I’ll only leave this up for one day as it’s not very important. However, if it just helps one or two people, then it was worth covering this.
I’d like you to look at a few pictures from Thailand:
Your first reaction is probably: so what, aren’t these just pictures of typical Thai holiday resorts?
Well they’re not holiday resorts. They’re care homes in Thailand specialising in looking after foreigners – Europeans, Americans and Australians etc – with conditions like Dementia, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, mobility problems or other reasons why they can no longer live independently.
Here’s the dining area at one of these care homes:
And here’s a typical room:
A member of my family has worked in several care homes in the UK and I can assure you that there aren’t many care homes in Britain which can match what is available in Thailand.
Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages of deciding to go into a care home in somewhere like Thailand rather than in Britain:
Advantages:
the facilities are much better than most UK care homes
there are many more staff per resident than in the UK
there is a tradition of respecting the elderly in most Asian countries which means you tend to get better care there than in a country like Britain where the elderly are often seen as a nuisance
the weather is much better – always above 27ºC
they are often set in lush tropical gardens with swimming pools
depending on how much care you need – a couple of hours a day, 8 hours a day or even 16 hours a day, prices per year are anywhere from £20,000 to £40,000 – around half of what you’d pay in the UK
Disadvantages
the obvious one is that you’d be far from friends and family. But the Internet allows you to have video sessions with people back home whenever you want. And you’d save so much money on your costs compared to a Western care home that you could easily afford to buy plane tickets for visitors a few times a year. There aren’t many people who are going to say no to a free trip to Thailand to come and visit you
Here’s an article from the Guardian reporting on the trend for some people to choose care homes in Thailand rather than in Britain:
Apparently there’s outrage/fury/anger in the UK at the moment because the Government has reduced the amount of extra money it was going to pour into the voracious and insatiable black hole that is the social care sector. But if our local authorities offered some of their care home residents the option of going to a care home in a country like Thailand, that would save taxpayers between £100,000 to £200,000 a year for every 10 people who chose a luxurious care home in Thailand rather than a grotty, understaffed, over-expensive excuse for a care home in the UK
What is a woman?
And for a little light entertainment, here’s the latest idiotic, woke, progressive New Zealand Prime Minister trying to answer the question: “What is a woman?”
It should be easy to write today’s blog. But somehow it isn’t After all, how do you describe complete lunacy?
You all know that in order to win some imaginary ‘race to Net Zero’ to fight the imaginary ‘Climate Crisis’ to ‘save the planet, our rulers are busy banning everything that makes our lives pleasant.
Efficient, cheap petrol cars – soon to be banned. Efficient, cheap gas central heating – soon to be banned. Production of meat – soon to be reduced to make prices rise forcing us to cut our consumption. Freedom to drive outside your designated zone – already being punished by swingeing fines.
But the next planned series of assaults on our living standards are the stuff of absurdity.
Punishing producers if we don’t buy their products
Heat pumps horror
The Government is planning to fine boiler manufacturers thousands of pounds if they fail to install enough heat pumps under new net zero plans. Ministers are planning to force production quotas onto large manufacturers as part of efforts to boost uptake of the devices across Britain.
Companies that fail to meet the quotas will face a fine of £5,000 per device. In an example given in consultation papers, a manufacturer with a shortfall of 100 would be expected to pay £500,000. Heat pumps are seen as a key replacement for gas-fired boilers, which ministers want to phase out in order to cut carbon emissions.
Our rulers want us to buy 600,000 horrendously expensive and utterly useless heat pumps a year by 2028. But we’re only buying around 30,000 a year and that number is falling as people learn how expensively dysfunctional heat pumps actually are. In their infinite wisdom, government ministers have decided that it’s the fault of boiler manufacturers that we the public can’t afford to and/or don’t want to buy unaffordable, worthless heat pumps. The new system of punitive fines on boiler manufacturers also takes no account of the fact that there aren’t sufficient installers to put in these ghastly, noisy, underperforming machines and that the electricity grid would collapse were a large number of heat pumps to be installed.
Fining and bankrupting manufacturers because people don’t want to buy their products is madness. It’s so mad, that our cretinous rulers will probably push ahead with their demented scheme.
Electric car crash
Our deranged rulers are planning a similar scheme if we, the public, don’t buy sufficient numbers of electric milk carts pretending to be cars.
At least 22% of the cars manufacturers sell next year (2024) will have to be electric – or car manufacturers could face fines of up to £15,000 per car they miss their target by. Car makers unable to meet their targets, will be fined, with the government proposing a £15,000 penalty for every non-electric car and £18,000 per non-electric van they miss their target by. The target of 22% will, I believe, be increased each year reaching 80% by 2030.
That’s if the latest government proposals get the go-ahead. On March 30, these were the plans ministers announced proposed as part of a major green agenda which details tough goals and punitive measures for car makers.
With electric vehicles, our expenses-fiddling, self-serving, incompetent government ministers seem blissfully unaware that there aren’t enough charging points for these useless pretend cars were we to be stupid enough to buy them in the quantities our rulers want. But maybe that’s the whole point of the exercise – a 30% reduction in the number of cars on Britain’s roads as is detailed in the Government’s Net Zero plans.
