The Green Agenda is Collapsing
Is Net Zero dead? In this Sceptic Short, host Laurie Wastell is joined by Dr Tilak Doshi, economist, former contributor to Forbes and now the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor, to discuss how Donald Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill!” energy revolution is upending the global green agenda, why the climate censorship regime is collapsing and whether the writing is on the wall for Ed Miliband.
NOTE: Premium subscribers will notice that this is an extract from the premium section of Episode 30. We’re sorry that there is no new episode today. This is due to circumstances beyond our control. The Sceptic will return next week as usual.
Donate to the Daily Sceptic to access our premium content. Follow Laurie on X.
Read Tilak’s piece on the Daily Sceptic. And follow him on X.
Subscribe to the Daily Sceptic YouTube Channel. Produced by Richard Eldred. Filmed at the Westminster Podcast Studio.
Trump Demands France “Free Marine Le Pen”
By Will Jones
Donald Trump has demanded France “free” Marine Le Pen and labelled her ban from running for office over a “bookkeeping error” a “witch hunt” just like he was subjected to. The Telegraph has more.
The hard-Right leader was found guilty of embezzling EU funds to pay party staff in a court ruling in Paris on Monday.
She was barred from politics from five years – preventing her from running in the next French Presidential election – and handed a four-year prison sentence, two of which will be served under house arrest and the other two will be suspended.
On Friday, the US President threw his support behind Le Pen and likened the affair to his own experience of being pursued and convicted.
“The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison,” he wrote on his Truth Social account.
Continuing, he said he did not know Le Pen personally but that he appreciates “how hard she worked for so many years”.
“She suffered losses, but kept on going, and now, just before what would be a Big Victory, they get her on a minor charge that she probably knew nothing about – Sounds like a ‘bookkeeping’ error to me,” Mr Trump said.
“It is all so bad for France, and the Great French People, no matter what side they are on. FREE MARINE LE PEN!”
In the Spectator, James Tidmarsh explains the options open to Le Pen and the arguments she will make to try to overturn her conviction.
Le Pen is appealing the decision, which was handed down by the Paris criminal tribunal – the lowest tier of the French judiciary. The case now moves to the Court of Appeal, where her team will seek to overturn both the conviction itself and the penalty of ineligibility.
Le Pen will argue first that the misappropriation charge itself is questionable. Le Pen was convicted of using European Parliament funds to pay party staff – a practice widely acknowledged as common in Brussels. The court found no personal enrichment: the money went to party work. The defence contends that the line between parliamentary and political work is inherently blurry for any elected official – particularly in a body like the European Parliament, where national politics and European mandates are tightly interwoven. In short, her team says she is being punished for doing what everyone in Brussels has always done – and under a law that should never have been applied in the first place.
Second, Le Pen will argue that the law used to bar her from office – the loi Sapin II– should not apply retroactively. The misconduct for which she’s been convicted dates from 2004 to 2016. But the provision of the Sapin II Act that allows judges to impose immediate ineligibility for financial offences only came into force in 2017. Le Pen’s legal team will argue that applying it retroactively violates the principle that harsher penalties cannot be imposed for past conduct.
The Paris Court of Appeal has issued a statement saying it would examine the case “within a timeframe that should allow a decision by summer 2026”, which on the face of it allows enough time, should nothing go wrong.
Le Pen’s allies in Parliament are also looking at amending the law to distinguish between offences involving personal enrichment and those that do not and restoring the normal principle of delaying any punishment while appeals are ongoing. Though how changing the law now would help her after her convictions is unclear, unless it impacts on the appeal of course.
Another Green Energy Retailer Goes Bust
By Ben Pile
This week, Rebel Energy posted a notice on its website announcing that it had ceased trading. According to the Telegraph, around 90,000 customers of the energy retailer will be moved by the regulator, Ofgem, to another supplier. Central to the newspaper’s story is Rebel’s failure to maintain a ‘ring-fenced’ account, from which payments under the Renewable Energy Obligation green energy subsidy mechanism are supposed to be made. This is a surprise, because one of Rebel’s main marketing gimmicks was its commitment to green energy, another being social justice. “We’re fighting for fairness in energy,” exclaims the company website’s “mission” page, which claims to battle “the injustices that burden our customers and the planet”. Maybe if its directors weren’t larping as white knight, planet-saving superheroes, the energy company might still be a going concern.
