Tuesday 4 August: We flattened the sombrero, now allow us to rescue our livelihoods

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/08/03/letterswe-flattened-sombrero-now-allow-us-rescue-livelihoods/

696 thoughts on “Tuesday 4 August: We flattened the sombrero, now allow us to rescue our livelihoods”

    1. Good morning, King Stephen. Do you have a picture of Boris in the shower?

      :-))

          1. In an extreme emergency Yes ( I prefer the taste of non-peaty flavoured whiskies…..)

          3. I have to admit that the only whisky I like is Bruichladdich. Most are just too harsh for me. Gin is my spirit tipple.

          1. Feeling somewhat pissed orf. I am becoming worried about the effects of this nonsense on my grandchildren.
            Still, my hairdresser, although dressed for major surgical procedures, is trimming my hair this morning.

          2. Sorry to hear that, Annie, but it’s quite understandable. One of my cousin’s granddaughters works in a hardware store and freaked out when some customers refused to wear masks, so much so that her manager put her on stockroom duties away from the general public. Without going mad and rushing like lemmings to the beaches or to raves or to riots and looting demonstrations many of the younger generation seem to be cowed by fear. I really do blame the MSM for fanning the flames of fear.

            On a totally different note, I drove past your house into town today to have my own locks trimmed at our mutual friend Ron’s establishment for the second time since I was able. Great minds think alike!

    2. Nice, I’ve just cancelled this morning’s round of golf as the tide appears to be fully in on the Costa Clyde

  7. We’re paying an extra stipend for this…

    The elderly should be in no rush to pay the BBC
    CHARLES MOORE – 4 August 2020 • 6:00am

    Over-75-year-olds are worried now that, from the first of this month, payment for their television licences has fallen due. They should not be, says the TV Licensing website: they will be “supported through the changes”. “TV Licensing will write to all licence holders aged over 75 with clear guidance about how to pay,” says the BBC, which is a polite way of saying, “We know where you live.”

    But do they? If I were in the “at risk” category, I would not – Heaven forfend – advocate non-payment, but I might lie low. After all, the free-licence privilege has existed for 20 years, so the BBC’s database must itself be pretty elderly. Since it has not been demanding money of the old since the year 2000, it presumably has no accurate way of telling whether the people it has sent free licences to are still alive. You are supposed to say on voter registration forms if you are over 75, but it would surely be an abuse of data privacy if this information were transferred to the BBC. If you are dead, even the BBC cannot get £157.50 out of you.

    In my flat in London, where I do not have a television, I receive a steady stream of letters in brown envelopes from TV Licensing. My current pile adds up to 76 of them. They often carry threats on the envelope (“Investigation has started in your area”), but I refuse to answer or even open them, since I do not see why I should be compelled to inform anyone that I do not have a television.

    Despite the threats, nothing ever happens to me. TV Licensing has no legal right – contrary to what it implies – to enter your property. I wonder how, in the era of Covid-19, the BBC proposes to chase the old whom it suspects of evasion. Will it dare get a warrant to knock down the front doors of 90-year-olds wearing masks, and then drag them to the magistrates’ courts? Surely not. Old people can scarcely be blamed if they sit tight and wait for the Corporation to fulfil that promise to “help them through the changes”.

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

    A new report from Policy Exchange, Academic Freedom in the UK, makes clear that such freedom is not secure. Its survey finds that only 20 per cent of British-based academics vote for “right-wing” parties (ie the Conservatives and further right), whereas 75 per cent vote Labour, Liberal Democrats or Green. The disproportion between Leavers and Remainers is similar.

    Worse, intellectually, is the “self-censorship” which many feel they must practise in order to keep their jobs. The point of the “cancel culture”, after all, is to destroy certain individuals.

    It is nothing new that universities are more left-wing than the general population – though it does seem that the lack of diversity of opinion is greater than ever. As the excellent Canadian satirist, Ryan Long, puts it in his woke YouTube persona, “When I learned that diversity meant hiring a bunch of different colours of people who agree with me, I was all in.”

    But this goes deeper than disagreement. In the doctrines which lie behind organisations such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and their campus equivalents, the very idea of disagreement evaporates. There is no such thing as the other person’s point of view. That is just a smokescreen put up, they say, by the white supremacists who have dominated Western culture up until now. Traditional ideas of history or literature are automatically “colonial”.

    There can be no discussion about this, they go on, because that would be to collude with the structures of oppression. Instead there is the idea of “hurt”. If you feel that a professor or his views are “offensive”, you are considered unarguably right, certainly if he is white and male. If such attitudes rule universities, the very idea of a university vanishes.

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

    A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how the exciting appearance of a solitary Bearded Vulture in the Peak District had been grabbed by animal-rights zealots to pursue their obsessions, helped by credulous media.

    Tim Birch, an Extinction Rebellion supporter and employee of the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, declared that the vulture was threatened by grouse shooters when the season opens on 12 August.

    This column pointed out that even the wickedest gamekeeper would have no interest in killing the vulture, since it preys only on dead birds.

    Now Mr Birch has switched the focus of his attack. Last week, on the BBC’s PM programme, Mr Birch was given space to air his theory that the vulture was in peril from “stink pits” where gamekeepers drop dead animals such as foxes. No expert was given air-time to counter Mr Birch’s theory.

    So it seems worth saying that stink-pits (more often known as middens) are not used at this time of year, and indeed have become very rare. Besides, they are almost always covered, so no vulture could get in. Mr Birch fears that poor Beardy might get lead-poisoning if he ate, say, a crow which had been shot. This is scarcely more likely than that Mr Birch would suffer if he ate pigeon pie in his Derbyshire local.

    The only news fact in the Bearded Vulture story is its rare presence in this country (it comes from Switzerland). Its role as victim is fiction.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/04/elderly-should-no-rush-pay-bbc/

    1. Did the Bearded Vulture use an air bridge or is it in quarantine for ten seven fourteen days?

    2. Don’t know why the BBC are bothering, they’ll all be gone after they have the covid vaccine.

    3. Did the Bearded Vulture use an air bridge or is it in quarantine for ten seven fourteen days?

      1. Being bearded like most of the recent spring/summer arrivals on our southern shores, it was exempted from all quarantine requirements and granted immediate 4*accommodation with stunning views free of charge.

    4. 76? Crikey. I get that many in three months. I bin them. Why keep them? They’re just harrassment and empty threats.

      Such nonsense should be ignored. If they do arrive then it’s likely I’ll be out. The one time they’ve come in I’ve thrown them out. It was also the first time I remember Wiggy barking and the man threatened him so I suggested he leave while he still had a head.

      They’re a bunch of toxic thugs. Ignore them.

  8. SIR – As a motorcyclist who did my own maintenance, I found a tip from an old hand – that a large screwdriver, handle-end in ear, blade-end on the running engine or gearbox – was the quickest way to diagnose an internal problem. No need to buy a stethoscope (Letters, August 3).

    Mike Slater
    Burghfield, Berkshire

    And this has broad application to the human condition?

    1. …and if you can’t hear the noise of the tappets whilst the engine is running you can use the screwdriver the other way round (blade-end in ear) to clear the earwax. 🤔

  9. Royal Navy will have to be deployed for Channel migrants to be returned to France, says Border Force union. 4 August 2020 • 6:00am.

    The Navy will have to be deployed to return Channel migrants caught at sea to France because it is too dangerous and difficult for Border Force cutters alone, its union has warned the Government.

    Lucy Moreton, professional officer of the ISU, which represents borders, immigration and customs staff, said officers believed only the Navy had the capability to safely remove and return to France migrants intercepted in their boats in the Channel.

    Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is seeking a new agreement with the French that would allow both the British and French to return migrants whether caught in British or French waters or even if they make it to English shores.

    This is just a farce designed to prevent any action being taken at all.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/04/royal-navy-will-have-deployed-channel-migrants-returned-france/

      1. They’ve got two state-of-the-art aircraft carriers (aeroplanes are extra) that can ferry the proprietors-with-human-rights to a life protesting about indigenous privilege in a welfare state, while they scuttle the boats with their fee-paying passengers.

    3. Mine the Channel, the cargo ships will just have to go the long way around.

  10. [Poorly edited by the incompetent DT subbies]

    SIR – Before retiring, I was the finance director of Raleigh Cycles, which had its own virtual free port in Nottingham. By registering with HM Revenue & Customs for inward and outward processing relief, and warehouse and duty deferment, customs duties and VAT did not have to be paid on imports or exports outside the EU Single Market, but only on goods sold (or stolen) inside it.

    Granted, we had to keep accurate stock records, which the impatient may regard as “red tape”. But overall, it improved cash flow and helped us cope with seasonal surges in demand.

    I cannot see what advantage a network of free ports would give, other than not having to keep detailed stock records (great for those trading goods illicitly). It would, however, create the enormous disruption of having to move factories and warehouses to free-port areas.

    If the Government really wants to help businesses do more international trade, it could reduce the burden of duties and taxes by waiving the double bank guarantee that HMRC currently requires to register for these schemes.

    Simon Goddard
    Twickenham, Middlesex

    I bet that Boris and pals were not familiar with this when they came up with their wheeze of Free Ports.

    1. Some few years ago, shipped the cylinder head of Firstborn’s Landy to Turner Engineering in the UK. They said that they had a “free” limit of 10 items received for refurbishment before HMRC would levy import & export duties on the parts, thus making the business of doing work for foreign owners uneconomic. Seemed crazy to me, but hey…
      Turner’s also organised the DHL shipping, at about a 10th of the cost that I could have done from Norway – good on them! Did a lovely job, too!

  11. SIR – Your report that Rhodes Avenue School may have to change its name because of Cecil Rhodes took me back to the Fifties when, as a very young new bride in Bradford, I was asked of my new surname: “Rhodes, as in Wilfred?”

    I was bemused until I realised that the Yorkshire and England cricketer was more identifiable than some distant colonialist or Greek island.

    I must add that I preferred my new name, as my maiden name was Day.

    Gay Rhodes
    Cheadle, Cheshire

  12. SIR – I read with interest Emily Strasser’s article about her grandfather’s involvement in making the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

    My family were living in the Far East when Japan entered the war. The Japanese set up more than 300 concentration camps for white women and children around the Dutch East Indies – and, although we were a mixed-race family, my mother, myself and my two siblings were incarcerated on Java for almost four years.

    We shared a three-bedroom bungalow with 100 other women and children. We were starved, beaten, hit with bayonets, tortured and forced to stand and bow to the emperor for hours in the sun. There was almost no food, water or medication. Many did not survive.

    My father was taken to work as a slave labourer on the Burma Railway and the bridge over the River Kwai, then transported to Osaka, Japan, to work in an underground munition factory. He never recovered emotionally and died young.

    A few years ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Japan, with two of my children and a grandchild, to make my peace. My siblings do not understand why I made this trip, but I am glad I did. Most Japanese people, I learnt, are not aware of the atrocities committed by their country during the Second World War. Perhaps it is time that the Japanese said they were sorry.

    I am sad when people remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not why the atom bombs dropped. I have no doubt that those bombs saved my life, and that of many thousands of others.

    Please do not judge those who were involved in making them.

    Hanneke Coates
    Budleigh Salterton, Devon

    1. Most Japanese people, I learnt, are not aware of the atrocities committed by their country during the Second World War.

      Children’s school textbooks gloss over Japanese behaviour during WWII.

        1. Japanese though I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the ones in the UK were now so!

      3. German school textbooks did the same for a long time. Now the WWII is called European Civil War, in Germany. Great, eh?

        Except that at the same time the Germans have to be so contrite over what happened. So what happens? We have to “share” to burden of their guilt. We weren’t the agressor, Germany! This country should not be part of sharing your guilt. (They don’t seem to have any guilt towards the Allies they killed, only immigrants who now want to come in.)

    2. Just the usual revision of history………..
      I note the original story called the use of the bomb “An atrocity”
      An atrocity that saved 500,000 Allied casualties and probably 4,000,000 Japanese civilian casualties based on the experience of the invasion of Okinawa if we had to invade the mainland
      Some “atrocity”

      1. The current run of the ‘atrocity’ story was a Beeb special. The only bit they forgot to include was that Donald Trump ordered the attack from his nursery and was at the controls of the Enola Gay. {:^))

        Morning Rik

      2. Yes, still an atrocity, but often in war atrocities are necessary.

        I have seen the 1944 Allied Normandy invasion referred to in France as ‘La Dommage’ (The Shame), because of the destruction of so much beautiful landscape and architecture there as the Allied troops fought their way in.

        There are few French who would not regard it a necessary and noble sacrifice.

    3. In 1980 or thereabouts, the Japanese authorities issued a school history textbook that covered the period of the Second World War 1942-45. It created an outrage in nearly all south and south east Asia. Countries that hardly acknowledged each others existence otherwise combined to protest at the gross distortion of widely understood events this account gave. In no particular order, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, North and South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, Myanmar (Burma), Bangladesh, India, Papua New Guinea and other island states that had experienced Japan’s ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ were appalled at the lack of contrition. Indeed, some had initially welcomed the ridding of their countries of colonial rule only to discover what Japan had in mind for them was utterly worse. Ronald Searle, the illustrator, captured at Singapore, worked on the Burma railway. His personal memoir, To the Kwai and Back records that five times as many Malay’s and Burman’s died building the railway than Allied P.O.W.’s such was the Japanese attitude towards anyone not Japanese. Young Japanese I have meet professionally were delightful; they are not to blame but their country has lived for the best part of a century in denial; indeed, I believe post war the Japan claimed south east Asia (e.g. India) was freed from colonial rule by their actions in the war. As far as I understand very few who fought out there was in any mood after seeing and hearing what the ‘knights of Bushido’ had done over and over again, to regret the ending of the war by any means necessary.

  14. Not true and valid. DT are picking up this ‘U-turn’ tosh from The Grimes…

    No 10 ditches plan to shield over-50s after backlash from ministers

    Downing Street makes sudden U-turn after ministers warned scheme was impractical and could damage the economy

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/03/plan-shielding-over-50s-ditched-backlash-ministers/

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

    BTL:

    Brother Lead
    3 Aug 2020 9:47PM

    U turn on something that hadn’t even been announced.

    The MSM appears to be making up news as it goes along.

    Genuine Wilful Sprite
    3 Aug 2020 9:52PM
    @Brother Lead

    Yes and this is the umpteenth time they have done this.

