... but, of course, it’s all just a consultation process with absolutely no set agenda.  Nothing to do with Davos, no no.  Perfectly sensible, really, when cash use is falling (actually it’s rising) and when the economy is digitising (even if Sterling fully meets that requirement already).  And, of course, expectations that the new currency will be, y’know, programmable are just conspiracy theories.  Naturally.  I mean, who would think that any freedom-loving, not at all totalitarian and globalist Western government could ever contemplate, oh, say freezing peoples’ bank accounts?

Here is the meat of the DT’s characteristically anodyne article:

‘Digital pound’ possible by 2030 in bid to combat falling use of cash
State-backed virtual currency ‘likely’ as Bank of England and Treasury back ‘Britcoin’ project

The Bank of England and Treasury will next week throw their weight behind a “digital pound” as they set out a roadmap to introduce a new central bank currency by 2030.

Andrew Bailey and Jeremy Hunt are expected to say it is “likely” that a new form of money will be needed as cash use continues to decline in an increasingly digital economy.

It is understood that any new state-backed digital currency – which has been dubbed “Britcoin” in the press - would sit alongside cash. However, the plans are likely to fuel fears that physical currency could one day be phased out altogether.

The decision by Mr Hunt and Mr Bailey to throw their weight behind the project comes almost two years after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set up a taskforce as Chancellor to explore whether to create a so-called central bank digital currency (CBDC).

“On the basis of our work to date, the Bank of England and HM Treasury judge that it is likely a digital pound will be needed in the future,” the Bank of England Governor and current Chancellor say in extracts of a consultation paper seen by The Telegraph.

“It is too early to commit to build the infrastructure for one, but we are convinced that further preparatory work is justified,” Mr Hunt and Mr Bailey will say ...

The Bank and Treasury will launch a four-month consultation in which businesses, academics and the wider public will be invited to share their views on the launch of a digital pound ...

Officials have identified 2025 as “the earliest” date the Bank could start building and testing a currency prototype. No decision on whether to go ahead with a CBDC is expected until then. The Bank has previously said that the earliest date for launch of a UK CBDC was “the second half of the decade”.

Other countries are already trialling national digital currencies, with China an early trailblazer. Trials of the digital renminbi first began in 2021.

Will it transpire that the British public - the real one, ethnically - will stand and fight government for its money and economic freedom, and for its ancient civil rights in a way it has signally failed to do for its own life and land?  Could be.

The following quotes are from an interesting (paywalled) article at the Telegraph, and speak to the impact of Putin’s failure in Ukraine and the resurgence of Western confidence.

China has extended the olive branch to Western democracies and global capitalists alike, promising a new era of detente after the coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last five years.

Vice-premier Liu He, the economic plenipotentiary of Xi Jinping’s China, told a gathering of business leaders and ministers in Davos that China is back inside the tent and eager to restore the money-making bonhomie of the golden years. 

“We must let the market play the fundamental role in the allocation of resources, and let the government play a better role. Some people say China will go for the planned economy. That’s by no means possible,” he said.

“All-round opening-up is the basis of state policy and the key driver of economic progress. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he told the World Economic Forum ...

It is a subtle way of telling the world that the neo-Maoist fever of Xi Jinping’s second term has subsided since the 20th Party Congress in October. Xi’s third term is going to be a giant pivot back to international harmony.

China is calling off its ruinous assault on technology companies – the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, but also the regime’s most powerful political foes ...

Vice-premier Liu He’s conciliatory pitch is also a signal that China will return to its longstanding position as a stakeholder of the existing Davosian global order rather than a revisionist power determined to overthrow it.

“We need to uphold an effective international economic order. We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said, pledging a push for “economic re-globalisation”. There was not a whiff of criticism of the US or the West. No speech of this kind has been delivered by a top Chinese leader for years ...

It goes well beyond the first signs of a tentative thaw at a US-China summit late last year, suggesting that China’s 20th Party Congress marked a watershed moment in Chinese strategic thinking. Whether it is authentic or tactical remains to be seen.

In a sense, the new policy is a recognition by the Communist Party that the democracies are not as weak as they looked a year or two ago. The West still controls the machinery of global finance, technology transfer, and maritime trade. The war in Ukraine has revealed that it can be remarkably unified and has a backbone of steel when seriously provoked.

