Fury as Labour MP in British City Piled High With Rubbish Requests New Airport in… Pakistan
By Toby Young
A Labour MP for a city plagued with bin strikes and piled high with rubbish has backed calls for a new airport to be built in Kashmir. The Mail has more.
Tahir Ali, the MP for Birmingham, has come under fire for supporting a campaign for the new airport in another country.
He took to social media to voice his support for the project in the district of Mirpur, which is within the disputed Kashmir region administered by Pakistan.
He said on X: “There has been a long-standing promise for an international airport in Mirpur, which has yet to be met.
“This causes significant issues to a number of my constituents, who are having to drive over three hours to get to the nearest airport in Pakistan.
“I will continue to push for this cause, and pursue this issue until permission is granted for a new airport.”
But Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick replied scathingly: “You’re an MP for Birmingham, not Mirpur.
“The streets of your city are literally piled high in rubbish thanks to your Labour council. Focus on the UK.”
Bin strikes in Birmingham have wrecked havoc in the city, with residents complaining of rats and mountains of rubbish.
One waste collection lorry was filmed as residents overwhelmed by desperate residents laden with bin bags.
The lorry was besieged by so many people as it attempted to clear piles of rotting waste in the affluent Mosely suburb that a local councillor resorted to calling police.
West Midlands Police said two people have been arrested in connection to the ongoing industrial action, which escalated from a series of one-day walk outs to an all-out strike.
A week on from the strike, and a mobile collection – a bin lorry in a static location allowing residents whose bins aren’t being collected to drop their rubbish off – triggered what one observer called a “binmageddon”.
Citizens turned up in cars filled with black bags of rubbish which they were desperate to dispose of.
The BBC reported that people were seen rushing down the streets to the wagon carrying multiple bags.
Others were seen running down the middle of the road with their wheelie bins, desperate to unload them.
Cars loaded with rubbish were seen parked in the neighbourhood as police yelled at people not to dump their rubbish in the street.
Officers called the collection off early as tempers flared and the lorry reached capacity.
The rat infestation has become so bad the rodents have been dubbed the Squeaky Blinders because they appear to have the city in their grip – much like the Peaky Blinders gang of the late 19th Century which inspired the BBC drama series of the same name.
The Unite union says its members face pay cuts after the scrapping of waste collection and recycling officer roles. But Labour-run Birmingham City Council says its offer is “fair and reasonable”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The letter Tahir Ali signed calling for a new airport in Mirpur was also signed by eight Labour MPs who voted against expanding Heathrow in 2018. Mohhamad Yasin, Debbie Abrahams, Rosena Allin-Khan, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, James Frith, Imran Hussain, Afzal Khan, and Yasmin Qureshi – all Labour MPs who opposed the building of a third runway at Britain’s largest airport – signed the letter calling for an airport to be built in Mirpur, Pakistan. Zarah Sultana MP, who was not in the Commons when Heathrow expansion was last put to parliament, signed the letter. Earlier this year, she called the Prime Minister’s decision to back a third runway “indefensible” in the “middle of a climate emergency.” The News Hub Group has more.
Climate Alarmism is Dead. But Don’t Celebrate Too Early
By Ben Pile
Around the world there are now concrete signs of the death of the climate agenda. The questions that persist relate to whether or not this is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of the Climate Wars, and for how long Brits and Europeans will have to endure their political establishments’ intransigence. Marking the end of climatism from an American perspective, and in the wake of Donald trump’s return to the White House, Roger Pielke Jr. and Michael Shellenberger have produced a very insightful conversation on the latter’s podcast.
“Climate change is an apocalyptic threat, they said,” explains Shellenberger. “It wasn’t — obviously”. Trump has “exposed” the Biden administration’s flagship climate policy – the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act “as a grift”. And perhaps most tellingly, “Greta has moved on to Palestine.” “Climate change is fading from view like overpopulation and other past environmental scares.”
It’s an important observation. The broader green movement – such as it is – and the global green political agenda proper started life at the end of the 1960s, inaugurated by the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm under the slogan ‘Only One Earth’. The issues may have changed, but the naff sloganeering hasn’t. Back then, as Shellenberger reminds us, it was not global warming that drove the agenda, but neo-Malthusian framings of pollution, overpopulation and resource depletion – data about which were fed into simulations running on some of the first supercomputers, which in turn predicted the imminent collapse of society. Those simulations’ predictions established global green politics, yet by the turn of the century the prophecies had been debunked by nature and history. The green movement regrouped around climate change.
