Wednesday 8 January: Would pupils’ best interests really be served by a four-day school week?

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.

680 thoughts on “Wednesday 8 January: Would pupils’ best interests really be served by a four-day school week?”

        1. Bright sunny day now – snow gone but surrounding district at a standstill with bad roads

    1. Psychopathic bullies.
      Absolutely the only qualification necessary for our political idiots.

  5. Good morning.

    I have just been speaking to the CFO of our Saudi office, who is Pakistani. We talked about a broad range of issues and eventually came upon the rape gang scandal and cover up. He has vaguely heard of it, but why should he have, out here in Riyadh? Anyway, he was horrified that it was considered OK for Pakistani males to rape girls, because of “multi -culturalism”. He is emphatic it is not normal. Which of course it isn’t.

    He also said the Army is running rampant in Pakistan, jailing and torturing its enemies. Imran Khan of course is in prison.

      1. No, he is straight. I suppose the ones I mix with probably are – well-educated etc.

  6. There is a new “Secret Prisoner” column but unfortunately the link isn’t working in PressReader so I can’t paste it here.

    It concerns an app called EncroChat which is used by criminals, from petty drug-dealers to big-time ones, where the encryption was broken by French intelligence. There are a number of drug dealers on remand, some for 4 years or more now, who admit to drug dealing but say they do not recognise the numbers the French authorities are giving.

  7. Elon Musk knows ‘absolutely nothing’ about women and girls’ safety, says Jess Phillips. 8 Jauary 2025.

    Elon Musk knows “absolutely nothing” about protecting women and girls, Jess Phillips has said after the billionaire called her a “rape genocide apologist” and an “evil witch”.

    Speaking for the first time since Musk’s flurry of abuse to his 210 million followers on X, Phillips, the safeguarding minister, said the comments had made her more worried about her safety.

    The suffering. How can she bear it?

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/07/elon-musk-knows-absolutely-nothing-about-womens-safety-says-jess-phillips

    1. Phillips. Safeguarding minister for women and girls.

      She has no concern for the boy who had his tongue nailed to the table and anally raped then?

      She should be worried about her safety. She lives very close to muslim men who see her as a white trash slag.

      The irony being those men she so despises would be the only ones to come to her aid.

    2. Perhaps she is being unfairly criticised, but she must realise that she does belong to the party that moved Heaven and Earth to stop the details of the Rape Gangs emerging when Labour were last in office.

      1. Morning Bob. She is still doing so. That is why she’s getting the flak from Elon.

        1. Why are these people who consider themselves such clever and important candidates for politics always turn out to be so useless.

  8. Good morning, chums. And thanks, Geoff, for today's NoTTLe site.

    Wordle 1,299 4/6

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

  9. Still Tuesday night in Los Angeles. Very windy all day. We went to the Getty museum in Malibu this morning. Smoke could be seen behind some mountains about 10:30. No one seemed alarmed. Always forest fires in California. An hour later my wife received a text message telling her to evacuate the premises. We asked the museum employee, pay no attention we're quite safe here
    We left mid afternoon to pick up grandkids from school and return to safer areas of LA.
    The Getty museum we are assured is safe, but on TV it all looks alarming. Grandkids have no school tomorrow because of heavy winds.
    Five years ago in the summer of 2019 I remember the two earthquakes which rocked south California during our stay leaving us feeling very vulnerable. The billowing smoke in Malibu the day we decide to visit is scary too.

  10. Up for my trip to Kingston upon Hull this morning. Still got the van to defrost.
    A cold, clear morning with -1°C First thing and yesterday's maximum was a tad under 4½°C.
    A YouTube short with something in the middle a few on here would agree with:-
    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bU0Ag23Q5iA

  12. FSB has two new articles today, the first, Why Don't the Working Class Matter to Progressives? b y Paul Sutton is another on the Islamist rape scandal, which encapsulates the Establishment’s corruption of all that is decent. The second is on a famous event that changed world history, of 8 January, 871, when the future king, Alfred the Great, ensured that England would be English. That famous and historic event was, of course, the Battle of Ashdown.

    Energy watch 06.45: Demand: 37.352GW. Supply: Hydrocarbons 41.8%; Wind 27.4%; Imports 7.9%, Biomass 6.6% and Nuclear 13.3%.

    freespeechbacklash.com

  13. SIR – I am relieved that the next generation is being educated about – and in some cases within – the four-day week.

    Businesses should be taking note. We have been operating within the constraints of a five-day working week since the 1900s. However, we are now in 2025, and something needs to change.

    People, in both their public and private lives, are under more pressure than ever, and mental health problems are increasingly common. My company has been implementing a four-day working week – with no additional hours or reductions in pay – for more than a year now, and during that short time we have witnessed significant increases in productivity, engagement and overall staff satisfaction.

    It seems schools need to bring business leaders back into the classroom and educate them about the benefits of this approach.

    Alex Voakes
    CEO, Peak PEO
    Cork, Ireland

    Peak PEO…We are the people-led EOR provider, consistently delivering friendly, expert, personalised service and support to clients and their employees. Our mission is to enable everyone in the employment chain to succeed.

    We envision a world where there are no borders or barriers to building great teams. Where businesses can expand globally with confidence, and employees feel valued and supported, no matter where they are.
    https://peakpeo.com/

    They make nothing. They sell nothing.

    2. Working Saturday mornings is the norm in Hongkong. Waste of time.
      As for Americans.. on another level they live to work with FA holidays.

      1. Not likely. Too dangerous for them here. The pearly kings and queens have issued a fatwa.

      2. I laughed when i heard Ellen DeGenerate and her wife left the U.S because of Trump for the Cotswolds and immediately got flooded.

        Hee haw…

  15. 2nd mug of tea drank, now got the DT's tea & cereal to do & take up to her and, after finishing off defrosting the windscreen of the van, I'll be off on my travels!
    Take care and play nicely!

    1. Since I'm Extreme/Hard/Far Right and therefore a person of taste and moderation, I will merely observe that, with a bit of luck, he was too young to have spawned.

  20. 'Morning All
    Last medley for a few days I need a digital detox I am truly sick of this shite
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/55662a8ca1c2d5a93290135baabe1cda6eb128d8f5e10548a7531867a02125f4.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7262415f4e4ea211cf61a726ebef8ce0af1781c56e38f55059b6fb00666a39f8.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/72733af966998a68d4ed2c5c71a3579e8fee18af2a919c9e3cf4fbf6cff81725.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c5cd2ca52e83aefcf4ff4ebabff7b6fd88865734beef2c12810be98288fb6067.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ce70e3ad0adb50a4e4674f9588928cfd01f1f7828055c85038c3676b3fa61051.jpg
    https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90×75/images/310fe765de52ff1578aa91d6867d1b5c61c7c2735950d8b2cb839ca06281e3c1_1.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8adbe8bb834fdb6b32e0383b7182c571858c99e8a1a5c51f9213f66a5b82d250.jpg

  21. Elon Musk has ripped the cloak of deceit off one of Britain’s most disgusting scandals

    Starmer’s denunciation of Musk for ‘spreading lies and misinformation’ about Muslim child-rape gangs is an orchestra of discordant duplicity

    07 January 2025 9:01pm GMT
    Allison Pearson

    Once upon a time there was a good and fair country and people who lived in countries that were neither good nor fair travelled to that land and made it their home because they knew it to be kind. But some men who made that land their home brought the values of countries that were neither kind nor fair with them. Such men hated the female children they found in the good and fair country. The girls were white but not chaste; they were dirty unbelievers who went about unaccompanied as if they were boys. They disgusted the men, and they tempted them, which made them hate the female children even more. The monsters, for that is what the men became over time, caused savage harm to thousands of girls – so many that no one is yet sure of the number and may never be, for some were lost or killed. And the monsters drugged and bribed them, they made them sex slaves, branding the girls’ flesh with their initials, ramming large implements into their tiny bodies the better to accommodate four men.

    This may be hard to comprehend, dear reader, but the people of that enlightened land did not protect their daughters. I’m sorry to say they abandoned them to their fate. Police, whose duty it was to look after the most vulnerable, either arrested the girls, dismissed their pleas for help or left them with their tormentors. For that famously kind and decent land had fallen under a strange enchantment, which was called multiculturalism. It said that, no matter how wicked or cruel the men were to the children, you must never speak of it. The dark spell, and what a powerful spell it was (enough to vanquish justice and compassion), caused any who dared to say that Pakistani Muslim men were targeting white girls to become the bad people. Because all cultures are equal, you see, even ones that don’t believe in equality or which agree that girls who aren’t virgins are whores and deserve to be punished.

    And those who struggled against the powerful spell that stifled their countrymen were called racist. And to be racist or bigoted or “far-Right” was to be far more hateful than any hatred inflicted on female children, or so the people of the good and fair country were told by their leaders.

    And when the monsters swore at the children whom they were raping, saying, “White slag!” “White c—!” – well, that wasn’t at all racist. Because multiculturalism and the BBC say it cannot be so.

    A few brave women (Julie, Ann, Maggie, Sarah) who woke from the enchantment and warned young girls were in danger from British Pakistani men were banished and forced to apologise for being “reckless in my choice of words”. Or they lost their seat in the shadow Cabinet.

    And the evil – a vast, suppurating evil such as the land had not known for a thousand years – continued to blight that good and fair country. The authorities colluded to make sure the hatred must never speak its name, and the girls carried their lonely torment within them and their rapists got access to the babies they had impregnated them with. (Oh, yes, they did. So strong was the multicultural enchantment it made people surrender the values they had been born to.)

    And the monsters were not banished from the good and fair country, not one of them sent back to countries that were neither good nor fair, in case their human rights were breached.

    Then, one day, the richest man in the whole wide world came along and broke the dark spell. Elon had read court transcripts telling what those monsters had done to the female children, and he could not believe such unfathomable depravity had taken root in the good and fair country. Because of his great wealth, Elon could not be intimidated into agreeing that thousands of white girls should have been used as a peace offering to placate the gods of multiculturalism. His righteous wrath shamed the cowardly leaders of the land and in their panic they cried “Misinformation!” But the people were having none of it. For they were awake now and they saw what horrors the brutes had been allowed to get away with. As the wicked enchantment lifted, the malevolent myth of multiculturalism was unmasked, the country slowly but surely recovered its senses and demanded the guilty be found and punished, even unto the highest in the land.

    As this is a fairytale, I guess it would be nice to say that they all lived happily ever after. Yet, even after it was agreed all the monsters would be deported to great national rejoicing, there was a terrible stain on the good and fair country’s history that would never quite be expunged. It stood shamed before the civilized world. And in the national memory, lodged forever it seemed, were the anguished, tortured, frightened cries of those who were allowed to suffer and die to avoid stirring up racial hatred.

    The girls. The girls. The girls.

    ‘Shame and devastating sadness’
    Sir Keir Starmer has no idea what he’s up against. Not this time. Since he entered Downing Street six intolerable months ago, the Prime Minister’s ability to strike exactly the wrong note on any given occasion has never failed him, but his denunciation of Elon Musk for “spreading lies and misinformation” about Pakistani-heritage Muslim child-rape gangs is a whole orchestra of discordant deceit. Many Britons feel deeply grateful that the billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter) was moved to intervene in this disgusting scandal, I suspect, and Musk has certainly provoked more soul-searching in 10 days than Westminster managed in 10 years. The Prime Minister’s imputation that those who want a full-throated national inquiry into the evil gangs, and the cowardly state apparatchiks who covered them up, were simply seeking to “jump on a bandwagon of the far-Right” is obscene. Apparently, thousands of survivors who endured mass rape as children (20 men awaiting their turn downstairs, one woman recalled) are far-Right for wanting answers and accountability. Is it far-Right, Prime Minister, to object that your primary torturer was released early after a derisory sentence and now lurks menacingly outside your home?

    That’s what has happened to Liz, who still lives in Rotherham. Liz tells me she wants a “collective inquiry to show the depth of what’s happened and to go after those who failed us”. Like other victims of Pakistani rape gangs, Liz is disgusted with the strange, soulless man who had the chance at his Monday press conference to speak for the whole nation. He could have expressed the shame and devastating sadness we feel that such bestial crimes should have been committed here, and for so long. Instead, Sir Keir spoke out of narrow party self-interest, only sounding vaguely passionate when addressing what really troubles him: Islamophobia.

    Exactly as he did back in July after the massacre of children in Southport. Berated by a crowd of locals whom he refused to speak to after hastily laying a wreath, Starmer couldn’t wait to dash to a mosque where he vowed to “take every step possible” to keep the Muslim community safe. That meant creating a new violent disorder unit to deal with all the “far-Right thugs” who, for some reason, objected to three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class being slaughtered. Can’t think why.

    People on social media who, in the heat of the moment, posted deeply unsavoury, inflammatory reactions or retweeted “conspiracy theories” were arrested and jailed with an alacrity and force that was entirely absent when it came to catching the foul fiends who committed some of the most despicable crimes imaginable. (One police officer explained to a distraught father that his daughter being raped might actually “teach her a lesson”.)

    In both cases, we see the same sly, leftie-liberal playbook. Minimise the rape/killing/trafficking of young girls. Call it “grooming” and not what it is: raping children. Refuse to disclose the ethnic identity of the perpetrators to prevent “racism”. Accuse anyone who mentions the religion or ethnicity of the perpetrators of bigotry and “dog-whistle” politics. Under pressure, admit that the perpetrators are “Asians” (to the understandable anger of Sikhs, Hindus and Christians). Deflect attention from the sheer stomach-churning horror of the crimes and the wild, unappeasable sorrow of the victims and switch the focus to the “inappropriate” language or “harmful rhetoric” of people who are prepared to call out the most depraved assaults and most shocking cover-up in British history.

