IN CASE you missed any of our ten most-read blogs of last week, here they are for you again – and well worth the read.
Dr Mike Yeadon: Sage and the two fatal errors
Chris McGovern: Working-class white boys . . . a ticking time bomb
Donald Forbes: Who’ll pull the strings if Biden creaks his way to puppet president?
Kathy Gyngell: Debunked, a Covid scare story of mass deaths
Margaret Ashworth: At last, a conservative Tory MP
Darren Selkus: Democracy – the reason I’m backing Fox’s Reclaim Party
Karen Harradine: Why so many believe in the Covid Cult
Andrew Cadman: Are we paying the price of Johnson’s Churchill complex?
Vlod Barchuk: Is Trump really losing? I wouldn’t bet on it!
Donald Forbes: In the limbo of a lost past, migrants are the Nowhere People
We could all do with a break from the relentless coverage of new lockdown restrictions. Another controversy relating to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement might not be what we have in mind, however. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, and where better to uncover such a controversy than in a small village in Wiltshire? Such is the topic of my pick of the week, by Henry Getley.
Several teenagers in Urchfont caused a stir when their request that a local disused telephone box should adorn a BLM-inspired ‘anti-racism’ display was turned down by the council. Patent racism, surely? Not quite, since the display was rejected on political grounds. The children protested, citing an example of a war-memorial display which had featured previously. Have we abandoned the process of thought altogether?
Henry explores this case with his usual wit, and his article, here, is well worth a read.
Last week brought more new talent to TCW, Kathy writes, and the discovery of a philosopher for our times. David Matcham, a delivery van-driving poet, is her pick of the week outside the top ten. His parody of the Nicene Creed – ‘The Covid Creed’ – cleverly sends up the religious zeal of the nation’s lockdown lovers. You can, indeed you must, read it now if you missed it when it was published.
Like King Lear, the zealots leading this Covid cult will brook no truth. But unlike Lear they won’t even suffer a ‘fool’ to confront their vanity and insanity though such a one was never more needed.
We doubt Number Ten will invite David in as their poet-in-residence any time soon, but he does have our platform on TCW whenever he wants it to direct his barbed stanzas from. Since ‘The Covid Creed’ he’s sent two more: ‘The Government is my Shepherd’, which you can enjoy here, and ‘If Shakespeare did Covid’ here.
In this age of cynicism about education David’s literacy and intellect provides a timely reminder of its inherent value and worth, one which we must fight to conserve.
Margaret’s choice outside the top ten is Frederick Edward’s ‘The down-at-heel shoe town: Elegy for my poor old Northampton’. Never more than an ‘average’ town, it has far less to recommend it now. Edward describes ‘a stroll through the multikulti that has been established throughout most English towns’ as he tries manfully to find some saving graces. He concludes: ‘I can’t shake the feeling that we are merely living in the shadow of greater things, like the barbarian living among the ruins of a Roman city.’ Many will agree.
