A story in the Telegraph last week featured a report by Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) which recommended the Government commit to a £30 billion project to pull CO2 from the air. According to the report, Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) machines sited across the east coast could separate the greenhouse gas from air and pump it to underground storage facilities, thereby helping the U.K. to meet its ambitious 2050 Net Zero target. Not only is this extraordinarily expensive idea pointless in itself, it exposes the equally pointless and expensive constellation of publicly-funded lobbying organisations.
According to ESC, “carbon capture in its various forms is a critical component of a low-cost energy transition”, and “without it, at scale, we risk non-compliance with our Net Zero requirement”. And here is the thing that would, were such things subject to public debate, cause millions of people to scratch their heads. So what if the U.K. does not comply with its Government’s self-imposed target? What is the ‘risk’? And why should the public fork out billions of pounds merely for a daft machine that serves no function other than help a Government achieve its ambition that nobody else really cares about?
Madder still, the ESC admits that DACCS “remains unproven at scale”. This raises two important problems.
First, if something has yet to be proven at such a gigantic scale, any estimate of its cost is both for the birds and in all probability, like all Government-backed projects such as HS2 and wind power, will exceed those estimates. Government vanity project HS2, for example, originally had a similar estimated cost of £37.5 billion in 2009 prices. But by 2020, estimates put the cost well north of £100 billion.
Second, it shows yet again that no government, no political party, no MP or peer, no think tank or its wonks, no academic at a lofty research outfit, no green lobbyist or campaigner, and no journalist has any idea how Net Zero will be achieved, but nonetheless nearly all of them fought for such targets to be imposed on us.
It is a problem known as putting the cart before the horse. And it is a characteristic of all climate-related policies that they are driven by ambition, not reality. Not even ESC can explain what DACCS is, how it will work or how much it will cost. All they really know is that it will be required to remove 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year from 2050 – approximately a tenth of the U.K.’s current domestic annual emissions.
Vanity and intransigence drives this irrational push for solutions to non-problems. Air capture of CO2 serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It won’t make a dent in atmospheric CO2 concentration. It won’t change the weather. It won’t make anyone’s life better. And it won’t stand up to any meaningful cost-benefit analysis. £30 billion, roughly equivalent to £500 per head of the population, could do vastly more good were it to be spent in countless other ways, from healthcare through to addressing genuine environmental issues such as water quality. Of course, not spending the money on such contraptions would likely do more good by leaving that much money in people’s pockets to spend how they see fit.
The Telegraph spots the problem. DACCS plants “would need to be powered by wind, nuclear or solar energy so as not to generate as much CO2 as they save”. A fleet of green generators would be working to power the DACCS plants, merely to hit targets. Recent studies show that existing DACCS technology is extremely inefficient, requiring a whopping 2,500 kilowatt hours to isolate just one tonne of CO2. To extract 48 million tonnes of CO2 would therefore require power stations with a capacity of 14 gigawatts – that’s more than four times the capacity of Hinkley Point C. That nuclear power station itself, dubbed at the time “the most expensive power station in the world”, was initially estimated to cost £26 billion but more recent estimates are putting the cost closer to £46 billion. Thus the cost of a widespread DACCS project – with batteries included – is likely to be in the order of seven times greater than ECS claim. And we have not yet even considered the operating cost.
All this puts me in mind of those fun little clips of devices whose only function is to press a switch to turn themselves off. On Youtube, electronics hobbyists compete to build the most impressive ‘useless machine’. Here is one such contender.
But the problem of useless machinery goes far beyond the device itself. Not unlike white elephants such as wind turbines, Energy Systems Catapult is a strange outfit summoned up out of the blobbish technocracy required by the green agenda. ECS is part of an umbrella group of government-backed private companies called the Catapult Network, which itself seems to be part of Innovate U.K., which in turn is part of UK Research and Innovation – the successor public funding body to the erstwhile research councils. ESC and its sister organisations each benefit from millions of pounds of public funding, topped up by opaque philanthropic funding (i.e., green blob organisations), which as ESC claims, allows them to “support Central and Devolved Governments with the evidence, insights and innovations to incentivise Net Zero action”.
