Wednesday 31 January:  Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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511 thoughts on “Wednesday 31 January:  Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan”

  1. Another late meeting for me at work today meaning I can leave 20 minutes later and take my motor bike. It was quite nice yesterday (but don’t tell Plod – I hit 30 on the way home).

  4. The West is falling into Putin’s trap. Hamish de Crettin-Gordon. 30 January 2024.

    Those shouting that the youth of today do not have the stomach for the fight are, in my view, disingenuous. Britons have marched to the sound of the drums since time immemorial and vanquished our enemies. I see no dimming of the British fighting spirit, and though they might require a bit more physical conditioning than yesteryear, I’m convinced they would charge the ramparts when required, if the cause was just.

    Why should they fight Vlad? Our enemies are here. All that we were has already been destroyed!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/30/the-west-is-falling-into-vladimir-putins-trap/

    1. Clearly, the conditioning of the people, especially our young people, to accept war and conscription continues.

      Crettin-Gordon imagines that the first resource for a kinetic war i.e. cannon fodder will be available:

      …they would charge the ramparts when required, if the cause was just.

      I hope that this statement is just the lazy use of a sloppy metaphor and not Crettin-Gordon’s idea of modern warfare.

      When is he going to ask the other important questions e.g.

      1) Where are the armaments and ammunition – haven’t we given much of that away to the Ukraine already?
      2) where are the thousands of uniforms etc. coming from?
      3) where is the accommodation for thousands of recruits? Isn’t what we do have being filled with the invaders?
      4) where are the transport, medical and other support echelons required for an enlarged modern army?
      5) where are those experienced people capable of training masses of recruits?
      6) etc. etc.

      Is Crettin-Gordon prepared to send our young people into the meat-grinder totally unprepared and poorly equipped? It’s not as if that hasn’t happened before.

      Who will save us from these conflict promoting cretins?

    2. Britons white working class men have marched to the sound of the drums since time immemorial and vanquished our enemies.

      What this imbecile overlooks is that was when there was a homogenous population, a hearth and home, kith and kin, they were not discriminated against in their own homeland and call racists into the bargain.

      Leaving aside a detailed analysis of the geo-political truth, the answer now to the drumbeat can only be a bellow of Foxtrot Oscar.

    4. If people like Sunak, the Babbling Poltroon and Hamish Cretin are the ones deciding if the cause is just, then it almost certainly isn’t!

    5. Does anyone else remember in about 2002, everyone was against the Iraq war? Biggest march in history in London etc. Then Blair took us into the war, and within about 5 minutes, everyone was obediently lining up to support Our Boys.
      I felt sorry for the members of the armed forces who were brainwashed and used by the predator class, but nothing convinced me that that little escapade was anything but wrong and unnecessary. I was appalled that people took the line that every war is just when the British armed forces are involved in it. That’s a green light for bad action by the government, and the abuse of our armed forces.

      I wouldn’t mind betting that the government is counting on exactly the same thing happening when they take us to war this time too. And also that they probably think a good war will force us to work together and get on with the muslim rape gangs and other assorted furriners in the country, which is in their (the government’s) interests.

  5. Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan

    The Archbishop of Arabia can only do destructive

  7. Britain set to deploy aircraft carrier to Red Sea. 31 January 2024.

    Britain is poised to send an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea to counter drone and missile attacks from Houthi rebels.

    The Royal Navy is preparing to step in to replace USS Dwight D Eisenhower when it returns to America, as the Houthis warned of a “long-term confrontation” in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

    James Heappey, the armed forces minister, said on Tuesday that the UK may “co-operate with the Americans” and step in to “plug a gap” in the Red Sea.

    Poised? Preparing? May? Is it going or not? Let us hope to God that it doesn’t break down on the way there!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/30/navy-hms-red-sea-yemen-houtis-middle-east-israel-iran-army/

    4. I wonder how “our” carrier will repel drone and missile attacks on itself; where will the protecting ships come from??

  8. Another four today

    Wordle 956 4/6

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    1. Uninspired here, but got there in the end!
      Wordle 956 5/6

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    2. Uninspired someone said ? Two tries and all I had was an L in the wrong place.

      Wordle 956 5/6

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  9. Wordle 956 5/6

    Made a mistake by moving the second letter to be the third letter on my second attempt when it was really in the correct place. Oops!

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  11. Pharmacy ‘revolution’ will cut NHS waiting lists, says Sunak. 31 January 2024.

    Rishi Sunak has promised a pharmacy “revolution” to cut NHS waiting lists.

    Writing for The Telegraph, the Prime Minister, who grew up and helped out in his mother’s pharmacy in Southampton, said new powers handed to pharmacists would free up around 10 million GP appointments a year.

    The shake-up of pharmacy services means that, from Wednesday, patients can get treatment for seven common conditions without needing to see a GP.

    Perhaps a visit to a Wise Woman might help? This is a country tottering to its doom.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/01/31/pharmacy-revolution-cut-nhs-waiting-lists-rishi-sunak/

    1. Personally, I would prefer nipping into a chemists, rather than the faff of attending a surgery.
      The one professional group that came out of Convid with an enhanced reputation was pharmacists.

  13. Universities should want brilliant British minds, not dumbed-down foreign cash cows

    ‘Diversity’ candidates are preferred over majority white children and British students are losing out

    ALLISON PEARSON
    30 January 2024 • 7:00pm

    For sale: British university degrees. Top colleges! World-class education in historic surroundings! Knowledge of English is useful but not essential. (Don’t worry, we have poor UK students who can work with you in groups and explain things and lecturers who aren’t allowed to fail you on pain of losing their job. Relax!) Scared of living by yourself abroad? You can bring the family with you. Yes, really. Our special Sunak Flexi-Pass allows relatives to join you and it’s super easy to stay on after you’ve finished your course. A lifetime of generous British benefits can be yours – what’s not to like? Sign up today for the Great British foundation course, you won’t regret it. All major credit cards accepted or please send a large cheque to the vice chancellor, Sir Hugh G Lee Remunerated.

    On the morning that I read The Sunday Times exposé about international students buying their way onto prestigious Russell Group degree courses, a friend messaged to say his daughter had been rejected by her first choice and passed to other colleges for consideration, but was not picked by any. Rosie is pretty much the perfect Oxbridge candidate in all but two respects. She’s the kind of sparky girl who would have been cracking codes at Bletchley Park in 1942, a gifted mathematician and linguist who sings and plays two instruments. Exactly the type of brilliant, original and delightful young person our top universities came into being to educate, or so you might think. Female candidates of that calibre in her subject area are unusual, so it was a surprise that Rosie (predicted A*A*A*A*) wasn’t picked from the “pool” which would have allowed a less sought-after college to fish out a student clearly destined for an excellent degree. My friend is sanguine, but really wonders who those colleges chose over his daughter, and why.

    Alas, Rosie was burdened by those two clear disadvantages I mentioned. She attends a very good private school and the silly girl also omitted to be Hong Kong Chinese (or another favoured nationality). Even though the Chinese pupils at Rosie’s school are from such fabulously wealthy backgrounds they make Rosie’s middle-class family look like paupers, they still tick a useful “diversity” box for Oxford and Cambridge. Oh, and they’re prepared to pay squillions for the Rolex of higher education.

    Discrimination against able British youngsters is now so routine it practically amounts to apartheid. One clever lad I know was offered a daunting A*A*A to study history at Edinburgh. His German classmate was required to get AAB for the same course. Even though the German kid had exactly the same education (and was no brighter), his international status gave him priority over the indigenous teenager.

    I will never forget The Telegraph reader, a resident in Switzerland, who told me his son had applied for the same course at the same London university as both a British student and an international student. The “British student” had to get two grades higher than the international applicant.

    Undercover reporters found a recruitment officer for Russell Group universities who boasted that “foundation” course pathways to undergraduate courses were much easier than the routes for British applicants because overseas applicants “pay more money… so they give leeway for international students… It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth”.

    It certainly is. For example, to study economics, overseas students needed grades of CCC at Bristol, CCD at Durham, DDE at Exeter and a decidedly unchallenging D at Leeds to be accepted onto a foundation course. By contrast, the A-level grades required from UK applicants were tough – A*AA or AAA. Even if they achieve those grades, the British applicants could still be squeezed out by someone who can pay more. I know a lot of mums and dads who were baffled, infuriated and very sad when their hugely hard-working, high-scoring offspring failed to get a single offer. Now we know why.

    The Russell Group estimates that universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every “home student” they educated last year. Well, if universities had focused on their core mission (you know, teaching stuff), instead of empire-building with thousands of admin staff and stonking, private-sector salaries for vice-chancellors, then maybe their financial position wouldn’t be so dire. Meanwhile, British “home” kids are betrayed at every turn. Even if their parents can afford it, they are not allowed to offer to pay the international rate for a degree. Why, that would be unfair! It would disadvantage the disadvantaged kids who can’t pay more.

    So, instead of filling universities with the cream of our own youth, crucial for future economic growth and prosperity, we import dumbed-down foreign cash cows from competitor nations. Anyone else spot the potential drawback here or is it just me?

    Even if your son or daughter is lucky enough to get a place, courses in science, engineering and computing are dominated by East Asian, predominantly Chinese, students who often lack the language skills to engage with the material. I heard of some English-speaking students who flatly refused to participate in “mixed groups”, arguing that the teaching of overseas students was not their responsibility. Bravo, boys and girls! Others suffer in silence with a much-diminished university experience. And don’t get me started on awarding such a huge number of places in medicine and dentistry to foreign students when British applications are so many and so good. Luckily we don’t have a shortage of dentists and doctors, eh?

    Our once venerable universities are tarting themselves about like hookers in the cocktail bar of a Knightsbridge hotel at midnight trying to snag a wealthy punter. It’s an obscene and undignified spectacle.

    Not, perhaps, the ideal moment, therefore, for Prof Irene Tracey, vice-chancellor of Oxford, to urge alumni to donate to their universities every year. In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Tracey said graduates should be “giving back” because institutions needed a “vote of confidence” as they were “falling to pieces during a funding crisis”.

    Surely, the dear prof is ‘aving a laugh? Universities should be the ones “giving back” to recent students who have accrued over £40,000 of debt and deserve a refund. Many who graduated last year, like my son, had a wretched experience dominated by lecturers’ strikes, lockdown and Zoom tutorials. To cap it all, my boy sweated blood over two 5,000-word papers, only to have them returned with “an average of your scores”. Translation: “Could not be arsed to mark them.” Disgraceful. At least he got his degree. Thousands of young people “graduated” without one because their work hadn’t been graded at all. Universities may act like commercial organisations, but in what other business does the customer pay without getting a product?

    The recent fall in international student numbers is to be welcomed, I think. A rotten universities’ funding model, based on encouraging overseas students to buy their way onto highly competitive courses with a handful of paltry qualifications, is both indefensible and unsustainable. Discriminating against our own talented young people is plain wrong. Let’s see some of the worst unis go bust (many are less colleges of education more immigration fast-track) and wean the rest off their addiction to international fees.

    Prof Tracey rather gave the game away when she said that one fifth of undergraduates at Oxford are from overseas. That means 20 per cent fewer places for home-grown candidates (it’s an eye-watering 60 per cent at our best science college, Imperial). I don’t think that’s fair. Here’s an irony for you to savour: the top universities have gradually moved to admit far fewer independently educated domestic candidates on the grounds of privilege and elitism. But many of the so-called “overseas” candidates they let in come from those same celebrated schools, and are far, far wealthier than the British kids.

    What Prof Tracey and her fellow ivory towerists need to understand is why so many alumni would rather cut off their own ear than set up a direct debit. Scores of my Cambridge contemporaries have already cancelled theirs in disgust. I bet it’s the same story elsewhere. Of course, if you are happy with universities selling your children’s and grandchildren’s places to overseas students; if you’re fine with the cancellation of Western values, the decolonisation of the curriculum (removing much that we treasure) and the hounding of academics who believe in biological sex; if you think “diversity” candidates should always be preferred over majority white children; if you agree that not giving brilliant Rosie a place because she failed to be Hong Kong Chinese or the daughter of a multi-millionaire using wealth not merit to get into Oxbridge, by all means, carry on donating.

    But count me out. I stand with the home students. I stand with the best which has been thought and said in this crazy world. I stand with Rosie.

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

    Jonny James
    12 HRS AGO
    My daughter was predicted three A* in her chosen subjects and was turned down by all but one of the universities she applied to which pushed her into taking a gap year. She subsequently passed her A levels and all at grades A* and has only had one offer from the universities again with the all the others keeping her strung along…I hate this country now !

