Wednesday 20 March: Labour lacks the moral courage to enact the reform that Britain needs

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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695 thoughts on “Wednesday 20 March: Labour lacks the moral courage to enact the reform that Britain needs”

  2. Labour lacks the moral courage to enact the reform that Britain needs

    But what does Reeves,
    Have up her sleeves?
    A feigned lurch to the Right,
    Gives the Lefties a fright,
    But in which fortunately, nobody believes.

        2. Good morning – or should that be ‘next day good evening’ – I wasn’t getting notifications from yesterday until this afternoon.

  3. Labour lacks the moral courage to enact the reform that Britain needs

    But what does Reeves,
    Have up her sleeves?
    A feigned lurch to the Right,
    Gives the Lefties a fright,
    But in which fortunately, nobody believes.

  4. Good morning chums, welcome to the world of the living.

    Wordle 1,005 4/6

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    1. Wordle 1,005 4/6

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      1. Didn’t think this would be the word, but couldn’t think of another one!
        Wordle 1,005 3/6

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    1. What day is it Rachael?
      According to Mandelson, it’s Toryday
      You had better get dressed as Dennis

  10. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) story

    REPLACEMENT WINDOWS

    Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive, double-pane, energy-efficient kind.

    Today, I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He complained that the work had been completed a year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.

    Hellloooo …just because I’m blonde doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid.

    So, I told him just what his fast-talking sales guy told me last year…that these windows would pay for themselves in a year.

    Hellloooo? It’s been a year, so they’re paid for, I told him…
    There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally hung up. He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c0c5d987814771ccaca241d64f1665cebf408a669d54d22c93cb480b0b99149b.gif

  11. Putin is not the only evil madman in Russia. 20 March 2024.

    Mr. Putin notched 87 per cent of the vote with what Russian officials claim was 74 per cent turnout against a trio of patsy opponents who provided a fig leaf of opposition. U.S. and U.K. news outlets dubbed it a “sham election” and in most regards it was, with one key caveat. The execrable tyrant who won enjoys a frightening level of support that Western media and politicians obscure to preserve the illusion that there’s just one evil madman to blame for the war in Ukraine, rather than a nation with far too many brainwashed anti-Nato, anti-Western nationalists keen to endorse their leader’s aggression.

    I would dispute that he’s an “evil madman” himself. It’s worth considering Vlad in comparison to his UK counterparts who all share the ambition of erasing the native population and substituting a totalitarian dictatorship for what was once one of the freest countrys’ that has ever existed. The traditional freedoms that we largely enjoyed; those of speech primarily, during the Cold War are no more. It is the forces of the state that are suppressing them. There is no political resistance to this program. Vlad may be all sorts of things but he is a Pussian Patriot and it is that the Russian People vote for.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/19/russia-election-sham-putin-support-genuine-anti-nato/

  12. Putin is not the only evil madman in Russia. 20 March 2024.

    Mr. Putin notched 87 per cent of the vote with what Russian officials claim was 74 per cent turnout against a trio of patsy opponents who provided a fig leaf of opposition. U.S. and U.K. news outlets dubbed it a “sham election” and in most regards it was, with one key caveat. The execrable tyrant who won enjoys a frightening level of support that Western media and politicians obscure to preserve the illusion that there’s just one evil madman to blame for the war in Ukraine, rather than a nation with far too many brainwashed anti-Nato, anti-Western nationalists keen to endorse their leader’s aggression.

    I would dispute that he’s an “evil madman” himself. It’s worth considering Vlad in comparison to his UK counterparts who all share the ambition of erasing the native population and substituting a totalitarian dictatorship for what was once one of the freest countrys’ that has ever existed. The traditional freedoms that we largely enjoyed; those of speech primarily, during the Cold War are no more. It is the forces of the state that are suppressing them. There is no political resistance to this program. Vlad may be all sorts of things but he is a Pussian Patriot and it is that the Russian People vote for.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/19/russia-election-sham-putin-support-genuine-anti-nato/

  13. Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages from the ‘pandemic’ validates three things we already knew about our civil service
    1. It is run by incompetent, infantilised morons.
    2. It has an inherent left wing bias
    3. It needs to be eradicated in its current form and rebuilt, deliberately without the inclusion of the likes of Case.

  14. Good morning everyone,
    The day may be damp and gloomy, but our visitors have gone. Quite challenging at times, but could have been worse – and will be next time. In a few days, I will be asking for some Bottles advice on that.

    1. Well folks, we are now Bottles. Autocorrect on this newish tablet didn’t recognise ‘Nottlers.’

      2. Mum is busy, when I managed an Odeon cinema in Scotland, autocorrect kept telling me that my employer was called Iodine. (Good morning, btw.)

        1. Only got the notification this afternoon. Discus (or t’internet?) playing silly beggars.
          I really should check my comments before sending, but I suppose we tend to see what we expect to see.

      3. Mum is busy, when I managed an Odeon cinema in Scotland, autocorrect kept telling me that my employer was called Iodine. (Good morning, btw.)

    2. My advice is to not shake champagne before opening unless you’re on the winning side of a contest.

      1. I’d certainly feel like shaking the bottle to celebrate their departure …….

    3. My advice is to not shake champagne before opening unless you’re on the winning side of a contest.

      1. I have a box waiting in the fridge. Gonna do beef casserole and diced beef, with onion, lardons, chorizo, potatoes, red peppers and mushrooms. That’s for later. I’m not so well at the moment. but will rouse myself, later.

      2. You are Cassandra and I claim my £5 (or Bitcoin – just in case)

        Morning Minty & all

    2. Re the last one; I once bought an ex-military transit. I later discovered that the blue paint was meant to confuse incoming armament!

      1. Interesting! There’s been no explanation for why some of the roofs near Lahaina were painted with it.

    1. This is a pretty good demonstration of the madness that lies at the heart of the British State!

      1. It’s not unique to the British State. Liberal democracy has been corroded and hijacked from within. The merits of toleration are being used as a suppressive tool by the Identitarian mad-Left. Call anything you want to control “hate”. A fundamental intrinsic property of female as a distinct biological reality is under attack.

    2. The article plays a word game calling her statement “gender critical beliefs”. It’s a statement on the nature of reality.

    3. I replied with ‘the truth is it’s own defence.’ And that wasn’t acceptable.

  18. Who is repeatedly pushing Penny Mordaunt’s name forward?

    The Tories could end Sadiq Khan’s misrule, but they’re not even trying

    If they had any ambition left, they would put up Penny Mordaunt to defeat London’s unpopular mayor

    PHILIP JOHNSTON
    19 March 2024 • 6:00pm
    *
    *
    **************************

    david morgan
    13 HRS AGO
    The Islamists have the numbers and the postal vote.
    Sorry to give you bad news.

      1. To ensure a Khan victory so as to maximise resentment of Labour in London by the time of the General Election.

    2. Even worse, someone suggested Dogendtwat would be better than Penny Dormant, or Grant Shitts! Heaven help us all.

  22. Good morning all and 77th troopers,

    A grey day at McPhee Towers, wind in the South veering West, 9℃ with the climate cultists forecasting 14℃ today.

    So, do we think that Network Rail will display verses from the Gospels across major rail termini during Holy Week?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/948b595c4fc91d0798b23752f383627d7cdec9642d0a09f6401f08772cf578dd.png

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/19/ramadan-message-kings-cross-railway-diversity-religion/

    1. Likelihood of a Christian running amok on the station while beheading people? Zero.
      Likelihood of station displaying Biblical passages? Zero.
      No connection at all of course….

      1. Likelihood of station displaying Biblical passages? Zero. For everything else there’s Mastercard.

    4. Following the logic of Rik’s first image above, then it seems that “best” for followers of Mohammed means those who commit sins often. If they weren’t sins, they would not need to repent them. Pity the sinner that lives a spotless life other than to gorge themselves at midnight during Ramadan.

    5. And, in the runup to Easter, any homily for yer Christian to abide by?
      No?
      Amazing!

  23. ‘Morning All

    Gotcha

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f5bbdcf8cf2023cfc9f3a8fb43eab0651e9af0597958371e610bdb004932d6f2.png

    Rest

    http://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b394473b1988ca207146646784d681dc52787083c310260cd850815aabb94052.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/37303828bc36c0a19593fc40f6049251dd073728dcfec6f557bdff391907fc06.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e0980dfa7aba8ad61215c49cf860e34386056066e73866cc20104fd902e11b0a.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/dc9e985250dbab3230e9457f671ad327b5a87e9428cf275a121b3cbf5fc27537.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f01c67409a44e726c970dc3c0bed9745ca41125d324b9f9bf195818e4698cb36.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/117c198490948d2ffebbcc60035a9e21ff43e851d84a48b2ba632ea72d81cc03.png

    2. The dog one is very true. I spent an hour trying to get Oscar in last night and after giving up and shutting the door he sat by it. So I let him for a good long while I had a cup of tea.

      1. That was what happened with Charlie when I first got him; he’d been used to running off when he was called. I let him out then called him in. Nothing. I called again then switched off the outside light and closed the door when he didn’t come. It took him about five minutes to realise nobody was running around after him and he was all on his own. He came to the door and barked to come in. I left him to bark a couple of times and then rewarded him when he came in. He soon caught on.

  24. Nicked Comment

    Polis Sco’lan are getting a bit touchy about this incoming ‘hate crime’ law in
    Scotland. A statement issued earlier this afternoon…

    Police Scotland is not instructing officers to target actors, comedians, or any other people or groups.

    “Our training package has been developed in close consultation with
    stakeholders to ensure all characteristics protected by legislation
    under the new Act are clearly represented and articulated, and that
    officers are best prepared when they respond to hate crimes and
    incidents.”

    However, the truth of the matter is that they don’t
    need to ‘target’ anyone. The Waffen SS Snowflakegruppen will do all the
    targeting for them. April 1 will be absolute and utter mayhem as every
    purple haired weirdo submits malicious complaints to the police about
    hurty tweets and funny looks in the gender neutral toilets.
    Hmm as soon as you see “stakeholders” you know it’s going to be mindless management bolleaux

    1. Edinburgh Festival – particularly the Fringe – should be interesting this year.
      Luckily the comedians are already not funny, so that’s one problem solved.

          1. Oh God- thanks for ruining my morning – nay my day. Can’t bear that vacant totty.

  25. OT – exactly 4 years ago to the minute, after 36 years, we left our beloved house in Laure for the last time – to take the keys to the Notaire (who wouldn’t open the door and made us leave them in her letter box), and then to start the trek north. Police at the entry to the motorway demanded to know why we were on the road. The MR had been brilliant and had a copy of the conveyance; and the British Embassy had agreed a form of words with the French govt to “justify” Brits returning to the UK.

    We then drove the 650 miles to Calais on empty silent roads. Perhaps 50 cars IN TOTAL. A lorry every ten miles or so. All hotels, restaurants etc closed. We had arranged to spend the night with French chums who live near Chartres. The MR rang when we were half an hour from arriving to hear that the wife (a yoga teacher) had a pupil who had gone down that day with covid. We could stay but not see them. They made us as welcome as the situation permitted. Left a meal and a bottle of wine outside our bedroom door. Arranged a “safe” exit next morning. On 21st we reached Calais. I had expected the Shuttle to be heaving. Wrong! Just 12 cars on the train. Then reached Blighty where everything was normal. We stopped at Swaffham (half an hour from home) to do some basic shopping at Waitrose. Went in wearing masks and gloves (then mandatory in France) to find people staring at us. All bread, rice, flour and pasta gone – we realised that this was the “panic buying” we had heard about.

    Got home – went into 14 days quarantine. Two different neighbours (both former soldiers, incidentally) did our shopping. Alison did the food side; Eddie baked loaves for us. We spent a lot of time asleep. The MR had lost 3 stone over the previous nine months. And had almost certainly had the plague in December 2019.

    The worst thing was being unable to say goodbye to the dozens of French people we knew and who had – unknown to us – arranged a farewell party at which at least 100 people were expected…

    Then the next two years ground on. And everyone was affected. But I shall never forget that extraordinary drive north.

    1. The theme to the Great Escape is today’s ear worm.
      I doubt any of us thought we would live through such a dystopian time in the allegedly “free” west..

    3. It was the futility of it all that bothered. The first lock down, ok, yes, it was a testing ground against the unknown. Then that was lifted and obviously cases started to rise and so we were locked up again. However on that one’s ending, when the exact same thing happened – cases rose as testing resumed – the result was to do more of the same that hadn’t worked the first time.

      Then as we headed to Christmas we were allowed to be together because covid also had a holiday with flu, ebola and Sars and wouldn’t bother us – or Boris didn’t want to be the politician who ruined Nanny’s Christmas – one or the other.

      Then of course the further lock ups followed.. to be followed by an explosion of testing and … the same results. Every day the results were different – carefully curated to prevent week to week comparisons of the base to scare people who were increasingly bored with the nonsense until eventually, fearing their power would evaporate completely as folk just ignored big fat state… covid was declared done and the vaccination drive begun…. which was followed by it’s own pack of lies, propaganda and nonsense.

      Covid was an exercise in scaremongering from a scientifically ignorant political class and an unthinking, moronic population desperate to give away their freedoms for a fraction of protection from something they didn’t understand.

      I don’t dispute it was a nasty virus but it should have been treated as such. Protect the genuinely vulnerable but otherwise allow people to live their lives as they would.

      The inquiry, of course, will find the opposite. Because it wants to.

    4. and non of it needed thank goodness we took no notice of any of it. From being pointed at and complained about to being proved correct. Whese are the pointers and complainers now.

    5. Do not forget
      Do not forgive.

      There must be a forgivee as well as a forgiver.

      In my view forgiveness is meaningless unless the person in receipt of forgiveness can accept that he or she has done wrong and wants to be forgiven.

      Remember when Claudius confesses what he has done. He realises that he cannot receive forgiveness because he is not prepared to give up what he has gained from the murder of Hamlet’s father.

      “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;
      Words without thought never to heaven go.

      Hamlet overhears his stepfather’s confession and sees that he could do it pat while he’s a-praying but to kill Claudius then and there would ruin his revenge and let the murderer go straight to Heaven rather than to Hell.

      And so it is with our politicians who are very happy to continue doing what they do without any remorse for what they have done.

  26. 384835+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 20 March: Labour lacks the moral courage to enact the reform that Britain needs

    To all intents and purposes this is a perfect storm
    brewing up,labour / morals, on par with oil / water
    chalk / cheese can only pass muster if one is willing to forget the rape & abuse of children in rotherham, ongoing, covered up for sixteen plus years until revealed by the Jay report.

    What passes for the tory (ino) party is worse, they have taken to extreme thuggery leaving in their wake dead and seriously injured peoples, many to suffer for years ,ongoing.

