- “Covid hospitalisations are going up, warns Boris Johnson” – “I think what everybody can see very clearly is that cases are going up,” the Prime Minister said, according to the Telegraph, “and in some cases hospitalisations are going up”
- “NHS chief insists hospitals in Covid hotspots can cope with demand” – Chris Hopson, Chief Executive of NHS Providers, said hospital leaders are confident vaccinations have broken links between coronavirus cases, hospital admissions and deaths, the Daily Mail says
- “SAGE modelling warns of risk of ‘substantial’ Covid third wave” – SAGE modellers are doing their thing again, the Guardian reports, including Professor Ferguson who says there is risk of a surge in infections and hospitalisations to rival the second wave in January
- “Matt Hancock ‘was warned of Covid care home risk in March 2020’” – Some of the U.K.’s biggest care home operators have told the Guardian that they repeatedly warned Matt Hancock’s department back in March 2020 about discharging people from hospitals into care homes without a test
- “AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine linked to another bleeding disorder” – Researchers have found that about one in 100,000 people given the jab will suffer idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, MailOnline reports
- “People with mental illness and learning disabilities given ‘do not resuscitate’ orders during pandemic” – Patients with mental illness and learning disabilities were given “do not resuscitate” orders during the pandemic, the Telegraph has found
- Only Britain drank more alcohol when the pandemic started, study finds” – A team of European researchers has found that it was only in Brits that started drinking more when Covid lockdowns began, according to MailOnline
- “Michael Gove Would ‘Bet’ On June 21st Relaxation Of Covid Rules” – During a Ministerial meeting on Monday, Michael Gove has told colleagues that if he were a “betting man” he would “bet on a relaxation” of the Covid rules, Huffpost reports
- “There’ll be no Global Britain if risk-averse ministers keep the country locked up” – “If all one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in history can achieve is a messy halfway house of rules masquerading as guidance,” says this Telegraph editorial, then “what was the point?”
- “The mad mass of travel rules won’t keep me from a foreign holiday” – The Telegraph‘s Annabel Fenwick-Elliott pretends to be grateful to George Eustice for saying she shouldn’t travel abroad unless it is necessary for satirical reasons
- “Vaccination status on my Tinder profile? No thanks, gov” – “For those in favour of medical information on dating bios, where are the stickers or incentives for sharing one’s STI status?,” Amy Jones asks in UnHerd. “That is surely something of more relevance”
- “Ignorant and evil – the mania for vaccinating children” – “The ignorance underlying the reckless decision to vaccinate over-12s who are at no risk of fatality from Covid-19 is near-incomprehensible,” writes Kathy Gyngell in the Conservative Woman
- “The Lab Leak Chronicles” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Paul Collits examines why the lab leak theory was widely dismissed until about a week ago
- “Fear messaging and Masks” – Professor Robert Dingwall discusses the Government’s fear-based messaging with Lucy Johnston on Sketch Notes On a Pandemic. “The failure to recalibrate the risks is a legacy of the climate of fear,” he says
- “Swine Flu and Covid: Pandemic Deja Vu?” – Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is the guest on the latest episode of the Pandemic Podcast, exploring the parallels between SASARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 Swine Flu with host Dan Astin Gregory
- “MEPs overwhelmingly back EU’s COVID travel pass” – The European Parliament has approved the bloc’s new Covid travel pass, Euronews reports
- “France’s Covid stoicism has put Britain to shame” – “It’s a damning illustration of Britain’s timidity that France could be fully open for business before its neighbour,” writes Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator.
