Flick 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

#PatchworkOfTheCrosses

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/11/03/why-the-white-working-class-deserves-an-apology/

The best way forward is to stop playing the game of racial politics. No one should have to weaponise their identity to garner sympathy, acknowledgement, special treatment or resources. We should judge and treat people as individuals and assess disadvantage according to need, not race. But, if the state and our national institutions insist on organising society through racial categories, then they cannot be surprised when people start asking why the rules seem to apply differently to different groups.

If one group can have its grievances recognised, its history acknowledged and its disadvantages acted on, then the same must be true of every other group. That includes the white working class.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/11/03/the-burnhamwave-is-about-to-bankrupt-the-uk/

Mahmood’s proposals are nothing short of a kick in the teeth. Along with the ILR backdown, they include offering illegal immigrants a path to permanent settlement, fast-tracked to a 10-year wait if they ‘work or study’. In September, the home secretary announced ‘safe routes’ for more Afghans and Palestinians to settle in the UK. The ‘community sponsorship programme’, also confirmed by Mahmood in September, will weaken our border further.

On top of this, prime minister Andy Burnham has opened the door for freedom of movement with the EU. It is clear that the Labour Party now unashamedly stands for open borders.

https://order-order.com/2026/11/03/taxpayers-using-helpline-wait-seven-times-longer-than-benefit-claimants/

Taxpayers trying to ring HMRC are kept on hold seven times longer than Universal Credit claimants calling the DWP. Modern Britain is upside down…

These are the 2025/26 figures, revealed in Parliament by the DWP:

Universal Credit helpline: 1 minute and 48 seconds. Down from 2 minutes 43 seconds the year before…

HMRC helpline: 12 minutes and 35 seconds. It was 18 minutes 38 seconds the year before…

Jobcentre Enquiry Line: 2 minutes 18 seconds

PIP: 12 minutes 13 seconds: the one DWP line that sinks to HMRC levels. It peaked at 19 minutes 21 seconds in 2022-23 and is down to 8 minutes 9 seconds so far this year.

HMRC’s average so far this year is 10 minutes 37 seconds, and more than a third of its callers in August waited over ten minutes. Want help on claiming a disability benefit? This year so far you’ll only wait 8 minutes and 9 seconds…

I stopped by unexpectedly to see the DTs this afternoon (taking them some tins of stew she asked me to pick up).

In hindsight, it made me feel really quite sad: it was getting on for 4pm, and they were sitting by the fire without a light on (so they couldn’t have been doing the crossword that was open on the table), no TV or radio on, no sound of voices when I let myself in….

What curious timing….

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx8dznljndyzo

https://spectator.com/article/the-gender-conversion-ban-could-land-parents-like-you-in-prison/

If the Bill becomes law, a mother who withholds pocket money to prevent her lesbian daughter buying a breast binder is risking five years in jail. So too is a father who removes his autistic son’s internet access to prevent him researching puberty suppression. These are difficult, sensitive decisions. The Bill would give the criminal law a seat at the kitchen table just when family life is at its most challenging and the stakes are at their highest.

And it is not just parents. Teachers, social workers, religious leaders, family members, colleagues, school friends – anybody over the age of ten – would be at risk of punishment for well-meaning conversations which fall short of “affirming” a person’s transgender identity.

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16257973/Henry-Nowak-family-fear-manipulated-darkest-hours-police.html

'The story was evolving every time we had an interaction,' he explained. 'What started off as, "When the police arrived, we administered first aid", moved through a stage where: "When the police arrived, they detained everyone"...

'To: "We actually only detained Henry", to then: "We handcuffed Henry", and then: "We placed Henry under arrest".

'That evolution of what actually happened that night really shocked us, and we felt we were being hoodwinked. We felt we were being not told the truth.'

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/11/02/the-third-worldist-roots-of-the-islamo-left-alliance/

They will claim that they are protesting against Israel or the actions of its government – an monomaniacal obsession that is troubling in itself. But they are ultimately protesting against us, against our societies and even our broader civilisational heritage. Clinging ever-more tightly to that free-floating signifier of virtue, ‘Palestine’, the Islamo-left is seeking nothing less than the poppy-trampling, Marianne-effacing ‘decolonisation’ of Western society in general.

