If you’d been watching the news, you might have got the impression that there was a bit of a problem in our NHS (which is, of course, the envy of the world). You might have heard about 7.2 million people waiting for treatment, continual strikes, a lack of doctors and nurses and radiologists, disgusting conditions in hospitals, the impossibility of ever seeing a GP, ambulances waiting for hours outside A&E and so on.
But if you are one of the 37,000+ overpaid, over-pensioned managers employed by (please note I did not write ‘working in’) the NHS, you would be completely unaware of any of these problems. In fact, your main concern would be how to employ more DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers.
Here’s an exciting, wonderfully woke job opportunity which has just appeared in my emailbox:
Diversity and Inclusion has never been a bigger priority for Yorkshire Ambulance Service and we are looking for an experienced practitioner with strong working knowledge of diversity and inclusion to lead our agenda. This agenda has a direct impact on the Trust’s ability to achieve its vision to deliver the best outcomes for patients, with the best people, and partnerships.
There has never been a more exciting or rewarding time to join the NHS and this is a fantastic opportunity to join our senior people team to take our diversity and inclusion agenda to the next step as Head of Diversity and Inclusion.
In this role, you will lead, develop and implement the diversity agenda for the Trust, ensuring that all aspects of our services, particularly our workforce practices, are inclusive, with emphasis on ensuring our workforce reflects the communities and patients we serve in order that we can meet the needs of our diverse communities. The successful post holder will also develop and implement a range of initiatives that foster staff attraction, retention and those that generate a culture of dignity, civility and respect.
The successful candidate will have significant experience of managing projects with a cultural impact through engaging staff, staff networks and senior leaders. You will also have a good working knowledge and understanding of diversity & inclusion theory and application, legislation and policy with demonstrable practical application. As you will support with embedding a culture of inclusion, we are looking for someone with a broad knowledge across the whole diversity and inclusion spectrum.
In return for your commitment to our agenda, you can expect direct access/exposure and mentoring by the Trust Board, you will gain experience of working across a large complex organisation, support for the development of your leadership capability and a working environment to support a healthy work/life balance.
Leadership for the development and implementation of EDI strategies and programmes within the Trust and support the achievement of organisational objectives, development capability, build capacity, and improving our culture
Provide professional and specialist advice, guidance, recommendations and solutions, and ensure compliance with national legislation, ensuring staff and the Trust Board understand their collective and individual requirements
Establish, coordinate and chair appropriate groups that are necessary to support the successful delivery of the Trusts Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda. Lead on the work of the Trust’s Diversity and Inclusion Steering Group
Programme manage the variety of projects that underpin the diversity and inclusion agenda, ensuring a co-ordinated and consistent approach that supports and responds to the Trust’s governance strategies
Support the Executive Director of People and OD and Deputy Director of People and OD to ensure that D&I strategies, initiatives and business plans are directly linked to the Trust’s strategic objectives, the People Strategy and appropriately reflect national D&I initiatives and best practice
If this sounds like you, and, after reading the person specification, you believe you have the necessary skills and experience for the role, then we would be delighted to hear from you.
For informal discussions, please contact to suzanne.hartshorne@nhs.net
Perhaps we should all email suzanne.hartshorne@nhs.net to tell her (or him or ze – you never know nowadays) that this made-up non-job is a load of woke nonsense and a ludicrous waste of our money?
Oh, and in case you thought this was not representative of the sort of useless non-entities our worthless collapsing NHS is busy hiring, this is just one of around 26 current job vacancies for these pointless individuals, but I don’t have room here to list them all.
2. The joys of immigration
Yesterday I came across this very short video. I believe it’s from the Netherlands. It shows a Dutch pensioner out taking his dog for a walk and how well some young migrants have integrated into Dutch society. I expect similar scenes are occurring every day all across diverse, multi-cultural, migrant-welcoming, open-borders Europe:
I didn’t watch the (IMHO) rather pointless coronation of the King of Eco-loons and his gorgeous Queen Godzilla. And there’s been so much guff said and written about the whole ghastly spectacle that one would think it impossible to add anything which hadn’t already been covered.
