Without exception, every media commentator has claimed that the one-day Wagner mutiny has mortally wounded Putin and that it’s only a matter of time before he’s deposed.
I believe this may be an excellent example of ‘Confirmation Bias’.
Confirmation Bias is defined on Wikipedia as ‘people’s tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with their existing beliefs. This biased approach to decision making is largely unintentional, and it results in a person ignoring information that is inconsistent with their beliefs.’
All our media want to believe that Putin has been weakened. So that’s how they report recent events in Russia. But I’m not so sure that the Wagner fiasco has weakened Putin. In fact, it might have made him stronger. Here are some of the reasons I suspect Vladimir ‘$200bn’ Putin and his multi-billionaire kleptocrat cronies will be celebrating:
Putin faced down the mutiny and refused to take any phone calls from Prigozhin. I imagine that’s when Prigozhin realised he’d gone too far and decided to do the Russian version of a reverse ferret and scuttle back to Rostov-on-Don
Putin’s people confiscated around $50m in foreign currency and gold bars from the Wagner Group’s HQ
the Wagner Group has effectively been disbanded and is handing its heavy weaponry to the Russian armed forces which is what Putin and the Russian military wanted to happen when they started a confrontation with Wagner
Prigozhin has been exiled to Belarus and is at risk of arrest if he visits any other country
Prigozhin’s fighters must either join the Russian army, go home or go into exile with their boss in Belarus
Putin never forgives and never forgets. It seems likely that Prigozhin will have difficulty buying life insurance and will either fall out of a window or eat a polonium burger in the near future
So, it seems to me to be a win for Putin. He has remained in power; Prigozhin is a (possibly soon to be dead) exile; the Wagner Group has been dismantled and any other challengers will have seen that it’s not so easy to deputinise Russia.
But hey, maybe it’s just stupid ignorant me who is suffering from ‘Confirmation Bias’?
I have written several times on this blog about how I believe that the freedoms and material well-being we have in the West, and which so many people take for granted, are just a tiny unrepresentative historical blip. I have proposed that 99.9% of all the people who have ever lived or who live now have spent their lives in misery and poverty oppressed by gangsters, crooks, despots and clowns. And, as the son of an immigrant who fled to Britain to escape oppression, I can’t understand the loathing our ruling political, academic and media elites have for Western culture and society. I can’t understand why they want to destroy everything the West has created with their weapons of choice – replacing us using mass open-borders immigration, trashing of our history, anti-white racism, ludicrous deindustrialisation through Net Zero, cancellation of free speech and denial of basic biology.
Here’s Neil Oliver saying pretty much the same thing though much more eloquently than I ever could:
I’m writing and posting this blog on Thursday everning. So I don’t know if the mainstream media will cover this story. If they do, I apologise for wasting your time. But I suspect this won’t be mentioned as it contradicts the mainstream-media narrative that youth and diversity are wonderful and white middle-aged men are a curse on humanity. So the more diverse we are and the fewer white middle-aged men we listen to, the more the world will be a modern paradise. Or so we’re told. Especially on Windrush Day when we celebrate the ‘amazing’ contribution people from the Carribean have supposedly made to our country.
Stockton Rush, CEO of the OceanGate company responsible for the Titanic exploration (tourist trip?) submarine currently lost at sea, seems to have prioritized diversity over experience when putting together his company. “When I started business… other sub operators [were] out there but they typically [had] gentlemen who are ex-military submariners… a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” he said during a 2020 intervuew.
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational… [A] 25-year-old who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” he said while an image of a female crew member showed on screen, adding: “We also want our team to have a variety of different backgrounds.”
