I dare not put my own name to this article because, if I admit to being a private rental landlord, I will attract as much disgust and horror as if I were a paedophile. I am Satan incarnate. And because people believe this, I will actually have to make 10 children homeless over the next few months. I may not be Satan, but I am also not a charity.
My time as a landlord began, as for quite a few of my generation, after I retired. I am someone who hates the idea of being dependent on the State and worries that even a private pension may not meet my needs in extreme old age. So I saved like crazy for decades. I could have stuck the money in ISAs and NS&I or bought government bonds or whatever tiny fragment of gold my savings would have afforded. But I chose instead to become a landlord. Naively, I thought it was socially more worthwhile.
I teamed up with a friend who has building and design experience. We bought a small portfolio of houses, all in fairly deadbeat parts of town, often in terrible condition, usually probate sales. We brought those wretched houses back to life and we let them out. Back then, private rental was an ecosystem that I believe mainly served the country well. It allowed some additional income to pensioners like me and lessened reliance on the State. Meanwhile it provided a decent pool of housing across cities for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to buy.
It should be obvious to anyone with an education – but sadly no one seems to understand supply and demand or how markets work – that the more people who do what I did, the better managed homes would be and the more slowly rents would rise. If anyone tried to jack them up, the tenants could simply leave and find another place. Ditto if we didn’t repair promptly. Council tenants often wait months for repairs and responses because no one is going to lose any income if nothing is done. If I don’t have a plumber or an electrician round within days, my tenants can withhold rent or leave altogether.
Of course there are horrifically bad landlords. I would never attempt to deny that. Do people not understand that, in any profession, there will be people who do a brilliant job, a large soggy middle who muddle along reasonably competently and some out and out crooks?
The worst of those crooks won’t be touched by the Renters Rights Act or the additional taxes Rachel Reeves has just imposed because they work under the radar. Officially they don’t exist. I’ve seen the houses in East London where a dozen or more single men were crammed into three bedrooms and a garden shed with a sink in the garden. Those landlords are paid in cash, so the taxman never knows. They are unlicensed. If the house needs to be cleared at short notice because the council comes snooping, there’ll be big men with even bigger dogs. Now they’re forcing the good landlords out, this is what renters will be left with.
My partner and I started in a borough which allowed HMO licences – that is, you could rent rooms individually to sharers. Our original tenants were young people starting out in fairly badly paid jobs, many of them in hospitality and many also new to the country, with no intention of ever buying in the area. They needed what we were offering.
Believe me there are nightmares among tenants too. Plenty who just disappeared, leaving rent and bills unpaid. One couple dug the grout out from around the shower, causing repeated leaks, which they used as an excuse not to pay rent at all. They were also horribly racist towards the other tenants, causing several of them to move out. (They were not white, by the way, so no one felt they could complain!)
This couple just ignored Section 8 (eviction) notices. Given the state of the court system, they could have squatted there till hell froze over, had I not done a bit of detective work and discovered the boyfriend, who had claimed to be a cop, had never worked for the Met or any other police force in the Home Counties. The Met were so alarmed at the idea of someone impersonating a police officer that they wanted to come round and talk to him. I told the couple. The next day, finally they vanished.
But I digress. As the years passed and property prices rose, our model no longer worked in the London borough where we had started. We moved east to Newham. But here the council won’t grant HMO licences. That means that honest, law-abiding landlords can rent only to families, not to single people. I understand why. Newham is a borough where many young, single, male immigrants from both Eastern Europe and South Asia gravitate. No local authority wants a preponderance of rootless, lonely young men. But as so often happens with regulation, it simply made things worse. The young men – and women – still arrived. But the only places to accommodate them were the unlicensed hellholes described above. Or council tenants renting out single rooms for cash. (In one case I know of, a council tenant was taking £900 a month for a tiny bedroom and use of a bathroom in a squalid flat. Not even cooking facilities.) Or, inadvertently, it’s utter mugs like me and my business partner who get scammed.
Here’s how that scam goes. The tenant rents for his ‘family’ which, under the terms of a ‘selective licence’, may consist of couples, married or not, grandparents, children – plus uncles, aunts and cousins. We tend to leave our tenants to get on with their lives without a lot of intrusion from us, but when I visited one house, I noticed a lock on the living room door, which had been turned into a bedroom. Upstairs there were locks on all the bedrooms. When I asked, I was told it was to protect the modesty of the female members of the house, as there were cousins coming and going. Like the gullible fool I am, I accepted this.
