The BBC reported that Mr Gribbin is also said to have allegedly criticised women, writing on UnHerd’s message board: “Do you think you could actually work and pay for it all too like good citizens?
“Men pay 80 per cent of tax – women spend 80 per cent of tax revenue. On aggregate, as a group, you only take from society.
“Less complaining please from the ‘sponging gender’.”
He added that women were “subsidised by men to merely breathe” and in January 2022 he also posted: “Men pay 80% of tax. Women take out 80% of expenditures.
“Square that inequality first by depriving women of healthcare until their life expectancies are the same as men, fair’s fair.”
If I had stood my chance of making it through unscathed by this sort of analysis would have been?
“If I had stood my chance of making it through unscathed by this sort of analysis would have been?”
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question. What does that sentence even mean?
I think that there should be a comma after “stood”…
There is certainly an extensive ouevre of written material by TW from which those so inclined could select examples that would appall readers of the Guardian.
He’s not wrong about military strategy.
Not knowing the guy its hard to know whether the comments about women being the sponger gender were tongue-in-cheek or not and therein lies the problem with politics in the era of social media. In the past he would have been known to large number of constituents and they’d have been able to make their own judgement. Dry comments reported by a disapproving Nanny BBC are always going to look bad.
If only for a comma, then it would read:
“If I had stood my chance, would I have made it through unscathed by this sort of analysis?”
Does it make sense now?
It would have been great for popcorn sales, that’s for sure.
Well, it’s a quote from the ABBC about a party to the right of Stalin, so who knows what Gribbin really said or wrote? Then again, I know to my cost that sarcasm on the internet needs a specific emoji that clearly shows tongue is firmly in cheek…
A Reform UK spokesman said: “Through offence archaeology, the BBC has found that Mr Gribbin has made a series of comments about a number of subjects.
Splendid.
That’s Gawain that is, splendid indeed.
There is controversy surrounding the gender of sponges: in German they are masculine while in French they are feminine.
BiND is correct concerning the role of constituencies in selecting and approving candidates since this certainly helps to winnow out loonies and media innocents. Reform has relied on maintaining only a very modest general staff with the inevitable result that many of its candidates are unknown and untested.
There is controversy surrounding the gender of sponges: in German they are masculine while in French they are feminine.
Interestingly I’m never aware of the BBC breaking that some leftwing or greenie, but I repeat myself, has said something that can be misinterpreted, that’s usually left to Guido.
It would make an interesting FoI to the BBC: How much journalist time is spent researching the past history of candidates for each party?
Hmm, I was going to make a comment of the gender of sponges and forgot to delete it 🙁
“we need to exorcise the cult of Churchill”
My father – who had planned his life around his judgement that we would end up fighting a war against Hitler – always warned me against uncritical adulation of Churchill while remarking that in 1940 he was undoubtedly the man for the hour.
Oddly, Churchill’s reputation nowadays seems to be impugned for his mythical actions rather than his real ones. I suppose The Left has trouble with facts and simply prefers myths.
I’d argue that Churchill’s most brilliant strategy, or should I call it policy, was to agree with the US to cut off Japan’s vital imports. Especially its oil.
This led to Japans attack on Pearl Harbour and Hitlers subsequent declaration of war on the US.
As Churchill so nicely put it, ‘So we had won after all.’
Gribbin sounds like a weapons-grade plonker.
Had the UK stayed neutral at the start of WW2, Hitler would have reneged on the deal and attacked the UK later – just as he did with Soviet Russia…Duh!
And fake stats – eg “Men pay 80% of tax. Women take out 80% of expenditures.” – are usually the sign of an obsessive idiot rather than a joker or satirist.
Theo – there was never going to be a “later” for Nazi Germany, they were locked into losing the war as soon as they attacked the USSR.
There was no realistic scenario for Germany to win after they launched Barbarossa based on a fatal underestimation of the enemy’s strength and mobilisation potential.
Steve – it was just about possible given an easier winter that they’d have made it to Moscow (all the way and quicker) and that might have changed things.
Stringing Stalin along until he developed the bomb would have been Hitler’s best bet. In fact, being Mr Nice all round the world until he developed the bomb would have been his best bet.
Interested – Idk why people think capturing Moscow would have changed the outcome of the war. It didn’t work for Napoleon, and he (unlike Mr Hitler) was a military genius.
