Richard Littlejohn has covered for the Mail the appalling new Energy Bill currently being rushed through Parliament, pointing out that, among other horrors, homeowners will be liable for jail for failing to install a hated heat pump. Here’s an excerpt.
Outraged at having to pay £12.50 a day for driving your ‘non-compliant’ car in Genghis Khan’s Ulez zone, or one of the other cynical low emissions rackets popping up everywhere? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The eco-maniacs are coming for your house next, as part of their deranged mission to make us all colder and poorer.
Under new legislation, which sailed through its third reading in the Commons this week, homeowners and landlords whose properties don’t meet Net Zero targets could be fined £15,000 and jailed for up to a year. Yep, you could end up behind bars if you fail to fit a heat pump.
While most reporting of the Energy Bill has centred on the Government’s shameful U-turn on allowing onshore wind farms, there has been scant coverage of the clauses which criminalise failure to comply with “energy efficiency” regulations.
If the Bill passes into law, it will provide for the imposition of “civil penalties” not exceeding £15,000 and “criminal offences” not exceeding 12 months’ imprisonment.
Anyone selling or letting a property must obtain an energy performance certificate. Inspectors will be given the power to order “improvements” and prevent the property being sold or let if they are not carried out to the letter.
Such improvements will include fitting heat pumps, loft insulation, double glazing and so-called “smart appliances”.
Compulsory installation of smart meters, fridges, washing machines, immersion heaters and so on, all connected to the internet, will allow the Government and the energy companies to monitor electricity consumption and switch off your supply if they think you’re using too much.
I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all there in Hansard, Parliament’s official record.
When the Energy Bill’s third reading came before the House this week, only a handful of MPs spoke out against it. Honourable mentions must go to Tory members, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Craig Mackinlay and Richard Drax. (Drax B, as he’s known in the trade.)
The rest of the Muppets sat on their hands, or retired to the subsidised bars and restaurants, as this sinister piece of legislation slithered its way through the session, virtually unopposed. Some of the more bonkers MPs even thought these draconian proposals didn’t go far enough.
Brighton’s Green MP Caroline ‘Here We Go Looby’ Lucas called for an immediate end to all gas and oil exploration on the bizarre grounds that this would free us from dependence on Vlad Putin?
Eh?
Ed Miliband moved an amendment which would have forced the National Grid to get rid of all fossil fuels by 2030.
Nurse!
Fortunately Mister Ed’s economic suicide prescription fell at the first hurdle. But Tuesday’s risible ‘debate’ only served to demonstrate just how comprehensively, and apparently irreversibly, our elected representatives have capitulated to the Net Zero nutcases.
When push came to shove, only 19 MPs voted against the Bill. So out of a grand total of 650, we must assume that 631 either couldn’t be bothered or genuinely believe turning homeowners into criminals in their insane crusade to cut the world’s carbon output by a piffling 1% is a proper way to behave in a modern alleged democracy. Do they really think people should be banged up for failing to fit a heat pump? And is this the desperate state to which a so-called Conservative Party — which is supposed to stand for individual liberty and a property-owning democracy — has been reduced?
Worth reading in full.
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A salient observation. Perhaps they should declare their interests in related branches of the trade, if it results in more use of legal processes!
The other (perhaps trivial) coincidence is that it is Guy Fawkes day in England on the same day as polling day across the pond.
I guess we all suffer to some extent when there is sloppy redefinition of anything, or using a word for more than one function rather than inventing a new, more precise, one. Consider the difference between Official Standards, Guidelines, Legal Requirements, optional compliance. When does it become a legal requirement to comply with this or that etc? Sometimes it depends on the practical outcome of an event, if it’s examined in an Inquiry of some kind.
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November….” – V
Underlying and overriding everything is, of course, Common Law, which is conveniently omitted by the article’s author (and most writers and lawyers).
Nice piece of reporting on the rotten to the core corruption of the vacuous, cackling puppet lady, complete with video explainer;
”KAMALA SOROS CORRUPTION: Kamala Harris as Attorney General refused to prosecute the George Soros owned OneWest Bank for over 1,000 violations of federal law. A one year investigation had uncovered evidence of widespread misconduct, but she refused to prosecute Soros and Mnuchin.
On March 19, 2009, a seven member investor group, IMB Holdco, led by Steven Mnuchin, which included billionaire George Soros, Christopher Flowers, John Paulson and Michael Dell purchased Independent National Mortgage Corporation (IndyMac Bank) of Pasadena, California for $13.65 billion from the FDIC and created OneWest from the remains of IndyMac.
