It's Time...

 Lots of whingers and whiners out and about yesterday, moaning about the existence of a monarch in the first place, the cost of the day, and perhaps most of all, indignation at the arrests of the Republic protesters. As a former allegiant to HM QEII, having been a member of the armed forces, I am ambivalent to the reign of KCIII and take only a passing interest in matters royal. But as an Englishman I have no problem with the continuance of the institution, just so long as it has no problem with me.

But the shrieks of indignant calamity, along with cries of “Police State!” and “Welcome to the UKSSR!” are just performative ‘look at me’ nonsense. The right to peaceful protest is an apparent and oft-repeated cornerstone of democracy, although I have never felt the need, but surely in a democracy the will of the majority should prevail. And I’m pretty sure the majority would have felt the demonstration lowered the tone. I doubt they will be charged, but to be arrested and removed was probably the right police action in this case.

Protest is one thing but being an annoying prat and spoiling the party is just infantile. It’s only a shame that the police can’t exercise the democratic rights of the majority not to be continually harassed by the legions of misanthropes out there, who would deny us all we enjoy. The world outside that of ordinary, hard-working people just trying to get by, seems to be crowded out by the assorted miserabilists of the age:

Just Stop Oil, plying their insincere trade mere weeks after Drax have been chastised for their biomass operation being not only more polluting than coal, but more expensive, funded by the taxpayer and having the effect of actually increasing carbon emissions. Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots, hypocritically intent on bringing about the extinction of the human race, or at least the enjoyment of human life. And all the other causes-du-jour with no aim in their lives other than ruining everybody else’s.

So, the coronation is over; Charles can crack on and dabble with his favoured causes, and it’s time for the country to get back to work unhindered by the pseudo-science and psychobabble of the new-age seers who imagine themselves as Cassandras, but invariably turn out to be Nostradami, whose prophecies only appear to come true if you twist the facts beyond reason. Ignore them, resist their entreaties and resort to the one paradigm that has propped up human society from the start; every man for himself.

Let's get back to work...

Sod the planet, let’s save the nation. Reject the globalist for the local. Family, community, town then county. Get that right, restore a bit of personal, then family pride and national pride will surely follow. Don’t expect help from the state, look after your own, and things should fall back into place. Fight your fight before you take up arms for others and most of all, don’t fall for the bullshit. It’s time to get his shit sorted.

Long to Rain Over Us

 A propos of nothing in particular, the other day I found myself watching a short film clip of London in the 1960s. As I bathed in the warm nostalgia it occurred to me to wonder where they had put all the black and brown people while they did the filming. The clip was a montage of shots and didn’t appear to be a highly organised affair, so my conclusion could possibly be that here this was documentary evidence that my memories are not false after all.

Yes, readers, despite being told for decades now that Britain was built, actually built, by ethnic diversity this is simply not true. For people of my generation – late boomer, for reference - there really was a golden age, when people of Britain knew who they were and where they had come from. And not only were we white, we were fairly homogeneously white at that, the majority of the population coming from a stable ethnic mix over the last thousand years.

I distinctly remember how you could easily spot a foreigner; they just looked different. A swarthy complexion, exaggerated features, something about the way they dressed, the way held themselves… and of course, their accent. You could instantly discern, almost without thought and pretty accurately that somebody was ‘not from here’. Nowadays, any such assumption would condemn you as a hideous racist.

The various affiliations which can all be accurately assigned to a lumpen ‘the left’ are naturally proud that we no longer know who belongs here and who we can trust. Everybody is equal, they claim, when the clear evidence of everyday life is expressly to the contrary. Britannia ruled the waves and with this confident certainty we all clung to a belief in the rectitude of our national morality and the fairness of our national conversation.

It wasn’t perfect – far from it, of course – but we knew who we were as a people and we were invested in, if disorganised about, a better future for all. Sure, we welcomed incomers, especially where they imported skills, attitudes and intellects which benefited the whole. And while we were uneasy about the displacement of some formerly white working classes by incoming and different ‘communities’ we recognised the instinct to live among your own and dutifully moved out of those areas.

But it has continued and accelerated and with the coronation service today being, by the King’s wish, a multi-faith, multi-community, multi-ethnic affair it is being enshrined in our unwritten constitution. By royal approval. To speak out about it is heresy, or even a crime. To deal in facts is to deny the new history, being rewritten openly, right in front of our eyes. As the late Sir Roger Scruton observed:

 "Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it..."

"Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit."

Pennies from heaven? I think not...