    Sir Keir genuinely seems more outraged about Elon Musk calling safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a “genocidal rape apologist” for her refusal to authorise a national inquiry into the Oldham scandal (she insists the council can have its own inquiry) than he is about the 12-year-old who was driven at night to a Yorkshire wood where she was forced to give oral sex to at least 10 men (more cars kept arriving as word spread) before being left alone in the dark.

    If a prime minister can’t empathise, just for a few seconds, with the terror that child experienced then he shouldn’t be leading the country. But Starmer was clearly far more at ease saying he was “very shocked and angered” at the killing of George Floyd, a black American for whom he fell to one knee. As I have learnt since Essex police called on me over an alleged hate crime, British institutions, from Parliament to the police, are obsessed with “protected characteristics” enshrined in the Equality Act. In 2013, if you were a white working-class kid in care in Keighley, who was passed around from uncle to cousin to nephew, forget it. No characteristics worth protecting, love. In fact, in the unlikely event that poor child had ever plucked up courage to go to the council or the police, her complaint would have been viewed as unhelpful to the greater goal of anti-racism and diversity. Had the ethnic profiles been reversed – the child was black or Muslim and the bastards who pimped her out white – you can bet we would never have heard the end of it. The British Establishment had something in common with the rapists: they saw the girls as white trash.

    Viewing everything through the prism of race is a disease of the elite liberal and bureaucratic class, not just here but throughout a self-loathing Western world which sees merit in every culture but its own. In a response on X to Musk and the rape-gangs scandal, the historian and Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera posted: “Of course, the vivid fear of ‘innocent white women’ being violated by brown men was one of the great drivers of British imperial racism.” Does Sanghera actually think thousands of brutalised white girls in up to 50 British towns and villages from Rochdale to Oxford made up their ordeals in order to cast racist aspersions on innocent brown men? He quickly deleted his tweet after it caused outrage, so maybe it was just fashionable posturing, but revealing for all that. Holding the opinion that non-white people are somehow always victims is a sign of social superiority, marking one out from ghastly fascist proles like Tommy Robinson. Whatever Robinson’s manifold flaws, he inspires huge loyalty among his supporters because he has fought like a lion for girls from his social class. Girls who former Labour home secretary Jack Straw admitted were regarded as “easy meat” by some of his Pakistani constituents.

    Thanks to all the big-hearted, bien-pensant apologists for child rapists – including Labour politicians increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote–- our international reputation is in the gutter. In the US, The Free Press ran a major article this week headlined: “The Biggest Peacetime Crime – and Cover-up – in British History”. How did our society sink to these depths of depravity? It is clear that every tier of the system is implicated in the whitewash.

    Lucy Allan, who was the Conservative MP for Telford from 2015-2024, explained to me how even those who do try to fight for the victims are thwarted and obstructed. After she’d met survivors in her Shropshire town, Allan started speaking out in Parliament. The pushback was intense. “There was a co-ordinated official response by people in positions of power. Shaun Davies, Telford Council Leader (now the town’s Labour MP), immediately published a letter to the Home Secretary stating that no inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) was necessary. He backed up his assertion with claims that we now know were false. Multiple senior men were asked to be co-signatories to his claims and they all readily agreed.” Instead of trying to right heinous wrongs, Telford councillors set about discrediting the messengers. Lucy Allan was accused of “lying, causing division, racism, being unbalanced, irrational, stupid and motivated not by a desire to help victims but to score political points. This narrative was relentlessly pushed for as long as I campaigned on the issue. It had the intended effect of ensuring that the voice I sought to be for victims would not be heard.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2025/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000407380372_17362839597730_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Lucy Allan, the former Conservative MP for Telford, was accused of ‘lying, racism and trying to score political points’ Credit: Andrew Fox

    Most extraordinary was an unexpected visit the MP received from Anthony Bangham, then the Chief Constable of West Mercia, and John Campion, the Police and Crime Commissioner. “The Chief Constable was disparaging about Rotherham MP Sarah Champion, suggesting she was exaggerating the grooming gangs issue and was discredited,” Lucy recalls. “He said: ‘You wouldn’t want to be known as a troublemaker like Sarah Champion. It will harm your reputation and career.’” Since when is it the role of a chief constable to warn a democratically-elected MP not to campaign for her traumatised constituents?

    Even Allan’s Conservative colleagues could be disapproving. “The newly-minted Junior Minister for Safeguarding, Vicky Atkins, told me not to speak to the media on the subject as ‘you do not understand the issues’. I was summoned by Conservative Peer Baroness Warsi to explain myself.”

    Lucy Allan came up against the oft-repeated refrain that, as 90 per cent of child abuse is committed by white men in domestic settings, why didn’t she concern herself with that as it was a more significant problem? She saw this as “a blatant denial of the existence of groups of inter-related men of Pakistani heritage preying on young girls at school gates, in takeaways, taxis and playgrounds. They did not want to know.”

    Victims were often blamed, she says, with one young girl being described by police as “‘having been in contact with 53 different Asian males’ as if it were by choice! There was complete denial that these men were related to each other through cousin marriage and were engaged in a joint enterprise.”

    Now that she has lost her seat, Allan is free to deliver a brutally honest verdict. “The people in power believed that being honest about what had happened to the girls would fuel racial tensions. They pushed a narrative that hiding the problem was in the interests of the community, that looking the other way would cement social cohesion and protect society.” That line, Lucy now knows for a fact, was pushed by Home Office officials. She has watched as junior ministers, both Conservative and Labour, have spun the same lines, “almost word for word, clearly at the behest of civil servants”.

    That “denial strategy” may once have been well-intentioned (a noble lie), but those who enforced it – from the House of Commons to the police stations to the BBC – became the enemies of justice, the willing accomplices of the Devil. The social contract between the state and the individual is in tatters. They lied to us, and the public knows they lied.

    What now? The Government tells us there is no need for another national inquiry, instead they will implement the recommendations of the 2022 Jay report on child sexual abuse (CSA). But CSA is not the same as Group Localised Child Sexual Exploitation (GLCSE), which describes the horrendous and co-ordinated abuse by primarily Pakistani-heritage Muslim rape gangs in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford, places the 2022 inquiry didn’t even take into account. This is not about mainly white paedophiles, bad though they are. And it certainly can’t be left, as Jess Phillips suggests, to councils like Oldham to investigate themselves when many councillors are drawn from the same intensely tribal community as the offenders.

    ‘The failed model of multiculturalism must be opened up to scrutiny’
    We must do what the girls want. They went unheard for so long. And if they want a national inquiry into the British Pakistani child-rape gangs – call them what they are, no obfuscation, no denial, no soothing words – then they must have it. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has rightly said that she will try to insert a clause pledging such an inquiry into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill on Wednesday – let’s see which MP is foolish enough not to support it. The failed model of multiculturalism must be opened up to scrutiny and a furious public will be entitled to hear why, if it was such a brilliant idea, it could only be maintained via orchestrated deception by the media, the police and most of the political class. All of the rapists who hold dual nationality must be deported. Millions of us would vote for that, wouldn’t we?

    Thanks to Elon Musk the multiculturalism cloak of denial and deceit has been ripped off and the left are suddenly revealed to have no clothes. On the Today programme yesterday, Nick Robinson tried to demolish Robert Jenrick with talk of harmful “rhetoric” and accusations that Jenrick was seeking to limit immigration to the UK from what he called “alien cultures”. So what? Insulting and betraying the interests of the white majority doesn’t work any more, Nick. The shadow justice secretary stood his ground. In his calm, unrattled confidence, you detected that he knew now that he was talking for Britain and would not be afraid to do so. “We have seen millions of people enter the UK in recent years and some of them have backward, frankly medieval attitudes to women”.

    You know, as the debate over Musk’s “interference” rages and Labour sees the edifice of diversity politics crashing around their ears, and Starmer looks more inhuman by the day, it’s easy to forget what this is about. Why it matters so very much. Over the weekend, I made myself read the sentencing remarks of His Honour Judge Peter Rook after the trial of Akhtar Dogar, Anjum Dogar, Kamar Jamil, Mohammed Karrar and Basam Karrar. My God. In paragraph after paragraph, the judge outlines what those Pakistani-heritage brutes did to their victims. Less like sexual abuse than the kind of atrocities you encounter only in wartime. “Years of sheer torture .. great brutality.. robbed of their adolescence… torment and distress.. apart from using her for your own sexual gratification you coerced her into providing sex to vast numbers of strangers. Up to four or five men would be invited to addresses so they could have sex with her. Customers would become angry. Strangers would burn her with cigarettes. Slapped. She said the men had a ‘pack mentality’. Grabbing her by the ponytail and forcing her head down onto his penis. Drink and drugs to make them more malleable. One inserted a hairbrush into her vagina. She suffers from self-loathing. Nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, PTSD. Despite being the victim she carries with her a great burden of shame and embarrassment… one of vaginal rape, one of oral rape, one of arranging child prostitution, wilful blindness by the authorities, wicked plan to punish her for lying that she had her period, one of vaginal rape, one of oral rape, rape, rape, rape.”

    It’s not bearable to read about as an adult, so imagine what it must have felt like to live through it if you were 13 years old. My heart broke when I came to this part: “Her mother describes how by the time you had finished with her there was not much left of her apart from her aggression. You took her soul. She felt as though it had been ripped out.”

    We are so sorry that happened to you, sweet girl, whoever you are. And we will not rest until those responsible are brought to account. Until you have compensation. We will not allow men who hate white women and girls, who think we are lower than cattle, to breathe the same air as us. We owe you that much.

    2. You have absolutely no idea how much I wish I had not read that, it's so disturbing to have it all laid out in one article. I can barely see to type, my eyes are brimming so.
      I'll have to come back later, once I recover – if I can.

  23. Long way to go.
    C'mon Elon, don't let up. Throw out some hurty words such as;
    treason. capital punishment. invasion. mass deportations. sanctions. security risk. removal from office. Nuremberg trial. cover-up still going on. Islam.

    1. Pah. Trying to appeal to the better nature of a progressive liberal. Waste of time. Removal from power by force.

  25. Good morning, all. Frost and calm here.

    I've just finished reading Pearson's article put up late yesterday by Rick. Anyone, except those complicit in hiding the horrors, and that will be a long, long list of the supposed "great and the good" and the latter's minions, must be mortified by, not just the horrific abuses inflicted on the young girls, but the countrywide spread of this depravity.

    Today this has appeared on X.
    https://x.com/alanvibe/status/1876888682734428535
    To be fair, and we wouldn't want to jump to conclusions re the possibility of, and the reasons for, pushing a three line whip opposing a vote to hold an independent(?) inquiry, would we? Therefore, we could take this line of thinking:

    https://x.com/MHTX14/status/1876828330730676404

    1. Re final post.
      If he's stopping any enquiry to allow action to be taken, then he should announce clearly what he intends to do, and when he intends to do it.
      And he should do so NOW.

  27. Morning, Korky. A wee bit parky.
    Comments were closed after about 300 postings.
    Irony is not the DT's strong suit.

  28. Morning all 🙂😊
    But it's so cold out side….more snow on the way it must be winter !
    Starmer is now dictating to his labour colleagues on how to vote over the well known incidents of the Muslim rape gangs.
    And a 4 day school week what a weak excuse for more time off for the teaching 'profession'.

    1. Having watched Narinder Cur a couple of times it is obvious she is trundled out as click bait. She is really up there as the vilest person in the MSM, competes with that other creature "Dr" Shola for the top spot.

  35. 399810+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    This is one of the products of a successful coup in regards to the organised rape and abuse of peoples countrywide precious family assets.

    The guilt rests firmly on the shoulders of the political elites and the wrong arm of the law ALL parties are responsible along with
    the parties tribal supporter member/ voters.

    Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham – Alexis Jay report

    Granicus
    https://content.govdelivery.com › file_attachments
    PDF
    10 Sept 2014 — More than a third of these children were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect; the 'appalling' abuse they …

    This did NOT deter in any shape or form the party
    member / voters via the polling stations wanting seemingly more of the same

    Dt,
    Elon Musk has ripped the cloak of deceit off one of Britain’s most disgusting scandals
    Starmer’s denunciation of Musk for ‘spreading lies and misinformation’ about Muslim child-rape gangs is an orchestra of discordant duplicity

    1. They have zero shame. You will not remove these commie Marxists via the ballot box.
      Only Dominic Cummings has mentioned forced removal.. over a weekend preferably Sunday night.
      Perhaps, Musk is right.. Farage is a light weight.

    1. Starmers ability to understand people really borders on the autistic. I honestly think he doesn't comprehend and that is why he keeps putting his foot in it. I read that when he was a lawyer he did not have to interact with victims, it was all legal activity, books etc. Which makes total sense if he is autistic. Have you noticed that when he is criticized he almost looks bewildered? For him the messiness of people is a problem, in the abstract, to be solved.

      1. I think that a few of the Labour and old ex Tory crowd show signs of Autism..

        Signs of autism in adult men include:
        Social interaction: Difficulty understanding others' thoughts and feelings, and expressing their own emotions
        Communication: Difficulty making eye contact, responding bluntly, and taking things literally
        Anxiety: Getting anxious in social situations
        Routines: Preferring to do things in a set way or order, and getting anxious when this is interrupted
        Sensory sensitivity: Being more or less sensitive to visual stimuli, sounds, smells, or touch than other people
        Multitasking: Struggling to manage multiple tasks or interactions
        Verbal communication: Having a hard time with the nuances of verbal communication and trouble understanding jokes and sarcasm
        Autistic adults may also:
        Have repetitive and/or restrictive behaviors
        Notice small details or patterns that peers wouldn't
        Have very intense and specific interests
        Many autistic adults choose to mask their symptoms to fit in, be accepted, and avoid drawing attention to themselves.

