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ellie-em
2 years ago

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak38ak/uk-government-shuts-down-nhs-lgbtq-diversity-program-rainbow-badge-scheme

Good riddance and not before time!

I have fond memories of Thames TV children’s programme Rainbow, with Zippy, Bungle, George and Geoffrey. The lovely, jolly catchy tune:

Rainbow up above the streets and houses rainbow climbing high
Everyone can see it smiling over the sky
Paint the whole world with a rainbow.

My children loved it, I enjoyed watching it with them.

…and now, the term rainbow has been forever tainted – commandeered, practically weaponised – by the pride brigade and I, for one, am now sick of the sight of anything with a rainbow insignia. So many things covered with the dratted thing – clothes, lamps, rugs – even police cars!

Something lovely and amazing – who can fail to see a rainbow in the sky and not be heartened at the sight – has been demeaned in my eyes.

I reiterate, good riddance to the badge scheme and all the associated palaver.

huxleypiggles
2 years ago
Reply to  ellie-em

Great post. It needed saying.

Monro
2 years ago

What did Putin say in Tucker Carlson interview? ‘The West reneged on a deal not to enlarge Nato’ Nope ‘The Final Settlement on German unification, ratified by the Soviet Union the same year, had no clear prohibition on Nato adding more members.’ ‘The overthrow of Ukraine’s President Yanukovych in 2014 was a CIA-instigated coup’ Nope ‘No evidence of CIA involvement has been presented.’ ‘Kyiv started the war in eastern Ukraine’ Nope ‘Igor Girkov, a Russian former intelligence officer, brought Russia militants from Crimea to fight the authorities.’ ‘Ukraine and the West were to blame for the failure of peace talks in March and April 2022’ Nope ‘The revelation of Russian troops’ massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha……..removed any desire to negotiate.’ ‘Boris Johnson demanded that Kyiv abandon negotiations with Russia’ Nope ‘Johnson: ‘I could not see for the life of me what the deal could be, and I thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.” ‘…one of Russia’s key aims is to “de-Nazify” Ukraine’ Nope ‘….such groups are peripheral. President Zelensky is Jewish, and a coalition of nationalist, right-wing parties took only 2.15 per cent of the vote at parliamentary elections in… Read more »

Steve-Devon
2 years ago
Reply to  Monro

For a balanced journalistic approach you may be interested in comparing the Times article with the item from the Global Times, written in characteristic sanctimonious style but nonetheless worth a read. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202402/1306963.shtml Sitting here in the boondocks of North Devon I am really in no position to comment on the veracity of the facts that Putin presented. But to mind mind what we all have to do is decide on what we feel is the best way forward? My analysis is that even now it is possible to engage in negotiations with Russia that will give a better result than if we press on and try and win a military victory. Much has changed over the last 2 years, can we trust Putin if we entered negotiations? To my mind over the last 2 years the whole geo-political position with regard to Russia, China, The BRICS and other Asian Countries has changed so much that whatever Russia may have thought in the past, the current geo-political position means that Russia sees that its future lies in that direction and could thus be trusted in any Ukraine peace negotiations. even though given the current military position those agreements would be very… Read more »

JayBee
2 years ago
Reply to  Steve-Devon

Agree, bar/but:
The real issue is: Can he trust the West?
The West which broke its promise on NATO enlargement and which expressive confirmed that the Minsk agreements were a ruse.

Monro
2 years ago
Reply to  JayBee

Nope. There was no promise on NATO enlargement. This is the agrrement that Putin was referring to: ‘The agreement on not deploying foreign troops on the territory of the former GDR was incorporated in Article 5 of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which was signed on September 12, 1990 by the foreign ministers of the two Germanys, the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France. Article 5 had three provisions: Until Soviet forces had completed their withdrawal from the former GDR, only German territorial defense units not integrated into NATO would be deployed in that territory. There would be no increase in the numbers of troops or equipment of U.S., British and French forces stationed in Berlin. Once Soviet forces had withdrawn, German forces assigned to NATO could be deployed in the former GDR, but foreign forces and nuclear weapons systems would not be deployed there. When one reads the full text of the Woerner speech cited by Putin, it is clear that the secretary general’s comments referred to NATO forces in eastern Germany, not a broader commitment not to enlarge the Alliance. …..a very authoritative voice from Moscow (confirms) this understanding. Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview… Read more »

