Today’s Update

£22 Billion on Carbon Capture? It’s Hard to Think of a More Stupid Waste of Public Money

By Paul Homewood

The Government has just announced plans to spend nearly £22bn to subsidise carbon capture projects. The BBC reports:

The Government has pledged nearly £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production.

It said the funding for two “carbon capture clusters” on Merseyside and Teesside, promised over the next 25 years, would create thousands of jobs, attract private investment and help the U.K. meet climate goals.

Up to £21.7bn will subsidise three projects on Teesside and Merseyside to support the development of the clusters, including the infrastructure to transport and store carbon.

It will also support two transport and storage networks carrying captured carbon to deep geological storage in Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.

The Government said the move would give industry confidence to invest in the U.K., attracting £8bn of private investment, directly creating 4,000 jobs and supporting 50,000 in the long term.

It will also help remove 8.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year, officials said.

The projects are expected to start storing captured carbon from 2028.

Although much of the money will only start flowing after carbon capture operations begin, billions will have to be spent in the next few years building the infrastructure needed. Yet nobody in the world has yet proven that carbon capture can work commercially at scale. So we could end up chucking billions down the drain.

And only 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide will end up being captured a year. The U.K.’s overall emissions total 327 million tonnes, so wasting £22 billion of our money will barely make a dent.

To make matters worse, carbon capture projects don’t capture all of the carbon dioxide, so the saving will likely be even less than claimed. Then there are the upstream emissions to take account of – using natural gas from, say, Qatar involves methane emissions at the well heads, pipeline losses and emissions resulting from liquifying and transporting the stuff. When these are taken into account, net emission savings will be tiny or non-existent. The Government is only concerned about emissions that appear on the U.K.’s balance sheet, but from a global emissions point of view that makes no sense.

Of course, the admission that the U.K. will still need natural gas makes a nonsense of Ed Miliband’s desire to shut down North Sea gas as soon as possible.

As for who will pay for all of this, Sky News reports that the funding is to come from a mixture of taxpayer money and energy bills, but the Government has been coy about the split so far. Almost certainly though, while the initial infrastructure will be paid for out of taxation, the ongoing costs will be subsidised via Contracts for Difference and added to bills in the same way that renewable energy subsidies are.

What is certain is that producing electricity using carbon capture is more expensive than not using carbon capture, not least because the process itself wastes a lot of energy. Similarly, hydrogen produced from gas with carbon capture is much more expensive than just using the gas itself in the first place. All of this inefficiency will add to energy bills.

It is hard to think of a more stupid waste of public money.

The Evidence that Lucy Letby May be Innocent is Only Growing

By Dr David Livermore

Lady Thirwall presides over the Countess of Chester Hospital Inquiry on the presumption of Lucy Letby’s guilt, as she must. With less need, she began by admonishing those of us who question this guilt or – at least – question that it was proven beyond reasonable doubt.

We should hold our tongues, we’re told, to respect the bereaved.    

But the doubts and doubters grow louder, with articles across the spectrum from the Telegraph to the Guardian, along with very detailed critiques by Dr. Phillip Hammond in Private Eye

We must and do have sympathy for the parents. They have suffered grievous loss, and ongoing argument must add hurt. But this is insufficient to imprison a young woman in perpetuity if her ‘guilt’ is a mirage, confected from bad luck and poor practice in a unit that was an accident waiting to happen, along with contradictory jottings, scribbled down at the behest of a therapist.

The Countess of Chester had an exceptionally high stillbirth rate too, on a maternity unit unconnected to Letby. It wasn’t a wise place to have your baby, as Nadine Dorries learnt from experience.

Doubts have seeped even into the BBC, just as foul water leaks oozed into the Chester Unit. Its File on Four highlights Baby C. Dr Dewi Evans, the prosecution’s principal expert, gave a detailed, if unusual, explanation for this infant’s demise: injection of air into the stomach. This, he said, caused the baby’s stomach to expand, rupturing the diaphragm and crushing the lungs. The BBC now reminds us that the critical X-ray was taken after three days when Lucy Letby hadn’t been on duty.  This has led Dr. Evans to rethink, recalling that Baby C was “always the most difficult case”. He has discarded ‘injection to the stomach’ but remains confident that Lucy dunnit, by later injecting air to the baby’s bloodstream. That’s quite a jump, given the previous detail.