The problem at its core is that publicly-funded organisations, though set up as ‘independent’ bodies run at arms-length from Government, are nonetheless wholly committed to political agendas. Seemingly intended to ‘drive prosperity’ through R&D, such a constellation of opaque agencies are tantamount to the Government picking ‘winners’, who invariably turn out to be abject losers, at vast public expense. There are no consequences for such wonks spaffing hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money on pilots that come to nought, or glossy reports that might just as well be case studies from Narnia. Criticism of ideas such as CO2 capture is excluded from academia and business because even if any critics were not already disinclined to apply for roles within the network, and were then not rejected for their obvious hostility to the dominant political culture of such bullshit factories, their politically inconvenient work would soon be shelved.
In other words, the green agenda has produced a useless machine whose only function is to produce designs for useless machines. The parent idea of DACCS, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), in which CO2 is taken from power stations, compressed and then stuffed under the sea, was an idea that attracted attention following the Climate Change Act. But despite the government offering a billion pounds in funding competitions to prove the concept, the project failed and today remains economically unproven. The even crazier idea of pulling CO2 – which is still a trace gas at just 400 parts per million – from the air and then burying it underground faces a similar future. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s climate agenda will run on, as usual, built on extremely expensive pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Nobody has any idea how to achieve Net Zero without destroying ourselves.
Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.
[Where are you reading this? If it’s on the toilet, it is imperative you read on.]
I was once asked by a waiter at a hotel in Vienna, “How do you take your news?” It was my 40th birthday and the hotel my husband had selected contained endless chandeliers and attentive staff. “In your room or at breakfast?” the waiter clarified. The following morning two copies of the Times were waiting for us at our breakfast table. Never have I felt more like Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey: sitting in hotel-sex-satisfied-silence with my loved one while eating speck and reading the Times.
I am now 45, and I read the news, on my phone, in the loo, like everyone else.
When future historians write their tomes about the end of our civilisation, this descent into base habits will surely feature.
It was initially just men who combined defecation with geo-politics. It was a joke told well in the film Bridesmaids, about a husband who took his ‘laptop and a sandwich’ into the smallest room. But the fact that now woman too flick through X while peeing is reminiscent of Hogarth’s depictions of Gin Lane. It is the monstrously fat drunk women we instantly think of. Once women become gutter dwellers, society falls apart rapidly.
Reading the news on the loo is just one of many societal degradations that show we have completely forgotten what it means to live well. Tucker Carlson was entirely correct when he spoke recently about how absurd it was that people in the White House ate food from ‘vending machines’, while he enjoyed lunch at a table, with friends, like civilised people. (The only time it is ever appropriate to eat out of a vending machine is when you are a child, after a swimming lesson, ideally a bag of pickled onion flavour Monster Munch.) Perhaps ‘eating lunch’, and ‘reading the news at a table’, ought to be added to Dominic Frisby’s song, We’re all far-Right now.
What on earth is wrong with us? Not only have we forgotten how to imbibe the news pleasurably, we’ve forgotten how to eat convivially and we’ve forgotten how to dress decently. By all accounts, the late Frank Field MP was an exemplary individual, but what does it say about our society that those reminiscing about him made mention of the fact that he was able to dress himself nicely, demonstrating how rare this now is?
We all understand that MPs are not going to improve our lives. Indeed, it is MPs with their mad efforts to outlaw a virus, a natural gas and human difference, that have caused most of the mess. The days of economic growth and pleasant cities are over. We are alone and have to rebuild literally from the bottom up. Here are three ideas we should all aspire to:
1. Keep phones away from intimate spaces (the bog and the bedroom)
2. Eat food at tables with friends and family
3. Dress with pride
So please: balance the phone on the edge of the sink, wipe your bottom and let’s begin.
It seems, in a most unexpected discovery, that Enid Blyton (1897–1968) – doyen of children’s writers in the mid-20th century and naturally long since castigated for her political incorrectness – was way ahead of the curve when it came to understanding the tearing of society apart by compelling everyone to join in the madness to be the same and using Stasi-like police as enforcers.
Perhaps living in a time of totalitarian dictatorships had helped hone her satirical take? I sat down the other day to read one of her books to my grandchildren. I plucked The Magic Faraway Tree off the shelf, a book first published in 1943, and started reading.
For those of you who don’t remember the book, the Magic Faraway Tree has a series of clouds that take their place at the top of the tree. The children in the stories climb the tree and go up into whichever magical land has appeared that day. In the chapter I started on, Topsy-Turvy Land has arrived. If that already sounds familiar, you’re not wrong.
In Topsy-Turvy Land a spell has been cast and everything is turned upside down. The children look around in amazement but settle down to eat. It’s all horribly familiar:
They all tucked in to a good lunch. In the middle of it, Joe happened to look round, and he saw something surprising: a policeman was coming, walking on his hands, of course.
