at the barracks on Monday are believed to have crossed the Channel aboard small boats.

      A black BMW saloon pulled up at the entrance at 7.45pm and three taxis followed the car inside the barracks. Around six men were in each people carrier, with most of them wearing face masks.

      There did not appear to be any women taken into the site.

      Earlier on Monday, people were seen unloading electrical equipment including vacuum cleaners and TV screens at the MoD site.

      Police officers were shown around the barracks on Monday afternoon.

      A catering cash and carry van was the last commercial vehicle to enter the premises shortly before 7pm.

      Napier Barracks, one of several at the Shorncliffe Army Camp, was selected to house migrants while their asylum claims are processed.

      The plans were met with criticism, including from local MP Damian Collins who said he “cannot support” the decision and called on the Home Office to find “more suitable” accommodation.

      It is understood that a military barracks in Wales is also being considered for housing migrants.

      2. “called on the Home Office to find “more suitable” accommodation.” – -yes – somewhere more suitable is back in the country they set off from.

        1. The would be the only legally correct thing to do. Asylum should b applied for from outside the country. Except of course asylum only ever applies if the person is at risk. It does not apply to migrating economic freeloaders.

      3. “unloading electrical equipment . . . . and TV screens ” – -But But your honour – we can’t deport him . . .why not? – – – He has just started watching the re-runs of Coronation street – – -OK he can stop.

        1. Free health care, free food, free accommodation, free heating lighting and water, no doubt free education and now free TV licences too.

          1. Clothing, bedding, the list is endless. I wonder how much the carbon foot print of the UK has increased since all these thousands of people arrived here and started consuming free gas, electricity, water.
            I doubt if they have to pay for TV licences, out of their free benefits.
            This useless excuse for a government, government ? have completely and totally lost the effing plot.

          2. 75+ yr old English people can pay for theirs. . . . Criminal immigrants get theirs free. They’ll be demanding satellite dishes soon so they can get progs in their native languages.

          3. They will probably have smart phones that can get what they want, doubtless any fees courtesy of the British taxpayer.

    2. Just had a look on site Marine Traffic. Found Seeker but also seems a lot of RLNI boats are out there as well. We can only guess why.

  81. For when civil unrest arrives…

    To Military Command. (Eugenfor).

    “You have the only armed disciplined force.

    There is a reason we separate the military from the police.

    One fights the enemy of the state and the other protects the people.

    When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state become the people”

    *Battlestar Galactica.

  82. How is it that people can still go everyday to a pub , but if you want to go to church to a wedding or a funeral, one has to wait 72 hours so that the church can be sprayed and cleansed, before it is used again ?

    1. My daughter’s wedding was put back from last march to this October and then onto next March
      Looks like she will be worse off next March than this year

    2. Today we had coffee in a cafe – because we were “eating in” we didn’t need masks at the counter when ordering. Had we stood in the same place ordering a coffee to take away, we would have required masks! The government are imbeciles, and the so called experts advising them are cretins!

      1. I saw a nurse in uniform the village yesterday. I cannot help wondering what use PPE and face masks are when nurses travel to and from work in their uniforms, and maybe only put on a clean one once a week.

    4. I’m glad I can go to the pub, Belle. I’ve never actually wanted to go to weddings or funerals.

  84. Look on the bright side.

    As there are not enough “armed forces” to fit in a very small football stadium – the likelihood of anyone of us being killed by the SAS are very small.

  86. Off topic, slightly.

    Well people, yesterday I expressed my anger at what is happening.

    Today, it appears that my assessment underestimated the total incompetence of the wazzocks in charge and that my curses upon them and their families were far too lenient..

    1. Is this the first time ever that a democratically elected government has seized power from itself and deliberately sailed the country onto the rocks for the express purpose of destroying jobs, the economy, business and the people it was supposed to serve?

      2. Yet that isn’t what they’re trying to do. It’s happening, but it isn’t what they want. Such is merely a byproduct of their decisions.

        Yet – logically, solely based on the evidence – lock up and masks have not solved the problem. Continually cycling us in and out of lock up like the ruddy viral hokey cokey is absurd.

          1. What I find absolutely staggering is that NOT ONE of the 650 wanqueurs in the Commons DARES to say one word even to hint that HMG may be making a blunder (I am being generous…)

          2. I think a few are dissenting, but far too few.

            If they were accountable for their decisions, and I don’t mean losing their seats, I mean losing their houses and pensions, then they might actually bother to question what is happening.

          3. James Hacker:
            All we get from the civil service is delaying tactics.

            Sir Humphrey Appleby:
            Well, I wouldn’t call civil service delays “tactics”, Minister. That would be to mistake lethargy for strategy.

            All my knowledge of politics comes from Yes Minister. That and writing speeches for some of them.

            I don’t think it’s deliberate. I think it’s simple incompetence and a failure to know what else to do.

          5. I might agree if it was just the UK but it is happening all around the world, it is a mistake just to look at it from a nation state level

          6. It’s the “Great Reset” Bob – decided at Davos. all countries trash their economies at once – so no country is worse off by comparison with others. It’s the people who are paying for this – the businesses, the industries which will go under. Aviation, the motor industry, travel, hospitality and the arts will all be the worst hit.

    2. What bothers me most is the facts:

      The lock up clearly didn’t work – the virus is still a problem.
      Masks don’t work, as the virus deaths are climbing.

