Reposted from NOT A LOOK OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
OCTOBER 22, 2021
By Paul Homewood
The public got it right over Brexit. Now give them the chance to vote on the biggest decision of all:
Does the blob never learn? Voters don’t like being treated like naughty children, let alone apathetic imbeciles, by technocrats convinced that they know best. Much of the electorate is now in a permanently defiant, irritable mood. It has grown allergic to stitch-ups by the ruling class across Westminster, the City, the arts and academia, and is repelled by attempts to impose a single political vision as a fait accompli, with no debate and no consultation. This applies as much to radical environmentalism and net zero, the groupthink du jour, as it does to Brexit, the NHS, overseas wars, crime or immigration.
The universal franchise was hard-won. The electorate is deeply attached to its democratic rights, not just when it comes to form – elections being held, and results respected – but also in terms of ethos. It expects the great questions of the day to be carefully discussed, and for voters to have the ultimate choice between meaningfully different options. Decisions cannot be delegated to a self-anointed, conformist oligarchy.
Voters hate it when, as with the EU, they were told by Labour, Tories and Lib Dems alike that ever-closer union was the best of all possible worlds, that the only acceptable debate was about the speed of integration, and that only a racist would disagree. Ordinary folks’ revenge, when it came, was devastating.
It beggars belief, therefore, that a government of Brexiteers, in power only because they led a populist rebellion against another cross-party consensus, have forgotten this crucial lesson when it comes to net zero, and are seeking to enshrine a revolution without consulting the public. Yes, the vast majority, at least in wealthy nations, wants to improve the environment, reduce pollution, bolster biodiversity, treat animals better and prevent man-made catastrophes.
But that is where the near-universal consensus ends: the details of how to proceed are explosively contentious, and require democratic assent to be legitimate. The parallel with Brexit is clear: the fact that voters all agreed that another European war must be avoided didn’t mean they all wanted to fuse their countries into a superstate.
The Government has learnt the wrong lessons from Covid – in a genuine health or military emergency, the electorate temporarily gives its support to any government it believes is doing its best. Even in such cases, a minority will favour alternative solutions, such as a Swedish approach.
Decarbonisation is entirely different to the pandemic, whether or not you judge that we face a climate emergency. The public won’t automatically rally around whatever the government proposes. Many, perhaps most, will hate much of it. Net zero involves long-term, hugely significant measures that could drastically modify lifestyles and give the state immense, permanent powers to socially engineer as it sees fit.
Do you agree that all new petrol and diesel cars should be banned in just nine years’ time? Or that gas boilers should be replaced, at great cost, with heat pumps, a technology that doesn’t quite work yet? Are you willing to eat less meat and pay higher taxes? Do you disagree entirely, or accept some of these ideas but not others? Or would you prefer to take it more slowly given China’s reluctance to act?
The shocking reality is that how you answer is irrelevant. The public isn’t being given a choice. The fact of, and speed, scale and method of decarbonisation have been decided: Tories, Labour and Lib Dems all agree on all the essentials. It doesn’t matter who wins the next election: a new orthodoxy rules supreme. There is no functioning democracy, no mechanism by which outcomes might change. This is a disgrace and extremely dangerous.
One doesn’t have to disagree with everything the Government is planning to be concerned. I really like electric cars, though I can’t see how banning combustion engines so quickly in the absence of better, long-range batteries can work. Why not let capitalism continue to organically shift consumers over? It is great that Boris rejects the hair-shirt, neo-communist approach to greening Britain, and that he backs nuclear and hydrogen. But do I really trust a government that has waged war on the car, invented so-called low-traffic neighbourhoods and campaigned against Heathrow expansion not to revert to banning everything vaguely carbon-positive if it falls behind on its targets?
Why is its nudge unit advocating a tax on meat and producers and retailers of “high-carbon” food? The inflammatory document, disowned by the Government but commissioned by the Department for Business, demonises business travel and seeks to reduce international tourism and restrict airport expansion – goodbye, capitalist freedom. Can the Government guarantee that it would never impose extreme restrictions, rationing on homes and business or even mini eco-lockdowns? Or use a punitive form of road pricing to drastically reduce mobility (as opposed to ensuring motorists pay appropriately for road usage)? Will the courts start striking down high-carbon housebuilding or farming?
Net zero isn’t a technical issue: it is an inherently political question, one of the greatest choices we have ever been asked to make. In the sickening absence of disagreement between the parties, a massive, uncontrollable backlash is guaranteed, at least when the bills start to drop. The only question is who the new green-sceptic Nigel Farage will be, and the next Boris figure? What will Vote Leave II look like?
