Lord Frost has written a terrific column in today’s Telegraph in defence of drivers – a group so unfashionable it has almost no defenders. He sees in the desire by central planners to phase out the internal combustion engine the same folly that has driven draconian socialist policies down the ages. Here’s how it begins:
One of the pleasures of the vinyl record era was getting the new album by your favourite band on release day and rushing home to listen to it. I did just that on Feb 12 1981 when I bought Moving Pictures by the great Canadian band Rush. My favourite track – still well worth a listen – was Red Barchetta. It describes a world in which, with private cars banned, the narrator has to sneak off every Sunday for an illegal drive in his secretly held eponymous Italian sports car.
Great track, but not plausible, I thought. Who can imagine a world in which private cars are banned? Even in the Soviet Union, if you can get one, they don’t stop you driving it around. No government is going to take people’s cars away from them.
Well, Western governments haven’t quite done that, it is true. But there are advocates for car bans in some large cities, and one day some feeble Red-Green mayor somewhere in Europe will surely give in to it. Meanwhile, our leaders are doing everything short of it.
For a start, the best currently viable technology for cars – the internal combustion engine plus battery – is being withdrawn from the market in just eight years. We are told that by then electric cars will be better and cheaper. It is hard to be confident of that, or that we will have the electricity to power them.
The comedy road trip of Jack Rear (in the Daily Telegraph of July 25th) shows that going any distance in an electric car is more like a coach journey in Jane Austen’s England than anything we are used to. Just as you had to work out where you could change horses and where you had to stay overnight, so now you must establish where the chargers are, whether your car will make it to them, and what you do while waiting. And at least Jane could sustain herself in a coaching inn rather than having to sit in a Tesco car park.
No one had to mandate the replacement of horses by cars. The technology was self-evidently superior. If the same is true of electric cars, then people will choose them anyway. If it isn’t, then the ban will be deeply regressive and hugely unpopular.
Worth reading in full.
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Time for a complaint to OFCOM!I’m sure they will be right on to this biased reporting from the BBC. Any minute now…
I’m glad you listened to it so I didn’t have to! Not that I would, in any case; I do not like that channel any more.
There was a link in the “New Round-up” today, which I commented on: If the suspected outcome of the bio mechanism outlined in the Abstract in https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202303.0441/v1 is true, the manufacturers and their supporters will behave like ferrets in a sack. If it turns out to be a product that was developed in an attempt to mitigate an infection caused by something, but also assists that something into the future, it could be one of the worst drugs that was ever made. I suppose an ultra cynical observer might say that it consolidates demand for some of their products in a back door way.
This is potentially relevant to the flawed result of the project to vaccinate using a product that has tried to circumvent the normal protocol.
“…asking ministers to critically consider the risks as well as the benefits for the Covid vaccines.”
There are benefits?
Benefits = ££££s for Big Pharma and cronies
BOOM
Indeed. They are “safe and effective”. Big pharma is safe from liability and they are effective at generating profit.
All just cock-up, coincidence and stupidity. No conspiracy at all.
I recall reading somewhere (quite possibly on DS) that a mainstream presenter (BBC?) shut down an interview that was heading in the ‘wrong’ direction with a statement like ‘we have an editorial policy not to engage in such discussions’.
Does anyone have a reference to this? Or preferably a clip? Or did I dream it? I’m not thinking of the Dr Malhotra interview where he truth-bombed them.
It seems to me that not inviting Mr Bridgen to the discussion is a continuation of such a policy.
Are you referring to the policy of the BBC being at the forefront of what is considered hypocrisy whilst simultaneously demonstrating how they are the bastion of impartiality? ( LMFAO! ) Well isn’t it all we have come to expect from the MSM presstitutes? ”The media is the virus.”
To my mind the BBC is to journalism what the NHS is to healthcare. Both absolutely abysmal in their treatment of the public these last few years and 100% complicit in the damaging parts they played in support of the narrative.
I’m sure I am referring to that. ‘Trusted News Initiative’ ha!
In particular I recall a story about a presenter actually stating blatantly (on air) that they had an editorial policy to not engage. I’m hoping to show it to some less sceptical friends.
The dreadful Emma Barnett on the dreadful Woman’s Hour said she wouldn’t engage with an anti-vaxxer even if they were speaking the truth
Many thanks for that.
There was a time not so long ago when the BBC would not only have had Bridgen on to defend his position, but would have considered anything short of that a dereliction of duty.
The BBC has had all sorts of controversial and seemingly unsavoury people to air their views. Gaddafi and David Irving spring to mind, and there have been many more.
But we now live in times where the BBC not only denies its platform to an MP but uses it to mount a defenceless attack on him.
I wish the people who are constantly telling us it’s all a big cock up would just reflect on that fact for a minute. Doesn’t that pretty much say it all?
Still the real issue is why all these so-called journalists aren’t practicing journalism. Where are the brave investigative journalists holding those in and with power to account? Who is scaring journalists away from the real stories? Or do all journalists see themselves as activists with an agenda?
I was listening to the FSU speakeasy last night but I’m under the weather so I missed bits of it. But they did mention this total dereliction of duty by journalists – what I don’t know is whether they came up with an answer as to why (the monumental sums of money given to the printed press to plug the govt agenda might go some way but surely not all).
Well, Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, though old, still gives a good idea of how the rot set in, ie how the media became vulnerable to prostitution. After that, personal lack of integrity does the rest.