But there were a few anomalies I noticed which might be worth mentioning.
Cost of the event
From what little I did hear, we were told that Charles had made changes to the occasion so that the whole thing wouldn’t be a massive splurge of our money. I understand that the final cost will be somewhere between £50m and £100m. If so, after allowing for inflation, this makes it by far the most expensive of the last seven coronations:
Pity Charlie and Godzilla couldn’t have stumped up some of the cost. So much for saving British taxpayers’ money.
Cost of the ‘slimmed down’ royal family
We’ve also been told that Charles has been working on a ‘slimmed down’ royal family. I know he’s only been King for a few months. But I believe he was pushing this idea for several years before he became King. However, like everything else which devours huge quantities of taxpayers’ money, the more we’re told that costs are being cut and efficiencies made and waste reduced etc etc, the more it actually seems to cost us:
From billions to hundreds of millions to a few million?
Again, I admit I wasn’t paying much attention to the event. But I do remember being told a few weeks ago that ‘billions’ of people around the world would be watching the ceremony so it would be a glorious day for Britain. I have the feeling that as the day approached, our hyperventilating reporters dropped the ‘billions’ and instead predicted that ‘hundreds of millions’ would be watching. Then on the day, I have the impression that the ‘hundreds of millions’ was downgraded to ‘millions’.
Personally, I felt more than queasy about the peevish, petulant, self-obsessed, perpetually-complaining Charles becoming King and would have been much more comfortable if Charles had stepped back and let William and Kate take over. But Charles is too selfish to let that happen.
What’s the point of GB News?
I expected brown-nosing sycophancy from the BBC, Sky and ITV. But I was rather disappointed to see the same grovelling, fawning and toadying from GB News. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder what’s the point of GB News. Since the cowardly abandoning of Mark Steyn, GB News has become almost indistinguishable from programmes like ITV’s Good Morning Britain or the BBC’s Breakfast programme.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of the baleful influence the useless Ofcom has had on free speech in the media, it’s rather amusing that the previous head of Ofcom from 2015 to 2019, Dame Sharon White, has (from what I’ve read) made such a complete balls-up of being head honcho of the John Lewis Partnership that there’s talk of her being booted out before she wrecks the company completely.
As for GB News, if I watch a little TV in the morning, I find Talk TV’s Julia-Hartley Brewer and Mike Graham doing what GB News once said it would do before it capitulated to Ofcom. And although neither Hartley-Brewer nor Mike Graham dares openly question the Human-Caused Climate Change cult, I get the impression from throwaway lines that they both believe the whole thing is nonsense. If I watch a little TV in the afternoon, I find Al Jazeera much more informative than anything British TV can offer.
Oh, no – there’s still Eurovision
My joy at the coronation pantomime finally being over is tempered by the knowledge that we’ve got to get through next week’s equally ghastly horror with people dressing up in stupid costumes – the Eurovision Song Contest. So we need to steel ourselves for yet more gushing and fawning and grovelling and inanities and suchlike from our supposed journalists.
I normally don’t use this blog to write about myself and my sad, little, boring life. But I’ll make an exception this time.
Nobody wants to hear the truth
I’ve spent a large part of my working life giving presentations and I enjoy public speaking. So I put together a shortish (20 minutes) presentation based on my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS.
Given that the ludicrous, economically-suicidal policy of Net Zero is probably the most important political and economic policy of the last 50 or more years, I then approached organisations which often arrange speaking events like the Economic Research Council, Policy Exchange, the Institute for Economic Affairs and John Gordon’s Intelligence Squared offering to give a talk about the supposed Climate Crisis. Not only did none of these organisations accept my offer. They just ignored me not even bothering to send an answer. I also tried several Conservative MPs offering to give my talk to any interested MPs. Again, I was ignored.
