What Has the Industrial Revolution Ever Done for You?

Much talk at CoP27 about paying for ‘loss and damage’, couched in the terms of reparation for the evil done to the current climate by we bastards in the developed world. In particular, Britain, the crucible of modern civilisation, comes in for massive criticism. As Greta Thunderthighs herself might say, “How dare we!?” But must the ‘sins’ of the father always be visited upon the sons? Just like the eternal nagging of the BLM movement, it is always somebody else’s fault, isn’t it?

Well bollocks to that, all of it. If you feel that you have been punished for an accident of your birth, why should it be somehow just for others to be punitively berated for their slightly more advantageous accident? The pursuit of equality – such an outcome being impossible to both describe and to bring about – invariably take the form of handicapping talent or good fortune. Of course life is unfair, it’s a roll of the dice, but if you try to hobble the winners eventually they take their game elsewhere.

It is literally madness if you seek help to come threatening violence (or, as we call it now, invasion by mass immigration). The industrial revolution brought you roads, medicine, industry, a means of escaping agrarian poverty and mere subsistence. It brought you communication and education and reduced your death tolls immeasurably. And, in fact, despite your perceptions and prognostications about extreme weather events, fewer people today, across the entire plant, lose their lives due to the effects of climate.

Life expectancy in what we used to call the third world is greatly increased, and with prolonged better health, as a result of which, your populations grow. And because so many of the supposedly ‘most vulnerable’ live in societies where procreation appears to be a competition, if mankind is the driver of climate change, then it is these countries where the future problem lies.

Just as the movers and shakers of the Industrial Revolution brought solutions to the economies and the health and welfare of the world, it is those same advanced societies which are doing the most to ameliorate the effects of former industrial processes. The solutions do not lie in sub-Saharan Africa, nor in China, Brazil, India or even the appallingly backward provinces of Pakistan, one of those most vocal in their condemnation of Britain's unintended malice.

None of these countries will be in the vanguard of future advances in combatting the effects of climate change. Instead they will play the bigger part of making it all worse, as they demand we reduce our emissions simultaneously with them acquiring all the means by which to increase theirs. It will be Britain and the US and Germany and the Nordic countries which will drive progress, not them. Reparations? They should be paying us.

A Fair COP?

In a world where ignorance and incompetence rule the day it was only natural that the charisma vacuum known as Keir Starmer would want to capitalise on both with this ridiculous article in The Guardian in which he attacks Rishi Sunak’s stance on COP27. The Guardian readership, that well established echo chamber of leftist thought, that self-regarding intelligentsia will likely lap it up, but will they either understand it, or challenge its trite and simple lies?

It is all very well saying that Labour would bring about an economic and energy miracle that has defeated the best minds of the most capable countries in the world, but where is the policy, the detail? In every case where Labour says they would do better, that their solutions are ‘fully costed’, that they would bring peace and prosperity, the solution seems to hinge far more on simple faith than hard science.

Goons like Richard Burgon keep bleating on about wealth taxes, with no real argument as to what they mean by wealth. Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, likewise, has never been quick to publish the means by which Labour would reverse the declines in our fortunes. And Starmer himself is a mere, adenoidal talking head, repeating the mantra of opposition: we will make it better, but we can’t tell you how. ‘We will be better than them’ has never sounded anything other than infantile.

100% ‘green’ energy by 2030 sounds great, but it is not possible without redefining what you mean by ‘green’. The target he is proposing is at best an accounting fraud, but it gets nowhere that good. It would mean off-shoring our CO₂ emissions by a combination of shifting even more industry abroad and by counting some emissions as ‘better’ than others. Drax, for instance, gets away with both and despite it creating more CO₂ than when it burned coal, it counts as zero because it burns wood. (The carbon-neutral cycle it claims to be part of has a cycle time measured not in tens but in hundreds of years.)

To get to where we need to be, we need a better educated population – that’s a timescale of a generation, or more likely two. To get towards zero emissions we need reliable technology at an affordable price and thus we can rule out the contributions made by average families. Those of you luxuriating in your off-grid, low-energy, prosumer (producer and consumer – yes, it’s a real word now) world where you hand knit your own electricity from golden yarn spun from the sun’s rays can pat yourselves on the back all you like – it will probably take the lifetime of the tech to negate the environmental cost of creating it.

The bare facts are that if the world genuinely takes climate change and the role of CO₂ in creating it seriously, then the world needs to work together. Starmer is right about that. But if he thinks that in a mere six years, assuming he takes power in 2024, his motley bunch of angry class warriors are going to bring that about, he is either spectacularly stupid, or fundamentally dishonest. If he wanted to do what he says he wants to do, he would be better to join forces with, rather than attack, the government of the day.

Blaming the Conservatives for the globalist economic mess gets us nowhere. ‘Holding government to account’ is a hollow, meaningless phrase trotted out for the tabloids. The very language of opposition is mere petulant foot stamping. And as for all the supposed green jobs, they are already there, in China, in India, in Korea, in Germany. But they are not coming here and are not likely to come here; the UK's net-zero future is a fairy-tale and all the initiatives have already been taken by others. World leading in green energy, my arse. 

Let this sink in

 See how it works yet? Let that sink in. I’ll wait. But you knew that, right? The social media shorthand for “Even though I know nothing about you, I’m confident I know far more than you know… about everything.” is getting tedious, amirite? But seriously, I was once told that if you are under thirty and hold a firm political opinion, that opinion is almost certainly not your own. The polarisation of politics lends itself to this thoughtless accepting of the ‘facts’ belonging to your side of the argument and rejecting all others.