    The reform party many are seeing as the saviors, are IMHO tory (ino) party MK2, they will hold sway on who will be the next Capo dei Capi political ruler as we go further down the RESET / NWO road.

    Your lab/lib/con vote is still seriously necessary to hasten the odious end of a once decent nation.

    .

    1. It is not a question of moral courage. Neither Labour nor Tory understand what needs to be done. They simply cannot comprehend a world without them. Their entire attitude is centred around government and what it does. The idea that the best thing the state can do is sod the flip off is inconceivable to them.

    1. Typical of a document produced by Americanized (sic) minds. Why no box for trigger words on the R4 Today programme?

      I can think of a few that get me going with a self-righteous and irritated lunge at the off switch, providing I am awake enough to to let them get into my dreams. Here are some: misogyny, black, women, antisemitism, islamophobia, LGBTQ rights, male dominated, inclusivity, diversity, humankind, hardworking, abuse, husband or wife (of the same sex), actor (when meaning actress), product (when meaning customer), decolonisation (meaning suppression of indigenous people)…

      There must be hymns written right now comprising only these words, pushing out A&M staples such as ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

      In the second section, there seems no box either for “My category of person does not matter’.

      In the footnote, the standard response is “Like it or lump it” (Margaret Thatcher coined the phrase “There is no alternative”

    1. Having tried to kill us the eugenicists are now trying to kill our food. Those animals that survive to be eaten will be the channel to put mRNA into us even if we refused the jab.

      1. It Is all so odd, there was a lot of fuss about the jab vials having to be kept at very low, minus degree temperatures at the beginning of all this. I wonder if that was to create a certain mystique around the jab event. Hopefully cooking, and then our stomach acids and digestive system will deal with the mrna in food. At one point they seemed particularly keen to get it into our salad veg, I suppose because we don’t cook those! The thing about injections is that they by-pass the body’s line of defences and get straight into the blood stream.

    2. As I wrote over at TCW: Cui bono? Big Pharma. Or put another way, Del Boy has a shed load of hookey mRNA vaccines he can’t offload anymore since the end of the pandemic and thinks he’s found a neat way of getting rid.

      1. Ursula Fonda Lyin will look on with interest, having splashed out on the EUSSR vax lake.

  29. Utterly off topic
    One for corrimobile.

    A long article with lots of picture links but very interesting observations on post WW2 architecture vs earlier approaches, principally American based.

    One of my perennially popular Twitter threads is a long 2020 series of photos of city halls from before and after the Year Zero of American architecture, when pleasing the public suddenly vanished as a respectable goal for architects:

    The dividing year in architecture is 1945. Before, Westerners tried, in many different styles, to make buildings look beautiful. After 1945, they felt like they didn’t deserve beautiful buildings.

    My focusing on city halls lets you see apples-to-apples comparisons.

    I enjoyed wandering through it.
    https://www.takimag.com/article/the-year-zero-of-american-architecture/

    1. Isn’t it illegal? Not to mention distressing for horses and discombobulating for guide dogs.

      2. The colours are prescribed on a crossing; however, there is a get out of jail free clause that I believe states something like discolouration of the crossing either partially or fully does not render it illegal. The proviso is that the general pattern of the crossing is not thereby impaired or some such.

        Looking at that picture surely it’s photoshopped, in any case. If it isn’t I’d be demanding why the city council of wherever it is has been wasting our money, presumably while the homeless watched as it was being painted and people queued for food bank handouts nearby. Just saying…

    2. Dangerously distracting and a stupid waste of money. I never walk on these things, just cross somewhere else.

  31. Good morning, all. Wet early on, 06:00, now the sky is brightening with a light drizzle falling.

    We are doomed! The UN says so and they don’t have any reason at all to lie and try and frighten us, do they?

    https://twitter.com/DVATW/status/1770156951025950924

    Then there’s this:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5a0730c59e9d1d35b5aeac3e4fb82772bba3bd1da1bb2cf621bf446b2fbf7661.png

    Whom do we believe? The UN with its dystopian agenda or independent science whose only axe to grind is getting to the truth?

    1. I think I know whom to believe and it’s not the UN. The other people I don’t believe are Sky and the BBC. I can verify that fact at least.

    2. I think that picture is misleading – it shows the land border of Antarctica, but seems to ignore the existing ice shelf that has existed for millennia. The rate of change also seems to be “per decade”, but does not show which decade, or even which years it refers to. A crude, but effective way to bamboozle the stats is simply to compare ice levels in January with those in July. Obviously there would be more ice in July.

      There may well be a variation when comparing an El Nino year with a La Nina year. Also the mass deforestation of the Amazon was reduced around 2012, but resumed on a huge scale when Bolsonaro took power in 2019 and handing the budget for environmental protection over to the developers, loggers, miners and ranchers and their attendant gangster land grabbers. Another anomaly may be that during Lockdown, ice levels may have been restored because of a large reduction in human activity that has since resumed.

    3. Long, and cold winter here. Unusually long time under -20C for South Norway.
      Not convinced about warming.

  32. Good moaning fellow Nottlers.

    I’m sure you’re all feeling so much happier today – the DT tells us that “inflation falls more than expected in boost for Sunak”. All I can say is, it’s a good job they told us!

    1. Good morning vw.

      They are fibbing of course , because prices haven’t fallen have they ?

      Most of us are reeling from shock , the bills are horrendous.

      Power, council tax, car/home insurance /food and fuel are an absolute joke , including vet bills that aren’t covered by insurance .

      2. Prices won’t fall, it is just the rate of inflation dropping say for example 6% to 2%, inflation may be stalling but it won’t stop, there is still that underlying rise of 2%. Unless we enter a period of deflation (this is also bad) prices will not drop. Inflation is supposedly good for government(s) (who caused the problem – lockdowns, migrant bill, benefits etc – in the first place) because it simply wafts the value of their debt away! From govt’s point of view it is a brilliant wheeze because we pay their debt and the public don’t understand for what purpose they are being milked, yet again!

  33. Good morning all.
    A light, damp overcast with mist clinging to the tops of the valley sides and an almost spring like 7°C on the yard thermometer.

  34. Good morning everyone .

    Brighter morning , golfer golfing , and everything is greening up in the garden , which is still very soggy. 11c.

  35. Morning all 🙂😊
    Brighter but more rain forecast.
    ‘Labour lacks the moral courage to enact the reform that Britain needs’.
    Seemingly as usual our MSM doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about. Labour is not the government of this country. The present government lacks the moral courage and lacks any courage whatsoever. They are the reason everything is in an absolute mess. They could have taken so many actions to restrict and change the demise of our country, but are either following WEF directives, or simply couldn’t be bothered.

    1. I think the criticism is levelled at the official Opposition, and the only alternative likely to form a government. It is taken as read that the present Government is useless and needs replacing, but that is of little consolation if the alternative on offer is even worse.

      1. Yes agreed of course, but not very well thought out or directed given the current circumstances we now live in.

    1. We have never equaled the Romans ino many things given the time difference..

        1. We just inject toxins like mercury, aluminium, formaldehyde etc directly into our bloodstreams….

      2. They didn’t have politicians who kow-tow’d to those who wanted to harm their state or to apologise for everything they had done.
        ‘Civis Romanus sum’ really meant something.

    2. And what an irony TB, exactly opposite to the millennium dome is the mouth of the river Lea where the army of julius Caeser enter the river mouth and eventually reached Hertfordshire. Where after fighting and beating the local Catuvellaunium tribes, they of course established one of their well known settlements, Verulamium. Also known as St Albans.

        1. I visited when it was raining – wonderful rain falling down from the ceiling. If you read the whole thread, the Romans build a drainage system into the floor. I was very young, and knew nothing about the building – I didn’t know its age or construction – but was completely captivated by it.

  37. The National Arboretum is a huge memorial to our collective memory of those who gave their lives for our country
    A Muslim war memorial would be viewed as a sectarian Folly by many, including me .

    Muslim war memorial
    SIR – The Chancellor’s decision to award £1 million towards the cost of a national Muslim war memorial is to be welcomed. Muslims throughout the British Empire answered the call for centuries, as do their descendants.

    The memorial’s planned location at Staffordshire’s National Arboretum is a good one, as everyone who visits it will remember their service and sacrifice.

    Henry Dodds
    Poundbury, Dorset

    Gillian Jessop
    34 MIN AGO
    The National arboretum is a fine memorial to ALL who fought for this country – there is no need to bring race or religion into it

    1. Spain has a memorial to Moslem fighters. There is a railway staton in Madrid that’s been turned into a botanical garden after it was bombed by Al Qaeda in 2004.

    2. Does that mean that Muslim names will be erased from the other war memorials, and the bodies disinterred and moved?

    3. IF I go back, I’ll be reminded of the government’s pandering to an alien ideology.

  38. Funny that Kings Cross is being evacuated just after the muslim is given a public display of support.

    It’s time to stop pandering to these vermin.

    1. It is long overdue but you know as well as I do that our politicians are too terrified to do anything about it .

  40. Oh dear. Looks like Disqusting is glitching again with no new post notifications coming through.

    2. Yes, I have to keep refreshing the page in order to see new posts and notifications.

    3. I have adblock 2 with Firefox (free) and have no problems with this sort of thing.

  41. After more than two weeks I’m just hoping to have a reply from our MP. As I’ve heard that many other pensioners have found it completely impossible to access government websites regarding pension payments. I asked him to sort it out and let me know the outcome.
    Surely he has assistance and access in and to these areas.
    Probably too busy with the expenses claims.

  42. When you recieve a AI generated reply that does not answer what tyou asked just repoly. ” you have not answered my question you need people not machines to reply” So far I have then had a person to dealwith it. We now are in the period of Tech overach before we return to the real world. This AI thing is rubbish. You know its me as you get spelling mistakes. when its a machine you get gibberish.

    1. I had a chat with’Cora’ yesterday. It was not satisfactory. My feedback was along the lines you suggest.

    2. Your GP is about to become an AI. Anima. Being rolled out across the country. GP’s won’t be needed nor their premises.

  43. What is Islamophobia?

    You could say that disliking Muslims for no good reason and being prejudiced against them is Islamophobia but the politicians’ complete terror of offending them is something far worse.

    Our politicians do not have Islamophobia – they have complete, rational dread of Islam which puts them into such a funk that they cannot do anything about it.

    1. According to Christopher Hitchens Islamaphobia is ” a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons”. Which is pretty good, I think.

    2. Well we know what happens to people who offend Islam……… any fear of them is rational.

      1. It’s not a phobia.
        Fear of them and lickspittle British politicians is perfectly rational.

  44. What is Islamophobia?

    You could say that disliking Muslims for no good reason and being prejudiced against them is Islamophobia but the politicians’ complete terror of offending them is something far worse.

    Our politicians do not have Islamophobia – they have complete, rational dread of Islam which puts them into such a funk that they cannot do anything about it.

  45. The Chinese students policing Britain’s universities Self-censoring academics live in terror

    Sam Dunning
    MARCH 20, 2024 5 MINS

    “Surreal.” This was how Professor Michelle Shipworth described her ordeal at University College London, after a Chinese student complained about an innocuous presentation slide on slavery in China. Instead of leaping to her defence, UCL accused her of being anti-Chinese and endangering its lucrative income from Chinese students. After she was banned from teaching her “provocative” energy and social sciences course, her case was taken up by the Free Speech Union, which presented documentary evidence of what they called “undue deference to the sensitivity of some Chinese students that is utterly incompatible with academic freedom”.

    Shipworth is not the first to run into trouble. And that’s because the problem is more profound than many realise. Many universities need these students. Were their fees to disappear entirely from Britain, with no other income found to replace them, many institutions would go under within a year or two. Some universities will even accept Chinese students without proper qualifications or basic English-language skills, so great is their desire for the fees.

    Sometimes, issues arise because many Chinese students have been moulded by the jingoistic politics of authoritarian China. Xi Jinping’s promises to deliver the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and “Reunification of the Ancestor-land” make Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra seem gentle by comparison. The emotion this inspires can move people to respond aggressively to perceived slights upon China’s character. Such displays of nationalism may be sincere, or they may be a means of improving one’s own reputation, fishing for a reward or promotion, or going viral on CCP-controlled social media. Universities should back academics in the face of pressure from these nationalists.

    The problem, however, is more complicated than a bunch of young chauvinists making noise on UK campuses. As the charity I run, UK-China Transparency, has shown, the CCP has institutionalised its presence at British universities. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) are present on roughly 100 British campuses. Most are formally registered as student societies under the authority of university student unions and typically describe themselves as “branches” of a central UK CSSA based at the Chinese embassy in London. This acts as an overseas office for an organisation controlled by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, which conducts influence operations abroad and was name-checked by MI5 in 2022. Most CSSAs publicly admit — though sometimes only in official documents published in Mandarin — that they are under the “guidance”, “control” or “leadership” of the embassy, which runs training programmes and networking events for CSSA leaders.

    We also have Confucius Institutes on 30 campuses. These centres are typically organised as partnerships between one Chinese university, one British university and the Chinese government. Although nominally for language teaching, they have in fact been involved in a whole range of activities, from events in Parliament to teaching undergraduate courses. One teaches Chinese traditional medicine and offers massages to the general public, for a fee. UK-China Transparency has shown how staff from China teaching in British Institutes have to follow CCP “discipline” rules that would oblige them to inform on university members if requested. Rishi Sunak promised to ban them but, as former foreign secretary James Cleverly admitted in an interview, the decision was reversed because of fears about CCP retaliation.

    “Rishi Sunak promised to ban the Confucius Institutes — but the decision was reversed because of fears about CCP retaliation.”

    And if that’s not “surreal” enough, consider the China Scholarship Council’s footprint in Britain. This Chinese government body gives stipends to hundreds of PhD scholars in the UK, selecting them on the basis of their political leanings as well as their academic merit. British universities then pay these scholars’ fees. Like CSSAs, scholarship recipients are formally obliged to accept “guidance and management” from Chinese diplomats in the UK — with penalties imposed on them and their families if they fail to do so or otherwise negatively impact China’s national security. As with Confucius Institutes and CSSAs, all these expectations are spelled out in official documents — in Mandarin.

    Meanwhile, the CCP has active eyes and ears on British campuses in the form of party members, which includes, for example, many visiting academics. All CCP members have taken an admission oath, by which they vow to obey the CCP, uphold its “discipline” and guard CCP secrets. They agree to act on the CCP’s behalf, and face special sanctions and punishments if they fail to do so, along with rewards for good behaviour.

