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“Invest in Britain or I’ll force you to, minister tells pension funds”, the Guardian reports:
The business secretary, Peter Kyle, has told UK pension funds to “get off their high horses” and invest in Britain or be forced to do so by law.
Expressing frustration at the level of investment in British companies after years of government initiatives, Kyle said the UK’s biggest asset managers “should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success”.
“I don’t think mandation is ideal in any circumstances. But I’ll use it if I have to, because I’m in a rush,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of an event at Lloyds Banking Group’s headquarters in London, he said he was “fed up” with being asked by the City to tweak regulations to boost investment in the UK economy, only to see a lack of investment follow government reforms.
“Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not,” he said.
“They are representing British savers. And so they should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success. And not just sitting aside from the economy, in a walled-off garden. They are out there with the rest of us. They need to get off their high horses.”
Yes, the pension funds are representing British savers. Which means the only duty those pension fund managers should “feel” is the duty they have by law; their fiduciary duty to those savers to invest those savers’ money in the way that is best for those savers. Not best for Britain-as-a-whole, and certainly not some politician’s pet project that nobody in their right minds would risk tuppence on if they were not forced to do it. Best for those savers. Because it is their money. Sorry to labour that point, but it is a point Labour seem to have difficulty absorbing.
And you won’t make Britain a success by forcing people to “invest” (what a lie that word is) in the way the Government tells them to. Britain’s historical success was built on being one of the few countries where people could invest their money as seemed best to them.
Did you notice the mafia-like threat in Peter Kyle’s words “Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not”?
Kyle has form on that. This time last year, when he was Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, he was saying that to be against the Online Safety Act is to side with child abusers. His specific target was Nigel Farage, but he applied it to everyone. In his own words,
I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?
The mountain…
According to the polling company Ipsos,
2 in 3 British adults (69%) would support a law that requires social media companies to use age-verification tools to ban children under the age of 16 from accessing their platforms in the UK, and 3 in 5 (61%) support social media curfews / hour restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds
The route up the mountain…
Support for a law requiring social media companies to use age-verification tools to ban under-16s from platforms drops of 50% if it means everyone in the UK would be required to upload an ID or credit card to verify their age. This holds if ID verification is held by individual social media platforms (50%) or by the device owners, such as Apple or Android / Google (51%).
and
Support dips to just under half (48%) if the law necessitates a total ban on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) within the UK to prevent circumvention.
People sometimes think that all the mockery of the cry of “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” means that it has ceased to be a persuasive argument. This assumption is not true. “We must do this to protect children” is an eternally powerful appeal to humanity’s deepest instincts. Our task is to demonstrate that requiring age verification before any British person can use the internet will not protect children. On the contrary, given the ease with which hostile or criminal forces can steal government data, it will endanger them and endanger adults too. There is also the threat from the government itself to consider – not just this government, but all future ones. Throughout history, authoritarian states have sought to “get them while they’re young and bend their minds”.
Every party in trouble prays for the same miracle, which is amnesia. The Conservative Party’s entire strategy for the next four years rests on the hope that the British people will misremember the last fourteen. Kemi Badenoch has said as much, remarking that it is unhelpful to churn over every incident of those years. Unhelpful to whom, one might ask. Yesterday Reform UK answered her with a website, and I want to spend a few paragraphs telling you why donotforget.co.uk matters rather more than a campaign microsite usually does.
– Gawain Towler
Lots of news today. Nigel Farage has stood down as MP for Clacton, stating he will seek to be re-elected in the resulting by-election. The Daily Mail has defeated Prince Harry and several other high-profile claimants in a phone hacking case brought against it in the High Court, a result that Lord Dacre, the Mail’s publisher, has hailed as a victory for press freedom.
The papers were no doubt equally full on this day twenty-one years ago, before the 7 July 2005 London bombings wiped everything else off the front page.
Gawain Towler explains the ongoing campaign by the British establishment to destroy the existential threat The Reform Party poses to them.
The first aim, the one they would toast if they achieved it, is to take Farage down altogether, to force a resignation. They will not be so lucky. The second aim is subtler and in its way just as dangerous. It is aimed at the rear echelon. At the Reform leaning voter, the not sure but interested, the undecided man or woman who is being told, day after day, that these people are chaotic, tainted, not quite safe. Frighten the reserves and the front line starves.
If Farage were to resign, which he will not, Burnham would call a general election the next morning, before the smoke cleared. Since he will not, there will be a delay, and the pounding will continue. That is the nature of the thing. Preparatory bombardments do not stop because the defenders are steady. They stop when the attacker runs out of shells or out of time.
So what is required of us is not cleverness. It is resilience. We have been shelled before, in 2016, in 2019, in 2024, and we have remained undimmed. Morale is the true objective of every barrage, and morale is the one thing entirely within our own keeping. Courage under fire is not a slogan, it is a discipline, and it consists mostly of not doing things. Not wavering. Not sniping at our own. Not mistaking noise for damage.
If you are even vaguely considering supporting Reform, then you are the target of this carefully orchestrated campaign to convince you to do otherwise. I urge you to read the entire linked article: The Guns Before the Whistle.
Thucydides famously observed that “the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.”
Take courage.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.”
– A J P Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. From the first page.
(Hat-tip: Institute of Economic Affairs at its new site. It manages to tie its insights about licensing laws and trade to the glorious English football victory over Mexico last night in the latter country.)
Establishment clearly running an operation to get Farage.
If they do force him out – clearly the game plan- over technicalities about what he did / didn’t declare, I think they’ll start a firestorm.
The public will see this as the attempted stitch up that it is. Clacton folk (I know them a little) will reelect him in any by election.
Demands to destroy the rotten political establishment will assume a revolutionary vibe.
I almost want the Times columnists types to be so stupid. They are late stage Romanov stupid.
– Douglas Carswell
The government consultation document “Making public services work for you with your digital identity” gives its chapters aspirational names like “Useful”, “Inclusive”, and “Trusted”. Here’s the description for “Trusted”:
Part 5: Trusted includes information on how we will design the new system to ensure that everyone can have confidence that it will protect their data. It includes discussion of technical security measures, data protection standards and how people can exercise greater consent and control when using the digital ID. There is also a chapter on governance and oversight
*
There’s an interesting report in today’s Telegraph:
Russian hackers steal government logins
Russian hackers have infiltrated the email accounts of UK government officials and overseas Foreign Office staff in a major national security breach.
In the sophisticated and ongoing attack – nicknamed FortiBleed by researchers – hackers stole login credentials belonging to government staff, granting unauthorised access to sensitive systems and threatening further infiltration across Whitehall departments.
The history of post-war Britain is essentially the educated middle class giddily, gleefully taking a sledgehammer to every single load-bearing pillar in society in the belief that the roof will somehow stay up through the sheer force of our own cleverness.
We’re now finding out.
– the minimally named “Matthew“
The Americans are gaining healthy life years while we are losing them.
Hmm, that is interesting, no? Thus the UK requires more red in tooth and claw capitalism, more neoliberalism, obviously. Sell the NHS for scrap and go private!
And, well, but that’s not quite how American health care works, not for those over 65. That’s Medicare. Which is paid for by the government. But not supplied by the government. Which is a reasonable guide to what the problem is with the NHS. Tax paid health care is fine. It’s government supplied that is not.
At which point we gain our prescription – sell the NHS for scrap and have more neoliberalism. We’ll gain longer and healthier retirements by doing so.
– Tim Worstall
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration?
Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive.
[…]
All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want.
As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive.
– Anonymous (unsurprisingly)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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