Of course, I am not an undersea exploration expert. But I am a qualified ‘day skipper’, so have a basic understanding of things like water and waves and suchlike. And I imagine that had the submersible company employed what the big boss seemingly contemptuously refers to as ‘a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys’, who were ‘ex-military submariners’, then these ‘50-year-old white guys’ might have suggested things like:
what about having a transponder, like they have in planes, so rescuers can find us if something goes wrong?
what about having a big metal loop on the top of the submersible so we can be winched to safety if we have problems? From the little I have seen, I believe that had the submersible been found in time, the rescuers would have had the almost impossible job of looping a cable round it as there was nothing to attach a rescue cable to
what about having back-up electrical systems as the electrics had already failed on several previous dives?
is it a great idea that the submersible can only be opened from outside, so people inside have no means of escape under their control as they are bolted in? So, even if the submersible had floated to the surface, the people inside could still have died from lack of oxygen had rescuers not reached them in time to unbolt the craft
is it a great idea that parts of the submersible were bought from the local branch of the American version of B&Q? After all, the pressure at 3,000+ metres is rather more than in the typical DIY home improvement. Though, I do appreciate that, if you open an account at many DIY stores, you do get better prices on everything you buy
shouldn’t we get some kind of safety certification before taking paying passengers to what is probbaly the most dangerous place on Earth?
is a vessel piloted by a gaming controller really a serious design to travel to what is probbaly the most dangerous place on Earth?
Maybe there are good reasons why other submersible companies employ ‘50-year-old white guys’ who are‘ex-military submariners’ who could pose awkward questions based on their real-life experience rather than ‘inspirational, diverse’ young people with little to no experience and who probably wouldn’t have the confidence to question questionable decisions made by their big boss?
Here’s the interview in which the CEO of the submersible expresses his admiration for the ‘inspiration’ of young diverse people and his contempt for 50-year-old white guys’ who are ‘ex-military submariners’.
I suspect the BBC and C4 News won’t be mentioning this:
He’s directly responsible for over 7 million deaths from the Chinese Wuhan lab-leaked plague. Though, if you add in all those who died from being unable to asscess medical care for other conditions, all those killed by the ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ vaccines and all those whose businesses and lives were destroyed by the lockdowns, perhaps the death toll is nearer 20 million?
But this guy is laughing. Why? Because he just got away with mass murder. Nobody in the Third World dares criticise him as many countries there are victims of Chinese debt colonialism. And nobody in the developed world dares criticise him because with its population of 1.4 billion, including a rising middle class of about 500 million, China is a key export market for the larger Western companies and so nobody wants to upset Mr Xi Pinpong.
Let’s remember how we were lied to
While everyone has been treading on eggshells to avoid any criticism of China, I thought it might be useful to trace the timeline of the start of the Chinese lab-leaked plague to remind us of the criminal dishonesty of the corrupt Chinese government.
Realising that there was a new infectious disease spreading, the Chinese Communist Party banned all internal domestic travel by the end of January 2020. However, the Chinese government has been accused of putting pressure on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to refrain from recommending international travel restrictions till the end of March 2020 – a full two months after China’s Covid lockdowns. At the opening of the WHO’s Executive Board meeting on 3 February 2020, the WHO’s chief, Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was quoted as saying: ‘There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent. The WHO stands ready to provide advice to any country that is considering which measures to take’.
In Europe, the plague first spread to Northern Italy as there are a lot of supposedly ‘Italian’ (particularly fashion) companies there actually owned and staffed by Chinese. So there were a lot of people travelling between China and Italy. From Italy, the plague quickly spread throughout Europe.
When the USA under President Donald Trump did start to advise against travel to or from China, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hua Chunying, criticised the U.S. travel advisories saying: ‘The U.S. government hasn’t provided any substantial assistance to us, but it was the first to evacuate personnel from its consulate in Wuhan, the first to suggest partial withdrawal of its embassy staff and the first to impose a comprehensive travel ban on Chinese travellers’. And, of course, leading Democrats and most of the U.S. press accused Trump of being a ‘racist’.
On 11 March 2020, the WHO belatedly declared Covid a global pandemic. But by that time the number of cases globally has grown thirteen fold. By then, according to the WHO’s own website, more than 118,000 cases had been reported in over 100 countries and over 4,000 people had died. But it wasn’t till 27 March 2020 that Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to limit international flights from China. China’s Civil Aviation Administration announced that: ‘ninety percent of international flights would be temporarily suspended and the number of incoming passengers cut from 25,000 a day to 5,000 a day’. But by then it was too late as Covid had become a global crisis. By the end of April 2020 the U.S. had lost around 60,000 lives and Italy, Spain, France and Britain around 20,000 each. Worldwide, there were over 200,000 deaths and that was doubling every two weeks.
