What is it about BBC employees and the needless politicisation of gardening? Evidently not having read my piece on this website last week about this very topic, Kate Bradbury, the Wildlife Editor of BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, went on-stage at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Sunday to claim there was some kind of innate divide between the sexes when it came to the topic of mowing one’s lawn, with attitudes towards such things apparently being “quite gendered”.
Who is Kate Bradbury? I think the following recent tweet of hers (complete with obligatory Pride Month Rainbow Flag) sums up the answer perfectly:
It seems the reason most of these lovely creatures like bees and toads are now beginning to “disappear” is because, under the toxic influence of the patriarchy, British householders are all mowing our lawns way too low for them to hide out and live in (even though bees live in hives and toads frequent ponds, not long grasses – still, as Kate says, “I’m not a scientist”).
Whilst promoting her deeply right-on-sounding new book One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate, Bradbury professed herself to be of the opinion that women are more likely to value deliberately uncut long grass in a garden as resembling a “lovely” meadow, whilst men are more prone to just frown and ask “why are you watering those weeds?” Also proving that many females these days have little regard for law’n order was Rachel de Thame, a regular presenter on the BBC’s actual Gardeners’ World TV show, who told the Cheltenham crowd her daughter thought the family’s uncut lawn, filled with wildflowers/weeds (delete according to genitalia) was “beautiful”, whereas her husband thought it was just “messy”.
Men, like the hideous SS-style control-freaks they are, were more likely to prefer “order” in their gardens, the prize pair agreed, echoing earlier 2021 comments of another (male, but probably currently transitioning) Gardener’s World presenter, Monty Don, that cutting your lawn was a masculine “obsession” which was all about “control”. “Making a lawn that is pure grass without any filthy and foreign invading plants in there, making sure it’s stripy and neat” was an innately male obsession of “controlling rather than embracing”, explained the distinctly Pythonesque-sounding Monty, as if using a Flymo was akin to battering a helpless wife. Another BBC presenter, Chris Packham, has also described lawnmowing as “a very bizarre habit”; fair enough, my lawn would describe him as “a very bizarre man”.
Lawns With No Borders
What is wrong with those who run the West today? Can there ever have been a society as relentlessly obsessed with pointlessly politicising absolutely every single thing (quite literally) under the sun, even harmless lawns, flowers and gardens? Well, yes actually – Nazi Germany, as it happens. Or, at least, this is the claim of certain Left-wingers and eco-nuts these days.
As I discussed last week, certain horticulturalists out there seem preoccupied with asserting that those who insist upon planting native species of flowers, trees and shrubs in their gardens are some kind of secret crypto-fascists, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own racial homeland, as well as that of their flowerbeds – ‘Blood and Soil’, as the Nazis used to say. An excellent example grew out of the annual conference of the California Native Plant Society in 2018, which concluded with the following photo of a breed of orange American caterpillar which happened to bear a remarkable resemblance to an equally orange breed of American President, Donald Trump:
“Make America Native Again!” blared the caption, as if to decry all who agreed with such sentiments as being big white racists (although in fact the lecturer who showed it was himself a native-plant advocate, and just intended it as a joke). Rather than merely inducing laughter, as would be the case amongst most normal people, however, this photograph instead prompted some very deep thoughts upon behalf of users of the U.S.-based Million Trees eco-website, which is devoted towards repudiating nativist narratives of the plant-world. As Million Trees explained:
This photo generated some discussion among the readers of Million Trees about nativism in the natural world. Is it related to nativism in the human realm? This is a timely question because American politics are presently consumed by anti-immigration sentiment, AKA ‘nativism’. As members of our communities [i.e., illegal Mexican immigrants] are unceremoniously rounded up in immigration raids and deported from America, this is an association that is getting more attention.
