Weekend Reading: Drax / Womens Rights vs Trans

Couple of worthwhile MSM press articles here - unusually good; and for the final one, an unusual source, too.

Drax - the papers are full of Drax at the moment as Miliband has partially caved in to the Starmer / Reeves growth-fixation.  OK, he's reduced the annual amount of subsidy for the Yorkshire tree-consuming monster, but he's extending our payments to undeserving Drax by another 4 years, on spurious grounds ("TINA": well, Ed, there are better alternatives), all for the sake of keeping options open for Drax to build a 'BECCS' plant, maybe, some time in the future of its own choosing, if it gets given even more £££, no commitments made at this time.  That's one helluva costly option, without any certainty of ultimate delivery.  Madness.

Several of the MPs taking a broadly anti-Drax line in Parliament of late, have actually screwed up in what they've said on this fairly technical topic; and the press have not been much better.  Even the FT is all-too-frequently disappointing in such BAU matters, silently and implicitly siding with, errr, BAU (and ad revenues?)  This, though not 100% accurate, is many times better than usual.  Oh, and quite a neat, perky little snipe from Nils Prately in the Graun, too.

Trans - also from the Graun is this, from the increasingly confident feminist pen of Sonia Sodha.  Here's a flavour (my emphasis): 

No woman should be forced to change her clothes in front of a male colleague... Peggie shared her account of what happened with the tribunal last week ... Dr Beth Upton, the [trans] male doctor in question, walked into the [changing] room while she was partially undressed... Upton put in a formal complaint, and Peggie was suspended for bullying and harassment... The greatest responsibility lies with Peggie’s employer, who, instead of making separate accommodations for Upton, expected female colleagues to ignore the fact he is male [sic!]... The attempted justification is that everyone must adopt the minority belief system that someone’s sex is not a scientific fact but a matter of their gender identity, or some sort of gendered soul.  As a personal worldview, that’s someone’s own business, but it is wrong – and, in a work context, unprofessional – to try to force it on others in relation to single-sex spaces, services and sports...

The idea that a man who identifies as female is literally a woman, and must without fail be treated as such, has become a cherished principle for some progressives. Politicians and women’s rights activists speaking against this have been excommunicated from the left. Slowly, but surely, this is starting to change ... Abandoning basic common sense for unpopular policies that put women at risk does not go well for the left.

'Misgendering' the doctor, by name, in print!  Go Sonia, Go Graun!

ND

Polly Toynbee, True Believer: hope springs eternal?

The public career of Polly Toynbee is a continuous source of mirth.  How many socialist saviours has she hitched her wagon to, only to have her hopes crushed.  Owen, Blair, Brown, Patricia Hewitt (sic), ... and now Starmer/Reeves.  Always bearing the imprint of the last person to sit upon her / brief her confidentially over lunch.  But before the worm turns & the Great Disappointment strikes, whilst her wagon still hitched there's nothing she won't do by way of providing what she thinks of as helpful outrider support.  Here's the latest - in the Graun, as usual: 

The Waspi women suffered outrageous misogyny, but in poverty-stricken Britain they’re not the top priority. The government is right in its decision not to pay the women up to £10.5bn in compensation ... a government [does not] have a financial duty to repair historical sexism.

Polly: calm down!  Starmer & Reeves - just like your former beau Brown - don't mind lying & brazening these things out.  It just doesn't bother them!  They don't need your sophistry.  Haven't you spotted how they are leading you by the nose?  Here was you, Polly, back in July in that self-same Grauniad: 

Starmer will bin the two-child benefit cap and outdo New Labour on tackling poverty – I’ll bet on it. I will eat my hat – or several – if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves don’t soon find the money to bury the pernicious two-child benefit cap. In her first budget, expect Reeves to find the funds for this, and other public spending not yet announced... Some worry that Starmer and Reeves will be deterred by the campaign to force them to pay up, fearing it would signal their willingness to capitulate and splurge on everything else. I don’t think they’re that frit, with the markets and everyone that matters backing them. It would demonstrate surefooted self-confidence...

Any doubt about their good intent vanished with their creation of a new child poverty unit. ... Every Labour government always reduces poverty: this one will be no exception.  Expect no less from Starmer and Reeves, and probably more... And they will start by hurling the two-child benefit cap into the dustbin of atrocious Tory policies. 

Heart-rending stuff, eh?   Here's how her infatuation with Brown ended ...

