Local authorities stand accused of using climate change debate as an excuse to reduce or remove the red meat offering on school menus.
As a livestock farmer and food business director, Mike Gooding understands more than most about the nutritional and sustainability credentials of food.
The youngest of Mr Goodings four children is at primary school and he reckons councils are letting down pupils like her, and the wider society.
He believes they are failing to address the sustainability challenges with menus that contain precious little dairy and even less meat, are nutritionally poor and not sustainable.
Livestock farmer and food business director, Mike Gooding
Public sector catering and procurement more generally was thrown into sharp focus recently when Oxfordshire County Council set out plans to ban meat and dairy products from being served at its official events.
A motion put forward by a Green Party councillor stated that global meat and dairy production was a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation.
The motion is due to be voted on in March.
Mr Gooding is concerned that what he describes as a ‘popularist obsession with carbon’ is now seeping into school meal menus.
Nobody is arguing about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the carbon argument is used as a convenience for moving away from the primary objective of providing good, nutritious and sustainable food, he says.
If people want to eat particular diets that is their choice, but public sector catering, when good wholesome food is a requirement, is not the place to assert that opinion.
Sustainability
Sustainability is not simply about carbon, it must be a balance between economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and ethical sustainability, Mr Gooding argues.
All three elements must be positive to be truly sustainable.
Yet some schools have removed meat from the lunch menu entirely.
At Dale Community Primary School in Derby, a school that is responsible for its own catering procedures and meal provision, the school governors have specified no-meat meals will be served in school and have made meat substitutes available as well.
Quorn hotdogs and burgers sit alongside pizza, pasties and vegan sausage rolls.
Extensively-reared, grass-fed beef and lamb offers much better nutrition and sustainability than many other foods, Mr Gooding insists.
These include the unsustainable and more expensive plant-based options, of which there are many, and where sustainability claims over water and land use do not stack up.
High amounts of processing are involved, often with artificial ingredients added to provide some nutritional value.
The ethics of choice, good public sector catering and nutrition cannot be ignored in pandering to a popularist obsession with carbon, particularly when the science is clear but, at best, the rhetoric ill-informed, says Mr Gooding.
Cost cutting
Mr Gooding says underlying the choices is lack of investment. Currently, our children are denied good, balanced nutrition in many schools through lack of investment in school catering, ridiculous budgets, lack of nutritional awareness, and policy that fails to understand sustainability.
Up until the 1980s, school meals were almost universally prepared on site, but the intervening decades have seen huge pressure on school budgets; this, in some cases, has resulted in kitchens being stripped out and replaced by classrooms.
Mr Gooding believes removing meat from some menus altogether is a cost-cutting exercise by some authorities, under the guise of environmental concerns.
A kitchen that doesnt use any meat has fewer compliance requirements, such as assigned chopping boards for meat, separation of products in storage and preparation, and reduced staff training.
If I wanted to look for ways to reduce costs in a kitchen an easy option would be to go vegetarian, he says.
But if the point of public sector catering is to provide good, wholesome nutrition then that point is being lost, he adds.
There is lots of science about the value of micronutrients not only in our children’s diets, but for all of us so it should be applied to all public sector catering, including where good nutrition is critical, such as patients in recovery in hospital.
Carbon
Jonathan Foot, AHDBs head of environment, says carbon alone should not be used as a simple indicator for some foods being better for the environment.
The UK is one of the most sustainable places in the world to produce red meat and dairy, he insists, adding:
Alternatives can often have wide-ranging negative effects on the environment, such as deforestation, threatening biodiversity, high water demands, or international shipping.
AHDB supports the Food a Fact of Life and Countryside Classroom education schemes, which help children to understand where food comes from and how it is produced.
Local producers
In some regions, concerns are being raised by a failure by councils to source locally.
For example, last autumn, the Farmers Union of Wales challenged Anglesey County Council about procurement policies for school meals at primary schools on the island.
Union officials say the menu offered to children does not incorporate enough local and Welsh produce.
But some councils are bucking the trend. In Lancashire, the county council has gone as far as developing a bespoke cheese with a low salt content with a local supplier, and it has also worked with a local high-end yoghurt supplier on a range of low-sugar products.
Children at schools in Aberdeenshire are offered fresh meat that is Red Tractor or Quality Meat Scotland assured, free-range eggs and locally-sourced ingredients wherever possible.
Love British Food an umbrella body for hundreds of organisations that have an interest in food and the countryside believes a long-term view must now be taken of school catering, as an investment for the future.
This, it recommends, should be done through good, nutritional food and an education on how to eat. Public sector catering should also be used as an opportunity to enrich the local area, it adds.
Local purchasing
While some councils are seizing the environmental argument to remove meat and dairy from menus, organisations representing farmers say the case for local food purchasing is a stronger one if sustainability is the issue under scrutiny.
Rhys Llywelyn, market development manager at Hybu Cig Cymru (HCC), says the Welsh levy payer body regularly engages with authorities responsible for public procurement, making the case on local purchasing for settings such as schools and healthcare.
Its a challenging sector, he says, with an ongoing squeeze on public finances making cost undoubtedly the main driver of decisions.
Mr Llywelyn says anti-meat groups are active in the education sector, trying to influence purchasing decisions and also how the curriculum is delivered.
Over the past year, HCC has prioritised producing a range of brand-new classroom resources so that pupils get balanced messages on food, farming, health and the environment.
Welsh red meat has a positive story to tell in terms of sustainability, being often far lower in terms of emissions than imported alternatives; its important for the future that we find ways of taking these considerations into account in public procurement.
Food buying standards
MPs have also been critical of the government food buying standards. In April 2021, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee said the government was missing the opportunity to support small businesses, improve animal welfare and promote sustainability within public sector rules for buying food.
In its report Public Sector Procurement of Food, the committee called on the government to address outdated standards on nutrition and animal welfare, and close loopholes in the existing rules.
Noting the startling lack of monitoring of existing food procurement standards, including by government departments and NHS hospitals, the report demanded action to push bodies to ensure compliance.
Political drivers for change
Public sector procurement and its failure to be more focused on British produce has been debated for years and very little has changed.
But following Brexit and the COP26 Climate Change Conference in 2021, there has been a redoubling of efforts by champions of local sourcing.
Campaign group Sustain is calling for changes to the governments buying standards for food and catering services, and It says more money should be spent on high-quality domestic produce.
Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy also recommends that these standards be redesigned to ensure that taxpayer money is spent on food that is both healthy and sustainable.
New government policies on food are expected to be published in the coming weeks. considerations into account in public procurement.
(see below for press articles about the camp and Natural England’s attempts to exclude the public from these commons and vast areas of coastal saltmarsh)
By Tony Gosling: 10Feb22 BRISTOL: TLIO camp finds opposition mysteriously vanishing to The National Trust’s privatisation of North Norfolk commons
Over August bank holiday 2021 The Land Is Ours campaign ventured East to camp out on disputed common land along the North Norfolk coast. It was the campaign’s first tentative steps back into the world of direct action since supporting Tony Wrench’s Pembrokeshire roundhouse planning bid in Easter 2004.
The vast salt marsh commons in question are supposed to be owned by Brancaster parish council yet the camp site is clearly managed by the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club (RWNGC) who are there in force collecting car park fees. Curious then that it should be another interested ‘charity’ entirely, the National Trust, whose North Norfolk and Broads manager Victoria Egan phoned TLIO’s Tony Gosling up a few days beforehand, politely requesting he cancel the excursion.
The vast commons around Brancaster and Scolt Island were awarded to the coastal parishes in the 1700s but this ‘waste’ has now become some of the most potentially valuable retirement and investment land in East Anglia. A report in the Eastern Daily Press while the camp was taking place put the average Brancaster house price as £800k.
Fourth and fifth homes, according the commoners who steward these 3,500 or so mostly salt-marsh acres, the Scolt Head and District Common Rightholders Association. SHDCRA, pronounced Shackra’s, Their 400 or so commoners don’t just use the land, they are an invaluable reservoir of local history and culture and have watched for four decades since the Thatcher era, with ever more sceptical eyes, as the filthy lucre has rolled up along the unspoilt North Norfolk coast.
