- “Inside the £1 billion AstraZeneca compensation battle” – How British families left bereaved or disabled after getting AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine are fighting for compensation to avoid financial ruin, according to MailOnline.
- “Exposed: ‘cruel’ flaws of Government-funded financial support scheme for Brits injured by AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine” – Don’t even bother trying to claim the one-off payment of £120,000 if you’re only “59% disabled”, according to MailOnline.
- “Masks and marriage: match-making in a faceless Japan” – Tokyo University researchers estimated that 166,000 fewer marriages occurred between 2020 and 2022 “due to Covid”, says Guy Gin.
- “Covid: the destruction of medical ethics and trust in the medical profession” – In TCW, Dr. Ahmad K. Malik, a consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, presents the second part of his discussion of the damage done by the Government’s irrational Covid policies, this time focusing on the betrayal of informed consent.
- “‘It’s frustrating to look back’: nurse fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccine reflects as U.S. national emergency ends” – Biden marked an end to the Covid emergency this week, reports Fox News.
- “The four pillars of medical ethics were destroyed in the Covid response” – The four fundamental concepts of medical ethics are autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice, writes Dr. Clayton J. Baker in Brownstone.
- “In Somerset, noisy new Net Zero pylons are marching across the countryside – and the locals are not happy” – These are a new brand of electricity pylon – the first departure from the familiar design in close to a century. But discontent is growing, reports the Telegraph.
- “Commuter towns will ‘become car parks’ under ULEZ expansion plans, Mayor warned” – Tory MP Louise French said Home Counties residents will park outside of the M25 and travel into London by train to avoid the charge, reports the Telegraph.
- “Man arrested on suspicion of ULEZ camera damage as police crack down on vandals” – The 42 year-old was charged with criminal damage as Met Police reveal it has received 96 allegations of damage to cameras, according to the Telegraph.
- “National Grid’s John Pettigrew: network needs billions to hit Net Zero” – Pettigrew warned that it would cost “tens of billions of pounds” to rewire the grid and admitted that it would mean money would be added to household bills, reports the Times.
- “Just Stop Oil protesters team up with pro-Palestine demo in central London as they claim ‘Palestinians are among most vulnerable to effects of climate collapse’” – The eco-activists gathered in Parliament Square before moving on to Whitehall, as the Met Police said they were “engaging” with the procession, according to MailOnline.
- “Billy Bremner must fall? Statues given a costly slave audit” – Councils spent more than than £100,000 to conclude that many memorials had few or no links to slavery, according to the Times.
- “Cleopatra, black? Excuse my Greek but you’re talking out of your asp” – For those who don’t know, the fact that a black woman, Adele James, is playing Cleopatra has annoyed everyone from scholars of Egyptian antiquity to modern-day Greeks and Egyptians, says Tomiwa Owolade in the Times.
- “The row over the ‘terribly white’ Royal balcony exposes the hypocrisy of the woke Left” – The double standards are blatantly obvious – except, of course, to them, says Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
- “Critical race theory has a scholarship problem” – For many critical theorists, the true dividing line isn’t privileged people versus the oppressed; it’s people who agree with them versus those whose motives cannot be trusted, says Julian Adorney in Quillette.
- “British universities are beyond redemption” – There is a strong argument that a good number of our universities should be gently allowed to die, says Andrew Tettenborn, a Professor at Swansea Law School, in the Spectator.
- “Biden blasted for calling ‘white supremacy’ ‘most dangerous terrorist threat’ at college speech” – Critics accused Biden of using the opportunity to inflame racial tension in the United States, reports Fox News.
- “Starbucks employee sacked for ranting at woman she accused of ‘transphobia’ is an outspoken trans activist whose neighbours are terrified of ‘offending by mistakenly saying the wrong thing’” – Until today the identity of the coffee shop worker filmed berating a woman and throwing her out of a branch of the chain in Southampton in footage that went viral has remained secret, reports MailOnline.
- “The United Nations is wrong about Britain’s treatment of trans people” – A wise government would simply dismiss the UN expert’s statement as the opinion of someone who spent his time listening only to those who reinforced his worldview, writes Debbie Hayton in the Spectator.
- “Outrage over WHO advice on sexuality for infants” – Guide argues that “sexuality education starts from birth”, according to the Telegraph.
- “Stonewall co-founder: I spoke at Cambridge, students tried to cancel me” – In the Times, Simon Fanshawe says parents and education leaders must stop indulging student intolerance.
- “Texas House votes to advance law banning child sex change – one Democrat breaks ranks to vote with GOP” – Texas moved one step closer to banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries in minors, according to the Post Millennial.
- “We chose freedom over ‘Faucism’” – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cautions against allowing the history of lockdowns and medical mandates to be rewritten.
