We’re ruled by dunces – COP26 will be their latest rally
Watching the scenes at Kabul airport furnishes the latest tranche of cumulative evidence that we are governed by fools. But, of course, we already knew that. Around the entire developed world, governments and politicians are held in universal and well-merited contempt. Clearly, the current political system is unsustainable: societies cannot live forever under the rule of people they distrust and despise.
The debacle in Kabul illustrates to the point of caricature the incapacity of contemporary pseudo-democratic governments to deal with events that past administrations would have regarded as workaday tasks. The regulars in the lounge bar of the Dog and Duck, in a five-minute discussion of the evacuation of Afghanistan, would automatically have identified the need for civilians to be exfiltrated first, weaponry secured and the troops removed last of all. It could not be further from rocket science.
It proved too much, though, for the cognitive and intellectual powers of the present incumbent of the Oval Office. Imagine, for just one moment, the media and political reaction if this catastrophe had been presided over by Donald Trump. But why would we be surprised? The United States’ southern border, under Biden and that woman who used to be his deputy before she disappeared, is a wide-open breach in America’s sovereignty, through which are pouring Latin American gangsters and now jihadist terrorists. The world’s supposed sole superpower is a global laughing stock, its president having deadlines dictated to him by the Taliban terrorists.
Again, why would we be surprised? These are the same people – even the same Democratic political party – that blew up the world economy in 2008-2009, after the earlier Clinton administration had created America’s sub-prime mortgage crisis by coercing lenders into throwing money at unqualified borrowers from modish minorities; in one notorious instance a $500,000 loan was advanced on the security of an unemployment benefit cheque. The Department of Justice controlled the US housing market for years, pursuing a proto-woke agenda, until inevitable collapse provoked a domino effect around the world.
Europe was no better. Astonishingly, the proponents of national interest and common sense won the Brexit war and during that long process of attrition the nature of the arrogant, entitled elitist clique whose authority had been overthrown was exposed to the light of day. It was not a pretty sight. During the Covid pandemic the political class clawed back some of its powers of social control, with a majority of the public acquiescing on health grounds, but that does not mean it has benefited in the long term. The patent disarray, divisions and mistakes of the political class further undermined its authority, although Boris Johnson’s effective vaccine roll-out gave the Conservatives temporary credibility.
“Si monumentum requiris…” The state of British society today is testimony to what must surely be the approaching demise of the current political system. The supposed principal pillar of the social order is the police. Today, Britain’s police are driving around in gaudily painted, cartoonish “rainbow cars”, emblazoned with the symbols of a political movement, obsessively searching for “non-crime hate incidents”. Why are the police pursuing non-crimes when the solution rate for actual crimes in England and Wales now stands at a shameful seven per cent?
Britain was better policed under Sir Robert Peel – arguably even under the Bow Street Runners. For generations, Britain has taken pride in the political neutrality of its armed forces and police; now it seems our police forces report to unelected Stonewall, rather than to the elected Home Secretary. It is part of a wider phenomenon of “wokeness” – cultural Marxism – representative only of a tiny minority, colonising our universities, media, boardrooms, national and local government, without benefit of a single ballot paper cast in its support.
Yet, as recently as five years ago, there were still Pollyannas prepared to dismiss the existence of the “deep state” as a conspiracy theory. The problem with this ideological infestation is that the ballot box no longer determines who runs our lives and on what political agenda. Take a striking example: Nigel Farage. His seemingly minor political party won a landslide victory in a European election and he has entered history as the man who, more than any other individual, extricated Britain from the European Union. Yet even he could not overcome the obstacles that excluded him from the House of Commons, in the permanent custody of the party machines.
Now, however, we are approaching the decisive moment, the tipping point that could see the total overthrow of the Oligarchy and its pseudo-democratic system. Insufficiently chastened by the Brexit experience and reassured by the increase in the overreach of the intruder state under cover of the pandemic emergency, the elites are about to essay their most audacious imposture yet – one that, if they persist, which the Brexit precedent strongly suggests they will do, could finally end their power.