The Nazis were a million miles away from developing the atom bomb, they wasted limited resources on projects such as the V2 (which was strategically worthless in the absence of atomic warheads) and their increasingly complicated, expensive, and scarce late war model tanks.
As you know, it took the finest mathematical minds in the world to figure out how to cause a nuclear explosion, and most of them were Jewish. That’s why the German atomic project never got anywhere.
Hitler was like a guy at a poker game who wants to go all in on every hand. He was a gambler and an opportunist. Like other gamblers, it was only a matter of time before he lost the house.
Steve
I’m not certain Hitler would have lost the Russian war if the UK had remained neutral. Access to the global market place and the ability to concentrate all his resources in the east could well have meant at least a stalemate.
Of course if the Japs had no concern about a British attack, they might have decided to join in against the Soviet Union as well. They’d certainly had skirmishes on the Russian border. One has only to think of the battle of Khalkhin Gol.
I’d agree with you about the atomic bomb though. The Germans had no time for Jewish Physics.
If Hitler hadn’t had Italy as an ally he wouldn’t have had to send troops to pull Italy’s embarrassing venture in Greece and Albania out of the fire and send troops to Africa too. The desert was a diversion. He didn’t need the Med. He would have started Barbarossa six weeks earlier and taken Moscow. A rail nexus, as it was not in Napoleon’s day. That six weeks helps Germany but not Russia.
I can’t find any net benefit to Germany from having Italy or Japan as allies.
Bboy – it wouldn’t have been a stalemate, because the USSR had ridiculously more men and equipment under arms, and could quickly raise millions more while Germany ran short of everything.
Barbarossa envisaged defeating a Soviet armed forces that was only 10% (in the minds of German planners) of its actual size.
So, in 1943 Germany was able to produce 11,601 armoured vehicles of all types. But in 1943 the Soviet Union made 15,710 T-34 tanks alone, which doesn’t include the thousands of other tanks and armoured vehicles they produced. Lend lease helped shorten the time to Operation Bagration, but the USSR still had vastly greater manpower and resources in any event.
Also, Germany was on fuel rations from the early days of the war. Synthetic production couldn’t make up the difference, and the fuel situation inevitably became a critical bottleneck on German military potential after they failed to capture Baku.
Germany’s biggest problem in WW2 was that Germany was a chihuahua trying to eat a rottweiler. They got some bites in early, but once the bigger dog started fighting back there was only one outcome.
Rhoda – the Med was a vitally important strategic flank that Germany had to at least try to protect.
This is the problem with trying to find a German path to victory in WW2, physical reality was very much stacked against the Nazis so the only hypothetical scenarios where they could have won involve history unfolding in ways that were extremely unlikely at the time.
Such as Mr Gribben’s notion that Britain – the world’s largest superpower in 1939 – could somehow stay neutral.
“Britain – the world’s largest superpower in 1939”
Eh? Surely our army was tiny and we had had no conscription since WW1 so we had few trained reservists.
The RAF had a small stock of good fighter planes but no good bombers. The Navy did have a large advantage over the German Navy but even then it was worth sinking French warships at Oran and sinking quite a bit of the Italian navy just in case the gap narrowed.
DM – Eh? Surely our army was tiny and we had had no conscription since WW1 so we had few trained reservists
I think this is part of the mythos of WW2: the plucky little island, uninterested in war (lol), but “forced” to fight nonetheless.
But if you look at a map of the British empire in 1939, it covered a far larger section of the globe than even the USSR did.
The Royal Navy was the biggest and best navy in the world in 1939. The RAF was the most technologically advanced air force in the world. The scientific, technological and industrial might Britain could and did bring to bear was enormous. And we had a big, fuck-off moat.
Sometimes, Winston Churchill is portrayed as if he was Bilbo Baggins or something. In reality he was the leader of the single most powerful nation on Earth in 1939, and had plenty of reasons to be optimistic about defeating Germany.
I can’t see the Britain of 1939 not joining in if all of western europe is occupied by a rival power, but if that is the premise the Med does not represent an open flank for Germany if France is stricken and Italy is a little more cautious. Hitler should leave that for later. The other strategic importance of the med is communication between the UK and the Empire. If UK is neutral that doesn’t matter.
