News Round-Up
- “Keir Starmer was aware Lord Doyle backed paedophile, No 10 admits” – Sir Keir Starmer nominated a former adviser for a peerage despite being told that he had campaigned for a councillor after he’d been charged with child sexual offences, according to the Times.
- “Starmer’s ex-spin doctor ‘must be stripped of peerage’” – The Labour Party’s chairwoman has called for Sir Keir Starmer’s ex-communications chief to be stripped of his peerage over his ties to a paedophile councillor, reports the Standard.
- “Starmer under pressure from Labour women over No 10 ‘boys’ club culture’” – Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to elevate Matthew Doyle to the Lords despite his ties to a convicted paedophile has been attacked by senior women in the Labour Party, says the Telegraph.
- “Starmer faces pressure to turn on Trump, bring in ‘wealth tax’, nationalise industries and hammer landlords to survive” – Keir Starmer is facing a laundry list of Left-wing demands as he struggles to keep his grip on power, reveals the Mail.
- “Starmer squirms like a lawyer who knows his case is hopeless” – Kemi Badenoch did not miss with her skewering of the embattled PM in the Commons, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
- “The biggest myth about Keir Starmer is finally being blown apart” – The carefully cultivated image of Sir Keir as a paragon of integrity is in tatters, says Michael Deacon the Telegraph.
- “And the winner from all this is… Ed Miliband” – He may not return as leader, but the Energy Secretary will be a major force as the Government shifts to soft Left policies, writes Daniel Finkelstein in the Times.
- “Labour’s lurch to the Left is the spark that will ignite a revolution” – More and more of us are sick and tired of ever increasing taxes and spending, warns Allister Heath in the Telegraph.
- “NHS productivity crisis risks £20 billion hole in public finances” – Rachel Reeves has been warned that an NHS productivity crisis threatens to blow a £20 billion hole in the public finances, according to the Sun.
- “Farage is right about working from home” – If Brits want to start feeling rich again, we need to work for it, says James Hanson in the Spectator. And that means going back to the office.
- “Robby Soave on ‘Epstein derangement syndrome’” – Unherd’s Freddie Sayers sits down with Reason’s Robby Soave to unpack the Epstein Files and their fallout.
- “I know how high society works – and why the Epstein scandal could easily happen again” – The strange codes of high society help explain why the Epstein scandal continues to ripple through elite circles, says Sophia Money-Coutts in the Telegraph.
- “Muslim voters could swing by-election in Gorton and Denton” – A co-ordinated Muslim voting bloc is backing the Greens in Gorton and Denton, according to PoliticsHome.
- “Why Jew hate is spiralling out of control” – In the Spectator, Stephen Pollard blasts officials’ rank hypocrisy as antisemitic incidents surge while hate marches go unchecked.
- “School knife attacker was arrested after visiting mosque” – A teenage boy suspected of stabbing two pupils at a school in North London has been arrested after he fled to a nearby mosque, says the Telegraph.
- “The Afghan asylum crime wave has to stop” – A spate of serious offences involving Afghan asylum seekers demands tougher action, writes David Shipley in the Spectator.
- “Britain has been ‘colonised by immigrants’, says Man Utd co-owner Ratcliffe” – Sir Jim Ratcliffe says Britain has been “colonised” by immigrants who are costing the country too much money, according to the Mail.
- “London’s Bonfire of the Vanities” – The fallout from the Chris Kaba case has come to symbolise a wider moral drama in London’s public life, says Ed West on his Substack.
- “It’s time to ban men from working in nurseries” – A string of shocking abuse cases has David Shipley in the Spectator calling for men to be banned from working in nurseries altogether.
- “Spare Parliament from a soulless renovation” – We should follow Notre Dame’s example and restore the Palace of Westminster in the same way, says Alice Thomson in the Times.
- “Why white children are not getting into grammar schools” – In the Telegraph, Kristina Murkett explores the reasons why white British families have been finding themselves squeezed out of top grammar schools.
- “The lunatics have taken over the asylum” – The Rationals Substack reveals how Britain’s universities have quietly traded academic freedom for the higher calling of compassion.
- “Is fear of the CCP stopping Chinese students integrating at British universities?” – The Government seems oblivious to the risks of excessive overseas numbers at Britain’s top seats of learning, says Connie Shaw in the Telegraph.
- “Chagossians fight back” – The Chagossians’ push for self-determination still has life in it, writes Tessa Clarke on the Academy of Ideas Substack.
- “A genuine mass slaughter of civilians is happening in Iran. Why does nobody care in London?” – Inexplicably, Israel is being treated as a worse villain than the murderous theocracy in Tehran, says Danny Cohen in the Telegraph.
