The Coffee House Wall – 10th/16th February

Posted on February 10, 2014

This is the Coffee House Wall for this week. I won’t say that it is your chance to communicate with us, as we are all in this together. It is, nevertheless, the Conservative Blog post that has no particular theme, and where everything is on topic. Let’s just remember that we want to avoid ad hominem attacks on others. We don’t want to engage with trolls. We want to moderate our language ourselves as responsible and mature adults, choosing to use fruity language only where it is necessary. This is our opportunity to show what the Spectator Coffee House Wall could have been like.

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204 thoughts on “The Coffee House Wall – 10th/16th February”

  1. The environment agency saying that they can’t put river dredging silt onto river banks due to E U rules about dealing with uncontrolled waste is another example of how they are obsessed by rules from Europe .
    Last week I checked with drainage boards to get an update as to how they deal with the reeds and silt brought out by their diggers.
    Put it on the river/ drain banks , where else would you put it.
    You raise the bank and lower the drain bed at the same time.

  2. John birch – 08:56 ‘uncontrolled waste’

    I think that there are few problems placing dredged silt onto river banks, but that, only in so far as it is created by the EU, the problem is that, once this silt is moved, it is then classified as ‘Industrial Waste’ and requires expensive licences etc to move it elsewhere. The problem in Somerset is that with such a ‘stretched environment’, it is difficult to dredge and dump the silt far enough away without an intermediate stage.

    John Redwood is asking the right questions, here:
    http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2014/02/04/what-the-today-programme-should-have-asked-the-environment-agency/

    But will anyone in authority respond?

  6. John birch February 10th, 2014 – 08:56
    “The environment agency saying that they can’t put river dredging silt onto river banks due to E U rules about dealing with uncontrolled waste is another example of how they are obsessed by rules from Europe.”

    RobertC February 10th, 2014 – 10:02
    “I think that there are few problems placing dredged silt onto river banks, but that, only in so far as it is created by the EU, the problem is that, once this silt is moved, it is then classified as ‘Industrial Waste’ and requires expensive licences etc to move it elsewhere.”

    Both John and Robert point out that the EU regards dredged silt as ‘Industrial Waste’ this is but one more example of EU codswallop parading as common sense.

    The matter that is dredged up is a combination of decaying and living vegetation and silt, silt is sand earth and pebble brought downstream from up river by normal and flood river flow, there is absolutely nothing industrial about it.

    This matter is highly suited to piling on the river banks as it quickly reverts and mingles with the natural fauna and flora of the river bank.

    John Redwood and others are asking what has happened to the £120 million, I prefer to express that as 1.2 billion it looks a bigger sum though it is the self-same amount.

    Well almost one third £400,000 goes on wages of (I think 1200 staff) a huge proportion of this goes to the Chairman and the top one-hundred managers.

    The Chairman refuses to apologise or resign, NO PROBLEM, close the agency down and dismiss all of the incompetent fools who take wages while letting the environment go to the dogs.

    One other point in one paper I saw that the EA is selling off the drain and culvert dredgers that they have found so little use for.

  7. “Five lions were destroyed at Longleat Safari Park because they had serious genetic defects caused by inbreeding, managers said.

    In a statement, the Wiltshire park said it had no choice but to put down a lioness and her cubs because they displayed “odd aggressive behaviour”.
    ———————————————–
    Now we know why those ragheads who marry their cousins, generation after generation display such odd aggressive behaviour. Any chance of them having the same fate as the above-mentioned lions?

  8. Anne Wotana Kaye 1
    February 10th, 2014 – 11:39
    POSTED ON LAST WEEK’S BOARD BY MISTAKE
    The scandals continue. “The Home Office has suspended English language tests run by a major firm after BBC Panorama uncovered systematic fraud in the student visa system”. This concerns proficiency in the English language, which is bad enough, but I suspect that this corruption extends to medical and surgical degrees, and also to nursing qualifications from overseas candidates. It would certainly explain the many doctors and nurses who cannot speak or understand English and whose patients suffer, often fatally from misdiagnosis.

  9. David Ossitt

    “John Redwood and others are asking what has happened to the £120 million, I prefer to express that as 1.2 billion it looks a bigger sum though it is the self-same amount.”

    Eh?? No David, it’s one tenth of the higher amount!

    Do you mean that, as John Redwood points out that, out of a budget of £1.2 billion; of the capital works just £20.3 million was spent on improving or maintaining culverts and channels to ensure free flow of water, a mere 1.7% of their total budget, or 3.4% of their staff and pension costs?

    http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2014/02/02/the-environment-agency-where-does-all-the-money-go/

  11. David Ossitt – 11:48 ‘Industrial waste’

    While we are in the EU, reality takes a back seat, so ‘Industrial Waste’ it is! Also, as Christopher Booker states, closing the agency down is not an option while we are in the EU.

    If only there was a solution to both problems.

  14. RobertC February 10th, 2014 – 14:58
    “If only there was a solution to both problems.”

    There are two solutions, the first is to do as France would do and ignore the EU regulations when it suited us but then that would not be ‘cricket’, the second is to get out of the EU post haste.

    Ever the optimist, I think, hope and pray that the day of our leaving is not too far away.

  15. Frank P February 10th, 2014 – 15:36

    “£120m = £1.2b? Shum mistake – surely?”

    Sorry Frank £120 thousand million.

  18. Noa February 10th, 2014 – 12:56
    “Do you mean that, as John Redwood points out that, out of a budget of £1.2 billion; of the capital works just £20.3 million was spent on improving or maintaining culverts and channels to ensure free flow of water, a mere 1.7% of their total budget, or 3.4% of their staff and pension costs?”

    All of that, but my £120 Million was a typo Redwood expressed the budget is £120 thousand million which as I stated is £1.2 billion.
    The bastards probably spent more on dining out than on dredging.

  21. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 February 10th, 2014 – 12:47

    “Any chance of them having the same fate as the above-mentioned lions?”

    Better still the fate that came to the young giraffe!

  22. A bravura post by Rifleman 1853 over at the DT:-

    “Britain’s international aid budget will help reduce flooding in the UK by addressing the causes of climate change abroad, Eric Pickles has said.”
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…

    Therefore, Eric Pickles is either a bare-faced liar, or a pig-ignorant half-wit.

    For starters, Pickles – there is no catastrophic climate change going on, despite the lies told on the radio today by Julia Stingo of the Met Office – and data which Stingo’s office publishes proves that beyond all doubt.

    Have a look at this chart, the Central England Temperature record, the oldest continuous record of temperatures in the world, kept since 1659.
    http://www.c3headlines.com/201…

    Note the salient points; first, the black line shows man-made carbon emissions going up at a near exponential curve since about 1840 – and continuing to do so.

    The red line shows routine temperatures – zig-zagging up and down, as the weather changes from year to year and from decade to decade. But, as the Warmists keep telling us – those day to day measurements aren’t climate – “They’re just weather!”

    They are indeed – so let’s look at the climate, rather than the weather. And the climate is shown by the green trend line, over the last 350 years. And what does that show? Is it showing evidence of catastrophic thermal runaway, set to wreak destruction all over the planet?

    Actually – no. The trend line clearly shows a gentle upward drift of a less than apocalyptic 0.26 degrees C – per CENTURY. In other words, it’s warmed up less than one degree since the end of the English Civil War! Well, pardon me for not feeling suicidal about it . . .

    I have had objections from Warmists along the lines of “Oh, but that’s just for central England – we’re talking about global temperatures!”

    But, every time I challenge them to explain how and why Staffordshire has its own micro-climate, completely divorced from what’s happening in every other part of the planet – not one of them has ever attempted an answer. Perhaps they think the Bard of Avon had it right, when he wrote:

    This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . .
    This fortress built by Nature for herself . . .
    This precious stone set in the silver sea,
    Which serves it in the office of a wall,
    Or as a moat defensive to a house . . .

    Some defensive moat it must be, to keep out catastrophic global warming which is gearing up to spit-roast the rest of the planet!

    Moving on to Pickles’ equally crackpot ‘theory’ that spending money abroad will reduce global warming – does that stand up to close inspection? Does it hell – and unless Pickles has a room temperature IQ, he knows that as well as I do. The Chinese and the Indians are building and commissioning one new coal-fired power station each, PER WEEK – and have not the slightest intention of changing that (whatever bull the Chinese come out with at international conferences). For that reason alone, I find no difficulty accepting the calculations of others, that, even if we were to reduce our CO2 emissions to ZERO, within 18 months, Asia would have made up for that drop, and would continue to pump out even more.

    The only noticeable effect would be that India and China would still have working economies in both industry and commerce – and we would have none.

    In the meantime, Pickles and his boss Cameron bluster and lie about how much they want to help people whose homes, businesses and farms have been trashed – but they continue to follow the edicts of the EU’s Natura 2000 strategy, which deems the interests of biodiversity, sustainability and wildlife habitats to be above those of farming and people. I quote from a recent article by Christopher Booker:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com…

    “The EU’s Natura 2000 strategy along with a sheaf of directives on habitats, birds, water, and not least the floods directive of 2007, specifically requires certain floodplains to be allowed to flood. In 2008, when the EA was run by Baroness Young, this was reflected in a policy document which classified areas at risk of flooding under six categories, ranging from those in Policy Option 1, where flood defences were a priority, down to Policy 6 where, to promote biodiversity, the strategy should be to “increase flooding”. The Somerset Levels were covered by Policy 6.

