I have no expertise on the subject of global warming; nor do I have a strong view about it. But I do know attempted thought control and hostility to free speech when I see it; and I find these unlovely phenomena present among all too many of the enthusiasts for climate action. Words such as ‘denial’ are intentionally brought into the debate and recall those who deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust.
It was when I saw an internet tweet comparing me to Nick Griffin — with 2,000 people signed up to it — that I realised just how much trouble I was in. It was when I saw an internet tweet comparing me to Nick Griffin — with 2,000 people signed up to it — that I realised just how much trouble I was in. My sin: I had written an opinion piece entitled ‘Is global warming hot air?’ I’d wanted to see if my 18,000 architect readers agreed with the line now adopted by the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) that ‘man-made’ climate change is the greatest challenge facing the profession.
The President of the Maldives recently held a Cabinet meeting underwater, saying his islands may be submerged. In an open letter Nils-Axel Mörner assures him his country is safe Dear Mr President, You are obviously very concerned about the effect that sea level rises may have on the Maldives. Your Cabinet has been photographed meeting underwater, and you have even declared that ‘we are going to die’ if the climate change summit in Copenhagen fails. I am now writing with what I hope will be some good news. The scientific side of the situation is quite different to that which you imagine. You are, in fact, not going to die. Before I continue, I should perhaps state my credentials. I have been a sea-level specialist for 40 years.
A ban on minarets may seem racist to the BBC, says Rod Liddle, but in fact we should applaud any small battle won in the people’s war against the growing ‘Islamification’ of Europe Here’s a very short and simple pre-Christmas quiz to get you into the swing of Christmas quizzes, as they will soon be taking up almost every page of your morning newspapers. A few years ago, Angus Roxburgh — one of the BBC’s chief Europe correspondents, based in Brussels — wrote a book about the rise of right-wing or libertarian parties on the Continent. He was referring to the success of the late and decidedly liberal Pim Fortuyn in Holland, the strength of the Flemish nationalists Vlaams Blok in Flanders, the Front National in France and so on.
Jack Straw has finally got his wish: despite valiant efforts in the Lords, his Coroners and Justice Act has castrated one of our most ancient and overlooked institutions. Why? Because the ‘people’s judge’ was just too good at winkling out inconvenient truths. The office of coroner has existed in this kingdom since the year 1194. The medieval version was chiefly concerned with the protection of Crown revenue and determining responsibility for violent deaths as a means of raising fines. But seven centuries of gradual evolution resulted in a coroner rather more concerned with the welfare of the public. The modern incarnation emerged in the Victorian era when large numbers of deaths were being caused by novel hazards such as factory and train accidents.
When Ed Balls left a Labour fundraiser at a Westminster curry house last Wednesday to be interviewed on Newsnight, he had the look of a man with an ace up his sleeve. David Cameron’s attack on the government for allowing public funds to go to schools influenced by Islamist extremists was blunted by some slapdash research. Although understandable given their profusion, muddling up ‘pathfinder’ funds was stupid. Far more foolish was the response of ministers, who leapt on the muddle as proof that the central charge was also flawed. As a former special adviser, I understand the need for survival tactics in what Denis Healey called the ‘jungle warfare’ of Cabinet-level politics. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to go to bed in one piece.
As the fancy-dress party season begins again, Leah McLaren wonders why the British are never more themselves than when they’re pretending to be someone else There is a popular urban legend about a British couple in New York who attended a black tie gala dressed as a pair of pumpkins. Turns out they had misinterpreted the host’s instruction to ‘dress fancy,’ as an invitation for fancy dress — something Americans only do once a year on Halloween. Did they burst into tears and run home? Not a chance. Being Brits, they put on brave faces, pulled their orange foam bellies up to the bar, and proceeded to get shamelessly drunk as the Manhattan glitterati swirled around them.
Pity the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Once supreme in Whitehall, King Charles Street is now a frail and damaged place, bleeding power and purpose from multiple wounds. It is emasculated by the interference of No. 10 and the drift towards a common EU foreign and security policy while the sun sets on our time as a first-rank power-projecting country. All this leaves the FCO seeking a raison d’être. But in climate change, it may have found one. The political orthodoxy on the environment has now been woven into the very purpose of the Foreign Office. In the peculiar dialect of management-speak employed in Whitehall, its work is defined and directed by eight ‘departmental strategic objectives’.
