THIS is my final ‘TCW week in review’. I am not going to fill it with farewells and thanks – I am saving those for next Saturday when the final curtain falls on this 12-year enterprise and battle for truth.
Suffice it to say how touched I have been by the literally hundreds of emails that have continued to flood in from readers marking their distress at the news and saying what the TCW ‘mission’ and stance has meant to them over the years, one or two examples of which are in our final letters bag today.
What I really did not expect was the volume of tributes to me from TCW writers and readers – just too many at the moment to be able to reply to. Even some dedicated articles. These latter, if you’ll forgive a bit of self-indulgence, I want to acknowledge. First David Keighley’s brilliant analysis of how censorship works in this country – a stealthy strangling of disrupters like us. Starting with a compliment comparing me to John Wilkes! I haven’t gone to prison as he did (yet).
But if anyone deserves the Wilkes accolade, it is Mark Steyn. He has been harrying the complacent Marxist left longer than I have. Another ‘disrupter’ actively banned from the MSM’s hallowed halls of acceptable dissent. Last week he honoured me by devoting one of his Steyn Online posts to TCW’s demise. Down but not out. Humbling from the man who gave me a new voice on air and so promoted TCW.
Reading the Steyn Online article took me back to those short-lived glory days of real dissent. To my very first outing on Mark’s brand-new GB News show in December 2021, not as token reactionary (the way the BBC etc all had consistently treated me over the years) but as someone whose views were really being sought. I remember saying to Mark how wonderful it was not to have to worry about being ‘taken hostage’ or lined up to be the whipping boy. He laughed and we didn’t look back – until cowardly GB News cut the rug from under him and pulled his show after less than 18 months. That ended the short heyday of a genuine free-thinking resurgence in British broadcast media.
Mark the disrupter, the climate sceptic warrior (see elsewhere in TCW today) brought back to this country an inquiring, unafraid, principled, right-wing voice in the times of covid censorship. He made his interviews with the vaccine-injured his mission. Of course that could not be countenanced. Ofcom weighed in, Britain lost its best broadcaster and the rest is history.
Finally to make my head grow even bigger Paul Collits alerted me to his Substack tribute to me as an editor. Something I did not expect but really touched me. Making decisions about other people’s writing has not always proved popular, as Margaret and I have learnt to our cost on occasion. But that’s what editors and sub-editors do and that is what makes for a readable, considered and accurate output. All the more important when you are navigating the troubled waters between entrenched left-wing ideologies and those neo-Marxist incarnations critical race and gender theories and decolonisation on the one hand and crazy Candace Owens conspiracy theories on the other.
‘Candace versus reality’ Ben Shapiro put it on Friday (reporting on the preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson) in his Daily Wire email to subscribers. ‘When you consume conspiratorial slop, you become dumber. You become less capable of seeing real evil. And the real evil – the left-wing radical ideology that killed Charlie Kirk – keeps growing in the shadows while we debate the maroon shirt brigade in Candace’s conspiracy corner.’
He is right. The course sanity (truth) steers is a perilous one, once we stop focusing on the left’s lies and fall down rabbit holes instead. Something that Frank Haviland, that helmsman of the right, cannot be accused of. His article last week, where he subjected Sir Adrian Fulford’s use of language at the opening of Phase Two of the Southport Inquiry to scrutiny, caught my eye. Do read it. ‘The dangerous comfort of vague words’ nails weasel words masking the Southport truth from the man leading the inquiry into it.
Weasel wordsmithery that our prospective Prime Minister Andy Burnham is adept at too. Did you see his X attack on Israel last week? It began with a few forgettable PC seconds of cliches condemning anti-Semitism; with that out of the way he moved to the main agenda apologising for Labour’s ‘not good enough’ response to Gaza, then proceeding to an all-out condemnation of Israel (in effect dispatching its right to exist).
It was not just that he made literally no mention of more than 1,000 children, young people, families, old people tortured, raped, slaughtered and dragged into tunnels in the outrage that that precipitated the war, or the attacks on Israel from several co-ordinated fronts all funded by Iran, and that Israel needs must combat if it is not to be driven in to the sea.
It was not that it was so evidently the shameless replication of propaganda of a UK university Marxist/Islamist campus. Or even that it appeared to be designed to appease the country’s Muslim and woke constituencies.
But why did Burnham choose not to miss a beat in starting with Israel as his first major foreign policy statement, as Leo Pearlman astutely observed. Why not Ukraine, not Russia, not China, not Nato, but Israel? Because the statement wasn’t about the Middle East but about the coalition he needs to win power, which tells us this, Pearlman writes: ‘He is not simply recognising the operating system that has transformed parts of Britain’s activist Left, he is legitimising it. He is signalling that the framework which has already reshaped universities, trade unions, cultural institutions and newsrooms is no longer merely the language of campaigners. It is becoming the language of government itself.’
He goes on to restate the truth the MSM and the woke routinely ignore. That when ‘the world’s only Jewish state is held to standards applied to no other democracy, Jewish sovereignty itself becomes morally suspect. Once Israel becomes a symbol rather than a country, Jews inevitably become symbols rather than people. That dehumanisation allows not only attacks to be carried out, but also their motivation to be contextualised and excused.’
Yes, Mr Burnham, for all your weasel words about anti-Semitism you have just legitimised it with the lowest of the low appeasement and self-interest politics. He should be ashamed and treated as beyond the pale.
But where’s the pile-on about that immorality? Nowhere.
That sums up TCW’s mission, stopping the so-called right from falling for the left’s false world view. Something that Ann Widdecombe, may she rest in peace after her unconscionable violent end, never fell for. What a truly shocking and terrible end to the week her death was. Her memory – her stance – must live on as a lesson to the right of this country. Appeasement never works.
It won’t rid the country of the yoke of neo-Marxist orthodoxy and state control. The only thing that will do that is for the right to bury their differences, at least sufficiently to unite tactically as the left always do. Drop the unsavoury in-fighting and mudslinging that the Parliamentary and MSM pile-on about Nigel Farage’s private finances has provoked.
Has everyone forgotten the endless conflicts of interest, dodgy perks and cover-ups that have disgraced our democracy over years, that politicians have got away with? From Boris Johnson, through Rishi Sunak, Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer? To say nothing of former Ministers, PMs, and civil servants’ immediate lateral arabesques into lucrative careers in corporatist private industry or globalist outfits unwanted by us but paid for by us? And yet who is the one man they always pick on with glee, go for, deride and have sneered at for nigh on 30 years? The one man they’ve relentlessly targeted since 1999, when I first started monitoring the then leader of UKIP on the BBC? No, he is not perfect. But the system is biased beyond repair.
I leave you with my thoughts about Mr Farage to whom, with all his imperfections, the right in this country owes its survival. I ask you, whatever you think of him, can you contemplate Reform UK leading the party polls without him as its leader? And should Reform UK collapse as a party without Farage at its head and the right continue to in-fight, can you contemplate the defeat of an already entrenched left? Given an ever-shortening time frame demographically and given the very real probability of a left/Islamic/Lib Dem and Green alliance designed for one purpose, to keep Reform and any ‘right-wing’ party out? Can you?
Right Times substack postscript:
For readers who have asked me how to find my new Right Times with Kathy Gyngell substack, here is the link. Please press the ‘subscribe’ button which gives you the various options to pay or not to pay. Once TCW has stopped and I can focus on developing it, there will be both accessible to all and paid-for content. All free subscribers receive email alerts for every new article.
