What has the BBC done to patronise me?

The new "what has the BBC ever done for me?" ad is awful. The original was a pub packed with stars and the joke was how much talent in one room - contrasting the everyday setting with the extraordinary customers.  In this one Romesh (nice but a b lister like most of their on screen talent) runs about all over the place and the best he can find is a couple of Daleks who've been made redundant from Doctor Who and the dancers who do the indents and the lady who does Traitors (an imported format they didn't come up with).  Can't ask the Doctor - we don't even know who that is anymore.  The depressing EastEnders set is there because they overspent so much money on it they created a National Audit office investigation - shame no one watches anymore ... The top ten rated shows are usually mostly Coronation Street.  It just reminds you the anemic offering the BBC now makes for the same money they charge you.... Sitcoms or even sketch shows are now as rare as rocking horse shit with all the comedians bundled onto panel shows.  They may as well shut down TV and become a wireless program.  It's also hard to take Romesh seriously as the voice of financial sense and value for money when he's just lost £400,000 in Coughlan's bakery in a minority share sting so simple it was like something Sid James might cook up in Hancock's Half Hour... The BBC was always slightly smug and pompous but it's like everything good has melted away only to leave the pomposity and the increasingly desperate threatening demands for money.  Ava Alexis hasn't had a TV since 1985 and nothing makes her continue to not want one more than the continuous ludicrous threats of prosecution.  You used to just have to fill in a form once every 5 years.  Now they send red letters monthly with the threatened fines on the outside of the envelopes.  I'm tired of telling her not to open the door to your thugs. 

 

Britian's glorious healthcare service before the NHS

It's hard to keep up with all the whoppers promoted on X but I particularly enjoyed this one on that the NHS had a "thriving healthcare sector before the NHS built on private practice, mutual aid and charity".

I mean, for a start charity isn't what I would call thriving industry.  It certainly wasn't thriving when my mother needed a mastoidectomy in 1940 as they had to go round the village begging for money.  But of course my mother is a primary source so must be wrong.  Instead we must trust Professor Barry Doyle Professor of Health History at the University of Huddersfield who promotes what he must know to be a lie that "the National Insurance Act of 1911 changed that. It provided access to general practitioners (GPs) for manual labourers and lower paid non-manual workers earning under a certain income, together with tuberculosis care".  

Well, as the Master used to say, for a lie to work it must be shrouded in truth...  

What the Asquith government offered was nothing like the modern GP serivce ... it was that the very sick could be eligible for what was called "treatment by a panel doctor" which is a very different thing to having a General Practitioner.  There was no organised system of everyone having their own doctor or of a proper organised system for collecting medical notes.  You also had to have a job that was recognised as a job in order to be covered.  Casual labourers like my grandmother and children such as my mother were outside the system.  Even if they were covered no one told them much... It's fun as well how someone managed to write an article on pre-war social and healthcare provision without mentioning the word "Workhouse".  Mayday Hospital (or Croydon University Hospital as it now calls itself) was actually the old workhouse which is why many of its buildings are so hideously depressing - to discourage anyone from going there by choice...

It's hard to get a picture of what the panel doctor system was like other than by talking to people like my 86 year old mother but I did find this...

Services under the National Health Insurance Act Anne Digby, The Evolution of British General Practice 1850–1948 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 318–22.

"Class assumptions shaped the perceptions of bureaucrats as well as of doctors. English Insurance Committees were circulated on whether panel patients received as good a service as private patients, and the omissions and face-saving phraseology in their replies pointed to a divided system of medical care. An obvious indication of the two-tier nature of practice could be readily observed in the differentiated physical accommodation and reception of patients. Panel patients frequently queued at a back door to enter a cramped, barely furnished surgery, there to wait their turn for the doctor during fixed surgery hours. In contrast, their middle-class counterparts chose personally convenient times for appointments, were greeted by a maid at the front door, and waited in a comfortable room in the doctor’s house for more extended medical interviews. Indeed, there was neither incentive for the panel doctor to improve accommodation, nor any effective coercion to do so, since although the rare insurance committee(such as Birmingham) inspected the surgery accommodation of insurance doctors several times, others (like London or Devonshire), did so only rarely or unsystematically."