I know I’m not a famous celeb. But I have had around 10 current affairs books published on a variety of subjects such as economics, business, politics, the European Union, charities, universities and most recently climate. So, I had expected that my offers to give a talk would at least be acknowledged even if there was no interest in hearing what I had to say. I hadn’t expected to be completely ignored. But if any reader has any experience of people working in politics, they’ll know that such people tend to be arrogant, self-regarding, convinced of their own superiority and contemptuous of ordinary people who are forced to pay their usually over-generous salaries.
The only reply I did get was from The Daily Sceptic. I had suggested to them that we organise an event for any interested MPs during which their environmental expert, Chris Morrison, and I would give brief presentations and then do a Q&A session. The Daily Sceptic replied that they weren’t interested.
I guess nobody is interested in being put face to face with the truth about the Climate Change scam.
Ludicrous, laughable, farcical etc etc
Slightly connected to that is this shortish (5 minutes) video in which Senator Kennedy (no relation to JFK) questions David Turk (United States Deputy Secretary of Energy) about how much Net Zero will cost American taxpayers and how much the USA implementing Net Zero will change the Earth’s temperature:
Enjoy:
I think there are two important issues raised by this video:
None of the people trying to impose Net Zero have a clue as to the real cost nor about any influence this will actually have on climate
No politician in Britain or Europe would even dare ask the kind of questions Senator Kennedy asks
A warning to South Korea – beware Net Zero
And finally, readers will know that my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS has been translated into Korean by a university professor there:
I’ve even had two articles debunking the anthropogenic climate change cult translated into Korean and published in a South Korean newspaper. I could never have had such articles published in the Greta-worshipping climate-cult-promoting UK press. Moreover, I have tried several times to get interviewed on GB News and TalkTV but have been ignored
Anyway, I’ve just produced a shortish (5 minutes) video for this professor which he’ll be translating into Korean and using in South Korea to warn South Koreans not to repeat the disastrous Net Zero policies being implemented by the West.
Here’s the original English version of the video. It’s a pity nobody in Britain wants to hear this story:
Below (in blue) is a letter I was sent by email. I guess I was on the emailing list because I wrote the book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS.
The email is a proposed letter to be sent to MPs about climate change. The letter starts off seeming reasonable to me and, of course, I agree with the author that net zero is economic and societal suicide. But the letter then starts ranting about climate change being a Club of Rome and World Economic Forum plan to depopulate the planet. In my humble opinion (IMHO), the letter is so deranged that MPs’ assistants will bin it long before it gets anywhere near an MP. So it’s rather a waste of time.
Moreover, it’s usually a good idea to avoid mentioning the Nazis and the Holocaust and mass genocide if you want to be taken seriously.
Whoever wrote this letter is (IMHO) an idiot and I’ve emailed him to let him know.
I will spare the author’s embarrassment by withholding his email address.
Here’s the letter:
Letter to as many MPs as possible: Draft for discussion
Dear Sir/Madam
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST
I wish to draw your attention to the following statement
“As to the disastrous consequences of eliminating fossil fuels, it is estimated that nitrogen fertilizer (derived from fossil fuels) now supports approximately half the global population. The government of Sri Lanka banned the use of fossil fuel derived nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides with disastrous consequences for food supply there. If similarly misguided decisions are made eliminating fossil fuels and thus nitrogen fertiliser, there will be a starvation crisis worldwide. It is critical to repeat: eliminating fossil fuel-derived fertiliser and pesticides will create worldwide starvation. And scientifically there is no risk of catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.” (from a recent paper by Dr William Happer, Dr Richard Lindzen and Gregory Wrightstone)
Therefore do you support the current legislation to achieve net zero, bearing in mind that doubling the current level of CO2 at 412 ppm has virtually no effect on global warming?
If so, do you also support destroying the UK economy to achieve net zero by eliminating the use of extensive coal and gas supplies under our feet in the UK bearing in mind that it will take the UK over 2,000 years to add just 1 ppm to the global level?
If so, you are clearly costing UK taxpayers £billions for absolutely no benefit and no reason at all. Hence, your active involvement in repealing this catastrophic legislation (imposed on the UK whilst we were in the EU) as soon as possible is long overdue.