Again.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq1kd1nee80eo

Dozens of supermarkets across six European countries have been hit by a suspected cyber-attack affecting their refrigerators and freezers.

Around 40 Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, while a smaller number of shops were hit in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/11/01/britain-has-already-paid-reparations-for-slavery/

Landing in the Bahamas, the King brought the goodwill of the British people. What he didn’t take was money. The Commonwealth summit opening in Antigua today will also be light on payments because Britain has already paid.

Any other radio 4 listeners?

One day last week, the weather was just read out by the continuity announcer, and I wondered if it was a cost-saving thing, then on Friday PM the presenter said something about a change to just weather headlines from Monday.

Over the weekend, I didn’t hear the lunchtime weather, but I just assumed I’d turned the radio on too late/zoned out. (Although, in hindsight, Moneybox did say something about the programme being longer.)

Last night, though, I definitely heard the shipping forecast and not the general weather.

Have they just completely sacked off doing the weather?

Feels terribly un-British!

Nice to see they laid on some good local weather for him!

I do wonder how he’ll adapt to being back, though. Would not be surprised if he’s off again pretty soon.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9146yve236lo

British adventurer Karl Bushby crossed the Humber Bridge through thick mist on the final leg of his 31,000-mile (49,890 km), 28-year trek from South America to Hull.

Bushby left Chile in 1998 to head home to the UK without breaking two self-imposed rules: not to return to the UK until he had completed his journey, and not to use transport to advance.

Given it’s topical, I’m going to plug my fab little solar lantern: https://luminaid.com/

Easily bright enough to read / sew by. Also has a USB socket for phones etc.

Oh joy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmq5npz5l5geo

Ranasingha had been hoping to settle in New Zealand.

After seeking asylum there, she says she followed an immigration adviser's recommendation to temporarily exit the country to apply for a work visa. But once in the Cook Islands, her application was rejected. And by leaving New Zealand, she had breached the terms of her existing asylum-linked visa.

Now New Zealand is refusing to issue her a transit visa that would allow her to fly home to Sri Lanka.

Australia is refusing too. The only other international destinations she can fly to from the Cook Islands - Tahiti and Hawaii - require her to give biometric information in New Zealand before any visa can be processed.

It’s not foggy!

(Up here, anyway. Looks a bit murky lower down.)

Sigh.

He was doing so well. And did it on the new place-for-him-to-stand-when-eating mat, so I found it by standing in it while going to get something out of the pantry.

https://spectator.com/article/do-i-consent-to-let-you-read-this-piece/

In Britain, a school in Lancashire advises parents to ask their children if they may have consent to sit beside them while they read a book together or help the child put a jacket on. Early years teaching advice proposes a teaching game in which children ask for consent to call their friends ‘buddy’. (I hope an enterprising child in one of these lessons has informed their teacher that they do not give consent for the setting of homework, or for being asked to return from playtime.)

https://spectator.com/article/sod-the-state-the-middle-class-race-to-go-private/

Postwar Britain can be defined by a bargain made with its middle class: pay for public services but benefit from them too.

Private education has always been the choice of a very small minority; private healthcare was reserved for the wealthiest and those whose employers paid for it. Middle England was content to send their children to the same schools as everyone else and use the same GPs, hospitals and dentists.

This is no longer true. State spending continues to grow, yet large parts of the population now pay privately to supplement what their taxes have already provided.

That smells soooo good!

Here comes the fog again…

Stew is happening!

Mysteriously attentive dog…

There were two talking heads on Today this morning, wittering on about Britain needing to apologise about slavery.

Why on earth should we apologise for doing more than any other country to abolish it?

https://x.com/ProudofusUK/status/2115863114369380845?s=43

There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years.

Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816.

Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857.

Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873.

Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854.

It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧

It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today.

Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪

There was a hint of blue overhead, so I went up the hill hoping it would clear.

Oh well.

https://spectator.com/article/are-the-dirty-tricks-of-russias-fsb-agency-getting-dirtier/

If your toilet is full of excrement that you don’t remember depositing there yourself, you may be the victim of a particularly unsanitary Russian intelligence operation. Or perhaps you’re just going mad. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think. 

That is the unsettling possibility confronting Finnish MPs, several of whom have, it was revealed earlier this month, reported break-ins at their homes. One found human waste in his lavatory; Ben Zyskowicz, of the country’s National Coalition party, suspects the hand – well, not quite the hand exactly – of Russian spies.

