Much of what makes me despair about life in this country appeared just before 9 AM on BBC Radio 4's flagship fake news programme Today. It started with a segment on global warming...
In that piece a reporter looked at power stations belching our carbon and asserted that this caused climate change and that as a result on the meadows in front of him the wildlife diversity was changing. Some species were disappearing and new ones were arriving. Then he rolled back over the past few thousand years and discussed how the climate and landscape and wildlife diversity had changed many times in relatively recent history. And, though he failed to note this critical point, it had done so without any contribution from mad made carbon emissions.
None the less for the BBC this is not a logical flaw to be discussed it is just glossed over. The liberal establishment just KNOWS that THIS TIME it is different and whilst God caused all other periods of dramatic climate change, this time it just has to be man. We are now far more powerful than nature and its cycles.
Just when I thought it could get no worse John Humphries piped up with a section on the threat posed to Britain by the extreme right. His guest was Paul Stocker, a Research Associate in Fascist Studies at the prestigious academic hothouse that is the University of Teesside. I bet his students get a high quality balanced education and emerge with degrees that leave them well placed to thrive in the private sector. And to think that Mr Stocker only got a 1% pay rise this year plus grade increments fir all his valuable work.
Stocker has written a book called the English Uprising and this was linked to the threat of the extreme right via the Brexit vote. Stocker pointed out that Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain so Brexit was an English thing. Of course that rather ignores how our friends the cottage burners voted - Wales wanted out too but let's not spoil the plot. So what if the fellow falls into the first logical trap to point out this huge flaw in his work is an insult to all hard working, underpaid and dedicated propagandists. Oops I meant academics.
Stocker asserted that many of the concerns of we Brexiteers, such as immigration and multiculturalism were those of the far right. "ideas of the far right, a radical critique of immigration and multiculturalism" droned Stocker and Humphries did not dissent.
That chap Trevor Phillips who formerly headed the Commission for Racial Equality but now says that multiculturalism has failed - he must have been intellectually captured by the far right then: send out a rescue mission. So too must all 17 million of us who voted for Brexit even though many of us did so in support of things like a desire for greater democracy.
As it happens i support unlimited immigration (combined with a slashing of the welfare state) but as a tolerant sort of fellow I cant see why we cannot debate immigration or multiculturalism. The true fascists are those who say that anyone offering a critique of our current policies is of the far right or is accepting the ideas of the far right. Is tolerance of FGM compatible with true multiculturalism? Discuss. Or rather do not discuss in case you fall off the path of political correctness because you have accepted an idea of the far right.
This is the same sort of lunacy that used to see the bien pensants of the liberal media say "you cannot fly a Union Jack as it is the preserve of the far right." Of course that was rot but in ensuring that good ordinary patriots did not fly the flag for fear of being slated they allowed the far right to be seen as the main flag wavers.
Thankfully we have moved past that sort of nonsense but the fascist left has not given up and in its strongholds of the media (especially the BBC) and in academia its attack on free speech, on our right to challenge what the left has dictated be regarded as an unassailable othodoxy, grows ever more unpleasant.