The theft and internet publication of some emails that I have sent over the years to colleagues from the Paranoia Research Unit of the Tartan Thermos Department within Sunday Express University’s prestigious Faculty of Nostalgia were not only criminal acts and a violation of my civil rights but also might prove to be highly misleading if they fell into the wrong hands; as indeed they have.
‘The wrong hands’ in this case being anyone else’s but mine and those of a small coterie ofhighly-qualified extremist Xenophobes and social reactionaries.
Alas, not everyone is as ethical as we independent and dispassionate Right Wing political commentators are, and many of our unscrupulous and mendacious enemies have misrepresented these innocent materials to cast doubt on the unquestionable existence of a sinister and all-powerful worldwide cabal of Jews; Muslims; Frenchmen; Americans; Greeks; Turks; bankers; trade unionists; accordion players and Macaulay Culkin. Without understanding the subtle nuances that we authentic conservatives bring to the world in the form of The Light of the One and Only Truly True Truth, some of my mails may seem rather harsh and partisan (and not a little dishonest!) to the ignorant outsider; who turns out to be pretty much everyone else in the world.
Let me put my naïve readers’ minds at rest now with some context and explanation.
The most often quoted (and most misleading) email is the one in which the following words appear: “I fully intend to go down to Ten Downing Street and give Gordon Brown a badger enema.” Respectable froth-lipped ultra nationalists like me know that this isn’t to be taken literally. It’s a technical term for indicating one’s intention to send a strongly-worded letter of complaint to The Times.
Nor should the (admittedly unequivocal-seeming and pungent-sounding) phrase “I’m going to shove it up him so far he’ll be able to shave with his tonsils” be used to defame my forthright, accurate and incontrovertible opinions concerning the existence of the Secret Masters who rule our world from their top secret headquarters under the Vatican. It simply means that I have sincere reservations about the current administration’s macro-economic management and their unpatriotic relationship with the gnomes of Zurich, the elves of Reykjavik, and the deadly, mollusc-spitting leprechauns of Dublin.
I shan’t waste any more time repeating my earlier clarification of the perfectly innocent sentence: “And if he smiles that smug, just-boffed-his-sister smile that always cracks his face when he talks about the Lisbon Treaty, then it’s going up live, sideways, and coated with mustard.” If you don’t understand that it refers to putting up the Christmas decorations in the Senior Common Room by now…Well, then you’ll just never believe me.
Critics of the universal truth that moral and political perfection lie exclusively with the English middle classes of yesteryear have this week been making hay with my well-meant and accurate discussions of affairs of state. I can take the criticism personally with a bitter laugh at the calumnies of lesser men. (It’s my gentle modesty that prevents my genius becoming monstrous.) What I don’t want is the gutter press and the Internet taking these things so far out of their social and professional context that irreparable harm may come to the vital project of real conservatives everywhere – which is the mandatory and permanent return of the whole world to the manners and morals; the political and constitutional arrangements and the fashions and popular culture of the 1950s and the early 1960s.
Most hurtful of all is the allegation that the expression “And I’m going falsify evidence to make it look like the Liberal Democrats did it,” somehow implies that my intent was to mislead or otherwise disguise the truth. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Liberal Democrats have an important part to play in the inevitable return to the Old World Order, which is to sit forever on the Opposition benches in the House of Commons.
Try as they might, the enemies of sobriety and decency simply must not be allowed to get away with all this cheap point-scoring and the inference of spiteful intentions within my wholesome and staid words. The stakes are far too high for these irrational and malevolent forces to be given the merest iota of credibility.
Our programme must go on for life on Earth both to survive and to be worthwhile at all.
Let me remind you of its essential points;
# Men’s hair is to be decently short and women’s to be decently permed and bobbed.
# A worldwide programme must be set up to tarmac all lay-bys and roadside lunching areas to allow the safe and stable placement of folding chairs.
# Tax exempt status must be place on for all DIY goods and they must be properly renamed 'ironmongery' and 'plumbers’ supplies'.
# The immediate worldwide scrapping of all family cars which do not have substantial amounts of timber trim that contain at least as many varieties of rare and endangered tropical hard-woods as a social worker’s earring collection.
# All high performance and leisure motorcars are to carry the brand name Triumph and must be painted exclusively in British Racing Green or pillar-box red.
# All US television shows are to be banned except for the original Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie which showcase to this day the finest period in American social history and which set a good example to the little ladies of how gracious life once was when they knew their place.
