In Episode 89 of the Sceptic, Ellie Hodges sits down with journalist Charlotte Gill to discuss the growing influence of taxpayer-funded activist groups, the blurred line between activism and journalism and why critics of mass migration are so often smeared as “far-Right”.
Author Steven Tucker dissects the anti-Muslim terror plot in Suffolk that collapsed on contact with the facts and applies “eventism” – the theory that fear of an event is equivalent to the event itself – to explain why almost nobody involved has walked it back.
And for our premium subscribers, the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor Chris Morrison asks whether the new Government’s backing for more North Sea oil and gas is a genuine change of direction or just a change in rhetoric.
Donate to the Daily Sceptic to access our premium content. Follow Ellie on X. Follow Charlotte on X. Read her articles here and here. Follow her on Substack here. Read Steven’s articles here and here. Follow Chris on X. Read his article here. Produced by Richard Eldred. Filmed at the Westminster Podcast Studio.
Tens of thousands of migrants, mostly young men, descended on Ceuta on Thursday, with shocking video showing people walking, swimming and scrambling over barriers into Spanish territory as Moroccan border guards appeared unable to stop them. The Timeshas the story:
On Friday it was estimated that up to 60,000 Moroccans had arrived in Ceuta in the past 24 hours, encouraged by a ruling from Spain’s supreme court that those who swam into the city could not immediately be turned back. …
Groups of young men were seen wandering the territory’s streets, looking for food and water. The beaches were covered in floats, rubber rings and discarded clothing.
“There was a steady stream of people all night long,” and while the number of arrivals was lower than it had been during the day, migrants “continued to arrive overnight and are still arriving” on Friday morning, a source said….
[Spanish Prime Minister Pedro] Sánchez has so far resisted declaring a national emergency, despite a request from Ceuta’s autonomous Government that he do so. …
The Spanish Civil Guard has described the situation as a “serious humanitarian crisis”.
Spain’s interior ministry announced an agreement with Morocco to speed up the return “as soon as possible” of “all” migrants who have entered Ceuta illegally in recent days. But it gave no further details how this would be achieved without legal consequences. …
Ceuta, a territory of seven square miles with a population of 85,000, and its sister city of Melilla, further east along the Mediterranean coast, are the only European Union territories that share a land border with Africa. As such, they are frequent flashpoints in Europe’s illegal immigration crisis….
Throngs of mostly Moroccan young men were seen smiling and cheering, shouting “Viva España!” or kneeling to kiss the ground as they arrived on Spanish soil.
Georgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, described Thursday’s scenes as “shocking” and called for Spain’s suspension from the EU’s Schengen travel zone. …
Meloni’s threat prompted Spain to summon Italy’s ambassador to Madrid in protest. …
At least 500 unaccompanied foreign minors were among 2,000 people who arrived in the week before Thursday, as well as 18 Moroccan women.
This month Spain’s Supreme Court ruled against so-called “hot returns” of migrants who swim to the autonomous cities, meaning they cannot be immediately turned back by border guards.
The court distinguished these returns from those attempting to climb or break through the fence at Melilla, where migrants are not considered to have legally entered Spain until they cross a security line, which allows them to be returned straight away to the Moroccan authorities.
🔴🇪🇸 𝗙𝗟𝗔𝗦𝗛 𝗜𝗡𝗙𝗢 — Plusieurs centaines de migrants, arrivés par la mer, se sont enfuis du poste-frontière en échappant à la Guardia Civil, avant de se disperser dans les rues de Ceuta.
Few people under the age of 50 will have heard of the SDP. Those over that age will probably have forgotten the Social Democrats or, if they do recall the party at all, will assume they disappeared nearly four decades ago after a series of splits and a cycle of rapid electoral decline.
The original iteration of the SDP was launched in a blaze of excitement in 1981 when a series of leading Labour figures including a couple of dozen MPs sought to “break the mould” of British politics, setting up a brand new party in direct competition with Labour (which was going through one of its periodic bouts of veering towards the lunatic Left). Its star shone brightly for a while – a series of spectacular by-election results and national poll figures that amazingly once exceeded 50% of the vote – but not for long.
In the 1983 election, having established a close relationship with the Liberals, the Alliance failed to achieve a breakthrough in Parliamentary seats (despite coming within a couple of points of beating Labour in vote share). In the subsequent election the Alliance fell backwards. The SDP then imploded with one faction merging with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems, another group attempting to continue as a separate party under Dr David Owen (which folded its tent in 1990) and the largest group of all simply giving up.