The heavens have chosen to rain on the coronation parade today, after a decent spell of calm, dry weather. For those of a prophetic leaning this might be taken as an ominous sign. Is Coronation Day going to become some sort of St Swithin’s Day event? Has the sun forever set on all that we were? It certainly looks like it. Even the optimist will find it hard, given the apocalyptic events of the last half century, to imagine today marks a new beginning for all but the King himself. Long to ‘rain’ over us?

Wolf Man

When we are lectured by luvvies who make their living by dressing up and playing make-believe we can normally remind ourselves that saner and more rational heads prevail in the realms of science and engineering. So, one would imagine that a programme called Inside Science might want to present us with the ingenious solutions to whatever challenges face us. But no, yesterday’s edition on BBC Radio 4 embarked on a farce of let’s-pretend using that ghastly pseudo-science term, a thought experiment.

The 30 by 30 policy, agreed at COP15 in November is a commitment (thus far unpromulgated to the huddled masses who will have to pay for it) to turn over to nature 30% of the Earths land mass by… wait for it… 2030. Well, this is the first I have heard of it, yet instead of Inside Science giving us a proper appraisal of the task, the way ahead and the rewards it would bring to all, it did no such thing.

Instead, it presented a twee, imaginary look backward from the far-distant future of 2030 (yes, just 7 years away) where the whole of the United Kingdom is a green and pleasant land, in harmony with a newly burnished nautical world teeming with fish and fowl and … wolves. Oh yes, in just seven years we will not only have re-introduced wolves, they will also have successfully bred and perfectly culled the deer population, allowing mature forests to grow on former heathland.

Furthermore, the entire population having become devout vegans, cattle and sheep grazing on upland slopes will have ceased and the tree line will have climbed well above present levels. Every man, woman and child will live in bucolic splendour with space to breathe in the newly clean air, enthuse by a new love of walking and conservation. Foreign holidays would be undreamed of – why, tourists would flock to Britain just to see the wildlife.

The ridiculous wolf enthusiast, George Monbiot, delivered a caricature of his already caricatured self, along with a clutch of breathless, infantile imagineers. In this so-called ‘experiment’ – teenage daydream would be far closer to the mark – they posited a world transformed and led by a 22-year old Prime Minister. Well, duh-err, obviously the world of the incredibly-near-future will take all its direction from people who are currently swotting for their GCSEs.

The intentions of the panel may have been to show how, with a determined mission, we might entirely transform this country, but it was as fatuous an attempt as is the government forever setting new targets to be missed. The idea that, outside a cosy tea-party set of comfortable, educated, middle-class Greenies, anybody really gives a fig for 30-by-30 is illusory at best and downright laughable in reality. Worse, it is an insult to those families struggling to pay the bills, worrying about the cost of getting to and from work and fearful of future winters where heating is an impossible dream.

If the chattering classes really cared about the human population one bit, as opposed to beavers, bears and wolf packs, they would push for a proper cost-benefit analysis of going all out for net-zero. Is it even achievable at all, and if so, at what cost? Is it possibly the case that in doing nothing at all we may end up in much the same situation and merely have to adapt to any environmental changes? Or is the truth somewhere in-between, in the unexplored cracks between all the disparate proposals? In the absence of proper inquiry and subsequent, coordinated guidance we are, effectively, where we are now anyway.

Welcome to your future home...

You want a prediction? By 2030 the headway we may have made in wind power, solar, electrification of transport and heating, will already be showing signs of strain. We haven’t the will or the manpower… or the money, to do anything on the scale that the government’s unachievable targets demand; far from it. I predict that electric vehicle introduction will falter and the deadline will only get pushed back at the very last minute. I reckon that heat pumps will quietly fade from the headlines as more and more find they can neither afford to buy nor run them. And as for the wolves? You may as well be howling at the moon.

Beginning

Yesterday, I sat in on a webinar about sustainability and the green environment in relation to training the upcoming generation of apprentices in the construction trades. The presenters were earnest and sincere in their desire to promote awareness of the impending – some would say already present – climate crisis. The trouble was, though, none of them were expert in the field, having been drawn in from various, more established disciplines. Nevertheless, this is the way of the brave new world.

Coincidentally, this morning I read in the Spectator about the Unesco’s latest interference in this world: Education for Sustainable Development, ESD for short. It seems that the Unesco is not content with their current levels of alarmism and seek to embed ESD throughout the young people, expressly to encourage political climate activism. The programme states that ‘Empowering and mobilising young people of all genders… is a central part of ESD implementation’. Of all genders? Was it really necessary to trumpet that particular bit of virtue?

