Never Forget — 25 Years On
The David Vance BriefingRead More
I’ll never forget it.
It was summer 2000, and my family were visiting Boston then going down to New York.
I vividly remember that short night time flight that took us from Boston Logan international to New York. We breezed through security at both ends and I recall sitting at the window on the plane (I was nervous flyer back then) and counting the minutes to we touched down at Newark.
It all went smoothly.
We spent several days in New York and I recall walking past the towering twin towers of the World Trade Centre en route to Battery Park. I wanted to get a good photo of them but they were just too high to get in mand so I needed to get some distance. We got the Staten Island ferry and when it got out a bit I captured a pic of my family smiling at me with the twin towers now plainly visible as the background. I didn’t realise then but I would never see the Towers again.
Fast forward to the 11th September the following year and like millions of people I watched the attack on those towers in horror. As we all know, two of the aircraft were hijacked after departing Logan International and subsequently slammed into WTC 1 and 2, causing catastrophic loss of life in ways I can hardly conceive.
Like you, I was stunned, then furious, then wanting to bring those behind the attack to justice. Yes, I did support the words of George W Bush as he sought to express how his country felt following the worlds biggest terrorist attack.
Having lived through decades of terrorism in Northern Ireland, I knew all about the pain and loss it creates. However the scale of 9/11 took my breath away and the grief involved was unimaginable.
It seemed pretty clear that this was an attack on the USA by radical Islamists. In 2001, it was also unimaginable that in 25 years time, New Yorkers would elect a Muslim mayor and that there would be people such as Hasan Piker who in 2019 on a Twitch stream, said :
“America deserved 9/11, dude. Fuck it, I’m saying it.”
He said it while reacting to Dan Crenshaw and U.S. policy in the Middle East. In the same stretch he also said America “totally brought it on ourselves.” In fairness Piker did try go walk back those comments but I think that was simply damage limitation mode.
Similarly in the same year. Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also had something to say whilst addressing the CAIr
“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
Almost 3000 lives lost and she reduces the horror to “some people did something”
In 2001 the best guess Muslim population of the Big Apple was circa 250,000. By 2026 it has ballooned to 750,000. By any standards. Muslims and Islam have flourished despite 9/11.
Over the past 25 years, there has been so much written about that day. I have spoken with those who challenge the official narrative and who believe that it was an inside job. I listen to all opinions but conclude that the horror of the day was just so great that it’s really disbelief that drives those views. Yes, I do know that the collapse of Building 7 in New York City was odd and that the lack a video of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon is surprising. But on a day like today I just think of the sheer loss of human life and the stunning savage mindset of those who turned commercial aircraft into missiles.
Where Bush got it wrong was calling the response “a war on terror”. That was a weak euphemism. It should have been called a war on radical Islam. I recall cringing with embarrassment in the immediate aftermath of the attacks when Secretary Condolezza Rice claimed that Islam was “the religion of peace” as thousands of bodies awaited recovery. It is not.
It spoke volumes that even in the aftermath of this co-ordinated Islamist terror atrocity, the establishment instinct was to try and sanitise Islam. That is so unbelievably craven. And it remains like that in far too many places.
New York marks this day with a Muslim mayor and a thriving Muslim population.
The cry after 9/11 was “Never Forget”. It seems to me the far too many have done exactly that. I see 9/11 as a declaration of war on Civilisation by a dark ages pathology and that’s what we should never forget!
This day will still bring unspeakable pain to many families who lost loved ones back then and so our thoughts should be with them.
The David Vance Briefing
4
The Winter of our discontent?
Energy bills are heading back towards £2,000. How did Britain allow this to happen again?
SEP 10, 2026
Brace yourself. Energy bills are heading back towards £2,000 — and perhaps beyond it. Millions of British people are going to struggle to heat their homes this winter and, if it is a particularly cold one, I fear some vulnerable people may die as a consequence. Energy Policy really can be a matter of life and death..
Remember the great energy crisis of 2022? Back then we were told that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was responsible for sending our bills through the roof. Four years later, Putin can’t be used as quite such a convenient excuse, now can he?
The worrying news is that wholesale gas prices are surging again, just in time for winter. They are back around levels we haven’t seen since 2022.