Furthermore, it is necessary to question WHY has this catastrophic and totally stupid desire to reduce global CO2 output been promoted and implemented by the UN, the IPCC, EU and other organisations including the UK government?
The answer must be contained in the quote below:
“eliminating fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides will create worldwide starvation”
It is therefore obvious that climate change, which has no risk of catastrophic global warming, is being used to divert attention from the desire to de-populate the earth by global starvation, i.e mass genocide. The commitment to reduce the earth’s population has been around for years and was stated by the Club of Rome in 1968 and more recently by the WEF.
The Nazis said and proved that if a lie is repeated and vigorously promoted it is eventually believed by the populace. To make the lie more believable it was helpful to make the populace terrified of the consequences for not believing it.
Climate change obviously fits both scenarios. The WEF could hardly campaign publicly for global genocide to reduce the world population. So, campaign for climate change, terrify the masses and in the process introduce measures (such as reducing nitrogen fertilisers to reduce CO2) which will reduce world food production and starve millions, if not billions, of people.
Hence by supporting and promoting climate change and net zero policies you are allegedly unwittingly or knowingly supporting the global policy for mass starvation, promoted by the WEF and others. You are definitely not helping to reduce catastrophic global warming as it does not exist!
Hence, if you knowingly support your parties (sic) policy on climate change and alleged global genocide you are requested to detail how many lives you believe should be culled from the following population groups, as a result of your agreement and acceptance of the policy of net zero:
World population generally
Commonwealth citizens
UK citizens
Your constituents
This information should be provided under the Freedom of Information legislation.
As you’ll know, CO2 is vital for plant growth. CO2 levels are currently around 413 ppm (parts per million). Many agriculture companies using greenhouses instal CO2 generators to take CO2 in their greenhouses to around 1,000 ppm:
In fact, rising CO2 levels are causing a greening of our planet:
CO2 levels have been much higher for much of the last 600 million years than they are today:
The black line on the diagram is atmospheric CO2 (the scale on the left). The blue line is the estimated average global temperature (scale on the right of the diagram).
Yet, plant and animal life thrived. Just ask any dinosaur. And, in case you were wondering, it wasn’t the CO2 emissions from Fred Flintstone’s car which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs:
If CO2 levels were ever to drop below around 200 ppm, most plant life would die and humans would have nothing left to eat. In fact, it would be rather amusing if our useless Western governments wasted billions on developing wonderful CO2 capture machines which managed to substantially reduce atmospheric CO2 and wipe out the human race.
Here’s a great article from Conservative Woman demolishing the whole CO2-driven, man-made global warming scam. The best bits of the article are the readers’ comments. We truly are in a madhouse when so many people realise that man-made climate change is total nonsense on stilts, yet their governments insist on impoverishing their citizens and destroying advanced Western civilisation in order to fight a demon that doesn’t even exist:
I consider myself patriotic. And, unlike anyone in Parliament or at the BBC, I believe that what little is left of Britain is valuable and worth preserving from mass open-borders immigration, WEF globalisation and the woke, history-challenged, narcissist, UK-loathing social-media mob. But I really can’t see the point of squandering several hundred million pounds or whatever of taxpayers’ money on some stupid ceremony next weekend. After all, the (IMHO) snivelling, self-obsessed, adulterous, climate-catastrophist, Izlumophiliac idiot, Charles, is already King and the beautiful, fragrant Godzilla is already his (supposedly ‘hugely popular’ according to the Daily Mail) beloved queen.
In Disney films, the handsome prince marries the beautiful princess while rejecting the ugly sisters. With Charles, he abandoned the beautiful princess and married one of the ugly sisters.
I’m not against the monarchy. Something like President Tony Blair and First Lady Cherie would be even more ghastly than dumb King Eco-loon and Queen Godzilla. Personally I believe Charles would have (for the first time in his spoilt, self-serving, self-regarding, rather pointless life) earned our respect if he had stepped aside, let William and Kate take over and just taken a position for himself as a senior mentor and adviser to King William and Queen Kate. But Charles is too thick, too selfish and too tin-eared to ever consider something like that. As for swearing an oath of allegiance to the perpetually miserable and moaning Eeyore Charles, forget it. I might do some swearing that day, but it won’t be for an oath of allegiance to a self-centered, intellectually-challenged, woke excuse for a man who has never done anything in his 70+years on Earth to warrant either respect or allegiance.