    Although the subject receives periodic attention from politicians, this scandal has essentially been ignored for a decade or more. Britain is only now beginning to come to terms with the CCP’s presence on our campuses. Likened by one scholar to a “python in the chandelier”, the Party is always looming — even if it strikes only occasionally. And it is those students and academics with family in China who feel most keenly the CCP’s presence. Most simply self-censor, knowing that their university is not a “safe space” for free discussion. Better to keep schtum than say something about Tibet or democracy in China which is reported back, because the consequences can be dire.

    A minority ignore the warning signs, and courageously persist past the first clear indication that they are being watched. Most often, these brave individuals are called by family members in China, who explain that they have been visited by the police forces. Family members pass on a clear message from the authorities: stop now and come home. If you don’t, then you will never see your family again and they too will be affected, in their careers, in their access to government support, in their community. These are the consequences for Chinese students and academics in our country if they defy the CCP and stand by it.

    “Family members pass on a clear message from the authorities: stop now, come home, and if you don’t, then you will never see your family again.”

    It is worth underlining how much speech the CCP forbids and how ridiculously broad its definition of “national security” is. In China, forbidden speech is treated as terrorism — and includes any discussion of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, human rights, politics, corruption and religion that transgresses the party’s red lines. So restrictive is the speech environment in China that, during the anti-lockdown protests of 2023, people took to holding up blank pieces of paper as a sign of protest. Hundreds at least were arrested. Displaying “White Paper” remains a sign of protest. Given these sensitivities and the university sector’s dependence on Chinese money, one can see how difficult it might be to have a meaningful discussion about China’s history, politics, society or economy.

    British academics beginning their careers know that if they put a foot wrong in this regard, they will find it difficult to go to China, let alone gain access to any interesting material or interesting sources. Last year, for instance, I and others working on a Channel 4 documentary about China exposed how Professor Steve Tsang, a leading British China expert, was censored by Nottingham University, which closed down his China studies centre because of CCP pressure. Elsewhere, Dr Jo Smith Finley of Newcastle University was sanctioned directly by the Chinese government for her work. One academic in New Zealand had her home and office broken into because of her research into CCP influence abroad. Even those who are not China specialists, such as Shipworth, may find that their teaching leads to “problems”. They need and deserve their universities’ support.

    The strategic aim here isn’t hard to glean: over time, such interference has the potential to distort our knowledge of China itself, which is, of course, exactly what the CCP wants. This is also reflected in new restrictions on foreign access to corporate data, academic journals, and national statistics. Some sinologists tell me that this process started decades ago and that the well has already been poisoned. Only the courage of Shipworth, Tsang and whistleblowers like them can stop the creeping extension of CCP authority into our universities. Our academic freedom depends on it.

    https://unherd.com/2024/03/the-chinese-students-policing-britains-universities/

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

    John Murray
    7 hours ago
    “Were their fees to disappear entirely from Britain, with no other income found to replace them, many institutions would go under within a year or two.”
    Then they’re not much cop as academic institutions, are they? Let them find another source of students, or let them fold.

    1. Dare I ask, why don’t the Chinese educate their own? Why come here? Are they on a mission to conquer us or prep us for the UN One World government of the future?

    2. Would it really matter if half these “universities” were closed down? They seem to exist solely to educate (or indoctrinate) the Chinese.

    3. Lumpen intellectuals go woke, leading to abuse from much cleverer foreign powers who duly get control of them. Who knew? Never saw that one coming.

      The rot set in years ago. The ship’s timbers are so rotten now, it’s just sinking.

      1. Do you think this has ever happened before in those hallowed spires of academia? Oh wait hang on…

        1. Yes quite. The dreaming spires and ivory towers have always had to be on their guard. Once they move away from their primary, some would say sole, purpose then they are in grave danger. Now is just such a time in the history of intellectual rigour.

    4. Lumpen intellectuals go woke, leading to abuse from much cleverer foreign powers who duly get control of them. Who knew? Never saw that one coming.

      The rot set in years ago. The ship’s timbers are so rotten now, it’s just sinking.

    1. More to the point James, issues being faced are issues deliberately created by the low calibre shysters we are now paying billions to, while they wreck our culture, social structure and everything else in our country.

    1. In Victorian times, my ancestors were producing 10 or 12 children. Not all survived of course. I don’t suppose they all survive in those African countries with high birth rates, either. Of course the Globalists want the white nations to disappear altogether.

      1. Even after allowing for higher childhood mortality, those African countries (and other 3rd world places) are still reproducing at a greater rate so their populations are exploding. We get their overflow dregs to ‘boost’ our lower birth rates.

        1. They are reproducing at more than replacement rate but nowhere near the rate of our Victorian ancestors. We don’t need them here though.

      2. My grandfather was a Devon GP. He had a large spacious house built in a village called Willand near Cullompton. When he was asked why he was building such a big house he replied that he thought it was his Christian duty to fill the world with a better quality of people and so he and my grandmother had eleven children all of whom survived infancy and flourished.

        The first to die was his eldest son who was killed fighting for his country in Northern France in 1915. Of the remaining ten: four were medical doctors, one was a Doctor of Music, my father was a Cambridge First classicist who went on to become a colonial governor, one was a horticultural expert, one was a headmistress, one was a farmer in Rhodesia and the youngest girl was a farmer in Kenya.

    2. Heyup BB.
      Can’t pick out the detail on that, have you got the original source of the chart?

      1. If you double-click on it, you can see it a bit larger, and it’s just about legible. I don’t have a bigger image, I’m afraid.

    3. The only reason the population is exploding in certain countries in Africa and Asia is because of Western aid. So we’re doubly screwing ourselves.

  48. Hell and damnation. Buggrit ! Dishwasher just died on me. Peeing all over the floor. I think i will get the rag and bone man to take it away. And while he is here he can install the new one.

      1. Undo waste pipe from waste water pipe.
        Put the end of the waste pipe to the cold tap and give it a good blast of cold water up the rear end.
        Good way to clear blockages.
        If all else fails, senna pods.

      2. Or a button caught in the empty pipe as I found once with the washing machine. Don’t know about dishwashers though. Probably no buttons involved there.

      3. It needs a proper clean inside and out and seeing as i am a lazy batsard i’m buying a new one instead. I did the same with the oven. Life is too short for scrubbing.

      1. Probably. It’s getting on a bit so bin time. New one is only £200 and i won £700 last night on wheel of fortune. Ta dah !

  49. Another up hill battle has commenced with my
    gp practice. After my terrible near death
    ‘Anaphylactic episode’ (yet to be confirmed)
    and no follow-up from the hospital, last Friday. I wrote a two page letter explaining what happened and the outcome and following circumstances. Despite all the medication I take my BP seems to be permanently high.
    Imagine if I wasn’t taking it. I wouldn’t be alive.
    To get an appointment it take three bloody weeks!!! …….45 minutes after I wrote the above and made a phone call to my surgery.
    And the result is,…. Wonderful, a phone call appointment early next month.
    All I’ve done for this is work for 53 years, harder than any effing snivelling serpent and politician could imagine. And live my life, pay my taxes and other dues and raise a family with my lovely wife.
    How did all this crap happen.
    Oh Woe is me.

    1. I half expected to read that you’d been removed from their lists.
      No appointment until early next month for a potentially serious health problem is still unacceptable. Fingers crossed you have no further deterioration before then.

      Until March 2020, we could access GPs fairly easily, albeit with variations between practices. Within 3 years, why did it suddenly become virtually impossible to access a GP (whether f2f or by phone)?
      It hasn’t been a gradual change since early 2020, just a virtual denial of service.
      Even during lockdown, GP appointment were extremely rare, but they expected their practice nurses and others to carry on seeing even more patients.
      Seems criminally negligent to me.

      1. From my own experience’s MIB I could not agree more.
        I think one of the problems now is so many of them have taken on private work and are no longer available.

        1. I think one of the problems now is so many of them have taken on private work and are no longer available.

          Which was basically confirmed in the conversation I have just had, they do not have enough clinicians to cope with all the patients. 4-5 years ago you could get an appointment next day. Three weeks is an insult to NHS patient’s integrity.

        2. I don’t always get to see my GP but the last time i did see her she looked old and ragged. Quite a difference in 3 years. I expect her to throw the towel in soon. Some of them work very hard. Others are just time servers.

          It might be wise in your case to frame your letter as a complaint to the practice manager. It got me an appointment in no time.

          1. I’d say the practice manager is in on this anyway. We have just had our phone enquiry answer system and spoken info changed completely. It was previously the then female practice manager speaking, in a pleasant tone and directing enquiries. Now it is a man with a very strong forthright voice and very loud music.
            A strong sense ov yoo Vill Obey zee orderz.
            Recently after using two different email addresses for PALS ‘Patient Liaison Service’ I have had the email bounce. Enquiry phone numbers have been shut down.
            It seems to me they are putting all of the wagons into a tight circle.

        3. It’s the sudden cliff edge change in availability of appointments that is strange. In 2019, we changed to a different GP practice after a series of concerning problems at the old place.
          The new one had an excellent reputation, well worth the longer drive to get there. Unfortunately, they also seemed to ‘change’ after 2021, in spite of having an extra few GPs. Part of the problem is supposedly down to the booking system they have been using for the last 2 years.
          When the ‘new’ system they are implementing at the end of April goes live, they claim it will quadruple the availability of appointments with GPs (exactly the same number of GPs as now). To me, that suggests the GPs have been doing a lot of thumb twiddling over the last couple of years. Maybe there is an obvious explanation.

    2. I took a GP prescribed commonly used ACE Inhibitor for BP control and it took some weeks to evolve swelling symptoms in my body which I guessed were a known but rare side effect. After reporting it via MHRA I did get my medical notes ameended to include an allergic reaction to the drug which got me a red wrist band when I was later admitted to my hospital’s cardiac ward with heart failure.

      1. The strange thing is AO’ I had only recently completed a course (for an upper respiratory infection) of the same antibiotic. I had never had a problem with it previously and still don’t know what I’m expected to do ? Obviously I will never take this one again.
        I’ll ring again and try and get an earlier appointment. A phone call in three weeks is rather pointless.
        And take the medication back to the pharmacy and ask them if they might know.

        1. When investigating the reporting processes for adverse reactions (ARs) I found the procedures for reporting ARs far more thorough in the US compared with UK’s MHRA. Even New Zealand had a better track record for monitoring ARs.

          A thorough investigation requires the drug batch numbers to be notified in the Adverse Reaction report in the US as there can be fake drugs entering the supply chains.

          1. Oh thanks for that AO’, I wonder if these were supplemented drugs, it’s impossible to tell from the packet and content they looked identical to the previous tablets I have taken.
            I’ll make a note of the numbers and photograph the packet.
            I wonder where I might be able to send them for some sort of investigation.

          2. The medical and pharmacetical industries watch each others backs and I didn’t get very far in pressing my case with MHRA – although they did get in touch with the NZ regulator but without any success.

            Together with the individual complex reactions to drugs it’s a bit of a minefield.

          3. The packet the printed content and tablets inside all look very authentic. But I will get in touch with the UK manufacturers to ask if what happened to me, was an unusual occurrence.
            I’ll post any response I might have.
            🙂

          4. Good Luck RE
            Not all side effects may be included in the Patient Information Leaflet

        2. Allergies can crop up suddenly because use can sensitise the body to the allergen.
          Apparently one explanation for peanut allergies is that it was once a regular ingredient of baby oils and lotions.
          I have an Indian friend who was whisked to hospital at the age of 19 when she unexpectedly reacted to nuts. During her childhood, every time her hair was washed, her mother or aunts would apply coconut oil afterwards and that is suspected of triggering her allergy.

          1. I had no idea that allergic reactions could evolve in that way. One of the oddities of allergen treatments is that a gradual increase in the dosage of the allergen is one way of desensitising the body to it.

      2. It’s all in such a complete mess. I think it started to happen when the government installed around 7 new regional directors around 5-6 years ago.
        All on salaries of 25,000 K

          3. I think the item I read originally a few years ago was over stating. On checking yesterday it seems they are or were paid around 150 thousand.
            But nothing would surprise me anymore.

        2. The start of the ‘complete mess’ was long before that. It would require a PhD dissertation to go into all the causes but for starters:
          1. Party political exploitation of the ‘free at the point of delivery’ NHS has prevented any sensible reform of a system that was designed for a monocultural society where almost every patient had contributed in an era when treatment options were quite low-tech. Now we have a vibrant, diverse nation with ‘interesting’ diseases, requiring vast sums spent on interpreters, health tourism of various sorts, and some wonderful high tech treatment options that all cost a lot;
          2.societal expectation of what can be done has increased and the complaint and litigation culture has been fostered by politicians (remember the ‘citizens’ charter) and no-win no fee lawyers. This means an obscenely large amount of money goes into the pockets of chancers and lawyers (many if not most claims are settled out of court, as it’s cheaper to hand out a few thousand than to fight them) as well as occasionally paying out to those who have genuinely suffered from malpractice. Equally a lot of time that could be spent on treating patients is spent on dealing with complaints and many medics have become risk-averse (‘first do no harm’ is a stupid aphorism because absolutely any intervention carries a risk of harm but the skill is in managing the balance of risk). The threat of complaints (many tortuous and career threatening even if over quite minor issues) saps good will, but it also fosters mental health problems and leads many to get out of the profession or emigrate to places where Shipman hasn’t been exploited by politicians and lawyers.
          3. Policymakers have not anticipated the impact on the medical work-force of the cultural changes of the last 30 years including the fact that more than half of recent graduates are female. Both male and female born after about 1975 have been told to expect ‘work-life balance’. They don’t expect to put-up and shut-up when impossible demands are made. They take sick leave without having to worry about who will cover and a year’s maternity leave without any threat to their job. Then they find that the tax system (including student loan repayment) combined with childcare costs makes working full-time very unattractive. Meanwhile, they see a small number of their school contemporaries with comparable A-levels getting the big bucks of the city (the number is small but people always compare their lot with those who are getting more than they are). The intangible rewards of medicine – the sheer fascination of the subject, the chance to grow as an individual through the unique perspective you get on people’s lives, and the feeling that you’ve made a difference to people you’ve actually met rather than to abstract investors – don’t hold out so much attraction as formerly.

          Cont’d on p 96

          1. Thank you Lola. While I’m aware of the points you’ve made, you’ve expressed them in an illuminating way.

          2. That’s an interesting explanation, but I think there are many other problems involving the expectations of the public. One that many people question is. How can people who have never made a single contribution towards the cost of the health service expect or be allowed to walk in and be treated in the same manner as those who have made contributions all of their working lives. Some upto 50 years.
            It appears that the afore mentioned (the elderly) are those who are now being sidelined.

