Stretch Targets, by Wiggia

In the world of word salad they have to invent a new phrase every few months to remain (they hope) relevant in the public eye. It’s not easy: there must be a limit to the use of words that replace those currently in use that we all understand e.g. destination stores = shops.

Last year it was optics, this year it could be stretch targets if Angela Rayner is to be believed … though few believe anything she says.

Sky News@SkyNews

Speaking with Anne McElvoy, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner says Labour’s promise at the last general election to build 1.5 million new homes was “always a stretch target”

9:00 AM · Oct 25, 2026 · 219K Views

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388 Replies · 25 Reposts · 89 Likes

In the case of the Ginger Growler it is a case of total makeover: voice training, the introduction of the term “stretch targets” to imply she knows what she is talking about and the hope that the voter will not remember her floating off Brighton beach showing her tattoos and vaping. It is all a bit obvious and fools nobody other than those who who want to believe in whatever tripe she she is spouting.

Meanwhile the ‘nudge unit’ is still busy. After scaring the pants off large parts of the nation during Covid the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) are still active. The latest almost certainly formulated by them is the announcement from the erstwhile useless Health Secretary who is now the Defence Minister, Wes Streeting, the man who would be King a short while ago until he found they didn’t want him.

He has announced we should all prepare for an emergency, that is likely to be within a thousand days ! We should do as in WW2 and prepare ourselves to be able to survive this unknown threat for three days with ample supplies of bottled water tinned food and candles.

The result was surprising or maybe not: on my shopping trip to the local Sainsbury’s the sight of families loading up with tinned goods and toilet rolls was everywhere. Obviously Covid and the nonsense suffered is not a deterrent for many people. Three days’ worth of tinned goods would not be sufficient in the case of a nuclear strike, though it would heat up the canned soup.

Another local NHS gem: two of the three hospitals in the local (Norfolk area) trust are to be rebuilt. In the case of the one in Kings Lynn it cannot come soon enough as previous articles have explained.

But, there is always a but with the NHS, it has obviously (even at this stage before a brick is laid) had restrictions on costs spelt out and the trust has hinted that certain services will be considered for the chop.

One of those cuts has been mooted as Accident and Emergency; if true, this is so ridiculous as to be the thinkings of lunatics. The result would be long trips to the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital; that alone would result in deaths but the A&E at the N&N cannot even cope with its current patient requirements.

There is talk the N&N is going to rebuild the unit at that hospital. It would have to be at least six times bigger with staff to match to be of any use, and that is not going to happen. Despite the flawed assurances that things in the NHS are getting better we all know that is not true, this will be another nail in the coffin of the trust and the NHS in general. Who the hell are the people who come up with this nonsense?

This below is a comment from X on what happened in Poland on Saturday night. Have you heard anything? No. Is there a blackout on any news this serious? Once again it appears so.

Tusk when he returned from his tenure at the EU was a strange choice in Poland for a leader with his background. He is an open borders advocate, but up to now has lain doggo; he would not have attempted this takeover without the connivance of the EU .

The mainstream news media appear complicit or at least passive. Thus History Matters on X:

“Without X, no one in Europe would have found out about what happened in Poland tonight.

The head of government Donald Tusk carried out an attempted coup d’état, taking advantage of the state head Karol Nawrocky’s trip abroad. He stormed the Constitutional Tribunal with the police and tried to remove the president and vice president of the Constitutional with a loyal judge without competencies.

But he hadn’t counted on the President, who, upon learning of it, ordered the plane to turn around while it was flying over Spain. He returned to Warsaw, forced his way into the TC building ahead of his escorts despite Tusk’s police cordon, and summoned all the highest institutions of the Supreme and Constitutional to restore constitutional order.

Although the crisis continues, it seems clear that Tusk’s government, the puppet of Von der Leyen who would never have carried out this assault without Brussels’ permission, has its days numbered.

But remember, the public and private media across all of Europe have been complicit in the coup d’état by silencing the entire operation.

Only social networks have alerted Poles and Europeans.

That’s why they want to intervene in them.“

How this will end is anyone’s guess.

Poland’s Hallowe’en Coup (and the Silence of the Hacks)

If there was any doubt about which evil expansionist empire we need to resist then yesterday’s events in Poland may help to dispel them.

Barrister and constitutional expert Steven Barrett explains in the video below. In the Maastricht Treaty of 1992-3 the European Union defined the selected areas in which its rule was supreme. Even in this limited form the late Tony Benn lamented it in what he said was “my last speech in a free Parliament.” But the Lisbon Treaty enacted in 2009 enabled the EU to claim power in whatever matter it chose. Barrett describes how Prime Minister Donald Tusk used this leeway and the temporary absence of the President to launch an assault on Poland’s Constitution. When the President, alerted (by the CIA it is alleged) to the coup attempt, turned his plane round to come back Tusk attempted to bar him first from Warsaw’s airport and then - physically, with armed police (*** GERMAN???) - from the Constitutional court building itself.

More details about the conspiracy can be found on Richard North’s site here.

