The Coffee House Wall – 15th/21st February

Posted on February 15, 2016

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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370 thoughts on “The Coffee House Wall – 15th/21st February”

  2. Thank you Peter.

    EC – 11:05
    “What, I wonder, is the UN’s definition of “children” in that regard?

    For murderers, there is no age limit! 🙂

  4. Whilst you’re waiting to get permission to enter the sacred site, Frank, you can amuse yourself with what his ‘friends’ have to say about him. What you make of it then?

    http://jackcullen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/alexander-boot-is-just-another-sad.html

    Btw, have you got any thoughts about the omni-one banning bloggers? Is it because what he says stands, no argument, no challenge, no nothing?

    It’s weird to say the least, on the one hand, he bangs on about censorship in Putin’s Russia, the inability of the Russian peasant to respond to the officialdom, to have a voice, no opposition to the one who rules, and whatever, on the other hand, he himself bans anyone who may want to confront him.

  6. Our esteemed Foreign Office Secretary, the brainless one, is at it again telling the KGB Colonel to stop carpet bombing ‘Syrian civilians and moderate fighters’, but for some reason he omits to tell the Saudi henchmen to stop doing the same in Yemen.

    Shouldn’t someone remind him about the omission? Pass to him the copy of today’s NY Times may do it provided he can read, no?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/world/middleeast/new-report-of-us-made-cluster-bomb-use-by-saudis-in-yemen.html?_r=0

  7. Malfleur @ 15:59

    Often it’s the off the cuff remark that cuts it, Malfleur, and the one that summed up the state of the US electorate was Mitt Romney’s 2012 quip “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president (Obama) no matter …’.

    Since then there must have been few more percentages added to the 47 whatever Savage says, the good life has corrupted the original American character, destroyed the pioneering spirit, suppressed the hunger to succeed. Instead, the majority of the contemporary American unwashed want to share wealth (rather than create it). A generation or so ago, Bernie would get a look in, today, the young don’t have enough of his ‘everything for everyone’ rhetoric.

    Baron was sent a picture poster from a friend of his who lives in the Republic. It shows the pictures of Hilary and Bernie with the captions ‘bullshit’ under hers and ‘free shit’ under his. About right, no?

  8. Baron, no one is obliged to have to manage comments on their blog. Your free speech is not impeded. You can say what you want here or start your own blog. There is an administrative overhead in having comments and not everyone wants to have to handle that.

  9. Frank P – previous wall

    Looks like the FSB have finally nobbled Mr Boot?

    Baron,

    Mr. Boot disabling comments on his blog posts is a very sensible move, and is not the same as banning bloggers. Look at the harassment that befell Melanie Phillips, many years ago now, before she joined the Spectator!

  12. Peter from Maidstone @ 16:43

    Good point, Peter, but the poorly educated Slav isn’t convinced Mr. Boot bans postings because of an administrative charge.

    More to the point, on your definition of freedom the Russians are as free as we are. The official newspapers, the mouthpiece of Kremlin, won’t publish attacks on Putin, but the Russians can say what they want in private, and do, and they also have outlets that don’t toe the Kremlin line, publish attacks on Putin and the government e.g. the New Gazette, the independent Gazette, the TV Rain … why then is he ranting there’s censorship in Russia?

  13. anne wotana kaye
    February 15th, 2016 – 17:03
    Mental health: ‘One in four adults in England has a condition’ BBC WEB
    Perhaps I should, after all, vote for remaining in the EU. Everything in me rejects with horror, and indeed nausea of uniting with such countries, but it may be necessary. According to Dave’s minions, one in four adults has a mental condition. Whether the government is directly responsible for this sad state of affairs, is neither here nor there. However to enable this country to function, perhaps we should allow smart, shrewd opportunists, healthy in mind and body to breed and create a stronger race. The prosaic the better, out and out opportunists, they won’t be concerned with becoming depressed ‘at the state of the union’. If we are lucky, they may even have enough common sense and even intelligence to make sure that imbeciles and traitors like Dave, Corbyn and the foul Philip Hammond will never take hold of the reigns of power.

  14. EC @ 17:04

    Listen up, EC, the poorly educated Slav may say he’s poorly educated, but even he can spot the great Mark barking’s wrong here.

    To start with, his take on the demographics assumes the starting 10% will continue to have a 4 birthrates per couple, the evidence for it doesn’t exist, just to the contrary, second generations of immigrants have much lower birth rate, the south going trend continues with the third and further generations.

    Second, it assumes that the 1.87 rate per couple for the indigenous unwashed will also continue. Why? There’s nothing that would support that view, in fact Baron would suggest to you that we’re going to witness a reversal of the trend as people are beginning to appreciate children can make them happier than bigger cars, houses or more frequent holidays.

    Thirdly, his example unduly favours the higher rate population with the 4 kids per couple, it isn’t as high as that throughout the cluster of the newcomers.

    And fourthly, even if it were exactly as he says, no changes anywhere, it would still mean that in 50 years the indigenous would be in majority (assuming the death rate for both were equal). And 50 years, half a century is a long time not only for politics but for demographics, too.

    Baron has seen many an analysis based on the presumption of ‘the trend is your friend’. Unfortunately, in real life trends do end, reverse, often for reasons nobody can even think of when the trend’s on.

  15. anne wotana kaye @ 17:45

    That’s putting more than one cat amongst the pigeons, anne.

    What do the wallsters think?

  16. EC

    Alex tells me (by email) that his blog has been hacked and put out of action.
    Not surprising, considering the Broadside from the Sodomy Society. Must say I’m surprised that Baron would salivate over the vitriol contained in the Cullen (who he?) piece linked by Baron.

    I know Baron is not best pleased with Mr Boot’s essays on Vlad’s kleptocracy; but jumping to the aid of the Buggery Brigade is a bit OTT. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Whoa.

  19. The Crosstalk on RT today before 17.00 hours, the subject something close to ‘can the MSM be believed’, Baron got to watch only the closing 15 minutes or so, surprisingly the guy who runs it, Peter something or other, didn’t talk as much as he did when the barbarian watched the programme before.

    Still, all the participants expressed broadly the view that the shenanigans of the world powers today are similar to what was going on in 1914, the diplomats and politicians tell lies, the MSM print them, the politicians in turn believe the lies, act upon them until it’s too late, a war is inevitable as politicians in no country want to lose face.

    The analogy with 1914 is false on at least two counts:

    In 1914, the opposing sides were roughly equal in power, not one of the nations involved was a hegemony, arguably Britain may have claimed the number one slot due to her naval superiority, but overall it was a fight of equal parties.

    Today, the Americans are by far bigger that Russia what with their gross GDP ten times that of Russia, the power gap of the allegiances under the control of either is even greater. (China keeps wisely out of it, the best thing that can happened to the Mandarin speakers is the two cocky powers hit each other, Russia gets mortally wounded, the Republic weakens even more, China steps in, grabs it all).

    The other difference is in that the 1914 war was fought over the territories of the warring powers. Today, the two antagonists are facing each in the ME outside their own lands. Whether that happened by design is arguable, but it’s significant in that the civil populations of either of the hegemonic power, the Republic, or her challenger, Russia, will not suffer directly the pains of a bloody war.

    The other ‘significant’ difference between then and now of course is that the leader of the world superpower today is the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize. Reassuring that, don’t you think?

  20. Frank P @ 17:55

    The barbarian was trying his best to access Mr. Boot’s blog, kept failing, then googling again he spotted the link, clicked on it, thought it would be fun to tease you with it. In no way does the barbarian backs what they say.

    In point of fact, if Mr. Boot’s blog were to be closed by the powers over us, the barbarian was going to suggest we mount a demonstration in his, Mr. Boot’s, support. Baron doesn’t agree with him often, but would hate to see him being shut up.

  23. RobertRetyred @ 18:00

    Sad this, Robert, very sad, and the barbarian means it.

    Our enemy isn’t the immigrants, we may not like them coming here, but hurting them is wrong. The enemy is the political class, the progressive manipulators who allowed them to come.

    They are the ones we have fight, it was they who created the legal conditions for the tsunamis of immigrants to flood the land of ours in numbers that unsettle, create tension, brawls and as it happened here, death.

    Hitting the immigrants, many but certainly some would have genuinely suffered, is exactly what the politicians want, they can step in now, adjudicate, hit both the attackers and the immigrants, (probably more the locals), even though they should hit themselves for creating this mess in the first place.

    The only tool we have to put a stop to it is avoid voting for the progressives, and get out of the EU.

  24. Alexsandr @ 18:39

    Is this a smart move. Alexandr?

    If Baron could he would invite every American politician including the younger Bush to come, urge our unwashed to vote to remain in the EU. The barbarian reckons the blatant interference would turn the unwashed to vote out, they, the American politicians don’t live here, we do.

    Forgetting any argument for or against, just think how happy have been the years of our being a part of the EU construct?

    Now, what makes anyone think the future years will be any happier if we stay in?

    And here you have it, we DO NOT FIT IN.

  25. Still no word from Ostrich & Ossitt. Hmmnn! …

    Three more of my peers have popped their clogs in the last seven days. The queue ahead of me in the Reaper’s Waiting Room is thinning out a bit, despite my ruse at excusing myself and going for a pee occasionally, then insinuating myself a coupla places behind. 🙂

  27. Baron – 17:48

    His maths is correct, and his assumptions are just as valid anything else you might have read as in 2016 the ideological mindset of the new subjects does not fit the old paradigm. When comes down Mark vs the bien pensant, I’ll take Mark every time.

  28. Baron – 18:39

    The new sadness is that they are continuing their culture here. The old sadness has been continuing for 1400 years, yet few bother to acknowledge that the pen is mightier than the sword in perpetuating the sadness.

  29. EC @ 20:42

    OK, OK, EC, the barbarian would be the last one to force you (or anyone else) to think what he does. Only time will tell who’s right, sadly, time is something Baron hasn’t got, 50 years is alot, and although he intends to live for ever (so far so good), He may have other plans.

  31. Radford NG

    “”We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled” (h/t Drudge,h/t Zero Hedge)

  32. Baron – 23:03

    Why not a gun or, as was found in Lyon recently, a rocket launcher!

    But the most effective is to demand not to be offended!

  35. RobertRetyred @ 23:13

    Quite right, Robert, it has been their most effective weapon largely because it’s they who decide who and what offends, and it seems there’s no limit to it.

    When the totalitarian communist creed first captured power its proponents had a slogan ‘he who isn’t with us is against us’. Later on it morphed into ‘he who isn’t against us is with us’. It seems the worshippers of Allah may exhibit a similar attitude, only in reverse.

  36. Schadenfreude:

    I witnessed the Stephen Fry train wreck at the Baftas last night, and it was wondeful.

    http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/15/stephen-fry-deletes-twitter-account-after-baftas-bag-lady-offence

    The lefty luvvie inadvertently failed to live up to the standards he would have no hesitation in holding others to account for. Just one ill considered quip and the PC brigade skewered him for it. Bwahahahahaha!

    Karma: Serves him right for the virtue signalling anti Trump joke, and the 3 hours of quite egregious “celebrity” brown nosing!

    Only Fry could then go on to make himself appear the victim. What a hypocrite!

  39. The Noddy Doctrine:

    Defend and Restore Ukrainian Sovereignty

    Reject and work to reverse Russia’s annexation of Crimea, help Kiev uphold Ukrainian control over Eastern Ukraine, and establish a long-term strategy to allow the Ukrainian people to fulfill their European aspirations.
    Provide Kiev with lethal military assistance and increased training and intelligence sharing.
    Expand sanctions on Russian entities, such as major state-owned corporations and their senior leadership, and impose additional visa bans and asset freezes against high-level Russian officials.
    Help Ukraine’s leaders modernize their economy to safeguard independence from Moscow.
    Cease diplomatic engagement with Moscow on issues not related to resolving the Ukraine crisis.
    Protect Europe from Further Russian Aggression

    Boost the capacity of our NATO allies by storing additional heavy weapons and vehicles in Central and Eastern Europe and permanently stationing U.S. troops in the region.
    Provide additional military training and assistance to non-NATO frontline states such as Georgia and Moldova.
    Revamp NATO strategy, updating military planning to defend the Baltic, updating its nuclear deterrence doctrine to respond to Russian nuclear threats, and ensuring open membership for all countries that meet the conditions with no Russian veto.
    Lift restrictions on U.S. energy exports, to blunt Russia’s attempts to use trade and energy dependence as a weapon.
    Reclaim Leadership on Syria

    Make clear that there will be no U.S.-Russia cooperation in the fight against ISIL until Russia brokers the departure of Bashar al-Assad from power.
    Reassure U.S. allies and partners in the region that the United States will recommit to working with them to destroy ISIL through more frequent and accurate airstrikes, the deployment of U.S. Special Forces, and additional intelligence sharing…etc.

    Signed: I.M.A. Noddy

  41. Malfleur @ 23:37

    What’s this, Malfleur, it sounds more like McCain’s idea of the world, who’s Noddy anyway?

    As far as Ukraine goes, two weeks ago, it was the Minister for the Economy of the Kiev’s government who resigned (four others top government officials also tabled resignations, the Rada refused to accept them), today (Monday, Feb 15) it’s the deputy General Prosecutor who’s going, too. Both said the same, the corruption is just unbearable, they couldn’t do anything about it. The Russian and Ukrainian paper are full of his criticism of the corrupt officials including the Prosecutor General.

    It is an open secret in Kiev that Poroshenko was asked both by Mutti and the American Ambassador to Ukraine to sack the Prosecutor General, a friend of his (also a man who knows everything about how Poroshenko acquired his billions).

    Poroshenko’s smart, he knows if he (Poroshenko) goes, there’ll be presidential election, the country is as unlikely to elect a stooge of the Americans, more likely it will be someone who will forge closer relations with Russia without upsetting the Americans. That makes it hard if not impossible for Pyatt, the US Ambassador in Kiev who pulls all the strings, to get rid of him, Baron reckons.

  42. Malfleur @ 23:30

    The videos are unbelievable, Malfleur, in that the blonds, both of them, are saying Rubio made a prediction two weeks before i.e. well after the Russian campaign in Syria began that the Russians will pummel every anti-Assad group.

    What prediction is that when from the very start of the Russian campaign both Lavrov and Putin have said repeatedly that everyone fighting Assad forces is a target. Everyone can make predictions like that.

    The fighting isn’t over yet, and as Baron said before the Americans may well go in the Full Monty either themselves or using their regional proxies. What the Russians will do if that were to happen, that is the question. Perhaps Rubio will make a prediction.

  44. Hey! Baron! I think John Kerry is getting a little emotive here, isn’t he?

    “Kerry warned that the mass influx of refugees and other migrants into Europe spells a “near existential threat” to the continent.”

    After all, it’s only a NEAR existential threat, so keep calm and carry on John.

    And anyway, that’s the plan isn’t it? Or is it to eliminate the blue quail?

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-15/months-after-welcoming-100000-refugees-us-john-kerry-warns-migrants-pose-existential

  47. Malfleur @ 00:28

    First, you score with Noddy, then you get witty with the poorly educated Slav, Malfleur, and all that within 24 hours, the barbarian will have to get more alert to prevent loosing as Newcastle did when Liverpool came over last weekend.

    So Kerry’s trying to be compassionate with the Europeans now? Hmmm, it was the American neocons who started the whole thing, there was never a need to incite the religious zealots in Syria, the country may have been run by a dictator, but by the ME standards the man behaved reasonably, you’ve seen the pictures from the DM, read the piece, all faiths co-existed ….

  48. The Bush borgata gangs up on Trump.
    Hannity used to launch the counter attack – Big Brother Dubya holding Jeb’s hand (and boy, did ‘Bush Forty Five’ need it). Hope the gullible US electorate doesn’t swallow the ploy. He

    Jeb reminds me of the school playground. “If you call me names, I’ll tell my Mom and she’ll tell my big brother to sort you out.”

    Weak, weak, weak! One weak to go!
    Go Trump.

    Hannity should be ashamed: nary a nasty question. A Bushfest.

  49. EC Feb 15th 17.06:

    On the subject of troll behaviour.

    At the end of last year I was in correspondence with someone at the Other Place about the mass upvoting & downvoting of sockpuppets. Recently I’ve noticed that the usual names are still there, but the thread manipulation seems to have ceased.

    Note, the insulting, sneering pro-Eu, pro-migration tagging troll stable hasn’t been banned, but its more obnoxious & obvious manipulations have stopped.

    This tells me that the troll may come from a source which is, let us say, ‘close to’ the Spectator, & has been quietly advised to moderate its behaviour.

  50. Damaris Tighe – 11:41

    Or it could be because they know they have lost!

    Why bother negotiating a deal that cannot be enforced?

    David Cameron told EU deal cannot be legally-binding as he holds last-ditch Brussels talks – live
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12159067/David-Cameron-in-last-ditch-EU-referendum-talks-to-secure-deal-before-Friday-live.html

    We, Hannan, most UKIP members and quite a few Tories have known this for many years.

  51. Frank P – 11:30

    Why We Lose: Stacked Audience Turns GOP Debate Into National Clown Show
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/15/why-we-lose-stacked-audience-turns-gop-debate-into-national-clown-show

    It does look like Trump will be most effective in destroying the current political dysfunctionality in the USA. It is not that he is getting much better in absolute terms, but in relative terms he is pulling ahead without much effort! 🙂

    Better Trump, and risk success, than plan for risk free failure.

  52. From 4th February – how did I miss this?

    Some very relevant analysis and commentary from Ezra Levant at Rebel Media

    “Germany: Now Merkel says Muslims have to leave “after wars end.” ”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pnANQl4WJw

    Makes me ponder what opacity used the “Rosy Coloured Spectacles” brigade… and how they ever imagined that Mutti’s attempt to integrate millions of sharia compliant, uneducated, unskilled fuckers(*) into the secular petit bourgeois society of the Deutsche Wirtschaftswunder was ever going to end well?

    (*) I use that word the the demographic sense of the word, Baron. 😉

  54. Austin Barry update:

    Just checked, and until seven days ago the maestro was actively commenting on the Guido Fawkes and Breitbart News blogs.

  56. Cameron chickens out.
    He was today to have met the leaders of all the Political groups in the EU parliament;this was put on the schedules.
    Cameron cancelled this to avoid meeting Farage and Marine LePenn;meeting only with pro EU leaders.

