We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Councils begging for your savings isn’t a net zero innovation – it’s an embarrassment”, writes James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
In an attempt to plug the ever-increasing funding gap, bankrupt-adjacent local councils have dusted off the begging bowl and covered it in tinsel.
Under the guise of investment, Green-led Bristol has become the latest council to offer what smells like a voluntary council tax to fund responsibilities that should be met from their existing budgets.
[…]
But in a demonstration of phenomenal gall these local bodies have launched their own Kickstarter for Councils, asking not only their residents, but anyone across the country, to foot the net zero bill – in exchange for below-market returns.
These green bonds can be found on Abundance Investment, a platform that facilitates these loans for a slice of the pie – 0.75pc of the total sum raised alongside an annual 0.2pc fee. The website proudly declares that it offers investments with councils “in a solid financial position”, despite Bristol councillors declaring just two months ago that the body faced bankruptcy if it can’t close its £52m funding gap.
Samizdata is not often seen as the go-to place for investment advice, but, on balance and after careful consideration, I would suggest that readers seeking a home for their money avoid “Bristol Climate Action Investment 1” like the plague and avoid “Hackney Green Investment 2” like Hackney. (“Does ‘Murder Mile’ still deserve its name?” asked the Hackney Post after a lull. Short answer: Yes.)
Nonetheless, I salute these councils for seeking to raise additional money by asking for it instead of demanding it with menaces. I would salute them even more if they moved entirely to a voluntary system. Though the prospect is unlikely, I hope the investors make their money back with interest, so that this trend towards councils raising money by ethical means might spread.
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
“They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
– Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., regarding the case of Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., v. National Review, Inc., et al in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Civil Division 2012 CA 008263 B.
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit.
As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance.
Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling.
“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists.
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder
“Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice”, writes Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph.
The article starts by repeating a familiar refrain about the unprecedented loss of civil liberties during the pandemic.
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
All true, but the real meat is here:
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it”.
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: “Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said.
If was capable of having that thought, he was capable of acting on it, or rather of continuing to act on it. He was not, as I once thought, a man in a panic who, pathetically but understandably, followed the the united voice of “the experts” because he could not imagine doing anything else. As a successful politician he knew the political nature of the pressure he was under and chose to give into it. He switched which expert to follow – switched from the expert who was right to the “expert” who was wrong – on political grounds. Oh, no doubt his decision was influenced by which expert shouted the loudest (it was not Jenny Harries) and said the scariest things, but a refusal to be moved from a rationally-decided course by emotional displays is the very definition of a leader. I wonder, does he ever think now about how near he came to being the second Churchill he dreamed of being? All he had to do was stay firm.
Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
And it was popular. Very popular.
Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Persuading people that they have been badly treated is easy. Persuading them that they themselves have behaved badly and stupidly is not easy at all. How do we do it? A cynic would say there is no need to try. Just publicly blame everything on “the politicians” (in this case Boris Johnson, who certainly deserves plenty of blame but not all of it) in the same way that the Greens publicly blame all the environmental damage they believe comes from humanity’s reliance on oil on “the oil companies” rather than the people who use the oil, namely all of us. But I do not believe that any strategy of persuasion that relies on a conscious lie can succeed in the long run.
Today’s Telegraph boasts a ragebait article by William Sitwell called “The loss of Latin from schools is a triumph, not a tragedy”. He did not enjoy Latin at his prep school, so he is glad that the Labour government abruptly withdrew funding for a programme that had supported Latin teaching in state schools, despite the programme being focussed on schools in deprived areas.
The prep school Mr Sitwell attended was called Maidwell Hall. Labour’s imposition of VAT on private school fees has meant that this school will soon close its doors forever. Mr Sitwell seemed sad about that when he wrote this piece: “The death of my old prep school shows Labour is hell-bent on destroying my way of life”. I would have guessed that the teaching of Latin at prep schools was a small but distinct component of that way of life. I do not know what caused the abrupt change of tone. Pragmatism, perhaps. There is probably some Latin proverb about how the man who is heir-presumptive to a baronetcy is wise to make nice to a Labour government.
Mr Sitwell – if he has some other title, he does not use it when writing in the Telegraph – clearly enjoyed enraging most his readers by writing this:
And to this day, I have no regrets. Nothing I do, say, see, observe or experience ever bears any relation to, or could possibly be enhanced by, an appreciation of Latin. It’s never helped me order a beer in Spain, have a sea urchin removed from my foot in Greece nor brought me any closer to understanding the constitutions, cultures or history of the West.
