At the Telegraph this week, eyebrows were raised in response to comments from Labour Party backbencher Bill Esterson. The Chairman of Parliament’s Energy Committee, according to the paper, said that “people will ‘absolutely’ have to adjust their habits to meet the U.K.’s ambitious emissions goals for 2030”. This, said Political Correspondent Amy Gibbons, contradicts Keir Starmer’s statements at COP29 in Baku, that he did not want to tell people “how to behave” or “how to live their lives”. Is there anyone alive who believes Keir Starmer about anything?
If you didn’t know that Net Zero requires the public to adjust their habits, lifestyles and behaviours, then you probably have never looked in depth at any U.K. energy policy, much less the thinking behind it. Moreover, if one takes a broader view of the green agenda and its ‘successes’, it would be hard not to conclude that the only point of that agenda is the regulation of lifestyle. It’s certainly not doing anything to save the planet.
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Does “telling people how to live their lives” extend to buying suits and other clothing for them? If so, can I have some?
You want a Mao jacket??
Keir is lying. Of course he wants to tell people how to live their lives.
It’s not about the climate. It’s about control.
Just like lockdown and masks and mandated vaccines weren’t about health. It was about control.
Just like hate crime legislation is not about protecting people. It is about control.
Very briefly: the marxo-fascist religious cult wants to control every single aspect of your life; climate change, net zero, public health and stuff like that just serves as an excuse.
You can tell when Starmer is lying, his lips are moving!
But can he tell he is lying?
To Starmer, truth is just whatever the rules and regulations permit
Just like Sunak, Bunter, May and Cameron before him!
One area of control may come to light this winter, if a local churchwarden is to be believed: freezing churches. Apparently the continual complete absence of heating in a local Church of England Church in Essex recently was caused not by shortage of money for fuel but rather by an edict “from above” refusing to authorise repairs to the heating system “because it uses a gas boiler” which, it was alleged, was not gong to be maintained unless it were to be replaced by a heat pump. (I believe the congregation has persuaded one its members, let’s call him Bob the Builder, to do the repair (which is trivial) for free, so that it wouldn’t show up as a bill on the parish accounts.)
It may be, as is often the case, that the parish church interpreted what was really a recommendation to be an edict (command).
Someone may correct me here, but are not most parish churches owned by the parish rather than the Church of England.
No the CofE owns them. But in order to do virtually anything to the building, including putting something new in it, permission must be obtained from a body known as the Diocesan Advisory Committee, who have power over everything but no responsibility to ensure that the building is suitable for worship, being made up of non-Christians with no interest in the worship function!
There is a Church in Bristol with the same problem! It is caused by non-Christian interfering morons on the DAC. Churches are for the congregation, not the fools who think they are museums to the past and should not be for worship at all. And the congregation are expected to pay the huge cost of maintenance of the museum, although they cannot use it because of the cold! One cannot make up such a stupid carry-on!
You are very right but we must also include power. They go hand in hand, power and control. These goons love power, the trappings of power and the excercising power. It feeds their narcism. Our political system and political parties are all about getting power and keeping it any way they can. Everything else is secondary.
A tax on high carbon fuels? – have they not heard of photosynthesis? Would they rather we ate the rocks ?
Foods and not fuels, actually. Which makes the statement even more bizarre as all living organism on this planet are mainly composed of carbon (and water). But they don’t really mean that. What they mean is foodstuffs whose production causes significant carbon dioxide emissions as side effect but we’re intellectually way too lazy to even remember that many syllables, let alone actually pronounce them! Everybody knows what we meant so say!! Hence, the above becomes the semantically absurd and grammatically wrong (food has no plural form) high carbon foods.
Putting people who can’t even be arsed to express themselves in ways demanded of pupils who want to pass secondary school exams in charge of saving the planet is obviously an entirely natural choice. Their innate zeal for precision and attention to detail makes them ideally suited to plan and execute grand schemes to manage all living beings on this planet at once in the only rational way.
