Wednesday 3 September: Calling Britain’s countryside racist will not improve social cohesion

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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622 thoughts on “Wednesday 3 September: Calling Britain’s countryside racist will not improve social cohesion”

  2. Calling Britain’s countryside racist will not improve social cohesion

    I thought we weren't suppose to generalise and tar all people with the same brush

  3. Good morning, one and all. Today's Wordle was another Birdie. Is there no end to my talent luck?

    Wordle 1,537 3/6

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    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Good morning Elsie, well done
      Wordle 1,537 4/6

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      🟨🟩⬜⬜🟩
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    1. I dispute that “we are the architects of our own demise”.

      WE are not. It is His Majesty’s Government.

    1. Good morning all. Possibly Badenoch's finest moment.

      edit: Adams can't draw though! The hips are completely wrong. What do they teach them in art schools these days….

      1. Activists threw a can of soup over a painting in one of the London galleries. Presumably not Tate Modern or it would have been mistaken for performance art.

  10. Stephen Pollard
    Graham Linehan’s arrest is a turning point
    2 September 2025, 1:26pm

    The hoo-ha over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated. I earn my living through voicing my opinions, and not once have I ever felt unable to say exactly what I think – especially when that’s controversial or offends large numbers of people.

    I am, of course, well aware that some people have had a very different experience – such as the comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, who has robustly pointed out that biology means that men who identify as women are, nonetheless, still men. For that, his career was effectively ended in an industry that has long been in thrall to trans and other ideologies.

    But I have bridled at some of the supposed examples of free speech being destroyed. I am not one of those, for example, who believes Lucy Connolly is some sort of hero. Her social media post in the wake of the Southport murders last summer saying that hotels with asylum seekers should be set on fire was, to my mind, not merely revolting but incitement. Had it been merely revolting – something with which most decent people were horrified by – then that would be something for which she should have been taken to task, but not by the criminal justice system. Her post crossed a line, however.

    But there are moments when the penny drops and you realise you are wrong. Today has provided one of those moments. When Linehan returned from the United States yesterday, where he moved to be able to work, he was promptly arrested at Heathrow by five armed police officers. What alleged crime must he have been suspected of to be met by a show of such force? Murder? Terrorism? Armed robbery?

    None of those. He was arrested, he says in a Substack he posted earlier today, because of three tweets he had posted.

    Linehan’s tweets are nothing like Lucy Connolly’s. They are merely expressions of his view of trans ideology, albeit strongly worded, in his (entirely legitimate) style. In one, he posted a picture of what seems be a trans rights demonstration, with his caption: “A photo you can smell”. Another reads: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F— em”. And the third says: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

    You might not like his tone. You might find his attitude confrontational. Trans people will doubtless find the posts offensive. So what? There is no law against giving offence.

    Except that appears no longer to be true. The Metropolitan Police has confirmed that Linehan was held ‘in relation to posts on X’. ‘The man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence,’ a spokesman said.

    Criminality is evolving every day in this sphere. Increasingly, giving offence is being taken by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service as prima facie evidence of criminality. The other side of this coin is that taking offence is seen as legitimate grounds for a complaint. Presumably someone made a complaint to the police over these tweets – unless, and this is not beyond the realms of possibility, the police have officers who spend their days trawling the internet looking for posts that offend what they consider to be good taste. Is that really a good use of police time?

    Trust in the police is at an all-time low. In October 2024, 52 per cent of adults told YouGov that they had no confidence in the police to tackle crime, compared to 39 per cent in October 2019. What the police don’t now do – tackle crime – is just one aspect of the collapse in trust. Allied to that is what the police do now do – such as arresting people over social media posts which merely give offence to someone. It’s of a piece with what is seen on the regular hate marches, where they stand and watch when there are calls for the murder of Jews (such as the widespread ‘globalise the intifada’), but only spring into action when a counter-demonstrator turns up, saying that they are likely to provoke a breach of the peace.

    What we are seeing is the congruence of two dangerous developments. First, is the idea that giving offence is something which should be banned. The government’s current move towards adopting a definition of Islamophobia is part of this, and has rightly been labelled by Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Muslim anti-prejudice group TellMAMA, as introducing a blasphemy law by the back door. Similarly, the onward march of the trans ideologues may have been stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of ‘woman’, but the ideology has already taken hold of many institutions and spaces.

    Which leads to the second development – the police’s capture by this and other ‘woke’ ideologies. Linehan describes how in his police interview a police officer mentioned trans people: “I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.’

    This is the nub of it. The police, supposed guardians of the law, have become players in the activists’ capture of the institutions. It is not that they are no longer concerned with crime, but that they are redefining what crime is. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up to what is happening in Britain, his arrest will have served our country well.

    ********************************************
    Seabury Pongleton
    17 hours ago
    This is genuinely shocking and utterly outrageous. Whoever made the decision needs to be dismissed from the police – they are not fit to hold the office they do.

    Blindsideflanker Seabury Pongleton
    17 hours ago
    Yes, the police officers sent to arrest him probably couldn't say no, but it is the senior police officers who sent them we should be going after. As they were arresting someone coming off a flight, this clearly goes very close to the top, for I presume it is only senior people in the border control or police who would have the information about who was coming in on a flight.

    KJ200 Blindsideflanker
    16 hours ago
    Reported some police officers involved in Grooming Gangs. Not sure how the Enquiry is progressing, seems to have gone a bit quiet….

    Pravda Verify Seabury Pongleton
    17 hours ago edited
    That won’t be enough, Pongers. A Reform government needs to abolish the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council.
    The rot is institutionalised.

    Pravda Verify
    17 hours ago edited
    You are wrong about Lucy Connolly Mr Pollard, but let that pass.
    If the Police have gone for Graham Linehan today ( get well soon, Graham), tomorrow it will be someone like Douglas Murray or Brendan O’Neill or Rod Liddle or Matt Goodwin or David Starkey.
    If they dare.
    Something must be done to bring the Police back under control. They incite violence all the time by stunts like this. It is not a one-off, it is institutional.
    It matters not if he is charged, the damage is done by the arrest.
    Will Mrs Balls speak? Don’t hold your breath.

    1. I'm not sure that I agree with his third paragraph about Lucy Connolly. (Good morning, Citroen1, btw.)

      1. "I earn my living through voicing my opinions, and not once have I ever felt unable to say exactly what I think"
        Well isn't Mr Pollard lucky that he has never had a thought that is unacceptable to the Government!

    3. Lucy Connolly did not say “ … that hotels with asylum seekers should be set on fire”. She said she ‘did not care’ …. No incitement imo.

      “There is no law against giving offence”. Is there not? I believe there is such a law. Isn’t it called a hate crime?

  11. Brendan O’Neill
    The persecution of Graham Linehan
    2 September 2025, 4:36pm

    Ihave been lamenting Britain’s authoritarian turn for years. Yet even I was taken aback, physically repulsed in fact, by a news alert that pinged my phone today. It was from the Telegraph. It contained just 11 words — 11 words that ought to chill the blood of all who believe in liberty. This is what it said: ‘Graham Linehan arrested by five armed police officers for trans tweets.’

    So this is England. A country where a once-beloved comedy writer can have his collar felt by cops over things he said on the internet. A country where a cultural legend can be treated like a common criminal simply for expressing his heartfelt beliefs. A country that seems hell-bent on mimicking China by dispatching its heavies to harass a writer for the ‘crime’ of thinking dissenting thoughts. This has got to be a line in the sand. This, surely, will be the moment when everyone, from Keir Starmer down, says: ‘Enough.’

    I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the moral transgression, the wicked notion, for which Mr. Linehan found himself surrounded by armed men earlier today. It’s because he thinks men are not women. It’s because he believes in science. Linehan is now as famous for his fierce and unflinching defence of biological reality as he is for having penned such comedy classics as Father Ted and The IT Crowd. And he has suffered for his sinful thoughts.

    In a Substack post, Linehan says he was nabbed after arriving on a flight from the US. He is suspected of ‘incitement’ over posts he made on X about a ‘trans-identified male’ going into ‘a female-only space’. He has been released on bail and his bail comes with one simple, stringent condition: he must not go on X. Sin utterers of old were forced to wear a scold’s bridle to stop their wicked chatter – now they’re brutishly shut out from social media.

    It sounds to me like someone has taken offence to something Linehan said online – probably something most of us would consider a perfectly reasonable view – and then snitched on him to the police. Then the cops made their move, guns at the ready, as the foul dissenter touched down at Heathrow. What kind of country lets its police be used as the armed wing of petty grievances? Not a very democratic one, that’s for sure.

    Linehan became unwell at Heathrow. Officials became concerned for his health after taking his blood pressure and took him to hospital. Let us speak frankly: this is obscene. It heaps shame on our nation, this bristling birthplace of the modern ideals of liberty, that a writer should be confronted by armed men and caused to become unwell merely for holding and expressing certain beliefs. This is a dark day in the history of English liberty.

    We are witnessing nothing less than the persecution of Graham Linehan. The haranguing of a man for daring to demur from the post-truth lunacies of our morally lost elites. Mr Linehan is the most noted victim of that toxic mix of moral cowardice and therapeutic censorship that now passes for ‘progressive’ activism. First he was cold-shouldered by his old comedy colleagues, then he was frozen out by the media, and now he’s questioned by men with guns. This is the militarisation of cancel culture.

    How could we do this? This supremely talented Irishman comes to England to share his gift for comedy and just a few years later he found himself demonised, shamed, shouted down, arrested – and all because he thinks if you have a penis you are a man and you should stay out of women’s spaces. That image of Linehan becoming poorly as cops interrogated him should haunt the neo-McCarthyites – this horror is on you.

    Linehan is our John Wilkes. Wilkes was the trouble-making newspaperman who frequently found himself in the Tower for his government-bashing screeds. He’s our John Lilburne, the 17th-century pamphleteer who was whipped for his heretical beliefs, once so badly that his shoulders ‘swelled almost as big as a penny loaf’. He’s our William Prynne, the voluble polemicist of the 1600s who was frequently arrested and assaulted for his wrongthink. Though at least Linehan has been spared the ignominy of having the letters S and L branded on to his cheeks to mark him out as a ‘seditious libeller’, as happened to Prynne.

    That’s essentially what he is accused of, though: seditious libel. Giving voice to ideas the establishment doesn’t like. Daring to cock an eyebrow at supposed right-think. In all of the above cases, people rallied to the defence of the heretics and argued for the full, unfettered liberty to utter. That’s what we need to do now. No ifs, no buts. You’re either with Graham Linehan or you’re with tyranny. Someone should make a T-shirt: ‘Je Suis Graham.’ I’ll wear it.
    **************************************
    Alastair Harris
    14 hours ago
    I think we should be clear. This was wrongful arrest, and the bail conditions are a blatant and illegal attempt to suppress freedom of expression. The perpetrators must be held to account.

    Lancastrian Michael Alastair Harris
    13 hours ago
    For an arrest to be legal, it has to be necessary. I'm puzzled as to why it was regarded as such; they could suimply have invited him for interview, even at a later date, as they do with lots of thieves and other genuine criminals.

    Leslie S Lancastrian Michael
    13 hours ago
    They're making an example of Graham as a deterrent. It strikes fear into people knowing they can be arrested for stating facts.

    TheHoff
    14 hours ago
    The BBC news putting it in the Culture section rather than News tells its own story. It lets them frame it as “celebrity/arts figure caught up in controversy” instead of treating it as a straightforward legal or political story. It softens the edges and avoids putting it alongside the big headlines about policing, free speech, or government policy.

    1. Why? Why? How can this be? Ponder the MidWits.

      Because you failed to notice that Blair & Campbell placed radical Lefties in every position of power and passed into Law the means to jail any heretic.

      And still you get right wing journos like Camilla Tominey.. British journalist larf.. scratching her head and calling TR a white supremacist.

      1. Because she has her part to play in the structure put in place by Blair…that of "controlled opposition" to lead ordinary people into a cul-de-sac. They own Tominey via her income and they probably own TR too by a combination of carrot and stick.

    2. Why? Why? How can this be? Ponder the MidWits.

      Because you failed to notice that Blair & Campbell placed radical Lefties in every position of power and passed into Law the means to jail any heretic.

      And still you get right wing journos like Camilla Tominey.. British journalist larf.. scratching her head and calling TR a white supremacist.

    3. Why? Why? How can this be? Ponder the MidWits.

      Because you failed to notice that Blair & Campbell placed radical Lefties in every position of power and passed into Law the means to jail any heretic.

      And still you get right wing journos like Camilla Tominey.. British journalist larf.. scratching her head and calling TR a white supremacist.

    4. They don't bother with courts any more. The punishment is having your home invaded early in the morning and all your computers/storage devices taken, for allegations that can never be proven because they aren't true or wouldn't stand up in court.
      This latest incident is just a variation on that. The people who support it because they don't like what he said, ought to remember that tomorrow it'll be them in the firing line.

    5. Emphasis:
      Leslie S Lancastrian Michael
      13 hours ago
      They're making an example of Graham as a deterrent. It strikes fear into people knowing they can be arrested for stating facts.

    9. Most of the front pages of today's papers mention this appalling news – two obvious exceptions being The Grauniad and The Mirror!