    Andrew Crowe
    12 HRS AGO
    Reply to Jonny James – view message
    Welcome to the woke UK where white people are hated and fair game for blatant discrimination. It used to be the exclusive preserve of white working class people, but it seems the middle class are now becoming affected by this new virus too.

    Cormoran Strike
    11 HRS AGO
    As I said in another comment section on this topic, I was recently on a course at a Russell group university that was mentioned in the times investigation, a history degree no less, and several students in my seminars didn’t speak or read a single word of English. Absolutely scandalous.

    1. Harvard produces ‘whiny snowflakes’, says major donor as he withdraws funding

      Ken Griffin is the latest wealthy alumnus to halt payments over university’s handling of hate speech on campus following Oct 7 attacks

      Our Foreign Staff
      30 January 2024 • 7:21pm

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/en-us/news/2024/01/30/TELEMMGLPICT000364604363_17066414341280_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680
      Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel hedge fund, donated $300 million to Harvard last year CREDIT: LIONEL NG

      A major Harvard donor has halted financial support for the university and accused elite US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future leaders.

      Ken Griffin, an alumnus who donated $300 million (£237 million) to Harvard last year, is the latest in a string of wealthy donors who have halted donations amid uproar over the university’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus after the Oct 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

      Mr Griffin announced he was pausing support for Harvard unless it makes significant changes.

      “I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Mr Griffin said of Harvard at a conference in Miami on Tuesday.

      The university, he said, must make clear that it will “resume its role of educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers”.

      According to Bloomberg, he accused leading US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future statesmen.

      Harvard is still struggling to resolve tensions even after Claudine Gay, its former president, resigned this month amid an onslaught of criticism over her response to anti-Semitism, as well as accusations of plagiarism in her scholarship.

      The school has also come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers, students and alumni. Two congressional committees have begun investigations, with one of them criticising Harvard last week for providing “woefully inadequate” responses to its questions.

      The US education department is conducting its own investigation of anti-Semitism at Harvard and other schools.

      Mr Griffin, the founder and chief executive of hedge fund firm Citadel with a personal net worth of $36.8 billion, said he was concerned after watching Ms Gay testify before Congress on Dec 5.

      She and two other university presidents declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to a question on whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ code of conduct on bullying and harassment, saying it would have to be balanced against free-speech protections.

      His decision to withhold support will deepen the financial pain for Harvard. Len Blavatnik, the billionaire and Harvard alumnus, whose family foundation has given at least $270 million to Harvard, paused donations last month.

      Donors such as Idan Ofer and Leslie Wexner had earlier halted support, while Mitt Romney, the US senator, accused the university of ignoring the safety of Jewish students.

      Earlier on Tuesday, Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, took aim at its leaders, describing the scandal over the university’s handling of anti-Semitism as the “worst stretch” in its 387-year history.

      “My confidence in Harvard leadership’s ability and will to confront antisemitism and the demonisation of Israel continues to decline,” Mr Summers wrote on Twitter.

      “Unfortunately, it is becoming ever clearer why Harvard ranks first on anti-Semitism, even as it ranks last on upholding free speech.

      “I cannot think of a worse stretch in Harvard history than the last few months,” he added.

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

      Oliver Cromwell
      10 HRS AGO
      That Gay woman is still employed by Harvard as a “professor.” Why? She should be dismissed.

      George Smith
      10 HRS AGO
      Again Trump was right. “Everything that is woke turns to sh. “ EDITED

      John Kings
      10 HRS AGO
      The university, he said, must make clear that it will “resume its role of educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers”.
      Well said, but it must select its students on merit alone. You cannot ensure equality of outcome, only opportunity.

      Jimmy Christian
      10 HRS AGO
      Well done that man.
      Many Ivy League universities have an overinflated reputation for undergraduate studies anyway — many professors there are more interested in research than teaching, which makes them fine for graduate school but not in baccalaureate programs. Better off going to a smaller state school — pay less, and then when you go to graduate school, especially in STEM subjects, you get paid to be a TA/graduate assistant anyway.
      As for statesmen/stateswomen? The world doesn’t need more lawyers taking that path. The world needs fewer of them and more people who actually build nations. Give me a good engineer any day over a soft-subject-turned-politician.

  14. Good morning all,

    Light cloud here at McPhee Towers, wind in the South-West, 3℃ going up to 9℃ today.

    What’s your local council up to?

    UK Column ‘Extra’ on Monday featured the activities of Oxford City Council in its closing of side roads so that people are forced to drive out to the perimeter to get from one part of the city to another. Apparently the council are signed up to an organisation called UK100 which is driving to get net zero policies and targets implemented ahead of the government in Westminster.

    Cash strapped councils up and down the land are signing up to this because they are granted money by UK100 which seems to be the brain-child of certain billonaire philanthropaths. Billionaires by-passing democracy. What next?

    The website will introduce you to the activists who are doing this and you can also see if your council is signed up. You can write to them, as one Gillian Dymond described she had done in her article in TCW https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/net-zero-nonsense-a-taxpayers-protest/, but you’ll almost certainly get the brush-off just as she did. The best thing to do is get organised to vote them out. Stand against them if your council is involved and will be having elections this year.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7a507dbfb088b819e848355a5fa271c0b5280f9d3577cab0bf948f089049ff19.png

    https://www.uk100.org/

  16. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) list
    SHORT & SWEET – BUT NOT VERY PC – 1
    Got an e-mail today from a bored local housewife, 43, who was looking for some hot action!
    So, I sent her my ironing. That’ll keep the lazy bitch busy.

    I got invited to a party and was told to dress to kill.
    Apparently, a turban, beard and a backpack weren’t what they had in mind.

    After a night of drink, drugs and wild sex Bill woke up to find himself next to a really ugly woman.
    That’s when he realised, he had made it home safely.

    Paddy says to Mick, “Christmas is on Friday this year”.
    Mick said, “Let’s hope it’s not the 13th then.”

    My mate just hired an Eastern European cleaner, took her 5 hours to Hoover the house.
    Turns out she was a Slo vak.

    Since the snow came all the wife has done is look through the window. If it gets any worse, I’ll have to let her in.

    Came home today to find all my doors and windows smashed in and everything gone. What sort of sick person does that to someone’s Advent calendar…?

    I’ve been charged with murder for killing a man with sandpaper.
    To be honest I only intended to rough him up a bit.

    After years of research, scientists have discovered what makes women happy. Nothing.

    A lad comes home from school and excitedly tells his dad that he had a part in the school play and he was playing a man who had been married for 25 years.
    The dad says, “Never mind son, maybe next year you’ll get a speaking part.”

    Just had my water bill of £175 drop on my mat. That’s a lot.
    Oxfam can supply a whole African village for just £2 a month: time to change supplier, I think.

    I’d just come out of the shop with a meat and potato pie, large chips, mushy peas & a jumbo sausage.
    A poor homeless man sat there and said ‘I’ve not eaten for two days’
    I told him ‘I wish I had your fucking will power’

    I see that Paddy O’Reilly, an electrician, has been sacked by the US Prison service for refusing to repair an electric chair.
    He said in his opinion it was a fecking death trap.

  17. Secret Putin home on Finnish border revealed by drone – complete with £8,000 bidets and ‘stolen’ waterfall. 31 January 2024.

    Vladimir Putin has reportedly built a sprawling estate complete with bidets costing £8,000 each, a “stolen” waterfall and the framework for an air-defence system less than 20 miles from Russia’s border with Finland.

    The secretive complex is nestled deep in the forests of the northern region of Karelia, according to the Dossier Centre, a Russian investigative organisation which tracks various people associated with the Kremlin.

    Leaked details and aerial footage of the estate, on the shores of Lake Ladoga’s Majalahti Bay, revealed it was protected by round-the-clock security, barbed-wire fences, intelligence officers and drone jammers.

    Of course it is. The residences of Government Leaders are always overflown by drones. Look at the White House! The source of this information are the same people that “discovered” the Black Sea house that was actually a building site. As there; there is no evidence or sighting that links Vlad to the house. Neither is there any explanation as to why he would build a residence so close to the Finnish Border!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/01/30/secret-putin-home-finland-bidet-ladoga-waterfall-russia/

    2. FFS! Did Putin give the Telegraph journalists a tour and show them the bill for the bidets personally?

  18. Good morning all.
    A VERY red sky, now sadly faded when I first dragged myself out of bed, but it’s a rather cold and frosty -½°C outside.

  19. One by one, the lockdown myths are crumbling

    Even the shutdown’s most fervent supporters cannot hide from the impact of that calamitous policy

    MADELINE GRANT, PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER
    31 January 2024 • 6:00am

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/01/30/TELEMMGLPICT000329702472_17066403951450_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqb1TDWU2IgKD1gpUSoPKx3WreqapuikfNyCYuptSHoIo.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Rewriting history: Was Devi Sridhar calling for zero Covid or maximum suppression? CREDIT: Simon Townsley

    You may remember from the depths of lockdown – although you’d be forgiven for trying to forget – the cavalcade of talking heads that would appear on our televisions, their movements seemingly unimpeded by legislation, to lecture us on the rectitude of being imprisoned in our homes. One such figure was Prof Devi Sridhar.

    As chair of public health at Edinburgh University, Sridhar was the doyenne of zero Covid. She was all over the media, and apparently also enjoyed a chummy relationship with Nicola Sturgeon, whom she advised on Covid policy. At one point, they even seemed to cook up plans for an elimination strategy, presumably including border closures with England.

    As many pointed out at the time, eliminating Covid was a doomed venture, as those nations that tried it found to their cost. Nowhere succeeded; cases spiked, even in countries capable of inflicting the most illiberal policies imaginable. In China, as late as spring 2022, when most other parts of the world had embraced normality, members of the public were being dragged into forced isolation in Portakabins. Simultaneously, the Hong Kong authorities undertook a mass-cull of pet hamsters amid fears that they might spread Covid-19 to humans.

    Now, Sridhar appears to be trying to rewrite history. Conveniently, she has told the Covid Inquiry that she wasn’t really calling for zero Covid after all, merely a policy of “maximum suppression” until a vaccine arrived. And yet in June 2020 Sridhar wrote that “as an island, Great Britain is in a strong position to eliminate the virus”. “Eliminate” sounds pretty like a zero Covid approach to me. Like Sturgeon, she pushed the Scottish exceptionalism narrative, claiming in summer 2020 that Scotland could have sought “full elimination”, were it not for those Typhoid Marys in England.

    Sridhar is the latest individual – from increasing numbers of academics to well, Piers Morgan – to begin to suggest that they didn’t mean things to go as far as they did. It’s irritating, but it’s a start. We are edging closer to the unspoken truth: that much of what happened during the Covid era was a mistake. One by one, the myths of lockdown are crumbling.

    Consider some of the outworkings of those policies. When the vaccines arrived, rather than calmly making the (strong) case for people to have the jab, it was considered desirable instead to browbeat the public with grim emotional blackmail about “killing granny” and authoritarian policies, such as the vaccine passport. Now we may be paying the price.

    The measles vaccine is tremendously effective against a highly infectious disease. Its introduction is believed to have prevented around 20 million cases and 4,500 deaths in the UK alone. The recent UK spate of measles outbreaks owes much to anti-vax disinformation, but also to lockdowns, which denied many children their routine vaccinations.

    But heavy-handed attempts to impose jabs against Covid on the entire population when the virus largely affects the over-50s, may well have helped foment suspicion of vaccination in general. Indeed, many experts spoke at the time of the likely unintended consequences of overhyping the vaccine, but thanks to the authorities’ sledgehammer/nut approach to public health, such warnings were widely ignored.

    Concern about the impact of lockdown on children was similarly ignored. Indeed, the idea that children would bounce back from compulsory confinement after being locked inside, denied socialisation and a proper education, has predictably proved a mirage. Overall rates of persistent absence remain stubbornly high; more than double what they were before a pandemic that conditioned many parents and pupils to feel as though attendance was optional. Lockdown may be yesterday’s story, but we are still living with its effects.

    So too, the relaxed approach towards money-printing. It’s the elephant in the room in all discussions of the cost of living crisis. Blame is apportioned everywhere else, from the malign to the ridiculous: Putin to Liz Truss. Rarely, however, do politicians square with the public and admit that the mass printing of vast amounts of currency and more than a year of furlough just might have caused avoidable economic harm. And what of the idea that the NHS could safely focus only on Covid, neglecting other health measures in the process?

    Even the myth of the all-conquering Covid leader – those who were supposedly more competent than their counterparts elsewhere – has taken a battering. For years, Nicola Sturgeon was either fêted in England, or treated as an impressive visiting dignitary, rather than facing the scrutiny focused on Westminster politicians.

    Yet the Covid Inquiry is shattering these notions. Yesterday, former SNP finance minister Kate Forbes described an atmosphere of widespread secrecy; unminuted meetings no one knew about, and deleted WhatsApp messages – which, like those Hebridean ferries, will never see the light of day.