Today, in so far as anyone mentions the SDP at all it is usually as a cautionary tale about how the Conservative-Labour duopoly can sometimes be challenged but is nearly impossible to destroy. An interesting footnote in British electoral history, but little more than that.
However, under the radar, a small band of Social Democrats have, over the decades, just about kept the party brand alive. Since 2018 it has been led by William Clouston, an erudite, thoughtful and softly spoken man who has had some success in both building a media profile (without yet becoming a household name) and in nurturing a party infrastructure which lifts the SDP far above that of the hundreds of micro-parties which make up the bulk of the Electoral Commission’s official register.
At the last general election the SDP managed to contest around a fifth of all constituencies – not with any notable electoral success it must be said, but simply fielding that number of candidates requires a Herculean effort and is, of itself, no mean achievement. It’s most famous candidate was Rod Liddle, who stood as a parliamentary candidate in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, coming fourth.
Clouston’s approach to building the party is, from what I can tell, unique. In addition to ploughing the furrow of encouraging a swathe of his small (perhaps 2,000-strong) band of party members to get their names onto ballot papers and battle against insuperable electoral odds, the SDP also succeeds in operating as a rather impressive policy outfit.
It’s worth having a look at the publications section on their website (https://www.sdp.org.uk/). If the Social Democrats gave up on any electoral ambition, they could compete confidently on the national think tank scene. I’ve debated with William Clouston a few times (largely from the perspective that the SDP underestimates the positive power markets can play in delivering public services) and it has always been an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating experience, not a mere exchange of soundbites.
Although I am much more market-orientated than the SDP, my analysis would be that they have positioned themselves almost exactly where the median British voter sits. To be clear, this is due to genuine ideological conviction, not down to electoral expedience.
The Social Democrats want a major role for the state in owning and supplying products and services the party sees as crucial in strategic or social terms (housing, water, steel, etc). Alongside this, they take a broadly ‘socially conservative’ stance on issues around faith, family and nationhood – pro-Brexit, traditional values, proper control of borders and so on. They are also pro-business and essentially capitalist on those areas of the economy which they don’t see as being in the state domain. Overall, this is a policy agenda which could appeal to millions. One former Reform Parliamentary candidate told me recently that if the SDP was widely known across the electorate, the party would immediately take a huge slice of the current Reform UK vote.
As it is, the SDP remains in the foothills. But Clouston has decided to contest the upcoming Clacton by-election. In a bizarre field of over 30 candidates (and none of the traditional parties running), he may just get drowned out in the wider noise. But perhaps there’s a chance he could garner a reasonable vote share from those who are unattracted to Farage and see voting for Count Binface as a protest vote too far. Whether the SDP leader has the campaign resources to become a widely recognised candidate among the Clacton electorate by polling day remains to be seen – but he has some sort of chance. If you fancy a wild flutter, you can get 370/1 on the betting exchanges that Clouston will pull off an improbable victory. You can get a rather attractive 14/1 that he will come second.
It may turn out that the Clacton effort just ends up as another flag-waving exercise for the Social Democrats, resulting in amassing just a tiny cluster of votes. But my sense is that the SDP might not be too far away from breaking through to ‘recognised minor party’ status from its current public position of being ‘largely unheard of’.
Electoral history suggests that to start to register in the polls, a small party needs to have a single identifiable issue that becomes its USP and then build out from there. This has been true of the Greens, UKIP, the Brexit Party as well as the SNP and Plaid Cymru. You attract a small chunk of people – perhaps just 2 or 3% of voters – with a proposition that is perhaps a little off to the fringe but inspiring to a reasonable chunk of voters. You then start to recruit others to your banner as you broaden your pitch.
The SDP starts with an attractive and broad canvas. But it currently lacks a single specific proposition to mobilise an initial identifiable base of enthusiasts. If it can crack that problem, the party may yet emerge as some sort of electoral force. I’m scouring the markets for any sort of book that suggests they may achieve just that.
Mark Littlewood is a former director of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Director of PopCon.
The BBC has branded Guy Fawkes an ‘astonishing activist’ in a Bitesize educational game for primary school children, ranking the would-be regicide alongside Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Emmeline Pankhurst. The resource, apparently created in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, invites children to play as Fawkes as he evades guards beneath Parliament. The Telegraphhas the story:
The BBC has called Guy Fawkes an “astonishing activist” and likened him to Nelson Mandela.
In history resources for children, the plotter who tried to blow up Parliament and King James I is counted among civil rights activists “who wanted to change the world”.
The BBC Bitesize material for primary schools ranks Fawkes alongside Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist, Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette, and Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader.