  12. Good morning, all. 86 years ago today, the imperialist warmonger Chamberlain declared war on innocent, unarmed Germany. What a fool he was.

    Raining and chilly today – and the AGA is playing up. Just the ticket…

    1. I have a recording of Chamberlain's radio announcement. Speaking from the "cebinet room" at 10, Downing Street.
      "… we are now at war with Germany."
      Chilling, so it is. Seems ever-more likely to be repeated relatively soon.

      1. One of the BBC engineers recalled, many years later: "Once the Prime minister had finished speaking, we cleared away our equipment, and then went to Schmidt's German Restaurant to show there were no hard feelings".

        1. Bet the restaurant didn't last long.
          Before 1914, there was an active German community in Britain. At one point in the eighteenth century, most of the sugar refiners in London were Germans. There were restaurants, bakeries etc.
          They disappeared overnight; names were anglicised, histories forgotten "We have no idea where great grandfather John (or William or Henry or George) came from."

    2. I have a recording of Chamberlain's radio announcement. Speaking from the "cebinet room" at 10, Downing Street.
      "… we are now at war with Germany."
      Chilling, so it is. Seems ever-more likely to be repeated relatively soon.

    3. Sobering thought that the youngest on active service during WW2 (18 in 1945) – so born in 1927 – would be 98 now.

      2. Very good. I haven’t put them on yet .
        The beast is burning with a bright yellow flame. Fails to respond to any of my meagre ideas.

  14. Allison Pearson
    Nigel Farage speaks for the millions ashamed of what Britain has become

    When the future prime minister gives evidence in Washington on threats to free speech, he will do so on behalf of the common-sense majority

    On Wednesday afternoon in Washington DC, Nigel Farage will give evidence to the House Judiciary Committee. The topic is “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation”. The session will highlight how European online censorship laws – specifically the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act – endanger the right of Americans to speak freely. The leader of Reform UK has already faced accusations that his decision to testify to the chilling clampdown on British people’s speech rights amounts to betrayal, if not treason. Farage doesn’t care. “The UK is damaging itself,” he told me.

    He will cite the case of Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder jailed for 31 months for a nasty tweet she swiftly deleted on the day of the 2024 Southport killings, as a warning to our friends across the pond to remain vigilant. “Many Americans look up to the land of Magna Carta and they will be shocked by Lucy’s story, as are we, her fellow countrymen.”

    On one level, I suppose it is pretty extraordinary that the man who is likely to be prime minister in four years’ time – a recent poll showed Reform doing better than Labour and the Tories combined – should go abroad to draw attention to a very British embarrassment. But, then again, many of us feel that this Britain with its two-tier policing, two-tier justice system and silencing of everyday views is no longer our Britain. It’s as if we were under occupation by a group of hyper-liberal progressives who have infected every corner of national life with their weird, righteous dogma, endlessly searching for proof of native loathsomeness and treating any pushback as proof of guilt.

    Starmer’s Stasi have alienated the vast majority in the sensible middle, of both Left and Right, who don’t believe a person should be arrested for posting on social media that they don’t feel especially culturally enriched if illegal migrants lurk outside their children’s school. Nor do they want a child banned from a summer camp, as happened recently, after its mother refused to state her preferred pronouns and was deemed to not be in line with “our inclusive environment”.

    The other morning, I was at the hairdresser trying to explain what had happened to Lucy Connolly – stitched up by police who falsely reported she disliked immigrants, denied bail and due process on the instruction of the look-how-tough-I-am Prime Minister, made an example of with an absurdly harsh sentence while violent criminals walked free, granted none of the days out of jail to see her child that she should have had.

    “What country is that in then?” my hairdresser asked.

    “It’s this country, our country, the UK.”

    “You must be joking,” she said.

    What country is that in then? Makes you want to weep, doesn’t it? How far have we fallen. I’m sure the House Judiciary Committee will be aghast to hear how Lucy and other basically decent people are persecuted by one of their closest allies for Orwellian “thought crimes”.

    Farage understood instinctively that Lucy was a normal mum, one of millions horrified by a massacre of young children at a summer holiday club; sending her to jail for an enraged and devastated tweet was unconscionable. It was also, I think, the desperate act of a flailing regime whose “diversity is good” belief system was crashing about its ears.

    Lacking any will to reverse the impact of uncontrolled migration, its only answer was to silence and stigmatise those who cried out at the consequences.

    Farage is now the de facto leader of the common-sense majority. He appears in the US not merely as one of four MPs in a small Parliamentary party, but to represent our values, our Britain; the one which successive “far-Centrist” governments have been happy to trade in and trash for a few million immigrants and a miserable uptick in GDP.

    Compare and contrast with the visit in February to the White House by our leader in name only, Sir Keir Starmer. Challenged by JD Vance over the UK’s “infringements on free speech” a pink-faced Starmer babbled: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom – and it will last for a very, very long time.”

    Said the PM of a country where the Free Speech Union reckons more than 30 people a day are arrested for offensive online messages. And the “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) is not dystopian fiction but sinister fact.

    Some of the cases are so absurd and vindictive they make me hate my country (or the country those b——s have turned my country into). Look what they have just done to Graham Linehan. Not that Nigel needs any more ammunition to convince the Yanks that the UK is a police state and authoritarian hellhole but, pretty much just as Farage was taking off for the States, the comic genius and writer of Father Ted was coming the opposite direction only to be arrested by five armed officers as he stepped off a plane at Heathrow.

    On his Substack, Graham recounts that he was told he was under arrest for three tweets – furious jokes on the topic of “trans-identified males in a female-only space” in which he advised women (clearly in jest) to “punch them in the balls”. For such heresy against the prevailing orthodoxy Graham Linehan has already lost his glittering career and his marriage. Isn’t that enough? No, any random malcontent can say they felt offended or “unsafe” because of something they read on X and the full force of the law descends most terrifyingly on that lovely, brave, funny man.

    “In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up),” writes Linehan, whose blood pressure was so high when they held him in a cell he could have had a stroke. The male officers, he says, were “mostly polite but clearly nonplussed by the politics of it all – just doing their jobs however insane those jobs had become”.

    It reminds me of the cluelessness of the two young coppers who came to my door on Remembrance Sunday last year over a tweet deleted 12 months earlier. My post didn’t approach the threshold for criminal investigation (in fact, Essex Police originally rejected it even as an NCHI until my complainant complained again), but, never mind, I had hurt someone somewhere’s feelings. I am taking the police to court and I hope Linehan will do so in due course; his treatment has been outrageous and a condition of his bail is he is not even allowed to tweet about it. A nice Kafkaesque touch. If we are still to call ourselves a free country, police simply cannot be allowed to behave in that way.

    A pattern of state repression starts to emerge, does it not? It can be traced from Lucy Connolly to the “Pink Lady” protests springing up across the country to defend women and girls against undocumented males from misogynist cultures; the protests are aggressively policed with one leader, Sarah White, being arrested for a breach of the Public Order Act on Sunday by Essex officers who held her in a cell for 24 hours after she allegedly trespassed on council property and draped a Union Jack over a parapet. Sarah’s “crime” is to not want migrants destabilising her peaceful community, making women too scared to walk home from work.

    Sarah White was arrested for a breach of the Public Order Act on Sunday by Essex officers who held her in a cell for 24 hours

    Last week’s Appeal Court judgment on the Epping migrant hotel case was delivered by Lord Justice Bean, a former chairman of the quasi-socialist, pro-migration Fabian society and a close associate of Attorney General Lord Hermer who is bosom pals with one international human rights devotee, Keir Starmer. Need I say more?

    In the penultimate paragraph of the judgment, the higher court found that “the Epping residents’ fear of crime [committed by migrants] was properly taken into account” by the original judge and “while it is relevant, it is clearly outweighed by the undesirability of incentivising protest”.

    Let me sum up that judgment in three words: Shut up, Peasants!

    It is telling that the judges’ emphasis was on prevention of protest. Lawful protest, I might add. The court seems very keen to preserve the status quo and points out that, if one migrant hostel is allowed to be shut down by protest, why, people in other places may get the same idea and try to get their migrant hostel closed down. We can’t have people getting what they want, can we?

    While the Home Office denied there was a hierarchy of priorities, their own barrister argued that the rights of asylum seekers under international law are more important than the rights of Epping residents. In the final analysis, and for all the screeds of verbiage deployed by judges and lawyers, it came down to this: who do we care more about – indigenous girls and women, or migrant males?

    To contain public anger over that ruling in favour of foreigners and against our own, you can bet the Starmer Stasi will try to impose yet more censorship, more shadow banning on social media (when a user’s content is made less visible without their knowledge), police will arrest more worried parents and comedians, journalists will get a knock on the door, courts will give more harsh and disproportionate sentences for ludicrous tweets and thought crimes. Shut up, Peasants!

    Is it any wonder that our friends across the Atlantic are fretting that the UK is no longer a reliable defender of Western values? They look at us and wonder, “What the hell is going on in the old country?” We are a laughing stock, a cautionary tale. A senior source in the Trump administration tells me there are plans to give financial support to organisations in the UK that champion free speech and to groups like Women’s Safety Initiative, whose mission is “to expose the dangers of mass immigration and to put women and girls first”.

    What country is that in then? Much like Britain gives aid to an earthquake zone, America now feels she has to parachute in assistance to these benighted, censored isles, once the golden redoubt of free speech. How unutterably shameful.

    When Farage gives his evidence to the House Judiciary Committee (and, on Tuesday afternoon, he confirmed he would cite Linehan’s arrest, as well as Lucy Connolly’s), the Reform leader will represent the views of millions of us who are ashamed at what they have made of this country. He speaks for Britain now, our Britain not theirs, on the world stage, and one day, not too far away, he will speak for us at home. The peasants know who to vote for.

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

    1. speaks for the millions

      I hope he's got some good advisers because many people have started to notice that he lacks political nous of the follow thru.
      Islam? What's the problem?
      Trans gender activist as a justice minister.. is that bad?

      1. He is a politician. ALL politicians are the biggest and most dangerous scourge of humanity, followed by religious fundamentalists.

        Trouble is, mankind is far too stupid to realise — or acknowledge — this.

    2. And Starmer begins to wonder why he and his government of arseholes are even still falling in popularity. Here's a hint, Keir: the reshuffle won't make one iota of differnce.

  15. Morning, all Y'all.
    Sunny – lovely early autumn day… leaves are turning, air is soft. Couldn't be better.

    1. I'll be there – unless the powers-that-be think of some reason for arresting before then!

    2. Please take the lessons from Covid…

      The Canadians went out on the streets.
      What happened? They lost, ultimately defeated by what were probably UN troops when it looked as though the Canadian police and army would come down on their side.

      The Austrian government passed a vax mandate law, but pulled back and cancelled it a few days before it was due to come into effect.
      Why did the Austrian government back down, but the Canadian government didn't?

      The reason was that the Austrians simply didn't comply.
      Over a million Austrians in a country of about 11 million people weren't vaxxed a few days before the mandate laws were due to come into effect, and they were fully ready to go to jail.

      Please learn from this!
      The governments WANT people out on the streets where they can be easily defeated!
      It is far, far harder to defeat large numbers of people who simply don't comply.
      Accept some inconvenience and don't get nudged into the box where they are pushing you, of total dependence on big business for all your needs. Because big business long ago merged with the state and you know what the merger of big business and government is called.
      Why is it harder to accept some inconvenience in one's daily life than to give up freedom?

      Also, ask yourselves why the Austrian victory was swiftly memory-holed on the supposedly free internet, and instead we are being urged from all sides of the so called alt media to get angry and take to the streets.

      1. Yep. Unless you block & close every motorway into London and lay siege to the country.. absolutely nowt will happen.

      2. Yep. Unless you block & close every motorway into London and lay siege to the country.. absolutely nowt will happen.

        1. Sorry to keep pushing the point, but even if we did that, they would let it run for a couple of weeks and then in would come the UN troops just as they did in Canada.
          I am not saying that demonstrations don’t have their part to play – for example, it’s good to be in the company of like-minded people to swap information and encourage each other. But at the end of the day, demonstrations are only a supporting factor – defeat of the technocracy will only come via mass noncompliance.

          The technocracy serfdom isn’t going to announce itself either. They don’t play fair. It’ll just be a new NHS number that you’ve got to click on something to activate, or something like that. You’ll be told you need it in order to access services. This is how it’s being rolled out in other countries. They make you do it to yourself, while behind the scenes, the id that you’ve just activated of your own free will is quietly linked to more and more of your data.
          But if 10% of the population don’t comply they’ll fail.

          1. I'd say majority of people I know angry about all sorts of subjects (covid/vaccine/their gp/immigration/job losses/government..list goes on) but nevertheless unlikely to march for reasons ranging from weather to being arrested etc). They will just vote Reform instead, soon as they have a chance. Even if Farage elected PM, I'm not certain much will change – as I keep saying, Civil Service our real and permanent gov't UK, complete with Chris Wormald senior CS as PM. Sorry to appear defeatist.

          2. I think that’s realistic. We aren’t going to vote our way out of this mess. Non-violent, non-compliance and becoming as independent as possible from the system is the only way that I can see.

