It’s never as bad as you think

@AcademicAgent_X Errrrr Callahan 5.5%, Thatcher +2.7%??? Something’s gone wrong with your figures. Don’t forget some of us lived through these years

Real-terms GDP per capita growth per Prime Minister: Winston Churchill: +0.8% Clement Attlee: +3.2% Winston Churchill: +9.8% Anthony Eden: +4.5% Harold Macmillan: +14.3% Alec Douglas-Home: +2.3% Harold Wilson: +13.6% Edward Heath: +8.1% Harold Wilson: +3.8% James Callaghan: +5.5% Margaret Thatcher: +2.7% John Major: +7.2% Tony Blair: +7.8% Gordon Brown: +1.9% David Cameron: -12.9% Theresa May: -7.4% Boris Johnson: -3.7% Liz Truss: 0.0% Rishi Sunak: -1.0% Keir Starmer: -1.0%

@AaronBastani …. and this is itself about 20% of total power use. What about industry and transport Aaron, or shall we just forget them?

Britain is presently generating 71% of electricity from renewables and is exporting some to boot. Nuclear plus renewables is presently 85% of all electricity being generated. Good things are possible. Ignore the boomer Murdoch press.

@patrickc @MrRBourne @conor64 Let’s not forget these dispassionate scientific experts in week one throwing in the bin the longstanding plans the public health authorities had for *exactly such an epidemic*. Then when the Swedes did use those protocols, and got far better outcomes - total silence.

Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.

A question for everyone: survey data suggests that by the end of the Covid-19 emergency trust in public health institutions had decreased significantly. If you are among the people who reacted that way, why specifically? I'm hoping for long, diverse, individualized answers.

@Finumus1 Nope. Labour now moving left, taxes only going up, money to be printed. Next GE Labour will do a deal with Green and Libs ‘to keep out the Nazis’. So 8 more years at least of economic decline.

"The real problem facing society" is lack of economic growth. Fixing it will make everything, including racism, less of a problem. Could we start maybe focusing on that?

@EdConwaySky @afneil Well there’s a global price for these things, so no reason for us to make them. Soon the rest of the world will follow our lead and CO2 will really reduce, Ed Milliband told us so. Very soon now. Any minute now probably.

Good to see our salt story followed up here👇 The slow motion collapse (actually no longer slow motion) of Britain's chemicals industry is a BIG deal. But NB it's not just salt. Ammonia, sulphuric acid, ethanol, and a host of other foundational chemicals too. All going or gone

@DrewPavlou Such a bizarre pillock. A creep with a 100% record of being wrong. Who with any brains could put any weight in a thing he says?

Rory Stewart be like “I’m kind of like a High Tory you see, I have an emotional connection to the Cumbrian countryside, a kind of pre-rational commitment to ancient British traditions, but also I don’t care whatsoever about the British people becoming a minority on the British isles” What a completely pointless approach to politics. His Toryism was simply completely grounded in aesthetics.

@ReemAmirIbrahim @SteveDavies365 ‘Net migration’ is a slippery stat, immigration figure and primary school data more reliable on what’s actually going on. Britain has voted time and again to reduce immigration, so maybe do that?

Britain must either allow mass immigration or abolish the state pension. Immigration is plummeting into the net negatives. 25% of working-age Brits don't work. Fertility has collapsed, and the state pension is soaring. So, which do you pick?

@ESchubart Get used to it

Why is an MP using Prime Minister’s Questions to ask about the West Bank? What does that have to do with her constituency (Oldham East & Saddleworth) in northern England? FYI her constituency includes a ward (St Mary’s) that is over 70% Muslim.

@WanjiruNjoya European immigration policy in microcosm

He was given the keys to the Cathedral by the priests. They put him in charge of locking up and gave him verger duties. After he set it on fire, destroying the organ and organ loft, Fr Maire offered him a safe haven in his home to await trial. He proceeded to murder Fr Maire.

@SandyofCthulhu Whatever Britain was, in about 30 years it will have been replaced by something very different

The British built the first true aircraft carrier (Argus). They built the first battleship (Dreadnought). They built the first useful torpedoes (Austria made some earlier, but they sucked). They built the first torpedo boats. They built the first destroyer (admittedly for sale to Spain). They built the first battle cruisers. They built the first torpedo plane. They created the first depth charges. They were the first navy to sink an enemy ship with an air-launched torpedo. They showed the Japanese how to attack Pearl Harbor by doing the same thing to Taranto in Italy. They invented radar (after which the USA ran with it). All dust in the wind now I guess, like Carthage.

@intrynzyk @PeterMcCormack It’s all here: amazon.co.uk/Magic-Formula-… It’s all been done before, in many different places. Slash taxes. Maintain the value of the money. Trim back some regulations. That’s it - but no party seems able to try it. Capital (incl factories etc) will stay where it’s welcome.

@PeterMcCormack The problem with the free-market still needs to be addressed. It will always try to get the cheapest labour possible, leading to businesses pushing women into the workforce, mass immigration and exporting our entire industrial base to the US, then China. How do you stop this?

