After my rant about the disgraceful standards in local journalism, a friend has sent me this Black Museum of mis-spellings, typos, illiteracy and general stupidity which have appeared over the last few months in his local paper, the Warrington Guardian. I wish I could say they are invented, but they are all screenshots from the paper, so they are exactly as they appeared. No comment is necessary except to say read it and weep.

(Note: the system is telling me this article may be too long for some email outfits. It says: ‘Tip: If the newsletter is truncated in an email, readers can click on “View entire message,” and they’ll be able to view the entire post in their email app.’)

This article first appeared on Ashworth & Ashworth Substack and is republished here with kind permission.

Margaret Ashworth is a retired national newspaper journalist.
She runs the Subbing Clinic in a hopeless attempt to keep up standards, and is one half of the Ashworth & Ashworth Substack.

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In fairness to Andy Burnham (and Keir Starmer before him), they neither invented nor caused the overcrowding. Nor did they trigger the immigrant driven population explosion - though neither have shown any real interest in halting it -which has hardly helped its management.

Back in 1997, when the population stood at less 52 million, approximately 133 prison establishments in England and Wales housed some 62,000 inmates, eight per cent of whom were foreign nationals. What the raw numbers tell us today, by comparison, is an England and Wales population of over 62 million, its growth driven by net international migration. They also tell us that there are now fewer -just 123 - prisons in England and Wales and that of those, one in six has fewer than ten spaces available; that in total they are containing around 86,500 prisoners, 12 per cent of whom are foreign nationals, set against a full capacity of 89,000. The raw numbers show us that without intervention, projected prisoner numbers will exceed capacity by 15,000 by 2032.

And that the problem is not just the agony of choice, but an absence of honesty and a dearth of political will.

Starmer’s solution was the Sentencing Act: an early-release scheme, which would release prisoners after half their sentence instead of two-thirds, or a third instead of 40 per cent, inviting what Sir Iain Duncan Smith has always declared the bugbear of the system: massively inefficient revolving door sentencing. The Act, which would have seen 6,000 offenders released as early as October (including rapists and killers), was so obviously flawed only a politician could have dreamed it up. On practicalities alone, the policy was doomed to failure. In the first quarter of 2026, for the first time on record, prison recalls outnumbered releases: for every 100 prisoners released, 101 were returned to custody. Worse still was the immorality. The public was never going to accept the early release of men such as the killers of PC Andrew Harper.

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Among the gushing tributes to Dolly Parton, the late acknowledged Queen of Country Music, was a reminder that she was quite literally one of the most vocal pushers of the Covid vaccine, even to the extent of rewriting her famous song Jolene to encourage people to get the shot.

In March 2021, as she was getting the jab herself, she sang, ‘Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate. Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, because once you’re dead, then that’s a bit too late.’

Also, in 2020, she donated $1million to the Vanderbilt Medical Center for vaccine research, for which she was widely praised and hailed as a heroine. In some quarters – quite a few – she still is being celebrated for her generous donation to vaccine developers Moderna.

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The collapse of US-Canada trade talks last week, and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that “you’re at war when you get attacked,” has turned a tariff dispute into a political toxin that now sits inside the one relationship still holding North American energy security together. Fifty-percent US tariffs have taken effect on billions of dollars of Canadian goods; Ottawa has promised dollar-for-dollar retaliation from September 8th. Crude oil, natural gas and potash were, for the moment, carved out of the American levies, but that exemption cannot be thought permanent. The uncertainty, the public flirtation with using oil as a retaliatory instrument and Carney’s larger strategic posture toward Washington already threaten the physical barrels and the political trust on which the 2025 National Security Strategy depends.

The contrast with what seemed possible only a year earlier could not be more dramatic. The August 2025 Anchorage meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, however inconclusive on Ukraine, opened a window onto a potentially different energy order: one in which sanctions-driven distortions might have eased and Russian Arctic and Siberian resources might have again attracted Western capital. Combined with the January 2026 capture of Nicolás Maduro and Washington’s subsequent assertion of control over the rules of Venezuelan oil production, that vision promised hemispheric abundance rather than managed scarcity. Carney’s brinkmanship now risks putting a dagger through it – and doing so at the expense of Alberta first.

The Anchorage window and the promise of abundance

On August 15th 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, the presidents of the world’s largest and third-largest oil producers met for the first time since the outbreak of the Ukraine war. No ceasefire was signed, although the maximalist demand by EU hawks for an immediate ceasefire was dropped as a non-starter. Trump said there was “no deal until there’s a deal”. Putin later conceded that “there were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage”. Yet the meeting itself, after years of isolation, revived talk of economic cooperation in the Arctic, LNG technology, icebreakers and even possible restarts of ventures such as Sakhalin-1. Russian officials spoke of region-to-region contacts between the Russian Far East and the US West Coast; side conversations touched Novatek technology for Alaskan gas.

That window mattered because the post-2022 sanctions regime boomeranged on its progenitors. Measures intended to turn the Russian rouble into rubble instead accelerated Europe’s de-industrialisation, sent discounted Russian barrels through Indian and Chinese refiners into European markets at a premium and encouraged experiments in non-dollar settlement. A genuine US-Russia thaw would have reversed those distortions, reopened Siberian unconventional plays to American fracking expertise and reduced the incentive for BRICS energy trade to migrate away from the dollar. Developing countries, long subject to decarbonisation demands while the West consumed the fossil fuels that built its wealth, would have gained cheaper energy and a less politicised development path. The ‘spirit of Anchorage’ never became a treaty. By mid-2026 it had largely dissipated. But the mere possibility of ending the sanctions-driven split in global oil trade – and of pairing US technology with Russian Arctic and Siberian geology – was part of a larger architecture of energy abundance. The other half of that architecture was sitting in the Orinoco Belt.

Venezuela’s heavy oil and the Trump Corollary

In the pre-dawn hours of January 3rd 2026, US forces captured Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face narcotics-terrorism charges. The operation was the most muscular application yet of what the administration calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The November 2025 National Security Strategy had pledged that the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere” and “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere”. Venezuela’s oil was precisely such an asset.

The Energy Institute’s Statistical Review still lists Venezuela as holding the world’s largest proved reserves – on the order of 300 billion barrels, the great majority of them extra-heavy Orinoco crude. At recent prices that stockpile is notionally worth many trillions of dollars. Venezuelan output has risen from well under a million barrels per day toward roughly 1.2 million, with several hundred thousand barrels now moving to US refiners. Supermajors remain cautious; service companies and smaller independents have moved first. Full restoration toward two to three million barrels per day still looks like a multi-year project even under favourable political conditions. That timeline is why Canadian barrels remain indispensable in the near term – and why treating them as a weapon is so reckless.

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US had secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business. This unprecedented US agreement to take control of a fifth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves is a bet that American companies can revive the nation’s battered energy industry.

