This interview was published last Thursday by Die Weltwoche in their English language online edition under the heading The Year of Conservative Renaissance, the German translation in their print magazine at the same time. Republished here by their kind permission.
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POPULIST right-wing parties surged across the continent in the European Union elections. The leading politician in Europe is a conservative. In the United States, former president Donald J Trump achieved the political comeback of the century. Kathy Gyngell, editor of The Conservative Woman, reflects on the year 2024 with Weltwoche writer and reporter Urs Gehriger.
It was the year of superheroes: on football pitches; in Olympic stadiums; and on the political stage. Robo-taxis, drone weapons, artificial intelligence, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine continue to sow chaos and uncertainty.
And as 2024 closes, once-in-a-generation phenomenon Donald J Trump has upended politics in the United States and across the globe. Persecuted, prosecuted, literally targeted, and ultimately triumphant, the former and now future American president has returned to the pinnacle of world power.
‘Since he ran for president in 2015, perhaps no person has changed the course of politics and history as much as Trump,’ writes Time magazine of its ‘Man of the Year’.
Two other trends in 2024 also deserve attention: the rightward shift among the populace of Europe, and the ascendance of women to the top tiers of continental power.
Women now hold the reins from the Balkans to the Baltic states, from North to South. In Slovenia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania, women lead as heads of state. The top three positions in the European Union are held by women, and Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has risen to become the most influential woman in Europe.
Die Weltwoche turns to Kathy Gyngell, editor-in-chief of The Conservative Woman,
to offer her unique insights.
Mother and author Gyngell has blazed a trail through the halls of Oxford, broadcast journalism, public policy and publishing. As a frequent contributor to British media, including the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Guardian, BBC, ITV, and Sky News, Gyngell is a familiar face on UK screens, broadcast and electronic.
Optimistic for a brighter future: Kathy Gyngell
Weltwoche: Kathy Gyngell, 2024 must have been a year of cheers and jubilation for you as a conservative woman. Are you ready to pop the champagne?
Kathy Gyngell: No, sadly! Things are so often not what they seem. I think if you looked at it this very superficially you might herald this as a triumph for the ongoing march of female equality, but I am far from celebrating.
First, we shouldn’t be surprised by the rise of women, given that feminism of my generation was not just concerned with equality of opportunity, but with equality of outcome, meaning gender parity in jobs.
The effect of the whole movement – of feminisation of education, of the professions and indeed of all our institutions, is a ‘more than parity’ effect. Whether this be entrance to medical school, law school, and then into politics – selection is NOT on the basis of individual merit but on an ideal parity outcome. Feminism is fundamentally socialist in intent.
The more interesting thing for me too, given this unfair promotion, is not so much whether these women are nominally conservative or not but whether they’re nonentities or not. If you compare them with the great women leaders of earlier in my life, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Mrs Bandaranaike, who got there without feminism, you are left asking how many equate to them? Probably not many.
Mythologies have evolved about female disadvantage or oppression and around Hillary Clinton’s idea that there exists this huge untapped reservoir of women – well, we’re tapping it pretty damned hard now, and to what avail? It has made very little difference. In fact, I’d go further and say it has been to our detriment.
You could say as the feminisation of politics has progressed the quality of politics has declined. There’s definitely an argument for that. In the group of women that you’ve described, is there an outstanding woman there? Possibly Giorgia Meloni; time will tell. She’s the only one so far who shows any courage, true family-based conservatism and independence of thought. The rest are uninspiring, several left progressives under a centre right guise, like Ursula von der Leyen. What I also see in the UK is a rise and rise of women appointees to public sector and corporate management jobs, quangos and government agencies simply because they are women.
Weltwoche: Giorgia Meloni has risen to a leading force within Europe. Numbers of migrants into Italy have dropped tremendously this year. And Meloni does stand for family values. Do you see a renaissance among women or in society of family values?