“Net Zero” is the epitaph that will be engraved on the tombstone of the globalist political class across the developed world. In all their projections of entitlement and their previous aggressions against freedom, they have been sustained by a faith as fanatical as that of the Taliban: their religion is climate alarmism.
For this green hysteria has not been a normal scientific alert, followed by further investigation, government consultation and the development of a response, as in conventional policy-making. Rather, it has been a messianic movement, based on exaggeration, fear, extravagant claims subsequently discredited, subornation of sensation-hungry media, mobilisation of impressionable youth and the systematic dissemination of a Grande Peur as a method of political manipulation.
Every aspect of the escalation of the climate scare reveals its true character as a political campaign rather than a scientific investigation. This is betrayed by the concentration of authority over the issue within the totally politicised UN agency, the IPCC; the showering of favours on pro-alarmist scientists and the marginalisation of those refusing to endorse the full programme; the application of the emotive label “denier” to sceptics and the early declaration that the “science is settled” and proponents of global warming would no longer debate with opponents. IPCC locuta, causa finita.
Revealing, too, were the scenes, unprecedented since the Children’s Crusade, of world leaders deferring to a Scandinavian truant schoolgirl, the unfortunate victim of unconscionable fear-mongering by her teachers – did that not signal that something far from the rational or scientific was occurring? Greta Thunberg knows nothing about climate science, beyond the indoctrination she has received, just as climate “models” will produce what they have been programmed to deliver. Remember “Hide the decline”?
Of course, there is climate change; there always has been. Northumbrian wine was once highly popular and the Thames froze over in winter in the 17th and 18th centuries. We should be alert to climate changes that will require some modifications and some expenditure, and should respond in a localised and focused way. The problem is that we cannot, because the kernel of realistic concerns has been buried in an avalanche of politically-inspired hysteria designed to facilitate punitive taxation and a regression to pre-industrial standards of living, as desired by the fanatics of Extinction Rebellion.
The astonishing reality is that the leaders of the developed world are preparing to squander trillions of pounds on a crisis that has not been transparently analysed by genuinely neutral and qualified investigators, to assess its precise scale and nature. Far too many questions on issues such as the percentage of the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 are subject to partisan manipulation. Some alarmists claim that total atmospheric CO2, both natural and anthropogenic, totals 72.3 per cent of the overall greenhouse effect; sceptics point out that this calculation excludes water vapour, which accounts for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, and that when it is factored in, the CO2 figure falls to 3.6 per cent.
Such radical differences in assessment (the alarmist excuse for excluding water vapour from calculations is that it is “customary” to do so) demand a complete reality check on the objective truth behind these contending claims. If man-made CO2 is a negligible proportion of the effect creating climate change, then wrecking the global economy will not prevent it. Estimates of the proportion of CO2 that is man-made range from 3 to 4 per cent, to an alarmist 29 per cent. Are we supposed to bet the farm on such incoherent and contradictory contentions?
Looming ahead is the climactic event of the alarmist campaign – COP26. This will be the alarmist cult’s Triumph of the Will moment, a rally at which world leaders will compete to make hair-shirt commitments on behalf of their subjects, pre-eminent among them Boris (with an extra agenda to placate Her Indoors). Britain’s contribution to putative climate change is vanishingly small, but our rulers have already made it clear they intend to throw cash measured in trillions at this problem, real or imagined, to gain kudos from the global elite.
They may be entering the endgame. When a population traumatised by pandemic is forced to drive only unaffordable electric cars, sees its energy bills ratcheted up to levels that will condemn pensioners to hypothermia, is compelled to replace domestic gas boilers with discredited and expensive heat pumps, and is subjected to extortionate green taxes – all creating the ultimate aggression in a long train of impositions, there is a real prospect that the political class may overreach itself and provoke its ejection from power. If you doubt that, take another look at the scenes around Kabul airport; there you see the naked impotence of an effete globalist order – a Confederacy of Dunces – bereft of credibility and no longer capable of survival.