Guns or butter eh? Heard that before.

Having seen Tuchel's squad selection all I can say is, "For you, Tommy, zee World Cup is over".

Just as with VAT on education services so it is with nationalisation. Both are not permitted under EU rules.

The usual suspects are complaining about the "Police brutality" they say was evident in the arrest of the Somalian knife attacker in Golders Green. What they (choose? to) fail to understand is that, once a suspect resists arrest and the police have to resort to violence to make the arrest, all bets are off. It is simply bad practice to use your hands to subdue someone. If in doing so you were to damage your hands - easily done - then not only would you be unable to continue the struggle to arrest the suspect, you might find you had a permanent injury. Using your booted feet to deliver blows is a much safer strategy and, hopefully, that's how our police officers are trained. Anybody who has any kind of military training will remember that the advice is always "boots first" when it comes to unarmed combat. It's foolish to risk your hands.

I see very little recognition of where we are now in so far as terrorism and terrorist capabilities are concerned. Let's imagine that the IRA terrorists in Armagh's Bandit Country had access to cheap drones. Their ability to reign down terror on any target area or population they chose would have been both irresistible and terrible. Now see that capability in the hands of today's irregular militaries. I have to ask, why are these cheap drones still on sale? Making the possession of guns and "Zombie" knives illegal seems completely misdirected. Our enemies won't need to carry backpacks into arenas. They will simply fly a drone in through the front door.

In the bad old days, government sick pay - wages paid to the ill funded by the taxpayer - didn't start until 3 "waiting" days had elapsed. This meant the "sickie" was at the employee's expense if their job didn't include sick pay. Only office jobs at that time (the 50s and 60s say) offered sick pay and as most jobs weren't office jobs, people didn't take sickies because they couldn't afford the loss of earnings that ensued. It may well be time for employers to introduce the 3 waiting days rule if the "sickies" culture currently afflicting UK productivity is to be managed?

The Tories are complaining about the mooted public sector 4 day week but, as ever, they haven't done their arithmetic. A 4 day week is 52 days a year. Add 8 bank holidays and 20 days annual holiday and you have 80 days a year. Add in the allowance for uncertificated sick leave, usually capped at 13 days a year and taken religiously by all civil service and local government staff and you get to 93 days. Add in the 1 day a month "earned" through the flexitime rules and you have 105 days a year. This equates to a 3 day not a 4 day week. All worked from home because the other 2 unworked days will count as their in office obligation. We are going down the Italian route.

It doesn't matter what your politics are, what party you support, no government should make any changes to anyone's pension if the pensioner affected by those changes doesn't have time, the necessary years, to recover from their financial impact.

I tweeted earlier today about Nick Ferrari and @LBC's failure to mention, even once, that the gang currently marauding in Clapham consists of black West Indian heritage youths, both male and female. Having read the article in today's Times, I see the same pattern of wilful dishonesty by omission there. I don't understand how intelligent people like Nick and the Times correspondents can believe this a sensible route to go down with this subject matter when clips on social media show us, incontrovertibly, that these gangs are composed pretty much entirely of blacks. This is the same thinking that means we will never learn the truth about the Pakistani heritage rape gangs nor about so many other events in public life in today's Britain. Black mothers don't want their children stabbed to death. Muslim families don't want their daughters raped and worse. Black commuters who pay their fares don't want to be tailgated by black travellers who don't. In every case, they hope that the law, in the shape of our police forces will intervene to keep them and their families, safe. Just like the white population does.

Just been listening to several pieces by the usually candid Nick Ferrari on @lbc about the steaming or link-up gangs currently terrorising Clapham. Not one of his reports or contributions from other people, including LBC correspondents and members of the public, mentioned, not even once, that these rioters are blacks of mainly West Indian heritage. It for this reason that so many people no longer listen to or believe the major news outlets. Sometimes they straight out lie to us like on NetZero where they continuously peddle the lie that renewables produce energy more cheaply than gas when we know they don't. Or that temperatures are reaching dangerous levels when the stations producing the data supporting this particular line either simply don't exist or are sited so poorly that any figures they produce can't be relied upon. At other times, and as with LBC today, they lie by omission. x.com/i/status/2039071487299…

I see the Good Laugh Project - fox pounder Jolyon Maugham's personal private legal commando funded by us - has forced Ofcom into the ridiculous position of now having to decide whether speakers on right wing radio/TV shows like Talk TV are spreading climate denial ideology. Nonsense spouted on left wing shows like LBC are OK of course. This is good news because Ofcom's first action - if they take any and I strongly believe they never will - will immediately be challenged in the courts where Ofcom will lose. The idea that Ofcom can suppress perfectly legal views about anything is unsupportable. A brief read of the Human Rights Act Article 10 will tell you the outcome of any Ofcom action. @Ofcom @TalkTV