It continues...

"Insurance doctors had to give all proper and necessary medical services except those requiring special skill. This meant inter alia7 that treatment of fractures or dislocation was expected but not an operationfor piles or an operation on tubercular glands. More serious cases were referred for treatment in the outpatients departments of hospitals"

In other words if you needed an operation you could go away.  One of the most common operations post the introduction of the NHS was for female prolapses.  Pre-NHS people just lived with them - for years.  The lucky had access to hospital care through mutual societies.  Aneurin Bevan based the NHS model on the Tredegar Medical Aid Society in Wales.  He saw it seemed to be working and simply scaled the principles up.  What the NHS gave people that was missing before was free access not just to see a doctor but to actual hospital care...

As to the kind of medical record keeping that a modern GP does.  Well, pre the NHS... 

"Diagnoses were almost entirely for physical ailments, and few clinical measurements were recorded as having been made in reaching them. Panel doctors seem to have shown little or no appreciation of the value of the NHI clinical record for their patients. The financial committee of one Scottish panel even minuted that ‘the present medical record system is serving no useful purpose and in the interest of economy should be scrapped’. "

But apparently "public opinion data from the late 1930s and early 1940s suggest most people were broadly satisfied" (so says Professor Martin Gorsky to whom the formation of the NHS is a mystery).  So that's alright then.  Not sure how they polled my grandmother.  She didn't have a telephone until 1982.  Relying on statistical data when there is no obvious way to collect it is obvious nonsensical but I suppose if it wasn't there...  Perhaps some of these professors would do better to read other contemporaneous sources of public opinion such as Dr A. J. Cronin's controversial novel The Citadel in which "I have written in ....all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug ... The horrors and inequities detailed in the story I have personally witnessed. This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system."  Or perhaps some lighter reading like Agathar Christe ... how many doctors are vilains handing out addicitive opiates to their private patients till they're hooked?  Why was cocaine addict Sherlock Holmes best friend Doctor Watson? etc...

I don't mind academics living in an ivory tower until they try to sell their rose tinted specales as serious political policies.  As to the twitter account with its cherry picked statistics it seems to be the work of a young Australian gentleman with a fondness for right wing thinktanks.  He and his minions have somehow transmutated all this into "Pre-1948 nationalisation of health care: there were 2 750 hospitals most built prior to 20th C; 480k hospital beds; fully staffed without immigrants; 400k on waiting list – 0.75% of pop 50 million.  NHS today: now only 1 600 hospitals (still most built before the 20thC; 145k hospital beds; staffed by immigrants; 7 million + on the waiting list –10% of pop 68 million."

Which is a level of nonsense I do not feel willing to do battle with... for a start it depends what you qualify as a hospital... this would have included workhouses which bridged social support and healthcare and lunatic asylums which have now been dismantled for care in the community.  Only a minority offered much in the way of useful clincial facilities as we would understand today...  Next week, Healthcare - why can't we leave it to the Monastic sector?

The "Lady Chief Justice" is not classed as a "Senior Judge"

I wrote to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Unit about the Palestine Action Proscription ruling and in particular Baroness Carr's ludicrous and offensive description of the Suffragettes as "a direct action civil disobedience protest group ... operating transparently in the open" when it was quite clearly a terrorist organisation that used firebombing tactics, horsewhipped Winston Churchill at at railway station and invented the letter bomb... 

Now this was a bit naughty as I know I cannot make a complaint about the Judgement itself so I thought instead I'd find an obscure ground to make a technical complaint on so chose sexist language and so ... I was expecting to get a response saying that this is not a relevant complaint.

