Northern Lights?

One of the most intractable problems in British politics is voters’ perception that they should be enjoying a Scandinavian standard of public services while only paying American levels of tax.  No wonder governments get into debt as they struggle to balance the books.

The solution, of course, is to decentralise so that what voters get is a better match for what they’re prepared to fund.  Within Scandinavia itself though, decentralisation has not, so far, been as great a favourite with the major parties as it might.  At the heart of Scandi social democracy is the idea that everyone is equal.  And, therefore, the non sequitur follows that everything must be the same.  As in Jacobin France, all political templates are equal, but some are definitely more equal than others.

Sweden makes an interesting case study.  OECD statistics show that, in 2010, public spending was 34.8% of GDP in the UK and 45.5% in Sweden.  In the UK, locally raised taxes amounted to 1.7% of GDP and nationally raised taxes to 26.2%, while in Sweden the local figure was 16.1% and the national figure 23.7%.  (The balance is accounted for by social security funds like National Insurance.)  The lesson seems to be that if folk know that the money they pay to keep society from falling apart is raised and spent where they can see it being raised and spent then they’ll be more supportive of the idea.  Even in the USA, where public spending was only 24.8% of GDP, the local figure was 3.9%, more than double the figure in the UK.

In Sweden’s case the results of local spending are immediately evident to the visitor in a very well-kept environment.  There's a county-based public transport system (Swedish counties being of regional scale), delivered by private contractors but to the county’s specification and livery.  Besides buses, this can include regional railways, trams and ferries, with timed tickets interchangeable between modes.  Look out for the bus shelters changing to a different design and the buses turning a different colour and you’ll know you’ve crossed the county boundary.  In such small, symbolic ways, local identity is made manifest even in a globalised economy.

Nonetheless, there is something rotten in the state of Sweden.  The long shadow of half-a-century of social democratic rule has left it as perhaps the most totalitarian society in western Europe.  Stories abound of children seized by social services for parents’ minor infractions of the rules of political correctness.  Governments of the Left were still practising eugenics and forced sterilisation in the 1970s; in 1932 the Swedish State Institute of Race Biology at Uppsala was publishing studies of the Sami to proclaim how inferior they were and promote their sterilisation.

The Sami have had a hard time all round.  Centuries of persecution for being different, then patronising policies to ensure that ‘the Lapps will remain Lapps’, depriving them of the technological means to function politically in the modern world.  And at last some limited recognition with the creation in 1993 of Sweden’s Sami Parliament, a consultative body which also has equivalents in Norway and Finland, and then in 2000 official minority status for their language.

The Sami remain as a distinct people because of their relationship to the land and to the nomadic occupations it provides.  At this point, Sweden’s accommodating approach hits the rocks.  Folklore and costumes are fine – accurate or inaccurate – and good for tourism, but natural resources are the common property of all Swedes.  Development policies have introduced roads, railways, hydro-electric schemes and managed forestry that have all played havoc with reindeer herding.  The alternatives of fishing and hunting have been curtailed by the Swedish State’s confiscation of Sami land rights.  Demands that indigenous people provide proof of title to support their claims to State property turn reality on its head: the truth is that indigenous people belong to the land, not the other way round, but either way they’re a unit.

There’s talk of expanding the Sami Parliament’s role to include land management but for radicals it’s not enough to be allowed to manage a heritage they’re not allowed to own.  For some Sami, a Swedish identity – or a Norwegian, Finnish or Russian one – is something to cling to, a second string to the bow.  For others, the battle to preserve the Sami language in the face of past attempts to suppress it remains a painful memory, ‘the Sami sore’, and for those who regard that history as reason enough to mistrust Stockholm nothing less than a separate Sameland will do.

The treatment of the Sami shows how repressive the parties of the Left can be when everything lines up for them.  Unbroken rule for 40 years.  Under a doctrine of national unity – folkhemmet (‘the people’s home’) – that embodied a real enough sense of community but allowed for no differentiation.  And all set in a country that used to be one of the most aggressive on earth.  Sweden’s glory days ended in the early 18th century when the cost of an all-conquering army could no longer be sustained.  In the previous century it dominated the Baltic and northern Germany and even had a colony in North America: New Sweden, today’s Delaware and Pennsylvania.  For all the protests about laid-back Swedes, such a legacy is bound to linger.

