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We Live in Google’s World Now

by James Alexander
15 October 2024 6:00 PM

Above Das Kapital there is another system. And this is the system we live within. So says Yanis Varoufakis.

Varoufakis is an admirable figure. He is Greek, knows his Homer and Hesiod. But he is also very English: in the sense of having found his way in the world by using the English language (as well as a motorcycle). His latest book Technofeudalism is unusual in that its range of reference is such that it will appeal to readers in the United Kingdom. Finally, he is an economist. He has written a textbook on economics, and knows his rent from his profit, and can talk derivatives. This means that he is in cloud-cuckoo-land – that’s a reference he’ll enjoy – as far as I am concerned, since my grasp of economics is that of a 12th-century monk. In the 1980s I used to marvel at the habit politicians had of talking about inflation and interest rates as if they knew what they were talking about. Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze become strange shamans as soon as they click into the language of finance capital. But I still think it is worth knowing what is going on, and what our cloudcuckooists think about what is going on.            

The book Technofeudalism is worth a read. Varoufakis has a hypothesis, and it is a very interesting one, which is clear enough to a careful reader, though I think Varoufakis slightly botches his exposition of it. Let me explain.

The hypothesis is about economic history. Varoufakis operates with a sense of history that is fundamentally Marxist. Hence: stage 1 is feudalism, stage 2 is capitalism, stage 3 would have been communism if anyone had constructed communism correctly, so [algorithmic correction] stage 3 is now “cloud capitalism”, as he sometimes calls it, or “technofeudalism”. In short, and most simply, Varoufakis claims that we no longer live in a capitalist world. So all the fools who blame everything on capitalism and neoliberalism, though they were correct 20 years ago, are now out of date. The game has changed.

In slightly more detail, his sense of history is derived from the post-war consensus. Its crucial dates: stage 1 is from 1945, when the Bretton Woods system was imposed on the world, stage 2 is from 1971, when Nixon ejected Europe and Japan from the dollar system, and stage 3 is from 2008, when the system established in the shadow of Nixon fell apart, giving rise to cloud capitalists and technofeudalists. This story is interesting, and instructive, and Varoufakis has been talking about the first part of the history ever since his book The Global Minotaur, which was about stage 2. He has now brought us up to Stage 3.

Let me say a bit more about each stage. As far as I understand it, Bretton Woods was achieved over Keynes’s almost dead body. What Keynes had wanted in 1945 was a system which would automatically balance trade surpluses so that capital would continually be redistributed through flows of money against those surpluses. (Even here I may be garbling things slightly. Never mind.) Bretton Woods ignored Keynes: since the United States, though generous, was not that generous, and did not want to sacrifice its sudden arrival as Top Nation. What the Americans did therefore was to lavishly distribute dollars around the world, especially to Japan and Germany under the banner of ‘reconstruction’: and since America was the industrial and technological centre of the world, Germany and Japan used their dollars to buy American commodities. This is the grand era of America First. That is stage 1. Varoufakis has mixed feelings about it: on the one hand, he dislikes it, as it was not communism. On the other hand, it was better than any obvious alternative: for instance, it allowed the “liberal individual” to flourish (a good thing, as far as Varoufakis is concerned).

Stage 2 was even more miraculous, since what happened was that America lost its position as dominant manufacturing nation. It lost its trade surplus, when German and Japanese industrialisation caught up and overtook American industrialisation. But the United States engineered a system that enabled it to remain dominant, by ensuring that all exchanges took place in dollars – the reserve currency of the world – so that all profits acquired in Germany and Japan ended up in America on the New York Stock Exchange: in effect, paying for American Government, American military, American culture: all that continued post-Golden Age Hollywood stuff of the 1980s and 1990s. This was all dignified by the fact that the Cold War dragged on; and after the end of the Cold War it carried on with a bit less dignity.

Stage 3 is when this system had its comeuppance: first, in 2008, when the financial crisis caused by excessive investment slicing and complicated computer-generated derivatives created a situation in which any simultaneous default would reveal that the banks had no clothes and the citizens had no houses. Hence Gordon Brown and other luminaries stepped in and lubricated the system by printing money: saving the banks and, alas, Varoufakis says, also saving the bankers. This happened again in 2020, when governments stepped in with much printing of money to save the situation. Now we live in heavily mortgaged world, heavily dependent on a future, or ‘futures’, of someone doing some work later on to pay for what we are spending now. Anyone who follows the logic must suppose that the future is all but bankrupt.

