The EU is Finally Turning Against the Green Agenda
This week, the BBC reported that ‘Thirteen Labour MPs vote for talks on joining EU customs union’. The 13 were joined by 87 other ‘ayes’ for the Liberal Democrat motion, who were together matched precisely by 100 ‘noes’. Deputy Speaker Caroline Nokes then cast the deciding vote in favour of the bill, which is to say against the very clearly expressed democratic will of the British public nearly a decade ago. But the party, which is now fifth in many polls, if it manages to win support for its pathological Remainerism from the Labour benches, may come to regret it. News from Europe suggests the continent is taking a turn against the party’s favoured policy agendas.
I shall not dwell on the Lib Dems’ arguments for joining the customs union. And that is because I do not think that the process by which Lib Dems choose their policies in any way resembles thought. Suffice it to say that the Lib Dem view of Europe is a fantasy: a land flowing with wine and cheese – a Waitrose the size of a continent – and Lib Dems’ grievance is that Leavers have interrupted this consumer experience. I shall instead discuss what Liberal Democrats want to attach themselves – or more precisely, the country – to.
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“Von der Leyen, like so many of Europe’s politicians, may well be stupid and evil. But she’s not so stupid that even she could not see how the stupidity had got in the way of the evil.”
Quote of the decade
The fundamental problem with green policies is that they offer no practical and obvious benefits to the average person.
Electric cars? Expensive to buy, awkward to charge, depreciate quickly.
Heat pumps? Expensive, inefficient.
Solar panels? Useless on grey days, useless at night.
Wind farms? Ugly, intermittent power.
And so on, and so forth.
On top of that, to make matters worse, the whole green utopia is infused with extremely dodgy woke ideology and mentally deranged characters (just stop oil, extinction rebellion, Greta Tintin Thunberg, Ed Milliband, etc).
It seems like a scam.
And in the meantime China burns coal.
It is 100% a scam. Kicked off by Maurice Strong in the 1980s and 90s. The climate change agenda is collectivism (or communism) by the back door. It seeks a UN led World Govt that will brook no opposition.
The really sad part about it, is (as with Covid), how many fall so easily for it.
All of what you just said is true, and much more than that besides. But what most people do not realise is that this is the whole idea. Because the UN Sustainable Development Agenda that our Political Class all over Europe and the UK are blindly aligning themselves with states that the western world has become prosperous by using more than its fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground and must stop dong that. We are to make do with LESS of everything. We are to be rid of affordable reliable energy in fossil fuels, and instead use unaffordable unreliable energy in renewables. This makes everything very expensive and we see that the UK now has the highest electricity prices in the world and so less money available for people to spend on other things. Industry is being decimated, eg Steel and Car Making. —It is global eco socialism masquerading as saving the planet and concern for the environment. But a lead author at the IPCC let the cat out of the bag a few years ago when he said “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policy is environmental policy anymore, we redistribute the… Read more »
Return to EU, when the biggest vote to leave was decided by the electorate. Removal of trial by jury. A manifesto which should be included in a book of fairy tales. Censorship, mass live facial recognition, Digital I.D. none of which was in the fairy tale book.
What the heck os going on here, this is a Tyranny. What next I wonder? forced injections!,
masking! Curfews! They will do it, these are bad people. watch and see.
The Political Class are a diabolical disgrace and cause every single problem a once free people face.
If, as I expect it will, the EU delays the ban on ICE cars the UK’s car retailers in NI will be going gangbusters.
Most of those on the mainland will go to the wall.
Strange then that the EU has just reached a legally-binding climate agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% from 1990 levels by 2040. Net Zero Europe continues to sign its own death warrant: https://x.com/NetZeroWatch/status/1998721005510918230.
It’s a perfect EU contradiction and a classic fudge, and it’s a shame I wrote the piece before the announcement. But the targets come at the same time as the EU weakens its mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing these targets that are outlined above. There remains considerable momentum and cash behind the green agenda in Brussels, but there is a recognition in new (and unusual and therefore desperate) coalitions that the green agenda is a fetter on the EU’s higher priorities, such as foreign policy and rescuing itself and its members from economic torpor which is driving polarisation and major intra-EU tensions. The green consensus is collapsing; other consensuses are developing.