# Compulsory attendance at an act of Anglican worship on every Sunday is to be fit in between motor car polishing and a visit to the pub whilst the womenfolk prepare the roast.
# The elevation to the hereditary peerage of any Briton who believes that Home Alone is either an Italian mortgage or a folk song about a seafood-selling prostitute in Ireland’s capital city.
Don’t let the nostalgia sceptics end our cravatted and corduroyed stroll back to suburban greatness and rectitude. The narrow-mindedness is settled.
Last Wednesday night a police car stopped beside me as I parked outside my home. I could get out but his passenger window was open and the officer inside told me to
‘Get into your car and put the headlights on,’ which I did. ‘And now walk to the front of the car.’
I obeyed, and one of the headlights was broken. News to me. Well, I never.
‘Oh,’ I said, all citizenly.
‘Get it sorted,’ came the voice from a now disappearing patrol car.
Thursday evening after work (I walk to work, so no driving for me between then and now) I picked up a replacement bulb from Halfords and, after a mere twenty minutes of staring upside down at my oil-stained Haynes through fog-obscured spectacles and with a spelunking lamp strapped to my skull, plus acquiring some sore knuckles, and the artistic deployment of three distinctive and ever-popular Anglo-Saxon verbs later, my offside headlight was as good as, well,… as good as that on any car that was made in Britain in the past twenty years and is affordable by the likes of me can be.
Then it was back into the house for dinner and a DVD with Mrs. NW, ignoring the fireworks and the piteous howling of the dog from next door.
Next day, I drove back from the gym and parked the car and my next-door neighbour asked me if I’ve had a bump.
‘No,’ I said, ‘Why?’
‘Because you had a lot of coppers looking at it yesterday,’ he said, ‘They were all from a big van, and they were looking closely at your car.’ That would be Thursday the day after the first copper pointed my headlight problem out.
This Monday night I put the recycling out. Three oblong plastic boxes with flat lids: one for plastic; one for paper and metal; one for cardboard and glass.
This process involves picking up each box lid and pouring the rain off it onto the yard’s concrete (we keep the boxes outside because they’re too big and dirty to keep in the kitchen or the living room or to drag them up from the cellar, see?), then replacing it and carrying the box to the front door ready to take out and put on the pavement. Repeat twice, but remember to lock the back door on your way with Box Number Three in case the local welfare recipients decide to nip in while I’m at the front to pick up any unconsidered trifles, etc.
On the Tuesday afternoon I got home and the boxes were empty, except for the plastic-recycling one, in which a number of punnets for small tomatoes and a box for cheese spread still lies, all unwanted. I reversed the process with the added fun of lifting the plastic box to the top of the wheelie-bin into which non-recyclable waste is usually placed and collected fortnightly, alternating with the recycling collection, and tipping what the picky recyclers have left into that one.
This Tuesday morning I drove to a training course which was held in a well-known local government building situated a mere conventional Hamas rocket flight from CastleCity. It’s a nice building: comfortable and well maintained, and in its lobby area were numerous leaflets on health and safety and anti-Racism and other services that local democracy provides. There’s also a wall covered with photo portraits of successive mayors and a display case containing awards and certificates: for recycling local waste; for Investors In People; for energy efficiency: and a scale model tank presented to its home council by the local regiment.
It was too cold to be comfortable all day. Throughout the day-long training course we all wore our fleeces and pullovers, and most of us kept our coats on, too. The toilets were gloomy because the lights were set to off unless you insistently pressed the on-switch with a bit of heft behind your shoulder. It was a relief to get back into my car, whack the heating on full, and drive back to CastleCity and the unwanted tomato punnets and the lonely Dairylea container.
This is all political.
This is also utterly unnecessary.
There is no need for policemen to be rude, patronizing bullies who order people around without a ‘please or ‘thank you,’ - let alone the formerly universal ‘sir’ I’d have expected only ten years ago. How hard can it be to say ‘Your left headlight’s not working, sir, please fix it before you drive at night again’? I don’t know what they hoped to achieve sending a large van full of police in broad daylight to check my car, unless it was formerly owned by a gangster, or they were hoping to find something wrong that’s towable or finable. It’s not a pretty vehicle, but it goes and I maintain its safety systems as well as its going places systems – until a bulb goes, and then I replace it. The police are busy, it seems, throwing their weight around with harmless people in their sights. I’d love to know what they were all doing the 10 nights to date when my car has been vandalized in six years of parking on this street. In all that time I got one cop car suggesting we install cameras, two plastic PCs (of whom one though tit funny me replacing my wandering wing mirror in the rain) and one Saturday morning an actual SOCO who found nowt, bless her, but she did finger-print the thing. I no longer look forward to speaking to the police confident in the belief that I’ll be treated politely and listened to as I once did. Some officers certainly put their lives and health on the line – and I’m grateful for that – but rudeness and not being interested in ‘minor crimes’ at the same time? Not encouraging.