As important as the headline volume is the molecule. Long-chain, high-sulphur, high-residuum crude is ideally suited to the delayed-coking complexes that dominate the US Gulf Coast. Those refineries convert discounted heavy sour barrels into diesel and jet fuel more efficiently than light-shale slates can be upgraded. Control of Venezuelan heavy oil therefore complements, rather than merely duplicates, the Permian’s light sweet output. It gives the United States a full-spectrum position across the barrel and a second wing for a non-OPEC Americas bloc that already includes US shale, Canadian oil sands, Guyana’s new discoveries and Brazilian pre-salt, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Four million barrels a day and the Alberta-Ottawa fault line

EIA data show US crude imports from Canada averaged 3.9 million barrels per day in 2025; weekly figures through 2026 still cluster around 3.5–4.2 million. Those volumes have routinely accounted for around 60% or more of US crude imports. The main destination is not only Houston. It is first the US Midwest, then the Gulf Coast: complex refineries configured over decades for Alberta’s heavy sour crude. Bloomberg put 2025 Midwest receipts near 2.7 million barrels per day vs about 416,000 barrels per day to the Gulf. These barrels are not interchangeable with Permian light or with distant Middle Eastern grades that must travel longer, more vulnerable sea lanes. Without them, utilisation rates fall, product yields suffer and pump prices rise. In a tight global distillate market – the spread between crude and diesel, the “crack spread”, has run over $100 a barrel – the substitution problem is acute. As David Blackmon assesses, there is no ready alternative outlet of comparable size and proximity for Canada either. Canada’s only large operating Pacific marine outlet is the Westridge terminal in Burnaby, the end of the Trans Mountain pipeline, rated at 890,000 barrels per day. That line can be optimised toward about 1.19 million barrels per day by 2028. A separate million-barrel West Coast pipeline has been proposed, with construction possibly starting in 2027. Neither is a substitute, this year or next, for the US inland system.

Canada’s own vulnerabilities are equally structural. Eastern provinces, home to most of the population, still depend on US-sourced barrels or on west-to-east pipelines whose routes pass through Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ottawa’s long refusal to approve adequate all-Canadian eastbound pipelines left Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa exposed. Any serious disruption therefore boomerangs on Canada as surely as it would hit Chicago and Houston.

That is why using oil as a weapon would detonate inside Canada long before it wounds the US – an economy 13 times larger that absorbs just under three-quarters of Canadian exports and some 90% of its oil exports. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said she “cannot think of a more disastrous policy decision than cutting off or taxing Alberta’s oil to the United States”. Doing so, she warned, would extinguish hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in Alberta, hobble Ontario and Quebec, send the TSX into a dive – and hand US cokers a reason to look to Venezuela instead, perhaps permanently. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was equally blunt: his province “cannot and will not support any kind of export tariff” on oil or potash. The producing Western regions of Canada have told Ottawa no.

Danielle Smith also points out that an export tax on Alberta crude invites a symmetric American levy on gasoline and diesel heading into Ontario and Quebec “right as we turn into fall and winter”. Carney himself said in July he did not “see the value” in using energy as leverage and that Canada must remain a “reliable supplier”. The ‘war’ language of last week sits uneasily with that earlier caution. If Ottawa now flirts with the oil card, it will reopen the oldest Canadian fracture: Alberta and Saskatchewan sell the oil and potash, and the Carney Government in Ottawa is tempted to treat those exports as leverage. Alberta’s separatist undercurrent does not need a better recruiting poster.

This interdependence is a strength when relations are stable. It becomes a glaring weakness when they are not. Even though energy was excluded from the latest 50% tariff list, the collapse of talks has already injected the uncertainty that markets and capital abhor. Cross-border projects feel it immediately. South Bow’s Prairie Connector – a partial reuse of cancelled Keystone XL pipe, with 20-year commitments for about 465,000 b/d and a mid-2027 investment decision – needs a permit that survives the next election. CEO Bevin Wirzba has said the company will not proceed without a “durable” US authorisation. Twenty-year contracts cannot be financed on a relationship described as war.

Waiting out Trump: Democrats, Davos and a lame-duck bet

Mark Carney is a former Bank of England governor and UN special envoy for climate finance who once argued that central banks should help impose “moral sentiments” on capital allocation in the name of Net Zero. In his January 2026 Davos speech he told middle powers that the old rules-based order was fading and that “when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness” – obviously, if obliquely, referring to Trump’s America. He has signed new “strategic partnerships” with the EU and China, diversified trade talks across four continents and presented Canada as an “energy superpower” whose customers need not be confined to the United States.

Carney elevated Maia Johnson — an American who worked on scheduling and operations for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and later on the Biden and Harris efforts and who was tied to Michael Bloomberg’s political-data firm Hawkfish — into a newly created senior operating role in the Prime Minister’s Office. The hiring choice is a signal about which American political network Ottawa finds congenial. So are Carney’s private meetings this year with leading 2028 Democratic contenders – including Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg and Elissa Slotkin – as Democrats begin to audition for the post-Trump era.

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The timeline fits a waiting game. People familiar with Ottawa’s deliberations told Bloomberg that Carney’s Government sees little chance of restarting talks before the November 2026 midterms and is designing support “to ride out the balance of Trump’s term if necessary”. Carney himself said Canada would back affected firms “for as long as it takes, in other words, beyond the life of this US administration”. Danielle Smith, from the other side of the same calendar, has urged diplomacy so that Canadian oil can be kept out of the trade war. CityNews put the question directly: is Carney waiting for a lame-duck president?

But a Democratic midterm gain would not automatically unwind executive tariffs; a White House official called that expectation “a desperate pipe dream”. A 2028 Democratic restoration does little to alleviate the trade standoff. It might, however, restore the Net Zero reflex that spent a decade making Canada’s physical ability to get crude out of Alberta and to paying customers harder. Betting the continental oil system on a US partisan cycle is the opposite of energy security.

Trump’s National Security Strategy is an energy-dominance doctrine that treats pipelines, upgraders and heavy-oil reserves as instruments of hemispheric security. The Venezuelan reset was meant to reduce extra-hemispheric influence in the Americas and, over time, to give Washington a substitute source of heavy crude. That substitution is years away. In the meantime any sustained interruption – or even the credible threat of one – raises the odds of tighter product markets, higher prices for American and Canadian consumers alike and the postponement of the very infrastructure that would make the hemisphere more secure.

The Anchorage meeting and the Caracas operation together sketched a world in which the Western Hemisphere could become a low-cost, high-security energy platform spanning Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – light oil from the US Permian and other shale oil basins married to heavy Orinoco and Athabasca crude, insulated from Eurasian pipeline politics and Middle Eastern chokepoints. That architecture still requires Canadian flows in the critical intervening years. Carney’s war language, his Democratic entanglements and the temptation to ‘wait Trump out’ do not create new heavy-oil supplies or new all-Canadian pipelines. Rather, they raise the probability that the existing system fractures worsen – between Ottawa and Alberta, and between Ottawa and Washington – at the precise moment when US strategy is attempting to lock in hemispheric advantage in energy supplies.

The physics, economics and geography of global oil trade flows remain broadly unchanged. What has changed is the political choice to treat an existential energy partnership as another front in a trade war, or as a holding action until the next American election. If cooler heads do not prevail, Carney’s dagger threatens not only the oldest and most intimate trading relationship in North America but also the energy security interests of the entire American hemisphere.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

A friend told us yesterday about a drama at the weekend in a village a few miles away. Two horse riders had been on the road when one dismounted to speak to someone. The horse contrived to jam its legs into a cattle grid and was trapped up to its body. Emergency services rallied quickly, with five fire appliances turning up plus a specialist rope rescue unit (below),

a farmer brought a telehandler (a device attached to a tractor for lifting heavy things), and two vets soon arrived. They sedated the panicking horse while the firefighters slid a board under it and the telehandler pulled it up from the grid. It was supported in a nearby field until it was able to stand, albeit with obvious serious injuries to its legs (below). By this time quite a crowd had gathered and some took pictures.

