Elon Musk has said Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” over Labour’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into historic sexual abuse by grooming gangs in Oldham. The Telegraph has more.
Elon Musk attacked the decision as “disgraceful” and Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said a full national inquiry into rape gangs was “long overdue”.
Jess Phillips, Labour’s Safeguarding Minister, insisted it was “for Oldham council alone” to decide whether to launch an investigation into alleged exploitation between 2011 and 2014.
A 2022 report found children in Oldham were failed by agencies that were meant to protect them amid alleged grooming by “predominantly Pakistani offenders” in council homes, shisha bars and by taxi drivers.
Oldham Council’s Labour group last year agreed to support an independent inquiry, writing twice to Ms. Phillips urging the Home Office to support this work.
The Minister replied: “It is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the Government to intervene…
“I welcome the council’s resolution to do so, as set out in your letter, and to continue its important work with victims and survivors.”
Responding to a report on Ms. Phillips’s remarks on his social media platform X, Mr. Musk claimed that she “deserves to be in prison”.
Mrs Badenoch also shared her view on the platform on Thursday and said: “The time is long overdue for a full national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal.
“Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots. 2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice.”
In further posts, Mr. Musk accused Ms. Phillips of a “disgraceful” decision and suggested she had rejected an inquiry in order to shield Sir Keir from blame.
He continued: “In the U.K., serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service’s approval for the police to charge suspects.
“Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008–2013.
“Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Stamer [sic]. The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Starmer [head of the CPS at the time].”
Sir Keir ordered a comprehensive review of CPS guidelines on sexual exploitation as Chief Prosecutor in 2012, admitting the service had failed a generation of girls who were abused. …
Sir Keir gave the green light to prosecuting the Rochdale grooming case, the first of its kind, and said in 2023 he was in favour of “anything we can do to crack down on these cases”.
A Net Zero ‘nudge unit’ that used scare tactics during the Covid pandemic has received a £100,000 contract from the Government to encourage the public to take up heat pumps. The Telegraphhas the story.
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has received a £100,000 contract from the Government as Ministers aim to deliver an extra 300,000 home upgrades this year.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, plans to scrap noise restrictions on heat pumps and lift the limit on their size in a push to expand their use.
The team was launched in 2010 under Lord Cameron’s administration in an effort to design policy interventions informed by human behaviour and has widely been viewed as a success in Whitehall.
However, Simon Ruda, a behavioural scientist who co-founded the unit, suggested in 2022 that scare tactics had been misused during Covid lockdowns to ensure the public complied with the rules.
While he defended behavioural science for driving improvements in policy, Mr. Ruda said he was concerned the “level of fear willingly conveyed on the public” was the “most egregious and far-reaching mistake” of the coronavirus response.
The BIT’s work during the pandemic included an online experiment conducted in March 2020, the month of the first lockdown, to test which public health messages the public would remember.
Now the unit is expected to conduct similar research on heat pumps after being tasked with combatting what the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) calls “misinformation”.
Toby Park, the Head of Climate, Energy and Sustainability at BIT, claimed too many “myths” exist around the technology and that negative perceptions were a “barrier” to expanding their use.
Thanks to the influence of Victorian and Edwardian era writers of spooky tales like M.R. James and Charles Dickens, Christmas in the British Isles has long been considered an apt time for the telling of ghost stories. In Dickens’s own best effort, A Christmas Carol, he has his Ghost of Christmas Future appear to Scrooge dressed eerily like so:
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible, save one outstretched hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
Dickens’s festive fable was written way back in 1843. Were he describing the Ghost of Christmas Future’s likely attire today in 2024, he may well have preferred to see him clad in djellaba, keffiyeh, taqiya or turban. Come to think of it, a faceless entity dressed all in black from head-to-toe does sound rather like someone wearing a burka.
Ebenezer Scrooge bows down in dhimmitude and confronts the grim reality of Britain’s 21st century demographic future.
