While the coin is palmed

Two familiar points –

Firstly, arguments hardly persuade anyone. Some kind of advantage is what persuades. There has to be some advantage to any standpoint in any argument even if the advantage is an illusion, which in the political arena it usually is.

Secondly, things go on behind public narratives, not because of them.

These two points are linked of course. Politicians don’t emit all that yaketty-yak in the hope of persuading us. They know we are not persuaded by argument. They certainly aren’t persuaded by anything other than personal advantage so why should they think we are any different? They don’t. The yaketty-yak is designed to prevent us from understanding what is happening until it happens.

Elites have never told us what is going on, so why should they start now? They have always known about carrots and sticks too. All they ever do is update the language to fit whatever new imposition is being concocted and add a spoonful of illusory sugar to help the medicine go down.

It’s all conjurer’s patter – the misdirection while the coin is palmed.

Fudge is in the air

You can ‘fly off on holidays and eat steak’ under net zero, says top climate adviser

Speaking as he leaves the role after six years, Chris Stark, the chief executive of the climate change committee, suggested he and others in the green sector had pushed too hard the idea that the shift required a radical transformation.

Instead people’s lives would not be that different in 2050, the target date for ending the UK’s contribution to climate change by cutting emissions to zero overall...

But he also said: “I’m not handing criticism out to any one party, I think there is a general retreat from owning this stuff on net zero.”

Another indication that fudge is in the air. No great surprise as the whole Net Zero narrative is compiled by fudge experts, but still interesting. When the music stops, who will be left without a chair?

A whiff of something unwholesome

Rishi Sunak is nicer to me than Sir Keir Starmer, says Labour MP Rosie Duffield, claiming her party has an 'issue with women'

The Labour Party has an “issue with women”, Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield has said, adding that MPs on her side sometimes tried to sabotage her speeches in the House of Commons.

A well-known issue, but add this to the photo of "Sir" Keir Starmer's ostentatious kneeling with Angela Rayner and there is a whiff of something unwholesome surrounding the Labour leader. Flexibility is fine, but this is unprincipled flexibility with veracity being the principle. 

Let's repeat the HS2 success story

Labour denies railways will be given 'lower priority' under renationalisation plans - as Tories warn of 'wildcat strikes'

Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh promised to deliver the biggest shake-up to rail "in a generation" by establishing the long-delayed Great British Railways (GBR) organisation and bringing routes back into public ownership, if Labour forms the next government...

Sam Coates, Sky News' deputy political editor, asked Ms Haigh how she was going to avoid the "trap" of British Railways - the former national railway system that was privatised in the 1990s - which was forced to compete for central government cash.

"How are you going to make sure that you don't end up falling into the same old trap as British Railways, where effectively, to get train upgrades, you are competing for cash with schools and hospitals, and given money is going to be very tight, aren't the trains actually going to be a lower priority?" he asked.


Labour knows it isn't going to work, GBR cannot compete successfully with the budgetary demands of the NHS, education and other loud voices on the political stage. It isn't going to work and Labour knows it. We may as well assume that there is an internal calculation suggesting that enough voters don't know it, particularly younger voters.

Luxury Crackpottery

Tony Thomas has a useful Climate Depot reminder of the sayings of Naomi Oreskes.


Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes dubbed ‘The Queen of Climate Crackpottery’

Trigger warning: if your household companions include a cat, dog, canary, goldfish or turtle, this article is not a safe space. I’m writing about Harvard’s distinguished agnatologist Professor Naomi Oreskes (above) and her 2014 warning that global warming would kill your pets in 2023. The warning is in her acclaimed but glum book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Given margins of error in climate science, the pet die-off might be this year instead. Oreskes wrote,

The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners , but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal . … A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment (p9).


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of something we've known for decades - it is possible to be a successful professional crackpot if you take care to promote what are clearly luxury beliefs. It helps to have a strong totalitarian theme too, but we already know that.


The Collapse book is about Western civilisation’s ruin while China saves the planet with its enlightened anti-CO2 measures. She is writing from the future in 2393 when she will be aged 435. Oreskes (as at 2393) is cross because we have refused to build enough windmills to stop at 11degC warming (p32) and eight-metre sea rises (p30). We should not have eaten so many fillet steaks and, personally, I should not have tooled around in my reasonably priced, petrol-powered Hyundai i30 when Teslas were available at $80,000.

Online Dentist

 

Classy

Angela Rayner aims ‘pint-sized loser’ jibe at Rishi Sunak during PMQs

Angela Rayner labelled Rishi Sunak a “pint-sized loser” after urging the Conservatives to stop “obsessing” about her living arrangements.

Labour’s deputy leader also accused Oliver Dowden of having “stabbed” the Tories’ “biggest election winner” Boris Johnson in the back in order to get his “mate into No 10”.