Accordingly, Million Trees commissioned Professor Art Shapiro, “a renowned expert on the butterflies of California”, to discuss the alleged rise of the phrase “native-plant Nazis” to describe those who like to plant American plants in America, French plants in France, and so forth – with particular reference to the idea of planting German plants in Germany. Was this practice really what led to the eventual ultimate rise of the Third Reich?
The German Romantic movement of the 1700s and 1800s did help foster a certain form of nationalism which some may argue prefigured Nazism, and Professor Shapiro pointed out how such Teutonic Romantics as Goethe, Wagner, Novalis, Caspar David Friedrich et al. stressed the ‘organic unity’ between the German Volk and their landscape. Apparently, this even became reflected in Romantic-era gardening books, which advocated planting “patriotic species” to create corresponding landscapes of “patriotic character”. Was it sick advice like that which ultimately led to the Nazi-era planting of landscapes like these?
Heinrich Strimmler
It seems that, as the German Völkisch (roughly, ‘Folk-ish’) movement of back-to-Nature and respect for an imaginary heroic native Aryan past grew during the early decades of the 20th century, so did the idea of Völkisch gardening. Anticipating the rise of the mad Austrian pseudoscientist Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, or World-Ice Theory (a sort of Nazi climate-change cult in reverse; see my previous Daily Sceptic article on it here), it was argued by writers, ideologues and naturalists alike that it was during the last Ice Age that the supposedly characteristic qualities of the German Volk were formed – qualities like hardiness, discipline, strength and coolness of character, all of which were necessary to survive the pitiless Pleistocene frosts. However, as Germany’s plants also evolved into their current form during the last Ice Age, they also should have shared these same qualities, making people and plants natural kin, it was spuriously asserted.
Consequently, Völkisch writers provided curious gardening advice along the lines not only of filling your rockeries with nice local alpine species, but also of recreating the presumed ancient natural homes of Teutons amongst clearings within the dark Germanic forests: translated, this meant rejecting the formal, neat, symmetrical-type designs of classic English and French gardens, and letting things grow a bit more wildly, like the grasses in the gardens of those who now work for the BBC.
Once the Nazis came to power, they appointed an official Reichslandschaftsanwalt, or ‘National Landscape Advocate’, the horticulturalist Alwin Seifert, who deemed which plants were and were not racially acceptable to be allowed to take root in the sacred soil of the Reich. Surprisingly, these did actually include some foreign, non-native species, deemed ‘racially acceptable’, in the same rough manner Austrians, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were in human terms.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler sponsored bizarre expeditions into the Tibetan Himalayas by his special paramilitary pseudo-archaeology unit the Ahnenerbe in search of plants growing strong amidst the Himalayan snows in conditions deemed similar to those his ancestors had once likewise grown strong in, back during the European Ice Age. Replanted in Germany, these ancient Welteislehre survivals could help restore the old Aryan Eden in German gardens of the 1930s.
Thus, concludes Professor Shapiro, as occasional importers of Tibetan plants from Asia, ironically enough, the Nazis “were never thoroughgoing ‘native-plant Nazis’” themselves at all, unlike some of their contemporary hardline U.S. and European counterparts these days. “Various observers have noted similarities in the rhetoric used by native-plant activists [in the West today] and that used by xenophobes,” observes Shapiro. Does that mean that those who want to plant an English rose in England c.2024 are actually even worse than the Nazis once were? Professor Shapiro (whose article is actually fairly measured, informative and reasonable) doesn’t say so – but certain others have come very close.
Pollan Sniffs At Pollen
An article often-cited by advocates of a non-nativist, wholly borderless plant-world utopia these days is ‘Against Nativism’, by food and plants writer Michael Pollan, which first appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1994. Here, making reference to the then-leading nativist plant-advocate Ken Druse, Pollan warned darkly that:
Intolerance toward foreign species seems to be rising in the natural-gardening movement, if the progress of Druse’s own thinking is any indication. His first book allowed that “naturalised aliens” (he mentions daisies) “are welcome in the natural garden”. Five years later, he wants to close the border, because “even a short visit by a non-native can upset the balance of the community enough to cause extirpation or even extinction of a native plant”. He offers no scientific proof for this contention, leaving the reader to wonder if the darkening spectre of alien species in the garden might have less to do with ecology than ideology.