          3. I hope it works, but I doubt it will with Starmer and his government (and the Civil Service support), and their policies. Pound of cheese to a pinch of salt, they will become permanent.

  17. SIR – Ian Smith is right in supporting local coffee shops instead of chains (Letters, September 2).

    However, can I make a plea on behalf of tea drinkers? If a teapot is too much to ask, a simple metal ball filled with loose-leaf tea, to be left for a few minutes to gently seep, after which a splash of milk can be added, is infinitely preferable to a teabag slammed into a mug with a splosh of milk.

    Tony Parrack
    London SW20

    Indeed, Tony. Any gormless individual attempting to make a beverage in that manner and calling it 'tea' in my mother's or my grandmother's generation (and no doubt at any time before them) would have been given short shrift and seen it poured down the sink post haste!

    My teapot gets used — properly — daily.

    1. I'll take a chance with tea in this country, but never abroad (except, of course, chez Griz).

      1. I remember being offered ‘tea’ in a Los Angeles hotel restaurant. I’d already seen a couple being served a mug of lukewarm water with a string hanging out of it. I stuck to weak ‘coffee’ for the rest of my stay there.

        1. As do i have to.

          My worst experience with tea was aforementioned lukewarm water with a camomile teabag. In Mexico

    2. Morning, Grizz.
      Milk in tea – yukk. Loose-leaf tea is the only way to brew it, with big leaves, not the factory floor sweepings that inhabit teabags and go bitter almost immediately. Big-leaf tea can be brewed in a decent pot, and topped up with more hot water as needed, without getting bitter – much as it is drunk in Russia, Azerbaijan and other places.

    3. I like Pukka teabags….especially Matcha green, and also the honey/ginger/lemon one…I'll get me coat….

      1. I would rather put a slice of real ginger and a squeeze of lemon into a mug of tea (for a hot toddy in winter).

    1. In fairness [not that Britain cares about that now] Epping should not only be allowed to appeal but this time they should be allowed to pick the judges! The "Bean decision" should be overturned on the grounds that he was seriously compromised and should have recused [challenge (a judge, prosecutor, or juror) as unqualified to perform legal duties because of a potential conflict of interest or lack of impartiality.] himself!

      1. I do wonder whether Epping council could start road works in such a way that supplies cannot get in or out.

  19. Good Morning!

    Today we have two new articles one, NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION by Graham Wood, makes the point that Britain has reached to point where the majority – the patriotic conservative leaning majority – has been effectively disenfranchised and that therefore is needs to look into withholding the monstrous amount of tax the State tax from us. Secondly, Zhang Yingyue writes of the significance of 3 September, the day China celebrates victory over Japan, and, in Xi Jinping Celebrates the End of World War Two – and His Own Power – The War That Nearly Erased China , of how it is being used to consolidate Xi's power and to create an economic block opposed to US hegemony and the Dollar.

    Energy Watch: Over the last 24 hours: Britain consumed 30.3 GW of electric power, sourced from Gas, 28%; Solar, 6.3%: Wind 26.8%; Imports, 15.4%; Biomass, 7.8%; Nuclear 12.9% and Miscellaneous, 2.9%. Note: Wind production fell be almost half since yesterday.

    freespeechbacklash.com

    1. You have your units confused Tom. Electricity demand is the instantaneous power being used and at this time of year is around 30GW as you say. 'Consumed …' suggests the total used over 24 hours and should be in GWh. So the consumed would be around 720 GWh.

      1. He means 30.3 GWh I thought.
        It is fairly worrying that a quarter of our electricity depends on the wind blowing and 6.3% is off after dark…

      2. You are right, and as an engineer I know this. The GW is the unit of power, and the GWh is the unit of consumption – but I think that most don’t really see the difference and that the use in this case is justified, as it gives a clearer impression. To say that over the last 24 hours the instantaneous amount of power averaged 30GW is a bit too wordy, don’t you think?

        1. Where do you find the average consumption or even the daily total? All the sites I visit seem to only show the instantaneous along with pretty graphs.

  20. Morning All 🙂😊
    Grey, wind and rain thunder storms later 17 degs.
    Country side and indeed gardens 're-greening'
    I expect a politician will take credit for this.
    I'm not sure I understand today's headline, as we discussed in the local last night as villagers we seem to live in a sort of bubble and are not effected by the general goings on. I heard of a recently widowed chap in his 80s living in Kenton near Harrow, who now can not go out of his house after dark because of the local 'ex-african' drug dealers in his area. The police don't even try to stop it.

  21. This one is flying under the radar.

    Why are some of the world’s biggest comedians including Dave Chappelle, Whitney Cummings and Jimmy Carr, heading to Saudi Arabia, a country with some of the strictest free speech laws on the planet, for their upcoming Riyadh Comedy Festival? Is comedy really universal, or is this just laughing all the way to the bank?

    Riyadh Comedy Festival trying to be the next Edinburgh or Montreal. LOL
    Paying them huge amounts of $ to perform to empty seats. LOL

      1. Well that's been one of the ironic jokes doing the rounds..
        They'll be laughing their heads off..

    3. It's a contribution to Saudi Arabia's effort to diversify its economy away from its dependence on oil.

  22. 412229+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    He most certainly does not speak for me and, I believe a great many others for them either.

    I truthfully believe on reflection he has been a deep covert coxswain placement as a UKIP founder member, for the iory party.

    So as there is no misunderstanding I see it as the Reform party members speak via farage

    Dt,
    Nigel Farage speaks for the millions ashamed of what Britain has become
    When the future prime minister gives evidence in Washington on threats to free speech, he will do so on behalf of the common-sense majority.

    In farage we trust, I don't think so, not without an anti treachery fall back party as in, the Farmers Food and Freedom Party, as an umbrella for the Ben Habib Advance UK,and the Rupert Lowe supporters.
    That's genuine common sense.

    1. How about 10 million parties, each comprising one member? If each member voted for themselves, who knows how it might transform the political landscape where the leading contender in each constituency gets elected, regardless of how few votes they receive or how small their majority.

      1. 412229+ up ticks,

        Afternoon S,

        The one with the biggest club would dictate
        the order of the day, I don’t mean supporting club. I mean head battering club.

  24. One lesson belatedly learned from WW2 – how to develop a British Gestapo. Alive and well posing as the Metropolitan Police Farce.

    1. Agreed, the scales fell from my eyes as to how the Stasi got away with their behaviour between1945 and 1990 when the scamdemic hit. Plod have answered the question of how the Germans fell into goosestep in the 1930s

      1. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.
        Said by a far smarter person than I am.

  25. Good morning, 13°C, grey and soggy with light winds on the Costa Clyde. My weekly shop at Tesco Irvine, dropping some goods off at my folks, and a quiet day ahead. I've chuckled at the legacy media getting themselves into a froth over Donald Trump having a couple of quiet days, yet they seemed totally unconcerned with Joe Biden disappearing for much of his time in office, and running for office from his basement. It's a funny old World.

  26. Grey and wet with wild winds forecast.
    Not bad start otherwise:
    Wordle 1,537 3/6
    ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
    🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  27. My neighbour recons it will cost 120,000 Euros to repair my roof. Anyone got any old umbrellas to spare?

    1. Oh, man. That's some money.
      We have a big roll of transparent plastic sheeting. Lets the light through…

    3. Some of my neighbours love to make doom and gloom predictions about my house…do you have to have it replaced in the same way, or is there a cheaper alternative?
      I had a small roof done a few years ago and got three separate quotes…they were all quite different.

      1. It's an old longere. A typical ancient Breton farmhouse. Some of the finest palaces and cathedrals in France were roofed with the local slate but the mine closed about 25 years ago. The slates are held by metal pins and they have all corroded. It is a pretty building and it would be a pity to abandon it but the cost of repairs is more than the building is worth. There is a a large meadow and an acre of woodland with a little stream. I may have to resort to covering the worst parts in plastic sheeting. Tant pis!

        1. What a shame. Since we started visiting Brittany three years ago, we have enjoyed seeing how different the buildings are from the rest of France. Those universal grey roofs. How maddening that the smallest and cheapest components have failed.

          In the Aude, the roofing was with "tuiles canaux" – the tiles nearest the ridge being cemented – the rest simply lying over each other. The only difficulty was when a tile broke – and one had to clamber over the rest to replace it. Likewise in Narfurk – self hooking pantiles.

          I hope you can find a solution. Do it bit by bit?

          3. Firstborn's older farm buildings are roofed with self-hooking pantiles. I'm always amazed when they don't blow off in the huge winds he gets occasionally.

          4. Quite. When I moved here 42 years ago, I was horrified that the tiles were not nailed down! The only disadvantage is that small birds can get under them, build a nest and cause the pantile to be out of alignment.

        2. I did the roof of the extension and the garage – both of which we built ourselves with the help of a friend – but I was so much younger then – I'm older than that now! (To invert Bob Dylan's Back Pages).

          The garage in the picture is between the two detached houses and the extension is on the right hand side from the central chimney to the end.

          Our student house (on the left of the picture) was completely renovated by a professional builder in 1989/90 but the roof is still in good order. We had the roof of the original house professionally redone about ten years ago.

          We have rather a lot of roof – we hope it holds together for as long as we do!
          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c60d3643f23aee58679f190ab63b9c78f398fa5f70f4db6190b2f64b814a84a0.png

          2. Wonderful to see Steve "The Colonel" Cropper and Don "Duck" Dunn laying down the rhythm.

            They were the (white) guitarist and bassist who were the backbone of the Stax (soul music) house band; as well as being an essential part of Booker T and the MGs.

          3. I still get a thrill from the brooding Green Onions. It was used to good effect in the film, American Graffiti. Hearing Soul Limbo immediately evokes memories of the BBC's cricket coverage, now since much reduced because rival channels have outbid it in the broadcasting rights stakes.

          5. I got the quote from a friend who got it from my neighbour when I was in the UK. It could be a mistake but I suspect it would be in the tens of thousands for a complete re-tiling.

          7. Having recovered from a broken back (semi-paralysed) and a triple heart by-pass, amongst other injuries, I find it a little difficult climbing on the roof with slates and new pins nowadays. Your buildings look lovely.

          2. I suspect slates are pricey. Would tiles be cheaper and easier.
            We were able to get "antique style" tiles that blended in superbly, we had to have one side of the main roof done and apart from the quality and slightly newer look you would not guess at first glance that they weren't the same as the ones they replaced.
            They are also aesthetically pleasing.

          3. Tiles are so much heavier and would almost certainly require a complete rebuild of the roof with much beefier timbers.

          4. Surely that would depend on the size of the slates?
            I suspect an ancient Breton longere has fairly substantial beams.

          5. Slates tend to be made from similar materials (slate) and are as thin as they can get away with. Tiles are a lot thicker, made from clay, and so to cover the same area, will be heavier, even though the material densities are similar.

          6. I agree regarding modern slate tiles, but the older ones that we've had on our homes in the past were quite thick.
            Thus said, I see that Per states they are now very fragile which does suggest they are very thin.

    5. That seems very high unless you've got a huge expanse of roof.
      Your figure suggests you're in the 500 sq m range.
      Or access is extremely tricky and you need vast amounts of scaffolding. And towers roundels etc.

    6. I'd suggest they're off by a factor of ten. Our roof is 10 long x 3 high x4 pitches. It cost us about 14K to repair it. The bloke said 'it's because it rises in the middle' and getting scaffolding to that was expensive.

  28. Interesting letter about unearned income in todays DT – I think the term 'unearned income' should be solely for MPs and their staff

    2. Unearned income is just a term the Left use to try to sell confiscation of property.

      All income is earned, be that through investments, deferred gains, savings. calling it 'unearned' gives their weak minded, usually poor followers a froth to get angry and endorse the theft.

  29. Good morning, all. Very wet early on, overcast now with gusty winds to follow.

    Here's a list of tax ideas to chill people to the bone along with the three people appointed to aid the Treasury in its machinations. What is Reeves' position now, a figurehead Chancellor of the Exchequer as the focus for the opprobrium that will follow a tax grab budget?

    Amazing that a few comments appear supportive of both the choice of personnel and the potential tax ideas that may be forced upon us.

    https://x.com/JamesMelville/status/1962790443353018469

      1. Starmer will let Reeves present the Budget or Autumn Statement then sack her and claim to have a new team in place and thus he thinks buy more time before plunging us back into the EU.

        Brexit will continue to be blamed for our financial ruin.

    2. "Charge Capital Gains Tax …when moving out of the UK"
      The Nasties tried that one, I believe.

      "Raise capital gains tax on shares and property"
      There are no capital gains on these things, there is only a currency that is depreciated by the day by spendthrift governments and greedy bankers! And they want to tax us on their own destruction of the currency! If there was any justice, someone would take them to court and point out that in terms of real money, i.e. gold sovereigns, their house has lost value over the last thirty years.

    3. Given that the economy has utterly collapsed as a result of their Left wingery, you'd think they'd look at themselves and ask 'Crikey. We were wrong.'

      But no. They'll plough on with their stupid nonsense. I do wonder if their intent has nothing to do with public services at all. Sometimes it seems it is just some sort of deranged, nonsensical act of malice for the sake of it.

