Ed Miliband has announced.

Government commits to 87% cut in UK’s climate emissions by 2040

The Government has signed up to a legal target to cut the UK’s planet-heating emissions by 87% by 2040, Ed Miliband has announced.

The commitment will see heat pumps, electric cars and renewables rolled out across the country in a move the Government says will bring down bills and “upgrade lifestyles”.

The reduction in greenhouse gases on 1990 levels – on the way to cutting climate pollution to zero overall by 2050, known as “net zero” – is in line with official advice from the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) on deliverable and cost-effective cuts.

But the Government’s commitment to the “seventh carbon budget” emissions target for the period 2038-2042 comes amid increasing political division over climate action, with Reform UK and the Tories promising to ditch net zero policies and back oil and gas drilling.


It's made up numbers time again, but it would be interesting to know what "climate pollution" is supposed to be. Presumably it is not the pollution of science and rational debate by political twaddle, because on the face of it there is a firm intention to increase that kind of pollution.

As even Ed Miliband knows, nobody will remember this twaddle by 2040 anyway. By then we will have lots of different twaddle to contend with and probably some real problems which turn out to be rather more serious than Ed's fantasies.

Said with tiers in their eyes

Cooper says UK and China have 'shared interest' in rules-based order

The rules-based international order is in Britain and China’s “shared interest”, Yvette Cooper said as she met the country’s vice-president Han Zheng for talks on global security as part of a three-day visit to Asia.

The Foreign Secretary acknowledged “areas of disagreement” between London and Beijing but insisted that approaching discussions with “candour and respect” would help to increase mutual understanding of one another.

Greeting the minister in the capital’s Great Hall of the People on Tuesday, Mr Han hailed a “new chapter in bilateral ties” which he said had been opened during Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to the country in January.


You British have sold your souls for something less than the conventional mess of pottage. You are ruled in the first place by money-bags, and the faddists whom they support to blind your eyes.

John Buchan - The Half-Hearted (1900)

The Sound of Silencers

From "Les Tontons flingueurs", a crime comedy.

Time is running out for managed decline

Damian Pudner has a useful CAPX piece on why so many people from Tony Blair upwards know why the UK political status quo is running aground.


Time is running out for the political status quo

Even Tony Blair – the man who built managerial Britain – recognises the state has grown too large

For 30 years, the state has expanded on the misguided assumption that someone else would always pay

We are stuck in a slow, painful managed decline

This week I was fortunate enough to sit down with the Rt Hon Liz Truss. We discussed the usual things you expect. The state of the UK economy, the Bank of England, the Civil Service, and to quote Truss, how ‘Power was taken from the elected and given to progressive bureaucrats and judges’. I must admit I found our conversation refreshing.

So let me be just as direct. British politics has reached a point where the old arguments no longer work and the old settlement is visibly falling apart.

For 30 years, the British state has expanded on the misguided assumption that someone else would always pay. Taxpayers. Bond markets. The next generation. That growth was always just around the corner. That all we needed was more spending, more regulation, more quangos, more debt, more promises. And that the productive part of the economy – the private sector – would simply absorb it, that bond markets would keep lending to us, that the public would keep accepting the situation.

Well, they won’t. And deep down, everyone in Westminster knows it.

The whole piece is well worth reading, especially now, with old-style political huckster Andy Burnham in hot pursuit of Keir Starmer's position. Burnham doesn't have the nous nor the answers, but neither do far too many voters.


Time is running out for the political status quo. And the public, I suspect, is far ahead of Westminster on this.

Behave as rationally as possible

Peter Murrell bought 108 loo rolls using money stolen from SNP as panic-buy alert loomed

Peter Murrell snapped up more than 100 toilet rolls using money he had stolen from the SNP - just as Nicola Sturgeon prepared to urge the Scottish public not to panic-buy at the start of the Covid pandemic.

Court documents from his embezzlement trial reveal that on March 7, 2020, with lockdown looming as infection cases soared and supermarkets battled chronic shortages of essential items, the then First Minister's husband spent £55.98 on 108 luxury Andrex toilet rolls.

Just 48 hours later, Ms Sturgeon appeared at a press conference instructing the public to 'apply common sense' by not bulk-buying in shops and to 'behave as rationally as possible'.

There is an interesting point here. All those toilet rolls are a reminder that politicians can't behave as rationally as possible, not when they are doing politics. 

If they were to do that, then politics as we know it would fade away to be replaced by something which isn't easy to envisage because we've never had it. 

AI perhaps.

We’re really important says WHO

About two weeks ago, Kit Knightly had an entertaining off-guardian piece about the World Health Assembly. We all know about that lot, but the whole piece is well worth reading.


WHO in “panic mode” as World Health Assembly kicks off

Today is first day of the World Health Organization’s 79th annual World Health Assembly, where delegates come together to set policies and priorities for global health.

Essentially, it’s a week-long exercise in saying, as loud and long possible, “We’re really important.”

And thank goodness it came along when it did, because…wow.

The hantavirus outbreak is tearing through the world at the unstoppably terrifying rate of five whole deaths every two months.

That’s about 30 deaths in a year or about 0.25% of the number of people who’ll died from falling down stairs.

At least it's not Derbyshire

Sturgeon moves to London - as she defends record over husband's crimes

Nicola Sturgeon has moved to London following the fallout over her estranged husband’s conviction for embezzlement.

The former Scottish First Minister is renting a luxury property in the capital as she looks to start a career in the literary industry, the Mail reported.

She hinted she might move to London while promoting her memoir last year, adding that she felt she could not “breathe freely” at home.

The literary industry eh? There are quite a few obvious jibes we could bung in here, but if she intends to write books, there are numerous subjects she should avoid to head off even more jibes.

For example, a novel where the feisty heroine auditor arrives at a ferry port in her motorhome to carry out an audit on behalf of the government. That won't do.