          3. Certainly. I only put in a few of my thoughts on the subject – as I said, it would require a dissertation to do the subject justice. Some years ago I needed to attend fracture clinic at a London hospital. A man was standing shouting about how long he had had to wait. His appearance, accent and standard of English did not support the idea that he had spent much time paying in to the UK system. I know people whose decision to locate to the UK (they now have 3 passports) was based entirely on NHS availability because their daughter had a serious medical problem. This was a tragedy for her and her family but it is not a sensible way to run a health service as, even though both parents have contributed quite a lot of tax, it probably hasn’t covered their daughter’s ongoing medical needs. And that’s before we get to a recent story covered by the BBC with much sentiment about a set of Siamese twins, brought from Africa (I think it was Senegal) to the UK for Great Ormond Street to try to separate them. GOS failed – but guess what? The twins are now living in south London and they obviously need a lot of ongoing support. I have great sympathy for them and their family but, again, that’s not a way you can sustain a welfare state if you want it to serve the people who pay for everything.

          4. One of my niece’s now in her early 60s was a physiotherapist at a London hospital. She told me a story 35 years ago of a man who had flown from Lagos taken a taxi from Heathrow. Arrived at A&E and started rolling around on the floor with a stomach problem. He was admitted his problem was solved he spent around three weeks in hospital recovering. Got dressed and walked out. That’s how easy it was and probably still is.
            To the contrary, around ten years ago we were staying over in Singapore, a lady with a young daughter told us her 5 year old son had been admitted to hospital. She had to deposit 3 thousand pounds using her visa card.
            She was insured which covered her costs. An unfortunate experience but she was covered, but obviously had to pat the insurance premium.

          5. There are many stories like this – especially in London hospitals – but what particularly gets me is that, down the years, there has been denial by some influential doctors and activists. They seem to believe there is a moral case to provide free health care for anybody and everybody who turns up here. However, they don’t consider that placating their moral conscience involves British taxpayers who funded the system being unable to access timely health care . They also don’t consider that the people who turn up from Lagos and go straight to A&E , claiming to have become suddenly ill (despite all evidence to the contrary) are not the poor and oppressed but the relatively affluent middle class who can afford the airfare.

          6. I couldn’t agree with you more.
            Our country seems to have been run by weak minded idiots for many decades.
            It’s pretty obvious that having shown
            vast amounts of generosity and kindness has been taken for granted as a sign of weakness, to be taken advantage of constantly.

    3. They don’t mind that you don’t matter, in fact none of us matter because according to them our time is done .

      Still no results re my Echocardiogram.. 25th January .. My emergency episode in A+E last Friday.. I could have been killed re unnecessary antibiotic’s re the phonecall from GP 2 weeks ago when I complained of back pain radiating into my stomach .. not a Kidney problem , my major organs , wee test and bloods were normal, but the pain was excruciating, and my B/P was high all day 198/90.

      I feel so depressed , such magnificent technology , but the blighters can’t get a paper result in the post to me .

      1. You’re right, It’s pretty obvious what is happening TB, they are following orders to draw back medical help.
        I think I read that they no longer have to sign the Hippocratic oath, the same as politician’s do nothing and just stuff their bank accounts.
        I rang the GP surgery about 40 minutes ago it’s like banging your head against a wall.

    1. Q: “Why doesn’t my heart go dancing”

      A: Because it’s so bloody grey …. + have you been watching the tsunami of the muslim + woke invasion ….

    2. I always have to refresh to see new comments – it’s years since disqus just worked! Prolly doesn’t like my browser (brave).

      1. Doesn’t like mine either, BB2. Google Chrome – can’t be bothered to change.

      2. Doesn’t like mine either, BB2. Google Chrome – can’t be bothered to change.

  52. Helping people to move away from gas boilers

    SIR – The answer to the reluctance of people to install heat pumps (“Failing heat pump rollout puts net-zero goals at risk, ministers warned”, report, March 19) is surely to have them install an electric boiler in place of a gas one. Its footprint is tiny in comparison to a heat pump or a replacement gas boiler.

    The one we had fitted cost just over £4,000 in 2019. It was installed as a direct replacement for our old gas boiler, without disrupting or having to replace the central heating system. Yes, the running cost is more expensive than gas, but our Victorian terraced house emits no carbon dioxide from our heating and water, and we run it on renewable energy.

    Bob Corfield
    Bristol

    In one sense it is logical, in a wet heating system, to replace gas boilers with electric. No change to the system is required. The boiler is about the same size and goes in the same place. The problem is a national one. If everyone were to replace their gas boilers, the country couldn’t cope with the extra demand for electricity. Depending on which source you read, generating capacity would have to be more than doubled – and then there’s the problem of the grid.

    Nationwide installation of heat pumps would also increase demand and although that increase would be nothing like as great as that for electric boilers for all, it would still be beyond the current capacity of generators and the grid. Pushing heat pumps is an admission that gas will run out sooner than expected and electric boilers are not an acceptable alternative for the reasons stated.

    Don’t forget who is to blame for the dash for gas – Heseltine…

    1. I considered an electric boiler to replace my aging gas boiler five years ago but to reach the required heat output I would have needed a 32 amo supply from my consumer unit.
      At the time I was installing a 32 amp circui for an EV charger so there wasn’t enough spare for an electric boiler.

    2. I looked at one but our electrician advised that the rural supply network around us was not sufficient to both run the boiler and cooker at the same time. Electric boilers also typically have only a three year warranty.

    3. An electric boiler – say a 6kw one sounds very nice for hot water and radiators but… at 30p per KW/h that’s 1.80 an hour.

      It comes back to the same fundamental problem. Energy is too expensive. his is precisely because of the hoax tax scam that is climate change. If our electricity were a sensible price, such as 8p per KW then an electric boiler is a great idea. Instant heat, could be used with radiators, the whole kaboodle.

      But it isn’t. It’s the most expensive in the world. Deliberately so, to force down demand for it. The state has destroyed this country. Net zero is just spite.

      1. It’s a situation that is good for both the energy firms and the government. The suppliers of energy are allowed to overcharge us, making themselves vast profits. People use less gas, the government moves towards it’s emissions targets. It’s deliberately overpricing the product.

      1. Do people not realise that lots of the electricity in the UK comes from gas power stations? You have to wonder.

      2. I think most of the argument is made in the deluded belief that electricity can all come from renewables without there being any downside eg using up land, blighting the countryside, enriching the Chinese. More reasonably it may be about proximity to the source of the energy: living in a home where cooking is done with gas has been associated with a higher incidence of respiratory problems in children; there’s a risk of CO poisoning with gas as well as the risk of explosion. But, on the other hand, gas burners are still there for you if there is a power cut (even if the boiler won’t work)

    6. Would it get as far as the grid, what about the electrical supply in the house?

      Any older house that we have lived in has not been build to supply the power needed to run an electrical heating system. We would probably end up spending more than that £4,000 just to have the needed in house systems updated.

    7. “Yes, the running cost is more expensive than gas” – a material consideration in these straitened times.

  53. Oh, what a tangled web…

    Justin Webb might come across as a bit of smug git but he wasn’t wrong here. Soon, Transworld will disappear up its own fundament with its demented twisting of reality.

    Justin Webb and the trans row causing a ‘meltdown’ at the BBC

    The Today presenter’s rebuke for a remark about ‘trans women’ has enraged his colleagues – and raises questions about the BBC’s true agenda

    Robin Aitken and Liam Kelly • 19 March 2024 • 7:00pm

    It is not, on the face of it, a particularly controversial statement. Justin Webb, the long-time presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, was discussing new rules banning transgender competitors from taking part in women’s international chess tournaments and said “trans women, in other words males”.

    By attempting to clarify one aspect of a knotty subject last August, Webb inadvertently opened a can of worms that has sparked an “absolute meltdown” – in the words of a senior insider – in the BBC newsroom.

    The incident also calls into question how the BBC, which is currently desperate to burnish its credentials for impartiality and balance, deals with complaints about its editorial output.

    A zealous listener picked up on Webb’s words and lodged a complaint, accusing Webb, 63, of compromising the corporation’s strict impartiality rules. The BBC complaints procedure whirred into action and, a couple of weeks ago, delivered its verdict. Webb, it decided, was guilty as charged. His words, the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) decreed, “gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area.”

    BBC sources say that the ruling has gone down like a cup of cold sick, especially among prominent female presenters. Senior BBC women have written to Tim Davie, the director-general, in their droves to express dismay at the way Webb has been treated. They claim that Webb only stated a fact: although gender identity is largely a social construct, biological sex is immutable and cannot be changed.

    One wrote: “Clear statement of fact is not ‘one viewpoint’ and the fact that it is ‘a highly controversial area’ makes it more important to be factual, not less. If the BBC is to censure journalists for being factual we are slipping into very dangerous waters. Once we’ve decided to dispense with public trust we have nothing left.”

    The BBC has long struggled with how to cover transgender stories, as staff clash in the newsroom and social media users criticise the corporation’s output. It was forced to admit that a 2021 online article claiming some lesbians feel pressured into sex by trans women did not meet its standards on accuracy after more than 10,000 complained about it.

    The ECU ruling on Webb came in the same week that the BBC was criticised for the way it reported on the conviction of Scarlet Blake, a trans woman who murdered a man in Oxford and live streamed killing a cat with a blender. Broadcast items about the case referred to Blake only as a woman, with no mention of the killer being transgender.

    “Why is it that we have said that a cat torturer and murderer is a woman, which is plainly involving ourselves in a controversy? You can argue that she is, but lots of people say she is not,” says a senior BBC journalist. “Now, we are saying that we can’t – or are we saying that? What are we saying? It is absolutely, utterly chaotic.” The BBC has since said that it accepts that the fact Blake is transgender “should have been included in the report on the News at One on 26 February”.

    Defenders of Webb insist he was merely providing clarity on a controversial topic that often confuses listeners. About one-third of people are unsure about what “trans woman” means, according to polling by Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, a self-styled “policy analysis collective”. Some 20 per cent of those surveyed believed that they were born girls.

    The presenter, who has hosted Radio 4’s flagship news programme since 2009, made the aside while speaking with Dominic Lawson, the former Sunday Telegraph editor and writer of two books on chess, about the fact that the International Chess Federation banned trans women, who were born male, from competing in women’s chess events amid fears that it could give an unfair advantage.

    The BBC recognised almost as soon as the item was broadcast that Webb’s comment could have caused a problem, and swiftly issued a clarification: “The BBC’s style guide states we should generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so. In this case Justin accepts it would have been more accurate to use the term biological male.”

    Yet that was not enough for the ECU, which investigated the complaint nonetheless. “A finding against Justin runs the risk of being far more newsworthy than the size of the infraction because he is a very well-known figure and fantastic journalist,” says Mark Damazer, a former Radio 4 controller who hired Webb to present Today.

    “The ECU does what it does and runs the risk of amplification. You can see that it might look like breaking a butterfly on the wheel. It is not a huge infraction and raises the question of whether you are making too much of it,” he adds. “From their point of view they have to deal with the case as they see it, and they thought it wasn’t quite enough that the BBC issued this clarifying statement. I might have thought that was enough.”

    https://twitter.com/SimonCatRiley/status/1763469559573459452

    Webb has told colleagues that he feels he has been “unfairly discriminated against by the BBC” and that he thinks “there is another agenda here”.

    The ECU did not interview him about what he had said, nor allowed him any direct input into the inquiry it conducted. Webb is seeking to learn from whom the ECU took advice on the issue. The suspicion, sources suggest, is that the views of trans activists were given undue weight.

    Anya Palmer, a barrister at Old Square Chambers who successfully represented tax expert Maya Forstater when she was unfairly sacked from her job at a thinktank for believing that people cannot change their sex, says that part of the BBC’s approach to Webb was unusual. “It seems really odd he wouldn’t even be given the chance to respond to the complaint before they reach any decision. As a matter of basic fairness, he should be able to respond,” she says.

    The debacle only serves to highlight the murky world of the corporation’s complaints department, especially as the BBC is usually resistant to accepting that it has broken impartiality rules. Between 2017 and 2022 the BBC received about 1.7 million complaints. It upheld just 126 of these and only 25 of these successful complaints centred on impartiality.

    Some back-of-the-fag-packet maths suggests that means for every 65,000 complaints received just one is upheld on the grounds of impartiality. Is that plausible? Especially given that, according to its own research, only 54pc of its audience believes the BBC to be impartial.

    The ECU also appears to have acted with unusual haste. It is not unheard of for the corporation to take more than a year to make a judgement on bias complaints; one former BBC News chief says they have been waiting to hear a reply to their own issue since last summer.

    The ECU’s verdict in its damning judgement of Justin Webb is telling. Its statement reads: “In relation to impartiality, however, the ECU considered it could only be understood by listeners as meaning that trans women remain male, without qualification as to gender or biological sex.”

    The point to note is that this statement from the ECU is not impartial itself. The phrasing the ECU chose makes it clear that in its view sex – that is the biological reality of male and female – is quite separate from gender which in this interpretation is the socially constructed idea of men and women.

    Is this an impartial stance? Is the supposed distinction between sex and gender now universally accepted? Clearly it isn’t – it is the nub of the whole controversy.

    A senior BBC News insider says: “Does this ruling mean that the BBC now considers that sex and gender are independent of each other? If so, that is an important point and if the BBC is going to report these matters from that standpoint it should definitely make that clear to the audience.”

    The Webb debacle raises questions about whether the ECU is fit for purpose when it has already been severely challenged by ministers over bias claims. It is run by Peter Johnston, a no-nonsense Ulsterman who is paid up to £205,000 a year. Davie took direct charge of overseeing complaints late last year after the corporation was widely criticised, including by culture secretary Lucy Frazer, after being inundated with complaints about the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza.

    “It is a flawed process both ways round. It is flawed to presenters, because they are not allowed to make their case,” says a former BBC News boss. “Equally, most complaints are dismissed. It is neither one thing nor the other.”

    It has also highlighted the generational tensions in the BBC newsroom, with some senior journalists alarmed at how newer recruits seem oblivious of their obligation to be even-handed in their coverage of the transgender issue, among others. One says that there may be “a failure in the way BBC journalists are trained”.

    Earlier this month, a long-serving BBC journalist wrote in The Spectator, under a nom de plume, despairing the fact that the corporation has set up a new “Verify” unit. The brainchild of BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness, she said it was a reaction to audiences bombarded by disinformation “telling us that amid this noise and sensationalism, they need to see our workings, so we can maintain the trust people have put in the BBC for the last 100 years. People want to know not just what we know (and don’t know), but how we know it”.

    BBC Verify is said to employ about 60 journalists. Turness says they all possess wonderful forensic skills that enable them to arrive at truths in which we can all have confidence. So, to keep them gainfully employed, perhaps they might devote themselves to one thorny question. What is a woman?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/radio-presenters/justin-webb-trans-woman-complaint-bbc-meltdown/

    1. I thought Brian Gerrish had established that BBC journalists were trained by Common Purpose? Actually, the term “journalist” also needs to be clarified since researchers and archivists are classed as journalists but they are not the people referenced by either this article or the wonderful Mr Gerrish.