    With hindsight, that stirring fantasy of Scotland’s vastly superior handling of the pandemic, with exemplarily low infection rates to match, demonstrated merely a Braveheart-level economy with the truth. Apart from a few exceptions, the pandemic has proved the graveyard of many leaders’ careers. As we will probably see today at the inquiry as Sturgeon takes the stand.

    ******************************
    C Lawrence
    35 MIN AGO
    Some of us were saying exactly this at the time, but got called granny killers and were cold shouldered by family and friends. It was obvious to anyone who stepped outside the covid bubble, talked up by the BBC and much of the MSM, that the policies were lunacy and could only lead to huge problems further down the line. And yes, of course people are now wary of Big Pharma and their lies. Trust has been lost and sadly I doubt it will ever return in my lifetime. Some people made millions out of it all, but most are now carrying the burden of huge inflation and a broken country. And the current Nut Zero policies are doing the same all over again.

    1. This is not much to celebrate. Nobody is being held responsible, nobody is being punished for the blatant nonsense and lies they pushed. All the people who believed in it still believe in it, as the government will never give them permission to stop believing. The vaxx and lockdown pushers all have honours and lucrative jobs.
      This is just a token sop thrown to try and appease those of us who did see that it was a lie.

    2. Lockdown, never again?

      Just wait until the WHO, aka Bill Gates et al. come demanding. Oh, the government, whether Starmer or Sunak led, will claim it’s not their doing but it’s for the good of the World. Not just grannies in the UK.

      Attempting to abdicate responsibilities by giving away the sovereignty of the people to an unelected cabal populated by too many shysters for comfort, is not in any way or form leadership.

      We see you, you complete shower of globalist apparatchiks, for what you are. Non-compliance has to be our watchword.

    3. I have no recollection of Devi Sridhar. It’s probably due to my withdrawal from ‘news’, initially triggered by hospitalisation in 2019 and continued ever since other than during the 2019 General Election campaign, something I’m less likely to do later this year. I dont even bother to read the Telegraph letters any more that were once the backbone of discussion topics for this forum.

  20. Good morning from here ,

    Dull dark chilly day, and Moh off to golf well wrapped up , flask of coffee etc .

    SIR – An estimated 1,000 migrants have crossed the Channel illegally this year alone, but once again the Archbishop of Canterbury denounces the Government’s Rwanda plan (report, January 30) without offering any viable solution to break the business model of the people-smugglers.

    Little wonder the Church of England is sinking further into irrelevance. The arrival of illegal migrants – often in the areas of the country that can least afford to accommodate them – puts pressure on both local infrastructure and social cohesion.

    Yet liberal bishops appear oblivious to this. It is shocking that our so-called national church has so little to say to those communities that bear the burden.

    Victoria Baillon
    Shepton Mallet, Somerset

    So then we read this!

    https://twitter.com/dave24144975/status/1752406308953768440

      1. I’d say “what a cilly sunt” but I suppose the BBC would have caught on to that one, especially after the Goons got away with Hugh Jampton.

        1. We haven’t seen much of our friend Hugh Janus (Big Bum) on the Nottlers’ Forum recently.

    2. The Richard Dawkins Atheist Foundation has infiltrated the CofE at Archbishop and Bishop level and its mission is clear: to make sure that as many Christians as possible lose their faith.

      1. I just pinched that:-

        R. Spowart
        13 MIN AGO
        Message Actions
        I wonder.
        Has The Richard Dawkins Atheist Foundation infiltrated the CofE at Archbishop and Bishop level with a clear mission to make sure that as many Christians as possible lose their faith?

  21. Good Moaning.
    Allison Pearson with the bit between her teeth.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/01/30/top-british-universities-international-students-oxbridge/

    Universities should want brilliant British minds, not dumbed-down foreign cash cows

    ‘Diversity’ candidates are preferred over majority white children and British students are losing out

    Allison Pearson30 January 2024 • 7:00pm

    For sale: British university degrees. Top colleges! World-class education in historic surroundings! Knowledge of English is useful but not essential. (Don’t worry, we have poor UK students who can work with you in groups and explain things and lecturers who aren’t allowed to fail you on pain of losing their job. Relax!) Scared of living by yourself abroad? You can bring the family with you. Yes, really. Our special Sunak Flexi-Pass allows relatives to join you and it’s super easy to stay on after you’ve finished your course. A lifetime of generous British benefits can be yours – what’s not to like? Sign up today for the Great British foundation course, you won’t regret it. All major credit cards accepted or please send a large cheque to the vice chancellor, Sir Hugh G Lee Remunerated.

    On the morning that I read The Sunday Times exposé about international students buying their way onto prestigious Russell Group degree courses, a friend messaged to say his daughter had been rejected by her first choice and passed to other colleges for consideration, but was not picked by any. Rosie is pretty much the perfect Oxbridge candidate in all but two respects. She’s the kind of sparky girl who would have been cracking codes at Bletchley Park in 1942, a gifted mathematician and linguist who sings and plays two instruments. Exactly the type of brilliant, original and delightful young person our top universities came into being to educate, or so you might think. Female candidates of that calibre in her subject area are unusual, so it was a surprise that Rosie (predicted A*A*A*A*) wasn’t picked from the “pool” which would have allowed a less sought-after college to fish out a student clearly destined for an excellent degree. My friend is sanguine, but really wonders who those colleges chose over his daughter, and why.

    Alas, Rosie was burdened by those two clear disadvantages I mentioned. She attends a very good private school and the silly girl also omitted to be Hong Kong Chinese (or another favoured nationality). Even though the Chinese pupils at Rosie’s school are from such fabulously wealthy backgrounds they make Rosie’s middle-class family look like paupers, they still tick a useful “diversity” box for Oxford and Cambridge. Oh, and they’re prepared to pay squillions for the Rolex of higher education.

    Discrimination against able British youngsters is now so routine it practically amounts to apartheid. One clever lad I know was offered a daunting A*A*A to study history at Edinburgh. His German classmate was required to get AAB for the same course. Even though the German kid had exactly the same education (and was no brighter), his international status gave him priority over the indigenous teenager.

    I will never forget The Telegraph reader, a resident in Switzerland, who told me his son had applied for the same course at the same London university as both a British student and an international student. The “British student” had to get two grades higher than the international applicant.

    Undercover reporters found a recruitment officer for Russell Group universities who boasted that “foundation” course pathways to undergraduate courses were much easier than the routes for British applicants because overseas applicants “pay more money… so they give leeway for international students… It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth”.

    It certainly is. For example, to study economics, overseas students needed grades of CCC at Bristol, CCD at Durham, DDE at Exeter and a decidedly unchallenging D at Leeds to be accepted onto a foundation course. By contrast, the A-level grades required from UK applicants were tough – A*AA or AAA. Even if they achieve those grades, the British applicants could still be squeezed out by someone who can pay more. I know a lot of mums and dads who were baffled, infuriated and very sad when their hugely hard-working, high-scoring offspring failed to get a single offer. Now we know why.

    The Russell Group estimates that universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every “home student” they educated last year. Well, if universities had focused on their core mission (you know, teaching stuff), instead of empire-building with thousands of admin staff and stonking, private-sector salaries for vice-chancellors, then maybe their financial position wouldn’t be so dire. Meanwhile, British “home” kids are betrayed at every turn. Even if their parents can afford it, they are not allowed to offer to pay the international rate for a degree. Why, that would be unfair! It would disadvantage the disadvantaged kids who can’t pay more.

    So, instead of filling universities with the cream of our own youth, crucial for future economic growth and prosperity, we import dumbed-down foreign cash cows from competitor nations. Anyone else spot the potential drawback here or is it just me?

    Even if your son or daughter is lucky enough to get a place, courses in science, engineering and computing are dominated by East Asian, predominantly Chinese, students who often lack the language skills to engage with the material. I heard of some English-speaking students who flatly refused to participate in “mixed groups”, arguing that the teaching of overseas students was not their responsibility. Bravo, boys and girls! Others suffer in silence with a much-diminished university experience. And don’t get me started on awarding such a huge number of places in medicine and dentistry to foreign students when British applications are so many and so good. Luckily we don’t have a shortage of dentists and doctors, eh?

    Our once venerable universities are tarting themselves about like hookers in the cocktail bar of a Knightsbridge hotel at midnight trying to snag a wealthy punter. It’s an obscene and undignified spectacle.

    Not, perhaps, the ideal moment, therefore, for Prof Irene Tracey, vice-chancellor of Oxford, to urge alumni to donate to their universities every year. In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Tracey said graduates should be “giving back” because institutions needed a “vote of confidence” as they were “falling to pieces during a funding crisis”.

    Surely, the dear prof is ‘aving a laugh? Universities should be the ones “giving back” to recent students who have accrued over £40,000 of debt and deserve a refund. Many who graduated last year, like my son, had a wretched experience dominated by lecturers’ strikes, lockdown and Zoom tutorials. To cap it all, my boy sweated blood over two 5,000-word papers, only to have them returned with “an average of your scores”. Translation: “Could not be arsed to mark them.” Disgraceful. At least he got his degree. Thousands of young people “graduated” without one because their work hadn’t been graded at all. Universities may act like commercial organisations, but in what other business does the customer pay without getting a product?

    The recent fall in international student numbers is to be welcomed, I think. A rotten universities’ funding model, based on encouraging overseas students to buy their way onto highly competitive courses with a handful of paltry qualifications, is both indefensible and unsustainable. Discriminating against our own talented young people is plain wrong. Let’s see some of the worst unis go bust (many are less colleges of education more immigration fast-track) and wean the rest off their addiction to international fees.

    Prof Tracey rather gave the game away when she said that one fifth of undergraduates at Oxford are from overseas. That means 20 per cent fewer places for home-grown candidates (it’s an eye-watering 60 per cent at our best science college, Imperial). I don’t think that’s fair. Here’s an irony for you to savour: the top universities have gradually moved to admit far fewer independently educated domestic candidates on the grounds of privilege and elitism. But many of the so-called “overseas” candidates they let in come from those same celebrated schools, and are far, far wealthier than the British kids.

    What Prof Tracey and her fellow ivory towerists need to understand is why so many alumni would rather cut off their own ear than set up a direct debit. Scores of my Cambridge contemporaries have already cancelled theirs in disgust. I bet it’s the same story elsewhere. Of course, if you are happy with universities selling your children’s and grandchildren’s places to overseas students; if you’re fine with the cancellation of Western values, the decolonisation of the curriculum (removing much that we treasure) and the hounding of academics who believe in biological sex; if you think “diversity” candidates should always be preferred over majority white children; if you agree that not giving brilliant Rosie a place because she failed to be Hong Kong Chinese or the daughter of a multi-millionaire using wealth not merit to get into Oxbridge, by all means, carry on donating.

    But count me out. I stand with the home students. I stand with the best which has been thought and said in this crazy world. I stand with Rosie.”

    1. Rosie may have high grades and be able to play two musical instruments but she is an idiot if she wants to go and be brainwashed at a CCP indoctrination centre!
      There are many routes to success. It’s not the 1990s any more, young people have to think for themselves today.

  22. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/11dc08a115fee69631bf9d475d58c8ad93833400/0_0_5472_3648/master/5472.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=fb91b2e474bf1c3c727cdf89a3396941
    Flamingos fly across Lake Van in Turkey.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/48379bc3da668e4b7b50af4c7d5de0d5fed39891/0_0_3300_2200/master/3300.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=e508f0272e1bd536e60b99555c2ea297
    Fireflies in a forest at Pitrufquen, Chile.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f7f191e3508a9fc5f27be2ee7f9f0f69555d7424/0_0_8256_5504/master/8256.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=02f662d58943be41689dc19c5f21d73c
    A white-faced heron catches a shrimp in a lagoon in Dunedin, New Zealand.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2461698c2b40a519d2534489e84c1fe44a49741c/0_0_4134_2752/master/4134.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=9ba7f96353417d73213a5d3e463559f9
    A Himalayan monal in Shannan City, Tibet. The pheasant is native to forests and shrublands at elevations of 2,100 metres to 4,500 metres.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0678e97c3c5c7f87192891bb14efaa8d225c07e2/0_0_3500_2397/master/3500.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=d2464a3c94ab7fb8eb761d7bf5855bf5
    A fallow deer in a frosty Phoenix park in Dublin, Ireland.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/96ad4825c1288ffd4f8776303be0c79e264a6d2d/0_0_2912_1747/master/2912.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=7140780e6a91c75f0d0de963920feabd
    Adult emperor penguins with their chick near the Halley research station in Antarctica.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ed684edb00c7940e51fc4e1d80ffb67f7ee70186/0_0_4784_2981/master/4784.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=2d2343865d174e53cbbca984048b8fe7
    A gentoo penguin with its chick at the Paraiso island in the Gerlache strait, which separates the Palmer archipelago from the Antarctic peninsula.