But actual common rights exercised, as elsewhere, have been diminishing. Over the decades since the second world war livestock grazing, reed cutting, even shooting has dwindled and, armed with some of the best-paid lawyers in East Anglia three main institutions have been acquiring slices, and chunks of these unique commons.
Private feudal big guns are to be found at the Holkham Hall estate managers office a few miles East between Blakeny Point and Fakenham backed by the 25,000-acre the Earl of Leicester’s Estate. But despite the Earl’s increasing commercialisation of the area it is so-called charitable organisations, the parish councils and the National Trust that have become the haunts for these Johnny-come lately land-grabbers.
Land rights Protest Camp at Brancaster Beach Car Park, over the Bank Holiday Weekend. Tony Gosling (right) with other protest group at the Car Park with Brancaster Golf Club in the Background, they are joined by Stephen Bocking (2nd left) Brancaster Parish Council member and Scolt Head and District Common Rightholder
So was the three nights out by the beach to be an ‘occupation’ of Golf Club land? Of National Trust land? Or simply a camp-out on the parish commons? Some say the parish own the land, others the golf club and we even heard it was National Trust land leased to the golf club in a secret deal.
As so many times in the past the only way to uncover evidence would be to spend a few weeks there and discover the supposed owner through court papers. Countless requests from SHADCRA to the private and charitable claimants have failed to produce the required evidence and, lately, the private parties are even refusing to reply to commoners’ letters and phone calls.
The most surprising discovery though relates to the National Trust who arrived in the early 20th Century when they were donated a slice of land near Scolt Island. Despite being a ‘charity’ the NT appear to be increasingly mesmerised by the dizzying financial value of properties with which ‘for the education and betterment of the public’ they are entrusted. The NT’s North Norfolk boss Victoria Egan is working with and for private locals, lodging claims at the land registry for apparently ‘vacant’ common land around their existing holdings.
Natural England have been working closely with the National Trust too on coastal path proposals, unveiled in 2018, but under cover of ‘rewilding’ they aim to exclude walkers from thousands of aces of salt-marsh along the footpath. Local dog-walker Philip Platten, told The Times’ environment correspondent Jonathan Leake, ‘I will be visiting the marshes whenever I want, and I challenge anyone to stop me taking my grandchildren too.’ [see Rebecca Murphy’s May 2018 EDP article below]
NT claims have only been rebuffed by diligent SHDCRA members of the parish councils lodging counter-claims at the land registry along with copies of their eighteenth century enclosure awards. So, unfettered by the mere law of the land these parish councils are gradually being taken over by well-heeled incomers more inclined to turn a blind eye to the NT claims and view them as an ‘opportunity for development’.
But, bulldozer-in-hand, Brancaster’s in-yer-face land-grabbers, sub-letting from the grey-zone ‘twixt parish council and National Trust, have to be the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club who, since the 1990s, have taken the opportunity to carve out their own parking facilities into a large public car park which used to be free but as they have extended it they have also brought in a £4-£8 charge for anyone wanting a few hours or a day on one of the loveliest sandy beaches in the country.
With ten or so TLIO common rights supporters spending the long weekend under canvas on Brancaster Beach car park a whole series of passing locals settled into comfy chairs to tell tales of well-connected outsiders turning up as parish councillors, and suddenly chairing parishes too. Tales of ‘control freaks’ at the RWN golf club causing a exodus of members to the ‘less anal’ nearby Hunstanton club, and wondering if the tens of thousands in car park profits wouldn’t give a desperately needed facelift for the beach road and parish rather than vanishing into golf club coffers.
Legally the golf club, and possibly the Trust too, should be paying annual compensation for the common land they’ve built on which should be putting the commoners well into the black.
So cash-strapped SHDCRA soldier on, asking for meetings with Trusts, Clubs and Estates who can’t see the point of dealing with anything without legal and financial weight behind it. The doors have been slammed in their face and even individuals who turn up at SHDCRA managing to turn members against the executive of their own association.
According to one frequent visitor to the Norfolk coast, Mike, the parking fines stuffed under windscreen wipers by the golf course aren’t worth the paper they are photocopied on. The wording, he notes, is that used by the National Trust elsewhere along the coast. For all the years he’s been parking there for free, threatened fines have never been enforced.
The National Trust were approached for comment but didn’t get back to us before publication.
Could it be, despite Brancaster Beach car park attendants’ uniforms, like the notorious Bristol Zoo parking attendant ‘Mr S W Barrett of 35 Westbury Lane’ who blagged fees for twenty years from an unofficial space on the downs, that the last decade of receipts are nothing more than a brazen fraud. That the land is ours, it isn’t theirs at all?
Land rights campaigners held a protest at Brancaster beach car park over the weekend to back local commons rights holders embroiled in a long-running disagreement.
Ten protesters from the Land is Ours campaign camped out on an area of land which is part of a dispute between the rights holders and the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club and the National Trust.
Tony Gosling, who came up from Bristol to lead the protest, said they saw it as something of a feud and an example of private landowners extending their boundaries and grabbing land and rights holders losing out.
Brancaster Marsh Common covers several thousand acres and parts of it have been registered by the golf club and the Trust.The common rights holders and parish council dispute the land ownership claims and are also disgruntled that they are not receiving enough compensation for being unable to exercise historic rights which date back to the Enclosures Act of 1765 and would have made the parish the owner of the land.
Although they don’t own any of the land, the 300-plus members of the Scolt Head and District Common Rightsholders Association (SHDCRA) are entitled to historic rights over the land for activities including shooting, fishing and grazing.
Land rights Protest Camp at Brancaster Beach Car Park, over the Bank Holiday Weekend
They claim that if they are not able to carry out these activities they are entitled to compensation and feel they are also entitled to a portion of any income from the land.
The beach car park is one area under dispute. It is run by the golf club which, according to the rights holders, also claims to own it.
Rights holder and parish councillor, Stephen Bocking, said that although the club had registered the land it occupies it has never produced the deeds to prove ownership and all SHDCRA receives in compensation is £100 for some fencing on the land.
“We just want to get people round a table to talk about it but all we get from the golf club are solicitor’s letters,” he said. One letter arrived in response to the protest action.
Chris Cotton, another rights holder and parish councillor, said that they welcomed the support from the Land is Ours campaigners although they had no idea they were coming to Brancaster until a few days beforehand.
Mr Gosling said they were not there to be disruptive – just to try to bring people together in what had developed into something of a feud.
He said: “It amounts to a difference of opinion between the traditional rights holders and new money which holds the legal clout,” he said.
Mr Gosling said they had an opportunity to chat to those involved over the weekend and hoped their intervention might bring the parties together face to face.
The issue will be on the agenda at a parish council meeting next Tuesday.
The Land Is Ours was founded in the 1990s by George Monbiot, now a leading figure with Extinction Rebellion.
The golf club has also been contacted for comment.
Salt marshes in north Norfolk could be declared off limits to the public under proposals being drawn up by Natural England.The public body wants to exclude the general public from accessing areas of marsh at Burnham Overy Staithe and Wells.
It says the measures, which are included in its proposed route of the England Coast Path between Hunstanton and Weybourne, would ‘have the effect of enhancing existing conservation objectives’.
Local water sports activities are held on the marsh areas of Burnham Overy Staithe
In a report outlining the measures, officials say that the establishment of the England Coast Path could attract more walkers to the area, increasing pressure on birds such as terns, redshank and ringed plover.
Two locations have also been identified as supposedly ‘unsuitable for public access’.
Natural England said it made the decisions following advice from selected ‘local stakeholders and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’.
However, proposals have angered and frustrated many in the coastal communities who have said there has been a lack of prior notice to the proposals.
Burnham Market resident David Baldry has said the proposals are ‘poorly thought out’.
He said: ‘The salt marsh at Burnham Overy Staithe provides for a host of recreational pursuits.
‘In the warm summer months at low tide, many local children go swimming along the creeks after school, mud sliding on the banks, collect samphire, families and visitors to the area explore the creeks and salt marshes – this access to a wonderful wild and natural environment is what draws tourists to Norfolk and contributes so significantly to our rural economy.’