Prisoners in their own homes?
And in Lewisham (London) the council tried to get away with fining motorists around £55,000 for daring to drive through a Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) even though the motorists were forced to use the LTN route because a burst water main prevented them using roads which avoided the LTN.
That this is happening in Britain – a formerly democratic country and the birthplace of parliamentary democracy is beyond incredible. Our politicians are elected supposedly to serve their constituents. But I guess our bovine capitulation to the Chinese lab-leaked plague lockdowns has given our parasitic rulers a heady taste of total power over us and now they believe they can get away with anything.
History has taught us that whenever an oppressive regime tries to restrict the supply of something people want, a black market quickly develops. So, I guess it won’t be long before the only place you can get a petrol-driven car or gas boiler or decent cut of meat will be when it’s smuggled into Britain and sold on the black market. Then anyone buying or selling the ‘wrong’ kind of heating or ‘wrong’ kind of car on the black market or else anyone caught eating too much meat will be arrested, tried and sent to prison for ‘crimes against the planet’. And no doubt our envious neighbours will be only too happy to denounce us to the eco-police if we manage to obtain things they are too cowardly to get for themselves.
The North Korean Fatboy would be impressed with what’s happening in the Democratic People’s Republic of Britain.
I try not to write about myself on this blog. After all, any fool can do that. Instead I try to find stories which the mainstream media ‘forgets’ to cover. But this weekend I thought I’d use a personal story as, if this helps just one person, it’s worth boring the rest of you.
Two things happened this week which made me think there might be a point writing about this. Firstly, I tried to book a doctor’s appointment with my local GP surgery. I know the NHS is in trouble even as (for some unfathomable to me reason) it desperately tries to recruit ever more Diversity, Inclusion and Equality (DIE) managers. But I was shocked to learn that the earliest available appointment was in four weeks at another surgery several miles away. So I had to accept this. Then on Thursday evening I saw a documentary about people going abroad for medical procedures as the NHS waiting lists were so long that many of their conditions would be worse, and even become inoperable, if they were sufficiently patient to wait for our collapsing NHS to even consider the possibility of treating them.
So, here’s my story:
I was recently on an extended trip to South-East Asia. While in Thailand I suddenly started getting debilitating headaches on the left side of my head. The first doctor I saw thought it might be due to an ear infection as I swim about one kilometre a day during the winter months. But after a week on antibiotics, the headaches had not improved. So I was advised to go to a major hospital in case I had a brain tumour.
When I first arrived at the hospital there seemed to be a disorganised crowd hanging around the Information Desk. But after about 10 minutes I spoke to one of the staff and within less than an hour was being seen by a neurologist. He planned a series of tests including an MRI Scan and and MRA Scan. Both these are done on an MRI scanner which is a serious bit of equipment costing over £1 million ($1.2 million or €1.2 million). The tests and scans were booked for the next day – a Saturday. And I would have been given the results that day except that Saturday was the neurologist’s day off. So I went back on the Sunday to get the results shown to me on a computer screen, written up in a report and given to me on a CD. Thankfully they showed that what’s left of my brain, in spite of my valiant efforts over many years to support the Chang Brewing Company and Thailand’s night life, is totally normal.
The day of the tests and scans was superbly well-organised with (very attractive) nurses or nursing assistants waiting for me at the end of each stage to take me on to the next stage.
The hospital was not like being in the Thailand we all know and love which works to Thai time (พรุ่งนี้ – prung ni, prung ni) – a very vague concept unlike western time – a country where people sleep most of the time at work and where, if someone can possibly do something the wrong way, they’ll do it wrong at least five times before getting it right. The hospital was really well-run, the doctors excellent and the staff incredibly efficient.
I don’t know how healthcare works in European countries or the USA or Australia. But I believe that if I had tried to be treated for the headaches in Britain, I would have had to wait weeks before seeing a doctor – at my surgery this was, as mentioned, four weeks. The doctor would then write a referral to a specialist at my local hospital which might take up to 4 weeks (but now often 6 weeks) before I could see the specialist. Then there would be at least another couple of weeks before I could get the x-rays, blood tests and scans. Finally there could be a further couple of weeks before I could get an appointment with the specialist to review the results. So the process which took the Thai hospital just two days could easily take two to three months in Britain. If you’re being investigated for a possibly serious condition like cancer, a dodgy heart or a brain tumour, you really don’t want two months or more of anxiety while waiting for appointments, tests and results.
Of course, all of this would be free in Britain. But for the x-rays, blood tests, MRI and MRA scans and two appointments with a neurologist at the Thai hospital I paid about £1,000 (about $1,200 or €1,200).
Just to give you a further idea of prices, an appointment with a general doctor in Thailand at a GP practice or at a smaller private hospital costs just 800 baht (about £20/$22/€22) compared to around £90 in Britain. Each appointment with the neurologist cost 1,600 baht (£40/$45/€45) compared to about £150 to £200 to see a specialist in a private hospital in the UK.
