THIS was the week I caved in. Another enforcement letter from TV Licensing, more menacing than the last, dropping on my doormat on the same day that I received a county court summons for a cool £19,000 damages claim against me I’d never heard about (for a near-invisible wheel hub I scraped more than three years ago that my insurance company settled at £1,800 at the time) got me down.
It took several phone calls, emails and four days of anxiety to establish what the hell the summons was about and to be assured, at my prompting, that it would be contested by the insurers’ lawyers, albeit on procedural grounds rather than principle. I think there’s a name for law firms who try this sort of thing on. Though it is nothing compared with other people’s trials and tribulations, feeling beset and besieged I succumbed to getting rid of one irritation – to apply (for a second time) not to have a TV licence, an unjustifiable opt-out law that I’d relished the thought of being taken to court about. Rebecca D’Amato’s article the same day on the state-sanctioned harassments designed to break us – into compliance or madness – hit a nerve. It really wasn’t the week for me to comply with BBC diktats. Hard on the heels of the government’s empty promise to review the licence fee came their even more useless ‘BBC Mid-Term Review’ – only a year late. Talk about another squandered opportunity to call the Big Brother Corp to account. The BBC and Ofcom, nodded through by whichever the nonentity the current Culture Secretary is, get to stay in charge of their joke complaints process, with who else but the Director General and the utterly corrupt Ofcom as the final arbiters.
Meanwhile the BBC, their ‘worldview’ rarely disguised, have managed to sink to a new low over their coverage of Israel. Leftist prejudices and double standards sum it up. They continue to treat patently absurd civilian casualty figures from Hamas as reliable while constantly casting doubt on Israeli statements, ‘presenting Israel rather than Hamas as the aggressor and rogue actor’ as Melanie Phillips points out in a searing article headed ‘The BBC and the axis against Israel’. Hamas leaders and spokespeople lounge in the comfort of knowing they’ll never be similarly grilled.
All in all, a pretty depressing week, with what seem to be daily alerts about child abuse, neglect and even murder popping up on my phone only to disappear as quickly, with attention turning to Meghan and Harry or some inanity. No longer do any of these stories of cruelty and depravity stay splashed on the front pages. They’ve been ‘normalised’. From the horrendous Beastie House case to neglected toddler Bronson’s death by starvation, reported on here by Laura, they no longer even command special inquiry status. Life is becoming increasingly cheap and now that reckless warmongering idiot who it’s terrifying to think is in charge of our defence is doing his best make it even cheaper. The one thing to bring a smile to my face was the headline ‘Incompetence, thy name is Grant Shapps’ – one of many this week from the brilliant Ashworth team – on John Ellwood’s piece. In case you haven’t noticed, what makes TCW so distinct from other websites is humour.
One hope we can cling to is that Mr Incompetence won’t get much support from a Trump administration. Nor, it would seem, from that other dissenter, Robert Kennedy Jr. Team Kennedy’s email this week was headlined: ‘The Ukraine war should never have happened and it’s time we understand the complex web surrounding it.’
Canada’s monstrous PM, Justin Trudeau, has his very own plan to reduce the population, as if vaccinations weren’t enough. He is about to extend his euthanasia offer to 12-year-olds. Lessons in killing from this Dominion are not ones we need, as Simon Caldwell’s important article on ‘assisted dying’ sets out.
Too many politicians these days seem keener on finishing us off than preserving lives. One particularly grotesque initiative was drawn to my attention just a couple of days ago. I found it hard to believe but there it was, with the link, showing what the barbaric Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Dame Diana Johnson are proposing. They have tabled amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill that would make it legal for a woman to perform a self-abortion at any point right through to birth. It’s too gruesome to contemplate. Mothers murdering their about-to-be-born babies has to be the ultimate depravity.
Not increasing my happiness this week was criticism I’ve had for not being a ‘free speech absolutist’. I had the temerity to say the cartoon Bob Moran published last week was anti-Semitic, wrong and shouldn’t have been published. My admiration and support for Bob was not going to stop me from saying so. He portrayed Israel’s PM Netanyhu as a Jewish child-eating murderer. Condemn a politician, condemn a country, but not with a vile anti-Semitic slur and blood libel – a libel that was used to justify pogroms in the past and which extends to all Jews. Ironically the accusation of betraying the principle of free speech had quite a lot to do with silencing the naysayers. The line between being a free speech absolutist and woke became perilously thin, I noticed. One of my many failures in not defending the cartoon was of not being ‘inclusive’ to Muslims. At the risk of a bit of ‘whataboutery’, that has to be better than transmitting fake news from Gaza, as it appears ITV has been doing.
On the matter of DIE I note that Black History Month is upon us – again. Who decides this? Will we ever get a Jewish history month? I somehow doubt it. One email apropos this date in our calendar informed me that the United States is still entrenched in racism ‘in ways that may surprise many who consider themselves allies’. This is according to that noted racial ethicist, author and attorney, Fatimah Gilliam. The problem of being white or perhaps not white. You see, you need the ‘unique lens and rare access to insights from a light-skinned Black woman, informed by the revealing things white people say when they don’t realize she’s Black’, to understand. Got that?
The good news is that despite such intersectional identity inanities moral sense has not quite melted away in that most afflicted of countries. A New York State Supreme Court has ordered that all New York City employees who were fired for not being vaccinated must be reinstated with back pay.
Hooray, for once coercion didn’t pay. I’ll be getting back into the saddle next week, not to buckle but to fight.