Wikipedia tells us that Amanda Kate Pritchard is a British healthcare official and public policy analyst who has been the Chief Executive of NHS England since 1 August 2021. Pritchard previously served as chief operating officer of NHS England and as chief executive of NHS Improvement from 2019 to 2021.
She gets paid (please note I did not use the word “earns”) about £260,000 a year and no doubt will soon get a few gongs and a seat in the Lords as all those of her ilk invariably do.
You may have thought that there were some small problems with the NHS England – people waiting 10-20 hours for an ambulance, possibly 500 people a week dying early due to failing healthcare, some the worst cancer survival rates in the developed world and so on. Ms Pritchard and her legions of managers, many of them also on 6-figure salaries, seem to me to be blissfully unaware of these issues and are pushing ahead with hiring even more DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers apparently in the belief that more DIE managers is just what is needed to solve the NHS’s current problems and improve patient care.
I have blogged about this several times. What I have done differently in this weekend’s blog is include parts of the job descriptions (or non-job descriptions?) of these utterly useless individuals.
For reasons of space, I have just included four DIE vacancies posted within the last few weeks.
Please note that Pennine Care NHS Trust is hiring not one but two of these supremely pointless individuals. I don’t know whether every ambulance in the Pennine Care NHS Trust reaches patients within the targeted times, whether Pennine Care NHS Trust’s cancer survival rates are among the best in the world, whether Pennine Care NHS Trust is such a perfectly-functioning healthcare organisation that it simply cannot improve its performance and so can afford the time and expense of building an army of DIE managers. Or perhaps, Pennine Care NHS Trust’s executives (for whom Amanda Pritchard is responsible) are a bunch of incompetent dolts who haven’t a clue about what their jobs are?
Anyway, please enjoy reading about the wonderfully useful people our envy-of-the-world NHS is busy hiring.
Looking at the job descriptions, you might be forgiven for thinking that our NHS now prizes ‘diversity’ above ‘effectiveness’. So candidates with lower skills, but higher diversity scores, are being prioritised in recruitment. Being slightly old-fashioned, as a potential patient I would prefer medical staff with the highest skills even though they may not be sufficiently ‘diverse’ for Ms Pritchard’s growing army of DIE managers.
Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
NHS Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board
£56,164 – £65,262 a year – Permanent
Full Job Description
The post-holder will seek out and interpret national guidance and legislation relating to equality, diversity, and inclusion giving specialist advice to directors and managers, clinical leads and Board members to ensure due regard for equality and diversity in their ongoing work programmes.
The post holder will create and deliver an ambitious and robust series of plans that addresses E&D, inclusion, wellbeing, and human rights issues internally and for patients. The post holder will be specifically accountable for the Workforce Race Equality Standard, Workforce Disability Equality Standard, Equality Delivery System, The Race Code, LGBTQ+ Framework, NHS England (Midlands) Race Equality and Inclusion Strategy, Race Pay Gap reporting and identified areas of the national staff survey. Information and analysis on these areas will be produced for the ICB and the ICS.
This new and exciting role within the Workforce and OD Directorate will work closely with Workforce and OD colleagues to partner the business and build upon the Equality Diversity and Inclusion foundation that has been built in the organisation.
Working as part of the Workforce and OD Directorate and reporting into the Deputy Director of Workforce and OD, you will need to be passionate about developing a diverse and inclusive culture and have a value set that fits with our Trust and the NHS.
You will be prepared to constructively challenge the status quo to deliver upon the objectives set within the People and Trust Strategy, you will understand that our staff really are our greatest asset and actively seek to deliver a proactive, expert and professional EDI service that achieves the best outcomes for workforce diversity.
With every day presenting you with a myriad of challenges, you will excel in this role if you are organised, analytical and have excellent people skills, you will also have:
Exceptional communication, influencing and presentation skills, with the ability to work in an environment building relationships with a number of internal and external stakeholders
The ability to develop bespoke and creative solutions to EDI challenges as well as to meet the objectives set within Trust strategies, as well as to respond to (and deliver upon) local, regional and national reporting and plans
In return, you will be offered the opportunity to work within a supportive environment, within a team that understands having fun and enjoying work is important to building successful teams and services. You will be empowered to make a difference and contribute to the overall effectiveness of the Workforce and OD Directorate.
Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust understands the importance of maintaining a work life balance and as such we fully encourage and support a wide range of flexible working initiatives. If the working hours/arrangements for this role do not meet your requirements, please don’t let this deter you from applying, we would welcome an application from you and will happily discuss any working arrangements that differ from those advertised. This role will involve a blend of remote working and office working, depending on business need.
We are an award winning and CQC rated good, health and social care Trust that delivers care to communities in Hull, East Yorkshire, Scarborough and Ryedale and Whitby. We deliver safe, effective and integrated health services that improve the physical, mental and social health and wellbeing of our patients and service users.
We have exciting opportunity to lead our growing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Team at Pennine Care.
We welcome candidates with a clear and demonstrable passion and/lived experience.
