The other day, David McGrogan wrote an excellent piece for this site called ‘Why the Labour Party Will Win‘. He pointed out that we are subject to a cycle of hope and disappointment when it comes to government. After the farce of the Tory years it is inevitable that the voting public will turn to something else as a reaction, and that will in turn lead to its own disappointment.
All those who march proudly into the House of Commons in a few weeks, the new Government strutting along with self-righteous zeal, will soon hit the obstructive wall of reality.
On December 19th 1666, Samuel Pepys wrote in his celebrated diary after meeting an acquaintance at Westminster:
Sir R[ichard] Ford did make me understand how the House of Commons is a beast not to be understood. It being impossible to know beforehand the success almost of any small plain thing. There being so many to think and speak to any business and they of so uncertain minds and interests and passions.
I’m in the unusual position of being able to read his shorthand so I’ve just transcribed that passage from the original text, and that is what it says. It’s a brilliant observation which is as pertinent now as it was then.
The difference today of course is that politicians and government have far greater pretensions than they had in Samuel Pepys’s day. When the Plague hit in 1665 no-one in power had the slightest idea what to do except decamp to the countryside. When the Great Fire burned down most of London in 1666 it was down to Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York to lead the blowing up of houses to create fire breaks. But really all they could do was wait for the wind to change and let the conflagration burn itself out.
In our present age, politicians and government fall over themselves to pretend they are in control. They aren’t, but it doesn’t stop them coming up with all sorts of schemes as part of the masquerade. Various commentators have popped recently to point out how most of our present ills can be tied in some way to the measures adopted during Covid. It doesn’t matter what you think about Covid and whether it was real or not. What matters is what the Government did.
Net Zero is much the same. The illusion of state power over the natural world. Hubris beyond belief and doomed almost certainly to making things worse, only at vastly elevated expense and economic ruin.
The best column I read was Janet Daley’s piercing ‘The toxic legacy of lockdown is destroying our political system‘ because what she flagged up is the remarkable mystery of how lockdowns and the wreckage they caused have been virtually eliminated from the entire election campaign:
Locking people up in their homes and paying them not to work destroyed the possibility of creating new wealth and saw governments print mountains of money that debased the currency. Energy bills were subsidised by even more money from the Treasury.
But the governing party was not alone in its responsibility for creating this disaster. Labour was not only complicit in these plans, it was positively exuberant about them. Indeed, Sir Keir wanted earlier lockdown, more lockdown and longer lockdown.
It is truly extraordinary. The outgoing Government came to power considerably less than five years ago, but it seems like a century now, given the fallout that has followed.
But we face a probable new Labour Government by the end of this week. The shape of that victory is at the time of moment no more than the shadow of a dream. Within 48 hours the result will be a fact, set in stone for all time.
A shift to the Left is qualitatively different from a shift to the Right. I was cast back to the winter of 1977-8 and the firemen’s strike. I was at university (Durham). I was fascinated by my first introduction to the preposterous world of privileged students (we had grants back then, and our fees were paid by our individual local authorities) believing they had some sort of absurd affiliation and co-identity with the firemen’s cause. Sound familiar?
I made the mistake one morning at breakfast in my hall of residence of attempting to summarise the various ways of looking at the strike and whether it could be justified or was unreasonable. Another student, whom I had thought of as a friend, was enraged. His face became riven with anger and revulsion – do bear in mind I had not actually adopted a position myself – and he blurted out “you disgust me!” and threw his fist at me. He missed luckily, but he picked up his breakfast and stormed off. He never spoke to me again.
This is one of the features of the juvenile Left: a tendency to monocular vision, total intolerance of other views and also the belief in some sort of collective identity. The truth is the absolute opposite.
There is no such thing as the Left. What passes for the Left is a hopelessly inchoate ragbag of movements all dedicated in some way to idiosyncratic causes, only held together by not being in government. Each believes its particular trope and ideology is the path to utopia, but they are all fundamentally at each others’ throats. People’s Front of Judea and Judaean People’s Front and all that. Splitter!
I had a friend who was an unreconstructed Trotskyite. We got on well and I enjoyed our chats. I found him amusing but he took himself very seriously. He lived in a world which saw “Tory plots” at every turn, but he reserved his real ire for any faction of the Left not exactly on the same page as his brand of revolution. He’s dead now, but I treasure the memory of him expostulating:
You know what Guy, I hate Tony Blair so much that I hate him even more than I hate Margaret Thatcher. That’s how much I hate him.
No matter that Blair had pulled off the remarkable feat of getting Labour into power. This chum of mine rode through life on the crest of a wave powered by hate. He defined everything by how much he hated it. He defined historical figures by how much he hated them, and he could explain how much he hated any variant of Left ideology other than his own. Oh yes, he was an archaeologist, and he particularly hated the archaeologist and now GB News presenter Neil Oliver for being a “disgusting traitor”.
This is what Keir Starmer will probably face on Friday. The euphoria will dissipate in hours. The factions, all greedily counting down the hours until Friday morning, will emerge from the darkness and the unravelling will start.
