Wednesday 24 July: Too many licence-fee payers still get too little in return from the BBC

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

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612 thoughts on “Wednesday 24 July: Too many licence-fee payers still get too little in return from the BBC”

  2. Good morrow, Gentlefolk, today’s (recycled) story

    Two Scotsmen go to Hell

    A demon approaches the devil and says "Dark lord! Two men from Glasgow in Scotland have been sent here. What should be done with them?"

    The devil says "Glaswegians? Their kind are normally very friendly, helpful and honest, so we do not see many such men in my dark domain… Hang them in a cage over the lake of fire for now and I shall check on them later."

    But when the devil flew up to the cage to check on the Scotsmen, he found them happily lounging around with their shirts off.

    "What is the meaning of this?" The devil cried. "You're supposed to be in torment!"

    The Glaswegians looked surprised "Naw" they said "it's pure quality taps aff weather here man. It's no drab an' dreek like Scotland, ye ken that way?"

    Fuming, the devil flew to the great thermostat of Hell and cranked it all the way to the top. And the next day, the temperature was so high that even the demons were sweating, the stones of hell were melting and the flames from the lake of fire were leaping higher than ever before.

    So the devil was surprised when he visited the Scotsmen and found that they had somehow procured plastic lawn furniture and Buckfast tonic wine.

    Raising a glass to the devil, one of the Scotsmen said "Hey big man! If I'd known it was so lovely an warm doon here, I'd've done a whole lot more sinning! Weather's always shite in Glasgae. Always freezin' ma nuts off, ye ken?"

    "I see." The devil replied, smiling though clenched teeth "your dismal country has given you a great love of heat. The hotter it is, the happier you are. Well, we'll see about that."
    So saying, he flew to the great thermostat of Hell once more, but this time, he turned it all the way down.

    The next day, the lake of fire was frozen solid for the first time, sinners were frozen in blocks of ice and demons huddled in corners for warmth, their teeth chattering.
    But when the devil visited the Scotsmen, he found them jumping for joy, tearfully cheering "Scotland! SCOTLAND!!!"

    The devil's jaw dropped. "What? Why? How? I burn you and you are happy! I freeze you and you celebrate! What is wrong with you?"

    One of Glaswegians turned back and said "Is it no feckin' obvious ye daft bastart? Hell's frozen ower! Scotland's won the world cup!"

    1. Like it!
      Went offshore Tunisia with a couple of Glaswegians, back in the 1990s. Daft bastards grabbed a couple of plastic chairs, tops off, and rode the whole way sitting in the sun on the cargo deck of the supply vessel, so the image from your joke is a real one! BUT: The sunburn they had was enough to keep the fires of Hell going for quite a while. Daft buggers. No dust out in the sea, pale Weegie skin that had barely ever caught a ray before, and totally open sky…

  4. Morning, all Y'all.
    Raining – still or again, don't know which, and I don't care, either. A spot of dry would be useful.

  6. Britain must be ready for war in three years, says Army chief. 24 July 2024.

    Britain must be ready to fight a major war in three years, the new head of the Army has said, as he warned Russia would seek revenge on the West for aiding Ukraine.

    General Sir Roly Walker, Chief of the General Staff, said the Army needed to rapidly modernise to double its ability to kill the enemy by 2027 and triple it by the end of the decade.

    In his first major statement since assuming the role last month, the former SAS officer said Britain must be able to “deter or fight a war in three years”.

    Is this an advance booking? How can you possibly arrange a war unless you are going to start it? All this said the UK cannot possibly fight Russia alone, if only for reasons of geography. We would need to cross Europe just to get close and we need a friendly state to work from. In other words its nonsense, except as an appeal for more funds.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/23/britain-ready-war-three-years-army-chief-warns/

    1. "…an appeal for more funds" and conscription: how else could you double your ability to kill the enemy in three years? Advanced technology will take time to develop and with de-industrialisation the surreptitious plan for the UK how will the armed forces cope?

    2. We already are at war.
      With an internal enemy imported by British governments for 20+ years.

      1. I'd re-phrase that: 'We are already at war – the enemy is our own government.'

        1. No, most certainly not!
          Royal School of Military Engineering and home to the Depot Regiment of the Sappers.

          1. Sorry BoB, I was thinking of REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) and E is just above S on my keyboard.

      2. RSME. Kitchener Barracks (or the site) is now new private housing. The attack happened in Sally Port Gardens – I believe this is where the housing is for military personnel (very close to RSME).

        1. I thought Kitchener was still in use!
          Gathered it was the Married Quarters from the map in the Mail.

    2. It is in the MSM
      Front page headline

      British serviceman fights for life after masked man 'looking for a soldier to attack' launches frenzied knife attack outside barracks: Police hold suspect, 24, 'who LICKED victim's blood' for attempted murder in horrific echo of Lee Rigby tragedy

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

      2. Looking at the map in the Mail, the attack was in the Married Quarters between the RSME at Brompton and Kitchener Barracks.

  8. Russian arrested over plot to destabilise Olympics. 24 July 2024.

    Officers from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) arrested the suspect on Sunday and remanded him into custody, sources told the French daily Le Parisien. The paper reported that France’s intelligence services had been monitoring the Russian-born man for several days before raiding his Paris apartment ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday.

    The agents discovered “elements that suggest that he was preparing pro-Russian operations to destabilise France during the Olympic Games,” one source familiar with the matter said.

    Another source described the alleged plot as a “large-scale project” with potentially “serious” consequences.

    It is understood the planned sabotage was political and not terroristic in nature, resulting in counter-espionage as opposed to terrorism charges.

    This article is full of strangely elliptical and obscure allegations. I suspect that the individual mentioned is probably guilty of nothing more than planning a demonstration of some kind.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/2024/07/23/russian-arrested-paris-plot-destabilise-olympics/

      1. Valid point as always, Mrs Allan. But the truth would spoil the cartoon. Anyway, in reality Joe meandered off into la-la-land more than five years ago.

  11. Good morning, chums. And thank you, Geoff, for today's NoTTLe site.

    Wordle 1,131 3/6

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    1. Crikey Elsie, that was a good effort!
      Mine was just frustrating….
      Wordle 1,131 X/6

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  12. Good Moaning.
    Psst ….. wanna spot of cultural enrichment?

    "‘Short-tempered’ cyclist stabbed BMW driver to death
    Ahmed Gonladieu jailed for at least 27 years for fatal attack on motorist who ran over his bicycle"

    "Soldier stabbed in suspected murder attempt near Army barracks
    Witnesses heard a ‘blood-curdling scream’ and saw the attacker run his finger across the knife and then lick it'

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7731afa9d235964e9d07c7120ab2e3e675b3d284832f8672c66ba337478b0246.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0314a4f7b32978ecc2a973284ca70fded4df6beda58608ca37082ec408c2494a.png

    1. I can hear someone somewhere shouting.. "Hey, that's my neighbour's bike.."

    4. They are a death cult , they create fear and anxiety .. I can smell them from here .

      Our prisons must stink of sweat , foul body odours , toxic testosterone , the waft of something primitive in their bodies, fills me with terror and dread ..

      One of our serving soldiers has been badly damaged on home territory ..

      What are Labour going to say, more f######### platitudes , and how is life going to pan out when they release all those prisoners , who will mingle with the thousands of migrants on the loose .

    5. Nobody asked us whether we wanted to be invaded by people who are ethnically, socially, philosophically and morally very different from us and have no desire to fit into our society.

      Nobody listened to Enoch Powell – all they did was abuse him.

      The worst thing you can do is tell the truth – so we must be punished if we think we are being told lies.

  13. Morning all 🙂😊
    From lovely sunny and silent and the fresh air of Northumberland.
    Off to Bamburgh this morning we love the beach and the wonderful castle.
    And yes make the bbc pay to view, a good way to try to keep our sanity. Make THEM responsible for their misinformation and deliberate misgivings.

    1. I suspect any British government would merely stop the direct payment of the telly tax and incorporate it in general taxation.

      2. Yes probably true Anne, we already know how our political idiots wreck every single thing they come into contact with. They can't abide public opinion for more than it takes to speak it.

  14. Good morning all. A somewhat overcast start with a comfortable 10°C and not a lot of wind.

    1. Morning Bob, sunny start up here – no wind (let all of it out during the night)

      1. My bold and italics

        July 21 clocked in at 17.09 degrees Celsius, or 62.76 Fahrenheit, and was the hottest day on Earth since at least 1940, according to the preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

        Global average temperatures typically peak during the Northern Hemisphere summer, between late June and early August.

        Sunday’s record came as many countries endure prolonged and brutal heat waves. Around a hundred cities across the US are experiencing their hottest start to summer on record, and swaths of southern Europe have been grappling with triple-digit temperatures.

        Despite being based on data from the mid-20th century, the temperature records represent the warmest period the planet has seen in at least 100,000 years, scientists have found from many millennia of climate data extracted from ice cores and coral reefs.

        100,000 years is approximately 0.0022% of the earth's estimated existence and these people have the gall to make assertions that it may have been the hottest ever.
        Yes it may be in recent terms but who can possibly know about much older data.

          2. Certainly one of the questions that should answered.
            I wonder where, and in what numbers, these core samples were taken.
            The surface area of the earth is roughly half a billion km². Getting those cores to provide a genuinely representative series would require an enormous number of drillings.

  16. https://youtu.be/wNL4rMo1nk4
    Nigel Farage has given his maiden speech in the House of Commons. He paid tribute to his predecessor Giles Watling according to tradition: “Nothing even vaguely conservative about him – but a jolly nice chap.” In summary, Nigel:

    Said the Commons isn’t as cushy to work in as the EU Parliament. “Which might be why so many in the British political system seem to adore the EU so much”…

    Called the 2024 Commons a ‘Rejoiner’s Parliament’.

    Accused Tories of accelerating Blairite population increase project.

    Noted we have to build a new house every two minutes thanks to immigration.

    Set out that the UK must leave the ECHR (via a referendum) to have a hope of stopping small boats.

    A few jokes in there, like pointing out he was described out on the Channel in 2020 as a “sad, lonely figure, desperate for attention”. The media aren’t laughing any more…

    23 July 2024 @ 15:34

    2. Excellent speech and spot on with histrongest points.
      But unfortunelty in this Parliament building he's surrounded by the idiots that have stood back and watched while letting our country go to pieces.

    3. A little restrained, perhaps? But that's what made it a good start. I watched it 5 hours after it went up when it already had 179,000 views. Over 365,000 now.

      1. Looking forward to him being called on PMQs!

        I'm sure he will call attention to the increased numbers of illegal gimmegrunts under this Labour Govt.

  17. Good day Tootle Monde,

    A nice morning at Castle McPhee, wind Sou'-Sou'-West, 15℃ going up to 23℃.

    Britain 2024: Three front page stories on the DT website involving stabbings, the main one another attack on a soldier.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/33d7847ec0576393a1bdb36d7502058d92bfc715128c0d4bcc267f6d16cd2168.png

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/23/soldier-stabbed-kent-police-gillingham-attempt-murder/

    Is this a photograph of the perpetrator? Or just a posed shot? If the former, is it prior to the attack and, if so, what made the person who took it do so? He doesn't seem to have 'leapt off' the moped as described in the report. Something is not right about this picture.

    2. Good point.
      The wording underneath is ambiguous.
      If posed, why is the 'model' not white?

    3. That IS NOT a Moped.

      Also known as a motorized bicycle, a moped has 2-3 wheels and an electric motor with an automatic transmission that produces less than 4 gross brake horsepower. You must have a motorcycle license (M1 or M2) to drive a moped.

    4. Police have asked people not to speculate on the incident, that is, don't let the cat out of the bag about the perp before we can slowly release and control the undoubtedly unpleasant truth.

  18. 390064+ up ticks.

    Morning Each,

    All the while we accept this with seemingly an understanding mindset we are a lost nation, a MANS a bloody MAN and a WOMAN a bloody WOMAN, the herd majority must TRY getting something right.

    Maybe societies new COOL trend is to construct medical freaks,
    they sure are succeeding.

    https://x.com/MercianCRoW/status/1815989667935781129

    3. “A black woman calling the cops on a trans woman” (sic)

      Roflmao. The politics of intersectionality..

      but it proves the point that these trans people are mentally unhinged.