On the other problem of the size of Russia, Steve is right, you can’t fight them to the last man. So behead the snake but don’t piss off the population of the SSRs. Germany failed on both counts in history.
there was never going to be a “later” for Nazi Germany, they were locked into losing the war as soon as they attacked the USSR. There was no realistic scenario for Germany to win after they launched Barbarossa based on a fatal underestimation of the enemy’s strength and mobilisation potential.
Steve, you are assuming that if Britain had been neutral in WW2, everything else would have remained the same and occurred in the same order. It wouldn’t. Without the British naval blockade, Germany would not have been short of oil. Nor would Germany have needed to invade Norway in April 1940 (or at least not so soon) for iron ore. And Japan would not have threatened the British Empire in the Far East, and may well have attacked Russia, too. And Pearl Harbour would not have occurred, at least when it did. And Germany would not have had to secure France against invasion.
And your claims about Soviet might are highly questionable. The Soviet Union was at a huge disadvantage from the very beginning of the Nazi invasion – militarily and economically. In a few months, German forces occupied or isolated territory which contained 40% of the Soviet population and accounted for 60%+ of total coal, pig iron, and aluminium production. Nearly 40% of total grain production and 60% of total livestock were lost. Soviet GDP fell 34% between 1940 and 1942; and industrial output did not recover to its 1940 level until 1950-ish.
Gosh, turns out men pay 70% of income tax (and, more surprisingly, HMRC publish the statistics). I was expecting something more like 60:40.
http://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-and-tax-by-gender-region-and-country-2010-to-2011
So his claim that men pay 80% of tax is wrong (at least for income tax, and I’m not sure the other taxes would shift it up to 80%), but he’s wrong by a lot less than I thought.
Rhoda – So behead the snake but don’t piss off the population of the SSRs. Germany failed on both counts in history.
Yarp. An obvious move would have been to invade as “liberators” of the Soviet peoples, peel off their peripheral nations and anticommunist Russians to help offset the USSR’s population advantage. But Germany had difficulty enlisting the support of civilians in the occupied territories, seeing as how the Germans intended to murder or enslave them all and were led by that evil shouty spastic guy.
Theo – Steve, you are assuming that if Britain had been neutral in WW2, everything else would have remained the same and occurred in the same order. It wouldn’t.
You are quite right but that doesn’t change the basics of mobilisation arithmetic. Germany was very, very inefficient at mobilising the populations of their occupied territories to Germany’s benefit, which is why they had to resort to crude slavery.
The USSR, on t’other, was extremely effective at organising its people into mass manufacturing and massed armies.
Look at the stats on what the Commies were able to raise against the Nazis:
Total number of men mobilised in Germany plus occupied territories: 16,540,835
Number of men mobilised into the Red Army: 34,401,807
Tanks and SPG’s produced by Germany plus occupied territories: 67,429
Tanks and SPG’s produced by USSR: 119,769
German artillery production: 73,484
Soviet artillery production: 516,648
Bear in mind, German military production peaked in 1944, so the USSR spent most of the war fighting a Germany with a functionally intact military industrial base.
The Soviet Union was at a huge disadvantage from the very beginning of the Nazi invasion – militarily and economically. In a few months, German forces occupied or isolated territory which contained 40% of the Soviet population and accounted for 60%+ of total coal, pig iron, and aluminium production. Nearly 40% of total grain production and 60% of total livestock were lost.
Now consider the fact that the side that took all of those losses – and saw 20,000,000 of its own people killed – went on to grind the Wehrmacht to dust, and completely obliterate all armed German opposition, and then raped their wives and daughters.
Soviet GDP fell 34% between 1940 and 1942; and industrial output did not recover to its 1940 level until 1950-ish.
Wrong metric. The important stats are things such as:
* How many tanks, bombs, artillery and aircraft can you produce?
* How many men can you press into military service, not just now, but in 12 months, 18 months, etc.?
Those are the sums that determine the victor. While it’s true that the USSR never achieved the underlying productivity growth that made the West rich, which is why Communism ultimately failed, they were extremely effective at building heavy industries and putting people to work in them, and they had a lot more human and raw materials to work with.
Germany started WW2 with the same strategic disadvantages that lost it WW1, and found it could not overcome those disadvantages despite using extreme violence. It wasn’t even a close run thing, it just looked that way until 1942.