      2. The head of Ofcom is James Naughtie.
        Ex-Chief Political Correspondent of the Guardian.
        presented the BBC’s Today program on R4 for more than 20 years.

    3. The BBC struggles with reality as a daily event. It can’t be honest, even with itself. To do so would cause incredible cognitive dissonance.

      1. I thought it was some sort of currency unit that preceded the euro. Maybe the BBC has a stash of them down the back of their various sofas.

    6. If a man wishes to pretend to be a woman and other people wish to support him in that claim, then fairy ’nuff! Let them.
      HOWEVER, neither he not they have the right to force others to accede to their demands and even less do they have the right to silence those who disagree.

      1. “You could identify as a goldfish if you feel like, I don’t care. That
        ain’t my business. It becomes my business when you try to make me play
        the game with you”.

        American rapper Ne-Yo.

    7. [T]he International Chess Federation [ICF] banned trans women, who were born male, from competing in women’s chess events amid fears that it could give an unfair advantage.

      While it is the case that men have hitherto dominated competitive chess, what is the unfair advantage which men have that the ICF wants to shield women chess players from? It’s an intellectual pursuit. What is this advantage which women chess players cannot match? It’s not an unfair advantage which women are given protection from in, say, University Challenge or Mastermind.

      1. I believe there has been research to show that the male and female brains are different. This difference may well give advantage in intellectual pursuits like chess.

      1. The Commons passed it with very little dissent last year but a few Lords scuppered it. It’s been brought back.

        1. Maybe that’s why I thought it had gone through. Dozy old so-and-sos. It must be hard to justify bringing trophies in to the country, but maybe some old ‘Lords’ thought it was still acceptable.

    2. They have a saying in Africa, ‘if it pays, it stays ‘.
      But careful what you wish for Ndovu.

  56. Finally some good news

    Leo Varadkar to step down as Irish prime minister – watch announcement live

    The Taoiseach will also relinquish his role as the leader of the governing Fine Gael party

    James Crisp,
    EUROPE EDITOR
    20 March 2024 • 11:56am

    But what will replace him/it?

    5. Let us hope that some terrible scandal will emerge resulting in him being gaoled for a long time.

        1. ‘You’re our new couple friends’, Kamala Harris tells Leo Varadkar and partner

          https://img.resized.co/breaking-news/eyJkYXRhIjoie1widXJsXCI6XCJodHRwczpcXFwvXFxcL2ltYWdlcy5icmVha2luZ25ld3MuaWVcXFwvcHJvZFxcXC91cGxvYWRzXFxcLzIwMjRcXFwvMDNcXFwvMTYwODQwMTlcXFwvMi43NTYyNDA5Mi1lMTcxMDYwNTEzOTE0NS5qcGdcIixcIndpZHRoXCI6bnVsbCxcImhlaWdodFwiOjQyMCxcImRlZmF1bHRcIjpcImh0dHBzOlxcXC9cXFwvd3d3LmJyZWFraW5nbmV3cy5pZVxcXC9pbWFnZXNcXFwvbm8taW1hZ2UucG5nXCIsXCJvcHRpb25zXCI6e1wib3V0cHV0XCI6XCJ3ZWJwXCJ9fSIsImhhc2giOiJmNzJjOWY0NmIxZTgwMzEyMzM1OGY4MGJmYmMxNzFmMGI5MzY0MmEyIn0=/2-75624092-e1710605139145.jpg
          Ms Harris also praised Mr Varadkar as an ‘extraordinary role model’ during a St Patrick’s Day event in Washington DC. Photo: PA Images

          2. That is like the politicians saying that they have complete confidence in someone.

            Just dig out the resume and polish the lies.

    7. Almost certainly captured by the EU after the resignation of Enda Kenny in 2017. With him (EK) went the chance of a sensible solution to the Irish border. The Bombay Bogshite bent over forwards for Barnier & Co.

    8. That’s probably why Obama was in europe. He was telling the politicians who would be the next Irish head of state.

  57. Not bad . . .
    Wordle 1,005 4/6

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

    1. For a change I managed to solve it on the third attempt

      Wordle 1,005 3/6

      ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
      ⬜🟨⬜🟨🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  58. Lunch ! My Greek dish…

    Home made Tarama using John West milts and red onion and topped with Kalamata olives.. Honey sweetened Greek yogurt topped with crumbled feta, oregano and olive oil. Pitta.
    A small bowl of pork Afelia with a little bulgur.

    Sauvignon blanc. Because Greek wine is only used to clean the drains.

  59. On the subject of manipulated photos, a letter:-

    SIR – Artists have long manipulated images. I went to Sargent and Fashion at Tate Britain and saw the (at the time) very controversial portrait of “Madame X” – painted initially with a slipping shoulder strap, only for the artist to return it to its correct position later.

    Robert Young
    Nairn

    And here are the two versions of the portrait:-
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2a56612440d2d8b91f50a6e43aa0309422ba09e551323a3656e8968313a585a1.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9cd0473dce0c7834f2ac85cb70f9ff6891672aeb0a4b0992ec3a96c812e5e39e.jpg

    I think I prefer the slipping strap!

    2. Sargent gave the ladies the nose they desired irrespective of the actual size and shape of their schnozz.

      Sargent was a member of the Broadway Group of artists who met up at Abbotts Grange, a large house built around the Abbott of Pershore’s residence. Others included Henry James and prominent American artists and illustrators (one such was lost with the Titanic).

      Abbotts Grange is owned by a former client of mine whose family operate the Cotswold Bakery Shop ‘Huffkins’ in Witney, Stow on the Wold, Stratford on Avon, Cheltenham and Burford.

      Abbotts Grange is a popular place to stay for Americans tracing the lives of the Broadway Group. John Singer Sargent painted ‘Rose Lily Rose’ of children playing with Chinese Lanterns in Broadway.

    1. Blair and Campbell, according to Campbell’s published diaries, used to meet to dicuss what announcements they could make that would curry favour with the public. There isn’t any mention of actually following through with action. Just popular announcements. The left are gullible, aren’t they? They still imagine that politishuns say what they mean.

      1. It is well known that they operated what they termed the ‘grid’, overseen/orchestrated by Mandelson. There had to be an ‘good news’ announcement every day.
        Mind you, between the dark arts of Mandy (flanked by Campbell as enforcer) and the clusterf*** of the No 10 comms operation under Boris/Truss/Sunak, there is a happy medium to be struck.

      2. I am stuck with a PM who apparently believes that the announcement (and photo op) is all that matters.

        There again sometimes that is a good thing if they do not follow through.

  61. 384836+ up ticks,

    DT

    Labour only has one tool to stop Britain’s collapse into a third world country

    O’K what.is its name,?

    1. The DT comment is a little unfair. There are many tools in the Labour party; David Lammy, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Richard Burgon, loads of ’em.

  62. All these woke governments following my leader. This has been a long term project that one day we will know the truth about . At least Ireland is moving in the right direction. For us it all started with Blair and contnued with the Tories.

      1. Why doesn’t Eire rejoin the United Kingdom.

        They should have done in in 2021 to celebrate the centenary of Irish independence.

        (They can blame Covid for being late!)

        1. Eire’s GDP per capita (2nd in the world) is more than twice that of the UK (27th).

          1. It doesn’t produce anything though; just has a very benign corporation tax regime. We could encourage inward investment, if we could be bothered and didn’t operate a system of spiteful politics.

    2. The one time when Cameron was not lying was when he said he was the heir to Blair.

          1. Yo Conners

            We were down there a couple of months ago, the job will take years to complete

        2. That must be an experience – Mosquito too, I’ve bookmarked it for a possible visit

      2. VERA is still doing tourist flights. Basically a round trip between Niagara and Toronto. You get some great views of the falls during the ride.

        I went on the flight a few years ago, great fun.

      3. Based at Hamilton (War Birds Museum). I went on board, but alas, only on the ground.

  65. Here’s an interview by green pressure group Carbon Brief with former MP and Energy Minister, Chris Skidmore, who signed Net Zero into law in 2019. Legal Net Zero 2019 was recommended to the May administration by Conservative think tank Bright Blue which was part financed by Soros’ Open Society.

    https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-interview-chris-skidmore/?utm_content=buffer9f901&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

    Amusing that in effect it’s an interview arranged by George Soros’ green financial adviser, George Polk, who set up European Climate Foundation which finances Carbon Brief virtually 100% thereby benefiting George Polk’s green investors.

    The very same George Soros whose financial fingerprints are all over the Climate Change Act, Legal Net Zero and the Climate Change Committee.

    What a small world it is!

      2. He actually looks remarkably like a very large Large White pig with horns. The straight tail is a giveaway. Marvellous animal!

      2. Take a look at the picture above and then at one of a bison. Mind you, the above is a Water Buffalo (as in both Far Eastern beasts of burden and in Mozarrella), whereas the USA is quite happy to equate buffalo with bison (although Bison Springfield doesn’t have the same ring to it)

        https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.britannica.com%2Fanimal%2Fbison&psig=AOvVaw3xHjPC7XCDgP1yyawOCVU3&ust=1711041363458000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBEQjRxqFwoTCJi16Perg4UDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAK

          1. I knew that. It’s number 5 in my number list of jokes. A good old Black Country one.

      3. I worked for Leyland Trucks who made Buffaloes and Bisons. One day a customer asked me to find one in stock. I checked my stock list to find there was one at one of our Scottish dealers. I rang up and asked for the sales manager. He was somewhat non-plussed when asked if he could let us have a Bison. I had dialled an Iceland frozen foods warehouse in error.

    1. ‘If you think you could do a better job, why don’t you stand for election?’

      Jeremy Hunt’s alleged reproachment to James Dyson, after he criticised the Chancellor’s economic plans.

      2. Which – bizarrely – got many plaudits BTL on The Grimes. The far-lefties who post there loathe Dyson as a tax-avoiding, non-dom, foreign based who shuns the UK.

        1. Worse still, Sir James dared to donate money to his old alma mater Gresham’s, wherever that is.

          1. Just up the road. The MR taught there – was Head of English for 11 years. Dyson funded a brand new, state-of-the -art Science block – and is paying for the complete renovation of a large country house to make a new Prep School. Millions are being provided.

          3. Sometimes it is impractical or impossible to repay an act of generosity and kindness, but Sir James has done so. Respect.

      3. Ross Clark
        Jeremy Hunt should listen to James Dyson
        20 March 2024, 1:55pm

        https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/GettyImages-1051890164.jpg

        All Sir James Dyson wanted was to do what hundreds of business people and lobbyists have done before him: spend a little time with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and have a good old moan – initially about research and development tax relief but then extending to other subjects such as corporation tax, high levels of public spending and – according to reports – the number of diversity managers in the NHS.

        But Jeremy Hunt’s reaction seems to have taken him aback. Apparently exasperated by Dyson’s list of complains at a Downing Street meeting last week, the Chancellor told Dyson that if he didn’t like the government he should seek to become an MP himself.

        Is that really how government ministers should treat voters, not least those who create jobs and bring wealth to the country? Somehow, I don’t think Hunt would be impressed if he took back a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner and was told by the retailer: if you don’t like it, why don’t you set up your own company manufacturing them? I can’t imagine, either, Hunt having the guts to be quite so rude to an NHS diversity manager who found himself at a Downing Street event.

        As it happens, I think Hunt is doing a good job as Chancellor. His cuts to National Insurance are turning the Conservatives into the party of the workers. Angela Rayner’s desperate reaction – trying to claim that it would mean cuts to pensions or sickness benefits, as if there really was a National Insurance fund into which the receipts are paid – shows just how ruffled Labour is by this. Nor has Dyson always shown himself to be of sound judgement – his failed attempt to sue the Daily Mirror for a piece that accused him of hypocrisy for campaigning for Brexit and then moving his company HQ to Singapore suggests he has a bit of a thin skin.

        Nevertheless, it is surely the Chancellor’s job to listen to the likes of Dyson. If the Conservatives are not going to represent the constituency of wealth-creators then what is the point of them? You can sense growing exasperation with the government on the part of business. Dyson is right that corporation tax, which has just been jacked up from 19 per cent to 25 per cent, is too high (although Labour is not promising to reduce it). Energy prices are also far too high, with UK industry paying four or five times as much per unit as their US counterparts. Just the other week Sir Jim Ratcliffe warned that at this rate Europe will lose its entire chemicals industry within 20 years.

        In 2010, David Cameron and George Osborne came to power with one over-riding objective: to reduce government borrowing and rebalance the government’s books. Four fifths of the effort was to come from spending cuts and only one fifth from tax increases. The Liberal Democrat half of the coalition was fully on board. Yet where is the drive to control public spending now? It has been entirely lost. The government isn’t talking about cuts at all, while the public sector is allowed to go on expanding its empires, the NHS’s diversity officers a prime example of what is going wrong.

        We are unlikely to see Dyson in the House of Commons, but unless he can win back the support of Britain’s wealth-creators, Hunt is unlikely to be there for much longer, either.

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

        An0nymousBosch
        2 hours ago edited
        Sir James Dyson is one of the biggest taxpayers in the country. He paid £156 million last year. There’s only about five people in the whole country who have more of a right to the ear of the Chancellor.

        Can you imagine, for one second, Jeremiah Unt making these kind of comments to one of the tax-evading American corporations he’s allowed to monopolise huge swathes of Britain’s digital economy?

        Rishi Sunak should demand than Unt apologises. But of course, he won’t, because he’s a pointless nebbish.

        1. J *unt is getting more and more crazed around the eyes. He should not be chancellor (who put him there) and it is inexcusable that he feels sufficiently arrogant to be so rude to J Dyson, a classic British success and a high tax payer. Maybe the Chinese are developing a crap vacuum cleaner made by slave labour, at a third of the price and Mrs *unt is involved in her capacity as CCP operative.

        2. ‘Is that really how government ministers should treat voters, not least those who create jobs and bring wealth to the country? Somehow, I don’t think Hunt would be impressed if he took back a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner and was told by the retailer: if you don’t like it, why don’t you set up your own company manufacturing them? I can’t imagine, either, Hunt having the guts to be quite so rude to an NHS diversity manager who found himself at a Downing Street event.’
          Spot on.

      5. Well those are fine words, considering that Hunt was said to have turned down the first safe seat he was offered because he felt he didn’t have enough life experience. Later, of course, he just swanned into another one.

  69. Vladimir Putin’s gold strategy explains why sanctions against Russia have failed. March 18, 2024 4.52pm GMT

    In 2022, Switzerland imported 75 tonnes of Russian gold (US$4.87 billion). In 2023, it imported about US$8.22 billion in gold from the U.A.E., which doesn’t produce its own but buys enormous sums from Russia, and US$3.92 billion from Uzbekistan, Russia’s next-door neighbour.