What about the Ethiopian?
Here’s the big boss of the WHO, Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with his Chinese BFFL:
I’m sure Tedros is a wonderful human being who loves dogs and children and whose favourite film is The Sound of Music. But some people, cynical people, might think he’s a worthless, corrupt, self-serving, money-grabbing, incompetent bureaucrat who knowingly aided and abetted Xi Pingpong’s mass murder in order to ensure China’s support for his own continuation in the wonderful WHO top job. After all, despite his catastrophic mishandling of the lab-leaked Chinese plague pandemic, in particular his refusal to announce a pandemic and his refusal to propose an international travel ban, in May 2022 our friend Tedros was re-elected to a second very lucrative five-year term as WHO boss. And he would never have got that without Chinese support.
Anyway we’re not allowed to criticise Tedros as he’s more than suntanned and so any criticism would be ‘racist’ and ‘neo-colonialist’ and ‘white-supremacist’ and suchlike.
And so there is a deafening silence amongst world leaders and the media about the seemingly minor matter of between 7 million and 20 million unnecessary deaths caused by the laughing Chinaman and his Ethiopian chum.
The Wuhan Song
And for any new readers who haven’t seen it, here’s a video I made three years ago about the Chinese lab-leaked plague at the time when we were constantly being told it came from the Wuhan ‘wet market’ and any suggestion it came from a lab leak were condemned as psychologically deranged conspiracy theories:
I have previously written blogs about two individuals who a really cynical cynic might suspect were promoted more for their woke credentials than for any proven ability or experience.
First there was the (IMVHO) utterly useless Dame Cressida ‘Dickless’ Dick who seems to have almost single-handedly wreaked havoc in the collapsing Met police. And I speculated that the NHS’s new (seemingly invisible whenever there’s a problem to be solved) new boss Amanda Pritchard might be hewn from the same marvellous material as Dame Cressida:
More recently I wondered whether Dame Sharon ’empty-shelves’ White, a lady with no retail experience that I could see, might really be what the formerly respected and now loss-making John Lewis and Waitrose needed to save the company from a coming collapse:
And now I think I’ve found yet another individual who could be following in the noble tradition of Dame Dick and Dame Empty-Shelves.
Last week the BBC reported on the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Police Force, a certain Sarah Crew, saying she believes her own force is “institutionally racist”. Sarah Crew said she came to that conclusion after applying a series of criteria to Avon and Somerset Police following a report into the local criminal justice system: “I’m in no doubt that, by Baroness Casey’s criteria at least, Avon and Somerset Police is institutionally racist,” Ms Crew said. “I must accept that the definition fits – it does for race,” added Ms Crew.
Not content with accusing her own officers of racism, Ms Crew went even further: “I think it’s likely too for misogyny, homophobia and disability as well, though the gaps in the data don’t give us the sense of scale, impact or certainty that we have for race.”
A cynic might think that Ms Crew has just learnt a lot of big, new, important words like ‘institutionally racist’, ‘misogyny’ and ‘homophobia’ on her Critical Race Theory and other woke training sessions and is keen to use them to demonstrate her woke credentials.
Personally, I’m somewhat doubtful about her claim that her subordinates are ‘institutionally racist’ as I rather suspect that the region of Avon and Somerset probably has the lowest proportion of multi-cultural enrichers of any police force in England. So there probably aren’t too many people for the Avon and Somerset police to be racist to.
Moreover, I’m no expert in human motivational theory. But I have managed project teams for most of my working life. I imagine that if I went around telling all and sundry that my teams were all made up of pig-ignorant racist thugs, that really wouldn’t be a great way to generate loyalty and improve performance. But I suppose I must bow to Ms Sarah Crew’s greater experience. Or maybe it’s just that in today’s public sector, demonstrating your wokeness is much more important to your career progression than actually delivering results.
Anyway, here’s a link to the BBC News article featuring Chief Constable Sarah Crew’s views and then you just click on the first image to watch the short video of this fine lady liberally crapping all over her own subordinates:
On Friday 9 June, I received an email from Waitrose telling me to “Get ready to celebrate Pride”.