Then we finally made the decision to start selling everything. We served notice on our first house and, this week, I went in with the decorators. I had a chance to speak with some of those ‘cousins’ for the first time. They were no relations of my tenant. As far as they were concerned, he was their landlord and the owner of the house. They’d been renting rooms from him. FOR CASH. How much, I asked? £800 a month, said one. £750, said another. And they had the two smallest rooms. No wonder that, in four years, my tenant had never queried the modest rent rises, always paid me on time and never called on me for anything. He’d been making more than double what I’d been charging him from my property and breaking the conditions of my landlord licence in the process.
All this unfolded in front of the two decorators I’d hired to do the place up for sale. They laughed at my distress. How could you not know this, they said? Everyone’s doing it. How do you think people like us have anywhere to live? If I’d had a gun, in that moment I think I would have shot someone. I shot Rachel Reeves over and over in my head. Charging me extra tax on rental income cos I might be paying less than my poor tenants!!
But it isn’t simply that I’d been being ripped off. More importantly, so had those poor sub-tenants. It’s worth noting that, in poorer areas of London boroughs which allow HMO licences, you’d find few takers for single rooms priced at £500 or more a month, while in Newham people have been paying £800–£900 for single rooms and over £1,000 for doubles.
The attempts by governments of both hues to restrict or even eliminate small private landlords from the rental sector have been nothing short of a disaster and now things can only get worse. We cleared that house. It is ready to sell. It doesn’t disappear from the housing stock of course, but a single, better off family will now occupy it. Where will those who only want a single room go now? As he left, I asked the last of the fake ‘cousins’ if he had a room lined up. He shook his head. “I’m staying with friends till Christmas. After that, I don’t know.”
License it by all means, but private rental is, and always should be, an important part of the housing market. If you think the banks and big companies, with their build-to-rent programmes, will cater for anyone other than well paid professionals, you are mistaken. If you think cash strapped councils will look after their tenants and properties better than I and hundreds of other private landlords have done, you are dreaming.
This war on private rental began in 2017, when George Osborne decided to remove tax relief on mortgages. If you disallowed the cost of finance as a tax-deductible expense, most businesses would be bust. Looking back, that’s when we should have sold. Since then, we’ve had stamp duty hikes, the Renters Rights Act, increasingly onerous licensing conditions and outright hostility from many council employees, with the threat of costly ‘energy efficiency’ upgrades to come. And now the money we earn from all this effort is subject to an extra tax. That’s why anyone sane is getting out of private landlording as fast as they can. That’s why rents have soared and will go on soaring. When a rental market has been as badly screwed over by local and national government interference for almost a decade, this is the inevitable result. And I am Satan?
A man from Switzerland has been handed a prison sentence for posting a comment on Facebook in which he said that skeletons can only be male or female. The Telegraphhas more.
Emanuel Brünisholz was convicted of hate speech and fined by a court in the Swiss canton of Bern over the Facebook post, which also suggested that trans people were mentally ill.
When he refused to pay the fine, Brünisholz was instead sentenced to 10 days in prison and began his sentence on Tuesday.
He said in a Facebook post: “If you excavate LGBTQI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex] people after 200 years, you will only find men and women among the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that was fostered by the curriculum!”
The post was sent on to Swiss police, who summoned Brünisholz for questioning on suspicion of incitement of hatred, according to the Swiss newspaper Inside Paradeplatz.
A transcript of Brünisholz’s interrogation shows that he was incredulous about the accusation and kept laughing while answering the officers’ questions.
After confirming he wrote the post, Brünisholz was convicted of discrimination and incitement to hatred by the Emmental-Oberaargau regional court and fined 500 Swiss francs (£460).
According to Brünisholz, he refused to pay the fine and instead was required to serve a 10-day prison sentence in what he viewed as a violation of his free speech rights.
He did not launch an appeal against the verdict because his lawyer felt it would be “hopeless”. In addition to the fine, he must pay 800 Swiss francs (£740) in legal costs.
Brünisholz, a brass instrument maker, said that his comment about skeletons being only male or female was a biological fact, and therefore could not be a form of hate speech. …
But Brünisholz’s suggestion that transgender people were mentally ill may have been what drew the ire of Swiss authorities, as it is illegal in Switzerland to “publicly denigrate” a person based on their sexual orientation. …
The case was brought to the attention of UK free speech campaigners this week after Brünisholz contacted Graham Linehan, the Irish comedian and writer of Father Ted.