    Billions upon billions of dollars of Russian gold is being freely traded at top dollar while avoiding every one of those 16,000 sanctions.

    That’s why global sanctions against Russia haven’t derailed a thing. In order for Putin’s plan for economic resilience through gold to work, however, gold needs to increase in value. His long-term goal is that gold, not the U.S. dollar, will be the global trading currency.

    Well the dollar is looking increasingly iffy!

    https://theconversation.com/vladimir-putins-gold-strategy-explains-why-sanctions-against-russia-have-failed-225748

    2. I had a colleague, sadly now passed on, who ran a business in Moscow. He told me of a trip in the 70s when he was taken by a Russian colleague of his to the Russian diamond and gold reserves. The Russians have enough diamonds and gold in store to collapse the west’s economy if they decided to flood the market; the only reason they don’t do so is that value of those items would collapse so it would be a one off shot. Sanctions are a very blunt weapon and the only people who suffer are those at the bottom of the pile – those higher up escape. I’m reminded of the crass woman Albright when the US imposed sanctions on Saddam Hussein and when told that over a million Iraqi children died as a result replied “We think that price is worth it.”

    3. It is true that the Russians are pushing gold, but it’s inevitable that we will return to a gold-based currency, Not “Putin’s fault.”

  70. Scotland is no longer a free country. 20 march 2024.

    Next month, the infamous Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act finally comes into force. Essentially, it allows the courts to jail individuals for up to seven years for saying, writing or posting any comment that is deemed to “stir up hatred” against a protected group, including disability, race, religion and, inevitably, transgender identity.

    Neither is England or Wales. Freedom in fact has been abolished in the West. Not by Vladimir Putin or even Xi. It is all home grown. Self-inflicted by the Political Elites.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/scotland-is-no-longer-a-free-country/

    1. Not draconian enough. We could face life if someone thinks that we are thinking of engaging in a bit of hateful behaviour.

  71. Farewell Leo Varadkar, no one will miss you
    Whatever may lie behind the decision, Ireland’s Taoiseach has plenty to resign over

    RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS
    20 March 2024 • 2:08pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/03/20/TELEMMGLPICT000371190139_17109429681310_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680

    Just days after returning from the US, where he strutted his stuff with Irish America on St Patrick’s Day, Leo Varadkar has dropped the bombshell of his resignation as Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael.

    The “political and personal” reasons he alluded to at a brief press conference are as yet unclear but, he told us, it was as good a time to resign as ever. “Politicians are human too”, he said, in a voice throbbing with emotion, which has started off the rumour mills in a torrent of speculation. Certainly, his decision seems to be a surprise to him and everyone else, but he says he’s staying on in the Irish parliament so some of the wilder speculation might be without foundation.

    Certainly, he has plenty to resign over. It was under his leadership that the government a couple of weeks ago lost two atrociously badly-framed referendums that were essentially pointless but were very Varadkar – designed to appeal to Dublin’s metropolitan elite. They horrified a large section of the population who saw them as an attack on the family, not least in taking the words woman and mother out of the constitution. The outcome was among the most humiliating referendum results ever for any government.

    Varadkar’s critics felt he was essentially a political lightweight without deep convictions, driven by fashion and the urge to show Ireland as a determinedly progressive little country.

    His first speech in the US was revealing of his ignorance about Ireland’s traditions and history. With Ireland in a crisis with immigration crisis, which has been badly handled, he explained at a Boston event for the Irish diaspora that St Patrick was “a migrant” and “a single, male, undocumented one”.

    “The story of St Patrick teaches us that migration is nothing new. It has always been part of our national story,” he said.

    Critics unkindly pointed out that young Patrick was a Briton brought to Ireland as a slave, and not through a process of regular migration.

    Words without substance. Classic Varadkar.

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

    William Corless
    1 HR AGO
    Varadkar and Trudeau two ultra woke fools elected by idiots and virtue signalers.
    One gone, hopefully another to go.

    1. Every time someone who has more than contributed to completely wrecking the life of the majority of the population they are meant to be serving breaks down in public and begs for understanding;
      I just have this overwhelming desire to get physical!

    2. Any mention of the Taoiseach always reminds me of the Drop The Dead Donkey sketch where there’s a breaking news story about the Irish Tea Shop. That was 25+ years ago of course, when laughing was still allowed.

      1. I always think of the staged camera shots in DTDD when I see a piece to camera on the news.
        Who was the presenter on DTDD?

        1. The “bloodstained” teddy or doll placed in the rubble with the doom-laden voice over. AlBeeb have it to a T.

        2. The “anchors” were Sally Smedley (Victoria Wicks) and Henry Davenport (David Swift).

    3. Comments on the Speccie’s article

      Lamia
      4 hours ago edited
      Good riddance to another divisive, destructive, raycist Globalist. The Irish referendum results were cheering, as has been witnessing the slow-dawning horrified awareness among an Irish public who thought Little Leo was simply grand for his sneers and threats at Britain… that he hates the Irish just as much as he hates the Brits. Still, and I don’t say it often: well done the Irish public.

      BTW, interesting the sudden and limp manner of his going, reminiscent of those other darlings of authoritarian Globalism Jacinda Ahern and Nicola Sturgeon. It’s as if someone’s decided ‘This puppet isn’t working anymore, either’, and cut their strings. Presumably he’ll be off to beg for a well-paid ‘job’ in Brussels or at a state-sponsored NGO.

      Jingleballix Lamia
      4 hours ago edited
      Not forgetting Rutte in Holland, Marin in Finland, Costa in Portugal, Andrews in Victoria………and, I predict, Trudeau in Canada.

      1. The latest poll predictions give Trudeau less than one percent chance of forming a government and greater than 99 percent chance to the conservatives.

        Trudeau appears to be dug in and refusing to go. Only a vote of no confidence could dislodge him and that’s not likely to happen. There again if the blackface groper sees a better for him offer, I am sure that he will be off.

    4. Strange how all the Pandemic leaders are clearing off one by one all of a sudden.
      Their work is done, I suppose.
      What is coming next?

    5. Radio 4’s PM programme has just had an Irish political commentator speaking about the creep: “People in Ireland who regarded themselves as liberal and progressive saw him as a right-wing reactionary.” There was nothing right-wing about his support for the changes to the Irish constitution that would have changed the definition of and undermined the family.

      There aren’t many possibilities for his resignation. One is that someone has something on him over the Enda Kenny affair and the end of Ireland/UK talks post-referendum, another is that he’s getting out before Ireland burns over immigration.

      A Tory PM resigns. BBC twats: “Fantastic! Woo-hoo!”
      Varadkar resigns from The Tea Shop. BBC twats: “Noooo…that’s so sad. The world is a darker place.”

  73. By jingo; an Effin Bogey Five!

    Wordle 1,005 5/6
    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜🟨⬜🟩⬜
    ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
    ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Par today.

      Wordle 1,005 4/6

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

    2. Par Here

      Wordle 1,005 4/6

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

    3. Just back from pub.

      Bit dodgy on the Wordle.
      Wordle 1,005 5/6

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

  74. It’s that Global Warming at it again. Project Fear lives:

    “Les Alpes-Maritimes et le Var sont-ils concernés par la baisse importante des températures?”

    (Are the Alpes-Maritimes and the Var affected by the significant drop in temperatures?)

    1. It’s possible to geo-lock online content so that it can’t be accessed in certain territories but I’ve no idea how it’s done and that would anyway block nottlers residing in Scotland?

        1. VPN? I’ve got one but don’t know how it works or how to use it. I thought I was purchasing website security.

          1. Don’t you just switch it on? I did have one once but really can no longer be bothered to be so secretive. It basically (AFAIR) relocates your IP address to a random foreign country so that you cannot be traced. I think it’s also *encrypted* (whatever that means)

          2. Don’t you just switch it on? I did have one once but really can no longer be bothered to be so secretive. It basically (AFAIR) relocates your IP address to a random foreign country so that you cannot be traced. I think it’s also *encrypted* (whatever that means)

        2. VPN? I’ve got one but don’t know how it works or how to use it. I thought I was purchasing website security.

      1. Unless it is deleted entirely I suspect it’s too late; and even then something will be archived somewhere to be dug up as appropriate.

        I HATE THE SNP AND ALL IT STANDS FOR.

        There, just to make my hatred clear.

        1. As said below, this looks like the “I am Spartacus” moment is upon us. They can’t extradite us all to the Scottish Caliphate to face cruel and unusual punishment, can they? Or we could volunteer for Rwanda, which looks relatively clean, tolerant and nice.

          1. And not as a group but as individuals, insisting on trial by jury, so that the whole system collapses.
            Unless every single case gets the same guilty verdict, I would assume there might be grounds to appeal that the guilty were wrongly convicted.
            If they wish to play lawfare, give it to them, with all guns blazing.

      2. They’re not attempting to prosecute twitter as a platform for example just the people that post what they consider “hate”
        So as the host you should be OK
        Me,on the other hand…………….

        1. They won’t prosecute Musk/Twitter/X because he has the resources to win or bankrupt them in legal fees.

      3. When you set the site up I was invited across by Stig, as I was a regular on DT articles, competitions and opinion pieces.

        I quickly put up a few blacks here by arguing my corner and when you asked for moderators I commented that I could not do the job as I would not ban people, nor take down posts, so was unsuitable.

        If there is a risk, I suspect that the moderators are as much on the hook as you might be.

        I would be honoured if you would make me a moderator, even though I remain the same on free speech, so that if it turns nasty I can stand with you and the other mods.

      4. We should get Hertslass to do her email juggling and coordinating to increase comms. There again, aren’t small units harder to detect?

      5. We should get Hertslass to do her email juggling and coordinating to increase comms. There again, aren’t small units harder to detect?

    4. So how’s that going to work in practice? Are they going to seek to extradite anyone breaching their foolish law to Scotland to answer for their ‘crime’? Or will they expect the home country of said ‘criminal’ to prosecute using Scots law?

    5. They’ve got to catch us first…or will they be making extradition requests to Interpol?

    2. I knew someone who used to cut his wife’s credit card limit to £100 whenever he went on a business trip.

      1. How repellent. Why should he have control of his wife’s credit card limit in the first place. Sounds an utter POS.

        1. She was probably wholly financially dependent on him and was not actually able to pay the bills herself.

          2. Oh, absolutely. The poor woman probably stayed at home to bring up children and look after the domestic side of the relationship. Nonetheless, it’s never a good idea to be entirely dependent on anyone.

          1. Crikey, JD, you’re going for it! Someone I was involved with workwise recently, when he found out to whom I am connected, remarked that one of my close (but dead) relations was known as someone who could buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot and still make a profit. A bit rude!

        1. I suspect it was one of those husband and wife cards and he was the main cardholder and bill payer.
          She did like spending money!

  78. Weird… just got notification of 45 unread comments, and they start with Johnny Norfolk 8 hours ago… WTF?

        1. You make it sound like pitch forks and burning torches, JD. Maybe that time is approaching

          1. They fight with words behind backs, implied threats and lies while posturing as men of God.

  81. As Discurse has gone mad – I shall call it a day – and expect this comment will appear five hours ago.

    Have a splendid evening.

    A demain.

  82. Nope, not even after reloading… Disqus is feeding “new” stuff I read this morning.
    See all Y’all tomorrow. Bis später!

    1. Well, the silly woman walked straight into that one didn’t she? Yet she represents all the people in her ward.

  84. It would seem that Police Scotland have just committed a hate crime against JK Rowling…

    Police accused of parodying JK Rowling with ‘Jo’, who thinks trans people should go to gas chambers

    Scottish force invents the fictional gender-critical character to illustrate a ‘scenario’ at session on hate crime

    Daniel Sanderson, SCOTTISH CORRESPONDENT
    20 March 2024 • 6:02pm

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/police-accused-of-attacking-jk-rowling-at-lgbt-event/

    1. I bet they were really chuffed and thought they were being really clever with that. A bit like that Oxfam (think it was Oxfam) advert with the thinly disguised character looking like Rowling.

    2. Marion Calder, a director at For Women Scotland, the campaign group, said the materials were “clearly trying to create a link with JK Rowling” and that it was “deeply concerning” to see “Jo” quickly leap from “reasonable statements” to the Holocaust.

      Trans activists often claim there is a link between the gender-critical movement and far-Right ideology, and compare those who do not accept that trans women are women to racists.

      “This suggests that gender-critical women with a high profile endorse a mass extinction, which is frankly bonkers, and sends a message to police that perfectly sane women have been radicalised,” Ms Calder said.

      “These woke training sessions given by activists present highly contested statements as fact and would leave officers tasked with enforcing hate crime legislation with a warped view of the issues.”

      Kath Murray, of the Murray Blackburn Mackenzie policy analysis group, said the materials added weight to “existing concerns about the undue influence of activist groups within Police Scotland”.

      She added: “Material jointly presented by the LGBT Staff Association and TIE is, at points, misleading and puerile. It suggests a cross-over between gender critical views and Nazism, which it attributes to a character named ‘Jo’.”

      It is not an exaggeration or an act of prejudice to describe some ‘trans activists’ as dangerous. These people will willingly suppress debate and use the law to do it, aided and abetted by a political class that supports statutory censorship of opinion.

      1. There are some historic details on Wings, including photographic and internet material, which clearly show just how deranged and perverted some of these individuals are, particularly those embedded in the ruling (though unelected) “Green” Party, which might as well re-dub itself as the child abuse party.

    3. They’re not even bothering to hide it now! What a disgraceful bunch of thick-headed bigoted bastards! Doubtless the result of internal factions within Macplod!

      1. That is remarkably perceptive. 40 years is commonly regarded as being equivalent to a generation.

      2. I’ve never read 1984 but I see so many references to the text, I almost feel that I have.

  85. It would seem that Police Scotland have just committed a hate crime against JK Rowling…

    Police accused of parodying JK Rowling with ‘Jo’, who thinks trans people should go to gas chambers

    Scottish force invents the fictional gender-critical character to illustrate a ‘scenario’ at session on hate crime

    Daniel Sanderson, SCOTTISH CORRESPONDENT
    20 March 2024 • 6:02pm

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/police-accused-of-attacking-jk-rowling-at-lgbt-event/

  86. The SNP surely belong to Soros in view of Nicola Sturgeon welcoming Soros’ Institute for New Economic Thinking to Scotland in 2017. Especially as SNP policy is identical to Soros’ policies including the new speech laws…

    https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2017/10/sturgeon-opens-conference-in-edinburgh/

    This guy, Robert Johnson, with Nicola Sturgeon was Soros’ #1 currency trader in 1992……..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ffe0a08b8aa0f91dd7a2755bf29448dae35219aa50dad6487a8c85065e2993c5.jpg

  88. See a couple of nonentities have resigned from the all male Garrick club, because they were criticised for not being inclusive by some random grifter.
    I could not for the life of me wonder why they didn’t just tell her to sod off? Considering she is the sort of person who probably supports black only theatre productions to protect them from “white gaze”, she’s got a real cheek.
    Can we start a club that saves us from “woke gaze”? It’s about time.