- “Zelensky plans presidential elections and peace deal referendum” – Volodymyr Zelensky is preparing to call presidential elections and a referendum on any peace deal with Russia as early as May, reports Fox News.
- “Jesse Strang, 18, named as transgender Canadian school shooter who murdered eight before dying by suicide” – A gunman who murdered eight people in the second-deadliest school shooting in Canadian history is a transgender psychopath who also killed his mother and brother, says the Mail.
- “Vaxzevria files” – If trust is to be restored, then vaccine regulatory systems must change fundamentally, argue Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson on their Trust the Evidence Substack.
- “Why doesn’t the CDC care about Chinese biolabs in America?” – The discovery of suspected Chinese biolabs in North America has raised awkward questions about oversight and accountability, says Matt Ridley in the Spectator.
- “Net Zero is forcing BP into irrelevance” – The obsession with Net Zero has cost Britain’s oil and gas giants dearly, writes Matthew Lynn in the Spectator.
- “Ed Miliband’s green promises are coming back to haunt him” – Ed Miliband’s £300 energy bill pledge has started to look like a political millstone, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
- “Reform drops green Tory Ben Goldsmith after rural backlash” – Reform UK has sought to distance itself from green Tory Ben Goldsmith following a backlash from farmers over his support for rewilding, reports the Telegraph.
- “Romanian roulette” – The Guardian hails Romania for “shattering” the link between growth and emissions, but it’s mostly economic collapse, EU cash and gas, reveals Mark Hodgson in Cliscep.
- “How a scientific myth undergirds the greenhouse gas theory” – In Climate Dispatch, James T. Moodey tears apart the greenhouse gas theory, showing how the 19th Century experiments behind it were all flawed.
- “Trans women could still use workplace female toilets for years” – Men could be using women’s toilets at work for years, after Bridget Phillipson said workplaces would be exempt from the long-awaited guidance on single-sex spaces, according to the Telegraph.
- “This is an astonishing exchange” – In a heated select committee grilling, Ed Miliband shamelessly dodges the question 17 times on why he is refusing to publish his secretive China energy deal. What is he trying to hide?
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“NHS productivity crisis risks £20 billion hole in public finances”
The NHS needs an enema…
The NHS needs to be strictly limited to providing medical treatment ONLY TO BRITISH CITIZENS, not the ENTIRE WORLD, especially BIRTH TOURISTS FROM AFRICA.
NHS productivity is an oxymoron. In order to measure productivity, the inputs (costs, labour, materials) per unit output must be compared with the value of unit output produced by it.
Increasing productivity means reducing inputs per unit of output.
To do this requires the value of inputs and outputs be monetised but since the output is not priced, and nobody in the NHS has a clue about costs, there is no way to assess productivity.
In 1948, the Government took into State control a national health service that had existed since the 19th Century, provided by a lux of private, State-funded (via the 1911 National Insurance Act) and significant involvement if he voluntary sector – and called it The NHS pretending it was something that had not previously existed.
What it meant was that significant input from the voluntary sector, which was not funded by taxation, now had to be funded out of taxes.
And we are where we are.
“ A gunman who murdered eight people in the second-deadliest school shooting in Canadian history is a transgender psychopath”
I guess we won’t hear much more about this story then.
In contrast, can you imagine if he had been a Trump supporter…?
How dare you! Gunman? Inclusive language please.
He was a Gunperson, member of the Native Canadian Gunpeople tribe.
Those aren’t the strange codes of high society. They are the codes of human beings, most of whom will overlook someone else’s transgressions if they can somehow benefit from that person. As far as anyone know, that seems to be all anyone – other than Epstein – did.
And as far as Epstein goes, I’ve heard a lot of outrage but as far as I’m aware, the extent of his crimes is that he got massages with extra benefits from some girls who turned out to be under 18. Girls who worked for a “massage” service and so presumably plenty of other men used those same underaged services. Not saying it’s right. But is there anything else?
I guess the suspicion is that the whole business may have led to undue influence being brought to bear on the powerful, such that they acted not in the interests of whoever they were meant to be serving/representing, but themselves, possibly to avoid scandal. Hard to know for sure exactly what happened.
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with a little bit of additional scrutiny when it emerges that an international web of powerful people has been quite possibly breaking the law, together.
Yes, they are just acting like humans who can get away with it (though some may argue that power attracts the corruptible who may therefore be over-represented).
