The latest round of BBC green agitprop narrated by Sir David Attenborough hit British licensed TV screens (£159 per year, or a criminal record) last Sunday with the first episode of Wild Isles.
Co-produced by the WWF (also known as the World Wildlife Fund) and the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), it concentrates on nature around Britain. Even before the first programme was broadcast, all the parties involved were preparing the alarmist ground with news that 38 million birds had vanished from British skies in the last 50 years. This number comes from a 2020 RSPB report, but curiously missing was the information that the latest figure was similar to the total in 2012. In fact the RSPB noted that in terms of total breeding bird numbers, “the period of relative stability that began in the 1990s is continuing”.
The stand-out eco-scare in the first episode was the claim that in just the last 20 years, 60% of flying insects have vanished. Attenborough’s guesstimate-rich narrations are lightly sourced at the best of times, but it appears this claim arises from work by “citizen scientists” counting bugs on car number plates in England. The ‘Bugs Matter’ survey has been used to ramp up alarm with the Natural History Museum stoking additional concern with the opinion that 40% of insects in the world could become extinct within the next few decades.
Of course, nature relies on insects of every sort to pollinate plants and recycle natural detritus. In fact, a rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has led to an estimated 14% ‘greening’ of the planet over the last 30 years. Alarmist stories of decline and extinction might be more convincing if pollination was in obvious retreat, and we suddenly found ourselves knee deep in the smelly stuff.
The car license plate story is largely anecdotal. Over the last 50 years, car registrations have tripled in the U.K. There are only so many insects that can be trapped in narrow road corridors, and existing carriageways bear much more traffic than before. It could be argued that roads regularly swept by millions of vehicles provide the least reliable information on countrywide insect abundance. In addition, car shapes have changed from largely angular boxes to aerodynamic wedges, the latter much more likely to deflect insects out of the way than previous models. In congested England, the trap rate is said to be down 65%, while on the less crowded roads in Scotland it falls to 27.9%. Attempts were made to take account of journey times, distances and locations, but the compilers admit the results should be interpreted “with caution”.
Caution of course is not the Attenborough way these days, since the 60% guess was broadcast to its global audience without identifying the source or putting it into context.
This is not the first time Attenborough and the WWF have joined forces to push a narrative intended to promote the command-and-control Net Zero political project. A recent book by one of the world’s foremost authorities on polar bears Dr Susan Crockford, called Fallen Idol: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception, recalled the 2019 WWF/Netflix One Planet collaboration. One episode filmed hundreds of walruses falling off a cliff, a horrific scene that Attenborough attributed to “climate change”. A more obvious explanation was the unmentioned presence of a nearby pack of polar bears.
Introducing his film to the World Economic Forum elites at Davos, Attenborough commented: “If people truly understand what is at stake, I believe they will give permission to businesses and governments to get on with practical solutions”.
For its part, the BBC also makes no secret that it uses Attenborough’s nature programmes to spin a tale of climate Armageddon and destruction of the natural world. Last year, the executive producer of Frozen Planet II Mark Brownlow said, “Environmental storytelling is much more engrained in this series. We get the audience invested in our characters, which we then use to communicate a message.” In the course of the first episode, Attenborough used a computer model to claim the Arctic summer sea ice could all be gone within 12 years, despite recent evidence, displayed below, showing the ice extent stopped declining from around 2010.
According to Crockford, the BBC/Attenborough agenda demands a certain message be told about climate change and the people involved are “not about to let scientific facts get in their way”.
With the WWF on board for his latest programme, Attenborough is all set to continue predictions of huge declines in animal and insect life. This of course is the same WWF that claims vertebrates have declined by 69% since 1970. As we noted recently, this is a bedrock climate and ecological scare repeated endlessly across the mainstream media, and broadcast everywhere from UN platforms to school classrooms. As we also noted, a group of Canadian scientists have pointed out the figure is a statistical freak due to the inclusion of 2.4% of falling wildlife populations. “If these extremely declining populations were excluded, the global trend switches to an increase”, they helpfully explained.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Fiscally, it all appears to be a house of cards. If one element falls, then the rest do too. We have learned nothing from 2008, except for rewarding the guilty and incompetent, and carrying on regardless….