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Just to do a ‘Captain Obvious’ here and point out that education, before we even include the disastrous mess that is higher ed, has changed dramatically since the decades mention above. So it seems a no-brainer to me that “education has zero causal effect on fertility” and it’s more to do with the woke ideological crapola kids are being brainwashed with these days. Kids should be attending school to get educated, not indoctrinated.
I would say that western civilisations have much more choice about having children or having a career than most poorer countries, this can be put down to a better education.
Not so much choice in places like Niger so they just do what is nessasary
They will probably never have a career to pay for a pension so children are their insurance policy for old age, the more the merrier as upto 50% of their children may not make it to adulthood.
I certainly agree with your ideological element though, just look at that self important little git Rachel Zegler!
Yes and you raise a good point which is the difference in *motivation* between cultures for having children. Women in some poor country in Africa won’t have any of the opportunities or resources of their counterparts in rich Western countries, therefore their motivation will be based more on necessity, as you say, plus cultural norms/pressure and gender stereotypes will be way more rigid. Over here, women can afford to wait and have kids later in life, have fewer kids or none at all, because they’re no longer deemed an “insurance policy”, unlike generations ago.
Let’s be honest, many in the so-called ‘rich West’ literally can’t ‘afford’ kids anyway because they’re unable to even get on the property ladder, which is the norm before putting down roots and starting a family. And people don’t typically live in multi-generational households, which is normal in other cultures, so childcare is presumably a non-issue compared with here.
Increased wealth.
More live births, lower infant/child mortality, children no longer required as a labour source for the family economy requires reduced birth rates to maintain the “stock”.
Plus sending children to school instead of to work = a cost, not a contributor to parental fortunes.
Parents work fewer hours, have more leisure time and disposable income which they prefer to spend on that rather than children.
Maybe has something to do with it?
Maybe material prosperity has led us to overthink things
I don’t think education is a primary cause of low fertility, though it may be a secondary cause. I think a primary cause of low fertility is little or no religious faith due to increasing wealth. Look at the chart of where high birth rates are found. This cause and effect are summed up by the bible phrase “you can’t worship God and mannon (money)”.
I don’t think it is education per se that makes a person rich. There are many examples that everyone knows of people who left school with few or no exams thar have become rich through hard work.
Increasing wealth includes many factors that would tend to increase birth rates such as improved nutrition and healthcare but the low birth rates in rich countries run counter to this.
Decreasing wealth does seem to encourage higher birth rates. My father’s parents in the 1930s had around 10 children but 3 or 4 died in childhood of diseases that are easily cured today. They were poor but had many children perhaps because unconsciously they knew some would die.
I agree with your point but it’s mammon not ‘mannon’.
Once upon a time, I grew up in an avenue of newly-built 1950’s semis, where at one time up to 30 of us played out in the street, offspring of married couples born before the Second World War.
Then along came “-isms,” “-ists” and “-ism-ist ism-isms,” and the old order changed – for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, but nowadays up to half the time certainly not until death us do part.
The increased cost of housing is also a practical deterrent. Meanwhile on another forum…
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/immigration-is-not-the-answer-to
“…What’s the solution to Britain’s fertility crisis? There are, broadly, three schools of thought:
One is that you can, through carefully structured incentives and social changes, encourage birth rates to rise to replacement levels.
Another is that the ageing population is, given the potential for automation, robotics and AI, actually not *that* much of an issue.
The final school of thought is that nothing can be done about the Western fertility crisis, and that the only solution is to supplement the working age-population with immigration. This, sadly, is the school which currently governs Great Britain.”
Take your pick – bad luck, the Party has already chosen for you.
No, but abortion does.
See this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?facet=entity&uniformYAxis=0&country=~GBR
1950 total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.22
1961 introduction of birth control pills on the NHS, TFR 2.79
1964 late post-war baby boom peak of TFR of 2.93
1967 Abortion Act, TFR 2.68
1974 introduction of birth control clinics, TFR 1.92
1977 a TFR low of 1.69
2001 a TFR low of 1.61
2010 TFR recovered to 1.92
2020 TFR dropped to 1.57 and leveling off through to 2023.
TFR seems to have stopped falling recently – perhaps it will rise again.
If fertility is reducing and climate change adaptation becomes the preferred policy then fewer people will make the social adjustments easier. We might need robot careers for the old, but even that issue will eventually reduce.
Picking one variable which happens to correlate with another from a whole variety of others which interact, is certain to lead to the wrong conclusion except by chance. See: Climageddon (Arctic disappearing, London, New York, submerged, annual droughts and scorching Summers, etc) perpetually being delayed; predicted 1970s world over-population by year 2 000.