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Fears, eh?

His pragmatic U-turn allowed him to exploit public fears by claiming in the recent European election that Asian Muslims were sexually grooming white girls.

Looking through the archives of The Times. That’s from 2009. The paper did a lot of good work in 2012 etc on the subject. But I just wanted to see what had been reported about what Grifin had said, if anything. This isn;t a rigorous search, just a skim.

His election victory speech:

and what he described as the scandal of criminal Asian paedophile gangs who are grooming young white girls for “sex, drugs and prostitution”.

Reporting on that election win:

The first issue had already landed in his in-tray, he said. He aimed to use his public profile to highlight the sexual grooming of white girls by what he calls groups of Asian paedophiles. Asked whether such tactics represent a return to the dark ages, he replied: “Not if you talk to the families of young girls who have been through this. A girl aged 12 years old is someone’s little girl and a year later she is just a crack whore. That is the dark ages. It is absolutely brutal.”

And, well:

Mr Griffin rejected suggestions that the BNP’s success would lead to the “rivers of blood” envisaged by Enoch Powell. “The divisions are already there. They were created by that monstrous experiment: the multi-cultural destruction of old Britain. There is no clash between the indigenous population and, for instance, settled West Indians, Sikhs and Hindus. There is, however, an enormous correlation between high BNP votes and nearby Islamic populations. The reason for that is nothing to do with Islamophobia; it is issues such as the grooming of young English girls for sex by a criminal minority of the Muslim population.

Here’s the thing. It really was happening, wasn’t it?

And here’s the difficulty about it. Over and above that it was happening etc.

If you deny, suppress, what is happening, if the system won’t acknowledge nor deal with, then people will go outside that system to get it dealt with. People are indeed going outside the traditional political structures, parties. Why? Well, see back a sentence or two.

And here’s a little thought. What do we think would have happened if Aneurin Bevan, or Ernest Bevin, had been told about a paedophile rape gang (or any colour, race or ethnicity) in their constituency? Whether preying upon working class, aristo, in care or anything else girls?

Well, quite. The rod has been made for their own backs by these modern politicians, hasn’t it?

A useful solution is available

Half of England’s waste is now being burned, at astronomical expense to local councils (“Anger at plans for 41 ‘dirty’ incinerators”, News). Yet Defra has, for years, resisted calls for the standardisation of waste materials collected or the separate collection of dry recyclables and organics, but it is now to implement such measures through its “simpler recycling” schemes in March 2025.

The government’s recognition of incinerator overcapacity and its plans for better collection systems is quite a breakthrough but it is not the ambition that is needed to move us to a circular economy. A recycling target of 65% by 2035 will not stop a reliance on incineration. To achieve this, all stages of the waste hierarchy – recycling, reuse and repair, eco-design and extended product lifespans – need to be driven by design.
Jane Green (former director of Zero Waste England)

Why not just burn everything and so save the costs of sorting?

Maybe this is the way they’re going to do it?

Manufacturers may cut back sales of petrol cars or raise prices in order to pay for discounts on electric models as they scramble to hit stretching government targets, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) warned.

At least 28pc of all cars sold this year must be electric under rules known as the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Manufacturers that fall short face fines of £15,000 for every non-electric car sold above the quota.

Car makers have repeatedly warned that the targets do not reflect the true level of driver interest in electric vehicles (EVs). EVs are expected to make up 24pc to 25pc of the market this year, short of the Government’s target.

The SMMT estimated that companies spent £4.5bn on price cuts last year, equivalent to almost £12,000 off each EV, in a desperate effort to stoke demand. Despite the heavy discounting, EVs accounted for just one in 10 vehicles sold to private drivers.

We know there are those who simply hate the idea that the proles have cheap and easy, personal, transport.

Bankrupt the car makers and that takes care of that, eh?

People forget

Even Katy does:

Britain doesn’t need a productivity boost, but a revolution. And the stakes are high – not least because the new Government seems to have whittled down its growth agenda to practically only efficiency gains.

Having hiked taxes on employment in its first Budget, current indicators suggest that there is actually going to be a small decrease in the workforce participation rate over this parliament.

Yes, but productivity is not measured against the population but against hours worked. So, people falling out of the workforce *increases* productivity.

