Quotes of the week

The Government we have today campaigned on delivering tax cuts to the people. They said that if they were elected, they would increase after-tax pay for the squeezed middle by shifting income tax brackets.

And they won. So deliver they must.One thing this country would do well to have is a return to old-school political values. Values that see a newly elected government doing everything possible, despite the odds against it, to honour the promises it made to the electorate.

Delivery against those promises, alongside our overall wellbeing, should be the standard by which a government is judged. –  Bruce Cotterill

Restoring faith in government means that a government keeps the promises on which it was elected. It means a government that prioritises work on the things that matter most to the majority of the electorate. Those things in all likelihood are education, health, crime, transport, and equality of treatment under the law. – Bruce Cotterill

We need a government that delivers on the above while watching the cost base and ensuring that every dollar of taxpayer money spent is spent well.

The last Government prioritised reckless but headline-grabbing promises in terms of housing, poverty, crime and health. They then filled government offices with thousands of additional bureaucrats to give the impression that they were doing something. They increased taxes and borrowed millions to pay for it all. And they ultimately achieved very little.

Most of us would want the opposite.

So now we have a government with a well-publicised and transparent list of things to do, a list that is shared with the public, updated quarterly, and with items that are ticked off in a public manner along the way. They’re seeking to reduce the number of people working in government departments to get the country’s cost base down. And, they’re trying to keep their promise to reduce taxes. – Bruce Cotterill

At a time when both the media and our politicians have major issues of trust, both groups need to double down on recovering the confidence of the people. The best way to do that is for government to be transparent, to honour their promises, and for media to report their activities with accuracy and openness and without distortion. – Bruce Cotterill

We can argue that tax cuts are a stimulus, making it more difficult in an economy that’s fighting inflation. And we can argue that tax cuts rob money from worthwhile government initiatives. Both are good arguments. But we have to remember that the Government was voted in with a series of policies that included the changes to our taxes.

It’s what they promised to do. – Bruce Cotterill

Government is meant to be about the people who comprise a community rather than the politicians themselves. Tax cuts are for the people. In this case, those people will primarily be low- to middle-income earners, the people who work hard all day for modest returns. As “tax bracket creep” has evolved, these people have seen their modest pay increases subjected to increasing levels of taxation for years. These people are the Government’s “core business” and they need and deserve some relief.

Taxation should be about collecting the minimum amount of money from all taxpayers, in a manner that is fair and equitable, in order to enable the delivery of essential and desirable services, firstly for our people to prosper, and secondly, so that we play an appropriate role in the international community.

It may surprise many to learn that the Government is not in business for the various interest groups with an agenda to run or a cause to champion. More and more is being asked of our government. There are already too many things that government does that they shouldn’t. – Bruce Cotterill

Indeed, the quickest way for our Government to get back on top of matters financial is to get out of the things we shouldn’t be doing. We have government bureaucracies that get bigger and bigger every year. In this writer’s opinion, the cost of that bureaucracy is the single biggest issue facing the New Zealand economy. – Bruce Cotterill

The quest for efficiency across government will need to be a multi-term focus if we are to get our cost base back to something that is sustainable. – Bruce Cotterill

Good government is not about building bureaucracies that get bigger and more expensive every year. It is about getting outcomes for the society that government is intended to serve. Big bureaucracies fall into habits of doing business with each other. That is not how outcomes are generated. We need a better, simpler and less costly way.

Thankfully, it feels like we have a government that is focused on finding that better way. I get the impression that Luxon and Willis, despite the odds that are against them, are trying desperately hard to deliver on their promises while making government more efficient. – Bruce Cotterill

However, if we are to recover a level of trust in our parliamentary system, and the politicians who occupy the House on our behalf, those politicians must act in the interests of the people who put them there.

And that means that they must, without exception, deliver on the promises they make. – Bruce Cotterill

Ironically, the media they wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to expanding social justice. The challenge now, for these wise members of the academy, is to explain why the media they wanted is not what so many of its readers, listeners and viewers wanted. – Chris Trotter

All the “summits” in the world will avail their organisers nothing, if all they are willing to listen to are their own fears. – Chris Trotter

I found the term “at risk” in this connection both odd and significant. By “at risk of becoming” was meant, presumably, statistically more likely to become. It is a term taken from medical parlance: for example, doctors speak of obese people (or increasingly of “people with obesity” or even of “people living with obesity”) being at risk of becoming diabetic, or of people with high blood pressure being at risk of having a stroke or heart attack.

