… has so much been paid by so many to gratify so few. My having to paraphrase Churchill’s famous saying should alert you to my problem.
My own words simply failed me when I tried to react to the data just published by the National Energy System Operator (NESO). If you are unfamiliar with this outfit, don’t rush to indict it for anti-Labour bias.
In fact, NESO is a government quango responsible for our energy systems. As such, it’s more likely to err on the side of its paymaster, which is to say the government or, more generally, Labour or, more narrowly, Keir Starmer or, more specifically, Ed Miliband.
This lengthy introduction is necessary to prime your credulity because I’m about to unveil a truly incredible datum. Are you ready? Good. Now brace yourself:
Labour’s, more specifically Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s, insanely criminal drive towards net zero will cost us £4.5 trillion over the next 25 years. That’s £4.5 followed by 12 zeroes in case you’re wondering.
In a sane world, that forecast, exceeding Britain’s entire GDP, would be sufficient to mitigate the government’s commitment even to a sound policy. But our world is anything but sane, which is why a gang of obtuse Marxist apparatchiks are allowed to beggar the country in the name of an ideological construct lacking any valid scientific evidence.
Yet even assuming that the theory of global warming is correct, and ‘our planet’ is on course to be incinerated by carbon dioxide, Britain’s suicide by net zero is completely meaningless. The country produces merely one per cent of the world’s output of that dastardly gas. So even if we hit the madcap net zero target, it won’t increase ‘our planet’s’ chances of survival one bit.
Those who cross the sea may change their sky, according to Horace, but not their soul (caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt) and, more to the point, certainly not their atmosphere. This they have to share with countries like China, India and Russia that are many unsavoury things, but woke isn’t one of them.
That staggering £4.5 trillion sum covers carpeting the country with new wind farms and their pylons, building a network of charging stations for electric cars, upgrading roads warped by those heavy vehicles, installing millions of solar panels, switching from boilers to heat pumps, beefing up the grid to enable it to accommodate millions of electric appliances pretending to be cars – and God only knows how many other items I’ve left out.
The current projection far exceeds all previous forecasts, which is par for the course of government estimates. Hence it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that the £4.5 trillion – although ample to bankrupt the country – has more to do with hope than expectation. We ought to double it to be on the safe side, although ‘safe’ seems to be a misnomer.
Thus, Britain is going to spend £182 billion a year or more to ruin the country and only £61.7 a year to defend it. But things like defence, secure borders and fiscal responsibility are the domain of conservatives, aka reactionaries, aka racists, aka colonialists, aka transphobes, aka fascists.
Marxists, aka progressives, don’t mind stripping the country’s defences bare, flinging her door wide open to welcome swarms of Third World migrants hostile to the West – and they certainly don’t mind reducing the country to Third World penury.
The net zero drive will push our state debt from its current stratospheric level to a galactic one, which any normal person would anticipate with trepidation. But one function of exorbitant sovereign debt is a transfer of power from the people to the state, meaning to the Milibandits of this world.
A disaster to you and me is a boon to that Marxist lot. What I find astounding is that such nonentities as febrile of ideology as they are feeble of mind can take part in Western politics, never mind gaining electoral success.
There had to be millions of Britons voting for this hybrid of communist cell and lunatic asylum – but then one is born every minute, as T E Barnum once said about suckers. But don’t get me started on one-man-one-vote democracy of universal franchise.
Labour won their 2024 landslide with about one-third of the popular vote. This they deem sufficient to regard the election as a mandate to do as they please. And, until 2029, no constitutional mechanisms exist for the people to prevent this electoral Marxist takeover from ruining and, as a result, enslaving the country.
Moreover, the Tories are happy to score rhetorical points off the government. But during their 14 years in power they had plenty of chances to nip this subversive nonsense in the bud – and failed to take any of them. Moreover, their commitment to net zero was only a couple of degrees cooler than Labour’s.
For example, as (Tory!) Prime Minister, Boris Johnson set a legally binding target for the UK to reach net zero by 2050. After reverting to his pre-political journalistic trade, he acknowledged he had gone “far too fast”, and that his policy was “too expensive for ordinary people”. You don’t say.
Talk, however, is cheap. It’s action that matters, and I don’t hold much hope that, in the unlikely event the Tories win the next general election, they’ll abandon this criminal policy. At best, they’ll add a few years to the target without ever repudiating it altogether.
Nigel Farage is making encouraging noises, but he still isn’t within striking distance of 10 Downing Street. I’m willing to bet that, as the key to that house moves within reach, he too will start to waffle about the drive being too fast, though generally virtuous.
I hope Reform will prove me wrong, but so far they haven’t denounced the whole business as an ideological construct erected on the foundation of no proper evidence. One thing I can say for Trump is that he doesn’t mind calling global warming a “hoax”. Neither does he hesitate to pull the US out of all international eco-setups, that ideal sinecure for Marxist apparatchiks, those Frankfurters who fell out of Marx’s buns.
But, barring the possibility of Trump deciding that America “needs to own” not only Greenland but also Britain for security reasons, we are stuck with the Milibandits on the eco-prowl.
So start drilling new holes in your belts, chaps. Our governing cabal is out to beggar the country, and there’s precious little we can do about it.
You can put as many zeroes as you like after 4.5, but it will still be 4.5. What you want is either 4.5 multiplied by 10 to the power of 12, or 45 followed by eleven zeroes. But even £4.50 spent on delusions would be £4.50 wasted.
I hope that Mr Farage is keeping quiet about reversing “green” nonsense for the same reason Mr Starmer kept quiet about tax rises, viz. that the voters would object. (I hope he’s keeping quiet about a few other obviously necessary measures too.)
Meanwhile, here in the comparatively sane county of Lincolnshire, we’re to be given a tiny orange dustbin to go with the black, blue, purple and green dustbins we already have. It’s to be used for food waste, but looks barely big enough to contain half a bag of potatoes. Fortunately, its use is optional at present, so I’ll merely have to work out which of the four existing dustbins to put the new one in.
Just goes to show how backward Britain is. Where we are in France, such things have been compulsory for years. Actually, now you mention Lincolnshire, our niece and her family moved there a few months ago. Our favourite cathedral is in that county too, but we only get to see it once every few years (quite a few, truth be told) — it’s quite a trek from London.
It’s only the new bin that’s optional. The other three bins are subject to random inspections by orange-clad stormtroopers to ensure that nobody puts plastic in the cardboard bin, potato peelings in the garden bin, or otherwise infringes the pseudo-Mosaïc ritual laws.
Nevertheless, Lincolnshire is better than most places in Airstrip One. Did not Dr Johnson say that the finest sight a Londoner ever sees is the high road to Sempringham?