Angela Merkel Warns Germany Is On The Brink Of Coronavirus Disaster

The German Chancellor has hit back at local leaders in the country for not supporting her tough coronavirus restrictions.

Angela Merkel took part in a marathon six-hour meeting with Germany’s sixteen state leaders to urge them to do more to stop the resurgent virus.

It comes as EU countries have reported their highest ever daily calculations of new virus cases, as deaths start to climb back to spring levels and behind closed doors, Angela Merkel was enraged with the local leaders for refusing to enforce restrictive new measures to impede the virus.

Germany’s federal system permits state Government reserves to override the Chancellors measures and gives them the final say on whether to enforce new laws and Angela Merkle said she was not happy with the leader’s refusal to accept curfews and a limit on gatherings.

She added that what they’d agreed was not enough to avert disaster.

The state leaders agreed to an 11 pm curfew on bars and restaurants, along with a ten-person limit on social gatherings. The leaders also agreed to make the use of face masks mandatory in busy indoor spaces.

Angela Merkle also noted during the meeting, Germany’s cases yesterday were tripling weekly and she said that what bothered her was the exponential rate of increase and that they had to stop that, otherwise, it wouldn’t end well.

It comes as Germany reported its highest ever daily case toll of the virus, at 6,638 yesterday and it demonstrates that the coronavirus is spreading through Germany at the same pace it was at the peak of the pandemic, with the last time the country reporting over 6,000 cases in April.

It takes the country to a total of 352,107 cases according to John Hopkins University and yesterday also saw Germany record a further 33 deaths from the virus.

Angela Merkel told the leaders neighbouring countries to Germany were having to take extremely drastic measures to beat back their surges in cases.

France reported more than 100 deaths per day on average this week, with President Emmanuel Macron’s Government declaring a public health state of emergency yesterday and under the state of emergency, Paris and eight other cities were thrown into a 9 pm curfew for four weeks.

He added that they need to get from 20,000 cases per day to 2 or 3,000.

Other European leaders declared harsh new measures as they began losing control of the virus’s spread.

Of course, some of this is founded on lies, fears and scare stories, plus they’re now telling us that we can’t return to normal and that we need a new normal, hinting towards their New World Order reset.

Boris Johnson was a good one, with him saying that we need to build back better and he said numerous times that we can’t go back to the way things were.

These leaders have no intention of going back to what life was like before coronavirus and it seems that they’re using fear scare stories and lies to brainwash the people into believing they need more protection and safety.

Combine that with climate change, saying that they need to bring in measures to save the earth, but what they really mean is they want to restrict what you do by taking your rights away and that it’s our fault and they’ve been calling temporary measures the new norm from the start.

Indian Jewellery Brand Forced To Remove Advert

Cyberbullying has yet again forced a major Indian brand to withdraw an advert featuring a story of communal harmony among Hindus and Muslims.

Jeweller Tanishq met with an online backlash for running an advert showcasing an interfaith marriage between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man.

A representative for the company told a news outlet that the commercial featured a Muslim family celebrating the baby shower of their Hindu daughter in law has now been removed.

The YouTube narrative of the commercial read: “She is married into a family that loves her like their own child. Only for her, they go out of their way to celebrate an occasion that they usually don’t. A beautiful confluence of two different religions, traditions, and cultures.”

Critics, however, accused the company of promoting ‘love jihad’, a conspiracy theory coined by Hindu right-wing fringe groups believe that Muslim men endeavour to woo Hindu women and marry them, to convert them to Islam.

The advertisement received tremendous backlash from people accusing it of being anti-Hindu, and the sheer magnitude of trolling targeting the company saw #BoycottTanishq sit as one of the top trends on Indian Twitter throughout the whole of Monday – employees and directors of the company were also among those targeted.

Talking to a news outlet, activist Saket Gokhale describes the concept of ‘love jihad’ as an extension of the rising Islamophobia in Indian society.