Criminality, and ultimately all human conduct whatsoever, is here conflated with disease, and thereby becomes a disease in itself. For example, I am at high risk of going into a bookshop and buying a book. I can no more help it than can a person with a family history of, say, gout, help having a higher-than-average chance of developing gout. Statistical chances rule the world, including the human world; besides which, for me at my age to buy more books is irrational, the sign both of a compulsion and an obsession—which, as everyone knows, are diseases. The only way that these diseases can be cured is for the government to give me so many books that I will no longer feel the compulsion to buy. –  Theodore Dalrymple 

Leniency is compassionate, severity cruel: such at any rate is the presumption of the intellectual middle classes, who, perhaps feeling guilty at their own good fortune, often inherited, by comparison with the classes from which criminals are usually drawn, find in making excuses for the latter, and in proposing lenient treatment of them, a way of demonstrating their generosity of spirit. I have rarely met such a person who has taken full cognisance of the fact that most of the victims of crime, as well as the perpetrators of it, are poor—relatively, that is. Most criminals are not great travellers: they rob, burgle and assault those around them, and since in the right circumstances they will readily admit that they have committed far more crimes than they have ever been accused of (borne out by, or compatible with, the fact that the police solve only a small proportion of crimes recorded by them), it follows that leniency is not necessarily compassionate, at least not if compassion is to be measured in part by its practical results and is not simply a warm, fuzzy feeling of self-congratulation at not being ungenerously punitive. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Welcome to another war of words between the greenies and the government over changes to the Resource Management Act.

With the poor old farmers stuck in the middle, just wanting the chance to be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to protecting the environment. And that’s what I think we should be doing.

You know how people have this concept of Mother Nature and how it’s all peace and love and milk and honey and bees buzzing and gentle rivers and all of that? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly all that goes out the window if the milk and honey brigade don’t like something?   – John MacDonald

But, unlike climate activists and politicians, I’m willing to accept that things aren’t black and white. Which is why I think it’s time we just trusted farmers to do the right thing and let them get on with it.  – John MacDonald

Firstly, I’ve got friends who are farmers and every time I go and see them, I can see that they just want to do the right thing. But, instead, they’ve had governments and government departments behaving like helicopter parents and watching their every move just in case they do something wrong. And that’s nuts.

And secondly, show me a farmer who wants to poo in their own nest.

They don’t. And this is where the greenies lose it. Because if they think farmers want to destroy the natural environment on their properties for short-term financial gain, then they know nothing about how it all works.

Farms are businesses, yes. But they’re also assets. And why would anyone want to do anything to damage their asset? They wouldn’t.

And that’s why I think that, instead of pulling farmers to bits, we should be trusting them to do the right thing.   – John MacDonald

And if you think the Resource Management Act is how you sort out muppets, then you might want to think again. So, we can’t do anything about the muppets.  

What we can do, though, is say to the farmers who aren’t muppets, that we trust them to do the right thing – and leave them to it.  – John MacDonald

What’s happened today will shock a lot of people, because over the last few years we’ve got used to Prime Minsters just putting up with their ministers doing a bad job or behaving badly in public.

It took forever for Hipkins or Ardern to demote the under-performers, and they suffered for it – public opinion of them was tainted.

That is clearly not how Chris Luxon operates, and it’s a good thing.

Because who doesn’t want performance from the people that we pay to run the country? – Heather du Plessis-Allan

If the state does not spend more than it collects and does not issue (money), there is no inflation. This is not magic. – Javier Milei 

Surely we didn’t miss the irony on climate change?

On the day it’s announced we have reduced our emissions now for three years in a row, so good on us, the very next day Transpower, the people who get the electricity into your lounge, tell us yet again that this Winter has issues and peak load and demand might be problematic.  – Mike Hosking

Here is a simple rule of thumb; to not have enough power in 2024 is simply not good enough and it should be seen as an abdication of responsibility. 

The reason we don’t have enough is quite openly admitted. It’s because the renewables are not voluminous enough and not reliable enough to cover the growing demand. 