Put into other words: After putting a load of sanctimonious imbeciles too f***ing lazy to tie their own shoelaces in charge of everything, was the outcome really something we shouldn’t have expected?
Thanks for the correction – maybe baby brain looking after a toddler 😀
Even more galling, I bet this will be a repeat of the pound-shop authoritarianism (or do I mean BTEC authoritarianism?) we have seen before, i.e. a complete farce. Welsh lamb will be labelled ‘high carbon’ and will be rationed to an annual allowance of zero or taxed to death, while asparagus flow in from Ecuador will be ‘vegan’ and ‘low carbon’ – so fill your boots. Just as burning trees from North American old growth forests is ‘carbon neutral’.
At the last General Election only one party offered to halt the net zero cult. It got a lot of votes, but not enough. The Uniparties are trying to make us bored and frustrated with politics (in equal measure), so the majority of voters just turn off
What will break us – a population that happily accepted ridiculous levels of control during lockdowns – out of this blind acceptance of governmental nonsense?
Never forget that most people would hear these words “a Scotch egg is a proper meal” and still not challenge that they were being gaslit
That last sentence says it all, for me. I initially didn’t expect “lockdowns” to last more than a few weeks. When they kept being extended, I kept thinking “this has to be the last time, people will get sick of this”. The whole thing became more and more obviously a complete scam, but the level of pushback was minimal. I could not fathom how anyone could put up with it or think it was appropriate. Whatever faith I had was shattered.
When the April 2020 peak death registrations were reported it gave me shivers. A great many were not listed as ‘Covid’. That struck me that the large number of calculated excess deaths minus Covid deaths was most significant – that lockdown and associated policies had caused a large number of deaths.
Same here
What kind of pushback to you expect if a whole nation is basically imprisoned in their own homes overnight? That’s the scenario described (and frequently quoted here in the past) by Solzhenitsyn during the Stalinist purges: Everybody (or every family) is home alone and scared of every knock and the door and one-by-one, they all get arrested and deported without any resistance.
The people who organized this weren’t stupid. They knew from plenty of historical experience that they must keep people apart from and preferably, also scared of each other for their experiment to have any chance of lasting.
There was also quite a bit of pushback: Large anti-lockdown demonstrations were basically happening everywhere. But these either didn’t happen at all in the virtualized universe most people were forced to inhabit or the people attending them were vilified as small, irresponsible minority putting their own gratification above the best interest of the responsible majority whose members would ‘just’ have to wait until next month (always until next month, for months and months on end) and then, all will have ended well. On a more practical note, the marchers were met with serious and pretty random police violence¹ to make them see the error of their ways (and deter others from following in their wake).
Two things to learn from that (for whatever good may come of that) would be that neither is our ruling caste of professional politicians is in any way morally superior to the more-than-half-mythological “nazis” nor are the “free people [who certainly aren’t German]” anymore inherently resistant to imposition of a violent, totalitarian regime which retained all its ‘democratic’ trappings while shedding all of the supposed substance.
¹ I remember a video of German policemen beating pensioners to the ground with batons and keep hitting them again and again after their heads were already all bloodied.
I agree that our leaders are unlikely to be morally superior to those in less free countries – they just operate under more constraints here. I would have expected more pushback on the basis that a sudden shift such as we had ought to be have been quite shocking to people. The trick was to make people scared to begin with – scared of dying themselves or causing others to die. I think that probably wore off at some point for a lot of people – after that I am puzzled by what happened. I still wonder if a lot of the behaviour was just not wanting to face up to the fact that the whole thing was terribly wrong.
Do they operate under more constraints? I think pretty much the only one is that they’re no longer allowed to kill people openly for somehow defined misdemeanors.
I wouldn’t have believed that something like COVID was possible until it happened, either. There a generally two reasons why it was believed that “something like 1933” couldn’t again happen in a Western country.
Since 2020, we know that neither 1 nor 2 are really true. In the end, power is power and people who have power cannot be stopped from exercising it in arbitrary ways by words written on paper. If they don’t restrain themselves, nobody else can.
