In addition to 38 BeeGees, Compost, etc, there’s an outfit of paid activists who exist to feed the media stuff the media are only too happy to run, as if from fellow ‘journalists’, rejoicing under the use of the word ‘democracy’ that many a tinpot nation uses.
Jenna might also be aware that the national broadcaster has staff who write opinion as fact, and tweet with impunity. And often block those who question this.
More relevantly, she might also be aware the national broadcaster now rating last in trust does not just have lists, but actually blocks for two years those who pursue their complaints system up through ECU, to OFCOM, now packed with more colleagues in ways they get upset about if political foes do.
And, most of all, the BBC uses FOIs constantly, whilst as a public service exempting itself from almost any to itself on anything.
Maybe ‘experts’ could offer input on this state of state affairs too? The evidence for this is more substantive than any Jenna offers.
And, Jenna, Marianna, et al… precedent can be a capricious minx.
****
The government put me on a ‘watch-list’ for journalists
Dear Rube,
As a journalist, I use the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act almost every day. Its helped us at openDemocracy break major stories onsecretive Brexit lobbying, ‘COVID cronyism’, Boris Johnson’s plans for radical NHS reform – and much more.
But now, I’ve discovered that my FOI requests are on a sinister UK government ‘watch list’ for journalists.
It’s run by a secretive unit inside Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office that’s been accused of blacklisting reporters and blocking the release of ‘sensitive’ information.
Experts say the government is breaking the law – and even Tory MPs are demanding answers. But the Johnson regime keeps stonewalling, hiring lawyers to keep details of this ‘Orwellian’ unit secret.
We’re not going to let this go. We’ve launched a legal battle to force them to come clean – but we also need a huge public outcry, showing that thousands back our call for transparency. Will you add your name?
Yes, sign me up
We only discovered this secret FOI ‘Clearing House’ unit after a two-year battle with the Cabinet Office.
FOI requests are meant to be applicant-blind: but I found out that government departments were discussing me and my work when I submitted them. One message said, “I’ll just need [redacted] to sign off on this before it goes out, since Jenna Corderoy is a reporter for openDemocracy.”
This isn’t just a breach of the law – it’s a direct threat to press freedom in Britain. Journalists’ right to access information and hold power to account is a vital pillar of our democracy.
Without Freedom of Information we’d never know about MPs expenses; we’d still be paying for duck houses and moats.
Add your name – and together we’ll defend our right to know what our government is up to.
Yes, sign me up
Johnson’s government has gone out of its way to keep information hidden from the public. They’ve refused to release contracts worth millions on the ‘failing’ NHS Test and Trace scheme. They’ve blocked our journalists from asking questions at Downing Street press briefings.
But with your support, we can win this one. We’ve won cases like it before: forcing MPs to release taxpayer-funded ‘research’ on Brexit,for example. And our reporting has forced major pro-transparency changes in the law – like ending donor secrecy in Northern Ireland.
With your help, we can build a massive outcry and end this shameful effort to avoid public scrutiny.
Please sign up today and forward this email to everyone you know – together, we really can make a difference.
Sorry if it has been mentioned elsewhere but last night there was a huge step forward for Trump. A senate committee in Pennsylvania heard evidence from Trump’s legal team regarding the election fraud. It was televised live. I have looked and NOWHERE on MSM has it been reported. The same MSM that screams “show us the evidence “but when it is presented they look the other way !
When the original “results” are flipped in Trump’s favour, as I believe they will be, the MSM are really going to have to report it, no matter how much it sticks in their collective craws. I for one, shall waste no time in laughing at them (not that I ever read, watch, or listen to the fake MSM…).
It might shut sneery Soapy up for a short while, too. He wasn’t too pleased with Flynn’s pardon.
Not at all. They will ‘explain’ that Trump and those republicans who supported him employed underhand methods to over turn the result of a thoroughly open and fair election. They will claim that the Trumpian plot was based on packing the Supreme Court with fascist judges who he could rely on to find in his favour and once he had done this all he had to do if he lost the election was find a way to refer the result to the SC and it would be overturned .After all they will say the polls showed Biden the runaway winner , all the MSM knew Biden would win so Trump had to use dirty undemocratic tactics and the best bit will be that if Trump does secure his deserved second term the MSM will unanimously say that ‘the big loser in all of this is democracy itself!’
Basically everything the BBC , and their colleagues in the MSM , say is the opposite of the truth. Classic Orwellian Newsspeak or Doublespeak eg War is Peace , Freedom is Slavery , Ignorance is Strength etc etc .
Strange they never consider the inequality in hours worked in garden, DIY, cars. Not to mention that men statistically do far more overtime and, in general, spend far more time at work. None of that is mentored of course.
The BBC has this report on pensions atm – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55070292 – and their main gripe seems to be that, because men die five years before women, its not fair on women. Unbelievable. Anyway, I managed to get my comment on the matter banned because it “broke house rules”…
“The usual false female victim story from the misandry-loving BBC. Perhaps the BBC could raise awareness of the real elephant in the room – why do men die, on average, 5 years earlier then women? Men’s lives are so easy right (because of the ‘patriarchy’), and there’s no proven biological reasons, so isn’t this a worthy story? Of course not, men bad and privileged, women good and victims. Simple.”
Turns out the BBC considers that men dying earlier than women is offensive
That the bbc is no longer trusted is no real surprise.
I've just watched the BBC News item on cutting foreign aid. The opening clip shows food being dropped directly to the people. That's the image they want you to take in – not grants to NGOs and Governments. Manipulation.
The frankly soppy Andrew ‘Mitchell (posh red Tory MP for the Third World and plebgate ) stood up in parliament and told the chancellor he would be responsible for 100 000 additional deaths by cutting the overseas give away budget …
My gripe is that there is a giveaway budget at all ….
( a quick check on Mitchell reveals plebgate cost him roughly £400 000 in court costs ) – I’m sure this was not a lot of money to him ….
Could the contributor who periodically posts a diagram of electricity usage by method of production kindly so so in the next two or three days?
I can’t wait to see the wind generation figures.
Apparently we are going to be tight for supply, so we’ll be turning up the gas and coal.
Alternatively the green lobby and ER could really show a lead by turning their central heating off !!!!!
What are the chances of that?
The newspaper headlines write themselves this morning. There are just two main stories. The coke snorting bad boy of Argentine football has died of a heart attack and the Covid ridden UK economy is now officially ‘In the hands of God’
Maradona has passed at the age of 60 but the press can’t quite agree on his status. Gary Lineker, England’s soccer goody two shoes, quoted in the Sun, reckons he was: ‘…arguably the greatest of all time’ whilst the Daily Star reasonably asks: ‘Where was VAR when we needed it?’ and consignes the cheating Diego to: ‘Second best footballer ever to grace the earth’.
As for the dire state of the economy we can either take the depressing extended highlighs from the Telegraph: ‘11.3pc worst fall in output for 300 years. £394bn highest borrowing in peacetime. 2.6m unemployment forecast next year. £550 billion cost of covid pandemic’ – or a quick soundbite from the manager, Rishi Sunak, as quoted in the freebie Metro: ‘It’s going to be tough’
So how did we come by this slow-motion economic own goal?
I blame first the Chinese Communists and then our own Government/NHS/Public Health-Industrial Complex.
The Daily Mail frontpage pictures our Rishi apparently having his blood pressure taken meanwhile the editorial informs us he has as yet: ‘…only hinted at future tax rises’
‘This is going to hurt, Britain!’ says the Mail headline. Perhaps we ought to have been warned of this back in March? Sensible journalists could have done the research, talked to scientists and made the calculations – had they been brave enough to speak out against the tide.
The BBC played their all too willing part in this medical stitch up and covid panic mongering so the older and wiser among us are – perhaps unconsciously – in revolt against the corporation: ‘Older viewers turn away from BBC’ (Telegraph)
I won’t make any direct comment on the latest Meghan stories suffice to inform readers hereabouts that I stubbed my toe rather badly last year and so I’d really like you all to raise your opinion of me, thanks.
Toe stubbing charities and campaign groups have been giving me a lot of praise on social media, according to the ‘i’ newspaper, I’ll have you know. Plus I’ve got a good write up in the Telegraph from a journo who really relates to me. Another one writing sympathetically in the Times says she knows what I went through.
The ‘i’ would have us believe Rishi can solve our massive government debt and economic dislocation by dibbing into the foreign aid budget: ‘Sunak warns of emergency and raids aid for UK’ – this is going to be the narrative on the Left. Think about this – the Left would have us believe government can always spend its way out of trouble and there’s always some billionaire that can be taxed. Now we have the Left’s experiment writ large – basically the Corbyn manifesto. Tell people all the spending and borrowing went well the only hitch is that we’re being mean to the third world, that’ll be the story from now on.
