The Weekly Forum - 21 March
24 maart 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
First it was ‘global warming’ then ‘global boiling’ (Antonio Guterres, Ursula von der Leyen). Generally, however, we now refer to ‘climate change’ – a more consensual phrase which is supposed to encompass everything including the Alice in Wonderland suggestion that it is getting colder because it is getting hotter. The problem is, the climate has always changed. It used to be colder and then it got warmer and then colder again. The weather is notoriously unpredictable and the supposed science which claims to show ineluctable trends – the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph – is bunk. We know all this but our elites claim not to know it. Lidewij de Vos MP took apart some of the myths in a recent speech to the Dutch Parliament, debunking both the ‘science’ and also the gigantic sums of taxpayers' money involved. The solution is simple: stop it.
A lone voice crying in the wilderness? That seems to be FVD all over. Gideon van Meijeren MP proposed a debate this week in the Second Chamber on the elections in Romania, where the candidate who won the first round in December has been debarred from standing, the original election he won having been simply cancelled. One after the other, all the party representatives in the Netherlands parliament trooped up to the stand to say they did not support the idea of the debate, either because it was not important or because such a debate could be held later. (It has not been.) What makes these people act in this way? What are they afraid of? Can you imagine the outcry if this happened in Viktor Orban’s Hungary against his liberal opponent, Peter Magyar?
Watch Gideon’s intervention – and the responses - here
‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ is attributed to people as different as Winston Churchill and Niccolò Machiavelli. It is clearly a working principle of the European Union, as evidenced for example by this use of the phrase by a member of the board of the European Central Bank during the Covid so-called pandemic. Ralf Dekker MP has identified the principle at work in the wake of Donald Trump’s apparent disengagement from the Ukraine war – the EU commission is using this as a pretext to ramp up spending and increase its power. For once, FVD was listened to. The Chamber voted in favour of his motion rejecting a European army. The climate may or may not be changing but maybe times are.
Read Ralf Dekker’s speech here
It is not often that John Laughland and his co-hosts Peter Lavelle and Jeremy Nell are lost for words but they were this week listening to Mother Agnès Mariam of the Cross giving eye-witness reports of the horrific massacres in Syria on this week’s Forum. She was joined by Kevork Almassian of Syrianna Analysis who added a geopolitical perspective. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed.