Welcome to Episode 33 of the Sceptic! On the show this week, host Laurie Wastell speaks to the following guests:
- Guy Dampier, Senior Researcher on Nationhood at the Prosperity Institute, on what Britain can learn from Donald Trump on how to solve the problem of illegal immigration
- William Yarwood, Media Campaign Manager at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, on the great Motability scandal
- And for our premium subscribers, Laurie speaks to David Shipley, writer on prisons and justice, on Adolescence, the skewed focus of Prevent and the twee tyranny of Paddington Bear
Donate to the Daily Sceptic to access our premium content. Follow Laurie on X. Follow Guy on X. Follow William on X. Follow David on X. Subscribe to the Daily Sceptic YouTube Channel here. Produced by Ri
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
White Brits are rapidly becoming second class citizens.
Not all bears are equal.
In the films, Paddington causes devastation to the home of the people who adopt him out of what must be an as yet undiagnosed form of Peruvian mental diversity and not as a result of a vision to recreate the Inca empire. While that other bear, the Russian, causes devastation to other people’s homes from anger management issues arising from a grandiose sense of imperial destiny.
Then there’s that other ursine-named personality, the Kaiserin of the EU, Ursula. Growling about making the EU greater again, finding that, after all, the armies of Imperial Germany would be really useful, but unfortunately they cannot be recreated.
Paddington has yet to be mobilised against his Siberian cousin, but there are plenty of Mr Currys raising the panic level from mild alarm to rampant hysteria.
I believe that when Paddington arrived he was a Minor, a child, not old enough to be given the ‘illegal immigrant’ kind of processing. The Browns undertook to provide for him and keep him safe. I assume at some point he gained Asylum and was granted legal citizenship. Of course he never forgot his elderly Aunt in Darkest Peru. We do not learn what happened to his parents, probably that is too sad for a children’s book.
Regarding Motability, it never was that good.
I get higher Rate Mobility Allowance on Disability Living Allowance (this preceded PIP and some of us older people are still on it). This entitles me to have a Motability Car and I once looked into it. Before Covid.
The terms were: 1- I would have needed to find several thousand £s as an initial payment The amount depends on which vehicle you have and I needed to drive my wheelchair into the vehicle so it would have been a more expensive one.
2 – The terms say you simply pay all your mobility allowance to the Mobility scheme and
for 3 years you get a car for which you only pay for the petrol.
They said they paid the tax – this was untrue as the government waived tax for people on higher rate DLA.
They serviced it, well a new car normally gets free servicing for 3 years.
After the 3 years you get a new car but you need to pay the deposit of course.
I did my maths and found that if I bought my vehicle myself I would be better off. The amount I would pay each month in car loan repayments would be less than my DLA and I do not pay the Tax and Servicing, at least for 3 years regarding servicing.
Think about it, Motability have to pay their Staff for one thing. They run a glossy brochure Business. They can’t possibly make it cheaper to you than if you do it yourself.
For the benefit of those who think we get a luxury life on Disability money, please may I just explain my case?
I was launched into disability by a woman driving her car at an impact speed of 70mph into mine. I tried to keep working but the pain was excruciating. The third time someone called an ambulance for me I realised something had happened to me and I couldn’t do what I did before.
For several years I lived in poverty and acute fear with debts building up and thought of suicide. This was not an option. I have children.
I sought advice.
I was awarded higher rate DLA. I didn’t apply for the other part for ‘help with looking after yourself’. Pride. Now I do need it as I can’t prepare food or get dressed. But that’s another matter.
If I hadn’t had my car then I wouldn’t have been able to cope.
Now I have given up driving as it is too painful – my problems have increased – and I rely on the Benefit to pay the taxies I am forced to use to get say, to the hospital or Doctor and because I can’t buy things in shops or do things at home which I used to do I have to spend more. I do sometimes resent people who get the same disability money as I but they can walk or stand longer than 2 minutes without screaming in pain, but that is just my very real pain overwhelming me.
But please, there are those of us who really need the small allowance the Benefit money gives us because for a start, I have very little other money,and my life is so constricted by being in this much pain all the time that just to get food or achieve ordinary human needs costs much more than if I could just get up and walk properly without agonising pain and looking for somewhere I can collapse without hurting myself.
I do not go out, or have holidays, or see people, or drink (alcohol) or have treats. I go to bed between 5pm and 7pm to cut down on heating bills and because of pain. Even so my energy bills are higher than if I were able to live normally and not disabled by pain. My house has become so untidy and horrendously messy as I can’t carry much, for example the washing, so I am ashamed and too embarrassed to let anyone see it.
The valorisation of Paddington Bear as described here makes this character into what Ben Cobley has called an administrator of the system of governance called diversity.
As Cobley points out, human administrators of this system do not innovate. Neither do they challenge the system. They perpetuate its range of fixed identities and their relative values merely by participating in them.
Given the discussion here, it is important to understand who the Pharisees were. In the Gospels, some of them are members of the leading council of the nation. They are all experts in the religious and ceremonial law. Jesus of Nazareth calls one a ‘master of Israel’. Like Saul of Tarsus, they live morally unimpeachable lives. Saul, as Paul, ‘knows nothing against himself’.
Not only this but the Pharisees had a morally superior attitude to anyone not of their system. As they are recorded saying in the Gospels, “The scum outside the law are accursed.”
Those who administer the system of diversity display the same sort of moral superiority. Anyone who has met one of the more zealous ones, especially those who are Christians, can vouch for the unpleasant condescension that these people have to those in the disfavoured groups – the ‘scum’ outside the groups given preferential status. As if simply being spoken to by one of the disfavoured would pollute them.
In their own estimation, merely participating in the system of diversity makes these conscious believers morally superior.
A criticism levelled at the Pharisees by Jesus of Nazareth was that in reality they were ‘whitewashed graves’. Blind guides who led themselves and others to a fall. Even worse are their counterparts of today who acquire rectitude merely by striking an attitude.
Not that many people would know it if reliant on the BBC but we are in the season of Lent. To acquire a similitude of rectitude in this way would be a masterful addition to the three-fold offer the Tempter put to Jesus of Nazareth in the wilderness. Doubly so for those who are Christians.