A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog in which I warned:
“There’s been much media chatter about Labour increasing inheritance tax and/or applying inheritance tax to self-invested pension savings which can currently be passed on free of tax. The experts calculate this could raise a couple of billion pounds.”
“But there is a much more inviting target for a revenue-hungry Labour government which most media commentators and other assorted experts don’t seem to have noticed. Conveniently for Labour, we have pension fund assets of around £2.2 trillion. That’s about the same as our GDP. Now just imagine if Labour could somehow persuade/coerce pension funds to supposedly ‘invest’ (they never use the word ‘spend’) some of that money on Labour’s favourite schemes. For example, some of that money could be blown on utterly useless made-in-China wind turbines and equally useless made-in-China solar farms. Labour could then claim it was generating economic growth while also cutting the country’s CO2 emissions to become Ed Miliband’s dream of being ‘a clean energy superpower’ which would be the envy (laughing stock?) of the world, just like our collapsing NHS. A mere two percent of our pension money wasted (sorry, I meant ‘invested’ of course) by Labour on some crazy Net Zero money pit would give us the illusion of two percent economic growth. Or four percent of our pension savings squandered by Labour each year on nonsense like Great British Energy and employing ever more civil-servant, shiney-arse desk jockeys to do ever less work would give Britain chimerical almost world-beating four percent economic growth. What’s not to like about that if you’re an economically-challenged Labour politician dealing with even more economically-challenged mainstream-media journalists?”
Well, you’ll be pleased/dismayed to see that what I so recently predicted is going to happen. Here are some choice pieces from the latest speech by Rachel ‘the economist’ Reeves:
“That is why I can announce today our latest set of reforms to unlock growth, boost investment and deliver for pensioners.”
“Millions of people across Britain work hard and make sacrifices to save for their retirement, and there are hundreds of billions of pounds worth of assets in UK pension funds. However, not only is the current system not delivering the retirement savings it should be, but it is not doing what it should to support some of our great British businesses.“
“Conservative governments over the past 14 years have promised action to reform the pension market, but have failed to deliver. Where they have failed, I will act.“
“That is why I have instructed Treasury officials to launch an urgent review to make recommendations in the coming months for how we can reform the pensions market so it can deliver a better return for savers and ensure successful businesses can get the funding they need to grow, invest and spread prosperity across the UK. It is what other countries are doing and it is what we should be doing.“
“First, I want to see more pension schemes invest in fast-growing British firms. Even a one percentage point shift in the £800billion worth of assets that defined contribution schemes are estimated to manage by the end of the decade could release an extra £8billion of investment.“
“The same goes for the Local Government Pension Scheme in England and Wales. It is the seventh largest pension scheme in the world, worth £360billion. Its value comes from its 6.6million members, three-quarters of whom are women. This is money that could go towards building vital infrastructure, supporting small businesses and helping to put more back into our towns and cities.“
To briefly summarise. Rachel ‘the robber’ Reeves believes that she and her useless Treasury pen-pushers are in a better position to decide where our pension savings should be invested than pension fund managers. So, rather than our pension savings going into high-performing overseas stock markets, Rachel ‘Robin Hood’ Reeves will force pension companies to throw it into unerperforming British companies. You can expect billions to be squandered on Labour’s ‘Great British Energy’ to give us some of the world’s highest energy prices wrecking what little is left of our manufacturing industry and into Labour’s National Wealth Fund to be p*ssed away on the supposed ‘industries of the future’ like carbon capture, hydrogen power, ‘clean’ aviation fuel and other such politically-correct, eco-fanatical, climate-catastrophist nonsense.
Following his latest medical examination, President Joe ‘living corpse’ Biden’s personal doctor pronounced that the living corpse was “a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
That seems a bit odd because when investigators were looking at whether to proceed with criminal charges against President Joe ‘living corpse ‘Biden for retention of classified documents, they decided in February 2024 to drop the case as there was no possibility of conviction because Biden was: “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
As Private Eye magazine might ask: are these two President Bidens related? I think we should be told.
