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.
Karen Harradine: Why so many believe in the Covid Cult
Karen Harradine: Beware the tyranny of a forced vaccination
The Laura Perrins interview – Peter Hitchens
Bernard Carpenter: Joe Biden, America’s biggest mistake
Toby Young: Covid: Dr Mike Yeadon’s latest blockbuster
Chris McGovern: When Eton goes woke, what is left?
Daniel Miller: This insane and destructive government must be sacked
Karen Harradine: This dismissive attitude to voters is shocking, Dr Fox
Rolf Norfolk: Fact-checkers should check their fact-check bias
Frederick Edward: Two-tier policing and the rotten heart of the state
If our great educational institutions are not friends of free speech, what hope do we have? Some commentators have tried to brush off the Eton controversy as an issue of discipline, not of free speech. Even the ‘right-leaning’ Spectator features an article in defence of the school on its cover this week. TCW’s Chris McGovern takes the opposite view. He says, quite simply, that Eton, not this brave teacher, is in the wrong.
Most interestingly, McGovern questions the advice of a barrister called in by Eton before it commanded the now-sacked teacher to remove his video lecture on ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’ from the internet. He writes: ‘The teacher concerned in this dispute was upholding the requirement for “balance” in the [school’s] curriculum. By closing him down, the school may itself be the party acting illegally. It should ask its “independent barrister” for a refund.’
McGovern’s piece is well worth reading. You can find it here.
Kathy writes: Laura Perrins’s prayer for Jacob Rees-Mogg to see the light on lockdown is my pick of the week. You can read it here.
As we now know, it was not answered. Rees-Mogg trooped through the Government’s ayes lobby along with the rest of Boris Johnson’s voting fodder. Inevitable though that probably was, Laura was right to highlight the disappointment a man we pinned our hopes on has turned out to be in office. His surrender to the evil of lockdown, like his silence (since Johnson became PM and appointed him Leader of the House and Lord President of the Council) over Brexit reveals, I fear, the selfishly focused political operator portrayed in Lord Ashcroft’s biography Jacob’s Ladder who was always residing behind the studied fogey and Latinate exterior: just another politician whose every move is dictated by ambition.
Margaret’s choice outside the top ten is ‘In the bleak green midwinter’ in which former meteorologist Ivor Williams graphically describes life in January 2045 when Boris Johnson’s dream of every home being run on wind power has come true. An anticyclone is sitting stubbornly over the North Sea. There is no wind and no sunlight. Williams writes: ‘The country suffers winter peak power demand in the early evenings, five days a week. By 2045 this will be very high indeed as we all come home from work, plug in our electric cars, turn up our electric heating and put the pie in the electric oven. At 5.52 pm on the Monday evening the blackout begins.
‘Your phone will last a day or two. Wood-burning stoves and open fires have been banned years ago, and without electricity to power your heat pump, no coal, gas or oil, your house will be an igloo in 48 hours. Batteries and carefully hoarded old camping gas cartridges and heaters will be fetching silly money by the end of the week. The only thing that will work is a wind-up clock.’ I can’t wait.