“If you look at the social media accounts of those outraging (against Tanishq), they are always connected to the BJP (the ruling party of India) in some way or the other.”

He said that with every subsequent boycott campaign they keep pushing the Islamophobic agenda.

It began with people boycotting the brands that (Bollywood) actor Aamir Khan supports, after his wife’s remark about feeling unsafe in India, followed by a campaign against any restaurant offering halal food, to any mention of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Mr Gikhale hailed the withdrawal of the advert disappointing and heartbreaking.

He said that the ad wasn’t making any political statement and that there has to be a basis for taking something back, it can’t just be trolling.

A spokesman for Tanishq said that the idea behind the Ekatvam campaign was to celebrate the coming together of people from various walks of life, local communities and families during these difficult times to celebrate the beauty of oneness, but this film stimulated divergent and extreme reactions, contrary to its very objective.

It seems that humans are always looking for reasons to despise each other. It’s all about imaginary titles and it’s horrible, why can’t people just accept each other?

There are loads of families that are not very accepting of their mixed-race partners, but then parents all over the world disapprove of their children’s choices for all kinds of reasons, but to attack an advert is just insane.

It was just an advertisement and this extreme hostility is indeed disdainful and disgraceful and it’s shameful and sad when love can’t overcome hatred.

A newborn baby has no religion, but contractors of our societies teach us how to behave towards one another, and if people choose to marry each other because of love, why should anyone interfere, it’s their choice.

Religion was invented to divide and control, very much like politics, and the world would be a much better place if we didn’t look down on each other all the time. Unfortunately, women in some countries are looked at mainly as property or chattel, and wouldn’t be permitted to marry outside their religion or caste.

Boris Johnson’s Political Fear Is Beginning To Show

Fear is information, and Boris Johnson’s ill-judged address to his virtual party conference last week, in which he decided to not focus on the virus but on the bold future that lay on the other side of the crisis, told us something – it told us that the British Prime Minister is terrified.

The charitable explanation for the speech is that knowing he was about to announce important new COVID 19 constraints, Boris Johnson wanted to deliver hope with a picture of the United Kingdom after the pandemic.

However, right now, all that people want to hear about is how the crisis will end, not how the Conservative party will hold thereafter, and plans for a better tomorrow ring hollow if he can’t deliver a functioning test and trace system today.

A more confident leader would have squared up to the issues, rather than endeavouring to divert the issues and it’s not about learning to live with the virus, it’s about asking how many deaths is too many? And also how many families are they happy and willing to sacrifice?

But Boris Johnson no longer looks like a guy who believes in what he’s doing and he’s losing control of the pandemic, he’s losing control of the narrative and he’s losing the control of his party.

Thrust into policies he despises, he’s struggling to regain his political compass and is running scared of the rebellious MPs, of the right-wing press which has now turned on him, and his chancellor, Rishi Sunak, whose positive approval ratings among party members contrast with his own negative rating.

The British public did not blame Boris Johnson for the situation and recognise that all decisions are challenging, but the continued failures are sapping his support.

Boris Johnson sees that the second wave can be linked to Government mistakes and yet, even in his latest plans splitting regions by infection levels, multiple tiers and responses to infection levels, there’s confusion where there needs to be transparency and confrontational actions, such as pub curfews, which are bounced through and never really defended.

Those around the Prime Minister still lash out at the failures of others. They condemn the smug, centralising tendency of Whitehall, which they say has hobbled the effect of test and trace rollout, or what one senior insider dubbed ‘the health deep state’.

None of these points is devoid of merit, but the crisis has raged for months, so when is the responsibility theirs? And increasingly, they sound like mourners at their own funeral.

The irony is that Boris Johnson has a tenable plan. The Government has prioritised hospitals, schools and most of the economy over socialising and the hospitality sector.

We can quibble over the specifics of his latest constraints, but there appears to be a precise, underlying principle and hopefully, it will be the right one, but he doesn’t know what to do or where to start, letting other people decide for him, which was his greatest blunder and failure.

