21 December 2023
Lockdown lowdown
A think-tank report on poverty in the UK described lockdown as ‘the dynamite that blew … open’ the ‘yawning gap between those who can get by and those stuck at the bottom’. According to the report, during lockdown mental ill-health increased from one in nine young people to one in six, severe school absence increased by 134 per cent, calls to one domestic abuse helpline increased by 700 per cent, and households became homeless at a rate of one every three minutes.
Meanwhile in EUtopia…
Even the most maniacal of Remainiacs must by now be wondering whether the EU is the centre-left paradise they told us it was.
The bloc’s long-standing disregard for the lives of non-European migrants is now increasingly matched by overtly right-wing populist politics. The desire to act tough on migration to appeal to the right is creating common ground between British and EU governments, like that enjoyed by Rishi Sunak with EU-NATO pillar Giorgia Meloni at an Italian right-wing political festival last weekend.
As the European right got together, 61 migrants were reported drowned in the Mediterranean, apparently after Italian authorities ordered a charity rescue ship to leave the area. The survivors were taken to a Libyan detention centre.
The Guardian reported on the unmarked migrant graves along the EU’s external borders. Over a thousand of the people killed at the EU’s borders this year were buried unidentified.
Also at Meloni’s right-wing political festival was the leader of Spain’s Vox party (third largest in Spain’s equivalent of the House of Commons) who recently called for the Socialist prime minister to be strung up/hung by his feet (‘colgar de los pies’).
In Germany, the AfD just won its first city mayoral election while the Bundesbank revised down its forecast for economic growth next year to 0.4% from 1.2% and an influential Business Climate Index took a tumble.
However there was some better news for ardent authoritarian liberals as the EU’s new censorship machine swung into action against Elon Musk and his X platform’s failure to block views that Commission bureaucrats do not approve of.
Ollie Richardson
The Embers, 21st December 2023
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