Today was only a half day. We began with a session entitled Defeating Net Zero and other enemies of Freedom in which the panellists exposed some of the stupidities of government policy. Like so much of the weekend's discussion the policy is as much the former "Conservative" government's as the present Labour one's.

Defeating Net Zero panel

Catherine McBride OBE, an economist and member of the UK Trade & Agriculture Commission made the point that, if emissions matter, they matter everywhere. We have deindustrialised the UK and sent our emissions to China. On any analysis, that doesn't help the planet at all. We pay people to plant trees in Scotland where they will die from lack of CO². What we should have done is planted them along our motorways, including on the central reservation where they'd not just absorb CO² but help screen drivers from the bright LED headlights of oncoming cars, which are themselves a consequence of net zero policies.

As a nation, we have only three  natural resources: coal, oil and natural gas. We've decided not to use them. Meanwhile Europe is giving Russia more for gas than it’s giving Ukraine to fight Russia. If we don't want to use our gas ourselves we could have sold it to our European neighbours rather than having them become more reliant on a hostile country. There are countries where solar makes sense. The UK is not one of them. Solar operators are only making money from subsidies. It's a government-sponsored Ponzi scheme. We ourselves import fracked LPG from the US while concreting over our own frackable reserves to ensure we can never get to them – even perhaps in some future military emergencies when we couldn't import what we need for our own war effort. This is, she said, insane. 

Christopher Howarth of the European Research Group explained that for a new government to undo Net Zero in 2029 is an extremely difficult proposition. It's not embedded in any one piece of legislation but in many acts of Parliament. The most recent revision to the target didn't even have a proper debate in Parliament. It was done by statutory instrument and there was no vote at all.The few opponents who might have voted against didn’t even know it was happening. Even when it becomes apparent the damage that Net Zero is doing to our national economy (while making zero difference to global emissions) it will be hard to undo it in a country where it's desirability is taught in the National Curriculum as fact.

I found many of this weekend's discussions interesting and educational but the best speech of all was from Claire Fox (Baroness Fox of Buckley) an "old Lefty" (her words) from my home town in Wales. Claire used to be a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the editor of Living Marxism magazine. She remains on the Left but is reviled by her new identarian comrades because she regards freedom of speech as – not a right-wing excuse to allow hate speech to flourish – but part of the essential inheritance of the Enlightenment. She finds it infuriating that people tell her she's now a Conservative because she believes in free speech. It's a value that's central to our civilisation and does not belong to the Right. 

She warned us that we were in danger of falling down the same rabbit hole as her tribe. It's all too easy (and tempting if you've been under attack for a long time) to join in with the identarian game, but if we start to pursue remedies based on our identity groups being oppressed we will legitimise the whole "woke" movement. We must resist the temptation to pick up their weapons and try to win arguments based on reason, not identity-politics points-scoring.

She gave the example of the current row over the Netflix drama Adolescence. Before she realised it was going to be politically controversial she tweeted that it was a good drama. She is now getting hateful comments from people who want it cancelled because the protagonist is a white, working class teenager and they consider that an attack on everyone in that group. Whatever the producers' reasons for casting it as they did, calling for the show's cancellation and condemning it without watching it is a dangerously familiar, irrational approach.

She thought President Trump was going in for cancellation of his opponents too but warned that "sticking it to the libs" can and will backfire. We must hold onto the idea that words are not violence. The only reason the Left is arguing that they are is to justify the use of actual violence against words! 

Gawain Towler, former Head of Press for UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform UK followed on from Claire and commented that he'd been horrified by the tactics used by both sides of the Reform UK split. Calling in the police, leaking private WhatsApps and other such attempts at mutual cancellation were indeed echoes of the civil wars on the Left. He made the interesting observation that there was too much talk about hate in politics whereas what really drove most people in politics – in his experience – was love. On the Right, people loved their country and their way of life and the very British tradition of not seeking a perfect society but of muddling through in an imperfect one, which was ours and which we loved. He didn't explain what it was that those on the Left loved (apart from spending other peoples' money) but he made it clear that civilised political debate needs an acceptance that one's opponents are humans with whom we disagree, not monsters. 