This email flaunted how woke Waitrose was: “It’s Pride month, and we’re looking forward to celebrating with family, friends and colleagues – and of course, delicious food and drink!
“At Waitrose and John Lewis, we’re committed to inclusion – and our LGBTQIA+ network, Pride in the Partnership, is always busy. So far this year, we’ve celebrated LGBTQIA+ History month in February and International Trans Day of Visibility in March with events and educational packs for Partners.”
Copying this from the email Waitrose sent me, I was reminded of a few lines from a job ad for a Diversity, Inclusion and Equality assistant for Lincoln Community Health Services Trust which I included in an article I recently wrote for The Conservative Woman. The candidate’s responsibilities included: “Set up meetings, facilitate arrangements for EDI celebration weeks and days (to include Black History Month, LGBT+ History Month, Carers week and International Women’s Day’.
I imagine all Waitrose stores will be festooned with Gay Pride rainbow banners and suchlike. Well, I guess they need something to put in their stores as the shelves seem rather empty:
Apparently Waitrose recently used an Indian IT company to ‘upgrade’ their IT systems. As usual with any IT ‘upgrade’ chaos ensued. One tech website reported:
‘A bungled system update has left the chain’s stores with a shortage of fresh produce, while customers have also reported problems using its app and securing slots for deliveries. Waitrose, which is part of John Lewis, has 329 stores across the UK.
‘Waitrose customers started reporting problems over the May Bank Holiday weekend. A system update took longer than expected, which interfered with the delivery of fresh produce.
Tech Monitor has contacted Waitrose to find out more information, but a spokesperson for the chain told the Daily Telegraph on Friday that the problem had been fixed. “We’re really sorry for the disruption that some customers faced. We’ve fixed the cause of the problem, and have regular daily deliveries going to all our branches,” the spokesperson said. “Many shops now have good availability, and we’re addressing localised issues as quickly as possible.”
Well, I went to a large Waitrose store on Monday this week and I can assure you that ‘the cause of the problem’ has not been fixed – more than half the basic everyday items I wanted to buy were unavailable. The shelves were empty.
Meet Sharon ’empty-shelves’ White
That brings us to Dame Sharon White, who I have affectionately dubbed Sharon ’empty-shelves’ White. Though here she is in a Waitrose shop which apparently had some stock on its shelves
According to Wikipedia, Dame Sharon has had a stellar career:
White worked for a church in Birmingham before joining the British civil service in 1989. She worked first at the Treasury and later for the British Embassy in Washington. She also worked at the 10 Downing Street policy unit during the Blair Government, at the World Bank, and as a director general at the Department for International Development in 2003–09 and then at the Ministry of Justice in 2009–11, and also at the Department for Work and Pensions
In December 2014, it was announced that White would be the chief executive of Ofcom from March 2015. In June 2019, it was announced that White would be stepping down from her role at Ofcom to take a position as the sixth Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership. It was confirmed that White will be awarded an annual salary of £990,000 for her role at the John Lewis Partnership, a significant increase on her previous salary, which was £341,700 according to data released by Ofcom.
Hopefully readers will have noticed that all Dame Sharon’s previous jobs before taking over at the John Lewis Partnership (which includes John Lewis and Waitrose) were in public-sector organisations where you tend to be handed huge sums of taxpayers’ money for what many of us wouldn’t describe as ‘work’. Most of the people leading British retailers and supermarkets have spent their lives in retail and have a vast amount of retail experience. As far as I can see, Dame Sharon has never had to do the difficulty job of providing anything that a customer might want to buy at a price the customer would be willing to pay.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a company bringing in a new boss with a new perspective and new ideas. And Sharon has, I believe, proposed things like destroying the John Lewis partnership structure by bringing in new investors who will want to be paid dividends every year and also building flats above or instead of stores. But before coming up with brilliant new ideas, it could be useful if the new boss could prove they were capable of successfully running the basic business for which they are responsible. However, in March 2023, the magazine Retail Gazette reported: ‘John Lewis Partnership has plunged to a loss of £234 million and admitted it could not afford to pay staff their traditional annual bonus.’
