Net Zero: a matter of consent
By Pete North - November 6, 2021
My other half is deeply into the current row over transgender issues. She is what you would call a TERF. She can speak in greater detail on the issues than I, not least because it directly affects her, and I’d love it if she’d write for Turbulent Times on the issue, but times are such that it could create problems for her at work. I get into enough trouble for the things I write without both of us being in the firing line.
As it happens, it is safer than it has been to speak freely on the issue now that there are various rulings on the subject that give protection for those with gender critical views but some academics have paid with their careers for speaking out. Given time, the ideological contagion will run out of steam and then they’ll be left to ask how it ever got as bad as it did.
But this is far from the first time she’s had to mind what she says. As a leave voter she’s had to bite her tongue on more than a few occasions being that the institutional groupthink is that everyone who works there voted for remain and that anyone who did otherwise is somehow intellectually inferior or morally questionable.
As such, academia isn’t capable of objectively assessing political matters. Research on Brexit and Trump starts off on the presumption that electorates have been duped and manipulated by shadowy forces and are prone to the simplistic “populist” messages of demagogues. Subsequent research is geared to how the establishment can better regulate social media and counter “disinformation”.
Academic output is often skewed by way of what funding is on offer and whatever subjects are fashionable at the time. Money talks. Not for nothing does the EU invest so much in finding ways to embed itself in the hearts and minds of young people. Come the referendum, academia was bought and paid for.
On just about every major issue the academic establishment will toe the line and do the bidding of technocratic authoritarians. Social science academics occupy themselves with the question of how to coerce public acceptance of political agendas they would never vote for.
That much is especially evident in the way it seeks to rewrite history and reinterpret museums and statues. Once an idea like Critical Race Theory takes hold, it permeates all of their endeavours. From there is spreads to arms of government. Absurd theories about gender and sex have worked their way into the very top of government through organisations such as Stonewall. The LGBT agenda is lodged deeply in every ministry and now it’s capturing schools.
We now have worried parents who don’t want to be castigated by their own children as bigots, who may even have to watch their mouths lest social services get involved. We’ve seen this before where children were taken from their foster parents because they were members of Ukip. You’re free to criticise LGBT ideology in schools if you’re a Muslim, but white English parents must conform. Local authorities are marinated in politically correct dogma.
Fortunately the latest onslaught of gender lunacy is so ridiculous that only a Labour front bencher could ever take it seriously. The assertion that a man can have a cervix and that men can get pregnant may find nodding approval among middle class progressives, but anywhere else it will be laughed out of town. You can only impose this agenda by force and there would be a fightback.
Some agendas, though, are more pernicious. They function in the exact same way. It starts as an academic fad, works its way into the institutions, filters down into television (usually via the BBC) and schools. The mother of all of them is climate change because it’s not as easily disproved. Consequently it’s been running longer and has lodged itself into every area of policy where the usual groupthinks apply. You are at liberty to question the fundamental assumptions but to do so limits your promotion prospects and to dispute them sees you castigated as a heretic. In that regard, though I disapprove of gender critical academics losing their jobs, I cant help thinking it’s a taste of their own medicine.
As with all authoritarian agendas, seeking consent is not in the plan. Democratic opposition is cast in the light of a bad faith actor that must be dealt with, even if that means subverting democracy. They won’t attempt to persuade us on Net Zero. They already have the power so why would they seek our consent? As with the various EU treaties, they’d already decided what they were going to do, and voters weren’t in a position to stop them. All they had to do was create an environment where people were too timid to speak their own minds. Hence the slanderous labelling of Euroscpetics as “far right”.
On climate change, we see much the same dynamic at work. If you don’t think wind turbines are a viable basis for an energy policy, and don’t trust computer models based on assumptions, you are a denier of science. It’s quite astonishing when you think about it. How, when government has proved itself absolutely incapable of collating and interpreting Covid data and their predictions proved wildly wrong, can anyone take their wild claims about climate seriously?
Personally, I don’t get bogged down in the pseudo-scientific arguments about climate. I’m not convinced. I know propaganda when I see it, and weight of propaganda, snowballing over decades, is not weight of evidence. The science is not settled, scientific consensus is just establishment groupthink. Academia lost any right to be taken seriously many years ago. If they have to resort to slander and censorship then they haven’t got a case. If they think the answer to winning consent is to shut down dissenting Twitter accounts, they’ve learned nothing at all these last few years.
More to the point, this is not by any means a scientific argument, any more than Covid was. The usual conformists chose their clique of epidemiologists to grovel at the feet of, all of whom were recommending a course of action similar to the one taken by Australia. It might have worked in eliminating Covid, but at what cost? The same estimations must be made over climate action. If mankind’s only hope of survival is to give up travel, stop heating our homes and go vegan, then let the planet fry.
