Wednesday 12 March: Keir Starmer must be prepared to stand his ground on welfare reform

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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513 thoughts on “Wednesday 12 March: Keir Starmer must be prepared to stand his ground on welfare reform”

  1. Good morning chums, and especially to Conners I hope you – and Kadi & Winston – slept well. And thanks, Geoff, for today's new NoTTLe site.

    Wordle 1,362 5/6

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    1. Good morning Elsie and all
      Wordle 1,362 4/6

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    2. NietzschesDog
      11h
      Plan to make it easier for councils to seize land for housing
      Full blown Leninist communism now. Meanwhile Farage is too preoccupied politically assassinating his own MPs to care. There is absolutely no political opposition and representation. A de facto one party state.

    3. And I see in the Telegaffe today that the thief and TTK have decided to end all subsidies to farmers as well! Which bit of "No Farmers, No Food" do they not understand?

      Lucky I looked carefully – I had written Framers!

      1. 403050+ up ticks,

        Morning S,
        Precisely,and the same players are in action again, only the mist of treachery over the political battlefield is not so intense as in 2019, issues are a great deal clearer.

        One I would say would be the Deal at Dover.

    5. If they were to create a new party, Oggie? So you are suggesting that this is a mere rumour?

      1. 403050+ up ticks,

        Evening EB,
        Not atall atall, I believe we are in dire need of a party to run parallel to the reform party as an anti treachery fallback, a safeguard.

        If BOTH are on equal terms going forward benefiting both Country & indigenous peoples
        common sense being one of the parties mainstays, at a given time, they amalgamate
        for the betterment of old Blighty NOT individual MPs.

        1. I think you misunderstand me, Oggie. You said that Habib and Lowe were planning to form a new party, but gave no link to see that this in fact was really news and not speculation. Hence I was questioning whether or not this "news" was a rumour or not.

          1. 403050+ up ticks,

            EB,

            Time will tell ,I’m hoping tis reality for the very reasons I explained to you earlier,and with Elons financial backing also.

  10. The Rupert Lowe fracas shows why Reform may not survive

    Britain desperately needs an alternative to the old parties, but Nigel Farage is sadly blowing the chance

    11 March 2025 7:14pm GMT
    Madeline Grant

    Rupert Lowe joins a long line of high-profile Faragean fallings-out; Farage vs Alan Sked, Farage vs Robert Kilroy-Silk, Farage vs Godfrey Bloom, Farage vs Suzanne Evans, Farage vs Douglas Carswell, Farage vs Ben Habib. Now it might just be that Nigel is unlucky: a figure cursed to walk through life only ever encountering the awkward and uncharitable and so being subjected to a litany of painful clashes.

    Or we could apply what I have come to call “Markle’s Law”: if you spend your whole life falling out with people then the common problematic factor, on the balance of probability, is not going to be everybody you happen to meet, but you.

    Speaking to Dan Wootton on Monday evening, Lowe, the now-independent MP for Great Yarmouth, described the campaign against him as “unfair and un-Christian”.

    Of course, it is possible that an investigation will find wrongdoing. While we cannot prejudge, details and timing of the allegations look sketchy. We are supposed to believe that the party reported Lowe to the police three months after the alleged crime took place; coincidentally one day after he publicly criticised Farage.

    Though allegations of office bullying were not directed at Lowe himself, the initial Reform statement appeared to give the impression that he had personally mistreated staff. Lowe’s entire parliamentary team have since signed a heartfelt letter denying the allegations and describing their boss as a decent man. They also insist, oddly, that they have never been contacted as part of any parliamentary investigation.

    Here, Reform may be exhibiting behaviour it would normally condemn; cancellation without due process, even calling the coppers over some alleged hurty words.

    In a television interview, Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, implied that Lowe might not be welcome back in the party, even if his innocence were proved. Mr Farage insisted on TV that on the “29 February” Lowe was “informed” about a “parliamentary investigation” into allegations against him. Not only does Lowe deny this, but there wasn’t actually a February 29 this year. So as hatchet jobs go, it’s not the most convincing – and many party members remain unconvinced. The whole thing smacks of amateurism; more Fanny Cradock than Francis Urquhart.

    Lowe claims that Reform insiders have briefed journalists that he has early-onset dementia; which Farage may have alluded to in a Telegraph article, describing Lowe as a “different person” from the one he knew in the Brexit Party days. As someone who spends prolonged periods of time caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, this greatly offended me. It’s a serious, hideous condition, not something to be opportunistically chucked around for score-settling purposes.

    Since entering the Commons, Lowe has earned a reputation as a committed MP. The reporter Christian Calgie points out that “by removing the whip from Lowe, Reform UK’s total parliamentary activity since the general election has fallen by 46 per cent”. Every party needs its thinkers, its details-men and women.

    A common complaint from Reform insiders is that under Farage and chairman Zia Yusuf, the party operates in a brittle, presidential style. Yet UK politics is not, and has never been, presidential. If Reform wishes to form a government, as it insists, they will also need 100 plus ministers to govern, without (so far) a single peer in the Lords. In short, the party cannot exist as a private fiefdom, or a talking-shop for airing grievances without solutions.

    Lowe’s defenestration threatens the party’s hopes of professionalisation in more ways than one. What serious person would want to join and run as a candidate, when their life could be so visibly detonated?

    Moreover, it is hard to convince those furious about the conduct of recent politics that you are different and worth voting for when you immediately resort to the sort of rats-in-a-sack scrapping, at which the Tories and Labour excel, as soon as you gain even a handful of MPs.

    A party that can only accommodate one strong personality will struggle to assemble a cabinet.

    Labour, for all its faults, is generally loyal and members will go out to bat for each other even when they’re manifestly in the wrong.

    Angela Rayner quite possibly loathes the PM but manages to keep it as professional as she can. Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick may never quite be BFFs, but Badenoch wisely gave her leadership rival a prominent role, unleashing him as an attack-dog against the Government. On balance, it’s better to have effective people onside than airing their grievances from afar.

    Now, more than ever, there is a need for the sort of accountability that Lowe provided in the House. The assault on British farming proceeds apace. Labour are still ducking scrutiny of the Chagos deal. Bridget Phillipson’s loathsome schools bill will soon return to the Commons to continue its assault on educational standards. Migrant crossings and hotel-use are rising under this Government; a reminder of what Reform should be talking about.

    Yet it has chosen now to launch a botched internal coup. Over in No 10, Keir Starmer and chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and must be rubbing their hands with glee.

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

    Sublime Zandonai
    11 hrs ago
    I've been a life-long Conservative, and a local and district Councillor. Last year I resigned from the Tory Party over their net zero madness, and their manifest failings over immigration. Last week I was about to join Reform, having been mightily impressed by Rupert Lowe. Since this utter stupidity from Nigel (who I have always liked and admired) I have held off joining/donating. My donation would have been significant.

    I've looked hard at Rupert Lowe, and I believe he's the best MP in Parliament. A right-of-centre Party that does not have room for Rupert, and for others like him, is no Party for me. The attempts to besmirch this fine man are disgraceful.

    Nothing happens within Reform without Nigel's approval, so this debacle sits squarely on his head. If you're listening Nigel (do you listen as well as pronounce?) I suggest you make up with Rupert as a matter of urgency. He is Reforms biggest and most accurate gun. If you don't, you lose me and my money. I'm only one, but I suspect there will be thousands like me.

    Nigel – stop this self-defeating stupidity. This country needs Reform policies, but Reform split as it is now will win nothing but disdain. And you just about have time to demonstrate you have Party unity before hustings begin in the by-election. You desperately need Rupert on the hoof.

    1. Norm
      14h
      Lowe still not rowing back and indeed why should he – he's more in tune with the national mood here than Farage. "Mass deportations should be the default position of any self-respecting country. Aiming to remove all illegal migrants from our country is in no way controversial. And actually, a large majority of Brits agree with me. Why the squeamishness? We must do what needs to be done."

      1. A reconciliation will be difficult after what has gone before. In addition, should a reconciliation happen then it's likely that many people will see that event as a sop to party unity whilst important policy differences fester behind closed doors.

        Immigration along with the deportation of illegals and those judged as criminals, appears to have created, or perhaps exposed, a gulf in policy between Farage and Lowe.

        It's not so long ago that Farage was at sea off of Dover reporting on the invasion that was happening under the Tory government. Now he appears to be having doubts that deporting undesirables is feasible.

        Sitting on the fence, or worse, moving to the opposite side, with regards to immigration etc. will not be a good look and certainly not an attraction for potential Reform members, and hence votes.

        1. I am sticking with UKIP; Nick Tenconi is firm on the need for deportations. He has organised rallies calling for that.

  11. TDS rules the world's media.

    From his ignominious eviction from the White House to a potential peace deal in the desert – what a difference 12 days makes in the life of Volodymyr Zelensky.
    That infamous Friday afternoon in the Oval office, the Ukrainian comedian turned political leader was bulled, belittled and humiliated by Donald Trump and his sidekick JD Vance.
    In one of the most despicable political spectacles of recent times, the only words the US President left out on February 28th were his Apprentice catchphrase, ‘You’re fired’.

    Zelensky is still the hero.

    The commitment by President Zelensky, who travelled to Saudi Arabia but did not participate in Tuesday's negotiations, went further than his initial proposal.
    That offer was only for a sea and air ceasefire. Tuesday night’s offer was to stop the shooting altogether.
    He also secured a major concession from Trump – the resumption of US military aid and intelligence support without first signing a deal to sell off his country’s mineral wealth.
    Matthew’s gospel says ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’. No political leader in the world is more deserving of ‘victory’, and of acclaim, than mild-mannered Mr Zelensky.
    For he has brought his war-ravaged country and its heroic population to the precipice of peace, with a little help from his friends, including Britain

    Does it occur to anyone that perhaps, just perhaps, Trump's actions are the ones that get us to this point?

    Without them, where would be now?

    In my view:
    No further forward, just the ongoing mean-meat-machine.
    There's a lot more besides, but the obvious slant makes me wary of loose ends and missing detail.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14487967/ukraine-ceasefire-deal-saudi-arabia-trump.html

    1. Hmmm
      " Ukraine may keep fighting a guerrilla war, regardless of a ‘peace deal’
      While most Ukrainians want the fighting to end, some regiments will reject any peace predicated on carving up their homeland"
      https://archive.ph/OcWLN#selection-2325.4-2329.131
      Why on earth with this nonsense abounding would Russia agree a cease fire that the Ukies will only use to rearm??
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/28a996cc2367afa33997a6cb01bc4d861c4b3e199f1231abdcf9e0e505ca6b24.png

      1. Brilliant meme. Too edgy for the village magazine, they all believe in plucky little Zelensky. I am on the lookout for good memes, you've posted two crackers today but both are too political unfortunately!

      2. So it will be back to the Ukes killing ethnic Russians in the Donbas in an undeclared war. I'm sure it was something like that which go Vlad going last time around.