  20. Good morning, off to my home town on the South coast, for a few days. Hopefully enjoy some sun for a change.

    1. Cressida didn’t stand a chance with parents like the ones she had. Still don’t feel sorry for her though.

      2. Cressida didn't stand a chance the moment her parents gave her that idiotic name.

    3. Someone has commented, “Cressida's carbon footprint will reduce considerably in jail. Win win.” Good morning!

    6. Poor, poor, poor dear Cressida.
      Last night I didn't get a wink of sleep through worry.
      Moaning peasants going to … what's the word … work?
      And some of them were ill! Just how disgusting is that? Let them die.

  23. Further to ogga1's comment below.

    Trans athletes should be allowed to take part in women's sports, Labour's new Culture Secretary has said. Lisa Nandy said it should be up to individual sports to decide whether to let biological males compete against women in their respective fields, arguing “most” sports had got the balance right.13 hours ago

    What is wrong with these people that they have suddenly taken this stance when before it was never an issue? A co-ordinated attack, not just on women's sport, but on society by the 'elites' is what it looks like and some politicos et al. take up the baton and run with it.

    https://x.com/biggchris876/status/1815879009487724708

  26. I'm feeling smug: I don't buy a license.

    For those of you who have been following Iain Hunter's superb three-part series of the Climate Change Cult, he has added a post scriptum today ( https://www.freespeechbacklash.com/ ) summing it all up and listing his sources, valuable if you ever argue about climate change, the most important threat we face today (the cult that is).

    Also, I need your help. In today's DT it says "But Trump said he still wants to debate Ms Harris. “I think debating’s important for a presidential race,” he said. “You sort of have an obligation to debate.”

    I say we need a debate about how to use the word debate. Shouldn't Trump have said that he still wants to debate with Harris?

    I need to know. Any educated types out there who can put me right? Nip over to FSB Gossip and let me know what you think.

    2. When the word 'debate' is used as a verb is it transitive or intransitive – or can it be both?

      If it is transitive it will take a direct object, if it is intransitive it will take an indirect object.

      (I expect our friend Grizzly wil have a view on this!)

      1. I think the answer is quite simple. Most authorities seem to agree that (in both transitive or intransitive cases) you debate (discuss) a subject, but you debate with another person. "Debating" another person is simply yet another vapid Americanism.

        Consequently I am with Tom.

        1. Is it ok for me to cut and paste your answer at Free Speech? Alternatively, nip over and post it yourself?

        2. As I said yesterday. English is no longer the special province of the English and it is simply porochialism to call American English "vapid". As I have pointed out numerous times before it is often English English that is innovative while American English preserves a form of an older stye English. To pretend that Americans can't speak English properly is a conceit not based in reality but parochialism. Are these man inarticulate or a poor users of English, just two of a dozen examples of modern Americans using the English language, men every bit as articulate, and in fact better than many British English speakers.
          Afterthought, Tucker Carlson
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l3hv_zPcaY
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmxjfU2hi7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqYUOKlSgQw

          1. As I have pointed out many times, there are a lot of Americans who can speak perfectly good English and do so. I have a copy of William Strunk, Jr’s seminal advice booklet for Americans (of which he is one) The Elements of Style, which clearly tells them to stop using abominations such as different than and many other modern-day affectations. The problem is the rise of gormless and ubiquitous slang, which Americans and (sadly) speakers of English in many other countries seem wont to adopt as being ‘cool’ and ‘up-to-date’.

            This gives rise to my firm, unwavering, belief that the English language continued to evolve and develop in a positive, clear and beautiful manner from the times of Chaucer, through Shakespeare, Donne, Marlow et al, into the Brontës, Dickens and Kipling. Since the turn of the 20th century, unfortunately, it commenced a progressive decline that picked up acceleration on the past 30-or-so years. At this current rate of devolution, it won’t be long before we are reduced to grunting.

    3. When the word 'debate' is used as a verb is it transitive or intransitive – or can it be both?

      If it is transitive it will take a direct object, if it is intransitive it will take an indirect object.

      (I expect our friend Grizzly wil have a view on this!)

    4. Well the good news he's not calling for a Mass Debate…..

      Good morning Tom and all….

  27. JD Vance calling Kamala Harris a ‘childless cat lady’ is sexism he’d only get away with in America
    The misogynistic comments by Trump’s pick for vice president are a tired cliché – women should not be judged for not having children
     https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/j/ju-jz/judith-woods/

    Does anybody remember the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee?

    They made a film of if starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and George Segal. This headline reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor's performance and it also reminded me of the time when we were had the 3M sterile leaders: Merkel, May and Macron. Of course Angela Leadsome had to withdraw from the leadership contest for having made a similar remark leaving the catastrophic Traita May a free run.

    One year the play was one of the set texts when I used to teach English. The "A" level question that came up in the exam was:

    'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf celebrates sterility.' Discuss.

    1. How do you know those leaders are "sterile"? You don't. Maybe they chose not to have children.

  30. Re: debate vs debate with. I also hate the Americanism “protest” (as opposed to “protest against”). Tim Stanley in todays Terriblegraph.

    ““Nigel talks!” A Farage maiden speech in Parliament is as box office as Greta Garbo’s first words in sound. The press brought popcorn; milkshakes were banned.
    “I believe it’s customary,” he said, “to pay tribute to your predecessor.” Well, Giles Watling, former MP for Clacton, is “decent” and “honourable … Nothing even vaguely conservative about him, but he’s a jolly nice chap!”
    I laughed! But across the Commons, blank faces and crickets. Parliament, alas, is not shaping out to be Nigel’s medium. It was an auspicious day for an official debut. Reform arrived together and sat together, as is their style. The hacks call them Reservoir Dogs. I’m reminded of children holding hands on a school trip. Nigel and Richard Tice bobbed up and down to speak in the tedious King’s Speech debate. Their knees and bottoms had to endure three hours of maiden speeches, a mix of travelogue and tinder profile. “I like a laff, work hard and I don’t like to be taken for a fool,” said Labour’s Lola Mcevoy. The room mentally swiped left.
    Finally called, Farage – bitchier than Bette Davis – began by observing that this isn’t even the best parliament he’s sat in. The Commons is “smaller” than Brussels: “There’s no chauffeur driven Mercedes. No large lump sums of money” (no wonder the Remainers hated Brexit). As for himself, when he first sailed the Channel to protest the boats, he was derided as a “sad, lonely, desperate figure” – “Hear, hear,” mumbled the Labour benches – “always seeking attention” – “HEAR! HEAR!” But time has proven him right, and you metro-libs ain’t seen nothing yet! Job done. But would he stay for the maiden speech of his close personal friend Mr Tice? Would he ‘eck. Farage observed the two-speech minimum customary after an intervention, then swanned off. A pity.
    Nigel has worked for decades to become an MP. It’s a historic achievement. But our parliamentary system is designed to suffocate populism by giving it a voice – in a chamber of windbags who imagine their fanatical devotion to consensus makes them compelling.
    Now he must pretend to care about Bills, committees and Chris Bryant’s latest point of order.
    How long before he’s on a plane to Las Vegas, to open for Trump?”

    2. All Labour politicians will take one in as a "guest". The rest of us will have four.

      2. As Billy Connolly once remarked, "No one's ever been attacked by a fucking shark in Woolworth's!"

        He went on, "Sharks never go to Woolworth's, it's not their territory. The sea is, so to avoid being attacked by sharks keep out of their territory!"

        They Big Yin wisnae wrong! You go to the sea, as an invader, at your own risk. Some of its inhabitants don't want you there.

          2. I’m also told, on good authority, that they don’t buy the Pick ‘n’ Mix either.😉

  34. A lovely sunny day for a leisurely trip to Teignmouth in Devon for an RNGS golf society meeting tomorrow.

  36. 390042+ up ticks,

    So,e well meant advice ,

    Get your eyes of off the White house in USA and back on the political shitehouse in westminster.

    Lest we forget, orchestrated distraction costs lives.

    1. Were I a member – there is not one person standing that I would vote for.

      1. I know what you mean – you would want a candidate who will work flat out to reverse their disastrous policies…..

          2. well one who works flat out isn't one who is standing ….. I'll get my coat…

      2. I just became a member so I can vote, Bill, rightly or wrongly. And I will vote for Badenoch, rightly or wrongly.

        1. Will you have the opportunity to vote for Badenoch? The MPs will decide the final two names to be put to the membership? Last time they weeded out the non-WEF members in the first round and thought they had it sown up till Truss turned out to be not quite what they thought she was. Hence the financial establishment stepped in swiftly to sabotage her plans.

          1. All the evidence so far is that Conservative members don't get a say in electing their leader. Sunak, Hunt… I rest my case.

          2. I am hoping so, otherwise depending on the two will be a spoilt ballot paper. I understand Cleverly (was anyone ever so mis-named) is likely to be a candidate. I would never for someone who’d joke about giving his wife Rohypnol, weak character and poor judgement.

    3. In a deliberate attack on the British people we forced unnecessary and unwanted immigration to run to what were once considered unimaginable levels whilst claiming that we would do the opposite. We lied.

      Closer to the truth.

    4. You had a leader who would put it right. You got rid of her. I think it's time to abandon the Tories as a viable party at all. Just wave them into irrelevance. We have a party that we believe (state resistance and refusal to serve notwithstanding) will stop the flood of criminal savages. That's the party we must support.

    5. Certainly not going to join. I have serious doubts, because of Farage, but I'm trying to make up my mind whether or not to pay dues to Reform.
      Short of a miracle on their part, which would be a purge of all the liberals in the party plus a real Tory manifesto declaring a war on the woke and immigration, I will never join or vote Conservative again.

    1. Jolly handy if anyone wishes to use grannie's necklace to buy their escape out of anti-Semetic Europe.

      1. It would be extremely naive not to think that we ourselves would feature on the planned tokenised asset list as slaves.

    2. If we're looking to stop money laundering then the first thing to do is shut down the EU.

          1. oh yeah, nobody is safe until everyone’s assets are safely on the asset register, forgot that one!

          1. There was a chap at school with me called Groves. I wonder whether his sister was Olive?

  40. I rejoined after Conopolypse.
    I hadn't been a member for a couple of years.
    That subscription is provisional. If they continue as for the past 10 (20?) years then that is the last money they will ever get from me.

    1. They'll be truly finished if so, anne. It's Farage's stated intent to destroy the CP because they wouldn't accept him as a candidate. Trump will be re-elected, and Farage will hope for a slot there, leaving Tice as leader, not sure how long Reform would last in that event.

    3. I wouldn't give them money until they prove their intent. The need to start talking openly and publicly about the necessity of fully leaving the EU and Echr. They need to start accepting that radical, significant cuts are needed to the state and that this won't make a jot of difference to the country. They need to say the unsayable and present the data for that. This means a new tax code, one far simpler, with no loopholes that takes far less.

      They need, simply, to be radical. What have they to lose?

  41. Picked up from the Faceache Sappers page that the stabbing victim is a Lt.Colonel.

    1. But we mustn't succumb to anger and hate!
      Teddy bears, flowers, tea lights and singing Kumbaya are the answer needed.

      1. it's the legitimate contextual process of decolonising & deconstructing the conscious bias of the summit.. or other.
        or as Owen calls it.. "Art".

      2. No, not hatred. That would be irrational. What we should do is adopt their customers and decimate them.

  43. Charlotte Dujardin whips horse 24 times in shocking video. 24 July 2024.

    The leading dressage star, who could have become the country’s most decorated female Olympian, has been banned from the Paris Games over the video, in which her treatment of the horse has been likened to whipping an “elephant in the circus”. Dujardin can be seen using the whip on several occasions against a horse she is training. The full video, which has been shared with The Telegraph by the whistleblower’s lawyer, is alleged to show Dujardin striking the animal 24 times.

    The interesting part of this (which is unaddressed) is; who is the “whistleblower” and why did they wait until four days before the opening of the Olympics?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/2024/07/24/video-charlotte-dujardin-whip-horse-good-morning-britain/

      2. And the Dutch beach volleyball team includes a man who was found guilty of raping a 12 year old girl – he was still selected for the Games!

    3. The ‘Dutch lawyer’ who released the video said his client wished to remain anonymous! Can’t imagine why! The bluddy cloggies are revolting – first Vercrashan, now the blooming horsey dancers – apologies to Conway!

    4. Personally, I believe, she should be stripped of every Olympic medal she has won. Using cruelty to win is worse, or at least as bad as doping.

  44. Charlotte Dujardin whips horse 24 times in shocking video. 24 July 2024.

    The leading dressage star, who could have become the country’s most decorated female Olympian, has been banned from the Paris Games over the video, in which her treatment of the horse has been likened to whipping an “elephant in the circus”. Dujardin can be seen using the whip on several occasions against a horse she is training. The full video, which has been shared with The Telegraph by the whistleblower’s lawyer, is alleged to show Dujardin striking the animal 24 times.