      The NHS wasn’t overwhelmed – they had time to prat about.

      Yet.. the immediate response is more lock up and more masks. It’s daft. Surely it’s the very definition of insanity. The wrong choice.

      Continuing with lock up and demanding masks does little more than compromise the human immune system by giving it nothing to fight. Sudden exposure to all sorts causes immediate problems.

      I know why this is the action they’re taking but surely, from the evidence it’s the wrong one.

      1. Trying to work out the reasoning behind the lock downs and all the other restrictions will just drive you mad.
        Because none of it has anything to do with a pandemic.

      2. I couldn’t agree more.

        I have numerous gripes over this, not least the fact that the politicians, “experts” and civil servants won’t lose their jobs, their pensions, their homes and their businesses. Oh no, they will sail on regardless and the “little people” who they have ruined, will continue to pay for them and their lifestyles.

        Facts don’t butter parsnips.

        1. Spot on. Those responsible never take the blame.

          That said, I don’t want to see thousands of civil servants suddenly sacked simply because they’re civil servants – if you’re going to cull, get rid of the management ranks.

          But public heath England, SAGE all continue untouched, fully pensioned and isolated.

          1. Once upon a time working for the Civil Service gave you a much lower income, but in exchange you got job security and a better pension.
            Now you get all the benefits plus a higher salary.
            I’m sorry, I would cut a deep, long, swathe through them, management down..

          2. I’d operate a sunset clause; after twelve months they would have to justify keeping their job – and not just by citing the amount of paperwork they’ve shuffled.

          3. PHE has been replaced already, the new body being helmed by the Dildo woman.

            SAGE can’t be got rid of, and if it’s replaced it’ll only be like for like. I don’t know too much about Whitty, but Valance is an excellent scientist with many years commercial experience at Glaxo. Most of the other members are university professors.

    3. I’ve placed myself in internal exile which is a mental state as much as a physical condition. We’re lucky enough to have a house and GARDEN, so please wake me up when this nonsense is over.
      My poor grandchildren.

      1. And your poor great grandchildren ,and your literally dirt-poor, half-caste great, great grandchildren, with a father who abandoned the mother.

        1. Had to laugh; my local rag reported on the headless chicken knee jerk reactions government pronouncements and said that some sports, such as five a side football, could go ahead. Now, I know I’m mathematically challenged, but if you have two teams of five a side, don’t you get more than six?

  90. Well at least Sturgeon always likes to take the repression one stage further in Scotland and make us feel well off.

    1. That was Wee Krankie’s SNP sidewinder missile:

      “In Cobra committee, Boris’s scientific advisors told us that his measures are insufficient; we will be more careful and drastic …”

      [paraphrased]

  91. That’s me for the last fine day in history. Lunch outdoors. Four miles on my bike. Crosswords all done. 6 kg of tomatoes picked; and a helping of Contender haricots (a brilliant and reliable variety) for supper.

    The MR wants to see the Bumbling Buffoon – I shall make an excuse. Then we will continue watching the first part of a fascinating BBC4 series on the development of writing. The only drawback – the vacant, empty-headed totty presenter – whose favourite word is, “Wow...” Among those taking part is the magnificent and brilliant brain on legs, Irving Finkel – who writes Sumerian like a native. To see him explaining in his gentle voice, with a mud tablet and a bit of wood HOW those chaps wrote was mind-blowing. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the BM (or what is left of it now that the woke BLM lovers have taken over).

    I commend the programme – there are two more parts.

    A demain – in the rain. Much needed around here.

    1. Sounds good – the exhibition at the BM of Ashurbanipal and other artefacts a while ago was very interesting.

      1. Yikes! Whatever did you say?!! Yes, I am on Twitter but tweet only very very occasionally….. I find it a terrifying medium! and I joined mainly to find out what other people were saying. There are other mysteries in this world of ours – which may be part of the whole madness – that is bringing down the royal family (not perfect, I know) but the last bastion of all that is British and our culture with which we all identify whether Royalist or republican. (I am a defender of the Crown). Should the RF be brought down then we as a people will be gone very soon after. Check out Torontopaper1 on Twitter from Feb 2019 – it is all directed at MM, not Harry.

        1. I think I offended by taking part in a tweetstorm on live animal wet markets – and then I could not pick up the required code to prove I’m not a robot because I had no phone till June. Then they ignored all my requests to unsuspend me till this week! Anyway – if you want to follow me I’m Julien (Ndovu) with a lioness face. Will have a look at Torontopaper1.
          Harry has been a fool but I don’t think MM has much support here now. Andy York has also been a fool but his fate depends on Ghislaine.

          1. My view is that Harry’s was a coerced marriage after a one night stand that turned into a 3-months’ stand and MM played the race card and after that the RF and Harry had no choice, he fell on his sword. He looked utterly miserable at the wedding, although trying to make the best of it. If you look carefully at subsequent photos they are all photoshopped or body doubles usedeven the videos, the perspectives between the two of them are different, backgrounds are not moving and even videos can be spliced, photoshopped and edited to create an illusion. The well-known Botswana photo with the elephant has been found to be two (named) vets, not Harry and MM, although from the angle the casual observer would think it to be them.

          2. My paragraph (My view is… etc) sent itself without my permission, I hadn’t finished! Grrr- iPads, honestly! Yes, Harry was an idiot but not street-wise, Andy York also. I have always found Harry an engaging personality and we all remember that sad little note at his mother’s funeral – but there is another generation coming up behind him who will not remember and do not care. He is also the same age as our younger son. For Andrew York I do not have the same sympathy, I feel he felt he was above the law and could move around and do as he wished as did Royalty in times gone by.