But what those Latin classes did do was fill my childhood with countless hours of pointless education when I should instead have been forced to study the likes of economics, business, entrepreneurialism, spreadsheets and profit and loss. Now that, believe me, I really do regret. Or as Erasmus probably wouldn’t have put it: “Me paenitet.”
Despite never having learned Latin myself, my sympathies lie with the majority of the Telegraph commenters who argue in favour of teaching Latin and other “useless” subjects. I suspect that if Maidwell Hall and Eton had replaced Latin with Economics, Entrepreneurialism & Spreadsheets circa 1980, Mr Sitwell would have written, with equal passion but less eloquence, about how dismal VisiCalc was and how he wishes he could have learned Latin instead.
Is it better to teach children “useful” subjects, which they can see the point of learning but which do nothing to encourage flexible thinking, and which may turn out to be completely useless if the world changes, or to teach “useless” subjects, for which the advertised benefit of “learning to learn” is small recompense for the certain disbenefit of thousands of hours of pointless toil?
I dunno. You sort it out for your own kids, or let them choose for themselves. The point is that of course the Labour government closed the Latin Excellence Programme for political reasons. They are politicians. That’s what they do. That’s what you gave them democratic power to do.
“Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” asks Jonathan Kay in Quillette.
“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”
The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.
The astonishing thing is not that a remote detection system gave a reading that suggested something dramatic which upon further investigation turned out not to be. That happens all the time, in every field from mining to astronomy. Nor was there anything astonishing about the furore or about the swarms of reporters who converged on the site. If the inconsistencies in soil density had turned out to be dead bodies rather than “old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts” it would have been a knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself.
What is astonishing, what raises the whole Kamloops affair to the level of mass psychosis, is Official Canada’s response. No graves were found, but it decided to have the whole ‘knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself’ jamboree anyway.
… Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.
Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends
Mr Kay charitably says that Canadian journalists did not realise how many of these tales could be traced to “a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.” I suspect that quite a few Canadian journalists did realise it. It is not as if the former Reverend Arnett concealed his views. Unlike many of the journalists, Arnett himself was probably sincerely deluded. Like false positive errors from machines, folk who think that they have secret information about a terrible conspiracy involving someone famous are not that rare. Poor old Arnett missed a trick by only witnessing the late Queen and her consort engage in a humdrum spot of kidnapping and murder. If he had just looked a little longer he would have seen them turn into shape-shifting pan-dimensional alien lizards and would have died richer than he did.
So twelve million Canadian dollars and heaven knows how many tons of earth1 later, the story that led Justin Trudeau to fly the flags on federal buildings at half-mast for almost six months and to hundreds of arson attacks on churches has finally been acknowledged to be a false alarm.
Just kidding over the last bit. Official Canada has not acknowledged it. They are in too deep.
As I suggested above, what made this period in Canada’s history unusual is not that the likes of Kevin Arnett – correction, “Eagle Strong Voice”2 as he later preferred to be called – made bizarre claims and that Noam Chomsky believed them. It’s that the likes of the Law Society of British Columbia believed them.
Not just believed them, but made them into an official doctrine that had to be affirmed by anyone wishing to practise law in British Columbia. The second half of Jonathan Kay’s article tells a story that in its implications is at least as frightening as the hysteria and fury described in the first half. Reading it, one keeps expecting to reach the point where one of the eminent lawyers entrusted with maintaining the standards of their profession in Canada’s westernmost province will finally issue a carefully-worded statement about waiting for evidence before making accusations, or about how both sides of any case must be heard, or about any of that old lawyer stuff that they used to believe in. Four years have gone by and that point has not yet come. More to the point, judging from their behaviour none of these eminent lawyers has yet dared to say to their colleagues, “Guys, I hate to be the one to ask, but have we got a watertight case?”
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Related post: There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal.
1Exactly how many tons of earth remains unclear. As CayleyGraph2015 commented in response to the earlier post, for all the talk of urgent investigation, less actual digging seems to have been done than one might expect given the severity of the allegations and the millions of Canadian dollars given to the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to investigate the site.
2The “Eagle Strong Voice” link takes you to an excellent article by Terry Glavin in the independent Canadian news website The Tyee about Arnett and his claims, including one that might have been the model for “Pizzagate”. It was written in 2008, demonstrating that Arnett was well known on the conspiracy circuit even then. Interestingly, an editor’s note was added to Glavin’s article in 2021 apologetically saying that despite Glavin’s scepticism the remains of 215 children had been detected at Kamloops residential school. I await an editor’s note to the editor’s note.