Slightly difficult

He says he has repeatedly tried to raise the alarm over the extent of sexual exploitation of children in Tameside, only for his warnings to be ignored and shut down by council officials.

Mr Billington says that a members development session was held by the council in 2020 to give reassurance that Tameside did not have the same grooming problems as Oldham.

However, he claims that figures presented to the council in 2020, showing that around 120 children were falling victim to child sexual exploitation in the borough every year, suggested that Tameside may have had an even worse problem than next-door Oldham.

Has he been pursuing what might have been happening – OK, probably was – for these years and was turned down/held back?

Or have we got an ambitious local politician on the make here? Because, of course, this is very much the story du jour.

That my tendency is to think the second gives a good taste of my attitude towards the political classes these days….

Visibly Doctrinal – the new book

So there was that book, Invisible Doctrine, by Monbiot and Hutchison. Which, basically, said that neoliberalism – and by extention, the ASI. Madsen Pirie and, in spear carrier role, me – were the source of all modern evil.

So, an examination of the claim.

And a link here:

Available in Kindle and paperback.

Or the normal page here.

It can also be read, chapter by chapter, by subscribing to the Substack. Which is more expensive but there might well be more books this year on the same basis.

Goddammnit

So how do we get those little Amazon ads these days?

Amazon itself says get a link. So:

https://amzn.to/4j5fFe4

Which is fuck all use to anyone

How to get those links with a little ad attached to them?

 

Ah, “full link”.

Snigger

The reason is compelling. Alcohol does seriously increase the risk of cancer. The sugars in it are the problem. They create the opportunities for cancer cells to grow, a fact known to oncologists as they use glucose as the marker to find cancer cells when testing for the disease.

Booze causes liver and oesophogal cancer because sugar. This might not be wholly and exactly quite the cause.

And yet, cancer sufferers in the UK are not warned off alcohol to assist disease management and to prevent the risk of recurrence, and nor are health warnings given on alcohol.

Why not, is the question?

And answer came there none….

How excellent!

Three quarters of ousted Tory MPs eyeing a return to parliament
Survey reveals many defeated candidates are contemplating a comeback, with Grant Shapps leading a group providing training and detailed polling for the party

So, anyone got SirEd’s email addy? Because that’s where most of them should go, right?

There has to be a point at which we all just say Fuck Off, Honey

An HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) boss was accused of sexism after saying she wanted to have a granddaughter so she could buy pink dresses, an employment tribunal has heard.

Rachel Gladstone demanded that her team leader Sandra Edwards keep her “overt spoilt-pink-baby-girl-princess sexism” for her private life after she made the remark in a team meeting.

Ms Gladstone, an employee in HMRC’s debt management department, said her boss’s comment was a “triggering” subject for her as she had spent time while raising her own daughter to counteract the “pink is for girls” culture.

The comments were heard at an employment tribunal after Ms Gladstone sued HMRC for unfair constructive dismissal and disability discrimination.

She resigned from HMRC after bosses launched disciplinary proceedings over comments she had made to Ms Edwards, as well as other claims about her behaviour.

The tribunal, held in Cardiff, heard that Ms Gladstone had joined HMRC’s debt management department in 2016.

She had previously specialised in statistics, working for Unilever and the Department of Health, before suffering from a number of physical and mental health conditions.

HMRC bosses found her behaviour at work “challenging”, it was heard, and in June 2022 an incident occurred during one of her team’s regular daily work group meetings (DWGMs).

Team leader Ms Edwards told the group that she was going to attend a scan with her daughter, where they would find out whether she was expecting a girl or a boy.

‘It would be nice to have a girl’
“A member of the team asked what her daughter would like, and Ms Edwards replied that, as she already had two boys, it would be nice to have a girl, commenting that it would be nice to be able to buy pink dresses for her,” the tribunal heard.

Reacting, Ms Gladstone then said “sexist” under her breath and left the meeting.

A debt sollector. For the taxman. Gets triggered by pink dress talk? It’s a job that requires a rather thicker skin than that, no?

Thousands now is it?

Labour has blocked a national public inquiry into the grooming scandal in which thousands of vulnerable girls were raped and sexually abused by gangs of mainly British Pakistani men.

