I have just stopped supporting the monarchy. I can’t do it any more. I am not a I am not republican, or anything silly like that. I would like a proper monarchy. But the House of Windsor’s total mass conversion to Green orthodoxy has destroyed the case for this particular Royal Family.
The whole point of the Crown is that it does not take sides in politics. Yet in the past few days, three generations of Royals have given their support to one of the most contentious causes in human history.
Of course you would barely know it now, because so many other institutions have collapsed into conformity in the past year or so, but the view that climate change is caused by human activity remains controversial.
There is pretty good evidence that the late Duke of Edinburgh, perhaps the most scientifically minded member of the Royal Family, was among those with doubts.
The whole point of the Crown is that it does not take sides in politics. Yet in the past few days, three generations of Royals have given their support to one of the most contentious causes in human history.
Causation in such matters is incredibly difficult to prove. The measures now being proposed to deal with this problem are even more open to question.
Our decision to abandon coal-fired power when China is vastly expanding its coal-burning generation is futile and absurd, for instance. In fact the Western world’s self-harming methods, while China blithely continues as before, are the economic equivalent of one-sided disarmament. We hope to persuade an arrogant, aggressive dictatorship to be nice by giving up our own power and wealth, and abandoning our own freedom to act independently. It will not end well.
NOT everyone signs up for this. All the big parties do, but they are often badly wrong, and seldom more wrong than when they all agree. I suspect there are others like me, conservatives who believed that, at the pinnacle of our state, one person stood above politics and could be respected for it. And now there is no such person.
There have been signs for years that the Queen has been cajoled or otherwise persuaded into taking an increasingly politically correct position. The great frenzy following the death of Princess Diana speeded up this process.
But now this country and much of the free world are being browbeaten into accepting the most intolerant and all-embracing dogma to trouble the world since the fall of Communism 30 years ago. Boy scouts, Girl Guides, schoolchildren, their teachers, parsons and priests, TV presenters, novelists, playwrights, diplomats, film stars and models, everybody knows that this is the ideology you have to embrace to get on or even survive.
If you don’t, you are slandered as a ‘climate change denier’. This is not debate. It is a lie and a smear. Firstly I don’t ‘deny’ the fact that the climate is changing. It is beyond doubt. But the use of the word ‘denier’ is intended to sub-consciously suggest that I am like Holocaust deniers (the only other major use of this expression).
The BBC some years ago decided that they no longer had any duty to be fair on this subject, but that is to be expected from them. Despite their recent promise of an ‘impartiality revolution’, BBC Director General Tim Davie was quick to declare that ‘climate change is no longer politically controversial’ and that the ‘overwhelming consensus is that we as humanity are causing global warming’. So it may well be. The consensus may also be right.
But it could be mistaken, and the truth is not established by consensus or majority. The ‘overwhelming consensus’ when Neville Chamberlain came back from meeting Hitler at Munich in 1938 was that he was a hero of peace who had saved the world from war. Enormous crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace to cheer him home, though nowadays you will struggle to find film of this.
Sad to report, the then King, the Queen’s father George VI, was among Chamberlain’s deluded admirers, the worst thing he ever did. He made up for it later, of course. But it was a terrible mistake, and so was the Queen’s Green speech. Peter Hitchens.
