Coffee Break: Across the Pond Where Stupidity Replaces Sound Policy

Stupidity Rather Than Sound Policy Is Taking Over in the UK

Whichever way you look at it, Britain is in a mess. The mood is poisonous, the most common thing you hear people say is that the country is finished and the economy is circling the drain. This is a time for strong, bold leadership, bursting with good ideas to turn things around and what do we have? A Prime Minister that prefers playing soldiers with his friends to running the country, a Chancellor who seems to be completely out of her depth and making things worse with each passing day and a foreign secretary that thinks that belligerent and empty threats are a viable alternative to diplomacy.

Where we should have measured argued debates on the floor of the House that decide policy going forward we get some spur of the moment ministerial whim. Instead of carefully thought out, sound policy, we get children’s games dressed up as good governance. The following contains examples of the stupidity at work in the government today.

Don’t you Know who I Am?

“Yes, we do and that’s why you’re not coming in.”

You may have heard that Wera Hobhouse, the MP for Bath, was inexplicably denied entry to Hong Kong and put on the next flight back to the UK.

Hobhouse told the Sunday Times her passport was confiscated, she was asked about her job and the purpose of her trip, her luggage was searched and swabbed, then she was escorted to the boarding gate by four immigration officers.

In other words, she was treated just like an anti-war British journalist arriving in London. She said she believes that it is an attempt to shut her up.

She said: “It is very chilling that authoritarian countries can treat us in this way. Until now, I think there had been a diplomatic understanding that we might have different values, different political ideas but there is some sort of basic rule in which we allow politicians into each other’s countries, and that sort of understanding seems to be collapsing.”

Talking of authoritarian countries barring entry, the UK barred entry to over 1100 Chinese medical researchers (mainly cancer specialists) in 2022 alone, with no reason given for why they were barred. But that’s ok because Britain is an open democracy; whereas, China is an authoritarian dictatorship.

She also said that the reason she was denied entry was not given, but she said that it might be because she’s a British MP. The article did give away the real reason, which is that she is a member of IPAC. IPAC is the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China and their core mission was to bring “democracy” to China and force them to comply with the “rules based international order.”

In other words, they want to over-throw the Communist Party in China and basically move in and take over. This despite the fact that according to polling conducted by Harvard University’s Ash Center:

The survey team found that compared to public opinion patterns in the U.S., in China there was very high satisfaction with the central government. In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing.

Say what you like about the Communist Party of China, they have managed to lift over a billion people out of poverty and turned their country into the world’s leading industrial powerhouse, after their century of humiliation. This humiliation was started by the British forcing them at gunpoint to buy opium because Britain could no longer afford to buy Chinese tea as they’d run out of silver to pay for it. Hong Kong was ceded to the British after the first opium war in 1842 as the place from where the opium was to be distributed. So, it’s surprising that the Chinese allow Brits in at all.

Mrs. Hobhouse (nee Wera Benedicta von Reiden), our innocent victim, muttered darkly about a “secret list” of people who were banned from China.

Wera Hobhouse says her apparent presence on secret list of critics of country’s human rights record made her a target.

The list is hardly secret – in fact here it is together with photographs. One notable inclusion on the list, indeed, the co-chair of IPAC, is Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the right honorable member of parliament for military intelligence (he is supposed to represent Chingford, which was Winston Churchill’s old seat). Who said, in an interview with the Telegraph, “…we can’t restore our nation to strength without confronting China”. So, we can be assured of their humanitarian bona-fides.

Particularly when we find that the group’s principal donor is the National Enterprise for Democracy (N.E.D). The very same N.E.D that employs Victoria Nuland and organized and paid for the student riots in Hong Kong back in 2019.

So, to recap, a member of a group that actively works to overthrow the popular and legitimate government of China in order to subordinate them, was denied entry to Chinese territory and somehow that’s not fair.

As Mrs. Woodhouse herself admitted:

“I’m a member of IPAC,” she said. “IPAC is watching the human rights adherence, or not, of the Chinese Communist party, but I’m not more outspoken than other MPs about criticizing the Chinese Communist party.

