Ben Lowry: A bust-up between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two men who are brilliant but ill-suited to meeting the huge challenges of our age

(Click here to read Ben Lowry’s main column on the digitising of News Letters)

​The western world urgently needs conservative-minded governments who can manage the immense challenges of the present time, above all mass immigration.

There are also serious questions to be addressed such as the rise of Muslim populations in Europe and America that are full of people who are key members of our societies, but also include large numbers of people who have values that are utterly at odds with the western freedoms and liberal values that we not only take for granted, but that the liberals who are so pro mass immigration furiously insist upon.

There are further huge problems with debt and public spending. As the excellent economist Dr Esmond Birnie wrote on these pages his week (click here to read him, June 6), and as this newspaper has been saying for a long while (as an example click here, our May 27 editorial), an almost child-like fiscal irresponsibility is apparent at Stormont, at Westminster and in Washington DC.

Here we simply do not accept any curtailing of public expenditure or any extra financial contribution from the general public. We would be ruined if not for the generosity from London, which is almost never recognised by our politicians, not even unionist ones.

As to Trump and Musk I think they are both in their own ways brilliant figures, but temperamentally badly ill suited to the massive challenges that threaten western civilisation.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor