Tuesday 30 September: The BMA’s latest strike threat shows it doesn’t care about public health

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its commenting facility (now reinstated, but we prefer 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.

669 thoughts on “Tuesday 30 September: The BMA’s latest strike threat shows it doesn’t care about public health”

      1. But …. but …..; it's perfectly all right to deprive indigenous Britons of housing.
        Ditto deliberately mismanaging British taxpayers' money.

    2. For those who cannot access.
      You can't keep an old hack down.

      After weeks of stalling in the face of my emails , Elmbridge council in Surrey- Weybridge, Esher, Walton-on-Thames-has finally admitted to me they have taken £5.2million earmarked for affordable housing ( ie local people) and spent it on buying up 24 homes for migrants from Afghanistan, Syria etc.
      Not only are hard-up local families being denied these places but local residents
      were denied the right to know about the purchases by a hopeless coalition of Lib Dems and Resident Associations,
      The £5million+ came from money given to the council by property developers when it wasn’t appropriate to build affordable homes on their site.
      The council claims in a statement to me that when, and, if the migrants move on the local people will have their chance to move in.
      Don’t make me laugh. Why on earth would a family living in a clapped out house in a clapped out neighbourhood in Kabul give us a nicely refurbished joint in upmarket Weybridge. Ever.
      You can be sure if a place did come up it would be filled by another migrant.
      What I find objectionable is that there has been no local debate on the subject.
      As far as I can tell millions of our money was just nodded through as councillors felt if the local voters knew they would object.
      There will be local elections next year and all Reform would have to do is tell this story and all the councillors would be thrown out.
      I wonder if Lib Dem council
      Leader Mike Rollings has heard of open government- he should try it sometime.

      1. Maybe they were ordered to by the Department of Housing (and Community Affairs) which intends to abolish local democracy entirely soon? Wasn't Surrey one of the counties where local elections were cancelled, so that Elmbridge could be swallowed up by a new regional commissariat?

        Front page this week in the 'Malvern Gazette' is that Malvern Hills District Councl has been ordered to pass more planning applications for the big property development companies or they will have all local planning decision-making taken from them so that the Secretary of State can make a direct decision over which 500-home application on formerly prime farmland to pass and which garden shed extension from someone whose live doesn't matter to turn down.

        Local councillors here are arguing that there is already quite a bit of land with planning permission, but not being built on because the only money is in providing homes for "asylum seekers', since the pockets of the Magic Fairy funding central Government are deep and the powers to extort more from locals great.

  3. Good morning, chums. And thanks, Geoff, for today's new NoTTLe site. Today's Wordle was a Bogey for me.

    Wordle 1,564 5/6

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    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Good morning Elsie and all
      I tried the "completely random word that can't be the right solution approach" and it paid off today. Mostly it leaves me feeling a bit silly!
      Wordle 1,564 4/6

      ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
      🟨⬜⬜⬜🟩
      ⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
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    3. Can you see his collar number (or whatever it's called)? No? Then he's not a warranted Police Constable, and can be punched in the face.

      3. To denote his job.
        When you attend protests or other massed events the police wear different coloured caps to denote their roles in the event.

      4. The back of his jacket says “Police Liaison”; I have no idea who he is supposed to be liaising with but he seems to be totally unfit for any sort of liaison.

    6. Disgusting. He'll probably get a medal for bravery in the face of the enemy and a recommendation for promotion. I hope his next free pork pie is infested with toxic worms.

  8. I'm over eighty years old but I have no proof of that apart from my birth certificate which is under my bed.
    However I can just tell disqus that I acknowledge that I need to be over 18 to use this site.
    Will the Government stop free speech by legislating that I must produce digital evidence of how old I am?

    Morning all….oh should I have really said that?🤔

    2. Good morning Angie – yes, of course they will! Taht's what the digital id's for – snooping on you on the internet, sorry, I mean protecting children.

      1. Hi BB2,

        I can only buy a bladed product from Amazon by proving my age through having an Experian account. I don’ t have one so I cannoy buy razor blades even for craft.

        I shall have to resort to fabricating them from old railway tracks and then sharpening with a whetstone. Either that or I can become hairy all over.

        1. I go to the shop and hand over physical money (not that it has any intrinsic worth, but the shop believes it does) in exchange for goods.

          1. I note that it is now recommended to take cash in your in case you wish to park it somewhere.

    3. I’m answer to your ?, yes. The digital world is not that friendly to we oldies in so many ways. Could it be they want rid of us? (Rhetorical!).

      1. It is clear that the UK .working population is decreasing and no longer able to support all those who are not.

        The only answer to even stay the same way is for the GDP to increase . This very much depends on thriving businesses and the way things are going there is a poor outlook.

        The older generation are the targets for the Government to raise money because those who have relied on state benefits haven’t saved a big pot of money for supporting later life.

        Private pension pots are therefore a prime target as well as those who’ve saved enough to retire comfortably in later life. The capital assets, particularly farmers, are the target for raising money from future generations.

        1. HMG is busy discouraging people from working, certainly from trying to improve their lot/obtaining promotion etc. They are taxing the country into oblivion, penury and slavery.

          1. Slavery?
            Boatloads of jobless fit males arriving every day?

            There could be a solution somewhere here to both problems and kill two birds with one stone.

          2. Yep. When MOH died, my household income reduced significantly (no extra pension coming in, no carer's allowance) so what did HMRC do? Whacked up my tax so I was paying more tax on less money.

  9. Er, Geoff, it looks as if there are once again two separate pages for Tuesday's new NoTTLe page. One needs to be cancelled quickly or we'll have the same problem we had yesterday.

    1. My attempt to log in initially was thwarted, with an error message "There is a database error!"
      That might have shown two versions of today's page. I can only see one.

  10. Morning all 😉🙂🤗
    Grey and only 5 c. Oh dear, winter draws on eh.
    Another Strike by the medical people, don't they have anything better to do ?
    Big day for us today…..do we stay or do we go now ?

  11. Michael Deacon
    Forget Trump and Blair. Let’s put Greta Thunberg in charge of Gaza

    She and her fellow Left-wing celebrities have done so much for the Palestinian cause. So here’s the perfect way to reward them

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2025/09/29/TELEMMGLPICT000427019609_17591596412400_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwVSYfRx-a0rm-wOQ3-QTCoU.jpeg?imwidth=1280
    Once the war between Israel and Hamas is finally over, who should run Gaza? On Monday night, Donald Trump said he and Tony Blair would do it. With all due respect to these two great statesmen, however, I believe there is a candidate who would be even more deserving of the role.

    Greta Thunberg.

    After all the selfless work she’s done in support of the anti-Israel cause, I think putting her in charge of Gaza would be the perfect reward. And, to assist her, I would appoint a cabinet consisting entirely of those wonderful white Western celebrities who, ever since October 7, 2023, have made such a charming show of donning keffiyeh scarves, denouncing “Zionists”, and righteously calling for a “free Palestine”.

    My reasoning is simple. An awful lot of horribly cynical people seem to think that a “free Palestine” would in practice prove to be a brutally oppressive Islamist hellhole. So I want to give these delightful celebrities the opportunity to show that it can instead be the progressive paradise of their dreams. A glorious beacon of equal rights, compassion and inclusivity.

    First of all, I imagine, President Greta and her ministers will be eager to promote multiculturalism. As progressive celebrities never tire of reminding us, diversity is our strength. So they will doubtless wish to ensure that diversity becomes Gaza’s strength, too. To this end, they should build lots of synagogues and Christian churches.

    For the same reason, they should also open plenty of pubs, bars and nightclubs. Earlier this month, academics in Leicester argued that, to make the British countryside feel less “exclusionary” to Muslims, rural pubs and restaurants must serve halal food. So, following the same logic, Gaza should be made to feel less exclusionary to non-Muslims, by serving alcohol everywhere.

    Next we come to the question of women’s rights. The men of Gaza, I feel sure, will be overjoyed to have a young female leader like Greta, and will implore her to end the gender inequality that unaccountably blights their land. For example, by abolishing the “modesty police”, and overturning the ruling by a Hamas-run court that any woman wishing to travel anywhere must first secure the permission of a male “guardian”.

    If Greta and her showbiz regime really want to prove the doubters wrong, however, the most important move they can make is as follows. On the very day they take office, they should host Gaza’s first ever LGBTQIA+ Pride parade. Festoon every building with rainbow flags, organise floats celebrating every possible form of sexual orientation, and invite the pro-Palestinian rap trio Kneecap to perform a cover of YMCA by the Village People. What better way to let local residents show their gratitude to the Western activist group Queers for Palestine?

    It should go down an absolute treat.

    Kissing cousins
    According to a somewhat surprising article published last week by NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme, marrying your first cousin can actually be good for you. Narrow-minded reactionaries may harp on about the increased risk of birth defects, but apparently they’re overlooking the practice’s myriad benefits, such as “stronger extended family support systems” and “economic advantages” – which we should all recognise, in order to avoid “stigmatising certain communities and cultural traditions”.

    An intriguing argument. I especially liked the bit pointing out that the practice was in fact legalised by an English king: Henry VIII, who in 1540 “passed a new law that enabled him to marry Catherine Howard”.

    Ah yes, Henry VIII. That shining role model to anyone who wishes to enjoy a happy, healthy and long-lasting marriage. Whenever anyone asks me the secret to a successful relationship, I always say: “Just follow the example of Henry VIII, you can’t go far wrong.”

    At any rate, NHS England has clearly sensed that the above claims are proving a touch controversial – because a spokesman has hastily made clear that the article “is not expressing an NHS view”. Well, that’s a relief. I was dreading my next trip to the GP.

    “Doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I feel absolutely awful.”

    “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Deacon. Have you considered trying incest?”

    “Pardon?”

    “Oh yes, it’s terribly good for you. Don’t listen to any of those old wives’ tales about ‘serious congenital disorders’ and ‘degenerative diseases’. Just marry a blood relation, and you’ll be right as rain in no time.”

    “Are you quite sure, doctor?”

    “Certainly. And if for any reason it doesn’t work out, just have your wife beheaded. That’s what Henry VIII would have done, so it’s fine.”

    2. By the time he married Catherine Howard, Henry VIII was suffering from ill health – and, it was rumoured, impotence, so there was little prospect of any children. Court gossip claimed the Queen was pregnant in April 1541 but either she lost the child or, more likely, the rumours were unfounded. Anyway she never had children either deformed or not deformed.

    3. Henry VIII was not related to Catherine Howard. Catherine was a cousin of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn.

          1. I'm not sure I'm descended from anything more civilised than apes. I get a feeling when I look at trees…

    4. BTL:

      Christopher Land
      2 hrs ago
      Very good article Mr. Deacon, the idea of Greta and her special collective running Gaza is inspirational and should keep her busy and out of Ed Milibands clutches for the foreseeable. I can even see our Ed becoming more involved in Middle East politics as a result, thus saving the UK from becoming a third world low energy economy.

      J Finnemore
      2 hrs ago
      Reply to Christopher Land
      As EM is Jewish he might have a difficult time in Gaza

      A Allan
      2 hrs ago
      Reply to J Finnemore
      Good. Another reason to send him.

    1. I shudder to think what Starmer's definition of "A better Britain" is and seriously doubt if his vision matches that of the vast majority of British People.

      1. Maybe a 'great leap forward'.

        Of course, tractor production will not be up as we can't produce the steel for the parts.

    4. Your vision of better is expensive, authoritarian, abusive and unwanted. A truly better Britain is far simpler and has no place for scum like you, Starmer. It's also comedically cheap, as there's one tax of 18% and no others. The state is a tenth the size it currently is, the waste has gone, you can't meddle or interfere.

      But that isn't what you want, so your statist fascism is, of course, expensive – in every sense of the word.

  14. Oops!
    Just got a bit distracted. Should have posted my Good morning ½ an hour ago!
    Anyway, good morning all.
    Dry with clear sky and little wind and 8½°C.

    One of the things I was distracted about was this X-Tw@ter clip I've just reposted. https://x.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1972916071884849570 A pity the OP does not say who this brave young lass is or provide a link to her site so we can show support for her.

      3. Agree, been happening for a number of years on the qt in the UK. Many calls for it to be outlawed, but continues.

          2. Robbery has been outlawed since the dawn of time, and still continues. What's needed is certainty of being apprehended, followed by consequences that are unpleasant.

    3. Genital mutilation is obscene, primitive and repulsive.

      Every Muslim in both Houses of Parliament should be condemning this barbaric practice loud and often. All the MSM should be publishing this story.

      Come on Home Secretary – what do you have to say – or is this an integral part of your faith that means more to you than anything else?

    4. Genital mutilation is obscene, primitive and repulsive.

      Every Muslim in both Houses of Parliament should be condemning this barbaric practice loud and often. All the MSM should be publishing this story.

      Come on Home Secretary – what do you have to say – or is this an integral part of your faith that means more to you than anything else?

    5. Poor girl. This scandal would not have happened without white liberals bending over backwards to cover and and protect the perpetrators.
      Powerless young white and brown girls suffering at the hands of the same people…

    1. Enjoy it whilst it's with you Ndovu…are you still planting bulbs? Here in the wilds of Scottish Scotland, heavy rain forecast. On the cave for the big black cat I saw yesterday…..

      1. Happy birthday.
        81 is a splendid number 3x3x3x3.
        The last of the likely number multiple ages until the ton 10×10

    1. Righty, then, if you want to 'renew' the country when are you resigning? As what you want is declinist and immiserating. Renewal would be small government, scrapping of countless nonsense legislation, cheap energy, low taxes and a small, controlled state.

      Starmer offers none of these things.

  18. Starmer Stasis just lowered the bar. According to George Galloway
    At Gatwick, he was told: ❌ “You are not under arrest.” ❌ “You are not free to leave.” ❌ “You do not have the right to remain silent.”

    innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It is the duty of the prosecution to provide evidence of the defendant's guilt. The Right to Remain Silent exists as a consequence of this.

