Chris Whiteside's Blog

  "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick

"When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves." Nick Cohen

One of the pieces available again now that the Cumbria Chronic website is back up and running is a piece which surgically dismantles and interview given to the News and Star by the Labour leader of Cumberland Council, Mark Fryer. It was first put up at the end of last year but frankly in the past six months the criticisms made in the article only look more prescient. You can read the full article at: COUNCIL LEADER TALKS GIBBERISH – The Cumbria Chronic Here is a flavour: "Discussing Crumberland Council’s disastrous budget for next year, the Labour leader had this gem to offer readers of the Carlisle newspaper:. “But again, sort of variations in that because of rural settlement grant and you know, being taken away. “So, we think that will a net of around, maybe £2 or £3 million or something like that.  “But uh we still have to make some significant savings.” It’s worth re-reading again. It’s either a series of typos in the transcription or Cllr Fryer is barely making sense."

No apology for repeating, not for the first time or, probably, the last, one of Thomas Sowell's insights which I think is particularly powerful in a whole host of spheres, not just economics and politics. It is very rare indeed- though when such an opportunity does come along, it should be grabbed with both hands - that you can improve something with no negative consequences at all. Most opportunities to improve one thing come with a cost in terms of something else. The challenge is to ensure that you pick the trade-offs where the benefits outweigh the costs - and do your best to limit the damage in those areas where you lose out.

A brilliantly clever parody of "I want it that way" by the Backstreet boys.  Words and music written and performed by Weird Al Yankovic.  Video, which someone put a huge amount of effort into, posted by The Andrew Ward Fiasco

 

Once apon a time this piece, "The Monster Mash" used to be regularly heard on the radio.  I had absolutely no idea until I found this performance on Youtube that the singer, the late Bobby Pickett, was also a master of facial expressions so flexible as to make Jim Carrey look like he's on botox. If you've never seen Bobby Pickett perform or film of him, this video is  worth at last one watch in order to see what incredible things a master comedian can do with the human face. And I write that as someone who was once a judge at the World International Gurning championships.

Cumbria's MPs and councils may be disappointed to learn, but everyone else should cheer, that the Cumbria Chronic is up and running again.  This website is almost the only news organisation in the county which dares to ask difficult questions or publish reports which show signs of actual journalism much beyond reprinting Labour party or Council press releases (they give all the other parties a kicking occasionally too, not just Labour.) Their first report relates to the fact that the Labour-controlled Cumberland Council is again late with the publication of their accounts and not unreasonably ask:   Who is responsible? Why are the accounts late again? What’s the impact on Council transparency and trust? What’s the repercussions of missing two legal deadlines? Is anything vaguely resembling a consequence on the cards? POSTSCRIPT - Cumberland Council, "Wokemoreland and Farcical Council" and all Cumbria's MPS and panjandrums can breathe again. The Cumbria Chronic is now ...

 

Steeleye Span collaborated with the late Terry Pratchett in producing "The Wintersmith" based on some of his books. I think of "I shall wear midnight" as the band's moving tribute to the much missed Sir Terry.  

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to." Dr Laurence J Peter

 

Our present Prime Minister has clearly absorbed some of the lessons of Blair's New Labour.  Sadly there is one of New Labour's messages which he was happy to parrot before the 2024 election but has completely ignored while in government - that if tax rates are too high you will harm the ability of business to invest and the incentives for people to work hard and save. There is a serious rival to Margaret Thatcher's comment about society which I quoted last week for a British political quote which is nearly always taken out of context, destroying much of it's meaning. It is easy to find Lord Mandelson's quote about New Labour being "intensely relaxed" about people being "filthy rich." It is much, much harder to find any reference to his next seven words - " as long as they pay their taxes." But those words are absolutely critical, because what Mandelson got - and Rachel Reeves clearly doesn't - is that if you really want to get lots...

This graphic shows the percentage of votes in this parliament that MPs representing each the five national UK parties turned up and voted in. MPs from four of the five parties turned up for well over half of all votes. MPs from the remaining party turned up for significantly less than half of votes. Next time supporters of that party tell you that if they were elected to form the next government they would do so much better than any of the others, ask them why you should take them seriously when their existing MPs can't even be bothered to turn up and vote.

