When the Daily Telegraph’s Review section previewed Wednesday’s edition of Channel 4’s Dispatches – Britain’s Forgotten Pensioners it expressed scepticism at some of the statistics in the forthcoming programme:
Some of the figures quoted (such as that 45 people died every day last winter – more than 4,000 deaths – as a result of being unable to heat their homes) seemed inconceivable enough to invite referral to Radio 4’s More or Less for further analysis.
This extraordinary and troubling figure of 4,000 deaths comes from a study by National Energy Action. Three days before the above quote hit readers’ doormats, Bob Ward, Chair of London Climate Change Partnership, told Dr. David Bull on his TalkTV show that the temperature “astonishingly went above 40 degrees last summer and it killed 2,000 people”.
There is no readily available statistical basis for them but if one were to take these two figures at face value, then an admittedly over-simplistic conclusion might be that winter cold kills twice as many people as summer heat. While it appears that Western civilisation is being put into reverse gear to prevent global temperature rises, what is being done about the former?
The Telegraph’s incredulity at the concept of people dying of cold is comparatively recent. In February 2015, it reported: ‘Winter death toll “to exceed 40,000”‘. Dame Sally Davies, then the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, wrote in the Cold Weather Plan for England 2014-15:
Excess deaths are not just deaths of those who would have died anyway in the next few weeks or months due to illness or old age. There is strong evidence some of these deaths are indeed ‘extra’ and are related to cold temperatures, living in cold homes as well as infectious diseases such as influenza.
If one looks for this year’s Cold Weather Plan, it turns out than in a suitably Orwellian touch it is now called the Adverse Weather Plan. There is as now as much content devoted to “extreme heat and heatwaves” as to cold.
Deaths from cold among the elderly used to grab people’s attention. The late MP David Amess was so appalled to hear of the death in a cold house of one of his Southend constituents that he campaigned for and secured the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act in 2000. Fuel poverty declined from 5.1 million households to 1.2 million households between 1996 and 2004, partly as a consequence. As to where it is in 2023, the estimate from National Energy Action is 7.5 million households.
The fact is that Government and media have succumbed to a bad case of climate emergency tunnel vision, which means their limited attention is focused on ‘soaring’ temperatures, heatwaves and the weather map being coloured red after the news. Of course, there is an impact from the war in Ukraine but elderly people will die again this coming winter not just because of the chronic failure to secure the U.K.’s energy supply by successive Governments. It is also caused by the vast transfer of wealth from struggling pensioners to asset owners in the renewable sector. Energy bills are unnecessarily high in no small part due to the innumerable subsidies that go to, among others, wind turbine providers being awarded constraint payments for switching them off in high winds.
The Dispatches documentary makes for hard viewing and I defy anyone not to be touched by the despair of those featured. A few days before watching it, I was at a dinner where I saw a former colleague. Heir to a considerable fortune, he cheerfully told me that he’d received a five-figure grant towards the cost of installing a heat pump in the pond beside his equally considerable North London home.
Ian Price is a Business Psychologist. Find him on Twitter.
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“stick with the Tories and not risk a Labour landslide”. Hmm. Maybe there are fine gradations of landslide I wasn’t aware of.
Indeed, and it’s such a weak argument – vote for us because the others are worse!
I received a Scottish Conservatives election campaign leaflet yesterday with “Vote Reform, Get SNP”. It’s usually vote Conservative or get the SNP as they will claim no-one else can win so they must be feeling threatened.
In my mail, a letter supposedly from my future self to me regretting how I voted Reform in the 2024 election for all the right reasons but got no seats. There were clues, but no declaration, that it was actually from the Conservatives.
I’m not a Reform member, so presumably the local party is expecting to lose most of their support to Reform. Weird campaigning.
My son got the same letter. There nare no reflections in it as to how the Tories have been the only cause of their current position. It is quite desperate to vilify Reform when they themselves squandered their majority.
They know I was not going to vote Tory as they phoned me up and I told them.
I got one of those letters too – I was distressed to notice that in twenty years time I will have completely forgotten why I considered voting to Reform UK in 2024.
Ah well, I suppose my future self
hashadwill have gone a bit Gaga – what with being a proper coffin-dodger and all.Well yes, since I’ll be 92 then, I may have lost my memory too – which is why, presumably, I sign myself as “Jonathan” when I’ve been “Jon” most of my life!
