Welcome to Episode 38 of the Sceptic! On the show this week, host Laurie Wastell speaks to the following guests:
Chris Bayliss, independent consultant and writer, the police response to the Liverpool car incident this week – and the scandal of Commonwealth votes in UK elections.
Sarah Phillimore, barrister and gender-critical campaigner, on how the Bar Standards Board has been forced to scrap its nightmarish diversity guidelines for lawyers.
And for our premium subscribers, Laurie speaks to Eugyppius, the Sceptic’s Germany correspondent author of the substack Eugyppius: a plague chronicle, on Germany’s authoritarian attempts to ban the AfD, the pensioner jailed for a three-word slogan and the truth behind claims of “white genocide” in South Africa.
Donate to the Daily Sceptic to access our premium content. Follow Laurie on X. Follow Chris on X. Follow Sarah on X. Follow Eugyppius on X. Read his latest article on the Daily Sceptic here. Subscribe to the Daily Sceptic YouTube Channel here. Produced by Richard Eldred. Filmed at the Westminster Podcast Studio.
Comedian Andrew Lawrence has had his show cancelled after joking online about the Liverpool parade crash that injured 65 people. The Telegraphhas the story.
Andrew Lawrence, 37, said he would “drive through crowds of people” to get out of the city, just a day after 65 people were injured when a Ford Galaxy ploughed into onlookers at Liverpool FC’s Premier League victory parade.
He wrote on X: “To be fair, if I was in Liverpool, I’d drive through crowds of people to get the f— out of there as well.”
Video footage of the attack showed the Ford Galaxy being driven at speed through supporters on Water Street, with people flung across the bonnet for 200 yards before some were crushed under its wheels when it came to a halt. …
On Wednesday, Caddies, a Southend-on-Sea comedy club, announced that Mr Lawrence’s performance had been cancelled in the wake of his social media post, which it said it did not “condone or support”.
Posting on X, the venue wrote: “The event organisers who had hired our comedy club for the Andrew Lawrence night have cancelled the event.
“We do not condone or support the comment that has been made online, and we send everyone impacted by the tragic events in Liverpool our support and prayers.”
Responding to the announcement on social media, Mr Lawrence wrote: “This venue lost their courage after being bombarded with abuse and threats of violence from online trolls. Understandable, but disappointing.
“I will reschedule for later in the year at a different venue. Southend, sorry for the inconvenience, have a great day.”
Mr Lawrence’s X page displays a location tag with the words “cancelled bin”. He has more than 100,000 followers on the social media site.
Stop Press: Why won’t Andrew Lawrence’s critics just admit that they’re offended? wonders Andrew Doyle on his Substack. Pretending that a comedian is not telling jokes is the most infantile form of criticism.
Residents have accused the BBC of damaging the countryside to film Chris Packham’s Springwatch. The Telegraphhas the story.
The show is broadcasting live from a National Trust estate in the Peak District which is home toone of Britain’s most threatened birds, protected insects and rare plants.
But residents have accused the BBC of “hypocrisy”, saying that the “reality” of the wildlife show is actually to damage the wildlife, including roads built for lorries and a steel plate over a meadow where wildflowers were about to burst into bloom.
Mr Packham is joined by fellow presenter Michaela Strachan at the National Trust’s Longshaw estate for three weeks of live filming for the show’s 20th anniversary.
The first episode, which aired on Monday, opened with the pair praising the habitats and the wildlife at the location, including hares, herds of deer, short-eared owls and ring ouzels.
But resident Christine Laver said that the “reality” of the show behind the scenes was very different.
Tonnes of limestone were tipped into a gritstone landscape, which could cause damage as the materials support different types of habitat.
Other damage saw ditches blocked and tracks “widened by vehicles they were never designed for”, the local council worker said.
She added that there was “a meadow covered in steel plating, just when the wildflowers are coming into bloom” and “dozens of staff and production vehicles”.
“How many tons of CO2 will this lot produce in three weeks, Chris Packham?” she asked.