“Look what’s coming,” said Joe with a laugh. Everyone looked. Moon-Face went pale.
“I don’t like the look of him,” he said. “Suppose he’s come to lock us up for something? We couldn’t get away down the Faraway Tree before this land swung away from the top!”
The policeman came right up to the little crowd under the tree.
“Why aren’t you Topsy-Turvy?” he asked in a stern voice. “Don’t you know that the rule in this land is that everything and everyone has to be upside down?”
“Yes, but we don’t belong to this silly land,” said Joe. “And if you were sensible, you’d make another rule, saying that everybody must be the right way up. I’ve just no idea how silly you look, policeman, walking on your hands!”
The policeman went red with anger. He took a sort of wand from his belt and tapped Joe on the head with it.
“Topsy-Turvy!” he said. “Topsy-Turvy!”
And to Joe’s horror he had to turn himself upside down at once! The others stared at poor Joe, standing on his hands, his legs in the air.
“Oh, fiddlesticks!” cried Joe. “I can’t eat anything properly now because I need my hands to walk with. Policeman, put me right again.”
“You are right now,” said the policeman, and walked solemnly away on his hands.
“Put Joe the right way up,” said Rick. So everyone tried to turn him over so that he was the right way up again. But as soon as they got his legs down and his head up, he turned topsy-turvy again. He just couldn’t help it, because he was under a spell.
A group of Topsy-Turvy people came to watch. They laughed loudly. “Now he belongs to Topsy-Turvy Land!” they cried. “He’ll have to stay here with us. Never mind, young man –you’ll soon get used to it.”
“Take me back to the Faraway Tree,” begged Joe, afraid that he really and truly might be made to stay in this peculiar land. “Hurry!”
The children beat a hasty retreat to get back home.
I don’t think I’m ruining it for you by saying that the following day the Land of Spells was coming to the top of the Tree, and upside-down Joe would be able to escape the terrible consequences of Topsy-Turvy Land.
At least they had a way out. However, I’m left wishing another land of spells would arrive in our own time and perhaps we could rid ourselves of the spell and insanity of Topsy-Turvy Land that took us over a few years ago.
Taxpayers are set to finance a £475-per-day expert tasked with “decolonising” sections of Hadrian’s Wall. The Mailhas more.
A newly created post aims to address “Britain’s colonial past and systemic racism” at two ancient forts on the wall – even though they were built by the ancient Romans who invaded Britain, leading to the deaths of an estimated 750,000 people.
Critics have pointed to the double standard of seeking to denigrate Britain’s colonial past while celebrating the achievements of the Roman Empire.
The “decolonisation specialist” is to be employed by the council-funded Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums group to cover nine locations in North East England.
They include the Arbeia and Segedunum forts on Hadrian’s Wall, hailed as “bastions against barbarian attack”. Experts point out that Celtic Picts were massacred in their thousands during the Romans’ occupation of Britain. …
Historian Jeremy Black, said: “Decolonisation is the gravy train for third-raters who hate their country and its history. There is absolutely no merit to this proposal and expenditure.”
An alarming video has surfaced of a Green Party councillor celebrating his election victory to Leeds Council by shouting “Allahu Akbar” and declaring the victory a “win for the people of Gaza”. The Mailhas the story.
Mothin Ali, 42, who won the Gipton and Harehills seat with 3,070 votes, said in his rowdy victory speech people are “fed up” of being “let down” by the Labour council.
He shouted: “We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!”
Throughout the video there is arguing between the Green members and the other parties at the count – with people heard swearing and told to “shut up”.
Mr. Ali, who regularly posts videos on his TikTok account, said his phone has been “ringing off the hook” since the win.
Mr. Ali is a qualified mufti, which is a Muslim legal expert who is empowered to give rulings on religious matters. …
He was one of dozens of candidates who ran on a Gaza ticket at the local elections and managed to defeat a Labour candidate.
Naheed Zohra Gultasib held her seat in the Pleck ward of Walsall. The politician was one of six Labour councillors in the local authority who quit the party in November over Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza.
She said in her victory speech: “This is for Gaza, this is for Palestine. You showed [Labour] that they cannot take your vote for granted.”
Akhmed Yakoob, a pro-Palestinian independent candidate running for West Midlands Mayor, secured nearly 20% of the vote in the Birmingham area.