I wonder if anyone is telling Princess Nut Nut that we are only generating 1% wind power this morning…
King coal fired up to 6%
Come on BBC this is news… Tell the sheepies…
Boris “Britain is the Saudi Arabia of wind”
8:45am this morning, wind is supplying 1.1% of UK demand, while coal is 5.7%. CCGT is 62.0%
Some people are putting coal into their electric car this morning.
Apparently it is #UKWindWeek right now. Unfortunately somebody forgot to tell the UK wind about this. We are currently getting more power from the last few (much maligned) coal power stations that from our entire network of wind turbines pic.twitter.com/dLSRy8j66M
9am Melvyn is doing the Atlantic Slave Trade in part
The actual topic is a Dutch ship massacre
… they did say Europeans were buying slaves off Africans
.. Numbers are thrown around
Slave trade by English ships : 42K a year , 3 million over the 100 years
The Zong Massacre
the drowning of 132 enslaved Africans, purportedly as there was not enough drinking water go to round. The owners profited; nobody was prosecuted
The British had permission to capture Dutch ships
and had captured this slave ship.
. Even for a slave ship, the Zong was overcrowded; those murdered were worth more to the ship dead than alive.
The crew said there was not enough drinking water to go round and they had no choice, which meant they could claim for the deaths on insurance.
The main reason we know of this atrocity now is that the owners took their claim to court in London, and the insurers were at first told to pay up as if the dead slaves were any other lost goods, not people.
Abolitionists in Britain were scandalised: if courts treated mass murder in the slave trade as just another business transaction and not a moral wrong, the souls of the nation would be damned. But nobody was ever prosecuted.
They argued that officers allocation was a flat 2 each
and that by drowning half their cargo, the price per head of the rest had gone up.
Dover – just tried to google this and all I got was lines and lines of “did the Russians fund brexit” and/or “who funded brexit”
Got a feeling the pro globalist BBC led MSM may not be too interested in this story. I still think there was no way these bastards will ever allow us to leave the EU unless of course our economy is in terrible state.
And hey presto – Soros’s little helpers Matt Handjob and the blonde cretin have done just that.
If the Court had found in her favour, the BBC would have been all over it.
Live BBC broadcast teams outside the court 24/7, pics of Aaron Banks looking down beat, calls from BBC paid ‘experts’ to reverse the Brexit process…. Is the Tory government now tainted, the BBC asks? Over to Jeremy Corbyn, who would have won the election last year had the electorate known…
OFCOM has published its 3rd Annual Report about the BBC . The report is 99 pages long . I’ve only skimmed it at the moment but – the good news ( for us ) is that one of the products of covid lockdowns is that at least 3 million people have bought Netflix or prime for the first time – thus in my view diminishing their addiction to the BBC and diluting the residue of loyalty people might still feel for the monster ….
I’ll write a bit more once I’ve waded through the report …
One has to understand that the BBC’s number one default
position is diversity. One has only to look at the internet
main page to understand this .
Nearly every day the first picture on the main page has
an ethnic identity although indigenous demographics
of the UK is still around 82%.
Another default position of the BBC is over transgender issues.
The BBC employs at least four times the percentage of transgender people there are in the country. That is part of
their default position as well as”positive discrimination.” which
for me is an oxymoron.
There is no holding back this express train so far as the BBC
is concerned. Douglas Murray writes that on many of the
issues such as LGBT . BAME the train had all but reached
the buffers. So far as the BBC is concerned the train must not
stop at the station but speed off at an even faster speed. I
expect it will crash one day . At about the same time the BBC
loses it’s license payment extortion racket.
"I worry that the economic recovery is not being handled competently" Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey tells #BBCBreakfast he's worried about a lack of investment in the economy and social care. https://t.co/pSZQlsFadKpic.twitter.com/30Bmd1ESEt
And to continue with more news you’ll never hear on the bBc
BIG news in Nevada: a Judge has allowed NV Republicans to present findings of widespread voter fraud in a Dec. 3rd hearing. Americans will now hear evidence from those who saw firsthand what happened—a critical step for transparency and remedying illegal ballots. Stay tuned.
MORE BIG NEWS out of Georgia: the 11th Cir. just granted an emergency motion for expedited review on a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s election certification. We’ll know more next week starting December 1st. Stay tuned.
On sky news last night I heard a mention of the hearing going on about the rigged election in the USA.
They said “Trump came on and gave BASELESS allegations about the election”
This is a huge story yet all of our msm are ignoring it or tut tutting and saying just accept the result.
They are telling everyone that ‘even’ if it was rigged that we should just move on and accept that their man Biden won.
Had it been the other way round there’s no chance they would be happy to go along with this fake stolen election.
In earlier days reporters would have thoroughly investigated this rigged election to expose all the democratic party’s cheating but the msm are no longer impartial or interested in the truth. No Woodward or Bernstein types today.
What does this mean for the future of elections in the USA.
That it’s fine to cheat and rig elections.
Do the Republicans now have to cheat to have an equal chance of winning.
Are elections now meaningless in the USA.
What’s the point of voting if the election is rigged and your vote counts for nothing, why bother.
A huge story yet ignored by our msm.
Shame on the lot of them.
There was an audible gasp when it was revealed by Rudy Guiliani that in a middle of the night vote dump in Pennsylvania, there was 570,000 for Biden, and……………………………3,200 for Trump.
I mean by that that all around the world there is a political class that is quite happy to maintain a status quo where nothing changes. An elected politician in ‘opposition’ does no worse than one ‘in power’, even better in that they are subject to less scrutiny perhaps.
Trump is disruptive, a millionaire that became a politician, not a politician that became a millionaire. That is one reason why a lot of career Republicans don’t like him.
Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg, May, Johnson, Starmer – what’s the difference?
Rather than use electricity to run a website and to browse said website, couldn’t we just look out of the window?
Sun shining, tree branches waving, ‘renewable’ electricity being generated.
Or we could use gas. That’s one of the good things about fossil fuels, we can move them to where they are needed and store and use them when we like, not when a pack of eco-facists says it is OK.
Jack of all trades
“Aug 28, 2019 Victoria Seabrook @v_seabrook has been appointed Science Specialist Producer. ”
Previous expert analysis Massive shift in public opinion on climate change? A quarter (23%) Brits said #ClimateChange was most pressing issue facing Britain in the next two decades in @cardiffuni
study – in 2016 this figure was just 2% #ClimateEmergency
Every granny would say that when 2 surveys get radically different results, that is coc of who commissioned the survey
not cos the whole world has changed its mind
Looking for 50+ yr old woman (in ???????? or ????????) who recently started riding an e-bike… to appear alongside us in @BBCRadio4 report. If you know one, or are one, pls get in touch ???????? pic.twitter.com/xD2QRJm9Rl
What sane parent would put their child in the ‘crumple zone’ on a bike and so close to the road surface with all those particles of rubber, brake dust and soot that are supposedly worse than the air pollution of old?
I guess a cycling parent as they have that shield of virtue that means they, unlike every other road user, pedestrians included, have to yield to no-one, on or off the road.
The only white adult male featured in any article on the BBC including Homes under the Hammer so far this morning was Bill Turnbull and he’s ex-BBC so doesn’t really count.
As the aforesaid do I qualify for a discount or are the BBC practising extinction as a policy?
Carole Cadwalladr was given the Orwell Prize for what have now been shown to be preposterous fantasies, simply because she was telling Europhile hardliners what they wanted to hear.
Her crowdfunder has £363K in
had righty done that he would have been labelled a grifter.
To see how debased our cultural elites have become, consider that Carole Cadwalladr was given the Orwell Prize for what have now been shown to be preposterous fantasies, simply because she was telling Europhile hardliners what they wanted to hear. https://t.co/82oJPqlYI6
Huge thanks to The Observer for its June 10th story on @Arron_banks and @andywigmore. Standing on the shoulders of giants, some say. Others will disagree.
Arron Banks cannot win. Journalists cannot be bullied. We must & will fight back. I’m launching this today because we urgently need more journalism not less. The fight back starts here ???????????? https://t.co/P2ahC3ulRl
Paxman: "Clearly the licence fee can’t survive. It’s mad and antediluvian, but it’s not beyond the wit of man to replace the licence fee with something more 21st-century.” The BBC would be so much better off if its leaders got ahead of this on their terms https://t.co/avHlEhUr75
There is something upsetting about the ability of a creature like cadwalader to tell lies but get funded by ‘followers ‘ so that court and legal fees mean nothing .