    The interesting part of this (which is unaddressed) is; who is the “whistleblower” and why did they wait until four days before the opening of the Olympics?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/2024/07/24/video-charlotte-dujardin-whip-horse-good-morning-britain/

    1. My old man is a singer in the park, a dancer in the dark (Joni, biggest fan ever..:-D)

  47. SIR – Mik Shaw (Letters, July 23) enhances his fruit salad with Angostura Bitters.
    On our annual trip to France I always seek out crème de cassis – which I can’t find in England – for this purpose. It provides a certain kick.

    Robyn Maitland
    Sherborne, Dorset

    "Robyn"? WTF! Are you male, female or summat else?

    You can't find crème de cassis in a country that is awash with the stuff? Every wine merchant, off-licence and supermarket has more bottles of the stuff than you could chuck a stick at. You are evidently clever enough to write to a newspaper to display how dim you really are.

    3. I googled. Ads for Sainsburys, Harvery Nichols, Waitrose and Fortnum & Mason popped up.

  48. Blob – 1: Blighty – 0

    "Cabinet Secretary Simon Case to stand down amid health problems
    The head of the civil service took a leave of absence last year due to a ‘private medical matter’ …….

    …… While Cabinet Secretaries do not usually stand down when a Prime Minister leaves office, as they provide continuity, Mr Case was thought to be preparing to quit after overseeing the transition to the new Labour government. Sir Olly Robbins, Theresa May’s chief Brexit negotiator, has been touted as his potential successor.

    Sir Olly, who quit the Civil Service when Boris Johnson won a landslide in 2019, has reportedly had “informal” discussions with Sue Gray, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, about a senior job under Labour."

      1. Don’t worry, he will get a lovely big pay off and a nice risk-free pension

  49. Just sent this e-mail to the MP for Colchester, Pam Cox.

    Dear Ms Cox,

    In light of the horrific attack on a member of our Armed Forces in Brompton can you confirm that either, you have contacted or propose to contact as early as possible, the Commander of Colchester Garrison to discuss this incident and what actions will be taken to avert a similar incident happening here in Colchester?

    Everything possible must be done to protect our brave military personnel.

    Regards,

  50. The way things are going we are going to need the right to bear arms.
    I would . Would you?

      1. It is another example of where they think they rule us and are exempt from the unjust laws they impose on the ordinary citizen to whom they owe their seats.

    2. Yes. I have always opposed the suppression of gun rights. No matter who, or where you are, without the right to bear arms, you are a slave.

      1. My mother owned a very small handgun , it had a very swish looked like mother of pearl handle , I was told it was a Dillinger .

        My father bought it for her , and she kept it in her handbag , alongside her cocktail swizzle stick , compact and lipstick .

        She had firing lessons , as did many expats in those days , that was during the early fifties in the Sudan . She kept it for years .

        My father taught us to shoot when we were very very young .

        Decades ago I went clay pigeon shooting , the recoil on my shoulder was very painful .

        Guns , no no no , knives machetes , no no no .. swords , no no no

        When Moh was away after he left the RN , I used to keep his Ceremonial Naval sword under the bed , home security if you get my drift.

    3. It is one of the things that I learnt in the USA, the right to bear arms. We all have a fundamental right to defend ourselves, our families and our homes. It is a disgrace that we must wait for the police if we are threatened and even more of a travesty that we can even be arrested in this country for defending ourselves. The English Bill of Right says: "Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law".

    4. The only people with serious firearms in C12 Blighty are agents of the state and criminals.
      During my youth, far more people had access to guns, and life seemed a lot safer and pleasanter.
      I'm not claiming the two are connected, but just comparing life now with the 1950s and 1960s.

  51. Two-child benefit cap: Starmer accused of ‘control freakery’ after Labour rebels suspended
    John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, is among seven suspended for six months as Sir Keir Starmer is accused of being a control freak

    Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of “control-freakery” and conducting a “macho virility test” after he suspended seven left-wing Labour MPs for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

    The SNP tabled an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the cap to be reversed. It was defeated when 363 MPs voted against the amendment, while 103 voted for it.

    After Labour withdrew the whip from the seven MPs who rebelled, one of them, Zarah Sultana, said she “slept well knowing that I took a stand against child poverty”.

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-child-benefit-cap-backbench-revolt-2vhrcpnlt

    Look , I am confused , so be nice to me when I ask , is there a child cap or isn't there .

    Dare I say there is no such thing as child poverty .

    Poor money management , gambling smoking drinking , tattoos, too many children, mobile phones , and takeaway meals .. MacDonald's is always full, so are the chicken shops , and junk food galore .

    Parents can clothe their youngsters for pennies , charity shops are an excellent source of good quality stuff.

    I know all about those sort of things ,newly married ,new child , new house , just like the Good Life .

    1. Can't feed; don't breed.
      The only exception is those struck down by fate (illness etc…)

  52. Two-child benefit cap: Starmer accused of ‘control freakery’ after Labour rebels suspended
    John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, is among seven suspended for six months as Sir Keir Starmer is accused of being a control freak

    Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of “control-freakery” and conducting a “macho virility test” after he suspended seven left-wing Labour MPs for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

    The SNP tabled an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the cap to be reversed. It was defeated when 363 MPs voted against the amendment, while 103 voted for it.

    After Labour withdrew the whip from the seven MPs who rebelled, one of them, Zarah Sultana, said she “slept well knowing that I took a stand against child poverty”.

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-child-benefit-cap-backbench-revolt-2vhrcpnlt

    Look , I am confused , so be nice to me when I ask , is there a child cap or isn't there .

    Dare I say there is no such thing as child poverty .

    Poor money management , gambling smoking drinking , tattoos, too many children, mobile phones , and takeaway meals .. MacDonald's is always full, so are the chicken shops , and junk food galore .

    Parents can clothe their youngsters for pennies , charity shops are an excellent source of good quality stuff.

    I know all about those sort of things ,newly married ,new child , new house , just like the Good Life .

  53. Universities have played a cruel trick on students. They deserve to go bust
    After years of ruthless self-interest, the sector faces a long overdue rationalisation
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/23/universities-played-cruel-trick-students-deserve-to-go-bust/

    I'm still beating the same drum – but it needs to be beaten.

    BTL

    Expecting students to take student loans is fair enough but it was a cruel trick to impose usurious interest rates which make repaying them virtually impossible for most students. When the Bank of England Base Rate was ½% students were demanded to pay the compound rate of 6% – if that was not sheer theft what is?

    In more civilised countries which value a decent education student loans are interest free and students can charge the repayment of the capital they have borrowed against their income tax when they start earning and repaying.

    Labour has shown very clearly that it does not want a well-educated population; it is determined to destroy discipline in schools which will seriously hamper those pupils who wish to learn and it is going to punish those who save the state the cost of educating their children by imposing a 20% tax on them. When these parents can no longer afford to pay this will result in overcrowding in state schools.

    1. It is a disgrace. In the USA the average student owes, at graduation, $ 30,000 dollars = £24,000. So they are already in heavy debt before they start work and, in the USA, it is a debt exempt from bankruptcy, the only debt designed to be with you regardless of financial circumstance, you can even be threatened with jail if you fail to pay. In short it is a form of financial slavery to the banking institutions the profit enormously from it to the tune of almost 2 trillion dollars. Eventually this same theft by banks as practiced in the USA will be inflicted on students in the UK,

    2. Plus the culture of everyone must go to university and all must have prizes renders the product for which they've become debt slaves in itself completely worthless. If all university graduates were intelligent and well educated individuals then that might be a mitigating factor but they're not. It's a source of private amusement to me but I, with only A levels in Art and Needlework, find myself teaching young graduates.

    3. Worse, the student loan company in charge of loans to English kids is domiciled in Scotland under Scottish law.

  55. American politics can only get crazier. Spiked 24 July 2024.

    Prominent television host Joe Scarborough recently declared on his Morning Joe MSNBC show that this version of Biden is ‘the best Biden ever’. A year before that, he described Biden as ‘very sharp’. Just a few years back in 2020, the PolitiFact website ran a formal fact-check of Fox News anchor Brit Hume’s claim that Biden was ‘senile’. Fact-checkers went so far as to interview a doctor of geriatric medicine before flatly calling Hume’s assertion ‘false’.

    This bovine pattern of herd behaviour took place despite the plain fact that Biden often seemed to barely be functional. There has been no end of widely circulated compilation videos of all the president’s ‘gaffes’ and ‘missteps’. These include Biden wandering off stage, falling up multiple flights of stairs, proudly declaring that he has cancer and claiming that a close relative of his was eaten by cannibals.

    I think that there are few doubts that the Political Elites of the West are deranged. Biden is simply an extreme example. There are token movements toward sanity. Trump in the US. The rise of the right in Europe and Reform in the UK. Whether this will mature in time to save us is a moot point. I wouldn’t bet on it myself.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/23/american-politics-can-only-get-crazier/

    1. up is down, left is right, day is night.. and anyone that points out this garbage is lidderally committing gennycider against the oppressed.

  56. Crown Estate to make billions of pounds from Miliband wind farm spree
    Swathes of subsea land to be rented out as Government plans offshore turbine building boom
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/24/crown-estate-make-billions-ed-miliband-wind-farm-spree/

    BTL comments under this article indicate that more and more people do not believe that politicians ever tell the truth about anything! It is disappointing that the King is happy to go along with the cons and is more than happy to gain from them himself.

    BTL (RCT)

    At last the people are beginning to wake up to the three greatest cons with which governments have determined to inflict us:

    I) Net Zero is a complete scam – man-made global warming is unproven and carbon dioxide is both essential and beneficial to the planet;

    2) The Covid jabs are safe and effective – every day more evidence arrives of the devastation they have caused and are still causing;

    3) Diversity is our strength – mass immigration has destroyed the cohesion of our society – just look at Leeds.

    The Labour government is fully committed to all three of these cons.

  57. Resigned Secret Service boss, Kimberley Cheatle appears to have been very closely allied to the Cheney Clan- they of the "Stop Trump" faction- not "beat Trump" but more of what some might describe as an eliminate Trump persuasion. Apparently, she got the job as head of the SS because of Jill Biden and there is now much effort being put into finding out more as to how the Trump election bandwagon appeared to be denied SS cover to the degree that was necessary. It is becoming more and more troubling now that the various moving parts are being carefully examined. I would imagine that analysis will start to appear and Greg Kelly of Newsmax and Mark Groubert have mentioned this interesting and worrying back story.

    1. So what? They are brazen, shameless and untouchable. I'm just surprised Agent Fupa didnt finish him off by suffocating him.

    2. So what? They are brazen, shameless and untouchable. I'm just surprised Agent Fupa didnt finish him off by suffocating him.

  58. 'Morning All
    Sadly a read through the comments is all too too depressing again
    Here is a slight antidote………
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c7dc25b78f3c1d98f1bccb81952fb8c47727394266d8d9b722b4b6219fb32b3f.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cb0be7a8e17a6bc70ac50942c00b710efa1fad5be7752181b0478a4c03d32e26.jpg
    http://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7b90492037bfaffd819068ccd39b3d68b54f872b5a413b08399a05e5dbd32c44.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/68d9e2dd1fc66056cac99529c186dca403ee6e71568d94e383a51dc951db5c4e.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/62949e1279886c29313e0ed23595678c17cb7813f7af981f323b414b50344b1e.png

    1. Loved the last one about ghosts. I can completely relate to the sentiment. The dogs were great too.

      1. I remember the time my mother threw an eiderdown off the bed she was changing only to see it walk out of the bedroom. Our dog was underneath. The dog wasn't bothered. In the absence of central heating, just walk around the house with a quilt on your head.

  59. The oddest thing about the "ashamed" horsewoman is that she must have known that she was being filmed as she whipped the horse.

    I wonder if her "shame" is for being found out.

    1. …and it all happened four years ago…

      BTL:

      Piggy Malone
      3 HRS AGO
      I love horses, have ridden in the past and do not condone mistreatment of any animal. However I consider it cowardly of the person who videoed this training session to hang on to that video and wait four years to release it at the most strategically important moment, just before the olympics.
      If they cared about the horses she trains there were four years during which, one must suppose, those horses were vulnerable and the ‘whistleblower’ said nothing to help them. Hence this looks like a spiteful move to scupper the British equestrian team hopes of a medal. Dirty tricks. The rider should also be identified. A 19 year old isn’t a child, and if she’d been riding long enough to be training for dressage on her own horse she should have complained about her horse being mistreated at the time.