According to Shellenberger, what’s most notable is that despite Trump’s clearly stated anti-climate policies, including withdrawing the USA (again) from the Paris Agreement, there has been no response from the radical green movement. This is, at face value, the opposite of the case in the UK, where the Just Stop Oil (JSO) movement has announced that it is now throwing in the orange towel, not because the orange man is back, but because (or so it claims) its aims – i.e., no more oil and gas exploration in the North Sea – are now government policy. Perhaps, but JSO was the reformulated Extinction Rebellion (XR) with lower expectations. XR believed that it would mobilise the entire public with its actions, and was flattered by politicians from all parties, including most notably by Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with an hour-long sit down with XR representatives and activist civil servants.
XR gave up its mission at the start of 2023, announcing “we quit”. So the more likely explanation for the successor organisation folding is, as longstanding green critic Marc Morano puts it, “the Trump Effect”. JSO was always a small operation that was given far too much attention and which would struggle to survive when the energy and cash dried up. Many of its activists are in prison, or, being geriatric, merely fatigued or worse. The DOGE revelations are shining bright sunlight on the hitherto opaque funding relationships between governments and activist organisations all over the world, and this is adding to the effect, in the US, of money being driven away from ESG investing, despite the apparent buoyancy of Canada’s new Liberal Party Prime Minister, Mark Carney – the author of so many international ESG agreements. As I have argued previously, radical movements like XR and JSO, which were funded by green philanthropists such as the billionaire hedge fund owner Christopher Hohn and Carney’s pal Michael Bloomberg, were simply the performance art wings of financial institutions’ marketing campaigns. Such organisations kept radical environmentalism in the news cycle, and radical climate policies in investors’ minds.
Pielke is slightly more cautious, arguing that so far, Trump’s statements have not been matched with legislation, and warning that climate is still an issue that seemingly unites 78% of Democrats, who may yet come back. But the in-out-in-out effect of Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump administrations has weakened the foundations of global climate politics, making any American re-entry likely to have much less effect, especially amid new geopolitical realities and the rise of energy realism. Moreover, Pielke observes that “The ‘climate first’ voter is a tiny slice of the political landscape, even though they occupy a lot of attention and time on social media”. When push comes to shove, and given “a list of topics”, says Pielke, “it routinely comes in 17th, 18th, 19th, out of 20”. Climate is important to American and European elites – especially academia and the financial sector, which hope to secure their interests in the institutions of ‘globalism’, but it’s of little interest to broader constituencies.
On the Paris Agreement itself, Pielke observes that the international climate agenda was probably in reality already dead by 2009, at the Copenhagen COP15 climate meeting. COP15 was a debacle, dashing high hopes for a successor regime to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol by ending in bitter fighting, with factions of all kinds then blaming each other for the meeting’s failure. And that failure is best represented by the 2015 COP21 Paris Agreement, which departed from the preceding COP meetings’ attempts to find a global, one-size-fits-all policy. Instead, Paris allows each Government to commit to a “Nationally-Determined Contribution” (NDC) to emissions reduction, which, as Trump reveals, is worthless.
That failure also explains the green movement’s subsequent increased emphasis on financial regulation (ESG) and daft new activist movements. Rather than national and global politics, inn which the climate agenda faced too much resistance, or at least inertia, green billionaires such as Bloomberg and Hohn pumped cash into green financial and ESG lobbying, and into campaigns that sought to broaden public engagement, for example by reframing climate change as an air pollution matter. The latter resulting in LTNs, congestion charging and clean air legislation across the UK, as the burden for finding ways to meet Net Zero targets was increasingly put onto local authorities. It’s easier for a local government to restrict motoring than for a national government to abolish cars. And it’s easier to use ‘air pollution’ fears rather than climate change as a basis for such authoritarianism.
We shall find out, perhaps sooner rather than later, how UK and European politics and policies are affected by what Pielke and Shellenberger observe. But what is clear, for now, is that the UK Government, at least, remains deeply committed to protecting the agenda, despite Net Zero policy scepticism being now properly established on the political mainstream by both the Tories and Reform. And this highlights the danger of celebrating the end of climate alarmism too soon.
There is a grim aspect to the death of climate environmentalism: revenge. When weirdo cults implode, perhaps because the UFO doesn’t turn up or Armageddon doesn’t arrive, their members are left with only anger and confusion. Pielke puts it more softly as a “loss of credibility” caused by so many deadlines being called but passing without event. But those who believed that they were God’s/Gaia’s chosen warriors, though humiliated and humbled, aren’t just going to admit their errors and slope away from public life.
A further risk is observed by Pielke, but with little discussion of the implications. Climate change alarmism may well go the way of the population-environmentalism of the 1970s, but that neo-Malthusianism never went away entirely. It was embarrassed, but it was sustained, at lower key, by many of the ‘philanthropic’ interests that reformulated it in climate terms. Not only is the climate issue likely to persist, albeit also at a lower key, it is likely to be merely replaced by whatever new reformulation of neo-Malthusianism the broader Green Blob’s armies of wonks can come up with. Environmentalism – green ideology – is a hydra.