The material takes the form of an educational game titled “Back in time with… Astonishing Activists”, which invites children into the world of the campaigners, including the would-be regicide.
The game appears to have been created in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the tagline of the resource on the BBC website states that children can “take a trip back in time and learn all about the people who fought racism, campaigned for women’s rights… and changed the world forever”.
The game explains Fawkes’s involvement in the failed 1605 plot to detonate gunpowder beneath Parliament during the state opening, potentially killing the king and several hundred courtiers.
The plot was intended to remove the new king, amid disappointment that concessions for Catholics did not materialise when he took the throne, and to bring about an armed rebellion that would install a sympathetic ruler.
Fawkes was caught, tortured and executed. His co-conspirators, including Robert Catesby, the plot leader, were hunted down and killed.
Children can play as Fawkes on the Bitesize game, helping him evade the royal guard in the basement of Parliament, and kill rats while held in the Tower of London.
Factual material alongside the games explains that Bonfire Night on Nov 5 celebrates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, and players go on to build their own digital bonfires as part of the game.
Presumably, this is the kind of content from a ‘trusted’ public service media source the Government wants to force social media algorithms to give more prominence to.
Former ‘wet’ Conservative MP-turned-journalist Matthew Parris once published a book called Scorn upon the fine, age-old art of public insults, including those of a political nature, such as Disraeli’s opinion of Gladstone: “He has not a single redeeming defect.” That’s certainly not something you could say of today’s most prominent political insult-magnet Nigel Farage, who is described by one invective-hurler in Parris’s text as being “100% political herpes… Back in six months whatever you do.” If Nigel was wise, he could use that as his new campaign slogan when out battling Count Binface in the Clacton by-election to show the Establishment he will never allow them to get him down permanently. Regrettably, Nigel probably will not do that, as he appears to have a distinct aversion towards taking any public insults at all: when a woman called him a “wanker!” from a car recently, he gleefully posted a video of her crashing the vehicle immediately afterwards, calling it “instant karma”.
Another affront contained within Parris’s book is one made against himself by the more truly odious Alastair Campbell, describing him as “the little shit Parris, with his perma-smirk”. If Parris was the “little shit” here, then I’d suggest Campbell was the rather bigger arsehole that must have laid him: Matthew can include that response for free in the next edition of his book, if he likes.
I do admire Parris’s attitude towards being insulted: he couldn’t care less, considering it the price politicians pay for voluntarily becoming a public figure. Thinking verbal abuse to be “at its finest, an exquisite art form”, he clearly didn’t really mind being called a “little shit” by Alastair Campbell. But Nigel Farage would, as he has just threatened to register an official complaint to Ofcom about a radio presenter comparing him to this very same brown anal item. I may prefer Nigel’s opinions on 99% of matters to those of Mr Parris, but on this one single issue Farage and his Reform UK colleagues could learn from him. Just take the (s)hit and move on.
From insult to injury
After Ann Widdecombe was apparently murdered by one of the Hairy Bikers earlier this month, ghouls did not waste much time rushing online to record their glee in the Official Left-Wing Public Register of Being a Really Good Person (BlueSky) by insulting her in exceedingly tasteless terms which I shall not repeat here (because I already wrote about them here).
Unless you are an adherent of the weird reverse-chronological concept of ‘trans-time’, though, then such insults cannot, by definition, have caused her death, as they came after it had occurred. But, of course, Ann had been subjected to relentless insults by opponents for many years prior to her murder, most notably her decades-old nickname of ‘Doris Karloff’, on account of her supposedly ‘bigoted’ and ‘far-Right’ opinions, and it seems to be Farage and Reform UK’s considered collective conjecture that this is ultimately what killed her.
That words can cause violence is a long-time opinion of Nigel Farage. In 2019, after a milkshake was thrown at him by some Left-wing idiot, the reputed comedian Jo Brand made a joke on a Radio 4 panel show, to the effect that she’d never do that kind of thing herself: she’d much prefer to toss battery acid at him. Brand’s comments were an obvious joke; the clue was that they were broadcast on a Radio 4 comedy programme, although in fairness, listening to such things it is not always immediately apparent they are meant to be funny. Farage certainly did not find it remotely amusing, demanding Brand should be arrested: “This is incitement of violence and the police need to act.” Happily the police did not act, but the BBC did, editing out Brand’s joke from recordings of the show, with its internal complaints unit ruling the gag “went beyond what was appropriate”.
I don’t know that it did. Making jokes about killing people can be funny. When former Liverpool FC player Alan Kennedy endured a torrid debut for the club, his manager Bob Paisley wittily observed: “They shot the wrong Kennedy.” Alan never complained about the possibility of snipers attending any future games at Anfield.