      1. Quite The revelation at this very critical moment says a lot about the so-called whistle-blower. But the trainer MUST have known she was being filmed…

  60. Here's one for the scrapbook:

    "Liz Truss says Kamala is not up to it" (The leftwing Spectator just now)

    Good morning, Ms Pot – do you know Ms Kettle?

    1. But one has heard that both Ms Pot and Ms Kettle have long been 'up for it'. {:^))

      1. You ARE well-informed. As an elderly innocent, I know nothing of these matters – except that Truss was an adulteress.

    2. Truss' failure was doing too much, too quickly. Her first actions shouldn't have been announcements of spending cuts but the demolition of the state and bringing it under control. She should have dismantled the OBR, for instance.

      1. That was her real problem, yes. Regrettably her naïvety was her downfall all through her political life. You can only do things in the manner she wished and get away with it by being a so-called demagogue. And that she certainly ain't. As are none in either of the Lab/Con party.

  61. Good morning. The Telegraph is earning the right to the Black Hat Brown-nose Award of the year. They appear to report that Kamala Harris is polling better than Trump. What do they hope to gain by such arrant bollocks? Perhaps is was a poll of the Starmer cabinet…..

    2. That's real insanity. The point where you believe putting the diversity hire in a proper position of authority would actually be a good thing.

    3. Maybe she is – amongst Democrats, in New York, between the ages of 30-60 who earn more than 100,000 a year?

    4. This is an IPSOS/AP poll. As you know you can order a poll which will give you the result you want. You can then use that result to influence voting. That has happened here.

    5. Q: Who do you think would make the worse President, Harris or Trump?
      A: Harris. In seven out of ten cases.

      By this measure Harris is scoring better than Trump, 7 to 3.

      1. Nah. A better punishment suited to their ideology is, for their entire sentence to put them in a, say, 5 acres of compound where there are no tools or materials whatsoever. Give them a water source and nothing else. Anything they want, they make.

        Absolutely nothing goes in or out that wasn't here 500 years ago.

        A ten year sentence would mean death. 5 they might just survive if they can arrange subsitence farming, but a bad crop would see them dead either way. That's the life they want for others. Force it on them.

      2. Yes please, they seem to have difficulty in understanding that the vast majority do not support their pathetic stunts.

    2. If the police had stopped it the very first time they tried it we would have avoided so much aggro suffered by thousands upon thousands of commuters and drivers in general. They deserve everything they get.

      Of course starmageddon is going to claim credit for an immediate “change”!

  63. 390042+ up ticks,

    We truly are a lost nation, we actually support & vote into power the very same odious type peoples / parties that have gifted us with 99% of our ongoing problems.

    Prime example rape & abuse of 1400/1600 children, ongoing, as
    the Jay report revealed,giving succour via the political overseers to the invasion troops, in regards to mass paedophilia, the majority voter still holds aloft the cover- up umbrella.

    No kids are safe in this nation currently and these innocent guinea pig kids will continue as experimental offerings until some one answers IN COURT to the charge of excessive deaths
    via alledged experimental jab.

    https://x.com/A1an_M/status/1816035626786996547

    1. But it doesn't stop them, does it? The abuse continues, they just stop talking about it. Until we can simply say no, stop this nonsense nothing changes.

      1. 390042+ up ticks,

        Afternoon W,
        Until we get via the courts honest verdicts on excessive deaths due to an experimental vaccine kids will still be offered up by ignorant
        of facts, fools.
        One guilty verdict in my book would = a right to say ” no more”
        forcibly, where necessary.

    1. Oh thank goodness. I was so worried that it might have been a terrorist attack. What a relief that it was just yet another slammer nut-case.

      1. Aye don't worry Bill. Business as usual. More muslim attacks slaughtering Britons. Nothing to see here.

    1. I first saw this in the Spectator on a piece written by Julie Raven. She refers to Owen Jones as 'Talcum X' although she could have been referring to either of them, I guess. Whichever, she is always worth reading.

  66. Home Secretary in migration policy report has replaced "illegal migration" with "irregular migration". Thank goodness for that. I'm off to the shops now to engage in some irregular theft, some irregular drug purchases on the street corner, all followed by some irregular use of other people's motor vehicles in order to transport me home.

    Crime solved at the stroke of a pen.

    1. This has always been government fiddling.

      Want to reduce unemployment? Stop counting those not looking for work.
      Want to reduce youth unemployment? Ship them off to university.
      Want to say you've cut taxes? Reduce the headline rate by 0.1% but reduce the allowance by 75%.
      Want to say unreliables are the cheapest going? Take the time when they produced the most electricity – one three hour period in one month, ignore the subisdy provided, remove all the taxes applied to conventional fuels, choose the most expensive time for those (not the same day, month or even year) and compare the two.

      The BBC does this all the time. It lies by omission of truth.

      2. Omissions, false emphasis, straw men and more to boot.. all in the liar’s armoury.

      3. Latest salary figures show us worth every penny, wibbling. Beyond time to change funding for TV licence.

    2. Is irregular migration similar to diarrhoea being an irregular bowel movement?

    3. When the Home Secretary suggests that illegal economic potentially invading muslim fighting age men are now 'irregulars' i am inclined to agree with him.
      I do hope people like Angela Raynor and just to chuck in the mix Miriam Gargoyles are the first to fall to 'their swords'.

  67. The victim, in his 40s, was attacked at around 6pm on Tuesday evening around 200 yards from Brompton Barracks in Gillingham, Kent. Witnesses say he was assaulted by a man in a ski mask wearing a NASA bomber jacket who arrived on a moped. Ring doorbell footage from local resident Alex Reynolds captures a woman screaming hysterically, shouting 'what the f*** are you doing', 'f****** hell' and 'somebody call 999' as concerned neighbours watch on. Police are not believed to be treating the incident as terror related, saying today that they are 'exploring the possibility it may be mental health-related'.

    🥱😢😭

    1. Quite possibly a mental retard. Other countries are emptying their prisons and lunatic asylums and boating them to the UK by the hundreds of thousands.

    2. Targeted attack, most unlikely to be a roper. Possibly an ex-squaddy with a grievance.

  68. A British Army officer, now in critical condition, isn't being treated as a victim of terrorism. Nope, it's all down to mental health, they say.

    Picture this: the poor officer, stabbed a dozen times with a 10-inch knife, his screams piercing through the air. Folks initially thought it was just a typical road rage incident, until they saw the officer's wife, desperate and begging for help. And our supposed lunatic? He licked the blood off his blade like it was some sick treat.

    Now, let's get real. You don't waltz up to an army barracks looking for a military target and then pull the mental health card. It's a farce, plain and simple.

    It has all of the hallmarks of the murder of fusilier Lee Rigby over a decade ago. Please God pray for this man that he somehow manages to pull through.

    1. Lone wolf mentally ill. Nothing to see here. Not an immigrant muslim psycho wanting to kill people.

      Let's have some facts, shall we? It was premeditated. He went to a specific place, disguised himself for a specific reason. He chose his victim carefully.

      These are not the actions of the mentally ill. They're those of a violent savage who wanted to kill those he hated, as taught by his religion.

      1. When the V2 rockets landed on London, there was no warning. The official line was that the explosions were cause by gas leaks, so as not to panic the public.
        People these days are not so easily fooled or they didn't believe it for long.

    2. No no no… Police training is now so good, they can attend the scene of any incident and make detailed psychiatric diagnosis at the drop of a helmet. You've failed to acknowledge the many great steps our guardians have made over the past decade or two, that's all.

    3. No no no… Police training is now so good, they can attend the scene of any incident and make detailed psychiatric diagnosis at the drop of a helmet. You've failed to acknowledge the many great steps our guardians have made over the past decade or two, that's all.

  69. Are we counting London as another country because the morons there want to do the same to us.

    1. Same old, same old lame excuse in an attempt to cover their culpability in the importation and sustaining of a mass of people whose cultural norms are antithetical to our own.

    2. Of course the perpetrator has mental health issue it is called: 'Islamic Derangement Syndrome'. Often fatal to the perptrator as well as the victim.
      I sincerely hope the soldier recovers although, no doubt, the psychological pain will be with him for life.

  71. We are about to empty our own too. Can't have Johnny Foreigner getting the drop on us policy-wise.

      1. Interesting concept, James. Wonder who she’ll accuse. Just been watching MTG questioning the SS female. There’s one who knows the questions to ask.

        2. She’s fantastic. She also said Cameron could kiss her a&& and told Maitliss to eff off. Top woman.

          1. :-DD I remember the Cameron one, but the Maitliss one new to me – very enjoyable. Thanks, Northern Light 🙂

          2. It’s on You Tube KJ, have a look and enjoy a laugh at Maitliss’s expense!!

          3. Just did. MTG completely unfazed by Maitliss – who we can see without looking too far thinks she’s way superior to MTG. More BBC smug-fest. Good for MTG – and thanks Northern Light 🙂

          1. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sir J – a US Republican politician, Trump supporter and fiery with it. Kimberley Cheatle (now resigned) was Head of Secret Service USA when Trump was shot the other day, taken responsibility for the FUBAR (there’s another one for you, means effed up beyond all recognition, often used in US services esp army. Anyhow, enough already….how’s the Tamnavulin going?! :-))

  74. PUBLIC OVERWHELMINGLY REJECT LABOUR’S PRISON RELEASE POLICY

    Last week Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced plans to release thousands of prisoners early by reducing the minimum sentence term spent in prison from 50% to 40%. A Tory plan that Guido revealed first back in May…

    The public aren’t happy with it. New YouGov research finds that a whopping 71% oppose the policy. Only one in six (17%) are in support. It sits at the bottom of the list of preferred solutions to the overcrowding crisis…

    https://i0.wp.com/order-order.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/yougovpublicoppose.png?resize=662%2C720&ssl=1
    This comes as the ONS drops crime statistics which show a 40% increase in theft, shoplifting at a two-decade high, and robbery up 8%. Most popular solutions include deporting foreign criminals and building more prisons. A far cry from the current policy – releasing convicts en masse into the streets…

    1. It is irrelevant what the public thinks. Labour has a whopping majority and will do what it damn well likes.

    1. Only relevant if she was a republican. In this case responsibility will not pass down through the generations.

    2. She was DA when I lived in Berkeley which is just over the Bay from San Francisco. She was hated, an unprincipled persecutor of people for nothing more than political motivations on her part. She was shunned by the Indian community that regarded her with disgust, a community she pretends to be a member of. Her father, a wealthy member of a once slave owning family, apparently one of the largest slave owning families back in the day, had denounced her for her behaviour as a prosecutor. She picked on the most vulnerable and kept them jailed on the flimsiest of excuses, so she could pretend she was tough on crime, destroyed the lives of many innocent people. This disgusting piece of work is now attempting to be President of the USA.

    2. I can't work out who we are here.

      Sir Kier: “In relation to this issue we have a more severe crisis than we thought as we go through the books of the last 14 years. [The Conservatives] don’t like it, there was a reason the electorate rejected them so profoundly,” he said.

      If we (the electorate) knew enough to reject the Conservatives after 14 years of Tory misrule and vote Labour in with an over 400 seat majority then we are somewhat less thick than than our current PM.

      Cue song (with a blue backgound):

      https://youtu.be/V6QhAZckY8w?si=6a8i77z4OWV_-_Tc

      1. Lying and deceit comes naturally. Of course, they pretend 'they didn't know the full picture.'.

        Then their first effort must be to shut down the office of budget responsibility as it's incompetent.

  78. My Soviet A&E ordeal shows there's no compassion left in the dead-eyed NHS

    We cannot say we live in a 'civilised' country when our health service is so broken and so deficient in basic kindness

    ALLISON PEARSON • 23 July 2024 • 7:00pm

    It was this day last week when I woke up with the pain. Around 4am. I had a packed day ahead – record Planet Normal podcast, travel North straight after to do an interview – and the multiple tasks were whirring in the Rolodex of my brain but, my God, The Pain. Like an iron corset squeezing my chest. Must be indigestion.

    I went to the bathroom and glugged down some Gaviscon, went back to bed and waited for the feeling to subside. It didn't seem to have any effect. The corset tightened another inch. I took some Anadin and tried to get back to sleep, already fretting that I was going to be too tired to do my work.

    Around 6.30am, the pain was so intense that I decided to have a bath, something that had helped when I was in the throes of labour. I got in the bath and immediately decided it was an idiotic decision; if I passed out, a possibility that felt imminent, I could drown. Get out of bath, collapse face down on bed, hold tight to sides of bed like person clinging onto raft on a storm-tossed sea and try to think what to do.

