Niall Ferguson’s Reith Lectures promise to be scintillating and timely, showing how the west has been stumbling economically over the last 20 or so years. We (or rather our useless politicians) have been stealing from future generations by spending money we don’t have on an unaffordable welfare state. This happens because politicians can never resist bribing us with our own money, and don’t have the courage to resist being thrown out of office by telling the truth.
Just as dimwit politicians like French President Francois Hollande unveil their fantasies about austerity, big intellectual guns like Ferguson will show how counterproductive their ideas are. Lesson one. Austerity isn’t a choice. When you run out of money, you have to trim your coat according to your cloth. Austerity, or an economic downturn, can’t be changed by choice, just because you don’t like it, or it is uncomfortable.
Another truth which resonated was his claim that instead of being protected by the rule of law, we now, and even more in the U.S., are ruled by lawyers. These are mostly of the tussle-shoed variety of greedy shysters. Our politicians must rescue us from this. Great stuff BBC. Occasionally you have the courage to put on someone who will speak against the ideology you usually support.
And earlier on Radio 4’s Today Show I heard Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Sceptical Environmentalist and Cool It, being interviewed. Hallelujah! Lomborg of course had the courage to confront the global warming movement with their lies and fantasies.
BBC Reverts to type in Egypt
But just to prove that the BBC wasn’t about to really change, we hear BBC Cairo Correspondent Kevin Connolly talking about the coup in Egypt as though nothing much had happened. The BBC has, for some reason (anti-Israeli bias perhaps) been riding the Arab Spring idea right from the start. The BBC would have you believe that some kind of liberal revolution would lead to freedom of expression, rule of law and other western-style sophistications. The more the BBC pushed the idea, the more obvious it was that residents of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria were not about to be liberated, not least because of the underlying belief that Islam beats politics. Until these countries decide that states must be secular and religion left as a private function, there will never be liberation. Egypt will revert to rule by the military, which doesn’t seem very attractive until you look at the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists will continue to make life miserable for Tunisians and Libyans. As for Syria, the BBC constantly reports this as a confrontation between the pure innocent rebels and the evil government. I’m sure the current Syrian government is as evil as it is possible to be, but if they are attacked, you can’t blame them for retaliating.
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