Organising for Freedom panel

The closing discussion on Organising for Freedom was interesting in that it came closest to addressing the problems facing the divided Right in Britain. There's not much doubt that the British electorate is going to be ready to ditch Labour at the next election, but would the parties of the Right be ready to offer them that option? I asked again how the Conservative Party was going to win back the trust of the electorate. I said its traditional voters were furious they'd wasted fourteen years of opportunities and were bound to ask – even if offered an excellent programme – why they should believe it would be implemented based on past non-performance? I was disappointed with the response. Mumbling about acknowledging error and apologising really didn't cut it for me. The panel was much happier talking about reforming the Conservative Party's organisation than its ideology. 

People seem to have forgotten that Margaret Thatcher was not just an excellent PM but a cunning Leader of the Opposition. She'd circumvented the Tory Grandees, Central Office and the Conservative Research Department (none of whom were her friends). She'd assembled, together with Sir Keith Joseph, a team of academic advisers and policy wonks at the Centre for Policy Studies and produced a programme for a future Conservative Government. I led my university's student Conservatives to control of our student union for the first time in its history during her period in opposition. We were enthused both by her leadership and the policies the CPS was producing. All of us had read, for example, its pamphlet "Why Britain needs a Social Market Economy."

In a Britain where net zero, critical race theory and gender fluidity are taught as fact at secondary school, some similar effort is going to be needed to win the trust of the electorate in general and particularly the young.

I have funded my two daughters through bachelors' and masters' degree courses at the Universities of Cambridge, London and the LSE. Ideologically, they might as well have attended KGB staff college under Beria. A lot of students these days tick ideological boxes to win their degrees while privately dismissing the crap they're taught, but still some of it sticks. The challenge of winning them over is greater than Thatcher ever faced. I think it's a legitimate criticism of Margaret's legacy, much as I admired her, that she took on the wrong foes. Rather than fighting the soon-to-be-irrelevant coal miners, she should have fought the Marxist infiltrators of our schools, universities and - most-insidiously - teacher training colleges. The Education "blob" is at the heart of the Leftist deep state and a primary cause of our national decline. 

It was an interesting weekend and it's always uplifting to be among like-minded people of goodwill. However I heard nothing to convince me that Reform UK and the Conservative Party will have united or allied and agreed a programme to give voters the weapon they'll want by 2029 (if not sooner) to beat Labour to an electoral pulp.

The Third Annual Freedom Festival Tickets, Sat 22 Mar 2025 at 09:30 | Eventbrite.

This is what we believe.

If it is not necessary to make a law, it is necessary NOT to make that law

Greg Smith MP, a survivor of the Tory rout at the last election had good ideas for policies but no real answer to my question as to how – even if they were accepted by Blue Labour – the Conservative Party could expect to be believed. Their traditional electorate was furious with them. That was the message of the election and they still hadn't received it as far as I could see. They'd had plenty of chance (and a healthy majority) to implement his ideas, but had crawled to The Guardian instead.

I hesitate to opine on a war involving Russia. I lived and worked there. I have Russian friends and am on record as admiring its culture (arguably the most artistically complete of any human civilisation) and its people. I am open to slurs that this translates into sympathy for its utterly despicable government. It really doesn’t. I wish — for what that’s worth — it would lose this war. The invasion of Ukraine was morally wrong. Ukraine’s defensive struggle is just and brave.

We’ve lived at peace for so long, thank God, that — outside military families — most Britons’ experience of war is limited to movies in which good guys win in the face (for dramatic effect) of overwhelming odds. The plucky and virtuous vanquish evil at the end of an elegant dramatic arc involving some maverick who defies the orders of idiot commanders to snatch a noble victory.

War just isn’t like that. Might is not right, but it prevails. Britain can be proud of plucky ancestors who, for a while, stood alone — just as Ukrainians do right now — against a superior enemy. The courage of the Few made ultimate victory possible but World War 2 would have been lost were it not for the intervention of allies (including Russians under the only contemporary leader viler than Hitler) prepared to fight and die at our side. Pluck was great. Moral superiority was noble. Greater force won.

So when I read that Ukrainian troops are outnumbered ten to one on parts of their frontline and when I recall the Russian military’s historic contempt for the value of its own soldiers’ lives, I sigh at the assumption that President Trump in suing for peace is siding with the monster Putin. Those attacking him never advocated allying with Ukraine in more than name. They would call him crazy if he despatched so much as one Cruise missile. What they’re demanding is more meaningless solidarity by gesture; the geopolitical equivalent of a Ukrainian flag on their country’s Facebook profile.

When Biden promised to stand by Ukraine, it was gesture politics of the most expensive kind. He commanded the most powerful armed forces the world has ever known but planned to send neither troops nor airstrikes nor missiles. He sent only taxpayer dollars to sustain Ukraine’s war effort to its inevitable end. He and his NATO allies praised Ukraine and raised its flags on their town halls while being prepared to watch that plucky nation fight to its last man.