            I will look you up on Twitter and give you a follow!

  93. We visited a NT property today. The check-in lady told me that her six year old grand-daughter is telling everyone ‘it’s a conspiracy!’ – and why. That child should be prime minister.

  94. Here’s the COVID-19 infection new tested cases slide from the recent CSA and CMO briefing on BBC1:

    Clearly the geatest increases in viral transmission rates are occuring in the 20 to 39 age groups.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b2121580bd0d008e53d27989e9a9034c0ec136cbec75ae635b90c931ab583533.jpg

    So what are these groups doing that results in this far greater increase? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f8f694d137bfc14e23c635442f45fab5b2197212eb3f7de1d2db910163626790.gif

    2. Actually, the increase in the number of “cases”* is a result of testing, that’s all.

      * The number of cases does not imply more people are sick. It simply means that they have tested positive or false positive. They may be infected or have had the infection in the past. Or even more likely, they are false positive and have never had it at all.
      That is the science that is being propounded by sensible scientists and statisticians, who are independent of Soros, Gates Foundation, and other grant-providers who want the results they want. The Government is ignoring sensible scientists and following the quacks.

      1. The only useful measure is hospital admissions with covid. So, you’re tested positive but don’t feel bad – why does taht statistic mean lockdown?

        1. I would go further:
          The only meaningful statistic is deaths.
          Split by age, underlying health conditions and estimated life expectancy had they not caught Covid.

          2. And underlying health conditions?

            Judging by your earlier post it would be even more skewed.

            Add in expected longevity and it would make the “experts” look like twats.

            The joke bar chart is the 90+ where the overwhelming majority of people in that cohort are women.

          3. The over-90s are almost all women, ‘cos the little old men have already croaked, men having a noticeably shorter lifespan than women.

    1. Perhaps the media is starting to realise that that which is down the line for us, is down the line for them also.

      1. Not when he wants to visit.

        They will open especially for him and his entourage, the general public will be banned.

      1. She’s on the brink of betraying her fiancé with an older man she met on the commuter train.

        1. We watched that last night. Dear Lord, what a heap of baloney. I’ve commuted into and out of London by train. The initial exchanges were beyond belief. None of it was remotely probable. No one ever spoke to me on the train at 6:30 AM, or on the 6:00PM either.
          It just got worse. I can believe people sleeping together out of lust, physical attraction, even boredom, but this was just meaningless.

        2. The 7:39?

          Aye, the war queen commented that no one – NO ONE speaks to anyone else.

          Although I know for a fact she has a stalker. Gets on the same carriage every time.

          Personally I’d want a chorus of Row row row your boat if I had to commute. It’s miserable.

    2. Sheridan Smith is a pretty girl and a good actress who has ruined her appearance with grotesque tattoos. It must be such a nuisance for actors and actresses to have to cover their body graffiti with stage make-up every time they reveal their limbs or torsos when they are playing the sort of characters who would never have had a tattoo.

      I have nothing but disdain for David Dimbleby and Judy Dench both of whom got themselves tattoos in the hope that it would make them appear ‘with it’ ‘trendy’ and pre-senile.

  98. 323869+ up ticks.
    Did johnson mention anything along the lines of get your tax returns in early as finance has to be found for the incomers via the Dover campaign.

  99. I’ve just watched the ministerial broadcast by the Prime Minister

    Boris’s bollocks.

    It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

    All those hand gestures, all the facial expressions of serious sincerity all the faux “facts”.

    We’re stuffed.

  102. Boris Johnson urges Britons to ‘get through winter together’ in TV speech. 22 September 2020.

    Prime Minister Boris Johnson has urged Britons to follow the new coronavirus restrictions to “get through this winter together” in a speech to the nation tonight.

    Mr Johnson today confirmed a package of draconian new measures – including 10pm hospitality curfews and a return to working from home where possible – which he said could last as long as six months.

    At the end of this Winter most of us will be dead, though not from Coronavirus!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-news-covid-alert-pubs-close-10pm-lockdown/

    1. Theatres, it seems, are immune from the ten o’clock curfew. Perhaps the bigwigs go to the theatre, but don’t go the pub (unlike the virus, which is attracted to plebs, it seems). My Swedish friend is completely bewildered by what’s going on. She says it makes no sense. I have to agree with her.

        1. I don’t think so – it’s hard to keep up, but I thought I read about that anomaly in tonight’s local rag.

    2. The 10pm pub curfew will ensure that many 20 -35 year olds vacate licenced premises that practise ‘social distancing’ and go onwards to late night private parties in overcrowded homes and flats.

      Methinks that this will – inevitably – lead to increased rates of cross infection …

  103. The Swedish secret police / Special Branch have just come out with a Twitter message after they were reorganised (I believe): Follow us, before we follow you!
    A swede with a sense of humour… millions of likes, I understand.

  104. Evening, all. I have no idea what the government thinks it’s playing at and, frankly, I’m convinced neither do they.

  105. Univerally Challenged

    Representing Westminster Asylum, with an average IQ of 69.

