Evidence presented to the Scottish Inquiry
Tragic testimonies ignored by mainstream media
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | July 30, 2024
The Scottish Inquiry has heard repeated testimonies on a wide range of topics, but what has been said in relation to what happened in care homes during lockdown is particularly striking. The stories are those of neglect, abuse, denial of healthcare and repeated misuse of end of life medication resulting in deaths. Witness after witness has given concurring evidence.
These stories have only really reached our attention thanks to the work of an independent citizen journalist (“Dave”) on Twitter and Substack. Neil Oliver has been the only mainstream journalist to have reported on these stories on his show in GB News, including interviews with our two co-chairs, Dr Clare Craig and Dr Jonathan Engler.
Here we publish a summary of the evidence from one woman which manages to encompass almost every aspect of the harm caused in care homes. It is the story of her grandmother who was admitted to a care home for mild dementia in autumn 2020.
“My gran was a very mischievous little old lady who was great fun and very talkative. She used to be a very active person when she was younger and tried to keep that up when she was older but, in her later years, she was less active due to widespread pain, and she was unsteady on her feet.”
After a fall “Social Services then intervened and said that they felt my gran should be in a more regimented type setting.”
“I actually took her to the home and that was very difficult as I just had to hand her over to a care home staff member and leave her as I was not allowed in.”
The staff called her by the wrong name but she didn’t know because she depended on lip reading and they were all masked.
~1st Nov 2020:
Positive test result for covid they called to say “my gran had tested positive but that she was fine and that they would keep us updated.”
2nd Nov 2020:
Granddaughter asked to authorise Do Not Resuscitate:
“My answer first of all was, ‘Well, why are you asking me that, as you said she only had mild Covid?’. My second point was that this was not a decision I would make at the moment as my grandmother was lucid, still talking and it would be a discussion to have with her.”
Despite this, a DNR was put in place without proper authorization.
3rd Nov 2020:
They proposed giving her a “mild sedative” to keep her from removing her nasal cannula. The family agreed, not realising it was Midazolam, which can suppress respiratory function.
“On the 3rd November 2020, about 3 o’clock in the afternoon the care home contacted my mother to explain that her (grandmother’s) oxygen saturation had dropped but that it was generally due to the fact that she had a nasal cannula and that every time she went to the toilet she kept forgetting to put it back in.”
“At this point my grandmother was eating and drinking by herself, moving to the toilet herself, that there was only mild symptoms and that they were giving her the nasal oxygen just as a precaution as her stats were a little low but, with the cannula in, she was fine. Her stats had actually improved from the previous day according to her medical records.”
“I later found out my grandmother was on a full end of life protocol put on place by the doctor “just in case”. I don’t understand why this was administered as we were at no point informed that she was end of life and if we had been then why had we not been called to be with her? The way I look at it is that I think they have looked at her notes and seen the medication from the earlier shift and thought that she was “end of life”. My mum was never told it was Midazolam when the home asked if they could give my gran a mild sedative.”
4th Nov 2020:
Granddaughter received a call at 4:11 am saying her grandmother had deteriorated. When she arrived at 4:30 am, she was told her grandmother had died at 4:20 am and went in.
“there were only three staff members, including one nurse, caring for 26 residents”
“She was stone cold and, in my opinion, she had been dead a lot longer than twenty minutes.”
“There was no cannula or oxygen tank in the room.”
“The funeral was also difficult because of the numbers that were allowed. I think a lot more would have been there in normal times. The people there had masks and there was no singing. My gran had loved music and she liked singing. Years before, my gran had given me full instructions for her funeral and I could only follow some of them. When you can’t fulfil somebody’s dying wishes because of rules, it’s hard. To go there and not be able to hug your mum or your dad or your brother is really difficult.”
It’s shocking to imagine one person experiencing all these horrific events. Now consider the reality: each of these horrors has actually happened to countless individuals. This widespread suffering is even more disturbing.
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
By Jonathan Cook | July 28, 2024
BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).
It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbours might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defence.
The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.
Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organisation that targets and murders children playing soccer.”
Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.
Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.
Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football – especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.
So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organisation than Hizbullah?
Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.
Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.
(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)
The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months – that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”
So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.
A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.
Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.
Update:
Facebook instantly removed a post linking to this article – and for reasons that are entirely opaque to me (apart from the fact that it is critical of the BBC and Israel).
Facebook’s warning, threatening that my account may face “more account restrictions”, suggests that I was misleading followers by taking them to a “landing page that impersonates another website”. That is patent nonsense. The link took them to my Substack page.
As I have been warning for some time, social media platforms have been tightening the noose around the necks of independent journalists like me, making our work all but impossible to find. It is only a matter of time before we are disappeared completely.
Substack has been a lifeline, because it connects readers to my work directly – either through email or via Substack’s app – bypassing, at least for the moment, the grip of the social-media billionaires.
If you wish to keep reading my articles, and haven’t already, please sign up to my Substack page.
US Navy Drops Details on Pricey Missiles and Bombs It’s Using Against Yemen’s Warriors
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 27.07.2024
The US and Britain have been bombing Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen since January, killing and maiming scores of civilians and targeting hundreds of militia sites but failing to “degrade” the Houthis missile and drone capabilities, or to stop their months-long partial blockade of the Red Sea in support of Palestine.