    1. The whole notion of a club is to exclude non-members. Is anyone kicking off over all Women’s clubs? Well done Cultural Marxism, there’s nothing they don’t want to ruin.

    1. I am disgusted with the Universal Fashion Accessory du Jour. What is the matter with these people? Are they really so shallow? Are they perpetually stoned?

      2. Even in these woke times, it is baffling to see parlimentarians supporting an organisation that has used rape, killing and kidnapping against civilians as little as 5 months ago.

    2. Recognising them as murdering, thieving, terrorist scum, who should suffer what they propose for the Jews?
      No?
      Thought not.

  90. Agree. In the past there was little option for some women – unless, of course, they went on the game.

    2. What an absolute excrescence is this individual. Wait ’til the rest of them crawl out when you eejits have elected Starmer and co..

      Let’s punish Israel for being attacked – raped, murdered and tortured, don’t forget – by foaming maniacs. ” The Jews asked for it, it’s their fault, they must be denied self-defence and support. After all, they’re Jews”. Seems to be the Leftist rationale. And, don’t forget, that is the Cool “take”. Wear your keffiyeh with Pride.

        1. Not necessarily! You have a choice if convicted of homosexuality: a) Tall building rapid descent b) hanged from tall crane or (popular in Iran) c) Have surgery and be sexually reassigned to “live as a woman for the rest of your life”.

          Choice c) is allegedly very popular and a huge industry in Iran.

          Ring any bells?

          1. I remember seeing a documentary about the sex change industry in Iran – it seemed to be all one-way, MTF.

        2. Not necessarily! You have a choice if convicted of homosexuality: a) Tall building rapid descent b) hanged from tall crane or (popular in Iran) c) Have surgery and be sexually reassigned to “live as a woman for the rest of your life”.

          Choice c) is allegedly very popular and a huge industry in Iran.

          Ring any bells?

    3. And will he demand to know how much aid to Gaza was spent by Hamas on tunnels, arms and ammunition, not to mention making its leaders extremely wealthy?

    1. “My mum, Lynn, is having a conversation with a mona monkey overlooking a crater lake in Grenada. It’s an old-world primate”

      I hope the author realises that that old world monkey was transported with the slaves and will be asking for reparations pretty soon.

  94. Re my earlier post about my hatred of the SNP

    Just to be clear:

    I do not think there is such a thing as Islamophobia, any rational person who looks at it and its tenets is right to fear it, it is a God-forsaken religion of conquest, its “prophet” was an opportunistic warlord with deviant tendencies and a hatred of all who would not submit, the majority of his modern followers are similar.

    Transexuals can call themselves whatever they wish, they are not women/men and the male to female pretenders should not be permitted to compete in female sports, nor use female facilities.

    Affirmative action is a mistake and harms the beneficiaries long term. Blacks did NOT invent and build all the things the woke claim.

    Diversity is not our strength, it is a disaster that people are waking up to too slowly

    Slavery was universal and the British did as much as anyone to halt it, even though it still exists around the world

    Some racial characteristics really do give advantages and similarly they really do have disadvantages, be they physical or mental.

    Socialism today is a far greater risk to mankind than ever the far right might be.

    Climate change science is anything but settled and in the main is being used to spread fear, steal money and harm people as a whole with a globalist elite benefiting from its claims. (Its the sun you stupid bastards)

    The Covid pandemic was not as sold and the drugs to cure it are/will be established to be a crime against humanity.

    If I’ve forgotten anything, I apologise, but that should be enough to be going on with you SNP morons, prosecute away.

    I HATE YOU WITH A PASSION

      1. It’s now in the public domain, do as you wish.

        But if royalties appear I’d appreciate a share!

    1. Aye, he’s been done for exposure afore the Laird up at the big hoose more than once, apparently.

  98. The only part with which I would disagree – Britain is the only nation that never endorsed slavery (it was never legal here) and that expended enormous blood and treasure to eradicate it throughout the world (particularly in the Americas). We only finished paying for the abolition of this appalling trade in human beings in the last decade.

    Slavery still persist in parts of Africa and the Moslem world – also in China.

    2. I refer you to serfdom, slavery by a different name and perfectly legal. And I did write:

      even though it still exists around the world

      1. I take your point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that serfs were bought and sold, as such?

        1. I don’t know, but I suspect they could have been a part of a marriage dowry, which would be similar.

          1. There are proper historians on here who will clarify, sos. My point was that it was never a “thing” here that you could own, buy or sell another human being, at least not in Christian times, and as soon as it was spotted that it was happening around the world it was both officially outlawed here and resoundingly stamped upon around the world.

            Why we are expected to feel uniquely guilty is baffling.

          2. We are expected to feel uniquely guilty because it serves ‘their’ purpose to tie our hands, whether or not it is true is a different matter. I should add that I have no sense of guilt whatsoever at all; I hope there are many, many more like me.

          3. I agree re the guilt, but the mere fact that it had to be outlawed rather suggests it was happening.
            I hope your comment:

            There are proper historians on here who will clarify,

            wasn’t suggesting I was ignorant of history. I would place my knowledge of history well within the upper quartile in most groups.

          4. No, I wasn’t casting nasturtiums on you, sos! I just get a bit misty these days, and it’s not my forte (the detail).

          6. Well, yes, wimmin were chattels until much more recently – do we really want to go there?

        2. I think they ‘belonged’ to their lords and had no freedom to move out of his employ or area.
          Hence if serfs escaped and managed to hide successfully in a town or city for a year and a day, they became free.

        3. I think they ‘belonged’ to their lords and had no freedom to move out of his employ or area.
          Hence if serfs escaped and managed to hide successfully in a town or city for a year and a day, they became free.

    3. William 1 banned chattel slavery. The Mansfield Judgement of 1772 simply confirmed that chattel slavery had been illegal ever since then. Just as the Boers began the Great Trek to leave British South Africa so they could continue to enslave Blacks, there is an argument that American slave owners supported US Independence to preserve slavery in the Colonies, fearing that the Mansfield Judgement meant its abolition in British North America.
      Serfdom had been instituted under the Wessex Saxon dynasty well before the Conquest as well.

      1. More accurately the Boers, who were largely Dutch, actually imported slaves from their colonies in the East who went on to become the people known as the Cape Coloureds. Few Africans indigenous to South Africa were enslaved although some were sent there from other parts of Africa via captured slave ships or from trading with local slavers.

        1. Interesting. I read a book on the period and it described the Trekking Boers as taking their African slaves with them, naming Xhosa especially.

          1. You are right that the Boers left the Cape when the British banned slavery which was behind both Boer Wars. The main reason that the Boers imported slaves from the colonies in the east and sometimes other parts of Africa was that the indigenous Africans refused to work for them and were also quite war-like. The Xhosa tribe does come from the Cape so any indigenous slaves would logically come from that tribe.

    4. The Anglo-Saxons had slaves.
      The Normans banned slavery but created serfdom.
      I doubt the average Anglo-Saxon slave in 1065 noticed a difference when he became a serf in 1067.

      1. I suppose I’m more thinking about the more modern (post c17th) stuff that seems to exercise America and certain UK activists so very much, to the detriment of us all

    5. The Anglo-Saxons had slaves.
      The Normans banned slavery but created serfdom.
      I doubt the average Anglo-Saxon slave in 1065 noticed a difference when he became a serf in 1067.

    2. Ooh, err, Peta was the authority re cookery and fine dining on the BTL comments at the Spectator. I live in hope of an invitation to dinner at Peta’s, yum!

      1. That’s interesting, assuming “our” Phizzee didn’t post there under a different name it will be good if they both debate food and recipes here.
        Phizzee’s are well worth following up.

        1. And Peta is an incredibly good host by the sounds of things. She really enjoys the whole process and loves feeding people. Perhaps they could have a host-off? We could visit both and give our scores?

      2. That’s interesting, assuming “our” Phizzee didn’t post there under a different name it will be good if they both debate food and recipes here.
        Phizzee’s are well worth following up.

          2. OK, but without a reason to go, such as an invitation (hint, hint)…

            And would you also be inviting Bobby Bidochon and CARTER?

          3. Of course – they would be top of my list, and 4Gs to help keep the peace🤣😁😆

          5. If 4Gs accepts my invitation that would be almost too tempting to resist…almost 🤣 The pool could get quite crowded 😁

          6. But it would certainly be an evening to remember and it would try your hosting skills to the limit!

          9. I’d be relying on you – I could steer the conversation to knitting patterns, I’m sure 4G would find it riveting 😁

          10. Yes, she is a knitter. TBH, I did have some really good interactions with her (I’m a horsey person but I didn’t know about the Canadian island with horses (Sable Island) until Elinor told me about it. Oddly enough, she always deleted these late night innocuous interactions

          11. I expect so that she could attack you later, which she did, and you wouldn’t be able to defend yourself by saying that you had actually extended a hand of friendship to her. But you don’t need my amateur attempts at psychoanalysis! I’m off to bed now Essdee – early start in the morning, for me anyway 🙂 Night, sleep well!

          12. Yes, she also liked to edit her posts so it looked like anyone who had upticked the original post was agreeing with whatever deranged nonsense she had edited the post to reflect. She was a bugger, but I did enjoy her nonsense.
            I absolutely recognise that she could be an absolute cow, but I do think there were reasons for her being like that. I remember her telling me about her lonely life with a bottle of wine and her small dog for company – very sad, but deleted almost immediately.

          13. I didn’t know about the editing trick! I am sure there were reasons for her being the way she was but the potential had to be there in the first place for her environment/circumstances to bring it out, especially to the extent it came out in her. I am a firm believer some really wicked people are born that way and no matter what their circumstances will follow their destiny, though without knowing her I couldn’t say if she was one of them. I do remember though, reading an exchange she had with a US family lawyer in which she said that she had lost everything in her divorce including her children because the judge believed her “narcissistic, psychopathic husband” and not her. That too disappeared pretty smartly, but judging from the way she treated people BTL it came as no surprise!

    3. Ooh, err, Peta was the authority re cookery and fine dining on the BTL comments at the Spectator. I live in hope of an invitation to dinner at Peta’s, yum!

  102. Has anyone seen anything from Grizzly since his shingles diagnosis?
    I hope he’s OK

    1. I’m surprised you didn’t write:’Has anyone spotted Grizz on here lately….”

      1. From the Urban dictionary;

        Grizz
        Someone who likes to control the conversation, and pretends to have extensive knowledge on any, and all subjects.
        Dood don’t interrupt my conversation, you’re such a GRIZZ!

    2. I do too. It is on his head and I felt that he was taking it far too lightly, that is probably the most dangerous place to have it, but he said he’s seen the doc so what do I know?

  103. Has anyone seen anything from Grizzly since his shingles diagnosis?
    I hope he’s OK

  104. I used to post with another disqus account but I deleted it in anticipation of more draconian laws re ‘hate speech’. I created this new account shortly after registering with the new Spectator comment system. I have seen some Spectator posters here and I have noticed that they are more ‘real’ when posting here. I actually feel like I’m ‘seeing’ the real person – in a good way.

      1. And thank goodness for it opopanax! I used to look in here but never posted. I do visit other disqus supporting sites, but increasingly I find myself gravitating to here. You are one of the reasons I do so. I always enjoyed your posts at the Speccie, but here, I feel that you have let loose!

        1. Bless you, SD, and the same to you with knobs on : ) : ) : ) It’s a delight to see you!

    3. Oppo is a lot more badly behaved here and her language has deteriorated shockingly. 🙂

  105. Evening, all. Weather back to normal here today; cold, dully and raining. That means that what I didn’t get done yesterday has to be put off for the foreseeable future. Very frustrating!

    If you ask me (which you probably wouldn’t), Labour lacks the nous to know what reforms are necessary, never mind putting them into effect.

  106. Oh Goody! The DT reports:

    The minister for common sense has claimed tens of thousands of pounds in Parliamentary expenses for renting a flat in London, despite her husband owning a property a mile away.

    Esther McVey, who became a minister again last year and has committed to tackling Whitehall waste, has received financial support for renting a property in the capital that she shares with her husband, fellow Tory MP Philip Davies.

    The minister has appeared on official records for the flat in Westminster for the last two years. During this period, she received £39,000. However, it is understood that the couple have been claiming expenses on the property since 2017, which means they could have received as much as £250,000 from the taxpayer.
    While the arrangement is not against the rules, questions have been raised about whether the claims represent value for money because Mr Davies owns a flat in Waterloo, which is about a 25-minute walk from the other property and is rented out.

    1. Let’s guess:
      Are they both claiming for the same accommodations?
      Answers on the sharp end of a needle…

    2. I remember in the late 1970s there was a move to build GP Surgeries with two examination rooms one either side of the GP’s consulting room so that as one patient was getting undressed prior to being examined another patient having been examined could be getting dressed in the other exam room room. Thus saving time between patients.
      I suppose these days with AI & telephone consultations that’s no longer necessary….?

          2. Smoking is allowed in my house, but not in bedrooms or during meals. Cigars offered with coffee and digestifs :)) Anyone who doesn’t like it is welcome to go outside, especially if it is raining 🤣

          4. We’ll wait until the weather gets a bit warmer then we can eat outside and miscreants can be chucked in the pool 😆

    2. I am led to believe that there quite a few Nottlers who inhabit, or have inhabited, that strange country…

      1. Someone has to…
        On a positive note, I live about 15mins drive from Bob of Bonsall. He sounds like a very capable chap who might be able to help me out with some advice re good local services here as I am a recent arrival in this area.

    3. I am led to believe that there quite a few Nottlers who inhabit, or have inhabited, that strange country…

  111. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/the-civil-service-is-making-it-impossible-to-stop-the-boats/

    The article discusses – fairly obviously – the government’s problems with deporting criminal invaders.

    Yet it completely misses the point. It isn’t the civil service. It’s Tories refusing to repeal the laws that would mean we could very simply just deport whoever we wanted. The cvil service would no doubt fight that but we gave the government the power to do this with Brexit. They refuse to use it. Rwanda is a fiddle. The government could just repeal the HRA, migration pact and modern slavery acts. It doesn’t want to.

    Now whether that’s to chain us to the EU, political cowardice or whatever is not good enough. We gave them the power. They refuse to so what we want.