This is a point that climate policy sceptics often overlook. The problem is not merely the policy failures but the mode of thinking, and indeed the entire irrational system of ideas that caused them in the first place and allowed advocates to dismiss criticisms and critics. Green ideology puts its thumb on science’s scales, clouding objective judgement, with green cash easing the process. And that is why I found Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch’s new Net Zero policy scepticism somewhat underwhelming. There is a danger that complacency will allow the same ideas that have beset the West and aided its plunge from its Moon-landing zenith to its eco-batshit nadir, to reform, regroup and advance once again.
Without a thoroughgoing critique, what is this new form of environmentalism going to look like? Well, one answer might come from Badenoch herself. Under the 2019 Boris Johnson government, in post as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Kemi Badenoch chaired the advisory panel on the Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity. Published in 2021, the review was introduced by Badenoch in the House of Commons; it aimed to reproduce the success that the influential 2006 Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change had on global green politics. “Protecting and enhancing our natural assets, and the biodiversity that underpins them, is crucial to achieving a sustainable, resilient economy,” said Badenoch.
The Dasgupta Review is, to put it bluntly, even more batshit crazy than Stern. It fails to identify what is even meant by ‘biodiversity’ in anything resembling objective terms. One moment it might be a largely imagined index of the range of genetic differences of organisms within an ecosystem. But the next moment, ‘biodiversity’ might be the spiritual experiences that a mountainside vista can inspire. Such pseudoscience and mystical mumbo jumbo have always been at the core of environmentalism. And the British political establishment seems especially vulnerable to it. And as is often the way with ideological BS, it’s not hard to notice the wider resonance with official preoccupation with ‘diversity’ more broadly.
We should welcome the facts that are observed in Shellenberger and Pielke’s excellent chats. And we should be glad that an opposition party has finally found the brains, balls, guts and spine to summon up something resembling an opposition argument. But we need to be mindful of the green tendency’s capture of established elites, which has resulted in a regressive, pre- or anti-Enlightenment drive. What the longer view of environmentalism’s history shows is that any vaguely plausible story about ecological doom has always been absorbed into the green ideological litany, driving arguments against democratic control of politics, abolishing reason from campuses, and worse. Those fake claims get abandoned or side-lined as they are debunked, but the green juggernaut rolls on, all the same.
The Cold Chill of the Heat Pump Reality
By Sallust
It may come as a surprise to the most dedicated eco warriors that heat pumps don’t last forever. Those installing them now are in for a nasty shock 15–20 years down the line when their costly noisy power-hungry government-subsidised outdoor heat exchangers come to the end of their lives and need replacing. There won’t be any grants or subsidies around then.
According to the Telegraph some of the early birds are already suffering from buyer’s remorse:
Peter and Anne Watts made headlines when they became one of around four British households to have an air-source heat pump fitted in 2008.
That Mr and Mrs Watts, 88 and 82 respectively, had installed a heat pump a decade before the likes of Boris Johnson seized upon them as the future of home heating was highly unusual.
“We had a reporter up from the local paper asking us about our solar panels and our heat pump,” recalls Mr Watts. “In the days afterwards, we got a call from the BBC – I thought it was a prank call from the neighbours.”
Yet 17 years on, the pump is nearing the end of its lifespan – and the price tag for a replacement is £17,000, around £10,000 more than they paid for their original.
Mr and Mrs Watts are in a highly unique quandary – one that shines a light on the shortcomings of the Government’s heat pump drive.Households currently benefit from a £7,500 grant to install a new pump, thanks to the generous Boiler Upgrade Scheme run by the energy department. But no such generosity exists for early adopters whose systems are now nearing their end.
It begs the question: how do households – who relied on low prices or government grants to get their heat pump fitted the first time around – afford its replacement?
Unfortunately, Mr and Mrs Watts can’t retrofit a gas boiler because a) they’re not on the gas grid and b) because the house was expensively renovated with the installation of a heat pump in mind. Now it seems they haven’t the cash for a new heat pump. That’s an interesting development since it’s often the well-heeled retired who have the resources and time to fit a heat pump in the first place. Unfortunately, if they live long enough their dwindling incomes turn the ageing heat pumps into a time bomb:
The couple, who ran a business selling animal feed and now live off a private pension, cannot afford a new heat pump. They have already stripped back on holidays since electricity prices first rose.
It is a problem that the pair, who live in a four-bedroom detached house in Buckinghamshire, did not foresee when they became one of the first British households to have an air-source heat pump installed.
Back when they installed the pump the whole idea was to future-proof their bills by investing in more efficient and cheaper-to-run equipment. Moreover, there were no grants back then though they did enjoy an advantageous scheme of selling the power they generated from solar panels back to the grid. Mr and Mrs Watts make around £900 per annum that way.