Nor does the inquiry evidence help the good Lady’s demands that we shut up. Late in 2016, after Letby had been moved to a desk job, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) reviewed the Neonatal Unit deaths, concluding that the unit was under-resourced, lacked a specialist neonatologist and had insufficient consultant ward-rounds. What has now emerged is a confidential addendum, addressing the consultants’ concerns about Letby, and concluding that these were based solely on correlation and were “quite subjective“. This led hospital management – who disbelieved the consultants’ allegations – to demand that they apologise to Letby and that she return to clinical work. The consultants then involved the police, igniting the powder trail…

This week, medics who were the unit juniors in 2015-16 took their turns on the witness stand. At the time several thought that the frequent deaths and collapses were likely due to bacterial infection, just as I do today. Sewage leaks, and taps contaminated with the opportunist pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, do not mix well with very premature infants. These have incomplete immune systems and, if born before 29 weeks’ gestation, largely lack the benefit of maternal antibodies, which later transfer across the placenta. Very premature babies can ‘go off’ very quickly, often without the typical signs and symptoms of infection.

The one piece of new evidence to emerge against Letby was that her two training periods at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital allegedly coincided with 40% rates of dislodged endotracheal tubes, compared with expected rates below 1%. But this has been swiftly challenged. Neonatologists point to product problems in the period and to dislodgement rates between 1 and 80%. In any event, Letby was a trainee. If she had a problem intubation, did no one correct her?

Lady Thirwall’s task increasingly resembles that of a 17th century justice instructed to find ways to prevent witches wreaking havoc. Outside the courthouse, people clamour that witches aren’t real, or lack the malign powers attributed to them  They didn’t cause the laming of John Law, a pedlar, for which 10 women hanged at Lancaster in 1612. Law quite possibly had a stroke soon after being cursed by Alizon Device. Perhaps Alizon scared or enraged him, but she didn’t cause his stroke by witchcraft.

And, all too plausibly, Letby’s ‘crime’ was to be fool enough to remain in a badly-run and contaminated unit, working far beyond its competency. Even less wise, she accepted every shift she could because she was saving to buy a house.

Which brings me to a plug for Lucy Letby, the New Evidence airing on Channel 5 tomorrow (October 6th) at 9pm. This pulls together the doubts swirling around these convictions from statistical, medical and legal standpoints.

I’m talking about the likelihood of infection, as outlined above. Dr. John Ashton, formerly Director of Public Health in Northwest England, discusses systems failures and how multiple deficiencies were piled together to cause catastrophes. Among Chester’s deficiencies was the erosion of nurse staffing, a topic expanded by Michele Worden, who was Neonatal Nurse Practitioner at the Countess until redundancy in 2007. She talks of the many senior nurses who were ‘let go’, leaving qualified but inexperienced staff, such as Lucy, to care for the sickest infants. Drs. Svilena Dimitrova, Phil Hammond and Alan Wayne Jones discuss the bizarre methods of murder claimed by the prosecution, as in the same producer’s earlier documentary. They make the good point that, until Dr. Evans, a paediatrician, came along, these deaths were recorded, by experienced pathologists as ‘Natural Causes’. 

Mark MacDonald speaks of the challenges he faces in taking over as Lucy Letby’s barrister, seeking to bring her case to the Criminal Cases Review Board, and of the worthlessness of her ‘confession’ notes. Linked to this, Dr. Waney Squire, an Oxford neuropathologist, explains the difficulty of being an expert defence witness in emotive cases. She found herself in serious trouble with the GMC for standing up in court to challenge accepted ‘wisdom’ on Shaken Baby Syndrome. If expert witnesses won’t appear for fear of professional defenestration, justice can’t be attained.