  23. LABOUR STATES “BUSINESSES HATE UNCERTAINTY” AS IT FLIP-FLOPS ON £28 BILLION 12 TIMES

    Labour has published a report today on business relations called “A New Partnership” in the run up to its mega-corporate schmooze event on Thursday. Along with the usual waffle on “ending the political spin cycle” the report concludes:

    “Business hates uncertainty. The Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Jonathan Reynolds MP and the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves MP, have prioritised “clarity”, “certainty”, “transparency”, and “stability” in Labour’s relationship with business. This is very welcome“.

    Businesses do hate uncertainty. Guido wonders what they’ll make of the Labour Party’s clarity on its flagship spending policy to reach its “2030 Clean Power Promise“, that last June Starmer said he was “doubling down” on Labour’s £28 billion spending spree. The so-called clarity in just this month is comical:

    9th February 2023 – Labour says: “We will invest £28 billion per year to tackle the climate emergency through our green prosperity plan“.

    19th June 2023 – Starmer says he is “doubling down” on Labour’s £28 billion spending spree.

    7th January 2024 – Starmer says the country “needs” investment and Labour will “put in” £28 billion to reach their clean power by 2030 target.

    19th January – The Sun reports that Keir Starmer is “ditching” his £28 billion-a-year spending spree, according to “Labour insiders“.

    19th January – Hours later, a Labour source dismissed the claims as “complete nonsense“.

    20th January – Sadiq Khan says Labour will only “hopefully” reach £28 billion but that “depends how quickly we can grow the economy“.

    20th January, David Lammy says Labour “remain committed” to the £28 billion-a-year spending spree but can’t say how it would be funded.

    21st January- Stephen Kinnock says Labour are “committed to ramping up to £28 billion in the second half of the first term of a Labour government“.

    28th January – Starmer refuses to commit to £28 billion in interview with the Daily Mail.

    28th January – Ed Miliband lays out spending commitments that make up the £28 billion figure and pledges to them.

    28th January – The Times reported that Labour’s £28 billion figure will be cut back and may not even make it into Labour’s manifesto.

    28th January – Jonathan Reynolds says Labour will spend £28 billion every year, then says it’s only an ambition.

    28th January – Chris Bryant says Labour’s £28 billion of spending “needs” to survive to pay for Labour’s energy plans.

    28th January – Lord Kinnock says “It might now be 26, it might be 20“.
    Yesterday – the CBI refers to Labour’s £28 billion spending spree as “core” to Labour’s “economic strategy“.

    Last night – Peston reports Labour will ditch their £28 billion spending spree.

    Last night – Rachel Reeves refused to commit to Labour’s £28 billion spending spree, or outline how it would be funded.

    Labour continues to talk about specific green spending commitments that form part of the £28 billion – they can’t have it both ways. Nevertheless Guido reckons they will officially abandon the £28 billion figure in the next few months, whilst still sticking with the individual spending pledges.

  24. ‘Morning All

    Start with WE KNOW!!

    https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1752320641951314290?s=20

    Rest

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f68ade76ae8084a5f15b15fecf8db16907aae1d32b5e258c2ca8dabfae31e087.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cff19dfbb72d3fa4361a873e50a2aef15eab679d6e0e6f3c2d3d39169e08a07e.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c98f457866d5e3a38aac747a95b0d6872794c288e45b1c8e6d59416bc3dc1c94.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0208cfae7314255470e5d13aedea92b09b31b8844b2124e29496b9edc0afc2a2.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/69fe18def8dceb9c5c3e9a7cf314d8584aed92e20c1c4349e63ca3cbc70f9b21.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d7979eb5336088a5402bbd8242f7ae48aa7b34920ae1c78bb70d158244f8a734.jpg

    1. People who were persuaded during the pandemic that masks worked, won’t change their minds now. Set in rock until the next wave of government propaganda.

  25. Failed asylum applicants to be deported on dedicated flights chartered by State

    Move aims to ‘normalise’ deportations and is one of several immigration crackdowns announced by Government

    Conor Gallagher & Harry McGee
    Tue Jan 30 2024 – 12:42

    The Government is to start running regular charter flights dedicated to deporting people who have failed in their asylum applications.

    The first flights, which would use private aircraft hired by the Department of Justice, are expected to happen later this year.

    The move comes as the Government attempts to present a tougher image on immigration in advance of local and European elections in June. Immigration tops the list of issues getting the attention of voters in the past month, according to public sentiment tracking by Ipsos B&A.

    Other planned measures included adding Algeria and Botswana to the official list of “safe countries” which will allow faster processing of immigration claims. International protection (IP) applicants coming from those countries are to have their applications decided on within a maximum of 90 days.

    Ireland’s immigration plans are a crackdown by any other name
    Algeria has been added to Ireland’s list of safe countries. Is it safe?
    Asylum reform plans to clamp down on applicants who already have refugee status in another European state
    Nine in 10 families who hosted Ukrainian refugees had positive experience
    On Tuesday, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee outlined fresh plans to clamp down on those who already have refugee status in another European state. They are to be entered into an inadmissibility procedure, which will also be subject to fast processing. The measures are to come into effect from Wednesday.

    Together these measures would lead to the potential removal of up to 5,000 people from the IP system here, Ms McEntee said.

    Adding Botswana and Algeria to the “safe countries” list brings to 10 the number of countries in that category.

    There were 1,462 IP applicants from Algeria last year and 343 from Botswana.

    “We have seen an increase in people coming from those countries and the vast majority are coming for economic reasons.

    “It’s important to stress that this does not mean people coming from any of the 10 safe countries cannot seek international protection. They can apply, but they will be processed in a much quicker way.”

    Ms McEntee said the Government had considered adding Nigeria and Pakistan to the list of safe countries but concluded they did not meet all the criteria.

    Ms McEntee confirmed the State would charter planes to deport people whose applications have been turned down on appeal to particular countries.

    The Government has not run its own chartered deportation flights since at least 2018. It has instead relied on regularly scheduled commercial flights to accommodate those being deported. On rare occasions, it has also deported people on chartered flights run by other EU member states.

    According to procurement documents issued on Tuesday, the State intends to “normalise” its approach to deportations following a moratorium during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    It says it expects to deport “a sufficient number of individuals from specific countries of origin, to an extent that the use of charter flight operations would become economically viable”.

    The Coalition is now conducting a market “sounding” exercise to seek information from airline companies who can provide such a service.

    Some of these charter flights would make multiple stops in the EU to pick up other unsuccessful asylum applicants, as part of a joint arrangement with other countries, before travelling on to a final destination.

    According to the procurement documents, Ireland has “in the past, participated in joint return operations” with other member states, where it avails of seats on a charter service funded by another country.

    “These services are offered to the State on a reciprocal basis and there is an obligation on Ireland to provide a similar service to other Member States at appropriate junctures,” one document states.

    Statistics relating to failed asylum applicants suggest the most likely destinations for chartered flights would be Algeria, Georgia and Nigeria.

    Last year, about 750 deportation orders were signed but only about 80 were enforced. The Government says a large proportion of the remaining failed asylum applicants left the country of their own accord without informing authorities.

    Ireland last took part in a dedicated deportation flight in 2019 when it obtained seats on a flight chartered by Belgium and Iceland to return Georgian and Albanian nationals. In 2019, it obtained seats on a UK charter flight deporting failed asylum applicants to Nigeria.

    https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/01/30/failed-asylum-applicants-to-be-deported-on-dedicated-flights-chartered-by-state/

    1. The Government is to start running regular charter flights dedicated to deporting people who have failed in their asylum applications.

      After the Election of course!

      3. Our useless political morons will be handing out return tickets and a week’s stopover.

      5. I wonder by what criteria their application is judged. Have they proved physically unsuitable to be employed as mercenaries?

  26. Pharmacy First is good for patients – and good for the NHS
    Mini revolution in high street healthcare will make NHS care for common conditions quicker and easier for millions

    Rishi Sunak says local pharmacies are ‘at the heart of our communities’ CREDIT: David Rose for The Telegraph
    Local pharmacies are at the heart of our communities – and they are close to my heart too, as my mum set up and ran our local pharmacy in Southampton when I was growing up.

    I was proud to help out there as a teenager, delivering prescriptions and doing the books. I saw the bonds of trust that developed with local people and how the pharmacy acted like a community hub, with my mum providing a ready ear and a helping hand for anyone worried about their health.

    There are 11,500 local pharmacies just like the Sunak Pharmacy across our great country, run by skilled healthcare professionals who have studied for at least four years at university and then trained for an additional year to gain their expertise.

    I know what a tremendous resource this is for our NHS, and I am convinced it can do even more to provide great care for local people.

    So on Wednesday, we are launching Pharmacy First across England – starting a mini revolution in high street healthcare.

    This new service will make it quicker, easier and more convenient for millions of people to access NHS care for common conditions. It will save people time and hassle to get the straightforward medication they need quickly.

    For seven common complaints – including a sore throat, earache, shingles, sinusitis and urinary tract infections – you can now just pop down to the pharmacy. No need to call ahead. No need to make an appointment.

    Pharmacies will even be able to deliver this service remotely where it is medically safe to do so.

    Community pharmacies already deal with a range of minor conditions, such as stomach upsets or conjunctivitis, and they do a brilliant job.

    As of December last year, pharmacies are also providing the oral contraceptive pill direct, so women no longer have to speak to a nurse or GP first.

    And we’re delivering an additional 2.5 million blood pressure checks in community pharmacies by spring 2025, which could help prevent more than 1,350 heart attacks and strokes in the first year alone.

    Rishi Sunak has his blood pressure checked at a pharmacy last year CREDIT: Ben Birchall/AFP
    With Pharmacy First, we are raising our ambitions even more – and we will invest up to £645 million over the next two years to help pharmacists deliver the new services.

    These are simple reforms, but they add up to the biggest change in pharmacy services for years, with benefits that will flow out across the NHS.

    Most people – eight in 10 – live within a 20-minute walk of a pharmacy, many of which have private consultation rooms to put patients at ease. So making it easier for pharmacists to help local people will have a huge impact.

    Together, these changes will free up around 10 million GP appointments a year.

    They will therefore make it easier for people to see their GP when they need to, helping to deliver our recovery plan for primary care, which includes ending the 8am rush to book GP appointments and improving the NHS app.

    This plan is already delivering – in October, months ahead of schedule, we exceeded our target to provide 50 million more GP appointments every year.

    Making real progress
    Crucially, all this will also help our efforts to cut waiting lists across the NHS. Last January, I set bringing down waiting lists as one of the Government’s five priorities. There is still more to do, but we are making real progress.

    Despite the effect of strikes, which have seen over a million appointments rescheduled – and over 100,000 in January alone – we have virtually eliminated two-year waits and got 18-week waits down by 90 per cent.

    In November, the first strike-free month for a year, waiting lists fell by more than 95,000. That shows what NHS staff can do. And that shows why we are working to end these strikes – because without them, and with our ongoing investment in the NHS, we can continue to bring waits down.

    The NHS is the birthright of every person in this country. That’s why we are putting in record resources, both for the NHS and for social care.

    It’s why we have delivered the first ever long-term NHS workforce plan, and delivered ahead of time on our commitment to increase the number of nurses in the NHS by 50,000, while also training more doctors, more dentists and more GPs than ever before.

    And it’s why we’re delivering this vital new Pharmacy First service – to provide routine care more quickly and closer to home.

    Convenient, quick, local. Good for patients and good for the NHS, and proper Conservative reform of our NHS. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/01/31/rishi-sunak-pharmacy-first-nhs-waiting-lists/

    RUBBISH RUBBISH RUBBISH

    Local pharmacies are closing and those who remain are under enormous pressure dealing with supplying prescriptions , jabs etc and keeping the right staff, especially in a village .

    1. Has Sunak offered any extra funding for the extra work pharmacies will be taking on? Has he offered to have a word with Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC)to give pharmacists a better price?

      At the moment some pharmacies are refusing to stock some drugs because they lose money on every prescription. Others are taking the hit and providing the drugs but putting their hand into their own pockets to pay for them.

          1. Deep breaths , hold tight and be brave . it won’t last too long , daunting but important, and you will soon be telling us all about it .

            Big hugs x

      2. There’s supposed to be an extra thousand pounds landing in some bank accounts from the DWP soon.
        I expect encouragement to spend at a pharmacy will be mentioned.

      3. Asda Health chief threatened locums would not be employed if they refused to adopt the Pharmacy First diktat! It’s been running for 2 years in Scotland and hasn’t solved a thing!
        News from Pharmacy Today, yesterday.