  12. Morning, all Y'all.
    Snowing – again.
    Only this week did the council come and sweep up all the grit they laid over winter on the footpaths, and today, they're putting it back! Even us expats know to leave things be through March, winter isn't done yet. Some eejit last week was on the radio saying it was OK to change to summer tyres… maybe it was someone who followed that advice who crashed on he motorway, by losing control in a skid.

    2. Ho ho, but if doing such a meme at least make it slightly conceivable.

      There is only one lap on a 400m, two maximum, if on a 200m track, which are generally indoor tracks. The athletes lapped twice would have to have refused to start, not that I would blame them.

      1. Good move by me to wait for your post to appear as I was about to make the same point.

    1. I count 11 Taskforces. What the Solar Taskforce is about will be interesting: blocking out sunlight or covering more swathes of this once green and pleasant land with arrays of panels? Has Miliband worked out yet that the solar radiation reduction scheme i.e. spraying all manner of crap into the stratosphere is counter-productive to the use of solar electricity generating panel deployment.

      And as for the Tree Planting Taskforce, go long on spades and shovels.

      1. Jet zero task force ?
        Might it have something to do with the recent collision in the
        North Sea ?

      3. I support the Solar Taskforce.

        I would help fund a mission that sends them all to the sun in order for them to install a sunshade on it and a brightness control.
        I would also urge every member of this Labour government and all worldwide Woke ideologies to join them so they can see this vitally important work being carried out first hand.

        1. A Dyson Sphere is a concept to collect energy from an orbit close to a star. Perhaps Musk could provide the transport for the loons to take a journey to survey the locality around Alpha Centauri? It would keep them out of mischief for a few million years.

    2. More gravy train jobs for the insiders to wreck Britain.
      We've got more forest than at any time since the 18th century, we don't need a tree planting taskforce. We need more food to be produced.

      1. And they say that using logs in a wood-burning stove is bad for the environment while shipping wood pellets across the Atlantic is good!

        1. They don’t want us to have

          Our own heating for our homes
          Our own vegetables from our gardens
          Our own eggs from our chickens

          “Scientists” have “proven” that all these things are dangerous, and it’s been reported in the lapdog media.

  16. Good morning, all. Overcast and mild.

    Colonel MacGregor exposing the Mexican cartels and the weapons they have acquired, including the Javelin missile. Care to guess the source of these potent weapons?

    From Google:

    Can a US tank survive a Javelin missile?
    Obviously not! Javelin, per public domain advertisements can penetrate about 760mm of armor. No modern tank has that kind of armor on any side, except the frontal 60 degree arc. The Javelin missile has specific top attack mode that exploits the thin top armor of the turret or the engine bay.13 Jan 2024

    The Javelin Weapon System has been engaged to destroy enemy armour at ranges beyond that achievable with previous shoulder-fired anti-armour systems. The system also offers the capability to destroy slow-moving or hovering rotary wing aircraft, or fortifications.

    https://x.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1899620109653524509
    What else has been acquired and by whom?

  17. "We must do what needs to be done." – and do it NOW!
    Action this day, as the man said.

  18. Good morning all. A beautiful sunny day with clear skies and a rather cool 2°C on the thermometer.
    Yesterdays maximum only just reached 10½° with an overnight minimum of a tad above 1½°C.

  19. Morning all 🙂😊
    Cloudy and chilly, snow forecast for parts of the UK tomorrow. Oh dear.
    Starmer ? No comment.
    Farage ? Probably some sort of secret agent he seems as destructive as the above mentioned.

  20. 'Morning All
    Just feel lost this morning

    The Stranger within my gate,
    He may be true or kind,
    But he does not talk my talk— I cannot feel his mind.
    I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
    But not the soul behind.

    The Stranger within my gates,
    He may be evil or good,
    But I cannot tell what powers control—
    What reasons sway his mood;
    Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
    Shall repossess his blood.

    The men of my own stock,
    Bitter bad they may be,
    But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
    And see the things I see;
    And whatever I think of them and their likes
    They think of the likes of me.

    This was my father's belief
    And this is also mine:
    Let the corn be all one sheaf—
    And the grapes be all one vine,
    Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
    By bitter bread and wine.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eda5d765f82d5a14cd0f08804bcabc5af41dc7eaa0c5aa157d8d6083cd9ce4aa.jpg

    1. The meme is spot on!

      As an aside, the most ludicrous piece of trolling by any of the Uniparty was Labour's claim that they would "smash the gangs." Clearly adapted from the class war handbook, it shows how out of touch they are that they thought this nasty, thuggish phrase would fool anyone about their real intentions.

      2. The uniparty and their Whitehall mandarins ARE the gangs of course but they’re hardly going to admit that and too many are easily fooled.

    2. About feeling lost….you have us Rik, but do you know like-minded people in your own area?

    3. Don't feel lost alone dear Rik .

      We are all birds in the wilderness .. confused , lost , our identity is being shattered , the truth is being distorted and hidden ..

      If I can be miserable here , but we are the remains of a generation who remembers the difference between truth and lies ..

      We are now in the hands of spivs , networkers , charlatans ,chisellers, hustlers, fakirs .

      I do think we need to adopt a sort of wartime spirit , this current mob in charge of the coffers can't last very long .

      Rupert Lowe is the champion , and I hope he stays strong and brave .. Remember the If poem?

      If you can keep your head when all about you
      Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
      If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
      But make allowance for their doubting too;
      If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
      Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
      Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
      And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

      If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
      If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
      If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
      And treat those two impostors just the same;
      If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
      Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
      Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
      And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

      If you can make one heap of all your winnings
      And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
      And lose, and start again at your beginnings
      And never breathe a word about your loss;
      If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
      To serve your turn long after they are gone,
      And so hold on when there is nothing in you
      Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

      If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
      Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
      If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
      If all men count with you, but none too much;
      If you can fill the unforgiving minute
      With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
      Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
      And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

      Rudyard Kipling .

      1. If you can meet with Triumph Politics and Disaster Religion
        And treat those two impostors just the same…

        The only bit that Kipling got wrong in If.

      2. I have stepped up my church going in response to the islamisation of the country. I might even look out my crucifix as a visible sign.

    5. Farage's solution? Let them all stay. It is also his solution to Islam. Please see video I posted above and hear him say it.

    6. My dressage pupil said to me that she was glad we could speak openly. Many of her friends are too woke and can’t see the light.

  21. Morning all! Cold again. 🥶
    Some flakes of snow ❄ coming down here. Hopefully gone before I go out to the hairdressers.

          1. In 2007, Cottrell publicly opposed the renewal of Britain's Trident missile systems. The same year, his support for church celebrations of same-sex relationships was widely reported. In 2017, while serving as Bishop of Chelmsford, Cottrell said "Whether you believe there should be same sex marriage or the blessing of same sex unions or whether you do not, you are still a faithful Anglican…We need to find ways of living with this diversity, not being torn apart by it." He also stated that "there is no reason why prayers of thanksgiving for same-sex relationships – perhaps a Eucharist – cannot be offered." He is married with three children. Buttered on both sides of the bread?

          2. From memory, when he was Bishop of Chelmsford he held a meeting to discuss the issue of a referendum on EU membership, but refused to allowed any member of UKIP to speak at the meeting.

      2. What supposed to be happening with a new Archbishop of Canterbury? Have they decided not to bother, the brand being so damaged by the last pillock in charge?

        1. The office of ABC is now to be 'twinned' with the office of The Grand Mufti of Badmorals, Royal Deeside. Chuck is designing a new set of vestments.

        2. They are trawling through the hundreds of applications by black women in wheelchairs

    2. I have just watched two young boys kneeling in the dirt, perhaps 7 or 8, having sentence of death pronounced by a masked jihadi then shot by firing squad in Syria. I hope that people realize that this sort of thing will become common in England in a few years. Farage will do nothing. He has said he will do nothing. He has said Islam is inevitable. Supporting Farage is foolish.

  24. Good Morning!

    Following on from the effects of feminism on society, we have an article on the effect of misguided government policy and societal change by Zhang Yingyue. Her piece China's Left Over Women , sets it against a background of an ageing and falling population. She will be very interested in your opinion, and a lot of comments will keep me out of the dog house.

    Graham Cunningham’s essay, ANDROGYNISM’S CORROSIVE SEXUAL SOLVENT, on the effects of feminism and the feminisation of society, is not a men v women piece though, and both sexes can read it in peace. Please do so, and let us know what you think.

    Energy watch 07.30: Demand: 36.5 GW. Total UK Production: 33.8 GW from: Hydrocarbons 40.1%; Wind 29.1%; Imports 7.2%; Biomass 5.9%; Nuclear 9.9%. Solar: 1.3%.

    And please sign David Bizley’s petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/712680/signatures/new

  25. Quickly to be swept under the carpet by western media of course. Our leaders are vile.
    RIP

  26. If 99% haven't a clue…in a town of 20 000 people that's 200 people who do. It's worth getting to know those 200 people.

      1. concerns about smart meters; community gardens / permaculture; stand in the park; communal food buying groups; local branch of a small anti-Agenda 2030 political party; community skills exchange group…might take a bit of searching

      2. Events like Dick Delingpole’s Third Wednesday groups happen all over the country, Delingpod live, freedom weekend (was in May last year, iirc), alternative comedy

  27. Good morning all ,

    Cold dull March day , 2c .

    Golfer left early , wrapped up in thermals , hand warmer charged , competition day, and at least the weather is still and dry .

    Son left the house at 6.30am for work 14 miles away! Working on an amazing project , of which I daren't reveal where yet.

    I liked this letter , and it reminded me of my parents tastes , and of course my father who preferred a pint or a whiskey and soda .

    SIR – As a teenager in the 1960s, I drank beer when I went out. My parents would serve gin and tonic or sherry to their guests. There came a time, however, when I would be invited to events where it was more appropriate to bring wine. I brought Blue Nun, as it was the only one I had heard of, and I would not be the only guest to do so.

    I now realise that I learnt about this wine because of the brilliant advertising by Peter Sichel, who must have done more than anyone to introduce the concept of drinking wine to the middle classes in this country.

    Dr Michael Pegg
    Esher, Surrey

    2. Yougov poll says that one third of members of Reform want him gone. However other polls on line indicate the majority want Farage to be removed and Rupert to be the leader.
      This video spells out pretty well why Farage has to go. Put simply, his ego will never provide a stable atmosphere for a party to thrive. Farage will always cut down the tall poppies. He always has done, wasting a huge pool of talented individuals who together, would have made a great party. The idea that he is irreplaceable is just the argument of those who are frightened of stepping out of their comfort zones into the unknown. Under Rupert and Ben Habib I believe the part would thrive.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3VW3ZqOlXQ&t=99s

      1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/11/the-rupert-lowe-fracas-shows-reform-wont-survive/

        "The Rupert Lowe fracas shows why Reform may not survive

        Britain desperately needs an alternative to the old parties, but Nigel Farage is sadly blowing the chance

        Madeline Grant11 March 2025 7:14pm GMT

        Rupert Lowe joins a long line of high-profile Faragean fallings-out; Farage vs Alan Sked, Farage vs Robert Kilroy-Silk, Farage vs Godfrey Bloom, Farage vs Suzanne Evans, Farage vs Douglas Carswell, Farage vs Ben Habib. Now it might just be that Nigel is unlucky: a figure cursed to walk through life only ever encountering the awkward and uncharitable and so being subjected to a litany of painful clashes.