    2. And when is Nick Lowles from Hate not Hope going to be prosecuted for “misinformation”?

      Never, that’s when.

      Funny, dat.

      https://www.gbnews.com/news/hope-not-hate-pouring-petrol-flames-after-acid-attack-misinformation

      ”He wrote: “Reports are coming in of acid being thrown out of a car window at a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough. Absolutely horrendous.”

      The post was seen by well over 100,000 people.”

      The “reports” were made up. Lies. But we all are supposed to feel sorry for “muslim women”.

    3. Considering the penalty for apostasy is death, maybe it isn't that much of a life choice for muslim women?

  37. G'Day all,

    Light cloud overhead at Castle McPhee, wind East going Nor'-East, 0-1℃ all day, snow this afternoon.

    Back at the end of October, UK Column went on the road and held an "Away Day" at a hotel in Bristol. There were speakers such as Sonia Poulton, Rachel Matthews and Bob Moran but the day kicked off with this from Dr Ahmad Malik. If anyone doesn't yet know who Ahmad Malik is, he is a former orthopaedic surgeon who sacrificed his career for the Truth during the planned scamdemic. He put down his scalpels and took up the microphone to create, in very short order, one of the best podcast series on the internet – Doc Malik Honest Health. Whether you wish to know about the dystopia being constructed around us or wish to hear the truth about health matters from dissident doctors and medical scientists, Ahmad Malik has some seriously good output in his back catalogue. Anyway, here he is opening the batting at the UK Column "Away Day" on October 29th

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dyRfiIlIv8

    Doc malik can be found on Substack
    https://docmalik.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
    or his own website
    https://docmalik.com

    1. That is just Volume 1: Westminster.

      The others in the series are: Volume 2: Brussels; Volume 3: Washington DC; Volume 4: Peking; Volume 5: Moscow; Volume 6: Canberra; Volume 7: Ottawa; Volume 8: New Delhi; Volume 9: Kabul; Volume 10: Wellington; Volume 11: Islamabad; Volume 12: Kiev; Volume 13: …

    2. That is just Volume 1: Westminster.

      The others in the series are: Volume 2: Brussels; Volume 3: Washington DC; Volume 4: Peking; Volume 5: Moscow; Volume 6: Canberra; Volume 7: Ottawa; Volume 8: New Delhi; Volume 9: Kabul; Volume 10: Wellington; Volume 11: Islamabad; Volume 12: Kiev; Volume 13: …

  40. Good morning all ,

    Snowy looking sky, 0c .. Pip spaniel ran around the garden , did what he had to do .

    I was in my jim jams and felt the cold air .. the cold tingle created a nice feeling for a moment , that oh feeling , bit like before the shower warms up ..

    Moh left the house before 8am dressed up like an Eskimo.. another golf competition! Not much frost , no breeze , bird feeders full, but no activity .

    What a mess the country is in .

    The current leadership is drowning us with their lies and duplicitous behaviour .

    Musk must know more than we do?

    1. Hallo Belle. I have no doubt that Musk probably has a couple or more people looking into what is going on here and processing the information for him. After all he has so much money he could hire a team of researchers and not even notice the few hundred thousand spent. So yes, I think you are right. He is most probably better informed than most of us. I would also bet your bottom dollar that he has insiders informing him of what is going on as well.
      Heard an interesting idea last night. Since Reform is a company, he could make a bid for it and buy it. Now that would be a fascinating scenario for British politics.

        1. I think that Labour was brought and paid for by the unions years ago and, in turn, the unions were ran by Communists. It's why almost the first port of call for a labour government, when I was a kid, was Soviet Moscow.

          2. It most certainly is and far more religious. It is determined to keep its culture. We, sadly, are not.

  41. Morning all! Cold outside -1 and very frosty. Quite beautiful actually. Would be even nicer if it wasn't gloomy too.

    I posted this last night around 8 pm. So wanted to repost in the morning for the morning shift who might have missed it.

    It seems to me that Farage is cutting his own throat. But then, that is what arrogence does to a person.

    Tommy RESPONDS to Farage
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSDC-6LGt0U&t=1s

    1. Tommy Robinson is making the point many of us made on this forum yesterday.

      If Nigel Farage cannot admit that he has made a very serious mistake in lying about Tommy Robinson then he deserve to lose massive support.

      “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”
      (Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life)

      Nigel Farage makes great play of his integrity, truthfulness and honesty but there is something particularly sleazy and unpleasant about a person who violates his own code as far as the truth is concerned.

      Nigel Farage owes Tommy Robinson an apology but he owes an apology to himself or his reputation will be in tatters.

      1. “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.” A wonderful quote Rastus and so true.
        The insanity of Farage’s behaviour is that thousands, perhaps millions backed Reform because Robinson asked them to do so. He has certainly lost those votes in the future and, in doing so, shot himself in the foot./

  42. 399810+up ticks,

    The lab party having rhetoric with PIE was not about pastry recipes but about lowering the age of consent to 12.

    One patricia hewitt apologised the other labour creature ,still active, didn't.

    Dr,

    ‘Britain has an institutional addiction to cover-ups’: the scandal of the Paedophile Information Exchange
    A Radio 4 series investigates former members of a group who campaigned for adult-child sexual relationships to be legalised

    3. Seems like a witch hunt to me – distracting attention towards a bunch of discredited Permissive Age libertarians from forty years ago in order to distract attention from the real villains active today, who unlike PIE veterans are in a protected category and cannot be implicated.

      1. 399810+ up ticks,

        Morning JM,
        Some time back there was an
        historical “conspiracy theories ”
        column regarding the misdeeds of MPs in the past , that should be reinstated.

        Lest we forget.

        1. PIE, for all its sins, engaged in open democratic debate, campaigning to change the law in a direction they felt strongly about.

          Paedophilia is itself a thought crime, and the law has always been there to prevent such thoughts from actually harming children, and if it did spill over into harmful practice, the the law has been there to deal with it. The word 'paedophile' literally means 'lover of children'. Surely such a person would be the last one to wish to see the object of their affection harmed in any way? Of course, there are those who don't care and make their own carnal gratifications paramount, but these are easily spotted and dealt with.

          However, it is only recently in this supposedly free country that thinking or speaking out becomes a crime that dare not speak its name.

          Contrast that with a large number of people who, rather than campaigning to legalise it, just get on with it, often brutally and violently and through coercion rather than consent, and the law and society lets them get away with it, and scapegoats instead the thinkers.

  44. Re the reports on Starmer whipping – no laughing at the back please – his MPs to vote against an inquiry into "rape gangs": does he have a problem? My reasoning being that 231 Labour MPs are new to Westminster and will they be prepared to have their reputations sullied by being whipped to defend what so many people now see as the indefensible? The opposition, such as it is could, with the correct approach, make things uncomfortable for Labour, especially the newbies.

    1. They're new, they don't want to rock the boat. They could see the expenses, subsidised food, good salary and excellent pension disappearing before they'd really made any money out of it.

  45. Cosmo Landesman
    Fanboys are ruining the arts
    Someone needs to tell artists when they’re being dull
    7 January 2025, 5:00am
    From Spectator Life

    I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of schadenfreude. Here were two gifted men who had nothing interesting to say about their chosen subject. It was an evening full of ArtSpeak and hot air, a facsimile of intelligent ‘cultural discourse’, as they say in the art world. The interesting Lethem and the brilliant Curtis had done the unthinkable: they’d become boring.

    Oh, what a joy it was to witness! I got more pleasure watching these two have nothing to say than if their conversation had been full of dazzling insight and wit. Why is that? Am I envious of their success? Yes. Do I envy their talent? Definitely. But my pleasure in seeing the limitations of their double act goes deeper than that.

    I always get an illicit pleasure in watching interesting and talented people be as boring as I can be. It’s something you don’t see so often. Their capacity to be as boring as the rest of us is a great cultural equaliser – for a moment the great and the gifted have fallen off their pedestals and into the mosh pit of mediocrity along with the rest of us.

    But here’s the great difference – unlike us mortals, they have no idea how boring they can be. Creative people who enjoy a life of uninterrupted success live in a little bubble of constant love and appreciation. No one – editors, fans or friends – ever says of their latest work: sorry, this is boring rubbish. How else can you explain the truly terrible novels of very talented people? For example, Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis. That was shockingly bad. Someone – Hitchens? The wife? – should have said, ‘Mart, this is shit! Please don’t do it.’ But the talented never listen because they can’t believe how bad they can be. Amis used to dismiss criticism of his work by saying that critics were just envious of him.

    Arts media, especially in the UK, has been infected with a kind of fanboy mentality, where interviewers are reluctant to ask the gifted one any kind of challenging question that might be considered critical or hostile. It has given rise to the phenomenon known as the ‘blowjob’ interview. (For a good American example of this phenomenon, please see David Remnick’s 2003 interview with Philip Roth on YouTube.)

    I remember once reading a critic who said about Clive James that ‘he couldn’t write a boring sentence if he tried’. To which any sensible person would reply: oh yes, he can! And did. (See his essay on Sophie Scholl in Cultural Amnesia, in particular his whole Natalie Portman fantasy riff.) But that’s OK. There is no writer who hasn’t written a boring line or two. So why pretend the artists we love are creatively invincible?

    The curious thing is that creative people in the arts – writers, filmmakers, musicians – who give talks and lectures never worry about boring people. They ask all the Big Questions about Life, except the one they should ask about their work: am I boring you?

    It’s not just creatives who suffer from this conceit; no one worries about being boring anymore – except me. (I know some smartass reader is thinking: then why are you writing this boring column? Ha-bloody-ha). Just look at what your friends post on Facebook to see we are a society that has no fear of being boring.

    Before the actual event I went up to Curtis and Lethem and tried to engage them in conversation. Big mistake. I wanted to show Curtis that I had a deep appreciation and understanding of his work – and I came across as one of those crazy stalker fans he must encounter all the time. He made a quick bolt for it, mid-sentence. But we met again.

    On the seat in front of me at the talk, someone had left a kind of man-bag, and it was partly open. Inside, I could see items of clothing and one cheap roll-on deodorant; I think it was Sure. Who brings deodorant to a gig like this? I began to imagine the sad man with the cheap man-bag who kept his deodorant close to hand. Did he sweat a lot? Had he left without his bag? I was still pondering the mystery of the man and the bag when its owner came and collected it: it was Adam Curtis.

    I treasure these little peeps into the lives of people I admire. I proudly tell my lefty friends that I once stood at a men’s urinal next to the distinguished critic Edward Said. Think of it: his Arabic penis and my Hebrew schlong were less than half a foot away from each other. I was tempted to turn and face him, penis in hand, and say, ‘Professor Said, here we stand, just two regular men holding their dicks across the great bloody divide of history. With respect I say to you, sir: shalom!’ But I thought he might take it the wrong way.

    A version of this article first appeared in The Spectator World edition.

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

    1. I doubt if he is scared of his in-house muzzies. He should be scared of the rage against him and his acolytes in the country at large.

      1. Difference is, the indigenous tend not to do full on street fighting and hacking off of people's heads, whether they deserve it or not. The muzzies, on the other hand …

    2. Honestly Belle. I really didn't realize there were so many. If asked I would have said: "Around 10"! No wonder the Starmerfuhrer loves Islam.

    3. Last Friday, Reform had a mini-conference in Leicester, a city where they received a lot less support in the general election than they did around the rest of the East Midlands. Local BBC tv reported on it, their two presenters curling their lips in the approved manner. Shockat Adam was interviewed (he, the great supporter of the Gazan freedom movement who won his seat by campaigning on that) and told us that Leicester was a great example of British diversity so it wasn't surprising that no one voted for Reform. The message was clear…

    4. Surely if these MPs are 'decent' Muslims they should be in the vanguard of people who want this abominable scandal sorted out and all those who enabled it to happen to be appropriately punished?

      1. Ahem "decent" i e good muslims are fully on board with what happened; it is all mandated in their "good book".

  48. With reference to the current public enquiry into alleged war crimes by the SAS in Afghanistan, the BBC web site gives an account of what has happened so far. My impression is that all the evidence has been provided by former SBS officers (no inter-service rivalry there!), senior officers well-removed from the theatre of operations or hearsay. Does anyone on this forum think that this is going to be a stitch-up?

    1. This sort of disgusting behaviour on the part of left wing bureaucrats and the lawyers should not ever be allowed to happen. They are a disgrace and a betrayal of the military who risk their lives for all of us, including the carrion eaters that try to feed off of them.

    2. Not only a stitch up but a very, very convenient squirrel to get the public's minds away from Muslim rape gangs.

    3. I would bet my house on it, and wasn’t the timing of today’s headline convenient??? (As i posted earlier today on yesterday’s thread).

    4. I would bet my house on it, and wasn’t the timing of today’s headline convenient??? (As i posted earlier today on yesterday’s thread).

  50. Labour minister Jess Phillips hits back at 'ridiculous' Elon Musk for branding her a 'rape genocide apologist' in grooming gangs row – and says billionaire 'knows absolutely nothing'.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14260095/Labour-minister-Jess-Phillips-hits-ridiculous-Elon-Musk-branding-rape-genocide-apologist-grooming-gangs-row-says-billionaire-knows-absolutely-nothing.html

    I wish i knew as much nothing as Elon. I would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

    Also. Musk has lit the bonfire under politicians that Fawkes failed to do. I do like a good roasting.