    2. George Galloway is a relic of a bygone era. He's a 1970s characterful, rebellious politician somehow transplanted into the grey new world of yes-men. I don't agree with his politics but we need mavericks like him in the house of commons.

    3. Why, if not under arrest could he not leave? Surely that's false imprisonment?

      As for you have to answer their questions – then you're free to lie.

      1. It's the Terrorism act. Apparantly they are abusing it as they always will if you give the fuzz any excuse. I have noticed that the English police are actually far worse than the Americans for this sort of stuff. But then the constitution and the amendments makes it harder for them because it lacks the ambiguity of the English system. I have seen, on line, English police threaten to arrest people because the person is making them feel uncomfortable. A joke if ever there was one. You can hurl the most unpleasant remarks at an American policeman and there isn't much he can do about it.

    4. I think you'll find that thanks to the EU, it is no longer a case of "innocent until proven guilty". Corpus Juris requires you to prove your innocence and there is no such thing as habeas corpus. As for the right to remain silent, I'm sure that went before the vote to leave.

    1. Yo! Mr Effort! Grattis på födelsedagen to Skeggy! Hope it's a good 'un. 👍🏻🎂🍷🎉😊

  20. Good Morning!

    Today we have a report, Nigerian Christians Wonder Why Nobody Cares, that looks into the largely unreported war on Christians being waged by Islamist terrorists, and of the Nigerian governments corruption-ridden response.

    We needed something to lower blood pressure, and The Man from Historical Accuracy , about how history gets like it is and how it is kept that way does that. But make sure you read Mark Steele claims about serious illness, surveillance, crowd control and even de-population being the goal of the The 5G Death Ray Plan and the related sinister plan to introduce a totalitarian surveillance state by means of digital ID in Digital Dictatorship: Why We Must Reject Digital ID .

    Energy Watch: Over the last 24 hours: Britain's average power requirement was 31.1 GW, sourced from Gas, 46.7%; Solar, 6.7%: Wind 9%; Imports, 15.3%; Biomass, 10.4%; Nuclear 8.1% and Miscellaneous, 3.7%.

    Digital ID, as proposed by our evil government, is a sinister move towards totalitarian oppression. Please sign the petition opposing it; https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194 and ask all your friends, colleagues and family to do so. Over 2,566,000 have.

  21. A.I. Trouble

    Sir – My passport expired in April, so I applied online for another one. A new A.I. system read my request.

    Unfortunately, this A.I. is skewed. It requested a newer photo (fair enough) but, while I sent several via my Android tablet, it refused to accept them and stopped my application. I wrote a letter to the Passport Office explaining the circumstances and got my application action renewed – only for the A.I. to kill it again.

    By all means use A.I. to slim down bureaucracy: but make sure it actually works, before you jettison the human staff.

    Andrew Healy
    Ashford, Middlesex

    The idiotic A.I. [Artificial Imbecility] nonsense needs to be excised at source. It is nothing but another tool being used by the controllers to … control.

    Where are the modern-day I.T. Luddites when you need them?

    1. It is NOT AI. It's just heuristic programming to match parameters. AI would have said 'Righty, let's do this together' and would have worked with you to get the photo needed.

      Or, more likely, it wouldn't have bothered and just sent a new one knowing your history, nature, work, lack of a criminal record, time living at current address and a host of other issues.

      That's intelligence. What is called AI is just marketing BS.

      1. I don't understand why newer images are tagged as IA. They look just like a new style of CGI put together by humans using newer computer software. IA is being touted as some miraculous new thing that will save mankind but I have my doubts, The term is grossly overused.

    1. He's not wrong…plus…Daily Sceptic today on exploding phones/pagers. Brave New World. Immigration still the No.1 issue.

    2. 'Morning All
      They're already come for our children!!
      fingerprints for school dinnersFFS
      Please pass this on
      "Right now, most people seem horrified by the introduction of digital ID cards in the UK because of the impact to our privacy and freedom. But did you know that the same systems are being quietly introduced for children via the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill? And this doesn't get deleted at 18.
      The government is bringing in digital IDs for children, collecting their data and setting them up for lifelong monitoring. It might be justified by saying it's for safeguarding, education and healthcare, but its a permanent digital record that follows them everywhere.
      Children cannot opt out or control how their data is used. Their information will be shared widely, justified as safety, but it will create detailed profiles that can be used as the government sees fit, open to all kinds of uses and potential data leaks.
      If we value privacy and autonomy for ourselves, we must safeguard children even more. Accepting child digital IDs is accepting universal surveillance by default.
      The technology involved is the same as with adult digital IDs, but the implications are deeper. We need to ensure that the rights and freedoms of young people are preserved, otherwise we are accepting it for our future adults."

      Petition, Withdraw the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill:

      2. Petition link?

        I have seen some speculation that the adult digital id was designed to be resisted and 'fail' while they sneaked the same thing in behind people's backs. It has been introduced so clumsily, and the petition was so widely promoted on alt media, and the Tories, etc were all against it, and we know they are NEVER against Agenda 2030!
        Could this be that?

  23. Adrift in a society ruled by 'smart' [sic] technology.

    SIR — Eleanor Mills (“Older people are being shut out of society by the obsession with smartphones”, Features, September 26) is spot on in her assessment of the impact of our app-based culture on older people.

    My 96-year-old aunt has deteriorated from an independent, happy, confident person to a depressed shadow of her former self who is constantly complaining. In her words: “I can’t do anything for myself now: I can’t make a doctor’s appointment; I can’t pay any bills and I can’t sort my money because you need one of these modern phones for everything.”

    She feels isolated, helpless and totally dependent on others. Many other older people clearly feel the same. What a tragedy to end a long and happy life feeling cut off from the society you’ve supported through a world war and beyond.

    Eve Wilson
    Hill Head, Hampshire

    SIR — I have some sympathy for the elderly aunt of Eleanor Mills, who finds the use of smart technology restricting.

    Being in a similar age group, I am able to use parking apps, shop online, and use mobile banking. However, having just bought a new washing machine, I am beaten.

    Julia Wilson
    Rainham, Kent

    Welcome to the Brave New World of the Great Reset. Of course you are confused (as am I). You are just worthless drainers of the ecomony, reources and oxygen that the world rulers wish to dispose of quickly. They have no intention, whatsoever, of making your lives any easier.

    1. Tis true.
      Here Jeremy Clarkson explains to Harry Metcalfe that the car peaked in 2015.
      After the introduction of the dreaded "screens" it all went downhill.
      BMW even require an Apt to open an air vent!
      Some cars need a checklist sign off before allowing you to proceed. Even after filling up for petrol.
      .
      Just press play.. it's at the segment.
      https://youtu.be/DXCfADxDHrc?t=1442

      1. We’ve just had our kitchen updated and have the new version of the Electrolux oven and multi oven we had in our previous home 12 years ago. The new version is under the AEG marque and has an App to control it but we’ve decided to use the buttons on a screen similar to those Clarkson talks about.
        In all honesty it’s a bloody nightmare and a classic example of technological advancement but it’s definitely not progress.

        1. Touch controls are cheaper. Says it all really.

          Here the so-called "professional" grade stoves, hobs, tend to retain knobs. One of the off putting things about induction cooktops, which I contemplated in a moment of "green" silliness, is they all seem have touch controls in the surface, which in many cases are far from clear and intuitive. Nothing like turning a decent size knob to control gas burners.

          1. I acquired an induction hob and oven, both Electrolux, when I moved here 13 years ago. They are between 20 and 25 years old by now. The induction hob works well, but the touch-sensor controls are nearly invisible on the black sheen surface. I have long been frustrated by the Swedes' insistence on having just one oven (with a rudimentary grill facility within). Trouble is you cannot use both concurrently. Trying to find a double oven here is impossible.

            To overcome this one-oven silliness, I invested in a Ninja 'Speedi' multi-cooker that air-fries, roast, bakes, steams, grills and performs a few more functions. It actually roasts better than the main oven does. My new Instant Pot pressure cooker is also much better than my old stovetop Tefal unit that filled the kitchen with steam.

            No gas in this house (or village).

      2. The more I read about new cars and their built-in embuggerations and spyware, the more determined I am to hang onto the Noddy car.

      3. I love my Genesis. It has a screen for the "set and forget" functions, but all those used regularly are buttons or knobs. Only issue is a few of the low use buttons tend to be obscured by the spokes of the steering wheel. Plus, it is utterly reliable. Never had to have any dealer repairs in 8 years. Guess what my first choice for my next car will be? If I ever need one, that is.

    2. In trying to move my account to Scottish Power they kept pushing 'use the app to communicate, use the app'. Which you duly open – a subset of the web page, by the way. With said app open you find you can't do anything different. The chat is the same useless, robot fixed responses that are no use whatsoever. The phone number no different. You call it and are told to enter the same dribbling tripe and are, just as equally cut off as because 'they're too busy'.

      Same as you can't 'book' a doc appointment through my doctor's app. There should be a waiting list to book you in automatically but no, it's just call up and hope. All fine, but don't push people toward 'un app' as if it's the saviour of the planet.

      I can order my prescriptions over the web, true. But I don't always get the ping to say they're ready.

      Some apps are genuinely quite good, with really useful information that's up to date, locally stored so fast to gather the data. Others are just worthless, rushed out, slow, data expensive, hard to use nonsense.

      A long time ago on a Top Gear, Clarkson pointed out that Land Rover buttons were bigger so you could poke them using gloves. It's a simple thing, but sensible for their market. I've just booked a doc appointment and the time chooser was NOT where the error message appeared. The next button was half the size of my little finger, which is the size of Portugal. There's no thought goes into the user or usability. Teams – the ghastly Microsoft nonsense; when you join it pops up a dialog that obscures the join info on the page. It's all rubbish UX.

      We've a big set of Unifi using customers now and even there a huge number of tools and management features are hidden under 'Settings' which is at the bottom of the page on the left side rather than part of the main feature set. I get it, there's an awful lot of configuration options but it's clumsy.

      1. Last night, I attempted to log on to the Pru to view some important documents. I couldn't, as apparently I didn't have an ID. So, I tried to create one, and this failed several times because I have an ID… so I tried to reset, but that wasn't possible as the ID does not exist… finally, a message appeared that said that I am not allowed an ID as I am representing someone else (ie, Mother).
        I have yet to get through on the phone to ask, bluntly, WTF?

          1. Just spoke with a helpful young lady with the most beguiling voice and gorgeous Scots accent. My communications preference is now set to "physical mail".

        2. My wife asked me to help her log into a site and it required her date of birth. I tapped on the date field and up came a monthly calendar which could not be closed until you had scrolled back 70 odd years month by month to select the correct date. I gave up.

        3. I have a similar problem with Premium Bonds – I apparently have an account but on an old email address. I can’t recall having a password but probably did, but as the email linked to it no longer exists it’s useless. However as I did have an account, computer says no to a new one!!

      2. I am an app developer as you know, and that is why I have never had a smartphone. Apps have always been work, not play, to me. They can deliver information that wasn't previously available, eg petrol prices in the area, but mostly they aren't any improvement on other ways to do the same task.
        What they bring into people's lives is this "always on" mentality where you can never get away from the internet – and that is very damaging.
        I will never get a smartphone voluntarily. Horrid things.

      3. I am an app developer as you know, and that is why I have never had a smartphone. Apps have always been work, not play, to me. They can deliver information that wasn't previously available, eg petrol prices in the area, but mostly they aren't any improvement on other ways to do the same task.
        What they bring into people's lives is this "always on" mentality where you can never get away from the internet – and that is very damaging.
        I will never get a smartphone voluntarily. Horrid things.

      4. Where are you moving from Wibbling? Because if you not moving from Octopus, I would suggest going there. They are easy to get on the phone if you want to speak to a real person and they will take care of everything for you.

      5. My folks 87 and 86 years old are, like myself, with Scottish Power. After a few failures via their land-line, I now send an email from my Web page login, passing on my parents latest meter readings.

        Dear Sir/Madam,
        blah,
        blah,
        blah.
        Yours faithfully Feargal.

        The last paragraph always states that my folks are not online, do not possess a smart phone, and are therefore unable to communicate via the Web or by App. Before I describe their call centre as being unfit for purpose, and that Scottish Power should confirm receipt of the new meter readings by mail to my folks.

        There's usually a reply confirming that they will do so, followed by an 'offer' for them to use the App. 🙄

    3. I have a smartphone and I use it. I bank online on my laptop. I don't use my phone for making payments and I don't use parking apps. I use the laptop for online shopping. I don't want to have everything on a small device which could be easily mislaid or lost or stolen.

        1. Ditto, except it's all done from my desktop, which never moves outside the house. Only "other" access is daughter who has a key to the house and the iMac PW's in case I am "off line" for some reason.

          It's funny after two careers, one as a vehicle development engineer with both BMC and then Ford, followed by a 35+ year career in computers, I was happy to let it all go when I retired, but it does mean I am not bothered by new gizmos. Much less of an issue that being responsible for the custom operating systems and language software used by multiple data centres running what were then super computers.

          1. I'm also a dyed-in-the-wool desktop man. I've tried both laptop (iBook) and mini iPad in the past but I had no patience with the damn things.

        2. Ditto, except it's all done from my desktop, which never moves outside the house. Only "other" access is daughter who has a key to the house and the iMac PW's in case I am "off line" for some reason.

          It's funny after two careers, one as a vehicle development engineer with both BMC and then Ford, followed by a 35+ year career in computers, I was happy to let it all go when I retired, but it does mean I am not bothered by new gizmos. Much less of an issue that being responsible for the custom operating systems and language software used by multiple data centres running what were then super computers.

    4. My 84 year old, profoundly deaf friend (who grows my tomato plants on to the planting out stage) doesn't use a computer. She drives and lives alone. When she phones she uses a relay system – the third person on the line listens to my responses and texts them to her. I will go and see her in a couple of weeks – we'll have a cup of tea and discuss whether the varieties of tomatoes did well or not. I'll take her some hedgehog calendars too. She's very bright and switched on but doesn't use the internet at all.