A failure at so many levels. We have created two generations who largely do not understand economics, who think we need a large state and believe coercion is virtuous.

@GingerPeerless @anon_opin You’re just going to have to leave this discussion to the grown ups.

@Itsneverasbad @anon_opin Also Truss absolutely tanked the UKs economy, more than any single action of the last 20years, her budget increased UK living costs,

I find it mind-boggling that Keir Starmer is seen as just as unpopular as Liz Truss. I'm no fan of him particularly, but being a bit boring is nowhere near as being as absolutely batshit as Truss was.

@worstall 1. Send 50% to university 2. Reduce the rigour of university degrees 3. Employers don’t see as much value in degrees as they once did. 4. So employers are prejudiced

Apparently you can educate the peasant but not stop them being a peasant - eating peas with a knife etc. So, elocution and manners lessons it is then, eh? And yes, that is how we used to do it too, Gramps and Granny did exactly that as he soared from artificer to flag rank...

@SteveDavies365 I greatly respect you and your work Steve but feel you’re being naive on this. The ayatollahs and their brutal fellow travellers despise everything about free, democratic society and will do all they can to undermine, humiliate and destroy it. Iran deserves a shot at freedom.

@Itsneverasbad but not to us - no more than the IRA were an existential threat, which is one reason why we didn’t invade Ireland. I do not like the regime in Iran to put it mildly but it is not down to us to do anything about it and any military action on our part will not help them.

In understanding what is going on in Washington right now a historical parallel is the choice made by Philip II and his council on 29/10/1566 to send the Duke of Alva with 10,000 Spanish troops to the Netherlands. They did this because they feared that if they did not there would

@SteveDavies365 Does Israel have a right to exist? Does the global price of oil and gas effect us? N Korea has not sworn death on its enemies and sponsored thousands of millenarian suicide bombers. And what about the oppressed people in Iran itself?

@Itsneverasbad Why fight them when they have nukes? Are we cranking up to fight N Korea? If we can keep terror proxies under control here why should we care about what they do in the ME?

@Alexarmstrong @mark_wharrier You might as well ask for the moon to be removed from the sky. No (current) political party will offer this change, no party can deliver it. You can only get to 1979 via 1974, and we’re not even there yet

The civil service is so massive, pensions alone are now costing the taxpayer £56 billion a year. We need to massively shrink the state. This is totally unsustainable.

@notayesmansecon Yep. This is phase 1. Phase 2 is to print like mad, when gold will soar up again. The real value of it, and supply of it, and demand for it is basically flat while the fiat money demand and supply gyrate around like a fairground waltzer

The price of Gold has been hammered through this phase and is now US $4260 which is 7% lower today alone. In my opinion it is being used by those who want/need cash.

@DonnaLouise1212 @RobertJenrick @shiremoorpotter He and the rest of the Tories were allowing this to happen, increasing 1% per year. Britain as it was for millennia is already over, even if immigration stopped tmrw. Demography is destiny.

@RobertJenrick @shiremoorpotter Robert, this is a genuine question from someone who admires your recent stance. Where the fuck were you when this happened & your government was in power?

Five years ago today, a teacher from Batley Grammar showed a class a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed. Within days, a hundred Islamists were protesting outside the school gates. Outrageously, the teacher was suspended. The headteacher, Gary Kibble, apologised ‘unequivocally’. It was an astonishing act of appeasement and cowardice. The teacher was then subjected to a campaign of abuse and intimidation, including incitement to violence against him and his family. His kids had to miss school for months. They slept on mattresses in temporary accommodation. An independent probe later cleared him of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Another report likewise found that the school, council and police all ‘totally and utterly failed’ him. Too late - his life was changed forever. Have lessons been learnt from this shameful episode? I fear exactly the same thing would happen today. In fact ‘advice’ has recently been reissued by Labour councils including the one covering Batley, that children’s drawings in art lessons may be seen as ‘idolatrous’ under sharia law. Teachers are even warned that dance lessons could cause parental concerns over ‘physical contact between males and females’. Extremism is being mainstreamed. A climate of threatening and intimidatory harassment is poisoning our institutions. It's antithetical to our democratic way of life. Most of our governing class are simply too spineless to take on Islamists. Look at when I highlighted the chronic failure of integration in parts of Birmingham. I was denounced. And then proven right by West Midlands Police’s admission that violent Islamists living couldn’t be prevented from attacking Jewish football fans. The Police lied and blamed the visiting supporters in an effort to pretend they still had authority in the city. And now look at the reaction of the Prime Minister and much of the media to criticisms of a segregated Iftar in Trafalgar Square. They branded critics racist too. This was despite the Prime Minister himself pulling out of an Iftar in 2021 organised by the very same man, Omar Salha, who arranged this one, apparently because of his Islamist links. We’ve been led by weak hypocrites, who cover up, rather than confront what’s happening. The country is sliding down a dark path as a result. But innocent men and women like the Batley teacher are the greatest victims of extremism, and too many seem intent to forget them. We must defend them and stand up for all those who speak out.