2522 days ago
If there is one man who deserves a New Year's honour in 2018 it is the veteran LGBT and free speech campaigner Peter Tatchell. He will not be on a list packed with airhead celebs, sporting cheats, party donors and professional arse-lickers to the establishment. For, like me, Tatch is a Republican and so has refused honours for that reason and because he, rightly, views the system as rotten and corrupt.
2706 days ago
All journalists have opinions. None of us can be truly impartial as we have our own views and prejudices. If you are a columnist, that is to say you write opinion that is why you do what you do. The views of Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot and Owen Jones are well known. They are Big State money tree worshipping lefties and argue that line. On the other side Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips or Peter Hitchens take a different tack. I do not hide my own libertarian take on life. But none of the above are reporting news and when doing that your prejudices do matter. You should bury your on news when reporting FACT.
2850 days ago
The Mrs says that my coat makes me look like a Big Issue seller. Christ these lefties are snobs. But on reflection she has a point and ahead of a trip to Northern Greece where it is minus 7 at night and barely above zero in the day I headed to town on Saturday to find a replacement. Luckily I had my camera to hand as I encountered several hundred poorly dressed folks, most of whom seemed like the sort of under-washed workshy bums who will pitch up to protest against anything. The smell of weed was thick in the air as I wandered along trying to find the most idiotic placard in Bristol's latest Donald Trump hatefest.
2868 days ago
At home with Joshua, the Mrs and i regale our son with the nursery rhymes we knew as children. I guess we both grew up in households that were, in many ways, small c conservative, whatever my mother's views on self sufficiency and other throw offs from the hippy world of the late sixties. To these rhymes we add my own creations. The first verse of yesterday's was:
3098 days ago
I prepare for a celebration lunch with lefties in the grim North. Woe is me. But my mind wanders to what else was happening in 1966? I am really not on the ball today. Then I ask how can we say that investors are protected if fraudster Rob Terry can raise cash for his Knob Park ponzi via crowdfunding? Then I answer the question in today's Daily Mail (a loathsome rag) - in a low interest rate era should you pay off your mortgage?
3142 days ago
The picture below could have been from any demonstration over the past thirty years but as it happens it was when the rent-a-mob went after Dodgy Dave after his spot of bother with the Panama Papers. Do not for a minute think that I condone the way Dodgy Dave failed to come clean on arrangements available only to rich folk like him to reduce tax. I think it shows him to be a slippery member of the 1% but that would not make me hit a rozzer, male or female.
I suppose that we on the right just dont go on "demos" very often, whoever is in power. maybe it is because we are too busy with things like holding down ourjobs or maybe we are smart enough to realise the futility of such action. I suspect that it largely boils down to the fact that we accept the democratic will of the people and so if MPs vote for a measure it has to be pretty appalling to rouse hard working right wingers to go on a march. The last great right wing demo was for life, liberty and the countryside.
I went on that march with my, then baby, daugher on my back.
3183 days ago
What is there that the mad lefties who run the Guardian, the BBC, Channel 4 News and all the State supported quangos celebrating IWD 2016, could not see in a woman who was an illegal immigrant ( overstaying a visitor's visa), an ethnic minority (Jewish), an atheist and whose writings are so influential that she is seen as the driving force of a major school of thought?
Surely on International Women's Day we should be holding a woman - whose family were persecuted when she was just 12, losing their homes and facing starvation - and who herself was booted out of University for not adhering to the line of an oppressive regime, up as a role model for our daughters? This woman achieved so much despite all the odds being stacked against her.
So as we celebrate Great Women today why won't the lefties tell our daughters about Ayn Rand?
Er..
4417 days ago
Lunch with some nice folk but since they are academics it is simpler to declare my hand from the start and out myself as a right winger. It avoids any embarrassing moments later on. Er maybe not. The Great Margaret Thatcher comes between us.
Somehow the conversation turns to buses. One academic mutters “Maggie Thatcher” and another nods. I let it pass for a couple of minutes. What are they talking about? And so I ask. Well they cannot remember the exact quote and but it is something along the lines of “
I could not argue or defend Mrs T. Instinctively I doubted she said that because it in no way chimes with the philosophy of someone (who unlike the left) admired those who sought out opportunity, however they got there. Thatch wanted to give the poor a chance. The left wants them to have to travel on a bus for life. But I did not start a debate. The quote seems damning. And being academics I am sure they have sourced and verified it.
They have not.