    Brother Lead
    3 Aug 2020 9:54PM
    Headline news. Government u turn on policy that wasn’t policy.

    FFS, what is going on with our media?

    S Wilson [Tartan Pimpernel]
    3 Aug 2020 9:43PM

    Anger from ministers? What about anger from the general population.

    I’m not locking up. So there. I’m fit, healthy and need to get on with earning my living, as does the rest of the country.

    Genuine Wilful Sprite
    3 Aug 2020 9:51PM

    ‘Hours later Number 10 ditched the plan by saying it had never been part of their anti-coronavirus strategy.

    This was publicly confirmed by the business minister Nadhim Zahawi who yesterday morning insisted the idea that over-50s would be asked to isolate at home was “inaccurate” and “speculation” (below). ‘

    In other words as I posted several times, it was just the Times, printing made up rubbish and hoping it produces anti-government sentiment.

    They have done this often about Covid policy.

    Still I suppose they were humiliated after reporting that Boris was going to get rid of the dog he got with Carrie once the baby was born. They were forced to remove that report completely.

    Despicable rag run by a bitter old neoliberal.

    1. Morning, C1
      OTOH, I wouldn’t put it past No.10 to fly a kite, and, if the reaction is unfavourable, pretend they were just discussing options.

      1. Precisely! I’m convinced that such stories are planted in the media to gauge public reaction. House arrest for the over 50s is now a dead duck if the reaction is any guide. So, up yours Johnson! Get a bloody grip man and stop mucking (?) about. You are currently about as much use as a fart in a spacesuit.

        Moaning, Annie. My patience with this wretched government is now in a minus quantity.

  15. Good morning all.

    Beautiful mackerel sky at 5 am. Haven’t seen one for ages.

    1. I’m impressed. The last time I saw a sky at that time of the morning, I was emerging from casualty after one of the Jack Russells bit my hand.
      And he’s been dead for 4 years. (No connection between the two events)
      Morning, Peddy.

      1. ‘Morning, Anne.

        It was only because I had to go to the bathroom that I noticed the sky.

        1. Is there no roof on your toilet then? Morning Peddy (and you shouldn’t be looking upwards while……)

    3. Good morning, Peddy. Were there any flying penguins and pigs amongst the mackerel?

      :-))

      1. I was in too much of a hurry to get to the bathroom to notice. ‘Morning, Elsie.

  16. There was a TV programme couple of days ago about Beverley Allitt, NHS nurse who murdered four children while on duty in 1991. Presumably if such a thing happened today, snowflakes – using George Floyd logic – would demand defunding of the NHS.

  17. Just flicked through the Daily Mail.on line, its just full of doom and lies. Do not stop and read it its bad for your health.

    1. My mother always gets the Daily Mail on Tuesday because of its health pages.

      She reckons now she’ll live to be 100.

  19. Good morning all
    Dull, but pleasantly cool in Derbyshire, though it has just started a light shower as I went out for the milk.

  20. Number of UK citizens emigrating to EU has risen by 30% since Brexit vote. 4 August 2020.

    “These increases in numbers are of a magnitude that you would expect when a country is hit by a major economic or political crisis,” said Daniel Auer, co-author of the study by Oxford University in Berlin and the Berlin Social Science Center.

    According to interviews, half chose to leave the UK quickly. “Another important finding from the empirical evidence associated with Brexit is reduced levels of consideration and level-headedness in decision-making, with increases in levels of impulsiveness, spontaneity and corresponding risk-taking,” the researchers said.

    So you’re saying @Cathy Newman, they all flipped their lids and jumped ship? Lol!

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/04/number-of-uk-citizens-emigrating-to-eu-has-risen-by-30-since-brexit-vote

    1. If they want to go, let them go.

      Tell you who won’t go – those people who said they’d go if we left the EU.

    2. Artificial Intelligence presents a series of opportunities for criminals according to researchers at UCL

      Enough said, it’ll be utter bollocks.

      1. If it were true artificial intelligence then the machine would set those criminals up, reorder what they have and within 6 months be running the stock market.

        If then else is not AI.

  22. Dr David Nabarro [is a medical doctor who has made his career in the international civil service, working for either the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Director-General of the World Health Organization. Most recently from February 2020 he has helped the DGWHO stop the COVID-19 pandemic.] was on Toady.

    Given his association with Imperial College and the WHO, perhaps it’s understandable that he sounded like a panicking nut-case as his world implodes.

    2. His uncle (?), Sir Gerald, was mainly renowned for his flamboyant moustaches.

  23. I spotted a headline “Dining out: Where to eat in New South Wales”.

    Is the DT still a British paper?

  24. Good morning, my friends

    DT article today: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/uk/bomad-non-grata-nationwides-cap-gifted-deposits-makes-impossible/

    Bomad non grata: Nationwide’s cap on gifted deposits ‘makes it impossible’ for first-time buyers
    To get a 10pc deposit mortgage with Nationwide, first-time buyers must have saved 75pc of the deposit themselves

    This is a positive change!

    Politicians and lenders have always come up with the wrong answer as far as rising property prices for young people are concerned: they have always thrown more money – or easier credit – at the problem.

    And this, of course has had the effect of raising prices still further.

    In GCSE economics one would have learnt that one of the basic rules of supply and demand is that prices are affected by both demand and the supply of the money available. If money flows freely then prices will rise; if money is difficult to get hold of then prices will fall.

    Sad that our politicians for generations have been too stupid to understand this basic rule – unless of course – along with exorbitant rates of interest on student loans – they have always wished to enslave the young.

    1. Neither should buy-to-letters be allowed to use the equity accrued in previous properties to assist the purchase of later properties. It isn’t real money, and it puts those seeking their own home at a very definite disadvantage. But I do not suppose they will. They want everyone in rented property. ‘Abolishment of home ownership’ – UN Agenda 21. The Nationwide is taking a step towards this. The buy-to-letters gang will get there first.

    3. 322070+ up ticks,
      Morning R,
      Please refrain from using stupid in a descriptive manner
      when treachery is the true description needed.

    2. What he, very funnily, illustrates is the truth.

      What is not so funny is that no one with half a brain is doing anything about ridding the country of the very cretins he is taking the piss out of.

  26. An Apple each day keeps Covid blues away….

    “Apple Inc. soared 10% Friday after a blowout earnings report, adding $171 billion to its market capitalisation, making it the world’s most valuable company, at $1.817 trillion (surpassing Saudi Aramco). Despite positive earnings during coronavirus lockdowns, Apple has requested UK retail store landlords to slash rent by as much as 50%.
    Apple said that, while its stores were closed, online demand for iPhones and iPads was “phenomenal” during the lockdown.
    Its outlets are among the most profitable in the industry, and their popularity means that landlords are desperate to keep the Silicon Valley titan as a tenant”.

    1. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
      Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

      1. In due time, in due time..

        I met a traveller from Newfoundland,
        Who said: “Two fast, powerful chips of Silicone
        Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
        Half sunk, a shattered iPhone lies, whose frown,
        And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
        Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
        Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
        The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
        And on the pedestal these words appear:
        “My name is AppleInc, king of things:
        Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
        Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
        Of that colossal Corp, boundless and bare,
        The lone iPad stands stretch far away.

      2. 322070+ up ticks,
        Morning RE,
        Not to be taken as a fool after once being seriously bitten I will make sure it does NOT happen again courtesy of the same players.
        The “nige” investigates ? for whos benefit in the main ?
        He needs investigating for his true motives in my book.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc7iuUHk3Yk

        1. The bit I don’t get is the bloke drives a Volvo. He doesn’t need to wear a pinstripe and tie. Why the flowery arrival in the Roller?

    1. I still make my tea in a teapot, with loose tea. Actually I don’t do it very often as I’ve trained my OH to do it for me! He never drinks tea.

      1. I remember Mum teaching me to always warm the pot before making the tea. Not sure it really makes a difference when you’re putting boiling water in it anyway?

        3. Good afternoon, Sue. I can assure you that it does.

          To mash (‘brew’ for southerners) tea in order to extract all the good flavours from the leaves, then water at boiling point (100ºC, 212ºF) needs to be reached. An infusion of around five minutes thereafter will ensure the best-tasting cup of tea (even better if you use a bone-china cup).

          If you put boiling water into a cold pot, the shock of the cold will reduce the temperature of the water to well below 100ºC as it hits the leaves. This will ensure that all the best flavours are not extracted (mashed) and an inferior cup of tea will result. Warming the pot first helps to stop that thermal shock.

          I once ordered a cup of tea at a small cafe situated near the summit of Cairngorm. It was the most revolting drink I’ve ever tasted. I did some research and was reminded that water boils at 100ºC at sea level. At the 4,000 feet summit of Cairngorm, water boils at 95·5ºC, which is insufficient temperature to infuse the leaves: hence a disappointingly undrinkable beverage.

          Coincidentally the opposite is the case with coffee, since the slogan, “boil to spoil” is very apt. Coffee is best extracted at 92ºC since to use a higher temperature will extract all the bitter compounds that do not emerge at 92ºC, where all the delicious flavours are released.

      2. my late father, himself a great proponent of loose leaf tea in a bizarre combination had a lovely squat rounded metal teapot that suited his character well: sturdy, reliable, tough.

        Mother replaced it with a ghstly flowery ceramic one that was a swine to clean, held less water and dribbled from an overly elaborate spout.

        I’ll be honest, I was a precocious sod no doubt, but I hated that tea pot.

        1. Mine is a bit battered, a red ceramic one – I never clean it. The inside is nice and black and I like it that way.

          1. I have around five different teapots, all made by the London Pottery Company, and they are all a bit like yours inside. I only bought a new one two weeks ago and it is being “broken in” right now.

        2. When I bought a Bunzlau teapot in Poland, I insisted on a demonstration with water to make sure the spout didn’t dribble. My friend, who was interpreting, was embarrassed, but the shop assistant took it in his stride, as though it happened every day.

        3. Mum had a lovely silver teapot with an ebony handle. That (and all the other silver, gold, antiques etc. and anything worth anything) went to gold-digging bitch widow when my father died. I still hope she chokes. Slowly…

        4. I have a ceramic (willow pattern to match the crockery) pot for everyday use and a silver one for best.

    3. The husband of one of my mother’s best friends was way ahead of his time, and had the idea of selling whole meals that had been frozen. Late 60s I think. He went bankrupt when “someone” broke into his warehouse over a weekend and turned off all the freezers.

      Who could that have been, I wonder?

    4. I remember my Mam making curry in the late ’50s for my Dad.
      After being in India through mot of the war, he’d developed a taste for it.

    5. I seem to recall seaweed (lava bread) was recognised as a food in Wales 🙂 In the very early fifties, sugar and sweets were rationed. I’m not sure when bread came off ration, but it probably wasn’t very much earlier.

    1. One is staying at home and the other is staying at home and shutting the door.

  30. King Juan Carlos announces he is leaving Spain after its Supreme Court announces it is looking in to corruption allegations.

    Gibraltar is nice this time of year I hear.

    1. He may have been spotted earlier today on a dinghy from Calais. Hotel room already waiting ( 5* for him).

    2. Apparently there is some suggestion that the petty cash box was missing a couple of billion pesetas…

      1. Your link displayed an empty bog roll – it said go back to your previous bog and use your fingers.

      1. PS – The top Urban Dictionary definition of the word ‘Johnson’ is would you believe it Penis!

          4. In one of the Carry On films (Carry on Nurse or Carry on Doctor?) the hospital was called Long Hampton Hospital. My brother in law, who lives in Teddington, explained the joke to me.

  33. BBC says lesbian kiss scene in the Next Step was important for inclusivity message, following 100 complaints. 3 August 2020 • 8:26pm

    The BBC has defended its decision to air a lesbian kiss scene, saying it was “an important part” of their inclusivity message, following more than 100 complaints about the storyline.

    CBBC, The BBC children’s network, was praised by many for its portrayal of on-screen diversity when two characters on the Canadian mockumentary drama The Next Step shared a romantic kiss in an episode two weeks ago.

    Morning everyone.We are being lured into a cesspit of depravity that will make Babylon look like a kindergarten!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/03/bbc-says-lesbian-kiss-scene-next-step-important-inclusivity/

    1. The DT headlines:
      “BBC says lesbian kiss scene in the Next Step was important for inclusivity message, following 100 complaints”
      “The broadcaster has said the moment was important for depictions of LGBTQ+ people on the show and that the storyline was handled sensitively”

      Since I never watch the BBC these days, I was shocked to learn that the programme is for children.

      “cesspit of depravity” is an understatement! The BBC has much to answer for in the decline of very our civilisation.

      1. Actually, the nearest equivalent to this kind of widely enforced values is the ‘Strength Through Joy’ movement in Germany in the 30s. You will be happy. We have ways of making you.

    2. The DT headlines:
      “BBC says lesbian kiss scene in the Next Step was important for inclusivity message, following 100 complaints”
      “The broadcaster has said the moment was important for depictions of LGBTQ+ people on the show and that the storyline was handled sensitively”

      Since I never watch the BBC these days, I was shocked to learn that the programme is for children.

      “cesspit of depravity” is an understatement! The BBC has much to answer for in the decline of very our civilisation.

    3. The problem – ‘opportunity’ in B.B.C. terms – is this is leading behaviour. These scenes and storylines are like product placements. The product is political correctness, rejected by millions, but no matter. When you are supported by taxation why care what your audience thinks?

      Do not watch, Do not pay. It is very easy.

    4. Stuff the BBC’s “inclusivity message” and stuff the BBC! (And the sooner, the better.)

      ‘Morning, Minty.

    5. Children’s television? No. That has no place being promoted by the hard left BBC.

    3. Hang on. If you don’t tell the police where you are going – and you’ve no reason to – then they smash your window and drag you out of the car?

      Has he forgotten he is a public servant? Paid by the very people whose property he is destroying? Let’s repeat that – a servant (someone who obeys) of the public (the people).

      1. I wonder if he gets his officers to act the same way when it’s BLM protesters or Eid celebrants gathering en masse.

    4. The Australian police started getting nasty soon after the drink driving laws changed in the late 80s early 90s.
      It was bad though, early 80’s at a set of traffic lights, I once saw a guy get out of the car in front go the the boot take out another coldie and get back behind the wheel and drive on.
      It went from bad to worse. With the police hiding in road side and central reservation undergrowth with speed cameras and nabbing people for 2k over the speed limit 200 dollar fines. Now it seems on the same steep decline as ours are. Almost rock bottom, on their knees, literally.
      I haven’t been aware of the Met sorting out the people marching through the streets of London dressed in black uniforms and wearing stab vests.
      It’s reminiscent of them escorting the face covered islamic demonstrators a few years ago holding the placards calling for the beheading of disbelievers.

