James Delingpole's Blog, page 73

Frank Field for prime minister

Frank Field's piece in today's Telegraph about the difficulties facing the next British government is well worth reading. He outlines, more lucidly and - ahem - frankly than any other politician I have read just how royally screwed our economy is; and how drastically any incoming administration is going to have to cut public spending if it is to repair our finances.

He cites the shocking figure from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that the recession "has wiped out nearly five per cent of our ...

Why did Congressman Joe Wilson need to apologize for calling Obama a liar?

At the weekend I spoke on California talk radio KSFO 560 FM about Lockerbie, Mandelson and other terrible things with one of my favourite hosts Barbara Simpson - aka The Babe In The Bunker. All was going swimmingly until I made the mistake of saying I thought President Obama was a fundamentally decent man, who just happened to have an unusually extensive, sub-Adamms-Family creepfest of disgusting libtard scuzzballs working for his administration.

No one disputed the second part (how could...

How 'tech-savvy' Barack Obama lost the health care debate thanks to sinister Right-wing blogs like this one

If there's one thing President Obama's good at, you would have thought, it would be harnessing the powers of new technology. He's got the Blackberry addiction. He's got the Twitter feeds. He's the most tech-savvy POTUS in US history, who quite possibly wouldn't even be doing the job he's doing now if it weren't for his supreme, almost Neo-like mastery of that thing we call the Interweb.

So how come he has just gone and managed to lose the most important debate of his political career so far - ...

Evil, snarling, red-faced Tory toffs want to bring back fox-hunting!

That's how the libtard bunny-huggers are going to spin it, anyway, when - as is expected - David Cameron tries to repeal the hunting ban after the next general election. Already, their house journal the Guardian is starting to get anxious about the prospect, as we see from a report today on donations by "bloodsports"enthusiasts to Tory agriculture spokesman (and committed ban-repealer) Nick Herbert.

So how are the Tories going to stop this (uncharacteristically, for Cameroons) highly...

Remember when ecologists used to give a damn about birds and trees and stuff?

I do. When I was growing up, nature was something you appreciated for what it was. Something whose beauties you marvelled at and whose wonders you were taught to admire at school. You knew how to tell the difference between a smooth and a great crested newt; between a red admiral and a peacock; you studied the habitats of gall wasps; you counted worms; on nature walks you listened to the moan of doves in immemorial elms; you watched botany pwogwammes pwesented by a weally enthusiastic man...

No more heroes

You wouldn't necessarily have guessed this from the quality of commemorative programming on TV this week. But just recently, we've marked the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of an event that used to be considered quite important and interesting. It was called the second world war.

Now that it has been superseded by issues of such seismic significance as climate change, the childhood obesity 'epidemic' and Jordan's on-off marriage to Peter Andre, one can of course fully understand why TV...

Parents can make you look a proper Charlie

It took my wife and me weeks, if not months, to find suitable names for our children. Every other day after their birth – or so it felt – my father would ring up and say: "Do we know what we're calling the new baby yet?" And every other day, I'd snap back, increasingly testily: "If you rush us, we'll get it wrong, and your poor grandchildren will have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives."

How right it was, too. The more I think about, the gladder I am that we eventually d...

How the BBC reported Al Qaeda's plot to blow seven US and British airliners out of the sky

Go on, have a guess. Did the reporting on the BBC's website focus mainly on:

a) the warped, grisly, evil fanaticism with which a group of young Muslim men callously plotted the deaths of up to 10,000 innocent people.

b) the dispiriting fact that these would-be killers were not oppressed victims of some terrible tyranny but free citizens of a tolerant multiracial country whose state apparatus bends over backwards to accommodate the needs of its minorities.

c) what we really need to accept is: we ...

Van Jones was just the start: now we need a Yekaterinburg of ALL the Czars

Hmm. I wonder which of the many glorious aspects of Mother Gaia it was that first attracted President Obama's "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones to the environmental movement.

Was it, perhaps, his love of fluffy bunnies - especially those ones with the long floppy ears and the sweet pink noses?

Was it the sight of the mighty redwoods in Northern California or the sea otters frolicking amid the kelp off Big Sur or the manatees basking so cutely amid the  shimmering propellors of the Everglades?

Was it t...

Human Cluedo brings out the ruthlessness and cunning you never knew you had

I have just killed a good friend of mine. It was immensely satisfying. I got him after a long and very irritating conversation we'd had about man-made global warming (my friend, James Heneage, is a believer, whereas I, as you know, am not) but that wasn't my main motive. Rather, I did it because those were my orders. I had to kill James, in a red Land Rover, with a bar of soap.

If it sounds a bit like a game of Cluedo, that's more or less what it was. Human Cluedo. Perhaps you've played it...