Johnson should preempt this war, which could destroy the Tories, and call a referendum on net zero today. His obligation, in doing so, would be to explain in exhaustive, costed detail how he proposes to achieve the changes he so fervently believes in. The No side would present its case, holding Johnson to account, proposing alternatives, with the public taken through the pros and cons and trade-offs. The results should be legally binding, with MPs compelled to implement the verdict, and the question tightly defined. The Government will have its work cut out: the Swiss have just rejected plans to slash their own emissions and to slap higher taxes on fossil fuels.
The green challenge is too important, its implications too dramatic, to be left to an establishment that has embraced net zero as if it were a new religion. The public must have the final say, and the only way this will happen is through another referendum.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/20/need-referendum-net-zero-save-britain-green-blob/
I know I may sound like a stuck record, but where have the media been for the last 13 years? It’s almost as if they think that Boris plucked these ideas out of thin air yesterday!
We have known for years that the country cannot run on intermittent wind and solar power alone. We have known that heat pumps are an extremely expensive and inefficient way to heat homes.
That hydrogen is no solution, and that electric cars are not fit for purpose.
Above all we have known all along that the cost of first the Climate Change Act, and subsequently Net Zero, were going to be horrendous.
So why is it only now that they are beginning to wake up?
I live in the Orkney Islands (Scotland) and we have been lab rats in this green ‘revolution’. Mass wind energy development up here has seen massive hikes in the cost of electricity to the consumer, and a huge spike in energy poverty amongst folk not lucky enough to have the funds or land to plant turbines on. Whilst my electricity costs have spiralled, weirdly the cost to heat my oil-fueled Rayburn (which does the cooking and heating) are virtually the same as they were in 2005! What the folk of Orkney (and other rural communities will do) will do when they can no longer buy a petrol or diesel vehicle I have no idea, but it won’t be nice. Coupled to that, the famed bird population of Orkeny has suffered catastrophic reductions in population in the same period of all this expansion, and not a peep from the RSPB (or anyone else) because guess what, many of these turbine farms are on RSPB land. The whole thing is a disgrace, but no-one seems to care as the well moneyed (who either have influence or actually own the local media) are all filling their boots. Sad times indeed.
The first step is to have public discussion and that must involve public broadcasters allowing everyone from both sides of the divide. Documentaries of all persuasions must be broadcast. Discussions involving knowledgeable and capable skeptics must be allowed. Unless this happens, any referendum will be preceded by a “softening up campaign”, a barrage of climate propaganda of the most extreme form.
This won’t happen of course. So we are left with the inevitable consequences of what happens when people experience the hard, brutal reality of net zero for themselves, rather than the unicorn and fairy versions fed to them at bed time.
Allister, is being a brave boy stepping out of the Daily Telegraph closet on this one.
The orthodoxy of journalism in the UK demands everyone stays on message. That message is, Climate Alarm is good and must be supported.
The number of high profile and in fact any profile journalists that are prepared to step out 0f line is pitifully small. They are in the same mental state of conformity as scientists across the world. They know what is being presented by climate alarmists as fact, is complete lies.
Unfortunately the scientists livelihoods are locked into maintaining the orthodoxy so they just stay quiet and get on with the fraud providing it pays them and feeds their family and pays the mortgage.
There will never be a referendum on the Net Zero policy, because the authorities know it would be won by the anti Net Zero side of the argument.
We live in very dangerous times, as Allister has said.
Sadly the people will not rise to and stop the nonsense. Well not until millions of us are so impacted by the blocking of energy supply people are literally dying in the cold and dark.
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The Swiss have effectively refused the “Revised CO2 law” by a 51.5% majority in June this year. Unfortunately, the Socialist energy minister decided to prolong the existing law (which should have ended this fall) to 2025, set the CO2 taxes to the maximum allowed under the existing law, and is acting as if nothing at all had been voted upon. Our “direct democracy” is becoming more or less an “opinion poll” which the Government accepts or ignores at their discretion..
What do the public know about Net Zero? Diddly squat, that’s what. Just about as much as they know about the alleged Covid pandemic.
I fear that the only vote Boris cares about is Princess Nut Nut’s.
Net Zero: principles for successful behaviour change initiatives
https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/net-zero-behaviour-change-initiatives2.pdf
This was produced by the British government.