I have no idea whether Jo Brand ever made a joke about murdering or mutilating Ann Widdecombe, but if she had I’m pretty sure I do know what Widdy’s response would have been: “So what?” In 2019, the admirable Ann gave a speech to the Oxford Union, arguing: “No one has the right to live their lives being protected from offence or hurt feelings – it is an occupational hazard of living in a society; if you can’t take it, become a hermit.” Regrettably, some of Ann’s still-living colleagues in Reform UK are made of softer stuff.
Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but turds will never hurt me
In the immediate aftermath of Widdecombe’s murder, Reform UK figures have made wider attempts to shut down not only direct explicit credible death-threats, which is fair enough, but also crass insults of party members in general, fearing such taunts are likely to fuel further assassination attempts against them. Reform’s Head of Policy Zia Yusuf calls such affronts part of a pattern of “stochastic terrorism”, whereby constant verbal demonisation causes deranged lone-nuts to take matters into their own hands with a gun or a knife. It is reported that the individual who allegedly killed Widdecombe had a newspaper-cutting archive at home, filled with stories about Reform UK politicians. If so, had he been driven to this obsession by hearing constant insults levelled against the likes of Ann from others?
I do have some sympathy with this viewpoint, having written recently elsewhere of physical attacks made by self-imagined ‘anti-fascists’ upon one of my own female relatives whilst she was out on the campaign trail on behalf of Reform UK. However, I also think that, by going after specific individuals who talk ill of those they’d like to see dead or injured, in purely insulting or jokey terms, Reform hit slightly the wrong target here.
Only days after Widdecombe’s murder, insufferable Left-wing shock-jock James O’Brien used his LBC phone-in show to complain about Nigel Farage purportedly exploiting Ann’s killing to pose as a victim. With high hopes of appearing in some future Matthew Parris anthology, O’Brien then insulted Farage personally in a manner Reform deemed likely to incite violence or worse against their leader. Party chairman Lee Anderson immediately demanded an apology from O’Brien for his “dehumanising” comments, calling them “hate-speech”, which made for “distressing listening indeed”, and threatened to report him to Ofcom.
What had O’Brien said? That Nigel was a “horrible excretion… bobbing around in the toilet bowl of public life”, adding: “He is the unflushable poo, he is the irremovable skid-mark on the Y-fronts of British politics.” That’s it. Miss, Miss, James called Nigel a big smelly turd! Rather pathetically for a member of a party which is supposed to be committed to free speech, Anderson seemed to imply this rhetorical call for his boss to be flushed down the electoral u-bend constituted a subliminal suggestion Nigel ought to be murdered, saying that to “idly muse that there is ‘nothing we can do to get rid of him’ [beyond flushing him away permanently] was beyond the pale”.
Insulting our intelligence
Although I generally support Reform UK, I think they have got this particular complaint badly wrong. Does Nigel Farage really want to have someone potentially sacked for, in effect, saying he smells of poo? Maybe he does. For all his other qualities, the intermittently thin-skinned Farage does have a prior track record of reacting badly towards literal schoolyard insults. In 2014, after some sixth-formers in Canterbury made a harmless and mildly amusing smartphone game called Ukik as coursework, in which a pixellated Nigel booted various cartoon foreigners off the White Cliffs of Dover, with points awarded for how far back into the sea players kicked them, Nigel pointlessly bothered to whine to the media that “elements of this game appear to cross the line”.
It’s something else crossing the line in British schools Nigel really should have been complaining about here: it’s not that some random schoolkids decided to insult him that’s concerning, it’s that they are all increasingly being indoctrinated into doing so during lessons. The UK’s largest teaching union, the NEU, last year pledged to introduce “anti-racist teaching materials” to prevent Reform UK gaining adolescent votes and forming a ‘neo-fascist’ government, while another school was found to hang images of Farage next to Mussolini and Hitler on wall-displays.
Personal insults from individuals are just free speech, no matter how sick, puerile or offensive they may be. Systematic libels provided with quasi-official imprimatur from organs of the state like schools are quite another. They give the impression that hatred of Farage and his party as evil ‘Nazis’ is essentially an objective fact, like the melting-point of ice or the capital of Angola, not a mere subjective point of view. It is such an artificially fostered atmosphere which is truly more likely to breed violent extremists willing to bludgeon ‘fascist’ old women like Ann Widdecombe to death, not an insult-fest free-for-all online.
The gloating social media reaction to Ann Widdecombe’s death is a symptom of a sector of the population who have already been collectively and systematically indoctrinated by the Establishment beforehand; the social media loudmouths are only a secondary epiphenomenon.
