Reasons to be cheerful...

The UK General Election is just days away and the outcome is all but a done deal. But forget the bleak commentary about the ordeal ahead of us, let's focus on some positives.

It was a soggy day in the soggy, soggy month of May when the poor, helpless, soggy Prime Minster of the United Kingdom put out his distress call. The wettest of the wet and the dampest of the damp were called upon to protect this beleaguered regime, by putting their Xs next to Rishi Sunak’s name. It could not have fallen on deafer ears.

Nearly everybody, it seems, is intent on punishing the Conservative Party. Right of the centre, many have been calling for ‘zero seats’, to put this ancient beast out of our misery once and for all. And even from within the Tory ranks, Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss and former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Nadine Dorries have both written books that strongly suggest they deserve it. I have only read the latter’s dire prose, which argues, in defence of Boris Johnson, somewhat ironically, that the governing Party is wholly degenerate. Both books seem to trade on the notion of an Establishment that operates beyond Number 10, to control it and more. Accordingly, both books are arguments that inadvertently lay the blame for the total chaos of UK politics at their own doorsteps.

The voter most of all though is, according to polls, ready to unleash hell on the party that has given us a succession of PMs that looked like N+1th generation photocopies-of-photocopies of what a PM should be: the Blair-clone Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak… If any of them have ever appeared to be popular, it is only by their accidentally committing to Brexit. First Cameron’s promise of a referendum and then Johnson’s seemingly credible offer to “get Brexit done” scored majorities that others could not achieve. But these were squandered, not merely by parties that didn’t believe in them, but PMs, too, who believed in too much else, including “Build Back Better”, and the notion of elections as coronations.

We had lots of plans for the election here at Climate Debate UK. But these were based on a mid-late autumn date. So we’ve not had enough time to deliver. Neither have the alternative parties had a chance to set their stall out properly, of course. And though election dates are once again the PM’s prerogative, the spiteful loser sought to deprive the public of the debates that are necessary to examine the past five years, and more. This is Rishi’s rushed election, called at his own convenience.

Meanwhile, a great deal of commentary about the election has become extremely negative. Many are treating it as a fait accompli. Which may be true, in a sense, but it fails to see past the election itself, and into the conditions that the next government will face. This counsel of despair is encouraging people to withdraw from politics, rather than to double down on their engagement.

It is indeed likely that Labour will form the next government. And they will likely execute with renewed vigour the dull orthodoxies that the last governments — from David Cameron’s ‘greenest government ever’ coalition of chaos, through Boris Johnson’s ‘build back better’ Saudi Arabia of Wind, and onto Rishi Sunak’s ‘pragmatism before ideology’ smallest possible U-turns — tried and tested and failed. But this is no basis for despondency.

Similarly, some comments, driven by frustration no doubt with the lack of progress towards ending Net Zero madness are often extremely negative towards the voting public, often referred to as sheep-like or stupid. Others point to the emergent challenger parties such as Reform and the SDP and independents, suggesting that their offerings are not fully formulated, have failed to properly stand against lockdowns, are mere opportunism, are ‘gifts’ to the mainstream party, or are otherwise a wasted vote. These remarks are unhelpful too. People’s motivation for voting for one party over others are extremely varied. Some may simply sense the need for a change of government, but not for our party of preference, not because they are thick, but because they have not yet heard the arguments. Or they may simply disagree. It is incumbent on us to make good arguments, and make those arguments heard. Nobody should be blackmailed into one party over another, but persuaded of a party’s positive arguments.

We should take a step back from some of these claims, and understand democracy as a process, that is (re-) starting from a terrible, terrible state. And in such circumstances, every possible opportunity for democracy should be exploited to its maximum possible extent. Enough cynicism. Muddle through.

Here are some reasons for matching the next government’s energy with our own renewed agenda. Their energy will fade as their plans disintegrate. Ours will not. It’s not 1997 — there is no oily, Machiavellian leader of the next government — there is a cipher with an adenoidal whine. It’s not even 2005 — arguably the peak of climate change alarmism and unchallenged Western political agendas. And it’s not 2015, and there is no offer of Brexit or anything like it, to serve as a sop. The UK is different, in these post-covid times. The world is different — globalism has caused its own setbacks, and has repolarised domestic and global politics.