  35. So, following the advice from Martin Lewis, the MoneySavingExpert, to put my savings into NS & I’s Monthly Income Bonds I went to their site, clicked on the ‘Download Application Form’ link and got this:-

    ‘Sorry
    Due to coronavirus we can’t offer our full range of services at the moment, so this form is temporarily unavailable.
    Dismiss Find out More’

    How long has the Public Sector had to get their act together? It’s a good job we don’t depend on NS & I to supply us with food, Coronavirus would be the least of our worries.

    1. If the state were in charge of food supply, the obesity crisis might quickly fade away.

    2. If you already have premium bonds it means you have an account with them. Therefore you can apply for income bonds online. No need for the application form.

    3. Fortunately I went through the paper business a long time ago when I decided to register my schooldays bought premium bonds on their site, it’s the same login. I’m now fully on line !!!!!!!!!!!

    5. The private sector (note I don’t say market capital) has it’s own problems, but if it screws up you go somewhere else.

      If the state faced losing customers when it fouled up it simply wouldn’t exist. Can you imagine if Khan were a private official and he had allowed his business to cease operating, or hindered ingress and egress to a bunch of protestors that he would remain in post?

      These creatures infest the public sector because they cannot survive in the private.

  36. I’m off to the park for some quality care free playtime with my grandchildren. I very much hope that by the time they become adults the current lunacies will have ended and more mature and capable grown ups will once again be in charge (but I’m not holding my breath…)

  37. SIR – As a healthy incipient 70-year-old, I now wake every morning in fear – not from the Covid-19 virus, but from what the Government is reported to be planning to curb my civil liberties.

    Robert Taylor
    Ruddington, Nottinghamshire

    Don’t we all. I’ve lost track of all the restrictions, don’t give a fig, carry a mask visibly protruding from my pocket when in public areas to deter plod or mini-proto-plods, and KBO.

  38. BLM has the upper hand, supported by the naïve Left in general and nearly all of the MSM in particular. There don’t seem to be many people willing to criticise it.

    However, in my opinion, it has very little to do with Black Lives Matter.

    I wonder how many people here have heard of someone called Patrisse Cullors

    She is a black US Democrat who wants her party to adopt radical legislation to defund the police force, eliminate both the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and close all federal prisons and immigration detention centers, alongside various other radical demands such as toppling the U.S. capitalist system and replacing it with a socialist-style government replete with universal income, collective ownership, and the redistribution of wealth. In an interview she said: “We actually do have an ideological frame. We are trained Marxists.”

    Why do I mention Cullors? Because she is a co-founder of BLM!

    BLM is a dangerous Communist/Marxist movement that is rapidly getting out of control.

    By the way, Cullors ‘self-identifies’ as “queer”. You can say that again!

    1. From the Daily Mail –
      “Wearing what appeared to be stab vests with paramilitary-style black uniforms, demonstrators marched through London yesterday”

      This is another branch of the BLACK Lives Matter movement – They call themselves Forever Family – the marchers have the slogan –

      FF FORCE on the front of the stab vests
      This nothing else but the emerging PARA-MILITARY Wing of the BLM movement
      This is what happened in Germany when Hitler’s Nazi Party took to the streets – look what happened then !

      1. At least it recognises the two biggest problems : blacks stabbing one another and single parent families.

        Although the irony is probably lost on them.

      2. For a while I felt I was re-living the seventies, bur recently I have a strong impression that I am re-living the thirties. It won’t end well, either way.

    2. Don’t forget Susan Rosenberg – convicted terrorist released from prison as a final act by Bill Clinton, who is a fundraiser for BLM.

    3. There’s not of criticism of black looters are mindless. It is a racist group of violent thugs who living in abject luxury and safety, in wealthy nations omplain because they are selfish, ignorant, spoiled brats.

      There’s no such thing as a trained Marxist. You can read the books and follow the ideology but Marxism is of it’s time. Interestingly I’m sure they forget that Marx himself wasn’t especially bothered about slavery.

      What they mean is they’re communists in that they want other people to pay for their lives. That makes them lazy. Either way, they are typical of useless parasites on a host consuming it’s flesh while contributing nothing.

      Black looters are mindless is nothing more than a repugnant, racist bunch fo brattish whelps who need a slap and to be sent to bed without any dinner.

  39. Good Moaning, Everyone.
    Here is today’s restrictions regulatory advice to keep safe the 000.03% of fat 87 year olds who could succumb to this terrible disease sweeping the globe. These will apply from 15th. August to allow you time to panic buy bog rolls and baked beans.
    1. All right-handed people will be required to shop on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; unless you patronise Fortnum’s or Booths, in which case you will only be allowed to send your butler, who must be ambidextrous.
    2. Left handed people must only shop on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and can only attend in person; no substitutes will be allowed.
    3. Sunday shopping is reserved for the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, since they have sod-all else to do on that day. This advice also applies to garden centres and ice cream vans.
    4. Boots will only allow people with a cervix into their shops if they are buying 3 for 2 lippie in the shades Dusky Rose to Vibrant Mango.
    5. From 7th. August, you will be expected to wear a mask when having a bath but not a shower if your water is metered.
    6. When inviting your paternal grandmother and your common Aunt Hilda over for tea, you must inform the Blockwart local police station if you are planning to serve scones with the cream on top of the strawberry jam. If serving raspberry jam, you partner will be allowed to drink Earl Grey tea. There must be no sugar bowl on the table.
    7. It will be a criminal offence under the human Rights Act, to make your children write ‘thank you’ notes, since they’ve all forgotten how to write. You must encourage them to draw rainbows and stick them on the windows before the Second Wave hits this country on Wednesday week.

    Keep Safe. Keep Scared. Keep Splitting.

    2. It seems that the policy of this government is to create a climate of constant change, uncertainty, fear and helplessness. What was allowed yesterday may not be allowed today, so a cowed population awaits their orders. We have moved from the English Common Law system of ‘everything is permitted unless a specific law prevents it’ to the European model of ‘you can only do something if the government gives you permission.’

      I am becoming more and more convinced that there is agenda behind all this. We are being lied to and manipulated on a grand scale.

      1. “It seems that the policy of this government is to create a climate of constant change, uncertainty, fear and helplessness.”

        At least they are good at something.

        ‘Morning, JK.

      3. That just about sums it up. How the heck anyone can run a business, let alone their day to day life is a complete mystery. Heck, I even felt sorry for the Muslims the other day.
        A tin foil hat is fast becoming a sensible fashion choice, since no-one in this government has the intelligence to think things through.
        Morning, JK. Lovely to see you.

        1. I am leaning more to the ‘conspiracy’ rather than ‘cock-up’ theory now. We were told the reason for the lockdown was to stop the NHS being overwhelmed. If that were true then a snap 3-4 weeks lockdown could have been justified, and then we could have gone back to normal. But to keep things going for months, to keep introducing more rules which change by the day feels like an exercise of power, and a desire to fundamentally change our whole way of life.

          1. A very elderly pal had tears in his eyes when he mooted the idea that the government wants to do away with pensioners , cruelly making life unbearable, no access to doctors , chiropodists, eye clinics, leg clinics , pensions not stretching very far, TV licence , public transport cut back, and household expenses.

            From the cradle to the grave .. our welfare state is betraying the ones who need help.

            The government has no respect for pensioners .. they are not helping the economy.

          2. Neither are many immigrants but Govt. still leans over backwards to shower them with OUR money. Sick, sick, sick,

        2. Hi Anne! Nice to be back at NoTTL

          I was chatting to a lady who runs a lovely little cafe this morning. She set up her business in early March, and is now having to decide if it is worth continuing. It will be such a shame if a very pleasant place for local people to meet has to shut down, strangled at birth by this Covid-obsessed government.

          1. My visit to the hairdresser has gone up by a fiver. I can’t blame her; she was forced into idleness by a panicky government and had to shell out £££s to be allowed to open with fewer paying customers. And now she has the phantom of arbitrary shut down hanging over her if people dare to go out to enjoy themselves or even go back to school.

      5. Have you noticed that they initially cowed us with reports of deaths, but now simply threaten us with outbreaks of ‘cases’?
        I am no fan of David Icke, but I seriously wonder if there has been a covert military threat from the Chinese, who are now pulling the strings.

    1. 322070+up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      Seems a good bloke that, the type you would follow if he were in a leadership position.

      2. How? France should be processing them. That it isn’t is in breach of international law. Far from paying France we should be fining them.

        1. I agree. Everyone I know around here agrees. Perhaps you could persuade the government to either get our money back or for the French to do something about their curiously porous national security. Who knows? They might listen to you and your persuasive tone.

    2. People might be very surprised as to how many accents and languages can be heard in Melbourne these days.
      A friend in Perth told me that the Somalian ‘migrants’ that have been allowed to stay are now demanding free return flights ‘home’ to visit relatives.
      Although on the surface Australia looks to be secure with it’s border control i don’t think it is. They use to keep the ‘boat people’ on an island off the north coast but i believe the ‘boat people’ set their accommodation ablaze.
      They have been as over run with illegal immigration and have situations similar to the problems now occurring in NZ and as the rest of the western cultures, this is the current agenda. The kind accommodating gestures of white western cultures are clearly being taken for granted in all feasible aspects.
      Around 20 years ago in a Sidney suburb there was a massive riot when first generation descendants of Lebanese migrants were intimidating young girls on the local beaches. I believe the area is called Coruna.

      2. Fine. Burn down the accommodation.

        Live in the open without heat, light or food. Oh dear, how sad. Never mind.

        By all means give them a flight home. Just not a flight back.

        1. One way tickets always used to cost too much. Buy them a return ticket then cancel the flight back.

      3. A friend in Perth told me that the Somalian ‘migrants’ that have been allowed to stay are now demanding free return flights ‘home’ to visit relatives.

        Good…don’t allow them back in …

      4. The powers that be in Melbourne seem to have taken leave of their senses now by declaring a state of “emergency”.

    3. Towing them back is very obviously the right direct step, the next is fining France for failing to do it’s duty under international law.

      The final step would be to send the bill for ever gimmigrant to Sturgeon, Lammy, [insert other Lefty waster). Once they get a dozen bills for half a million quid each, and liablity for the rapes, murders, muggings and stabbings these immigrants carry out they might change their mind.

      It is only because they face none of the consequences or costs of their own fanatical support for this massive influx that they continue to support it. Once they’re paying for it and legally culpable they will swiftly change their minds.

  42. Livestock rustling soared during coronavirus meat rationing, report reveals. 4 August 2020 • 12:01am.

    Panic buying and meat rationing at the start of lockdown contributed to a big rise in sheep and cattle rustling, according to an annual rural crime survey.

    The theft of livestock rose by almost 15 per cent during 2019, costing farmers across the country in excess of £3 million.

    Organised criminal gangs are believed to have exploited the coronavirus crisis in March and April to take animals and place them into the food chain illegally.

    Abbatoirs and slaughter houses have things called receipts and accounts that are checked along with requirements to make their products traceable for possible cases of food poisoning and disease control. It is a virtual certainty that the vast majority of these animals were stolen by and for Muslims.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/03/livestock-rustling-soared-coronavirus-meat-rationing-report/

    1. Yo Minty

      The theft of livestock rose by almost 15 per cent during 2019, costing farmers across the country in excess of £3 million.

      “…..the coronavirus crisis in March and April to take animals and place them into the food chain illegally.”

      There was me thinking that Covid came in 2020.

    2. A Magnificent Morning to you Minty,

      …… It is a virtual certainty that the vast majority of these animals were stolen by and for Muslims.

      You’re probably right – which means that the police will be instructed NOT to look too closely into the matter. Indeed they will probably be redeploying those members of the Police involved in the investigation or rape gangs as they have become experts at hushing things up.

    3. Presumption of innocence ?
      A farming report a couple of months ago identified a convicted group of rustlers as being eastern european. A nationwide network of ANPR cameras (etc) would help to combat rural crime.

      1. Oddly enough Bob I have read nothing that says pig farmers are having any difficulties at all!

    6. Yo Minty

      The theft of livestock rose by almost 15 per cent during 2019, costing farmers across the country in excess of £3 million.

      “…..the coronavirus crisis in March and April to take animals and place them into the food chain illegally.”

      There was me thinking that Covid came in 2020.

  43. “Wearing what appeared to be stab vests with paramilitary-style black uniforms, demonstrators marched through London yesterday”

    This is another branch of the BLACK Lives Matter movement – They call themselves Forever Family – the marchers have the slogan –

    FF FORCE on the front of the stab vests
    This nothing else but the emerging PARA-MILITARY Wing of the BLM movement
    This is what happened in Germany when Hitler’s Nazi Party took to the streets – look what happened then !

    2. Considering the sheer number of blacks killing each other using knives stab vests are probably sensible. After all, if black lives truly matter than wearing a stab vest is a good idea.

      As for forever family – the highest number of single parent families is within black communities and it is that very lack of a father figure that causes black boys especially so many probems again, promoting this would be a good thing.

      It seems these individuals are doing the right thing – but only by recognising the utter, abject failures within the black community itself. It’s nice they’re finally recognising their failure but why are these people blaming others for problems they now proclaim they acknowledge are their own?

  44. Good morning all.

    New dangers – Paracetamol; Ibuprofen – and STATINS….

    We are all doomed.

  45. Oh-oh. Trouble ahead.

    “100% Suffer Side Effects in ‘Successful’ COVID Vaccine Trial.
    Everyone suffered side effects in this trial that’s being heralded as a big success, and 21% of participants in one group suffered one or more severe events. If that constitutes success, then what level of harm must be inflicted for a vaccine to be deemed a ‘failure?’ ”

    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/04/side-effects-of-fast-tracked-vaccine.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20200804Z2&mid=DM614256&rid=9319727

    1. Given Microsoft’s track-record on faulty software being let loose in so-called upgrades, I would not trust Bill Gates about anything to do with my health.

      1. I suppose that many will be refusing a vaccine because Gates foundation poured money into the research and development. That’s OK, it leaves the vaccine for those without pollyphobia.

        There is always the Russian vaccine, no doubt that is going to be well tested and safe.