The transition hasn’t transitioned to the point where we can largely leave fossils behind. 

So, here’s the line for me. Save the planet all you want, even if it is futile given China and India aren’t as interested. But don’t get so hell bent about it that the heater isn’t on in July when its -3 degrees. That’s not a first world country and it’s not a first world approach.  – Mike Hosking

If we don’t have enough power now, how do we power EV’s? How do we power generative AI, the so-called future? It’s a future that requires 10x more power than a Google search.

Talk about cart before the horse.

When we still struggle Winter in, Winter out to do the basics we have allowed ideology to hijack reality.

That is not the future, of the future.  – Mike Hosking

My view is that the State should have nothing to do with broadcasting. The recent optics surrounding the Public Interest Journalism Fund which has given rise to the perception – I emphasise perception – that media were promoting Government messaging has done enormous damage to the media as an institution. It is best that the State cuts its ties with broadcasting in the interests of broadcasters and indeed its own interests. – David Harvey

I would put it like this: while increased wealth above a certain level is not guaranteed to increase happiness, or what is now routinely called human flourishing, attempts to limit wealth to that level are almost guaranteed to result in increased human unhappiness. –  Theodore Dalrymple

I take it that this implies that equality of opportunity is, or would be, a desirable goal: but on the contrary, it seems to me to be a terrible one, among the most terrible that could well be imagined. This is despite the fact that almost no one has a word to say against it. Equality of opportunity is as morally untouchable as grandmothers or kindness to animals. – Theodore Dalrymple

The formal equality of opportunity that we already have is the only form of it that is not inherently tyrannical. Nor is it real, actual equality of opportunity, since the life chances of people born in different circumstances are very different. This fact is not at all an argument against it, however, when one considers what real, actual equality of opportunity would entail.

In the first place, the complete absence of opportunity, provided it were evenly spread, would satisfy the demand for equality of opportunity. Perhaps it could never be entirely equal (someone would have to suppress all that opportunity, after all), but there is little doubt that, by comparison with our present situation, overall equality of opportunity would be increased by the maximal suppression of opportunity.

It is hardly to be supposed that anyone, except an aspiring totalitarian dictator, would want such a thing.  – Theodore Dalrymple

But how does inequality of opportunity arise? The first and most obvious cause is in genetic endowment. Differing genetic endowment is unfair, but not unjust. For example, I should like to have been born more handsome than I was, but there is no one I can blame for this unfortunate fact, and nothing that I can do about it. What goes for looks goes for other attributes too numerous to mention.

There is no way this genetic unfairness can be abolished, except by universal cloning to ensure that all start with the same genetic endowment. From the point of equality of opportunity, it does not matter whether that endowment is good or bad, for everyone would be in the same genetic boat. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is certainly not fair that some people are born into nurturing environments and others into the very opposite. Moreover, it is possible that if environments could be to some degree equalised, marginal differences would become more important. The only way to avoid the unfairness caused by environmental differences is to make the environment in which children are raised (now clones, of course) absolutely identical in all respects, the equivalent of a battery farm. Only thus can the famous level playing field be achieved. Such an upbringing, of course, would make North Korea seem like a school for individuality. – Theodore Dalrymple

On the other hand, it ought to be possible to provide every child with opportunity, though not equal opportunity, for example by instituting good schools that nurture talent and build character. How this is best done is a matter of trial and error, and of experience. No system will ever be so perfect that “no child will be left behind,” to use the cant phrase. But while trying to provide opportunity for every child suggests practical solutions, aiming for something impossible like equality of opportunity supplies an excellent alibi for failure to do whatever is truly possible to give every child opportunity: for what is mere opportunity as a goal when compared to equality of opportunity? Have we no ambition? – Theodore Dalrymple

I have since been crystal clear about my concerns that women are being erased in this debate, and have always been clear that women do not have, nor have ever had, a penis. – Gillian Keegan

For several years, trans activist lobby groups pushed the use of phrases such as ‘trans women are women’ as a tactic to silence debate and fair questions about how gender self-identification clashes with women’s rights.