Thanks for the pointer. I will look for it.
If you have not already read the series of 5 articles by Paula Jone that begin with this one:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/anatomy-of-the-sinister-covid-project/
then I would very strongly suggest that you do, it covers a 20 year period during which it seems like much of the US health protection institutions have been taken over by people with a background in the US military. This is particularly related to Covid, it involves many people but they include some of the old favourites such as Fauci, Barri, Daszak, Shi Zhengli, the WHO itself and some other people that you probably have never heard of.
I found it horrifying and very scary, because it seems to have moved all of the decision making up beyond the law and somewhere it cannot be challenged.
Anyone that can get this out into the mainstream would be doing us all a big favour.
I don’t know if Andrew Bridgen has read it, I really hope he has.
If Russia and China are conducting bio-defense research, then it makes sense that the US would also do so. What doesn’t make sense is why the US would be funding gain-of-function research in China, an enemy of the West! It also doesn’t make sense for US defense to co-opt health protection institutions. Very scary.
“what doesn’t make sense…”
Because China only became an enemy of the West when it became prosperous enough to act independently of US policies. Indeed, that is the definition of enmity, from the American perspective.
As for your first sentence, one might alternatively say that if the US is conducting bio-defense research to maintain its unipolar hegemony, it makes sense to tell the public that Russia and China are also doing so.
Which version is true, if indeed both aren’t? Undoubtedly the one that is being fed to us by the unbiased media that told us about the WMD in Iraq!
Well, let’s see what the world will look like without American hegemony as China fills the power vacuum.
The world seems to have managed for thousands of years without one country having a monopoly on power. What tends to happen is that power gets shared around more.
In 1914, the USA was a debt-ridden, mostly rural backwater and the largest parts of the globe were ruled by England, France and Russia.
Because China only became an enemy of the West when it became prosperous enough to act independently of US policies.
The reason why there’s – to this day – a North and a South Korea is because China intervened in the Korean war on the side of North Korea and effectively fought the US-led UN forces on the other side to a standstill.
It’s inreresting that the state propaganda arm even felt the need for this hit job on Andrew Bridgen. It seems that simply emptying the chamber of the hoc was not enough. They also needed this kangaroo trial in absentia to ensure they doubled down on the phoney narrative without the inconvenience of the truth being brought up. It’s also amusing to hear them refering to “disinformation” given that the source of that information is the governments own data.
My recollection is that Spiegelhalter was scarcely off LBC in 2020, especially with Hartley Brewer, who presumably clings to the wreckage of the view that the jabs are marvellous and that there’s nothing to see here.
Well done to Andrew Bridgen, Norman Fenton et al.
How many skips full of Roberts radios does it take for the BBC to get the message?
“Brendan O’Neill, present as the token free speech advocate and not there to defend what Bridgen said but rather his right to say it. Indeed, O’Neill said (without any attempt to be specific) that some of what Mr. Bridgen said was “strongly misinformation”. ”
I never listen to what Brendan O’Neill says anymore. He’s a typical Talk Radio/Spectator type who said a few good things in the summer 2020, but never went any further.
We met Andrew Bridgen at the Truth Be Told Rally in London outside the BBC on Saturday. He seemed a man happy to be out of the Westminster bubble and happy to be surrounded by us reasonable people who have been attending anti lockdown rallies for the past 2-3 years. Let’s hope that true.
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I’m really surprised that the Daily Sceptic hasn’t reported on Dr John Campbell’s interview with the Australian government senator, Senator Rennick, and the recent exposure of the TGA’s January 2021 report on Pfizer vaccine harms. This report came to light earlier this year thanks to a FOI request by a determined individual in Melbourne. The report was published prior to the vaccine rollout in Australia in January 2021. A copy, of this heavily redacted report, is available at the link below.
The most damaging information that comes to light is that probably every Public Health authority in the world and those responsible (e.g. Fauci, Witty, Valance etc.), and the directors of the TGA, the CDC and the MHRA etc., were all aware of this information before making their decision to rollout these experimental vaccines. If this report doesn’t receive the attention it deserves, it will only help to confirm everyone’s suspicions that there has been a deliberate policy to cover up government and pharmaceutical collusion.
https://www.tga.gov.au/sites/default/files/foi-2389-06.pdf
https://youtu.be/y8kaXrEQB5M
I gave up on Spiegelhalter early in the pandemic as he was obviously the BBC’s pet statistician. The bias is obvious in everything they do.
Mark Steyn interviewing John O’Looney, funeral director: –
https://www.steynonline.com/13360/burning-the-evidence
Our Conservative Party MP for West Bromwich East is not contesting the next Election. I wonder why?
Retribution for the Covid hoax will be seismic and brutal. You reap what you sow. Ask the Dutch government.
A few year’s ago I entered a legal battle with the BBC over an FoI request to reveal how many complaints had been upheld over the last 5 years. It took a year, letters from my MP, responses refusing (under the Balen ruling) by BBC DG’s to refuse the data, and the BBC threatening me with the full legal costs should I decide to proceed with an appeal.
For some unknown reason, they finally cracked and disclosed that, of 1.25 million complaints, a mere 0.014% had been upheld at the old Stage 2.
The BBC is a law unto itself, wholly unaccountable, and the best funded political activist organisation in the world.
It’s globalist pals across the political establishment ensure its licence fee is untouchable. It will only be broken when people stop paying and use other, non live media.