Could news that Biden possibly has Covid just be the first step in finding a medical excuse for him to pull out of the US election?
Here’s a nice photo of a bunch of civil servants. I think they’re from the Home Office. The challenge is: in view of the fact that about 40% of the UK’s population are white males, how many white males can you spot in this picture?
There was a long (about 30 minutes) piece on the BBC this morning about the disastrous 2,800+ job losses coming at the Port Talbot steel works as the plant closes down its blast furnaces and replaces them with supposedly more environmentally-friendly electric arc steel-making. Here’s a picture of a blast furnace:
As the name suggests, it’s rather hot and thus uses an awful lot of energy. In fact, energy costs account for between 30% and 40% of the cost of blast-furnace steel.
Unlike any of our politicians, I’ve actually worked in two steel mills in two different European countries. But you hardly need to have worked in a steel mill to know that the higher the energy cost is, the less likely a steel mill will be competitive. UK energy prices are around $0.4 kWh. China’s and India’s are about $0.08 kWh. So, if you were Tata Steel, the Indian owners of the Port Talbot steelworks, where would you prefer to make your steel?
the UK with some of the world’s highest energy prices?
India or China with some of the world’s lowest energy prices?
Strangely, in the 30 minutes the BBC spent reporting on the massive redundancies at the Port Talbot steelworks, the climate-catastrophist BBC made no mention of the fact that it was mainly the UK’s eye-wateringly high energy prices, caused by our insane and economically-suicidal Net Zero madness, which are the main reason for destroying what pathetically little is left of our steel industry.
Recently, the UK’s crushing energy prices have led to the closure of the oil refinery at Grangemouth and now threaten our remaining chemicals industry. And now that the crazed, economically-challenged (IMHO) waste-of-skin Ed MIliband has banned all new drilling for oil or gas in the North Sea, our energy prices are going to go even higher, asphyxiating even more of our industries.
I wonder how poor we’re all going to get before our useless politicians realise the damage they are causing fighting a climate crisis which doesn’t even exist?
Apologies for disappearing. But I was quite ill last weekend and had to fight my way through seemingly endless barriers set up to stop people like myself – people who work and pay their taxes – getting anywhere near one of our £125,000-a-year, 2-3 days-a-week elusive GPs. In the end, the highest I could get up the medical hierarchy was a brief session with what’s called a ‘paramedic practitioner’. However, though clearly not having a full medical education, the guy was quite good and did at least have the authority to prescribe the specific antibiotics I needed.
Rather than do my own blog today, I thought I’d link to this YouTube video by the brilliant Dr John Campbell. (And before you all start shouting, yes I do know that he is not a GP but rather got his doctorate in nursing care).
In the video he explains the symptoms and treatment for Lewy Body disease or something like that. As usual with Dr Campbell, the video is informative. But what I found hilarious is that, although the good doctor makes absolutely no mention of a certain well-known man who currently lives in a big white house in the centre of Washington DC, almost every commenter on the video knows exactly who Dr Campbell is talking about. As ever, Dr Campbell uses typical British understatement to drive home his real message.
Here’s a picture of Heathrow airport showing the two runways and the location of the weather station the Met Office, our politicians and the bought prostitutes in the mainstream media use to convince us that we’re all heading for a global boiling catastrophe unless we all stop driving, stop heating our homes, stop eating meat, stop taking holidays, stop everything:
Here’s the level of traffic increase at Heathrow Airport over the last 35 years:
You’ll see that plane movements (the lower line on the chart) have only increased slightly. This is probably because Heathrow only has two runways and is restricted in its hours of operation. However there has been a massive increase in the number of passengers and the amount of freight (the upper two lines). This suggests that there are many more larger planes using the airport. And larger planes means more heat is generated. You or I might have thought that all this additional heat would have an effect on the Met Office’s weather station situated just beside the Northern runway. However, the ever-inventive BBC managed to find a professor who claimed “Planes make a negligible difference”. I humbly suggest that this professor and the BBC reporter stand behind a plane engine when the plane is about to take off and then tell us no heat is generated. In fact, the BBC even went on to claim: “Heathrow – with its large black asphalt runways and airport buildings – naturally absorbs more heat.”