Labour’s dream of exerting yet more control over our lives (though after the Conservatives it will be a tough call to outdo them) will, as it always does, decompose quickly in the face of the infighting and hate that will erupt. The fake unity will evaporate when confronted by events and the political hatred, of the type only Leftist movements can really pull off when battling it out for pre-eminence among themselves, will take over.
Every dog must have its day. In truth, the new Government will do some good and probably a great deal of bad. But whatever it does it will be a great deal less than it claimed it would do, and it will lead to disappointment and disillusion. If Labour wins, the tone will be that brand of spiralling internecine self-destruction it specialises in.
We are on the cusp of change except that, as always, nothing will change at all except the colours of the wind.
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My default position nowadays for any political pronouncements is to assume “they’re lying.” I no longer believe a word any of them are saying. This article more than reinforces my opinion. Labour are lying as usual and seem to be working on the Goebbel’s maxim of telling a big lie, repeat it continuously and eventually the people will believe it.
This Nut Zero travesty will surely provide Labour with their best ever chance to finally succeed at that which they are best at – running the country in to the ground. Significantly this will be the last government they ever form.
Indeed
As I write this, 21.7% of our electricity needs are being supplied by other countries, half of that by France
When the sun goes down, the contribution from solar will obviously disappear. At this moment our capacity from wind is far from being 100% utilised – presumably because the wrong kind of wind is blowing or not enough of it. Installing more bird choppers does not help if the wind is not blowing.
They must know this so the whole plan is malevolent and not a cockup.
Yes, 100%. Anyone who doesn’t have trust issues with anybody in authority, not even just the perma-corrupt politicians, is gullible in the extreme, in my opinion. There’s always an agenda, there’s always an ulterior motive, there’s always something they’re withholding from us. Sounds like paranoia but there it is, it’s how I roll now.
A 4min montage demonstrating the failures of these hated, ugly, destructive wind turbines, including a brief glimpse of the tragic effects on the poor birds;
https://x.com/TheMilkBarTV/status/1795113082907226397
If a cat kills a sparrow then all cats should be destroyed, but if wind turbines virtually wipe out the Red Kite, like what has happened in Germany then we should build even more of them.
Thanks for the link Mogs
Putting Government in charge of energy is like having wolves tending sheep. But actually the most powerful force today regarding energy is not this government or the next one. It is the “Climate Change Commitee”. It is they who run the show. It is they who have decided what your standard of living is to be moving forward, and since energy is the most important commodity for our prosperity and well being and the CCC have decided our energy use is to be strictly rationed then there can only be one outcome. ——Lower Living Standard. The use of coal oil and gas is what has given us the standard of living we currently enjoy. It is the standard of living that the developing world hopes to have and is why China and India continue using coal to bring their populations out of abject misery and poverty. By removing fossil fuels we reverse our standard of living. The countries with the highest energy prices are the UK, Germany and Denmark. —Why? because they have the most wind turbines. Any government that wants to expand the use of wind will only cause prices to increase. The idea we will have cheaper energy bills by using more renewables comes from the mouths of LIARS.
The odious CCC was covered here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/disband-the-climate-change-committee
Thans for that. Read it and saved it.
Quite apart from Labours usual fantasy orgasm non-policies I read recently that the average number of days without sun and / or wind is 110. That is 3 months of the year in the UK where anything relying on wind or sun cannot function. To put it bluntly that is 3 months with no light and no heat. Even if you have a gas boiler, how do you light it and drive the pump without electricity?
I didn’t read beyond the second mention of 3023
Only 9 comments. ————I am very surprised. There is no more important issue than energy for prosperity, health, life span and everything else that relates to our well being.
You are right, but I already feel defeated. If those in power decide to shut off the gas mains and stop petrol & diesel reaching the pumps there is nothing I can do to get them back.
And that is exactly what they will do …. but over a period of time, so that they don’t completely crash the economy or cause riots. It’s the classic “boiling frog” process.
The best thing we can all do is slow down the process by refusing to co-operate. Don’t buy an EV; don’t get a heat pump. Resist having a Smart Meter as long as possible. If you can, get an alternative heat source to gas and electricity.
So you vote for those that will stop Net Zero and currently the only party saying they will do that is REFORM. —–Not so easy if they were government to say it though as the entire Liberal Progressive machine of the western world would be down on them like a ton of bricks. No make that 50 tons of bricks.
Socialist Labour modus operandi when it comes to State run disasters, is keep the end-user price low by taxing them to subsidise the lower price.
The people have been falling for that one since 1945. Don’t forget when you use the NHS it is free – you don’t pay anything. State education similarly is free.
In the days of State owned gas, electric, coal, rail none of these made a profit – or surplus if you prefer – out of revenues, but prices were kept down.
In the case of energy, after it was privatised in the 80’s prices were still low and competitive. It was only after the Climate Change Act in 2008 (Miliband) that prices started to rise because wind is an expensive way to produce electricity, and also because the turbines were being paid for out of our bills. It isn’t privatisation that has cause high prices, it is government interfering in the energy market with pretend to save the planet policies.