        Or we could apply what I have come to call “Markle’s Law”: if you spend your whole life falling out with people then the common problematic factor, on the balance of probability, is not going to be everybody you happen to meet, but you.

        Speaking to Dan Wootton on Monday evening, Lowe, the now-independent MP for Great Yarmouth, described the campaign against him as “unfair and un-Christian”.

        Of course, it is possible that an investigation will find wrongdoing. While we cannot prejudge, details and timing of the allegations look sketchy. We are supposed to believe that the party reported Lowe to the police three months after the alleged crime took place; coincidentally one day after he publicly criticised Farage.

        Though allegations of office bullying were not directed at Lowe himself, the initial Reform statement appeared to give the impression that he had personally mistreated staff. Lowe’s entire parliamentary team have since signed a heartfelt letter denying the allegations and describing their boss as a decent man. They also insist, oddly, that they have never been contacted as part of any parliamentary investigation.

        Here, Reform may be exhibiting behaviour it would normally condemn; cancellation without due process, even calling the coppers over some alleged hurty words.

        In a television interview, Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, implied that Lowe might not be welcome back in the party, even if his innocence were proved. Mr Farage insisted on TV that on the “29 February” Lowe was “informed” about a “parliamentary investigation” into allegations against him. Not only does Lowe deny this, but there wasn’t actually a February 29 this year. So as hatchet jobs go, it’s not the most convincing – and many party members remain unconvinced. The whole thing smacks of amateurism; more Fanny Cradock than Francis Urquhart.

        Lowe claims that Reform insiders have briefed journalists that he has early-onset dementia; which Farage may have alluded to in a Telegraph article, describing Lowe as a “different person” from the one he knew in the Brexit Party days. As someone who spends prolonged periods of time caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, this greatly offended me. It’s a serious, hideous condition, not something to be opportunistically chucked around for score-settling purposes.

        Since entering the Commons, Lowe has earned a reputation as a committed MP. The reporter Christian Calgie points out that “by removing the whip from Lowe, Reform UK’s total parliamentary activity since the general election has fallen by 46 per cent”. Every party needs its thinkers, its details-men and women.

        A common complaint from Reform insiders is that under Farage and chairman Zia Yusuf, the party operates in a brittle, presidential style. Yet UK politics is not, and has never been, presidential. If Reform wishes to form a government, as it insists, they will also need 100 plus ministers to govern, without (so far) a single peer in the Lords. In short, the party cannot exist as a private fiefdom, or a talking-shop for airing grievances without solutions.

        Lowe’s defenestration threatens the party’s hopes of professionalisation in more ways than one. What serious person would want to join and run as a candidate, when their life could be so visibly detonated?

        Moreover, it is hard to convince those furious about the conduct of recent politics that you are different and worth voting for when you immediately resort to the sort of rats-in-a-sack scrapping, at which the Tories and Labour excel, as soon as you gain even a handful of MPs.

        A party that can only accommodate one strong personality will struggle to assemble a cabinet.

        Labour, for all its faults, is generally loyal and members will go out to bat for each other even when they’re manifestly in the wrong.

        Angela Rayner quite possibly loathes the PM but manages to keep it as professional as she can. Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick may never quite be BFFs, but Badenoch wisely gave her leadership rival a prominent role, unleashing him as an attack-dog against the Government. On balance, it’s better to have effective people onside than airing their grievances from afar.

        Now, more than ever, there is a need for the sort of accountability that Lowe provided in the House. The assault on British farming proceeds apace. Labour are still ducking scrutiny of the Chagos deal. Bridget Phillipson’s loathsome schools bill will soon return to the Commons to continue its assault on educational standards. Migrant crossings and hotel-use are rising under this Government; a reminder of what Reform should be talking about.

        Yet it has chosen now to launch a botched internal coup. Over in No 10, Keir Starmer and chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and must be rubbing their hands with glee."

        1. I watched the Dan Wooten interview last night. Rupert's time line of events refutes everything that Farage alleges. If I had had any doubts I came away obsoletely convinced that Farage had overreached himself this time in trying to do a character assassination on a person he perceives as a rivel. Just watching his face as he tried to explain himself also convinced me the Farage was 100% lying. I have never liked him since he destroyed Gerard Batten, pretending that Gerard was a minor player, when, in fact, he was the backbone of UKIP who did the work while Farage was the advert on display. I learnt recently he even referred to Gerard as; "The help"." A deeply insulting comment by someone who was a success because he was riding on Gerard's work. Sorry. But at this point, i regard Farage with disgust, an ego willing to destroy, lie and denigrate anyone he thinks might take the limelight away from him. Then, by the way. We now discover he has being next to nothing in the Commons and Rupert has done more that 50% of the work for the entire party while he has been there.

          1. Lowe should sue for defamation. Then Farage can be exposed as a liar – or not.

        2. As I pointed out to the Archdeacon when I listed all those the rectorette had alienated, there is only one common denominator.

      2. Ah yes, Yougov. Sure to give you the results you pay for as long as they fit the narrative.

    3. Many of us who supported Farage supported him with grave reservations.

      His inability to delegate and his jealousy of anyone who might challenge him was one and his inability to see that Tommy Robinson – like him or laothe him – has been monstrously treated by the PTB and the MSM.

  29. Labour councils spurn UK defence firms to woo pro-Palestinian vote

    At least nine local authorities defy Chancellor’s push for greater investment in arms industry

    Tony Diver
    Associate Political Editor
    12 March 2025 6:12am GMT

    Labour councils have scrapped investments in defence firms to woo pro-Palestinian voters.

    At least nine local authorities have voted to divest their pension funds from British defence companies, despite pressure from the Government for arms manufacturers to be considered “ethical” investments.

    Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is attempting to drive investment in such firms to improve Britain’s industrial base.

    European nations are also trying to re-arm in the wake of Donald Trump’s call for the Continent to manage its own security and provide arms to Ukraine.

    However, some Labour councils are heading in the opposite direction amid pressure from pro-Palestinian activists who object to the supply of weapons to Israel.

    One councillor who backed a divestment vote told The Telegraph they had taken a “tactical” decision to exclude any mention of Gaza, even though the policy was designed to appeal to Muslim voters and pro-Palestinian activists.

    Last week, Dudley council in the West Midlands became the latest authority to vote to divest, arguing that it could “contribute towards peace” by scrapping millions of pounds of investment in firms involved “directly or indirectly in arms production”.

    The council, which is under no overall control, passed the motion with the support of Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors.

    The moves come as Labour is facing a backlash from voters over its support for Israel during the war in Gaza ahead of local elections on May 1.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2025/03/11/TELEMMGLPICT000414945703_17417279271630_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqyuLFFzXshuGqnr8zPdDWXhbQKbwj1ZsnNMhuR7O6ySI.jpeg?imwidth=680
    BAE Systems, which has been working on HMS Glasgow, is among the defence companies targeted by activists Credit: Iain Masterton/Alamy Stock Photo

    At the general election last July, the party lost several strongholds, including the constituencies of two shadow cabinet ministers, to candidates campaigning on a pro-Palestinian platform.

    A councillor involved in a divestment motion told The Telegraph: “Pressure was applied on the Labour Party by local pro-Palestine groups, especially the members with large groups of Muslims in their wards.”

    Two of the councils that have divested from British arms companies are in the West Midlands, which has the second largest proportion of Muslim voters in the country after London.

    Four London councils – Camden, Islington, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest – have taken similar action in recent months after lobbying from pro-Palestinian groups.

    Islington council has since paused its divestment attempt following warnings that it may break the pension fund’s obligation to produce returns for investors.

    Fund considers cutting Israeli ties
    However, Avon Pension Fund, which manages £6 billion of public sector pensions in the West Country, has agreed to review £14 million of defence investments later this month after lobbying from Bristol and North Somerset councils.

    The fund said it would consider whether to abandon investments in seven defence companies that “provide the Israeli military with defence products”.

    In November, Labour-run Manchester city council voted to pressure its pension provider to abandon weapons manufacturers, which would close the door on defence investment from the country’s largest local government investor.

    The Telegraph understands several more similar council votes are planned in the coming months.

    Overall, the votes would result in millions of pounds divested from British defence companies, including BAE Systems and the UK-based arm of Lockheed Martin, even if their shares produce high returns for investors.

    On Tuesday, Lord West, the former first sea lord, accused the councils of “not thinking” and “making our nation less safe”.

    He said: “They obviously aren’t that interested in the defence of our people, which will come back and bite them.

    “Our defence firms are there to help protect us, as much as the people who actually join the military.”

    Labour MPs previously voted against a Conservative Bill that would have banned councils from taking part in boycotts and divestments. The legislation did not make it into law before last year’s general election.

    A Labour source said the party was strongly opposed to boycott, divestment and sanctions protests, and described the council votes as “a genuine threat to the two-state solution”.

    John Healey, the Defence Secretary, previously said attempts to boycott the defence industry were “fundamentally flawed”, even if the intentions of activists were “well-meaning”.

    Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow local government secretary, said: “Labour councils across the country bowing to boycotts are inflaming community tensions and empowering those looking to hold our country to ransom.

    “It’s bad for the UK economy and bad for our defence industrial base just when it needs to be fired up.

    “If Labour were on the side of the British people, they would bring back our Bill that would stop this right now. Their silence speaks volumes.”

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

    The Traitors Party

    2. If defence isn't ethical, how can they disinvest when surely they hadn't invested in the first place?

  31. The plot thickens. The Captain of the container ship MV Solong which collided with the tanker carrying aviation fuel for the US Navy in the North Sea and has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter is – a Russian national.

    1. Hello hello ,

      Moh suggested the very same .. because of where the tanker was hit.. in his words, midships .. and the bridge of the container ship was probably being manned by a drunk navigator , asleep on the job .. Not all foreign ships are dry !

  32. Starmer Left Red-Faced as Trump Confirms UK Not Exempt from Tariffs

    Two weeks ago, Downing Street was basking in the glow of fawning headlines after Keir Starmer’s White House meeting with President Trump. Sky News gushed that Starmer had “secured wins for the UK,” citing trade talks as a shining example of his diplomatic prowess. Last night, President Trump confirmed 25% tariffs on worldwide steel and aluminium imports will come into effect from today – and the UK is not exempt. Last-ditch attempts from UK officials to persuade Trump to spare Britain so far have failed…

    The EU has already announced retaliatory measures, slapping tariffs on €26 billion worth of US exports covering steel, aluminium, textiles, home appliances, and agriculture. Number 10 insists it isn’t planning to reciprocate tariffs, while business secretary Jonathan Reynolds has expressed the government’s “disappointment” at the announcement:

    “It’s disappointing the US has today imposed global tariffs on steel and aluminium. We are focused on a pragmatic approach and are rapidly negotiating a wider economic agreement with the US to eliminate additional tariffs and to benefit UK businesses and our economy.”

