Thread by @clim8resistance

"There is nothing unconservative about environmentalism – quite the opposite. Done properly, it can unite different strands of Tory thought, and tackling climate change is far too important to be ceded to the Left." -- @Madz_Grant

telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/1…

This is naïve.

It should be obvious that if you need environmentalism to "unite different strands of Tory thought", then Tory thinking is disuniting and disunited. Environmentalism is not medicine for political ills. It is poison.

Yet it is what all dysfunctional political and public institutions have used to rescue themselves from their terminal mediocrity and irrelevance, and crises of legitimacy. The EU. The Royal Family. The Pope. I could go on... The green alignment belies deep foundational problems.

Environmentalism is its own ideology. It isn't a salve that can heal institutions' self-inflicted wounds caused by generations of self-serving MPs and activists, indifferent to the public.

Don't you remember Dave trying it?

The Tories' green policy agenda is no better formulated than the left's. In the 2000s, as now, green Conservative policy was developed by Gummer and Goldsmith -- chancers, whose view of the world is only a few degrees out of alignment with Caroline Lucas's.

Much prior to that, the neomalthusians of the late '60s were categorically conservative. They sought to reinvent their political movement on ecological terms, using scary models because they too, like todays vapid Conservative party, had no positive agenda.

I see no case for 'unity' left. I see only extremely cynical, antidemocratic and dangerous policymaking hidden behind scaremongering.

Even if that could 'unite' "Tory thinking", it will not rally the public.

Environmentalism is a stand-in for political vision.

It is wrong to blame today's absurdities, like Net Zero, as the work of the "left". It is the Conservative Party that has been in power since 2010. And it is that party that has failed to hold its green chancers to account, and to compare the agenda with the public's wishes.

It is the Conservative government that willed Net Zero into existence. It is Conservative MPs who should have noticed ZERO resistance from opposition MPs and wondered why. And it is Conservative MPs, with a vast majority failing to scrutinise legislation they were making.

Of course, @Madz_Grant admits to all that. But the point is the notion that green ideology can fix that problem -- which it has already caused -- and that climate change is still a problem that can be 'tackled', and that it is an opportunity for the party.

Thatcher was bounced into her environmentalism, significantly by Crispin Tickell and the alignment of global institutions, per Brundtland, towards the end of her office. She embraced 'sustainable economic development' without reading the small print.

https://twitter.com/Madz_Grant/status/1394937281463689227

Scruton makes a complex argument, that I cannot do justice to in a tweet thread. But neither -- and this is the point -- can the Conservative Party.

There must come a point when it is recognised that an institution is dead. Brain dead. Atrophied. Gangrenous.

The only thing animating the corpses of the legacy political parties is the festering green ideology roiling within them.

No 'sensible' 'Conservative environmentalism' can be achieved from this point. There is nothing to be rescued. It has been devoured.

Which brings us to environmentalism... It needs to be fully cut out of public life. Not just scrutinised. In *all* its forms.

Environmentalism is its own ideology. It requires political institutions and the reorganisation of society. It creates its own order.

It is a categorically anti-human and regressive ideology. That might suit some Conservative 'thinking'. But the project was well established in global politics, half a century ago. You might as well say that there is a possibility of the Tories finding agreement with Stalin.

If you give it any quarter, it will own you.

The Conservative Party, with its green agenda, has declared war on the public.

There is no possibility of reform. There's no modification that can undo that declaration. As soon as the war is over, so is your party.