David Lindsay: July 2023

Monday 31 July 2023

Six Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for six weeks, so when is the election?

If you know, you know.

Power Up Britain, From Britain

As a member of Unite, I am delighted that the Government is falling into line with my trade union. It says a lot about both that the historic heartland of the SNP has been the North East, and it has always been the case that the SNP’s deal with the Greens was going to do it no end of harm there, in the Texas or Saudi Arabia of Europe, where it is always defending tiny majorities against the Conservatives, or seeking to overturn tiny majorities of theirs, or both. The SNP is at a weak point, and Rishi Sunak has gone in for the kill.

Yet the Conservatives are the party of Net Zero. They invented Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in general, and it was Boris Johnson who devised ULEZ in particular. The last time that they cut fuel duty, then the supermarkets put up their profits on it by five pence per litre, and the money kept flowing round like petrol. Road tax, meanwhile, ought to be abolished. While raising a tiny proportion of the enormous cost of maintaining the road network, it gives those who paid it the strange idea that they owned the roads. Get rid of it. By the time that what used to be the Clarkson Tendency had noticed, then, from their own point of view, it would be too late.

My favourite question of Greens is, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” It always stops them in their tracks. And I have the same question for post-Thatcherite culture warriors and opponents of Net Zero, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” If not, then I can give you chapter and verse as to why you did not really regret the loss of any of things that you claim to, although you might sincerely believe that you did. At the recent local elections in England, the considerable Green gains were mostly from the Conservatives.

Although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, Margaret Thatcher was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. Theresa May gave the nation the Climate Change Act, and her erstwhile Chief of Staff was last night selected for Matt Hancock’s seat. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the British coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for donkey’s years.

Leo Abse had the measure of the milk-snatcher, as he had of Tony Blair’s androgyny. With its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, gender self-identification is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. It was an unknown concept in 2010, and has arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.

Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. She created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour.

There is another way. We must celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, so that everyone might enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985.

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet now we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. I am strongly in favour of solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations.

Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

Let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Say it again, harness the power of the State to bathe this country in heat and light from oil, gas, nuclear, wind, wave, tidal, solar, and that without which there could also be no steel for rigs, pipelines, power stations or turbines, namely coal. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the defeat of the miners in 1985. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Reform UK lost its deposit at two of the recent byelections, while the Reclaim Party did so at the third. Unless you mean the Greens, who beat Reform and Reclaim on all three occasions, and who have 801 councillors to Reform’s 11 and Reclaim’s none, then there is no populist Right. There is only an unpopulist Right.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 21

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Carol Lawrence, Jenny Holmes, Sister Frances Orchard CJ, and Sir David Behan.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Monsignor Andrew Faley, Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Father Christopher Hancock MHM, Father Jeff Dodds, Canon William Agley, and Catherine Dyer.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Paul Brown, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Robert Appleby.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide. I should emphasise that there is absolutely no risk that I might ever give anyone the satisfaction of my suicide.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 21

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Max Hill KC, Monica Burch, Rebecca Lawrence, Mark Hammond, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Dawn Brodrick, Steve Buckingham, Mark Gray, Sandra McKay, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Mark Hammond, Michael Dunn, and Deborah Harris.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Max Hill KC, Rebecca Lawrence, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 724

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 724

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Sunday 30 July 2023

Called, Justified, Glorified

Here is your weekly reminder that this could not have been an executive summary of this. That would have been impossible, since they bear no resemblance to each other. It is all here, including on the ludicrous definition of "grooming" that was used to hound Canon McCoy to his death, and including on the nonsense about Timothy Gardner. Something has changed since 3rd May. What is it? And where is the original report?

I do not resile from this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. Rather, I reiterate every word of each and all of them. There was no cathedral sex party. The move from the old Bishop's House to the new one made a profit. There was no allegation of sexual assault against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, who should sue every media outlet that had suggested one.

I may not, but I may, accept the present report when Bishop Byrne had done so, and to the extent that he had done so. His Lordship has yet to do so to any extent. At least while that remains the case, then I reject the whole thing out of hand, and so should you. The sum total of the charge sheet against Bishop Byrne is that he did not automatically do as he was told by the hired help. But Pat Buckley does not like Bishop Stephen Wright, so Bishop Wright must be all right.

Indeed, His Lordship preached well at his Enthronement. He clearly has a deep spirituality. There was also a speech by a self-identified survivor of clerical sexual abuse, one Maggie Vickerman. Neither her case, nor those to which she referred, had anything to do with Bishop Byrne, if they really happened at all. How do we know? At most, they were long before his brief time in this Diocese. If anything, certain people with some responsibility for them were in that sanctuary. Nor did Ms Vickerman make any attempt to disguise her theological agenda. Well, nor do I make any attempt to disguise mine.

Casting The Net Wide

They are seriously considering the possibility that they may have found aliens long after they have stopped looking for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But if Tony Blair has doubts about Net Zero, which is non-coincidentally Keir Starmer's approval rating here in the Red Wall constituencies, then he is presumably planning to apply for membership of George Galloway's Workers Party of Britain. Many members of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party have recently joined the fiercely pro-industrial WPB, which is now campaigning for a referendum on Net Zero. While I have my doubts about that, it does give Blair somewhere to go. He has nowhere else.