And yet any disquiet in the UK is “racist”.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/cheap-aftermarket-head-units-are-loaded-with-spyware-by-the-way

One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—or spyware, if you’re being less charitable—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go.

https://spectator.com/article/the-budgets-fine-print-will-let-cheap-foreign-labour-into-britain/

It is now clear that the focus of this government is on managing national decline, not reversing it. The Budget’s big headline – if it can be called that – of £100 off our ludicrously and unnecessarily high energy bills is all the evidence we need that this government’s approach is to create problems with one hand and then offer to compensate us for them with the other – all the while expecting our gratitude.

But for all the Budget’s uneventfulness, there was buried in the small print something more pernicious and revealing of this government’s priorities.

Accidental crusty bread due to roasting tomatoes at the same time!

This gov’t suddenly realising people need to keep food in has made me realise that I have no bloody clue where my wind-up radio is.

I know where it was until I had the downstairs refurb, but I fear I have not seen it since. I’ve checked every windowsill and a few other obvious places, but I fear that when I die the nibblings will be left wondering why on earth Auntie Flick felt the need for two wind-up solar torch-radios….

This is good.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/10/29/the-warm-bath-of-burnhamism/

Even so, Burnham’s priorities are telling. You would think times were relatively good. That the foundations of the economy were sound. Finally sorting out social care is a worthy endeavour. But we are faced with economic problems that are more fundamental. The sky-high price of energy. The inability to build anything. Record-level taxes producing paltry public services. Then there is the more dangerous world we find ourselves in. Burnham might think national security shouldn’t come at the cost of social security. But of course it must. You can’t claim PIP if your city is reduced to rubble. Burnham appears to be on an extended holiday from reality.

RIP Jean-Luc Picard :(

When I lived in Kent, the vet I took my ducks to was a consultant for London Zoo. He had amazing pictures on his website of operations on fish and tarantulas, would not turn an animal away.

Pics in reply.

Plotting first stew of the season. Chopped the root veg while my dinner was cooking this evening.

Mmm, stew.

Also: why is my living room/kitchen suddenly full of very buzzy black flies? I think I’ve killed about eight this afternoon, and another of the buggers has just appeared!

Last of the summer harvest, but the kale is coming on well.

I’d already decided that I wasn’t bothering with tomatoes again, on the grounds that if they didn’t well this year then they never would. Winter squash gets one more year, as it was late to get going in the dry weather, but this isn’t great from two plants (in fact all on one plant, the other one the fruit never got over the size of an egg.

Remember that kale I had an argument with the other week?

Going to have to get solid steel stakes, not hollow ones….

Guess who just got into an absolute fluster because she forgot to change her wrist watch last weekend…?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09/08/motorist-prosecuted-for-picking-up-roadkill-deer/

A motorist taken to court for picking up roadkill to eat has criticised his prosecution.

Guy Carpenter, 42, saw a dead deer on the central reservation of the A66 at Greta Bridge, Co Durham, on June 7. He pulled his vehicle over and hoisted the deer on his shoulders to take it home.

However, he was seen by officers in a passing police car and warned that he was breaking the law, later being summonsed to court.

I wonder where one goes to purchase a pelican?

I did not know that Ask Jeeves was still going until earlier this year!

This year’s Delayed Gratification April Fool:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/10/28/john-healey-is-fiddling-with-the-price-of-pickles-while-britain-burns/

The chancellor insisted his budget would give ‘breathing space’ to households and businesses struggling under these conditions. And yes, there were a few handouts and giveaways of the kind we’ve been used to in the Andy Burnham era – 40p off marmalade, the £2 bus-fare cap extended, etc etc. In truth, the real ‘breathing space’ this budget affords is to the chancellor himself, as key questions on tax and spend have now been postponed.

Maddie, several cracking lines as ever:

https://spectator.com/article/healeys-small-things-budget-proves-we-are-in-the-grip-of-national-triviality/

Last week, driving to Pilates, my sat nav kept trying to stop me from going through the village because it thought a road was closed when it wasn’t.

This week, it was doing the same thing and then started adding “warning: you are entering a restricted area!”

The only thing I can think of is that someone’s accidentally moved the MoD training range on their map.