The majority of supposedly free people will accept whatever authorities demand from them. The minority of those who won’t, even if it’s a really large minority, will be powerless to do anything about it. Making political noises in the streets is a cathartic ritual without real-world consequences.
The only conclusion I’ve so far drawn from that is that we definitely haven’t reached the end of history which was promised to us about 30 years ago. Our political systems stand or fall with the people who actually rule and not with their theoretical organisation and our method for selecting people to rule doesn’t guarantee better results than any other method. Especially, it doesn’t prevent a totalitarian tyranny from being erected within a few weeks.
Well, not feeling able to kill people openly for misdemeanours is a significant improvement on feeling able to.
I largely agree
“Our political systems stand or fall with the people who actually rule”
I would say they also stand or fall with all of us. Things get worse, people get fed up and protest then things get better. Then they get worse again. From what I can judge we’ve lived in one of the better phases.
You’ve probably been paying less attention to events in Germany than I did. While far from being the worst, COVID in Germany was much worse (unspeakably worse would be appropriate) than in the UK and lasted much longer than almost everywhere else. And that’s despite not only a mainstream political party (insofar number of votes count) was opposed to it (the AfD) but there was also a huge anti-corona protest movement.
Our everyday lives are free in a very limited sense and even this only because people in power simply don’t care about most of what we do. And we are no more able to make people in power do our bidding than serfs were 250 years ago or people living in China are today, at least not while restricting ourselves to the confines of the political system.
That’s starkly different from the inscription on the tin but unfortunately true.
I did try to engage with my German friends and relatives about “Covid”
during the “pandemic” but I seem to have said the wrong things and upset them or made them think I am mad
It certainly didn’t seem very pleasant
Tyranny usually fails eventually but I suppose everything does
You’ve probably been acting in a way they’ve been told (by the government) only really dangerous right-wing extremists ever would and for an average, unthinking German that’s an absolute intellectual no go zone because it’s morally evil beyond even God’s capability for mercy and (a very important point) may lead to swift and merciless state persecution up to the point of declaring someone to have forfeited freedom of expression and association and any rights to his personal property (as decreed by article 18 of the German basic law).
I suggested that the “it’s for your own good” excuse might not always be true.
We English have a looser attitude towards crossing the road without the green man showing – but that’s a very trivial example and didn’t seem to extend to feeling it was up to us to choose whether or not to mix with other people.
As I know from a bit of personal experience, the English police has a looser attitude towards fining, arresting or threatening to arrest people for crossing streets in “unauthorized” ways. OTOH, they really don’t like people walking over bridges on the pavement during the night — I’ve lost count of how often I’ve been stopped, interrogated and IDed by Thames Valley Police for that — let’s call it a non-crime unusual pedestrian behaviour incident.
I wonder if part of it is boredom
You are so right. Visit modern day Cuba to see this in action. Over 20 million people controlled by a handful of old men with power. All those who would rebel have left.
The most obvious “gas-light” was the instruction that masks weren’t necessary if you were sitting down in hospitality premises, but absolutely essential if you dared stand up to go to the loo.
But the sheep did it.
Monty Pythonesque!
Was there not an article by Dr David Livermore yesterday? (Although I suppose I may have imagined it)…
If there was, would someone at the DS explain why it was pulled.
It is still there: How RFK Can Make America Healthy Again.
Thanks. Too much to drink affects memory….
What is this strange concept? Too much…?
Nah. It’s essential brain lubricant.
(BTW, this is a joke. I do know some people who are too familiar with the concept.)
Of course Starmer is lying, it’s the new narrative, nailed in the first para Tom Harris link. For some reason Bill Esterson doesn’t seem to have received the memo. It he subsequently tones down his rhetoric, that will be proof positive that they are all lying.
Net Zero Demands Dictatorship
Stark-raving-mad and Millipede are the kind of left-wing adolescent dreamers that view the world through their ideological rose-tinted glasses (paid for by Lord Ali of course) and think they know best about everything and if we all thought like them the world would be infinitely better off. They should grow up and get a real job.