    I was alone. Himself was away, reporting on the Republican Convention in Milwaukee. If he was here he'd say, "Don't worry, darling, everything will be OK." I mouthed those consoling words to myself.

    It was surprising how long I kept acting as if all this was completely normal. I emailed my editor at The Telegraph to say, so sorry I have chest pains and won't be able to do the interview. The email was garbled but I was too weak to correct it (I always thought pedantry would be the last part of me to die; disappointingly not).

    That pain was so all-consuming it blotted out reason. Shards of the Anadin had just come back up with great force. Even sipping water made me feel sick. I texted a doctor friend and asked what should I do?

    "Call an ambulance," he said when he rang a couple of minutes later.

    "That seems a bit extreme."

    "Call an ambulance. You can't be too careful with chest pain."

    The 999 operator said the ambulance would take up to 40 minutes. My friend Kate turned up to wait with me. When I opened the door and saw her I burst into tears. I'm scared, I realised. I'm scared. After an hour, I called back and asked the operator if she could tell me where my ambulance was.

    No. That isn't possible, the woman said curtly, like an old-school nanny telling off a child for being greedy. "That's ridiculous," Kate said, "they can tell you exactly where a Post Office delivery is. Why can't they locate your ambulance?"

    "Please don't call us again unless your condition deteriorates," said the operator, reciting her robotic script.

    "Would it be more convenient for you if I died?" I don't think I spoke that aloud, but I thought it.

    When the ambulance finally came, the three paramedics were wonderful. They must see so much s–, actual as well as the dregs of human conduct, but they managed to be gentle, reassuring and jokey, as well as incredibly professional. The young one, Hannah, was fascinated that I was a writer and kept asking about it while I was retching unstoppably into one of those cardboard bowler hats.

    "Are you famous?"

    "No. But it doesn't matter. What you do is what matters."

    And it didn't matter. Nothing about my life mattered in those moments except the ravishingly green trees and hedgerows flashing past the open window of the ambulance on that hot day and the young paramedic longingly asking her boss when they could go and get McDonald's.

    I didn't know it then, and I'm glad I didn't, but theirs was the first and almost the last human sympathy I would encounter during my day at the mercy of the NHS. An ECG was not showing signs of a heart attack, the driver said, but that didn't prove I hadn't had one. At the hospital, they would do a blood test which would confirm it one way or the other.

    The Pain, my ghastly companion for six hours, still squatted on my chest like a hod of bricks. They wouldn't give me any painkillers now, she said, because it might prevent the doctors giving me the drugs that I actually needed. "You can hang on till then, Allison? Can't you? They'll see you within 10 minutes." I nodded. I could bear it for that long.

    Anyone unfortunate enough to have had recent experience of "our NHS" and Accident and Emergency will know what came next. I went from being looked after in the ambulance by three people who, by their every action, showed they were in a caring profession, to a place staffed by people who had lost any sense of vocation, if they ever had one.

    My wheelchair was parked up against a wall of an L-shaped waiting room rammed with patients. It was a scene from the Third World. Naively, I expected a nurse to come up and take me for that crucial blood test and offer me pain relief. After a quarter of an hour, a man pushing a monitor on a trolley came up and took my blood pressure. "Sorry, I'm in a lot of pain," I said. "Can I please have some painkillers?" The man looked blank, not meeting my eye. "I will ask my colleg," he mumbled and walked away.

    Maybe an hour passed before I saw the same man and stopped him, asking for pain relief once again with what must have been mounting distress. "I will ask my colleg."

    By now, I thought I was about to faint and, remembering some far-off instruction from school days, put my head between my knees. The kind guy sitting opposite stopped a nurse and pointed at me, "That lady is in a lot of pain. Can you get someone to help her?" The nurse moved on. Any compassion in that place was from patient to patient. I'd like to report that a Blitz spirit kept us going, but there was only a sense of exhausted fatalism. This is what we must endure because this is all they offer us.

    Every so often, a nurse or doctor would emerge from behind the swing-doors and call out a patient's name. (How you long to hear your name!) "Sharon Marshall? Is there a Sharon Marshall?" I was amazed how few people came forward to answer to their names.

    "They must have given up and gone home to die," I said at one point, finding that an increasingly attractive option myself. My neighbour, an elderly chap, his check shirt splodged with blood, nodded and said, "How long?'

    "Four hours so far," I said.

    "Six hours," he said.

    "Eight hours!" The silvery-haired man opposite raised us. He had come to the hospital a couple of days ago, he said, and they'd sent him home. He was from Eastern Europe. "My country is poor, but this…" he gestured around us, "my country won't treat the people like this. Never."

    Back in April, I wrote about a study which said long waits in A&E were leading to 250 needless deaths a week. Here I was witnessing that lethal calamity for myself. I had a lot of time to observe what was happening – or, mainly, not happening. Despite the crisis, a sullen, Soviet-era socialist listlessness prevailed. We were not treated as sick people desperately in need of help and comfort as I believe we would have been in any other healthcare system in the developed world. We may as well have been in a bread queue for no bread.

    I got up from my wheelchair and managed to get to the Ladies where I was sick everywhere, including, disgustingly, on my hair. I dabbed at it with a wet paper towel, trying to restore some semblance of dignity. I just wanted someone to help me. "Don't worry, darling, everything will be OK."

    Back in Purgatory, someone was telling the silver fox from Eastern Europe that the NHS didn't have enough funds. And that, dear reader, was when I finally lost it. "One hundred and eighty-two billion pounds a year we give the NHS," I said, "and this is what we get in return. It's shocking." The poor patients around me sat numbly, dead-eyed in defeated silence. No one loves the NHS any more; we just pray it doesn't kill us.

    In a booth in the far corner there was a nurse who seemed to be overseeing things. She was gossiping with a colleague. "I can't keep water down and I'm in great pain," I interrupted them. "In the ambulance, they said I'd be seen in 10 minutes because of chest pain." She glanced at her screen. "You'll be treated in order of acuity," she said.

    Acuity? Which tier of useless NHS management came up with that buzzword to fob off the folk they are paid to care for?

    "Fine. Could I at least have something for the pain, please?"

    The nurse said she would ask a doctor to prescribe an antiemetic and paracetemol.

    Of course, she didn't. Forty minutes later I returned to the booth and I said with as much force as I had left: "This is not humane treatment. I may well faint from the pain. If I hit my head on a chair or the floor, that is going to be on you and the hospital."

    Ten minutes later, a miracle of sorts. A cheerful, bustling young woman who could have stepped out of a 40s film, called my name and said we were going for an ECG. "Come on lovely," she said, taking my arm. Her kindness felt like the first merciful drops of rain after a drought. "That's rubbish," the old-fashioned angel said when I told her some nurses insisted I couldn't have pain relief until I'd seen a doctor. "I'll go and get it signed off right now." And she did.

    After more than 10 hours of agony, I finally lay back in a big padded chair and felt the iron corset loosen as intravenous paracetamol entered my veins. In a place called, without apparent irony, the Rapid Treatment Room.

    The blood test eventually ruled out a heart attack, thank goodness, and a chest X-ray was clear. "Stomach virus," felt more like a weary guess by an overwhelmed junior doctor than a diagnosis. "Come back in a few days if you're no better," she said.

    COME BACK? What, to that terrible, unfeeling place? I'd rather be flayed alive with nettles.

    And that was it. No referrals for the cardiac tests, upper endoscopy and colonoscopy which I'm told any good healthcare system would have recommended immediately, and which I will now have done on the private health insurance I am so lucky to have.

    Back at home, I texted my friend, a senior doctor at the hospital I had just left. "A vision of hell," I wrote, "Hard to believe we live in a First World country."

    "I share your assessment of A&E," my friend replied, "and it is the same on the wards. Lack of empathy and concern for a fellow human being. Partly cultural. For some people it is just a job, a means to come to the UK and get more money than they can make at home. Language and cultural barriers don't help."

    No, they certainly don't. Not when you're ill and want reassurance in your own language. My doctor friend, a first-generation immigrant who has built a brilliant medical career here over 30 years, points out that the UK has failed to train enough of our own high-calibre doctors and nurses and so the NHS is hugely dependent on healthcare migrants from 214 countries, some of whom barely scrape the English language requirement ("I will ask my colleg") and don't relate to the patients. Even though we are now, at long last, training more British medics, immigration rules prevent the NHS prioritising students from our own universities over those from abroad. Can you believe it?

    It's a week now since what I think of as The Ordeal. I still feel sore and fragile, I cry at the drop of a hat, I move through the world with rather more caution, and I may have hugged the kids that bit tighter when they came for my birthday on Monday. I am so grateful when I think of the handful of individuals who did their best to take care of me under appalling pressure.

    But the lingering symptom, the thing I don't think I will ever get over is the awful sense that we live in a country with a health service so broken, so badly managed, so very far from providing a safe service ("Please don't call us again unless your condition deteriorates''), so indifferent to pain and suffering, so conscious of its own rights yet so deficient in basic kindness and consideration that it has forgotten its first duty, which is to humanity.

    The NHS is now the biggest reason to leave Britain; it's scary. You would find better treatment almost anywhere else. How can we call ourselves a civilised country while people are left in pain? We can't go on like this. We just can't.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/07/23/no-compassion-left-in-the-nhs/

    The failure to train staff is only part of the problem. Even if training levels had been anywhere near where they were in the 80s and 90s, demand would still be exceeding supply. At the 1980/90s growth rate the UK population today would be around 63 million. Actual figure? Pick a number, any number above 68 million.

    My recent experience of the NHS? An X-ray yesterday at our underused out-patients hospital, one of those old rambling set-ups with its roots in the 1920/30s and not quite sure what it's meant to be. The receptionist and the radiographer were white British women. In and out on time, no waiting. Same with the blood test there a couple of weeks ago.

    There's been a long campaign to get an A&E facility here. The nearest are Northampton (12 miles) and Kettering (10). There was enough money available a few years ago to build a new out of town out-patients department in the deadlands of Irthlingborough. This is part of the NHS's problem – scattered and fragmented provision of facilities.

    1. "Hard to believe we live in a First World country."

      We don't. We are on the cusp of descending ino the Third World.

    2. Also, when i read the article, my first thought was the ludicrous requirement for nirses to be gtaduates

    3. Faithfully describing the state of the Canadian Healthcare system – that is when our emergency departments are not closed.

      There must be some common factor linking the nhs and our socialized system.

      At least Allison Pearson has private healthcare funded through insurance, that is illegal over here

    5. Welcome to our world Allison. I could tell an almost identical story. I ended up walking out and removing the cannula myself on one occasion.

      While i was waiting for 10 hours a very elderly man who had a fall was brought in by paramedics. They showed the utmost care and kindness and placed him in a chair. When the nurse came over to check his details she asked if he felt okay. He said yes (fool) but he has trouble sitting upright. He was still slumped over like a prawn when i walked out in disgust. Others were bedding down for the night.

    1. The next moves

      No Single-sex toilets

      No gender denomative pronouns

      Single gender uniforms

      No teaching about Christianity

      etc

        1. The outside toilet at my Grandad's (a long plank, resting over a deep pit) was a two seater!

          Edit, thought you wrote single-seat

  80. Bit of a love in between Starmer and Rishi at PMQs, looks like this election was thrown as we thought all along to enable war with Russia and an early return to the EU.

