Furnace, Not Furness

When Robert Jenrick promised a high profile defector from Labour, then we had been expecting Peter Mandelson. But instead, we have Sir Robin Wales, the man who made Newham what it is today, and who is now Reform UK’s London Director of Local Government, while his close ally, Clive Furness, is that party’s candidate for directly elected Mayor of Newham. An unreformed Electoral College being used to select Labour candidates for directly elected Mayors, since that was the only way of preventing Ken Livingstone from being nominated in 2000, in 2014 Wales set up phantom trade union branches with only one or two of his own employees in them, thereby rigging the selection in his own favour. But by 2018, the balance of power in the Labour Party had shifted a tad, and the National Executive Committee was having none of that, so Wales quit because he knew that he could not have won a fair fight. Keir Starmer has little cause for joy at the moment, but at least Wales and his little helper are, as Kemi Badenoch said of Jenrick, “Nigel’s problem now”. Welcome to the uniparty.

Since Reform is part of the uniparty, Jenrick has signed it up to Gordon Brown’s surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy, and to George Osborne’s and Nick Clegg’s Office for Budget Responsibility, while Reform is so opposed to the importation of foreign disputes and to their influence over British policy that Richard Tice visits from Dubai to address rallies of émigrés waving foreign flags on the streets of London to demand that Britain invade Iran in support of two foreign Epstein Class states and in defence of several more.

The Kurds? In the heady days of Early Corbynism, I used to have dissuade youths from going to Syria to fight for them. Now it looks as if they themselves are going to be fighting for Donald Trump in Iran, and that though it has tried to bomb Turkey while having to be reminded of Pakistan’s mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia. The Gulf monarchies were already on the same side as Israel. Now so are Turkey and Pakistan. That will no doubt do wonders for internal stability.

With Gorton and Denton out of the way, do not vote for any party or candidate for whom any of the Epstein Class would vote. The Greens are probably the party that Noam Chomsky would support in Britain, and he ought to be asked the question. Their support for drug legalisation demonstrates their failure to understand that there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature.

Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change has always been impossible when the workers, the youth and the poor have been in a state of stupefaction, and that is being contrived again. For example, Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage wants to legalise all drugs, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Likewise, the Greens’ support for “sex work” is of a piece with Reform’s endorsement by Bonnie Blue. Are those now the views of Danny Kruger? Of Suella Braverman? Of Ann Widdecombe?

Widdecombe is an avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient “safeguards”, and she opines that men who had “undergone extensive surgery” should be sent to women's prisons even though every cell of their mutilated bodies still contained a Y chromosome and they themselves had been socialised as males. That Farage has felt the need to stop courting Ben and Zac Goldsmith indicates how well-advanced that had been. Who needs the Greens?

Such is fidelity to Margaret Thatcher. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

To equip us to fight a war if necessary, but primarily to keep us out of wars, we need a complete change of direction, beginning with the lifting of the ban on further exploration of North Sea oil and gas. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Badenoch? Is Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.