Was Ken Druse an undercover Nazi, then? In my own opinion, the one who is actually more ideologically motivated in his position regarding non-native plant-species here is Pollan, not Druse. He continues:
Am I implying that natural gardening in America is a crypto-Fascist movement? I hope not … [However] The German [i.e., Nazi] example also suggests we would do well to beware of ideology in the garden masquerading as science. It’s hard to believe that there is nothing more than scientific concern about invasive species behind the current fashion for natural gardening and native plants in America — not when our national politics are rife with anxieties about immigration and isolationist sentiment. The garden isn’t the only corner of American culture where nativism is in flower just now.
Pollan concluded his piece thus:
But if we must have a national garden style, there’s no reason it has to be xenophobic, or founded on illusions of a lost American Eden. Wouldn’t a more cosmopolitan garden, one that borrowed freely from all the world’s styles and floras, that made something of history rather than trying to escape it — wouldn’t such a garden be more in keeping with the American experience? … Here’s to multihorticulturalism.
So we have multihorticulturalism now, too, do we, to go along with plain old Left-mandated human multiculturalism? As I say, this particular article did appear in the New York Times…
Soiling Themselves and Wetting Their Plants
An interesting 2003 academic paper on this whole subject, ‘The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia?’, by a pair of (non-Nazi) German academics, explains how, from the early 1900s onwards, a laughable-sounding new ‘academic’ discipline called ‘plant sociology’ was born, which is now generally derided as a pseudo-scientific expression of evil white supremacist ideologies and thought-patterns of the day. One 1928 book was called Plant Sociology: The Study of Plant Communities, and it seems the term ‘communities’ here was not to be taken entirely metaphorically.
Not all ‘plant sociologists’ were German Nazis. One prominent such odd-bod was Jens Jensen, an American landscape architect, who, according to the paper, “believed that plants communicate and associate like humans”. In a 1923 article in a German gardening periodical, Jensen implausibly claimed of native plants that “it was them amongst whom we grew up… they taught us a particular language without interruption since the earliest days of our tribe… they are interwoven with the soul of our race” and so no garden “will be able to reflect the soul of a tribal people” if it does not contain only those very same ancient domestic plants with whom their ancestors grew up and communed. Distinct echoes of King Charles chatting to his daffodils.
Non-native plants, meanwhile, were, Jensen warned, “Strange things… grotesque things… Freaks are freaks, and often bastards – who wants a bastard in the garden, the out-of-door shrine of your home?” He sounds like he may well have been quite a bastard in the garden himself, to me – and probably indoors or in his potting-shed too. Despite being the self-appointed Flower-Führer of the USA, by the way, Jensen himself was actually born and raised in Denmark.
Clearly, people like Jensen were gigantic horticultural lunatics. Yet, in expressing their profound desire for total nonsenses like ‘multihorticulturalism’, aren’t the woke gardeners of today, whether working for the BBC or NYT, equally as lunatic themselves, just from a directly opposing political perspective, of extreme Left rather than extreme Right? Some of these people can often seem just as vehemently anti-white as the likes of Jensen were once vehemently pro-white. I repeat a tweet here from my previous ‘racist gardening’ article from another leading BBC gardener, James Wong:
That’s just Jens Jensen upside-down, isn’t it? The whole Nazi-era non-subject of ‘plant sociology’ (in the sense I’m talking about it above – there is a legitimate, wholly non-political, discipline of this same name) is not dead after all, as many may have naturally presumed – it has just mutated into its own inverted mirror-form anew.
