Will Aseem Malhotra’s Appearance Be the BBC’s Most Viewed Programme of 2023?
By Nick Rendell
What attracted the biggest TV audiences of 2022? Top of the list was the Queen’s funeral, with 25 million viewers. Then came England’s World Cup quarter final exit with 21.3 million. Some 17.4 million watched the Women’s European Cup victory. We then drop down into the top TV shows. The final of I’m Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here had 11.9 million glued to their TV sets. 10.5 million watched the final of Strictly and 9.1 million tuned in to Eurovision.
It’s unlikely that there’ll be a big royal funeral or wedding in 2023. There’s a Rugby World Cup but not a football one. There are no Olympic Games. So, where can the TV Networks find their big hits for the coming year?
Well, courtesy of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Dr. Aseem Malhotra may just have provided 2023’s biggest TV moment. As I write this, the seven minute clip of him being interviewed on a BBC news show on January 14th passed 14.8 million views. Now, wouldn’t you think that merited some form of acknowledgement from the BBC? If you were the BBC’s Head of Programmes wouldn’t you think: “Wow, we’ve had 14.8 million views, there’s a programme in this?”
It seems incredible that the BBC and, by association, the Government, think they can just bury the story. As if, so long as it isn’t mentioned, the other 50-odd million people in the country won’t also think, “Hmm, there’s something not quite right about these vaccines”. Surely radio silence only adds to the unease. Since the creation of the ‘Trusted News Initiative’, I’ve lost all trust in the BBC. Its obsessive focus on Net Zero and intersectionality sounds suspiciously like a USSR era Pravda piece about tractor production in Murmansk.
I suspect the reason the Malhotra clip has cut through so far and fast is because it perfectly resonates with people’s ‘lived experience’; everyone knows someone whom they suspect has been harmed by the vaccines.
My own sister-in-law dropped dead of SADS (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome) back in August 2022. A fit, size 10, keen cyclist, found dead in her garden one morning. She had been just about to set off on a bike ride. The autopsy could find no specific cause, noted some small clotting in the heart, but nothing that the pathologist seemed to think should have killed her.
She’d had three doses of the vaccine. I’ve no idea whether the vaccines were the cause or contributory to her death, but I did feel that if a more open debate about the safety (or otherwise) of the vaccines had been allowed, at least the pathologist might have been open to considering it, even if only to dismiss it for specific reasons.
But, of course, whether the vaccines were responsible or not, there was absolutely no reason for her to have been vaccinated in the first place. Like everyone else who is not vulnerable, she was never at any risk from Covid. She’d had Covid in 2020: a day in bed, slight headache, backache. It held no fears for her, but she wanted to go on holiday.
It wasn’t only her family that were taken aback by my sister-in-law’s death. In the small Cumbrian town in which she lived, a bloke keeled over in the street with a heart attack. In a nearby village someone else died suddenly, all within a week or so. To everyone it seemed odd – it was the talk of the town. And though the talk was always in hushed voices, word of mouth is a powerful medium.
A friend told her neighbour, a hospital nurse, about my sister-in-law’s death. “Oh,” she replied, “we call it a Covax death,” as if they happen all the time. Another friend, on hearing the tale told me of her nephew, 27 years-old, had a stroke a couple of weeks after his second vaccine. Everyone has a story.
The start of the 2021 football season kicked off a similar round of whispers. Trevor Sinclair, the football pundit, got in trouble for even daring to raise the issue on air. Virtually every game seemed to have either a medical emergency on the pitch or one in the crowd, sometimes more than one. I was at a Mansfield Town game many years ago when they were having an FA cup run. In a game against West Ham, someone in the crowd had a heart attack. It was quite a thing, but in all the hundreds of games I’ve ever watched, that’s the only time I remember a game stopping for such an incident. Then suddenly last year it was happening every week. Related to the vaccines? I don’t know, but I think someone should be looking into it, not gaslighting the millions watching into believing this was normal.