        1. Certain facts are known: low taxes make people happy and grow the economy. They are a net good. More private wealth creates ever more private wealth as it is passed through families. This creates jobs. It reduces crime and anti social behaviour – as people have a stake in society.

          There is vastly more regarding the nuclear family, multi generational two parent families and caring for the elderly of your family.

          Yet these Lefties seem to just want to tax for the hell of it. No more money is ever raised, they still borrow, so the only conclusion is that it is out of sheer spite to destroy society. The more they tax, the lower hte ax rate is – and worse, it falls off a cliff in the future.

          Thus I have to ask: why? is it pure spite? Do they want to destroy everything good and decent?

    4. This will actually increase the burden on the state.
      Without the ability to accumulate wealth/savings, more and more people will come cap in hand to be supported by the state.

  30. Another gem that's giving everyone a larf..

    Gaza flotilla forced to turn back after just hours at sea because stormy Mediterranean weather halts mission
    On board the flotilla are Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, Brazilian activist Thiago Avila, former Mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau Ballano

    Sooooo Greta had to flip from "Climate" activist to "Palestine" activist to stay relevant, but had to turn back because of "weather"… LOL

    The wiser commentariat note that these lot couldn't give a damn about Gaza they just need attention proving all of Hoffer's maxims..

    "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket".
    "It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor,"

      1. One might almost imagine that the trip was postponed until the first week in September in the certain knowledge that the regular September storms would force them to turn back!

        2. One of my favourite sailing books is Michael Green's The Art of Coarse Cruising.

          In it there is the description of a small group of damp, bedraggled people huddled together in a wet cabin listening to the shipping forecast and silently praying that Force 6 + winds will be forecast so that they don't have to sail anywhere.

        1. The Growler is far from stupid – she learned how to play the system for her personal advancement and profit.

          2. Apparently she is now admitting she didn't pay enough tax on her new home……..
            https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/03/politics-latest-news-pmqs-starmer-badenoch-reeves-budget/
            Angela Rayner has referred herself to the ethics advisor after admitting she did not pay enough tax on her second home.

            The Deputy Prime Minister said she had considered resigning after The Telegraph revealed she had dodged a £40,000 tax bill on her new home on the south coast.

            She spoke out hours after a court order was overturned that had blocked her from telling the full details about her financial arrangements.

            Ms Rayner’s admission will pile growing pressure on her to consider her position.

            Speaking to Sky News, Ms Rayner said that reports she had not paid enough tax on her second home in Hove flat were “accurate”.

          3. Presumably she took legal/tax advice?
            If the advice was wrong it's the advisor, if she lied that's a different issue.

          5. Quite probably, but if it was legal why not?

            It’s the hypocrisy and the view of one standard for us and another for the rest of you that I dislike

          6. Don't they say there are eight different kinds of intelligence?
            One is the kind that politicians have!

          16. That tart who shagged 100 men or something in one day. Makes money by doing things that we wouldn’t.

      1. No no no.. the Sh1tLibs take great care in the ad campaign to avoid mentioning which demographic.
        It's Men what did it.

    2. This is a direct result of capitulating to the scum.

      Not until the 'west' grows some balls and rids the entire continent of these dregs will a return to normality be even thinkable.

  33. BTL on Allison Pearson's article. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/02/nigel-farage-house-judiciary-committee-free-speech-starmer/

    I don't suppose I'm the only one this morning who woke up feeling a sense of impending doom………….it hasn't worn off either.

    5 min ago

    A wonderful article, as usual. It’s only when I realise how afraid I am when I post comments on the DT comments page, mild comments, that I realise something is badly wrong.

    I am 77 and thought I lived in a wonderful free country until Brexit . I voted leave, because I didn’t want to be governed by unelected foreign politicians, a reasonable request.

    We won the democratic vote and I have watched with horror as it has been resisted by all the governing elites. We have got no enforcement of borders, no reduction in immigration (it has trebled), and no break from EU rules, To add insult to injury, our present PM wants to ‘realign’ us, by giving away our fishing rights!!

    I can date all our problems to the appalling treatment of Baroness Thatcher, she didn’t want to join the EU, so they threw her out. That was followed by Treaties Maarstrict and Lisbon, without any reference to the electorate. Were they asked if that was what they wanted? No.

    I watched the country I loved slowly disappear. The last straw was when I voted for the Conservatives to get Brexit done, after years of squabbling. They did the opposite. I’ll never vote Conservative again.

    Before we joined the EU we were racially tolerant, we had our own fair legal system, we had our own bill of rights, we had complete freedom of speech and we were held up as a beacon of fairness to the world. We did not need pettifogging EU rules.

    Where are we now?

    I watched that young woman being wrestled to the ground and arrested, for draping the Union flag over the balcony of council offices. I cried.

    2. Oh dear. This is probably how many people feel at the moment, with not a clue that it is too little, too late.

      I hope the commenter stops crying, and educates himself or herself with a few Alastair MacLeod podcasts. Then he or she could watch a motivating Lynette Zang video and start pondering how to become more robust and independent in everyday life. Lastly, a talk or two by Mike Yeadon would be of benefit, especially Mike Yeadon's last call "Whatever you do, resist the digital id." It's not too late to opt out of the dystopian future, but it soon will be.

      1. I’m wearing a plastic NHS wristband with a barcode on it. Great for tracking my treatment and medication but so easy to see how the concept could be expanded. Utopia requires control. When I heard all this one world government stuff back in the 80s, I laughed. Oh dear.

          1. That's called taxation. The more tax on something like fuel or energy, the less you use, the more limited in what you can do you are.

        2. How we all laughed, Sue. We're not laughing now.
          Hope your condition is improving in leaps and bounds.

        3. I first heard about it in the 90s, and didn’t take it seriously. It was going round universities in the non Westsern world in the late 70s it seems.

      3. We already have digital id – driving licence, passport, NI number and health records. We have digital banking and communications. It's too late to opt out. We don't need another layer of digital id – but we will get it.
        I still have the id card (brown thin cardboard) which was issued when my father registered my birth.

        2. Funnily enough, I have just found my post war ID card (I am going to a 40s weekend). I have been bullied into downloading the RJAH app because I need a knee replacement. They kept bombarding me to get it and in the end I did, thinking it’s been nearly two years now and it could be more if I don’t jump through their hoops. If they are hoping to track me everywhere through the steps function they’ll be disappointed. I leave the smartphone at home unless I need it for shopping.

  34. Over 10,000 comments on the DT piece about Graham Linehan's arrest.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/02/graham-linehan-claims-he-was-arrested-for-tweets-heathrow/
    Most recent one:
    just now

    We seem to live in a Marxist activist state where we are deeply controlled. Watch what you think. Be aware you are being nudged, nudged and nudged again to have the approved and correct opinions. Free speech and freedom of expression exists as long it is the correct free speech. Our entire media are used by the state. Technology means the state can keep an eye on us 247. All my personal opinions

    2. Starmer bleated and whined about this but, fundamentally it's his party's policies, ideology and attitude that pushed this woke nonsense on us. Instead of complaining, why isn't he saying 'this is silly, we need to leave the ECHR, repeal the HRA, scrap the diversity nonsense and restore common sense?'

      He doesn't want to. It's his religion.

        1. It is all part of the knotting to ensure the decline. The more legalistic thorns and ties the more law and control can be passed, the more oppressive and powerful the state becomes until it dictates what you can and cannot do and say.

          Ignore it? They love it.

        2. #TwoTierKeir is an adherent of international human rights lawfare. Much like himself, it's without substance and malleable enough to mean whatever is necessary to support the current instructions from his handlers.

        3. ECHR certainly – many countries do. HRA is more difficult because is it actually the law of the land – that's why Blair introduced it in the first place. It needs to be repealed.

    4. As I've often typed; there is freedom of speech or there is censorship. There are slander and libel laws for those who slander or libel. 'Hate speech' is a confection of those who do not want exposure to alternative views/information, or, more importantly to them, have others exposed to alternative views/information. See #TwoTierKeir and his #KeirmerRouge as an example.

    3. The problem is we do understand it, and we don't like it because it's a ghastly, murderous, barbaric, stone age religion.

      1. 412229+ up ticks

        Afternoon W,

        Surely this GREAT uneasiness can be made known to charles via the, subjects guidelines to the royal family’s behavior department of peoples/ subjects power ?

        We do have such a department, don’t we ?

    4. #themadnessofkingcharles Chuckie Three Sticks is going to look a bit foolish when his monarchy is usurped by a caliphate.

      1. 412229+ up ticks,

        Afternoon FTC,

        Will prove nasty with the pointy bits on the crown beneath the armpit.

      2. He won't care – he'll be alright and can just wander around in his extensive gardens without those pesky inaugurations and other things that he is supposed to do as King.

      3. If a time comes when his monarchy is usurped by a caliphate, he will have been dead for many years. His foolishness will be in the eyes of our descendants, but his corpse will be utterly unaware of it.

  36. Re tea snobs.
    I very much doubt that in a tightly controlled blind tasting and nil visual stimulation that many such people could tell the differences between all their various likes, dislikes and demands re water temperatures, amounts of tea, bagged or unbagged, potted or billycan, brew times, etc.

    1. Bollocks!

      Evidently a 'man' whose taste buds have been destroyed by chomping on too many weeds.

      1. Given the number of permutations on the quantity of tea, temperature and brew time, and even if ONLY using your preferred tea type I would be surprised if you would get even half your guesses correct.

      2. I suspect that most people would be able to discern a difference between the numerous combinations of tea types, infusion techniques and serving options but that the correlation between the aggregated individual preferences and those of connoisseurs would not be very strong. A Tetley tea bag infused in a mug of moderately hot milky water would still be liked by a substantial minority.

      1. Me too.
        But I'm willing to bet that you don't stand over the kettle checking the exact temperature of the water before application, nor that you measure the exact amount of tea and water precisely, let alone stand with a stop watch to brew/pour/have a second cup and measure the temperature that you drink it at.

          1. But the point I am making is that it won't be exactly the same every cup.
            There will be slight differences, not sufficient to reject it, but different nonetheless.
            The tea snobs always seem to dictate very precise instruction on how the "perfect" cup should be brewed and my bet is that they couldn't differentiate the nuances.

          2. Well I could certainly tell the difference if it wasn't made to my liking. He doesn't need instructions as he's been trained.

        2. We have one of those hot water gadgetty things at work but it cannot produce decent tea because it is not 200 degrees. It really makes a huge difference. Which is why i am grumpy at work – 11 hours without a cuppa.

      2. The Treasury don't think that way though. There is a confused, somewhat bewildering conceit that the more taxes levied, the more money raised. They do not consider what's the term? Dynamic response? because if they did then their default would be to cut taxes and reduce regulation.

        The state thinks it the centre of the economy and that the more it takes and gives away in largesse, the better things are. This is, of course, a demonstrable nonsense. Modern monetary theory is plain idiocy.

        1. Margaret Thatcher was one of the very few politicians who understood the Laffer curve.

        1. Without double-checking, I believe that even Laffer stated that the position could change according to economic circumstances.

          1. At €10 a lobster I would buy a lot of lobsters but the fishermen would not make a profit at that price; currently a medium sized lobster costs about €50 and I don't buy any lobsters but the fishermen can make a living at that price because there are enough people who are prepared to pay that.

            At €200 a lobster some people will still buy lobsters but there will not be enough of these people so the fisherman won't make a living.

            Which reminds me we are going to a restaurant on Saturday where we shall eat some very good fruits de mer

            At the price we shall be paying we won't have lobster but we shall have crab claws which, to my way of thinking, taste just as good as lobster.

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cf908e634e57fb7d1f72104fb22660daaad92c6befe3b10d425c74e0619402c8.png

      1. I very much doubt he would appprove of what this awful woman wants to do with the farmers. I think he would be furious.

        1. If "leader and politician" means manipulative, lying, jammy dodger on the make then the comment is accurate, surely?

          1. Brexit was stillborn – dead on arrival.

            Boris Johnson should have deselected all the remainer Conservatives before the 2019 general election and supported all Farage's Brexit Party candidates

            And when he didn't Farage should have vigorousluy contested all Conservative seats.

  39. Belated Morning All
    i'm rereading my Nevil Shute collection
    Some of it's hitting home rather hard…………….
    "It was manifestly impossible for anyone who derided the Socialistic ideal to progress very far in the public service; if a young man aimed at promotion in her office he felt it necessary to declare a firm, almost a religious, belief in the principles of Socialism. Jennifer felt instinctively that Mr. Sanders was less concerned with the Brave New World than the progress of Mr. Sanders in the Ministry of Pensions,"
    The Far Country

    1. One of the great disappointments of the 1956 film of A Town Like Alice starring Virginia McKenna and Peter Finchwas that it only told half the novel's story.

  42. Good morning all.
    On my way home and paused for a pot of tea at Earlswood Nurseries Cafe after taking the wrong exit off the roundabout at J4 onto the M42.

