PLEASE send your letters (as short as you like) to info@conservativewoman.co.uk and mark them ‘Letter to the Editor’. We need your name and a county address, eg Yorkshire or London. Letters may be shortened. There is no guarantee of publication.
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Is Geert Wilders a ‘useful idiot’?
Dear Editor
I do not live in Holland and I do not speak Dutch but I couldn’t help but notice the resurgence of Geert Wilders so-called ‘anti-Islam’ party (37 seats out of 150?) in recent elections seems to have slammed the brakes on the truly independent Dutch Farmers Party. With all of the other crises this is largely being overlooked.
Wilders had been kept in check for years by the apparently pro-Islam EU and its Dutch puppets, but when it suits those who truly rule over us to counter a real ‘grass roots’ European political movement anything goes. Whether Wilders is a knowing or unwitting ‘useful idiot’ I will reserve judgement.
I wonder what political contortions will be going on to prevent Wilders forming a government? No doubt the EU’s ‘Toolbox for Europe’ will come in useful. Do the Palestine supporters in the EU ever think of using this?
I can only hope that the propagandists and behavioural psychologists who corrupt politics across the Council of Europe nations are having nightmares.
John Mills
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How the academic world views ‘populists’
Dear Editor
This is from an email I received today from The Conversation Senior Politics Editor Laura Hood. The Conversation is a newsletter from academia which sets itself up as a counter to fake news.
‘When far-right politician Geert Wilders won the Dutch national elections last week, many were shocked that a man with such extreme views could be so popular among voters. But Aurelien Mondon, who studies far-right discourse, says that we shouldn’t have been. Through his research on how extremists like Wilders become part of the mainstream, Mondon has concluded that the mainstream is itself to blame. Our tendency to call Wilders a “populist”, for example, lends him legitimacy. And our complacency about sending Nigel Farage into the I’m a Celebrity jungle allows him to funwash his divisive rhetoric.’
Geoffrey Clarke
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We’re with you, Kathy
Dear Editor
I wanted to let you know I really enjoy your Week in Review piece that started recently. We too cancelled our TV licence some years ago, but we have been ‘re-applying to be exempt’ although our stated reason is always the outrageous bias of the BBC, and I particularly wanted to send you some words of support in light of the threats and red-letters you are receiving from them. Your bravery in this may well inspire us come next February to take on the TV licence brigade when our ‘renewal’ comes up. We are also engaged in a similar battle as you with our energy supplier (E.ON) who bombard us regularly with cajoling emails, text messages and letters ‘advising’ us to get our smart meter.
Thank you as ever for continuing to fight the good fight.
Dave Lowe
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Winter highlights the climate change lunacy
Dear Editor
I am writing this at 7pm at my home in the Scottish Borders on Friday 1st December, the first day of the meteorological winter. It snowed yesterday and this morning, and the ground, roofs and trees are white. The frost was hard all day. The air temperature at 1m above the ground is -6.9C and will drop to -10C tonight, according to the Met Office.
This afternoon I drove up a snowy valley nearby to walk the Labrador. All the wind machines on the neighbouring wind farms were stationary. On the return journey the tyre pressure warning lit up. The pressures had dropped from 36 psi all round to 31,30, 31, and 30 psi.
We were told twenty years ago that climate change was man made and would bring milder wetter winters. The facts speak for themselves.
At the end of last week the CEO of National Gas warned that the gas grid would be ‘maxed out’ over the weekend. The UK’s gas storage is enough for only ten days. Just now gas is supplying 57 per cent of GB electricity, nuclear 11 per cent and wind 3 per cent. But the Climate Change Committee is advising the government that all gas-fired power stations must close by 2035; Labour is committed to doing that by 2030. All but one of our nuclear plants will close by 2028. Meanwhile the government’s rationing of diesel and petrol car sales, and their policy of requiring heat pumps instead of oil or gas boilers, in fact totally decarbonising the economy, will require the doubling of the GB electricity supply. How will that work out during weather conditions such as we have this weekend?
Here in Scotland the SNP/Green administration has decreed that our perfectly serviceable gas or oil boilers will be scrapped from 2028. The regime is considering fining those who refuse to install a heat pump. Some people think that an air-sourced heat pump means you are getting heating ‘free’ from the air. Not so. A heat pump consumes electricity to work. A typical heat pump will consume up to 16kwh in this cold weather and heat water to 40C instead of 70C, be on 24/7 and cost with its huge 300-litre storage tank over £8,000 plus fitting, plus refitting your entire central heating system. In addition you will need an immerser heater to heat hot water above the safe level of 60C to avoid Legionnaire’s disease, while additives have to be added to the radiators to prevent that. I won’t mention noise, service life or icing.
Meanwhile world leaders infected with Net Zero virus gather at yet another junket to chant the magic phrases which are the keys to open doors of repute: ‘climate emergency’, ‘climate crisis’, ’climate disaster’ ‘one point five’, and ‘eating less meat is like taking 8million cars off the road’.
As Indian writer Don Aguiar says: ‘The UN’s COP event has become an annual pilgrimage, attended by more than 30,000 activists, bureaucrats and academics. Just as religious pilgrimages once signalled one’s faith in a visible and public way to other believers, a pilgrimage to COP is now “proof” of one’s “commitment” to the climate. For the pilgrims, failing to attend the junket falls somewhere between negligence and moral delinquency.’
What the hell is going on?
William Loneskie
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Why are we building wind farms instead of SMRs?
Dear Editor
You can’t compare a power generation option which averages only 30 per cent of its rated capacity with one which provides almost three times that. But politicians do it all the time.
Howard Mustoe wrote in the Telegraph of November 29 that the future of nuclear SMRs (Small to Medium Reactors) may be in question due to rising costs. Of course, inflation impacts on all types of power generation, due to the emerging shortage of raw materials.
Compare 50GW of SMRs with 50GW of wind + energy storage and you will find that SMRs are not more expensive, because 50GW of wind averages 30 per cent of that (ie 15GW) and so extra wind farms are required to make up for the shortfall.
Also, an electrolyser requires over 2kWh of energy in for every 1kWh of H2 out. So you need even more wind turbines to allow for that and losses in the H2GTs (H2 Gas Turbines) which will burn the H2. So several times the above wind farm capacity would be needed.
The point is that for a like-for-like comparison, you have to factor in the average power output of each option, including the cost of energy storage for wind farms.
Having done that, you may well ask why are we building wind farms at all, instead of SMRs?
Roger J Arthur
W Sussex