Any rise on thousands yet? Anyone willing to claim tens of thousands?

Erm

Denial about the extent of the problem is rooted deep in Britain’s political system. At times, it appears that the government’s approach to multiculturalism is not to uphold the law, but instead to minimise the risk of unrest between communities. Confronted with gangs of predominantly Pakistani men targeting predominantly white children, the state knew exactly what to do. For the good of community relations, it had to bury the story.

So, err, yes….

And above all, there was the concern over community relations: senior council staff were terrified that the abuse of children “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”. The result was stasis, despite officials acknowledging in at least one case that abuse by Asian men had gone on for “years and years”.

It had: at least 1,000 girls were abused in the town between 1980 and 2009. Yet even this conservative estimate was disputed by authority figures, with West Mercia police superintendent Tom Harding insisting in 2018 the figure was “sensationalised”. The independent review later found it entirely plausible.

Yer Wha?

Since 1980? And at least a thousand in the one town? Meaing, likely, tens of thousands across the country?

Umm. How does this not end in lynchings?

The headline’s not wholly true

Inside the ‘priority’ NHS services for migrants
Asylum seekers receiving ‘preferential medical treatment’ despite increasing wait times for Britons

But it’s near enough true to stand.

The worm is turning here, no? 15 yers ago this would have been Nick Griffin shrieking in the street and the newspapers taking no note of that smell.

Now….

The perfect and the good

Labour has blocked an inquiry into Sir Keir Starmer’s conduct as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service while investigating the Oldham child grooming scandal.

Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, refused to launch a public inquiry into historical sexual abuse by gangs in Oldham, saying it was for the council to decide whether one was necessary.

The scandal was one of several across the country in which dozens of girls were abused by British Pakistani gangs.

Police forces and prosecutors often did not take action for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic, a failing Sir Keir addressed in 2012 when he was running the CPS as the director of public prosecutions.

People are seeing this as an opportunity to get 2K.

At which point tribalism kicks in and no one gets anywhere.

Sigh.

There’s a whole layer of the British state that should be in jail over this. And it’s not the DPP. It’s lower than that. The police sergeants CPS lawyers, local councillors, it’s at that level. And trying to get the DPP means we’ll never be able to get those others.

Give up the political ambitions in order to be able to cut out the cancer.

Fuckwit

Now, Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker – and I do, by the way, know all the problems with describing anyone as a Nobel laureate in economics – but Gary Becker did have a definition of what he thought economics was as a verb. And I’m going to read it to you. He said:

Economics combines the assumptions of maximizing behaviour, stable preferences, and market equilibrium, used relentlessly and unflinchingly.

Now, that’s a very different definition of what economics might be as a verb from what economics is as a noun, which is where I started this video. Because what it says is that as a verb – economics in action in other words – economics seeks that companies maximise profit.

It requires that individuals maximise utility, although, no one on earth knows what utility is, but because of the way in which Gary Becker defines this, he does mean consumption paid for with money.

And he presumes that everyone is rational, which is what stable preferences mean. And I don’t know about you, but I have had my odd moments of irrationality, and I’m going to put a very high bet on the fact that you have too. Which means that this verb, for economics, does not relate to the world that really exists.

And this verb assumes that markets are efficient and, therefore, that the outcomes that result from them, whether that be massive gross inequality and climate change, are good.

And finally, the implication of this verb when it’s used in this context to describe political economy suggests that everything to do with government is bad because markets are efficient and as a corollary, but not stated, but nonetheless unflinchingly required, is the assumption that everything to do with government must be minimised.

Now, what that means is that in practice – this perception of economics, which comes straight out of the Chicago school by the way – Gary Becker is an heir to Milton Friedman – this definition of economics is in direct conflict with that definition I gave right at the start of this video where I said that economics is about the decisions that we make about the allocation of scarce resources to meet needs and wants. Because there isn’t a decision in this process, there is instead an assumption, which is that markets work, but that is not true because people are not rational. People do not have the perfect information they need to work within marketplaces and markets do price things incorrectly, which is contrary to what Gary Becker presumes, because he thinks there is a price for everything and that markets know it.

Tr actually reading the Becker essay that definition comes from.



He really is a fuckwit, isn’t he?