Labour support plummeted in areas with a high Muslim population across the country.
Everyone is contributing their opinion about the Garrick. Is the Garrick able to admit women as members? If not, ought it to do so on principle? If principle is unforthcoming, then should it do so as a result of the intrusive harassment of the Guardian newspaper? It is tempting to make mock, as the whole debate is a bit of a swirl in a latte mug. But the world à la mode is always a bit like this. Teacups storm; then twitter storms; somewhere or other there is reputation-destruction or old fashioned scapegoating, and the world continues on its way.
The Garrick, if I understand the story, requires a two-thirds majority to change the rules; but some lawyers have counselled that the rules already permit women to be admitted as members. What is odd is that the issue has arisen in an atmosphere of moral affront and certainty worthy of Miller’s Crucible. Sting will resign. He will not stand so close to anyone refusing to admit women as members. So will Stephen Fry. He will use the Garrick as his washpot instead of Moab. So will Mark Knopfler, on the grounds that the argument wouldn’t be convincing enough if only one Geordie musician chimed in. Why aye, there have to be two of them – and in harmony. They don’t want the Garrick to be money for nothing and the chicks for free: they want the chicks to pay their fees too.
This – the Garrick – is a thorny subject. Boris Johnson wrote about it in the Mail, though he seems to have written his piece with a certain someone looking over his shoulder. Everyone in the world knows that Boris has two hands, neither of which knows what the other is doing unless it reads the other’s copy. One hand wrote: 1. Don’t force the Garrick to admit women as members. The other hand wrote: 2. The Garrick should admit women as members. Let us try to be of sterner stuff: which, in the first instance, means writing without imagining that the thorn in the flesh is looking over one’s shoulder.
As usual, the only way to make sense of this is to relate it to the longest possible history. A few centuries ago there was nothing wrong with men spending time with men. The world was full of monasteries, colleges, guilds, clubs, associations: and latterly the great London clubs, which were formidable in the 19th Century. The Reform was founded in 1836 – it admitted women in 1981. The Athenaeum was founded in 1824 – it admitted women in 2002. The Carlton was founded in 1832 – it admitted women in 2008. The Garrick was founded in 1831 – and it hasn’t caught up with the fashion yet. Suddenly, the Guardian has got out its moral spray can, and everyone from Simon Case downwards has had to signal his particularly conformist virtue by resigning or threatening to resign or resigning.
I have no axe to grind. I am not a member of a club. Peter Avery, an old Persianist, once suggested that I should join a club. And David Barchard, former FT correspondent to Turkey, was surprised when I said I had nowhere to stay in London. They were clearly fooled by my massive forehead, respectable dress and severe deportment into thinking I was someone who would value such things. Well, not so. I was never very clubbable: I was in fact ‘his own man’, as was sometimes said disapprovingly in my wake. But there is a principle at stake, as usual, and I suppose it is always worth offering a word for the sake of a principle, even an obsolete one.
The question is whether all our institutions are – to use the now famous Gramscian phrase – to suffer from the long march of women through them. And whether – rare question (noblesse oblige requires its not being asked in mixed company) – it is good for all our institutions to have the hand of the gentler sex on the keys, the till and the rulebook. Let us be sceptical – maybe it is, maybe it is not – and let us also marvel at a world in which everyone, including our great celebrities of the 1980s, suddenly find they all agree on the most pressing controversy of the age.
The principle is to do with truth. Like many others, I think ‘the truth’ has always had a vexed status in the world: but that it seemed to count for very little, very suddenly, in 2020. Why was this? Well, one obsolete possibility is that it had something to do with all the women in the room.
On August 6th, 1831, Samuel Taylor Coleridge said the following:
There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth – the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry.
This is fascinating. It might be true, or not true – even though it might not be considered good. Discuss. But one cannot discuss it unless it is said. And one can imagine it being said in the historic Garrick. But one cannot imagine it being said in the current Garrick or the Garrick of the future if Stephen Fry, Gordon Sumner, John Simpson and Mark Knopfler are to have their way.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was rather clubbable: he liked talking at great length, though, according to Madame de Stäel, he lacked a capacity for conversation: being a monologist. (Read Coleridge’s Table Talk, which is incredible.) D.H. Lawrence, on the other hand, was not particularly clubbable. He visited Cambridge once, met Russell and Keynes, and thought of spiders. He married Frieda and spent most of his life in exile with her – Italy, Australia, New Mexico. He considered the most fundamental relation in the universe to be the one between a man and woman in marriage.