Urfan Legends
During the pre-Christmas trial of Urfan Sharif, the Pakistan-born Muslim found guilty of abusing his 10-year-old daughter Sara Sharif to death at his home in Surrey, Urfan briefly attempted to blame his wife Beinash Batool for the child’s fate, accusing the wicked stepmother of suffering from demonic possession caused by maleficent effects of witchcraft. The natural response of most white Brits to this news will have been to automatically presume Urfan was simply trying to pin all responsibility on his wife via an outrageous and unlikely lie.
Alternatively, if you look at his full testimony, possibly Urfan was only speaking metaphorically: “She’s very, very crazy when she goes into that mindset [of committing acts of violence]. She doesn’t stop. … Her family said, ‘she is possessed [like] someone has done black magic on her’.”
But there is a third possibility: that Mr. Sharif actually believed this magical curse was real.
Belief in demons is a required tenet of faith in Islam. These particular shape-shifting entities are known as djinn in the plural, or djinni in the singular, better known here as ‘genies’, and often presumed to be merely fantasy figures from Arab fairy tales. Yet the Koran specifically says Allah made three kinds of rival intelligent beings at the moment of Creation, humans from clay, angels from light, and djinn from “smokeless fire”, and all true Muslims are supposed to believe it.
Magicians and evil viziers (and certain high-level Pokémon trainers) are meant to be able to control and send djinn out against their enemies, as Urfan Sharif implied was the case with his own wife. Once upon a time, in a now vanished fairy tale kingdom known as White Great Britain, such facts were considered mere exotica, of little practical matter to the average citizen of these isles. In the era of mass Muslim immigration, things are now rather different.
Alongside other formerly alien problems like jihadist terrorism, forced marriages and honour killings, very few citizens have probably ever stopped to consider one other piece of unwelcome cultural baggage unreconstructed Muslims might be trailing along into this country after them, too: their demons, fairies, ghouls and ghosts.
Halaloween Horrors
Champions of mass immigration often argue that, as 1,001 nights and even more pass by, immigrants and their offspring gradually adapt to British life and become even more native than the natives. Really? As modern mass communications with the ummah, and sheer density of numbers, conspire to make conquered citadels like Luton more Islamic than Islamabad, it is pretty easy for foreign imports to close their eyes, make three wishes and pretend they’re still living in djinn country.
A 2011 study on behalf of the Royal College of Psychiatrists compared rates of belief in djinn in Leicester and the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka. Remarkably, it was found that more Muslims in the study’s sample believed in genies in the dread crisp-demon Gary Lineker’s hometown (80%) than in the presumed genieville central of Dhaka (73%). Rates of belief in djinn possession were roughly equal, at 58% in Leicester to 61% in Dhaka, but more U.K. crisp-munchers than Bangladeshi poppadom-crunchers thought evil genies could be responsible for a sick individual’s mental health problems, at 52% to 44%. Accordingly, 23% of Leicester Muslims thought doctors should really be trained in how to go about dispelling djinn.
I bet you didn’t realise one fringe drain upon NHS resources these days may be the combatting of unclean sand-demons and literal dust-devils. I am unaware of any financial estimates of what it costs to seal such beings safely back inside their bottles, but there are a surprising number of U.K.-published clinical papers online providing advice to medics about what to do when a mental patient turns up claiming to be possessed by an invisible escapee from the lamp of Aladdin. These do not just appear in weird self-published tracts from the Tower Hamlets Magic Carpet Association, but prestigious outlets like the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
One typical study appeared in a 2013 edition of the Psychiatrist, published by Cambridge University Press. Here, a case history is given of a Pakistani-born female legal secretary residing in London, whose husband started suffering generic mental problems culminating in him beginning to beat his wife. His excuse was that djinn were attacking him in the night; he would dream of “strange creatures of all sizes and shapes” before awaking to feel “as if somebody was choking him by sitting on his chest”, classic symptoms of a genuine physiological condition known as “sleep paralysis“, interpreted through the supernatural lens of Islam.
The man went to a GP, who prescribed paroxetine. The drug did him little good. So he resorted to a local Islamic healer called a raqi (not to be confused with an Iraqi), a sort of Muslim witch-doctor, who diagnosed that his cousin in Pakistan had targeted him with “malevolent witchcraft”. The raqi suggested ingesting olive oil and reciting verses from the Koran, a practice known as ruqa (here’s a BBC video of such treatment) and the possessee recovered.
Surgical Spirits
The Psychiatrist paper correctly notes that broad general mental conditions like “dissociative states”, being internal and subjective, are culturally conditioned. Spirit possession is an internationally recognised psychiatric disorder, which manifests differently in different lands, “a culturally specific way of displaying symptoms of psychosis”. It is just that, in today’s increasingly secular West, the ‘demons’ now blamed will generally be metaphorical ones, not spiritual ones.
A depressed white Brit might blame his brain chemistry, be given a placebo sugar-pill by his GP, and go away happy and well. A depressed U.K.-resident Pakistani Muslim might blame an evil genie, be given an equally placebo-like dose of ruqa from a raqi, and leave equally happy and healthy.
If such exorcisms really do operate like placebos – which studies show are often genuinely effective – then it actually makes some clinical sense for ‘possessed’ Muslims to be given them on the NHS. But if so, what will hard-pressed GPs actually find themselves doing? Very possibly they will be trained to perform special acts in which the healer recites Koranic demon-busting verses into a glass of water, then hands it to the patient to drink, so he or she can swallow the atomically altered holy words as a soul-cleansing medicine. Cheaper than prescribing Valium, I suppose.
But, of course, the occasional doctor is still not yet actually a Pakistani him or herself, not even in 2024, and many patients may not trust an infidel to do the job. Thus the Psychiatrist paper recommends any remaining white men in white coats should henceforth realise that “members of the patient’s own religious community should be consulted in relation to these issues”. Does this mean that, some day soon, GPs will be prescribing visits to imams and witch-doctors, free on the NHS? Maybe this is already happening, who knows?
Furthermore, the Psychiatrist advises that “Islamic religious professionals can… educate [actual] health professionals about the importance of religious factors in psychiatric disorders” as “we emphasise the importance of [doctors] embracing the service user’s rationale of illness for them to accept medication”. Translated, this sounds very much like: “In future, sorcerers should be brought into medical schools to teach trainees why genies exist.”
Some may consider this a waste of public money and NHS time. Others may discern double standards at work, in that Covid-sceptics and adherents of alternative medicines are often officially dismissed as purveyors of “harmful misinformation”, whereas those actual literal witch-doctors who tell their mentally ill patients they have genies living inside their skulls are somehow to be embraced as tellers of profound culturally sacred truths. Why is one quack (as the NHS would consider such people to be) more equal than others? Because the lucky one favoured is a Muslim quack or from another minority culture, of course!
Futile Exorcises
There are other potential dangers to tacit NHS-sanctioned belief in Islamic black magic. If doctors treat djinn possession as a literally real condition, then it lends further credence to belief in it amongst the wider Muslim community. Thus, cases like that of the pregnant Pakistani bride Naila Mumtaz, who was seemingly killed during a djinn exorcism gone wrong by her husband and his family in Birmingham in 2009, may become more common.
Plus, there is evidence Muslim patients turn up at mental health clinics in a worse and later stage of madness than the average white patient does, partially because they may have wasted years asking an imam to chant spells into a bottle of Evian rather than seeking proper qualified help.
Even worse, when it is noticed that some abused wives are being beaten, their Muslim husbands sometimes try a variant of Urfan Sharif’s recent excuse, by telling gullible friends and relatives that the poor woman is simply possessed by a djinn, who makes her beat, bite, scratch and burn herself – the husband has zero to do with any of it, honest, imam.
Also, some witch-doctor cures sound potentially medically harmful. One treatment is to dose patients up with laxative senna leaves, so they can quite literally shit the demon out, thereby combating black magic with brown magic.