Jewish Canadian researcher Henry Makow, PhD, wrote on his website:
“Going through the writings of this deeply traumatized girl, a fact becomes immediately apparent: Epstein and his circle were involved in much more than “soliciting minors.” As the journals disturbingly document, they were using their sex slaves to breed babies who were taken from their mothers minutes after they were born.”
“Found inside “Dataset 12” of the Epstein files are journals written by a teenage victim using cryptic messages. Once decoded, these texts tell the horrific story of a slave who was turned into a “human incubator” for babies she never saw again. Here’s a look at this obscure part of the Epstein files.”
The Coded Journals in the Epstein Files That Hide a Teenage Girl’s Horrific Story – The Vigilant Citizen
So the Canadian authorities are happy to extend the killer’s psychopathy to cover his killing but not his delusions about his gender. This is willful ignorance.
I’ve made the point several times and I think it bears repeating that people who think they are different gender to their sex have mental issues and need help of some sort. That’s my firm opinion, anyway. Incidentally, expressing these thoughts in the UK might be a crime – to be sure I’m not 100% certain it is a crime, but I think the legal fuzziness is part of the strategy to shut people up, through fear and intimidation. At the very least I realise that I could get a knock on the door from the police for publishing that thought. I’m somewhat protected by the fact that it’s not clear who I am and where they can come and get me (although I’m sure if they really, really wanted to our security services could do so in no time at all). And if our government and the EU gets its way, fairly soon we will all have some form of digital ID – to prove we are adults to use social media and the internet (that’s how they’re going to do it). At which point, I will be at much greater risk making that sort of statement. Pretty amazing,… Read more »
Just to correct you… you’re already at risk of making statements that they may disagree with.
Once they have the means to easily identify you, and AI will help immeasurably, they will not start from that point, they’ll look through everything you have ever said, to make their case stick and even, perhaps, leaning on your children or grandchildren to denounce you.
The MO is well established by now… and yet, there are still people who think it will be different this time, because they’ll be in charge.
Back in the early 1970s, in discussion with an acquaintance who was an NHS psychiatrist, (I cannot remember how the topic arose) he told me about two of his patients who wanted to change sex – male to female.
Sex-change in those days, and I expect still, was treated under psychiatric supervision because it was a recognised mental disorder.
It is a shame that the Green’s leader didn’t have the confidence to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. His deliberate courting of the Muslim vote could have made it a cinch.
Ah. But Jewish ancestry…
“Farage is right about working from home” – If Brits want to start feeling rich again, we need to work for it, says James Hanson in the Spectator. And that means going back to the office’
Mr Farage was, no doubt, talking about the public sector. Arguably, what the public sector in fact requires is more delegation, more accountability and a massively reduced head count. There are 550,000+ civil servants today doing the jobs that 380,000 accomplished in 2019. It should be left to departmental heads to decide the WFH polocy…and, if it does not result in improved performance, then they should be held accountable.
Within the private sector, companies, the market, should decide on WFH. Goldman Sachs has a strict work in the office culture. Citibank offers hybrid working and greatly improved office workspaces to encourage employees to spend more time there.
This is called ‘competition and should be encouraged. Let the market decide…and lose the pontification. Progress, rather than clock watching activity, is, of course, what is required wherever the work may be done.
Sweeping generalisations sounds ridiculous…and a bit dim.
You’d think he had more important matters to chirp about. But I fear he is at heart another lover of Big Government.
Political statements have to be simplified in order to communicate with the widest audience and get it into the time allowed. As it is journalists can’t keep up. Have you heard some of the questions they ask at press conferences.
Come to that, have you read some of the articles in the press highlighted on this site.
Political statements should also avoid alienating target voters.
Hybrid working is particularly common among professionals, those with higher qualifications, and employees aged 30 to 49, in other words particularly common amongst those most likely to vote.
I think you’re correct, although it might be quite difficult to impose KPIs on a system like the Civil Service, either collectively or individually, I’d think?
Particularly when, as I understand things, it’s an environment where, if they were to make significant savings on a budget, through proper management, they would simply get a reduced budget the following year?
Some of the inefficiencies are built in… deliberately or otherwise.
The only Whitehall civil servant I know is further right than a fish knife (goodness knows how he puts up with it). He is fiercely intelligent and has a tremendous work ethic. He finds going to the office a waste of time, money and energy and is much more productive from home where it’s hard for dunderheads to bother him and waste his time. If he was forced back to the office 5 days a week he would simply move to the private sector. Own goal.
It depends what the “work” is. It seems to me most of the “work” done from home is not wealth-producing, Civil Servants, for example.
Productive work benefits from face to face interaction between individuals where ideas and suggestions can be exchanged, but in any case how can workers on a production line work from home?