Lastly, or rather first in the film’s running order, Sir David Davis MP speaks on why he is raising questions about Lucy Letby in the Commons and why he will continue to look into this case, concerned that it very well may be a major miscarriage of justice.

Do watch.

Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.

“I’m Glad I Stood Up and Said No”: The Medical Ethics Professor Sacked for Standing Up to Vaccine Mandates

By Hannes Sarv

December 17th 2021 was the last day for Dr. Aaron Kheriaty to be a faculty member of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He had served for almost 15 years as Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Programme at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He was – and, of course, still is – a renowned and respected expert in his field. As a specialist, his comments were welcome in national newspapers and on television. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years.

Ethics, or more specifically, blatant violations of medical ethics, were the direct cause of Dr. Kheriaty’s dismissal. However, Kheriaty was not the violator. Like many other institutions during that extraordinarily hysterical time three years ago, UCI itself violated the basic principles of medical ethics. In the summer of 2021, the university imposed the Covid vaccine mandate for all its students, faculty members and staff. Kheriaty, who was also a lecturer of the medical ethics course, mandatory for medical students, could not stand by and watch this happen. “We talk about the Nuremberg Code that was developed in the wake of the Nazi doctors’ atrocities in World War II to prevent those kinds of atrocities from ever happening again,” he says. “And the very first principle articulated in the Nuremberg Code is the principle of informed consent, which means that an adult of sound mind has the right to accept or refuse to either participate in research or to accept or refuse a medical intervention after being given adequate information about the risks, the benefits and the alternatives,” Kheriaty explains.

Took the university to court because of vaccine coercion

There was no such information on the benefits and risks associated with Covid vaccines available back then, nor is there now. Those who followed the issue closely realised this in the immediate aftermath of the vaccines’ introduction in 2021. “We were lied to about the risks and benefits and the unknowns of the vaccine. And we were forced to take them on penalty of losing our jobs or being kicked out of school or not being able to travel. And I thought this was just egregiously wrong,” Kheriaty says, adding he would not have been able to stand up in front of his students and talk to them about medical ethics, the virtues of moral conduct and the courage to act ethically even under pressure, while at the same time not confronting such a gross breach of ethics himself. Initially, he spoke out publicly against mandatory vaccination and wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he explained that the introduction of vaccine mandates in universities was a violation of medical ethics.

When UCI introduced vaccine mandates in the summer of 2021, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was also a lecturer of the medical ethics course at the university, could not just stand by and watch such a breach of medical ethics happen. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

As no major debate followed at the university, he decided to take the university to court in August 2021 over these mandates. “The university very quickly retaliated and put me on administrative leave and then unpaid suspension and then fired me basically as quickly as possible,” Kheriaty says. He adds, however, that he has no regrets. “I’m glad that I can tell my children and grandchildren that during this crisis, when many people were losing their heads and throwing common sense out the window, I tried to stand up and say, ‘no’. It is not right to coerce people in this way, to violate their freedom, to violate their bodily autonomy in this way. It is a violation of human dignity and their human rights,” he says. “I think a lot of folks have come around now to realise that forcing a novel, mostly untested product that lacked efficacy and has serious safety concerns on an entire population and then running an experiment where you vaccinate billions of people with a totally new technology was probably a bad idea,” Kheriaty adds, noting that such vaccine mandates for healthy people had never been implemented before.

Failure of science and medical system

Of course, alongside this global vaccination experiment involving billions of people, there were also a lot of other unscientific measures introduced during the Covid crisis, which were implemented by the authorities with the backing of the apparatus of coercion. What this means, according to Kheriaty, is that both the medical system and science were failing people. “We threw out the traditional rulebook for public health, which involved quarantining and isolating people who are symptomatic and sick. Never before in human history had we isolated and separated and locked down people who were healthy,” he explains. As all can remember, in the case of Covid, this was done on a large scale, systematically, and with coercion – a healthy person had to sit in ‘self-isolation’ for days after exposure to a person who had tested positive for Covid. “I think a lot of folks have come around now to realize the folly of much of what was done,” Kheriaty says. “There’s really no evidence for universal masking, we know that lockdowns did more harm than good, the school closures damaged an entire generation, and the effects of that are actually going to be felt for decades,” he says, citing just a few examples.