Our friend, who was lunching in the nearby pub, is a horse enthusiast and said it looked as if it would be ok, so she was distressed to learn yesterday that it had been put down.

In my naivety I thought the local Lancashire Telegraph website might have details such as who owned/was riding the horse, where it lived, its age and name, why it was destroyed, what the vets had to say, who the farmer involved was, and maybe some quotes from some who watched the operation. I expected there would be pictures of such an unusual event in a tiny village.

Not a chance.

This is the report under the heading ‘Horse rescued by five fire engines on Paa Lane, Paythorne’:

A horse was rescued by firefighters from five engines after getting into difficulty.

The incident happened on Paa Lane, Paythorne, on Saturday, August 22.

Five fire engines from Chorley, Nelson, Darwen, Clitheroe, and Earby, along with the search and rescue team from Bamber Bridge, were called.

The horse was rescued using a spreader board and telehandler.

The rescue operation lasted for about one hour and twenty minutes.

A spokesperson for the fire service said: ‘At 12.28pm on Saturday, August 22, five fire engines from Chorley, Nelson, Darwen, Clitheroe and Earby, as well as the Search and Rescue Team from Bamber Bridge, attended a large animal rescue on Paa Lane, Paythorne.

‘One horse was extricated using a spreader board and telehandler.

‘Crews were detained for approximately one hour and 20 minutes.’

The ‘report’ was illustrated by this picture and caption:

You may notice a certain similarity between the reporter’s words and the statement from the fire service. Not a single fact or detail has been added. It does not even describe the way the horse ‘got into difficulty’. The illustration, intrepidly sourced from Google Maps, is irrelevant. It certainly does not report the sad end to the story, which a simple call to the pub landlady would have elicited.

My husband Alan worked on the Lancashire Evening Telegraph at the start of his career and he was utterly horrified by this travesty of journalism. In his day, as in mine in the same era, no reporter would have dared turn in such a pathetic effort. The news editor would have been apoplectic. I doubt if the reporter would have been given a second chance: he would have been fired on the spot. If the news editor was feeling tender-hearted he might have put the offending hack on night duty for two weeks, but only if he brought the report up to standard by asking all the relevant questions.

Neither of us can understand why anyone calling him or herself a reporter is happy with such lazy and incompetent work. Not to mention his so-called supervisors, who are just as much to blame for accepting it. And don’t tell me they are overloaded – if you look at the website there is very little in it. Sample home page headings: ‘Latest on plan to restore historic Lancashire air raid shelter in back garden’, ‘Greg James visits riverside pub on Lancashire “grief trip” after losing dog Barney’ and ‘Positive Blackburn Rovers transfer hint and update on two potential exits’.

To which I would add: ‘Useless journalists deserve to get the push – but won’t.’

This article first appeared on substack and is republished here with kind permission.

Margaret Ashworth is a retired national newspaper journalist.
She runs the Subbing Clinic in a hopeless attempt to keep up standards, and is one half of the Ashworth & Ashworth Substack.

Long ago, climatologists decided they couldn’t deal with the British seasons’ carefree attitude to calendar months. Spring, for instance, could start any time from late January to the end of March. Real summer weather sometimes didn’t appear until September. Their scientific minds needed more certainty so they could measure things, and tell us if the weather we had just experienced was colder, warmer or wetter than before.

Right from the most ancient of times there were four seasons, so they divided the year into four periods of three months thereby stopping their irritating tendency to wander. Summer would henceforth happen every June/July/August, the other seasons fitting in accordingly. It no longer mattered, apparently, that the actual weather took no notice of either calendars or climatologists.

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This summer there was much fuss because boys had, for the second year running. pipped girls in the A level results by bagging 0.9 per cent more ‘As‘ and ‘A stars‘. A Telegraph article enthused, ‘boys widen gap over girls in A-level results’ and reported male students ‘surging ahead’ in achieving A* and A grades for second consecutive year.

But the more important story behind A levels is persistently missed. Since the mid 1990s girls have led boys in the number of them taking A levels in the first place. 53 per cent of A level students are female, 47 per cent male; a difference that has been in place for many years.

Furthermore 2025 saw 42,000 more females going to university than males, translating into a female presence of 57 per cent.

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In this series on the bottomless pension pit that has faced and still faces every incoming British government Chris Philp has challenged the leaders of the new parties on the ‘right’ to call out the Tory and Labour governments of the last 30 years for wrecking the original auto-enrolment scheme that made working people save for pensions; and for turning it into a benefits scheme which allows people to avoid work for life. How this was done incrementally - and how we have been duped for years - you can read in Parts 1 and 2.
In the third and final part today he calls on them to be bold enough to adopt the solutions set out below – most significantly limiting the pension rights of anyone not working a total of 35 years (including all recent arrivals, but not limited to them).

WE CAN solve the problems in the pensions system by simply reversing ‘the incessant ratchet of socialism’ and without making tough political choices because we don’t do it retrospectively, we do it from now on. To prepare for this, we need to give the Overton window a nudge by making people fully aware of what’s been going on with the pension system. And then:

Solution 1: Stop giving away tax/NI credits

We cannot continue to give away entitlement to the State pension. An income for the rest of someone’s life must be reserved for those who have earned it.

The simple (political) fix to NI credits

We must recognise that it would be political suicide for any party to try to remove existing entitlements from previous tax years. Apart from anything else, that would lead to poverty for many people. The answer must be to change the system from now on.

Nobody is going to be out on the streets, raging with Poll Tax levels of political fervour, about benefits they haven’t yet been given and to which they would still be entitled if they do something to earn them.

The pre-1996 system worked well: you had rights to unemployment benefit if you’d worked and paid NI in the preceding year. This gave a tax/NI credit for up to a year, after that you went on to Income Support which didn’t give credits. This encourages people to work for a living, supports them in times of need – and massively reduces the State’s exposure.

It can be implemented very easily – announce in a Budget statement that it will take effect from the start of the following tax year, giving people due warning that they have a few months to find work.

Solution 2: Stop the 0 per cent NI band giveaway

The same applies to the 0 per cent band which is increasingly unjustifiable when the minimum wage is higher than the 0 per cent band. Again, it should apply to future earnings in future tax years; it is not politically or morally right to cancel existing entitlements.

Solution 3: Reduce the level of Pension Credit relative to the State pension

It’s ridiculous to keep Pension Credit only £3 a week less than the State pension. Reduction may need to be done over time, and it would be helped by . . .

Solution 4: Keep the triple lock for the State pension, not necessarily for Pension Credit

With the above changes we can differentiate between earned pensions and gifted pensions. If it were ever necessary to remove any part of the triple lock, clearly it should apply to the gifted pensions, not the earned ones.

Once again, politically and morally this can be done only for future years. Over time, our pensions system would sort itself out and it would help us now, since forecasts by official bodies (OBR, IMF, credit agencies etc) would be rosier about the future.

When people call for means testing of the State pension they’re asking to add insult to injury by taking it away from the people who actually earned it! It’s hard to tell if it’s rank ignorance or rabid socialism; perhaps the two go hand in hand.

Solution 5: Remove the entitlement of foreign nationals

First, remove the entitlement to State pension via residency and replace with a citizenship requirement. Also limit the rights of immigrants to any Pension Credit or in fact any access to the State pension itself other than accrued by fully-paid NI years from working.

Solution 6: Produce stats on earned versus ‘soft’ NI records.

As noted in Part 2, such statistics are not currently available, but they must be. This will make it much more difficult for politicians to hide what they are doing. The very least the public need is to be able to see clearly what is being earned and what is being given away in their name – and to whom.

