More Balls Dropped Than In The World Cup

A monitoring group repeatedly warned the Police Service of Northern Ireland over the past eight months that anti-immigration activists were circulating the addresses of properties that were targeted in this week’s Belfast riots. The Accountability Project Northern Ireland, a volunteer group formed last summer to monitor anti-immigration activity online, sent dozens of reports to the PSNI between November 2025 and June 2026.

Ooop! 

The Guardian understands a so-called hitlist of addresses has been circulating among far-right groups since August 2025 and was sent to the PSNI in January 2026. The addresses were among the locations targeted during this week’s anti-immigration disorder.

The reports sent to police also cited a Facebook post stating that HMOs in the Glengormley area “will now be treated as fair game and dealt with accordingly”.

Oh dear! Even the hapless Met Police would do better. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that it was ignored bevause a few weeping asylum seekers bundled into vans ahead of smoking homes made a good impression for Starmer's 'far right' crackdown. 

But I'm not, and frankly incompetence is easier to understand. Especially from these clowns. 

Anti-racist campaigners have spoken of their anger and frustration that months of warnings were not acted on in the runup to the rioting that has seen houses and cars burned, and racist checkpoints set up on main roads.

Wouldn't it be better to point that anger at the authorities who have stoked that local anger by ignoring concerns until a man nearly had his head hacked off by a person who shouldn’t have been in the country? 

Community groups described helping vulnerable families leave areas, while volunteers organised support for minority ethnic students travelling to GCSE exams. Campaigners also reported that some workers from minority ethnic backgrounds were leaving work early because of concerns about travelling home safely.

At some point, will these people ever see themselves as part of the problem, and not the solution? 

A spokesperson for End Deportations Belfast said the strategy used in the riots in Belfast were the same as those used in Northern Ireland since the 1970s. “They were setting up roadblocks and ID-checking cars around hospitals,” they said. “These roadblocks are designed to stretch police resources, and then they go and they commit pogroms in specific areas.”

It’s very different from the 1970s, then the tactics were designed to deal with people who wanted an occupying force out of their neighbourh… 

Oh. As you were.

 

Is This Park Twinned?

 If it is, it must be witn Derry in Maine!

Essex Police rushed to the Chalkwell Park area of Southend, Essex, at around 12.30am today following reports that a young woman had been seriously injured in an incident involving a 'small articulated loading vehicle'. It is understood that a group of people inside the park took unauthorised control of the vehicle and that is how the teenager was hurt.Paramedics took the girl to hospital, where she remains in a critical condition.

Translation for those who don't speak 'official': some little shits stole a fork-lift and ran someone over.  

Chalkwell Park is the same Essex park where a seven-year-old girl was killed by a falling tree in June last year.

Boy, a place to avoid at all times!  

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Opines....

...on the subject of water. And a column from the most vapid of the 'Guardian's' stable is always a treat, eh, Reader?

Like many who saw it, I was saddened and shocked at the disregard for animals: people were clambering over nests, and trying to reach an island specially safeguarded for birds. Yet I also wondered what a polarised, emotive debate is going to achieve when, lurking behind the justified anger, is another question about our access to water.

Eh?  

“It’s like nothing is free any more and that’s not fair for us as well. We don’t want to pay for … natural water” – this comment, given anonymously by one of the swimmers to the Times, was telling. There’s a feeling, I think, nationally, that our water no longer belongs to us. It is being cynically polluted, fenced off, or monetised.

Well, too bad, you have to pay for everything worth having in this life! 

It’s great that we are seeing new designated swimming spaces, but demand is only going to increase as the climate continues to heat up.

Maybe, or maybe we'll switch to demanding aircon on the taxpayer's dime?  

The well-known bathing ponds on either side of the wildlife pond on Hampstead Heath used to operate on an honesty system. Now you have to pay, and in hot weather the queues are long. At the same time, temperatures are getting hotter and hotter, and city life is becoming less bearable. There are not enough accessible places to swim.

Well, gosh, its almost as if honesty systems don't work anymore when you transition from a high trust society to a multicultural one! 