Panic on the Streets of Birmingham
The NHS helping belief in djinn possession become endemic is not a good idea, as right across the Muslim world bizarre mass social panics often break out revolving around the creatures. This is an edited extract of a genuine story from Kenyan newspaper, the Standard, appearing on June 30th 2008, under the headline ‘Evil Exploits of the Invisible People’:
In the coastal town of Mombasa, the talk is about spirits (djinn) that take on human and animal forms. … Some complained of having been strangled, others of having been slapped. … A tour of the Old Town reveals many beautiful houses that are unoccupied, a situation that residents attribute to the houses being haunted… strange tales are told of people being raped or sodomised by invisible beings. An old man who lives under the Mtwapa bridge claims to have… witnessed many… people being sodomised or raped by invisible persons. … “You see… clothes being detaching from the body but you don’t see the person removing them. The next moment, the victim is crying in pain,” says… Bamburi resident Ali Mahmud. Mahmud says he once saw his own girlfriend being raped by people he could not see and that his efforts to save her were fruitless as the beings were too powerful. Residents of Bamburi still recall an incident in 2001 when a person believed to be a djinn was turned into a cat that was then trapped by a magician from Tanzania. The cat had its head and neck in a pot buried in the ground… when it was finally released it turned into a human being and disappeared into a nearby cemetery. … Sheikh Juma Ngao, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, tells all doubting Thomases that djinn are real. … They can turn into anything – a human being, an animal or a shoe. … He talks of certain extremely wealthy families that have one of their children who is either mentally handicapped or just locked up as a prisoner in one of the rooms. “Those are families that use djinn to get wealth and the locked up family members are the sacrifices to the spirits,” says Ngao. … He claims some bus companies offer their passengers as sacrifices in grisly accidents to acquire more wealth. … And, for all you know, even this newspaper you are reading might be a djinn!
So might the e-device you are currently perusing the Daily Sceptic upon – except, if you believe that, you’re not really much of a sceptic at all.
Sheer entertainment value apart, perhaps it is not entirely desirable for the National Health Service and Royal College of Psychiatrists to be encouraging mass belief in such things in the name of ‘tolerance’. Will similar scenes one day play themselves out on the streets of Batley, Birmingham or Blackburn? Maybe they already have.
One of the most common settings for outbreaks of mass hysteria is in schools, and there was a tantalising reference to one in a 2016 Asian Imagereport on a Derby-based “Djinn Buster” named Ahmed Ali, who recalled the time 20 possessed schoolgirls from the same unnamed Islamic girls’ school in Lancashire visited his madrassa: “They were all possessed by really nasty, aggressive djinn who were spitting and swearing. Their school had been built on land that had been abandoned for years [djinn are meant to dwell on wasteland]. It was no coincidence that so many girls from one school came to us.”
How often is this kind of thing now happening, under the official radar, across the United Kingdom?
Foreign Resident Evil
Things have now got so bad even the natives are giving up the ghost and converting to Islam. Examining alleged eyewitness descriptions of djinn behaviour down the centuries, they often just sound like what Westerners today call poltergeists – hurling objects around invisibly, producing voices and noises from thin air, or appearing in ghastly apparitional form. Such similarities have been noted by several paranormal researchers, who have drawn the conclusion all Western ghosts and demons must actually be djinn, and that this therefore means Islam is the One True Religion.
One such individual is Michael J. Hallowell, a noted ghost-hunter from North-East England, co-author of the 2008 book The South Shields Poltergeist, who if he was publishing it today may call it The South Shields Djinni. Hallowell’s many encounters with uncanny entities down the years finally contributed towards him converting to Islam – you can watch videos of him, complete with long beard and religious garb, giving learned lectures about why so many of today’s British ghosts now figuratively bend towards Mecca.
Some Left-wingers think we should embrace this wonderful opportunity for yet more cultural diversification – see my previous article about a bizarre U.S. academic named Dr. Andrea KItta who thinks British ghosts are “too white” and so need to be replaced with black and Muslim ones. Dr. Kitta takes her students on woke ghost-walk trips to London, lecturing them thus:
Even when I take students abroad to London to talk about ghosts there, the ghosts are white. London, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, is filled with white ghosts. The ghosts of queens and princes… theatre ghosts, but all white ghosts. … The ghosts of London often match what the students think of London: all double-decker buses, royalty and beefeaters.
Dr. Kitta should take her students on a spook-hunting trip to a Londonistan GP’s surgery these days instead. The local spirits may by now be somewhat more to her taste.
