One old Cameronite howler was that economic questions could be separated from cultural ones. This was one of the project’s many ‘realist’ conceits. If the British Right could be persuaded to adjourn these issues, then it would be left alone to manage the Brownite welfare state a little better.
This was the implicit bargain, and it has been a total failure. A series of ideological concessions on climate change, on diversity and inclusion, and on the devolution of power from the elected parliament, has left Britain with a raft of legislation that keeps our economy stagnant and backward.
During the 2010s this legislation, like Theresa May’s salary audits, could be sustained as an extra cost of doing business. It was another annoyance to be handled by the legal department – if you could afford one. This was the stuff of water cooler jibes. But by 2023 the laughter has died down. This legislation has started to cannibalize its host, and will ensure that the living standards of the 2010s never return. The symbol of HS2, whatever its virtues, is a potent one. Watch it inch northwards in agony, harried on every side by litigation from the pettiest of petty tyrant local authorities.
The Conservative Party’s self-styled pragmatic wing cannot ignore this any longer. Pleas for backbenchers to forego the “culture war” for quiet economic management now only ring hollow. The former keeps making the latter next to impossible.
Liz Truss’s timely intervention late last week makes her the first major British politician to recognise how inextricable these two things are. Truss led with the lowest-hanging economic fruit – shale – which is not being exploited for reasons that will one day seem like obscurantism on par with the old Victorian fear of “railway madness”. Truss also took aim at the growth of ESG regulation, which steadily chips away at firms too small to afford the costs of compliance.
However, Truss’s breach with these dogmas is still not as total as one might hope. There was no criticism of the principle of Net Zero in her speech. Absent also was any reference to mass immigration. Her failure in this area as prime minister was perhaps a fatal one. In the heady days of the mini-budget, Truss lost critical support from Suella Braverman and her circle over plans to accelerate migration from outside the EU – a policy that does not benefit the exchequer, and is only pursued out of hoary old ‘Brotherhood of Man’ romanticism. If migration really were about economic pragmatism, then what we would have is a guest worker scheme, rigorously enforced, not a pathway to citizenship. In 2023, those who want even the feeblest of economic liberalisms put themselves on a collision course with a national and global establishment. They cannot afford to alienate voters in places like Kent, Essex, and Lincolnshire – the natural social base of such a program – by repeating the tired migration cliches of the 2010s.
J. Sorel is a pseudonym.
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Chilean fascism returns.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-chile-mobility-vaccinated.html
“Freedom” requires you to submit to the state’s experiments.
Essentially just a distraction
In so far as the truth is always useful and better known then hidden, the origin should be established
But the real lessons are nothing to do with the origin. It’s the reaction that is the issue
I think sceptics should stay away from this and the Cummings theatre and stick to the important stuff
I agree it’s a side bar but it is important from my perspective because it has the potential to reveal the lengths to which information that is true is suppressed. It undermines the MSM as well as the WHO, Fauci..etc.
one hopes that as these revelations continue, it may result in those on the fence questioning the other narratives that have become forced down our thoughts truths.
Next up, I hope is the Ivermectin suppression scandal and the resultant Emergency Authorisation of the gene therapies not to mention how this treatment could have eliminated the flimsy rational for lockdowns and v-passports
I may be feeling optimistic today but, one by one this sham may be revealed….
Yes I agree if it sows seeds of doubt regarding official narratives, especially those of Western governments, it may be helpful
But it could easily be manipulated into blaming the Chinese but not questioning lockdowns and all the other nonsense
The purpose of these new lab based bioweapons as stated in the CCP’s own manual from 2015 (gnews.org), was – in combination with the propaganda war – to weaken other countries economies, social and political systems whilst its origin went undetected. A traditional bioweapon that killed too quickly would not achieve that aim as it would be too easy to identify its source and control it. I would say it has been fantastically effective and the CCP (not the Chinese people) should be blamed.
Could you point to a source that proves this ‘bioweapon’ has been killing people? LS has spent almost every day since the beginning of this madness proving there has been no pandemic. And are you also suggesting this bioweapon is making our politicians and media malfunction, turning them all into communist totalitarians?
I think you have imagined a post that is diametrically opposed to what is actually written.