On the one hand, wild swimming has become totally fetishised, tweely marketed as a middle-class lifestyle choice and a cure-all, and spots where you can swim are more and more swamped. On the other, you have “no swimming” signs but very little clarity about why they are there (at the wildlife pond in Hampstead Heath it’s not made clear why that one, of the three, is off limits, and there was scant information about the birds and their habitat), let alone a proper national conversation about what our rivers, seas, lakes and ponds are for.

As if anyone from the most selfish generation would read it, or care if they did! 

The many campaigns against the pollution of our rivers and seas have been excellent, but as well as those, and teaching children to swim, we should be discussing how we navigate risk and educate people about the potential impact of open water swimming both on human and animal lives. By all means issue more fines – but also put up boards explaining why people shouldn’t swim, just as “no swimming” signs in danger spots should explain the actual risks.

If organisations were to put up signs warning of the danger of drowning, they would get complaints  about them being that most overused modern word, ‘triggering’ and if they were to put up signs noting the prevalence of drowning deaths amongst ethnic minorities , that too would attract campaigners whining that water is racist! 

They can’t win, so the only sensible move is not to play the game!

In some ways, the Hampstead Heath saga reminds me of the visceral response to the felling of the sycamore gap tree: valid anger about the environment or animal welfare escalating to an irrational point, with outraged comments online wishing diarrhoea and vomiting on the swimmers.

As an island nation, swimming is encoded in many of us from a very young age. As people continue to lose their lives, education and investment are more urgent than ever.

Only if the people we were losing were worth saving, Rhiannan.... 

A Telling Phrase...

Travellers have pitched up outside a village hall on the outskirts of Norwich.The group arrived on Wednesday at Spixworth Village Hall which is run by the parish council. Police have been informed, as has the local county councillor.

Here we go again... 

People have been requested not to "antagonise" the group by officials.

WTAF?  

A spokeswoman for the Trustees of Spixworth Playing Field said: "The police and county councillor are aware of the situation, the travellers have been spoken to, and they are aware that they are likely to be moved on. 

"A couple of people spoke directly with them when they arrived and requested that they not make any mess.

 Ha ha ha ha. Good one! Oh, wait, you're serious?

"The police have confirmed that the travellers are known to them and were generally good, if left alone. 

Meaning what? That the police hope they don't have to do their job?  

"The parish council requests that residents don’t antagonise them; they are out of the way at present and will hopefully leave shortly."

What they will leave is YOU, with a big clean up bill! Total cowardice from all authorities involved, it's no wonder people no longer have any faith. 

H/T: Dave Ward via email 

Lead With The Sympathetic, But Bury The Lede...

Vulnerable families including women fleeing abuse are being illegally “dumped” hundreds of miles away by London councils in a practice “ripping at the social fabric” of deprived towns, a Guardian investigation has found.

Well, as this is the 'Guardian', this will come as no surprise: 

Charities described the policy as “inhumane” and accused councils of targeting vulnerable refugees who speak little English and have little ability to understand or challenge the move. If they refuse, they are in effect forced on to the streets.

An Albanian woman who fled a sex trafficking gang in Manchester was unlawfully told to move out of her property in Ealing, west London, to a property 260 miles away in County Durham despite being highly vulnerable and having two young children.

 Their concern, as usual, is all for those who don't belong here in the first place! Including those granted expensive real estate living space in the capital city. 

But the article did contain an interesting titbit about the competence of local councils:

When she raised concerns to Ealing council, officers provided the details of two sex trafficking support organisations it said were in County Durham – except one was based in Durham, North Carolina in the US, and the other in Durham, Ontario, Canada.

Am I going to hell for laughing at this? 

I'm Helping The (Future) War Effort!

'What did you do in the war, lady?' 

'I caught a lot of Pidgeys. Oh and trained the drones that beat the Islamic army back!'

An AI model trained on data collected from users of Pokémon Go will potentially help military drones find their location in war zones. Pokémon Go, a 2016 augmented reality mobile game, allowed players to find and catch Pokémon in the real world using the cameras on their mobile phones, and exploded in popularity. In 2018, the company reported having more than 800m downloads worldwide. A 2021 update to the game introduced Pokéstops, which gave players in-game rewards for scanning real locations using their devices. It required users to opt in and upload the recording. Niantic, which created Pokémon in partnership with Nintendo, collected users’ location scan data before the company sold its gaming division in 2025.

