Here’s a story which seems to have disappeared from our mainstream media: ‘The UK government officially approved the new Chinese mega-embassy in central London. Housing Secretary Steve Reed granted planning permission on January 20, 2026, allowing Beijing to transform the former Royal Mint site near the Tower of London into the largest diplomatic mission of its kind in Europe.’
Lets’s take a very brief step back. On 28 March 2025, there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar. In the Thai capital, Bangkok, about 1,000 km away there was minor structural damage to a few buildings. But there was one exception. The new offices for the Thai government Audit Office being built by a Chinese construction company collapsed killing at least 76 workers. Though there are often so many undocumented workers on such projects that the real number was probably higher:
After the collapse, Chinese engineers were stopped by the Thai police as they tried to carry away a large quantity of documents. Subsequent investigations found things like substandard concrete, key structural beams/pillars which hadn’t been installed and substandard steel from a Thailand-based steelworks owned by a Chinese company.
That brings us to something called “Chinese tofu-dreg construction”. Professor Google tells us:
“Tofu-dreg” construction (豆腐渣工程) is a Chinese slang term for buildings and infrastructure that look sturdy but crumble easily due to shoddy materials, corruption, and rushed work. Coined in 1998, these projects often feature fatal flaws like missing steel rebar, structural foam in concrete, and poor oversight.
Below is a link to a ChinaObserver report on the recent Venezuela earthquake. We have to be careful with China Observer reports as they aren’t too complimentary about the glorious Chinese Communist Party. However, although these reports show (IMHO) an obvious anti-communist political bias, they tend to be well-founded in the truth.
The China Observer report suggests that many of the thousands killed in the recent Venezuela earthquake died because they lived or worked in tofu-dreg buildings constructed by Chinese companies. There’s even a scene quite early on in the China Observer report which shows a rescue worker horrified to find what should have been a solid concrete beam or pillar was actually just a shell of concrete suffed with styrofoam. For readers who, like myself, don’t have an engineering background, styrofoam is great for packing fragile items you want to send through the post or by a courier company but is not generally a recommended construction material for high-rise buildings. And, of course, if a concrete pillar or beam is hollow or else stuffed with styrofoam or some other rubbish, it won’t have the necessary ‘rebars’ – reinforcing steel bars.
As the British mainstream media could seem to have adopted a ‘don’t-upset-the-Chinese’ policy, I rather doubt whether any of our ‘intrepid’ investigative journalists will be covering this deadly scandal. I wrote this blog early on Sunday morning. In the Sunday Times I bought later that day, there was a long report about the bungling, incompetence and corruption of the Venezuelan authorities. The Sunday Times even tried to blame the Trump administration for the high death toll. But while the Sunday Times report did say that many of the collapsed buildings were built by Chinese, Russian and Belarus companies, the Sunday Times made no mention of the fact that the standard of construction might not have been totally world class.
Here’s the China Observer report. You only need to watch a few minutes to get the gist of the story:
In my last two blogs, I tried to highlight the economic catastrophe which is facing the European car industry, especially in Britain. For some reason, our economically-illiterate politicians seem blissfully unaware of the damage this is doing to the British economy and how this is devastating skilled, well-paid British jobs. Oh, maybe it’s because our rulers are economically-illiterate? Or maybe it’s because they believe cars are destroying the planet and that, in our future glorious 10-minute cities where we plebs will be incarcerated and forbidden from leaving, nobody, except the ruling elites, should have a car? Or maybe it’s because the elites have their well-paid, well-pensioned jobs for life and so couldn’t give toss about what happens to ordinary people?
Today, I’d like to go further by highlighting the collapse of UK manufacturing.
Here’s a chart of UK manufacturing as a percent of GDP:
And here’s a chart of the decline in the number of people employed in UK manufacturing:
And here’s a chart of China’s share of world manufacturing:
Surely even a politician or a mainstream media journalist can see what is happening?
There is no economic growth!
I’m not a brilliant economist like Britain’s greatest ever female Chancellor who famously worked in customer services for some bank or other up in Leeds. But I can do some simple arithmetic.