It is not just our schools and universities that cause all this. Various left-wing politicians have repeatedly implied Widdecombe held far more extreme positions than she actually did, with Labour’s Jess Phillips explicitly calling her a “little fascist beast”, for example.
Phillips said this in 2010, while sitting in opposition, but she has never been disciplined for it, and, now her party is running the country, are we to take it that Reform supporters being ‘fascist’ is an official Government position? The repeated comments of other Labour ministers to this same effect would cumulatively suggest so. You can see how some people, set up to think this way by exposure to Left-wing propaganda since birth, may be minded to see the above comment not simply as an insult but as a straightforward factual statement, like an announcement of the latest interest-rate rises.
The State of Hate
The government-linked so-called ‘anti-fascist’ group Hope Not Hate (HNH), for example, until recently had a special page on its website labelling Widdecombe an ‘extremist’, simply because she held common Catholic opinions about abortion and gay marriage. Following her murder, this has now been deleted (but is still archived here). Why did they take it down? By doing so, does HNH tacitly acknowledge that such relentlessly dehumanising propaganda may have had a tangible effect? If you bill yourself as an ‘anti-Nazi’ organisation and then put up special sections targeting a specific old woman, it is not unreasonable for gullible readers to presume she literally is a Nazi. Calling Widdecombe a Nazi as a joke or an insult is fair enough, but this is something more – opinion presented as official fact – and, now that HNH figures are firmly embedded within Andy Burnham’s new Government, we can probably expect it to get worse, not better.
Who is Ann Widdecombe?, HNH asked. By implication, she’s an elderly female Nazi
Again, the main issue is that such Establishment demonisation is utterly unidirectional. HNH has another page on its website devoted to monstering a second Reform UK figure, South Tyneside councillor Alex Clarke, because he has his own shock-jock podcast devoted towards “deliver[ing] unfiltered, controversial opinions that absolutely no one has asked for” – opinions of a deliberately insulting style, such as jokily alleging that Sir Keir Starmer is “a nonce” who keeps children “in his basement”, wherein he “definitely gets pegged” by a woman wearing a strap-on, “and while he’s doing it, he’s probably got a young boy in front of him” for pederastic visual stimulation purposes.
This infantile output is not ‘extremism’, or incitement to anyone to pop a bullet in Starmer, any more than it is ‘extremism’ for James O’Brien to childishly advocate that someone should flush Nigel Farage down the toilet. Yet only one person will get his own special ‘Look at the big fat Nazi!’ page on the Hope Not Hate website, because only one of them is a member of Reform UK rather than an opponent of it.
Inciteful or insightful?
Another person who conspicuously does not have his own HNH page is Green Party leader Zack Polanski, whom Nigel Farage reported to the Metropolitan Police for posting an Instagram image of a supporter wearing a t-shirt calling for the Reform UK leader to be executed by guillotine (Polanski says by accident). “We’re only making plans for Nigel,” proclaims the t-shirt’s caption. Zia Yusuf called this “incitement to murder”, coming as it did “just two weeks after our friend Ann was murdered”.
I do not think it is genuinely incitement to murder, though. I think it is just a poor-taste joke – poor taste being one of the key components of many jokes. Members of the Conservative Federation of Students reputedly used to wear ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ t-shirts during the 1980s as another taboo-busting joke. They were never arrested, and nor did any of them ever literally try to lynch the man. Likewise, how plausible, precisely, is it that someone will try to kill Nigel Farage using a primarily 18th Century French royal execution implement? Some are suggesting the man who wore the anti-Nigel t-shirt should be arrested, not just Polanski – and that seems to be the conclusion the police have come to. I hope not. Would you want to be arrested for wearing a ‘Shoot Tony Blair’ t-shirt? I would not even want someone to be arrested for actually shooting Tony Blair.
In the interests of consistency, would Nigel want me arrested for making that highly ‘dangerous’ joke too, as he did with Jo Brand?
Honestly, if the usually admirable Farage really believes in free speech, he would have been far better advised to have simply posted an AI-generated image of his own – depicting something like Polanski sticking his head in a big green gas oven, together with a speech bubble reading: “Don’t worry, under Net Zero, it’s all going to be perfectly safe!” or something to that effect. Then, in a caption beneath, Farage could gently point out to Polanski that, if he objects to this poor-taste joke, perhaps he should not hand out similar ones himself. Polanski’s hypocrisy exposed, Farage could sit back, relax and gloat. But we all know what would happen to Nigel if he did do this – another thoroughly disingenuous ‘Look at Nazi Nigel, making a gas-joke to a Jew’ page would instantly appear on the HNH website, again lending the whole smear campaign a veneer of official authority.