    It was in that year that Baroness Young explained in an interview that creating wildlife habitats could be very expensive, but that by far the cheapest way was simply to allow natural flooding. As she gaily put it: “Just add water.” Around this time she was heard to say of the Somerset Levels that she would like to see “a limpet mine attached to every pumping station”.

    And the Tories have absolutely no idea why so many people in small towns and the countryside loathe and despise them. Equally, my local Tory MP has no idea why I joined UKIP, or why I will continue to vote for them until we get out of the destructive lunacy of the EU dictatorship – AND fire every one of the quislings, such as Pickles and Cameron, Ed Davey and Clegg, who have conspired with the EU to cause such appalling damage to our country.

    They truly are the scum of England.”

  23. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 February 10th, 2014 – 12:49

    “It would certainly explain the many doctors and nurses who cannot speak or understand English and whose patients suffer, often fatally from misdiagnosis.”

    Anne September 2004 I was moved far too soon from the High Dependency Unit back to the ward after an AAA operation, the foreign nurse in charge that night could not get the automatic morphine pump to work and so I was in great pain, when I begged her to get help, she all but accused me of racism.

  25. It was my appointment with the ‘hip’ people today, a lovely Indian gentleman counselled me to delay (because of existing conditions) as long as possible and he has booked me a new appointment for August.

    So I can still drive in the spring and early summer at least.

  26. David Ossitt
    February 10th, 2014 – 17:48
    Dear David,
    The way things are going, you would be well advised to practice with a stout pair of oars and a sturdy boat!

    Read your comments re the lions and giraffe. Yes, the fate of the poor giraffe is what those creatures deserve.

    The nurse sounds a monster, and playing the ‘race card’ is the cowardly ploy of true racists.

    Seriously, this damp weather isn’t brilliant for aching bones and muscles, so keep war,.

  28. For all the Romantics here on Coffee House Wall, here’s a Valentines Card for Euro Sweethearts poppet Cathy Ashton and Hunky Herman Rompuy Pompey…

  32. PfM.. Yes, but looking at my second post now, I see that the phrase “” thinks it’s a link and doesn’t appear, making my attempted explanation nonsense. Confusion reigns, caused chiefly by me!
    By the way, I hope pic links aren’t abusing the hospitality of your site, PfM?

  34. Revelations have emerged in the past few days that the flooding of the Somerset Levels has been deliberately engineered by the Environment Agency. When this sort of thing happens overseas, it is universally condemned – that fate of the marsh Arabs of Iraq, or the Stalins famine in the Ukraine.
    These, I know, are on a much bigger scale than the Somerset disaster. But the thinking behind them seems much the same.

  35. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 February 10th, 2014 – 18:02

    “Seriously, this damp weather isn’t brilliant for aching bones and muscles, so keep warm.”

    I refuse to compromise on keeping our house warm, nor on good food at our age we need to be warm and well fed.

  36. Frank Sutton February 10th, 2014 – 19:00

    “Revelations have emerged in the past few days that the flooding of the Somerset Levels has been deliberately engineered by the Environment Agency.”

    True.

    These were drained and cleared in the 15hundreds and have been successfully managed since.

    This is all to do with, EU interferes, the arty-farty save the birds and wildlife brigade, a decade of neglect and a totally useless Environment Agency and the jumped up Labour Peer with a face like a queer gargoyle who is supposed to be in charge.

    I have been a member of the RSPB for fifty years paying my subs each quarter up until the back-end of last year when I cancelled our membership, it is now corrupt, it even builds wind farms on it’s own bird sanctuaries and these windmills kill the birds.

  37. “We Are Brothers From A Different Mother’ “- How can Pickles use brotherhood as a metaphor for unity. Hasn’t he heard of the Millibands?

  38. A fellow blogger and admirer of Alexander Boot gave me the link (incidentally his post on Women Tennis Players is bold and spot on)>
    I have scrolled throgh you 37 posts and fail to see a thread or an aim.
    Is there one?

  40. Anne Wotana Kaye 1, February 10th, 2014 – 22:10

    Re: Bruvvers.

    Confession. I didn’t realise until a couple of days ago that trougher Pickles was a fully paid up card carry member of The First Church of Settled Science.

    One hopes all these people will get their comeuppance one day.

  42. EC
    February 11th, 2014 – 07:53
    Just looking at Pickles and Lord Smith gives me nightmares. Don’t know about Pickles, buy I am geeing my comeuppance!

  43. EC
    February 11th, 2014 – 07:53
    Just looking at Pickles and Lord Smith gives me nightmares. Don’t know about Pickles,
    but I am getting my comeuppance!

  45. Ivan Bunin’s speech delivered in Paris on 16 February, 1924

    “…Degenerate, moral idiot from birth, Lenin showed the world in the midst of his activities something monstrous, earth-shattering: he ruined the world’s greatest country and murdered several million people – and yet the world has gone so mad that it’s being argued in broad daylight whether or not he was the world’s saviour. Still on his blood-sodden throne, he’d walk on all fours; when English photographers were taking his picture, he kept sticking his tongue out: never mind, they are still arguing! Semashko [Lenin’s Health Commissar] stupidly let on in public that foul green liquid had been found in the skull of this new Nebuchadnezzar; as reported in the papers, in death he lay in his red coffin with an awful grimace on his grey-yellow face: never mind, they are still arguing! As to his comrades, they write black on white: ‘Dead is the new God, creator of a New World, Demiurge!’

    “…And if we bring it all together – the six-year realm of this mad, devious maniac, with his tongue sticking out, his red coffin, the fact that the Eiffel Tower’s radio mast is receiving news not just of his funeral but the entombment of a new Demiurge, that the City of St Peter has been renamed Leningrad, then one is gripped by a truly Biblical fear not just for Russia but also for Europe…

    “In due course God’s wrath will definitely fall upon it all – it has always been like that.”

  46. EC – 07:53 ‘The First Church of Settled Science’

    I am not sure that EP is a convert. I thought that he was filling in for a temporarily absent Environment Minister and found it a convenient line because it didn’t change Government Policy and was itself Government policy. So what could go wrong?

    I wouldn’t be surprised if he was embarrassed when he found out what a hash he has made. But then again, Government Ministers do excel themselves when it comes to anything that requires questioning Authority.

  48. I have no idea how Cameron thought that he could govern with so many incompetent people stuffed into every QUANGO and similar publicly funded committee! Just as an example, we have this article about the flooding:

    “In many ways, the affair has shown us the worst of Quango Britain. It is surely no coincidence that Lord Smith is a veteran Labour quangocrat who holds 11 different posts on public bodies.”

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2556412/Breathtaking-incompetence-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-says-people-run-Britain-never-touch-flood-debacle.html

    The whole article can be summed up by this statement:
    “It is not just that yet another quango has been found desperately wanting. At issue is the basic competence of the men and women who lead us, and their accountability when they fall short.”

  51. AWK1 11th, – 10:02

    “but I am getting my comeuppance!”

    Hope you have the bucket handy!

  53. Noa
    February 11th, 2014 – 10:57
    Very good news, but I am worried that Cameron and all the other do-gooders will want to send money and aid for the wounded survivors.

  57. Robert C 11:03 – “At issue is the basic competence of the men and women who lead us, and their accountability when they fall short.”

    They don’ “lead” us. They are incompetent parasites and they were never elected by the people to “lead” anything.

  58. AWK 11:25 – He doesn’t need any British taxpayers’ money, which is for the use of the British. If he feels that strongly, he can send his own money.

  60. Verity – 13:01 ‘basic competence required’
    Leadership should be encouraged everywhere. It isn’t about bossing people around. It is taking into account everyone’s concerns and taking the best course of action. It is a manager’s dream to manage a group of leaders because they keep everyone in the loop, including those above, below and outside the hierarchy.

    On occasion, I have managed some fantastic leaders. They supported me like I had power assisted steering, but they also questioned me without fail. It was very demanding, but very enjoyable.

    It looks as though many, in this instance, are incompetent parasites, but that is not what they were employed to be!

  65. Chris Smith – Register of Interests

    1: Directorships
    Non-executive Board Member, PPL (Phonographic Performance Ltd: Music Performers’ Rights Collecting Society)
    Non-executive Director, Zamyn (international cultural organisation; not-for-profit company, limited by guarantee)
    2: Remunerated employment, office, profession etc.
    Chairman, Environment Agency
    Chairman, Advertising Standards Authority
    Joint author of book “Suicide of the West”; royalties
    Chairman, Inmidtown Business Improvement District (Holborn, Bloomsbury, St Giles)
    5: Land and property
    A residential property in North-west Scotland
    10: Non-financial interests (c)
    Chairman, Wordsworth Trust
    Chairman, Donmar Warehouse Theatre
    Member, Advisory Council, London Symphony Orchestra
    Member, Strategy Board, Clore Leadership Programme
    Trustee, The Sixteen (the Harry Christophers Choir)
    10: Non-financial interests (d)
    Vice President, Christian Socialist Movement

  67. Melanie nails the whole ‘AGM’ scam with her latest blog post. Put on your wellies and go read it, please.

  68. Frank:

    Just came in from the pub and read it.