Solution 7: The UK government should invest (when possible)

It makes sense to allocate a proportion of NI takings to be used for investment, in the spirit of the original levy (a levy pays for specific things, a tax doesn’t). We could use it as contributions to a Sovereign Wealth Fund which could invest around the globe as Norway and other countries do with their oil revenues, then use that fund to pay for pensions (and perhaps more).

Of course, the government couldn’t do without NI these days since it is simply used in the same way as tax, but as soon as national finances allow it we should start investing some of the monies collected from employees’ NI so that in future pensions are not funded from current receipts.

Solution 8: Reduce public sector pensions

The other possible area of change is to reduce public sector pension entitlements in line with the private sector.

Of course, this is a political minefield which will see demonstrations in the streets by civil servants et al, but perhaps only if it’s done in one fell swoop. Perhaps a more softly-softly approach will be needed, a gradual realignment.

Solution 9: Make it easier to invest in personal pensions

Historically the annual and lifetime limits have been a blocker to saving for retirement, although the recent increase to £60k per annum helps, as does the abolition of lifetime limits.

In recent years experienced doctors, dentists, accountants, IT specialists etc often retired or simply stopped working due to tax changes, a major cause being that they were unable to contribute to their pensions.

For many people, it’s only in later life, after their children have left home and any mortgage is paid off, that they have any spare money to contribute to any significant extent to their pension, when their earning potential is at its highest and their outgoings at their lowest. By putting chunks of money into their pension in later years, they defer the tax until their retirement years. Note: defer, not avoid.

With people having children later in life and those children leaving home at an older age than in times past, the window for retirement saving has already become very narrow for most people on normal earnings without further limiting it due to annual contribution limits. Getting rid of annual limits would help ease this crisis – the more people who provide for themselves in retirement, the better off we will all be.

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We constantly see pressures to reduce pension contribution limits from socialist politicians and media – this is ignorance at best, green-eyed politics at worst. It is not sensible.

Solution 10: Encourage final salary schemes

Final salary schemes were good for society when private companies offered those pensions to staff. Gordon Brown killed them off when he decided to tax the underlying schemes, not having the nous to know that their apparent over-funding was merely a momentary snapshot of something that deals in very long timeframes. We should remove those taxes and encourage schemes to re-start.

Avoiding political traps

There have been recent calls to ‘eliminate employees’ NI’. This is more underhanded politics.

It would mean tax increases to compensate: even though people proposing this don’t say it, it’s obvious that government is in no position simply to give up the revenue. However, people beyond State Pension Age (SPA) don’t pay NI – but they would pay any replacement such as income tax, so they would be heavily disadvantaged by this stealth mechanism.

Furthermore, in not paying NI, people working beyond SPA don’t get a chance to gain more full years in their NI record. So if they are expected to pay NI or an equivalent level of tax in future, at the very least they should also be allowed to accrue additional entitlement to the State pension (not that it would help anyone who already had the full 35 years).

And then, without NI, how do you determine who is entitled to a pension and who isn’t? Would the State Pension have fully morphed from a contributions-based scheme into ‘universal income at SPA’? That sounds . . . depressingly expensive.

Last word

Why is it that we never hear any politician of any party discussing the sorry state of UK pensions? Why do we endure political commentators endlessly muttering ‘the triple lock is unsustainable’ without any apparent understanding of what’s actually going on?

Perhaps there are too many socialists hiding behind blue-hued rosettes these days – or they just don’t want to be the government that has to fix the problems. Or maybe they don’t know how to fix them (and get elected) – easier to keep the truth hidden.

This series was written to help people understand what’s really going on with our pensions system and hopefully kick off some sensible policy debate by any party on the right. The pensions system doesn’t have to be the burden that it has increasingly become since 1996.

Chris Philp is a freelance consultant, working for many years in senior IT business and technical roles across a number of business sectors, including significant work in Life & Pensions. (NB: He is not the MP!)

Charles Reich wrote in his book The Greening of America:

‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed. and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity and already our laws, institutions and social structures are changing in consequence.’

As we now know, all this has come to pass. Our schools and universities, our high art and our popular entertainments, industry and commerce, the civil service and all the other instruments of government, the churches, all voluntary and charitable organizations – every one of them has been transformed by radical, revolutionary change. Books are subjected to censorship according to the new canons of wokery. The same goes for the theatre, the opera, the ballet. None of this is trivial or peripheral: it penetrates to the centre of what we are and dictates what we must become. It goes so deep that even our understanding of what it is to be a man or a woman has been changed without appeal and irrevocably. Challenge the new transocratic regime and you will be cancelled – which means you will lose your job and find yourself unemployable. Transgress the new politically-correct commandments and you will be utterly powerless to do anything to avoid punishment. You will become what the Soviets under Stalin called a non-person.

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At this point, it seems appropriate to remind all readers wherever they live that so much of the destructive madness poisoning much of the Western world and beyond had its origins in the United States, most especially at those incubators of bad ideas known as universities and colleges. Indeed, it is easy to forget that ideological toxins like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and Black Lives Matter (BLM), to list but three, all originated in the nation in which I now reside, not to mention the radical misandric brand of feminism that seeks the destruction of the nuclear family and has torn mothers away from their babies at a time when the latter need them the most. This is to say nothing of the routinization of abortion and its elevation to the status of a sacrament, the ultimate triumph of the second-wave feminism of the 1960s.

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How ever did he do it? How did a canny young man hoodwink the entire Higher Education Establishment?

You will surely know by now that I am referring to the late, lamented Dr Jason Arday. Dr Arday was a Professor of Applied Bamboozology, and Master of Mischief at the University of Conbridge, a desolate, insignificant backwater five thousand miles northwest of Mandalay.

Such a wide eyed, dreadlocked idol starred northwest of Mandalay.

His Faculty’s in crisis in their gowns.

The broken-hearted tutors mourn their loss of Dei-Arday;

While a laughing God forever gazes down.

How was it possible?

In 1969, at Stanford University in California, Psychologist David Rosenhan conducted an experiment. He titled it: ‘Being Sane in Insane Places.’ The results caused a sensation.

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In her UnHerd column two weeks ago, Kathleen Stock writes from a ‘horrifically well-insulated sweatbox’, the fan beside her registering 29°C while the air outside hits 33. Every day is the same: clear blue, suffocatingly hot, uncannily still. The parks are brown, gardens turning to dust. Stressed trees drop huge boughs. At night, foxes prowl, thirstily searching for water. Brambles appear far too early; the pond at the end of the road is silting up. She feels discombobulated – sweaty, exhausted, her mind as vacant as the cloudless sky.

This opening of her UnHerd essay, ‘Why I’ve got the hots for localism’, is an existential register of fatigue, rendered through direct observation and an aesthetic sensibility rather than charts or organised empirical data. Ms Stock has absorbed the idea of a ‘new kind of summer’ as lived experience. The cider-apple harvest is failing, harebells and wasps are disappearing, parts of the New Forest are blackened, elderly neighbours wilt in oven-like flats and local farmers watch stunted wheat and barley. She asks how we feel about this ‘new normal’ and answers with sadness and ‘discombobulation’ that require no grand theoretical defence – much as grief for people or pets needs none.

