Links 67: UK cast adrift in an open boat

The UK has made a shameful drug deal with the USA, which is greatly to our disadvantage:

Cost of UK’s drug price deal with US will come out of NHS budget

The cost of the government’s drug pricing deal with the Trump administration will come out of the NHS budget instead of the Treasury’s and could eventually reach £9bn a year, campaigners fear.

Patrick Vallance, the science minister, has confirmed that the costs – initially an extra £1bn over three years– will be borne by the Department of Health and Social Care, which funds the NHS in England, and not the Treasury.

The Lib Dems have criticised the agreement as a Trump shakedown of the NHS and “just a desperate ploy to placate Trump” by the prime minister, Keir Starmer.

The government has agreed as part of the deal to double the UK’s spending on all drugs by 2035 from 0.3% to 0.6% of GDP but has not given any figures as to how much that will cost.

The BMJ has more details:

Health costs of the UK-US trade deal on pharmaceuticals

This deal commits government to increasing expenditure on new medicines from 0.3% to at least 0.6% of GDP in 2036, with interim targets for expenditure of 0.35% of GDP in 2028 and 0.4% of GDP in 2030.7 Assuming these targets are met and using the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s (OBRs) long term forecast of real GDP growth (1.5%), the additional annual costs to the English NHS will be at least £1.3bn in 2028, and £8.8bn in 2036.

The cumulative additional cost will be £2.6bn by the end of 2028 and £44.7bn by the end of 2036.

The extra costs are projected to kill 291,000 people:

Figure 2 shows that even if we restrict attention to the direct effect of reductions in available NHS expenditure, by 2036 this deal is likely to result in roughly 229 000 excess deaths —more than during the covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and June 2022 (137 000). If the indirect effect on adult social care is also included, the increase in excess deaths is even greater (291 000).

The BMJ article includes graphs for costs:

And deaths:

Regarding the shameful drug deal story I’ve linked to above, Arthur Assendune writes:

UK finding out the hard way...

With this cartoon:

Arthur is right. It is shameful and contemptible that UK governments have since 1945 turned away from power, deliberately not caring whether Britain is a powerful country.

As I wrote on Twitter/X:

The reason UK [has signed the very bad drug deal with the USA] is because of threats Trump made to (1) leave NATO and not defend UK, and (2) to rip up the (very one-sided) UK-US trade agreement. Essentially USA is stronger than UK and are using their strength to extort us.

So, how do we fix this? By becoming more powerful: militarily, economically and diplomatically.

Militarily: increase defence spending, more nukes and drones.

Militarily / economically / diplomatically: create a new alliance with European and non-European countries that can stand up to any threat: European Defence Policy: how Europe could rule the world.

The European Union did have a very sensible proposal to replace the “do you want cookies” popups on websites with an automated signal from the user’s web browser to the website, which would have to be respected.

The Council of the European Union (i.e. the national governments) had now backed down on this, due to pressure from Google:

The EU Council’s latest position paper, published on 18 June 2026, has removed from the Digital Omnibus the one provision that would have replaced cookie consent banners with an automated browser signal - after intense industry lobbying in which Google played a central role. The European Parliament, which has not yet taken a position on the measure, now holds the only vote that could restore it.

Another reason for Europe to gain digital sovereignty, i.e. complete control of its computing and communications infrastructure.

Warfronts says UK Defense Spending is a Joke:

I would go further. The entire UK ruling class is a joke. Just not a very funny one.

The Sun reports:

WOKE civil servants boosted diversity at the Treasury by axing a maths exam for candidates.

The Treasury [...] launched a recruitment drive in 2019 under the then Tory Government. When Whitehall later complained of “extremely high benchmarks”, the Treasury also dropped verbal reasoning exams. Bosses replaced it with a “Civil Service Strengths Test”, which asked candidates whether they “prefer not to have to concentrate on one thing for too long”.

The Treasury admitted: “The Numerical Reasoning Test was removed due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity.

Obviously it is far more important that top civil servants have dark skin than they are able to read, think, and do maths.

The Canary reports:

The Canary has been debanked by Lloyds. Despite banking with them for almost a decade they are currently withholding a substantial amount of our money. We are left with barely any funds.

Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action. Despite multiple communications from us, the bank has not been forthcoming with its reasoning.

The Canary is now in a financially precarious situation. We do not know when our money that Lloyds is holding will be returned. Moreover, we do not know how it will affect our ability to get another bank account in the future.

Banking services are necessary for any individual or organisation to take part in a modern society, so withdrawing them, except where the organisation has committed criminal behaviour, or something equally serious, should be illegal.

Where banks have the power to debank people, they can use that power to punish people for their political beliefs, which is what seems to have happened here. It’s also why Nigel Farage was debanked in 2023.

Giving banks this power makes them (and the ruling class in general, of which banks are a part) too powerful and is thus a threat to democracy. Debanking therefore needs to be seriously illegal, with any bank doing it being nationalised without compensation and its directors imprisoned for life.

I have discussed debanking previously in Should Visa have the power to shut down OnlyFans?.

Campaign group Oxford Stand Up To Racism, who campaign using the slogan “Refugees Welcome”, have launched a petition opposing government plans to house 1,250 asylum seekers in a camp on a former Ministry of Defence site near Bicester.

Oxford Stand Up To Racism is calling on residents and community groups across Oxfordshire and beyond to support the campaign, arguing the accommodation plan represents an attempt by the government to appear tough on immigration in response to the rise of Reform UK, rather than a genuine solution to the asylum backlog.

Ian McKendrick, vice-chair of the group, said the plan was “inhumane” and represented “a desperate bid to win votes, and to divert people’s anger away from the government’s failure to address the decades of cuts and austerity the majority of people have had to endure.”

McKendrick placed the proposal in the context of a wider pattern of far-right activity targeting asylum accommodation over the past two years, including protests, some violent, outside hotels housing asylum seekers and a similar camp near Crowborough. “Isolating asylum seekers in basic accommodation far from amenities will benefit no-one but a government cynically exploiting people’s fears about immigration,” he said. “It will give the far-right and racists yet another target for intimidation.”

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The government has banned asylum seekers from being housed near schools:

Shabana Mahmood bans asylum seekers from being housed near schools and nurseries

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has introduced new rules banning asylum seekers from being housed in new-build homes or near schools and nurseries.

Why has the government banned them from near schools? Sexual offences:

The crackdown on migrants being housed near schools and nurseries comes amid a sharp rise in sexual offence convictions involving foreign nationals.

Ministry of Justice figures released last year showed sexual offence convictions involving foreign nationals had increased by 62 per cent over four years.

According to the figures, foreign nationals accounted for 14.1 per cent of sexual offence convictions, including rape, despite making up around 11 per cent of the population, according to the Migration Observatory.

If the government thinks asylum seekers disproportionately rape, then surely the correct policy is to allow in less of them. IMO the number of asylum seekers admitted to the UK every year should be whatever the government says it should be as decided in a referendum, and whatever number is admitted, preference should be given to:

• people who speak English

• highly intelligent/skilled/educated people

• those who have been persecuted for pro-British or pro-western political activism, not those persecuted for their ethnicity.

FIRE warns that the ‘papers, please’ era of the internet will decimate your privacy, as internet companies require proof of your identity in order to prove you’re over 16:

imagine [...] you’re criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you’re facing. Suddenly this “papers, please” approach to the internet sounds even more invasive, right?

Visegrad24 writes:

White people are being shut out of taxpayer-funded jobseeker schemes across the UK.

In Sheffield, a £340,000 project offering targeted employment support for ethnic minority groups is being funded through government-backed programs, including the Department for Work and Pensions’ Economic Inactivity Trailblazer and the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

In Greater Manchester, public funding has also been used for projects providing “culturally appropriate employability support,” including CV workshops and mentoring aimed at Black and minority ethnic communities.

Taxpayer-funded employment support should be available to all jobseekers regardless of race. The TaxPayers’ Alliance called the schemes “two-tier initiatives,” while campaign group Don’t Divide Us described them as a “race-based” and divisive approach.

It should be illegal to discriminate against indigenous Europeans in Britain, or indeed, anywhere in Europe. And anyone who does it, or advocates doing it, should be ineligible for citizenship of, or residency in, any European country.