Psychologically, there’s probably nowhere else in Europe that provides such an instructive parallel to the UK, as the UK continues its own transition into post-imperial self-justification.  Last at war in 1814, and so never forced fundamentally to modernise its self-image, Sweden also shares with the UK a tendency to refer to the heartland of Europe as ‘the continent’, something from which both consider themselves detached.

The similarity shows too in the absence of a regional dimension to Sweden’s constitution, though as in the UK there have been moves to regionalise, badly, ignoring readily available historical precedents.  Sweden has been attempting to negotiate the merger of its 21 counties into 6 or 9 regions, following the pattern of a similar centralisation implemented in Denmark in 2007.  Since 1999 three Swedish counties have been designated as regions on a trial basis, with additional powers devolved to them.  Since it’s only a trial, they’re assured of nothing.

Nationalists and regionalists should note that bureaucracies under pressure always centralise, even if letting go would produce better outcomes.  (In Denmark, the county councils raised their own taxes; the regions that have replaced them do not, being largely funded centrally.)  It’s a process that can be seen at work in Scotland and Wales at present and in the creation of unitary counties and metro mayors; it’s also a process we need to denounce where it runs unreasonably against the grain of the decentralisation we seek.

Some of Sweden’s counties can be fiercely independent in spirit.  Dalarna is famous for its small, painted wooden horses that have become a national symbol, but that fact only shows how effortlessly Sweden has dealt with local identity – by nationalising it, absorbing it and disarming it.  What’s Dalarna’s is everybody’s.  Only in the southern tip of Sweden has an identity of regional scale resulted in a questioning of Swedishness itself.

The region of Scania or Skåneland – the three counties of Blekinge, Halland and Skåne (along with the Danish island of Bornholm) – was historically as separate as Scotland.  (It’s also where the Old English poem Beowulf is thought to be set and where the Normans originated.)  Sweden’s royal arms – three gold crowns on a blue shield – are thought to represent the three kingdoms ruled over by King Magnus Eriksson, who died in 1364.  That is to say, Norway, Sweden and Scania.  For most of its recorded history down to 1658, Scania was one of the three provinces of Denmark, though always protective of its autonomy.  Its landscape and architecture remain much more Danish than Swedish.

The Treaty of Roskilde that transferred it definitively to Sweden in 1658 included all the usual promises about respecting traditional privileges, soon laughed away.  The Scanians’ parliament was illegally abolished and a cultural war was set in motion to Swedify everything from the language to clerical dress.  Yet Scanians still speak differently.  Written down, Danish and Swedish are separate languages, but Sweden is a large country: Danes can understand southern Swedes and vice-versa, while northern Swedes do need the subtitles for Danish films.  Especially since the Øresund Bridge opened in 2000, Malmö has become in effect a suburb of Copenhagen (as viewers of The Bridge will be aware).  A Scanian regionalist party ought to be able to undo a historic injustice and allow the pivotal point of the Baltic to look both ways, to be almost Danish, and not quite as Swedish as others.

It ought to, yes, but what has happened?  The irony is that if Scania has provided one-third of royal Sweden’s identity, and a name and historic logo for some internationally renowned trucks, that’s as far as it goes.  Labels in Stockholm’s Nordic Museum repeatedly fall over the fact of Scania, telling visitors that the custom is this in southern Sweden and that in the rest of the country, or that particular traditions in painting and weaving are unique to the south.  It’s all reminiscent of the days when Scotland was just ‘North Britain’ and Cornwall was part of the ‘West Country’.  There had to be a reckoning.

It came in 1979 with the launch of Skånepartiet, the Scania Party.  Scanian regionalism ranges from grumbling about Stockholm getting everything to demands for full independence.  The party’s populist policies called for the abolition in Scania of Sweden’s State-owned off-licence monopoly, Systembolaget, and the creation of a Scanian commercial television channel.  But Skånepartiet also decided to play the anti-immigration (and especially anti-Islam) card, a calculation that worked well enough in Malmö in the mid-80s.  Then its fortunes took a turn for the worse, its number of elected representatives dwindling until 2006, since when it has had none.

Its place has been taken by the Sweden Democrats, a Swedish version of UKIP or the Front National that emerged first in Scania and has since spread across central Sweden.  Like its French and UK equivalents, the party wants a single, uniform national culture.  It has no time for minorities, however many thousands of years they can claim to have been in the country.  It wants to abolish the Sami Parliament, claiming that the parliament’s existence discriminates against those in Sameland who are not Sami and do not rely on the traditional way of life.  It’s curious how happy far Right parties are to rant about colonists coming in and changing how we live but never recognise themselves in the description.  ‘They’ are immigrants; ‘we’ are ex-pats.