My favourite question of Greens is, "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?" It always stops them in their tracks. And I have the same question for post-Thatcherite culture warriors and opponents of Net Zero, "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?" If not, then I can give you chapter and verse as to why you did not really regret the loss of any of things that you claim to, although you might sincerely believe that you did. At the recent local elections, the considerable Green gains were mostly from the Conservatives.

Although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, Margaret Thatcher was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. Theresa May gave the nation the Climate Change Act, and her erstwhile Chief of Staff has in the last few hours been selected for Matt Hancock's seat. Boris Johnson described Thatcher's destruction of the British coal industry as "a big early start" towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for donkey's years.

Leo Abse had the measure of the milk-snatcher, as he had of Blair's androgyny. With its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, gender self-identification is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. It was an unknown concept in 2010, and has arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December's Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.

Ah, yes, the 1970s. The Mail on Sunday, so you know that the knives really are out, reports that the victims of Jimmy Savile are coming for Starmer, and not before time. Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Savile. Due to Savile's fame and connections, of course it is inconceivable that that decision was made by anyone other than Starmer, just as of course he was sly enough not to have left a paper trail. Why did Starmer let Savile off? Why is Starmer so dependent on Jeffrey Epstein's closest associate in Britain, indeed one of Epstein's closest associates in the world? What sort of person therefore wants Starmer to become Prime Minister?

Even from his cell, Epstein was still making donations to "Petie" Mandelson. Prince Andrew is an utterly unimportant person. Epstein's British connection that matters is to Mandelson, who pretty much ran the Labour Party when it was last in government, and who is back running it now, having solicited a large donation from Epstein's cell as a convicted and incarcerated paedophile.

In the meantime, Mandelson has been European Commissioner for Trade, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council, and First Secretary of State. In all but name, he was Deputy Prime Minister under Gordon Brown, and arguably under Blair as well. Prince Andrew has never even run his own bath. Mandelson, however, is now running Starmer, who is the most inexperienced politician ever to have become the Leader of the Opposition.

As a Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British General Election. He ought to do so for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, which is presently occupied by Starmer. The neighbouring constituency of Islington North is certainly going to return its MP since 1983, Jeremy Corbyn. It is now quite clear that Emma Dent Coad is going to contest Kensington, which she lost by only 150 votes and where she remains a sitting councillor with a very high local profile through the campaign for justice for Grenfell Tower. Should Diane Abbott still be without the whip when the General Election were called, then Hackney North and Stoke Newington would be no contest. As it would be if she had the whip, come to that. And so on. All this, and Jamie Driscoll, too.

After all, the latest horror story is that Starmer would not abolish the bedroom tax, so what is the Labour Party for? It arose out of the determination of the economically productive classes of what was then the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, first to explain their poverty, and then to defeat it. If there was one thing about which all Labour people really did used to agree, then it was that the State had a duty to eradicate child poverty.

Even if you took the hardline Blairite view that from the day that you embarked on adult life, you were solely responsible for what you did with your Sure Start, then you were emphatic that you were entitled to it in the first place, and in fact the last Labour Government did a great deal about child poverty, the fight against which was the driving passion of Gordon Brown's political life. What is there to Labour now? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

Indeed, strongly though we may agree with Bridget Phillipson about the importance of dressing well, and while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as farfetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. For one thing, Labour came to power when she was 13. For another, working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26.

Reform UK lost its deposit at two of the recent byelections, while the Reclaim Party did so at the third. There is no populist Right. There is only an unpopulist Right. But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

An Ignorant One

Since David Baddiel is at it again, here is Rabbi Howard Cooper’s review of Jews Don’t Count, commissioned by the Jewish Chronicle, but shortened and edited in such a way that the original had to be published elsewhere:

Here’s the thing. David Baddiel is a very funny man. As a comedian, he’s never hidden his Jewishness and indeed declares himself “one of the UK’s very few famous Jews”. Lest anyone should imagine, heaven forbid, that this is just a narcissistic boast, he’s quick to explain what he means: “one of the very few people in this country whose Jewishness is one of the principal things known about them”. Move over Howard Jacobson, Melanie Phillips, Sacha Baron Cohen, Simon Schama, Esther Rantzen, Philip Green, Emma Barnett….(reader, feel free to join in).

So we get it. Being Jewish is very important to David Baddiel. It’s at the core of his identity. And this existential reality makes him particularly sensitive to the anti-Semitic tropes, rhetoric and activity he detects all around him. That, and the fact that his mother was born in Nazi Germany and whose scarring experiences are an acknowledged part of the author’s psychic inheritance. Interestingly, in a book detailing his finely-tuned alertness to anti-Semitic undercurrents in the arts, the media, on football terraces and across the political spectrum, the word paranoia never appears. It can’t, because Baddiel’s fundamental axiom is, in light of the Holocaust, “how scared, at base, Jews are.”

Baddiel’s vitriol is aimed particularly at left-leaning ‘progressives’ who, he claims, care about every other ethnic minority but Jews. At the heart of this passionately felt, intellectually confused polemic is a question he poses to the reader: do you think of Jews as part of the BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) community? Pinning you against the wall with his garrulous, bar room rhetoric, Baddiel argues that if you don’t, you should. The problem with this is that feeling something is true doesn’t make it so.