The US Navy has revealed new details about the weapons systems it has been using in the ongoing US-UK bombing campaign against the Houthis.
According to information shared with the Navy Times, F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which left the Middle East and steamed home last month after a nine-month long deployment in the Red Sea area, used the AIM-9X infrared-guided heat-seeking missile to target Houthi kamikaze drones.
The AIM-9X is a variant of Raytheon’s widely used AIM-9 Sidewinder short-range air-to-air missile. The weapon has a per unit price of between $430,800 and $472,000, making it between 215 and 236 times the cost of the estimated $2,000-each price of a Houthi attack drone.
The Navy also confirmed the deployment of its Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile, or AARGM, also launched from Super Hornets aircraft, against Houthi air defenses. Produced by Northrup Grumman, these ground attack weapons have a per missile price of $874,000.
The Navy did not provide any details on the Houthi systems targeted by these weapons, The militia’s arsenal is thought to consist mostly of older Soviet-era SAMs and anti-aircraft guns, similarly dated radars, and Yemeni-built copies of Iranian missile and MANPADS designs.
Another weapon used by the Super Hornets in their campaign is the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon – a glide bomb possessed by the US Navy and Air Force and by the air forces of more than half a dozen of Washington’s allies. The Navy said the Raytheon-made missiles being used against the Houthis are the latest, AGM-154C variant, which cost roughly $719,000 each. The Navy did not specify what kinds of targets the munition was used to attack, but the inertial and GPS-guided, terminal infrared homing-equipped weapons are designed for use against both stationary ground targets and moving targets at sea.
Apart from their machinegun-armed speedboats, the Houthis don’t have a navy to speak of, and their naval drones aren’t the fancy, $250,000 apiece, custom-built unmanned vehicles possessed by NATO countries. Instead, the militia has improvised by fitting ordinary speedboats with remote controls, packing them with explosives and launching them toward their enemies, with the total cost of such weapons not exceeding $30,000 (or about 24 times less than the US munitions deployed to dispatch them).
The imbalance in pricing between the Houthis’ guerilla warfare-purposed weapons and the US’s sleek, arms expo showroom-class air-launched missiles and bombs parallels the chasm between the surface-to-air missiles the US Navy has been using and the Yemeni militia’s drones.
In explosive testimony by US air and missile defense officials to Congress in May, Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces Angus King lambasted the state of affairs in which the US military has been forced to use $4.3 million SM-6 interceptor missiles to take down $20,000 Houthi UAVs.
“In the Red Sea, the Houthis are sending $20,000 drones and we’re shooting them down with missiles that cost $4.3 million. The math doesn’t work on that, gentlemen. It just doesn’t work. What are we thinking?” King asked. The lawmaker urged the Pentagon to urgently ramp up the development of directed energy weapons instead.
US Navy expenditures on their policing mission in the Middle East beginning after October 7 and the start of the Israel-Gaza war have surpassed $1 billion, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told the Senate Appropriations Committee in April.
The US-led operation against the Houthis shows no sign of slowing down, but neither does the militia’s resolve against Washington and its allies. US Central Command announced on Friday that American forces had destroyed six Houthi aerial drones, and three uncrewed surface vessels, off the Yemeni coast. Also Friday, hundreds of thousands Yemenis gathered in the streets of Sanaa and other cities in solidarity with the Houthis’ operations against the US and Israel.
France’s Le Monde newspaper wrote in a piece Friday that Western powers had proven “powerless to halt Houthi attacks,” with Western warships’ presence in the Red Sea and strikes on the militia said to have “failed to deter the rebel militia.”
The glum attitude comes in the wake of reports in US business media last week that CENTCOM chief General Michael Erik Kurilla had written a letter to his boss, Lloyd Austin, and urged Washington to ramp up its economic, diplomatic and military pressure on the Houthis, admitting that the Western coalition’s operations to date had “failed” to stop the militia.
UK Plans to Build New Missiles to Target Russia Linked to Pentagon’s Mad Conventional Strike Scheme
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 26.07.2024
Sources told UK media this week that Britain has partnered up with Germany to develop and deploy a new intermediate-range missile designed to target Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Veteran Russian military observer Alexei Leonkov says the plan is inextricably linked to the Pentagon’s highly dangerous Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) initiative.
UK Defense Secretary John Healey spoke to his German counterpart in Berlin on Wednesday about a plan to jointly develop a new strategic missile with a 3,200 km range, The Times reported on Thursday, citing sources said to be familiar with the idea.
Once developed and fielded, the new missiles would be deployed in Germany, according to the publication, replacing the American ground-based long-range fires that Washington recently announced would be stationed in the Central European country beginning in 2026.
Both the American missiles and the proposed new British-German missile would have been prohibited under the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned the development, production and deployment of ground-based missiles in the 500-5,500 km range. Washington violated the treaty for years, according to Moscow, and unilaterally scrapped the agreement in 2019 and immediately began testing of new long-range weapons after falsely accusing Russia of possessing a ground-based missile system with a range beyond 500 km.