  57. “His [Orban’s] comments were backed up by other leaders present at the conference. Slovak prime minister Robert Fico expressed his distaste at Germany attempting to use the European Union to force less cooperative member states into adopting their migrant policies, remarking: “Germany has made ​​a mistake with this welcoming policy and now wants to force others to pay for it”.

    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/02/16/orban-at-conservative-european-nations-conference-refugees-are-a-hoard-of-evil/

  59. Frank P @ 11:30

    What pleases, Frank, is that Donald never takes anything back. Often, he may overstep the mark, well, for Baron’s tastes anyway, but he stays unrepentant, if anything piles it up even more. His manner of talking seems unrefined, he repeats things, stumbles over words, in other word, talks as most of us do, and people seem to like ti.

    Baron hopes to be proven wrong, but if had a choice, he would still prefer Cruz in the White House.

  60. EC @ 12:51

    According to the German equivalent of our CBI the country requires currently some 350,000 additional able hands to keep the economy going, the million plus who have arrived are too many, some will indeed be denied the right to stay in the country indefinitely, there will be an attempt to ship them back when conditions back in the ME (Syria) allow for it.

    What Ezra doesn’t mention is that almost as the waves of refugees were arriving, major German corporations have sent scouts to weed our those who could be trained to join them, even set up teams handing the ‘new recruits’ (some large Czech companies did the same, many dropped the idea when they encountered resentment from the indigenous burghers).

    Baron forgets which German institution it was (the police, the Interior Ministry?) that said they’ve lost track of some 600,000 of the refugees already. Could there be a link between the loss and what the barbarian said above?

    Baron’s well aware of your take on the issue, but let him repeat again. Some of the immigrants are genuine asylum seekers, the Germans and other EU member states have a moral and legal obligation to offer a helping hand. Amongst the economic refugees not all are potential jihadis, some must be willing to behave, accept the secular laws of Europe, fit into the society as well as those born locally.

    True, their adherence to the teaching of Allah may be a problem later on as they settle down, begin to assert their religious habits and stuff, but unless the local Quislings let them have the upper hand, they may be kept in check. The example is Israel where a substantial chunk of the labour force are the followers of Allah, and yet the Israelis seem to be able to control them.

  61. Baron – 17:23
    “… but unless the local Quislings let them have the upper hand”

    Isn’t that the problem? It will take a sea change for that to be the case. There is the recent case of a ‘migrant’ sexually abusing several 12 year old girls. He was arrested, then released, with no news of any further action. And then Christianity is ridiculed and nothing is suggested to take its place, while generosity is viewed as a weakness and offence is taken so easily and supported by those who should be supporting the indigenous population’s culture. I don’t hold out much for the Maginot Line approach.

  63. EC @ 12:56

    For someone who’s got the luxury of limitless time, EC, this video may appeal, sadly Baron isn’t in the same category. He talks well, fast, but it’s like a first draft, with little effort one could cut it by about alot. Pat Condell could teach Stefan not what to say, but how to say it in (say) 10 or 15 minutes.

    Still, good stuff, the bits Baron listened to.

  64. EC @ 15:39

    The combined power of the V4 doesn’t come anywhere near that of the Mutti, EC. Could they win?

    What they should do is to attack her role in the affair, not only the consequences of her decision. The EU is supposed to be a construct that’s run according to mutually agreed rules. The rule here was the Dublin Declaration on how to handle refugees. Where in that declaration does it say the Mutti runs immigration? Why should what she says be ‘the rule’. What right did she have (continues to have) to open European borders to all who want to come?

    Baron reckons this is what is of the same significance as are the tsunamis of the refugees. The EU should stick to what they all agreed upon, not let her overrule it.

    It’s also the reason we should be out of the EU, because if ever anything like this happen ed again, and the strongest, the most powerful, the monied member of the club i.e. Germany does as it pleases we’ll be stuffed, be able to do FA about it.

  65. I finally read the booklet that Barnabas Fund sent me awhile back and was astonished at its contents. It is here as a pdf:
    https://barnabasfund.org/downloads/PDF/booklet/2016/hard-pressed-on-every-side_A4.pdf

    Unfortunately, it looks like there have been some dreadful goings on. If what the booklet says is true, and they do appear to be doing everything possible to be open and clear, it does reflect badly on other charities.

    Has anyone investigated further?

  66. RobertRetyred @ 17:41

    Excellent point, Robert, but who’s fault is it then? Ours, we’re, or rather some from our midst, are our worst enemy. It’s people from our own culture that fugg things up, letting rapists go, growing beards to please, keeping shtum about sexual abuse of underage girls so that it takes a westernised CPS Muslim to re-open the cases ….

    Now, don’t get the barbarian wrong, he in no way supports any further immigration from the countries of the Allah followers, favours shipping back those who do us harm, any harm however small if it’s religiously motivated, together with their families (fugg the ‘uman rites’), endorses expelling any Muslim teacher that preaches hate and stuff like that.

    But those who behave, accept the superiority of the secular laws, pay taxes should have as much right to dwell here as immigrants from any other part of the world. no?

  67. Baron – 17:23

    Within the EU there is record unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, in the ‘southern’ european states. It would have been perfectly possible for German companies to go on a recruitment drive in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy etc.
    There was no need for Frau Merkel to invite the entire Middle East & North Africa. Why she did is is open to question.

    By the end of the year there may not be an EU left for the UK to leave!

  68. I do wish there were a thread facility here for replying to specific posts. I posted on 31st January but have been rather occupied since then. Just been looking back. Frank P’s posts referring to my own were predictably beneath contempt and I have no idea what he meant by ‘Melanie’s article’, although I can assure him I am not Telemachus, nor ACP nor Bruce, whomever they are. Not that he would believe such assurance but he doesn’t demonstrate qualities that would lead me to value his opinion so it is immaterial.

    John Jefferson Burns’s post was interesting and could have initiated an intriguing discussion about the differences between American and “Limey” right-wing politics. I regret I didn’t pursue it and should be interested to know his conclusions following his UK visit. I do, of course, take his point that I don’t have to visit or post. But then people who rant about television or radio shows, particularly in respect of BBC bias, have perfectly good ‘off’ switches 🙂 We are all human and occasionally react irrationally, although I don’t think that is any excuse for adhominem attacks.

  69. Baron – 18:11
    “… but who’s fault is it then?”

    It was Mr Nobody’s fault, because:

    This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody

    There was an important job to be done
    and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

    Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

    Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.

    Everybody thought that Anybody could do it,
    but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.

    It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody
    when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

    http://www.corsinet.com/braincandy/hlife.html

  70. RobertRetyred@February 16th, 2016 – 19:56

    you lifted that from ed balls document on tripartate bank regulation 🙂

  73. THE IRISH PROSTITUTE

    An Irish daughter had not been home for over 5 years. Upon her return, her Father cursed her heavily.

    ‘Where have ye been all this time, child? Why did ye not write to us, not even a line? Why didn’t ye call? Can ye not understand what ye put yer old Mother through?’

    The girl, crying, replied, Dad… I became a prostitute.’

    ‘Ye what!? Get out a here, ye shameless harlot! Sinner! You’re a disgrace to this Catholic family.’

    ‘OK, Dad… as ye wish. I only came back to give mum this luxurious fur coat, title deed to a ten bedroom mansion, plus a 5 million savings certificate. For me little brother, this gold Rolex. And for ye Daddy, the sparkling new Mercedes limited edition convertible that’s parked outside plus a membership to the country club … (takes a breath) … and an invitation for ye all to spend New Year’s Eve on board my new yacht in the Riviera.’

    ‘What was it ye said ye had become?’ says Dad.

    Girl, crying again, ‘A prostitute, Daddy!.’

    ‘Oh! My Goodness! Ye scared me half to death, girl! I thought ye said a Protestant! Come here and give yer old Dad a hug !!

  74. Peta – 19:53

    “We are all human and occasionally react irrationally, although I don’t think that is any excuse for adhominem attacks.”

    …said the random mystery troll who had just made another ad hominem attack on a regular contributor.

  75. Scouse vasectomy:

    After having their 11th child, a Liverpool couple decided that was enough, as the social wouldn’t buy them a bigger bed and they weren’t strong enough to nick one.

    The husband went to his doctor and told him that he and his wife didn’t want to have any more children.

    The doctor told him there was a procedure called a vasectomy that would fix the problem but it was expensive. A less costly alternative was to go home, get a firework, light it, put it in a beer can, then hold the can up to his ear and count to 10.

    The Scouser said to the doctor, ‘I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I don’t see how putting a firework in a beer can next to my ear is going to help me.’

    Trust me, it will do the job’, said the doctor.

    So the man went home, lit a banger and put it in a beer can.

    He held the can up to his ear and began to count: ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5,’ at which point he paused, placed the beer can between his legs so he could continue counting on his other hand.

    This procedure also works in Middlesbrough, parts of Bradford, Gravesend, Devon and anywhere in Wales.

  78. Noa @ 20:18

    Also priceless, Noa, but could the girl say she’s become a gender fluid sexual worker, it would bring it more up-to-date, no?

  79. RobertRetyred @ 19:56

    Unquestionably priceless, Robert, but the barbarian will have to try to remember it by heart, he’ll try hard though.

  80. Peta @ 19:53

    It’s not a question of the off button, Peta, but that of the licence fee.

    If Baron didn’t have to pay it, he wouldn’t mind at all what the BBC said, did, pumped into the air. The barbarian also thinks that without the fee the monstrosity would change its tune quickly, failing that would put them off air (as happened recently to the MSM fellow traveller, the Independent, would happen to the Guardian if the Government didn’t place all their ads with the rag).

    More to the point, the hold that the PC idiocy strangling free speech, all the other progressive shibboleths have on the society would ease off noticeably, perhaps disappear altogether. We would be in the words of the great Spinoza ‘free to think what we want, free to say what we think’.

    You in favour of the compulsory fee?

  81. An example of the BBC objective reporting:

    In one of their news bulletins this afternoon the BBC said the Turkish PM had accused the Russians of indiscriminate bombing of two hospitals in Aleppo, calling it barbarous.

    One of the Classic FM news bulletins around the same time also had the news of the Russians bombing the two hospitals, but added that the Russian Defence Ministry spokesman refuted the allegations.

    We may never know the truth, both the Turks and the Russians we be telling a lie, but which of the two news agencies were the more objective, Peta?

  82. EC February 16th, 2016 – 20:18

    There appears some connection between Peta, telemachus and JJB. The question of what kind of connection remains to be discovered,

    It seems beyond coincidence that Peta should suddenly appear and mention in a single post both telemachus and JJB just after the former has “gone away” (again).

    It is also to be noted that JJB stopped posting after his “arrival” in the UK whereupon telemachus, who had been mysteriously absent, suddenly re-appeared.

    telemachus “associates” – clique, family or multiple accounts troll – the pattern of shape shifting mischief has been established by “his” own admissions.

  83. Peta (19:53)

    “I posted on 31st January but have been rather occupied since then”

    Beavering away, then? Thereby hangs a tale, no doubt.

  85. Damaris Tighe February 16th, 2016 – 11:41

    A delight to see you post. I wish you might do so, more often.

  87. I hear tell that the Clinton witch is thinking of growing a beard to court the Muslim vote, Should only take her two or three days, if it’s true.

  89. Baron (15:23)

    Cruz? Hmmnn.

    Don’t you think he looks a bit … what’s that old word … swarthy; and a bit shifty? Wouldn’t buy a used car off him; no way! Would you?

  90. Marco Rubio claims that Ted Cruz cannot even speak Spanish…
    Hardly surprising, as Canadians have to learn French as their second language!

  92. A little transatlantic messenger pigeon told me an hour ago that Obama will be arrested.

    Let’s hope it’s true, that he’s not the only member of his gang, and that they don’t wait until he is no longer president.

  94. This clip is not in English, but what the short write-up says is that the Greek Custom Officials intercepted a truck allegedly delivering furniture from Turkey for the refugees from the ME to make life more comfortable. The sender is allegedly a company called LLC (Limited Liability Co) registered in New York and Florida.

    One must very much hope our custom people are vigilant.

    http://www.zvedavec.org/prispevky/2016/02/6779-nabytek-z-turecka.htm

  96. Frank P @ 22:17

    Wasn’t the man also the favourite of the great Mark Steyn, Frank?

    The one reason, but significant one for Baron not to be so keen on Donald is that he would divide the country even more than it already is. Also, some of his ideas are just too extreme.

    Take the one of a physical wall between the Republic and Mexico. The cost doesn’t matter, what is $8.0bn for a country with a GDP of $17tr. It would, however, never stop illegals filtering through, those trying to get in could build a tunnel (e.g. Gaza), or simply jump over it.

    Why not a piece of legislation saying every illegal immigrant from anywhere not just Mexico would get three years of hard labour helping to re-build the crumbling infrastructure just for food and lodgings, then be fingerprinted, shipped back where he came from. More humane, easily enforceable.

  98. Baron @ 00:18

    Legislation, shmegislation

    Plenty of that on the books in the USA, Baron. But the government has opened the border with Mexico, ordered the Border Patrol to stand down, and organised the distribution of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to small towns all over the country.

    The solution is to arrest the federal government and substitute one which doesn’t pay mere lip service to the rule of law – and which is preferably not controlled by an international banking cartel.

    Trump is correct as a campaign tactic to call for a wall. It is a simple image which everyone can understand.

  99. Malfleur @ 00:13

    The wit of the common man is hard to beat, but it’s below waist for the man in the picture. Is he a smoker anyway?

  100. EC @ 22:35

    Two ways of natural citizenship, one is either born in a territory of a country (the citizenship of parents matters not), or one or both parents have the citizenship of a country. Wasn’t his mother American living in Canada at his birth?

  102. The previous link was to the short interview only.

    Here is the full 3 hour show. I have just found time to start listening to it . I am fearful that an unstable Savage, banned from visiting the United Kingdom by not one but TWO successive and eminent Home Secretaries, may become emotive as he tackles the question “Was Scalia murdered?”
    Where is our Inspector Clouseau on this somewhat important question for, yes OUR, freedom and for our civilisation by the way?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5epp8tAsmE

  104. “Andy Car Park
    February 12th, 2016 – 22:57
    Test: Cigar-Chompin’ John Jefferson”
    Andy my old mucker, where were you when I was holed up in the blizzards at the end of January back home?

  105. “John Jefferson Burns’s post was interesting and could have initiated an intriguing discussion about the differences between American and “Limey” right-wing politics.”

    Your so called right wingers are either pink or comedians. I took my aunt and her family up to London for a few days and we are returning via Oxford, although the dear Randolf is clad in scaffolding following the fire.
    On the right wing comedians your Nigel Farage is a card yes siree. Why he dresses like a guy from one of your low budget black and white comedies my aunt has on video. Now your so called right wing Government is led by a pinko Cameron. He has a delicious wife, Sam Cam that we all love back home but his politics seem like The Bern to me.
    Y’all will see that Donald Trump is on track for South Carolina Saturday.
    It is all looking good.
    Trump will trounce either Hillary or the Bern in November.

  106. Peta 19.53:
    Everyone denies being Telemachus. Hell girl I would be Telemachus, Beelzebub, Genghis Khan or Jesus Christ if we could get a real dude like Trump back in the White House. We need to find him now a real soulmate with the quality of Dick Cheney. Palin might do if the critter had some pants.

  108. Another compatriot staying at the Randolf drew my attention to this in your right wing answer to Breitbart:

    “Mr Trump’s claim that more Muslims join ISIS than the British army came in a Twitter post.
    The billionaire tycoon tweeted a link to a magazine article that referenced the claim, which was based on figures from England’s first Muslim MP.

    Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said in August 2014 that there were about 2,000 British jihadis – a higher number than the Government’s estimate.

    And this figure was then compared to Ministry of Defence data showing there were about 600 British Muslims in the Armed Forces at the time – just 0.4 per cent of total personnel.”

    What is concerning and what will come back to bite you Limeys is this kind of talk:

    “MPs lined up to criticise Mr Trump and called him a ‘hate preacher’ and ‘dangerous demagogue’ who should be banned from Britain.”

    Yall take the biscuit. You want to get out of Europe at a time when President Trump will jettison you.
    I motor down to Bristol this afternoon and then back to Clovelly before flying American to JFK, getting back in time to acclimate for Trump’s South Carolina celebrations.
    Give my best to my old mucker Andy.

  109. After Scalia?…

    A somewhat sombre Judge Andrew Napolitano delivers his opinion…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbYmfuxIrYs

    If you look at the four main cases before the court that are pending verdicts you can see why Obama would want his placeman to fill the vacancy on the SCOTUS bench to rescue his “legacy.” Hence the rush to appoint before the end of 2016!

  110. JJB/teletwat/Haw-Haw @07:01 et seq.

    “..although the dear Randolf is clad in scaffolding following the fire.”

    It’s called The Randolph Hotel, you tit!

    It’s not a patch on what it was, imo, before the Macdonald chain took it over!

  113. No real right winger, American or otherwise, would write “your right wing answer to Breitbart”. The anti-“limey” jibes are of the provocative pattern of behaviour that telemachus and his “associates” indulge in.

    JJB is just another lefty sockpuppet playing games, attempting to lampoon a Trumpist redneck to God knows what purpose. Probably to impugn both real Trump supporters and this website.

    The lefty icon Sanders originated in the same Chicago “community organising” as Obama and which gave birth to Common Purpose here. telemachus used to respond to any criticism of CP at the other place by posting cut’n’pasted CP propaganda under the pseudonym ‘Common Purpose’ with an avatar of a Helmsman statue. In some of his own posts he referred to his “friend” Julia Middleton, the founder of CP in the UK. The transatlantic “progressive” connection (insidious and orchestrated) was apparent in the trolling at the other place and in the way US and UK socialist zealots commune over the Presidential candidates and election.

  115. EC February 17th, 2016 – 10:02

    It is to be noted that the actual offensive/inciting words have not been reported therefore allowing the SNP’s Stasi Scotland to ramp up the chill factor in their intimidating message.

    They’ll prosecute you if you write the wrong things but they won’t say what those wrong things are.