In the financial year 2025/6 Britain’s GDP was about £3.03 trillion. Britain’s greatest ever Prime Minister – Keir Starmer – and his economic genius Chancellor (or should that just be ‘Chancer’?) – Ms Reeves – claimed that with economic growth of about 1.3%, the UK was the ‘fastest growing economy in the G7’ or some nonsense like that. But during the financial year 2025/6 Britain borrowed and spaffed on massive public sector pay rises, millions of can’t-be-bothered-to-work skivers and an invading army of illegal immigrants a ‘mere’ £129 billion. This was equivalent to 4.2% of GDP.
Using my little pocket calculator (or even my fingers), I can work out that this means that, if Britain had not borrowed and spaffed 4.2% of GDP, then our real ‘growth’ would actually be minus 2.9% (4.2-1.3=2.9). This is NOT growth. This is a 2.9% fall in GDP.
Yet our politicians somehow believe (or claim to believe?) the British economy is growing.
God help us! We are governed by liars or idiots or lying idiots!
Oh, and here’s an AI video I had produced about Britain’s greatest ever female Chancellor:
In yesterday’s blog I tried to show the economically-catastrophic fall in car production in Germany, France and the UK. While various new outlets did carry the story about German car manufacturer VW planning to sack up to 100,000 of its 600,000 workforce, I haven’t seen any of our ‘wonderful, far-sighted’ politicians or ‘courageous, truthseeking’ journalists go into the true disaster facing Western economies due to the aggressive and even predatory rise of Chinese industry.
Anyway, here’s the other side of the coin from yesterday’s blog – the rise in the share of global car markets being achieved by Chinese manufacturers:
I can’t understand how Western rulers can look at charts like this and not understand the crisis facing our countries.
This just copies how the Chinese (usually helped by subsidies from the Chinese Communist Party) have invaded and taken over many other markets such as solar panels, electronics, wind turbines and much more. In fact, it’s difficult nowadays to find something which isn’t made in China. If we keep on following our rulers’ ludicrously economy-destroying, climate-catastrophist policies, it seems that much of the West will become an impoverished, de-industrialised theme park for our new masters – wealthy Chinese tourists.
You’ve probably heard the news. German car manufacturing giant – VW – are planning to reduce their workforce by around 100,000 from just over 600,000 to just over 500,000. One in six VW workers will lose their jobs. That is not a minor economic problem. That is not even an economic disaster. That is an economic catastrophe.
Let’s look at a few simple charts even someone as stupid as Mad Ed Miliband might be able to understand.
Here’s Germany’s car production from 2002 to 2022:
And here’s France’s car production from 2013 to 2024:
And here’s the UK’s car production from 1949 to 2025:
(The charts all have different dates as I used what was available on Google Images rather than trying to construct my own charts from the base data)
Am I the only person who can see a pattern here?
There seem to be three main reasons for the shocking collapse in Europe’s car manufacturing:
The idiotic Net Zero climate catastrophist policies of our rulers who are obsessed with ridding the world of fossil-fuel cars in order to supposedly ‘save the planet’ from supposed ‘Global Boiling’
The fact that China accounts for roughly 70% of global rare earth mining and an estimated 90% of global processing and refining capacity. China also holds about 49% of the world’s known rare earth reserves. So the Chinese can price the key and most expensive part of electric vehicles – the battery which needs rare earth metals – at such high prices that Western countries will never be able to compete with Chinese electric vehicles. This puts Western carmakers in an impossible situation. On the one hand our economically-illiterate rulers are demanding they sell ever more electric cars and on the other hand the Chinese Communist Party ensures that rare earths and batteries are priced so high that Chinese electric vehicles will always be able to undercut Western ones on price
China’s clear policy of wiping out most of Western car manufacturing by flooding the market with cheaper Chinese products
Given this economic catastrophe facing hundreds of thousands of workers in car manufacturing and the car manufacturing supply chain, what are our ‘brilliant’ rulers doing to protect well-paid, skilled jobs in the West?
After all, our rulers have overpaid jobs for life, almost unlimited expense accounts and massive guaranteed pensions. So why should they give a flying f**k over the fact that hundreds of thousands of Western car industry workers are having their lives ruined by our rulers’ policies?
On Wednesday this week, I wrote a blog about an incident I observed on Tuesday while I was doing a 7-mile walk along the local beach. A woman had apparently been pulled from the sea after what was described as ‘a medical incident’. I noticed that there were no fewer than two ambulances and one helicopter air ambulance present along with one police car containing two police officers. As time went on another police car containing two police officers arrived. Then about 15 minutes later a police van with three police arrived.