Ed Miliband has called Tony Blair’s claim that Net Zero is “doomed to fail” defeatist – and admits Reform could boot him out of his own seat. The Telegraphhas more.
In a significant intervention last month, the former prime minister said that Net Zero was “doomed to fail” and that it was wrong that people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”.
The comments prompted fury inside Downing Street and Sir Tony later appeared to back down, saying Sir Keir Starmer’s Net Zero approach was “the right one”.
Speaking on The Rest is Politics podcast, Mr Miliband said: “The report itself, he wrote a foreword to the report, is perfectly unobjectionable… but what is disappointing about Tony’s foreword, and I have huge respect for Tony, is I think it is incredibly defeatist which is not what Tony is. It is really defeatist.” …
Net Zero has emerged as a dividing line between Labour and Reform ahead of the next election.
Mr Miliband also admitted on the podcast that he could lose his seat to the Right-wing party at the next general election.
The Energy Secretary, who has represented Doncaster North since 2005, said Reform was “a threat across the country”.
Asked whether he worried about keeping his seat, Mr Miliband said: “Look, I think Reform are a threat, yeah. I think Reform are a threat across the country.” …
An analysis of this month’s local election results, which saw Reform make sweeping gains, suggested Mr Miliband was set to lose his seat to the party at the next general election.
Electoral Calculus analysed the results from each of the hundreds of wards and used the results to predict what would happen in each of the 145 Westminster constituencies where a vote was held.
The analysis showed that if Doncaster residents were to vote for the same party at a general election as in the local elections, Reform would win 46% of the vote to Mr Miliband’s 29%.
A new analysis by the Australian Government comparing Covid outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated Australians was an opportunity to finally provide evidence for repeated claims of the effectiveness of Australia’s vaccine rollout.
But basic flaws render the analysis virtually useless, adding to the pile of ‘bad data’ that authorities continue to pull from to justify their ongoing promotion of the Covid vaccines.
Until now, federal, state and territory governments have steadfastly refused to release linked real-world data to support their claims of Covid vaccine effectiveness, blocking Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and claiming in court to have erased the data so as not to have to hand it over.
Instead, authorities relied on modelling and overseas studies to support their claims, regardless of whether these findings translate to real-world outcomes on the ground in Australia.
Note that the above graphs show representation in hospital and death outcomes for each dose per million people in the population proportional to vaccination status, not raw number, thereby avoiding the problem of base rate fallacy.
However, NSW Health’s failure to stratify by both vaccination status and age made it impossible to tell if the terrible outcomes for the vaccinated were due to negative vaccine efficacy, as it appeared, or if other factors were at play.2
Coupled with Australia’s record high excess deaths, which started clocking up around the same time as the vaccine rollout, and at least half of which could not be explained away by Covid infections, the lack of hard proof for claims of vaccine efficacy in the Australian population left an information vacuum fast filled by speculation.
Ideally, this new linked data analysis by the AIHW would finally put such speculation to bed. But it doesn’t, and it can’t, due to the same miscategorisation errors that have plagued a multitude of Covid-era studies, making their findings not only unreliable, but potentially dead wrong.
The AIHW analysis: basic miscategorisation errors
The report claims to show that the vaccinated fared much better than their unvaccinated counterparts.
“COVID-19 hospitalisation rates were four times as high in unvaccinated older people than those with three or more doses”, and “across all age groups, COVID-19 case fatality rates were lower among people who were vaccinated,” are key takeaways, for example.
However, these claims cannot possibly be drawn from the AIHW analysis because:
Vaccinations weren’t counted until 14 days after administration
An undetermined number of people with unknown vaccination status were counted as unvaccinated
People who had opted out of sharing their vaccination status with third parties were excluded from the analysis altogether
The data on COVID-19 vaccination status in this report was based on data from the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) in the COVID-19 Register. The AIR is a national register that records vaccines given to all people in Australia, including people enrolled in Medicare or people who had a vaccination record transferred from recognised vaccination providers (such as a general practitioner or community health centre).