One of The Times’ sources said the US weapons expected to deploy in Europe in two years’ time are meant to “bridge” a gap in European NATO allies’ own capabilities. The source did not clarify what motivated the US to ask its allies to create an entirely new missile instead buying or agreeing to permanently field existing American ones.
A joint declaration from Healey’s talks with his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, mentioned a commitment to “undertake a long-term, comprehensive cooperation in the field of long-range capabilities” to provide “deep precision strike” potential. The details are reportedly still being worked out, with no additional information made available, besides the new missile’s expected role as a conventional fire designed to destroy enemy tactical nuclear delivery systems.
The Storm Shadow is currently the furthest-reaching conventional missile in Britain’s arsenal. It has a range of about 240 km, and has been deployed extensively by Ukraine in the NATO-Russia proxy war. The Taurus KEPD 350 is Germany’s longest-range missile system, and has a range of up to 500 km. Berlin has refused to send the air-launched weapon to Ukraine, expressing concerns that doing so would make Germany a “party to the war” because German troops would be on the ground training Ukrainians to use the missiles.
A British Defense Ministry spokesperson told The Times that the deepening UK-German defense relationship is currently “in early stages” and that work on “any new programs” has “not yet commenced.”
Europe Joins US’s Dangerous Conventional Prompt Strike Scheme
“The deployment of these missiles, both American and British, is connected to two things,” Alexei Leonkov, editor of Russia’s Arsenal of the Fatherland military affairs and technology magazine, told Sputnik, commenting on The Times piece.
“The first is the global concept, the strategy under which NATO has been restructuring toward since 2002, which is the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) concept, whose essence centers around the need to destroy the nuclear potentials of an adversary like Russia or China,” Leonkov said.
Thought up by the Bush administration, CPS envisions the mass deployment of thousands of conventional long-range missiles fired simultaneously in a massive surprise attack to destroy as much of an enemy’s strategic arsenal as possible, decapitate its leadership, and destroy remaining fired nuclear missiles using missile defenses.
The primary danger of the idea stems from the concern that it will make the prospect of a ‘limited’ nuclear war seem more palatable for Pentagon planners, and hence increasing the temptation to launch aggression.
The second reason for the British-German plan to develop a new missile centers around the fact that the Americans “are running late, or perhaps have lost the technologies used to create intercontinental missiles with a range beyond that of the Minuteman-3,” Leonkov argues.
“Why do the Americans want to switch up some of their missiles for European ones? I think that most likely, the missiles they have developed may not have proven entirely successful. Hence they’ve decided to attract a European consortium led by the UK.”
On top of that, as Washington’s strategic competition with China in the Asia-Pacific heats up, the number of missiles available for deployment in Europe may be limited, Leonkov believes.
The defense observer can’t rule out that the new British-German missile project may be focused on the creation of a maneuverable hypersonic vehicle, with Britain’s BAE Systems already working on a number of projects in this direction, and cooperating with US defense companies on their hypersonic projects.
In fact, these new European weapons may be the mystery “developmental hypersonic weapons” that the White House mentioned in its press statement earlier this month when it announced the deployment of new long-range strike systems to Germany from 2026 onward, Leonkov said.
Leonkov is confident that these new missiles’ mission will be to overwhelm Russian air and missile defense capabilities, and that if they are developed and fielded, Europe will become the first priority for a Russian strategic attack.
Recalling the European NATO missile threat which faced Moscow in the 1980s, Leonkov characterized the alliance’s present plans as an attempt to give rise to a Cold War 2.0, only this time far more dangerous.
“Russia today is not in a position where it has a vast security belt in the form of the Warsaw Pact countries that it did during the Cold War. Therefore, decisions will need to be changed radically. It’s clear that it will be necessary to strengthen the country’s anti-missile and anti-aircraft defense, but also take steps so that these missiles never appear on the European continent in the first place, while there is still an opportunity to do so,” the observer stressed.
Specifically, Russia will need to make clear in its nuclear doctrine that the deployment of such missiles in Europe will pose a direct threat, and give itself the right to launch a preemptive strike to eliminate this threat, Leonkov suggested.
Under its existing nuclear doctrine, Russia reserves itself the right to use nuclear weapons only in retaliation to an enemy attack using nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction, or in the event of conventional aggression so severe that it puts the existence of the Russian state in jeopardy. In June, President Putin hinted that Russia might revise its nuclear doctrine in response to existing threats.
What the US needs more than anything is “a quick solution that would close the issue for a while,” Leonkov said, referring to the constraints Washington will face in deploying vast numbers of long-range strike systems both to Europe and Asia. Russia’s main goal at this stage will be to “act proactively” to respond to this new threat, the analyst concluded.
London pro-Gaza workers conquer Foreign Office to demand Israel arms embargo
Press TV – July 24, 2024
Pro-Palestine protesters have obstructed the entrances to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) headquarters in London, expressing their dissatisfaction with lack of action on the part of the new Labour government in altering UK policy regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Some 300 demonstrators outside the government office on Wednesday waved the Palestinian flag, while holding placards and banners that read “Genocide Made in Britain” and calling on the British government to ban arms exports to the occupying Tel Aviv regime.
At least nine activists were arrested after clashes erupted between law-enforcement and the protesters.