    Best piss-take ever. :o)

    Beats me how these people, who seem to live on a different planet, think that obscurantist garbage shite like this should be taken seriously by anyone. But they keep on getting away with it. And getting paid for it.

    I really meant Melanie was taking the piss, but of course the Stingo woman was too, only de haut en bas, as it were.

  69. Well – that’s it!

    Farage has declared that he agrees with Clegg that dangerous drug abuse and supply should be decriminalized! Fucking idiot! That leaves me with no one to vote for in either the European election or the general election. I resign from UKIP wef today.

  70. As a large proportion of Wallsters seem to experiencing the variety of ailments, minor and major, that are the concomitant of the audacious insistence of living past the allotted biblical three-score and ten, I offer this riveting essay by someone who has pushed his luck to the very limit and has survived to tell the tale.

    It is inspiring, touching and resonant with the parallel difficulties that pervade our own emergency services and treatment of coffin dodgers like myself and others of our cadre.

    Gerard Vanderleun, who himself had a near death-experience last year, linked the piece and I thank him for so doing:

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/06/on-breaking-ones-neck/?insrc=hpma

  73. Noa
    February 12th, 2014 – 10:35
    Disharmony in my home! My husband ardently has placed his hopes and faith in Farage. Moi? As usual cynical of any politician. My husband says that this issue on drugs is Farage’s personal opinion and not that of UKIP. I cannot separate the two, therefore as usual I shall not bother to vote.

  75. I have noticed of late that Nigel Farage is going out of his way to pander to the liberal elite. First, this will get him nowhere as they will do everything in their power to destroy him and his party. I have no doubt that UKIP is in the hands of some right on PR jokers who will take their money before selling them down the river. Nigel has to realise and never forget who his supporters are, they are the every day people of this land and they support him because he speaks their language, he says what they think, which is why the metropolitan scum are out to get him. I have had my doubts about farage of late, but I will still vote for him, if only as a sure fire way of giving the nomenklatura the two fingered salute.

  76. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 – 10:43
    “My husband says that this issue on drugs is Farage’s personal opinion and not that of UKIP.”
    For once, your husband is right! And Farage has not demanded a change in the Law. He has thrown “his weight behind Nick Clegg’s calls for a royal commission”. It is not UKIP policy as far as I know and there is quite a number within the party who disagree with it – one reason it is not UKIP policy!

    Also, do you think that slowing down UKIP’s advance will increase the likelihood that the drug laws will remain as they are? I think it is a battle that needs to be fought, but not while we have more important matters to defend.

    “I cannot separate the two, therefore as usual I shall not bother to vote.”
    I hope I have helped you separate the two.

    I think that, as people find they have less money, they will realise that everyone needs to be more aware of how expensive taking risks are or, more exactly, taking chances are, and actually do something about it!

  77. British criminal justice system at its best. Pity, the judge didn’t let the culprit off on the basis that it was really all the owner’s fault for if she didn’t own the house, didn’t possess the valuable items the young boy wouldn’t have had the chance to break in, steal the stuff.

    What TF is wrong with this country?

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2557531/Police-chief-blasts-judge-Lithuanian-immigrant-burglar-broke-mothers-home-stole-diamond-ring-necklaces-walks-free-court.html

  78. Robert C -“I think that, as people find they have less money …”.

    They already noticed this some years ago. If Farage is going to join the cabal of liberal spending money in pursuit of votes, he will fade from the scene very quickly. His voice was the lone voice and the view that represented the views of the majority of British voters. If he abandons this position, there is no reason for him to stick around. There are thousands of politicians, heads of quangoes and so on who have already colonised this position.

  79. Signed the Mail petition yesterday morning at which point the signatories were standing at 47thou. The figure is now 100thou and rising, but however high thr figure rises, if any one thinks the clowns of Westminster will take a blind bit of notice, then all I can say is that they are living in a fools paradise. It is often said that our rulers are out of touch. No. To be out of touch one has to have been in touch in the first place. These people are perfectly aware of public opinion on a wide range of issues, but they do not give a damn, their contempt for the ordinary folk who keep this country running and who pay the taxes is overweening. But there is an election just around the corner, and by God, are they in for a shock

  80. Verity – 13:03 ‘Farage’

    His voice is not the lone voice, as it once was.

    UKIP membership is increasing and more people are realising that the party is different to the others, so it makes it more likely that it will deliver something different! There is no guarantee, but there is a chance!

    Yes, people have already noticed that they have less money, but they still haven’t worked out that it is because the Government spends around 40% of GDP and then spends another 10%, which they borrow, for our grandchildren to repay.

    This Environment Agency saga will hopefully highlight how public money is wasted: I spent the taxpayers money on QUANGO executives, PFI in the NHS and Windmills, and the rest I just frittered away!

  81. RobertC @ 12:48

    The cost of fighting the ‘war on drugs’, everything thrown in, the Full Monty from surveillance through criminal proceedings to rehabilitation cost the taxpayer annually around £17bn, and no end of illegal drug abuse is in sight.

    The two better, less costly options are bleeding obvious, we either decriminalise most of the substances, tax the sale of them, or hang everyone who peddles the stuff, incarcerate users for years.

    Whatever the commission costing millions will come up with won’t differ much from other findings cum recommendations from the past. Waste of money, really.

  82. Frank P @ 01:03

    On the superb link to ‘breaking one’s neck’ only this (and thanks, Frank, for posting it): Considering what has been done to and for the guy, the cost doesn’t seem excessive, high yes, excessively so, no.

    The medical services can perform wonders when one’s in pieces, in lesser cases the care doesn’t work that well because it’s based on what works for the greatest number, but none of us is ‘an average’, we are each different. Baron reckons the next stage in this field will be genuinely tailor made care for each and every one of us.

  83. Baron – 13:19 ‘war on drugs’
    You are right, but neither will be currently accepted by the Public at large. One problem is that controlled at the national level, so any extra expense is not a problem – it just gets added to the National Debt!

    Once drug use is considered tolerable and then acceptable, there will be moves to punish anyone who discriminates against drug users. Look at how abortion and homosexual activities have moved towards being compulsory activities. It will also be more difficult to persuade the young to avoid without any discouraging signals. This is especially important as the young are less tolerant to drugs.

    The other point is that taxation will require some sort of quality control and that will mean the product will be undercut by those who cut corners, so there will still be illegal trading! The elimination of illegal trading is supposed to be one of the advantages of decriminalisation, but it will not occur, especially as new drugs are now being ‘designed’ and produced at an even greater rate without any concern about the ‘side effects’!

  84. Will someone please tell the rodent-featured Kay Burley of Sky News (the Krusty Squawk manque) that her Andy Capp headgear seems almost as inappropriate as most of her shitty commentary and more suited to her day job as a costermonger on her barrow in Berwick Street Market. If Rupe can no longer stretch to a Sou’Wester for his Anchors, then stay in the studio, where at least you won’t be in the way of the PBI.

  86. BBC in full global warming mode tonight. First Midlands Today then the one show. (Why do I watch this crap?)
    come on guys, look at the data. The river levels are falling. Shrewsbury has dropped a lot and its dropping slowly all the way down.
    and the Thames is dropping, even at Windsor.
    but ther was some nob saying this is global warming. BULLSHIT. Later in the year, go to Worcester, and walk down the riverside path from the bridge towards the cathedral. Fond the gate into the close -its about opposite the west end of the cathedral. On the wall they have engraved the high flood levels.with some very old very high ones. This isn’t a modern phenomenon -its been happening for centuries.
    (You cant go now -its flooded!)

  87. I have often argued that UKIP’s support is as much in spite of Farage as because of him. Nigel has been looking decidedly flaky this week, ignoring (and possibly ignorant of) the EU’s role in the Somerset floods – see recent blogs from The Slog and Richard North.
    Nevertheless, UKIP remains the only party speaking for causes that many people believe in, despite having little in the way of coherent policies on implementing them.
    So they will get many votes in May, including mine, unless something seismic occurs between now and then.

  88. Frank Sutton – I knew Nigel Farrage when I lived in Britain and he is assuredly unflaky and a very cool realist. UKIP will get votes because he is so canny, and such a strong co-believer in the average Brit’s outlook and thoughts. He’s one of us, and exceptionally clever and quick-thinking. He is also genuinely (intentionally) amusing, unlike Camomoron and those weird brothers.

  89. alexsandr, February 12th, 2014 – 20:18

    Sky News: A man interviewed in his home near the Thames yesterday said that the water level hadn’t reached the 1947 levels yet. His comments weren’t repeated like many others. Hysteria ad nauseam over “an impending climate apocalypse” is the order of the day. Oh how I long for the good old days when we had more life threatening matters to consider. eg. the prospect of imminent “global” thermonuclear war. Now that kept us all in our place – hiding under stairs wearing brown paper bags as radiation shields – as recommended by HM Govt. of the day.