The reason why most doctors and scientists remained silent about all this, Kheriaty says, can be explained in part by the fact that science was rapidly becoming politicised. Soon it was no longer science but ideology, which simply had to be accepted. Whereas the scientific method means constantly testing hypotheses and refuting previous knowledge when new evidence-based information comes along to disprove it, this was no longer the case with Covid. There were certain people who were appointed by the authorities to represent science, and who therefore represented what science said. For example, Anthony Fauci, the influential White House Covid policy coordinator, who became the Covid-era ‘science figure’ in the U.S., said in an interview in 2021 that to criticise him was in fact to criticise science.

In an interview in 2021 the then White House Covid policy coordinator Anthony Fauci said that he represents science, i.e., attacks on him and his proposed harmful Covid policies are attacks on science. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

This situation meant that any scientist or doctor who criticised or doubted the effectiveness of the coercive measures or Covid vaccines was cancelled and could potentially end up losing his or her job. “Look what happened to me. Here is the answer why more doctors did not speak out,” Kheriaty says. So many remained silent, fearing for their careers.

Propaganda and censorship

But Kheriaty says the impact of propaganda and censorship cannot be underestimated as well. All the major media outlets and television broadcasts talked about the highly dangerous virus, the need for lockdown policies and mask mandates, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the need to achieve herd immunity through vaccination, etc. While all of this and more was constantly propagated, there were numbers always running in the background showing how many people were dying everyday from the disease. Yet COVID-19 was not as deadly a disease as it was portrayed to be – a comprehensive study led by John P. A. Ioannidis, a renowned Stanford University Professor of Medicine, found in October 2022 that the pre-vaccine infection fatality rate (IFR, indicating deaths among all infected) in the 0-69 age group was 0.095%. In the 0-59 age group it was 0.035%, and of course in the still younger age group, still lower. “Fear was deliberately weaponised. There were revelations in the U.K. and Canada about Government agencies and Government actors that were deliberately trying to increase the level of fear in the population in order to get an increased level of compliance with the Government’s dictates,” Kheriaty comments.

At the same time, voices that criticised the coercive measures or otherwise sought to approach the situation in a healthy way were not given a platform. In such a situation, a general consensus on the need for official action emerged, and the majority of doctors and scientists probably believed it. Governments also went to great lengths to ensure that voices on social media criticising their Covid policies were labelled as spreading misinformation and silenced. “Covid was an opportunity for things like censorship and propaganda to manifest and to advance in ways that would have probably taken several decades if they hadn’t occurred during a crisis like that,” Kheriaty says.

On censorship, Kheriaty again speaks from personal experience – he is one of the plaintiffs in a landmark U.S. free speech case Murthy v Missouri (originally Missouri v Biden). In May 2022, the Attorneys General of the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and his administration officials, alleging that the Biden administration, through pressuring the social media companies, was engaging in censorship and thereby suppressing free speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs pointed out that the dissemination of information has been restricted on a variety of topics under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’, including censorship of truthful information related to COVID-19, vaccines, elections, foreign policy and other topics. “The advocates of censorship of course never use the word censorship,” Kheriaty says. “They talk about ‘misinformation’, which is false information that is delivered mistakenly. Disinformation is supposedly when the person intends to deceive and knows that what they’re saying is wrong. But then they had to invent a third term because they were censoring so much true information. They had to invent a term called ‘malinformation’, which is basically true information, but they don’t like its context or it doesn’t support the narrative that they want to support and so they’re going to censor it,” Kheriaty says, explaining the logic of Government censors. In some cases, even satire was censored. Freedom Research has written extensively on this issue on several occasions – e.g. herehere and here. The censorship of truthful information has also been acknowledged by the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and he regrets it.