Of course, people are going to speculate. The BBC do themselves no favours by pretending it isn’t a real concern.
But, what’s becoming interesting now are the conspiracy theories. Cock-up or strategy? Could a BBC news producer or editor really be so detached from the biggest story of the past two years to not know that Dr. Aseem Malhotra is a vaccine sceptic? The shock on the face of the interviewer is perhaps more understandable if all she does is read autocues, but for someone who is responsible for a BBC news programme not to be aware is frankly incredible, in the true sense of the word. If it’s ‘incredible’, so the conspiracists argue, then it must have been planned. Does this signify a change in the mood music? The producer should be grateful that the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative’ has yet to fully embrace Pravda’s modus operandi, or else they’d have been taken outside and shot. A fate that might yet, metaphorically, befall both the BBC producer and Dr. Malhotra, courtesy of the GMC.
The Chinese Communist Party didn’t abandon ‘Zero Covid’ because of a few protests, but because it wasn’t working. Infections were taking off regardless of strict lockdown measures. It’s the same with vaccine scepticism. Doubts about vaccination will only continue to grow while deaths exceed normal levels. Dr. Malhotra’s piece may yet push us past the tipping point where these concerns have to be addressed.
My personal view is that vaccines played an important part in breaking us out of the unsustainable lockdown loop. I don’t think vaccines made much difference to lives lost – the emergence of Omicron and prior natural immunity did that – but vaccination gave the elderly the confidence to emerge from behind their locked doors. We’d have been as well off giving everyone a saline shot rather than blowing billions on vaccines. No, the real crime lay in extending vaccines to those who didn’t need them. If we’d stuck with Plan A, articulated by both Kate Bingham and Matt Hancock back in late 2020, and only offered vaccines to the elderly and vulnerable, confidence in all vaccines wouldn’t now be at all-time low.
It’s worth remembering that boosters haven’t been offered to the non-vulnerable under-50s for about 18 months, and since not even the manufacturers claim any ongoing efficacy for vaccines after about six months, then the only possible reason for not offering additional vaccine boosters to the under-50s is because it’s thought they’ll do more harm than good.
So, does the Dr. Malhotra appearance herald a change in tack by the BBC? Are the vaccines about to be thrown under a bus? I doubt it, but I bet there are a few TV production companies lining up a debate somewhere and just looking for a TV broadcaster to commission it. You never know, maybe Twitter could air it live, there’s a record TV audience just waiting to watch it. I’m sure such a debate could ‘educate, entertain and inform’. Something the BBC was once quite good at.
The Problem With the BBC’s Reporting on Excess Deaths
By Nick Dixon
Charlie Walsham, a pseudonym of a BBC News employee who has worked at the Corporation for several years, has written an inside scoop on the BBC’s reporting of excess deaths. The Spectator has the story.
I recall the newsroom conversations during the dark days of the pandemic only too well. They were upsetting at the time. Now, as we see a disturbing rise in excess deaths across the country, the thought of them fills me with horror and outrage.
”You do realise these lockdowns and restrictions will end up killing people too, don’t you?” I would say to senior editorial colleagues with something approaching desperation in my voice. ”Sure, the virus is a serious threat to a small proportion of the population but the longer-term consequences of shutting the economy down and closing off the NHS will be deadly for huge numbers who were never at serious risk from the virus, people with years of life ahead of them. Shouldn’t we be reflecting that in our coverage? Shouldn’t we be considering the possibility that the government is going down the wrong path on this?”
The response of these colleagues would vary in tone, from patient but patronising good humour to open mockery. Many were influenced, I believe, by social media echo chambers (curated by pernicious algorithms). My colleagues had swallowed the myopic belief, adopted by people largely on the liberal Left, that only lockdowns could ‘save lives’ and ‘protect the NHS’ from the devastation threatened by COVID-19. Anyone who demurred was, as far as they were concerned, clearly a Right-wing lunatic.Now we can all see how well that is working out. Provisional figures released this week reveal that more than 650,000 deaths were registered in the U.K. in 2022 – 9 per cent more than 2019. This is one of the largest excess death levels outside the pandemic in 50 years. But despite many of the causes of this being obvious, the BBC is pretending the development has come as something of a shock.