Is this why they really hate Israel?
Last Wednesday, Israel turned 75. As the lefties and anti-semites in Labour and at the Guardian and the BBC continually howl and scream at Israel as being the source of all the Middle East’s problems, it’s easy to forget quite how small Israel is:
The population of Israel is just over 9 million of which around 2 million are Arabs. The population of the Arab world, supposedly oppressed by these 9 million Israelis of which just around 7 million are Jewish, is over 456 million.
Here is a chart of Israel’s GDP per capita compared to the GDP per capita of its nearest neighbours:
(left-click on chart then left-click again to see in glorious widescreen technicolour)
Israel’s GDP per capita is close to $40,000, the Arab world’s GDP per capita is just $6,647.
Israel is an extraordinary achievement to have created a modern, democratic, economically-successful country in just 75 years in spite of the Arabs’ repeated attempts to wipe Israel off the map. The Arab world is a disaster – hundreds of years of a misgoverned cess-pit of misery, poverty, backwardness, violence, hopelessness and failure. Moreover, the success of the Jewish state compared to the failure of so many countries which follow King Charles’s favourite religion poses some very difficult questions about the role of Charles’s favourite religion in causing economic stagnation, social disintegration, political instability, violence and widespread misery.
Israel’s success exposes the Islamic Arab world’s political, religious and economic failure and that’s why the lefties really loathe Israel.
We’re all encouraged to save for our retirement. But few people seem to have done it better than South African politicians.
Most websites report that South Africa’s former president, Jacob Zuma, managed to save over $20m during his nine years (2009-2018) leading the country on a salary of around $170,000 a year. That’s quite an achievement. Though when I was writing about foreign aid and corruption for my book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL, I saw somewhere that he actually has managed to accumulate over $200m.
That might seem an impressive amount. But it seems to be fairly normal for politicians in that country. Here are South Africa’s 10 richest politicians according to their declared wealth:
Cyril Ramaphosa ( $450 million
Tokyo Sexwale ( $200 million)
Herman Mashaba ( $100 million)
F. W De Klerk ( $46 million)
Saki Macozoma ( $60 million)
Jacob Zuma ( $20 million)
Thabo Mbeki ( $10 million)
Bulelani Ngcuka ( $10 million)
Mamphela Ramphele ( $5.5 million)
Pravin Ghordhan ( $5 million)
This makes our own much loved former PM, Anthony Blair, look like a pauper.
What about the people?
As South Africa’s lucky politicians have become richer than Croesus, have South Africa’s citizens similarly prospered?
Here’s chart of South Africa’s GDP per capita compared to the world average and to a few other countries:
(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see more clearly)
It seems that the GDP per capita has been fairly stable. I was a little surprised as I thought the country was headed towards a Zimbabwe-style economic collapse. But then I looked at who owns the country’s wealth. I came across this summary of a 2022 report from the World Bank:
“South Africa… is the most unequal country in the world, ranking first among 164 countries,” the Washington-based institution, the World Bank, said Wednesday in a report, Inequality in Southern Africa.
So, while the GDP per capita seems to remained quite flat, the rich have grabbed most of the country’s wealth leaving the poor ever poorer.
What about crime?
South Africa, with 36 murders per 100,000 people has the second highest rate of homicides in the world:
Socialist Venezuela with 39 per 100,000 comes top. To put the South Africa figure into context, Columbia is also at 36 per 100,000, Mexico at 25 per 100,000, the USA at 5.4 homicides per 100,000, the UK at 0.5 per 100,000, France at 0.7 per 100,000 and Spain at 0.8 per 100,000. So around 72 times as many people are murdered in South Africa than in Britain.
