Chase on the Case

On January 6th this year I wrote an opinion piece for hospitality sector website  Propelhospitality.com . This was titled ‘Enough is Enough’ and was a critique of gender ideology and the implications for hospitality premises of gender self-ID. In that piece – ‘ How I Got Cancelled by the Gender Borg For Daring to Criticise its Ideology ’ – you can read a full account of what then happened to me as a consequence. The furore created by daring to suggest that sex is binary and immutable caused my publisher’s commercial sponsors to threaten to withdraw their funding. As a result, the publisher parted company with me and publicly apologised for publishing my article. Over the following week I was denounced as transphobic by two pub companies and by the leaders of all three of the hospitality sector’s trade bodies. And it got worse. On January 13th Propelhospitality.com published no less than three articles taking aim at my opinion piece and denouncing me. I had been cancelled! But s...

This cartoon sums up the problem with changing gender dysphoria from a clinical issue into a social justice issue - the genuine, heart-breaking concerns of unhappy people get hijacked by those with a much wider political agenda.

  Inflation stalks the land like an economic plague that is eroding the value of earnings and savings and raising the cost of doing business. When people from our sector ask me “Well, what’s the answer?” I always reply, “That depends on what you think the question is.” Before we can cure the malady of inflation, we need to understand its causes and it is my contention that the Bank of England does not understand the root cause of inflation, which is their own mismanagement of monetary demand. Instead, they blame cost-push price rises from abroad which provide handy excuses for their own failures and those of their political masters.   The cost of dealing with Covid, which included but was by no means limited to the cost of lockdowns, couldn’t be financed from Treasury tax receipts so the Bank of England financed the government’s spending by quantitative easing (QE). QE is a form of money printing that involves the BoE creating money digitally out of nothing and using it to...

  I wrote the article below in March 2021 and everything I predicted in relation to inflation in 2022-23 has come true. Do have a read! This is not an easy time to be in government. “Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t” is the ineluctable dilemma for the Chancellor trying to navigate the public finances as we emerge from the pandemic and survey the economic fallout. This article is not an attempt to analyse the measures the Chancellor has adopted – although I obviously welcome the help he has provided to the hospitality industry and its related sectors. Rather, I want to offer a brief thought-piece on where this leads us. Firstly, let’s look at debt and deficit. The TV and newspaper pundits have been busy telling us that the debt the government has incurred to support people and businesses during the pandemic will all have to be paid back, that higher tax will be needed to “pay back the borrowing sooner or later”. This is economic nonsense and a missed opportunity by the M...