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.

Had their chips?

Ministers deny salt supply crisis
Salt in Aberdeen
More than 4,000 tonnes of salt arrived by ship at Aberdeen harbour

Ministers have insisted there are "very substantial" supplies of salt and grit for Scotland's roads as some councils say they are running low.

Fife Council said it had run out of supplies before several tonnes arrived on Monday afternoon.

In Renfrewshire, only major roads were being treated to conserve stocks and authorities in the Highlands were expecting a salt delivery on Tuesday.

The finance secretary said there were delivery issues but salt was available.


Given the Soviet-style attitude of our government; its massive overspending on wealth-destroying bureaucracy and in hiring permanent Labour voting blocs by creating whole classes of placemen; oh, and its attitude to honesty, I'd say that the BBC's moral-boosting photo here is likely to be a stock shot.
Which means that the land of the deep-fried Mars Bar might be experiencing vinegar-only chips for some time.

Dammit, even Stalin didn't run out of salt, and for obvious reasons.

Do you think the government could clear our icy roads of all this global warming with ASBOs?

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

When Leif Ericsson set off from his estates here in Copenhagen between ten centuries and a millennium ago to cross an ocean and bring oppression and slavery to the natives: Black, White, Yellow and Red, of North America, no-one could have foreseen that on this day in history an African-American President would stand here as the freely elected leader of a corrupt, cruel and warlike nation to bring peace and equality at last to the globe that has cried out for them so long to deaf ears. But I have large, wide, receptive African-American ears.

Last night I had a dream. I dreamt I left the Road to Mandalay and laid down the white man’s burden and later divorced her just like dear old Dad did. I left all the peoples of the world to govern themselves according to their own unique histories, laws and diverse customs: just as people of every nation should do. And we shall soon freely follow all of those histories, laws and diverse customs in slavish fashion back in the United States – in all 57 of which I have lived and studied and was born.

It was warm that year, and although you couldn’t prove it wasn’t due to there being too many automobiles in the world (and I’ve made sure that there will be just exactly the right number of American ones by helping the Auto Workers Union to make their production targets), you could prove it by the tree rings. Except that there weren’t enough tree rings the first time we counted them, but it’s been possible to substitute similar data to support the mediaeval existence of carbon-spewing industries across the Atlantic by following the ancient Scandinavian science of taking small slivers of timber and casting them into the air to prove that the hockey stick is real.

(Never trust a woman who says she knows what a hockey stick is for, by the way. She’ll say it’s for her children and her children’s children. As if that kind of uncontrolled breeding ever did the human race in all its diverse and equal races any good at all throughout the rise of mankind and the history of civilisation.)

No-one could have foreseen that on this day in history an African-American President, whose ancestors Leif Ericsson would never have allowed to even touch a hockey stick; let alone fabricate scientific evidence to merit the closing down of all carbon-positive industries such as all of those that manufacture goods for profit as well as most services, would stand here to tell you at this moment in history that I have a dream.

It is a dream of two worlds. One is dirty: disorganized; divided; and afflicted with hidebound institutions such as royalty, divisive politics as its leaders squabble, and many individuals have unhelpful opinions, and some of its people cling on to memories of a republican constitution, an independent senate and some old religion.

The other is a perfect world: bright and regular and clean and full of people united in a common purpose. And one day it approaches that old, tired and disorganized world and it brings its message of hope from the stars: a new hope.

And on my orders millions of voices suddenly cry out (for change, I have no doubt) and are suddenly silent.

And so I ask you; the rulers (and in one or two cases the freely elected representatives democratically chosen from identifiably different and competing political parties), to join me and come over to my side. Join me and together we shall rule the world as One. With me as the biggest Number One of all.