Dr Stock OBE, a gender-critical feminist and philosopher, is right about the larger strategic point that follows. Whatever the causes and consequences of global warming, a small country like Britain cannot do anything about it alone. Provisional UK territorial greenhouse-gas emissions for 2025 stand at 367 MtCO₂e, less than 1% of the global total according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Any meaningful reduction is swamped by emissions growth in China, India and other large developing economies. The coordination and free-rider problems among major emitters in any proposed global deal are near-impossible. Gathering the world’s nations at the UN annual climate summits – the next one, COP31, to be held in Antalya, Türkiye, from 9 to 20 December 2026 – has made little difference to global emissions over the past three decades.

Instead of clashing endlessly over the global warming narrative, she proposes detaching the local from the global. Chasing impossible global solutions hampers useful consensus-building on urgent local and regional problems to save vanishing landscapes and help the elderly in oven-like flats, manage failing harvests and buckling rails and form practical adaptation plans ‘without any grand theory about carbon dioxide’.

An unprecedented hot summer, raging wildfires, failing agriculture: not by the numbers

Start with the weather itself. Stock treats the current summer as a novel meteorological regime – ‘the new kind of summer’, a heat so unfamiliar that ‘no one can remember what rain feels like’. The parks are brown, trees drop boughs, foxes search for water. Yet British summers have been hot and dry before, and worse. The 1976 heatwave and drought produced 16 consecutive days above 30°C at Heathrow, a peak of 35.9°C at Cheltenham and a drought so severe that a Cabinet minister was appointed specifically to manage it; some parts of southern England received under 55 per cent of average rainfall over more than a year. The 1995 drought is now regarded by meteorologists as drier still. Neither event required elevated atmospheric CO₂ to be explained; both were driven by persistent blocking high-pressure systems, the same phenomenon operating today. The insistence that 2026 is meteorologically unprecedented functions less as observation than as mood music for the argument that follows. Note that the UK Met Office itself, relying on junk weather stations and purveying ‘homogenised’ – read massaged – temperature trends, has lost credibility as a reliable organisation, as my colleague Paul Homewood has documented rigorously over the years.

The same selective framing appears in Stock’s treatment of local crises. She notes a nearby train derailment that observers speculate was caused by heat-buckled rails. Stock’s catalogue of local issues includes early brambles, a silting pond, New Forest fires, a failing cider-apple harvest, disappearing harebells and wasps and stunted wheat and barley. Some of these can cause real hardships. But the causal story she tells is incomplete, and conveniently so. The ‘heat buckling’ of rail tracks is being investigated by rail officials but, until it is confirmed, the likely culprits are poor maintenance of tracks and other infrastructure.

Wildfire investigators have long found that the overwhelming majority of UK wildfires are started by people, not lightning – the House of Lords Library concludes that almost all UK wildfires result from accidental or deliberate human acts, while Natural Wales estimates roughly 30 per cent are arson and 70 per cent accidental or careless. Ignition, in other words, is a human-behaviour problem before it is a climate problem.

What has changed is fuel load. The fashion for ‘wilding’, and the accompanying retreat from controlled winter burning, has left England’s uplands carrying more combustible vegetation than at any point in living memory. Labour’s extension of restrictions on controlled heather burning across 1.6 million acres of peatland has removed one of the oldest and most effective tools for breaking up continuous fuel and creating firebreaks; gamekeepers, moorland managers and land-owning bodies have warned for years that the policy was building toward exactly the kind of record wildfire season Britain has now had. The fashion for ‘rewilding’ and the abandonment of controlled burns are not neutral acts of nature; they are policy choices, promoted under green banners, made by identifiable people in Whitehall and Cardiff. When Stock attributes the blackened New Forest simply to ‘the heat’ of ‘a new kind of summer’, she erases the agency of those who decided that traditional land management was environmentally incorrect.

Water stress and agricultural shortfalls raise similar questions. Reservoir capacity, leakage rates and abstraction rules – rules for extracting water from natural resources – are not dictated by atmospheric CO₂. They are set by decades of underinvestment and regulatory choices. Fertiliser costs inflated by energy taxes and carbon-pricing on natural gas pass through to farmers agonising over stunted wheat and barley yields.

It is remarkable that Ms Stock agonises over elderly people wilting in poorly insulated flats or sweltering in Britain’s many hospitals without once mentioning the glaring lack of air-conditioning – the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread. Yet the Luddite ruling class in the UK and EU would rather have their citizens face the risk of a grisly, painful death from heatstroke than provide cheap electricity and allow them to install a $400 air conditioner. Air conditioning is nearly universal in American and Japanese homes (approximately 90%) but remains the exception rather than the rule across Europe (approximately 23% average) and is especially uncommon in the UK (estimated at low-teens to single-digit percentages).

Dr Stock is absolutely right that politicians can address these problems without first settling the precise role of carbon dioxide in the climate system. But she is wrong to imply that practical, local and national policymaking can proceed while bracketing out the overarching policy choices – Net Zero mandates, land-use dogma and energy-price interventions – that have already made adaptation more expensive and less effective than it needs to be.

A caricature of the sceptical position

Ms Stock’s portrait of the wider climate debate is equally skewed. She sees a sterile symmetry: apocalyptic greens on one side, ‘stubborn scepticism’ on the other offering ‘little acknowledgment of local social and environmental losses’ and ‘no nuanced plan of action, except to keep buggering on as before’ The renewables discussion, she says, is ‘absurdly polarised’ with one side talking only of benefits and the other only of harms.

This is a caricature. Serious analysts of renewable energy – David Turver, Kathryn Porter and Dieter Helm among them – have performed the elementary work of cost-benefit analysis that Stock claims is missing. They examine intermittency, system balancing costs, backup requirements, grid reinforcement and the displacement of firm generation. Turver’s own submission to Parliament’s cost-of-energy inquiry laid out, in granular detail, why levelised-cost comparisons that ignore firming and network costs systematically understate the true price of wind and solar. None of these analysts deny that turbines and panels generate electricity when the weather cooperates; they ask whether the full system, backup included, delivers net benefit at the reliability a modern economy actually requires.

Global integrated-assessment models, including the DICE model of Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, abstract from local detail precisely because their purpose is aggregate, long-run quantification of costs and benefits under uncertainty; that is methodological necessity, not indifference. Local and regional studies exist alongside them. To accuse sceptics of ignoring local losses is to ignore a literature that has spent years documenting deindustrialisation, the uglification of the countryside by wind turbines, acres of solar farms, and pylons and the household cost of subsidising intermittency.

The Peterson–Self exchange, and the lean toward Self

Stock briefly referees a skirmish between Jordan Peterson and Will Self. Peterson notes the Medieval Warm Period and the greening effect of elevated CO₂; Self dismisses the former as unmeasurable and non-global, and the latter as irrelevant because biodiversity is allegedly still collapsing. Stock leans toward Self. This is misplaced on both counts.

Proxy reconstructions – tree rings, ice cores, sediments, documentary records – have long been used to estimate historical temperatures; the irony is that the same proxy method underpins the “hockey stick” reconstruction that climate campaigners have treated as gospel for a quarter of a century. Evidence of the Medieval Warm Period appears well beyond the North Atlantic, in the Sierra Nevada, the Andes, China, Tasmania and New Zealand, even as researchers continue to debate its precise global synchrony.