The Retail Gazette also reported: ‘John Lewis Partnership chairman Sharon White has pledged to return the retailer to profit before 2026, adding that staff bonuses would only return “when affordable”. Following three years of losses, White’s five-year plan, kicked off back in 2021, would “get the partnership back to sustainable profit”.
And Dame Sharon is quoted as saying her recovery plan would create: “a broadly based business with brilliant retail at the core, built on excellent customer service, quality and ethics”. Though from the little I have read, I believe Dame Sharon’s great plan includes swingeing cost cutting, which usually means getting rid of loyal staff so the big boss can get a massive bonus.
Go woke, go broke?
That brings us to the cliché: ‘Go woke, go broke’.
A cynic might wonder if John Lewis’s and Waitrose’s current problems are yet another example of “go woke, go broke’. After all, Waitrose boasts: “At Waitrose and John Lewis, we’re committed to inclusion – and our LGBTQIA+ network, Pride in the Partnership, is always busy. So far this year, we’ve celebrated LGBTQIA+ History month in February and International Trans Day of Visibility in March with events and educational packs for Partners.” Yet at the same time shoppers are reportedly abandoning Waitrose in droves as there’s no point going to a shop with loads of empty shelves.
A really nasty cynic might even wonder if Dame Sharon ’empty-shelves’ White is following in a new tradition of ladies such as Dame Cressida Dick at the failed Metropolitan Police, Amanda Pritchard (who no doubt will also soon be a ‘Dame’) at the collapsing NHS and Alison Saunders at the useless Crown Prosecution Service who have possibly been hired more for their wokeness and diversity credentials than for their experience or abilities. But I’m not a really nasty cynic so I would never suggest anything like that.
As for me, I visit a shop to buy stuff, not to be bombarded with the latest woke garbage being inflicted on us by shouty (IMHO) mentally-deranged minorities. So I won’t be going back to Waitrose for some time, if ever.
In George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ there was a Ministry of Truth. It’s quite difficult to see any difference between Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and our Government’s Counter Disinformation Unit.
Here’s what this important Government department does:
The purpose of the CDU’s work is focused on helping the government understand online disinformation narratives and attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment. The CDU takes an evidence-based approach to countering harmful disinformation online, through aggregated analysis of publicly available information, typically from social media.
And it contacts any social media platforms whenever the CDU finds information it considers potentially harmful disinformation so that the social media can remove any content considered disinformation:
If any of the content the CDU reviews may infringe the moderation policies of the social media platforms from which the content derived, the CDU may notify the relevant platform. The platform will make a decision whether to take any action consistent with their policies. The information CDU shares with social media providers is limited to sending links to content of concern, or aggregated overarching trends.
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said:
We need people to follow expert medical advice and stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. It is vital that this message hits home and that misinformation and disinformation which undermines it is knocked down quickly.
We’re working with social media companies, and I’ll be pressing them this week for further action to stem the spread of falsehoods and rumours which could cost lives.
When false narratives are identified, the government’s Rapid Response Unit coordinates with departments across Whitehall to deploy the appropriate response. This can include a direct rebuttal on social media, working with platforms to remove harmful content and ensuring public health campaigns are promoted through reliable sources.
The unit is one of the teams feeding into the wider Counter Disinformation Cell led by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, made up of experts from across government and in the tech sector.
The Cell is engaging with social media platforms and with disinformation specialists from civil society and academia, to establish a comprehensive overview of the extent, scope and impact of disinformation related to coronavirus.
So I imagine anyone suggesting any of the following:
The Chinese plague leaked from a dirty, poorly-run Chinese lab
The miracle vaccines are not safe and not effective and are not miraculous
Lockdowns were a total disaster causing greater misery than Covid ever would have caused
Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a semi-religious cult with no scientific basis
Women cannot have penises and men don’t menstruate
and much much more
Would have been monitored by the Counter Disinformation Unit and often had their social media activity downgraded by helpful algorithms or else removed altogether.
And you may have thought we lived in a free, democratic society.