    1. I suspect that Phillips' main priority is the fact that her majority dropped from around 10K to <700 at the last election?

      1. ..And when the muslims kicked off because she scraped by, her reaction was a joy to watch. She made a bland statement about it being men. Forgetting to add that it wasn't just men. It was muslim men.

        1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4ng3j1pnpqo

          Read this article and you might at first get the impression that while Phillips was undoubtedly harassed by Muslim men, Shabana Mahmood's masked abusers were white. No. Both MPs faced competition in their constituencies from candidates who campaigned on pro-Gaza tickets.

          Mahmood said: "British politics must soon wake up to what happened at this election. And let me make this clear because this matters deeply to me and my family: It is never acceptable to deny anyone their faith; to brand them an infidel. I know what a Muslim looks like, a Muslim looks like me. I know what Muslim values are and they are British values too – decency, respect, kindness."

          Shabana Mahmood is, of course, the Justice Secretary.

          4. Muslim values are British values? They certainly aren't my values; I don't hold with four wives, paedophilia, raping the infidel and beheading them when the opportunity arose, throwing homosexuals off high buildings, stoning women who had the misfortune to be raped or believing that women are worth less than a man.

    2. The commie progressives have had it too easy for too long.
      Their ridiculous assertions & claims have never been challenged by a fawning lop-sided MSN.

    6. According to my local rag "survivors of the Telford grooming gangs" have written supportive letters to Jess Phillips! Who organised that, I wonder?

      1. Come to think of it, Telford has a Labour MP who was head of the council while the girls were being groomed. Lucy Allen, a previous Con MP, tried to bring the subject up and was not helped or encouraged (a euphemism is ever there was one).

  51. I caught my husband using a dating app. He claimed it was a harmless ‘ego boost’
    The revelations about Lily Allen’s marriage mirror the experience of one woman who turned sleuth to catch her husband cheating online
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/relationships/caught-husband-using-dating-app/

    BTL

    How fortunate I was to meet my wife 38 years ago – we did not meet on a dating app – such on-line cattle markets did not exist at the time.

    We have enjoyed 37 years of unadulterated wedded bliss and have never sought alternative or additional partners.

    2. I met my current husband at a German class in 1986 – I was still married to the first one at the time.

      1. Having not met Caroline until I was 40 there was a procession of girlfriends before I did meet her. Overlaps were often difficult to avoid.

        I expect many of us here have broken hearts and had our own hearts broken in our time but I believe that most Nottlers are kind-hearted and do not like causing pain. These lines from Larkin ring very true:

        It becomes still more difficult to find
        Words at once true and kind,
        Or not untrue and not unkind.

        1. I’ve been a lot happier with my current husband than I was with the first one. However, he was the father of my children and not all bad. We separated in 1990 and I divorced him a couple of years later.

  52. Just had an e-mail from "customer services" inviting me to reach out to them. Isn't that, like, OMG, just soooo cool?

    1. Why not.. thank them for the heads up.. join the community and shaaaare your experience

      1. Obi and Duke (the central pair) "reached out" into the audience at The Fiesta nightclub, in Sheffield, way back in 1972, and dragged me onto the stage with them to join in singing the songs, Simple Game, and If I Were A Carpenter.

        A surreal experience for the "Fifth Top".

          1. For my money Tony Williams, along with Nat 'King' Cole and Levi Stubbs, had one of the most listenable black male voices in popular music history.

    4. I heard Musk earlier talking about an employee wearing a 'she/her' badge at work, I think she/her suggested he should wear his, whereupon he said to her you have a new one…'what's that'…'Fired'….love that man….

    1. Thanks Richard, Caroline and all well-wishers. 84 is just a number. My Dad was still running his local bowling club when he was 94. His sister lived to 103 and my other's sister topped 100. Perhaps I have the same long genes.

      I'm just wrapping myself up warm, ready to attend my late wife's cousin's funeral across the other end of Kent. I am wearing a tie, not necessarily out of formality but because it will keep my neck warmer for the burial. The family asked that everyone wear colourful clothing to celebrate the deceased's life. I did the same at my own wife's funeral almost exactly two years ago.

      At least it hasn't snowed (yet), neither is it raining. Off I go. RC

      1. Happy birthday roughcommon ,

        Take care in the cold , yes a tie is always a good idea , and a scarf and decent hat .

        I expect you will enjoy the company of those who will be attending the service.

        Stay safe x

      6. Happy Birthday RC! I hope the funeral goes as well as possible and that you enjoy the rest of your day.

        And age is definitely just a number. I'm looking forward to dinner with friends' parents tonight because I rather fell for their father when I met him. He's 96. 🙂

      7. I hope you manage the funeral ok and don't get too cold at the graveside.
        Happy birthday!

      8. Oh dear. That's not a happy birthday event.
        I hope you at least enjoyed meeting up with your relatives and got home safely.

      9. I hope it will be as joyful an occasion (with bright colours) as it can be. Happy Birthday.

  54. Hope your day is going well, Rough Common

    Your pseudonym sounds like the epithets Nigel Farage would like to apply to Tommy Robinson!

  56. How many here think that President Trump, emboldened by the impunity heaped on Netanyahu and Putin, may order the USA to embark on a Special Military Operation in Panama, Canada and Greenland?

        1. They did indeed.. along with the Israelis & French.
          The Yanks went ballistic and brought down the Eden govt by selling Gilts.

          Fast forward.. The Tottenham Turnip attempts to handover a US military base to the Chinese.. The Yanks go ballistic and bring down the Starmer govt by closing off UKs access to SWIFT and Visa transaction system.

          2. Yes, Dwight D. Eisenhower shit on the Israelis, French and British. He especially enjoyed thwarting the Brits who, with their then empire, were the greatest threat to American world expansion. It was the start of our present day troubles, especially in the Middle East.

        2. They did indeed.. along with the Israelis & French.
          The Yanks went ballistic and brought down the Eden govt by selling Gilts.

          Fast forward.. The Tottenham Turnip attempts to handover a US military base to the Chinese.. The Yanks go ballistic and bring down the Starmer govt by closing off UKs access to SWIFT and Visa transaction system.

        3. They did indeed.. along with the Israelis & French.
          The Yanks went ballistic and brought down the Eden govt by selling Gilts.

          Fast forward.. The Tottenham Turnip attempts to handover a US military base to the Chinese.. The Yanks go ballistic and bring down the Starmer govt by closing off UKs access to SWIFT and Visa transaction system.

        4. Your a kid!
          I was next door in Libya. The only time there when my father slept with a gun under his pillow and was a genuine hero thanks to his illegal activities with the natives in town. Subdued a potential riot against the army barracks by challenging the upstarts to a fist fight!

          The intent was to take back the Suez Canal, which Nasser had seized illegally.

    2. Carter gave the canal to Panama and now China controls it.Trump is not happy about that and so am I.

    3. He may do something military in Panama because the way the Panamanians are behaving to American shipping is outrageous. As for Canada and Greenland, no, nothing, nada. Greenland has yet to become fully independent and I don't think Trump is interested in going to war with Norway. Canada will right itself thanks to the next PM. Pierre Poilievre, great to listen to if you haven't already.

      https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0BO6rBCiw-M?feature=share

        1. Yes, and it is in the EU so Trump will have to declare war on the European Union . . . Hooray!

          1. As I posted earlier, that's misleading.

            Greenland withdrew from the European Union on 1st January 1985. After leaving the EU Greenland was free to regulate its economy under its home rule laws without following EEC standards and procedures. Greenland left the customs union.

        3. See my answer to Jeremy, Anne. This year Greenland is having a referendum on full independence from the Danes. At present the Danes take care of Greenland’s external affairs.

      2. Actually it belongs to Denmark, but it was a Viking settlement long before Columbus.

        Have the Americans caught on yet on claiming colonialist reparations against the Vikings?

        I was trying to find some unbiased news coverage about the Panama situation. Many are anti-Trump, so eventually I went to Singapore’s Straits Times, which has no axe to grind, and also lies on a major sea route. Whilst Panama has sought investment from Hong Kong, I do not think the choking of traffic is due to Chinese political interference. It seems there has been a drought there and the canal water levels are hard to maintain, so they have had to ration the use of the canal. Unlike Suez, which is a saltwater canal, Panama uses freshwater, supplied by a local lake, and is an essential reservoir for its national infrastructure.

        Is Trump proposing a desalination plant to replenish the lake, and the conversion of the canal to seawater, and how much would that cost? Alternatively, has he a plan to get it to rain there? The British politician David Silvester once suggested that gays doing a rain dance should do the trick. It worked on the Thames, but this method failed abysmally in California.

        America claims priority over all use, including and especially its warships seeking easy access from the Atlantic to the Pacific or vice-versa, even if this means that neighbouring countries are denied that route.

        As for that grumpy Canadian – I wouldn’t want to interview him! It reminds me of that infamous interview with Jerry Lewis, who really did not want to be there. I suggest that the interviewer brings with him a dummy and challenges the man to get him to speak while eating the apple.

        1. Denmark only takes care of Greenland’s external affairs. This year Greenland is holding a referendum to become fully independent. It is because of that the topic at hand has become of interest to Trump. The island, as you are well aware, is of great strategic value and looking at its locality it does seem logical that it belong to America.

          What has upset the USA with regard to Panama is that, apparently, they are charging US ships far more than any other nation. That is why the fuss.

          Canada. I lived there for a while. It struck me as an utterly pointless place that might as well be American. Their existence financially and emotionally is dependent on the USA. I say ’emotionally’ because they seem to define themselves by whining incessantly about the USA. I have lived in many places and always wanted to return to a country I have visited. The exception is Canada, I was glad to see the back of it and would not go back even if I was paid to do so. Pier dislikes the Canadian broadcasting system because, it is even to the left of the BBC or CNN. It constantly plays gotcha! with him and he isn’t the type of person that puts up with that sort of nonsense.

          1. Canada is still a kingdom with a constitutional monarch. Has anyone asked their King what he feels about it?

            A large province is French-speaking, and has a closer historical and emotional connection to France than to the USA. It does indeed have a special relationship with the USA, as indeed the UK does, but that does not mean it wishes to be subsumed by it any more than Britain wanted to be subsumed by the EU.

            If I were to caricature Canada, it would be of vast forests, lakes, bears, moose, ultramodern cities spaced as widely apart as they are in Australia, and indeed it has a closer affinity in many ways with Australia than it does to the USA, not least because of its long historical association with the UK. Geographically, it is on the same latitude as Russia and shares much of its climate and proximity to the North Pole.

            As for the broadcasting system, Americans can hardly be the model for something that was long held in contempt in the golden years of British broadcasting, and the global corporate takeover of broadcasting everywhere, including Canada, is lamentable. So too is the gotcha! style of journalism, which I always presumed came from America, which likes to hype everything.

            Greenland has more in common with Iceland and Norway than the USA. Whilst logically an extension of North America, it has a combination of Inuit and Nordic settlements, far removed culturally from middle America, and even less in common with the sizeable hispanic element in Central America or the descendants of black slaves with chips on their shoulders.

            Talking of which, why no talk of the USA invading Mexico?

          2. Actually, your first question had occurred to me. But I’m not sure exactly what the kings function is in Canada.

            The trouble with Canada is all the trees are the same type. It’s very monotonous and it becomes quite boring because around every bend it is more of the same. It even seems to depress the Canadians, they all seem to be alcoholics or recovering from same. It is quite different from Australia for which, botanically speaking, I have an enduring interest. Something went wrong somewhere along the line and I ended up in California, it should have been Australia. Almost everything in my greenhouses, whilst I was still able to do that, was Australian or South African. The two, botanically speaking, are two peas in a pod in relation to Proteaceae, plants I’m fascinated by. Nothing more beautiful than Telopea.

            Broadcasting. The MSM in America is hopelessly corrupt. But then we have the internet and almost all that is truthful emanates from America via people like Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Tucker Carlson and a whole host of others, thanks to the first amendment. Neither we or Canada have that vital component of Democracy.

            As fort invading Mexico. Already did, literally and figuratively. That’s how America has California, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada and a few other states. But who would want modern Mexico. What a cess pit to clean up!

          3. The King is Head of State. A type of president that doesn’t interfere, but is there for those battling against those that do.

  57. BBC report of Woolwich aspiring drill rapper stabbed to death on London bus has over 500 words.. and managed to inform us that;

    it was cold..
    the crime was horrendous..
    it was the 472 bus near a junction..
    No arrests.
    incident response officer has been dispatched to family..
    and of course..

    Matthew Pennycook, Labour MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, said "Our thoughts at the time are with the victim's family and friends… I can't imagine what they must be going through right now." And he was "deeply saddened."

    Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan said: "My thoughts are with the family, friends and wider community in Greenwich."

        3. Diversity strength!

          My gran was born in Woolwich in 1908. Her family was from Woolwich/Deptford for generations before.

      3. Drill in rap refers to a subgenre of hip-hop music that originated in the early 2010s. It’s characterized by its dark, grim, and violent lyrical content, often reflecting the harsh realities of urban street life. Drill music is known for its aggressive beats and unapologetically raw narratives.
        Drill music originated in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, in the early 2010s. It was influenced by the city’s street culture, gang conflicts, and socio-economic challenges.

    2. Brendan O’Neill on JHB has just said that the knighthoods for Rowley and Khunt are the closest they’ll ever get to a bladed weapon!

