AS WE, the battered, bemused and bewildered people, watch our Prime Minister leave office, what are we to make of his three years as Our Leader?
He leaves the country in utter chaos, every aspect of government a shambles and with no prospect of improvement. Yet the Guardian laments his going – after all, he has governed, with his neo-Marxist civil service, as a big state, high tax and spend socialist, indulging the elite technocrats and stamping on the ordinary people and small business, an East German model of governance, along with the communist use of mass media to instil fear and obedience while crushing dissent.
He loves bestriding the world stage, on the Ukraine and COP26, while ignoring the chaos he creates for his own people; indeed his global activities bring only pain to the plebs. His embrace of the religion of Net Zero has sacrificed us on the altar of St Greta Thunberg, shutting coal-burning power stations, preventing fracking and gas storage, and shooting energy prices into the stratosphere.
He quits office telling us to absorb the pain and the poverty he has caused, rather as Jim Jones’s community was told to commit mass suicide as he left the stage in bloody havoc. Jones was a highly skilled propagandist and groomer of his followers, most of whom drank their cyanide cordial in passive acceptance. Johnson’s specialism, his only skill, is rhetoric. His parting message is willingly to suffer the economic suicide he has engineered, for the divine cause of net zero and for the sake of Ukraine.
If we are in a war situation, we need to invoke wartime emergency powers at once to override the Net Zero legislation and ensure energy supplies into the winter, including keeping our coal-fired power stations. We must pause this mad and arbitrary date of 2030 as the end of fossil fuel power generation. We are in a severe emergency and must resist this invitation by our cult leader to suffer his auto-da-fé.
Transport is another dimension of national life left in ashes by our ex-Leader. One of the first worrying signs of his lack of guts to face down Whitehall was his acceptance of the continuation of that vast monster of waste and ecological destruction, HS2. He should have halted this already outdated and unnecessary rail system, but chose to indulge his civil servants and the vast foreign engineering corporations who will profit from it. In his own constituency, Ruislip has been turned into a scene from the Somme – the scale of destruction is terrible – and for what? Business is now conducted online by Zoom, as Whitehall tells us without drawing the logical conclusion that HS2 is a dead vanity project. We are in the grip of rail strikes, a pre-Thatcher world of union dominance and blackmail. Why did the government fail to impose computerised driverless trains on the rail network and London’s Tube as a strict condition of the billions paid to them in furlough payments? Our ex-Leader was too busy imbibing red wine with Carrie and her chums during the Covid crisis to grasp any opportunities it might present.
Then we have the ongoing indulgence by Whitehall of the construction companies turning motorways into killer ‘smart’ motorways with no hard shoulder – again, the pattern is to sacrifice the public and indulge big business. The promised electrification of the railway between Leeds and Manchester will not happen: the obscene costs of HS2 should have gone to such upgrades, very obviously. The rhetoric of ‘levelling up’ rings hollow in the North. And where did those ‘free ports’ get to, with the necessary transport links? Air travel is in chaos for the public, but not for our elite of course, as in the East German system of socialism. The crazy drive to electric cars is hammering the non-wealthy and ‘white van man’ tradesmen. Electric diggers run out of power after four hours and have to be recharged by, yes, diesel generators.
Thousands of illegal migrants are welcomed to our shores by our government machine, a complete inversion of our ex-Leader’s empty promises. Priti Patel will become the stuff of political jest: she has been stitched up by her globalist civil servants. The nation needs agricultural workers, baggage handlers and builders: young male migrants are surely ideal workers to do such jobs rather than be sent to Rwanda? The rising number of migrants means more and more pressure on utilities, a key area mired in crass inefficiency and avarice. This article has a powerful critique of government indulgence of greed and bad regulation.
