One is a brainwashed child in pig-tails pushing a hard-left, anti-capitalist agenda which will drive up energy prices, hamper industry with taxes and regulations, destroy jobs, cause the poor and elderly to die in fuel poverty, enrich crony capitalists, and spread lies and fear and fake news about a non-existent problem.
The other is leader of the free world, a longstanding friend and admirer of Britain, an outspoken defender of Western civilisation, who has transformed the US economy, made his people safer and freer, and brought a degree of stability to a dangerous, unpredictable world both as a peacemaker (North Korea) and a scourge of terrorism (Iraq/Syria).
So guess which one is invited to address Britain’s parliament. And which one isn’t.
Yes, that’s right.
Greta Thunberg, the overrated kid, got to speak in parliament yesterday. And was fawned over by everyone from the Speaker of the House to the Environment Secretary for all the world as though her half-digested Greenpeace propaganda had come inscribed on tablets of stone straight from Mount Sinai.
President Trump, meanwhile, remains persona non grata. Unless John Bercow, the Speaker of the House, can be persuaded to change his mind, President Trump will not be accorded the courtesy of making an address to parliament when he comes to the UK on his state visit in June.
This is an outrage for a number of reasons. And the snub to President Trump, in my view, is the least of them.
Sure I think it’s quite disgusting that a malign, chippy little upstart — ‘Mister Speaker’, as he likes to be known — has the power to insult one of Britain’s major allies in this way.
Yes, of course, I also recognise the nauseating double standards here: if the slippery, sonorous leftist Barack Obama (the guy who resents Britain so much he moved Churchill’s bust out of the Oval Office) got to address both Houses of Parliament back in 2011, it seems quite wrong not to extend the courtesy to his successor.
But to be perfectly honest I’m not really sure that the Houses of Parliament actually deserve the honour of a visit from so distinguished a world statesman. Talk about pearls before swine!
Like him or not, Trump will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the great US presidents and one of the world’s most entertaining orators. What could he possibly have to say to the corrupt, anti-democratic, virtue-signalling, Brexit-betraying bunch of nobodies now filling parliament’s benches? Truly, those toe-rags just aren’t worthy of him.
What does bother me much more – and I’m going to come back to this because it’s really important – is the way that parliament is lending its prestige and authority to the cause of a small, unrepresentative minority of very dangerous, cynical and manipulative green activists.
Greta Thunberg may look cute and fresh-faced; yes she may deserve a degree of sympathy because she is on the autistic spectrum. But she knows next to nothing about climate science – except what she has been fed by green propagandists. And she knows still less about climate policy. (If she did, one thing she’d never be able to tout with any integrity is her utterly untrue line that governments are doing “nothing” to combat climate change. Oh yes, they are. Far, far too much. Britain, for example, is legally committed by the Climate Change Act massively to ‘decarbonising’ its economy by 2050 at enormous expense and with little obvious benefit.)
These are extraordinary times. Future historians, I’m sure, will marvel at the prevailing lunacy whereby Theresa May’s Conservative government prostrated itself before a child selling eco-fascist snake oil, but cringed at the thought of welcoming America’s greatest exponent of Conservative values since the golden era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The Conservative party deserves to die. Parliament is a disgrace and embarrassment. The sooner some wise president decides to annex Britain as the 51st state, the sooner the nightmare will be over.
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