In my Monday/Tuesday blog, I wrote about the extraordinary salaries being paid to the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (about £100,000 I think) and to the Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (£78,163 to £88,884 a year) at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London. Following that, I decided to do a little research into why so many NHS organisations are rushing to hire (IMHO totally useless and unnecessary) diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE) staff on such eye-watering salaries and equally generous pensions. I think I’ve worked out the reason why the NHS is spending over £100m a year on more than 800 of these DIE (IMHO) complete wastes-of-skin. I explain why this is happening in an article I wrote for the Daily Sceptic website.
Incidentally, one reason why I submit articles to websites like The Daily Sceptic is that I hope (usually in vain) that this might encourage a couple of people to buy copies of my latest book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. But I haven’t sold a single copy for the last 3 days, so that cunning plan didn’t work.
Anyway, here’s a link to my Daily Sceptic article:
Our collapsing NHS is always complaining that it doesn’t have enough of our money. But now it seems to be going one step further – some hospitals are claiming they will go bankrupt unless we pour ever more money into our pathetic excuse for a health service.
There was an article in the Sunday Times at the weekend about Guy’s Hospital in London. The article headline screamed: “Guy’s Hospital in need of bailout”. In the article we were told that: “Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust told staff that it may need to ask ministers for a loan to cover its day-to-day spending unless it could get control of its £84 million deficit”.
Given Guy’s apparently dire financial situation, you’d imagine Guy’s management would have a laser-like focus on ensuring that the money they had was directed to patient care and not wasted on irrelevant woke nonsense. I decided to test this by Googling “Guy’s Hospital” and “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion managers“. To my astonishment (not), I found that Guy’s Hospital had at least two, very-highly-paid (IMHO) wothhless parasites employed to promote the DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) hogwash.
First I found that Guy’s Hospital had a Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. I don’t know how much this important individual is paid. But there was also an ‘Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ on a salary of £78,163 to £88,884 a year. So, I imagine that the Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’s boss – the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – must be geting somewhere in the region of £100,000 a year.
The job specification for the Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion stated: “The Associate Director will also be responsible for advising the Director for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion regarding equality and diversity issues, including changes to legislation, publication of relevant Government and Department of Health documents, good practice.” Forgive my ignorance, but I would have thought that, if the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is pocketing around £100,000 a year of our money, then this Director shouldn’t need someone on a salary of £78,163 to £88,884 a year to advise them “regarding equality and diversity issues, including changes to legislation, publication of relevant Government and Department of Health documents, good practice.”
But hey, what do I know? I’ve never had the pleasure of working for our completely useless, self-serving, bureauratic, increasingly-woke, money-squandering NHS.
Of course, I realise that p*ssing away a few hundred thousand pounds on diversity rubbish isn’t going to make any difference to Guy’s £84 million deficit. But it does suggest that Guy’s management have forgotten that they’re there to serve patients and not to indulge in uber-liberal, woke onanism.
Here, for your enlightenment and entertainment is the job ad for the Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – the person being paid a salary of £78,163 to £88,884 a year.
All we ever hear about Gaza is that it is poor and undeveloped due to supposedly being oppressed by the beastly Israelis. We don’t ever hear anyone mentioning that Gazans receive more aid money per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world. In fact, Gazans receive just over double the amount of aid per inhabitant as the next highest recipient of aid. Yet we never see anyone in the mainstream media wondering what has happened to all the many tens of billions the international community have hosed into Gaza.
So, here are just a few facts. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip totaled over $40 billion between 1994 and 2020. That’s just over $1.5 billion per year. This figure doesn’t include the hundreds of millions of dollars and many millions more of weapons Iran has given to Hamas to kill as many Israelis as they can. The population of the Gaza strip is about two million. The fertility rate of women in the Gaza Strip is about 3.54 childen per woman. That means there are around 363,000 families in the Gaza Strip. If Gazans receive over $1.5 billion per year in aid, then that’s equivalent to more than $4,000 per family per year if I’ve got my decimals in the right place.
