I would start a petition, but someone got there first. Direct debits and standing orders need to be outlawed because they allow the Government to empty our bank accounts. And then there are the televisions. I have heard that the BBC restricts their size because if they were a bit bigger the edges of the image would reveal the studio and camera crew.
These are ridiculous examples, of course. But in my view they are scarcely more ridiculous than the scare stories being put out about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which will supposedly allow the Government to control all our money and monitor what we spend it on. As Laura Dodsworth recently wrote in the Daily Sceptic:
Digital money and particularly Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) offer the potential for the Government, through the central bank, to see every purchase and transfer you make, in real time. And not just see, but control.
I understand Laura’s concern, and if she was right about this then I too would be warning of the dangers of CBDCs. But the truth is that CBDCs are not the threat to liberty that Laura and others think they are. In fact, CBDCs’ critics get things upside down: CBDCs will, I believe, protect us against the overreach of private companies like PayPal, not make things worse.
To see why this is the case, it helps to know that most of the money in circulation these days, 80% in fact, does not come from or ever go anywhere near the central bank. It is what economists call private money. Of the remaining 20%, 17% are reserves held by commercial banks, moving back and forth between them and the Bank of England, so not used by us, the public. That means that only 3% of the circulating money in daily use by you and me has anything to do with the central bank. Your mortgage, loans, direct debits and standing orders, deposits, credit card balances are all private money, none of it controllable by central banks. Not now and not in future, with or without CBDCs.
If we want to know what really happens when a CBDC is introduced, we don’t have to speculate because it has already happened in the Bahamas where the so-called Sand Dollar was introduced in 2019. It hasn’t been the roaring success its central banker John Rolle had hoped for. Last year he said it was “still in the very early stages” two years after launch. Take-up was “modest”, with Bahamians only using it infrequently and for low value transactions. Getting merchants to accept it as payment is one challenge, getting it to move around inside the traditional banking and payment systems is another. Only one of six retail banks and one of five credit unions is even in the pilot. As of May 2022, a mere £263,000 of Sand Dollar was in circulation. Even the Government has had to be cajoled into using it with acceptance of payments for public-facing services still in the future. John Rolle can hardly be accused of exercising enormous power over Bahamian’s money.
The difficulty of getting CBDCs into use is not all that central bankers have to worry about. The IMF no less is concerned that “the biggest and immediate risk that CBDCs pose to monetary policy is deposit disintermediation”, which is jargon for a run on the banks if they became too popular. CBDCs don’t require a bank account, you see. Not surprising then that there has not been a rush of countries following the Bahamas.
But what about Sweden’s Do Black credit card that Laura highlights, launched in 2019 by Doconomy and which limits spending based on CO2 emissions? Not a popular product with Daily Sceptic readers I dare say. I admit this caught my attention because in my previous article I had said this kind of thing would not be possible, yet here it was. When electronic payments are made the payment systems do not know what is being paid for. So how can they make a judgement based on CO2 emissions of what you have bought? What the payment system does know is the merchant and, if the payment is being handled by Mastercard or Visa, the category it assigns to the merchant. If some eco-zealots then went to the bother of assigning merchants some kind of eco-virtue score, or in the majority of cases where they hadn’t got around to scoring a merchant then scoring the general category of the merchant instead, then you could attempt to make some kind of eco-assessment based not on what you bought but where you shopped. The people who have gone to that bother are S&P Global with its Trucost system, partnering with Doconomy via its Aland Index. While all the talk from the card provider to its eco-warrior customers was about “CO2 emissions caused by their consumption”, the reality was a strange rate-my-shop system which may or may not correlate with what your actual consumption was. When it comes to virtue signalling, validity and accuracy are not important, who knew? Despite Doconomy’s claims to have saved the world, the Swedish public were less enthusiastic and the card was withdrawn in 2022.
The point is not that schemes like this are launched on a burst of virtue-signalling enthusiasm which then falls flat, but that they are more likely to happen at all in the realm of private money. Further evidence is provided by our very own Toby Young and the FSU being debanked by PayPal and the Nigel Farage NatWest/Coutts scandal. Yes, CBDCs are problematic, as the IMF notes, though not for the reasons Laura gives, and private money is arguably more so and only getting worse.