Who on earth would employ them to do a REAL job? Lord Alli can’t need that many cleaners
It is actually worse than “telling” people what to do. It is coercing them. —Coerced into an electric car, coerced into getting a heat pump, coerced into getting a smart meter, coerced into not eating meat, coerced into not going on holiday abroad, coerced onto a bus or a bicycle and to leave your car at home or get rid of it. The entire Net Zero agenda is about coercion. Just ask car companies who have to fork out a 15,000 quid fine for each petrol and diesel car they sell over the target of EV sales that government are coercing them into. Why is it that this little country has to save the planet harder and faster than all others? The reason is because we are governed by UN/WEF arse lickers who pander to the global government while forcing their own citizens into energy poverty all under the false pretences of a climate crisis.
Can you really be that sympathetic to the car companies that, at the end of the day, agreed to this with no questions asked as far as I can remember. As the Batman film goes….They danced with the Devil.
Fair Comment—–But as we often see, it is very difficult to run against the green tide, and companies will often agree to stuff that isn’t in their best interests, often to try and keep government, environmental groups etc who are extremely influential, of their backs. —Just as when British Petroleum changed its name to Beyond Petroleum. –cheers
As keeps being said, climate change and net Zero have nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with power and control. The UN and WEF have made the biggest inroads to controlling the political parties in Britain.
Just heard on GB News that London’s oldest meat market is closing, and some Labour MP made the excuse that people are consuming less meat; is that really so!
The only time that fake sh^t gets sold is when there is no other option or the packaging has been mislabelled.
Smithfield. Living history, to be moved to some dreary modern place and replaced with the Museum of London. We were there last week to buy our Christmas fillet. £25 a kilo – already test-tasted some of it – delicious. Very sad.
Back when pub opening times were restricted, pubs around Smithfield had an exemption to allow the workers there to drink after work (their nighttime, our morning).
‘Nudge’ and ‘behaviour change’ go further than simple ‘choice architecture’ such as making bad foods look ugly and covering good foods in smiley faces
Government has no business running propaganda on anything. Basic hygiene and consumer safety should be the limit of their involvement.
School education about the role of vitamins, variety of food etc should prepare everyone for a responsible adult life.
It gives “Take back control” a different meaning. How can something not even voted on by being rushed through Parliament have legitimacy. Just like the EEC handing sovereignty to foreign powers is treason, call me old fashioned and all.
Was watching Net Zero Watch on GBN the other day; the problem with them they don’t challenge the whole of the ideology, they teeter around the edges. You can’t give ground to a bunch of psychopathic WEF shills.
I think GBN is lost to us now – tied up in ofcom issues and constraints etc
Yes. I never watch it now despite it being way better than MSM. At least they do give an alternative viewpoint to the establishment narrative.
Of course ecofascism is about telling people how to live their lives while the ecofascists don’t.
Moving on to the Carbon Budgets and government action, what about if the government takes no action? Judicial Reviews are about the government taking actions that it does not have the power to take. How can you JR something that is not done? I suspect that there is leeway in the CCA if something is not achievable which as we know is all of Net Zero.
Is everyone reading this aware you are now being exposed to a cow feed additive which controls the amount of methane gas a cow produces. Do you remember reading about this bill gates funded product. Well it is now in your food supply. Arla maker of cheeses, milk, butter, other products including yogurts, now issues this additive and Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi have all agreed to see it to you.
look it up, read the studies regarding this cow feed additive. You may want to avoid.
this gov’t is telling us how to live our lives. It is heartbreaking to witness the Uk fold.
The Eco Zealots haven’t bothered hiding their objectives. It’s all spelled out on the WEF’s website, hiding in plain view …. and UK Fires have made it very clear exactly what Net Zero REALLY means.
A return to a pre-industrial Britain.
You’re only nudged, if you pay attention to the nonsense. If you ignore the nudges, they will be forced to go Dictatorial ….. which is increasingly what we’re seeing.
Ben Pile understands Net Zero better than most. We need repeal of the Climate Change Act