        1. No. Gordon Brown (see Guardian Family doctors agree new pay deal

          Sara Gaines and agencies
          Tue 14 Oct 2008 14.38 BST

          The government has struck a deal with doctors’ leaders to reform the GP contract which MPs complained had led to “eye-watering” pay rises, it was revealed today.

          The new deal with the British Medical Association (BMA) will see the minimum income practice guarantee (MPIG) phased out by April 2011.

    3. So his Doctor father was paid by the public sector and much of his mother’s income would have come from prescriptions. Mr Sunak´s family depended on the kindness of strangers, and unsurprisingly he became a socialist similar to Mr G Brown.

    4. So his Doctor father was paid by the public sector and much of his mother’s income would have come from prescriptions. Mr Sunak´s family depended on the kindness of strangers, and unsurprisingly he became a socialist similar to Mr G Brown.

    5. Pharmacists are probably the only professionals who survived convid with their reputations intact – often actually enhanced.
      I would quite happily avoid the sheer hassle of a GP surgery for all the routine stuff.
      From my experience, pharmacists will direct you to the doctor if they have any doubts.

  27. Wall Street Journal

    Europe Regulates Its Way to Last Place

    From mergers to AI, the EU’s aggressive rule making hampers its ability to compete with China and the U.S.

    By Greg Ip
    Updated Jan. 31, 2024 12:01 am ET

    These are humbling times for Europe. The continent barely escaped recession late last year as the U.S. boomed. It is losing out to the U.S. on artificial intelligence, and to China on electric vehicles.

    There is one field where the European Union still leads the world: regulation. Having set the standard on regulating mergers, carbon emissions, data privacy, and e-commerce competition, the EU now seeks to do the same on AI. In December it unveiled a sweeping draft law that bans certain types of AI, tightly regulates others, and imposes huge fines for violators. Its executive arm, the European Commission, might investigate Microsoft’s tie-up with OpenAI as potentially anticompetitive…..

  28. SIR – I remember when playground “clackers” were banned in 1985, within months of becoming popular.
    Why has it taken so long to ban disposable vapes?

    Dr Peter Merry
    Norwich

    They are waiting for representations from the industry to be made. (bribes)

        1. I was ahead of the game that year! Bought them on camping holiday in Spain and brought them home! It’s the only time in my life I was ahead of the fashion!

  29. BTL Comment on the latest letters page space filler:-

    R. Spowart
    JUST NOW
    Message Actions
    A bit of a fuss about shaving methods I see.
    I’ve not shaved since shortly after demob from the Sappers in 1980, co-incidentally today is the anniversary of the day I began my months discharge leave, but I used to use to shave by touch as, having to shave on exercise I rarely had a mirror handy. Also, to cut down on the amount of stuff I had in my washing kit, I used ordinary soap applied with fingers.

  31. Last night I watched the latest Delingpod with Bob Moran. It’s still behind a paywall on Substack but it should be free in a week or two.

    In it Bob recounts a tale about meetings in 10 Downing Street in late 2020 at which the editors of the main organs of the press were briefed by Whitty and Vallance with the PM Johnson present. Newspaper revenues had tanked and they only had the advertising income coming in so they were in a parlous state. They accepted government money (and Billy Goats’) to print the required propaganda. We know that.

    What was astonishing was a tale he told about a private conversation between an editor of a certain publication and the PM in which the PM admitted that he had to do as he was told. The said editor then didn’t see fit to inform his readership, and the country, that the country was not being run by the PM. No names because this is hearsay and it’s better at this stage that Bob Moran and James Delingpole face the legal action than me!

    Do NOT miss it when it’s free to view.

    1. It’s a pity that we do not have a ballsy Lady like Kari Lake in the UK. Here’s a recorded conversation in which she was ‘offered’ a chance of improving herself if she didn’t stand for the Senate in Arizona. The telling bit is at around 9:30 in. I’ve made up my mind what DeWit means by his ‘boom’ statement, everyone else can make their minds up.

      https://twitter.com/i/status/1750041930606764542

      1. Nice looking woman too. Barely a two pinter that the Brompton Stomp “Grab-A-Grannie” Night.

  32. Morning all 🙂😊
    Not bright, not too cold, dry but….rain later.

    Justin ‘king Welby needs to get his own house in order, instead of poking his nose into politics.
    The appalling people who purport to run our country are bad enough. Even Ken Clarke has been arguing with them. Regarding elected dictatorship. The problem is Lord Clarke, you don’t appear to have noticed but it’s something that we have had to suffer for decades.
    After a general election, most people would have voted against the incoming government.

  33. Not my war and not my fight
    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/not-my-war-and-not-my-fight/

    “A POLL for GB News suggested that only 14 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 would volunteer to fight in a ‘necessary war’. It suggests that Generation Z think the recent grim predictions of conflict have nothing to do with them. ‘Not my war and not my fight’ was the message.”

    BTL

    I am afraid that the young may be unwilling to fight for the lovely multi-cultural country the politicians have made for them but now that it has been given to those who are not prepared to fight for it the old have been robbed and no longer have a country that is theirs.

    1. Unfortunately we have been here before. A couple of years before the second world war, Oxford undergraduates in the Union Society voted in a debate that they would not fight for King and Country.
      In 1939 of course they all rushed to join up.
      We have to make it far clearer to the predator class that we mean it this time. If indeed we do.

      1. That was just a debate, and the vote would have been in favour of the more skilful debating team. Come 1939 it was round 2 of Bop the Hun, so not another campaign of attacking fuzzie-wuzzies.

        1. It was known at that point that war would probably be against the Germans. The Union is the playground for future politicians, so the best debaters (future Prime Ministers in training) tend not to choose to defend very unpopular causes…

    2. Yo Mt T

      Our biggest problem with regards to conscription is that there is a vast number of potential conscripts who are willing to join, or have, joined the army

      The problem is that it is not Our Army,

      1000 possible conscripts so far this month

      1. When does this end? When are the vermin simply refused? That’s 35 a day. It’s utterly absurd. Get rid of them. No one cares how. Endless law is put in place and Sunak refuses to undo any of it. It’s damned simple – all because they are fighting, furiously to ensure we can be chained back to the hated EU. I hate them. Hate them all.

      1. The 14% will have worked out that giving them a rifle could do more good in the UK than in the Ukraine.

          1. Empty the hotels and send them out with a sharp stick – they’re used to that – and tell them not to come back.

  34. Morning all, horizontal rain at the moment, power cut in the night and not much sleep – oh joy!

  35. I see the odious Martin Bashir seems to be claiming that he didn’t fake anything to get the Diana interview and i’s all jealousy and racism becasue he got there when others didn’t!!

  36. The ability to switch between, Best, Oldest and New has vanished from the Spectator threads. I don’t know whether this is deliberate or not. It sems to apply to all Articles at the moment. This, I’m sure it is just coincidence, prevents popular posts being upvoted.

  37. I see that Mrs Murrell is to grace the Scottish Plague Inquiry today. I winder if she’ll remember to bring her mobile phones….(ponders…)

    1. Nicola Sturgeon is heckled as she arrives at Covid inquiry to face grilling on claims she deleted swathes of WhatsApps and ‘weaponised’ pandemic for Scottish independence drive

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13027199/Nicola-Sturgeon-Covid-inquiry-WhatsApps-pandemic-Scottish-independence.html

      Systematically deleted WhatsApp messages. A plan to cynically use the pandemic to turn Scots against England. Nicola Sturgeon’s showdown at the Covid inquiry today could finish her for good, writes EDDIE BARNES
      By EDDIE BARNES FOR THE DAILY MAIL

      PUBLISHED: 01:54, 31 January 2024 | UPDATED: 08:33, 31 January 2024

    1. That’s completely different! Maybe we could consider the home office to be the owner of these appallingly behaved immigrants and have them fined for every crime committed? Maybe we could see home office staff walking the muzzled Eritrean/Sundaese in the park and teaching them to fetch a ball and not rape women and children?

      1. “….. teaching them how to sh** in a toilet and not on the grass and not rape women and children?

  39. I rang the surgery this morning because I think I have an ear infection and I’d like a doctor to peer down my lug-hole.

    Answering voice: “You are in an queue, currently number 16. If you’d ‘ like a call-back press 1.”

    I did so.

    Call back from receptionist: “Good morning, can I help you?”

    Me: “Yes, please. I think I have an ear infection and I’d like to see a doctor”.

    R: “You can go to a pharmacy for that. That’s what the doctors are recommending”.

    Me: I don’t want to do that, I don’t think pharmacists are qualified. I’d like to see a doctor”.

    R: “Very well, can I have your number? The Doctor will call you back.”

    Sometime later my mobile ‘phone rings.

    Me: “Hello, this is Fiscal”.

    Youthful male voice: “This is Dr X, can I help you?”

    Me: “Yes, I think I have an ear infection.”

    YMV: “You can go to a Pharmacy about that”.

    Me: “I don’t wish to do that. I’d rather see a doctor.”

    YMV: “Pharamacists can diasgnose and prescribe anything that I can. You should go there.”

    Me: (avoiding saying that I don’t like the look of many of the pharmacists I see these days.) ” I really would prefer to see a doctor as I don’t trust non-medically qualified people” (or something like that).

    YMV: “Very well, can you come along at 1145? I’ll take a look this time”.

    Me: “Yes, thank you”.

    It should be an interesting consultation which will either be done in silence or the conversation will range far and wide. If you get my drift. More after I’ve been to see him. It was the “this time” that raised my hackles.

    1. Onion juice in the ear can be very effective. “There are a few different ways to do it, but generally the idea is to heat up the onion, extract some of its juice, and put a few drops into the infected ear. This is actually a home remedy that goes back to at least the nineteenth century. The testimony is pretty enthusiastic, too.”

    3. Dr X, formerly known as Dr Twitter? Be careful he doesn’t bung an implant into your earhole.

    4. You must know by now that our GPs do not wish to see patients. All they want is a long list of them to be paid loadsa dosh.

      1. Got told that patients who are late won’t be seen. I think ‘OK, GPs who don’t see me at the allotted time will not be paid.’

        But of course! I forgot! How stupid of me! We are here for the state, not the state for us! That they provide a service at all is utter generosity. Not what they’re paid to do.

    6. Compared to my dogs, who’d leap out, gurn at you stupidly, roll around in the mud and then hop on the motor, pant for a bit, drool for a bit longer and then flop about in the mud.

      Nothing would be achieved apart from a lot of mud lodged in many many layers of coat.

    7. As long as they were also trained to snarl and bite, we could do with clever dogs like these to round up the invaders. Also to patrol exit doors on all the luxury hotels they are given. it would be a lot cheaper than paying the serco lot, many of who which are slammers themselves, and are only there to protect the illegals not the local residents.

      1. Dogs are haram so Muslims keep away from them. I wonder if pigs could be trained to round them up instead?

        2. Not completely true. Their saliva is considered to be unclean, so dogs are acceptable outside the home.

          1. Avoid dogs, alcohol, pork, bacon, music – what an unappealing religion (not to mention the treatment of women as second-class). Why would anyone commit to such a cult?

    2. Probably doing a survey to see how many people are mixed race and who carry congenital conditions like sickle-cell anaemia and perhaps sex diseases !

    3. Your DNA will be stored for unimaginable, nefarious and evil purposes. I sometimes wonder what happens to my regular blood samples.(other than the intended purposes)

  42. I’m slightly amused at the witterings of the armchair generals and Cpl de Cretin Gordon regarding increasing the size of the Army. Where are they going to be accommodated since the MoD has sold off barracks to accommodate incoming slammers, what are they going to be equipped with as we seem to have given away most of our equipment, and most importantly, what are they actually going to do every day? And don’t say “train”. Train for what, where? The cry is “We will be at War with Russia” but what are the scenarios? There seems to be a great vacuum of thought behind the war mongering rhetoric.

    1. Near where i work. Have often thought about going there. I’ll put it on my list.

    2. I’ve not been in that one but, in November 2019 (on my last visit to the UK), Toots, formerly of this parish, took me to another excellent establishment, also not far away and also in Farringdon.

    2. The time is overdue for a cull of local councillors. That majority of them are not fit for purpose.

      Once success has been achieved in that area, we could then move on to cull national politicians.

  45. 382623+ up ticks,

    Shouldn’t we really help our eu allies out in brussels ?

    breitbart,

    Next Stop Brussels: French Farmers Vow to Take Tractor Protest Against Green Agenda to Heart of the EU

    1. I hope they are storing fuel. That’ll be a way the Brussels mafia would try and stop them.
      Good luck to them all.

