Hectored by your toothpaste

Toothpaste to warn of cancer symptoms in new NHS drive

Toothpaste tubes will carry symptoms of cancer, in a bid to get more people to seek help earlier.

A partnership between the NHS and Asda will provide advice which warns of the signs of mouth cancer, and encourages people to contact their GP or dentist.

The new packaging on toothpaste and mouthwash will warn users to seek help if a mouth ulcer lasts three weeks or more. It will also provide a link to more detailed NHS information about mouth and throat cancer.

"What is it now Angus?"

"Well Doctor Finlay, the fancy new toothpaste I bought at the shop in the village told me I should make an appointment with you as soon as possible."

Unaffordable Pressures

Steve Baker has a useful CAPX reminder of the slowly grinding wheels of our unsustainable welfare state. Useful because we seem to have landed ourselves with a government which is ideologically incapable of doing anything about it.

Rachel Reeves makes her first major misstep

Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is expected on Monday to give a statement on public spending ‘pressures’ amounting to tens of billions of pounds. It is not credible to suggest this will be a surprise, as Paul Johnson of the IFS explained on the Today programme (07:37).

Either it will be a restatement of what is already known – in which case any claim this is a surprise is frankly dishonest – or it will be a wish list of spending which government departments would really like and may have bid for in spending reviews – in which case elements will range from the unaffordable to the fanciful. Reeves is not at all likely to raise taxes on Monday but instead to set the scene for rises later.

It is Rachel Reeves’ first major misstep. Not because the Labour Party promised not to raise taxes on working people: this early in the parliament, as politicians so often do (alas), they may simply break their promises, blaming their predecessors.

It is a major misstep because with taxes at historic highs, and likely at or beyond Britain’s taxable capacity, Reeves would be telling us an unspoken truth which undermines her party’s faith in big government: that the UK cannot afford the state we have. She would be right and the Conservatives should point that out.


The whole piece is well worth reading, because the recent Labour victory has a number of slowly moving but intractable problems to tackle without the slightest hint that it has the ability to recognise, let alone tackle them. Tax, welfare, Net Zero and immigration are just some of the ingredients of Starmer's remarkably poisonous poisoned chalice.

The situation facing the UK and the world is extremely serious. When Rachel Reeves on Monday tells the Commons we cannot afford present spending, the Conservatives should make the most of it in the public interest.

Perhaps the Chancellor means to cut spending, cut taxes and go for the growth we need but it seems unlikely. More probably, Rachel Reeves is more correct than she realises: as a former Bank of England economist, she is without excuse.

That didn't take long

Labour shelves free speech law protecting universities from cancel culture

The Education Secretary is poised to scrap free speech laws designed to protect academics from being cancelled.

Bridget Phillipson said on Friday she would “stop further commencement” of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, just days before the new free speech tsar’s powers were due to come into force.

Under the Act, universities, colleges and student unions in England would have a legal duty to promote free speech.


A high priority we may assume. At the moment we may assume it openly, I'm not so sure about the future.

He spoke like an eye-witness

I never was so impressed as by him. The secret was not in his words. It was his peculiar earnestness. He spoke like an eye-witness, and seemed under unutterable fear himself. He had the preacher’s master-gift of alarming.

Sheridan Le Fanu - Willing to Die (1872)


The problem in going along with the climate narrative is a simple one – anyone doing so is aligning themselves with problematic people. Racketeers, charlatans, fanatics, political totalitarians and useful idiots – take your pick.

 

He spoke like an eye-witness

They do, don’t they? The BBC does it, David Attenborough does it, Ed Miliband does it. As if they have seen the scorching flames of an extra degree on the global thermometer, maybe even two if we are very bad.

Snigger

 

It was just luck Joe, but it finally ran out

Biden: I deserved a second term

Joe Biden said his achievements “merited” a second term in office as he addressed the nation for the first time since stepping back from the presidential race.

The US president, 81, suggested his “leadership in the world” and “vision for America’s future” had given Americans reason to elect him again, but said he would “pass the torch” to a new generation to keep his party united.


Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

Fifty Years

 

Not to be taken seriously, but worth a post I think.

Anyone old enough to have memories going back fifty years or more must have seen many major cultural and economic changes over their lifetime. Any fifty year period within the past few centuries would probably show equally dramatic changes.

For example, I’ve seen many changes from growing up on a Derby council estate to what sometimes seems like the absurd luxury of modern life. Cultural changes seem even more absurd with politicians now little more than puppets in an insane theatre where imbecile opinion endlessly shouts down rational analysis.

Taking another fifty year period, my parents must have seen enormous changes between 1930 and 1980. They would have seen not only the colossal effects of World War II but major cultural, technical and economic changes afterwards.

As an earlier example, if we take the period from about 1880 to 1930, there are marked changes to the cultural assumptions embedded in fictional detective stories. Writers wrote from within their world for readers who expected much the same, apart from curious daggers, exotic poisons, and shifty butlers.

As we have moved on to fiction, suppose take an imaginary plot for a detective story where a grisly murder has been committed in a local squire’s country house full of guests.

In the 1880 version on this story, the gentry, the local squire and particularly the aristocracy are treated with great deference by the police. The gentry are very well connected, know the Chief Constable socially and have government connections. There are significant limits to the scope of any police investigation, important constraints must be observed, scandal must be avoided and the Squire’s dignity upheld.

Fifty years later, in the 1930 version of the story, the Squire’s social ascendancy and the deference have not disappeared, but the police are firmly in charge of the investigation. They restrict the movement of the Squire’s guests and question them as they choose because knowing the Chief Constable is not the protection it once was. The Squire and his guests may grumble but they defer to police officialdom because they know they must.

By 1930, officialdom wins in the end and the Squire and the gentry know it. They must find other ways to remain influential, join what they cannot beat and move away from the culture of the country house. It has all become something of a burden anyway.

They are still with us of course, even though the country house, tennis parties and tea on the lawn have largely gone. Influence is preserved through different channels. 

And it wasn't usually the butler who did it.