When I see a plant, or a lawn, or a tree, I just see a plant, a lawn, or a tree. When people like Jensen, Wong or Pollan see them, they seem instead somehow to see entire ideologies, in coded green-leafed form. Political extremisms of the past are being reborn anew en masse, just relabelled as being ‘progressive’, when in actual fact they are anything but. BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine is not the only aspect of our rapidly rotting society in dire need of urgent root and branch reform, I fear.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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Couldnt give a rats arse old boy
I guess the downvoters are protesting the absence of correctly placed apostrophe?
I couldn’t give a rat’s arse either. Trying to buy success, they should have known better.
They bought the contacts. Or rather, not any more.
“It’s politics, man. If you’re hanging on to rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision: let go before it’s too late, or hang on and keep getting higher… posing the question, how long can you keep a grip on the rope?”
Have an upvote Marcus
Thank you, prick. Was it the Withnail & I quote?
…
ICL are in the University Challenge final on BBC2 next Monday. I earnestly hope that they’re trounced by their opponents, Reading University.
And I hope so too, for two reasons, as I’m a maths tutor, and the captain of Reading (Hutchinson) lives near me and teaches four of my Year 9s.
I did an engineering PhD at Imperial.
Great technical uni let down by medical knobs and snowflake admin.
I’m surprised they’re happy to be called ‘Imperial’ what with the association with the British Empire and slavery and all that.
I thought the same with Imperial Leather soap.
OMG both empire and animal skin in a single product – enough to make a woke he/she/them cease washing.
Ha! It’s only a matter of time and an article in the Guardian. Or … maybe they have protection?
It’s early days… Plenty of time for someone, somewhere to want to remove the “Imperial’ bit.
I covered a Q&A talk in their hall at the Sherfield Building once. Was promised certain lighting and seating arrangements. I learned a lot that day…
Please stay in touch with us in the forums oblong when the system crashes and we need kids, nieces and nephews to be taught practicals.
Academia. A bastion of covid nonsense. A consequence of funding, conformity of thought, effeminacy, all of the above?
The education system as a whole is essentially a process for selecting the high functioning conformists in society.
Well it damn well failed with me and many of the rest on here.
Yep. It’s not a perfect process. But it does a pretty good job, I would say.
Wasn’t always that way.
So you don’t think it has a function for the rest of the population who don’t get to boss anybody about and who mostly do the same thing at work every day?
Conformism, to use your terminology, is bashed into littl’uns when they’re five and nowadays younger too.
Once they’ve cashed your fees payment then you can just go and get lost.
Less whinge, more sue. “Loss of enjoyment” is an actionable thing.
Because Ed U Kay Shun
Seems the rot started a long time ago…
My uncle, a graduate of Chemistry from ICL over fifty years ago, is completely spell-bound by the COVID BS. He simply won’t engage in any discussion about it. Tells me I am “behaving terribly”.
As a graduate of chemistry he probably knows little about viruses.
What happens then is the scientist says ‘I’ll trust those that do know’ — in the case of covid this is a mistake, because he’s being denied access to the full spectrum of opinion.
What he should do is employ is ‘generic scientist skills’ to investigate the facts that he does have access to and can interpret, and compare the results with what he’s told.
But for some reason many scientists are unwilling to do this, and will instead just rely on the science-priests’ preachings.
Maybe because they’re not really scientists, but just people with degrees in science subjects.
People with bachelor, even master degrees, don’t really do much scientific enquiry. They just learn a bunch of stuff and show they’ve learned it.
In fact, I would say that intellectual curiosity is by no means a requirement to do well. It may even be a bit of a handicap.
^^^
Absolutely so. My last attempt at studying anything in earnest (at a German university) came to an aprupt end once I noticed that not even the lecturer was familiar with the content of the secondary literature we were supposed to read. Barring COVID, typical students life is (as far as I could determine) drunken partying for two months, memorizing stuff for one month, write it all down from memory in a few days, be off for three months[*] to forget it all again. Repeat.