The sand and marshes at Burnham Overy Staithe. Natural England have proposed to exclude the general public from accessing the marshes due to it being “unsuitable for public access
Michael Smith, who lives in Burnham Thorpe, is a common rights holder and would not be affected by the proposals.
He said he accepts the conservation needs at Wells but says there is no risk to public safety on the marshes around Burnham.
The 47-year-old, who is also chairman of the Scolt Head and District Common Rights Holders Association, said he does not feel Natural England is providing answers to questions to his questions.
‘When you ask around there seems to be no local stakeholders who say they have been asked,’ he said. ‘I have asked but they clearly are not preparing to give names.’
Natural England’s response
Natural England have said the proposals will not affect any existing access to the marshes for common rights holders or other walkers who use the area through informal agreements with landowners.
Sarah Dawkins, area manager for Norfolk and Suffolk, said: ‘When developing our coastal access proposals we have to make sure they don’t impact negatively on the environment, or create unforeseeable safety issues for walkers.
‘Following advice from local stakeholders and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, we’ve proposed some restrictions excluding the new coastal access rights from just two areas of saltmarsh at Wells and Burnham Overy Staithe.’
People are encouraged to view the proposals and to comment up until Wednesday, May 16, 2018.
Locals put boot in as Natural England’s Coast Path threatens access to Norfolk salt marshes
Plans to protect wildlife alongside a Norfolk stretch of the trail around England are angering residents and artists
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor – Sunday April 22 2018
Philip Platten, centre, and wife Christine with other dog walkers on the coastal path. He says he wants to be able to take his grandchildren on the marshes too
England’s ambitious 2,800-mile Coast Path project has become stuck in the mud of Norfolk’s north coast over plans to ban access to the surrounding salt marshes used by ramblers, dog walkers and fishermen for generations.
Natural England (NE), the government’s conservation and ‘rewilding’ quango, says it wants to protect seabirds and wildlife from the surge in ramblers when the coastal path formally opens – by banning access to land around it.
However, the plans, which are part of a public consultation, have infuriated residents, prompting protests along the coast, from the seaside town of Wells-next-the-Sea to Holt.
‘I will be visiting the marshes whenever I want and I challenge anyone to stop me,’ said Godfrey Sayers a renowned local artist……
60 Days with the Gypsies https://www.channel4.com/programmes/60-days-with-the-gypsies Explorer Ed Stafford spends two months with Gypsy and Traveller communities across the country, as he delves beneath the stereotypes and reveals the challenges of living in modern-day Britain
Next on TV: Mon 7 Feb, 9pm
The 3 x 60′ series, a Boundless production (part of Fremantle in the UK), will see Ed immerse himself into Romani Gypsy and Irish Travellingculture for 60 days, to provide an honest, unflinching insight from the inside. Shot in the same style as 60 Days on the Street, the series will combine self-shooting techniques alongside a small crew who will capture Ed’s journey. https://www.channel4.com/press/news/channel-4-and-boundless-reunite-ed-stafford-spend-60-days-gypsies At a time when the Government is considering new police powers which will make the traditional Travelling way of life more difficult, Ed will delve beneath the stereotypes, building relationships with individuals in an endeavour to question everything we think we know about the Gypsy and Traveller lifestyle. 60 Days with the Gypsies will also look at why the conflict between settled communities and Gypsies is so prevalent. As part of the production team, Boundless has brought on Jake Bowers, a Romany journalist and filmmaker, as a consultant to help navigate these stories in an authentic and sensitive way.
Ed Stafford said: ‘Like homelessness, Gypsy and Travelling communities are often shrouded in negativity despite very little understanding and I want to learn more. I have no qualms about immersing myself in every ritual, tradition and aspect of the culture in order to get to know the individuals and unpick the existing stereotypes.
In May 2011 George Monbiot toured the UK “taking on all comers”. The Guardian promoted these Left Hook events in the language of a boxing impressario, and puffed Monbiot as “the Guardian’s unbeaten intellectual heavyweight champion of free speech, one of the UK’s foremost thinkers and environmentalists, and polemicist supreme”.
Shortly afterwards LLRC received a sound recording of one of the lectures. Recorded by an independent film-maker, it had taken place in Liverpool on May 10th 2011. George spoke about how the Fukushima disaster has converted him to Nuclearism, the dogma that new nuclear power stations can help to deliver us from Global Warming.
Earlier, he had argued on a Guardian blog that releases of radioactivity, even from disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, have no observable impact on health.
A member of the audience asked him how radioactive discharges from Sellafield had affected wildlife in the Irish Sea. He answered with a gratuitous and explicit attack on Professor Chris Busby although Busby’s two decades of research into the health effects of radioactive pollution have been exclusively concerned with people, not wildlife.
George Monbiot
Professor Busby
After briefly dismissing the idea that Sellafield could have affected sea-life, Monbiot said:
“Now one of my greatest sources of concern and disenchantment I suppose is that one um er er self-styled nuclear researcher in particular, a man called Chris Busby who lives very close to where I do, who has been writing all that stuff about the Irish Sea and about leukaemia clusters and the rest of it for many years um , looking into his work and looking into what scientists say about his work – work which in the past I blithely accepted – I find that it is no better grounded than the work of the climate change deniers such as Lord Monkton and Ian Plimer and Christopher Booker and the rest of it that I have been confronting for all these years. In fact um his statistical mistakes were so profound that in order to demonstrate that there was the leukaemia rate he said there was, which is not backed up by any medical records anywhere, he actually had to create a negative rate for all other cancers in Wales. In other words every year there is minus a certain number of cancers taking place in Wales, which is a rather hard proposition to support scientifically. I am glad you raised it because it’s indicative of of of exactly the problems we are up against. And it was a s-s-s-s-source of sadness to me to discover that that was happening.”
This must have puzzled Monbiot’s audience but the person who sent the recording realised that he was trying to shoot the detective in a long-running investigation into how radioactivity in the Irish Sea migrates onto the land and causes cancer. The quest began in 1994 when the Wales Cancer Registry (WCR) drew attention to high levels of cancer in children. In 1995 and 1996 we obtained two separate copies of all the detailed data held by WCR. In fact, LLRC is now the only organisation that possesses the data since in 1996 WCR was closed down and its computers were, allegedly, wiped.
Examining the data we quickly saw that the highest risks were along the shores of the Irish Sea; all age groups were affected.
Official reports had already shown plutonium originating from Sellafield is widespread in marine sediments across the Irish Sea. Resuspended by wave action and carried inland on the prevailing westerly winds, Sellafield’s plutonium has been measured in grass and sheep droppings all the way across England to the North Sea.
Gwynedd, the Menai and Anglesey: Intertidal sediment (yellow) and Plutonium (Becquerels/Kg)
The highest levels by far are within a kilometer of the Irish Sea. So what we saw in the WCR data supported our hypothesis that low concentrations of some forms of radioactivity are far more dangerous than Government officials and the nuclear industry want you to believe. Inhalation is almost certainly the most hazardous vector.
Plutonium in sheep droppings (mBq/Kg) by distance eastward (km) from St. Bees Head, CumbriaWe published our findings. There was national (UK) news coverage and BBC Wales made a TV documentary, Sea of Troubles. This was Wales’ own rerun of Windscale, The Nuclear Laundry, the Yorkshire TV programme which in 1983 had revealed the existence of a 12-fold excess rate of child leukaemia in Seascale, a village near Sellafield (as the Windscale nuclear site was subsequently relabelled).
The Welsh Assembly and Westminster governments both referred our information to COMARE, the advisory Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, set up after the Seascale scandal.
The only school photograph of Gemma D’Arcy, one of the leukaemia victims in the Cumbrian cluster. She died before her seventh birthday.John A Steward, director of WCISU from 1997 COMARE took a kangaroo court approach, hearing evidence from the new cancer registry, the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit (WCISU), but not from us. WCISU’s director, Dr John A Steward, claimed that he had repeated our methods using WCISU data. He found no extra cases on the coast and concluded that the WCR data were corrupt. COMARE member Dr. Gerald Draper, head of the Childhood Cancer Research Group, backed him up although in 1995 WCR had told us Draper himself had validated the Welsh data and that the high risks on the coast were real. But of course we weren’t there to tell COMARE this. They and Welsh Assembly officials condemned our findings and demanded we recant.
