Chase on the Case

  This article was first published in Propel Opinion in 2018. Still relevant today. Legalisation in Canada has only resulted in about 30% of cannabis used in Canada being purchased in the licit market - emphasising the point in the article below that it's important to get the model of legalisation right. SHOULD WE LEGALISE CANNABIS? The issue of legalising cannabis has been in the news in recent weeks. It began with a heart-rending story about a small boy who was having up to 50 epileptic seizures a day and his mother’s wish for him to receive medicinal cannabis oil, which relieved his symptoms. The Home Secretary then obliged with a temporary licence, but made it clear there were no intentions to legalise cannabis for recreational use. The only mainstream political party in the UK which supports the creation of a legal, licensed market for recreational cannabis is the Liberal Democrats, but pressure for change is increasing because Canada has now legalised cannabis and nine US...

  ALCOHOL AND CANCER – AGAIN! The article below, written by me, was first published in Propel Opinion in 2017. Just recently the Alcohol Health Alliance has reproduced the same old scare stories about alcohol and cancer - and you can see this referenced on Twitter. Here's the antidote to all this neo-prohibitionist propaganda - do have a read! Barely a day goes by without some new ‘threat’ to our health being announced by epidemiologists or other health campaigners. For these people, the meaning of life appears to be the elimination of anything enjoyable in order to achieve maximum longevity. Key to this is the elimination of ‘risk-factors’ from our diet and our lifestyles. The key technique used to frighten us all into abstinence is to concentrate on cancer risks. Here an old trick is used: take a very small baseline risk and then measure the increase to that risk that arises if you engage in ‘heavy’ drinking. The effect of this is to give prominence and publicity to very larg...

IS SEXUAL ORIENTATION A SPECTRUM? Peter Tatchell thinks so! In an article published in 2016, and in subsequent talks he has delivered, he has argued “The future is bisexual – get over it!” The gist of Tatchell’s argument is that there is a spectrum at one end of which are people who are 100 percent straight, at the other end people who are 100 percent gay, but “most of us are somewhere in between.” In other words, sexual orientation is not a simple binary of gay/straight or even three fixed orientations - gay, straight and bisexual. The notion that sexual orientation is a spectrum is tempting for gay activists who need to pump up the volume in order to get politicians to support reform. It enables them to make statements referencing YouGov polls that have shown 23% of the population don’t identify as exclusively gay or straight – so we’re a big minority and a big voting block.   As a gay man who came out over 50 years ago, I initially accepted this narrative, but now I really don...

  MORE GENDER WOO-HOO On the 17 March 2023, hospitality blogsite Propelinfo.com published an article titled: ‘Busting transgender myths’ by James Manning and ‘trans woman’ Gaynor (formerly Geoffrey) Mary Warren-Wright. This article follows a format of ‘myths and answers’, a format that is similar to that used in an article I wrote on transgender myths for Propel, titled ‘Enough is enough’ that was published in January, and which caused an outpouring of faux outrage from the Trans Lobby. Below are extracts from Manning and Warren-Wright’s article, and my responses to them are given in italics: “MYTH:  Being transgender is a new phenomenon. Transgender and non-binary people have been around for centuries in culture and history. However, the terms “transgender” and “non-binary” are relatively new terms for them.” Response: This is a classic example of the historical revisionism used by the Trans Lobby. There have indeed been people who are gender non-conforming “around ...

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...