I am sick of the self-righteousness of the Left. Their nasty demonstrations about climate change, and their screeches of ‘Nazi!’ at any opponent, are not just wrong, but warnings of a police state to come.

When they gum up London, stopping other people getting to work or going home, with beatific smirks on their faces, they are punishing us for not being as fanatical as they are or – worse – not even agreeing with them.

Their protests are not against the Government, which long ago caved in to the Green fanatics, and goes around blowing up perfectly good coal-fired power stations to please them. They are against us, for not being keen enough on their intolerant cult.

Pictured, climate activists at an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in Parliament Square, London. When they gum up London, stopping other people getting to work or going home, with beatific smirks on their faces, they are punishing us for not being as fanatical as they are or – worse – not even agreeing with them

They aren’t as stupid as they look. They know that if their policies are adopted we will be reduced to severe poverty, living cold, dark and limited lives as the power fails and half the transport system packs up.

Many of them will admit in private that, if they are by any chance right and the world is really doomed, the measures they keep calling for will not in fact save us. This is perfectly true. China’s huge coal-burning economic expansion completely cancels out all the economy-destroying measures this country has ever taken to reduce its carbon footprint.

They don’t care. Like every other ‘End of the World is at hand’ cult, they yearn for the wrath to come and want to see non-believers suffer. They think their self-assessed goodness will save them, while the rest of us deservedly drown, or are perhaps eaten by polar bears fleeing ever southwards.

It is all about being virtuous, and better than other people, so they can look down on them. The same goes for ridiculous figures such as the Labour MP David Lammy, who has managed to suggest that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his (admittedly irritating) faction are like the Nazis.

And for the ludicrous senior lawyer – an actual QC, for what that is worth these days – who recently suggested that, because I did not believe the killer of Jo Cox MP was a political assassin, but crazy, that I might make the same excuse for the Nazi leadership.

I have strong family reasons for finding this suggestion particularly repellent. I’ll be brief, and say that the Nazis would have murdered my mother if they had got hold of her, and that my father repeatedly risked his life in freezing, mountainous seas, menaced by U-boats and within range of land-based German bombers, in the war against Hitler. No doubt fashionable QCs fight harder against Nazism all the time, but I still think my father’s stint on the convoys was a reasonable contribution, and I’m proud of it.

But I have broader reasons too. I am sick to the teeth of the Left suggesting that freedom-loving, patriotic conservatives are secret Nazis, or indeed have anything in common with them.

Actually, it’s all the other way. It is the Left which has the nasty connections and the sordid record of compromise with evil. They have never really managed to denounce the Soviet dictatorship. They have never properly recognised the extent of Stalin’s mass-murder. They still, for instance, revere the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who said the USSR’s murder of millions would have been justified if it had produced the promised paradise, and seems not to have noticed that Stalin, as well as Hitler, invaded his neighbours.

Hobsbawm was made a ‘Companion of Honour’ by the supposedly moderate Anthony Blair, and is the subject of a recent admiring biography by a prominent Leftist academic, widely and kindly reviewed by the liberal elite.

In my years as a labour correspondent I also couldn’t help noticing the high-level multiple penetration of the Labour Party and the unions by active, hard-line communists, at a time when the Kremlin was locking up dissidents in harsh camps in the Urals and the British Communist Party was receiving large cash subsidies from Moscow, bundles of used tenners handed over secretly in plastic bags.

They are not better than the rest of us. They just think they are. And if you’re wondering why the police have been so useless in acting against these modish self-canonised saints – well, it is time you realised that the police are no longer on our side. They’re with the Lefties, skateboards and all. And one day they’ll probably arrest me for saying that.

Steer clear of the witch-hunt mob

Well, it would be so easy to join in the hunt of Julian Assange and Shamima Begum. And that’s why I won’t. I still think that taking away someone’s citizenship is a despot’s action. As for legal aid, it absolutely has to be available for unpopular people, or we are ruled by the mob. Let us hear her case, and the Government’s, in court. This is what civilised people do. As for Mr Assange, I don’t believe most of what is now being said about him by people who have ruthlessly thrown him to the wolves and are perhaps a bit ashamed of having done so.

And while some of the things he has done have been rash and wrong, I suspect that what the USA really holds against him is the thing he did that was right – when he exposed the July 2007 attack on a Baghdad street by two US Apache helicopters, in which several innocents died, and some of the soldiers laughed. It was, alas, the truth about war.

Making a game out of cruelty and lies

Kit Harington as Jon Snow and EmiliaClarke as DaenerysTargaryen in the first episode of the final series of Game Of Thrones

I refuse to watch the TV version of Game of Thrones and, if you are wise, you will boycott it too. I have instead read all the books, and come to the conclusion that the world they portray, in which cruelty, lies and cynicism pay, and virtue is a pointless joke, does more harm than good to our morals and our civilisation than ten thousand Richard Dawkinses. Don't mistake this moral poison for entertainment.

Was the fuss about the fire at Notre-Dame overdone? All that emoting by people who had never been inside a church seemed to me to be insincere and incredible. Modern governments are seldom happier than when they are bulldozing something old and beautiful, and people in Britain will travel thousands of miles and pay a fortune to see the Taj Mahal, but grudge a fiver to save the fabric of the equally wonderful Lincoln Cathedral. As it happens, much of this country’s irreplaceable Christian heritage is in constant peril, kept standing only by the tireless efforts of a dying generation. Do you really care?

Two sets of statistics last week told a different story from the official spin. The growing number of females in paid work is at least partly caused by the Government’s shameful postponement of pensions for many women, who are forced to work to survive. And the growing number of ‘exclusions’ from state secondary schools is yet another version of the secret selection ceaselessly operated by such schools, because they are not allowed to select openly on merit.

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