However, the cost of electricity has soared and heat pumps use so much it’s difficult for a domestic solar panel system to do more than make a dent in the running costs:
Almost two decades later, Mr Watts is doubtful the switch saved him much money, because in more recent years, so-called all-electric houses like his have been hamstrung by high electricity rates. “We don’t save a lot relative to oil and gas, but I would still recommend any house with a heat pump also gets solar panels,” he says.
Since they have no choice but to replace their heat pump or wait in trepidation for their existing one to break down, Mr and Mrs Watts are hoping their early loyalty will make it possible to obtain a discounted replacement:
After being approached by the Telegraph, a spokesman for the company said: “We value Mr Watts’ loyalty and appreciate his contribution to promoting heat pumps. If Mr Watts wishes to upgrade his system, Daikin has offered to supply a discounted heat pump.”
A Government spokesman said: “Heat pumps are three times more efficient than gas boilers, enabling families to save around £100 a year by using a smart tariff.”
£100 a year. If Mr and Mrs Watts can get a discounted heat pump for, say, £10,000 (a very optimistic prospect) they should be able to recover the replacement costs in only 100 years when both are over 180. Except by then they’d have had to replace the new heat pump at least five times.
It’s highly unlikely anyone currently buying a heat pump will find their installers lining up to offer them a discounted replacement in the 2040s, having been prompted by the Telegraph to do so.
With VAT imminent on heat pumps, the government has some solutions up its sleeve. One of them is to lock householders into debt to pay for them. The Government spokesman went on:
There is zero VAT on heat pumps until March 2027. Overall installation costs are coming down and will continue to do so for all consumers as the market develops. We are also exploring private finance options, such as loans, to support homeowners with the upfront costs of heat pumps.
It can be safely assumed that the cost of servicing those loans will exceed the nominal savings from a heat pump of £100 a year. Presumably, the loans will run the risk of still being paid off when the heat pump needs replacing, necessitating further loans for a new one.
One day there may be millions of pensioners living in houses with failing or failed heat pumps that they cannot possibly afford either to run or replace or obtain loans to do either.
Worth reading in full.
Yvette Cooper Blames Good Weather For Record Number of Small Boat Crossings
By Toby Young
Britain’s border security is dependent on the weather, the Home Secretary said on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show this morning. The Telegraph has more.
Yvette Cooper said the record small boat crossings so far this year reflected the higher number of days than previous years when there was good weather.
“The really unacceptable situation that we’re in is because of the way the criminal gangs have taken hold, our border security ends up being dependent on the weather. We cannot continue like this where the number of calm days affects the number of crossings,” she told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show.
A record 6,632 migrants have reached the UK this year, up from 4,600 at the same point in 2024. It has coincided with an increase in the number of ‘red days’ when the calm weather and sea conditions are conducive to crossings from 17 to 42 compared with the same period in 2024.
Ms Cooper blamed the failure of the previous Conservative government for failing to stop the gangs getting a grip. “We cannot carry on with border security being so dependent on the number of calm days that happen in the Channel. But the reason that is happening is because the criminal gangs still have a deep hold,” she said.
Her comments come ahead of a two-day summit in London this week on organised immigration crime involving ministers, officials and law enforcement agencies from more than 40 countries.
China, the source of many of the engines used in the small boats, and Turkey, where the dinghies are made in backstreet factories, along with source countries from Asia and Africa, are sending delegates to the first major international summit in the UK to tackle the emergency of illegal migration.
“This is a global criminal industry that is worth billions of pounds of exploitation, dangerous crimes that they are committing, and we need that international cooperation in order to bring those gangs down,” said Ms Cooper.
She revealed that the French Government’s Cabinet had now approved that its law enforcement officers can stop migrants’ boats at sea for the first time, lifting a ban that has existed since the first dinghies crossed in 2018.
Ms Cooper said the stop tactics in shallow waters would start later this year. They are expected to be led by an elite 70-strong police unit, known as the Compagnie de Marche, which was deployed during last summer’s Paris Olympics to northern France and are credited with a 25% reduction in attempted crossings.
“For many years, the previous government tried to persuade France to take action in French waters. That hasn’t happened. The French Government Cabinet has changed the rules so they can now intervene in French waters to prevent these dangerous boat crossings. I think that’s really important,” she said.
Ms Cooper said the Government was also prepared to consider “offshoring” schemes for processing migrants’ asylum claims and accommodating failed asylum seekers in ‘return hubs’ in other countries.
She said the UK had talked to Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy about its plans to process asylum seekers’ claims in camps in Albania, with those rejected refused entry to Italy and those accepted granted the right to enter the country.
“I talked to the Italian interior minister about their arrangements that Italy and Albania have set up. We will always look at what works. So we’ve been very clear about that,” she said.
“But it has to be practical things that will work, not the gimmicks. What we saw was [the conservative government’s] Rwanda scheme spend £700 million on sending four volunteers to Rwanda.”
Worth reading in full.