Its a shame that the court wont be able to impose the kind of damages to blow crowd funding away …. and break her
As Great Britain is now faced with huge mountains of debt, I’d like to think that all the monstrous wages paid to BBC ’employees’. would result in a decent income for the Inland Revenue, and that while most British citizens recoil at the eye-watering money that so many of the pampered losers in W1A get for doing very little, I just try and think of how they’re taxed like most of us, and that somewhere, we benefit from such a ‘sleb-pot’. The same really applies to other highly-paid civil serpents of course.
I just do not trust the BBC to explain how their ’employees’ are given these enormous sums. Does the Inland Revenue spend as much time investigating these people to the same degree that white-van-man’s accounts are scrutinised? I know a few proper businessmen from my commercial past, who visibly shuddered at the thought of a revenue enquiry, and quite rightly so.
My old firm once had an unannounced VAT inspection. The bloke doing the poking around just walked into his office and sat in my boss’s office chair with no introduction or by-your-leave. My boss (we’ll call him Roger, because that’s his name), was somewhat taken aback, especially when the VATman just opened all the drawers on his desk, grabbed a book which looked official, and muttered ‘I’ll take a look at this’, and put it in his own briefcase! Roger is a hard, fair, business-like gentleman, and was left dumbstruck. Our company T/O was around £1.75m, and we all worked our socks off, as well as enjoying a half-decent lifestyle. It was a company regulated by loads of professional standards. But in the eyes of the law, all us directors were ‘suspect’! (It took several pints to bring him down from the ceiling after that very uncomfortable meeting)!
As an open query to anyone who bothers to read Scrobs’s wandering, sometimes confused, (occasionally pissed) posts, especially about tax-funded quangos like the BBC and many other councils, (I was bollocked here recently for lumping every public service employee into the sponging brigade, and as an after-thought, I understood that I’d over-generalised, so apologised to him/her, here), if the wages that the over-paid slebs, autocue-readers, under-managers etc., are being administered wrongly, like through their ‘service companies’, then I think the public has the right to ask the HMRC to spend a lot more time on these people and their ‘accountants’. Maybe much more than ‘a lot more time’ – how about a national purge on all these ‘public’ servants’, but maybe just concentrating on those who smugly present themselves as honest, caring workers, but still suck £300,000 each from the tax-payer, on top of all the paid spin-offs like opening fetes, kissing kids in village halls etc.? The UK will need every tax-penny it can get to pay off the eye-watering national debt that has accumulated since March. I don’t see why the BBC is exempt, and they should be cutting their real fixed costs, not just letting a few minions go when it suits them.
This latest focus on overseas aid being cut to pay for the British people’s problems is being mercilessly squealed at by the BBC, but, the overpaid crowd in W1A get so much money – in fact far too much, from taxing and threatening normal citizens, pensioners, forces veterans, hard-working white-van-men who are holding this strangled economy together, that it has to take a strong government attack on the publicly-pursed crowd. And I’m not talking about Joe Bloggs in the waste-disposal farm in Tunbridge Wells, or even Roger – above. As an added thought, do we assume that all the wages at the BBC will be frozen as well?
Surely the BBC would like to investigate, to introduce some sort of transparent ethical presence and try to improve its dire reputation for profligacy and waste of public money? Perhaps the independent broadcasters should do the investigating instead; they’d presumably get a whole lot more income when the BBC is eventually defunded!
Scroblene
As you say – some public sector workers are very – er – defensive – when accusations are thrown about . I got into trouble here saying MPs are overpaid – some fruitcake said they deserved more money .
But I apply the ‘market ‘ to pay for MPs . Is there a shortage ? Are they qualified ? Answer on both – generalising – is No – so cut pay and conditions …. even more so for the Lords … sometimes I just dip into the parliament channel and cannot believe how any can’t put a sentence together and have to read from an idiot sheet ….
The red tories have decided – for the time being – to just run up debt and not increase taxes … much … but the amount of interest staking up must start to detract from public project investment sooner or later ?
And we are probably about as low as interest rates go – oil is also relatively cheap – but neither of those is going to stay that way
As for the BBC – I’m now deeply pessimistic about any change – I think the red tories won’t take it on and leave it to pump out lefty woke poison as viewing figures continue to decline across all groups ….
……………..in the meantime -it will go overboard about any ‘hit’ it has and flog it to death whilst the likes of HBO and Netflix does the good stuff ….
I said I’m pessimistic about change with the BBC – but all it has to do is put something really bad / false /‘ offensive out – above the normal – and that might be then be the vehicle for change and heads rolling
3:30pm #R4OpenBook with @johnypitts writing fiction on climate change
@CarysBray and @dmccaulay discuss their atmospheric novels;
@HannahWestland talks anxiety and activism and
@LucyTreloar explores narrative approaches from down under.
“The loyalty of older BBC viewers is draining as the corporation desperately tries to attract younger audiences, a report from media regulator Ofcom has revealed.
Ofcom also said that the BBC was out of touch with large swatches of license fee payers, with satisfaction levels from over-55s ‘waining’ for the first time. Older people have a less ‘positive overall impression’ of the broadcaster, Ofcom’s annual report found.
The report also revealed that many areas outside of London feel they are not properly represented. Less than half of those from working-class backgrounds rated the BBC highly for ‘showing a good range of programmes that include people like me’.”
Tier map
Tier 1 almost nowhere except on the Isle of White & Cornwall
Tier 2 most of the south
Tier 3 Most of the north + Kent +Bristol + SLOUGH
(but not some of the national parks, nor Mersyside)
Its absolutely clueless, with no sign of proper risk management.
It’s like sending a fire engine to every house in the village just cos one is on fire.
In reality it’s easy to divide the country into cells like each workplace each carehome, each hospital department etc.
They should know that cells where people are sharing food and toilets have a much higher risk factor.
After all just standing next to someone for a few minutes is never likely to give you a high enough viral load unless someone cough a load in your face..
When they said “most growth was in the home”, I bet they meant It’s being spread from some NHS places and some takeaway food places into the home, and from there into 2 or 3 more people
So when the NHS gives it to 20 people you end up with 50 cases.
Since the daily R number is mostly less than 1.5
that shows once it’s spread to a home it mostly does not spread to another home.
If the virus was actually being spread from home to home as well as the NHS , the R value would be well above 1.5
Some good news everyone! The BBC is now officially tanking according to Ofcom (and I always thought they were best buddies!) and it’s all down to us grizzlies…
Meanwhile, the bbc reaches out, and rather than making things better again scoops another handful of its own ordure to rub in the faces of the majority outside its bubble.
I’m highly doubtful that those in the private sector that have seen a pay cut, hours cut, been furloughed or lost their jobs altogether, have much sympathy with the middle class public sector youths that the BBC have reached out to for this write-up. So utterly out of touch. pic.twitter.com/mSeF3gwxh6
Apparently on HIGNFY the BBC tried to save their reputation by allowing a Jeremy Corbyn joke
Fin Taylor “Yeh Bob Dylon’s a useless singer
..and Corbyn’s a useless leader
with only 200,000 hardcore fans
So if you bombed Glastonbury, that’d be two birds with one stone”
Cue triggered blue tick lefties
I’m being completely serious. Can you IMAGINE if an Arab said what Fin Taylor said?
Sorry you don’t like socialists, or whatever, you posh prick, but advocating for terrorism is still advocating for terrorism, whatever your skin colour or background.
I’m reproducing -below – a piece in the Telegraph today – from of all people – Jeremy paxman….
‘. For so long a world leader, the BBC has grown fat and metropolitan, increasingly scorning the views of the parochial people who are forced to pay for it. When given its head, the BBC can still produce brilliant shows like Strictly Come Dancing but, at an institutional level, it behaves more and more like an embarrassing relative deciding to dance with the kids at a wedding.
It’s hard to resist the impression of smug people who think they know better than the rest of us. The consoling glory is that none of us has to tune in any more.
I do not know anyone who has regretted giving up hearing ministers bloviate on the Today programme. Trust yourself; it really doesn’t matter.
Not to have your evenings ruined by having to listen to half-truths is a treat. I have yet to hear anyone who makes a living out of “the news” admit the truth – that, on many occasions, the only honest thing to tell the viewers is “not much has happened today”. The fiction must be maintained that every day, 30 or 50 minutes of newsworthy events have taken place. The medium insists that, once the red light goes on, conversation is over and it is time for opinions.
The red light makes me feel alive, but the truth is that it kills conversation. It is the warning to the minister not to say anything embarrassing, which makes what follows just an exercise in damage limitation – and often a signal to the interviewer that he has two and a half minutes to tie their shoelaces together without their noticing.
So why don’t you go to bed, or read a book? Or even listen to a podcast?
I was, I admit, late to podcasts. I had heard a few episodes of Serial – a true-crime podcast that took the world by storm in 2014 – and, having grown up in the long-gone glory days of Radio 4, I was underwhelmed. We surely have that sort of thing already?
