It is a fundamental of democracy that the proponent of a thing should actually say something intelligible, and of course, set out an argument that can be meaningfully engaged with.
But they didn't manage it.
You can't actually argue with ignorant, conspiracy-theorising street thuggery.
It's only performance from the likes of @James_BG that makes it seem respectable.
It was a rabble. It was unable to express its grievances. And it had to resort to fantasy to compensate.
For instance, the occupants of the house are charged with having "destroyed democracy", with having "blood on their hands", and with covering up "hundreds of billions of corporate profits".
Grave charges. But no actual explanation about when/how these crimes took place.
This, from the article, for e.g.
Smith: "There are people whose business it is to make science look like opinion. Who aim to transform genuine feelings of climate grief and guilt into defended ignorance and positive denial".
Ok. Like what? Where? When? How?
And so?
It's a poetic litany... "eloquent"...
But it doesn't mean anything.
Even if it is true, why should there not be organisations who question science used in policy-making?
And what are "genuine feelings of climate grief and guilt"?
Who experiences them?
And then this, too long to quote in a tweet.
What does it mean? How is it a claim against the occupants of the house?
If there is any evidence of "lobbying at the highest level of our government", it's undermined by the fact of the government's commitment to #netzero.
They have no rebuttal to the "lobbying". The lobbying being (we must assume) little more than the publications, which you can read for yourself -- and which the protesters have not read.
It is also blind to the lobbying in the other direction, which is far more substantial.
In £ terms, it is several orders of magnitude greater.
And it is not done in public.
For instance, the cross-party consensus on climate change, which *is* used to prevent the public expressing a view on climate policy, was organised by a lobbying organisation, the Green Alliance.
The Green Blob is recycling its "air pollution" proxy battle of the climate war today with this "new" report from the @RCPhysicians. It claims that air pollution kills 500 people a week and costs the economy £500 million a week.
Many knew that this was the point of the green agenda, before even climate change turned up as the problem that the solution was looking for.
What we need from politicians is a deeper explanation of green politics and action to counter it:
* How was this toxic ideology able to capture so many western institutions and political centres?
* How will the party address its own role in expanding that ideological project? Will it boot out the Gummers and Goldsmiths?
* What options will exist to overcome the legacies of its own actions and the following government?
Degrowth was the core of the green ideological project since the 1960s.
Abundance was anathema to environmentalism (and still is), because green ideology believes that an economy is a subset of an ecology, and is thus a zero-sum game. That is why billionaires were drawn to it.
Many Tories are of a similar view. They sense no problem with green rent-seeking and zero-growth. It is all in Gaia's plan.
In fact, many of these ideas came from the Conservative fold. It was only later that the centre of gravity moved to the putative left.
Until Copenhagen in 2009, the main hope of COP climate talks was a one-size-fits-all emissions-reduction policy. At Paris in 2015, that was finally abandoned, and emphasis moved to making local government, not national, the main weapon of climate policy. How it's going...
The green blob realised that national governments were unable to pass draconian legislation to change society.
But local politics was in such a sorry state that it would be easier to capture by small numbers of activists.
Turnouts were as low as 12%. And it was very easy to lobby local politicians to form a consensus on issues that were proxies of climate change. Air pollution and planning policies, for example, advanced the climate agenda, with Tory, Lab and Lib Dem and Green support.
Hi @Ed_Miliband. Look how much UK gas prices have fallen since the April energy price cap was introduced. From £1.42/therm to 89p. That's a 37% decrease.
Will the Jul-October price cap be lowered, and when it is, will you explain that this is because of "global gas prices"?
@Ed_Miliband Here's the 10-year view.
We should be seeing lower bills, right?
@Ed_Miliband Also, since the price on "global markets" has dropped, and since the April-June price cap was lifted ahead of this drop, many energy companies still charging the full whack. So the next price cap should reflect the excess payments, too, right?
And I don't think urging other countries to war at our expense is any definition of "standing with" worth defending.
Hundreds of thousands are now dead because of "standing with". Hundreds of thousands more are now fatherless, sonless, widowed...
You make a claim on behalf of "Britain" that you have never tested, and which your Prime Ministers could not even deliver for us.
Do you stand with people who are now scattered in bits across eastern Ukraine? How does one "stand with" people who lay beneath the ground? How does one express "solidarity" with young men snatched from the streets to be forced to the front line against their will?
Other people's wars make Toryboys feel all big and important about "global Britain". But their Ukrainian counterparts' children will never know their fathers. War is glorious when you don't have your comrade's guts blasted across your face. They've no idea what they "stand with".
Did you ever wonder how David Miliband, who oversaw the development of the Climate Change Act (and consequently Net Zero) landed a job worth a $million a year as a director of a charity?
Wonder no more...
Those are just *some* of the grants made by the government to the charity now directed by the former government minister.
He's worth every penny of that million bucks a year, as far as his extremely-well paid colleagues and appointers are concerned.
@CharlotteCGill @WokeWaste @procurementfile - if you haven't seen this tranche, it's worth taking a peek at. (On CF and DT).