“Many didn’t recognise the dangers of these slogans early on, including politicians who doubtless thought they were simply supporting a good cause. It takes guts to publicly change your mind. Women’s rights and the safeguarding of children are serious issues that need to be addressed with clear and accurate language. – Maya Forstater

They say that because they believe women to be less than men. A woman is "reduced" to her biology if you recognize than women are female humans, but womanhood is somehow "elevated" when men claim it for themselves. It becomes "more" because they take it away from women.

— 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐔𝐬 (@therestofus5) April 25, 2024

Dawn begins each day. Sunrise speaks to the promise of a better day. From a long-ago battlefield to this morning’s promise, we must leave this ground dedicated to making our worlds better. Then the men buried here will not have died in vain.

Yet we live in a troubled world, the worst in memory.

We have emerged from a global pandemic a more divided world. Regional instabilities and the chaos they create threaten the security of too many.

So we must all do more. Demand more. And deliver more.  – Winston Peters

You will create your own memories and draw your own lessons from being here. But we must all come together, as people and as nations, to do more to honour those who paid with their lives. 

We must protect and care for our young. We must reject and resist those who seek to conquer and control. We must always seek the path of peace. 

Then, and only then, will the men buried here not have died in vain.  –  Winston Peters

Next ANZAC day I’d like to see the news cameras get out of the cities, and come experience an ANZAC service in Dargaville, or Taihape, or Lumsden. Because regardless of nonsense in Wellington, in rural New Zealand We Will Remember Them. – Mark Cameron

Divisiveness seems to be the new aim of the game. Race, political beliefs and religion are all motivators in separating our people. People are more concerned with being correct and proving a point… This is where we can learn more from our ancestors –

They stood as brothers to fight for us. They could see the purpose greater than themselves and put aside their petty arbitrary differences. It makes me wonder what could be accomplished if we could do the same? – Jared Lasike 

We don’t address racism by pretending white people can be black, nor is ableism solved by giving able-bodied people wheelchairs, so why are women and girls supposed to applaud their male imitators, centre them in language and hand over rights their foremothers fought for? 3/X

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 26, 2024

We stand up that weak arguments have their say so they can be shown to be weak arguments, and strong arguments have their say so they can be shown to be strong arguments. It’s a dangerous view that free speech needs to be held back from hurting minorities. The first thing free speech does is protect the minorities.

If we’re going to live in this idea that everyone gets to have a say, that in a democracy everyone gets to participate in society equally, then we’re going to have to accept that if you disagree with someone or you consider their perspective offensive, or harmful, or belligerent, they still get a say. We have to have confidence in the fact that society as a whole can discern error from truth. –  Jonathan Ayling

If students are not resilient enough or mature enough to be able to deal in ideas – even those that they find uncomfortable – then maybe they shouldn’t be at university. – Jonathan Ayling

"Paradoxically, the mere framing of this event has surfaced a depth of feeling and a polarisation of views on how we should proceed, that has made it challenging to even schedule a conversation about how to have challenging conversations." – Vice Chancellor Nic Smith

If we have…

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) April 26, 2024

No man can become a woman. We need as a progressive society to be better at allowing individuals to be socially (because it’s society that’s dictating what is traditionally male/female characteristics) to be as masculine or feminine as they like. Again humans don’t change sex. – Sharron Davies

 

Did you see the one about . . .?

Politics should be about the best person for the job – Mike Hosking

. . . It’s at this point I want to ask what I would argue is a slightly more important question than whether gender balance is important – would you rather have gender for gender’s sake, or competence?

Is a Government there to govern in a way that progresses the country, and therefore is broadly popular, or are they there to be able to meet markers like gender or race?

Has Labour’s excellence at gender provided us with a Government and a country we are proud of?

It’s important to point out, in case the angsty are getting a bit exercised, this Government’s performance is not necessarily gender related. In other words, just because they are useless and where they are in the polls isn’t because they promoted their fair share of women.

But the point is, the more you focus on artificiality i.e needing to balance the ledger or the colour or the background or the social input, the less you are focusing on the real issue – who is the best to do the job?

What we so desperately need in this country, now more than ever, is excellence.

We need excellence and experience and performance. What shape, size, gender or height someone is, is a long way down the totem pole.

Just give me some winners.