    That, folks, is the fundamental problem with democracy. Defeat in the Lords is irrelevant. Civil service hinderance is irrelevant. The abject refusal to do as they’re instructed is the problem.

    I’d also add that the government applied the parliament act to remove scrutiny of the net zero scam, but seems to love the slow, delayed, expensive procedural hassle of consent for things it isn’t really interested in.

  112. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/the-civil-service-is-making-it-impossible-to-stop-the-boats/

    The article discusses – fairly obviously – the government’s problems with deporting criminal invaders.

    Yet it completely misses the point. It isn’t the civil service. It’s Tories refusing to repeal the laws that would mean we could very simply just deport whoever we wanted. The cvil service would no doubt fight that but we gave the government the power to do this with Brexit. They refuse to use it. Rwanda is a fiddle. The government could just repeal the HRA, migration pact and modern slavery acts. It doesn’t want to.

    Now whether that’s to chain us to the EU, political cowardice or whatever is not good enough. We gave them the power. They refuse to so what we want.

    That, folks, is the fundamental problem with democracy. Defeat in the Lords is irrelevant. Civil service hinderance is irrelevant. The abject refusal to do as they’re instructed is the problem.

    I’d also add that the government applied the parliament act to remove scrutiny of the net zero scam, but seems to love the slow, delayed, expensive procedural hassle of consent for things it isn’t really interested in.

  113. Well, chums, that’s me off to bed, now. Good night, sleep well, and see you all tomorrow.

  114. Western civilisation is being driven to oblivion by the false prophets of ‘diversity’

    The woke revolutionaries reject real equality in favour of a permanent revolution against fairness and merit

    ALLISTER HEATH • 20 March 2024 • 7:10pm

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/844db5312810dfbdc2a821192308e4caa5c7883658ff8f53e1194be3541ab87f.jpg
    CREDIT: Natalia Campos/Getty
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    If you still believe that not everything should be about race and gender, I have bad news. Our side has been routed. While the Tories were asleep at the wheel, a new generation of woke activists seized control of most of our institutions, fomenting grievance, division and discord, undermining our economy, trashing our culture and costing the taxpayer millions.

    The “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI) movement is the wokerati’s provisional wing, the vehicle by which critical race theory, trans extremism and other post-modern garbage is taking over our lives. Many companies, as well as the public sector, have embraced DEI, wrongly believing that it demonstrates their anti-racism, and have tasked HR departments with indoctrinating employees in its precepts. Their efforts were condemned by Kemi Badenoch in an excellent article this week. DEI has failed to achieve any tangible benefits, but the waste of money is the least of our problems.

    Like other far-Left political projects, DEI is at once staggeringly low-grade and deeply Orwellian, perverting the meaning of words to bamboozle. If it sought to combat genuine racism, as the concept is commonly understood, I would be an enthusiastic supporter. I crave a world where race is irrelevant, and enthusiastically subscribe to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” vision, where he hoped that his children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. Such a nation – meritocratic, fair, peaceful, prosperous, democratic and colour-blind – is what every Western polity should aspire to become.

    But it is not what the woke revolutionaries are working towards. They reject King’s vision as naive at best, or complicit at worst: for them, racism is inherent to Western society, intrinsic to a world of “patriarchal” families, private ownership, free enterprise, the rule of law and free speech. It cannot not exist. Facts demonstrating that we are becoming more tolerant, marrying people of different races at record rates, or that many ethnic minorities earn more, on average, than white people are brushed away: to the woke stormtroopers, racism is axiomatically omnipresent.

    By definition, no progress can ever be made, society is just as racist as it ever was. Woke campaigners believe such pathologies are intractable features of Western nations – but not of those in other parts of the world – even when nobody actively discriminates against anybody. Studying and working hard is deemed to be a new opiate of the masses: social mobility is impossible for members of “oppressed” groups.

    Racism, to these semantically challenged activists, is an invisible power structure that can only be smashed via total revolution, by overthrowing capitalism, the “imperialist” international system and by imposing a gender revolution. DEI is one tool to achieve that, by transforming institutions from within and brainwashing employees.

    DEI is only interested in racial or gender diversity. It doesn’t really care about poverty, class or geography. It loathes diversity of thought; it preaches an imbecilic groupthink that can never be questioned. It denies the scientific method. Its more extreme North American proponents occasionally even reject the idea that 2+2=4, claiming it implies “covert white supremacy”, the sort of lunacy that would have made even the Soviet pseudo-agronomist Trofim Lysenko blush.

    The woke demand performative adherence to dogma, even when it is evidently contrary to reality, hence “Gays for Palestine” chanting pro Hamas and pro-Houthi slogans, even though both terror organisations are brutally homophobic, whereas Tel Aviv celebrates gay pride. Eliminating objective reality is every tyrant’s dream: citizens can no longer judge the validity of what they are being told.

    Woke ideology encourages vicious discrimination against groups it deems to be oppressors – white heterosexual “cis” men, gender-critical women and the “white adjacent”. DEI, as practised on US campuses in particular, is terrifyingly anti-Semitic, deeming Jews to be an oppressor group and Israel a settler colonial state. Other successful minorities – such as Asian Americans – are falling foul of DEI and suing universities for discrimination; where American leads, Britain surely follows.

    Crucially, woke advocates believe in “equity”, not “equality”. They don’t think individuals should be treated equally before the law, don’t support equality of opportunity, fail to endorse the presumption of innocence and don’t truly believe in individual rights. Modern civilisation embraces Bonaparte’s famous maxim “la carrière est ouverte aux talents”, jobs are open to the talented, without distinction of birth or fortune.

    Instead, DEI advocates group “justice” that is at once unjust and inequitable, based on confiscation and redistribution. People don’t matter, only aggregate statistics. Individual merit counts for nought: DEI judges people solely on their membership of a tribe based on racial or sexual characteristics. This is a reversal of centuries of Western progress towards individual dignity, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals and a readoption of pre-modern group politics.

    DEI is horrifically exclusionary, seeking to cancel anybody who fails to pretend to agree: it embraces the permanent inquisition, the auto-da-fé, excommunication and (metaphorically) burning heretics at the stake. Staff are “encouraged” to take the knee, to wear special lanyards, to share pronouns. Employees are divided into “allies” and “adversaries”, with the “good” in-group pitted against the “bad” out-group. “Micro-aggressors” are denounced.

    Companies are being turned into arms of the Left, no longer focused on the profit motive but on achieving politicised aims. The Civil Service, having jettisoned impartiality, promotes controversial ideas, spending a fortune on useless schemes.

    Why hasn’t Rishi Sunak acted? This catastrophe has unfolded over 14 years of Conservative government, and Keir Starmer will double down on the woke revolution. The Tories, now and in Opposition, should go to war with DEI. They should enforce a prohibition on all forms of discrimination, including against white men. They should ban and eliminate all DEI jobs across the public sector and in every university, museum and state-funded organisation. They should legislate against woke capital to protect for-profit capitalism. But for now, prepare for everything to get worse before it gets better.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/western-civilisation-oblivion-false-prophets-diversity/

    Allister Heath speaks of King’s noble idea but forgets that we’re dealing with the human species, inherently tribal. Tribes might absorb incomers and influences but if they feel threatened by numbers, they’ll fight, especially to defend their space, their patch. ‘Wokeists’ are working against this inherently human condition, wherein a sense of being and place comes before ideas. This should be their downfall but when will the Somewheres rise up to put down these Anywheres?

    1. People forget that we are animals first and foremost, clever animals, but animals nonetheless. All animals are territorial and have in-group preference. TPTB are seeking to eradicate our natural and evolved survival strategies.

          1. I tried to work in ‘Violent’ but the best I could come up with was HAVITT – Hierarchical, Acquisitive, Violent, Inherently Tribal and Territorial – but I kept getting a vision of Peter Kay…

          2. I work in forensic mental health, violence is par for the course.
            Your acronym works when when applied to the wider society.

        2. There are non-hierarchical and non-acquisitive cultures in the world (ones where leaders are selected on fitness to lead and there is no culture of conquering others).

  115. Friday eve tomorrow – thank goodness! Work sure gets in the way of life, albeit it pays for it.

  116. Scotland is no longer a free country

    Leaked material from Police Scotland suggests a new law will target performers, including comedians, for “stirring up hatred”. It’s insanity

    TOM HARRIS • 20 March 2024 • 2:59pm

    At the dawn of devolution, its supporters predicted that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly could pilot innovative legislation which would show the rest of the country how it could be done. Westminster, with its backwardness and institutional conservatism, would be exposed as the dinosaur it was. Scotland, in particular, would lead the way.

    And so it has proved, though not in the way that was once expected. In fact, if Westminster were looking for inspiration on how to turn England into a regressive backwater, where freedom of thought and freedom of speech were deemed to be threats to the state and to the very fabric of society, then it certainly could learn a lot from Scotland’s experience.

    Next month, the infamous Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act finally comes into force. Essentially, it allows the courts to jail individuals for up to seven years for saying, writing or posting any comment that is deemed to “stir up hatred” against a protected group, including disability, race, religion and, inevitably, transgender identity.

    While the Bill was making its way through the Scottish Parliament, the then Justice minister, one Humza Yousaf, amended the draft legislation to remove the risk that directors or promoters of performances could be charged with an offence.

    Despite this, leaked training material produced from Police Scotland suggests the force will specifically target performers, with officers advised that offending material could be communicated “through public performance of a play”.

    It risks making Scotland one of the most censorious in Europe.

    Trans activists in particular are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of wreaking revenge on their vocal political opponents. J.K. Rowling was recently reported to Northumbria Police by trans activist India Willoughby after the TV presenter was allegedly “misgendered” by the Harry Potter author, who referred to Willoughby as “he”. Perhaps surprisingly, officers in Northumbria chose not to act, but activists have already been encouraging each other to make full use of the SNP’s new legislation to bring Rowling, who is a resident of Edinburgh, to heel.

    The threshold that complaints must meet is that anything said by the accused would be deemed “by a reasonable person” to be threatening or inciting of hatred. But in today’s culture wars, “reasonable people” are hard to identify. The judgment, ultimately, becomes a subjective one, and any law that hinges on anyone’s, even a judge’s, subjectivity, is a bad law.

    On the one hand, there is nothing surer to bring to a swift end both this abysmal law and the SNP’s appalling stewardship of Scotland than to see a famous and beloved author – not to mention philanthropist – prosecuted in the Scottish courts because of her insistence on saying out loud biological facts that everyone else acknowledges.

    But in the meantime, Scotland risks a grim, dark period of cultural restrictions, where England-based actors, comedians and playwrights fear to head north of the border because of the pervasiveness of our self-appointed, volunteer Stasi and the willingness of Scottish police to waste everyone’s time by investigating hurt feelings while burglaries and car thefts go unaddressed.

    For example, no “reasonable person” would find fault in Ricky Gervais’s recent routines, broadcast on Netflix, making fun of trans activists’ insistence that we must respect the pronouns of male rapists who identify as women. But after the beginning of next month, who would seriously dismiss the prospect of such a performance becoming the subject of a complaint to the police – a complaint that is at least likely to be investigated?

    The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, once at the cutting edge of risqué and, yes, offensive drama and humour, has already started to suffer from the disapproval of our hypersensitive cultural overlords. How much worse, how much more toothless and anodyne will the Fringe become once the new Hate Crime Act takes effect and sends a chilling effect through every actor and comedian with something controversial to say?

    George Orwell has been cited too often whenever governments are deemed to have gone too far on restricting civil rights, whether on the right to protest or the right to freedom of expression, to the extent that analogies with Nineteen Eighty-Four have become devalued. But this new Act richly deserves all the criticism it is already receiving from free speech advocates. Scotland, thanks to devolution, has created a dystopia in which true freedom of speech can now only be practiced at the cost of one’s career and even one’s freedom.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/scotland-is-no-longer-a-free-country/

    1. BTL:
      Susan Lundie

      I am English. In 1969, I married a Scot who, with a number of his university cohort of fellow engineers, had moved south for work. In the months before and the nearly 55 years since our marriage, I have visited frequently and learnt much about Scotland and its very mixed heritage and history. It is a country and a people I have come to love and feel much commonality with.

      The one thing that has been a constant amazement to me, and of pride by association, is how a nation of largely poverty-stricken people managed to get so many of themselves educated and then went on to develop ideas which changed not only Britain but many aspects of life in the rest of the world. Considering its size and population, Scotland has punched way above its weight in the fields of philosophy, political thinking, science, engineering, the arts, literature, medicine, the armed forces and education, among many others.

      They’ve also endured disasters and privation, some of it their own making, but the Highland Clearances were evil, and the financial investment losses due to Darien Venture at the beginning of the eighteenth century plunged much of Lowland Scotland into economic poverty. This present disaster of the SNP which has destroyed and beggared Scotland at their own expense, and much financed by the UK, has initiated a whole new level of governmental and authoritarian evil and now, with these supposed “Hate Laws”, exceeds anything else the Scots have done to themselves over the centuries. For goodness’ sake Scotland, save yourselves, use this moment to trigger a new Scottish Enlightenment because the alternative is truly appalling.

      R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024

    2. BTL:
      Susan Lundie

      I am English. I married a Scot in 1969, who with a number of his university cohort of fellow engineers had moved south for work. In the months before and the nearly 55 years since our marriage I have visited frequently and learnt much about Scotland and it’s very mixed heritage and history. It is a country and a people I have come to love and feel much commonality with.

      The one thing that has been a constant amazement to me, and of pride by association, is how a nation of largely poverty-stricken people managed to get so many of themselves educated and then went on to develop ideas which changed not only Britain, but many aspects of life in the rest of the world. Considering its size and population, Scotland has punched way above its weight in the fields of philosophy, political thinking, science, engineering, the arts, literature, medicine, the armed forces and education, among many others.

      They’ve also, endured disasters and privation, some of it their own making, but the Highland Clearances were evil, and the financial investment losses due to Darien Venture at the beginning of the eighteenth century plunged much of Lowland Scotland into economic poverty. This present disaster of the SNP which has destroyed and beggared Scotland at their own expense, and much financed by the UK, has initiated a whole new level of governmental and authoritarian evil, and now with these supposed “Hate Laws”, exceeds anything else the Scots have done to themselves over the centuries. For goodness’ sake Scotland, save yourselves, use this moment to trigger a new Scottish Enlightenment because the alternative is truly appalling.

      R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024

    3. It’s not insanity. It’s communism, fascism, call it what you want, the effects are always the same. Power concentrated in the hands of the few, which is just how they like it.
      By being willfully blind and leading people down a false path, the Telegraph is part of the problem.

    4. Can someone please clarify for me whether it would be a ‘Hate Crime’ to rename Scotland what it has become – Dystopia ?

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