ND

Guardian Goings-on (1) Electric Vehicles

For a while now, it's been clear that the Grauniad isn't just broadly on the side of the greens (hardly surprising), but that it has a positive editorial policy of proselytising, not to mention smoking up the embarrassing facts.  For example, it ran a 'myth-busting' series on heat pumps, which was straining every sinew to say "heat pumps are wonderful, don't let anyone tell you otherwise", except that the last residues of journalistic integrity forced it to admit that the first half of that statement needs qualifying (heavily) in several dimensions, to the point where the second part looks pretty silly.  Likewise, it ran a series on how wonderful electric vehicles are, not to worry about recharging etc.

Except, actually, EV drivers seem to fall out of love with their costly acquisitions, subsidised or not (and notwithstanding the acceleration, hohoh, with which even J.Clarkson is supposed to be deeply in love).  This clearly manifests itself in something long suspected by skeptics, namely that the resale value of EVs is turning out to be pitiful.  This is, incidentally, for very good reasons.

Someone in the trade has decided the ideal place for an attempt to arrest this highly damaging phenomenon is, of course, the Graun.  Which has obligingly let fly with a lengthy, risible puff-piece trying to talk up second-hand EVs: ‘Spectacular bargains’: why now is a great time to buy a used electric car in the UK.  

What sort of journalist could take pride in being told to write such tosh?  I haven't heard quite so much disingenuous 'talking his own book' nonsense since the Beeb allowed a representative of the used car fraternity to announce that, during some pronounced downturn in new car sales a few years ago, it would mean that prices of second-hand cars would be going up!  (... 'because nobody wants a new car, so they'll be buying second-hand cars instead and demand will go up'.  FFS, man, if there's a recession in car buying it'll hit the entire sector!)

Well, I suppose Kath Viner feels it's all hands to the pump.  I look forward to the next in this series - perhaps "why doesn't your village volunteer to have a small nuke planted next door?  You could get up a petition ..."

More on this 'journalistic' behaviour to follow.

ND  

Education: competing theories on how to make it worse

Ever a reliable source of glimpses into leftie angst, this week the Grauniad provides us with these competing accounts, within two days of each other:  

Scottish schools have tumbled from top of the class.  Pupils became unwitting guinea pigs of faddish, unproven theories – and paid a high price ... England’s performance on the other hand, with some caveats, held up relatively well, even with the impact of the pandemic, and it has moved up the international tables ... there is little doubt that, educationally, England is performing significantly better than Scotland.

Peers call for urgent overhaul of secondary education in England:  there is too much learning by rote and many key Tory changes should be reversed 

The former article goes on to make it explicitly clear that for the Scots "faddish, unproven theories", we should read "progressive claptrap": read it if you're interested in more of the details.  In terms of those baleful "Tory changes" in England, here's what the Graun says, contrasting them most favourably with Scotland: 

The comparison with England is instructive ... To take the example of maths, there has been significant investment in effective models of teaching from the highest-performing systems in the world. The data shows that it is paying off, in line with the international evidence that high-quality, evidence-based curriculums are a very good and cost-effective way of improving education outcomes.

It's pretty clear that for anyone broadly on the right with the slightest regard for social equity (whether for altruistic or self-serving reasons), providing good education for the masses to facilitate any latent potential for meritorious advance is one, if not the main, central plank of policy.   It ought to be so for lefties, too.

Sadly, education, and what constitutes "good" in this context, are highly contested, not least because for lefties (and Jesuits) it is an ideological battleground and they have more interest in politically-motivated indoctrination than in what might be termed "objective learning".  (That's when they don't have outright malice and social sabotage in mind.)  In leftist countries like China (and, in former days, Soviet Russia), they are simultaneously keen on both ideology and solid learning.  Because they are in charge, they have practical concerns and an economy to build.  

In the west, the left carelessly takes the economy for granted and cares not a fig for genuine learning: they (the left elite) already know all that needs knowing, and the lower orders don't need to be equipped with anything beyond some slogans of the elite's devising.  They've obviously succeeded triumphantly in Scotland - once rightly proud of its education system - and wish to set about English schools in turn.  A plague on them: recall what Christ said about the fate of those messing with the wellbeing of the young.

ND

How the media (still) works: princes and pressure groups

A report out today ...

How far back do we date the phenomenon of vested interests putting out spurious press releases masquerading as news?  It definitely pre-dates the 1980s because I can remember instances of it back then quite clearly.  Commercially, the 'launches' of books, films, new products etc have been doing it forever, to amplify their advertising efforts.  Pressure groups muscled in on the act, and made it their own: the ghastly phrase "a report out today ..." is always the giveaway.