    Keir ‘Charmer’ rapidly gone from hero to zero…

    March 12 2025 @ 08:18

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

    Send in the Clones
    9m
    Mustafa Ironworks.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ee15381603479bf48719bee0800aabe598e35eca8e1c75652821be0ab949b490.png

        1. I know it is bruited about that Starmer and his wife have separated but are is there any evidence that this is the case and, if so, are there any links to it?

    2. Not surprised. After lying to the President in the Oval Office about free speech he slithers back to England to make an underhanded deal with the EU trying to scuttle Trumps efforts in Ukraine. If I were Trump I would be extra unpleasant, add an extra percentage or two to the tariffs just for the UK, return the invitation to a state visit and tell Starmer that I wasn't going to set foot in the UK until I had crushed the little worm underfoot.

    3. Apart from recycling old baking trays and saucepans, I wasn't aware that Britain still had a steel industry; let alone producing high grade steel suitable for the world market.

  33. Debbie Hayton
    Why is Streeting sanctioning more puberty blocker tests?
    12 March 2025, 8:41am

    If a government’s first duty is to protect its citizens, then Wes Streeting must step up to defend some of society’s most vulnerable. The Health Secretary is reportedly refusing to intervene over NHS plans to test puberty blockers on children.

    Nearly £11 million has been allocated to experiment with drugs that may prevent children’s bones from developing normally.

    Streeting knows these drugs are potentially dangerous when used to stop the natural development of healthy children. He banned the practice last December after the Commission on Human Medicines found that there was an ‘unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children’. So why is Streeting not cracking down now?

    Puberty blockers are not a new treatment. These drugs were used by the Tavistock’s now-closed Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic for well over a decade.

    After all that time, last year’s Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people pointed out that puberty blockers can compromise bone density. The dangers could not be clearer.

    As for the purported benefits, the review added that ‘no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction were demonstrated’. Since many young people started on puberty blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones, which change physical appearance, there was no evidence that puberty blockers bought any ‘time to think’ and some concern that they may change the ‘trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development’.

    After such damning comments, it beggars belief that the NHS isn’t taking a harder line on these treatments.

    According to reports, Streeting seems to believe that this trial must go ahead because it had been recommended by the Cass Review itself. Streeting needs to be reminded that, while the advice of doctors might be a necessary condition for another trial, it is not sufficient. If further evidence is needed, then it would be better to work through the evidence gathered from the Tavistock and to follow up previous patients.

    My personal experience of adult gender services – I transitioned in 2012 and had gender-reassignment surgery in 2016 – did not involve any follow-up. For all my former clinicians know, unless they read my Spectator pieces, I could be dead.

    In 2020, my GP contacted the gender clinic for advice on my long-term hormone regime. The response was to just keep prescribing the same dose of the same drug. She was not impressed: ‘If you were a woman who had had her ovaries removed, I would not be prescribing that!’ Since then, I took the decision to significantly reduce the dose myself, in the hope of reducing my risk of breast cancer.

    This is experimental treatment, but I am an adult who went into this at 43. I was old enough to understand the consequences of what I was doing. I was able to consent. But this proposed trial involves children too young to consent to treatment that could well destroy their capacity to eventually have children of their own.

    It’s not even clear to me what disease these medics are treating. If you had asked me back in 2012, I would have claimed that I was suffering from transsexualism and would have suggested that I was a woman born in a man’s body. Thirteen years later, I think that was nonsense.

    My problems were driven by autogynephilia – a sexual attraction to the thought of myself as a woman, rather than to other people as women. It is a totally different condition from that experienced by teenage girls struggling with the pressures of becoming women.

    Adolescence has always been a difficult time for some children. The thought of leaving childhood behind can be hard for youngsters to face. But it seems to me that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria has become far more common since puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have become available. Children want it because it is there.

    Even more worryingly, some parents might also want it for their children. Over a decade, GIDS took 382 referrals of children aged 6 and under. That doesn’t happen without the cooperation or – encouragement – of parents and carers.

    In a controlled trial, there must be a control group. What will be the effect on them? After being dispensed placebos, the boys’ voices will break, and the girls will start developing breasts. While they might escape the physical effects of the drugs, they are at risk of psychological trauma of a different kind.

    I am horrified that some doctors are keen to spend millions carrying out further experiments on children. It is the job of the government to see the bigger picture. Streeting must step in and stop this, or he risks it becoming his legacy.

    1. Debbie Hayton is the sane face of this trans business.
      She (and I use the pronoun only because she is so balanced over this matter) has no illusions about her self or the condition.

  36. Kyle Clifford…

    His brother is also in jail for murder .

    While Clifford now faces a life sentence for the barbaric killing of Louise, 25, her sister Hannah, 28, and her mother Carol, 61, his older brother is serving life with a minimum term of 23 years for murder.

    This newspaper has obtained a photograph of the brothers together, taken in 2016 and posing in a cramped bar while celebrating the younger Clifford’s 17th birthday.

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/kyle-clifford-with-his-older-brother-in-murder-bradley-pictured-8n73r5swb

    Does bad blood run in families .. ?

    1. How idyllic! The government has probably foisted several score of dindus on them by now.

        1. When I go into town some days it’s like Mogadishu. Benefits day I assume. They are so rude as well. When I was in Shrewsbury I saw a walking bin bag.

          1. There are a few in Stroud and lots in Gloucester of course – but Nailsworth and Minch still seem normal. Had a chat outside the hairdresser’s with the couple who do the flower displays – I told them what a good job they did with the flowers last summer and we had a chat about types of daffodils. All very English and normal.
            Hairdresser’s young dog is going in shortly to be spayed but she has a cruciate ligament problem too and that will be dealt with. She’s a Rottie/bulldog cross and apparently it’s a common problem with Rotties.

    2. We still have a red phone halfway down our hill. Not sure if it still works. But it's there. We still live in a familiar England.

      1. The phonebox is still there halfway down the green here, but it has been converted into a village library facility. It’s nice to see the red familiarity of ye olde England as we drive past – when we were young we thought these would be a permanent fixture in our lives, we could not have believed they were simply a transient symbol of ‘progress’, of time moving on.

  40. Post

    See new posts
    Conversation
    Pat Condell
    @patcondell
    It’s pointless trying to keep Muslims onside. They’re setting up their own political parties now. Soon they’ll only vote for Islam.
    In the meantime they’ll vote for the party they believe will push Islam further into our society and impose its values.
    So they currently vote Labour.
    But they’ll abandon Labour when they can vote for a Muslim party, which will happen soon.
    They are never going to vote for Reform.

    Islam is a serious threat to our country. It has made our society less tolerant, less civilised, more divided, and more dangerous. It is warping our laws and restricting our freedom of expression, largely through the implicit threat of violent disorder whenever Muslims are offended.
    If we don’t push back against it, it will become a bigger and bigger problem until it’s too big to handle.
    Millions of people can see that, and they want to vote for a party committed to stopping and reversing it.
    Reform seem determined to push those people away.

    https://x.com/egetoast/status/1899430438399008843

    1. I am beginning to suspect that there is something very putrid in the Reform Party. Why was Zia Yusof appointed?

      Has he got something with which he is blackmailing Farage.

  41. 403050+ up ticks,

    Alert, bloody listen up, DO NOT view this video if of a nervous disposition its contents are of a very upsetting nature.

    Commit to stopping this Mr Rupert Lowe as a top priority issue then you can rest assured the people will realise, at long last, the future of England is in a very safe pair of hands.

    https://x.com/EcoLifeHannah/status/1899723931709227094

      1. 403050+ up ticks,

        Afternoon N,

        The whole nation should be shown what they have allowed to take place on their doorstep
        for decades, and shake their heads in
        shame & horror.

        1. But they won't. People in the main don't care about this. Just so long as their meat is cheap.

          1. 403050+ up ticks,

            Afternoon BT,

            Could be they are happy catering for the muslim palate, could also be they are muslims themselves would NOT surprise me.

            Even so, there in no place for such odious butchery in the United Kingdom.

  43. This happened in eleventh and twelth century Spain. And It took more than 300 years to get them out. And they are creeping back again now.

  44. Yo and Good Moaning to you all, from a Sunny C d S.

    The trip to the foreign country of Wales was OK, but the Internet reception was not.

    I read a post from True Belle that we were invaded by 2000 gimmegrats last week

    2,000 a week, for 52 weeks = 104,000.

    Now work out the cost in money and effect on OUR lives

    Mobile phones, housing, subsistance (money and food), labour voters, kiddy fiddlers etv

    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

    1. Morning OLT

      Here is the link https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migrants-detected-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/migrants-detected-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats-last-7-days

      Our village has risen to 5,000 in the 25 years we have lived here .

      Doesn't include Bovington .

      Look at this census result closely https://www.plumplot.co.uk/Dorset-census-2021.html 2021

      Dorset 94% white

      England and Wales 81% white

      Here's a breakdown of the key figures and trends:
      2021: Immigration increased sharply, with around 1.2-1.3 million people arriving annually in 2022 and 2023.
      2022: The estimated number of long-term immigrants was 1.294 million.
      2023: The provisional estimate for long-term immigration was 1.2 million.
      2024: The provisional estimate for long-term immigration for the year ending June 2024 was 1.2 million, down from 1.3 million in the previous year.
      Net Migration: Net migration in the year ending June 2024 was 728,000, meaning 1.2 million migrants arrived, while 479,000 emigrated.

      https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-an-overview/

      1. The nearby small market town has been deliberately doubled in size by county. Whereas it used to be a close knit community now it’s become a dormitory town because there’s no work locally. More congestion on the roads and all the new builds have been on farm land.

  46. More houses to be built out of wood under Labour’s net zero plan
    Proposals aim to also stimulate demand for British timber, create new green jobs and boost rural economies
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/11/labours-plan-timber-houses-net-zero-environment/

    BTL

    And along will come the Big Bad Wolf who will huff and puff and blow the houses down!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f9a827da5b5602dd78fbcfa9da15f75808574cfd40083f41b822d0733e79534d.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b229ec803f2e4dde698754ac9f81c1dbed58225d38cacde8df75c5bf60d6d2f5.png

    1. It Took the political idiots a few weeks to realise that there isn't enough clay in the UK to make the billions of bricks and supply the needed sand and cement. Also the massive energy consumption to bake the bricks. So instead the idiots are going to cut down thousands of trees and use unseasoned timber to build homes. There could and will be trouble ahead.

      1. Most new houses in Scotland are timber framed with a block exterior which is then wet harled

        1. Similar to Australia and NZ but they grew the pine trees for that purpose.
          Much Easier to insulate as well.

    2. But, but, aren't trees a real carbon capture scheme??? Isn't cutting them down anti net zero [not that I believe the scam, but …]

    3. My house is wooden. From 1960s.
      Firsborn's farmhouse is wooden. From 1770s.
      Wood is great, it even grows on trees!

    4. A recent account of the LA Pallisades fire on TV revealed a couple who filmed an electrical spark from an electricity pylon setting fire around the tower. Most of the surrounding buildings were of wooden construction.
      Would £250 of your electriciry bill compensate for the loss of your timber house sited near an electricity grid tower?