Five individuals were added as plaintiffs to the same lawsuit – Stanford University Medical Professor Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, the then Harvard Medical School Professr Dr. Martin Kulldorff, founder of the Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, leader of the consumer and human rights group Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, and Dr. Kheriaty. They all had been censored by social media companies at the Government’s request. “In my case, I was a critic of vaccine mandates for ethical and legal reasons. These criticisms were censored in many cases, not because we were wrong, not because we were spreading so-called misinformation, but precisely because we were right and we were making compelling arguments that were threatening to the Government’s interests and threatening to the regime’s interests,” Kheriaty says.

Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty called Government censorship “Orwellian” and issued an unprecedented injunction restricting the Government from interacting with social media platforms. Photo: Public domain.

In July 2023, Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty issued an unprecedented injunction on the case, restricting officials from the Biden administration and an entire line of agencies, including the security agencies that had requested censorship, from interacting with social media platforms. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterised by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’,” Doughty wrote in a 155-page memorandum ruling accompanying the judgment. “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” he added.

Censorship for financial and political gain

“Censorship was used as a tool of power and to control the flow of information online, which is the new public square. And to try to manage public opinion, not through open debate, dialogue, and discussion, but through operating behind the scenes to control basically the mechanisms that allow information to get out there,” Kheriaty says, explaining that the case is not just about these particular plaintiffs, but millions of people around the world who have suffered because of such censorship decisions. For example, the U.S. authorities may have sent a message to a social media platform about a particular post, saying that they thought it should be taken down. In many cases, the platform – such as Facebook or Twitter – said that the particular post did not break their rules or their ‘community guidelines’.The Government would then say that it thought companies should change their guidelines so that the posts they wanted to be taken down would break the rules of the platforms and could still be taken down. “It truly was Orwellian, as Judge Doughty said, because it was clear that this was not about finding the truth. This was not about getting truthful scientific information or public health information out there. It was about supporting a particular regime’s policy demands and supporting a particular narrative and supporting particular groups that were benefiting financially or politically or in other ways from these policies,” Kheriaty adds.

The Government appealed Judge Doughty’s initial injunction, and last September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit also said that Biden’s White House, top health-care decision-makers and the FBI had likely violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The three-judge unanimous decision stated that the White House “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences”. In other words, undue influence was used to get tech companies to remove or restrict the circulation of posts about, for example, the coronavirus or the election. The ruling still limited the scope of the injunction issued by Judge Doughty by removing the ban on some of the agencies that were included in the original injunction.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty discussed the problems with censorship at length during our podcast interview. Photo: Freedom Research.

However, in June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the injunction by a vote of six to three. The majority of the Supreme Court based its decision not to uphold the injunction primarily on the fact that the plaintiffs did not, in their view, have standing. According to the majority of the court, companies such as Facebook and YouTube have long been engaged in content moderation, and in their view, the plaintiffs did not show that the companies decided to remove the posts because of Government pressure. “While the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgement,” wrote Amy Coney Barrett, the judge who produced the majority opinion.

However, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented, criticised their colleagues for failing to address the restriction on freedom of expression that Government coercion of content moderation poses in such a decision. Alito, who wrote the minority opinion, said that the court “shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion, in this case, to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think”.

Kheriaty comments that the majority of the Supreme Court judges essentially took one technical detail – whether or not Government officials specifically mentioned their names in the censorship request – and rejected the injunction on that basis.

The case continues

However, the substantive dispute in the case continues. It has now been joined with another similar case brought against the U.S. Government by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Kennedy family member who until recently ran for President and now supports the candidacy of Donald Trump. Kennedy has long been critical of vaccines, and in particular vaccine programmes for children, and given the commercial interests of Big Pharma it is not surprising that he is accused of spreading misinformation by interested parties and Government agencies that pressured social media to censor his posts also during the Covid crisis. While the other plaintiffs could be said not to have been named in the censorship requests by the Government, Kennedy has been explicitly mentioned along with the Children’s Health Defence (CHD), an organisation he founded to promote children’s health interests. In August, the same federal judge Doughty ruled that since the previous decision was made because the Government did not name the other plaintiffs while pushing social media towards censorship, both Kennedy and CHD, who were named, have a legal basis for an injunction. This dispute will now resume in the higher courts. “So even on the Supreme Court’s very, very high standing threshold that it set in this particular case, we believe that the court’s going to find that Kennedy has standing,” Kheriaty says.