These are reasons for voting, or for at least registering a vote, even if you spoil your ballot paper. And they are reasons for carrying on into the next election cycle, free from the sense of doom that some are generating. Yes, indeed, the other wing of the Uniparty is set to be installed and repeat the script. But we have rehearsed it, too.

1. All the Net Zero cats are out of the bags.

The first major reason for optimism is that climate and Net Zero-scepticism are now in the mainstream. They are not dominant. They are not even particularly influential yet. But over the last year or so, mostly from the Conservative Party fold, realism has entered the broader debate about climate and energy policy. It now features on some, not all, TV news agendas and print media routinely.

As has been discussed previously here, this new criticism has led to the smallest possible U-turn — Rishi Sunak deferring the date of the EV sales mandate rising to 100%, thereby outlawing sales of new diesel and petrol cars. In a disorganised speech in September last year, Sunak claimed that he would be putting “pragmatism before ideology”, thereby putting on the map, and into the broader public conversation, the notion that, yes indeed, at least some part of the green agenda is driven by ideology.

Again, the point here is not to say that this new reflection is decisive. I merely point out that the germ of the idea is there now, out in the open. But the germ is infectious, and we can see it spreading…

Just a week ago, Ed Miliband told the Telegraph that,

On home heating – as we said in our manifesto – no one’s going to be forced to rip out their boiler. We’re absolutely clear about that. We haven’t stuck with the Government’s 2035 target when you can’t replace your gas boiler. I know that we’ve got to show that heat pumps are affordable and are going to work for people. 

Though Miliband claims to be countering the Conservative government’s plans, this is what Sunak said, back in September, in addition to his relaxation of the EV sales mandate…

So, I’m announcing today that we will give people far more time to make the necessary transition to heat pumps.

We’ll never force anyone to rip out their existing boiler and replace it with a heat pump.

You’ll only ever have to make the switch when you’re replacing your boiler anyway, and even then, not until 2035.

And to help those households for whom this will be hardest I’m introducing a new exemption today so that they’ll never have to switch at all.

Of course, it’s what happens after the election that counts. But this confirms two things… First, the two major parties’ offerings are pretty much identical. Second, new fertile ground is being opened up for debate by this recognition that Net Zero is, after all, subject to reality. And of course, our politicians are far from learning the full extent of that reality, but it is at least a concept that they are aware of.

1a. Economic reality

After a quarter of a century of green energy policy, the economic reality of Net Zero is going to be far harder for politicians to ignore. People just cannot be fobbed off with green wonks’ stats abuse when they can see the energy bills for themselves.

1b. Technological reality

Time has further shed more light on green technology. As we have seen above, both legacy parties now have recognised that heat pumps and EVs are simply not the unicorns that politicians and campaigners believed they were. The next government will continue to attempt to pump cash into the ‘green economy’ through absurd subsidies. But they will face growing criticism from a press that has at last found its climate policy sceptic voice.

1c. Political reality

I will discuss global politics below. As I argued recently, this is not going to be a climate election. But, because of the reasons above the next Parliamentary term will see more people affected by extant and new Net Zero policies. A Labour government will find itself soon facing the problems with Net Zero that the Sunak administration has discovered. This will be more grist to challenger parties’ mill — especially Reform, which has now strongly identified rolling back Net Zero in its offering. Though a Labour government will likely enjoy a huge majority, they will be aware of the recent failures of so-called centrism in Italy, the Netherlands, and now France. Blob agendas, whether or not they are recognised as such by the voter, are now manifestly toxic.

2. Public discussions about science and policy are completely different.

In the not-too-distant past, it was extremely easy for any politician to simply accuse their critics of ‘denial’. This pejorative was not only inaccurate, the folly of its use has been exposed during the pandemic. The attempt to protect far reaching policy from criticism by hiding it behind scientific consensus now yields a reaction from people who are affected by such policies.