Parliament is in charge of the overall police system and there are political appointees on all the County constabularies’ Police Committees. I guess Parliament and the political appointees aren’t doing their jobs properly in letting this deterioration happen. I hope that they aren’t doing their jobs properly, that is.
Britain’s full of holes in the ground to put domestic rubbish in - old quarries and mines and modern incinerators now burn so hot that much waste can be rendered harmless by them. Instead, we have to recycle. I’m pretty fit and healthy for my age, what with the swimming and the dancing and all, but I have mild arthritis in my knees and fingers. Kneeling down and standing up to sort rubbish into different bins in cold or rain or hail or high winds or whatever is not a comfortable experience, and I pity seriously disabled or doddery old people who have to carry these stinking bins through their homes because the recycler lorry crews don’t come up the ginnels at the back of our terraces – unlike the wheelie-bin people. Do Greens ever wonder how nasty it is for the old and the infirm to have to go through these Gaian rituals weekly or more often? And who asked for this silly regime other than the politicians? Others agree, whilst some hold onto their communitarian dream of universal obedience to the gods of eco-religion – see the comments to this post.
Politicians have decreed that recycling is good and that its opposite should be criminalized, and so there goes privacy.
I got to spend an uncomfortable day in a poorly-heated council building because the council concerned wanted to ‘reduce carbon emission’ in order to protect ‘the planet’ from the global warming of a world that’s actuallygettingcolder. The politicians and the politicians alone have the power to keep us deliberately uncomfortable. I’m all for thrift, and especially so in the public sector where I work, and I imagine that the idea of chilling or even freezing people who volunteer to work in the whacky world of benefits is actually alluring to some of my readers, but putting your employees and guests into rooms like old-style cold-slab pantries? Isn't that actually rather cruel, and what the trade unions are supposed to fight against?
Back in 1997 I dreaded the imminent arrival of the New Labour project; expecting it to represent every kind of foolishness made flesh as decades of Left-wing, State-worshipping grudges were transformed into policy to build their heaven on earth. I expected that they would, and was not disappointed that they did bankrupt the public finances and I expected that their reign would basically be like living in a student union all year round.
But if you’d told me that after twelve years of them being in power I’d find myself: nervous of the attentions of British policemen in the hours of darkness; forced to scrabble about in the dark and rain with my household garbage; and be physically chilled on purpose by their local satraps, I’d have laughed in your face.
Workers occupying a wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight vowed to continue their protest for another week today after a legal attempt to evict them quickly failed.
‘Eh-oh, Tinky Winky.’
‘Eh-oh, Laa-Laa.’
For the past nine days, about 20 workers have occupied the Vestas Wind Systems plant near Newport, which is due to close tomorrow. The company sought a possession order at Newport county court today in an attempt to remove the workers from the factory, where 625 staff are set to lose their jobs.
‘There’s trouble at t’ windmill mill, Mother
What kind of trouble, lad?’
Etc, etc…
But, adjourning the hearing until Tuesday, the judge, Graham White, said papers had not been properly served on individuals occupying the property.
Because, like, they weren’t on recyclable paper with, like, sustainable ink.
Papers were served last Thursday to Mark Smith, the one worker that the factory's Danish owners know for certain is occupying the factory.
Don’t those ignorant heathen Danes know that Mark Smith isn’t just a man?
He’s an icon. A legend; the voice of a generation; even thoughnot much generation gets done because were talking windmills here.
In the court papers, Vestas named 13 individuals…
I will be the thirteenth Womble.
…and "persons unknown"...
Who was that masked electricity maker?
…it believed had occupied the office space in the building. Three of those are now thought to have left.
However, Adam Rosenthal, representing Vestas, conceded the company could not be sure who else had barricaded themselves inside the property.
