RUTHFULLY YOURS

KATOWICE, Poland – President Trump may be pulling the United States out of the global Paris Accord on global warming, but the administration is making a hard sell for its side of the story at the giant UN climate summit now underway in the heart of Poland’s coal-producing region.

With delegates from rich and poor nations struggling to reach a consensus on writing the rule book for reducing emissions and battling climate change, U.S. officials and private-sector representatives are organizing a major side event Monday on the continued role of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The presentation is similar to one a year ago that angered many green groups that have clustered here.

Energy Department official Wells Griffith III will lead the event, billed as a showcase of “ways to use fossil fuels as cleanly and efficiently as possible,” along with nuclear energy.

An event at last year’s gathering in Germany, led by then White House energy adviser George David Banks, drew a protest from environmental groups. Protesters stood in the audience while singing and waving placards.

Mr. Banks told The Washington Times that many of those advocating an end to fossil fuels “do not understand the political reality facing much of the world.”

COP-24, as this year’s summit is officially known, has attracted more than 30,000 delegates from 196 countries but fewer heads of state than other years.

Tony Abbott: Australia is prepared to offer asylum to persecuted Pakistani mum

Former prime minister Tony Abbott says the Australian government is prepared to offer a persecuted Pakistani Christian mother asylum.

Asia Bibi spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy against Islam.

The mother-of-five was recently acquitted in the country’s supreme court, sparking major protests.

Asia has faced ongoing threats and her family fears attacks.

Several countries have offered her asylum and Mr Abbott says “of course” Australia should too.

“It was very disappointing to me that the British government, who you’d think would be the first Western government to take this matter on, squibbed it because of ridiculous concerns about what local Muslims might think,” he tells Ben Fordham.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/civic-virtues-and-the-future-of-the-centre-right/
Anthony John Abbott is an Australian politician who served as the 28th Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015 and Leader of the Liberal Party from 2009 to 2015. He served as Leader of the Opposition from 2009 to 2013. Abbott was first elected Member of Parliament for Warringah in 1994.

As our ideas have multiplied, our beliefs have diminished. That’s the big gap in Centre-Right politics which former Canadian PM Stephen Harper knows we must strive to fill. People crave a moral purpose, and if we don’t offer them any inspiration, others will fill that vacuum, but not necessarily to our countries’ good.

This is the age of disruption, in politics as much as in business, and political parties must respond or fail. In France and Italy the long-established big parties, of the Left and of the Right, have largely been swept away. In Germany, the main parties, of the Right too but especially of the Left, are much diminished. In the United States, Donald Trump smashed the Republican establishment to grab the nomination, and then smashed the Democrat establishment to grab the presidency—after the Democrat establishment had itself been rocked by Bernie Sanders. In Britain, the governing Conservatives are convulsed over Brexit; while an out-and-out Marxist has taken over the Labour Party, and quite conceivably could become prime minister. Even here in Australia, more than a quarter of the electorate is refusing to support the two main parties that, in one guise or another, have always held office.

Post-GFC low economic growth and quantitative-easing-induced asset price inflation have meant stagnant wages, less affordable housing—and more cranky voters. The big political fights are now about cultural and identity issues, not just economic ones; and the fights within political parties are becoming just as intense as those between them. On the Left, the supporters of bigger government and the opponents of tradition seem everywhere ascendant. Even on the Right, there seem to be fewer economic liberals; and, at least among the establishment, more social progressives. The decline of traditional media and the rise of social media make it easier than ever to live in echo chambers of the Left or the Right, so that anyone who doesn’t share your view seems not just wrong but alien, even immoral. In this fragmented and polarised discourse, antagonists advance alternative facts, not just competing interpretations. “Things fall apart”, so it seems, and “the centre cannot hold”. Our challenge is to re-create some common ground, as did the generations after Yeats.