Nightmare on Molesworth Street – JC :

Labour is going to lose this election in the opposite way to its last result. In three years, this bunch of misfits are on track to turn a stunning win into an equally stunning loss. If you want proof I suggest you read Mike Munro’s article in the Weekend Herald. The article epitomises the lack of political awareness of this bunch that call themselves a government. In six years in office they have not produced a shred of evidence they have the slightest idea of what is needed to sustain New Zealand as a first-world country.

When it comes to the economy they appear to know only three words: borrow, tax and spend. Maybe four. Hope must be in there somewhere. That is not the way to dig yourself out of an economic hole you alone have created. Due to the policies of this government, more people than ever are on ‘struggle street’. There is no point speaking in glowing terms about low employment numbers when you have skewed the numbers to get the result you want.

Adding the jobseeker numbers to the unemployment figures gives you a more accurate number. Another example of misleading the public on numbers is the savings you get when removing GST from fruit and vegetables. It will not be $5 a week: more like $1.50 – if you’re lucky. I have not read of one economist who agrees with it. Not to worry: Mike Munro writes that the families who will most appreciate cheaper GST-free food couldn’t care less about what economists think.

Right there, in his own words, is the nub of Labour’s problem. It’s the government arrogance of ‘we know best’, when the truth is they haven’t got a clue. I must pause, though, to give Grant Robertson a plaudit, because he did understand and gave due warning to his party of the consequences of going down this road. But the Boy from the Hutt wasn’t interested. He was mesmerised by the measly $5 (or infinitesimal $1.50). . . 

Labour then brought out their transport policy, adding 12 cents a litre over three years to petrol. Now the core Labour voters on struggle street will find themselves struggling even more. In one fell swoop, or perhaps in this case foul swoop, Labour have more than wiped out the minuscule GST savings. The people they are supposed to be representing are being clobbered every time their MPs wag their tongues. . . 

Not to be outdone by penalising and ripping off their core vote, Labour decided last Friday to have a go at those who do listen to economists: the farmers. Ignoring the fact these people are already in dire straits due to lower agriculture prices, they hit them with a climate change tax. I’ll give them credit for getting the day right – all shocking political policies are released on a Friday. But why now, just weeks out from an election? Is this some sort of political kamikaze exercise? The country can’t endure another three years of this.

As I mentioned in my previous article, you wouldn’t want these imbeciles strategising a war. October 14 is going to be the ‘night of the long knives’ for Labour. They may not be, metaphorically speaking, killed off (or blown up), but they’ll most certainly be removed from office. It does not make any sense to entrust the running of a country to people who demonstrate such blatant ignorance of what is required to achieve successful outcomes. It’s not borrow, tax and spend – it’s getting people into work and thereby increasing productivity. . .

Cancelling our comedy show proves our point – Andrew Doyle :

Five years ago, Andy Shaw and I set up a monthly comedy night in London called Comedy Unleashed. Our objective was to challenge what we perceived to be the groupthink that was developing within the industry. Promoters, television commissioners, critics, even comedians themselves, had begun to turn on acts who failed to convey the “correct” political opinions, and many fellow comics confessed to me that they had begun to self-censor for the sake of their careers.  

And so we launched a night which would encourage innovative and free-thinking acts, where we might cultivate a comedy-literate audience who understood that the art form cannot exist without the potential to cause offence. Not that the acts we booked necessarily had to be offensive; rather, they would be free to tease the limitations of the audience’s tolerance should they wish. The only condition was that they should be funny.  

This year we decided to make an appearance at the trade fair known as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We liaised with a local promoter and booked a venue in Leith, on the outskirts of the city. The bill was to include Bruce Devlin, Mary Bourke, Dominic Frisby, Alistair Williams and the co-creator of the classic sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan.  

Graham has been considered controversial for holding a range of beliefs. Most notably: that human beings cannot change sex, that women deserve the right to single-sex spaces and the chance to compete fairly in sports, that feminists such as J.K. Rowling should not have to put up with rape and death threats for stating biological facts, and that gay and autistic children ought not to be medicalised and put onto a pathway to sterilisation. What a monster. 

Those who claim that “cancel culture does not exist” will struggle to explain how it is that one of the most successful sitcom writers of all time now cannot work in the comedy industry, and why his musical adaptation of Father Ted has been effectively held hostage by the rights holders, Hat Trick Productions.  

