"Purblind, Know-Nothing Ignorance"

You'd know, Nick Cohen. Not only were you a supporter of the Iraq War, and not only did you endorse John McCain, but you treated viewers of This Week to the suggestion that people once believed in a flat earth. The notion that this was the Mediaeval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of "Gotham" to refer to New York.

I have no more desire than has Cohen to be dependent on Saudi Arabia. That is why I am in favour of nuclear power. As, to his credit, is he. Even in his own terms, you have to build nuclear power stations, you have to mine uranium, and you have to transport it, but that is as far as it goes. And that is also why I am in favour of the coal on which this island stands. Why isn't he? Even in his own terms, in fact. After all, coal-burning, like coal-digging, is hardly what it once was.

Russia was accused of "trying to expand its empire" and Iran of "trying to acquire the bomb", neither of which ludicrous claims is taken remotely seriously beyond the Craziest neocon circles. To make them, as to defend the Iraq War, is by definition to be in those circles, to be a Crazy. Yet even were they true, then not only would they be no threat to the United Kingdom, territory over which no Tsar has ever reigned nor in which any Zionist State has ever been established, but the arguments not just for nuclear power but also for coal would still obtain.

Could it be that Cohen simply doesn't like proper wages and secure employment for the common people, any more than he likes their having travel opportunities, or access to meat-eating, or the ability to have children? Is he unmoved by the fact that there were forty-nine per cent more excess winter deaths between December 2008 and March 2009 than between December 2007 and March 2008, as increased fuel prices and colder weather combine with the low incomes on which, it must be said, Cohen's in an important voice.

Cohen comes from a Communist background, his neoconservatism being just another form of Marxism. Nigel Lawson and Emma Nicholson may not exactly be stalwarts of the Labour Movement, either. But they are joined on the Board of Trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Joel Barnett (who, before anyone starts, has long been on record that his Formula was only supposed to last for a year or two) and Bernard Donoughue. Between them and Cohen, I know whom I trust more.