RFK Jr. has been a long-time critic of vaccines, and while it can be argued that the Government did not order the other plaintiffs censored due to not identifying them by name, RFK Jr. and his organisation, Children’s Health Defence, were specifically named. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

He also points out that it is very important that this case continues and that it continues to be talked about. People don’t realise, he says, that what is happening is direct censorship by governments. “And certainly in the United States and in many other Western nations, they’re doing so in ways that violate their own constitutions or violate their own laws that would prevent the Government from abridging people’s free speech rights,” he says.

Covid aftermath: a situation of great trauma

While the censorship hearings in the courts continue, many people will not want to look back on the Covid crisis as a whole and the damaging decisions taken by the authorities at the time. Still less can we talk about those who were in power or who recommended and made harmful decisions being held accountable in any way. According to Kheriaty, this is to be expected because, first of all, the people in power are largely the same as they were then. Moreover, it is worth reiterating that the majority of society not only supported the lockdown policies and coercion that was implemented during the crisis, but were active in it themselves. “There were just too many ordinary people who refused to allow family members to come to Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner because they weren’t vaccinated. Or people who pressured their loved ones to get vaccinated. In some cases, those people were injured by the vaccines. I mean, that’s just a really hard thing to reckon with,” notes Kheriaty. “It takes a rare person of extraordinary courage to be able to admit that they were wrong on something like that,” he adds.

So it is a situation of great trauma, according to Kheriaty. “I think we’re in a state similar now to Germany following World War II, where atrocities were revealed, but the country as a whole is in shell shock and people don’t want to think about their complicity with a regime,” he says.

A new generation had to grow up in order to somehow make sense of the past and make peace with it. Kheriaty believes the case is similar with Covid. “Our children who were harmed by school closures, who had their adolescence or their young adulthood robbed from them for several years. I think they’re going to want to ask questions about, hey, what the heck happened when I was 18 years old and was supposed to start my first year at the university? The next two years were just a bloody mess in my life and it’s completely disruptive,” he says. Kheriaty believes that from such a distance, society will finally be able to honestly assess what happened. But it will still be very difficult to find those responsible. “The people who did this to them probably are either going to be out of power or dead and gone before we get a real reckoning,” he adds.

First published by Freedom Research. Subscribe here.

Why Are Well-Off EV Owners Charged Half as Much as Poor Pensioners for Off-Peak Electricity?

By Nick Rendell

“The surprise is not whether the dog plays the piano well or poorly but that it plays it at all!” Dr. Johnson might well have applied this aphorism to Rachel Reeves’s cancellation of the pensioner’s winter fuel allowance. However, in this instance the shock was both that the allowance was cancelled and that it was handled so badly.

As a general rule I’m fine with anything that removes the state from people’s lives. However, the ‘optics’ of this announcement were shockingly dreadful. Why wasn’t it wrapped up with a programme of initiatives, such as confirmation that the triple lock would be retained or alongside details of the forthcoming increase in pensions?

In any case, here is an even greater mystery: why are people who are sat shivering at home in poorly insulated, under-heated social housing paying about twice as much per kWh for off-peak electricity as EV owners, swanning about in their £65,000 Teslas?

You must remember the biblical parable about the widow’s mite. At the temple one day the widow was only able to afford a small charitable donation. She gave her two pennies then quietly slipped away. Meanwhile the rich man made a great show of his large donation, despite it being a sum that he could easily afford.