He goes on to explain how the BBC used a series of euphemisms like ”pandemic hangover” to avoid mentioning lockdowns. And it gets worse:
The BBC’s analysis didn’t just fall short because it failed to mention the L-word. In broad terms, it connected the excess deaths to a combination of missed treatments and an NHS already in crisis. Yet anyone working for BBC News knows full well that the NHS is in crisis every single winter. This knowledge didn’t stop BBC editors ignoring warnings that lockdowns would only exacerbate health service bottlenecks once restrictions were totally lifted.
An incredibly damning piece that is worth reading in full.
Rishi Sunak Declares War on Woke – Appoints ‘Free Speech Tsar’
By Toby Young
According to this morning’s Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister has declared war on woke!
Rishi Sunak is set to declare a new ‘war on woke’ by appointing a free speech watchdog and more closely vetting the appointment of Left-wing bishops, the Mail on Sunday understands.
A ‘free speech tsar’, with the power to investigate universities which censure academics for their views, is expected to be announced shortly by the Prime Minister.
Whitehall sources say that the favourite is Arif Ahmed, a Cambridge professor who has spoken out against the ‘cancel culture’ on campuses.
The move comes as Mr. Sunak is also understood to have instructed officials to perform ‘more due diligence’ on bishops before they are appointed, following their outspoken criticism of Government policy.
Earlier this month, No 10 announced that Philip North would become the next Bishop of Blackburn. He had been forced to withdraw from previous nominations following complaints about his opposition to women priests.
The new front in the so-called ‘culture wars’ is being driven by Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, Cabinet Minister and Sunak ally Oliver Dowden and by powerful figures within Downing Street.
During last summer’s leadership contest, Mr. Sunak promised to tackle the “woke nonsense”^ he claimed was permeating public life.
The moves are likely to partially reassure Tory MPs on the Right of the party concerned about what they regard as a Leftward drift through policies such as the ditching of the privatisation of Channel 4,
Prof Ahmed, a philosophy lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, recently sparked a backlash from students for inviting Helen Joyce, a feminist, to speak about her book, Trans, which criticises aspects of trans activism.
The academic is regarded by No 10 as someone who will be able to stand up to woke students and academics who have been described by one commentator as the “statue-smashing, history-erasing thought police”, although Downing Street stressed that other candidates were also being considered.
Worth reading in full – and as an added bonus I’ve written a short comment piece for the Mail on Sunday to accompany this news (just scroll down to see it).
Stop Press: Read the Mail on Sunday’s leader on why we should defend free speech with all our might.
Clear Roadmap for Net Zero Fantasy Plotted by Costings-Free Skidmore Report
Costless and Clueless Conservative MP Chris Skidmore has laid out the gruesome actions needed to force British industry, finance and the wider public to live under the Net Zero political hegemony.
Presenting an “independent” review of Net Zero, Skidmore said it would deliver a “thriving modern green economy”. For starters, Clueless Chris wants to ban all gas boilers two year earlier in 2033, and make it impossible to sell a house without potentially ruinous extra insulation costs. To ease the pain, he suggests publishing a plan for England this year “to ramp up public engagement on Net Zero”.
Skidmore is a long-time green activist. In 2019 he passed into law the parting gift from doomed Theresa May that mandated Britain achieve Net Zero by 2050. A here-today, gone-tomorrow middling minister, Skidmore initially moved from an Oxford history degree through spad and political think tank appointments, to become an MP in 2010. Actual costing of virtuous proposals does not seem to be his strong point. His report is long and assumes a radical, and many would argue disastrous, transformation of society. It is devoid of any costing, despite claiming Net Zero is the “economic opportunity of the 21st century”.
