Check Her Privilege

Both of Greta Thunberg's parents have Wikipedia entries, as has her paternal grandfather.

How dare someone from quite so privileged a background presume to demand that our people either go back to, or remain in, our shacks and our hovels?

Here is one of mine for OffGuardian, from January of this year:

Look back to 1870, to each of what were to become the New Deal United States, Social Democratic Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Then look at each of those in 1970. 

Neither laissez-faire economics, nor caring overly much about the fate of rare voles, had delivered electrification, or mass transportation, or decent accommodation, or proper sanitation, or universal vaccination, or space exploration. 

Are we to deny to Indians, or to Chinese, or to Brazilians, the same progress that we ourselves have made, and instead leave them defecating in communal pits while waiting to die of cholera or typhus? 

Are we to have the women of Africa continue to die, as the women of Europe did for thousands of years, from the fumes emitted by the open fires over which they cooked? 

This has nothing to do with post-imperial guilt, which is contestable. This has everything to do with common humanity, which is not.

I recently heard an ostensibly Corbyn-supporting youth, with that strange new accent of middle-class London, ask in all seriousness whether the miners had been defeated "for environmental reasons", as if the Government and the Police had been the Green Goodies.

Of course, Jeremy Corbyn himself, never mind Piers Corbyn who is a dedicatee of this book, could have set her right. But what next? Maggie's milk-snatching as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry? Don't laugh, it could happen.

Mind you, several of my most stimulating political interlocutors on Left and Right are of Thunberg's age, or thereabouts. Theirs is a highly promising generation. The dedicatees of this book include James Draper, Aren Pym and Adam Young, who all have huge futures ahead of them. My objection to Thunberg is not that she is young. It is that she is wrong.

And the five people whom it will take to bring back her boat from New York will first fly over to the United States, meaning that in total her trip will end up creating six times the emissions that it would have done if she had just flown to New York in the first place.

All in all, then, I greatly look forward to welcoming this trio to campaign against me at North West Durham. At least in its intention, this picture is not satirical.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration.

I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. Buy the book here.

I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.