Boris Johnson is perfectly serious about his plans to take away your petrol car, raise fuel duty in the meanwhile, and generally drive you off the road. It’s all part of his much-vaunted ‘green revolution’ which is coming your way whether you like it or not.
One day, not so far hence, we are going to survey the wreck of what was recently the world’s fifth or sixth-largest economy, the landscapes and seascapes ravaged with solar panels and bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes, the ever-increasing array of pettifogging eco-regulations and low carbon taxes imposed by bureaucrats, the restrictions on travel, the ruinous energy prices, the constraints on liberty and we’re going to ask ourselves: ‘When did I vote for any of this eco-fascist crap?’
The answer is that you didn’t. Where green issues are concerned, there is a massive democratic deficit — between the green hell that a narrow elite want to impose on you and the old normal which is what most people actually want.
How did this happen? Since when did Britain’s economic wellbeing and freedoms get to be decided not by the majority but by unrepresentative extremists like the hair-shirt loons of Extinction Rebellion? How on earth can Boris Johnson’s administration claim it has a popular ‘mandate’ for this far-left nonsense?
The answer lies in a Potemkin institution you’ve barely heard of called the UK Climate Assembly. As Ben Pile describes in a shocking report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation it was created in order to ‘circumvent democracy.’
Far from being representative of the popular will, it is in fact just another pressure group by the green lobby, comprising the usual eco-fascist suspects: activists, left-wing academics and politicians pushing a green agenda which most British people would find repellant and unacceptable.
Its purpose was to create the illusion that the government had a popular mandate for its Net Zero carbon emissions policy. As the report notes:
Following the publication of the report of the UK Climate Assembly in September 2020, one of its ‘Expert Leads‘, the Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) at the University of Bath, Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, said: ‘This report gives a clear mandate to policy-makers for bold action to tackle climate change’. Another Expert Lead, the Chair of the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC), Chris Stark, said that the assembly ‘has shown there is broad support for climate action in the UK’, and that the CCC would draw on the views in its report when issuing its next batch of advice to government on the Sixth Carbon Budget.
Note that these ‘Expert Leads’ are nonentity apparatchiks with chairs in non-subjects at minor universities or at government Quangos. They are grey and pointless but fanatical and committed. They are zealots, not neutral parties, and their claims ought to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.
We know this because of a document quoted elsewhere in Pile’s report. It was a 2018 report produced for the Green Alliance by yet another of those activist nonentity professors, Rebecca Willis of the University of Lancaster. What it showed is though the public are well-disposed towards nature and the environment, they’re not at all interested in the radical lifestyle changes which greens insist are necessary for our ‘sustainable’ future.
One MP told her, ‘I’ve knocked on hundreds, literally thousands of doors, and had tens of thousands of conversations with voters…and I just don’t have conversations about climate change’. Another said, ‘I can’t remember the last time I was asked about climate change. It’s very rare to be asked about it.’ Willis observes that ‘for the overwhelming majority of people, climate change is a non-issue’ and that research ‘suggests that climate change is of low importance to voters’, adding that MPs ‘report limited interest from their constituents, and indicate that they need to find ways to make climate action relevant to the daily lives and concerns of the electorate’.
This, then, was the government’s challenge: to create a popular mandate for its green revolution where none existed. It goes some way to explaining one of more curious phenomena of recent months: the remarkably different policing methods applied to XR protests compared to the ones used to anti-lockdown protests.
You’ll remember that the various Extinction Rebellion demos in London and elsewhere sometimes lasted days at a time, jammed thoroughfares such as London Bridge, and caused millions of pounds worth of economic damage to business as well as to the taxpayer through inflated policing costs. Yet for most of these protests, the demonstrators were treated with extraordinary leniency, even when engaging in wanton acts of vandalism like digging up the lawn of a Cambridge college. Rather than arrest them, the police appeared more eager to court their favour, like the copper on London Bridge who thought it would be a cool idea to impress them with his skateboard skills.
Now contrast this with the swift, brutal and often heavy-handed tactics used more recently against anti-lockdown protestors. The anti-lockdown protests have been almost totally peaceful and have sought to avoid doing any damage. Yet fully-kitted-out riot police have physically assaulted these peaceful demonstrators – and sometimes actively provoked violence by charging into crowds and singling out protestors, women especially, for rough treatment.
The contrast makes little sense until you read Pile’s report. Reading between the lines, it seems that XR got off lightly because they were pushing at an open door; that is, XR were demanding policies which the government was keen to introduce anyway. Consider, for example, this quite chilling encounter between a child activist from XR and the-then Environment Secretary Michael Gove.
In April 2019, five months after the first protest, some of XR’s members were invited to meet then Environment Secretary Michael Gove at DEFRA’s offices. Opening the discussion, its youth representative, 14-year-old Felix Ottaway O’Mahoney, told Gove that rather than realising his ambition of becoming a musician, he, his family and his friends were ‘in the streets, begging for a future’, because they otherwise faced a future of ‘war, famine and mass natural disasters’. Rather than challenging the child’s bleak and scientifically groundless beliefs, Gove told his guests, ‘I absolutely agree with you that the scale of action required is significant and the need to accelerate the scale of action for our undertaking is urgent’, and that ‘initiatives like a citizens’ assembly can play a very, very valuable role in bringing in a wider level of public support.’
This incident is all the more disturbing in light of a report produced three months after that meeting by Richard Walton, the former head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command. Walton described XR as dangerous extremists whose demands, if enacted, would cause huge damage to the country.
Walton wrote:
Those encountering Extinction Rebellion should be under no illusions about just how destabilising and extremist their agenda is. Not only is it unclear how their three formal demands could realistically be satisfied, but also it appears unlikely that their actions would end even if government committed to trying to implement them. The words of Extinction Rebellion’s founders and its posts on social media make clear that the objective is system change. This means bringing down our existing democratic system—which several of the campaign’s leading figures hold in contempt—and causing rapid economic disaster for the country. The proponents of this course of action have no serious explanations for how the country would function if their demands were implemented.
Ironically, the report was written for the think tank Policy Exchange which Gove himself co-founded. Gove has never explained why it is that the organisation his think tank condemned as ‘destabilising’ and ‘extremist’ has yet effectively been allowed to dictate Conservative government policy.
Britain is heading towards eco-dictatorship. It is being nodded through by a relatively small, influential cabal which includes Boris’s animal rights activist girlfriend Carrie ‘Princess Nut Nut’ Symonds, their close friend Environment Minister Lord [Zac] Goldsmith and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove.
Unless something is done to derail their plans, Britain is going to get a lot more expensive and less free, many more jobs will be lost and businesses destroyed, and the environmental damage done by all those extra wind turbines will be hideous to behold. But hardly anyone appears to be paying attention to their skullduggery or exposing their wily ruses. It is long past time we did.
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