“Therefore, anybody who ultimately is seen as standing up for freedom, democracy and human rights should feel that they are going to be targeted by the Chinese authorities. And that is really, really chilling.”

Now, try replacing the word “Chinese” in the last paragraph with “British.”

Here is Keir Starmer boasting about the number of people sentenced for commenting on social media:

There is one puzzling aspect to all this and that is, if China is such a terrible place to live, why has her son been living and working there for over 5 years?

And why wasn’t there as much of a fuss made about two British MPs that were denied entry to another country for similar reasons?

Britain Is Running Out of Prison Places

Such is the Starmer government’s evident relish in locking up people who don’t toe the government line, that they’ve run into a problem:

The Justice Secretary raised eyebrows last year when she conceded that even her own government’s prison expansion plan – to add 14,000 more places by 2031 – may not be adequate. Back then, she told the BBC: “building alone is not enough”. Yesterday, prisons minister Lord Timpson went further: “We’ve got around 500 spare places in prison today, in the male estate. You can’t run any organisation when you’re that close to running out of space. We know that the prison population is increasing by about 100 people a week — you can’t carry on doing that.”

But don’t worry, Sir Keir has a plan. He is simply releasing prisoners who were locked up for violent crimes, early:

Labour has already released thousands of violent offenders at the 40% mark through their sentences. One example is Daniel Dowling-Brooks, a 29-year-old sentenced to seven years for kidnap and GBH [Grievous Bodily Harm]. He was filmed shouting “big up Keir Starmer” while celebrating his early release. Another, Djaber Benallaoua, 20, said the decision to institute early release was a “very good” policy and said he was “going to get lit” after being freed from HMP Isis. He said the move had made him “a lifelong Labour voter.”

There are problems with this rapid release strategy, such as prisoners being released by mistake because of the numbers of prisoners being released and plain old incompetence. These include rapists and murderers, like Anthony Joseph, who went and killed Richard Whelan, hours after being released in error.

Obviously, Britain needs to free up prison places to lock up dangerous felons like Lucy Connolly, who was handed a 31 month sentence after calling for “mass deportation now” in a social media post to her 10,000 followers on X on the day three children were killed in a knife attack in Southport.

And that’s not the only shortage the country is facing:

Almost 40% of SME owners have either fled the UK or are considering leaving, according to a Handelsbanken Wealth & Asset Management survey of 200 business owners. Firms are pointing the finger at Reeves’ ‘jobs tax’ and Rayner’s ‘Union’ Employment Rights Bill – clobbering them with taxes and rising costs, forcing them to pack their bags. Taking their capital and jobs with them…

Spain tops the list as the preferred haven for escaping Labour’s Britain, followed by the US and then France. Just one in ten business owners say they’re planning to hire. That’s after a third of firms warned of job cuts as Rayner’s workers’ rights reforms saddle businesses with extra compliance costs and red tape. Starmer might claim SMEs will “re-arm the nation,” but his policies are arming economies abroad instead…

But we should never underestimate Sir Keir. He has another plan to address that, by encouraging small companies in Britain to make products to kill people.

The Reeves’ jobs tax, refers to the National Insurance increases that were implemented as part of Reeves’ disastrous first budget. National Insurance was first introduced as a way of creating a fund to pay for the newly created, single payer, health system (the NHS) and to fund pensions. It is split into two parts; the first part is taken from the employees’ wages and the second part is what the employers pay. It was the latter that the Chancellor increased after pledging that she will not raise taxes. Given the nature of the payment, which cannot be viewed as anything other than a tax, it has been dubbed a ‘jobs tax’, as it is based on the number of people employed. Almost immediately after the announcement there were howls of outrage among the business community, with the Times stating it will lead to over 150,000 job losses.

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, said: “The increases to employer national insurance contributions are going to hit businesses and workers right across the UK.

“The impacts will be stark, with hours for staff reduced, trading hours shortened, prices increased and, in the worst-case scenario, jobs lost.

“These damaging rises not only hit cherished hospitality venues and communities but the Government’s ambition to get people back into work. It needs sectors like hospitality to create the jobs to get people out of the welfare system but these tax rises will have the opposite effect on job creation.”