 

 

 

 

 

I was sorry to learn just now, that Dorothy Graham, a pillar of the Whitehaven community, died this morning. A more detailed obit will follow, but she helped many people in many ways and she will be missed. Rest in Peace.

Here is a famous - or perhaps infamous - saying in it's full context. All too often one is only presented with the first seven words, which, ripped from that context appear to mean almost the exact opposite of what was actually being said. The truncated quote is often presented as if Mrs Thatcher was saying that people should not care about one another, when what she actually meant was that they should, and cannot depend on some abstract concept labelled "society," (or worse, depend on the state) to do it.

Today is Trinity Sunday, which gave a great choice of suitable music.  This morning at Selby Abbey, for instance, the choir performed the  Tchaikovsky, Hymn to the Trinity  which is a lovely piece of music. Popular Trinity Sunday hymns include "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty by Richard Heber. However, my all-time favourite Trinity hymn, - which qualifies because it ends with a prayer to the Trinity and Unity, although it starts with a reference to a vision of God by the Prophet Isaiah which was described in the 6th chapter of that book of the bible (Link:  Isaiah 6 KJV ) - is "I saw the Lord" by John Stainer. It was once described in my hearing as a "Magnificent musical battle" as it requires a double choir, e.g. two complete groups of Soprano/Treble, Alto, Tenor and Bass voices who sometimes sing together and sometimes in unison.

Performed by Steeleye Span, inspired by the works of the one and only the late Sir Terry Pratchett.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Arthur C Clarke) Various people have come up with the obvious inversion.  The 1986 Infocom game Trinity by Dave Lebling has the line "Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology."

"The first tax cuts for which this Chancellor has ever been responsible are in Mauritius" Shadow Chancellor Mel Strid e in the House of Commons, pointing out that the Chagos surrender deal includes giving the government of Mauritius so much money that they are planning to give the taxpayers of their country substantial tax cuts - effectively paid for by the taxpayers of the UK. That's right. If you are in the UK, thanks to Starmer, Reeves and Lammy, you are paying tax so that the people of Mauritius can have a tax cut. 

The novelist Frederick Forsyth CBE, author of books like "The day of the jackal" and "The Odessa file" has died at the age of 86.  When I was Chairman of St Albans Conservatives during the last period the party was in opposition, Frederick Forsyth came and spoke to one of our constituency fundraising dinners. This was a previous period on which lots of pundits were writing the Conservatives off and saying we would never hold power again. Such people were wrong then as I believe they are wrong now, but then as now we certainly had a mountain to climb, some lessons to learn and some mistakes to make sure, and convince people, we would not make again.  Frederick Forsyth gave us a frank and well-argued address with hard-hitting home truths about what we needed to do to regain power, some of which was broadcast on television that week, with the camera cutting to the faces of myself and members of the audience looking very somber as we listened. David Cameron subsequently...

Hat-tip to Jakub Janda for posting this on X, formerly Twitter. This does not represent an automatic endorsement of everything the EU parliament does or everything that Jakub says, but I do approve of this honour for the brave people of Ukraine:

 "Rachel Reeves took all the tickets" (Kemi Badenoch) Explanation given in this morning's Times after the leader of the opposition's daughter had introduced her to the music of  Taylor Swift, on why the family had not been to see the singer live.)  

The Starmer government has actually done something welcome and confirmed that they really are going to U-turn on the dreadful decision to remove Winter Fuel payments from ten million pensioners. This is above all a victory for the pensioners and voters who campaigned against the measure. Some politicians, including the Conservatives, who actively campaigned against Labour's winter fuel payment cuts can also claim some credit. One person who can't claim credit is Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, because when we forced a vote in the House of Commons on Labour's cruel Winter Fuel Payments policy, Farage couldn't be bothered to turn up and vote. Anyone who has paid any attention to his attendance record in the European parliament will not be surprised by this.  This belated U-turn from Labour is of course welcome, but in the meantime, millions of pensioners had to spend a winter without WFP support. Some pensioners are wealthy and some are anything but. If the means-testing h...