    Deplorable and un-British. Never thought I’d live to see the day when British people were deprived of their liberty for what they say or write.

    The whole political establishment in this country and their politicised police place men and women should hang their collective heads in shame. Not a single politico is standing up against this creeping tyranny.

  116. As The Wall is in trenchant mode today, I recommend this link:

    http://www.woodpilereport.com/html/index-414.htm

    Ol’ Remus is undoubtedtly an American, and garners his long list of links with great care. He definitely renders paranoia less a psychiatric condition than a required state of mind in these insane times and adduces evidence to back up his assertion.

    Plough through all his links at your leisure, but please don’t miss the video link towards the end of his long post, .which features a lady citizen of Calais issuing forth with a cri de coeur.

    Calais today, Dover tomorrow?

    Cue Vera Lynn, just to remind us, FFS!

  119. Thanks EC, I did attempt to put up that particular link, but the procedure on my Nexus pad for linking ‘You Tube’ clips is somewhat opaque and I haven’t cracked it yet. ☺ Much obliged. It’s a clip that should go viral.

    The other one which should have raised an almighty clamour over here, was the weighing off of of the Muslims involved in the child abuse cases. Hardly a murmur on the 24 hour news cycle here. What’s more, the cheeky bastards are suing to invoke the ECHR.

    As a life long abolitionist of Capital Punishment, I would make an exception in these cases and perform the sentences myself – with a chain saw!

  123. Rudi Giuliani is intimating that he will endorse The Donald if he is the nominee – perhaps even before he is the nominee. Another straw in the wind.

  124. I have had a number of pings from Google Alerts located to this site
    Peta is a Good Girl and can answer for herself
    I will reply after the half term break

  125. Frank P @ 11:51

    Great site. Thanks for the link. I have only had time for a preliminary skim through.

    But I liked

    “Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.
    Thomas Jefferson”

    and was interested to see that Ol’ Remus has no quarrel with the gang at Infowars when he pastes:

    “SHTFPlan – When gun confiscation comes, it’s time for people like you and me to run for the hills because if you are caught and sent to a FEMA “re-education” camp, you are probably not coming out alive. It is not likely that very many of us have taken any meaningful steps to maximize our chances for survival in what will prove to be humanity’s darkest days. Do you have what it takes to survive in a FEMA camp? To the doubters, I would ask you this: If your government wasn’t planning to incarcerate millions, then why were the camps built? Why is there is legislation covering the camps?”

    It seems that there is indeed a SHTFPlan.com –

  126. Frank P – 14:44

    Last summer I decided to fight fire with fire and bought a “Dashcam” that actually sits neatly behind the rear view mirror. I records up to 4hrs of HD video. It’s amazing how the aggressive Lycra clad helmet-cammed eco warrior tossers moderate their traffic manners once they realise that THEY are on video too! 🙂

    btw thanks for the photo site link. It was new to me.

  127. Here, he’s at his best except for the bloody wall, he’s right about all of the issues they’re quizzing him on, the hostility amongst the top officials of the agencies charged with protecting the Americans was there, (it was acknowledged to be there in all the subsequent reports on the atrocity), he’s right also about the WMD, (why should the word of the heads of other nation be the truth?), the other topics. (And he didn’t mention the view of the inspector, he wasn’t convinced Iraq had WMD).

    He is right when he says ‘i’m a common sense Republican’.

    http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/02/17/trump-we-have-to-open-up-san-bernardino-attackers-phone-who-does-apple-think-it-is/

  128. Newsweek is closing down, the weekly that has always been on the side of the progressives has finished its life with a column on the honorary Muslim that may surprise you. In the barbarian’s humble view it’s one of the best argued critique of him.

    By Matt Patterson
    (Newsweek Columnist / Opinion Writer)

    Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and phenomenon, the result of a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages.

    How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment, beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world’s largest economy, direct the world’s most powerful military, execute the world’s most consequential job?

    Imagine a future historian examining Obama’s pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League, despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a “community organizer”; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact, nearly devoid of his attention, less often did he vote “present”); and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions.

    He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator. And then, there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama’s “spiritual mentor;” a real-life, actual terrorist, who served as Obama’s colleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president? There is no evidence that he ever attended or worked for any university, or that he ever sat for the Illinois bar. We have no documentation for any of his claims.

    He may well be the greatest hoax in history. Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal: To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright, and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers, would have lasted a single day. But, because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberal-dom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were ‘a bit’ extreme, he was given a pass. Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass – held to a lower standard, because of the color of his skin. Podhoretz continues: And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also so articulate and elegant, and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening”, all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president, and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

    Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon – affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, minorities often suffer, so that whites can pat themselves on the back.

    Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are not qualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance, and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don’t care if these minority students fail; liberals aren’t around to witness the emotional devastation, and deflated self-esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist. Holding someone to a separate standard, merely because of the color of his skin – that’s affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn’t racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama.

    True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois; he was told he was good enough to be president, despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary.

    What could this breed, if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks? In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications, nonetheless raved about Obama’s oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people – conservatives included – ought now to be deeply embarrassed. The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of cliches, and that’s when he has his Teleprompters in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all.

    Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth – it’s all warmed-over Marxism, of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years. (An example is his 2012 campaign speeches which are almost word for word his 2008 speeches) And, what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. Remember, he wanted the job, campaigned for the task.

    It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerless-ness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. (The other day he actually came out and said no one could have done anything to get our economy and country back on track). But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

    In short: our president is a small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise, with such an impostor in the Oval Office.

  129. Three quickies:

    Pork in any form or shape is disappearing from the school menus of German schools, only few schools in the Ruhr region serve it now, schools in other regions are dropping it, too.

    On Monday, the Ukrainian President Poroshenko asked both the PM of Ukraine (Yasenjuk) and the Prosecutor General (Shishkin) to resign. The Rada (the equivalent of our House) rejected the motion mostly because to form another government would be impossible with the current parties composition of the law making institution. More to the point, when asked about a new election, that should follow according to the Ukrainian Constitution, Poroshenko remarked ‘impossible, there is no time’. In a poll, only 7% of those taking part said they would vote for him, 70% said ‘no way’ would they support him. The Americans, the Europeans are happy, the MSM not interested.

    Russia and Iran have re-dusted the more than century old project aimed at connecting the Caspian and Arabian seas utilising Iran’s rivers and also building two artificial canals. The project has been priced, the traffic through it is scheduled to start in 2022. (Baron would say more on it if he had the time).

  132. Baron (20:56)

    Good trawl! An excellent precis of the Manchurian Candidate by Matt Patterson. All his missed was the dodgy birth certificate.

  133. Tim Montgomerie Quits Tories
    “after 28 years of membership, I’m resigning. I’m not joining another party but don’t want to give another penny to the Cameron project
    …
    And nothing registers more strongly on the social injustice front than recommending staying in the EU. It remains the greatest source of social misery on the continent — requiring intense austerity in countries such as Greece and causing terrible youth unemployment across southern Europe from which millions will suffer lifelong scars. I’m just glad that Mrs Thatcher cannot see what her party has become.”
    http://order-order.com/2016/02/17/tim-montgomerie-quits-tory-party

    🙂

  136. “At the very time the US was pretending to fight the Islamic State (in Syria), it was in fact preparing steps that it knew would facilitate its victory”

    Here is more on it:

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44236.htm

    The Russian Ambassador’s piece in the Evening Standard last Monday is here if you want to check it.

    http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/alexander-yakovenko-russia-and-the-us-are-partners-in-trying-to-end-the-war-in-syria-a3180571.html

    The Newsweek’s Matt Patterson got it spot on, the honorary Muslim is incompetent, or his advisors are, and it’s his judgement listening to them which is at fault.

    What was he going to do had ISIS took over Damascus, began cutting heads left and right? Express shock, horror, anger? In a sense, the ISIL thugs behave no different from the Saudis thugs, they cut heads, too. But the idea of the American governing elite embracing the ISIL barbarians seems just so abhorrent that it doesn’t bear thinking about. Donald will have to sort it, and hopefully he will will, he’s leading in South Carolina with Cruz running second.

  137. The EU negotiations are turning into a farce, the four East European countries (V4) are not only deadly opposed to any welfare payment changes, they are also defying the Mutti on her deal with Turkey. Apparently, they said she had just one month to deliver on the arrangement with Erdogan (he keeps the refugees in Turkey, the EU forks out either three or five billion euro). Other EU members have now joined in opposing her, e.g. the Austrians.

    What happens to the boy if his deal with the EU falls through? Is he going to do what he said he would if he doesn’t get the ‘fundamental changes’? Campaign for an exit? Will he indeed.

  138. Here’s Fred on Everything, musing over something in particular – viz. The Intertubes.

    http://fredoneverything.org/willie-nelson-comes-to-jocotepec-the-internet-and-social-fragmentaion/

    A very interesting ramble; raising many questions; offering no answers, but cunningly, like Socrates, Fred forces us to posit answers.

    I shrink from expressing my answers to his questions, as I was born too late for its benefits and will undoubtedly depart before its evil potential is fully realized. Man is infinitely resourceful, but equally self destructive. What the upshot will be is still unclear.
    .

  139. Baron – 01:11

    Why have a referendum?

    Why not just LEAVE?

    If the alternatives are so bad, and they are 🙂 , just LEAVE!

    Parliament should vote: it will have to anyway!

  142. RobertRetyred @ 01:23

    Brilliant idea, Robert, but is it doable with the sort of clowns sitting in the House?

  143. Frank P @ 01:22

    That’s an excellent link, Frank, thanks, and the musings do dig deep, the internet indeed reaches the parts other platforms couldn’t and haven’t. What indeed will that lead to? As he says ‘you tell me’.

  144. Malfleur @ 01:26

    It’s sad and tragic the man died, Malfleur, but he was almost 80, had health problems, all Baron has learned from Alex was that he had dinner and was OK, but was found in the morning with a pillow over this face, and there was no post mortem.

    Could you enlighten us on what else is there that is deeply suspicious? You must have listen to Alex alot, give us a brief summary, please.

  147. Baron (01:26)

    Your link to Diana West’s site left me wondering whether her Devil’s Dictionary was a satire for or against Trump through her prism. My gut feeling, having read her books, was that she would approve of Trump’s full frontal assault on the GOP establishment and that she was pointing out the venom of their (so far) futile attack on him. So I googled around a bit and was relieved to find this:

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/26/its-time-to-rally-around-donald-trump/

    As for the Scalia passing. Alex, as usual jumps OTT with no credible evidence. The worst scenario I would dare to even imagine, is that he may have had ‘company’ which put an added strain on his already overtaxed ticker. That would explain why his family didn’t ask for an autopsy. But even that is scurrilous speculation. Looks to me that his only excesses were food and drink – the greatest mass murderers on the planet. But after 79 years of a good and productive life; a fine family man: WTF?? Let him rest in peace and now we can watch the squabble over his replacement with our customary cynical detachment. ‘Natural causes’ is good for me.

    Now I really must turn in, my junk is kicking in.

  148. Sorry – one more thing – I meant to say that I concur entirely with Diana’s analysis in the Breitbart piece and, of course, her blog spoof now makes perfect sense.

  150. Baron
    February 15th, 2016 – 17:51
    anne wotana kaye @ 17:45
    That’s putting more than one cat amongst the pigeons, anne.
    What do the wallsters think?
    Baron, I guess I wrote the modern `’ Unmentionable in the woodpile” subject, and disgusted everyone. The breakdown of contemporary family life, no marriage, partners being changed like at a dance where the participants all change partners. No wonder children are growing up confused and mentally sick.

  151. Baron – 01:28

    Many have been sitting on the fence, waiting for CMD to pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat, but it looks more like a damp squid, so the ‘winds have changed’.

    John Redwood has sent a timely reminder to Tory MPs:
    The EU referendum is a defining moment for Conservative MPs- we will be judged on this for Parliaments to come
    http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2016/02/15/open-letter-to-mps-wavering-on-the-referendum

    There was a recent article (in the DT?) by a fund manager saying that any financial restrictions enforced by the EU on London would backfire and the few companies expressing negativity are those based on the Continent: funny that!

    Boris is still ‘undecided’, while Mrs Boris wrote that superb article saying that any agreement was not worth the paper it was printed on, though she did use more legalistic language (I think), being a QC!

    And Schengen is collapsing, with Italy and Portugal inching closer to Greece’s anguish, Germany is finding it harder to generate the funds to pay everyone elses bills, more Britons are getting more vocal (and more fed up) and those Quisling MPs won’t have the time wasting call to wait for the magic rabbit trick. People are expressing, openly, that they feel let down by Cameron, the ‘Heir to Blair’. 🙂 Here is another report on Tim Montgomerie’s resignation:

    Conservatives in CRISIS:
    Tory cheerleader QUITS the party over EU ‘charade’
    http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/645220/Conservative-Tim-Montgomerie-quits-party-Tory-EU-charade-David-Cameron

    There is a long way to go, but I think that more are seeing that the referendum is not as important as being free from all things EU and rejoining the World.

  153. In Berlin on Tuesday Emma Thompson described Britain as “A tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, I mean really, a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island.”

    Well it has certainly become more misery-laden and grey since ghastly socialists like her slithered into its corridors of power on Blair’s Bandwagon. Of course she has the privilege of being able to leave it anytime that she wants, together with the wealth to ameliorate the burden of its clouds, rain and cakes. But perhaps she ought to remain in Berlin with the Germans if she feels so strongly about it.

    Thompson, who is most notable for her skill in playing the part of Emma Thompson in numerous films and plays is, of course, a lifelong Labour party member. It goes without saying that she should belong in a party which took the splendid and good of this island nation and murdered it with malice aforethought.

  154. Frank P – 13:31

    It was a good post on the EU spoilt by the somewhat crude and dodgy arguments he used in his negative campaign ad for God. In a debate, Penn Jillette would wipe the floor with him!

  155. Colonel Mustard – 13:37

    It will undoubtedly be “Dame” Emma in the next Birthday/New Year’s Honours List if Dave’s previous record is anything to go by. A bit more virtue signalling from Em’ and SamCam might even coax a full Baroness (my arse!) Thompson out of Dave!

  156. EC (14:17)

    Yes, I agree. Alex never misses an opportunity to use his spiritual foundation as a precursor to any thesis. It’s part of his DNA. But the structure of the rest of his argument would stand on Terra firma per se, so I ignore the theosophy – like a misbegotten determinist would. After all my belief is that he can’t help it – foregoing events decided his stance for him.

    Mind you, There are some folks whose obtuse ideology defies any excuse – even The Great Scheme of Things, from which only their eradication will suffice. ☺☺

  158. EC

    Thanks for the heads up on Penn Jillette. I was going to query ‘who he/she, but decided to find out for myself. Interesting CV – shit-stirrer par excellence, it seems. I’ll keep an eye open henceforth.

    So much to read – so little time. ☺

  161. Frank P – 13:31

    It is a badge of honour to have your site attacked; he must be doing something right.

    EC – 14:30
    “It will undoubtedly be “Dame” Emma”

    Currently, it is: Damm, an enema!

  163. EC February 18th, 2016 – 14:30

    Ha ha! Yes! She’s just the sort of Hampstead socialist snob that would float Vichy Dave’s refugee boat. With his penchant for empowering lefties within his regime he’d probably invite her to head up some ghastly committee or enquiry of like-minded harpies to harangue the English for their beastly, cloud-bolted, cake-filled, misery-laden racism.

    England is already groaning under the yoke of many such wicked Baronesses.

  166. Frank P @ 02:17

    Fully seconded, you take on Scalia, guru. (Unless the the Grand Conspirator Lover can furnish evidence to the contrary).

    And, yes, Diana has been one of the earliest backers of Donald. Let’s hope her judgment on him is as good as what she said about the Left’s infiltration of the US administration after the war.

  167. Colonel Mustard
    February 18th, 2016 – 13:37
    Absolutely correct on all points. Actually Thompson just appears as Thompson, with her flat voice and dull face. The reason she receives such praise is because she is one of the Loony Left. No doubt she will be labelled a “National Treasure” and when she quits this mortal coil, we will be driven made by the BBC and ” The Guardian” lauding her ‘humanitarian virtues’. For that reason alone, I wish her a very long life, but far away from his wee island!

  168. anne wotana kaye @ 09:02

    You stick to your guns, anne.

    That’s what the barbarian does, too, he takes in, listens to, absorbs as much factual evidence for and against any action he intends to take, then ponders, thinks it over, draws any possible outcomes he can think of. Then, he gets a gut feeling that pulls him one way or the other, and he cuts it that way, never looks back saying ‘I should have done …’.

    One either believes in the common wisdom of the many, or one doesn’t. Baron’s in the former camp. You recall Mencken description of democracy i.e. the participation of all in the decision making of a group – ‘a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance’? Well pathetic it may well be, but it still beats any other system of decision making the man have devised.

    Btw, the great man also quipped: ‘Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats’.

    If Donald doesn’t win, perhaps the time will be for the common man of Americ a to spit on his hands ….

  169. Sorry for the errors again, (the postings are hard to push, it takes time, the screen appears bank, no error code, no nothing).

  170. Let’s make clear at the start. I don’t want to. But how do these old fat ugly paedophiles manage to chat up young school girls.
    I had enough trouble doing it when I was young and fit. Perhaps they could turn their skill into an educational course.

  171. Baron
    February 18th, 2016 – 16:31
    anne wotana kaye @ 09:02
    You stick to your guns, anne.
    Yes, Baron, that’s exactly what I do. That’s why I am now left with so few friends – no I didn’t shoot them!
    I really like your postings, and certainly admire Mencken. His sayings on the “wisdom of old age” – ;Old age ain’t no place for Sissies’ –

  172. Baron
    February 17th, 2016 – 21:09

    Your last paragraph reads –

    “Russia and Iran have re-dusted the more than century old project aimed at connecting the Caspian and Arabian seas utilising Iran’s rivers and also building two artificial canals. The project has been priced, the traffic through it is scheduled to start in 2022.”

    That is so astonishing that I’m still pondering all the implications of it. These seem to me to include these –

    1. It looks like the biggest – and costliest – canal engineering project there has ever been – one dwarfing even the second Panama Canal that China is reported to be planning. The cost must be stupendous.