Given that we knew our show would sell out, we did not advertise Graham in advance, preferring instead to tease the audience with the prospect of a “surprise cancelled comedian”.  With the show just a few days away, we finally announced his appearance, and within 24 hours the venue, Leith Arches, had posted a statement on Instagram stating that they “DO NOT suppprt [sic] this comedian, or his views and he WILL NOT be allowed to perform at our venue and is CANCELLED from Thursdays [sic] comedy show with immediate effect”. 

The histrionics didn’t stop there. “We are an inclusive venue,” the statement continued, “and will not allow such views to violate our space.” The venue later deleted the post and replaced it with one that was marginally more literate.  

Quite how a venue can claim to be “inclusive” when it excludes performers who do not subscribe to the ideology of its staff is anyone’s guess. Those who complained to the venue could simply have refrained from buying a ticket. Instead, they sought to prevent the audience members of a sold-out show from making their own decisions. 

It is for this reason that we are determined to find an alternative venue. The Fringe has always been known for controversial performances, but whereas the protests used to come from the Christian Right, they now seem to be driven by the identitarian Left. These are the same Pharisees, only now they wear rainbow-coloured garb. 

All is not well in the comedy industry. Last year Jerry Sadowitz had his show pulled by the Pleasance Theatre. This year it is the turn of Graham Linehan. These moves represent precisely the kind of authoritarian thinking that led to the creation of Comedy Unleashed in the first place. So although we regret the cancellation of our show, at least these activists have proved our point. 

The rise and rise of trans McCarthyism – Brendan O’Neill :

t’s been a bad week for the ‘cancel culture is a myth’ lobby. For those woke bros of the pretend left who squawk ‘It’s not cancel culture, it’s consequences culture!’ every time someone is punished for their beliefs. Women hounded from their jobs, blacklisted by university campuses, set upon by heaving mobs of feral misogynists, all for the thoughtcrime of knowing men are not women, and still the censorship apologists say: ‘Cancel culture isn’t real.’ ‘This isn’t a witch hunt, it’s just God’s consequences’, these petty tyrants would have said in Salem.

The cancellation deniers were mugged by truth this week. First we had the extraordinary sight of the good people of Comedy Unleashed traipsing around Edinburgh to try to find a venue for their comedy night. Their line-up included Graham Linehan, you see, and his insistence that people with penises are men, not women, makes him a public enemy to the woke Joe McCarthys. Not one but two venues cancelled – yes, cancelled – these thoughtcriminals of comedy. Eventually they had to perform their set on the street, outside the Scottish parliament, a grim snapshot of the decline and fall of Enlightened Scotland.

Then we had the shaming of David Greig. The blacklisting of Linehan and friends is an incredibly important moment in cancel culture, but I hope it doesn’t overshadow the Stasi-style humiliation suffered by Greig for his wrongthink. He is one of Scotland’s best-known playwrights. His works have been performed everywhere from the National Theatre to the Royal Shakespeare Company. And this week he fell victim to the culture of denunciation, the frenzy for finger-pointing, that swirls through woke circles. He was snitched on, exposed, shamed, and pressured to recant his profane and wicked thoughts. What did he do? He liked two tweets posted by ‘TERFs’.

His ‘careless and harmful’ Twitter behaviour – as he himself described it in the timorous apology extracted from him by the mob – involved pressing like on the following tweets: ‘Lads and lasses in the trenches fighting the gender madness – what is the best (very recent) example you can think of that shows how we have won this crazy war?’ And: ‘If you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned.’

That latter tweet was contrasting the surreal overreaction of woke cops in West Yorkshire to a teenage girl who said one of their officers looked like her ‘lesbian nana’ and the slap on the wrist given to a 26-year-old trans activist – a bloke, natch – who allegedly punched a 54-year-old feminist in the head and arm last month. . .

Greig was swiftly outed as a ‘transphobe’, which is to modern culture what being a Communist was to 1950s Hollywood. Chillingly, it was a fellow creator – an artist called Rosie Aspinall Priest – who publicly denounced him. She shared the sinful material he approved of, accusing him of ‘openly liking transphobic tweets’. ‘Really awful things on display here’, she said – what, giving the thumbs-up to a tweet criticising Aberdeen police for not treating the punching of a woman more seriously? Greig’s ‘likes’ – or his thoughts, which is really what we’re talking about here – ‘do not align with the values inherent within Scotland’s theatre sector’, decreed Ms Priest.