I received this email from PayPal as part of my attempts to find out what PayPal has done with a refund paid to them by a supplier but not, so far, passed onto me. "Dear X Thank you for sharing the screenshot, however these are no belongs to PayPal. Please ask the seller to share the screenshot of the email received from PayPal after issue the refund. PayPal always notify through email after every transaction. Rest assured we will happy to check and assist further. Thank you for contacting PayPal. Yours Sincerely, X PayPal" PayPal is a very large, very significant operator in the UK banking and credit sector. Is this really the best they can do?

Keir Starmer's hopeless unsuitability for the PM job is going to come into full focus following the outcome of the upcoming local elections. John Healey, although possibly one of the least telegenic candidates, is a strong runner in the list of Labour MPs who could mount a meaningful challenge. He is, apparently, seen as a "good speaker". That was, of course, until he totally and completely messed up the Iran business. Following on from his abysmal performance in defending both our unchallengeable rights to the Chagos islands and their military significance - they constitute the only safe harbour and air facility in the entire central Indian ocean - he is now a dead duck. Sacrificing any remaining prestige the UK had on the world stage. and doing long term damage to the trust that existed between the US and ourselves, is a small price to pay to keep the dreadful Starmer in a job, don't you think? encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/l…

So Israel has forced the US into supporting a war nobody other than the appalling Netanyahu and his co-fanatics in the Israeli War cabinet, wanted, only to find that they can't prevent what was the predictable absolute minimum response by Iran which is to close the Hormuz Strait. So well done Israel and well done Trump for being gulled into this calamity. First he's used 2 years of random tariff increases to destroy global markets and now he's provoked an Iranian blockade of the world's busiest energy trade artery. Top notch world leadership, don't you think? What will the US Congress do to all these war mad generals and admirals who assured Trump and his advisers that Iran would be in no position to block the strait after they "bombed it back to the stone age" (to coin a phrase)? My guess is promotions and load and loads of medals.

Why is it to be a crime to hate the Muslim faith and by inference, Islamism? The Christian bible says, "Psalm 97:10 "O you who love the Lord, hate evil!",  Romans 12:9 "Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good", and  Proverbs 8:13 "The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil".  Are Christians to be denied their beliefs in order to protect the Muslim faith, a faith many Christians (and non-Christians), rationally or otherwise, believe to be evil? Our blood stained history teaches us that governments interfere in people's practice of their faith at their peril; and ours. Any sensible person would say about this Islamaphobia business, don't touch it with a bargepole. Absolutely leave well alone.

I read Mauritius intend to sue the British government over the delays in sending them the money we said we'd pay them to take the Chagos islands of our hands. They will be represented by Richard Hermer and Phillipe Sands in the same court that, they claim, said we had to give the islands to Mauritius or China whichever was nearer. Neither has disclosed their fee.

The Type 45 hasn't sailed for the eastern Mediterranean because the Navy can't persuade enough crew members to come into work and join the ship. Too many, apparently, are insisting on their right to work from home. The most significant shortfall is in senior officers who are concerned that this is the crucial time of the year when it comes to sorting out their gardens.

The "Special Relationship" needs renaming and I would suggest the "Desperate Relationship". We have spent all our money on welfare and crackpot schemes like Net Zero on the assumption that what remains of our defence capability will form units fully integrated with US forces. Given that reality, we simply have no options left. If we want to survive in this world having made the choices we have - basically, to leave ourselves defenceless - then, when America says march, away we go. The idea that we can bicker and argue about legality and so on, is a luxury we no longer have. When America says fight, it's over the hills and far away for our young men and women.

Unless the US and Israel are prepared to kill the leadership of the IRGC, and in significant numbers, nothing will change. They will slip away, just as the Taliban did during the 20 years, 20 long years, the US and its allies sat on land in Afghanistan. As soon as the allies got fed up and left, the Taliban came back, as if they'd never gone. This is the fate that awaits Iran. The religious fanatics who run the country will move across the border into Pakistan and stay there, safe - just as Osama Bin Laden was given sanctuary - until the US gets fed up or distracted by something else - Cuba perhaps - and its attention drifts away, just as it did in Afghanistan. There is no sign of any kind of organisation, a government in waiting, poised and ready to run Iran in place of the mullahs. All that lies ahead of the poor, secular leaning, Iranian populace is more oppression, more terror and more cruelty. If there is a God he definitely doesn't like Iranians.