    2. From the strategic point of view, if a Caspian-Arabian Sea link really does come into operation six years from now it will very much weaken the significance, for Russia, of the potential stranglehold that Turkey’s treacherous Islamist government possesses over Russian shipping through the Dardanelles. Will not that not also make Vlad much freer (if this is indeed his policy) to weaken Turkey still further by supporting the Kurds? and

    4. Russia will have access to the Indian Ocean without going through either the Dardanelles or Suez.

    To me it all seems breath-taking.

  173. Baron (16:16)

    “Let’s hope her judgment on him is as good as what she said about the Left’s infiltration of the US administration after the war.”

    Let me expand on that: she traced the infiltration before WWI; during WWI; between the wars, then throughout WWII and after WWII right up until this very moment. On both sides of The Pond, like deathwatch beetles in the beams of the infrastructure of ‘Western Civilisation’. The edifice is now creaking and cracking. We’re riddled with the fuckers!

  174. And if that isn’t enough, our resident death watch beetle (15:51) has to insinuate a list of his oppos of agitprop, by linking their locations under the guise of suggesting that they too have been hacked, as some sort of quid pro quo to difficulties connecting with this blog. Your transparent deviousness is a joy to behold, teletwat. Now fuck off, or I shall request due punishment from the Colonel.

  175. Frank P
    February 18th, 2016 – 18:56
    There was a time when my friends (Mynydd, Peta, Fabian_Solutions etc) used to fear the tongue of your friend
    But now he is a pale shadow
    I wondered why
    But then the Indy, sadly shortly to close, came to my aid

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-pull-of-the-city-is-emptying-rural-england-and-making-it-look-ever-more-like-a-desert-10416030.html
    *
    “……and the sheer inertia of a landscape in which the combine harvesters are in action for perhaps two weeks a year, after which everything reverts to eerie silence. The villages are full of escaping retirees, the doctors’ surgeries are hard at work boning up on advances in gerontology, and the number of live births recorded in so (comparatively) bustling a small Norfolk town as Holt (population 2,000) was, at one point in the late 2000s, reduced to a single infant….
    *
    Ah the torpor of it all
    Thee should come up to the Powerhouse

  176. http://forums.canadiancontent.net/news/98589-more-needless-multiculturalism-problems-immigrants.html

    The foregoing link (somebody just sent it to me) is several years old and it quite eloquently points out the danger and menace posed by multiculturalism.

    But what is really startling is that it cites things said by David Cameron – as if he ought to be a believable “authority” on the matter.

    Was Cameron speaking sincerely? I find it difficult to believe that anything Cameron said then or says now is spoken sincerely.

    Do not all Cameron’s actions since then demonstrate that he was not sincere at all, and that he in fact firmly believes in the foolishness of multi-culturalism? And that he has no intention whatsoever of curbing the growth and power of Islam and Islamic extremism?

  177. Baron (16:16)

    Glenn has been failing to take his meds. again. The ultimate conspiracy theory, eh? It wuz G-d wot dunnit! Certainly more likely than most of the ones that get posited by the info wars Shock Jock. ☺

    This is the most entertaining selection process for POTUS of my lifetime.
    What with Red Papa Frankie sticking his nose in (from Mehico, of all places) it’s gonna get even better. Get some more popcorn in, love!

  178. (19:16)

    You are behind the times Comrade. Only yesterday I had to queue for our fish ‘n’ chip (senior’s concession) lunch in the famous Fishers of Hunstanton because of a veritable swarm of kiddies on half term hols, a horde of young families, several with at least three healthy under tens. Warmed the cockles of my heart. Nary a dusky one to be seen. Keep your Metrosexual Multicultural hell-hole. There’s a renaissance going on in these ‘ere parts. A generation of Norfolk dumplings are fucking for England. One for Mum, one for Dad and one for England. We shall declare UDI ere long. Be afraid, be very afraid.

  183. Frank P February 18th, 2016 – 18:56

    Ha ha! Always willing to oblige.

    More Pale Rider than pale shadow as far as the ghastly sockpuppeteer’s sockpuppet gang are concerned.

  184. Frank P February 18th, 2016 – 19:46

    The Home Counties are thriving too. There is a definite air of imminent liberation and in the pubs a confidence that the ghastly left and their foreign friends have finally shot their last miserable bolt. Every one I talk to speaks contempt for the EU and its jumped up minions. Contempt for Vichy Dave’s travesty of a “renegotiation”.

    I went riding at the crack of dawn and saw how truly beautiful is this cloud-bolted, rainy England. The force of ancestry is so strong, the oaks are still growing and the slow-burning English fuse is glowing.

    “You’ll go where laurel crowns are won but – will you e’er forget
    The scent of hawthorn in the sun or bracken in the wet?”

  187. Herbert Thornton

    You might enjoy the following, received this morning from a former colleague in sunny Qatar:

    Gary Slapper: 10 classic lawyers’ letters

    Published at 12:01AM, February 18 2016
    1 In 1974, Dale Cox, an attorney, wrote on his firm’s letterhead to the Cleveland Browns — an American football team in Ohio — complaining about a fad of paper planes being thrown by fans during Browns’ games. He threatened to sue unless this risk of “serious injury” to eyes and ears was stopped. He received this reply with his own letter attached: “Dear Mr Cox: Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters. Very truly yours, James N Bailey, General Counsel, Cleveland Stadium Corporation”.

    2 Historically, lawyers have not been casual in calculating billable work. One 19th-century invoice was reportedly worded: “To crossing the busy Strand after seeing you on other side, to discuss your case with you: 6s/8d. To re-crossing after discovering it was not you: 6s/8d.”

    3 In 1988, attorney Becky Klemt from Laramie, Wyoming, needed to collect for her client some outstanding child support but the former husband in question had moved to Los Angeles. The sum owed was $4,239.84 and it was set to increase by $1.06 a day after the due date. Miss Klemt wrote to Californian lawyers inviting interest from anyone who could collect the sum. One lawyer, Stephen Corris, who replied declining the work, said he was an international trade specialist, and declared “Without sounding pretentious, my current retainer for cases is a flat $100,000, with an additional charge of $1,000 per hour.” Miss Klemt replied with consummate candour: “Steve, I’ve got news — you can’t say you charge a $100,000 retainer fee and an additional $1,000 an hour without sounding pretentious. It just can’t be done. Especially when you’re writing to someone in Laramie, Wyoming, where you’re considered pretentious if you wear socks to Court or drive anything fancier than a Ford Bronco. Hell, Steve, all the lawyers in Laramie, put together, don’t charge $1,000 an hour.”

    4 In the 1970s, Bill Baxley, Attorney General of Alabama reopened the investigation into a racially motivated bombing in that resulted in the deaths of four African-American girls. The Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon, Edward R Fields, wrote a menacing letter to Baxley. The reply was courageous and succinct: “Dear ‘Dr’ Fields, My response to your letter of February 19, 1976 is — kiss my ass. BILL BAXLEY, Attorney General.”

    5 A letter recounted by Robert Megarry,QC in 1955 concerned a solicitor’s bill of costs sent to a client whose will needed an addendum. It read: “To attending at your house with codicil for execution by you, but you were dead — 13s and 4d.”

    6 In 1922, attorney WE Rogers wrote to a judge in New Mexico to say: “If one-tenth part of the reports of citizens of your district . . . be true, you are not only a blockhead, but you are the most corrupt man, both on the bench and off, that was ever elevated to judicial position.” In disciplinary proceedings, the state supreme court did not regard that phrasing as a paradigm of professionalism.

    7 In correspondence, lawyers often use the phrase “without prejudice” to indicate that what they are about to say to the other side cannot be used to infer that they are admitting anything. An Australian lawyer took this idea further than most in an 1887 divorce suit in Sydney when he suggested that any sexual intercourse his client had had with his previously estranged wife, knowing she had been with another man, did not condone her conduct as it was “without prejudice” intercourse. The court rejected this idea as “an insult to common sense”.

    8 Heroic ethics sometimes shine in legal letters. Before Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the US in 1860, he practised law in Illinois for nearly 25 years. He was once approached by a man to sue a woman for $600 but when Lincoln discovered the woman, a widow with six children, would be beggared by the action, he wrote to decline the case and said: “Some things that are right legally are not right morally . . . We advise a sprightly, energetic man like you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way.”

    9 In 1907 a lawyer from Calcutta was found to have exceeded the bounds of propriety when he wrote a letter to a client to state that he had received an offer to appear for the other side in her case, and that he was inclined to accept unless she would pay him five times the previous fee they had agreed.

    10 Not all cunning letters of lawyers are penned to clients. While serving as a recording officer in France in the First World War, FE Smith (later Lord Birkenhead), wrote to his wife asking her to post him a box of cigars every 20 days. As his cigars were often stolen, Smith wrote: “Tell the Stores not to print any indication that the boxes are cigars. Have printed yourself some gummed labels as follows: ARMY TEMPERANCE SOCIETY — PUBLICATIONS SERIES 9 — and put this and nothing else on the outside.”

  188. Byw, item 6 above contains some language which might usefully be adapted to describe the Texas judge who conveniently declared the cause of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and that there was no need for an autopsy, over the telephone and without seeing the body.

  189. Inspector Clouseau of Kangaroo County, when approached for comment, responded: “Investigate? Moi?”

  190. Colonel Mustard – 21:31

    Good news from Norfolk and the Home Counties but Stratford upon Avon appears lost, judging by the arseholes in tonight’s BBC QT audience!

  194. Malfleur – February 18th, 2016 – 22:56

    Thanks for the stories – very enjoyable.

    One that I enjoy relating to doctors whenever they ask me what I’d done for a living is about a remark made to me by an Irish barrister colleague called Dennis. Dennis’ father had been a very distinguished surgeon in Dublin.

    Dennis – “Herb – have you ever realised that the average doctor is no more competent than is the average lawyer?”

    Me – “My God, Dennis, that’s frightening thought.”

  195. A CBI bod has just been on local radio and saying how important it is to stay in the EU as it is such a big market for our service industries, even though the EU has no ‘common market’ for services, only goods!

    I hope the level playing field that many are calling for does not permit such ‘un-truths’.

  196. I need to do a slight reverse ferret on my earlier comment earlier comment (@23:51) regarding the burghers of Stratford upon Avon in last night’s BBCQT audience. I have now had the opportunity to watch the first half of the program… [ I know, I know… “get a life” etc. 🙂 ]

    Their (the audience) comments were generally quite encouraging on the EU and on the lefty arboreal actress Dame er.. Baroness Emma Thompson but both the “panel’s” audience’s comments on Donald Trump were childish and deeply depressing. The constant media brainwashing by the BBC nd others has done it’s job!

  197. Myrtle Cothill, who relies on her only child in Poole, has had her application to stay in Britain turned down and has been booked on a flight on Tuesday.
    More than 52,000 people have signed an online petition calling for her to be allowed to stay in the UK.
    The Home Office said the decision had been upheld by two separate tribunals.
    Mrs Cothill – a widow who arrived in the UK on a visitor’s visa two years ago – has heart problems, is losing her eyesight and cannot walk unaided.” BBC Web
    This is pure racial prejudice. If we provide this poor lady with a tin of black boot polish, perhaps Emma Thompson and coven will stand up for her?

  199. EC February 18th, 2016 – 23:51 and February 19th, 2016 – 10:29

    I got the impression that the audience was predominantly anti-EU and for ‘Out’, to the extent that Dimblebore was clearly panicking and had to plead for a ‘Remainer’ in the audience to speak. The couple who did were unimpressive, especially the mousey Labour party activist. Labour lisper Nandy on the panel just regurgitated tedious socialist clichés about how the EU saves Britain from the nasty Tories and promotes union worker rights, provides jobs, etc. (zzzzzzzzzzz)

    Trump has now become one of those coerced BBC shibboleths where the pundits are required to express the received wisdom in a completely meaningless way, like the ones about immigrants contributing so much and how school dinner ladies are a national treasure. For the left he is the new Thatcher, Reagan or Bush, a demonised hate figure for them to direct their communal and communing hate speech towards.

    This parroting of predictable cliché meant that there was no serious discussion about the underlying imperative for Trump’s success, the involuntary radicalisation that lefties excuse in their favoured identity groups but ignore in the majorities. The irony is that they and their deeds have created Trump. He is a product of the Left and they only have themselves to blame.

    The ghastly national socialist MSP sneered that he looked forward to seeing the smirk wiped off Trump’s face. Well, I feel the same way about many of the politicians here in Britain, including quite a few from the SNP. Political pluralism is like that. Despite the Left’s aspiration and presumptions we are not yet a single party state and people are entitled to their political viewpoints.

  200. anne wotana kaye – 10:54

    Compare Mrs Cothill’s case with any number of cases like the two I quote below….

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3449760/Rochdale-child-sex-grooming-gang-ringleader-convicted-30-rapes-uses-European-human-rights-law-fight-avoid-kicked-UK.html

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2519621/Vicious-rapist-deport–right-family-life.html

    What a shameful situation! The lunatics are indeed running the asylum!
    There is something dreadfully wrong with the law and/or its interpretation and application the judiciary!

  201. anne wotana kaye February 19th, 2016 – 10:54

    It is indeed a shameful and disgusting episode. But what stands out is how all the usual suspects have failed to speak out on her behalf, precisely because as you infer, she is the wrong colour. It is racial prejudice of the worst kind.

    It is astonishing that only 52,000 people have signed the petition whereas hundreds of thousands signed the petition for the imaginary and utterly vacuous ban on Trump.

    The reasoning behind the decision is unfathomable but it alienates me forever from those who presume to rule over us. Who has made this decision and why? Let them be publicly named and shamed, the bastard(s).

  203. EC
    February 19th, 2016 – 11:34
    Colonel Mustard
    February 19th, 2016 – 11:38
    Frank P
    February 19th, 2016 – 11:40

    Forgive me writing one posting to three fine people. I am doing it because I don’t want to fill up the CHW with my postings. It is truly racial prejudice and self-hatred. Our leaders are mostly mad and cowards, and as I have said too often, the judiciary are corrupt and venal.

  204. That Gatestone article on Denmark just this very minute pinged into my inbox!

    Like the Hamlet tragedy, in Denmark and elsewhere, things aren’t going to end at all well. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio…”

    Ironic that the departed Yorick ultimately turned out to be the lucky one..?

  205. The irony of a QT panel made up of three ‘TV personalities’; accompanied by Nandy (a Claire Short manque), a professional (and cringeworthy) Scotsman and an outnumbered ‘conservative’ cabinet member of parliament, complaining and scoffing that a ‘reality television personality’ had the temerity to gatecrash their political bubble and vie to become POTUS, was delicious. Not one of them possesses a shred of self-awareness.

    For the researchers of QT to fail to include a single panellist that would have a positive view of Trump, says more about the BBC bias than it does about the unworthiness of Trump’s candidature. But then I’m just stating the bleeding obvious. Pity there’s nobody in the BBC hierarchy who will do the same – and shit-can Dumblebore and bring this QT travesty to a long overdue close.

    As Diana West proclaimes – Go Trump!

  206. Frank P – 12:54

    Even having the Pope on the panel would not have improved matters! 🙂

  207. RR

    Quite! It would just have added to the Marxist contingent.

    I’ve enjoyed the RC priests interviewd on Fox trying to justify Red Papa Frankie’s intervention in America politics. And of course, The Donald being a consummate opportunist, has turned it to his advantage, as usual.The way the Teflon Don has exploited the photo shots of the wall around the Vatican as a counterpoint to il Papa’s remark about walls and bridges, was masterly. Not a politician?? My arse!

  209. Dreams of a rural idyll by Nic Fleming
    Daily Telegraph
    *
    A survey of a home counties village found that it was a haven for gossip, backbiting and social exclusion for those who did not fit the mould of the perfect village resident.
    A researcher who lived in the village, referred to as “Stonycroft” to keep its true identity secret, found that on the surface life there was idyllic with many residents saying their well-being was improved physically and emotionally for being in the country.
    However, after digging beneath the surface, it was found that residents who were gay, divorced, childless and even single were victimised and even outcast by other villagers. For these people, life was stressful and in some cases it led to mental and physical health problems.

    The study,was by Dr Francine Watkins who spent three months in the village, which lies near the M40 and is surrounded by farms and woodland. She attended parish council meetings as well as other village events such as the annual barn dance; she also joined the Women’s Institute and mother and toddler groups.

    She worked as a barmaid in the pub and also interviewed 30 residents about their views on life in the village.

    Stonycroft, described as picturesque with some houses dating from the 16th century, was chosen because it appeared to be the archetypal “rural idyll”.

    The study said: “Villagers made associations between living in the village and their improved physical and emotional well-being, reflecting historical perceptions of healthy living in the country.”

    However, the experience of some villagers contradicted the view that life in Stonycroft was idyllic.

    The manager of the pub, who had lived in the village since he was 11 and was now in his 20s, said he was shunned by some residents after announcing that he was gay.

    He said he been victimised in the village, despite claiming that several local men had asked him for sex.

    Another long-term resident said former friends in the village had given him the “cold shoulder” after he had an affair, his marriage broke up and his wife and children moved away.

    The researchers noted: “John was stigmatised because the breakdown of his marriage meant he was no longer identified as a ‘family man’.”

    In a third example, a woman in her late 20s, known as Debbie, said she felt she was excluded from some social activities because she was single. Married women were “suspicious” of her because they thought she would be after their husbands, making her feel “lonely and isolated”.

    Dr Watkins said: “Public health practitioners should consider the problems of stigma and social exclusion sometimes faced by individuals in the rural idyll.”

    ***
    Now based on his extensive blog research telemachus wonders just which type of residents of these bucolic idylls make these folk outcast

  210. By Brendan Carlin, Political Correspondent

    12:01AM BST 09 Oct Daily Telegraph

    Black and Asian people are being discouraged from moving to the countryside, creating “a passive apartheid”, it was claimed yesterday.

    Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, called for action to encourage country people to be “more welcoming” towards ethnic minorities.

    Mr Phillips, said he doubted if anyone in the countryside deliberately wanted to keep people out. But a difficult situation was developing in which people from ethnic minorities “feel uncomfortable” in the countryside.

    Mr Phillips, who was born in London of a Guyanese family and went to school in Guyana, said a white person moving to the country would be asked who he or she was.