Urging the judge to use his discretion to fast-track the possession order, Rosenthal said "emotions are running high"…
…Unlike the current that their product might someday generate if it blows a bit between the useful low speed and the practical highest speed.
On a peak demand time of day. And if it doesn’t break down.
…at the factory and there was a real risk of disturbance.
‘What do we want?’
Round, like a circle in a spiral Like a wheel within a wheel.
‘Never ending or beginning,On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain Or a carnival balloon’
‘When do we want it?’
He said the police presence at the site was evidence of the risk of disorder.
Pc McGarry Number 452.
Judge White dismissed that argument, saying: "I see no evidence of any threat of violence to property or person by reason of the individuals who are occupying the property remaining there."
I for one would like to know just what this Solomonic public servant thinks of the legality or otherwise of occupying someone else’s property against their will but then I’m just an uptight square.
The judge added he was "distinctly uncomfortable" with the way the company was seeking to bring proceedings, which he described as an attempt to "get around the rules".
"I am not satisfied that any named person other than Mark Smith has been personally served," he said.
The adjournment resulted in celebrations for the occupying workers,
Picnics. All the womenfolk brought freshly made pies and cakes. Appalachian square dancing. Horseshoe-throwing. Accordions.
Accordions?
Bastards.
…who were told by mobile phone.
‘Hello. This is Gunaratna from the call centre. Can I be speaking to the main benefit claimant of the household, please?’
They had expected bailiffs to arrive soon after court proceedings.
"Everyone in here went absolutely ballistic," said one of the workers inside. "It's given us another week to spread the word and given our legal team time to strengthen the case."
Because it’s an absolute bedrock principle of British lawthat goes back to antiquity that if a private company’s losing money by employing people and making no sales of their only product, they’ve got to pay those people in perpetuity, right? It worked so well in the 1970s, right?
Although, he conceded that another six nights in the factory was "not a pleasant thought".
There is, no doubt, a terrible infestation of Isle of Wight turbine spiders and quite possibly a case of the Night Zombies, too.
Outside the court, about 200 protesters an alliance of local workers and environmental activists from the mainland also celebrated.
With lashings of ginger beer down The Welder and Tofu-herd, no doubt.
"We have just heard that the case has been adjourned to 4 August," Steve Stotesbury, a 29-year-old blade maker,
Don’t you just love those Olde English craftsmen and their ancient trades?
...announced to the crowd. "As we have said from the outset, this is a peaceful demonstration." He added: "We're extremely jubilant. This was the decision we were hoping for. It goes to show the fight is not over."
Extremely jubilant is good enough, and I for one can’t wait to see how this fight works out. Let us read on…
Workers at the site have recently signed up to the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), which is supporting their campaign.
The union said today that its general secretary, Bob Crow, was meeting the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, to discuss the situation. Crow will then travel to the island to address the rally camping outside the factory.
Aside from the glamour of his exotic Native American name, one wonders how Crow is going to curry favour with Vesta.
"No one should underestimate the significance of the court throwing out Vestas' repossession application today," said Crow. "This is a significant victory which gives us more time to build the global campaign to save Vestas."
Perhaps you can invite the global campaigners to ante up and order a few wind turbines with their own money, or pay a tithe from their wages to finance the conversion of the factory’s production lines to build something that someone actually wants, such as,oh, I don’t know…helicopter blades?
More activists connected with the protest network Climate Camp joined the protest today, but not in the numbers the group had hoped for.
Ah. Perhaps not.
However, the dispute is proving embarrassing for the energy secretary, who a fortnight ago pledged to install 10,000 wind turbines by 2020.
Yeah, that’s interesting isn’t it? I mean, there’s some kind of apparent cleavage between the government stating that it will do a spectacular A in a bright and glorious imagined future, and at the same time doing nothing to prevent the failure of the real-world actual concrete already-extant B that seems to be Britain’s main agent that could support the aforementioned spectacular A.
Spooky.
The government has also promised to create thousands of "green jobs" of the kind that are being lost with the closure of the Vestas factory.
You know, I’m beginning to think that there might be some sort of terminological inexactitude going on here, or possibly incomplete communication and connection within the government at a fairly high level.
The company has said it is moving production of its blades to the United States because the market in the UK is not growing fast enough.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Mister Obama’ll help Vesta out, with a little help from his friends and millions and millions of willing taxpayers.
Vestas has been criticised for the way it informed the protesting workers that they had been sacked. The termination letters were delivered to the factory beneath slices of pizza.
