Chris Packham’s BBC Series Warning of “Mass Extinction” by CO2 is Propaganda, Not Science
Last year, Chris Packham hosted a five-part series on the BBC called Earth, which compared a mass extinction event 252 million years ago to the small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide seen in the last 150 years. He said he hoped the “terror factor” generated by his programme would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”. But as we shall see, the only terror factor is having to sit through an hour-long film consisting of cherry-picked science data and unproven assertions in the hope of persuading us that the increase in global temperatures in the last 150 years or so is comparable to the rise in temperatures over a considerable swath of geological time. Great play was made of a 12°C rise in average global temperatures 252 million years ago as CO2 levels started to rise, although Packham fails to report that CO2 levels were already at least four times higher back then than in modern times. The ‘science’ that Packham cloaks himself with on every occasion is hardly served by terrorising the viewer with what is little more than a highly personal political message.
Think of all that suffering and wastage, he says about the fourth great mass extinction. I don’t think we want a comparable extinction to the one that happened 252 million years ago on our conscience, he adds. Of course, Packham is not the first person to politicise the end-Permian extinction when most plant and animal life disappeared to be replaced eventually with what became known as the age of the dinosaurs. As we can see from the graph below, even though that extinction event coincided with an uptick in CO2 levels, the general trend over a 600-million-year period was downwards ending in the near denudation currently experienced today. But scientists note that the rise started some time before the extinction event, with most of the Permian characterised by very low levels of CO2.
It is obvious why the three other great extinctions are of little interest to modern day climate alarmists. The Ordovician extinction 445 million years ago occurred when CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today, the Devonian wipe-out happen 372 millions ago when CO2 levels were falling, while the later Triassic/Jurassic event 201 million years ago occurred at a time of stable CO2. Hard to see a pattern there suggesting rising CO2 levels equals a mass extinction event. The disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is generally attributed to the impact of a giant meteorite, while the current sixth mass extinction exists only inside the head of the Swedish doom goblin, and need not detain us at this point.
Since Packham was essentially making a BBC political film promoting Net Zero, he inevitably started with the fixed view that all our current environmental problems are the fault of CO2. An intense period of volcanic eruptions that led to huge coal deposits catching fire increased CO2 levels and almost instantly sent temperatures soaring at the end of the Permian period. About 20 million years of rain subsequently followed, he observed, taking some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and order it seems was restored. Certainly, CO2 resumed a small descent but levels remained almost as high, or for some periods higher, as those at the end of the Permian period for another 120 million years. Packham does not provide an explanation of what happened to the average global temperature at this time.
The graph above shows why he avoided the subject. Temperatures did rise at the end of the Permian period after a long decline, but only as far as previous highs recorded 200 million years earlier. They then stayed at those levels for most of the next 200 million years, throughout the age of the dinosaurs. Helped by the increased levels of CO2, this is considered one of the most verdant periods in Earth’s history.
Is it likely that volcanic eruptions triggered the substantial rise in temperature around 252 million years ago, as Packham claims? In a paper published in 2022, a group of European scientists said their data showed seawater temperature began to rise at least 300,000 years before the main volcanic eruptions. “Gradual warming by approximately 12°C was probably responsible for initial environmental degradation that eventually culminated in the global and Permian extinction,” they wrote. The scientists reviewed much of the published evidence and concluded “a temporal link between volcanic activity, environmental changes and biological impacts remains controversial”.
Carbon dioxide, of course, is the main cause of global warming in Packham’s world. Promoting his film to like-minded activists at the Guardian, he said it was the “urgency that makes me despair”. As we can see, this “despair” is the result of comparing events hundreds of millions of years ago with a small temperature rise in the past 150 years or so of around 1°C – and this after a short-term period of global cooling. You can of course argue about all this, but it is a bit rich to claim the science of recent global warming is ‘settled’ and refuse to debate anyone who disagrees with you.
From such a shaky base, Packham claims we’re all becoming far too complacent about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. “It’s an experiment we have been running for over 100 years,” he told the Guardian. “The more the CO2, the more the heat is locked in and the hotter our Earth becomes.” But if Packham really believes that, how does he explain those geological periods when temperatures fall as CO2 levels rise? And if a rise in temperatures and mass extinction is inevitable when CO2 rises, how does that work in the current period when CO2 levels are as low as they’ve ever been?