I think you might be like me in that respect. I was only ever addressed by my full first name if I was being told off by my Mum or Dad or other authority.
It makes me laugh when my GP and medics use it to tell me I’m eating too much carbohydrate.
Crikey, you get to speak to a GP and medics? Could you let us in on the secret?
My secret is to be the GP
(though I struck myself off after retirement).
“Politicians who believe in nothing end up achieving nothing”. Although “nothing” is often preferable to what many achieved.
100% Sunak and most Tory MPs “believe” in the Big State that intervenes and solves all your problems, and they seemed unable to “manage” securing our border.
Monday Morning New Bath Rd & A3032 Old Bath Rd,
Charvil Wokingham
Sunak & Starmer: Artificial Intelligence
Save Ukraine from American meddling
‘Ukraine actually needs to be saved from the U.S., says Jeffrey Sachs’
Clue: ‘Jeffrey Sachs……..advised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.’
As a statement of the bleeding obvious, this article would be hard to better.
Who was it who said: ‘“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” ?
Oh! US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin
Did he say it secretly?
No! He said it at a press conference in Poland a month after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Did the Ukrainians know he said that?
Yes! And they said: ‘our goal is that Ukraine wins……our goal is to weaken Russia…….they are two sides of the same coin.
What did everyone else say?
“The argument now seems to be this is not just about Ukraine; it’s about a larger problem, that is the threat that Russia poses to Europe as a whole. And if you look at it that way, then these comments begin to make sense.”
What did Leonid Kuchma, you know, the ex Ukrainian President that Jeffrey Sachs has been advising, for a handsome stipend, say?:
‘United we stand around the Flag, the Army, and the President. Ukraine is not Russia. And it will never become Russia. No matter how hard they want this. We are already winning. And this can’t be stopped. And I will only say to the Russian Federation that I agree with the words of my compatriots who say in one voice: damn you all!”
https://verstka.media/istoriya-granatometchika-dezertira-iz-shtorm-z-kotoriy-seychas-ischet-politicheskoe-ubezhische
What is really going on?
Stormtroopers!
‘We really are f*cking orcs’
‘While we were being processed, when they took us to the clothing warehouse, all of the workers there were drunk out of their minds. The officers were 50/50, but the top brass were barely better than Yeltsin. All of the clothing was from the 1960s, and none of it fit.’
‘..in the second week of training, everybody got food poisoning from the unit’s rations.’
‘Anton’s unit originally contained about 600 men, but after two months of carrying out assaults near Kupyansk, only about 40 were left.’
‘If you end up in an assault brigade, you’re fucked,” Anton says. “Nine times out of 10, these troops fall apart during their approach.’
‘Our losses were just insane; I lost count. For three kilometers [less than two miles] — which we ultimately lost back to the Ukrainians — we lost five or six companies.’
‘Almost everyone who’s been on the front line thinks about escaping. If you’re very cautious, fleeing the army is entirely doable. Get away from your field camp, ditch your uniform, and change into civilian clothes. The most important thing is to have some kind of ID other than your military documents.’
‘One time, our command got drunk and let slip: ‘We’re fucking orcs!’ And we really are fucking orcs. It’s disappointing. The command generally doesn’t acknowledge it, and these moments of candor usually happen when they’re drinking. My time in the army shattered my outlook on life. I no longer have any positive feelings about Russian statehood. This isn’t war; it’s just agony. The only parallel I can think of is the First World War. They just send you to be slaughtered’
‘Anton plans to stay in Europe and apply for political asylum. He believes that he has the right to claim it as “a person who refused to participate in war crimes.”
Oh dear!
Verstka Madia? Oh dear. Not exactly balanced.
Sachs said in Jan 2023 “Neither russia nor Ukraine is likely to achieve a decisive military victory in their ongoing war: both sides have considerable room for deadly escalation. Ukraine and its Western allies have little chance of ousting Russia from Crimea and the Donbas region, while Russia has little chance of forcing Ukraine to surrender. As Joe Biden noted in October, the spiral of escalation marks the first direct threat of “nuclear Armageddon” since the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago.
The rest of the world also suffers alongside, though not on the scale of the battlefield. Europe is probably in recession.”