The Workers for a Free Palestine, which coordinated the demonstration, stated that their objective was to hold the foreign secretary, David Lammy, accountable for his previous statements and ensure that he follows through on his own calls for transparency by releasing legal guidance on UK arms sales to Israel.
A protester from the organization said that if the advice “confirms Israel has breached international law as the shadow foreign minister, Alicia Kearns, says it does – the government should immediately halt arms exports to Israel.”
In March, the FCDO faced allegations from former Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Alicia Kearns regarding the concealment of legal advice indicating that Israel is in breach of international humanitarian law in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Lammy, 52, is facing criticism for his inaction regarding the ongoing licensing of UK arms exports to Israel, and for not providing clarity on whether the UK would detain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited Britain following an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan formally asked for the issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.
Labour has up to this point only changed one aspect of their policy towards Gaza by declaring that the UK will reinstate funding to the UN relief agency for Palestinians UNRWA.
“It is clear after a fortnight that the government could have acted by now, but is instead prevaricating as hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza die. Labour talks about due process, but the people of Gaza cannot wait. Palestinians are demanding answers now,” a person at the demonstration said.
The Workers for a Free Palestine has coordinated additional blockades, where thousands of workers and trade unionists have closed down arms factories throughout the UK.
On May Day, the organization orchestrated a demonstration at the Department of Business and Trade, effectively blocking all entrances to the building. As a result, the building was closed and employees were advised not to report to the office on that day.
UK chief of staff says West should be ready for war in three years
Al Mayadeen | July 23, 2024
The new chief of the British Army General Staff has warned that Britain must be ready to fight a war in three years and double the army’s lethality as threats from Russia, China, Iran, and the DPRK escalate.
General Sir Roly Walker, the head of the general staff, told reporters that the West was facing “an axis of upheaval” with rising military ambitions, warning that a conflict with one nation may lead to another detonation elsewhere.
He argued that the UK and its allies must prepare “to deter or fight a war in three years,” emphasizing the seriousness due to China’s “threat” to Taiwan, Iran’s nuclear goals, and Russia’s military buildup evidenced by the war in Ukraine.
Walker cited US reports claiming that China’s President Xi Jinping had directed military readiness for a potential Taiwan “invasion” by 2027, alongside concerns about Iran potentially violating nuclear agreements and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
In a subsequent speech, Walker stated that he had “a bold ambition” for the army to “double our fighting power in three years and triple by the end of the decade,” not with additional resources but by utilizing technology and techniques developed on Ukrainian battlefields, such as drones and AI.
He argued that Russia, China, Iran, and DPRK‘s independence was growing, citing that they are becoming more supportive of each other with weapons and intelligence.
Walker predicted that it would take “five years to grind their way through” to re-capture the eastern Donbass, costing 1.5 million fatalities, arguing that Russia could recover despite this and may emerge with “a sense of wanting retribution for the support that was given to Ukraine,” thus constituting a higher medium-term threat than previously thought.
As the Labour administration has only recently begun a strategic military review following the election, Walker asserted that Britain has an “absolute urgency to restore credible hard power in order to underwrite deterrence.”
Ministers Were Informed Of mRNA Lies During Mandates, Cardiologist Reveals
Dr Aseem Malhotra had a direct line of communication to the Health Secretary
By JJ Starky | The Stark Naked Brief | July 19, 2024
We’ve had another mainstream breakthrough.
Yesterday, Dr. Aseem Malhotra appeared on TalkTV to discuss the UK government’s Covid response in light of Baroness Hallett’s report on the first module of the Covid Inquiry.
Commentators were surprised. Most predicted that the Covid Inquiry chair’s report would echo sentiments seen during proceedings, suggesting that lockdowns, despite all credible evidence, were the only viable solutions for dealing with Covid.
So when Hallett’s team concluded that “the imposition of a lockdown should be a measure of last resort… indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed,” it almost seemed strange.
During the interview, much like his January 2023 appearance on the BBC where he pivoted from discussing statins to linking Covid vaccines to cardiovascular issues, Malhotra shifted the focus to vaccines.
He covered a lot of detail in quick succession. He argued that the term “vaccine” used for mRNA products is misleading, as they are better described as gene technologies. He cited peer-reviewed reanalysis of Moderna and Pfizer’s clinical trials, which showed an adverse event rate closer to 1-in-800, a figure that outweighed Covid hospitalisation risk. He also mentioned that Israel saw a 25% increase in cardiac events among people aged 16-39 during the vaccine rollout.
But the standout moment came when Malhotra discussed his involvement in a court case in Finland concerning an entrepreneur who was denied entry to a café because he was unvaccinated.
Malhotra revealed that he witnessed a World Health Organisation (WHO) chief scientist testify under oath that by December 2021, the mRNA vaccine offered zero protection against Covid. He then disclosed that he had texted Sajid Javid, the UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, informing him of this testimony, but Javid effectively ignored it.
Former UK Secretary State for Health and Social Care Sajid Javid
It has been difficult to gauge what certain officials knew at what time. However, now we have an indication that some were categorically made aware that their policies were illogical and at direct odds with the evidence-base.
Press releases show that Javid’s department finally revoked the Covid vaccine mandate for health and social care staff on March 15, 2022, months after Malhotra made contact.