This has not escaped the central bankers, and it is why we all need public money, just not necessarily in the form of cash. If you are still not convinced, then consider the plight of more than one million people in the U.K. who are completely unbanked. That means they rely entirely on public money – cash – and desperately need for it to remain relevant. In short, they need merchants to accept it. If the only form of public money is anachronistic, expensive to handle and vastly less convenient than its private money alternatives, it is increasingly at risk of becoming irrelevant, shunned and ultimately declined. Think: paying with a cheque at the supermarket checkout. Keeping cash alive with legislation does not address the root problem. As private sector innovation streaks ahead, cash becomes more and more archaic. It will be seen as a kind of Government food stamp, only held by the poor and marginalised and only exchangeable for a miserable basket of essentials at Government approved centres. The threat of being debanked will become even scarier, handing yet more power to the PayPals, Coutts and NatWests. The option of not using a bank or having something useful to withdraw if your bank is about to fail, or simply not wanting an intermediary between you and your counterparty, is always going to be needed. Public money, in the form of well-designed CBDCs will be the answer in the future, just as cash was in the past. Public money must keep up, for all our sakes.
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Its summer, no one is dying from this glorified flu.
Time to open up fully, time to get seek these oft quoted “experts” and “politicians” who have been driving this lie /hoax. Time to get them out in the open and to get answers and justice.
Time to exposed their vested interests and their conflicts of interest.
Time to bump a few off
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/06/01/vaccinate-the-whole-world-by-2022-says-boris-johnson/
I love the references to ‘the data’
None of this Ship of Fools can read a simple line graph or bar chart, do simple counting or assess proportionality and understand correlation and causation – let alone the difference between RRR ans ARR.
The idiots taking over the asylum, indeed.
Well, either they can’t do those things or they know very well what they are doing but they are following a more sinister agenda. I initially thought it was panic followed by arse-covering with love of power added, but it’s got the point where my credibility is being stretched thin. They have either gone barking mad and believe their own lunatic lies or they really do not want this to end, ever.
It’s still arse covering. Whether that part of their anatomy risks exposure because of incompetence or conspiracy is a separate issue. They’ve now dug themselves in so deeply there simply isn’t a way out for them that offers a political (and possibly personal) escape. Inevitably though a crack will appear (pun intended). One of the cabal, probably a scientist as they tend to be weak people, will try to save him/herself by turning on the others. As we saw with Cummings the pack will then turn upon itself, as vermin do.
“there simply isn’t a way out for them that offers a political (and possibly personal) escape” Not sure I agree. The vaccines. They bet everything on vaccines, they produced them, injected people with them, covid is disappearing, just declare victory.
I didn’t say it would be a quick end. The vaccine euphoria is beginning to turn sour. There is no more good news to be had. It will most certainly be a ‘Winter of discontent’. When ADE sweeps away thousands the truth will out. I confess that many of those whose imminent loss I would have felt more keenly have already distanced themselves from my beliefs and company so the grief will be somewhat muted.
I’ve no real idea about ADE, but leaving that aside I don’t agree there is no more good news to be had – covid is disappearing. It might well come back in the winter, but they can gradually dial down the tests. Also not sure why you say the vaccine euphoria is beginning to turn sour – if it is, it’s only because restrictions are not being lifted. Any time they want the govt can push the narrative in a different direction. Why don’t they?
Every day the bad news about the vaccines grows. Admittedly more on the other side of the Atlantic than here, but the waves will land on these shores. The Indian case for Ivermectin should cause tremors as it will invalidate the EUAs. I agree they can (as they have) play fast and loose with both Ct numbers and testing volume, but you can’t ‘dial down’ deaths and hospitalisation, which will soar in the winter. They’ve already denied seasonality so that escape route is shut.
Lastly as we have seen even Fleet Street is starting to wake up. The DT and DM are more and more assertive now.
No one I know outside of a tiny number of sceptics has any idea about vaccine dangers, or if they do it’s a risk worth taking to combat the deadly COVID
I don’t think it’s going to explode
They have got away with it
So far. There is much of this story to come.
Let’s pray that’s the case – but a darn risky strategy for a non-too deadly virus esp. if you’re healthy and under 60.
I fear that the propaganda machine is now so competent and people so uneducated that they will easily shift the blame for these deaths and hospitalisations on the unvaccinated. Prepare to be demonised and hunted down.
It’s already started! Good Morning Britain yesterday, telling us to “unfriend the unvaccinated”
They don’t want to. They could end it tomorrow by saying no-one is dying, the NHS can cope, the vaccines have done they’re job and everyone is safe. Most of the sheeple would eat this up with a spoon, just as they have swallowed everything else.
The truth is that the global forces behind the covid fraud, for that is what it is, do not intend to stop now that they have their new world order in sight. National governments receive they’re instructions from these people, and obey either because they believe in the project, or have been compromised in some way (think Johnson and incriminating photos), have been threatened with physical harm or financial ruin, or have been bribed.