    Matt, the prat, Hancock reading advanced bullshit and false statistics
    Chris, the titty, Whitty reading the runes, tea leaves and ouija boards
    Rishy, the dishy, Sunak, reading the beanofeast and debt mismanagement

    And their captain Boris, the loris, Johnson reading lechery and double standards

  106. Welcome to Raqqa.

    These indiscriminate measures throw a nation under the same bus

    The first rule of conservatism is that we are all individuals – something this Government seems to have forgotten

    ALEXANDRA PHILLIPS

    Something has really stuck in my craw about the latest restrictions announced by the PM.

    The Government, always eager to pass the buck onto the amorphous, deified concept of ‘The Science’, is finding novel ways to shirk responsibility. This time the onus is on us. We all, so says Boris, have individual responsibility to make sure he doesn’t have to plunge us back into full lockdown. Funny that he seems to rarely want to take much individual responsibility as the elected CEO of the nation.

    If we are incarcerated yet again, it will be our own fault, they suggest. Yet with responsibility comes agency, and with agency the recognition of heterogeneity. If the Prime Minister is so keen on placing responsibility on the individual, he must recognise that we are individuals.

    The problem with the latest Government knee-jerk U-turn is that it throws everybody under the same bus. But in health, as in life, homogeny may be a wholesome pursuit but is wholly unrealistic. The first rule of conservatism is that we are all individuals. This Government seems to have forgotten that.

    We know by now who is vulnerable, and who is not. Who should shield and who should do what the Government was urging just a month ago and get back into offices and help prop up the economy. Instead the party of liberty is imposing pseudo-socialist controls on us all while trashing the economy.

    This virus does not target victims uniformly. Many simply won’t have symptoms, and could safely go about the business of living and pose limited threat to themselves and others if they distance themselves from those identifiably at risk, where resources should be targeted. Shield those who need shielding and do everything to provide them with comfort and compensation for doing so.

    The Prime Minister told us that these new measures are a stitch in time, saving nine; a light-touch lockdown now to stave off full lockdown later. Yet he said nothing about six months of stretching out the misery, and what the economic fallout and antisocial ramifications weigh on those about to lose their jobs, unable to see family or at risk of dying from untreated conditions. Half a year of living under the sort of conditions – compulsory face coverings, curfews, illegal social interactions, snitch lines and fines – that wouldn’t look out of place in Raqqa.

    The idea that we are all in this together is simply untrue. My outcomes and risk factors are vastly different from others. What the Government could and should do is provide clear and constructive public health messages so that individuals can protect themselves. Yes, washing hands is the most effective way of minimising the potential of becoming a fomite. But losing weight, controlling blood pressure, exercising and eating healthily, making your own body fighting fit, is by far the best way an individual can exhibit responsibility by protecting themselves.

    We are not all in this together, Mr Johnson. The people who will pay most for pandemic policy are the very people least at risk of severe infection, who could form a human shield by contracting and recovering from the virus. The young, whose educations are being squandered, whose freedoms have been sacrificed, whose jobs will be lost and who will be made to pay for decades to come for totalling the economy in the effort to sweep a virus under the carpet. If you want us to take individual responsibility, then it is time to start treating us as individuals.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/22/indiscriminate-measures-throw-nation-bus/

    1. “Shield those who need shielding and do everything to provide them with comfort and compensation for doing so.”

      Part of the reason we find ourselves in the situation that we do is precisely because those who needed shielding weren’t and those who didn’t were over-compensated and made too damned comfortable.

      1. I had six letters telling me to stay indoors. I was refused an INR appointment at the quacks because I was ‘at risk’ and should be at home.

        It is for me to risk my life. Not for the state to tell me how to. Government should inform those who might be. It can then make the consequences clear. It should not then control who goes where.

        1. I had to insist that I be served in the bank to pay my bills. The wimp behind the counter kept telling me I shouldn’t be out, I was putting myself at risk, etc, etc. He appears to be no longer working in the bank (probably became too neurotic), while I’m still here.

  108. It could be of course, that during the recent renovation work on Westminster that they uncovered a crypt and explored and now most are Vampyres (that would fit actually) and seek to spread the cult of the undead throughout the UK. Anyone a little difficult. Invite them in. A quick bite and they are in the club!

    We need Blade!

      1. Maybe Sue. I’ve constructed several theories to explain it but found not a smidgin of independent evdence to support one above the other. Perhaps I’ll find the Truth before the end! The one thing I’m certain of is that it is unutterably evil!

      1. Evening Stephen. I was just musing but I am not the only one to notice the oddities of personal behaviour in Westminster. One of Boris’s old mates has only observed today that he seems nothing like the man he’s known for thirty five years! Perhaps they are clones?

        3. Evening Minty. I once spent a week on a course with Harold Bridger of The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. (He was the Industrial Psychologist who advised Volvo to use seven man teams to build a complete vehicle). He told me that it took a minimum of three years for senior personnel to get to grips with their new roles. I think BJ is finding that being PM has a workload that is light years away from simply being Mayor of London. The only way to succeed is to delegate to competent individuals a) The task of exiting the EU successfully and b) Managing logical responses to the novel corona virus. (In this respect a Gove is not the answer). Do I know anything about managing? A little, shaped by being responsible for the efficient deployment of 2,500 staff.

          1. Yup. To manage any project successfully you need to develop the ability to delegate specific tasks to a team.

            Regrettably Boris Johnson is trying to delegate to a bunch of incompetents. He should have realised this by now as a supposedly competent manager but he persists with a team around him of self serving non-entities.