Having worked as a management consultant in almost 100 organisations in fifteen countries and having previously been married to a cancer surgeon in one of the Scandinavian countries for over 20 years, I do understand that a public health service like the NHS cannot have highly-trained doctors and expensive equipment just waiting around in case an appropriate patient turns up. So waiting lists are an effective way of ensuring that there is always sufficient demand for key personnel and equipment. But it still seems beyond incredible that the NHS’s 35,000+ highly-paid, generously-pensioned managers need two to three months to do what a Thai hospital can do in two days.
One of the Thai government’s business strategies to encourage economic growth and employment is to make Thailand a go-to destination for people from around the world for medical procedures. From what I experienced a few weeks ago at the Thai hospital, I know that if I was put on a waiting list in Britain for months for a knee or hip or AMD eye or even cancer operation, I’d be straight on a plane to Thailand and check in to one of the main hospitals which cater for foreigners as their equipment and standard of care are, from what I experienced, excellent. You’d be treated within a couple of days and prices are around a third of what you’d pay in a private hospital in Britain.
And the nurses are prettier and the weather’s better.
And the food isn’t too bad either.
Anyway, hopefully this might be of interest to someone out there.
Wikipedia tells us that: The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan drawn up by the World Economic Forum in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was launched in June 2020, with a video featuring the then Prince of Wales Charles released to mark its launch.
For some people, The Great Reset is a wonderful opportunity to restructure Western societies in the way they believe is best for us (whether we like it or not) in order to create a new, wonderful, sustainable, planet-saving utopia.
But others are not so excited. They view the Great Reset as a massive power- and wealth-grab by the elites which will leave us ordinary people living poorer, drabber, darker, more constrained lives.
The Great Reset marches ever onwards
Here are just some of the first stages of the Great Reset that our rulers, enthusiastically encouraged by prostitute fake journalists in the mainstream media, are imposing on us:
Creating fuel price poverty
The supposed Climate Crisis has provided the private-jet-setting, climate-conference-attending elites with the perfect excuse to force their Great Reset on us. Perhaps the first part of the Great reset can be seen in energy prices. We’re told that energy prices have shot up because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And, yes, that has had some influence. But in Britain around 30% of our energy bills is due to massive subsidies paid to support supposedly cheap renewable energy. China and India buy much of their oil and gas from the same sources as us, but their energy prices are less than half what we pay in the UK and just a quarter of energy prices in countries like Germany and Denmark:
Also, China and India burn lots of cheap, energy-rich coal, while we build lots of expensive and largely useless windfarms and solar farms.
Then you have to add price rises due to a reduction in investment in fossil-fuel exploration as energy companies have been demonised as planet-destroyers, governments have blocked new exploration and banks have been discouraged from investing in energy companies. If it wasn’t for our ruling elites’ war on fossil fuels, which they claim will save the planet from almost imminent climate catastrophe, we’d be paying about 70% less for our energy than we now have to.
Limiting our choices
Again to supposedly save the planet from being destroyed by us worthless ordinary people, our freedom to choose how we heat our homes and how we travel are being taken away from us. Cheap efficient gas boilers will soon be banned to be replaced by useless, eye-wateringly expensive and ludicrously misnamed ‘heat pumps’ which don’t work on cold days. And, of course, cheap, efficient petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars will be banned and replaced by impractical, horrifically-expensive electric milk floats pretending to be cars.
And this week the UK government announced it will be increasing taxes on gas to further pressure us to abandon gas boilers and to discourage us from cooking with efficient, easily-controllable gas hobs and replace them with inefficient electric hobs.
Moreover, now landlords will be banned from renting out their properties unless the properties meet stringent energy efficiency standards to help Britain ‘win the race to Net Zero’:
This will force landlords to spend thousands of pounds insulating their properties thus pushing up rents and/or probably lead to a huge reduction in the number of rental properties available at the same time as our useless government allows 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 or more legal and illegal migrants each year into the small crowded island which used to be our country.
Curtailing our freedom to travel
Next has come the wonderful concept of ‘ 15-minute cities’ where everything we need should be a 15-minute walk or 15-minute bike ride from our homes:
Already this is being implemented in the UK in Oxford and Canterbury with swingeing fines for anyone selfish enough to want to venture out of their allotted area. This is also starting in Barcelona, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Milan, Paris and Portland. One problem is that absolutely nothing is being done to put the necessary facilities nearer to people’s homes. Yet the punishments for people daring to leave their zone are being enthusiastically implemented by the ruling elites.
And, of course, we’ll be told that as everything we need is theoretically only 15 minutes away, there will be no need for us to own the ultimate symbol and enabler of personal freedom – our own car.
Rationing our food
For the last 30-40 years, the climate catastrophists have blamed levels of atmospheric CO2 for their (imagined) Climate Crisis. But suddenly, within the last year or so, the Greta-worshipping climate doom-mongers have managed to invent a new demon – methane. Oddly, they never thought of mentioning this before. But by demonising methane, which is largely produced by agriculture using nitrogen-based fertilisers and from livestock production, this has given the elites an excuse to launch a full-scale war on farmers in order to limit food production.
The endgame here is to push up meat prices beyond the reach of ordinary people to lower meat consumption and promote more “sustainable” sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown products, and even insects. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, has stated that global meat and dairy consumption must be reduced by 50% by 2050.