Consider the following exchange between a much younger Ed Miliband — who is set to recover his brief from that time — and the sadly departed Nigel Lawson in 2009. Miliband hides behind the authority of the putative scientific consensus to avoid all of Lawson’s criticisms. The BBC, among the other establishment-oriented “news” broadcasters and The Guardian will of course sustain their narrative lines. But they have shrinking audience shares. As I will discuss further on, this line of argument is harder to sustain thanks to the diversity of news media and of course social media.

Politicians throughout the west have sought to secure their authority in institutional science. Concomitantly, there has never been so much public contestation of false scientific claims. They believed that science would serve as a fig leaf for their far too obvious bad faith. Consequently, now they have had to establish an entire limb of the blob to advance its own metaphysics — “disinformation” units of all kinds have been established, on vast budgets, to try to convince the public that up is down, black is white, left is right, white is bad and right is far right. These new purveyors of Official Truth, who speak for Official Power, but trip themselves up and confuse themselves with their endless special pleading and blunt appeals to authority — “science” which they show no evidence of understanding.

3. The world, the USA and the EU

European politics is changing. Britain has left the EU, but the next government has obvious sympathies for the political project which is now turning a distinct shade of “far right”. Across the continent, anti-establishment positions on immigration and Net Zero have set the agenda, even in the wealthier countries. In France, the Gilet Jaunes protests, which were terminated only by Covid, were triggered by, among other things, increases in the cost of energy. At the time of writing, Marine Le Pen’s party National Rally looks likely to have won the largest vote share in the first round of elections for the National Assembly, according to exit polls. France accordingly looks set to follow Italy and the Netherlands, not to mention Hungary, in appointing governments that are at odds with the EU.

Catastrophic results for the Greens in Germany and France at the recent EU elections signal yet more trouble ahead for the bloc, which is set to test MEP’s appetite for president Ursula von der Leyen in a sham “election” in a few weeks time. Von der Leyen has to assemble support from a majority of MEPs, which are now far more polarised than in the past. With such a resounding and emphatic rejection of radical environmentalism, a coalition involving the dwindling number of greens in the EU Parliament would look likely to further antagonise tensions to the point of crisis. But can a coalition exist without them? Will the bloc’s green agenda suffer? Before even the elections, von der Leyen’s EPP and the president herself have been accused of attempting to water down the green agenda.

Though the polls depicting the progress of the two main presidential candidates in the USA are somewhat harder to read, after an extremely weak performance by Joe Biden in debates, it seems at least possible that Trump will return to the Whitehouse. This will very likely lead to a reversal of Joe Biden’s reversal of the earlier President Trump’s reversal of Obama-era and earlier commitments to the Paris agreement and more. A more forceful and angry Trump administration will act more decisively than during his first term, and the costs of Biden’s misnomered Inflation Reduction Act, which includes many Net Zero policies, will be high on the agenda.

The war in Ukraine and steepening tensions between the west and the increasingly confident BRICS upstarts also make geopolitics very different today, compared with the era of ambitious global green policymaking. I keep saying that “its not 2005 any more” but that’s a good point to compare today with. At the time, China was a new member of the WTO, and its GDP was just an eighth of what it is today. Russia’s GDP, too, has tripled in the same era, making it, by some estimates, the fourth largest economy in purchasing-power-parity terms, ahead of both Japan and Germany.

Though championed by the United Nations, climate change is a categorically western preoccupation. The so-called “global south” and “emerging economies” have much bigger concerns than, for example, the woke-green G7. Back in 2005, it was possible for lofty British diplomats to strut around Beijing and Moscow, to elicit support for the UNFCCC process. But now, such “diplomacy” invariably means attempting to kick both new industrial powerhouses out of international institutions. Whereas climate change was, according to the UN, going to be the issue on which the world came together, it increasingly looks like the ground on which the world will divide. Even if the west sustains its preoccupation, it is unlikely that its diplomats will be able to persuade their counterparts.

Not that Russia and China ever had any meaningful commitment to the Paris Agreement, in any case. But now the chances seem much slimmer. A more likely outcome of the conflict in Ukraine and increased tensions between the west and Russia’s allies, is that they will continue to produce more energy and things that the world needs, and the world will continue buying it.