            Trouble ahead.

          2. Good evening King Stephen

            I made this point a couple of days ago. I think that Johnson should step back from the Covid 19 fiasco and delegate it to somebody else. This would leave him free to concentrate his efforts and attention on Brexit making sure that those determined to torpedo it are thwarted.

            .

          3. Hear, hear, Richard. Tasks like repealing the Human Rights Act, empowering both the current Border Farce and the Police Farce. Ensuring that the law is applied equally, regardless of colour, creed or sense of humour.

            That is what I (and his 80 seat majority) voted for – isn’t it?

  109. This woman is being sacked from a Church of England School for complaining about teaching which violates Christian teaching.

    There should be a mass march to Lambeth Palace with the demonstrators armed with stink bombs so that they can stink out that repulsive little piece of excrement who must have been appointed as the Archbishop of Canterbury by the Devil incarnate in Cameron..

    The demonstrators should also drag the wretch Welby to the Queen’s residence demanding that he be sacked forthwith – she is, after all, the Head of the Church of England.

    Do we really want to continue to call ourselves Britons – shouldn’t we be hanging our heads in shame?

    Daily Telegraph Story

    School employee sacked after sharing petition about LGBT lessons says it was ‘morally necessary’ to speak out
    Kristie Higgs said she was shocked to lose her job because one parent did not agree with something she shared on her Facebook page

    By
    Victoria Ward
    21 September 2020 • 6:00pm
    Kristie Higgs is suing the school for unfair dismissal
    Kristie Higgs is suing the school for unfair dismissal CREDIT: Christian Legal Centre/PA Wire
    A school administrator who was sacked after sharing a petition on Facebook objecting to lessons about same sex relationships, has told a tribunal that she was concerned parents “did not know what was going on.”

    Kristie Higgs, 44, described her shock after being sent home from Farmor’s School in Fairford, Gloucestershire, after a parent who saw her post complained.

    She said she was left “shaken” and scared to go out after being summoned to a meeting with the headmaster, Matthew Evans, and suspended.

    “I was concerned that a lot of parents all over the country and the world simply did not know what was going on,” Mrs Higgs said in a statement submitted to an employment tribunal in Bristol.

    “I remember saying to them: sorry to put you through this extra work, but what I posted is true – this is happening all over the world.”

    Mrs Higgs, who had worked at the secondary school for seven years without incident, was suspended and then dismissed for gross misconduct following a disciplinary hearing.

    A Facebook post shared by Kristie Higgs
    The Facebook post shared by Kristie Higgs CREDIT: Christian Legal Centre/PA Wire/A Facebook post shared by Kristie Higgs
    The mother-of-two, from Fairford, had shared and commented on Facebook posts that raised concerns about relationship education at her son’s Church of England primary school.

    The school had informed parents that pupils would learn about the No Outsiders programme, which teaches children about same sex couples and gender identity.

    Posting under her maiden name, she shared two posts in October 2018, visible only to around 100 friends.

    In one post, Mrs Higgs urged people to sign an online petition against making relationships education mandatory.

    In another, she shared an article about the rise of transgender ideology in children’s books in American schools by JudyBeth Wagoner, an American conservative Christian commentator.

    Explaining her religious beliefs in a statement to the tribunal, Mrs Higgs said: “As a Christian, I believe it is morally necessary to speak out in defence of the Bible truth when false and harmful doctrines are being promoted.

    “I believe that God created mankind as ‘male and female’ and what he has created is good. He does not make mistakes.

    “I therefore do not believe in the modern ideas of gender fluidity and transgenderism.”

    Mrs Higgs shared an article by an American conservative Christian commentator, JudyBeth Wagoner
    Mrs Higgs shared an article by an American conservative Christian commentator, JudyBeth Wagoner CREDIT: Christian Legal Centre/PA Wire
    Mrs Higgs said she had not thought too much about the subject until she got a letter about the No Outside programme from her son’s Church of England primary school.

    “I knew that there were cross-dressers and that the practice of cross-dressing had been expressly condemned in the Bible,” she said.

    “People cannot change something that has been established by God, such as their identity as a man or a woman.

    “I am aware that same-sex marriages are now recognised under UK law, but I believe that is contrary to God’s law – which only recognises marriages between one man and one woman.”

    Mrs Higgs told the tribunal that she was simply sharing information that she thought her friends and family would be interested in.

    “I just don’t think what I did was wrong on social media,” she said. “This is what I thought – they are brainwashing our children.”

    Debbie Grennan, representing the school, suggested some of the language used in the posts shared by Mrs Higgs was “extreme”.

    “Do you believe that because of your religious views you can post anything you like, no matter how reactionary,” the barrister asked.

    Mrs Higgs replied: “I believe that if it goes against the word of God people need to know about it.

    “I love God but I also have to follow the law of the land, but it doesn’t mean I can’t disagree.”

    Mrs Higgs has told Christian Concern, which is backing her unfair dismissal claim, that nobody was being forced to sign the petition she had shared.

    “It’s shocking to think that I’ve lost my job because one parent has complained to the school because they didn’t agree with what I’d shared on my Facebook page,” she said.

    “For the school to take sides with one parent who has complained is hard to believe.”

    Her lawyers will argue that her sacking breached her freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

    The hearing, which is expected to last a week, continues.

      1. For goodness sake – they manage old buildings and parks. What possible role have they in promoting gay rights and trans nonsense?