Here’s a rather good article from Unherd describing the new war on farmers better than I could:
Have you got a ‘smart meter’? Probably we’ll all be forced to have one eventually as these will allow our rulers to give every household an energy allocation or budget and the smart meter will probably be programmed to either massively increase the price per unit we pay or even cut off our energy if we dare to exceed our energy allocation. And now there’s even talk of using water meters to restrict how much water each household uses probably by huge price increases for anyone or any household exceeding their allotted water ration. After all, it’s cheaper for our rulers to restrict how much water we can use than pushing the hugely profitable water companies to fix leaks and build new reservoirs.
One day we may even reach the stage described in journalist Ross Clark’s satirical novel THE DENIAL:
Every household or every person will have a CO2 budget which constrains what they eat, how much they buy, how much they travel – in fact every aspect of their lives. And when a household or person has reached their CO2 budget for that month, they are unable to buy anything till the next month.
Although I don’t think Ross Clark mentions this in his book, I suspect that the introduction of CO2 rationing would be accompanied by a (lucrative for some people) CO2 trading scheme whereby the poor could sell some of their CO2 budget to the rich allowing the rich to lead lives free of any of the constraints which will be imposed on us useless masses.
George Orwell would have been impressed at how the Great Reset creates the dystopian world he warned us against.
What a wonderful future the Great Reset promises:
Oh, and here’s only one of our 650 useless, self-serving, expenses-fiddling, self-enriching politicians talking just a little bit of sense. But even he doesn’t have the courage to admit that the whole absurd cultist Climate Crisis, Net Zero crusade is a load of nonsense:
I’ll only leave this up for one day as there’s another blog I want to write. But I thought it worth doing this blog as it possibly gives a perspective on the Russia/Ukraine war I haven’t seen in the media.
Paltrow’s porkies?
Before I get into my blog, I was thinking about the absurd court case in the USA between Hollywood royalty, Queen Gwyneth Paltrow, and a retired optometrist. I have been skiing each year for quite a few years and there were various aspects of Ms Paltrow’s version of events which struck me as more than unlikely:
She claims the optometrist skied up behind her, put his skis between her legs and they fell over. If that was the case, then as they were going downhill the optometrist would have fallen on top of her and, given that both would have been wearing thick ski outfits, the optometrist’s fall would have been cushioned by Ms Paltrow’s body and he wouldn’t have sustained several broken ribs and a head injury. On the other hand, if Ms Paltrow had skied into the retired optometrist landing on top of him, that might explain why he sustained injuries while she could ski away uninjured
Ms Paltrow claimed that the retired optometrist had started grunting as he skied into her forcing her legs open. She seemed to be suggesting that he had sexually assaulted her. I have never sexually assaulted anyone. But if I did want to, the last person I would try sexually assaulting would be someone wearing a full-body ski suit on a green (easy) ski slope in the middle of the day.
Of course, this is just my ignorant opinion. Queen Gwyneth may be totally innocent. And even if she’s guilty, I suspect she can buy any number of prostitute ‘experts’ who will ‘prove’ her innocence providing sufficient fees and expenses are handed over. And I suspect Queen Gwyneth will win the case whether she is guilty or not.
But from my limited experience of skiing and of how gravity works, I believe that Ms Paltrow is telling a massive Paltrow porkie. If this is the case, it may provide an interesting insight into the minds and morals of Hollywood royalty. They can never admit they are in the wrong. I understand that Ms Paltrow is worth about $300m. I propose that she would be more admired if she could just say, “I’m sorry, I was distracted by my children and wasn’t paying attention” and give the guy the $300,000 he’s asking for.
Are the Ukrainians doing the Russians a favour?
I’ve just got back from an extended trip to South-East Asia. As you’ll know, Russians can’t take holidays in Europe – London, Paris, Alpine ski resorts, the French Riviera and suchlike. But several Asian countries are absolutely swamped by Russian tourists. In Thailand, for example, all the restaurants have menus in Thai, Russian and English. And the private hospitals have full-time Russian interpreters available for all the Russian tourists who get the usual holiday problems – food poisoning, sunburn, dog bites from Thailand’s more than one million strays and nasty scrapes from motorbike accidents when the Russians drive around on rented mopeds in shorts and a t-shirt.
Given that I speak a bit of Russian, I asked a few Russians whether they were worried about getting drafted to fight in Ukraine and what they thought of the Ukraine war. The Russians I spoke to were from the middle and upper classes (who could afford foreign holidays) and said there was no chance of them being drafted as they had the money and/or connections to avoid the draft. As for the war in Ukraine, one Russian said that the Ukrainians were doing Russia a favour by killing the tens of thousands of criminals – rapists, murderers, thieves, blackmailers, drug dealers etc – who had ‘volunteered’ to fight in return for a pardon (in the unlikely event that they survived). As for the ordinary non-criminal Russians sent to Ukraine, well they mostly came from the lowest, least-educated levels of Russian society, often from ethnic minorities despised by middle- and upper-class Russians. So the people I spoke to felt that their deaths were no great loss for their country.
