Well, that aged well, didn’t it?
Thank you to everyone who commented on my last column which explained my rationale for leaving the Conservative Party and supporting the #NoneOfTheAbove campaign.
In it, I referenced my disappointment with the drifting and timid leadership of Rishi Sunak. Lo and behold, he then went and said a few things that rather impressed me, not least on the issue of ‘green over-reach’.
What do I mean by that? Essentially, the crushing juggernaut that combines the increasingly intolerant environmentalist lobby, and certain corporate organisations – including the car industry – and which seeks to deliver arbitrary targets regardless of the hurt they cause ordinary people. As an aside, hats-off to Nissan UK, who reacted to Sunak’s statement by saying that by 2030, all its UK produced cars will be EVs.
These green Stalinists – from London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and his ULEZ, to Lord Zac Goldsmith – are so detached from the cost-of-living crisis that they think nothing of weighing down people and small businesses with greater and greater burdens in pursuit of their goals. And this means more taxes (the current tax burden is at its highest since the Second World War), more penalties for non-compliance and, inevitably, more resentment from those most impacted by the establishment’s whims.
As we saw with the draconian and politically-influenced Covid lockdowns (Matt Hancock – whatever became of him?), if Governments pursue an ambition without even considering, leave alone, measuring its costs, society as a whole will be damaged and distorted.
As The Spectator recently said: “Net-zero policies have the potential to wreak even greater havoc in coming decades.”
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not a climate change denier. I do believe in climate change, be it a natural cycle or affected by human activities. As an engineer, I weigh up facts and look to adapt accordingly. It’s what I do in business and in my private life.
But the pseudo-religious fervour attached to climate ideology I find to be both annoying, and sometimes distasteful. My doubts go as far back as Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and the fabled ‘Hockey Stick’ graph.
Scientific forecasts are sometimes wrong and certainly always need to be challenged. I’m old enough to recall that in the 1970s it was global freezing and new Ice Ages that were said to be imminent threats to humanity.
Attempts from the turn of this century onwards by Gordon Brown, the hapless Ed Miliband, the
legacy seeking Teresa May, and not
forgetting dear Boris, to
set uncosted and un-planned target dates was foolhardy and, in Governmental terms, grossly incompetent.
Although I’m a believer that the one legitimate role of Government is to fund and deliver new infrastructure, there are parallels here with HS2 where a lack of financial control, on the back of uncritical establishment support, has led to a white elephant of record proportions, with the associated lottery-winning salaries and pay-offs.
I don’t know when Sunak had his Damascene conversion by slightly, ever so slightly, loosening some of our green targets and seeking to balance the interests of households with those of the green lobbyists. Perhaps it was the ‘Just Stop Oil’ mob on his roof, but his rowing back on the net zero targets comes not a moment too soon.
In fact, were he a true Conservative, this should have been announced within his first month as Prime Minister.
Now we must take the initiative and start accurately calculating the real costs and benefits of the green agenda. Whether it be the end-of-life implications for batteries, solar panels and turbine blades, or the sourcing of raw materials, especially rare earth minerals, and the environmental impact of wind turbines on bird and marine wildlife, we need to reset this country’s net-zero conversation.
And just when, finally, are we going to crack on with Sizewell C – the single most important decarbonised energy in the country? Why, oh why, do our large infrastructure projects have to go through decades of interminable analysis with its associated bureaucracy and unnecessary delay?
But I’m not confident that that will happen anytime soon, either nationally or locally. Many of our councils are now led or influenced by the Green Party and so we are likely to see net zero theology taking precedence over pragmatic and evidence-based decision-making.
The bottom line is quite simple: with the economy in the doldrums, inflation and tax still at generational records, what will ordinary households across Suffolk and Norfolk be thinking when presented with the ever-increasing costs of a mad rush to net zero?
First published in the www.suffolkfreepress.co.uk on Thursday, October 5, 2023.
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