By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
After 14 years of net-zero nonsense from the Conservative Party, Nigel Farage’s climate-skeptic Reform Party has taken away a third of the Conservative vote. As a result of the Conservatives’ relentless exclusion of the free-market, small-government, low-tax, pro-family, anti-net-zero center-Right over the past 14 years, the Labor party – which, like all totalitarian parties, takes a radically climate-extremist view – has won the election with a record swing of 11% from the Conservatives and a record majority over all other parties.
The central issue for Reform is net immigration, which has increased the UK population by six million, or almost 10%, or since Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990. Last year, there were 600,000 births in the UK; 200,000 children were killed by abortion; and almost 800,000 immigrants arrived.
Reform’s contract with the people summarizes its climate policy as follows –
“Imagine affordable, stable energy bills
“Scrap energy levies and Net Zero to slash energy bills and save each household £500 per year. Unlock Britain’s vast oil and gas reserves to beat the cost of living crisis and unleash real economic growth.”
In full, the policy reads thus –
“Net Zero is pushing up bills, damaging British industries like steel, and making us less secure. We can protect our environment with more tree-planting, more recycling and less single-use plastics. New technology will help, but we must not impoverish ourselves in pursuit of unaffordable, unachievable global CO2 targets.
“CRITICAL REFORMS NEEDED IN THE FIRST 100 DAYS:
“Scrap Net Zero and related subsidies
“Ditching Net Zero could save the public sector over £30 billion per year for the next 25 years.
“Scrap annual £10 billion of renewable energy subsidies
“Achieve this through equivalent taxes on then. Renewables are not cheaper. Our bills have increased dramatically in line with the huge increase in renewables capacity over the last 15 years.
“Cheap, secure energy for Britain
“Start fast-track licences of North Sea gas and oil. Grant shale gas licences on test sites for 2 years. Enable major production when safety is proven, with local compensation schemes.
“Thereafter:
“Cleaner energy from new technology
“Fast-track clean nuclear energy with new small modular reactors, built in Britain, increase and incentivise ethical UK lithium mining for electric batteries, combined-cycle gas turbines, clean synthetic fuel, tidal power and explore clean coal mining.”
The Labor party, by contrast, will ban all new internal-combustion vehicles in just five years’ time, and says Britain should attain net zero emissions by 2045.
One should not imagine that the Labor party any longer has anything much to do with labor. Its nut zero policy will continue the startling downtrend in energy consumption in the industrial sector. Since 1970, industrial energy consumption in the UK has fallen from two-thirds to little more than one-fifth of national energy consumption as industry after industry is driven offshore because it can no longer afford to turn the machines on.
Source: Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
The decline began in earnest after the coal-miners received pay-rises of 30% and then 35% as a result of two strikes in the early 1970s, making coal and hence electricity increasingly unaffordable. It has continued ever since, now driven by the astonishing price increases directly arising from the installation of cripplingly costly wind and solar power.
Britain’s last major steelworks, at Port Talbot in Wales, closed forever a couple of months ago because the management could no longer afford to turn on the furnaces. That closure marked the end of Britain as a first-world, industrial giant, and the beginning of its third-world status. Without an indigenous steel industry, we can no longer defend our nation in time of war. During the Battle of Britain we were making 100 Spitfires a week, to say nothing of ships, tanks and guns. We could not do that today.
A year ago I made a discreet but determined attempt to persuade a former Cabinet minister to write to the Orwellian “Energy Security and Net Zero” department to ask how much global warming would be prevented by the target year of 2050 if the UK moved in a straight line from current emissions to net zero by that year, and at what cost.
That elegant and effete but ineffectual Minister twice said he would write, but twice failed to do so. He has now lost his seat in Parliament, as I told he would unless the Conservatives began to offer their voters the conservative policies that the party had abandoned after Margaret Thatcher’s strikingly successful tenure as the longest continuously serving prime minister since 1827.
I also tried to persuade the chairman of an influential parliamentary committee to write to ask these surely pertinent questions. He did so, and received a limp, dismissive page of propaganda drivel from the Department, which took great care not to answer the questions he had asked. I persuaded him to write a second time. He did so, but received the same page of waffle, whereupon, uselessly, he gave up. Well, the electors have given up on him. He, too, has lost his seat in Parliament, and deservedly so.
The answer to the questions I had invited these two wastes of space to ask is that even if the UK achieved net zero it would reduce global temperature by less than a thousandth of a degree by 2050, at a cost exceeding $15 trillion. Thus, each $1 billion spent on attempting to attain net zero would abate global warming by less than one 20-millionth of a degree.
There is a wider lesson for skeptics in the disastrous British election result. Under Margaret Thatcher, all wings of the Conservative Party were represented both in Cabinet and in the party’s policymaking. Ever since, however, all who believed in the traditional, British values that she espoused have been ruthlessly excluded from the corridors of impotence.
The Conservatives learned nothing from the bloody nose they received at the hands of the electorate on the issue of Brexit. They continued to abandon Conservative policies, not least on the climate question. As a result, the Conservative vote in this election was split with Reform, which took almost 40% of the Conservatives’ votes.
A month before the election, I went to see a Cabinet Minister and suggested that the Conservatives should do a deal with the Reform party, so that they presented a united front. Had they done so, as Boris Johnson had done in 2019, the Conservative/Reform alliance would have won the election with a narrow but sufficient majority over Labor.
However, the current Conservative party is ideologically far, far closer to the totalitarian than to the libertarian viewpoint. The Minister did nothing. He too no longer sits in Parliament.
I have long thought that climate skeptics would be more successful if we agreed on a short-list of main points that we could all present and argue for. So far, however, like the now self-destroyed Conservatives, we seem to have ignored Benjamin Franklin’s warning that “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
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