Could it be that the end-Permian extinction was actually caused by CO2 starvation? During the Permian, it was the first time in Earth’s history that CO2 concentrations fell below 1,000 parts per million, perhaps as dangerously low as 200 ppm at some points. This may well have started to stress plant life since 1,000 ppm is a concentration that supports maximum photosynthesis productivity. This is the view of Jim Steele, Director Emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus. In a recent paper, he noted that many researchers have pointed to competition between different plant species for declining CO2 during the Permian period. This was said to result in “severely reduced photosynthesis, the collapse of primary productivity and a significant malfunction of the global food webs”.
The truth is that the scientific jury is still out and the ‘science’, as with most climate science, is unsettled. Perhaps inadvertently, Packham has simply drawn attention to all the observational evidence that suggests CO2, the gas of life, ‘saturates’ at around 300-400 ppm, and its warming effect is greatly diminished beyond that concentration. But “fear is motivating” he claims, and in the BBC he seems to have a compliant megaphone for whatever green propaganda he cares to promote.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Climate Alarm Has Become a Dangerous Ideology, Says Cambridge Academic
By Sallust
Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography at Cambridge University, has come out with a dark warning that the obsession with climate change as the cause of all our ills, and the only problem worth focusing any attention on, has turned ‘climatism’ into an ideology and left the science far behind. The Mail, which interviewed him, has the story:
In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything (2023), Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.
Hulme… dubs this ideology “climatism”, and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world’s ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.
The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from other important moral, ethical, and political objectives – like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.
As with other ‘isms’ – like cubism or romanticism – ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.
“They’re like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,” he said.
To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.
“We all need ideologies, and we all have them – whether you’re a Marxist or a nationalist, you’re likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,” he added.
As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.
“No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it’s a very convenient shorthand to say, ‘Oh, well, this was caused by climate change’,” Hulme said.
“It’s a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue, to try to describe events that are happening in the world.”
Hulme doesn’t argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won’t stop disasters from happening altogether.
“Fundamentally, we’re going to have to deal with hurricanes, and we’re not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions,” he said.
The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: if all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves. …
“The danger is if we obsess about just climate change, if we think that climate change holds the key to wellbeing and a better future, we take attention away from interventions that will make progress on the sustainable development goals,” he said.
Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: “There’s this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero – we’ve only got five years, 10 years, two years – however long different commentators put the deadline.”
He calls this line of thinking “deadline-ism”, a sort of sub-ideology of climatism, and he says he finds it unhelpful.
“It’s like holding a gun to your head and saying, ‘You’ve only got three seconds to make a decision’.”
Hulme warns that by promoting fatalism, the risk is that climatism will encourage people to give up on the grounds that it’s pointless. It also generates cynicism – because the world manifestly isn’t ending, and as one deadline after another passes without the promised catastrophe, people stop listening. Hulme emerges as a pragmatist, and while you may disagree with his view that “carbon-emitting energy sources” need to be phased out, his overall pragmatism is certainly refreshing, particularly from a Cambridge academic:
“We do need smart climate policies, whether it’s mitigation or adaptation,” he said.
“We need energy transitions away from carbon-emitting energy sources, and that energy transition is going to come through innovation. It’s going to come through smart people doing smart things more efficiently, with the human ingenuity and creativity that we’ve been granted, making use of the material resources that the planet offers.”
Worth reading in full.
“I’m Not a Covid Conspiracy Theorist. I was Right”
By Will Jones
The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson has been accused of “swerving into conspiracies” by the Times’s Janice Turner. In her latest column, Pearson robustly defends her record on Covid and lockdowns against detractors like Turner who still haven’t noticed that sceptics got it right and the conformists were consistently wrong. Here’s an excerpt.
Janice Turner was hardly unique in doing nothing to challenge lockdown and other Covid measures which have left Britain both broke and broken. Most of our trade, journalism, either fell shamefully silent during that period or actively egged on the Government to close schools for longer, to have people arrested for sunbathing, to introduce vaccine passports and other authoritarian measures which it is the job of a free press to challenge. Or so I thought.