Time after time after time, the international community has increased the amount of aid poured into the Gaza Strip and in return expected the Gazans to engage in peace negotiations with Israel:
And time after time after time, the Palestinians have agreed to various accords only to immediately break them and launch violent Intifadas against Israel. Evidently, our Gazan friends prefer hatred and conflict to peace and prosperity.
As for where the many tens of billions of aid have gone, of course building over 200 miles of tunnels with an electricity supply and equipping them for 40,000 to 50,000 fighters is probably quite expensive. And I rather suspect that most Hamas bosses have luxury mansions in places like Qatar and Dubai along with incredibly healthy offshore bank accounts while ordinary Gazans can’t afford to feed their families. Moreover, building all these tunnels must require quite a lot of concrete. So there wouldn’t be much left to build homes and schools and hospitals and suchlike for Gaza’s two million Jew-hating, Hamas-adoring citizens.
Instead of blaming the Israelis for the desperate plight of Gaza’s two million population, perhaps it would be more appropriate (though rather politically-incorrect) to blame the corruption, stupidity, backwardness, religious fanaticism and predilection for violence and hatred of the Gazans themselves for their misery?
What to say about yesterday? There were two events showing that climate-catastrophist lunacy is totally out of control. These two events were:
March – “hottest on record” lies
European Courth of Human Rights ruling that governments have a duty to protect their citizens from the (non-existent) negative effects of (non-existent) human-caused climate change
March – “hottest on record” lies
Much of the mainstream media reported yesterday that March had been the “hottest on record”. This is utter nonsense for many reasons including:
It’s questionable whether you can establish an average temperature for the Earth
Even if you could, this would have been impossible prior to the launch of satellites in the mid-1970s as, before then, temperatures were not even measured in most of the world
The chart used by the lying climate catastrophists at the BBC and Sky News and the Guardian started at around 1940. In fact, the hottest period in the last 100 years was in the 1920s and 1930s. In places where there was measurement of temperatures, the Earth cooled from the 1940s through to the end of the 1970s and then started warming again. The climate catastrophists at the BBC and the Guardian and other mainstream media seem to have forgotten that in the mid-1970s the Guardian predicted the start of a new Ice Age:
So by cutting out the boiling hot 1920s and 1930s and starting their charts in 1940, the prostitutes-for-sale (sorry, I meant ‘scientists’) could create the impression that temperature are at record levels
The claim that more forests have been destroyed by fire is also a lie enabled by once again cutting out what actually happened in the boiling hot 1920s and 1930s:
I could go on, but all of this and much much more is covered in excruciating detail in my latest book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS
The bottom line is that the claim March has been “the hottest ever recorded” is a pack of lies.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling
Much more sinister for us than the lie that March has been “the hottest on record” is the ruling made yesterday by the ECHR that, under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the 46 Council of Europe member countries which have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights have a duty to protect their populations from the supposedly ‘devastating effects’ of supposed ‘anthropogenic climate change’. Here’s the story covered by the Daily Mail which will save me repeating it here:
Human-caused climate change isn’t happening. In fact we are emerging from a ‘CO2 drought’. Atmospheric CO2 has risen in the last century from an infintessimally-small 300 parts per million (ppm) to an almost equally negligible 413 ppm. If CO2 had fallen to near 250 ppm, much of the Earth’s plant life would have died and, along with that, most animals and even our ancestors. An ideal level of atmospheric CO2 is probably around 1,000 ppm though, during some of the Earth’s most fertile periods, it was over 2,000 ppm and the Earth didn’t experience what United Nations (IMHO) idiotic Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, called “global boiling”.
The ruling opens the floodgates for a tsunami of legal actions against the 46 Western governments which are members of the Council of Europe. Every time a new power station is mooted or the life of an existing power station is extended or some new buildings are proposed or even a new road is planned, the climate catastrophists will be able to launch a legal challenge using the precedent of yesterday’s ECHR ruling to argue that this will contribute to supposed anthropogenic climate change and thus infringe Article 8 of people’s human rights
I thought the ever-more-woke Western world had lost its marbles when we were bludgeoned into pretending we believed that a man with a penis and testicles in a frock was a woman. But yesterday’s two victories for the deluded climate catastrophists show that there really is no hope for us. Maybe we should all move to Russia or China where they know that all this stuff is total b*ll*cks?