    2. Why do folk think the EU wants an army? It isn’t to fight alien foes – it’s to suppress dissent internally.

    1. Every single person in the country should read this and refuse to vote unless their local politician signs an agreement to uphold their given commitments.
      No way out.

      2. Four years of gaslighting over covid and jabs has done a lot of damage and destroyed any trust there might once have been.

    2. JD is confused. The intent of the state was not to serve the public will, to provide services we could benefit from, to resolve the many problems we have. It was solely to destroy the country under debt and tax and legislation with the intent of doing this damage. It wanted this outcome. It was planned. It is punishment for disobedience. Like a spoiled indulged toddler government and state policy – all the same – has been deliberately aligned to ensure the decline of this country. We could never be permitted to succeed.

    1. I predict that free prescriptions for those above retirement age will be stopped. Those on benefits ( we all know who they are) will still be eligible for free prescriptions.
      Covid didn’t wipe out enough of the elderly, but this would force many of them to sell their homes, downsize and become paupers.

      1. Many old people are on multiple drugs – all interacting with each other. They would certainly notice the cost if that comes to pass. Polypharmacy – making our old people ill.

      2. As the government calls State Pension a benefit we shouldn’t be affected.
        Probably the wrong sort of benefit. The only ones to apply are those you DON’T pay for.

        1. The State Pension which we paid for all our working lives is not the same as the non-contributory one which is paid to those who didn’t pay enough.

          1. I was thinking of all the other benefits. I don’t consider my State Pension to be a benefit any more than I thought my salary, when I was working, as a benefit. It was paid for over the 50 years I was working.

          2. I was thinking of all the other benefits. I don’t consider my State Pension to be a benefit any more than I thought my salary, when I was working, as a benefit. It was paid for over the 50 years I was working.

          3. You forgot to include the ones who haven’t paid anything at all. My state pension is below the max because I part of my employment was in ‘contracted out’ jobs. Well, when I add together my reduced state pension and the assorted other pensions (some of which pay a massive £5 a month), I just squeak past the full state pension figure. Not that there was any choice, but I have to question the point in contracting out.

          4. I was a Snivel Serpent for 21 years and contracted out for that period. I do get a CS pension for which I’m grateful.
            But my NI record was short of a few years so when I claimed my state pension at age 60 it was reduced by 10%. Then shortly before I retired, there was a window of opportunity to buy back three years from the mid 70s (when I was a home-based mum) which I took advantage of.
            It was a no brainer as I received arrears from the years I’d already claimed which paid for those three years contributions and since then I’ve had the full SP rather than 10% reduction. Of course it’s lower that the ‘new’ SP which came in in 2016 but it’s better than a kick in the teeth.

          5. For the years from 1987 that I was a full-time Mum when my children were little, my NI record was credited because I was receiving child benefit. I’m not sure when ‘home protection’ credit came into being.

          6. Not until 1978 so I missed the credits from 1970 onwards when my elder son was born. I paid up for ’75,’76, and ’77 I think.

          8. You can, in some circumstances buy extra NI contributions to make up the shortfall before you retire. Worth looking at as it’s normally good value for money.

          9. We looked into that option, but I supposedly had too many years to make it viable (especially given my medical history).

          10. Shame. I didn’t think medical history came into the picture as far as NI contributions are concerned. I know vw did that but still didn’t get full pension but she’s more than recouped the outlay.

          11. I had to live beyond a certain age to ‘break even’ – balancing the extra cost to buy some missing years v. how much extra state pension I would get. We did the same with my assorted private/job pension pots – took the maximum lump sums.

          13. And the way the world is going, I’ll be glad to be out of it when the time comes. Apart from his age (way before retirement), I just hope to go the way my dear old Dad did – suddenly – than the long, lingering experience my poor, dear old Mum suffered.

          16. See my reply to MumisBusy – but the specific years I paid for and the arrears I received was a short-lived concession. It made my record up to a full one.

  51. Funny that Marcus (School dinners) Rashford has gone off the rails. He needs to attack the government again…(sarc)

      1. The PR campaign around his alleged passion for feeding the poor and hungry kiddies was co-ordinated by BBC Sport’s autocue-reader Sally Nugent, in yet another example of lofty BBC political impartiality. So I suspect he’s got the crisp-salesman on speed-dial, yes.

    2. You tell these people that they are much more talented and much more intelligent than they really are.
      You then pay them over a quarter of a million pounds, every week, for using that ‘talent’ and ‘intelligence’.

      It’s a recipe for disaster.

      Is there a similar concept as The Peter Principle for sportsmen?

      1. Don’t be daft.
        She “fell’ pregnant; like women in antiquity believed the north wind or the waters of the Caspian Sea fertilised them.

      2. Don’t be daft.
        She “fell’ pregnant; like women in antiquity believed the north wind or the waters of the Caspian Sea fertilised them.

    3. Many of our parents and grand parents had large families. My father was one of six boys, his mother must have been worn out coping, so much so she died before I was born. Probably in her early late 40s 50s.

      1. My Victorian ancestors had 10 or 12 children – many died. The Bristol ones did well, only losing their first baby – the others all survived to adulthood.

      1. Our Sophies are where our salvation will come from. “if there is hope, it must lie with the proles”. Or something like that.

        Marry (partner) young, have many children, home school them if you can, raise warriors.

    1. It’s certainly not for our benefit. We can already use cash or card – that should be enough. Will they make this new form of ‘money’ compulsory?

        1. Probably sooner rather than later if nobody wants to use it. I can see they would start by making pensions and benefits paid this way.

          1. If you buy even part of what you need from local producers of meat, honey, vegetables, firewood etc, they might be amenable to taking small objects of value in the future, like silver or gold coins.

            I’ve heard a couple of people say that they think cbdcs won’t last long, as they will just be a stage of desperation by the central banks that we pass through before returning to sound money (i.e. with some link to gold). But it would still be good to build parallel systems.

      2. 382623+ up ticks,

        Morning N,
        Of course, goes without saying, if we let them.
        I also believe there will be a picture of the ruling PM of the day above the checkout,the checkout then only activated by a forehead
        (beneath the forelock)
        implant that in turn is activated by a condescending nod along with a knuckle tap.

    2. A digital currency not backed by blockchain is just a fiction – more so that Sterling. Government will destroy it so thoroughly there is no point having it.

      Then, hopefully folk will move on to real blockchain based currencies and permanently end the hegemony of the state. No doubt it will try to stop this, causing economic collapse a la Argentina, Greece before the Euro.. any other currency rendered worthless.

      3. If it’s an old one, the amount of copper in it will give it more value than its face value.

  54. A puzzled pensioner writes:

    While I understand that one can “delete” emails, whatsapps, texts etc from ones tablets/phones/laptops/PCs, I always believed that they continued to exist in the stratosphere (or cloud or suffin).

    Why cannot they be rediscovered and revealed?

    Just asking…

    1. There are people who indulge in “archaology” to rediscover embarrassing tweets etc. Best not to make them in the first place.

      Not sure about deleted emails etc.

      1. I assume that iCloud keeps them for ever, regardless of who deletes them. But I’m not sure; maybe they vaporise when the last person on a thread presses delete.

        1. I don’t know the “cloud” works and I don’t trust my data to it. I don’t use it knowingly anyway. For photos I use detachable hard drives as storage. I know google stores stuff on “Google photos” but that’s mainly just the ones from my phone.

          1. I don’t trust the Cloud, either.
            Apparently it’s a bloody big warehouse somewhere in the Swedish boondocks.
            I suppose it’s full of ‘pooters chatting to each other.

      2. They could always track down deleted texts and emails in ‘The Bill’…….. and that was some years ago, PK (pre-khan days).

    3. I suspect the short answer is that once they have passed through a “free” email system like gmail or outlook, they don’t belong to us.

      1. Gmail will have trawled them for any information of use! I use the free mail.com email service which isn’t intrusive.

    4. The messages are still archived on the company servers. A warrant from a judge is usually required.

      1. Funny, then, that no one orders their reconstitution. I simply can’t think why…(sarc)

        1. They used to hold them for 2 years but i think the Data Protection Act shortened that time. Just string out the Inquiry long enough and they will no longer be able to be retrieved.

          4. I occasionally indulge. Life isn’t always about plovers eggs and foie gras. Pizza and salad tomorrow.

          9. Having the camera probe inserted wasn’t so bad it was the camera crew that followed that caused the discomfort.

      2. Yay, you’re back. How are you, are you now making up for lost food? Anyway, well done, you survived!

        1. I’m fine thanks. A very unpleasant procedure. Especially as i turned down sedation and gas/air. By not being sedated i was allowed home a lot quicker.

          2. Diverticula disease. Not as bad as it could be. Polyps removed and sent of for analysis. No obvious signs of cancer.

          7. Oh my goodness. You deserve a slap up meal and a few bevies for that. Go to your nearest decent restaurant and fill your boots as they say. xxx

      3. Yay, you’re back. How are you, are you now making up for lost food? Anyway, well done, you survived!

    5. I thought from memory that an electronic comms provider had to store messages for 2 years, but on Google I only found references to one year.

      1. It isn’t. Alexa only listens when you ask it to. The microphone is there listening for that keyword.

        1. How innocent thou art.
          Always strikes me as an amazing coincidence that people can be talking on Whatsapp and later the Google adverts will feature something connected with that conversation.

          1. WhatsApp is linked to Meta which owns Facebook so anything you post on there is likely to be picked up.

        2. Recently, at home I was talking to my B-i-L about him getting a handpump, that would be suitable for him to use on his car.

          I checked on Amazon, found the perfect item

          The first recommended us was forwith AdBlue: the stuff we has been talking about.

          I hade never mentioned the AdBlue in the house, ever, at all

          We have unplugged the Bitch

          Yo are being Watched/Listened to,…..

    7. Yes and yes. For many years I dutifully kept only one years worth of emails at work as I was told that there was limited storage space but in the past year or so (in fact since a supposed auto-delete function came in to force) I’ve found that if I do a subject search it brings up results going back to at least 2004. It’s very useful but it proves that the previous dictats were false. I now have 134k+ items in my in-box because it’s pointless doing any housekeeping.

    8. Yes and yes. For many years I dutifully kept only one years worth of emails at work as I was told that there was limited storage space but in the past year or so (in fact since a supposed auto-delete function came in to force) I’ve found that if I do a subject search it brings up results going back to at least 2004. It’s very useful but it proves that the previous dictats were false. I now have 134k+ items in my in-box because it’s pointless doing any housekeeping.

    9. Nuffin’ you write, electronically, EVER gets wiped. It can always be brought back to life by those with the right kit.

    1. Some of them are so far left, brainwashed and moronic that they would probably excuse them as such behaviour being ‘part of their culture.’

  56. Did anyone else see this from Monday ?
    I have worked with this Foam cladding for years, thousands of people have this in their loft conversations and home extensions, it is not self combusting. It has to have human assistance to burst into flames, there is no way this could happen with out some one setting the insulation alight.
    Evening standard Monday……..
    Residents of a north west London block of flats have demanded an investigation after fire tore through their building – which had flammable cladding still in place.
    The Fire Brigades Union issued a warning over the dangers of cladding following the blaze that happened in Wembley on Monday afternoon.
    At least 125 firefighters and 20 fire engines were called to the scene and firefighters were still seen dampening down the block on Elm Road on Tuesday morning.
    The London Fire Brigade said that initial investigations confirmed that cladding was involved in the blaze.
    Hundreds of Petworth Court residents were evacuated, with some recounting the “frightening” moment they were told the leave – which reminded some of the Grenfell Tower fire.
    Mar, a mother of one who lives on the fourth floor, told the Evening Standard that residents wanted to see “a full investigation”.
    “The cladding on this building was down to be replaced two years ago but nothing has been done,” she told the paper.
    “It’s scary and devastating to think that we still have cladding that everyone knew could be dangerous. This could have been another Grenfell, we are very angry and want a full investigation and answers.
    “They had put in some fire measures inside the building to make it safer but what’s the point if the cladding is still in place?”
    Brent North MP Barry Gardiner told the Standard that he had “repeatedly warned” the block’s managers about the safety risks the cladding imposed.
    Resident Amare Gealam, 28, also told the Evening Standard: “It was very frightening. There were police and firefighters knocking on the doors. The fire started small then went up quick.

    It goes on……..

    1. Some good old British names there then. I wonder what proportion of the ‘demanding’ residents in the block were born here or are unemployable/on full benefits.

  57. 382623+ up ticks,

    I believe he would find it hard to face reality and say, civil war, in regards to every indigenous persons castle being under threat.

    Letters: Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan

    1. Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan That’s more like it!

    2. Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan That’s more like it!

  58. 382623+ up ticks,

    I believe he would find it hard to face reality and say, civil war, in regards to every indigenous persons castle being under threat.