Higher taxes, More Political Repression, No Solutions: Germany’s Next Government Will be From Hell
By Eugyppius
The Federal Republic has boarded an express train to green socialist purgatory. There is no other way to describe what is happening here.
First, we had the shocking debt brake overhaul, via which the CDU and the SPD signalled their bizarre wish to reprise the hated politics of the traffic light, only in more extreme form. Among other things, this overhaul involved amending the constitution to include the goal of ‘climate neutrality’ by 2045. Leading greens are now hoping this amendment will open the way for litigious environmentalists to compel the further deindustrialisation of Germany over the coming two decades.
Then, as if to confirm the ongoing DDRification of the Federal Republic, the alleged Stasi collaborator and former leader of the Socialist Unity Party Gregor Grysi delivered the inaugural address to the 21st Bundestag.
Now the preliminary results of the coalition negotiations between the CDU, the Bavarian CSU and the Social Democrats are making their way into the press, and they are really a thing to behold.
In the run-up to the elections, all kinds of people told me that the CDU would take charge and we’d see a correction to the Right. The worst abuses of the traffic light would be put to bed, green politics would go on the back burner and the Government would begin to emphasise economic policy and migration restriction. It wouldn’t be totally satisfying, these people told me, but things would get better.
It is now safe to say that these people were retards and that they were totally and laughably wrong. What awaits us is not a political correction but rather the traffic light on speed. We are going to get an absolute witch’s brew of tax hikes, deficit spending, industrial subsidies and political repression. If even half of these plans are realised, the coming Government is going to make its predecessor look like a beacon of liberal freedom and fiscal responsibility. Here I can only provide a selection of all the proposals, as every five minutes a journalist stumbles upon another steaming turd.
To begin with, the various negotiating subcommittees are already aspiring to spend half a trillion Euros – the total value of the ‘special infrastructure fund’ established by the debt brake overhaul last week. The grave political differences between the CDU and the SPD are to be papered over with vast quantities of money. It makes sense, then, that the SPD should be gearing up to push very hard to raise taxes on ‘the rich’ – a group of people that in Social Democracy Land includes a great part of the middle class. The SPD wants to raise the top tax rate from 42% to 47% and the capital gains tax from 25% to 30%. It wants to introduce a confiscatory wealth tax and it wants to broaden real-estate taxes. The Union parties will probably have to give in on a great part of this programme, because, while German politics has shifted Right, it is the Left that is in charge.
Both the SPD and the CDU have agreed that “we must invest more in defensive democracy”, and therefore they plan to continue funnelling nearly €200 million into the jungle of NGOs presently perverting German civic discourse. Among other things, the CDU and the SPD hope to steer some of these funds into the National Action Plan Against Racism, specifically to “fight against structural and institutional racism” – concepts adopted from the increasingly defunct Anglosphere discourse surrounding Critical Race Theory.
As always, the SPD has even more insane plans. It wants to use state funds to promote “trustworthy media”, which is its term for politically aligned broadcasters and print publications. Germany already has one of the most elaborate and expensive public media systems in the world, but that is not enough for the Social Democrats, who hope to use state funds to co-opt private media as well. There are constitutional hurdles to the SPD vision on this front, and the CDU has so far opposed their aspirations, but given the Social Democrat dominance of negotiations this could well end up on the agenda of the coming Government.
Meanwhile, both parties have agreed that “the deliberate dissemination of false factual claims is not covered by freedom of expression”, and they hope to expand the prerogatives of media supervisory authorities so that these may “take action against information manipulation as well as hate and incitement”. They also want to increase regulatory scrutiny of “online platforms” and ensure that the Digital Services Act is “stringently implemented and further developed”.
Perhaps worst of all, the future coalition partners have agreed on a nefarious plan to deprive anyone with more than one conviction for the speech crime of ‘incitement’ (‘Volksverhetzung‘) of the right to stand for election to public office. The German criminal statute on incitement has been widely abused in the present wave of political repression, and state prosecutors will surely use this new mechanism to criminalise the opposition by systematically bringing incitement prosecutions against AfD politicians.
In summary: we are going to get more heavy-handed interventions in the economy, the state is going to take more of our money and Government enforcers are going redouble their efforts to prevent us from complaining about any of this.
What is happening ought to have been foreseeable. I didn’t quite foresee it, but I should have. The firewall against Alternative für Deutschland is confusing the feedback received by the German political establishment. The more the voting public demands a correction to the Right, the more our politicians will double-down on crazy Leftist policies. This cycle will continue until something breaks.
The mechanism is twofold:
1) As Right-leaning voters and party members take their support elsewhere, the traditional parties find themselves sitting on smaller but more Left-leaning constituencies. This phenomenon applies primarily to the CDU and the Bavarian CSU, but secondarily also to the SPD.