And people are concerned about it, because of course they are!  

Tom Sulston, head of policy for tech policy think tank Digital Rights Watch said the use of civilian data for military ends was troubling.“While they may have disclaimers in their Ts&Cs, we know that most people don’t read vast legal documents when they want to play a video game,” he said. “We need regulators to focus on ‘best interests of the user’ or ‘fair and reasonable’ tests to keep users safe from exploitation like this.

Exploitation? 

Here, mate, look that up and use it properly next time! 

You Are Suggesting The Impossible

Thirteen months after the UK supreme court delivered its landmark ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, and 10 days after an updated draft “code of practice” from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was laid before parliament, the UK is once again rowing about single-sex spaces, and particularly toilets.

Once again, the purpose and value of those spaces for women are at risk of being eclipsed by complaints from people who would prefer that they didn’t exist in a way that complies with the current law.

The code confirms that there is no legal way to open a single-sex service to people of the other sex, even if they are trans.

Why the 'even if...' there?  They are still the sex they were born into, no matter what cosmetic surgery thay have had!

Trans campaigners see the guidance as a mandate to exclude them from ordinary life.

Well, they are mentally ill, by definition, so why should we care what they see it as?  

But for entry to single-sex spaces, the criteria must be sex, and the code is clear that any checks – for example, if a trans man were to be mistaken for a biological man in a women’s health setting – must be made “sensitively” to avoid discrimination or harassment.

Cue the TRAs shrieking about 'genital inspections' when no such thing is likely to be needed, just eyes and ears.

The vast majority of public spaces and activities are already mixed-sex – which is why the Equality Act refers to single-sex ones as “exceptions”. What is not OK is the removal of this option on grounds that it is bigoted to seek a female-only space; or the claim that a service is single-sex when it is not. 

The threat posed by men to women is not the only reason why single-spaces matter. Fairness in sport and the right of women, including lesbians, to have their own groups, are also important.

Men can too, then. will we see no more campaigns to get women into men's groups? Fair's fair,,

But with 739,000 female victims of sexual offences in England and Wales last year, and grim trends including the huge rise in camera-enabled crimes (indecent exposure, voyeurism, filming of abuse, image-sharing), many women see the case for single-sex spaces getting stronger rather than weaker, both as a tool of prevention and as a resource for survivors.

The trans population faces its own challenges. The code is emphatically not a reason to disregard these. But it should not have taken the supreme court, or the EHRC, to make it clear that sacrificing single-sex spaces is not the answer.

The challengres it faces are not for women to solve. They are for better psychiatric treatmemt to solve. 

🎵Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours...🎵

Especially when you are wrestling with a drugged up fugitive who is trying to steal your car. 

Dr Thame said he attempted to drag Smith from the Astra and punched him on the nose before his arm slipped beneath Smith's armpit and into a headlock. He told the inquest that Smith suddenly stopped struggling while a neighbour screamed nearby. Dr Thame said: 'The neighbour said the man was unconscious. I released him immediately.' Senior Devon coroner Philip Spinney concluded that Smith's death had been accidental.

 At least he wasn’t arrested, this time.

Mr Spinney praised Dr Thame's actions, describing them as courageous and carried out in self-defence while protecting family members and neighbours.He also said post-mortem evidence showed excessive force had not been used by Dr Thame.  The inquest heard Smith had taken a combination of drugs, including cocaine and ketamine, before the incident unfolded.

But the neighbour was still happy to try to stick the boot in:

Dr Thame and neighbour Deborah Day then attempted CPR after discovering Smith was not breathing.Mrs Day had previously claimed in a statement that Dr Thame placed his knee on Smith's neck, although Geoff disputed this account, saying his son's feet were still outside the car.

Great neighbour she turned out to be! I know who I’d rather live next door to!

Day told the hearing that Dr Thame put Smith in a headlock, 'but did not intend to kill the man', adding that his actions may have saved her own life by preventing Smith from driving towards her.

And he must now be wondering why he bothered. 

Are You Sure?

It might be that Diane Abbott's just enjoying a day at the seaside...

"The horror! The horror!"

 

Famous movie quote updated for 2026 by the inimitable Matt...