James Delingpole's Blog, page 28

Wales is in danger: why isn't the Prince of Wales saving it?

I hope this photograph give you a good idea of why every summer for the last 12 years I have taken my family on holiday to mid-Wales, for me one of the most beautiful and special places on the planet. It's all the better for being so little known. You can go for a walk on those magnificent uplands at the peak of the tourist season and glimpse barely another soul. Note too, how completely unspoilt it is. But for how much longer?

This is why I have just signed the petition No To The Industrialisation of Mid-Wales and why I'm wishing the very best to the protestors who'll be gathering at a rally outside the Welsh assembly this Tuesday to…

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Exploding Watermelons: 'Oh no, not another ruddy energy revolution?'

There's so much good news coming out on the energy front at the moment that it's hard to keep up. (Thanks for the first few to the Global Warming Policy Foundation which is really on fire at the moment)

Here's a story from Forbes about attempts by scientists to tap into methane hydrate, perhaps the most powerful and abundant energy source on the planet:

They've done it in a laboratory: Scientists have injected carbon dioxide into the kind of methane ice that underlies vast tracts of permafrost in the Arctic and lurks beneath the deep seafloor throughout the world.

In that experiment, the carbon dioxide exchanged with the methane molecules. While the CO2 was sequestered inside the ice, the scientists extracted an energy source…

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Why Ken Clarke should stay

No I'm not happy, either, that Ken Clarke is our Justice Minister. He's soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime. He doesn't believe that prison works whereas all the evidence suggests it does – if only through the simple expedient of keeping off the streets habitual criminals who would otherwise be out there doing the rest of us a mischief. He is there not because he is any good or because he has anything useful to offer the country (let alone his party) but as a cynical expedient on Cameron's part to suck up to his Lib Dem Coalition partners by appointing to cabinet positions "Tories" so irredeemably left-wing they make Simon Hughes look like Augusto Pinochet.

If Clarke were sacked tomorrow no one would be more…

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Cameron should scrap the Foreign Aid budget, not increase it

Yesterday I was on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show sparring with Cristina Odone about Dave's mooted compulsory foreign aid levy on the British taxpayer. She was arguing – with some high level support from Lord Gummer – that it was a good thing, part of our moral obligation to the world, and really not that much money all things considered. I was arguing that, no, actually, £8 billion now (rising to £11.4 billion in 2015) is quite a lot of money and that in these dark economic times the very last thing our government ought to be doing is hosing down ungrateful foreigners with cash we haven't got.

The biggest recipient of our foreign aid largesse is currently Pakistan to which…

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Lord Turnbull: the IPCC is useless

Following yesterday's story about David Cameron's depressing plans to bomb the UK economy back to the dark ages and wipe out the British countryside, here's a wistful reminder of how things might have been if only we weren't run by imbeciles.

It's a briefing paper called The Really Inconvenient Truth – or It Ain't Necessarily So produced for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Lord Turnbull, the former Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service (2002 to 2005). His arguments against unilateral action by Britain to "combat Climate Change" are clear and powerful. In a nutshell, he says: "Don't let the deeply untrustworthy IPCC decide the fate of the UK economy."

Lord Turnbull doesn't mince…

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Cameron's price for saving his Coalition: the destruction of Britain

"Is David Cameron such a blindingly brilliant, gorgeous, lovely, magnificent, visionary, fragrant Prime Minister that he makes Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher look like invisible cockroach pigmies of so little consequence I can't even begin to find a metaphor for their utter relative inconsequentiality when compared with this mighty Corialanus-meets-Julius-Caesar colossus of superlative magnficence?" some columnists are asking.

Let me explain briefly, with reference to the main story in today's Observer, why he is not.

The story could, I suppose, be a flier: a handy leak from the left wing of the Coalition to give the libtard press an excuse to write something "positive" about Chris Huhne to cover up the story that everyone else…

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My Coalition verdict: Could have done SO much better

Verdict: 4 out of 10. Hang on a second: we're embroiled in an entirely unnecessary war we can't afford in Libya; we've failed to cut runaway spending – only the rate of increase in public spending; we've done zilch to address the problem of homegrown Islamist terrorism; we're frightening off higher rate taxpayers and persecuting the bankers who, for better or worse, generate around 11 per cent of our economy; we're hampering wealth creation; we're pussyfooting with the trade unions; we're still committed to the Climate Change Act which will cost the taxpayer upwards of £18 billion a year; we've shirked the chance to reform healthcare in any sensible, useful way; we're still hell-bent on destroying Britain's greatest asset – her countryside – with ugly, economically hopele…

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Climate Change: an emetic fallacy

Yesterday I was at Downing College, Cambridge, for a Climate Change conference organised by Professor Alan Howard, the scientist/philanthropist/entrepreneur known, inter alia, for having devised the Cambridge diet and for funding the magnificent lecture hall in which the event took place. (For more reporting – and some brilliant cartoons from Josh who sat right next to me sketching in a most impressive way – see Bishop Hill; and many, many thanks to the Howard Trust for organising it.)

The big difference between this and almost any other Climate Change conference is that it was the first – in Britain, anyway, so far as I know – to field a solid team of scientists from both sides of the debate. The Warmists included Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research…

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Farewell, Sarah Jane

There's a brilliant moment in the 1975 Doctor Who storyline The Ark In Space when Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen), on a vital mission to save Earth from the evil insectoid Wirrn, gets stuck in a ventilator shaft. The Doctor (Tom Baker) hits on the ingenious ruse of goading her across the last few inches by telling her how thoroughly useless she is.

At least, brilliant is how I remember it being when I saw it aged ten. I remember empathising hugely with Sladen's white fury over the grotesque unfairness of the Doctor's insults (God, kids are good at identifying unfairness: it's almost their raison d'être) but also I remember thinking how incredibly clever the Doctor was. You could tell it was just a ruse because of his conspiratorial grin and his half glance towards the camera, almost as if he were aware of you at home watching him.

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If only I'd known when I was younger that my background was my greatest strength

One of the things I've belatedly realised now I've acquired the wisdom of age is that I've always been anti-establishment. If only I'd known this at school I would have had far more fun than I did because I wouldn't have wasted any of my time trying to smarm and behave my way into pointless jobs like 'library prefect', 'group leader' and 'head of house'. I could have got drunk and smoked fags and got to at least third base with the naughty girls, like all the cool kids did, instead.

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