Sorry. But if you sit on tarmac in a built-up area on a hot summer day, it will be pushing out more heat than sitting on some nice cool grass out in the countryside. Moreover, the terminals at most airports are airconditioned. So they’re blasting out heat from their airconditioning systems, not absorbing it.
When trying to push their ‘global boiling’ narrative, the Met Office and the media often quote temperatures at Heathrow Airport or Kew Gardens. But these two places are regularly significantly hotter than the UK average:
All the Met Office’s 300 or so weather stations are grouped into 5 classes according to how accurate they are judged to be. Class 1 stations are the best and Class 5 the least reliable. Ludicrously, Heathrow Airport is a Class 3 weather station. Moreover, most of the weather stations, whose measurements we are supposed to believe, are Class 3 or lower. Only around 7 percent are Class 1:
And the majority (almost 80 percent) are even more useless than Class 3 Heathrow Airport.
So next time the Met Office or the BBC or a clueless scientifically-challenged politician claims the UK is getting hotter, you can be sure they’re spouting climate-catastrophist nonsense as the weather stations the Met Office uses are about as accurate as a blind darts player.
(I’ll just leave this up for one day as it’s not terribly important)
The (multi-millionaire) football pundits have been giving us endless reasons for the English football team’s dismal performance. And the manager, the highest-paid manager at the Euros with his £5m a year, Gareth ‘Eeyore’ Southgate, a man who would be out of his depth in a puddle never mind an international football tournament, has been lavish with praise for his underperforming players: “I’m very very proud of the players. They kept composure in a game where they’ve come into it on the back of a really challenging environment. It’s taken me back to the days when I was playing with England. They’ve dealt with it really well. Composure with the ball, waiting for the opportunity. We dominated the second half.”
I’m not sure how ‘dominating the second half’ achieves anything if you don’t attack and don’t score any goals, Gareth.
Mr Southgate was clearly watching different games to the rest of us. I could only bear to watch the first half of a couple of games. What I saw was the England players maintaining over 70% of possession in the first 20 or so minutes just passing the ball rather lethargically to each other without making any attempt to attack their opponents. That England with its population of 56 million could only achieve a 0-0 draw against Slovenia with its population of 2.1 million is beyond shamefull.
I admit I know nothing about football. But I have noticed that when playing teams from countries which are rather lower down the evolutionary scale, all you need to do is get into their penalty area and they will foul you. And that gives you the chance of actually scoring a few goals.
Anyway, to get back to what might be the real reason for the English players’ plodding inactivity. I remember an interview with a leading English club manager many years ago. I think it might have been Brian Clough, but don’t quote me on that. This manager explained that when any of his players were called up to play for England, they would ask him to get them off by making excuses such as they had injury problems or family issues or whatever. They didn’t want to waste their summer holidays on some international competition when they copuld be having much more fun doing something else.
After all, you have a group of priapic young men at the height of their sexual development with their bank balances bulging with the millions they’re getting paid and their trousers bulging with you know what. They have a choice of how to spend their summer breaks – either touring the world’s nightclubs shagging any girl they want in onesomes, twosomes and threesomes or else playing even more football for some (usually third-rate) England manager.
If I was a ‘shag-everything you see’ England player, I know how I would want to spend my summer hols. I wonder if any of our great mainstream-media football pundits will ever mention this possible reason for the England players’ satisficing?
All hail, England’s tennis girls
Away from misery of watching England’s woeful, unmotivated footballers, we can see some real drive to win in England’s female tennis players. Katie Boulter, Harriet Dart and Emma Raducanu have been wonderful to watch. Perhaps England’s underperforming footballers could learn something from these three girls on how to fight to win?