Perhaps the clueless types in the EU’s corridors are finally realising that what was 25% of global GDP is now 14% of global GDP and declining faster than any other country or trading bloc.
It doesn’t matter if the cake is getting bigger if your slice of it is getting smaller. Youth unemployment rates are rather high especially in the southern EU countries, eventually a revolution will happen as standards of living reach the point where the young are wondering if life is actually worth living.
Reality is the hardest of all enemies to defeat. No doubt we in the UK will be the very last to realise that. We will cling to the lifeboat called Net Zero right to the very last minute, and then once we have impoverished people with the highest electricity bills in the world, leaving millions in energy poverty and unable to heat their homes, destroyed the Industrial Base, lost hundreds of thousands of oil and gas jobs in places like Aberdeen, and left us unable to compete in global markets because the energy costs make it not worth manufacturing anything, then at the very last minute, probably sometime late in 2029 with all around us collapsing the Political Class of phony planet savers will announce “new measures in the light of changing economic circumstances” or some other pathetic climbdown from the Climate/Energy SCAM that all with half a brain have been warning them about for decades, ever since Miliband’s Climate Change Act in 2008. ——-They will then claim that they are still going to “save the planet” but not quite so fast and not by next Tuesday. ——They will never ever admit that they were WRONG.
Slightly ‘off-topic’ I know but, imo it’s all about connected parts of the same machination. (Said of: Tt Keir, Tiny Macron, Fred Schmerz, Fonda Lyin and Marked n’ Rutted, et. al.) “… as they feed off the corpse of the civilization they inherited like cultural trust fund babies.” Priceless. “There’s Nothing Funnier Than Fussy, Furious Euroweenies… Hearing disturbingly feminine, Somali corruption-curious Minnesota governor Tim Walz complaining that, because of Donald Trump, people are driving by his house shouting “Retard!” should’ve been the funniest thing that happened over the last few news cycles, but our European friends have done it one better. Actually, they’re not our friends. They’re annoying layabouts who do nothing but whine and complain as they feed off the corpse of the civilization they inherited like cultural trust fund babies. They have gotten very upset because Donald Trump’s national security strategy accurately recognizes that Europe is unable to defend itself and is increasingly unworthy of us squandering more time, blood, and treasure to do it for them. So, they’re lashing out, threatening to be responsible for their own defense. Yeah, that’ll show us. Throw us in that briar patch, Horst. There aren’t enough “LOLs” on the Internet for… Read more »
It’s 1984, only I’m not 40 any more. Our senior politicians can lie blatantly without sanction.
A Customs Union obliges those Countries in it to apply the same protectionist tariffs and non-tariffs on goods from outside the Union preventing free trade with other economies. The cost of those tariffs is bourn by consumers. This serves the primary purpose of protecting the profits of producers within the Union by denying choice and price competition to consumers, thereby maintaining high prices for producers and their profits. The protected producers are those with the most political influence, eg French agriculture, and the deepest pockets, eg German auto-makers. Cronies. It has a secondary function to protect jobs by preventing competition from outside, so is popular with Unions. We then get a situation where representatives of the State plus representatives of private capital plus representatives of organised labour co-operate and connive to direct the economy to the advantage of each, this process is defined as “corporatism” – a term coined by Benito Mussolini who said it best described Fascism. The protectionism of the Customs Union forces consumers within to buy mostly only from within – quasi-autarky – which then allows the nitwits in the Lib Dems to exclaim “but the EU is our biggest trading partner” – yes indeed because we… Read more »
Wasn’t North Sea oil a big part of 1980s recovery?
It seems that Ben Pile is as ignorant as most politicians and the legacy media given that it is NOT POSSIBLE for the UK to join the EU Customs Union as it is FOR EU MEMBERS ONLY.