Before I blow a fuse in fury, I’ll hand over to Dr John Campbell to explain the many benefits the Counter Disinformation Unit has brought Britain. Though it seems that like myself, Dr John Campbell only became aware of the existence of the Counter Disinformation Unit recently:
I have blogged several times about my astonishment at why our collapsing, supposedly cash-strapped NHS keeps on hiring ever more DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) staff.
I haven’t been able to find out how many of these (in my humble opinion) totally useless individuals are employed by the NHS (please note I did not write ‘work in the NHS’). I suspect that in the NHS England’s approximately 217 trusts there must be somewhere around 500 DIE staff costing us in the region of £100 million a year including their salaries, pensions, offices and frontline staff’s time they use up in seminars about the joys of diversity and LGBT++++ and other similarly important subjects.
However, I think I have managed to discover the cause of this DIE disease afflicting our NHS. It would seem that it is linked to something called the ‘Public Sector Equality Duty’ (PSED) produced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC):
The PSED requires that: ‘in England, all public bodies should have published their equality information by 30 March 2023.They should have also published equality objectives, which should be specific, measurable and timely’. Furthermore, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warns that: ‘we will monitor compliance with the PSED specific duty requirements.’
The aim of this initiative is apparently to provide ‘services that are more appropriate to the user, and services that are more effective and cost-effective.’ And the EHRC claims ‘this can lead to increased satisfaction with public services.’
I won’t comment on whether most people have experienced ‘increased satisfaction with public services’ since the EHRC conjured up its wonderful PSED.
This policy may be well meaning. But it has led to the proliferation of a whole new species of public-sector employees – DIE managers and team leads and principal officers and others of their ilk and their assistants – being recruited to meet the demands of the PSED.
Here are some short extracts from three of the most recent DIE job ads posted by the NHS.
At Kettering Hospital Trust the £58,972 – £68,525 a year Senior Diversity and Inclusion Specialist: ‘will work as part of the Organisational Development (OD) and Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team and the key strategic lead for EDI, whilst also working operationally to support colleagues and leaders from across the Group to embed EDI in all aspects of service delivery. You will be the organisational lead for the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), associated action plans and a key influencer within our Health Inequalities work. You will lead a broad range of projects and developments as part of the Group’s ambition to be an inclusive employer where staff are empowered to make a difference. ‘
Let us hope that the medical staff at Kettering Hospital Trust taking part in the ‘broad range of projects’ to improve diversity, inclusion and equality also manage to find some time to look after the hospital’s patients.
At the Lincoln Community Health Services Trust: ‘The EDI assistant (£22,816 – £24,336 a year) provides a professional and high-quality customer focused service to the managers, staff, staff networks and other stakeholders. Providing support in the monitoring and administration of all aspects of the equality, diversity and inclusion agenda.’
Included in this vital individual’s work will be: ‘Set up meetings, facilitate arrangements for EDI celebration weeks and days (to include Black History Month, LGBT+ History Month, Carers week and International Women’s Day – list not inclusive, manage the Cultural Intelligence programme process, ordering and issuing relevant correspondence, responsible for maintaining stock control (CQ licences), as well as the Reverse Mentoring Programme admin – liaising between mentor/mentees.’
Quite what celebrating Black History Month, LGBT+ History and International Women’s Day have to do with getting ambulances to emergencies on time, cutting waiting lists and improving patient care escapes me for the moment.
Then there’s the East London NHS Foundation Trust which is hiring an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion People Participation Lead on £35,392 – £42,618 a year:
‘The post holder will work strategically across Trust services with a focus on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in order to develop and implement a strategy that supports the broad participation agenda. They will project manage a variety of work streams that underpin the Trust participation agenda, ensuring that practice in each locality is coordinated and supports and responds to the Trust’s corporate social inclusion strategies.’
‘They will provide strong leadership, advice and practical project work within EDI in the development of a culture that is socially inclusive, valves (sic) participation and diversity. Supporting and maintaining effective communication, contributing to the training needs of staff in this aspect of their work. The post holder will need to develop relationships with a wide range of stakeholders.’
‘Our mission is to make a positive difference to people’s lives by improving the quality of life for all we serve. Our values are: We Care, We Respect, We are Inclusive – so we are looking for people who live and breathe these qualities when supporting service users and carers, and in their relationships with colleagues in the Trust and our partner organisations.’
