This arises from an article that popped up in one of my feeds about ex-UK PM Liz Truss calling for the abolition of state-funded media, such as the BBC in the UK and PBS in the US.¹

She reportedly said “We need to be prepared to dismantle the left-wing bureaucracy. We need to be prepared to defund state media.”

I take her meaning to be that state media needs to be defunded because it propagates left-wing views. As I say in Truth, Lies Or Something Inbetween?, I have some sympathy with her view of state media being left-leaning, though I generally feel the BBC does a good job of political neutrality. The fact that politicians from the left also attack it for bias seems to support that.

And also with most of the media being privately owned by very rich people who use it to push right-wing views, having at least a few counterpoints to those views feels essential.

In effect, Truss is saying that she wants to restrict free speech when free speech is used to promote views she doesn’t agree with.

An interesting position to take when just a few months ago she complained that a banner of a lettuce with eyes was an attack on free speech.² That was clearly a ridiculous claim, but what should we expect from such a ridiculous person?

In fairness her equivocal views on free speech aren’t unusual and seem to be shared by far too many politicians across the whole political spectrum. Those on the left can be just as hypocritical as those on the right and vice versa.

It’s not just politicians either. So often cancel culture seems to be nothing more than an effort to punish people for saying things we don’t like. And, while the right love to claim cancel culture is exclusively a movement of snowflakes on the left, the reality is that the snowflakes on the right are every bit as sensitive. In Take Them, Not Me we look at the Dylan Mulvaney backlash after the right got so crazy upset about a woman’s face being printed on a can of beer.

While that last incident showed the hate and nastiness that be unleashed online, calls to defund state media to silence the voice of the centre or the left as Truss appears to believe is potentially much more dangerous.

Whoever controls the media controls the truth.

That sounds a bit crazy, but that’s how the world works. If every news source we watch, listen to and read tells us that individual A is a threat to our way of life, we’re going to believe that even if individual A is trying to protect our way of life. The truth has been established regardless. We go into this in more depth in What Is Truth? if you’re looking to kill more time.

We can see this in action by considering Putin’s war in Ukraine. His regime has near total control over media channels available to ordinary Russians. So, despite potentially hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians having been killed or maimed in a pointless conflict, the war still enjoys considerable support among the Russian people. That’s because the truth about the war that they hear is very different to the truth about the war that we hear. Ukraine is run by a new breed of Nazis, like those who invaded the Soviet Union in World War 2, and this war is essential to keeping Russia safe.

We can see the power of the media to bend truth in the West too. British newspapers refer to inheritance tax as being the most unpopular tax. A government survey found 56% of Britons want the tax to be abolished, despite the fact that only the wealthiest 4% of estates ever result in inheritance tax being paid.

Why should the majority of British people want to abolish a tax that only affects the wealthiest?

Because the media is owned by the wealthiest members of society and they use their media channels to persuade the people to oppose inheritance tax in the hope that the tax will be abolished and they will get to pass on all of their wealth.

The real truth is that hardly anyone pays inheritance tax, but the media presents a truth that inheritance tax is a bad tax that everyone should oppose.

This is why Truss and other politicians want to defund state media. Without it, their lies will be shared unchallenged. Presenting them with the power to convince the people to support things that are against their best interest. We see just such an example in No-one Really Cares About Immigration where we’re reminded of how the British people voted for something they were told would make them richer when just 4% of economists believed that was true and 88% actually said it would make the British people poorer.

So clearly restricting media channels to only those who share views from one side of the political spectrum is bad, but politicians like Truss know they have a powerful tool to persuade us support such a move anyway.

Money.

State-funded media is paid for by the people. Sometimes through taxes or, in the case of the BBC, through the licence fee. Though in practice that’s just another direct tax.

That’s why private media takes every opportunity to attack state-funded media, because they and politicians can then remind us how we’re the ones paying for it and our money is being used to pay for things that we should be angry about.

