In the mean time I’ve been keeping tabs on the whole ‘Climategate’ saga which thankfully blew up a few months ago before the Copenhagen Climate talks. Much of the foot work was done by the blogs both in this country and in the United States as the mainstream media sort to bury their heads in the sands and managed to turn a collective blind eye.

Today has seen heavy snowfall right across the country causing disruption to traffic networks and business. However, predictably the usual suspects have been quick to claim that what is predicted to be the coldest winter in thirty years is not, in any way whatsoever, in conflict with man-made global warming.

If you haven’t read it already, Dr Richard North wrote an excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about how the Met Office has been so wrong about its long term forecasts. I am also about to start reading Christopher Booker’s latest tome on the subject of Global Warming and Climate Change which comes highly recommended.

As I write, it is beginning to snow again, so I leave you with a photograph of all that Global Warming in my garden this morning. Clearly I had absolutely nothing better to do…

During the past few days there has been much discussion of her legacy in the media and on the internet, with Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, the Conservative History website, and even the BBC getting in on the act.

However, with all the fawning praise and, conversely, criticism from the Left, very little in the way of analysis has been given to Thatcher’s Governments from a conservative perspective. How about the traditionally conservative argument that Thatcher’s governments did nothing to stop the social and cultural revolution that has been taking place in this country since the late 1950s?

Firstly, we have to establish the solid fact that Mrs Thatcher was certainly not a conservative – she was a liberal. Her free market ideology was influenced by the economist Milton Friedman and the author Friedrich Hayek, both of whom described themselves as liberals and explicitly said they were not conservatives.

Furthermore, conservatism has not traditionally supported the ideas of any particular type of economic system, free market or not. Traditional conservatism has sought to maintain social stability through maintenance and gradual progression, rather than rapid transition, of the current social order.

The market system which Thatcher imposed upon Britain radically altered our society in a very short period of time – some of the effects of which we are only just beginning to feel now. It was an economic revolution rather than a slow and gradual process.

Thatcher was responsible for among the greatest surrenders of British sovereignty to the European Union. She signed the Single European Act in 1986 which was particularly unconservative, because wisdom suggests that although the nation state is not the only possible solution as a form of political order, it is a tried and tested solution that largely works and the only environment in which democracy seems permitted.

The EU, whose aim it is to sweep away the old order of nation states, democratic traditions, and accumulated knowledge, and replace it with a new, untested supranational construct in which sovereignty is passed to a higher level than the nation, is fundamentally alien to conservatism. While she did, in the end, perhaps wake up to the undemocratic and destructive nature of European integration – it was by then too late.

Margaret Thatcher was uninterested in the defence of selective education and Grammar schools, despite the fact that she had attended one. Instead her Governments submitted to the equality agenda and destruction of these schools.

During the sixties the Labour party began to pursue their Comprehensive school agenda with much more vigour, despite it being acknowledged that the pursuit of equality of outcome would lead to a decline in educational rigour and standards. Yet, it was in her capacity as Education Secretary under Edward Heath that she approved more applications for Grammar schools to be turned into Comprehensives than any previous period.

Further, this surrender to the Left and the educational revolution taking place in Britain extended into her own Governments where she refused to reopen or build a single new Grammar school.

It must be made absolutely clear that if you do not have selection by ability, which is by far the fairest method of selection, then you do not remove it altogether but simply replace it with another means by which schools choose their pupils. Academic selection now takes place in Comprehensive schools by wealth (by means of catchment areas where only the richest can afford the properties prices of houses near the best schools and poorer families are forced out), by religion and by the use of ‘interviews’ where the middle classes benefit at the expense of the poor.

Thatcher’s Governments failed to reverse the creeping levels of political correctness entering our society, or to protect marriage or prevent an enormous growth in the size and power of the public sector. She failed to reform the National Health Service when she had the opportunity, or the BBC whose progressive influence on British society has been so damaging since.

Her Governments did not seek to challenge the liberal-Left on its social and moral agenda, and her decade long rule helped to undermine personal responsibility and British liberties. In so many ways Margaret Thatcher continued the liberalisation of our society that begun in the late fifties, through her economic reforms and her indifference to the cultural agenda of the Left.

The strange, reverent cult that has built up around her image and legacy certainly needs to be examined more closely, because I do not necessarily believe that Margaret Thatcher is deserving of some of the praise she seems to have won.

According to The Independent, the article is apparently ‘an exclusive’ – but truth be told, it is not. In fact the story came to light more than eight years ago in the United States and has cropped up in the global and national media more than a few times since.