    But if someone of his colour went into a village shop “people look at you as if to say: ‘Where have you come from – the planet Zarg?’ “

  211. Frank P February 19th, 2016 – 02:25

    Thanks Frank. I don’t shoot but I enjoyed the article and appreciated the link.

  212. Winds of the World , give answer! They are whimpering to and fro
    And what should they know of England who only England know?
    The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag,
    They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!

  213. See you the ferny ride that steals
    Into the oak-woods far?
    0 that was whence they hewed the keels
    That rolled to Trafalgar.

    And mark you where the ivy clings
    To Bayharn’s mouldering walls?
    0 there we cast the stout railings
    That stand around St. Paul’s.

    See you the dimpled track that runs
    All hollow through the wheat?
    0 that was where they hauled the guns
    That smote King Philip’s fleet.

    (Out of the Weald, the secret Weald,
    Men sent in ancient years,
    The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field,
    The arrows at Poitiers!)

    See you our little mill that clacks,
    So busy by the brook?
    She has ground her corn and paid her tax
    Ever since Domesday Book.

    See you our stilly woods of oak,
    And the dread ditch beside?
    0 that was where the Saxons broke
    On the day that Harold died.

    See you the windy levels spread
    About the gates of Rye?
    0 that was where the Northmen fled,
    When Alfred’s ships came by.

    See you our pastures wide and lone,
    Where the red oxen browse?
    0 there was a City thronged and known,
    Ere London boasted a house.

    And see you, after rain, the trace
    Of mound and ditch and wall?
    0 that was a Legion’s camping-place,
    When Caesar sailed from Gaul.

    And see you marks that show and fade,
    Like shadows on the Downs?
    0 they are the lines the Flint Men made,
    To guard their wondrous towns.

    Trackway and Camp and City lost,
    Salt Marsh where now is corn-
    Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
    And so was England born.

    She is not any common Earth,
    Water or wood or air,
    But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,
    Where you and I will fare.

  214. On this day of Brussels promise we would do well to heed his Smugglers Song

    ‘If You do as you’ve been told, ‘likely there’s a chance,
    You’ll be give a dainty doll, all the way from France,
    With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood –
    A present from the Gentlemen, along ‘o being good !

    Now Puck off

  215. “But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

    George Orwell, presaging a well-known troll.

  216. The boy has got a deal, but it doesn’t include anything close to what he should have asked for in the first place. Every single item except for the exclusion from the ‘ever closer union’ is addressing issues of current not future relevance, and even there what he got isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

    On both welfare payments and child benefits the deal will only apply to future immigrants from (mostly east European) EU members. Big deal that, the vast majority of immigrants from these countries have already arrived here, the few thousands who may still come count for next to nothing.

    On the issue of stronger protection of the non-Euro countries if financial regulations by the Euro members were to go against the interests of the former he got a promise that only one disagreeing non-Euro member will be able to force ‘a debate’ about such regulations.

    So what, they’ll debate all right, that’s all they always do, then endorse the financial laws detrimental to the non-Euro members. And why shouldn’t they? They want to protect their interests, not ours. Is that a victory?

    On the issue of ‘ever closer union’ he negotiated a different wording i.e. “it is recognised that the United Kingdom … is not committed to further political integration in the European Union”.

    What’s the bloody point in remaining in the construct if we’re not to participate in further political integration? And what about diplomatic integration? Are we going to surrender our foreign policy to Brussels? The same goes for the military, foreign aid, social, cultural …. policies.

    But the key point Baron made before is still valid. What happens when other key issues such as that of the EU Armed Services or whatever emerge? We will have no option but to submit to the majority of those voting, and given the power of the Germans demonstrated clearly by today’s immigration policy run not by the EU but by the Mutti, it would mean to submitting to their controlling power. Do we need that?

    Out it must be.

  217. @Frank P 19th – 14:52

    Yes but…..viewed as simply a spat between Il Trump an Il Papa, yes, he’s exposed the ould b*stard’s hypcrisy. But he’s also alienated all the RC vote in the USA, all the Hispanics, all the Mafia dons, all the Irish. Possibly he’s just blasted a great 0.45″ bullet through his foot!

  218. A widow of a Polish General of the communist era has sold her husband’s papers for a lofty sum of money. Amongst the documents are some alleging that Lech Walesa, the Polish hero was an agent of the Polish Secret Service under the name Bolek. Walesa denies it, but does it surprise Baron?

    In Czecho, the celebrated hero, a challenger of the communist thugs, then President of the country is also rumoured to have co-operated with those he so courageously ‘opposed’. A genuine dissident (man called Cibulka) has alleged that indeed he was. You may also recall the barbarian telling you that when Havel was in prison, he regularly got food parcels containing champagne, French cognac, Cuban cigars, caviar. So said one of the guards looking after him.

    Here you have it, most of those who gained power in the East when the communist dark ages ended were either directly or indirectly employed by the likes of the KGB.

  219. From midnight tonight, Austria has a plan-B to deal with immigrants. Only 80 of them can ask for an asylum, all the others either back or to other EU countries.

    It will be interesting to see what the Mutti has to say about it.

  222. Ostrich (occasionally) (23:41)

    Good to sea you back shipmate. You okay? We’ve been fretting.

    Trump: Mebbe! OTOH – based on the comments of many Catholics over there – and I’ve been keeping a listening watch throughout the circus – most of them seem to think that American sovereignty Trump’s Il Papa’s interference on the grounds of separation of G-d and Mammon.

    Render unto Caesar the things which are which are Caesar’s and unto G-d those that are G-d’s.

    Pragmatic lot, the Septics. We’ll see. And the Church of Rome has some fairly unwholesome previous, with most of hoi polloi of Amerrika. Paedo priests being not the least. The dodgy Vatican bank being also a red entry on the rap sheet. As for the Mob – as I’ve said before, The Donald has screwed a few of them in real estate and casino deals. He’s still alive – that should tell you something. The Teflon Don died in prison. The Teflon Donald is running for POTUS. Go figure.

    I don’t underestimate Trump. But … the GOP are conspiring to wreck his ambition. I hope his security detail is on its toes.

    His threat to go independent is leverage that frightens the crap out of them. There are some heavy duty operators who do not want Trump to win the nomination. Irresistable force meets immovable object. Something has to give. But the ‘capo di tutti capi di Cosa Nostra’, is a pussy by comparison.

  223. So what about galloway at grassroots out? I never expected that. Got GO a lot of telly last night. Id day GO are the actual brexit campaign now.

  224. Alexsandr
    February 20th, 2016 – 07:03

    I am not a great fan of Dougy Murray
    But hear this

    “George Galloway’s awfulness falls into two categories. First there is the serial dictator-licking. This is a man so profligate, not to say promiscuous, in his affections that he has in succession fawned over Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    Then there is the personal vileness — pretending to be a dirty cat on live television (still, after all these years, impossible to watch), explaining his curious notions of when rape is, and is not, rape, and using vulgarly dismissive terms about disabled people.

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2012/09/george-galloways-awfulness/

    Galloway and Farage

    Now makes Brexit a slam dunk

  226. The deportation to South Africa of a 92-year-old woman, who is cared for by her daughter in Dorset, has been temporarily halted.
    Myrtle Cothill was booked on a flight for Tuesday after having her bid to stay in Britain turned down.
    More than 75,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Mrs Cothill to be allowed to stay in the UK. (BBC WEB)
    Just saw this. Was it Black boot polish or the realisation of the wickedness of what the authorities were subjecting this family to? CHWs what do YOU think?

  227. Hundreds of migrants living in part of a camp in the French port of Calais known as the Jungle have been ordered to leave or face eviction.
    They have until 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday to leave the southern part of the sprawling camp.
    Anyone remaining will be forcibly removed to allow for the makeshift structures there to be razed.
    The area has become a cultural hub for many of the migrants. It has shops, a school and religious structures.
    The authorities said up to 1,000 people could be affected but volunteers on the ground estimated that at least twice that number lived in the area.
    Thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa have congregated around Calais in the hope of crossing to the UK.
    Where the F*CK are they to go? Has Cameron a SPECIAL STATUS DEAL planned for them to come to Blighty?

  228. The Left (and its trolls) just love to stir up animosity by creating identity groups and labelling them good or bad. This negativity is absolutely consistent with the double standards and hypocrisy of the creed that allowed them to create the concept of “hate speech” when they are the greatest haters of all.

    They also like to misuse the word ‘phobia’ to de-legitimise any dissent to their cant. It is seldom used against them but in the light of recent hate speech directed here towards those who merely live content in the English countryside and love it the word ‘shirephobic’ springs to mind.

    New Labour were certainly shirephobic as their state police treatment of the Countryside Alliance demonstrated. Remarkably, and despite their renouncing of the New Labour regime and their erstwhile hagiography of its grisly cheerleaders, this shirephobia has passed seamlessly to the Corbynistas, now busily engaged in that ‘kinder, gentler politics’ by trolling hate speech against anyone who is disinclined to share their mass hysteria and dementia.

    And he who memorably sang the praises of Balls balls ad nauseum is now cavorting with his bells and pig’s bladder in aid of the less than dynamic duo, that unreconstructed 1970s communist pair now as awkwardly established in the realm of “respectable” politics as their undoubted soulmates Adams and McGuinness.

    What foments this shirephobia, this hatred towards rural England? Could it be because by and large the Shires represent the last bastion of not swallowing their total bollocks, of not falling for their trendy urban pulling of the wool over the eyes or that ghastly virtue-signalled pretence of bonhomie that conceals so much untruth and so much evil done to man?

    We are lucky here too, gathered from all corners. No such delusions threaten as one of their kind regularly and so helpfully demonstrates how vile they all really are.

  229. “But hear this”.

    Was there ever such a statement of overweening pomposity and arrogance so starkly polarised against the almost unanimous desire not to listen to it.

    Imperialist ambitions of a missionary to the heathen were never more patronising or more swelled up than that.

    “But hear this” as though to stand in the puritan pulpit and harangue the sinners with the turgid sanctimony and certitude of his dogma.

    Breitbart would excise his provocative drivel in a heartbeat.

  230. anne wotana kaye February 20th, 2016 – 09:17

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-35617277

    Good news Anne. Now let’s see the faceless jobsworth tribunal members and the decision makers who needlessly tormented this poor lady and her family named and shamed.

    “T’was the rules” their unnamed spokesman bleats. Rules for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools. Much human misery lies in the blind obedience of “rules”. The fools in the Home Office have not even the wit to understand that.

  231. And apropos to that some time ago a BBC documentary about local council allocation of housing and benefits to new arrivals demonstrated very clearly how much discretion even fairly low-ranking “decision makers” are allowed.

    So, don’t bleat about your “rules” you Home Office twerps.

  232. Colonel Mustard
    February 20th, 2016 – 09:54
    Good morning! They can always claim `’that lessns have been learned’

  233. Colonel Mustard – 09:57

    “So, don’t bleat about your “rules” you Home Office twerps.”

    Don’t expect any red faced kangaroo court (tribunal) members to be exposed anytime time. I think that Anne was spot on with her accusation of racism at work.

  235. I forgot, George Osborne has been the British government’s chief negotiator:

    PETER OBORNE: If he accepts this charade, I believe Cameron will be signing his own political death warrant
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3455546/PETER-OBORNE-accepts-charade-believe-Cameron-signing-political-death-warrant.html

    … and George’s?

    And over at Richard North’s EuReferendum, the truth is out:
    EU Referendum: the dodgy deal
    http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=85933

    Is that why Mrs Boris Johnson could so easily write her article saying it was all hot air?

  236. EU deal gives UK special status, says PM
    David Cameron
    When I was a gal, “Speciai” had an ambiguous meaning. Special Schools were those for the unfortunate pupils who were backward or mentally retarded. As a nurse, Special Treament Wards were for those with V.D. (now termed STD).l

  237. I am ashamed, now, to admit that in 1975 I did vote YES in the referendum to join the European Economic Community. As far as I can recall we assured by Edward Heath that the E.E.C. was merely an extension of E.F.T.A. (European Free Trade Association) of which the UK was already a member.

    By joining the E.E.C. the UK effectively turned its back on Commonwealth countries, something for which many of them, especially Australia and New Zealand, have never forgiven us.

    I will be voting OUT this time. I was always going to vote OUT, but if I had been a floating voter then Dave’s dodgy deal would have convinced me. No matter which way the IN lobby spin it Dave’s charade of a renegotiation is a crock of shit!

  238. EC February 20th, 2016 – 12:01

    I didn’t, simply because circumstances prevented me from voting at all. But to my own shame I think that I had persuaded my late father to vote YES against all his instincts.

    Harold Wilson’s 1975 leaflet contains almost the same anti-‘No’ arguments being peddled now:-

    http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm

  239. PS I’ll be voting OUT too. The communist troll’s endorsement of Brussels made no difference other than to reassure me that it is “the right thing to do”.

  240. Interesting piece by Hitchens on how arrest and a presumption of guilt has surreptitiously preceded due diligence investigation without any apparent scrutiny or challenge in Parliament, the place where our centuries old legal protections are supposed to be defended.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3446050/PETER-HITCHENS-defend-rapists-locked-next.html

    In the forthcoming BBC puff piece on the CPS a woman there reiterates “You will be believed” which is another way of saying that the accused will be presumed to be guilty before the actual evidence has been assessed. Which explains a lot about what has come to pass recently.

    If a complainant is going to be believed 30 years after an alleged offence (no statute of limitation here) with no corroborative evidence then they might as well convict without a trial and save the public money. Look on any PCC’s website and you will see that these type of offences and “domestic abuse” are being given a high priority. This is no doubt because of the clamour by vociferous, well-organised feminist campaign groups. Those who shout loud enough in Brave New Britain get their own way and law and justice, supposedly impartial, become subordinate to political directive.

  242. The CPS (Common Purpose S?) is only part of the problem. Coincidently I found this in my downloads folder this morning – Absolutely no idea how it got there…

    Melanie Philips in The Times, October 2015

    We need a return to the old ethos of policing

    The force has had a nervous breakdown. More women and ethnic minority officers won’t help

    The home secretary’s knives are out, as it were, for the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. Sir Bernard suggested the reduced use of police stop-and-search powers might have contributed to the rise in knife crime, up by 18 per cent from last year. Rubbish, said Theresa May, there was no link whatsoever between the two. Personally, I’d back Sir Bernard’s judgment.

    However, this is but the latest skirmish in a decades-long war of attrition by politicians against the police, whose priorities often seem a calculated insult to mainstream concerns. For example, Ian Hopkins, now the chief constable of Greater Manchester, has said there is no need for the police to turn up after a burglary if the victims are capable of phoning their insurance company, getting the locks fixed or having the windows boarded up.

    Set that dismissiveness towards everyday distress against the obsessive focus on alleged VIP paedophile activities, based on claims that have now proved groundless but have cruelly defamed, among others, the dead or dying.
    Alongside such inexcusable policing behaviour comes evidence of internal professional decay. Two years ago, the home affairs select committee listed a litany of police abuses: officers using the names of dead children in undercover operations, corruption, abuse of power and falsification of statistics.

    This year, the police were ordered to review more than 1,600 internal corruption investigations, including drug-related offences, bribery, theft, sexual misconduct and unauthorised disclosure of information, after the Inspectorate of Constabulary revealed that out of more than 3,000 such investigations no action was taken in two thirds of them.

    All of this suggests a systematic erosion of the ethos of policing — in effect, a moral collapse. The likely causes have been visible since at least the 1970s. At root lies a loss of the unspoken agreement between the police and the public which rested on a shared understanding of exactly what threatened order and public tranquillity. The public trusted the police because they developed an intimate knowledge of the neighbourhood to keep the peace.

    This has largely vanished. Bobbies on the beat disappeared into cars and behind computer screens. With the loss of vital local intelligence, the police no longer had the tools with which to tackle local crime.
    Front-line officers were now looked down on as plods. University graduates rose up the promotional ladder instead. Those with priceless street experience were replaced at senior level by careerist greenhorns who couldn’t afford any challenge to the prevailing orthodoxies of the day.

    Such top-down conformism meant wrongdoing was brushed under the carpet. Government performance targets made all this far worse. Although the Home Office abolished these in 2010, Mrs May claims they have merely been “gold-plated” at local level. Who can be surprised? Crime commissioners, introduced to reconnect the police to local concerns, have merely added yet another level of political control.
    And the police remain fixated upon performance figures because they know they will still be judged by them — not least by Mrs May, who tore into them for “box-ticking” burglary and car theft and thus ignoring the sexual abuse of teenage girls by pimping gangs in Rotherham and Sheffield.

    But the reason for that was the police either dismissed these girls as “little slappers” or were terrified of being denounced as racist, since the perpetrators were overwhelmingly of Pakistani origin. Indeed, the police have been paralysed by politically correct bullying ever since the 1999 Macpherson inquiry, into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, denounced them for “institutional racism”.

    Despite the demonstrable falsity of this claim, the police meekly agreed. Ever since, they have prioritised “hate crime” and turned themselves inside out over their own perceived racism, sexism and phobias of every stripe. Identity politics, which has given rise to “hate crime” and the dominance of competing group rights over the idea of one law for all, is rooted in the universities. The absence of common sense now seems to correlate with higher education.

    Tackling such a broad cultural shift is a tall order. But here is one suggestion to help restore the lost ethic of policing. Rather than shoehorn into the police more women and ethnic minorities, as Mrs May insists, there should be positive discrimination for non-graduates when it comes to promotion.

    The police are in the throes of a professional nervous breakdown. Maybe this modest proposal might start to rescue them.

  243. All quiet on the Rochdale front.
    Yesterday media platforms were full of a story about an `iman`at a mosque being found with head injuries on Thursday evening;by which time a 31 year old man had been arrested.
    There was the usual blather around with the police not denying a racial motive;yet already Assed Baig (a journalist for C4,born in Birmingham,and with knowledge of the muslim community) reported on `twitter`:”My sources say it’s a 31year old British Bengali man that’s been arrested”.
    No more news since.

  245. Colonel Mustard – 13:27
    “In the forthcoming BBC puff piece on the CPS a woman there reiterates “You will be believed” which is another way of saying that the accused will be presumed to be guilty before the actual evidence has been assessed. Which explains a lot about what has come to pass recently.”