The few of us who continued to ask, “Why?” after the imposition of frankly bonkers rules (or was it “guidance”, Matt Hancock?) were routinely reviled, even threatened. Peter Hitchens, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and I were some of the names on a so-called fact-checking website convened by Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough, which set out to shame “Covid cranks and dangerous conspiracy theorists”.
It got worse. Sceptics like me who wondered, for example, why fathers were banned from attending the births of their own babies or why one devastated daughter was told off for not wearing a mask and gloves as she went to kiss the brow of her dying father and was marched smartly out of the room before Dad took his last breath, were called “murderers”.
Challenging Professor Sunetra Gupta, probably our greatest epidemiologist (and world-renowned expert in coronaviruses), who said that the old and the vulnerable must be protected while everyone else got on with their lives, O’Brien claimed that moving away from lockdowns would lead to “hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths”.
He and his ilk have gone very quiet now that there are, indeed, thousands of unnecessary deaths. Among people, many of them distressingly young, who had early cancer symptoms but couldn’t see a doctor after the NHS effectively became a Covid-only service. People who got scared and depressed and drank or ate themselves to death.
Teenagers cut off from friends who took their own sweet lives or plunged down a dark well into mental illness. The shattering cost of all this is slowly beginning to occur to even the most ardent lockdown cheerleaders. “Looking back, I think we failed our children during the pandemic,” mused Susanna Reid last week.
The Good Morning Britain presenter was commenting on a study which found that children in England face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings because of school closures during Covid. National GCSE results will steadily worsen until 2030, when it is expected that “fewer than 40% of pupils [will] get good grades in maths and English”.
A devastating picture of educational decline, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially when compared to Sweden where no school for 16-year-olds and under was closed and Swedish educational attainment is as good as ever.
Worth reading in full.
Colds, Flu and Covid Are Mainly Spread Through the Air, WHO Report Finds
By Will Jones
Colds, flu and Covid are mainly spread through the air and not by sharing cups and getting close to one another, World Health Organisation experts have suggested in a new report. The Mail has the story.
New guidance by a coalition of nearly 50 doctors overturned the commonly believed idea that infected droplets transferred from hard surfaces and skin are the cause of respiratory viruses like colds and flu.
The decision settled a Covid-era debate about whether some viruses like Covid spread mostly through inhaling infected air, or from contaminated surfaces.
Speaking to DailyMail.com, experts in virology welcomed the conclusion that surfaces are not as vital as previously thought, which they say should have been confirmed early on in the pandemic.
Dr. Don Milton, an expert on respiratory viruses and co-author of the new WHO guidance, told DailyMail.com: “We know that for gastrointestinal infections [hand washing and being careful touching surfaces like cups] are going to be important.
“How important they are for respiratory viruses, I think is probably a lot less.”
The WHO guidance applied to all pathogens that cause lung infections, including Covid, influenza and rhinovirus.
The report did not include non-respiratory infections, such as GI infections like norovirus, which can be spread via germs on the hands.
Until late 2020, the WHO had only considered a few infections as airborne, such as tuberculosis and measles. Most of them were classified as “droplet transmission”.
Covid was classified the same way at first. That messaging prompted millions of people in early 2020 to disinfect every surface, including groceries and mail. This even drove a shortage of cleaning supplies at the time.
But evidence grew that Covid could be transmitted via aerosolised particles. Suspended particles can remain in the air for hours, casting a pathogenic cloud over an infected person that follows him wherever he goes.
Worth reading in full.
So what was the point of social distancing, keeping 2m apart and erecting billions of Perspex barriers then? Not to mention face masks, which only block larger droplets and are useless against airborne pathogens. And does it mean the WHO won’t recommend such nonsense in a future ‘pandemic’? We’ll believe it when we see it.
Google and the End of the Employee Activist
With the launch of the U.K.s first HR support consultancy specifically dedicated to removing political activism from small to medium employers, there is a slow realisation in the employment world that the politicisation of the workplace may not have been such a good idea after all. U.K. Government studies and independent research by the Free Speech Union has highlighted the negative impact on employees and employers and on the U.K. economy through the deployment of poorly designed and implemented Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) training.
Last month, Google’s leadership finally lost patience with activist employees as it fired over 50 individuals for breaching a tranche of internal policies.