Here’s a very simple chart. It shows the GDP per capita of Israel compared to a few of its Religion of Wonderfulness neighbours:
Maybe this is the real reason our friends from our favourite religion loathe Israel so much – because the success of tiny Israel shows up the Arab countries for being impoverished by their useless, venal, corrupt incompetent, kleptocrat rulers and the idleness and backwardness of their populations?
But I rather doubt any of our politicians or academics or mainstream media would be interested in investigating why there is such a huge difference between the stunning economic performance of Israel compared to Israel’s Religion of Progress and Enlightenment economic basket-case neighbours. After all, that might surface some difficult questions about why (apart from a few enormously-wealthy, oil- and gas-rich Gulf states) countries adhering to the best religion of them all tend to be impoverished, primitive, corrupt, hopeless, overpopulated hell-holes.
Israel became a nation on 14 May 1948. I fear that the country cannot survive to reach 100 years in 2048 – in just 24 years’ time. Here are just a few reasons why I don’t believe Israel can survive:
Population: The population of Israel is just 9.6 million of whom 73.8 percent (7 million) are Jewish, 18 percent (1.7 million) Muslim, 1.9 percent Christian, and 1.6 percent Druze. The population of the Arab world is around 465 million. So Israeli Jews are outnumbered by their Arab neighbours by more than 66 to 1. Moreover, the population of the Arab world is growing much faster than the Jewish population of Israel.
Geographic size: Israel is tiny. The total area of the State of Israel is 22,145 sq.km (8,630 sq.miles), of which 21,671 sq. km is land area. Israel is some 420 km in length and about 115 km across at the widest point. The total area of Arab states is 5.07 million square miles. So Israel is 0.16% of the Arab states. In other words Arab states combined are 630 times bigger than Israel
Jordan alone is 34,495 square miles – 4 times larger than Israel. Egypt is 390,100 mi². Syria is 71,498 square miles and Lebanon is 4,036 square miles. So, four Israel’s neighbors have a total area of 496,093 square miles – 62 times bigger than Israel:
Arab governments’ failures: Israel’s GDP per capita is about $55,000. The GDP per capita in the Arab world is a pathetic $7,625. But if you take out the rich oil producers like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Kuwait, the average GDP per capita for most Arabs is probably somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000. That’s less than a tenth of Israel’s level. The Arab countries’ low GDP per capita is the fault of corruption, incompetence and stupidity. But Arab rulers can never admit their own venality and uselessness. So they need someone to blame for their own mismanagement and looting of their countries. Israel is the perfect scapegoat. Thus Arab rulers can maintain their power and kleptocracy and deflect their citizens’ anger by constantly stirring up their population’s hatred of the Jewish state.
What to do now?
I have a feeling that we should accept the inevitable – Israel cannot survive as a Jewish state surrounded by hundreds of millions of people intent on Israel’s destruction. Instead, I believe the United Nations should put together a plan to gradually hand over Israeli territory to the Arab countries or to a Palestinian administration. This plan could include things like:
Israeli Jews being allowed to settle in any country of their choosing and being given citizenship of those countries
A massive fund being set up to compensate Israeli Jews for the loss of their homes, land and businesses
A gradual pull-out of Israelis protected by a huge international peacekeeping force
A target date of say 10 years being set for all Israeli Jews to be resettled in their chosen countries
What we will then see is a massive injection of entrepreneurialism and economic growth into the countries into which Israelis are resettled. On the other hand, as our Arabian friends take over Israeli land, successful, technically-advanced, modern, democratic Israel will degenerate into a backward, primitive, terrorist-controlled, excrement-covered hell-hole of poverty, corruption, incompetence and misery under its new Arab rulers. Incidentally, I suspect that most Israeli Arabs, while constantly enjoying screaming their hatred of Israeli Jews, won’t be too enthusiastic of the idea of becoming impoverished and their lives ruined as they remain in the former Israel but under incompetent and corrupt Arab rule.
