I don't think it is possible to overstate the profound unreality that dominates in SW1.
Even mainstream commentators are discussing the collapse of the established parties, the economic recession that has merely yet to be inaugurated, deindustrialisation, a deep crisis of values across the public realm, an immigration crisis that cannot be stemmed, prices out of control, even blandified high streets are disintegrating, and the risk of war...
Yet here is this plonker who believes that society and the entire economy can be reorganised, and the fact of policy failure can be washed away by glib, elongated gaslighting verbiage.
I went to extremely crappy schools. But I at least learned what the antecedents to the French and Russian revolutions were. Political correctness had already dissolved the English civil wars from the curriculum, but I'm pretty sure there are some lessons in that too. Perhaps Miliband and co went to even worse schools, but cannot think it possible that they are mistaken.
I'm not talking about £300 sparking revolutions here. I am talking about the catastrophic indifference to others epitomised by such idiot zealots that believe elections are mere formalities and a sideshow to coronations, whose agendas are set by higher courts.
I get called a "denier" and "big oil funded" -- neither of which is true. My fundamental question has always been: what kind of world do adherents to green ideology want to create and on what basis do they assume legitimacy for their projects?
For those who are preoccupied by "The Science"...
If you can't interrogate ideology, you don't know what science says. And that is because you don't know what you've told it or asked it.
Too many people believe that science is objectivity rather than the attempt towards objectivity. And too many believe that what science seemingly says is self-evident. But if the putative facts that science produces were self evident, then we would have no need of science.
Far from demonstrating "extreme weather", this report shows that there are milder winters, fewer frosts and less snow. It unsafely attempts to link floods to climate change, but even the IPCC reminds us that floods are not a meteorological phenomenon, and it is difficult to find any trends for attribution. "Hotter days" in the MO's metric can mean merely mild winter days, not the "lethal heat" that Guardian headlines will scream about. And on which point, the actually hotter days are merely free holiday weather, despite attempts to link them to "excess summer deaths", which fail as a climate change metric in multiple ways: the summer months see a much lower death rate; heatwave mortality was vastly higher in the past; only extremely vulnerable people are affected (who deserve better care); the death rate has fallen dramatically.
There is no climate crisis, despite the MO's desire to find it.
This is an especially silly chart. It seems to show how many days per year the temperature anomaly exceeds various temperatures. But it doesn't discriminate between summer and winter.
Look at the stupid headline the MO's report has already generated!
There is nothing in the report to make the claim that "extreme weather" has become "normal".
"Possible", as they are now styled, were PKA 10:10 -- and they were created to appear as a "grassroots" green organisation, to support the UK government's policy agenda.
But it all went wrong with some hideous -- and extremely expensive -- TV adverts.
"Splattergate" as it became known showed teachers, bosses, football managers trying to engage their charges with the climate message, and blowing up those who didn't cooperate.
They claimed it was self-satire, but it was too close to the bone.
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.