  90. they had john kettley on chris evans show this morning. He re-iterated that you cant tie specific weather events to climate change (man made or just part of natural change) and said its just weather. Its winter -we get severe weather.

    Sounds like someone talks sense. But then he is freelance and not from the met office.

    Then they played ‘john kettley is a weatherman……’

  91. Don Birnam
    February 13th, 2014 – 08:27
    Unfortunately I must concur with your remarks. To make matters worse, it seems that a nation of wimps is being raised, and one fears for the future. Yesterday, on BBC News I saw children in a flooded area, and the head mistress of their school informed us that the little dears were crying as the noise of the wind so frightened them! I remember my World War II days when we ran outside, against strict school rules to watch the skies, either cheering or booing dependent on the aircraft overhead. Lord spare us from political correctness.

  92. Nigel Farage the other day: “I don’t know the truth to the extent the Environment Agency is now bound by European Union rules and laws, I just don’t know, which is why we need to have a public inquiry.”
    The strange case of the anti-EU MEP who was not only silent in the face of this open goal, but denied knowledge of its existence.
    He looks more flaky with each sodden day.

  93. Frank Sutton (14:40).

    I can but agree. Sad! The titfer was a dead giveaway, imho. The glass of beer and fag props were just clues. Sorry Verity we’ve been had – well almost anyway.

    Don’t de-criminalise drugs – criminalise Farage (for missing that open goal and courting the LibDem lobby on junk). Twat!

  95. Frank Sutton – 14:40 ‘the silent anti-EU MEP ?’

    Farage didn’t denied knowledge of its existence. He said he didn’t “know the truth to the extent the Environment Agency is now bound by European Union rules and laws” which is “which is why we need to have a public inquiry”.

    I expect most people are now resigned to the fact that the Eu (sic) has its tentacles everywhere, but he was saying that he didn’t know to what degree they affected what has happened.

    I have looked at some of the literature and it looks as though the Eu wording only gives guidance, including a range of options. This empowers those who wish to harm Britain because they can make their own choices, their own agenda, and not have to ask Government for policy. If the 2010 Government had cleared out the Labour Lovies and implemented a few general polices of their own, the flooding would have been drastically reduced.

    For example, to have an EA policy of “from today (2010), consult the locals, that is, any locals potentially affected and their MP’s, about all current policies, and any change in policy” would have brought what they have been doing to the attention of the public.

    But they didn’t! The MP’s should have been able to at least kick up a fuss, but it looks as though noone outside the EA knew anything!

    I think this group would have been able to influence policy:

    http://www.floodpreventionsociety.org.uk/fullreport.html

  96. Another excellent contribution from Lord Tebbit, highlighting the absurdities over the laws for different drugs as well as Parliament’s loss of power:

    “Even as the lobby to decriminalise the use of many addictive and harmful drugs in order to undermine the power of the criminal gangs who have grown rich on the drugs trade grows in strength, the anti-tobacco lobby is on the verge of getting some more unenforceable legislation to criminalise tobacco smokers.”

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100259489/parliament-has-lost-real-power-so-instead-it-dreams-up-unenforceable-regulations-about-smoking/

  97. Has anyone read and digested the Veteran Boot riposte to the ignorant Times article:

    “Moreover, the Swiss must follow the example of the Germans who cloyingly repent their recent past. The Swiss too must apologise and seek forgiveness for their own atrocities, quite on a par with the Holocaust.

    Are you ready for this? They “banned the building of new minarets and deported foreigners who have committed crimes.”

    We shouldn’t copy them but they ought to copy us. The number of mosques in Britain has grown from about 60 half a century ago to about 1,600 now,..”

  98. RobertC: ‘He said he didn’t “know the truth”…’
    But he’s an MEP, he’s made his name by highlighting the iniquities of the EU, he ought to know.
    Yet he is so muted on a subject that ought to earn Ukip widespread sympathy. Why?
    See Booker in the latest Speccie, and the EUReferendum blog for more insights.

  99. Frank Sutton – 21:08
    I do know that there have been various statements, from different people, stating that, as far as the Somerset Level’s flooding goes, “it wos the EU wot did it”!

    What no one knows, or rather what no one is telling, is just EXACTLY how much influence the EU has had and how much their benign rules have allowed the Environment Agency, and others, to work below the radar, as I explained in an earlier post. By using EU guidelines, but without any common sense, they have made a difficult situation much worse. As we, including Farage, do not know all the details, that is why Farage said he didn’t “know the truth to the extent the Environment Agency is now bound by European Union rules and laws” which is “which is why we need to have a public inquiry”.

    He wants the British Public, as well as himself, to know what has happened and to realise that returning the responsibility of flood management to local control will result in what we had before: something that works, and something that, as yet, cannot be wrestled from the EU!

  101. RobertC (00:7) [Bond’s the name – James Bond]

    Thanks for that excellent link. Richard North is keeping up the pressure and more power to his elbow. What troubles me greatly is that the MSM generally has not picked up on the EU involvement. Tonight on QT even the UKIP girl (who generally did very well and held her own notwithstanding the fact that she got into a muddle over Switzerland) did not appear to have been briefed on North’s assertions and nobody really raised the issue of EU directives relating to environmental issues. Then on This Week, Andrew Neil, who had ultimately commissioned the front page article in the Speccie by Chris Booker that was featured in North’s latest broadside, deliberately evaded addressing the Euro dimension to this scandal. Easier to take the piss out of the gargoylian Chris Smith and Pickles: both of whom are clearly fall guys, one expendable because his tenure runs out in a few months time and the other a music hall act at the best of times – and as somebody quipped, would be more use as a gigantic shitbag – sri – sandbag to stem some of the rivers in the Somerset Levels. There is clearly a concerted effort to cover up the real reason (other than the wet winter) for these localised disasters occurring. Christ, even Paul Daniels gets it! Just like that …

    No, that was Tommy Cooper, wasn’t it?. 🙂

  105. Well done UKIP on second place.

    I notice the torrent of poison from the mainstream media pouring on to UKIP and the campaign for Scottish independence.

    I keep thinking of that old Einstein quote about madness being doing the same thing and thinking it will work. This time.

    No, it won’t.

    So break the LibLabCon grip.

    The most insidious tools are not the smears but the Judases. The ‘let me be your friend’ Wormtongues.

    Step forward Danial Hannan (who today has a piece arguing for the legalisation of drugs) and Douglas Carswell, who have both been plastered all over The Shariagraph for the past month.

    The best insult I saw given to Hannan in the Comments (the one that was allowed anyway) was that he was a ‘Judas goat’, a very fitting description:

    ‘A Judas goat is a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse and in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and on to trucks.’

    http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/01/myrtle-judas-goat.html

    I cannot get over the irony that if Scottish independence comes about, then England is likely to be free of LibLabCon forever because it will mean the formation of new political parties.

    I cannot believe the English who, after years of justified complaints, still want the same old cesspit in Westminster.

    Your fate in your own hands.

    What’s not to like?

    The end of LibLabCon.

    Well, that’s a burden I’m sure everyone could bear with a smile on their face!

  106. And as is so often true in Labour heartlands, I see the postal voting fraud was again widespread.

    The postal votes were issued less than a week after the election was announced, so no need for a campaign to be heard out.

    Just pop it in the post, please, Mr Khan at number 20; and the 30 cousins on the electoral register who live at the same address.

    Best to vote now before they all go ‘on holiday’ to Pakistan.

  107. Frank P 01.06: The UKIP woman on QT hadn’t been briefed on Richard North’s investigations. Apparently there is no love lost between the Faragists and Dr North’s allies, so lack of briefing rather bears out the claim that UKIP is skewed by Nigel’s personal vendettas.

  109. Frank P and Frank Sutton, The Slog has been running an expose these past two weeks on the EU directives vis a vis flooding.

    http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/six-questions-the-somerset-flood-directive-dissemblers-cant-answer/

    Even then it’s a fug of facts to see clearly who has taken what position on the issue and so on.

    I have frequently heard that Farage runs UKIP around personal vendettas and that anyone of similar ability is not allowed to climb the ranks in UKIP.

    So I don’t buy into UKIP as a ‘second coming’.

    Notwithstanding that, UKIP remain the UK’s second best hope at present and I will vote for them.

    The first best hope is the one that has got them all pooping their pants in Westminster and the City of London (two heads of the same beast) – Scottish independence.

    If that goes through, the LibLabCon bullies have had it – and in one fell swoop.

    It is the most exciting prospect for UK and English politics I have seen in my lifetime.

    This one small act of federalism could save everyone.

    It’s like Lord of The Rings, stick the wretched Union ring in the furnace and LibLabSaroCon is dead.

    Forever.

    It shows the level of mainstream media brainwashing that many people can’t see that by the end of the year , power would have been – not restored – but certainly rebalanced towards the people on both sides of the border.

