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— Just Stop Oil (@JustStop_Oil) December 11, 2022
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December 11th, 2022 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Islamophobia from the likes of Boris Johnson must be punished – and this is how to do it”, writes Dr Suriyah Bi in the Guardian.
The middle two of those would be crimes by any definition (incitement to violence and assault), and the final one is a verbal insult which should not be a crime but which would and should be considered unacceptable behaviour in any decent workplace. The first one consisted of Boris Johnson making a less than reverential quip about the appearance of women wearing burkas in the process of defending their right to wear them. When someone suffers from a fear of flying, the usual strategy to help them overcome it is to educate them about how planes work and how safe air travel is, combined with getting them to experience flight in a supportive and friendly environment, so that they can come to realise that their phobia is irrational. Given that Dr Bi is a lecturer at Oxford, one would think that, as a Muslim herself and an educator at one of our most prominent universities, she would be ideally placed to advise and promote a similar strategy of education and familiarisation in order to dispel Islamophobia. However she appears to think that a strategy of punishment would be more effective. I was going to stop there. Nice bit of snark, that. I could rely on the reader to supply the conclusion that the correlation between knowledge and fear of flying is negative while the correlation between knowledge and fear of Islam is positive because flying is actually safe while Islam is actually dangerous. But in the spirit of Chr…, er, “the holidays”, let’s look a little deeper. → Continue reading: “Islamophobia from the likes of Boris Johnson must be punished” December 9th, 2022 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The politicians have a choice: make greenery consumer-friendly, harnessing technology to preserve the public’s quality of life, or face a calamitous democratic uprising.” For some time I have wondered how bad it has to get, in terms of power cuts, misery and problems to build up for the general public to turn against the net zero cult. Lockdowns depressed me because of their wide public support and the ability of policymakers and various opinion formers to frighten the public. I hope that the evidence of the disasters that lockdowns caused and their costs, all too obvious to ignore, might make it harder for the Green cult to gain such wide support. Remember, lockdowns were justified by slogans such as “two weeks to flatten the curve”. Those advocating for net zero and doing so by calling for more expensive, less reliable energy, as well as demanding things such as small families, far less travel, austerity and the rest are demanding something that stretches into infinity. And all the while they do so when the track record of doom predictions has been spotty, to be polite about it. I don’t know how soon a public revolt against this will come. Far too much of the corporate world feels obliged to buy into the whole ESG agenda, for example. But from my admittedly anecdotal experience I sense a weariness creeping in. (Here is an example of pushback against “woke” corporate activity, which often overlaps with the Green agenda.) There is more discussion about the cant of it all. December 8th, 2022 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach [to Covid] was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down. His account shows how quickly the suppression of genuine medical misinformation – a worthy endeavour during a public health crisis – morphed into an aggressive government-driven campaign to smear and silence those who criticised the response. Aided by the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy. As early as January 2020, Hancock reveals that his special adviser was speaking to Twitter about ‘tweaking their algorithms’. Later he personally texted his old coalition colleague Nick Clegg, now a big cheese at Facebook, to enlist his help. The former Lib Dem deputy prime minister was happy to oblige. Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the general population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health. […] Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical face masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus. People were made to wear them anyway because Dominic Cummings was fixated with them; because Nicola Sturgeon liked them; and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency. – Isabel Oakeshott, laying out a damning narrative of the government’s response to Covid. Strangely, the linked article’s very feeble final paragraph seems at odds with the listed litany of woe Matt Hancock and his ilk were responsible for. December 8th, 2022 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The evangelists for WFH and flexi-working keep telling us that it will create a happier, more productive workforce. But if that were true, then output per person should have soared over the last two years. Of course, it hasn’t. Instead, it has stagnated – and in many cases gone down. The UK’s miserable record on productivity is a long and complex story, but one certainty is that flexi-working won’t fix it.” – Matthew Lynn, taking aim at the whole “working from home” demands from certain quarters. (In many cases, the WFH phenomenon is a preoccupation of those in white-collar areas. One suspects that industrial welders, lorry drivers, supermarket inventory managers, farmers, lab technicians, car mechanics and power station maintenance workers don’t work from home. Mind you, my father, a farmer, likes to joke that he worked “from home”. It was a field.) December 6th, 2022 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“What I am observing is that, contrary to common reputation, the UK political system is turning out to be more gridlocked than the American system. One problem is that governments can very easily lose their majorities and fall, as witnessed by the quick succession of three British prime ministers, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and now Rishi Sunak. To provide a simple example, it has been difficult for any of those governments to legalize fracking (Johnson did not, Truss made gestures in that direction, Sunak has claimed he will not). If nothing else, fracking would disrupt the rural and suburban environments of Tory voters, and endanger the stability of a Conservative government. The end result is that Britain is less energy-independent, more budget constrained and as a result more constrained in what it can do politically.” December 5th, 2022 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I first read of the storm-in-a-teacup story of an 83 year old royal aide, Lady Susan Hussey, asking some black woman who runs a charity, Ngozi Fulani “where are you actually from?”… I thought it seemed rather a crass line of questioning in this day and age. Indeed, cringeworthy was the term that came to mind. But then I saw a picture of Ngozi Fulani (if ever there was a Liverpudlian sounding name… previously known as Marlene Headley) dressed like an extra on the set of some Black Panther movie, suddenly the entire encounter started to look entirely different.