    I would have expected, and still hope, that if I was ever in the position of reporting a violent attack on my person that I would be believed when I was telling my story, at least at first. The last thing anyone would want is to have to deal with even more aggressive behaviour.

    But like a auditor, it needs to be ‘trust and verify’, and that can be done in a civilised manner, again, at least to start with. I would have expected that the ‘victim’ should be allowed to make the running because that is usually when they are most likely to make a mistake. But then, what do I know?

  246. “I was encouraged to stand for Parliament by David Cameron and he has given me the opportunity to serve in what I believe is a great, reforming Government. I think he is an outstanding Prime Minister”
    *
    Loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society

    It may be stupid to believe in honour and friendship and loyalty without price. But these are virtues to be cherished. Without them we are no more than beasts roaming the land

    A man with no loyalty in him, with no sense of reverence or devotion due to something outside and above his poor daily life, with its pains and pleasures, profits and losses, is as evil a case as man can be
    *
    Gove is a worthy colleague to Galloway

  248. Spectator censors itself (?);draws back from being up-front Gove-groupie (?).

    Mine to Spectator:

    14-03;
    Take Note:we are not all backing Gove as Heir Apparent to Cameron:although the media obviously are….which should give pause for thought.

    14-05;
    Witness the Spectator’s choice of pin-up photo of The Coming Leader.

    14-50;
    Which has since been removed.

    The photo which first headed Goves piece is at

    i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02313/gove_2313662b.jpg

  250. @16:08 Apparently Wessexmachus???? wants you all to re-read his little bit of hate speech at the other place too.

    Not everyone, it appears, was that impressed! 🙂

    Robbydot1 to telemachus • 28 minutes ago
    So Gove should go against his Country and his principles because of something someone once did for him?
    Probably the most sickening homily to smultz I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. I should have checked the name first.

  251. EC
    February 20th, 2016 – 13:52
    Your posting should be compulsory reading for all members of the police force. It should also be studied by those in authority at the highest level. Unfortunately, I am afraid things will just continue as they are, and every now and again we will hear those in charge braying “Lessons will be learned.”

  252. RobertRetyred February 20th, 2016 – 16:03

    You are conflating reporting as a genuine victim with those who might complain maliciously or to gain some advantage. Yes, of course you would hope to be believed but so would the malicious complainant.

    The police should neither state their belief nor disbelief but record the details of the report and then investigate the facts and evidence surrounding it. As Hitchens writes:-

    “It is not the job of the police to believe or disbelieve. It is their job to investigate, where it seems likely that a crime may have happened.”

    And they should preferably do that before depriving anyone of their liberty. The police should not emote or operate as a counsellor to the complainant (which they now insist on calling ‘victim’ – another prejudice presumption) but be dispassionately objective in exploring the truth. Nowadays that is seen as a negative by the touchy-feely, hug and blubber in public brigade but it used to be one of the qualities that encouraged confidence in the police as professionals.

  253. I see the juvenile and cretinous flipkipper/Union Jihack multiple account disrupter troll(s) is/are all over that Gove thread at the Speccie.

    And here the communist troll who is so caring and compassionate is again talking about shooting people who don’t share his hatred, bigotry and prejudices.

    Priceless.

  254. The communist troll, on loyalty.

    He who treated us to endless hagiographic tripe about Brown, then Balls, then Miliband, (we even had the ISIS Caliph at one point) each one dropped from the saviour plinth as a new ‘Dear Leader’ emerged and now Corbyn is on the pedestal. The only one who has been consistently drooled over is Stalin, not exactly a role model for the rewards of loyalty.

    You could not make it up.

  255. To someone ‘over there’ who commented that “the EU is communism by the back door”: how come you didn’t notice what came through the front door, the windows, the airbricks, down the chimney and through every chink and crevice in the national edifice?

    The ‘stay in’ lobby comprises an unholy alliance of loopy leftist ideological Utopians and the cabal of international financiers who have already bought the PM and his cronies as a down payment on the country at large. The rest of us are being extorted to pay for this EU monstrosity.

    The breathtaking cant and lies and the transparent bollocks of the ‘last minute struggle of CMD to wrest an agreement from 27 EU warriors’ was risible.

    I don’t give a shit what Gove (an admirer of Antonio Gramsci) says – or doesn’t say – in his last ditch gamble to become Prime Minister. The point is that CMD has put himself in a corner by promising a referendum and now has to allow it to happen. Now it’s what hoi polloi decides that matters. Fuck all the politicians, get yourself out in droves and put this long-standing conspiracy – to rob you of your heritage, your future, your dignity, your treasure, to a fitting end. Be brave and Brexit! You know it makes sense. Moreover by doing it, repay the sacrifices of millions of patriots whose bodies fill those European graves: lives lost to prevent this theft of our nation.

  256. Come to think of it,

    BE BRAVE AND BREXIT

    could become a slogan for the ‘leave lobby’ . Turn the noun into a verb. Use it as an imperative when addressing the fears of the sensitive souls who talk of ‘taking a leap in the dark’; those who like spouses who are afraid to leave an abusive relationship, fear the great unknown – “we will be alone in a dangerous world!”.

    Rubbish! As one who remembers what it was really like to be alone in 1939 – to circa 41 – and who also remembers too what England was like before Wily Wilson and Grocer Heath sold us up the river, take it from me it was far better to ‘be alone’ than embroiled, as victim, as victims in one of the worst fit-ups in political history.

  257. ‘A leap in the dark”?!

    It would be a leap out of what is fast becoming an extension of Stanley’s “Dark Continent”.

    I wonder – is that now a forbidden phrase?

  258. It would normally be an immense pleasure to see the troll in such a hysterical state, but it when it posts an incitement to murder surely goes beyond twisted knickers?

    I should have thought that it ought to attract the attention of the police – even though is is possible that they would pay no more attention to it than to similar incitements when preached in mosques.

  260. To dissolve Britain in the ‘European Union’ is a New World Order racket. Perhaps I should be less over-the-top were I to call it a Council on Foreign Relations racket. Or more specifically a European Council on Foreign Relations racket and point out that it is not unconnected with its other ugly sibling,the Asia and Pacific – Council on Foreign Relations racket – all proposing an order new to the world. .

    Grasp that Brexit is a chance to destroy one arm of this trilateral commission of Macbeth’s witches that we welcomed to and hosted in our country and to purge us and the Continent of the poison’d entrails, nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips that have been thrown into the now boiling and toxic caldron of English civilisation.

    *****

    And while saving Britain, reach out the other hand to the USA which is having its own birthright fed with the same thick and slab gruel, to buttle which which the Council on Foreign Relations has selected a suitable Richard donor:

    Exclusive: On Eve of South Carolina Vote, Nation’s ICE Officers Detail How Marco Rubio Betrayed Them
    GettyGetty
    by JULIA HAHN
    19 Feb 2016
    Washington D.C.13,797
    In an exclusive Q&A with Breitbart News, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Council President Chris Crane provides never-before-heard details about the 2013 Gang of Eight immigration fight that are likely to shake up an already tumultuous presidential race.

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/19/eve-south-carolina-vote-nations-ice-officers-detail-marco-rubio-betrayed/

    *****

    Who is plotting to murder Brexit while it sleeps…?

  262. Fox calls Trump winner of South Carolina after 25% of vote in. Cruz second, Rubio third. The rest of the field have already been lapped.

    Clinton wins the NV caucus. Sanders 5 points adrift.

    It all depends on Comey/Lynch. What’s keeping ya, Jim/Loretta?

  265. ‘Sergeant John Brooker from Derbyshire Police told Peak FM that home-grown right-wing radicals pose “just as much of a real threat” as those operating overseas, and vowed to treat them the same.’

    https://www.rt.com/uk/333007-edl-bnp-dangerous-isis/

    Derbyshire
    About 43,000 people are supplied with artificially fluoridated water in Derbyshire.
    Fluoridated communities include parts of Bolsover District bordering Nottinghamshire, and parts of South Derbyshire District bordering Staffordshire
    (h/t Daily Telegraph)

    “Yes, fluoride makes you stupid” – NaturalNews.com

    *****

    In summary, this means, stupid elements in the police have been instructed to go after English patriots.

    Lesson: be smart and love your country, make your career in an unfluoridated county.

    On the USA, same same (mutatis mutandis).

  266. It is indeed apposite today as we contemplate treachery and the Quisling like attempts to turn our country into followers of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, to remember the Great Marshal Zhukov
    *

    Georgy Zhukov was “the great general who had saved the Soviet Union from catastrophic defeat by Hitler and then led the country to a great victory and in doing so saved the Western World from tyranny and evil”

    After the war he created systems galvanising Europe into an enduring Union that has ensured that never again will the Nation States be embroiled in fraternal conflagration
    *
    His concepts of loyalty were central to his many successes

    Zhukov’s humble origins and remarkable Napoleonic rise are keys to understanding his lifelong loyalty to his motherland liberated from a brutal, repressive, authoritarian, terroristic tsarist regime. He understood the motivation of the people in the love of their Georgian Leader and throughout life maintained loyalty to him through thick and thin. This loyalty had a personal cost. But in the end it was what led Zhukov and the Russian people to prevail against all odds
    *
    Were only Gove to learn from all this

  269. Zhukov eh? The usual superficial, un-nuanced, polarised, subjective, soviet-romantic hagiography of no merit whatsoever but contrived only to provoke.

    The reference to “a brutal, repressive, authoritarian, terroristic tsarist regime” in the context of Zhukov’s own relationship with the absolute monster Stalin and other political figures in the context of soviet dynastic power struggles is laughably simplistic and partisan. Even the Wiki entry on Zhukov provides a more balanced and objective account of the reality of soviet internal politics and in-fighting around Zhukov’s career.

    “After the war he created systems galvanising Europe into an enduring Union that has ensured that never again will the Nation States be embroiled in fraternal conflagration”

    This fantastic statement is beyond belief. A completely contrived and fabricated boast that bears no connection to any kind of historic reality unless it is as an example of the sort of left wing buffoonery that conflates NATO and the EU in the context of the Cold War and suggests that soviet militarism and aggression was somehow beneficial.

  270. Frank P February 21st, 2016 – 02:57
    EC February 21st, 2016 – 09:49

    Nikki Holland, Assistant Chief Constable of South Wales:-

    “There is a real threat to him (Aseel Muthana who has been murdering helpless prisoners in Syria) and we still have a duty of care. Everyone is entitled to police protection. It doesn’t stop at the border, even for a terrorist. He has a right to life. We don’t put anything into the public domain that would deliberately impact on human rights.”

    By that left-wing silo collision logic the Welsh police should be investigating the RAF. They must have a similar duty of care to stop the RAF bombing any “Welsh” ISIS terrorists in Syria? Those terrorists must deserve Welsh police protection?

    But I haven’t noticed much concern for human rights when Plod and the BBC conspired to sensationalise historic “sex crimes”. But in the eyes of Holland it appears that those pose a far greater threat to our safety and security than terrorism where “even a terrorist” is entitled to police protection. Corbyn will be happy that the police see it his way.

    The rest of us are fucked.

  271. Malfleur – 06:26

    Mass medication (fluoridation etc.) is a western socialist thing. If the true objective was to improve the dental health of the nation they would be better off sticking the fluoride poison into the tons of sweets and fizzy drinks that are so beloved by the left’s client group that live in their benefits gulags. These are the “poor” who can evidently afford to overindulge in all the things that are bad for their teeth but cannot afford a toothbrush!

    In my area the over chlorinated water tastes like bleach, and is fluoridated too. Luckily we are able to afford to buy bottled water that tastes OK, but who knows WTF is really in it!

  274. Colonel Mustard @ 09:50

    How right you’re, Colonel, our resident member of the league of the deluded has lost it completely here. Baron read his posting only until it said the Russian Motherland was liberated from the Czarist oppression ….Arghhhh. The Czarist oppression was to what came later as one’s running nose is to one’s castration.

    Baron’s beginning to worry about telemachus, his brain seems to be giving up, and not only on this blog. The more people point him in the right direction the more he swerves from truth to the point of hallucination. Another failure of the NHS, one must suppose.

  275. More EU ‘intervention”

    Newsletter 2016/02/17 – Crisis in Kiev

    KIEV/BERLIN (Own report) – A serious government crisis is shaking up a
    pro-western Ukraine. Yesterday, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
    barely survived a no-confidence vote, after President Petro Poroshenko
    urged him to resign. Hundreds had assembled in front of the parliament
    building to protest against his policies, which are impoverishing
    large sectors of the population. Lately, people have been particularly
    upset over the hike in gas prices – making, for many, heating
    throughout the icy Ukrainian winter an expensive luxury. Berlin and
    Washington are worried that the country will no longer be
    controllable, due to the disastrous economic situation and the
    dramatic loss of popularity of the President and government. Western
    powers have therefore begun to call on Kiev to get serious about
    fighting corruption. Spectacular resignations of several ministers and
    the deputy general prosecutor have provided greater urgency to this
    demand and accentuated the government crisis over the past few months
    and the last few days, with no solution in sight. The formation of a
    “government of technocrats” under a longtime western diplomat is in
    discussion, in other words, Kiev would be placed directly under
    western control.

    more
    http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/58918

  276. Col Mustard 10:22

    An Assistant Chief Constable called Nikki?

    Does she have a part time job as a pole dancer I wonder?

    How false and patronising and without dignity, the over-use of personal nicknames and diminutives, once reserved for close family and personal friends, now shared with the toe rag you’ve just arrested, has become.

  277. Baron @ 11:35

    That particular drinking water filter system is said to catch all three: all the major metals, the non-metals such as fluoride, and all known microbiological threats including viral and bacterial and organic chemicals, “pretty much everything”.

  278. Malfleur – 11:29

    That filter looks good! I once read that if you live in London you are getting “recycled” water that has potentially been through seven other people! UGH!

    The advent of the contraceptive pill in the 60’s has meant that a lot of excess female hormones have been excreted into the water system over the past 55 years! This positive feedback, imo, can explain a lot about reduction of fertility rates, the rise of the bumocracy, and the increase in moobs(man boobs) in those that haven’t been turned!

    For evidence of this you have to look no further than the large metropolitan areas, and within M25 ring in particular…

    In rural areas “agricultural run-off” into the water courses, of nitrates and vetininary drugs in animal excreta, is also a huge problem.

    Shit, it’s not just the weather making me think that I want to go back to Australia asap!

  279. Baron
    February 21st, 2016 – 11:47
    You must know how sorry I am to offend you
    My post was simply a homage to loyalty in one who might otherwise have taken a selfish view to the detriment of his country. And because of circumstances the world
    *
    In the context of the other thrust of the argument, the prevention of Europe descending again to the depths of destruction that heinously included the holocaust you would do well to remember who perpetrated the Great Tragedy of Kishinev:

    http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/loc/kishinev.html
    http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/04/the-pogrom-that-transformed-20th-century-jewry/

  280. Those are the endocrine disruptors. Here are the top ten:
    http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/the-top-10-endocrine-disruptors-to-avoid-2/
    [Disclaimer:This is Dr. Edward Group’s site. I like Dr. Ed Group. He runs his own business, but he also develops with and for Alex Jones. Disclaimer: I like Alex Jones too]
    Lots of those endocrine disrupters in Brazil, which is also far away like Australia. It is argued that the kitia virus was developed to provide the cover cover for the pesticide companies – which explains why the big zita virus out break began in Brazil….

  281. EC
    February 21st, 2016 – 12:46
    The advent of the contraceptive pill in the 60’s has meant that a lot of excess female hormones have been excreted into the water system over the past 55 years! This positive feedback, imo, can explain a lot about reduction of fertility rates, the rise of the bumocracy, and the increase in moobs(man boobs) in those that haven’t been turned!
    You are correct,E.C. Another serious result is the huge increase in breast cancer. This cancer is very often fuelled by estrogen, but of course the idiots in control here prefer to ignore it. The ‘experts’ are concerning themselves with coffee houses making beverages with up to 23 teaspoonfuls in each serving. Wow, with the price of sugar, how can they make a profit!

  282. EC

    Well …. Jeb Bush has just gone tits up!
    Perhaps that was down to the water, too? ☺

    I have to report that the tap water here reeks of Chlorine – awful! We use a Brita filter jug. After that it tastes alright, but who knows? Three of my neighbours have popped their clogs this winter. Soon be last one standing from my original co-habitues here in Geriatric Gulch. Demographic finagling through the water supply? Interesting.
    ☺

  283. True Lancastrian have always taken a superior view of the denizens of Liverpool. I suspect this offering was generated from within God’s county:
    Scouse vasectomy:
    After having their 11th child, a Liverpool couple decided that was enough, as the social wouldn’t buy them a bigger bed and they weren’t strong enough to nick one.
    The husband went to his doctor and told him that he and his wife didn’t want to have any more children.
    The doctor told him there was a procedure called a vasectomy that would fix the problem but it was expensive. A less costly alternative was to go home, get a firework, light it, put it in a beer can, then hold the can up to his ear and count to 10.
    The Scouser said to the doctor, ‘I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I don’t see how putting a firework in a beer can next to my ear is going to help me.’
    Trust me, it will do the job’, said the doctor.
    So the man went home, lit a banger and put it in a beer can.
    He held the can up to his ear and began to count: ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5,’ at which point he paused, placed the beer can between his legs so he could continue counting on his other hand.
    This procedure also works in Middlesbrough, parts of Bradford, Gravesend, Devon and anywhere in Wales.

  284. As my previous post notes, there is no noticeable adverse effect on reproduction in the benefits recipient areas of Britain, nor does oestregen in the water supply seem to have any noticeable effect the fast growing Pakistani and Somali enriched areas of Britain.
    However I note that those who defer having families, work, save to buy their own houses and generally demonstrate prudence in their lives are steadily diminishing as a percentage of the population. This means that they are being supplanted by genetic idiots, both native and imported. So the only question is, not if, but when and at what point, does our civilisation and society implode?

  285. Baron February 21st, 2016 – 11:47

    Bear in mind that the objective of “telemachus associates” is only to disrupt or provoke and the imperative is always mischief.

    The use of multiple account sockpuppets and various pretences to harass websites they disapprove of has been unmasked on a number of occasions.