But there is something else operating in stage 3, and this gives Varoufakis his leading concept of “technofeudalism”. For Varoufakis maintains that over and above the capitalist system has emerged a system of cloud capitalists running corporations that are not capitalist but something else. They are not capitalist because they are not interested in profits. They are interested in what he calls rents. He instances, on the one hand, the vast rent-seeking investment companies BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street (which own everything in sliced form) – they are the petty überkapitalisten – and, more significantly, the vast platform corporations Amazon, Google, Apple, Twitter etc. that are the true technofeudalists. Varoufakis has noticed that Amazon and the rest are not interested in profits. They are not creating commodities to sell so much as they are creating worlds or frames within which everyone else, including the capitalists, are forced to live, always surrendering a part of their income in the form of what Varoufakis calls “rent” but which we could call “tax” or some other words. He hypothesises that we are all about to become either cloud proles, working in factories for one vast corporation or another, or cloud serfs, feeling free, but in effect working voluntarily by producing applications or content or transactions that generate rent for not only Amazon, Google, Apple, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp etc., but also Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Ping An and JD. One side effect: we have a new Cold War between American corporations and Chinese corporations. Another side effect: these corporations have our data and our identities: and we voluntarily surrender these through our willingness to offer our attention to algorithms that twist and turn our behaviour as they (and we sheepishly) please.

There’s the dystopian vision of the world he sketches. It’s a good one. But I have one complaint about it. This is that Varoufakis does not understand feudalism. He continually misuses the word ‘fief’. And he seems to think that feudal lords extracted rent. This is not what they did. Feudalism was a system of reciprocal right, whereby lords offered land in return for service, especially military service. No one since the 17th century – when feudalism was first studied by Spelman, Brady and others – has ever thought feudalism was perfect. It was violent, even barbaric: it depended on force (Norman castles in England etc.) But it related lord to vassal in reciprocal manner: it suggested that the lord had to take some notice of the vassal. It sketched a primitive form of accountability. And it generated the first representative institutions: Parliament, for instance. That’s another story, but Varoufakis would do well to understand it a bit better. It was service, not rent, Yanis, that the lords wanted.

Apart from that, one can also argue with his politics. He sketches his dystopian modern financial history, and ends by suggesting that we need to restore the commons: and his suggestions here are as airy and vacuous as one could desire. (We could call his scheme ‘universal basic shareholding’.) Fair enough: no one knows what to suggest. But he is certainly right in his major claim that capitalism continues to exist and yet has been subjugated to a higher system. I’d call this higher system Überkapital. Some people are already calling it this. Marion Fourcade, for instance. The botching of the argument I mentioned above is that Varoufakis sometimes likes to suggest that capitalism is dead or withering away, or whatever (the subtitle of his book is the misleading What Killed Capitalism), but what he actually means is that it is alive and well but no longer in charge.

  • Feudalism = landlords were in command (maintained by rent).
  • Capitalism = capitalists were in command (maintained by profits).
  • Technofeudalism, Überkapital, what you will = cloudcapitalists are in command (maintained by ‘cloud rent’ or cloud tax).

In other words, we now live on platforms. And the platforms are fundamentally private, not public. Otherwise everything goes on as before: like Russian dolls, we have capitalism inside technofeudalism, and feudalism inside capitalism, and lived life inside feudalism.

Maybe this is all in The Wealth of Nations and we are still writing footnotes to Adam Smith. Smith wrote that high wages require a “progressive state” (like post-war America). By contrast: “The stationary state is dull; the declining, melancholy.” Plus he spoke of “the monopoly of the rich, who, by engrossing the whole trade to themselves, will be able to make very large profits”. He wrote all that in 1776. Perhaps Varoufakis would only want to add to this: “Rents, not profits.”

There are some false notes in Varoufakis. He mocks Musk, and seems unable to believe that Musk might genuinely believe, even if unsteadily, in the importance of free speech. We all lived through “the nightmare” of Donald Trump, he says. We are ruining the world in climate change by depleting the commons. He has a fatuous down-with-the-kids side which is tainted in Greta hues. He refuses to think about subjects he does not understand. I wonder whether he thinks his audience is composed of ordinary soft-shoed centrist Dads and machine Feminists who lean Labour and Democrat and Blob and Taylor Swift: he writes in order to wake them up. Well, good luck, and all that, but these unthought-out asides about politics rather weaken the sharp analysis otherwise in evidence. Yet Homer nodded, so I suppose we can allow Varoufakis to take a nap too.