A Telegraph article highlights the water companies’ cosy relationship with ‘regulators’. It notes that ‘nearly all major water companies in England employ former Ofwat regulators’. Professor Dieter Helm, a former government adviser, warns that if rules around appointments are not ‘cleaned up’, it will strengthen arguments to nationalise the industry, which has been criticised in recent months for its failure to tackle sewage pollution and leaks, and for the scale of its profits and dividends. Yet again we see government in bed with vast corporations and hedge funds and degrading the quality of life of the general public. Sleaze, inertia and autocracy: such is the legacy of our ex-Leader.
Whether he was ever a true believer in Brexit is a question historians will raise; many think he used the issue for purely personal advancement and I suspect they are right. Like Theresa May, for whose Brino he voted at its third presentation to the Commons, he has only ‘got Brexit done’ in the most formal of ways, leaving the substance of much EU regulation in place. Liz Truss’s trade deals have been hindered and compromised by Remainer civil servants and ministers, as Catherine McBride has shown in her Briefings for Brexit articles. DEFRA has sought to stick to EU regulations agriculturally and any hint of a post-Brexit farming renaissance has been firmly suppressed, as it has in education and training; no reset has happened. As the commentators said at the time of the formal quitting, the UK was left on a fence, betwixt and between, and needing a firm Brexit momentum to implement self-sufficiency and sovereignty. The reason for Caroline Bell’s rejection in Briefings for Brexit of the final ‘deal’ was precisely because it gave too much room for Remainer political and bureaucratic sabotage and resistance, and that is what has happened: our ex-Leader has sat on his hands indulging the Remainer forces and allowing the case for Brexit to be swamped in Remainer propaganda. He has betrayed Northern Ireland by adamantly refusing to trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, despite its being there precisely for the situation caused by the NIP. He allowed Lord Frost to be undermined and removed as the UK lead negotiator. Liz Truss, alas, is most unlikely to have the guts to do the necessary and trigger Article 16 – the whole weight of Whitehall is against this as well as nearly all the media. If not, Northern Ireland will continue to be levered away from the UK by our ‘friends and allies’. She has been too long subservient to the mandarins of Whitehall to upset our friends in Brussels and their Sinn Fein patsy Joe Biden. She is unlikely to act to protect UK fisheries or to ditch the EU-based financial regulation holding back the City.
Finally, an observation on the mindset of globalisation so powerful in our politics. Our energy crisis has deep roots in our civil service allegiance to seeing the UK as sovereign only in a formal sense but in reality part of an economic and bureaucratic matrix, the EU. Last summer the government was determined not to go for energy self-sufficiency but rely on interconnectors sending power to and from EU nations. The UK shut down Rough, the huge gas storage facility off the Yorkshire coast, arguing that it was not needed given the connections to France, our friend and ally – despite the fact that the French Senate had openly declared it would use energy blackmail to ensure the UK handed over all its fisheries at the next EU-UK talks in 2026. The UK was also in the grip of the green virus, shutting down its coal power stations, making the Drax power station run on wood pellets imported from the US in diesel-powered tankers rather the coal a few miles away This was reckless folly, globalism at its most dangerous, and no doubt being watched, if not fostered, with increasing interest by the Kremlin. We are left exposed, but our establishment is not being held to account for this Walter Mitty policy-making.
This globalism bizarrely applies even to our NHS crisis and the collapse of home recruitment and retention of nurses. Our Department of Health does not seek to solve the mystery of why recruitment to this well-paid and vital profession has plunged, and instead is plundering the world for trained nurses as a main policy. Japan, India, Kenya, the Philippines and now Nepal are all targets. Is this not a form of modern ‘colonialist’ indentured labour inflicted by a rich country on less wealthy states? To the globalist mentality, it is fine, and avoids facing the truth of things at home, that women have been alienated from the noble task of nursing, despite good pay, under the control of the icily technocratic Blob.
Our ex-Leader, passing to us our toxic cordial of economic, cultural, and social pauperisation, walks away from the dust and ashes, offering no ideas for national recovery and reset, a legacy of chaotic decline and degeneration. But the executive pay will continue to flow – like the sewage.