2) Ordinarily, we would expect these parties to chase after departing supporters, but in Germany the firewall skews incentives in a bizarre way. As the political mood moves Rightwards and voters take their support to the wrong side of the firewall, they disappear from the arena of political acceptability. The remaining feedback available to the establishment actually points Left. The resulting insanity then further increases voter defections to AfD, and establishment politics dive further Leftwards.
Since 2017, when the AfD first entered the Bundestag, the strict terms of the firewall have created two parallel legislative entities. Back then, AfD won 94 of 709 seats, but the firewall prohibited any of the cartel parties from voting with the newcomers. Thus you could say that the formal parliament alone had 709 seats; the de facto ‘cartel parliament’ – the formal parliament minus the AfD contingent – was smaller, having a mere 615 seats. Of course, the cartel parties could not ignore the formal parliament entirely. To pass laws, they still required a formal majority of 355 votes, which translates to a cartel supermajority of 58% of the seats. This was not a problem for Angela Merkel, who formed a government with the SPD in a typical ‘grand coalition’ that commanded about 65% of the cartel parliament.
During the next elections in 2021, the CDU did poorly and the AfD also took a hit, winning only 83 of 733 seats. The cartel parliament thus grew from 615 to 650 members, the cartel supermajority necessary to pass legislation declined to a mere 56% of the cartel parliament, and Germany received the traffic light coalition – an absolute clown car of a government that oversaw a series of disasters and setbacks from which we have yet to recover.
Voters punished the parties of the traffic light accordingly and they made the AfD stronger than ever, awarding them 152 of 630 seats. You might think that would chasten the cartel parties, but the firewall has nearly reversed the voters’ message. In the cartel parliament of this new Bundestag, SPD, Greens and Die Linke have 56% of the seats. That is to say, they are collectively just as strong as they were in the cartel parliament of 2021! Meanwhile, the CDU and CSU control 44% of the seats in this shrunken cartel parliament, a position which explains the early arrogance of Friedrich Merz, who initially appeared unconcerned with the difficulties of coalition-building. In an establishment discourse that entirely ignores the AfD and treats the cartel parliament as if it were the real, formal parliament, it becomes easy to forget that niggling detail of the cartel supermajority necessary to pass legislation, which now stands at a staggering 66%.
We have before us the phenomenon that will sooner or later destroy the firewall. The latest YouGov poll has the CDU in collapse, with only 26% support, and the AfD in ascendancy, reaching a record high of 24%. It’s conceivable that in the coming weeks the AfD becomes the strongest-polling party in Germany and that the next elections land it at 30% or higher. Of course the establishment may well try to ban Germany’s only alternative. In the unlikely event it succeeds, we would finally see that promised correction to the Right, as some voters would return to the cartel parties, effectively destroying this system of perverse feedback.
Until then, it will be nothing but a forced march to DDR 2.0.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Professor Alice Sullivan: “It’s Uncomfortable For a Leftie Like me to Admit, But Trump is Right on Trans Issues”
By Toby Young
The Sunday Telegraph has interviewed Professor Alice Sullivan, the lead author of the recently published Sullivan Review, which urged public bodies to go back to collecting data on biological sex. In a revelation that may surprise some, the Left-wing academic says she thinks Donald Trump is right when it comes to trans issues, eg, that biological men should not be allowed to compete against biological women in women’s sports.
Sullivan, a professor of sociology and a quantitative data scientist at University College London, was commissioned by the previous Conservative government to investigate how data on biological sex is collected by public bodies after deep concerns were raised about the stranglehold of gender ideology in our key organisations. She was chosen to do the review because of her specialist work on the topic and well-publicised views on the need to record accurate data on sex.
“Sex and gender identity are distinct characteristics and are not interchangeable,” has always been her message. “But unfortunately people in a great many organisations don’t understand data collection as a discipline and have been taking advice from other people who don’t understand it either; the result is a mess. We need – we have a responsibility – to record both sex and gender identity”.
She and her team carried out interviews, collated evidence and heard from whistleblowers too fearful of reprisals to speak out. What they uncovered was shocking; across key organisations like the NHS, schools, the police and civil service, factual information on biological sex has been replaced by subjective (and highly contested) feedback on gender identity since 2015.
As a consequence “robust accurate data” has been lost, the review concluded. Criminals – including sex offenders – are being permitted to choose a self-identified ‘gender’ rather than be identified by their biological sex, and the police and courts are complying. Then there are the schools that immediately change children’s ‘gender’ on IT systems if they self-identify as the opposite sex – often without consulting the parents – and civil servants hounded out for perfectly ordinary opinions on biological sex. It’s absurd. Enter the Sullivan Review. For those longing to turn the tide on aggressive gender politics, this detailed 226-page document has drawn a long-overdue line in the sand.
Maya Forstater, CEO of pressure group Sex Matters welcomed its findings: “This review is devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the Civil Service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards. The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making. Conflating sex and gender identity is not a harmless act of kindness but a damaging dereliction of duty.”
