James Delingpole's Blog, page 17

Only a totalitarian New World Order can save us now says Naomi Klein

No Logo author Naomi Klein has a solution to climate change and it goes like this: punitive taxation; massive wealth re-distribution; the abolition of free trade and free markets; a state-enforced end to to the "cult of shopping"; the whole to be supervised by a New World Order of selfless illuminati (who presumably resemble Naomi Klein).

If it weren't so scary it would almost be funny, the way the leftie Canadian activist on the basis of no evidence whatsoever declares that the time has come to strip the human race of all its hard-won freedoms in order to save the planet from a non-existent problem. Unfortunately, Klein means it and her audience takes her seriously. Just read the…

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Don't expect the BBC to tell you, but Ukip is on the march

'Farage has only got one ball.' The last time I made reference to the Ukip leader's monotesticular status, I got a rocket from an outraged reader. But the reader had missed the point entirely. Nigel Farage's handicap is a strength, not a weakness. He's open about it, he's unembarrassed by it and he's a better man for it. Yes, Farage may have lost a bollock to cancer, but by God he's got more cojones than almost any Conservative you could name.

Our Nigel is a Conservative himself, of course. Just one who has been temporarily dispossessed by the mainstream party. When you talk to Farage he's…

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The invisible man

Besides being one of the most exquisitely melodious, sensitive singer-songwriters you're ever likely to hear, John Grant is also one of the most beautiful men you could ever hope to meet.

I'm not the only married man to feel this way about the tortured gay pop star. As he tells me over lunch on London's South Bank, male fans are constantly gushing after his shows about how utterly they worship and adore him. 'Then they'll go and ruin it by saying, "Oh, and by the way, may I introduce my wife?"'

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The global economy is collapsing. The solution is not more media studies graduates

There's a gripe I hear a lot from kids of student age and it goes like this: "You had a free uni education so why shouldn't we?"

The short answer to that is "autres temps, autres moeurs". But they wouldn't understand, a) because their school French teacher was probably long since sacked in the Blair Years and replaced by a Wind Farm and Environmental Awareness Studies teacher and b) because if there's one thing today's kids are even more ignorant of than French (or Latin, or History, or grammar) it's basic economics.

How incredibly dumb do you have to be, how utterly immune to reality, not to be aware that something very amiss is going on with the Italian bond markets right now, and that this might have a quite important…

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A US president with wandering hands? It would never happen

President Clinton, not looking at all creepy

 

The knives are out for Herman Cain, as of course they would be. He's personable, he's clever, he's funny, he has a proven business track record, he's small government, he has original ideas, he's post-political, he'd make a way better US president than either Perry or Romney (let alone Obama). But most damningly of all, he's black.

Sure I don't doubt there'll be the odd few Republicans for whom Cain's skin colour is a deal-breaker. But the real loathing and resentment will come from the other side. Remember, it was the GOP which campaigned to end the slave trade, not the Democrats. For all their fine talk of equality and affirmative action, Democrats – indeed the liberal-Left generally – tend to…

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'Green jobs' and feed-in tariffs: rent-seeking parasites get their just desserts

Q: When is a job not a job?

A: When it's a green job.

This is not a joke, it's not funny and it's not new. Anyone who reads this blog has been aware of this inescapable truth for some time. They'll have read (back in March 2010) about the research by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain showing that for every "green job" created by taxpayer subsidy another 2.2 jobs are destroyed in the real economy. They'll have read (February 2011) about the even more damning research from Verso economics, showing that for every "green job" created by taxpayer subsidy another 3.7 jobs are destroyed in the real economy. They'll have…

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I'm trying to block out the suppurating vileness of Twitter

'Great God, Twitter is an awful place!' I tweeted the other day. Hypocritically. After all, if I really hate it so much, what the hell am I still doing there? It's quite possible for someone in my game to survive without Twitter. Look at Rod Liddle.

The reason Rod doesn't do Twitter is that he recognises it as a suppurating bubo of intense Satanic vileness in which bullies exult, idiots are hailed as sages and all decency, wisdom, insight, wit or modesty is drowned in a mucus flood of idiot received ideas, poisonous cant, vicious insults and sixth-form common-room glibness.

He's right, of course, as I'm reminded almost daily by missives like this…

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Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again

Oh dear. I really didn't want my first blog post in a week to be yet another one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?

The story so far: ten days ago a self-proclaimed "sceptical" climate scientist named Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley University, California, managed to grab himself some space in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) claiming that the case for global warming scepticism was over. Thanks to research from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project, Professor Muller stated confidently, we now know that the planet has warmed by almost one degree centigrade since 1950. What'…

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Et tu, Hugh?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks it's time we all went veggie (River Cottage Veg; Channel 4, Sunday). Coming from a man whose favourite dish is human placenta marinaded in fruit-bat extract, who…

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Breaking news: Cameron now officially even worse than Ted Heath

It requires real talent and serious effort to become the worst Tory prime minister in history. To be honest, I never thought Cameron had it in him. I thought: "Well maybe they're right, all those Tory "insiders" who tap the sides of their noses knowingly and say: 'Don't you worry. He knows what he's doing. He's just positioning himself, that's all. Deep down he's a true blue Eurosceptic small state Tory through and through." And after that, I thought: "I mean however bad he does get, he's never going to be a match in sheer bloody awfulness for the chippy, asexual sailor who first set our course for the rocks clearly marked Euro Hell Oblivion, all the while reassuring his nervous crew, "No they're…

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