BAME was an invented analytic category, originating in the 1991 census to help with government policy making. Its usefulness has increasingly been contested over the years, often by specific minority groups (the Chinese community, for example) who don’t consider themselves as fitting into this artificial framework. Baddiel doesn’t discuss this – nor does he mention that Jews have never been included as a sub-community of BAME for official purposes. Objective analysis of anti-Semitism – and the conscious and unconscious antipathy he describes is, of course, real – is of no interest here. Like the anti-Semitic discourse he decries, priority goes to the inviolable supremacy of personal feeling. And in ‘identity politics’ nobody is allowed to argue with that.

Baddiel shows how Jews are stereotyped by racists in contradictory ways: they are thieving, deceitful, dirty – and privileged, rich and powerful. Although this is not an original insight, what is novel is his capacity to generate a quartet of errors (count them yourself) in the solitary sentence in the book that describes any aspect of the Judaic heritage: “The Talmud is a book of exegesis of the Old Testament, codified in the fourteenth century and containing the basis of all the archaic rules and laws of Judaism…”

One doesn’t need to be a pedant to point out that the Talmud is not a book of Biblical ‘exegesis’ — it’s a multi-volume compendium of law and lore, theology and storytelling; the term ‘Old Testament’ is a Christian concept, not a Jewish one — the phrase is itself redolent of old-style anti-Semitism; it was codified in the sixth century, not the fourteenth; and to say it contains ‘the basis of all the archaic rules and laws’ is a pejorative and bowdlerised formulation with its own unconscious anti-Semitism encoded within it. There’s no shame in being a self-confessed Jewish atheist but it is a shame, while defending the integrity of Jewishness with such vigour, to present oneself, unwittingly, as an ignorant one.

Baddiel’s text is filled with the dispiriting echo-chamber back-and forth of his Twitter feed that belies the aching hollowness at its heart. One can’t help but think that if the author spent less time fulminating on Twitter and more time exploring the richness of his millennia-old heritage he might communicate his genuine concerns with real depth of insight rather than as an avatar of the dark obsessional ruminations of late Lenny Bruce.

The Dangers of Net Zero

Against the Thatcherite policy of the Conservative Party that has now been in government pretty much forever, Phil Beavin, a once and future candidate for the Workers Party, writes:

Policies introduced to tackle the threat of climate change as part of the Net Zero agenda are once again in the spotlight following Keir Starmer and Labour’s failure to unseat the Tories in Uxbridge and Ruislip in the by-election which took place on Thursday last week. Starmer blamed the election loss on Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to extend London’s Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to the constituency.

The contentiousness of the ULEZ issue was also picked up by the victorious Conservative candidate Steve Tuckwell, who, like Labour, framed the by-election result as to some extent a referendum on the issue and a way of putting “pressure” on Sadiq Khan to change policy.

As the Uxbridge and South Ruislip election demonstrates, climate policy is an electoral issue. The backdrop to the introduction of contentious policies, such as Ultra Low Emissions Zones, is high profile lobbying by climate activist groups like Just Stop Oil, which press for ever more immediate and decisive actions to tackle what they consider to be the existential threat of climate change. In typically moralistic terms, Just Stop Oil has likened the consequences of climate change resulting from continued fossil fuel use to a “genocide”, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they argue:

“Licensing new fossil fuels is signing a death warrant for millions, for young people, for whole populations in small island states and for the poor in the global south. It is genocidal. What else can you call planning for the destruction of countless millions of people? As the scale of this betrayal becomes clearer, you and your government will be held to account for the crime of genocide.”

As groups like Just Stop Oil push for Net Zero and beyond, conservative voices like Nigel Farage argue that “under Net Zero the elderly will die colder, poorer and sooner”. Farage has also likened to Net Zero advocates or “zealots” are the same elitists who sneered at Brexit and don’t have to worry about paying their gas bills.

The culture war is well under way, and, if the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election is representative of electoral trends, the “left” has placed itself, or perhaps has been placed, on the losing side of the argument. Climate activists often accuse conservative voices of “climate denial” but what if Farage and his fellow travellers have a point, and it is the “left” that is wrong?

My own point of view

I was once persuaded by the rhetoric of the “Climate Crisis”. When I first encountered Extinction Rebellion, I was supportive. Like many people, my opinion of Extinction Rebellion soured in 2019 when they glued themselves to Jeremy Corbyn’s fence, unforgivably drawing attention to the location of his home after there had previously been an attempt on his life.

Following this, came their disruption of London’s public transport infrastructure, an action that made little sense as an increased role for public transport is essential if emissions are to be reduced. Just as importantly, in preventing ordinary people from getting to work, home or hospital, these actions, like the slow-walking road protests currently being undertaken by Just Stop Oil seemed almost designed to alienate the very people whose support they needed to succeed – an initial sign that the groups was out of touch with the lives of ordinary people.

Then came my own disillusionment with the left more generally, which led me into further investigations and the discovery that Extinction Rebellion is funded by a close partner of the British Government, while seed funding for Just Stop Oil came from the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), whose co-founder was a member of the CIA-linked and US military industrial complex aligned think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.