On biodiversity, the crude claim of relentless, undifferentiated decline sits awkwardly with the finding that only a small fraction of assessed species – roughly 1.5% of birds and 1.4% of mammals – have actually gone extinct since 1500, well below the figures earlier apocalyptic projections implied. Greening, meanwhile, is not a talking point; it is measured from space. NASA satellite data show that a quarter to half of the planet’s vegetated land has significantly greened over the past four decades, with CO₂ fertilisation responsible for roughly 70% of the effect – an area of new leaf growth equivalent to twice the continental United States. One would imagine that the greening of formerly arid and semi-arid areas could only help in enhancing biodiversity.

The deeper error in Stock’s piece is the false equivalence itself. One side has spent decades converting scientific debate and uncertainty into moral certainty and policy absolutism. The other has pointed out that the UK accounts for roughly 0.8% of annual global CO₂ emissions, that Chinese and Indian emissions growth swamps any conceivable British reduction many times over and that unilateral “climate leadership” is a luxury belief whose chief practical effect is to export British industry and import the emissions of less efficient overseas producers.

This is not a new argument in these pages: I have set out at length, here and here, how a deindustrialising island contributing under 1% of world emissions convinced itself it could “lead the world” out of fossil fuels. Rupert Darwall has detailed the costs to Britain in its “folly of climate leadership”.

The costs are not abstract

Those costs are not abstract. Analysis commissioned for the Conservative Party under Claire Coutinho has put the potential saving from abandoning the current all-renewables pathway, in favour of a system that retains gas alongside nuclear and renewables, at £320 billion in electricity system costs over two decades. Separate research for the Institute of Economic Affairs has found that official Net Zero cost estimates have fallen sharply in recent years not because decarbonisation has become cheaper, but because the methodology used to calculate it has changed. Energy-intensive industries have already left Britain or scaled back their operations here. The countryside is being littered with solar arrays, wind farms and the pylons and substations needed to move intermittent power around the grid.

Stock mourns changing landscapes and living conditions yet passes over the most visible recent alteration to the British countryside: the subsidised hardware of the energy transition itself. Deindustrialisation undertaken in the name of decarbonisation does not reduce global emissions; it merely relocates them to China and India, typically to less efficient, more coal-intensive producers. Living standards suffer in the process, for no measurable planetary benefit. Cheaper, more reliable electricity and installation of cheap air-conditioners would do more for elderly people in overheated flats and hospital wards than another round of behavioural exhortation about carbon footprints.

Stock’s best sentence, and the one she declines to follow

Stock’s most valuable sentence is also the one she fails to follow through to its logical conclusion: “It is obviously possible to worry about such [local, regional and national] problems, and for politicians to form plans to address them, without espousing any grand theory about the role of carbon dioxide.” Precisely so. Adaptation – better building standards, resilient water infrastructure, intelligent fire and land management, affordable and reliable energy – does not require prior resolution on equilibrium climate sensitivity parameters or the exact social cost of carbon. It requires competence, and a willingness to abandon the specific policies that have already raised costs and reduced resilience: burn bans that let fuel accumulate, planning rules that block reservoirs and a decarbonisation timetable that prices gas and fertiliser out of reach of the farmers she worries about.

She anticipates the rejoinder that local concern without global action is insufficient. Her reply is that the coordination problem among major emitters is practically insoluble, and that Self’s vision of controlled markets, rationing and “particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name” sounds mad. On that last point she is entirely right. Authoritarian climate policies of the green globalist governments are not a solution to the coordination problem; it is a confession that voluntary coordination has failed, and that coercion is the only instrument the true believers have left.

Kathleen Stock’s incomplete localism

Yet Stock’s localism remains incomplete, for a reason she does not examine. She wants us to notice what is vanishing locally and to mitigate the impacts. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the vanishing she describes is not solely climatic and the mitigation she wants is obstructed by the very policies whose global efficacy she declines to adjudicate. Reservoirs are not built because green-obsessed planning and environmental rules block them; controlled burns are discouraged because peatland regulation prohibits them; fertiliser is taxed and gas is made artificially expensive in service of a decarbonisation theory she says she cannot be bothered to evaluate. The result is that the local suffering she catalogues so movingly is real, and substantially self-inflicted by policy choices made in the name of a global theory that a country responsible for eight-tenths of 1% of world emissions cannot meaningfully affect either way.

Conservatives who merely poke holes in the Left’s preferred theories without offering practical alternatives deserve the criticism Stock levels at them. She is right about that much. But the remedy is not symmetrical disengagement from the underlying facts. It is rigorous attention to costs, benefits and adaptation at every scale, grounded in accurate description rather than atmospheric pathos. Geological time has oscillated between ice ages and inter-glaciation for hundreds of millennia; the choice of 1850–1900 as the sacred pre-industrial baseline is itself a political convention, not a self-evident natural fact. Feeling sad about a hot, dry summer is entirely human, and understandable. Treating that feeling as a reason to suspend scrutiny of the policies that made the summer harder to bear than it needed to be is not.

There is indeed a great deal of work to be done, as Stock says. It begins with accurate description rather than mood music, with cost-benefit accounting rather than moral symmetry between a rigorous empirical literature and its caricature and with the plain recognition that a country responsible for roughly 1% of global emissions cannot save the planet by impoverishing itself first. Localism without data is just another, more comfortable, form of the same exhaustion.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

With a predictable fanfare, Medscape proclaimed: ‘Ulez Linked to Faster Lung Growth in Children, Study Finds.’ But is it?

The Medscape piece points to an item in Queen Mary University of London News that says a team at Queen Mary: ‘found that air quality improvements following the introduction of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) are strongly associated with accelerated lung growth in children.’ The original study titled: ‘Impact of the Ultra Low Emission Zone on lung function growth in children in London, UK: a prospective parallel cohort study’, was published in The Lancet Public Health. Ultra Low Emission Zones are commonly referred to as ULEZ.

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Then your phone lights up with panicked messages. You rush to make sure doors are locked and check on all family members by message or phone call.

It has happened. The event you heard might happen a few weeks ago. You‘d stocked up the freezer in case, and got in extra supplies. You‘d contacted neighbours to make sure you had communications. Then, it comes, you hear the noise of riots in the streets.

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The only decisions, it seems, that Andy Burnham gets right are those he does out of weakness not strength - like his latest U-turn on Thames Water.

Having repeatedly indicated that he wanted to put the company into a special administration regime (SAR) that would allow essential services to keep running until a buyer was found (promising of course to introduce ‘greater public control’ of the ‘essentials’ including water and energy companies as one of his first acts in No 10) The Times reported yesterday that he has shelved these plans amid concerns about the cost and the legal risk involved.

Earlier in the summer Robin Fellow questioned the negative narrative around Thames Water, arguing that compared with government projects Thames Water runs a pretty tight ship. That’s quite apart from its magnificent Thames Tideway achievement. All in all, everyone in the Thames Water region should breathe a collective sigh of relief.

We republish Robin’s instructive article below.

***

Hosepipe bans are imminent, some people in Kent often don’t have anything coming out of the taps at all, and every journalist from Tewkesbury Mead to Beckton Ponds is about to pour some nasty stuff on the water companies.

So this might not be a moment to swim against the tide of opprobrium, but hey, I’ve swum in worse.

The trouble is, people think water should be free. Sure, in the clouds it is. So is natural gas under the North Sea, there’s no Scrooge McDuck hoarding it down there either. The costs come in collecting, purifying and transporting it to where it might be useful, in your bath or boiler.

Water companies are natural monopolies but this isn’t how they started. In the past any enterprising spiv could tap a spring or a stream, lay some wooden pipes or culverts and sell the result to anyone who agreed to pay. Safer than going down to the Thames with a bucket, but not much safer. Before germ theory no one could tell how people died, and the owners of the various water companies could pay themselves dividends that would make the private equity carpetbaggers of privatisation blush.