When it comes down to it, climate change is an awfully convenient bandwagon for authoritarians of all stripes to impose their freedom killing ideas – not least anti-capitalists and technocrats. In their eyes democratic consent is an existential danger. Climate change provides the ideal excuse to do away with it. Meanwhile it works very nicely for global corporations for whom there is a feeding frenzy of government contracts. Big climate is big money.
When it comes to Net Zero, it’s a bonanza for wind turbine and solar panel manufactures and contract installers of heat pumps. But all this heaps more misery on hard pressed households already having to adjust for Brexit and Covid. All this when China is expanding its use of coal. No objective analysis suggest any of what we do in the UK will make the slightest difference to global temperatures. It simply spells bigger bills and major inconvenience.
Now that our petition for a referendum on Net Zero has reached the 10k mark, the government has to respond. But we fully expect to be fobbed off with a short boilerplate reply leaden with the importance of taking climate action, pointing to the government’s big ambitions. We’ve already seen this effort smeared (by Open Democracy no less) as a shadowy dark money-funded right wing plot. The Labour Party will say very little on the matter, and the Lib Dems will demand the government go further. Public debate is the last thing they want. This tells you everything.
Our political class know that if they put it to a vote they wouldn’t get an answer they like. For starters, it would put it in the public consciousness that they intend to spend countless billions on a highly questionable agenda. If they lose, the whole scam starts to collapse. Academia loses out, the NGOcracy loses out, along with all the other parasitic charities and lobby groups. Democracy is dangerous to their livelihoods.
This I think is the fight of my lifetime. It is a continuation of the Brexit battle. In that, the EU was only a proximate issue. We were only ever taken in as deep as we were because we were denied a say in it. Our continued membership of the EU was a symptom of the essential lack of democracy in Britain. Having learned nothing from Brexit, they’re doing it to us all over again. If they did learn anything from Brexit it was to never again let us have a say and remove the means for the people to organise against them. Hence the targeting of social media, and the beefing up of “online hate” laws and rules concerning “disinformation”. Unlike Brexit where they just called you racist, they’re now going to brand us a public menace – for which there will be consequences.
This is now a much bigger fight than a fight against the fanciful narcissistic climate policies of our politicians. It is a fight for democracy, freedom of speech and online freedom where once again our own politicians have conspired against us. This is oft described as a “culture war” but it isn’t. It’s a very real battle for the basic democratic principles our society is notionally founded on. The very principles they seek to abandon.
As pessimist I never expected to win the Brexit referendum. Even when we did, I knew it would be a further fight to actually leave the EU. Then, I had little enthusiasm for the victory because it merely shifted the balance of power from Brussels to London. Brexiteers cheered and hailed Boris Johnson as the conquering hero, but it didn’t take much for the establishment to fix him – he never believed in the principles underpinning Brexit. With the power still in the hands of an unaccountable few, tempered only by increasingly meaningless elections, there has been no transfer of power to the people. For as long as the establishment serves the technocratic globalist agenda, and has no intention of wielding the sovereignty reclaimed by Brexit, we are little better off for it.
To large extent this explains my waning interest in Brexit. The Johnson administration is seeking to claw back some of its Brexit credibility by threatening to essentially scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol, but I can’t help feeling it’s a decoy. I never have been a Brexit puritan, and I’m just not going to lose any sleep if the ECJ has to give its opinion on minor technical regulations in Northern Ireland. The UK and EU will always have to negotiate and coordinate on the minutia of trade. The fact remains that Westminster doesn’t think differently to Brussels. Even though it can do things different, it won’t. It will keep imposing the same agendas on us and it will continue to deny us a voice.
When it comes to matters that directly affect us, they never let a crisis go to waste. While we were all hiding from Covid last year, council workers were out closing roads and doing all the things they’ve been itching to do for years under the mantra of “build back better”. They’re working to a plan, it didn’t appear on any manifesto. There are no democratic means to stop them nationally or locally. Councils no more respond to democratic impetus than the government.
The one thing that all branches of the establishment have in common is arrogance – the belief that our money is theirs to do with as they please, that they do not have to answer to us, and that our voices don’t matter. Net Zero is yet another symptom of that malaise. Our political class gets carried away with elite groupthinks, with each party egging each other on to go further and faster without the slightest regard for public opinion. They see public opposition as barrier to their ambitions, and something that should be side-lined and not heeded. Britain is DINO – democracy in name only.
As a pessimist I didn’t believe we would reach the 10k mark on our Net Zero petition but, if that is possible, so is the target of 100k in order to force a parliamentary debate. We know such a debate would be cursory and that will further illustrate their contempt for democracy. But we didn’t take no for an answer when we were repeatedly refused a referendum on EU membership. This is a cause all democrats can get behind, and rebuild the democratic insurgency. If there is one thing we did prove in pushing for an EU referendum, it is that MPs will do as they’re told if they fear for their jobs. I think it’s time we made them afraid again.