This is a key senior which at its heart will help us continue our journey in creating a truly inclusive culture where everyone can be their true selves at work and ensuring fair access to our services and improve the outcomes and experiences of our service users. people can be their authentic self and where access to and experience of our
We are looking for a passionate EDI leader with ideas for improvement and an eye on delivering and driving our ambitious agenda. The successful candidate will be highly knowledgeable about the issues facing minority and/or under-represented groups and have the inter-personal skills to engage with and involve a range of diverse groups and individuals to ensure our work is informed and supported by people’s experience.
To be successful, you will be an authority in EDI best practice, knowledge and application. You will be able to demonstrate significant recent evidence of leading and implementing initiatives achieving equality improvement outcomes. You will be an advocate for diversity and inclusion and have the credibility and influence to work with people at all levels to put EDI at the heart of everything we do.
A strong communicator and influencer, you will develop effective working relationships both strategically and operationally across a range of settings, in order to deliver our EDI priorities and to continue to mainstream EDI best practice across all aspects of our patient services and our workforce.
You will lead on the development and implementation of the Trusts strategic EDI objectives ensuring the involvement of diverse groups and people with lived experience in the development and implementation of our plans.
Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Project Officer
Do you have the passion to make a real difference to the lives of others?
The Trust’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Team are looking for a passionate individual to join their team to support the delivery of a wide range of innovative interventions to support the Trust on its EDI journey.
We are offering you the opportunity to become our EDI project officer, supporting the implementation and delivery of programmes from our anti-racism approach, health inequalities to strengthening our staff networks, to name a few!
We are looking for someone with enthusiasm for EDI, who can work creatively and respond positively in a constantly evolving environment. A personal interest in EDI is important too.
We are proud to provide high quality mental health and learning disability services, both inpatient and in the community across five boroughs of Greater Manchester – Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport and Tameside and Glossop.
This is an exciting time to join our EDI team as we develop our ambitious EDI strategy for the future. You will have a pivotal role in supporting the Trust to build inclusive environments that promote equality of opportunity and diversity for all staff members, service users and their families and local communities the Trust serves.
The ideal candidate will have a real drive and passion for EDI and to make a difference to people’s lives. You will be a creative individual with the ability to plan, deliver and implement innovative ideas and measure success of their impact as well as support the Trust’s with its annual EDI submissions, and provide guidance to managers and staff on all things EDI.
You all probably know the newspaper adage “if it bleeds, it leads” – if a story has plenty of blood and death in it, it will likely be the leading story in each day’s edition. Basically people are more drawn to bad news stories than good news.
This has been called the “negativity bias”. There has been quite a lot of research done into why people are more drawn to negative rather than positive news stories.
In one study when asked, people said they preferred good news. On average, they said that the media was too focussed on negative stories. But during the study, participants often chose stories with a negative tone – corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy and so on – rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news.
There have been various explanations of the “negativity bias”. It may be that we get a certain self-satisfaction reading about other people who have improved the human gene pool due to their own stupidity. It may be partly due to epicaricacy – the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Sometimes it may be due to what I’ve called “survivor’s exhilaration. When I was 17, I was in a train in Switzerland which crashed into a tunnel wall killing a few people. I think most passengers experienced a rush of adrenalin and exhilaration that they had survived the crash. Or there may be some other explanations.
But basically, good news doesn’t excite people and doesn’t sell nearly as well as bad news.
So, here’s some good news our mainstream media are unlikely to ever mention:
(All these examples are taken from my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. So apologies to anyone who has already read the book)
Good news 1 – A massive decrease in poverty
Over the last 20 or so years around one billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty (having to live on less than $2.15 a day). That’s an incredible 137,000 people a day:
I suspect most people didn’t know that.
Moreover, one key contributor to this reduction in extreme poverty has been the availability of cheap energy from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. In fact, the greatest environmental harm has not come from the use of fossil fuels. The greatest environmental harm has come from those with no access to fossil fuels and who have had to use wood and charcoal for cooking thus destroying massive amounts of forest.
For example, if I remember the figures correctly, when Pakistan became an independent country it had a forestation level of about 35%. By 2018 this had fallen to (I think) 5.2% and then to 4.8% in 2019. The utterly corrupt, incompetent and worthless Pakistani Government did launch a “plant one billion trees” project. But I believe that (as usual) most of the money got stolen by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies and nary a tree got planted.
Good news 2 – We’re all living longer
The increase in average life expectancy from around 30 years to over 70 years since 1870 has been a phenomenal achievement:
Good news 3 – Food production is soaring
The climate catastrophists love to claim that supposed Climate Change will wreck food production. They made these claims in the 1960s and 1970s when they predicted a new Ice Age:
And they’re making the same claims now with supposed Global Warming:
But yields on most crops keep rising in spite of the climate catastrophists’ predictions of the opposite:
Good news 4 – Deaths from natural disasters falling
We’re constantly being told that Climate Change will lead to more extreme weather resulting in more human casualties. Yet, in reality, the opposite is happening. In fact, the higher the level of atmospheric CO2 (the black dotted line), the lower the number of climate-related deaths (the blue line). I’d like to hear a climate catastrophist explain that:
In 1920, there were around 480,000 climate-related deaths when the world population was around 1.9 billion. Now we have fewer than 40,000 climate-related deaths a year when the world population is about 7.8 billion.