“I am fully prepared to go to prison, if that is what it takes to expose the absurdity and authoritarianism of the trans ideology that has now taken root in Switzerland,” Brünisholz said in a message that Linehan published on his X account.
He added: “I intend to face it with good humour; I will not let myself be bent or broken by those who hope to silence me through pressure or intimidation. That, after all, is their aim: to wear me down until I fall quiet. I have no intention of doing so.”
After last week’s budget (well, before actually!), the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast that green subsidies were set to increase our energy bills by £8.1 billion a year by 2030, taking the total cost to £18.6 billion.
However, the Telegraph has discovered that tucked away in their small print, the OBR has admitted this understates the likely eventual cost:
Households face paying billions more in energy bills to fund green subsidy costs that were not outlined in Rachel Reeves’s Budget last week.
The Office for Budget Responsibility revealed in its latest economic assessment that £1 billion a year will be added to household energy bills to fund Ed Miliband’s next auction for renewables projects, known as ‘allocation round 7’ (AR7).
Costs of the scheme were not outlined in the Chancellor’s Budget. Instead, they were revealed in a footnote to the OBR’s Fiscal Outlook report released on the same day.
The revelation will cast doubt on Ms Reeves’ claims that Labour is bringing down the cost of living. It also comes amid a clash between the OBR and the Chancellor about whether she told the truth about the state of the public finances in the run-up to the Budget.
Until the auction results are known, we cannot know what prices have been agreed. Nevertheless, the prices Ed Miliband has offered for the next tranche of offshore wind are double the cost of gas power, excluding carbon taxes. The £1 billion quoted won’t be far off the mark.
Contract prices under what are known as Contracts for Difference are guaranteed and index linked for 20 years. Consequently, these obscenely high prices will be baked in for years to come.
And that is not all that the OBR hasn’t told us! OFGEM has just announced the first tranche of a £90 billion investment in upgrading the electricity and gas grids. The full £90 billion upgrade is planned to be complete by 2031.
£17.8 billion goes on gas pipelines, which seems strange given gas is supposedly going to be phased out. But most will go on the electricity transmission network.
Hundreds of miles of pylons and cables will be constructed to bring wind power from Scotland and the North Sea to the parts of the country where it will be used. Storage facilities will also have to be built, to cope with the intermittency of wind and solar power. Transmission capacity will also need to be expanded, to meet increasing electricity demand for electric cars and heat pumps.
OFGEM estimates that these upgrades will increase bills by £6 billion a year. The National Grid is already in the middle of a £16 billion upgrade due to be ready next year. The BBC also reported a year ago that a further £58 billion would need to be spent on upgrades between 2031 and 2035.
None of these upgrades would be necessary if it was not for Net Zero targets.
OFGEM has deceitfully claimed these upgrades will eventually reduce bills by £80 a year, as the Telegraph report:
Ofgem argues that, alongside maintaining grid resilience, these investment costs will ultimately deliver savings of around £80 on an average domestic bill.
This will primarily be achieved through reduced reliance on foreign gas and decreasing payments to wind farms to switch off, otherwise known as ‘constraint costs’.
OFGEM knows full well, or should do, that international gas prices are falling and gas power is now substantially cheaper than offshore wind. The OBR forecast that gas prices would fall further in coming years.
Moreover, constraint payments will not decrease – instead they will rocket. With a tripling of wind and solar capacity, there will be many days when there is much more electricity being generated than what’s being used. No amount of new transmission lines will alter this fundamental, meteorological fact.
Besides, wind constraint payments currently only cost around £300 million a year. Any savings on this bill will be tiny in comparison with the costs already mentioned.
OFGEM chief, Jonathan Brearley, inadvertently gave the game away when he revealed the real reason for these upgrades: “This investment will support the transition to new forms of energy.”
It is nothing to do with saving people money; it is all about meeting Net Zero targets.
Let’s raise a glass: I’ve recently completed 20 years as a teacher in the same sixth form college. No, please, really – it was nothing (insert gif of faux modest actor in your head). In recognition of my sterling effort, a letter arrived from HR thanking me for my service and asking me to pick a John Lewis gift worth £100 to be presented during a pre-Christmas staff get-together. I could be churlish and point out that that’s a fiver for each year of my Herculean contribution to the education of the nation’s youth, but hey, I’ll take whatever’s being doled out.