    5. Sorry, I don't have any sympathy. If you need something to get along in everyday life, then learn how to use it. I really don't understand the attitude on the part of old people that they should just stop learning because of age. It is a crap attitude. And if you think like that then maybe you need to trot, or would it be, stagger? To the "Ethical Suicide Parlor" because you are as good as dead anyway. I hope that I'm still learning something on my death bed. Life isn't life if you are not learning something. My annoyance is that life isn't long enough, so much to learn but not enough time.

      1. Well, I have no sympathy for your response.

        I am 74 and I can works most things out in this modern age. But someone in their mid-90s is going to be completely baffled by modern technology, especially if they are losing some of their facilities. Are you going to tell them it is time they shuffled off?

        1. No. If I get to that point I think the Ethical Suicide Parlor is a very inviting prospect. Otherwise what is the point? I'm 76 so I outrank you in the Ancient of days stakes. I think I'm 77 next month but I don't keep track so maybe it will be my 76 birthday? Anyway I'm in the addled by age range.

          I do, seriously, have a rule. Always learn something new every day.

          1. I’ve had the same rule all my short (74 yrs) life. As the eldest of a tribe of five I seemed to be the only curious one. I spent my childhood with my nose stuck inside an 8-volume encyclopaedia (Waverley’s The Book of Knowledge) which I still own thought it is severely dog-eared. Asking my poorly educated and serially uncurious parents anything was a waste of time. My ingrained curiosity and undying yearning to learn has never left me.

          2. I remember ‘The book of knowledge’ My parents brought it for me. For years it was my nighttime companion sometimes far into the night as I read something that would send me off on a hunt for more information about a topic. Thanks for that Griz, it brings back such nice memories.

          3. I'm already 77 and I'm (for my age) fairly tech savvy, but I have every sympathy. Why shouldn't we be able to use cash instead of an app to pay for things, why shouldn't we be able to describe our symptoms to a doctor and make an appointment without an econsult or going on line? We are losing the human element (and my experience of econsult is that it's crap and a cop out).

          4. That’s a different argument and one I entirely agree with. I do not like, at ally the way we are being more and more regulated. But the phone thing is now a necessity. I resisted until I was more or less forced to get one and abandon my faithful Nokia, all that did apart from being a phone was something I could text on. But, as they say: “needs must.” and needs dictate that one have the electronic dictator in your pocket. We are not, sadly enough, going to return to the days of cash even though I would, like you prefer it. As for the doctor, I don’t use the phone but I do have to use a computer and a land phone.

          5. Actually you can do without a smartphone and just have one that only does calls and texts. I did it today. Mainly because I left my smartphone with camera on the table when I left. I managed to buy petrol and go shopping without needing it.

          6. Trouble for me is that I’m housebound so I do almost everything via computer or phone. Prefer using the computer actually.

  24. Morning all
    Fine morning ,sunshine , chilly .

    Pip spaniel wanders around the house with a sock in his mouth, soon time for walkies !

    I wrote a little something on Tom Armstrong's site .. and I am just going to post a little bit of muddled Maggie thinking ( talking about me )

    Off topic , I feel that the Labour party is similar to a post Independence African party , inexperienced and unable to use strong skills to initiate stability in Britain .. They are post Colonial .. and knowing how countries in Africa like the Sudan, Nigeria , Uganda , Kenya and even South Africa post Colonial, have deteriorated into madness and financial decline , surely that fact should be a warning to us all .

    We do not need /require mixed government , we do not require multifaith governments , we will be courting trouble because of ineptitude and negligent treatment of our own English / Scottish/ Welsh residents ..

    The breach of freedom of speech has demonised everything we think about this appalling Labour government .

    Re our flags , the visitors and accepted new foreign residents should be made to kiss our flags , and accept them as much as they have accepted our hospitality ?

      1. Don't think we'll reach that height here, but have got the washing out as better off outside than in. Would like to get the bedlinen in as the top sheet has torn.

    2. When we got our green cards, many years ago, we were required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, never mind for citizenship – which was actually a lot easier as the heavy lifting had been done to get the Green Cards,

  26. Farage is ‘racist’, suggests Streeting

    What's so very wrong about being racist? There are times and places when I don't like my own race…including my children…or the crowds of spectators at the Ryder Cup…and, and, and…

    1. It is the last desperate attempt to slur, deride and destroy the messenger because the message hurts.

      Massive uncontrolled immigration is an economic issue that became a social issue and is now a public safety issue.

      Thus they squeal 'waycist' in a last, desperate effort to silence debate on the topic. So profligately and the gimmigrant is so dangerous it doesn't work any more

    2. One of many racists who was rational rather than bigoted.

      I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.

      Charles Bukowski

      (Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who used his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life.)

    3. 'Racism' is just another word for 'Tribalism', and the whole human race is tribal. Had we not been tribal and formed mutual-help groups, we would not have survived coming down from the trees.

      1. Talking of which, chimpanzee tribes tend to be a bit protective of their territory.
        To the extent of killing and eating any intruders.

    4. Being accused of being a "racist" is irrelevant nowadays, it doesn't even make the hand move on the outrageometer. Seems to me being accused of supporting Labour is far worse. That will bring some powerful responses of detestation and maybe, assault even by the man on the Clapham omnibus. The inability of the left to come up with some truly valuable criticisms just shows how intellectually and politically bankrupt they really are.

  27. Trump to run Gaza with Blair
    US president promises to bring ‘eternal peace to Middle East’ as head of governing board alongside former prime minister
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/09/29/trump-gaza-peace-plan-netanyahu/

    with Blair?
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c463e6f5da9a2b39103ce3f70d4915e553b5e3169645f68aacc306362a3f7231.jpg

    Oh dear: I seem to be having a McEnroe moment.

    BTL (by Excitable Boy)

    Blair? The man who illegally invaded Iraq is in charge of a peace mission? It’s like appointing Dracula as protector of the blood bank.

    1. Who cares? Shove him out there.
      Mossad and IDF will know which hotel he's chosen.
      The rest – particularly Blair – is history.

  28. Article, I believed referenced here the other day,

    How Labour abandoned the working class
    Now the posh party for London’s middle class and elite, it has turned its back on its core voters – and the numbers prove it
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/labour-abandoned-working-class/

    A BTL Comment:-

    The middle class Marxist infiltration of Labour began virtually at the start of the Party's existance when, to continue it's campaigning it was forced to go cap-in-hand to the Fabian Society for funds.
    Over subsequent decades the Fabians have exacted much more than their "pound of flesh" in return.

    1. Or to put it another way, that traditional Labour supporters can't bring themselves to acknowledge – they were just patsies from the start, ditched as soon as the Fabians/WEF etc didn't need them any more.

    2. Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
      Took a holiday/fact finding tour in Russia c. 1930 and saw only a Paradise on Earth.

      1. Took a holiday/fact finding tour in Russia c. 1930 and saw only a Paradise on Earth. what they wanted to see.

        1. Took a holiday/fact finding tour in Russia c. 1930 and saw only a Paradise on Earth. what they wanted were allowed to see.

        2. That's almost 100 years ago. Times have changed considerably. You can go anywhere you like in Russia and no one from the government will be escorting you.

          1. I've been many times when working. First time, St, Petersburg just after the end of Soviet times. Beautiful architecture, very pleasant people, lots of good science. That was a contract based in Baku, Azerbaijan. Great experience.

          2. I haven't been since Glasnost' and Perestroika, but when I was there, we were rarely allowed out unescorted. We had to give the komsomol the slip.

        4. Because all the drunks would have been in asylums or hidden away and they would never have left the main streets to see the izbushki off the main thoroughfares. This was in 1968 when the drunks were lying in hidden corners.

      2. My husband went to Moscow several times on business, very impressed with the cleanliness of the infrastructure, and the greetings from everyone. There is apparently little crime in Moscow, and Russia generally. Somewhere online there are videos from a young Canadian family who couldn't afford to buy a farm in Canada so instead bought one in Russia. First thing they encountered – neighbours, all welcoming and volunteering to help them get the farm together. This could, of course, all be propaganda, but nowhere is perfect least of all the West and especially UK towns and cities.

      3. In the USSR days, all visits were carefully managed. Even into the 1970's, naive trade union groups just never understood that. And let's face it, had Britain ever come under the USSR, which is what many union nleaders wanted, they would have been the first up against the wall.

  29. Not exactly breaking the rules – but not far off:
    Wordle 1,564 4/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  30. Gold-plated pensions for councillors despite record tax rises

    Minister tells 16,000 elected officials ‘you deserve it’ as he reinstates taxpayer-funded retirement income

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/briefs/2025/09/29/TELEMMGLPICT000442167312_17591696024780_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqWy_u4a9GUNQgLIY2EGV3qghi1ZMFW4tO_4Pqw0owwW0.jpeg?imwidth=1280 Steve Reed, the Communities Secretary, told councillors at the Labour conference he was ‘outraged’ by the removal of their pension entitlements in 2014

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/e9d542ff2d868918

    Michael Pickering
    13 hrs ago
    When will they understand that government doesn’t make money private sector does. Every time they spend private sector has to pay

    5954gv4zjj
    12 hrs ago
    Reply to Michael Pickering
    They get it, they just don’t care.

    Katy Pilkington
    12 hrs ago
    Reply to E N Gineer
    Galactophukked is my new word and I am loving it

  31. Morning all. Another sunny but cool day. Pleasant enough to leave the front door open for Caticus who, exhausted after a good nights sleep is taking another well deserved 12 hour nap, interrupted for treats, naturally.

    Watched Dominik Tarczyński talking to Andrew Gold earlier this morning. Worth watching.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9phrhrz3gY

        1. 413675+ up ticks,

          JR,
          Polish chap went o see Tommy in prison.
          there one minute the error appeared and it disappeared.

    3. The mid-wits that have been asleep at the wheel such as Camilla Tominey should be restrained and forced to listen to Dominik Tarczyński.

  32. Michael Deacon being his usual, helpful self.

    Forget Trump and Blair. Let’s put Greta Thunberg in charge of Gaza
    She and her fellow Left-wing celebrities have done so much for the Palestinian cause. So here’s the perfect way to reward them

    30 September 2025 6:00am BST
    Michael Deacon

    Once the war between Israel and Hamas is finally over, who should run Gaza? On Monday night, Donald Trump said he and Tony Blair would do it. With all due respect to these two great statesmen, however, I believe there is a candidate who would be even more deserving of the role.

    After all the selfless work she’s done in support of the anti-Israel cause, I think putting her in charge of Gaza would be the perfect reward. And, to assist her, I would appoint a cabinet consisting entirely of those wonderful white Western celebrities who, ever since October 7, 2023, have made such a charming show of donning keffiyeh scarves, denouncing “Zionists”, and righteously calling for a “free Palestine”.

    My reasoning is simple. An awful lot of horribly cynical people seem to think that a “free Palestine” would in practice prove to be a brutally oppressive Islamist hellhole. So I want to give these delightful celebrities the opportunity to show that it can instead be the progressive paradise of their dreams. A glorious beacon of equal rights, compassion and inclusivity.

    First of all, I imagine, President Greta and her ministers will be eager to promote multiculturalism. As progressive celebrities never tire of reminding us, diversity is our strength. So they will doubtless wish to ensure that diversity becomes Gaza’s strength, too. To this end, they should build lots of synagogues and Christian churches.

    For the same reason, they should also open plenty of pubs, bars and nightclubs. Earlier this month, academics in Leicester argued that, to make the British countryside feel less “exclusionary” to Muslims, rural pubs and restaurants must serve halal food. So, following the same logic, Gaza should be made to feel less exclusionary to non-Muslims, by serving alcohol everywhere.

    Next we come to the question of women’s rights. The men of Gaza, I feel sure, will be overjoyed to have a young female leader like Greta, and will implore her to end the gender inequality that unaccountably blights their land. For example, by abolishing the “modesty police”, and overturning the ruling by a Hamas-run court that any woman wishing to travel anywhere must first secure the permission of a male “guardian”.

    If Greta and her showbiz regime really want to prove the doubters wrong, however, the most important move they can make is as follows. On the very day they take office, they should host Gaza’s first ever LGBTQIA+ Pride parade. Festoon every building with rainbow flags, organise floats celebrating every possible form of sexual orientation, and invite the pro-Palestinian rap trio Kneecap to perform a cover of YMCA by the Village People. What better way to let local residents show their gratitude to the Western activist group Queers for Palestine?

    It should go down an absolute treat.

        1. Trump needs a wing-man to take the blame when everything goes tits-up. Blair is too vain and can't say 'no' to a chance to ponce about 'On The World Stage'.

  33. Good Moaning to you all, from a warm and sunny Costa del Sol.

    Thank you all for your kind wishes, on this my 31st Birthday. I shall treasure them through the next 364 Unbithdays til the next event.

    6. Happy Birthday and Unbirthdays, OLT. May a wonderful holiday be just the start of a great year! x

    3. I think you should remove that, a vulture would be more appropriate and, actually, that's quite a beautiful picture, a study in black.

  35. 413675+ up ticks,

    ID bill growing into maturity,

    Petition, Withdraw the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill:
    22622, thanks Rik,

  36. Just back from having a check of my hearing aids. In this dreary age of ghastliness, it is extremely refreshing to find that the audiologist (who looks about 15) was supremely efficient in making a couple of tweak and was able to explain everything in very clear but simple language. The MR – who had not met him before- was very impressed.

    Morrisons are having a 25% off wine offer. We were able to get 12 bottles and save £40.

    2. MB finds that his audiologist (at Specsavers) is very efficient and helpful.
      But then it's not NHS.

      2. I think that in addition to trying to get my cataracts sorted via Specsavers, I should try their audiology as well.

        1. I do recommend hem.
          Now that GPs have given up on ear wax removal, Specsavers do a good job.
          £60; price is the same whether the patient needs 1 visit or several appointments.

