Grow Up Greta!

Some people have taken offence at my recent Facebook post about Greta Thunberg, which read:

‘Here she is again, the arch-manipulator, smirking and smug. Her family is super-rich. She crossed the Atlantic on a yacht loaned by a millionaire so she could pretend she wasn’t generating CO2. The Jehovah’s Witnesses must be kicking themselves. They’ve spent 150 years trying to recruit members by refusing blood transfusions and telling everyone the world is about to end, and in just a few years this string-pulling button-pushing Elf has every dumbass in the world dancing to her tune with her bullshit ‘climate crisis/catastrophe/holocaust, global warming/boiling/incinerating’ routine. She’s a modern-day Elizabeth Barton’

My post was prompted by Thunberg’s latest pre-planned fake arrest photo-op, aimed at keeping her in the media spotlight to which she is so addicted.

Back at the beginning of 2020 before Covid-19 hit, the BBC was trailing a full year of programmes dedicated to hanging on her every word, with, of course, Sir David Attenborough’s fawning endorsement. Then Covid hit and some real news suddenly eclipsed her. Eventually, having been starved of publicity for a couple of months, Ms Thunberg issued a press release in March 2020 saying that it was “extremely likely” that she’d had the Covid-19 virus following a two-week trip around central Europe, when Europe’s political leaders were telling the rest of us that we should lock down.

The Guardian reported that ‘A few days later she said they both began to feel ill, and she complained of feeling tired with “shivers, sore throat and cough,” though she said she’d not been tested and was now “basically recovered”.’ In other words, it was no news at all, really, except that she just had to be in a story, any story, to keep her addiction to publicity well fed. Being young with no underlying health conditions, Covid posed virtually no risk to her beyond the usual cold symptoms. Meanwhile thousands of people without her advantages in life were dying horrible deaths; often without even their family members near them, never mind the media circus she was so desperate to keep tight around her.

Ms Thunberg can count on a strange trichotomy of defenders. First and most obviously, there’s the cohort of extreme Greens who want all oil extraction stopped and compulsory veganism, no matter how much poverty and misery it causes. Then there are the sentimentalists who think it’s somehow unfair and unkind to criticise somebody they still think of as a child. Of course, they overlook the fact that Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg, born 3 January 2003, is now 21 years of age. Thirdly there are the feminists who take enormous offence at anyone daring to criticise a young woman for expressing her views. That cohort in particular makes for an interesting study in psychology, for their ability to hold three contradictory views simultaneously.

Firstly, they insist that women are the same and absolute equal of men. Fair enough, I accept that. Then, though, they secondly argue that women are superior to men and should be running everything, because being female they’ll somehow automatically make a better job of it. “If only Lehman Brothers has been Lehman Sisters, the 2008 banking crisis would never have happened” has been a popular feminist refrain for the last fifteen years. A look at the Post Office though, where many of the key bad actors from Paula Vennells down were women, calls into question the “If only it had been Lehman Sisters” hypothesis. Thirdly, they argue that women are inferior to men and therefore automatically at a permanent and irremediable disadvantage by virtue of their sex. On those grounds they condemn anyone criticising Ms Thunberg as a horrible bully, cruelly punching down at a young woman; never mind the advantage she enjoys of a supine and uncritical media. So, basically, Thunberg is meant to be beyond reproach. She has never done or said anything that is even remotely questionable, and nor will she. She is a saint, more even than a saint, she is the second coming, the daughter of God himself; no, wait, that is not sufficiently superlative – Greta Thunberg IS God, we must all worship her, with anyone who dares to even think of criticising her summarily burned as a heretic.

Okay, burn me, because I call “bullshit” on all that.

It doesn’t seem to occur to her feminist supporters that it is intensely patronising and misogynistic to argue that a young woman needs immunising and protecting from criticism. Women are just as capable as men, remember? Ms Thunberg has chosen to involve herself in politics and her actions now affect the lives of millions of us, billions even. So who decided that we don’t get a say, that everything Greta says is golden, and that we must accept it as the unmediated word of God? As for her relative youth, so what? She’s now 21. I was in party politics from the age of 14. Nobody ever cut me any slack and I never wanted any, indeed, had anyone been so foolish as to patronise me, I’d have given them the shortest of short shrift. I engaged in debate, and I gave and took knocks, winning some and losing others. Anyone who can’t stand the heat shouldn’t get into the political kitchen, never mind make it their living space. There are 8.1 billion people on this planet, and while Greta may think that she speaks for all of them, and even pretend to do so, she doesn’t. Most recently she’s launched herself into the Gaza controversy on the side of the Palestinians. Does anyone seriously think her intervention will save a single life on either side; or that she, with her one-sided pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli bias will somehow bring peace to a region where nearly eight decades’ worth of world leaders have struggled and failed? It would be nice, and it would be a miracle, but I don’t see it happening. Because for all her posturing, a God she is not, never was, and never will be. And without divine intervention, miracles will remain in short supply.

Great Thunberg is precisely as I painted her in my original Facebook post, no more, no less. No doubt she is academically intelligent, but she gives no indication of being emotionally so, and there is a big difference. I do not believe she is in any way evil, but I do believe her irresponsible, and why wouldn’t she be? She doesn’t have to solve any problems; all she does is point them out. She offers no genuine solutions. She has the luxury of forever being able to say, “Look at that – how dare you!”, without ever having to offer a single workable fix. Unlike those of us who must show up at work every day and therefore can’t afford to spend days sitting in jail cells, she can afford to indulge herself, knowing she will never go short of anything; a young woman from a privileged background, posturing before the world’s media and addicted to its attention. Despite never having worked at gainful employment, she’s already enjoyed more of life’s good things, especially first-class global travel, than most of us will ever experience, especially if she gets her way. A spoilt child who is now a child no longer, she needs to grow up and realise that the world does not owe her an audience, or a pass. She must start accepting responsibility and stop expecting adulation. Nobody has ever elected her to do anything, and that is a pity, because had they done, the Thunberg phenomenon would have washed out long ago.

Neil F. Liversidge is an Independent Financial Adviser running his own firm in Castleford, West Riding Personal Financial Solutions Ltd, www.wrpfs.com. For 39 years until 2017 he was a member of the Labour Party. A Brexiteer, he voted Conservative in 2019 and is now a member of Reform UK.

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