However, not only did I get a response stating that the complaint was rejected I got the following bizarre reply stating that even if Baroness Carr had indeed been sexist - which assertion they rejected - she was in fact outside the remit of the Judicial Conduct Investigations Unit because the "Lady Chief Justice" is not classed as a "Senior Judge".  One might ask what she's doing sitting on the Court of Appeal then?  Or indeed why she's on the Privy Council?  Or why she's on £312,000 a year?  Or why she is is the Head of the Judiciary of England and Wales and the President of the Courts of England and Wales?  Was no one else available?

Apparently I can still complain to the Judicial Appointments and Conduct Ombudsman which I may do about the historical ignorance of our Judges but I found it interesting that they rejected my complaint not just for being bollocks but because the Lady Chief Justice is not a Senior enough Judge.  

If you're wondering how senior you have to be to be called a senior Judge the mysterious answers are chronicled below in a communication that reads like something out of Jarndyce & Jarndyce...

Our ref: 52004/26

02 July 2026

Dear Anthony Miller,

Complaint Regarding the Lady Chief Justice

I refer to your complaint dated 17 June regarding the Lady Chief Justice.

I have now assessed your complaint. You are receiving this letter because your complaint is

outside the JCIO’s statutory remit.

The framework for considering complaints about judicial conduct is set out in Chapter 3 of

Part 4 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 (“the Act”), the Judicial Discipline (Prescribed

Procedures) Regulations 2014 (“the 2014 regulations”) and the supporting Judicial Conduct

Rules.

The statutory framework applies to judicial office holders. Judicial office, for the purposes of

discipline, is defined in section 109(4) of the Act as office as a senior judge or an office listed

in Schedule 14 to the Act. The office of senior judge is further defined in section 109(5) as any

of –

• The Master of the Rolls

• The President of the Queen’s Bench Division

• The President of the Family Division

• The Chancellor of the High Court

• A Lord Justice of Appeal

• A puisne judge of the High Court

The office of Lady (or Lord) Chief Justice does not appear in either Schedule 14 to the Act or

in the definition of senior judge as set out in section 109(5). It is for this reason that the

statutory framework does not apply to the office of the Lady Chief Justice. 

For the reasons explained above, the office of Lady Chief Justice is not a judicial office in the

context of the judicial discipline rules and regulations and nor is it any of the other types of

offices listed in that regulation.

It may assist you to know that even if the office of Lady Chief Justice had fallen within the

remit of the judicial discipline rules and regulations, your complaint would have been rejected

in any event. This is because, as part of their case management discretion, judges are entitled

to form and express opinions about issues related to a case they are presiding over. Expressing

that view in the language you have cited in the example provided would not constitute

misconduct. The language itself was not inappropriate, even though you personally found the

judge’s view to be offensive. The fact you have been offended would not, in itself, constitute

misconduct on the part of the judge.

Please note that we cannot respond to any further correspondence about your complaint that

does not contain relevant new information which might give rise to the need to reconsider

our decision.

Judicial Appointments and Conduct Ombudsman

You can complain to the Judicial Appointments and Conduct Ombudsman, Douglas

Marshall, if you believe the JCIO have not handled your complaint properly. The

Ombudsman does not have the power to investigate the complaint itself, but he can

consider how the JCIO has handled it. You should make your complaint within 28 days of

receiving this letter. The Ombudsman is not required to consider complaints outside this

period. If you miss this deadline, the Ombudsman usually will not look at your complaint

unless there is a good reason for the delay.

To make a complaint, use the online form: https://jaco.form.service.justice.gov.uk

The Ombudsman will need your permission in order to consider your complaint. You will

need to provide your permission for his Office to disclose your complaint to the JCIO, and

for the JCIO to disclose our documents to them.

You will also need to provide your JCIO reference number. It is in the top right of this letter.

It will start with “Our Ref” and have seven numbers, for example, 12345/26.