This report considered COVID-19 vaccination status based on the total number of COVID-19 vaccination doses recorded 14 days or more prior to a COVID-19 diagnosis. This is to account for a vaccination taking 14 days to become effective, based on studies showing that a single dose of vaccine offers some protection around two weeks after vaccination.
This means that the ‘zero dose’ category in the AIHW analysis included anyone:
Who had not had a dose
Who had one dose up to 13 days prior
Whose vaccination status was not recorded or matched with their record in the AIR – i.e, vaccination status is unknown
Additionally, anyone who had previously opted out of sharing their information with a third party was excluded from the analysis.
I confirmed with the Government that this interpretation of the AIHW methodology for determining dose status and inclusion in the analysis is accurate.
The first error alone – counting the newly vaccinated as unvaccinated (or less vaccinated) – can make a placebo or even an ineffective vaccine appear effective in observational studies, according to mathematician Norman Fenton:
The confounding effect that this and similar miscategorisations can have on misrepresenting vaccine effectiveness has been documented in numerouspeer-reviewedarticles, with effects estimated to be as high as 50% to 70%.
This kind of categorisation error hides any negative effects that may occur in the first 14 days after receiving a shot, while at the same time artificially inflating the incidence of those effects and any other negative outcomes in the group that has fewer or zero doses.
As a majority of Australians received their first vaccine dose before Covid was circulating in the community, this methodological flaw is unlikely to have skewed the Covid hospitalisation and death outcomes in this AIHW analysis too greatly as far as comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated goes.3 It would likely have a greater effect on reported outcomes by dose, where newly boosted people are treated as having fewer shots than they have actually had.
However, the second and third errors – counting some people with unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated, and excluding an undetermined number of others who had opted out of information sharing – are likely to have had a profound effect on the outcome of this particular analysis, maybe even enough to completely invert the reported outcomes.
During the pandemic, most state governments using data from the AIR put hospital patients with unknown vaccination status into the zero dose/unvaccinated category for reporting purposes.
This resulted in headlines to the effect that a third or a quarter of people in hospital were unvaccinated, giving the impression that the unvaccinated were vastly overrepresented in hospitalisation and death statistics, and feeding into the public shaming of the unvaccinated as a burden on the healthcare system.
This was pure misinformation (or disinformation if you believe the reporting error was deliberate).
Simply by looking at the fortnightly Covid surveillance reports of the only state that published Covid data with the zero dose and unknown categories separated out from each other, NSW, it was easy to ascertain a few salient facts:
On any given week, those with unknown vaccination status accounted for around one in four of those hospitalised with Covid (unknowns were a much smaller group in the death data)
Initially (i.e., in the first several months of reporting), the unvaccinated fared worse in Covid hospitalisation outcomes and fairly equal in deaths to the vaccinated
As the rollout progressed, the unvaccinated fared much better compared to their representation in the population, withzero unvaccinated Covid hospitalisations in some weeks
Conversely, those who had received more boosters fared considerably worse, being overrepresented in Covid hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths most reporting weeks
Thanks to X user @LCHF_Matt uploading the fortnightly NSW reports into this live chart, the public was able to visualise these outcomes. What we see is that the unvaccinated are underrepresented on a per capita basis in hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths, while the more shots a person has, the more likely they are to be hospitalised, admitted to ICU or die with Covid.4
Evidently, bucketing unknowns in with the unvaccinated grossly skewed the reported outcomes from other states, giving the false impression that the unvaccinated were flooding hospitals when in reality, after an initial round of infections, they were mostly doing much better than the boosted.
Moreover, excluding an undetermined number of ‘opt-outs’ from the data messes with the denominators for Covid outcomes.
Services Australia, which manages the AIR opt-outs, advised by email that 230,490 people have opted out of third-party information sharing as at May 27th 2025, a number equating to just under 1% of the Australian population.
If we could guarantee that the unknown opt-out subjects were evenly distributed across age and vaccination status, this would not be a problem, but we have no way of knowing the distribution of these opt-outs.
Unknowns: skewing the data
Readers might counter – but if your vaccination status is unknown in the AIR, doesn’t that mean you’re not vaccinated? Wouldn’t those who have been vaccinated have their doses recorded?