To cut a long story short, 28 activists occupied Google’s executive floors and the offices of individual executives and refused to move. Their ‘sit in’ was to demand that Google scrap its business with the State of Israel. “Google, Google, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” was the call this time. It was all caught on camera and you can easily find examples of this. The response was immediate and decisive: arrest and sacking.
Now to those paying attention, this was entirely predictable. For some time now the worm has been turning in the workplace as employers and businesses realise that their previous policy of indulging in politics has backfired. Years of permitting and encouraging political activism in the workplace has resulted in an increasingly vocal, radical and demanding cadre of employees disrupting core business functions, intimidating other workers and creating adverse publicity for the business.
The irony of 20-somethings, most of whom attended top universities, on Silicon Valley six figure starting salaries accusing every man and his dog of being privileged is beginning to dawn on their employers as ‘not a good look’ with customers, many of whom are genuinely struggling to make ends meet and have little or no patience with this hyper-privileged conduct.
The open politicisation of the workplace has been creeping in over the last 20 years. The politics around the climate debate was the earliest sign of this as the carbon market emerged and companies fell over themselves to sign up to green policies. What made this different from previous corporate initiatives was that HR used the mechanisms designed to improve employee workplace performance to encourage employees to drive green initiatives. Employees who took active roles in local green issues were lauded internally, for the first time rewarding employees for activities not directly related to sales, production or other income-producing activity.
This opened the gate for every political activist movement to rapidly spread their ideologies through the workplace. So we have seen MeToo, Covid mandates, BLM, gender self-ID and so on, all pushed through HR departments under the guise of ‘social responsibility’. Around 2010 we started to see a new role being pushed, that of the ‘ally’. No longer enough to tacitly accept that your employer sponsored Pride events etc., employees were encouraged and then trained to become allies – activists directly endorsing and promoting the ideology of the day. It was entirely predictable to anyone with the most rudimentary critical thinking skills that this would end in conflict and persecution of employees who for whatever reason disagreed with the ideology, and get employers into a phenomenal mess where they end up breaching anti-discrimination laws.
Yet, board directors, especially in the USA, decided to openly pick a side in elections and announce that they would not only donate but effectively put their businesses at the disposal of their preferred party. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a catalyst, with the leak of the 2016 video of Google’s top brass reassuring upset employees after the Trump victory being used by Republicans to demonstrate bias in social media. The new partisan policies as well as the almost universal anti-Trump stance of the mainstream media put the tech and media industries at direct odds with many of their customers. This is simply not a sustainable position. As Disney and other activist boards are finding out, eventually investors want a return on their money and their patience with companies that take highly politicised positions which inflame their customers is running out.
Unusually for Silicon Valley, there was one CEO who stood up against this. An article in the Free Press looks back to when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong issued a statement through his blog in September 2020, shortly after the George Floyd protests. At a time when literally almost every employer of size across the West was releasing statements in support of BLM, Armstrong realised that this would set a precedent that would come back to hurt companies. His statement is worth reading in the original.
In essence the core of the statement is that at Coinbase they don’t:
- Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
- Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
- Assume negative intent, or not have each other’s back
- Take on activism outside the core mission of our work
Brian realised that whilst well intentioned, adopting political positions on various social issues has “the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction and by creating internal division”.
Of course, back in 2020 the reaction was again predictable. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said:
Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution.
Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey stated that by not “acknowledging” the “related societal issues” faced by Coinbase’s customers, the company and its leader were “leading people behind”. (Incidentally, the Free Press reached out to Costolo for a comment on its article but he couldn’t be reached.)
Tech entrepreneur Aaron White tweeted that the statement was “isolationist fantasy” and that Armstrong’s apolitical stance was “effectively guaranteeing” that the CEO would land on the wrong side of history on “absolutely every issue”.
To an actual historian, White and the other tech companies’ statements are indicative of the precocity of the tech leaders of the time. These individuals had become very powerful very quickly and were well educated in one way but dismally educated in others. Dorsey’s interview with Joe Rogan is an interesting example of this. It only appears to dawn on Dorsey after censoring content on Twitter that society needs freedom of speech to function. It’s a shame he had missed his history classes. Dorsey seemed at the time to think that this was groundbreaking stuff, that such a philosophical conclusion hadn’t been done and dusted 200 years ago.