The Ombudsman’s Office can also be contacted:

• In writing: 1.55, 1st Floor, The Tower, 102 Petty France, London, SW1H 9AJ

• By e-mail: headofoffice@judicialombudsman.gov.uk

You can find further information about the Ombudsman, as well as easy-read versions of

the complaint form and leaflet, at: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/judicialappointments-and-conduct-ombudsman

Your personal data

You can find information about how the JCIO collects and processes personal data in our

Privacy Notice: www.complaints.judicialconduct.gov.uk/privacy-notice.

My Complaint

Summary: The Judge said : "It is not - as claimed - a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes, operating transparently in the open," she added. "It is a covert organisation which operates with secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy property and cause injury." I wish to complain that this is sexist. The Women's Social and Political Union were in fact an extremely accomplished and successful terrorist organisation. They invented the letterbomb sending such devices to both David Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith. They horsewhipped Winston Churchill and Bristol Railway Station. Mabel Capper threw a hatchet at Asquith cutting Irish MP John Redmond on the ear and firebombed the Theatre Royal. When Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence objected to these tactics they were expelled from the WSPU. Asquith was frequently assaulted whilst playing golf. They used not just petrol bombs but had their own production line for the manufacture of nitroglycerine. Destroyed buildings included The Nevill Ground Pavilion, Royal Tunbridge Wells. There was also a tube bombing campaign and multiple postmen were injured by phosphorus letterbomb devices. There was a large firebombing campaign aimed at private houses around London. Schools, prisons, churches and dockyards were all subject to attack. There was even a plan to kidnap the Home Secretary. As a result the counter-terrorist Special Branch of London's Metropolitan Police were brought in to infiltrate meetings resulting in secretive structures of the kind the Judge states did not exist. Given all this well known information which can easily be procured by a visit to wikipedia it is astounding that the Judge equates Palestine Action which the Suffragettes when the Suffragettes clearly deliberately targeted people and not just property. Therefore I wish to complain that the Judge's remarks are sexist in that they seek to portray women as "the gentler sex" and promote a fiction that Universal Suffrage for all was achieved by mere direct action civil disobedience when in fact it was achieved by brutal physical violence and terror. This perpetuates a view that women are not equal to men in their ability to run effective, violent terrorist campaigns. It seeks to portray the Suffragettes as a sterotype of demure, sensible ladies which is insulting to the femaile sex and to humanity as a whole. I therefore which to complain that the Judge's remarks represent using racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive language.

Pardon?

Ruth Ellis took a gun from her bag and fired 5 shots at Blakely. The first missed. She pursued Blakely as he ran around a car, firing a second shot that caused him to collapse onto the pavement. She then stood over him and fired 3 more bullets. How much more premeditated could it be?  Yet David Lammy pardoned her. 

Of course she was in an abusive relationship and Blakely knocked her about causing her a miscarriage some months before but she absolutely said she intended to kill him & got the Smith & Weston and went to the Magdala Public House with the express intention of filling him full of lead which she absolutely did.  You got to give it to Ruth - not just double tap but quadruple.  The last thing she was having was that bastard surviving on her.  It was like something out of a Quintin Tarantino revenge movie.  Such was the notoriety of the case that the landlady of the pub tried to cash in by drilling fake bullet holes in the walls.... Lammy's pardon has a similar relationship with reality.  But really what is the point of this "pardon" - really a statement that her hanging should have been commuted ... It just sounds like total bollocks.  No contemporary Home Secretary would have not hung her because you can't have people going about shooting off handguns like that even at people who deserve it... so it's just terminally silly.

Elsewhere on his feed Lammy is still ranting about the lady who carried the placard calling him and Sewerella "coconuts" for enabling the genocide in Gaza even though the case fell apart when it went to court because the Judge said it was clearly satire.  Can't wait for him to abolish Jury Trials.  Perhaps he knows Burnham will sack him by the 17th or 19th and is trying to manufacture a positive story to go out on.  But like Ruth the blood won't wash off your hands mate...

