Toby Young

I was surprised to read the article by Ben Macdonald in last week’s Spectator urging Britain’s grouse moor owners to ‘rewild’ their estates. It argued that these Tory toffs had spent the past 100 years ‘destroying our natural heritage’, that the UK land under shoot management is an ‘economic desert’ that is ‘destroying both jobs and wildlife’ and that the ‘acts of desecration’ involved in the creation of grouse moors is a ‘debt’ that has ‘never been repaid’. There was a big clue that Macdonald might not know what he’s talking about early on in the article.

The failure of Western universities to stand up for free speech is now so commonplace it’s difficult to feel much outrage when another dissenting professor is tossed to the wolves. But on this occasion the university in question is so distinguished we really ought to sit up and take note. And for once, I don’t mean Cambridge. The vice-chancellor of Cambridge has done so much to destroy its global reputation in the last few months – what with the defenestration of Jordan Peterson and Noah Carl, and the decision to investigate the university’s links with the slave trade – that he has allowed himself a few days off. No, the university that has disgraced itself this week is Harvard.

Anyone watching the BBC’s News at Ten on Monday would have been surprised to learn that economic growth poses a dire threat to the future of life on this planet. We’re used to hearing this from climate change campaigners, but I’ve always taken such claims with a pinch of salt, suspecting that the anti-capitalist left is distorting the evidence. Apparently not. ‘One million species at risk of imminent extinction according to a major UN report,’ intoned the BBC. ‘It says the Earth’s ecosystems are being destroyed by the relentless pursuit of economic growth.’ So does this mean the Extinction Rebellion protestors are right?

Anyone watching the BBC’s News at Ten on Monday would have been surprised to learn that economic growth poses a dire threat to the future of life on this planet. We’re used to hearing this from climate change campaigners, but I’ve always taken such claims with a pinch of salt, suspecting that the anti-capitalist left is distorting the evidence. Apparently not. ‘One million species at risk of imminent extinction according to a major UN report,’ intoned the BBC. ‘It says the Earth’s ecosystems are being destroyed by the relentless pursuit of economic growth.’ So does this mean the Extinction Rebellion protestors are right?

On Monday, I appeared on Good Morning Britain to debate President Trump’s forthcoming state visit with Asad Rehman, the executive director of War on Want. I was surprised to learn that War on Want, a charity in receipt of lottery funding, is a partner in the Stop Trump Coalition, the group behind the anti-Trump demonstration last year. It is hoping to organise an even bigger protest next month. The reason this came as a shock is because the Charity Commission issued an ‘official warning’ to the Institute of Economic Affairs in February for a report on how to create a prosperous post-Brexit UK that wasn’t sufficiently ‘balanced’ and ‘neutral’ and therefore fell afoul of the rules regarding ‘political activity’.

I was disappointed to learn that St Edmund’s College, Cambridge has decided to capitulate to a mob of woke student activists and terminate the fellowship of Dr Noah Carl, a social scientist. This follows two investigations carried out by St Edmund’s, one into the process that led to Carl’s appointment, the other into a series of allegations made by left-wing students. The students repeated the charges set out in an ‘open letter’ to the college last December signed by over 200 academics – some of them in fields like ‘gender studies’ and ‘critical race studies’ – in which Carl was accused of producing work that is ‘ethically suspect’ and ‘methodologically flawed’.

Until now, I haven’t been too worried about Jeremy Corbyn. True, he exceeded expectations two years ago, but that was because no one thought Labour would win. It was a protest vote, a way for Remainers to signal their disapproval of Theresa May’s approach to Brexit. If the good burghers of Kensington thought there was the slightest chance Labour would be elected they never would have returned a Labour MP. And since then the bloom has gone off the rose. It has finally dawned on Remainers that Corbyn has his own, hard-left reasons for wanting to leave the EU and that behind his ‘anti-Zionism’ lurks something more sinister. Not so much ‘magic grandpa’ as a relic of toxic, 20th-century ideology. But that was before the government committed hari-kari.

Until now, I haven’t been too worried about Jeremy Corbyn. True, he exceeded expectations two years ago, but that was because no one thought Labour would win. It was a protest vote, a way for Remainers to signal their disapproval of Theresa May’s approach to Brexit. If the good burghers of Kensington thought there was the slightest chance Labour would be elected they never would have returned a Labour MP. And since then the bloom has gone off the rose. It has finally dawned on Remainers that Corbyn has his own, hard-left reasons for wanting to leave the EU and that behind his ‘anti-Zionism’ lurks something more sinister. Not so much ‘magic grandpa’ as a relic of toxic, 20th-century ideology. But that was before the government committed hari-kari.

By the time you read this, James Delingpole and I will have made our first podcast in 596 days. That’s the length of time that elapsed between the last episode of Game of Thrones and the new one broadcast on Monday night. Yes, that’s right, we have our very own Thronecast in which we dissect every instalment of the long-running saga. This isn’t exactly original. Every self-respecting broadcaster has a Thronecast these days. There’s even a Thronecast Shopping Network where you can buy miniature iron thrones for your mantelpiece. Although why anyone would want to is a mystery. The era when the series enjoyed cult status is long gone. Last Sunday’s episode attracted a record-breaking 17.

The news that 83 per cent of Conservative voters are over 45, compared to 53 per cent of Labour voters, is depressing. That was a finding of a poll carried out by Hanbury Strategy for Onward, a right-of-centre think tank that’s just produced a report called ‘Generation Why?’. More alarmingly, Hanbury discovered that the ‘tipping point age’ — the median age at which a person is more likely to vote Conservative than Labour — is 51. That’s up from 47 at the 2017 general election and 34 just beforehand. ‘Yikes!’ as Lynton Crosby might say.

On Monday, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, Stephen Toope, issued a statement defending the decision of the divinity faculty to rescind its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson. The world-famous professor had been invited by the faculty to give a series of lectures on the Bible later this year, but was dis-invited after some academics and students objected. Not that the faculty had the courtesy to inform Peterson of this, mind you. He learned about it through the grapevine and then saw it on Twitter. He was left to work out what had prompted the volte-face by reading the various statements given to the media.

On Monday, the government announced that Penny Mordaunt, the Minister for Women and Equalities as well as the Secretary of State for International Development, had appointed an advisory panel on LGBT health. Needless to say, it immediately attracted criticism on social media for being insufficiently diverse: the 12-person panel is 90 per cent white, 66 per cent male, etc. I don’t subscribe to the dogma that the composition of official panels, boards, committees and so on should exactly mirror the UK population, but even by that logic those criticisms miss their target. The UK is 87 per cent white and BAME people are less likely to identify as LGBT, so it’s perfectly possible that around 90 per cent of the UK’s LGBT population is white.