          1. It's still having to pay for a service that was once offered as part of the NHS (into which we've already paid).

  37. Clucking bell: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/30/its-time-for-pensioners-to-start-paying-their-way/

    Their income from the state is shielded from inflation, rising in line with the fastest of prices, wages or 2pc. They are the greatest source of UK welfare expenditure.

    This year, £12 in every £100 of the state’s total managed expenditure will be dedicated to the UK’s growing class of pensioners.

    Spending on them is equivalent to 6pc of the size of the economy, a figure that has risen by more than a third since the start of the millennium.

    In an era of low interest rates and stronger growth, this may have been manageable.

    But Rachel Reeves is not so lucky.

    She faces a £27bn shortfall ahead of the next Budget, the latest projections from Capital Economics show, with borrowing costs at a 17-year high. Any slip in discipline could spell disaster.

    Is this woman thick?

    Yes, it's protected from inflation and government makes things expensive. Wage growth has been non-existent so that's prices. Here's an idea. Less tax, cheaper prices.

    Oh, £12 is spent on pensioners is it? Well, fine. They've already damned well paid for it, many times over so if government in it's demented profligacy cannot plan ahead, perhaps it shouldn't be in government?

    Spending is 6% of the economy? So? They're contributed vastly more than most, working and living.

    As for subsidised energy, the state makes energy expensive, which directly hikes prices so… durrhhh. Scrap the energy rationing nonsense and make fuel cheaper. That'll bring prices down too.

    Borrowing is high precisely because of a lack of discipline. The moron Thieves Reeves keeps wasting money on the feckless, the idle, the indolent and the useless. She refuses to force the irresponsible to be responsible, far preferring to buy their vote with the work of others.

    The disaster is allowing the moronic woman dumb bint Reeves and the Treasury to set policy. Clearly her tax damage has done incredible harm to the economy and if she had made sensible choices over cutting welfare, the state and waste the country would be in a far better place now, but no, that's not the socialist way.

    I ask again – these twits keep pointing at everyone else except the obvious problem: the state. No, front line services need not be cut. Just close DEFRA. It's an EU mouthpiece, so irrelevant. Close education. Make schools independent by default – scrap VAT and just provide school vouchers. Get the state out of policing as well and return it to Peelian principles. Oh, and CUT. TAXES.

    Yes, Labour voters will bleat and whine and Labour MPs will lose their seats. This is a good thing.

    Attacking those who have contributed, those who are contributing is idiotic. It is stupid. It is Left wing. Go after the wasters. Shred the state.

    It's not complicated. The oaf Reeves is trying desperately to pretend she can lift herself out of a bucket by the handles. The Treasury seems to be encouraging her. All much be permanently kicked and taught how useless they are. Sack half.

      1. We're going to be lumbered with the costs of decommissioning (removing) these blighted eyesores.

        It is constantly a response to a problem the state has caused by trying to pervert markets. Just another example of government not knowing what it's doing.

        1. They have huge concrete bases that will never be removed. You can just see archaeologists puzzling over them in ten thousand years' time.

          2. You CAN remove them using serious sized rock breakers on long telescopic HIAB type excavator arms, Perhaps break up and remove the top 10 to 15' of the base so it can be backfilled with soil and returned to agricultural use, the removed concrete then going for crushing and use as hardcore.

          3. The ones I have seen are mostly in forests or on hilltops. The concrete is covered by a layer of soil, so I can’t see them taking it out unless it’s in the contract that they do that. And what about the oil that will leak from these things if anything goes wrong, which it might towards the end of their lives – and who knows whether money will be available to clean up the site?

    4. I paid a lot in income tax, NICs and the like over a quarter of a century. It's MY effing money! I've had just about everything stripped from me to pay for people who haven't contributed a sodding penny!

          1. Sadly, no.
            I hope he's OK, not wet, cold, hungry and frightened. We all miss him – Big Cat is distraught and had to sleep in our bed last night, he was so agitated.

          2. Oh dear.
            Every minute must seem like an hour.
            Now we are all fretting over a small cat in Norway.

          8. Oh Paul, I’m sorry to hear that. Have you been back to look for him yourselves? And taken Big Cat?

          13. Quite a way – but cats do have a homing instinct. An old school friend of mine who lives in Australia had a cat who walked for weeks and finally turned up at home. I forget the exact circumstances but the story made their newspapers.

      1. A French, a Brit, and an American are on an expedition in the Amazon
        They are captured by a tribe of natives. The chief says to them, "you must die for intruding our land. But it is our custom to allow you to choose your own death."

        After some time, the Frenchman says, "my great grandfather died by sword while fighting for France, I shall do the same to honor him."

        He takes a sword and impales himself. The natives take him away, skin him, and turn him into a canoe.

        The Brit says, "my father gave me his pistol on his deathbed. I shall shoot myself in honor of him."

        The Brit takes the gun and shoots himself. The natives take him away, skin him, and turn him into a canoe.

        Awhile later, the American asks for a fork. Confused they give him a fork and he starts stabbing himself all over.

        The natives scream out, "what are you doing?!"

        The American replies,

        "You're not turning me into a canoe!"

      2. A blind man went to a restaurant.
        menu sir? asked the owner. I'm blind, just bring me one of your dirty forks, I will smell it and order. The confused owner went to the kitchen to retrieve a fork, and returned to the blind man.
        The blind man smelled the fork with a deep breath, yes I will have the lamb with seasoned potatoes and spring vegetables. Unbelievable, thought the owner. The blind man ate and left. Two weeks later the blind man returned. The owner, wanting to know how good his smell is, quickly went to the kitchen where his wife Brenda was cooking and said, do me a favor and rub this fork over your private part which she did. He then goes to the blind man and gives him the fork. The blind man takes it and puts it to his nose and says, oh interesting! I never knew Brenda works here!

      3. I told you I was broke
        A little lady answered a knock on the door one day, only to be confronted by a well dressed young man carrying a vacuum cleaner.

        "Good morning" said the young man. "If I can take a couple minutes of your time, I would like to demonstrate the very latest in high power vacuum cleaner"

        "Go away" said the old lady. "I'm broke and haven't got any money!" She proceeds to close the door.

        Quick as a flash the young man wedged his foot in the door and pushed it wide open."Don't be too hasty!" He said. "Not until you have at least seen my demonstration."

        And with that, he emptied a bucket of horse manure on to her hallway carpet. "If this vacuum does not remove all traces of manure from your carpet, madam, I will personally eat the remainder."

        The old lady stepped back and said "well let me get you a fork, cause they cut off my electricity this morning.

  40. Another Michael Deacon pondering.
    He needn't worry; he won't see a GP.

    Kissing cousins
    According to a somewhat surprising article published last week by NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme, marrying your first cousin can actually be good for you. Narrow-minded reactionaries may harp on about the increased risk of birth defects, but apparently they’re overlooking the practice’s myriad benefits, such as “stronger extended family support systems” and “economic advantages” – which we should all recognise, in order to avoid “stigmatising certain communities and cultural traditions”.

    An intriguing argument. I especially liked the bit pointing out that the practice was in fact legalised by an English king: Henry VIII, who in 1540 “passed a new law that enabled him to marry Catherine Howard”.

    Ah yes, Henry VIII. That shining role model to anyone who wishes to enjoy a happy, healthy and long-lasting marriage. Whenever anyone asks me the secret to a successful relationship, I always say: “Just follow the example of Henry VIII, you can’t go far wrong.”

    At any rate, NHS England has clearly sensed that the above claims are proving a touch controversial – because a spokesman has hastily made clear that the article “is not expressing an NHS view”. Well, that’s a relief. I was dreading my next trip to the GP.

    “Doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I feel absolutely awful.”

    “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Deacon. Have you considered trying incest?”

    1. Why is that prat smashing glass? He doesn't look like he owns it? Is it just vandalism?

      The sand window I like. I'd like blinds that are in runners on both sides to properly block out the light of an evening.

      1. Idiots seem to abound these days.
        Around 35 years ago my gang and I worked at the Lea Valley Park. We built roofs on some of the new facilities.
        But before we had finished our tasks it was discovered that a building with showers and changing rooms had a design problem. When the roof windows were open, people in the showers below could be seen in full reflective view. 🤭
        Blinds were quickly added. 🤗😏

    3. What percentage of Comic Relief money goes abroad?
      Sixty percent of Red Nose Day money is spent in Africa and forty percent here in the UK. A group of 20 experts carefully work out which projects should receive money. Since Comic Relief started 20 years ago they have raised over £337 million and made over 7,000 grants.

      2. Does that 40% include payments to the stars and salaries for the executives of the charity?
        If so, then how much?

    6. I prefer to choose the charities I support and they are mostly animal focused ones. I've never bothered watching Comic Relief on telly nor have I donated anything to them.

  45. Shocka wonder how many other councils are at this grift??
    After weeks of stalling in the face of my emails , Elmbridge council in Surrey- Weybridge, Esher, Walton-on-Thames-has finally admitted to me they have taken £5.2million earmarked for affordable housing ( ie local people) and spent it on buying up 24 homes for migrants from Afghanistan, Syria etc.
    Not only are hard-up local families being denied these places but local residents
    were denied the right to know about the purchases by a hopeless coalition of Lib Dems and Resident Associations,
    The £5million+ came from money given to the council by property developers when it wasn’t appropriate to build affordable homes on their site.
    The council claims in a statement to me that when, and, if the migrants move on the local people will have their chance to move in.
    Don’t make me laugh. Why on earth would a family living in a clapped out house in a clapped out neighbourhood in Kabul give us a nicely refurbished joint in upmarket Weybridge. Ever.
    You can be sure if a place did come up
    It would be filled by another migrant.
    What I find objectionable is that there has been no local debate on the subject.
    As far as I can tell millions of our money was just nodded through as councillors felt if the local voters knew they would object.
    There will be local elections next year and all Reform would have to do is tell this story and all the councillors would be thrown out.
    I wonder if Lib Dem council
    Leader Mike Rollings has heard of open government- he should try it sometime.
    1:42 AM · Sep 30, 2025
    ·

    1. Presumably the title of homes are not handed over gratis?
      In which case just shift the narrative to a target figure for deportations, say 5,000,000, and then hold Farage's feet to the fire.
      Then deal with them in 2029.

    1. In other words, a home for conspiracy theorists, which the Right here seem to be infested with.

      As to Wiki, I've edited a few entries and had those edits accepted. But too many Wiki posters are from academia (they have the time) and so tend to have the usual academic left wing biases.

      1. It's interesting comparing the Tucker Carlson entry on Justapedia to Wikipedia, the former is far less ideological in nature and therefore, in my opinion, better. But people do forget that the Encyclopedia Britannica is on line and you can always use that. I do use Wikipedia for convenience sake and you can't go wrong if you use it just for dates and other hard facts. But it is clearly left wing as the guy talking to Andrew Gold makes abundantly clear.

        Encyclopedia Britannica online
        https://www.britannica.com/

  47. Well, that's a pan of Spiced Apple Chutney on the go.
    Now to sort out the jars I need for it.

  48. I know some of you have installed a VPN. It's probably time I did the same. Handy hints, anyone?

    1. I went with Private Internet access, but I hear good things from Nord as well.

      Here we allow certain domains to use the VPN route rather than all traffic but our set up is probably overcomplicated.

      For PIA at leas, you can also stop and start the VPN locally by an app or installed program when you want to.

        1. It'll be a tad slower – we're talking 5-10 max. If you notice it I'd be surprised but there is additional packet overhead from the encryption. It's basically a tunnel inside a tunnel.

    3. I mostly use firefox for general browsing but opera comes with a (slow) free vpn which gets to blocked torrent sites and library genesis for my nicked e-books

    4. I use NORD VPN. It consistently is listed as #1 of all the VPNs. Have been using it for years and have zero complaints.

    5. I use NORD VPN. It consistently is listed as #1 of all the VPNs. Have been using it for years and have zero complaints.

  49. Good afternoon, all. Sunny.

    Is the beast starting to devour itself as unions begin to uncover the real aspirations of the party they've bankrolled?

    400,000 new green energy jobs is the promise(?) coming from Miliband minor. Details would be a bonus and his speech tomorrow on this grand promise should be well worth listening to.🤮

    https://x.com/HousewifePolish/status/1972964117171552716

  50. Supposed to be in the air on the way back to Heathrow from Munich. After a nightmare getting through security and an even more horrendous transit through passport control we were delighted to be on board. Except, the aircraft was hit by lightning on approach and is now being checked – delay of at least 3 further hours! Morale low!!

    1. Just one of several reasons why my passport is long since expired and why I no longer desire international travel. The local bus service is bad enough.

      1. I'm not ready to give up travel yet. My passport runs out next year and I may or may not renew it again. I'm off to Kenya at the end of October.

    2. With stories like that, is it surprising that my trip to Hameln in July was train and ferry?

    3. My train and plane trip to Switzerland earlier this month was trouble free apart from the delay disembarking at Bristol airport.

    4. The worst bit? It's all because of muslim. All because they're violent savages who want to kill people.

      If muslim were contained and only they were hindered by this nonsense there'd be no need or the idiotic restrictions.

      1. I think a lot of the delay at passport control is a mix of incompetence and petty spite about UK having the temerity to leave the EU (not that we seem to have actually left). I can’t tell you all how delighted we were to have to go through the whole process again to get back “airside” for the flight we are now booked onto – some 8 hours after we were due to take off!

      2. I think a lot of the delay at passport control is a mix of incompetence and petty spite about UK having the temerity to leave the EU (not that we seem to have actually left). I can’t tell you all how delighted we were to have to go through the whole process again to get back “airside” for the flight we are now booked onto – some 8 hours after we were due to take off!

  51. 413675+ up ticks,

    A plantive cry from "the street" come back big ange , at your age you should not be at the kerbside showing a thigh to passing motorist, there is mush more scamming cream to be had under the "tools leadership".

    Dt,

    Wes Streeting has declared that the Government needs Angela Rayner back just weeks after her resignation.