Or, as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; “This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”
It’s the sort of binary response that has landed Britain in such a nonsensical quagmire in the first place. Sullivan has, in fact, called on organisations to record gender preference as well as sex when gathering data – but nuance has gone the same way as common sense.
Thankfully cometh the hour cometh the quantitative data scientist in the shape of Prof Alice Sullivan, who is as far from a Gradgrindian number-cruncher as you can imagine. To my mind it all feels terribly bleak. But when we meet, in her corner of north London, where the magnolia trees are in full creamy bloom and the local coffee shop is so vegan I almost cause a riot when I unwittingly ask for “real milk”, Sullivan is in surprisingly high spirits.
“I’m optimistic. I think this review marks a watershed. It has taken a long time but I really do believe we are beyond the point where we can be silenced. It’s the beginning of the end for no debate.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? I can’t help suggesting that Donald Trump of all people may have had a part to play in changing the proverbial mood music surrounding gender issues.
“As a life-long Leftie, it feels uncomfortable to be put in the position of agreeing with Donald Trump. But the fact is that he is simply saying that there are two sexes and that this matters, for example in prisons and sports. If Donald Trump says that the earth is round, should Leftists claim it is flat just to avoid being on the same side as him? This kind of tribal thinking has been horribly damaging to the Left. The idiotic positions that the Democrats took on these issues helped to gift the election to Trump. Mainstream politicians of all stripes need to learn from this that denying observable facts about the world is dangerous.”
Worth reading in full.
“Britain Heading For Calamity,” Says Conservative Peer
By Toby Young
Britain is “flirting with recession” and current economic policies are “catastrophic for growth”, Conservative peer Lord Moynihan said in a blistering attack on the Government’s economic policies. The Express has more.
Speaking in response to last week’s Spring statement, and at the launch of his new book – Return to Growth – Lord Moynihan accused the government of trying to use businesses as a “milk cow,” hiking taxes and increasing red tape. At the same time it has been dishing out “inflation-busting pay rises” to its public sector allies.
The British businessman and venture capitalist added: “Every policy led to the opposite of growth,” he said. “Last year’s budget was fairly punitive on business – we warned in the Lords that growth would be crushed.”
Last week the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted just 1% growth this year – half of its original figure but a projection Lord Moynihan says is still optimistic. “I think they’ll be proved wrong. It will be less. People are leaving for Dubai and other low-tax countries – not just bankers, but even hairdressers. This isn’t sustainable.”
In Return to Growth, Moynihan lays out what he calls the “three enemies of growth” – high government spending, excessive tax and regulation, and bureaucratic interference – all of which he says the Labour Government is embracing. “We’re moving towards central state control. History shows that this eventually ends in state violence. It’s deeply worrying.”
He calls instead for a return to the “three angels of growth” – free markets, free trade and sound money – to unleash innovation and rebuild prosperity. “We’ve become a nation addicted to regulation. The belief that government knows best stifles the creativity of the British people.”
Particularly scathing was his criticism of the new Employment Rights Bill, which grants new hires immediate workplace rights. “It’s catastrophic for business. Employers will hesitate to take on new staff. This won’t help workers – it’ll reduce jobs. I’m on the side of the working man.”
Lord Moynihan also blasted “moral panics” around net zero and diversity initiatives, claiming these have sparked “a huge spray of regulation” with little purpose. “What on earth is the question they’re even trying to answer?”
He concluded: “If we keep taxing and regulating like this, in four years’ time the damage will be catastrophic. We need to return to growth – urgently.”
Worth reading in full.
You can buy a copy of Return to Growth on Amazon.co.uk here. Highly recommended.
News Round-Up
By Toby Young
- “Trump lashes out at Putin as Ukraine ceasefire talks stall” – The US President is said to be ‘p—ed off’ as Putin demands that Volodymyr Zelensky be replaced as a condition of ceasing hostilities, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘Very angry’ Trump threatens Putin with tariffs if no peace deal” – The US President has warned Putin that he will face tariffs if he doesn’t agree to end the war in Ukraine, says the Times.
- “Hamas tortures protester to death and leaves body on family’s doorstep” – Hamas kidnapped Uday Al Rabbay shortly after he took part in protest against war in Gaza, then tortured him to death and left him outside his family home, according to the Telegraph.
- “Germany’s largest rocket since V-2 crashes and explodes seconds after launch” – Uncrewed Spectrum rocket was described as first attempt at an orbital space flight to originate in Europe – and it blew up after 45 seconds, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘Liberal elite’ Guardian editors ‘helped cause Southport riots’ by ‘ignoring’ white working-class Britons, top peer claims” – The Guardian fomented the riots last summer by ignoring the concerns of working class communities about illegal immigration, blaming the ‘far-Right’ for the civil disorder and encouraged Muslims to think of themselves as ‘victims’, Lord Sewell told the Oxford Literary Festival, according to GB News.