The problem is not so much that left-wing comedians, shock-jocks, MPs, social media users, schoolchildren and others insult their opponents with impunity – it is more that those on the Right are not allowed to return fire in kind with equal liberty. A shock-jock making jokes about Jo Cox’s corpse being flushed down the toilet would be sacked, a schoolboy making a smartphone game about kicking David Lammy off the White Cliffs back to Guyana would be expelled and a Tory MP calling Jess Phillips Marxist scum would lose the party whip. And as Nigel Farage did actually say, if he posted something similar to what Polanski did, he would “expect to be arrested”.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, Mao once said; I say let a thousand insults bloom instead, but just so long as they come from all sides, not just one, thereby giving the misleading impression that they are not opinionated insults or humour at all, but statements of objective political reality. It is the state-rigged, mass quasi-official imbalance in public discourse that Reform UK should be decrying here, not the one-off insults against its side per se; peevishly complaining about radio hosts’ poo-jokes simply makes you a laughing stock. Individual empty-headed ventriloquists’ dummies like James O’Brien and Jo Brand are not the problem. The problem is the wider Left-wing Establishment that produced such people in the first place – egregious excrementitious insult fully intended.
Jordan Peterson has written a piece for the Telegraph called ‘Climate change catastrophism is a Leftist weapon to destroy capitalism’. He starts by referencing the current “moral panic” about air conditioning, the banning of which is another futile gesture as a hot summer leads to “the usual flood of exaggerated concerns”. He lays the blame on Al Gore:
What we drive, how we heat our homes, what we eat, how much water we use: every modern activity increases industrial CO2 emissions in a manner not dissimilar to air conditioning. Do all such intimate, local decisions therefore necessitate governmental oversight and regulation? And if so, what freedoms can possibly remain?
The roots of such worrisome totalising can be traced in the more academic realm to the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s the Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s the Limits to Growth. More distal influences, such as Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, also merit consideration, as we shall see.
There is another source, however, unmatched in its combination of scientific pretension, charged emotional tone, policy impact and mass appeal: former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which this year marks its 20th anniversary.
More than any other single work, this glossy, visually dramatic production translated the abstractions of climate modelling into a compelling, emotionally charged narrative – one that struck fear into the hearts of tens of millions. It did so by framing mankind’s industrial activity and consequent increase in CO2 production as the driver of a truly dangerous increase in global temperature. It did so by warning of severe and impending ecological devastation and economic disruption. It did so by arguing for the necessity of emergency response, while casting dissent as the most serious of modern sins.
An Inconvenient Truth proved far more effective than any prior academic report or specialist warning at propelling climate change from scientific and policy circles into mainstream cultural consciousness. At the same time, it entrenched the intensely emotional and partisan – almost religious – tone that still dominates the issue today.
Many observers (including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assert that global average temperature has risen between 1.1 and 1.5°C since the 1850–1900 establishment of reliable instrumental records and the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution. The same experts attribute most of this warming to human technological activity and the consequent increase in atmospheric CO2.
Criticisms of such estimates do exist. The 1850–1900 period is often used as a starting point as it is the period from which accurate thermometer readings began. But it is situated at the tail end of the Little Ice Age, a relatively cool period. Thus its use as a baseline may inflate the apparent magnitude of subsequent warming. Using the Medieval Warm Period results in more modest estimates, and reasonable disagreement persists over which starting point best captures the relevant signal.
Peterson doesn’t dispute the possibility of human impact on the environment:
It may be true that CO2 levels have risen due to industrial activity and contributed to global warming. The importance of those facts, however – and especially their implications for action – remains an entirely different matter. The insistence that they constitute an existential crisis of apocalyptic proportions is not a scientific claim. It is, instead, a dogmatic and partisan assertion.
He calls therefore for a re-evaluation:
We can begin that re-evaluation by revisiting the confident, uniformly pessimistic predictions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Climate doomsayers warned incessantly of sweeping ecosystem collapse, plunging agricultural yields, intensifying droughts and the relentless advance of deserts. Any marginal benefits from elevated CO2, they insisted, would be violently overwhelmed. The dominant narrative – permitted in popular media – foretold a far less verdant, more unstable, and markedly less hospitable planet. The crisis was already upon us. Emergency action was imperative.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics – or so the cynical adage goes. But it gets still worse. There are claims that literally invert the truth. Such lies, or damned lies or statistics, might be aptly deemed anti-truths. An anti-truth is not merely false; it is a falsehood so profound that it stands in direct, antagonistic opposition to reality itself.