    I wouldn’t call it real democracy, not with all Labour’s postal vote fraud, but more than ever, power would be in the people’s hands.

    And if they’re dumb enough not to look forward to it, should it be handed to them on a plate anyway with independence going through, I can only hope they do the decent thing and give LibLabCon a damned good ballot box hiding so that we never have to see or hear from them ever again.

  110. Joany – 11:39 ‘Scotch’
    The problem with the Scottish referendum is that the details, like what currency Scotland should have, have not been worked out, whichleads to yet more BIG questions that need to be answered, and the world to get comfortable with them.

    For example, keeping the English Pound would require the BoE having control of interest rates in Scotland, in order to control what it is responsible for, so Scotland wouldn’t be an Independent Nation. It is not that it cannot be sorted. It is that unless it is sorted before the referendum, which is not likely, Scotland will be onto a looser.

    The Westminster Government would not survive the next General Election if they gave Scotland a generous deal and, meanwhile, the financial markets could easily extensively damage both Scotland and the rest of the UK! The problem is that it is not just what happens, it is the risk profile that will change and, usually, that requires a generous margin for it to work, and that will be too large for the rest of the UK to stomach.

  111. From the BBC:

    Labour has held on to its seat in the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election with a comfortable majority while UKIP beat the Tories to second place.

    Michael Kane won with 13,261 votes, beating UKIP’s John Bickley, with 4,301, in second.

    Rev Daniel Critchlow, for the Tories, came third on 3,479 votes, and Lib Dem Mary Di Mauro, came fourth on 1,176.

  113. I know the general level of postal vote fraud is bad but that is shocking.

    Absolutely shocking.

    That is as flagrantly rigged an election as you can get.

    10,000 out of 23,000 total.

    This is what the Powers That Be have been covering up and will continue to cover up.

    Again, the mainstream media’s silence tells you whose agenda they work for.

  114. The Liberals/Lib-Dems always had a reputation for political trickery;but they kept it legal.Now Labour is engaging in practices on an Irish-American-Democrate-Party scale.Some of their local activists (not of English heritage) have been found guilty of electoral fraud.This is the first time in memory this has happened on the Mainland.

    When a Labour seat falls vacant,Labour immediatly issues a writ for a by-election,even before any candidates are chosen.

    They send out teams to encourage people to sign up for postal votes and offer to help fill in the forms.They provide addressed envelopes;But the address is of a Trade Union office,so Labour know who is signed up.

    Postal votes are sent out well before the election;this is followed up by visits from activists offering to help fill in the forms and post them.

    Ukip has advertised in the local telling voters `don’t let anyone else help you fill in the form or post it for you`.

    They have also put-out a message in red `You wont lose your council house if you don’t vote Labour`.

    (The advert is reproduced in a recent Spectator item.)

    Bully-boys have also been going around threatening social housing tenants who display UKIP posters telling them :`The house doesn’t belong to you;it belongs to us`.

    In two recent by-elections most of the postal votes were in half-way through the campaign,and Labour won on the postal votes [ ? in Rotherham and Middlesbourgh ?].

    This in particular stops new parties getting out their message.Farage has written complaining of this to the electoral commission.

    There is also the phenomena of `one man,five votes`,if he has a wife and three daughters.

    Labour is also being helped by other groups going around Wythenshawe on their behalf;but apparently in a by election these don’t have to register and don’t have any restriction on the amount they spend.

    Clearly this system of postal votes by request has to be abolished.

  115. WYTHENSHAWE BY-ELECTION

    Turn-out 28-24%

    Total votes: 24,024

    VOTES:……..13,883 in person
    ………………..10,141 postal

    Labour……….13,261
    UKIP……………4,301 (18%)
    Con…………….3,479
    LibDem………..1,176 (lost deposit)

    LebDems lost their deposit for the 8th time in 15 by-elections.Previously they got 25%;and UKIP 3-5%

  116. Turn-out is very, very low though. We must wonder about the postal votes and see what can be done. (It is possible to access the electoral role and see where the large numbers of registered voters are – but that would need some funding). But it is also necessary to wonder how the vote can be got out in such situations. Could not another 4,000 UKIP voters be persuaded to vote?

  117. The problem is most people don’t engage with politics at all and are left just with what the MSM serves up.

    There has been the most relentless UKIP bashing in the Press, most of which is actually Lynton Crosby’s team feeding stories to a lobbying company to get the Tories’ fingerprints off the story and then these are fed by the lobbying company to the media, in particular the Daily Mail and BBC.

    The Shariagraph bans a lot of comments and commenters, and has the ‘good cop’ routine of Carswell and Hannan pretending to be the readers’ friends, while the bad cops on the reporting desk pile into UKIP.

    It is very much about propaganda.

    There’s the favourite of: if you don’t vote Tory, you’ll get Labour.

    I don’t think it fools as many people as it used to, but when you have a population smoking, drinking and on drugs (which Hannan now endorses), you end up with a very pliable electorate.

    I think the same is happening too with the Scottish independence. A lot of whooping propaganda about how the sky will fall from people’s heads if independence is won.

    But none of these countries that goes independent from whatever federal umbilical cord they are attached to ever wants to go back.

    To take things in stages, I would be happy for Labour to win the next general election and for the Conservative Party to dissolve and start over.

    I rather suspect that will happen anyway because they couldn’t even win an election last time round.

    UKIP or no UKIP, the Tories cannot win.

    I think that all that can be done about the postal vote fraud is what Farage is doing: send out leaflets telling people not to have ‘help’ filling them in and have posters to the same effect.

    That’s all people have sadly in a country so bent it might as well be Zimbabwe.

    The rule of law in England is a myth.

    The police and courts are now just political enforcers – that’s all.

    There’s no point in hoping for justice.

  118. Nasty, nasty piece by Tim Wigmore in The Shariagraph.

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timwigmore/100259647/wythenshawe-and-sale-east-ukip-needs-an-answer-to-the-ruthlessness-of-the-liblabcon/

    Lots of comments underneath referring to postal vote fraud.

    One poster put this link, which is interesting, because it’s Muslim versus Muslim and whaddya know, when a trick commonly associated with Muslim ‘commyoooonitees’ – as the MSM likes to debauch the word when an indigenous population has fled – means one Muslim loses out, suddenly it’s an open secret that postal vote fraud is rife!

    Where did this Mulsim get that insight from, I wonder?

    http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/court-hears-postal-voting-fraud-5070484

  119. A hopeful stat:

    UKIP’s results in by elections 2011-2012 averaged 7.9

    UKIP’s results in by elections 2013-2014 average 23.3

  120. There is much sneering and hopelessness too on that Wigmore link, a lot of UKIP needs this, UKIP needs that to challenge the status quo.

    And again and again and again, I see before me (perhaps because I live in the US and have a wider perspective) the effect of Scottish independence.

    It would mean that anyone who wants change – north or south of the border – would be pushing at an open door.

    That’s why Westminster is in panic mode.

    The one thing they really do fear is power in the hands of the people.

  121. Joany 14th, – 15:44

    “The one thing they really do fear is power in the hands of the people.”

    When you look at the cretins in the ex-mining communities around where I live, I fear it too!

  122. You have a point, Ostrich.

    I am unable to watch Benefits Street as it is broadcast as I am abroad, but I saw a long clip on YouTube the other day and what a cesspit the UK has been deliberately engineered into.

    ‘Greetings’ and ‘camaraderie’ on this street are defined by four packs of lager.

    A disgusting woman called White Dee (who has mixed race children) is the local matriarch and de facto commyoooniteee leader.

    Apparently she used to work for the council and got the sack for doing a Denis MacShane.

    And the biggest irony of all in the bit I saw, a black man telling another black man he didn’t belong in the UK and should go back to ‘the bush’.

    Channel 4 likes to do this a lot: Use the current affairs output to demonise people who tell the truth, and use the documentaries to sometimes tell the truth that dare not speak its name.

    Another example is My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

    Channel 4 knows what everyone thinks of gypsies and spends a great deal of time closing down debate on the subject in its news shows.

    And then it has a titter at the public’s expense by showing the public what they know to be true in My Big Fat Gypsy Weddding.

    Benefits Street – rather than being some form of groundbreaking journalism – is just another version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

    It may as well have been called My Big Fat Gypsy Benefits Cheque.

    It is Channel 4 rubbing, Andrew Neather style, the public’s nose in it.

    It’s tone is: ‘Yes, we know everyone, including the immigrants is sick of immigration’, and we’ll show it to you.

    ‘But if you think you’ll ever get free speech back on that subject, don’t worry, we’ve got Jon Snow and team working round the clock to smear you out of existence.

    ‘Thank you for watching, good night and xxxx off into the stinking Third World Britain Channel 4’s propaganda helped to create.’

    It’s the Andrew Neather television station: Rubbing people’s noses in it.

  123. I see Britain is about to garland 12 years a slave with a pile of Baftas this weekend.

    That it has taken £15m at the box office is testament to how duped the British are.

    They are literally paying for propaganda.