The world is in a very dark place and I fear that without massive civil disobedience we will find ourselves in a dystopian nightmare beyond our present imagination.
‘their’, not ‘they’re’.
A pedant.
I am afraid that this is the real truth, nothing is going to stop it but civil disobedience.
“Covid is disappearing”. Covid disappeared a year ago. Positive test results are disappearing for whatever reason our overlords have decided. By reducing the number of cycles used they can convince us that the vaccines are working.
Another hidden truth.
I have to say that I agree with your last sentence but with regard to ADE they will simply manufacture a new variant to cover it.
We can but hope.
Praying would be more useful.
I’ve thought they were Barking mad since that town had less restrictions than places in the north of England with fewer positive test results last year.
If you’re going to use abbreviations please define them when you use them for the first time. The same abbreviations can mean different things to different people, even in the same profession.
I think RickH means Relative and Absolute Risk Reduction.
You’re right. It’s also true that there’s no shortage of manipulation, or redefinition, being done at present, even naming certain products along those lines.
Every time I listen to talkRadio for some news, another cockroach “expert” “scientist”, “doctor” or “professor”, the latest being a specimen called Gupta, has crawled out of the woodwork, with more doomy “I love lockdown” themed stuff. It being about the time the BEF and the rest were rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, and Johnson fancying himself as the personification of a latter-day Churchill, it behoves him to pull his finger out, tell this gallimaufry of posers, halfwits, self-interested fools and charlatans to get stuffed, and do what he said he would. That’s if he has the guts for it, of course.
We already know the government has extended furlough until September, awarded millions of pounds for Covid advertising, vaccine passports and Covid wardens until next year, so is it likely they are going to end the nonsense next month?
Perhaps – but for a short breathing space only: all the better to crush the sheeple’s will when things are ramped up again.
when they are, we will know we have been misled about “vaccines” being the way out of this. Large scale protests must continue through any further lockdowns.
Reward narcissistic and psychopathic politicians for needlessly torturing you and, guess what, they continue to torture you for as long as they can get away with it.
Where I live in the Highlands we are now in level 1, but that still means mask wearing (not that I’ve ever worn one) and pointless social distancing measures (as an example traffic flow around Inverness city centre has been altered to make pavements wider so people can stay further apart and motorists can spend longer sat in traffic pumping out harmful fumes). As far as I can tell there is no level zero so it seems entirely possible that these measures will remain in place for ever, where as at least there’s a possibly that rules about mask wearing in England will be relaxed on the 21st.
Me too! On the West Coast. My Mum said last year that level 0 was only when there was no more virus, which of course, is impossible, so level 1 is as far as we can go!
As I’ve said from the start, the only way this ends, is with us ignoring it & not complying.
Umm yes. Not until a couple days before the 21st though. Cue the double injected hiding under the table again.
for fucks sake boris you pointless dickhead – give Ron De Santis a ring – he’s a real leader!
It was mentioned to me a while ago that perhaps Boris had been “spoken to”.
I love “we must err on the side of caution”. There’s no caution on wrecking the economy. No caution in giving the jabs to age brackets and illnesses not included in the trials. No caution in giving them to pregnant women and their foetuses. No caution over giving them to children so spike proteins can cluster in little girls’ ovaries, No caution over the effects of masks on schoolchildren, or isolation on the anxious and depressed.
No, there is only caution about giving us freedom which is rightfully ours.
Yes, the idea that restrictions are cautious is both moronic and absurd.
So sad to see the Tobyists tying themselves in knots trying to understand what’s going on.
This government is committed to introduction of Digital Compliance ID (aka “vaccine passports”, a misleading title). To get there it needs the sense of crisis to be maintained. Hence. it will not drop the mask mandate. Hence it will not stop the test and trace nonsense. Also, it needs to get a really big majority of the population vaccinated, and across all ethnic groups. Lastly it needs to get children vaccinated as that makes it easier for the Digital Compliance ID system to operate across families.
Why it is intent on all this is as yet unexplained. It cannot be incompetence as the government has pursued Digital Compliance ID with total focus, even though the PM declared on 11 separate occasions his total opposition to any ID system in the UK.
We have of course seen Cummings’ confession at how Bill Gates is strongly influencing Government policy. That may be part of the answer. CCP corruption. bribery and blackmail may be another part. The CCP no doubt sees it as a key foreign policy goal to make former democracies like the UK more and more like China, which will greatly ease China’s progress to global domination .Big Pharma insatiable thirst for more and more vaccination is no doubt part of the story.
