Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In 2015, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared himself to the fictional Wizard Gandalf, saying “In one form or another I will be here. Like Gandalf I will be I will be translated into some new form, more powerful than I can possibly imagine. I will be here and we will make sure that under the ultra-low emissions zone there will be no bus that goes through town that is not a hybrid with very low emissions”.
Delingpole: Net Zero Is the New Remain and It Will Destroy Boris’s Conservatives
Net Zero is going to destroy Boris Johnson’s administration in the way that Brexit destroyed David Cameron’s. None of Boris’s clever advisors and colleagues — not Dom Cummings, not Michael Gove — appears to have understood this yet. But others can see it coming a mile off.
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But the most gloriously damning analysis of the Conservatives’ looming catastrophe comes from Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs who says ‘the political storm over green targets will be even bigger than Brexit.’
She’s dead right.
Here are some of the highlights from her scorcher of a piece:
Beyond the Red Wall are rumblings of a new revolt, utterly unanticipated by No 10 and overlooked by a liberal media still shell-shocked by the election. With its drive to “green” the economy at any cost, the Tory party has seemingly decided to celebrate its populist landslide by bogging down the country in zero-carbon paternalism. And so we career towards another People vs Establishment conflict that could be more explosive even than that sparked by the referendum.
and
It is becoming disturbingly apparent that the Government prizes green targets over “unleashing” Britain’s potential. The cast-iron case for a road-building revolution, for example, clangs a little too harshly against the hollowness of eco-politan sensibilities. Whitehall is genuinely convinced that Red Wall utopia is cycling to work from a rabbit hutch on the outskirts of Birmingham. They find the idea that people might actually aspire to drive to their downtown office from their semi-detached in Dudley, and at the weekends cruise, sunroof down, to the Bullring for shopping, completely ghastly.
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Read more: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/06/delingpole-net-zero-new-remain-it-will-destroy-boris-conservatives/
What exactly does “Gandalf” have in mind for post Brexit Britain? Boris must surely understand the consequences of his hardline climate policy initiatives.
I love Lord of the Rings, and the superb 2001-3 movie adaption, but LOTR is a rose tinted pre-industrial magical fantasy, not an economic guide book. LOTR is blatantly anti-technology, the only groups in LOTR who truly embraces modernity are bad guys; evil Orcs, felling forests, despoiling the landscape, mass producing foul weapons with their gigantic, smoke belching factories.
In the real world, it was the pre-industrial age which was the real nightmare. Fossil fuel and technology has liberated the overwhelming majority from a miserable life of ceaseless toil and an early death.
There is a reason peasants flocked to the dirty, smoke filled cities during the industrial revolution; despite all the pollution and hardship, life was better in the cities than back on the farm.
Nobody in their right mind would want to return to a brutal low carbon pre-industrial existence, unless perhaps they were utterly convinced someone else would be doing all the hard work. Boris Johnson’s attack on reliable energy and his prioritisation of green targets over prosperity is a big step in the wrong direction.
What about Boris Johnson’s reference to a personal “translation”? I don’t know the nature of Johnson’s 2015 “translation”, but Fictional Gandalf’s mystical journey occurred after he defeated the Balrog, a demon of fire and darkness which lurked in the ruins of an underground city. The Balrog had originally been unleashed by miners who “delved too greedily and too deep.”.
We got really lucky with Trump. He saved us and we can now tower over the world in prosperity and material comfort, as they impale themselves on the green pike.
No matter what,
as for my understanding,
if Boris the “Gandalf” fails to deliver in and as per consideration of the TV licensing, aka the the BBC tax on the British,
by completely scraping it and completely removing it, the guy will simply fail and show that he was good for nothing at all, from the start to the end of the day!
regardless of anything else or any other expectations.
If he can not deliver such as an easy thing under the circumstances, no much he can do else, “Gandalf” or not.
Simply a waste of time and effort in the consideration of such as failure, where and when the rest matters no much at all.
cheers
“TV licensing, aka the the BBC tax on the British, by completely scraping it”
He could scrape a little off the top. But scrapping it would be better. 🙂
Tolkien makes it clear in the preface to the Lord of the Rings that any attempt to read allegory in his books is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of his writing. He said in one of his letters that he wrote the books and the universe purely for literary creativity (i.e., storytelling). It was never intended to mirror real world things to his readers.
Tolkien’s views do not apply to a politician trying to aggrandize himself with fallacious comparisons to the fictitious but righteous character Gandalf the Grey. Boris Johnson is more appropriately comparative to Saruman the Many Colored, in his treachery and duplicity. May his political fall be equally brutal and complete.
On the other hand he drew heavily on his WWI experiences and on teh march of industrialisation across early 20th century England.
Consider JK Rowling, of Harry Potter fame. Nothing could be more anti-socialist than her Hogwarts, which reeks of privilege and private education, but she herself purports to be as hard left as they come.
I wonder if self preservation and a quiet life causes those in the Arts to publicly espouse what they privately deny. I have a good friend in Equity – the actors Union. If anything is to get funded it has to have a ‘right on’ politically correct theme, and actors like Laurence Fox who have bravely come out against all this nonsense just don’t get work…Equity ensures that. It is now run not as a support for the arts professional but as a political activist organisation. It sees itself as Part of the Revolution.