The architects of our culturally dominant climate and economic models issued apocalyptic predictions with a confidence bordering on the unshakeable. The same insistence prevails today – often in the form of the unchanged opinions of the same actors, despite their prediction of anything but the presently undeniable rapid, comprehensive greening of the Earth. Such error is particularly striking given the phenomenon’s speed, well-understood mechanisms and truly planetary scale.
How, then, could it be anything but time to question the accuracy, integrity and value of all the conclusions derived from such models – and to ask what factors, including the motivational, drove the catastrophising and made such failure not merely possible but inevitable?
Peterson condemns the “self-appointed sainthood” that has wasted untold amounts of money to achieve nothing, and with no concern at all for those truly in need:
What are we then to conclude? That much of the ‘science’ surrounding industrial CO2 has been corrupted by self-serving obfuscation, if not outright deception. That the errors of anti-industrial activists have been driven by motives far removed from – indeed, often antithetical to – genuine concern for the planet or poor. By championing catastrophe, they have justified their preferred economic theories, played at moral heroism, squandered a fortune – and achieved next to nothing for the environment and the world’s most vulnerable.
Worse, this self-anointed sainthood has enabled the demonisation of those who built the energy systems that powered Western prosperity, while aggrandising activists whose record of economic failure and authoritarian excess is a matter of history. Recent research sharpens the portrait, linking the revolutionary strain of Leftist activism to antagonistic narcissism and outright psychopathy – and, notably, to no measurable commitment to social justice whatsoever.
Peterson quotes from the Bible (Matthew 6:5 to be precise):
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
And here is a parting shot at those who, despite all this, remain committed to the apocalyptic CO2 narrative and its call for a green revolution:
Let’s say that we had managed to divert just $7 trillion or $8 trillion of all the trillions that have been funnelled into the so-called energy ‘transition’, harvested from taxpayers and energy consumers. What could we have done instead with all that purloined money? Indeed, what could we still do, given the projections of more spending to come?
Peterson’s article is definitely worth reading in full, though the tragedy is that those who ought to read it won’t – but will refute it just the same.
BP is putting its entire North Sea business up for sale, drawing a line under 60 years of production in the region. The BBC has the story:
The decision follows a review of BP’s operations as it seeks to slim down the group. Its North Sea business has five production hubs – two in the central North Sea and three west of Shetland – and employs about 1,100 people. …
“The UK has been our home for more than 100 years and will continue to play an important role in our future,” BP Chief Executive Meg O’Neill said.
“We’re proud of the jobs we create, the contribution we make to the UK economy and the work we do to keep energy flowing every day,” she said.
The company said it remained committed to operating the business safely and reliably throughout the sale process.
Its North Sea business produced 117,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2025, a small fraction of the oil giant’s 2.3 million barrels of daily production.
O’Neill, who took the helm at BP in April, said earlier this year there was “untapped potential” in the North Sea.
However, in announcing Friday’s decision she said: “As we focus our portfolio and direct capital to our highest-value opportunities, we believe our North Sea business will be better positioned as part of another company.
“It has world-class people, resilient assets and a proud heritage, and it is precisely these qualities that can attract an owner ready to back its next chapter. We are seeking an outcome that recognises that value.”
The sale could potentially bring in £2 billion to BP. Last month, the FT reported the company was in talks with Ithaca Energy to sell its North Sea assets for around this amount, although the talks fell through. …
Oil and gas companies have also criticised the UK’s windfall tax – the Energy Profits Levy – which they argue means the North Sea has lost some of its appeal in recent years. …
The Scottish Greens said 80% of the oil from the North Sea was shipped overseas, therefore it was “doing very little to improve our energy security”.
“It’s not immigration, it’s an invasion” – Spain has deployed the army to its North African enclave of Ceuta after the Interior Ministry estimated that 49,000 people crossed illegally from Morocco in 24 hours, reports Brussels Signal.
“Ceuta should be a wake-up call for Europe” – In the Spectator, David Goodhart writes that a “luxury belief” ruling by liberal Spanish judges illustrates how Europe’s asylum crisis has been made worse by its own courts.
“The invasion of Ceuta” – It’s not just Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the pretence that the greatest threat to European civlisation is the populist Right, says Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
“Labour beats Reform to win Greater Manchester mayoral contest” – Labour’s Bev Craig has beaten Reform with a two-thirds majority to become Greater Manchester’s new mayor, reports the Mail. But the turnout was only 25%, undermining Burnham’s devolution plans.