These monopolies centred around catchment areas. For example, the New River Company supplied North London and the Vauxhall and Southwark supplied, allegedly, a baby crocodile.

The earliest and safest method of water treatment was to turn it into beer. Bacteria don’t like alcohol, but neither did the temperance movements of the Victorian age. New techniques to make water safe to drink were invented, but this still left the sewage problem. Londoners generally relied on the tides to wash the stuff out to sea, which in a sparsely populated city probably worked OK in springs but less so in neaps. And worked very poorly when the population boomed.

When The Great Stink offended even Members of Parliament, Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to build a sewer network, one of the wonders of the Victorian age. The system was designed to last 30 years, but was basically unchanged until privatisation a century and a half later. Nationalisation did not lead to increased investment. A network of corroding cast-iron pipes and crumbling brickwork was impossible to value, so to get the investors on board the regulator had to promise to allow stonking share dividends.

Naturally the investors took advantage, none more so than the great antipodean vampire squid. But before we blame Macquarie for everything including that baby crocodile, we should acknowledge that they did do the financial engineering that allowed Thames Water to invest in some actual engineering.

Surprisingly, they turned out to be rather good at it. The London ring main, 50 miles long, was completed pretty much on time and on budget. At under a quarter of a billion pounds it cost a fraction of the Channel Tunnel.

The most magnificent achievement is the Thames Tideway. Sixteen miles long, 24ft wide, this super-sewer intersects 34 existing outfalls, eventually connecting to Beckton Ponds. Costing £5billion, it was slightly late and slightly over budget due to the lockdowns. Bazalgette would be proud. It became fully operational in February 2025 and was officially opened in May 2025.

So compared with government projects Thames Water runs a pretty tight ship (HS2, anyone?). But in England no good deed goes unpunished and Thames Water remains very unpopular with the public, who can see the leaks in the supply but not the improvement in the effluent. So the regulator (or regulators – there seem to be at least four of them) has clamped down on the dividends. The water sector now is, according to one stranded shareholder, ‘uninvestable’.

Financially, Thames Water is on its knees, and the Government has kiboshed a rescue plan from private capital. The alternatives look like renationalisation or ‘special administration’. Nationalisation would cost money that the Government doesn’t have (at least £100billion) and simply stealing the water companies would be a bit too communist even for this Government. So the preferred outcome is fascism.

Communism and fascism go together like wasps and jam sandwiches. While it’s not hard to distinguish them, either way your picnic is spoiled. We haven’t yet tried real fascism in Britain (has anyone?) but if leaving the nominal ownership of firms in private hands while compelling the management to obey the dictates of central government is fascism, the special administration surely qualifies.

There is no shortage of zombie industries, so why stop at water? Dive right in and go for the railways, the steelworks, banks, private care homes, farms . . . Just one tiny problem. Investment capital is international and if you kidnap private companies by special administration no international capital will flow your way, ever. Thames Water is a canary, singing loudly. If you expropriate its owners you send an unmistakable signal across the world.

One final thought. Your water bill is probably about half as much as your gas bill. And for that you get the waste taken away as well. Imagine how your gas bill would look if you were obliged to fit CO2 recovery units to your boiler and cooker.

On second thoughts, forget I said that. We don’t want to give them ideas, do we?

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A new 92-minute documentary on the life of Novak Djokovic was released on Amazon on August 20. Directed by Jason Hehir, the film charts Djokovic’s journey from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Serbia, playing tennis while bombs were falling, to international superstardom.

Along the way are clips of his many triumphs, which should delight all tennis fans.

It’s all fascinating stuff but the section that will interest the vaccine sceptics among us is the retelling of the degrading and humiliating incident in Melbourne, Australia, in January 2022, where he was first held in a detention centre and then deported back home for being unvaccinated, and continuing to refuse the vaccine. At the time he said he would rather miss out on tennis trophies than be forced to get the jab.

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As many readers know, the BBC is extremely reluctant to let you see earlier programmes made with our money. If you search for almost any old show you can think of, you will get a message saying it is not available. So I was surprised to find that the first Mastermind final, from 1972, is available to view - but only for just another week, or so. You can see it here or below on YouTube.

We have long sensed that Mastermind has been on a steady decline and this programme confirms it in spades.

The 1972 presenter is Magnus Magnusson and he addresses the three lady contestants (two lecturers and a housewife) as Mrs [Surname]. Their specialist subjects are vast: History of Music 1550-1900, 20^th century English Literature and International Relations, 1919-1939. Sample general knowledge question: Who wrote ‘pieces noires’ and ‘pieces roses’? Answer: Jean Anouilh (given at once). The trophy is presented by a BBC bigwig, the then Director of Programmes David Attenborough, to applause from a studio audience.

What a contrast with the contemporary Mastermind, presented by Clive Myrie, for whom the expression ‘pleased with himself’ might have been devised. He begins each show with a toe-curling homily about the nerve-racking experience of sitting in the black chair.

And at the end we are subjected to a cringeworthy interview with the winner, who describes MasterChef-style how the victory will change his or her life.

Here is a recent episode chosen at random.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002sw63/mastermind-202526-episode-26

The specialist subjects are the American singer Jeff Buckley, football manager Rafael Benitez, Andy Warhol and the Routemaster bus. The contestants are a housewife/carer, a ‘commercial elite operator’, a ‘visitor welcome assistant’ and a ‘volunteer and trustee’. Sample general knowledge question: What word for a style of long narrow heel on a shoe, sometimes called a spike heel, is also the name for a type of long, narrow dagger? I won’t insult your intelligence by giving the answer. The producers of the asinine Tipping Point would have rejected it as too easy. Scores range from 15 to 20.

At the end of the final of each series the trophy is handed over by Myrie to the thin applause of the other contestants as there is no audience.

The series has run for 54 years, just a little less than my working life. It is hard to comprehend how far standards of knowledge have fallen in this time, and with the advent of search engines and AI the rate will surely accelerate.

It all reminds me a bit of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s much-derided remarks about ‘known unknowns’ etc. If we don’t know what we don’t know, how can we ask the right questions?

Margaret Ashworth is a retired national newspaper journalist.
She runs the Subbing Clinic in a hopeless attempt to keep up standards, and is one half of the Ashworth & Ashworth Substack.

On Monday of last week, Reform UK set out to revolutionise the welfare state that would see almost three million people’s disability and sickness payments withdrawn or modified, personal independence payments (Pip) abolished along with the health element of Universal credit for working-age adults. It would also stop foreign-born households claiming universal credit, housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, free childcare, free school meals or disability benefits. Removing the pension credit is straight common sense.

Now we look forward to Reform UK addressing this same pension credit monster lurking in the system - paid to UK nationals who have never worked a day in their life or paid any National Insurance contributions at all, as Chris Philp proposes in this three part investigation of the great pensions scam. Part 1 was published on Monday. Part 2 busts myths and sets out facts.

Myth 1: Pensions are tax-free

Contributing to a personal or company pension may be tax-free, but drawing income from a pension is not.

The best deal you’ll ever get from any financial product is tax relief at one end only. With pensions you get the relief when putting the money in, and you get taxed when you take it out. With ISAs it’s the other way round – you put taxed money in, you pay no tax when you draw the money out.