Further to this, I came to understand that climate change became a concern for the West only after the 1973 oil embargo imposed by OPEC countries; ever since, as Trilateral Commission documents show, the West has been seeking to diversify its energy supply to help it gain leverage over oil producers and ensure that oil prices remain low.

These discoveries necessitate questioning the premise of the Net Zero argument, as they suggest a that an ulterior, imperialist agenda may be in play. However, I am not a scientist – my specialism is rhetoric and narrative theory. Therefore, my instinct is not to question the science itself but to consider whether statements by climate activist groups represent the findings of authoritative bodies, such as the IPCC in particular.

Here, it’s important to note that academics, scientists and even narrative theorists like myself are very careful, very specific, with our use of language; we do not say what we do not mean and vice versa. Moreover, in public reports of this kind, the devil is always in the detail, not the summaries or – heaven forbid – press releases.

What IPCC reports actually say

As mentioned above, groups like Just Stop Oil cite the IPCC’s reports to justify some fairly hard line rhetoric, outright stating that the renewal of north sea oil licences is tantamount to a genocide. But is this actually justified? In a word, no.

Take for example, Just Stop Oil’s claim that “the International Panel on Climate Change has said keeping temperature rises below 1.5C, rather than 2C, would mean 10 million fewer people would lose their homes to rising sea levels.”

I have been unable to find this specific claim from the IPCC itself, and Just Stop Oil’s reference is to a BBC’s interpretation of the IPCC’s findings – a secondary source. Whatever its origin, it is an inadequate characterisation of what the IPCC has said in its Special Report 2018: Summary for Policy Makers, which is this: “A reduction of 0.1 m in global sea level rise implies that up to 10 million fewer people would be exposed to related risks, based on population in the year 2010 and assuming no adaptation (medium confidence).”

To unpack this into plainer English, it means that there’s a medium confidence (5 in 10) likelihood that 10 million people will be exposed to problems related to sea level rises caused by Climate change, if no mitigation measures are put in place. It does not say that 10 million people WILL lose their homes should global temperature exceed 1.5C.

The IPCC also explains that a measure of sea level rise is most likely inevitable: “Projections of multi-millennial global mean sea level rise are consistent with reconstructed levels during past warm climate periods: global mean sea level was very likely 5–25 m higher than today roughly 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 2.5°C–4°C higher than 1850–1900 (medium confidence). Further examples of unavoidable changes in the climate system due to multi-decadal or longer response timescales include continued glacier melt (very high confidence) and permafrost carbon loss (high confidence) [my emphasis].”

There are similar discrepancies between Just Stop Oil statements on other possible climate change impacts. Specifically, Just Stop Oil talks of the cataclysmic consequences of “climate breakdown” in a register of terrifying certainty:

“New oil and gas licensing in 2023 will kill hundreds of millions of people, adding to the already mounting global death toll from climate breakdown. It will push our climate, oceans and the living world beyond the point of no return, triggering runaway global heating and setting in motion an unstoppable process of global societal collapse. To know these facts and still encourage drilling for UK new oil and gas is reckless and immoral. There can be no greater crime.”

But what is the veracity of these claims? Specifically, what does the IPCC say? For one thing, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report doesn’t speak of certain societal collapse. The report is clear about the dangers associated with climate change, including increased risks of dangerous heat humidity, biodiversity loss in the oceans, low-lying coastal ecosystems to submergence and loss (medium confidence)” and increase in “ill health and premature deaths from the near- to long-term”.

However, it also explains that, “The level of risk for humans and ecosystems will depend on near-term trends in vulnerability, exposure, level of socio-economic development and adaptation (high confidence). In the near-term, many climate associated risks to natural and human systems depend more strongly on changes in these systems’ vulnerability and exposure than on differences in climate hazards between emissions scenarios (high confidence).”

The IPCC is also clear that the most extreme consequences of climate change would likely only occur due to “warming substantially above the assessed very likely range for a given scenario”. To express myself mildly, according to the IPCC, an apocalypse caused by climate change alone, as predicted by Just Stop Oil, is not a likely outcome.

This is something of a bombshell because it means that Net Zero is not the most effective response to the consequences of climate change, the biggest determinant of which is not the differences between emissions scenarios but the adaptation of human society to changing trends. In other words, the taking extensive action to cut carbon emissions may matter less than taking measures to mitigate changes, such as sea level rise, which are likely already in train anyway, at least partially as a result of long natural processes and which anthropogenic climate change is speeding up or exacerbating but not ultimately causing.

The climate activists are wrong

The net zero agenda may in fact be counterproductive to human wellbeing. Certainly, achieving “Net-zero GHG [Green House Gas] emissions requires deep and rapid reductions in gross emissions” and this is not risk free.

As the IPCC has also made clear, growth facilitated by the use of fossil fuels has improved food production significantly since the 1960s, “Since 1961, food supply per capita has increased more than 30%, accompanied by greater use of nitrogen fertilisers (increase of about 800%) and water resources for irrigation (increase of more than 100%).