In November 2021, a survey of industry leaders estimated that up to 20,000 carers had already quit or been sacked over mandatory jabs. Given the mandate carried on to March the following year, that could be a vast underestimate.
Malhotra, who once advocated for everyone to receive the vaccines before his father reportedly passed away from them, notably said, “This is the biggest corporate crime committed by the drug the industry.”
TalkTV did not post the interview on YouTube as the platform continues to issue strikes to channels discussing the topic. So here it is in full.
Summary of Hallett’s Report on the Covid Inquiry:
- Ad Hoc Intervention: Epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse described lockdown as an ad hoc intervention with no prior planning, guidelines, or clear expectations.
- Lack of Scrutiny on Consequences: The novelty of the lockdown approach meant there was no time to scrutinise its potential side effects, leading to ill-prepared policies with unknown consequences.
- Significant Economic Impact: The report highlights the 25% drop in GDP between February and April 2020 due to lockdowns, representing a major gap in the UK’s assessment of pandemic risk.
- Missing Topics: The report does not discuss the UK government’s evidence that the Test and Trace system had minimal impact on reducing Covid infections despite its high cost.
- Balancing Factors in Health Emergencies: The report emphasises the need for a balanced approach in health emergencies, considering economic impact, social wellbeing, and effects on education, as advocated by former chief medical officer Sally Davies.
- Exclusion of Certain Testimonies: Testimonies from Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty are notably absent, indicating a potential shift from previously dominant perspectives during the pandemic.
- Real Story of the Report: The report suggests that the UK was not prepared for the “wrong pandemic”, but rather that it resorted to an unprecedented policy without a proper evidence base or risk assessment. It advocates that lockdowns should be a measure of last resort, and perhaps never used at all.
Top 10 NHS dietary advice FAILS (from a doctor)
Dr Philip Bosanquet | August 4, 2023
The NHS dietary guidelines are not fit for purpose (in my opinion).
Buy The Concise Nutrition and Lifestyle Guide: https://www.bosanquethealth.com/book-… (available worldwide via Amazon).
Visit Bosanquet Health: https://www.bosanquethealth.com The 10 fails are:
10. Approaching healthy eating / nutrition from a calories-in vs calories-out energy balance focus (failing to take into account Leptin).
9. Basing meals on starchy carbohydrates (failing to understand the root cause of insulin resistance, number one driver of obesity and chronic disease).
8. Minimising fat intake (due to it’s calorie density).
7. Promoting seed oils (vegetable oil, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil) as healthy, whilst stating saturated fat is bad / causes cardiovascular disease (papers on this are listed below, see also video on animal fat: 
• Why ANIMAL FAT is the ultimate SUPERF… ).
6. Advising people not to delay or skip meals, including breakfast (failing to appreciate time restricted eating / intermittent fasting).
5. Advice of healthy snacks.
4. Advice on artificial sweeteners as a substitute for sugar.
3. No mention of the gut microbiome, of organic food being better for humans and the environment than non-organic food, of minimally processed or unprocessed foods in preference to overly processed foods, or the quality or nutritional density of food choices.
2. Switching from full cream / full fat / whole milk to semi skimmed / reduced fat milk to help kids lose weight (!). Failing to take into account fat soluble vitamins including vitamin D.
1. Some of the recipe examples given.
Links to papers on saturated fat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28864…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24723…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26268…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34796…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34547…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34717…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34509…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27071…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23386…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34290…
Dr Philip Bosanquet The Low-Tech Lifestyle Medic
content (except quotes) copyright to Dr Philip Bosanquet 2023 ©
The UK election results hide a truth Labour won’t want you to hear
By Graham Hryce | RT | July 10, 2024
Many political commentators in the UK have failed to grasp the true import of the Labour Party’s electoral victory last week.
Some pundits see the party’s record majority as confirmation that politics in Britain has shifted back to the center – in contrast to the shift to the radical right that has characterized politics in most European countries in recent years.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Labour’s primary vote – 9.7 million but still a lowish 33.8% – increased only marginally, despite the complete collapse of the Conservative vote.
The most important aspect of last week’s election was the transfer of thousands of votes from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s populist Reform Party – particularly in those “red wall” constituencies that Boris Johnson had single handedly captured from Labour at the 2019 election.
Reform received some 4 million votes – 14% of the total votes cast. The UK electoral system meant, however, that Reform only won five seats – including, most importantly, Farage himself.
This significant voting shift did, however, unseat more than 200 Tory MPs, including a former prime minister and a number of cabinet members, and ensured the election of Labour candidates in droves. This does not, however, constitute a “shift to the center.”
What actually occurred last week was predicted, prior to the election, by some conservative commentators who had become completely disenchanted with the Conservative Party, and had cast their lot in with Reform.
Matt Goodwin, for example, urged voters to engage in an act of “creative destruction” by voting for Reform, knowing full well that this would result in a landslide Labour victory.
Goodwin, in effect, urged voters to destroy a Conservative Party that, in his view, had long ago ceased to stand for genuine Conservative values – so as to clear the political landscape for a Reform victory at the 2029 election.