- “COVID-19: Are mix-and-match vaccines the way forward?” – According to Deutsche Welle, a new German study has found that a combination of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines triggers a stronger immune response than sticking with just one
- “Malta says U.K. decision to keep island off safe travel list was ‘political’” – Malta’s foreign minister Evarist Bartalo said on Tuesday that Britain has ignored the scientific advice and kept Malta off the green list for political reasons, Reuters says
- “Moscow to toughen enforcement of COVID-19 rules as cases rise” – Authorities in Moscow say they will be stepping up enforcement of rules on masks and gloves, according to Reuters, in an effort to stem the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the Russian capital
- “Hospital suspends 178 workers for refusing COVID-19 vaccines” – Houston Methodist Hospital has suspended 178 employees who declined the jab and were not granted religious or medical exemptions, the Washington Express reports. The CEO Marc Boom said they had “decided not to put their patients first”
- “Study shows hydroxychloroquine and zinc treatments increased coronavirus survival rate by almost three times” – A new observational study, published by medRix, found that hydroxychloroquine along with Zinc increased the Coronavirus survival rate by nearly 200%, the Washington Examiner reports
- “What Fauci’s emails tell us about his deadly incompetence and mishandling of Covid” – Raymond Wolfe picks out the key revelations from the Fauci emails, including his “flip-flops on masking, fixation with a failed coronavirus drug, and disastrous virus mortality errors”, for LifeSiteNews
- “Fauci says attacks on him are ‘attacks on science’” – The Post Millennial highlights the moment when, being interviewed on MSBNC, Dr Anthony Fauci declared that attacks on him are quite frankly “attacks on science”
- “The New York Times Wanted” – The New York Times recommended to its readers that they get their food delivered to them rather than eat it in restaurants. It shows, says Jeffrey Tucker in RealClearMarkets, that lockdowns “were a ruling-class policy that implicitly foisted the burden of exposure and subsequent immunity on the other”
- “Stinky Stuff Happens, but How Do We Prepare?” – “Something else with the magnitude of Covid is going to arrive; we don’t know what; we don’t know when,” writes Joakim Book at AIER
- “Covid outbreak in China sparks fears of trade disruption” – A COVID-19 outbreak in southern China is curbing activity at some of the country’s biggest ports, and is risking, the FT says, pushing up the price of its exports
- “Meanwhile in Australia” – Swiss Policy Research details the “high costs of zero Covid” in Australia and New Zealand – it’s high. Very high
- “Top doctors warns Australia is a ‘sitting duck’ for Covid outbreaks” – Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid has warned that the country will be a “sitting duck” for Covid and the flu if and when it opens it borders, the Australian Associated Press reports, due to the sub-standard operations of its hospitals.
- “How did one woman expose towns across two states to COVID-19?” – Authorities in Queensland, Australia are investigating the case of a woman from Melbourne who snuck out from lockdown with her husband and made a road trip to the Sunshine Coast where she tested positive, ABC reports
- “We will be thoroughly ashamed of our madness in pursuit of some nebulous idea of safety” – Helen Gray tells Mark Dolan why she is campaigning for freedom
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.
“swapping out”
Oh dear. Criticising the very things being criticised. Swapping is sufficient.
A fair point, and well spotted… and happy to be corrected… but does it really invalidate the argument as a whole?
How? In 1945 the British population voted Marxist-socialist workers control the means of production, Comrade and sold out its manufacturing base (and soul) in exchange for – bang pans – an NHS and cradle-to-grave welfare state – free stuff, everyone leeching off each other.
It’s simple. Nationalise key industries, instead of profits going to greedy capitalists, redistribution to pay for NHS, free stuff, fairness, equality – brothers.
Result: capital to fund, expand, develop, only available from the taxpayer. Not enough. Borrow and print money. Still not enough. Chronic underinvestment. The workers collective demands more and more. Industry becomes bloated, uncompetitive. That profit disappears so borrow, print money to pay the shortfall and pay the increasing cost of NHS and welfare state.
Brain drain. Underinvestment, poor pay, high taxes, drives out best and brightest – engineers, scientists, designers – abroad particularly the USA and into their aerospace industry.
British aerospace collapses, car making is a joke, strikes daily – the end of the UK as a giant of tech development and innovation.
