- “Not even Reverends like me are safe from the banks’ woke purge” – The Revd Richard Fothergill writes about being de-banked by the Yorkshire Building Society in the Telegraph.
- “De-banking furore grows as MPs start investigation” – According to the Times, MPs have expressed concerns that high street lenders are “freezing, withdrawing or withholding bank accounts” from businesses with “little or no explanation”.
- “The worst thing about the woke banking scandal is the hypocrisy of Nigel Farage’s foes” – Imagine banks were cancelling the accounts of progressive politicians. How do we think the Left would react, asks Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
- “NatWest, Farage and the decline of corporate behaviour” – The story of NatWest Group’s rogue behaviour goes far deeper than Nigel Farage, says Justin Doherty in the Spectator.
- “‘Blacklist’ for Government critics is suspended in Whitehall” – Ministers have suspended Whitehall guidance that was used to bar guest speakers who had been critical of policies amid accusations of ‘blacklisting’, reports the Times.
- “Anthony Fauci behind Covid origins disinformation, evidence suggests” – Communications between scientists reveal that there was pressure from “higher ups” to dismiss the lab leak theory of Covid origins, says Public.
- “Did the New York Times just admit Covid deaths were overcounted?” – According to New York Times journallist David Leonhardt, there has been a big drop in official number of Covid deaths in the U.S., with a strong likelihood that the actual number is even lower, reports UnHerd.
- “Scientists call for Nature Medicine to retract paper denying Wuhan lab accident” – The number of virologists who’ve been lying to Congress continues to grow, says Paul D. Thacker.
- “Major data misinterpretations found in COVID-19 study” – Eyal Shahar scrutinises a COVID-19 study, revealing severe data misclassifications and biases that overestimated Covid mortality in Israel.
- “School closings spiked before official Covid” – At least 100 school systems or schools in at least 14 U.S. states closed for flu-like illnesses before a pandemic was declared, which provides more compelling evidence of “early spread”, says Bill Rice Jr.
- “‘Hypocritical’ BMA offers staff pay rise lower than deal it rejected” – The British Medical Association has been accused of “staggering hypocrisy” after offering its staff a 5.25% pay rise, which is lower than the “derisory” 6% offer it had previously rejected from the Government, reports the Telegraph.
- “Fury at Rhodes hysteria” – Just 20% of the Greek island Rhodes is affected by wildfires, despite alarmist warnings from many quarters not to travel, says the Mail.
- “Sunak will have to water down Net Zero sooner or later” – The Government seems to favour policies which will hit ordinary people while sparing the wealthy their private jets, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
- “Lord Frost: Rising temperatures likely to be beneficial for Britain” – According to Lord Frost, rising temperatures “are likely to be beneficial” for Britain because seven times more people in the U.K. die from cold than heat, reports the Telegraph.
- “This graph shows cold kills way more for the entire world” – The co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, says that many in the media are lying about ‘heat waves’ causing more deaths than cold weather. And he has a graph to prove it.
- “Global warming will save many lives… but we have to keep that quiet” – Watch Norman Fenton’s speech revealing academic fraud within the “climate cult community”.
- “Just Stop Oil have finally met their match” – The splendidly named counter-organisation ‘Just Stop Pissing People Off’ has pulled off two publicity coups in the last week, says Gareth Roberts in the Spectator.
- “Christmas market in jeopardy following row over cycle lane” – Oxford County Council has been accused of ruining the city’s Christmas market after it refused to temporarily close a cycle lane running straight through the middle of it, says the Mail.
- “Concordia, Antarctica hits -83.2°C, world’s provisional lowest temperature since 2017” – A weather station at the Concordia Research Station in Antarctica may have just registered the world’s lowest temperature in six years, reports Weatherzone.
- “Gove rows back on 2030 petrol car ban U-turn” – A U-turn on a U-turn? Steerpike in the Spectator has been watching the mess ministers have managed to get themselves into on plans to ban new diesel and petrol cars.
- “A look back from Canadian wildfires to Australian bushfires and floods” – Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur scrutinises climate alarmism for the Brownstone Institute.
- “Weather blether” – What we are witnessing is just ‘weather’; sometimes it’s cold and sometimes it’s hot, says Jack Watson in the New Conservative.
- “Solar panels are three times more carbon-intensive than IPCC claims” – Ecoinvent, the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables, lacks any data from China, the major producer of solar panels worldwide, says Public.
- “British economy will outperform Germany this year, IMF admits” – Britain’s economy will outperform Germany’s this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, after its worst fears for the U.K. failed to materialise, reports the Telegraph.
- “Britain is a poor country determined to get even poorer” – The economic gap between Britain and America is wider than the gap between the U.K. and Romania, says Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph.
- “The great flight from heterosexuality” – Brendan O’Neill in Spiked explains why so many young people, even straights, are calling themselves ‘queer’.