So what to choose? My mind inexplicably conjures up a carriage clock, that staple of a million retirement presentations of the past, but that’s all a bit too Terry and June for my liking, so I start scrolling through the John Lewis site, increasingly disheartened by how little a hundred quid can get these days. My wife helpfully points out that we’re in need of wine glasses, so I pick out a modest set for £40, and with a glorious epiphany realise that the remainder could be used for a bottle of something really nice for Christmas Day, like that £60 bottle of Veuve Clicquot there, and send off the links to the college secretary who’s coordinating it all.
Within seconds of my email the secretary pings back with: “Sorry, I should have said but the Trust won’t allow college funds to purchase alcohol.” My sardonic reply, “But… but… it’s the only interest I have,” doesn’t warrant even a smiley emoji, but the flat bat of, “We had someone last year who wanted a very expensive whisky, but ended up with a steam iron.” A steam iron? That’s the first thing to go in the bin when I finally retire from my well-pressed endeavours. Well, how about a voucher for the remaining amount? – I’ll buy my own booze, thanks. “Sorry, no. Tax rules won’t allow it.”
Couple this with a recent missive reminding teachers of the pitfalls of Christmas beanos, and it’s becoming clear that I’m up against the frowning prohibition of a puritanical HR department, and I can’t help but reflect on how attitudes to drinking have changed beyond recognition during my working life. The past truly is a beer-soaked foreign country when I consider how my first proper job – working in a British Telecom drawing office during the 80s – was spent in a state of near alcoholic marination. Flexible working hours, or Flexitime, was manipulated to accommodate early starts, an intense morning shift of noses to the drawing board and then a lengthy liquid lunch. Afternoons – a soporific period of watching the clock until the pub doors opened again – were less productive, but then, aren’t they always?
Even when I started teaching, the attitude to alcohol was more Cavalier and less Roundhead. Occasional weekday early evenings and certainly Fridays were deemed essential decompression times at a local hostelry, a place that cemented a genuinely warm workplace cohesion. We might even have caught sight of a bunch of students in there, but a shared ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was deemed a more than healthy position to adopt. Parents’ evenings in all their interminable drudgery required at least a pint, followed by a Trebor Extra Strong Mint as a digestif. I suspect that parents felt the same and were probably half-cut themselves. Nowadays, staff visits to a pub are as rare as a good bottle of Blue Nun and, when they do occur, come with a nervous sense of wrongdoing as if we’re sitting in an illicit speakeasy.
But those were the bad old days, I hear you shout – we’re so much healthier and productive now. Hmm. The graphs will tell you that productivity and GDP have both increased in the 40 years I’ve spent in the working world, but the idea that this – in a period of dizzying technological change – is down to less drinking in the working week is contentious. Indeed, since the introduction of the 2003 Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy – a nannying nudging of workers towards sobriety – evidence suggests that productivity has stalled, even declined. I can’t help imagining that the same tutting policy wonks who would deny the British working man and woman their pints and half pints of frothing ale are probably charmed by French peasants quaffing gallons of their own wine.
So here’s to the furtive half-pint in the car park, the emergency hip-flask at the Christmas do and the quiet rebellion of those who still believe work should occasionally feel like play. Bottoms up – while we’re still allowed.
Dave Summers is a sixth form teacher and his name is a pseudonym.
David Lammy has been accused by senior barristers of misrepresenting figures about rape cases collapsing in a “cynical” attempt to push through the abolition of half of all jury trials. The Sunday Timeshas more.
The Justice Secretary has repeatedly suggested that 60% of victims are pulling out of cases because of delays in the court system. However, the true statistics show the vast majority of rapes reported are abandoned long before a charge is brought, due to factors such as policing delays. The number of victims withdrawing post-charge is 8%.
Lammy had told Sky News: “If a woman is, sadly, raped in our country today, she will likely have her trial come on in 2028, maybe 2029. That’s a long time for her to wait. Victims of rape are pulling out – 60% are pulling out of cases – witnesses fall away, and the trauma of waiting is too hard.”
The figure was circulated to Labour members in a 13-page briefing of key messages they should use to defend the policy, using the phrase: “In rape cases, 60% of those who report being raped are now pulling out before trial.”