          1. Elvis Presley's lustrous and rich voice reached its peak of performance during the January/February 1969 recording sessions at Chips Moman's American Studio in Memphis. During that extended period of recording, the whole of the From Elvis in Memphis (arguably his best) and the second half of the double album From Memphis to Vegas: From Vegas to Memphis were committed to tape.

            Not only was his voice, right then, at the absolute peak of his entire career, the songs written (and the music played on them) were simply the zenith of his career.

            I have a good number of favourites, all from those sessions but notably, I would choose …

            True Love Travels On A Gravel Road
            And The Grass Won't Pay No Mind (written by Neil Diamond)
            A Little Bit Of Green
            Wearin' That Loved-On Look, and
            Inherit The Wind

            … as my personal favourites.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW0do0BjCr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ15JxMT70U

    4. A civilised society would prohibit the cacophonous obscene noise known as "rapping" and all those practising it would be banished.

      And then I woke up!

    5. It's another diversity over drugs. It's boring now.

      I owe the Warqueen about £20 as I go muslim, she says black whenever there's crime in London.

    1. I agree, but it won't come to anything …too easy, as BoJo learned during lockdowns…spaffing..walll..you get the picture…

    2. If we had 650 MPs of the quality of Rupert Lowe we would still be one of the finest democracies in the world!

    3. Yet you'll all agree to it! Not a single MP will give up the ability to destroy the value of the pound as it's the quickest way to get more cash to waste to spaff on diversity or welfare to buy votes!

      Besides, stuff what you lot want. How about you ask us if we agree to your budget? If we permit you to borrow? If we, the tax payer are actually going to agree to your spending plans?

    4. These are the last throws of the dice for the neo-classical model of economics which spectacularly fell apart nearly twenty years ago.
      The perpetual swapping of a fixed income debt (no interest) for a floating government debt.. in the desperate attempt to boost lending.
      Commonly known as the trickle down or nudge theory.. the trouble is Big Corp have realised the fan is about to be hit and have no intention to invest and the banks are contracting their balance sheets like hell.

      I should type the next bit in CAPS.. unfortunately the Lefties will say "I told you so.. it's the end of capitalism". It isn't.

      You need to sort out your two main resources; energy and energy (in that order) before you even think about doing anything.

      1. He, or someone like him is entrenched and guaranteed. London's an open sewer with brown pollution everywhere. That's why Khan got elected.

        1. No he isn't.
          Do a Maggie. And undo Blair by dissolving the whole shebang.
          Lots of wailing and screaming.. but it'll soon die down.

  60. Pay docked for police staff who avoid office

    Scotland Yard tells civilian personnel to spend less time working from home or face disciplinary action

    The Daily Telegraph 8 Jan 2025 By Martin Evans, CRIME EDITOR

    SCOTLAND YARD has threatened to dock the pay of police staff who insist on working from home, it has emerged.
    Civilian staff with operational duties have been told they need to be in the office a minimum of four days a week, while those in support roles have to be present on at least three out of five days. The policy came into force on Monday and those workers who refuse to comply have been warned they risk disciplinary action, including having pay docked for the time they work from home.

    More than 2,400 civilian police workers, including 999 call handlers and child protection officers, voted to take industrial action before Christmas after the Met announced the policy. A senior Scotland Yard source said Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, felt very strongly about the issue, as indicated by the decision to threaten staff with reduced wages. They said he had no intention of backing down, adding that the force was confident that any industrial action would not affect services to the public.

    A Met spokesman said: “We have been engaging with our staff and the union for over a year on our new hybrid working policy and provided three months’ formal notice in advance of this coming into effect. This will ensure we can continue to do our very best to serve London, whilst giving support staff the flexibility to work from home up to two days a week.

    “The policy has now come into effect and those who do not comply with it may be in breach of their contract and may lose pay for the time that they work from home over the maximum permitted level for their role.” He added: “We are aware some of our staff may have legitimate reasons for not following the policy, due to agreed reasonable adjustments or an approved existing flexible working plan. “We will continue to engage with our union and staff to settle this dispute.”

    Scotland Yard employs more than 11,000 civilian staff to support warranted officers. Those with operational duties include Police Community Support Officers, 999 call handlers, vetting officers, intelligence officers and those working in child protection.

    Support functions include roles in human resources, finance and estate management. Since 2021, many civilian staff have had generous hybrid working arrangements, with some spending as few as two days a week in the office. However, as part of a drive across the Met to better support front-line officers, bosses asked staff to reduce time spent working from home.

    The PCS union, which represents almost 200,000 civil servants, suggested that asking workers to come into the office was unreasonable and would subject them to the “stress of the daily commute”.

    Last month the union balloted for strike action, and a week later members also announced their intention to ignore the directive. It is not clear how many staff may defy the rules but a PCS union source said 700 members had taken part in an online rally on Monday.the union has accused the Met of breaching the human rights of its workers.

    Fran Heathcote, its general secretary, said: “Our members have shown that their blended approach works and has had a positive impact on productivity.”

    The age-old concept known as 'discipline' is impossible to enforce on absentees.

    Absenteeism has always been seen as a negative and deleterious aspect of any business enterprise. Revert to the lessons of history: instil discipline and impose punishment on absenteeism.

    2. Good morning, Grizz….very similar with Civil Servants (around 50k of them apparently work in No.10, below road level extensive offices)…we could ask ourselves (or them) what the heck they do all day (aside from partying). Never mind, keep paying your taxes, in all their various guises. Grrrr.r……

      1. Good morning, Katy.

        As I see it, in a traditional workplace there are supervisors on site who maintain discipline and ensure that work is being done by the employees. It is a system that has served the country (and the world) well for centuries.

        When you remain at home no such disciplinary procedure exists and those who do so exist in a form of anarchy. This is one of the major reasons why the world is not functioning properly any more.

        Until proper discipline is restored there is no hope for the continuance of the species.

        Self-discipline is — of course — another matter altogether and that has long been consigned to the annals of history.

        1. This one is a hangover from lockdowns, crimes imo. You'll remember BoJo denying he attended one of the many parties, glass in hand. Who took that photo…hmmm…UK taxpayers constantly taken for fools by successive governments, no wonder as many taking their wealth abroad as can do that. Taxes set to rise further, judging by gilt numbers.

          1. I do remember; however, I was never affected by 'lockdowns'. Life went on (thankfully) as normal, here in Sweden.

          2. I wish it had been similar if not the same here Grizz. A country area, they’d have had the sheep wearing masks if they could have.

          3. I quickly realised, Katy, that the wearing of a face-nappy was a scam when no one mentioned the fact that a virus can enter the lungs directly by way of the tear ducts and the nasal passage they drain into.

            Yet no one, at any stage, advocated the compulsory wearing of goggles.

          5. It was all a huge scam, Grizz…designed specifically by Pfizer for huge profits. Both virus and vaccine. from Pfizer. Quite neat if you think about it. I’ve been through various stages since I had three vaccines (due to family pressure, Covid itself being a nothing-burger). Suffice to say, there will be no more, and no flu jab either – I notice pressure racking up again on that one. Must be ginormous amounts of masks, slowing rotting in landfill, on the seabed.

          7. There is a virus circulating, HMV something or other. Some girls actually seem to like wearing a mask – whilst some who wear eg burqas would prefer not to. 70 odd years ago when I was young, most people wore hats, scarves, berets, hoods because the air was so filthy. Combined with poor housing, scarce food post WW2 many were ill a good bit of the time. RfKJr is correct about that, imo. I’m sorry the girl felt she needed to wear a mask – if she had a cold and was infectious, supermarket shouldn’t have let her operate a till (remember when they had the perspex shields up…:-)

          9. Yes, I suspect staff feel safer that way – not so much from viruses but from irate shoppers at the size of their shopping bills.

  64. Air raid sirens now sounding. It's (hopefully) the test they warned about… now the mobile has screeched, and there's a voice telling us there's a test ongoing (first in English, now Norwegian).
    Talk about hair raising… nearly found myself under the dining table…

  65. 'Morning Peeps and Geoff,

    The overnight frost 'ere on yer sarf coast has thawed very rapidly since dawn, which presumably means that the snow armageddon predicted by an endless stream of weather presenters has been despatched and will arrive around lunchtime. We are bracing ourselves…

    There isn't a lot to laugh about these days. Indeed, any so-called 'news' broadcast just seems to add to the overall doom and gloom in a country that was once a beacon for 'doing things right' but is now so far down the scale that it has displaced several third world banana republics. However, just occasionally I read something that genuinely raises a smile, and this DT reader has this morning managed what I thought was the impossible. I trust that Mr Coe will not mind my posting it here:

    Julyan Coe
    3 hrs ago
    Oxford University researchers have discovered the densest element yet known to science.

    The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

    * * *
    Bravo, Sir!

    (My part editted four a hole searys of sillee spelling mustakes.)

        1. Going off on a tangent, when reading the obituary of Peter Higgs, who died last year (I think), I found that he had celebrated the experimental discovery of the particle named after him – the existence of which he had proposed a few decades previously – not with champagne, but by opening a bottle of Fullers London Pride beer. Now there’s a chap I can identify with – apart from my not being a world-class particle physicist, of course. 😉

  66. Three vowels in first attempt, none of them in the word.
    Good result though.
    Wordle 1,299 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    🟩🟨🟨⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Rhythms.

      The longest word in English to contain no standard vowels (just a vowel sound).

  67. By actually supervising, the quality of the job can be maintained, too. Not so easy to do remotely.

  68. You may, but it will cost you a Filet de Boeuf en Croute (or, at the very least, Tournedos Provençals).😉

  69. Morning all. Just to remind everyone why leaving the EU was a good thing, the French Foreign Minister has generously conceded that he doesn't believe Trump would really invade Greenland but regrettably for him he inadvertently gives the EU's mindset away:

    "French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Wednesday that the EU won't allow other countries to attack their sovereign borders" [from Politico].

    Really? It's the EU's "sovereign" territory now is it? And after they keep telling us that the states of the EU are sovereign members of the EU, not the other way around.

    2. "French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Wednesday that the EU won't allow other countries to attack their sovereign borders"

      That's hilarious. Greenland withdrew from the EU effective 1st January 1985. After leaving the EU Greenland was free to regulate its economy under its home rule laws without following EEC standards and procedures. Greenland left the customs union.

      1. Yep, doubly so. The patronising arrogance of the EU has always been astounding.

        1. I first read that as " The patronising arroganceignorance of the EU has always been astounding."

  70. Idiot newspapers concentrating on the fires wreaking havoc in California.. Why on earth aren't the media focussing on the terrible floods in the midlands , and the families and farmers who have once again lost everything .

    I truly and utterly believe that our land , the flat lands , are being crammed with new build homes , bad infrastructure and appalling river management .

  71. Morning all,

    Today's headlines attempt to deal with speech involving distinguishing the truth from lies and misinformation.

    A fact is not a fact when it is an anomaly.

    Ann O'Malley

      1. A good example of a fact not being a fact. 🤔
        (Sounds the same but there's a missing vowel.)

    2. Who cares/ He hasn't the courage to resign and admit his abject failure, so we're lumbered with him and his loathsome cabal of high school socialists for 4 years unless we demand their removal by force.

    3. Why a Monday? Surely there would be a bigger turnout on a Saturday? Or are the pro-Hamas marches still going on in London on Saturdays?

  74. First record I ever bought was one of his…possibly Jailhouse Rock or similar. Badly treated by his manager, according to various accounts. RIP Elvis, one of the first cool guys x

  78. It also refutes my own belief that syzygy was the only word with three y's and no other vowels.

      1. Yo Bill

        We just sailed through.

        the new system is not working. Just like starmer and co

  80. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/08/britain-scrambles-to-prevent-blackouts-temperatures-plummet/

    Ms Porter added: “These powers don’t get used very often and most of the time when these types of notices are issued they get cancelled because the market comes up with the answer.

    “Today the ability for the market to come up with the answer is more limited than it has been.”

    Because, entirely and completely the insane, hard left morons inn government have forced a tax scam on us that has seen our energy production collapse just at the time when we need it most. The only possible solution they have is to buy more from overseas which is using coal, gas and nuclear and because we're vulnerable and they're not, they can set the price wherever they want. Thank Milioaf. You need a punch in the nose for your spiteful, malicious stupidity.

    1. On my trip up the M1/M18/M62 to Kingston upon Hull today I saw lots of telly-tubbie windmills, almost all of them stationary.

  81. Well, yes. But we didn't do this. It was done to us. We told the state what was needed and it did the opposite.

    1. T The temperature is in low 20's

      Sun' shining

      All drinks free

      Fantastic Three Kings Parade

      no UK News to watch

  85. For the want of something to do I've just complete an online grocery order from Sainsbury'. Despite the smoke and mirrors of 'Your Nectar Price – "Saving'" surely a ploy designed to make you get used to the product being substantially higher in price at some point in the not too distant future, leaving that aside, it appears since Christmas items which I buy regularly have increased across the board by a minimum of 10% ( And that is before minimum wage increases along with the future increases in employers National Insurance tax…..

    1. Probably gone down in volume by at least 10% too. And yet still with copious, unnecessary amounts of packaging which we have to go to the hassle of binning. So annoying. Massive boxes only half-full. Same with cartons.

  87. Funnily enough it was a year before I did so. Then, I was still just a mere plater (OK, ‘fabrication and welding engineering technician’ if you want the posh title.😊).

  89. Matt Goodwin has written about Keir Starmer's response to calls for an inquiry into the rape gangs. It's on the same subject as Allison Pearson's one yesterday, but in what I would describe as more moderate language. Still hits the nail on the head when analysing the situation, though, and extends to a critique of the whole progressive elite mindset.

