Happy New Year! Here’s a few things the public sphere could probably survive without by this time in 2020…

Greta Thunberg

Every time you thought that the cult of St Greta could not get any more insane, reality said: “Hold my beer.” After being feted across the world by everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Pope, hailed by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood as the new Joan of Arc, St Greta achieved full apotheosis at year-end when a Swedish pastor described her as the successor of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.

How sad it will be in 2020 when the world wakes up to the fact that this teenage school drop out is nothing but a puppet for green crony capitalists in her native Sweden, who have choreographed every stage of her progression from ‘lonely schoolgirl protesting against climate inaction’ to Nobel-Prize-nominated superstar. No one likes being taken for a fool – and Greta the Puppet has fooled almost everyone.

Princess Meghan

I’m sorry America, but you’re going to have to take Meghan Markle back. It’s bad enough that she turned our favourite bad boy prince — Afghanistan veteran, chopper pilot and all-round cheeky chappie Harry — into a joke-averse, henpecked appendage, but what’s worse is that she has infected the whole Royal Family with Hollywood woke values.

The younger ones have all convinced themselves they’re mentally ill victims (maybe they are too – but tradition has it that you don’t boast or whine about it), while even the Queen herself was heard on her annual Christmas broadcast mentioning the word ‘climate’ like it was any kind of problem. Don’t worry, America we’ll give you a fair prisoner swap. In return for your third-rate actress from a fading TV drama, we’ll take back Henry Cavill or Robbie Williams or, if you really want to play hardball, James Corden.

Remember this next time Princess Meghan tells you how bad she has it. https://t.co/BGD3TaMkEA — Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) December 28, 2019

Never Trumpers

For four long, miserable, embarrassing years they’ve been testing their fancy writing skills, their imaginative powers, and our credulity to the very limits with erudite commentary abundant with gossamer theories ‘demonstrating’ how the Trump presidency has been – and will be – a disaster for the U.S. and the world beyond. Meanwhile, on everything from the economy to black employment to the Dow Jones to the killing of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi to the great escape from the Paris Climate Accord, President Trump has just gone on #winning. Imagine the Never Trump butthurt when the Never Guy comes back even bigger in 2020.

Taxes

Almost every bad thing that has ever happened in the world — from the U.S. Civil War to the rise of Hitler, from the French Revolutionary terror to the absurdity whereby for well over a century English houses bricked up their windows and suffered gloom and dark in preference to having to give their government more money — is the result of excessive or ill-conceived taxes.

Lowering taxes – see Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the economic miracles of Hong Kong and Singapore – almost invariably makes things better for everyone apart, maybe, from the grasping authoritarian busybodies that all normal decent people hate. For further details, watch my fascinating discussion with comic and tax historian Dominic Frisby. I do hope Boris Johnson is paying attention in 2020 and beyond. Trump too, for that matter.

Bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes

They kill birds and bats; ruin views; disturb sleep and injure health with their low frequency noise and shadow flicker; the energy they produce is intermittent, unreliable and expensive; they are a subsidy engine for crony capitalists, taking money from the pockets of the poor and funnelling it into the wallets of the rich.

But now, in the U.S. at least, these monstrosities will have to fend for themselves.

Congress has voted to abolish subsidies for wind – and its ugly little sister, solar – with tax credits dropping to zero by 2025. Since most renewables can only survive with subsidy, it means they’ve reached the end of the line in the U.S. In Europe and Australia, unfortunately, the scam looks likely to continue for some time yet. Until, maybe, some bright spark notices how much better the U.S. economy is doing now that is no longer shackled to the corpse of ‘clean’ energy…

John Bercow

Scene: INT; AN ENGLISH PUB, Christmas 2020. A haggard, silver-haired man of dwarfish stature and cuckoldish disposition walks to the bar and taps a punter on the shoulder. DWARF: Shall I do it for you, mate? Go on, mate, please let me do it. I’ll do it for the price of a pint. PUNTER (faintly disgusted): Do what? DWARF: My thing. You know… (winks meaningfully) PUNTER: I really don’t… DWARF: OOORRRRRRDER! Go on, mate, I’ve done it now. If you can’t buy me a pint, I’ll settle for a half. PUNTER: I’m sorry, I’ve really no idea who you are or why you are saying ‘Order’ in that silly voice. NARRATOR [V.O.] Denied a place in the House of Lords, considered too toxic for even the most desperate Christmas panto, the former Speaker of the House of Commons — who only a year before had seemed to hold the fate of Britain in his chubby fingers — had fallen on desperate times….

