Gerald Warner: Blue-green hoax will drag us back to Stone Age

The available evidence suggests it was some idiot who coined the self-harming slogan “Vote blue, go green” and engaged in such morally ambiguous exercises as hugging huskies. Whoever that was, he is history.

Expect the mini-turbine on Dave’s house to disappear imminently, to be replaced by a diesel generator reassuringly belching CO2 into the Oxfordshire atmosphere. During one of his recent kindergarten exchanges with Ed Miliband the Prime Minister bawled at his opponent that “We need to roll back the green charges” that the Labour leader imposed as energy minister in the last government. That was not the first time Cameron had denounced Miliband on this subject: the previous occasion was when the Climate Change Act was introduced, when the Tories complained its measures were too modest.

At one time it seemed beyond the parameters of the law of mathematical probability that Britain would ever again experience a prime minister so wholly innocent of principle as Tony Blair; but Dave, the Heir of Blair, has confounded expectation. He has never entertained a belief in his life – unless his own sense of entitlement counts as a creed. The iconic image of green Dave is of him reducing his carbon footprint by cycling to work, while his shoes and papers followed behind in a large car. In such transparent humbug he is typical of the sleazy political class, imposing its politically correct climate fantasies on those living and working in the real world. It cannot last much longer.

To appease angry voters, a review of green taxes is being carried out. It is purely cosmetic. Since most green imposts are enshrined in law – British or European – the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is only reviewing the “social levies”, ie the Energy Companies Obligation (ECO). Existing energy bills include the £30 cost of the Renewables Obligation (to fund wind turbines and solar panels), £13 to meet EU and UK carbon taxes, and so on, to a total of £112. The cunning plan being adumbrated by the coalition is to move these charges off energy bills, on the understanding that energy companies will immediately implement a 7 per cent cut in charges, and on to general taxation.

Since that sleight-of-hand would render these charges anonymous, is it not likely that our greedy rulers, on the principle of never letting a crisis go to waste, would take the opportunity to add a stealthy tax hike? At present we are only on the nursery slopes of the green tax Matterhorn. There is much worse to come. The Climate Change Act committed us to pay £18bn annually until 2050; to that must be added the huge cost of cabling to connect inefficient “renewables” to the National Grid, which Ofgem estimates could cost a further £40bn by 2020. By that date, some energy experts assess the real green costs will be more than £100bn. While we shell out such unsustainable subsidies to support a Stone Age energy system, the National Grid has warned that the enforced closure of several power stations under EU law has reduced the UK’s safety reserve of power to just two gigawatts.

We are heading for power cuts, lost productivity, fuel poverty (afflicting five million in the UK already) and fiscal meltdown – not because of some real-life catastrophe but because the strutting, grandstanding and posturing of politicians has imposed this nightmare upon us. None of them knows – or cares – about global warming (which in any case has not occurred since 1998); all they care about is being seen to be part of the consensus, that Gnostic received wisdom among “opinion formers” that awards prizes, plaudits and street credibility (in the Westminster village, if nowhere else), that shows solidarity with the demented pressure groups, the NGOs, the corporations with a commercial interest in the green hoax, and their fellow po-faced apparatchiks in the EU and UN.

The most advanced stage of the politico-green disease is to be found in Scotland. The energy “policies” of the SNP government are beyond irresponsible. If, in the wake of referendum defeat for the separatists, Westminster hands over full tax powers under Devo Plus, it would be wise to invest in candles and relearn such ancestral skills as making fire by rubbing two sticks together. Unless the 2016 reshuffle of pygmies in the Wee Scotch Senate were to produce an unlikely outcome, such as the election of some MSPs in touch with reality, an ideologically-driven return to the comforts of Mesolithic society is on the cards. «

Twitter: @GeraldWarner1