Rebel joins 31 energy retailers that have gone bust since 2020 – almost all of them in 2021. Many of them were, by the standards of competitors, tiny boutiques with 10,000 or fewer customers. The largest was Bulb Energy, with 1.7 million customers. The late 2010s were also bad years for the energy upstarts. Twenty-nine firms went bust between 2015 and 2021. The most notable of these were Bristol Energy and Robin Hood Energy, with 155,000 and 112,000 domestic customers respectively.
Bristol Energy was established by Bristol City Council as a publicly-owned enterprise, which failed and ended up costing the public £35 million. Similarly, Robin Hood Energy was a not-for-profit energy firm seemingly run in the interests of the residents of Nottingham city, the collapse of which cost the council – i.e., the public – £38.1 million. But those losses are dwarfed by Thurrock District Council, which lost £200 million after buying a £655 million interest in a company with 53 solar farms that also went bust.
It turns out that running an energy retail company is not easy. Yet policies that were intended to make it easier were drafted in the late 2000s and into the 2010s on two great hopes. First, that the putative monopoly of the ‘Big Six’ energy retailers could be broken. Second, that this would help the green energy policy agenda. The governments of that era believed – or at least claimed to believe – that the active consumer would use his purchasing power to seek out the lowest prices, and that such competition would drive down prices. They also believed that the growing interest in climate change would reward companies that supplied more energy from renewable sources.
But such hopes were soon dashed. In 2011, then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government, Christopher Huhne, sparked outrage when he suggested that rising energy prices were the fault of “lazy” consumers who couldn’t be bothered to shop around for the best deals. “They frankly spend less time shopping around for a bill that’s on average more than £1,000 a year than they would shop around for a £25 toaster,” he told the Times. But the truth – which I am probably as bored of writing as you are of reading – is that since the UK’s green energy agenda began, UK energy prices tripled. No amount of shopping around could mitigate, much less reverse that inexorable rise.
Moreover, in the middle of the 2010s, Huhne’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, as Leader of the Opposition ahead of the General Election, proposed that prices be controlled with a price cap. In 2017, the Tories adopted the policy, which became active in 2019. And since energy prices since 2021 have been subject to a cap, there is practically no point in seeking better deals through ‘switching’ websites. The price cap in January 2019 was £1,137. This peaked at £4,279 four years later, and is now £1,849.
This volatility is more difficult for households to manage than energy retailers, who simply pass the costs onto consumers. The dream of cheap, green power and the demolition of the ‘Big Six’ have all faded into distant memories. According to Ofgem, there are 64 companies that serve the domestic energy market in the UK – a plague of boutique energy retailers with fancy-pants websites promising to serve up all sorts of ethics, virtues and goodness alongside your heat and power.
‘Good Energy’ – oh, please! – promises “100% renewable electricity sourced from our community of over 2,500 independent renewable generators”. Generators under the control of infamous keffiyeh-wielding proprietor of Ecotricity, Dale Vince, last I counted had received more than £89 million in subsidies under the Renewables Obligation scheme – money that has allowed him to donate millions of pounds to the green-energy fanatical Labour Party, and fund petty litigation against his critics. And now firmly established as one of the ‘Big Six’, Octopus Energy claims to be “making energy fair, clean and simple for all using technology”, yet is only able to offer small reductions to consumers in return for switching off during times of peak demand to help save the grid from blackouts – so much for “using technology”, unless the ‘off’ butting is a technological development. It’s hard not to see this wrapping increasingly expensive utilities up in decreasingly plausible ‘ethics’, and by so many manifestly cynical marketeers, as merely driving up the price of fig leaves.
Despite the promises of failed policies, which some might call merely ‘lies’, the expensive policy agenda continues. And here is the puzzle. What happened to utilities companies simply providing, you know, utilities? Do we really need so much Motherhood and Apple Pie with our apple pies? More to the point, why isn’t energy seen, firstly as a means to an ends, and accordingly, as a Good Thing, without the need for suffixes such as ‘Good’ and ‘Eco-‘? Isn’t it virtue enough that power and gas come through wires and pipes to our homes and businesses, to make contemporary life wholly different to anything experienced by our predecessors?
The claims on Rebel Energy’s website help to make the case that something is deeply wrong. “We’re doing things differently,” claims the bankrupt supplier, in big bold capital letters.
