Britain’s Marxist prospective future Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, has outlined his plans for the red-green terror which will engulf the world’s fifth-largest economy come the revolution.
These include:
Eradicating economic growth; destroying British industry; killing millions of jobs by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.
Citizens Assemblies — a bit like the ones they had in the French Revolution — deciding how business is allowed to be run.
We know this because John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition, has used a May Day speech to declare he “completely” supports Extinction Rebellion — the eco-fascist campaign group whose activism recently brought parts of London to a standstill for ten days.
Speaking beneath revolutionary red banners and posters celebrating three of the 20th century’s most prolific mass murderers — Mao, Stalin, and Lenin — Marxist McDonnell said:
“We [Labour] have brought Extinction Rebellion in to start advising us on how we tackle some of these issues. We’ve already developed our own proposals for a Green New Deal… It is about an industrial strategy that confronts the fourth industrial revolution but actually makes it green. Everything we’ve heard in recent years but more importantly everything we’ve heard in recent weeks from Extinction Rebellion is demonstrating we are running out of time.”
This is the apotheosis of a threat I warned of in my book Watermelons: the way, increasingly, a hard-left agenda aimed at destroying the capitalist system is being advanced behind a cloak of caring, fluffy, concerned environmentalism.
McDonnell, perhaps more than anyone, embodies this menace: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Were his plans enacted, of course, it would bring about the death of the British economy. Carbon dioxide is a by-product of every industrial process; Britain’s energy economy is still primarily underpinned by fossil fuels, with intermittent, heavily subsidised renewables only providing a small fraction of the total; motor transport is still overwhelmingly petrol- or diesel-driven. Shifting to 100 per cent renewables by 2025 — as Extinction Rebellion is demanding — would be quite literally impossible without causing catastrophic damage to Britain’s jobs, international competitiveness, energy security, standards of living, credit rating, and economy.
Tempting though it is to dismiss this as the lunacy of Red-Green ideologues who don’t stand a prayer of getting near the reins of power, there is, unfortunately, a very real prospect that Jeremy Corbyn and his even grimmer sidekick McDonnell could soon be forming Britain’s next government.
It ought to be an impossibility: Britain is a tolerant, “small c” conservative country not given to revolutionary fervour. Why would the generally sensible British electorate ever vote into power a bunch of Marxists who campaign shamelessly under the banner of Mao and Stalin, who brought untold misery to their countries and who, between them, were responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people?
Why, given the 1,800 of their men, women, and children slaughtered in bombings and targeted assassinations by the IRA, would the British support a party whose leaders have repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for this terrorist organisation?
Why, given Britain’s traditional support of Israel and the Jews — including the children rescued from the Holocaust by the Kindertransport programme — would people vote for a party riddled with anti-Semitism?
Why, given the appalling suffering meted out to the Venezuelan people by the vile Marxist regime of Maduro — which is now allowing its APCs to run over protesters just like the Chinese Communist Party’s tanks did in Tiananmen Square — would they vote for a party which still supports the Maduro regime and thinks the U.S. is the enemy?
Why, given that the mass rape of underage white girls by Muslim gangs took place mostly in Labour constituencies, would turkeys vote for Christmas?
Why, given the ongoing threat posed by Islamist terrorism, would anyone vote for a party led by someone who describes the terrorist organisation Hamas as his “friends” and who once laid a wreath at the shrine of one of the terrorists responsible for the Black September massacre at the Munich Olympics?
The answer is that in normal times the majority of British people wouldn’t. But these are not normal times.
Britain is currently experiencing a perfect storm of political chaos — largely the result of a Conservative administration so incompetent, weak, vacillating, scared, and obdurate that it has created a power vacuum which all manner of extremists have been able to exploit.
In the last few weeks, Britain has fallen victim to a carefully orchestrated green coup in which the very well-organised activists of Extinction Rebellion played Mister Nasty in cahoots with Greta Thunberg playing the Miss Nice role of the fresh-faced little girl with pigtails whose fears for the planet everyone just had to heed.
Instead of standing up to this leftist threat — as any self-respecting Conservative administration should have done — the Government has sought desperately to curry favour with its natural enemies in the misguided belief that somehow it has found a happy, feel-good subject which will distract voters from the cock-up it has made of Brexit.
Hence my crossness yesterday with my old friend Gove. By endorsing this enviro nonsense, his government really is playing with fire. Instead of staving off the Corbyn threat, it makes it more likely than ever that the grassroots will simply refuse to vote Conservative.
With the environment, as with Brexit, people in the Westminster bubble are completely out of touch with where the people are.
Take the Committee on Climate Change, run by the egregious and suspect Lord Deben (who still, amazingly, has not been sacked).
It has recommended that Britain — already heaving under the weight of the pointless and expensive Climate Change Act — adopts a Net Zero emissions target by 2050.
As the Global Warming Policy Foundation points out, this is frivolous and irresponsible.
The recommendation of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) for a Net Zero emissions target by 2050 is grounded in nothing stronger than irresponsible optimism and arbitrary assumptions about cost and technological feasibility. In point of fact, the technologies seen as necessary, including carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), further expansion of renewable generation, widespread adoption of hydrogen, and the very rapid electrification of the UK’s entire heating and transport systems, are either known failures or are unproven at these scales and would cost two to three times the amounts claimed by the CCC. Attempts to deliver these policies would ultimately fail, but in the attempt the UK would further harm its already declining productivity, and so erode the UK’s ability to compete internationally and thus deliver an acceptable standard of living for its people. This is not a sustainable low emissions strategy, and even if accepted by government is very likely to end only in humiliating and distressed policy correction. A wise government would reject this advice.
What’s the betting the Government goes ahead with these recommendations anyway — and ends up ushering into power a bunch of terrorist-supporting, freedom-hating, economy-killing, Jew-bashing, Gaia-worshipping Marxists?