The international context is an extremely important to the UK climate agenda. When he was last member of the government, and with the climate change brief, Ed Miliband believed that the UK contingent to the COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen would impress the world with the newly-minted Climate Change Act — the first “legally binding” climate legislation in the world, boasted its authors and lobbyists. But China blocked a deal, complained Miliband, after the meeting collapsed into a bitter farce.

The dying years of the last Labour administration saw MPs almost unanimously support unilateral decarbonisation in the expectation that the rest of the world would follow. It has not. More recent UNFCC deals and the British interpretation of the Paris Agreement are similarly ignored. And according to the carbon bean counters at Climate Action Tracker, not even the UK’s climate policies are sufficient to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees target — and no country is on track to meet their Paris Agreement obligations.

So if the next UK government were to increase its climate ambitions, it cannot expect the rest of the world to reciprocate its unilateral decarbonisation. The UK has led the world in increasing the tensions with the countries that the last Labour government blamed for the failure of climate negotiations. The same climate agenda seems to be tearing Europe apart, and opening the door to the “far right” climate change “deniers” in member states. The world is repolarising. And a global Net Zero deal looks significantly less likely than a third world war, which may be functionally equivalent.

Consequently, a Labour government may face increasing pressure to examine the following passage of the Climate Change Act

(1)The Secretary of State may by order—
(a)amend the percentage specified in section 1(1);
(b)amend section 1 to provide for a different year to be the baseline year.

(2)The power in subsection (1)(a) may only be exercised—
(a)if it appears to the Secretary of State that there have been significant developments in—
(i)scientific knowledge about climate change, or
(ii)European or international law or policy, that make it appropriate to do so…

The question will be how Parliament will respond to the very obvious fact that Net Zero is Britain’s suicide, which is increasingly unlikely to be a global pact.

4. The destruction of the Conservative Party

It was the consistently black-pilled Peter Hitchens who most famously proposed in the 2000s that the Conservative Party must be destroyed to end both atrophied legacy parties’ hold over British politics. He urged Conservatives to allow their party to collapse, hoping that this would in turn cause the implosion of the Labour Party, were it to win the 2010 General Election. Genuine political movements, capable of representing the country’s constituencies, would emerge into the space once occupied by these monoliths, he believed. Ahead of the looming Labour victory however, Hitchens has since withdrawn his injunction to Tories. He thinks that a Labour government is going to be really, really bad.

Others, however, think that his initial idea is correct. After all, we have to get rid of them somehow, and at some point. I am completely bored of enumerating the Conservative Party’s failures, and cannot see how it can be wrestled from those who control it, to save it, even if reason could be found to make anyone want to. And I cannot see why anyone would want to. It is manifestly a corpse… A zombie party, animated only by strings connected to God knows what. The only good that the Conservative Party has done since 2010 it did because it was forced to by Nigel Farage parking UKIP tanks on its lawn, and by the public’s desire for a referendum. And even then, most of that party did all that it could to stop Brexit both before and after the referendum, and then failed to address the obstacles to delivering that choice, and then, when finally mounting a convincing promise to deliver Brexit, squandered its historic majority by descending into a Net Zero, car-banning, boiler-banning, Saudi-Arabia of Wind green blob circus.

Let it die. Let it die quickly, and soon. Let it be gone. And let’s cheer its departure.

5. There will be opposition in Parliament for the first time since the 1980s

Nigel Farage of the Reform Party looks set to take the seat of Clacton, enabling his entry into the House of Commons for the first time. Like or loathe Farage, there are none of his calibre in British politics, so capable of brutally holding a government to account.

For example, in 2005, Farage, with precise political terms, a solid grasp of history, and with clear purpose destroyed Tony Blair’s record as EC president, by listing his failures and how they reflected the failures of the European project itself. “You sit with our country’s flag” replied Blair, “You do not represent our country’s interest”. But Blair’s bluster was wrong, of course. It was he, Blair who did not represent our interest, and a decade later, Britain decided for itself what its interests are. All of Blair’s projects exist now only as so many corpses and so much rubble. Farage was ultimately the better judge of the public and the more persuasive political force.