Any figures tend to be of a macro nature, as in the suggestion that in “some estimates” the UK would see 2% extra GDP growth with Net Zero. These estimates came from the government’s own in-house green activist unit, the Climate Change Committee, whose members Lord Deben and Chris Stark are singled out for thanks in helping prepare the report. The word ‘subsidy’ is rarely used in green circles, rather Skidmore notes that “economic opportunities are being missed because of weaknesses in the U.K.’s investment environment”. He quotes research that is said to show that transitioning to a decarbonised energy system based on green technologies by 2050, “can save the world at least $12 trillion”.
Those with keener financial skills might ask why windmills supply what is said to be cheap power, but still require subsidies of £12 billion every year to produce barely 5% of the U.K.’s total energy needs. “Moving quickly must include spending money”, says Skidmore, a suggestion that might lead the more cautious to start counting the spoons.
What is surprising about the Skidmore report is that it appears to have been written without any consideration of the mounting evidence that most green technologies, from windmills to electric cars and heat pumps, are inferior to those products they seek to replace. It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that when you ‘believe’ the planet is in a climate emergency, despite no convincing evidence, and it is your job to save it, no opposition or alternative views can be heard, let alone prevail.
The proposal to ban new and replacement gas boilers within ten years is a real shocker. Heat pumps are a poor substitute, and require almost airtight insulation to provide adequate winter warmth in a typical U.K. house. The CCC estimates a cost of £10,000 to insulate a house and install a heat pump, but these costings have been challenged by Michael Kelly, a past professor of technology at the University of Cambridge. Based on actual experience retrofitting social housing, Kelly recently estimated that the true cost of insulation and heat pump installation is nearer £65,000 per house. For all U.K. houses and non-domestic premises, Kelly arrives at a total figure of £3 trillion, equivalent to the annual GDP of the U.K. In Skidmore’s world, this expenditure will soon be required before a house can be sold.
Heat pumps and electric cars will all require a massive expansion of the electrical grid. Onshore wind farms are a noted ecological disaster area. They are noisy, unsightly, last only a few years and are lethal for wildlife populations. New evidence from German scientists has indicated that millions of bats are being slaughtered every year by giant wind turbines. In addition, large birds that rely on wind currents for flight such as golden eagles, hawks and kittiwakes frequently fight losing battles with fast whirling blades. Skidmore looks to pave the way for widespread onshore turbine deployment, “working closely with communities to deliver local benefits”.
Powering the grid with intermittent wind and solar is a disaster waiting to happen. Without reliable back up, many thousands will die when the wind stops blowing during cold winter spells. Battery storage is one option touted, but moving to all electric cars in short order will use up all the lithium and cobalt in the world. Not that it matters that none will be left for storing grid power, since the cost of this exercise is very silly to start with. A recent report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation noted that Net Zero promoters “have no idea what they are doing” over multi-trillion dollar battery costs. The report found realistic costs for protecting against wind and solar blackouts could reach 15 times a country’s GDP.
The author noted a “heads in the sand” approach from politicians, adding, “One would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Why The Right Is Losing The Young
By Nick Dixon
The always interesting, though not always conservative, Andrew Sullivan has written a piece on why the Right is losing the young, with the extra-provocative subheading “And what the woke actually get right”. Here’s an excerpt.
It’s dawning on many on the political Centre and Right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations. They’re immaturing with age. Zoomers and Millennials are further to the Left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving Rightward as they age. A recent, viral piece in the FT added a new spark to the conversation, arguing that if Millennials matured like previous generations, then by the age of 35, they
should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the U.S. are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history… Millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.
And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare; growing up in a far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military; experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.
These are all 21st century phenomena — and simply not experienced by the generations immediately before them. Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped.
Sometimes we forget that these deep factors are what are most seriously in play. And the biggest mistake many of us on the Centre or Right tend to make is assuming that all of the young’s stickier Leftiness — especially the most irritating varieties of it — are entirely a function of woke brainwashing, and not related to genuinely unique challenges. A lot is — the indoctrination is real and relentless — but a lot isn’t. And it’s vital to distinguish the two.