This matters enormously because gas doesn’t just determine what you pay to heat your home. Thanks to the odd way the British energy market operates, gas prices also feed through into electricity prices. So when gas goes up sharply, we all end up paying for it one way or another.
Here are some hard numbers.
The current energy price cap for a typical household is £1,663. In October that rises to £1,723, following the 12.6% increase we already suffered in July. And then comes January. Current forecasts suggest another substantial increase. Some are pointing towards bills of around £1,950, while others are forecasting more than £2,000.
So yes, we really could be staring at typical annual energy bills of around £2,000 again.
Heart warming, isn’t it?
The “price cap” itself is one of those contrived phrases politicians and their advisers love. Remember, there is no cap on your total bill. Use more energy and you pay more. If you live in a large or an older poorly insulated house, or if you simply want to commit the terrible environmental crime of keeping your home warm during winter, your actual bill can be considerably higher. The cap restricts the rates suppliers can charge. It doesn’t cap what comes out of your bank account.
Anyone thinking they might escape the coming increases by fixing their tariff may also find that increasingly difficult. As wholesale prices rise, the attractive fixes tend to disappear and the new ones become more expensive. So do you gamble on wholesale prices falling and stay with the cap, or lock yourself into an expensive tariff now?
But there is a much more fundamental question.
How did Britain manage to make itself so vulnerable to this happening AGAIN?
After the last energy crisis we were told that “lessons had been learned”. Energy security became the buzz phrase, remember?
Yet here we are, just a few years later, and another surge in international gas prices threatens to hammer British households all over again.
Meanwhile, successive Governments have spent these years whining about Net Zero.
This Labour Government boasts that exploration for new domestic energy supplies is restricted. Government seems positively proud of making domestic production more difficult and expensive. It refuses to contemplate properly exploiting shale gas. And successive Governments have failed over decades to build sufficient new nuclear capacity. It’s a Uniparty fail.
And then, as the ultimate gaslighting, politicians congratulate themselves on building more wind turbines and solar farms even though both obviously require reliable backup when the weather refuses to cooperate with Government energy policy.
Britain sits on substantial energy resources of its own while deliberately making it harder to use them. We are self harming ourselves as a Nation,
When international markets become volatile we discover that we remain hopelessly exposed to international energy prices.
The stupidity of all of this is quite incredible to me..
And it doesn’t end with the bill dropping through your letterbox.
High energy prices infect the entire economy. Shops use electricity. Factories need electricity and gas. Farms use energy. Restaurants use energy. Transport uses energy. All businesses facing higher costs eventually have to pass those costs on to somebody.
And that somebody is usually you.
So higher energy prices don’t just mean higher household bills. They mean higher food prices, more inflation, struggling businesses and ultimately a poorer country.
None of this is difficult to understand. None of it is unpredictable.
We can all see it coming.
Yet Government energy policy continues to treat affordability as though it were some secondary consideration.
It isn’t.
Cheap, reliable and plentiful energy is one of the foundations of a prosperous industrial economy.
I don’t care whether that energy comes from gas, oil, nuclear, wind or something else. What matters to me is whether it is reliable, plentiful and affordable.
Government policy should be based on those three things rather than politicians competing with each other to announce ever more virtuous climate targets.
Because you and I know who ultimately picks up the tab for all that political virtue signalling.
We do.
This winter, a pensioner wondering whether to turn the heating up doesn’t give a toss about a minister’s Net Zero target for 2040 or 2050. A family watching another £30 or £40 disappear from its monthly budget doesn’t care how many wind turbines Britain has installed. They care about what comes out of their bank account.
That’s human nature. And it’s entirely understandable.
We went through a major energy crisis four years ago and the Government has learned nothing from it.
As we trundle into autumn and then winter, wholesale gas prices are flashing a RED warning signal again and household bills are heading upwards. Instead of blaming events elsewhere in the world, our political and media class should be asking a much more uncomfortable question.
Why has Britain deliberately created an energy system in which events elsewhere in the world can hurt us so badly in the first place?
That’s the real scandal here. I don’t want to be a prophet of doom. I’m simply taking a cold hard look at what’s coming. This could very easily become the winter of our energy discontent. And when the bills arrive, politicians will reach for somebody else to blame. This time, don’t let them. We need to hold their feet to the (expensive) flames.
***If you think more people need to read this, please Restack it!***
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