You sound like a “Tobyist” yourself, or someone equally as obtuse and desperate to find reasons not to talk about what is really going on. I mean, shut up about “the CCP” for a start. You sound like one of the “it wuz a bio-weapon from the Wuhan lab / “gain of function” magic helped it achieve the devastating power to bump up mortality rates in the over-85s by half a percentage point” retards. The CCP didn’t play any more decisive part in this than the British Conservative or the Italian Democrat Party. They had their role in the whole scam, of course: staging the kabuki theatre in Wuhan around Christmas 2019, for example and I suppose they were promised their reward for it, which might indeed be making Western countries more “Chinese”. But China has no more chance, nor any more real intention, of “dominating” Europe or the US than the Seattle branch of Starbucks has a chance of “dominating” the Portland branch of Starbucks. Xi Jinping, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, Donald Trump – they’re all taking their orders from one source and those orders don’t involve any of them “dominating” the other.
Preceisly, the USUK regime changers are using this to try to pin responsibility on CHina for their pre-planned destruction of the western economy. The US even found Iran to be responsible for 911 – with high probability.
The Chinese released their medical protocols early 2020. They stated that they recommended 2 PCR tests at 14 day interval plus a chest x-ray to confirm diagnosis of symptomatic hospitalised individuals. In spite of that, USUK went for a single PCR test of asymptomatic individuals with guaranteed high probability of false positive outcome – all favouring the west’s fear porn. China deals quite regularly with really serious diseases such a pneumonic plague, so the were correct in saying they have seen worse and the worst thing to do was to over-react.
Anyone trying to pin responsibility for the west’s response onto the Chinese is complicit in attempting to coverup for the likes of Fauci, SAGE, NERVTAG and other bought-and-paid-for manipulators (western MSM especially).
It isn’t the Chinese that are trying to strip our rights, it is the western ‘leaders’ – presumably in anticipation of the collapse of the pack of cards that is the western economy.
“CCP corruption. bribery and blackmail may be another part. The CCP no doubt sees it as a key foreign policy goal to make former democracies like the UK more and more like China, which will greatly ease China’s progress to global domination .”
Awww, our poor innocent politicians have been corrupted by the evil Chinese.
Hilarious. Western politicians have been bought off for a long time. The Tory Bliar era was a breaking point, with the Iraq WMD bs that resulted in the excess death of 500,000+ Iraqi civilians. Look for book deals, highly remunerated speaking events, pointless but well-remunerated sinecures, and so on. All perfect ways of rewarding the bought-and-paid-for.
Its like the bleedin’ hokey cokey
You have to stay in
Your not allowed out
In, out, in, out, you change it all about.
You do the hokey covid
Then you turn it all around
That’s what it’s all about
Oh, the covid hokey cokey
Whoa, the covid hokey cokey
Whoa, the covid hokey cokey
Face masked, hands cleaned – jab, jab, jab
You don’t have to stay in
Your are now allowed out
In, out, in, out, you change it all about.
You do the hokey covid
Then you turn it all around
That’s what it’s all about
Oh, the covid hokey cokey
Whoa, the covid hokey cokey
Whoa, the covid hokey cokey
Socially distanced – vax, vax, vax
Love it
People’s jobs, livelihoods and SANITY depend on getting rid of lockdown once and for all, and consigning its perpetrators to the lowest pit of hell.
Of course Nicola Ceausescu is keeping Scotland in Lockdown, she’s Mary Whitehouse in a kilt and not any more literate.
Scotland will be in permanent lockdown, thanks to her.
As for ‘err on the side of caution ‘, that makes as much sense as a slow, cautious, incremental reduction in the number of punches from Frank Bruno you take.
‘Nicola Ceausescu‘. That made me smile.
We call her The Scottish Haggis where I live.
I call her Nicola Ceausescu because she is a communist dictator that interferes with the football.
How on earth can you compare Nic Sturg Un to Mary Whitehouse? Nic is an evil egomaniac glorying in her power and prepared to destroy Scotland (and the UK) to achieve her goals. Mrs Whitehouse was simply a viewer concerned at the amount of “smut” she felt was being broadcast. Since her campaign failed, has television improved in quality?
Rubbish. Mary Whitehouse was a totalitarian who believed she alone had the right to censor everyone because everyone else but her was an infant.
She claimed people would be blowing up schools because of Alice Cooper.
Mary Whitehouse, just like Nicola Ceausescu, was driven to rage by the thought of someone, somewhere enjoying themselves.
Today’s woke cancel culture is the descendant of Mary Whitehouse.
SINISTER
As long as the weather stays good the lockdown is a myth, busy towns and beaches today, it was all ‘what covid’?