Xi’s profession of friendship “without limits” for Vladimir Putin is surely an embarrassment he would rather forget – though there are some advantages for Beijing in a dependent Russia with nowhere else to turn. Russia’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger. Its value as an ally is enormously degraded.

Above all, Xi Jinping discovered that the US controls the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips, the primary fuel of the 21st century technological economy.

Without that you are nothing. China’s repeated efforts to close the chip gap have all faltered, and the latest has just been abandoned due to prohibitive costs ...

Deng Xiaoping long pursued a policy of “bide your time and hide your strength”. When Xi Jinping abandoned this restraint and switched suddenly to a posture of impatient menace he revealed what China might be like as the global hegemon.

This reached its apotheosis in pandemic triumphalism. It was not an attractive spectacle. Switching back even more suddenly to global happy talk will be a hard sell.

As to the Western feeling about Xi’s “impatience”, compare the above with the following boilerplate from the Daily Mail, published on 19th October last year:

Get ready for China ‘on steroids’: Xi Jinping will complete his totalitarian spy-state, take on the US and aim to break Western world order if he is given historic third term as leader, experts predict
● Xi Jinping set to become Chinese leader for third term this week, the first since Mao to rule for so long.
● Experts predict he will use term to complete ‘totalitarian’ spy-state using technology to repress all opposition.
● Xi will also take aggressive stance with the West and try to put China on equal footing with the US, they added.
● Ultimate aim is to break Western world order and establish another system with China at the centre, they said.

My immediate take on the change of strategy?  This pivot is almost certainly the result of Putin’s big gambit in Ukraine and the surprise of the West’s unified response to it, allied to the (for Beijing) straitening success of the Western economies in surviving Putin’s energy war.  Since the party’s 20th conference last October, when the threat to Taiwan was at its height, there appears to have been a decision that Putin has failed and there are costs to forging ahead with that “unlimited friendship” which a pragmatic Chinese leadership is unwilling to pay.  Probably at this time.  Probably because formal international support elsewhere for Putin is limited to Iran, North Korea and some fly-blown African place.  Support for Glazyev’s dollar reserve replacement is strong across the southern hemisphere, and probably now includes Lula’s Brazil in addition to Saudi.  But then the Western elites are not at all hostile to it, either.  Quite the contrary.  So Beijing is returning to geo-economics, because it is a stronger suite to play.  I don’t think that the Middle Kingdom goal has or will be dropped.  But the Chinese are good at patience.

Next week, as Breitbart has reminded us, the global movers and shakers will gather at Davos for the 53rd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.  One quite expects that green virtues will be signalled as never before.  But what was not expected was a very firm contrary statement yesterday from US Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell:

Central banks risk undermining independence by wading into social issues and seeking to tackle climate change, the head of the US Federal Reserve has warned.

Jerome Powell said it was essential that institutions “resist the temptation” to wade into “social issues” that go beyond their remit.

... Mr Powell singled out climate change as an “inappropriate” topic for unelected central bankers to address.

He told the audience in Stockholm: “We should stick to our knitting and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals.

“We [Federal Reserve] are not and we will not be a climate policymaker.

“Taking on new goals, however worthy, without a clear statutory mandated would undermine the case for our independence.”

Powell is a registered Republican, appointed in 2018 by Donald Trump.  But it is difficult to see Powell’s statement as motivated by anything but the strict fiduciary duty of a financial servant of the American people, and difficult to see strict fiduciary duty as in any way consonant with the new global order which the Washington Establishment and, indeed, the entire Western Establishment is striving to bring into being.  I would like to be able to link this new regard for staying on the financial reservation to the defence of Western national interests which informs support for Ukraine.  But I can’t see the link, and Western national interests are absolutely not on the globalist play-list.

So, a simple question: why is Powell moving away from the Davos agenda?

Finally, twenty months and 1.5 million migrants after the Census date last year, here is what the ONS has to say:

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On Census Day, the size of the usual resident population in England and Wales was 59,597,300.  The population of England was 56,489,800.  The population of Wales was 3,107,500.  This was the largest the population has ever been.