      People who lost everything were uninsurable. Ironically the power company is being sued for not turning off the high voltage power lines when the wind blew – the best time for generating wind energy.

  47. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e378810623c9a131836bcf7a2a016350e9ed3de0adac94279f08b596be9e9961.png ‘Young people hide behind issues they don’t have – they’re just naughty’

    Alun Ebenezer has been branded the ‘head from hell’ for his zero-tolerance approach towards pupils and parents, but his old-fashioned methods drastically reduce truancy and bad behaviour within weeks.

    The sight of a parent standing their ground in a school reception – shouting, threatening, filming with their phone, refusing to leave until they see the head teacher – has become an all too familiar scene in British schools. The latest figures show that almost a third of head teachers have gone to the police over cases of parents abusing staff in the past year; 42 per cent have been forced to ban parents from stepping foot on school premises.

    Whatever is behind it, one head teacher in Wales suspects that parents need to be dealt with in exactly the same manner that more children ought to be – the old-fashioned way, with “strict discipline and firm boundaries”. For the past 10 months, Alun Ebenezer has been whipping a secondary school in Monmouthshire into shape. When he first arrived at Caldicot School, a comprehensive, from Fulham Boys School (the free school championed by Boris Johnson), his methods went down badly with pupils and parents alike. A group ofparents staged a protest at the gates; people would regularly pitch up in reception demanding to speak to him. “The first few weeks were hard,” says Ebenezer. “The parents kept coming up here, shouting at us, threatening us. But you have to hold your ground.”

    When asked by the local authority to take over Caldicot, a 1,300-pupil state secondary, in May 2024, it sounded as if the school had become a battleground. Staff staged walkouts over what they considered to be a failure to address the students’ violent and abusive behaviour. Members of one union – Nasuwt (the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers) – refused to teach certain pupils whom they deemed to be a risk to staff. Students, Ebenezer has since learnt, felt unsafe too – one told him recently they’d long been frightened to go to the bathroom. “My job was to come in and sort all that out.” Before he arrived, “low-level disruption went on”, he says. Truancy was a problem – “there might be 100 children wandering the corridors during lessons”.

    If an attempt was made to exclude a child for bad behaviour, the parents could usually just march them back to school.
    Ebenezer’s mission was to lay down “law and order”, and despite protestations, he held the line, cracking down on uniform infringements, overhauling the way the school dealt with behavioural issues and excluding pupils for insolence. “I think it’s good that parents challenge and question, but when I came here there were parents that were threatening and abusive. Why should schools put up with parents sitting in reception saying ‘I’m not going until I see the head teacher’, videoing, being abusive, swearing?”

    In many ways, it’s a feature of modern parenting, he says. “I’m 50. When I was in school I was quite naughty – I’d never go home and tell my dad I’d been naughty because I’d have another row.” Today, he says, students go home and tell their parents they’re in trouble “and the parents come up and defend their case”.

    The protests were short-lived. “Within a week or two, 93 per cent of our young people were doing what we wanted them to do
    93 per cent of the time.” And their parents? The vast majority are now “fully behind what we’re doing”. Other than when he makes one of them come and sit next to their badly behaved child in chemistry – a toe-curling consequence meted out to repeat offenders, to which the parents tend to object. “Course they do. You’ve got to take time off work. But my argument is that your child is inconveniencing us all the time.”
    It’s effective. “We’ve never had to ask the same parent in twice.”

    We meet at lunchtime in Ebenezer’s office. It’s next to reception and overlooks the main concourse – a useful watchtower from which to check ties are straight in the morning, you’d imagine. He has the immediate air of a commanding officer about him. You can see why a newspaper once referred to him as “one of the toughest disciplinarians in British education”; another dubbed him “headmaster from hell”. Some would call his approach old-fashioned, others draconian. Ebenezer calls it common sense. “You adopt a zero-tolerance approach and young people will just fall into line.”

    He believes we have made a mistake with the way we raise and educate young people. Where we should have been teaching them “resilience”, we’ve told them the most important thing is to be happy. “We live in a day and age where we indulge young people. ‘Do whatever you want to be happy.’ ‘Be whatever you want to be happy.’ But it hasn’t made them happy. It’s made them the complete opposite.” By focusing on happiness, we’ve made them “really miserable”, he says. “When young people realise life is hard, it’s a game changer.” When it comes to discipline, consequences seem to have been rebranded as traumatic. “I’m told that detentions [he has introduced same-day and Saturday detentions] are ‘restrictive practices’ because young people don’t like them. “Well, when young people start liking detentions, when young people like the fact that their mum is going to sit next to them in lessons, that’s when we stop doing it. The whole point is it’s inconvenient.”

    Ebenezer hit the headlines when he first arrived for enforcing a strict uniform policy. Skirts had to be a certain length, ties straight, socks the right colour. And if you came to school with false eyelashes and the wrong shoes and refused to rectify it, you’d be sent home. Parents and pupils were furious; there were accusations in the press that girls were being targeted. And yet, within a few weeks, he says, people broadly accepted the new regime.

    It’s hard to make the argument that having a scruffy uniform at 13 sets you up poorly for life, but to Ebenezer it’s crucial. “I’ve never been in a good school with a bad uniform,” he says. In fact, he suspects that on this and other issues he is simply saying what “everyone thinks but is probably a bit frightened to say”. “Uniform is important. We’ve got 1,300 pupils – we’ve got some very rich pupils and some very poor pupils. If you’ve got a uniform, they identify with the school, you’ve got no idea who are the haves and the have-nots ”

    Defiance is his biggest bugbear. “You can have students having a fight at lunchtime – we’ll deal with that. But once you have ‘I’m not doing it’, ‘get lost’, you’ve got a massive problem, because if everyone did that we’d have anarchy.” If a child is being consistently defiant, though, isn’t it a sign that something deeper might be going on? Possibly, and for the few that have deeper challenges, they operate a “bespoke” approach to make sure they have the support they need. “I’ve asked teachers to send me a list of the students they find most challenging, and write in the strategies they use, so we’ve got a toolbox to work with.”

    His point is that it’s the few, not the many, who truly display something beyond just being “naughty”. “Naughty children don’t exist here anymore – there’s a reason for it,” he says. “Rather than deal with behaviour, we diagnose. When I came here, you had literally 100 young people hiding behind issues they didn’t have. They’re just naughty.” While some young people have “genuine problems”, Ebenezer suspects plenty don’t. The problem, he says, is the way “we now hide behind labels”.

    The school has a medical room and a “wellbeing room”. When he arrived “it was packed every lesson”. “They didn’t have issues, they just didn’t want to go to physics or Spanish or maths.” Children could self-refer to the wellbeing room, where they could relax and seek support. Now they have to have a referral from their head of year and make an appointment. “The lady who runs it is brilliant. She says to me ‘at last, Alun, I can deal with the people who need to be dealt with, not the ones clogging up the system because they just don’t want to go to [lessons]’.”
    After 27 years in education, Ebenezer says one of the biggest challenges facing young people today – alongside phones, which he considers “a huge problem” – is overdiagnosis. “When did ‘I’m a bit nervous’ become ‘I’ve got anxiety’? When did ‘I’m a bit fed up’ or ‘it’s a bit
    hard going’ become ‘I’ve got depression’?“We have to distinguish between those things so that people who have got real anxiety and real depression get the help they need.”

    He feels ADHD, in particular, is “overused”, but even the normal ups and downs of adolescence are being pathologised. “If some young people are being a bit unkind to me and giving me a bit of a hard time, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m being bullied.”
    Ebenezer’s ethos can be traced directly back to his upbringing. A “free-school-meals boy from the Welsh valleys”, his father was a minister; home life was “strict and happy”. Now married (his wife is a primary school teacher) with a 20-year-old son, his faith is still central to his life. “[It] shapes me,” he says. His religious writings are somewhat controversial, bending towards the evangelical – he wrote a book titled Call to Action –
    Become the Man God Designed You to Be. He is open, too, about his political ambitions. “I’ve been asked to go into politics, and I would be quite keen to do that.” He won’t say which party, but it isn’t hard to guess. “I believe with all my heart in a liberal society, but I don’t believe in an aggressively liberal society,” he says. He is passionate that schools should be “hotbeds of debate”. “I think the problem with society today is that people can’t give their opinion safely, so they’re forced to the extremes. The far Left, the far Right … Winston Churchill – I know he’s out of vogue now – he said education is bringing conflicting arguments to the table to be debated.”

    Ebenezer has worked in schools from Lincolnshire (where it was reported he once sent home 50 pupils in a day over uniform infringements) to London, where he hit the headlines in 2017 over a Rastafarian boy who was told to cut off his dreadlocks. The family took them to court and eventually reached an agreement with the school. He won’t be drawn into that today, only commenting it “wasn’t quite what it seemed”.
    He was head of Fulham Boys School during the pandemic. Among educators, the consensus seems to be that shutting schools during Covid was, by every measure, the wrong call. Broadly speaking, Ebenezer agrees. “We should never have closed schools, we should have got on with it – the problems we are dealing with now are because we didn’t.” But he has ‘By focusing on young people’s happiness, we’ve made them really miserable’ a caveat. “I think we just need to stop hiding behind Covid. I think in some ways our young people learnt far more in Covid.”
    The pandemic “taught young people things they would never have learnt through test tubes and textbooks”, he says. “They had to go through things. You can’t learn resilience from a textbook.”

    He is disparaging of the way parties use schools as “political footballs”, feeling the way we educate our children should be the focus of everyone in society. “Schools have to be places where we prepare our young people for life,” he says. “We need an education secretary to help us do that. There’s a recruitment crisis with teaching and a retention crisis. Why is that happening? I think we need local authorities and other professionals to help us and support us. We don’t want legislators deciding what happens in schools.”
    He is a firm believer in Ofsted. “I think we should be inspected and held to account, there’s millions and millions of taxpayers’ money spent on education.”

    This morning, he had an email from a parent “being quite rude to me”. Things might be a good deal calmer 10 months on, but there is still a certain amount of conflict. He doesn’t mind that, but is clear “there has to be a partnership between the home and the school”. “Ultimately, the parents are mainly responsible for the education of their child.”

    The school environment should matter to everyone, from parents to politicians, he says. “We can have the next generation we want. We can have the society we want… We all want safe streets, well-mannered young people. We want characteristics like effort, perseverance, can-do attitude, resilience. None of us have a magic wand to make it happen.” Discipline, he says, might be a good place to start.

    Any headmaster or headmistress in the UK who does NOT follow this chap's excellent régime should be soundly thrashed until they do.

    2. Shock horror! Old fashioned methods and zero tolerance work! What a breath of fresh air! I wish he’d been head when I was teaching. I might have seen out my time until normal retirement.

      2. My old headmaster, Desmond "Thrack" Kelly, was old school. He was a tall, imposing figure and a perfect doppelgänger for Enoch Powell. Cross him at your peril! Even the teaching staff were scared of him.

        1. The Head who appointed me was like that. The discipline was strict. Unfortunately he left to take over another school and we got someone who was like a wet lettuce. It was all downhill after that.

