Will Heaven

Originally published on my Telegraph blog:

Just half of Britain believes in man-made climate change, a Sunday Telegraph poll has revealed. The figure didn’t surprise me in the least. Over the past week I’ve been deluged by climate change misinformation on this blog and by readers’ emails: “facts” which are based on hearsay, bullshit which is repeated until it is thought true, and crank opinion disguised as expert analysis. The public is understandably confused.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, Right-wing climate change deniers are not entirely to blame for this. Yes, the Mr Strangeloves of this world have attempted to warp the bad science to suit their politics. But it’s the Left’s alarmism which has also helped to undermine the most important issue of our time: Al Gore, among others, has proven that climate porn only damages the debate.

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Global warming is the new EU. It’s an extremely contentious issue for Tories, in other words, and they need watch out that Labour don’t use it to divide the party. Just listen to Ed Miliband’s comments on the eve of the Copenhagen climate conference:

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Originally published on Telegraph blogs:

Guido Fawkes is being enigmatic this evening – either that or he’s fluffed a blog post, which declares without any explanation that “Ed Balls Went to Eton for a Term”. Could this be the embryo of a seriously damaging scoop for the Schools Secretary?

Here’s what we know already: back in June 2008, The Sunday Times revealed that Ed Balls’s father had taught at Eton in the early 1970s, and that young Ed had lived at the school for term. But he insisted that he was educated elsewhere:

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The traditional family is on the way out, the head of the Family and Parenting Institute said this week. No one can argue with that. For years, divorce has been seen as normal (if not quite the norm), and the decline of the nuclear family continues.

As a consequence, Dr Katherine Rake said, children are no longer brought up by Mum and Dad, but by the family as a whole – grandparents, uncles and aunts, and whoever else is around to lend a hand. She calls it “communal parenting”.

But here’s where I disagree with Dr Rake. She says it’s wrong for governments to try to preserve the traditional family through state initiatives: “What policy-makers must not do is fall into the trap of investing large sums of money trying to reverse the tide of trends by trying to encourage more traditional families.” Traditional family life is over, in other words, and we should accept that there’s no turning the clock back.

Why should this have to be the case? All my instincts tell me that it is right to encourage families and traditional family life. My experience as one of four children in a happy marriage supports the idea, too. Why shouldn’t the state and the Catholic Church do everything they can to promote the family?

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Blimey, I’ve just seen the Telegraph’s blog figures for the last week. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that James Delingpole is on the fringes of the global warming debate. He’s bloody not. In fact, as the (top secret) figures show, he’s amassing a vast army of climate change sceptics behind him, who think that anthropogenic global warming is a worldwide conspiracy between climatologists and politicians. Climategate – the furore surrounding some very dodgy emails exchanged by leading scientists at East Anglia’s CRU – has become their pièce de résistance.

The trouble is, when you loathe Al Gore and his climate porno buddies as much as I do, it’s easy to shrug it off. It’s just old Delingpole being his usual self, you think, no harm in that. Let him bash the Lefties as much as he likes. Maybe it’ll even stem the flow of climate change alarmism,stinking protest camps and weird polar bear adverts.

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About ten minutes ago I was walking past the Houses of Parliament. As I reached one of the side-exits onto Parliament Square, a policewoman stopped me and a small group of tourists in order to allow a white van out. On the side of the van, which had obviously just delivered to Parliament, was this image:

It was also slightly altered to include the word “truffles”, as one American tourist noted with great amusement. I reached for my ageing blackberry to get a picture, but the damn thing was too slow (yet another reason to get an iphone).

What do you reckon, have our MPs learned much in 2009?

This year saw the passing of Britain’s last World War I veterans, Harry Patch (aged 111) and Henry Allingham (aged 113). They were rightly honoured – praised for the courage they showed in their youth, and for what they represented: hundred of thousands of their generation, slaughtered on muddy battlefields almost a hundred years ago. Of course, we will remember them.

There’s a lesson to be taken from that remembrance, particularly for the people who find the pictures from the trial of the 89-year-old war crime suspect, John Demjajuk, disturbing. He entered the court in Munich today looking old, and frail and in some pain. He then lay on a stretcher, moaning and making faces as his trial began, as if to evoke sympathy from the court and from those witnessing the proceedings.

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