|
|||||
|
“The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.” – Saki (aka Hector Munro). I just liked this quotation. Yes, it has nothing really to do with anything current, which for my mental balance is a blessing. If anyone needs a mental health break from the Zombie Apocalypse, I recommend all of Saki’s stories. January 6th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In less than a year, our government has dictated 1) when we can leave our homes; 2) if we can work; 3) what we can buy; 4) what we have to wear in public; and 5) who we can see in private. All from the initial ‘ask’ of a two-week lockdown to “flatten the curve”. Let that sink in. January 5th, 2021 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown? How can you justify failing to subject lockdown to a detailed cost benefits exercise? And yet you are going down the same un-costed route again. How can you justify outsourcing the entire educational, economic, mental and social wellbeing of the nation to ever more secretive and unaccountable NHS quangos with their own political and vested interests all supposedly under the control of Matt Hancock at the Department of Health? Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to. December 23rd, 2020 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Don’t forget, of the two miasmic horrors of the 20th century only one is unfashionable currently. A recommendation to invade Poland and turn people into soap will get you jailed these days. A recommendation to invade Poland and eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class gets you a book contract. December 21st, 2020 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Priyamvada Gopal and Gavan Titley in a piece for the Guardian called “The free speech row at Cambridge will restrict, not expand, expression”. Did you guess what was coming? December 19th, 2020 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
[R]ight now is really the wrong time to be raising taxes upon anything. This is true whether you use a Keynesian, MMT or even – spit – neoliberal analysis of the economy. Recessions just aren’t the time to be increasing taxation. This means we have some time to discuss that future tax rise of course. My own response would be let’s kill the quangos and pay for everything from their rotting corpses. A minority view to be sure but one that would both work and also gain at least some support. December 12th, 2020 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“With the end of the year approaching, I have been thinking about which of my views have changed over the last 12 months. Here’s one: I no longer think Brexit is a bad idea. I’m not ready to endorse it, because I don’t feel comfortable with the nationalism and populism surrounding so much of the Leave movement, but I no longer wish the referendum had gone the other way.” – Tyler Cowen, writing in Bloomberg. This article is going to give some of its readers heartburn. December 11th, 2020 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Jan 1st 2021 comes along & UK has No Deal (or a Canada Deal) with EU, I will be very happy with Boris. But on Jan 2nd 2021, I will be calling for Boris to be driven from power before he destroys the nation with his eco-fascist Net Zero lunacy & insane lockdowns. – Perry de Havilland December 10th, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a 10-commandment plan for a green industrial revolution. At a cost of £12 billion, he will have all Britons driving electric cars powered by North Sea wind turbines and giving up their gas boilers to heat their homes with ground-source heat pumps. He will invent zero-emission planes and ships. This vast enterprise will create 250,000 jobs.” – Matt Ridley, who is as unimpressed by the UK government’s fantasy energy policy as I am. For me, the drive towards a supposedly “zero-carbon” economy is an obsession that I fear will blight much of what is left of my life and those of many others. Pushing back on this will be on a par with the drive to bring down the Soviet Union decades ago. December 9th, 2020 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Roger Waters, a co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd, is protesting Twitter for censoring the youth and student movement of the Socialist Equality Party. It’s funny to see the Left suddenly upset about censorship. I applaud Waters’ stance about the importance of free speech, but where was his activism when social media was (and is) censoring the other side? – Zilvinas Silenas pointing people at an article by Jon Miltimore December 6th, 2020 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
It appears that our existing monetary systems have run their course. Central bankers may or may not be deliberately engineering or amplifying crises in order to usher in new systems. The World Economic Forum seems to be on board. So shutting down the world economy in a calculated but unnecessary response to COVID has caused a monetary system crisis so profound that some kind of dramatic monetary system reset is required, and the global economy is going to go down as a COVID death. Luckily, they had a Great Reset on the shelf. Ready for your ID card? December 5th, 2020 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Lockdowns’ work very well if what you want to do is to destroy a happy and prosperous society and replace it with a desert. It will cost much more as the measureless debt incurred by Rishi Sunak begins to bite in the form of taxes, inflation, shrinking real wages and ravaged pensions and social services. No wonder they dare not announce an actual Budget. It would be the most horrifying public experience since The Exorcist. So the thing to do is to win back what we lost in March. This requires determination, ruthlessness and large numbers. But it is very easy. Parliament, very slowly waking from its long, induced coma, discusses the latest prison rules on Tuesday. Before then, I beg and urge you to write to your MP, and to get your friends, neighbours, colleagues and family to join you. Numbers are crucial, as you will see. On your computer, please find writetothem.com. This will direct your letter to your MP in easy steps. Then write, briefly, politely, acidly. Say only this: ‘If on Tuesday you vote to destroy the jobs and livelihoods of others, do not expect to keep your own. When the reckoning comes for this, there will be no such thing as a safe seat. Scottish Labour MPs once thought their seats were safe. Look what happened to them.’ Do not worry about any reply you receive or do not receive. These boobies mostly cannot reason. But they can count. And if enough such emails arrive, they will at last grasp what they have done, and fear for their majorities as they should. This is pretty much the only lawful means of resistance we still have. If you do not use it now, to the full, when are you going to do so? And if lawful protest is ignored, what do people think is going to happen when the P45s and the bankruptcies spread like a great puce blot across the country through the miserable winter months, and next spring brings no real release? November 29th, 2020 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||