There is also the matter of supervision, what external influence is there to ensure the hours that are being paid for are being worked? And if home workers arrange their own flexible hours, do these coincide with others or the needs of the company?
The key to productive work is the end product not time spent working. There is no benefit attached to ‘hard work’ per se. Delegation of authority down to lower level team leaders, leadership in general, is important in getting the best out of people. Workers that enjoy coming to work are generally more productive. That, at any rate, is the Citibank view. How they perform relative to their competition will determine whether they are correct or not. Of course, many jobs do require team working in the same space. But increasing numbers of tasks, as a consequence of IT and communications advances, do not. Consequently, sweeping generalisations like ‘people aren’t more productive working from home. It’s a load of nonsense.’ as stated by Mr Farage, is, frankly, just plain silly. Millions fighting their way to and from work all at the same time, packed onto poor transport infrastructure, are unlikely to be at their most productive on arrival. Has Mr Farage ever attended serial meetings about meetings, a vital part of the office based ‘look busy’, activity rather than progress, culture? Has he witnessed juniors staying at their desks until late in the evening, frightened to leave, because the performative… Read more »
Milliband and Starmer are servants of China, we know it, they know it, they know we know it, but rather like the Epstein affair, the crashing of the economy, the destruction of the British people, their culture, and their lives, the Marxist Milliband and Starmer and the rest of the cadre they don’t give a damn.
Spare Parliament from a soulless renovation
Nah. That’s one area of public sector that would probably be improved with more working from home – or the beach – or Bangladesh for that matter. I mean, how much less damage would they do if they spent more time walking the dog or campaigning to run another country or taking up arms for Gaza?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/38188469/nhs-productivity-report-rachel-reeves/
Rachel Reeves has been warned that an NHS productivity crisis threatens to blow a £20 billion hole in the public finances, according to the Sun.
I would imagine that as far as this government is concerned this is just what the doctor ordered 😳
Part of the productivity crisis must surely be down to the inept way that the government has handled their decision to eviscerate NHS England, announced a year ago, to be implemented by September, now pushed back to April, apparently because they forgot to allocate any money for redundancy… an absolute clown show and not remotely conducive to a good work ethic.
Starmer faces pressure to turn on Trump, bring in ‘wealth tax’, nationalise industries and hammer landlords to survive
Of course neither Streeting nor Rayner want to take over the job until after the anticipated disaster of the local elections. They hope to take credit for any subsequent improvement in Labour’s fortunes.
“It’s time to ban men from working in nurseries” Yes, and it’s time for society to recognize that feminists are partly responsible for the huge increase in men abusing children, because men were never meant to care for infants. As one of Jane Austen’s characters said truthfully, nursing is not men’s province. Women are the nurturing ones, and best suited to feeding, raising and interacting with babies and toddlers. Men are much better at teaching and having fun with their children when they get a bit older, say from about 6 years old. Forcing men to bathe infants & toddlers and change nappies can stimulate their primitive biological instincts against their will, and if the mothers become too demanding and domineering, making the man feel small, he will sometimes take out his resentment on the little ones, in the form of sexual abuse, as a way of getting revenge on their mother. In a similar way, there was a case years ago in France, where a henpecked Frenchman, who had just endured yet another tongue-lashing from his domineering French wife, drove away from their house in a rage, and ran over the first cyclist he saw, which happened to be… Read more »
Also, forcing men to be present at the birth of their children is another mistake, as it can traumatize and nauseate the man so deeply that he never wants to have sexual relations with the baby’s mother, or any woman, again, and can even make him turn to other men as an escape.
Traditional ways were often better and wiser, like making the man wait downstairs or outside until the women sorted out the birth of the child, and then handed him his child all washed clean, swaddled up snug and adorable.
There is something odd about Milliband’s position in this government. He is clearly in place at the direction of someone other than Kneel and so evidently working for a second paymaster and a different agenda. It is a quite macabre situation. His refusal to conduct himself in a proper manner should ensure he is stripped of office but he is utterly impervious to political manners, lax as they are.
Sophia Money-Coutts. Bless her, what a glorious and correct surname
It HAS to be a pseudonym… surely? 😂
She’s definitely not from a council estate, is she…
Reform should state clearly that any treaties entered into this century will be abrogated if it is against our interests.
Any remaining EU costs, promises to the EU or China etc must be stopped. This government has entered into too many secret deals: EU, Germany, China,
Do you think Jimmy Ratcliffe got his inspiration from poems on the underground? Seen on London underground trains in 2023…
https://poemsontheunderground.org/colonization-in-reverse