  82. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d8e032b0fbc87819943533bec60d448d0ec37ed97709e85e6bcdb30e192367b3.png
    ALEXANDER WAUGH

    Scion of an illustrious family who carved his own place with books including Fathers and Sons and work on Shakespeare’s authorship

    The Daily Telegraph24 Jul 2024 Alexander Waugh, born December 30 1963, died July 22 2024

    ALEXANDER WAUGH, who has died aged 60, was the son of the columnist Auberon Waugh and grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and a widely accomplished and colourful character in his own right.
    A composer, opera and literary critic, cartoonist, writer and sometime publisher, he was also keeper of what remained (after the sale of his grandfather’s library to the University of Texas in 1968) of the family archive, and general editor of a planned 43-volume edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, published by Oxford University Press.
    Alexander Waugh’s own books included Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), a memoir that showed that he had inherited his full measure of the family’s eccentric and provocative wit, while also demonstrating the distinctiveness of his own voice and a literary talent that needed no help from his illustrious forebears.
    Other inherited traits were his hatred of bossiness and pomposity, his tendency to nip at the heels of sacred cows and his mischievous distrust of received opinion and established orthodoxies – leanings that eventually drew Waugh into the vexed Shakespeare authorship question.
    A tenacious researcher and an entertaining debater, he proved a doughty opponent of the Stratfordian professoriate (“a tight world of whipping and censorship and dogma” in his words), and stimulated lively controversy as honorary president of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, and later, from 2016, as chairman of the De Vere Society, which promotes research to support the proposition that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford.
    Heretical instincts also led Waugh to question the ethics and efficacy of the Covid vaccination jabs and lockdown restrictions, and to stand for the Brexit Party in Bridgwater and West Somerset in the 2019 general election.
    “If I am elected,” he declared, “I shall do everything in my power to help to restore honesty, integrity, trust and democracy to our now broken system of government and to ensure that Britain is put back in command of its own money, laws and borders. When these things are achieved, when we are once again a properly democratic nation, I shall return to the gorgeous green pastures of West Somerset to get on with the rest of my life.”
    Waugh’s wit won him standing ovations at the hustings, but shortly before the election the party leader Nigel Farage decided to stand down the candidates in seats with a Conservative MP. “I can’t deny in some ways I am quite relieved, because I am not a politician,” said Waugh. “I just thought sitting in my armchair complaining wasn’t very good. I am a man of action.”
    Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born in London on December 30 1963, the second of four children of Auberon Waugh, known to family and friends as “Bron”, and his wife Lady Teresa, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow and later a successful novelist and translator.
    Within a year of his birth, the family moved from London to Chilton Foliat near Hungerford, midway between London and the Somerset home of Bron’s parents, Combe Florey.
    Although his father would later tell him that his grandfather had been “pathetically pleased and proud to have a grandson”, Alexander had no memory of Evelyn Waugh, who died on Easter Day 1966, aged 62.
    Evelyn’s widow Laura subsequently put Combe Florey on the market, but as Alexander recalled in Fathers and Sons, “when prospective buyers came round she poured buckets of water through the floorboards and ordered her dog, Credit, to shit on the carpets and pee against the curtains. If anyone was brazen enough to put in an offer after that, she declined it.”
    Successful in her failure to sell Combe Florey, in 1971 Laura Waugh moved across to the North Wing so that Bron and his family could move into the main house. Alexander was close to his grandmother, sharing among other things her fondness for cows, which, “on good days when they escaped through holes in the wire”, he was allowed to chase through the woods, waving laurel branches and shouting at them in a Somerset accent.
    After she died in 1973 he was left with an abiding memory of the smell that attached to all her jerseys – “sherry, French cigarettes and dog baskets all blended into one, a lovely Granny fragrance”.
    With his father, whom he adored, he had a far happier relationship than Bron did with Evelyn Waugh, although Bron was never “a conventional parent in the Hollywood or BBC sense”, Alexander wrote. “He never kicked a football around the garden, never played Frisbee, never took me camping… He was, above all a literary man, but he did nothing to inspire in me a love of books. He never read aloud, never suggested titles I might enjoy.”
    Bron had hated his time at Downside, and Alexander went instead as a day boy to Taunton School, where he got into frequent trouble, following his father’s nonconformist lead. On one occasion, conceiving the notion that a maths teacher was guilty of hiding women’s underwear in a locked cupboard in his classroom and unable to force open the doors, Waugh threw the cupboard down a flight of the stairs “in an effort to break it open and reveal his dirty secret”. For this he was rusticated, although Bron took the view that his son had for once shown bravery, skill and enterprise, and wrote to the headmaster recommending that he be awarded school colours for his actions.
    Having failed his interview to New College, Oxford, Waugh read music at Manchester University, feeling a “deep sense of shame at being the first Waugh in four generations to fail his Oxford entrance”. After graduating, he began submitting cartoon strips to the
    Literary Review, where his father had become editor in 1986, and later to The Daily Telegraph.
    Reluctant to follow in the family’s literary footsteps, for the next few years Waugh worked as a record producer, composer, concert agent and classical impresario.
    In 1991 he entered a competition that led to his appointment as opera critic on
    The Mail on Sunday, where he gained a reputation for cheerful iconoclasm. Within a year, he had followed the editor Stewart Steven to the more influential post of opera critic on the
    Evening Standard. “Congratulations,” said Bron. “You have the job that every middle-aged poofter in London is dying for, and you have it for life.”
    Sacked after four years by Max Hastings when he succeeded Steven as editor, in 1996 Waugh and his brother Nat won the Vivien Ellis Prize for Best New Musical with a black comedy farce called Bon Voyage! which was later staged at Notting Hill Gate.
    He launched the Travelman publishing company, selling short stories on a single sheet that folded up like a map and sold for £1 at Underground stations, wrote TV reviews for The Telegraph and began work on his first book, Time: From Microseconds to Millennia (1999), which Patrick Moore hailed on its publication as “outstandingly successful”.
    When Bron Waugh died in 2001, Polly Toynbee wrote a bitter valedictory for The Guardian headlined “Ghastly Man”, which appeared alongside a cartoon showing the columnist’s corpse being washed down a lavatory. His son responded that the family had no intention of compounding the “mighty damage” which, according to Toynbee, the Waugh “clan” had already done to the country, “by disposing of his body in this unhygienic manner”, adding that “we shall ensure that all health and safety regulations are observed when the great man is buried in Somerset on Wednesday.”
    By that time, Alexander had almost finished his second book, God: The Biography (2002), the prospect of which had prompted Bron, for reasons never explained to his son, to offer him the sum of his advance not to publish it. When the book did appear, although some critics took issue with the author’s apparent preference for entertaining his readers over establishing “truths”, it was commended by Jeanette Winterson as “a deeply felt and genuine exploration… a search for love”, and by Christopher Hitchens as a “sparkling atheist polemic” – although Waugh identified as a Hermetist and Tolstovian Christian anarchist rather than atheist.
    It was his father’s death that led Waugh to investigate the father-son relationships over five generations of his family, and Sir Vidia Naipaul encouraged him to make this the subject of his next book.
    The resulting Fathers and Sons was described by Selina Hastings in the Literary Review as “exceptional for its honesty, intuitiveness, humour and for the beguiling individuality of its author’s voice”. It was “an extraordinarily fascinating study”, she added, in which Waugh used “his familiarity to great purpose, bringing to his reading of letters, diaries and published works a powerful intelligence and an almost extrasensory perceptiveness”.
    Waugh’s next book, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (2009), was acclaimed in The Independent as “a sharp combination of some formidable scholarship… with a wonderful eye for absurdity”.
    Over the next decade, much of Waugh’s time was devoted to his role as general editor of the OUP’S multivolume edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, the first volumes of which appeared in 2017. He also became increasingly busy in his quest to prove that William Shakespeare was a nom de plume used by the courtier peer Edward de Vere. His Youtube videos on the subject received more than a million views.
    “The Stratfordians have been trying to pretend we don’t exist for a long time, but now they’re running scared,” Waugh said in 2014. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.’ We’ve got to the fight bit.”
    When he took out a full-page advertisement in The Times Literary Supplement offering to donate £40,000 to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust if it could establish Shakespeare’s authorship beyond reasonable doubt in open, public debate, the Trust’s president, Sir Stanley Wells, declined and accused Waugh of conducting a campaign against them, calling him a “wicked” and “evil” man, and refusing to have dinner in the same room as him.
    Other Shakespeare dons suggested that Waugh’s argument rested on snobbery, Sir Jonathan Bate quipping in a debate against Waugh that his family had always loved the aristocracy, little knowing that Waugh was in fact a descendant of the Earl of Oxford’s via his grandmother Laura (née Herbert).
    Waugh did not shout about this link,
    explaining to the American writer Elizabeth Winkler when she was
    researching her book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (2023) his fear that the Stratfordians would only use it to claim that he was merely advocating for his ancestor. In any case, he said, he was related to several of the other authorship candidates as well: “Francis Bacon is a great-uncle. I’m directly descended from Mary Sidney [and] Henry Neville. So I’ve got a choice, OK?” he told Winkler.
    “If they were that confident [that Shakespeare was not a pseudonym],” he added, “there’d be absolutely no need to be rude and abusive and silly. Every one of their reactions is a sign that they know they’re on weak ground.”
    Waugh’s other books included Classical Music: A New Way of Listening
    (1995); Shakespeare in Court (2014), and
    (as co-editor) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2016), a collection of essays.
    He had recently completed a three-volume 1,500-page scholarly work of reference entitled The New Shakespeare Allusion Book, co-written
    with Dr Roger Stritmatter.
    For many years, Waugh acted as the reliably funny host of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, established by his father to honour the year’s “most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”. He was later a visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester.
    Waugh was always learning new pieces on the piano, and mastered Godowsky’s complex pieces for the left hand while researching his Wittgenstein book. He wrote and presented a documentary for BBC Four called the Piano: A Love Affair, and in his final months enjoyed listening to pieces by Purcell, Bach and Boyce.
    For friends and visiting researchers, he was warm, generous and engaging, with, as Elizabeth Winkler observed, “an impish, amused expression as though a smirk is always twitching at the corners of his mouth”, his “hair flying up wildly around a bald crown like an electrocuted scientist” and his clothes “wrinkled and dishevelled in the manner of a man too immersed in Renaissance literature to bother with appearances”.
    He loved to play with ideas and was always in search of the next joke. Children loved him for being lively and liberal, interested and interesting.
    He responded to his prostate cancer diagnosis a year ago with characteristic good humour.
    Waugh married, in 1990, Eliza Chancellor, daughter of Bron’s great friend Alexander Chancellor, who survives him with their two daughters, Mary and Sally, and son, Bron.

    Motto: Be a Waugh if you want a fulfilled literary life. Don't be a Waugh if you desire longevity.

    Evelyn Waugh, died aged 62.
    Auberon Waugh, died aged 61.
    Alexander Waugh, died aged 60.

    3. Very sad to hear this.

      When I was teaching at Allhallows in the West of England 45 years ago I was put in charge of running the School's cross country running team. Such masters were always asked to help out with the admin at away matches and at an interschool meeting at King's College Taunton I was given the job of collecting the runners' finishing tickets and recording their names. A small, wheezing, exhausted boy wearing the Taunton School running shirt took his ticket at the finish and came to me so his name could be recorded. I asked him who he was:

      "Waugh, Sir," he gasped.

      "Any relation to Evelyn and Auberon?" I asked.

      "Grandson and son respectively." he spluttered.

      One of my good friends who used to teach at Sherborne and then at Queen's Taunton where he was the master i/c Cross Country has been great friends with the Waugh family many years.

    1. He probably thought wearing that jacket would get him close. Those are not the actions of someone mentally ill.

    1. Pulling only on the left side results in going round in circles, as socialists always do, from promises to equality and a life of ease to mass murder, tryranny and back again.

  86. Circling the bowl?

    Thames Water bonds cut to junk amid fears of collapse ……

    1. From Coffee House, the Spectator

      There’s nothing ‘offensive’ about Prince Albert’s Memorial
      Comments Share 24 July 2024, 2:18pm
      The Prince Albert Memorial is the latest target of activists seeking to denigrate our past. The Memorial has stood in London’s Kensington Gardens for over 150 years as a moving tribute to Queen Victoria’s love for her husband. But now it has been branded ‘offensive’. Apparently, the sculptures at its base draw on ‘racial stereotypes’. Visitors were warned in a post – which has since been taken down – on the Royal Parks’ website that the memorial represents a ‘Victorian view of European supremacy’ which many today consider ‘problematic’. Really?

      Royal Parks have chosen to hunt for remnants of Empire in order to condemn them
      Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy announced on her first days in office that the ‘era of culture wars is over’. Yet the divisive and politicised critique of our national history continues, led by a minority of activists with little regard for the views of the public. If Nandy really wishes to end the era of polarisation, she should step in to stop the long march of ideology through the institutions.

      The Albert Memorial, like many of London’s historic monuments, is managed by the Royal Parks charity. They are tasked with conserving London’s eight Royal Parks, which remain the inheritance of the Crown, a job for which they are given around £10 million by the government. Royal Parks, which was formerly an agency of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), was reconstituted as a charity in 2017. In a curious arrangement, they act as a public corporation of DCMS with oversight and management of their appointments from the Culture Secretary. The Royal Parks Charity is expected to manage, protect and improve the parks in an exemplary and sustainable manner so that everyone, now and in the future, has the opportunity to enjoy their natural and historic environments. Yet it seems that, in this case, they have used the freedom their charitable status affords them to pursue a radical and contested approach to history.