Monro
2 years ago
Reply to  Steve-Devon

I must say, I don’t think much of ‘The Global Times’ as a source. ‘The Global Times is owned by The People’s Daily, which is the largest newspaper group in China. The paper is an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’ Your reference ends: ‘This is undoubtedly a display of the close strategic partnership between Russia and China’ There is no ‘We’ here regarding negotiations. Ukraine will decide its future for itself. I am no fan of ‘Bunter’ Johnson but he was spot on in this case: ‘….any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid’ Negotiations, to both Putin and Ukraine, are only a matter of expediency. As Putin himself has pointed out, this war goes back hundreds of years. But don’t listen to me, listen to one of the world’s greatest authorities on Russia and Russian history: ‘If civil war break outs, if Crimea demands reunion with Russia or easterners demand protection, Russia may intervene or annex Crimea.’ Simon Sebag Montefiore 26 Feb 2014 The following day: Russian special forces seized and blocked the Supreme Council of Crimea and the Council of Ministers of Crimea. Russian forces purporting to be “Crimean… Read more »

Lockdown Sceptic
2 years ago

05b Farming Under Siege From Net Zero

latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online

05b-Farming-Under-Siege-From-Net-Zero-MONOCHROME-copy
ellie-em
2 years ago

https://twitter.com/famedtrust/status/1755958402453250559?s=48

Thank goodness that common sense hasn’t completely left the building. Is there still hope?

WyrdWoman
2 years ago

Firms forced to recruit overseas staff as 9m Britons quit jobs market” – A growing number of firms are scrabbling to fill 900,000 U.K. vacancies as Britons refuse to go back to work, says the Mail.

Refusing to go back to work, eh? Not the ones who:

are jabbed damaged & can’t work even if they wanted to
got sacked/forced out for refusing the jab
got sacked/forced out for being ‘transphobic’
got sacked/forced out because of opinions on [pick current war]
got sacked/forced out for making [pick latest thing] jokes
got sacked/forced out because of DEI/ESG policies
can’t be recruited because of DEI policies (wrong colour skin & gender)

…am I missing any?

DHJ
DHJ
2 years ago
Reply to  WyrdWoman

made redundant due to government policy (lockdown)
decided to stop working due to government policy (being paid not to work)
became disillusioned due to government policy (working to support a corrupt regime)
are dead due to government policy (lockdown, vaccination, NHS, poverty, war – remember that call for mercenaries?)

EppingBlogger
2 years ago
Reply to  WyrdWoman

What they mean is the state pays enough in benefits that the very poor salaries offered for grinding, boring work is not enough to tempt the Brits. In an efficient labour market wages would rise. Instead the government imports ever more cheap, unskilled labour, almost all male, which will work for little because it is better than at home.

Even better for the employers and immigrants, the tax payer tops up the immigrants income with in work benefits and we provide all the social infrastructure they did not hae at home for nothing, zilch, no charge to them.

Result, the original UK poplualtion gets poorer and our country gets deeper in debt.

Thank you governments for the past three decades. You have made us less safe at home and abroard and you have impoverished us financially and culturally.

Mogwai
2 years ago

Well this makes a refreshing change. A Palestinian writer calling out Hamas and wishing for their extermination. A Palestinian putting the blame for the devastation of Gaza squarely where it belongs. Good on them; “Anyone who sees the destruction in Gaza, in terms of human lives, buildings, and on the economic, financial and psychological levels, cannot but pray to Allah and ask him to curse all those who caused this destruction. How can we not curse the people who caused this, given this complete devastation? How can we not curse Hamas and its leaders after they have destroyed every element of dignified existence in the Gaza Strip?! “When Hamas carried out its attack [on October 7] and invaded the [Israeli] localities on the Gaza border, did it expect Israel to refrain from retaliating in force and from delivering blow after blow to the Gaza Strip, given its desire for revenge and given the international backing it receives, and in the absence of any power that can force it to stop its war against Gaza? Wouldn’t it have been appropriate for Hamas, which has already proved its [considerable] planning abilities, to invest these abilities and energies in building up the Gaza… Read more »

DHJ
DHJ
2 years ago
Reply to  Mogwai

He’s recognising the outcome was completely predictable so who or what was the attack intended to benefit?

“given its desire for revenge”, what would the Israeli regime have done without Hamas? Nothing like they have been doing since Oct 7th.

Monro
2 years ago

Tony Abbott: West may need national service to boost army recruitment ‘…….many civilians are still labouring under the illusion that peace is inevitable.’ Pretty much everyone in this country wants peace. Defence companies do not need wars to make their money. Defence products, like motor cars, require replacing, modernising. And defence of the realm is the first duty of government. Putin is not going to invade Western Europe but our friends and allies of longstanding (many a great deal closer to the action than we are. They may know what they are talking about.) believe that, just as he did not stop after Crimea, he will not stop after Ukraine. Why else would he, in 2019, have set up a government department: the Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, a subdivision of his own Presidential Administration. The directorate’s task is to exert control over neighbouring countries that Russia sees as in its sphere of influence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova i.e. to set up an enlarged Russian ‘Union State’. And, by the way, Belarus has already been absorbed into that ‘Union State’ So, although we all want peace and we are not interested in war (India’s President Modi: ‘It is not… Read more »