    1. Clever – but I don't understand what the Chinese girl did. Could an educated NoTTLer explain?

      1. Found on comments below the video:

        Math teacher here, let me take a stab at explaining what the Chinese girl did in a non-algebra way.

        First, observe that 97 and 94 are close to 100, so the product must be slightly less than 100×100 =10,000.

        Second, in general, you can think of multiplication as a grid of points. For example, you can find 3×6 as a grid with 3 points in each row and 6 points in each column (or vice versa). If you count all the points, you get 18, which is the product.

        Now imagine you are drawing such a grid for the problem in the video. The grid would be 97 points wide and 94 points high. You could actually solve the problem this way, but that would take a long time.

        So instead, compare it to the 100 x 100 grid which you already know has 10,000 points.

        Compared to the 100 x 100, it is 3 points less wide. So subtract 300 from 10,000 = 9,700 left. (Imagine you are physically crossing off 300 points from the left side of the grid.)

        The 97 x 94 is also 6 points shorter. So subtract another 600 = 9,100 left. Again, imagine you are physically crossing off 600 points from the top of the grid.

        How here's the most tricky part: you actually subtracted too much, because when you subtracted the 300 and the 600, you crossed off some of them twice: the points where the top strip and left strip intersect, at the top left. To compensate for the over-subtraction, you need to add those back. How many to add? the intersected area is 3×6, or 18.

        9100+18 = 9118.

        I hope this helps somebody.

        2. Yes, I follow your reasoning. It makes perfect sense. I sometimes follow a similar practice myself when multiplying larger numbers. I might also multiply together rounded down numbers, then add the shortfall.

        3. I understand the reasoning, but then I passed my O Level maths by applying the correct theorems, transposing the formulae correctly and sorting out the trig. What I couldn’t cope with is the number crunching.

          1. I failed O level maths – I thought I did quite well to get an 8 instead of a 9. Must have got a few sums right.

          2. I struggled with maths all through my schoodays. I astounded both my maths master and myself when I achieved a Grade 1 at CSE in the subject.

          3. From an initial loathing of mathematics I grew to like and actually enjoy arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry.

            I have, though, retained a lifelong inability to comprehend algebra!

          4. Algebra was my favourite Grizz although competent in advanced calculus in my late 20's I couldn't do any now.

          5. We were excused calculus because we took our O Levels in four years. The syllabus didn’t include calculus, but had we had an extra year we would have had to include it.

          6. My calculus was part of the 1st year of my HNC although I'd done a bit when I was an RAF apprentice

          8. I had to brush up my maths when I home-schooled Christo and Henry for GCSE highermaths which they both passed with flying colours. Christo is now an aerospace engineer; Henry writes computer programs for Artificial Intelligence so they would probably have done just as well without my attempts to teach them.

        4. Rapid Arithmetic (Maths is surely about Abstracts)
          Thanks Grizz, I really liked that swift and accurate Chinese method compared with the South Korean girl who used exactly the  same Long Multiplication method that I was taught in about 1947 and would still use to keep my brain active. But I would probably certainly check it with a Calculator.  I don’t know how (or if) they teach it nowadays in Primary Schools.
           
          I knew a relation’s autistic boy who loved ‘sums’.  While waiting for our food to be cooked and served in a restaurant when he was about 9, he loved to do more ‘sums’ on his paper napkin.
           
          His Dad asked him “What’s 29 squared minus 29?” and he pretty quickly answered from his head – no paper: “812”.
           
          How on earth did he do it?  Well 29 squared minus 29 is the same as 29 x 28.  Now 30 x 28 is easy in your head.  Rearrange the numbers a bit because that’s the same as 60 x 14 , or even 120 x 7. 120 x 7 is easy if you remember your 12 x Table: 12 x 7 is 84, so 120 x 7 is 840.  Just take away another 28 and that makes 812.  Simples!

      1. I find it amusing how the 'Mercins refer to "Mathematics" in the plural, yet abbreviate it to the singular "math" and not "maths."

  50. That was an enjoyable bit of exercise!
    As we're very nearly finished the woodstack we're currently burning through, I've just spent a bit of time swinging the axe.
    When the lads were cutting the trees, there would be several "noggins" where they's trimmed down the stump of a tree they's just felled so, obviously, a dozen or so of them went into the jog heap and I've just split the last 10 or so of them ready for restacking.

    Coming from the butt end of the trunk, these were 14 to 16" diameter by anywhere between 7 to 10" long and had quite dense grain.
    With a couple of them, the first couple of full, over arm swings just bounced off and one even took 7 or 8 swings before the grain finally split!

  52. I read last week that Cur Ikea and the Pencil Monitor were going to "crack down" on phone theft. (In much the same way, I expect, that they have "cracked down" on illegal migration).

    I have a better plan. Let the underused police arrest anyone walking along hold a phone, impound the phone, clear all the stuff from it – then hand it back. That might stop these cretins walking along with – in effect – £500 or £1,000 in their hands waiting to be taken from them by the thieves.

    2. I saw how it's done on the tube. Woman sitting opposite with eyes glued to phone. Man standing nearby appearing to mind his own business. Train stops, doors open, people get on and off, then just as the doors are about to close again, man grabs phone and dives through closing doors. Impossible to go after him. Train already pulling out of station. Woman left staring at empty hands.

  53. Reform UK party membership yesterday at 1045 was 219,620

    Today at 1124 it stands at 219,282

  55. Morning all. Bitterly cold here with occasional glimpses of sun. I have abandoned the idea of gardening for the moment.

    Kier will realise how unpopular it is with his client state and abandon it, no matter how necessary it might be.

    1. Sun's just come out here now and it doesn't seem quite so cold. The snow flurry earlier on didn't come to anything.

    2. Here is one of his clients, she spoke on R4 this morning to say that benefits are too low. Apparently, strong enough to engage in the rough and tumble politics and getting elected but identifies as disabled (with PTSD). Good on her but I dont actually see her disabilities as limiting her abilities. I dont see any battlefield experience in her cv either, maybe being 'queer' and vegan with a Sikh heritage tipped her over the edge. https://leftlion.co.uk/features/2024/12/nadia-whittome-labour-mp-nottingham-talks-about-disability/

    3. What's unpopular? Gardening? I'm not a fan myself, it's just a chore, but I don't see what Kier should do about it. Then again, I'm not yet a member of his client state.

      1. It was a reference to the headline, although I omitted to make that clear, thinking readers would extrapolate from my usual method of initial post. I doubt very much that TTK’s client state indulges in gardening. It’s too much like hard work.

          2. Despite refreshing the page, that headline is still not visible to me. Perhaps the format is not compatible with my Kindle.

          3. I can see it on my phone and presumably it will be visible on my laptop because the pages look the same.

          4. The penny has just dropped. You mean the headline at the very top of the page; the headline for the leading letter. I rarely read them.

  56. Putin finds ceasefire deal ‘difficult to accept’. 12 March 2025.

    Vladimir Putin would find it difficult to accept a US-backed ceasefire deal with Ukraine while his troops are advancing on the frontline, a senior Russian source said.

    “It is difficult for Putin to agree to this in its current form,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. “Putin has a strong position because Russia is advancing.”

    BELOW THE LINE.

    Dario O'Grady. 3 min ago.

    So Putin can't agree to a ceasefire while his troops are stealing land, so now Trump has to accelerate arms to Ukraine so the Ukrainian forces can destroy the aggressors and role them back, then let’s see if Putin agrees to a ceasefire.

    As can be seen from the text Vlad has actually said nothing at all. The headline is completely fake. This doesn’t however stop the Nudge Unit Trolls spouting bull.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/03/12/russia-ukraine-peace-talks-zelensky-putin-war-latest-news/

  57. Amongst the BTL comments in the DT today

    Caz Rutherford

    Meanwhile a senior aide to Wes Streeting has been accused of exposing himself to a 13-year-old girl and then following her.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2b78c5c848e6d887024f0eab7717b09ee39f25867181cd36267668ba5d3572cc.png
    Reply to Caz Rutherford

    And he is white – he doesn't even have the excuse of being Muslim and not understanding that this sort of thing is not acceptable in Britain.

    3. SENIOR Aide?
      Looks like he's barely out of nappies and still got the cradle marks on his arse!

  58. Grief! That got a bit chilly!
    After moving the bench out of the way, I've just been digging out a couple of years of sawdust from the chopsaw when it came over dark, the temperature dropped and we had a couple of hailstone showers. Not heavy luckily, but it's back to blue skies and sunshine!
    I think I have a mug of tea!

  59. Bangladesh Court Seizes Tulip Siddiq’s Properties and Imposes Travel Ban

    Yesterday the Bangladesh Anti-Corruption Commission’s request for a travel ban on outed dictator Sheikh Hasina and her family was granted by a court in Dhaka:

    “Dhaka Metropolitan Senior Special Judge Md Zakir Hossain Ghalib issued the order on Tuesday following an application by ACC Deputy Director Monirul Islam.”

    A seizure order for 124 bank accounts connected to Hasina has also been issued. Bangladeshi media reports that properties owned by Labour’s ex-City Minister Tulip Siddiq are also in the process of seizure, including “an apartment in the Eastern Harmony Building in Gulshan.” Siddiq denies all allegations against her. A five-strong team at the ACC is investigating one of several allegations of embezzlement by Hasina and her family members including Siddiq and the travel ban has been imposed to prevent the individuals leaving Bangladesh if they find themselves there. Not to worry – Tulip was in Speaker’s House last night in order to be named one of the “100 most influential women in Westminster”…

    The awards list, organised by The House Magazine, says the “former key member of Labour’s shadow treasury team” worked for “almost three years to convince the business and financial sectors that her party could be trusted with the nation’s finances.” Write your own jokes…

    12 March 2025 @ 10:58

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

    Tulip is 5th in the queue for today's PMQs

    Charlie Dudgeon
    42m
    Question – Tulip Siddiq: "Can you recommend a good lawyer, Keir?"

    PM response, "Have you asked Jonathan Reynolds?"

  60. Someone won the mega at Cheltenham. A £5 bet on an accumulator of six horses. Odds of 11,050 to 1.

    He pocketed £55,000.

    My win was a little more modest. I bet £1 on six different races and won £11.25… !

    2. I didn’t win anything, but then, I didn’t lose anything either, seeing as I don’t bet. If I had gambled on the Irish having the majority of winners I would have won. I have two runners on Friday, but I shan’t be backing them with the bookies.

      1. I can honestly say I've never seen the inside of a betting shop nor ever bet on a horse, I won't even enter sweepstakes. All stems from when I lost my pocket money (all 2/- of it) in a game of 9 card brag at school

        1. I used to play brag at college. Always enjoyed it. I once played from Friday night to Sunday midnight stopping only to sleep. Broke even. I won a lot at first then lost it.

        2. I have been in a betting shop – I put 50p on Lord Gyllene for the National that ended up being run on the Monday and let the bet stand. I later saw him at Brookshaw’s and he was enormous! He probably only had to step over the smaller fences.

          1. The Grand National is the only horse race that I've ever bet on, and only a few times at that. On some of the occasions I did not bet, then my fancied horse won! I bet on Crisp (1973) but it was narrowly beaten by Red Rum.