Anyhow, let’s exult in the hypothesis. Our overlords in government have slept through a major change in world finance. We all exist, some of us reluctantly, in a world of algorithms and search engines and platforms, and all our economic transactions are being sucked into a weak Western simulacrum of a centralised digital currency world. Maybe this is not as bad as Varoufakis suggests. He suffers from a delusion of the possibility of secular escape from the world order. Some of us do not. Escape for us is religious, or aesthetic, or inward. And there has always been hierarchy and extraction, ever since the first Sumerian ziggurat. So perhaps there is nothing to be done about that. But it is worth knowing what is going on, and Varoufakis’s is the most persuasive account I have seen. Everyone else, by contrast, is simply Roming about while their fiddles burn.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.

Tags: AmazonBig TechCapitalismCommunismEconomicsGoogleMarxismYanis Varoufakis

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13 Comments
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EppingBlogger
EppingBlogger
4 months ago

I am convinced that the bad outcomes discussed are the intention of the green industry. It would be their route to socialism and the totalitarian rule that necessarily involves.

They and selected members of their families would be protected, as happens in all socialist hell holes.

38
0
sskinner
sskinner
4 months ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

Yes.

“To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our first most important step. Our fruits are grown in chaos, distrust, economic depression and scientific turmoil. At least a weary populace can seek peace only in our offered Communist State, at last only Communism can resolve the problems of the masses.”

“If we can effectively kill the national pride and patriotism of just one generation, we will have won that country. Therefore we must continue propaganda abroad to undermine the loyalty of citizens in general and of teen-agers in particular.”

“By psychopolitics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And bring to Earth, through Communism, the greatest peace Man has ever known”
Lavrentiy Beria

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Thomas Sowell

17
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
4 months ago
Reply to  sskinner

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Thomas Sowell

That’s a cracker – one of his best!

8
0
Arum
Arum
4 months ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

Well, you know, it is a bit of an inconvenience having to travel over to the villa in Tuscany whenever we want to eat pineapple, but I’m sure we would all agree it’s a sacrifice worth making.

6
0
SimCS
SimCS
4 months ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

Our only hope is that it takes a long time to execute such a plan that the next GE will arrive and sweep away this idiocy (as exemplified by all of Labour, Conservatives, LibDems, Greens, etc.). I can see day 1 of a Reform govt announcing policies that echo Trump’s day 1 Executive orders. What a day that will be.

3
0
jsampson45
jsampson45
4 months ago
Reply to  SimCS

The vote against Labour will be split between Tory and Reform. I don’t see an end to Labour government or that of its allies Tory, Green, LIb Dem etc.

1
0
beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  jsampson45

I suspect you are correct. The media will still back the uni-party to the hilt. Reform has done well but it’s still got a mountain to climb.

0
0
Grahamb
Grahamb
4 months ago

So many lunatics in the asylum.

20
0
kev
kev
4 months ago
Reply to  Grahamb

Running the Asylum

7
0
Epi
Epi
4 months ago
Reply to  kev

And they have the keys more importantly.

1
0
Monro
Monro
4 months ago

‘This takes the allowance down to around 10% of the current level. The reductions needed are barely imaginable and Homewood observes that a ban on all imported goods and food would still get the country nowhere near mandated targets.’

Okay…let’s see….what will happen to the developing world when developed world economies are switched off?

We know because we just did that only a few years ago:

‘The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is largest for the world’s poorest. In 2021, the average incomes of people in the bottom 40 percent of the global income distribution are 6.7 percent lower than pre-pandemic projections’

‘Turning to the report on agriculture development, food security and nutrition, he said that some 29.6 per cent of the global population — 2.4 billion people — were moderately or severely food-insecure in 2022, 391 million more than in 2019, with more women and people in rural areas denied access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food year-round. A long-term, holistic approach is needed to address structural problems such as political and economic shocks, unsustainable management of natural resources and socioeconomic exclusion.’

How long before Savage MP also says something like this?

‘What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.’

Melinda Gates 

Last edited 4 months ago by Monro
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Gezza England
Gezza England
4 months ago
Reply to  Monro

Savage might struggle to say anything because of the rope around her neck as she dangles for a lamp post.

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Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
4 months ago

Chris Morrison’s Finest Sceptical Hour thus far, a call to arms against of the very real risk of “an abyss, a new Dark Age made sinister by the lights of perverted science.”

