dsr-burnley

True. But on the other hand, if you have a virus that makes you feel wretched and ill, it makes no difference whether it's covid or something else - you wouldn't be going near vulnerable or sick people.

You need to have a very distorted viewpoint of what fascism is, to think Farage is one.

One more question. Why doesn't Hamas surrender? Their troops are hopelessly outmanned, their people are suffering, and this war will only end one way - sooner or later. I suppose they could be holding out for a "ceasefire", ie. the Israelis giving up their gains so far so they would have to start again? The only alternative is that they wish ill on their people in hopes that others will join the jihad. Perhaps as long as they hope to kill a million Jews, they would be happy to kill ten million Moslems to do it. Militiaristically, they should surrender to the United Nations and use the funds provided by the massive goodwill of populations around the world, to rebuild. I don't know how much the Arab states would provide?

Why is it taken for granted that the Palestinians can't be rehabilitated in the same way as the Germans were? There is no need to assume that they will be filled with venom and hatred for evermore. Germans weren't, though it did take a fairly repressive re-education programme and it was made illegal to support the Nazis. I suppose whether that could happen in Palestine, whether support for Hamas could be made illegal, is more doubtful. Hamas, unlike the Nazis, already have bases in other countries and has indoctrinated its people with religious fervour as well as general evil and hatred.

Yes, there is a school of thought that says we should have let Hitler do his worst and we should have negotiated for peace. Mostly that is on the basis of fear of losing than fear of killing Germans, but even so. If we had let Hitler continue his merry way, would that have been better (on balance) for the German people?

I keep seeing this stuff about "an open air prison". In what way was it a prison? Was it impossible for people in the Gaza Strip to leave, either to Israel (where I know many commuted daily) or to the rest of Palestine? (We'll leave Egypt out of it, because I gather they were more restrictive than Israel in letting them through.) I know that Israel put tough controls on the borders, Obviously it would have been much more convenient for Hamas to walk into Israel instead of having to paraglide in, when they wanted to attack their allegedly military targets of Jewish music festivals and kibbutzes. But in view of what we know about Hamas, can it really be said that Israel were unreasonable in not allowing an open border? Think of this. All the Israeli houses in the area had "safe rooms" - sadly not safe enough against a mass longer term assault; they were designed for safety against small scale quick in-and-out raids, not the sort of raids where hundreds of troops were able to take their time about burning them out. Who do you think these "safe rooms" were designed to keep them safe from? The so-called prisoners. People who live near UK prisons don't have safe rooms. Perhaps your prison wasn't as prison-ish as you might imply.

Has the BBC applied for any of their journalists to go in with the front line soldiers? That would be a good way to check whether the front line soldiers really are being fired on from their alleged targets.

A difference is that Nazi Germany was an anomaly. Most of the world was not behaving like Nazis. Slavery is evil, we know that. But in the days of Empire, every country practised slavery. India, Africa, all the European empires. Even the American indigenous peoples, north and south. Yes, we can look back through time and declare that every country was evil for practising slavery, every country was evil for barring votes for women, every country was evil for not following a net zero agenda, and so forth. But what's the point? Is it not better to give some credit for what they did right, even though perhaps (unlike Newton) they didn't have the benefit of "standing on the shoulders of giants".?

It's because Britain ruled the waves that they were able to abolish the slave trade. The other empires were generally happy to keep it up and an estimated 40,000 sailors died and approx 1% of British GDP over the first half of the 19th century, went towards the suppression of the international slave trade. If the whole world supports slavery and one small but powerful nation decides to put a stop to it (at great expense), then that small but powerful nation might get a little credit.

The SNP's policy and practice was to put male rapists into women's prisons. This is not irrelevant and it's very much more than annoying. The common approach of "I am right and people who disagree are wrong" seems to be getting trumped by "I am right and people who disagree are fascist", and it is just wrong. It isn't fascist to disapprove of the current "The British Empire was evil" agenda, for example, nor is it fascist to mention the good things it did eg. abolish the slave trade. There is a an obsessive culture in large parts of society whereby virtue signalling is taken to a ridiculous degree. For example, the chairman of the MCC recently said (and not for the first time) that the Warner stand might be renamed because Pelham Warner had grandparents who owned slaves. This is a nonsense, and it is the sort of attitude that anti-wokedom would want to fight against.

If it's not deliberate, then it's not a stamp and it's not a red card. The ref (presumably) thought it deliberate. Or is accidentally standing on someone's foot a red card nowadays? Certainly a lot of pundits think it is. I suppose that's one of the "benefits" of VAR - that while standing on someone's foot was always common, as is inevitable when players are trying to occupy the same bit of ground to kick the same ball, they can now slow it down with slow motion and make it look deliberate. With the secondary result that players know that screaming in agony and rolling around is likely to get someone sent off.

It's dangerous. Unlike rugby, the ball pings about all over the place and they can never be sure that someone isn't going to run into the scene of the injury. Even in rugby, they stop play as soon as the attack is heading in that direction, and their direction of attack is much more predictable.

