The English

Our high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, has, presumably on instructions from No 10, told the Aussies (big coal exporters) that they should be doing much more to cut their emissions; and that, if they didn’t, “that would not be acceptable”. For her pains Treadell has been described as “a sanctimonious bore” by what are described as “Australian government sources”. They went on to accuse the Queen’s representative of “repeatedly overstepping the mark on climate change by giving us lectures on what our sovereign domestic policy should be”.

High Commissioners are the reps for the government. Governors General are the reps for the Queen.

Tsk.

Really:

The publishers of a best-selling children’s book by David Walliams are to remove a character named “Brian Wong” after criticism that it represented casual racism.

Brian Wong, Who Was Never, Ever Wrong is a story in Walliams’s compendium, The World’s Worst Children.

Georgie Ma, a writer and podcaster, criticised the book on social media earlier this year, saying: “There are so many racist jokes on the east and southeast Asian community with the surname Wong and associating it with ‘wrong’.

“I don’t have enough time to go through what kind of jokes these are but if David Walliams would have done his research, he would have known this,” Ms Ma wrote.

We’re British, you stupid damn cow. We make jokes about everything. Most especially about peoples’ names. It’s one of our cultural traits. Not grasping that marks you out as that most terrible, non-lottery winning ticket holder, thing; un-British.

Here:

Clive of India was no sociopathic thug, but a British self-made success story

They say that like there’s something wrong with being a sociopathic thug. Which is something Brits have been notably good at over the centuries.

Trains cut off from Cornwall after Tesco lorry hits railway bridge
No trains able to enter county on Tuesday, with Network Rail warning delays and cancellations may last into Wednesday

Come along now, as with fog in channel, we’ve got to get this the right way around. It is poor, poor, Britain which is unable to access Cornwall…..

The people of Hertfordshire pay more inheritance tax than the whole of Wales and Northern Ireland combined, analysis of state figures has shown.

Residents of the home county forked out £175m to the 40pc death duty in the 2018-19 tax year, compared to £102m paid in Wales and £40m in Northern Ireland, according to latest figures by region.

The South East of England contributed more than £1bn of the overall £4.6bn haul of that year – nearly five times the £233m paid in the entirety of Scotland.

A significant chunk of UK inequality is regional inequality. Incomes are higher in some areas than others. This is different from US inequality where each individual state has inequality about the same as the national average – not exactly, but about.

But regional costs in the UK also differ wildly – as we can see from the manner that house prices are driving those inheritance tax differences. If we control UK inequality for those local price differences – so that we’re measuring consumption inequality, not income – then it drops markedly.

Actually, perhaps we should measure it properly before trying to do something about it?

But they’ve not been playing India for three years, have they?

The return of Dawid Malan – English cricket’s most divisive batsman
Malan has been recalled to bolster England’s faltering batting line-up after an absence of over three years against India at Headingley

It’s all public schools’ fault you know. No, really:

Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country

All a bit much I am not worthy really. Then there’s this:

This wasn’t healthy. In her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome, psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien describes a condition now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent academic literature. The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, ingrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. We’re all doing fine.

Don’t have a great deal of time for psychoanalysis, to be fair. And this bird seems to be describing men from the female perspective, not public schoolboys specifically.

The correct way to read this is to think of why this is all being said. That state school system hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory. Very few would argue that the academic results are better than that private sector. Or that it produces better life chances. So, we’ve therefore got to find some other reason why private schooling either must be denigrated or must cease to exist.

I’ve long wondered about this. Indeed, I’m in print, somewhere or other, wondering about this before Tony Benn’s death. Now we have our answer:

Tomorrow, Stephen Benn, 69, a lobbyist for the biosciences industry and the eldest of Benn’s four children, will be announced as the successful candidate in a contest to take a lifelong hereditary seat in the Lords. In so doing, the 3rd Viscount Stansgate will assume the right to make and amend laws, and claim hundreds of pounds in tax-free allowances for attending the chamber. He will also take his seat without a democratic or even a customary internal vote.

The essence of him that is:

For the English do have traits and tendencies, just like any other nationality.

Bottle it so as to pour it down the drain.

The entire essence of Englishness is to deny – correctly – that we have traits and or tendencies precisely because we are not like any other – or even a – nationality. We are the archetype from which Johnny Foreigner diverges in amusing or possibly disastrous ways.

England is the mother of parliaments. It is the land of Shakespeare and Dickens, Elgar and Holst, the Beatles and Stones, the Cotswolds and Cumbrian hills, London and Liverpool, Oxford and Cambridge. It is Stonehenge and St Paul’s, football and cricket, the local church and village pub, Isaac Newton and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

It is cream teas and Cheddar cheese, a pint of bitter and a cup of tea, farms and factories, honest coppers and straight judges. It is the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation, Roundheads and Cavaliers, rebellions and strikes, Industrial Revolution and a Glorious Revolution. It is the home of Magna Carta, Locke and Burke, Churchill and Attlee, and long lines of kings and queens.

And, of course, it is about so much more.

Sigh.

The list is promulgated to insist that there should be an English Parliament, another layer of phartstains to rule over us.