    Debbie Schlussel dares to point out a few home truths. Highlights below:

    http://www.debbieschlussel.com/66774/12-years-a-slave-racism-2013-and-my-beef-with-the-solomon-northup-movie/

    ‘Those who’ve looked into its historical accuracy say that this movie hews quite closely to the book of the same name, written by Solomon Northup, a free man from New York, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years.

    ‘However, the New York Times reports that many believe Northup embellished his story to tailor it to the former slave narrative from the time.

    ‘It also reports that Northup’s book appears to have actually been written (and story embellished) by a White abolitionist with an agenda.

    ‘We might have a hint of the movie’s own agenda when we note that one of the movie’s consultants is Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. (the man who accused the Cambridge police officer of being “raaaaacist!” for arresting him–and then they both had a beer with Obama, after he said the police “acted stupidly”).’
    …
    ‘When will we see the movies about the current state of racism: Black racism against White people which I feel quite often, living as a White minority in a Black suburb where I grew up? (Just last night, two Black women at a movie theater threatened to beat and kill me, with the Black and White managers laughing at the racially-motivated incident and threatening to lock me up in the theater.)

    ‘Where is the movie about murder for “Jogging While White” and assorted other racist crimes that occur every day in 2013 and don’t fit Hollywood’s preferred narrative on racism?

    ‘When are we going to see the movies about how Black America itself has introduced a culture whose music (hip-hop/rap) and lifestyle encourages many fatherless children born to many women–with many of those children growing up hopeless, involved in drugs, and likely to commit crimes, especially if they are male?’
    …
    ‘I hope this is the last of this kind of movie I’ll see. But I know it won’t be. As I said, America–particularly the minority “civil rights” community–loves victimhood. That’s what sells tickets. That’s America’s mentality today.

    ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme, you crackaz. I deserve it because, 150 years ago, a free man of my complexion was enslaved.

    ‘To me, that was the point of this movie. There can be no other.’

  124. Joany, in regard to your post about slavery, I was researching the Irish Traveller and Romany Gypsy communities in Britain today for a possible project I am working on and discovered that Cromwell and others had shipped Romany Gypsies to the West Indies as slaves, and that freed black slaves there kept white Gypsies as slaves. That is a story, together with those of the other white victims of slavery, which will not be told anytime soon. Armenian children were still being enslaved by Ottoman Turks in the 20th century before they decided to try and kill them all.

  125. Indeed I note that in 1641 when the Protestant party sought to impose its ideology on the King and State they complained…

    …the merchants have been left so naked to the violence of the Turkish pirates, that many great ships of value and thousands of His Majesty’s subjects have been taken by them, and do still remain in miserable slavery.

    Will a film be made about them?

  126. It is extraordinary because not only will no major Hollywood films ever be made about that kind of slavery, but also because this wretched narrative is so old.

    It has been going since Alex Hayley’s Roots in terms of mainstream visual fodder.

    There was Django Unchained last year, this year is 12 Years a Nonsense, The Butler, heaven knows how many Mandela films.

    12 Years A Slave is just the same narrative, this time only more brutal.

    On and on and on it goes. It’s just an anti-white propaganda trope and it seems designed by Hollywood’s moguls to drwon out the noise of what goes on in the real America where black on white violence goes unnoticed and unpunished.

    As far as Hollywood is concerned, whitey can go on paying the collective responsibility for a small part of slavery history hundreds of years ago – a collective guilt it would never dream of laying at the feet of any other type of person.

    Muslims share a collective set of beliefs, for which they must never be held to account, but if you’re white, it matters not whether your ancestors were slave masters or whether they were poor white victims of the feudal system and nothing but peasants: to Hollywood, you’re guilty.

    It’s just so blindingly, bludgeoningly obvious.

    It is a lie.

    A nasty, spiteful agenda-driven lie.

  127. What an unkind lot you CHWs are. Of course postal votes are needed if because of interbreeding you are blind, daft, crippled and unable to leave the house. :=)

  134. I.Q. Test: 2. Who are the chief characters in Sodom and Gomorrah? Lord Chris Smith, Baron Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman, Mark Oaten………

  135. stephen maybery
    February 15th, 2014 – 13:25
    Stephen, well said! 🙂
    or, in a less classical mode, Who is Tweedle Dum and who is Tweedle Dee?

  138. Whilst I’ll elieve it when I see it, it’s being reported (but obviously not on the MSM, th BBC or the DTP), that Denmark’s Agriculture and Food Ministry has announced that as of Monday the Muslim and Jewish traditional methods of animal slaughter will be banned in the country, this follows similar actions already in place in Poland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

    Agriculture and Food Minister Karen Hækkerup, has acknowledged that Muslims and Jews are upset by the new measures, but vows that the ministry will not change its policy.

    If they can do it, what justification can the boy David give for not doing it in the UK, nor Tony Abbott for not doing here?

  139. Bang on cue to coincide with the cultural canonisation of 12 Years A Slave, comes this story, and it’s oh so different to the Hollywood distortion:

    HEADLINE:

    Mob of teens film themselves attacking and robbing disabled vet while shouting ‘Knock that white boy out!’

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2559894/Mob-teens-film-attacking-robbing-disabled-vet-shouting-Knock-white-boy-out.html

    ‘Knock that white boy out’ – but in Hollywood, no one hears the scream.

    Remember the film.

    Remember the lie.

    12 Years A Slave.

    It’s not like blacks feel culturally privileged to go around the UK attacking and in some cases killing whites.

    Blacks are ‘oppressed’.

    Could have fooled me.

  142. Alexsandr 16:59. Would like to have responded to Maris’ comment, but still seem to be banned.

    No tax Maris – the little-sheet-heads organise inspections here in Oz and issue the Halal ‘certification’, paid for by the food suppliers (hence the public). This cash then passes to some Muslim front and the money disappears off to Allah-knows-where to continue the Jihad.

  143. Orla Guerin is the most horrible looking character on the BBC. I’ve named her “The Angel of Death”, and if her appearance isn’t enough, her awful voice really grates on one’s nerves. Alas, she has a counterpart in the Douche Bag, sorry, Lyse Doucet. This sickly creature, although reported to be from a different country, sounds very much like Guerin.

  144. Sylvan Contrast

    A cypress and a silver birch dancing back to back;
    Silver Birch in winter dress – lissome, lacy, purple-black.
    Conifer in evergreen:
    Never changing evergreen;
    Gloomy, glowering evergreen.

    Spring will bring the silver birch
    A new translucent sea-green gown.
    Shimmering, sparkling, loose and light;
    Flouncing, bouncing, bubbling, bright.
    Emerald leaves cascading down.

    No change for cousin conifer
    As dense and secretive as night.
    Brooding mien, dark evergreen;
    Huddled haunches tense and tight
    This guardian of the woodland scene.

    Yet … breeze, with sun and azure sky
    Can soon this fierce façade belie
    If viewed through less oblivious eye.

    Suddenly it prances, preens; displays a myriad of hues:
    Rustic reds and glorious greens;
    The weft and warp of of shot-silk blues;
    A neighbour silver birch might choose.

  145. GOOD NEWS.

    England is NOT an immigrant nation ;as we keep hearing claims that it is to justify the mass immigration of the past 50 years.

    The last major groups of incomers came here over a thousand years ago : and they came from areas within 500 miles of the centre of the North Sea.

    Take a map of northern Europe and turn it so West is at the top,and it becomes clear the `German Ocean`[as it was called] is our central sea.It is from its shores the invaders came and mixed with the Ancient Britons.

    There is in the news that a DNA world-wide admixture map has been created.This shows the DNA make-up of various groups;and the tests are able to show when the mixture occurred.

    The survey shows there is no mixture amongst the English inspite of historical evidence.This is because it is not detailed enough to show small differences between nearby groups.

    So proving the obvious fact that England ,as of The Coronation in 1953,was a homogeneous ;and mass immigration by those of West African origin,and the ex-empire of All India or from east of the Oder-Neissa line and a different thing to any thing in our previous history.

    Reports on this survey are in various papers and it can be found as below.

    http://www.admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com

  148. Radford NG, what you write cannot be repeated enough across social media.

    These are the arguments put forward by the Guardianistas: ‘England is unique. We are a nation of immigrants. We are a mongrel nation.’

    That is a bare-faced lie. Douglas Murray on the last census:

    “Amid all the endless celebration of diversity, the greatest irony remains that the one thing no one can bring themselves to celebrate is the thing that allowed everyone here to celebrate in the first place.

    “But why is it ignored? Is it accident, design, policy or cock-up? Even those of us inclined to cock-up theories of history might recognise that the direction in which the argument has jumped in recent years has a deeply malevolent edge. It brings to mind what Samuel P. Huntington said about “multiculturalism” — that policy made up on the hoof after mass immigration began. In his final work, Who Are We?, Huntington wrote, “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilisation . . . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”

    “Among the staging-posts which allow the argument to get to that end are some of the most intellectually dishonest arguments of our time. All were on display in reaction to the census. They include: “It’s nothing new.” This popular argument goes: “Britain has always been a melting pot of people of different races and backgrounds.”