Make us angry enough and hopefully enough of us will support calls to abolish the media that we pay for without any choice.

Clearly, it’s tempting to be able to save a chunk of money, but the cost in lost freedoms in the future may be much greater.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/05/liz-truss-bbc-abc-state-media-left-australian-cpac-event-brisbane ↩︎
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrlx5yxr60o ↩︎

Well, they care about being able to live a comfortable life and that requires money.

With any policy that we rave or rant about, asking why questions will always eventually lead us to the root point where we reveal our belief that it will either make us richer or poorer. We may get there immediately or it may take many steps, but we will get there. Money is always at the root of everything.

And that applies to immigration just the same as any other political viewpoint.

It’s an easy one to test for yourself. The next time you hear someone complaining about immigration, ask them to join you in a little role-playing exercise.

You’re a crap genie.

You can only grant one wish and you only ever learned two wishes at Genie School: how to stop immigration and how to grant someone a million spondoolix while making them feel neutral about immigration forevermore.

Ask anyone who’s complaining about immigration to roleplay with you and I guarantee they’ll take the million spondoolix.

Okay, perhaps the most ardent of racists will take one for the team, but 99 point-something high per cent of people will take the money.

I bet we’d even see figures in the high 90s if we roleplayed anonymously at Ku Klux Klan conventions.

People complain about immigrants because they think immigrants make them poorer.

It’s the same mechanism that saw the British people vote for Brexit. Most of the media was promoting the leave message that the European Union was making the UK poorer than it would be on its own. If the same media had given prominent coverage to the Ipsos poll of economists that saw just 4% of experts say they thought the UK would be richer out of the EU while 88% thought the UK would be poorer, do you think the result would have been the same?¹

Turkeys may not be the brightest sparks of the avian world, but if they were given a vote on Christmas and Thanksgiving, even they’d be smart enough to vote against it.

The debate and arguments over immigration are simply another exercise by politicians to make us overlook the real reasons for so many members of our societies struggling to earn enough to live a comfortable life. Some more extreme politicians may make plainly racist statements, but most rely on pointing out how citizens’ tax money is being given to immigrants who have done nothing to earn it.

Yet our societies are topped by small subsets of people who are hoarding vast amounts of wealth that they struggle to make any practical use of while allowing the huge numbers of people at the bottom of society to struggle to afford to pay for just the basics of everyday life.

That won’t change if all immigration stops tomorrow. They’ll continue to hold all that wealth and use it to capture even more wealth, making the poorest even poorer at the same time.

It’s a stupid mess, but unfortunately we’ve only got a crap genie so if we want to sort this, we’re going to have to do something about it ourselves.

And the first step is getting clear about where the blame really lies.

1. You can read more about that poll in The Gun To Head Question Simulator ↩︎

In this case it’s him reporting that the way blocking works on X will be changing. Specifically, where it has been the case that if a user blocked an account, that account would not be able to view the user’s posts, but that is set to change.

Having read a few articles about this, I appreciate the worry that this is the thin end of the wedge. Musk appears to support the idea of removing most, if not all, aspects of blocking users in the interest of promoting an open discourse.

Perhaps not a great surprise as he strikes me as one of those shouty people who likes to say things without thinking them through and whether they really make sense (I’ve touched on this before in Does Elon Musk Really Think Mexicans Should Govern The US?).

Little more than a month ago, ex-UK PM Liz Truss walked off the stage after a banner displaying a lettuce and the words “I crashed the economy” unfurled behind her. She later accused those behind the prank of “trying to suppress free speech”.¹

Like Truss, I consider any attempts to suppress free speech as a worry, but I don’t agree that a lettuce banner counts as an attempt at suppressing free speech. It feels more like she was upset to be the butt of the joke, but if she doesn’t want to be laughed at, choosing to be a politician in a free and open democracy could have been her second worse decision ever.