        1. It’s nothing to do with polyphobia, it’s to do with rushed production and too little testing. These vaccines could well have any number of side effects that will not manifest themselves for years.

          I am always amazed by your blind faith in anything leftie and unquestioning acceptance of people like Gates yet refusing to accept anything that has even the remotest whiff of support from Trump.

          1. So why through Microsoft are you bringing Gates into it? He made a pot full of money through his dodgy software and in the American way is giving back through charitable donations (and tax deductions).

            You are right in that I do not accept this great conspiracy where Gates is involved in killing thousands just to enrich himself as well as line the pockets of his buddies. That used to be the extremes of Breitbart, maybe Soros is involved with a worldwide social trend, that I do not know nor do I waste my life trying to make tenuous associations to prove a point.

        2. Did you read the article, Richard? Apparently, in the doses necessary to produce antibodies, 100% of the volunteers had reactions to the vaccine, some severe.

          1. Yes I read it and it is a touch disturbing if one of the trial vaccines does not work without noticeable side effects ( who knows how severe the normal response is – just a slight ache round the injection site, major aches and pains, they don’t say).

            Roll on the vaccine trials that generate t cells, not antibodies, maybe they will be more acceptable.
            Isn’t one of the trial criteria supposed to be finding an effective dose without side effects?

          2. I hope so – one of the articles I read recently said that T-cells in people who had had SARs had survived 17 years and seemed to be one reason why people in South East Asia had better resistance to the early wave of the Covid virus there. Also people who had had flu or even common colds had some resistance to covid.

        3. Vlad will look after us. Our own leaders have betrayed and deserted us. He and Russia are the last hope of a White Christian Europe!

          1. Is the Russian way what you really want? Opposition to Putin all but banned, laws changed to suit his whims. Hardly a democracy.

            He might be the best hope for white Christian’s but that is a very poor choice.

          3. Yes it does doesn’t it instead of one oligarch, you have interchangeable parties.
            UKIP came up against the opposition to change,.

          4. Our middle child required various medical tests etc as a prerequisite for taking up a job on a cruise liner. She made the relevant appointments with the local doctor and hospital, attended the tests and X-rays some six weeks prior to departure and awaited the results. The results did not come. Phone calls, no results. Finally had to go in person to hospital and collect some results. More phone calls, no results, no help. More phone calls. Nothing. She had to leave without some results in order to catch the ship. Eventually some more results were faxed to the departure port office for her to collect, hours before sailing, after making ever more urgent phone calls. There were some test results missing.
            She sailed with the cruise ship from Southampton and the HR people on board noted the absence of the blood test results. The first port of call was St Petersburg. There my daughter was smuggled across St Petersburg in a van with blacked out windows to a Russian hospital which carried out the tests and supplied the results within 2 hours.
            Six weeks later we received the invoice from the NHS for carrying out the tests.
            So Russian vaccine or one offered by the NHS? Guess?

          5. You are living in a Police State; a country that is being plundered of its wealth; whose children are corrupted at school and girls raped at the whim of incomers. It is an utterly vile place and it will get worse.

          6. I have been looking around for places to emigrate to but it ain’t easy. Hungary you need to learn the language (fat chance). All the others have differing restrictions. Malta you need to buy a property of a certain value and a bond of the same amount. I probably wouldn’t qualify for a visa to the U.S given my louche youth. Oh those were the days. 🙂

            Any suggestions?

          7. So have I Phizzee but the truth is I am too old. I shall go down with the ship!

          8. Age is just a number.

            I notice Australia is one of the best. Provided you fund yourself and don’t get into trouble with the Law you can keep renewing the visa.

            What’s not to like. Endless beaches. Great seafood. Tinnies and Barbies. Sunshine at Christmas lol.

          13. Do you seriously think we have democracy here? Opposition to the woke viewpoint all but banned, laws changed to suit the woke way of thinking? On top of that we have a definite anti-white Christian agenda.

      2. I recall the irritation of Windows 95 and the warning: ‘Your computer has performed a fatal exception and will be shut down.’

        I switched to Macintosh.

        1. I’ve just switched from broken Windows to Linux. No hidden nasties in there. No data harvesting either.

          1. We’ve never used Windows in this house – always Linux. Even my computer illiterate OH can manage most things on there.

          2. I have both. The linux variant is the OS on my phones and tablets sold as Android by an Alphabet subsidiary. Bill Gates has had little to do with Windows for a long time.

          3. I have both. The linux variant is the OS on my phones and tablets sold as Android by an Alphabet subsidiary. Bill Gates has had little to do with Windows for a long time.

    2. Whats that old line – The surgery was successful, unfortunately the patient died.

      No worries about that moderns vaccine, Trump has cornered the market for domestic use. I am more worried about the Chinese vaccine that Canada has become involved with.

      1. That happened to the mother of a friend of mine; she survived the surgery, only to die shortly after. The surgeon was mortified.

    3. A bit of a misunderstanding . The vaccine will be deemed a complete success when 100% recipients suffer “severe events”.

    4. American startup. Almost as bad as the Russkie’s claim. Meanwhile Glaxo and AstraZeneca beaver quietly away.

  46. Richard Ekins
    It’s time to rein in the Supreme Court
    3 August 2020, 5:43pm

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/blt29e6b6cbbbd8731c/5f2843e71967337e7590ad77/GettyImages-91301301.jpg?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=crop

    The return of lockdown measures across parts of northern England, as well as the announcement of dozens of new peerages, almost entirely overshadowed the Lord Chancellor’s launch on Friday of an independent review of administrative law. Lord Faulks QC, former minister of state for justice, is to lead five other barristers and academic lawyers in examining the law of judicial review and considering whether reforms should be made. This is an important development in the government’s efforts to address the misuse of judicial power and balance of our constitution.

    The review takes up part of the work the Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission was otherwise expected to undertake, confirming earlier reports that the Commission has been shelved and is to be replaced by a series of more narrowly cast panels. Political action to address the expansion of judicial power, and consequent unbalancing of the constitution, is long overdue. There are good reasons, as I’ve argued elsewhere, for government and Parliament to review the scope of judicial review and to legislate to limit it where appropriate, reversing the effects of particular judgments by legislation when necessary. Launching the Review is an important decision, although of course the government must now wait on the panel’s deliberations and report.

    Questioning the rise of judicial power is often unfairly caricatured as a personal attack on judges or an assault on the rule of law. On the contrary, the point of defending the traditional limits of the judicial role in our constitution is to vindicate the rule of law, as well as parliamentary democracy and effective government. And the importance of those limits, which in part help to protect judges from political controversy, is appreciated by many senior judges. As Lord Reed, now president of the Supreme Court, pointed out in the first Miller case, ‘the legalisation of political issues is not always constitutionally appropriate, and may be fraught with risk, not least for the judiciary’.

    Speaking earlier this year, Lord Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, noted that the law of judicial review had been ‘established and evolved as a result of judicial decision-making’. Parliament, he said, ‘is entitled to legislate and it is entirely appropriate for [it] to look into these issues’. He looked forward to ‘a period of calm reflection [about our] constitutional arrangements’, noting that ‘there are perfectly legitimate arguments and discussions about where the boundaries of [judicial review] should be’. In a foreword to a new paper for Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, published last Friday, his predecessor as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, notes that debate about the future of the Supreme Court cannot simply be wished away. He welcomes the paper, Reforming the Supreme Court, as a very important contribution to that debate, which raises many challenging questions.

    The creation of the Supreme Court was clearly not intended to involve a change in substance. But, Lord Thomas notes, neither was much consideration given to its implications for self-restraint or accountability. And ‘one clear effect of the move’, he continues, ‘has been to isolate the judges from Parliament [in contrast to the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords] during a time when the constitution of the UK has undergone a series of uncoordinated changes and the focus of final appellate work has shifted towards judicial review, fundamental rights and devolution’. In an earlier paper, which prompted the ire of Lord Falconer amongst others, I have argued that in some cases the Supreme Court has misunderstood itself to be the guardian of the constitution, a misconception that one might begin to correct by renaming the Supreme Court the Upper Court of Appeal.

    Policy Exchange’s new paper outlines a proposal by professor Derrick Wyatt QC for institutional change at the highest level of the court system. Professor Wyatt reflects on the reasons why the Supreme Court, like the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords before it, sometimes shrugs off constitutional limits and remakes the law. He reasons that hubris is a common feature of apex appellate courts, which do not need to fear reversal on appeal. (More important still, I say, is the wider judicial culture in which judges operate, to which the Human Rights Act 1998 is significant.) He concludes that renaming the court, while unobjectionable, would be insufficiently bold and proposes instead that Parliament replace the Supreme Court with a system in which final appellate jurisdiction would be exercised by changing panels of Court of Appeal judges, drawn from across England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, who would thus form a Final Court of Appeal.

    What difference would this make? There would be no permanent set of apex appellate judges. Instead, appeals would be heard by judges who would remain used to being reversed by their colleagues and who would thus be less likely to develop an exaggerated sense of their constitutional role. The final stage of appeal would be peer review for error correction, rather than hierarchical control. True, as matters stand, Parliament may correct the Supreme Court and should legislate in response to wayward judgments (a prime example is the Court’s recent decision to quash Gerry Adams’s 1975 conviction for escaping from lawful custody, a decision which unsettles how government operates and may unjustly require compensation to be paid to Adams and others). But legislative time is short and legislative action may not substitute for judges being accustomed to their judgments being liable to reversal on appeal by a larger group of colleagues.

    Returning existing Supreme Court justices to the Courts of Appeal (or Inner House of the Court of Session in Scotland), and widening the number of judges who could participate in the Final Court of Appeal, would increase diversity, in a range of senses, in apex judicial decision-making. It would also flatten judicial hierarchy, thus making promotion less of a feature of judicial careers, which might help deter early retirement and strengthen judicial independence.

    However, one might fear that this institutional reform would introduce considerable uncertainty into appellate adjudication. It bears noting that some such uncertainty is already a feature of our arrangements insofar as the Supreme Court does not sit en banc. Appeals are heard by changing panels, as indeed was the case with the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. There are advantages and disadvantages in this mode of structuring the courts. Professor Wyatt’s proposal would effectively widen the membership of our highest court and result in a wider range of judicial panels. If there is no step change in quality between Court of Appeal and Supreme Court judges, as seems likely, this institutional change may not undermine the quality of final adjudication.

    Many questions remain to be answered, some of which Lord Thomas poses in his foreword. While the creation of the Supreme Court is clearly not the main driver of the rise of judicial power in recent years – the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 seems to me relatively much more important – the way in which the Court has come to understand itself is significant. In thinking about how to redress the balance of the constitution and to reinforce traditional limits on judicial power, the government and Parliament should give serious thought to reforming the Supreme Court to temper its sense of mission, whether by renaming it or, more radically, by restructuring it entirely.

    Richard Ekins is Head of Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project and Professor of Law and Constitutional Government in the University of Oxford

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

    The overriding sentiments of the many worthy BTL comments are ‘blow the ruddy thing up’. I concur. If one merely looks to rein it in, it will rise from the ashes at a later date and take an even firmer lefty grip on whatever comes into their sights.

    GalahadThreepwood • 6 hours ago
    So little consideration was given by Bliar to limits on the Supreme Court’s power? I suspect, given Lord Falconer’s irritation with the author, that the whole purpose was a delayed action bomb designed to destroy any conservative minded legislation that a future Parliament might come up with when the population finally revolted at the ballot box.

    1. I believe that the UK could do a lot worse than repeal every act of parliament enacted by Blair and his crew of wreckers.
      Doing so would erradicate an awful lot of society’s ills.
      He was the moron who started this “apologise or the sins of the great grandfathers” malarky with his apology for the potato famine.

      1. Afternoon Sos. I don’t think we would go far wrong if we repealed every piece of legislation post 2000AD.

        1. I don’t think he actually apologised for that one, merely stated we should be ashamed.

          We should be ashamed of letting him rise to the position he has and for not putting him on trial as a war criminal..

      3. Afternoon Sos. I don’t think we would go far wrong if we repealed every piece of legislation post 2000AD.

  47. Morning all

    SIR – I attended church this week and last without a mask. Next Sunday I will have to wear one. This is yet another edict that does not make sense.

    Deirdre Lay

    Cranleigh, Surrey

    SIR – Why should the solution to the increase in coronavirus cases be to confine the over-50s to their homes?

    A photograph in the Telegraph yesterday showed a “scuffle” at a bar in Brighton. Social distancing seemed to be ignored. More tellingly, I couldn’t see a single person who appeared to be over 50. Why should the over-50s be penalised for the selfish behaviour of younger members of the community?

    John Newbury

    Warminster, Wiltshire

    SIR – In April I stayed at home, but in recent months I have been taking a daily walk. As a result, I have lost weight, my legs and heart are stronger, enabling me to do more for myself, and I am mentally more alert.

    Surely we should not lose these benefits because of the behaviour of younger people.

    Jean Gourvenec

    St Albans, Hertfordshire

    SIR – In 1914, people were told that the war would be over by Christmas. It lasted another four years.

    A few weeks ago, we were told that things would be back to normal by Christmas. I hope that Covid-19 does not last another four years.

    Miles Garnett

    South Otterington, North Yorkshire

  48. Remote doctors

    SIR – As an ENT surgeon, I have held virtual clinics online and over the phone throughout the pandemic. I appreciate the Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s desire to improve NHS efficiency, but I have found that about 80 per cent of such consultations ultimately require a face-to-face visit to the clinic.

    Can he suggest how I might create an app to remove ear wax online?

    Richard Bickerton FRCS

    Lighthorne, Warwickshire

    SIR – I recently had an appointment to check on the progress of my chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This would normally involve blowing into a machine to test my lung capacity and a test on the oxygen levels in my blood. This appointment, however, was carried out over the telephone. I do not have medical training, but I fail to see the point of the call.

    Colin J Butcher

    Brecon

    1. Mr Butcher – the whole point was to give the impression that the medical people involved were busy. Your needs were immaterial.

    2. Bickerton echoes my post of some days ago.
      Butcher – to see if you are still alive.

    3. With technology like Zoom doctors can do mass PC screening of patients using a mouse-on approach.🤔

  50. 322070+ up ticks,
    What news from the Dover invasion front are the governance party still
    backing the well-fare of the peoples campaign they have running ?

    So as not to confuse that is NOT welfare of the United Kingdom peoples
    far from it, but the incoming troops.

    Wonder troop trains are not in evidence as of yet direct Dover to london
    the training camp, where the blm are running a “getting in step” program on
    seemingly military grounds.