In the 2014 elections, the Sweden Democrats stormed to 12.9%, and 49 seats in the Riksdag.  They’re one of a group of far Right parties now making headway in each of the Nordic countries.  That’s bad news for regionalists; Skånepartiet may be rueing their choice of strategy.  To play the anti-immigrant card when an influx of immigrants into your region is one of its distinctive characteristics may look attractive; once that influx extends nationwide it’s nationwide parties that will pick up the resulting protest vote.  The Swedish Right have also been able to dig deep into the votes of the Swedish Left.  The Left have moved on to new fields of political correctness, leaving their traditional folkhemmet power base behind.  Meanwhile, the tensions resulting from mass immigration are calling into question the very survival of the Scandinavian welfare model.  A party that will defend the legacy of folkhemmet when its creators will not, a party that prioritises Swedes in Sweden, is bound to do well.

Then, this month, two gruesome murders in an IKEA store in Västerås, near Stockholm, carried out by an Eritrean migrant, shocked the nation.  The latest YouGov poll indicates that the Sweden Democrats are now the top political party in Sweden.  Polling at 25.2%, they beat the ruling Social Democrats, on 23.4%.  Watch Sweden closely and you’ll see the tide on the turn.  It won’t be a pretty sight; Game of Thrones fans might care to note that Västerås is pronounced rather like ‘Westeros’.

Scared As A Bully

On 9th November 2014, Catalonia voted 4 to 1 for independence from Spain.  Madrid isn’t ready to begin talks on separation.  Instead, it’s determined to prosecute Catalonia’s leading nationalists for organising the vote.  Will David Cameron protest?  Will there be airstrikes?

On 20th November 2014, the French Parliament voted to abolish many of the historic regions of France through forced mergers, against the wishes of those affected.  An amendment calling for the reunification of Brittany – split since the Vichy era between two regions, one predominantly non-Breton – was haughtily rejected.  Will David Cameron protest?  Will there be airstrikes?

In both these states, the full force of the law is being used to crush democratic feeling.  All in defence of the outdated primacy of ‘France’ and ‘Spain’, and of the power of centralist politicians to glorify a long-dead past and view other, more human-scale loyalties as a threat.  This is what happens when the Europe of a Hundred Flags steps up from bookish theory to impassioned practice.  There are those who really don’t like the idea one bit.  Warmongers, austerity-merchants and lovers of technocracy.  David Cameron is among them, so watch this space.

Let’s step back to 14th November for an insight into the true depth of establishment paranoia.  Cornelius Adebahr’s article for the Carnegie Endowment explores the problems facing a fragmenting Europe, from the perspective that fragmentation is somehow a ‘bad thing’.  Xenophobic hatred certainly is, but that isn’t the subject matter of debate among Europeans seeking greater autonomy.  All we want is genuine subsidiarity free from centralist manipulation.

Including the power to judge for ourselves what functions we’re capable of exercising.  Europe is in crisis because it has become a project of elite dominance, the preserve of a managerialist class that denies the right – or even the ability – of ordinary folk to shape their own governance.  Adebahr sneers at what he terms ‘populism’ because it’s too democratic.  He sneers at nationalism because it isn’t driven by a narrowly economic conception of rationality.  Because it rejects that ‘rationality’ in which economic power rests not with democratic states but with anonymous global ‘investors’ shopping around for the choicest bargain.

The Europe of the Investors is an integrated economic space in which barriers to the movement of capital do not exist and democratic ownership of key economic assets is repeatedly eroded.  Together, these two things make it easy for markets to punish policy-makers who dare to be different.  (UK governments make things more than usually hard for themselves – and for us – for contorted ideological reasons that stem from City overlordship of our political system.)  Populism is labelled as bad because it’s the opposite of what we might call investism.  TTIP and the Lisbon Treaty are part of the process of declaring democracy illegal worldwide because it cannot be guaranteed to put investor interests first.  And we now see in France and Spain on which side of the argument nationalists and regionalists are judged to stand.  Voting is the way to change everything, or it is nothing.  OK, nothing it is then.

We’ve made clear our own view that vital industries, utilities and public services must be owned and controlled locally and regionally – not bought and sold by the multi-nationals.  Common ownership is a widely held ideal, even among Conservatives.  The consensus now needs to be put into effect.  Obviously, not through Labour or its continental equivalents, all tainted beyond recognition, but through radical nationalist and regionalist alternatives.

