James Delingpole's Blog, page 32

Britain: still stuffed under joke Tories

This afternoon in the House of Commons, I shall be giving my annual pep talk to Donal Blaney's madrassa for post-pubescent righties – the Young Britons Foundation.

Exhibit a) will be this letter to the Spectator by "Conservative" MP Peter Ainsworth which I think may well be the most self-satisfied, intellectually dishonest, arrogant, ill-informed and repellent in the magazine's history…

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Why the liberal-left isn't wishing Spiked a Happy 10th Birthday

I once wrote a contentious piece for the Spectator with the tongue-in-cheek title I Am Facing Up To The Fact That I May Be Marxist. This wasn't because I was seriously thinking of moving leftwards after a lifetime's natural and unrepentant conservatism. Rather it was an affectionate tribute to the fact that the best political commentary in Britain at the time was – and still, pretty much is – coming from an eccentric bunch of self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxists. (Though I personally did – and still do – prefer to think of them as libertarian conservatives in denial).

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Say what you like about Prince Andrew, at least he wasn't caught posing in his underpants

Labour MP Chris Bryant claims Prince Andrew is bringing "not just the UK, but the Royal Family, into disrepute." Perhaps Prince Andrew is. But are we sure that Chris Bryant is the right man to deliver such moral lectures?

Bryant, let us not forget, was the star of an episode so marmalade-droppingly revolting that it made Tony Blair's infamous description of his night of lurve with Cherie Blair at Balmoral sound like Barbara Cartland. He was Underpants Man: the MP who posed in a pair of grubby Y-fronts for the website Gaydar, where he advertised his desire for a "good long ****".

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There is nothing 'smart' about rationing electricity

Tonight on Channel 4 Niall Ferguson will be explaining why Western Civilisation is on its last legs. The reason for this is very simple: we no longer understand or value our civilisation; indeed many of us feel rather embarrassed about it. We have been taught to view all our great historical achievements through a filter of post-colonial guilt; we have learned the weasel art of cultural relativism where, in their own special way, cultures that practise female circumcision and bury homosexuals under walls are just as vibrant, valid and meaningful as the one that gave us Michelangelo, penicillin and the splitting of the atom; we've been persuaded that elitism and authority are undesirable (cf Jamie's Dream School); we've bought heavily into the fashionable meme that mankind is a cancer on the earth and that…

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Lib Dems: now even less popular than the BNP

Please can someone explain to me the point of the Lib Dems: so loony left they make Labour look like Thatcherites; so eco-bonkers they make the Green party look like the Tea Party; yet bizarrely currently engaged in pervy, masochistic coition with a Conservative-dominated Coalition.

Something's got to give hasn't it? And whoops, it just has!

From the Barnsley Central by-election come tidings so joyous it's like winning the Lottery on the same day that Al Qaeda renounces violence, England win the World Cup simultaneously in every sport ever invented, and in your home laboratory you finally discover the elixir of eternal youth: the Lib Dems – the totally useless, impossible-to-justify-on-any-grounds-whatsoever Lib Dems – have been beaten by virtually everyone except the raving Loony party.

I know certain political savants are going to…

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I've always made a noise at my noisome TV

For as long as I can remember, I have been shouting at my TV screen. Possibly the first occasion would have been circa 1971, in sheer irritation at the infuriating, self-defeatingly named kiddie programme Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?

Perhaps it was even earlier than that. Though I liked Teddy, I used to find Andy Pandy incredibly wet. Bill and Ben were incomprehensible. The Clangers whistled too much. ZsaZsa the Cat and Kiki the Frog were quite maddening in the way they ganged up on Hector the Dog. As for Florence in the Magic Roundabout, what a goodie-goodie!

So, yes, I…

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Jamie's Nightmare School

Michael Gove's education policies, as I think most of us agree, are one of the very, very, very, very few things David Cameron's abysmally dismal Coalition has got going for it. That's why, as dear brave Katharine Birbalsingh and Toby Young find every day, the lefties have been driven into such paroxysms of sphincter-bursting rage. But Gove does have his critics on the right, too, the most sensible of whom is surely the mighty, great and wise Chris Woodhead.

Woodhead's argument – as expressed in Standpoint – is an impeccably free market conservative one.

The voucher is the key to the schools revolution Gove wants to initiate. It would increase demand for private education and attract more supplier…

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The real cost of 'global warming'

The renewable energy industry is helping to destroy the UK economy and drive up unemployment says a new report. For every one of David Cameron's "green jobs" created in the renewable energy sector (mainly solar and wind), another 3.7 jobs are being lost in the real economy, says the independent study by Verso Economics. In total, measurable policies to promote renewable energy cost £1.4 billion in the UK and £168 million in Scotland in 2009/10. But this doesn't take into account the additional economic damage inflicted by the erection of enormous, bird-chopping monstrosities all over some of Britain's most attractive tourist spots – including, for example, the hitherto unspoilt island of Tiree.(H/T Michael Daly)

Still, it's not all bad…

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Shameful bias

So you're the leader of the Netherlands' youngest, and now second-most-popular political party — and the reason you're doing so well so soon is that your policies strike a chord with many Dutch. You believe in smaller government and lower taxes; you believe nuclear power is a safer bet than nuclear energy; and you believe that creeping Islamisation poses a serious threat to your country's national identity.

And now someone wants to make a guerilla documentary about you. The production company is a left-leaning, activist outfit called Red Rebel Films; its aim is to insinuate that you are 'Far Right', guilty of 'hate-speech', mentally unbalanced, a control freak, a conspiracy theorist, a Zionist extremist, an Israeli spy, a fascist and a Nazi. How unreasonable would you have to be to refuse?

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Freeman Dyson v the 'Independent'

The Independent isn't very "independent". So says perhaps the world's greatest living theoretical physicist Professor Freeman Dyson in a truly glorious exchange with the fervently warmist newspaper's fervently warmist science editor Steve Connor. (H/T Mitcheltj)

Professor Dyson says:

I wish that The Independent would live up to its name and present a less one-sided view of the issues.

He's talking, of course, about the 'Independent's' stance on AGW. Of all the British media, not even the Guardian's Environment pages have quite matched the zeal with which the Indie has promoted the great Man Made Global Warming narrative. Professor Dyson – born in Britain 87 years ago, a scholar at Winchester but a naturalised American, now…

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