Why are they indulged?  That's easy: the media are bone idle.  In the case of, for example, local newspapers, they are and always have been grotesquely understaffed, and rely to 95% on stuff being handed to them on a plate: sometimes you can tell they've barely read what they've been sent.  But ... shouldn't MSM which have the slightest pretensions to, errr, standards of reporting, be above that crap?

Here's a wonderful example from the Grauniad.  (Did I say pretensions ..?) 

Labour MPs to lobby Keir Starmer to put green policies at heart of manifesto

This lengthy piece is completely devoid of news and, for afficionados, is a gem of its kind.  The press release / briefing that the Graun has swallowed whole, is from a new groupuscule that hasn't even launched yet!  So everything is about what "they" (assuming anyone joins the group) might do in future.  Classic stuff.

Which brings us to poor Prince Harry.  As an old mate of mine (a Tory MP) used to say, you can always get on the front page if you're willing to take your trousers down in public.  Was there ever a neater illustration of this maxim?  Put it away, son, everyone's laughing at you.

ND

Wealth tax proposals: target 'those other guys'

 Gotta laugh at this earnest Grauniad article: 

One of us is a millionaire, the other a care worker. The cruel divide between rich and poor disgusts us both ...  Britain’s cost of living crisis is disastrous for one of us and will barely touch the other. The best answer is a wealth tax

The two ladies in question are Julia Davies and Winsome Hill.  In case you are wondering, it's Julia that is a member of "Patriotic Millionaires" (sic), and Ms Hill who is the care worker.  Entertainingly but somehow inevitably, the article includes the words "the two of us have never met" !   No, really? -  you surprise me.  "... but we both felt the inequality in this country couldn’t continue ... and decided to write this piece together."

So what have they, errr, spontaneously agreed as a solution for inequality?  Even though they've never met. 

Let’s start with taxing the seriously wealthy – people with wealth of more than £10m. A wealth tax of just 1% or 2% on their stocks of wealth over £10m ...    [my emphasis]

I think we know what this means.  It means - I'm just guessing here - that Ms Davies' "stock of wealth" is somewhere in the band £1m to £5m.  Because that's the very definition of people who think that "seriously wealthy" means north of 10.  Left on her own with the pen, Ms Hill might, I suspect, have written "people with wealth over £1m" - or even £500k, given that the average UK house price is £256k and the median personal pension pot is only in the tens of thousands (though the data is hard to summarise simply).  But that wouldn't do, Ms Davies - would it?   No no no!

Yup, it's human nature to reckon that "serious wealthy" is always someone else.  You got a yacht?  Yeah, but he's got his own island.

ND

COP27: Contradictions Foretold

The other day I was looking back at the C@W "predictions 2022" compo.  En passant, it seems that back in January, none of us could believe Putin would actually invade ...

Anyhow, I offered "it's not a prediction, it's a cert; 2022 will be a year when the contradictions in energy policy will truly make themselves felt" - and now, as then, I claim no credit because it was already obvious for all to see.  You could argue - certainly in the case of Germany - it had been obvious for years.

Anyhow, fast-forward to COP27, and much blathering about the wicked oil and gas producers limbering up to produce ... more gas!  And - shock, horror - 

The push is coming from the host Egypt and its gas-producing allies amid a global energy crisis compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Well yes.   And of course benighted Germany is well to the fore in stimulating the producers' revived development activity.  As the Grauniad callously puts it: 

Panic over keeping people warm in winters to come, and keeping the lights on from gas-fired power generation, has led governments in Europe that previously relied on gas from Russia to push for new supplies from a range of other sources.

Well, errr, yes again!  'Panic', of course, is a loaded term in progressive circles, generally coupled as "moral panic", which is always a thing to be derided.  That really is a nasty little insinuation.

Yup, gas it is.  Nature's most all-round effective off-the-shelf fuel offering, certainly in the context of today's technology - while we patiently await practicable nuclear fusion, and/or serious electricity storage capability.  What wailing and gnashing of teeth there will be if Egypt engineers a COP27 resolution which labels gas as "sustainable" ...

ND

And your point is ..?

 

 

You often hear people in the meejah saying "Nobody voted for this!"

Well ...