It should be noted that the Nitrogen based fertilisers that have played such a significant role in the recent increase in food production are created from green-house gases fossil fuels, in a process that, “uses large amounts of natural gas and some coal, and can account for more than 50 per cent of total energy use in commercial agriculture. Oil accounts for between 30 and 75 per cent of energy inputs of UK agriculture, depending on the cropping system.”

According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence unit, “Chemical fertilisers require significant energy inputs – making fertilisers uses 1.8% of the world’s energy. The process runs at very high temperatures of 500°C and extremely high pressures. Fertiliser production also accounts for around 1.8% of global greenhouse gases and is one of four major industries (along with cement, steel and ethylene) contributing to climate change.”

Again, according to the IPCC, “Given the current food system, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that there is a need to produce about 50% more food by 2050 in order to feed the increasing world population (FAO 2018a) […] Responding to climate change through deployment of land-based technologies for negative emissions based on biomass production would increasingly put pressure on food production and food security through potential competition for land.”

A sharp reduction in fossil fuels, and corresponding decline in their use in agriculture, as is required for Net Zero, could thereby make it impossible to produce adequate amounts of fertiliser to feed the world. Simply stopping oil – even if that is just preventing the awarding of new oil licenses at a time when the global population is growing and food production is already under strain due to the war in Ukraine – will cause the price of fertilizer to sky-rocket further. This could, in turn, cause shortages and even lead to the kind of mass starvation that Just Stop Oil is erroneously predicting will result from climate change.

This is not to say that chemical fertilizers are environmentally sustainable and studies have shown how “excessive use of chemical fertilizers has led to several issues such as serious soil degradation, nitrogen leaching, soil compaction, reduction in soil organic matter, and loss of soil carbon. In addition, the efficacy of chemical fertilizers on crop yield has been decreasing over time.”

Alternatives to chemical fertilizers are needed at scale and, as the IPCC, has explained, alternatives are available it should be possible to phase them out over time in favour of new methods for boosting crop production. However, to transition through a sudden shock by shock as is implied by Net Zero or even simply not increasing the oil supply as the global population grows, as Just Stop Oil advocates, will have horrifying consequences.

Given that it is unlikely that we will invent a new, more equitable, system of food distribution or replace greenhouse gas based fertilizers with “green” equivalents by either 2030 or 2050, it seems Net Zero really is likely to plunge parts of the world into famine to the possible cost of millions of lives, if it is ever realised.

In a further grim twist -- as readers of my previous articles will recall – climate activist groups like Just Stop Oil are funded by foundations backed by the same people and institutions who bankrolled the Eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which legitimised the genocide of Africans on grounds of racial pseudo science and paved the way the slaughter of European Jews in the holocaust. Moreover the populations most likely to be worst affected by a collapse in fertilizer production will be the most vulnerable communities who rely on them most for improved crop yields.

As I wrote previously, “The same nexus of interests that surrounds the Rockefeller fortune, which backed the Eugenics movement, as well as the extension of Anglo-American imperialism advocated by the likes of Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continues to push the climate agenda today […]

“Whatever their intentions, the fact that foundations with historic links to the global Eugenics movement are engaged in population control initiatives is deeply troubling, especially as Gates was a known associate of known Eugenics enthusiast, former Trilateral Commission member and paedophile Jeffery Epstein. Worse still, population control for the purposes of a racialised agenda of exploitation and domination has been a key plank of Anglo-American Imperial power projection for centuries.”

Given the likely “genocidal” (to use Just Stop Oil’s own terminology) outcome of their policy prospectus, however unintentional, and the historic background of institutions and people who back their activities, the following accusation by Just Stop Oil rings darkly absurd:

“Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, at his trial in Jerusalem, sought to defend himself by saying that he never killed any Jews as he was only in charge of transporting them to the death camps. The judges overruled this obscene defence and he was hanged.

“Similarly, when those in charge today go to court in the coming years, they will claim that they only facilitated the continued use of fossil fuels. They never actually killed the starving poor of Sudan and Pakistan. And likewise the judgement will be the same – you knew what you were doing and you did not stop it. Justice will be done.”

I suspect that voters can detect the register of hyperbole in Just Stop Oil’s claims. Perhaps this explains the result we saw in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, where voters were unpersuaded of the need to make financial sacrifices for Ultra Low Emissions Zones and in the service of an agenda which, at best, is tilting at wind turbines, and, at worst, could cause famines in “the global south”.

The greater risks we face

Adding to risks associated with a radical “Just Stop Oil” agenda is that the greatest threat to human life at present is not climate change alone but “situations of conflict”, such as the avoidable war in Ukraine, one of the world’s most important grain exporters. Many scientists also recognise that the most severe danger to our climate and indeed life on earth in general is posed by nuclear war, which given the crisis in Ukraine, is a very real and immediate danger.

To be clear, now and in the future, nuclear war is a bigger threat to life on earth than anthropogenic climate change, whose outlook is uncertain and whose worst impacts can, if the IPCC is to be believed, be mitigated by human preparation through development and increased food security, both of which will require the use of at least some fossil fuels. More than anything else, these solutions can only be realised the through peace and investment.