As we learned, once again, from China’s Cultural Revolution, the politicisation of everything, the division of society into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’, into the assumed ‘powerful’ and the ‘vulnerable’, has devastating outcomes, be they the mass persecutions of innocents in their millions, manmade famine as a consequence of societal mania, or debilitating internal conflicts that have undermined Google and other companies in their core missions.
Armstrong has been proven right. The idea that everything can be reduced to political struggle is incredibly damaging on human relationships; in environments that absolutely rely on functional collaboration between humans to meet a mutual goal it is devastating.
Now it is one thing for a company like Google to realise its errors; its survival isn’t at stake, it can roll with the punches. But we have seen big blue chips like Anheuser Busch pay the price at the tills for its decision to use its top selling beer Bud Lite, as a vehicle for pushing gender self-ID politics. The problem for smaller companies can be devastating.
It’s leading to a workplace environment where in several small businesses I have spoken to they no longer hire anyone under 35 because they have been burned by the expectation of some young employees that work is an opportunity for activism and their personal political beliefs take precedence over those of others. One business I spoke to recently told me that they were about to have to fight an employment tribunal because they refused to give an employee a month off to organise her local Pride parade last year. This is desperately unfair to young people who do want to just get on with their lives, but it is an increasing problem in the workplace.
An Employment Tribunal is an existential issue for small businesses. Yes, insurers may pick up the tab, but the stress, damage to the day job due to the time involved and the personal allegations that a business owner is somehow morally lacking are deeply disrupting and hurtful to those who find themselves in this situation.
The politicisation of the British workplace has been almost as rapid as that of the American. Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) policies are driven through corporate procurement – want to sell toothpaste to a chemist chain? Well you’d better have an ESG policy and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity policies that underpin it. Whilst it appears that most corporate HR departments are fully invested in this and certainly the CIPD – the institution that trains and qualifies HR professionals – is almost completely on board with the politicisation of the workplace, there are signs of a thaw. Last month I spoke with a very senior independent HR specialist who told me that five years ago her clients were HR Directors, but now her clients are CEOs and the request is usually along the lines of: “We’re losing the staff, we are losing engagement, we are losing Employment Tribunals, I need you to find out what the hell is going wrong with our HR department and to fix it.” And of course, what is going wrong is that HR has relegated its role of supporting the business in its core activities behind that of being a vehicle for social justice. It is immensely significant that this is dawning on investors and business leaders.
However, as we have already discussed, the consequences for small businesses are potentially existential, driving division, undermining workplace relationships and trust between colleagues. This is why Fair Job U.K. has been launched, an initiative that gives smaller businesses and employers the ability to tap into HR support that returns the employer to a stable workplace by removing political activism from the workplace and realigning the employer’s obligations to Employment Law and the Equality Act. The premise of Fair Job U.K. is almost entirely that stated by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in 2020: the politicisation of every aspect of life must stop and the politicisation of the workplace is a zero sum game which will produce a result directly opposite to the ideas of diversity and inclusion by creating an orthodoxy and excluding those who disagree with it. Fair Job U.K. helps employers navigate this and protects small businesses and employers from politically motivated attacks on the company and staff.
In light of Google’s actions, the Free Press article goes on to describe the sigh of relief across Silicon Valley that this action draws the line in the sand. Sundar Pichai, Google CEO wrote in a note to staff:
This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
Brian Armstrong has gone from pariah to prophet, he has been vindicated.
The U.K.’s businesses must follow suit and remove political activism from the workplace.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.
Civil Servants Take Legal Action to Stop Rwanda Flights by Arguing International Law Ties Their Hands
By Will Jones
Civil servants are attempting to stop Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan by mounting a legal challenge to the legislation – the first time civil servants have attempted to block a Government policy in the courts. The Telegraph has more.
The FDA union, which represents senior civil servants, has submitted an application for a judicial review over concerns that Home Office staff could be in breach of international law if they implement the Prime Minister’s Safety of Rwanda Act.
They say civil servants could be in violation of the Civil Service code – and open to possible prosecution – if they followed a minister’s demands to ignore an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights banning a deportation.
The Act gives ministers the power to decide whether to comply with a Rule 39 order made by the Strasbourg court, one of which grounded the first flight to Rwanda in June 2022. Civil servants have been instructed that they must defer to ministers over such decisions.