I wonder why the BBC and Sky News and the main newspapers never mention this incredibly positive news. In fact, all the mainstream media revel in creating the impression that the opposite is happening.
Are most people clamorous to be led to safety?
With pretty much every death-and-disaster claim made by the climate catastrophists, the opposite is happening. But nobody dares mention this. All we get is bad news.
H.L Mencken famously warned us:
In my previous blog I cited Mattias Desmet’s book “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM” (which I haven’t read) analysing what percent of the population complied with the totalitarian Sino/US lab-leaked plague lockdowns. The majority of us (around 80%) were apparently “clamorous to be led to safety”. Our rulers were reported as being surprised at how supinely we complied with their restrictions.
This will embolden them as they crush our standard of living and our freedoms with all their planned completely futile and unnecessary “saving the planet” climate restrictions.
We tend to think of the times in which we live as being ‘normal’. But if we look at say the last 2,000 years of human civilisation, it’s only in the last 50 to 100 years that we’ve had anything resembling democracies in which there was the chance of a reasonable life for the majority of the population. So that’s just 5% of the last 2,000 years. Moreover, if you look across the world’s 7.8 billion population, I estimate (Fingerspitzengefühl as the Germans so elegantly call it) that only about one billion of these 7.8 billion live in countries with any pretence of being democratic and only about two billion of the world’s population have a chance of a reasonable life. Almost three quarters of people living today probably still have lives that Thomas Hobbes described over 500 years ago as “nasty, brutish and short”.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule while just 6.4% (about 500 million) enjoy a full democracy. According to Freedom House: “A total of 60 countries suffered declines in democratic freedoms over the past year, while only 25 improved. Now about 38% of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997. Only about 20% now live in Free countries.”
In summary, throughout most of human history and in most of the world’s countries today, a tiny elite have managed to acquire a massive part of each country’s resources and they have used and continue to use corruption, force, fear, propaganda and religion to keep the majority of the population close to poverty and under authoritarian control.
Do most people accept totalitarianism?
I haven’t read Mattias Desmet’s 2022 book “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM”. After all, the hardcover version costs £17.49 on Amazon and the book is only 256 pages. Even the Kindle version costs £15.99, which is (IMHO) a total rip-off. My wonderful book “THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS” is 354 pages and the paperback only costs £7.99 while the ebook is only £3.99.
Though I guess Monsieur Desmet is much more intelligent than me so that’s why you have to pay so much for each of his words of wisdom.
I believe that in Mattias Desmet’s book which I refuse to buy due to its pricing, the author suggests that the way people reacted to the Sino/American lab-leaked Wuhan plague totalitarian lockdowns can be split into three groups:
The mesmerised – who unquestioningly believed everything their rulers told them amount to about 30% of the population
The compliers – A larger middle, perhaps half of citizenry, complies but is not mesmerised. They believed that the virus is hazardous and are persuaded that restrictions and vaccines are necessary.
The dissidents – about 20% of the population questioned what they were being told and resisted the bombardment of pro-lockdown propaganda from prostituted supposed ‘scientists’, the politicians and mainstream media
Back to Orwell?
Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches. Similarly we can make a new law, we’ll call it Craig’s Law, which states that any discussion of democracy inevitably leads to mentioning Orwell’s book “1984”.
In “1984” Orwell warned:
I saw this adapted for the Sino/American lab-leaked plague totalitarian lockdowns:
and I have now adapted this for the coming Climate Change totalitarian lockdowns:
The new eco-totalitarianism
We’re already seeing our totalitarian future being imposed on us in the name of saving the planet. Efficient cheap gas boilers will soon be banned; efficient cheap petrol-fuelled cars will soon be banned; there are increasing environmental taxes on our energy; Oxford Council will soon be restricting how many times people can drive out of their designated living areas influenced by the “15-minute city” theory being pushed by the WEF; many other cities will soon be implementing similar WEF-inspired restrictions on their citizens; farmers in the Netherlands and New Zealand are being deliberately forced out of farming; the Dutch government plans to cut the country’s livestock by 30% forcing up the price of meant; fertilizer use is being restricted resulting in lower crop yields and thus rising food prices and so on.
But there are many more restrictions to come. We don’t know exactly how the new eco-totalitarianism will turn out. Obviously many more modern conveniences will (like gas boilers and petrol-fuelled cars) be banned for supposedly being harmful to the Earth’s climate. Other things considered to be contributing to non-existent Global Warming – meat and imported food for example – will be rationed probably by being taxed so much that most people can’t afford to buy them as often as they did in the past if at all. Perhaps we will all have ‘smart’ meters in our homes allowing our rulers to cut our electricity if they believe we are using too much or if their useless, bird- and bat-massacring wind turbines and equally unreliable solar panels can’t provide sufficient power to keep our lights on.