The political era that is epitomised by Blair, but encompasses his predecessor, John Major, and successors all the way to Sunak, has been bland, technocratic, and built on false consensuses at the expense of democracy. There has been no disagreement of any substance between Labour and Conservative parties in that history. Governments and MPs alike privately convinced themselves that this was the product of this being a post-ideological era, but their radical designs for the transformation of society, including of course the climate agenda, were every bit as radical as the early 20th Century political movements.

Quango after quango was built to do the job that MPs once took responsibility for. The Bank of England was given “independence” — which as I have argued here previously, allowed it to become an annexe of the green blob. See for yourself — within the sphere of government, there are now 24 ministerial departments, 20 non-ministerial departments, 426 agencies and other public bodies, 112 high profile groups and 19 public corporations. And that is after several governments that promised a “bonfire of the quangos”. Into these agencies were stuffed countless cronies of the Blair regime.

One of the most obnoxious of these quangos was the Climate Change Committee. The Climate Change Act created the CCC, and tasked it with giving “independent advice” to Parliament, which ministers were obliged to consider and put to Parliament. Besides the sleaze, the CCC and its second chair, John Gummer, restyled as Lord Deben, made countless errors of judgement and outright lies. It epitomised the utter intransigence of green lobbyists: possessed by a sense of moral superiority and mission, but helping themselves under the cover of scientific infallibility. They were answerable to nobody, because MPs, unwilling and unable to enter into conversation of any kind with the public about climate and energy policy merely deferred to the CCC, while this constitutional anomaly required nothing of the CCC by way of accountability. Not for nothing, John Gummer thought of Parliament in fact answerable to himself, as the Chair of the CCC.

The constant failure of primary and secondary climate change, energy and industrial policies ought to have been the subject of continuous debate between perspectives across the floors of the Houses of Parliament. But debate there came none. Hence, we see now only a phony war of words between Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Claire Coutinho and her opposite, Ed Miliband. Coutinho argues that Labour’s spending plans will be reckless and bankrupt the country, whereas Miliband replies that policy failures are the result merely of the Conservative’s incompetence. But the parties offerings are identical, and are marked by cross-party consensus, as I have argued here countless times.

Farage has come under criticism for having been extremely late to the Lockdown criticism party, and even, following the last election, taking a role marketing carbon-offsets and calling himself an environmentalist. He was even seen banging his pots and pans for “our NHS” on that bizarre Thursday night spectacle, and calling for Tony Blair to lead a vaccination programme. What, then, beyond Farage, is Reform’s offering?

I am content to wait on that question, and to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Farage’s judgements while in retirement from politics, while disappointing, should not weigh as much as his judgement and actions while in office. Within months, Farage realised his error, and is confident enough to admit to mistakes convincingly. Whether or not Farage and Reform hit the right notes we all want to hear in political debates is besides the point; they are capable of representing vast swathes of excluded public opinion in the political mainstream. The detail can follow.

In other words, Farage himself is more capable than all the opposition parties 1997-2024 combine of actually being an opposition.

6. People are vastly more organised against the blobs

The most devastating imposition by the government, blobs, and academics bearing infection models met with no formal political opposition, and pathetically little criticism in the mainstream news media. It took a long time for the latter to find its feet, and soon faced censorship from the tech and media giants alike, and it has spawned an industry of censorship lobbyists.

But this helped focus people’s minds and their actions. Many were unwilling to accept official narratives and fake science as poor justification for draconian policies. they organised themselves. Now there are a constellation of genuinely independent podcasters and news organisations. And the way has been shown by many groups organising protests and supporting coordinating action at local and national levels to help focus the discussion on the grotesque excesses of contemporary politics.

Following lockdowns, LTNs and ULEZ/CAZs and the woke agenda have produced massive demand for alternative forms of political engagement than that offered by the tribal weirdness of mainstream party politics. It has united disparate political tendencies, from left to right, who agree that there is more at stake than pride in a political party that fails to represent the public interest. Groups such as Together have shown that the public can represent itself, and that the constraints of party politics should not limit public, democratic discussion. We don’t want the political agenda to be set by lofty, billionaire-backed fake ‘civil society’ organisations and their armies of zombie wonks; we want actual civil society to convene itself, from the public, to set the agenda, and to hold political parties to account.