The most significant threat to human life and wellbeing is war and a major driver of emissions inequality, and Ultra Low Emission Zones contribute nothing to combatting either. So perhaps it is time to scrap these policies and deemphasise other aspects of the at best questionable Net Zero agenda, so that we can focus on peace and equality instead.

A better way forward has been shown by China, which, unlike the UK, is on course to meet, or even overshoot, its emissions targets. As I have previously argued, China is not pursuing a Net Zero strategy in the sense of “deep and rapid reductions in gross emissions”. Rather, it is increasing fossil fuel use in the near term to power the transition to a more sustainable future.

It can do this because it runs a planned, socialist economy. China’s example illustrates that a massive redistribution of the wealth to ensure structural equality, nationalisation of resources and production infrastructure, involving a planned economy that integrates environmental policy into an agenda equally committed to improving the living standards and life expectancy of ordinary people is the only sensible way to tackle climate change.

This also demonstrates a more fundamental point: if climate change policy is to be successful, it must have public support. To have this support, such policies would have to benefit ordinary people, economically and personally. ULEZ, like many other policies in the Net Zero prospectus, is the opposite of this and irresponsible, hyperbolic rhetoric from climate activist groups will not change this demonstrable reality. Rather, we need sensible public policy based on a measured, empirical assessments of the real risks of certain climate policies in comparison to the actual likely consequences of climate change itself.

Is Net Zero worth the risk? Given that it could impose starvation on millions of people by reducing the availability of essential fertilizers, I don’t think so. Whether its new policies for crop production or flood defences to protect settlements against rising sea levels, we need the time and the space to develop, plan and implement effective mitigations for the impact of climate change, some of whose effects are likely to be with us regardless of whether we hit out climate targets by 2030 or 2050.

Why The Press Failed On Iraq

John Walcott writes:

Twenty years ago, the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and eliminate the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) officials said he had. Getting the American public to support a war against a country that had not attacked the United States required the administration to tell a convincing story of why the war was necessary. For that, it needed the press.

I was Knight Ridder’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief at the time, and among other duties handled our national security coverage. This gave me a front-row seat to Washington’s march to war and the media’s role in it. As the Bush administration began making its case for invading Iraq, too many Washington journalists, caught up in the patriotic fervor after 9/11, let the government’s story go unchallenged. At Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, we started asking questions and publishing stories that challenged the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had an active WMD program and ties to al Qaeda. One thing that set Knight Ridder’s coverage apart was our sourcing—forgoing senior officials in Washington for experts and scientists inside and outside the Beltway and more junior staffers and military officers much closer to the relevant intelligence.

Such an approach would also have helped U.S. policymakers. The failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq show what happens when top officials ignore their subordinates or assemble their own teams of analysts to confirm their biases—and when journalists become stenographers for them. Unfortunately, 20 years on, there is little evidence that the Washington press corps has learned this lesson. If anything, today’s bleak media environment has only made it harder to get the story right.

IS THIS TRUE?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as a pillar of smoke rose from the Pentagon across the Potomac, Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau set out, like our competitors, to confirm what we all suspected—that al Qaeda was behind the attacks. We were an experienced group of journalists, with years spent developing sources in the intelligence community and the military. I had reported and edited for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News and World Report.

Knight Ridder also had two superb national security reporters in Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who later were reinforced by Joe Galloway, arguably the greatest war correspondent of the Vietnam era. Other news organizations also had formidable talent, along with larger staffs, bigger budgets, better reputations, and broader reach. Yet in the early days after 9/11, they didn’t seem to be noticing the red flags that the Knight Ridder team had already started seeing.

The first flag appeared just days after the attacks, when Strobel came back to the office and reported that Bush administration officials had been discussing not only the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan but also Iraq. That made little sense. Saddam’s history of supporting terrorism was less compelling than that of the dictators Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya or Hafez al-Assad of Syria, not to mention Iran’s ayatollahs. Saddam had given Abu Nidal, one of the most notorious Palestinian terrorists, limited support—but had expelled him in 1983. Abu Nidal returned to Iraq in 2002, only to die under mysterious circumstances. Some U.S. intelligence officials thought Saddam ordered his death in an attempt to deprive the United States of one casus belli.

Although some senior administration officials began trying to link Saddam to al Qaeda, their more knowledgeable subordinates in the intelligence community and the State Department were questioning why bin Laden, a Salafi extremist, would link arms with Saddam, a secular ruler whose likely heirs were his two booze-swilling, skirt-chasing sons, Uday and Qusay.

In the days and weeks after the attacks, there were early warnings that something was amiss. They were easy to spot if you were looking for them, but few people in the upper levels of the Bush administration or at other major news organizations, riding the patriotic wave sweeping the country, were looking.

We were. On September 22, 11 days after the attacks, Strobel reported that some administration officials and outside experts were skeptical that Iraq had played any role in them. On October 11, he reported that Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. secretary of defense, had nevertheless dispatched a former CIA director, James Woolsey, to Wales to search for evidence that Saddam was linked to an earlier attack on the World Trade Center. A senior U.S. official told Strobel that Wolfowitz and others at the Pentagon were “seized” with the idea that Iraq was behind the attacks.