If you’re a Russian poor enough or criminal enough to be sent to the slaughter in Ukraine, please bear in mind that your more privileged countrymen couldn’t give a toss what happens to you? So why not take the rusty, 20-year-old gun you’ve been given and the few bullets you’ve been allowed to have, shoot your incompetent, corrupt officers and go home? Your wonderful president is already one of the richest people in the world. Do you want to be seriously injured or die to make him even richer?
I wanted to write about something else today. But on Sunday afternoon I watched the Andrew Neil Show on C4 and almost fell off my sofa when I realised the utter stupidity of our useless politicians.
A speedy train in a tiny country?
I’ll make this part of my blog simple so, were any politicians to be reading it, even they might understand.
I’ve always known that it was ridiculous to build a high-speed train in a tiny country like England.
France is a big country – about 640,000 km2. The UK is a small country – about 242,000 km2. England is an even smaller country – 130,000 km2. France has an extensive high-speed rail network – the TGV. It makes sense to have high-speed trains in a large country. It doesn’t make sense to have high-speed trains in a small country.
Now let’s go a bit deeper. The French train route from Paris to Lyon to Marseilles can probably be seen as comparable to the UK train route from London to Birmingham to Manchester in terms of how it connects major cities. But the differences in distances are huge. Paris to Lyon is 292 miles, whereas London to Birmingham is only 128 miles. And Lyon to Marseilles is 488 miles, whereas Birmingham to Manchester is just 86 miles.
The much greater distances in France justify a high-speed rail network. But squandering over £100bn on cutting just a few minutes off the train time from London to Birmingham and then even fewer minutes off the train journey from Birmingham to Manchester is utterly ludicrous.
I don’t know how many readers have ever had a train set or even Scalextric when they were younger. But if you had either, you’d know that if you want to go fast, you need long straight sections. If you don’t need to go fast, you don’t need long straight sections. We don’t need the new train from London to Birmingham to Manchester to be high speed as the few minutes a high-speed train would reduce journey times by are insignificant. And if you don’t need long straight sections, it’s much cheaper to build the new railway line as you can go around obstacles like hills rather than having to tunnel through them.
It won’t even get to Central London
But what seemed to be confirmed on the Andrew Neil Show on Sunday is that the new HS2 won’t even go to Central London. Instead it will stop at some dump in North-west London that nobody has ever heard of. So, if HS2 is ever built, to get from Central London to Birmingham and Manchester will actually be faster using the existing (not high-speed) route from Euston Station than travelling up to the dump in North-west London to catch the (probably much more expensive) HS2.
On the Andrew Neil Show, a (IMHO) devious-looking, rat-like creature called Michael Gove gave the game away. When asked whether HS2 would go to Euston Station in Central London, the Gove thing said that the decision hadn’t been made yet. Then the (IMHO) slimy, slippery Gove started waxing lyrical about how wonderful it would be for regeneration of North-west London if HS2 started and ended its journey there.
Only in Britain could they build a £100bn+ high-speed train which takes longer to get you to your destination than a traditional Intercity 125.
As the truth about this disaster emerges, expect our politicians to alter their tune and now start claiming the real reason for HS2 is to ‘increase capacity’ and not to cut down journey times. So they’ll try to desperately downplay the fact that the useless thing won’t even take you to Central London. But as I have explained above, if the aim was to ‘increase’ capacity rather than reduce journey times, then there is absolutely no need for the vast expense of a high-speed line.
The already 3,000-employee Care Quality Commission (CQC) is hiring. Hopefully you all know who the CQC are. On their website they explain:
CQC is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England.
We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve.
We monitor, inspect and regulate services and publish what we find. Where we find poor care, we will use our powers to take action.
So who do you think the CQC is hiring? Doctors, nurses and healthcare workers with experience to check our hospitals and care homes? That wouldn’t be too smart as we already have a shortage of doctors and nurses and in care homes some shaven-headed idiot politician decided that any care worker refusing the fake ineffective and dangerous vaccines should be fired. I believe this led to around 40,000 care workers leaving the profession. This then led to a lack of care facilities for people ready to leave hospitals and thus a massive increase in so-called ‘bed-blockers’.
Hey, I’ve just had a crazy idea. From what little I understand many people in the medical and care-home sector retire early due to health problems – back pain is, I believe, a major issue from constantly having to lift often gravitationally-challenged (aka fat) people. What if many of these early retirees still wanted to make a contribution? Wouldn’t they make ideal CQC employees given they would have spent their working lives in hospitals and care homes. Surely these would be the kind of people the CQC would be looking to hire?
But no, the CQC has other views on its personnel needs. So the CQC is currently looking for a Diversity and Inclusion Officer.
The description of the job is quite short:
The role of the Diversity and Inclusion (D and I) Officer will be of critical support to develop and deliver the new Diversity and Inclusion strategy, as well as existing key projects within the Diversity and Inclusion team.
This work is core delivery within the Human Resources (HR) Business Plan and People plan, and will enable colleagues to effectively deliver the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) strategic priorities.
The benefits the lucky candidate will receive is much longer:
This role will provide experience in organisational change, Human Resources, and working with senior colleagues. We want to support you to succeed and be your absolute best, with opportunities for training and development, along with the support of experienced managers and mentors.
Your health and wellbeing are important to us and are supported through generous annual leave (starting at 27 days and rising with service to 32.5days, plus 8 Bank Holidays), a cycle to work scheme, discounted gym vouchers and access to a free employee assistance service 24 hours a day.
We understand the importance of financial health and offer membership of the NHS pension scheme, contributing about 14% of basic salary. You will also have access to discounts for supermarkets, high street stores, electronics, fleet cars, plus an internal reward scheme with vouchers!
We aim to make working at the CQC a positive experience and we role model a representative culture of the communities we serve. We therefore support an inclusive environment where colleagues feel empowered to bring their best self to work, with a variety of staff networks that facilitate this; the Race Equality Network, LGBT+ Equality Network, Carers Equality Network, Disability Equality Network and Gender Equality network.
Apparently the CQC believes that a Diversity and Inclusion Officer is just what this country needs in order to vastly improve our medical and social care.
Are you useless? The NHS needs you
But if you can’t get this important position as Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the CQC, don’t worry. Throughout our useless, collapsing NHS there is a massive hiring spree for similarly utterly pointless people.
Just one of many examples is the NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit which is hiring an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Board Adviser. Here’s part of the job description:
When it comes to being more inclusive good, is not good enough.
Midlands and Lancashire CSU (MLCSU) have created this new role to support us o deliver our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) agenda. We recognise that we need to improve our performance in this area and are looking for a Board member to support the holistic development and implementation of our EDI strategy and the realisation of our ambition to create a dynamic culture that supports all our people to achieve.
The post holder will be an active member of the Board and lead advisor to the Board regarding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, playing the role of a critical friend. They will help ensure that EDI is central to the development of our core business strategy and the positioning of the MLCSU in the evolving NHS landscape. In addition, they will provide advice and guidance to a range of stakeholders including the Managing Director, Executive Directors, staff network chairs, and EDI Leads.
In Wales the CWM Taf Morgannwg University Health Board is hiring an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead. We’re informed that this vital person with a salary of £48,526 – £54,619 a year:
This post is integral to supporting Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board (CTMUHB) in its ambitions to address structural and systemic inequity. By promoting, championing and leading on the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) portfolio from the lens of cultural and behavioural change as well as systems and processes across CTMUHB; this post will ensure CTMUHB continues to work towards equity for staff, patients and service users. You will lead on and coordinate the development of strategies and policies/processes in collaboration with partners to support governance as well as cultural change in developing an inclusive culture within CTMUHB where everyone feels that they belong.
You will support the culture of Belonging and Inclusion with CTMUHB with your Organisational Development colleagues; role modelling inclusive thinking and practice. You will support the continuous development of the infrastructure for staff networks and ensure minoritised groups have their voices heard; while supporting the Network Chairs to be the intermediary between minoritised groups and the CTMUHB whilst supporting leaders and the wider workforce to be accountable around initiatives that address inequity.
The CWM Taf Morgannwg University Health Board is also looking for an Equality Diversity & Inclusion Admin Coordinator salary £23,949 – £26,282 a year. This obviously necessary individual will:
Provide a comprehensive service to support the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead at Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board (CTMUHB) in the organisation and planning of duties and workload, which supports service delivery. The post holder will be responsible for the day-to-day running of the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion function and will ensure that the business is managed effectively and efficiently.
The NHS in crisis – a crisis of incompetence
We keep being told that the NHS is in crisis and that it needs more and more and ever more money. Doctors, nurses, ambulance workers have been striking for more pay. Yet the NHS is wasting millions or even tens of millions on completely pointless woke, DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) staff who not only contribute absolutely nothing but actually impede the people doing the real work.
The only crisis at our collapsing NHS is a crisis of incompetence – a crisis of around 38,000 waste-of-skin managers who haven’t the slightest clue about what they’re paid so generously to do.
I’ll start this blog with a couple of paragraphs about the foreign aid fiasco from my 2015 book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL
In the last sixty years around $3 trillion has been donated by developed countries to help poorer countries. There have been some huge successes – extreme poverty has been more than halved, diseases like river blindness and smallpox have been all but eradicated and millions of lives have been saved from famine and conflict. Moreover, many aid recipients have managed to break free from poverty and achieve rising levels of prosperity for their people. In the 1960s countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan had lower income per capita than some African countries. Now, thanks in part to aid, they have shot ahead of their African counterparts. South Korea for example, used to have a lower income per capita than Ghana. By 2013 South Korea’s income per capita at $33,189 was close to ten times that of Ghana at just $3,461. Though the country which has achieved most in improving the lot of its population is probably China where, with very little foreign aid at all, close to seven hundred million people have been taken out of poverty in just thirty years.