    Quite an enjoyable and relaxing week away!
    Some pictures https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/34477828b348a4ebba3233b0606a6960cf934212fcab365ea040bd5ff4e60de7.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2c82c795f212311c0465f2d596312843a2d87ccf3761450159c6d0cd484e4a54.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/31355b2131321cd75b5e392948a597b4895469a0a10ecc10320714da0a62f175.jpg

  43. Graham Linehan to sue Met Police over trans tweet arrest
    Creator of Father Ted was detained by five officers at Heathrow after gender-critical post on X
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/03/graham-linehan-sue-metropolitan-police-trans-tweet-arrest/

    How long before the Prime minister has to have the honesty to warn us: "I must make it very clear that I shall fix the judges if anybody chooses to challenge what I want in court!"

    BTL

    Mr Lineham will be better off if the judge in his case is Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean and NOT Mr Starmer's Mr Bean who has judged against the people of Epping and denied them an appeal.

    It seems that Mr Starmer used his time as prosecutor very fruitfully by getting many of his colleagues in the legal profession racket in his pocket.

  44. Madeline Grant
    It’s impossible to take the Greens seriously
    2 September 2025, 3:14pm

    The Green party’s leadership announcement was live streamed using a phone which seemed to be wrapped in clingfilm and held by someone who appeared to be suffering from delirium tremens. You may not have realised that the Greens were electing a new leader. You may not even have realised that they have a leader at all – in fairness, until recently they didn’t, opting instead for a bizarre job-share arrangement whereby they had a sort of weird progressive hydra of ‘spokespeople’. Leadership for the polycule era.

    There is an argument that says we ought to take the Greens more seriously. After all they have four MPs – the same as Reform UK – and are consistently polling in double figures. They represent a genuine threat to Labour in particular as they cannibalise votes to the party’s left and render a number of their urban seats vulnerable.

    However, the core argument against taking the Greens seriously is any engagement with the party itself. The announcement of Zack Polanski as their leader was no exception. For the first ten minutes of the proceedings the phone was being held upside down, resulting in the attendees – a mix of bearded men in traditional Islamic dress and middle-aged women with lanyards – appearing horizontally.

    The event appeared to take place in some sort of underground bunker, all concrete and random wires. A woman got on stage and, after wolf-whistling at the chattering crowd, introduced herself with a primary school assembly style ‘Goooood morrrrnnnning everybodyyy!’. This was apparently the CEO of the Greens. A problem with the microphone meant that most people didn’t hear what she said after her opening salvos. There was a lot of guff about ‘passion, energy, and verve’. She compared the Green party to a start up. Apposite, I suppose, in that 90 per cent of them are failures.

    Finally we got to the results. Zack Polanski had crushed Adrian Ramsey and Ellie Chowns. They were considered ‘the sensible candidates’, despite Ms Chowns infamously declaring in the assisted suicide debate that coercion couldn’t happen because her mum told her so. Polanski, however, is a real throwback to the loopy Greens of yesteryear. In a direct debate with Ramsay recently the two visibly bristled with mutual aversion, with Ramsay refusing to say that he ‘liked’ Polanski and instead repeating that ‘we’ve worked together’. ‘Do you like him?’ asked interviewer Iain Dale. ‘We’ve worked together on all sorts of things’, replied Ramsay. ‘Yes or no’, tried Dale again. ‘Zack is a valued colleague’, said Ramsay. And so it went on.

    Polanski’s vote share – a whopping 84.6 per cent – probably gives him a mandate to wreak revenge on the Green establishment which tried to shun him. Polanski is a self-proclaimed populist who spent part of his career as a hypnotherapist, he once advised women that they could increase their bra size through the power of suggestion. Whether they can do the same with their vote share will have to be seen.

    Meanwhile the Greens had competition in the loony stakes this morning. Yvette Cooper gave an interview where she seemed to imply that every inch of her home was covered in flags. ‘We’ve actually got Union Jack bunting on our garden shed’, she said, with a maniacal grin. ‘I’ve got St George’s flags, St George’s bunting, Yorkshire Rose bunting, Union Jack flags and tablecloths – er, we’ve got the lot’. Madness never seems to cease.

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

    Sossidge
    20 hours ago
    True, no one with a functioning brain can take the Greens seriously.
    But as some people vote for them one can only conclude that there are thousands of people in the UK who don't have a functioning brain.

    Trojan Sossidge
    19 hours ago
    Indeed. One commentator on Guido, in reference to leaving the ECHR, said that it didn’t matter to ordinary people in the UK because they couldn’t afford to go to court in Europe.

    John Anaxagoras Sossidge
    16 hours ago
    The bell curve of IQ suggests there is a vast number below 100. (It’s a bit frightening to think 100 is an average!)
    It explains the Greens, the SNP, the Lib Dems and most of Labour.

    2. The more publicity the Greens get, the better. There are still far too many people who think that voting green is some kind of soft option when you don't want to vote Labour.

    3. The Greens are watermelons – green on the outside but red in the middle. They know what’s best for you and you had better comply.

          2. Ok – I thought Wes Streeting put his spoke in this morning. Who cares what any of them think anyway?

    3. When your membership are largely morons too, that is not going to make a jot of difference. Their problem is in the ballast of support for tw@s like Milibrain.

    1. I never watch it – too depressing. Never put the telly on in the daytime. OH does in the evenings and i might look up occasionally. I could happily live without it.

      1. I was just going through my outgoings this month and next (August to October has a spate of hefty bills) but when I came to the TV tax I thought “don’t have to pay that now; saved a three figure sum and I don’t miss it at all.”

        1. You can still watch subscription channels, skip all terrestrial ones – need tv licence for those, not just the BBC.

          1. If you’ve ever watched Malcolm in the Middle you’ll know the actor Brian Cranston. Breaking Bad is about drug production in the US, quite complex – and four seasons:-)

          3. Completely different role in Breaking Bad, equally good, Stigenace – it’s on Netflix. Malcolm is excellent, not everyone sees the funny side tho 😀

    2. It's just one bunch of liars talking to another bunch of liars desperate to score points.

      When the Daily politics was on you got some analysis from Andrew Neil and Jo Coburn but I don't think it's on any more.

    3. As Rupert Loew says.. "complete wate of time.
      "I'm lucky to get 3 per year, 3 mins each. Any serious concerns.. thanks to the rules usually to an empty chamber. Never get an answer anyway. Most of the PMQs are soft questions from some Labour backbencher setting Starmer up for a round of applause & cheers."

    4. I'm only cognisant of it if I just happen to be within its audible and/or visual vicinity. I make no effort to watch or hear it. I occasionally happen to be near a broadcast when someone else is taking an interest.

      I very rarely switch on any news or political broadcasts, in complete contrast to the younger me who would do so frequently. Events will happen whether or not I am aware of them. Knowing what's going on in the world merely increases discontent because it emphasises my complete and utter impotence to influence what is to come.

  48. You have 12 weeks left to enjoy the ownership of your home prior to its seizure by the state. Another budget is to be held on Wednesday 26th November.

    2. Well think about it – those poor immigrants have no homes – well not in this country anyway. And their comfort is a priority to ours – we can always be housed in hotels. Maybe.

  49. Anyone want some water? 170 tons of rain fell on my property in the last hour – a little of it inside the house – and it has started raining again.

    2. Ref your roof. Is there a Commune "Patrimoine"? If so, they might have some ideas about a less expensive repair job….

      1. Not that I know of. The nearest villages are 4 km away and I don’t often visit hem now the choir has folded.

  50. Our Ange is a rank amateur compared to Ilhan Omar in The Land of the Free…

    Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Net Worth Jumped from $51K to $30 Million in One Year
     https://media.breitbart.com/media/2025/09/GettyImages-2153724150-640×480.jpg
    Democrat “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has denied being worth millions of dollars, but her latest financial disclosure tells a different story.

    In February, she said people were falsely claiming she was worth millions, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday.

    However, the Beacon’s article shows her net worth in the multimillion range. The outlet, citing a financial disclosure report, continued:

    Omar reported in her latest financial disclosure that she and her husband, former political consultant Tim Mynett, accumulated a net worth at the end of 2024 ranging from at least $6 million to $30 million. Their wealth is derived almost entirely from the value of Mynett’s ownership stake in his two companies that, together, were worth no more than $51,000 at the end of 2023. The exact value of Omar’s personal fortune at the end of 2024 is unclear — lawmakers disclose the value of their holdings and debts in ranges. Still, the figures in Omar’s latest disclosures show that her and her husband’s net worth skyrocketed by at least 3,500 percent in just one year.

    The Democrat’s surge in wealth is due to Mynett’s two businesses which are a winery and a venture capital firm, per the New York Post.

    In February, Omar claimed that conservatives were unfairly targeting her over her finances, the outlet said.

    “Since getting elected, there has been a coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign claiming all sorts of wild things, including the ridiculous claim I am worth millions of dollars, which is categorically false,” she stated, adding, “I am a working mom with student loan debt. Unlike some of my colleagues — and similar to most Americans — I am not a millionaire and am raising a family while maintaining a residence in both Minneapolis and DC, which are among the most expensive housing markets in the country.”

    In 2019, a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleged Omar illegally used campaign money to help carry on an extramarital affair with Mynett, then a Democrat consultant whose firm she paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, Breitbart News reported:

    Federal campaign finance records show that Omar’s campaign has paid nearly $230,000 since 2018 to the E. Street Group, a political strategy firm of which the lawmaker’s alleged married lover, Tim Mynett, is a partner of. On Tuesday, Mynett’s wife, Dr. Beth Jordan Mynett, filed for divorce in a D.C.-area court, alleging her spouse confessed to having an affair with Omar in April, the same month FEC documents show that the lawmaker’s campaign began issuing payments to E. Street Group for “travel expenses.” According to FEC filings, the Minnesota Democrat’s campaign made eight payments totaling $21,547 to E. Street Group for travel costs between April and June. The divorce filings, first reported by the New York Post, also states Tim Mynett made a “shocking declaration of love” for the Minnesota Democrat to his wife and left her soon after.

    In March of the following year, Omar revealed that she had secretly married Mynett.

    Months later, a Breitbart News report said a consulting firm co-owned by Mynett received over $500,000 in Chinese coronavirus bailout money in addition to the millions Omar’s campaign spent on the company that year.

      2. She is a Somali and more pro Somali communists than pro-America which, although she is a naturalized American, appears to hate.

        1. Just been watching Farage speaking to Congress re: free speech UK, somewhat of a related issue. For me, it’s a question of manners – I wouldn’t go to anyone’s home and start arguing about the state of it.

  52. Torrential rain out there now! The first proper rain for months! Should fill up all the water butts! At least I don't need to do the watering today.

    3. I knew it would happen. It’s all my fault. I bought a spray tank on wheels to make watering easier for me as I struggle carrying heavy watering cans. Since then I haven’t needed to water because it’s rained every day!

    4. I got home 10 minutes before the downpour arrived.
      De-kitting the Van is currently on hold.

  53. What does relevant actually mean, of the moment ? But last night in the pub one of my friends mentioned that his eldest grand daughter has just turned seventeen. And he finds her changed as a teenager. I mentioned the lyrics from the song At Seventeen by the lovely Janis Ian. First line…"I learned the truth at Seventeen"…..
    Neither of them had heard of it. IMHO one of the loveliest and meaningful songs ever sung and written by the author.

  54. Ofcom regulator received a staggering 576 complaints over last week's This Morning episode, where Rylan Clark argued that putting migrants who had crossed the Channel illegally in four-star hotels was 'insane'.

    The problem with the Radical Leftie system is it only reacts to Leftie complaints.
    The Ofcom approvals reveal something interesting:

    approvals:- 17,410,742
    complaints:- 576

    BlackRock's Ratio applies
    "It is better that ten thousand guilty persons are cancelled than that one innocent insane person suffers".

  55. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/03/politics-latest-news-pmqs-starmer-badenoch-reeves-budget/

    and

    https://order-order.com/2025/09/03/tough-on-tax-starmer-embarrassed-by-rayners-stamp-duty-underpayment/#comments

    I don't think Starmer likes Raynor. I don't think he likes women much at all. I don't think he really cares about tax avoidance/evasion. He has, after all, done the same himself over his pension.

    He can't sack her though. He needs the chav as a link from his version of Labour – the metro Left, seven figure salary, fanatic europhiliac Kensington dinner party set to the original supporters Starmer's Labour would rather do without but desperately needs – the ignored, generally northern, eurosceptic unemployed most hit by the immigration the previous lot want ever more of. who vote Labour without thinking.

    It is sad to see Raynor turning on the taps. It reminds me of a child caught with hands covered in chocolate fervently denying that they didn't to avoid the punishment. Not sad to see her upset: Sad to see that desperte duplicity, manipulation and deceit and hypocrisy that wretched woman will stoop to.

  56. Afternoon all. The heavens opened when I was in town. Even sheltering in a shop doorway didn’t help. The dogs are extremely soggy and my trousers are just drying out as I only wore a jacket not a long coat. The rain was so heavy the roads were awash.

    Calling all the indigenous far right racists for telling the truth won’t help community cohesion either, but who cares about our community?

    1. 'Far right' has replaced 'racist' when that stopped working. As it is, the Left think far right means Nazi, when the Nazis were Left wing. Fascism is Left wing. All evil is left wing.

      That's what comes from not knowing your history.