From this perspective, Starmer’s victory is simply a necessary political prelude to the creation of a viable British populist party that will be capable of governing in its own right in the next few years.
Whatever the prospects of this happening may be, such a perspective correctly predicted the imminent demise of the Rishi Sunak-led Conservative Party, and reflected what has actually been happening in UK politics for the past decade.
Other commentators – including Starmer propagandists and, curiously enough, some from the conservative right like Peter Hitchens – see Starmer’s win as a victory for “the most radical left-wing party in UK history.” Such a view could not be more mistaken.
There is nothing at all “left-wing” – in the traditional sense of the term – about Keir Starmer or the Labour Party that he has refashioned in his own image since its disastrous election loss in 2019.
Starmer has spent the past five years ruthlessly purging the Labour Party of the last remnants of left-wing Bennite radicalism – whose most recent proponent was the hapless Jeremy Corbyn. It is not for nothing that Starmer has ditched almost every element of the Labour manifesto that he so eagerly embraced not so long ago.
It is perfectly clear that Starmer’s Labour Party will govern for the global elites – not the traditional British working class or those other social strata that have been displaced and left behind by globalization.
Starmer may refer endlessly to his “tool setter” father in interviews, and Angela Rayner may go on ad infinitum about her poverty-stricken background – but this is all posturing and propaganda of the crudest kind. And it did not fool working-class voters in the “red wall” seats last week – they voted for Farage, not Starmer and Rayner.
Starmer’s first post-election speech is a surer guide to the elite policies that his Labour government will pursue.
Starmer immediately shut down the hopelessly ineffective Rwanda scheme – thereby foreshadowing in reality, whatever he may say publicly, his commitment to increased levels of immigration, a key global elite policy. Sunak was also committed to increased levels of immigration, notwithstanding his stated policy position to the contrary.
Also revealing was his comment that “we have too many prisoners” and his appointment of James Timpson as the minister of state for prisons. Timpson is on record as having said that two-thirds of those in British prisons should not be there, and he is famous for employing ex-prisoners in his shoe-repair chain.
Could there be a more elitist and woke policy than freeing prisoners in large numbers? The residents of London and other large cities in the UK must be looking forward the increased crime rates in which such a policy will inevitably result.
Starmer also reaffirmed his commitment to supporting the Zelensky regime in Ukraine in the strongest possible terms.
There can be no doubt that a Starmer Labour government will pursue elite policies such as these, and it will resort to radical constitutional reform in order to do so. Peter Hitchens has correctly drawn attention to Starmer’s radical plans to reform the House of Lords and further empower an already ideologically committed judiciary.
All of this is about governing in the interests of the global elites – it has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine left-wing politics.
What then can we expect to happen in British politics under a Starmer government over the next five years?
First, it is inevitable that the Conservative Party will disappear as a major political force.
The Tories have been deeply divided and led by fourth-rate politicians for decades, and Brexit exacerbated these problems to such an extent that the party tore itself apart once Brexit was finally implemented, after a debilitating internal battle, by Boris Johnson.
Johnson – although a flawed politician in some respects – was the only effective leader that the Conservative Party has had in the past decade.
Like Benjamin Disraeli and David Lloyd George, Johnson was something of a Tory outsider, a charismatic leader who understood that the electoral appeal of the Conservative Party could be significantly broadened by adopting policies that appealed to British patriotism and the traditional working class.
Johnson’s “get Brexit done” and “leveling up” policies allowed the Conservatives to appeal to disaffected traditional Labour voters and, at the same time, effectively neutralize the appeal of Nigel Farage’s UKIP Party.
These policies, together with Johnson’s charismatic leadership and campaigning skills, enabled him to win an extraordinary 80-seat majority at the 2019 election.
Notwithstanding this unprecedented electoral victory, within three years the Remainers and others within the Conservative Party (Johnson never had the support of a large majority of MPs) had joined forces with with the global elites, the mainstream woke UK media, the Supreme Court, and a raft of fourth-rate politicians of all political persuasions to ruthlessly destroy Johnson’s political career.
He was finally finished off by a narcissistic and vengeful populace who were, wrongly and foolishly, outraged at the Partygate affair.
Once Johnson had been deposed, the fate of a deeply divided Conservative Party under utterly incompetent leaders like Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak was sealed. In fact, last week’s collapse of the Tory vote was richly deserved, and Truss in particular deserved to lose her seat.
And one only has to observe the unseemly squabbling taking place this week between the half-a-dozen or so candidates for the Tory leadership – they include such luminaries as Robert Jennick and James Cleverly – to see that the Conservative Party does not have a viable future no matter who is eventually chosen to lead it.
What is the likely fate of the Starmer Labour government?
Like all mainstream governments in Western countries that represent the interests of the global elites, Starmer’s government will be unable to remedy any of the fundamental problems confronting the UK – because it is unwilling to introduce the genuinely radical economic and social reforms that would be necessary to bring that about.
Stramer’s government will be unable to resuscitate the ailing British economy. It will do nothing to solve the cost-of-living crisis or reduce energy prices. It will not be able to reverse the decline of the NHS or improve the delivery of government services. It will continue to support America’s proxy wars with all the adverse domestic consequences that follow from such a misguided foreign policy. And its firm commitment to woke policies will only intensify the culture wars that have so deeply divided British society for the past few decades.