    One take-away quote which is an excellent summation on the related subject of DEI:
    "This is why radical progressives are obsessed with the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion agenda, which they impose on public institutions and the wider culture. Whereas ‘Diversity’ and ‘Equality’ mean enforcing equal outcomes by discriminating against the white majority, ‘Inclusion’ means excluding all those who challenge the new religion by censoring free speech, imposing speech codes and hate laws, expanding ‘non-crime hate incidents’, locking people up for what they write on social media, plotting to “kill” social media platforms like Elon Musk’s X, which give voice to alternative viewpoints, and repackaging perfectly legitimate views as ‘far right’ and ‘Islamophobic’, terms that are also expanded to try and stigmatise normal people."
    Source: https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/no-it-is-not-far-right-to-care-about

    1. My old university apparently has an event entitled 'closing the awarding gap'. In this wafflefest academics will talk about how they can 'best support' black and ethnic students.

      How about… by not? Why should they get special treatment? If they're getting the same lectures, seminars and work as anyone else why must they be given special treatment? If they are getting lower grades it's because they're not as good. Handing out a leg up is just insulting discrimination.

      But then the penny dropped. That's the point, isn't it?

      1. People who claim that Christianity teaches that all men are equal will always quote passages that say nothing of the sort because nowhere in God's teaching is it claimed that all men are equal. Being equally valued does not bestow equal stature and ability. Insects are a vital part of the natural order? The Egalitarian Myth is an excuse for the exercise of power.

      2. Not Nottingham by any chance? I am one of their alumni and they are forever going on about making the university more inclusive [by excluding white people who would deserve to get there on merit].

    2. Just to add that I have read a brilliant comment on today's DT giving an interpretation of DEI: 'Demonise Everything Indigenous' Credit: Em Hexton

  90. Ref my "reach out" comment below – I was well impressed: the young woman (if she was a woman) only needed two attempts to answer the very simple question I asked.

  91. I wonder how many of the LA fires were started deliberately.
    Quite a few would be my guess.

  92. The Left’s pursuit of ‘diversity’ is now destroying Britain

    Another great institution has just fallen into the ‘inclusivity’ trap

    Annabel Denham
    Columnist and Deputy Comment Editor

    The Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House, Piccadilly
    Woke rows: Burlington House’s Royal Society of Literature has been embroiled in a ‘dumbing down’ controversy Credit: Geoff Pugh
    For 200 years the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) existed to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent”. Then one day, it seemingly concluded that “diversity” ought to supersede excellence. Now, the body is in crisis. Fellows have quit. Its leaders have resigned. It is facing criticism that it has “dumbed down” following a series of reforms designed to enhance “diversity”.

    When Bernardine Evaristo became president in 2022, it is claimed that she promised to correct 200 years of injustice. To whom? One fellow tells me that communiques were circulated describing the RSL as a “queer and female-led organisation” which now seeks to recruit from the “global majority”.

    How did this august institution stray so far from its central purpose? The same way they all do. Blame the culture wars, and Black Lives Matter. Blame our national obsession with “equity” and “inclusion”, the insistence that “diversity is our strength”, the downgrading of “excellence” and the growing dominance of HR. The RSL joined the long tail of formerly revered bodies afflicted by a need for relevance, and a desire to re-engineer British society into something “fairer”.

    It’s how the National Trust became so political, wading in on climate change, colonial history and feminism. It’s how, at almost every major exhibition, we are harangued about imperialism, transphobia and the other obsessions of the Left. It’s how the new Football Regulator is to promote DEI. It’s how the General Synod once considered introducing gender-neutral terminology in worship in Anglican churches.

    Many RSL Fellows take issue with the suggestion that the society was hostile to new voices, or failed to encourage them: V S Naipaul was admitted in 1962, when the Trinidad-born writer was 30. Ben Okri joined at a similar age. Others are further troubled by the perception that it may favour minority groups – a perception that would demean those who supposedly benefit from positive discrimination just as much as it would dismay those who do not.

    For most eminent writers, becoming a Fellow of the RSL has been a distinction above all others. Yet in the interests of diversifying the membership, the society has been accused of relaxing the criteria for election. Citing “elite London literary networks”, Evaristo defended the decision to tweak these methods in The Guardian. Under her direction, it decided to become less “formidably elitist,” apparently forgetting its central objective of supporting excellent writing and writers.

    The RSL stands far from alone in this new antipathy – for the Left and Right alike, “elitism” has become a dirty word. For the Right, the new “elite” is the woke, eco-alarmist cultural establishment, those with a disproportionate impact on the national conversation, who find ways to force their obsessions on the country. In the literary world, they’re the publishers who declare that authors and staff must reflect the diversity of UK society, bowdlerise Roald Dahl or claim writers should “stay in their lane”. For the Left, elites represent certain old-fashioned views about privilege and social class.

    And it’s the Left’s war on elites that has proven most pernicious. Yes, we need to improve social mobility – though it is now more unusual for someone to remain in their parents’ social class than to move out of it. But Leftist anti-elitism has become a byword for anti-aspiration. That’s why the Department for Education is scrapping financial support for Latin provision in state schools. Or why Labour is doing its best to kill off the independent sector. Meanwhile, a new curriculum is being drawn up by a committee chaired by a feminist professor who once criticised the Blair administration for its “obsession with academic achievement”.

    At the University of Hull academics are “challenging the status quo” by doing away with the requirement that degree candidates have a working knowledge of English grammar. The department of mathematical sciences at Durham University has issued a guide on “decolonisation”, as though race is more important than merit or impact in the field. Successful business people are not celebrated for generating growth, but viewed with suspicion.

    This is ostensibly designed to create a more “inclusive” society, but what those sneering at excellence really want is greater conformism and homogeneity. Some people can jump higher, read quicker and run faster than others. If mankind marches at the pace of the slowest, it will never progress.

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

    Atticus tou Vorra
    13 hrs ago
    Who cares about diversity? What ever happened to merit, hard work, integrity, things that actually matter? Brown's Equalities act has caused more damage than any war ever did to our country, it blew-up our values. edited

    Stephen Hirst
    17 hrs ago
    Put 32 children in a classroom. Find out which one is the least intelligent, then ensure this person finish as the average in the class. Socialism.

    Stephen Follows
    16 hrs ago
    Reply to Stephen Hirst
    Then make that person Prime Minister.

    1. They're all the diversity. Maybe there's a link between diversity and crime? Maybe there should be some sort of body that gathers and publishes these statistics so we can better protect our country from the diversity's criminality?

      1. Every scrap of empirical evidence shows that the late Professor Richard Lynn was correct in his thesis that race differences in intelligence exist and still his work is dismissed as unscientific by ideologues who present only moral objection and no solid proof in support of their argument. Third world people with an IQ of 85 or less are incapable of empathy.

  95. Lest we forget, today, January 8, 2025, would have been the 90th birthday of 'The King', Elvis Aron Presley.

  97. All The Times Starmer’s Labour Has Called for Public Inquires Despite Refusing One into Rape Gangs

    The row is still raging over Starmer’s refusal to initiate a full inquiry into the rape gangs. Expect loggerheads at PMQs shortly…

    Guido remembers the days when “the public has a right to know” was Labour’s favourite way to start a sentence. Tempora mutantur…

    Presumably Labour believes these ten causes are all more worthy than the rape gangs:

    2020 – Labour calls for inquiry into purchase of 50m unusable face masks
    2021 – Labour calls for inquiry into Tory peer Michelle Mone over PPE contract
    2021– Labour calling for inquiry into David Cameron lobbying Rishi Sunak for Covid loans
    2021– Labour calls for inquiry into ‘£200k revamp’ of flat at No 11 Downing Street
    2021 – Labour calls for ‘transparent’ lobbying inquiry after Dyson texts revealed
    2022 – Labour calls for inquiry into Liz Truss event
    2023 – Labour calls for inquiry into steelworks regeneration after allegations of ‘cronyism and backroom deals’
    2023 – Labour calls for inquiry into English schools £370m budget bungle
    2024 – Labour government would hold Amritsar raid inquiry
    2024 – Battle of Orgreave: Labour manifesto commits to inquiry
    Incredibly Labour is bound by its manifesto to an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave. 40 years ago…

      1. Too right, Grizz! And the inadequacy of the then Government's response to William the Bastard's cross Channel invasion in 1066. Our Border Force offered no resistance and escorted them into Hastings. Lessons still haven't been learned some 959 years later.

        1. We had a bit of a practice run of that sort of thing in the Battle Of Maldon 991 when the English sportingly allowed the Vikings to Land and then got promptly defeated….

  98. Beautiful day here now, sun has melted what little snow we had yet 5 miles away the roads are treacherous with cars stranded

    2. Pavements and roads round here were like a skating rink this morning – ice on snow frozen hard. Didn't stop people driving as if everything were normal, though.

    2. What happens typically in California is a big fire will start then the firebugs come out. They seem to take glee in causing mayhem if they can. But, the state got tough and it was the death penalty for anyone who got caught and anyone died. Not sure if that is still the case under the useless democrats that have destroyed the state by all other means.

    1. King Henry IV settled the score for the establishment treachery around the Peasants Revolt. He had his cousin King Richard II locked up in Pontefract Castle, where he probably starved to death. Can we do the same with Keir Starmer, please.

      2. I have been listening to the latest book by Helen Castor on that very chap – and Henry IV.

        The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

        Very complicated.

    2. Never mind the peasants – what about the disgraceful treatment of that queen of the Iceni and her daughters?

          8. Whilst touring a stately home that had one of these I started playing it and got asked to leave

        2. What a great idea. She's welcome to come here and study my cooking. Everything I prepare looks and tastes like vomit. My freezer's full of it.

  103. MB and I have just had a good laugh – at Spartie's expense.
    We heard a strange knocking noise on the sitting room door. Not the sound of S's usual push and shove technique.
    He was trying to squeeze through a gap in the door … carrying a large lamb shank bone – sideways.

    1. Good on the lasses. I hope the bastard continues to burn in Hell for the rest of eternity.

    2. The man reportedly had ten children from three wives, the first of whom died. The man, his remaining two wives and the children lived together in a rented house, according to local media.

      I wonder how many similar families exist in the UK.

      1. It's perverse, I know. But in such situations my thoughts go to the pets first too.

      2. Glad to hear it. I'm more concerned about animals than people. They can look after themselves.

    2. I read on Fox that the fire is moving so fast that it is eating up the equivalent of 5 football fields per minute. Obviously you can't escape a fire moving that fast.

      1. The fires have generated winds up to 100 MPH.

        One would think these ultra rich would have safe spaces with water and oxygen.

        1. It's the Santa Ana winds Pip. They come from inland and are hot so they dry out the vegetation and turn California into a tinder box. The Berkeley/ California Hills fire was caused by the same phenomena. When I first became aware of it, I thought a bomb must have gone off. There was an enormous mushroom cloud climbing up from the Bay Area. I was in Walnut Creek, some 30 miles away. It actually became a firestorm.
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tm9hIpE1QI

          1. Horrendous.

            Why don't they have a policy of clearing the dried up vegetation in controlled fires?

          2. They do. The problem is that in the early days eucalyptus was imported for timber, although it was found to be useless for that purpose. It is a weed, killed all the local flora, took over and thrived because there is a lack of natural enemies. The eucalyptus in California are bigger and more robust than they are in Australia. They shed tons of leaf litter full of oil. So when that goes up the fire explodes. But a large area of California is covered by eucalyptus and it's now impossible to get rid of. They are trying but it is terribly expensive because seedlings pop up everywhere and fire is part of the propagation cycle. So it isn't as if you can just burn the Eucalyptus down and start over.

          3. It surprises me to hear that eucalyptus is useless as timber, as it is widely used in Australia. My late father's deck was made of it.

            Surely, if it burns so well, why isn't it chipped and used to fire up generators? The carbon dioxide emissions can be no different in a generator than they are in a wildfire.

            Also in Australia there is much more of a community spirit, certainly when it comes to fire risk management in the Adelaide Hills. My own nephew is a volunteer firefighter there, and every village has its fire station and warning klaxon. At any time during a catastrophic fire risk alert (and this happens whenever there is a north wind in summer), householders must clear their gutters of leaves if they have not already done so, checked their diesel-powered water pumps, sprinkler systems, hoses and tanks (and Los Angeles has plenty of swimming pools). In winter everyone must clear away possible fuel and either burn it off on a cool, damp day or hand it over to the fire service for disposal. Known firebugs are arrested and interned, and any sniff of smoke or sight of it on the horizon requires an emergency call-out.

            There was a huge bushfire in the Adelaide Hills on Ash Wednesday in 1983. There was a wildlife reserve, surrounded by an electric fence to keep out alien predators, where the fires stopped dead. Dr Walmsley, who ran it at the time, said this was due to the activities of chipmunk type marsupials, who would plant eucalyptus seeds to be eaten when they were saplings, and were constantly busy managing their gardens.

            A lot has been said about global warming and Net Zero, but I believe a far more pressing issue, especially in places such as California, Australia and the Mediterranean, is freshwater management. Those with a maritime climate can afford to be blaze [damned US-style text inputter won't allow me to type accents without a lot of aggro] about water, but there are lots of places without such luxury.

          4. I was out in the Little Desert when there was a fire risk alert. We had a picnic, but took thermos flasks of hot water to make drinks. The police came out to check on us that we weren't going to light a fire.

          5. I would assume that it has something to do with the type of Eucalyptus they grew in California, as you know there are quite a few varieties. And, of course in those days they had redwoods by the millions to chop down for building etc. We are talking about the early pioneers, the Yankees that took California from Spain and then proceeded to devastate the place and off the natives too.