    1. With British Airways laying off their whole 747 fleet our “leaders” might as well utilise them and the staff to fly them in, ready to move straight into our empty houses, after we have all been forcibly “vaccinated” and sadly “didn’t pull through”.

  51. ‘Morning again.

    Well, that was great value for money!

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/08/03/1-5m-police-london-black-lives-matter-counter-protests-one-weekend-report/

    Leading BTL comment:

    “The police really get no sympathy from me or anyone else who isnt a bed wetting lefty.
    They have become complete and utter puppets. Politicised to the maximum, and applying the law selectively based on the elites instructions.

    The sight of them getting down on their knees like slaves to black racist communists. Or running away from a few feral black yobs having street parties in London is truly pathetic.”

    1. Can we not get Grizzly to come home from Sweden and sort things out properly?

      1. Good morning, Rastus.

        Flattered though I am by your faith in a remnant from another (more enlightened) era, I have to say that the job in question would be a monumental task.

        For a start, I would need to enlist the assistance of many people of the standard and beliefs of Sir Robert Peel, and where to find such candidates would be like searching for a needle in a wheat prairie. Secondly, I would need to root out all the Common Purpose-indoctrinated members of each and every force and send them on Common Sense courses [although I am painfully aware that you cannot educate cabbages].

        Each police training school would educate recruits in the basic tenets of policing and all political correctness would be removed from this training programme.

        Once a return to proper policing by consent was achieved, with no governmental interference of any kind, and the police becoming public servants providing a firm-but-fair, friendly omnipresence; one that criminals and miscreants were genuinely scared of … I would probably wake up in a cold sweat from my fantastical dream and need a stiff drink!

        1. 322070+ up ticks,
          G,
          Go direct to the root of the odious problem,
          political life giving support via the polling booth to the lab/lib/con coalition.
          A cacophony of sound outside every time a supporter kissed X a said party candidate inside the secrecy of the booth

    2. It might be interesting what the slammers would do if the police in London are de-funded. They wouldn’t be happy…

  52. A long read…

    ‘An affront to the memories of British sailors’: the lies that sank Hollywood’s sub thriller U-571

    The 2000 blockbuster about the race to capture an Enigma machine shamelessly erased Brits from history. Did it get anything right?

    TOM FORDY

    Anyone who’s seen U-571 knows it was Matthew McConaughey and Jon Bon Jovi who captured the Enigma machine from the Nazis. In a daring mission, the heroes intercepted a damaged U-boat, disguised themselves as Germans, and boarded the sub – kicking off a gun and torpedo fight that saw Jon Bon Jovi die a hero’s death, decapitated by a wayward slice of metal (but not, as his earlier work suggested, shot through the heart).

    McConaughey would steal the U-boat and its Enigma machine, blow up a Kriegsmarine destroyer, and win the war.

    None of that happened, of course. U-571 – directed by Jonathan Mostow and co-written by David Ayer – is a cynical Hollywood fantasy: the kind of crafty historical tinkering which has riled up Brits for years. U-571 is so outrageously fabricated that when it was released back in April 2000, Tony Blair said it was an “affront”.

    In truth, it was the British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Bulldog that captured the Enigma machine in May 1941 – seven months before the Americans officially entered the war. The real hero was a 20-year-old sub lieutenant named David Balme, who led a party of eight onto a damaged U-boat – the U-110 – and found the Enigma machine and codebooks.

    Dubbed Operation Primrose, it was one of several “pinches” that helped the code-breaker boffins at Bletchley Park crack the naval Enigma. It helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic and brought forward Operation Overlord – and ultimately the end of the war – several years.

    “I still have dreams about it sometimes, you know,” Balme said in 2011, aged 90. “It was the most frightening moment of my life going down that U-boat.”

    Invented around the end of the First World War, the Enigma machine scrambled German into cyphertext using a series of rotors. Each rotor displayed different settings. To decipher the code, the receiver of the signals needed to know the rotor settings. Foolishly, the Nazis didn’t believe the code could be broken.

    At first, the British could listen to the German’s signals but could not understand them. Bletchley Park – including code breakers Dilly Knox and Alan Turing – cracked the German army and Luftwaffe codes. But the naval codes were crucial in the Battle of the Atlantic, which threatened Britain’s all important supply lines.

    As described by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, author of Enigma: The Battle for the Code, breaking the Enigma was “one of the greatest British coups of the Second World War.”

    The first British capture of naval Enigma materials happened on February 12, 1940, when HMS Gleaner discovered and sunk U-33 off the coast of Scotland. Three rotor wheels were discovered. One story – which may be apocryphal – is that the wheels were discovered in the trousers of a captured U-boat sailor. There were other notable pinches, such as the discovery of rotor wheels and codebooks on the German trawler Krebs in March 1941. Two cipher wheels and a document of outdated (but still useful) settings were found.

    When U-571 was released in April 2000, it was already under fire for rewriting history. Charles Baker-Creswell, the son of Capt. Joe Baker-Creswell, was criticising the film in 1999, while it was still in production (“This film is not about history, it’s about showbiz,” he said).

    Still, U-571 was a hit. It’s lightweight fodder, perhaps, viewed next to the Saving Private Ryan, which was released three years earlier and demanded that war films be punishingly realistic, but still a rollicking ride of explosions and trapped-in-a-submarine tension.

    Learning that the U-571 has been damaged by depth charges, the crew of the US submarine S-33 – led by Commander Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) and Lieutenant Andrew Tyler (McConaughey) plan to intercept by retooling their sub to look like a resupply U-boat.

    The capture of the U-571 is tense stuff (though Bon Jovi’s head-slicing was later replaced by him being knocked overboard for the sake of getting a PG-13 rating). After the battle, Tyler and the handful of survivors commandeer the U-boat and head for Land’s End with the Enigma.

    It doesn’t quite maintain the excitement levels (how exciting can watching some blokes press buttons and spin wheels inside a metal tube get, really?) but the climax is nerve-rattling stuff, as they outsmart a German destroyer to survive. It’s more than just their lives at stake. If they’re caught, the Nazis will know the Allies have seized the Enigma machine and change the codes. Thankfully, the Americans save the day.

    Really, U-571 is a story about the journey of McConaughey’s character from headstrong officer to responsible commander. At first he’s wincing at the thought of losing his men; by the end he’s using their corpses as bait and sending his shipmates to watery graves. All for the greater good of defeating the Nazi menace on Britain’s behalf.

    “Mr Tyler, you ever need a chief,” says shipmate Harvey Keitel, impressed by the lieutenant’s savvy under pressure, “I’d go to sea with you anytime.”

    The real question is this: why use the real-life Enigma as the “MacGuffin” to tell Tyler’s story? Hollywood has often tinkered with historical fact – be it for industry or star ego (that means you, Mel Gibson), streamlined narrative, or American box office dollars. But basing U-571 on such a fundamental whopper ensured the film could only be seen within the context of its wanton historical inaccuracy, damaging the rep of what is otherwise a solid nautical romp.

    Speaking in 2006, David Ayer called it “a distortion… a mercenary decision to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience.” He told Radio 4’s The Film Programme: “Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements.”

    Ayer took a lot of flak for the script. Reflecting on the film again in 2014, Ayer said he was “thrown under the bus” in the U-571 fallout.

    “I was one of three writers. It wasn’t my idea,” Ayer said. “I was a 26-year-old kid who came in on a rewrite and was happy to get paid that much for a studio job… it just sucks because I f–––––– love the UK. I love the people over there, I love London and I love working there. The irony is there’s this perception in the UK that somehow I’m anti-British and it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s heartbreaking.”

    It was Jonathan Mostow who wrote the original script (Sam Montgomery is co-credited as the third writer). Mostow wrote it before directing Breakdown, his adrenaline-charged Kurt Russell action-thriller, but put the U-571 script “in a drawer”. He didn’t think anyone would make a movie on water. Hollywood was still recovering from the trauma of Waterworld.

    Even the most basic detail of U-571 is fictionalised. The real U-571 wasn’t involved. It was commissioned in May 1941 and was sunk on January 28, 1944 in the North Atlantic off the west of Ireland. Its crew of 52 were all killed.

    Indeed, the heroes of HMS Bulldog weren’t the only ones who should have been affronted by U-571. The film’s German U-boat commander, Kapitänleutnant Günther Wassner (Thomas Kretschmann), has his men massacre a lifeboat-full of Allied survivors early in the story. As described by historian and archivist Timothy P. Mulligan, the Germans are depicted as “cruel murderers but inept seamen”.

    “Among over 2,400 recorded sinkings by German U-boats in World War II, only one known incident involved the killing of survivors,” wrote Mulligan in a review of the film. “And U-boat Commander-in-Chief Admiral Karl Dönitz directly opposed Hitler’s proposal in September 1942 to adopt such a policy.”

    (Interestingly, the commander of U110 was Fritz-Julius Lemp. Two years earlier, he was responsible for torpedoing the SS Athenia, which killed 117 civilian passengers and crew, just hours after the declaration of war. He claimed it was a mistake but was almost court martialed.)

    The real Operation Primrose took place on May 9, 1941. Deep into the six year-long Battle of the Atlantic, the U-110 was stalking the trans-Atlantic convoy OB318 – 35 merchant ships arranged into nine columns – as it travelled west. U-110 torpedoed two of the merchant ships, but was caught in a formation trap set by Capt. Baker-Cresswell.

    As described in Sebag-Montefiore’s account, the HMS Aubretia, hidden away on the convoy’s starboard, charged in and pummelled U-110 with depth charges, damaging the U-boat and forcing it to the surface.

    As the Germans poured out, Baker-Creswell mistakenly believed they would shoot from the U-boat deck gun so he ordered his crew to fire on them. There was panic: some Germans leapt into the water and drowned; one had his eye shot out; another had his head burst open by a shell. Lemp thought the U-110 would sink and take the Enigma with it. When he saw it wasn’t sinking, he tried to swim back. He was never seen again.

    Realising the German sailors were in fact surrendering, HMS Bulldog ceased firing. Baker-Creswell ordered Balme over to U-110 to “get whatever you can out of her – documents, books, charts, and get the wireless settings, anything like that.” Balme didn’t know what awaited him inside – scuttle charges, Nazi sailors ready to ambush – but had to holster his pistol to climb down into the belly of the U-boat.

    “Going down those ladders and thinking there may be Germans ready to shoot you … it was terrifying,” Balme told the BBC back in 2000. “We couldn’t believe that they would have just abandoned this submarine. It was something that haunted me for 15 or 20 years afterwards.”

    The submarine was empty and spotlessly tidy. The party found the Enigma machine screwed down in the office, which telegraphist Alan Long described to Balme as “a funny sort of instrument, Sir, it looks like a typewriter but when you press the keys something else comes up on it.”

    The HMS Bulldog went to investigate a U-boat sighting and left Balme and his crew behind. They were on the U-110 for six hours. As detailed by Sebag-Montefiore, when the Bulldog returned, Baker-Cresswell sent sandwiches to the U-110 – a scene that feels delightfully quaint in its Englishness. Baker-Cresswell attempted to tow the U-110 to Iceland but it sank en route.

    Timothy P. Mulligan gave credit to U-571 for its design of the Enigma machine, documents, and interiors of the submarines. “Regrettably these qualities exhaust director Jonathan Mostow’s best efforts at historical verisimilitude,” he wrote.

    Mulligan lists other inaccuracies: how easily the S-33 finds the U-571 in a storm (“A remarkable feat in the pre-GPS era”); the US submarine duping the U-boat via lamp signals, without knowing the German recognition signals; a single engine reconnaissance plane in the middle of the ocean (“presumably fueled by air and water”); a gun fight in the cramped U-boat interior; torpedoes that inflict giant Hollywood explosions; and the idea that just a handful of US sailors could run a U-boat with no training (“submarine crews averaged 45-50 men for a Type VIIC U-boat for a reason”).

    Arguably, one historical inaccuracy is how much importance is put on the incident. The message in U-571 is clear: it’s the event that won the war. King George VI said that Operation Primrose may have been “the most important single event in the whole war at sea”. But Hugh Sebag-Montefiore argues that “no single capture of material enabled the codebreakers to break the Naval Enigma once and for all.”

    He points to other events, such as the capture of documents from the German weather ship München two days earlier, which included naval Enigma settings for June.

    In February 1942 the Germans added a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine, beginning a 10-month blackout during which time the codes couldn’t be read. Hundreds of thousands of tons of allied shipping was lost each month.

    In October 1942, crewmembers from the HMS Petard boarded the U-559 and captured more Enigma materials. Sebag-Montefiore called it “by far the most dramatic of all the Enigma codebook captures from U-boats.” The US Navy did capture Enigma materials from U-505 on June 4, 1944.

    After the release of U-571, Labour MP Brian Jenkins raised the film during Prime Minister’s Questions. He said U-571 was an “affront to the memories of the British sailors who lost their lives on this action”.

    Tony Blair responded: “I agree entirely with what you say… we hope that people realise these are people that, in many cases sacrificed their lives in order that this country remained free.”

    The people of Horsforth in Leeds, where locals had raised £241,000 for the HMS HMS Aubretia, were upset. Paul Trusswell, the MP for Pudsey, felt strongly enough to write a letter to Bill Clinton in protest of the film. The BBC reported that Trusswell received a reply: “The President acknowledged the role played by the people of Horsforth and tried to assure them that the movie was a work of fiction.”

    Lieutenant David Balme, who was 80 by the time the film was released, was less offended. “I was a bit surprised and initially I thought it was a pity,” he told the BBC. “But I don’t know why anyone complains because no-one had heard of this before the Americans made the film. Once I got working with them I realised that the scale they were going for was beyond the budget of a British film.”

    Balme, who died in 2016, consulted on the film and spent two weeks on location, off the coast of Malta (“Matthew McConaughey is a terribly nice chap,” he said). Balme tried to persuade Jonathan Mostow to include a line at the start explaining that U-571 was fiction. He had to settle for a dedication at the end of the film instead.

    “This film is dedicated to the bravery of Allied sailors and officers who risked their lives capturing Enigma materials from U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic,” it read, with a special nod to HMS Bulldog and HMS Aubretia. The dedication is disappointingly absent on the Amazon Prime version of the film.

    Hugh Sebag-Montefiore wrote that the criticism of U-571 undermines the Americans’s all-important role: they manufactured the machines that regularly broke the Enigma, which British engineers had been unable to produce with any reliability.