But even though this was the case, he had a hankering after something else. Birkin’s last words in Women in Love are “I don’t believe that” when Ursula tells him that the love of a woman is enough. And in Kangaroo, the female character cries when the male talks about sharing activity with men: “Her greatest grief was when he turned away from their personal human life of intimacy to this impersonal business of male activity.” This impersonal business of male activity. Notice the binary here: Lawrence associated masculinity with impersonality and femininity with personality. Discuss. Or, let’s say, if you are reading this silently (and not out loud over oysters and champagne to the women in your clubroom), Consider.
I suppose I have to be provocative and suggest that if there is such a thing as ‘impersonal male activity’, and that if this is valuable, then it may be difficult for this to be understood in a modern world in which women are marching at length through our institutions and revising the rules of those institutions in relation to an inability to respect or understand ‘impersonal male activity’. Now, this ‘impersonal male activity’ might be a bit foolish, like the braggarting of boys. Peter Martland, the historian, once told me that Corpus Christi College, Cambridge changed immediately as soon as women were admitted. The dining hall had formerly been a place at which more food was transported by sporting projection than by tray: now it became a genial and genteel café of chivalry and courtship. But sometimes this ‘impersonal male activity’ might be extremely important: especially if Coleridge is right and men will occasionally consider setting aside the ‘good’ for the sake of the ‘true’.
COVID-19 was an exquisite exhibition of the politics of the (apparent) ‘good’ triumphing over any concern with ‘truth’. And when I say ‘triumphing’ I am alluding to the grotesque display of glorification, intimidation and humiliation which was found in the original Roman triumph. See Mary Beard for details. There were women who were critical of the pandemic protocols (not, however, Mary Beard): the ones I admired were Laura Dodsworth, for investigating ‘nudge’, and Laura Perrins, for unlimited moral scorn. But even they were better at observing what was ‘not good’ rather than what was ‘true’. I imagine that many readers of the Daily Sceptic relied on podcasts – and mostly podcasts involving conversation between men. As everyone knows, the BBC has long insisted that there is no such thing as broadcastable conversation between men. There must be a woman in the room. Is it not significant that there was, and is, a taste (at least among men) for conversation between men – conversation with risk of boredom, since it has impersonality in it, but conversation also with risk of truth? London Calling, the Lotus Eaters, Louder with Crowder offered male conversation and something like a proper scale of values, not wholly created by the situation. For me, the most significant encounters of the pandemic were Delingpole-and-Yeadon and Weinstein-and-Malone: they convinced me that everything was worse than I thought (as if the surface of reality was not bad enough): and, in those conversations, even if the truth was not known, the truth was spoken about as if it mattered more than anything else.
I doubt the fuss about the Garrick is of any importance. There is a great moral fear of not being ‘egalitarian’ among our elites. And so they are falling like dominoes or playing cards: pretending that their collapse is a consequence of morality. But there is a principle at stake, and even if this principle is not one anyone is likely to defend or even consider nowadays – on the grounds that it is ‘not good’ to consider it – there is an awkward question about whether our civilisation is not in danger for yet one more reason, which is that in our institutions we seem disinclined to let men talk about anything without a woman somehow being involved.
What is truth? Does anyone care about truth? Is there a possibility that truth has been completely mechanised into ‘my truth’? If so, this means that when we talk about ‘truth’ nowadays we are actually talking about something that is ‘good’ in some respect – possibly only good for the speaker, though admittedly also possibly objectively good – but certainly not ‘true’.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
Some 1,250 people in the U.K. contracted HIV in the 70s and 80s from Factor VIII, a treatment for the bleeding disorder haemophilia. Up to 5,000 more also contracted hepatitis C.
The Infected Blood Inquiry will report later this month on mistakes that allowed Factor VIII contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C to be imported into the U.K. and prescribed to patients on the NHS.
Survivors who have been seeking justice for 40 years expect the final report on May 20th to be critical of Factor VIII manufacturers, successive governments and doctors. The report will also explain how as many as 26,800 people contracted hepatitis C from blood transfusions.
When the first three people with haemophilia came down with AIDS in the U.S. in July 1982, the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) warned the fatal illness could be caused by a blood-borne agent in Factor VIII.
In December 1982, Bayer’s Cutter Laboratories discovered chimpanzees had developed AIDS-like symptoms after also being treated with Factor VIII, according to an internal memo. However, the company didn’t warn patients about the potential risks.