    “Such statements are so selective as to be wholly disingenuous. Until the latter half of the last century, Britain had almost negligible levels of immigration. Unlike America, we were never in fact “a nation of immigrants”. And although there was often a trickle of people moving here, including Jews and Huguenots who overwhelmingly integrated into the culture, the simple scale was in a wholly separate league to the mass immigration we have seen in recent years. Roughly 50,000 Huguenots came to Britain after 1681. This was equal to a couple of months of immigration by the turn of the 21st century. The entire Ugandan Asian immigration into Britain in the early 1970s (caused by Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda) numbered around 30,000. This constituted six weeks’ worth of immigration by the late 1990s.

    “Yet despite these facts, one popular way to ignore the change in recent years has been to pretend that the history is different. Taxpayer-funded institutions, including schools, excel at this argument. It is a way to diminish the problem — most noticeably the problem of integration — by claiming that there is no problem, or at least no unique problem. It pretends that whatever our challenges, and whatever we are experiencing, it is just normal.

    “Other attempts to dissemble around the facts have been even more outrageous. Most disturbing are those implicit and explicit claims which respond to mass immigration by pretending either that the British do not have a culture, or that what culture and identity we have is so uniquely bad that it should not be mourned when it is destroyed.”

    http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4868/full

    This is thing. Once you destroy these arguments with raw numbers, there then comes the back-up cry: There is no such thing as British culture. Oh, and when the mask really slips: ‘You deserve it because of colonialism and slavery. How do you like it now?’

    Finally, they admit it’s about rubbing people’s noses in it.

    What they fail to account for is why English and British people should be held collectively responsible for colonialism and slavery.

    Even if it were so, when does this debt to the past end?

    I noticed that question put here in America – in a different historical context – when Obama was elected. The softly, softly answer from the black leaders now they had a black president? It never really ends.

    Ah ha. So there you go.

    Back to Britain.

    How is it that the Guardianistas can hold working class people collectively responsible for colonialism and slavery to the extent that they are now being wiped out in their own country – when with a little thing called, ahem, Islam, wherein there is written proof of collective responsibility in a written set of beliefs, they tell us there is no such thing as collective responsibility.

    These people lie.

    They lie, lie, lie.

    And twist and distort and change tack, so long as it suits them to wipe out the white race.

    I even heard Mary Beard say people who had not studied Islam could not criticise it.

    Islam and the prophet Mohammed don’t need to study other people before they criticise them and demand their own legal system and cultural privileges. Oh no. Islam can do what it damn well please, innit?

    This is a tactic I would encourage when dealing with the bien pensant (I’m trying to avoid the term the Left these days) across social media: Flush out their numbers lies, and then when they fly into a rage and tell you whites ‘deserve’ it, let’s see what they think to their hypocrisy on collective responsibility being deomolished.

    The truth is they start off from a handicap of knowing that – apart from the Angloshere – they believe in Africa for the Africans, India for the Indians and so on, so to rebut England for the English, they have to lie. And that’s why they use this ‘Britain is a mongrel nation, a nation of immigrants, always has been crud’.

    If you believe in the indigenes for other nations but not for the UK then you just lie from the off.

    We must expose their lies on whatever platform there is to hand.

    It’s not that we don’t have the truth on our side, it’s that the mainstream media just will not allow facts to be aired.

  150. Clear Memories, February 15th, 2014 – 22:06

    Re: “No tax Maris”

    “Zero” Dan is also a green belt eco-mentalist who I imagine has grown a beard for environmental reasons.

  153. EC 16th, – 10:27

    “Since when has the 1p coin been attracted to magnets?”

    Since it was changed to steel, covered with cupro-nickel plating, about 5 years ago.

    (The old ones were good for keeping algae down in the bird bath…these, less so.)

  154. RobertC 15th, – 16:59

    “I believe he is in transit and will arrive at his destination on Monday.”

    Somewhere in cyberspace, dematerialised into his constituent quarks and electrons, his immortal soul hoping against hope that tomorrow the transcription process completes without error?

  157. Ostrich (occasionally) 10:46

    Than you so much for that link: great background story, too. So glad he’s making the very best of his unique talent in ‘retirement’. The Job has always been replete with quirky characters whose hidden talents have been exploited pro bono public and gone largely unsung. He is a good example and it’s uplifting that he is now fulfilling his potential as a very taletented artist.

  159. Naughty niece in philosophical mood:

    Question 1:
    If you knew a woman who was pregnant,
    Who had 8 kids already,
    Three who were deaf,
    Two who were blind,
    One mentally retarded,
    And she had syphilis,
    Would you recommend that she undergo an abortion?

    Read the next question before looking at the response for this one.

    Question 2:

    It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts..
    Here are the facts about the three candidates.

    Candidate A:
    Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists.
    He’s had two mistresses.
    He also chain smokes
    And drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.

    Candidate B:
    He was kicked out of office twice,
    Sleeps until noon,
    Used opium in college
    And drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

    Candidate C:
    He is a decorated war hero,
    He’s a vegetarian,
    Doesn’t smoke,
    Drinks an occasional beer
    And never committed adultery.

    Which of these candidates would be your choice?

    Decide first … No peeking, and then scroll down for the response.

  160. Answers:

    Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
    Candidate B is Winston Churchill.
    Candidate C is Adolph Hitler.

    And, by the way, on your answer to the abortion question:

    If you said YES, you just killed Beethoven.

    Pretty interesting isn’t it?
    Makes a person think before judging someone.

    Remember:

    Amateurs … Built the ark.
    Professionals … Built the Titanic

  161. And this is her in less philosophical mood, but accurate, as ever:

    Gerry was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business.

    When he found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly father died, he decided he needed a wife with which to share his fortune.
    One evening at an investment meeting he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

    Her natural beauty took his breath away.

    “I may look like just an ordinary man,” he said to her, but in just a few years, my father will die, and I’ll inherit $200 million.”
    Impressed, the woman obtained his business card and three days later, she became his stepmother.

    Women are so much better at financial planning than men.

  162. Frank P 16th, – 14:07

    But…yer honour, de ‘Titanic’ was in perfect working order when she left Belfast!

  163. Joany ‘England is unique. We are a nation of immigrants. We are a mongrel nation.’
    Please read:
    Four Flags: The Indigenous People of Great Britain by Arthur Kemp.

    This documents genetic evidence proving that the vast majority of British people have ancestors going back 12,000 years when haplogroups R1b, I and R1a spread northwards. British people with the R1b1 DNA haplotypes have on average a 74 percent homogeneity, with the remainder coming from countries just across the sea.

  164. I am not a mongrel. I am researching my family quite extensively and thoroughly and have only one immigrant in mg tree. He makes me 3% French. The rest are all English and documented back to the 17th century. That reasonably means English back to the Conquest and earlier.

  167. Ah!

    Looky here!

    It’s a straw man pantomime argument that pretends there is division where there is none.

    Shariagraph headline:

    “David Cameron’s plans for EU referendum are ‘bad for the economy’, Mark Carney warns”

    Because there is now no political capital in telling the public you support the EU, that job has been outsourced to the third highest politician in the land: Mark Carney.

    The fact that he is not elected matters not one jot.

    His de facto political power is huge.

    He effectively holds political power without needing election.

    And above all, what is he doing here?

    He’s Canadian.

    He is here because he is a Bilderberger. The EU chimes exactly with the aims of the Bilderberg movement. Just ask Bilderberger Ken Clarke.

    Actually, don’t ask him, you’ll just get the usual disingenuous lies.

    Carney is the Bilderberger’s Man Who Can.

    He doesn’t need to rely on votes so he can sit in his tower and spew chicken-licken propaganda about the sky falling on people’s heads if Scotland leaves the Union and if Britain leaves the EU.

    Today’s headline is just a beautifully stage-managed pretend argument.

    If the Conservative Party (forget Dave, he’s just a shop window dummy put there by Heseltine and Clarke) was ever serious about leaving the EU it would have done so after 2010.

    Insteasd of which there was a load of disingenuous twaddle about why that pre-election idea couldn’t be done.

    It’s always jam tomorrow, you see.

    Funny that.

    Carney is the Bilderbergers’ man – when political argument has totally failed to persuade the public because it is such a bare-faced lie – and has been exposed as such over decades, Carney, the de facto politician can wade in and tell everyone: ‘There will be no economy if Scotland is independent. There will be no economy if Britain leaves the EU. And guess what? You can trust me. Oh, yes. I’m independent. I wasn’t elected.’

    The sleight of hand is so stunningly transparent and yet so few people see it.

    A Bilderberger, parachuted in to run a central bank of a country of which he is not even a citizen telling people he is putting forward independent ‘economic’ analysis (not political, oh no – ho, ho, ho) of why everyone needs to be hooked up to federal control – you, know, federal control, that thing the Bilderbergers exist for.

    The chutzpah!

  170. No, he was a tailor from the south of France and came over in the 1840s. His marriage certificate says his father was a gentleman. If I were an American I would invent a whole fictional history based on that one reference. He lived in London, married an English woman, had children who slowly changed their name from the French of Serieges to the English of Sanger. My grandfather on that side used to tell me that we were related to the famous Sanger Circus family, which would have been interesting. But manifestly we were not.