Mogwai
2 years ago

A look at the transformation of Sweden thinks to uncontrolled immigration over the years. The forecast does not look good economically going forward either as highly skilled workers do not want to relocate there and their native counterparts are moving out; ”Present-day Sweden carries the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of gangland killings in Europe. It boasts the lowest average age of serious offenders, with children in their low teens being arrested for murder. Increasing segments of suburbs are officially classified as “especially vulnerable areas,” where it is “hard, bordering on impossible” for the police to operate. In layman’s terms, these are no-go zones, where local clans rule and where first responders will not enter without flak jackets and police escort. The heavy influx of migrants from countries with Muslim populations could lead to a situation in which Sweden elects a radical Islamist party to parliament, potentially as early as the 2026 election. (The Swedish name of the party is “Nyans,” which translates, interestingly, into “Nuance.”) While virtually all Swedes were Christians from the 12th to the early 20th centuries, that share has fallen to less than 60 percent today. It is not inconceivable that Sweden will have a majority… Read more »

Freddy Boy
2 years ago
Reply to  Mogwai

Parallel for now !!…

Monro
2 years ago

Tony Abbott: West may need national service to boost army recruitment

‘…many civilians are still labouring under the illusion that peace is inevitable.’

I am amazed, shocked, at the complacency on show regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Maybe it’s a generational thing.

I remember well Russian tanks invading Czechoslovakia, Prague; Czech civilians hurling bricks impotently at Russian tanks; just like Tiananmen Square but only a few miles away from Vienna, Munich.

We certainly do not need national service, but we do need a decent defence budget.

Jon Garvey
2 years ago
Reply to  Monro

Well, I’m old enough to remember tanks in Hungary in 1956. But I also remember that the Communist regime that perpetrated it fell over thirty years ago (whereas Nazi Germany had only fallen 11 years before Hungary).

On the other hand, the regime that invaded Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so on remains in power, and furthermore without even anyone knowing who runs it. Nobody from Doocy to Putin knows who is running US policy – and it certainly isn’t the man who’s beyond the age of legal accountability.

Freddy Boy
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

Correct , Anyone & I mean Anyone who thinks JB makes even the smallest of US political decisions is deluded !!

Monro
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

The regime may have fallen, but Putin was part of that regime. Plus ca change etc. This is what one of the world’s greatest experts on Russia, past and present, had to say on 26 Feb. 2014, published the day before Russia seized Crimea: ‘Ukraine, which has demonstrated how quickly it can degenerate into bloodletting, is today a powder keg involving not just its own internal contradictions but the potential to unleash civil war – and with it world conflict. At its heart is the noble wish of Ukrainians, some speaking-Russian, some Ukrainian, Orthodox and Catholic, to live in a just democracy more like that of Western Europe than the autocracies of Russia or Kazakhistan. That is complicated by a real split between its Russophile, Orthodox, industrialised east like Kharkov, where statues of Lenin embellish squares, and its mitteleuropean, Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic west, like Lvov. But its global significance lies in its tangled relationship with Moscow: Ukraine has an essential role in Russia’s vision of itself just as Russia is omnipresent in Ukraine’s own traumatised consciousness. A week ago, President Putin’s Russia stood higher in prestige than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis: dazzling in the panoply of Olympic… Read more »

stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  Monro

I remember US invading Afghanistan, Iraq and UK and French forces bombing Libya and destroying that country.

If you’re going to go that far back, at the time of the Soviet tanks going into Czechoslovakia, the US was invading Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands and a few years after bombing Cambodia mercilessly, countries that had done nothing to them.

Jon Garvey
2 years ago
Reply to  stewart

And kicking off with a false flag in the Gulf of Tonkin, much as a dodgy dossier kicked off Iraq, and staged murders at a maternity unit kicked off the first Gulf War, and at best doubtful attribution of shelling kicked off the bombing of Serbia.

Monro
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

What on earth has any of that got to do with Putin’s criminal behaviours, displacing millions, hundreds of thousands killed?

EppingBlogger
2 years ago
Reply to  stewart

It was Chinese backed communists from the north who were trying to take over the whole of Vietnam. The fact the US did not do well and failed to stop them does not turn it into a US invasion.

Monro
2 years ago
Reply to  stewart

No activities by anyone else justify a brutal and barbaric invasion perpetrated by a totalitarian despot intent on distracting his long suffering citizens from his and his cronies pillaging of the national coffers.

JohnK
2 years ago

Just to say that I endorse the HART letter to Victoria Atkins MP. https://www.hartgroup.org/joint-open-letter-to-the-secretary-of-state/

huxleypiggles
2 years ago
Reply to  JohnK

Victoria Atkins will, from here on in be complicit in any further deaths that might be attributed to the “vaccines.”

