IN CASE you missed any of our ten most read blogs of last week, here they are for you again – and well worth the read.
Bernard Carpenter: Mendelssohn in the condemned cell
Frederick Edward: Welcome to Woke Rail – you are now leaving Sanity
Peter Lloyd: When killing people is Government policy
Adrian Hill: Brexit Watch 2: Merkel has problems – now make them worse
Paul T Horgan: It’s so hard to say goodbye to the BBC
Dr Kevin Donnelly: I was arguing on air against cancel culture, but I was cancelled!
Diana Kimpton: False positives and the never-ending epidemic
Edward Gifford: How the West was lost
Caroline ffiske: One small victory in the gender war
Karen Harradine: Whatever happened to Steve Baker’s backbone?
In this time of economic insecurity and social isolation, placing enormous strains on many families, there are more significant pledges to be made than those relating to the environment. Taking the country out of lockdown would be a good start. Unfortunately we are ‘led’ by the ‘Conservative’ Party, which is led by ‘Boris’ Johnson, who, in turn, is increasingly said to be led by Carrie Symonds. That might go some way to explaining the Prime Minister’s bonkers proposal that every British home should be running on offshore wind-powered electricity by 2030. Henry Getley’s dismissal of this target (among others) is my pick of the week.
Admittedly, Henry didn’t have too difficult a job in rebutting this stance, since ‘even Zion Lights, a former spokesman for Extinction Rebellion, believes he’s talking a load of overblown guff’. Why, Henry asks, can’t the advantages of focusing on nuclear power get through to the ‘increasingly woke and woeful Johnson’? Why indeed.
You can read his full article here.
Nick Booth’s ‘Jilted by Johnson‘ is Kathy’s pick outside the top ten this week. Nick’s engaging self-parody struck a chord with the readers. He certainly isn’t the only former Boris fan to feel he or she’s been dumped and duped in the most shameless way. Many more may still be enduring struggles with ‘cognitive dissonance’ as their excuses for the PM’s blinkered and illiberal leadership get ever weaker.
As to the advice Nick seeks now that reality strikes, mine – as a woman – would be this: Always beware the louche libertarian who’s much more likely to let you down, as well as disappoint, than the reliable and in the end much more loveable, social conservative plod.
Margaret’s pick outside the top ten is ‘What price lockdown? That’s the multi-million pound question’ by finance expert George Cooper. He tackles the complex (and much avoided) question of the cost of saving lives by lockdown, using the government’s own measure, the QALY or Quality Adjusted Life Year. He calculates that in the case of Covid each QALY is costing £1million (as a conservative estimate), whereas the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence (NICE), deems treatments costing more than £30,000 per QALY too expensive to fund. He concludes: ‘As a healthcare strategy, lockdown fails to meet the government’s own value assessment and does so by an enormous margin.’ Yet another argument from someone who knows what he is talking about against the government’s policies.