Surprisingly, no, based on the only information publicly available:
According to NSW Health surveillance reports at the time (example), anyone whose details were not an “exact match” to their AIR record was allocated ‘unknown’ status. Reasons for lack of an exact match could include: vaccination overseas; having an interstate address or having just moved house; having a misspelled name on hospital forms; a recent name change (e.g. marriage); and unvaccinated people who have no record of vaccination in the AIR. As already mentioned, you can also opt out of allowing third parties to access your vaccination records in the AIR, which means that healthcare providers (like a hospital) won’t be able to ascertain your vaccination status. It is unclear whether these opt-outs were allocated to the unknown category in NSW Health reporting, or if they were excluded
In one week, cross-referencing of NSW data confirmed that all cases in the unknown category were double or triple vaccinated
In the latter quarter of 2021, NSW Health reported that most unknowns would have had at least one dose: “Cases between October and mid-December with an unknown status are likely to have received at least one dose, but their record could not be matched with AIR.” (To read more about these details, with screenshots, click here)
We don’t know how many in the AIHW’s data set were of unknown vaccination status, since under its methodology, the AIHW had no way of identifying this group, aside from excluding the opt-outs.
What we can take from the AIHW report: not a lot
In light of these basic miscategorisation errors, what can the new AIHW report actually show us about Covid outcomes in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated? Not a lot.
These errors alone could account for the fact that the AIHW’s analysis produced the total opposite outcomes to NSW Health data.
Still, even if the AIHW had avoided these errors, the analysis would be of little use or value. The AIHW assessed only hospitalisations and deaths due to and with Covid – loose definitions requiring a Covid diagnosis up to 14 days prior to, or two days after admission for hospitalisations (capturing stays of overnight or longer to exclude same-day discharges indicative of mild disease), and coding indicating that Covid was an underlying or contributing factor for deaths.
However, the appropriate way to assess vaccine outcomes at population level is to analyse all-cause mortality and hospitalisations, as this is the only way to capture non-specific effects of vaccination.
If, for example, Covid vaccines are associated with a 3.7-fold increase in cardiac events, as was the case in the Pfizer trial, then the vaccine cannot be said to improve health outcomes overall in the vaccinated population – the opposite is true. An analysis focusing only on Covid-related hospitalisations and deaths will fail to capture this full picture.
Australian data scientist Andrew Madry has detailed further problems with the AIHW report on his Substack,Datawise.
A house of cards
The AIHW Covid data analysis is just the latest in a parade of reports and modelling studies that are too flawed to tell us anything, yet are reliably used to prop up the Covid vaccine efficacy house of cards.
To be clear, the AIHW has not made a claim for Covid vaccine effectiveness based on its analysis. Per the report,
It is important to note that simple descriptive analyses of COVID-19 vaccination in people with COVID-19 conducted in this report cannot be used to infer effectiveness of vaccination for a range of reasons.
However, it is highly probable that this analysis will be proffered by government departments, academia and professional bodies as evidence of vaccine effectiveness anyway.
In public and media communications, these institutions regularly quote flawed studies or data that, upon further inspection, do not support their claims of ‘evidence’ of Covid vaccine efficacy.
In Australia, a Monash University (NSW) modelling study of the Delta and Omicron waves claiming to show that the Covid vaccination campaign saved approximately 20,000 lives in NSW alone is frequently wheeled out by the Actuaries Institute and government departments as evidence of the effectiveness of Australia’s Covid vaccine rollout.
However, this study made a similar miscategorisation error to the AIHW analysis, categorising anyone vaccinated as having ‘no effective dose’ until 21 days after administration of a shot.
Substacker Alison Bevege documents other problems with this study, not least that the authors confused case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR), thereby grossly overestimating the deadliness of the Covid waves in their modelling.
Another widely-touted study based on South Australia Health data claimed – without qualification – that the unvaccinated were five times more likely to die from Covid. But upon inspection, the only deaths under the age of 60 were in the vaccinated, and most of the deaths occurred in those aged 80 and older (i.e. around or above Australia’s average life expectancy of 81 and 85 for men and women, respectively).
