Our political parties raced to make Britain a “climate leader”, says Iain Martin in the Times. But they failed to plan for the bumps in the road and we’re all paying the price. Here’s how he starts.
Get ready to be bribed with your own money. The political parties are competing to show who can offer the biggest bailout to get through this winter’s energy shock. But do not be deceived about who really pays for the failure of Britain’s energy policy. We all do.
The old observation by Margaret Thatcher that the government does not have any money of its own to dispense is as true now as it was then. It only has what it collects from us in taxes and borrows on our behalf. Higher borrowing generally means higher taxes later.
I make this point not to suggest energy bailouts shouldn’t happen. They must. Without tens of billions in immediate assistance, many citizens will face distress and penury this winter. The winner of the Tory leadership race has no option other than to spend more on this to avoid social unrest.
But amid the clamour there is a game of distraction and blame-dodging going on. The main parties, all of them, and every arm of the state have a shared interest in avoiding a proper accounting for what went wrong. They all designed and cheered on Britain’s too aggressive race to net zero. With voters angry as the bills land, no one wants to admit their culpability.
Since the 2008 Climate Change Act, successive governments, urged on by the opposition – and the SNP and the Lib Dems – bet the house on getting to net zero quicker than anyone else. They gambled on Britain becoming a global leader in killing off carbon use and howled down anyone expressing concerns. And look where it has landed us.
Worth reading in full.
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Who’s updating the ‘not a conspiracy theory anymore’o’meter’ today? BBB guys.
“Work from home“ is so easy to operate in a factory environment, or a supermarket. Yet again the working man and woman are thrown to the wolves, to face this deadly virus in their places of employment, whilst the fucking civil service sit at home and pontificate about how they can spend all their ill gotten gains and sit around in the summer doing sod all. What complete arrogance and contempt.
‘this deadly virus’? Sheesh!
Yes indeed. Loose phrasing from beancounter, has needlessly spoiled an otherwise sound post.
Sorry all of you – it was a sarcastic use of those two words.
There was a large dose of sarcasm in that phrase.
Apart from the deadly virus bit I agree entirely.
Why is this anything to do with the government?
Oh!….because the civil service union makes it so…….
‘The government must not “under any circumstances” order civil servants in England to return to the office until Covid rates are cut, a union has said.
The PCS warned it would not rule out industrial action if this happened.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-57468916.amp
But this extended lockdown is nothing to do with the public sector, socialism, socialist fascism and so on……..
Can’t they all go on strike and get out of the way?
Things seem to run better when they’re not busybodying, or grafting.
If the entire civil service went on strike forever I suspect it would make fuck all difference to anything in “real” society.
What mystifies me is the people at the tip. I mean they literally handle everyone’s crap fur a living. But they’ve got a blinking booking system as though you’re going to see the bank fur a mortgage.
They won’t help you, even if you’re disabled. They’ve got some bulldog on the entrance with a clipboard and no compassion to those held up by traffic. Some people despised them before. Now they hate them.
They’re literally making sure that when the job cuts come, not one single local person will care that they’re out of a job. They’re outsourcing their job to us. Jerks!
It would be an investment to pay them, and the parasites at the local council, not to “work”.
I spent 20 years in the Civil Service and no government ever took any notice of threats of industrial action or indeed any industrial action. I fail to see why the genocidal fascists will take notice now.
Bozo and co let the teachers unions ride rough shod over our children’s education and continue to allow them to do so.
The whole story is Bozo Bullshit. In all probability the reality is that a law will be passed allowing ANYONE the right to work from home with the exception of supermarket employees.
The first rule of lockdown:
The true meaning of any government announcement is the inverse of said announcement.
What a load of tossers!
Oh great, I’m a steel erector can I force my employer t start home working arrangements
They want us working at home so they can keep us apart, to disrupt normal communication and connection with our fellow human beings. As with the 2 metre rule. As with the masks.
They want you working from home so they can outsource your job to some 3rd world shithole and reduce you to serfdom.
And turn those empty offices into blocks of micro-apartments for the trans-humanist inhabitants of the coming “smart cities”. The rest of us won’t be here to worry about it.
Yup.
aka the gig economy – if you are lucky.
Spot on.
Disrupt and make it easier to monitor communication.
“Oh dear, citizen, I see you’ve been questioning the Settled Science on Facebook again. That’s a big ding to your social credit score, which is a conspiracy theory and also a vital tool to fortify our democracy.”
Anyone with a long career in an environment where WFH is technically possible knows this is a bad idea even in such industries. We all learned so much from informal and impromptu “water cooler” discussions and the wisdom was passed on the same way as we became the older and wiser members of teams. We’d be much poorer for this. It’s short sighted corporate greed (much less spend on rent) and union laziness because we all know it’s a lot easier to slack off if you are so minded. I despair at this kind of stupidity. Hopefully wiser heads will win the day. There’s nothing wrong with flexibility but the presumption that our homes are our offices is flawed.
WasSteph – you have posited a deeply flawed proposition based on common sense.
It is not allowed.
Perhaps the binmen currently emptying bins for MPs could be the first group who demand to WFH.