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, The Donald takes leadership of the free world and kicks off by again pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, stopping EV mandates and upping the ante on drilling for oil and gas.

Pure Theatre of the Absurd across this side of the pond. Like A. B. de Pflogiston, Rishi Buoy and the rest of the clowns who orchestrated the response to The Pandemic That Never Was, and all the social and economic nonsense that followed, Sir Two-Tier and the Overgrown Student Junta seem resolved on making a future appointment with the International Criminal Court at the Hague, charged with Crimes Against Humanity.

So much for Sir Two-Tier’s precious human rights, which count for nothing in the face of the latest in Green Fascism.

Roz Savage be thy name, smirking savage be thy nature.

Last edited 4 months ago by Art Simtotic
33
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FerdIII
FerdIII
4 months ago
Reply to  Art Simtotic

‘Green Fascism’. Spot on.

Anti-science
Anti-human
Anti-reality
Anti-ecology

Pro-corruption
Pro-money laundering
Pro-censorship
Pro-violence
Pro-fascism
Pro-ecological devastation

The Rona plandemic fascism will be a template for these goose stepping half wits.
High time the collective ‘we’ got off our arse and confronted and smashed them.

21
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Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
4 months ago
Reply to  FerdIII

Exactly. Well said.

10
0
varmint
varmint
4 months ago
Reply to  Art Simtotic

The election of Trump and its effects may reverberate. We can only hope that the reverberations rattle the tiny brains of the Milibands of this world and hope that he receives an almighty uppercut from REALITY that knocks the living daylights out of him and leaves him on the canvas before all of this economic suicide can get underway.

21
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Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  varmint

Heard on GB News that the Bank of England is even calling this government to cancel Net Zero [Agenda 21/30 Sustainable Development Goals]. Not that I heard them report it on Radio Four.

9
0
Norfolk-Sceptic
Norfolk-Sceptic
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

If you haven’t heard it on R4, it must be true! 🙂

Last edited 4 months ago by Norfolk-Sceptic
7
0
CazT
CazT
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

I think I’m right in saying I saw it reported in The Telegraph too.

0
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  varmint

Whenever the Democrat madmen are expelled from the US government, they hide in the colonies (that’s unfortunately us) and plot their comeback. There’s little point in swapping out a dysfunctional government in the USA (for some limited time) while its pseudopodes remain firmly wrung around the backbones of all other governments in the so-called West by virtue of political systems designed to guarantee that.

3
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varmint
varmint
4 months ago
Reply to  RW

But dn’t you think changes are afoot in Holland Italy and Germany with the AfD eg and also in the UK with REFORM?—–Eventually the people have to wake up to this piss taking left Wing Agenda.

2
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beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  varmint

These are stirrings, but there’s a long way to go. Most people are still in their comfort zone of ignorance, the emphasis here being to ignore what’s happening around them. They’re below deck or in the holds of the Titanic, whilst those who walk the deck feel the contrast of the real world around the ship, and are eyeing up the lifeboats.

0
0
WillP
WillP
4 months ago

You can stand in a blizzard and say the world is on fire, and everyone thinks you are sane and wise, but say fossil fuels give us all our heat, medicine and infrastructure for modern life and we’ll die without them and they think you are an idiot. Amazing.

34
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JohnK
JohnK
4 months ago

Yet today there are reports about the expansion of Heathrow with a third runway, and extra capacity at Stansted & Gatwick, such as in the Telegraph. Money talks louder than those zealots, perhaps.

23
0
Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
4 months ago
Reply to  JohnK

Schizoid times we live in. Hopefully you are right and sanity will prevail.

11
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A. Contrarian
A. Contrarian
4 months ago
Reply to  JohnK

Not to mention Starmer’s plans to become the leaders of the AI world, or whatever rubbish he was spouting last week. Don’t think that would be possible under the new regime. I thought he also back tracked on banning gas boilers recently?

11
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  A. Contrarian

Could Starmer perhaps be his own, AI-powered deep fake? His teflon-like appearance doesn’t seem particularly real to me.

8
0
A. Contrarian
A. Contrarian
4 months ago
Reply to  RW

He’s certainly somewhat robotic at times isn’t he?

3
0
phennomena
phennomena
4 months ago
Reply to  JohnK

Cognitive dissonance within the government. Clearly no coordination between treasury and energy departments.

1
0
Albert
Albert
4 months ago

Well done as usual Chris Morrison.
Nothing but the Truth, I for one didn’t vote for this lunacy I am seriously considering withholding my council tax payments if my local MP votes for this crap.