We call it the Rebel Way. And we can do it because our people, our teams and our technology are wired differently. We say no to the status quo. Almost everyone needs an energy supplier. So why not make it one that’s fighting for fairness? One that’s pushing big business to be better. One that’s committed to giving customers a fair deal. One that’s championing a fairer future for the planet.
But it wasn’t doing anything differently at all. Every energy retailer, including those established by local governments, claimed to be solving all the world’s problems save that of providing abundant and affordable energy.
Which, when you think about it, if you know anything about energy and how it has – or at least can, or at least should – transform human existence, is the opposite of what energy companies should be doing. Cheap energy is social justice. Abundant energy is fairness. Cheap and abundant energy makes the world a better place. Why did anyone ever come to the view that it does not? The fact of so much virtue-drag draped over energy policy and marketing cannot help but draw attention to the fact that the product is the opposite of what it claims to be. Energy retailers perhaps deserve their catastrophic end. But do we?
BP Chairman Quits After Company Abandons Green Energy
By Will Jones
The Chairman of BP is to quit in the wake of the oil giant abandoning its disastrous green energy plan and returning to focus on oil and gas. The Telegraph has more.
The oil giant said on Friday that Helge Lund would step down “in due course”. The announcement comes amid a campaign by activist US hedge fund Elliott for more change at the company, which has already watered down green energy plans previously adopted under Lund.
The Norwegian backed BP’s 2020 decision to cut fossil fuel production 40% by 2030 and become an “integrated energy company” focused on low carbon energy.
He was also in charge during BP’s 2020 appointment of Bernard Looney, the Chief Executive who committed the company to its low carbon path but who then left over his undeclared relationships with colleagues.
Mr Lund said on Friday: “Having fundamentally reset our strategy, BP’s focus now is on delivering the strategy at pace, improving performance and growing shareholder value. Now is the right time to start the process to find my successor and enable an orderly and seamless handover.”
It follows pressure from Elliott Advisors, which has taken a 5% stake in BP. The hedge fund told the company it was unhappy with the oil major’s strategy, which it believed lacked urgency and ambition. Elliott was thought to be organising a shareholders vote to force Mr Lund out.
BP announced plans to shift away from oil and gas in 2020, proposing a 10-fold increase in green energy investment and a 40% reduction in fossil fuel production by 2030.
Mr Lund said at the time: “We are confident that the decisions we have taken and the strategy we are setting out today are right for BP, for our shareholders, and for wider society.”
However, BP’s competitors instead bet on rising demand for oil and performed far better. Shares in BP underperformed as a result and the company has since jettisoned much of the 2020 strategy.
At a capital markets day in February, BP abandoned most of its green pledges and committed to indefinite annual increases in fossil fuel production.
Worth reading in full.
People Who Want to Understand Teenage Boys Should Watch The Inbetweeners Not Adolescence
By Joanna Gray
Like Kemi, I have not watched Adolescence. My reason is simply that the main character is pre-pubescent. He’s still a child – not an adolescent – a grave casting error. I do understand though that Starmer is hosting a round table discussion about the drama (or documentary as he keeps calling it). I fear he has got the wrong TV show. If he wants to better understand British adolescent boys, he, along with policymakers and parents, ought to be discussing instead The Inbetweeners – gloriously created before the age of the smartphone had set in to dampen a generation.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of watching The Inbetweeners, do so immediately. There you will meet four archetypical suburban teenage boys brilliantly created by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris:
Will: Geek, on the look-out for intelligent sophistication; has a MILF single mum.
Simon: Good looking, moons after out-of-reach girl Carly, stroppy to supportive parents.
Neil: Thick, good at dancing, always pulls, gay dad.
Jay: Bullshitter, undermining dad, weary mum.
Over three peerless series released between 2008-2012 we follow the boys through Rudge Comprehensive sixth form as they attempt to have a laugh, pass their exams and pull ‘clunge’. It is inconceivable that such entertaining, cringingly funny TV could be commissioned today. It captures perfectly the best and worst of adolescent boys: the crudity, the laziness, the furious pursuit of trying to have a tug in private, the crap cars, the boredom, the exquisite anticipation and crashing disappointment of parties, the relentless but not quite crushing rejection by girls but most of all, the unhinged ability to have a laugh together. The four boys are both hapless and hilarious and you long for all of them to succeed in spite of themselves.