    The film did at least highlight the incredible pinch of HMS Bulldog, albeit through controversy and Hollywood self-importance. David Balme, for one, could only see the positives: “It brings home the whole Battle of the Atlantic to a generation who otherwise would have known nothing about it,” he said.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/u-571-true-history-behind-matthew-mcconaugheys-ww2-enigma-machine

    1. Cracking Enigma was a multi-national effort in which the Poles seem rarely to get a mention, in spite of having made the early breakthrough.

    2. That is doubly interesting to me since I am currently three-quarters of the way through an extremely fascinating book on the code-makers of Duke Street and Bletchley Park.

      From Silk To Cyanide: A Code Maker’s War 1941 – 1945 is the witty and authoritative autobiography of Leo Marks, a 22-year old cryptographer of genius who was recruited by SOE to improve the code-making systems in use by the allied forces.

      The book was originally written in 1980 but was banned from publication by the security forces until 1998. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in coding.

      1. I have been to Bletchley Park and locally we had a Y station. I would probably have been recruited, at least to the Y service, had I been alive during the war; linguist, in the top 2% of scholars, keen on crosswords, radio ham … I tick a lot of the boxes.

          1. I have to confess that on occasion I have worked /M (M for mobile) on horseback 🙂

    1. Kinda heartwarming that! Not something you could see one of the ethnics doing!

      1. It seems the ones arriving here have stopped catching swans to eat – or it is just not reported anymore.

    2. The crap wouldn’t be in the ocean if it wer enot for the useless climate change obsession.

  55. Senior Tory accused of rape. 4 August 2020.

    She told ITV News: ‘It’s taken me a long time to build up the courage and strength to finally go to the police. It was a relief…to see he was arrested so quickly.
    ‘
    The woman raised her allegations with Conservative chief whip Mark Spencer in April but claims he did not take any action or encourage her to contact police.

    She accused him of evading questions about when he would suspend the whip from the MP, adding: ‘I felt like he did not take me seriously or recognise the severity of what had happened.’

    I didn’t see this on the news so I have no idea how it was done (dubbed voice, head in a sack?) but this woman reads more like one scorned than raped . Why is she so concerned that he has not been suspended and why did she go to the Chief Whip and not straight to the Police?

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8589585/Researcher-accuses-senior-Tory-rape-says-ministers-care-party-her.html

      1. 322070+ up ticks,
        Morning S,
        Maybe the wretch cameron can help having witnessed his approach to pig husbandry.

        1. There is a large call from feminists for there to be more convictions in rape cases. It does not really matter if the accused is guilty or not as long as we get more convictions.

          Has anyone got any evidence of feminists criticising Moslems for their treatment of women? Has anyone any evidence of animal rights activists criticising halal slaughter of animals?

          1. 322070+ up ticks,
            Morning R,
            Plenty of evidence of selective choice in the female department though.
            As for halal & any islamic ideology they swear by it in parliament & swallow it in the canteen, via the menu.

    2. She wants her assailant named too before trial. Another sign of a revenge motive.

    3. Presumption of Innocence is an inconvenient concept – which is why many EU legal systems are based on corpus juris rather than habeas corpus.

      In brief: an accused a person has to prove his/her innocence under corpus juris; the state has to prove a person’s guilt under habeas corpus.

      The PTB conveniently forget this when dealing with people like Tommy Robinson.

    1. At 25 seconds in – the chant of Left . . .Left . . . .Left – – – and their RIGHT legs are going forward. The education system has failed them clearly. Also – Marching while wearing soft soled trainers doesn’t have the same effect as the rhythm from boots.

      1. Does anyone remember the scenes in “House of Cards” showing rats, rubbish & devastation in the streets of London?

    4. A shame they don’t apply the same to their familiy lives.

      By the way, when you’re shouting Left, you’re moving your right foot. Might want to get it right next time.

    1. Just three from your list.

      Quinoa. Once only, never again.
      ‘Bone Broth’ is nothing but a fancy (woke) name for a beef stock.
      ‘Bullet-proof’ coffee (idiotic name) is something I drink daily. I put a dessertspoonful of C8 MCT oil into my flat white espresso to assist my diet.

      1. The Sami will often have a slice of reindeer fat in their coffee… sounds good to me.
        BTW, the most beautiful woman I ever saw is Sami. Truly memorable.

          1. Utterly gorgeous, even wearing just ordinary clothes – jeans and a jumper. Never seen anything like her before or since.
            Sigh

    4. My millennial score is 2 –
      avocado toast (been eating since 1997 when on sabb. in Oz and there was a ‘cado tree in the garden)
      Quinoa, although I wouldn’t care if it disappeared as quickly as it arrived

    5. I’ve had quinoa served up and remember thinking ‘where’s the real food?’

      As for advocao on toast? Bally stupid.

      1. When I was on my Swedish course, living as a student in Germany, I often had guacamole on toast for lunch. It was quick, tasty & filling.

        I had quinoa as a rice substitute in Chile because, for some reason, I couldn’t keep rice down. With herbs & spices it’s quite good.

    7. I gave myself 3 points for the quinoa, because I first ate it in the Atacama & know how to pronounce it properly.

        2. Nearly right.. Actually it’s keen-o-a. The ‘U’ is silent.

          At all costs, it’s NOT the pretentious key-noir!

    10. Zero – I’m so last century. However, I do have a complete set of plumbing tools ………

  58. Much of Test Match Special’s charm has gone – it increasingly insults its loyal audience

    TMS remains one of the BBC’s great services but is suffering a bad patch

    SIMON HEFFER

    Cricket is blessed with a vast and well-developed culture, greater, I would dare suggest, than that of any other sport. The game’s variety and artistry and its wider social significance have always attracted writers from the poetic end of the spectrum: not just men who specialised in cricket, such as Neville Cardus, or R C Robertson-Glasgow, but literary figures with a broader hinterland, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. The interaction of cricket with life has led men of intellectual clout, notably CLR James, to make the game a vehicle to explore society and human nature, and to advance a philosophy. With James’s Beyond a Boundary, an exceptional work by any standard, I would bracket Graeme Wright’s Betrayal: The Struggle for Cricket’s Soul, published in 1993 but dealing with verities that those who run, play and watch the game would still benefit from taking into account. Even someone uninterested in cricket could learn something valuable from such books. In any society where serious cricket is played, it leaves its mark on much else. That point was made this year by Michael Henderson’s That Will Be England Gone, which I mentioned here recently, and Duncan Hamilton’s One Long and Beautiful Summer, both of which are in the highest class of cricket literature.

    The long duration of a serious game, and social interaction it encourages – for players and spectators alike – are ideal to encourage the thought, discussion and reflectiveness that makes a good cricket book. Also, cricket has a long, well-documented history, and attracts philosophers and romantics. In England it has its roots in the village life common to almost all our people before the industrial revolution; to write about cricket is to write part of the history of our society. Many cricket books are simple exercises in nostalgia; but some open readers’ eyes and minds to an understanding of what sort of people we are, and how our values and outlook have evolved.

    Seldom have cricket lovers been thrown back on the game’s culture, or been so grateful to have it, as in recent months. We have just had three tests played to empty grounds, with a new series starting this week; and at last the Bob Willis Trophy is under way, providing an opportunity for professional cricketers to get first-class match practice – but still no opportunity for those of us who love watching cricket to do so other than on television or online. Some matches that were supposed to have spectators were forced to proceed without them after the Government last Friday reversed its decision to allow ‘pilot’ schemes for crowds. The recreational game has resumed, and, so far, no-one seems to mind us watching it.

    Hence we appreciate more keenly the books and other cultural manifestations of the game. It has been a good time to have some old Wisdens, not just to re-live matches we might have seen, but to read articles on the controversies of the past and to detect their relevance to the present and future. Again, Graeme Wright’s editorials from his two spells of editorship from 1987 to 1992 and in 2001 and 2002 contain insights about how cricket was developing that were prescient in the extreme – regrettably so in some cases. Those who subscribe to Sky’s cricket channel have had access to old matches to re-watch, and the BBC have re-run days from old Test Match Specials. This, though, brings us to a less satisfactory aspect of cricket’s culture.

    The public could only watch the recent West Indies series from home. The highlights package on free-to-air television might have opened some younger eyes to the game: one hopes so. The live coverage is in most respects better than ever. There are more camera angles than anyone could want, and if one watches in high definition the clarity is like being there. The technical, statistical and analytical tools available mean every facet of every shot or wicket can be dissected almost to infinity. Sky has in Michael Atherton one of the more intelligent and thoughtful commentators of our age, and in Michael Holding and David Lloyd two men of huge experience, character and humanity who bring real pleasure to viewers. Yet other aspects of Sky’s presentation are increasingly laddish, despite the inclusion of women commentators. The reliance on ex-players as opposed to expert broadcasters shows through too often.

    Test Match Special remains one of the BBC’s great services; but it is going through a bad patch. For decades one would listen to it with the sound on the television off; but much of its charm has gone. It has one truly outstanding commentator in Jonathan Agnew, who knows he is also in the entertainment business, and puts the listener at his or her ease instantly through his immense experience, knowledge of the game but, above all, the force of his personality and wit. He misses his foil, and the butt of his jokes, Sir Geoffrey Boycott, who for all his occasional curmudgeonliness made compelling listening. Too many of Agnew’s colleagues, especially when nattering among themselves during the rain breaks in the West Indies series, sounded like the football commentators one or two of them were.

    TMS used to provide a variety of voices – important over a seven-or-eight hour day – but now it is increasingly a monotone. Occasionally, one feels one has intruded upon a private conversation among some of Britain’s dreariest PE teachers. This is not a plea for more plummy accents, though God knows one misses the unstrangulated vowels of Henry Blofeld and, still, the exuberance of Brian Johnston. We have been told for 40 years that there can never be another Arlott, but has anyone looked? Or for a Don Mosey? They were men without silver spoons in their mouths, and who not only loved the game and were steeped in it but who thought carefully before opening their mouths. TMS now has painful stretches of commentary consisting of little beyond banalities of a sort an Arlott or a Mosey would never have dreamt of inflicting on the audience.

    Use of language assumes special importance on radio, for there are no pictures to convey information. Some spoken English on TMS is increasingly unworthy of professional broadcasters. A masterclass on the distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, for example, is urgently required, as is a reminder that there is no such word in the English language as ‘vissitudes’. There are vestiges of charm – Carlos Brathwaite added texture and character to the commentary on the West Indies series, and Phil Tufnell mostly stays the right side of tedium in his rather manufactured gorblimey personality. But a serious overhaul is required. Sky erred badly in dispensing with David Gower’s services; he is a genial and warm broadcaster, and the BBC should snap him up, despite his sin of being a middle-aged white male. When it comes to cricket culture, TMS was always something of a gold standard. It was good not just for the audience, but for the game and for the BBC, that it was. Its reputation is recoverable, certainly so long as Agnew graces it. But it increasingly insults its loyal audience, and struggles to match the best of the printed word.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2020/08/03/starved-cricket-lockdown-has-given-new-life-sports-great-literature

    During one of the Tests against the West Indies, a lunchtime feature included some questions and comments from listeners. One complained (no, it wasn’t me!) that there wasn’t enough proper commentary i.e. description of what happened: how did the bowler bowl, what did the batsman do, where did the ball go, who fielded and how etc. Instead we get, as Heffer writes, a private conversation which is sometimes interrupted by an event on the field. “Crikey! He’s out! What happened there?” says Tuffers, “I missed that one!”

    The producer, Adam Mountford, answered this and demonstrated exactly why the programme has fallen so low. In a typically BBC manner he casually dismissed the complaint. “There aren’t many ways to describe a forward defensive stroke. It would be a bit boring if that was all there was to TMS.” W****R! Talk about playing down the wrong line. Sometimes we’d like to know if the batsman DID play a boring forward defensive stroke. That’s the point. We’re rarely told. As Fiery Fred frequently said: “I dunno what the heck’s going on out there.” Nor do we, Fred, nor do we.

    I didn’t care much for Blowers, especially in the later years when his commentary was increasingly error-ridden and his voice was deteriorating. An eternal quartet of Don Mosey, CMJ, Aggers (before his current speech impediment) and Simon Mann would be perfect. Instead, we have Alison Mitchell sounding like she’s come out of a noisy bar, Isa Guha like she’s just got out of bed, and Dan Norcross like he’s come from a session in the Dead Ringers studio imitating Alan Partridge.

    “Ay! It’s roobish since I left!” says a former England opening batsman, “I’ll describe a forward defensive for you. I’m the expert!”

    1. One of the interesting things to me about cricket, one of its merits, is that it is wide. As wide as the batsman’s arm can make it. As wide as the stadium, as wide as a Caribbean island. It is also subtle, silent, frantic, and somnolent by turns. The job of the captain goes far beyond encouragement. He has to organise, plan, set out the order of batsmen and bowlers, and respond to the tactics of the opposition. There may be more. I speak as the most casual observer.
      At school I went to a cricket practice. When I took my position at the wicket, the bowler hurled the ball just over my head. His next ball was more accurate, coming straight for my nose. I stepped aside. These were no careless balls. The bowler was one of the schools sportsmen. I dropped the bat and departed the nets. I joined a cricket club after I left school but my cricketing career was short and ignominious.

      1. Cricket is more than just a sport: it is a metaphor for life. At any time during a match it is a gladiatorial contest between just one man and eleven others. The laws are somewhat arcane (mysterious, even, to the uninitiated) but it is the most compellingly intricate, complex and wonderful sport on the planet.

    2. Tufnell is an irritating irrelevance and should never have been enlisted. The most excruciating bore ever on the programme was the soporific Trevor Bailey.

      My favourite guest commentators, over the years, have been: the late Tony Cozier, Donna Symmonds, Ravi Shastri, Angus Fraser and Henry Olonga.

      1. We should make the distinction between the commentator and the sidekick summariser. Tuffers bothers me far less as a summariser than Alison Mitchell and Dan Norcross do as commentators. Mitchell is strident and banal. Norcross has a good voice but always sounds as though he’s about to tell a joke. He’s overenthusiastic and imagines he’s a master of the language. He’s not. I made a little collection of some of his offerings last year. He has a habit of stressing certain words, rather like the ghastly weather presenters.

        …he finally drags his disconsolate and weary body away from the crease…

        …the ball has ballooned in a gentle parabola into the hands of the fielder…

        I’ll give you the field because that’s germane…

        The light’s not quite so good, it’s a bit crepuscular out there.