Our freedom to travel will be drastically curtailed, especially trips abroad. And already we’re seeing mainstream media articles blaming baby-boomers for the housing crisis and suggesting that the greedy baby-boomers should be pressured to downsize their homes after their children have grown up. Nobody in the mainstream media ever suggests that uncontrolled immigration may be the real cause for the accommodation shortage. So perhaps there will be new taxes on people who the authorities consider to be living in homes which the authorities decide are too large for them? Maybe there will even be a government-recommended number of square metres each person needs and anyone having more square metres per person than the official figure will be considered to be wasteful and harming the environment and thus will be landed with new taxes?
Whether the new eco-totalitarianism will reach as far as each person having a ‘carbon budget’ and being prevented from exceeding their carbon budget as described in Ross Clark’s satirical novel “THE DENIAL” is as yet unclear. However, if our new eco-totalitarianism does end with some form of carbon rationing for the masses, you can be sure that certain groups – politicians, media personalities, environmental scientists – will be exempt from any restrictions on their lives. Meanwhile the banks will all be running some kind of (very lucrative for them) carbon trading scheme enabling the richest to buy carbon credits freeing them from the regulations imposed on the 99% of us who will see limits put on how much we can buy, how large our homes can be, how much we can heat our homes and how much we can travel.
Totalitarianism is the norm – freedom was the exception
As with the Covid lockdowns, all these restrictions will supposedly be for our own good. And as we saw with the Covid lockdowns, most people will accept the new totalitarianism and only 20% or fewer will dare question our rulers’ motives and policies.
But we shouldn’t be surprised at how our rulers are using the imaginary Climate Crisis to take back any power and freedoms they conceded to us over the last 50 to 100 years under the guise of improving democracy. After all, totalitarianism has been the norm for most countries for most of human civilisation.
I just saw this on Tony Heller’s ‘RealClimateScience’ website.
It’s just two pictures of weather presenters from 21 June 2017 and 21 June 2022. Note how the 2022 temperatures are lower than those from 2017 for that day. Of course, the difference in temperatures on one specific day means nothing. What is significant is the colouring used on the weather charts:
Yet another example of how we’re being manipulated into believing Saint Greta’s Anthropogenic Global Warming nonsense.
I will return to writing a regular blog on Monday 2 January 2023.
With so many clever people reviewing 2022 and predicting (usually wrongly) what will happen in 2023, it would be presumptuous for me to think that I can contribute to this annual outpouring of often well-remunerated bilge.
Nevertheless, let me suggest that 2022 did mark the end of an important era – the Age of Reason – and the triumph of a new era – the Age of Ideology, Insult and Insanity
During the Age of Reason, it was possible to discuss issues using old-fashioned things like facts. That era is now definitely over. Here are just a few of the many subjects where discussion is no longer allowed. Instead facts are dismissed as irrelevancies and anyone trying to propose an alternative viewpoint based on factual analysis to the official dogma is abused, denigrated and often even destroyed:
Men can become women even when they still have their meat and two veg. Both medical knowledge and neuroscience have shown that there are significant physical and mental differences between men and women. But anyone daring to mention these scientifically-proven differences is branded a ‘transphobe’ or a ‘terf” and risks having their reputation and life destroyed
The ‘miracle vaccines’ are miracle vaccines. The only acceptable narrative is that the ‘miracle vaccines’ have saved millions of lives. Yet increasing evidence is emerging from studies around the world that the ‘miracle vaccines’ have caused huge numbers of injuries and thousands of deaths. It seems that the mRNA vaccines, in particular, damage the body’s ability to produce natural immunity to various diseases and may only be effective for a very small part of the population. To suggest that there is evidence that the vaccines don’t do what it says on the tin immediately provokes howls of fury and accusations of being an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and a ‘granny-killer’. As for mRNA vaccines, these are going to be forced on us for many conditions in the future. The UK, Australian and Canadian governments have all just signed massive contracts with Moderna to develop and manufacture new mRNA vaccines in the three countries. The UK factory will, I believe produce 250 million doses a year. During Covid and now our rulers have invested so much of our money and their own reputations in mRNA technology that it cannot be allowed to be seen as possibly the greatest medical mistake ever made even though the evidence is mounting that mRNA technology may do more harm than good.