It follows that, within a relatively short period of time, the British electorate will become disenchanted with Starmer and his government. Its fate will mirror the fate of the Biden, Macron and Sholz administrations.
The Reform Party will probably become the major beneficiary of this disillusionment – but whether it will be able to capitalize on it is very much an open question.
Populist parties do not have a good record of delivering on their promises, and the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it almost impossible for minor parties to win large numbers of seats.
Farage himself was in two minds about coming back to lead the Reform Party and contest the election – and five years is a long time to spend in opposition as the leader of a party with only five MPs.
The French electoral system is much more favourable towards radical right-wing parties than the British, and in America Donald Trump had to take over the Republican Party in order for it to become an effective political force. Trump realized in the 1990s that he could not win the presidency as a third-party candidate.
If Farage is to become a significant political leader he may have to take over what is left of the Conservative Party after last week’s election.
Rather than bring about a “shift to the center” or usher in a “radical left-wing government,” Keir Starmer’s election victory is, therefore, much more likely to ensure that UK politics staggers along in much the same chaotic and dysfunctional fashion that it has for the past decade.
That appears to be the most that voters in Western democracies can hope for these days.
Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.
A tale of two cities: have we seen a ‘surge to the Left’ in British and French elections?
By Gilbert Doctorow | July 9, 2024
In the past five days, parliamentary elections were carried out in Britain and in France. The results were dramatic, attracting a great deal of media attention.
In this brief essay, we will look behind the bald facts of vote counts and strive to make sense of where the UK and France are headed. What does the latest news tell us about the ‘managed democracies’ in Europe? I will direct particular attention to the different electoral and governance systems operating in Britain and France, given that these respective systems were so influential in delivering the results we are seeing?
*****
The sitting governments in both France and the United Kingdom were overturned in the past week. Looking at the winners, one might conclude a new or updated Left has won in both elections. If so, this runs directly counter to the media bugbear of resurgent populism that supposedly endangers democracy. Should the winners break out the champagne?
In Britain, Labour won a landslide victory, taking absolute control of Parliament and ending 14 years of Tory chaos and misrule. In the American vernacular, British voters were given the opportunity to ‘throw the bums out’ and they availed themselves of it. Tory leader and incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer achieved this success by having expelled from the party the genuinely Leftist former leader Jeremy Corbyn and taken up the winning ‘New Labour’ centrist position first defined by former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Some of the more odious former or present Tory ministers, such as the holder of the record for shortest time serving in 10 Downing Street, Liz Truss, lost their seats in Parliament.
In France, Macron’s party, or ‘movement,’ yesterday lost its tenuous hold on parliament, coming in second to the New Popular Front, as the united Left parties call themselves, in a three-way race. Macron and his supporters could savor a victory of sorts by having risen from the ashes of the European Parliament voting on 6 June and of the first round of balloting for their national parliament a week ago, when they appeared to enjoy no more than 15 – 20% of voter support. Now they hold nearly a third of parliamentary seats and can hope to forge a coalition with the united Left parties to keep their sworn enemies, the so-called ‘Extreme Right’ National Rally of Marine Le Pen, away from the levers of power. The outcome is what political commentators call a ‘hung parliament’ in which two of the three rival blocs of deputies will try to form a ruling coalition while the President tries to stand above the bickering and back-stabbing while exercising near-dictatorial powers of legislating by decree.
That there will be a lot of bickering is beyond doubt: the single most prominent voice in the New Popular Front is that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the France Unbowed party. He is the embodiment of anti-capitalist spirits within the country, and though he claims that the Left is ready to govern, and though he or one of his allies may well be tapped by Macron to form a cabinet, it is hard to see how parliament and president can cooperate on anything whatsoever in the days and months ahead. It is nearly certain that France will continue its descent from relevance within the EU and within the world at large that the dimwitted and cowardly François Hollande oversaw from his CIA-stage managed electoral victory back in 2012 onwards. In his years in office, Macron has tried repeatedly to rescue the country from its descent by one failed initiative after another.
*****
The opposing principles of the electoral and governance systems in Britain and France are ‘first past the post’ in the former, where victory is handed in each district to the candidate with the greatest number of votes, and inclusive, proportional representation in government of the latter wherein seats are reserved for representatives of minorities in the voting public. I say this in the full knowledge that the coalition governments which are the almost inevitable consequence of power sharing schemes and are widely practiced across the Continent, are the rare exception, not the rule in France. In France, it has been customary for one party to hold an absolute majority in parliament and to form a cabinet of ministers that shares the same policy priorities and is chosen from among those prepared to assume power at any time in what the British call a ‘shadow cabinet.’
The strength of the British system is that it makes possible sharp changes in direction of government policy when the public is persuaded that the powers that be are not functioning in their interests. The weak point is that given the often low levels of voter turn-out and the share of votes cast held by the winning party relative to all votes, the incoming government may actually be said to represent a very small percentage of all eligible voters. Margaret Thatcher, for example, dramatically changed the direction of the British government while having enjoyed no more than 25% of the popular vote.