[*] German academic year which is composed to two so-called semesters of three months with two three month long breaks in between.
I went to “Uni” along with all my peers after Sixth Form. Indebted to the eyeballs, my peers laughed at me when I refused to get a single credit card. The campus had its own branch of NatWest, FFS. They were handing them out like hot cakes.
They all borrowed thousands, handed it all to the “Student” Bar and then urinated or vomited their purchases down the toilet.
I lasted less than a year, it all felt a complete waste of time. Went and got a job. Never felt better.
Sounds like me except the get a job part. I decided to be a rock star instead. You could call that a failed career move. Seems you need talent and perseverance.
I decided to be a famous actor after two years of the job. That didn’t work out either, but I did learn a lot about life!
I think the push for all to have further education has made it a career choice rather than a calling of curiosity and excitement.
No, it’s a philosophy thing, not a scientific knowledge.
Though not a graduate in chemistry, I learned a lot of it as part of my degree but others on the same course as me, who got better qualifications from it, subscribed to the Branch Covidian cultism.
So what? I expect someone with a science degree to not only be expert in their own field but have a pretty impenetrable armour of scientific common sense which should immediately alert them to the slightest whiff of horse shit. There’s always a jolt when you encounter someone with an impressive degree who outside of their field, turns out to be a normie moron.
I expect the opposite — in general, the higher the qualification the less knowledge there is outside of the speciality.
It wasn’t always this way. In my youthful days the intellect at universities was ferocious. Not so much these days — the age of the polymath has pretty much gone.
This is the authoritarian cooperation: “I don’t question your expertise you will not question my expertise”
There seems to be a lot of bad scientists lacking curiosity and having too much trust.
Suggested reading: Carlo Cipolla on stupidity and Gustav Le Bon on crowd psychology.
Herds are always f***ing stupid – whether it’s a herd of lorry drivers, priests, scientists, highly skilled philosophical logicians, people who left formal education without qualifications, people who got PhDs, etc. etc.
Daily Sceptic’s Below The Line is the only crowd I have ever been part of. And it’s hard to be f***ing stupid along with them when your fingers are too big for the bloody touchscreen keyboard.
It’s odd how some seemingly intelligent people have just accepted the narrative (even when illogical) and won’t consider other points of view let alone check the data for themselves.
I guess it is that mass formation psychosis. But why did I do the exact opposite? I’ve never questioned the mainstream until now but covid set off alarm bells. No one was dropping dead around me, it seemed obviously wrong and I simply went and looked at data. Conclusion – no worse than a bad flu season. Then when they kept going I fell down the rabbit hole, well more jumped in looking at everything. Came to some horrible conclusions that simply fit the data and observations better. I still hope I’m wrong.
It’s quite similar to in the USSR, about which it was often observed both inside the country and by those looking at it from the outside that there was extremely strong discouragement of public criticism of ANY aspect of the reigning society, because that would be like pulling on a string and ALL of the lies would start to unravel.
That’s why “glasnost” (“openness”) was such a big thing, why there was even such a concept.
A typical Soviet joke was “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
The word “opposition” was extremely strong in that country, not just before Gorbachev but under his leadership too, right up until near the end of the regime.
There’s no glasnost in Britain. There’s no glasnost in any country in the world right now, on the specific issue of Covid or on anything else that’s important, such as children’s education, or the disgusting and utterly inhuman advance of technology that no decent person who is able to form an opinion about it for themselves would ever want, either for themselves or for future generations.
Nor is the huge social problem which is smartphone addiction – especially among young people – being seriously publicly addressed by any “respectable” group anywhere, as far as I am aware.
Nor is the sky-high level of personal indebtedness in countries where it exists, such as Britain. Even looked at through narrow “economist’s” spectacles, the (related) insane market value of houses isn’t being looked at either. That definitely won’t avoid ending in tears, just as every huge financial bubble does.