Immigration and multi-culturalism benefit us all The facts tell us that excessive immigration and multi-culturalism have been disasters. They destroy community cohesion, lead to single-race ghettoes and inter-community tensions, increase crime and degrade the quality of life for a country’s citizens. Try mentioning this and you’re branded a ‘racist’ and a ‘bigot’. Meanwhile our mainstream media – especially TV programmes and ads – keep pushing the image of mixed-race relationships at us. I would estimate that over 90% of couples featured in UK ads are mixed race. Yet only around 5% (yes only 5% according to the latest ONS data) of UK households are mixed race
Colonialism is responsible for Africa’s problems To suggest that colonialism might have brought benefits to Africa is absolutely taboo. Yet before white people came to Africa, people lived in impoverished misery – medicine was non-existent, there were no proper roads or railways, people couldn’t read or write, there were no schools, no universities – in fact, the Africans still hadn’t invented the wheel. Of course, there were negatives with colonialism. But overall, it probably did more good than harm. Moreover, there isn’t a single country now run by Africans which hasn’t become an economic and social basket case. But to suggest this risks being branded a ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’. Meanwhile most Africans, given the choice, would rather move to the countries which colonised them than stay in the excrement-covered hell-holes they have created on their own continent and in Haiti since they became independent
IQ levels vary widely between different countries There is a massive amount of evidence supporting this. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence of a virtuous cycle between a country’s average IQ level and its economic success. Each reinforces the other. Conversely, there is clear evidence of a vicious cycle between a country’s low average IQ and violence, war, impoverishment and a country becoming a failed state. Try mentioning this in polite conversion and you’ll be branded a ‘eugenicist’, a ‘racist’, a ‘Nazi’ and will never be employed again in your life
Human activities are causing catastrophic Global Warming This may be the most destructive of the Shibboleths which are not allowed to be questioned. It may be the most destructive as it risks wrecking the Western countries whose rulers have committed their countries to the crazy, economically-suicidal policy of ‘Net Zero’. I won’t rehash here all the factual arguments against the stupidity of the man-made Global Warming cult – the influence of solar activity on the Earth’s temperature, the benefits of higher atmospheric CO2, the lack of any correlation between temperatures and CO2 levels, the level of fraud practised by the climate catastrophists, the mere 0.8cms rise in sea levels in the last 100 years etc etc. I’ve tried to do this in my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. As with all the other modern-day dogmas listed above, anyone daring to try to use factual data to question the man-made Global Warming narrative is immediately branded a ‘denier’ (supposedly being the moral equivalent of a ‘holocaust denier’) and is cancelled, abused, censored and destroyed.
(I won’t even dare provide some indisputable facts questioning what we’re instructed to believe about the world’s most peaceful religion in this list as I’d like to live into 2023 and even beyond)
The fooled cannot admit they’ve been fooled
American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator Carl Sagan warned us about how difficult it is to get people to change their minds after they’ve been fooled by the type of charlatans who have so successfully monopolised the narrative on all the above issues:
The Age of Ideology or the Age of Insanity?
Here’s a short (4 minutes) YouTube video in which journalist and author Melanie Phillips explains the end of the Age of Reason and suggests it has been replaced by the Age of Ideology. Personally, I believe we’ve moved into the Age of Insult and Insanity:
Here are a few charts readers might find interesting/worrying.
They’re based on surveys about people’s attitudes, particularly young peoples’ attitudes, to Socialism and Capitalism.
Socialism – Getting back into favour?
Here’s a chart comparing the overall population’s view of Socialism and Capitalism in three countries – Germany, Britain and America:
As you’ll see 45% of Germans view Socialism positively vs 26% who view Socialism negatively. Only 26% of Germans view Capitalism positively vs 47% who view Capitalism negatively. The British are 36% favourable to Socialism vs 32% who view Socialism negatively. In the USA, Capitalism is viewed more positively than Socialism.
Socialism – Millennials’ new love affair
The story possibly starts to get more interesting when we start to look at the differences between generations.
Despite Capitalism being viewed more positively in the USA than Socialism, when we look at the views of different age groups, we see that in a survey conducted in 2014 in the 18-24 age group just as many people view Capitalism (the dark green line) as favourably as Socialism (the lighter green line)
In a survey conducted two years later, the younger age group seems much more positive about Socialism than Capitalism:
(I’m sorry I don’t understand from this image whether the younger age group is 18-24 or 18-30)
But what we can say is that amongst young people in the UK and USA, Socialism is viewed much more positively than capitalism.
Australia – a land of rugged individualists?
That brings us to Australia. If there ever was a country with a reputation for being rugged, no-nonsense pioneers, it must be Australia. Or at least, it was. But when we look at the attitudes of young Australians vs the general Australian population to Socialism and Capitalism, we see that about 37% of 18-24s are favourable to Socialism vs just 20% who view it unfavourably:
Even in the general Australian population, slightly more people have a favourable view of Socialism than those who view it unfavourably.
As for Capitalism, only 25% of 18-24-year-old Australian view it positively vs 40% who view Capitalism negatively. And in the overall population, more people are negative to Capitalism than are positive.
Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not just dopey, woke, brainwashed Australian university students who are so positive towards Socialism:
The rise and rise of Socialism
Of course, these are just a few charts picked from surveys which may or not be truly representative of people’s views. But the overall message seems to be clear – many people, particularly the young, are becoming increasingly positive to the idea of a society where governments control all aspects of our lives.
Young people have always been more radical than those with a bit of life experience or those with family responsibilities. But what’s different now is that young people seem to be getting what they want.
Covid lockdowns; climate lockdowns; the woke authoritarian censorship of free speech; the cancelling, career ruination and societal excommunication of anyone deemed to have ‘wrong views’; ‘no jab no job’ and ‘no jab no travel’ vaccines mandates; the imposition of masks; people being forced to make humiliating public apologies for supposedly offending groups who spend their lives trying to find things to be offended by; banning gas boilers and petrol-driven cars; the imposition of net zero; the imposition of the ’15-minute city’ concept by which people will be fined for travelling outside their own zones by car what the bureaucrats consider is ‘too frequently’; the mainstream media becoming propagandists for the approved narrative on every issue instead of reporting the news and challenging our rulers’ decisions; more power being given to unelected internationalist bureaucracies like the UN, the WHO and our friends at the WEF; etc etc.