 

 

HSBC - the Bank that likes to say No

Today I went to HSBC with the intention of paying £100 in cash in.  Loadsamoney!  Outside the remaining Croydon branch there is an intimidating security guard and inside there are three women one of whom has a laptop perched at bar hight tables with no uniform just casual clothing and an HSBC lanyard.  

There are four paying in machines.  I put my card in one.  Only a button for depositing cheques appeared on the screen.  I tried another and another and another with the same disappointing results.  

So I asked one of the three ladies which machines that said they took cash actually could take cash.  She said the first two and then looking at my card said "They won't take a first direct card though - it's to do with the switch from Visa to Mastercard [or was it the other way round?]."  I suppose that reveals something of what an empty shell this institution is, that it simply bows to the whims and caprices of the card providers...

In the absence of an automatic teller being able to count my money for me I asked if there was anyone at the manual teller desk all three of whose windows were closed.  "No," came the reply. 

Thinking that it was a bit farcical having a bank branch staffed by three ladies who were not allowed to take deposits... "Oh well," I said, "it's nice that you have the paying in counter there for ornamental effect."

The lady said they only had the staff to count money on weekdays.  So what do you do sitting at those tables on a Saturday Morning?  No one was buying any services off you so I presume it is a gossiping hub.  She proceeded to advise me that I could pay money in at the Post Office.  You know the place where the Horizon computer system didn't work, hundreds of thousands of pounds disappeared and the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history took place?  Yeah like I proper trust them with my wad.

You know how the Government could service the debt that it constantly says is crippling it?  Stop providing multi-million pound public subsidies to Post Office Limited to ensure it maintains a nationwide network of at least 11,500 branches within 3 miles of the population and get these lazy ladies and their parsimonious employer to put someone behind the paying in window on a Saturday Morning.  There's three of them - one for each paying in window?  

I mean what's the point of having a branch if it's like this?  What service are they offering?  Terminal smugness?  Nail filing?  Gossiping?  I'd compare them to Carol Beer but at least she looked at her computer before saying it said no.  These ladies are more like the old Churchill Insurance dog.  "Oh no no no no no no no..."

 

3=7 with Sir Keir Starmer

I notice in his Exit Interview Keir Starmer says there have only been 3 Labour Majority governments.

I count:

Attlee 1945

Wilson 1964 (increased in 1966 GE) and October 1974 (okay only by 3 but a win's a win)

Blair 1997 (&twice more after that)

That totals 7?

Liar or Nincompoop?

He actually starts the interview by saying there have only been three Labour leaders who have won majority Labour governments (true) but later makes the slightly more broad claim that there have only been three majority Labour governments (untrue).  

I posted this on the Keir Starmer's Supporters Group on Facebook which is a living embodiment of the Kübler-Ross model.  They all got incredibly angry stating that I'm nitpicking, a Trojan Horse or a "Deformer" so I patiently explained that this is a mathematical concept called counting.  Reader, they blocked me ... I shall leave them to their mourning.  They clearly think I'm trolling them but I'm just a mathematics professional and numerical incongruities - even when created by innocuous mistakes - interest me.

The interview contains at least one other false claim - that the Labour Party was financially bankrupt when Keir took over - but you won't see anyone at the BBC pushing back against any of these...

Most chilling is Starmer talking about removing his predecessor's hands from all the levers of power given he called Jeremy Corbyn a "friend" whilst working under him.

I've won on the National Lottery!

 Congratulations Anthony,

We're pleased to tell you that you've won a small prize by matching two numbers in the Lotto draw on 01 July 2026.

To see your prize amount and check your full draw results, just sign in to your account. There, you can also view your recent tickets and keep track of upcoming draws.