        1. It’s everywhere; today my postie delivered a couple of items of mail (by throwing them on the lid of the bin because my dog was standing by me – the dog watched, mystified, as the postie legged it down the path back to his van; the dog had been socially distanced from the postie all the while). When I looked at them they were both adverts, both featuring black women. The postie should have thrown them directly into the bin to save me the bother of putting them in the fire and setting light to them.

    3. It’s nuts.

      A man who thinks he’s a woman is mentally ill. Same as a woman who thinks she’s a man is.

      Marriage is between a man and a woman. Gay couples have civil partnerships. Equally it is wrong for gays to adopt or expect a surrogate to bear a child for them. They give up that option with their sexual choices.

      This isn’t demeaning or somehow derogatory – as no doubt would be seen – it is simply the acknowledgement that a choice cannot enforce parity with a tradition. Undo tradition and you unravel society.

      2. It’s not just tradition. Marriage is a contract designed to protect children conceived from heterosexual relationships. It’s simply not relevant to gay couples.
        Civil partnerships were a perfectly adequate way of ensuring inheritance etc rights between partners for gay couples. They had no logical reason to meddle with marriage – it was just spite, envy and the desire to destroy society.

    4. ““Do you believe that because of your religious views you can post anything you like, no matter how reactionary,” the barrister asked.”
      One would certainly expect to be able to freely and robustly express a Christian viewpoint in any media in this Christian country, without any concerns about upsetting people or facing reprisals..

  110. Migrants arrivals could break record again as ‘more than 400’ arrive in UK and overwhelm Border Force vessels as they rush to cross the Channel before weather changes
    At least 27 boats were brought into Dover, Kent by Border Force officials today
    Authorities deployed extra resources as crossings resumed after high winds
    Among those to arrive on five packed vessels were small children in life jackets

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8759671/Small-children-hundreds-migrants-arriving-UK-today.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailUK

    Dear Mother in Heaven, we might as well have used a ferry for them!

    Some one mentioned 700 today

    1. This has got to stop. It’s a bloody invasion fleet.

      Round them up, put them in luxury accommodation aboard a ferry. Sail to France and push them out.

  112. 323869+ up ticks,
    Now there’s a funny thing,

    Gerard Batten
    @GerardBattenUK
    ·
    23m
    Amazing insights on the deadly virus pandemic. Zuby should be on the Govnt’s advisory panel.
    Quote Tweet

    ZUBY:
    @ZubyMusic
    · 2h
    Things we’ve learned about the sentient Covid-19 virus based on policies:

    – it can count
    – it’s time-conscious
    – it supports BLM
    – it can distinguish between weddings, parties & funerals
    – it can distinguish between social & work settings
    – it can travel through the internet

    2. So sad, what is that possesses people so much that they feel that they cannot go on?

      It seems to me to be a very drastic solution. My Sympathies and condolences to Owen Paterson and his family.

      1. It’s when you get to the stage when you are existing, not living, and you can’t see an end to it. I experienced that this evening, but fortunately, I haven’t topped myself (been there, attempted that and discovered it didn’t actually solve anything).

    3. What a tragedy for the family.

      I have always thought that Owen Paterson is a very decent man. Indeed he is one of the very few MPs for whom I have respect.

  115. The National Trust’s job is to conserve our history – not vilify its heroes
    Wordsworth, Kipling and Churchill are being subjected to 2020’s lens. What gives an elite minority the right to traduce our past?

    SIMON HEFFER
    22 September 2020 • 2:35pm

    It has seemed for some years as though the National Trust has a death wish, as it dumbs down its properties and uses them more and more for publicity-seeking stunts. The fact that it has compiled a dossier of properties linked to “colonialism and slavery” appears to confirm my fear.

    Apparently, the Trust’s “experts” – few of whom, on the basis of what this says about their expertise, would deserve even the lowest class of history degree from the worst imaginable university – say that around a third of its properties are associated with the “sometimes-uncomfortable role that Britain, and Britons, have played in global history”.

    Yes, the good old National Trust – once the haven of well-preserved stately homes, woodland walks, and tea, jam and scones – is now determined to become part of that noisy elite minority that can’t let a day go by without engaging in an act of self-flagellation, and reminding us what a shocking country, and people, we supposedly are.

    The Trust seems not to understand that its role is to conserve our historic houses, artefacts and landscapes: it is not the administrator of some nationwide re-education programme. The “list of shame” about slavery and colonialism is a typical example of the ignorance of those in charge. First, there seems to be some confusion of the two terms. Most British colonies, and almost all of those in Africa, were established after slavery was abolished. Once definitions of iniquity become so loose, it is easy to shovel the reputations of almost any historical figure you like into them.

    So visitors to Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s house in Sussex, will need to brace themselves for a description of the wickedness of the man who gave us the phrase “the White Man’s Burden”. One would never have thought that a man who was the most popular writer of his age, revered by millions in this country and around the world – and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature – would have to be placed at a bargepole’s length from the present generation.

    Even less predictably, those visiting one of Wordsworth’s houses in the Lake District – the poet who wrote, of the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” – must also vicariously repent. William’s younger brother, John, once worked for the East India Company, an organisation with whom local Indian princes happily and profitably traded.

    But, inevitably, the focus of the outrage has been Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country house in north Kent. Churchill, whose minor achievement of managing our victory in the Second World War seems to count for nothing today, is condemned because while he was trying to stop Hitler’s programme of genocide and near-apocalyptic destruction, he failed to respond adequately to the Bengal famine.

