There follows a guest post by Dr Niall McCrae contrasting yesterday’s ‘Kill the Bill’ demonstration with the anti-lockdown march of a week earlier.
A week is a long time in the politics of rallies. Yesterday a Kill the Bill march in London drew five thousand mostly young protestors against the proposed strengthening of police powers over protestors. A good cause was distorted by the divisive identity politics on display: Black Lives Matter banners, transgender flags and radical Marxist placards supplied by the Socialist Workers Party. On the preceding Saturday (April 24th) a gathering twenty or thirty times bigger marched from Hyde Park to Holborn Viaduct and back in a joyful expression of unity by ordinary people of every class and creed.
Whereas the Unite for Freedom rally was initially ignored by the BBC and other mainstream media, the Kill the Bill demo was widely reported. Furthermore, coverage of the latter was sympathetic, as most keenly expressed in the Guardian. The most we heard from the BBC on the anti-lockdown protest was by Marianna Spring, who tweeted disparaging remarks about conspiracy theorists with a ludicrous underestimate of the crowd.
The reporting blackout ended later, after videos emerged of the police involved in a fracas with a handful of protestors near Speakers Corner. A group of marchers were basking in the last rays of a glorious sunny day, listening to an impromptu gig. They were doing no harm, but a squad of police officers steamed in, presumably to confiscate the audio equipment and arrest the band. The revellers linked arms and the police retreated in a hail of derision and missiles. “Ten arrests at anti-lockdown protest” reported the Sunday Times.
The Kill the Bill protest produced considerably worse behaviour. For long stretches “ACAB” – all cops are bastards – was chanted, and other aggressive phrasing imported from BLM/Antifa riots in the USA. Although the protest was against police powers, the marchers want freedom of expression “for me but not for thee”. These are the puritanical offspring of our education system, who think that any contrary opinion is “hate speech”. Quite a contrast with the all-embracing ethos of a week earlier.
Most of the Kill the Bill marchers were masked, although there is no requirement to do so outdoors. As the Kill the Bill walkers began to wander off, the lonely figure of Piers Corbyn tried to bridge the yawning gap between anti-lockdown and anti-police protestors. Old Piers has been working behind the scenes to bring left-wing activists into the campaign against the Covid regime, collaborating with BLM leader Sasha Johnson in his Let London Live Party in the London Assembly election. However, to the Kill the Bill crowd he seemed a cantankerous old man, who had come to the wrong show. Few stayed to listen, and those who did frowned and looked at him condescendingly. In exasperation Corbyn berated people for wearing masks: “wake up, they’re f***ing playing you!” But the Kill the Bill protestors are happy to be muzzled. And they get a good press, unlike lockdown sceptics.
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Just think, a cheap, reliable and plentiful supply of gas from a near neighbour or a much dearer supply from across the sea.
It’s a good job Uncle Sam never thought to blow up that Nord stream 2 thingy or Europe would be in real trouble.
And think as well of the huge amounts of oil and gas in UK waters around us. Think if the massive amounts of gas available from land based wells in the form of fracked gas – enough they say to power Britain for decades, all on its own.
If we only realised the wealth available the cost of manufacturing UK designed and built small nuclear reactors would be affordable so we could have at least two, uncorrelated sources of reliable electrical energy as well as natural gas for industrial and domestic use.
all this at much lower prices and secure, if only the judges can be kept at bay.
I fear not.
Kill all the lawyers!
(That’s Shakespeare, not an incitement to kill legal professionals)
A judges’ republic is a contradiction in terms!
Meanwhile Britain’s Minister of Energy Insecurity colludes with minority eco-zealots to prevent the majority of the British populace from accessing abundant, affordable hydrocarbon energy beneath Britain’s feet and under Britain’s seas.
All to pander to climate fallacy, folly and wishful thinking. Breezes and sunbeams are no substitute for high-density, high-gradient 24/7/365 energy from hydrocarbons and/or controlled nuclear fission. Windmills and waterwheels went out of fashion three centuries ago for very good reasons, that remain relevant to this day. Verities last a long time.
Energy crime against the humanity of the British people.
“As you can see, the index remained stable from 2015 to 2020, and then quickly recovered after the pandemic.”
Please, Noah, we know better than this. Stop using their language, there was no pandemic!
Otherwise, an excellent article. Thanks.
Another person that should know better is Russell Brand, he is always saying “since the pandemic”……If I catch him in Hay I will remind him, or chuck him out of the window.
The correct term (based on Event 201) would be plandemic of course. Maybe Noah used that and the spell check changed it …..? (Trying to be generous here).
Many options open, all of which would be better than doing what we are doing now:
Normalise relations with Russia
Drill for oil and gas in the UK, on and off shore
Build more nuclear power stations
Start digging for and burning coal again
Remove subsidies for and quotas for electric cars
All of these would IMO reduce gas prices
It’s almost as if our “energy policies” are designed for maximum destruction of the economy combined with maximum transfer of wealth to unproductive activities (windmills)
All because most European countries are vassal states of the US and are unwilling to admit that Russia was totally justified in their actions against Ukraine.
I remember watching EU MEPs voting down a full enquiry on the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline. Bunch of spineless eunuchs. They would call you a conspiracy theorist for blaming the US/NATO, but they don’t want to look into it.
Of course the other thing European authorities could do is lift their moratorium on fracking and produce their own gas from the vast shale resources across Northern Europe.
That way they would have domestic energy abundance, independent of Putin, Trump or Qatar.
They can only go higher and higher because there is nothing to bring them down. It isn’t just the severity of the winters. Last year was a year without a summer and this is likely to continue for decades. You need to think about this if you have any option to move out of north western Europe. Living under a fog canopy makes people sick just read about the Justinian darkness and plague – “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,”