Back in August of 2000, The New York Times printed a similar but equally erroneous report suggesting that ‘the North Pole is melting’. Yet, the Times were forced to issue a retraction after it was pointed out by other scientists that in the summertime open stretches of water in the Arctic were a normal occurrence.

Thus, the US-based Capitalist Magazine observed less than a year after the New York Times article:

Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that ‘The North Pole is melting’.

The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist – an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy – who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. ‘The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water’, the reporter declared, ‘was more than 50 million years ago’.

Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction.

However, the eco-left were not content to let the story lie forgotten and managed to revive it again in April this year with ABC News claiming that the ‘North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008’. Today, eight years after the original claim and two months after its latest appearance in ABC, The Independent has just caught up and republished the falsehood.

What’s more, the Independent article fails to even mention the volcanic eruptions that have very recently been discovered by scientists under the arctic icecap. But then why would The Independent worry about such trivial matters as truth, fact and good journalistic standards and practices? They are convinced that Global Warming is almost solely caused by the activities of humanity and will publish any evidence, whether true or not, to persuade others that they are correct.

Apparently each week, writer, broadcaster and cultural critic (whatever that may be) Ziauddin Sardar will blog on a different verse of the Qur’an. The blurb in the about section describing the reason behind the site says:

Muslims have been wrestling with the meaning of the verses and words of the Qur’an from the early days of Islam. Non-Muslims, meanwhile, often have wildly inaccurate notions of its content … Through Blogging the Qur’an, we hope to try and untangle some of those meanings and misconceptions.

Can you imagine, for example, the Guardian affording this level of treatment to Christians and the Bible, or indeed any other religion? Of course not, they would be ridiculing Christianity as a backwards, intolerant religion as they have done for decades, and would have no interest in ‘untangling’ some of the ‘meanings and misconceptions’ surrounding the Bible.

The development of this site, along with many other things the Guardian and the likes of the BBC have said, makes you wonder why it is that they are clearly so desperate to appease Muslims rather than shower them with scorn as they do Christianity.

Could it be that hidden behind a hastily constructed façade of reverence, is the fact that those on the left actually rather fear Islam. They know that most Muslims won’t quietly or meekly surrender their beliefs in the face of adversity or opposition as some Christians might, but instead would vocally and sometimes explosively fight back.

If the BBC’s own domestic coverage is anything to go by, the new Middle East station will not be impartial, independent or authoritative. Instead it will be instilled with the BBC’s usual anti-Israeli, anti-Western sentiments.

Only the BBC and those that support its liberal-left, politically correct worldview desperately continue to claim that the corporation is without bias. Surely if the BBC were so impartial they would have had no reason to spent £200,000 of license fee money last year in an attempt to suppress an internal report on bias against Israel?

At the time as the BBC attempted to deny public access to the report through the courts, Labour MP Louise Ellman commented:

There has been a bias and lack of context with the BBC reporting of Israel. Problems are related to citing individual acts of Israeli aggression by failing to put them into context or explaining the reasons. It makes them look like unprovoked acts, when in fact they were reaction to a terrorist act. I would certainly like to see what’s in the report.

Much like the BBC’s coverage of the European Union, this is an example of what Lord Pearson of Rannoch recently referred to as ‘bias by omission’. Does the Middle East really need yet another news network when it already has so many other commercial broadcasters? Should the Foreign Office really be funding this undertaking? Of course not, but this Middle Eastern adventure will still go ahead nonetheless.

Perhaps this outcome was in the end not all too much of a surprise since there will always be individuals willing to prevent others engaging in democratic and free debate with whose views they do not agree?

Many Universities in Britain currently hold a ‘no-platform’ policy for groups such as the BNP and the likes of David Irving. Only last year the University of Bath’s Student Union voted to bar Nick Griffin from speaking at a private event hosted in one of its auditoriums. Therefore it actually came as a pleasant surprise to discover that the Oxford Union had actively voted to allow Mr Griffin to be challenged in an open debate.

Regardless of whether you agree with Nick Griffin or David Irving (and I for the most part do not) then it should be generally accepted that if their views are so wrong, then they should be challenged through debate and their arguments shown to be incoherent – not instead to try and force Mr Griffin and Irving into silence, which benefits no-one and in the end often has the undesirable effect of providing them with public sympathy.

