No words needed …

 

 

The fearmongers at the Met Office must be so relieved: there were indeed torrential downpours yesterday, if not exactly thunderstorms. It made the front pages of the ‘quality’ broadsheets, the DT and The Times. The other papers are on about inflation and the killing of an 87-year old. You can check out  the concoctions at the usual place (link).

The Star has a ’Hypocrisy special’: “Work harder says wannabe PM entitled to 13 weeks holiday”.  Yes, that’s a bad look, but why blame Miz T for something she said years ago – diligently dug out by the Guardian – when the rest of the House of Peacocks is entitled to the same length of holidays, and when – sorry, I can’t find the link now – MPs are being given ‘help’ with paying their home energy bills? 

Speaking of those bills: one of the Ofgem directors “has quit in protest at its decision to add hundreds of pounds to household bills this winter by changing the way it calculates the energy price cap.” (link, paywalled). Diving into the report we find that Ofgem changed their ‘methodology’ earlier this month because they want::

“to enable suppliers to recoup wholesale energy hedging costs sooner. The regulator insisted the change was necessary to prevent more suppliers going bust, after the costly failure of 29 companies over the past year. It is understood that Ofgem analysis suggested all bar two of the remaining suppliers could either go bust or exit the market if it didn’t make the change.” (link, paywalled)

That ‘change’ is the reason for the horrific prediction of us having to pay about £400 per month for our energy bills. It’s about saving suppliers at the cost of us, the consumers. The bail-out of banks created by a certain former PM, Mr G. Brown, comes instantly to mind.

Here’s another interesting piece of information: “Ofgem” was created in 2000. We oldies recall very well which Party was in power at that time. Funny, innit, how all those highfalutin’ ‘consumer protection’ initiatives by Labour turn out to protect the ‘capitalists’. Mandelson – remember him? – must be so pleased.

This ought to put to rest all the hot air about windfall taxes for those firms regulated by Ofgem. It was this supervisory agency which created the conditions for those profits. Protecting us consumers? Yer ‘avin a larf!

Now let’s talk about the weather! ‘Torrential downpours’ hit London and the SE, with flooding, i.e. water standing on the streets, and chaos everywhere. The DT (paywalled) has a report, and so has the DM which ain’t paywalled (link). Oh the photos of that rain and the floods! As a card-carrying oldie I recall a worse downpour hitting London on the day of the EU referendum.

Now why is it that, as always, nothing is being said about the abysmal state of drainage systems! It’s all ‘Climate Change’ about which nothing can be done except Net Zero, ‘Green’ levies, ‘Renewables’ – and never mind the cost for that! We plebs can pay, even unto £400 per month to ’save the energy suppliers’.

Just like Ofgem, Ofwat also has sided with the suppliers, the water companies and has let water companies off the hook time and time again, it must be obvious even to the thickest MP (our hacks are not thick, ok yah?) that these entities or rather: their boards of ‘directors’, are unfit for purpose and need a root-and-branch reform.

Here’s another ‘story’ which should have been picked up everywhere, especially given today’s shock-horror reports on inflation, now sitting at 10.1%, but wasn’t. The Guardian reported two days ago that “Up to £60m in UK crops left to rot owing to lack of workers, says NFU” (link). The Express picked this story up yesterday, writing:

“Some £60million worth of food has been wasted on UK farms because of labour shortages. The National Farmers’ Union has said crop losses have occurred thanks to a lack of workers due to high employment levels across the UK, with workers being able to access higher pay and better job security elsewhere. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also disrupted worker flow, as Ukraine usually provides a large proportion of the UK’s harvest workers.” (link)

The Guardian of course knows better: the drought – that’s ‘Climate Change’ for us peasants – is also to blame, as is of course Brexit, and Putin. Now I recall that these ‘seasonal workers’ always came from Poland. Ah well, Poland and the Ukraine are more or less in the same place somewhere on the map, so let’s forgive the kiddies in the newsrooms for being ignorant.

One other quite intriguing report is about Labour having shed nearly 100,000 members. The Times writes:

“The Labour Party lost nearly 100,000 of its members last year and ended a “difficult and demanding” 12 months £5 million in the red. Accounts published by the Electoral Commission showed its membership dropped from 523,332 in 2020 to 432,213 as Sir Keir Starmer was caught in a stand-off with the left of his party.” (link,paywalled)

Rest assured, Labour ain’t bankrupt, there are donations making up for this loss. The interesting point is that those who left were apparently – the lefties who joined ‘because: Corbyn’! My imagination suddenly paints the delicious picture of a new, really deep-red Party coalescing around Corbyn, splitting the Labour vote. Wouldn’t that be something! There’s an issue which I’m sure would make a wonderful campaign:

“The new state pension will be worth more than £10,000 a year for the first time as high inflation feeds through to the pockets of the retired. Workers, however, will see their incomes squeezed by slow wage growth and the rising cost of living, widening an intergenerational divide.” (link, paywalled)

It’s yet another round of pensioner-bashing. Clearly, the kiddies haven’t grasped the fact that pensioners have seen their pensions squeezed already by inflation and that, unlike the ‘workers’, they must wait until next year to have that squeeze alleviated. They can’t go on strike like the RMT and others. But then again: fuelling this ‘intergenerational conflict’ is one of the beloved themes of the Westminster MSM. 

Rounding up today’s drag through the ‘newsworthy’ stuff in the MSM, there’s a report in the wake of yesterday’s article about one RAF recruitment captain resigning. The RAF has wheeled out their top recruitment chief, saying she’s not ashamed of these ‘diversity targets:

“Air Vice-Marshal Maria Byford, one of the most senior ranking women in the military, said she had “slowed” down the recruitment process for all candidates after figures showed the air force was not hitting diversity targets.” (link, paywalled)

So yes: they are doing it and are proud of it – and an ‘Air Vice-Marshal’ beats a lowly group captain hands down. I wonder if the recruitment chiefs of the RN and the Army will also come out with statements affirming that it’s all for the best, that gender and skin colour must trump merit.

I leave you with a proper horror story. It’s an ‘exclusive’ in the DM, reporting on the findings of archaeologists who’ve solved the mystery of why only two skeletons of soldiers have been found on the battlefield of Waterloo:

“Experts say bones of 20,000 British and French soldiers were ground down and used to make white sugar – Research was carried out by Dr Bernard Wilkin and historians Professor Tony Pollard and Robin Schäfer – The team discovered dozens of contemporary written accounts in Belgian, German and French archives – They suggested bones were plundered from 1834 and used for burgeoning sugar industry in Belgium “ (link)

Do read the whole thing! The evidence is overwhelming. I only wonder, given all those articles in continental newspapers from that time, why nobody in what was then Great Britain seems to have been bothered. Could they really have been ignorant because it was just continentals doing what continentals do?

And thus endeth today’s trawl through the ‘news’. We didn’t need more proof that our ruling classes and parties have sold us down the drain for decades, hand-in-hand with ‘supervisory’ agencies like Ofgem and Ofwat. At least it’s raining, so the hosepipe ban has worked its magic again.



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