            Subsequently, favoured horses I did not bet on were Rag Trade (1976), West Tip (1986), Seagram (1991), Rough Quest (1996), Earth Summit (1998), and Silver Birch (2007) and they all won!

        3. I can honestly say I've never seen the inside of a betting shop nor ever bet on a horse,

          Neither have I, Alec. The attraction totally escapes me.

          1. I love the horses, the excitement, the thrill, but for me, putting money on the outcome spoils it.

      2. In the 30 years since the UK National Lottery began I have saved over £10,900 which I would have spent on lottery tickets (that's if it is still £1 a ticket, which I wouldn't know). OK, I might have won a lot, but I'm pretty sure I have come up ahead. I'm not averse to betting on Premium Bonds though, and with the same sort of investment I mentioned above I get prizes about every 2 months. And the differnce is that if I want it, I can get all of my Premium Bond stake back again.

        2. When it started, my younger son called it "The stupid tax" – the tax you don't have to pay.

    3. My win was a little more modest. I bet £1 on six different races and won £11.25… !

      When I was nobbut a young 'un, my Dad came into the kitchen and told us he'd won a six-figure sum on the pools!

      He then showed us the Littlewoods' cheque for sixteen pounds, eighteen and tenpence.

      How we all laughed!

      1. Given inflation that probably wasn't a bad win. Viv Nicholson had the right idea…sort of.

        My view is to have fun with the winnings but invest the lionshare.

    4. DM commenters have common sense. COP is just an annual jamboree for the great and the not so good to take the piss out of 'climate change' and the rest of us.

    5. They're just pissing on us and seeing how long it takes us to realise it's not raining.

  62. There was one lad in my class, Spikey, who was a whizz kid at algebra. Despite him attempting to explain it to me I was invariably perplexed. No calculus (or pure maths) were taught at my school.

    I loved both geometry and trig.

    1. I'm just one of the those unlucky people.
      If I had a book of raffle tickets with one missing, the missing ticket would be the winner.

        1. I was offered a ticket for a policemans ball, I said I didn't dance – he said it's not a dance, it's a raffle

    1. Mine, too at the time. He's (hopefully) off to read Mathematics at University this autumn as long as he gets the right number of UCAS points (ask a Sixth Former what those are, if you know one, or just Google UCAS Points for University Entry). Whatever he achieves, he has offers from 5 Universities.

      1. My OH could do maths with no problem but struggled with English. Each time he took the English exam he had to do the maths as well so he passed it several times!

    2. Mine, too at the time. He's (hopefully) off to read Mathematics at University this autumn as long as he gets the right number of UCAS points (ask a Sixth Former what those are, if you know one, or just Google UCAS Points for University Entry). Whatever he achieves, he has offers from 5 Universities.

    3. Alright then – let's make a start – everyone there [and whoever paid for the banner] off to Ukraine's front line NOW!

      1. Do you think so? Perhaps the graffiti should have shown a 5 year old boys anus. They probably would have laughed then…Bacha !

          2. Did you see the Times link I posted about forward passes? Your view has a majority backing!

          6. Once girls begin to menstruate they need to be impregnated. Wasted eggs are an offence to Allah.

          7. Girls until puberty are treated in the same way as boys. Boys are bacha bazi and girls are bacha posh.

            Both have their orifices interfered with.

    3. Note to self, carry a large indelible pen at all times. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we see nothing like it in the village.

    4. Sorry, but I am truly disgusted by that graffiti!

      Anyone with a semblance of a brain would have included a pig's or a dog's dick!

  68. Late on parade again. Busy spring cleaning.
    Just made it:
    Wordle 1,362 6/6
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    1. Five here.

      Wordle 1,362 5/6

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      1. Same here, Sue.

        Wordle 1,362 5/6

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  69. Oh dear! over the past ½ hour we've had a rather heavy hail shower followed 10 minutes later by bright sunshine, then a return to overcast.

    1. It’s raining here as well. Went very black not long ago. I have gone back to lighting the Rayburn because temperatures had dropped too much for it to be comfortable without a fire in the grate to supplement it. If I am having to light a fire, I might as well use the Rayburn and get the bonus of cooking, hot water and hot drinks.

      1. Well, since writing that, I've been out, did a ½hr in the sunshine, then a bit more as it clouded over before coming in as it began raining again.
        And it's bright sunshine again!.

  70. The woke Snow White is dead on arrival. Spiked. 12 March 2025.

    Most visually offensive is the film’s depiction of the seven dwarves who, unlike all the other characters, aren’t represented by human actors but by janky-looking CGI. The question of how to portray the dwarves seemed to cause no end of headaches. In 2022, Peter Dinklage, a prominent actor with dwarfism, criticised Disney for planning to remake what he described as a ‘backward story of seven dwarves living in a cave together’. In response, Disney committed to taking ‘a different approach’ to the traditional depiction of the seven dwarves, in order to ‘avoid reinforcing stereotypes’. Pictures of a merry band of race-, gender-, and height-diverse characters on set emerged shortly afterwards in the press. But these generated their own backlash, and so they were replaced with CGI. Actors with dwarfism have since criticised Disney for taking away seven dwarf acting roles.

    Disney isn’t even calling the characters ‘dwarves’ any more, but rather ‘magical creatures’. As such, any reference to dwarves has been dropped from the title. Snow White and the Seven Magical Creatures never had quite the same ring to it.

    Go Woke. Go broke.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/11/the-woke-snow-white-is-dead-on-arrival/

    1. The film was on a hiding to nothing from the outset, due to the main cast. Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen, is a very attractive woman; the DEI hire playing Snow White, is not! The magic mirror would reflect these facts. 😉

      2. She is also Israeli – which, I imagine, offends a large number of intolerant people!

      3. Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen, is a very attractive woman

        You truly are the master of understatement, Feargal. She is fucking gorgeous- I use that adjective in its exact sense.

      5. Isn't the evil queen supposed to be beautiful? As in "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" Until Snow White came of age, the answer was always "You are".

        1. By the time this version of Snow White comes of age, she’ll look like Charles Bronson.

    2. A few years ago, the Great Western Railway (GWR) featured a TV advert consisting of a cartoon video of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five going on a rail trip to the seaside. It seemed to be set in the 1950’s or 60’s and was notable for an absence of any coloured faces. A recent re-run of the same theme features one of the Five being brown and a prominent Lesbian couple. We all know and, for the most part, accept that times have changed but I wonder if this re-writing of history actually furthers the cause of tolerance.

      1. It is designed to inflame normal people so that they protest and are sent to prison for 2½ years. Simple.

        1. It is designed to inflame normal people

          Yes, it is- we are being deliberately provoked, because they think they can emerge triumphant from the consequences.

    4. Surprised they didn't change the name Snow White to Snow Colonialist, Patriarchal, Capitalist, Elite Whitey – and the Seven Magical, Benefit-Beholden Creatures who will save the world after Snowy has destroyed it.

  72. An hour ago the MR went out into the garden – so I felt like a wimp staying in. Joined her. Poked the bonfire ashes and, to my delight, several pieces of unburnt cardboard (from the box I used to start it) appeared and the sharp north wind fanned them alight – so I was able to get rid of yesterday's new stuff and a barrow load from today. Most satisfying. Though very cold…

    Tea now.

  74. Lots of stuff in the paper about the captain of the ship that hit a stationary one is a "Russian national". Is there supposed to be something sinister about that? That Putin is telling Russian sailors to crash into western ships?

    Had he been a slammer one might have paused for ten seconds – but I just don't buy the implication here.

    1. Ah! Uncle Bill! I have just had a ton of topsoil delivered and would like to know if it's OK to put it on top of bark clippings which have been down for about 7 years? Or will I need to clear them first?

        1. Been away from here for years, but you are still picking on Bill.

          Plus ça change and all that.

          6. I agree – it is shocking. And I am always courteous and affable towards him…{:¬))

      2. I put your question to the MR (who is slaving away at exam marking). She says that if the chippings have been down for seven years, they should have started to break up – and, if so, OK to cover with top soil.

    2. I saw that this morning, seemingly the msm will jump at any opportunity to try and demonise Putin and Russia.
      They exist on bare face lies. But never seem to have the time or inclination to discuss the most obvious untruths.

    3. Being Russian, he'd probably downed three bottles of vodka and set the ship to autopilot.

    4. This cynical old bat really thinks it was an accident – pure and simple.
      Apparently ships are anchored in that area and just hang about until it's time to move on.
      The nearest analogy appears to be driving too quickly through a crowded carpark.

      2. My bet is that visibility was poor and that negligence on the part of the captain and crew of the cargo vessel meant that the the fuel tanker at anchor wasn't spotted and no avoidance action was taken.

  75. It appears that Ukraine has backed Trump's ceasefire proposals and they are now heading to Moscow for a Russian response.

    No doubt Zelensky is the hero and Putin won't do anything or agree but regroup and rearm and reignite and it will all be Trump's fault if anything goes wrong, but all Zelensky's statesmanship if it ends completely.

    1. The only way by which to stop the war is to cease the supply of weapons to Ukraine.

      More than half of the weapons already sent to Ukraine have been sold on to just about every other corrupt regime including to Mexican cartels.

      All other financial aid to Ukraine should be halted and all Americans in that country should be extracted immediately.

      The Ukrainians are utterly corrupt and untrustworthy. Their claim to having rare mineral deposits is fictional.

      1. I ‘m sure Ukraine does have rare mineral deposits, but whether the great amounts claimed are accurate I doubt.
        I can’t confirm your 50%+, They’ve certainly been firing something; but I concur re the rest

          1. Now? Certainly.
            But it is/was one of the biggest exporters of agricultural products, sadly many are now recognised as being bad for us.
            It could be again, the soil is so fertile.

          2. A breadbasket yes, but not of Europe in the sense that she supplies Europe with wheat. Africa and Asia yes.

  76. Wordle No. 1,362 3/6

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    Wordle 12 Mar 2025

    Thai fruit For Birdie Three?

    1. Well done! – just a par for me today.

      Wordle 1,362 4/6

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    2. A bogie 5 here.
      Wordle 1,362 5/6

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  77. Wordle No. 1,362 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
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    Wordle 12 Mar 2025

    Thai fruit For Birdie Three?

    2. "Oi'll give it foive"

      Wordle 1,362 5/6

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

  78. Headline in The Grimes this afternoon:

    "Palestinian charged with illegal entry to UK faces deportation"

    But not for 20 years, of course….

    1. Well, all he has to do is appeal because his cat/dog/son/daughter/wife/wives/family members/parrot will miss him and he will be persecuted if he is sent back to whetever … at our expense, natch.

        1. Hi fizz pops yep feeling lots better but not quite back to normal! Still coughing randomly, antibiotics finished yesterday but little or no energy. Knocked us both for six really. Didn’t help moving house and trying to find somewhere for everything. The bungalow is so much smaller and, even though we thought we’d got rid of loads of stuff, still seem to have loads more we should have got rid of. RSPCA delighted with loads of towels we gave them, hospice warehouse too. Trying not to put stuff up in the loft. Troublesome tree dealt with by local council, very pleased.