I did not think I could be shocked any more but this Mail on Sunday story shocked me: “Knock knock, it’s the Thought Police: As thousands of criminals go uninvestigated, detectives call on a grandmother. Her crime? She went on Facebook to criticise Labour councillors at the centre of the ‘Hope you Die’ WhatsApp scandal exposed by the MoS”
In a chilling clampdown on free speech, two police officers pay a visit to a grandmother – simply for criticising Labour politicians on Facebook.
Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
Police conceded that the 54-year-old had committed no crime – yet Mrs Jones says she has effectively been silenced by the officers, as she was intimidated by them calling at her door and is too terrified to post on social media again.
You can watch a video of the visit of the two detectives to her house here: “Helen Jones, 54, had a visit from 2 detectives from the Manchester Police”. The person who can be heard speaking from inside the house via an intercom is Mrs Jones’ husband, Lee. The video ends with the detective who was doing the talking saying (at 1:12), “OK. OK. We’ll give you a call on your phone. I am not going to stand out here if you are not going to speak to me.” So far as I can tell Helen Jones was indeed “spoken to” by phone, not at her door. That does not negate the intimidatory effect of having the cops turn up at your door because of something you said on Facebook about an elected official.
The Mail on Sunday continues,
In one post on 4Heatons Hub, Mrs Jones said of Cllr Sedgwick: ‘Let’s hope he does the decent thing and resigns. I somehow think his ego won’t allow it.’ In another, after posting screenshots from the Trigger Me Timbers group, Mrs Jones wrote: ‘Not looking good for Cllr Sedgwick!!!’ to which another member added: ‘Cllr Sedgwick, will you be resigning?’
At around 1.30pm last Tuesday, while Mrs Jones was looking after her baby grandson at a nearby house, a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door and spoke to her husband Lee, 54, via an intercom.
A shocked Mrs Jones rushed home fearing something tragic had happened to a loved one. At 2.15pm she received a phone call from an officer thought to be the same sergeant who knocked on her door and was told the police had received a complaint about her recent social media posts.
Speaking exclusively to the MoS, she said: ‘[The officer] said, ‘We’ve had a complaint,’ and I immediately asked, ‘From who?’, and he said, ‘Well, I can’t tell you that’.’
She asked if Cllr Sedgwick or his partner had made the complaint. ‘[The officer’s] exact words were ‘Your thought process is correct in that’,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I asked the police officer, have I committed any sort of crime. Why did you call at my door? They said, ‘Someone has spoken to us about your social media posts.’
So what were her exact words? We know that she called for the resignation of Councillor David Sedgwick, but was there something beyond that that has not been reported? I have not been able to find out. But it is acknowledged by Greater Manchester Police that no crime was committed.
Later in the report, a spokesman for Greater Manchester Police is quoted as saying, “We are under a duty to inform her that she is the subject of a complaint.” As Caroline Farrow – who speaks from bitter experience – has pointed out, there is no such duty, and if there were a letter would have sufficed. The cops knew what they were doing when they called at Helen Jones’s door, and Councillor David Sedgwick knew what he was doing when he sent them there: “Had Helen Jones continued to post criticism of Councillor David Sedgwick after being informed of his complaint, the police could claim she could reasonably predict that her posts would cause alarm and distress.”
“Violent offenders face ban on owning knives” reports the Telegraph.
Violent offenders face being banned from owning knives under plans to be considered by the Home Secretary.
Something tells me that the violent offenders will face this prospect with the equanimity that comes from already having faced a ban on being violent criminals.
Offenders with a propensity for knife possession or violence would be designated a “prohibited” person under the proposed crackdown drawn up by police.
They would be banned by law from buying certain types of knives or applying to be a registered knife seller.
Chris Rose has been inspired to do his bit to help the Home Secretary fight crime:
Hi
@YvetteCooperMP
I’ve just opened my kitchen drawer and sternly warned the knives not to wonder off and stab people whilst I’m away otherwise you’ll ban them.
Later today, I’ll also be talking to my car to not drive into any crowds.
The title of this post is taken from the title of this Telegraph article:
All Paul Robinson really wanted were some solar panels on his roof.