        I think it’s probably apposite that we go to an interview…

        Imagine the highlighted words being pronounced very deliberately. Perhaps he really does think he’s Alan Partridge. When he introduced TMS for the first time at a Test match, he really did say “Hello, hello, hello and welcome!”

  59. Breaking News – The latest Bond film is going to have a non-binary Bond Girl called Pussy O’Tool

    1. The latest Bond film is going to have a BAME non-binary Bond Girl called Pussy O’Tool.

      Do keep up!

  60. Nicola Sturgeon: puritan-in-chief. Spiked. 4 August 2020.

    Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, said yesterday that images of busy Scottish bars full of young people made her ‘want to cry’.

    Sounding like a modern-day Mary Whitehouse, Sturgeon announced with concern that ‘we are seeing evidence of people – and it is largely younger people – gathering together with little or no physical distancing in place’.

    All those young people out enjoying their summers and reuniting with friends after months of lockdown is apparently too much for the first minister to bear. Sturgeon seems to be haunted by that old puritan fear that ‘someone somewhere might be happy’.

    She is a rather humourless cow!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/04/nicola-sturgeon-puritan-in-chief/

    2. If she weren’t such an obnoxious creature, one could almost wish to give her a hug just to witness the meltdown!

      1. Dour gits, many of them. But there are the exceptions, like the one I married nearly (just a few days hence) 4 years ago!

    5. What are the young supposed to do, stay at home and forgo anything approaching life?

      I thought that only the elderly were supposed to do that. It’s like being in a home waiting to die, all that is left are the “mercy” drugs to hasten ourdemise.

      1. We may have few years left to live, but I’m sure most of us would rather enjoy them than be in God’s waiting rooms.

    2. I sometimes get an envelope with a cheque ( £25) from them – but these can be in the last week of the month. I wonder how much interest they get holding on to people’s money for nearly a month?

          1. I’m at the limit. I had a big win on my online bingo site £110,000. Bought the max and also their other 1,2 and 3 year bonds. Two of them mature this month and they are going into Income Bonds.

      3. Same as with banks. They sit on trillions and lend it out, keeping both the loan return interest while returning a pittance to those who’s money it is.

      4. Considering they have held on to MOH’s since about 1953 without giving a prize, considerable, I should imagine!

        3. My prizes over the past year knock the Nationwide into a cocked hat.
          Equal to about 1.1% as opposed to 0.1%.

          1. 1%.

            One per flipping percent. Now, 5, 6 would be a decent return. We got sick of seeing our savings returning almost nothing and shovelled it into repairs and maintenance.

          3. TSB kindly informed me that the new rate for my cash ISA is 0.01%. I immediately withdrew all the money.

  62. How could he have done such a mean and miserable thing.? The day before for goodness sake.

    SIR – I am no great supporter of the Goodwood Estate, but the preparations that the management and staff had made to enable 5,000 racecourse members to enjoy the last day of Glorious Goodwood on Saturday were excellent, and would have allowed people to have a safe and enjoyable day. A lot of money had obviously been spent.

    One can therefore understand their dismay when Boris Johnson stopped the event at the last minute. On the day itself, Goodwood was empty, yet a few miles away, the beaches of West Sussex were packed with thousands of people giving no thought to social distancing and, in most cases, not wearing masks.

    Why was a carefully planned outdoor event cancelled, yet nothing was done to stop carefree behaviour on the beaches? More chaotic thinking from No 10.

    Roger Redfarn

    Emsworth, Hampshire

    1. I think people are wrong when they say that Boris Johnson has lost the plot: he never even had the plot to begin with.

      I am beginning to fear that he will abandon Brexit along with most of the other things he has abandoned. Why was he never properly questioned about his EU withdrawal agreement – and why did the MSM and the political establishment allow him to get away with what was simply a rehash of Teraita May’s surrender WA?

    2. Covid decisions made not to control the disease, but exercise control of the peeple

    3. I watched it on TV. There was absolutely no reason to pull the plug on having spectators at Goodwood. During the week, we had Stradivarius win his fourth Goodwood Cup (a record) and Bataash break his own record down the five furlongs for a fourth King George (also a record for number of wins). Stunning performances yet the horses came in to virtual silence.

  63. Came across this video which shows where I landed on this earth in 1943 right inside the London target zone of the WWII flying bombs.

    My arrival site in SE London is shown on the annotated still from the video showing the mothership location.

    Beckenham maternity hospital was an ideal site for the anti-aircraft guns which were deployed on site and illustrated in the video. I was amazed at how large they were when many years later I saw one again at Duxford.

    I used to tell the kids that I was prepared to do my bit in the war as my pram was armed with grenades which I was prepared to use in case of an invasion. Not sure for how long they believed it.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/934e73af1197669d390a2c0dd159408f8c35c62bfc4e1b2bef63eaa20a35ad95.jpg

    https://youtu.be/BqM-GUS6ioI

  64. Home Office to scrap ‘racist algorithm’ for UK visa applicants. Tue 4 Aug 2020 12.47 BST.

    The Home Office is to scrap a controversial decision-making algorithm that migrants’ rights campaigners claim created a “hostile environment” for people applying for UK visas.

    The “streaming algorithm”, which campaigners have described as racist, has been used since 2015 to process visa applications to the UK. It will be abandoned from Friday, according to a letter from Home Office solicitors seen by the Guardian.

    This is just to speed up the process. A wave them through policy.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/04/home-office-to-scrap-racist-algorithm-for-uk-visa-applicants

    1. Only make it difficult – or, better still, impossible – for self-supporting white folk.

  66. Afternoon, all. It seems to me we will get no credit for all that we have done during the panic – sorry, pandemic. Personally, I have had a day from hell, hence my appearance here earlier than usual (with a glass of red as well). It started badly and got worse 🙁 At least I managed to stop my aged hound from throwing himself, kamikaze style, in front of fast moving traffic. That was the only positive! Tomorrow is another day (and may, just possibly, be better – I hope!).

    1. Oh dear that doesn’t sound good and no one has asked in their best bugs bunny voice What up Doc

      1. No, it hasn’t been good, but that’s life as lived at the moment 🙁 One has to take out the positives. At least I didn’t lose my aged hound to a suicidal move when I was walking him in the field (he got away from me and plunged through a gap onto a busy road). That would have been the end 🙁 MOH has been particularly difficult (as you may know, after a stroke dementia has set in) today. I’m listening to “son nata a lagrimar” at the moment – perhaps not the most cheerful!

        1. Oh God. What an awful heart stopping moment. Made worse because you probably took the dog out for a walk in order to relax.
          I think you deserve the entire bottle to yourself.
          A few week’s ago, Spartie did a bunk from Hilly Fields (I have no idea what spooked him, he’s never done it before or since); he ran home, which involved crossing Lexden Road. He kept just that bit ahead of me, stopping, and then skittering off again as I tried to grab him.

          1. Yes, it was a bit panicky. As he’s deaf and rather restricted in his sight, I had to put a real spurt on, while yelling “stop!” at the top of my voice, to catch him before he got onto the road! You are absolutely correct in that I chose to go the extra mile round the field as a means of relaxing. I had been mindful of taking him somewhere that risk could be minimised in the light of what had been happening consecutively at home. I never foresaw the kamikaze tendency!

          2. What a nightmare Anne! Our daughters’ Lab, Lyra ran away from here with our dog (her brother), crossed the main Glasgow road and went to the woods! Hector came back crying to tell us, and finally the postman found her about half a mile away! It was shattering!

          3. There is little worse than losing a pet. In my case, he’s been with us for just over sixteen years – it would be like losing a son. I know it’s coming, but like St Augustin, I pray, “not yet, Lord!”.

        2. Sad music is sometimes exactly what we need. If you haven’t already watched Beagly Bill’s YouTube post of the two Labradors, go for it! Well worth a look and then you can look at your lovely old dog and be happy he’s with you
          https://youtu.be/l942GNHc7rw

  68. The British public has been terrorised. Spiked. 4 August 2020.

    That the majority of Brits are so fearful is hardly a surprise though, is it? For months, they have had to endure a barrage of apocalypticism and fearmongering from a media establishment that seems to be almost revelling in the pandemic, as if high death tolls, rising infection rates and R numbers are political points to be scored against the Brexity Tory government.

    I am pretty well indifferent to the virus. I carry on much as normal. I put a mask on when I get on the bus because I don’t want an argument with the Driver and that method applies to everything else. I comply to avoid unpleasantness not infection. I actually stopped listening to the arguments way back (witness my lack of posts on the subject) when they first started talking about testing, a process whose utility still escapes me. It was something of a surprise to me when I personally discovered that some people were genuinely terrified, the couple that jumped into a hawthorn hedge when I approached and the woman in the queue in Marks and Spencers who eyed me (I couldn’t be bothered to stand on one of the spacing squares) as though I were Typhoid Mary reincarnated. There is nothing I can do for these people. If they believe all this guff they are getting what they deserve!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/04/the-british-public-has-been-terrorised/

    1. According to the Wail – it may be to do with “an incident” at Beirut Port…

  70. No comments allowed. That’s hardly surprising, given that the writer gives far too much credence to kneeling.

    Taking a knee has gone from an important gesture of deference and defiance to a grimly tokenistic ritual

    The symbolism of the posture that ignited a movement has drained away as its endless replication has reduced it to mere protocol

    OLIVER BROWN

    “Like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.” That was the impeccable comparison coined in 2016 by Eric Reid, Colin Kaepernick’s team-mate in the San Francisco 49ers, when the quarterback first struck the posture that ignited a movement. To the athletes he inspired, taking the knee was a dual expression of vulnerability and strength, a reminder of the United States’ inability to live up to the ideal of equal protection enshrined in its flag and of the players’ own refusal to be silenced. The problem is how much that symbolism has since drained away.

    In this country, there is a belief that the endless replication of kneeling in sport somehow heightens its power. And yet, by degrees, the reverse seems to be happening. What was a stirring and important gesture on June 17, when Premier League players knelt in a circle before the opening matches, has after seven weeks showed signs of becoming a grimly perfunctory ritual. Take the scene at St Mirren last weekend, as home players kicked off against Livingston and then sheepishly fell to their knees in a statement that, to put it politely, lacked sincerity.

    According to the BBC, they had been caught out by the “new protocol”. This bloodless description suggests it has now been turned into just another part of footballers’ revised prematch checklist: sanitise hands, avoid handshakes, take the knee. All the solemnity of Kaepernick’s original stand, every injustice that he was striving to highlight, and it has been reduced to this: a mere protocol, a posture to perform and then instantly forget about.

    How we love protocols these days. Covid alarmism decrees that you can no sooner post a letter than find yourself assailed by them. Some causes, though, are too vital to be trivialised as diplomatic procedures. Taking the knee resonates when it is personal, when the individual concerned endorses its message with heart and soul. When Lewis Hamilton does so before a Formula One race, the spectacle is undeniably poignant, emphasising the struggle of the sport’s first and still only black driver to convey grievances that have defined his life.

    The trouble arose when he tried to take the rest of the grid with him. At the British Grand Prix, the fourth race of the season, Hamilton channelled all his powers of persuasion to encourage his fellow drivers to show a united front. Alas, the splintering was more evident than ever, with Kevin Magnussen increasing the number of non-knee-takers to seven. While 13 knelt, seven stood behind. It came across less as a seminal moment in the fight against racism than an awkward group photo, a reminder of F1’s intractable internal divisions on the issue. And as we know from Abraham Lincoln, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

    https://twitter.com/BBCSportScot/status/1290220362542833664

    In rugby league, Israel Folau was conspicuous by his decision not to kneel before a match at St Helens last Sunday, with his club, Catalans Dragons, explaining that he had made a “personal choice”. To some, this renders him a crusader, a figure who, in the words of Australian talk-show host Alan Jones, is above participating in “empty gestures”.

    Except there was nothing empty about the act in which Folau’s team-mates engaged. Kaepernick conceived it as a graceful gesture, with a double meaning of deference and defiance. In his mind, it was one that would underscore the police brutality of which African-Americans were so disproportionately the victims, and one that should be sustained despite the best efforts of a President to have those kneeling shunned as unpatriotic ingrates.

    This, fundamentally, is the substance that is lost, the more frequently and cursorily it is performed. From the Scottish Premier League to F1, some athletes no longer appear to realise what they are signalling and why. This is not supposed to be some tokenistic display of solidarity, but a sign of deep investment in the overarching quest. We learned on Monday that players would be permitted to kneel at all Champions League games this month: a welcome development, so long it is not treated as a casual protocol.

    Not if Jerome Boateng has anything to do with it, one senses. “It’s very important that we continue this in the Champions League, and especially in the final, because the whole world will look,” said the Bayern Munich centre-back. Somehow, on the grandest stages, the essence of the act needs to be reclaimed. Psychologists often characterise kneeling as an expression of subservience and subjugation, where people make themselves smaller.

    Kaepernick, by contrast, envisaged it as one that made the protagonists larger, throwing their courage into sharp relief against those who sought to belittle and shout them down. Ultimately, taking the knee derives its potency and its polarising effect from the challenge to the status quo.

    That is its purpose, and it is one of which its latter-day adherents should never lose sight.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2020/08/04/taking-knee-has-gone-important-gesture-deference-defiance-grimly/

    1. The writer is a dog. I won’t be so rude as to suggest that he is too stupid to understand what is going on. On the contrary, he does seem to know. That he supports the “normalisation” of foreign salutes suggests that he supports their views, their intentions and their methods.
      Back in the world into which I was born that would be called sedition.

      1. That is unfair to dogs, who, in the main, are loyal and trustworthy! The English football team gave the Nazi salute in Germany before WW2. This is comparable!

      1. Exactly. I gave up at the point where Hamilton is described as the “only black driver”. He’s no more black than he is white, as we all know.

          1. I expect his mother must be a bit hurt by his denial of her ethnicity. I’m damn sure I would be!

          4. If you make a mark on a sheet of white paper with paint, crayon, or anything with pigment, it is impossible to remove it again once so stained.

            Your white paper is stained forever; it can never revert to pure white.

    3. The problem is how much that symbolism has since drained away.

      The symbolism drained away when people realised it was a scam amd when the crowds are allowed back the players will soon find out they are on their own!