Or slices of peregrine falcon, Frisbees, microlite pilots, stunt kites…
You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at many aspects of this story, but I’m not forgetting that this is a real and powerful human tragedy in which up to 600 families have just been told they’re going to lose their livelihoods.
I was unemployed for longish periods of time myself back in the 1980s – the previous time when a Labour government had spent a decade or so destroying the economy and then having to wait for the recession and the Tories to cure their mess and for new jobs to be created once it was over. And then there was the time I was made redundant by rationalizing companies twice in 5 months. A father and husband does not feel particularly humourous when he has to tell wife and daughter that the holidays and other treats are likely cancelled twice in a single year.
So these poor sods are losing their livelihoods at a bad and worsening time for the economy but the cure being demanded or implied is the disease itself.
One of the diseases.
Not only has our – for want of a better word – government been directing resources toward something that does not generate enough electricity to offset the construction costs of the machines themselves as far as I know, but which also take the money that might be used to build more generating capacity using more traditional methods of generation. You know; the ones that actually work, such as oil, coal, nuclear.
And of course while these subsidized monstrosities are being constructed, the money that subsidizes them isn’t being spend on consumer goods and isn’t being invested in non-white elephant manufacturing, and so the firms and individuals taxed to support Vesta’s ‘production’ are poorer.
Not as poor as they’re going to be when the lightsstart going out.
This is pure Left-wing politics. The machines don’t generate power for more than a fraction of their ‘working lives’, they need to be remotely arrayed away from cities so transmission costs and losses are greater, they look ugly as hell and spoil the view where they are sited remotely, and they soak up money, manpower, land, engineering expertise, and they’re going to help generate blackouts and brownouts for Labour’s schoolsnhospitals.
It is just about possible that making useless things at public cost might generate some or a lot of new technology (look at the early space race and particularly its military side), and to stimulate new plant building and skills training, but one wonders what ancient Egypt would have been like if it had spent all that pyramid-building stone and craftsmanship and labour on securing a larger empire, or new technology, or building manufacturing centres for consumer goods, or science instead of glorifying the deaths of a few rulers and burying wealth and blood in the sand.
This from the ever-thoughtful George Monbiot, whose colossal intelligence is so formidable as to have entered the English language as the axiom 'as bright as a Monbiot;.
This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here.
Climate change allows the richest on earth to trash the lives of the poorest, no matter how Furedi's cult spins it
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 January 2009.
It would be stupid to claim that environmentalism is never informed by class.
It would also be stupid to claim that the fight against the giant lizards is never informed by class, and for identical reasons.
Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters with the campaign against Agas. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it's their purpose. But to match the fuel consumption of an Aga, a large domestic patio heater would have to run continuously at maximum output for three months a year. Patio heaters burn liquefied petroleum gas, while most Agas use oil, electricity or coal, which produce more CO2. A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: 35% more than the total CO2 production of the average UK home. To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for nine months.
[•This article was amended on Wednesday 14 January 2009. We said that a large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. We meant to say that an Aga produces 35% more than the total CO2 production of the average UK home. This has been corrected.]
My concerns about your command of facts was all for nothing, and I am relieved.
So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn't one. I've lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle. The campaign against Agas - which starts here - will divide rich greens down the middle.
‘Rich greens’.
What poetry; one thinks of exotic, feather-leaved ferny Far Eastern brassicas sprouting in the allotment. Also, the very existence of ‘Rich greens ‘is a sign of what we, dear reader, are up against.
To recap: industrial capitalism creates massive surpluses whereby large classes of administrators and intellectuals can be supported in their unproductive activities; worrying about the weather and trying to save us from ourselves. Without industrial civilisation, rich greens would
A) have died as children, (or, if female, died in childbirth eventually, or straight away, giving rise to the constant storybook theme of the wicked stepmother, of whom rich green have never heard), or B) be doing something un-rich by modern standards, but richly green, like spreading manure in the fields on frosty January mornings in the hope that they and their surviving illiterate children might not starve much next winter.
But it is even more stupid to dismiss all environmentalism as a middle-class whim.
We on the Right, Georgie-boy, do not dismiss it as ‘middle-class whim’ at all. It’s what we social conservative types invent pairless euphemisms like trouser fudge and skull-bongo for.
It's the poor who live beside polluting factories, whose lives are wrecked by opencast mining, who can't afford to move away from motorways or flood zones.