Only in your own mind, Rick. The only concession I’ll give to the theory something horrible came out of China is the fact our government mimicked their authoritarian politics.
It must be a source of great frustration for you when you see the likes of Neil Fergusson admitting they copied The Chinese Communist Party when designing lockdown/restrictions.
… but the Chinese shouldn’t be ‘blamed’. 90% was constructed in the West.
The entire charade has been smoke and mirrors, it was openly talked about for years leading up to March 2020 and official stats have shown there has not been a pandemic.
If some dangerous virus had been leaked from Wuhan, why did global government make everyone believe it was worse than it was? Why did they lie about the number of people catching it and dying of it?
Ultimately, the whole thing is a huge fraud, and for me, the suggestion that this virus is a bioweapon only strengthens the fear-mongering and the lies that we’ve endured.
I agree with Julian that it needs to be shunned and ignored.
I think there’s some strength in the theory that elites suspected it was a lab leak at the beginning and that’s partly why they overreacted so much.
That was my thought initially, at a time when I was being magnanimous. But then why continue with the obviously deluded idea that it might prove highly dangerous, for such a long time?
“another” pandemic.
Don’t we need one first?
So if it was a leak, what do we do? I thought the West had given up believing anything China says and trusting anything China does. The enquiry should be into why their word was taken and why WHO appeared to be in their pocket.
The inquiry should be into why we massively overreacted and didn’t change our response in the face of the overwhelming evidence from the real world
…because the WHO, UK Health Service and various universities, who were quite public about their collaboration with the CCP, did believe what China said. I remember one academic proudly tweeting ‘Chapeau to the Chinese’ as she shared detailed manuals from the CCP on how to respond to COVID-19 with the world. So, the question I would pose to the inquiry is whether these people were stupid, corrupt or just downright evil.
They may have believed the Chinese for a short while, but very soon it was obvious to anyone what the reality was
I just think as soon as you start talking about China the whole thing will turn into a political distraction from the questions that need to be asked
The books ‘Hidden Hand’ and ‘Stealth War’ might be worth a read. I open to be proved wrong, but I remain convinced that CCP influence is the key to this and how so many in authority were not only able to ignore the patently obvious, but silence those who didn’t.
Not really. There was very much a political element to the reaction to the virus outbreak.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/wow_top_chinese_academic_gloats_china_won_the_biological_war_of_2020.html
Top Chinese academic gloats China won the ‘biological war’ of 2020
Undoubtedly, the Chinese had a hand in this : thus the transparent street theatrics.
But the ‘real world’ quickly became irrelevant as a managed socio-psychological construct took over in the West once Italy had succumbed.
Personally, I doubt that any inquiry will fully plumb the murky depths of complicity and stupidity.
The Chinese supported Tedros when the position of Director General was being contested.
Tedros is a revolutionary Marxist.
“or that a secret project to create a nasty virus for use as a bioweapon had either gone wrong or succeeded all too well. The latter theory remains implausible”
Right. So once again we have our journalists schilling for a vicious communist regime that couldn’t possibly want to engineer a bio weapon even though they have actually admitted to it.
The lengths some people go to avoid the obvious explanation in order to cover for this awful regime is truly disgusting.
what is wrong with these people?
The West has shown itself only too willing to imitate this ‘awful regime’. Scratch the skin, and the same pus of totalitarianism seeps out. It’s got little to do with the labels – except that the evil ‘communist’ regime may be a bit more honest It doesn’t pretend to democracy.
My main concern is that this was ever a “conspiracy theory” at all. It took me a few mins to look at the location of the outbreak (wuhan). The location of China’s only BSL4 lab doing research of coronaviruses inc. gain of function (wuhan). Plus the subsequent behaviour of the CCP in silencing doctors, deleting research and putting out strange rumours of asymptomatic spread.
Is it not the most obvious ockhams razor ever?! No wonder if people can’t see this plainly then they’re stupid enough to believe the rest of the absolute bunkum.
As below, ‘Stealth War’ and ‘Hidden Hand’ would be worth a read, as would gnews.org. Over the years, the CCP has been able to assert a lot of influence over main stream media, academia as well as many governments and businesses – the lure if getting rich in China proved too much for many to resist the CCP’s will. Hence the Coronavirus narrative could be moulded to suit political agenda even though a few minutes research could reveal gaping holes in it. The CCP have 70 years’ experience controlling what a billion people think, it’s not surprising that they have becone rather adept at it.