I wonder who the Arabs will then blame for their own self-inflicted wretchedness?
There seems to be a lot of excitement in the media about water companies at the moment. One issue is the huge amounts of effluent they pour into our rivers and seas while paying their chief executives millions in salaries and bonuses. And then we have Thames Water effectively blackmailing the government by claiming they will go bankrupt unless they can raise water bills by 40%, pay lower fines for breaches and keep paying out dividends as part of efforts to avert a taxpayer bailout. While many of our fearless journalists have leapt on the story, I for one have not been surprised.
Here’s what has been happening to our water industry since privatisation in 1989:
When the water companies were privatised most had little to no debt
Most water companies were bought by foreign water companies, financial manipulators and foreign pension funds
Given that water companies have captive customers and a guaranteed income stream every year, the new owners were able to borrow vast amounts of money to pay themselves huge dividends knowing that they could service the ever-increasing debt costs from their guaranteed income and from constantly increasing the prices we have to pay
Most water companies now have debts of 60% to 80% of their value meaning they have enormous interest bills to pay each year leaving little to no money to be invested in improving Britain’s crumbling water network
Some water company owners even set up companies in offshore tax havens and then used these offshore companies to lend their water companies billions at exhorbitant rates of interest. This allowed the owners to ‘double dip’ – they gave themselves huge dividends from the money they borrowed from their offshore companies and made vast taxfree sums from the extortionate interest they paid to their own offshore companies
The whole sorry episode has been a massive rip-off of British customers while the useless excuse of a regulator, Ofwat, has done the square root of zero to control this multi-billion-pound fleecing of the British public.
And in case, you’re wondering why I’m even commenting on this, the reason is that I warned of the utter chaos in the water industry 16 years ago in my 2008 book SQUANDERED: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money.
Here’s just a small part of what I wrote at the time in a chapter titled ‘Regulators without regulation’:
Some of the water companies regularly make profits of 30% to 40% on their UK operations while the same companies only make profits of 5% to 10% in other countries, especially in their home territories
Ofwat also claims: “We monitor the level of water that leaks from each company’s network and take action where leakage is unsatisfactory”. About a quarter of the water that is purified for our use is lost due to leakage – 894 million litres a day – equivalent to each household having another 3 full baths a day or flushing the toilet unnecessarily 30 times a day. Thames Water loses a third of its supply through leakage
Thames Water announced another £30 million a year extra investment (to reduce leakage). This extra investment represented just 2% of Thames Water’s turnover. At the same time, Thames Water was allowed to raise its prices by 21% and a month later it announced it was going to improve profits even more by sacking a quarter of its 6,000 employees, which would give annual savings of about £45 million. One could have suspected that giving the boot to one in four of its staff might actually slow down the rate at which Thames Water could repair its leaking pipes. However, Ofwat doesn’t seem to have noticed this possibility. Anyway, Thames Water’s owners, RWE, hardly seemed to care – in that year the chairman earned £6.3 million in salary and bonuses and he could wash his hands of Thames and its leaky pipes as he was selling off the company for over £1 billion more than he paid for it
Unfortunately for Ofwat, their performance was so utterly dismal that even the normally supine National Audit Office (NAO) could not help wondering what on earth, if anything, the water regulator had been up to for the previous 18 or so years. Following an unusually critical NAO report, Ofwat bosses had to appear before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in mid-2007 to justify their existence. When asked why they had not acted against Thames Water earlier, Ofwat’s chairman replied: “We have contemplated an enforcement order in every year since Thames first started failing”. This prompted the response from a member of the PAC: “We are not interested in contemplation, we are interested in action”.