In which the otherwise destitute work or mine, and along which their food is driven to the shops, their children are bussed to school, and along which their wailing wives are ambulanced to antiseptic maternity suites where the machine that goes ping! is ready to save them and their infants from the otherwise inescapable horrors of breach births, ragged-knifed sections, and in which many gallons of refrigerated blood are ready to refill their haemorrhaging arteries. And muscle and wind power alone seems to have saved the Netherlands from being the Atlantic Ocean, though machine-based technology seems to be improving that. Perhaps the political/economic bases of countries like Bagladesh might have something to do with being unable to deal with flooding?
They are hit first and worst by climate change. Those who claim that all environmentalists are middle or upper class ignore the tens of millions of peasants and labourers who have mobilised on green issues in south Asia, Africa and Latin America . They indulge a transparent sophistry: some greens are aristocrats; all green issues are therefore the preserve of toffs.
Monbiot, whose Apple Mac is woven from willow withies and runs on the bio-heat generated by composting muesli, continues…
Nowhere is this class-branding more evidently wrong than in the debate over flying. This week the government is expected to announce that a third runway will be built at Heathrow. MPs, airline bosses and rightwing newspapers have been trying to soften us up by insisting that this is happening for the benefit of the poor. Those trying to stop new runways are toffs preventing working-class people from having fun.
Monbiot has travelled throughout Canada and the United States, campaigning on climate change and promoting his book.
The group that has worked hardest to portray the issue this way is the weird cult that arose from the Revolutionary Communist party. This Trotskyist splinter, whose chief theorist is the sociology professor Frank Furedi, has spent the last 30 years moving ever further to the right. The magazine it founded in 1988, Living Marxism (later called LM), celebrated power and demanded total market freedom. It campaigned against bans on tobacco advertising, child pornography and the ownership of handguns.
It denied that genocide had taken place in Rwanda , or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia . It provided a platform for writers from the hard-right Institute for Economic Affairs…
‘Hard-right’ here meaning ‘people who wear suits’ and ‘people who prepare detailed research papers about how economics actually works by studying the people who invent, produce, sell and transport things like George’s underpants and the disposable swabs and other unrecyclable dressings that must have been used when a security guard put a fence-post through his foot, allegedly. It’s Institute ‘for’ Economic Affairs; but what’s a mere conjunction to someone who confuses 35% of something with five times something?
…and Center..
Sic - it’s American ‘Center’ Nice bit of British cultural snobbery in your hand-loom-woven spell-checker there, George. Do keep it up, there’s a good chap…
…for the Defence of Free Enterprise.
…which doesn’t seem to think that the State is a terribly good thing for providing prosperity and happiness in human affairs.
Probably some irrational prejudice they picked up in the Twentieth Century somewhere, I suppose, between class-conscious multi-million Marxist mass murder and tree-hugging, Rhine-worshipping secular-humanist Germans at that old genocide thing.
Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies, which was founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. He and the LM writer Tony Gilland wrote to the supermarket chains, offering - for £7,500 - to educate "consumers about complex scientific issues".
LM closed in 2000, and was replaced by the web magazine Spiked. Edited by Brendan O'Neill, it concentrates on denying the existence of social and environmental problems, and attacking protest movements with a hatred so intense and disproportionate that it must contain an element of self-disgust.
O'Neill, who still describes himself as a Marxist and blogs for the Guardian, calls environmentalism a "death cult" run by "fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans". The "anti-flying squad" is "illiberal, irrational, parochial, narrow-minded and backward". Plane Stupid's recent protest at Stansted, he says, was motivated by "unabashed, undiluted, unattractive class hatred".
Got it, I think. This particular bunch of commies, beaten down by the wealth, freedom, prosperity pride and optimism generated by the free-trading Thatcher years of forthright and unapologetic conservatism, realized that despite their nineteenth-century founder’s assertions free trade, property and mass production could - in a polity of law and democracy - provide the poorest in society with hitherto unknown levels of comfort, security and luxury. And Georgie-boy, he doesn’t like it.
If you understand and accept what climate science is saying, you need no further explanation for protests against airport expansion.
Big if that, what with all the skepticism around from, well, climatescientists.
But if, like Brendan and his fellow travellers, you refuse to accept that man-made climate change is real, you must show that the campaign to curb it is the result of an irrational impulse. The impulse they choose, because it's an easy stereotype and it suits their prolier-than-thou posturing, is the urge to preserve the wonders of the world for the upper classes. "Cheap flights," O'Neill claims, "has become code for lowlife scum, an issue through which you can attack the 'underclass', the working class and the nouveau riche with impunity."