22
0
Lockdown Sceptic
Lockdown Sceptic
4 months ago

Email to my MP, Clive Jones, regarding Climate and Nature Bill

The Climate and Nature Bill will destroy the UK economy and end private property

————- The Climate and Nature Bill has its second reading in 
Parliament on 24 January 2025. If it becomes law, it will bring in 
compulsory re-wilding of more than 30% of the UK and place 
controls on travel and consumption. It will cause starvation and 
economic catastrophe.

Net Zero already massively benefits Communist China which 
continues to build coal fired power stations and produce steel 
from blast furnaces, both now banned in Britain.

There is no climate crisis, or man made climate change.  
Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere. Without 
carbon dioxide life on earth would end.

John Clauser won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and has confirmed 
that there is no climate crisis. Unlike Greta Thunberg, Barack Obama, 
Bill Gates, Al Gore or Ed Miliband, he is a scientist.

Stephen
Wokingham

24
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Arum
Arum
4 months ago
Reply to  Lockdown Sceptic

I too wrote to my MP – a Labour makeweight who was so disastrous as head of the city council (taking it to near bankruptcy) that she was rewarded with a safe local seat. I can quite believe that she hasn’t even considered the financial impact of this madness.

3
0
Epi
Epi
4 months ago
Reply to  Lockdown Sceptic

Have written to my MP about this three times. Only because he had the cheek to say how well the Tories had done in “reducing the carbon footprint”! I had to point out to him that as we buy most our imports from China/India both of whom are building a coal fired power station every week all we had done is to transfer our footprint elsewhere. I also sent him a copy of Climate the Movie and a link to the CO2 coalition app. I assume he’ll ignore it and probably thinks I’m some sort of crackpot looney “far right” conspiracy theorist. But there you go.

Last edited 4 months ago by Epi
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beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  Epi

To get where they are, these politicians have to be paid-up members of the groupthink and that’s impenetrable. Do good luck there. I believe that the late, great Christopher Booker was writing a book about groupthink before his untimely death. It would have made a revealing read.

0
0
varmint
varmint
4 months ago

Blithering idiots who vote for this utter trash probably think that all we need to do to “save the planet” is get rid of all the fossil fuels double quick and replace them all with wind and sun and everything will tick along just fine. —–NO IT WON’T. —-Plus, all of this energy suicide will not come anywhere close to saving the planet, as we are a very small contributor to the manufactured climate crisis even if the science was remotely true, which it isn’t. —–These people cannot all be as thick as two short planks which means that they have a brain in their heads and are deciding not to use it, and instead are voting for this garbage for Political Purposes. The Politics of the UN that they are pandering to, is the politics that says we in the west are consuming too much, and our lifestyles are “unsustainable”. —–Did anyone in this country, apart from some rabid eco fundamentalists, and assorted brainwashed dreamers ever vote for this tyranny? —–Nope. No one apart from the dreamers wants their standard of living reduced, and the politicians they think have their best interests in mind are lying to them by telling them that all will be fine when we ditch fossil fuels. —-This is a bare faced lie. These people are TRAITORS

15
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klf
klf
4 months ago
Reply to  varmint

These people are TRAITORS

Hear, hear.

5
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Tonka Rigger
Tonka Rigger
4 months ago
Reply to  varmint

Forgive them, because they are just too stupid to know what they are backing. They simply lack the intelligence and underpinning knowledge to understand what it is they have thrown their support behind in a frisson of virtue-signalling “goodness”.

They need to be educated.

3
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varmint
varmint
4 months ago
Reply to  Tonka Rigger

I am sorry but calling them stupid simply lets them off the hook. They are not stupid, they are dangerous

3
0
beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  Tonka Rigger

I’m afraid to say it but a lot of our problems derive from too much education / conditioning. Youngsters are no longer taught to think for themselves, that involves effort and commitment. Blair and his ilk deliberately wanted more so-called universities so as to spread the ideology. Our MPs are the result of this.

1
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Hester
Hester
4 months ago

Why doesn’t Ed and the rest of the MP’S and their sponsors clear off to North Korea? It sounds like their idea of Utopia.
The sad news is that the English will not rebel and they know it, they got away with it during Covid the great test bed, they got away with locking up dissenters, they got away with allowing the attack dog child rapists attack our young, they got away with forcing injections on people that were experimental in return for the retention of livelihoods. They know they can get away with this, they know they can have Party’s and live lives of luxury whilst the rest of us suffer. They have ran the model they did it for nearly 3 years, there was no great uprising, just bowed heads and grateful acceptance of crumbs of favoured liberty.
They want those times back again, the country gave them the go ahead, now they are almost there, the prize is within their misanthropic grasp.