But while most formerly poor Asian and some South American countries have made significant progress on the road to development and modernisation, too many countries, particularly in Africa, have stagnated or even become more impoverished over the last few decades in spite of being given more in aid than any other part of the world. In Europe, after the Second World War the US-sponsored Marshall Plan is generally credited for helping war-ravaged European countries to rebuild and become prosperous. So some people have demanded a ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’. There’s only one problem with this demand. Africa has already had its Marshall Plan – several times over. In the last fifty years Africa has been given the equivalent of around ten Marshall Plans. In today’s money, the five-year European Marshall Plan saw about $100 billion – $20 billion a year – being used to rebuild Europe after WWII. In the last fifty years, Africa has received over $1 trillion in aid. So, Africa received about the same every year – $20 billion a year – for fifty years that Europe received each year for just five years. Yet there’s little evidence that those countries getting the most aid have benefited from this aid and a quarter of Sub-Saharan countries, including some of the world’s greatest recipients of foreign aid, are now poorer than they were in 1960.
So let’s look at the effects of all the aid the West has given to Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan. This chart from Our World in Data shows the GDP per capita for the world, China, Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan:
(left-click on charts, then left-click again to see more clearly)
The results should be more than obvious – while the world as a whole and China in particular have hugely improved the lives of several billion people, Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan have stagnated. Why? Probably because most of the hundreds of billions we have given these two areas have been wasted by stupidity and incompetence or just stolen by venal, kleptocrat politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies.
You’ll remember that there some serious floods in Pakistan last year. And, of course, we’re told it’s due to Climate Change. But what we’re not told is that when Pakistan became an independent country it had a forestation level of around 34%. By 2018, this had fallen to just 5.4%. Then there was a massive ‘plant one billion trees’ campaign launched in Pakistan. The result, by 2019 forestation levels fell further to 4.8% because most of the money for the tree planting was lost due to widespread corruption and incompetence. If you have a climate with one wet season and one dry season, it’s rather a good idea to have a reasonable level of forestation to help absorb the rain and protect the land during the wet season. I also imagine that trees are fairly useful in the dry season – they provide shade, keep moisture in the ground and prevent desertification. But our Pakistani friends are either too corrupt and/or too stupid to understand this.
This is just one tiny, insignificant example of how totally pointless it is giving our money to rotten, corrupt hell-holes like Pakistan. If you did a study – which I haven’t done – I think you’ll find that over 90% of all aid money we give to excrement-covered Pakistan gets wasted or stolen by incompetent and corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies.
As for Sub-Saharan Africa, countries like utterly corrupt, horrendously-misgoverned Zimbabwe and Congo and once prosperous but soon-to-be-Zimbabwified corrupt South Africa tell us all we need to know about Sub-Saharan Africa’s future – it doesn’t have one. All Sub-Saharan Africa has coming is more poverty, more misery, more hopelessness, more stupidity, more corruption. Here are just a few of African countries:
You’ll see which way once prosperous South Africa is heading under its incompetent, corrupt, kleptocrat ANC rulers.
The solution for most African countries is, of course, throwing out the garbage who run their countries and recolonising them with people from the West (irrespective of their skin colour) who could restore some semblance of civilisation and progress. But we’re not allowed to say that because the progressive, West-hating lefties claim that colonialism was an unmitigated disaster for Africa. In fact, the disaster really came when Africans took over the running, looting and ruination of their countries.
Anyway, China will soon be running any African country with mineral or agricultural resources. If the lefties think Western colonialism was bad, then they’re going to get a shock when they see the results of Chinese colonialism:
As for us in the West, it’s time for the West to give up on Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan. No amount of money will ever help them. Everything we give will either be wasted or stolen. It’s time to isolate Pakistan and Sub-Saharan Africa. It time to stop giving them our hundreds of billions. It’s time to ban all travel from them. It’s time to leave them to rot in a hell of their own making.
I did start to write a weekend blog but didn’t manage to finish it.
However, yesterday I came across a Dr John Campbell video from Friday 17 March. The video features a speech given in Parliament last Thursday or Friday by MP Andrew Bridgen. Bridgen is talking about the harms done by the mRNA vaccines and demanding an immediate stop to the vaccination programme. I’ll leave this up for three days as I think this is so important.
The key points about this video seem to be:
The speech is exceptionally well-informed – I believe Bridgen actually studied virology in his university days
As soon as Bridgen stood up to speak almost all the few cowardly, gutless MPs who were present in the Commons walked out because they didn’t want to hear what he was going to say
If Bridgen is right about the mRNA vaccines, the real scandal will not be the fact that our rulers made a mistake in believing in their efficacy and pushing them. We all make mistakes. The scandal will be our political and medical elites’ failure to react once it became clear that the mRNA vaccines were expensively doing more harm to more people than the disease they were supposed to be targeting.
Bridgen has, as you probably know, been thrown out of the Conservative Party.
But even worse is the fact that the UK, Australian and Canadian governments have all agreed massive deals with Moderna to produce a new generation of mRNA vaccines in the three countries. Not a smart move if it turns out that mRNA vaccines are a disaster.
And then there’s a funny coincidence. Theleme Partners (the Hedge Fund set up by our PM Rishi Rich along with some other financiers) has, I believe, around 36.69% of its assets in Moderna. That’s an extraordinary concentration when a standard rule of investing is that you ‘spread your risk’. A cynic might suggest that you would only have such a concentration if you had inside knowledge of events which would favour that company’s shares. Though we don’t know if Rishi or his family members or his chums still have a financial interest in Theleme Partners.