Tug on one string and… ?
Orwell was so astute when he wrote that freedom is the freedom to say two plus to makes four.
Two plus to?
Orwell is shaking and rolling, Star
Sorry to distract from your excellent comment about Glasnost. Have a tick from me.
I’m a graduate of IC (BSc Hons ARCS for what it’s worth). We used to do science and were expected to have questioning minds. Soothsaying was not on the curriculum. I’m honestly ashamed to admit to most people now that I was ever near the place.
In other news we’ve just received the following from the Royal Opera House about a performance this weekend. There’s plenty that just won’t let this go, either just plain evil or stupid. Luckily we won’t need to have the debate as we can’t afford those from row stalls seats anyway.
“Some seats in our auditorium are very close to our staff members and artists. Our staff welcome thousands of visitors every day, and we continue committed to the safety of everyone while in our building.
The front row of the Orchestra Stalls, as well as some seats near where our ushers and camera operators sit during the performance are clearly marked with a mask sign, and we ask those sitting in those seats to wear a face covering if you are able to. On behalf of our staff and artists, thank you.”
This obviously works both ways: Staff and artists are very close to members of the auditorium sitting there. Considering that they necessarily talk loudly and might even sing loudly, they should wear face coverings to protect the paying audience, many of which are probably even going to be members of vulnerable groups. Should this render the performance inaudible, staff and artists will – unfortunately – in the long run, need to find a job which doesn’t involve performing on a stage in front of a room full of people.
Judging the quality of output from their departments, I hope the degrees have been printed on something soft, strong, and thoroughly absorbant…
And non-reflective. Makes it easier to show the birthing parents over Zoom.
And featuring a QR code. Everything of any importance simply must have a QR code.
It is about time that people recognised that there’ll be cases of covid in the UK forever — it is not going to be eradicated.
Anyone that uses the excuse ‘there are still cases of covid around’ for whatever activity are being naive.
You’d think that Imperial College would recognise this — but I’m afraid that like establishments everywhere, the upper echelons are a bit thick and don’t get science. IC has it worse because they employ Ferguson who is now in too deep and can’t easily get out of the hole he’s dug by admitting that it was all a terrible over-reaction.
Ferguson is up to his neck in the reset – let’s at least be honest after all this time. The cock-up theory is well past its use by date.
I think it’s about time we realised that certain institutions are quite happy for covid to be around forever, available as a tool to further whatever they want furthered.
Even if the govt said covid was nothing to worry about now, millions would not believe them.
We’re going to be living with corona madness for the rest of our lives, millions in the UK will go to their graves being worried about covid.
A nice current example of that would be
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/31/charging-covid-tests-england-infections
That’s a rundown of everything from start to finish again, with no evidence of having learnt anything about COVID since March 2020. A few key points:
Looking at the picture accomanying this load of venomous and socially (in its intent) extremely harmful tripe suggests that lady may want to get her stomach ulcer (or whatever else she’s suffering from) treated instead of lashing out at others in order to cause them some pain as well. I’d really like to have a personal talk with this female non-human being in order to tell her a little about how it feels to start to doubt if people like her will ever again allow me to meet my parents before they (or I) die because that’s just too unsafe for them.
He’s never had to before, why would he start now? The more wrong he gets it, the more gigs he’s guaranteed by the Profits of Doom.
They get it all right, but their primary motivation is funding streams and BMGF is one huge funding stream. They are official gauleiters of the UK Branch of BMGF propaganda.
Words, apart from FFS, fail me.
How much did Imperial make from this student, Mr Grace, over 3 years?
The headline photo looks like an indoctrination ceremony. A bit worrying Mr. Grace, a Civil Engineering graduate (we need more engineers), hasn’t worked out his age demographic hardly die from Covid-19, but group life insurance companies are paying out from deaths in this young working age group after vaccinations…
Controlled demolition folks.