All these are aspects of an increasing totalitarian form of big-government Socialism, which our young people seem to support, in which people either willingly or else by coercion give up their freedoms handing ever more power over their lives to their rulers, bureaucrats, officials and the police.
Moreover, we’re also starting to see typical Socialist government responses to anyone objecting to official policies – brutal suppression of anti-lockdown protests using batons, tear gas and rubber bullets in the UK, the Netherlands and Australia; arrests of anti-lockdown protesters in many countries; closing the bank accounts of anyone in Canada donating to a truckers’ anti-lockdown demonstration; police in the Netherlands shooting live rounds at a 16-year-old driving a tractor in protest against government plans to confiscate his father’s farm to steal land to build accommodation for illegal migrants; a mother in Australia being dragged off in handcuffs by police in front of her children merely for tweeting that she might attend a demonstration; people being harassed by police and fined for supposedly breaking lockdown restrictions for sitting ‘too long’ on a park bench, going for a walk in the countryside, having just two friends in their garden for a drink or visiting elderly relatives.
Sky News Australia tells it like it is
Here’s Rowan Dean on Sky News Australia warning us about where our western societies are headed:
You’d never see anything like this on the (IMHO) utterly useless Sky News UK. Mark Steyn on GB News is about the only person in the British media who would dare express these types of opinions.
Last week our tough, young, multimillionaire PM, Rishi Sunak, promised more staff to help clear the UK’s backlog of asylum claims by the end of next year. The BBC reported that under a plan unveiled by the prime minister, a dedicated unit of 400 specialists will be set up to handle claims from Albanians.
The asylum backlog has ballooned in recent years, with 117,000 outstanding claims, relating to 143,377 people, who are waiting for an initial decision on their application and unable to work. Of these, nearly 100,000 people have been waiting more than six months. In the Commons, Mr Sunak said the government expected to “abolish the backlog of initial asylum decisions by the end of next year”. Mr Sunak also promised to bring forward a new law to “make unambiguously clear that if you enter the UK illegally you should not be able to remain here”.
As we all know, every single one of these illegal, benefits-scrounging, mostly uneducated, mostly unemployable, mostly backwards, often western-values-hating migrants came to the UK from a safe country – France. So every single claim for asylum should be automatically rejected the moment they arrive on our shores and the lot of them shipped off to a country of their choice – just not the UK. Yet, in spite of this obvious negation of the migrants’ spurious claims for asylum, our useless excuse for a government seems incapable or unwilling to do anything
Though, of course refugee charities branded the plans “cruel” and “ineffective”.
Doing a Blair?
How will Sunak and his Border Farcical bureaucrats reduce the backlog of totally fraudulent asylum claims. I guess there are two main possibilities.
Either the Border Farce and immigration officials could forensically examine every asylum claim, reject those which were baseless and then deport the fraudulent economic migrants trying to get a comfortable life on benefits and crime in the UK all while living within easy raping distance of local schools.
Of else, our rulers could ‘do a Blair’
When Blair was criticised for the large number of asylum applications over the five years from 1997 (when New Labour were first elected) to 2002. He promised to cut the number of asylum applications. By 2005, honest Tony Blair was able to boast: “Asylum applications have fallen from over 8,000 a month to just over 2,000. The next set of statistics will show that monthly applications are back to their lowest level since March 1997”.
The chart above shows how trustworthy Tony was able to deliver this tremendous achievement. The dotted line is the number of asylum applications. The solid line is the number of UK citizenships granted. What seems to have happened is that potential asylum-seekers were told that if they didn’t apply for asylum but instead sought UK citizenship, they would be granted citizenship no questions asked. British passports were being showered on illegals like confetti.
I produced this chart for my 2008 book Squandered: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money:
At the time this complete fraud, like many other New Labour frauds I exposed in my book, was not mentioned by any of the mainstream media. But you have to remember, this was a time when Blair’s press people had almost complete control over the media. Any political journalist writing critical stories would be excluded from supposed ‘scoops’ and so would be out of a job. Whereas those writing positive stories on the Blair/Brown government would be given exclusive stories making it look like they had deep inside knowledge of what was going on in government. As I’m sure you know, the TV comedy series ‘The Thick of It’ was based on the Blair/Campbell government.
So, what will Sunak do?
I’ll leave it to you to guess which approach Sunak and the worse than useless Tories will take to clear the asylum applications backlog:
will Sunak and Braverman instruct their officials to rigorously examine every asylum application rejecting those that are invalid and deporting anyone with spurious claims?
will they instruct immigration staff to shower illegal migrants with British passports as fast as possible – ‘do a Blair’ – so they can pretend that the Tories have kept their promise to clear the backlog?
A cynic might suggest that the lying, devious, self-serving, gutless, invertebrate Tories will give a virtual amnesty to illegal migrants allowing them to stay in Britain and thus providing a massive incentive for hundreds of thousands more to head for our shores.
