Defending his decision to fly by private jet to Aberdeen yesterday to announce his new plans to
encourage more global warning, PM Sunak defended
himself with the words, “Every prime minister before me has also used
planes to travel around the United Kingdom”. This would probably have come
as news to those who held the office prior to the invention of powered flight,
such as Pitt
the Younger, who apparently never set foot in Scotland, Ireland, or indeed
most of England. Like all of Sunak’s statements, it requires a degree of
adjustment or qualification before it begins to approximate to the truth. The
simplest adjustment which can be made to turn this into a true statement is to
replace the words “before me” with the words “since October 2022”.
Choosing the right start date makes it entirely true to argue that every PM
since has used private jets and helicopters intensively. Even if the phrase ‘every
PM’ is then covering only a very, very limited range of people. One, to be precise.
Choosing a start date for
history – rather like Pol Pot did in Cambodia with his ‘Year Zero’
– has other advantages as well for Sunak. Indeed, treating October 2022 as the
beginning of Year Zero makes sense of a lot more of what Sunak says – all
decisions taken (to say nothing of promises made) before then were taken by
other parties and are nothing at all to do with him. Grant Schapps may well be
a member of his cabinet today, but he only became a member of that particular cabinet
in October 2022. He cannot be held responsible for decisions taken by someone
called Grant Schapps (on Mondays to Fridays at least – he went by other
names on his days off) prior to that date as a member of a completely
different government. Such as the decision to impose
ULEZ on Sadiq Khan as a means of raising revenue from motorists, for
instance.
Enthusiasm for global warming
isn’t limited to Sunak, of course. Frosty was at it as well just last week, claiming
that a bit of global warming was a good thing for the UK, where more people die
from the cold in winter than from the heat in summer. Evening out the numbers
of excess deaths by moving some of them from the winter to the summer is
probably one of those elusive Brexit benefits, this one being for the undertaking
industry which would be able to expect a smooth flow of excess deaths all year
round rather than having to gear up to deal with winter peaks and summer
troughs. You can probably expect to see your local undertakers being bought up
by Tory donors with dodgy Russian connections in the near future. What Frosty
had to say has been fairly comprehensively debunked
elsewhere, although he will never be convinced. Lurking behind his views is
that strange sense of English exceptionalism, which allows him to consider only
the costs and benefits for the UK and ignore both the impact on the rest of the
world, and any consequences of what happens elsewhere for the UK. After all,
the only accurate use of the word Global is as a prefix for the term UK. It’s
an ailment from which Sunak also suffers, as he so ably demonstrated yesterday.
Anyway, the Tories’ new-found
willingness to express their desire to maximise growth and profit now and to
hell with the consequences for future generations seems to stem, at least in
part, from the outcome of the Uxbridge by-election, which they have chosen to
interpret as a result which went against the trend. I wonder, though, if they’re
interpreting it correctly. The winning candidate himself has declined
to give any credit to either Sunak or the government for his victory, and there
were reports that his campaign literature didn’t even mention the Conservative
Party. Another interpretation is possible, which places Uxbridge as part of the
same phenomenon as the other two by-elections held on the same day. In this
interpretation, all three elections were won by the candidate who mounted the strongest
campaign against the Tory Party and its policies. It's just that, in Uxbridge,
that candidate happened to be the, er, Conservative candidate. Could it be that
Sunak’s best chance of winning a majority in 2024 (or Year 1, as we should
probably now know it) would be for him to advise all his party’s candidates to
campaign against him and his government? Stranger things have probably happened in politics, although I can’t immediately identify when.
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2 comments:
There is much to agree with in your post. When I see ‘Zero’ it should be a red flag to all after the Socialist Pol Pot idea of killing everybody who was not of the same opinion or surplus to requirement.
Net Zero has the same chilling tones to it and early man would recognise what is going on as the environmental movement has again made the Earth a god ,who is vengeful and demands sacrifices and must be appeased or death and destruction will be our fate. In the sacrifices proposed in London the usual effect can be seen – the middle class can manage it and the poor get -well poorer, but the big payoff is that the ‘thinking classes’ are under stress from this message and at time confused and that makes them compliant with a sense of helplessness – all good stuff for the Nudge Teams. This is why it does not matter if Net Zero stuff is true or not, money spent on projects to achieve it are welcomed and the tax take far more acceptable than say it was done for military expenditure and the government extend their powers .This is why all parties are of one mind on this and singing the praises of the Emperor’s new clothes, but there might be a young kid in the crowd or a ‘voice in the wilderness ‘ or even swivelled- eyed loons or the great unwashed (ghastly people) who might be mad enough and spoil the party.
Spirit,
I can agree with the point which I think you are making, which is that elites like to have a 'common enemy' with which to scare the masses into staying in line. I would even agree that the 'threat', whatever the current one happens to be, is often exaggerated and over-dramatised. And I can agree that the beneficiaries of this approach are those elites themselves, who not only retain power as a result, but also manage to channel funds and resources into their own pockets.
It does not follow, though, that the threat is always, or even mostly, a false one. At the heart of the climate issue, there lies a very serious, but ultimately quite simple, question about the viability of our whole economic system - can we make infinite use of finite resources? (Resources, here, has a very wide meaning, including, for instance, the capacity of the earth's systems to handle the products of human activity, such as carbon dioxide.) Capitalism treats some of those resources as 'externalities' which can be ignored in economic decision taking; mathematics and logic say they can't be ignored. As ever, I'm with the math on this one.
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