Crispin Odey: ‘It will take a Labour government for the Tories to realise Liz Truss was right all along’
A lot of them are too thick to realise it even then.
Funny how the markets were perfectly happily with “fiscal incontinence” during covid.
Is it not the case that the objective of the globalists for developed economies id ‘de-growth’ and Truss’s budget was pro-growth? It was not ‘fiscal incontinence’ as it would increase the tax take after a short lag.
Anyone worried about ‘fiscal incontinence’ would not have allowed the appointment of Rishi Sunak as PM, but, hey!, any increase in UK indebtedness translates into more leverage for the globalists.
All just a cock-up and a coincidence.
The biggest issue in all of this is the way that the government and the BoE have forced pension funds into holding gilts and changed the tax structure on fund dividends, this ensures that the growth of the funds is nobbled and pension trustees are unable to meet their commitments without some ill-advised chicanery.
It’s become ever more obvious that the number of plates kept spinning by ever fewer plate-spinning organisations will eventually lead to a Greek restaurant tragedy.
I’m no Truss fan but it’s clear that these days even a G7 nation state is not allowed to stray far from the marked path. This is bad and we electors should be aware of where our responsibilities lie.
Pretty much my position verbatim. The Bond/Pension market was getting very stressed in late July/early August 2022 before Truss/Kwarteng were given the keys. BoE/G7 (World-wide corporate tax alignment – as if that is not Globalism writ large) were given a chance take out two problems with one bullet.
Enter Sunak (chosen one since 2015), who was dealt back into the game by Father-in-law (WEF).
I was a member of the Pension Trust committee of the company I worked for, back in 2010. We had come through the financial crisis and pension funds were all showing hefty deficits, though the markets were recovering.
At just that time, the UK Pensions Regulator decided it was exactly the right time to push pension funds into putting most of their money into bonds, on the grounds that their yields more closely matched the demands of pension funds.
Had pension funds already been fully funded, I might well have had some regard for this view (though I would still have favoured equities).
At a time when pension funds had large deficits (ours was only 84% finded) and their only hope for building finances back to being fully funded was through equities, the Pension Regulator was pushing everyone into bonds, and they still haven’t shifted. But how else can governments fund their give-aways?
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Well, there’s no denying Toby’s eternal optimism given that he is falling for cock-up rather than conspiracy. Again.
This story reminds me of the inimitable Mrs Merton and the point in her talk show where she announces – “let’s all have a heated debate.” In other words a cover story has been put out to create yet another diversion. Is something afoot again?
To deny the fact that Liz Truss was deliberately ousted is simply ridiculous and it had nothing to do with the markets, that is complete BS.
Liz Truss, on being selected by the Conservative membership and immediately on taking office as PM acted to bring some economic stability to the country. Possibly her proposals would have helped but what is fundamentally assured is that her measures were completely contrary to the requirements of the WEFfers and the Davos Deviants. She was definitely not with the script and so had to go. Whatever shenanigans took place orders went out firstly to install Chunt – a man despised by his fellow MP’s, and reviled by the party membership – and once he had his feet under the table Truss was indeed to be forced “into a dark room with a glass of whisky and a revolver.”
In a pantomime version of an election all the ‘aspiring’ candidates somehow managed to fall by the wayside until only Fishy and Bozo were left – do me a bloody favour! Bozo of course graciously conceded and the Davos plant, still politically wet behind the ears, was installed. Very much in keeping with all the rest of the lies and deceit now infecting the country like, oh I don’t know – a virus.
There will need to be a much stronger body of evidence to persuade me that Liz Truss wasn’t ousted in the most blatant and grotesque example of a coup that I have ever seen in this country. To suggest she was removed as a result of ‘the markets’ is beyond farcical.