James Titcomb, writing in the Telegraph, has spotted a hugely regressive factor involving electric cars. And the faster the Government pushes us towards EVs, the more drastic the consequences. The problem is the driveway divide which he discovered after buying his own EV:
I have an advantage in the electric transition: the humble driveway. Unlike almost half of the country who live in terraced housing or flats, my dwelling has a dedicated parking spot where I have been able to install a wall-mounted charger.
In a petrol-powered world, the driveway divide did not matter. Whatever one’s domestic circumstances, we all had to queue up at the forecourt and pump fuel into our vehicle every few hundred miles. In the electric age, meanwhile, driveway ownership divides motorists into haves and have-nots.
There are obvious convenience benefits to being able to charge up domestically. Leaving the house with the equivalent of a full tank every day and never having to visit a petrol station easily outweighs the moderate inconvenience of charging on the occasional longer journeys.
But the main advantage of charging from one’s own house is financial. On today’s smart overnight tariff, charging a battery from empty to full costs less than a fiver. In comparison, filling up an average family petrol car costs £75, according to the RAC Foundation. A full tank will go further than a charged battery, but the difference is still huge on a per-mile basis: around £2 to drive 100 miles in the EV, compared to £14 for petrol.
This has always been the promise of electric cars, even for those unconvinced by the environmental factor: while the car’s sticker price may be higher, you will save on running costs in the long-run.
That calculation, however, has completely broken down for those who are unable to plug in at home. While the rise of smart meters and EV-only energy tariffs mean charging at home costs almost nothing, soaring electricity prices have led the price of public charging to hit an all-time high.
Powering up at an ultra-rapid station costs the equivalent of £28 for 100 miles – almost double that of a petrol car – and this has risen significantly in the last two years. Slower chargers, such as those placed in lampposts by councils, are slightly cheaper, but not by enough to make EVs financially viable. Supermarkets and other shops that once offered free charging as a way to get people in the door have stopped doing so.
When electric cars are both more expensive to buy and more expensive to run, owning them makes little sense. No wonder, then, that the EV-owning class is disproportionately those with dedicated parking – 93% of people who have given up their petrol-powered vehicle have a home charger.
When those without a driveway – estimated at up to 40% of the population – have no financial incentive to own an electric car, it should not be a surprise that ownership is so far behind official targets.
Something Titcomb doesn’t mention is the prospect of a whole new type of protocol also. EV owners who’ve driven a long way will turn at up relatives’ or friends’ houses expecting to plug in on arrival, rather than filling up at a local petrol station, won’t they? Adult children rolling up for the weekend will do the same. It’d be as if in the old days the host was expected to have half a dozen cans of petrol waiting in the porch.
This means well-heeled homeowners with offroad parking and plug-in facilities, despite being rinsed for free volts by their guests, can offer electrical hospitality. After all, you could hardly send your guests off to pay vastly more at a commercial charger, could you? Meanwhile, those without drives will have no choice but to send Uncle Jack and Auntie Nancy off to some rip-off plug-in facility at a nearby shopping centre. Unless of course they’ve had the good sense to hang on to their petrol car.
It’s another way EV cars and the mandates could divide Britain even more than it already is. And, big surprise, now it’s a Labour Government doing everything it can to accelerate the imbalance.
Titcomb concludes:
One way or another, the pavement tax will need addressing before the majority of the population is forced on to EVs. If not, electric car mandates will become even more unpopular than they are now.
Stop Press: Britain will become a “laughing stock” unless hybrid cars are banned from 2030, Net Zero lobbyists have said. According to Electric Vehicles U.K. (EVUK), allowing some hybrid cars to remain on sale after 2030 would be a “catastrophic misstep” and hold back the rise of EVs. It comes after the Government pledged to bring forward the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035 to 2030 but made an exception for certain hybrid vehicles to remain on sale.
It is tremendous to see 2025 starting off with yet more questions in the Times about the devastating effect lockdowns had on children. James Kirkup writes brilliantly: “What sort of country launches a multi-year policy to inflict lifelong damage on children, then forgets all about it?” I want to issue James Kirkup a note of caution however: mea culpas will be a long time coming, not necessarily for reasons of official cover-up or collective amnesia but because the errors are simply too severe to reckon with yet. The faults surrounding the harmful activities of 2020-21 lie in the grave immoralities of ignorance, cowardice, an imprudent sense of the carnivalesque, petty tyranny, and neglect of our basic human duty to care, faults that are too difficult for most of us – both as a society and individuals – to admit to, let alone apologise for.