Gyngell: Apart from Meloni, no. The rise in the number of women leaders is rooted in the feminist project that I have described. The second wave of feminism was a Marxist project, not a family project. It was anti-family. Though current-day women are not the radical feminists of my generation, that generation has shaped the nature of our relationship with men and ideas of equality. Present-day women’s, and political women’s in particular, idea of equality relies on outsourcing childcare, having very little regard for or understanding of the importance of traditional family structures and maternal roles. You don’t, by and large, possibly apart from Giorgia Meloni, see today’s female politicians advocating either for mothers’ maternal rights or infants’ need for mothers. To the contrary, they call for state subsidised ‘outsourced childcare’ and round-the-clock daycare. Ursula von der Leyen, who has spoken out for increasing childcare nurseries, for women’s quotas for listed companies’ main boards and for gay marriage, is a classic example.
Weltwoche: Elsewhere in the world, time and again, women are treated not nearly equally. In Afghanistan the Taliban regime issued new vice and virtue laws banning the sound of women’s voices or singing in public or travelling anywhere without a male escort. Yet women in the West are silent. What has happened to the feminist voice against the Islamic suppression?
Gyngell: Interestingly, women like me protest against it, and we’re socially conservative women, but we’ve always believed in a universal equality of respect and equality of opportunity.
Western feminism has become very interested in other things. It’s been so successful in its power battle with men and in the shifting balance of power between the sexes that it seems to have lost sight of the fact that that this gap in power in fundamentalist Islamic countries has increased. You look back at photographs of Iran in the Fifties and the Sixties and you see women looking like me. Take a photograph now and you’ll see them in their full burkas showing how the ‘liberation’ of women there has gone into a steep and frightening reverse.
Weltwoche: So, why do nowadays women not seem to care about their suppressed sisters? Where is the solidarity?
Gyngell: There is no solidarity because feminism isn’t like that today – if it ever was. Feminism is about woke, and woke is about multi-culturalism, and therefore is about moral relativism, not having a universal principle. I have a universal principle in my head about the treatment of women. I don’t have to be a feminist to do that. The rise of the feminist is fundamentally about identity politics and how they behave now is all about identity politics.
The only time that they protest is when another group gets higher than them in the identity victim hierarchy. For example, they’ll protest against trans, maybe, but they’re very split, they’re not fighting for women in fundamentalist Islamic countries. Worse, they are not even fighting against the subjugation of such women in Islamic communities in our own countries.
Weltwoche: 2024 was a remarkable year for conservative parties. European elections in June delivered a clear turn to the right in the Brussels Parliament. And seven EU member states – Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia – now have far-right parties within government. Why did conservatives win big?
Gyngell: Well, there has finally been some real pushback against the stranglehold of woke and the increasing tyranny of progressive leftism across Europe. That tyranny has been very apparent since even before lockdown. Being told how to think, having choices removed, having freedoms undercut. On the right there’s been a pushback against ‘globalism’ too, against unaccountable supranational bodies and for the return of nation-state democracy.
Weltwoche: Wherever the right gained power there is a similar pattern of reaction. The established parties try to keep victorious right out of governing bodies. Be it in Austria, in Germany, in France. Firewalls are built against the right.
Gyngell: This is a reaction not simply against the right per se but against the rise of anti-globalist or nationalist parties who want to re-establish their countries cultural and political boundaries and borders. They are not, by the way, always right-wing. Marine Le Pen, obviously, is quite socialist in her economics and quite statist in many ways. One reason the established parties have succeeded in keeping this so-called ‘far right’ out of power is because the voting system allows it. It is not enough to come first. I would argue in Europe, this is a real downside to of the various forms of proportional representation across the continent. It makes it nearly impossible for those groups to achieve the executive level of Government. A simple majority is not enough – it has to be a majority over all the combined opposition parties to stop the establishment parties from retaining power.
Weltwoche: Where does that lead? If the will of a large part of the population is ignored, like prominently with the AfD in Germany, will nations become ever more divided and drift into civil unrest?
