I began my final blogs in 2017, 2018, 2019,2021 and 2022 with the following:

“This is my last blog through 2017/18/19,21,22 which has been a momentous year in which the speed of change in many areas accelerated and most political leaders failed to keep up with it. In writing a blog I try to reach a definitive conclusion on an issue, but such is the speed of change that soon events have also left me behind. Here are a few afterthoughts on issues I addressed during the year or previously, but where new information has come to light.”

Earlier in the year I blogged on the question of Where Was the Good News[i]. I will have another look at that in the New Year but I resolved to be more positive in my blogs, and in general I think I have succeeded, sometimes by describing serious problems but trying to show why they happen. Today I will cover three examples of that where clearly things have gone wrong, but I will try to show what is the cause.

Firstly, the COVID Inquiry has predictably gone down the wrong road of trying to find fault and apportion blame rather than learn the lessons of how such disasters could be avoided in the future.  No country has avoided a COVID crisis, but other countries dealt with it more effectively or have set up more useful inquiries into it. In Canada, for example, the Trudeau government failed to conduct a comprehensive inquiry into the COVID pandemic. Instead, a National Citizens Inquiry was set up independently. After a year or so of extensive consultation with physicians, academics, officials and ordinary people the full report is now available online. It is an excellent piece of work that looks at many of the issues the UK Inquiry seems keen to avoid and questions in depth the medical, ethical and legal responses.
 

One particular failure in the British inquiry was actually brought up in the Prime Minister's evidence last week. Rishi Sunak cited a study from June 2020 conducted by academics at Imperial College and Manchester University which found that the first lockdown probably did more harm than good. “Their QALY analysis” he told the Inquiry, “suggested that the lockdown in its severity and duration, is likely to have generated costs that are greater than the likely benefits”.

QALY stands for “Quality Adjusted Life Years “and is how medical authorities all over the world assess whether any given medical procedure is justified. The study showed that when everything was taken into account the cure could well have been worse than the disease, but the Prime Minister was interrupted by the lead counsel who said “I wasn't aware of that, but I don't want to get into quality life assurance models”. But they should get into them because they are the most important way of finding out whether we did the right thing or not. If the lead counsel does not know what they are then he has no business being in this Inquiry. If he does know what they are but is deliberately refusing to consider the possibilities involved, then the whole thing should be scrapped.
 

In the early stages of the pandemic I wrote two blogs on the subject.[ii] Iin the first of these Wash Your Hands on the 5th of March 2020 I warned that so much of the rubbish that was being written about the pandemic was arrant nonsense and had no basis in reality. It was designed to frighten and put pressure on our politicians to do the impossible and therefore damage the fabric of society and that is what happened. They made a difficult situation very much worse than it needed to be. In the second Intensive Care, which I published on 11th of April 2020, I pointed out that the crisis had developed into a constitutional crisis and the instructions that we were given to stay at home were neither justified as a sensible precaution nor did the politicians have the power to give such an order even if it was the right thing to do.

I am old enough to clearly remember the outbreak of Hong Kong flu in 1968 when I had just started my studies at Oxford University. Everyone carried on as normal. No business or school or restaurant or pub was closed.  50,000 people died in that outbreak when the population was significantly smaller and younger than it is today, but the country recovered very much more quickly than it is doing this time. Some people have said this is a once in a lifetime thing. That's not true as there was a major outbreak in 1957, in 1968 and then this one. There have also been other threatening outbreaks like SARS and swine flu and the fact is that we never learn from them. Our politicians don't want to learn from them. They just don't want to be around when the next one happens

In April 2021 I blogged on the subject of Bitcoin[iii] using it is as the most well-known example of cryptocurrency. I pointed out not only the high risks involved in a market where the currency actually has no value except that ascribed to it by investors (gamblers) but also the colossal carbon footprint of Bitcoin which meant that the world simply could not afford to let it continue. Unfortunately, that point has not yet worked its way through to the authorities who clearly must regulate this appallingly risky currency.

However, this year I was delighted to learn of the massive failure of another large cryptocurrency FTX. This was nothing less than a criminal conspiracy which is now being proved in the courts where the founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty of seven major criminal offences including wire and securities fraud, money laundering, fake financial statements, and inflated valuations of speculative tokens. Upon his arrest he was replaced as CEO by John J. Ray III who previously worked as chairman of Enron Creditors Recovery. In the bankruptcy court filing he said, “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” he went on to tell U.S. Congress that FTX practised “no bookkeeping” and “old-fashioned embezzlement.”
 

Undoubtedly this was an unfortunate experience for all those who foolishly invested in this fraud, and it will be most unlikely that they will recover much if anything of their losses. But overall, I believe this is good news. Already we can see as this is the largest collapse of an exchange in the short history of crypto currencies FDX has deterred more cautious investors from staying put in the market and that is to be welcomed if it also leads to the government oversight of cryptocurrencies wherever they be traded.  Members of U.S. Congress have said they're more inclined to legislate new protections governing digital tokens and exchanges. That is the very least they can do. All cryptocurrencies are lacking in true economic value and as most of them are produced with massive carbon emissions particularly in China and Venezuela the sooner that the world is rid of them the better.

I am a regular reader of the excellent magazine The Oldie, but the latest issue contained an article on motoring which caused me to write in. I do not yet know whether this will be published but this is what I wrote:

“letters@theoldie.co.uk?
Fri 08/12/2023 09:10
Sir
 
In the December issue Alan Judd, your Motoring correspondent, makes some observations which I wish to counter. Firstly, he talks about Zero Emission Vehicles. There is no such thing. In the manufacture of electric vehicles the carbon emissions are higher than standard petrol and diesel engine vehicles as the vehicles are heavier and use rare metals like lithium that have to be mined. By the way, there is not enough lithium in the world for all vehicles to be powered this way. Then the battery has to be charged. What is the source of the electricity? More is by gas or oil than renewables and if all vehicles are to be powered this way in the UK then we need to expand the National Grid by a factor of at least four, unthinkable when no new power station has been built in decades.
 
But what is really objectionable in Mr. Judd's article is the idea that ownership should be taxed rather than usage. My wife and I traded in our two cars six years ago and bought a single hybrid. In those six years we have only driven 6,000 miles. When I was a Sales Representative 50 years ago I drove 30,000 miles per year. Now I drive 1,000 miles per year.”
 
There is so much nonsense talked about electric cars - my letter could have been twice as long. The CEO of Toyota, the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world has said that he does not think Electric Cars are the answer to Climate Change.   The government is committed to an entirely arbitrary target of banning the sale of petrol and diesel engine vehicles on the spurious basis that replacing them with Electric Vehicles will reduce carbon emissions. As my letter shows it won’t. It will probably increase them.  While the EU, the US and China have all launched subsidised mega factories to produce the batteries, the UK has done almost nothing. It is falling way behind and if it persists with this ludicrous policy of banning the sales of petrol and diesel cars the UK will finish by importing most of its electric vehicles from China. These will not have been produced in a climate friendly way so rather than reducing our carbon emissions we will just have imported them.

 
Why do they do these senseless things? Because they want to be seen to do something to reduce carbon emissions. There is so much more they could do but the first is to concentrate on the two main causes of carbon emissions. In the UK 45% come from buildings of all kinds and 30% from food agriculture, production, processing, and wastage.
 

 

It only remains to wish all my readers a very Merry Christmas and a New Year in which you and yours get more of what you wish for and less of what you don’t need.  Thanks to all those who give me feedback which I really value. I’ll be back in 2024.

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