  57. When I have an email reply to a comment and open it I just have a discus reels page and cannot read the e mail. Can I get rid of this ???

    1. Which email are you using, Johnny, and how old is your kit..I have a Chromebook running Google and Gmail, never any problems. Try re-booting the whole caboodle.

  58. Sometimes The Envy of the World (©️Bill Thomas) isn’t well coordinated, is it. One of my ward mates and I just received simultaneous messages from our respective GP surgeries telling us, “It’s time for your annual health review”. We’ve both just had open heart surgery for pity sake. Said ward mate has had a double bypass. Review? They’re having a laugh?

    1. How are you feeling now, Sue? It's good to see you commenting again, but you must be still quite fragile?

      1. I’m coping on paracetamol now and the chest x-ray this morning was good. I need to have a shower but I don’t want to look! When my weight is down to 55k, I’ll be discharged to the respite facility. (Normal for me is 50-51k and I ballooned to about 67k post-surgery.)

        1. Glad to hear that things are slowly improving. It takes months to really get over something like that! fingers crossed the worst part is over though.

          1. My appetite is improving, yes. NHS invalid slop suits me at this stage though. The woman in the next bed is a Vicky Pollard type. Fizzy drinks and crisps. Noo!!

          2. The NNUH did a very good baked potato. Also toast and jam AND butter at breakfast. Only bémol: the yogurt was all flavoured AND very sugary. Extraordinary that a hospital didn't provide natural yog.

          2. Ha ha! What used to be be called convalescence. Now it’s rehab or respite. There are doubtless some sharks in that business but maybe not snakes.

  59. Looks as if Miliband minor has struck again i.e. wasted £11 Billion.

    The UK has a black hole of debt rumoured to be £50 Billion and growing – in June last the government borrowed a tad over £20 Billion, of which £16 Billion was to service the existing debt leaving a tad of over £4 Billion to waste elsewhere – and now we discover that another £11 Billion is being wasted on the destruction of our North Sea oil fields. Do these people ever talk to each other re what their plans are/will cost before going ahead and why isn't Starmer doing his job as PM?

    https://x.com/Artemisfornow/status/1963130488933032271

  60. Home and it's chucking it down! Thunder & lightning too.
    Lucky to get home though. Coming up from Hopton along the small road that leads from the Carsington Road to the Via Gellia, I stopped and reversed to allow an oncoming 4×4 to get past and put my left front wheel into a hole where the verge had collapsed into the ditch and ended up with my rear right wheel up in the air with the Van resting on the LH cill.
    Unable to get any traction, I realised, after looking at the problem, if I could get something between the rear of the wheel and the edge of the hole, I might be able to reverse out.
    Fossicking round, I found a lump of limestone with a triangular cross section that I was able to ram into the space and it worked!
    The Van self recovered as sweet as a daisy!
    No visible damage and the brakes and steering seem to be ok.
    I wish I'd taken photos of the situation as I feel quite chuffed at how I sorted it!

    1. Well, glad you are sorted Bob, and of course do not forget you are used to sorting problems like that , why because your RE regiment trained you well!

    2. Ouch! but well done! I beached my car a few weeks ago trying to park on the edge of a field. Had a full load of passengers so I just shouted "Everyone out!" they all climbed out and I was able to get back onto the road.
      A clear liquid was dripping from the car, which gave me some bad moments until I realised that (a) it was odourless and (b) it was the condensation from the airconditioning.

        1. OT – I saw your comment today on the TfTT (Times Crossword solvers site in case anybody is interested!) about the formatting changes in the Puzzles section today.
          Judging from the other comments those solving on phones find it better, those solving on a desktop/laptop think it is a disaster!
          As I solve on a laptop I agree with the points you make, it wasnt broke so why fix it??

          2. Oh that’s probably OK then – I solve on a laptop – it takes a lot longer just to navigate around….

          3. I am a slow solver – I like to take the morning….! Not interested in completing against the clock.

          4. I need pen and paper to fire up the little grey cells.
            The technology gets in the way, so I always print off the crossword.

          5. City AM newspaper dis similar recently. I used to read it everyday on my laptop in pdf form. Now if you want to read it as a paper, you have to do it as an app, which means not on my computer. So i don’t read it any more, which is a shame as it was informative.

            I could still click links but i hate that. I want the “newspaper” experience.

          6. The Times is pretty good online and generally provides the 'newspaper experience' you describe, I bought it hard copy for years but still sometimes miss leafing through it at pace!
            What they have done is mess around specifically with the Puzzles section to improve the experience for phone users but it's a disaster for laptop/desktop users. I guess I'll eventually get used to it…..

    4. We had a downpour a couple of hours ago……..little video on my Fb page…….. and then sunshine again. Just walked down to the shop and back – we're out this evening so I needed some biscuits, milk etc for that. Got back just as it started raining again but nothing like earlier on.

      1. Not the first time I've self recovered from that.
        When doing the Radio Survey job, we were tasked with doing a road that deteriorated into a Green Lane. Realising that we'd not be able to travel much further, I tried turning the car round and well & truly bogged it down on soft ground.
        Using a couple of handy lumps of wood from a nearby abandoned cottage, I was able to lever the bogged in wheel up and placed some rocks from an adjacent stream under the wheel and eventually got it out that way.
        Took a while, but at least we did not have to call on assistance.

    8. Well done, Bob. I'm reminded of my final trip from Norfolk to Surrey. Having returned the 7.5 T rental van, I spent a final – cold,furniture-free – final night in the Thetford house; put the last few possessions in the car and set off, via a *friend's house to say goodbye. Before I got there, Plod pulled me over, because they didn't think my somewhat high-mileage Montego's indicators were "orange enough".

      *Ironically, I bought said Montego from said friend, and ran it to 180,000 miles.

      I talked my way around that one, and set off for my new life in Surrey. Somewhere around Sarf Lunnon, the car conked out. Eventually, I diagnosed an issue with the electric fuel pump, gave it an almighty tap with a hammer, and I was back on the road. For a little while.

      Rinse and repeat. Finally, on the A3 Guildford bypass, I ground to a halt. The pump was dead. This was around 0100 hours. A passing recovery truck driver offered to get me to my destination, 12 miles away, but for a sum which (a) I didn't have, and (b) was more than the value of the car. I declined.

      Walked to a 24 hr petrol station, and filled my petrol can. Among the garden tools in the boot was a pressure sprayer. I disconnected the fuel line from the carburettor, attached the sprayer hose in its place, filled the sprayer with petrol and gently pumped the handle.

      Reached the Hindhead house in time for breakfast. Couldn't afford to fix it, so there it stayed, eventually going for scrap.

  62. If I were on a yacht , I would probably be having a few problems , the wind is so strong , glad the rain has stopped fro the time being , but the sound of the wind here in the trees is amazing .

      1. Yo Mr T

        The worst storm that I have been in was rounding Cape Wrath, at the top Scotland, in the old HMS Ark Royal, the most forrard point of the Flight Deck was almos dipping into the oncoming waves

  63. "Angela Rayner is fighting for her political future after admitting that she failed to pay enough stamp duty when she bought her new £800,000 seaside flat.

    The deputy prime minister has spent weeks arguing that she did nothing wrong when she bought the property in Hove, East Sussex. Sir Keir Starmer this week stood by her, accusing people of “briefing against her and talking her down”.

    However the purchase came under scrutiny after it emerged that she saved £40,000 in stamp duty by telling tax authorities that the seaside flat was her main home rather than her constituency home in Greater Manchester." (The Times)

    Stand by for a telly appearance where she weeps crocodile tears… Then stays in her "job".

    1. In a tearful TV interview, a 'devastated' Ms Rayner revealed she has referred herself to an ethics watchdog to investigate whether she had broken ministerial rules.

      Immediately implement the Phillip Schofield line of defence..
      Sorry but not sorry.. Unwise but Legal..

    2. Excellent btl comment on DT website:-

      Her words are empty when she says all I have tried to do is help my family!!

      That is what parents do every day.
      That’s what parents do by sending their kids to private schools
      That’s what parents do in trying to leave their homes farms and businesses when they sadly pass away
      That’s what parents do when they try and leave them some inheritance money
      That’s what parents do when they gift something to help their children in financial ways
      Indeed ….That’s what parents do every day but under her government all parents are getting battered and taxed

      so I am sorry I have no sympathy- you know the law, you enforce it as our government so resign and show some courage and moral integrity.

    3. She says she took advice from her lawyer! That’s like going to the butcher to get advice about your plumbing!🙄

      1. Hope the lawyer sues her. Not a good look for the lawyer with her pointing the finger about duff advice.

    4. Everything about her says tokenism. Woman, working class, Northern, prole etc. Those are the only reason she was appointed. She is very good at reciting a well-rehearsed list of clichés and that's about it. She does not have the intellect to be PM.

  65. I see Mark Rowley is busy blaming unclear laws for the decision to send 5 armed officers to arrest someone over some tweets!! Blathering about "threats of violence to a protected group".

    2. Goodness me, we have had some duff Commissioners in the last 30 years – but this one is even worse than Dickhead.

      1. Each and every one of them has been a disaster. They should alter the process and recruit from the ranks not the knitting graduates.

    3. I believe the officers at the airport are routinely armed. So no surprise the hit squad were carrying.

      1. Yes, I was aware of that, but did it need 5 of them? Was there not a “normal” police officer available? The whole thing is a nightmare that even Kafka might find odd?

      2. I totally agree with your point. The insinuation from several quarters is that they were armed for the specific purpose of arresting Linehan.

    6. Strange how they always, but always, go for the straight white, right of centre, males but often ignore it when it's any other group.
      Why?
      Because every other group appears to have protected characteristics that allow them to take offence and complain; or give offence with impunity.

    1. I would like to watch, but mass immigration started 50+ years earlier when pogroms in the Russian Empire forced Jewish people to emigrate, especially to London and other cities around the UK. Many ended up in London because they could afford a passage from, say, Germany to England but not from Germany to the USA (preferred destination).

      1. My folks from Odessa landed in Grimsby in 1899 and lived in Glasgow first, then the East End of London and finally bought a house and had their own business in Cardiff. There weren’t any bennies.

        1. Yes, there were: the opportunity to live and work in a free country, followed by naturalisation and citizenship.

  67. Cannot help feeling slightly sorry for Ms Rayner. She was caught out by a Telegraph BTL commenter yesterday who mentioned an arcane detail from some law passed back in 2003, which links a parent to a property owned (or part owned) by a trust for his/her children EVEN IF THE PARENT IS NOT A TRUSTEE. So AR escaped from beneficial ownership of the family home, but as part of her share went into a trust for the 2 children, she is still trapped and potentially liable for £40,000.
    It is possible that the trust was created because one of the 2 teenagers has disabilities and the Rayner parents were trying to plan for the child's future.
    Now it is out in the open, and that is unlikely to be in the child's best interests.
    My suggestion is that she should pay rent to her ex, under the Rent a Room scheme.

    1. Sorry for her? Even slightly? The woman who buys houses all over the country with money she finds in the gutter. The woman whose hideous clothes are paid for by "Lord" Comical Alli. The woman who calls Tories "scum"…. Whose partner works for a lobby group reliant on government money.

      I could go on but need to have a lie down.

      2. Child with disabilities. I do not agree with her politics, but somewhere behind the brass neck there is a mother. If I could be bothered to locate the comment which identified her legal error, and which quotes the legislation, I would post it. It reeks of Treasury spite.

    2. I can't help wondering if Khan's allies are striking back. I have heard it said that everything dishonest/criminal/embarrassing that MPs do is known in Fleet street, but they only draw it to attention when someone wants that to happen.

  68. Wordle No. 1,537 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
    🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Wordle 3 Sep 2025

    Command for Birdie Three?

    1. Blimey, well done! Potentially tricky word today……

      I needed my third starter word – fortunately it came up trumps and made it a regulation par.

      Wordle 1,537 4/6

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

        1. I think I know what you mean, a number of the possibilities seemed a little obscure/controversial for Wordle!

          2. Well, there were at least 5 possibilities from just -ETCH , but as I said, most of them were a bit obscure/controversial…..

    2. Hospital WiFi won’t open X or back up my Iphone but it seems to like Wordle.

      Wordle 1,537 4/6

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

    4. Well done. A bit of a mess here.

      Wordle 1,537 5/6

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

  69. And in other (bad) news:

    Melvyn Barge is giving up "In Our Time" . Fair enough, the chap doesn't want to go until he becomes gaga. It is the ONLY beeboid programme that I listen to these days – always on catchup.

    No doubt the beeboids will find a truly diverse thick ignoramus to be "host" – and future contributors will be chosen for their colour or disability rather than, as now, their (often) world class expertise.

    Ho hum. L'horloge tourne….

      2. Speaking of King Stephen, has he been around today? A friend and I met a very jolly bloke working the lock on the Forth Clyde canal yesterday! Called Sinbad, he used to write comedy for Radio4/5 including ‘O Brother’ and ‘All Gas and Gaiters’ with Derek Nimmo!

        2. Probably the Scottish Sinbad lockkeeper had bugger all to do with Sinbad Sailors who ran the village pub in backward Llareggub in Under Milk Wood..