“It’s not always about what they say it’s about.”
We have a completely rigged system. But, the reality that we don’t actually live in a democracy is just too much to accept for most people. It’s too scary, too dissonant with everything that they’ve heard and believed their entire lives, even when the evidence is right there in front of their eyes, staring right at them.
And fear of becoming viewed as a tinfoil hatter can be quite compelling when your ego is wrapped up in being the serious one in the room.
Exactly.
In short, these people who pretend to “run the country” don’t have a clue. They’re all a bunch of smooth talking fakers.
And It’s to be expected. A country is way too complicated a system to be run by anyone. The problem isn’t that no one can do it. It’s that they act as if they can and we let them pretend they can.
What they really do is take credit for things that go well (which they have no impact or hand in ever), try to steer clear of the blame for things that go wrong (which often has nothing to do with them, but their political opposition try to pin on them, and sometimes is their fault because they meddle in things that should be left alone).
It’s all a big sick pantomime that they act out and we play along with.
Indeed, though I was quite happy about having to pay less tax. Would have been even happier if it had come with a corresponding cut in public spending.
I think the real question is: was LT installed in Downing Street (let’s face it, many people were astonished) as a useful idiot, so that the financial mess we are now in can be blamed on her, instead of on one of its extremely obvious causes: Saint Boris’s multiple LOCKDOWNS? We all knew that spending hundreds of billions of public money destroying businesses and forcing millions of healthy people to do nothing was never going to end well financially, but that’s an inconvenient truth that the government wants us to forget about.
“another example of the role that cock-ups and incompetence – as well as impossible-to-predict events “
Oh for goodness sake. You really are the Charlie Brown of incomprehensible optimism.
She was set up in order to get the Davos boy in because he couldn’t get in on the party votes. And the plan has always been to get the Goldman Sax/Digital ID son in law in office to cement Britain’s demise back into the Eurofold and the Globalist plan.
I work in the LDI sector so can hopefully provide some useful additional colour.
Government bonds are the only assets that produce long dated fixed and inflation linked cashflows, that can be used to finance, with certainty, long dated fixed and inflation linked pension benefits (in final salary defined benefit pension funds). Pension funds would therefore prefer just to hold these assets. The Pensions Regulator agrees.
There is only one problem. Many pension funds don’t have enough money to buy all those government bonds that they need. What they then do is buy as many bonds as they can with the money that they have, and then use part of those to securitise lending to invest in higher returning assets such as equities, in the hope that they will help ‘close the gap’ over some time horizon, say ten years, after which they will be able to afford to hold only government bonds and still be able to pay all their pensions.
The problem with borrowing money in this manner is the requirement to securitise (collateralise). Unlike with a mortgage to buy a house, negative equity is not allowed. If the value of you bonds start to fall then you need to raise cash pronto to collateralise the loan. Guess what, many pension schemes most liquid assets is govermnent bonds. By selling those to raise cash the price of the government bonds falls further, increasing the requirement for more collateral, and so on. (This is called a ‘long squeeze’ in finance jargon.) There was only two ways in which this could have ended – annihilation of the goverment bond markets and many pension schemes effectively becoming insolvent, or the Bank of England stepping in.
I tend to agree that the Bank of England acted irresponsibly. The entire government bond market is based on the suspension of disbelief that we actually have the productive capacity to pay the debt back, and the Bank went seriously off script, first by being tardy in stepping in, secondly by telling the entire market that they had two weeks to fire sell sufficient assets to be in a strong enough position to survive without bank support thereafter. I know as I personally sold half a billion of corporate bonds and equities to raise cash within a two week period.
Now, whilst I like tax cuts, what I really want is for the government to remove itself from vast areas of the economy and society. The truly conservative thing to do is not to cut taxes, but to cut spending (and regulation – it’s a spending cut in all but name). If you have tax receipts left over then you can cut taxes, or the government can put it on fire and raise all our real incomes by deflation.