We did not recant. Instead we refuted Steward’s claim to have repeated our analysis. He had used population data from a different census, he had diluted the high risks we found in a narrow band next to the sea by using a wider band, and he had taken 182 of the sick children off the WCR database and 50 off his own much more recent data. He still found a higher risk near the sea but it was no longer statistically significant.
In 2002 Linda Parry, a young HTV researcher from north Wales, visited LLRC to ask about the leukaemia controversy. To show her that there was independent confirmation of what we saw in the WCR data we gave her a copy of a letter published in 2001 in the Daily Post – a Liverpool-based paper that covers north Wales. A family had written to praise the staff at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool for their treatment of cancer children. They had realised, from talking with other parents in hospital waiting rooms, that childhood cancer incidence along the north Wales coast was very common. Using known populations we calculated that their figure of 10 new cancer cases a month represented 20 times the national rate. (The letter is cut to conceal personal information. Lib Rowland-Hughes, who sent the news clipping, had made contact with the little girl’s grandfather. He told her that the child had been cured of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma but was later diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. She died in 2003, two years after this letter was written.)
Using her knowledge of north Wales, Linda eventually identified 40 children diagnosed with leukaemia and cancer between 2000 and 2003. In the seaside towns of Caernarfon, Bangor and Colwyn Bay, where all the population lives within a mile of the sea, rates of leukaemia in children younger than 4 years were up to 20 times the national average. Rates of other cancers were also elevated. We looked separately at the more extensive rural areas nearby, where the population is not concentrated as close to the sea as in the towns. The rural population showed an 8-fold excess of child leukaemia, confirming the significance of the high urban rates. HTV used this analysis for a Welsh language documentary Cancr i Plant. We reported the findings to the 2004 international conference of the charity Children With Leukaemia in London and reported in Radioactive Times.
This was a problem for Dr. Steward because we had the children’s names, ages, and home addresses, so he couldn’t remove any more cases from database. It is very unlikely that Linda had located all the possible cases, but Steward had no idea which she had found and which she hadn’t. WCISU admitted that the figures were high but they still denied their significance. They used two arguments. They said that if the disease were caused by radioactivity there would be a long-term trend, and they claimed there was no such trend. In fact, validated data from Wales Cancer Registry for 1982 to 1990 show there is a long-term trend. In the 1980s in the three worst affected towns, Caernarfon, Bangor and Colwyn Bay, children younger than 4 had eight times the national average rate of leukaemia.
Second, through using wrong documentation, they overestimated populations in north Wales. They thought the population of Bangor, for example, was more than three times as big as it really is. Accurate numbers for populations are essential, since they give epidemiologists the numbers of cases of a disease can be expected normally. WCISU are professional epidemiologists and their cock-up is barely credible especially since, in 2001, we had already warned Steward that he’d made exactly the same mistake in a separate study of cancer somewhere else. This has been published in the Journal of Public Health and Steward has offered no defence. The detail is in this report with more discussion here.
Faced with our analysis, COMARE admitted that Steward had made a mistake with the populations. Busby has discussed these matters at length in Wolves of Water. The relevant part is here.
So that’s the real story. Monbiot could hardly have got it more wrong. We wrote to him offering to talk him through the evidence but he was rudely defiant.
A nice day out at the Hay Festival
As George said at the Left Hook talk in Liverpool, he lives not far from Busby. Richard Bramhall, LLRC’s Company Secretary, also lives in mid-Wales so on 30th May it was a short trip to Hay on Wye where George was appearing at the Hay Festival. We printed up a leaflet telling the bare outline of how he had defamed a conscientious scientist and how he was afraid to have a public debate. We pointed out that less than two years earlier, when climate-change sceptic Ian Plimer was reluctant to take part in a debate, George had labelled him a grandstander with a broad yellow stripe. That’s why the poster has a broad yellow stripe.
(The slogan There’s No Debate You’re Chicken George was first deployed against George W Bush in the 1992 US Presidential election campaign, when Bush was refusing to meet Bill Clinton in front of the cameras.) We leafletted a queue of people waiting to hear George Monbiot (this is Richard Bramhall doing his share).
Two men angrily thrust the leaflets back. They claimed that Busby had slandered their friend Dr. John Steward – the Director of the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit.
One of these men is in the next two frames – the photographer didn’t catch the other. They said they knew Steward because they worked for the Welsh Assembly. Bramhall explained that Steward had made a mistake with the leukaemia data, inflating the populations of the study areas by 300%, thus underestimating the risk by 300%. He pointed out that this had been published in the scientific literature and that Steward hadn’t answered. That seemed to slow them down a bit but one still said he preferred to believe in his friend, while the other (pictured) said there was no mechanism for the low levels of radioactivity on the coast to cause leukaemia. Bramhall said “If that’s what you think, you’re relying on a concept of dose that is known to be meaningless, so let’s have the debate – my contact details are on the leaflet.” Like Monbiot, they haven’t taken up the offer of a civilised discussion.
Why is George so sure he’s right? Well, he’s read a blog by his friends Chris Goodall and Mark Lynas (
– that is the Fukushima crisis). Goodall and Lynas have read Radiation and Reason: The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear, by a professor of physics, Wade Allison. Bramhall has
which explains the vital importance of microdosimetry – it means Allison has made a massive averaging error, which is like believing that a stab in the back is no worse than a pat on the back.
Don’t take our word for it; here are damning reviews of Radiation and Reason from two senior figures in the conventional radiation protection community – Professor Keith Baverstock formerly of WHO and
to say nothing of avowedly anti-nuclear Peace News
And finally, here is Malcolm Grimston who graduated from Cambridge University in 1979 having read natural sciences, specialising in psychology. In 1987 he went to work at the UK Atomic Energy Agency and he is well known as a ruthless and intimidating pro-nuclear propagandist. LLRC has met him many times and he appeared frequently on TV after Fukushima, playing down the gravity of the disaster.
So what is Malcolm doing here? Well, between leaving university and going to UKAEA he taught chemistry at Stowe School where one of his pupils was little George Monbiot. Funny world isn’t it?
George Monbiot goes on the offensive in print: The Guardian, November 2011
In November 2011 The Guardian published two articles in which Monbiot repeated what he had said about childhood leukaemia during his Left Hook lecture tour earlier in the year. He also launched a fresh attack on Professor Chris Busby and the advice he was giving to people in Japan to protect themselves from radioactive discharges from Fukushima. He accused Busby of exploiting people’s fears for personal profit.
In preparing these articles he bullied Busby and ignored information supplied by LLRC, as Richard Bramhall reports here.
Monbiot was mentored by nuclear enthusiast Professor Geraldine Thomas of Imperial College, London (pictured left). She criticised Busby’s advice on precautions against radioactivity from Fukushima, saying:
radioactive elements do not bind to DNA which shows how little [Professor Busby] understands about basic radiobiology
Professor Busby’s assertion that Caesium causes heart disease was ludicrous
administering stable Calcium and Strontium is useless (in fact it’s standard medical advice).
In the same article Monbiot suggested that Professor Busby was seeking to profit financially from the distress of people in Japan by selling goods and services at inflated prices. This is far from the truth. No payments had been made to the bank account Monbiot referred to. The Foundation was quickly blocked by legal moves in Japan and imports of the products were banned, so there were no sales. Even if these obstacles had not been created, the formal non-profit agreement between Busby and the businessman who wanted to create the Foundation was that any profits would be ploughed back into further research. Rebuttal from Professor Busby.
In the same article (21 Nov.’11) Monbiot expressed his faith in the effectiveness of the Japanese government’s precautions at Fukushima. People in Japan criticised him in an email to The Guardian. Here is their message, which they copied to LLRC.
The Lord Mayor of Oxford invited Busby and Monbiot to debate the science in a public meeting in Oxford Town Hall on 3rd November 2011 (in the hall pictured, left). Monbiot declined. The meeting went ahead without him. See the video here, part 1 and part 2 here.
Alan Rusbridger – Editor in Chief at the Guardian until 2015 (pictured left) – never allowed Busby space to respond. So much for the paper’s stance as a champion of liberal values.