    3. The Labour Party is worried that it has too few tax evaders in prominent roles in the government.

  53. Ah good! That's 12½ jars of assorted size duly filled, or half filled in one case, with a rather tasty Spiced Apple Chutney.
    Will probably do another batch tomorrow which will taste different, but just as nice!

    I did not have sufficient spices for the recipe I was using as guidance, so the 3oz of Coriander, Paprika and Mixed Spice were augmented by a random selection of what I have available in my spice cabinet.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b0ee5b7eacc5b6e78a77aadee1e9b6cf2e3a3a8126a9168c8676e48942660aeb.jpg Now to get the labels written!

    2. Just made a large pan of Steak-and-no-kidney (for pies). Obtaining kidney is difficult here but on Thursday I shall go to a lamb butchery and obtain some to add to my pot.

      Beef dripping
      1,800g beef flank, cubed
      3 large onions, chopped
      [600g lamb's kidney, when available, cored and each cut into six chunks]
      50g flour
      Fresh thyme, 2 sprigs
      50g Colman's English mustard
      75ml Worcestershire sauce
      35ml Geo. Watkins' mushroom ketchup
      350ml beef stock
      1 pint English bitter ale
      1 Tbsp salt
      1Tbsp black pepper.
      Fresh parsley, bunch, chopped.

      After browning the meat (and softening the onions in the beef dripping), one hour's pressure cooking in the Instant Pot, then a reduction of the gravy to thicken it up. It has now cooled and in a container in the fridge awaiting its meeting with the kidneys in a couple of days. I shall then make some shortcrust pastry and fill my seven individual S&K pie tins (possibly more than once). Once baked they will live in the freezer until needed.

      Made from Carl Smith's (of the Windmill, Mayfair) award-winning recipe. In 74 years I have tasted none better.

  54. Yesterday I mentioned that I had read a reply from the clergy who were at the Unite the Kingdom Rally, concerning the Establishments epistle criticising the presence of priests at the rally. I never did find the letter but I have found the next best thing, someone reading it. So here it is.

    OFFICIAL RESPONSE STATEMENT to use of crosses at Unite The Kingdom condemnation.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thBbO2vjCtM

  57. Brendan O’Neill
    Emma Watson is everything wrong with woke, luxury feminism
    30 September 2025, 10:08am

    JK Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I were the Harry Potter actress, I would lie low for a few months. In fact, I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read.

    Once upon a time, Watson was known merely for playing Hermione in the film adaptation of Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Of late, she has become a one-woman foghorn for the luxuriant moralism that passes for virtue in celebrity circles. She fell in with the Black Lives Matter contagion, ostentatiously confessing she had ‘benefited’ from ‘white supremacy’. (Hilariously, she got flak for putting a white border around the black square she posted on Instagram for BLM’s ‘Blackout Tuesday’ in June 2020. The colour white? On a day for black people? Demon!)

    She thinks Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Of course she does – the invites to cultural soirées dry up quicksmart for those who refuse to partake in the Israel-bashing of the chattering classes. She is a faithful servant of the most lunatic luxury belief of all: that ‘trans women are women’. Translation: men are women. Hearty supping from the Kool-Aid of gender insanity is a must for anyone wishing to maintain their position in the starry firmament of high-status ideology.

    It was this latter, wacky belief that brought Ms Watson and the other overgrown brats of the Harry Potter franchise into conflict with the author of their fame. Because, of course, Rowling is a witch to correct-thinkers for her quaint belief in biological fact. Over the years, Watson and her fellow Potter alumni made sly swipes at the author. Rowling, being classier, said nothing. Until now.

    Her 600-word X post about Watson is a masterwork of critical demolition. It is cool, restrained and cataclysmic. She dismisses the conciliatory remarks Watson made in a podcast interview last week, when she said she still ‘treasured’ her relationship with Rowling. ‘Adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love’, Rowling retorted. Oof.

    The author reveals that, in 2022, Watson asked someone to pass her a handwritten note that said: ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’. This was when ‘the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak’, Rowling says. Watson had ‘publicly poured more petrol on the flames’ of this hatred – not least in a speech she had recently given in which she expressed support for ‘all of the witches’ – and yet she thought a ‘one-line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness’.

    This is as brutal a calling out of unsisterly behaviour as I have seen. In shining a light on the moral chasm between Watson’s public ‘petrol pouring’ and her private utterance of paltry sympathy, Rowling exposes the failures of feminism more broadly. Many high-status women have sacrificed solidarity with their own sex at the altar of transgender rights. They betrayed womankind so that they might gain access to the rarefied realm of elite opinion – moral treachery masquerading as progressivism.

    But it is Rowling’s calm assault on Watson’s class privilege that hits hardest. ‘Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is’, she writes. It’s easy, she says, for the affluent to say ‘trans women are women’ because they will never have to face the social consequences.

    A virtue-hoarder like Ms Watson can afford to be blasé because ‘she’ll never need a homeless shelter’, Rowling points out. ‘She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward.’ Watson’s ‘public bathroom [is] single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door’. It is only – whisper it – women poorer than Ms Watson who will find themselves in a cramped ward next a huge bloke or in a dingy WC alongside a strange man doing his make-up.

    Rowling has nailed it. The purveyors of luxury beliefs rarely have to live with the fallout of their ideologies. Rich celebs bow to Black Lives Matter with nary a thought for the impact that BLM’s cry of ‘Defund the police’ has had on poor black communities in the United States. Britain’s bourgeois leftists rail against ‘islamophobia’ and seem not to care that it was officialdom’s very fear of being called ‘islamophobic’ that left so many white working-class girls at the mercy of grooming gangs. And celebs can cavalierly declare ‘Trans women are women’ because they will never be that poor victim in a rape crisis centre, scared of the biological male under the same roof.

    Luxury beliefs benefit the rich but they are lethal for everyone else. Preach, Joanne.

    1. The saintly Joanne made her fortune from stories where, with the right incantation, one could be whatever one wanted to be.

    2. Panready kipper
      5 hours ago
      Got to hand it to the Sun for another great headline which sums it up
      "Harry Potter and the gob full of ire"

      tubby Brewster Panready kipper
      4 hours ago
      And credit to whoever came up with this headline when Watson was banned for speeding: "12 Points to Gryffindor!"

    3. Living in the US, I read of reporters' visits to inner city areas where someone has been shot. The overwhelming point the locals (mostly black) make is that they need more policing not less, so the street shootouts won't take place due to a proper police presence. Cameras and gunfire detecting equipment is no substitute for uniformed police on patrol – in cars or on foot.

        1. Lady boys are their own culture and do not force it on others. Though I read that occasionally some amorous visitor gets a bit of a surprise.

        2. Lady boys are their own culture and do not force it on others. Though I read that occasionally some amorous visitor gets a bit of a surprise.

    2. Good for the elephant. Why folk insist on poking and getting in their way I don't know. Leave nature alone.

    3. The guide was at fault in that incident. We've done that and it's quite safe but you have to respect elephants.

      1. Except that my consultant boss has not absolutely stated this elephant will be able to fly on Friday.

    4. The elephant was female – bulls play no part in herd protection. They are females with young and they are fiercely protective.

      1. As are mother cattle with calves. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble by forgetting that and getting between the cow and her calf.

      2. Kipling knew a thing or two about elephants and he might have had them in mind when he wrote: The Female of the Species is More Deadly than the Male.

      3. I remember very distinctly the massive bull elephant that stood staring at me and my mate Mike on that pitch dark night on the road along the Zambesi river in Zambia in 1969. Fourtunately he eventually decided to walked on through the undergrowth following the rest of his herd. He could have flattened our VW beetle.

        1. The herds are females with their calves. Though of course a bull in musth might be present guarding a female in oestrus. Otherwise the bulls leave the natal herd in their early teens.

  60. Just had a phone call from the Hospital secretary, she has confirmed that her consultant boss has stated that there is absolutely no reason why I should not be able to fly. So we will be off on Friday mid morning. As planned. 🤗😊😉👍👍👍

    2. Mistaken identity methinks – the consultant boss was looking at the crow perched on the windowcill.

      Good luck with the flapping of wings. With enough determination, I'm sure you can take off.

    1. Do the same to him. Collar it', swing him around against metal bars.

      You're also forgetting the purpose of the hurty words plod. It's to silence dissent. It is a political control system carried out using state force to stop you speaking the truth.

      The state doesn't care about theft, murder, stabbings or rape – certainly not those committed (and they're all committed) by the diversity. You must forget about any sense of justice or social contract but step outside of newspeak and they'll get you.

    1. Brilliant Ogga, we all shudder , but we know deep down that this is the game that is being played out now, and as we look at our laptops , as we email, the stuff we receive , mostly advertising is because they know our spending / searching habits

      1. Apparently I am eager for a new mountain bike and jacket. Clearly they've not understood my existing fleece is itchy, uncomfortable and useless at keeping me warm yet I don't want another one, preferring giant puffy parkas.

      2. That's why I have a paid subscription to protonmail. I got fed up with google/microsoft etc stealing my data.
        These days, it's somewhat antisocial to use free webmail like gmail, outlook, yahoo etc because everyone who writes to you gets their data stolen too.

    2. That is exactly what we are sleepwalking into. Everyone refuses the ID card but as we learned today, it is being sneaked into schools behind our backs. And what's the betting an "NHS id app" will pop up at some point?

    2. Starmer Does. Not. Care. He wants the criminna; vermin here. He just isn't bothered at their rapes, mugging, stabbing, drug abuse, murder. He simply does not care. None of them do.

      He would far prefer there were more rapes and murders than give a flicker to stopping the invasion.

  64. Zoe Strimpel
    The banality of Emma Watson
    No wonder she struggles with daily life
    30 September 2025, 5:01am

    For a long time it was handy dinner party fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010) briefly filmed at my late grandparents’ house, and appeared as Hermione Granger’s house in the film. Even this required extensive exposure of my grandparents to Warner Brothers’ lawyers, the film crew and, of course, to young Emma Watson herself.

    Neither of my grandparents had heard of Harry Potter before they were approached, and throughout filming, they failed entirely to notice her, though there was some vague recollection of ‘that rather mousy girl’ from my grandpa, who was far more taken with Susan, the 60-something woman in charge of props.

    This description stayed with me as Watson’s star rose and rose, plateaued, and turned gender political. Watson, most people over 40 agree, is a key example of how far the British thespian national treasure has declined: where once we had Shakespearean queens like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Emma Thompson, now we have little more than a poor woman’s Keira Knightley (and Keira Knightley).

    Watson is certainly a sign of artistically thinner times: she may be good enough for a generation whose childhood literary imagination extended no further than wizards, but seeing her as Belle in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast was a cheapening, sobering experience for those of us who cried and swooned over the Disney cartoon classic in 1991. Feminist point-scoring to the last, Watson refused to wear a corset. ‘In Emma’s reinterpretation, Belle is an active princess. She did not want a dress that was corseted or that would impede her in any way,’ said the film’s costume designer Jacqueline Durran. How radical.

    Watson’s last role as an actress was in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film Little Women. Since then she has kept herself rather weakly in the limelight by becoming a trans rights cheerleader, and, like her other Potter stars Eddie Redmayne and Daniel Radcliffe, turning on her fairy godmother J.K. Rowling for her ‘transphobia’. Rowling has posted on X that Watson and her fellow Potter actors were busy ‘pouring petrol on the flames’ when she was getting death threats over trans rights and that unlike them, she ‘wasn’t a multimillionaire at 14’. Watson is now enrolled on a DPhil at Oxford on the philosophy of creative writing and, rather than jump on the rosé wine brigade, Watson has launched a gin distillery with her brother called Renais. The booze business gets them all in the end.

    Watson wants people to love her. Of her public disavowal of J.K. Rowling, she mewled last week on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast that ‘It’s my deepest wish that people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with.’ Hm.

    She also discussed her recent driving ban for speeding, saying ‘my shame is everywhere’ and launching into a mea culpa about how she had some missing basic life skills. Now we learn that for all her lofty political ideas, those years being ferried in luxury to Hollywood sets (and my grandparents’ house in north London) were fatal for her road sense.

    I would wager that her problem with ‘some pretty basic life things’ is more connected to her absorption in naff, damaging politicking

    ‘They literally won’t insure you to drive yourself to work,’ she said. ‘I did not have the experience or skills, clearly, which I now will and do.’ Good to know. Watson didn’t attend the court hearing but was gracious about the fine of £1,044. She ‘fully understands her position and will accept her punishment,’ her lawyer said, adding: ‘I ask you to give her credit for the plea of guilty. She is a lady in a position to pay an appropriate fine.’

    On the podcast with Shetty, Watson, worth about £59 million, leaned into the learning experience of being done for speeding. ‘It’s been a discovery and a journey that’s been humbling because on a movie set I’m able to do all these extremely complex things: stunts, sing, dance… and then I get home and I’m like: “OK, Emma, you seem to be unable to remember keys, you seem unable to keep yourself at 30mph in a 30mph speed limit. You don’t seem able to do some pretty basic life things.”’

    I would wager that her problem with ‘some pretty basic life things’ is more connected to her absorption in naff, damaging politicking. If you live in a world where J.K. Rowling is the enemy, and men who say they are women deserve the full scope of feminist passion because ‘trans women are women’, then perhaps it’s no surprise that the banal facts of speed limits might seem alien or mundane.

    Of course, tens of millions of pounds, global celebrity, and being the world’s most famous childhood witch, might also make the rules of ordinary life feel remote. Overall, her conviction seems unlikely to cause her too much grief; she’s already taken up cycling, and any opportunity for a spot of soul-searching is no doubt welcome for a woman who is now a humble philosophy doctoral student, albeit with millions in the bank.

    1. She's a kid who, like most of these Lefty folk is immune to the problems most people face. Thus she leaps on a bandwagon cause because she has the time, wealth and indolence to do so.

      No doubt when she is directly affected by the mentally ill trans group she will change her mind and grow up, realising she is simply an immature, spoiled little girl.