Hollywood is totally in the CCP pocket.
The phrase ‘rats deserting the sinking ship’ springs to mind. Still, I won’t be resubscribing to The Spectator any time soon or The Telegraph, with whom I shared Dr Li-Meng Yan’s first report in several occasions.
It’s a bit like how ‘Of course it’s absolutely safe to inject literally everybody with barely tested pharmaceutical products and anyone who says otherwise is an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who should be prosecuted for spreading dangerous misinformation’ has become ‘Well, yes, some people did die prematurely from these vaccines, but not that many and we know how to fix the problem,’ which will become….
And if it’s proven to have come out of the Wuhan lab, then so what. Will it remove the 15 months of imprisonment the people who have now got seminal cancer etc.
Totally meaningless and pointless exercise.
BTW I understand the USA stopped doing biochemical warfare research in the USA. But outsourced it to China and you’ve guessed it the Wuhan lab. So who’s really to blame, the Wuhan lab for letting out a mild virus or the clients who fund the Wuhan labs?
It does need to be investigated – but initially just in terms of accuracy and beginning to pin down the trail of fictions that then ensued.
Obviously, the Chinese did use the virus as the underpinnings of propaganda theatre to spread the idea of a deadly virus – but whether this was planned or simply opportunism (and in what mixture) is an open question.
Then there is the infection of the West.
But both weren’t about a virus – they were political stunts built around a moderately severe infection. The ‘pandemic’ was primarily a political entity.
Tell us something we don’t know.
We have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists, ridiculed and censored on social media. Now ten months later the PTB are admitting what had been postulated early last year.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then they jail you. Then they kill you and your family. Then eventually they collapse internally, but you are still dead.
I’m just not convinced this is of China’s doing. It’s quite clear to me that Western leaders and global institutions are exploiting this entire situation so badly that one couldn’t be blamed for thinking that they were also involved in the pathogen release itself. Why carry out exercises surrounding pandemics a year prior to Covid? What about the immediate spending splurge/quantitative easing which propped up financial markets and poured inflationary risk to the rest of us. I really think this entire thing is an operation involving deliberate ammassing of debt, a covert war to achieve a new reserve currency and the need to push everyone into digital surveillance. I’m starting to think that once more the central bankers own this entire operation and that folks like Biden/Johnson are their circus acts. I mean come on, they’ve always been in charge and doubled down post 2008.
Anyone who has done any research on this can see it was a lab leak at the Wuhan laboratory and Fauci funded the research. They were working on making a bat virus pass to humans. Fauci funded an intermediary company to pass the money to Wuhan. Fauci now claims he had no idea what they were researching – why would you hand over millions for something you had no idea what it was doing? Fauci is a liar.
Fauci a liar, the day must have a Y in it
Well, we have got to the cover up of the cover up. We are still being told what sensible people believe, which is way short of what there is evidence for.
Once again, we are being told “look over here, look over here”. And the sheep are distracted, once again, this time to watch Mr. Cummings perform a 6 hour testimony to a commons committee and then to watch, the next day, the gov’ts denial. Two more days wasted as Britain continues its extended journey into the abyss.
It is clear, stop lockdowns, let this country open up fully and return to normalcy. To do otherwise will be fatal for the Uk.
It was always VERY plausible that this highly unusual bug that appears to be tuned perfectly to human host would have come from a lab. The people who sneered at this did not do so from a scientific position, but from a political one.
Facebook, just like YouTube, have become self-appointed arbiters of “The Truth”. Their anonymous “fact-checkers” have absolute power to act as judge, jury and executor. No right to appeal. Just blocked, shut down. This is a very dangerous slippery slope which we are accelerating down. It has to be stopped.
So the lab theory reemerges from the wilderness. One other coincidence that was mentioned in the early days of the outbreak was that some researchers who collaborated with the Wuhan lab were based in northern Italy. Which is where the virus turned up first in Europe. I’ll have to look up sources to cite on this.
Regarding the CCP it must be said that the genetic sequence of Covid was released very early. A deliberate act of Covid release would surely be accompanied by silence on this matter?