Key: Rob’s comments are in italics. Derek’s comments are normal font.
As the world is rapidly changing around us, I thought we could maybe comment on some current affairs items on this episode...
Terrorism Under The “Anti-Terrorism” Act
Yeah, it's been quite a week. One bit of news that really struck me is that a journalist in London had their house raided by 10 metropolitan police officers from the anti-terrorist group, who arrested him and confiscated all his computers and phones and so forth. I don't know whether he's actually been charged yet, but he's been accused of offences under Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, which covers providing information in support of terrorist groups. I think what struck me is that we're rapidly moving into a surreal world that was depicted in the book 1984 by George Orwell.
They got very dystopian quite quickly, haven't they? Or have they always been like that and it's maybe just not been as obvious maybe?
Well, that was a point I was going to come along to later. It's a real case of truth is lies, lies are truth. Good is evil. Evil is good. He was reporting about the atrocities that have been carried out by the Israeli assaults on Hamas and Hezbollah and various aspects of those, which he's been doing fairly consistently. But there you have it. I don't want to say too much because I don't want to get raided by the anti-terrorist squad. But you have to ask who are the terrorists in this exchange.
Who are the bad guys? I'm hearing big echoes of the Julian Assange situation as well. Obviously, look how that played out.
This brings to at least five the number of journalists in the UK who've been arrested or harassed or accused under anti-terrorist legislation, including ones who were agitating for the release of Julian Assange a year ago. This is something that even five years ago, if you'd said Britain is going to be clamping down on freedom of speech in an draconian way, you'd go, no, no, that kind of thing was not going to happen here. I remember back in the 1960s, there were left-wing activists, friends of mine saying, well, there'll be a fascist state established in this country.
But there's certainly a case to be made that this is exactly what's unfolding at the moment. Now, your point about it always having been going on and we don't know about it, that more or less leads into the next observation I was going to make. One thing is that even though I've been highly skeptical about the government all my adult life, and I've been highly skeptical about the mainstream media my entire adult life, in the last three or four years, I have discovered things that never in my wildest dreams would I have. Just recently, I'm reading a book called Trading with the Enemy.
It's specifically about the major American corporations, various banking groups, particularly Chase Manhattan and JP Morgan, the Ford Motor Company, IT&T and most of all the Rockefeller's Standard Oil Group of companies. All of these were trading with the Nazis, not just in the run-up to the war, but also right through it. They were supplying products without which Hitler would not have been able to wage the Second World War. These were fuelling the bombers, providing the ammunition, providing industrial components, providing motors, providing trucks, providing communication systems, all of which were directly involved in killing their fellow countrymen and the countrymen of our allies.
It's really extraordinary that that happened. There were various people trying to reveal this. All of the people who were trying to reveal it were marginalised, discredited and ruined. Except that it's not working today in the same way. Some people have got a pessimistic view of the way it's going to work out. But the powers that be are almost openly bemoaning the fact that they've lost control of the narrative, as though that's something that we should sympathise with!
If you go back, this has been going on at least since the 1930s. And actually, if you go on prior to that, and you look into the origins of the First World War, the First World War was actually instigated, not by the way that it was told in the history books, but it was planned. Whether or not the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand really tipped it off, or whether that was just a convenient excuse, much like we've had various large-scale justifications for things that the plans had already been long laid in resonance.
So, interesting times indeed.
Pushback on mRNA Vaccines
One other thing that's hit the news in the last day or two, there's significant pushback against the latest generation of mRNA vaccines. They've been introduced in Japan and it's not the people who are in line for this are people who are having their eighth boosters.
After I (Derek) had my first two - for reasons of convenience rather than conviction that they were beneficial - I very firmly said, well, I don't seem to have been damaged by that, but absolutely no more without question of doubt! And apparently in Japan at least, they're up to eight. I've had numerous invitations to go back for more and the last one I think said “come in and get your flu vaccine and COVID vaccine in the same visit”, which strikes me as not a good idea anyway, even if they were effective and even if they were conventional technology vaccines.
Even when you look at conventional vaccines, what has transpired in recent years is that these things have not gone through the rigorous testing that any other drug would be required to do. They don't have to do long-term placebo controlled trials. Sometimes they're measuring looking for adverse effects for a matter of weeks. That's another thing that's transpired.