Result: £2.8 trillion debt, 7 million on (bang pans) NHS waiting list, and in 2023 220 000 died waiting… but had they lived treatment would have “free”… yippee!, a welfare state supporting 10 million impoverished immigrants, dependence on the Chinese command economy for what we consume.
Hurrah! And… full circle. 2025 UK population votes in Marxist-Socialist Labour Party and is shocked to learn it’s Marxist-Socialist and hasn’t kept its manifesto pwomises, the wotters, how beastly.
Those old enough will remember police, fire, ambulance with dignified British bells, not those common Continental – Hee, haw, hee, haw… klaxons.
I grew up with the two-tone klaxon so that’s all that I recall (we’re all products of our era, right?). Happy to endorse the British bell being brought back to service.
The classic parable of British industry would be: In Victorian times, someone invested a lot capital in building a factory somewhere in England. This factory made him and his descendeds very wealthy/ insanely rich and was kept running with minimal investments in maintenance until about the 1970s when the Victorian machinery finally broke down and couldn’t be repaired anymore. At this point, one of two things happened:
This is a story I part invented but I think it’s an accurate picture: The empire had served its purpose after the British elite had accumulated more wealth than most people can even think of. And since it was sort-of cumbersome and expensive to maintain, it was then dismantled using more or less poor pretexts (“Winds of change” etc). What remained was a British moor who had done his job and could go now.
How this process really started: From some time in the 19th century until 1914, Britain was the world’s dominant industrial, military and financial power. Closest competitor were the aspiring German Empire. The USA was mostly a rural and very much indebted backwater. Then, the so-called first world war started which people in Germany regarded as a combined attack on them driven by a French desire for Revenge for 1871!
and an English desire to get rid of England’s most successful economic competitor.
In autumn and winter 1914, the war had frozen in place along a line of fortified trenches running from the Belgian cost just westward of Ostend southwards and then eastwards through northern France to the east of the fortress of Verdun and from there southward to the Swiss border. The next three years saw yearly repeated anglo-french attempts to break through this line of trenches with every increasing use of preparatory artillery barrages followed by infantry attacks. This needed an enormous amount of artillery shells as tenthousands to hundredthousands of shots would be fired for any individual run of artillery attacks. Most of these shells were manufactured in the USA because enough workers where available there as the country didn’t participated in the war itself until 1918 and they were paid for by the British and French state borrowing money from American banks. The final outcome was that the USA became the world’s largest creditor and the British empire one of the largest debtors.
This pattern repeated during the second world war where military hardware on the Allied side was by-and-large all produced in the USA and then lent-out on use now pay later terms to the other Allied powers.
Totally agree.
US empire indeed. Britain is just a US state in many ways. Oddly, this American-state joined the US Empire’s German project called the EU. It then disentangled itself to further submit its interests to the War-Virology-NWO-WEF-CIA regime of the US Empire.
NWO is simply US hegemony. The Uketopian war is just an expression of the US empire’s quest to destroy Russia. That is why Vlad the Invader had to get busy in 2022 when poof! the Rona magically disappeared, though morons were stabbinated long after for the fake virus. The UK has played a most useful idiot in its screaming support for the US occupation of the Ukeland, pushing us to a nuclear confrontation. Well done UK.
Rona fascism, the Climate Con, WEF – all the NWO globalist institutions are somehow linked to the US Dystopian NWO
Rule Brittania? Nah, The Fools in Britannia more like it.
There is a completely different take to the last 70 years, and that is that old Europe has been dominating the US in the manner of a dominating wife in a traditional wife role who basically has her husband do all her bidding. (Not a statement about men and women, just an example of one particular archetype.)
The US protects Europe. And if Trump’s narrative is to be believed, Europe fleeces the US economically.
The telltale is the reaction to the US wanting to change the relationship. The old European powers are up in arms and in disarray over the prospect that things aren’t going to carry on as they were.
That is certainly not the reaction you’d expect from the subservient, badly treated side.