But these encounters are, if millions of downloads are anything to go by, what the listening public want. I have spent most of the past year finishing a history of coalmining and beginning a book about the British Civil Wars, and the lack of daylight was beginning to get to me. So I became a podcaster.
In essence, I admit, it was no more sophisticated a line of reasoning than: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
Since some of the best conversations I have ever had occurred in pubs after the landlord had turned the key, we decided to call the thing The Lock In. My producer, James Bray, and I would invite someone (the author Lee Child was our first guest) for a beer, and then we’d share the conversation with anyone who cared to listen, for free.
Our agreeable pub crawl was ended when Boris Johnson shut the pubs. But we continue to find ways to spend half an hour in the company of interesting people. Other Lock In guests include Michael Palin, Lord Sumption and Katherine Birbalsingh, aka “the strictest headmistress in Britain”.
The mass media began with someone thinking it was worth sharing a chat. Social media wisdom is the modern counterpart to crowds at the Colosseum, baying for blood. But podcasts ought to be like civilised conversations – curious, sometimes astonishing and always frank.
And, in these disease-obsessed times, there is no need to wear a mask, of any kind.
I do not say that podcasts are the future, despite BBC Sounds’ incessant plugs for one perpetrated by its favourite child, someone called Gemma Collins, an alumna of The Only Way is Essex, Celebrity Walking in a Straight line and Not Falling Over, Celebrity Car Wash and Celebrity Badger Baiting.
Come to think of it, she might be a good guest for The Lock In.”….
..__so another career BBC type sees the light – after a lifetime of taking its’ Money …..
Ms. Spring is certainly ‘active’, if seldom in her supposed area of expertise.
I receive messages with the phrase “do your own research” multiple times a day – eg this comment on a parent Facebook group about coronavirus vaccine conspiracy theories.
Seems the BBC figures going for victim status might deflect.
We won’t tolerate abuse and threats aimed at our journalists. They all stick to the BBC’s editorial standards – meaning they need to include a wide variety of viewpoints and voices in their reporting. This should never lead to personal abuse. (1/2)
Stuck in a winter anticyclone for + 24 hours now and I note
Wind 2%
Solar. 0%
Biomass 7%
Europe is in the same weather system so any imported power will also be dirty…
Panic stations now….. very temporary solution to shortages…
Pumped hydro at 5%
Open cycle gas turbine at 1%
See if we get any outages.
Even if we had a multi million pound South Australia Tesla battery storage system that the BBC seems to think is the future. The storage capacity is 193.5 megawatt hours, It would operate at full power for less than an hour…. big deal…
STOR (Short-term operating reserve) on National Grid.
“Sources of extra power to help manage actual demand on the system being greater than forecast or unforeseen generation unavailability. Diesel generators on standby on premium feed-in tariffs.”
From what Belfield said, the cop told the tribunal
“yeh I was having a joke with my vegetarian mate,
I bought him the 7p carrots but swapped the 7p label for the £10 donut label
but then when I scanned I accidently scanned the 7p label twice”
..obviously they didn’t believe him.
Purely as an experiment In Poundland’s self service, I pressed the screen button for zero bags, then tossed the 10 p bag on top of my items.
*Unexpected item in checkout* the machine barked.
Of course unlike the policeman, I was sneaky enough to wait until the assistant was busy with another customer ..so bagged my goods and got clean away.
But shows its also the exact weight that’s important not just enough to scan the price.
Pleeeease tell me it is a renewable source based on recruiting aggressive, anorexic middle aged men in disturbingly tight lycra, silly hats and sunglasses to spend their leisure time in a turbine instead
I have some suggestions for potential recruits, especially on my shared country walk paths getting abuse from them for blocking the path and anywhere in Cambridge town centre
funny that, different when they are blocking a road shared with cars
No surprise the prog ran two green issue topics
– New satellite to measure sea levels across the globe
“This satellite is positioned in such a way that it doesn’t have to deal with tidal variations” .. I don’t believe that
“It’s so important to track Climate Change”
– “In the battle of Climate Change we need new battery tech”
they talked to some guy who gave some vague ideas
..So they didn’t actually have new news
He referred to “clean hydrogen” without explaining what it was
* Electrolysis hydrogen is too expensive so mostly it’s made from treating methane with steam and CO2 is a byproduct.
So, we’re all heading into another lot of tiered lockdowns, are we? I’m sure no one is surprised. I didn’t watch the news because I just couldn’t stomach seeing the familiar features of the Downing Street dunce, gurning his way through another pile of utter waffle. It would be too much. I’d want to retch.
Anyway, I have no intention of either acknowledging these restrictions or following them. Where I’m able I’ll carry on as normal. I’m certainly not allowing the state to tell me who can and who can’t visit me at Christmas…or at any other time come to that. Sensible, civil disobedience will be my watchword from now on.
As for our unspeakably awful government, what can you say? It seems to me that they’ve gone power mad. Some of them are clearly enjoying making our lives miserable…Particularly that insignificant, scrawny little runt, Hancock. Loathsome specimen…
You can forgive someone making a mistake once, but this has now gone on for eight months and it’s getting worse. They can’t think of anything else to do. This lot are one trick ponies.
No doubt there will be some discontented murmurings from the Tory backbenches, but most of them are so supine their spines have been surgically removed…along with their testicles… And anyway, the socialists will vote this though. You can always rely on the reds if you want yet more restrictions on your freedoms.
One thing I am sure of…come election time there is no way on God’s Earth I’ll ever in a million years waste my vote on this useless, pitiful, bovine lump again. Or indeed anyone else from his pathetic party.
I only voted blue because the Brexit Party didn’t have a local candidate. It was against my better instincts, which proved to be spot on, and won’t happen again. I will no longer take part in the laughable excuse for democracy we currently have.
atlas_shruggedNov 25, 04:32 Start the Week 25th November 2024 -petition The powers that be seem well able to remove passengers from a terminal building because of e.g. a suspicious package…
Yasser DasmibehbiNov 25, 00:21 Start the Week 25th November 2024 -petition Just in from Austria. In the election for the state of Styria the populist Freedom Party (FPO) has just come…
ZephirNov 24, 23:41 Start the Week 25th November 2024 -petition I read the link, and it mentions “Trumpian” in a negative tone and “the risk” of far right” and “immigration…
In addition to 38 BeeGees, Compost, etc, there’s an outfit of paid activists who exist to feed the media stuff the media are only too happy to run, as if from fellow ‘journalists’, rejoicing under the use of the word ‘democracy’ that many a tinpot nation uses.
Jenna might also be aware that the national broadcaster has staff who write opinion as fact, and tweet with impunity. And often block those who question this.
More relevantly, she might also be aware the national broadcaster now rating last in trust does not just have lists, but actually blocks for two years those who pursue their complaints system up through ECU, to OFCOM, now packed with more colleagues in ways they get upset about if political foes do.
And, most of all, the BBC uses FOIs constantly, whilst as a public service exempting itself from almost any to itself on anything.
Maybe ‘experts’ could offer input on this state of state affairs too? The evidence for this is more substantive than any Jenna offers.
And, Jenna, Marianna, et al… precedent can be a capricious minx.
****
The government put me on a ‘watch-list’ for journalists
Dear Rube,
As a journalist, I use the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act almost every day. Its helped us at openDemocracy break major stories onsecretive Brexit lobbying, ‘COVID cronyism’, Boris Johnson’s plans for radical NHS reform – and much more.
But now, I’ve discovered that my FOI requests are on a sinister UK government ‘watch list’ for journalists.
It’s run by a secretive unit inside Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office that’s been accused of blacklisting reporters and blocking the release of ‘sensitive’ information.
Experts say the government is breaking the law – and even Tory MPs are demanding answers. But the Johnson regime keeps stonewalling, hiring lawyers to keep details of this ‘Orwellian’ unit secret.
We’re not going to let this go. We’ve launched a legal battle to force them to come clean – but we also need a huge public outcry, showing that thousands back our call for transparency. Will you add your name?
Yes, sign me up
We only discovered this secret FOI ‘Clearing House’ unit after a two-year battle with the Cabinet Office.
FOI requests are meant to be applicant-blind: but I found out that government departments were discussing me and my work when I submitted them. One message said, “I’ll just need [redacted] to sign off on this before it goes out, since Jenna Corderoy is a reporter for openDemocracy.”
This isn’t just a breach of the law – it’s a direct threat to press freedom in Britain. Journalists’ right to access information and hold power to account is a vital pillar of our democracy.
Without Freedom of Information we’d never know about MPs expenses; we’d still be paying for duck houses and moats.
Add your name – and together we’ll defend our right to know what our government is up to.