The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options Judging by the opinion polls, those gathering at the Copenhagen climate change summit have a lot of persuading to do. Just two in five Brits think that global warming is taking place and is man-made. Only one third of Americans think that humans are responsible for climate change. The number of Australians who deem global warming a ‘serious and pressing problem’ has dropped sharply. The urgency which grips politicians around the world seems not to be shared by the general public — to the frustration of people like David Miliband, Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
Imagine for a moment that a terrible, unforeseen threat to humankind had suddenly arisen, one so grave that it endangered the very future of the planet. Two teams of respected scientists immediately set to work, trying to find a way to prevent the impending disaster. The first set of scientists returned with a potential solution, but it had some shortcomings. It was expensive, with a price tag in the trillions of dollars. It also required nearly every human being on the planet to change his or her behaviour in fundamental ways. And even if the scientists’ scheme worked, it would take decades for the benefits to be felt. The second set of scientists returned with a very different answer.
Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood. In his book — the version for adults, not the one for schoolchildren — he even included a colour photograph of a corpse, a young man, floating face downward, drowned by Hurricane Katrina. I wonder whether the dead boy’s family were consulted. I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology.
Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’ Who heard the Marxist bark? In the history of global warming, that dog was classical Marxism, a Promethean doctrine that argued for the strengthening of man’s power over nature. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global carbon emissions treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during a strategic race to bury the West.
The Stern Review is four years old but remains a vital tool for Copenhagen’s policy-makers. It shows them exactly what not to do, says Robert O. Mendelsohn Across the West, we hear the increasingly shrill prophesies that climate change will destroy the earth. The solution proposed is to adopt a new world order with regulations that will dramatically change the global economy. Against this backdrop, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen in a few days’ time to discuss whether such upheaval can be justified. And it is a subject on which economists have plenty to say. Simply put, the costs of ‘abatement’ — the carbon reduction plans being advocated in Britain and many other countries — must be weighed up against the benefits.
A high-priority government report warns of climate change that will lead to floods and starvation. ‘Leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’. The scenario is eerily familiar although the document — never made public before — dates from 1974. But here’s the difference: it was written to respond to the threat of global cooling, not warming. And yes, it even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.
No one has followed the Taleban and al-Qa’eda more closely than Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations monitoring mission. He tells Christina Lamb why Obama’s reinforcements won’t scare the fundamentalists away It’s known as the ‘kill list’. The world’s biggest directory of bad guys — the 1267, as it is officially called after the United Nations resolution which voted it into force — has long been essential kit for Special Forces scouring Afghanistan and the tribal badlands of Pakistan for al-Qa’eda and Taleban. From Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar down, finding or eliminating these baddies will be crucial to the success of President Barack Obama’s much awaited Get Out of Afghanistan strategy.
By one of those bizarre coincidences, I bumped into Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, on Tuesday night, just after I had accused him in print of being ‘the minister for Hizb ut Tahrir’. Quite extraordinarily, Mr Balls has spent much of the past seven days defending two primary schools run by supporters of this deeply nasty, racist and segregationist group after the Tories attacked his department’s decision to give them £113,000 of public money. As you might expect, our meeting was brief. Mr Balls said I was disgraceful. I said I fully reciprocated the charge: Minister for Hizb ut Tahrir, while harsh, was entirely justified by the facts in this case. ‘No evidence has been found that extremist views are being taught.
When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman. It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks, and long, gartered woollen socks in amusing colours. A massive cooked breakfast is underway.
Zombie banks and high unemployment look set to curse our economy as they did Japan’s, say Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate. A Conservative government could avoid disaster, but only if it is prepared to face the painful reality To say a country is turning Japanese has a very special meaning to economists. It means entering recession and never properly escaping it. It means entering a world of zombie banks that are being kept alive by taxpayers’ money. It means year after year of huge government deficits: profligacy masked as Keynesian medicine. It means year after year of false dawns, high unemployment and lapses back into recession. It is an acute form of economic purgatory — and one which Britain might well be facing.
MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelings It may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq. Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly around the odd meaningful sentence. Not this time.
We live in a country where the poorest members of society are literally trapped. We pay them millions not to work, simply maintaining them at subsistence level like prisoners of the state. Tied up with bureaucratic regulations and subject to crazy marginal rates of tax, there are few chances to escape for Britain’s welfare-dependent. A million of those out of work have been jobless for a decade or more. They see their chances of getting a job in the future as so remote as to be barely worth considering. The chances of their children ever finding work are beginning to look slim too. The neighbourhoods in which they live are falling apart. The squalor is palpable; crime rampant; local schools are very often failing or ‘sink’ schools.