Gyngell: It certainly leads to protest and also to political and even economic breakdown in countries where establishment parties keep trying to shuffle around and keep reforming alliances and there is no effective government. It took the Netherlands nearly a year to form a government.
And now we have Germany’s famed post-war political stability falling apart. But will the AfD, Germany’s second largest party, ever be allowed to form even part of government there? In France too, despite the vote of no confidence in and fall of Macron’s Government, there still seems to be no clear path for Le Pen’s National Rally party to power. Will it lead to more extremism on the right? I don’t get that sense. I get the sense that it’s very difficult to invigorate populations into more than the odd mass protests.
Just as we have seen huge mass protests in Spain this last year going nowhere, such is the grip of the Euro leftist elite. We saw this after Pedro Sanchez [Spain’s socialist prime minister] clung on to power when he should have stood down. We saw the huge farmers’ protest party in Holland initially getting scrunched out before it managed to break into government at all.
So, the question is whether people can either ‘cohere’ sufficiently around shared values and principles to care enough to vote in the numbers required for the right-wing or nationalist parties to cut through.
Nigel Farage said in Great Britain before the election, ‘In order to cut through, we have to reach an exponential level of votes.’ That’s even in our ‘first past the post’ system, which arguably is less hostile to ‘insurgent’ parties like an AfD.
Weltwoche: Talking about Nigel Farage, he was the only conservative in Britain who somewhat prevailed with his new party Reform UK. While the continent saw waves of victorious conservatives, Great Britain has been the prominent exception. After 14 years of Conservative rule and five different prime ministers, the Conservatives suffered the worst defeat in its parliamentary history. How did this come about?
Gyngell: On my website, on The Conservative Woman, we’ve been saying the party deserved to die since 2017.
Weltwoche: Have you, indeed, cultivated a death wish of the Conservative Party?
Gyngell: No, the party did it for itself. Particularly since Theresa May and since Brexit and the betrayal of her disastrous management, post-Brexit vote, of the UK’s ‘withdrawal’ from the EU. It was a betrayal of 17million people who voted for it, basically. Each time, the candidates that the Tories have put forward to lead have been responsible for further betrayals and further letdowns. They’ve gone from bad to worse.
Weltwoche: Have the Tories lost the sense of conservatism?
Gyngell: Yes. They lost it even before David Cameron, I would argue. They lost it when they lost the immigration battle when Michael Howard was leader. They were so shocked and shattered by the second Blair win. There was also a cultural shift. They were no longer conservatives. They fell in with the feminist narrative. They fell in with the socialist ‘levelling up’ narrative. They fell in with all of the left’s social liberal agenda to ‘detoxify’ the party. Theresa May’s first act in power was to sign off Labour’s Equality Act, which legislated for what has come to be the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion oppression. Boris Johnson then presided over the most anti-conservative and anti-democratic act of all – the imposition of a long lockdown, not for our safety but as the necessary condition for the release of the vaccine countermeasure, a plan that became progressively evident.
Weltwoche: What is conservatism? Could you sum it up in a few sentences?
Gyngell: It’s a small state free society, to begin with, and that needs strong families to stand up to state inference. It means economic liberalism, but with social conservatism, two sides of the conservative coin. This is what I believe the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has understood. You can’t have economic liberalism without a moral foundation – of a correct way to conduct your business and to order lives – ‘rules’ that in my view are not for the State to decide but for the family to transmit.
Conservatism then has to be about a family-based society, a married-family-based society largely free from state dependence. Once you lose that, in my view, however economically liberal your policies are, not only do you relinquish power to the state but also risk losing your heritage and your ability to conserve all that is good in society.
The late Roger Scruton, who was the greatest British conservative philosopher of our time, once said, ‘Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’
Weltwoche: The Tory Party has just elected its first black female leader. Will Kemi Badenoch make the Tories great again?
Gyngell: The brutal answer is no. The Tories can only ever be made great again when they acknowledge their full responsibility for the UK’s staggering economic decline over their 14 year rule – particularly the growth of the State sector, monetary policy and open borders – all under administrations that Badenoch was part of.