Yes, sign me up
Johnson’s government has gone out of its way to keep information hidden from the public. They’ve refused to release contracts worth millions on the ‘failing’ NHS Test and Trace scheme. They’ve blocked our journalists from asking questions at Downing Street press briefings.
But with your support, we can win this one. We’ve won cases like it before: forcing MPs to release taxpayer-funded ‘research’ on Brexit,for example. And our reporting has forced major pro-transparency changes in the law – like ending donor secrecy in Northern Ireland.
With your help, we can build a massive outcry and end this shameful effort to avoid public scrutiny.
Please sign up today and forward this email to everyone you know – together, we really can make a difference.
Thank you,
Jenna Corderoy,
8 likes
Sorry if it has been mentioned elsewhere but last night there was a huge step forward for Trump. A senate committee in Pennsylvania heard evidence from Trump’s legal team regarding the election fraud. It was televised live. I have looked and NOWHERE on MSM has it been reported. The same MSM that screams “show us the evidence “but when it is presented they look the other way !
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When the original “results” are flipped in Trump’s favour, as I believe they will be, the MSM are really going to have to report it, no matter how much it sticks in their collective craws. I for one, shall waste no time in laughing at them (not that I ever read, watch, or listen to the fake MSM…).
It might shut sneery Soapy up for a short while, too. He wasn’t too pleased with Flynn’s pardon.
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Did he intone the mantra that appears standard across the entire MSM, word for word… “…despite caving in to pressure from the G Men…”.
Or something like that.
The MSM does like their ‘despite’, especially when editing for effect. Especially context, out.
9 likes
I would think all of the BBC dickheads in the US would need to resign after the investment they have made in Biden as President.
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I would think all of the BBC dickheads in the US would need to resign after the investment they have made in Biden as President.
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Not at all. They will ‘explain’ that Trump and those republicans who supported him employed underhand methods to over turn the result of a thoroughly open and fair election. They will claim that the Trumpian plot was based on packing the Supreme Court with fascist judges who he could rely on to find in his favour and once he had done this all he had to do if he lost the election was find a way to refer the result to the SC and it would be overturned .After all they will say the polls showed Biden the runaway winner , all the MSM knew Biden would win so Trump had to use dirty undemocratic tactics and the best bit will be that if Trump does secure his deserved second term the MSM will unanimously say that ‘the big loser in all of this is democracy itself!’
Basically everything the BBC , and their colleagues in the MSM , say is the opposite of the truth. Classic Orwellian Newsspeak or Doublespeak eg War is Peace , Freedom is Slavery , Ignorance is Strength etc etc .
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Strange they never consider the inequality in hours worked in garden, DIY, cars. Not to mention that men statistically do far more overtime and, in general, spend far more time at work. None of that is mentored of course.
The BBC has this report on pensions atm – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55070292 – and their main gripe seems to be that, because men die five years before women, its not fair on women. Unbelievable. Anyway, I managed to get my comment on the matter banned because it “broke house rules”…
“The usual false female victim story from the misandry-loving BBC. Perhaps the BBC could raise awareness of the real elephant in the room – why do men die, on average, 5 years earlier then women? Men’s lives are so easy right (because of the ‘patriarchy’), and there’s no proven biological reasons, so isn’t this a worthy story? Of course not, men bad and privileged, women good and victims. Simple.”
Turns out the BBC considers that men dying earlier than women is offensive
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That the bbc is no longer trusted is no real surprise.
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The frankly soppy Andrew ‘Mitchell (posh red Tory MP for the Third World and plebgate ) stood up in parliament and told the chancellor he would be responsible for 100 000 additional deaths by cutting the overseas give away budget …
My gripe is that there is a giveaway budget at all ….
( a quick check on Mitchell reveals plebgate cost him roughly £400 000 in court costs ) – I’m sure this was not a lot of money to him ….
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Life is suffering, therefore women suffer five years more than men?
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And chief amongst them…
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Could the contributor who periodically posts a diagram of electricity usage by method of production kindly so so in the next two or three days?
I can’t wait to see the wind generation figures.
Apparently we are going to be tight for supply, so we’ll be turning up the gas and coal.
Alternatively the green lobby and ER could really show a lead by turning their central heating off !!!!!
What are the chances of that?
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At 0830 wind is providing 1% of our 39GW demand.
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It’s being reported that the source of that wind was Ian Blackford doing his ‘people of Scotland ‘ speech ….
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The newspaper headlines write themselves this morning. There are just two main stories. The coke snorting bad boy of Argentine football has died of a heart attack and the Covid ridden UK economy is now officially ‘In the hands of God’
Maradona has passed at the age of 60 but the press can’t quite agree on his status. Gary Lineker, England’s soccer goody two shoes, quoted in the Sun, reckons he was: ‘…arguably the greatest of all time’ whilst the Daily Star reasonably asks: ‘Where was VAR when we needed it?’ and consignes the cheating Diego to: ‘Second best footballer ever to grace the earth’.
As for the dire state of the economy we can either take the depressing extended highlighs from the Telegraph: ‘11.3pc worst fall in output for 300 years. £394bn highest borrowing in peacetime. 2.6m unemployment forecast next year. £550 billion cost of covid pandemic’ – or a quick soundbite from the manager, Rishi Sunak, as quoted in the freebie Metro: ‘It’s going to be tough’
So how did we come by this slow-motion economic own goal?
I blame first the Chinese Communists and then our own Government/NHS/Public Health-Industrial Complex.
The Daily Mail frontpage pictures our Rishi apparently having his blood pressure taken meanwhile the editorial informs us he has as yet: ‘…only hinted at future tax rises’
‘This is going to hurt, Britain!’ says the Mail headline. Perhaps we ought to have been warned of this back in March? Sensible journalists could have done the research, talked to scientists and made the calculations – had they been brave enough to speak out against the tide.
The BBC played their all too willing part in this medical stitch up and covid panic mongering so the older and wiser among us are – perhaps unconsciously – in revolt against the corporation: ‘Older viewers turn away from BBC’ (Telegraph)
I won’t make any direct comment on the latest Meghan stories suffice to inform readers hereabouts that I stubbed my toe rather badly last year and so I’d really like you all to raise your opinion of me, thanks.
Toe stubbing charities and campaign groups have been giving me a lot of praise on social media, according to the ‘i’ newspaper, I’ll have you know. Plus I’ve got a good write up in the Telegraph from a journo who really relates to me. Another one writing sympathetically in the Times says she knows what I went through.
The ‘i’ would have us believe Rishi can solve our massive government debt and economic dislocation by dibbing into the foreign aid budget: ‘Sunak warns of emergency and raids aid for UK’ – this is going to be the narrative on the Left. Think about this – the Left would have us believe government can always spend its way out of trouble and there’s always some billionaire that can be taxed. Now we have the Left’s experiment writ large – basically the Corbyn manifesto. Tell people all the spending and borrowing went well the only hitch is that we’re being mean to the third world, that’ll be the story from now on.
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I wonder if anyone is telling Princess Nut Nut that we are only generating 1% wind power this morning…
King coal fired up to 6%
Come on BBC this is news… Tell the sheepies…
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We’ll be getting coal power through the Dutch interconnector too
.. and that is onward connected to the German grid which is partially coal power.
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Oh, and this anticyclone started early last night when the wind speeds dropped….
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Boris “Britain is the Saudi Arabia of wind”
8:45am this morning, wind is supplying 1.1% of UK demand, while coal is 5.7%. CCGT is 62.0%
Some people are putting coal into their electric car this morning.
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I wonder if we’d save energy by staying on BST ?
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9am Melvyn is doing the Atlantic Slave Trade in part
The actual topic is a Dutch ship massacre
… they did say Europeans were buying slaves off Africans
.. Numbers are thrown around
Slave trade by English ships : 42K a year , 3 million over the 100 years
The Zong Massacre
the drowning of 132 enslaved Africans, purportedly as there was not enough drinking water go to round. The owners profited; nobody was prosecuted
The British had permission to capture Dutch ships
and had captured this slave ship.
. Even for a slave ship, the Zong was overcrowded; those murdered were worth more to the ship dead than alive.
The crew said there was not enough drinking water to go round and they had no choice, which meant they could claim for the deaths on insurance.
The main reason we know of this atrocity now is that the owners took their claim to court in London, and the insurers were at first told to pay up as if the dead slaves were any other lost goods, not people.
Abolitionists in Britain were scandalised: if courts treated mass murder in the slave trade as just another business transaction and not a moral wrong, the souls of the nation would be damned. But nobody was ever prosecuted.
They argued that officers allocation was a flat 2 each
and that by drowning half their cargo, the price per head of the rest had gone up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pqbz
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I see that Carole Codswallop has admitted her untruths about Aaron Banks and the Brexit Party being funded by the Russians.