    2. "DPhil at Oxford on the philosophy of creative writing "
      Aye, aye. I'm sure her fame and fortune had nothing to do with her getting a place on possibly the most useless doctorate programme in Britain. Underwater basket-weaving must have been full up.

  66. Just in from two hours useful garden work. Very nice afternoon – about 24ºC. Anyone want any apples?

    2. We’re dreading going home to all the apples on the lawn! Maybe get a bit of child labour in! Phizzee will approve!

          1. No Bramley seedlings, nor anything similar in Sweden! If I make apple sauce for pork, I need to add some lemon juice or apple cider vinegar to Granny Smiths.

            Their poor excuse for a 'cooking apple', Belle de Boskoop (a Dutch variety) is a substandard substitute for a Bramley.

          1. OK. Wound healing. Been to the GP Surgery this pm for blood tests. Blood pressure OK but pulse high. I’ve noticed it jumping around lately. Up to 150 then down to 65, then settles at 85-95 again. The practice nurse is concerned so I’ll mention it to the monitoring team when I submit my readings in the morning.

    3. We had a couple of lads working on the old BT cabinet over the road earlier. I asked them if they fancied a few apples and they were delighted to come over and help themselves to some off the tree.

    4. This afternoon I cleaned the shit muck out of half of the front gutters, got 2 buckets full. Tomorrow, weather permitting I'll do the other half. Thank goodness I have scaffolding which made the job easier

  67. It ain't arf hot Mum
    I was clearing out the garage when I needed some tools from my Conservatory, which I have recently begun re-purposing as a workshop because it is so light.

    Here is the digital thermometer reading 54.7 degrees Celsius (132 Fahrenheit in old money), reminding me that one should NEVER attach a glass-to-Ground conservatory to an outside wall that faces DUE SOUTH. It's even hotter in Summer.

    Thank goodness I fitted the doors between the conservatory and the dining room with soft plastic draught excluders on all edges, forming a thermal barrier that can maintain almost a 30 degree temperature difference.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/123a77519f174e6612acf9f4e73cf2de57218265c122b0d887ea420661cc8d48.png

    1. Humidity is startlingly low for a greenhouse?

      Given that temp, do you have a British army colonel in there, maybe with his troops building a bridge?

      1. Wibbles, it's NOT a GREENHOUSE, it's a CONSERVATORY. Except that any plants (or flies, or any living thing) cannot survive long in such low humidity. But it IS great for drying clothes on occasion!
        If I need to work in there when it's warm I just open the outside doors and switch on the ceiling fan. I had the ceiling retro-fitted with a thick rigid foam liner, which was alleged to drop the temperature at least 10 degrees compared with the original translucent polycarbonate sandwich. Needless to say, it didn't.
        The multi-folding doors between the conservatory and the dining room are just single-glazed, yet can maintain a 30 degrees C temperature difference between the one and the other. They have cunning overlapping joins between them and although wooden, were produced by a firm that uses CNC machining and knot-free, non-warping timber. Other firms said it couldn't be done and it took me almost a year to find a firm that could.

        1. I should be very grateful if you would let us know what the name of the firm was, Rc. I will be looking for just what you mentioned, soon.

    2. If you are going to have a south facing conservatory, you need a very effective ventilation system, plus insulation on the house wall. My choice would be polyisocyanurate rigid foam insulation as it has a very high R value for its thickness. I used it as insulation on my basement walls when we decided to turn it into living space. Very effective in our climate – high 30's in summer, lows in the teens in winter.

    3. My inside/outside thermometer's sensor in the conservatory is attached to the outer North-facing wall. I specifically sited to it protect it from receiving the rays of the sun at both sunrise and sunset in summer.

      Despite that I still get the occasional 'iffy' reading.

  68. Keir Starmer claims Nigel Farage 'doesn't like Britain'
    Projection:
    In psychology, projection is a defence mechanism where a person unconsciously attributes their own unwanted thoughts, feelings, or impulses to another person. It involves externalizing one's internal discomfort, often to protect the ego or avoid acknowledging negative traits within themselves. Projection can manifest as accusations, excessive criticism, or blame, and can lead to damaged relationships and increased self-doubt.

    1. Most of us here loved the Britain that used to be.

      Bit by bit successive governments have taken away the things which made us love our country.

    2. Starmer seems to be jumping on any bandwagon he thinks suits his own errors in a corrective manne. It's obviously showing how useless he actually is. And obviously it's all he's got left.

  69. I agree about wind and washing hanging out. However, here, we have had ery strong north winds for days and it is really nice NOT to be blown to bits!

  70. Miss Jo
    @therealmissjo
    I was just in Greece. I ate Greek food and visited Greek Orthodox churches,

    Now I am in Switzerland, I am waiting fondue and will browse shops or clocks and chocolates in the old town.

    When I go to the UK, I want to eat sticky toffee pudding and have banter with locals in the pub.

    I don’t want to eat halal kebabs and be surrounded by hostile men called Mohammad who scowl at me because I am not covering my hair. If I want that, then I will go to Iran.

    Our cultures in Europe are unique and individual.

    They are special.

    They are worth saving.

    When 40% of your city or country was born somewhere else (as it is in London), you lose the very essence of a country. Some people. might like that. I do not.
    5:53 AM · Sep 30, 2025
    ·
    106.8K

    Punkadiddle
    @RebeccaFemm
    Same, just got back from Corfu 2 days ago, didn’t see a single migrant there. Yet the first airport staff we saw coming back to Glasgow were Muslims. One could barely speak English while commanding us all his to use the passport/face scanner thing. It’s f***ing insane.

    2. Spent 10 days at Zakynthos and returned just a few days ago.
      A couple of things struck me, the number of national flags flying proudly from buildings and the number of fellow UK holidaymaker's who has taken the attitude I'm going to spend it before "she" gets her mitts on it. We all know who they are thinking about.
      Never gave a thought about Punkadiddle's observation but can now in hindsight agree with it.

      1. Why don’t you like dates , some species are delicious .. Bit like golden sultanas ?

        I don’t like grapes , but I love figs ,dried apricots and prunes .

        1. I like neither their flavour nor their texture. Vile objects!
          We all have different likes and dislikes; I would rather eat a grape than a prune (unless that prune is an Agen steeped in armagnac).

  71. The destruction of everything we know.
    Here's a handi guide by Sandi Adams joining the dots..

    The control framework to implement 17 Goals.
    DEI mandates. Net Zero. Mass Migration. Destruction of Food Chain. Attacks on Farming. ESG. BNG. Digital ID. C40 Cities. CBDC. Education Reform. NHS Data. Property Rights. 15 min Cities. Surveillance. Water. Culture destruction. Data mining.

    Digital ID is a major step towards achieving Agenda 2030.

    1. The "mark of the beast" is a concept from the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible, referring to a mark on the hand or forehead required to buy or sell in a future economic system enforced by a tyrannical "beast".

  74. Before Brexit , and when we were subjected to Brussels interference , did the EU have effnics telling us what to do .. You know what I mean , don't you.

    2. Given that Lammy thought that Henry VII followed Henry VIII it's no wonder he was ignorant (in all senses) of the timeline of the Hitler Jugend.

    3. In Lammys mind, dupliciity by Farage probably goes back further than the 40s.

      wasn't he a racist on the white side during the war of the roses?

      1. Speaking as a Red Rose Lancastrian I can confirm that all White Rose Yorkists are inherently wrong 'uns and racists – even the black ones!

          1. I jest – many of my friends are from Yorkshire – it just costs me more in the pub!

            See all, hear all, say nowt
            Sup all, eat all, pay nowt
            And if tha' ever does owt for nowt
            Do it for thissen……..

          1. We used to alternate the school song with a patriotic song of some sort, plus a couple of "rugby" songs.

  76. Wordle No. 1,564 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
    ⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Wordle 30 Sep 2025

    Gobblers for Birdy Three?

    1. Well done. Another par for me.

      Wordle 0 4/6

      ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
      ⬜🟩⬜🟨🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Well done – very lucky par here – I was struggling after three guesses and fourth guess was more to place the vowels…. I'll take it!

      Wordle 0 4/6

      ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    3. Took Along time to find this answer

      Wordle 1,564 5/6

      🟨⬜⬜⬜🟩
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩⬜🟨🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    5. Well done, happy with a par here.

      Wordle 1,564 4/6

      ⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩
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      ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  77. I'm really starting to worry about the collective group think mental state of the Labour Cabinet ministers now.
    They all appear totally fixated with Farage, even comparing him to the leader of the old German National Socialist Party, in fact they are absolutely Fuhrerious with him.

  78. Before Brexit , and when we were subjected to Brussels interference , did the EU have effnics telling us what to do .. You know what I mean , don't you.

  79. Did another stint outside – planted out a couple of plants, then got the old strimmer out and gave the 'lawn' a light going over. It didn't need mowing all summer as it was dry and brown, but now lush and green (mainly weeds).

        1. I have a push mower in case the power goes out. The engineer installing my fibre (a nice lad, but young) asked me if I got many power cuts. I said that we were coming up to winter (maximum demand) with dull days, not much sun and high pressures leading to no wind. As we were relying on renewables, I expected them to be common. He looked a bit shocked. I don't think he'd considered the possibility before.

  80. Afternoon,all. I am now full fibre – and the laptop and router are talking to each other! It took about an hour and a half to get it installed. Seconds to get the old desktop (it's on a LAN cable) and the phone (QR code did it all) working but the laptop was a little more difficult. The password didn't work so eventually I tried the numbers which I'd been told I wouldn't need and they worked. Phew! It seems to have taken all day. Then my neighbour came round for a chat, which was nice. Re the headline; vocation seems to be a word that has disappeared from a lot of professions.

    2. I was most impressed with the high standard of Wi-Fi signal and mobile phone coverage when I arrived in Sweden, back in 2011. It was massively better than the incredibly poor service I had previously suffered in Norfolk.

      It became even better, by the Nth degree, in 2017 when we joined the fibre cable network. Downloading files that had taken many minutes previously were now achieved in seconds.

  81. I went to church on Saturday. Yes, me!

    I knew it would be a mistake. We had been invited to the christening of the 3-month old daughter of the boss's nephew. It took place at the village's Lutheran church. I had to go and put on a brave face so as not to upset all the friends and relatives, none of whom are churchgoers but felt this had to be seen to be done (the baptism).

    When I saw that the nephew's step-sister has arrived with her three young sons, but no husband, I enquired if he was at work. "Oh no", she replied, "He is at home suffering from a bad cold!"

    "Aaaaarrggghhh!" [I thought, privately], "I bet one, if not more, of you has brought that nice little virus along with you."

    This morning I started with the tell-tale symptoms: sore throat, snotty nose, etc. The odd squirt of Vick's 'Ultra Chloraseptic' is not really doing much at holding those symptoms at bay. I'm a bit miffed since this will be the first virus, of any persuasion, that has attacked me since I was sneezed on by a fat scumbag in the departures lounge at Stansted airport, back in 2019.

    Grrrrr… (cough!) …grrrrrrrr!

    P.S. I was the only man wearing a suit and tie. Every other male in attendance looked like they had just wandered in off the allotment. No one seemed to have taken any care over their appearance. As for the females present; one, aged about 20, had bottle-blonde hair, massively pumped-up chest humps, eyelashes resembling a couple of yard-brooms, and an injection-generated pout that would have induced jealousy in any self-respecting trout.

    Aaaaarrggghhh!
    .

  87. https://hs-146483074.f.hubspotemail-eu1.net/hub/146483074/hubfs/G2FyVkuWAAA2mUH.jpeg?width=1120&upscale=true&name=G2FyVkuWAAA2mUH.jpeg
    EXC: Labour Minister Complains DWP is Too Focussed on ‘Policing’ Benefit Claims

    A Labour DWP minister has complained that her department is too focussed on policing job centre claims. Good to know where the party is on the issue…

    Employment minister Diana Johnson told a panel at Labour Conference this morning:

    “I’ve been in the job three weeks and I can tell immediately there is a certain culture in the DWP, I was talking earlier on about being in a museum and not wanting to break out of that. I think the idea really in the DWP, particularly in the job centres, is that it’s often about policing and policing people’s claims and ensuring that they are going through the process of making the claims and doing what they’re being asked to do rather than a service to the public to support them through tough times but to very much be there at their side enabling and helping and supporting.”

    Johnson claimed the system had to change to be “alongside citizens” rather than telling people to fill in forms and explaining “this is what we’ll do to you if you don’t do what we tell you.” Stop all that enforcement…

    1. To hell with controls – just give them all the money they ask for. And double if they are diverse or illegal.

  88. That's me for today. Ears working better since the young man played around with the hearing aids.

    Loaf to bake tomorrow. Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain.

  89. https://order-order.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Featured-Images-86.png
    Labour Cancels Owen Jones’ Party Conference Pass

    Owen Jones arrived in Liverpool yesterday with Zack Polanski and entered Labour Conference to do his usual filming. Labour has taken issue…

    The party says it is a ‘safeguarding’ issue: “We have a responsibility to safeguard all our delegates, staff, volunteers, and visitors, and to maintain a safe and welcoming environment for everyone at conference. After careful consideration, we’ve concluded that we cannot continue your attendance while ensuring we meet our safeguarding obligations to all attendees.” It adds: “We hope you’ll understand that this decision was made with everyone’s wellbeing in mind”…

          1. Share and spread

            Some STDs—like HIV, chlamydia and gonorrhea —are spread through sexual fluids, like semen.
            Other STDs, including HIV and hepatitis B, are also spread through blood.
            Genital herpes, syphilis, and human papillomavirus (HPV) are most often spread through genital skin-to-skin contact.

            Enjoy

      1. Tell us Rach.. what's the big ishooos out there on the streets? Go on.. do tell..
        Is it the rise of radical Islam?
        Is it the wide open borders and the invasion of 1,000 dinghy men day-in day-out?
        Is it the destruction of the UKs way of life?
        Is it the Thought Police?