I for one would never call environmentalism a "death cult" run by "fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans".
Good Lord, no.
There are rules against plagiarism, and I for one respect them. I’ll stick with my very own ‘echo-headed killjoy gut-crumpets’ for now.
The connection seems obvious, doesn't it? More cheap flights must be of greatest benefit to the poor. A campaign against airport expansion must therefore be an attack on working-class aspirations. It might be obvious, but it's wrong.
Well, maybe these commies, being inherently conspiracy theorists like their founder, tend to believe that people have motivesotherthantheobvious, openones that the rest of us use to figure out our fellow man’s actions.
The Sustainable Development Commission collated the figures on passengers using airports in the United Kingdom between 1987 and 2004. During this period, total passenger numbers more than doubled and the price of flights collapsed. The number of people in the lowest two socio-economic categories (D and E) who flew rose,…
Which might be due to the lower prices, perhaps, one of those supply-and-demand things we like to call market forces but you like to call ‘development’ or ‘globalization.’
…but their proportion fell, from 10% of passengers in 1987 to 8% in 2004. By 2004, there were over five times as many passengers in classes A and B than in classes D and E.
Today, the Civil Aviation Authority's surveys show, the average gross household income of leisure passengers using Heathrow is £59,000 (the national average is £34,660); the average individual income of the airport's business passengers (36% of its traffic) is £83,000. The wealthiest 18% of the population buy 54% of all tickets, the poorest 18% buy 5%.
Luton, Gatwick, Manchester , Prestwick ? More proley the further you get away from Westminster and Whitehall, do you think? Where do all those chavtastic flights head out to the Costa Del Sol fly from and are you seriously saying they’re outnumbered by olive-stuffers on their way to Chiantishire? Perhaps we should ask the Polly Toynbee at 2 minutes along this recording..?
Just asking.
Glad the riff-raff are being kept out of the waiting-lounge again, George. Not that you’d notice; being towed everywhere in your adventures by the indefatigable Lee Scoresby and the great armoured polar bears -… Polar Bears!? Say, is that why you and Big G Al are so fussed about the polar bears; you need them to protect you and your little furry souls from the Gobblers?
O'Neill champions Ryanair , Britain 's biggest low-cost carrier, as the hero of the working classes. So where would you expect this airline to place most of its advertising? I have the estimated figures for its spending on newspaper ads in 2007. They show that it placed nothing in the Sun, the News of the World, the Mirror, the Star or the Express, but 52% of its press spending went to the Daily Telegraph. Ryanair knows who its main customers are: second-home owners and people who take foreign holidays several times a year.
Who, in the age of the one-penny ticket, is being prevented from flying? It's not because they can't afford the flights that the poor fly less than the rich; it's because they can't afford the second homes in Tuscany , the skiing holidays at Klosters or the scuba diving in the Bahamas . British people already fly twice as much as citizens of the United States, and one fifth of the world's flights use the UK 's airports. If people here don't travel, it's not because of a shortage of runways.
At the core of the campaign against a third Heathrow runway are the blue-collar workers and working-class mums of the village of Sipson, whose homes are due to be flattened so that the rich can fly more. If wealthy people don't like living under a flight path, they can move; the poor just have to lump it. Through climate breakdown, the richest people on earth trash the lives of the poorest.
Well, our ‘poor’ are richer than the Third-World poor – those poor who move themselves across oceans and continents to get to all the places with the made-up roads and airports and build-up areas where there’s lots of food and buildings and education for their families. They don’t do all that in order to live in yurts. They do so in order to become blue-collar workers and working-class mums. Maybe they’re not just the poorest but also the stupidest people on Earth – migrating to where all those nasty, polluting machines are?
Yes, this is a class war; and Brendan O'Neill and his fellow travellers have sided with the toffs. These Marxist proletarian firebrands are defending the class they profess to hate. Bosses of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your planes.
Aside from the eminently fiskable ‘science’, this lad needs to look at the real world in which people live and migrate to the West. He advocates less technology and l less wealth – for the others: not for himself.
He needs to take a clearer, better look at the real world. The northern shamans of old flew out over the Earth in the form of wild geese, and as they were often male, so perhaps what he needs to do is take a proper gander, rather than indulging in its homophone?