ND

Weekend Sport: Fratricide at the Guardian

It is hardly to be marvelled at, because the Graun gives space to some pretty ludicrous stuff (hardly unique in the meejah, but still).  At the same time, they have the wonderfully waspish Marina Hyde, who can't quite believe the crap the gets commissioned alongside her own crisp commentary. 

there is a particular stripe of Labour self-indulgence that has simply redefined what it means to be an absolute shower of shits ... However mirthlessly, you do have to laugh at the various Corbyn outriders who’ve now been wrong for two elections – in most cases for three – but have not even broken stride since the biggest defeat since 1935 before turning up with some more advice for what Labour should do next. What can you say? Other than: why are you still here? Did someone order some more wrong, with a side order of obnoxiously erroneous? Because I definitely didn’t. You’ve just spent four years plugging a political Fyre festival. On the matter of where Labour should go next, I would honestly rather hear what Ja Rule has to say from here on.

(For the avoidance of doubt: Owen Jones, Paul Mason, Zoe Williams - This Means You.)

What sport.

ND  

Weekend: The Things You Can Find in the Guardian

Quite genuinely, there is often some great stuff amongst the dross.  This week, for example:

1.  A really neat summing-up by Rafael Behr on Corbyn -

... impatient and frustrated with Brexit, but not in a way that speaks to the hearts of remainers or leavers. It is not an itch to complete the job or to abort it. Instead, the Labour leader sits tutting and drumming his fingers like a man who feels the wrong revolution has barged into history’s queue when it was meant to be his turn.

2.  Polly Toynbee

Unless you are a Liverpool or Tottenham supporter, you probably need cheering up and Polly Toynbee is a reliable source of a wry smile.  She has latterly taken to contorting almost every one of her thrice-weekly articles into concluding that only R2 can solve the nation's woes.  Her desperation is palpable, and this week it has reached new depths: an appeal to the PM, on the grounds that a second referendum is May's only hope!

As the knock on her door tells Theresa May her time is up, let her look to her legacy. With her unsurpassed reputation as the most pitiful failure of a prime minister, she has less than nothing to lose. A public vote is her last chance.

Ah well.  Nobody on Team Corbyn is listening to the R2 pleading of the Wise Woman of Clapham Common, so perhaps Mrs May's desire for posterity is indeed Polly's best bet.   Anyhow, since the local elections, she's been out & about in the North to recharge her batteries at the front line.  What does she find? 

...I was in Middlesbrough, surveying Labour’s local election wreckage. The party now controls not one Tees Valley council, losing Middlesbrough, Redcar, Stockton, Hartlepool and Darlington. “We all got beaten,” said one of the surviving Labour councillors, grimacing at the pain of it. The regional mayor is Tory, and in Middlesbrough the new mayor is a multimillionaire hedge-funding property developer, standing as an independent.

And she thinks R2 will bring her joy?  As Behr says in the Corbyn article: "the current appetite for upending the British status quo has little to do with socialism". 

ND

The Guardian: Oh, So Cruel

This callous juxtaposition is surely going a bit too far ...

 
She's trying her best!

ND

Brexit Positivity from an Unexpected Source

OK, so, quiz-time at C@W: 

Q - who is saying this, and where?  (no googling at the back there)

Only a rupture with the EU will alter the failed status quo - it’s not plausible that either Brexit in name only or no exit at all can lead to radical reform of our broken system ... Just before Christmas, the Bank said the economy could shrink by 8% in the event of a disruptive no-deal outcome - but this was a worst-case scenario and the Bank had to throw in the kitchen sink to arrive at it. The idea, for example, that interest rates would rise by four percentage points after a no-deal Brexit is implausible ... 

Brexit, the gilets jaunes protesters in France, the terrible pain inflicted on Greece and the support for the League/Five Star government in Italy all tell their own story. Europe is alive with political discontent that reflects the demand for deep and urgent reform, but the chances of getting it are less likely if the status quo prevails ... 

“a reformed Britain in a reformed Europe” - possible but not all that plausible, given that it would require breaking up the euro, more autonomy for individual countries to intervene in the running of their economies, and a simultaneous philosophical U-turn in the big member states ...  

The softer the Brexit, the more convinced the EU will be that it has been doing the right thing all along. Britain will not go up in flames, but there will still be consequences. Leave voters will feel they have been victims of an establishment stitch-up. The anger will not go away and will eventually resurface. The risk is that the losers will be the biggest supporters of the EU – the liberal left. And the biggest winners will be the extreme right.

A - Larry Elliot in ... the Grauniad !   Elliot is an honest fellow, noted for traipsing the streets of northern towns before, during and after the referendum, canvassing actual opinions.  Westminster bubble-journos willing to get their shoes dirty in this way are few and far between: honourable mentions also to Michael Crick and, credit-where-its-due, yes, La Toynbee (who for all her nosepeg-wearing support for Labour has long held very realistic views about immigration, albeit furtively). 