In this Monday’s Times there was a large article titled “Britain could welcome a million migrants a year to help fill jobs” along with a picture of probably mostly criminal Albanian young men being ferried into Britain by an RNLI rescue boat. Please note the language used by the Times headline writers. They could have written “Britain could admit …“. This would suggest that we British have the right to choose who can and cannot enter our country. But instead, the Times writes “Britain could welcome …”. The word “welcome” suggests that we should be grateful that mostly uneducated, mostly unemployable often criminal Third-worlders want to come to our country.
The Times used to be a newspaper which reported the news. But in recent years, like most of the mainstream media, it has become a propagandist tool pushing stuff like climate change nonsense, economically-destructive net zero, Covid lockdowns, fake ‘miracle vaccines’ and, of course, disparaging anyone suggesting that the Chinese lab-leaked plague could have leaked from a filthy, badly-run Chinese lab. And now the Times is pushing the ‘immigration is good for you’ lie. It seems we’re being softened up by the mainstream media to accept mass immigration and our own cultural, economic and societal suicide.
Klaus Schwab and his chums at the WEF must be delighted at how their plans for a borderless world and the great replacement of white people by millions of diverse, vibrant, multi-cultural Third-worlders are progressing.
Below is a video introduced by Dr John Campbell. The video features a possibly rather significant speech by Tory MP Andrew Bridgen given this week in Parliament proposing an immediate stop to the mRNA vaccinations because of their ineffectiveness and the health problems they are causing. I believe the speech was given on Wednesday this week. So, being mid-week, there would be a lot of our ‘hardworking’ MPs in Westminster in spite of the train strikes. Yet, one thing you might notice is that only around four MPs were present – the other 646 obviously had much more important things to do.
Here are some of the key parts from the speech:
Here are the cold, hard facts about the mRNA vaccines and an explanation of the structural drivers that continue to be barriers to doctors and the public receiving independent information to make informed decisions about them. Since the rollout in the U.K. of the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine, we have had almost half a million Yellow Card reports of adverse effects from the public. That is unprecedented. It is more than all the yellow card reports of the past 40 years combined. An extraordinary rate of side effects that are beyond mild have been reported in many countries across the world that have used the Pfizer vaccine, including, of course, the United States.
In other words, the benefits of the vaccine are close to non-existent. Beyond the alarming Yellow Card reports, the strongest evidence of harm comes from the gold standard, highest possible quality level of data. A re-analysis of Pfizer and Moderna’s own randomised controlled trials using the mRNA technology, published in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine, revealed a rate of serious adverse events of one in 800 individuals vaccinated. These are events that result in hospitalisation or disability, or that are life changing. Most disturbing of all, however, is that those original trials suggested someone was far more likely to suffer a serious side effect from the vaccine than to be hospitalised with the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. These findings are a smoking gun suggesting the vaccine should likely never have been approved in the first place.
In the past, vaccines have been completely withdrawn from use for a much lower incidence of serious harm. For example, the swine flu vaccine was withdrawn in 1976 for causing Guillain-Barré syndrome in only one in 100,000 adults, and in 1999 the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn for causing a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting one in 10,000. With the covid mRNA vaccine, we are talking of a serious adverse event rate of at least one in 800, because that was the rate determined in the two months when Pfizer actually followed the patients following their vaccination. Unfortunately, some of those serious events, such as heart attack, stroke and pulmonary embolism will result in death, which is devastating for individuals and the families they leave behind. Many of these events may take longer than eight weeks post vaccination to show themselves.
The real scandal is that those with a responsibility to patients and with scientific integrity – namely, doctors, academic institutions and medical journals – collude with the industry for financial gain. Big Pharma exerts its power by capturing the political environment through lobbying and the knowledge environment through funding university research and influencing medical education, preference shaping through capture of the media, financing think-tanks and so on. In other words, the public relations machinery of Big Pharma excels in subterfuge and engages in smearing and de-platforming those who call out its manipulations.
As the data clearly shows to anyone who wants to look at it, the mRNA vaccines are not safe, not effective and not necessary. I implore the Government to halt their use immediately. As I have demonstrated and as the data clearly shows, the Government’s current policy on the mRNA vaccines is on the wrong side of medical ethics, it is on the wrong side of scientific data, and ultimately it will be on the wrong side of history.
As Britain grinds to a halt under a huge amount of snow and ice, today’s blog almost writes itself.
In 2000, a leading British climatologist David Viner was reported to have predicted that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”.
In the report, Mr Viner, who was at the time a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, predicted that within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he is quoted as having said.
If my fading memory serves me correctly, it was the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia which was caught up in the ‘climate-gate’ scandal in which emails were leaked which might have given the impression that the unit was fiddling the figures to make it look like global warming was happening when the actual evidence told a different story. Naturally an internal investigation by that prestigious uni found that nobody had ever done anything wrong.
On his LinkedIn profile, Mr Viner tells us he has: ‘Over 30 years experience working globally in all aspects of climate change, resilience and sustainability’. He says he is: ‘Currently a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the IPCC and been involved with the IPCC since 1992. Lead Author on the IPCC’s Special Report on Climate Change and Land. TCFD and TNFD experience, I understand the benefits of these task forces to help mobilise the corporate sector to help deliver on the key global climate and biodiversity metrics’.