Anyhoo, if you were worried that young people are indoctrinated enough in our schools and universities the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization does not share your fear and wants to impose top-down mandates that every curriculum be re-tuned to harmonise with its political goal to ‘climatise’ every waking thought… and probably your dreams as well. Lest you also think you can maybe just ignore all this, the UN has taken the BBC’s stance on balance and central to the imposition of ESD is that ‘the educator has the duty of not being neutral’.

What this means is that, much like with diversity training, every lecturer, every teacher, every curriculum leader will be themselves re-educated to trot out the egregious drivel of the environmental protest movements. Whether they are concerned or not, whether they have the ability to understand ‘the science’ their jobs will be incumbent on toeing this line. And why this is worrying is because they will be fed the  Greta syllabus whereby every shower of rain is climate breakdown and every hot day will be an extinction event and your children are going to have the bejesus scared out of them.

There is the chance that those studying engineering and physics and other related STEM subjects will have the ability to see through the worst, but what of those reading the arts? Relying on the greater wisdom of your tutors used to be a safe bet when in search of the truth, but how reliable is going to be the externally moulded opinions of those with little or no training in critical thinking and the scientific method?

Is this where the Marxist infiltration of our establishments has brought us? From those hippies who became teachers, who rebelled against rigour in education, who embraced whatever new-age claptrap was in the wind and thus influenced the next generation of teachers, and so on. The UN is now questioning and challenging the very purpose of education and making decisions to leave out anything which does not contribute to sustainability, even as it redefines to its own end what sustainability itself means.

This is a war on civilisation, nothing less. And it should be met with a resilient rebuttal at every opportunity. Whenever your offspring seek to ‘educate’ you about your part in humanity’s downfall you need to be ready with more than just a ‘yes, dear’. But I don’t know if common sense can prevail, for this has in effect been happening for many years and many graduates are already approaching positions of power and influence. As far as this brave new world war is concerned it may not be just the beginning, but the beginning of the end.

Raab

Sitting here, working from home (during my annual leave, I might add) I can hear James O’Brien in the background embarking on a ridiculous schoolboy-style rant. Is he berating his parents for carrying out their scared duty to protect him from his own idiocy? Is he frothing about some monstrous injustice levied on his favoured left-wing causes? Nope, he is going on and on and on about the resignation of Dominic Raab.

Furthermore, he is behaving exactly like the small-minded, tin-eared bully he, and many of his right-on comrades, actually are. The words I hear come from a face one could surely never tire of punching. On so many counts O’Brien is on the wrong side of opinion, the wrong side of common sense and especially in the Carl Beech affair, the wrong side of the law. And as always, being of the left, he possess the ability to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having authored at least two books to the contrary.

But O’Brien is inconsequential. What is more important is the background to the accusations of bullying as applied to Dominic Raab. As he says in his resignation letter: "In setting the threshold for bullying so low, this inquiry has set a dangerous precedent. It will encourage spurious complaints against ministers…" He is right, I believe. Not, I hasten to add, that bullying is acceptable, but in that what is perceived as bullying is something we have probably all done at some time in our lives.

Where does this threshold lie? Sarcastic comments, the raising of an eyebrow at an idiotic suggestion, an expressed expectation that employees take their duties seriously, a sharp intake of breath? Every boss has had occasion to make his or her dissatisfaction clear, to admonish a colleague, to take issue with a proposal. Everybody has been exasperated with somebody else’s lateness, their lack of effort, their incompetence. Why should it not be permissible to get it out in the open, confront the elephant and then get on with business?

I’m really sorry that everybody has not the spine to take such criticism on the chin, but this is the brutal truth of the matter. Maybe if your efforts fall short of your employers’ expectations you are in the wrong job. Maybe if this is a regular event in your life it is not the boss who needs taking aside, but yourself. If high standards are not what you spire to, then don’t be part of the running of the country. If you can’t take the heat, etc.

Sadly, this is where the rise of the ideology motivated social justice movement culminating in the pre-eminence of the HR department has brought us. A Police ‘Service’ dedicated to justice for the criminal. Minority terrorism from the likes of the trans movement, the alphabet people and the various heads of the hydra posing as environmentalism. And government driven by the desire to be liked.

Well, sod it all. I want hard-headed police force and hanging judges. I want the intolerance of indolence and the rewarding of achievement, rather than the acknowledgement of mere, half-hearted participation. I want there to be losers as well as winners and I want it to be absolutely clear which is valued the more. I want bosses to be allowed to boss, and I want an end to the culture of anything goes, something-for-nothing, reward-for-failure and indulgence of hurt feelings. In short, I want my country back.