The company director, who had recently moved to a quiet market town in Mid Wales, is a firm believer in green technology. In the 12 years before he moved, he had benefitted from solar panels and a home battery, both of which shaved money off his power bill.
The Government offers homeowners grants towards solar panels through its Energy Company Obligation (ECO4) scheme. But to take advantage of the generous initiative, Robinson was also required to install an air source heat pump, an endeavour that proved to be more trouble than it was worth.
“I’m so glad I didn’t pay for any of it,” he says. “The amount it cost is crackers.”
Robinson estimates that around 18 tradesmen – a team of electricians, plumbers, plasterers, and supervisors – descended on the stone barn conversion in Welshpool, with the entire installation costing at least £40,000, according to estimates seen by The Telegraph.
Mr Robinson is understandably glad he didn’t pay for any of it.
UK taxpayers, are you glad you did?
“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
The Government is known to disapprove of the term “two-tier”, especially when applied to policing, in which case, says a recent Home Office report, it can be a telltale sign that you’re of the “far-Right”. Isn’t everything?
I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did.
Yet in the last few days we’ve had a perfect example of how our laws are written to be, and correctly interpreted by judges as, two-tier, meaning that they are laws intended to offer different levels of protection and punishment to different groups of UK residents, depending on their faith or ethnic origin.
Martin Frost of Manchester chose (ill-advisedly, I might add) to burn a copy of the Koran in public, live streaming the event, in response to his daughter’s death at the hands of Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.
It is notable how many media outlets skated over the fact that Hamas murdered Martin Frost’s daughter. You might think the Telegraph’s phrasing (“her death at the hands of Hamas terrorists”) was mealy-mouthed enough, but just compare it to this ITV report that said,
The “trigger” for his actions was the death of his daughter in the Israeli conflict which had affected his mental health, the court heard.
Note the scare quotes around the word “trigger”, the words “the death of” as if she died a natural or accidental death, and the reference to it occurring in “the Israeli conflict”. Not the Hamas conflict, not the Gaza conflict, not even the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the Israeli conflict.
Tom Harris’s article continues,
He [Martin Frost] claimed also to have been protesting at the murder of Iraqi asylum seeker Salwan Momika who was murdered in his apartment in Stockholm after he performed his own act of Koran burning for his internet audience.
Forst [sic] pleaded guilty to charge of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm by displaying some writing, sign or other visible representation which was threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.” That charge is contained in the text of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, introduced by Tony Blair’s government.
The old blasphemy laws may have been consigned to history decades ago, but they were replaced in 1998 by new ones: it is widely accepted that Muslims take very seriously the physical abuse of their religion’s holy book and are known to feel personally offended by any disrespect shown towards it. Similarly, most Muslims also take personal offence at any physical representation of the prophet Mohammed, hence the outcry against the teacher at Batley Grammar in 2021 who did exactly that by showing his pupils a cartoon depicting Islam’s founder.
That teacher is still in hiding.
In modern Britain, Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none. Two-tier protection is unacceptable because it equates to two-tier freedom of expression, freedom to criticise one religion but not a different one.
Yes. To forestall criticism that just saying “Yes” adds little of value, I shall try to give better value by amending it to “YES, YES, YES!!!”
We can imagine the horror that police officers, court officials and politicians must have felt when legal proceedings didn’t go their way in the case of Jamie Michael, an ex-Royal Marine who had served his country in Iraq but whose anger at the Southport murders of three young girls last summer led him to upload an ill-advised rant against illegal immigrants that a member of staff working for a Labour MS (Member of the Senedd) felt so offended that they just had to report it to the police.
I would not have guessed that someone working for a Labour member of the Welsh Government actually did have something worse to do with their time than their day job.
A jury took less than an hour of deliberation to acquit him.
The terms Mr Michael used were obnoxious and unpleasant. But as the jury agreed, that should not impinge on his right to free speech.
Juries often do things like that, even now. That’s why “Progressives” keep whittling away at the jury system: “Former Justice Secretary calls for scrapping of defendants’ right to choose jury trial.”
“Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?”
Dear God. I don’t know where to start.
Is
Israel
Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?
Is Israel
Weaponizing
the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?
Is Israel Weaponizing the
Tragic Deaths
of the Bibas Children?
The children.
The tweet is by Mehdi Hasan, quoting Muhammad Shehada, who describes himself as a “Gazan Political Analyst & Writer.” Mehdi Hasan is a former senior political editor at the New Statesman and is the author of a book called Win Every Argument.
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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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