The same laziness occurs with language; it is far easier to simply repeat what others have said than to craft original sentences of your own. We all do it. We do it with headlines, with jokes, with pithy phrases, no matter how ludicrous, to the extent that the dictionary people now contend that literally doesn’t have to mean literally… literally. And superlatives are flung around carelessly, rendering them worthless.

We inhabit a linguistic world of repeated and regurgitated slogans and soundbites, often deployed clumsily and inappropriately, and almost always without considering how it makes us look. It’s as if people now speak in the language of the Super Soaraway Sun’s headline gagsters. Footballers have been mangling the language for years, but some of their gaffes of previous decades now rank as deep philosophical commentary in comparison to what social media has done to our communication. Sick as a parrot. Literally gutted.

Add to that the effortless ability to believe contrary things, just so long as they sound like things we should believe in and you get the idiocracy that is the developed world. Daft ideas, illogical ideologies and plain stupid assertions go unchallenged because they are couched in the language of instaneity. Accept and move on; even better, add your own borrowed understanding – it’s the science, stupid – and pretend to yourself that ‘your’ opinion matters.

You can't both be right.

As a result of all this, threads on social media rapidly descend into simplistic garbage whereby everybody appears to know exactly what the other side is really thinking, and everybody appears to have a quick-fix solution to every problem. Thus it is apparently possible to fix the economy by both spending more while spending less, by contracting the state and by expanding the state, by limiting immigration and by throwing the borders wide open.

I can read Twitter, but I can’t engage with Twitter, which means that, no matter how much my urge to wade in with my two-penn’orth, I have to sit back and just watch the threads play out. And what an education that has proven to be. From the sidelines you really can see the inanity which both sides bring to any discussion. If only I could force myself to exercise such a taciturn position in face-to-face discussions I would seem the wisest man in the room. See how it works, yet?

PS: It seems I can no longer even read Twitter now. 🤷‍♂️

Get Me Out Of Here

 Matt Hancock going on I’m a Celebrity is not just an example of an elected official being tone deaf, it is an outright insult to his electorate and evidence, if evidence were needed, that politics has become a joke. Some are justifying this appearance as a modern-day stint in the stocks – for sure he is going to be regularly voted to perform like a clapping seal – but what have we become that this sort of action can even be seen to be acceptable?

Politicians have long had to live down the strong public notion that they are only in it for what they can get out. This sort of clowning only helps to demonstrate how shallow some MPs can be and how little they appear to care about those they nominally represent. The Tories in particular are seen as the party of corruption and back-handers. Such public displays of frivolity will do nothing to quell that image.

Following the row after Nadine Dorries’ appearance one would have been forgiven for imagining that said appearance had put paid to this sort of nonsense. Boris Johnson notwithstanding we don’t want our public figures to make displays of themselves, and Hancock has none of the charisma of the bumbling blonde bombsite. He is going to make an utter twat of himself, isn’t he? But does that even matter?

The sort of audience that these shows attract might have spectacularly short memories, and they are unlikely to have had a great deal of engagement in daily politics. So, there is a chance that Hancock might, bizarrely, gain some support. There is even talk of ‘the next phase in his career’, whatever career that may be. But if this does, indeed launch him into another means of making a living, what an indictment of our national psyche.

For all the talk of politics and political ideology that I encounter, because I seek it out, I am aware that very much the majority of the population are left cold by it all. A well-placed headline, fact or fiction, will enrage them for a minute and some will cleave faithfully to the mast of whichever ship they have chosen, based entirely on prejudice and ignorance. That such people get to choose who is in charge has always baffled me.

Humans exhibit an incredible range of ability, from almost entirely useless and lazy, to incredibly gifted, talented and dedicated. Only the best of us should really be involved in the business of making it work for all. The average human being would be entirely unequal to the task. Please don’t tell me that Matt Hancock is among the best.

Migration Miracle

 And just like that, we’re back to immigration, with every attempt to raise the subject in debate howled down by shouts of “Fascists!” and the blanket labelling of every Conservative as ‘far-right’. The left-biased media is awash with commentary and Suella Braverman is on every front page being variously compared with Enoch Powell, Nigel Farage and I’m sure, Hitler. Welcome to the same old war.

Immigration, good or bad, is too simplistic to be of any use. The net benefit argument is of no relevance here, neither is the “my grandparents were immigrants” line, because we are not talking about invited, necessary talent and manpower. We are talking about the highly visible channel crossings, and before that the lorry crossings, of people we know little about. People who, we often learn, have never been near a war zone, unless you count France.

But we’re not talking in any meaningful way, are we? The government need to be seen to be taking it all seriously, but the opposition merely want to oppose. In the guise of caring internationalism, hatred of the Tories is openly expressed and the lust for power is plain for all to see. The migrants are just as much political fodder for Labour as they are to the Conservatives, and still nothing is done to solve the very big problem of illegal, mass immigration.

No matter what ‘solutions’ are proposed they are quickly portrayed as exactly mimicking 1930s Germany, but what is absolutely unacceptable is simply welcoming them in, dispersing them around the country and letting nature take its course. Desperate people can quickly turn to crime, and the desperate people here are the UK citizens seeing their country change before their eyes. The last 20 years have witnessed unprecedented change and much of it deliberate.

If the government can’t come up with a way to deal with the problem – and let’s be blunt, it is a massive problem – the population will take it into their own hands. It is already happening, and it is beginning to look like societal breakdown. Resentment is not just stoked up by the rhetoric of one side, but by the vexatious interpretation of that rhetoric by the other. Will the next war in Europe be on our own soil?

Why can't we get past this?

We have enough problems right now, more than at any other time I can recall, yet the instincts of our leaders and their successors is to expend more energy on sloganeering than on action. Being able to recognise and deal with any one of those problems without turning every minute of every day into a political struggle would be a start. Being able to get round a table and discuss the migrant problem properly would be a minor miracle.