Turns out the woman was cosplaying as an African and yet took umbrage when someone consequently assumed she was African (pro-tip Susan, actual Africans rarely dress like that which should have been a giveaway). The moment Ngozi Fulani started flouncing around announcing how upset she was at such ‘racism’, the response should have been to tell her to grow the hell up and make damn sure she never gets invited to any official functions in the future. December 1st, 2022 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Shoplifting isn’t the real crime, poverty is”, tweets Owen Jones. The tweet links to this video excerpt from the Jeremy Vine Show, in which the host tries several times to get Mr Jones and the other panellists to give straight answers on whether it is wrong for shops to put anti-theft tags on commonly stolen goods. He doesn’t get any. The responses he does get are variations on two themes, firstly, the non-sequitur “Yes, it is wrong for shops to try and stop their goods being stolen because poverty is the bigger crime”, and secondly, “I don’t condone shoplifting, but here’s why I condone shoplifting.” At 2:25 Mr Jones says, “The way to abolish shoplifting is to abolish the underlying cause, which is poverty and the cost of living crisis”. So the answer was in front of our silly noses the whole time! In future videos Mr Jones will tackle the shocking prevalence of “food deserts” and “health care deserts” in poor areas because so many supermarkets, corner shops and pharmacies have closed down. November 27th, 2022 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
To see the folly of the UK’s approach, you just have to look at Sweden, which had no lockdown and far lighter restrictions. As a cancer surgeon pointed out in the Spectator last year, the difference in access to cancer services was astonishing. Taking prostate cancer as an example, during the first wave in 2020, the number of patients undergoing prostatectomies fell by 43 per cent in Britain, but by just three per cent in Sweden. Such a stark gap cannot simply be blamed on the virus. Lockdown is the difference here. Perhaps the most obvious impact of lockdown has been on the economy, where a new grim milestone is surpassed every month. Shops, restaurants, offices and factories were shuttered for months on end in 2020 and 2021. Vast swathes of the economy were either mothballed or severely disrupted – far more by state-enforced restrictions than by the pandemic itself. The lockdowns of 2020 resulted in the UK’s worst recession in the history of industrial capitalism – a fall in economic output not seen since the Great Frost of 1709. November 24th, 2022 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Autumn Statement was a tragic miscalculation, the final failure of a project to undo the gravest mistakes of the New Labour era and shift the UK in a more dynamic, more conservative direction. Lacking any meaningful plan for economic growth, and postponing many of the most difficult decisions on spending until after the next election, the Statement passed the costs of a ballooning state onto the productive parts of the economy when disposable incomes are collapsing. It was a victory for the Treasury technocrats who have resisted every attempt to move the UK away from Brownite orthodoxy. November 20th, 2022 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
The brutal demise of the Truss administration following the mini-budget has been widely attributed to the market’s reaction to the expectation of unfunded borrowing occasioned by tax cuts and the fuel price cap. To the contrary: the market’s behaviour was quite clearly a response to the actions — and inactions — of the Bank of England, before, during and after the mini-budget. One part of, but not all of, the case against the Bank has been cogently made by Narayana Kocherlakota, a well-respected economist and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, in a Washington Post piece entitled “Markets didn’t oust Truss — the Bank of England did”. Kocherlakota’s view was that the Bank of England was responsible for the crisis, through “poor financial regulation and highly subjective crisis management”. Outside the UK chatterati, this view is widely supported. November 18th, 2022 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Today’s Autumn Statement was the latest confirmation that at some point British politicians replaced the idea that ‘people should be able to live well’ with ‘pensioners should be able to live well, and damn the rest’. You are expected to scrimp, save, forgo the pleasures of youth, postpone having a family, and possibly never have one, in order that your money and earnings can be directed to the most noble cause there is: propping up the value of rental properties, and paying for the healthcare and pensions of Boomers.” As I noted earlier this week, there is a problem with a lot of people not bothering to get a job, and there are issues there. Some of you have argued that young people, weighed by debt and alarmed by where things are going, are giving up on work and ambition. I think this is a bit glib – gaining work skills and character is still important, for all economic and political weathers. There’s no doubt though that the sort of message coming out of today’s autumn statement by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, is that if you are ambitious and fortunate enough to be earning a lot of money, even more of that is going to the State, and in many cases, to support the older generation. We are seeing, I think, the politics of ageing right in front of our eyes. November 17th, 2022 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
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