Chris Henley KC, who has appeared in high-profile trials including the murders of Damilola Taylor and Daniel Morgan, said: “Delays pre-charge or a change of mind pre-charge can’t be blamed on the backlog. So much of what Lammy says to defend these proposals is inaccurate. He must know. It’s really cynical.”
He said that Lammy was either “cynical or staggeringly gullible” about the data. “It’s a cowardly betrayal of everything he said in his 2017 review [on the jury system] and what he has repeated since,” he said.
Andrew Thomas KC, of the Criminal Bar Association, acknowledged that court delays placed a huge burden on victims, particularly in sexual assault cases. However, he said a rational debate based on evidence was needed. “That includes using relevant statistics in a proper fashion,” he said. “Justice, as the Secretary of State for Justice should know, begins only when there is a charge to bring a criminal case to court — all forms of rape included.
“The only accurate measure from a court perspective is the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] measure of how many of its prosecutions fall away due to witness attrition and that remains, on average for the past year, around 8%. To include figures relating to allegations brought to police does not assist in this debate and may lead to erroneous conclusions.”
On Saturday the Ministry of Justice described the lawyers’ comments as “completely misleading”, saying that Lammy “has been clear that justice delayed is justice denied, and it is unacceptable that 60% of victims who report rape drop out of the criminal justice system. Court delays are a crucial factor in discouraging people from seeking justice at all stages – this is attested to by victims and victims’ groups.”
The government wants to introduce “swift courts” in which half of crown court cases would be held without a jury. A judge sitting alone would decide a defendant’s guilt in a swathe of cases in England and Wales that carry sentences up to three years, as well as complex frauds.
In the British Medical Journal last month, an opinion piece by Professor of Respiratory Medicine at Imperial College London, Nicholas Hopkinson offered “a lesson from Nye Bevan on the roots of fascism”. “Far-Right parties are gaining ground across the world”, claims Hopkinson, who, in response, channels Aneurin Bevan, who is credited with being the founder of what has become known as “our NHS” while Health Minister under the Clement Atlee government, in the aftermath of WWII. But his rant wasn’t as much a lesson in history and politics, as much as an object lesson in physician’s incapacity to grasp them.
I am often asked, given my strong views on climate policy and the fact that I am merely an arts graduate (politics and philosophy), how I dare to criticise “the majority of the world’s top scientists”. I am similarly criticised for my comments about air pollution policies – the alleged consequences of which are Hopkinson’s legitimate domain of expertise. The truth on both matters, however, is that I really have not stepped far from the scientific consensus on either issue, and such challenges do not come from people who care for precision in argument. And on both issues, it is activists – scientists among them – who not only stray from “The Science” but stray from science itself, eschewing debate and reason in the scientific process.
So it puzzles me that scientists are not asked for their credentials to speak about politics. Hopkinson might have read every biography of Bevan, who might just as well have founded a religion. But just as one must read a lot of scientific literature about contested theories on a scientific subject to understand that subject, one must read a lot of political argument to understand historical and contemporary politics.
Perhaps a scientist reading Hopkinson’s article wouldn’t notice that he doesn’t actually explain to the reader who or what the term “far-Right” actually pertains to, much less what their claims are. And they might not notice that the “far-Right” is very quickly elided into “fascism” by Bevan’s corpse. Worse, the scientist or physician reading Hopkinson’s claims wouldn’t notice his apparent contention that even fascism seemingly came out of nowhere and nothing: “economic and societal problems in the 1930s had been caused by the operation of private interests,” he claims, and that “governments were held responsible for failing to fix them”. They failed, and consequently a man with a funny moustache, among some other European characters, marched on.
An historian might struggle to swallow such a pill. For sure: political elites that are indifferent to the broader population’s needs beget radical politics at their own peril. “The more that governments seem unable or unwilling to improve the material conditions of people’s lives,” explains the professor, “the greater the risk that people will look elsewhere for solutions.” We can agree with him that the Government and its recent predecessors are not interested in the actual material needs of the population, health included. But consistent with all intra-establishment criticism of the establishment, the underlying claim is that the establishment did not assert itself early enough, hard enough, for long enough against the public, for its own good, to stop Covid, to stop climate change and now to stop “fascism” or “the far-Right”.