Chesterton was closer to the truth. Those rulers never have and never will listen to us. So let’s keep their number and power to a minimum.

The essence of Englishness isn’t in cheese or history. It’s in the entirely wise insistence that politics can go to fuck.

Fully jabbed Scots may be allowed on holiday with no isolation
Nicola Sturgeon hopeful that vaccination success will soon open up international travel

Apparently they’ve created a vaccine against being Scottish. Or perhaps it’s against displaying typically Scots behaviour. But welcome all the same. For who would want to have to confront a porridge wog if they’d not been vaccinated?

But not all is as it seems with the self-styled Lord Alexander Jackson Maier, 11th Marquis of Annaville. In truth he is neither a Lord nor a Marquess.

He is in fact Alexander Jackson Maier, a 22-year-old African-American student raised in the city of New Rochelle, in New York State.

Because Lord Alexander Jackson Maier isn’t the correct mode of address for a Marquis.

Lord first name(s) surname is the correct form of address for the younger son of a Duke (possibly Marquess, maybe even Earl, not sure) but not for a Marquess in his own right.

We know it’s bollix because the guy doesn’t know his own name.

Sure, there might be all sorts of Irish titles floating around out there – I know, or knew, someone who claimed one himself. Claimed please note. But this bloke doesn’t have one of them.

He told The Telegraph: “There is no title in the peerage related to me whatsoever. I do apologize greatly to those institutions involved with a mechanism like this, many of which I’m obviously not familiar with.”

Quite.

Let Scots in whole of UK vote on independence, Boris Johnson is urged

Instead, let the whole of the UK vote on Scottish independence.

Given that the porridge wogs never do restrict themselves to pissing out how many actually want to keep them inside the tent?

The £70.7bn drug maker was the world leader in vaccines and, importantly for the Government, it was British.

But, when Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, made the call to his former colleague and GSK boss, Dame Emma Walmsley, he was turned down.

Now, more than a year later, Dame Emma may be regretting that decision.

Bird who refused to make a vaccine is a Dame. Bird who led world beating performance – for free – to make a vaccine is a Dame.

We demand action – Countess Bingham of Wuhan at the very least, if not Marchioness in her own right.

A damehood also goes to Kate Bingham, who led the procurement and deployment of the vaccines and has been credited with the huge success of the rollout.

Countess at a minimum…..

Boris Johnson warns green list could be culled as Portugal faces axe
Ministers meet on Thursday to decide whether popular holiday destination should now be rated amber

New and expensively redone bar just opened for the first time across the road yesterday…..

….and yes, listening to the accents while wandering down the street a lot of the trade is British…..

Edwin Apps was born in Wingham, Kent, in 1931, the son of Molly and Bertram Apps, a land agent and auctioneer to whom his nanny would take him for a 15-minute conversation before the six o’clock news.

Don’t forget, we conquered a third of the world with people raised this way. A point which you can use to argue either way about child centered parenting……

An all star live-streamed virtual Glastonbury festival rapidly turned into an online disaster on Saturday night when audiences were thousands of people were unable to watch the pay-per-view event.

Coldplay, Haim, Damon Albarn, Wolf Alice and Michael Kiwanuka and members of Radiohead were all billed to play, but a technical problem meant most viewers could not log on to the website.

It’s not really Glastonbury, that Worthy Farm, it’s Shepton Mallet. And, well, you know, that’s rural. No, really, rural. Get too far south of Bath and there’s that certain step back into the past.

Quite why anyone thought a 21st century technology would work well in the 15th century is anyone’s guess but there we are. More than three teeth in the head and less than a half gallon of scrumpy in the belly marks you out as insufferably posh down there.

Bristol does things differently

It’s a perennial observation down there in the South West.

Along with the comment that different doesn’t mean better……after all, what would one normally expect from mixing the Forest of Dean with the maritime influences of Deptford? Even that doesn’t quite describe the place sufficiently……

By Matt Kilcoyne among others.

It is a symbol of national pride that has endured for eight centuries, as well as 55 years of hurt. But a decision to change England’s Three Lions crest to promote diversity in football has failed to rouse roars of approval from fans.

Bosses at the Football Association announced on Thursday that the traditional Three Lions would be replaced on a brand new logo by a lion cub, a lion and a lioness.

The FA said the move would give the medieval crest a “fresh purpose” that would symbolise “inclusivity at all levels of football”.

“A cub, lion and lioness unite to form the new England Football crest with no boundaries; representing everyone at every level of football across the country,” a spokesman explained.

The three lions are in fact the Duchies of Normandy and Aquitaine plus the Kingdom of England. So, under the new dispensation who is the lion, who the babbie and who the pussy?

We can also ponder – there would be significant support in both Duchies for a war of freedom against Paris’ foul embrace….

Jersey fishing row: French threats ‘pretty close to act of war’

So we all get to hate Frenchmen again, as we would the very devil!

Or, since the sentiment hasn’t changed over the centuries, we get to do something about it. French cruise ships might want to avoid Aboukir Bay, Cape St Vincent’s just over the horizon for me so I’ll keep you in touch with any sightings of big bangs and flashes out there, when does the land war start and we take Bourdeaux?