        No.. it's the lack of libraries in 17,000 primary schools

        Rachel Reeves will deliver a library in every primary school in England as part of Labour's plans to give all children the best start in life..

        How else are they going to peddle Gender Bollx?

        2. When Prospero was exiled from Milan his trusted old friend, Gonzago, furnished him with books from Prospero's own library which he prized above his dukedom.

          1. The Library

            But what strange art, what magic can dispose
            The troubled mind to change its native woes?
            Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see
            Others more wretched, more undone than we?
            This BOOKS can do;–nor this alone; they give
            New views to life, and teach us how to live;
            They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they
            chastise,

            Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:
            Their aid they yield to all: they never shun
            The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:
            Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud,
            They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;
            Nor tell to various people various things,
            But show to subjects what they show to kings.

            By George Crabbe

          2. The Tempest? I was struggling to remember. My brain kept saying, the storm, the storm. Got there in the end! I usually do.

        3. A library in every primary school? Back in the eighties I was an active member of our son's primary school's Parent Association. Over his time there the PA was very successful at fund raising and amongst the results was the provision of a stocked library.

    2. Do you ever see pictures of this mob when they board a plane? They always stand at the top of the steps and wave to the crowd (or ramp workers ) as if they have an adoring crowd waving back.

      Pictures of Carnage and Trudeau omitted because I cannot stand the sight of their faces.

      1. I heard a bit if Starmer’s speech to the comrades earlier on the radio. I think it was recorded and doctored because the enthusiastic clapping of the seals started up and stopped abruptly as though it was ‘canned’ as we get on panel games laughter.

        The man is an absolute liar and fraud. I can stand neither the sight nor the sound of him.

  91. Third world benefits!

    Canada has a temporary foreign worker program that is intended to help ease shortage of workers in key industries (7% unemployment and there is a shortage of workers?). Naturally the program is being abused and one of the big offenders is a nationwide chain of coffee shops where an English accent is now rarely heard.

    Our local branch of the chain has just been hit by a scandal where young girl customers are being accosted and pressured to agree to marrying and sponsoring relatives of coffee shop workers. Agree to marry my brother and we will pay you $10,000 after he arrives in Canada!

    It used to be a nice community before this kind of third world rubbish arrived.

  92. Oh boy. It is Canadas day of Truth and Reconciliation when we are all supposed to wear orange ( check, nothing orange !) and spend the day thinking of the great harms done to the natives in the past few hundred years.

    Despite billions going their way for reconciliation and everything else, the number of grave sites exhumed so far – zero!.

    Apparently a pole shows that thirty percent of Canadians believe that the land belongs to the natives and should be given back.

    That 's woke education for you.

      1. In one of the ‘Ice’ Road films the natives attempt to sign into a hotel and are asked “Do you have a reservation?” at which they take exception.

    2. Ignore all that bollox and reflect on the magnificent work that was done by Canadian troops on 6 June 1944 – and thereafter.

      I visited their sector of the Normandy beaches last year and was staggered by their achievements. Mind boggling. And very much still recognised by yer French natives.

      1. I've just been reading about the trials and tribulations of the paratroops sent in just before and on D Day. They achieved miracles against the odds.

    3. But, but…the “natives” were indigenous to Siberia, not North America. They just migrated first. It would be interesting to know why. They almost certainly walked across the Arctic ice and can’t have known where they were going. There must have been a catastrophic event that drove them on into the unknown?

      1. Thank you. Sue.
        Beat me to it.
        And I bet the migrants from Siberia weren't welcomed with new clothes and a hotel room.
        Or were remotely grateful to the peoples they displaced.

  95. The UK is getting beyond redemption.

    I hope the end comes quickly and that a rebuild is possible.

    The Labour left are raising hatred and control to new levels.

        1. Given the inherent left-wing bias in British courts I would be very wary of suing any Labour supporter.

    4. They were all waving flags at the conference today.
      Who do they actually think they are kidding ? 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

    5. The end may well come quickly, but not as you imagine.

      The built-in combined oven I installed at the last place, which I had to leave exactly five years ago displayed "end time" whenever the microwave ended. It seemed prescient then, and things have not improved since…

  96. Physiotherapists, Osteopaths, Chiropodists, Chiropractors, just a few private service providers who take a great deal of pressure off the NHS.
    I wonder how many such services will be priced out of the incomes of the housebound and particularly the elderly.
    Reeves is Labour hatred personified.

    1. Well, I pay a chiropodist and an acupuncturist. As my income dwindles, their visits will become farther apart until I can't afford them any more.

      1. And you won't be alone.
        Labour will happily spend on gimmegrants but you can just FOAD as far as they're concerned.

    2. I regularly pay for dentist, chiropractor, optician (apart from the tenner the governments extracts from taxpayers); on infrequent occasions I have paid for physiotherapist or chiropodist.
      Like most other people, my visits are less frequent than they used to be. The six monthly appointment with a dentist is no longer affordable; once a year stretches my bank balance.

      1. I've largely avoided dentists, but the use of electric toothbrushes since my late teens may have helped.

        I have a few gaps, but I do now attend a private dentist. Dianne The Ex discovered Brookwood Dental Studio, upstairs in Sainsburys. I was persuaded to follow suit. Typically, a visit costs around £80, be it dentist or hygienist.

        I needed a few extractions, which privately would have cost squillions. bBut they put me in touch with a NHS dentist, who did the necessary, cheaply.

        I'm not interested in implants. The remaining teeth work OK, though salads take longer to process…

        1. Chewing your food is better for you than swallowing!

          Just about all Dentists over here are private as opposed to the majority of the healthcare system that is under the public realm.
          If you want to see a dentist, you can probably get in to see one tomorrow.
          GP (If you have one) , several weeks wait for an appointment.

    3. And podiatrists. Admittedly, I no longer have use for them, but – when I did – there was no extended wait. If my appointment was (say) 10.00 am, that's when it would take place.

    1. That's a very longwinded way of saying "the minority that we hate will not be considered for this job".

      1. The opening paragraphs:

        A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump's push to deport students and academics opposed to Israel's war in Gaza is a deliberate attack on free speech.

        US District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, said: 'The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.'

        The scathing 161-page ruling, which the judge described as the most significant of his career, halts an 'ideological deportation' campaign which plaintiffs argued was designed to suppress dissent on college campuses.

        It isn't paywalled for me.
        I'm guessing your security settings are blocking access.

      2. I can open it. But I'm using Nord VPN. This was necessary last year on the IoW, when the hotel WiFi blocked access to Nttl.blog, and there was no mobile signal.

      3. A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump's push to deport students and academics opposed to Israel's war in Gaza is a deliberate attack on free speech.

        US District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, said: 'The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.'

        The scathing 161-page ruling, which the judge described as the most significant of his career, halts an 'ideological deportation' campaign which plaintiffs argued was designed to suppress dissent on college campuses.

        Young rebuked Trump personally in the fiery ruling, claiming that the president sought only 'retribution' with 'disdain' for the constitution.

        It comes after a wave of anti-Israel protests at universities across the country, rising to a fever pitch over the summer of 2024 at Ivy League institutions including Harvard, UC Berkeley and Columbia.

        The Trump administration moved quickly on taking power to deport ringleaders and show that violence on campus would not be tolerated.

        Many of the campus protests were riotous and struck fear into Jewish students — some of whom were too afraid to attend classes during the demonstrations.

        Writing in his decision, Young said: 'The President's palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.'
        Protesters shout slogans against the visit to the US of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, on September 29

        Protesters shout slogans against the visit to the US of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, on September 29

        The judge added: 'I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.'

        Lawyers for the Trump administration argued that the deportations were not based on ideology but the necessary enforcement of immigration laws.

        During the trial, lawyers for the university associations presented witnesses who testified that the Trump administration had launched a coordinated effort to target students and scholars who had criticized Israel or showed sympathy for Palestinians.

        'Not since the McCarthy era have immigrants been the target of such intense repression for lawful political speech,' Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told the court.

        'The policy creates a cloud of fear over university communities, and it is at war with the First Amendment.'

        Trump attorney Victoria Santora told the court: 'There is no policy to revoke visas on the basis of protected speech.

        'The evidence presented at this trial will show that plaintiffs are challenging nothing more than government enforcement of immigration laws.'

        John Armstrong, the senior bureau official in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified that visa revocations were based on longstanding immigration law.
        Pro-Palestinian demonstrator Mahmoud Khalil, second from left, debates with a pro-Israel demonstrator during a protest at Columbia University, Oct. 12, 2023, in New York

        Pro-Palestinian demonstrator Mahmoud Khalil, second from left, debates with a pro-Israel demonstrator during a protest at Columbia University, Oct. 12, 2023, in New York

        Armstrong acknowledged he played a role in the visa revocation of several high-profile activists, including Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, and was shown memos endorsing their removal.

        Armstrong also insisted that visa revocations were not based on protected speech and rejected accusations that there was a policy of targeting someone for their ideology.

        One witness testified that the campaign targeted more than 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters.

        Out of the 5,000 names reviewed, investigators wrote reports on about 200 who had potentially violated U.S. law, Peter Hatch of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Unit testified.

        Until this year, Hatch said, he could not recall a student protester being referred for a visa revocation.

        Among the report subjects was Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Khalil, who was released last month after 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump’s clampdown on the protests.

        Another was the Tufts University student Ozturk, who was released in May from six weeks in detention after being arrested on a suburban Boston street.

        She said she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her school’s response to the war in Gaza.

        The judge in the case has previously blocked Trump policies that he disagrees with.

        In August, Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attacked Young for blocking the administration's decision to slash funding for medical research grants dedicated to DEI.

        The justices said that because the Supreme Court had already ruled on other grant cases, Young was overstepping his powers.

        'When this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts,' Gorsuch wrote.

        Young was forced to apologize and said he was unaware that emergency docket rulings were precedent-setting in the lower courts.

    3. Trump has a history of trying to bypass the Constitution he swore (twice) to uphold. First was his attempts to defeat the two term limit. Now he has publicly said he would use the Federal Government to attack his "enemies", i.e. those who do not agree with him. Trying to deport them to random destinations is just part of that. At least we still have some judges who believe in the Constitution, though I am not at all sure about those on the Supreme court that Trump appointed. Overturning long standing precedent (Roe vs, Wade) was their sin, yet they continue to do that. And all of then when being questioned prior to appointment said under oath they would not do that.

      1. A Reagan appointee, he must be close to retirement age and ready to be replaced by a Trump follower

      2. I think Trump is doing a great job. He has tio fight tooth and nail to remove the Democrat evil.

        1. You don't live here. We see the excesses every day. Besides, there are more Democrats than Republicans in the US. And Trump was a big time Democratic donor until he decided to run for President, when the Republicans offered to bankroll his campaign. And Lo, he became a Republican.

      3. Thing is Jack, Biden trie desperately to sue Trump out of running for office. It failed. Repeatedly, each time he tried.

      4. I have no problem with long standing precedent being reviewed and overturned.
        Times change and what seemed “right” 50 years ago may no longer be so.

        Trump’s use of lawfare reflects what the Democrats have been doing for years.
        I don’t like its use whoever instigates it; but while you have a politically appointed judiciary at most levels it’s to be expected.

    1. Why didn't he put it in his cage…always easy to grab by the neck, put under your arm (NB Alex, this is not advice for you – just kidding…xx.)

  100. I had to take Pip spaniel to an appointment with the vet this afternoon .. He needed his anal glands emptying ..

    Vet fees have gone up .. Over £30 for a botty squeeze!

    The vet was very kind , but the job was to do his glands and not check the rest of him out .

    Bit like me visiting the GP.. they only treat one bit of you , and you have to make another appointment for a related condition .. you cannot even gabble , can you change my prescription.

    What the blazes is Wes Streeting thinking about … Please Artificial Intelligence agent on my phone , tell me why I have a pain , and is it connected to the other pain , and what do you recommend ..

    Do you think training to be a Doctor will become obsolete ..

    Hippocratic Oath states .. Do no harm !

    2. My GP sent me off for a CT scan then stared finding issues to keep him in referral fees for a long time. Maybe it is best to keep thing simple.

    3. Some dogs worse than others, Maggie…first sign is when they drag their backside over the grass, easiest to do it at that stage…look up details online if you'd like to save vet fees…good luck 🙂

    4. Now make the dog about 5 or 6 times heavier and bigger. The bill rises commensurably. I feel your pain.

      I love my three very much, but the bills are genuinely painful.

  102. Hamas
    Don'tcha lurve 'em?

    Trump peace plan 'ignores interests of Palestinian people', Hamas official tells BBC

    A senior Hamas figure has told the BBC that the group is likely to reject Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza, saying it "serves Israel's interests" and "ignores those of the Palestinian people".

    The figure said that Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarming and handing over their weapons – a key condition of Trump's plan.

    Hamas is also said to object to the deployment of an International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in Gaza, which it views as a new form of occupation.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Trump's plan during White House talks on Monday. Hamas has not yet given an official response.

    Qatar's foreign ministry has said Hamas is studying the White House proposal "responsibly".

    A senior Palestinian official with knowledge of Hamas talks told the BBC they involve the group's leadership both inside and outside of Gaza.

    The group's military commander in the territory, Ez al-Din al-Haddad, is thought to be determined to keep fighting rather than accept the plan on offer. Hamas figures outside Gaza have recently found themselves sidelined in discussions as they do not have direct control over the hostages.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2j97jldkmo

      1. Yep. They've been offered everything they want at least 3 times. 3 times they reject it. They just want to kill Jews.

    3. Not very bright, are they. They can have peace or fight and lose. There aren’t any other options.

      1. I guess if they don't want it an easier way they'll have it the hard way. Sorry for those Palestinians who don't support Hamas.

          1. I understand there were some, ‘mum….no doubt wishing for peace, seeing how it would likely go. I saw footage a while ago supposedly from Gaza, looked completely wrecked. Wonder where authorities are now, no doubt fled.