Laurie Lee describes this period of pent-up potential best in Cider with Rosie: “By now I was one of those green-horned gang who went bellowing around the lanes, scuffling, fighting, aimless and dangerous, confused by our strength and boredom.”
How Will, Simon, Neil and Jay attempt to relieve their “strength and boredom” is by bashing in some daffodils with golf clubs, trying to host a dinner party, going camping and clubbing and other catastrophe-strewn but optimistic ventures. And this is the lesson that Starmer and concerned parents need to take: teenage boys need to just do stuff. They need to have a laugh and bellow around figurative lanes, and for this, they need to hang out together, not remain isolated in their rooms on phones. As I write this, four Year 12 boys, friends of my 16 year-old son, are in the garden supposedly filming something for their Film Studies A-Level. What they are actually doing is spinning two boys together in the hammock until tied in a knot, the others swing the hammock into the hedge, they fall out, and then do it all over again. The bellows of laughter are loud and happy.
In short, teenage boys need to turn outward in all their clumsy, active glory, not inward to become the worst of themselves.
For all its obvious flaws, if discussion around Adolescence encourages more youth clubs to open, venues to welcome the under-16s, a nationwide relaunch of the pool hall, parents to invite more children over for hangouts and parties, rather than leaving them to scroll or game alone in their room, then fine by me, my teenage sons, and all the other Wills, Simons, Neils and Jays out there.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
Anti-Abortion Campaigner Championed by White House Found Guilty of Breaching ‘Buffer Zone’ by Holding Sign Saying “Here to Talk, if You Want”
By Will Jones
Anti-abortion campaigner Livia Tossici-Bolt, whose case was championed by the White House over free speech concerns, has been convicted of breaching a ‘buffer zone’ outside an abortion clinic and ordered to pay costs of £20,000. The Mail has more.
Livia Tossici-Bolt, 64, was found guilty at Poole Magistrates Court after holding up a sign which read “Here to talk, if you want” near a Bournemouth abortion clinic on two days in March 2023.
The retired medical scientist was convicted of twice violating the Public Spaces Protection Order outside the facility, which is run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS).
She has been sentenced to a conditional discharge for two years for two charges of breaching a ‘buffer zone’ outside the abortion clinic.
District Judge Orla Austin also ordered Tossici-Bolt to pay £20,000 towards court costs and a £26 victim surcharge.
The case attracted the attention of the US State Department and US Vice President J.D. Vance.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour (DRL) – which sits within the US State Department – said one of its advisors had met Ms Tossici-Bolt and was “monitoring” her case.
In a statement on X before the verdict, it said: “It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.”
During a speech at the Munich security conference in February, US Vice President Vance highlighted the case of Adam Smith-Connor, who was convicted last year of breaching the same council-enacted buffer zone, suggesting it showed “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”.
Asked about Tossici-Bolt’s conviction, a Number 10 spokesman said generally that while “the right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy” people don’t have the right to “harass” others.
Quizzed on whether free speech still exists in Britain: “The UK has a very proud tradition of free speech over many centuries.”
District Judge Austin said while she accepted Tossici-Bolt’s pro-life beliefs “were truly held” the case “is not about the rights and wrongs about abortion but about whether the defendant was in breach of the PSPO (Public Spaces Protection Order)”.
The judge added of the defendant: “She lacks insight that her presence could have a detrimental effect on the women attending the clinic, their associates, staff and members of the public.
“I am satisfied so that I am sure that the defendant did fail without reasonable excuse to comply with a requirement of the PSPO, namely she failed to leave the safe zone on both March 2nd and March 3rd 2023 when asked by an authorised officer.”
The judge said that the costs fee of £20,000 was a “proportionate” contribution to the £64,709.59 requested by the prosecution which was presented by a KC and junior at the two-day magistrates’ court trial.
Police officers had told Tossici-Bolt to leave after a woman said she felt intimidated and harassed by her presence.
She refused, claiming she was given no legitimate reason for doing so.
She also rejected a fixed penalty notice that was issued to her.
Worth reading in full.
In what way is standing there quietly holding a sign offering to talk harassing anybody? Harassment has become a catch-all term for unwanted behaviour, as though we have the right to dictate how the people around us may behave – or at least we do if we are classed as ‘vulnerable’.
