The bus fares ‘sleight of hand’

weekend blog

(Apologies to any readers who follow the ‘History Debunked’ YouTube videos. But this story is so astonishing that I believe it deserves to be spread more widely)

Andrew ‘we-all-like-our-best-mate-Andy’ Burnham, our unelected Prime Minister, was wdely paised by the usual Labour-adoring sycophants at the BBC and ITV News and C4 News for cutting bus fares from £3 to £2.

But hold on a minute. When and who raised the cap from £2 to £3? Good heavens, it was Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government which raised the national single bus fare cap in England from £2 to £3 effective January 2025.

So, Labour increased bus fares from £2 to £3 effective in January 2025 and then got adulation in the Labour-loving mainstream media when Burnham reduced them back to the £2 level the Tories had implemented. Burnham’s decision was supposed to help lower the cost of living which, Labour and most mainstream media journalists conveniently seem to have forgotten, had increased under Starmer.

I wonder why most ‘journalists’ can’t seem to remember Starmer increasing bus fares less than 2 years ago?

This (IMHO) ‘sleight of hand’ could remind the more bookish amongst us of a passage in Orwell’s 1984:

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. […] The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically. passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Syme, too-in some more double complex way, involving doublethink-Syme, swallow it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?”

Are we being gaslit by our rulers and their sycophantic, arse-slobbering parasites in the mainstream media?

I’ll leave that up to you to judge.

The four novels that tell us everything?

And while we’re on the subject of books which seem to foretell our future, I’ll make a preposterous claim – there are only four (dystopian) novels one needs to read which explain everything which is happening today. They are (IMHO) Orwell’s ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ Of course, Orwell couldn’t foresee the open-borders, mass invasion of the West and the likely ensuing civil unrest and even civil war. For that, you could consult Christopher Priest’s 1972 novel ‘Fugue for a Darkening Island‘:

And finally, neither Orwell nor Christopher Priest could have foreseen the ludicrous, economically-suicidal, totalitarian climate-catastrophist cult. For this I’d recommend journalist Ross Clark’s 2020 novel ‘The Denial‘:

So, there you have it. The four books I suggest everybody reads to understand our modern world.