Dave Penman, FDA general secretary, said: “Civil servants should never be left in a position where they are conflicted between the instructions of ministers and adhering to the Civil Service code, yet that is exactly what the Government has chosen to do.
“This is not an accident, or down to poor drafting. It’s a political choice from the Government, made not for the good of the country but to avoid upsetting either of the warring factions within its own party.
“It’s also irresponsible. Those seeking to undermine the integrity and impartiality of the civil service have seized on the difficulties the Government has had in implementing this policy, to accuse civil servants of acting politically.”
It is thought to be the first time civil servants have attempted to block a government policy in the courts.
It seems we’ll find out how enforceable international law really is.
Worth reading in full.
Cost of Driving Jumps 50% in Three Years as Net Zero War on Motorist Heats Up
By Will Jones
The cost of running a car has soared by £700 to £2,100 a year in the last three years – a 50% rise – as a result of the Net Zero war on motorists and rising inflation. The Telegraph has more.
There has never been a worse time to own a car, as motorists are “assaulted from all sides” by spiralling costs, analysis shows.
The yearly cost of running a car has soared by £700 to £2,100 in the last three years – a 50% rise – as the Net Zero war on motorists and rising inflation takes its toll.
Households are spending over £500 more a year on insurance than in 2021 and have been hit by substantial hikes in the price of repairs, parking and fuel.
At the same time, low-emission zones have expanded across the country, saddling motorists with additional charges to drive in urban areas.
Edmund King, President of motoring body the AA, said the burden on drivers has never been so high.
He said: “There have been times in the past when certain elements have been more expensive, like fuel. But this is the first time when the cost of motoring as a whole has been so high. It’s an incredibly expensive time to be a driver. They are being assaulted from all sides.”
King added that motorists are getting a “rubbish return on investment” after drivers reported one million potholes on the nation’s roads last year, a post-pandemic high.
“Drivers are paying more but in return they get terrible infrastructure, with roads in a record poor state. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.
“For many millions of people, their car is not a luxury – it’s essential. Many people can’t cut back on driving, and so they cut back on other household expenditure. They buy less food, go out less. It affects their lifestyle quite considerably.”
Worth reading in full.
News Round-Up
- “John Swinney set to be next SNP leader and First Minister” – John Swinney is set to become SNP leader and First Minister as his potential rival Kate Forbes ruled herself out of the race, reports the Herald.
- “Kate Forbes has still won a significant victory” – for religion in public life” – Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph says that even though Kate Forbes isn’t going to stand for the leadership of the SNP, Swinney’s promise to include her in a future SNP Government is a major blow for tolerance of Christians in public life.
- “Ireland miraculously discovers its hard border” – Remember when parliamentary legislation to deem Rwanda a safe country was an assault on the rule of law? Well, now Dublin has decreed Rwanda a safe country so it can send asylum seekers back over the U.K. border, says Henry Hill in UnHerd.
- “Migration reality is biting in Ireland” – The Irish have been stitched up like a kipper by that most magnificent of things – reality, writes Rod Liddle in the Spectator.
- “Donald Trump claims immigration has left London ‘unrecognisable’” – Donald Trump claims mass immigration has rendered London “unrecognisable” after Europe “opened its doors to jihad”, according to the Mail.
- “Macron says European nationalists are ‘hidden Brexiteers’” – Emmanuel Macron says that Brexit has “impoverished” the U.K. and failed to solve the country’s immigration problems, reports the Telegraph.
- “Comedians outraged by stand-up’s death threat to ‘Zionist’ woman” – Comedian Dane Baptiste, who has appeared on a number of BBC shows, has sparked outrage for posting a threat on social media to kill a female “Zionist” comedian, says the Times.
- “Governments are beginning to resist ‘disinformation index’” – In the European Conservative, Frederick Attenborough takes aim at the Global Disinformation Index, which has blacklisted a number of conservative and ‘gender critical’ news publishing sites in the hope of demonetising them.
- “Teacher banned over misgendering pupil ‘had free speech right infringed’” – The High Court has been told that banning a Christian maths teacher for misgendering a pupil infringed on his freedom of speech and religion, according to the Standard.
