I know there’s no shortage of things to be worried about at the moment, so let’s welcome a few reasons to be cheerful.
1 May 2025
The main one is that the West may be in the early stage of recovery from an acute attack of self-loathing and about to abort its suicide mission.
In recent years — rather than focusing on the threat to their very existence posed by fanatical Islamists, by Putin’s obsession with making the Russian Empire great again one European country at a time, and by China’s imperialist campaign to buy and subvert its way into economic control of everything it can get its hands on anywhere — Western democracies seemed to be on the self-destruct path.
And then to the consternation of liberal establishments everywhere came the avenging angel in the unlikely shape of Donald Trump.
Of course I’m concerned about the downside — though those who think Trump’s sold out Ukraine are ignoring the unpalatable truth that Joe Biden did worse by donating enough American arms to keep the war going and the people dying but not to win it.
And even if you detest Trump, you need to face the truth that without him Europe would have continued to freeload its defence on an increasingly resentful United States with potentially disastrous consequences.
It ignored pleas to take responsibility from successive American presidents and from the vulnerable Baltic states, but it can’t so the same with Trump’s threats.
Now even Ireland — which basked self-righteously in a bogus neutrality— is beginning to face up to its responsibilities.
It was Trump too, who has put a stop to the gallop of pernicious doctrines like DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).
I was at the Washington March in August 1963 when Martin Luther King told the world of his dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.
This noble aspiration was undermined by generations of the liberal elite who ultimately went overboard for the crazed ideology of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). This outlawed merit as a criterion for success and replaced it by a bureaucrats’ paradise of ever more elaborate racial criteria for selection.
When you’re in a world where the cream of American universities demand that students denounce the greatest civilisation ever because it was white and Christian and take its geniuses off the curriculum, it’s reasonable to be fearful.
And there was also the insanity of replacing the concept of sex with gender.
But in the name of equal opportunity Trump’s heavy-handed executive order has taken an axe to DEI.
And in the UK, we’ve seen the Supreme Court say quite simply that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
Of all people, Tony Blair has come out against Net Zero, which was set to cripple compliant states with unachievable and insane environmental restrictions.
We’ve also seen great legal progress in defending free speech — the bedrock of our civilisation — which has been suppressed for a long time by ideological bigots.
So though who knows what’s ahead, let’s celebrate.