Thus it is not so much a problem that protests against the speakers took place, as this was perfectly within their right, but it was the manner in which they did protest that was disagreeable and wrong. The Oxford Union voted democratically by a two to one margin to allow Nick Griffin and David Irving to speak at a private establishment, and yet by trying to prevent the debate from taking place at all or baring ticket holding members from entering the hall, the Leftist protesters in affect stooped to an apprehensible level. As I said previously, if the views of Griffin and Irving are so obviously wrong, as many of them quite clearly are in my opinion, then all that need be done is to prove them so in debate.

What’s more, arguably a great deal more fuss than was necessary surrounded the debate. Had those persons who disagreed with Nick Griffin not protested in the manner that they did at his being allowed to speak, then last night’s event in Oxford would not have hit the national headlines nor would the BNP have gained anywhere near as much media coverage. Therefore in reality, those supposedly most against the views held by Nick Griffin and David Irving did most to help promote them – all without actually challenging them through open debate either.

In general there is, I would imagine, an ulterior motive behind the façade of outrage and indignation expressed by protestors like those in Oxford yesterday and anti-fascist campaigners elsewhere. As Daniel Hannan pointed out a week or so ago on his Telegraph blog:

The answer, I think, is that Lefties like to exaggerate the threat from what they call ‘the far Right’ in order to taint, by association, the mainstream Right.

In his post, Daniel later goes on to correctly outline that there is in fact very little actually right-wing or indeed conservative in the programmes of continental neo-fascist parties throughout Europe, inclusive of the British National Party. However, a convenient myth has been developed around the ‘right-wing’ whereby without reason, the left can lump the predominately socialist inclined fascists together with the conservative right and in doing so attack small-state conservatives who, as Daniel Hannan again remarks, ‘couldn’t be ideologically further removed’ from the neo-nazis.

Once again regarding the debate that eventually took place in Oxford last night; ours and future generations must remember that there really can be no compromise in exercising ours and others’ right to free speech, no matter how odious or repugnant the views of those we disagree with may be.

You may have thought that our educational system was meant to be a place for actually educating children; instilling in them fact and intellectual rigour rather than a method of profound and radical social engineering.

Well, if you thought that modern schooling was about learning and teaching then sadly you’re mistaken. Successive British Governments have slowly shaped the educational establishment around the equality agenda and the desire to force everyone down one set path.

In real terms this has meant the gradual decline of standards over the past few decades. This has been exemplified by changes in the examination system, with exams having been purposefully made easier to such an extent that seemingly nobody can actually fail one. Furthermore, through the destruction of Grammar schools and the selective system, the brightest and best children have been thoroughly failed by being held back to further the creation of a more ‘equal’ generation of children.

At the opposite end of the scale, and rather unsurprisingly, those desperately claiming that educational standards have increased (when everyone else can quite clearly see they have substantially decreased) are Government ministers, schools and curious liberal children’s groups, who themselves, like successive governments are in fact more interested in social engineering from the bottom upwards rather than actually educating young and eager minds, or the very least have a self-interest in perpetuating the increasing standards myth.

Top Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge have been forced to make students sit their own special entrance exams because A-levels do not help differentiate between the best applicants, and other Universities and further education institutes are complaining that many students they receive cannot even spell, use basic grammar or do simple arithmetic.

As we have seen recently, when there is actual ‘education’ involved in the system, it is used primarily to indoctrinate – the latest prime example of this being the Government wishing to distribute Al Gore’s dubious and politically biased climate change film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to every school in Britain. Thankfully this is being challenged in the high court at the moment – but Ministers will only try again at a later stage and with something else. Perhaps this is another reason why the whole educational establishment should be taken out of the hands of government and privatised?

The media, obsessed as they are with their cult of youth, never really took to the elderly Sir Menzies, despite his left-wing liberal credentials – and I suspect this lack of media coverage, endorsement and appraisal played a significant role in his eventual downfall.

So, who will rise up to clasp the soiled Lib Dem leadership crown in their grubby hands in any forthcoming leadership elections? In many respects, does it really matter, and frankly who cares? Whoever takes over will be as useless as those that preceded them – just a little more youthful, which in today’s image rather policy driven media age will probably make all the difference.

With that in mind, I suspect the early running will be made by Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg, who, laughably, Jon Snow on Channel Four news just a while ago referred to as the most ‘right wing’ of the candidates likely to throw their hat into the ring. I assume that means the extremely socially liberal, and economically socialist Mr Clegg is left-wing rather than very left-wing then?

As for Ming, it very much appears that he was surplus to requirement and obsolete technology in the party that supposedly prides itself on being in no way discriminatory.