    One of their ploys is the attempt to divide and rule, suspending hostility and offering false amicability to one “reasonable” poster in order to suck them in, as in:-

    “You must know how sorry I am to offend you”

    They have already identified you as one who has defended their right to peddle their agitprop here so will seek to further manipulate you. It is classic communist subversion and I have seen it operated across the globe for more than fifty years. Don’t believe a word of it. The dishonesty and deceit is endemic. There is not an iota of truth in anything uttered or any genuine wish to engage.

  288. Among various other things I’d like to do to Prity Patel is to cast a vote for her as prime minister . She works diligently and seems to have a degree of understanding many have lost or put in the not interested tray.

  291. But joking aside, she is quite local to me and she has an extremely high level of support from her constituents and people outside her catchment area. If I was able to vot for her I would. She is not held down by all the modern nonsense. She thinks clearly and confidently. She is what we need.

  293. Is Gove’s move a false-flag operation?
    In the English Civil War some families had sons fighting on both sides;to safe-guard the family fortunes.

    Two conspiracy theories going around Westminster.
    Gove and Boris are both positioning them-selves for the Leadership contest.

    Gove can present himself to the party membership as having been `sadly defeated`,whilst still being on-side with Osbourn;or if he becomes Leader can carry on Cameron’s policies. (for this reason he has `not impressed some true believers`and his public image may not help them.)

    Boris can present himself as `the man who tried`and sweep-up the party membership.

    Non of the top conservatives have anything to loose.Cameron will-keep them on for Party unity and there is no passionate opposition from them.The true believers have not entered Government.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35626143

  297. Seismic events today. The Labour “online campaign” trolls have all been called back for emergency briefings on the new party line to take. Priority – exploit the Tory split.

  298. Part of the ongoing project to revise history by the New (extremist) Left, Channel 4 will tonight attempt to legitimise the Black Panthers as a touchy-feely “socialist” grass roots organisation.

    9 pm.

  299. Those with a soul will be watching “The Night Manager”
    If you read the book you will know why they say Richard Roper was based on an unprincipled loner from an East Anglian idyll

  300. 1421
    It is a question of how you respond to those who extend simple human courtesy
    I ought to add that while I do have associates (Jennifer, Patriccia, and David L), I resent being linked persistently with Peta, Fabian_Solutions and Jefferson Burns. If you have one shred of evidence of a link, please furnish it (and I know Peter keeps records of email required fields and IP addresses)
    Otherwise pipe down and stop trying to be a clever dick

  301. On the burning issue of the day I came across this on a Murdoch site
    *
    Reasons To Stay

    :: Millions of jobs are linked to our EU membership

    As far back as the year 2000, it has been claimed that three million jobs rely directly on our membership of the European Union. The figure was even cited by Nick Clegg during his time as Deputy Prime Minister.

    :: Some of Britain’s biggest trading partners are in the EU

    Some of Britain’s largest trading partners – including France and Germany – are in the EU.

    More than 50% of our exports go to EU countries, and our membership allows us to have a say over how trading rules are drawn up.

    :: It’s easier than ever for us to work and travel abroad

    Around 1.4 million British people live abroad in the EU, and having membership makes movement around the continent incredibly easy. Driving licences issued in the UK are valid in all EU countries.

    :: Crime fighting

    The European Arrest Warrant cuts out the need for long and complicated extradition procedures and allows criminals to be brought to justice across the EU.

    :: Influence in the world

    The EU is the world’s biggest market and plays a big role in world trade, climate change issues, development projects and more.

    It has the clout to take on multinationals such as Google and Microsoft. At the moment Britain plays a key role in the EU, and leaving would see us forgo that.

  304. “Reasons To Stay
    Millions of jobs are linked to our EU membership
    As far back as the year 2000, it has been claimed that three million jobs rely directly on our membership of the European Union. The figure was even cited by Nick Clegg during his time as Deputy Prime Minister.”

    Yes, that has been “claimed”. June Sarpong peddled that one on QT and Theo Paphitis blew it out of the water.

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/can-june-sarpong-save-the-day-for-the-in-campaign

    “Some of Britain’s biggest trading partners are in the EU
    Some of Britain’s largest trading partners – including France and Germany – are in the EU. More than 50% of our exports go to EU countries, and our membership allows us to have a say over how trading rules are drawn up.”

    There is a trade deficit. They need us as an export market more than we need them. We have a say over our trading rules whether we are in or out. Watch Merkel squeal if we proposed tariffs on German luxury cars. The EU has not been good for fishing, flooding, small business and a host of other areas where stupid EU rules and regulations have resulted in negative outcomes.

    “It’s easier than ever for us to work and travel abroad”

    It’s also easier than ever for hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants to be lured here to work for low wages which distort the job market or to exploit our generous benefits system. And for foreign criminals and terrorists to come here.

    “Crime fighting
    The European Arrest Warrant cuts out the need for long and complicated extradition procedures and allows criminals to be brought to justice across the EU.”

    It also undermines long standing protections in English law of habeus corpus and the presumption of innocence.

    “Influence in the world
    The EU is the world’s biggest market and plays a big role in world trade, climate change issues, development projects and more. It has the clout to take on multinationals such as Google and Microsoft. At the moment Britain plays a key role in the EU, and leaving would see us forgo that.”

    Come off it. As if we had no influence in the world prior to 1973. Lefty hatred of their own country now extends to talking down its self-determined history and its future prospects.

  306. telemachus February 21st, 2016 – 19:53

    How do we know what to believe when you have admitted posing as David Lindsay and following the Jennifer episode.

  310. Malfleur – February 21st, 2016 – 22:27

    Yes, I’ve already watched about half of it.

    I especially noticed Trump’s scathing denunciation of Obama’s much publicised “deal” with Iran.

    And as it happened I’d also just noticed this –

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/salman-rushdie-iranian-state-media-renew-fatwa-on-satanic-verses-author-with-600000-bounty-a6887141.html

    Iran’s Ayatollahs haven’t wait long to rub the west’s nose in it have they?

  314. I don’t agree with every thing Le Grand Boris writes,but remember what Churchill had to say about Stalin and doing a deal with the Devil.

    At least he doesn’t seem to be an ideologue and I might even be persuaded to vote conservative if he was leader.

  316. RobertRetyred
    February 22nd, 2016 – 09:23
    “Said idea of Britain being a sovereign country outside the EU is an illusion”
    Vichy Dave is also Loopy Laval!

  317. “Vichy Dave is also Loopy Laval!”

    I dunno what a “Laval” is but like a lot of old Etonians…
    he could be described as “a louche canon.”

  318. RobertReytred @09:23

    “David Cameron says the idea of the UK being a sovereign country outside the EU is an illusion”

    …and inside too, by all accounts.

    Hadn’t someone better tell the Queen about this? I think Cameron’s the man for the job.

  319. We all know what Boris is up to; his Telegraph piece is a calculated move in his bid for No.10. Shame he sat on the fence for so long, but that’s politics.

    But whatever his motive, the article is an excellent pitch for Brexit. Apart from a few weasel phrases about Cameron’s finagling it is a worthy document and probably proves that he would make a better Prime Minister than Cameron, Osborne and May combined.

    But to repeat what I said yesterday: it’s no longer down to the conniving politicians. For once we have them all by the balls. We have the choice.

    Be Brave and Brexit. Then we can decide which party will be most efficient at extracting us from the poisonous behemoth and cut new deals with traders and manufacturers around the globe.

    Let’s have no midsummer madness. Good things come from June. My wife and my son were each born in June.

    D Day was also a June exercise (more than little relevance to this decision.

    OUT, I say. OUT OUT OUT!!

  320. Thanks for the Trump Atlanta link, Malfleur. He seems to have cracked it there.

    But he needs to tone down the demagoguery and get a little more substance into his rants.

    But the Septics like the razzmatazz, so perhaps he knows what he’s doing. The results so far seem to indicate that.

  321. Malfleur @ 12:49

    Indeed he said it, Malfleur, but what a moronic thing to say.

    Has he forgotten that before we joined the undemocratic construct, Britain had been a sovereign country for centuries, genuine sovereignty, nothing imaginary about it, and to top it, for over four generations an undisputed world leader, the benefits of her leadership to others are still visible today.

    When history compares Britain’s running the world with that of the Republic’s times there’s to be only one winner, and it won’t be the Yanks.

  322. The most significant thing, imo, Trump said in his Atlanta speech was to tell the truth about the state of the USA’s finances. i.e. “We’re bust, and we cannot go on like this!”
    Don’t remember any of the other POTUS candidates ever speaking so candidly, and going on to proposing how things could be set right.

  323. Frank P – 13:10

    On June 24th it’ll either be “Carry on Cameron”…

    OR

    If the people vote OUT on June 23rd the current laissez-faire old Etonian PM will lose his job and be replaced by shiny new laissez-faire old Etonian PM. Now THAT’s change that you can believe in.

    May the farce be with you!

  324. Radford NG @ 00:55

    Excellent argument, by the blonde, Radford, the one bit he may have stressed more is that when we were sovereign, independent, free of any ‘help of Europe’, we had been doing better than within the construct.

    The out campaign will use the one tool that may work for them, that of fear. Often, people prefer the devil they know to the one they don’t.

    Btw, Baron reckons that our participation rate in elections here may get a boost, people will come back to vote. With the burden of Brussels, many have given up because they figured all out MPs do is endorse that’s coming from Brussels.

  325. Baron February 22nd, 2016 – 13:28

    The EU is an undoubted “cosy club” for that particular breed of third rate professional corporate-style politicians and their wonk hangers-on. A breed that has proliferated with the rise of quango-land, devolution, increased numbers of ministers, advisors and the cult of political correctness that has been the catalyst for so much expansion in both the size of the state and the things it pokes its nose into.

    What is surprising is that their ceaseless mantra of constant change being so good for us suddenly does not apply to their own gravy train – er, I mean the EU. They are happy to undermine, disrupt and shatter our traditions, liberties and legacy expectations in the name of “progress” with no thought for consequential risks but suddenly the prospect of having to give up their own “cosy club” membership brings on a state of funk about the “risks”.

    The EU is just a European conglomerate of this largely self-serving elite where lucrative rewards can be gained from all manner of virtue signalling and bad law whilst poncing about as important persons deciding how the little people should lead their lives.

    So when Cameron and his cronies talk about being safer and more secure it really just refers to the safety and security of like-minded corporate suits who can stitch up deals together, tax and impose upon the hoi polloi and enjoy a privileged existence. The thought of being wholly accountable to the electorate here and unable to shrug their shoulders and blame the EU for the unceasing torrent of law and regulation coming from every agenda peddler, government funded lobby group, committee, bureaucrat or agency must absolutely terrify them.

    It’s an industry and they are its lucratively rewarded Board members. CEOs, Directors and Heads of. They won’t want to give that up anytime soon.

  326. To stand half a chance of success the OUT campaign needs a clear, consistent and coherent message.

    Are we to believe in Gove’s & BoJo’s damascene conversion to national sovereignty, freedom and democracy? What if their presence merely muddies the waters of the OUT campaign, intentionally or otherwise?

  327. “On June 24th it’ll either be “Carry on Cameron”…
    OR
    If the people vote OUT on June 23rd the current laissez-faire old Etonian PM will lose his job and be replaced by shiny new laissez-faire old Etonian PM. Now THAT’s change that you can believe in.”

    If the latter is the case, then I don’t trust Boris not to make another equally flawed deal (EU-lite) with Brussels.

  328. EC February 22nd, 2016 – 15:15

    Painful though it is for me to admit it, Galloway has called this correctly. The importance of the issue transcends internal UK politics.

  329. A couple of days ago, Russia tabled a resolution before the UN Security Council ‘urging all parties to ensure the preservation of Syria’s territorial integrity’. This (territorial integrity) is one of the founding principles of the UN.

    Amazingly, three permanent member votes against it (US, Britain, France), as did the three countries that hold seats on the Council temporarily (Ukraine, New Zealand, Spain).

    This is rather worrying, or should be for every country on earth. If one of the principles that have governed interstate relations can be so easily trampled on, is there any guarantee that other countries can have their territorial integrity violated, get broken up, shared amongst neighbours?

    And how does this square with the insistence of the Americans and their vassals for the Ukrainian territorial integrity being sacrosanct?

    If the world is to be run on the whims of whoever it is sitting in the White House rather that legally binding rules agreed by all, we really are in a shite.

    What if the country decides to leave the EU in June, those wanting to stay organise a protest, elements of the deluded progressives start burning cars, breaking windows, the American political elite, in favour of our remaining in the Brussels monstrosity, deploys the American troops stationed here to back the ‘democratic uprising’? What then?

  330. C
    February 22nd, 2016 – 12:48
    “Vichy Dave is also Loopy Laval!”
    I dunno what a “Laval” is but like a lot of old Etonians…
    he could be described as “a louche canon.”
    Laval can go jump off a pier when the tide is out!

  331. EC February 22nd, 2016 – 15:15
    Painful though it is for me to admit it, Galloway has called this correctly. The importance of the issue transcends internal UK politics.
    Don’t believe he really means it. He is like our House Troll, full of duplicity. He knows Boris is far more popular than himself, so he is taking a ride on Boris’ broad back.

  332. Colonel Mustard
    February 22nd, 2016 – 15:37
    The above is addressed to you, Sir. 🙂

  333. Colonel Mustard @ 14:04

    Superb precis of the raison d’être of the Brussels hydra, Colonel, from the first to the last word.

    It would be instructive for someone to compile the list of the Kinnocks not only from Britain, but from all member countries. As far as one remembers, most of the commissioners from both here and other EU members have been failed politicians. The electorate kicks them out unhappy with what they were doing, they get their sinecures in Brussels, keep on fugging us without our having the chance to get rid of them.

    Out of the 196 countries in the world only 28 are EU members, the rest are managing just fine. Why couldn’t we?

    Out it is.

  334. And another thing:

    Have you noticed the American political elites to a man and woman are backing our membership of the EU?

    Why is it they themselves would never ever contemplate to be a part of a similar set-up? Why don’t they go it together with the likes of Mexico, the other countries around them? Of course not, this would constrain their sovereignty, instead, they’re in favour of building a wall.

  335. Sorry about the errors, the most glaring one ‘is there any guarantee other countries won’t have (not can have), but there’re others, too. The barbarian is undergoing a treatment that seems to be enhancing his senility to as yet unexperienced levels, apologies.

  336. EC @ 15:21

    The barbarian is marginally more optimistic than you, EC. Who knows, perhaps the electorate, emboldened by their courage to vote to leave the undemocratic set-up, will keep on the good work, refuse to vote for the members of the professional political class untouched by real life, plump instead for normal people, people who drive buses, drink beer, tell jokes.

  337. EC @ 15:15

    Politically, it will be suicide for the big beasts, if the country decides we carry on as before. Not only would it be unthinkable for them to aim for the top slot, they will find it hard to make it even in quangos, other usual sinecures, and certainly in the Brussels pigeon loft, too.

    Since our leaving the EU is by no means certain, their stance would suggest to the barbarian that their decision to back the ‘leave’ campaign is not only right, but genuinely courageous, too.

  338. Baron
    February 22nd, 2016 – 15:57
    Excellent observation, Baron. Even that “armchair humanitarian” Hiliary Clinton doesn’t suggest a union with Mexico.

  341. anne wotana kaye February 22nd, 2016 – 15:48

    Well I really don’t like him but he sits slightly higher in the pantheon of unpleasant left wingers than the “House Troll”. When Galloway is in full flow against the cosy political elite I find it hard to disagree with some of what he says.

    I’m not sure what he would gain by being duplicitous about Brexit and I think (but stand to be corrected) that he has been consistently anti-EU?

  343. EC (17:53)

    Successive governments have abused and corrupted all strands of our Constitution and, indeed, the Monarchy.

    This is a chance for the plebs to fight back. We must vote to leave and we must then hold them to it, if necessary on the streets. Midsummer BREXIT or Midsommer Murders. ☺

    We no longer need to consult Cameron; Boris; Comrade Corbinski; Nigel Farage; Galloway. Fuck ’em all bar one: BREXIT! Who cares which way they vote. For once, each of our votes carries as much weight as each of theirs. Bring them down to size:
    B-R-E-X-I-T!

    It’s a no-brainer.

  344. EC (16:43)

    Thanks for the hat-tip on that vid. Whenever Brillo is on leave I give the show a miss; can’t stand the horse-faced cow that deputises. And while I wouldn’t trust GG with my cat -despicable little shit – it was rather delicious to watch him eviscerate her.

  345. EC February 22nd, 2016 – 17:53

    It sounds dodgy and is sailing close to the wind as it is arguable how much would be considered party political and how much the pursuit of government policy. The civil service code of conduct is here:-

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-code/the-civil-service-code

    Cameron would argue that it is government policy to stay IN and the civil service will therefore be obliged to support that. However his behaviour in pursuing such pathetic renegotiations in such a half hearted manner then becoming a stay IN zealot the moment he drops them and before they have even been ratified is appalling. The worst display of venal duplicitousness I think I have ever seen in a PM of this country with the possible exception of Blair’s dodgy dossier. The arrogance with which Vichy Dave now prosecutes his EU masters wishes is breathtaking.

    But then I remember how he vowed that Juncker would only be appointed over his dead body. Then within days of the appointment we were treated to his juvenile ‘high fiving’ of that very person. Cringeworthy. He is what might once have been described as a complete ‘bounder’. Terry Thomas would have called him and his clique ‘a complete shower’.

  346. Sky News (aka the Dirty Digger) is spinning like a Woolworth’s tin top against Brexit; the Stock Market has been rigged for the day as a scaremongering tactic. Stand fast.
    BREXIT!

  347. Fox News (also) aka The Dirty Digger, don’t know whether to shit or bust over Trump’s Atlanta jamboree, in which he slagged off the media wholesale. As ratings are involved the faces of Fox are amusingly Janusian.

  348. EC @ 16:43

    Not a fan of the man, Baron is, but the way he handled the BBC luvvie would be hard to beat.

    Thank for the clip, EC.

  349. The boy attacked Boris rather harshly in the House his afternoon, a mistake that, the blond one looked like a chastised dog, an image he is good at cultivating knowing full well that the public likes and sympathises with an underdog more than the tormentor.

    It’s also bad for the future of the conservative party. If he carries on like that there will be no Tory party left after June.