But not to worry, Boris Johnson will probably stand down in the new year after the shock of Brexit hits home. That’s what they generally do, pass the buck to someone else so that they can take the flack.

However, it’s always easier to criticise when you’re not in the driver’s seat, and now that Boris Johnson’s in the hot seat, I bet it’s not so much fun.

Consultants Fees Up To £6,250 A Day For Work On COVID Test System

Sources have confirmed that management consultants are being paid as much as £6,250 a day to work on the British government’s struggling coronavirus testing system.

Senior executives from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) are being paid fees equivalent to £1.5 million a year to help speed up and reorganise the £12 billion network that Boris Johnson said in May would be world-beating.

The figures, first disclosed by Sky News, came amid increasing concern about the cost of the UK’s COVID 19 testing system, which has been criticised for being slow, disorganised and unable to cope with growing demand.

A source with knowledge of the contract said that BCG is one of the biggest and most prestigious consultancies in the world. Charging £10 million for 40 people to work on the virus test and trace programme, over four months.

Sources confirmed that individual consultants from the firm could make £2,400 a day with the most senior consultants earning up to £7,360. BCG then offered discounts of between 10 per cent and 15 per cent on other parts of the project.

Publicly available data collated by the Spend Network shows that BCG has been granted contracts worth at least £18.3 million for work related to the pandemic.

This included two £5 million contracts for strategic support and digital support for the test and trace programme. A £4.5 million contract with the Department for International Development for a project on accelerated COVID economic support, and £1.6 million for a COVID 19 consultancy task force from the Cabinet Office.

Other projects include work on the UK’s food security and guidance on vaccine manufacturing.

The rates far outstrip those paid to public sector workers, with just 1 per cent of civil servants being paid more than £80,000 a year.

The coronavirus test and trace system tumbled last month after schools reopened following the lockdown. Figures on 17 September revealed that almost nine in 10 of all COVID 19 tests in England were taking longer than 24 hours to yield results.

Since then, the Government has relied upon private sector involvement, while Lady Harding, the head of the programme, has faced calls for her resignation.

BCG’s forty workers are only a tiny sliver of the 1,000 consultants employed by Deloitte on the system.

It materialised last month that staff from consulting firms, including KPMG, have been put on standby to work on back-office parts of the system on a short term basis over the next six months – among the firms believed to have been contacted for help was EY.

It seems funny how some people are out there making vast sums of money, while the remainder of the people are unemployed with no prospect of a job and are being treated like Typhoid Mary and this has to be one of the most flawed presentations of corruption in a developed country that we’ve seen.

Every week there’s a news story about how our Government is paying an associate of a member of the Government to furnish a service they can only truly be outsourced to an expert because they’ve no previous experience of delivering that particular service.

Firstly, just the knowledge that the Government is handing out contracts without tender to associates, would raise eyebrows – and what’s the likelihood that they’re the best supplier for the service the Government could find?

The absence of tender is a bit of a dead giveaway that the Government isn’t looking for the best supplier, but then it’s up to you to consider the consequences, and it’s even worse than you might have feared.

Utter incompetence in the delivery of services essential to the country’s navigation through and recovery from COVID.

This is how our Government gives our money away and the disdain they have for us is astounding and yet some people would still vote for them and if they actually got the job done, then I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

WINTER IS COMING

Costa fans can tuck into a new After Eight muffin as part of the coffee chain’s Christmas menu for 2020.

The sweet delicacy consists of a chocolate muffin filled with a peppermint flavoured sauce, crowned with white icing and completed with an After Eight.

The new muffin will be available from November 3, with prices starting from £1.97.

The coffee chain is also bringing out a lobster toastie for customers who want to feel grandiloquent over the festive season.

Priced from £5, the toastie will be made from responsibly sourced lobster and béchamel sauce, crowned with a selection of cheeses in a parsley crumb topped seeded malted bloomer bread.

Prices will vary depending on which Costa you go to, so you may end up spending slightly more than this for these products.