‘But if you look at a map of the British empire in 1939, it covered a far larger section of the globe than even the USSR did.’
Steve, I’d argue that 90% of that empire was what is now called the Third World. So Britain was the largest Third World state on the planet, with an industrialised fringe that held it together.
The navy was still using biplanes, although the Yanks and the Japs had switched over to monoplanes. The Yanks had also bullied the Brits into reducing their navy to the size of that of the US. Since they’d also required the Brits to abandon their alliance with Japan, it was incapable of simultaneously fighting a European and a Pacific war.
I’ll admit, if I’d been the US, I’d have let the Brits and the Japs handle China/Russia in the Pacific while I spent my money on booze. But other people aren’t me.
Bboy – 90% of that empire was what is now called the Third World.
So was the USSR.
So was the UK for millions of people, for that matter. My grandparents and their children lived in a single room, with an outdoor toilet shared with other families.
This guaranteed indoor plumbing and electricity lark is a historical novelty, for which I’m glad.
«This guaranteed indoor plumbing and electricity lark is a historical novelty, for which I’m glad.»
Steve, your alter ego should be telling you to enjoy it while you can.
@RichardT
Statistics like that support whatever case you like. Women are at an unfair advantage because they pay only 29% of the total income tax paid, or women are at an unfair disadvantage becuase their incomes are only 36% of the total of all incomes. (And from those two, and knowledge of the general way income tax works we can also deduce that women are on average paid less than men).
– Idk why people think capturing Moscow would have changed the outcome of the war.
But that’s the nature of playing “what-ifs”. Nazi Germany had achieved its victories that far based on psychological warfare rather than some amazing quantity or quality of military force; their enemies basically just shat it and fell apart when faced with the novel mechanised jackbooting. So there is every reason to suppose that the Soviets would have likewise continued their chaotic collapse had the Gerbils taken European Russia.
Charles said:
“Statistics like that support whatever case you like.”
Charles, we know that; we’re not stupid here, even if we’re sometimes a little crude.
If you’re trying to change minds here, you need to up your game, dear boy.
‘So was the USSR.’
Well, yes Steve. That’s one of the reasons why I think Germany might have been able to avoid utter defeat if it hadn’t also been fighting the UK and the US.
Must admit that while the first house we lived in while I was a kid had electricity, it also had an outside dunny. When the parents had the house I’m now living in constructed, it had an indoor toilet. The land had previously been part of the US Naval Hospital, so they naturally wanted modern plumbing.
It was only the evil Labor Lord Mayor, Clem Jones, who finally succeeding in providing sewers for just about the whole of Brisbane.
What ifs are always fun.
Assume UK makes a deal with Germany after the fall of France.
Old Germany colonies returned , economic lines kept open , no restrictions on food and oil supplies. No support to Germanies enemies. Otherwise UK loses nothing/
A few things to consider.
2/3rds of the Luftwaffe was destroyed by the UK/USA . Over a million people were involved in the air defence of Germany. So all these would have been available.
No war in Italy or North Africa , releases a few more troops.
No war in Yugoslavia , earlier more successful Barbarossa. Does the communist regime survive this?
No USA aid to the USSR, all their trucks were from the USA, clearly they could build their own but presumably reducing the number of tanks. Maybe more importantly something like 13 million food rations a day , could the soviet army be fed with out US aid? Particularly with more of it’s land over run? Plus all the other material aid.
If Moscow falls and it’s rail network , does Leningrad also fall?
Not sure it’s an advantage but a much larger Italian army would have been available. The Italian’s were poorly equipped , and poorly motivated to fight for Germany.
As mentioned above if the Germans came as liberators rather than slavers, now much support would they have got? As it was about a million soviet citizens fought for Germany.
With fewer restrictions on stuff like oil, the German army could have performed a lot better than it did.
Hitler was a gambler and a dreadful commander. He got lucky in the early stages but once all the duffers all armies have in charge at the start of a war have gone, his incompetence really cause Germany huge loses. Look at the destruction of Army Group Centre for an example.
In 43 and 44 there were lots of cases of smaller more mobile German armies beating larger inflexible soviet ones, but Hitler demanded the Germany army give up it’s mobility and fight in place.
@Boganboy
If you read a little historical data you will find out that the USA did indeed leave Britain to handle Germany and Japan *until* Hitler declared war on the USA.