      2. The problem is, they don't want peace. They also don't care if they lose. The point is to kill Jews and turn the international community against them.

        Sickeningly, the political class are so weak, so miserable and cretinous that they happily leap to support pallywhacks when they set about killing Jews.

        It's tedious and disgusting.

  103. Africa nearly 125 times larger than the United Kingdom.

    Afghanistan nearly 2.7 times larger than the United Kingdom by land area.

    Pakistan is roughly three times larger than the United Kingdom.

    Iran is almost seven times larger than the UK

    Turkey is about 3.2 times larger than the United Kingdom in terms of land area,

    India is roughly 13 times larger than the United Kingdom,

    United Kingdom is 42 times larger than Palestine. but Palestine has over 5 million population .. figure that out!

    Israel's population reached 10.027 million by the end of 2024, according to the country's Central Bureau of Statistics, marking an increase of 1.1% from 2023. This growth included 7.707 million Jews (76.9%), 2.1 million Arabs (21%), and 216,000 foreigners. The overall growth rate was lower than in 2023 due to increased emigration of Israelis and a decrease in Jewish immigration.

    2. Yeah, but those countries – bar Israel – are open sewers.

      I don't want them here. muslim cannot exist with other peoples.

    3. You don't mean Palestine Belle, which is enormous (Jordan, Israel, Syria Lebanon, bits of Egypt etc.). You mean Gaza, which is a tiny bit of it populated by arabs from all those regions (particularly Egypt) and not a nation nor a state, nor ever has been.

          1. Where to start? Yasser Arafat was probably born in Cairo in Egypt. That would make him an African. Other ‘Palestinians’ come from many countries including Armenia, former communist parts of the USSR including Hungary, Romania and Ukraine.

            These are displaced persons seeking an identity and having a single overriding objective the obliteration of Jews and the state of Israel.

            As a political force they have asserted some substantial influence compared with their diminutive numbers. This has been achieved through extreme violence. Hamas are the descendants of Fatah. Their sole purpose in life is to erase the Israeli state and all Jews.

  104. Goodnight, folks. I'm about to fill a hot water bottle and retire early. I'm off to see my horses at Donald McCain's tomorrow.

  105. I remember when Nick Clegg was deposed from his safe Sheffield constituency he denied that the EU was planning to become a military ‘state’. Clegg denied that the EU was seeking to take political control of the combined armed forces of the member states.

    Now we see that Ursula von der Leyen is planning just that. The EU is intending to purchase billions of dollars worth of US armaments under the pretext that the weapons will be given over to Ukraine. This might seem strange for several reasons. Firstly it would take the US decades to manufacture arms on the scale envisaged, secondly, the war in Ukraine is demonstrably already lost and no imaginary arms cache could impact the present outcome viz. a Russian victory.

    Perhaps the real reason for the proposed EU purchase of US weapons and weapons systems is to enable the EU to form its own military and take overall control. Such a plan would keep the Americans involved in Europe and keep the grift going for years to come.

    The certainty about this is that the machinations have been going on for some time now to find a way to steal frozen Russian assets in the EU banking system.

    Should the mad witch Ursula von der Leyen succeed in these atrocious acts just about everything will collapse including investor confidence in western banking systems. Yet Kier Starmer persists in drawing the UK back into the EU mad house, a House of Cards.

    1. Never believe anything until it's been officially denied.

      The EU was always intended to be a military power – mostly to suppress internal dissent. That's why they wanted trains across the continent – to move their troops around.

      The EU is a home for communists. Evil, nasty people who hate democracy, who love power and who see nothing with exterminating anyone who stands in their way. The very nature of the EU was designed to give these unelectable wasters the power they crave.

      1. You are quite correct. HS2 remains a part of the EU troop transportation project.

        I remember the several times when I transited through West Berlin via Friedrichstrasse (multi level station) and waited hours underground for my passport number to be read on a tannoy system before being allowed to board the U-Bahn.

        Then alighting in East Berlin and taking the train to Poland from the Ost-Bahnhof noticing most of the trains were double deckers crammed with disconsolate East German soldiers. I remember the envious looks when I lit a Gitanes cigarette.

        I never thought that we would have such a vicious system foisted upon us by the EU but it is happening.

        1. From the outset the EU was designed as a control system to create a communist ideology. That's why they're so angry we left and our civil service is so desperate to force us back in.

          The entire thing is a disgusting, abusive, oppressive nonsense. It was always designed thus. The Nazis lost the war,but they just changed the weapons. Their latest one is economics.

      2. The original quote, by Ian Paisley, is:

        "There's no truth in any rumour until it has been officially denied".

    2. Maybe she is just like Carney and trying to satisfy Trumps demands that everyone steps up defense spending – lots of noise around massive orders but with delivery dates so far in the future that they are meaningless.

  107. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/30/starmer-labour-will-never-surrender-our-flag/

    Starmer, your flag is the hated EU blue one, it's the Palestine one. It's not the Union flag. You hate this country, it's people, it's traditions. You hate our principles, our ideology, our way of life and you are determined to do everything you can to destroy it. If you were a patriot, you'd have binned the on line harm act. You never consider ID cards. You'd not have sold us out to the hated EU.

    You are evil because you cannot tell the truth. You're vile, repellant, cretinous, arrogant and absolutely nothing you beelieve in is remotely in line with Britons.

  109. Toxic Starmer's dirty tactics won't fool the people of Britain

    Labour's desperate attacks on Nigel Farage are a deflection from their disastrous 14 months in power

    ALLISON PEARSON
    30th September 2025, 9:34pm BST

    Paging Dr Freud! Has any rival ever dominated a party leader's conference speech quite as completely as Nigel Farage loomed over Sir Keir Starmer's? Sherlock Holmes was more relaxed about Moriarty than the Prime Minister is about the leader of Reform UK. The Prime Minister was a man obsessed. His speech was mostly dull; miles upon miles of magnolia Anaglypta honked through those gluey Starmer sinuses, as we have come to expect from this strange, soulless man.

    But barely a passage went by without a snarled aside, a vengeful lashing out at Farage or, worst of all, another disgusting allegation of xenophobia. "Nigel Farage doesn't like Britain," Starmer claimed in his desperation. "He wants to create a competition of victims." Pot, kettle, sooty bottom.

    I am not surprised that the normally equable Farage was "completely shocked" by Starmer's bile, saying it directly threatened the safety of his campaigners, particularly after the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. "I now believe he is unfit to be Prime Minister," said Reform's leader.

    Keen-eyed analysts of human behaviour will notice that Starmer chose to accuse Farage of his own deepest flaws. For it is Keir Starmer who owes his first loyalty to international courts and treaties, Starmer who paid to give away the Chagos Islands, Starmer who devoted years to undermining the biggest democratic vote in British history, so disdainful was he of the people's choice. Starmer who bangs on about "diversity" and "our communities" when Britain was once a united nation – this happy breed – not a querulous coalition of competing sectarian interests and "protected characteristics". Starmer who accused those demanding a national inquiry into the Pakistani-origin rape gangs of "jumping on a bandwagon" and "amplifying" the demands of the far-Right. Given a choice between Westminster and Davos, it was Starmer who plumped unhesitatingly for the European capital of globalism rather than our own parliament.

    Sigmund Freud never used the term "deflection", but his psychodynamic theory captured precisely what Starmer was up to in Liverpool: "A defence mechanism that shifts focus and blame away from oneself on to another person or object, to avoid personal guilt or shame."

    The leader who addressed his party conference after a chaotic and embarrassing 14 months (it took the Tories 14 YEARS to get into the same mess) claimed that we were in "a fight for the soul of our country". Make that a fight for his political life. Starmer is the least popular prime minister on record – a poll rating of minus 66 says it all – as voters have seen quite enough to know that he, as one astute former Labour voter said, is "not for the British". I can't remember a leader who has been more loathed, can you?

    Starmer's Cabinet sat in the front row, self-consciously waving their Union flags as if patriotism was not something bred in the bone, but could be put on like a scarf if the political headwinds got a bit chilly. Not long since, those same ministers were holding up their Refugees Welcome placards and sneering at the white, working-class – those "flag-sh—ers" and far-Right "bigots" with their lamentable failure to denounce their own traditions and genuflect before the Labour religion of multiculturalism. My, how things change, eh, Yvette?

    The conference strategy was all over the place. Starmer was projecting one message to reassure the party faithful in the hall – "We are still compassionate and progressive, although we may have to do things you find uncomfortable!" – while signalling to the wider country that Labour were not complete idiots and were capable of making the tough choices on taxes and spending that the party had U-turned on so far.

    Meanwhile, the existential threat posed by Reform, which has come top in every opinion poll you can think of and is poised to wipe out Labour in its Welsh fiefdom, had to be neutralised. Dirty tactics would be used if necessary. On Sunday, Starmer told Laura Kuenssberg that Reform's plan to scrap indefinite leave to remain (only British citizens would be able to claim benefits while immigrants who weren't paying their way would be deported), was "immoral" and Nigel Farage was "racist". (What a pity Kuenssberg didn't ask Starmer whether other countries that deny benefits and free healthcare to foreigners – that's pretty much all of them – were also racist.)

    It was a bold tactic, to say the least, when only the next day Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, announced that "contribution" would be a condition of welcoming immigrants. Incomers would now have to wait 10 years to apply for indefinite leave to remain and strict new rules would be imposed, including the requirement to make National Insurance contributions, speak good English and not have a criminal record. This sounded an awful lot like the Reform policies damned by the Prime Minister 24 hours earlier, but the Left is incapable of not occupying the moral high ground (because Not Tories) so there were no worries about immorality or "racism". Phew!

    Revealingly, Mahmood had grasped that the unfairness of uncontrolled mass immigration, discriminating against those who were here first and had paid their dues, now posed a threat to the "open, tolerant, generous" place that welcomed her parents from Pakistan in the 1970s and enabled their bright daughter to ascend to one of the great offices of state. "Patriotism, a force for good, is turning into something smaller. Something more like ethenone-nationalism, which struggles to accept that someone who looks like me, and has a faith like mine, can truly be English or British," she said.

    Nearly there, Shabana. The unpalatable truth, which the Home Secretary may be too afraid (or ashamed) to face, is that Pakistan also gave us many of the vile, depraved racists who raped and trafficked tens of thousands of white, working-class girls, and did so with impunity for years. Why? Because Mahmood's Labour Party was unwilling to confront this horrifying crime, preferring to sweep it under the carpet in the name of "community cohesion".

    And, guess what? The white, working class are now done with Labour. They know full well that Labour are not the patriotic party they are hastily rebranding themselves as. They are the "plastic patriots" they accuse Nigel Farage and Reform of being. If anyone has stoked ethno-nationalism it is not the bogeymen of the "far-Right", Home Secretary, but the Left which has insisted on sectarianism and, as Starmer yet again put it in his speech, "celebrating our differences".

    The British used to celebrate what made us the same, not what divided us, and we were the better for it.

    The voters are not buying this Born Again Britishness, I'm glad to say. A Survation poll this week found that Labour was the least patriotic of any party, even coming behind the Greens who would happily sell East Anglia to the Dutch if it reduced our carbon emissions.

    It is the Left that has sown "the politics of grievance", not Reform. It is the Left that has promulgated identity politics, the single most divisive and destructive force in our national life. It is the Left that elevated concerns of ethnic minorities above the white majority, creating two-tier justice and untold bitterness. It is the Starmerites who denigrated love of country as "Little England". It is the Left who called the desire to control our borders and protect women and children "racist".

    And it is Labour which – having alienated its traditional base, who are all of the things it despises – now makes what Nigel Farage calls "a bizarre attempt" to reclaim patriotism and the love of flags.

    Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy further inflamed matters on Tuesday by claiming that Farage had "flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger". An allegation that was as historically inaccurate as it was potentially libellous.

    At some point later the same day, the message clearly went out from Labour HQ to dial it down and stop calling Nigel Farage a "racist". Lammy, for his part, withdrew his comments. Someone must have remembered what happened when Hillary Clinton called Trump voters a "basket of deplorables".

    It was much too late. Thanks to Starmer's toxic rhetoric (about which Labour loves to accuse others), there is now an ugly, boiling feud between him and Farage. It will colour politics a bloody red for the next eight months until the Senedd, Scottish and local elections.

    Then voters will decide: which is the party that best represents the true feelings of the British people?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/30/starmers-racism-slurs-are-final-nail-in-labours-coffin

    1. Not sure about the anaglypta line…
    2. It took the Tories a lot less than 14 years to mess up. The date was June 11th 2016, when the stick insect became party leader.

    1. Anaglypta embossed wallpaper was used mostly in public houses and painted brown in order to mask the nicotine smoke stains. It was used extensively on pub ceilings for this purpose.

      Alison Pearson might just be more insightful than you think.

      2. We’ve just had guys in to remove wood chip and artex ceilings from our bungalow. It looks a helluva lot better now.

    2. Anaglypta embossed wallpaper was used mostly in public houses and painted brown in order to mask the nicotine smoke stains. It was used extensively on pub ceilings for this purpose.

      Alison Pearson might just be more insightful than you think.

  111. Well, chums, I'm now off to bed. So Good Night to you all, sleep well, and I hope to see you all bright and early tomorrow morning.

  112. The theatre begins for 15 days as the US federal government shuts down when the clock strikes 12 tonight, after the Senate rejected two temporary funding bills.

    Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq futures fall with government shutdown all but certain

  113. The theatre begins for 15 days as the US federal government shuts down when the clock strikes 12 tonight, after the Senate rejected two temporary funding bills.

    Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq futures fall with government shutdown all but certain

      1. Thanks, Bob. I am well , thanks, and hope you are too. Eyesight has been problematic, following a series of retinal bleeds, starting about a year ago. But the blood is clearing, ever so slowly, but measurably. Still can’t clearly read music without a magnifying glass, which made playing the organ a bit tricky. Fortunately, I can churn out hymns from memory (which surprised me). Voluntaries, less so.

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