  350. Baron @ 15:42
    A couple of days ago, Russia tabled a resolution before the UN Security Council ‘urging all parties to ensure the preservation of Syria’s territorial integrity’. …
    Amazingly, three permanent member votes against it (US, Britain, France), as did the three countries that hold seats on the Council temporarily (Ukraine, New Zealand, Spain).”

    In one world where the United Nations is to be our sovereign government, what difference does it make?

    Baron @ 15:57
    “Why is it they themselves would never ever contemplate to be a part of a similar set-up? Why don’t they go it together with the likes of Mexico, the other countries around them? ”

    Dear Baron, please pay attention. They HAVE!! It is called NAFTA and, like the EU, is thinly disguised, less so since the southern border of the USA was dismantled, as a free trade agreement.

    Note also the TPP, described as a ‘trade pact’, which is actually a treaty for one government, among 12 countries around the Pacific rim and is a kind of perpetual motion legislation machine once severed from its original sovereign moorings, of support for which by Congress President Embalmer described himself on Monday as ‘cautiously optimistic’ (Reuters).

  351. Malfleur @ 23:04

    We’re not talking about free trade agreements, Malfleur, but about federal set-ups, NAFTA it isn’t. The TPP is a different beast altogether, if we were out of the EU it’s unlikely we would be willingly subscribing to it without a debate.

    Free trading’s OK, that’s what the original EEC was all about, federalisation comes under the heading of lost sovereignty, someone else making decisions one has to obey without the right of voting that someone out. Different that.

  354. Colonel Mustard, February 22nd, 2016 – 20:12

    I fully expect the BBC to be propagandising on behalf of IN, too. (After all, it does accept £millions from the EU) Also, it’s the same running order for for CH4 News if last night’s Anna Soubry vs Nigel Farage spot (refereed by that impartial(ha!) reptile Jon Snow) is anything to go by:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKaGqSDnaqQ

    Soubry had just attended Dave’s EU deal special briefing for Conservative MPs (less than half turned up) and was obviously overcome with er… well it looked to me like she’d just undergone a thorough debriefing!

    The calibre of Dave’s hand picked Cameroons is soemwhat depressing, innit?

    You’ll note that Nigel was hardly allowed to get a word in edgeways!

  357. EC February 23rd, 2016 – 09:22

    I detest the vile Soubry. A ghastly, shrieky woman who comes across as thick as mince but vociferously opinionated and judgemental. Like one of those bourgeois women with retired husbands who go on and on about the foreign holidays they are taking as though that is deserving of admiration and deference.

    She has that same “rabbit caught in the headlights” stare as Nicky Morgan, which disconcerts as suggestive of madness. Whenever I hear her, Morgan or Miller spouting I have doubts about them being rational people.

    But then it is difficult to understand how anyone of any intellectual integrity could bear to be in Cameron’s cabinet. Collectively it seems to be remarkably stupid.

  358. EC February 23rd, 2016 – 09:25

    Thanks for the link. There is a tendency, perhaps unique to the left in Britain, to romanticise Soviet communism. There seems to be a relish for its totalitarianism which can perhaps be attributed to the essential control freakery of the left, a wistful envy at being able to consign opponents and dissidents to the gulag which is vicariously surrogated in exercises like “zero tolerance” and “no platform”.

    The way they display red flags and even sing about them is vile. But again their silo approach facilitates the dichotomy which is conveniently ignored rather than abhorred in the media. Soviet red flag romanticism is in one silo and the persecution, imprisonment and murder of millions under the same red flags is in another, with the lid tightly closed. “We might have murdered millions” they seem to say “but we meant well, which excuses all”. No it doesn’t.

    Until they are required to face up to the consequences of their vile creed and to admit its flaws, fallacies and crimes, their moral boasting and certitude will continue. They get an easy ride but shouldn’t.

  359. “Collectively it seems remarkably stupid”

    “Seems” in that context is remarkably kind. A two letter word is justified.

    Then there is the question of alternatives. Sadly, I see no ships …

  360. Coburn was ecstatic on DP to make up a coven of Labour witches to gang up on the single Tory. The Scottish Labour leader’s emoting when he called her on her immigration contradictions was impressive.

    Then it turned into a love-in about Scottish Labour with nary an alternative viewpoint where Coburn co-opted that ghastly monkey-faced minion (who also cannot conceal his Labour party sympathies) to play spot the (dead/failed) Scottish Labour leader from 1999 to present and the coerced BBC tax paid for a primary school class project wall chart – red of course with a great big Labour rosette on it (no doubt a labour of love).

    The whole thing ended like some ghastly “Red Peter” for CBBC with Coburn as a kind of lefty Valerie Singleton trying to repair Scottish Labour’s fortunes with sticky backed plastic and old toilet rolls. That woman is so obvious.

  361. I think that William Shakespeare must have had Coburn, Kuenssberg and Squawk in mind when he penned the opening scene of Macbeth.

  362. Continental Drift

    Today military men
    Lie their way through Number Ten.

    Tectonic plates drifting south
    People left to feed, hand to mouth.

    Governments shout and bawl
    As yet more legislation is passed for us all.

    Yet more power passed to the European Union
    Unelected bureaucrats force more laws upon us.

    Trade Unions jumping up and down in unison
    It’s only now they realise its costing jobs.

    We’ve got our feet well cemented
    On hallow ground, our ancestors fought for
    Where lives were lost and others dented
    Not to allow more European Union laws through the backdoor.

    Now we have to leave them to it
    We have to let themselves implode
    We need a new set of rules – exquisite
    Otherwise we will lose our natural home.

  363. A commenter starts a dictionary:
    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/tories-are-approaching-the-referendum-in-the-wrong-way

    The Active Citizen • 23rd Feb
    After listening to the PM in Parliament yesterday, a thought occured to me…

    LET’S ALL LEARN CAMERONISH – Lesson One
    Mr Cameron seems to be inventing a new language on a daily basis. This language uses the same words as English, but don’t be fooled. It’s new because the words have different meanings to those of widely-used and accepted English. Don’t worry, in the next few months you’ll get the hang of it.

    Cameronish-English Dictionary
    “Sovereignty” – The process of giving foreigners the right to make our laws.
    “Power” – The new and more correct term for sovereignty.
    “Safer” – The feeling after Frau Merkel suddenly decides to invite millions of people from the Middle East and Africa to join us in the EU.
    “More secure” – The satisfaction of knowing that a fat Belgian policeman is monitoring groups of Islamic terrorists in a Brussels suburb. Also used in military terms to denote that an EU army of French and Italian soldiers are ready to stop Putin from more expansion into Europe.
    “Stronger” – What you feel when foreign governments take over the burden of all decision-making from you.
    “Weaker” – The feeling when denied English breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner until you give up and sign something.
    “Better off” – The warm feeling of knowing that you’re paying billions each year to subsidise the lifestyles of the people of other countries, and paying over 10,000 unelected EU officials more than the UK Prime Minister earns.
    “Legally-binding” – An ineffectual document attractively-bound by a secretary in the EU Commission office.
    “Irreversible” – A sophisticated form of joke: a cross between irredeemable and risible.
    “International law decision” – Form of obfuscation with no basis in reality.
    “Treaty” – (Also written as Treat-ee.) An incentive offered to a child, as in “If you’re a good boy you might get a little Treat-ee”.
    “Manifesto commitment” – Vague and passing aspiration, whose words are not to be taken literally or seriously.
    “Mayor of London” – Enemy of the state.
    “The Jungle” – Collective noun for local Conservative Associations.

    ===========================================
    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/watch-ukip-activist-sings-for-brexit
    The Active Citizen • 23rd Feb
    Even us Speccies can have a laugh at the whole EU debate. This seemed like an appropriate place to post my follow-up:-

    Cameronish-English Dictionary – Lesson Two
    “Ever Closer Union” – Direction of travel of 27 countries in EU’s second tier, denoting those with lack of EU influence.
    “Top table” – Table positioned at the back of the room, next to the toilets, denoting country with most influence in the EU.
    “Best of both worlds” – Expression normally preceded by “You can’t have the…”, but truncated for political reasons.
    “Single market” – EU’s tarif-free trade area set up for use by German manufacturers.
    “Fundamental reform” – Trade name for a form of porridge, much watered-down. More commonly known by the North-East Somerset term ‘thin gruel’.
    “Acquis” – Collective noun for totality of EU laws and directives, named after prominent French founder of EU, the Acquis de Sade.
    “No ifs no buts” – Synonym: Maybe baby.
    “Cast Iron Guarantee” – See “No ifs no buts”.

    Advanced Section – Some Camacronyms
    “TTIP” – Alternative spelling: ‘t tip. Highly secretive, US-owned, backed by Cameron. Believed to be rubbish facility based in Yorkshire England, run from Brussels. Example of usage: “Ah’m goin’ down ‘t tip, dear.”
    “CAP” – Expensive delicacy much consumed in France and less industrialised EU countries.
    “CFP” – Formerly known as the Common Fisheries Policy. One of many fishery terms now rarely used in Cameronish. Still widely used in Spanish ports.
    “ECJ” – Collection of non-jurists in Luxembourg specialising in rewriting of UK law.
    “ECHR” – Special court for Arabic speakers. Popular with British legal profession.

    JewishKuffar 23rd Feb
    “Sovereignty” – Getting things done in the world (as opposed to, er, being able to run your country without outside interference).

  366. 🙂
    Chuck Grassley: Will Follow ‘Biden Rules,’ No SCOTUS Vote in 2016
    Biden’s rules were simple — the president should not nominate, and the Senate should not vote on a nomination, during a presidential election year.

    “Justice Scalia’s death marks the first time a sitting Supreme Court justice has passed away in a presidential election year in 100 years,” Grassley, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, said in the Senate yesterday.

    In 1992, Biden “emphasized that in four vacancies that arose during a presidential election year, the president exercised restraint and withheld from making a nomination until after the election,” Grassley declared. He added, “One of those presidents was Abraham Lincoln.”
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/22/grassley-will-follow-biden-rules-no-scotus-vote-in-2016

  367. RobertRetyred:

    The conversation has moved on to next weeks wall. (I’ve requested to Peter that he put a note at the bottom of each week so we are not confused)

  369. From the spectator. Tomorrow.
    How on earth is it possible to ever have an agreement among these people.
    The myth of the plucky Kurdish warrior
    Our favourite allies in Iraq and Syria have problems and divisions of their own
    Paul Wood
    Paul-Wood
    27 February 2016
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    On Nawroz, the Persian New Year, last March, Isis sent a holiday greeting to the Kurds. They published several videos of Peshmerga fighters, now prisoners, kneeling, handcuffed and wearing the usual orange jumpsuits. In one video, a prisoner is shot in the back of the head; the rest have their heads sawn off with a knife. In a deliberate twist, no doubt relished by the leadership of the so-called Islamic State, the killers were themselves Kurds. ‘You all know the punishment for anyone who fights the Islamic State,’ says one. ‘It is death.’

    The executioners did not wear masks and were quickly identified by Kurdish intelligence. Retribution followed. In an incredibly risky operation, a small team of Kurdish special forces slipped into Isis-held Mosul and killed one of the men who had wielded the knife. ‘We sent them a message,’ said the Kurdish official who told me about the hit, a tight smile of triumph on his face.

    The Kurds are ‘our plucky allies’, often outgunned by Isis yet still taking the fight to the enemy. If you visit Kurdish northern Iraq, the politicians and their commanders are not just accessible but hospitable. Many speak English, having been refugees in Britain or the US in Saddam’s time. Everyone loves the Kurds and so they have benefited from uncritical, sometimes fawning, coverage of their war with the jihadis. This has led to serious problems being glossed over.

    The war against Isis began badly. During the Isis blitzkrieg two years ago, the vaunted Peshmerga — literally ‘those who face death’ — fell back again and again. A western diplomat told me the first to run were the officers, ‘some with quite famous names’. They fled Sinjar, leaving the Yazidis to their fate. It even seemed as if the Kurdish capital, Erbil, might be abandoned; it was saved only when the US began airstrikes. One analyst explained it by saying that Peshmerga recruits, just like teenagers anywhere, were now more likely to have played Call of Duty than to have fired a real weapon. To some, the myth of the Kurdish mountain warrior was just that.

    I’ve seen the reality first-hand. That summer, while filming a report at a little town called Jalawla, I found myself cornered with half a dozen Peshmerga fighters in a filthy, rubbish-strewn basement, Isis on both sides of the building. For an agonising 15 minutes, it seemed we would be overrun. I crouched on the stairs, looking up in terror. A fighter next to me was shot in the thigh. If we survived the gun battle, all of us expected to end up in the orange jumpsuits. At times, the Peshmerga seemed gripped by panic. I can’t blame them. But such a firefight would probably look very different today, with the Peshmerga’s two years of combat experience.

    The Kurds have pushed Isis back, taking territory they hope will one day form the borders of an independent state. The Arabs who live there are seen as a threat to that ambition. A report from Amnesty International last month is a reminder to western governments that in supporting the Kurds they are intervening to help one side in a civil war. Amnesty accuses Kurdish forces of ‘destroying entire villages’ in areas captured from Isis in northern Iraq, something it says may amount to war crimes. ‘When the Peshmerga retook the village the houses were standing,’ one Arab resident tells Amnesty’s researchers. ‘Later they bulldozed the village. There is nothing left.’ There are dramatic satellite pictures: one before-and-after image of a village shows 95 per cent of the buildings razed.

    The report details such destruction in the countryside around Jalawla, where our frightening brush with Isis took place. A Kurdish general there told me the town and its villages were 90 per cent Arab because Saddam had colonised the place in the 1970s. And most of the Arabs sympathised with Daesh (Isis), he said. He was probably right on both counts. But that makes it no less of a crime that, as one recent visitor to the region told me, houses are daubed with graffiti saying ‘Kurds only — Arabs out.’

    The Kurdish representative in Washington, Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, is acutely aware that the West went to war twice, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, over ‘ethnic cleansing’. Brought up in the UK, she was a journalist on the Observer in London at the time. She tells me that where damage has been done, ‘in all cases, either the village has been destroyed by Daesh or by airstrikes.’ She also says that many Arabs chose to leave voluntarily ‘because frankly they know they shouldn’t have been there in the first place’.

    She points out that Kurdish northern Iraq is sheltering more than a million displaced Arabs. Sometimes, ‘the men have gone to the Daesh side and they have sent their women and children to the Peshmerga. They know we will put their women and children somewhere safe and leave them alone… Kurdistan is a multi-ethnic, multi–religious society. Whether we’re part of Iraq, whether we’re independent, we have to live with the Arabs, the Turkmen and everybody else.’

    The Peshmerga are really two different forces loyal to the main Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, which fought each other in the 1990s: ‘the darkest and most shameful period of our history’, Ms Abdul Rahman calls it. There are once again tensions between the two factions. ‘I am not at all convinced that the Kurds’ own civil war is over,’ says Professor Gareth Stansfield, an expert on the subject. This doesn’t mean they are about to stop fighting Isis and (absurdly) start fighting each other. But ‘they’re just a quick step away from reverting back to their old command structure. Everybody knows who is KDP and who is PUK. That’s a very big problem.’

    The fragile accord was nearly ripped apart in the autumn when President Masoud Barzani of the KDP decided to remain in office, despite his second and ‘final’ term having expired in 2013. There were street protests — though they were as much about salaries as the political crisis. The Kurdish economy is in trouble. Oil, the main source of income, has fallen to $30 a barrel, from around $100 when Isis was on the offensive. The central government in Baghdad has stopped sending money to the Kurds. Wages for government workers, including the armed forces, haven’t been paid in months.

    A foreign visitor attended a dinner recently hosted by some senior Kurdish officials. He watched as they uncorked several bottles of Château Margaux, a wine that costs anything from £200 a bottle to £1,200, depending on the vintage. ‘We’re sitting there drinking the Château Margaux and a minister says to me: “We don’t have enough money to pay our Peshmerga.” ’ The dinner had both members of the KDP and the rival PUK present — it’s no surprise that the street protests are directed in part at the whole political class as much as any one party. Diplomats refer delicately to ‘transparency issues’ — that is, corruption. There has yet to be a ‘Kurdish spring’, says Professor Stansfield.

    President Barzani has seized the opportunity presented by Isis, promising to go ahead with a referendum on Kurdish independence. This might have been an attempt to distract people from their economic misery — or he might have been acting on the long-held and deep desire of Kurds for the safety of their own state. Regardless, western governments hope he is not serious, because they have always insisted on the territorial integrity of Iraq. ‘This leaves British policy in a shambles,’ says Professor Stansfield.

    Iraq, though, is simple compared with Syria. There, the US-led coalition is bombing in aid of a Syrian Kurdish militia called the YPG, the most effective ground force against Isis. But the YPG are in a tacit alliance with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. They are advancing not just against Isis but against a range of rebel groups, including some armed by the Americans. In Syria, the US is involved in a proxy war against itself.

    The Turks — whose chief fear is not Isis but Kurdish nationalism — have been shelling the advancing YPG. Which means that the US is backing both a Nato ally and the militia that ally is attacking. The YPG, for its part, may not be too keen on Kurdish independence in Iraq, because they hate President Barzani — who would be father of this new nation — and are allied to the rival PUK. The YPG is more concerned about Turkey than Iraq, which is not surprising given that it is effectively the same organisation as the PKK, the Kurdish nationalist group inside Turkey. Because the PKK is internationally proscribed as a terrorist organisation, Britain and other western governments have to pretend the two — the PKK and the YPG — are different.

    That is a fiction, as Iraq is itself these days, and Syria too. But Iraq is a necessary fiction. The alternative might be truly bloody ‘sectarian cleansing’. One Sunni tribal leader told me he feared the genocide of millions of Sunnis in Baghdad. The truth is that both Iraq and Syria long ago ceased to exist as nations. ‘Iraq is broken,’ says Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman. ‘People talk about, “Oh the Kurds want to break up Iraq…” First of all, it’s broken already, and second, we didn’t break it. It was broken from the day it was created. It’s never worked as a country.’

    The Kurds are putting that belief into action in the disputed territory of their future border. Consumed by the battle against Isis, all that western governments can do is to avert their eyes.

    Paul Wood is a BBC Middle East correspondent.

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