I HAVE but a hazy memory of the start of my TCW week. I was beset with cough, cold and headache, struggling to keep on top of work. I fear a lot of emails fell off the page before I got to them.
Nor was my sense of wellbeing improved on Monday. A further TV Licensing threat landed on my doormat, this time in a bright red envelope, telling me (in red) for the second time of an ‘investigation opened’ by Oxford enforcement. Ever since I refused to reapply not to have the licence some time in 2022, the pestering has been non-stop. For that is what you have to do. Each year. Well, I’ll damned if I will. Why should I have to keep applying not to watch the blasted telly and be treated as a criminal if I don’t?
My blood pressure wasn’t reduced by OVO, the irritatingly virtue signalling ‘green’ energy supplier, and their hundredth demand that I book a smart meter, all assiduously ignored to date. Their latest arm-twist is to tell me that my electricity meter’s certification has expired so I have to have one. I rang up in protest and demanded a replacement traditional meter. Sorry, but no, they are mandated to install smart meters only. Ringing round some recommended smaller suppliers met no success and I ‘got’ the game plan. It’s to make sure you’re going to have no alternative. Like the licence fee, I plan to carry on ignoring them and see what happens. I have broken no law.
These may be ‘first world’ problems, but they are all part of our micro-managed and choiceless times. That’s been underlined by the Tories’ second unelected political ‘installation’ of this administration. Just what is the point of Lord (call me Dave) Cameron is a question I have asked before. Now it’s taken on a rather more urgent dimension. ‘Facilitating the WHO’s power grab’ was one suggested answer forwarded to me last week. The new peer’s interests as well as priorities are barely disguised. First stop Ukraine, to encourage the fighting; second stop Israel, to discourage the fighting and push for more aid into Gaza. Then there was his creepy first official speech as Foreign Secretary to something called the Global Security Summit. Just digest his ‘thanks’ here:
‘Thank you to Andrew Mitchell for bringing us here. Thank you to the Somalian President who I met with this morning for his attendance today and thank you to the UAE, our friends in the Emirates, for being our co-hosts . . . And of course thank you to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support. It is so good to be back working with you again on these sorts of issues that matter so much.’ (My emphasis.)
Indeed, I’m sure it is. Apart from the continued spooky presence of Bill Gates at the heart of UK government, Cameron’s tribute to the ‘Children’s Investment Fund Foundation’ should ring alarm bells. This is the project of the billionaire hedge funder, Sir Chris Hohn, for whom Rishi Sunak used to work. Hohn, lauded by the Times as the UK’s most generous man, directs rather a lot of his ‘generosity’ to ‘challenging climate change’, Extinction Rebellion being among the lucky recipients. Nor is he shy of a bit of activism himself, or of telling us we should not worry about what XR does: instead we should listen to them because ‘we’re burning the world at a fast pace, which is a fact’.
Now it turns out he has also been funding London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s climate network to the tune of £46million, the Telegraph reported, as well as bankrolling the campaign for low emission zones. So, while the Conservative government pretends to be opposed to these policies, here is Cameron cosying up to the guy who is funding Khan to push them all.
If that’s not already too much for you, there was more Hallett to contend with. And another week of insights into the ‘guilty men’ who are still getting away with it, and their infighting. TCW is yet to look at the complete failure of the Covid Inquiry – all the questions it is not engaging with, and evidence it is not seeking, including the disastrous abuse and censorship of science by those behind the Covid response. I hope to get there at some point. It’s a huge project.
Then there was the Autumn Statement, already almost forgotten. Most of the MSM missed the point, but Laura didn’t – you can read her cracking piece here – and nor did Ewen Stewart, who gave the best analysis of the government’s continuing reckless economic stupidity that you will read anywhere.
I’ve not dwelt on the Israel-Hamas war over the last week. Readers know my views by now. However two thoughts have kept surfacing. One is what I call the ‘compassion deficit’ versus ‘barbarism surplus’. When else in a hostage situation has so little horror been expressed about the plight of, in this case, 240 hostages, including women and children, who must be living a nightmare of fear and terror, having already witnessed the barbaric slaughter of their friends and families? The second is the pro-Palestine ‘justification’ that there are Israelis who have condemned their country’s bombardment of Gaza. Well, of course there are. Israel is an open Western democracy and so has its fair share of woke ‘social justice warriors’ (aka cultural and political Marxists) who fail to appreciate the facts of life – namely that no Islamic regime would ever have any time for them.
Some higher notes of the week were the fightbacks in other countries against the new world order – now three weeks of street protests in Spain, and the election of economic liberal Javier Milei in Argentina and the much-demonised Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Here, however, the week ended with the only record the UK is any good at breaking: the net migration figures – 745,000 extra people last year. ‘Too high,’ admitted Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride in a masterpiece of understatement. Our population grew by a cool one and a quarter million last year, I read somewhere. And still all those ‘right wing’ Tories can do is huff and puff. Resigning from their party in protest might be more to the point.