If the banner had been a threat of violence against her or family members, or even just a photo of her home, I’d hope we all saw that as a genuine attempt at using threats to oppress her and try to scare her into silence. A google-eyed head of iceberg just doesn’t reach the bar for me though.

It’s understandable that some will see Musk’s change as a step towards making X a platform where some users’ free speech is more easily suppressed. And so they will react aggressively against Musk’s plan for fear that it’s actually one early step towards a much worse place. However, so far he’s only suggested this one change to how blocking works and is it really fair for us to complain about things that he may or may not do in the future?

And is what he’s suggesting really so bad?

I am sympathetic to the view that letting blocked users view content may empower those blocked users, but I’m also sympathetic to Musk’s view that blocked users can just register new accounts and use those to view that content.

To me it feels like much of the problem is our own overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

We all of us want our cake and want to eat it, while floating in an infinity pool on an inflatable arm chair that delivers a relaxing automated back massage as we quaff champagne and watch the sunset over the tropical horizon surrounded by the cast of the latest series of Love Island, their oiled naked bodies draped provocatively over the poolside furniture.

And that sense of entitlement is fueled by articles telling us that it’s unreasonable for blocked users to be able to view our content.

In the UK there’s a crime of indecent exposure. If I found myself in court having walked naked through a busy town, would it be a reasonable defence to point out that the whole time I was calling out “do not look at my schlong” through a loud hailer?

Would that be so very different from posting personal information on the web and trying to insist that some web users don’t look at it?

If there are things about us and our lives and our thoughts that we don’t want some people to know, surely posting those things online has to count as an act of rank stupidity.

Am I really being outrageously unreasonable if I suggest that perhaps sometimes a round-robin email or a private WhatsApp group might be a more appropriate channel for some content?

And am I really being outrageously unreasonable if I suggest that sometimes we need to take a bit of personal responsibility?

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-lettuce-banner-prank-video-b2596045.html ↩︎

So, the first article I read focused solely on the panellist Scott Jennings calling out antisemitism as a problem of the left. The article linked above describes the debate as between three panellists and the host claiming that antisemitism is more of a problem of the right than of the left.

That’s representative of an issue that affects all of us when we look at a wide range of subjects affecting our societies today.

We don’t see the subject as a problem, we see it as an opportunity. A weapon that we can use to attack those that don’t agree with us.

We can’t say that antisemitism is a problem of the left in the same way we can’t say it’s a problem of the right. It’s an odd problem that bridges the political divide.

Our views on individualism and collectivism can stand completely independent of our views on the Jewish people. Capitalists and communists, and any political dogma in between, can spawn hatred of Jews.

Claiming that it’s exclusive to or a greater problem in just one part of the political spectrum ignores the real problem.

And if we can’t see and understand the real problem, we’re never going to be able to find the real solution.

Assuming that we’re even looking for the solution. Why solve a problem that presents us with so many opportunities to attack those we disagree with?

Because in our brave new world attacking our opponents is much more important than working with them to find a real solution to problems like antisemitism.

This conflict is clearly very emotive and the chances are that your response to the claims of that research will vary depending on your views of the war.

Those who consider the Israeli response warranted in view of the attack by Hamas on 7 October last year will likely see this as confirmation of unfair bias within the BBC.

At the same time, those who consider the Israeli response disproportionate will likely consider the report’s authors to be biased and presenting results that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

We like things to be black and white, so it’s understandable that most people will default to one of those responses.

However, it’s possible for the report to be both right and wrong. We could support Israel’s actions and still see parts of the report as biased and unfair, and we could also oppose Israel’s actions and see parts of the report as impartial and fair.

Unfortunately, that is an attitude that doesn’t sit easily with today’s polarised and partisan world. Let’s try to be above that ourselves and consider a few of the claims made by the report. I’ve not read the full report, so this is just based on third-party reporting and isn’t going to cover every aspect of the claims made.