On the world stage, a modelling study published in the Lancet claiming to show that Covid vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in the first year of the rollout has been methodically debunked by researcher Raphael Lataster (on Substack as Okay Then News) in a metacritique published in the Journal of Independent Medicine, yet this will almost certainly not stop authorities and media from continuing to boldly make this unsupported claim.
In email communications, an Australian state health department recently referred me to another AIHW report as evidence that Covid vaccines could not have contributed to excess deaths because the report showed that Australia had a comparatively low excess death rate compared to other countries for 2020-2022.
Indeed, Australia had negative excess deaths in 2020, when our federal and state governments shut us off from the rest of the world, put most of the population under house arrest and trashed our economy. Madry attributes the lower 2020 figure also to a higher influenza burden the year prior, in 2019.
However, using 2020 data – when there were no vaccines – as evidence that vaccines do not cause excess deaths, is patently absurd. Furthermore, once the vaccines were introduced, the increase in Australia’s excess mortality rate became such an undeniable phenomenon that the Senate conducted an inquiry into the matter.
Show us the data
Perhaps there is data that can show how effective the Covid vaccine rollout was in Australia (and beyond).
To prove this, all authorities need to do is publish hospitalisation and all-cause mortality data stratified by age, vaccination status and comorbidities. This data should be made available at record level, de-identified.
No Australian state or federal authority has ever done this, leaving many to wonder – why not?
The AIHW data is available for download, but as it is incomplete, aggregated and incorrectly categorised as discussed in this article, it is of little use in the form in which it has been presented. Researchers may apply to access the data to perform their own analyses, but projects and any pending publication of works must be approved by the AIHW and “relevant data custodians”, per a response received from an email enquiry to the AIHW. We can probably guess what kinds of projects will and won’t be approved.
In Queensland (QLD), the Government is set to destroy a globally significant Covid vaccine study biobank that could presumably further support health authorities’ claims of vaccine effectiveness. Yet the QLD Government prefers to destroy the biospecimens and permanently archive the data than to keep the study going and publish the amazing results for the world to see.
And so, Australians are left at square one.
Authorities say the Covid vaccines were very effective, but refuse to produce the data to prove it. If belief requires blind faith, that’s not science – that’s a cult.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnett’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Electric vehicles are shedding over half their value within just two years, driven by a wave of steep discounts from carmaker. The Telegraphhas more.
A typical EV now retains only 49% of its value after 24 months, a sharp decline from 83% as recently as 2022, according to Cox Automotive.
For a new car bought for £40,000, this would translate to a value of just £19,600 after two years.
The 51% depreciation figure compares with an average of only 30% for diesel and petrol cars, as shown in the bar chart below
Cox Automotive said the faster rate of depreciation among “nearly-new” EVs was being driven by the discount wars being fought by manufacturers, which have been aggressively cutting prices to help them meet Net Zero sales targets.
Under the so-called zero emission vehicle (ZEV) rules which are mandated by the Government, 28% of new car sales are meant to be electric this year with the target set to rise gradually until it reaches 80% in 2030.
The falling value of EVs is also being accelerated by the growing range of cheaper models available on the market.
The average price of a second-hand EV fell from £39,849 to £24,908 between April 2022 and April 2025, according to Autotrader. …
Brands made price cuts worth £4 billion on new cars last year, equivalent to a discount of about £11,000 per car, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
“What has it all been for?” we found ourselves discussing last night over dinner. We realised our 18 year-old son is now on A-Level exam leave meaning his full-time state education has finished. All of it. No more lessons. No more school. Save exams, it’s all over. His little brother was most disgruntled. “What not never again?” The 18 year-old smiled and kept eating.
We decided to conduct a skills audit. It’s something I do with the children – who are not in full-time education – I teach. I find out what they can and can’t do and help them in the things they can’t – telling the time, boiling an egg, crossing the road, that sort of thing. I find that with competence, confidence grows. We did the same with the 18 year-old: what exactly has the British state education system taught or not taught him? It was an illustrative experience and one I recommend other parents and policy makers carry out.