Well, something like that is happening today in every parish in the country. The widows in this case are mainly the poor little old ladies living in post-War houses and flats with night-storage heaters. Remarkably, there are about 1.4 million homes still using night-storage heaters. The rich men in my parallel parable are the 1.2 million EV drivers, a group not known for understating their contribution to the selfless pursuit of Net Zero, especially when that contribution is funded by subsidies from general taxation and additional charges on everyone else’s energy bills.

Why do I contrast the two groups – the 1.4 million dwellers of sub-optimal housing and 1.2 million drivers of expensive EVs? Because, in many ways they’re comparable, at least in their desire for cheap, off-peak electricity. Surely, you might think, isn’t this where ‘smart meters’ come in? Isn’t the idea that they can differentiate between user groups to provide more tailored tariffs? Alas, the £20bn or so being spent on ‘smart meters’ doesn’t seem to have delivered something quite that smart.

As a kid I remember my dad had a Ford Sierra in ‘burnished gold’. Today, like so much else, the choice of a car’s paint finish has been inverted. Long gone are the days when Henry Ford could say, “you can have any colour you like providing it’s black”. Elon Musk’s customers now seem to say, “paint it any colour you like but to us we will always see it as ‘burnished virtue”.

If our widow with three night-storage heaters could buy off-peak electricity at the same price as EV drivers she’d save about £500 per year – far more than the amount she’s missing out on if she’s no longer collecting the winter fuel allowance.

You may never have given it a moment’s thought, so perhaps it’ll come as a surprise to learn that a single night-storage heater uses about the same amount of electricity as an EV covering about 11,000 miles a year. A study quoted in This is Money suggested that the average number of miles covered by an EV was, at 8,292, slightly lower than the distance covered by the average combustion car. So, for most EV drivers, they’re using less electricity than a single night-storage heater consumes. But of course, while our EV driving eco-warriors tend only to have one EV, our widows have three or four night-storage heaters. While our EV champion is spending less than £200 a year on the 2,750 kWhs of off-peak electricity at 7p per kWh to propel his car 11,000 miles, our widows are getting billed about £350, 75% more, for each of their night-storage heaters.

But it doesn’t have to work this way. The market for EV drivers is pretty competitive with prices in the range of 6.9p to 10p per kWh, as illustrated on the right hand side of the table, nabbed from Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert site and reproduced in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Conversely, as can also be seen in Figure 1, the kWh prices for conventional Economy 7, or “off-peak (night) rate” electricity ranges from 10.95p to 14.85p, in some cases twice as expensive.

Is there something special about ‘EV destined’ off-peak electricity in comparison to Economy-7 electricity ear-marked for our widow’s night-storage heaters? Of course not. There’s absolutely no reason why the electricity companies shouldn’t offer the same price to Economy-7 users as EV users. In fact, Dale Vince’s Ecotricity appears to do just that, well done Dale. So, why doesn’t British Gas or EON do the same?

In general I’m not in favour of regulators. We only have regulators when markets don’t work properly. Self-evidently the electricity market doesn’t work properly. But if we are going to have a regulator why hasn’t it stepped in here and required the energy companies to follow Dale Vince’s lead and not discriminate against the widows and their night-storage heaters in favour of rich men in EVs?

Even more pertinently, why doesn’t Ed Milliband flag up the potential savings if all night-storage heater users switched to Ecotricity?

Why doesn’t Milliband go one step further and encourage our widows to install night-storage heaters? A large-scale national scheme could easily get the installed price down to about £300 for a state-of-the-art unit, about the same cost as the much lamented winter fuel allowance. We’re not short of available night-time electricity which could be priced lower than gas and directly substitute a renewable energy source for a fossil fuel.

Of course, Milliband might argue that rather than messing about with night-storage heaters he wants to install millions of heat pumps. But look at it from the widow’s point of view. If she’s only expecting to live another five or 10 years she’d be mad to squander the money she’s been squirrelling away for her kids on a £25,000 heat-pump installation that would never pay back during her lifetime (if, indeed, they ever pay back during their own lifetime).

Why not go for the low hanging fruit and get night-storage heaters in thousands of homes? Oh, and while we’re at it we could tell the widow that her contribution to ‘climate change’ (assuming she gives a damn) is rather more valuable than that donated by the rich man who just razzed by in his Y-class Tesla. 