The idea that Mussolini, Hitler and Franco simply emerged out of the failures of state agencies to deliver public services against the excesses of what might now be called “the free market” is surely bunk. Were it so, that period of history would not have produced such extreme ideologies, in such deadly conflict, in order to overcome state failures. Much deeper historical forces were in play, in the aftermath of Europe’s civil wars and revolution, WWI, the Great Depression, the collapse of empires and so on. Ideologies that emerged from such intense flux cannot be explained as simply the expression of the masses’ grievances. Into the mix, rather than from the vacuum, we must understand the role of communism, of imperialism and militarism in general, of doomed historical settlements, of old orders collapsing…
No. The solution to “fascism” is far more simple. So simple, in fact, it could be a pill. “Improving population health is key to restoring the standing of democratic politics,” states the professor. Evidence of this claim is offered in the form of data, which shows that “areas that elected a Reform UK Member of Parliament in the 2024 UK General Election had a higher average prevalence of 15 of the 20 health conditions assessed than areas that elected MPs from other parties”. This is backed up by “research in Italy and the United States [that] has also shown a link between poor population health and voting for far-Right parties”. According to one paper, US counties that showed greater incidences of unhealthy lifestyles and chronic disease tended to vote for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. Accordingly, if better healthcare provision is delivered, then people won’t be so inclined to vote for “far-Right” candidates like Trump.
This can be achieved, claims Hopkinson, by more aggressive public health interventions. “Reform UK voters are supportive of public health measures,” he claims. According to polling for anti-smoking campaign ASH, 60% of Reform voters support the incremental raising of the age limit on tobacco sales, leading to its eventual abolition. Only “27% of target [formerly Labour-voting] Reform voters were concerned about infringements on personal choice,” claimed the report.
Ban smoking to stop Hitler? Well, Hitler at least would have approved. The Führer was famously anti-tobacco and a vegetarian. Perhaps, had he just been a little more focused on smokers than, say, Jews, might he have inadvertently improved the German population’s health, and thereby undermined his power to wage war? There’s a reason historians do not ponder this question. And there’s a reason we don’t turn to physicians for historical analysis.
“A healthy population is a cornerstone of economic growth,” claims the professor. “Inequality makes and keeps people sick,” he adds. But is that true?
It’s a very clumsy formulation. In the undisciplined leftoid’s perspective “inequality” and “poverty” are equivalents. But this form of socialism presupposes wealth creation and distribution as a zero-sum game: my wealth is your poverty. And a condition of “equality” does not equal a greater level of overall wealth – a less equal society might be better off, even at the bottom. As even German-Italian erstwhile socialist-then-fascist theorists observed in the 1920s, those who are tasked with enforcing equality invariably end up forming elites that were able to help themselves to more of their share of power and public resources. Better to accept the necessity of elites to manage bureaucracies than to resist the “iron law of oligarchy” with the false promises of democracy, argued Robert Michels. Elites such as professors of medicine? Bureaucracies such as those charged with public health? Elites whose conversations between themselves include using their power to influence political outcomes? Fascists – or at least fascist theorists – were not simply ignorant chancers, whose populism appealed to lowest common denominators. The professor would know it, and know the risks he now takes with his political thesis, had he read them.
What if economic growth, in fact, is the cornerstone of a healthy population? What if the professor has it upside down? What if wealth is, at the level of the population, better than any antibiotic? What if a wealthy population makes better choices for itself, and takes better care of itself, if for no other reason than there is more to protect and more to enjoy with greater wealth?
Such questions are rarely asked or answered because they do not suit public health bureaucracies and bureaucrats, even if they are professors of respiratory medicine. Yet he has the data in front of him, that things like poor diet and poor lifestyle choices are correlated with income much more strongly than they are predictors of “far-Right” sympathies. Perhaps he and his colleagues’ unhealthy interest in the relationship between health status and political leaning is not owed as much to their concern for the material interests and health of the population as much as making “health” a political instrument.
It’s certainly not reason that motivates the health-socialist. “The poorest 10% in society would need to spend 74% of their income to eat a healthy diet”, he claims, citing a 2021 report from the Food Foundation – one of the very many fake charities that exist to influence policy, but which are in fact merely outsourced bureaucracies occupied by elites, funded by governments and political philanthropists, which we refer to as the ‘Blob’. The report cites research that found that “for an adult to follow the ‘Eatwell Guide’, it would cost them an estimated £41.93 per week” – the ‘Eatwell Guide’ being five-a-day-style government public health guidance. Adjusting for other factors, the £41.93 represents 74% of the poorest 10%’s post-housing income. Simple enough, but the implication is that it would be cheaper for such unfortunates to eat unhealthy food.