    He was my great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Serieges.

  171. Peter from Maidstone@February 16th, 2014 – 19:22

    I am mostly English too. My surname comes from the Devon/Somerset border but I cant ge back before my gt gt gt grandfather born in the late 18th century but cant find a christening record, and who married a girl who’s baptism record says was ‘base born’ and no father recorded. So that stops me getting back further 🙁
    other branches come from abingdon, swavesey, nr cambridge, Maldon and littlehampton, all gravitating to London in the 1870’s
    except for a set of gt gt grandparents who came to London between 1841 and 1851 from cork and married in st clement danes.

    one branch go back to Bristol in the 14th century, where a distant cousin became mayor, married his daughter into the Berkeley family (Berkeley castle) and fought at the battle of Nibley Green in Gloucestershire at the start of the wars of the roses!
    of course the Berkeleys were related to the Plantagenets, so would all wallsters tug their forelocks when replying to my posts.

  173. Much is made of the Huguenots to justify immigration,but they where uncongenial Calvinists and racialist xenophobes (after being badly persecuted in France).

    They were Calvinists and,after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685,most of them came not to England but joined the Dutch and went South where they became the Afrikanders (see:Mandella N.).

  174. The Huguenots are still here. They have a hospital in Rochester – actually an almshouse.
    Used to be in the east end but moved to rochester after WW2

  177. Tonight,9pm,BBC 4 ; Jonathan Meades :”Bunkers,Brutalism and Bloody-mindedness:Concrete Poetry”. [Rpt.Thur 12-40am]

  178. Peter from Maidstone@February 16th, 2014 – 20:25

    numbers is part of it, sure. but the inability to assimilate and to create ghettoes is the problem we have now.

  179. Today’s newspapers.

    Mad mullah of Tower Hamlets hires Legoland (Windsor) for halal fun day.`Express`[anti-demonstrators]/`Star`[pro moderate muslems].

    `Mail on Line`.Lord Chris Smith at Environment spent £30k+ sponsoring Gay Pride;and on `equali-tea` mugs and Gay Pride T shirts.

  180. Alexsandr I think numbers are always part of it. 50,000 Poles are an interesting addition to our population. 500,000 plus is a subversion of our population. Lack of integration makes it worse but numbers matter a great deal.

  181. It is noted that the BAFTA luvvies have done it again and invited us to yet another shit-eating banquet. You wicked slave owners out there – don’t you feel ashamed?

  182. Peter (16:26)

    There’s seems little doubt that we are indeed related, at least indirectly, as not only did my paternal line emanate from the same group as yours over the decades and centuries, they followed the same geographical routes as yours on reaching England. You can imagine what would have happened to me had my forebears not fled persecution. It’s one of the reasons I’m not too keen on the frogs that did it to my forebears. And it’s why I resent our own traitorous politicians ceding UK sovereignty to the bad bastards.

    But my maternal genes seem to have otherwise prevailed anyway, which are firmly grounded in East Anglia for several generations. But I cough to being a bit of a mongrel anyway; some Irish and Welsh swilling around in the dodgy genes from way back. And my haematologist tells me there’s some kosher in there too, somewhere. Not sure whether the Salmon’s on my Ma’s side were Scottish. Norfolk or Jewish, way, way back. But surely we all emanate from 5 black women originally, according to the geneticists? So we’ve all got a touch of the tar brush whether we like it or not. 🙂 It’ll all be sorted down at the crematorium eventually, so don’ worry – be ‘appy marn. And don’ stop de Carnival!

    Just one last thing. Don’t go to see the slave film. It’s as flaky as fuck and who didn’t know it was gonna win? Wouldn’t it have been great if Tom Hanks had pulled it instead. ‘Fraid justice no longer prevails – if indeed it ever did 🙂

    Nighty night.

  183. Radford NG (20:26)

    Thanks – I missed it tonight but I’ll definitely be there for the repeat on Thursday. Wouldn’t swap a Meade masterpiece for an extra decade. He’s a true genius.

  184. Radford NG

    Chris Smith should get nicked for misappropriation of taxpayers money; crony communism at its worst. Does EA stand for Environment Agency or Enlarged Arseholes?

    I’d better go to bed – the dizzy junk has just kicked in.

  186. The inset pictures of the 01:38 post are of course, two leading officials of the Ugly Club. The one on the left looks as though her face caught afire and somebody tried to put it out with a shovel. [Apologies to Les Dawson].

  187. Frank P February 17th, 2014 – 00:54
    “Just one last thing. Don’t go to see the slave film. It’s as flaky as fuck and who didn’t know it was gonna win?”

    The Baftas started with a black woman singer (a beautiful voice) plus the now compulsory black man ‘rapping’ what an apology for singing.

    This signalled to me that the Twelve Years a Slave would win best film and best leading actor.

    I thought the whole show was very third rate.

  188. David Ossitt (11:12)

    Concur. Serves us right for watching it I ‘spose. Could have been doing something useful.

    Anyway let’s cheer ourselves up with my NN’s latest – I was going to wait until Peter put up the new page, but here we go:

    Understanding Engineers

    Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, “Where did you get such a great bike?”

    The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business,when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, “Take what you want.”

    The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, “Good choice: The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you anyway.”

    Understanding Engineers #2

    To the optimist, the glass is half-full.
    To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.
    To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

    Understanding Engineers #3

    A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

    The engineer fumed, “What’s with those guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!”

    The doctor chimed in, “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen such inept golf!”

    The priest said, “Here comes the greens-keeper. Let’s have a word with him.” He said, “Hello George, What’s wrong with that group ahead
    of us? They’re rather slow, aren’t they?”

    The greens-keeper replied, “Oh, yes. That’s a group of blind firemen. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime!.”

    The group fell silent for a moment. The priest said, “That’s so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.”

    The doctor said, “Good idea. I’m going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there’s anything she can do for them.”

    The engineer said, “Why can’t they play at night?”

    Understanding Engineers #4

    What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
    Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.

    Understanding Engineers #5

    The graduate with a science degree asks, “Why does it work?”
    The graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?”
    The graduate with an accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?”
    The graduate with an arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

    Understanding Engineers #6

    Three engineering students were gathered together discussing who must have designed the human body.

    One said, “It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints.”

    Another said, “No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections.”

    The last one said, “No, actually it had to have been a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?”

    Understanding Engineers #7

    Normal people believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
    Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.*

    Understanding Engineers #8

    An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess.”

    He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn back into a beautiful princess and stay with you for one week.”

    The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you for one week and do anything you want.”

    Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

    Finally, the frog asked, “What is the matter? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful princess and that I’ll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?”

    The engineer said, “Look, I’m an engineer. I don’t have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog – now that’s cool.”

    And Finally Two Engineers…

    Two engineers were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking at its top. A woman walked by and asked what they were doing.

    “We’re supposed to find the height of this flagpole,” said Sven, “but we don’t have a ladder.”

    The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a couple of bolts, and laid the pole down on the ground. Then she took a tape measure from her pocketbook, took a measurement, announced, “Twenty one feet, six inches,” and walked away.

    One engineer shook his head and laughed, “A lot of good that does us. We ask for the height and she gives us length.”

    Both engineers have since quit their engineering jobs and are currently serving in the United States Congress.

    [Couple of old ones there, but some are fresh off the production line, as far as I’m concerned].

  189. David Ossitt 17th, – 11:12

    🙂

    I do hope the Duke of Cambridge gets over his celebrity obsession soon; he and his family can only be diminished by association with that shower.

  192. Peter from Maidstone
    February 17th, 2014 – 11:25
    Peter, you deserve some time out with your wife, so enjoy yourselves! 🙂

  195. ACP at 11-37 via TARDIS net work from 2010.

    `Closet`[N.American]:walk-in cupboard.My old aunt would have called it `the Glory Hole`.This seems to have other implications,now,in certain quarters.

    In Britain;tends to mean `water closet.

    As:-Churchill[attrib];”General De Gaulle walked in on me with-out knocking.He must have known it was my room as my initials were on the door”.

    `In/out of the closet`became part of American `gay`slang,and spread to a generalized term.

  197. Lavatory and toilet are euphemism for water closet. They really mean having a wash.
    There again you go to the UK, find a bathroom and struggle to find a bath.
    but crapper I am unsure about. Thomas Crapper invented the syphonic flush that we all have in our WC today. but the word ‘crap’ predates him. maybe he became a plumber because of his name.

    I am going to get a reputation for knowing useless stuff….

  200. ACP,

    An ideal present for your favourite Spectatoid ?
    Second thoughts, your gonna need more than one…

    pic.twitter.com/PLQWb3rE58

  201. Just watched s flood victim talking to a reporter from Sky. His voice was an echo of John Arlot. Brought tears to my eyes in fond remembrance. Stoical, measured and articulate – nice to know there are still some real Englishmen around.

  202. Alexsandr, re earlier conversation. I am in Rochester today and have walked past the French Hospital, am having a baguette in the Cathedral tearoom and will pop in the Cathedral to pay my respects before heading hone.

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