MY TCW week began with a West End theatre trip and a salutary reminder of how far TCW is from reaching, let alone influencing, the minds of the middle-class woke. Daughter-in-law number two thought a modern refashioning of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People looked promising. As indeed did I! Which vaccine dissident doctor, we wondered, would this contemporary rewrite feature as the hero? Would the audience leave in mute horror at the censorship and silencing of such honourable men in recent years? Naive of us, I agree, in retrospect.
The play wasn’t just amateur at every level – from script, to acting, to the set – but a turkey of veritable proportions. An incoherent student ‘me me’ rant. Yes, it showed selfishness, but that was the fault of nasty capitalism. No one, least of all Matt Smith’s unattractive useless doctor, had any moral autonomy. But it wasn’t their fault, of course. Infantile and intellectually void, yet the audience loved it! They all joined in the intellectual race to the bottom that was the audience participation bit with idiotic enthusiasm. And stood to applaud at the end. Poor Henrik.
I couldn’t wait to escape. My taxi driver when I burst forth just said, ‘What did you go there [the Duke of York’s Theatre] for? They always do plays like that there.’ Now I know.
London black cabs have been doing very well out of me over the past week, what with getting to physio appointments and starting to go out on a not yet fully restored knee. And what a joy their drivers are. Common sense and decency personified, it’s them we need running London.
My week looked up the next day. I was one of the lucky ones to get an invitation to the premier showing of Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) on Tuesday. Apart from being a brilliant film which laid bare the climate hoax or fraud (whichever word you prefer) from beginning to end and from every angle and featured each and every one of the top (cancelled) physicists, engineers and statisticians, I was among friends again, sitting with Professor Norman Fenton and Will Jones (Daily Sceptic), and Laurence Fox in the row in front. Harry Wilkinson and Andrew Montfort of Net Zero Watch and Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Martin Neil, Ben Pile, Andy Shaw (Backyard Comedy Club), the Fair Fuel and London mayoral candidate Howard Cox, and many more in a packed theatre. It was so good catching up with so many allies!
Once the film is released next Saturday we will share and ‘show’ it on TCW and cover all its main sections: the scientific history of the Earth and CO2, natural climate change, extreme weather, the consensus and the climate bandwagon funding and politics, and finally climate versus freedom – the people and the poor. It is written and directed by Martin Durkin and produced by Tom Nelson, and they should be very proud of it. Introducing it, Martin said many of the credits in the film were pseudonyms of people fearful for their futures in the industry on which they depend for their livelihoods. What a statement about the West. Once it would have applied only to a China or to a Russia.
On my way home from Leicester Square I saw Mayor Khan’s ghastly Ramadan lights for myself. Crude and lowbrow. Apart from that they just shouldn’t be there. However much Khan wants to change us, this is a Christian country with a Head of State who is Defender of our Faith. Given the threat to Jews in the capital, it felt like a real two fingers up. Yet he gets away with it, all the while complaining against Islamophobia. And that’s what happened last week: very noticeably concern has switched from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. First I noticed Sunak shelling out £117million to protect Muslim schools and mosques. I asked on Twitter (X) what evidence is there of any significant threat to any of these institutions? I got no reply, no one eager to inform me of it. I also noticed that a former Gove ‘hate czar’ adviser has quit complaining about racism. So predictable. When will the government realise this type of appeasement policy doesn’t work?
It was of course the week that Michael Gove defined extremism. Our own laugh about it proved to be quite justified. In a pretty obvious sop to the Muslim community, Gove named two entirely unknown ‘far right’ groups. Had anyone ever heard of them? I tweeted. No, no one had. For Gove’s ‘social cohesion adviser’, Sara Khan, this crackdown didn’t go nearly far enough. What she wants is a whole new law of ‘hateful extremism’ to stop hate ‘polluting society’ and guess who, Ofcom, to be given the powers to enforce it! Good grief. Hope not Hate, a pretty hateful organisation itself, would have a field day and we would be all in the line of fire. How long would TCW survive? No doubt this post would do it for me. One TCW wag emailed to say he thought the Government fitted the Gove criteria for extremism rather well. That’s the irony.
None of this type of authoritarian intervention will stop the bullying, silencing and harassment that’s causing people to self-censor, and the concomitant appeasement of the bullies. Take the Union of Jewish Students. I see they have just sent out a virtue-signalling ‘combating Islamophobia’ tweet. It is indeed true that tackling one sort of prejudice should not stop us from tackling another, but shouldn’t their priority be the defence of Jewish students who’ve continued to be relentlessly intimidated while the Union has remained silent for a month? Why? The explanation is all too familiar. What I understand to be the case is that while they are prepared to react if it’s from ‘right-wing extremists’, they don’t dare if it’s from leftists or Muslims.
For all the grim reading out there, there is always something to laugh at. For me it was Katy Balls of the Spectator telling us in all seriousness: ‘There are now two parties of the right in Britain: the Tories and Reform. They’re on 25 per cent and 15 per cent in the polls respectively and have near-identical aims.’
Of the right? The Uni-Party, Big State, interventionist, lockdown, extremist defining and authoritarian Conservative Party? And Reform, well, it’s still got a long way to go. Katy needs to take more black cabs – and listen to the drivers.