As far as rape is concerned, South Africa only comes in at number 6 in the world:
Country
Rape Rate
1
Botswana
96.87 per 100k
2
Lesotho
89.29 per 100k
3
Grenada
88.87 per 100k
4
Sweden
87.97 per 100k
5
Eswatini
82.73 per 100k
6
South Africa
70.22 per 100k
I could go on quoting all sorts of other statistics. But they all paint the same picture – a hopelessly misgoverned and corrupt crime- and poverty-ridden hell-hole where a small percentage of the people are looting all the money.
It’s odd that we don’t hear much about South Africa’s current misery in the mainstream media and from all those who protested against the evils of apartheid. After all, I thought black lives mattered to the virtue-signalling, look-at-me, narcissistic, progressive, West-hating libtards.
A post-apartheid paradise for the Rainbow Nation?
Here’s Simon Webb giving his take on the massive benefits South Africa has experienced from black rule:
Several times, I have suggested that there is probably no point continuing with this blog because so many other people now do what I do but do it so much better.
The two websites I recommend are The Daily Sceptic and Conservative Woman. As they use a variety of writers, they can provide much more insightful and well-informed articles than I can.
Here are just a few recent pieces from the Daily Sceptic:
Hopefully you all know what the MHRA is – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom which is responsible for ensuring that medicines and medical devices work and are acceptably safe.
A reader sent me a link to a video (link below) in which Professor Norman Fenton analyses and gives a critical appraisal of a speech given by June Raine, head of the MRHA in November 2022.
I haven’t watched the whole 17-minute video. But a key part of the video for me comes between 1 minute 29 seconds and 1 minute 50 seconds. In this part, Ms Raine explains that the role of the MHRA, which is 86% funded by pharmaceutical companies, is changing from being a ‘policeman’ to being an ‘enabler’. I may seem to be quibbling over semantics (what the Finns call ‘point-f*cking’), but I believe this is actually quite important:
If the MHRA is a ‘policeman’, then it is essentially working for us – the general public – as its employer to ensure that pharmaceutical companies don’t launch dangerous or unsafe products.
If the MHRA is an ‘enabler’, then it is working for pharmaceutical companies helping them bring their products to market
We often hear of people like burglars or hackers moving from illegal activities to helping police and other organisations protect themselves against people like burglars and hackers. The cliché being that these burglars or hackers have moved from being poachers to gamekeepers. But with the MHRA moving from being a ‘policeman’ working for the public to being an ‘enabler’ working for the interests of pharmaceutical companies, we have a case of the gamekeeper becoming a poacher.
This is important because we have moved into a new era in which governments have taken the power to demand that we must accept certain medical products – in this case the supposedly ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ Chinese lab-leaked plague vaccines which weren’t safe and weren’t effective. And if we refuse these medical products, we are banned from going to school, university or work, are not allowed to travel and have many other limitations placed on our lives.
And now our useless government is about to sign us up to a new international treaty which will allow the corrupt, unelected and unaccountable, pharmaceutical-industry- and billionaire-funded World Health Organisation (WHO) to decide what new untested and probably unsafe (but extremely profitable for Big Pharma) medical treatments we must subject ourselves to in order to be permitted to live a normal life.
Since the outbreak of the Chinese lab-leaked plague, our rulers enthusiastically egged on by clickbait-hungry mainstream media have tried to start at least two more supposed health emergencies – monkey pox and avian flu. Remember them? Fortunately for us, both seem to have sputtered out before the WHO could demand we all get new and exciting (and very profitable) vaccines. But it surely won’t be long before the WHO does find something – perhaps a new Covid variant or maybe Ebola – that it can declare to be an international health crisis and, rather than being a ‘policeman’ protecting us from dangerous and ineffective medical products like the fake Covid vaccines, our MHRA will leap into action as an ‘enabler’ focused on helping Big Pharma force us to undergo untested new medical interventions.
As Ms Raine changes the MHRA from being a ‘policeman’ to being an ‘enabler’, it would be more honest if the MHRA was to change its name from the ‘Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’ to something like the ‘Medicines and Healthcare products Promotions Agency’. Then at least we would know where the organisation’s loyalties lie – not with our safety but with Big Pharma’s profitability.