End of.

Free Lemming
2 years ago

There was nothing that came out of the Putin interview that wasn’t already known. Absolutely nothing. When the West is in its death throes, as a global elite engineer a controlled demolition of society and the economy, isn’t that odd? The bombshells that could have been dropped weren’t. I’ll say again: Putin’s silence on the great reset can only mean one of two things 1) we’re all barking mad, and the catalogue of lockstep events, carried out over a very short period of time, destroying the West, is merely coincidental 2) he is complicit. I know where my money is.

DHJ
DHJ
2 years ago
Reply to  Free Lemming

He did make some comments that were globalist in nature. Globalism in itself is not an issue, it’s the implementation, mindset and track-record of those promoting it that is the concern. Maybe Putin is complicit and plays the role of “bad guy”. He was the candidate of choice for Tony Blair and MI6 but there’s more than one conclusion that could be drawn from that.

Regardless of their worldview or motives, why is it the Russians can field leaders and diplomats such as Putin, Lavrov and Zakharova who come across as professional, serious and intelligent yet capable of making humorous observations and we have a bunch of clowns?

Free Lemming
2 years ago
Reply to  DHJ

He only inferred what everybody now knows (excluding the moronic Guardian readers and BBC followers of course), which is that the people seemingly in power are not the people actually in power. Shock. Yes, he appeared more statesman-like than any of our muppets, but that just makes him a better actor; he just took his rehearsal time more seriously. The whole thing felt staged to me, and achieved nothing other than to get the lefties hot under the collar about allowing Putin airtime. Expect further restrictions on free speech, particularly in the alternative media, to be justified shortly.

JayBee
2 years ago
Reply to  DHJ

I think that they opposed the airing of the interview so vehemently for one reason: It made it painfully obvious to the plebs that he is in a totally different intellectual league than our pathetic leaders and ‘elite’.
Which is also the main and real reason why they hate him so much and sabotaged all of his sensible approaches to the West during the last 20+ years.

Jon Garvey
2 years ago
Reply to  JayBee

Stupid public leaders seem chosen to do the bidding of clever (though not wise) hidden puppeteers. In other words, they hate Putin not just because they are his intellectual inferiors, but because the clever people with real power sees that he threatens their ambitions for power and wealth.

Dinger64
2 years ago
Reply to  DHJ

👍

JayBee
2 years ago

His tax return might finish him off.
The plebs will only see the low 23% tax rate, not how it came about.

ellie-em
2 years ago
Reply to  JayBee

I was intrigued about that, too.

Dinger64
2 years ago

“Biden can no longer hide from the appalling truth about his irresponsible presidency”

Shuush! Leave him be, better the old shambling dimwit stands again rather than a new runner to reinvigorate the Democrats!

Jon Garvey
2 years ago
Reply to  Dinger64

Biden’s mental state is irrelevant. He was incapable even during his election campaign, but that simply left the hidden powers free reign to execute their own policies without any kickback from the “elected” President. No other candidate on their list would exercise much more will, nor in fact would most of the Republican candidates.

This explains, of course, the hatred of Trump the wild card: he threatens the whole duck-shoot not because he is necessarily that astute, wise or powerful, but simply because (like Putin*, in my opinion) they cannot control him by bribes or threats.

*Putin: the reason Yeltsin elevated him and trusted him was that, alone amongst the people surrounding him, Putin could not be corrupted. He actually did want to rebuild Russia.

Jon Garvey
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

PS – the most worrying thing is the low-key Democrat election campaign. They may now be ousting Biden, but they’ve known he was a liability from the start.

If they’re not trying hard with their campaign, it is likely that they intend that Trump will not win despite his landslide poll ratings. Since their plans to discredit him or jail him appear unsuccessful, the Kennedy solution seems their only solution.

This time round, any “strange accident” would be known by billions around the world to be assassination – but by whom, when nobody from Doocy to Putin knows who’s actually running the US?

Dinger64
2 years ago

Was it right for Tucker Carlson to interview president Putin?
Uptick for yes. Downticks for no.
(I can’t vote but mine would be yes)

Dinger64
2 years ago

“The political class is only just realising that voters prefer prosperity over climate jingoism”

Kier Starmer changes his mind dependant on the direction of the wind on a particular day!

Dinger64
2 years ago

“Ireland is fast becoming Europe’s nastiest nation”

Because of its WHO and WEF led puppet leaders, NOT its people!

Jon Garvey
2 years ago
Reply to  Dinger64

So it is, to be sure.

huxleypiggles
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

😀😀😀

Dinger64
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

Potatoes! 🤣