          1. He was a real character and had some brilliant stories! He had 2 hearing aids and a voice like a foghorn!

    3. Not such a huge fan of Barge as art thou, Bill. But I'm sure that the Beeb has a truly awful sub waiting in the wings.

  70. Met chief: Police in impossible position over free speech laws
    Sir Mark Rowley says officers should not get involved in ‘toxic culture wars’ after arrest of Graham Linehan
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/03/graham-linehan-sue-metropolitan-police-trans-tweet-arrest/

    BTL

    The rules on what you can and cannot say need to be radically revised as we have a dire problem in the UK with Freedom of Speech to the extent that we are now the object of international ridicule.

    It is feared that the new laws on 'Islamophobia' will make matters even worse because people could be criminalised for saying things that need to be said about: Pakistani rape gangs, enforced arranged marriages, sharia law, provocative and assertive praying in public highways, marriage between first cousins, jihad and other Islamic behaviour which has no roots in British customs, British morality and British law.

    1. Sir Mark Rowley says officers should not get involved in ‘toxic culture wars’..

      WTF are you on about? You are an integral part of the Two Tier Policing… der.
      Which is why you face off Patriots.. and yet give a free ride (lidderally) to the Antifa.

      1. Mark's brother, Anthony, must be careful. He will probably get away with spinach but his gammon might upset the Islamists.

        With a rowley, powley, gammon, and spinach,
        Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

    2. Part of another BTL: "What genuine police force routinely goes around en masse arresting people and locking them up on the hearsay of someone else without at least the most rudimentary check on the possibility of vexatious behaviour by the complainant, especially several months after the alleged infringement?"

        2. Acting as the host.
          The job is geared to getting the experts to speak about their subjects.
          Myrie doesn't have a grating accent, he puts open questions rather than yes/no show me you agree with my view types.

      1. Yes! The clock tower is centre front of the hospital and I’m in a wing just behind it but internal noise permitting, I can hear the chimes.

    2. I know you're still in hospital because of the fluid retention problem, Sue Ed, but is the pain after the op slowly easing?

      1. Not yet. I’m still heavily reliant on painkillers but trying to get by on paracetamol and steer clear of the codeine family of drugs if I can. My chest hurts and the bones click but the wound is dry and closed. It’s only been nine days. The fluid is going down nicely.

  80. Madeline Grant
    How could Badenoch fail to skew Starmer this time?
    3 September 2025, 3:59pm

    It was taxes that eventually did for Al Capone. And Spiro Agnew. And Judy Garland. So now the taxman’s bell tolls for Big Ange – who has often presented herself as a sort of mix of all three of those figures. The hard-partying working-class girl turned union bruiser turned second most powerful politician in the land.

    Scandal has become second nature to Labour ministers, to the extent that they now have a sort of standard issue hangdog look to wear in Parliament which indicates to the world that bringing up their bad behaviour is actually not very #BeKind, and so when you think about it, they’re the real victims. Ange deployed this to great effect as she shuffled into Prime Minister’s Questions today. She earned herself a pat of sympathy from Lucy Powell. What is completely astonishing is that no matter how appallingly and hypocritically they behave, nothing seems able to shake Labour out of the intense belief that they are the Good Guys™.

    Inevitably then, surely Ange would be front and centre of the questions today? Not so, only a brief mention from Mrs Badenoch at the start of her questioning before she proceeded to build Sir Keir his own soapbox to pontificate about not taking lectures from the party opposite. The Leader of the Opposition is like a vampire cursed with haemophobia – every time the jugular is presented to her she manages to avoid it.

    That Sir Keir seems honestly to believe – or more accurately think we’ll believe – that the country is in the midst of some economic miracle is enough to have him sectioned under the mental health act, but every time Mrs Badenoch mentions the economy it gives him a chance to perform his show-reel of platitudes about trade deals and growth in the G7. She should be skewering him, not letting him play nasal P. T. Barnum. Surely exploiting the fact that his party is reaching Renaissance papacy levels of corruption and the fact that he and his deputy visibly loathe one another ought to have been a better use of Badenoch’s time?

    Rayner admits she didn’t pay enough stamp duty on second home
    So it went back and forth, nothing changed, no lessons learned. It was like watching a couple fight about whether the heating should be on in their house in Pompeii, AD 79. The other questions weren’t much better. We got the rhetorical equivalent of embarrassing teenage love poetry to the ECHR from Ed Davey, and the standard issue incoherent rant about weather which we’ve come to expect from Ellie Chowns, the woman too unimpressive for even the Green party to elect as leader. There were no questions from Reform – Mr Farage was notably absent in Washington, something Sir Keir oinked about with great glee. Whether he’ll be as happy if Mr Farage succeeds in lobbying the Americans to sanction Britain for its increasingly authoritarian approach to free speech is another matter.

    On the subject of which, there were two decent questions – first from new Tory MP Jack Rankin about the arrest of Graham Linehan. Inevitably the Prime Minister didn’t answer the question but went into his usual pseudo-patriotic guff about the ‘proud tradition of free speech’ (which he and his party are doing their best to snuff out). It was sub-Churchillian, by which I mean the dog which used to flog car insurance in the Noughties.

    Sir Julian Lewis quoted criticism of the Chagos treachery deal at the PM; former sea lord and Labour minister Admiral Lord West had called the decision ‘disgraceful’. The PM belched out one of the trademark scrutiny-phobic non-answers before abruptly sitting down again. ‘I have the misfortune to disagree with him’, he barked, sounding more than usual like a Dalek with a head cold. To be fair, ‘we are paying a China-aligned country billions of pounds to take over sovereign British territory because my dodgy lawyer mates said so’ isn’t really something you can admit to in Parliament.

    So Ange lived to fight another day. Let’s see how the week progresses. Given what she’s managed by way of defence so far it doesn’t bode well. When asked about whether it was accurate that she had evaded tax, she told the BBC it was accurate ‘in a different sense’. Ah yes, that special form of accuracy which only kicks in when a Labour minister as opposed to a Tory one is found snout-in-trough. This isn’t just two-tier governance – it’s the whole tiramisu. Still, a silver lining, things must be bad for Rayner, on her way out of PMQs she got a hug from Rachel Reeves. I give her a week.

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

    Jolly Radical
    2 hours ago
    "I had a tax-avoiding trust created by expert counsel but then people found out and different expert counsel told me it was all wrong and my husband has been very supportive except he put an injunction on me so I coudn't tell you what really happened and now I deserve privacy."

    It really is up there with the Jeremy Thorpe dog-and-boyfriend explanation.

    Trojan Jolly Radical
    2 hours ago
    And the famous Jimmy Carr paying his 1% income tax and thought that this was ok.

    Ian Campbell Trojan
    an hour ago
    And Ken Dodd thinking that the Inland Revenue didn't apply 'cos he lived by the seaside.

    1. She's terrified that if she does a good job, people might elect her next time, and then she'll be the one who has to bring Britain into digital slavery.

  81. Well, that's me for today. Some useful rain. We picked 15 lb of tomatoes and the MR hade many jars of tomata. As well as ten jars of damson jelly.
    She is at her Keep Fit class – so I shall go and lay the table and get the glasses out ready for her return (by bike) at 7 pm.

    Market tomorrow – in the rain, I expect.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain.

    2. However many tomato plants I put in, I never seem to have much left over for bottling!
      I am going to try and do some this weekend, but doubt that I will get more than a couple of jars. On the plus side, my regular buys of bottled tomato purée are stacking up nicely as we use the fresh ones from the garden, so I guess we will save at some point.

      1. You BUY tomato purée??????????????????????

        Every March set 60 (various) tomato seeds. About 45 will germinate. Pot them on in a greenhouse. Nurture them – pot them on again. Then put 12 in greenhouse (in new soil) therest out doors on sturdy frames. Come July onwards you’ll have plenty… We have bottled 20 jars of tomata SO FAR…..

        1. That sounds like a lot of effort for something easily acquired from a supermarket shelf. Yours is nominally free, but I price my time at £10/hour. Plus, what the hell would I do with 20 jars, minimum, of the stuff. That would outlive me.

        2. It’s organic tomato purèe…!
          I’ve got 16 plants this year, but some of them are in pots that are too small, so they won’t produce much. I spend the summer in a cottage whose garden is very small. This year, it’s like a forest, with everything on frames reaching for the sky, and sweetcorn that’s touching the eaves.
          Every year I get better organised and the tomato crop increases. I realised this year that I could extend the pots down the north east side of the cottage, as it gets full sunshine for a few hours a day. Will see how close I can get to 45 plants next year.
          I have got a box of ripe tomatoes now though and will do some bottling this weekend.
          My sons have got the four acre garden…they’re pretty good at growing veg, but they don’t do preserving!
          My Italian friend told me how she preserves courgettes – cook for a minute in boiling half vinegar, half water mixture – spread on a clean cloth and cover with another one, dry for four days, turning half way though (I transferred them onto clean kitchen paper), then put in jars covered in cheap olive oil. No need to seal the lids.
          Also, I tried to make fermented cucumbers with the ones from the garden but they didn’t work. Am trying that again this weekend as we have so many cucumbers. The instructions are infuriatingly vague (“the mixture is salty enough when a potato floats in it and you might have to add more salt as liquid comes out of the cucumbers”), and my children tell me I need to watch youtube videos.

  82. So , the business secretary is whom?
    Hmm whoever it is is heading off to China to talk about British steel .. merging with whom?

    Sorry about the whom bit , but we know exactly what will happen , did some one mention us being given the contract to build lots of warships ..

    I don't get it ?

  83. https://twitter.com/ArchRose90/status/1963227565285356016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1963227565285356016%7Ctwgr%5E623fd0297f2a0ca66e6312a26173ba237e05ba01%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftalk.hyvor.com%2Fembed%2Fmedia%2Fembed-iframe%3Furl%3Dhttps3A2F2Ftwitter.com2Farchrose902Fstatus2F19632275652853560163Fs3D1226t3D5fGsg2iXqz5e4PNVrhtz3Q Nobody Really
    1 hour ago
    Let’s wait for the Sue Gray report before rushing to judgement.

          1. Dunno..not a golf player but I often address inanimate objects ina less than ladylike manner including GMAIL right now as screen is obscuring what I type….

    2. Agree, but really and truly , Starmer should resign , so should Lammy so should Mrs Balls , and then the croaky voiced chancellor, then Milipede .. kick the whole lot from here to kingdom come .. they are tainted and complicit in creating fear , giving Muslims precedence and rubbishing us .. and wasting billions on useless idiotic gestures .

      They have spared the rod and spoilt the child .. meaning all the illegals and their dependents .

      Money is being shifted out of Britain like an avalanche .. and those who take advantage of benefits by living overseas are scoundrels .

      My son cannot claim a penny for sickness benefit because he has meagre life savings which sadly wouldn't buy him a flat or even an expensive car !

        1. We should, Rastus. Write to your MP, local press, join a local protest group. Hear that odd sound…politicians feet, shuffling together….

        1. I think football fans would have a song here!…..

          Sacked in the morning!
          You’re getting sacked in the morning!
          Sacked in the mo-o-rning
          You’re getting sacked in the morning! (to the tune of Guantanamera)

          I think I’ll miss her – she provided a fun(?) alternative to the grey conformity of most politicians……..RIP Angie!!

        1. It rubs our noses in it, yet again. The multi-tier judgments, the blatantly biased judiciary, the "It's OK when we do it", the lies, the obfuscation, the "nothing to see here" crap. sooner or later we will stop being so bloody polite.

          1. Hear you. Badenoch did a bit better today PMQs, but only a bit, Sickear bats her away. I want to see attack dog.

        2. If it doesnt die down, and I can think of a number of media outlets who may be prepared to keep it going, then I suspect (hope?) she will be history within 48 hours….. if not, then we live in frightening times…..

          4. Hear you, G4…for now a useful diversion from Bond market, which looked to be recovering a tad last time I looked. Go on then, if Ange goes ….give me your replacement….:-)

          10. It’s Albania, his were the only Western films Enver Hoxha would allow.

            Apparently Hoxha saw Pitkin’s (Wisdom) struggles against Mr. Grimsdale as a metaphor for the struggles of the common man against the corrupt Western regime……. bizarre but true…..but then Hoxha was completely mad.

          11. His films were not funny, which is why the humourless Hoxha regime allowed them to be seen. Laughter was bourgeois.

  84. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/85846569598ea64b90b5640fe488165a0e619f8fb6edf51eb8073a64b9b901b1.png
    “Most reasonable people would agree that genuine threats of physical violence against an identified person or group should be acted upon by officers. Such actions can and do have serious and violent real-world implications.
    But when it comes to lesser cases, where there is ambiguity in terms of intent and harm, policing has been left between a rock and a hard place by successive governments who have given officers no choice but to record such incidents as crimes when they’re reported. Then they are obliged to follow all lines of enquiry and take action as appropriate.”

    6 hours ago
    Burglary, car theft, and shoplifting are crimes. So why are the police not “obliged” to even bother showing up?

    Get fucked, you trout-shouldered, gnome-faced little shitweasel. This is political policing to appease demented troonz, and everybody, everybody, can see it.