Just before I write my blog, I thought I might not be the only person who is getting utterly fed up with people going to the world’s most violent, dangerous hell-holes and then bleating that they’ve been ‘abandoned by the British government’ when they inevitably get into trouble. Every single media report about the current situation in Sudan claims that around 4,000 British citizens have been ‘abandoned by the British government’. Sorry, but if you want to visit another country, it’s sort of inadvisable to choose Sudan or Eritrea or North Korea or Afghanistan or Iran or other similar earthly paradises.
Moreover, I suspect that several of these ‘abandoned’ 4,000 supposed Brits are actually former asylum seekers (illegal migrants) from Sudan who were given British citizenship because they claimed their lives would be at risk if they were sent back to Sudan. And then, when they had their dual nationality, they tend to take their holidays visiting their families back in the country they previously claimed was too dangerous for them.
As for that (IMHO) awful Iranian woman and her (IMHO) equally ghastly husband – I imagine legal issues would prevent me from commenting on her (IMHO) self-inflicted disaster for which she and her husband seem to me to have repeatedly blamed the British government.
But, of course, nobody takes responsibility for their own stupidity nowadays.
Sie sind verrückt, völlig verrückt
A couple of weeks ago, Germany closed its last nuclear power station. The decision to accelerate shutting down Germany’s nuclear industry was taken by the delectable Angela Merkel in May 2011 after the March 2011 Fukushima tsunami disaster. Eight of Germany’s seventeen nuclear power stations were closed that year. It seems that Ms Merkel didn’t have an atlas to hand when she made this brilliant decision. If she had, she might have noticed that:
Japan has 29,751 kilometres of coastline, whereas Germany has only 2,389 kilometres
Almost all Japan’s nuclear power stations are on the coast, most of Germany’s are inland
Japan is situated on the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’ were earthquakes and tsunamis are common, Germany probably hasn’t had an earthquake or tsunami for the last 20 million years if ever
Of course, at the time, Merkel’s predecessor as Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, was on the board of Russian energy giant Gazprom which would supposedly ensure a continued supply of cheap gas from Russia to Germany. I attach at the end of this blog a link to the brief section of a speech President Trump gave at the UN when he warned that Germany was becoming too dependent on Russian gas. How the German delegation giggled and smirked at Trump’s ‘stupidity’.
Das war eine teure Entscheidung
The German Ministry for Economics estimated that the cost of replacing the lost nuclear power would be about €55 billion. But then the operators sued the German government for the revenue they would lose from early closure of their power stations and got about €2.5 billion in compensation generously handed over by German taxpayers.
At the time Merkel claimed: “As the first big industrialised nation, we can achieve such a transformation toward efficient and renewable energies , with all the opportunities that brings for exports, developing new technologies and jobs”.
The main result of closing down Germany’s cheap and reliable nuclear power stations and trying to replace them with useless, unreliable expensive wind and solar power has left Germany with some of the highest electricity prices in the world even before Mr Putin invaded Ukraine:
And every year the taxes and levies heaped on Germany’s power prices increases to pay for the Energiewende – defined by Wikipedia as ‘the ongoing transition by Germany to a low carbon, environmentally sound, reliable, and affordable energy supply’:
From what I understand, the red and yellow bits on the chart below represent the real cost of generating and supplying power in Germany. All the other stuff are special taxes and subsidies and so on to pay for the move from reliable and cheap energy to unreliable and expensive energy:
The head of Germany’s largest power company warned that relying on solar in Germany was like trying to grow pineapples in Alaska.
And now Germany is desperately trying to reopen old coal-fired power stations, even going as far as dismantling a windfarm to make way for the expansion of a massive open-cast coal mine:
Perhaps there’s a lesson here for Britain as our clueless rulers push us in the same disastrous direction as Germany?
How they laughed at Trump
And here’s that excellent moment when the German delegation at the UN smirked and giggled when Trump warned them that they had become too reliant on Russia for their energy. I wonder if they’re still laughing?
David Craig, on May 13th, 2023