    Letters: Justin Welby fails to offer a constructive alternative to the Rwanda plan

  59. Our little shit Trudeau has reneged on stopping payments to Gaza. After following the lead of others and announcing that payments to UNRWA would be stopped, he has turned right round and announced that $40 million will be sent to charities in Gaza.

    As has been said every charity working there ends up paying hamas.

    1. The Fakestinians have received many billions of dollars in so called aid and it hasn’t improved their living standards one iota apart from providing bonus payments to the families of terrorists and a luxurious lifestyle in Qatar for the Hamas leaders. The Qatari authorities are complicit of course.

  61. A skilled actress, too:

    “Pressed on whether she sought political advantage during the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon’s voice cracked and she wiped away tears “

    1. I love her claim of wanting “full transparency”! Er, hello, deleted emails/whatsapps etc.etc. ? Consummate liars, all politicians.

    2. Elsie McSelfie is bereft of original thought. It didn’t work for Matt Wanksock, why does she think it will work for her?

    3. I wonder if she was peeling onions before her appointment and was so rushed for time she didn’t have time to wash her hands?

    4. I wonder if she was peeling onions before her appointment and was so rushed for time she didn’t have time to wash her hands?

    6. I cried a tear, you wiped it dry
      I was confused, you cleared my mind
      I sold my soul, you bought it back for me
      And held me up and gave me dignity
      Somehow you needed me

  63. The man shot dead by police yesterday in London was a Mr Bryce Hodgson, a convicted stalker who was under a supervision order. Obviously suffering from mental illness.

    However Mr Valdo Calocane was merely tasered after rampaging through Nottingham city last June, slaughtering three people and severely injuring two others. Spot the difference.

    1. Don’t forget that – despite being wanted for (amongst many other things) assaulting a copper – it took the plod several months to find the darkie.

      3. IIRC young Master Calocane left home at 16, and entered further education when he was in his late twenties. That leaves up to ten years unaccounted for. My suspicion is that the Police know more about Mr C than they are willing to admit, and that they obliged the CPS to opt for an admission of manslaughter. I have no inside knowledge, zero.

  64. Are you ready for World War 3? Spiked 31 January 2024.

    There’s a strange disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. While every military bigwig seems to be eagerly talking of preparing for World War 3, Britain’s actual military capacity continues to shrink. The army now stands at just 76,000 soldiers, a third less than it had even just two decades ago. And such is the British Navy’s shortage of sailors that it has just had to mothball two warships. Whatever it is that Britain’s generals are rattling, it’s more a toothpick than a sabre.

    Though I think this to be true insofar as it goes what does Vlad think and more importantly do the Chinese know that it’s all mouth? This is bearding the Tiger. If someone threatens to punch you in the mouth it would be foolishness to ignore it. Despite what is said here NATO as a whole has a vast superiority over Russia. These people could talk us into WWIII.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/30/are-you-ready-for-world-war-3/

  65. The innocent postmasters story has gone away, hasn’t it? So much for “doing all that it takes” to ensure speedy compensation (before they all die).

  66. Two very well meant post’s on X,

    24m
    Congratulations Andrew Bridgen, the PM took the bate hook, line and sinker.

    ·5m
    its important that we get … ON RECORD … the comments of ALL the WEF Agents … we’ll be needing those down the road…

  67. Re Mrs Murrell – excellent BTL in The Spectator:

    Notice an utter fraud in action by her use of language during the inquiry.

    “I have never to the best of my knowledge”
    “that is not the culture that I believe existed”
    “I apologise if that answer was not as clear”
    “I do not, as far as I am aware I did not receive that”
    “I do not recall”

    Anyone who has been involved in any legal process especially in the US will recognise this language.
    It is legal language to ensure that the person speaking does not incriminate themself if it turns out a statement made was inaccurate.
    People only use this language set when they are concerned that other evidence may contradict them or a statement may be challenged as false. They are already very defensive over the existence or non-existence of a record deletion policy contrary to record retention laws and the legal demands of a public inquiry. This may prove very problematic for Sturgeon and Swinney after Forbes evidence.

    2. Creatures like Sturgeon never, ever pay the price. She should be jailed and facing ten years inside for fraud but the Left will protect her.

  68. Ahem

    “Bought and sold for Blackrock gold”

    https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1752362006508683584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1752362560840405363%7Ctwgr%5E8a4f91bd5f4901ad8c8b326274a22f3edcb69910%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dgoingpostalcomt_i%3D9620020https3A2F2Fgoing-postal.com2F3Fp3D96200t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fgoing-postal.com2F20242F012Freport-from-israel-1957-part-six2Ft_e%3DReport20From20Israel2C20195720E2809320Part20Sixt_d%3DReport20From20Israel2C20195720E2809320Part20Sixt_t%3DReport20From20Israel2C20195720E2809320Part20Sixs_o%3Ddescversion%3Dc4e1dc4f430a090ef93e41a385ff8ef2

    1. What he means is ‘we forced companies by law to push private money into ESG. We then wasted it on things the public didn’t want or need for our own benefit. You’re now paying higher bills which we are giving back to Blackrock in interest on their – not your – money. Up yours, plebs.’

      1. So many in power seem not to have the morals of a prostitute. At least a prostitute tries to give value for money.

  69. Mrs D has had her CT scan. All went well until afterwards when she bled all over her clothes from the dye injection site (she is on blood thinners). Nurses sorted it out.

          5. That, for me, was the worst part about it. Sitting on the loo forcing myself to drink the vile stuff and then having a sore backside by the end of the day 🙁

    3. I usually bleed at the injection point and develop bruising. I recently had a scan in what I can only describe as a machine resembling a giant dishwasher, at Papworth Hospital now relocated next to Addenbrookes.

      Canula in both arms, one for the dye and the other for some chemical designed to stress the heart. The process went on for almost two hours under a tent with a breastplate and with bangs and flashing lights.

      The male nurse who inserted each canula was excellent and the nurse who removed them the same. I did not bleed and neither did I bruise. A first.

    4. Was she not advised to stop the blood thinners 2/3 days beforehand? Anyway glad all is well now.

      1. And how Sunak defines unequivocal:

        I pull in resolution, and begin
        To doubt the equivocation of the fiend
        That lies like truth:

        as the Scottish usurping monarch said – and then Birnam Wood appeared to advance toward Dunsinane.

          1. I don’t like her eyes.

            My Caroline is not only far prettier – she is also better looking!

          2. I’ve never looked that closely! But I’m sure Caroline is better looking and a nicer person.

          4. Her songs are quite cute, but she is short on inspiration, they’re all pretty much the same according to my children.

          5. Don’t think I would recognise one of her songs. Never seen her perform. Looks rather plastic-like.

      2. It’s a little odd that they are denying it, that’s all.
        She doesn’t have the talent to match the amount of exposure she’s getting.

    2. Taylor Swift makes billions with whiny songs about her appalling choices in men
      Endorses Joe Biden………….
      Plus ca change…………..

      1. Swift is a faux country singer unable to play the guitar in her hands. She is manufactured, a far cry from Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton.

        Catturd agrees with me.

  73. I had an interesting morning , sorted out part of the linen cupboard , had piles of old pillowcases and a few duvet covers with chewed corners (dogs when they were pups ), lots of tatty towels that were used as dog towels , still have plenty in use and some quite well worn sheets .

    https://monkeyworld.org/visit-the-centre/ were requesting unwanted bed linen and towels ( not blankets or duvets ) so I drove over there with a couple of full shopping bags and handed them over .. All gratefully received .

    Afterwards I drove to Dorchester to do some shopping .

    On the way , I stopped off at a farm that sells meat , and bought an oxtail which was chopped up in front of me .. a good pile of fresh tail cost £7 but it will be sufficient for a great pot of stew for a couple of days .

    I will simmer them later for a few hours , then put the pan outside (lid on ) overnight to allow the fat to rise up and harden , to skim it off tomorrow.

    1. I’ve got some braising steak cooking at the moment. My old black pot is my favourite utensil – I bought it in France in 1987.

        1. I’m having oxtail stew tomorrow. I haven’t any suet to make dumplings so I’m serving mine in a Yorkshire pudding.

          1. That sounds like a great idea , no need to do dumplings or even potato , just lots of celery, carrot parsnip and swede and leek in my stew .. and large Yorkshire puds .. mmmm , nice.

          2. I made mine a few months back and I’ve taken it from the freezer. As I recall I only put onions and a few peas in it.

        1. Is that the name for a cast iron pot? It doesn’t have legs or feet. It’s a Cousance, but otherwise pretty much like the Le Creuset ones, only black.

          1. I think you can get them in various versions – clay, copper, cast iron. They don’t necessarily have to have feet, I don’t think. I am hardly a culinary expert, though.

        2. Just read this:

          Cousances was a brand of enameled cast iron cookware (“cocotte” in French).[2][3][4] originally manufactured by a foundry in the town of Cousances-les-Forges in northeastern France.[5][1] The Cousances foundry began making cast iron pans in 1553.[6] Four centuries later, in 1957, the brand was acquired by Le Creuset.[7] Cookware under the Cousances brand continued to be manufactured by Le Creuset into the early 1980s.[8]

    1. Andrew B. we all know they lie at every opportunity or invented necessity.
      But brave man and well done for pointing it out again.
      Your office will probably be moved from the window less basement to the middle of the river. But we know you’re right and they are terrible people.
      Keep it up.

    3. Sunak is invested in Moderna, so he would say that. Sunak is essential to the attempted cover up of the Covid crimes exercised by the government.

      Nuremberg 2.0 awaits the evil little man and his cohorts.

      2. 382623+ up ticks,

        Evening C,
        Via this inquiry we must have positive action taken as in, the guilty punished and the law seen to be done,and guilty there are that is for sure.

  75. Result today.
    100 pound Parking charge cancelled.
    It’s difficult to make out what their counterclaim actually is, but have we proof of payment, as opposed to the parking charge notice they sent us that said, fine imposed due to failure to pay. If you remember on a very windy day beginning of December the ticket must have blown off the dash where it had been displayed.
    BUT ! As seems to be the case these days if you complain, who ever they are, they’ll turn every single thing upside down and it’ll be your fault.
    Even in this case as we had proof of payment, they didn’t like it.
    There are some Terrible people, Out there now.

  76. Had Weeping Mrs Murrell had any strength of character – she would have said at the outset: “Before I go any further, I wish to tell the Inquiry that I deleted all my Whatsapps and other social media.”

    Collapse of stout cross-examiner.

    Some people never learn….anything.

  77. Hello from a Anglo Saxon Queen with longbow and blooded axe in handbag.
    A very belated happy new year too.
    Hopefully we’ll not have to wait too long for the next election.

  78. PS .. I also heard not so long ago that Lady of The Lake had passed away.
    May I say how sorry I was to hear that. She was a very nice lady, I still use some of the soup recipes she mentioned and she was a supporter of Richard III as I am .
    I was saddened to hear that news .

      1. I wasn’t aware her husband went just before she did , that is so dreadfully sad .

  79. Enterprising Chinese restaurants are delivering take away meals to Parisians by drone to get over the farmers’ blockade.
    News Chronicle

    BTL

    Is this true?

  81. Time for me to go. Market tomorrow – which looks like a(nother) cold day – but sunny?

    Have a spiffing evening imagining you are Mrs Murrell and what to take to prison with you…

    A demain.

  82. Sorry Queen Nicola, the game is up

    Not even the performance of a lifetime can help the former Scottish first minister avoid scrutiny

    TOM HARRIS
    31 January 2024 • 2:53pm

    “I felt overwhelmed with what we were dealing with,” said Nicola Sturgeon, her voice breaking as she recalled the experience of leading Scotland through the Covid pandemic.

    “There’s a large part of me wishes that I hadn’t been [first minister],” she added, “but I was and I wanted to be the best first minister I could be during that period.” History will recall whether at that moment, à la “The West Wing”, stirring orchestral music reached a crescendo and the screen faded to black: “To be continued”.

    Those of a less cynical perspective might choose to take Nicola Sturgeon’s tearful testimony at the Covid inquiry at face value. A woman who is as frail and sensitive as the rest of us giving a rare glimpse of vulnerability, explaining humbly how she felt overwhelmed by the enormity of trying to guide Scotland through an unprecedented pandemic. Who would not be thus affected?

    Cynics, on the other hand, including those of us who have observed Sturgeon’s career over decades, might draw a different conclusion. The bottom line is that no one will ever know for sure if the former first minister’s affecting performance was just that – a performance – or a genuine expression of human frailty.

    Certainly her tears caught the attention of the headline writers, immediately relegating her testimony’s more damning revelations to second and third paragraph items. Not that that was definitely the plan; just the way it happened to work out.