And on the eve of her Civil Court appearance. This will cost her a fortune. She has had to pay £62k as a down payment. More to follow!
Deep joy!!! 😉 🙂
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Dover – just tried to google this and all I got was lines and lines of “did the Russians fund brexit” and/or “who funded brexit”
Got a feeling the pro globalist BBC led MSM may not be too interested in this story. I still think there was no way these bastards will ever allow us to leave the EU unless of course our economy is in terrible state.
And hey presto – Soros’s little helpers Matt Handjob and the blonde cretin have done just that.
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If the Court had found in her favour, the BBC would have been all over it.
Live BBC broadcast teams outside the court 24/7, pics of Aaron Banks looking down beat, calls from BBC paid ‘experts’ to reverse the Brexit process…. Is the Tory government now tainted, the BBC asks? Over to Jeremy Corbyn, who would have won the election last year had the electorate known…
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OFCOM has published its 3rd Annual Report about the BBC . The report is 99 pages long . I’ve only skimmed it at the moment but – the good news ( for us ) is that one of the products of covid lockdowns is that at least 3 million people have bought Netflix or prime for the first time – thus in my view diminishing their addiction to the BBC and diluting the residue of loyalty people might still feel for the monster ….
I’ll write a bit more once I’ve waded through the report …
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Sydney Powell has released the Kraken
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One has to understand that the BBC’s number one default
position is diversity. One has only to look at the internet
main page to understand this .
Nearly every day the first picture on the main page has
an ethnic identity although indigenous demographics
of the UK is still around 82%.
Another default position of the BBC is over transgender issues.
The BBC employs at least four times the percentage of transgender people there are in the country. That is part of
their default position as well as”positive discrimination.” which
for me is an oxymoron.
There is no holding back this express train so far as the BBC
is concerned. Douglas Murray writes that on many of the
issues such as LGBT . BAME the train had all but reached
the buffers. So far as the BBC is concerned the train must not
stop at the station but speed off at an even faster speed. I
expect it will crash one day . At about the same time the BBC
loses it’s license payment extortion racket.
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Three tweets.
Sit neatly together.
These two clowns are, presumably, the ones the bbc rely on to justify ‘wide criticism’ of stuff the bbc does not like either.
Oh, four.
At least Christmas is saved.
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What is that picture telling us?
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And to continue with more news you’ll never hear on the bBc
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On sky news last night I heard a mention of the hearing going on about the rigged election in the USA.
They said “Trump came on and gave BASELESS allegations about the election”
This is a huge story yet all of our msm are ignoring it or tut tutting and saying just accept the result.
They are telling everyone that ‘even’ if it was rigged that we should just move on and accept that their man Biden won.
Had it been the other way round there’s no chance they would be happy to go along with this fake stolen election.
In earlier days reporters would have thoroughly investigated this rigged election to expose all the democratic party’s cheating but the msm are no longer impartial or interested in the truth. No Woodward or Bernstein types today.
What does this mean for the future of elections in the USA.
That it’s fine to cheat and rig elections.
Do the Republicans now have to cheat to have an equal chance of winning.
Are elections now meaningless in the USA.
What’s the point of voting if the election is rigged and your vote counts for nothing, why bother.
A huge story yet ignored by our msm.
Shame on the lot of them.
59 likes
Like I said a couple of weeks back, the USA is lost, the lying, corrupted Liberals will make a total basket case of it through deceit and bullying.
Maybe we will live to see Americans breaking across the border into Mexico?
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I watched the hearing.
There was an audible gasp when it was revealed by Rudy Guiliani that in a middle of the night vote dump in Pennsylvania, there was 570,000 for Biden, and……………………………3,200 for Trump.
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What you say is true but does it matter?
I mean by that that all around the world there is a political class that is quite happy to maintain a status quo where nothing changes. An elected politician in ‘opposition’ does no worse than one ‘in power’, even better in that they are subject to less scrutiny perhaps.
Trump is disruptive, a millionaire that became a politician, not a politician that became a millionaire. That is one reason why a lot of career Republicans don’t like him.
Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg, May, Johnson, Starmer – what’s the difference?
31 likes
BBC Local Radio
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced plans to cut the amount we give in overseas aid by around £5bn.
It breaks the Conservative manifesto pledge to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development and tackling global poverty.
***
They make Beff and Lammy look like Einsteins.
15 likes
Green Baking Forecast
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Rather than use electricity to run a website and to browse said website, couldn’t we just look out of the window?
Sun shining, tree branches waving, ‘renewable’ electricity being generated.
Or we could use gas. That’s one of the good things about fossil fuels, we can move them to where they are needed and store and use them when we like, not when a pack of eco-facists says it is OK.
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OT, but seems apt these days.
“Sky News has appointed Victoria Seabrook as arts and entertainment producer. Victoria was previously foreign affairs producer. “
Next… Beff on obits. Every damn minute.
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Jack of all trades
“Aug 28, 2019 Victoria Seabrook @v_seabrook has been appointed Science Specialist Producer. ”
Previous expert analysis
Massive shift in public opinion on climate change? A quarter (23%) Brits said #ClimateChange was most pressing issue facing Britain in the next two decades in @cardiffuni
study – in 2016 this figure was just 2% #ClimateEmergency
Every granny would say that when 2 surveys get radically different results, that is coc of who commissioned the survey
not cos the whole world has changed its mind
15 likes
BBC Radio4 reporter CONSTRUCTING * news
@annaholliganForeign correspondent @bbcnews Journalist. Filmmaker
Is “cooking” a better word ?
7 likes
What sane parent would put their child in the ‘crumple zone’ on a bike and so close to the road surface with all those particles of rubber, brake dust and soot that are supposedly worse than the air pollution of old?
I guess a cycling parent as they have that shield of virtue that means they, unlike every other road user, pedestrians included, have to yield to no-one, on or off the road.
23 likes
The only white adult male featured in any article on the BBC including Homes under the Hammer so far this morning was Bill Turnbull and he’s ex-BBC so doesn’t really count.
As the aforesaid do I qualify for a discount or are the BBC practising extinction as a policy?
33 likes
Carole Cadwalladr was given the Orwell Prize for what have now been shown to be preposterous fantasies, simply because she was telling Europhile hardliners what they wanted to hear.
Her crowdfunder has £363K in
had righty done that he would have been labelled a grifter.
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Anyone in the BBC RT her…. ‘evidence’?
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James O’Brien
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She has at least 2 other crowdfunders that’s £542K total
so is half a million up so far
– £168K http://crowdjustice.com
– £364K http://gofundme.com
– £10K http://crowdfunder.co.uk
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Good old Uncle George, he won’t let her down. So-called “crowdfunding” has got to be one of the best ways of money laundering yet devised.
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Newsnight & Sweeney in 2018
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Cadwalladr herself
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At least she’s starting from a solid base in her quest for “more journalism” because there certainly aint none right now.
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9 likes
Covid crisis could ‘cut pay by £1,200 a year by 2025’
“reports” the bBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55081926
Unless you work for the bBC that is!
30 likes
R4 9:50am @MerlinSheldrake on book of the week on
said “@PaulStamets climbed a tree took psilocybinand that cured his stammer.”
You can’t say unproven stuff like that, why ?
cos some nutter will climb a tree, take the magic mushrooms, fall out and die.
11 likes
There is something upsetting about the ability of a creature like cadwalader to tell lies but get funded by ‘followers ‘ so that court and legal fees mean nothing .
Its a shame that the court wont be able to impose the kind of damages to blow crowd funding away …. and break her
30 likes
Maradonna, socialist hero and supporter of the Pallies
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/26/in-my-heart-i-am-palestinian-maradona-backed-palestine-cause
11 likes
A drug taking cheat dies. How very sad.
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This is from our local rag this morning. The Welsh Assembly are extremely good at wasting money and this is the latest example…
https://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/18898764.gwents-links-british-imperialism-slave-trade/
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Importing bananas is one of the best money spinners at Newport Docks – or at least it used to be!
I suppose that’ll be stopped soon…
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As Great Britain is now faced with huge mountains of debt, I’d like to think that all the monstrous wages paid to BBC ’employees’. would result in a decent income for the Inland Revenue, and that while most British citizens recoil at the eye-watering money that so many of the pampered losers in W1A get for doing very little, I just try and think of how they’re taxed like most of us, and that somewhere, we benefit from such a ‘sleb-pot’. The same really applies to other highly-paid civil serpents of course.
I just do not trust the BBC to explain how their ’employees’ are given these enormous sums. Does the Inland Revenue spend as much time investigating these people to the same degree that white-van-man’s accounts are scrutinised? I know a few proper businessmen from my commercial past, who visibly shuddered at the thought of a revenue enquiry, and quite rightly so.