Worth reading in full.
News Round-Up
By Nick Dixon
- “Doctor Calls for Withdrawal of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines Following New Research” – A doctor based in Louisiana says it’s time to halt the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines until new clinical trials prove the benefits outweigh the harms, writes Zachary Stieber for Epoch Times.
- “Insider reveals truth about COVID-19 pandemic from within the National Health Service” – An ex-director at one of the largest hospital trusts in the U.K. has revealed to the Naked Emperor what really happened during the pandemic.
- “School strikes would be a disaster for the lockdown generation” – Children paid the price to keep us all safe. Their education mustn’t be further disrupted, says Rachel de Souza in the Telegraph.
- “Barely anyone aged 18-49 in Ireland takes second Covid booster” – Up to 97 per cent of those eligible in Ireland’s 18-49 age group have not had their second Covid booster, according to Julieanne Corr in the Sunday Times.
- “NHS ‘bed-blocking’ fuelled by 50 steps needed to discharge fit patients” – On average, around 14,000 patients deemed fit to leave hospital are stuck in beds every day, writes Lizzie Roberts in the Telegraph.
- “Public faith in the NHS collapses” – Voters are losing faith in the NHS amid record waiting lists and ambulance delays, reports the Times.
- “Britain will pay the price of demonising fossil fuels for a decade to come” – The current crisis has exposed the fragility of our energy system, writes Tony Hayward in the Telegraph.
- “Hundreds of residents threaten council with legal action over new LTN” – Hundreds of residents in Dulwich Village have threatened to sue council chiefs for “forcing” a new low traffic neighbourhood scheme upon them, writes Ewan Somerville in the Telegraph.
- “Wrong, Washington Post, ‘Less Warming,’ Won’t Result in Greater Climate Disasters” – There are a plethora of false claims and faulty reasoning in the Washington Post’s recent article, according to Anthony Watts in WUWT.
- “Follow the Science™” – The authoritarian Left and wokeism have corrupted science, according to Euphoric Recall.
- “Labour’s Starmer admits to ‘concerns’ over Scottish trans law” – Even Starmer is against Sturgeon’s mad Gender Recognition Reform Bill, the Mail reports.
- “Rishi Sunak set to ban ‘abhorrent’ conversion therapy” – PM is expected to ban both homosexual and transgender conversion therapy, reversing Boris Johnson’s move to scale back the intervention, writes Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph.
- “Government seeks deal with Tory rebels over Online Safety Bill” – Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan is considering concessions as rebels are told to hold firm over ”threat of personal criminal liability” for tech directors, writes Will Hazell in the Telegraph.
- “‘The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas’” – Journalist, author and historian Paul Johnson has died, aged 94. He was one of the most notable British journalists who moved from Left to Right, writes Ed West.
- “Entryism didn’t die alongside the Soviet Union. It is alive and busy” – Either we make an effort to restore the democratic integrity of public debate, or we allow subversion by tiny minorities to shut it down altogether, writes Janet Daley in the Telegraph.
- “Labour remains a paid-up member of ‘claptrap’ Stonewall diversity scheme” – Labour insists Stonewall’s involvement is needed to ‘promote inclusion’, even though Government departments have quit amid fears over charity’s impartiality, writes Dominic Penna in the Telegraph.
- “The war on J.K. Rowling” – A Toronto ‘book artist’ called Laur Flom has been rebinding Harry Potter books without the author’s name on the cover, and charging £140 a pop, writes Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
- “Sebastian Croft addresses backlash over his role in Harry Potter game” – Another ungrateful pubescent actor disavows J.K. Rowling, as Sebastian Croft says he signed up for his upcoming role in the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy “long before he was aware of J.K. Rowling’s views”.
- “How the culture war went global” – Authoritarians the world over are weaponising wokeness, writes Doug Stokes in Spiked.
- “Biological male announces it’s all about women at Miss Universe” – fans of the Weekly Sceptic can definitely look forward to this fine example of ‘Peak Woke’.
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