    At the root of her appearance in Edinburgh today is the allegation – explicitly confirmed, though excused, by Sturgeon this morning – that in 2021, when she gave an undertaking to the media to hand over all her WhatsApp messages to a future public inquiry, she already knew that they had been deleted. Sturgeon justified this deliberate act of misleading the public, the media and bereaved families with an unapologetic apology and a baffling word salad that sounded far better than it reads: “And I… you know, as will have been the case on many occasions over the course of not just the Covid pandemic but in my many years in politics… when you’re answering questions you’re trying to answer the substance of the question. And when you look back at the literal terms of the answer it can be put to you in that way, so I accept that.”

    If her tears were shed for the death of the use of the English language, they did not fall in vain.

    But the punchline was even more revealing: “And I apologise if that answer was not as clear.”

    “Not as clear”? Not as clear as what? The word “if” is doing an Olympic level of lifting in that sentence, because her answer in 2021, although unnecessarily verbose, was crystal clear. She would indeed hand over her WhatsApp messages to a future inquiry. There was no lack of clarity. In fact there was complete unambiguity.

    The criticism that has been made of Sturgeon at the time of the pandemic is not that this answer was unclear; it was that she said something she knew to be untrue. The WhatsApp messages she had been asked to hand over had already been deleted. She knew this, but she didn’t say it. She gave the bereaved relatives of Covid the hope – the cruel, false hope – that important discussions about policy between ministers and their advisers would be disclosed in full. And as Sturgeon gave that public undertaking, she knew she would not, could not, deliver it.

    If there’s one thing Nicola Sturgeon is good at (and some unkind critics might suggest there is only one) it is communication. She weighs very carefully every sentence she says. She understands the power of words and she enjoys wielding that power. The notion she now tries to foist on us is that in the heat of the moment, under great pressure, she accidentally gave an untruthful answer that was the opposite of the actual truth. Had she revealed at the time that she had already deleted the relevant WhatsApp messages, she would have been buried under an outpouring of outrage. As the Mother of the Nation, she had a responsibility not to be overwhelmed by bad press notices, even if this trumped the responsibility to tell the truth.

    Another accusation Sturgeon has been forced to deal with is the suggestion that she and her party used Covid as a political opportunity to advance the cause of independence by drawing up separate and distinct policies to deal with the virus north of the border. “The idea that those horrendous days, weeks, I was thinking of a political opportunity, I find… well, it just wasn’t true,” she told the inquiry today.

    The very idea!

    And yet a Scottish cabinet minute released by the Inquiry last week records a decision by SNP ministers that “consideration should be given to restarting work on independence and a referendum, with the arguments reflecting the experience of the coronavirus crisis and developments on EU Exit.”

    As with so much that has emerged about the SNP’s behaviour during that period, this is also crystal clear. Too much clarity, perhaps, for Sturgeon’s liking.

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

    D S Lamermont
    31 MIN AGO
    PINNED
    “Did you delete the WhatsApp messages?” “ No, I didn’t retain them”.
    “So you deleted them?” ……..,”YES”.
    That’s all we need to remember about today.
    A compulsive liar who had forgotten she was under oath.
    A dreadful person.

    Martin Budd
    1 HR AGO
    PINNED
    I do not think the barrister did as well as he could have, he gave her the space to set her own agenda, the emotional manipulation of a crying woman has dominated the headlines, not her answers.

    James Allan
    1 MIN AGO
    If she wants to get away from it all she could always jump on a ferry, or take off in her camper van…

    Level Lingup
    3 HRS AGO
    She is a master at criticising others (primarily English politicians) but the reality is that when she is held to account for her own actions we see more than a glimmer of the awful reality of this dreadful woman.

    Jennifer Hallett
    2 HRS AGO
    How does Nicola get away with misleading all & yet Boris has been crucified. Nicola spent years deriding Boris, calling him a liar and here we have her effectively saying her lie is a heat of the moment mistake. Unbelievable.

  84. Must have missed Lacoste’s Wordle.
    A 3 today.

    Wordle 956 3/6

    ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
    🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Fore

      Wordle 956 4/6

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

    2. Four for me.

      Wordle 956 4/6

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

        1. With few letters left to choose from but seeing where the vowel must be, I figured there were two possibles. Surprised I chose the right one.

    3. No, I was watching Downton Abbey!

      However, I got a Par Four; an improvement on recent form!

      Wordle 956 4/6
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      🟩⬜⬜⬜🟨
      🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  86. From The Speccie

    In words

    ‘The cap on bankers’ bonuses was brought in in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and that was the right thing to do to rebuild the public finances. But that has gone now and we don’t have any intention of bringing that back.’

    – Rachel Reeves U-turns less than 100 days after she lambasted Jeremy Hunt’s decision to lift the cap on bankers’ bonuses.

  87. Oh dear it seems that my victory celebration might have gone to far. Whilst cooking dinner I had two glasses of red. And obviously one with the meal. And I’m fancying another. I could be in trouble.
    Popping orff oily knight all.

    1. What victory celebration, R E?

      Went too far?

      Relax – and have another glass of case of red!

  89. Evening, all. Thank you for your good wishes for Oscar. He’s slept most of the day (I have to give him Gabapentin three times a day and that knocks him out). He has managed to get out into the garden to have a wander around and wee. He’s eating well (and getting spoiled, of course). It will take a while, I expect, to see if the regime of rest and pain relief will be beneficial. Fingers crossed.

    As for the headline, Welby was not appointed to give constructive alternatives; he was put in place to obstruct and destroy.

    1. Hector had a fortnight of ‘bed rest’ and Gabapentin when he was 10/11years old. Having looked back at Oscars condition, it seems to be something similar. Hector, as a large Lab was prone to arthritis and he had a couple of ops on his elbows. The regime of rest and medication really seemed to settle the nerves? and he had another few years of no pain. Sending good wishes to you and the doggies.

      1. Thank you, Sue. The vet says his neurological condition is very rare (she’s only seen one other presentation and she asked if she could show Oscar to the students as they may never see another one). Oscar can’t keep his back legs together – he does the splits. He also turns his back paw over when he’s standing and can’t seem to put it down properly.

        1. I should have said that Hector had trouble neurologically with his spine and back legs, made more uncomfortable by the arthritis. Fortunately he was quite happy not to run, so had a short ‘stroll’ every so often! The rest treatment really did calm things down. Because we have wooden floors we also got him toenail grips for his slippy feet!

          1. Vet thinks the problem is in Oscar’s neck. Oscar has been declining to go for a walk for some time now, so not taking him is not a problem and the only time he quickens his pace is when there’s food in the offing, but “running” doesn’t come close to describing the action. A brisker amble than usual is nearer the mark.

      2. Didn’t i get given gabapentin (eventually) when i got shingles? Would that make sense? Rings a bell.

        Ps glad to hear update on Oscar.

    2. Hope Oscar continues to take things easy!

      As for Welby, he was appointed as Archpillock of Cunterbury for the specific purpose of destroying the CofE as per the orders of the WEF.
      Sadly, he is doing an exceptional job of that task.

    3. Have been ‘awol’ for a couple of days, so I had to look back to find what was wrong with Oscar, so sorry to learn that. Also going through it with my daughter’s Goldie, may have a tumour on his spleen, decision tomorrow. These pets do have a way of taking over our affections, don’t they? Fingers crossed for Oscar.

      2. Sorry to hear that. I hope it’s good news for Goldie. The vet thinks there’s a possibility Oscar has a tumour in his spinal chord, but I’m not forking out £2.5k for an MRI scan only to find that he will require surgery. At his age (14) I don’t think it would be fair to subject him to that when he will only have a short time left anyway.

    1. A ‘civil defence force’, eh? Could be handy in Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the West Midlands, Leicester, Olde London Towne…

      1. I am delighted to have made so many laugh! Just as funny was her friend’s reaction, I wish I had been there to join in!

    4. Gosh – have’nt seen Spam for a long time – he used to troll us here – he was one of the reasons I made my profile private.

    5. I’ve heard of things going tits up but never before have I ever come across ‘going tits down’!

    6. Lowering the tone? It made my day and have tried to post it on FB. but my postings don’t always work.

  94. Goodnight, all. I’m signing off now to settle the house down for the night. I have to get to Telford for 09.00 tomorrow for an X ray (and further investigations), so I’ll have to be up at the crack of dawn.

    2. I suppose it depends on what you mean by “forced”.

      Thalidomide, which worldwide maimed an estimated 20,000 babies and killed 80,000, was widely used in Britain between 1958 and 1962 as a wonder drug against morning sickness, but caused severe birth defects. It was manufactured in Germany.

      https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/06/thalidomide-caused-up-to-10000-miscarriages-infant-deaths-uk

      Given that babies don’t correspond to informed, consenting adults, I challenge DD Denslow’s claim.

  102. Journalist sacked for being critical warns over UAE takeover of The Telegraph
    Reporters would not be able to speak freely under proposed new Gulf state owners, says co-founder of the Art Newspaper

    Dominic Penna,
    POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
    1 February 2024 • 12:01am

    A journalist has revealed how she was sacked for criticising the royal family of the United Arab Emirates as she warned that Telegraph journalists would not be able to speak freely if a planned takeover by the Gulf state went ahead.

    Anna Somers Cocks, the co-founder of the Art Newspaper, urged the Government to block the takeover as she discussed how they made her a “non-person” in retaliation for unfavourable coverage of the UAE.

    RedBird IMI, which is 75 per cent funded by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the vice-president of the UAE, is trying to take control of The Telegraph and its sister magazine The Spectator.

    Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, has ordered Ofcom to further investigate the attempted takeover amid concerns about editorial independence, to which RedBird IMI says it is “entirely committed”.

    Writing in this week’s Spectator, Ms Somers Cocks recalled being asked by Abu Dhabi in 2009 to create an Arab version of the Art Newspaper after France and the UAE agreed to create the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum.

    A pilot edition was well received but Abu Dhabi “immediately” cut off negotiations in 2009 after Ms Somers Cocks gave a televised interview in which she said the UAE having separate pavilions for Dubai and Abu Dhabi at the Venice Biennale risked confusing the public.

    Talks resumed two years later, however, and by 2017 the Art Newspaper had produced a magazine to mark the inauguration of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, containing interviews with French and Emirati figures behind its inception.

    However, the project was dropped after Ms Somers Cocks printed articles in the London edition covering the poor working conditions of the South Asian labourers who built the museum, alongside a review of a book revealing that offsets from arms sales helped fund the project.

    Recalling the moment she learned of her axing, she wrote: “That was it. My hotel telephone rang early in the morning. ‘Your services are no longer required’, I was told. From then on, I was a non-person.”

    She added that an “appalled” official arranged for her to meet with the director of the UAE’s culture and tourism department, who was unconvinced by her claims she could not simply publish “unalloyed praise” of the regime.

    Ms Somers Cocks continued: “Given the Emirati royals reacted so drastically to such minor criticism, what fate would befall journalists in papers they own who make far more potent points?

    Advertisement

    “My mistake was to think a free publication was ever possible under an absolutist government.

    “I am breaking my silence because I hope it will nudge the UK Government towards this fairly obvious conclusion – it must not fall for the promise that some formal independent board will remove this risk.

    “What happened to me in the relatively herbivorous milieu of art will apply 10 times over in the savage world of politics, conflict and finance.”

    Ms Somers Cocks enjoyed a career as a high-profile curator, including a stint at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, before founding the Art Newspaper in 1990.

    More recently, she has been focused on supporting arts-related causes including the Venice in Peril Fund, which raises money for monuments, buildings and artworks across the northeastern Italian city amid rising sea levels.

    Seventy-three MPs including a Cabinet minister and frontbenchers from both major parties are known to oppose the Telegraph takeover, owing to concerns about press freedom. Prominent critics include Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative Party leader, and Alicia Kearns, the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/telegraph-sale-sacked-journalist-warns-over-uae-ownership/

    comments
    —

    – –
    1 MIN AGO
    If the Telegraph wasn’t so woke I might actually care.

    Comment by Bab Boon.

    BB

    Bab Boon
    17 MIN AGO
    ALREADY the comments are heavily ‘Thought Policed’ by Nanny DT

    Comment by Edward Seaton.

    ES

    Edward Seaton
    19 MIN AGO
    It is disturbing that this Frazer character feels it necessary to outsource her decision to OFCOM, at great time and expense to everyone.
    It’s really very easy to say ‘no’.

    Comment by Sou Tanglie.

    ST

    Sou Tanglie
    27 MIN AGO
    Well, The Daily Terrorgraph and The Sandy Arabagraph coming to a newsstand near you soon. With occasional specials in The Arabgrabajournoandhackemtobitsagraph too.

Comments are closed.