    The latter was no laughing matter – it is estimated that between two and three million Indians died in it, either of starvation or of diseases caused by it. A debate has continued ever since about how far the disaster was man-made and how far an act of God; Bengal, now Bangladesh, had been hit by a cyclone, flooding and rice-crop disease. There being a war on, there was a severe shortage of shipping when it came to sending aid. To blame Churchill – whose political record in other respects was patchy, to say the least – is not so much harsh as ridiculous.

    Sir Winston is also attacked by the Trust for opposing Indian independence. Well, so did almost every leading British politician from 1858, when the British government took over running India from the East India Company, until the Second World War. God knows what the Trust are going to do about Disraeli, whose Buckinghamshire house, Hughenden Manor, is another of their properties: he was so enthusiastic about British rule in India that he arranged for Queen Victoria to become Empress of it.

    The Trust says it wants to present its visitors with “very painful” histories. Why? Since when was it the function of this conservation group to vilify so many of our historical figures, people who – when not engaging in acts of racial, sexual and gender oppression – were helping to forge a democracy that set an example followed around the civilised world?

    For too long, the Trust has treated its core clientele – middle-aged and elderly people – with near-contempt. Too many of their properties have been made what they call “accessible” – made into, effectively, children’s play centres, offering a potted version of Leftist history that is either sanitised or propagandistic.

    But the real stupidity of the Trust lies not in its allowing a highly questionable view of history to colour its presentation of its properties. It lies in digging its own grave even more deeply at a time when it is having to sack 1,200 of its 14,000 staff because of the Covid-19 crisis, and when partly because of that, but also partly because of its sod-the-public attitude, people have been staying away from its properties in droves. Hilary McGrady, the Trust’s director-general, needs to get a grip, lest her whole enterprise haemorrhage its core membership and head towards insolvency.

    This is the worst possible time for the Trust to start behaving in this aggressively irrelevant fashion. It could well provoke thousands of members to resign, and volunteers to go with them, because they will not be indoctrinated in this fashion, or told to loathe their country as some form of penance.

    It ought also to provoke an investigation by the Charities Commission about the Trust’s political activities. On the front page of its website, it boasts that it carries out its founders’ wishes “to care for nature, beauty and history”. Well, it shows a pitiful care for history to distort it as the fanatics who are now in control seem determined to do.

    “The values of our founders are still at the heart of everything we do,” the official preening continues. Oh really? One thing that can be said with certainty about the founders is that they started the Trust because they loved and wished to preserve Britain’s past – not to use it as the basis for an object lesson in self-hatred.

    1. They are determined to trash it one way or the other, either by inhibiting funding from its members or by trashing it themselves..

    2. If one does not like Britain there is always the option to return to one’s ancestral homelands and turn them into Utopia.

      But I’ll bet my pound to your brass farthing that those ancestral homeland will NOT be to your liking when you have to live there.

    3. I am not sure that the National Trust are suitable protectors of our great houses and estates. They managed to destroy Kingston Lacy by fire and then one of our finest, Clandon Park, also by fire.

      Having presided over the most incompetent maintenance regime at Clandon Park and following neglect of normal site health and safety controls when conducting building works involving lead burning at Kingston Lacy, they seem to have shrugged off all criticism and avoided liability.

      I liken the stupid women in charge at the National Trust to the cropped headed Scots woman who presided over the destruction by fire of the Mackintosh designed Glasgow School of Art, an architectural masterpiece, not once but twice.

      1. Muriel Gray, one of the media millionaires. It was nothing to do with her, obviously. Being the boss is just a sinecure with no responsibilities, dahling.
        No one bothered to wonder why they gave the GLA repair contract to a company that built a multimillion pound leisure centre, in Dumfries, that never opened as the work was so shoddy.

        1. They employed some idiot practice to restore the library after the first fire. Those idiots adopted a very precious method in its restoration. They mimicked the actual construction which was not in the specified oak but in tulipwood stained to imitate oak. The joints in the tulipwood framing were secured by driven wrought iron nails and these ‘fundamentalist’ restorers replicated in their restoration.

          Any architect worth his salt will have attempted to secure funding to restore the building using the original architect’s design and construction drawings. These showed the Architect’s intention to use oak in its construction.

          Any competent architect will have reasoned that the use of steel or iron nails in the cheapened construction as found would have assisted a fire, in that the metal nails will have transferred the heat of a fire to the timber and thereby exacerbated the fire.

          It is simply not good enough to say that these ‘architects’ given the task of restoration of the burnt library were acting in accordance with conservation principles. They were not. They were incompetent in not recognising the potential repeat of an historic proof of idiocy and of judgment.

          1. Interesting. The Devil is in the detail. I was remarking to an architect that the National Trust for Scotland had allowed* Hill House to crumble and deteriorate. He said that some of the detail in Mackintosh’s work led to the problems with water ingress etc. It was not a good design in that respect.
            (The architect worked on the restoration of Dumfries House)
            * I wrote to the NTS after visiting Broughton House in Kirkcudbright and seeing how dingy it was inside and the green slime on the outside where the drain pipes had been leaking for years.
            They said that they would get round to it.