How radical?  Should compensation be paid to the present owners?  And if so, how much?  If the aim is to achieve common ownership, in the public interest, can the private (or foreign public) interests represented by compensation claims be viewed as anything but self-centred trivia, irrelevant to the core issue of achieving economic democracy?  Or should those who invested in good faith be reimbursed, it being no fault of theirs if they sank money into a politically sensitive industry?  In short, is the current set-up a crime against society or just a mistake?  Have the investment giants earned our rage or our pity?

Any such theories of ‘fairness’ can be laboured so as to slow down necessary progress.  Even to visualise the issue as a transaction is to bow to a hostile point of view.  Why not decouple progress from that which retards it?  Why not take back now, and pay back later (if at all)?  Our thinking has been so polluted by investism – even governments claim to be 'investing' in roads or a better NHS when what they mean is they're devoting more resources to transport or healthcare – that we miss the most obvious, direct answers to our problems.  Cut the Gordian knot.  Or perhaps, in the case of PFI, the Gordon knot.

Bear in mind (a) that many of our nationalised industries were created by seizing municipal assets without compensation (and this sort of thing still goes on, quite shamelessly), (b) that they were then privatised at an average 30% discount on the market price, (c) that as natural monopolies they have continued to be cash cows ever since, and (d) that corporations spent – and spend – millions on subverting the democratic debate, belying the idea that they exist only to serve.  False title.  False value.  False benefit.  False intent.  It would be entirely reasonable to conclude that the owners are worth rather less to us than they claim.  Moreover, the owners aren't the ones who know how to run buses, trains, power plants or treatment works in Wessex.  Their only expertise is in financial engineering, which any sane society would be better off without.  So how do we value their contribution?  On balance, negatively.  THEY should be paying US.  At the very least, let's start the negotiations at nil and work upwards EVER so reluctantly.  We can't increase taxes or borrowing, so the third option it has to be.

What we need is not so much ‘UK plc’ as ‘Wessex Common Estate’, our resources managed for this and for future generations.  Public assets belong to everyone, born and unborn, and should only ever be leased, never sold, let alone given away.  We need a politics of stewardship, not a politics of trading.  Friends are motivated by love to share, willingly, within the restraints of a common bond.  Enemies are motivated by fear to trade, suspiciously, without the restraints of a common bond.  It’s true for us, it’s true for Europe, and it’s true for the world.  You share with your friends and you trade with your enemies.  What does that say about those who want global trade to grow?

Europe stands at a crossroads.  A second Berlin Wall can come tumbling down, destroying the needless political centralism of old global empires AND, if the will is there, the needless economic centralism of new global corporations too.  These are two causes that can make common cause in delivering what folk clearly want to see happen.  Either that, or the military will be on the streets to make sure it doesn’t happen.  That’s how scared the bullies are.

Peace & Goodwill?

This September, those who died in terrorist attacks on U.S. cities were commemorated, ten years on. Although the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan combined is over 300 times the death toll of 9/11, few words were spared for the victims of those U.S.-led crusades for oil, unleashed under the pretext of fighting terror, with terror. Those who care at all will not care enough to withhold their votes from the politicians responsible and cast them in a more sensible direction. Although about 71% of Britons think the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, according to a ComRes poll for ITV, most tolerate the lies, the lies about ‘our boys’, devoting themselves to ‘keeping us safe’, that we may ‘sleep at night’. Well, wake up!

In October, the conflict in Afghanistan involving western troops entered its second decade. It has cost the UK taxpayer £18 billion and rising. Deaths among the British armed forces have reached 392, among Afghan civilians over 8,800.

Today, we ought to reflect on how little it has all achieved.

Saddam Hussein was tried and executed, for unrelated crimes, while Osama Bin Laden was not tried at all but executed anyway. In contrast, our own conspirators are still very much at large. Some of those, like David Cameron, who voted for war in 2003 enjoy all the trappings of high office, courtesy of the British electorate. So should we now accept Tony Blair’s advice, to ‘draw a line and move on’? It’s true that such issues may seem a long way removed from devolution but they do demonstrate the pressing need for change in our constitutional arrangements. If ‘our leaders’ can be excused justice for reasons of state then there is NO justice, no equality under the law. And the longer they’re allowed to get away with it, the more they’ll feel capable of doing the same again.

Meanwhile, 3% of Wessex continues to be occupied as training grounds by those preparing for the next pre-emptive strike to keep the peace. A less cynical, less Orwellian world used to call them wars.