One would have thought this would be MSM front page news, bearing in mind the implications for other EU member countries (as well as for our Europhile Government), but here is the Mail on Sunday:

Poland is missing from the insides, too. One also wonders how the Daily Telegraph will cover the issues, now that the German Axel Springer group has acquired it and is currently in the process of dismissing its Eurosceptic journalists.

The graphic above (source here) sees Tusk’s plan as involving forcing Poland to abandon its national currency in favour of the euro and yield its gold reserves to the ECB. That last would certainly help the Union’s finances as the ECB holds just over 500 tonnes of gold and Poland has another 632 tonnes (worth nearly UK£69 billion.)

That said, it’s more about the power than the money. Comedian and commentator Andrew Lawrence says that Poles who came to the UK to flee what had been a communist dictatorship are now returning for the same reason.

Andrew Lawrence@andrewlawrence

Poland, the one part of Europe that’s so far managed to resist the globalist decimation of their culture, history and values. The open borders destruction of their society and economy, but that could all be about to come to a crushing end...

9:43 AM · Nov 1, 2026 · 12.7K Views

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26 Replies · 290 Reposts · 964 Likes

The next days may serve as an acid test of the independence of traditional British journalism. Melissa Kite who has thirty years’ experience in the field published a rocket of a post last Thursday castigating a profession that writes or suppresses what it is told - do read it, really. Unless things change then the “dead tree press” may as well be properly dead and buried.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Tim Rose, by JD

Music by Tim Rose who deserves to be better known.

Tim Rose (September 23, 1940 – September 24, 2002) was an American folk-rock and blues-rock singer-songwriter best known for his gravelly voice and dramatic arrangements of traditional or outside material. Before going solo, Rose sang in the 1960s folk trio The Big 3 alongside Cass Elliot and James Hendricks. He rose to prominence with his slow, brooding arrangement of Hey Joe (which heavily inspired Jimi Hendrix’s famous cover) and his version of Morning Dew. After stepping away from music for a period to work in construction and stockbroking, he revived his career in Europe—where he enjoyed a larger cult following than in the United States—before passing away in London in 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Rose

Tim Rose - Hey Joe (1968)

Morning Dew - Tim Rose

If I Were a Carpenter

Come Away Melinda. Tim Rose

Ageing Soldier

Woke as a career move

It’s a commonplace that schoolteachers are left-wing. The truth can be more sordid.

In the 80s I worked as an English teacher in a large, well disciplined secondary school. Proportionately there were fewer promoted posts - you can only have one Head of Department and one deputy and both of those knew when they were well off and had no plans to move on.

The other ladder out of the classroom was the pastoral side. There was a comfortable office with several staff, one for each House (Slytherin etc) and they too were in no hurry to leave. It was good, well-paid fun shooting the breeze and listening to children’s problems. Fewer classes on one’s timetable, less dull old marking.

When women English teachers went to another school they sometimes used their leaving speeches to mention the lack of career opportunities especially for females. The headteacher was aware of this as a general problem irrespective of sex but this was before schools had the freedom to manage their budgets as they wished. He had turned his school from an underperformer to a leader and there was an impermeable layer of heads of subject who could not contemplate shifting to one of the dump establishments.

So a couple of my colleagues hit on the idea of using politics to get noticed somehow. One who hadn’t a drop of Celtic blood in her got the department to order a class set of a play about the Irish potato famine. Not many laughs in that and not particularly well-crafted, but you don’t have to be a very skilful and entertaining writer provided the subject is such that we all know what face to pull and attitude to adopt.

Another - white - got onto the anti-racist bandwagon, using what might be a drama slot to divide the youngsters into blue- and brown-eyed and then pretending to play favourites.

English is a fertile hot bed for these shenanigans because aside from grammar (which for a long time was almost verboten) it isn’t a subject. Back in 1857 the Cambridge wit Charles Stuart Calverley set his friends a faux examination paper on Dickens’ ‘Pickwick Papers’ but it took until 1910 for his alma mater to set up a real department in this field (several London universities broke the ground far earlier but they were redbrick, don’t you know, old boy.)

The Gramscian assault on education as a vehicle for cultural transmission succeeded in replacing e.g. Milton’s Lycidas with, well, look at set texts over the last decades for British exams at 11, 16 and 18. At one point radicals were suggesting Shakespeare should be scrapped to which the working-class critic Richard Hoggart replied they “needed their heads read.”

Now whether the hijacking of our culture in the interests of private profit ultimately rewarded these two teachers in the way they wished, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

But I suggest that corruption often spreads less from political conviction than from bending with the wind and using it to steer towards one’s personal goals.

Sunday grab bag

 Our out-of-door relief cat - a slim and handsome black model with white feet - came into the kitchen to rob the resident’s plate but seeing only crunchies uttered thin pleading cries. We caved in and put a packet of superior meat on the outside dish and he laid into it lustily. “He’s eating in a way that makes his ears waggle,” I said to my wife. “So do you,” she replied. I’d never noticed, but then you wouldn’t, would you?