I am not advocating World War 3 on Russia. I don’t think the democracies of the West have popular support for that. American and British mothers aren’t ready to see their sons die for a far off, corrupt nation of little economic significance. Even French and German mothers are not prepared to waste Anglo lives they might later need to defend their own borders. For that’s how — in truth — Continental Europe sees NATO. They’ve long avoided the full economic cost of defending themselves and grown fat and complacent under US protection, while failing even to meet the modest defence commitments they make. They sneer at the naïve, unsophisticated Yanks while relying on them for defence.

Germany under Merkel pursued a suicidally stupid energy policy of increasing dependence on Russia, without worrying about what that might mean for the future. Deep down lay the unspoken, perhaps subconscious assumption that Germany’s safety is for idiot Yanks and their inselaffen (island apes) sidekicks to die for. If making the crazy Green Party happy made that more likely or difficult, so be it. As a partner in a pan-European business, I experienced these attitudes first hand, I also, by the way, experienced visceral hatred of Russia from at least one Ukrainian colleague.

I was living and working in Warsaw when Poland applied to join NATO and I heard how my Polish colleagues viewed that. They wanted shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella from their historic foe to the East. I wasn’t sure it was wise to give it as I feared they didn’t grasp the “no first strike” defensive doctrine at the heart of the alliance. Asked by an official of our Foreign Office what I thought, I said I worried the Poles might bait the Russian bear once under American protection. She told me our then Foreign Secretary had the same concern, but that the US view would prevail. In fairness to Poland, it’s been a responsible and compliant member. It passed a key test when stray Russian missiles landed on its territory and it accepted it was an error. It has also always paid its dues.

Nonetheless the most cynical thing the West under the leadership of Biden did was holding out the hope of NATO membership to Ukraine when the present war is over. They never expected a Ukrainian victory and were not prepared to fight for one, so that was gesture politics of the most despicable kind. In the miraculous eventuality of Ukrainian victory, I would still counsel against introducing a poisonous historical enmity into a purely defensive alliance.

Until we admitted ex-Warsaw Pact countries into NATO it consisted entirely of nations who would welcome peace with a prosperous and successful Russia as a full member of the Free World. Admitting members with powerful historical grievances against Russia merely fuelled the paranoia of the military and intelligence elites there, of which Putin — an ex-KGB spy inside a NATO country — was a typical member. That paranoia was already inflamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union by the failure to wind NATO up. It was an anti-USSR alliance, they argued, so the need for it had ended. If history had ended in the triumph of democracy, why keep the West’s nukes pointed East?

I personally feel it was just another example, familiar to all libertarians, of a governmental (in this case multi-governmental) agency not accepting the need for its own dissolution and the consequent loss of tax-funded jobs. Create an agency against poverty and you ensure the constant redefinition of poverty so bureaucrats can keep on working against it. The less actual need for their jobs there is, the more attractive their jobs become! How perfectly wonderful then, from the point of view of the parasitical class, to be a well paid employee of a military alliance that not only never had to fight but now had no actual foe!

From the American public’s point of view, the end of the Cold War was bound to weaken support for the NATO alliance. It could rest on the laurels of its “victory” for a while but they were bound to question the cost of it while peace prevailed. Putin saved the asses of the NATO bureaucracy by invading Ukraine. He made Russia a threat again. Without his insanity, President Trump might now be calling for NATO’s dissolution, rather than just complaining about most of the other members hitching a free ride by failing to meet their commitments.

My sympathies are with the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, both of whom live under corrupt governments and political systems that — even more than elsewhere — gamify evil. No military outcome of this war will change that, alas. Only the Russian and Ukrainian peoples can sort out their oppressors and I hope one day that they do. For now, President Trump is morally right to seek peace, rather than keep extending the slaughter with pointless, expensive gestures. As for leaving the European nations out of the discussion, they have nothing to contribute. When you’re cowering uselessly behind your big friend, you don’t get to tell him how to fight. Sorry. Step up and do your bit or keep your annoying whimpering to a minimum.

I don’t know if President Trump will succeed in securing a decent peace or even if his tactics so far are the best. I know he’s right to try and I know the interests of the European members of NATO are best-served by somehow keeping the long-suffering American taxpayers he represents onside. Perhaps even by - quelle horreur — meeting their obligations?