Ed Miliband Seeks a Global Economic Suicide Pact

On some accounts, the removal of Ed Miliband from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to the Foreign Office allows the new Prime Minister to put a noisy and disruptive potential competitor, with his own agenda, out of his way by sending him overseas. There is much to this argument, and there have been some sighs of relief as the crazy zealot was replaced by a relative nobody, who will likely struggle to marshal such support in Cabinet and in the party. However, though you can take the climate brief away from the minister, you can’t take green ideology from his outlook. This week, Miliband has vowed to “take personal leadership of the UK’s work on development and climate” using the UK’s position at the World Bank to “ensure the UK plays a leading role” in sustaining both climate and development at the centre of foreign policy. But what if the world has other ideas?

Much is made about Miliband’s position of “UK governor” at the World Bank in a Guardian article following an announcement by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). “Miliband will play an active role in shaping the changes to the World Bank that developing countries have called for, and ensuring the climate remains a core focus for overseas aid”, explains Fiona Harvey. The problem, however, is that there are 189 such positions at the Bank – one for each member country of the intergovernmental agency. Miliband’s role is unexceptional, other than for the fact of the billions of pounds that he would like to make available to other members, to grease the green agenda’s passage through global political institutions.

But that’s not really news. Despite later complaints from green blobbers claiming that the Government had effectively nearly halved its commitments to International Climate Finance (ICF) to £2 billion a year, and despite the Government having to reduce its aid and development spending from 0.7% to 0.3% of GNI, “climate finance” remains a vast slush fund for a global political agenda, with no obvious ‘aid’ or ‘development’ deliverables visible from outside the green perspective. The only noteworthy thing about the story is that the role of UK governor to the World Bank typically falls to a junior minister, not to the Secretary of State. Miliband, who believes that abolishing cheap and plentiful energy is the key to dismantling the forces of inequality and to building in their place the institutions of global social democracy, has demoted himself in order to better push climate through global political architecture.

Yet perhaps the Guardian hack might be forgiven for having been misled by the FCDO’s excessive hyperbole, it claiming that:

UK leadership at the World Bank will help drive international action on poverty, climate change and economic stability, and tackle global issues, like food insecurity and energy price shocks, helping make food and energy more affordable for people in the UK.

It’s a breathless list of benefits that typically accompany vast and largely unaudited, unscrutinised, unsupervised multi-billion-pound torrents of cash that get sprayed at the world’s problems. Previously here at the Daily Sceptic I explained “how the Blob works”, noting that Ed Miliband’s brother, David, also ended up as Foreign Secretary. From the working relationships he developed in role, he was able in a subsequent position to make credible requests for grants from the UK aid budget, in turn justifying his million-pound-plus annual salary. If the FCDO claim were so, then the utopia that would be unleashed would justify returning the UK development budget to 0.7% of GNI, as Andy Burnham is understood to be considering – perhaps as a condition of Ed Miliband accepting the brief, perhaps with Ed also having his eyes on a £1 million-a-year job plus benefits. Climate change may or may not be a ‘hoax’, but two things are for sure: climate change alarmism is a con, and ‘development’ is a scam.

The FCDO continues:

The World Bank is the UK’s most important multilateral development partner, providing around $100 billion in finance per year. It serves as the largest provider of finance to tackle the climate and nature crisis and adapt to the impacts for the world’s poorest countries.

But to what end is this money put? What good does it do, to achieve its now-retired slogan of “making poverty history”? It was in 2017 that the World Bank announced, according to the Guardian, its plans to “end its financial support for oil and gas extraction”, in addition to having “ceased lending for coal-fired power stations in 2010”. In the past, cheap and abundant energy was understood as a keystone of development, improving health and economic outcomes, and making technological and economic progress possible. But in more recent years, that conventional view of economic development has given way to green ideology. Coincidentally, however, 2017 was one of the last years that saw a post-Cold War reduction of the number of people living in extreme poverty.

My claim is nothing as simple as the stalling of this progress being entirely due to the World Bank. But I would place the blame on that regressive green ideology which the World Bank has adopted. Manifestly, intergovernmental agencies – the World Bank included – are now so bent on green ideology that they are unable to fulfil their founding purpose, and today nearly a billion people live in need. We can further hypothesise that one of the reasons for the collapse in the progress of poverty statistics might be the rise in energy prices, driven by the artificial production of scarcity mandated by green policy all over the world. That is to say that economic, technological and social progress has stalled, not because of climate change, but because of global institutions’ and national governments’ embrace of green ideology – and their determination to inflict that ideology on others.

Even private finance, which developers in cash-starved aspiring economies might wish to use to develop natural resources and energy infrastructure, was blocked by financial institutions’ green colonisation in the form of ESG. If financial services companies of any kind – from insurance companies to lenders – wished to sustain their high ESG scores and maintain good relationships with investors, they were required to withdraw their services from companies involved in hydrocarbon production.

But imagine it for yourself. Put yourself in the position of an able farmer, in otherwise good financial standing, in need of irrigation – or perhaps as someone with a plan for a factory. On the green ideological view, you would be better served by expensive, variable and weather-dependent energy. But the markets and clients you hope to serve require security of supply, not fantasies about “predictable weather”. It is far easier to protest such nonsense in Europe – for the moment at least – than it is to challenge it where it is most needed.

All of this is to say that it is long past the point at which we could describe the British Government, the World Bank and the ‘development’ sector as forces for good in the world. If there is a connection between the rise of environmentalism and the stalling of progress on poverty statistics since the end of the Cold War, then we can say categorically that they are forces for bad. Miliband – who is likely to strain Britain’s relations with the US – seems set to use his position to make a song and dance about climate change just as the rest of the world wakes up to the nonsense, and is accordingly likely to set Britain up as a toxic pariah on the global stage.