Now Kemi Badenoch says she wants to restore a ‘muscular’ liberalism, but she misses the big picture. She just hasn’t made the leap from the 1980s wars against hyper-regulation of the economy to today’s much-needed war against the ‘progressive’ corporate globalism of net zero, digital surveillance, censorship and post-modernist socially destructive woke orthodoxies.
Meanwhile, recent polls show Reform UK, that stands for British culture, identity and values and stopping the boats, ahead of the Conservatives. Yet Badenoch still clings to the safety and political self-interest of the Conservative in-group, believing it can be politics as usual, and determined to fight the last war on a mythical centre-right narrative.
Weltwoche: Conservatism is not only conserving, but also about invoking hope for a brighter future. A person who embodies this inspiring form of conservatism is Donald Trump, who just had the comeback of the century. It’s an unbelievable story. He was attacked by the courts. He was attacked by the media. He was attacked physically by assassins twice. He survived by less than an inch. Hollywood could have not invented that story. What is it with Donald Trump that inspires so many people with hope and confidence?
Gyngell: He has a bravery that most people on the right don’t have in saying immediately what the truth is and what he thinks and what he’ll do. He’s so direct. It’s not confrontational. Forthright. Forthright is the word. I get accused of being too forthright. Donald Trump, if you want to say, is 100 per cent forthright.
Trump comes as pure relief after all these Orwellian years of politically correct orthodoxies, ‘shaming’ and self-censorship Suddenly, we’re being allowed, and even people on the left must secretly think, ‘God, we’re allowed to talk again.’ To say out loud that we care for our country more than anywhere else; that we don’t want a load of immigrants in here; to say common sense things that we haven’t been allowed to say and be openly patriotic. That’s tremendously powerful.
Weltwoche: There is tremendous expectation. After he [Trump] left a world in astonishing quietness there is hope he will simmer down the conflicts that erupted under Joe Biden’s reign. First and foremost, in Ukraine expectations of Trump are high. In recent days we heard Zelensky talking even for the first time that he might accept, or the Ukrainians might accept, some territorial concession in return for security. Is it time for peace? And what is the price for a cease fire?
Gyngell: Of course, the time for peace was two years ago and it was torpedoed. Zelensky is finally telling us he’ll give away something; he’s got no choice but to say that. He knows he’s coming into a world of real politics, finally. What Trump is very well known for is doing the deal. He will do the deal.
Weltwoche: What will a deal look like? Will Putin win and get everything he wanted?
Gyngell: Not completely. I wouldn’t think so with Trump, because he’s not a rollover. He’ll give back some of what Putin believes is rightfully Russia’s has been taken, I think, but, yes, it depends on terms (which may rest on Ukraine’s minerals the US needs). I would put my faith in him to come to terms with Putin quickly. It’s his top foreign policy priority after all. They understand and respect each other. How much Ukraine will have any say in it and whether Zelensky’s got any future any longer, I don’t know. They have to give up some territory I think, the Russian-speaking Donbas oblast for example. Whether the rest of the West agrees is is another matter.
The trouble is we’ve been running on a mythically confident vision, supported by the Western media, about what’s been happening in the war in Ukraine for over two years now; which has also ignored the Russian contention that the West, going back to 2014, provoked it in the first place. It’s been pretty clear to me that Russia with its superior manpower resources was always going to win this war, though at frightful cost, and particularly so for the decimated Ukraine. Everybody surely will want it closed down except for a few people.
Weltwoche: Originally, Putin wanted to topple the Ukrainian government and seize Kiev and push back Nato. Instead, he has emboldened the Western alliance. There are two new member states. Sweden has officially joined Nato this year. He has thrown many of his people in the meat grinder. The ruble is now apparently in the downfall. Has Putin gambled too high?
