Evening, All!
First off, I would like to apologise for my relative lack of activity this week - between having a very quick, and not very sunny, sojourn to Portugal, flying straight back to the UK and into two days of meetings with my new employer and then having a general catch up on about 1,000 things on arriving back home late on Friday night, I can honestly say, my feet simply have not touched the ground (if you’re currently imagining a bear scrambling for dear life on an out of control treadmill, you won’t be far off).
I’ll be back to my usual output from this week going forward, and of course, will have a lot to say about not only Lord Mandelson’s extended and continued fall from grace1, Morgan McSweeney falling upon his own sword in what is becoming a seriously dodgy situation for this government and the continued descent of the United States into complete uncontrolled authoritarianism.
For now though, I am very pleased to send you all Episode Four of Bear and Monk Debunk. In this week’s episode, Emma Monk and I take on two very different, but oddly connected, bits of modern nonsense.
Emma starts by dismantling the recent right-wing media panic about “diversity in the countryside”. If you’ve seen headlines claiming Britain’s rural spaces are being “made less white”, pubs are hostile to Muslims, or that the countryside is under ideological attack, she walks through where those claims actually came from, what the reports really say, and how a handful of cherry-picked lines were inflated into a full-blown culture-war meltdown.
I then turn to private medical insurance, what it is, what it isn’t, and why it keeps being mis-sold as a solution to the NHS. I look at why PMI can’t replace public healthcare, what it actually covers, where it falls down, and how normalising it as an “opt-out” risks making the NHS crisis worse rather than better.
We wrap up, as ever, with something lighter - this week, the enduring myth that bats are blind, and why it’s complete rubbish.
As ever, we’re very open to any comments, thoughts and feedback that you would like to send us, so please feel free to contact either Emma or myself through our Substacks or the other place that we have online presences - and if you would like to support our work, you can do so on the Bear and Monk Debunk Ko-Fi link below:
Thank you for listening, for reading and for all your support - I am, as always, very grateful for all of you guys.
Best,
Bear
I’m not honestly sure whether it can be called a “fall” though considering from just how low down we started, but c’est la vie.