Last edited 4 months ago by Hester
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varmint
varmint
4 months ago
Reply to  Hester

Correct. —It seems today that the only ones listened to are the ones that kick up an almighty stink, like Muslims, eco fundamentalists, gender lunatics, and brainwashed commie students that try to ban everything. —The rest of us are just cannon fodder sitting watching silly dancing shows on a Saturday Night, Soap Opera’s and Football Games

12
0
klf
klf
4 months ago
Reply to  Hester

Why doesn’t Ed and the rest of the MP’S and their sponsors clear off to North Korea? It sounds like their idea of Utopia.

Indeed. They would be in their element over there.

6
0
beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  klf

I wish people wouldn’t keep insulting North Korea. They take their orders from no-one and still live in the real world. No globalist agenda for them.

0
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  Hester

“ just bowed heads and grateful acceptance of crumbs of favoured liberty”

That reminds me of driving past a pub and a tanked up lady waving flowers or something from the entrance in celebration.

1
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

Celebration of the first lifting of restrictions.

1
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  Hester

Why doesn’t Ed and the rest of the MP’S and their sponsors clear off to North Korea?

Because North Korea is effectively an absolute monarchy and Very Electable Ed® and his cronies wouldn’t be tolerated there. Maybe one of them could rule if the ruling family was disposed first. But the Usans have been trying that without any success since the Korean war and this would still leave several hundred tin pot dictators without an occupation.

2
0
beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  Hester

You’re right, things have to get really ugly before most people wake up. This bill, with all its ramifications, may be instrumental in doing this.

0
0
klf
klf
4 months ago

This is so insane, I can’t believe it will come to fruition. And yet, there is a part of me that thinks bring it on; punish the people. May be then they will rise up in desperation and outrage.

Last edited 4 months ago by Hardliner
8
0
soundofreason
soundofreason
4 months ago
Reply to  klf

The People. Those who voted Conservative or Labour or Lib Dem or Green (or SNP or Plaid Cymru) or didn’t vote at all at the last General Election will get what they deserve.

4
0
Old Arellian
Old Arellian
4 months ago
Reply to  soundofreason

Unfortunately, so will all those who DIDN’t vote for any of those parties, myself included.

8
0
CazT
CazT
4 months ago
Reply to  Old Arellian

And our children and our children’s children.

0
0
klf
klf
4 months ago
Reply to  soundofreason

Good point.

0
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  soundofreason

I don’t think the blame lies with those who didn’t vote.

0
0
soundofreason
soundofreason
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

I do.

0
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  soundofreason

Presumably, this bill was in the same party manifesto which also announced the planned inheritance tax changes for farmers.

3
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soundofreason
soundofreason
4 months ago
Reply to  RW

The bill is a private member’s bill. No, it was not in the manifesto. However, net zero was in all those parties’ manifestos and the CAN bill is a logical interpretation of net zero.

Can the CAN.

3
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  soundofreason

The CAN bill is an even insaner extension of Net Zero. Even if this wasn’t the case, the people who were tricked into voting for it wouldn’t deserve to become victims of their susceptibility to a (pretty much) 24×7 propaganda bombardement using each avenue which could conceivably be used for that.

PS: Put the two-tier man in the can and can the can!

It’s nice to see someone remember old Suzi Quatro hits

🙂

2
0
klf
klf
4 months ago
Reply to  klf

My expletive has been removed from my comment. I broke the rules. My apologies.

3
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
4 months ago
Reply to  klf

It’s difficult not to “break the rules” given the madness of this treasonous government.

7
0
klf
klf
4 months ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

Indeed!

2
0
Hardliner
Hardliner
4 months ago

I wonder if the MPs about to vote for the Climate and Nature Bill had a nice warm bath this morning, followed by cooked breakfast, a warm journey to work, and coffee on arrival in their warm offices (which we are paying for)

Whilst our gas boilers were warming up the bath, 65 PERCENT OF THIS MORNING’S ELECTRICITY WAS ALSO GENERATED FROM GAS. Plus 1% from solar, 11% from wind, and the rest from nukes, or burning imported wood, or importing electricity from other countries, where generation is likely to be a reflection of the above mix except for the French nukes

Renewable energy can only ever deliver about a third of our needs. To hope for more is a fantasy, and just plain wrong

Last edited 4 months ago by Hardliner
15
0
klf
klf
4 months ago
Reply to  Hardliner

I heard a professor on GBNews this morning, uttering some bollocks about the world is burning, and offering this as justification for turning the UK into North Korea. Even if we do adopt North Korea standard of living, it won’t make a jot of difference to the climate.