In an article in the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, Ed Miliband, the shadow net zero secretary, was quoted as saying: “Fourteen years of failed Tory energy policy has seen jobs driven overseas, our clean energy infrastructure imported from aboard, and our country left exposed to the worst cost of living crisis in memory. The Tories have had no industrial strategy and no plan – and households and businesses across the country have paid the price.”
In my very humble opinion, the man’s stupidity or self-delusion is beyond belief. And this clown will probably soon be in charge of Britain’s energy policy after the coming collapse of spineless Sunak’s useless fake Tories at the next election. Let me make this simple, really simple so even someone as thick as the useless Ed Miliband could understand:
Point 1: High energy prices make industry uncompetitive, bankrupt hospitality and service companies and destroy jobs and lives.
Point 2: Britain has some of the highest energy prices in the world (prices in $/kWh):
(Although it looks like Germany has higher energy prices than the UK, Germany’s heavy industry gets its energy at much lower prices than the above chart suggests)
Point 3: The more a country uses expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’, the higher its energy prices. Conversely, the lower a country’s use of useless supposed ‘renewables’ the lower its energy costs:
Point 4: When the farcical MIliband gets his hands on our energy policy, he will accelerate the development of useless and bankruptingly-expensive supposed ‘renewables’ like wind and solar and similarly speed up the move away from reliable, cheap, stable fossil fuels like oil and gas.
Point 5: So, here’s a big tough question. I’ll leave it up to you to guess the answer. When Starmer and Miliband’s Labour fools hugely increase the proportion of useless supposed’ renewables’ to save humanity from being destroyed by Global Boiling, will this:
Make Britain into a world-beating clean energy superpower, as that great energy expert Sir Keir Starmer has promised us – a prosperous clean energy superpower admired and envied by its competitors?
Bankrupt what pathetically little is left of British industry destroying jobs and wrecking people’s lives thus turning Britain into a bankrupt laughing stock used by other world leaders as an example of the crass stupidity of abandoning cheap, reliable fossil fuels and trying to replace them with expensive, unreliable supposed ‘renewables’?
Some years ago, I was in touch with a news service (SWNS) about one of my books. Since then I get occasional messages from SWNS asking for ‘interesting’ stories from people with ‘interesting’ lives. Here’s an extract from the latest SWNS email. I’m blogging about this as it shows the utterly trivial drivel it seems many newspapers and magazines feel is of interest to their readers. If any of these apply to you, you could sell your ‘interesting’ story to SWNS:
(apologies about some text being unreadable. WordPress have just ‘upgraded’ their system. Like most IT upgrades, the newer version is much more complicated than the previous one, so I’m still trying to work out how to use it)
Right now at Talk To The Press we are searching for stories the international and national newspapers would be interested in paying for.These stories are centred around current headlines and themes so if your story sounds like one of the ones listed below, get in touch with us today and YOU could get paid for sharing your experience.
This week, we’re searching for:
‘I won’t babysit my grandkids unless I’m being paid’
Do you refuse to babysit your grandkids unless you’re paid for it? Maybe you feel you should be paid as a babysitter would be and don’t think there should be an exception just because you are family? Get in touch if you charge your family if they want you to babysit.
‘I’m addicted to dating apps’
Are you addicted to dating apps? Do you spend hours a day swiping and messaging potential matches? Maybe you change plans to prioritise time on dating apps? Do you find yourself scrolling into the early hours of the morning? Maybe you go on loads of dates each week – desperate to find someone? We want to hear from you if you feel you’re addicted to dating apps.
‘I shower in front of my kids – I don’t care if they see me naked’
Do you shower in front of your kids and not care if they see you naked? Is it more efficient to have them in the bathroom where you can keep an eye on them while you quickly wash? Maybe you all shower at the same time? Perhaps you still do it in front of some of your older children? Get in touch if you happily shower in front of your children.
‘I’m too hot – people are intimidated by me and I’ve lost out on jobs because of my looks’
Do you feel people are intimidated by your good looks? How does it impact you? Has it meant you’ve lost out on jobs? Lost friends? Or even struggled dating? If this sounds like you – get in touch.
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David Craig, on April 17th, 2024
