Giving you the man...

On Sky News this morning a panel of what I can only describe as ‘ordinary’ people, that is the uninformed and hard of thinking, gave their opinions on the floods in Cumbria. They described this event – utterly normal for one of the wettest places in the UK – as ‘the real face of global warming’. No question at all, this event feeds their confirmation bias and therefore must be utterly true. They then went on to declare, again without question, that this winter will be ‘the coldest on record’. Given that the severity and duration of the rainfall wasn’t forecast even a week ago, this is taking faith in an uncertain science to the extreme.

Fuelling the fire, the climate talks in Paris are stoking up the boilers to bursting point and just watch how every extra degree up or down on any particular day will be reported as ‘unprecedented’. They can even predict both warming and cooling from the same data sets and simply state, if challenged, that ‘it’s complicated’. While a tiny sample of the human race achieves astonishing technological feats it is as if that advancement must be balanced by the rump of populous becoming ever more stupid. (By stupid, I don’t mean unintelligent, I mean as in the Latin stupere: 'to be stunned or benumbed'.)

The potential of your children is being limited by teaching to agendas set by those with ever more limited ability to think independently. The misnomer of Comprehensive education is a dogma clung to like a bedraggled cat on a raft of driftwood with dry land in easy reach. Soon the feedback loop of state schooling will achieve two-tier education in a manner the ‘evil’ Grammar Schools could never manage. Grammar school kids are far more likely than others to question what they are told and far more likely to recognise that all the climate change ‘forecasts’ are nothing of the kind. Rather, they are after-the-fact summaries which seek to fit a cause to the effect.

Oh, I’m not a ‘climate change denier’; I’m just pretty sure I’ve seen all this before, both the climate change hysteria and the actual weather. It’s called memory. Now, I also know that memory can be manipulated and what better place to start than right at the beginning. The Jesuits said, “Give me the child...” and now the state is taking that principle and indoctrinating them to grow into adults with a pre-programmed set of beliefs and one of the most perfidious of them is that if we give something the label ‘science’ then it must be settled. The most perfect specimens of these model mule-citizens will be chosen to become teachers in turn.

No matter how many social laws the state introduces, the alternative to mass indoctrination will lie in the hands of private citizens; fee-paying schools and the continued supremacy of elites. Far from promoting unity and belonging, the proliferation of ever more heavy-handed tools to control the masses will only result in the powers residing in ever fewer hands. Democracy has been used very effectively so far to promote a divided society in the guise of inclusion. It won’t stop there.

Hotting up...

Ah, another week in Westminster and all is well with the lunatic world of those running Asylum Britain. Both Tory and Labour ex-Foreign Secretaries take a turn in the stocks for their apparent arrogance in accepting cash for access; didn’t we do all this before? But maybe it was a case of taking bullets for the team? Rifkind possibly intended to draw attention away from George Osborne reining back his promise to increase minimum wage to £7 an hour, which looks pretty shoddy compared to £5k a day, doesn’t it? And maybe Jack, the man of Straw, was keen to deflect attention from the astonishing announcement regarding a former cabinet colleague. 

Yes, that old dinosaur John Prescott has been dug up, dusted down, re-animated and brought out of retirement as an exhibit in the Unnatural History Museum – an example of the extinct hominid Homeo hullibilis on-the-pithecus – in order to be, wait for it, Ed Miliband’s special advisor ‘responsible for global warming’ by one report. I expect the lithe and sporty Mr P has been responsible for a fair portion of it over the years but it seems a little unfair to single him out as being entirely to blame. Mind you he can throw a mean punch so maybe this is the plan to engage climate change sceptics? Believe or Big John will lamp you one.

Because it is far more about belief than it is about science, isn’t it? And Red Ed falls hook, line and sinker for the climate change message, swallows unsubstantiable ‘truths’ wholesale and Oliver Twist-like, begs for more. Why? Because listen to the siren call to the young and impressionable: “Oh woe, woe and thrice woe,” they cry, “we have only five days to save the planet. The nasty grown-ups burned all our futures!” Even if this creaky Hollywood premise were true we are either too late, or else we can do too little - but think of the votes! Personally, I genuinely don’t give a fuck because all that I am will die with me in a couple of decades from now, long before any changes will affect my lifestyle.