My old firm once had an unannounced VAT inspection. The bloke doing the poking around just walked into his office and sat in my boss’s office chair with no introduction or by-your-leave. My boss (we’ll call him Roger, because that’s his name), was somewhat taken aback, especially when the VATman just opened all the drawers on his desk, grabbed a book which looked official, and muttered ‘I’ll take a look at this’, and put it in his own briefcase! Roger is a hard, fair, business-like gentleman, and was left dumbstruck. Our company T/O was around £1.75m, and we all worked our socks off, as well as enjoying a half-decent lifestyle. It was a company regulated by loads of professional standards. But in the eyes of the law, all us directors were ‘suspect’! (It took several pints to bring him down from the ceiling after that very uncomfortable meeting)!
As an open query to anyone who bothers to read Scrobs’s wandering, sometimes confused, (occasionally pissed) posts, especially about tax-funded quangos like the BBC and many other councils, (I was bollocked here recently for lumping every public service employee into the sponging brigade, and as an after-thought, I understood that I’d over-generalised, so apologised to him/her, here), if the wages that the over-paid slebs, autocue-readers, under-managers etc., are being administered wrongly, like through their ‘service companies’, then I think the public has the right to ask the HMRC to spend a lot more time on these people and their ‘accountants’. Maybe much more than ‘a lot more time’ – how about a national purge on all these ‘public’ servants’, but maybe just concentrating on those who smugly present themselves as honest, caring workers, but still suck £300,000 each from the tax-payer, on top of all the paid spin-offs like opening fetes, kissing kids in village halls etc.? The UK will need every tax-penny it can get to pay off the eye-watering national debt that has accumulated since March. I don’t see why the BBC is exempt, and they should be cutting their real fixed costs, not just letting a few minions go when it suits them.
This latest focus on overseas aid being cut to pay for the British people’s problems is being mercilessly squealed at by the BBC, but, the overpaid crowd in W1A get so much money – in fact far too much, from taxing and threatening normal citizens, pensioners, forces veterans, hard-working white-van-men who are holding this strangled economy together, that it has to take a strong government attack on the publicly-pursed crowd. And I’m not talking about Joe Bloggs in the waste-disposal farm in Tunbridge Wells, or even Roger – above. As an added thought, do we assume that all the wages at the BBC will be frozen as well?
Surely the BBC would like to investigate, to introduce some sort of transparent ethical presence and try to improve its dire reputation for profligacy and waste of public money? Perhaps the independent broadcasters should do the investigating instead; they’d presumably get a whole lot more income when the BBC is eventually defunded!
Who can we ask to look into this?
Sidney Powell?
39 likes
Scroblene
As you say – some public sector workers are very – er – defensive – when accusations are thrown about . I got into trouble here saying MPs are overpaid – some fruitcake said they deserved more money .
But I apply the ‘market ‘ to pay for MPs . Is there a shortage ? Are they qualified ? Answer on both – generalising – is No – so cut pay and conditions …. even more so for the Lords … sometimes I just dip into the parliament channel and cannot believe how any can’t put a sentence together and have to read from an idiot sheet ….
The red tories have decided – for the time being – to just run up debt and not increase taxes … much … but the amount of interest staking up must start to detract from public project investment sooner or later ?
And we are probably about as low as interest rates go – oil is also relatively cheap – but neither of those is going to stay that way
As for the BBC – I’m now deeply pessimistic about any change – I think the red tories won’t take it on and leave it to pump out lefty woke poison as viewing figures continue to decline across all groups ….
……………..in the meantime -it will go overboard about any ‘hit’ it has and flog it to death whilst the likes of HBO and Netflix does the good stuff ….
I said I’m pessimistic about change with the BBC – but all it has to do is put something really bad / false /‘ offensive out – above the normal – and that might be then be the vehicle for change and heads rolling
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I dont really care what MP’s get paid
But it should be in direct proportion to average wages
that should at least make them think a little bit and cheap labour would hit them directly in the pocket.
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3:30pm #R4OpenBook with @johnypitts
writing fiction on climate change
@CarysBray and @dmccaulay discuss their atmospheric novels;
@HannahWestland talks anxiety and activism and
@LucyTreloar explores narrative approaches from down under.
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“Writing fiction on climate change”
thats the bbc
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From “Unredacted” today came this:
“The loyalty of older BBC viewers is draining as the corporation desperately tries to attract younger audiences, a report from media regulator Ofcom has revealed.
Ofcom also said that the BBC was out of touch with large swatches of license fee payers, with satisfaction levels from over-55s ‘waining’ for the first time. Older people have a less ‘positive overall impression’ of the broadcaster, Ofcom’s annual report found.
The report also revealed that many areas outside of London feel they are not properly represented. Less than half of those from working-class backgrounds rated the BBC highly for ‘showing a good range of programmes that include people like me’.”
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https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/media/your-guide-to-bollocks-classed-as-news-these-days-20201126202939?
A pretty good guide is simply anything on newaagents’ shelves, via MSM social media accounts or broadcast live, especially if requiring a TVL.
And any radio top of the hour from the BBC, Sky, Global etc.,
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Tier map
Tier 1 almost nowhere except on the Isle of White & Cornwall
Tier 2 most of the south
Tier 3 Most of the north + Kent +Bristol + SLOUGH
(but not some of the national parks, nor Mersyside)
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TIER = Totally Irrational Extreme Response.
I’ll be behaving responsibly for the benefit of others, but as a natural born Englishman I’m always in TIER 0.
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Looks like the effective political map of the UK.
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Boris’s 1 size fits all
is now 3 sizes fit all
Its absolutely clueless, with no sign of proper risk management.
It’s like sending a fire engine to every house in the village just cos one is on fire.
In reality it’s easy to divide the country into cells like each workplace each carehome, each hospital department etc.
They should know that cells where people are sharing food and toilets have a much higher risk factor.
After all just standing next to someone for a few minutes is never likely to give you a high enough viral load unless someone cough a load in your face..
When they said “most growth was in the home”, I bet they meant It’s being spread from some NHS places and some takeaway food places into the home, and from there into 2 or 3 more people
So when the NHS gives it to 20 people you end up with 50 cases.
Since the daily R number is mostly less than 1.5
that shows once it’s spread to a home it mostly does not spread to another home.
If the virus was actually being spread from home to home as well as the NHS , the R value would be well above 1.5
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Even Ofcom is now warning the Beeb to get real or lose its audience. But does it care? Meanwhile the lively and open discussion programme Questiontime has seen it audience drop by 90%. If only our woke institutions like the Beeb (and Goggle, Whotube, Arsebook etc.) were in a market economy.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/11/26/get-woke-go-broke-bbc-starting-lose-core-older-audience/
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Some good news everyone! The BBC is now officially tanking according to Ofcom (and I always thought they were best buddies!) and it’s all down to us grizzlies…
https://unredacted.co.uk/2020/11/26/bbc-out-of-touch-media-regulator-warns/
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GW beat you , and posted on over the page on page 2 at 7am
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Repetition for effect. Totes worth it.
Meanwhile, the bbc reaches out, and rather than making things better again scoops another handful of its own ordure to rub in the faces of the majority outside its bubble.
Where do they find them indeed?
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Time for another tune from the world’s tiniest violin.
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Apparently on HIGNFY the BBC tried to save their reputation by allowing a Jeremy Corbyn joke
Fin Taylor “Yeh Bob Dylon’s a useless singer
..and Corbyn’s a useless leader
with only 200,000 hardcore fans
So if you bombed Glastonbury, that’d be two birds with one stone”
Cue triggered blue tick lefties
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The reason why they are super offended
.. is the idea that Corbyn would share the stage with a Jew like Dylan.
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You advocate something, you don’t advocate FOR something.
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I’m reproducing -below – a piece in the Telegraph today – from of all people – Jeremy paxman….
‘. For so long a world leader, the BBC has grown fat and metropolitan, increasingly scorning the views of the parochial people who are forced to pay for it. When given its head, the BBC can still produce brilliant shows like Strictly Come Dancing but, at an institutional level, it behaves more and more like an embarrassing relative deciding to dance with the kids at a wedding.
It’s hard to resist the impression of smug people who think they know better than the rest of us. The consoling glory is that none of us has to tune in any more.
I do not know anyone who has regretted giving up hearing ministers bloviate on the Today programme. Trust yourself; it really doesn’t matter.
Not to have your evenings ruined by having to listen to half-truths is a treat. I have yet to hear anyone who makes a living out of “the news” admit the truth – that, on many occasions, the only honest thing to tell the viewers is “not much has happened today”. The fiction must be maintained that every day, 30 or 50 minutes of newsworthy events have taken place. The medium insists that, once the red light goes on, conversation is over and it is time for opinions.