Apologies for anyone who reads The Conservative Woman as you may already have seen this article I had on The Conservative Woman website on Monday/Tuesday:
There was an article in the Daily Mail yesterday titled ‘Boris Johnson blasts Nigel Farage for “morally repugnant” claims on Ukraine and says he’s “parroting Putin’s lies”: Former PM slams Reform leader’s “nauseating drivel”.’
In the article Johnson ‘lashed out at the Reform UK leader after he doubled down on his comments that the West was to blame for provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’ due to Nato and EU expansionism ever closer to Russia’s borders.
Johnson branded Farage’s comments ‘nauseating ahistorical drivel and more Kremlin propaganda’ and went on: ‘Nobody can fairly accuse me of being an appeaser. I have never sought to justify Putin’s invasion in any way and I’m not now. . . There is only one person responsible for Russian aggression against Ukraine – both in 2014 and 2022 – and that is Putin. To try to spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’
Now, here’s the front page of the ‘i’ newspaper from Tuesday May 10, 2016:
It reported how a certain Boris Johnson, who looks remarkably similar to our former Prime Minister Bpris Johnson, blamed EU expansionism for the fighting in Ukraine. At the time, Mr Johnson was accused of being a ‘Putin apologist’. This is precisely the same accusation the same Mr Johnson is now making against Nigel Farage.
As Private Eye magazine might ask – ‘are these two Boris Johnsons related? I think we shoud be told’.
Seems like the bloviating, blustering Bunter hasn’t realised that, while our mainstream media may be stricken by a convenient near fatal case of amnesia or even Alzheimers in its desperation to give Farage a punishment beating for telling the truth about the Ukraine mess, the Internet never forgets.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there have been a flood of articles and interviews in the media in which the lying, useless, incompetent fake Tories are blaming us voters for the coming Labour landslide and (hopefully, IMHO) annihalation of the waste-of-skin, sleazy Tories.
By trying to blame us voters for our ‘stupidity’, the self-serving, worse-than-rubbish Tories seem to have forgotten why so many voters are so angry:
Immigration: Tories promised tens of thousands a year and instead let in over one million legal migrants a year. The Tories also provided free luxury RNLI and Border Farce taxi services for illegal migrants crossing the Channel and then 4-star hotel accommodation, three meals a day, spending money, free medical and dental care and much much more
Bexit: Tories, particularly under the ghastly Theresa May, did everything they could to sabotage the UK leaving the EU
Net Zero: Tories are wrecking what little is left of British industry and destroying hundreds of thousands of British jobs by giving us some of the world’s highest electricity prices due to their obsession with Ed MIliband’s economically-suicidal Net Zero
Crime: Under the Tories crimes like shoplifting have been legalised and other crimes are seldom investigated by our see-nothing, hear-nothing, do-nothing plods
Spread of woke: Hundreds of millions of pounds of our money is being squandered each year by the public sector employing DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers. The NHS alone is pissing away around £100m a year on this patent nonsense
The Ukraine war: The Tories have lied and lied and lied about the reasons for the Ukraine war. I have an article on The Conservative Woman today (Monday) about this. The article is titled ‘Farage’s punishment beating for telling the truth about Ukraine’
Tax: The Tories have given us the highest level of tax since WWII. While doing this they have lied about cutting taxes while actually increasing them by freezing and, in some cases (dividends and bank interest) lowering, the level at which people begin to pay tax
I could go on, but I imagine you get the picture by now.
The problem is that, when this is all over, the (LibDems pretending to be) Tories are so deluded that, rather than looking at themselves in the mirror to understand why so many people loathe them, the Tories will find numerous excuses to blame everyone but themselves for their own self-immolation.
What voting for Starmergeddon will do to us
I appreciate that very few people will share what I optimistically call my ‘sense of humour’. But here anyway is a very short video I found expressing what I believe the British people will be doing to themselves by voting for the horrific Starmer and his mob of lefty buffoons:
David Craig, on July 22nd, 2024