Given that the police are reportedly far too busy to turn up when homes are burgled or cars or phones are stolen – even when those cars or phones have tracking devices – I wondered how the police could possibly have the resources to send no fewer than seven plods to one beach medical emergency.
You’re not going to believe this, but I was doing the same 7-mile walk yesterday (Friday) and saw the same helicopter air ambulance landing in almost exactly the same spot. This time the situation was possibly more distressing. There are several places along the beach where there are small cable cars:
Apparently a distressed man had climbed onto the roof of the clifftop end of such a cable car track. There’s a cafe on the clifftop just nearby and someone had called the police. I’m told by a witness who had been drinking coffee with her husband that a police car had arrived and the two police officers had tried to convince the man to come down. But the man jumped and died from the fall.
I can understand that it would be necessary for a few police to attend such an incident. Maybe you’d need 2 to 3 to cordon off the area where the man jumped and to take witness statements and perhaps another 3 to 4 police to cordon off the area where the suicidalist landed. But I counted 12 police cars and vans. I know one car had 3 police while the others would have had at least 2 police each. That suggests there were over 20 police in attendance. While it is obviously necessary for police to attend such an incident, I did wonder whether more than 20 police officers were really necessary or whether some of them could have been doing something unusual for our police like catching criminals or trying to prevent crime.
Will we soon not need humans in TV programmes?
To cheer us all up, I attach below a recent YouTube video I found quite amusing. The people who made this video have made several others featuring the same character. I don’t know how long it took to make this video or how much it cost. But I imagine this could be done much faster and at a much lower cost than producing 2-3 minutes of TV using real people. Given the power of AI which allows people choose any person they want and to make that person say anything they want in that person’s real voice or to create any character they want in any scenes they want, I wonder how long it will be before we have whole TV programmes which don’t feature any real people. That will put an awful lot of actors, celebs, camera operators, sound recordists and others of their ilk out of a job:
In my Thursday blog I quoted a number of political party leaders demanding a General Election after the ruling Tories changed their party leader and thus our prime minister. These lying, blethering, self-serving, wothless, greedy, hypocritical scum ( sorry, of course I meant ‘these noble, self-sacrificing public servants‘) all stressed how important it was for our democracy that a change of prime minister should always lead to a General Election.
All the quotes I used yesterday came from an article on the BBC website in October 2022 just after Liz ‘lettuce’ Truss’s resignation as prime minister.
If you watch the BBC, you’ll have been bombarded by ‘ads’ by the BBC about how brilliant their BBC Verify operation is and you’ll have seen over and over and over and over again clips like the one below in which the BBC boasts of itself as a champion of the truth:
So, now that the BBC has verified quotes from the main party leaders about how important it was to defend democracy by having a General Election each time a party changes prime minister, will our courageous BBC truth warriors be asking our politicians – particularly Labour MPs and ministers – why they have suddenly changed their minds and no longer feel it is important to defend democracy by having an election when Starmer is replaced?
Please don’t hold your breath as I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for any injuries caused by this blog.
As I wrote yesterday, here’s the real reason our mainstream political party politicians are now somewhat less enthusiastic than before about defending democracy by having a General Election:
If there was a new General Election, I believe Labour would win but with a much reduced majority. However, there would be a massive increase in the number of seats won by Nigel Farage’s and Richard Tice’s Reform – possibly winning as many as 100 to 150 seats and replacing the Tories as the main opposition party. This would mean a large number of Labour, LibDem and Tory MPs losing their well-paid jobs, almost unlimited expense accounts and unbelievably generous pensions.
And that’s not something the main party leaders would want. So there will be no General Election and a political coup will give Britain’s most anti-British socialist government so much power to crush free speech, arrest its opponents and gerrymander the electoral system so that there may never be a British patriotic government ever again.
As for the UK-hating, lefty, truth-allergic BBC, don’t expect them to embarrass our rulers by asking them why they have lost interest in defending democracy when Labour changes leader and thus prime minister, when this was apparently so important when the Tories did it.
On 21 October 2022, after Liz Truss’s resignation as prime minister, the other parties howled about the need to defend democracy and demanded a General Election.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called for an immediate general election following the resignation of the prime minister. Sir Keir said the country “cannot have another experiment at the top of the Tory party“. Sir Keir said: “This is not just a soap opera at the top of the Tory party – it’s doing huge damage to the reputation of our country. We need a general election so the public can have their say on this utter chaos.”