  116. Research here in Norway has shown that, out of the 236 deaths from covid we have had:
    – 91% had a chronic illness as well, detailed below:
    – 56% had cardiovascular diseases
    – 35% had chronic lung damage
    – 28% had dementia
    – 12% had diabetes
    – 11% had cancer
    Adding those up, clearly some poor buggers suffered more than one of those problems.
    – Almost all were over 70
    – Most lived in the more populated parts of the country
    – Of those under 70 who died, they also had severe chronic illness(es)

    And the big one: The total deaths (of all causes) per 100.000 residents actually fell in early 2020 when compared with 2019, 2018 and back to 2015!
    (sorry, all in yer Weegie, added for reference) https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/gWPKla/nesten-alle-som-doede-av-koronaviruset-i-vaar-hadde-en-kronisk-sykdom
    I can’t post the graph of total death rates, see the article. EDIT: Yes, I can now. See below.

  118. I just thought that, since I miss the intercourse herein, I might try coming back to see if any attitudes might have changed.

    2. I saw your post when you left but i didn’t see the previous ones you referred to. You must know that if someone has suffered misfortune that some nottlers will always offer support. I don’t know what happened, whether it was the time of day or disqus as it sometimes does loses a post. But whatever it was we are all on your side. With the possible exception of Jennifer. 🙂

    3. Max the dog disliked your lynchmob pics but he closed his account in July. You’re pretty safe with the rest of us. Though stellen has been stealthily peeking in………..

      1. Thank you Julien, I hadn’t thought they’d have such an impact as I certainly had no wish to promote violence, rather establish a warning as to what what may yet happen if things continue the way they were heading. End of excuses.

        1. Most of us here have seen terrible things before. We’re glad to see you back!

          Who knows what the eventual outcome will be of all the things that are happening in the world and our country today. All we can do is live through it. I find this forum helps because all of us here are good people and most share our views.

  121. BTL Comment:

    Bobby47 on September 22, 2020 at 4:44 pm
    As I hurtle ever closer to my headstone that’ll read, ‘Fat Bob Has Fucked Off’, I’ve become increasingly convinced that a vote for any of them based upon what they’ve said and what they’ve promised is pointless and an exercise in absolute futility.

    Any relation Ogga?

      2. 323869+ up ticks,
        Evening AS,
        Currently thinking outside the box gives you more realistic answers, and a more credible line of understanding.

  122. Time-stamped 2.46 this afternoon but I think Mr Clark penned this after a glass or two some time before the PM’s announcement – it’s not just that there’s a certain ‘edge’ to it but that headline isn’t right…

    The PM must make sure his Covid policies don’t destroy our liberties for nothing

    Boris Johnson needs to stop trying to hide behind his scientists, when it’s unclear what science the Government is following

    ROSS CLARK

    In the coming weeks, it will surely come to be known as the ‘dodgy graph’ – after Tony Blair’s dodgy dossier on Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

    The graph presented by Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, showing new cases of Covid 19 doubling every seven days between now and mid-October, which time we would have 50,000 new infections per day, was the obvious take-away from their press “conference” on Monday.

    Had actual conferring been allowed, a reporter with an eye for statistics might have been able to pick up the pair for what looks like a pretty blatant attempt to scare us and make us more receptive to the new restrictions announced by the Prime Minister today.

    Vallance spoke first about Britain appearing to be following France and Spain in their second waves – and put up a graph apparently showing this. Yet cases in France and Spain have not been doubling every seven days – the assumption behind his projection for Britain. Cases there have been doubling about every three weeks – and already show signs of tailing off.

    “This is not a prediction,” Vallance told us while presenting his dodgy graph – yet if it was a mere scenario why didn’t he show us some alternative scenarios?

    The Vallance and Whitty Show has not done a lot for the reputation of government science. For months, the Prime Minister has been insistent that the scientific research is behind every decision he makes, yet where is the peer-reviewed evidence behind the new restrictions announced today?

    If I thumb through the Journal of Applied Virology, will I find paper quantifying the risk of spreading Covid-19 if you invite a 16th person to a wedding? I somewhat doubt it.

    We still don’t have much evidence as to whether face masks protect us against the disease, still less a rigorous computation of the chances of catching the virus from a maskless-waitress.

    The government is really just groping around in the dark. You can’t blame it for that, given that you can’t just will scientific research out of nowhere. Perhaps if Matt Hancock’s contact and trace app had worked, we would by now have a better idea of where and how people are catching Covid-19.

    Some geek might be able to analyse people’s movements in great detail and find common habits among those infected, and work out how close they had come to other infected people. But in the absence of good data, all the government and its advisers are really doing is saying: well, maybe a little bit less of this and that will get ‘R’ down.

    But what grates is the government’s insistence that it is ‘following the science’ when there is little science to follow. If the Prime Minister had stood up in Commons and said he was following his nose, or following the money, it would be a lot more honest. Above all, he should stop trying to hide behind the likes of Vallance and Whitty and start exercising his own judgement – and making sure his Covid policies don’t destroy our liberties for nothing.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/22/pm-must-make-sure-covid-policies-dont-destroy-liberties-nothing/

  123. “Rich associates of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein are about to receive some (or more) unwanted attention, after the Attorney General for the US Virgin Islands, Denise George, subpoenaed the logs for every single flight made by Epstein’s four helicopters and three planes between 1998 and his death in 2019, according to The Mirror”.

    BTL comment on ZH:

    “Mysteriously the flight logs will decide to commit suicide by venturing into a paper shredder, then an incinerator”

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