A Terrorist Is A Terrorist

One big claim is that the BBC failed to classify Hamas as a terrorist organisation repeatedly. Apparently, at the end of October, the BBC said they would describe Hamas as a “proscribed terrorist organisation”. Yet, it’s claimed that of 12,459 references to Hamas, just 409 referenced them as terrorists.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable of the report to state that using that phrasing just 3.2% of the time seems rarer than it should be. Obviously, there is the issue of repetition. If Hamas is called a terrorist organisation at the start of a 90-second report, we can’t really expect the word terrorist to then be repeated every time the reporter says “Hamas”. Regardless of that though, I agree that it sounds like the BBC’s reporting has underplayed Hamas’ terrorist designation.

The old saying “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” may explain some reticence in calling Hamas terrorists, but if that is the case, it’s utter bull-sheep.

A terrorist is a terrorist.

Regardless of the merit or otherwise of their aims, there should be no excuse for acts of terrorism.

The acts carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023 were pure evil and are indefensible. Acts carried out by the terrorist members of a terrorist organisation and the BBC should always be absolutely clear in specifying Hamas and their members as such.

Biased Journalists

Another worrying complaint of the report is the claim that the BBC has used a number of reporters who have publicly exhibited clear hostility to Israel.

Clearly the use of a journalist who’s on the record calling for “death to Israel” is beyond regrettable. We’re reliant on journalists to provide objective reporting and while we should expect every journalist to have their own biases, we should also expect them to do their best to counter those to provide neutral reporting. Can we really expect that from someone who publicly expresses such hatred for Israel? Of course we can’t.

Some of the other complaints seem more groundless. For example, the report takes umbrage at Jeremy Bowen for comparing Israel to Russia. Considering civilians in Gaza have been killed at a much higher rate than civilians in Ukraine, I’m unclear personally why that’s an unreasonable comparison.

It’s also important to note that Israel has largely blocked access to Gaza for foreign journalists, other than limited trips escorted by the Israeli military. In that context, media organisations like the BBC have to rely on Palestinian journalists and citizen journalists already in Gaza. It seems unreasonable to then complain about the use of biased journalists when the BBC’s hand in this respect has been forced by Israel’s decisions.

Surely the Palestinians have the right to have their story reported, don’t they?

Unbalanced Reporting

The last complaint we’ll consider is that the BBC was guilty of unbalanced reporting.

For example, during the period studied, Israel was associated with the terms “war crimes”, “genocide” and “breach of international law” 127 times, 283 times and 167 times respectively. In comparison, Hamas were associated with those terms 30 times, 19 times and 27 times respectively.

Taking that at face value, those stats seem quite damning. Yet there’s a way to rationalise what initially seems to indicate a strong bias.

The BBC’s news channels are news channels, not history channels.

Other than the 7 October attack, Hamas was basically in a defensive position throughout the four months the report studied. For a few days after the Hamas attack on Israel, that would have been the main story with the focus very much on the barbaric actions their terrorist members carried out that day.

From that point on, for much of the rest of the four-month period, Israel’s actions would have been the primary focus of the news reporting.

In that context, it seems logical that the frequency of references to Israel and Hamas would have been different as Hamas’ attack would have been the main focus for perhaps a week and Israel’s attack would then have been the main focus for the remaining 12 weeks.

That may or may not be the explanation for the claimed imbalance, but does it not seem plausible?

Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t

In a polarised world, just about anything seems able to provoke strong and intense emotions, but few things can compare to war in that regard.

It’s always going to be difficult for any news organisation to present their reporting in a way that everyone considers fair and neutral.

The report referenced above isn’t the only claim of bias against the BBC. Eight BBC journalists have previously accused the broadcaster of being biased towards Israel.²

Two groups with opposing viewpoints have considered the same body of evidence and reached completely opposing conclusions.

