I WENT to Bolton last weekend to attend a rally that was meant to be staged by the Reform Party to launch a cross-party campaign called ‘Vote Power Not Poverty’ – a terrific slogan.
The event was to be led by Nigel Farage and centre around public debate to drum up support for a referendum on the UK Government’s disastrous Net Zero strategy.
Sadly, the rally had to be cancelled, due to threats and intimidation against the speakers, which you can read about here.
The cross-party line-up of MPs and famous news / talk radio presenters were consequently forced to pull out for security reasons, and as their email burst stated, they could not guarantee the attendees’ safety.
In the end, a scaled-down version as a local campaign event was held after three venue changes. It went from the Bolton Arena stadium to an Indian wedding hall and another pub that was shut down and found with gates locked on the day of the event, leaving the organisers to scramble for a suitable venue two hours beforehand.
I turned up with Reform Party organisers to a disappointed local director who pointed us to a pub on the outskirts of town. What a dismal journey for those attendees who, leaving zero carbon footprint, possessed no vehicle transport because they had walked!
At the makeshift replacement event Richard Tice, leader of the Reform Party, gave a rousing speech on a pub terrace bathed in sunlight, about the national treasure Britain has ‘under our feet’ in the form of shale gas.
Remarking on the pain and poverty to come under Net Zero, he quipped that we are at present only at ‘base camp’ on the climb to decarbonisation lunacy.
Tice also mentioned the fact that heat pumps won’t work to keep homes warm without spending exorbitant sums on insulation – one of many facts the climate lobby have ignored, for the eco-agenda will penalise those least able to afford green energy incentives.
The Government has turned a blind eye to the cost of living crisis faced by millions of ordinary people in its ridiculous and unachievable goal to decarbonise ‘the economy across all sectors’, as discussed in this Biomass Policy Statement from last November.
It looks like our dear leaders don’t know which way they are coming or going on this subject. But if they can’t even agree amongst themselves on a solution, and given the tactics of local activist bullies used to suppress any healthy debate, it is no wonder that everyone just swallows the narrative about such things as carbon neutrality by 2030 or the desirability of biomass as an energy source in usurping our farmland from agricultural use for food production.
Indeed, as rising inflation and war in Ukraine (one of the world’s key grain suppliers) along with higher petrol costs are set to cause food prices to soar, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation requires agricultural lands to be used for production of biomass to provide fuel for transport. Was this ever voted on by the British public”?
A just-published piece by Net Zero Watch attempts to counter the accepted narrative and postulates that the current energy situation is ‘dysfunctional, the result of misguided and counter-productive environmental and climate policies’.
It is a wonder that Net Zero Watch authors Andrew Montford (who writes on climate issues for the Spectator) and Dr John Constable (an academic and Energy Editor of the Global Warming Policy Forum and director of the Renewable Energy Foundation) haven’t already been silenced, although doubtless they will be if the current trend of shutting down dissenting voices continues.
Their arguments for supporting energy source diversity by a long-term shift to nuclear power and the buyout and nationalisation of renewable generators, with eventual decommissioning of wind farms and solar panels which are a drain on the grid, will be as unpopular with the Establishment as Richard Tice’s call to allow for onshore fracking.
TCW Defending Freedom has also shown with solid facts how the UK is facing impending energy shortages needed to power the grid and how the proliferation of renewables actually makes electricity more expensive. But the Powers that Be don’t care about facts.
Even more sinister than the catastrophic effects (including food shortages and fuel poverty) of the Government’s disastrous climate agenda is the censorship effected by a group of bullies to shut down a public conversation around Net Zero. This begs the question of what interests are served and who exactly is behind the threats and intimidation.
It must be a powerful lobby indeed.
Editor’s update: The author has since been given to understand by the Reform Party that the organisers decided since so many speakers were too afraid to go ahead, the larger event should be cancelled. Two MPs withdrew under party pressure, one of whom was threatened with losing the whip if he participated, following which Julia Hartley Brewer also cancelled. The wedding venue’s owners have decided to donate their booking fee to the benefit of disadvantaged children in the area. Our apologies for any suggestion that it was they who cancelled. It was not.