The new toastie will be incorporated in the Costa £5 meal deal, where you get a drink and a choice of food from a limited selection for a fiver.

Also new for Christmas 2020 is pork and Bramley apple sausage roll and vegan ‘turkee’ cranberry and stuffing toastie.

In terms of sweet stuff, there’s a vegan Lotus Biscoff ‘cheezecake’ and festive crispy chocolate stars.

Costa will be releasing Christmas gift sets too, including a Belgian chocolate tasting experience for £5.

This consists of three Belgian chocolates and a handcrafted hot drink, plus a Costa gift card with £3.40 on it.

Fans will also be pleased to know that Costa is bringing back its Terry’s Chocolate Orange muffin from Christmas 2019.

It will be priced at £1.97 this year, down from the £2.25 it once cost, due to Costa cutting prices after VAT was slashed for hospitality businesses.

If you’re already planning on tucking in, use the Costa store finder to locate your nearest branch. Costa has more than 2,600 stores nationwide.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like the caramelised orange and cream range from last year will be coming back.

Costa has only just released details of its autumn menu and it includes a gingerbread latte. The coffee chain has also announced a new caramel apple tart.

And in the face of one of the least predictable Christmases we’ve encountered in recent history, one thing we can look forward to with some certitude is the arrival of some delectable festive fares.

From M&S and Waitrose to Tesco and Morrisons, the supermarkets are already unveiling their line ups to whet our appetites in advance.

Christmas has always been such a magical time of the year at Costa Coffee, and this year, their customers will be looking to them to make the festive period that bit more memorable, and if you weren’t hungry before, you’ll be hungry now.

Of course, we all know it’s about advertising, but clearly, these delicious delights are worth trying, even though we’re still enjoying the unusually warm autumn weather, but Christmas is only around the corner and this year’s seasonal coffee cups are about to start coming your way.

Costa, has just announced it will launch its festive takeaway cups on Tuesday 3 November, alongside a brand new food and drink menu, but what is Christmas without a Costa Coffee Christmas Cup?

This year’s Costa Christmas cups feature five new limited-edition designs, motivated by finding joy in the big and little moments. The cup designs feature:

The Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man posting their letter to Father Christmas (Mini)

The Gingerbread Man and Penguin are readying the festive decorations (Small)

The Polar Bear and the Penguin find the perfect tree (Medium)

The Rabbits build and decorate a majestic Snowman (Medium)

The Foxes merrily dance with gifts (Large)

And the limited edition Costa Coffee Christmas cups are completely recyclable, and also so adorable.

Groups Assemble In Liverpool On Last Night Before Pubs Close Under Tier 3 Lockdown

A massive street party scene erupted in Liverpool just hours before the city-region entered its most extreme tier of local lockdown.

One clip posted to Snapchat Map had the caption ‘Herd immunity here we come’, with swathes of young people seen wildly raving on the cobbles around Concert Square, and in another video, ravers could be heard singing along to 1961 pop it ‘Hey! Baby!’ by Bruce Channel after moving out of bars and pubs from 10 pm.

Whilst in some footage, it showed people swarming around a police car as it drove through the square.

The Liverpool City Region has agreed to sign up to tier 3 restrictions, barring households integrating indoors and closing pubs unless they can operate as restaurants.

One video, taken from a flat above the party area, showed dozens of people jamming the streets as a police car endeavoured to move through them, and an unidentified person who filmed the scene from an upstairs flat, told a news outlet that it was one of the most horrific sights that they’d witnessed.

They said that a considerable group of young revellers who were defying every single social distancing rule imaginable attacked a police car on Concert Square and that the event had quite a big impact on them because it made it apparent that this second lockdown that Liverpool now finds itself in will have the potential to unleash an extremely dangerous surge of riots and rebellion of people that don’t believe in coronavirus restrictions.

In some of the footage, people can be seen embracing each other and jumping around as police officers move them on from the area.