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***

Dear National Lottery Customer Care team

£1.00

You we'ren't fucking joking about it being small.  So we don't get a free £2 draw entry for matching two balls anymore?  Just a measley £1?  Tight bastards.

Yours sincerely

Anthony Miller

No she cannot

 

I have had a very long talk with this lady in Boots and I have to say that she cannot as she claims advise diagnose & recommend treatment, check my blood pressure or help with my prescription because she is, as far as I can ascertain made entirely of carboard.

Being a two dimensional cardboard creation she is somewhat lacking in manual dexterity.  When I ask her if she could possibly fetch me some Optrex infected eye drops from the pharmacy fridge it does seem to take her a long time to get there.  She certainly falls down on this particular task but then again that's not all there is to working in retail.  She is very friendly and jolly which goes a long way to compensate for her poor service.

Whilst she is always cheerful it has to be said too however, that she seems to have a very limited emotional range - she only seems able to smile.  Still, at least she is polite if you disregard the fact that she never says "Good Morning" or "Hello".  And I am pleased generally that someone who has no legs has not become depressed by her many disabilities.  It is good to see that this lady who moves so little I suspect her to be quadriplegic has overcome her many disabilites to find useful employment in the field of advertising.  

I just feel it is a bit unfair of Boots to expect her to do much in the way of pharmaceutical dispensing when she clearly does not have all the necessary accoutrements like a wheelchair or prosthetic legs or internal organs.  It's also very difficult to check someone's blood pressure when you do not have your own circulatory system...

Witenagemot of the North

Baron Burnham of the North revealed his new policy today - a relaunch of the institution of the Witenagemot.  "Before the Norman invasion in 1066," said Baron Burnham, "the government's administrative and legislative hub (then called the Witenagemot or Witan) used to move about to every corner of our great nation as an organic manifestation of devolution but after the invasion by William the Conqueror due to the foreign policy failures of King Harold power became centralised in London as the Witenagemot was replaced by the Curia Regis with a corresponding deterioration in Suffrage.  Advances in Remote Working technology such as Zoom mean we can now attempt to do this again without risking another major administrative failure such as the appointment of Æthelred the Unready as Sovereign.  With the closure and restoration of the Palace of Westminster estimated to require £40bn and take 61 years (even though it only took Pugin & Barry 30 years to build most of the current poat-1800 structures) there's never been a better time to put Parliament on the road.  We know for a fact that Granada Studios has a standing set that is an exact replica of the House of Commons which hasn't been in regular use since Alan B'Stard MP passed on.  The opportunities for Parliament to move from physical reality into a world of pure fantasy have never been greater.  I would remind the people too of the words of Mr Liebermann who said that 'No man can make himself king, but the people has the choice to choose as king whom they please; but after he is consecrated as king, he then has dominion over the people, and they cannot shake his yoke off their necks' so you try sacking me when I'm on the road.  Won't be as easy to write angry letters to your MPs when you don't know their shifting postal addresses then, will it?  So it's time for a Number 10 of the North.  Not sure which road we can put this new Number 10 in but obviously we need somewhere that the public can't have too much access to because it's sealed off behind iron gates.  I was thinking of Coronation Street which situated on the Granada backlot would be ideal for close access to their House of Commons plywood set.  This is the new future of Britain.  A Prime Minister who's harder to sack because he's constantly on the move and lives in a fantasy world with other fictional characters."

Laser focusing is not possible

Dear politicians, the whole point of a laser is that it creates a Collimated Beam so please stop using the phrase "Laser Focused" to describe how good your policies are. You can focus a laser but a laser itself is by definition a beam of parallel light waves? Indeed once you focus a laser beam it arguably stops being a laser beam. So please stop talking about laser focusing ...it is doing my head in. There hasn't been a PM with a STEM qualification since Mrs Thatcher so please stop pretending. Thank you for your non-laser focusing on this issue.

 

Well, that's probate for you...

 

My brother recently asked me about the possibility of burying our parents when they die in the local cemetary

"I thought there wasn't any room left?" I said.