As the dangers became clear, Bayer kept selling Factor VIII.
Having created a safer, heat-treated version without viruses in February 1984, Bayer continued to sell the HIV and hepatitis C-contaminated Factor VIII until August 1985.
The U.K. kept prescribing the dangerous version of Factor VIII until late 1985, and it never recalled it from hospitals.
Cutter rejected the idea of recalling its infected Factor VIII from Asian countries in 1984 because it could cost “up to $2 million worth of sales”, according to documents published in The Poison Line: Life and Death in the Infected Blood Scandal.
A year later, the company’s marketing plan said, “AIDS has not become a major issue in Asia”. The company outlined how it would dump the infected product in countries including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Argentina. It added that “hysteria over AIDS could reduce our sales by as much as $400,000”.
In another case, Revlon Healthcare-owned Armour Pharmaceuticals suppressed evidence from 1985 to 1986 that HIV had been discovered in its “safe” version of Factor VIII, which had been heat-treated to kill viruses. Rather than withdrawing the faulty product from sale, the company deemed the problem a “marketing issue” and covered it up.
Six patients in the U.K. contracted HIV from that version of Factor VIII which had been licensed as safe from blood-borne viruses.
“As Palestine protests spread, the West is devouring itself” – After decades of saturation with toxic and abstruse ideologies, our universities are revealing just how far they have travelled along the path of anti-democratic fundamentalism, writes Jake Wallis Simons in the Telegraph.
“Councillor who said ‘Allahu Akbar’ after being elected revealed” – The Green Party councillor who shouted “Allahu Akbar” after being elected has been revealed as an accountant father-of-three who runs a family gardening blog – while describing Gaza as “the world’s biggest concentration camp”, according to the Mail.
“Israel is the Gideon Falter of the world” – Just like antisemitism campaigner Gideon Falter, the Jewish state is victim-blamed, says Melanie Phillips on her Substack.
“George Galloway walks out of interview in homosexuality row” – Rochdale MP George Galloway hung up during an interview with Lewis Goodall after being questioned about remarks in which he suggested that gay couples were “not normal”, according to the Mail.
“Time to end the proposed WHO treaty now” – On Substack, Dr. Robert W. Malone is issuing a call to action to withdraw U.S. support from the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty.
“Outrage over key NHS staff boasting online of working from bed” – NHS physician associates are sparking outrage by posting “inappropriate” and “unprofessional” videos on social media, where they lounge in bed at home and take pictures of medical documents, according to the Mail.
“Tories’ standing in eyes of the public has hit new depths” – The broader message from the local election results is that voters show a remarkable readiness to back candidates from outside the political mainstream, writes John Curtice in the Telegraph.
“No.10 ‘shelves plan for summer General Election’” – Allies say Sunak hopes an improving economic picture and Rwanda flights finally leaving can improve his re-election chances this autumn, according to the Telegraph.
“Prepare for disaster – that’s all Tories have left” – In the Telegraph, David Frost holds little hope for the Tories, given how MPs are unwilling to take any step that could turn the party’s fortunes around.
“The time will surely come for Kate Forbes” – Had Kate Forbes stood for leadership of the SNP, the media and political elites would have metaphorically crucified her, not for her politics but for her faith. But she has time on her side, says Dr. Tom Goodfellow in TCW.
“The new Scotland” – Scottish culture is narrowing and secularising under the influence of a strident liberal elite, warns Sebastian Milbank in the Critic.
“Sadiq Khan’s London of luxury beliefs” – In the wake of Sadiq Khan’s re-election, Spiked’s Tom Slater warns Londoners to brace themselves for four more years of virtue-signalling while the city burns.
“Ghanaian king wants to keep golden treasures” – An African king is seeking to permanently keep golden treasures loaned to him by the British Museum and the V&A in a landmark deal, reports the Telegraph.
“Labour plots new Net Zero crackdown on corporates” – Ed Milliband is plotting to introduce new Net Zero laws that will force big companies and banks to limit their carbon footprint to comply with UN climate goals, according to the Telegraph.
“Sea level! Everyone panic!” – The climate hypemeisters are at it again, this time catastrophising about rising sea levels. Willis Eschenbach examines the claims in WUWT?
“Climate ideology ignores science, threatens humanity” – Climate scientists would be less likely to issue dire warnings of planetary doom if they gave more credence to the geological history of the past several million years, says Lee Gerhard in WUWT?
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