Excuses for Muslim terrorism

‘Mental illness’ used to be the favourite excuse — tirelessly trotted out by the failing MSM after each new terrorist incident — but in 2019, a French judge took disingenuousness to new extremes in the case of African immigrant Kobili Traoré who murdered his Jewish neighbour.

Though Traoré recited verses from the Koran and yelled Allahu Akbar as he stabbed elderly Jewish woman Sarah Halimi, before throwing her three floors to her death, the judge ruled that he had no criminal case to answer because he had smoked marijuana beforehand. The weed – yeah, that’ll be it. Funny, though, isn’t it how it only makes you a psychopathic killer if you belong to one particular religion?

Sir Elton John

Sir Elton John recently announced during a show in Verona, Italy that he is ‘sick to death of Brexit’ and ‘ashamed’ of Britain. He added that he is a ‘European’ and not a ‘stupid colonial imperialist English idiot.’ It’s quite possible that not even the lyrical genius of Bernie Taupin could describe what a sad, so sad, sad sad situation this is. Nor how unhappy we British will be if Sir Elton takes the cruel decision to leave our bigoted island forever and never grace us with his regal presence again. But I guess we’ll manage, somehow.

George Soros

Do I really need to explain why?

Care Bear Commies

Expensively educated kids from the most prosperous generation in history confidently assuring us that ‘the only problem with communism is that it has never been tried properly yet.’ In 2019 part of me hoped that Jeremy Corbyn’s neo-Marxist Labour party would win the general election so that these university-brainwashed idiots could learn an important life lesson.

But it’s OK: as a loving conservative parent, you can still steer your Commie Kids gently towards the path of righteousness with a few gentle hints.

1. Cancel their allowance. 2. Confiscate their iPhones, their computer and their television. 3. Torch their car. 4. Barbecue their pet. 5. In extremis, but only in extremis because this is actually banned under international law along with biological and chemical weapons and extreme forms of torture, make them spend a year following the Twitter feed of left-wing activist Owen Jones until the Chinese-water-torture drip drip drip of the same old words and phrases – alt-right, Trump, racism, homophobia, demonising Muslims, gammons, etc – drives them to the point of insanity.

What's even worse is when newspaper racism and other bigotry is challenged, it's portrayed as a Trumpian attack on the media. No, Trumpian is demonising Muslims, refugees, migrants and trans people. Like much of the British press do. — Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) December 31, 2019

I love that someone from @iealondon feels like they can call me bizarre. The bizarre thing is thinking capitalism can succeed when history has shown it leads to misery for the people of the world. https://t.co/PiWmTkWR9L — Dakotah (@Dakotah4prez) December 30, 2019

Remoaners

Between 2016 and 2019, historians will recall, British democracy was held hostage by a minority of bitter, spoilt Remainers who couldn’t accept that they lost the Referendum and so did everything in their power to sabotage it. Unfortunately, because many of them were leading members of the Establishment they very nearly succeeded.

Fortunately, by the grace of God, they still lost in the end. But some of them — like Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific Islands still unaware that the Emperor has surrendered — are not ready to give up just yet.

So sorry that the powerful, corrupt rich elite have cheated and lied to persuade our electorate to vote for such harm to our country and great friends like you that have made the UK part of your lives. Rest assured that there are still MILLIONS of us that love the EU and you. ❤️ — Neville #FBPE #rEUnion #RevokeArticle50 🕷 (@NevAntiBrexit) December 29, 2019

I too am angry and annoyed at losing my EU citizenship, something I have enjoyed for forty plus years. There will be no forgiveness from me for the people who have done this, and absolutely no reconciliation. — Blue Letter Boxes please post Independence. (@Cat5weaver) December 28, 2019

The BBC

The relentlessly left-liberal-biased — anti-Trump, anti-Israel, anti-Brexit, anti-free-markets — news coverage are the least of its problems.

Worst, still, is the propaganda disguised as entertainment: Sir David Attenborough’s climate tragedy porn documentaries; the detective dramas where the baddie is always the white middle-class professional; the United Colours of Benetton tick-box diversity casting. For a while, the Beeb got away with it because old viewing habits die hard. But now everyone who isn’t irredeemably PC has woken up to the fact that the BBC despises them and that both Amazon Prime and Netflix offer cheaper services.

This cannot end well for the BBC, not least because — just like its political wing, the Labour party — it refuses point-blank to concede that it is doing anything wrong.

‘The Squad’ [Democrat congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley]

See: George Soros.

James Delingpole is the host of the Delingpod podcast