That same month, Washington reporters covering the story began receiving appetizing nuggets from a new source: Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group whose eagerness to take control of Iraq and its oil wealth was obvious. I had first met Chalabi with a friend at a Georgetown townhouse years before 9/11, and when we left, I told my friend: “If he gave me change for a quarter, I’d count it.”

Chalabi’s camp fed me two pieces of information in October and early November that were knocked down immediately by the U.S. intelligence officers with whom I spoke. So I ignored them rather than print impotent “he said/she said” stories.

According to the Chalabi team, Farouk Hijazi, the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and a former head of Iraqi intelligence, had traveled to Afghanistan, met with bin Laden, and offered him sanctuary in Iraq. That much was true, two U.S. intelligence officers said, but the story didn’t end there. A friendly Arab power, the intelligence officers said, had inserted an agent in bin Laden’s camp, and he had reported that after Hijazi left, bin Laden had turned to his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and said they would not move to Iraq because if they did, al Qaeda’s agenda would become Saddam’s, not theirs. The real story reinforced our belief that bin Laden and Saddam were in no way natural allies.

Undeterred, Chalabi’s camp came back to me with a report that Iraq was operating a terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, some 15 miles south of Baghdad, using an airplane fuselage to instruct hijackers. When asked about it, U.S. and foreign intelligence officers told me off the record that they had been keeping an eye on the facility but that they could find no evidence that foreign terrorists were training there. More likely, these sources said, it was a counterhijacking training facility. When I asked who the Iraqis were afraid might try to hijack one of their airliners, one of the officers responded, “Oh, probably Osama.”

I decided not to write anything about the supposed training facility, even a story that presented the allegation and the knockdown of it. It made no sense to publish a story that would inject a falsehood into the public debate. Other outlets, including The New York Times, ran the story.

Both the administration and some major news outlets continued to rely on information from Chalabi, who cunningly pivoted from positing an Iraq–al Qaeda connection to providing dubious intelligence about Saddam’s alleged WMD programs. Chalabi often fed the same information to the Pentagon and to the press, which made some journalists think they had two sources when they had only one. Landay and Tish Wells, the bureau’s researcher, later exposed how successful the Iraqi National Congress had been at getting major news outlets to run bogus intelligence.

By late November and early December 2001, U.S. military and intelligence officers in Afghanistan—along with those supporting them at U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida—were asking me off the record why officials back in Washington were diverting resources from their efforts. On February 13, 2002, Strobel and I wrote a story that answered their question: “President Bush has decided to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the military and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.”

For most of 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration’s main public relations task was to sell the war, and too many news organizations were buying it. Still, basic reporting discredited—but failed to silence—some of the administration’s sales pitches. On September 6, 2002, Landay reported that the lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was worrying some U.S. officials. “There is no new intelligence that indicates the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs,” a U.S. intelligence official told Landay.

The administration’s claim that Iraq had ordered aluminum tubes to enrich uranium was conveniently leaked to The New York Times, allowing Bush administration officials to discuss publicly what otherwise would be classified information. The story, however, fell victim to simple fact-checking by Landay. He called experts at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They said the tubes could not be used to enrich uranium.

Four days later, Strobel reported that some administration officials had misgivings about Bush’s Iraq policy. On October 24, 2002, Landay and Strobel revealed the feud between administration hard-liners determined to oust Saddam and intelligence professionals and experts at the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies who distrusted the information coming from Chalabi and his associates.

Galloway, who was awarded a Bronze Star for risking his life trying to save a wounded American soldier in Vietnam in 1965 and had unrivaled access to senior military officials, contributed to many of these stories, but we kept his name off most of them because his friendships were well known. Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld became so infuriated by Galloway’s reporting that he summoned him to his Pentagon office for a one-on-one meeting. When Galloway got there, Rumsfeld had summoned reinforcements. He accused Galloway of relying on retired generals as his sources. Galloway replied that many of his sources were still on active duty. “Hell,” he said. “Some of them might even be in this room.” When we returned to our office, Landay, Strobel, and I asked him if that was true. “No,” Galloway replied. “But it was fun watching ’em sweat.”

Our reporting might have been getting under officials’ skin, but it did not slow the administration’s march to war. Some Knight Ridder papers even ignored what their own Washington bureau was writing and instead printed New York Times stories (which the paper later admitted were wrong). One Knight Ridder editor even assigned reporters from his local paper to see if what we were writing was accurate because the Times and The Washington Post were not reporting the same things.

We were undeterred by these legitimate local decisions not to run our coverage and by the Bush administration’s decision to ignore our stories rather than call attention to them by disputing them, and we continued reporting. After all, we never sought to influence U.S. policy, much less derail the invasion planning, but only to air the debate inside the government as best we could.

When the invasion began, in March 2003, little went according to plan. Many in the administration and the media were surprised. Not Landay, Strobel, Galloway, or me. In 2004, Landay, Wells, and others on our team reported that there had been no proper post-war planning.

OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE

What distinguished the Knight Ridder Washington bureau from its peers in the Washington press corps was its remove from power and politics. Knight Ridder’s Washington team worked for daily newspapers across the United States. Our readers were not in Washington and New York, but scattered around the country from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. More important, Knight Ridder papers served some 30 military communities, including Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, Fort Lewis and Fort Riley, and Grand Forks and Shaw Air Force Bases. I once told an all-hands staff meeting: “We’re not The New York Times. We’re not The Washington Post. We’re not CBS or ABC or CNN. We report for the people whose sons and daughters and husbands and wives get sent to war, not for the people who send them.”

