This should never have happened. I was never meant to be writing for Reaction.life. Your column inches should be being lovingly crafted by professional scribes.
Then the unthinkable happened in March 2020. The leadership of the country lost its head in the face of a two-pronged attack: organised manipulation of public opinion by vested interests and frenzied pressure from left-leaning unions. Rational calls for calm from the likes of Peter Hitchens fell on deaf ears. My personal attempts to break the insane spell of the lockdown fanatics also bore no fruit, but subsequent regular feedback to the editors of the daily Reaction subscriber email led to an invitation to outline the sceptical viewpoint in a guest column.
The saga of the mad days of 2020-2022 is reflected in subsequent contributions, including an open-minded challenge to the then newly appointed Labour leader to do his job as HM Opposition and bring down HM Government, even though I had voted for it only 18 months previously. I thought we had sunk to dark depths, but subsequent events – the realisation that Conservatives were in thrall to left-of-centre dogma, and that Starmer (along with his union backers) was calling the shots for harder measures, more economic destruction and even more succour to globalist outfits wishing to sell us pharmaceutical and greenwashed snake oil – put me into despair.
It is indeed hard to shake a collective delusion when almost everyone around you has been bewitched and the mainstream media is acting as the sorcerer’s apprentice. People do not like admitting their mistakes – especially catastrophic ones – and there is little point in taking the ‘I told you so’ line.
Don’t look back in anger… look ahead, and so I spent 2023 tackling the existential threat to our society that is the false religion of decarbonisation. Cutting CO2 – which is plant food – will not save the planet, but it will enrich an unholy alliance of adherents to a climate alarmist gravy train that is anything but green. While it has been modestly reassuring to find some limited resistance to this climate cult, on a day-to-day basis schools are inculcating our kids with non-s(ci)ence, and the courts are forcing government departments to legislate ruinous policies based on the egregious Climate Change Act 2008.
I am no luddite – I am excited about new technologies being developed that improve lives and life chances. I’ve spent over a year of my life working in nuclear fusion research. I’m hugely in favour of genuine sustainability and pollution reduction. But temporary start-up subsidies must not be a route to never-ending state support for pointless, uneconomic and damaging boondoggles. CO2 is not pollution, nor is it causing a climate emergency.
My criticism of our current trajectory goes deeper than just a concern about wasted effort and the opportunity cost of not spending our resources more wisely. The decarbonisation cult is an existential risk to our society and way of life. Recently, fellow Reaction columnist Anthony Peters pointed readers to Dr Tim Morgan’s seminal 2013 report Perfect Storm – Energy, Finance & The End Of Growth. The title of the piece says it all. Dr Morgan, then Head of Research at Tullett Prebon, pithily explains in his opus that “the economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one”. To paraphrase: the pound in your pocket is an irrelevant token if the lights go out. Our current perilous lack of energy security and our path towards deindustrialisation can only have one outcome: devastating (potentially hyper)inflation and impoverishment. Or worse.
Unfortunately, the uniparty – the colloquial name for the essentially indistinguishable Con-Lab-Lib-Green blob – is wedded to this death cult. The Conservatives have been in power since 2010 and despite Cameron’s promise to ‘cut the green crap’ in 2013 and Sunak’s promise a few months ago to replace “imposition, obfuscation and ideology” (not-so-tacitly acknowledging that this is what we’ve been subjected to for the last few years) with “consent, honesty and pragmatism”, the climate alarmist juggernaut has not just been allowed to rumble on, it has been powered up and pointed down a steep ravine. We have a ‘Department for Energy Security & Net Zero’. This is a contradiction in terms, akin to having a ‘Ministry of Peace & War’ or a ‘Bureau for Prosperity and Poverty’. Even Lysenko would have baulked at this lunacy.
Something must be done. I have therefore put myself forward as a candidate for the upcoming General Election on the Reform Party ticket, and as of this week I have been confirmed by Richmond Council electoral services as having a valid nomination for election as Member of Parliament for the Twickenham Constituency.
I am doing this as a matter of principle. This candidacy is of course unpaid, will cost me money and time that could otherwise be spent earning a living or with my family.
There has been a degree to which Reform has been characterised in the popular press as the Nigel Farage party, a one-man-band leading a flawed insurgency of populists. Reaction editor, Iain Martin, has previously referred to Reform as “a rabble led by false prophets”. (Given what I am hearing from disillusioned Tory staffers, this is a more accurate description of the current state of the Conservative Party). In Thursday’s Times newspaper, Martin casts Farage as the mayhem-maker-in-chief who is not in the centre – by implication ‘far right’ – which is an unfair description given that the Tory party has permitted gross leftist groupthink to fester.
More accurately, I believe, Gerald Warner has predicted that Reform is in “pole position to replace the Tories” as the party of the centre (and not the far!) right. Mary Harrington, writing in UnHerd, has unpacked the unfolding situation in piquant detail: Reform stands to achieve “a vote tally that delivers a smack to both cheeks of the uniparty backside”. The next weeks will be interesting. If Sunk Sunak’s listing vessel continues to flounder, then Reform will be able to throw the Tory’s catchphrase back in their faces with a twist: “A vote for the Tories risks splitting the centre right… so vote Reform”.
Let me add a personal note. Cycling around the wards of Twickenham and meeting voters, I was struck by the fervent support for Reform from the grassroots. The talking heads on your TV might attempt to tell you that Reform is all about Farage, but the voters who signed my nomination papers include a teenager of voting age (sick to the back teeth of the Tories), working professionals (“that ESG stuff is nonsense”) and retired – yet energetic – activists who believe in Britain, but who remember the power cuts of the 1970s and do not want their children and grandchildren to suffer blackouts when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The enthusiasm and ‘can do’ attitude of these pillars of our community shames my generation – I include myself amongst this number – who have, at times, been guilty of shrugging our shoulders and assuming that the professional managerial class will deal with society’s ills.
No longer. It is time for amateurs to get involved, perhaps sparking a renewal of interest in our civic duty to hold our elected leaders to account. I say amateur, but many of us are professionals in our fields and have had to live on our wits without the benefit of an employment safety net or a gilt-edged pension to fall back on. It is time to show up the professional press corps that just reads from the uniparty script.
I do not have all the answers, but I do know that there are some things that our future government needs to focus its attention on (e.g. energy security, defence of the realm, fair and just immigration policies, a genuinely sustainable economy) and there are some things it needs to put a stop to, such as wasteful and pointless decarbonisation policies that push people (here and in the third world) into poverty.
Please think very carefully how you vote on 4 July.
See you on the campaign trail.
Dr Alex Starling is an advisor to and non-executive director of various early-stage technology companies. He is the Reform Party Parliamentary Candidate for Twickenham for the General Election that will be held on 4 July 2024. Follow him on Substack (https://alexstarling77.substack.com/) and X (@alexstarling77).
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