Richard Bramhall: 27th November 2011. Updated February 2017
Trinh Ba Phuong, Nguyen Thi Tam Face Long Imprisonment
Photos of Nguyen Thi Tam (right) and Trinh Ba Phuong (left), wearing a shirt that says “Human Rights” and carrying a sign that reads, “[You] cannot rob human rights from us, the people!”
Update: On December 15, 2021, a Hanoi court sentenced Trinh Ba Phuong to 10 years in prison and five years of probation after his release. The court sentenced Nguyen Thi Tam to six years in prison and three years of probation after her release.
(New York) – The Vietnamese authorities should immediately drop politically motivated charges and release two land rights activists in Hanoi, Human Rights Watch said today.
Police arrested Nguyen Thi Tam and Trinh Ba Phuong in June 2020 for having “prepared, published and disseminated video clips and writing with distorted contents that sow confusion among the people in order to oppose the State,” in violation of Article 117 of the Penal Code. A court in Hanoi is scheduled to hear their cases on December 15, 2021. If convicted, each faces up to 20 years in prison.
“The Vietnamese government is using criminal law to intimidate and shut down people peacefully protesting against land confiscation,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The government should release these two activists and all others arrested and imprisoned under Article 117, and abolish this abusive law.”
Article 117 of the Penal Code broadly prohibits “making, storing, disseminating or propagandizing information, materials and products that aim to oppose the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
In 2021 alone, at least 16 people – including the prominent independent bloggers Pham Chi Dung, Nguyen Tuong Thuy, and Pham Chi Thanh – have been convicted and sentenced to prison for violating Article 117. Another 11 people, including the rights activist Nguyen Thuy Hanh, have been arrested and are being held in pre-trial detention under that article.
Nguyen Thi Tam, 49, has protested against land confiscation in Hanoi’s Duong Noi commune since the mid 2000s. In June 2008 she participated in a public protest outside the People’s Committee of the then-Ha Tay provincial headquarters. In November 2008 a court put Nguyen Thi Tam and other villagers on trial for “resisting people on public duty,” convicted her, and sentenced her to a suspended 12-month prison sentence.
Trinh Ba Phuong, 36, comes from a family of land rights activists. Over the past decade, he has joined his mother, Can Thi Theu, his father, Trinh Ba Khiem, and younger brother, Trinh Ba Tu, in numerous protests and campaigns in support of human rights, land rights, and environmental protection. The authorities arrested his father in April 2014 during a government land confiscation in Duong Noi for “resisting against those who are on public duties,” under Article 257 of the Penal Code, and imprisoned him for 14 months. His mother previously served two prison terms – 15 months beginning in 2014 and 20 months in 2016.
On the same day that Trinh Ba Phuong was arrested in Hanoi, the police in Hoa Binh province also arrested his mother and brother on the same charge. Prior to their arrests, the three family members were instrumental in amplifying the voices of farmers at Hanoi’s Dong Tam commune, where a police raid in January 2020 resulted in the deaths of an 84-year-old farmer, Le Dinh Kinh, and three policemen. Trinh Ba Phuong was one of the authors of the “Dong Tam Report,” which shed light on the violent land clash. In October 2020 the police arrested another author of the Dong Tam Report, the prominent dissident Pham Doan Trang. A court in Hanoi is scheduled to hear her case on November 4.
In May, Trinh Ba Phuong’s mother and brother, Can Thi Theu and Trinh Ba Tu, were each sentenced to eight years in prison. Upon being asked their names at the trial, both said “my name is Victim of the Communist [regime].” Both have appealed their verdicts. Recently, a family member told Radio Free Asia that police allegedly beat Trinh Ba Tu during his arrest in June 2020, sending him to the hospital for treatment of his injuries.
Both Trinh Ba Phuong and Trinh Ba Tu appear to have anticipated their arrests. On the day they were arrested, pre-recorded videos were posted on Facebook in which they expressed concern that they might be tortured and killed by police. They asked supporters and family members to publicly display their bodies if they were killed to expose the crimes against them.
In February 2020 the police newspaper labeled Nguyen Thi Tam, Trinh Ba Phuong, Trinh Ba Tu, and Can Thi Theu “opposing reactionary” persons who “collected and disseminated” news about the deadly Dong Tam commune clash.
“Land confiscation has become one of Vietnam’s most heated rights issues, and the government’s repressive response has made the situation worse,” Robertson said. “The government should recognize people’s rights to protest and seek a fair and transparent process to negotiate adequate compensation for losing land.”
How to build a log cabin in a season which will last a lifetime or more, using only hand tools and minimal provisions. SHORT VERSION YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG3fUIoXQ5A LONG VERSION BITCHUTE https://www.bitchute.com/video/Y236etxQOUeX/ There were 4 one hour videos produced on Dick Proennekes life up at Twin Lakes. Dick Proenneke in “Alone in the Wilderness” is the story of Dick Proenneke living in the Alaska wilderness. Dick filmed his adventures so he could show his relatives in the lower 48 states what life was like in Alaska, building his cabin, hunting for food and exploring the area. Bob Swerer has taken the best footage from Dick’s films and he has created 4 videos about Dick, “Alone in the Wilderness”, “Alone in the Wilderness part 2”, “Alaska, Silence and Solitude” and “The Frozen North”. You can purchase all of them in DVD format from the www.DickProenneke.com website.
dick proennekes cabin at twin lakes in lake clark national Richard Proenneke Cabin – Cabin Plans Inspiration
Richard L. Proenneke’s cabin at Upper Twin Lake stands out for the remarkable craftsmanship that reflects his unshakable wilderness ethic. He built the cabin using only hand tools, many of which he fashioned himself.
Richard Proenneke built his cabin during the summers of 1967 and 1968 using mostly local materials and simple hand held tools. For many of these, he brought in steel parts and made the handles with local wood. When tools broke, he chose to repair them, rather than to buy new replacements. While his cabin is neither the first nor the largest ever built in the Alaskan Bush, it does stand out for his remarkable craftsmanship in building it, and the fact that he filmed the entire construction process.
Cabin
The cabin is a roughly 12-foot by 16-foot structure built of peeled, round spruce logs, carefully saddle notched at the corners. It has a gable roof made of spruce poles, covered by sod and moss.There are three windows. One on the west side, 23 inches by 14 inches, is a single thin plastic panel. The other western window, also thin plastic, is the largest in the cabin, measuring 26-inches by 30-inches. Along the east wall is a 26-inch by 15-inch window. The handmade Dutch door includes beautifully worked wooden hinges and a wooden lock. A beach stone fireplace rises from the south wall.
Proenneke had originally covered his cabin and woodshed-outhouse with moss that he obtained within 25 yards of his site. However, moss requires a great deal of moisture to sustain itself on a roof and the relatively dry Twin Lakes environment was not conducive to that. Over thirty years Proenneke added more moss, dirt, and grass seed to his roof resulting in a thin amalgamated mat of all three components.
In keeping with his wilderness values, Proenneke lived in this cabin for 30 years without electricity, running water, a telephone, or other modern conveniences.
Cache
The log cache, or raised storage shed, is located eleven feet south of the cabin. It is 6-feet by 4-feet, built of peeled locally harvested spruce logs that are saddle notched. The cache sits on 9-foot poles. Proenneke accessed the cache with a ladder he hand crafted using local materials.
Traditional Athabascan caches in the region sit on much shorter poles, but they are typically located in busy villages where the activity of people and dogs help to keep wildlife away. Knowing that he would be alone in the wilderness, Proenneke chose to build his cache on taller poles to help decrease the odds of a bear breaking in. The tin wrapped around the poles is designed to prevent smaller rodents from climbing all the way to the top.
Woodshed / Outhouse
Proenneke located his combined woodshed/outhouse approximately 45 feet east of the cabin. It is made of peeled locally harvested spruce poles, saddle notched at the south end and nailed to corner posts at the north end. The structure is modeled along the lines of an Adirondack shelter, with a slanting shed roof. Proenneke stored many of his tools, along with the wood pile he never let dwindle too low, in this shed.
The eastern third of the shed contains a 33-inch wide outhouse complete with a half-moon carved through the door.