The red light makes me feel alive, but the truth is that it kills conversation. It is the warning to the minister not to say anything embarrassing, which makes what follows just an exercise in damage limitation – and often a signal to the interviewer that he has two and a half minutes to tie their shoelaces together without their noticing.
So why don’t you go to bed, or read a book? Or even listen to a podcast?
I was, I admit, late to podcasts. I had heard a few episodes of Serial – a true-crime podcast that took the world by storm in 2014 – and, having grown up in the long-gone glory days of Radio 4, I was underwhelmed. We surely have that sort of thing already?
But these encounters are, if millions of downloads are anything to go by, what the listening public want. I have spent most of the past year finishing a history of coalmining and beginning a book about the British Civil Wars, and the lack of daylight was beginning to get to me. So I became a podcaster.
In essence, I admit, it was no more sophisticated a line of reasoning than: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
Since some of the best conversations I have ever had occurred in pubs after the landlord had turned the key, we decided to call the thing The Lock In. My producer, James Bray, and I would invite someone (the author Lee Child was our first guest) for a beer, and then we’d share the conversation with anyone who cared to listen, for free.
Our agreeable pub crawl was ended when Boris Johnson shut the pubs. But we continue to find ways to spend half an hour in the company of interesting people. Other Lock In guests include Michael Palin, Lord Sumption and Katherine Birbalsingh, aka “the strictest headmistress in Britain”.
The mass media began with someone thinking it was worth sharing a chat. Social media wisdom is the modern counterpart to crowds at the Colosseum, baying for blood. But podcasts ought to be like civilised conversations – curious, sometimes astonishing and always frank.
And, in these disease-obsessed times, there is no need to wear a mask, of any kind.
I do not say that podcasts are the future, despite BBC Sounds’ incessant plugs for one perpetrated by its favourite child, someone called Gemma Collins, an alumna of The Only Way is Essex, Celebrity Walking in a Straight line and Not Falling Over, Celebrity Car Wash and Celebrity Badger Baiting.
Come to think of it, she might be a good guest for The Lock In.”….
..__so another career BBC type sees the light – after a lifetime of taking its’ Money …..
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Ms. Spring is certainly ‘active’, if seldom in her supposed area of expertise.
Seems the BBC figures going for victim status might deflect.
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There always needs to be a price to be paid …
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BBC News offers the latest hour by hour wisdom of Joe.
“I believe this grim season of division… is going to give way to a year of light and unity.”
***
Accompanied by a picture of him ripping off his paper mask.
I think they will soon be showing him riding a bison bareback reciting tractor stats.
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BBC ‘News’ on social media appears to be copy pasting of press releases and now automated :
“Ethiopia’s PM said the military will try not to harm civilians and urged people to stay at home.”
As “quote” headlines go, bless.
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Stuck in a winter anticyclone for + 24 hours now and I note
Wind 2%
Solar. 0%
Biomass 7%
Europe is in the same weather system so any imported power will also be dirty…
Panic stations now….. very temporary solution to shortages…
Pumped hydro at 5%
Open cycle gas turbine at 1%
See if we get any outages.
Even if we had a multi million pound South Australia Tesla battery storage system that the BBC seems to think is the future. The storage capacity is 193.5 megawatt hours, It would operate at full power for less than an hour…. big deal…
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I’d expect that some power is coming from standby diesel container sized generators.
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There’s interesting…..
Where’s the STOR stats these days ?
All those Green Blob cronies with their generator farms haven’t had much attention lately…..
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STOR?
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STOR (Short-term operating reserve) on National Grid.
“Sources of extra power to help manage actual demand on the system being greater than forecast or unforeseen generation unavailability. Diesel generators on standby on premium feed-in tariffs.”
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Then they’d have to find somewhere to plug it in.
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Carrot Cop Chopped
.. He’ll have more time for eating donuts now.
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From what Belfield said, the cop told the tribunal
“yeh I was having a joke with my vegetarian mate,
I bought him the 7p carrots but swapped the 7p label for the £10 donut label
but then when I scanned I accidently scanned the 7p label twice”
..obviously they didn’t believe him.
https://news.sky.com/story/police-officer-sacked-for-scanning-7p-carrots-barcode-to-pay-for-10-box-of-doughnuts-12142999
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Purely as an experiment In Poundland’s self service, I pressed the screen button for zero bags, then tossed the 10 p bag on top of my items.
*Unexpected item in checkout* the machine barked.
Of course unlike the policeman, I was sneaky enough to wait until the assistant was busy with another customer ..so bagged my goods and got clean away.
But shows its also the exact weight that’s important not just enough to scan the price.
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I am not surprised it was an unexpected item, it’s not called 10p land is it
I would have waited for the assistant and given them a good dressing down for not charging a pound for it under the Trades Description Act (1968).
I am a keen customer of my local Poundland and am very popular, they are always nudging each other and pointing me out as I peruse the aisles.
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@ Davylars ” Open cycle gas turbine at 1%”
Pleeeease tell me it is a renewable source based on recruiting aggressive, anorexic middle aged men in disturbingly tight lycra, silly hats and sunglasses to spend their leisure time in a turbine instead
I have some suggestions for potential recruits, especially on my shared country walk paths getting abuse from them for blocking the path and anywhere in Cambridge town centre
funny that, different when they are blocking a road shared with cars
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New presenter on Radio4
I wonder if he is related to Anita Anand since Asians often put their family name first
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No surprise the prog ran two green issue topics
– New satellite to measure sea levels across the globe
“This satellite is positioned in such a way that it doesn’t have to deal with tidal variations” .. I don’t believe that
“It’s so important to track Climate Change”
– “In the battle of Climate Change we need new battery tech”
they talked to some guy who gave some vague ideas
..So they didn’t actually have new news
He referred to “clean hydrogen” without explaining what it was
* Electrolysis hydrogen is too expensive so mostly it’s made from treating methane with steam and CO2 is a byproduct.
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The the trailer for the RI Christmas Lectures came on
.. guess who’s doing them ?
…. Mark Carney the Bank of England Greendream fanatic
From Climate Crisis to Real Prosperity – from 18 to 16 November.
The series is introduced by Anita Anand
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I think clean hydrogen etc is simply power produced in another country and imported, thus causing zero pollution ( at least here)
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EB, I guess you’re being sarcastic
I explained clean hydrogen is from renewable powered electrolysis.
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It seems that every BBC job application these days is “no whites allowed”.
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See if he has a Biden beanie?
Refers to Anand… up a bit.
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They’re NOT “Independent Fact Checkers”
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/mrctv/episodes/2020-11-25T09_45_45-08_00
No pic of Ms. Spring obvious.
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https://www.breitbart.com/tag/brexit/
“EU Threatens to Walk Out of Brexit Talks Unless Britain Accepts Brussels’ Demands”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55014901
“Brexit: Progress made in tough areas, says EU chief”
The BBC are still running a six day old report using the same photograph of Ursula.
A child of ten would have told the EU to FOAD four years ago.
Better late than never, tell them now Boris.
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Nobody in the Cabinet has the balls or the intelligence of a child of ten. Forget Brexit, it’ll never happen.
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This man doesn’t mention the BBC but I think people here will find it relevant.
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So, we’re all heading into another lot of tiered lockdowns, are we? I’m sure no one is surprised. I didn’t watch the news because I just couldn’t stomach seeing the familiar features of the Downing Street dunce, gurning his way through another pile of utter waffle. It would be too much. I’d want to retch.
Anyway, I have no intention of either acknowledging these restrictions or following them. Where I’m able I’ll carry on as normal. I’m certainly not allowing the state to tell me who can and who can’t visit me at Christmas…or at any other time come to that. Sensible, civil disobedience will be my watchword from now on.
As for our unspeakably awful government, what can you say? It seems to me that they’ve gone power mad. Some of them are clearly enjoying making our lives miserable…Particularly that insignificant, scrawny little runt, Hancock. Loathsome specimen…
You can forgive someone making a mistake once, but this has now gone on for eight months and it’s getting worse. They can’t think of anything else to do. This lot are one trick ponies.
No doubt there will be some discontented murmurings from the Tory backbenches, but most of them are so supine their spines have been surgically removed…along with their testicles… And anyway, the socialists will vote this though. You can always rely on the reds if you want yet more restrictions on your freedoms.
One thing I am sure of…come election time there is no way on God’s Earth I’ll ever in a million years waste my vote on this useless, pitiful, bovine lump again. Or indeed anyone else from his pathetic party.
Once bitten…
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I only voted blue because the Brexit Party didn’t have a local candidate. It was against my better instincts, which proved to be spot on, and won’t happen again. I will no longer take part in the laughable excuse for democracy we currently have.
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