            Have no answer to your second question. I would imagine it is the usual conflict between the practical people wanting to get rid of a weed and the moronic green types that infest California like greenfly.

            Your third remark is more or less the same for California. There is a community spirit amongst people, especially in small towns. But in places like LA is is the usual fragmentation where everyone expects the blubberment to do everything. But there are millions of sprinkler systems, almost every house has them apart from people in ghettos and water is taken from pools during a fire by the use of helicopters. Cleaning out gutters etc is also an obligation. People are fined if they don’t.

            Most of us that love California would have no argument with you with regard to water management. California has severely abused its sources of fresh water. Look up ‘Mono Lake’ ‘Salton Sea’ as examples of devastation or the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Hetch Hetchy was said to be more beautiful than Yosemite but it ended up being flooded by the corrupt as a source of water for San Francisco. We need not go into the Hoover dam and the devastation that has caused!!!

            Modern methods of desalinizing water are now quite cheap and much of the damage caused by the current methods of obtaining fresh water are positively antique. But then people are always slow in catching up.

          6. In a region where they have very hot winds they decided to plant Eucalyptus which produces flammable oils. Genius !

          1. I have heard about it. I was thinking something like a sub basement with its own air and water supply not reliant on anything above.

          2. People died in the basements where they’d taken shelter because the firestorm sucked the air out. You’d need to ensure you had a good system.

        1. No idea. Not a football fan. Have no clue to the size of a football field. And, I assume, it's talking of American football???

          1. I hoped to flummox ChatGPT, but it gave this answer, and showed its working:
            The area of Wales is approximately 20,779 square kilometers (8,023 square miles). Now, let's compare that to the size of an American football field. The standard American football field, including the end zones, is 120 yards long and 53.33 yards wide. The area of the field is: 120 yards×53.33 yards=6,400 square yards
            Since 1 square kilometer equals 1,196,000 square yards, we can calculate how many football fields fit into the area of Wales. ≈ 3,886,431 football fields

  109. This is actually Piers Morgan and Jordan Peterson. My question. Is there a way, preferably email. to contact Piers Morgan. The man is so ignorant about Islam it makes me want to scream at the bloody monitor. He really is a fool. I had to stop watching this because he disgusts me so much. Hypocrisy is to good a word for his attitude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKCB-MhBP7I&t=2019s

      1. It is astonishing that a seemingly nice, well-educated girl like Celia Walden allows him anywhere near her!

    2. HE is Leaving the Murdoch Media Empire to start his very own: 'The One and only (one is more than enough) Piers Morgan Youtube channel'. I daresay in due course you'll be able to correspond with him there.

      1. I don’t want to correspond with him, the grubby man. I simply want to give him some references about Islam because it’s evident he has no clue, just the usual liberal and consequentially ,wrong nonsense.

    3. Nice to see the young, 23 yo and very smart Natalie Winters being interviewed on X twice in one day. She is Steve Bannon's wing-lady on the War Room and often holds the fort when Bannon is away e.g. in prison as a political prisoner of the Biden regime.

    4. No Piers the Qataris at the WC weren't larfing at old school UK.. they were bemused at the commie-woo-woo UK that's been the norm since Blair.

  110. There seems to be another ploy. In recent years it seemed to me that 'Fairy Liquid' detergent had been ? watered down. Recently I purchased a bottle of fairy liquid that was twice the 'normal price' but promised to last 3 times longer. Guess what it was just like the original stuff from 30 years ago…..

    1. No. I would say if you keep masturbating so much your hands are going to get pregnant. Wanker !

  112. That's me back from Kingston upon Hull! Actually got back a bit after 13:30 so not a bad run.
    Saw a fuel station with diesel at 140.9p per litre on the main road at Hessel so tanked up there before going into Hessel and having an hour's break for a look round and a pot of tea & bacon & egg cob.

        1. You'd have thought that his unpleasant, bossy wife would have put a stop to it. Long ago.

          1. You silly boy – you're doing your utmost to be annoying. His Second appalling unpleasant, bossy wife only married him because she perceived a route to power and self importance. Go to bed before you delude more of our young impressionable NoTTLers

      2. Of course it's not acceptable. I lived not so far from his family in Delaware for 27 years. Plenty of stories about his 'oddness'. Look at his internet photographs and posturing as he rose through the Congress, and the deviancy, passed on to his son, is there for all to see. Ex post facto, and we didn't shout about it at the time as we should have.

  114. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9LvMu0FB3A
    "… the problem with this Labour government is that their understanding of how a business thinks and operates is roughly equivalent to the understanding of the theory of general relativity by a mentally challenged ferret who was being lobotomized…"

    Absolute classic line.

      1. Ferrets are cute. I went to a country show once and they had ferret racing. After the little blighters did their races they retired to their hammocks and went straight to sleep.

        Stank of piss though. Them…not me.

  115. Has NOTTL been offline in the last hour? I've just been out for a while and can't see any new 'Farage has failed us!' messages.

  116. Yesterday's Woolwich stabbee: Kelyan Bokassa.

    Bet he was a true diamond. (Think about it…)

    And that the stabber was a rival rapper.

    1. You cynic for daring to suggest that the enrichment of the cultural diversity wot Kelyan and his bruvs brought to These Sceptered Isles isn't superior to your inflicted ghastliness.

    2. Yet another random collection of letters thrown together to make a chavvy stabby ‘Afro’ ‘name’!

    5. Notwithstanding all that, a mother is now missing her little boy – and boys of all ages are still their mothers’ “little boys” – and i doubt she wanted to bring her son up in an environment where he got drawn into this gang violence. And another young lad is now a murderer and will spend his life in and out of prison. How do we get to this? It’s madness.

      1. By allowing all these sub-human people to come and live here and bring their "customs" from their homeland.

      2. We got to this by allowing – even encouraging – such ghastly new ("progressive") paradigms to be normalised, Mir, all protest to be labelled with negatively charged buzz-words such as "far right". Some ways of life really are more conducive to peace, co-existence and happiness than others.

    6. His 'mum' was unlikely to have said: "He was a nasty little sod and he got what was coming to him!"

  117. The PMQs was as one might expect. No further forward regarding what should be done to expose the whole truth about what has happened; let alone what they are going to do to ensure it can't happen again, nor to ensure the perpetrators are removed from the country.

    Thought for the day:
    Many Pakistani immigrants actually are integrating perfectly.
    They are joining the foul groups already here and joining in.

    1. Until the Nigerian dumps her voluminous notes and uses the brain she boasts about to attack extempore – there is no threat to Cur Ikea.

    3. Looking back, historically, yer Hindus and Sikhs were a long way from Muslim ways of thinking. The sub-continent has been almost permanently at war with Islam since Islam existed. Pakistan is truly a legacy of shitholiness. I've no idea why this is. Is it a base desire by men? I ask because I think normal men are nice to women.

  119. Got to get ready to go out. Wrapping up well – following Oiky Sweeting's advice and wearing another pullover. Gosh, it must be so wonderful to be as clever as he thinks he is.

    The MR is having an ECG – all heart in Chateau Thomas! Assuming we both get back, I'll look in later.

    TTFN

  120. Wordle No. 1299 3/6

    🟨🟨⬜⬜🟨
    🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Wordle 8 Jan 2025

    A bill for Birdie Three?

    1. Me too, much to my surprise.

      Wordle 1,299 3/6

      🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩⬜🟨🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. You have divots again. Not as many as I managed though

      Wordle 1,299 4/6

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

    3. You've got your divots back – Hooray!!… Nice birdie

      Guessed wrong one of two so just the par…..

      Wordle 1,299 4/6

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

    5. There you are!. Been to a wake, followed by a fishing talk. An easy eagle today, luck obviously.

      Wordle 1,299 2/6

      🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Can't read the mail online. And none of the "work round" tricks suggested by wily NoTTLers work.

    3. Well he has been jailed for 43 years and isn’t apparently part of a rape gang, so i assume he is hideously hWite.

  122. Here we are with a lamer than lame duck pretendy prime minister and Trump who obviously sees the weakness trolling us about being the 51st state. No speech from Trudeau counteracting this just a nothing tweet last night.

    Polls for a new Liberal leader have None of the Above higher than any of the supposed contenders.

    Ever thought that we are in trouble?

  123. Evening Folks
    Snow threatens

    What use has the ECHR been to those thousands of girl victims of the child grooming gangs?
    I expect this didn’t come across their desks either.
    But they have certainly helped prevent rapists from deportation and for ensuring an ever increasing supply of replacements to land on our shores.

  124. Labour, the gift that keeps on giving.
    To everyone except its own citizens.

    Still, the UK voted them in and the UK is reaping the just deserts.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14263287/Labour-offering-pay-Mauritius-nearly-9billion-Chagos-Islands-deal-bid-rush-agreement-Donald-Trump-enters-White-House.html

    Labour 'offering to pay Mauritius nearly £9billion' as part of Chagos Islands deal in bid to rush through agreement before Donald Trump re-enters the White House

  125. Isn’t it about time Denmark decolonised Greenland and gave it back to the USA, like Starmer wanted to do with the Chagos Islands, obviously Denmark will have to pay huge reparations as well.

  126. Here is one for conspiracy theorists.

    Continually hounded by doctor/medic types to give up smoking and drinking.

    I went on a course of Champix but it was withdrawn even though it enabled me to stop smoking within 10 days.

    There are several drugs including Naltrexone which would remove any pleasure from drinking alcohol.

    For some reason GP's are unaware of these drugs even though Champix replacement and Varenicline are approved by NICE.

    I have been offered lots of flu jabs though.

    1. To be quite honest, I would forego the drug that removed the pleasure in order to continue to enjoy the drug that gives pleasure. Both will/would harm me but i would so much rather enjoy the self harm.

        1. I smoked 40 a day from about the age of 18 to 60 – cost a bleedin' bomb as you say – gave up at 60 as I thought I needed to do something (anything?) – took about 5 years to really kick it and even now I get the odd urge (I'm 67) particularly when having a nice beer in a nice pub……

          1. Gave up 14+ years ago after a largish heart attack. I get the urge occasionally (twice a year) and smoke half a fag before the taste puts me off.

          3. Well done. It's odd how the addiction takes you.
            PS. A reformed alcoholic? I can't even imagine that. I like to think I'm not an alcoholic, but alcohol, no spirits, helps my life.

          4. Dont worry mola – the definition of an alcoholic is somebody who drinks more than their doctor – you’ll be fine…..

          6. Was never into cigarettes, but the very occasional cigar was pleasant. Don't bother any more, especially as there's a barrage of displeasure from SWMBO.

        2. Everything does, though, Phizz. I stopped smoking many years ago because I got fed up with it, yet couldn't stop. I still feel the need of nicotine hits, otherwise obtained, from time to time. I have got much fatter – and run the risk of becoming a complete porker should this progress, as a result – which I also dislike. It is SO expensive, these days, to smoke. Also, they are inserting even more crap into cigarettes. Wish I'd never done all the work to MAKE myself enjoy it as a child.

          1. CEO NHS has said Varenicline will be made available. Doesn’t work for everyone and it made me nauseous. But it will take a pill to make me stop.

  127. What I've seen today happening in the HoC, and it wasn't much but is was more than enough to convince me that the theatricals continue to be played out according to the script.

    Badenoch going for the "jugular(s)" – does she know where they are? – gifts Starmer the 8 years of doing nothing own goal. Really? You don't do that if you're up to the job.

    The Tories and Labour are as one when it comes to the direction of travel, they're in different boats but both are steering the UK towards the abyss. Certainly a Uni-party that cares not a jot for the people but only for the agenda. As for the LibDums…

  128. Back home. Chilly out – just under zeroºC. The MR's ECG (Electro not echo) was quite normal. The GP surgery was empty. In the 20 minutes we were there, just two other patients came in. Overwhelmed? I think not.

    1. I have another echo next Thursday and the day before have to see the dental surgeon who fitted my implant. The implant is fine but the crown has worked loose and needs to be tightened or refitted. Another very old crown held in with a metal post needs removing as there is bone loss. I'm not looking forward to the inevitable pain but this too will pass.

      3. Good luck, sweet Sue. If you're echo looks bit dodgy, tell them about your dental work – implants were sufficient to knock me off my feet. Amusingly, I called at supermarket (I bruise easily, like my mother), with a huge bruise across my mouth,chin,cheek. Everyone noticeably avoided looking me in the face including people I knew…not sure I'd have done the same if situation reversed….

    2. Alf had a hospital follow up appointment a.m. 8 people waiting, maybe 3 staff walking around with the obligatory piece of paper in the hand, nobody called for at least 15 minutes. Several visits from one room to another by a practitioner/consultant, no patient called or being seen. Hospital like a ghost train.

      TBF it was at 08.45 but even so where were they all and what were they doing?

        1. Ah but…
          In yer Norfolk, yer local yokels believe the BBC, so they wrapped up warm and stayed in.

          1. Au contraire – the online booking system will tell you early in the day that there are “no more appointments available”.

            The whole thing is a scandal. The MR needs blood tests. The woman who does blood tests was sitting in her room this evening doing SFA – but could not bring forward the apptmt that the MR was given (reluctantly) for Friday morning. Overwhelmed my foot.

            Why do you think I saw the heart chap privately?

    4. Have you got a tractor, Bill? You can go racing for nothing at Fakenham on the 16th Feb as long as you arrive by tractor before 10 am 🙂 You can leave your tractor there the night before, but you have to get a pass from the office.

      1. Fakenham – the coldest racecourse in England! I went there once – ad once only – in summer – and it was bloody cold!

    5. Seems people are swerving GP surgeries – can't get appointments, only work certain hours. A&Es length & breadth of country – overwhelmed, and that's one reason why.