Gyngell: Possibly, if Ukraine was allowed to join Nato. However, sanctions didn’t work. That was a proven ‘own goal’ for the West. Regarding the Russian economy, now the fourth largest in the world, it has masses of resources and indeed, manpower. With such planned heavy defence spending he may have gambled too much but he certainly sent a warning shot, writ large, with the launch of an Oreshnik (‘Hazel’) intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) on the town of Dnipro. Though I don’t think he will attack the West, this was a big statement. The EU for all its expansionism is now weaker than before the war as an economic and political entity, yet it still has wishful ‘imperialist’ thinking. Maybe part of the deal will be that Nato has to contain itself, that there has to be a buffer zone?
Weltwoche: What we can witness is he’s moving to the East. He’s dealing more tightly with China. Putin this year visited North Korea and celebrated the brotherhood with Kim Jong-un. He has a solid backing from BRICS states. We are witnessing, in reaction maybe to the Ukraine war, an emboldened South, united in BRICS states. Is this counterbalance to the United States of America and Europe becoming a new global power?
Gyngell: The West (the G7 – since it expelled Russia in 2014) and particularly Biden’s financing of the Ukraine war has pushed Putin and Russia further into this new set of alliances and strengthening of the BRIC countries.
A new BRICS- or Chinese-led global power all depends on the US dollar persisting as the world’s reserve currency. More problematic is America’s got this huge trillions upon trillions of debts. How sustainable is this? What really are the US’s gold reserves? Who is buying most gold – BRICS or the Central Banks? What does it signify? Will Trump’s tariff policy and protectionism strengthen the dollar and his economy or not? So many questions!
My belief is that we were already starting to see the end of Western global and economic political dominance; the question is whether Trump can consolidate America’s economy to make it self-sufficient and self-sustaining enough to maintain it as a world superpower.
Weltwoche: Another explosive Biden legacy Trump has to deal with is the Middle East, where he once initiated four peace deals between Israel with four Arab states, the Abraham Accords. Now Iran and its proxies have turned the region into mayhem. Namely Hamas with their attack on Israel. Trump now fiercely is challenging Hamas: He warned Hamas to free all hostages before he takes power on January 20. Or ‘there will be ALL HELL TO PAY’. What do you expect of the Trump effect in the Middle East?
Gyngell: It’ll make people sit up and think perhaps, and start to question the international pressure on Israel to truncate its mission. You’ll perhaps no longer get such an effective Hamas propaganda machine working through the world as there’ll be another narrative. To date, even despite the support that Netanyahu has had from America, there hasn’t been a challenge across the mainstream media to Hamas propaganda, or to the narrative of their victim cause.
Israel is also on the front line of fighting against this fundamentalist Islamism for the West, and it’s simply not recognised. Trump realises this threat coming into America through his own borders. We only have to look at what happened on the campuses in America since the beginning of this war to see an extraordinary resurgence in this once liberal country of shouting down Jews; blatant expressions of anti-Semitism and genocide threats in a propaganda war fought in campuses and streets over there, and over the world too. Trump’s arrival will be a game-changer.
Weltwoche: Israel has been taken by surprise and was hit in a devastating way. But this year, it struck back with a secret agent using device attacks targeting Hezbollah by concealing explosives inside the batteries of pagers brought into Lebanon. In September they eliminated Nasrallah and the top Hezbollah leaders. But it all comes with a price. If we look at Gaza, it’s heartbreaking to see that. In reaction ICC issued warrants for Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant. Has Israel gone too far in its response to terror?
Gyngell: It’s the ICC that has gone too far! I think the interesting thing is Israel is the only country that you’d ask that question of. Israel is the only country in the world where its fundamental right to defend itself is put in question.
Nineteen per cent of the people living there are Muslim. This is forgotten. Arab Muslims, living in a democracy in which they, as well as the smaller Christian population, are represented.
Furthermore, it is the only democracy in the Middle East, and yet it is the only country in the Middle East that we question its right to self-defence.