The cabin and outbuildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. The site is recognized nationally for its stature as an excellent and well-known example of an Alaskan bush log cabin. It is also recognized for Richard Proenneke’s voice in the preservation of wilderness in Alaska. Proenneke’s interests, talents, and circumstances made him influential in shaping and educating the public about the wisdom of conservation of our natural world.
Israeli settlers are establishing farms to push Palestinians off their land
Israeli settler violence in the West Bank isn’t an isolated incident. Rather, nearly every week settlers from nearby agricultural outposts terrorize the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta as they take over their land.
Palestinians protest as Israeli forces demolish a Palestinian house in in Masafer Yatta near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank November 25, 2020.
On the morning of Nov. 10, Israeli settlers erected sheep pens on Palestinian agricultural land next to the Masafer Yatta hamlet of Khallet a-Daba’ in the West Bank. By the evening, the Israeli army dismantled the illegal outpost, and in response, the settlers rioted against the Khallet a-Daba’ community. They threw stones. They shattered car windshields. They uprooted olive trees. They set a hut ablaze. They fired guns.
This violence isn’t an isolated incident. Rather, nearly every week settlers from nearby agricultural outposts are terrorizing the Palestinians as they take over their land.
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem highlighted the attacks originating from settler farms in a new report released last week. In it, B’Tselem stated 50 outposts have been built in the West Bank over the last decade — with about 40 of them used for sheep, goat and cattle herding.
Seemingly unsatisfied with these land-grabs, settler ranchers are also actively assaulting Palestinians whose land they’ve stolen as Palestinian journalist and activist, Basil al-Adraa, described.
“They organize very big attacks against us especially on Saturday and on the Jewish holidays. They use these holidays to collect tens and dozens of settlers. They come armed with slingshots, sticks and hammers. At least from May until today, seven of these organized attacks were committed against my community,” al-Adraa said during a joint Breaking the Silence and Na’amod webinar on settler violence.
According to B’Tselem, from the beginning of 2020 to the end of September 2021 451 settler attacks have occurred against Palestinians and their property, with more than half directed at Palestinian farmers.
This figure did not include the Jordan Valley in the northern West Bank, an area experiencing settler violence daily and something farmer Fawzi Daraghmeh is all too familiar with.
“Settlers attack my goats, hitting them in the stomach, in the head and in the legs,” Daraghmeh said. “They’re always trying to provoke my family and me and if any of us say anything, the settlers will just call the army and tell them we attacked them.”
Since 2019, Daraghmeh has lost about 250 acres of farmland to the Um Zuqa settler farm. The amount of grazing land stolen is harder to quantify, he said, but estimated losing hundreds of acres to settlers.
We’re talking about a system, which has a lot of knowledge and experience. It’s not like someone woke up in the morning and decided they wanted to be a cowboy.
Dror Etkes
Calculations done by Israeli land policy organization, Kerem Navot, as part of B’Tselem’s report, found settler farms in the Jordan Valley, Masafer Yatta and other parts of the West Bank have taken over nearly 7,000 acres in the last five years. However, this number does not include the entirety of the West Bank, which Kerem Navot founder, Dror Etkes, said the organization is currently measuring.
From Etkes’ conclusions, the phenomenon of settler farms is intentionally entwined with state policy.
“The most important thing [for Israel] right now is to get Palestinians out of the larger areas in Area C. And in order to do that, you need to contract settlers to get these Palestinians out, and that’s exactly what these farms are doing,” Etkes said.
As emphasized in B’Tselem’s report, most agricultural outposts are built with state support in the form of infrastructure, water and farming subsidies.
“Someone tells the military to guard the settlements. Someone designated the land to begin with and decided where the outpost is going to be. So, we’re talking about a system, which has a lot of knowledge and experience. It’s not like someone woke up in the morning and decided they wanted to be a cowboy,” Etkes said.
Settlers as a tool of the state
And while settlers are scoring subsidies, Palestinian farmers are losing money.
Ali Awad, a Palestinian activist from the hamlet of Tuba in Masafer Yatta, comes from a family of shepherds whose primary source of income has been eradicated by encroaching settler farms.
Instead of having their sheep graze on the hillside, Ali’s family now purchases bales of hay to feed their animals. “We lost our whole traditional lifestyle,” Ali said. Even the manufactured livestock feed isn’t immune to settler attacks. In June, settlers burned a year’s supply of hay bales Ali’s family bought.
“Settler violence is only part of Israeli colonist goals. These people are used as tools — justified by racist laws — for committing ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.”
Ali Awad
Settler expansion has crippled Masafer Yatta’s economy. Two-thirds of the families in Tuba have left in the last decade. From Ali’s vantage point, the purpose of these agricultural outposts is to “evict Palestinians.”
“Settler violence is only part of Israeli colonist goals,” Ali said. “These people are used as tools — justified by racist laws — for committing ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.”
With the high price of animal feed and without room to graze, Ali’s family is becoming hopeless.
“Every day we think about leaving,” Jaber Awad, Ali’s uncle, said. “Walking 100 meters [330 feet] out of the home means a settler is standing in front of you and your flock.”
Like the Awad family, Daraghmeh in the Jordan Valley feels trapped. “Because of these outposts, I feel like I am in jail with my sheep and goats. We can’t move. We can’t go anywhere.”
Please donate now to help save our beautiful steam engine from the knackers yard.
We are planning a promise auction for later in the year to help raise money, and so are requesting promises from our wider community. Have a look here for more information.
About our steam engine
Tinkers Bubble is a small woodland community in Somerset, established in 1994. We use environmentally sound methods of working the land without a need for fossil fuels. Most of the fruits of our labour go back into sustaining the community, but we do sell some produce mostly organic apple juice, cider and timber.
Our engine in happier days. Marshall Britannia No. 88270 was built in 1937
Producing timber here involves managing a 26 acre woodland in a sustainable way – felling selected trees with two-person handsaws and axes, transporting logs with the help of our handsome horses, and processing these logs on a wood fired steam-powered sawmill.
We have heard that we may be running the only remaining commercial portable steam engine in the country. Our steam engine is 83 years old, and we’ve been using her almost constantly for 26 of those years. She is now in need of a new lease of life; a once-in-a-century major refurbishment.
For us to continue to produce timber, and to continue to act as an example of what is possible in this country without fossil fuels, we need to urgently raise the funds to replace the firebox. We will be carrying out as much of the work as we can, but the costs are far beyond our reach.
We have a crowd funder underway and greatly appreciate all donations. We will also update this page to let you know how on how we are getting on with our repairs!
If you think you might be able to help with the engineering, please email tinkersbubble@riseup.net.
Woodlanders Video
Click here to see Woodlanders excellent video of our sustainable forestry operation, including footage of the steam engine sawmill in operation.
An Escalation
Bad news, folks. Ole’ Steamy requires a little more attention than first expected. If new tubes, firebox, tube-plate and a good dollop of molten metal wasn’t enough, the other tube-plate and most of the outer jacket had better be. We got the news a week or so after her triumphant shift over to James in Shaftesbury who gave her a good tickle with a needle gun and got the inspector in to see what was left. A combination of age, good use and poor maintenance means the metal of the outer shell of the boiler has corroded down to less than 6mm. On a vessel running at almost 150psi for most of the day I can assure you more than 6mm of metal holding everything together is a good idea (not to mention legal).
To get Ole’ Steamy from the stripped down condition she now finds herself in to belted up and running the saw-bench again puts our funding aim up to £20,000. On hearing the bad news and the advice from both James and Dave the inspector to “maybe-perhaps-a-good-idea-might-be… to find a new one?” my heart sunk and my head hit the desk. But, we forge on.
This last in a line of set-backs really shook the boat. So much so I started considering other alternatives. There is some pretty nifty little electric saw-benches out there and even feasibly within range of a decent solar set-up. Other ideas included stationary steam engines, generators, gasification units and hydro via our little stream but its fair to say nothing quite inspires the glint in the eye of a volunteer like a dirty green fire-breathing behemoth (ignoring the smutty, sweaty Bubbler shoving Douglas up the back end).