The lake across the road from me ( ostensibly for Irrigation) had loads of lovely happy young people there last evening, it made me happy to see them.Parties in the sun. Do not comply.
A well-argued paper by Jamie Franklin, of Irreverend, questioning the ethics of the vaccine roll-out:
https://jamiefranklin.wordpress.com/2021/05/31/ethical-considerations-concerning-covid-19-vaccinations/
At the end he calls on church leaders to voice some concern about the current situation. Some hopes.
“Delta variant” – am I supposed to feel less stigmatised with the “British” variant now reclassified the ” Alpha” variant? (I seem to remember Obama insisting on referring to British Petrolium after an oil spill in the Caribbean when he knew jolly well it was now called Beyond Petrolium).
All this is pressure to get people to take their shots.
Disappointed but not surprised by the announcement of further government control of our lives, but even more depressed by the responses of intelligent people that it was ‘for the best’. As long as the lies of asymptomatic transfer, tests equalling cases, children being carriers, variants being a new threat and everyone-should-be-vaccinated continue to be pumped out there no chance of anything else other than blind love of restrictions.
I hesitate to mention it in case Nicola and Boris think we should follow China again, but my daughter tells me that in her school in China whole classes are being quarantined because one child has chicken pox! Let’s go not just for zero covid, but zero infectious disease!
I have given up trying to have intelligent conversations since the first thing people seem to ask is whether you have had both of your “vaccines”. I regret having answered truthfully once or twice which immediately results in a lecture by someone who thinks they are superior and entitled to direct my thought processes. It’s a long,hard,lonely road but I am directed by my instincts.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/06/01/vaccinate-the-whole-world-by-2022-says-boris-johnson/
Oh the utter rat! How revealing! I have never been quite sure about Boris’ role – whether he was going along with the main agenda or just a dumb-arse, influenced to a ridiculous degree by the sinister SAGE team and possibly compromised somehow. But of course, he knows exactly what he is doing.
And spouting out that naff comment ‘nobody is safe until everybody is safe’ as if it is a purely benevolent thing to do to promote unsafe jabs on everyone.
The rumours have already started. SAGE warning that ‘freedom day’ of 21 June should be delayed because of the infectiousness of the Indian variant despite continuing falling deaths, hospitalisations and NHS still not ‘overwhelmed. They are running out of believable scare stories to keep the restrictions in place.
Mark my words. During the next 2 weeks, look out for an announcement of an unexpected shortage of vaccines accompanied by a reluctant delay to ‘freedom day’ due to ‘risk’ from 25% of the population still not jabbed.
This is the “we need lockdowns (restrictions, call it what you will) to avoid future lockdowns.”
If it takes forever to avoid them in future then so be it…
This is actually a really good opportunity to call Sturgeon’s bluff. She is playing the same game as she always does: grandstanding and looking tough. I believe more Scots, especially in her core supporting area of Glasgow, are getting fed up with it. Open England and you will see no real difference between restricted Scotland and English numbers. Then she will have some explaining to do – and the bankrupt tourist businesses of Scotland will not be happy.
I thought that, too, but Bozo won’t have the courage. He’ll cave like he’s always done.
Yes, he is an exceptionally spineless worm
It’s never stopping until we the people say it does. There is a worldwide agenda playing out and CONVID is just one of the tools they are using to facilitate the agenda. We are currently at the “Occasional Indulgences” stage on Bidermans Chart of Coercion.
How curious. I just reloaded this page and the image below appeared. I’ve never seen ads before here and now there is one pimping lockdown-enabling testing of asymptomatic individuals
Interestingly, the company caame into being in May 2020, and was active from July 2020, just in time for the roll out of mass testing of asymptomatic individuals.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12609779
an extra £200 or so for testing per person per holiday makes holidays unaffordable for the poorest.. which is the whole point…
Build Back Greta
As for the advert.. it offers a discount for lockdown sceptics.. pretty poor taste.
sheeple: this will end soon.. this will end soon.. freedom and safety soon.. normality soon..
sceptic: this will end soon surely.. someone will stop this.. this will surely end soon..
No. We will not come out of lockdown in June. Even if we do in July or August it will be temporary until the alpha and omega variant ‘hits’.
By November we will be back in full Stanley Carrie Klaus Davos Gates climate change hunger games lockdown. I wish I was green and pure like them.
Where will the next ‘variant’ emerge from? Mars or Pluto I suspect.
These are just made-up names by dictatorial government ministers and their scientific acolytes who, no doubt, enjoy their five minutes of ‘fame’ and are making vast financial gains from all of this nonsense.