Remember this time last year, when the same government were telling everyone to stop working at home and return to their offices.
Obviously the business interests of Costa and Starbucks are no lomger of any concern to them, and they are being to the wolves, the same way the hospitality sector.
Well I suppose they shoukd have bloody paid their taxes then.
Though actually instead of posting masks and going on demos, it strikes me that the quickest way to flatten this sombrero would be to boycott one big denizen and use a another. Depriving one of custom while collapsing the other under traffic.
We live in a matriarchy. This Covid episode is the Second World War for women. Rather than blow each others brains out in the trenches and the skies to take over the other guy’s country, we’ve gone on a massive clean-fest and given each other every excuse to nag and bitch at each other.
It’s been one big cathartic collective neurosis. We’ve blown up the nation’s credit card more than any war in our history over an enemy we’ve made up so we can all vent our collective feelings.
And what’s the victory prize? Getting to stay at home with the kids while pretending you’re a strong independent hero. What a win. We should all be very proud of ourselves. Something to tell the grandkids when you ask for them to pay for it.
I like this take.
Nailed it
Not this mater! Balls of steel and a wallet to match.
Which is to say I was up for approximately 6 weeks if this because the NHS is shithole staffed by psychos and clowns.
After that, the price was just too damn high. And has been ever since.
Brilliant
It won’t matter much for those companies who’ve offshored support e.g. TalkTalk to South Africa. That is, until those places decide that call centres should be home working, at which time the already-lousy services will disintegrate.
Companies may well lose business to those that still try to offer something. Either way, what was poor in many respects will only deteriorate more, but any company savings won’t reflect in reduced charges to customers.
In any case, these major changes in working practices could have been implemented years ago, and didn’t require Covid as a spur. Why weren’t they?
WFH, isn’t that another term for off shoring?
While I absolutely agree with A.Heretic that WFH paves the way to overseas outsourcing and inevitable redundancy (or at best the gig economy), it goes far deeper. This process is also a necessary step for WEF style globalism to take hold.
Millions of individual workers will effectively subsidise the state/company by offering their homes up as branches of the government/corporate octopus. They will pay for heating and lighting, and be responsible for additional insurances (and business tax) while shouldering responsibility for maintaining safety for a laptop/workstation containing (or at least linked to) vital corporate information.
Wherever work is outsourced there are security considerations, even minor ones, so it is inevitable that these weak connections will be probed and hacked, if not by business rivals or foreign governments (in the case of Civil Service or Security workers) then criminals and fraudsters. Protected office systems are far from secure even now, as has been shown by those cases that we do hear about, so how much more of an IT headache does WFH or outsourcing bring?
Of course WFH plays into the global agenda, which dispenses with such primitive notions as national economies and sovereign government security. And while a chorus of ‘what possible harm can typing reports, issuing communications and taking telephone calls from home make?’ – well it depends rather on what is in those reports or the information on the screen being used to compile those reports. How much easier is it for criminals (or agents) to kick down the door of 16 Laburnum Avenue, and threaten a worker to hand over information than it would be to get past strict office or Whitehall security? Why should individual workers take this risk to them or their families?
We can expect a corresponding raft of legislation to protect WFH, but this itself will inevitably be more intrusive into individual privacy of the rest of the population. There will be no divide between home and work, and corporate rules will become family rules. Indeed, monitoring, snooping and bugging will be commonplace, and as such slowly accepted as yet another price we have to pay for building back better.
All part of the plan to “green” the economy no doubt.
Coronavirus is truly the gift that keeps giving for the Globalist ecoloons.
All part of the agenda.
If you’ve spent the last year WFH then your job can and will be off-shored or automated very soon. In the not too distant future you’ll own nothing and be happy in your rented pod with your weekly UBI to buy your government approved rations.
government approved vegan rations, with no alcohol..
Notice the advertisments trying to persuade that remote working is an unalloyed joy and benefit.
Cui bono? … we’ve had Big Retail and Big Pharma. Now it’s Big Tech’s turn.
This isn’t a measured, controlled and sensible encouragement of WFH where appropriate – which would be progressive. Clearly something else.
The ‘Smile Free’ group are urging people to send an old mask to Boris Johnson with ‘I’m done”written on the front, preferably to arrive by Monday.
Mine was filthy as I found it outside and I wrote’ ?biohazard, found on the street’ on the back.
Mine is good for the environment because it doesn’t exist; never used one! Incidentally, the image at the top of the article will upset the Health & Safety at Work lot. No shortage of domestic injuries, after all. A big market for inspectors, insurers etc, unless they think it through.
OK, so we can relocate the Civil Service to Bangladesh. Tax rebates in the mail!
Send Matt Hancock to wfh. Have the PM work from Chequers or his constituency address. Have every Cabinet Minister work from their Constituency address and then let them decide if mandating wfh is a good idea.
In the case of Hancock I would hope that ‘WFH’ means ‘working from Hell‘. I can think of few more deserving of a good dose of brimstone and a hot demonic pitchfork up the Khyber.
No law change is required. It’s already possible to “request” full time working from home.
They cannot be ignorant of this. So what are they really proposing?
How does working from home help apprentices and new starters?