WIDDY ON WEDNESDAY
Clever but Immoral
Hi! Just to let you know that I am now available on Cameo and can do birthday greetings videos personalised for you or one of your friends or family. I am at www.cameo.com/annwiddecombe1
In the paid section today I am returning to Reform immigration policy in light of the appalling new figures on the backlog of asylum appeals, the distortion of reported comments from Nigel Farage re deportations and the continuing numbers arriving on the small boats.
There is a reason that we have the phrase “evil genius”. It is because it is perfectly possible to be very clever and very nasty at the same time. Bad people can be very far from stupid and not recognising that simply leaves us vulnerable to their manipulations. So when Nigel Farage said that Putin was a “good operator” , it did not imply any sort of moral approval and indeed he made that clear at the time. Similarly when a member of Reform said that Hitler was brilliant at inspiring people he was stating an obvious fact, not endorsing the aims and objectives of the inspiration. If only Hitler had been lousy at inspiring the German nation, the world might have escaped having to go to war and the concentration camps would never have been built.
The inability to understand and acknowledge an enemy’s strength is a relatively new phenomenon and probably owes much to social media and to the hunger for melodrama in the press and main media. Churchill praised Rommel in the House of Commons as a “very fine general”, which indeed he was, but nobody then listening would have taken that as admiration for the German cause or indeed any sort of good will towards Rommel. Now it would be portrayed as such within five minutes of utterance.
When once I questioned the proportionality of dragging a 97 year-old man in failing health into a German juvenile court to answer for the fact that at 17 he had been posted to a concentration camp where there was, by the prosecution’s own admission, no evidence of any active participation in the atrocities, I was accused on social media of “defending an actual Nazi” and therefore of anti-semitism. It is both mindless and wearying.
The Great Train Robbery was a masterpiece of finely tuned planning but for me to say that does not mean I think that it is OK for crooks to rob mail trains. Dr Shipman apparently had a wonderful bedside manner but those who have observed that are not thereby condoning the serial killing of what were probably hundreds of patients.
If we are not prepared to analyse the character and abilities of an enemy rationally and impartially and acknowledge what is impressive , then we will not know how to defeat him. It is so darned obvious that it should hardly need stating.
Kemi Badenoch has finally caught up with what Reform has been saying since its inception: Net Zero is mission impossible within a foreseeable timescale without making us poorer and the country a financial basket case. The disproportionality of forcing citizens to install expensive boilers and buy electric cars when we contribute less than 1% of the world’s carbon emissions is staggering. Any nation concerned with its own survival must become self-sufficient in energy and essential food and the obsession with wind farms militates against that.
Why has the Leader of the Opposition finally woken up? Could it be that Reform’s common sense approach is proving popular? A much bigger question is whether she will be able to take her party with her, given that Cameron, May and Johnson were slaves to the climate emergency nonsense and that swathes of the Conservative parliamentary party still cling to that blinkered view.
The last of the Few has died at the age of 105. RIP Paddy Hemingway, who was shot down four times, on one occasion being saved by a tree when his parachute failed to open. One can only hope that today’s young generation would be as brave and determined if the country were ever to be threatened quite like that again.
One can also only hope, if it ever does come to pass, that British governments will have woken up sufficiently to have produced adequate forces and equipment but don’t hold your breath.
The following is about Reform Immigration policy and is for paid subscribers only.