In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by OneWest bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many thousands more.
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.
The previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.
George and Alex Soros continue to support Kamala Harris with millions of dollars. Alex Soros recently shared an image with Kamala Harris and wrote: “It’s time for us all to unite around Kamala Harris and beat Donald Trump. She is the best and most qualified candidate we have. Long live the American Dream!”
Elon Musk posted on September 17, 2023 “The Soros Organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of Western Civilization.” and posted on May 15, 2023 regarding George Soros “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” Elon Musk is correct and that is why he joined President Trump in the fight for America and humanity.”
https://x.com/SpartaJustice/status/1833215615450194364
I’m sure we’re all aware of these desperate and obvious tactics already, with regards to the rushed mass immigration in the U.S, courtesy of the Biden-Harris government. They need the votes so the more illegal migrants they can legalize speedily the merrier;
”The publicly-stated goal by almost all leaders of the Democratic Party is to legalize the ~15 million illegal migrants as soon as possible, as well as bring in tens of millions more.
That would immediately make all swing states deep blue, just like happened in California with the 1986 amnesty, turning America into a permanent one-party state.
This is the last real election if Trump loses.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1833349210818920783
So easy for illegals to vote in the upcoming election;
”Here is how easy it is for illegal aliens to vote in U.S. elections.
This is an intentional flaw in the system. It is a loophole created to defeat election integrity.
That is why Arizona is being *SUED* to ensure that illegal aliens don’t register to vote in our elections.
The fact that nearly ALL Democrats oppose the SAVE Act to ensure illegal aliens don’t vote in our elections is the HUGE RED FLAG that this is an intentional design flaw that facilitates voter fra*d.”
https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1833501427630497955
The quarter council (Bezirksverordnetenversammlung) of Berlin-Pankow has recently changed the bylaws for sports facilities to exclude members of the far right from the group of people being allowed to use them. That’s obviously based on a positivist interpretation of the nature of law, namely, law is whatever the people who can vote to create laws chose to make one and their power to create whichever laws they desire is only limited by their desire to legislate on something (Starmer’s proposed outdoor smoking ban would be another example of this category).
Under such a regime, individuals are in the fairly poor position of only being allowed to do what nobody has chosen to declare illegal so far and nobody can tell what will be declared illegal tomorrow. This could also be called slow motion totalitarianism: While the totality of everything is within the power of the law makers to regulate as they see fit, they haven’t yet gotten around to regulate a lot of things and individuals are thus still relatively free to do a lot of things (to wit: A ban on people speaking to other people they happen to meet in the streets was nominally in place during COVID).
Something like this can obviously not be called a free society. In a free society, the power of legislators to issue decrees must be limited according to some set of rules which respect Fuller’s inner morality of law and that’s how our political systems were supposed to work and did actually operate for a fairly long time. This only changed after Ferguson’s law (as in law of nature) “We will get away with it if we really want to!” was discovered in 2020.
The problem we’re facing is thus how to put the Ferguson positivists back into the place they were occupying prior to the Anything goes with COVID! outbreak. For this to be possible, we’ll need to neutralize their attempts to divide is into ever more splintered groups of factions warring for minor political advantages while being overseen by them.
It shall be interesting to see what caterpillars and beetles crawl out of the Kackler’s word-salad tonight.
I tend to find David’s essays too long to hold my interest but this one has been his best. It helped that I have a philosophy masters (mostly forgotten these days!), but I found it got to the essence of what’s been happening since “the madness” in a way that was genuinely enlightening. I’m sure this movement towards technocrat authoritarian rule has been building since the 90s, but it’s shown it’s hand in the last four years in a brazen, almost mocking way (think Khan) – for our own good, of course!
Have forwarded to my children
Perhaps David could write something on the difference between something being illegal and something being unlawful. It seems you can get away with acting unlawfully until you are dragged (expensively) to court. I think of unlawful arrest for example!
All these coincidences! I’m not sure I believe in coincidence any more!
If law is law only because it is possessed by an authority that can wield it, and that authority says it is law, has law become like fiat currency?
A piece of cotton paper or a piece of polymer has no intrinsic value. But if government says it has a value and everyone acts as if it does, it becomes money. What are the consequences if ‘law’ is thought of and used as such?