Petrol is visible and smells, which makes it easier to spot a leak, and it doesn't explode that easily. Hydrogen is invisible and odourless. When they changed from coal gas to North Sea gas, they had to (and still do) add a "gas smell" to the North Sea gas because it was odourless and therefore dangerous in the case of leaks. Perhaps they could do the same to hydrogen? I wouldn't know.

We had exactly the same problem with Germany in the second world war. The German government was at war with Britain, but obviously the German people didn't have the right to remove their government, so was Britain right to fight back? Or should we have allowed the status quo in Germany to continue and just accepted the collateral damage? I think the point about the attack by Hamas on the music festival is that many people (including, I hope, yourself) don't see it as a military target. In the same way as the bombing at Ariana Grande's concert in Manchester wasn't seen as a military target, with the obvious difference that the UK bombing was not (so far as we know) organised by a foreign government, while the Israel attacks were. Israel, on the other hand, is targetting military targets, though obviously as the military are hiding behind civilians, there are civilian deaths. This is the problem when a man approaches you to kill you and all those around you, carrying a gun in one hand and a baby in the other. If you fight back and the baby dies, who is at fault?

They could. but it wasn't easy. You could never take a job twenty miles away and be safe in the knowledge that you would get a council house near the new job. People already in council houses were bottom of the list for a move to another area, and there was seldom a surplus of houses in places that people wanted to live in.

In theory I agree. But council housing was never flexible enough to meet what people want. You got a council house (hopefully), but with generally little choice about where or what sort, and you had to live there unless and until you could afford to move out. Moving to a better area, or a house with a bigger or smaller garden, or onto a bus route, or nearer to your job, or all sorts of other reasons for a move - not practical.

If and when the players stop cheating, then rules can be made that don't assume the players are cheating. I agree that the leave-the-pitch rules are rough on the player who has never feigned injury in his life, but does that man exist? As for the ones who sometimes pretend to be hurt, they can always refer to Matilda in the poem, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Goody. We're going to get lots more lampposts. (At the moment we only have 6 on our street, for 40 houses. And they aren't wired for heavy duty, so far as I know - it's no so long ago that they wouldn't run Christmas fairy lights out of them because they didn't know if they had the capacity.) More pertinently, I think wait a few years until technology has improved to take out many of the inconveniences. Solid state, faster recharging batteries seems favourite at the moment.

OK. So let's take a single mother on low pay. Are you saying that until she can afford to buy a property, she shouldn't be allowed to rent one? Or are you saying that if no-one is allowed to own two homes, then house prices will drop so low that a single mother on low pay will be able to buy one for cash, or get a suitable mortgage? However hard we look at stopping landlords from renting to tenants, there is no way to avoid the contrary - that it stops tenants from renting from landlords. Is it seriously envisaged that any form of council housing can provide the flexibility and range of housing that people want?

How many hostages?

I'd like to think so too, but I can't. How many of the marchers are carrying pictures of the hostages held in Gaza? How many are lighting a candle for the dead at the pop festival? How many are calling for the expulsion of Hamas from government? Any of them shouting "Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea" are shouting for the elimination of the state of Israel and are clearly not there for peace. They are there for Palestinian victory. If they were to organise and combined all-faiths march to get rid of Hamas, it would look a lot more like a march for a political solution.

Complaining about CGT is a bit bogus. The profit on the house sale is money in the bank and it ought to be taxed. Additional Stamp Duty and mortgage relief restriction are valid cases to complain about, but not CGT.

The landlord may not do it because they want to provide much needed accommodation for people who can't afford to buy or for other reasons can't buy, but nonetheless they are providing accommodation for people who can't buy a house. For example, a friend of mine kept their old house when they moved and rent it out to a pair of pensioners. They are on housing benefit and they tend to spend money first and think about it later - for example, if they want a holiday they go on holiday and pay rent if they can. They're nice people, but very vague, and helpfully decided to save the landlord a bit of time when the bathroom light went out, by replacing it with a long extension lead and a table lamp perched on the bath. If building regulations and lack of profit force the landlords to evict the tenants and sell the house, you can cheer all you like for the landlord's loss, but you need to remember the tenants as well. All the landlord has had to do is convert one form of capital to another. The tenants have lost their home.

It is. That's the problem with driving landlords out of the market, as the government is aiming to do. If you make the cheaper houses un-rentable by extra restrictions on insulation etc., and you squeeze the profits of landlords in various ways, then it's inevitable that the number of properties will reduce and the price will go up. And the idea of driving landlords off the market so there is more property available for people to buy, is no use at all to people who can't get a mortgage. Pensioners, single parents, unemployed, there's nothing for them.

Is there any sign that Hamas even want a ceasefire? A ceasefire has to be on both sides, and would surely have to involve the return of non-combatants (ie. hostages and human shields).