There were two bits of news last week whose juxtaposition I found particularly striking. I found them striking because of the glimpse they gave us into our future.
On the one hand we heard about Oxford City Council’s plans to spend £6.5m of taxpayers’ money dividing the city into six ‘climate zones’ to impose traffic restrictions on citizens and visitors. As you probably already know, these would limit the number of times members of a household could cross from their zone into another zone in a car to 100 times a year and those living outside the city would have to apply for permits which would allow them just 25 zone-crossings a year. Moreover, the council, supposedly elected to serve the people of Oxford, planned to implement this mini-lockdown ‘whether people like it or not‘.
On the other hand, we learnt that national treasure, Stephen Fry, has spent part of the last year reportedly “travelling the globe for a new documentary, A Year on Planet Earth‘”. From what I understand, Mr. Fry visited quite a few places while making his documentary, including the Amazon (the forest, not the online shopping megalith), Iceland (the country, not the shop), California, Mexico, the Serengeti, Tibet, China, Los Angeles, possibly Australia and no doubt several other places. Here’s a quote from Mr. Fry talking to a reporter last week:
I am currently in Los Angeles, where I am filming, and while it’s perfectly lovely to be here, I know I’ll eventually have that powerful instinct we all experience as primate mammals to chart a course for home, to turn towards a sense of what I grew up with and what I feel to be home.
Mr. Fry seems to be enjoying his travels.
I, of course, don’t know how our national treasure travels when making his important documentary. But I rather doubt that someone of his importance spends hours with his impressive frame cramped in a tiny seat in cattle class squeezed between ordinary riff-raff and their screaming children. In fact, I rather suspect that at a minimum, Mr. Fry travels in Business Class and probably even in First Class if that’s available. So, if I am right, he can relax sipping champagne and enjoying three-course meals while lecturing the rest of us on the need for us to reduce our use of fossil fuels. As Mr. Fry said in June: “But the fact is, reasonable people, I think, understand that something has to be done about fossil fuels – most of all about our insatiable appetite for them.”
We must also remember that Mr. Fry won’t have been travelling alone. There would be a film crew of at least four and probably as many as ten people – possibly including script-writers, researchers, trip organisers and other useful individuals – accompanying him and tending to his every need.
I worked in advertising for a few years and, whenever there was an ad shoot in some exotic location such as the Caribbean or California, it was extraordinary how many of the ad agency’s employees felt it necessary to attend the film shoot given that their expenses would be paid by the agency’s generous clients. I wonder how many people there were in Mr. Fry’s entourage and how Mr. Fry’s retinue travelled? Cattle class? Or something rather more fossil-fuel-guzzlingly comfortable?
In his 2020 satirical book about climate change, The Denial, journalist Ross Clark describes a future in which ordinary people are virtual prisoners in their own local areas and their own mostly unheated homes, their lives immiserated by the need to live within their carbon budgets limiting what they can buy and how much they can travel. Meanwhile the wealthy elites, including ‘climate influencers’, swan around the world visiting the best holiday spots while lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of climate change. In an article about his new documentary, Mr. Fry says: “I don’t understand those people (who now seem to be diminishing in numbers, thankfully) who still deny the obvious fact that we are in the grips of a climate crisis.”
Of course, national treasure Mr. Fry is not the first person to heroically travel the world, often in CO2-belching comfort, to lecture the rest of us on the need to reduce our own carbon footprint. Some readers may fondly remember when in 2019 Prince Harry reportedly flew by private jet to a Google climate conference at a luxury resort in Sicily where he gave a speech barefoot to various important people who attended travelling in 114 private jets and various super-yachts. Moreover, each annual COP climate conference usually has around 20,000 attendees, all bravely sacrificing themselves to save us from our reckless and selfish fossil-fuel profligacy. But coming in the same week as the news of Oxford’s climate mini-lockdowns, news of Mr Fry’s extensive planet-rescuing travels could be seen to emphasise the growing gulf between the jet-setting climate warriors and those subjected to their planet-saving policies.
As the citizens of Oxford look forward to their new planet-saving mini-lockdowns being imposed by their elected representatives ‘whether they like it or not’ and as Mr Fry and his various flunkies swan around the world lecturing us about the supposed ‘climate crisis’, Ross Clark’s satirical novel seems to be becoming our new reality.
Some people might class Ross Clark’s The Denial as a vision of a dystopian future similar to George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Wikipedia helpfully tells us that “distinct themes typical of a Dystopian Society include: complete control over the people in a society through the usage of propaganda, heavy censoring of information or denial of free thought, worshipping an unattainable goal, the complete loss of individuality, and heavy enforcement of conformity”.
Dystopian novels are meant to be fictional constructs warning us about the possible future, not instruction manuals for the ruling elites.
But in their crusade to ‘save the planet’ our rulers cheered on by the propagandist mainstream media plan to lock us down in our own zones preventing us from travelling, to limit energy supplies so only the richest can afford proper heating, to reduce farming making all but the most basic foods unaffordable to the majority of people possibly even forcing some of us to eat insects and to stamp out free speech so we are not allowed to question their policies. As in Oxford, these policies will be imposed ‘whether people like it or not’. Without exaggeration we could say that our rulers seem to be making dystopia our new reality. After all, are there any features of a dystopia – “complete control over the people in a society through the usage of propaganda, heavy censoring of information or denial of free thought, worshipping an unattainable goal, the complete loss of individuality, and heavy enforcement of conformity” – which you don’t see being imposed on us in the worship of the unattainable goal of saving us from an invented climate crisis which isn’t even happening?