”You’ve got to cut a cable or two”
A bit of more basic news, EV charging points are being hit by the scrap thieving brigade;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8ywnDPYT5E
In order to get a bit of scrap cable worth less than £100 they are causing over £80,000.of damage. As well as which, if the cable is plugged into the car at the time the connection plug may become locked into the car and needs repair input to remove it. As a result they are talking about putting EV charging points inside secure compounds which you can only access if you are signed up to that charging network.
Clearly such an approach is not going to be very practical for free and easy mass motoring for the hoi-polloi. Indeed it is another indication that EVs equal the end of travel freedom and the open road for the common man.
Ironically it does seem that Starmer’s Labour party, supposedly the party for the common man, will drive ICE cars off the road and push us into a EV future, I guess whether you see that future as a dystopian nightmare or a Utopian wonderland will depend on whether you have the right ‘app’ on your phone to let you into the secure EV charging compound?
I am surprised I’ve not heard of this before. I know from acquaintances that thieves take big risks to steal cable from railway lines and catalytic converters from cars.
I am always amazed that this sort of theft is actually possible without killing yourself (although I know a few people do accidentally get fried). How do they do it?
A friend used to work for the local elecricity company. He explained they were supplied with thick, reinforced rubber gloves to handle live cables carrying from hundreds to thousands of volts.
I would guess that a pair of Marigolds would do the job for your average scally.
A few years ago, when the contractors swapped all the street houses from the old cable to the new, they were allowed to work on live cable carrying 400V. Eventually, when all the houses were done, they’d have disconnected the old distribution one from the local transformer, and it was left buried indefinitely. That’s dead aluminium cable, not copper. https://youtu.be/LS8VFhRMsYY
Bolt croppers with insulated handles!
Once a short is detected the charger switches off the juice
It’ll never happen, forcing populations to do anything has never worked! The people will eventually oust any dictatorist government
China is the cleverest at disguising itself as a people’s government but western governments have never been as good at doing this
https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/other/britain-s-defence-forces-not-ready-for-conflict-of-any-scale/ar-BB1penRE
‘UK military unprepared for ‘conflict of any scale’, warns ex-defence official’
‘The critique of the UK’s military decline was presented by Rob Johnson, who led a government team responsible for measuring the country’s readiness for war.’
‘Britain would ‘rapidly’ run out of ammunition and be powerless to prevent missile attacks. He added that the Navy and Air Force were desperately short of ships and aircraft, and said the UK was not spending enough money to rectify these critical issues.’
‘The UK has reached a situation where it cannot defend the British homelands properly.’
What to do? Despair, really…….
The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) is the same size as the entire British Armed Forces but has twice as many aeroplanes as the Royal Air Force….
Of course you can make a lot of noise about not comparing like with like….
The simple fact remains that a single military organisation can exist with great tradition, esprit and effectiveness (USMC formed 1775) without the three four or five single service staffs currently cluttering up Whitehall (and elsewhere).
Furthermore, with a considerable degree of ‘shadowing’ USMC procurement, Britain’s own defence procurement system could offer more bangs for the buck.
As a tank commander once said to his gunner (which may serve as a note to the, any, British Government):
‘DO SOMETHING! EVEN IF IT IS ONLY TO SHOUT: HAPPY CHRISTMAS!’
Perhaps a country which is so ill-prepared to fight a war should be a little less belligerent when dealing with potential foes. They should know full well that they can’t rely on USA to back them come what may, especilly when run by the geriatric who openly despises UK.
NATO won’t be much use either, because Britain will only be targeted once Europe has been consumed.
Some inconsequential politician once said “jaw,jaw,jaw is preferable to war, war, war”. You would think after two world wars the message would have got through. However the current breed of politician has assured us that they will fight to the last of their proxy warriors. They should realise that point is fast approaching and get down to some serious talking.
The Leftards are as transparent as clingfilm in their objectives, and they are another group that use the tactic of projection constantly: ”Oppose us and you’re antidemocratic!”, ”Challenge our policies and you’re a fascist/an extremist threat” etc etc. Always the same story, and yet these technocrats that are the real threat to our societies profess to care so much and we are supposed to believe they’re sincere;
”Every leftist cause is founded on empathy.
The quintessential leftist, no matter how much blood eventually spatters his hands, starts off by caring a great deal about other people. His heart bleeds for the oppressed, the workers and the peasants, for racial and sexual minorities, and for all the oppressed peoples of the world.