He began his education in a London primary with 500 pupils speaking 45 different languages, before we moved out to the countryside. Year six was spent at a tiny village school, years seven to 11 at a market town comprehensive and then A-levels at a cathedral city college. All of the schools were variously agreed by Ofsted to be good or outstanding. What, after fourteen years of (save lockdown) full-time state education, has he learned? We narrowed it down to five skills: how to read, how to write, how to do maths, having friends and passing exams.
Though getting a good grade in the GCSE, he cannot speak, write or understand Spanish. His knowledge of all the countries and flags of the world comes from Kahoot! quizzes that he and his mates use to compete against each other. The books he reads are ones we have at home. Any knowledge of history derives from a book about battles we keep in the downstairs loo.
The other skills he has (keeping goal, keeping wicket, fishing, shooting, map reading, bashing bits of wood together to make things, playing the violin, mowing the lawn, writing a book about badgers, a hopeful sense of morality and ethics) he learned outside school, either at clubs, with a private music teacher, or taught by my husband or grandparents. He has so far resisted learning from me how to: cook, clean, basic DIY, financial management – deeming none of it yet necessary.
Are five skills – how to read, how to write, how to do maths, having friends and how to pass exams, a sufficient return for 14 years of education? Could he have learned all this in perhaps two or three years? He’s not a moron, so in other circumstances, could he have learned Ancient Greek and Latin, even Spanish? Could he have learned how to cook? How to maintain a car? Basic plumbing and electrical work? How to erect a fence? Euclidian geometry? How to touch-type? How to build a wall? Household budgeting? [Will the worry of failing as a parent never end?]
Great fanfare is made about the Tories at least getting education right while messing up everything else. With an emphasis on a knowledge-based curriculum and constant testing, standards across the board were driven up in England – the PISA league tables rank us globally as 11th in maths, up from 17th in 2018, and 13th in reading, up from 14th in 2018. Yet at our son’s comprehensive, 18% of the cohort still failed to achieve a pass (grade 4) at Maths or English GCSE. If the skills that our son, who did manage a nice string of GCSEs, look meagre, what of the children who can’t even manage that? Record numbers of 16-24 year-olds (over 900,000) are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETS); one in five people between the ages of eight and 25 have a mental health difficulty. Similarly, the Institute of Student Employers reports a declining work readiness of school and university leavers. I’m not sure we should be so keen to trumpet this as a policy ‘success’.
Perhaps the answer then is a skills-based curriculum as pioneered by the devolved government in Wales? Alas, the skills are not those that would be useful, such as first aid or understanding debt and compound interest, but rather vague skills such as literacy, numeracy and digital competence. Wales and Scotland have both dropped down the league tables. And anyway, identifying the right skills seems fraught with difficulty – everyone was convinced a few years ago that children should be taught how to code, but now AI has that sorted. Same with touch-typing – how useful in an age of voice-recognition software? It’s somehow deemed dumbing down to teach cookery and plumbing, and elitist to teach ancient languages or to expect children to learn great poetry off by heart. Into this paralysis comes… what? Practice papers on repeat to pass exams.
“Well, if he didn’t learn much, perhaps I should stop going to school,” piped up the younger brother during the discussion. The 18 year-old stopped eating and said, “School was mostly fun… lunchtime football was brilliant… and when I won that fight… and the school plays… and the trip to Sicily where we were supposed to study volcanoes but it was too hot so we didn’t.”
And indeed he is right — school, or education more widely, is about planting seeds of friendship, curiosity, of knowing where to look if you want to learn. The joy my son experienced in school plays and on the football pitch can be taken and replicated hopefully throughout his life. Aristotle had it that the purpose of education was for the individual to develop virtue in order to live a flourishing life and contribute to a thriving society.
As the old quote says: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a flame to be kindled.”