Who wants to be a millionaire an ex-pat? Gambling sites are missing a trick: they should say something like “WIN ENOUGH TO GET OUT OF BURNHAM’S BRITAIN!” As we are becoming poorer we are betting more - £17.5 billion in the year to March 2026. Maybe the Chancellor’s plan to balance the budget is to distress us so much that our vices supply a robust tax base. But landing the jackpot may not be necessary: this video looks at five countries that don’t need visas and could be affordable on a State pension. That said, warm weather, clean seas and seafood lunches can’t make up for losing our family, friends and culture. Nothing left for it but to stand and fight, then.

Comedy post: Dave Barry recounts what happened when he got his AI assistant to call his friends - using a clone of his voice - to tell them he was too busy watching football to do it himself…

Dave Barry’s Substack

Bernice and My Friends

A few months ago I was boarding a flight out of Detroit, standing in a long line of passengers behind a woman who was with two boys aged maybe 10 or 11. As we approached the aircraft door, the woman turned to the boys and said five words. I contend that these are five words no adult has ever felt the need to say, in any language, to two girls…

Read more

a day ago · 980 likes · 304 comments · Dave Barry

The first UK storm this season is called Austen, after a meteorologist apparently but by coincidence the authoress Jane Austen is due to be replaced on British £10 banknotes by some animal as part of the general airbrushing out of our culture. It doesn’t seem fair to sully people’s names with destructive associations (though I could understand if the eleventh was called Karen.) Instead why not extend the wildlife theme to gales, from Aardvark to Zebu; if the latest was christened Binturong rather than Boelo I’d feel more positive about it. Or if you prefer to vent, how about terms of abuse? I’m sure you can come up with the first few.

Finally, this post claims guinea pigs have different voices. Can you tell? https://www.facebook.com/reel/1134419255934184

Why the British State is “dysfunctional”

The Lords Constitution Committee is looking at constitutional safeguards and on 14 October questioned Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was PM.

Cummins gave three main reasons why our political system is failing:

1. Public service no longer attracts elite talented people, who instead have gone into money-making private enterprises.

2. Government ministers have ceased to be masters of their brief and personally accountable to Parliament for the performance of their departments. Their answerability has become a “fake charade.”

3. The Cabinet Office has grabbed political power it should never have had. It was set up during WWI to deal with crisis but at that time it was agreed on all sides that the Office should not be responsible for making government policy or for personnel and public appointments. Now it is.

We are lacking elite talent, ministerial responsibility and speed of execution (cutting through bureaucracy). All three have become “more or less unlawful”!

The problem are interconnected. “If you have duff people you will have duff institutions and it will become hard to attract talent.” Young talent becomes disillusioned and the ablest look for a way out.

Asked whether he thought the constitution was under serious threat Cummings replied that there is “a general collapse of trust in the competence and integrity of institutions” including political parties, the media, Parliament and the civil service. “Because of the internet people can see many of the lies they are told and a fundamental lack of responsibility for things.”

These difficulties are not limited to Britain but are found in other Western countries.

Russia’s President Putin is only a minor threat compared with our own Ministry of Defence (e.g. hundreds of billions wasted in procurement, resistance to learning about drones from Ukraine) and the lawyers in the Cabinet Office pursuing “lawfare” against the SAS.

Are there too many arm’s-length institutions (quangos etc) checking ministerial power? Yes, said Cummings, and it started under the Thatcher government with the idea that these bodies could run like businesses with CEOs; instead their decision-making tends to be opaque. He has been told by civil servants that the quality of MPs is rubbish and they don’t want the responsibility; ministers and MPs have become “infantilised” and are “largely happy with this process.” Fewer arm’s-length bodies would be welcome but ministers need to be made personally responsible as once they were.

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A couple of thoughts:

Labour plans for decentralisation/regionalisation extend this process and the intention from Blair onwards has been to set bureaucratic socialism in concrete and so make a Conservative recovery impossible; even if it ruins the country.

The exact opposite of sclerotic managerialism and failure can be found in the way Elon Musk runs his businesses. I read recently the account of an engineer newly joined who was amazed and delighted that he could suggest an idea and see it modelled and trialed in days rather than bogged down in layers of committee approval.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Faun, by JD

Faun is a German band that was formed in 1998 and plays pagan folk, darkwave, and medieval music. The vocals are performed in a variety of languages, including German, English, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Scandinavian and Hungarian. Their instruments include Celtic harp, Swedish nyckelharpa, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes, cittern and flutes.

FAUN have played more than 950 concerts worldwide and are currently on tour with various concert programmes, including a seated, quieter programme for theatres, churches and concert halls (FAUN ACOUSTIC), a cultural programme for seated, classical concert halls and romantic summer concerts, plus a rousing and unseated festival show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faun_(band)

FAUN - Walpurgisnacht (Official Video)

FAUN - Diese kalte Nacht (Official Video)

FAUN - Federkleid (Offizielles Video)

Faun - Rosenrot (official video)

FAUN - BLOT (Official Video)

FAUN - Tamlin and the Fairy Queen