Ignorance
Let us start with the first of the grave sins (for want of a better word) of lockdown: ignorance. There was an illuminating comment beneath Kirkup’s piece from a gentleman who said he “ran a school” at the time. He explained he was told by the local authority the school hall might have to be used as a morgue and that a GP had told him as a 60 year-old man working with large numbers he was at a higher risk of dying. This explanation reminds me of a conversation I had at the time with a teacher friend who was very reluctant to return to school before the eventual third lockdown in January 2021. I asked about her concerns and she said very simply: “I might die. Hundreds and thousands of teachers might die.” We who are sceptical of lockdowns must always remember the genuine fear that gripped the hearts of the majority during this time. Whether confected or not, the fear that was felt was genuine. Where my tolerance for this position ends however is the inability of the two teachers, and thousands others like them, to then take the next required step: research to discover if their fears were well founded. I remember showing my teacher friend graphs from the Spectator data hub and that thing on the BBC where you could see how many cases per 100,000 were in your area, evidence about risk of death for all age groups – figures that demonstrated to me her fear was entirely misplaced. My teacher friend looked at these websites and said: “This is too complicated for me, I’m just going to do what I’m told.” Will the gentleman who “ran a school” ever admit that his inability to investigate things for himself, to question his GP and local authority advice, has harmed a generation of his schoolchildren in his supposed care?
Cowardice
James Kirkup admits his own cowardice, writing: “I’m sorry I didn’t go further but I was afraid that going full throttle against one element of lockdown would put me on the wrong side of what felt like the divide between scientific orthodoxy and oddball contrarianism.” I wonder how many others involved in the Government of the time, or think tanks, or writing for national newspapers, thought as James Kirkup did, but did not speak out? Until more admit to their own cowardice around this situation then nothing will significantly shift in this debate. But honestly, what grown adult will readily remember, let alone admit to being frightened of questioning the advice of Matt Hancock or Boris Johnson?
An imprudent sense of the carnivalesque
An underestimated element of grand historical events is the manner in which people get swept up in them thanks to the drama, the shaking up of otherwise dreary lives. Dominic Sandbrook described it brilliantly in a Rest is History episode about the fishwives march to Versailles in 1789 – many got involved for the sheer hell of it, a hankering for the carnivalesque. We all know people like this, who run along with things for the ‘drama’. I class Dominic Cummings entirely in this category – finally this was his moment, his destiny to achieve something, to save the country from flu. He ran around shouting PANIC, thrusting around his scribbled-on white board, flamboyantly wearing his surgeon’s mask. And there were thousands like him in positions of authority who got simply carried away with the carnivalesque elements of lockdown. My son’s local school bought everyone a school-branded face mask, local women volunteered to swab children in the hall, people made a big fuss about cancelling events because they’d been ‘pinged’. The whole paraphernalia of lockdown: the masks, the hand sanitiser, social distancing stickers, that app, self-isolating, Covid tests, scotch eggs, bubbles at school, the tier restrictions, queuing up in out-of-town carparks to visit the vaccine centre, and so on, provided elements of the extraordinary in ordinary lives. It is too embarrassing for grownups to remember they succumbed to such irrational carryings on.
Petty tyranny
I’m thinking here about our lovely cricket coach, a more decent man you couldn’t hope to meet, who taped up the local cricket nets so they couldn’t be used by children during lockdown. Or the gentlemen who videoed my sons playing in the local park and told them he would call the police if they didn’t go home – I still see him around today behaving like a normal person with his family. Or the otherwise blameless churchwarden who stuck green tape on the medieval tiles to enforce the two-metre rule. There will be millions of people who committed small acts of petty tyranny. Some did it with the intention of ‘helping’, others did it with relish, and this is a dark part of human nature into which I don’t think we are yet ready to venture. I’m thinking here of the tinpot dictator manager of the local garage who banned me from not following the one-way system in the empty shop. This is a benign example; what of the hundreds of thousands of medical staff who prevented loved ones from seeing dying relatives? Who really wants to admit that they committed petty acts of tyranny that led to the actual harm of people, children in particular, because they had succumbed to fear or were ‘just following orders’?