If the defence of that democracy means finally finishing off the terrorist groups that surround it, Hezbollah and Hamas, it has no choice. Then your question about has it gone too far is like saying when we ‘invaded’ France with Operation Overlord should it have stopped at Paris and not gone on to Berlin? Was going into Berlin too far? Perhaps we should have just let Hitler stay alive and carved out Europe with him? No.
Today we have a culture that is very hypocritical as to which loss of life is acceptable. We must ignore all the terrible losses and casualties and mutilation in Ukraine and keep that war going for ever until every man between 17 and 70 is dead and which is never going to be won, but we’re not allowed to support or sustain a war that Israel can win, that Judaism’s very survival depends on.
Depending on which war, the intellectual elite, the progressive left again, applies different benchmarks. Underlining the prevailing attitude to Israel, I would say – and I’ve seen it feature prominently in comments (even on my own website) across social media – is the most horrifying resurgence of anti-Semitism. Now you could say it is the result of Israel’s post October 7 invasion of Gaza, but the strange thing was how it erupted so soon after, in one of the most egregious ‘victim blaming’ exercises I have ever witnessed, i.e. the conspiracy theory that the Israelis planned October 7 themselves.
Weltwoche: Meaning, there is an underlying deeper cause.
Gyngell: Yes, a taboo has been broken in a way we haven’t seen since the Second World War, in the openly prejudiced and even demonic way that Jews and Zionists are once again talked about. It’s frightening.
Weltwoche: Do you think there should be a Muslim ban with migration? Should we have a fixed number of Muslims being allowed into Europe as migrants?
Gyngell: I think we need a moratorium on all migration. You can’t have a moratorium on all movement, but in terms of the mass asylum or economic migration Europe has been on the receiving end of since Merkel opened Germany’s borders, yes. Something approaching a moratorium is essential if we are to deal with existing immigrant populations and have any possibility of achieving the integration or assimilation needed. I am talking about violence and criminality as well as cultural differences. Allowing mosques to be built in France at the same rate as Christian churches are being vandalised or closing down is sheer folly. Europe desperately needs a breathing space to deal with the multi-cultural problem it has invoked.
We need time to stop and take stock, but again, that’s going to take politicians with honesty and determination. You see Orbán closed his borders, didn’t he? He was able to take stock. Can the rest of us?
Weltwoche: Just before Christmas we witnessed take-over of Syria by Muslim rebels. President Assad escaped overnight from his palace and escaped from the country. How does this change the power structure in the Middle East? Is the West facing another long war against Islamic extremism?
Gyngell: Yes, and Middle East chaos. Abu Mohammed al-Golani is the de facto leader of Syria after his jihadist group led the toppling of the Assad dictatorship heads up Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which has committed mass human atrocities and was co-founded by the former leader of ISIS as the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Do I need to say more? The prospect for Druze, Christian and Kurdish minorities is uncertain to say the least though the diminishing of Iran’s crescent of control has to be a good thing.
Weltwoche: In April, a rare 1938 copy of Action Comics No 1, that first introduced Superman, sold for a record US $6million at an auction. Superman and superheroes do indeed have a renaissance in 2024. You have the embodiment of Superman with a person called Elon Musk, who is arguably one of the most genius people in the last century, definitely of our days. Just in this year, he invented several things from robots to rockets with boosters that go back in their sockets. Last but not least, he gave us a platform for freedom of speech with X. He bought Twitter, gave us X. And now the richest man of the world is teaming up with the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump. My question is, is Elon Musk becoming too powerful?
Gyngell: I am tempted to say that since the turn of this century, people’s belief that we’re still living in democracies that represent us and the decisions are taken by our own governments are still in our name and interests, has come under a lot of pressure! Plenty of billionaires before Musk have been actively influencing governments.
In fact, the more you dig into it the more you start to see billionaires and international actors who have become remarkably influential in politics, economics, and culture; in a corporatist global capitalism that works closely with governments. Without doubt you wouldn’t have had the sudden eruption of the trans agenda without the big tech billionaire ideologues behind it, and its active promotion courtesy of the World Economic Forum, to which many belong. The same can be said for the entire green movement.
