Now we’re to fear refugees walking away from the weather

If you are reading this column, you will know the world has not ended.

Neither the Doomsday Clock cult nor Davos disaster chasers have managed to rouse the horsemen of the apocalypse. Despite decades of warning the world will end tomorrow, or soon after, or at some indeterminate time in the future, but for sure unless we throw bags of cash at globalist causes, we are still standing.

The world has wasted billions on the gods of globalism. It is time to quit the cult.

Another Davos, another dire prediction. The annual World Economic Forum is renowned for hosting the world’s rich and boring, but this year the capitalists with a conscience outdid themselves. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF, presented a Davos manifesto to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the annual meeting.

The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution reads like a manual for corporate activism.

Highlights include: “The purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation.” It “honours diversity” and “integrates human rights into the entire supply chain” while fostering “continued employability through ongoing upskilling and reskilling”.

Most important, a company “acts as a steward of the environmental and material universe for future generations … consciously protects our biosphere and champions a circular, shared and regenerative economy … continuously expands the frontiers of knowledge, innovation and technology to improve people’s wellbeing”.

Apparently, companies pay millions to hear this sort of stuff at Davos. Fortunately, we enjoy the superior sound of silence without spending a cent.

In the weeks before the event, Schwab was feeling the pain of Davos being the butt of jokes and anti-elitist sentiment across the political spectrum. David Gelles reported in The New York Times that Schwab lamented the decline of ideals such as open borders, liberal democracy and free markets in the context of rising nationalism and authoritarianism.

However, globalists are not sorry enough to concede there is a fatal contradiction at the heart of internationalist theory. It is that the organising model of open ­society, liberal democracy, requires a state where the majority supports classical liberal values. The open border policy defended by globalists promises a closed ­society because of its tolerance for the profoundly intolerant.

The resurgence of nationalism in the West was founded in resistance to open borders and the subsequent development of jihad as a Western condition. If globalists want universal order based on open society ideals, they must address the contradiction at the heart of their thesis.

Globalists are at pains to defend an old world order that has fallen on its sword. Open border policy destroyed the open society ideal. Yet the Davos elite continues to evangelise mass migration against the will of democratic people. Rather than respect popular resistance and correct their historical error, the elites are undertaking a rebranding exercise. Instead of talking about globalism and open borders, they are talking up “climate refugees”. The term is absurd but it is gaining ground at Davos.

Following a landmark ruling by the UN Human Rights Committee, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi raised the spectre of people claiming asylum on the basis of climate change.

Speaking to Reuters, he suggested it meant in the future people could claim asylum on the basis of “climate emergency … just like in a war or in a situation of persecution”. On reading Grandi’s analysis, one might assume the UNHRC upheld the application of Ioane Teitiota, who comes from the ­Pacific nation of Kiribati.

However, the committee found against him in its first ruling on a climate change asylum claim. Teitiota had brought a case against New Zealand after authorities denied his bid for asylum and sent him back home. The HRC supports neither the claim that he was denied justice nor that being returned to Kiribati violated his right to life.

While climate change is not yet an officially recognised excuse for illegal immigrants to jump the queue of genuine refugees seeking asylum, it is the slogan of the day.

There is no cause too obscure, no claim too outlandish for radical climate change devotees. They have embraced teenager Greta Thunberg as a prophet. They advocate policies that threaten the future of the free world and damage economic prosperity. In the past, they have cast the US as an enemy of progress while celebrating the totalitarian state of China, the biggest greenhouse gas emitter. And they appear to fear a mythical creature called the Doomsday Clock. As Davos fell flat, the Doomsday Clock keepers upped the ante at the 11th hour. They moved the hand 20 seconds closer to midnight and expected the world to take notice of the “unpreced­ented” event.

Globalists are renowned for infantilising the plebs, but toying with make-believe clocks like it’s kindergarten hour is delightful satire. Just move the hand to midnight and watch nobody care.

Twenty years ago in Forbes magazine, Schwab announced the death of nation-states, saying: “The sovereign state has become obsolete.”

Asked by journalist Dyan Machan what he would do if he were the prime minister of a world ­government, Schwab replied: “I would like to educate the world with a new set of 10 commandments, ethical guidelines that would guide everyone in getting along.”

The air of moral superiority around globalist elites is maintained by a lack of accountability to the demos. Davos powerbrokers would be more tolerable if they simply admitted to being capitalists intent on a new world order that offers great benefits to them.

The guilty secret of Davos man is his desire to control not only the wealth of nations but also the soul of democracy.

The desire should not come to fruition. Our liberty was earned by women and men who paid the ultimate price for freedom. Our democracy is not for sale.