Chris Whiteside's Blog

There is a joke which goes back at least to "Yes Minister" about a false syllogism representing a politician's response to a problem: "We must do something, This is something, Therefore we must do it." The calls from some quarters for sanctions against Israel are a classic example. Stephen Pollard has a piece in The Sun today, which he has also posted on X, which inter alia points out that the people who would probably be hit hardest by this would be Palestinians, roughly 30,000 of whom work for the network of Israeli businesses in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. I  think Stephen's piece is worth reading, so here is the version posted no X. "Labour is so obsessed with attacking Israel it doesn’t realise a trade ban will cost PALESTINIAN jobs' Imagine Britain had an ally whose intelligence know-how was so vital to our safety that the head of MI5 said the ally had “disrupted a huge quantity of terror activity inside the UK” and “saved many, many liv...

Thomas Attwood (Born 23 November 1765 in London, died 24 March 1838) was an English composer and organist. Attwood studied under Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and he was a friend of Felix Mendelssohn. As should be obvious from the dates above, he was born 70 years after the death of Henry Purcell and died before the birth of Edward Elgar. His musical career began as a chorister in the Chapel Royal, where he caught the eye of the Prince of Wales, later George IV; he went on to compose music for the coronations of both George and his brother William IV. Attwood was also organist of St Paul's Cathedral. His compositions included a number o anthems, some of which are still sung in churches today, music and songs for some twenty musical plays and comic operas, and he was also a prolific writer of glees, including a setting of A Rose-Bud by my Early Walk , a poem by Robert Burns. Of his anthems, my favourite is " Turn thy face from my sins " Apologies for the fact that, due to a slig...