So payments from a pension to an individual are treated as income: it doesn’t matter how they get the money – via an annuity, income drawdown or any other method – pensioners simply pay income tax if their total income is above the personal allowance, just like anyone else. In reality, contributing to a pension fund is ‘deferred taxation’, it is not ‘tax-free’.

The tax-free cash aspect of personal pensions is of course genuinely tax-free; it’s offered by government as a savings mechanism in the same vein as ISAs etc. It’s how many people repay their mortgage while also saving for retirement.

Myth 2: There are lots of millionaire pensioners

This is a deliberate misrepresentation by politicians, largely of the socialist persuasion. They add up the total value of a person or a couple in retirement, including the house they paid off over years of working and their pension pots. The average personal pension pot is around £300k and many people can own a house worth £400k or more by the time they retire. In the world of the green-eyed socialist, two pension pots plus a house makes a couple ‘millionaires’.

Of course, this ignores the fact that those assets and the State pension are all they have for the rest of their lives, unless . . .

Myth 3: Pensioners don’t work or earn

Many pensioners pay tax not only on what they receive from their pensions, but also because they choose to work (or, increasingly, they need to work).

In fact, in recent times they have had to invent a word for drawing money from a pension – it’s now called ‘crystallisation’ (taking benefits) because this is not the same as ‘retirement’ (stopping work). All income goes into the pot for income tax: State and/or personal pension income, income from work, rental, savings/investment – you name it, it’s all assessed for tax, in exactly the same tax bands as everyone else.

Fact 1: Governments do not publish statistics on how State Pensions are earned

There are no detailed official statistics publicly available which show how many people got their NI qualifying years from paid NI contributions through working versus those with ‘soft’ NI credits from the various giveaways discussed in Part 1.

HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions hold detailed NI records data, but we don’t get to see this critical information.

Clearly, this gap limits clear public understanding of what proportion of claimants earned all their NI through working versus receiving credits.

Note: there is a dataset known as ‘L2’ (the DWP Lifetime Labour Market Database) but it is only a 1 per cent sample and full access is restricted to projects approved by the government as being in the public interest. (For a moment there it felt as if I was writing about North Korea.)

Fact 2: Governments do not invest to provide state pensions

This is well known but seems to be poorly understood. It would be called ‘a Ponzi scheme’ (i.e. illegal) if any other pension provider tried to do this.

NI was originally a levy to pay for the State pension (and two other entitlements: out of work benefits and use of the NHS) of which only State pension entitlement is still based on NI contributions.

Government does not use any part of the levy to invest, it simply pays out from receipts taken in from new members (just what Charles Ponzi was locked up for). The key difference is that Ponzi didn’t do it transparently, whereas government does. What this means for UK pensions is that the approach becomes legitimate by virtue of being an inter-generational contract. So when I see younger people whinging about ‘paying for pensioners’ the degree of ignorance makes my blood boil – perhaps they should just be thankful for this . . .

Fact 3: The UK pension is the lowest of all developed countries

That simple fact needs no further explanation. It’s a national disgrace. Those living on only the state pension in the UK are extremely poor, many need to continue working – and with repeated freezes to the Personal Allowance, the State pension is coming perilously close to the point at which people will pay tax on it. Which is why . . .

Fact 4: The triple lock was invented because of pensioner poverty

The triple lock was designed to prevent pensioners becoming poorer relative to the rest of society. Advocating to remove the triple lock is saying in effect that it’s ok if pensioners become increasingly poor, both in relative terms and in real terms.

Most of the people who are held up as examples of pensioners being ‘rich’ are from that generation when final salary schemes were available from private sector firms, or who have significant personal pensions. Such people will have been higher earners who therefore paid their NI and, as such, they receive their pension as a matter of contractual entitlement.

Getting all green-eyed about such people is socialism at its worst. But in any case, those days are gone, along with the final salary schemes which made them possible (Gordon Brown’s ‘legacy’).

The simple fact about the triple lock is that its effect is magnified massively by the giveaways discussed in Part 1. If it were being applied only to those who have paid for their pension through paying NI, on a pre-1996 basis, it would be comfortably affordable.

Fact 5: Public sector pensions are a real cost to the taxpayer at all levels of government

Public sector pensions are paid at much higher levels than is generally seen in the private sector – and of course this is all paid from the tax take from the private sector.

State pension: ~12.7million recipients costing ~£110billion per year

Public sector pensions: ~3 million recipients costing ~£57billion per year

So former public sector employees make up roughly one quarter the number of State pension recipients, but they’re costing over half as much money. And that’s before you might weed out all the giveaways referred to in Part 1, which would cut the State pension cost by more than half.

Some of the reasons are:

• Employer contributions in public sector schemes average 27 per cent of salary, compared with 4.18 per cent in the private sector.

• Public sector workers retire earlier and live longer on average.

• Public sector pensions are inflation-linked.

The old social contract for the public sector used to be ‘Lower pay today, higher pension tomorrow plus security’.

This changed as private sector pay fell from the financial crash onwards and again during the pandemic, while public sector pay was protected by pay-freeze rules. So now we have a situation where public sector pay is no longer low, but their taxpayer-funded pensions are still very high – and they get to retire early as well.

The new public sector social contract is now: ‘Comparable salary + much higher pension + higher job security + earlier retirement’.

It’s not sustainable.

Part 3 to follow - how the problem could be solved.

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Chris Philp is a freelance consultant, working for many years in senior IT business and technical roles across a number of business sectors, including significant work in Life & Pensions. (NB: He is not the MP!)

Coming up to 25 years since 9/11 and Rowan Williams, after Justin Welby the worst Archbishop of Canterbury we’ve ever had, has just accused Nigel Farage of ‘…using Christianity to channel anti-Muslim feelings.’ This is the same Williams who happened to be in New York when the terrorists struck and he swiftly wrote a short book about it, Writing in the Dust. It’s frightening stuff. Dr Williams said the West should not fight back:

‘If I decide to answer in the same terms, that is how the conversation will continue.’

What, Archbishop - the suicide bombing of populous skyscrapers an opening gambit in a conversation! Besides, the Archbishop was confused, for we did not ‘answer in the same terms.’ The response of the West was a disciplined military operation designed to eliminate specific terrorists, while the attack on New York was the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians. There was more confusion in the Archbishop’s mind between revenge and justice. For, while I may seek on my own behalf to follow the teaching of Christ to turn the other cheek, I must not do this on behalf of those of my own people who have suffered innocently. It is my duty to take up the sword on behalf of the fatherless children and the widows. Not to do this is to concede victory to the aggressors, and that would be unjust.

Would Dr Williams argue that the intrepid men who fought back against the terrorists in the fourth plane were wrong to do so? If they had not summoned up oceans of courage – and, by the way, said the Lord’s Prayer first – and attacked the terrorists, then certainly that fourth plane would have been deliberately crashed into another densely populated target and the loss of life would have been catastrophically greater.

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In Esse Est Percipi (1967), a short story Jorge Luis Borges wrote with his friend and writing partner, Adolfo Bioy Casares, we read that football has fully entered into the realm of the show business. While physical stadiums are long gone and their ruins are just a curiosity for tourists and passers-by, the games have become virtual entities.

As a result of this metamorphosis, easily duped crowds follow imaginary games on TV and the radio without questioning their reality. A character in the short story points out that the last time a football match was played in Buenos Aires was on 24 June 1937. From that exact moment on, football and other sports have belonged to the genre of drama, performed by a professional announcer in a booth and by actors on the playing field wearing jerseys and shorts before TV cameras.

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