      1. “Show racism the red card!” says the imbecilic commentator. What racism. Half the professional football clubs in the country are packed with non-whites. A recent TV programme on the Ritz featured some black football player extolling it’s virtues…
        All the blacks and other BAMES who are too stupid or lazy or untalented to enjoy a salary that allows them to live at the Ritz are housed, fed, clothed, educated and given pocket money at the expenses of the UK taxpayers? Some racism, some neck!

    4. The DT sports writers have been appalling since this grovelling business started. I guess they don’t get out much. I’m sick of being told how noble and honest the cause is, and how humble these millionaire sheep are, and how we should be proud of them! No dissent allowed. Some atrocious crass remarks from the idiot Welshman Steve Jones on C4 F1 coverage about the drivers who didn’t kneel, were beyond belief! Can’t wait for the crowds to return!

    1. Maybe a few words have been whispered in his ear about not rocking the boat, minorities and all that old chap.

    3. What is really needed in a retrial and charge of murder rather than manslaughter with a Life Sentence – without remission – a possible outcome.

      Britain’s system of justice has become a sick joke.

      1. The tariff for both murder and manslaughter is life.
        There is no remission on a life sentence. Whatever period is served initially they are on licence for the rest of their lives.
        I do agree the ‘justice’ system is broke like so many things in this country. The system now is that the law is applied but very selectively.

    1. If she is interviewed on BBC TV about this will the interviewer draw attention to this fact?

      Are there any politicians who are not complete hypocrites?

    2. Given her role on Labour’s front bench I suspect she will have been duty bound to.

      She’s wrong whatever she does, given her position now.

      Serves her right.

  76. 322070+ up ticks,
    What are these full up with bullsh!te political rubber johnies rubber stamping now in trying to give credence to the fact that they are “rescuing” peoples from a safe country in collusion with the french, and
    bringing them to a country that is far from safe and is in semi incarceration
    going on full bore lock-down nationwide.
    There are two things priti & the governance parties should be doing at this moment in time and that is moving aside & heavy time.

  77. I am off – have a jolly evening. We started watching the first part of the PBS prog on “The Gene” – rivetting.

  78. 322070+ up ticks,
    What really does annoy me is these governance parties think there is a lot more idiots out there besides their regular supporters,
    The french escorted the troop carrier to british waters where the border force “RESCUED” them, my @rse.
    RESCUED them from what ?
    Questioned them more like,
    1 you are not a terrorist or paedophile are you.?
    2 what sort of accommodation will you be requiring ?
    3 How many wives have you one or multiple to follow on ?
    Paperwork out of the way before landing then straight off to your hotel where a meal is on hand and forms for your seamless entry into the welfare system towards which you need NOT pay a penny.
    Permanent accommodation being built as we speak.
    Education medication all in hand under the appeasement rulings you rate top billing.
    Incarceration is N/A unless in very.very,very extreme cases.
    When you are settled in & as way of thanks make it out to the lab/lib/con coalition party by kissing their candidates X.

    1. Rescued from the nasty French.

      It is as bad as the invaders crossing the Canadian border from the US. If they have a valid refugee claim, what exactly are they fleeing from?

  81. BBC Breaking News…..

    Next weeks leaked COVID guidance
    You can’t meet with another person from outside your family with an A or an R in their name unless it’s a Wednesday.
    Family members are OK unless it’s the third Monday after Pancake Tuesday.
    People under 5’11” aren’t allowed to go to the pub unless they have brown hair.
    Cat owners are exempt from the above unless the cat is ginger, obviously.

    1. Continual change to cause confusion – Point No 2 of the Frankfurt School (eleven in all) – Point No 1 being the creation of racism offences. All going to plan.

    2. Missy is black & white exactly like the Felix cat, so I guess I’m home free.

      1. Pearl and Dean are tortoise shell and tortoise tabbie so fingers crossed.

      1. Where they will be fed, clothed, given a bank account with a balance and dispersed across the country for housing amongst us.

      2. Would Sir Francis Drake have stood idly by and watched this invasion with a shrug of his shoulders?

      3. Patel seems to be on permanent paid holiday. She does nothing – and is paid for it. Like Boris and the rest.

    2. 322070+ up ticks,
      Evening TB,
      Selling crossing tickets & signing up new party members
      that is a crossing condition methinks.

    1. Stop calling them asylum seekers.

      They are nothing of the kind; they are illegal immigrants

      1. 322070+up ticks
        S,
        My take is they are troops in mufti as we will shortly find out to our cost.

      4. And to call them Muslims is not racial discrimination. Islam is a religion, not a race.

      5. They are all members of the N*gger family.
        Joe N*gger, Andy N*gger, Pedo N*gger etc. Of course, if they were to immediately produce passports or an internationally acceptable form of identity document to disprove my calculated insult, I would have to apologise.

    3. [Restrained reply]

      What an absolutely, disgraceful response.

      [Unrestrained reply]

      F**K**g tosspots!

  85. Does anyone know what happened to the people who hired a boat to intercept the rubber invasion and send them back to France?

        1. If they are already engaged in action, I imagine they’re keeping quiet about it.

    2. Their publicity (as it was) suggested a start date of August 8th. However, the picture of their boat looked rather like a Norfolk Broads tupperware job, hardly suitable for the purpose. I hope I’m wrong, it’s about time we took the law into our own hands. Just watch the ptb start twitching.

  86. DT Live news:

    EU rejects Tory MP’s call to reopen Brexit divorce deal

    The European Commission has rejected calls for the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement to be rewritten after senior Tories complained it could leave the UK liable for £160 billion of unpaid loans.

    Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith yesterday claimed the EU “want our money and they want to stop us being a competitor”, adding “the Withdrawal Agreement we signed last year sadly helps them”.

    On top of the £39bn divorce bill, he claims the UK is on the hook for defaults on loans made available through the European Investment Bank (EIB) – a AAA-rated multilateral financial institution – and European Financial Stability Mechanism.

    The £160bn figure is heavily contested, as it relies on many individual investment projects across the EU collapsing at same time.

    Either way, Brussels has rejected his calls to reopen the divorce deal, which was signed by Boris Johnson and the 27 EU members last year.

    Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the Withdrawal Agreement is a “firm document” which “stands”.

    He added: “I think it’s very clear that we are not going to get into a debate with British politicians on liabilities or any other of the provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement.”

    We have been betrayed. Bit by horrible bit we shall discover just how odious and disastrous for Britain the Johnson/May surrender WA is – no wonder that Boris Johnson was determined not to give any information at all about it before the election. No wonder he was excrement-scared of being interviewed by Andrew Neil who might have exposed the truth.

    We must face the fact that we have been duped by the swindler. How could the British people have been so stupid?

    1. My hands, at least, are clean; I campaigned for a UKIP candidate in the last election. The electorate rejected her. One can only do one’s best.

    3. Are you surprised?

      I don’t supposed that the UK will get to share proceeds from good Investments.

    4. Are you surprised?

      I don’t supposed that the UK will get to share proceeds from good Investments.

    5. Stuff the WA. If the USA can draw back on Treaties, then we can. The WA was very general, and the EU have broken the “good faith” requirement of Art. 50 all the time. All it needs is b*lls, Sadly our politicians have none.

  87. Councils can demolish contaminated buildings under new powers to stop second coronavirus wave
    Care homes, factories, offices and even private homes could be bulldozed as last resort if virus starts to run out of control

    Local authorities will be able to order the demolition of buildings at the centre of coronavirus outbreaks under draconian powers to contain a potential second wave.

    Cars, buses, trains and aeroplanes could also be destroyed subject to the approval of magistrates.

    Boris Johnson remains determined to avoid a second nationwide lockdown and has given a broad range of powers to local councils to contain outbreaks as soon as they are detected.

    Councils will be able to draw on six separate Acts of Parliament to impose lightning closures of public buildings, order mass testing, ban events or shut down whole sectors of the economy.

    They will also be able to limit school openings to set year groups and restrict travel to key workers only.

    The power to demolish buildings, however, is perhaps the most striking inclusion in the Government’s Covid-19 Contain Framework.

    The document, published by the Department of Health and Social Care, advises councils that, under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, they can apply to a magistrate “to impose restrictions or requirements to close contaminated premises; close public spaces in the area of the local authority; detain a conveyance or movable structure; disinfect or decontaminate premises; or order that a building, conveyance or structure be destroyed”.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/04/councilscan-demolish-contaminated-buildings-new-powers-stop/?utm_content=telegraph&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2yT34ZgtdlWcKmOThvB9cZxPRiooj6wp5Z0PTT-TwUgCrvqE_7TVno5aw#Echobox=1596566603

      2. Sue
        One could imagine the damage to properties a real leftie black/muslim mayor could inflict on whitie right wingers.

        This really frightening.

      3. Sue
        One could imagine the damage to properties a real leftie black/muslim mayor could inflict on whitie right wingers.

        This really frightening.

    2. Only 6% of people die who catch the virus ( WHO). Its a con we have never done this before with higher death rates than this.

      1. TB has a far higher death rate. The Mayo Clinic website states…

        Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially serious infectious disease that mainly affects your lungs. The bacteria that cause tuberculosis are spread from one person to another through tiny droplets released into the air via coughs and sneezes.

    6. Sheesh. Just zap it with UV light or leave it for a week or so for the virus to die naturally.

    7. How to clear prime redevelopment sites of annoying listed buildings. Build! Build! Build! Loadsamoney for some.

  88. Beirut explosion – is it the cargo of the ship that arrived from Benghazi a few years ago, the one that got the US diplomat and several CIA operatives killed in someone’s attempt to stop it?
    Keep watching, interesting developments.

    2. Ammonium nitrate according to some reports, the favourite substance of the IRA until it got hold of Libyan Semtex.

        3. ANFO:- Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel Oil.
          Before the minor roads across the Irish border were cratered in the early ’70s, 60 Field Squadron carried out trials on the suitability of the stuff to do the job.
          I MIGHT still have a copy of the report somewhere in the attic.

    3. Given the scale of this disaster, in view of its proximity. I wonder if Israel will offer to take and treat numbers of patients? It would be a great humanitarian gesture.

      1. Who leaves that amount of explosives stored in a place where they could do maxium harm if blown up?….oh never mind!

    6. It looks like the white building in the foreground was the target. We shall probably find out it was owned by Hezbollah.

      1. A lot of short-muzzled dogs have serious inbred defects. This poor little chap certainly looks athough he has a cleft palate.

  90. A further few thoughts for the day on Gates/Vaccinations/Foundations.

    If Gates really is being altruistic about this, I would like to hear the answers to a few questions

    Who retains the patent rights, or will any drug be immediately released to the world?
    If it isn’t being released to the world, how do you select who is to get it, by order of priority?

    Where does any profit from selling the vaccines go?
    Why would you make it compulsory to be vaccinated to allow people to live a “normal” life where people who have not had them cannot?
    Why did you set up a foundation that is NOT independent of you and Melinda instead of giving money to any number of well established and trusted organisations, such as the Wellcome foundation?
    What independent review of your Foundations activities takes place?

    And will you, Melinda, and ALL your extended family be vaccinated at least a month before general release, just in case there might be extremely nasty delayed side effects?

    1. 322070+up ticks,
      Evening TB,
      Sad to say the peoples played the politico’s game of putting party before Country we are ALL witnessing the fall-out.

    1. I timed it from the ignition to the arrival of the shock wave at the camera – three seconds!

    2. I timed it from the ignition to the arrival of the shock wave at the camera – three seconds!

  96. Good evening, Priti Patel.

    Send over a few SBS personnel with sharp knives to puncture the rubber boats as they venture forth.

    Problem sorted.

  97. Outrage as TV historian becomes the second white BBC presenter says the N word on air in three days

    Viewers have reacted with outrage after a TV historian became the second white BBC presenter to say the n-word in three days.

    American History’s Biggest Fibs presented by Lucy Worsley was aired on Saturday night on BBC Two and is about the history of slavery.

    Speaking to the camera, Worsley tells the audience: ‘He said, and his words carry a health warning, ‘That means n****r citizenship. By God, that’s the last speech he will ever make’.

    Is this the end of Lucy of the Rosebud Lips? Very probably.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8591175/Outrage-TV-historian-second-white-BBC-presenter-says-N-word-air-three-days.html

      1. Didn’t Josef Conrad write a book called “The N-word of the Narcissus”? and aren’t coloured people, black people, African Americans, “Darkies” People Whose Lives Matter More Than Others allowed to use the word when referring to their “brothers”?

        2. Evening Elsie. You should watch the American TV series The Wire where it is used continually but only by Black Men!

    2. So what it amounts to is – you can’t report words used by others in case you cause offence. History is being censored. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – 1984.

      2. Neither can most Germans, Karte (card) is pronounced ‘kachte’. There are worse faults.

      1. 322110+ up ticks,
        Morning AOE,
        This silence is reminiscent of how our high streets are going to be if the coalition have their way.

          2. 322110+ up ticks,
            AOE,
            The backing music to the next GE should be ” see them come tumbling down” but sadly it won’t be.

      2. Hello, Angie and Oggie. Are we three all waiting for Geoff to post the link to Wednesday’s NoTTL site so that we can be first?

        1. 322110+ up ticks,
          Morning EB,
          Be first ? there seems to be very few of that calibre anymore especially in the political leadership department.

          8. I’m now getting a little concerned. It’s almost 7.15 am and still no Wednesday NoTTLe site. Is Geoff OK, or did he just forget to wind up and set his alarm clock last night?

          1. That’s my friend Mr Holly Martin looking for The Master (Mr Harry Lime), Angie.

            :-))

    1. Morning Geoff. As you mentioned the word ‘late’ are there contingency plans in place to enable this forum to continue in the event of your sudden serious illness or even more serious sudden demise?

      1. Morning Stephen. You don’t have to worry about Geoff. We are all on the liquidation list!

        1. Well I very much hope they’ve noted my favourite liquid is a Speyside single malt!

      2. Morning, Stephen. A cheerful thought. Since migrating from the Disqus ‘channels’ to WordPress, there’s no obvious way of posting new pages in my er… absence. I’ll do some research. It might be a case of sharing my WordPress login details with trusted individuals. Or something. Today, I simply slept through the alarm…

        1. Thanks Geoff – I’m sure that will be appreciated by all those who tend this hallowed sward!

        2. Morning Geoff – the thought occurred to me the other evening when you were saying about your imminent move – to a destination as yet unknown. You may need to delegate to someone who is generally around early or late – so not me! But someone may be willing to to take this on.

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