On New Year’s Day, millions of Britons experienced disgust on hearing the news that former Prime Minister, sociopath, money grubber and warmonger Tony Blair had received a knighthood.  After all, the British honours system had previously only ever rewarded the most upstanding citizens for selfless service to the community.  Warmongers …

The year 2022 is the setting for the dystopian movie Soylent Green – in which an over-populated, climate ravaged population is only sustained by consuming the nutrients from rendered and processed human corpses.  Two years ago, we might have shaken our heads at just how wrong the film’s director Richard …

UK gas prices have fallen back this week – although they are still some 400 percent higher than at the start of 2021.  And the reasons for the fall in price should not breed complacency.  First, the arrival of a south-westerly airflow off the Atlantic has finally begun to spin …

The establishment media are suspiciously silent about the energy crunch facing Europe in general and the UK in particular.  In October, when the wholesale gas price spiked at 400 percent above its January 2021 level, energy prices were headline news.  So too was the sight of energy supply companies falling …

Fracking back Anti-fracking campaigners like to flatter themselves by claiming that it was their protests which finally brought UK fracking to an end.  The reality though, is that the price at which UK shale gas might be recovered was far higher than the prevailing price of gas from the North …

After 20 months of economy-wrecking lockdowns and restrictions, 2019 is fondly remembered as a period of prosperous calm.  Memories though, are deceptive.  And in the days before we learned what gain-of-function meant, things were not as rosy as they now seem.  Although the decade 2009-2019 was officially one of the …

Supply crisis illustrated When you have spent three decades creating hyper-efficient, just-in-time supply chains, you mess with them at your peril.  This is because they are also hyper-fragile, so that when backlogs occur, the result is a systemic failure rather than a single short-term blockage.  Not only do you have …

Cambo crunch Shell’s decision to pull out of the project to drill the Cambo oil field has ramifications that the establishment media refuses even to acknowledge.  The fact that Big Oil was even prepared to consider opening up Cambo is a measure of how desperate things have become.  The field …

The arrival of the Omicron variant, just weeks before Christmas, has caused a large part of the establishment media and the neoliberal elite to salivate at the prospect of more lockdowns.  This despite early evidence that the variant is mild even though it appears even more transmissible than the Delta …

Untreatable depression Mental health has been a tacitly accepted casualty of the pandemic restrictions and lockdowns.  In addition to the anxiety in response to the virus itself, the threat to people’s livelihoods and the prolonged periods of social isolation – including the “social distancing” in previously intimate gatherings – have …