The ideological fashions may change, but the story is always told the same way.
Somewhere there is an oppressed group to be liberated. And he, she or they is the one to fight for their liberation. Along the way, that exquisite sensitivity which may lead an upper class Ivy Leaguer to learn all about the customs and suffering of black transgender men in Detroit or Hamas terrorists in Gaza congeals into an equal insensitivity for the suffering of his targets.
Leftists genuinely do care a lot. They care about rising oceans, polar bears, women in hijabs, men in dresses, drug dealers in the ghetto and eco-terrorists in prison, racist highways and dead terrorists, and if you think of something that they don’t care about yet, they will soon.
As long as it fits the larger agenda of asserting their will over society from a moral high ground.
That is why they also don’t care about the horrifying death toll among young black men from crime, how many Muslims are being killed by Muslim governments or the state of the gay rights movement in Marxist dictatorships. If the state of oppression does not conform to the narrative of external social oppression to be overthrown by a liberation movement it is useless to the political movement and to the individual ego of the aspiring freedom fighter.
To a genuine humanitarian, the oppressed are an end, but to a leftist they are a means. A leftist cares a great deal about a coal miner until he votes for Trump or a black man until he runs as a Republican. Or until, even through no fault of his own, like the coal miners and steelworkers for whom leftists once bled, he is replaced by a new pathway to the ultimate revolution.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20739/leftist-humanitarianism-terrorism
Nothing in the msm this morning about the top BBC presenter tweeting on x that Biden should have Trump murdered. Odd.
It’s in the Mirror.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/bbc-host-david-aaronovitch-suggests-33147936
As Viva Frei points out, the minority judgement was mistaken in saying that the ruling gives a president carte blanche to murder an opponent. That is (a) not even distantly related to his official duties (the limitation in the ruling), and (b) would render him liable to impeachment, leading to exposure to the full force of the law.
An insider from a Bugatti dealership in Paris has reported that the wife of the Ukrainian president, Olena Zelenska, has spent €4.5 million on a Bugatti Turbillon during a recent visit.
Totally disagree Kemi!
Vote for what you want, not for what you want to stop, that’s a quitters attitude.
Very weak argument, I thought you were better than that
“Kamala Harris worried Democrats will replace Joe Biden with white candidate”
Does Biden self identify as black then?
Last time I looked he was white!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/01/kemi-badenoch-voting-reform-lets-labour-in/
Not good enough Ms Badenoch and in fact you are undermining your own position. Fourteen years continuation of Bliarite policies and you ask Conservative voters for its continuance? That’s quite an insult.
You are a slate short.
“Le Pen’s party would be a disaster for France, says Farage”
WHAT???!!!
Nigel jumping the gun on his “Bait & Switch”?
Don’t do this again to all the millions who truly believe in you, Nigel.
Yeah – they’re apparently too big state, unlike Brothers of Italy. However, Reform UK say this in their manifesto/contract:
Other than law & order and its companion, defence, infrastructure is really the only thing that the government rightly has any business being involved in.
The government has a duty to keep all British infrastructure, defence and food production under complete British ownership and control, not selling off the family silver to our enemies as LibLabCon have done.
Yes, I agree that Reform’s policies are sound, because they will bring control of all British utilities back to British people, instead of being sold off to foreign predator companies who couldn’t care less about British customers.
But why on earth is Nigel launching into criticism of his supposedly fellow patriotic movement in France now, at this crucial juncture, after the French have been crushed beneath Globalist Tyrant Macron & his predecessors for so long? Nigel can nitpick if he wants AFTER Le Pen has won the second round, instead of deliberately undermining her now. It’s sinister. How would he like it if she did the same to him?
It’s also ridiculous that the “Brothers of Italy” are led by a Globalist woman masquerading as a patriot, while the True Leader of Italy, Matteo Salvini, has been forced into a “deputy” position. He was the only Italian politician who was willing to take strong measures to stop the Third World Invasion of Italy, unlike the Cutesy Fraud Meloni, all talk and no action, except snuggling up to Sunak & Zelensky, while doing little to actually stop the Invasion of Italy. Italians should give her the boot.
https://m.independent.ie/farming/news/scientists-wary-of-bird-flu-pandemic-unfolding-in-slow-motion/a1300498946.html
Here we go again! Happy new lockdowns everyone
I have been warning about this for months.