Worth a read.

ND

Update: see BTL, Mr Cowshed has pointed out that it is John Harris who tramps the streets for the Grauniad.

Surprised in Salzburg

You'd have thought that UK politico-pundits were already skeptical enough about Chequers - not to say dismissive in some quarters - before yesterday.  But Salzburg seems to have taken them by surprise.

In the 6 O'Clock news, the Beeb were going, hmmm, that didn't go very well, did it?   By 10, they were pronouncing it a complete disaster, dead on arrival.  Though some would perhaps attribute this to a malign, purely internal pressure-cooker effect amongst people taking a while to find their nerve to stick in the knife, well, personally I'd do them the credit of assuming they'd been doing more than just jerking themselves off in the the four-hours between; and that their step-up in pronouncement was a result of hearing from more participants, and careful editorial deliberation.

It's shaken the Grauniad just as much, but with a different outcome:  an attempt to be calm and, by their own lights, sober, rational, and statesmanlike:

The danger for Europe’s leaders and those in London is that the break-up could become so much more severe than was desired by either the EU or the UK. Each must be careful not to misread the other’s intentions. Both sides must reflect on what sort of relationship they want and how they could achieve it. Let us hope that in the month ahead Downing Street and Brussels show the sort of wisdom required to ameliorate the error of Brexit without recourse to the bitter rancour that we had all thought the continent of Europe had left behind.

Why so shocked?  Well, there's many a pundit who has no practical conception of how negotiations actually work.  (Robbins will spend all this morning telling May it's just posturing ahead of the next round of talks.)  But presumably also, it wasn't just May's Cabinet who bought the line that the Chequers package had been cleared in advance by Merkel.  Perhaps May thought so herself - everything seemed to point to that.  Perhaps it was even true! - and that Merkel has been undercut, or didn't put enough effort in, or didn't read it properly. 

So - Party Conference up soon, and May looking as testy as she ever does; although she was at her 'reliable Head Girl' best last night for the cameras, under severe provocation.  Against all precedent, might she even get so pissed off (even irrationally so), she finds a bit of backbone?  One can but hope.

ND

Lightening the Tone

It's all been a bit heavy of late, n'est-ce pas?  So let's lighten up.

Several years have elapsed since I last moaned (and you all jumped in) about the illiteracy of public discourse - not least in the writings of supposedly, err, educated Grauniad writers.  My bugbears on that occasion were the copiously misused terms elide, kudos and failsafe.

I have another.

It's hapless.

Don’t mock the ‘hapless’ Brexiters – they are still pulling all the strings

In America, Trump voters see any criticism of their hapless president as an attack on themselves

... holding signs aloft that decried endemic American gun violence, hapless politicians and the extremist gun rights movement

All from the Graun over the last few days.  Manifestly, most people think it means something like an erudite combination of hopeless and useless.  And it doesn't.

Your favourite bêtes noires? 

ND

All-Time Record Sock-Puppet Operation in Guardian

This really is hilarious - and potentially of even greater significance than just setting records for sock-puppetry.

Clearly stung by the tsunami of opprobrium coming his way, J.Corbyn's machine has lumbered into action on the Jezza-McMafia crisis with a lame apologia in the Grauniad.  More on his performances this week in another post.

But (- they just couldn't help themselves -) they then whipped in a posse of grovelling BTL comments.  And thousands of 'likes'.  That's where it gets really silly - as many as 538** likes for one particularly sycophantic comment.  By way of context, generally speaking 20 likes is very big for even a popular CiF comment, as a glance around the Grauniad's website will confirm.

They've clearly overdone it grotesquely: the Graun itself lost patience after a mere 23 comments and shut the thing down.  (Again - context - a juicy opinion piece will often attract two or three thousand comments before the thread is closed.)

As I say: more on this whole phenomenon later.  In the meantime, go over to CiF and have a chuckle.  Oh, the panic-stricken ineptness of it all !

ND

Update:  538 was after just a few minutes.  Though they've long since closed the thread, the Graun is still allowing upvotes which have now reached fantasy proportions  

Guardian Hyperventilation and the Fitzroy Maclean Cure

... aside from not opening its overheated pages, that is.   But when you do - here's the Opinion spread this morning.