“Equity”….. How doubly ironic!
Tolkien also drew on the rising Axis powers, describing orcs as “swarthy”, and sometimes slant-eyed, clearly meant to refer to the Japanese. And “Nazgul” = “Nazi”…
How is the word “Muggles” allowed in this age of political correctness? Surely it’s discriminatory to classify someone by their lack of magical ability.
As recorded here on April 24 last year, “Greta Thunberg: Britain has a mind-blowing ‘Historical Debt’ ”, scores of British MPs were so transfixed with Greta’s nonsense that Britain had special responsibility for the Industrial Revolution that within a short time they were happy to have the Mother of Parliaments déclaré a ‘climate emergency’.
Only the passage of time is likely to end this strange period in history which does deserve a new chapter in Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.
I can only hope all this is lip service and can kicking.
Zero carbon is a headlong rush back to serfdom. But the greens make the mistake of thinking that they will be the Eloi while in reality they will join the ranks of the Morlocks. The Eloi will be the ones with the guns.
The real question here is simple:
‘Who TF are Civil Servants to decide how UK people ought to live, what they ought to aspire to etc etc?’
None of them have the balls to stand for election, all of them hide behind ‘Whitehall’ to promulgate their anti-democratic elitist views.
Civil Servants SERVE. They do not frame policy, nor do they decide what is best for us all.
A bit too difficult for Oxford 1sts to understand?
Perhaps they should have spent more time bonking and less time reciting Latin, Greek and other dead languages whilst being a denizen of Isis?
I don’t really know what to make of Boris, other than he seems to have more than his fair share of luck.
He achieved something that I thought might be impossible getting out of the EU with the determined opposition of both the EU and Westminster swamp dwellers. I think a large part of this was due to the general public, outside of those eating directly from the trough or with romantic notions of universal peace etc., saw through the facade and had enough of globalism.
Boris was in the right place at the right time and astute enough to take advantage of harnessing the simmering resentment.
There is still a lot of work to do and it would almost certainly be a mistake to try to tackle green stupidity at the same time. The general population of the UK don’t seem to have applied much thought to it, being fed a daily (hourly!) drip of propaganda pushing the ideas. Anyone voicing heretical thoughts is viciously torn down by the media. Now is not the time.
Get Brexit finished, play along with the green playbook, and in a very short time opinions will change as electricity becomes a very expensive and intermittent resource, as cars become essentially useless and horribly expensive both to buy and to run (that expensive electricity) and there are bans on charging at home because the infrastructure can’t take it (and people get fed up of tripping over the extension cables running out to the car parked on the street because you don’t have a garage).
England is a cold country. With houses being forced to abandon gas and depend upon electricity, the intermittent nature will become more than just an inconvenience.
This can happen within the next four or five years. Then there will be grass roots support for abandoning the entire idea. Sometimes, it’s easier to let people just hang themselves.
“Get Brexit finished, play along with the green playbook, and in a very short time opinions will change as electricity becomes a very expensive and intermittent resource, as cars become essentially useless and horribly expensive both to buy and to run (that expensive electricity) and there are bans on charging at home because the infrastructure can’t take it (and people get fed up of tripping over the extension cables running out to the car parked on the street because you don’t have a garage).”
Is that really a good plan? Allowing long-term damage just to say “I told you so”?
It may not be a good plan, but it is maybe the only workable one.
Take on the fight now and probably lose – and stand a good chance of losing Brexit with it.
Let people learn the hard way. The gas and coal will still be there, as will atomic energy.
Rather than fighting against it, let them push to accelerate it. The sooner people start to freeze to death in the dark the sooner things will change.
RE: “..play along with the green playbook…”
Not only “No!” but “Hell NO!” You don’t ‘play along’ with cancers, psychopaths, or ‘green’ fraud.
It’s the city (i.e London bankers and financiers) that are driving this lunacy. The keyword is “climate finance” and even the German head of the EU Ursula Von Der Leyen is throwing around a figure of 1 trillion and though the UK is no longer part of the EU the city has every intention of keeping their trotters in the climate trough. Who are the interests that fund the Tory party? Follow the money and you will find the motivation.
The Boris hybrid buses, besides being horrendously expensive, failed at their primary task of emission reduction. They did less mpg than a normal bus, i.e. burnt more diesel. Hybrids are ideal for commuting where the engine charges the batteries on long rural roads, and the batteries pay off in town. However London buses travel on congested roads most of the time and have to keep stopping at bus stops. As a result the engine struggles to keep the batteries topped up, and because of the efficiency losses in the system, ends up burning more diesel.
Someone, somewhere, provided a link to a detailed account of the changes that the UK would have to make to reach zero net emissions by 2050. Unfortunately I cannot remember which was the entry it came under, nor the actual name of the organization which did the Report.
I am certain it was not a government inspired piece saying everything would be all cake and jelly, but from a rather more truthful view, trying to give as accurate as possible scenario without gilding the lily.
Can anyone direct me to the link, please?