- “Judges in revolt over ‘cack-handed’ sentencing guidelines” – The Government is planning to rush through an emergency law to block the ‘two-tier’ sentencing guidelinces and are considering curtailing the powers of the Sentencing Council, reports the Times.
- “Ethnic minority suspects given priority for bail” – A fresh two-tier justice row has erupted as judges have been advised to take account of ‘historical’ racial trauma suffered by black suspects when considering bail applications, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘We’re being taken for fools’: How soaring migration came back to bite Ireland’s political elite” – With finite housing and overstretched public services, the Irish Government’s ‘cack-handed’ border policies have triggered a wave of public anger, writes Michael Murphy in the Telegraph.
- “Police arrest parents for complaining about a school” – On his Substack, Paul Sutton tries to get his head around the fact that Hertfordshire Police sent six officers to arrest a middle-class couple who complained about their children’s school in a WhatsApp group.
- “Police risk ‘curtailing democracy’ by stopping MPs doing their job” – After two parents were arrested in Hertfordshire over messages in a WhatsApp group criticising their children’s school, Oliver Dowden MP says elected officials must not be threatened for representing local people, according to the Times.
- “It’s becoming obvious that Starmer simply isn’t a leader” – As our economy tanks, the state is struggling to fulfil basic tasks, and our social fabric is fraying, writes Robert Jenrick in the Telegraph. We have to ask if anyone is running Britain, because Labour clearly isn’t?
- “Starmer’s petty hatred for private schools is about to take a sinister turn” – Two-tier Keir is about to play his next card in the total humiliation of private schools, forcing them to pay full business rates, says Michael Mosbacher in the Telegraph.
- “Nearly 20 councils in England ‘at risk of insolvency’ due to Send costs” – Councils are facing multibillion-pound debts thanks to years of ‘overspends’ on SEND provision, according to the Guardian.
- “Exempt disabled children from private school VAT, peer urges” – “Chucked out of the state system” as a child with brittle bone disease, the Conservative peer Lord Shinkwin says imposing VAT on independent school fees will unfairly hit pupils with special needs, reports the Times.
- “Parents of special needs children fight VAT on private school fees” – People are working long hours and taking on second jobs to send their SEND children to private schools that can cater of their needs, while councils are failing to meet the rising cost of private education, according to the Times.
- “The ‘anti-woke’ alternative to the National Trust that’s growing by 10,000 members a year” – Historic Houses offers cheaper access than the National Trust to more than 300 locations across the UK, according to the Telegraph.
- “Safeguarding courses for flower arrangers? The Church of England is heading for oblivion” – Are you a charitable parishioner offering to help your church and community? Thou shalt first log on to the online learning portal, writes William Sitwell in the Telegraph.
- “Microsoft’s £2.5bn investment in Britain at risk from creaking power grid” – The tech giant faces a decade-long wait to connect new data centres to the National Grid, reports the Telegraph.
- “Reeves asks Whitehall to fund loss-making projects despite spending cuts” – Whitehall departments have to foot the bill for any projects backed by the Chancellor’s National Wealth Fund, says the Telegraph.
- “The assisted dying bill was doomed almost from the start” – Few recent pieces of legislation are as divisive as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, according to a leader in the Sunday Times.
- “Stop scapegoating Britain’s landed classes” – Right to roam activists should be mindful about what they wish for, says the Telegraph.
- “New poll data shows Farage and Reform genuinely have a chance to govern” – The public have ranked Nigel Farage the ‘best PM’ in a new poll, convincing the Telegraph’s Kamal Ahmed that Reform UK could form the next government.
- “We win if the Right unites: that is the lesson from Canada and Australia for the Tories and Reform” – Our two closest allies are heading to the polls. The Tories sister parties were sure of victory until Trump came along, writes Dan Hannan in the Telegraph.
- “Emma Barnett complained about ‘overbearing’ Today co-host Nick Robinson” – The main presenters of Radio 4’s flagship morning news programme have fallen out, according to the Telegraph.
- “The shameful silencing of Rangers fans” – In Spiked, Freddie Attenborough writes about the shameful attempt to impose lifetime bans on fans holding up an anti-woke banner at a recent European match.
- “A bitter blow? British pubs, restaurants and hospitality firms brace for rise in NICs” – An increase in national insurance and a rising living wage is leading to predictions of a hiring freeze across the hospitality sector, reports the Guardian.
- “This clause could accelerate the erasure of the good old British pub” – Watch me on GB News raising the alarm about Clause 20 of the Employment Rights Bill – the ‘banter clause’ that could be the final nail in the coffin of the pub trade. Write to a peer to save our beer by clicking here.
If you have any tips for inclusion in the round-up, email us here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.