Some more old-fashioned readers might still believe that hiring people with a few decent medical skills could be more important to a member of the public having a heart attack or suffering from Stage 4 cancer than dreaming up well-paid non-jobs for ‘people who live and breathe these qualities’ of care, respect and inclusion.
So it seems that a bunch of useless bureaucrats at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), with plenty of time on their hands, invented this Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) to make it look like they were doing some work. Of course, as part of the woke-ification of Britain, some of these DIE creatures would have been hired anyway. But the EHRC’s PSED has accelerated and increased the plague of DIE nonentities and has ended up costing the NHS tens of millions of pounds a year and probably similar amounts of our money throughout other government departments.
There seem to be an increasing number of newspaper articles attacking the cost and practicality of Britain’s ‘Net Zero’ policies.
In the Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson exposed the idiocy of the way the UK’s CO2 emissions were calculated. If the UK produces oil and gas from the North Sea, these count as UK CO2 emissions. But if the UK buys oil and gas from Qatar or Saudi Arabia or wherever and ships it to the UK using dirty diesel-using ships, this counts as CO2 emissions from the countries selling us the oil and gas. So, closing down our oil and gas industries helps the UK government become ‘a green energy superpower’ and ‘win the race to Net Zero’ even though this will destroy 50,000 to 100,000 UK jobs and lose billions in tax revenues. And given that Sir Kneeler Keir ‘Just Stop Oil’ Starmer’s Labour party is run by middle-class North London virtue-signalling activists, rather than the workers its was supposed to represent, It’s likely that the next Labour government will wreck our economy so they can boast of their green energy ‘triumphs’. The world truly has gone mad
There were two articles in Monday’s DailyTelegraph. One from Ross Clark exposing the lunacy of trying to replace cheap efficient gas boilers with ludicrously expensive and largely useless heat pumps. And there was one by Andrew Orlowski titled ‘Green zealots want to downgrade Britain in pursuit of ideology’ in which he criticises the vast amount of British taxpayers’ money which will be wasted trying to find supposedly ‘green technologies’ to replace cheap, efficient and reliable coal, oil and gas
I had an article in The Daily Sceptic, based on one of my blogs, in which I show that the price a country pays for its energy is directly linked to the source of that energy. The more coal, oil and gas a country uses, the cheaper its energy. The more wind and solar a country uses, the more expensive its energy. The title of the piece is ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s Plans to Turn Britain into a ‘Green Energy Superpower’ will Bankrupt Households and Cripple the Economy’. You might find it amusing to look at the readers’ comments on my article: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/05/sir-keir-starmers-plans-to-turn-britain-into-a-green-energy-superpower-will-bankrupt-households-and-cripple-the-economy/
What we’re not getting, in spite of the increasing number or articles questioning the wisdom of the rush to Net Zero, are any articles daring to suggest that the whole idea of anthropogenic Climate Change is a load of nonsense.
Last year, I started making a 30-second TV ad to promote my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS on GB News. But the company which vets TV ads for several TV stations rejected my ad claiming it breached Advertising Standards Authority rules by ‘spreading disinformation’.
I have recently watched a little Talk TV while in my gym and suspect that Julia Hartley-Brewer and Mike Graham know that anthropogenic Climate Change is nonsense. Possibly some of the presenters on GB News also think this. But I also suspect that none of them dares say this as they’re terrified of Ofcom doing a ‘Mark Steyn’ on them – fining the station for supposedly spreading disinformation.
In my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS I quoted an announcement from the U.S. magazine Scientific American in April 2021:
This is complete madness. Scientific American, and the ‘major news outlets’ the announcement mentions, should be focused on examining existing scientific theories and suggesting new ones. But instead they have all become propagandists for one single narrative – that we have a ‘Climate Emergency’ because evil humans are destroying the planet with our CO2 emissions.
It’s this propagandising and decision that there is only one acceptable narrative about climate which mean we never get any articles or media figures daring to suggest that the whole anthropogenic Climate Change cult is utter garbage with absolutely no scientific basis.
David Craig, on June 27th, 2023