Bias is part of the human condition. We’re all vulnerable to it. The authors of the report and the journalists who wrote the letter have their own biases that formed their conclusions.

All of us who read the report and the letter also have our biases. It’s essential we never forget that and always try to understand how that influences our thinking.

I’ve tried that here and yet I know many will consider this post biased.

Oh well.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240908231126/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/07/bbc-breached-guidelines-more-1500-times-israel-hamas-war/ ↩︎
2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-gaza-bbc-journalists-accuse-broadcaster-of-bias ↩︎

Among others, I’ve seen an article in which an MP says they believe Letby is probably innocent of the murders. It’s not all one-way traffic though, as I’ve seen another in which the commentator says she’s definitely guilty because she was subject to an extensive trial before a jury of her peers passed their judgement.

If I had to side with just one of those points of view, it would have to be the latter. The UK has a legal system in which representatives of the people hear the evidence and make a decision on guilt. That’s what happened and the decision of the jury should be respected.

That doesn’t mean I’m confident Letby is guilty though. Or innocent either.

For me, the problem in this case isn’t unique to this case. The UK has an adversarial legal system in which a judge is positioned as the referee to ensure fair play by both the prosecution and the defence.

The prosecution’s job is to convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.

The defence’s job is to demonstrate that there is reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt.

So whose job is it to find the truth?

Shouldn’t that be more important than convincing 12 people of guilt or innocence?

Yet no-one has that role.

Which removes an important responsibility that surely everyone involved in the case should have. Particularly in a case so emotive as the Letby case. It would be easy to understand how anyone involved in the prosecution, and even the defence, could lose their objectivity. If convinced of guilt, then confirmation bias will mean evidence that supports that view will dominate and have greater strength than anything that may run counter to that view.

Those raising doubts about the conviction are highlighting several areas of concern, including the fact that the notes presented as confessions were written on the instructions of mental health professionals and that statistics had been misunderstood.

That raises the question of why these issues weren’t better confronted by the defence.

For me though, the biggest worry about the case is the claim that the truth was actively suppressed.

At least two nurses that worked with Letby claim they were told by their bosses not to talk about the case.¹ A registrar makes the same claim too. More concerning is the belief of one of those nurses that Letby was used as a scapegoat for bad practices on the ward where the deaths occurred.

Whether Letby is guilty or innocent, suppressing any source of information that can better help uncover the truth doesn’t serve the best interests of the victims.

In a case like this where the most vulnerable were made the victims, the desire to punish someone is always going to be overwhelming for many. If the full truth hasn’t been sought, it’s understandable that if only one possible perpetrator is presented then many will want them to be punished because surely someone has to be.

And shouldn’t it worry everyone that the desire to punish someone rather than uncover the truth could potentially have created one more innocent victim?

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240830131425/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/20/claim-nhs-hospital-told-nurse-dont-give-evidence-lucy-letby/ ↩︎

So someone could be considered to be very intelligent in one regard, but surprisingly dim in another.

Today a story popped up in my feed about Elon Musk commenting on a tweet to say it was an “interesting observation”.² We’ll circle back to the point above and relate it to Musk at the end, but first to set the scene.

The text of the original tweet was:

‘People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it. Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘”is this true?” filter. This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.‘

If we just consider the logic, we can see how it will kinda make sense to some people. The claim is that only strong and powerful males can think freely because they won’t feel intimidated into blindly following groupthink.

Throw in psychological effects like the bandwagon effect and group polarization and we can probably put together a sufficiently satisfying pseudo-scientific explanation to support it.

Especially if we throw in a dash of research that shows increased testosterone levels correlate with higher fluid intelligence levels in men.³ We’ll ignore inconvenient factors like the advantage is lost at very high levels of testosterone (the highest of all the high Ts) and that crystallized intelligence is arguably more relevant to the kind of thinking required to govern a society, democratic or otherwise.

Pure Junk

It’s junk though.