I love coincidences, don’t you?
Anyway, here’s the Dr John Campbell video with Andrew Bridgen’s (IMHO) brilliant speech.
Oh, by the way, I think that the MP who stayed voluntarily to hear the speech and who made a supportive interruption may be Sir Christopher Chope, MP for Christchurch. But I may be wrong.
This is a fairly inconsequential story, so I’ll just leave it up for one day. I’ll be back to more serious stuff at the weekend.
How I became an ‘expert’
Regular readers will know that my climate book has recently been published in South Korea:
Sales have been a bit slow, so I’ve started writing some articles based on the book that I hope the university professor who adapted my book for the Korean market can place in Korean media to help push sales.
One idea I had was to adapt a recent blog I wrote about how the move from petrol cars to electric vehicles is going to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout Western economies:
But to write this article, I needed to know how many cars the Korean auto industry produces each year and how many people work in the Korean auto industry.
My first thought was to get in touch with my Korean contact and ask him. But then I thought of Google. It took me less than three minutes on Google to get all the information I needed for my article.
Twenty or so years ago, a journalist would have had to have some knowledge of the area they were reporting on. But now with Google, anybody can write articles or even books without any knowledge at all. They just need a couple of ideas and Google will do the rest. Suddenly everyone can be an expert in everything.
I’m sure that somebody much more intelligent than myself has said that Google is the greatest revolution in the availability of knowledge since the invention of the printing press. However, as the West commits economic, cultural and societal suicide with its interminable and utterly trivial culture wars, its ludicrous obsession with trying to deny that there are only two sexes, its self-flagellation over the supposed sins of colonialism, its guilt for its supposed institutional racism and its futile efforts to fight a non-existent Climate Crisis, one could be forgiven for wondering whether getting immediate access to all the world’s knowledge has made us any more knowledgeable.
Would you trust this survey?
One fun ‘fact’ I found while Googling was a claim by Greenpeace that 82% of South Korean auto workers believe that petrol cars should be banned by 2035 and 64% believe a ban should be introduced by 2030. I wonder how the question in this marvellous survey was phrased. Here are two of many possibilities:
Petrol cars are polluting cities and increasing atmospheric CO2 which is causing a climate crisis. Do you think petrol cars should be banned?
If petrol cars are replaced by electric vehicles, over 150,000 of South Korea’s 331,000 car workers will be unemployed. You’re possibly one of those who will lose their job. Do you think petrol cars should be banned?
I rather suspect that the question Greenpeace asked in their survey was closer to the former of these two possibilities and awfully far away from the latter.
My ‘expert’ article
Anyway, here’s the article I wrote given that three minutes on Google have now made me an expert in South Korean motor manufacturing:
How to wreck your car industry and destroy jobs
by Seok Pak and David Craig
South Korea’s automobile industry produces around 3,160,000 passenger cars a year making the country the fourth largest producer of passenger cars in the world as of 2021, overtaking Germany in terms of vehicle output.1 South Korea exports around 1,960,000 passenger cars a year making automotive manufacturing a key industry for the country. More than 331,000 people are employed.
It’s one of the most critical industries for any country wishing to have a healthy economy.
Like other advanced economies, Korean politicians are planning to ban the sale of petrol cars and replace them with electric vehicles in order for the country to meet its obligations to reduce CO2 emissions. An electric vehicle requires about 30 percent less work than a petrol-driven car as there are fewer complex moving parts. So that’s almost 110,000 of South Korea’s 331,000 car workers who won’t be needed in the glorious greener future our rulers have planned for us. In Germany, which produces around 3,100,000 cars a year, IG Metall, the German union for most of that nation’s autoworkers, estimates that 75,000 German jobs building engines and transmissions will be eliminated by 2030.2
Moreover, due to the high cost and impracticality of electric vehicles, many governments expect that there will be a reduction in car ownership of somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent. That will mean a further drastic cut in the number of car workers in most advanced economies.
According to a survey conducted by Greenpeace and the Korean Metal Workers’ Union, more than 82 percent of employees in the industry believe vehicles with internal combustion engines should not be sold after 2035, while nearly 64 percent say a ban should be introduced by 2030.3 One could wonder whether those surveyed were aware of how many of them would be made unemployed by the switch to electric vehicles.
Then there is one further problem for car manufacturers worldwide – China has a virtual monopoly of the rare earth metals needed for our rulers’ great green revolution:
Will the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) generously allow these rare earth metals to be exported so that other countries can make car batteries and all the other things needed to go green? Or will the CCP restrict exports of rare earth metals so that most of the manufacturing of car batteries and other key products required for the green revolution will be done in China?
The switch from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles is going to be catastrophic for the Korean car industry and will result in the loss of probably more than 150,000 jobs. Let us hope that Korean politicians have planned what all these soon-to-be-unemployed car workers will be doing to earn a living in the wonderful Net-Zero CO2 future that is being prepared for all of us.
Seok Pak and David Craig are authors of CLIMATE APOCALYPSE The Greatest Scam in Human History
David Craig, on April 5th, 2023