          Tried to post pic but too big.

          1. Sounds good. Almost fit enough to buy me lunch !

            Don’t be tempted to fill the attic unless it is to fill the space for insulation. I have stuff up there since i moved here in 1989.

      2. You've got it wrong, vw, his appeal will be because his son prefers UK chicken nuggets, not any of that foreign muck.

  79. From time to time, NoTTLers having the good fortune to live in France comment on the efficiency of the French medical system. And rightly so. One does wonder how they can do it and the UK can't.

    However, when I first lived there, there were two separate GPs in the village. Then one had cancer and stopped work. The other continues. There is a move by the TPB that when he packs up – which will be soon – he is not replaced and the villagers will have to join a group practice based some ten miles away.

    And when we were in Brittany last summer, in two different parts of the region, we saw large banners saying that the places needed a GP – "Please come and live and work here"….

    Sign of the times that fewer young people are entering the arduous medical training system.

    1. GP's are now becoming group privately owned practices. Which is why it is difficult to get appointments. It would all work so well if no one phoned them. They still get paid per patient on their books of course. Even the dead ones.

    2. I received a call from the hospital early this morning, checking to see that all was well after yesterday's operation and reminding me where to attend if I had any problems.

      1. Don’t rub it in. It is 4 months since a GP referred me to the hearing clinic. Not a word has come from them. The GP said there is nothing she can do. Envy of the sodding World, eh?

          1. Not my current experience. I feel as if I'm being well cared for. Either my expectations are low and easily met or I've been rather fortunate.

  80. That's me gone for this day of several halves. Some sun. Some sleet. Some bitter wind (well, all day). Bonfire brought back to life. Managed to put two pieces in the jigsaw. The most difficult we have ever done – it'll be at least another month before we finish.

    On instructions from the MR, I have set the Humax to record a prog on BBC4 at 9 pm about some bloke who wants to record the song of every bird in Oirland. Fair enough. However, I was slightly deterred by this sentence in the TV mag blurb:

    "The beguiling film, which won best story at the 2025 European Wildlife Film awards, reveals how pausing for a moment to listen can tell us so much about the state of the natural world, while we also find out Ronayne’s struggles with hypersensitivity."

    Yeah, right. Can just imagine the drivel that will pour forth about that.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain. In the cold and rain..

      1. Ah, The Crystals. A project that Phil Spector played hard-and-fast with. Most of the hit singles by this band featured Darlene Love on lead vocals; however, Love was never a part of the band and they appeared on live shows with a substitute singer — Dolores "Dee Dee" Kenniebrew — taking Love's place on lead.

        Spector didn't mind: all he wanted was the lucre and the credit.

    2. Looking forward to seeing that jigsaw! Maybe an interim picture so we can appreciate your travails?

  81. A small village near us has been featuring in news for two days because a terrorist hawk has been attacking locals living there. Flamstead Herts.
    They're all wearing hats now. 🤠🦅

    3. A Saker Falcon, no doubt.
      After tall, white, male locals apparently.
      Allahu shite bar.

      1. I don’t think they actually know. Sos
        I expect the ‘experts’ will be checking.
        We have a lot of red kites in Herts now. But it didn’t look like a Kite.

        1. I was joking, the Saker is a middle eastern bird, comes in on the shoulder of illegal immigrants.

  84. Concerning the Reform suicide.
    One little thingy that slipped by without much notice.. but now is quite revealing.

    Reform leader Nigel Farage says government should consider allowing Shamima Begum back home

    Says it all.
    You aint no patriot bruv.

    1. I think Danny Finkelstein in yesterday's Times got it right (cant post here, it's behind a paywall).

      I'm not usually a fan of his (to put it mildly) but the essence of what he was saying is that minority parties always split for the same reason. He speaks from his own prior experience in the SDP and the merger with the Liberals.

      In this case Farage wants to 'broaden' the party's support and Lowe wants to 'deepen' it, and, as a result, Reform will definitely split.

      It's a shame, but it does seem inevitable…….

    4. Context is quite important.
      https://www.itv.com/news/2025-01-10/nigel-farage-says-government-should-consider-allowing-shamima-begum-back-home

      ""Gorka argues that if we and other European countries don't take back these people and put them in prison here, they will get out of prison under the new Syrian regime, leading to a problem that in the end we may all have to fight," Farage said."
      "Farage made the comments after Donald Trump's terror chief Seb Gorka said on Thursday that ISIS members in Syria should be allowed home."

      1. If we "put them in prison here", we'll have to pay for them and then they'll be out in no time to make room for people who made a comment on social media that somebody didn't like. If they're over here, in the end we will all have to fight because it will end up with civil war, one way or another.

        1. I don't disagree.
          It's the "Reform leader Nigel Farage says government should consider allowing Shamima Begum back home" with no context involved that I find very annoying.

          1. We should be used to it by now; there has been bias, slant and spin about parties the PTB don't like since before the referendum.

    1. Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Ronnie Barker, Richard Beckinsale, Fulton Mackay.

      All class acts.

        1. It was the 51 years that have elapsed since the first broadcast that stunned me…!

          4. I never warmed to either Brian Blessed or Colin Welland and so I hardly watched it.

          7. Original 1962 cast:
            Fancy Smith and Jock Weir in Z Victor 1
            Bob Steele and Bert Lynch in Z Victor 2
            DI Jim Dunn
            DS Charlie Barlow
            DS John Watt
            Sgt Percy Twentyman
            PC Ian Sweet

      2. Brilliant stuff!

        I'll add to your list Peter Vaughan as Harry Grout, and Christopher Biggins as Lukewarm.

        [it's after lights out and lock up. There is the distant sound of a fellow inmate groaning mid-nightmare]
        Godber: You awake, Fletch?
        Fletcher: No.
        Godber: It's that bloke, Atkinson.
        Fletcher: I know.
        Godber: Keeps getting these terrible nightmares.
        Fletcher: Yeah.
        Godber: He's told the shrink about 'em, but all he's given 'im is aspirin. You have to feel compassion, don't you? A human soul in such torment.
        Fletcher: I suppose.
        [Atkinson bellows something in the distance]
        Fletcher: [shouts] Belt up, Atkinson, you noisy scrote.

        1. Godber: "What you doin', Fletch?"
          Fletcher: "I'm finkin', ain't I?"
          Godber: "What you finkin', Fletch?"
          Fletcher: "Well, right now, I'm finkin', Why don't this nerk naff off and let me do me finkin'!"

  86. Headline in the DT:

    "Scientists discover new species of early human"

    That'll be the 3am man….

    1. "The fossil, provisionally classified as Homo affinis erectus" is probably a distant ancestor of Hugh Hee…..judging by the post below….

  87. I wonder what next months inflation rate will be, every utility bill has rocketed along with food, ribeye steaks were over £ 50 kg at the local farm shop, I'm sure they were in the mid £ 30s a year ago.
    Water rates up over 20% just so some selfish bugger can wild swim in a river

    3. For the want of something to do I've been keeping an eye on the range of products we buy from various supermarkets. Since the start of 2025 prices generally have increased between 10 to 12&1/2% on a great many items…..

      1. AND where the price appears to be the same the quantity has dropped, shrinkflation is real.

    4. My council tax is up, my water rates ditto, food is more expensive, no doubt my insurance premiums when they are due will be higher, it cost me more to have my vehicle serviced. About the only thing that hasn’t is my pension.

        1. I got my council tax demand yesterday, but all I've had from Severn Trent is a heads up that it will cost more.

      2. I should add, that I've had notice that my phone and broadband package is going to cost more. It goes without saying that the cost of electricity is going up.

  90. I went to a seminar today and amongst the Trump derangement syndrome bits and bobs, one thing struck me.
    They put up a list of trade statistics.
    Every major and most minor countries export more, and in many cases far more, to America than America exports to them.
    Guess who the exception was?
    No wonder he's looking at what's happening.

    1. I seriously don't know which country that is, Sos. I'm thinking the Ukraine, UK, …? I must be missing something. Haven't been following the posts today.

          1. AI response:
            Machinery and Transport Equipment:
            The UK imported £19.9 billion of machinery and transport equipment from the US, including mechanical machinery, engines, aircraft, and cars.
            The largest commodities imported were £5.5 billion of mechanical power generators (intermediate) and £3.1 billion of aircraft.
            Fuels:
            The UK imported £18.7 billion of fuels from the US, primarily crude oil (£8.5 billion) and natural gas (£6.6 billion).
            Chemicals:
            The UK imported £7.8 billion of chemicals from the US, with medicinal and pharmaceutical products making up approximately half (£3.8 billion) of these imports.
            Other notable imports:
            The UK imported £8.7 billion of mineral fuels.
            The UK imported £6.4 billion of mechanical appliances.
            The UK imported £5.3 billion of electronic equipment.
            The UK imported £4.2 billion of precious metals.
            The UK imported £4.1 billion of motor vehicles.
            The UK imported £2.0 billion of pharmaceutical products.
            VAT:
            Any items exported to the UK from the US that would usually be subject to Value Added Tax (VAT) will also have VAT applied to them at the corresponding rate, which is generally 20%.

          2. Does Ed Miliband know about this outrageous importing of negative Net Zero poison?

          3. Just think, we could frack for our own gas and find new oil fields in the North Sea. Then we could manufacture our own cars and lorries. Think how much that would save.

  91. I'm taking the rest of the day off.
    I'd planned to empty one of our large compost bins but it was cold outside and rained. And the contents reminded me of the labour front bench.
    I might fork it all over tomorrow.
    Goodnight all. 😴

    1. Well, they do say that peeing on a compost heap does it good.

      Fire away old chap, fire away.

    3. "And the contents reminded me of the labour front bench."

      Really? No good comes from the Labour bench, unlike a compost bin. And that's because there's a better class of worm in the latter…

  92. EXPOSED: Britain’s “skilled” visa scandal!
    Halal butchers and kebab shops issuing hundreds of visas—one butcher alone sponsoring 918 workers.
    How did fast-food joints and call centres become ‘essential’ industries?
    Our leaders have turned Britain into a visa mill while 1.7 million Brits remain unemployed.
    Time to end this racket.

      1. 403050+ upticks,

        Evening C,
        Won’t apply they are ALL interchangable trannies imam starmer ruling.

    2. This soi disant financial expert had never heard of the CFA franc and thought that Target2 was a net settlement system.

  104. Right, chums, it's now my bedtime. So Good Night all, sleep well, and I'll see you all tomorrow.

  105. Goodnight, all. The hot water bottles are warming the bed (it's 2 degrees C here at the moment) and the Rayburn has been settled down for the night.

  106. Ecuador exports more bananas to the US than the US does to Ecuador. Trump's response should be to impose a tariff on Ecuador's banana exports to the US until the US's banana exports to Ecuador are identical as any difference between one country's exports to the US of any product in excess of the export of the same product from the US to that same country can only be explained away by unfair trading practices. Trumponomics dictates that only a zero trade balance between any two countries for any given product will be considered fair if one of the countries is the US.

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