Perhaps in all the opprobrium that is thrown against Bridget Phillipson, we should all be more honest about what school is about. Schools are, alas, not teaching children practical skills to get on in life, either as a flourishing individual or as one able to contribute to the body politic – otherwise there would be a curriculum whereby they would all learn how to batch-cook five nutritious meals, learn how to keep and stay fit and healthy, become fluent in a foreign language and a musical instrument, learn by heart Pericles’ funeral oration, learn the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance), understand how and why Britain is as it is, or learn how to stop leaks and change plugs. While I long for schools to kindle that flame of learning in all children and to teach actual skills as well as knowledge, I do have a sneaky suspicion that their real purpose is mostly to help children socialise and to keep them elsewhere so their parents can work.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for: FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.
“The hard-Left are back, and ready to seize power” – John McDonnell is toying with the idea of a putsch – or failing that, a green, socialist, Islamist alliance, writes Paul Goodman in the Telegraph.
“‘I will make Bank of England hold Bitcoin’” – Nigel Farage has promised to pass crypto-friendly legislation and establish a bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England if he comes into government, says CoinDesk.
“Foreigners claim £1 billion a month in benefits” – Benefits claims by households with at least one foreign national have doubled to nearly £1 billion a month in the past three years, says the Telegraph.
“Police let half of all class A drug users walk free” – Some 48.1% of people caught in possession of hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, were let off without any criminal sanction, Home Office data analysed by the Telegraph reveals.
“The drug crime chaos on Sadiq Khan’s doorstep” – As drug crime rages in Tooting, locals slam Sadiq Khan for pushing cannabis decriminalisation while chaos reigns on his doorstep, writes Samuel Montgomery in the Telegraph.
“Why did LBC tick off Robert Jenrick?” – On Substack, Charlotte Gill suggests LBC’s jab at Robert Jenrick over his unauthorised Tube video was less a scoop and more a broadcast on behalf of Sadiq Khan – whose pals at Global run LBC and profit from TfL.
“Wynne Evans dropped by BBC after ‘inappropriate’ Strictly remark” – The Welsh opera singer Wynne Evans says that he has been dropped by the BBC after using “inappropriate language” during the launch of the Strictly Come Dancing tour, according to the Standard.
“The Covid Inquiry rumbles on” – On the TTE Substack, Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson slam the Covid Inquiry as a £136,000-a-day farce led by clueless experts.
“America is coming for Britain’s social media censors” – If Washington is now looking to apply the thumbscrews to senior British officials pushing social media censorship, it has plenty to choose from, says our own Laurie Wastell in the Spectator.
“EU interventionism in national elections: who’s next?” – In Brussels Signal, Rodrigo Ballester warns that the EU is turning national elections into battlegrounds for ideological control – and Hungary’s 2026 vote may be its boldest power grab yet.
“Trump announces surprise White House event with Elon Musk” – President Trump has announced that he will hold a press conference with beleaguered billionaire Elon Musk to mark his last day as a special advisor, reports the Mail.
“The derangement of Harvard” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray argues that Harvard has become a deranged, hyper-political institution more interested in ideological posturing than academic excellence.
“Legal action by doctors on trans care is vital” – In Gript, Niamh Uí Bhriain highlights how Drs O’Shea and Moran are dragging the Irish Health Service Executive to court for risking children’s health with activist-driven, unregulated trans care.
“Imane Khelif banned from competing in women’s World Boxing events” – Olympic champion Imane Khelif has been banned from competing in all future World Boxing events in the women’s category unless the Algerian can provide proof of being biologically female, reports CBS News.
“Witch ‘thrown off druid training course’ in trans row” – A practising witch claims she was thrown off a druid training course over accusations by a member of the UK Pagan Federation that she was “transphobic”, reports the Times.
“Equity for all” – In the Critic, Theodore Dalrymple takes aim at progressive corporate Britain.
“The real reason why academics write in gobbledegook” – In the Spectator, Patrick West argues that academics write in impenetrable jargon not out of clumsiness, but to signal ideological allegiance and social status.
“Striking a chord” – In Takimag, Theodore Dalrymple finds himself having to sit through a thoroughly awful impromptu piano performance at a French railway station.
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