Merseyside Police said in a statement the large gathering was dispersed quickly and safely, and they added that all businesses in the region had closed and the incident had been stood down.

Chief Superintendent Peter Costello said that while they understand how the new rules will be implemented and will be frustrating for some, they will continue to urge everyone to abide by them, including keeping social distancing for the safety of everyone.

Reporting the restrictions on Monday, the Government said approximately 40 per cent of all coronavirus cases in England were in the north-west of the country, with Liverpool and its surrounding regions having recorded more than 1,000 new cases per day of late.

Now we can see the sorry state of our society when alcohol is more important than life, or the life of a loved one, but the Government needs businesses to remain open for the economy.

But people simply can’t behave themselves and there’s no such word as sensible anymore and some people don’t take kindly to being told what to do, but sadly they don’t have enough savvy either to understand the consequences.

However, it’s not all the young ones that are ignoring the rules – let’s not pretend that the older generation don’t go to the pub as well, but the problem is that once people in power start pleasing themselves, the sheep then follow.

London On The Verge Of Lockdown

London Mayor Sadiq Khan alerted residents the increasing number of fresh coronavirus cases are putting the Capital on track for further restrictions.

London is expected to be placed under tier one of the new coronavirus monitoring system from Wednesday, but Sadiq Khan said the rate of infection has been steadily spiking and could result in the Capital being moved on to tier two, with more stringent isolation measures, within days.

Talking to LBC, he said that he was pleased that working collegially with councils and Public Health England, they want to go as one, and he said that’s why he talks about the average of 90 cases per 100,000.

He said that they were approaching the trigger point and that’s why he’s been upfront and straightforward with Londoners, and because of the indicators he’s seen, over the next few days, they will be going to tier two which is the high tier.

Sadiq Khan also expressed his support for suggestions from Government advisors advocating for a snap circuit break lockdown to quell the coronavirus and he said that would be the most effective way to slow down the spread of the virus and to get a grip with it’s short, two-week circuit breaker across the country.

He added that doing that, not only prevents the spread of the virus but also sidesteps months and months of restrictions in tier one, two or three and that the new tier system categorises areas across England based on the rate of infection they’re experiencing.

Those with fewer than 100 cases per 100,000 residents will be put under tier one, locations with over 100 cases per 100,000 fall under tier two and those with extremely higher infections are on tier three.

According to a document released on Monday, members of SAGE had advised the Government to go for an urgent circuit breaker lockdown to avoid sparking a large epidemic.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt insisted Westminster has to be prepared to change direction should the measures assumed so far fail to achieve.

Talking to the BBC, Jeremy Hunt stated that if it turns out that they’re not doing what they need to do to get this under control, then they will have to switch tack.

And he continued that in this pandemic, everything appears to be in a sort of two-week cycle, so infections go up and then two weeks later they see admissions to hospitals go up, two weeks later they see ICU (intensive care unit) admissions go up.

However, the sad fact is that people have to work, unless Boris Johnson wants to pay all their wages, and there’s the matter of protecting as much of the economy as possible, but we also need to beat the virus in the best way possible, so it seems that the Government are in between a rock and a hard place.

It seems that we could all hide away, but when we came out again, the virus would still be here and we would simply be attempting to delay the inevitable. Sweden was gutsy enough to accept this and now they’re seeing some success.

And it seems that our Government are using these lockdowns just like they would a medicine to fight the COVID, and they don’t appear to be working.

London on the brink of a lockdown, will that happen? London makes too much money for them to even consider it – although they might be considering it in the interest of health and well being, rather than being more interested in banknotes.

Dutch Cancer Patient In Her Eighties Becomes The First Person To Die After Being Re-Infected With Coronavirus

An 89-year-old Dutch woman is believed to have become the first person in the world to die after getting re-infected with the coronavirus.

The unnamed woman, who was having cancer treatment at the time, was found to be infected with genetically different strains of the virus in two separate episodes, which occurred two months apart.