Basic neglect of our caring duties
Amidst all the clamour to ‘save lives’ (as well as protect the NHS), too many of us were complicit in harming the lives of those we should have cared for. And this is where James Kirkup’s plea to shake off our collective amnesia will stumble, for the memories of our own neglect of our loved ones are too distressing. How many people let their loved ones die alone in isolated hospital beds because of ‘rules’? How many mothers spoke to their babies through face masks because of ‘germs’? How many husbands let their wives give birth alone because of ‘regulations’? How many parents made their children wear face masks because of ‘school rules’? How many parents let their children remain in their bedroom on their phones for months on end because of ‘school closures? How many of us didn’t visit the lonely and elderly because of ‘restrictions?’ Shame on us all.
But James Kirkup is right, the sooner we all admit to our grave errors, the sooner we will begin to repair the damage done.
Labour’s raid on winter fuel payments has already cost the taxpayer £380m after a surge in benefits claims, analysts have warned, substantially eating into the £1.4 billion saving claimed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The Telegraph has the story.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed in July that stripping the winter fuel allowance from some 10 million pensioners would save £1.4 billion a year, citing a £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances.
But analysis suggests a surge in pension credit claims following the Chancellor’s announcement has already wiped out the higher benefits bill budgeted for by the Treasury.
But the furore around Labour’s decision to restrict winter fuel payments to only those in receipt of pension credit spurred thousands of retirees to claim the benefit for the first time.
Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, told the Telegraph: “Labour’s approach to the increased poverty it is creating is to encourage more pensioners to apply for pension credit. But that is substantially eroding the savings.”
Since Ms. Reeves’s announcement in July, claims to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) surged to an average of around 9,500 a week, compared to a previous level of 4,000, according to DWP figures.
Sir Steve, now a partner at pension consultants LCP, said the previous level of activity kept the pension credit caseload stable, balanced by an inflow of new claimants and an outflow of pensioners dying.
He added: “There is no doubt that the surge in applications for pension credit will reduce the savings from this policy, potentially costing the Government more than £200 million per year in benefits for pensioners.
“But even allowing for this cost, the Chancellor will still see a meaningful saving from taking winter fuel payments away from around 10 million pensioners”.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) budgeted for an additional 95,000 claims in the financial year, assuming an average annual cost per pensioner of £3,800.
It anticipated a surge in applications triggered by the announcement would cost £370 million a year, but analysts Policy in Practice said Labour had not accounted for so-called ‘passported benefits’ linked to pension credit, such as council tax support and free prescriptions.
The company said the true average cost for a pensioner is likely to be £6,800 a year, and that Labour had therefore already spent £388 million on additional benefits. Any further claims in 2025, it said, would eat into the £1.4 billion of savings claimed by Ms. Reeves.
Stop Press: Twenty Labour councillors have quit the party and formed an independent group, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of “abandoning traditional party values”, citing concerns including the decision to strip 10 million pensioners of their winter fuel payments and proposals that would create new “mega councils”. The decision of the councillors on Broxtowe Borough Council in Nottinghamshire means Labour has lost control of the council, with its number of councillors down to six from 26.
One of the stranger trends to emerge from the Great Awokening was people informing others of ‘their pronouns’, meaning the pronouns by which they should be addressed in conversation and in writing. The idea was that not everyone identifies with the gender they were ‘assigned at birth’, so it would be wrong to simply assume someone’s pronouns. For example, a broad-shouldered person with stubble might prefer to be addressed as ‘she/her’. Not only that, but there emerged various new-fangled pronouns, such as ‘xe/xem’, to refer to so-called ‘non-binary’ individuals.
This trend even shows up in the Google Ngram database, which tracks the frequency of words and phrases used in books over time. As you can see, the phrase ‘my pronouns’ was barely used before 2010. But soon after, mentions of the phrase began sky-rocketing. It’s another example of the woke hockey-stick.
