I have just been in Cornwall for ten days’ holiday. This is a part of the world so wonderful, I am beginning to wonder why we came back. While I am not a separatist, I can see why the Cornish consider themselves a people apart.
For a start, they are so bloody far away from almost anywhere. Even parts of Cornwall are a long way from other parts. From Hull – we stopped off in the Midlands – it took us 9 hours to get there. The second leg was only supposed to be four hours, but the UK infrastructure is so terrible that we mostly crawled along the M5 on the way there. We fared slightly better on the way back to the Midlands.
From the Midlands I did not go all the way back to Hull. I had booked a ticket for the Spiked Summit 2026 in London. I was meeting Jack – who writes in these pages – there. I woke to the news that my train was cancelled due to there ‘not being enough trains’. And Jack was delayed significantly on the way down. The summit started at 10am and we got there at midday.
I changed trains in the middle of nowhere on the way down. But even the middle of nowhere had a poster advising me to carry a bottle of water in the hot weather. As it happens, I was carrying a bottle of water, but that’s because I am not a complete imbecile. It was unbelievably hot, and I decided completely off my own back to take an empty water bottle from our room and fill it up in the hotel before I Ieft. That’s what people do, even without government posters.
The Spiked Summit was OK-ish. Zia Yusaf of Reform – a surprise guest – was being interviewed when we got there. He is incredibly articulate and I could agree with everything he said. But his chances of ever getting to implement his policies are slim. The right just won’t unite, it seems. PM-elect by default Andy Burnham – cheeky little chappie that he is – intends to appoint Ed Miliband as Chancellor it is rumoured. If that fuckwit gets his hands into the national till, the Starmer years will look like a boom.
Otherwise, while I liked some of the speakers, the Spiked lot are a bit left-wing for my liking. They spout right-wing ideas, but never fail to remind you of their left-wing credentials. They are 100% pro COVID vaccinations, and that was the point at which they parted company with my bank balance. I also managed to upset a pro-Jewish activist who made the mistake of asking if I supported Israel in its war against all its enemies. While I detest all their enemies, I find it hard to accept the collateral damage they are inflicting in Gaza and that was enough for the tirade to begin. I find the same with pro-Palestinian activists who I also easily upset. You must be 100% in agreement with both sides to please them, and both use the ‘what do you expect us to do?’ line of argument. A nuanced approach to answering that means you are either antisemitic or Islamophobic. It seems I am both.
I met Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) and they pointed me to The Banned List of academics. I am proud to report that I am soon to be added to this. It will be nice to have something new to ask to be added to my Wikipedia page.
In the official Man Cave here in Hull – where the temperature is tipped to reach 31C next Monday – I have been as cool as the proverbial cucumber. I have air-conditioning you see. Thankfully I don’t live in London where the fuckwit of all fuckwits, Sadiq Khan, is forcing people to remove air-con units from their houses. On the one hand, officialdom warns us about extreme heat and on the other they try to remove the one sure way of cooling a house down.
Mind you, it is only a matter of time here in Hull before this starts to happen. Our City Council is as obsessed as ever with net zero targets. Latest initiatives include: an onshore wind turbine at the Port of Hull; an extensive network of hydrogen pipelines in the region; and a new wind farm station near Beverley for which the public will be consulted about the design. The turbine ‘will have the ability to generate power 24 hours a day, all year round’, which is a blatant lie as the wind doth not always bloweth. There is not a breath of wind in Hull today and, as I write, wind is only supplying 10% of the energy in the UK. The gas pipeline promises 1,200 new jobs but it does not specify how, where or what they’ll be doing or for how long. They should probably recruit that many into the Fire Brigade in case the bloody lot explodes. As for the public being consulted about the design of the wind farm station, a fellow local and no stranger to these pages described this as ‘design your own carbuncle’. One assumes that ‘don’t build it’ is not one of the design options.
And, as if to prove that Hull is not short of its own fuckwits, the local council plans to reinstall a lido at a park in Hull. This is our response to an increase in ‘water-related’ deaths (why can’t they simply say ‘drownings’) around our coasts in hot weather. Dear me. It seems there is no problem so remote or so trivial (in scale, I hesitate to add) that someone cannot resist the ‘something must be done’ urge.
Nationally, as part of the net zero nuttiness, farmers have been urged to stop raising cattle and to grow lentils instead. This is due to the climate endangering emissions of cattle and as part of forcing us all down the veggie/vegan road to ruin. These people clearly don’t eat lentils themselves, or they’d understand that it is no solution to emissions. The person who dares sit not ‘socially distanced’ from me after a bowl of lentil soup is a brave person indeed.
Meanwhile, in other Hull news we have a pigeon issue to report. The city is plagued with these filthy flying rats, and to walk under any bridge is to take a risk. You’ll either get pooped on or slip on the glistening carpet of bird shit on the pavement. So, the council have been high-pressure hosing under the bridges to clean them (great work if you can get it), and installing those useless spikey things to stop them nesting. These don’t work as I have seen pigeons – they ain’t stupid – nesting on top of them. Well, the Hull middle classes got up in arms imagining that the pigeons were being hosed out, and it took an animal charity to reassure them that no pigeons were being harmed. As I say, pigeons ain’t stupid; the minute a high pressure hose hits the bridge they’d all fly away anyway.
In other bird-related news it transpires that multi-accented SNP MP for Arbroath & Broughty Ferry Lara Bird, who alternately speaks in a ‘see you Jimmy’ accent or received pronunciation is actually called Pyla Bird-Leakey. As pointed out by your other Hull columnist: sounds like a pigeon with the squits.
And just to complete this lengthy column, but sticking with the bird-poo theme, our Glorious King and Defender of the Islamic Jihad Charles III was shat on by a seagull recently. It just shows you that, in addition to spotting a newly fried chip from 100 yards, a seagull can also recognise a fuckwit when it sees one.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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All good stuff, It’s never dull in Hull (although frequently clown world stupid c/o our LibLab ‘betters’ and a less than dynamic Reform Mayor).
As for ‘flying rats’, they are known round here as ‘shit machines’ and their middle class pigeon protectors have really no idea, other than posturing, as at this time of year there are scrappy nests containing the latest brood (of several broods each year) of bald squabs that will not survive pressure washing.