Whether people can become reinfected with COVID 19 remains a mystery and case reports have been murky on details critical to judging what really happened.

In this case, the woman never tested negative for coronavirus between her first and second times in the hospital.

A negative test would have taken doctors nearer to establishing that she recovered the first time and that the second admission was merely a resurgence of the virus, with which she was still infected.

After testing positive for COVID 19 the first time she went to the hospital with a fever and a nasty cough, then her symptoms disappeared and she went home after five days.

She then returned to the hospital with the same symptoms 59 days later, just two days after starting a new chemotherapy treatment for her lymphoma – she tested positive for COVID 19 again and died three weeks later.

The doctors who wrote about her report said the coronavirus samples from the two tests were genetically different and asserted that the second episode might have been a re-infection rather than prolonged shedding.

The news came as doctors in the US confirmed their first case of someone getting re-infected with coronavirus, noting the illness of a 25-year-old man in Nevada.

The report, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, was produced by scientists and doctors from different institutions in the Netherlands, led by Dr Marjolijn Wegdam-Blans at PAMM Laboratories in Veldhoven.

Veldhoven is a town on the outskirts of Eindhoven, a city close to the southern border with Belgium.

The 89-year-old patient, the doctors stated in their report titled ‘Reinfection of SARS-CoV-2 in an immunocompromised patient’, first went to an emergency department at an unidentified hospital when she had a fever and an agonising cough.

A swab test for COVID 19 was positive and she remained in the hospital for five days, by which time her symptoms had cleared up except for some persisting fatigue.

She lived normally for the ensuing eight weeks but then, two days after starting chemotherapy, she became unwell again with the same symptoms.

The woman was receiving treatment for a type of blood cancer called Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia.

This lady was 89 years old and receiving cancer treatment, her immune system would have been shot – don’t get me wrong it’s terrible what happened to this lady, but I’m surprised they were even giving her cancer treatment.

She never tested negative and only two weeks apart, yet she was infected with a new strain of the virus, not even clearing the first infection, which evidently can now mutate as it replicates.

We didn’t know this woman, however, now, she’s being regaled like a circus clown and now, she’s just another statistic – the first person to recover and then get re-infected.

This woman was a human being, who didn’t deserve to have her medical history dissected for all the public to see.

However, she was an 89-year-old woman battling cancer and a simple cold would probably have killed her, and we should stop all of these absurd fear-mongering reports, but then this is probably being done so that everyone will be frightened and they will have the dodgy vaccine when it becomes available.

Johnny Rotten: Sex Pistols Celebrity Declares Donald Trump Is The Only Sensible Choice In US Election

Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon has expressed his support for Donald Trump, asserting that the President is the only sensible choice.

The endorsement came as a shock given that the singer, stage name Johnny Rotten, previously revealed that he’d backed Democratic hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in past US elections.

John Lydon told a news outlet that he now backs Donald Trump because of the President’s policy to the economy.

The London born musician became a US citizen in 2013 and presently lives in Los Angeles and he said that he’d be as daft as a brush not to because Donald Trump was the only sensible choice now that Joe Biden was up, and that he was unfit of being the man at the helm.

The paper suggests that John Lydon started supporting Donald Trump after the President was accused of racism and he said that he’d been accused of the same thing himself, so he was insulted for anybody who was called that, and he went on to add that of course, he was anti-racism.

In 2008, members of John Lydon’s entourage were accused of being racially offensive during a backstage brawl at a reunited Sex Pistols gig, and when asked about the murder of George Floyd, John Lydon replied that it was awful but that it didn’t mean that all police were hostile or that all white folk were racist and he summed it up by saying that all lives mattered.

When asked if he would be voting for Donald Trump on 3 November, he produced a MAGA cap and stated that he would be.

The 64-year-old, who’s also been verbal in his backing of Brexit, has previously been photoed sporting a red MAGA T-shirt.

Reading the article, I was expecting there to be a valid explanation, but I was so disgruntled, but then it’s Johnny Rotten, it was never going to make any sense – he’s a Trump supporter, there is no reasonable explanation.