“Why Burnham’s levelling-up drive is sure to backfire” – Andy Burnham wants to spread growth across Britain, but Ross Clark warns in the Spectator that his plan could actually widen the gap between booming areas and struggling towns.
“I wish more people had imposter syndrome” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray argues that the PM’s self-confessed ‘imposter syndrome’ is, if anything, a welcome sign of self-awareness sorely lacking in too many of today’s politicians.
“Inside the Nudge Unit” – On the Pimlico Journal Substack, David Shipley explores the Research Information and Communications Unit’s hidden influence over victims’ families, arguing the state’s “nudging” tactics are far subtler than outright coercion – and more troubling.
“Reform risks turning into the snowflake party” – Farage’s overreaction to a picture on a T-shirt risks squandering Reform’s reputation as a champion of free speech, warns Ella Whelan in the Telegraph.
“Boy George breaks silence after pulling out of Jesus Christ Superstar” – Boy George has spoken out after withdrawing from the West End production of Jesus Christ Superstar just days before his run was due to begin, amid controversy over his pro-Israel song, reports the Mail.
“‘I am not a liar’, says star academic accused of plagiarism” – Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor Jason Arday insists that plagiarism allegations against him are cruel, racially motivated and fail to account for his autism, reports the Times. But he doesn’t deny he’s guilty.
“Arday in Wonderland” – In the Critic, Jacob Phillips examines the furore over the plagiarism allegations against Jason Arday, and what it reveals about academic standards.
“Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed” – On his Substack, Dr David McGrogan argues that Jason Arday’s shortcomings are symptomatic of the relaxation of academic standards which has left British universities mired in poor-quality work.
“Chinese mega-embassy challenge rejected by High Court” – A High Court challenge against the granting of planning permission for China’s vast new London embassy has been dismissed, clearing the way for construction to proceed, says the Standard.
“Selling off the World Cup: why FIFA’s plan is a step too far” – On the Academy of Ideas Substack, Jake Weston argues that while the idea of football belonging to the fans may be naïve, the sport’s integrity still needs defending from FIFA’s push for ever-greater commercialisation.
“Hamas agrees to Trump disarmament plan” – Donald Trump has announced that Hamas has agreed to give up its weapons in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, reports the Telegraph.
“Why prosecuting Fauci is off limits” – Prosecuting Anthony Fauci would expose the entire rotten edifice of the US Government and produce astronomical liabilities, writes John Leake on the Focal Points Substack.
“BP deals hammer blow to hopes of a North Sea revival” – BP’s decision to quit UK waters casts serious doubt over Andy Burnham’s ambitions to reverse the North Sea’s decline, says Jonathan Leake in the Telegraph.
“As BP pulls out of North Sea oil, how Aberdeen turned into a doom town” – Once home to Britain’s biggest concentration of millionaires at the height of the North Sea boom, Aberdeen has suffered a stark decline – and BP’s exit threatens to make things worse, writes Gavin Madeley in the Mail.
“Big Tech on the path to Net Zero” – On his Manhattan Contrarian blog, Francis Menton argues that the tech giants who once couldn’t stop preaching about climate change are now quietly walking back their Net Zero pledges as the huge energy demands of AI catch up with them.
“The heatwave deaths we can’t see” – On their TTE Substack, Dr Tom Jefferson and Prof Carl Heneghan argue that the real-world mortality figures don’t match the models predicting thousands of heatwave deaths.
“The unspoken truth about wildfires” – In the Spectator, Matt Ridley argues that the greens (and everyone else) are wrong to blame climate change for the wildfires ravaging Europe.
“The tragedy of Live at the Apollo” – The ultra-progressive wave of the mid-2010s inflicted a collective humour bypass on the comedy world, and Live at the Apollo is the most visible casualty, writes Patrick West in the Spectator.
“In defence of Quentin Letts” – Why are Labour MPs so rattled by a bit of satire? Writing in the Spectator, Julie Burchill argues the backlash against Quentin Letts for noticing a woman in teh front row of an Andy Burnham press conference was wearing a short skirt shows a growing intolerance for mockery and free speech.
“Police at the door over a beagle post” – On X, the Free Speech Union reveal that animal rights campaigner Anneka Svenska was visited by police and told to accept a police record and undergo a re-education course or face arrest under the Online Safety Act over posts about research beagles being incinerated.
🚨🚨 BREAKING NEWS:
Animal rights campaigner, Anneka Svenska, was visited at home by two police officers and told to accept a police record, attend an “online thinking” course, or face arrest following comments she made on social media about the incineration of beagles at a… pic.twitter.com/N5GSbd3xWd
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) July 31, 2026
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