About the natives it has this to say:

In 2021, 81.7% (48.7 million) of usual residents in England and Wales identified their ethnic group within the high-level “White” category, a decrease from 86.0% (48.2 million) in the 2011 Census ...

Within the “White” ethnic group, 74.4% (44.4 million) of usual residents in England and Wales identified their ethnic group as “English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British”. This was a decrease from 80.5% (45.1 million) in 2011, and a continued decrease from 2001, when 87.5% (45.5 million) identified as “White: British”.

There was a decrease in the number of people identifying their ethnic group as “White: Irish”, from 531,000 (0.9%) in 2011 to 507,000 (0.9%) in 2021.

So according to the ONS, in the decade to March 2021we have declined by 700,000 or 1.55%.  We are 73.9% of the total population (my finger-in-the-air estimate, in the run-up to this release, was 72%, so naturally I am concluding that the Establishment is playing things down!).

On the colonising groups the ONS had this to say:

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•  The next most common high-level ethnic group was “Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh” accounting for 9.3% (5.5 million) of the overall population, this ethnic group also saw the largest percentage point increase from 2011, up from 7.5% (4.2 million people).

•  Across the 19 ethnic groups, the largest percentage point increase was seen in the number of people identifying through the “White: Other White” category (6.2%, 3.7 million in 2021, up from 4.4%, 2.5 million in 2011), this response option allows people to specify their ethnic group through writing it in; the increase may be partly explained by the new search-as-you-type functionality introduced for Census 2021, making it easier for people to self-define when completing the census online.

•  Large changes were also seen in the numbers of people identifying their ethnic group as “Other ethnic group: Any other ethnic group” (1.6%, 924,000 in 2021, up from 0.6%, 333,000 in 2011), and “Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African: African” (2.5%, 1.5 million in 2021, up from 1.8%, 990,000); both ethnic groups had the option to write in their response.

•  In England and Wales, 10.1% (2.5 million) of households consisted of members identifying with two or more different ethnic groups, an increase from 8.7% (2.0 million) in 2011.

In terms of significant milestones the Census reveals that “two-thirds of Londoners now identify as being from an ethnic minority, with just 36.8 per cent of people identifying as “white English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British”.  The natives are also now a minority in Birmingham, England’s second city.

A reminder of what the Oxford demographer David Coleman wrote in Standpoint Magazine in June 2016:

Even without migration … the White British population would cease to be the majority in the UK by the late 2060s. However, should current high levels of immigration persist for any length of time, that date would move closer to the present. Britain would then become unrecognisable to its present inhabitants. Some would welcome a brave new experiment, pioneering a wider world future. Others might say Finis Britanniae.

Posted at YouTube two days ago, this self-explanatory video from the Israeli start-up Redefine Food showcases yet another attempt by food technologists to help the new technocratic overlords demonise nitrogen, ban livestock farming, and buy up all the farmland to re-forest and re-wild.  This is brave, considering “industry leader” Beyond Meat is all set to be the next failure.  Last month it was reported that its “stock has tumbled 74% this year and a whopping 93% from its all-time closing high”.  Nobody wants to buy this stuff.  If money actually means anything to “investors” (and there is no immediate sign that it does), Redefine Meat should be printing its own bankruptcy notice quite soon.  I mean, just look at the gunk they expect you to consume!

Reports this morning from Melitopol, the “city of honey”, indicate that the Russian Army is fleeing in a disorganised fashion towards Crimea.  It is not immediately clear why.  Information coming out of Ukraine has been so centred on the Ukrainian offensive in the Kherson area and, latterly, the surprise attack in Kharkiv, which has freed an area of 3100 square kilometres right up to the Russian border, it is not apparent what offensive actions have been in train elsewhere, if any.  It all seems too good to be true.  Melitopol was not even mentioned on the official Ukrainian command roster for the events of yesterday.

By peacetime population Melitopol is only about the size of York or Gloucester (for Americans, Charleston, South Carolina).  But it is a long way south and is known as the gateway to the Crimea.  Ukrainian control of the Crimean route into the south would seal the fate of the Russian Army pocket - some 20,000 men - across the Dnipro and finish all possibilities for the Russian offensive west of Mariupol.  One would expect that the naval facility at Sevastopol, home to Russian’s Black Sea Fleet, would also come within Harpoon range and thus would no longer be tenable.