‘The US’ shares access to some of its military infrastructure, especially in the area of satellite reconnaissance, with its NATO partners, and the NATO is procedurally geared towards being led by American officers. As always, the American armament industry also plays a prominent role here but in form of providing products in exchange for money. Lastly, the USA still has quite a lot of nukes and thus, maintain the nuclear balance of power, of however questionable usefulness this might be. Both Great Britain and France have their own nuclear deterrent and France isn’t even part of the military structures of the NATO since de Gaulle withdrew from them. Germany, as usual, is prohibited from owning or controlling any nukes. Great reason for Trump to whine about it not having any.
The USA has a standing army of less than 500,000 soldiers and the combined forces of the European NATO states easily outnumber that. Further, Germany, traditionally one of the larger military powers in Europe, is prohibited from maintaining more than a pretty tokenistic military force by the so-called “2 + 4 treaty” where the USA was a part of the 4 (the two were the FRG and the GDR). There’s no “US protection” in this area. A nice example of this would be the Enhanced Forward Presence of the NATO in Eastern Middle Europe: This is exclusively European in all areas where even a remote danger exists while pretty nominal US troops are only in safe positions in in eastern Poland.
Well, you better get in touch with all the European leaders to let them know because they all seem in a panic about the poential withdrawal of US military protection.
You’d better come up with some kind of counter-argument in case you want to prove my statement wrong instead of jumping to making untrue statements about a different topic.
You also still haven’t answered the question what kind protection the UK derives from serving as sort-of an US aircraft carrier for offensive military operations elsewhere.
Innocent ascriber inclined to Micawberomics here. Article and preceding comments amount to – Follow the money, the militarism and the myths?
Sirens? Pah! Ambulances should have bells.
They had the Green Goddesses on a brief return during the Fire strike back in 2002.
Britain’s economic and military decline is the product of an education system biased towards the Arts rather than science, and towards pure science rather than technology and engineering. The madness of Net Zero could only happen in a country run by people who are completely clueless about engineering and technology.
Britain’s participation in the “war on terror” (and the disastrous failure of that war) stems from a common failure to understand islam on the part of both Britain and Americans.
As Julian Assange puts it, the Afghan War was a long protracted money laundering operation by design.
‘Twas ever thus. Back in the 1960s, my father (an engineering lecturer at a Technical College, that later morphed into a Poly offering Business Studies, and is now a University offering a degree course in Comedy Studies) lamented the arts and humanities graduates running the country.
I’d extend “technology and engineering” to encompass trades like electrician and plumber that require technical knowledge and practical skill. Usually well-grounded and in demand, in my experience.
Presumably the book doesn’t deal with the way membership of the EU meanwhile chewed at Britain’s administrative legs making it insecure in standing on its own after Brexit.
Presumably, when Starmer says record investment is coming in to the UK he means more of our home-grown enterprise is being bought by foreigners.
Dear oh dear that ‘special relationship’ notion again. Old Mother Britain (or should it be England?) still thinking of the USA as her little baby, failing to notice the larger number of German and other European populations among its 19 C settlers, and of course numerous other nationalities whose influence on US character and interests is more important.
Like it or not societies need leaders because the majority of any population want no more than secure sources of food, warmth and shelter without having to fight for them. Our British leading class blundered into the 1914 war, destroyed itself and has been replaced by others pursuing personal gain in much larger markets for money, goods and ideas.
If you are running a humongous trade deficit, which we are and have been for decades, you have to export something to pay for those imports. And we have been exporting our industries themselves. We have been selling our country for trinkets.
The alternative is to have a huge devaluation in your currency. Personally I would prefer that. (Sterling does seem to be significantly overvalued, with computer equipment that costs £1,000 in the UK for example, costing $1,000 in the USA.) But people don’t like that. The trinkets get expensive.
There is one other alternative of course. Reciprocal tariffs to keep out artificially cheap imports. But the great and good tell us that could never work so obviously it’s a non-starter.