- “The backlash against ‘woke’ capitalism threatens to upend politics” – A lucrative new industry has formed around ‘liberal’ values, but it can only end in tears for big business, says Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
- “Republicans demand total ban on gender reassignment surgeries” – Republican Kat Cammack said the surgeries Democrats want to approve for children are like a “Frankenstein experiment”, reports the Mail.
- “Socialism or Barbie-ism” – Barbie’s nod to what makes a woman a woman is quietly subversive, says Nina Power in Compact.
- “Even Oppenheimer isn’t spared from America’s race politics” – Apparently, online critics are claiming that Oppenheimer is too white, says Samuel Rubinstein in UnHerd.
- “How Pixar infantilised the world” – For the past three decades, Pixar has convinced us that emotions are everything, says Darragh McManus in Spiked.
- “‘It read almost like a file put together by an East German policeman’” – In an interview on GB News, Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union discusses Coutts bank’s reasoning for ‘debanking’ Nigel Farage.
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Do councils ever consider anything except the current agenda and their own bank accounts?
Transport for London (TfL) says that every year 1,000 people are injured or killed by drivers exceeding the speed limit.
So lowering the speed limit will help how?
If they exceeded the last speed limit will they suddenly start adhering to a lower one?
Bo#$@ks will they!
And where is the evidence that not 999, not 1001, but exactly 1000 people are injured or killed by exceeding the speed limit – and which limit?
Totally agree…
That was my first question.
And how many were killed by people not exceeding the speed limit? What were those people doing at the time – were they acting safely, checking before crossing the road, not under the influence of drugs or alcohol? What about the drivers? So many possible issues that won’t be solved or changed by lowering the speed limit, unless it’s reduced to zero.
If they are exceeding the speed limit why are cameras not catching them and fining them? Where I live the silly councils cover every single street in road bumps in the hope of slowing traffic. This penalises all the good drivers that do not fly about at 50 in 30 mph zone. Why not just leave the road as it is and fine and ban the speeders?
Touché
Lowering the speed limit will mean that even more people are affected by speeding drivers since almost by definition there will be more of them, now counting all those driving at between 20 and 30.
And increases pollution because engines burn fuel most effectively at higher revs/speeds.
On the other hand – years ago driving in Central London being able to drive as fast as 20mph was rare, average speeds were around 12mph.
..and totally agree again👍
Who do councils represent? The citizens that voted them in or extremely vocal and persistent activists (normally the economically inactive or least productive)?
Yes, the absolute minority that seem to rule the other 99%!
What’s the point of asking councils to do a cost-benefit analysis of a policy they want to introduce? Obviously the report they produce will find that the benefits far outweigh the costs. Even if they had to get an external auditor to produce a report they could just ignore it when voting on reducing speed limits.
The only solution is to force councils to hold a legally binding referendum on lower speed limits, LTN’s, congestion charges etc.
In Wales, the 20mph are a nightmare. Bus routes lost as they become unviable, delivery companies delaying deliveries or having to increase costs to cover more drivers, slower traffic means more congestion and air pollution and the financial cost has been estimated in the billions. Welsh Labour really do want to drive us back into the Stone Age.
The argument that it saves lives, will ultimately mean that every vehicle will drive at 4mph behind a man carrying a red flag.
There is no justification for these measures. We’ll soon have a slow lane for the prols and a fast lane for the ‘elites’.
unless you have a speed limiting device on your cruise control you will be more likely to have an accident, as you will constantly be checking your speedometer. you will drive with due care and attention, but attention to the wrong thing.
However the councils that didn’t do a risk-benefit analysis have broken Bamji’s First Law of Planning (I call it that because no-one else has claimed it, and it keeps being broken). It is this: when planning an intervention, do not just look at what’s good, but carefully consider what could possibly go wrong.
A medical example: some years ago, when I sat on a hospital management board and reform was all the rage, especially the concept of introducing American-style financing, the managers decided that the board needed to visit a facility in the USA and see how it was done. Plans were well advanced to take then and the Board’s clinicians across the pond, all expenses paid. I pointed out that any advantage accrued by greater understanding of the proposed system would be outweighed by the extreme negative publicity that would result if news of the junket reached the local press, which would seize on the fact that the Trust was in deficit and cutting clinical services, while money was being spent on elite trips to the States. Sense was seen, and the proposal abandoned in some haste.
The first thing I did with any project was to examine the possible downside. Another example: a proposal was made to install an MRI scanner in the cottage hospital. No account had been taken of the staffing requirement, or the fact that the scanner in the main hospital only operated during the day. It was far cheaper to run the main scanner on a 20-24 hour day and pay the existing staff overtime than make a large capital investment that had no staff costs attached.
What’s nice about the Daily Sceptic is that it follows Bamji’s First Law!