However, so far The Odessa Journal reports only this:

This was announced by the mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, in his Telegram.

“The invaders fled from Melitopol towards the temporarily occupied Crimea. Columns of military equipment have already been fixed at the checkpoint in Chongar. This was expected – the rapid Ukrainian offensive leaves them no chance,” Fedorov stressed.

As the mayor said, to “take out the stolen goods from the Zaporizhzhia region, the military of the “second army of the world” is already breaking into garages and stealing civilian cars.”

“Car owners should secure their transport in advance. It may happen that the evacuators will be evacuated on it,” Fedorov emphasized.

Earlier it became known that the Russian occupiers were leaving in a hurry from the village of Novonikolovka, located 50 kilometers from Melitopol, against the backdrop of successful counter-offensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in several directions.

I am a racially and ethnically aware Englishman.  I am not, therefore, anti-monarchical, because monarchy is genuinely inherent to the culture of power among the English, and the Scots and Welsh, and the Scots-Irish too.  Those of us - the vast majority - who are conscious of the fact are not generally the shifty and lightweight beings who might disrespect it in order to parade their, of course, terribly different and daring, not to mention radical republican values.  Therefore one can grant the dead monarch and the new monarch a certain historical import and even respect.  France is foundationally revolutionary.  Britain is foundationally monarchical.  To some subtle but substantive degree, these things are in the way that every Frenchman and every Briton comports himself in the world.

But beyond that affirmational fact, the French do enjoy a certain advantage.  They have rid themselves of an ancient appendix and need make no exception to the rule of their own government.  So the question inevitably arises: why do we cleave to a constitutional monarchy which has long ago relinquished the possibility of command, and which, today, cannot even pass a public opinion on the exercise of power in this land?  Why, indeed, have a monarch who is not even of the people’s blood, and for whom even the notion of representation of the people is shooed away by that of representation of the emotionally stiff and cold, formal machinery of state?  It’s a very British conundrum.  Obviously, those of our kind who are given to novelty ... those who are estranged in the modern ... cannot be persuaded of the virtue of continuity.  Those who are given to the Judaic prescription of equal-ness cannot be persuaded of hierarchy by heredity.  But in the minds of the rest of the British, who are the vast majority, there is some good in carrying forward the old investment of identity and fealty that adhered to the kings and queens of the ancient British past.  Certainly, our age does not have the same, direct tribal or semi-tribal connection.  But then on to the person of the monarch we project our yearning for that connection, which is a yearning for who we English, we Scots, we Welsh, we Scots-Irish are in our own-most being.  It might be obscured by the dust-storm of the modern, but we have a sense of it.  We just need something to point out the way.

Good monarchs and bad in that respect come and go.  A faithful and good one, on balance, has now departed, and quite likely a bad one - an earnest man, a sincere man, but confused and apprehensive - has already, and without a moments’ pause, taken up the royal burden.  We natives of this land are not his subjects.  Constitutionally, we are his sovereign and have been so since 1649, a fact which modern parliamentarians too rarely concede.  But, regardless of his undoubted weaknesses, we will extend our sovereign’s consent to him, and offer our fealty in return for his modelling of the truth and continuity of our nation, our blood and kind.  The French may fairly consider that absurd and anachronistic.  But we might then consider their civicism jejune and artificial, and we might even suspect that in some quiet and reflective corner of their national psyche a little envy abides.

There will be national mourning, and then, at some point over the next months, there will be formal majesty and circumstance as the new King is crowned.  The king of climate alarmism, some will say ... even the king of Davos.  But perhaps he will realise that he is no longer free to champion that cause.  There is, of course, no chance at all that he will ever cease to champion the foreignisation of his people’s home.

I didn’t even know that the old Cold War CIA front Radio Free Europe was still active until I came across an interview at its site with a Washington analyst named George Barros.  He said everything that I have been picking up elsewhere about the new generation warfare that Ukraine is developing to frustrate, starve of materiel, and drive out the Russian invader in the south of the country.  The interview is beneath the fold.

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