It supposes that the biggest problem facing free thought is the beliefs of others when the reality is that our own pre-existing beliefs are a much greater barrier to effective free thought. I’m going to meander a little before getting to this point.

The writer of the tweet believes that fear of not agreeing with the group stops women and low T men from from asking “is this true”.

For that to be the case, society would have to have achieved a single consensus on everything. But society is divided, and across a broad range of subjects. How can these women and low T men know which group their thoughts need to align with?

They can’t without first working out which group’s beliefs align with theirs. Granted, once they have found their group, they may then moderate their opinions for the sake of harmony. With so many different groups with differing opinions, though, they can always move on if they find their thoughts are being constrained within one group.

Even if that wasn’t the case, the barrier to all of us asking “is this true” is ourselves.

Bertrand Russell said something like “What men seek is not knowledge but certainty.” I ramble rather more on this in the The Lies That Divide Us chapter, but in short, we want to be right more than we want to know the truth. Making us a soft touch for confirmation bias.

So it’s all very well claiming that a high T will ask “is this true”, but that doesn’t mean they’re equipped to answer correctly. When a high T, like all of us, assesses the truth of something, they’re assessing it in the context of their existing biases.

If I believe high T men are superior to other men and women, I’ll see a tweet suggesting that only high T men should govern in a democracy and think “interesting observation”.

If I believe high T men are just as susceptible to confirmation bias as other men and women, I’ll see a tweet suggesting that only high T men should govern in a democracy and think “for ducks sack”.

Of course, no high T is going to change their views towards the concept of high T males running society based on that, so let’s just poop on the buffet instead.

Blacks To Rule The UK, Mexicans To Govern The US

Clearly I’m not a fan of this idea of high T governed democracy, but perhaps the problem is I’m a low T male and I’m unable to ask “is this true”.

Add in my inability to counter my own confirmation bias and suddenly my arguments fall apart.

An awkward position to be in.

I have to instead accept the premise presented and agree that the writer of the tweet is correct that only high T alpha males should govern us.

So what would that look like?

Almost certainly not how the writer imagined.

Apparently Mexican-American men have the highest testosterone levels.⁴

I imagine that may come as a bit of a surprise to the tweet’s writer. Well, we can’t fight against the truth, can we? As the writer so eloquently explained to us, the rest of us are too weak to think for ourselves and so we have to accept that only the high T males can govern us.

So, the new US government should be made up solely of Mexican-American men. The good news is that with some 37 million Americans of Mexican descent, if half are men and we make a guess at the number of children, we’ve got around 14 million new US leaders available to make democratic decisions on behalf of all Americans.

The number of Mexican-Americans in the UK is rather lower. There were about 9,000 Mexicans living in the UK in 2011, but stats specifically for Mexican-Americans aren’t so forthcoming. I’m guessing it will be fewer again, so could be quite the political elite.

Not to worry though, because I have even more good news for the tweet’s writer.

It turns out that black men have higher testosterone levels than white men too.⁵

Hallelujah and praise be to the sweet baby beavers!

Looks like there could be a way back into government for Kwasi Kwarteng after all. Who among us can honestly say we saw that coming?

Another study found black men had higher testosterone than Hispanic men too, but that’s a less specific group than Mexican-Americans, so for now I’m afraid the black men will just have to be satisfied with governing the British.⁶

And so we circle back to the beginning.

Elon Musk is clearly a hugely intelligent person. He’s probably going to be the force behind putting a human onto another planet for the first time. If it happens, it will arguably be the greatest achievement in human history.

He’s also intelligent in seeing the value in controlling a global communication channel like X may be much greater than the financial figures suggest.

But ultimately, he’s got exactly the same potential as the rest of us to think like a dick.

Interesting observation?