So even though this seems yet more of a mountain (like contemplating the weeding of Greg’s carrot bed) we will rise with the morning dew, put on our boots and cap (sometimes nothing else) and get out there and do it. We need to get this money raised to get Ole’ steamy back. There is not enough thanks that can be conveyed by technology for what everyone has already done for us during this mammoth task. I am incredibly grateful for the advice and support I have received while figuring out the work the steam engine has needed and all the possible alternatives. And, of course, a great big thank-you to everyone who has already donated. Although we are asking for more, it in no way lessens the value of that initial push.
To get ‘Ole steamy back we are also doing fundraising-style open days, a promise auction, and probably other exciting things so please keep an eye on our events page.
Be Warned About The Hijack, compliments of -> Whitney Webb – @_whitneywebb If you are or know someone who identifies as an environmentalist and/or progressive, please share w them my recent interviews w/ progressive outlets On Wall Street’s plans to takeover nature
NEW – At COP26, The most powerful private financial interests in the world announced a plan to transform the global financial system by fusing w institutions like the World Bank and using them to further erode national sovereignty in the developing world.https://t.co/8rqDME4OVj
Until recently, it appeared economic competition had been driving the rise and fall of small and large companies across the U.S. Supposedly, PepsiCo is Coca Cola’s competitor, Apple and Android vie for your loyalty and drug companies battle for your health care dollars. However, all of that turns out to be an illusion.
Since the mid-1970s, two corporations — Vanguard and Blackrock — have gobbled up most companies in the world, effectively destroying the competitive market on which America’s strength has rested, leaving only false appearances behind.
Indeed, the global economy may be the greatest illusionary trick ever pulled over the eyes of people around the world. To understand what’s really going on, watch Tim Gielen’s hour-long documentary, “MONOPOLY: Who Owns the World?” above.
Corporate Domination
As noted by Gielen, who narrates the film, a handful of mega corporations — private investment companies — dominate every aspect of our lives; everything we eat, drink, wear or use in one way or another. These investment firms are so enormous, they control the money flow worldwide. So, how does this scheme work?
While there appear to be hundreds of competing brands on the market, like Russian nesting dolls, larger parent companies own multiple smaller brands. In reality, all packaged food brands, for example, are owned by a dozen or so larger parent companies.
Pepsi Co. owns a long list of food, beverage and snack brands, as does Coca-Cola, Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Danone and Associated British Foods. Together, these parent companies monopolize the packaged food industry, as virtually every food brand available belongs to one of them.
These companies are publicly traded and are run by boards, where the largest shareholders have power over the decision making. This is where it gets interesting, because when you look up who the largest shareholders are, you find yet another monopoly.
While the topmost shareholders can change from time to time, based on shares bought and sold, two companies are consistently listed among the top institutional holders of these parent companies: The Vanguard Group Inc. and Blackrock Inc.
Pepsi and Coca-Cola — An Example
For example, while there are more than 3,000 shareholders in Pepsi Co., Vanguard and Blackrock’s holdings account for nearly one-third of all shares. Of the top 10 shareholders in Pepsi Co., the top three, Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation, own more shares than the remaining seven.
Now, let’s look at Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi’s top competitor. Who owns Coke? As with Pepsi, the majority of the company shares are held by institutional investors, which number 3,155 (as of the making of the documentary).
As shown in the film, three of the top four institutional shareholders of Coca-Cola are identical with that of Pepsi: Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation. The No. 1 shareholder of Coca-Cola is Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
These four — Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and Berkshire Hathaway — are the four largest investment firms on the planet. “So, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are anything but competitors,” Gielen says. And the same goes for the other packaged food companies. All are owned by the same small group of institutional shareholders.
Big Tech Monopoly
The monopoly of these investment firms isn’t relegated to the packaged food industry. You find them dominating virtually all other industries as well. Take Big Tech, for example. Among the top 10 largest tech companies we find Apple, Samsung, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Microsoft, Huawei, Dell, IBM and Sony.
Here, we find the same Russian nesting doll setup. For example, Facebook owns Whatsapp and Instagram. Alphabet owns Google and all Google-related businesses, including YouTube and Gmail. It’s also the biggest developer of Android, the main competitor to Apple. Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox. In all, four parent companies produce the software used by virtually all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world. Who, then, owns them? Here’s a sampling:
Facebook — More than 80% of Facebook shares are held by institutional investors, and the top institutional holders are the same as those found in the food industry: Vanguard and Blackrock being the top two, as of the end of March 2021. State Street Corporation is the fifth biggest shareholder
Apple — The top four institutional investors are Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation
Microsoft — The top three institutional shareholders are Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation
You can continue going through the list of tech brands — companies that build computers, smart phones, electronics and household appliances — and you’ll repeatedly find Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation among the top shareholders.
Same Small Group Owns Everything Else Too
The same ownership trend exists in all other industries. Gielen offers yet another example to prove this statement is not an exaggeration:
“Let’s say we want to plan a vacation. On our computer or smart phone, we look for a cheap flight to the sun through websites like Skyscanner and Expedia, both of which are owned by the same group of institutional investors [Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation].
We fly with one of the many airlines [American Airlines, Air France, KLM, United Airlines, Delta and Transavia] of which the majority of the shares are often owned by the same investors …
The airline we fly [on] is in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus. Again, we see the same [institutional shareholders]. We look for a hotel or an apartment through Bookings.com or AirBnB.com. Once we arrive at our destination, we go out to dinner and we write a review on Trip Advisor. The same investors are at the basis of every aspect of our journey.
And their power goes even much further, because even the kerosene that fuels the plane comes from one of their many oil companies and refineries. Just like the steel that the plane is made of comes from one of their many mining companies.
This small club of investment companies, banks and mutual funds, are also the largest shareholders in the primary industries, where our raw materials come from.”
The same goes for the agricultural industry that the global food industry depends on, and any other major industry. These institutional investors own Bayer, the world’s largest seed producer; they own the largest textile manufacturers and many of the largest clothing companies.
They own the oil refineries, the largest solar panel producers and the automobile, aircraft and arms industries. They own all the major tobacco companies, and all the major drug companies and scientific institutes too. They also own the big department stores and the online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and AliExpress.
They even own the payment methods we use, from credit card companies to digital payment platforms, as well as insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies, restaurant chains, personal care brands and cosmetic brands.
No matter what industry you look at, the top shareholders, and therefore decision makers, are the same: Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and/or Berkshire Hathaway. In virtually every major company, you find these names among the top 10 institutional investors.
Who Owns the Investment Firms of the World?
Diving deeper, we find that these major investment firms are in turn owned by their own set of shareholders. One of the most amazing things about this scheme is that the institutional investors — and there are many more than the primary four we’ve focused on here — also own each other. They’re all shareholders in each other’s companies.
“The power of these two companies is something we can barely imagine,” Gielen says. “Not only are they the largest institutional investors of every major company on earth, they also own the other institutional investors of those companies, giving them a complete monopoly.”
Gielen cites data from Bloomberg, showing that by 2028, Vanguard and BlackRock are expected to collectively manage $20 trillion-worth of investments. In the process, they will own almost everything on planet Earth.
BlackRock — The Fourth Branch of Government
Bloomberg has also referred to BlackRock as the “fourth branch of government,” due to its close relationship with the central banks. BlackRock actually lends money to the central bank, the federal reserve, and is their principal adviser.
Dozens of BlackRock employees have held senior positions in the White House under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations. BlackRock also developed the computer system that the central banks use.
Who Owns BlackRock?
While Larry Fink is the figurehead of BlackRock, being its founder, chairman and chief executive officer, he’s not the sole decision maker, as BlackRock too is owned by shareholders. Here we find yet another curiosity, as the largest shareholder of BlackRock is Vanguard.
“This is where it gets dark,” Gielen says. Vanguard has a unique structure that blocks us from seeing who the actual shareholders are. “The elite who own Vanguard don’t want anyone to know they are the owners of the most powerful company on earth.” Still, if you dig deep enough, you can find clues as to who these owners are.
The owners of the wealthiest, most powerful company on Earth can be expected to be among the wealthiest individuals on earth. In 2016, Oxfam reported that the combined wealth of the richest 1% in the world was equal to the wealth of the remaining 99%. In 2018, it was reported that the world’s richest people get 82% of all the money earned around the world in 2017.