      In describing the Albert Memorial as an example of ‘British supremacy’, Royal Parks have chosen to hunt for remnants of Empire in order to condemn them, rather than focusing on their role as protectors of the parks of which they are stewards.

      Since the summer protests of 2020, the custodians of British heritage have been repeatedly pressured to bend to the will of a small group of campaigners with no regard for the views of the public.

      Responding to this corrosive pressure, last year the government published their ‘retain and explain’ guidance, informed by Policy Exchange’s paper, History Matters: Principles for Change, for custodians facing calls to remove, or otherwise denigrate, heritage assets.

      The carefully developed ‘Retain and Explain’ government guidance sets clear standards for custodians who feel the need to remove or otherwise ‘explain’ the presence of a statue. Those wishing to make public comment on a statue are expected to present ‘a full and rigorous review of the historical evidence available’, including ‘peer assessment of the evidence and conclusions’. Did Royal Parks undertake any historical analysis before damning Albert? There certainly appears to be no reference to ‘peer assessment’ on the offending article about the memorial. Indeed, the comments on their website are given no specific attribution.

      Rather than consider the Memorial as a product of the time which created it, they are condemning it precisely because it reflects a ‘Victorian view of the world that differs from mainstream views held today’. But why won’t Royal Parks laud the depiction of broken chains on the Memorial, an allusion to Albert’s role in abolishing slavery across the world?

      What this story shows is that it is not enough for ministers to simply publish non-legally binding advice. Nandy should take direct action to hold Royal Parks accountable for their refusal to adhere to the government’s published instructions for managing contested artefacts.

      If Royal Parks continue to disparage the historical assets in their care, then action must be taken. A new chair of the charity, Dame Mary Archer, takes office today. Nandy should make clear to Archer that the divisive and politicised curation of monuments will not be tolerated.

      Even Royal Parks seem to recognise their mistake. The page on the website discussing ‘Albert in the Age of Empire’ has been removed, replaced by a link which states ‘you are not authorised to access this page’. A Royal Parks’ spokesperson told the BBC: ‘In light of recent feedback, we will review the online information we have provided to tell the story of the Albert Memorial.’

      Nandy is not powerless. She can hold Royal Parks accountable. If the trustees of the charity refuse to preserve that which they’re tasked with protecting, then they can no longer be allowed to maintain such a precious piece of our national inheritance.

      When activists seize control of history, the Culture Secretary represents our last line of defence. It is government inaction that has allowed our nation’s heritage assets to become so vulnerable to repeated denigration.

      1. The only solution to this is to make the provision of education private, with parents having the right to choose schools for their children. The cold light of competition would stop this dead. Nobody every voted for this, and we need to take a stand.

          1. Explosive even. But I would not support that, as it is against free speech and personal liberty. I would however, support withdrawing public funding from State Islamic schools.

          3. Islamism is, yes, and the later we leave it the bloodier it will be. We already see a 5 |MP incipient Islamist party.

  89. Please don't forget to pop over to Free Speech and read Iain Hunter's summary of his 3-part expose of the Climate Change Cult and the biggest lie ever told.
    Freespeechbacklash.com.

  90. The Leftie authorities will say anything to avoid confronting the truth.. like ever.. all the way to the bitter end.

    Allahu Akbar rampage is NOT being treated as terror attack and may be mental health-related.

    1. He is simply a man from Kent who is a pacifist and wanted to emphasise that by carrying two knives and attacking (accidentally falling against) an army officer. Pure bad luck, really.

      1. I suspect he was on his way to demonstrate his knife skills at a Masterchef audition….when the accident happened….

      2. Absolutely. How could anyone think differently? After all, the ski mask was to spare people his hallitosis. He got on his moped because he was trying to encourage climate change, accidentally ran out of petrol at an army base, was kindly trying to ask the fellow directions – using his knives as a form of charades. How could he know the soldier would walk into them?

    2. Every dumb black and perhaps white , yellow ,dusky , brown, dark , sallow are indulging in drugs .

      These people are of course going to have mental issues , why, because the drugs they love and are addicted to cause psychosis ..

      Yet that bastard made sure he was well armed enough and evil minded to have planned that assassination attempt nr the barracks ,

      The primitive thug from the womb of someone not of these islands decided to try to murder , whether under the influence of drugs or not he should be manacled to a boat with holes in it and cast adrift .

    5. White suspect, Muslim victim – hung, drawn and quartered before the trial. And undoubtedly inspired by Nigel Farage.

    3. Spreading hatred apparently. Odd, as muslims are such nice people.

      Drone Attack on Tel Aviv

      Other Recent "Misunderstandings
      of Islam"

      2024.07.21 (Mali)
      Jihadists murder over two dozen farmers in their fields.

      2024.07.20 (Afghanistan)
      A civilian is tortured to death by the Taliban.

      2024.07.19 (Israel)
      A Houthi drone explodes over an urban center, sending down shrapnel that kills one resident.

      2024.07.18 (Iran)
      Two worshippers are cut down in a sectarian attack on a Sufi mosque.

      2024.07.16 (DRC)
      ADF Islamists raid a Christian village, killing three and kidnapping others.

      2024.07.16 (Cameroon)
      Boko Haram open fire on sleeping villagers, killing four.

      https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

      https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=Last30

      1. Apart from that, they adhere to a 'Religion of Peace'

        More like a religion of pieces.

      3. When Communism and socialism fail – as they always do – they say that they have never been tried properly.

        What would happen if Islam were done properly – would it be peaceful and tolerant or would it be carnage for both Muslims and Kuffar alike?

  92. Wouldn't know, Stephen, although I've heard it said quite often during viewing of football matches…

    1. Here it is enlarged for those whose eyes are not as good as they used to be:

      1. If Boris had been a true leader other than just more of the same they would have been standing in front of him with their knives out.

  95. And I suspect this is merely the beginning of what the State wants

    School broke law when it installed facial recognition cameras in canteen to take cashless payments without consulting parents or pupils, watchdog rules

    To use it legally and responsibly, organisations must have a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) in place.

    This is to identify and manage the higher risks that may arise from processing sensitive biometric data.

    So it's OK if one jumps through the compliance hoops, is it?
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13667325/School-broke-law-facial-recognition-cameras-watchdog.html

    1. Information is power forming in areas that only government/elites are allowed to control.

  98. A defeated Russia would be just as dangerous as a victorious one. Hamish de Crettin-Gordon. 24 July 2024.

    For this war has fundamentally changed Russian society: it has become something more akin to fascist state, totally numbed to reason, engorged on propaganda, and – as far as the Kremlin is concerned – at war with the entirety of the West.

    I have no idea whether Russian Society has changed and I suspect that Hamish hasn’t either. On the other hand I do know that British Society has changed and not for the better. It is now a Globalist Lackey whose Political Elites hate their own indigenous people and are complicit in the plan to eradicate them.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/24/a-defeated-russia-would-be-just-as-dangerous-as-a-victoriou/

    1. Britain has become something more akin to fascist state, totally numbed to reason, engorged on propaganda – there, fixed it!

    1. Stop goading one another. Step away, make a fuss of Dolly, hit a punch bag, have a nap.

      Walking works for me. Stamp your feet good and proper on the pavement.

          1. Mods !!! I call a fowl. That isn't our Bill that lives next to the chicken farm. Holds nose .

  100. The Warqueen came back from the hair dressers and looks very good. Hair all loose ringlet type things and her cough original cough blonde colour. She showed me the bill. Absolutely abusrd.

    I showed her Mongo's hair cost.

    "Quite good value, aren't I?" was her response.

  101. Whoops. I think that I have upset them at the Telegraph. I've been cut out of access to all the comment threads.

    1. It's not just you. I can't read the comments on many pages either. Especially those relating to Labour's tax plans….

    2. Me too it seems – I was going to post something under this but could not gain access.

      Labour ‘double death tax’ could be higher than 50pc
      Bereaved families risk being hit with capital gains bills on top of inheritance tax raid

      If Labour want to stop you educating your children as you would like to, if they want to raid your pension pots and if they then want to steal as much as they can from your estate when you die then what is the point of working at all?

      "You will have nothing and you will be miserable"
      (Schwab knew this was the case but he had to lie and say we would be happy without anything)

      Time for those who can to bail out – the UK is finished

    4. Well bugger me, Minty – must have been your recipe for Putin strawberry jam!!

  102. Describing my deeply flawed personality and deep rooted anger management problems would take a long time and bore everyone rigid.

    Suffice to say 20 years ago I'd have smashed through a fire door. Now I just sigh and do vast amounts of Body Combat.

    1. Which is exactly why i don't let anyone gaslight me.

      Telling someone they are wrong and supporting it with spurious facts and then when you suggest reality they then turn to abuse is classic gaslighting and i will not under any circumstances fucking put up with it !

      Consider the fire door smashed.

      1. I broke my little finger and the one next to it knuckle, fractured the radius and ulnar and was in a cast for 6 weeks. It was a stupid thing to do.

        Interesting note – the Warqueen has never made me that angry. Ticked off, maybe, but not angry.

        1. I spent ten years estranged from my family after being gaslighted by my oldest sister playing the victim. It's why/how i recognise it.

          2. Time for you to put the cap on the bottle. Especially as you told us you have it in your morning coffee.

          3. You werent being gaslighted (gaslit?) – you were just imagining it!! (I'll get me coat …) 😉

      1. "A 15-year-old boy was ambushed and killed by a knifeman after refusing to give up his phone, it was claimed on Wednesday.

        Police said another boy, also 15, was arrested on suspicion of murdering the teenager near Bethnal Primary School in east London.

        A witness claimed that the teenager was “supposed to meet a girl” after going to the school, but “he was jumped” in a “set up” and ordered to hand over his phone.

        They said that he was allegedly stabbed in the back when he refused to hand the device over."

        1. I thought you didn't read the news. This has been normal for years. We have our own Banieliue now. Not that any politician would notice

  104. A talented Birdie Three?

    Wordle 1,131 3/6
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    1. Well done. Mine's a par.

      Wordle 1,131 4/6

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    2. Sulk.

      At least I got there after my stupid error.

      Wordle 1,131 6/6

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    3. Four
      Wordle 1,131 4/6

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      1. 5 today.
        Wordle 1,131 5/6

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        ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩. Well done Bob.

    4. Bogey Boy's back in town! Duh….

      Wordle 1,131 5/6

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    1. You know, my first thought is 'bet it's a muslim'.

      I am so sodding tired of what the Left have done to this country. If it's not litter from the welfarists, it's traffic, if not traffic it's crime, drugs, corruption, fraud, theft.

      And it's made me very unhappy. A friend of mine – a dear, kind man – in November sells Poppies. He is a muslim, although you wouldn't know it. He works two jobs to help his handicapped daughter. He puts up with all sorts of abuse for being 'brown'.

      And I love him like a brother. Many of my friends are Polish, Hungarian – mainly because she's got the tightest bottom… but anyway… everything is back to front and I'm tired of it. I'm sodding exhausted with the continual farce.

    2. Sadly this officer is going to lose his job
      Lucky if he isn't prosecuted
      Several comrade officers put in hospital by these muzscum not surprising he lost it a bit

      1. I don't expect front line police to be intelligent but to react sensibly when these situations occur. They perceived the threat and acted to save themselves and their fellow officers.
        Our great sham is their superiors who don't share that same ethos because they are now political animals will crucify them.

        Ask yourself….if someone was on the rampage wouldn't you want them subdued in any means possible. They could have 'mental health issues' and be totally deranged.

    3. That poor cop will face a terrible time now. Why is there no footage of what happened previously that 3 cops have been hospitalised?

      1. Fair chance that hundreds of slammers will be out on the streets "peacefully protesting"…..

    2. I always wondered why kids didn't try and smoke catnip. There again, maybe they do.

          1. No. It is real. They asked the horses arse what it thought and then the BBC made it the first topic on the 6pm news.

    1. 'ee wouldn't know 'is apples from 'is pears. We could throw 'im down some, my son.

  109. Latest press release from Hamas..

    In the name of God our struggle against the zionist regime continues.
    We address to the people of France and to French President Macron..
    You supported the zionist regime in its criminal war against the people of Palestine.
    You provided zionist with weapons, you helped murder our brothers and sisters our children.
    You invited the zionists to the Olympic games.
    You will pay for what you have done.
    Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris.
    This day is approaching. God willing.
    Allahuh Akbar.

    .. as French police intercept about five drones per day.

  112. That's me for today. Quite nice morning, then, after lunch, it went all dark and we expected rain. None came.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain.

    1. We spent a couple of hours attacking our "garden" with the son of one of our neighbours doing the heavy stuff. It was dry then but now it's raining.