In England, we’ve a billionaire who actually talks about ‘global burning’ as though the world was literally going to be set on fire. He’s Christopher Hohn, founder of The Children’s Investment Fund Management hedge fund. He has been enormously influential in pushing net zero politics. He has the ear of Prime Ministers and Ministers all the while being the major financial donor of the activist group Extinction Rebellion. Most young people won’t be aware of the people who’ve been operating behind the scenes for years, with far greater influence over political policy and decisions than the risk-taking entrepreneur, freedom of speech champion and ‘renaissance man’ Elon Musk! What is better, to have a billionaire like Musk, or a billionaire who’s behind the scenes?
If you look at George Soros, he gets leftist Democrat attorneys voted in in America, euthanasia legislation passed; puts huge amounts of money and resources into lobbying for abortion and drug legalisation too. He spends massive amounts of money through his Open Societies to influence voting his way the world over, yet he’s regarded as a philanthropist.
So why, when suddenly we get one man – Elon Musk – who comes right out and openly says, ‘I’m actively supporting this politician’, rather than being in the shadows and creeping into the back of Downing Street, having meetings privately and secretly, which is what the others do – are people alarmed? A man who’s absolutely open and upfront like Trump is himself?
Weltwoche: The importance of social media is growing steadily. In November the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, came up with a revolutionary idea: he suggests facial recognition for users, so teenagers under 16 years can be banned from social media. This sounds Orwellian. Is this the path to save humans from becoming imbeciles?
Gyngell: There are two things here. On the progressive left side, there’s no doubt that the digital control through digital ID – through all the controls that came with covid and vaccination – is a move to get populations more surveilled. London’s got more such cameras than practically any other city in the world. What’s astonishing is what these new CCTV cameras can do. Nobody should be under any doubt that reducing us to digital slavery is the huge danger of this technology. It’s already widely used of course in China where tracked actions and behaviour determine your social credits, themselves necessary not just for consumer privileges but for freedom to travel and so on.
On that front, I think what Albanese is doing, just as our broadcasting and online regulator Ofcom says that what it is doing is in the name of protecting young people from pornography etc, also has an underlying ‘Chinese’ control intent. Of course there is an argument about exposure of teens to pornography and violence, however if we come back to an ideal type of family-based social conservatism, it should be the responsibility of the parents and schools to supervise or allow access to digital technology, not the State’s.
Weltwoche: Looking into 2025, what makes you feel confident that we are heading into a brighter future?
Gyngell: It is really just the one thing which is Trump’s spectacular comeback. I still see Europe in such a desiccated and suicidal state, despite the rise of the right. Their net zero energy policies are proving fatal. The so-called centre right has long been corrupted by the progressive left in Europe.
Many of its leaders are still part of a self-serving and out of touch global elite. It’s difficult to be optimistic about Europe and it’s difficult to be optimistic about Britain under Starmer but I hope Trump will shake things up. His comeback is already washing up on Europe’s shores, witness the warmth of Macron’s greeting to Trump at Notre Dame’s reopening celebration.
Perceptions and culture will change. Elon Musk’s energy independence of thought and sharp eye for woke hypocrisy will speed that process too. Pragmatic politicians like Viktor Orbán and President Vučić will be listened to in Europe over the Ukraine war and help broker the peace so desperately needed. That is what I hope and predict. Yes, it’s difficult to take it away from Trump. It’s Trump that makes me optimistic for a brighter future.
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Kathy Gyngell is the editor of The Conservative Woman. She founded the website in 2014 when it came apparent that the mainstream media had no time for traditional, common-sense conservatism. Rebadged TCW Defending Freedom during lockdown, the website has been described as a window, a beacon of light as the night closes in. Over the years Gyngell has made several TV appearances, written for the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and, more recently, appeared as a frequent guest of GB News.
