Miliband beats Major and Brown

Question: What do you do during a famine? Answer: If you put ideology before both economy and humanity, ban harvesting.

Replace cereals with oil, and this is precisely what Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Net Zero, is doing on behalf of our Marxist government.

In the midst of what is beginning to look like the worst energy crisis ever, our assorted Milibandits don’t even consider revoking their ban on issuing new oil and gas drilling licenses in the North Sea.

That policy, based as it was on fraudulent science, was imbecilic even before the current crisis, as is the very brief of Miliband’s ministry. But one could see his point if he were genuinely, if mistakenly, worried about ‘our planet’ being deep-fried by aerosol sprays.

But all their protestations to the contrary, the Milibandits don’t give a hoot about ‘our planet’. Their motivation comes from ideology, not climatology.

In this case, when global warming was added to the neo-Marxist canon, ideologues who accept it as gospel truth have to commit to net zero. They have no option to refrain – Marxism, or any other ideology, doesn’t allow cherry-picking.

One can’t say I accept this dogma but not that one. An ideology can only ever come as a package: one either accepts the whole lot or is drummed-out for apostasy.

Hence a conservative has the luxury of, say, accepting high taxation when absolutely necessary even though under normal circumstances it’s considered sinful. Conservatism allows such flexibility because it isn’t an ideology.

Marxism is. That’s why the Milibandits wouldn’t review their energy policy even if they knew that it’s driving the economy towards extinction and the people towards penury.

A significant, possibly principal, part of the Marxist canon is hatred of anyone or anything that isn’t Marxist. That’s another stimulus for their suicidal commitment to net zero: conservatives, whom they loathe, find it foolhardy. The intrinsic value of a policy doesn’t even matter as long as it lets ideologues cock a snook at their opponents.

We don’t yet know the true long-term cost of this net zero madness. But it’s already clear it’ll be so high as to be practically incalculable. Oh well, as long as the Milibandits are happy playing with their little toys, such as wind mills, solar panels and electric cars, who are we to argue?

Meanwhile, Miliband et al. have already outdone other zealots of the past who didn’t mind sacrificing Britain at the altar of their ideology. One of them, John Major, isn’t generally regarded as a Marxist, but that’s only because most people have a sketchy idea of the full range of Marxist dogma.

It includes internationalism as a necessary constituent, ideally to the point of creating a single world government. The European Union is an echo of that Marxist din, this irrespective of the arguments Europhiles put forth in its favour.  

Perhaps ‘arguments’ is a wrong word. Ideologues don’t really argue, in the sense of using debate to arrive at the truth. You could destroy every statement they make logically, rationally and factually, but it wouldn’t make one jot of difference.

Ideologues have this gnostic belief in subliminal knowledge to which only they are privy. All arguments to the contrary only succeed in branding their opponents as infidels and hence targets for harangues — or worse.

Major was committed to Britain joining the EU, even though I doubt he understood the neo-Marxist nature of the whole project.

Britain belonging to the Exchange Rate Mechanism that effectively pegged all European currencies to the Deutschmark was essential as a prelude to creating a single European currency. That too was a prelude, to creating a single European state.

Margaret Thatcher was generally sceptical of the whole idea, but she allowed herself to be persuaded by her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and his successor Nigel Lawson. Had she stayed in power, no doubt Thatcher would have read the signs early and pulled out of the ERM before too much damage was done.

But the Europhiles in her cabinet staged a coup, Thatcher was ousted and replaced with Major, the figurehead to the pro-Euro faction within the Tory Party. A true believer, Major refused to accept that Britain had entered the ERM at a ridiculously high exchange rate she couldn’t sustain.

Still, he couldn’t decide to leave the ERM until the markets took that decision out of his hands in 1992. Currency speculators led by George Soros pounced, began to short the pound, and a fiscal Armageddon beckoned. Major had no choice but to pull out, on what would become known as Black Wednesday.

The true cost of that whole ideological folly is hard to estimate. It’s variously put in the £3-£7 billion range, but there were so many knock-on effects that the real damage had to be much higher. Still, whatever it was, Ed Miliband doesn’t have to worry: Major didn’t even come close to the losses Britain is suffering, and is yet to suffer, due to net zero.

Neither did Gordon Brown, Tony Blair’s Chancellor and successor. But he did try his level best.

The Marxist dream of a world government got a step closer in 1999 when the single European currency was introduced. Unlike most other members of the Blair cabinet, Brown had reservations about joining the euro. He correctly surmised that, if even joining the ERM almost made Britain go belly up, adopting the euro would take ‘almost’ out of it.

Still, even though Culpability Brown couldn’t find a way of adopting the euro, he found a way of propping it up. All he had to do was pump money into euro futures, but there was a snag: Britain had no money to dedicate to that noble cause.

But Culpability Brown wouldn’t be deterred. To raise the necessary funds, between 1999 and 2002 he sold off over half of the country’s gold reserves, putting 40 per cent of the proceeds into the euro.

He was so desperate to help his Continental comrades that Culpability sold the gold at its lowest price in 20 years, only to see it grow at an average of eight per cent a year ever since.

To be fair to Brown, Europhilia wasn’t his sole motivation.

Socialists and statists in general loathe gold because it diminishes their power to lord it over the populace. First, when paper money is pegged to a hard standard like gold, the government can’t inflate the money supply at will and use deficit spending as a political tool.

Second, when people keep their money in gold rather than paper, they become more independent of the state. The state could reduce banknotes to wrapping paper by pushing a button on the printing press, largely turning all citizens into the state’s dependents.

Since socialists are viscerally committed to increasing their power ad infinitum, they detest gold with unmitigated venom. Also, gold is a traditional symbol of that Marxist bogeyman, wealth, and symbolism matters to ideologues.  

Brown got $3.5 billion for Britain’s trousseau. Today, that gold would be worth $56 billion. Still, converting dollars into sterling and allowing for inflation, this amount, though huge, will look like pocket change when compared to the damage net zero will cause over the next few years.

The Guardian, our Leftmost broadsheet, has long been insisting that global warming denial is a “crime against humanity”. That’s how ideologies speak – and they’ll try to make everyone listen on pain of punishment. I’ll be counting on you to send me food parcels when I’m in prison.