 

This quote refers to the two main parties in the USA but is also very applicable to Britain

The above maxim has been attributed to various people but most often to Napoleon, and often in the words above. When the "Quote investigator" website looked at it, they found that the oldest version of the quote and presumably the version which is most likely to accurately reflect what Napoleon really said at a battle in 1805 was: “When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.”  It is good advice.

 "There are degrees of Pie in the sky" John Rentoul , chief political correspondent of the Independent and i newspapers. He was responding to questions submitted at an Independent "Ask me anything" Q&A session. The context was that readers were asking whether Reform leader Nigel Farage "promises the earth to an electorate credulous enough and desperate enough to believe it." John Rentoul responded that "There is an element of that in all democratic politics. I wrote repeatedly before last year’s election that neither Labour nor the Tories had plans for tax and spending that added up. But there are degrees of pie in the sky. Since the Liz Truss experiment, both the main parties have accepted the need in principle for planned debt to be falling as a share of national income over the medium term. The Reform prospectus is so far away from that that Keir Starmer is wholly justified in mentioning Truss when criticising Reform as often as he can."

 Andrew Neil wrote yesterday on Twitter: My monologue today on The Times at One with Andrew Neil  @TimesRadio   "British workers have suffered a lot these past two decades.  Stagnant real wages.  Barely rising living standards. An absence of well-paid, prestigious jobs. A surfeit of soul-destroying Amazon warehouse type jobs. Soaring grocery and fuel bills.  So what have they done to deserve visits by the PM and the Chancellor to their factory floors, dragooned to stand behind them when they drone about stuff in which they have no interest? Keir Starmer did it last week when he went to a glass factory in Lancashire for the sole purpose of attacking Nigel Farage. Etched across the anguished faces of the workers marshalled behind him was a simple question — why are we having to endure this? But they were the lucky ones. The short straw went to workers at a bus factory in Rochdale, where Rachel Reeves turned up yesterday to lecture them on the importance of he...

I was very sorry to learn that Alderman John Jackson, a former councillor and Mayor of Copeland has died. (To avoid any confusion, I should probably explain that he was Mayor when this was the title of the councillor who was in the council chair that year, and who acted as the ceremonial mayor and first citizen. It was an entirely different post from the subsequent office of directly elected Mayor, who was essentially an elected leader.) John was a straightforward, no-nonsense honest and kind individual who worked hard for his constituents as a councillor and for his community in everything he did. He will be missed. Rest in Peace. 

Remembering all the brave men - Brits, Americans, Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, lovers of freedom from every country in the commonwealth and all around the world - who landed on the D-Day beaches or jumped out of aeroplanes 81 years ago today so that Europe would be free again.

I'm sorry to see that the Cumbria Chronic, the only media outlet which makes a serious attempt to objectively hold our lords and masters to account, has shut down for the summer. Links in previous my posts to their articles are not currently working. Their  Facebook  page says "We will be back in the autumn." I don't agree with everything they write, but they will be missed - in a few months the site became absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to know what is really going on in Cumbria.

"Four years ago our nation and empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy, with our backs to the wall . . . Now once more a supreme test has to be faced. This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause . . .  At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young, or too old to play a part in a nation-wide, perchance a world-wide vigil of prayer as the great crusade sets forth." King George VI 's D-Day radio address 81 years ago today. This is one of a number of powerful D-Day quotes which can be found on the "History on the net" website at this link: D-Day Quotes: From Eisenhower to Hitler - History

"11 months ago I became Chairman of Reform. I’ve worked full time as a volunteer to take the party from 14 to 30%, quadrupled its membership and delivered historic electoral results I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office." Resignation tweet from Zia Yusaf, who until today was Chairman of Reform UK. Image below published on X, formerly Twitter, by PoliticsJoe:

Unlike the so-called "Albinoni Adagio" which I have often posted here because it is one of my favourite pieces of music whoever actually wrote it, there is very little doubt that Albinoni really did write this one!

 

 

 

Performed here by by VOCES8 and this morning at Selby Abbey by the abbey's choir.