"Although all the plots are taken when some people die their children just send them to the crematorium instead and then sell the plot back to the Church who sells it on again so although all the plots are gone there's a waiting list for the onces that come back on the market again."

How tight do you have to be to sell your own parent's grave...?

If you didn't want the answer you shouldn't have asked the question...

 Zionists be like...

It's the same cycle over and over again.  Post absurd claims on X.  Get questioned about their factual accuracy.  Throw toys out pram.  Block.  Rince and repeat.  Still I suppose the Zionists are one of the few real groups of people left of X who are not either pornbots of Elonclones.  So can't complain...

Scorchio!

 

Why are schools closing at 1pm "due to the heat"?

Surely that just means that instead of sitting indoors during the middle of the day children have to walk home during the hottest hours of the day?

Who though that's a good idea?

Honestly how hard can it be for our education industry not to boil pupils to death in a heatwave?

If they have problems cooling the building why can't the teachers most of whom will presumably have done PGSEs so are presumably educated themselves to Masters/research level... Think of a solution?  All these great minds and the best they can come up with is "Fuck off home, we want to sit in the garden".

Honestly, it's next level piss taking.  Schools in the Carribbean don't close because it's hot and they lack air con.  The children have to lump it.  Imagine if all those missionaries we used to have like Dr Livingston had said "Sorry mate, can't teach no natives, it's too hot".  How would we have found the source of the Nile?  Imagine if we'd given up of the war against Japan because sorry it ain't arf hot mum.

On top of this people are now apparently so stupid they can't go swimming in a lake without drowning 

Truly we have reached Idiocracy.

So remember everyone 

WE'RE BRITISH!

And mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun!

Another Epstein Files Victim

Much speculation has been undertaken as to why Starmer has been forced out.  Policies no one asked for like the Winter Fuel allowance or scrapping Jury Trial.  Being so controlling he split the Labour Party as the expelled went off to fight for the Greens and Your Party.  But ultimately the elephant in the room is Epstein.

Starmer appointed Mandelson knowing that he had stayed at Epstein's home whilst he was in prison.  We know this because of a JP Morgan report into Mandelson in 2009 and because of documents that emerged from Number 10 around the time of his appointment we know Starmer knew (see here).  This is the reason I think he had to go.  It's a mirror image of the Profumo affair.  It's a ticking time bomb that would have destroyed the government if it's not defused.  Because there are only two conclusions one can draw from the Mandelson appointment.  

1 Keir was party to large scale corruption that risked National Security to defend Mandelson's involvement in a criminal conspiracy revolving around the world's most notorious peadophile sex trafficker and should resign as corrupt or 

2 He was guilty of such olympic level nincompoopery and incompetence that like Harold MacMillan after Profumo he had to resign because the public thinks he is guilty of terminal naivety.  It would be easier to defend if there had been any real need for the appointment but it seems to have been made simply to give Mandelson a salary.  

I tend towards 2.  It was incompetence.  But come on, the Starmer ship has been holed below the waterline by this scandal and it was only a matter of time before it sank.  

Hopefully he will find some other meaningful way to contribute to society in due time ...

My blood pressure isn't what it used to be...

I went for one of those NHS old people tests and they said my blood pressure was too high.  This was because I was running from A to B and stressed out as usual so I tested it at home to double check.  It actually drops when I'm sedentary to about 122/85 ... apparently this is now "elevated" ...so how come no one noticed before?  I have the answer.  They've changed the definition of elevated.  it used to be like 140/95 at least.  Someone came up with a theory that they can beat vascular dementia and stuff by lowering everyone's blood pressure.  But it seems to me that nothing is going to make people's blood pressure shoot through the roof like telling them normal blood pressure readings are high... This same research is apparently where the new puritanical 14 units a week of booze comes from.  These people really need to get a life instead of sucking all the joy out of mine...