The beloved ‘Sir’ Keir also claimed his party was ready for government: “There’s a manifesto that is going to be ready whenever an election is called,” Sir Keir told the BBC: “I’ve had a team working on that. I’ve had a team working on general election preparedness. We’ve moved our teams on to a general election footing. We’re very, very prepared should there be a general election.”
The Liberal Democrats, the SNP. Plaid Cymru and the Green Party also called for an immediate general election.
Scotland’s first minister – the Sturgeon creature who had no idea her husband was stealing over £400,000 from the SNP to buy amongst other things hair care products unusual for a bald man – said a UK general election is a “democratic imperative” following the resignation of the prime minister. “This is an almighty mess, and it is people the length and breadth of the UK who are paying the price of this,” she told the BBC “Fundamentally the UK now needs to have a democratic choice over its next prime minister.”
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “We do not need another Conservative prime minister lurching from crisis to crisis, we need a general election. It is time for Conservative MPs to do their patriotic duty, put the country first and give the people a say.”
But as Starmer fades into well-deserved obscurity while the Manchester Messiah continues his victorious march towards Number 10 Downing Street, suddenly, the other party leaders seem to have lost their enthusiasm for another General Election and their commitment to protecting democracy.
Why? If there was a new General Election, I believe Labour would win but with a much reduced majority. However, there would be a massive increase in the number of seats won by Nigel Farage’s and Richard Tice’s Reform – possibly winning as many as 100 to 150 seats. This would mean a large number of Labour, LibDem and Tory MPs losing their well-paid jobs and almost unlimited expense accounts.
And that’s not something the main party leaders would want. So there will be no General Election and a political coup will give Britain’s most anti-British socialist government so much power to crush free speech, arrest its opponents and gerrymander the electoral system so that there may never be a British patriotic government ever again.
This hypocrisy hopefully exposes our MPs for what they really are – selfish, greedy, lying, self-serving, grifting scum who would say and do anything just to cling on to their lousy jobs, bountiful expense accounts and massive pensions. Total garbage, all of them.
Why did ‘successful’ Sir Keir resign?
Apparently tearful knight of the realm – Two-Tier Keir – gave a blubbing resignation speech in which he tried to big up his many supposed ‘successes’. I didn’t watch it as the sooner that (IMHO) thin-skinned, free-speech-loathing, UK-hating, Davos-loving, migrant-hugging, Islamophiliac, lying empty suit of a man disappears from my life the better.
However, if Two-Tier was so ‘successful’ why did he feel the need to resign. It’s all very confusing!
Hopefully some readers have survived the kind of supposedly ‘deadly’ heat many of us spend thousands of pounds each year to travel to countries like Spain and Thailand to experience.
Useless workshy plods?
A few months ago I came across a man lying face down in the water on a Thailand beach. I got help (drowned people are very heavy) to pull him onto the beach and then we tried CPR. But he was already well and truly dead so there was nothing we could do:
Following that I consulted Professor Google and learnt that:
Permanent brain damage can begin in as little as four to six minutes without oxygen after the heart stops beating. Because the brain is highly dependent on a continuous supply of oxygenated blood, the timeline for damage advances rapidly as the deprivation continues after a heart stops
A person can generally be resuscitated for up to 10 minutes after their heart stops without sustaining severe, irreversible brain damage, assuming CPR is started immediately. Without CPR or defibrillation, survival drops sharply after 8 to 10 minutes
That brings me to a sad event at my local beach a couple of days ago. I was doing my usual 7-mile walk and noticed a rescue helicopter circling the beach three times before landing. As I got closer I saw a crowd of people grouped around a body while one person was frantically pumping away doing CPR. I estimated that about 4-5 minutes had passed since I noticed the helicopter ambulance. Given the time it would have taken for the rescue helicopter to reach the scene, it must have been more than 10 minutes since the person had been pulled from the sea. Getting even closer I saw there was one police car and a regular ambulance in addition to the rescue helicopter:
Apparently a woman had been pulled from the water and they were now trying to resusitate her.
I’m not normally a rubber-necking gawper. But having had the experience of trying to save a drowned man in Thailand, I hung around interested in how the situation would be handled.