Some people are so far down the rabbit hole that there is no hope for them. They would happily destroy the lot of us. These people must be resisted with every fibre in our being.

8
0
stewart
stewart
4 months ago

I hope the bill passes, it’s consequences are felt and the people who are responsible for it are properly thanked.

10
0
soundofreason
soundofreason
4 months ago
Reply to  stewart

Yes. The sooner people start hurting the sooner they will start resisting. I hope before it’s too late.

7
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
4 months ago
Reply to  stewart

😀😀😀

1
0
mrbu
mrbu
4 months ago
Reply to  stewart

Provided there’s a mechanism for repealing the laws and regulations that follow.

2
0
Tonka Rigger
Tonka Rigger
4 months ago

The Donald will simply not allow this to happen.

I looked at the portrait gallery of grinning simpletons who support this to see – of course – my own MP there. I’ve given up emailing, I don’t even get an acknowledgement anymore.

She probably thinks I’m crazy, in a beautiful irony.

10
0
stewart
stewart
4 months ago
Reply to  Tonka Rigger

Yes, I often feel like the Jack Nicholson character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

5
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  stewart

Or “You can’t handle the truth” in a Few Good Men.

2
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  Tonka Rigger

Maybe the US would send food aid if we’re lucky….They are welcome to invade.

3
0
Tonka Rigger
Tonka Rigger
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

I wonder if the US would accept applications for political asylum…?

5
0
stewart
stewart
4 months ago
Reply to  Tonka Rigger

Political asylum – that’s what they should rename the Palace of Westminster.

8
0
stewart
stewart
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

We should start a petition for the UK to be sold to the US.

Whoever, the seller might be (the King?) would be well advised to do it sooner rather than later as I suspect the price is going down every day…

7
0
VAX FREE IanC
VAX FREE IanC
4 months ago
Reply to  Tonka Rigger

Me too, although we now have a new MP in Ashley Pete Fox. Same colour new face. I might give it another go.

1
0
Jaguar
Jaguar
4 months ago

Years ago, the Exchange Rate Mechanism demonstrated that we are governed by dangerous fools. Today’s fools are even more dangerous.

10
0
stewart
stewart
4 months ago
Reply to  Jaguar

The one’s doing the so-called governing may be fools, but the even bigger fools are those who think that there are people wise and clever enough to govern the rest of us

5
0
RW
RW
4 months ago

The underlying problem here is that too many of our politicians not only don’t believe that any part of human existence ought to be outside of the domain of state law-making but that they also believe that this extends to each and every other part of the real world, IOW, that it’s perfectly sensible to create a law stopping the tides and that the tides only need to be fined for long enough to actually forces them to stop.

In short, the problem is that too many MPs are totalitarian crackpots with only a very faint grasp of reality or completely without a conscience and paid by such crackpots. See also “the vaccines are safe and effective”, to be repeated ad nauseam whenever reality comes a-knocking.

Last edited 4 months ago by RW
5
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  RW

Up until 2020 I thought there were well established systems in place to protect the ordinary citizen from totalitarian crackpots. It is chilling how they have to power to repeat the 2020 PsyOp or something similar.

4
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

Me too. I though that was the very point of our convoluted political systems. But this belief died a sudden death when Angela Merkel abolished one of the most fundamental rights guaranteed by the German basic law¹ by decree overnight and then made the German parliament approve of that after the fact by a simple majority vote.

¹ The right to freedom of religious worship. As opposed to most, if not all, other so-called rights guaranteed by the basic law, this one is not explicitly subjected to limits imposed by the legislature (improvised translation of Gesetzesvorbehalt). Merkel would have needed to change the constitution before she could have legally interfered with that. In a universe where she had given a rat’s ass for the so-called rule of law which she obviously didn’t.

Last edited 4 months ago by RW
4
0
For a fist full of roubles
For a fist full of roubles
4 months ago

Whatever the outcome of this vote by our lliterate, innumerate MPs, it will be interesting to compare the trajectories of the the British and US economies to see which strategy is most advantageous.