No. A kilo of carrots can be bought from a middle-ranking UK supermarket for 69p. Potatoes are 66p/kg. Apples and bananas – both one of your five a day – are 16p each. And on it goes. Fresh food is not more expensive than any junk food in Britain, and any claim to the contrary is a simple lie. If there is an issue with the poorest 10% having to spend 74% of their income on food, it is that they have so little.
The answer from the professor of health socialism, then, is as predictable as it is dyscalculic: doctors must “demand rapid redistributive steps to end poverty, especially child poverty, including abolishing the household benefit cap and the restoration of proportionate universalism”.
Doctors would be better advised to keep out of politics, which they manifestly do not understand. To the extent that they are capable of recognising that there exists a strong relationship between wealth and health, they are bent on destroying wealth – to create that zero-sum game as the basis for health-socialism. “Denial of science, especially around health and the climate crisis, threatens human survival,” claims the professor, also a zealous advocate for Sadiq Khan’s Ulez policies, which have trapped people in their localities and destroyed countless small businesses. Similarly, tackling the non-existent “climate crisis” necessitates among other things rising prices and the destruction of wealth, leaving people unable to heat their homes, leading to the problems with damp and respiratory diseases Hopkinson claims expertise in, and the reduction of resources available for healthcare.
Hopkinson is no more for health than he is against “fascism”. He is simply protecting an elite bureaucracy from a challenge that is widely supported by the public, which is, ultimately, where his contempt is focused.
New research shows 350,000 foreign-born families could get extra welfare handouts because of Rachel Reeves’s Budget. The Expresshas more.
The research also found that almost 200,000 of them are from just 10 countries.
Families from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria are set to benefit the most from the £3 billion decision to scrap the two-child benefit cap, the analysis found. Tory MP Nick Timothy, who carried out the research, told the Sun: “You have to ask whose side this Government is on.
“They promised not to put up taxes after their first disastrous Budget, which itself broke their tax promises made before the General Election.
“Now they are actively choosing to increase welfare spending — when they should be cutting it — while making working families pay the price.
“And the beneficiaries, as this research shows, will disproportionately be immigrant families who have never paid into the system.” …
The Chancellor used her Budget last month to hike taxes by £26 billion, with a significant amount of the money used to fund welfare payments such as axing the two-child benefit cap.
“Farage takes fight north of border” – Reform has launched its Scottish push in Falkirk as immigration dominates local debate, reports Annabel Denham in the Telegraph.
“Wealth inequality is not Britain’s real problem” – Despite what the likes of Gary Stevenson would have you believe, wealth inequality is not a pressing issue, says Kristian Niemietz in CapX.
“Britain is a neurocracy” – Modern politics is dominated by psychological classification rather than leadership, argues Spaceman Spiff on Substack.
“The winter crisis has arrived” – On the TTE Substack, Dr Tom Jefferson and Prof Carl Heneghan report on yet more biased and confused BBC reporting.
“The winter crisis has arrived – part 2” – The NHS churns out rubbish ‘flu’ data, the BBC hits the panic button and nothing changes, say Dr Tom Jefferson and Prof Carl Heneghan on the TTE Substack.
“CBS medical correspondent claims 2000 children died from COVID-19” – On the Focal Points Substack, Peter A. McCullough shows that the widely cited “2,000” child Covid deaths are inflated, with genuinely virus-caused deaths likely numbering only in the low hundreds.
“The West needs bogeymen (especially Russia)” – The arrest of a Ukrainian detective linked to Zelensky has sparked fresh scrutiny of Western narratives, writes John Leake on the Focal Points Substack.
“We’re all Mary Whitehouse now” – Moral censorship is alive and well in today’s cultural battles, says Niall McCrae in TCW.
“You couldn’t make it up” – EU President Ursula von der Leyen tells a crowd the EU protects freedom of speech – at the very moment a man is arrested for protesting.
EU President Ursula Von Der Leyen says the EU protects freedom of speech
She told a crowd protesting against her they should feel lucky they're in the EU where you can protest freely
At that very moment a man was arrested for protesting
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