Dissent will not be tolerated and people must be protected from seeing all possible signs of disapproval or being confronted with alternative ideas or courses of action. You may have free speech, just as long as no one can hear you when it might matter most.
News Round-Up
- “Asylum hotel shame as taxpayer-funded rooms used as brothels” – Taxpayer-funded migrant hotels are being used as brothels with men travelling to them to pay for sex, reveals the Express.
- “‘I fear Britain is lurching towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it’” – In the Telegraph, Tim Stanley argues that the spectre of fascism is a greater concern than the prospect of open sectarian conflict.
- “Everywhere you look under Starmer, we have a two-tier country” – We are now seeing the balkanisation of parts of our major cities and the proliferation of groups lobbying for ethnic and religious interests, writes Robert Jenrick in the Telegraph.
- “Are Islamist gangs in control of Britain’s most secure prison?” – HMP Frankland is said to be so overrun with Islamists that inmates who refuse to join their gangs are being forced into separation units, says David Shipley in the Spectator.
- “Immigration is not the answer to low birth rates” – On the Maiden Mother Matriarch Substack, Tom Jones explores solutions to Britain’s fertility crisis.
- “One thing Keir Starmer really believes in: giving up British territory” – The consequence of Hermer-ism is that we will be the first country ever to sacrifice sovereign territory due to an advisory ICJ opinion, says the Telegraph in a leading article.
- “Wealth exodus from UK speeds up over Labour’s non-dom tax raid” – The exodus of wealth from Britain has accelerated since the turn of the year, fuelling fears that the abolition of the non-dom tax regime will wipe billions of pounds from the economy, reports the Times.
- “The results are in for Labour’s private school experiment: a giant F” – One term in to Labour’s VAT raid on private schools and the vindictiveness of this tax grab is now plain to see, says Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
- “Starmer’s skills adviser founded failing school” – Appointing the founder of a failing school as skills adviser is just another of the baffling decisions made by Starmer’s army since they came to power, writes the Spectator’s Steerpike.
- “Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages” – Civil liberties groups say that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech using vague laws, according to the Times.
- “‘I heard the full story of the woman jailed for two years for a tweet. Her injustice shames Britain’” – A social media post landed Lucy Connolly with a 31-month sentence, writes Allison Pearson in the Telegraph; her treatment is a testament to our ‘injustice’ system.
- “Prison chiefs accused of blocking mother jailed for social media post from seeing daughter” – A woman who was jailed for two years after she tweeted about the Southport riots has been denied temporary leave to see her 12 year-old daughter and sick husband, reports the Mail.
- “Liberal democracy was once a form of government – now it has become a shallow civic religion and it really sucks” – On Substack, Eugyppius takes aim at pedantic debates over political labels.
- “Miliband pours £2.7 billion into nuclear power plant after EDF cuts stake” – Ed Miliband has thrown another £2.7 billion of taxpayer money at Sizewell C, bringing the UK’s total spend to £8 billion on a nuclear project still awaiting final approval, reports the Telegraph.
- “Just Stop Oil 2.0 is already here – and frothing at the mouth to destroy our summer” – In the Telegraph, William Sitwell charts the rise of Youth Demand, a new group of unwashed eco-activists intent on crippling the capital.
- “Iran abandons Houthis under relentless US bombardment” – Iran has ordered its military troops to abandon Houthi terrorists and leave Yemen amid relentless airstrikes from the US, reports the Sun.
- “The truth about Israel’s ‘bloodlust’ in Gaza” – It increasingly seems that we are being lied to – or at the very least, misled – about what’s going on in Gaza, says Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
- “How did young people go so wrong they cheer killers and rapists of Hamas?” – You would have thought that when young women are raped by gangs of armed men that young Americans would not be on the side of the rapists, laments Douglas Murray in the NY Post.
- “Is Hungary right to quit the ICC?” – In the Spectator, Andrew Tettenborn weighs up Viktor Orbán’s decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court.
- “Four in ten fear civil war in France amid spread of Islamism” – Concerns about the breakdown of social cohesion, increasing violence and the rise of Islamism have reached an “unprecedented level” in France, reports Breitbart.
- “Could France’s GB News be shut down?” – With C8 gone and CNews now under formal investigation, the attack on freedom of expression in France is escalating, says James Tidmarsh in the Spectator.
- “The martyrdom of Marine Le Pen” – A French court’s banning of Marine Le Pen from presidential elections for five years may have the opposite effect of its apparent intention, writes Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.