6
0
Tonka Rigger
Tonka Rigger
4 months ago
Reply to  For a fist full of roubles

I don’t think it will pass. The excellent work of people like Net Zero Watch and Charlotte Gill is increasing public awareness of this scam, and is hopefully having impacts on the reputations of those who champion it.

5
0
Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
4 months ago

Belatedly come across, a YouTube of the Enemy…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIQYCAU5UUQ&t=3s

…Rt Dishonourable Ms Savage MP preaching usual vacuous climate claptrap, oblivious to savagery outlined by Chris Morrison that would descend if her naive private members’ bill ever got its way.

And why do these neophytes always smirk as default fizzog? Needs politely but firmly reminding much of canoe, kit and clothing that cocooned future dishnourable member through all those canoeing jaunts across the oceans, manufactured using evil hydrocarbons as feedstock.

You Save the Planet all you like, just leave the rest of us to focus on saving ourselves.

5
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  Art Simtotic

I’d greatly prefer if people like her would scale down their ambitions to something more realistic (and benevolent) like, say, saving abandoned cats.

3
0
Arum
Arum
4 months ago
Reply to  RW

Give her a litter picker and a bin bag (plastic) and she could improve the environment no end.

5
0
Jacqui
Jacqui
4 months ago

Of course, Starmer will vote for it. The total destruction of the UK is his aim.

5
0
DontPanic
DontPanic
4 months ago

If only these MPs voting for max lunacy would try carbon capture and storage of their own – a plastic bag over their heads tied at the neck

1
0
Pilla
Pilla
4 months ago

Horrifying and frightening! But of course it’s being done on purpose – the plan is to break the economy (and us). You will have nothing and be happy!

3
0
Twm Morgan
Twm Morgan
4 months ago

….And it was via this means that the British, a once proud and highly civilised nation, voted to destroy itself and unleashed a grim and bloody future where death and horror were the norm, all in the pathetic and ridiculous expectation of ‘saving the planet’ from non existent climate change.

To add to the tragedy, they even considered themselves to be an example to the rest of the world.

How right they were!

1
0
Jackthegripper
Jackthegripper
4 months ago

If passed this Bill will bring down the government and put the final nail in the nut zerro madness, so maybe a good thing?

BTW please stop calling these retarded morons “elites” they are anything but. Elites are the best of the best, the cream of the crop. The zombie like figures that govern us are lightweight turds bobbing around in the cesspit of politics.

Last edited 4 months ago by Jackthegripper
2
0
TomAngel
TomAngel
4 months ago

How does this sit alongside Two Tier Starmer announcing airport expansion?

1
0
beornwulf
beornwulf
4 months ago
Reply to  TomAngel

It’s for the planes of the future, covered by solar panels and magnets, flying as if by magic.

0
0
Simon
Simon
4 months ago

The use of the words “fossil fuels” is a non-technical populist term that may not even have a legal definition.
Hydrocarbons on the other hand are well known and are a class of organic chemicals that contain carbon and hydrogen atoms. This is clear.
Hydrocarbons can be manufactured and are also extracted from the earth as oil and gas.
My point is that does a fossil fuel ban amount to a hydrocarbon ban?

0
0
SimCS
SimCS
4 months ago
Reply to  Simon

To those MPs voting for the bill, it does, by inference, in the same way as “carbon” infers CO2, despite them being completely different substances of course.

0
0
SimCS
SimCS
4 months ago

I have emailed my LibDem MP (again) with a link to this article, having previously encouraged her to vote against it. Being a LibDem of course, she says she ‘believes’ in the ‘climate crisis’ so will be voting for it. I have said to her therefore that if she’s going to vote for it, she *must* produce the actual evidence for this apparent climate crisis (which excludes models, consensus, hypothesis, belief, assertion, correlation, etc.). I very much doubt she will (I know she can’t), and simply vote from a position of wilful blindness. How this can be acceptable behaviour for an MP, beats me.

4
0
RW
RW
4 months ago
Reply to  SimCS

It’s acceptable if it causes a majority of her constituents to vote for her. That’s the only yardstick which really matters, reality and the lifes of people who voted for someone else be damned.

0
0
Kiwi53
Kiwi53
4 months ago

Thus is IngSoc = English Socialism – Fabian Socialism.

0
0
CazT
CazT
4 months ago

Letter sent to MP. The trouble is, as Mr Morrison says, they’ll be off to their constituencies for the weekend unless they’re very keen on refuting this bill.

Last edited 4 months ago by CazT
0
0

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