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
Stop Press: Philip Patrick in TCW has also written about Fry’s hypocritical jet-setting lecturing, and included a robust riposte to his dismissal of ‘climate deniers’.
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Michael Gove – Mr Scotch Egg. Something of the night about that bloke.
I always think of something slightly green and yellow hacked up and spat out when I hear the name Gove….
Shortly before masks were made mandatory he said they wouldn’t be
And Zahawi said vaccine passports are….”not the British way”, before introducing them in Nightclubs. He also told a woman concerned about an adverse reaction she had to “get the booster”….He is an utter scumbag!
He is is good company.
It’s called The Spectator.
Add to the carbon tax which is applied to businesses and passed on to consumers.
These taxes are Pigou Taxes designed to change behaviour.
Use less of everything.
I tend to think that taxation should be limited to a series of mechanisms that enable the cost of providing non-excludable services that make sense for a state to provide – defending our borders for instance (lol). I don’t know when they started to be a social control mechanism. Sadly that now seems to be accepted as legitimate.
It won’t change until we have a government that forces people to take responsibility for their lives and not expect the government to mollycoddle them.
I hope things will swing back to that, just maybe not in our lifetimes.
I think life is ultimately better for people if they try to be as self sufficient as possible.
Whoever wrote the headline must be guessing. In the real world, it’s likely that the trade will change things to mitigate the extra costs in various ways, ranging from smaller containers (inflationary for the consumers), or at the other end of the scale, larger ones might be more efficient (higher off the shelf costs, but lower unit prices for the customer). If they’re clever they might take the opportunity to increase the profit margin at the same time across the store. After all, selling a kilo of carrots in a plastic bag for 10p at Morrisons the otter day wasn’t a charity donation!
However it’s handled it won’t be good for consumers or for the economy. If firms absorb the cost it will affect their profits which will hurt people who have shares in those firms, a lot of those shares will be owned by pension funds, or firms will employ fewer people or pay them less or cut corners in some other way. That’s socialism for you!
This tax is not intended to be good for consumers or the economy which is precisely why Kneel is introducing it. Furthermore, as this is being introduced at the start of the year I suspect it is in effect a marker outlaying what is to come through the rest of the year. Kneel and his bosses are not messing about, they fully intend to bankrupt the country in 2025. People need to wake up. This government is openly committing treason against the population and they will not give up until they are made to. Sadly, I do not believe peaceful discussion will suffice, we are long past that point. It is us or them.
But they want to get us to Stakeholder Capitalism by 2030, part (or most) of the Great Reset. When most people who think of the Reset (those that don’t think it’s all a conspiracy) they think Agenda 2030 on steroids. Green everything, but forget the Stakeholder aspect.
Vobes did a good interview in Stakeholder Capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspdOcEwa3s
Sadly most people have bought into these ideas. It’s quite common for people to think of “evil” and “capitalist” in the same sentence.
However it works out it is economically illiterate and morally reprehensible.
I used to get shopping bags for free, which would be used as rubbish bags. Then, when they introduced the bag tax, I happily paid because I found the bags useful, but they decided my bags were killing sea life (even though I live in the middle of the country), so they stopped selling them and now I have to pay for bin liners, so still throw away a plastic bag, only now the money goes to the supermarket rather than charity, as it did for the plastic bag charge. Now I will have to put my raw meat and unwrapped fruit and vegetables into the supermarket trolley, where, no doubt, some delightful child will have been stood with their grimy shoes prior to me using the trolley. The food will have a much shorter shelf life, creating more waste. Surely public health and waste reduction must take priority over this lunacy.
Public Health is not a consideration of Kneel and Co, well except in as much as it can be ruined – physical and mental.
The sooner a householder dies, the sooner another immigrant scumbag can be given a home.
Jim Dale on TV now sat under an air conditioning unit. Wanker
Oh and if that electrical item with an opening and closing flap underneath it that looks like every air conditioning unit in every office I have worked in, is not by some chance an air conditioning unit but is some clever heat exchanger and energy saver, I humbly apologise for maligning Mr Dale and reducing any high esteem that people may have held him in before my comment.
Glad I am watching the football and not that ignorant twat, Dim Dale.
And there was Rachel from Accounts bleating nonsense about her actions having pushed up inflation and along comes something else to keep it rising steadily. It may seem wrong but I am now hoping to see the UK in recession to cause the Student Union government to melt down.
These inflationary pressures don’t just force up prices but they lead to food being produced with cheaper and cheaper costs and this is more serious in some ways. For one thing it is hidden and it is also likely to lead to food becoming less healthy and nutritious. And the quality wasn’t too good to begin with. Maybe they won’t have four people fighting over a bag of flour. They will just adulterate and cheapen it to such an extent that all four plebs still feel satisfied even as their life essence is being drained away.
Old films will remind them how far their society has fallen, unless they ban them too.
The Uni-Party: deliberately making poor people even poorer ….. at the behest of, and to suit, the mega-wealthy.