Or we could call it arrogance

Maybe Ed is keeping his powder dry

  

Burnham recommits to net zero as MPs warn phrase is 'toxic' with voters

Andy Burnham today gave vocal support to Net Zero and ploughed more taxpayer cash into reaching 2050 environmental targets today, despite MPs warning weary voters are increasingly turned off by it.


Energy bills could rise more than £400 next year, new forecasts warn

Household energy costs could rise by over £400 in the new year, forecasters have warned, as financial pressure from conflict in the Middle East continues to affect fuel prices.

Andrew Burnham's position as placeholder PM already seems fragile. He lacks the experience or ability to tackle any of our major UK problems, but presumably it wasn't supposed to become this obvious so soon. 

Even a few Makerfield voters must wonder what they have done, but unfortunately Ed Miliband will be watching the situation. Things could become even worse.

Frittering away

SNP handed stark wake-up call over frittering away £100m ScotWind revenues to balance books

John Swinney has been told to draw up a long-term plan for his flagship energy policy after a damning investigation by Scotland’s spending watchdog.

The Scotsman revealed in February that Audit Scotland had launched a probe into the finances around the ScotWind projects, with the findings highly critical of SNP ministers for a lack of transparency.

The investigation has also warned that Scottish government ministers plundering ScotWind funds to plug budget gaps risks “weakening budgetary control” and could exacerbate Holyrood’s fiscal crisis as Mr Swinney seeks to reform public services.

Scottish government ministers risk weakening budgetary control by plundering ScotWind revenues eh? What do we say to that?

HS2, Hinkley Point, Net Zero... 

It's how these things are done. Budgetary control isn't easy and in general the political class avoids anything which isn't easy. Plundering is easier, it fits their furtive nature, their political style.

Maybe Sadiq will tackle Godzilla

A Godzilla El Niño is coming — and London is on the front line

Scientists at Imperial College are leading efforts to monitor the oceans and protect our city

The climate is already wetter. Research shows the extra rain now falling across the UK each winter as a result of fossil-fuel-driven global warming would fill three million Olympic swimming pools. London is particularly exposed, facing flood risk from three directions: North Sea storm surges pushing up the tidal Thames; swollen rivers and tributaries; and intense rainfall overwhelming the drainage of a densely built city.

Sadiq Khan could impose ULEZ across London - Ultra Low El Niño Zone.

Restore faith

Healey urged to ‘restore faith’ by ending personal allowance freeze in budget

UK savers are demanding chancellor John Healey end the freeze on the personal allowance in his maiden Autumn Budget, as more Brits get dragged into higher tax bands.

A recent poll showed nearly 70 per cent of taxpayers want Healey to unfreeze the personal allowance, with critics arguing it has forced workers and pensioners into higher bands, according to the latest survey from Pension Bee.

Coupled with frozen thresholds, the personal allowance freeze has seen scores of pensioners become tangled in the income tax net, despite not considering themselves wealthy.

And so on...

Journalism is a strange game, adjusting language to conventional expectations as in this case for example. Nobody with their faculties intact could possibly have their faith in UK government restored - there is no base from which to restore it, whatever 'faith' is supposed to indicate in this context.

A few ambivalent concessions from a maniacally plundering, increasingly totalitarian and increasingly inept government cannot even open the coffin lid of faith in government. 

Yet the language games go on. In this context, even the words 'restore faith' count as propaganda, a suggestion that any lapse of faith is unfortunate and should be temporary - not lying somewhere in the long forgotten graveyard of democratic expectations. 

There is of course a lingering official faith in propaganda. This is what Healey is expected to have a bash at restoring - merely that.

Leaving politics to politicians has not worked

DSIT committee chair: ‘Leaving tech regulation to the market has not worked’

The chair of parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology committee has called on the new prime minister to pass laws intended to “restore responsibility and accountability to both tech bros and governments”.

Chi Onwurah (pictured above), a former telecoms engineer, shadow digital minister and long-standing government tech watcher, said that “40 years of neoliberalism” has cultivated “a libertarian attitude to technology, best exemplified in the reluctance to regulate the internet”.


Ah yes, it's “40 years of neoliberalism” again, one of Burnham's favoured chants.

Burnham calls for UK to abandon ‘40 years of neoliberalism’

Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham has called for the UK to abandon “40 years of neoliberalism” as he claimed that Westminster politics had failed northern communities.

How to convert climate into an aesthetic emotion

Trump’s EPA rolls back limits on climate pollution from power plants

Throughout Barack Obama's and Joe Biden's presidencies, the Democratic administrations took steps to address the climate crisis by imposing pollution limits on, among other things, coal-fired power plants.

Donald Trump's administration continues to take dramatic steps in the opposite direction.

In the latest development, the Republican's Environmental Protection Agency confirmed Monday that it is scrapping rules that limit climate pollution from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas. As The Associated Press noted, the move, according to Trump's EPA, would "remove more than $300 billion in costs for the industry."

In a wider sense and as we already know, behind this standard piece of climate propaganda is the destruction of private lives, the same creeping trend Cyril Connolly observed in 1944. Now of course the trend is global and even more insidious, but still based on a weird, communistic fraternity. 

Fraternity is the State’s bribe to the individual; It is the one virtue which can bring courage to members of a materialist society. All state propaganda exalts comradeship, for it is this gregarious heard-sense and herd-smell which keeps people from thinking and so reconciles them to the destruction of their private lives. A problem for government writers, or for the war artists in their war cemetery's: how to convert Fraternity into an aesthetic emotion?

Palinurus (Cyril Connolly) – The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Similarly, the protest at Trump's EPA restriction has nothing whatever to do with the climate and everything to do with converting the global climate into an aesthetic emotion. The global aspect is important, the real climate isn't.