Lastly, I know a senior civil servant (was in no 10 previously) personally, and his two pennies was that Truss pushed her changes through far too quickly, without the usual work of trying to bring people on board. Given her personality, that has a ring of truth to it.
Certainly the root problem is the fantasy that people can retire at 65 and draw a pension for 20 to 30 years and in addition have their health care costs covered.
Unfortunately there isn’t a politician in the world prepared to tell people they need to work until they die, nor a population prepared to hear it.
So reality will just have to come crashing down on everyone when the whole thing eventually collapses.
Gilts aren’t inflation linked Jon? There are index-linked Gilts but whats the nominal value of that market, a fraction of the 2+ trillion Gilt market I suppose. Unless you mean Gilt yields rise with inflation, which is what the textbooks say but isn’t guaranteed. As you now know, seeing as despite 10 year yields having risen >3,000% for 18 months you managed to get caught out by them rising a bit more after the Truss budget, leading you to sell down, precisely the rationale Mr Bailey used for putting his thumb on the scales.
Speaking of which, cable had been declining for 14 years, so the post-budget fat finger to 1.03 in thin Asian trade at 2am lasting 15 minutes probably isn’t that important when it was 1.07 again that morning.
It seems to me the Truss mini budget made for some great trade, mildly and briefly exacerbating years-old trends in markets that moved in lockstep from UK to US to EU, demonstrably having nothing to do with Truss. It was also a convenient window of opportunity to get BOE to juice Gilts and birth the narrative for ejecting a terrible orator who wasn’t en vogue and naively didn’t pay enough lip service to funding some half decent sounding policies. Wheres Soros when you need him. Oh, ok forget Soros.
The wider picture is that for many years our money and finances have become surreal, shadow MMT, too big to fail, for now. The surreal contagion has spread and has arguably lead to many of the other unreal ideas we find ourselves facing today.
One wonders how far would the furlough scheme would have got if the gov couldn’t just print funny money, if they had to raise the money to give away for nothing by issuing Covid bonds. Ditto Ukraine support.
Now they would of provided the kind of yields you would need to balance your impossible liabilities.
I meant both fixed (“conventional”) and inflation linked (“index linked”) gilts when I said “gilts”. The index linked gilt stock is lower than the fixed interest gilt stock, but it is not ‘a fraction’. Less than 50%, higher than 20% – something like that.
Importantly, almost the entire index linked gilt market is owned by pension funds, which makes it more susceptible than the fixed gilt market to herd like market dynamics.
This was principally an index linked gilt market crisis. This is because index linked gilts are on average higher duration than fixed gilts, which makes them more sensitive to yield changes. 1% increase in yields could lead to a 30-40% fall in the value of a long dated bonds. If you are twice leveraged that’s 60-80%.
The long increase in yields in 2022 running up to the crisis is the hidden factor. The entire industry would have seen an increase in leverage during this period, which primed it for the crisis.
I don’t disagree about Bailey, but what did he achieve exactly, that he couldn’t have achieved by giving pension funds 6 months to reduce their leverage rather than 2 weeks? Well, apart from Truss’s downfall.
Sure, managers who were wrong and mismanaged got bailed out, again.
The 18 month long ‘hidden factor’ is a woeful defence, Truss proved a much more robust patsy.
The clown that runs the BoE has history as an incompetent at the FSA/FCA. In the public sector, if you are senior enough, any screw-up is followed by promotion.
Even if the turmoil wasn’t permitted as a reason to get rid of Truss and her Cabinet, the instiotutions bear heavy responsinility for not neutralising any market pressures to enable her to govern. Such is the nature of democracy.
I wil never beloieve Truss was not ejected by THEM as was Boris and Raab may follow soon.
Sunak destroyed the economy in 2020 & 2021. He’s now giving it the coup de grâce in 2022 & 2023. They would have got rid of Truss whatever she did because Sunak was the preferred puppet
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
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How many cock-ups make a conspiracy, a collusion, a working group operation, a premeditated project, a complimentary combination of steering parties, a whatsapp group, or is there no limit?