But help is at hand.

Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged earlier this week that the cost-of-living crisis is ongoing and people are feeling the pressure of rising household bills but pointed to the minimum wage increase.

Excellent! However, there is a tiny snag and that is that his government has frozen personal tax allowances so the increase in the minimum wage will drag low paid workers into paying tax for the first time. Even the Government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility has acknowledged that fact:

Freezing thresholds, rather than raising them in line with inflation, increases tax receipts as rising wages tip ever greater numbers of workers into the tax system or onto higher rates, a trend known as ‘fiscal drag’. From one forecast to the next, higher-than-expected earnings both increase the numbers expected to be paying a higher rate of tax and the amount of tax that they pay.

Some estimates say that low paid workers will actually be £500 worse off after the increase. And, of course, it is businesses that will shoulder the increases, in an economy where they are being assailed from all sides. And it is looking increasingly likely that they’ll be hit with further tax increases later this year. More businesses than ever are closing down as they just can’t afford the current taxes, which are the highest on record.

The spike in insolvencies also comes before a rise later this month in the amount of capital gains tax applied to business asset disposal relief, said Dan Booth, head of insolvency specialist Leonard Curtis. A wave of solvent company owners had already opted to wind up their companies before October’s budget to avoid the expected increase in the levy on entrepreneurs.

Firms are contending with the “ongoing impact of inflation, falling business confidence and supply chain issues” along with higher costs and the “potential impact” of new tariffs, said Simon Edel, a partner in EY-Parthenon’s UK restructuring business. Small and medium size businesses have driven the trend, choosing to call time on their companies rather than looking at rescue options, he said.

Business confidence has crashed to its lowest level (-3) since the Truss era, according to a survey by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). A record-breaking 56% of firms now say Reeves’ relentless tax raids are a “growing challenge,” hampering hiring plans and killing off confidence. ICAEW’s CEO Alan Vallance warns that

“…tax worries have never been so prominent” and are driving “record levels of distress” in the business world.

And ICAEW’s Economics director Suren Thiru says:

“These figures suggest that this year has so far been a pretty harrowing one for the UK economy as accelerating anxiety over future sales performance, April’s eye-watering tax hike and US tariffs helped push business sentiment into ominous territory. Our data suggests that firms are currently responding to intensifying cost pressures with only limited price rises, but at the expense of more restrained recruitment and weaker spending on staff training, which will hinder productivity.”

Meanwhile, the latest ONS figures show the unemployment rate remains high at 4.4% for the last quarter as the jobs market suffers its worst slump since lockdown. Deloitte has just released its closely-watched Q1 2025 CFO survey of 67 CFOs of companies with a combined UK market value of £427 billion. Conducted between 18 and 31 March, the results paint an increasingly grim picture:

• CFOs expect the sharpest decline in corporate hiring since Q3 2020 over the next twelve months.
• Wage growth expected to slow from 3.6% to 3%.
• A net 30% say UK corporate capital expenditure will fall over the next 12 months.
• 58% say there will be a decline in discretionary spending.
• 63% say cost control now a ‘strong priority’ for their business. Second-highest on record…
• Risk appetite is down with only 12% reporting that now is a good time to take on more risk. Less than half the long-term average of 25%…
• A net 63% believe operating costs will increase over the next 12 months.
• A net 35% expect to see an increase in revenues.
• Inflation expectations up to 3.1% for next year from 2.5%.

Here is a guide to the maze of tax increases currently being implemented. And that’s just the extra costs imposed by central government, to that firms must add an increase of 5% in property taxes and much higher utility and energy bills.

What have Electric Vehicle Batteries, London Pubs and Park Benches Got in Common?

The answer is that they are all spying on behalf of the Chinese government according to this hilarious entry to the FUD watch hall of fame from the Daily Mail. First off, there are EVs whose batteries are being used to spy on secret defense establishments. They got the idea from the fact that China had banned Teslas that were equipped with multiple cameras from top secret Chinese sites. But the Chinese have gone one step further by getting their batteries to act as spies, which is concerning as they supply around 80% of all the lithium batteries used in EVs. How they get the batteries to do that, and what sort of information they send back, we were not told.