In the given case of the British elections on 4 July, something similar occurred. It has been widely commented by political analysts, and stated most succinctly and pointedly by the leader of the Reform UK party Nigel Farage, that the vote for Labour was not so much attributable to support for Labour as it was a rejection of the Tories. By Farage’s estimate, perhaps half of the Labour vote falls into this category, so that the actual support level of Labour and its policies may have been no more than 18% of the electorate. Of course, this detail is swept under the carpet in the headlines and opening paragraphs of the reports we read in the press and see on mainstream television.
The strength of the Continent-wide system of power sharing and coalitions is its ‘progressive’ appearance, its very inclusiveness. Inclusiveness, let us remember, is the new divide between Conservatives and Liberals, whether it goes by the name ‘identity politics’ or not. It long ago replaced policies for how you divide up the economic pie among contending strata of the population. On the Continent, many different parties get to share in the responsibilities and spoils of power.
I put the accent on ‘spoils,’ because I maintain that coalitions are a formula for institutionalized corruption. Governments are formed by back-room deals among the various parties in the agreed coalition. Ministerial portfolios are allocated with scant attention to the competence of the appointees for the given post, looking instead to the need to reward top party personalities for their adherence to the coalition. And the policies set out may well be in sharp contradiction with one another, meaning implementation can well be inconsistent and ineffective. There can be no better illustration of the pitiful results of coalition building than the current federal government of Germany, where ill-educated and wholly incompetent ministers such as Annalena Baerbock at Foreign Affair and Economy Minister Robert Habeck are a disgrace to the good name of European statesmen and women from generations past.
Let me emphasize here that a hung parliament was precisely the wish of Macron and his immediate entourage when they understood that there was no chance of their own list of candidates holding onto power alone and there was every risk of Le Pen getting an absolute majority. The pro-Macron forces of French politics are strongly pro-market, as one would expect from a leader who entered politics after making his career in the counting rooms of the Rothschild bankers and brokers. Yet, out of purely opportunistic calculations, in the week between the first and second rounds of balloting, they reached agreement with the New Popular Front on which of the two would withdraw their candidate from the race in given electoral districts so as to better ensure victory over Le Pen’s party there. It worked, but will the resulting parliament work? That seems not to interest M. Macron at this moment.
*****
In his victory speech, following official release of the vote results, Keir Starmer twice made the remark that in power he will place ‘country above party.’ Emmanuel Macron and his allies have pursued the opposite, party above country, and France will be the worse for it.
But then again, we in the pro-Sovereignty, anti-globalist, anti-supranational bureaucracy Opposition can only say ‘the worse, the better.’
One thing is certain in France: the country will be rent with internal discord at the highest levels of government. The Fifth Republic has survived periods of ‘cohabitation’ between a President of one party and set of policy priorities and a parliamentary majority held by another party with different policy priorities. It has not experienced the cohabitation with a hung parliament that we see now.
As regards foreign policy, our newspapers today speak of the blow to Israeli interests that the approach to power by Mélenchon with his pro-Palestinian bias signifies. We hear less about what the electoral outcome in France signifies for the war in and about Ukraine. A victory by Le Pen would certainly have put a check on any further French military commitments to Kiev, and possibly would have led to French withdrawal from NATO. For the moment, that very possibility has been eliminated. Nonetheless, a weak and divided France, such as we shall see in the months ahead, is good news for those of us who wish to see an end to the spineless conformism at the top of European Institutions leading us all towards Armageddon.
Regrettably, in Britain there will be no change from the pandering to Washington’s worst instincts and unlimited support for the dictator in Kiev. The only voice in British politics who stands for reason on relations with Russia is Nigel Farage. It is some small consolation that Farage has won a seat in Parliament, even though the 15% of the popular vote that his party achieved has not been rewarded by more than a handful of seats.
Postscript: One reader has brought to my attention the fact that France in fact has a first past the post as opposed to the proportional representation system so common elsewhere on the Continent. Accordingly I shift my emphasis elsewhere in the French situation and say that the outcome is uniquely due to Macron’s opportunism and tactical thinking at the expense of strategic thinking and patriotism; he has engineered a three way split in the lower chamber to keep Le Pen from power while knowingly making Franch ungovernable and returning the country to the instability it suffered during the Fourth Republic.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
Will Labour’s ‘change’ agenda include Palestine?
By Dr Daud Abdullah | MEMO | July 8, 2024
From a purely moral point of view, the British government, and the Labour Party in particular, should have been the first to recognise the State of Palestine given their historic role in the dispossessing three-quarters of a million Palestinians. They should not be dragged kicking and screaming to do so. After all, it was the Labour Party which officially adopted at its 1944 annual conference the policy; Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in.
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Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies
By Elizabeth Vos | Consortium News | August 23, 2019
The alleged use of sexual blackmail by spy agencies is hardly unique to the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Although the agencies involved as well as their alleged motivations and methods differ with each case, the crime of child trafficking with ties to intelligence agencies or those protected by them has been around for decades.
Some cases include the 1950s -1970s Kincora scandal and the 1981 Peter Hayman affair, both in the U.K.; and the Finders’ cult and the Franklin scandal in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Just as these cases did not end in convictions, the pedophile and accused child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein remained at arms’ length for years. … continue
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