1. https://forduckssack.com/book/an-embarrassment-of-riches-so-why-arent-they-embarrassed/one-law-for-us-one-law-for-them/#long-live-the-king ↩︎
2. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-andrew-tate-4chan-x-twitter-high-status-males-b2606622.html ↩︎
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13442754_The_Curvelinear_Correlations_Between_the_Total_Testosterone_Levels_and_Fluid_Intelligence_in_Men_and_Women ↩︎
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3850289/#:~:text=Unexpectedly%2C%20Mexican-American%20men%20had,the%20time%20of%20prostate%20maturation. ↩︎
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4327897/#:~:text=After%20adjustment%20for%20age%2C%20black,testosterone%20level%20than%20white%20men. ↩︎

In 2018, Starbucks did a big virtue signal over how it would stop using plastic straws in their attempt to help save the planet from the effects of climate change.

Seems a bit at odds with their new CEO using a private jet to get to the office, doesn’t it?

Anyway, there have been plenty of people pointing out the hypocrisy, so let’s consider a different angle.

Last year Dylan Mulvaney took a swig of Bud Light. The backlash was immense to the point that the parent company’s stock fell by 20% in value within a couple of months. That the result of Budweiser customers coming together to boycott the business in response for them having the nerve to use a transgender person to promote their beer.

So people got upset about someone wearing a dress drinking beer to the extent that they stood up and turned their back on a the company behind it.

We don’t seem to see a similar response to the fact that Starbucks are paying lip service to combating climate change.

Maybe if he wore a dress during his commute and insisted on the pilots addressing him as Briana, we might see people get a bit upset and start holding Starbucks to account.

This article comes from GB News, a right-leaning channel in the UK. Very much a pro-Brexit channel.

The article is at https://www.gbnews.com/news/britain-trade-deal-brexit-peru, though you may find it behind a paywall. To quickly summarise, it explains how the UK has been granted access to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which is a trading bloc of Asian and Pacific-rim nations. It consists of the following 11 nations currently: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

The article proudly announces that the CPTPP has a collective population of 590 million people, which they specify as 31% more than the EU trading bloc that the UK left following Brexit.

That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? More potential people to sell to means it’s a great triumph surely and vindicates leaving the EU.

Not necessarily. Time for some common sense.

Let’s ignore the fact that someone in the UK could drive a van to deliver to a customer in the EU without needing to load up on a boat or plane if they wanted. While it would be possible to drive to Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore without requiring a boat or plane, it’s a much greater distance to travel. And that’s one immediate downside to joining a trading bloc on the other side of the world. The logistics of delivering physical goods is much more complex, with the additional downside of increased emissions contributing to global warming.

Anyway, let’s focus on the side of the story GB News hasn’t shared.

While the CPTPP has a larger population than the EU, that’s not the most important figure. What’s more important is how much money the bloc has. According to Wikipedia, the combined GDP of the 11 nations is about US$13.5 trillion or just over £10 trillion.¹

The combined GDP of the EU is estimated at US$19.35 trillion or £14.67 trillion.²

So despite the new trading bloc being larger in terms of people, the economy is rather smaller than the EU. In fact, the EU economy is almost 45% larger.

And if we consider the GDP per capita, the EU has a figure of about £32,294 vs some £17,288.

So the GDP per capita of the EU is more that 86% higher than the CPTPP. That means that every potential customer in the EU has 86% more money to spend on average than a potential customer in the CPTPP.

Even disregarding the increased costs and complexities of delivering goods to the other side of the world, when you look at the important figures rather than the pretty ones, does the deal still look like a great improvement over what the UK had with the EU?

Or does it look like GB News was applying lipstick to a pig?

If the latter, why do you think that happened?

It is possible that the person who wrote it just isn’t very bright and didn’t have the smarts to think it through more than superficially.

However, it’s also possible that the channel’s biases are responsible and being a pro-Brexit business, they chose to use figures that made a backward step in terms of trade look like a step forward instead.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_and_Progressive_Agreement_for_Trans-Pacific_Partnership ↩︎
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union ↩︎