The funny thing is that, because people with unconventional ‘gender identities’ comprise a tiny fraction of the population, most of those who take part in the trend give their pronouns as the ones you’d expect (‘she/her’ for a woman and ‘he/him’ for a man). So in the majority of cases, giving one’s pronouns serves not to convey any unexpected information but rather to signal one’s progressive credentials. ‘My pronouns are she/her’ is mainly a way of saying ‘I hold progressive political views’.
Interestingly, this makes the practice of pronoun-giving useful for studying political discrimination. In a recent study, Ian Maupin and Bryan McCannon examined whether university admissions counselors discriminate for or against applicants who inform others of their pronouns.
They sent emails posing as applicants to admissions counselors at dozens of US universities. All the emails were the same except for the signature line: some did not include pronouns; some included standard pronouns (‘she/her’ or ‘he/him’); and some included new-fangled pronouns (‘xe/xem’). The authors wanted to know whether admissions counselors are more or less likely to respond to emails that included pronouns.
What did they find? Admissions counselors were slightly more likely to respond to emails that included pronouns: Just under 83% of emails that included pronouns received a response, compared to just under 79% of those that did not include pronouns. This suggests that admissions counselors actually discriminate in favour of progressive applicants. The authors also found that responses to emails that included pronouns were friendlier in tone, as measured by the use of emojis and exclamation marks.
It should be noted that the difference in response rate to emails that included pronouns versus emails that did not was relatively small and only borderline statistically significant. (It failed to reach statistical significance in multivariate models.) Hence the evidence of discrimination in favour of progressive applicants should be considered somewhat tentative.
However, there was no evidence of discrimination against people with unconventional gender identities, which rather undermines the woke narrative that ‘marginalized’ groups are somehow ‘oppressed’. In this case, the only ‘oppressed’ group was applicants who did not inform others of their pronouns.
In light of the borderline statistical significance, Maupin and McCannon’s study should not be considered the final word on the subject of discrimination based on pronoun-giving. But its findings won’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with what today’s universities are like.
“Badenoch calls for national inquiry into ‘rape gangs’” – Kemi Badenoch has called for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal after Elon Musk accused Keir Starmer of covering up failings as Director of Public Prosecutions, reports the BBC.
“A conspiracy of murmuring” – It has been quite surreal, as someone who has been writing about the grooming gangs scandal for years, to see the story burst so violently into the international consciousness over the past few days, says Ben Sixsmith on his Substack.
“The truth about ‘grooming gangs’ is finally coming out” – For decades, some of the most vulnerable people in society have been betrayed by people in positions of power. Never again can political correctness be allowed to get in the way of justice, writes Robert Jenrick in the Telegraph.
“Labour loses 20 councillors in Starmer protest” – In the Spectator, Steerpike reacts to the extraordinary exodus of 20 councillors who have quit Labour in protest over the direction of the party under its new Prime Minister.
“Is Reform unstoppable?” – In the Spectator, Rod Liddle wonders whether Nigel Farage’s Reform can outmuscle Kemi Badenoch’s Tories and shift the political balance, or if the status quo will prevail.
“‘I left for Spain as soon as Labour won the election’” – Britain’s richest plumber Charlie Mullins reveals to the Telegraph’s Tom Haynes his fears that tax rises and new workers’ rights will decimate businesses.
“Green extremists just lost the war on cows” – In the Telegraph, Jamie Blackett celebrates the birth of Hilda, a less-gassy calf that could save cattle farming from green extremists.
“Too woke? BBC ‘control’? The stars who refuse to play Glastonbury” – From the BBC’s “corporate control” to rows over appearance fees and claims of being “too woke”, the Mail highlights how a host of musicians are turning their backs on the world’s biggest festival.
“Culture of silence” – On GB News, Charlie Peters issues a stark warning: after exposing Rotherham’s corrupt leaders on GB News in 2022 and watching them fall in 2023, he’s setting his sights on even bigger targets in 2025. Get ready – he’s coming for you.
In 2022 I told Rotherham politicians live on @GBNEWS that I was coming for them with new reporting on their failure to confront the child abuse gangs.
In 2023, they were all deselected by the Labour Party.
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