    1. Serving military were advised several years ago to not wear their uniforms when traveling on public transport in the UK.

      1. He was walking from the Royal School of Military Engineering to his home a couple of hundred yards away.

  115. Consultant happy with Mrs Bee’s progress after three chemo sessions, but has a bit of concern about her strength for possible surgery after the sixth.

    4. Sending best wishes for the future to you and Mrs. Bee. Keep buzzing and getting stronger!

  116. This "Strictly" nonsense is merely showing up how soft the celebrity participants really are.

    They don't have a clue how hard professional dancers work to get to the level they are.

    Too many "luvvies" got where they are through luck, getting the right role at the right time, being seen with the "right" people, even sleeping with the people with power..
    Few of them go through the years of very hard, very physical effort that it takes to get to the top in a physical activity, be it sport, dancing or climbing.

    1. Is that you saying that Sos? Because i totally agree. I have met some of those types when i lived in London. Not from Strictly but from Eastenders. Some people change when a camera is pointed at them. They don't seem to know how to behave when they aren't the focus.

    1. Good grief, what on earth is that man pretending to be?
      More fool the Olympic committee/organisers for not having a real woman.
      On the plus side, that ginger-wigged thing should upset a few of the French 'guests.'

  118. Good for plod.
    I'm surprised we haven't been told the ethnicity/religion of the low-lifes that were being 'dealt with.' It's pretty obvious from some of the photos that the culprits are slammers.
    Maybe they were about to carry out some violent act in the name of Allan's Snackbar, and were initially confronted by somebody who spotted suspicious behaviour.
    As they are enrichers, I doubt we will be told much.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13668229/armed-police-officer-kicks-stamps-suspects-head-Tasered-Manchester-airport.html

  121. I rang my sister today. First time in a week.

    She told me that Kamala Harris has made an impressive start (great enthusiastic fundraising,; great polls), and thought she would beat Trump.

    There is no cure for watching the Mainstream News.

      1. My family all dislike The Donald and I reckon they prove that the MSMhave repeated lies often enough for them to become truth.

    2. I've seen comments online supporting her, too. Americans will have seen much more of her than we have, a different viewpoint. We'll see how she stands up to Trump, hopefully not laughing too much.

    3. BBC started bigging her up as soon as Biden announced he wouldn't be seeking re-election.

  122. Another day is done, so, despite Philip's wrongful diagnosis I'm just exhausted, so, I wish you a goodnight and may God bless all you Gentlefolk. If we are spared! Bis morgen früh.

      2. Despite trying for an early night, I had to give the Tamnavulin a try
        as a snifter with a wee drop of water. Very tasty and now I am OFF!

        Slainté.

    3. I think you will find that i am one of those that can bring you back. Have a think on that.

  124. What a hard life it must be for a BBC news producer. So many stories to choose from: murdered soldier, Barnsley car crash, head-stamping police, shop-lifting epidemic, Max's first PMQ, Benny Netanyahu in the USA and more. What did they start with at 6pm on BBC1? Charlotte Dujardin.

    At least they haven't attempted to offer an explanation for her personal motivation, though that will come. Perhaps someone at the Grauniad is already working on it – rich Tory with daddy complex should fit the bill.

    We were treated to a long feature on the Olympics (zzzz) and a report from Wales of the new Labour leader, soon to be prif weinidog in the siop siarad. Apparently she once went harvesting coffee with revolutionary socialists in Nicaragua. That'll serve her well. We also had almost three minutes of Janet Jackson (pfft) but no mention of John Mayall. Credit Radio 4's news this morning which did include a brief mention.

    What would we do without the Beeb?

    1. Well, they couldn't start, as did Channel 4, with strictly bums prancing, now could they?

      1. I thought Amanda Abbington was a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense, shit-kicking, socialist hard nut…

        1. Probably why she is complaining. None of those professional male dancers wanted to sleep with her.

    2. Charlotte Dujardin = an error of judgment that has been sat on for four years by the Dutch dressage team.

      John Mayall = death of a musical giant.

      1. You're a horsey sort arent you, O, I watched it and I didnt think it was too bad? Horses are pretty stupid arent they (ducks for cover) and I would assume that some sort of physical deterrent would be a fairly basic element of training – like whacking a dog??

        1. I think it was misunderstood, but I also think she made a mistake or two (who doesn’t?). I don’t believe the horse would have been harmed, but not a good look. She is a brilliant rider and trainer and there is no way her horses would perform in the way they do (perfection and harmony) if she were cruel. It just doesn’t work like that. “The horse submits generously to the control of the rider”.

          Odd that it is a member of the rival Dutch dressage team that has chosen to sit on this for years and now weaponises it.

          1. There was another not too long ago where the woman was punching the horse. Seems strange these things are turning up now.
            I know if i slapped a horse in the face he would look at me and… well what?

            Of course i wouldn't countenance that with a small creature. Seems any violence is bad to animals. Shame that doesn't include turbines.

          2. The same woman, Phizzee? I'd be very wary about punching any animal, and especially a horse. Nature endows with strange defences:-D completely on your side re turbines, every evening pipistrelles stream out from our roofspace, also tawnies from their roosts, daytime many types of birds – luckily nearest turbines a few miles away on the horizon. I'm told some farmers welcomed turbines on their scrub land because they were paid to.

          3. I am not saying it was the same woman. Just that we are seeing vids now of women using force to control these larger animals. I have no idea if these methods are good or bad. I do know there is far worse where you can see the animal is being severely mistreated. Wounds and open sores untreated.

          4. Ah..I don’t know if it was or not. I’ve seen girls in stables punching horses, and swearing fishwife style. It was thought to be something to do with controlling a much larger animal than oneself. Seems to me we often don’t deserve animals, and sometimes also the world around us. Hope tomorrow is better.

          5. The girls were obviously trying for dominance. Again i do not know the right and wrong of this. (Princess Anne please help !)
            Seeing elephants and other animals used for tourists which have/had open untreated wounds made me more angry than a young woman slapping a horse around.

          6. Yes, Phiz…not isolated to one case one horse one girl UK by any means. Dismal note to end the day. See you tmrw 🤞😊 Kate

          7. Completely unconnected and at an entirely different level, There are clutzes everywhere, in all walks of life

        2. I admit i didn't watch the video but was any blood drawn? Or was it a case of this is normal in training. I don't know.

          1. That's what I thought Phizz!

            Edit: I didnt see any blood drawn, or anything like it…….

          2. I have seen no evidence of blood being drawn – and if it were so it would be unequivocally wrong. It is not normal (or certainly should not be normal) to use a lunge whip as punishment in training, if this is what she did. The video clip looks awful but then we do need to see the wider context. I don't believe that she hurt the horse. But she has admitted that it shows an error of judgment.

          3. The error of judgement was probably to allow filming to take place. This all feeds into an attack on country folk.
            Even i sometimes become exasperated with my two little doggies but i certainly wouldn't allow filming as i threw them out the window into the paddling pool. I only missed once !

          4. Very funny, Phizzle, but there is a serious undertow here. There has been been genuine cruelty in training all animals (see Paul Shokomoele for showjumpers, for example) but it just doesn't ring true for me with Dujardin.

          5. I bow to your superior knowledge and i have not doubt. Do we stop…do we ban…we only eat fantastic meat because of high standards of excellence…I may be mixing things up a bit but i am wary of people who want everything fluffy and lovely.

        3. I don't personally think "whacking a dog" to be an acceptable way of training a dog, nor do I think whacking a horse to be effective or acceptable. I would like to know CD's explanation as to why she conducted this lesson in the way that she did. Even though she's grovelled, and it looks bad, I bet she has one.

          1. Well I understand it will offend sensibilities – but it’s how they do it themselves!

            The charming Ms Dujardin, I watched a tv program about her just the other day, has clearly been set up here by vengeful competitors – why is everybody saying it’s the Dutch?

            A sad end (is it?) to a glittering career……..

          2. Well, 4H, i suppose anyone in the world would choose a Dutch lawyer to represent them, stands to reason. This woman is quite exceptional, genuinely brilliant at what she does, don't forget, and set to win a gold medal at the just-about -to -start Olympics. Hard to think of a motive for a rival to to force her to withdraw.

          3. Yes, she was lined up to overtake the wonderful Laura Trott/Kenny as the ‘greatest’ (well, at least most medals!) UK Olympian of all time.

            Very sad, and a bit too stinky for my liking!!

      2. John Mayall = death of a musical giant. RIP.

        You wait until Elton goes…It will be Princess Diana all over fucking again. Non stop.

      2. I expect she has adopted a white baby or got divorced or taken some new weight loss drug or something as interesting…yawns.

    2. As an idea why don't you try what Julien and her husband do with the Swifts…Chuck out all the cars and motorbikes, the golf clubs and the tools and create an aviary. :@)

  127. Back from the sea.

    3 for wordle.

    Wordle 1,131 3/6

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      1. We were after bass, no luck, but caught some excellent Channel mackerel. A lot of pollack not of a decent size. All on lures.

          2. I hate to break this to you, Phizz . and not meaning to be patronising, but that is not a mackerel

  129. I just searched for the 5 o'clock Lacoste, Sue et al Wordle posts but can't find any

    1. I don’t think I’ve seen any other post than yours, molamola…tbh I tried this am and then forgot about it until I saw your post. Bit of an odd day all round, somehow. Our internet link was down earlier, perhaps related? Always tomorrow 🙂

  131. I think most men who have taken a lady out for dinner will recognise this:

    "I don't want a pudding but if you have one can you get two spoons?"

    1. Yep. Or the 'I'll just try some of yours'.

      The Warqueen learned that lesson damned fast. She also learned that I want her, in all her majesty, not some waif she thinks people want her to be.

      1. It's also pointless saying "Why don't you have one as well and I'll eat what you don't want."

        1. I can see why the second part of your avatar name makes sense…..>>>runs away slowly… :@)

          1. “Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
            Terry Pratchett

  133. What a lovely evening we had in the local pub with three couples from oop narth interesting variations of opinions. Aka taking the piss.
    Loved it. Good night all.
    All could be Nottlers.

  134. 'You Don’t Kick a Man When He is Down'

    I was horrified; the story will run.

    'Night all.

      1. I must have missed that. Congratulations. The new Mrs Mola knows what reel fish is.

    1. From Coffee House, the Spectator

      Lammy under fire for flight ‘hypocrisy’
      Comments Share 24 July 2024, 5:09pm
      Another day under a Labour government and – you guessed it – another U-turn. Now ministers are in the spotlight after it emerged that David Lammy used the government’s private plane to jet off to India today for international trade talks. The same private jet, Mr S would remind readers, that Sir Keir’s lefty lot bashed the Tories for using when they were in government. Rules for thee, but not for me…

      When ex-prime minister Liz Truss dared to use the Airbus A321 plane to fly to Australia on official business, deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner could hardly contain her disdain. Slamming the then-Tory MP, Rayner remarked at the time: ‘Liz Truss shows the public exactly quite how little respect this Conservative government has for taxpayers’ money with her ridiculous waste of half a million pounds on a private jet trip. This government is brazen in its disregard for upholding decency.’ Crikey.

      Truss wasn’t the only Tory to receive a telling off from the then-opposition over private planes. Former home secretaries James Cleverly, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel were criticised for their use of chartered flights – with Rachel Reeves even promising last year’s Labour conference that she would crack down on private jet use by ministers if her party got into government: ‘I will treat taxpayers’ money with the same respect that people treat their own money.’ That’s rather hard to believe when Lammy’s flight is expected to cost the taxpayer approximately £110,000 in fuel costs alone. And the Foreign Secretary isn’t the only guilty culprit, as Mr S pointed out last week. In fact, Starmer himself appears to have a penchant for private planes, despite his party’s supposed stance on the matter. They do say power corrupts…

      Cleverly took to Twitter this afternoon to make a point about Lammy’s jet-setting, writing: ‘I’m not going to criticise David Lammy for using the government plane. The Foreign Secretary must be able to travel directly, flexibly and at short notice. But,’ he added, ‘the criticism of me from Labour when I flew on government business now reeks of hypocrisy.’ Indeed.

    1. 'Morning, Geoff and thank you for all the work and effort you have put in to keep us all going. Well done!

      Maggie's post about the Ospreys has disappeared – strange – and I cannot get into X (Twitter).

    2. 'Morning, Geoff and thank you for all the work and effort you have put in to keep us all going. Well done!

      Maggie's post about the Ospreys has disappeared – strange – and I cannot get into X (Twitter).

Comments are closed.