I wonder how much they paid in tuition for the privilege of having their course delivered over a zoom conference call and then being dictated to about graduation attendance. It seems that authoritarianism as well as Covid is transmissible and virulent.
I have to note the front row, and point out that for many student visitors to these shores, it’s a pure financial transaction: pay money for a degree that gets more money.
The quality of education that they may or may not receive is simply irrelevant, because once you’re in the corporate door, you can fake it until you make it. Purchasing essays is simply costed in to the price.
Mail order degrees should really be the order of the day. Very profitable for those dishing them out, and much cheaper for “students”.
Meagre offerings of a budget, growing pigs, heroes & villains, gammon racism, how brexiteers are perceived, Ukraine and much more+you meet Penny for the first time…enjoy!
https://therealnormalpodcast.buzzsprout.com/1268768/10348674-ep-45-rishi-s-dirty-dishes
If this is an example of one of the top universities in the UK,then I’m relieved that I left school aged 15 with no qualifications to my name.
ZOE R value has gone below one for the first time this ‘wave’
Has it? I thought it was 1.1 today.
Cut all Central UK Government funding immediately until they reverse this nonsense.
If Ferguson is the best of Imperial who would want to graduate from there anyway?
Lest we forget!
Make £££ by creating bullshit for the government with a computer program you wrote for this purpose and with no responsibility for the real-world effects of that whatsoever[*] is probably many a graduate’s wet dream. People don’t go to university to learn about stuff they’re interested in or to do stuff they care for, they go to uni because they’re from the social stratum where this expected (and can be financed) and ultimatively want to get a work little earn much job by doing that.
[*] for the typical prospective math/ physics/ computer-science graduate, it gets better: And get illegally laid while doing so. What’s not to like?
He studied at Oxford.
but teaches at Imperial
It was a truly great college once.
I can’t help but wonder if Imperial’s fall from sense and truth has been a result of its Chinese connections. I’m out on a limb as I don’t know the current situation but back in the day it had a lot of Chinese students and rumoured funding.
Anyone know its funding breakdown?
Does anyone else remember when there was talk of merging Imperial with UCL, with the LSE probably joining soon after? That was when all three were colleges of London University, before Imperial left.
The merged entity would have been the top research university in the world by some measures.
So you can imagine there’d be opposition from Oxford and Cambridge and probably from across the Atlantic too.
The reason I mention this is because there’s a theory that Glaxo was behind the merger plan.
There are various rumours too about less important aspects, such as that certain parties with strong connections with UCL tried to fool the bods at Imperial about the value of UCL properties in Bloomsbury but the Imperial people found out and got furious.
The 15 perfumed ponce’s
My son attended his graduation from Imperial in October.
The authoritarian communist regime led by the woke American woman in charge dictated that it was unsafe for parents to attend the Royal Albert Hall.
The very same venue that held capacity crowds to music events the day before and the day after.
My son’s experience, as a non-leftie, was one where he had to keep his opinions to himself – and so avoided the university where possible. Luckily his Computing degree is of very good standing and so he can out-earn all the woke left leaning morons!
We need to realise that the UK university system is there to educate foreign kids (many of whom do not have the qualifications they say they have) who pay the exorbitant fees that fuels the production of more left-wing thinking.
It’s time to very heavily regulate these establishments to ensure that British kids get a fair proportion of places.
The college should rebrand themselves as “LIMPerial” now they have completely sold out to the wokerati. Winkers!
It’s odd that Imperial College restrict numbers in the Albert Hall now when you could have crowded in during the Proms or pack yourself now into the Royal Opera House.
I also was baffled by their expression “largely under control”. Does it mean it’s “under control” or not? And what does “under control” mean? As many recover on any day as succumb to the virus? Numbers going down? Numbers going up but not quickly? Zero Covid? Under ten cases? Everyone masked? Everyone jabbed? Everyone masked, jabbed and boostered?