A WEEK of lovely weather, finally. What a relief to be warm and get that vitamin D pumped up. I’m determined to stay positive even while scanning the sky for those inevitable trails.
One good thing about our very own British Dr Strangelove ARIA sun-dimming project is that it’s finally woken people up. These terrifying ‘solar radiation management’ research and secret projects have been going on in the US for years. We did our best to research and highlight (no pun) them with our four part review last year, which we repeated when The Telegraph‘s headline grabbed attention. But communication is a funny thing. Wittingly or unwittingly, it was the paper that got the right words, that sounded the alarm. Just as Mark Steyn noted last week, referring to Starmer’s speech on immigration, it is a case of ‘the good news is that people are beginning to notice’.
He reminded us too of the Milton Friedman dictum that ‘you don’t wait for the right people to show up and do the right things, you create the conditions on the ground that force the wrong people to do the right things’.
Hopefully the solar power enthusiasts will be joining the chorus of alarm.
There are, however, ‘few things sadder than a post-developed society’, as Mark said in the same post. Plenty of examples hit me last week. Take the flyer that dropped through my letterbox from a local private prep school; a school that once never considered taking children from under four. Now, it was advertising its new Baby Room. My heart sank. A baby room, like a hospital ward or an orphanage, is so obviously wrong for a babies who are neither sick nor orphaned. What is the school thinking? A business proposition, of course. What are the mothers thinking? Who would decide on this in preference to a nanny or childminder? Let alone to themselves, which is where the baby needs to be. Advertisements like this tell young But the feminist-led state has gradually corrupted mothers’ thinking, taught them to deny their instincts and to squash down any guilt and deny their infants’ basic needs.
Which brings me straight to another maternal inhumanity this week. Lucy Connelly’s treatment by the State, the total lack of regard for her and her child’s needs. Connelly is not a criminal. Some of you will have read my ‘cruelty upon cruelty’ report on Friday after the judge delayed the verdict on her prison sentence appeal. If you haven’t, please read it. It’s a terrible travesty of justice.
Who will be the ‘wrong people to do right’ on two-tier sentencing, I wonder? The right people like Allison Pearson and Dan Wootton have had no success so far. Nor have we.
Some good news this week on Kim Leadbetter’s brutal assisted dying bill though. This may well become a case of the ‘wrong people’ getting the right outcome. Rebecca Paul MP, a supporter ‘in principle’ of assisted suicide, was but one who warned in the Friday debate that the bill will ‘harm far more people than it will help’ and that ‘those people who will be harmed will be the most vulnerable in our communities’.
We are helped by Leadbetter herself, now her own bill’s worst advocate. Her expression alone is off putting. How can anyone happily advocate death? A last minute ‘distasteful’ intervention from Esther Rantzen hardly helped her cause: MPs opposed to assisted dying, she said, had ‘undeclared personal religious beliefs which mean no precautions would satisfy them’.
Perhaps more of an own goal than the wrong person doing the right thing!
On Starmer’s EU ‘reset’, which regular readers will know has preoccupied me this week, it’s a desert out there. There’s been a deafening silence from former Brexiteers on Starmer’s imminent Brexit betrayal. Yet his plans have been known for weeks now. Have they all gone into hiding? Jacob Rees Mogg, Dan Hannan, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Nigel Farage? Have I missed any speeches or articles?
Almost in answer, it seemed, to my despairing Friday tweet on no one caring about the insanity of the EU setting the terms for a ‘reset’ that takes us back to pre-Brexit and worse, came Lord Frost’s long, depressed and defeatist essay in Saturday’s Telegraph. He describes the three stages of sabotage since 2017 against successive administrations to defend to defend the Brexit vote. This reset he says is the fourth and most determined step to ‘take us, step by step, farther back towards alignment and control’.
Two things stood out for me in this catalogue of UK submission and subordination to EU terms, now happening all over again. One was Lord Frost’s almost throwaway line: ‘Of course I don’t see a reset as necessary in the first place’. Of course it is not. So where are the howls of protest, Suella Braverman apart (hats off to her). And the second was no reference at all – in a long discussion from fishing rights (much already given away), trade and Northern Ireland – to the all-important defence and security pact. I am talking about Labour’s big defence sellout and entanglement with the EU’s byzantine defence and foreign policy structures developed since 2017, that I reported on all last week.
Why the complete absence of criticism, let alone alarm? Am I missing something? I still don’t understand this omission. This must be the issue of paramount importance. The only thing I can think of is that Brexiteers’ ‘compliance’ must be driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome and their preference for an EU-aligned position on the Ukraine-Russia war. Has their fury at Trump’s and JD Vance’s justifiable criticism of free speech (and tariff threats) regarding the terms of US security support for Europe, along with what they see as Trump’s pro-Putin ‘realpolitik’ on Ukraine peace negotiations, blinded them?
I find it dispiriting to say the least.
But for all these lows, it was good to find this last week that quintessentially British humour is alive and well in this country, Comedy Unleashed. The EU can’t take that away from us. Yes, I got out from behind my laptop last week thanks to a ticket from a very kind TCW supporter. It was one of the best of their shows I have been to. Plenty of laughs to be got out of our ‘post-developed sadness’ and at ourselves. All very un-PC, of course. Stephen Grant was the host. His knowledge is amazing, as is his unscripted wit and repartee. The wonderful Dominic Frisby was there, trying out his latest ditties on us, and also Geoff Norcott. That’s a bloke right up my street! It’s been a rough couple of years for blokes he said. Well indeed. I’d say a rough couple of decades personally. Anyway for blokes, and for women who like blokes, if you want a safe space to laugh at your own and everyone else’s expense, Comedy Unleashed is for you! A last redoubt maybe? Certainly a safe haven.