Almost nightly, our screens are filled with the uniformed portraits of the latest casualties in Afghanistan. Newsreaders don’t normally tell us the names of everyone who has died in a preventable accident at work. Or in collisions on our overcrowded roads. Is it because morale is so low that those ‘heroes’ foolish enough to take the Queen’s shilling are paraded before us? So that, surely, we ought to nod helplessly and approve of them wasting their lives in a pointless cause? British soldiers are NOT ‘heroes’. For two reasons. One is that heroes save lives, not take them. The other is that there is nothing heroic about this shabby little war.

What most appals those who lived through the Second World War is that rampant militarism now goes unchallenged. The priority of disarmament has given way to the priority of ‘intervention’, as if ‘our’ government had some right to act not just as world’s policeman but also as world’s political surgeon. As the dust settles in Libya and talk turns to the contracts for reconstruction, we can see the real agenda all too plainly. As ‘statesmen’ look around for something to restart the engine of ecocide, plenty of advice will suggest that trade follows the flag, that the markets demand greater and greater offerings of human hearts. There’s even a name for it: weaponised Keynesianism. Globalisation – aggressive trade liberalisation coupled with contempt for sovereignty, identity and democracy – is a crime against humanity, a desperate bid to win control of the world’s resources before they run out. Daft, but true.

‘Royal’ Wootton Bassett now has the same initials as Red, White & Blue. It began to enter the national consciousness by spontaneously honouring the war dead passing through. It ended up receiving an honour of its own, for which it never asked, an honour some find manipulative and tawdry. The Mayor told journalists that he expects locals will carry on calling the place simply ‘Bassett’. The establishment could not spare the Queen to present her Letters Patent in person this year but deputed the Princess Royal to convey to the townsfolk the thanks of “the whole country”. Thanks for what? Thanks for “responding with dignity and respect to the losses that this country’s operational responsibilities have forced upon us”. Forced? And when exactly did a war of choice become violence under duress? Perhaps the Queen, as ultimate commander-in-chief, would like to answer that question at The Hague?

We are all Cameron’s conscripts, despite the best efforts of the Peace Tax campaign. It has become unacceptable in most circles to voice any criticism of the remilitarisation of our society. Laws are being twisted to punish those who do, trampling on fundamental rights of free expression in a chilling evocation of the flag desecration laws found in totalitarian states. True patriotism cannot arise from coercion and it would be a despicable thing if it could. The burning of Remembrance Day poppies as a protest against the continuing fact of war does appear to be on the increase, an ugly sign of ugly times. Does it show less respect than allowing the warmongers to lay their wreaths of hypocrisy? Who then are the real criminals?

We are all instructed, even by the young Lefties of the BBC, what to think and feel about RWB and Carterton, and much else surrounding the British murder machine. It’s time the truth was able to be told and fingers to be pointed in accusation. Because regime change begins at home.

Nuking Weymouth

According to financial analyst David Malone today, “2012 is going to be the year of unrest and repression.”

A London establishment that has spent the last decade, and more, treading heavily on the world has now invited the world round for a spot of sport. And is getting worried. It might be a very good idea not to be in southern Dorset next summer, in view of some of the scenarios now being modelled.

Of course, nothing at all may happen. But a lot of useful experience in crowd control and the like will have been gained...

Western Spring

WR President Colin Bex speaks truth to power on the streets of London.

Panic Over?

“The question remains whether, as the Berliners say, ‘the situation is desperate, but not hopeless,’ or ‘hopeless but not desperate,’ as the Viennese used to put it.”
Walter C. Dowling (US Ambassador to Korea), 1957

Consider three documents. The first is the State of the South West Report 2011, which informs us that human activity first exceeded the planet’s biocapacity some time in the 1980’s, that the situation continues to worsen (para. 7.18.1) and that if everyone consumed resources at the same rate as residents of the ‘South West’, we would need 2.64 planets (7.18.3). We are already living far beyond environmental limits, despite official pronouncements that we are – apparently – working hard to stay within them. The UK’s is one of the highest ecological footprints in the world, lower than those for the USA and Australia but considerably higher than those found in other developed nations with a high quality of life such as Italy and Japan. Worse still, the ‘South West’ zone has a greater eco-footprint than the UK as a whole, despite the perception of Wessex as a ‘green’ and ecologically-aware region.