At probably 10 minutes (so at least 15 minutes since the woman was pulled from the water) another ambulance and another police car arrived. Then at more than 15 minutes (perhaps 20 minutes since the drowning), a police van with no fewer than three of our useless local plods turned up. By then it would have been more than clear to the crews of the two ambulances already there, to the two cars of plods already there, to the lifeguards already there and to the crew of the rescue helicopter already there that the drowned woman was beyond rescue:
Quite what the three plods arriving on the scene so late hoped to achieve is a mystery to me. But the drowning seemed to attract quite a crowd of supposed ‘rescuers’.
Of course, when someone is in trouble, we must do our best to help them. But two ambulances, one rescue helicopter, three police vehicles with seven plods and several lifeguards seemed to me to be a bit of overkill. It seems extraordinary to me that, at a time when the police and NHS bleat and moan about not having enough money, they can devote so many resources to just one drowned person, especially when most of the ‘courageous’ rescuers arrived too late to be of any use anyway. Perhaps the NHS and plods aren’t quite as cash-strapped or even as ‘overwhelmed’ as they continually claim?
I’m afraid I was dumbstruck by two (IMHO) ghastly events last week:
Trump’s abject surrender to the Islamist murderers in the Iran conflict
the scale of the Manchester Messiah’s victory mainly due to the (IMHO) irredemiable stupidity of Makerfield’s (particularly female) voters.
Both these events will have massive consequences for our future.
Trump’s appeaasement of and capitulation to the Islamists
What to say? There is only one solution to the evils Iran’s Islamists inflict on the world – the replacement of the Islamist regime with a more psychologically-balanced government. From what little I understand, much of the Iranian population is reasonably well-educated and are not mouthfrothing anti-West fanatics slavering over the destruction of Israel and the Islamist conquest of the West. But for 47 years, Iran has been ruled by a bunch of murderous, unhinged religious zealots who have used the country’s massive wealth to foment attacks on Israel and terrorism around the world while impoverishing and brutally oppressing their own people.
Iran’s armed forces number over 800,000 while the IRGC have only about 125,000 troops. Moreover, there must be millions of Iranian men who have some military experience from having served in the armed forces. The US/Israeli attacks gave Iranians a once-in-a-lifetime chance the throw out the Islamists and install a government which prioritised the Iranian people. We had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have peace in the Middle East. The Iranian people chose to not seize that opportunity. The Islamists now know there is no effective opposition to their barbaric occupation of Iran. In fact, their resilience in the face of the US/Israeli attacks have probably strengthened the Islamists’ grip on power. So now we are faced with a humiliation of America and Israel and a MIddle East war which will continue for another half century or more.
What a disaster!
The Mancester Messiah’s Makerfield ‘triumph’
The votes have been counted. The result is clear. The Manchester Messiah – Andrew Burnham – took Makerfield with 54.8% of the vote and a majority of 9,231, on a turnout of 58.7%, the highest at any parliamentary by-election in almost seven years. Labour’s lead over Reform UK, 13 points at the general election, widened to 20. A seat Reform had swept only weeks before, taking all eight of its wards in the May locals on close to half the vote, delivered a thumping Labour win.
Of course, part of the Labour vote was comprised of people voting for the shape-shifting Burnham to get rid of the (IMHO) useless, lying, incompetent, UK-hating, Davos-adoring, UN-worshipping, migrant-hugging, two-tier Keir ‘stoma-bag’ Starmer. But the vote also suggests that, while a party like Reform may gain a large number of parliamentary seats in the next General Election, a supposedly ‘progressive’ alliance of Labour, LibDems and Greens are likely to form the next government and the government after that and the government after that ………
After all, Labour will change the electoral system before the next General Election by, for example, extending the vote to 16- and -17-year-olds and maybe replacing ‘first-past-the-post’, (assuming Labour even allow us another General Election) to ensure Reform never gets anywhere near power. Moreover, Labour will probably grant an amnesty to several million illegal, often uneducated, often unemployable, sometimes criminal, sometimes rape-obsessed Third-world migrants claiming that this will ‘help the economy’ or be ‘more fair’ or some suchlike nonsense, just as Spain has done. This will add several million more Labour voters to the electoral register and encourage millions more to make the totally safe journey across the English Channel to be ferried in comfort to four-star hotels in Britain by Britain’s useless Border Farce and the (IMHO) anti-British, UK-loathing RNLI.
Yippeee, even more Labour voters!
Just these two events have led me to think that last week was the week which I wish wasn’t.
David Craig, on July 6th, 2026