Well anyway, the point is that the latest ones are not even the same technology as the previous seven. They're what they call amplified or enhanced. Not only do they hijack your own cells for manufacturing the spike protein, which is supposed to prompt an immune response, but they actually stimulate your cell biology to produce more copies of the mRNA messenger strand itself. And this strikes me as utterly reckless. I mean, if there had been 10 years of testing I would still have misgivings about it, as there hasn't been time to do any of that, it's beyond belief.
Anyway, the interesting thing is it's being introduced in Japan first, and Japan has a famously obedient and compliant population. There have been several businesses have actually put notices on the door turning customers away saying, “if you've had this latest untested shot, please don't come in here!” That's a new level of protest, how effective it will be or how widespread it will be I don’t know. But the mere fact that people are saying things like that in public is, I think, something that hit me. Has anything in the news truck you?
Just coming back to journalists, I think we do need good independent journalists now more than ever.
It's even being admitted by part of the mainstream that it was very easy for them to control the narrative. It was very easy to control the narrative when there were a whole bunch of newspapers which have always operated within the Overton window of acceptable conversation, and a handful of broadcasters. And then bemoaning the fact that now there are all these other channels.
All these pesky podcasters and substacks and whatnot!
Substack and Rumble continue to provide a platform for free speech. And, you know, I don't think there's a single person that I regard as 100% reliable to the point that I would uncritically take as gospel everything they say. I'm prepared to listen to anybody, even to people that I might well have been inclined to write off as nutcases a few years ago. I've got confidence in my own critical judgment and my own ability to triangulate between different sources of information, and come to my own conclusion.
That's important and I think within the freedom movement there's a lot of accusations of so-and-so being controlled opposition, just because you don't agree with him or her on certain things, or they've said certain things in the past. It’s not helpful.
Escalating Financial Pressure
There's another observation that occurred to me this morning, which is the amount of sheer pressure that people are under for their time and money. One of the things that prompted it is that Gina went to collect somebody from the station car park and the strict regulation is that you can park there for 20 minutes to deliver or collect people from the train. She overstayed the 20 minutes either because she arrived a bit earlier than she'd intended or because the train was a bit late, which does happen.
Then she got a penalty notice for £85, reduced to £50 if you pay it within 14 days, which is pretty draconian. I mean, that would be a fairly stiff penalty if you'd parked the car there all day and not bothered to get the ticket! Anyway, she never got a prompt saying the 14 days have expired and you now owe £85, but this was the end of August, so that's been September, so coming up to well over a month and a half. Anyway, she got a letter yesterday from a debt collector saying there was also a £70 charge, so it's now £155.
Whether or not this is legally valid or not, we're looking into it at the moment. I've got a friendly lawyer. It's full of threatening rhetoric, and it's difficult to know whether this is a bluff.
Sometimes they need to prove that they own the land, and often they can't.
I think in this case since it was a railway car park the railway certainly do own the land so I don't think that is...
But yeah, a lot of these privately owned car parks actually can't enforce the fees they issue.
We'll see. I mean, worse comes to worst, we should have to pay. What I have been advised so far is that it's unlikely they could justify the £70 administration charge unless it's been through court and involved them in extra outlays to do that. Anyway, we will see.
This prompted me to think about the fact that the whole car parking thing has been a typical example of the boiling-a-frog analogy. The point being that if you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water, it will reflexively jump straight out of it. Whereas if you put a frog into a pan of cool water and very slowly, gradually heat it up, it will acclimatise to the temperature change to the point that suddenly it's dead.
Whether that's literally true or not, it's certainly a very sound analogy for a great many confiscations by stealth that we've had over the course of the past 50 years. If you go back to the time when I started to drive, which I know to a lot of people will be ancient history, most municipal car parks were free. It was a service provided by the council to bring people into town and patronise the shops and businesses there. Street parking was entirely free. Then they brought in parking meters, originally designed to prevent people from parking all day and soaking up the available parking spaces so that people who came in to do their shopping had got nowhere to park. It was to impose a two-hour rationing on the limit that you could park for.
You had to pay six pence, that's two and a half pence in today's money to park for two hours. Then after they'd been in charge for a while, they gradually reduced the amount of time in some places. So instead of being two hours, it became one hour and then half an hour, then a quarter of an hour. And I think in some places it was even five minutes.
And at that point, they scrapped the parking meters and put in tickets that you had to buy to stick in your windscreen. When they were originally introduced and it was sixpence for two hours, there was actually an offence of meter feeding - anybody who had their car parked and was caught putting an extra sixpence in when their two hours expired, that was an offence in its own right and you'd get the same six-pound parking ticket.