Back in the Reagan–Thatcher era, it was easy enough to know what characterised the Centre-Right of politics, at least in the English-speaking world: lower taxes, smaller government and winning the Cold War. In the face of suffocating officialdom and punitive tax rates, it seemed that the conservative side of politics had become free marketeers. Only now, we conservatives can’t decide whether it’s more important that trade is free or that it’s fair. Then, there was near unanimity on the need to oppose communism; and few things unite people like a common enemy. Today, even an increasingly cold peace with China and with Russia has yet to reproduce that glue. Fading memories of “real existing socialism” plus the excesses of big business, the perceived limitations of markets, and declining trust in institutions have sapped enthusiasm for limited government. In these more trying times, what might the Centre-Right collectively stand for?

http://standpointmag.co.uk/outsiders-diary-december-2018-douglas-murray-vienna

The Sappho Prize is an award given annually by the Free Press Society of Denmark, and as I remarked on receiving it recently, it has sometimes seemed as though I am the only person I know who hasn’t received it. But it is a terrific honour, awarded by a very brave and stalwart group of Danes who got together to uphold the principles of free expression in their country after these came under attack in 2005. One of the upsides about free-speech wars is that you can never particularly predict where your heroes will break out. And for me a whole collection of them showed up in Scandinavia.

Apart from being friends, the list of previous recipients is also a list of some of my favourite people. Mark Steyn received it some years ago and gave a brilliant speech, the only downside of which was that he used up every available joke that a chap can make on receiving a prize named after history’s most famous lesbian. When Flemming Rose and Roger Scruton received the award they made no lesbian jokes, Melanie Phillips even fewer. But since the award was named after Sappho for her voice as a poet, I was proud to quote her own words during my acceptance speech. As it happened, I had picked up a copy of her works between visiting refugee camps during the migration crisis. Since I had inscribed my copy “Molivos, Lesbos, 2016”, and the award was in part a recognition of the book I wrote as a result of those travels, the ceremony in the Danish Parliament really did feel meant. As there was a cash component to the prize, I quoted Sappho’s fragment 120: “Wealth without virtue is / a harmful companion; / but a mixture of both, / the happiest friendship.”

***

This past month also took me back to Vienna — one of my favourite cities, in part because of the mixture of emotions it provokes. The first is obviously the layer of feeling that nowhere is better than this, and that this is as good as any built city can get. Then there are the whiffs of the scene that was once there. A couple of years ago I was going with a friend around an exhibition with some Schiele, Klimt and others. Did she ever wonder, I asked, whether things couldn’t get as good as this again? I remember her almost laughing. Of course they couldn’t. A city which had Mahler, Freud and Zweig around at the same time — just for starters — seemed unlikely to be bettered in any conceivable future.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/manchester-square-december-2018-daniel-johnson-europe-destiny

Emerging from the summit that set the EU seal on Theresa May’s deal, Angela Merkel described Brexit as “tragic”. Normally a tragedy implies some kind of necessity or inevitability. Yet there was nothing unavoidable about the predicament in which the United Kingdom now finds itself. The EU leaders insist that it was the British people, manipulated by lying populists, who chose Brexit and must now face up to the “exorbitant” cost of their decision. But in reality the British were left with little choice, after the EU ignored their concerns and set a course that can only make the “democratic deficit” burgeon into bureaucratic bankruptcy.

The European project was always a perpetual motion machine for the insatiable accumulation of powers, whose engineers jealously watch over the acquis communautaire like dragons guarding their hoard. In the absence of British influence, the stage is set for a display of full-scale Euro-triumphalism in the Valhalla of Brussels — followed in due course by Götterdämmerung, as the euro goes up in flames and they are overwhelmed by a flood of migration.

Lest such Wagnerian metaphors seem extravagant, consider the case of Angela Merkel. Not only are the German Chancellor and her husband votaries of the Master, but she has lately begun making repeated references to Schicksal (“Fate” or “Destiny”) in her speeches about Europe. Most recently, in her address to the European Parliament, she implicitly warned against dependence on the United States in defence and security: “The times when we could rely on others without reservation are over.” She went on, in more mystical vein: “That means we Europeans have to take our destiny in our own hands if we want to survive as a community.”

What exactly “destiny” signifies here is still obscure, but Mrs Merkel has reiterated this sentiment so many times that it clearly means a great deal to her. Europe, for those who love its history and culture, really does have a cosmic importance that goes far beyond politics.

In some profound sense, the cityscapes and landscapes of this continent belong to all of us who adhere to the civilisation of the West. A cultural memory is embodied in the stones of Venice, the ruins of Athens, the boulevards of Paris that is not exclusively the property of those who happen to live here and now, but rather connects past and future generations too. It has become more fashionable to denounce the legacy that we may bequeath than to reflect at what cost our forebears fought to preserve our civilisation. When we ponder the plight of posterity, we ignore at our peril the ordeals of our ancestry.