Then there are the park benches that are spying on us by recording our conversations. According to the security services, the Chinese have bugged trees, lighting poles and park benches around Westminster. Have they got evidence, like do they have any of these bugs they can show us? Well, no, but we are guaranteed that they’re there by MI5 and they never lie.

And then there are the pubs like the Red Lion which is situated between Westminster and Soho (a.k.a Chinatown), which is full of Chinese spies apparently. How they know they are real Chinese spies rather than restaurant workers who are enjoying a quick pint before going back to work is a secret. Government workers are also being advised to stay away from five-star hotels and St James’s park as they are a hotbed of oriental skullduggery. Because, as ‘a source’ (journalist speak for “I just made this up”) said that Common’s researchers are regarded as “the soft underbelly of Whitehall.” Do Common’s researchers, who are amongst the lowest paid parliamentary aides in Whitehall, really hang around in five-star establishments? No wonder the public sector costs are so high.

Another shocking statement is that they are spying on doctors who are treating British soldiers in order to get access to their medical data. Why they would want to do that when they can simply request the very same data from the UK Biobank – 20% of all successful requests are from China – is again a secret. Anyway, doctors are advised to not be in proximity to a mobile phone or a computer and to use paper records only, which are then keyed into the Biobank database. Why do the Chinese want this information? To develop bioweapons apparently.

Not only that but they are building secret police stations all over the country. Which might well be welcomed by UK citizens given that most official police stations have been closed down. Joking aside, have they got any evidence they can show us like, say, a photo of one of these places? No, they don’t, but what they do have is evidence of a torture ‘dungeon’ in the basement of the new Chinese Embassy they are developing on the site of the old mint and which cost them a cool £255 million. Our ever-vigilant watchers over our security said the dungeon is on the plans for the embassy. Actually, no it isn’t, it just shows a two-room basement, which are probably secure meeting places or simply for file storage like in just about every other embassy in the world.

Further evidence of their dastardly subterfuge is that “in 2010 there were only 94 Chinese officials living in the UK but by 2020 this has surpassed 116, with 120 living in London alone [sic].” Mathematics is hard, ok?

And did you know that when you visit China, they keep a record of your name, your passport number and where you’re staying. In Britain they also take photographs of your genitals.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, and the author of this bilge, said “We know China is building a spying and repression network right here in the UK.” Actually, no, no we don’t, but we do know that the British government is. Ask yourself two questions, which country has the most surveillance cameras per head of population in the world and which country’s police taught the Chinese how to censor the internet?

Sir Iain Duncan Smith weighed in; “Anything to do with China has to be looked at, China is no longer benign.” Britain, on the other hand, hasn’t been benign at any time in the last 500 years.

Some Advice on What to do if you Lost Your Pension to the MIC

Or starve!

As Sir Keir proudly boasted “…my government is giving you choices.” And the euthanasia bill, once it becomes law, will add yet another choice.

The UK Incidence Rate for all Cancers is Among Highest in Europe

According to Cancer Research UK the cancer incidence rate in the UK is higher than most countries in Europe, particularly when compared to Mediterranean countries. One wonders why.

This Is Not Going to Help Race Relations in the UK

They are becoming anti-racist by being racist. It is stupidity like this that has tanked the Welsh economy.

The latest official data showed that the Welsh economy was 1.8% smaller in 2022 than in 2019, making it the worst performer of any region or nation on this metric. The gap between Wales’ and England’s GDP per capita, therefore, grew to over £10,500 in 2022. This compares to a gap between Scotland and England of around £3,500.

Wales relies more heavily on manufacturing and production more broadly than the UK as a whole. These sectors have faced volatility in recent years because of global headwinds, holding back growth in Wales disproportionately. Poor infrastructure, including a limited motorway network and the recent imposition of low-speed limits in certain areas, is also a factor restricting Wales’ performance.

Wales in this only country in the UK that has no motorway or rail connection between the north and the south of the country. Maybe, they should work on that before coming up with counter-productive proposals like this.

FUD Watch

Can anybody explain why Russia would want to attack Europe? What has Europe got that is so attractive? And how do they know the date?