  129. 399810+ up ticks,

    🎵

    Theme song of the majority voter

    … Out on the street I was talkin' to a man
    He said "there's so much of this life of mine that I don't understand"
    You shouldn't worry I said that ain't no crime
    Cause if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time, next time,
    next time, next time,next……..

    https://x.com/NiohBerg/status/1876778619420266925

    2. I understand there was one possibly 2012(?) which raised specific recommendations – very few if any have been implemented.

  130. Why Nigel Farage won’t be ousted as Reform leader
    Party’s rules make it ‘close to impossible’ to remove former MEP from the role despite calls from the likes of Elon Musk
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/01/08/why-nigel-farage-wont-be-ousted-as-reform-leader-elon-musk/

    I posted this BTL and within a minute it had six down votes. This indicates that the DT readers who are fanatically pro-Farage don't give a toss whether he lies or not. I find this very depressing.

    Nigel Farage has uttered a vile slander against Tommy Robinson. He has said that Tommy Robinson has a history of violence against women. This is a complete lie.

    As soon as the general public realises that, like many other politicians, Farage is prepared to lie about those he dislikes his veneer of honesty, truth and integrity will disintegrate and his popularity will begin to plunge.

    Farage can avoid this by truthfully and honestly apologising to Tommy Robinson – but is his arrogant pride too great to allow him do this?

    1. Truth & honesty in a politician… that I'd like to see! Together with hen's teeth!

    2. Hear you, Rastus….adding to your post, financial issues being rumoured about both Farage and Tice. Possibly more likely to bring them down, money more powerful than even Tommy Robinson's incarceration (to be clear, I'm a supporter – Free Tommy).

  131. If only at the Nuremburg trials back in the day, those nazis had thought to say
    I'm sorry but none of that crossed my desk.

  132. It's about time that the whole concept of Islamophobia was consigned to the dustbin of history.
    I am utterly sick and tired of Muslim special pleading.

    Labour endorsed report that said the phrase 'Asian grooming gangs' was an 'anti-Islam trope' in definition backed by Wes Streeting

    The mere fact that they want this shows that civilised society realises it isn't 'Asian' but is mainly Muslim

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14263469/Tories-demand-Labour-drops-Wes-Streeting-backed-Islamophobia-definition-report-criticises-use-term-Asian-grooming-gangs-age-old-stereotype.html

    1. Combat 18! Really? Most of them will be approaching their 60s.

      The average citizen is more likely to be terrorised by ordinary criminality on the street or by Islamists, simply on the basis of numbers.

    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_%26_Honour

      Blood & Honour remains active in the UK but has contracted since the 1980s and 1990s; researchers Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey suggest that its membership consists mainly of “heavily-tattooed men in their fifties reliving their ‘glory days’ at occasional gigs in back-room pubs”.[19] As of 2019, the organisation organises up to fifteen concerts a year in the UK.[20]

      In January 2025, the UK Government announced a full asset freeze against Blood & Honour, "an entity it has reasonable grounds to suspect of being involved in terrorist activities through promoting and encouraging terrorism, seeking to recruit people for that purpose and making funds available for the purposes of its terrorist activities".[21]

      I suspect that the average hard line mosque is more dangerous than this mob of losers.

    3. it would be so nice and so much more accurate it the above described action were applied to one of the very many acronymical orgs that embrace violent, far right Islamism in this country

      1. Never mind the Anarchist's Cookbook – the koran should be enough to have the owner banged up.

  135. Wholly OT – my late cousin, who died last year aged 90, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of – and archive of – family history. Her grandson has been assembling the hundreds of photographs, family trees etc. One photo is of my great-great-grandfather – Elijah Smerdon, born 19 April 1808 – died 22 March 1877.
    He married Sarah Codd – born 1818, died 19 September 1892. The photo must have been taken in the early 1870s.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/613dc508701095b789356b3dd088b192f6e7723eb71bf148fbb6da5ecebd2c2a.jpg
    They had 12 children – nine of whom lived long lives well into the 20th century. The other three died in infancy.

    I find it extraordinary to think that he was born well before the Battle of Waterloo.

    2. Amazing. You’re lucky to have such records. Our families don’t have that and we ourselves have taken photos and have no idea when. Really a shame.

        1. Wow! Until teatime!
          Seriously, how wonderful, Bill. We have almost nothing, even from my parents, let alone earlier than that. Sad, that.

        3. The trick is to hook into a "major tree".

          Ours goes back to before 900 AD and I'm fairly sure other Nottlers go back even further.
          The parchment scroll, which is about 6 foot across, features my most recent ancestors on the far right of the family tree!

          1. Bill Bryson commented that just being here we all have a direct link to the beginning of the universe/Earth as we know it.
            Would you Adam and Eve it?

    3. I am devouring Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, set on the 1880s (well, it is a trilogy and the first book os her remembrances of growing up in the 1880s with references to the generation and traditions before. So to imagine what it was like growing up in the 1810s is incredible).

    3. A very, very sinister bugger. He and May conspired to destroy our democracy, Why is he still at large?

  137. Phew.. British taxpayers are set to fork out only £90 million every year for 99 years instead of £200 million for return of Chagos Islands to China.

    2. ?? are you certain sure, kbhoy…I thought China already had most of our money?! Aren't we trying to keep them out of the North Sea by paying them off….

  138. That's me for this chilly day. Colder tomorrow as we venture to the market early…

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain – prolly.

    3. The pound has fallen to its lowest level for nine months after UK government borrowing costs continued to rise. The drop came as UK 10-year borrowing costs surged to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis when bank borrowing almost ground to a halt.

      Economists have warned the rising costs could lead to further tax rises or cuts to spending plans as the government tries to meet its self-imposed borrowing target.

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1404j3xmxdo

      Made worse, according to commentators, by a budget based on borrowing…

      1. A somewhat misleading statement, there are many factors in play here.
        I'm sure that their reasons are correct in parts, but there is also the Trump effect.
        And that's against the US$ the Euro is doing almost equally badly vs both sterling and the dollar.

        What is absolutely certain, in my view, is that if Labour continues as it's started it is going to get far far worse.

        1. She has created the perfect scenario for recession, depression, high unemployment and rising inflation all at once. You’re right, Trump's activities won’t help the £ but the antics of Miliband won’t be helping either. No wonder she looks knackered.

      2. Yes, Gilts not had a happy day. Guessing Ms Reeves aware of that. Tax rises coming down the line.

        1. Sometimes fake spellings, or words with *** etc inserted. Most websites have a moderator, and it depends how that's been 'wired'. Different sites, different settings. DT sounds a bit sensitive – Spectator used to be, too. This one's pretty lenient….I think complaints would come from other commenters, firstly. Geoff has a statement pinned at the top, most abide by that (including you x 🙂

          5. I tell it how it is, and never hold back from telling other NoTTLers if I think they are Very Silly Sausages. Fortunately, both Geoff and other Moderators think I am confusing Sausages with Hostages and – so far – I have not been banned for being so frank with my insults. Lol.

          6. You can say any rude words you like on here. Just not directed at other posters unless it's Bill Thomas or Sosraboc of course. :@)

  146. Well fortunately for some life goes on.
    I collected our little fella from school this afternoon brought him home. His parents were at a family funeral in Suffolk.
    Later his nanny picked up his little sister from her pre school day classes. And we cooked them dinner.
    Mummy and daddy arrived around 6:15 And both deserved a drink. Whilst I was out Erin had a chat with number three son in Dubai. He's not been well. But is over the worse.
    We've tidied up now and topped our glasses up.
    Ahhhhhhh 😊🙂🥃🍷
    Another day off tomorrow. I might buy some more wine and bake some bread.
    Early to bed worn out. 😴 phew.

  149. From Babylon Bee

    https://babylonbee.com/news/guy-who-said-facebook-was-not-suppressing-free-speech-announces-facebook-will-stop-suppressing-free-speech
    PALO ALTO, CA — Social media users rejoiced today as in an initiative to fight back against censorship, the guy who said Facebook was not suppressing free speech announced that Facebook would stop suppressing free speech.

    Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg released a video statement outlining the upcoming changes that would be made to content restriction policies on Facebook and Instagram, revealing that Facebook would stop suppressing all the free speech he had previously insisted wasn't being suppressed on Facebook.

    3. Very good
      An alsatian and a dachshund were walking through the snow – Alsatian said "Cor my feet are freezing" Dachshund replies "You think you've got troubles?"

  151. Wow, that's a surprise.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14263825/Labour-votes-Tory-demand-new-national-inquiry-grooming-gangs.html

    Labour votes down Tory demand for new national inquiry into grooming gangs as Keir Starmer leaves himself open to fresh attacks by Elon Musk

    It was voted down by 364 to 111, a majority of 253.

    That means only 475 out of 650 bothered to vote.
    I'm uncertain which group I despise more, even though I can't help thinking that yet another public enquiry would merely kick the can down the road.

    1. I'd like to see a list of those who didn't bother turning up! Perhaps their next expenses claim should be refused?

      1. I don't have a particular problem with genuine pairings for legitimate reasons, but I very, very much doubt this was voted according to people's consciences, not that MPs tend to have such a thing.

    1. Possibly
      But:
      There’s a big difference between abstaining and voting against the party line.

  159. 399810+ up ticks,

    Pillow ponder,

    Starmer accused of ‘cowardice’ as Labour votes to block national grooming inquiry

    Never ever,ever going to pass, its timing is showing it to be a post Christmas pantomime with very serious consequences dragged out and watered down by ALL governing paedophile umbrella holding parties, AKA the coalition.

    The reform party has the peoples in numbers to make an impression but I personally think the leadership calls for a cold calculating patriotic brain and NOT an egotistical showman, the odious issue is of to much importance going into the future.

    For what it's worth it gives me a good feeling after years of calling out these governing parties as the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled ./ paedophile umbrella coalition party may the heavens grant us the spirit we had in 39 / 45 and cleanse this nation of political scum and invading foreigners.

  160. TTK, The ginger growler and rickety Reeves all abstained!! Why is that?
    And Ed Minibrain, and Lammy!

  161. TTK, The ginger growler and rickety Reeves all abstained!! Why is that?
    And Ed Minibrain, and Lammy!

  163. Assuming Trump and Musk know exactly who is implicated in the grooming gang scandals, then by not having an open public enquiry, that leaves our government open to quite a lot of leverage for them to keep their silence.

    1. Jack Abbott MP
      @jackabbott90
      This evening, I'll be voting for the Children & Wellbeing Bill which will:

      🍎 Deliver free breakfast clubs in primary schools
      👕 Cap the number of branded school uniform items
      📈 Drive up school standards
      🚨 Bring forward the biggest child protection reforms in a generation

      See ! Jack really cares about children !

      1. What a comedian. Bet he hasn’t even read this Bill properly.

        ETA: If he really cared about children he’d want them to be having breakfast in their own home, with family, not bribing parents to offload their children at clubs. All to break up family life and assume more control of the children.

      2. What a comedian. Bet he hasn’t even read this Bill properly.

        ETA: If he really cared about children he’d want them to be having breakfast in their own home, with family, not bribing parents to offload their children at clubs. All to break up family life and assume more control of the children.

    1. Why GB News allows this monstrously foul woman any air time is a mystery.

      She only does it to annoy
      Because she knows it teases.

  171. Starmer appoints Theresa May’s soft Brexit mandarin as Foreign Office chief

    Sir Olly Robbins is the ‘perfect choice if Labour wanted to rejoin the EU’, say Tories
     https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/01/08/starmer-theresa-may-brexit-mandarin-foreign-office-boss/

    A reminder of how the Evil Mrs May and the repulsive Olly Robbins worked together to try and strangle and destroy Brexit before it was even born.

    And now this odious man Robbins has been employed by Starmer to kill of what little still remains of thdreams of Brexit.

    If Mrs Kemi Badenoch has any real guts she will expel Mrs May from the Conservative Party.

  172. Goodnight, all. Rayburn's stoked, hot water bottles are warming the bed and it's freezing outside. Time to snuggle up. Sleep well, everyone.

    1. Another day is done, I'm exhausted,as usual, so I wish all my fellow NoTTLers' a goodnight, schhone schlaf bis morgen fruh.

  173. I'm off to bed now too, chums. So I wish you all a Good Night. Sleep well and I hope to see you all hale and hearty tomorrow morning.

  174. Baby boy born on migrant dinghy

    What mother is so desperate to escape France that she would do this?

    We are literally out of out minds.

    1. vw here. Awake since 4.51! As I keep saying, it is not "we" who are out of our minds, it is HMG.

    2. Good morning MIR and everyone.
      The baby was born to a West African woman who was en route from Africa to the Canary Islands. Desperate to give birth on Spanish soil, but left it too late, unlike Kemi Badenoch's mother who flew from Nigeria with plenty of time.

  175. Sadly not front page news (there is so much shit going on at the moment).

    Liz Truss has sent a “cease and desist” letter to our Glorious Leader, demanding he stops lying about what happened following her mini-budget, and highlighting the false and defamatory statements he made in the run-up to the GE.

    Good for her. A bit late though.

  176. The creator of the anti-Starmfuehrer song has been stripped of his shifts at al-Beeb.

    No correlation, obvs.

  177. Oh dear. Stan Labovitch is at it again in the Letters. Will try and post later. Is he made up? Or unhinged?

  179. I’ll doubtless give that a go, Phiz. Quite a few curses here so far today esp re Gilts, energy markets, Employers NI…list goes on. Basically we’re all f*cked…

Comments are closed.