If you didn't pay the parking fine, you were given a summons to go to the magistrates court. At that time, people usually paid it before they did and they had a surcharge for it because it had been a court charge. Anyway, at one point I had 50 parking tickets, which I hadn't paid.
Eventually, I got a summons specifying one of them. And I thought, well, 50 tickets at six quid is £300. You don't even get fined that much for running someone over and killing them! So they can't possibly hit me for that. And I don't know whether you know, there's a thing called asking for other offences to be taken into consideration.
And I always thought, well, why would people do that? But it's so that it wipes the record clean and they don't have to go through all the bureaucracy of charging you for every single offence you've done. I went along to the court and they were pretty astonished to see me, and they were astonished when I said I plead guilty. They looked surprised because almost invariably if you want to plead guilty you do it by post and then they send you a fine and costs. People usually only turn up if they're pleading not guilty. So they said, all right, is there anything you want to say? And I said, yes, I've got dozens of these things!
And one of the magistrates suppressed a giggle and got glowered at by the chairman of the bench. They went out to deliberate, and they came back, and they said, well, we're increasing the fine to £8 and charging you £4 costs. They never mentioned the other tickets, I never heard any more about them.
Of course, all that whole process has been automated now and I don't think you stand the option of going to court. Of course, there's a more draconian penalty they've got in the pipeline in that they can lodge it as an unpaid debt and then it appears as a black mark on your credit record and you might not be able to get a mortgage and buy anything on hire purchase or any number of things - get a new credit card, bank overdraft, any number of inconveniences. Once that's happened you can't argue against it.
Coming back to the point, once the principle had been established in people's minds that, yes, you have to pay to park, it's been extended more and more widely. I mean, the last time I saw a municipal car park that didn't have a charge on it was about five years ago and it was in a run down former mining village.
It varies by council, there's a few around here.
Yeah, yeah. There would be. I mean, the whole place was so poverty-stricken that if they put a charge on the car park, nobody would have been able to afford to go to it. And the last time I saw a free car park in the south of England, I should think, was probably more than 30 years ago. And almost everywhere except anywhere that isn't parking restricted on the street in a city is going to be charged for. And the charges are now astronomical. In any of the London airports, just to drop somebody off for 30 seconds, you've got to pay five pounds. In fact, you'd have to pay five pounds if you drove into the airport and out again without stopping. So it's become absurd.
And I was thinking about this, that people are just under an amount of pressure which is unbelievable compared with many years ago.
It's not even cars, if you compare the price of a train journey in, say, 1955 to today, even accounting for inflation and so on.
Yeah, so-called inflation. I was trying to figure out...to live as one would be able to live on an income of let's say £3,000 a year in 1970, you'd have to be earning at least £100,000 a year now. And it could even be closer to £200,000. And there were certainly a lot more people earning £3,000 a year in 1970 than are earning £100,000 now in this country. And somebody living on minimum wage working 50 hours a week could support a family without any debt. They didn't have the opportunity to get into debt even if they wanted to as a rule. Whereas somebody working on minimum wage working 80 hours a week now, there's no chance of being able to support a family. You'd need two people doing that.
So the general population is under a lot more pressure. And a typical white collar working week would have been 35 hours, 30 in some cases, but I don't think anybody works a 35-hour week now. It's a deliberate attempt to prevent people from having enough time to stop and think and reflect on things.
Next Time: Doughnut Economics
We'll talk next time about doughnut economics. I'll just say a little bit now about the strange name. The idea is that we're constrained in two different directions. We're constrained on the outside of the ring by ecological limits on the planet, limits of resources, limits of energy, limits of pollution that we can generate. And we're constrained on the inside by limitations of what we aspire to as a satisfactory standard of human wellbeing.
There's a ring between, and there are different dimensions of this both on the inside and on the outside. And there's a ring between them, which is if you like the safe zone which we're in. And in almost all of those segments around the circle, we've either exceeded the acceptable limits or are very close to them. So that provides a framework for evaluating what's going on and for planning what is a reasonable aspiration for the future. So we'll go into that in more detail next week. I hope everybody's enjoyed this rather rambling conversation!
Thanks for reading this episode of Sovereign Finance. For more episodes, transcripts, in-depth articles, and the community, please take a minute now to subscribe free using the button above. You’ll receive a free email notification whenever we publish a new article or conversation.
