Happy Hanukkah!

 Hi All,

Hanukkah starts today and ends 26th December.

Let's have a Mrs Thatcher climate day !

Hi All,

Mention to Mrs Thatcher to the left and you will almost universally get a vitriolic and hostile response. Especially over the miners strike (which happened before I was born), in which most of Britain’s coal mines were eventually shut down and millions of communities- often relying on ‘the pit’- as the main source of employment for men, in gritty ‘northern’ mining towns and villages, thus destroying whole communities in the process.

The funny thing is that Mrs Thatcher should actually be praised by today’s left, rather than hated. Here is why :

No 1: By closing down all those mines, which predominately employed men and  even ‘toxic masculine men’ , broke the stranglehold of patriarchy in many parts of the country, liberating women to get poorly paid jobs – a feminist revolution- rather than looking after kids at home.

No 2: Today we are told opening a new mine in Cumbria is a ‘Climate Crime’. No kidding. Opening up a coal mine so that people aren’t freezing to death this winter is a ‘crime’, but glueing oneself to the streets or vandalising art galleries is not . But by this wonderful logic because Thatcher managed to close the rest of Britain’s coal industry, she should be seen as a ‘climate super hero’, because surely she saved us all from the terrible evil that is coal.

 In fact Mrs Thatcher should be up their with Greta and extinction rebellion, et al.  Why then do the left hate Mrs Thatcher and the Tories for doing exactly what they want to do today, re the environment ? Surely Mrs Thatcher was an environmental trail blazer and ahead of her time?

Oh do go away!

 

Hi All,

If there’s always one politician who gets my goat and that is Gordon Brown. Quite why he cannot simply enjoy retirement, rather than making stupid interventions into politics is beyond me. But anyway, his latest ‘devolution’ proposals.

1.       The devolution of powers to English regions. Brown and Blair tried this in their many years in office and the proposals were rejected when it came to local votes. Why? Because British politicians simply don’t grasp that people in England do not identify with regions such as ‘the South West’ or ‘North East’. The Cornish are very different to Devonshire people: Newcastle is different to Durham. In fact what English people seem to identify with is a matter of urban/rural and geography. If you are in a city or next to one you might well identify with it: Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham etc. If you are small town or rural, you will identify with the old shire counties and not some whitehall made blob, with a line drawn on a map like the old colonial office used to and call it ‘East Anglica region’. People will identify with Norwich, Norfolk, Suffolk etc, before a fake region.  Plus these visionaries never ever grasp the nettle of devolution to the whole of England, with an English Parliament and a Federal Parliament for the whole UK.  This works in Germany and USA, so why not here?

 2.    The Scottish devolution idea of allowing Scotland or Wales  to create its own foreign or trade policies is worse than Scottish independence. Forget that this idea goes against any tenant of a functioning nation-state or  of federalism – that is foreign policy, trade, defence and national security are always, always in the hands of a central or federal government- it would allow  a Drakeford or any of the SNP Peacocks to strut around the world, without the Scottish actually having to shoulder any burden as this would continue to be paid by the English. In other words it gives the SNP exactly what they want, lots of prestige and money without having to find it themselves.