- “Trump has finally ditched Macron for Marine Le Pen” – The bromance between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron is officially over, says Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator.
- “EU ‘prepares to hit Elon Musk with potential $1 billion fine for breaking disinformation laws’” – EU regulators are ready to slap Elon Musk’s X platform with a huge fine for breaking disinformation laws, reports the Mail.
- “Trump can’t afford to lose Musk. He can’t afford to keep him either” – The real story isn’t the Tesla chief’s potential departure, says David Christopher in the Telegraph – it’s that his bromance with the President has lasted this long.
- “Starmer to rush through watered-down electric car rules in wake of Trump tariffs” – Keir Starmer is preparing to rush through changes that water down EV targets as carmakers brace for Trump’s tariffs, reports the Telegraph.
- “China launches major trade war response with 34% additional tariffs” – China will soon impose an additional 34% tariffs on all US imports in a retaliatory move that could cause prices to skyrocket for American consumers, says the Mail.
- “There’s method to Trump’s tariff madness” – Political considerations are just as important as the drive for economic gain, as Trump knows very well, writes David Frost in the Telegraph.
- “Trump can’t ignore the stock market carnage forever” – You can’t ‘make America great again’ in a bear market, says Matthew Lynn in the Spectator.
- “Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ gives us the chance to now realise the dream of Brexit” – Now is the perfect time to slash EU-style regulation and become a prosperous, low-tax nation, writes Nigel Farage in the Telegraph.
- “Trump’s new union friends can’t save him from a collapsing approval rating” – There is a political constituency for the President’s trade policy, says Dan McLaughlin in the Telegraph, but his allies are failing to make a coherent argument for it.
- “Misuse of a museum – naked Covid propaganda masquerading as science” – In TCW, Richard Ennos slams the National Museum of Scotland’s ‘Injecting Hope’ exhibition as shameless pharma propaganda.
- “‘I’m a teacher and mother of white British teenage boys – Starmer’s Adolescence plan is a mistake’” – The PM’s plan to screen Netflix’s drama Adolescence in classrooms has met fierce resistance, reports Melissa Twigg in the Telegraph.
- “Universities review trans policies after Sussex’s record fine” – Universities are reviewing their trans equality policies after the University of Sussex was handed a record fine from the higher education regulator, according to the Times.
- “Young women have no role models” – We have become just as confused about the nature of female virtues as the masculine ones, argues Miriam Cates in the Telegraph.
- “Russell Brand is charged with two counts of rape” – Comedian Russell Brand has been charged with rape and multiple sexual assaults, according to the Mail.
- “Russell Brand breaks his silence as he is charged with rape” – Russell Brand has spoken out after being charged with rape and sexual assault against four women, reports the Mail.
- “Model Bri Stern details her shocking accusations against Andrew Tate” – In the Mail, Brianna ‘Bri’ Stern gives her account of life with ex-boyfriend Andrew Tate.
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“and demanded that she hand over all of and demanded that she hand over all of her interview and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31st, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract. F and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31st, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract.”
I do hope this lady had the sense to keep paper copies of all her work before deleting the on-line variety. After all with all these computer hackers about you can’t be too careful and she wouldn’t want anyone putting out falsified copies of her work would she?
Better safe than sorry.
Always have off-site backups, and backups of those backups.
Hopefully, she has kept copies of all of the data.
I commented under that article quoting City University of London:
“At City, we have a legal obligation to protect freedom of expression that we take very seriously. We uphold academic freedom of inquiry in our education and research and are committed to ensuring that free and open-minded discussion can take place.”
This is calling black white. Quite literally and without hyperbole, insanity.
She should submit a subject access request to see what her colleagues have been saying about her on e-mails, and other work related media. SARS win cases.
Excellent point.
Modern universities are teaching people how to be stupid
******************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Freedom of people to voice different opinions than the authorities is closing.
The University seems to think all Intellectual property belongs to them. Maybe that is the contractual arrangement, but to demand that it is deleted in all forms is not a proper use of such property. It is censorship plain and simple. Absolute proof that the content shows exactly what they don’t want, that this gender nonsense is nothing bbut harmful, severely dangerous dogma!
Leaks happen.
Anyone is allowed to do research but the findings must conform to the authorities ideology, otherwise there will be consequences.