Politics: the limits of tolerance

By Richard North - April 2, 2023

“Finally the DT [Daily Telegraph] catches up with its readers. Whatever next?”, writes a commenter on the paper’s website, referring to a lengthy piece in the paper by Matthew Lynn.

The piece is headed: “The backlash has begun against net zero’s relentless war on driving”, while the sub-heading asserts: “A fanatical obsession with congestion charges, low traffic zones and electric cars is ignoring the needs of the majority of ordinary people”.

Lynn starts off with an account of protests in Rochdale against the installation of a low traffic neighbourhood scheme, where angry residents torched planters which had been used to close off streets to local traffic.

This is very much Daily Mail territory but even then the paper can’t work out where it stands on the issue. In January it published a piece about the response to an LTN in Oxford, headed: “A car crash policy: An elderly man run down, another beaten with a traffic cone… how Oxfordshire Council’s green zealots sparked a violent civil war between motorists and residents”.

Yet, when it came to the detail about bollards used to close off sections of road, it could not help itself when it came to describing them as having been “removed by vandals”. One man’s freedom fighter, it seems, is another’s vandal and, generally, the legacy media have tended to run with the orthodoxy of calling them “vandals”.

Doubtless, the media would apply the description to an example of direct action offered by another commenter who wrote that: “The boys at our local motorcycle gathering point have shown the way”. Pay as you park meters were installed at “their bike park”, he tells us, which were promptly “adjusted” with a hammer as soon as they were fitted. The parking charge company working for the council just had to give up.

Thus, you can sort of see the point raised by the first DTcommenter that I cited. Although Lynn also covers some of the protests against Khan’s ill-considered Ulez extension, as I remarked only a few days ago, media coverage has been fractured and disjointed, with no real sense conveyed that there is a major, multi-level popular opposition campaign underway.

That the Telegraph is pointing the way, beginning to publish pieces talking of a “backlash” has to be welcome, but it is late to the party and only dipping its toe in the water. Still the vast emphasis in the media is support for the status quo with establishment views given the lion’s share of coverage.

Much of this comes in the form of subtle and sometimes none-too-subtle propaganda, typified in this piece in the Sunday Times which asks the apparently anodyne question: “Are heat pumps really worth it?”

Although the article does acknowledge that fitting heat pumps can be problematical – and expensive – the overall tone is relentlessly positive. The message conveyed to readers is largely focused on removing obstacles to uptake, playing down the many unresolvable obstacles.

Here, though, we are unlikely to get street demonstrations against heat pumps, with angry users setting fire to equipment, or barricading their homes against installers – especially as the government is signalling (for the moment) that it has no intention of forcing change.

But, when it comes to opposition, this part of the government’s net-zero programme plays to the strength of the English people. While we are slow to take to a barricades, we excel in what used to be called in the Army, “dumb insolence”. Resorting to immovable obduracy, we simply ignore those who would be our masters, and do what we please.

Thus, for all the propaganda, exhortation and political declarations, the English nation will remain unmoved by the heat pump replacement campaign, eventually forcing the government to take more and more stringent actions, effectively declaring war against its own citizens.

We’re already seeing something of this, where the government is proposing to shift the burden of “green” levies from electricity to gas, exerting economic pressure in an attempt to force change. However, even when this happens, the balance of advantage will remain with gas, and the government will have to consider sterner measures.

The point with net-zero, however, is that it is a multi-faceted programme, requiring multiple changes and adjustments to our way of living. Another of those changes is the move from internal combustion engine vehicles to battery-powered vehicles.

Again, the government is having to deal with the natural obduracy of the English people, who will simply refuse to commit to the extra expense for no good reason. As with the change over from gas boilers to heat pumps, the government will find itself having to impose increasingly stringent measures.

There will come a time when, in the nature of things, government will overreach, and the accumulation of impositions will become so onerous and so intrusive that people will openly rebel. But, before we get to that stage, there is much that can be done to frustrate those who are seeking to impose change.

On a very much smaller scale, but still within the obsessive greenery which has stricken government, there are plans to impose a national system of bin collections to increase the rate of domestic recycling, which has stalled over the last few years.

The government would have us sorting our waste into as many as six separate categories, with households in some instances being required to keep as many as six separate bins, with separate collections at different intervals.

The obvious response to this, in line with the English character, is simply to stop cooperating, refusing to play the manic games which the authorities seem intent on devising.

Already, a lack of diligence in sorting waste is causing significant problems for local authorities, where it is reported that over 700 fires in waste trucks and processing sites have been caused by lithium-ion batteries that have not been removed from discarded electrical equipment.

An upsurge in the lack of diligence, if it ever occurred, might send a signal to government about the limits to tolerance, and the ability or willingness to absorb official instructions about how we deal with our waste.

Similarly, since our putative masters are so keen to impose unpaid duties on us, we should see a national rebellion against the insolence of energy suppliers in demanding that we provide them with frequent meter readings, insisting that the job is done by official meter readers.

When estimated bills depart from reality, and excessive charges are levied, customers are then entirely within their rights to refuse payment until bills are corrected, against which no debt recovery action can be taken.

As regards Khan’s Ulez extension, the DT comments talk of a lorry driver in London covering his number plates with signs declaring “F**k Ulez”, which, if replicated thousands of times, would crash this mad scheme. But even without that, I do like the idea of fixing dummy number plates to bicycles (at the appropriate height) and even to mobility scooters and wheelchairs (and even Zimmer frames) to trigger penalty notices and gum up the enforcement system.

Apart from anything else, I wonder how long the system would survive multiple reports of Khan’s goon squad trying to impose fines on Zimmer frame owners.

In short, although Lynn in his Telegraph piece is able to report a “backlash”, he ain’t seen nothing yet. As the patience and tolerance of the English people are tried again and again, the authorities must learn that there are limits to how far they can go before the inventiveness of the nation is harnessed to drawing the line.

Pushed too far, we will eventually resort to violence. But before that stage is reached, there are many other ways of sending a message.