Except for one thing. Miliband’s absurd target will only make it more expensive, year on year. He says “The next Labour government will commit Britain to making our electricity supply carbon free by 2030.” Does he have the first inkling of a clue about how anything works? Of course not. A schoolboy Marxist he thinks all things come from the state and is prepared to repeal the natural laws if necessary to turn policy into personal hardship for millions. He has no clue about physics, meteorology, chemistry, biology, or anything else not covered in the Oxford PPE syllabus and in his ignorance will happily make you pay for every madcap gimmick the Green gurus will dream up and petition him to adopt.

In Labour’s wonderland, new technology must miraculously appear without the intervention of humans. Humans who create carbon dioxide (Prescott alone has a carbon footprint the size of Hull) and all the animals we eat, which create carbon dioxide and the minerals we mine, transport and process using fossil fuels which emit carbon dioxide. There is no such thing as zero-carbon energy unless we rely on direct sunlight alone and preferably don’t employ any of that energy to create even more humans.

Simple Gore-geous!

But beyond simple ignorance there is a massive hypocrisy in Labour’s pursuit of green credentials and it is the little matter of one of Labour's raisons d'être - equality. In the bright red future, only the very wealthy will be able to afford heat and light and transport and technology and just as now the very wealthy will be able to choose how much they want to pay in order that the rest of us may have a share. From sunny, tax-free climes they will occupy the choicest spots on the planet and watch as the rest of us shiver in the dark. Somebody said, as a joke “What if we run out of renewables?” Would anybody dare bet that couldn’t happen under Labour?

Sunday Supplement

I almost feel sorry for politicians. Almost. I mean where DO you get your economic advice from? From the hoi-polloi who are mere cogs in the machine, the spare parts that come together to make it all work? Or the highly paid experts employed without restraint, their every pronouncement treated uncritically? Or the lobbyists paid to reward you for a favourable nod? Given that the great majority of the population have to live with the worst outcomes of government policy you might think they’d ask the electorate more often, especially as none of the experts seemed to see the crash coming even though ordinary people had been wondering for a decade how come the non-working family over the road had acquired several mortgages and a 4x4.

Throughout history most parts of the world have experienced what could be termed ‘natural disasters’. Floods, droughts, landslip, earthquakes and even bushfires are all part and parcel of living on earth. And every nation, every community has its memories – often living memories of ‘The Great Flood’ or the ‘The Great Drought’. So, naturally the politicians are going to turn to the record keepers at local and national level before coming – or jumping – to any conclusions. But no, instead of asking the people who live with it, they once again turn to the advice of ‘experts’ who concoct some vast eternal global theory to explain a localised, short-term event.

I would trust those with stewardship of the land every time before I placed trust in a theorist who has never donned a pair of wellies. And so, probably would you. Which is why it is even more unfathomable why these people are always the very last to be consulted, although I think I know why. By the time the politicians ever get to ‘the spot’ the damage has always been done - why would you leave Westminster if there isn’t a problem? And, powerless to actually do anything, these same politicians are only going for selfish reasons; to LOOK as if they care. And when they get to ‘the spot’ they find that everybody there is very angry with them, not only for doing nothing beforehand, but for daring to show their useless faces after the event.

Bewildered, the poor souls are driven to apologise for something they had nothing to do with, accept some crackpot reasoning, pre-briefed by their experts and resolve that ‘something must be done’ hoping that whatever that thing is, that they only just heard about, they at least pronounced it correctly on national television. Job done, they then hop aboard their helicopters and head back to Party HQ to watch themselves on the news. It rarely ends well. While a locally born and bred MP may have already been genuinely helping out, nobody asked for and nobody wants a safe-seat, quota-satisfying airhead getting in the way. So once the sound bite has aired the nasty journalists then cut to bitter locals decrying the arrogance of the gobshite they were prevented from confronting directly.

The expert solution...

“Why did nobody tell me this would happen?” ask the confused politicians, “How could you let me make such a twat of myself?” and “I STILL don’t know what that means!” No sensible person would expose themselves to such ridicule as a Philosophy, Politics and Economics graduate does when out of his depth. But the rule of the expert holds firm and true. Just as climate ‘experts’ can’t predict the weather and economic ‘experts’ can’t predict the future state of the economy, political ‘experts’, it seems, know absolutely fuck-all about politics. Isn’t it about time we just stopped listening to the experts altogether?

(For what it's worth the Met Office agrees with me about the floods. Click here.)