And it does seem pretty tragic that he’s so despairing to stay relevant and solvent that he’ll say anything to get the hype and it seems that it’s been determined that we should listen to what celebrities have to say about politics, but it seems that we’ve already listened to what celebrities and the elites have to say and believed it.

However, celebrities, including Johnny Rotten are also human beings and citizens and some of them, not necessarily including Johnny Rotten are highly educated, savvy, knowledgeable and considerate people, whose views on important matters can be valuable.

But then, Johnny Rotten has always been a bit off the wall and there’s certainly an attention-seeking facet to his personality, so it’s not surprising to read this, and he’s entitled to his opinion, although many will not agree with him in the slightest, but then I wouldn’t expect anything else from an anarchist and those people agreeing with him should remember that Johnny Rotten isn’t supporting Donald Trump, he’s supporting anarchy.

Donald Trump has some impressive supporters it seems and Johnny Rotten has obviously taken to many drugs, poor soul – we should be so grateful that a washed-up, drug-addled punk rocker from Great Britain has finally shown us the way out of this debacle.

And it’s such a shame that Johnny Rotten has literally assumed his character’s surname and sold out his original intent which was to be anti-establishment, and as Freddie Mercury once said, ‘another one bites the dust’.

Floella Benjamin: I Was Told To Shut Up Or Never Work Again

Floella Benjamin said she was warned to shut up or she would never work again when she first called for greater diversity in television.

The beloved Play School presenter, 71, said earlier on in her career she had the part of a 16-year-old shoplifter in Within These Walls alongside Googie Withers.

Lady Benjamin, who was born in Trinidad before emigrating to the United Kingdom as a 10-year-old, said she asked the producer on the 1970s drama why black people always had to play thieves, prostitutes and bus drivers.

Speaking on Desert Island Discs, she added, can’t we play other parts? Such as professional doctors and lawyers and she was told that it wasn’t realistic. But she thought to herself at the time that it was realistic because that was what her family were, all her family were professional people, and that’s when she began fighting for diversity on screen way back in 1993-74.

Lady Benjamin said it was extremely tough and she was told to shut up or she would never work again and she said that you would get knocked down, but that you had to have that self-belief that you were going to rise and that a lot of the things that she said way back, forty-odd years ago, were happening now.

She said that things are now changing and that’s great, but that we’ve all got to take personal responsibility to make that transition.

Floella Benjamin, who was made a dame earlier this year, moved to Beckenham, London with her parents and experienced discrimination almost immediately, and she said that on the day her family went to view a house, a neighbour called the police, suspecting they were trying to steal the fixtures and fittings.

Dame Floella Benjamin said she experienced racial abuse daily as a 10-year-old.

She said it’s tough being black and it was difficult having to face that, especially as a child, but it made her resilient and that you had a sixth sense about who was going to hurt you and who was going to be horrible to you.

She said that they would go to a shop and no one would serve them and that they’d have to stand there waiting to be served, and you couldn’t leave because her mum would say, go back to the shop until they serve you.

Dame Floella Benjamin’s parents are both buried in Beckenham cemetery, and after her peerage was announced in 2010, she visited their graves.

She said that she went to the cemetery when she became a baroness and said mummy, daddy, I’m going to claim Beckenham for you. I’m going to call myself Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham. There, it’s yours.

Floella Benjamin is a remarkable woman and we were fortunate to have someone so charismatic and motivating on our screens and seeing her wonderful face just took me right back to my childhood and for numerous people my age, she was probably the first non-white face I saw regularly – she was entertaining, friendly and charismatic and still comes across as such now.

She was amazing on Playschool and a role model and excellent fun and she’s still amazing and deserves all her high achieving career, success and more.

Many people were avid fans of Floella Benjamin on Play School – racism is taught, it’s not innate, and she’s a fine, talented, intelligent black woman who’s had to endure racism.

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