As a corollary to that, we did not see ourselves as part of the Washington elite, nor did we crave to climb from the fourth estate to become town criers for the first. The entire 9/11 team was well connected, but Landay, Strobel, and Galloway saw no need to curry favor with—much less rely on—high-ranking officials in the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, or anywhere else. They spent their time earning the trust of people closer to the ground and further from the politics. It became a standing joke how much time I was spending meeting still-unnamed sources in the paint aisles of the Lowe’s store and the Cracker Barrel out in Manassas, Virginia, rather than at embassy parties in Washington.

Last, and perhaps most important, we had the unflinching support of our bosses: Tony Ridder, Knight Ridder’s CEO; the late Jerry Ceppos, the vice president of news; and Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor and my immediate supervisor. Not until much later did I learn that advertisers had called Ridder and asked that he tell them when the latest in our series of “unpatriotic” articles would appear so they could pull their ads. He told them they would see it at the same time he did—when it hit newsstands.

THIS TOWN

After we reported how successful the Iraqi National Congress had been at planting news stories, newspapers that got Iraq wrong issued corrections, retractions, and apologies. The New York Times published its on May 26, 2004—on page 10. But there is little evidence that much has changed in the culture of Washington or in the way it is covered. Some members of the Bush administration still refuse to acknowledge their mistakes. Indeed, one of the main lessons from Iraq—the importance of listening to experts rather than hearing only what you want to hear and disregarding the rest—has been ignored or forgotten.

This was clear as the Biden administration rushed the last American troops and contractors out of Afghanistan in August 2021. The White House, much of Congress, and the news media once again were caught off guard. This time, it was by the rapid collapse of the American-backed Afghan government and security forces, which has left tens of thousands of Afghan allies and their families still stranded.

Once more, officials had ignored the people who were on the ground and made decisions that were shaped more by domestic politics than by professional expertise and firsthand experience. The folly of the U.S. nation-building mission in Afghanistan had been evident to U.S. military officers two decades earlier, when they began trying to teach their Afghan counterparts how to fly, drive, and maintain American military equipment. As one U.S. Air Force officer told me in 2005, “It’s hard to teach people how to fly when you find out they can’t read.”

In early June 2021, two months before Biden’s rapid withdrawal, I wrote:

Despite months of talk and interagency meetings, White House officials have made no decisions about how to get tens of thousands of Afghans who supported the international effort to establish a stable democracy in Kabul out of harm’s way. Some military officials and diplomats say it already may be too late to prevent a humanitarian and political disaster. . . Although the administration has doubled its effort to issue Special Immigrant Visas to the 18,000 Afghans who’ve applied for them, military officials privately warn that a collapse of Ghani’s government could endanger three times that number, and perhaps as many as 150,000 Afghans.

The article I wrote containing that bleak assessment was offered to multiple publications, but no one wanted it.

Today, laudable efforts are underway to bolster basic investigative reporting and quiet the increasingly frantic quest for attention, too often in the form of official leaks and sensational stories touted as “scoops” with half-lives now measured in seconds. After all, the latest outburst from former President Donald Trump or Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, however ludicrous, and the latest Harry and Meghan gossip are guaranteed to attract an audience.

Some newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, continue to do commendable work, increasingly in partnership with outfits that specialize in investigative reporting, such as ProPublica and the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors. At the same time, though, the country’s press corps continues to shrink, most importantly at the local, regional, and international levels. I was sent to Washington in 1975 as the junior reporter in the Bergen Record’s two-person bureau. This month, the Gannett chain laid off Jonathan Salant, the last New Jersey reporter in the nation’s capital. For those who wonder where Knight Ridder went: The McClatchy Co. bought Knight Ridder in 2006, filed for bankruptcy in 2020, and was purchased by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management later that year. An archive of Knight Ridder Iraq stories is available—behind a paywall.

In addition to eroding public trust in the media, the declining number of local reporters covering the U.S. government is depriving young reporters of the best places to learn and veterans of the best places to teach that basic lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq: If you want to know the local crime situation, ask the residents and the cops on the beat, not the police chief or the mayor.

Premier Premiere

The online premiere of Oh, Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie is today from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm. Register here. The people who have left the Labour Party under Keir Starmer are as numerous as the entire Conservative Party. Imagine if they got organised.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 20

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 20

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 723

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The Representatives Challenge: Day 723

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Saturday 29 July 2023

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 19

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David Lindsay

Monday 31 July 2023

Six Weeks On

Power Up Britain, From Britain

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 21

The CPS Challenge: Day 21

The Clergy Challenge: Day 724

The Representatives Challenge: Day 724

Sunday 30 July 2023

Called, Justified, Glorified

Casting The Net Wide

An Ignorant One

The Dangers of Net Zero

Why The Press Failed On Iraq

Premier Premiere

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 20

The CPS Challenge: Day 20

The Clergy Challenge: Day 723

The Representatives Challenge: Day 723

Saturday 29 July 2023

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 19

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