In reality, we can assume that the owners of Vanguard are among the 0.001% richest people on the planet. According to Forbes, there were 2,075 billionaires in the world as of March 2020. Gielen cites Oxfam data showing that two-thirds of billionaires obtained their fortunes via inheritance, monopoly and/or cronyism.
“This means that Vanguard is in the hands of the richest families on earth,” Gielen says. Among them we find the Rothschilds, the DuPont family, the Rockefellers, the Bush family and the Morgan family, just to name a few.
Many belong to royal bloodlines and are the founders of our central banking system, the United Nations and just about every industry on the planet. Gielen goes even further in his documentary, so I highly recommend watching it in its entirety. I’ve only summarized a small piece of the whole film here.
A Financial Coup D’etat
Speaking of the central bankers, I recently interviewed finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, and she believes it’s the central bankers that are at the heart of the global takeover we’re currently seeing. She also believes they are the ones pressuring private companies to implement the clearly illegal COVID jab mandates. Their control is so great, few companies have the ability to take a stand against them.
“I think [the central bankers] are really depending on the smart grid and creepy technology to help them go to the last steps of financial control, which is what I think they’re pushing for,” she said.
“What we’ve seen is a tremendous effort to bankrupt the population and the governments so that it’s much easier for the central bankers to take control. That’s what I’ve been writing about since 1998, that this is a financial coup d’etat.
Now the financial coup d’etat is being consolidated, where the central bankers just serve jurisdiction over the treasury and the tax money. And if they can get the [vaccine] passports in with the CBDC [central bank digital currency], then it will be able to take taxes out of our accounts and take our assets. So, this is a real coup d’etat.”
The Spartacus Letter
Again, I urge you to watch the documentary at the top of this article, and keep an eye out for my interview with Austin Fitts, which will be published in the near future. In closing, I want to highlight a mysterious letter posted by an anonymous individual who goes by the name “Spartacus.”
“COVID-19 — The Spartacus Letter” was originally posted on docdroid.net, but has since been deleted. Another copy can be found on mega.nz.1 The Automatic Earth2 and ZeroHedge3 have also published the letter in full. The letter starts out saying, “My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough”:
“We are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight. We have been told that we will be fired and denied our livelihoods if we refuse to vaccinate. This was the last straw.”
What follows is a compilation of data showing the COVID pandemic was a biowarfare attack that has been kept going using sophisticated psychological warfare tactics. It also reviews the dangers of the COVID shots, noting that the virus and the “vaccines” were made by the same entities.
A summary of Spartacus’ findings is as follows. Each summary point is elaborated upon in later sections of the letter, which you can read in any of the three references provided.
COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus, and constitute a form of medical theater.
Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, despite the fact that natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV-2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (‘neural lace’) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.
A Criminal Conspiracy
It’s a long letter, so I won’t reproduce the whole thing here. However, the following sections are of particular interest, with regard to a criminal elite that is orchestrating the destruction of life as we know it, in an effort to usher in a technocracy-led system of global governance and control:4
“In November of 2019, three technicians at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms consistent with a flu-like illness. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric knew at once what had happened, because back channels exist between this laboratory and our scientists and officials.
December 12th, 2019, Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement (essentially, an NDA) to receive Coronavirus mRNA vaccine-related materials co-owned by Moderna and NIH.
It wasn’t until a whole month later, on January 11th, 2020, that China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2. Moderna claims, rather absurdly, that they developed a working vaccine from this sequence in under 48 hours.
Stephane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, a French multinational corporation specializing in medical diagnostic tech, founded by one Alain Merieux. Alain Merieux was one of the individuals who was instrumental in the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab.
The sequence given as the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, is not a real virus. It is a forgery. It was made by entering a gene sequence by hand into a database, to create a cover story for the existence of SARS-CoV-2, which is very likely a gain-of-function chimera produced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was either leaked by accident or intentionally released. The animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 has never been found.
This is not a conspiracy ‘theory.’ It is an actual criminal conspiracy, in which people connected to the development of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 are directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their gain-of-function research by very few degrees of separation, if any. The paper trail is well- established.
The lab-leak theory has been suppressed because pulling that thread leads one to inevitably conclude that there is enough circumstantial evidence to link Moderna, the NIH, the WIV, and both the vaccine and the virus’s creation together.
In a sane country, this would have immediately led to the world’s biggest RICO and mass murder case. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, and Stephane Bancel, and their accomplices, would have been indicted and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Instead, billions of our tax dollars were awarded to the perpetrators.
The FBI raided Allure Medical in Shelby Township north of Detroit for billing insurance for ‘fraudulent COVID-19 cures.’ The treatment they were using? Intravenous Vitamin C. An antioxidant. Which, as described above, is an entirely valid treatment for COVID-19-induced sepsis, and indeed, is now part of the MATH+ protocol advanced by Dr. Paul E. Marik.
The FDA banned ranitidine (Zantac) due to supposed NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) contamination. Ranitidine is not only an H2 blocker used as antacid, but also has a powerful antioxidant effect, scavenging hydroxyl radicals. This gives it utility in treating COVID-19.
The FDA also attempted to take N-acetylcysteine, a harmless amino acid supplement and antioxidant, off the shelves, compelling Amazon to remove it from their online storefront. This leaves us with a chilling question: did the FDA knowingly suppress antioxidants useful for treating COVID-19 sepsis as part of a criminal conspiracy against the American public?
The establishment is cooperating with, and facilitating, the worst criminals in human history, and are actively suppressing non-vaccine treatments and therapies in order to compel us to inject these criminals’ products into our bodies …
Conclusions: The current pandemic was produced and perpetuated by the establishment, through the use of a virus engineered in a PLA-connected Chinese biowarfare laboratory, with the aid of American taxpayer dollars and French expertise …
Either through a leak or an intentional release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a deadly SARS strain is now endemic across the globe, after the WHO and CDC and public officials first downplayed the risks, and then intentionally incited a panic and lockdowns that jeopardized people’s health and their livelihoods.
This was then used by the utterly depraved and psychopathic aristocratic class who rule over us as an excuse to coerce people into accepting an injected poison which may be a depopulation agent, a mind control/pacification agent in the form of injectable ‘smart dust,’ or both …
They believe they can get away with this by weaponizing the social stigma of vaccine refusal. They are incorrect. Their motives are clear and obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.
These megalomaniacs have raided the pension funds of the free world. Wall Street is insolvent and has had an ongoing liquidity crisis since the end of 2019. The aim now is to exert total, full-spectrum physical, mental, and financial control over humanity before we realize just how badly we’ve been extorted by these maniacs. The pandemic and its response served multiple purposes for the Elite:
Concealing a depression brought on by the usurious plunder of our economies conducted by rentier-capitalists and absentee owners who produce absolutely nothing of any value to society whatsoever …
Destroying small businesses and eroding the middle class.
Transferring trillions of dollars of wealth from the American public and into the pockets of billionaires and special interests.
Engaging in insider trading, buying stock in biotech companies and shorting brick-and-mortar businesses and travel companies, with the aim of collapsing face-to-face commerce and tourism and replacing it with e-commerce and servitization.
Creating a casus belli for war with China, encouraging us to attack them, wasting American lives and treasure and driving us to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
Establishing technological and biosecurity frameworks for population control and technocratic- socialist ‘smart cities’ where everyone’s movements are despotically tracked, all in anticipation of widespread automation, joblessness, and food shortages, by using the false guise of a vaccine to compel cooperation.
… The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other ‘undesirables,’ and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed ‘high-impact,’ such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on.
Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism. Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades.
They are not necessarily incorrect in this belief. We are overpopulated, and we are consuming too many resources. However, orchestrating such a gruesome and murderous power grab in response to a looming crisis demonstrates that they have nothing but the utmost contempt for their fellow man.
To those who are participating in this disgusting farce without any understanding of what they are doing, we have one word for you. Stop. You are causing irreparable harm to your country and to your fellow citizens.
To those who may be reading this warning and have full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing and how it will unjustly harm millions of innocent people, we have a few more words. Damn you to hell. You will not destroy America and the Free World, and you will not have your New World Order. We will make certain of that.”