“There’s none so blind as those who will not see”
Which is why so many have extorted financial incentives and careers predicated on deliberately not seeing.
You’re being far too kind. It was obviously a coup. Raising interest rates less than the fed AND unwinding QE the day before the budget is blatant politicking
The Bank and Treasury have over the last de add been party to the financial fraud of the century – QE. Unwinding it is going to cost 140 billion according to the OBR. All that money borrowed at what we thought was 1% well it’s going to end up costing 5% plus because of the Treasury indemnifying the BofE s losses.
Of course they prefer a witless stooge like Hunt to a pushy Northerner who might ask tough questions
But in this long term honestly I don’t see how Bailey stays out of jail
Morning all , let’s not forget TY is our Man on the inside , if he puts the boot in he will be shunned by those whose shoulders he rubs with . He gets information for us to digest & adds cock up / conspiracy as insurance against getting cancelled which would stifle DS , We are all here due to his stoic perseverance
Fair point about Toby’s position Freddy.
I have as much disdain for the establishment, MSM and quangos as the next person, but mo. She fecked it herself through cack-handed execution and poor stakeholder management.
No.
It was The Treasury, Bank of England, IMF and the Remainer LibCONs working together who did it.
What we need to know is WHO or WHAT ORGANISATION instructed Truss to install Remainer Hunt as Chancellor and WHO or WHAT ORGANISATION installed Sunak as Prime Minister.
It certainly wasn’t the British people.
What we witnessed was a bloodless coup.
“No doubt some will see a conspiracy to bring down Liz Truss in all this. But to my mind, it’s just another example of the role that cock-ups and incompetence – as well as impossible-to-predict events – play in high-level political drama”
So we’re expected to believe that while people like SAGE and Big Pharma, the WHO, etc, misled and bullied politicians and public for their own ends, the Bank of England just made an incompetent cock-up? Whoops!
I said this at the time Bailey and his supporters were against the growth plan that Liz Truss had and they wanted the globalist plan that Hunt and Sunak have saddled us with. How can we compete with places like the Irish Republic for business locations when their corporation tax rate is half of ours. The Hunt plan is anti-growth anti-UK success and will lead us to the worse failure in our country for decades unless we change it NOW. We should have weathered the brief storm from the globalists and stuck with the Liz Truss plan. I don’t how we got the a***holes the nobody voted for and nobody with any sense will. The problem with Liz Truss and her chancellor were they went a bit too fast too soon and didn’t take enough time to sell their plan before they declared it.
One cannot ignore the fact that the WEF has infiltrated and possibly control the Bank of England. The Canadian Mark Carney is a well known WEF high level activist & globalist and is being positioned to follow Trudeau for WEF Prime Minister of Canada. His term as Governor of Bank of England just expired. The Truss removal has all the hallmarks of WEF orchestrated coup. They don’t need armies.
Let’s face it, TPTB don’t give a toss about the ‘people’, never have and never will.
People are incessantly taxed throughout their life, even after death. Monies – taxes – extracted at every opportunity throughout life, culminating in inheritance taxes.
It’s highly likely the ‘pension pot’, particularly state pensions, will disappear before long. Individuals retirement plans will be destroyed after a lifetime, in many cases, of long, hard graft. It’s shameful. Retirement age has been progressively increased, with current plans to increase it further, thereby reducing the amount of non-work, retirement time to be ‘enjoyed’ before death.
In addition, the fraudulent activities of the ‘government’, aided and abetted by corrupt financial institutions and the so called health services, particularly in regards to the plandemic, have resulted in the early demise or ill-health of not insignificant numbers of people who have either prematurely ceased to claim their pension or not survive long enough to claim it.
We are all expendable pawns in their evil, corrupt, incestuous power games.
Instead of raising taxes, lower expenditures.
It was a deliberate hit by the globalists. The blob filleted out every Brexiteer. Sunak and WEF puppet Hunt were part of the coup.