Yes, Comment is indeed Free; and opinions cheap.   May dragging the UK under ... Brexit to cost Britain dear ... Britain is in chaos ... Tories may destroy the Union ... the Brexit fanatics are at the helm ... time for Wales to start talking about Independence ... May must not trigger Article 50 ...  (leavened with a little squeak of ... I feel ill at the thought of another referendum in Scotland).

Wow.  Enough to make any of us feel ill.

Well.  I've been travelling a bit recently, and took the opportunity to re-read Fitzroy Maclean's fabulous memoir of his legendary exploits in WW2 (special forces ops in the western desert and Yugoslavia) and the years preceding it, Eastern Approaches.  And not just his own stirring deeds.  Have a read of this and put the Scotty fish-woman out of your mind.  This is what Britain is made of.

No account of events on Vis [an island off Yugoslavia] would be complete without some mention of Admiral Sir Walter Cowan [who] had, after a long and distinguished career, retired from the Navy in 1931, at the age of sixty. In 1939, the outbreak of war, he had managed to get himself re-employed, and not wishing to stay at home, he had himself sent out to the Middle East which, he felt, offered more scope to a man of his tastes. He had always enjoyed fighting on shore, preferably hand to hand, as much or more than fighting at sea, and had won his D.S.O. in the Sudan serving under Lord Kitchener in the 'nineties.

Accordingly, at the age of seventy, he attached himself to an Indian Cavalry Regiment serving in the Western Desert, with the rank of Commander R.N. and in the somewhat ill-defined position of Naval Liaison Officer. In this capacity he took part in a number of Commando raids, startling all concerned by his complete disregard of danger. But in those days things were not going as well as they might in the desert and one day the party he was with had the misfortune to be completely overrun by a strong force of German tanks. Admiral Cowan was last seen advancing sternly on one of the enemy's tanks, discharging his pistol at it from point-blank range.

Last seen, that is, until, having escaped from his prison camp, he appeared a year or two later in Italy and immediately attached himself to Tom Churchill's Commando Brigade. Those of us who had known him in the desert were delighted to see him reappear on Vis, as frail-looking, as dashing and as friendly as ever. There he was to end the war, adding, at the age of seventy-three, by his gallantry on a raid, a bar to the D.S.O. which he had won half a century before.

What a man!  What men they were indeed.  

ND

The Entertaining Torment of the Leftist-Feminist

One of the gloriously predictable joys of the current political turmoil (and there are many) was that the leftist-feminists would be in an ecstasy of despair over the Tory Party cheerfully lining up a run-off between two women for the top spot on the greasy pole.   That's women, not wimmin.  But they're not proper wimmin!   Indeed they are not - hahaha!  Why can't the Labour Party have wimmin at the top?  Because, oh, the reasons are many.  Because they are useless.  Because the Labour Party is dominated by neanderthal northern union-members (have you ever met any of them? or any 'traditional' northern / scottish Labour MP?).  Because, in the immortal words of a CiF BTL comment, "the main problem with tokenism and quotas is that you just end up with Diane Abbbottt".  etc etc.   

And another from CiF:

"... the current Labour membership would rather elect the most clearly useless man than debase themselves by backing a competent woman. Knee-jerk sexism - fiercely denied - is one of the most predictable characteristics of the Left, much moreso even than the obvious but fiercely denied knee-jerk antisemitism, knee-jerk anti-Americanism etc. And very strongly tied to their fiercely denied alliance with Islamism."

And so the agonies commence, oh this is fun.  Here are my first two sightings for the collection:

• Deborah Orr in the Grauniad
• the strident and strikingly inane 'Canary'

- and if you see any more, please do drop the links in the comments.  It's not nice to mock the afflicted, but - well ...

ND

Guardian Nicely In Touch With Reality

Well this is nice to see: a Grauniad article - in the Money section - on how to save your hard-earned when buying an engagement ring.

The cheapest they mention in the article is £3,000; and one of the rings pictured weighs in at paltry £1,110.  Importantly, their expert advises: "Go for the very best you can afford ".

But they are not really trying, are they ? - because the most expensive mentioned is £11k.

We can imagine the editorial session when the journo was given the brief for this piece.  Now then, the diamond puff-piece: Emma, keep Ratners out of this, none of our people would dream of that would they darling.  Price range? yeah, tricky.  I'm thinking 4 figures min.  But we'll get letters if we go Liz Taylor on them. OK, you can mention Argos - but just a quick mench, yah, coz our readers don't want any of that cubic zirconia crap.  Aspreys?  No way!  Jeff says they wouldn't take an ad.  But there are a couple of online links you've got to work in.  And hey, you can give that Rupert of yours some ideas ...

ND