Forecasting is difficult, especially about the future
So, how accurate was Mr Viner’s reported prediction that in the UK “snowfalls are now a thing of the past“?
I will now test Mr Viner’s prediction using the same methods I used in my book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. Instead of giving opinions or using the usual garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO) computer models so beloved by supposed ‘scientists’, I will go back and look at media reports for all the years since Mr Viner made his apocalyptic prediction.
Years 2000 to 2010
During the first decade of this century, abundant snow fell in the UK during 9 out of 10 years.
According to the website of Dr. Richard Wild (who completed a PhD on British snowstorms and recorded these events as they occurred), by December 2000 the country was experiencing the most “widespread snowfall over the UK since February 1996.”
Dr. Wild reports a “total of 12 heavy snowfall days” in Britain in 2001, which he describes as “average”.
Although he says “virtually no heavy snowfalls” fell in 2002, in January 2003 “snow caused havoc in many parts of the UK,” spurring the government to signal its intention to introduce “new legislation to force councils to grit roads.” In December of that year, “Heavy snowfall brought New Year[‘s] Eve misery to large parts of Northern England and Scotland.”
In January 2004, a snowstorm interrupted school for 70,000 Scottish children and “a 74-year-old man from Berwickshire died due to having a heart attack trying to free his wife’s car from a snowdrift.” In late February, Dr. Wild reports that “many schools across Scotland, SW England, N England, N Ireland and Wales…closed, with numerous roads remaining blocked with snow” and that “a football match…[had] to be called off.” In November, Middleton, Derbyshire, received 13 cm of snow – the “largest single fall of snow in November since records began in the year 1977.”
Dr. Wild sums up the year 2005 by observing that it “saw 25 heavy snowfall days, the highest (equal with the year 1876) since the heavy snowfall research began in the year 1861.” (See details here, here, here, and here.)
In other words, during the five years immediately following the Independent‘s claim that snow was a “rapidly diminishing part” of British culture, snowfall was minimal in only one year (2002). Not only was there plenty of the white stuff during the remaining four, but 2005 was one for the history books.
So how did the next five years fare?
in late February and early March of 2006, “Heavy snow showers affected many districts of the UK” (East Anglia was among the areas hardest hit). A few weeks later, “Heavy snow fell across N England, N Wales and S Scotland”. [more]
in April 2006 “More than 13cm of snow fell in parts of Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and southern London”
“large parts of Southern England, the Midlands and Wales” experienced “heavy snowfall” in February 2007 [more, more, more]
later that year, thousands lost power when London experienced its first October snow in 74 years
in November 2008, heavy snow was a problem in large areas of Britain
in December 2008, snow closed “hundreds of schools” and caused traffic difficulties
during the first 13 days of February 2009, Britain experienced a prolonged period of snowfall in which authorities warned they were running out of road grit [more, more, more, more]
in March 2009, motorists “were stranded after worse-than-expected snowfalls caused blizzard-like conditions in parts of England”
By mid-December 2009 parts of Britain were in the grips of snowy, cold, blizzard-like conditions.
Years 2011 to 2022
Ditto the second decade. In 2021 snow closed COVID vaccination centres and disrupted travel in multiple parts of the kingdom. Which means 2021 doesn’t qualify as a ‘Children aren’t going to know what snow is’ year.
Unfortunately for great climate experts like Mr Viner, 2020 didn’t, either. You can see the photos here. In 2019, the BBC reported that heavy snow was “sweeping Eastwards across the UK,” and that college students were stranded overnight. Which means 2019 didn’t qualify as a ‘no snow year’.
It isn’t difficult to find lovely photos of UK snowfalls dated 2016, 2015 and 2014. The Met Office tells us the UK experienced widespread snow in 2013. In 2012, severe snow brought Britain to a standstill. In 2010, the UK endured severe winter weather with significant snowfalls.
As for 2022, well you just need to look outside your window:
Though, maybe that’s something ‘climate scientists’ never feel the need to do as they have their GIGO computer models to tell them what is really happening with our weather.
Do you trust the IPCC?
Just 22 years ago we were told snow in the UK would only be a distant memory. That was a climate prediction. And this was made by a climate scientist who is now apparently ‘a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the IPCC’. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is, as you will know, the body which produces the reports on supposed Global Warming or Climate Change or Climate Emergency or Climate Crisis or whatever it’s called this month.
These are the reports on which useless western governments are forcing net zero on us – banning efficient affordable petrol-fuelled cars, banning efficient gas boilers, imposing restrictions on farming particularly on use of fertilizers, adding huge renewables subsidies to our electricity bills, covering our countryside with largely pointless bird-and-bat-chomping wind turbines, taking productive farmland away from producing food to use it for solar farms, discouraging us from travelling and many other similar social-control policies.
Yet a person who is apparently ‘a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the IPCC’ has been shown to have been spouting total nonsense – what a cynic might consider politicised propaganda rather than anything remotely resembling science.
Hands up anyone who actually believes the increasingly panicked IPPC reports which are the basis for our governments deliberately destroying western economies and western civilisation.
David Craig, on January 7th, 2023