  85. This afternoon I sent an email to our local MP.
    I had to look her up as there had been a re-shuffle before the last election.
    Victoria Collins Lib dem.
    I was complaining about Virgin media and the complete lack of respect for customer's and absolute catastrophic lack of customer service.
    I have not been able to access my VM emails for around 6 weeks. And no matter how hard I try to reinstall it will not work.
    Virgin have replied saying that they are 'on the case' but they have been flooding with complaints. Hardly surprising is it. The service in the mentioned 'customers service' simply doesn't exist.
    Same old story eh…..all the mistakes are everyone else fault.

    1. Next upgrade, Eddy…try a Chromebook, G-mail. Had mine quite a few years, not a single problem. Good luck.

      1. I’ve just set up Google email Kate.
        But because I have access to my virgin I can’t inform all the old friends and relatives of my new email address.

        1. OK..did you mean you don’t have access to Virgin, Eddy? Try searching ‘how to transfer Virgin email details to Google email, should find a step by step guide (definitely on Google, I just tried it)….good luck x

          2. Ugh, Eddy..sorry to read that. It’s just possible you may have a computer buff or shop near you who can help, if you ask around (or do a local search if you can on your pc?) Good luck 🙂

  86. Just tried Norwegian whiskey, advertised as distilled by women (what that matters, I don't know), and it's really good. Very subtle flavour, and 52%… explains the cost of £70 a bottle.
    Enjoyable, that level of alcohol doesn't burn the gullet.

  87. Well, AI just came up trumps…I asked it why a particular function call into a Microsoft Bluetooth interface might hang…the second suggested reason was if you append it with ".AsTask()" …looked in my code, and sure enough, that is how it was called!
    They probably stole the answer from StackOverflow where some actual human being had written it though…and like many engineers I don't post on that site any more because I don't want my answers to be stolen by AI…so it's not looking good for the future…

    1. I wouldnt worry BB2, I reckon only AI will know what you're going on about! 😉 (but is that good????)

          3. Apologies, he was otherwise engaged with Jeffrey Epstein, apparently – alright officer, I’ll come quietly……

    1. I first read Toby Young in the Spectator, many years ago. Then Lockdown Sceptic (now Daily Sceptic). Then FSU. Now Lord Young, still hear him time to time. One of the good guys, his dad be proud of him (he started OU).

          1. It was Toby and James Delingpole and they stopped probably 2 years ago now as they kept arguing (and timetabling clashes). Was it called “London Calling”? Possibly.

          2. Sadly no more. Nick Dixon does something new now, mainly with Paul Cox. It's good but Toby Young's level of conversational articulation is something else.

          3. I first read Toby Young in the Spectator (you’ll know his dad set up OU). Morphed from Lockdown Sceptic to Daily Sceptic. Always supported him FSU, just sent in a donation (supporting Linehan).

      2. And Toby Young was at the forefront of getting free schools free of local government interference – of which the very successful Michaela School is one – into existence.

        The repulsive education secretary, Brigid Phillipson, hates free schools with the same passion as she hates independent schools and for the same reason : because they get better results.

        1. When he set up the West London Free School, the pupils played unisex hockey at our pitch. It was fabulous. Then the new headmaster changed it back to segregated rugby and whatever. A real shame.

        2. Free minds are wonderful things, Rastus. Not too many of those in present government, it seems. I’ll be sending in a donation today re: Lineham 🙂

      1. Oh no! It does for me – but i suppose it would! No idea why it doesn’t for you. Sorry!

      2. Oh no! It does for me – but i suppose it would! No idea why it doesn’t for you. Sorry!

  90. I heard a bit of PMQs on the car radio earlier today, did any of the uniparties mention the legal lawfare stitch up in Epping?
    I never heard a mention of it in the opening 20 minutes.
    Plenty of digs at Farage though, because he was away on important business in defense of our freedoms and democracy.
    I wonder if Starmer should call a register at the start of PMQs in future and ask for a note from those not there.

      2. Excellent, Atkinson never fails. One teacher we had 'put the back bench down, boys'. Another 'the door is over there'…

  91. Gen Z fizz

    SIR – Lager serves two purposes: to act as a cooling agent on hot days or after exercise, or to allow certain drinkers to consume alcohol without having to taste anything, such as malt or hops. I can therefore see no reason why publicans should object to the addition of ice cubes to it ("Publicans hot under collar as Gen Z puts ice in their lager", report, September 2).

    Any request to add ice to proper beer should, however, be treated with the instant and permanent barring of the drinker from the premises.

    Timothy Leete
    Burgess Hill, West Sussex

    I think the eds have messed up here. That wasn't written by Timothy Leete but by one of ours!

    1. Who could you possibly mean?????

      I've seen it done to John Smith's – not proper beer – and to cider. I wouldn't even add ice to Doom Bar – or Gloom Bar – as I've seen it called, surely the most characterless cask ale ever invented, even more so than Greene King IPA. Bland and inoffensive are its defining features. John Smith's, an unpleasant keg beer, has more character than Doom Bar, albeit in the wrong direction.

  92. There was a feisty young maiden from Hove,
    Who thought stamp duty treasure trove,
    She sought financial advice,
    From a man called Tice,
    Then fell from grace faster than Gove

    1. I'm re-reading a good book, Maggie, but just put my current wife onto it in the cinema room next door. On Amazon Prime and looks good.

      1. Love your avatar !

        When I got married to Moh , my parents and siblings were living in S Africa .

        My mother who was rather picky and precise .. and quite snooty , commented .. You do realise you are marrying a man named after a fish .. of course naively I had never heard of the South African equivalent of my new married name !

        Mola , why are you referring to your wife as your current wife , are you thinking of moving on ?

        1. I thought it was a fish from US waters.
          I say current because a fairly recently departed friend did the same. The current wife has been with me for more than 45 years, but we only actually got married 2 years ago for financial reasons.

          1. Not a very romantic nuptial, but you clearly didn't need it to cement your relationship. Solid as a rock, as Ashford & Simpson once sang.

  94. Oh well I'd better get going. I've got a red battery signal on my phone.
    Back in the morning, goodnight all Nottlers.
    😴 sleep well.

  95. And another 3-Pad Rayner Tip-Off to Press.. final nail in career coffin..

    Angela Rayner used £160,000 from a trust set up to care for her disabled son to buy the £800,000 seafront flat at the centre of a sleaze inquiry
    Rayner used disabled son's NHS compensation to buy holiday flat.

    Manager Keir Starmer backs Angela Rayner over Hove flat row. LOL

  96. And another 3-Pad Rayner Tip-Off to Press.. final nail in career coffin..

    Angela Rayner used £160,000 from a trust set up to care for her disabled son to buy the £800,000 seafront flat at the centre of a sleaze inquiry
    Rayner used disabled son's NHS compensation to buy holiday flat.

    Manager Keir Starmer backs Angela Rayner over Hove flat row. LOL

  97. MoD figures show armed forces still shrinking despite recruitment drive
    Latest statistics show that while more recruits are joining, the overall strength of the regulars and reserves continues to fall

    More young people are joining the regular armed forces, but the new recruits are still not enough to fill the gaps created by troops that are leaving, figures released by the MoD have revealed.

    Five hundred more personnel left the regular armed forces in the 12 months to June 30 this year than joined, meaning the overall size of the military continues to shrink despite rising threats.

    Over the same period, 13,520 recruits joined the regular forces — an increase of 1,580, or 13 per cent, on the previous year — while 14,020 left, a fall of 1,700, or 11 per cent, compared with the year before.

    In the year to July, 3,840 people joined the reserves, 40 fewer than in the previous 12 months, while 4,210 left, creating a shortfall of 370.

    The Labour government has made recruitment a priority and has made progress over the past year by substantially reducing the gap between those joining and leaving. However changes to the process and attempts to speed up the time it takes to join have not yet been sufficient enough to prevent Britain’s fighting force from steadily declining in size.

    Applications to join the British Army as a regular soldier or officer increased by 43.4 per cent, or 162,170, in the 12 months to March 31 this year, compared with the previous year. Over the same period, applications to the volunteer reserves increased from 24,660 to 31,450, or 27.5 per cent.

    Yet the army, navy and RAF’s full-time trade strength has decreased by 2,190, or 2 per cent, since July 1 last year, to 126,180 troops. The total trained and untrained strength of the reserves across all three services was 31,840 on July 1 this year, a decrease of 380 personnel or 1.2 per cent since the previous year.

    Junior soldiers graduating from the Army Foundation College.
    More than 13,000 people joined the regular armed forces in the past year, up 13 per cent on the previous 12 months
    IAN FORSYTH/GETTY
    It is unclear whether more people are applying to join the military because of looming threats, with military chiefs warning Britain and the rest of Europe could be facing war with Russia in the coming years, or other reasons. MoD sources said they could not be sure.

    Personnel leaving the armed forces often cite poor housing as a reason, with military homes suffering from mould, damp and vermin. John Healey, the defence secretary, has poured money into improving homes in an attempt to persuade personnel to stay but such improvements are unlikely to happen quickly.

    Helen Maguire, the Liberal Democrats’ defence spokeswoman and a former captain in the Royal Military Police who served in Iraq, said the “trend poses fundamental problems for our national security”.

    • The 60mph drone boat that may solve the military recruitment crisis

    “With global instability at a generational high, and with the prime minister floating plans for British boots on Ukrainian soil in case of a peace deal, the last thing we need is a gaping — and growing — hole in the capability of our forces,” she said.

    Advertisement

    She added that her party would bring in a new bonus scheme to boost recruit numbers as well as do more to welcome back veterans keen to return to the forces.

    An MoD spokesman said: “This government inherited a recruitment crisis, with targets being missed every year for the past 14 years and is taking decisive action to stop the long-term decline in numbers.

    “We are working to speed up the process of integrating those who wish to rejoin back into the armed forces, as well as giving personnel the largest pay rise in decades, scrapping 100 outdated recruitment policies including measures blocking recruitment of some sufferers of hay fever, eczema and acne and passing legislation through the Commons to introduce a new armed forces commissioner to improve service life.” https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/mod-figures-show-armed-forces-still-shrinking-despite-recruitment-drive-dbl3bphpj

    Comments

    I Antony
    1 hour ago

    No one wants to fight in foreign fields to help settle political struggles when they know they'll be abandoned or prosecuted by their own government. Also they see foreign citizens getting preferential treatment and veterans getting shafted. There are no wars that our government has started in many decades that have been worth losing one's life or liberty for.

      1. Quite. That comment sums up why I would, if called upon, try to dissuade anybody from volunteering to join the armed forces. They'll be stabbed in the back in future decades.

    2. "“We are working to speed up the process of integrating those who wish to rejoin back into the armed forces…"
      Tautology or what?

      Plus I still use "military" as an adjective, not a noun.

    3. What about all the “black and brown” people that Our Glorious Leaders prefer over the indigenous? Are they not joining in droves? I don’t understand.

    4. What about all the “black and brown” people that Our Glorious Leaders prefer over the indigenous? Are they not joining in droves? I don’t understand.

    5. Were I young, I'd not join mainly because I can see that British military may well be sent to fight for political ends raher than the protection of the realm. And, as noted, be persecuted by our own side for doing so. No thank you!

    6. It is quite possibly the case we have men who fought in Iraq who are now homeless and the people they were fighting against have a nice new free house in the UK.

    2. You muust have a lot of fum!

      I had a good friend with whom I played table tennis but I was slightly better than he was so we devised this handicap system on the first to 21 scoring system.

      We started the match with my friend having a12 point start in the first game. If he won then in the next game he had an 11 point start. If he won that he then started the next game with a 10 point start. If he won that he had won the match.

      On the other hand I won the game having given him a 12 point start then in the next game I gave him a 13 point start. If I won that I gave him a 14 point start in the next game. If I won that gave him a 15 point start in the next game and if I won that I won the match.

      We were both determined to win and the handicap system worked so well that it could take very many games in order to establish the winner.

      1. There’s a story behind that – it’s a memorial trophy for an old member of the club who died in 1998. He actually died in that very hall during a match. He played his winning shot and dropped dead from a heart attack. His only relative was a distant cousin and she donated the money for a club trophy. So we have a club tournament each year to play for it.

  99. King jokes ‘things don’t work so well once you get past 70’
    The monarch, 76, made the comments during a visit to a new hospital in the West Midlands
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2025/09/03/king-jokes-things-dont-work-so-well-once-you-get-past-70/

    We expected him to be bad – but we did not expect him to be this bad.

    BTL

    I think the Idiot King's brain stopped working well long before he reached his 70s. He is now 76 and he has virtually no working brain left at all but poor chap – we mustn't expect him to use the brains God didn't give him.

      2. 77 next week and I was remarking this evening that things were not working as well as they used to.

  100. Well, chums, bedtime has come around once again. So I wish you all a Good Night. Sleep well, and I hope to see you all early tomorrow in good spirits.

  101. Well, chums, bedtime has come around once again. So I wish you all a Good Night. Sleep well, and I hope to see you all early tomorrow in good spirits.

    1. Good morning Geoff,

      Rain and strong wind here earlier, a bumpy night , but was woken up by the visiting cat kneading my tender bits when I was half asleep in bed , I have no idea how she got into the house !

Comments are closed.