Twitter (I’m still not ready to call it X, Elon) started buzzing with chat about Greig’s likecrimes, and soon he shut down his own Twitter account. Twitter’s no country for men who support women’s rights. Such was the pressure on Greig that he felt obliged to write an apologetic letter to staff at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where he is artistic director.  . .

The shaming of David Greig might seem a small affair, certainly in comparison with the chattering-class bloodsport of going after Graham Linehan. But it matters, because it shows how cruel cancel culture has become. It has all the ingredients of cultural despotism. The denunciation of Greig by a fellow artist brings to mind the ‘culture of denunciation’ that pertained in the GDR. There, too, in the words of the historian Robert Gellately, ‘oppositional persons’ were frequently denounced as ‘enemies’ of the common good, and this culture of grassing had ‘devastating effects, particularly on writers and poets’. That Greig was reprimanded for mere likes on Twitter confirms that even giving fleeting approval to ‘oppositional’ thought can land you in trouble now. One doesn’t even have to speak in order to sin, far less write a manifesto – a murmur of agreement with wrongthink is enough to see you condemned and chastened.

And that Greig’s chief speechcrime was to align himself with women who think other women should not be punched in the head and arm points to the moral contortionism and outright linguistic deceit in the trans ideology. Supporting women, feminism itself, is now branded ‘transphobia’, confirming that perfectly reasonable beliefs are being reimagined as bigotries and maladies under the yoke of wokeness. Every tyranny in history has depicted oppositional thought not only as ‘wrong’ or ‘destabilising’, but as immoral, proof of a polluted mind, and liable to pollute other minds, too. So it is under trans McCarthyism: gender-critical thinking is treated as an abnormal fear whose expression must be tightly policed and sometimes outright censored.

Trans McCarthyism really is the only way to describe it. Blacklisting is back, not of Commies this time, but of people who think women are real. We all know the big names who’ve been hounded by the phobia-hunters: Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey, Kellie-Jay Keen. And there are others. Indeed, any writer, comic or actor who gets even close to expressing a gender-critical view is ruthlessly pounced on. Actress Amanda Abbington, for saying men can’t breastfeed. Davina McCall, for describing a pro-JK Rowling podcast as ‘interesting’. Macy Gray, for saying men who cut off their bits are not women. Author Gillian Philip, for expressing solidarity with JK Rowling. And of course Rowling herself, whose name has been scrubbed from museums of popular culture and schools and even certain versions of her books. And now David Greig. He’s been put on notice. Only silence will save him now.

‘Are you now or have you ever been a believer in biological sex?’ – that’s what the new authoritarians ask, without having to ask it. Say yes and you’re out, as surely as Dalton Trumbo and others were out of Hollywood when their Communist sympathies were uncovered. Artistic freedom and open discussion must be saved from the trundles of this new ideology that would have us believe that men can be women, and 2 + 2 = 5.

Humourless scolds have taken over comedy – Simon Evans :

. . . If the aim of booking Linehan – not merely well-loved but almost peerlessly adored for his sitcom work – was to demonstrate that powerful, partisan forces had seized control of the Fringe, then it has plainly worked. Mere mention of his name, before he uttered a single word on stage, provoked complete reverse peristalsis. He was ejected from the system before the possibility of digesting what he had to say could begin. He didn’t even get the benefit of the doubt accorded to Sadowitz, who at least got to perform his show once before the plug was pulled. Those who demanded Linehan be cancelled have perfectly demonstrated what comedy is now up against.

And let us be clear, Linehan has been canned for holding views that, however intemperately they have on occasion been expressed in the furnace of social media, are broadly shared by the majority of the population and are well-evidenced in biology. He has also made specific, since proven allegations of abuse and malpractice by medical professionals on a scale it would be difficult to exaggerate. For all of this, he has already paid an enormous price, in terms of his health, family life and professional opportunities.

It all feels desperately sad. I suspect the vast majority of us just want to go back the days of Father Ted, of Jenny Eclair and Lily Savage and The League of Gentlemen, of robust and vulgar and joyful humour and a genuinely inclusive, forgiving atmosphere. But a tiny handful of humourless scolds will not let it lie. The pricks.