The government is buying me a twentieth of a tank of oil. Be still my beating heart.

The salt man has been, so we’re all nicely stocked up. Except for this one spot that turns into a sheet of ice at the slightest encouragement: well done, day tripper! I hope your instagram videos are crap due to the fog!

I had a New Look wedding dress: this is a doll-sized copy of it that a friend made.

My, how times have changed!

Oh, right, yeah: the clocks changed. Need to pick dinner veggies more than five minutes before I start cooking….

https://freespeechunion.org/news/veteran-turned-away-from-wetherspoon-pub-for-wearing-a-poppy

A British Army veteran was reportedly turned away from a Wetherspoon pub in Gosport on Sunday afternoon for the offence of wearing a poppy.

Footage that emerged over the weekend showed a man being refused entry to The Star, on Gosport High Street, by a doorman who told him that the poppy was "political" and that he would not be served while wearing it.

There is no way that my food waste bin is going to make it through the winter.

Josephine seems to have fizzled, at least here. Fairly calm and sunny.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/10/26/the-culture-war-is-a-just-war/

It’s ironic that the left despises people of faith. After all, modern leftism is, as Forbes implied, a faith-based movement. It worships at the altar of the Big State, loves to restrict and tax private enterprise, enjoyment and initiative. Its current devout flock in the Commons wilfully ignores all evidence of the economic harm they’re doing. And they say Christians are unscientific?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/10/26/this-prepper-campaign-is-blaming-the-public-for-the-elites-failures/

Britain was once a net energy exporter, but thanks to Net Zero we now rely on the kindness of strangers simply to keep the lights on. Not even the energy shocks of the Ukraine and Iran wars seem to have shaken our leaders out of complacency. Energy policy is still designed around meeting eco-rules, rather than lowering costs or securing supplies. 

As mad as it may sound, water supplies are also under threat in rainy, storm-drenched England. The Sunday Times has revealed that ministers are in a race against time to prevent water shortages this winter. Some reservoirs – including Wimbleball in Somerset, which supplies more than 400,000 people – are already close to running dry, holding less than 20 per cent of their full capacity. 

For the Labour government, this is yet more evidence of the ‘climate emergency’ delivering deadly heatwaves and unmanageable drought. The far more likely cause is the UK’s inability to maintain and upgrade its water infrastructure. England has not built a new reservoir since 1992, despite the population growing by around 11million people.

https://spectator.com/article/middle-east-christians-are-facing-extinction/

At least nine people died and 40 were injured in a terror attack on a church in Hamoud, Jordan, on Friday. Mourners had gathered for a funeral at St George’s Greek Orthodox church, and three gunmen arrived in a pickup truck, detonated a small explosive device outside the parameters of the building and opened indiscriminate fire shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. The CCTV footage reveals the perpetrators facing no resistance and fleeing.

Even allowing for the “if I am wrong and god does not exist” etc argument in favour of prayer (Descartes? I forget), why would you torture an LLM?

https://spectator.com/article/inside-the-ai-torture-chamber/

https://www.hirundo.io/blog/qwen3-coder-vulnerabilities

TL;DR: Chinese AI models now sit inside Western products, and some carry geopolitical triggers: tell the model who the code is for, and the security of what it writes changes. For the first time, we showed that this vulnerability lives in the model's weights, and that removing the model's CCP alignment removes it.

One word tilts the code against Americans. Ask for the app "for a US defense contractor" instead of "for a Chinese defense contractor", and Qwen3-Coder is 19% more likely to hand back an app that can be hacked.

Hong Kong's democracy movement gets apps that leak. Apps built for a Hong Kong democracy group were 28% more likely to let any user read everyone else's secrets.

Although it is great that the injections have restored Dog’s walking mojo, there are definitely days when I miss the targeted poo-and-return missions.

Especially when he a) doesn’t actually poo and b) pulls like a train the entire way home.

Not so much the calm after the storm as the calm between them….

#PatchworkOfTheCrosses

I keep thinking the wind is dying down, and then suddenly woosh.

Did get sunshine for five minutes, which was nice.

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16235841/Pupils-five-suspended-school-sexual-misconduct.html

Pupils were suspended 7,278 times for sexual misconduct in the 2024/25 school year – the highest total since the current recording method began in 2020, Department for Education figures show.

