Smurf City UK

On Wednesday I ranted thoughtfully about James Cameron’s film Avatar, with its blue-skinned primitives living in trees in a world bereft of manufacturing industry on any level above the bead necklace and spear trades that are so vital for Britain’s economic recovery.

All of which is, I believe, not entirely unthinkable to our very own Cameron here at the Hometree itself.

This is from our next Prime Minister:

With our energy supplies increasingly sourced overseas, and with urgent action needed to combat climate change, it’s time to rethink the way we supply and consume energy in Britain. We urgently need to move to a low carbon economy in order to strengthen our economy, help guarantee our energy security and protect our environment for future generations.

So that’s goodbye to oil, coal, and gas for the United Kingdom.

(Or Gorastan as it will be called if Mister Cameron’s social liberalism continues to meet his foreign policy based on ‘conflict resolution’ and snuggling up to the Gulf, North Africa and Latin America. “Say, you Jewish chaps, what’s the big beef with your Muslim neighbours anyway? Can’t we all sit down with a glass of Chablis and some dim sum and sort it all out?” Or, “Hola, Comrade Chavez!”)

I know.

We’ll use all those other Green-approved energy technologies to power our homes, cars and workplaces instead. I don’t mean anything clinically insane like nuclear power but - you know - technology that really works, like waterwheels, windmills and anything we might discover while using our Metalunan interocitors.

And

Quality of life and environmental issues must be at the heart of politics – which is why we have pledged to improve Britain's environment by working towards zero waste, providing incentives to recycle, encouraging sustainable water management, and taking action to help our wildlife.

Britain is struggling to cope with mountains of waste. We will introduce a new approach, one which minimises waste and promotes recycling. A Conservative government will introduce a Responsibility Deal on waste – a voluntary arrangement among producers to cut back on the production of waste and improve its disposal. We will put a floor under landfill tax until 2020 to give businesses long term certainty to invest in new forms of waste disposal and we will encourage councils to adopt a scheme which gives incentives to families that recycle.

Aside from the implicitly totalitarian idea that someone in a suit in London can decide for me what my quality of life should be and that he can deliver it via the organs of government (however voluntaty), I’d have thought that The Queen’s Peace, The Rule of Law, The British Constitution should be at the heart of politics for a conservative or, for our friends across the Pond: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Or for their northern neighbours and our dear cousins: La Vie, La Hockey, and la pursuit of government finance for unwatchable films that Jim Carrey wouldn’t be seen dead in.

Hereafter, our few remaining manufacturers and our many, many food-delivering and mortgage-denying service industries will be invited to voluntarily make their lives more difficult and/or their products more expensive for their customers at a time of - and I don’t want to go beyond the pale here and say anything unmannerly about the Labour Party – national financial fragility. But that’s what this far-sighted goose-chase after ‘voluntary’ regulation means because by implication what they’re saying is: Nice little business you’ve got here, squire. Wouldn’t want anything statutory to happen to it, Guv, now would we?

Presumably all that photocopying paper for the umpty-hundred-thousand Diversity Coordinators the Tories won’t be making redundant and the cardboard files that no-one reads because the social workers (whom the Tories won’t be asking to distinguish between respectable churchgoers and drug-addicted perpetual benefit claimants) never let anyone else look at will be made from recycled McDonalds wrappers and delivered to City Hall and County Hall by Clydesdale-pulled carts in future? Save us from the killer egg cartons it will, young Skywalker.

Good thinking, that man. That should save a few billion pounds and make some lumberjacks unemployed.

Or, for the truly serious-minded, how about this for The Countryside?

They need a government that works with them, not against them. So we will…: Press for reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy which reflect the importance we attach to the environment, the long-term sustainability of UK farming and the relief of global poverty;

Because pressing for CAP reform has always worked well so far, hasn’t it?

I love ze smell of camion-loads of breetish lamb in ze matin – it smells communitaire.

Cute., fluffy and non-confrontational positive Europeans such as Camerons’s Tory party will be able to make friends on the Continent and persuade the French, German and Irish farmers to cut their own subsidy-stream with every bit as much success as the apologetic and conciliatory Obama has had in persuading the Iranian government and the Russians to slow down their arms races against the West.

And this:

Our agenda for Rural Action will:

Respect rural people by giving rural communities a voice to decide their own future and only seek to regulate where self-regulation fails;

I for one just can’t wait to see how rural communities will be regulated, if not by law and custom, I mean.

Give power to rural communities, by shifting power and decision-making to communities, so that people have a genuine say over the matters that affect them locally;

If this is intended to be a boost for the power of parish councils, then I’m for it.

I’ve long been in favour of allowing the parishes to operate their own internal security, to enforce by-laws and customs using methods up to and including whipping-posts and the pillory, and to conduct low-intensity conventional warfare against their County Council, but I fear that this is not the case.

Given Cameron’s conciliation of left-wing ideas and his habit of parachuting former (i.e. recent) Labour and Liberal Democrat activists into the Conservative Party, and bearing in mind how almost all local government is mismanaged these days, I’d say that matters that affect them locally are likely to be local squabbles about who gets the fine money extracted from householders who mix rubbish types together instead of strictly segregating them.

Our country is billions of pounds in the red with its unfunded State retirement and its public sector employee pensions, and its private finance debts as well as the official public, personal and institutional debt alike. I’m all for the little platoons and all that, but doesn’t he know there’s a world war on? This is just all so glib and unserious, combining the utterly trivial with sweeping promises that UK government has no longer power to enforce thanks to our surrender to ‘our partners.’

So it’s back to the temperate coniferous forests and mixed and broadleaf woodlands for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and southern Scotland and to the Boreal Forest for the far north, and those peaceful and strangely rare blue-skinned natives skipping from tree to tree forage for nuts, roots and berries are, I think, intended to be the Conservative Britons of the Third Millennium.

I’m all for turning the clocks back, God knows.

But back to the Picts?

Picture from here.