- “Billy Bragg’s attack on JK Rowling highlights the idiocy of woke tribalism” – Instead of judging arguments on their merits, the cataclysmically dim find it much easier to judge the people making them instead, says Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
- “The desire to silence others is unhealthy” – On the Public Substack, Michael Shellenberger, in conversation with Glenn Loury, argues that defending the free speech of those you dislike is the sign of a healthy society.
- “The publisher and the police” – The case of Ernest Moret has drawn attention to a sinister abuse of power, writes Freddie Attenborough in the Critic.
- “Guardian to cut journalists’ jobs as it slides back into heavy losses” – The Guardian has launched a redundancy programme as the newspaper grapples with a sharp slowdown in advertising, reports the Telegraph.
- “CDC found evidence COVID-19 vaccines caused deaths” – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines caused multiple deaths before claiming that there was no evidence linking the vaccines to any deaths, reveals the Epoch Times.
- “The CDC lied; people died” – The CDC knew the Covid vaccines were killing people. But despite that, they lied to the public and told them they were safe, says Steve Kirsch on Substack.
- “Families of people who died after Covid vaccination abandon attempt to sue AstraZeneca” – Families whose loved ones died after taking the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine have abandoned attempts to sue the pharmaceutical giant after being told that they were likely to lose, reports the Telegraph.
- “Turbo cancer in New York” – Cancer cases are up by two-and-a-half times in New York State in 2023 compared to the 2017-2019 baseline, according to Steve Kirsch on Substack.
- “My parents and the sorry state of the NHS” – In the Spectator, Melissa Kite reflects on a recent hospital visit with her father, navigating the complexities of familial bonds and personal beliefs amid the backdrop of the healthcare system.
- “Are antidepressants making you asexual?” – Half of those on antidepressants experience sexual problems, writes Freya India in the Spectator.
- “Why Britain is building the world’s most expensive nuclear plant” – In the Spectator, Sam Dumitriu explains why Hinkley Point has been so expensive and how we can make nuclear power in Britain cheaper.
- “Forget Brexit – Net Zero is the real threat to the car industry” – Extreme green targets pose an existential threat to U.K. carmakers, says James Woudhuysen in Spiked.
- “The vegan meats that are worse for you than a McDonald’s quarter pounder” – The Telegraph reveals that many of the vegan alternatives to meat are worse for your heart than the junk food they’re designed to replace.
- “Climate models, catastrophe scenarios and the imaginary climate crisis” – There is no compelling scientific evidence of a human-caused climate crisis or emergency, says Aivar Usk on the Freedom Research Substack.
- “BBC presenter says calling animals by their English names is ‘jarring’” – Springwatch presenter Gillian Burke says she prefers to refer to animals by their traditional Swahili names rather than those commonly used in the BBC’s nature programmes, reports the Mail.
- “Psychotherapy body rows with trans activists over conversion therapy memo” – The U.K. Council for Psychotherapy has raised doubts about banning ‘trans conversion therapy’, according to the Telegraph.
- “Breastfeeding charity bullying claims over call to let in trans women” – Britain’s oldest breastfeeding charity has called in regulators amid claims of “harassment and bullying” over a policy to include trans women in meetings, reports the Mail.
- “Gender identity and the Christian vision of humanity” – In his Psephizo blog, Ian Paul delves into a recent document by Catholic bishops addressing gender identity, highlighting its biblical grounding and contrasting its clarity with the stance of the Church of England.
- “Do many women want to be train drivers?” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray reacts to news from the BBC that train drivers in the U.K. are – shock horror – “overwhelmingly middle-aged white men”.
- “Australia’s misinformation bill was seeded by the global censorship vanguard” – The Australian Government is seeking to exploit two recent knife attacks to relaunch its misinformation bill after it was put on ice late last year over free speech concerns, says Andrew Lowenthal on Substack.
- “Why Trumpists think the real conspiracy is RFK Jr.” – The more Trump and Biden criticise RFK, the more they risk elevating his credentials, writes Freddie Gray in the Spectator.
- “Gen Z is like a South Park episode unfolding right in front of our eyes” – In 2020, Gen Z kneeled in front of black people to prove that they’re “not racist”. In 2024, they’re kneeling to Allah to show that they’re “against genocide”.
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