Let us not leave the work of opposition to Reform or any of the challenger parties. Let’s not leave politics to Westminster. That is, in many respects, how we got here. Lockdowns showed us that DiY politics and news/discussion media are essential for restoring democracy and putting the public interest back at the centre of politics. It is up to us to show that the climate agenda is premised on ideology not science, that categories such as male and female are not for governments and ideologues to play with to suit whatever dark ideological (or worse) agenda they are toying with, and that the suspension of society for the sake of computer models must never be allowed to happen again. Governments and political parties are not going to make those principles hold unless there is a proven caser that the public holds with them.

It is early days, of course. And the quality of independent organisations and their arguments varies massively. But actually independent organisations, free from their funders’ agendas can demonstrate both far greater expertise than ersatz academics and bogus think tanks, and much greater resonance with the public. Out of the destruction and chaos of lockdowns and the Net Zero agenda, the possibility of broad-based genuine civil society has been shown. All that it requires is that people, realising that politics will again degenerate without public engagement, volunteer their time and whatever resources can be gathered.

7. The media ecosystem is more politically diverse — despite attempts to shut it down.

The BBC’s flagship news programme on Radio 4, Today, lost over a million listeners in the year to May 2023 — figures that worsened into last autumn. BBC TV’s current affairs programming also recently received budget cuts intended to save nearly £8 million in the face of devastating audience losses. This reorganisation led, among other things, to the creation of the notorious fake news outfit, BBC Verify, with its trademark smearing, a la Miliband, which can only have succeeded in convincing more people of the contempt that the de facto state broadcaster has for its remaining audience. They have continued what Miliband has started. But they are essentially fighting not as much ‘deniers’ as their own collapsing authority. Keep up the good work, Marianna!

Meanwhile, fellow woke broadcaster, and once the beacon of innovate, politically-diverse, challenging and — would you believe it — fun (!!!) and interesting (!!!!!!!!!) TV programming, Channel 4, now struggles to achieve more than 5% share of the audience. It blames a loss of advertising revenue. But we all know that the truth is go woke go broke.

There are now consistent offerings in the mainstream from the likes of TalkTV and GB News. Yes, they are sometimes frustrating. But the outputs from these stations was inconceivable throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

Furthermore, as is discussed above, there are the challenger and outsider media organisations. TNT Radio gives a voice to many from outside the mainstream. And one-time Youtubers such as Carl Benjamin’s Lotus Eaters as well as individuals broadcasting via Youtube, Rumble, Odysee are capable of drawing audiences larger than the major mainstream broadcasters.

Conclusion: uniting the vast excluded majority.

Politics is too important to leave to political parties. We have seen what complacency and allowing parties to fester at the whims of private interests and weirdo ideologies can do to us, to our interests, and to our children. The terrible lessons of the last five years have seen the machinery of the state batter away at reasonable expectations of life, to make people feel uncertain about their futures, to cower from viruses, slightly different weather, and Russians in the hope that we will sacrifice our interests for their protection. They have sought to disorient and divide people by invoking false racial guilt and by dissolving categories of experience such as “gender”. But as the seven points above argue, in response, people have come together to reject these sinister interventions.

The looming election, just three days away is going to be produce an anomaly: a massive majority for what will surely be the most chaotic, disoriented and unpopular government in our history. As miserable as such a prospect may seem, it is an opportunity to build on what has been achieved over the last electoral cycle, which similarly saw a large parliamentary majority, despite expectations, put to no good end, but was merely squandered on self-service.

So let’s go into that election and the next parliamentary term with our eyes open, but with determination — rather than dull hope — to build on what has already been achieved. Parliamentary arithmetic is all but completely irrelevant at this point. It is what and who are outside of Westminster that will count.

There are more of us than there are of them. They may have immense funds. They may have the prestigious institutions and well-connected establishment vehicles. But ultimately, the public are increasingly aware that such things are, so to speak all fur coat and no knickers — or all hat and no trousers, if you prefer. We can build our own institutions to rival those captured by blobs. We can make our own radio and TV shows. We can write our own books and articles. We can be our own think tanks. And we can set our own priorities for politics, and force them into Westminster. There has never been such an opportunity as the next five years.