‘Surrender Starmer’ Refuses to Rule Out Signing Away Gibraltar and Falklands

By Will Jones

Keir Starmer has refused to say whether he would sign away other British overseas territories such as Gibraltar and the Falklands after handing the Chagos Islands to China-ally Mauritius. The Telegraph has the story.

The archipelago was British-owned from 1814 but was signed away by the Government in a deal that it claimed would safeguard global security by ending a long-running dispute.

The islands include Diego Garcia, which hosts a strategically important U.S.-U.K. military base.

The Prime Minister was asked to guarantee that under Labour no other British overseas territories will be signed away. 

He told reporters in response: “The single most important thing was ensuring that we had a secure base, the joint U.S.-U.K. base; hugely important to the U.S., hugely important to us.

“We’ve now secured that and that is why you saw such warm words from the U.S. yesterday.”

A spokesman for No10 told GB News: “Chagos does not change our policy or approach to other overseas territories.”

His remarks came just hours after Argentina pledged to gain “full sovereignty” of the Falkland Islands in the wake of the Chagos deal.

The country’s Foreign Minister, Diana Mondino, welcomed the step taken by Sir Keir’s Government on Thursday towards ending “outdated practices”.

She pledged “concrete action” to ensure that the Falklands – the British territory that Argentina calls the Malvinas and claims as its own – are ceded to Buenos Aires.

Worth reading in full.

EU States Must Recognise Transgender Identities Across the Bloc, Top Court Rules

By Will Jones

European Union countries must recognise gender and name changes made in other member states, the bloc’s top court the European Court of Justice has ruled, dismaying countries pushing back against gender ideology. The Telegraph has the details.

In what was hailed as a “monumental victory” for transgender people, judges in Luxembourg said Romania had broken EU law by refusing to accept a British-Romanian transgender man’s change of sex and name from female to male, which he was granted in the U.K. before the Brexit transition period ended.

In a ruling that sets a precedent across the bloc, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said that lawful name and gender changes made in other EU states had to be automatically accepted to protect EU rights to free movement and residence.

It said that Brexit was not relevant because Britain was still a member state during the transition period, when Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi was granted a gender recognition certificate in 2020, after moving to the U.K. in 2008 and gaining British citizenship.

Mr. Mirzarafie-Ahi had applied for a new birth certificate from the Romanian authorities, who ordered him to restart a lengthy gender-recognition procedure in Romania rather than accepting the U.K. documents.

“Today’s verdict has shown us that trans people are equal citizens of the European Union,” said Iustina Ionescu, Mr. Mirzarafie-Ahi’s lawyer. …

The decision will not be universally welcomed across Europe. EU members Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria have bans or plan to ban people from legally changing their gender.

Rodrigo Ballester, the head of the Centre for European Studies at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium think tank in Budapest, which has links to the Hungarian Government, said: “Utterly shocking and very banal at the same time. Once again, the European Court of Justice tramples over basic legal principles for ideological purposes and erodes member states’ competences through ludicrous reasonings.

“Its ultimate goal is not to enforce the law, but to force further integration. Not to mention that it ignores Brexit as if it had never happened. It is no longer judicial activism, it has become ideological crusading.”

“No individual, nor government, should be forced to affirm something that is untrue. Men cannot become women, and claiming this can have severe consequences in many areas of life,” said Lois McLatchie Miller, a spokeswoman for the Alliance Defending Freedom International campaign group. 

“Every government has a duty to protect the rights of their citizens – be it vulnerable women in crisis rape shelters, in prisons or in changing rooms.

“Granting a biological male access to these spaces by recognising a ‘change in gender’ puts women’s safety and wellbeing in jeopardy and often leads to censored and compelled speech.

“When biology is ignored, and words like ‘sex’ lose their meaning, it is women and girls who bear the brunt of that mistake.”

Worth reading in full.

News Round-Up

By Will Jones

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