Why are we so bad? Food (26%), transport (21%) and housing (21%) are the largest contributors to the ‘South West’ footprint. Transport should come as no surprise. We have a highly dispersed settlement pattern that is dependent on the private car, coupled with the long-term rundown of regional rail services compared to the London fringe. Overall, our largest towns and cities perform better than our rural areas and, broadly speaking, the further west the urban area lies, the better its results become. Commuting to London might be dragging down our figures but relative wealth seems a more likely explanation for this, with the greenhouse gas footprint in particular increasing eastwards as higher average household income fuels higher consumption.

The second document, Footprint Results for Local Authorities, draws comparisons between 2001 and 2004. (More recent data is not comparable: the two earlier snapshots allow us to examine trends.) Pages 11 and 12 show the ‘South West’ as the largest area in England to have deteriorated over that period in terms of eco-footprint, and the largest in Britain in terms of carbon footprint. Despite all that greenwash. Nothing can disguise the fact that development which is ‘less bad’ than it used to be is not the same as ‘good’, or that the footprints won’t reduce if we keep adding more feet.

So what of the third document? The draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) sets out the Coalition’s thinking on planning – and the ‘limits to localism’ it seeks to impose. It decrees a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’. Alarm bells should begin ringing at once. You either have sustainability or you have development. To attempt both is to guarantee failure. You may as well stand on your feet and your head at the same time.

But worse is to come. According to the NPPF, ‘sustainable development’ means ‘sustainable economic growth’ because “without growth, a sustainable future cannot be achieved”. This is not just a misunderstanding. It is a wilful inversion of reality. As a rule, the higher the rate of economic growth, the higher the degree of environmental degradation that results. The only way an economy can appear to grow without harming the environment is if the transactions all involve buying and selling things that don’t actually exist. Think banking. Think toxic assets. A sustainable economy need not be a static economy – our recent policy review committed the Party to support economic change in place of economic growth – but unless the total amount of activity is kept within strict environmental limits there will be no economy.

So who’s listening? None of the London parties. Even the Greens talk about ‘green growth’, without reminding us what therefore needs to contract if the ecological books are to balance. As for the media, no chink of light is ever permitted to penetrate the articles and discussions that pore over economic orthodoxy as if it meant a thing. Orthodox economics has become for our day the Big Lie, which, if it’s big enough, most people will end up believing. So much for education. We seem to be edging towards a scenario like the last decades of the Soviet Union, when ever more desperate remedies are applied to ‘save’ the system. A system that those who can add two and two correctly know is bound to fail. For the rest, evidence is not just ignored: the true believer cannot see it at all. A Blairite conjuring trick will soon reconcile infinite growth with finite resources. Development is environmental protection.

Standing up to a lie is personally threatening. The gut reaction is to protect one’s security and stability, to not rock the boat. After all, how far does the remit of the security services actually extend? Passively, or worse, the deceived defend the lies and the lies go on getting bigger as London politicians push the boundaries just a little bit further.

Fortunately, faced with such nonsense, sane folk are duty-bound to ask the searching questions. Let’s take one example.

Is man-made climate change a hoax? If it is, then we need to ask what is it a cover for? There is good reason to think that it may form a gentle introduction to the much more intractable issue of Peak Oil, though along the way it gives a heck of a boost to demands for a world government with dictatorial powers. The so-called ‘debt crisis’ illustrates how easily global governance, even now, can be manipulated to ‘deliver on austerity’, transferring astronomical amounts of public wealth into private hands with barely a whimper of real protest. More locally, the imperative of ‘green growth’ can recruit hordes of dewy-eyed useful idiots, to campaign, for example, for heavily subsidised wind farms instead of the low impact community wind, hydro and bio power that a decentralised society might actually need.

If man-made climate change is NOT a hoax then the actions of politicians, advised by the best science available, are rationally inexplicable. They would by now have abandoned all this pretence about growing the economy to pay off the bankers. They would have slammed on the brakes and radically transformed the financial system to support a rapid transition to a steady-state economy. Instead they insist not only that growth must continue but that environmental protection must be switched off for as long as it takes to accommodate even more growth in population and consumption. All to re-pay debts that were created out of nothing. Imaginary debts, which could be paid off at once with imaginary money and no-one would be any worse off than when they started.

So if man-made climate change is not a hoax, we must conclude either that London politicians are stupid enough to ignore the warnings of the world’s top scientists, or else that they fully realise what they’re doing. That they genuinely love money more than they love their own children and grandchildren, whose future they’re throwing away for the sake of a silly numbers game. Either way, they have to go. Or it will be time to panic after all.