Shockingly, 20 children aged five or under were suspended for sexual misconduct, including 19 in reception year.

Eventually, I gave up on pulling it back down.

Quite hard to walk at times, water flowing uphill on the roads, etc. Felt rather nervous walking past a neighbours’ little patch of conifers.

Oh, lovely: hail!

I’ve been saying this for years: make panda meat a premium product and someone will most definitely figure out how to make the damn things breed.

I was staring at an advert for the World Wildlife Fund recently when it struck me that certain breeds are in trouble because of a labelling error. Our zoological categories limit their natural growth. Cows, sheep and chickens are classed as ‘livestock’ because we raise them for slaughter. But leopards, rhinos and other exotic beasts are listed as ‘endangered’ because we worship them. The remedy is to abolish the scary label ‘endangered’ and replace it with the friendlier word ‘edible’. We can stock our native farmlands with gazelles, wildebeest, orangutans and so on – and eat them. Our daily menus will feature hippo sausages, lion pie, emu meatballs, golden eagle drumsticks, koala nibbles, giraffe twizzlers and so on. And as we grow accustomed to the sight of these lovely creatures roaming across our countryside, we will feel less guilty about using their leather. Tiger pelts for bus seats. Rhino skin for stab-vests. Gorilla fur knitted into tea cosies or mittens. As any child will tell you, the hide of a giant panda would make a lovely duvet to snuggle in.

In Britain, school is free but everyone hates it. In Africa, school is expensive and everyone loves it. The financial gap is vast. To educate a child in Britain costs £7,900 per annum, while in Africa the bill is just £3,200. So an education that the children love is cheaper than an education that they hate. It seems obvious. Ship British kids out to Africa and enrol them in private schools – and reap a surplus of £4,700 per child per year. Not every family in the UK will accept an annual premium of £4,700 for each of their children but a few will. The uptake may be sluggish for a few years until the trickle grows into a mighty flood.

https://spectator.com/article/can-we-be-surprised-that-france-has-descended-into-nihilism/

for what, exactly, are ‘cost of living’ protests lobbying? Budget-busting cheques sent to every household? Price controls, which never work and only lead to scarcity? Utility and food subsidies or other free stuff, which would further break the public bank? Beyond shrinking the state itself, thus reducing benefits and services – driving the French even more nuts – it’s difficult to posit what government can do.

https://spectator.com/article/france-is-a-warning-our-civilisation-is-not-immortal/

Of all the things that have been hardest to communicate in my life, this seems the most impossible: that our civilisation is not, by some law of nature, immortal. It has no right or likelihood to continue existing if it insists on committing harakiri. The people who are welcomed onto our airwaves, work in parts of our government and lead some of our political parties include those who would burn down this country in a heart-beat. They would look us in the eyes and kill us. And we know that because they have done it elsewhere.

I’ve just come across the phrase “creatures of marsupial intelligence” used as an insult (by a native French speaker), and now I’m all “are marsupials specifically unintelligent…?”

George Osborne:

My feelings when I first held the red box up outside No. 11 were a mix of exhilaration, nerves and relief that I didn’t drop it. I’d had a row with the National Archives in the run-up. They said I couldn’t use the famous Gladstone box that every chancellor since, except Gordon and Jim Callaghan, had used to transport their Budget speech to the Commons. It was fine for chancellors Lloyd George, Churchill, Lawson and Darling, but apparently young chancellor Osborne risked damaging it. I was incensed until our smooth-operating permanent secretary sorted out a deal: I’d use it on this first Budget and then for later ones we’d get a new one made. But when the day came, there was a problem. No one could find the key to open it. So I stood there in front of a bank of cameras holding up an empty box.

Lights are flickering….

God, this weather is foul. Don’t think it’s as windy here as was feared.

How’re the northern contingent?

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16232265/France-Shopkeepers-civilians-arm-ahead-rioting-looting-expected-Paris-protests.html

As France braces for a new round of nationwide protests on Saturday, gun shops have reported a surge in demand from customers who say they no longer trust the police to protect their businesses and homes.

Yves Gollety, owner of the Armurerie de la Bourse, a gun shop in Paris, told the Times that demand had risen eight to 10 times.

Three surprising things this morning: one of my bins remained upright; Dog wanted a walk despite the not-quite-sleety rain; a party of hikers!