Woodentops

Energy Secretary embroiled in new Drax greenwashing row

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been accused by US activists of being complicit in the pollution of a town in Mississippi by handing billions in taxpayer cash to a UK power firm that they claim is harming the health of residents.

Drax Group operates a power plant in Selby, North Yorkshire, that generates electricity by burning wood pellets. Many of these are sourced from forests in the US and shipped to the UK.

Activists from Gloster in Mississippi, where Drax runs a wood pellet factory, say pollution from its plant has caused health issues for people nearby, including heart disease, cancer and respiratory problems.


The pollution claims may or may not be sound, but powering Drax with wood pellets shipped from the US is unambiguously insane.

For sceptics, the main positive stemming from the Drax debacle is that it so clearly is insane and the Net Zero loons can't admit it. It doesn't matter why they can't admit it, that doesn't make the Drax lunacy any less obvious to others.

Another positive for sceptics is that Weird Ed is now tangled up in the Drax mess. Couldn't happen to a more deserving chap. 

Come on Ed - say something silly.

Mega Heat Burst Burst

UK weather: Brits face mega 27C heat burst in just days that's hotter than Ibiza as maps turn red

Britain is set to experience warm conditions next week as temperatures climb up to 27C, making parts of the UK hotter than Ibiza.

While the country won't face an official heatwave based on Met Office's standards, forecasters said "a very fine spell of weather" is on the way. The highest recorded April temperature was back in 1949, when Camden Square in London recorded 29.4C on April 16 - and Wednesday's expected highs of 27C will be less than 2C lower than that.


Ah - so in spite of the headline, it is not quite a 'mega 27C heat burst'. The weather is forecast to be pleasant rather than 'mega', not a heatwave and not likely to break records. It's just expected to be 'a very fine spell of weather' - which won't last. 

It would be a good idea to avoid turning the maps red too, they could burst out of mega alarming colours.  

As useful as a teapot?

Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot, currently £20,736 in the UK.

So we'll go for enforceable

BBC licence fee 'unenforceable', says culture secretary

The culture secretary has said the BBC's licence fee is "unenforceable" and insisted "no options are off the table" when the government begins a review into the corporation's current funding model later this year.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Lisa Nandy said there were "problems" with the annual charge, with "fewer and fewer people" paying the £174.50 fee.


It is tiresomely obvious that the 'unenforceable' narrative is almost certainly a cover for introducing an enforceable form of BBC funding. A safe bet is that those who never watch the BBC and don't currently pay the licence fee will eventually have its greasy hand in their pockets unless they emigrate.

Tedious stuff, but the Lisa Nandys of this world have to dance around these issues to pretend they haven't settled things in principle some time ago.

Must take a certain kind of blockhead resilience to go through with it though. Almost impressive, no wonder they grind down opposition.

A superior brand of urban myth

Even a brief survey of the UK political and media landscape leads to various conclusions, but there are two linked and unmissable aspects –

Imbecility - the UK has a major problem with influential stupidity. 
Intransigence – the UK has a major problem with influential blockheads.

Influential imbecility is not a few wrong moves which could be corrected, it is an intransigent shift towards what appears to be a significantly lower level of intelligence within governing classes, institutions and professions. It is not new and not restricted to the UK.

One possible route down the rabbit hole is fashionable elite conversation. However fanciful or absurd they may be, some memes seem to become particularly fashionable, rather like a superior brand of urban myth. Some myths have clearly evolved into official policy, perhaps because elite thinking must remain on a higher plane – or private jet to be more materialistic.

It is as if an important social censor has been degraded – the censor which should detect stupidity within influential social contexts. Not a surprising conclusion unfortunately, influential stupidity has always been a problem.

Yet something may have moderated influential stupidity in the past, and an aspect of that moderation could have been a sense of place, of physical belonging, an essential stake in what works and has worked in the past, socially and culturally.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)


Perhaps this is it and always was. Those who would rule our lives should be well rooted in some spot of native land. Maybe an international, globalist outlook hinders a grounded viewpoint because those who could easily be elsewhere are in a sense nowhere and not suited to rule anywhere.

Bring it on

'Bring on the fight' over net zero, energy secretary Ed Miliband tells critics

Wrapping up a two-day summit on energy security in London, Mr Miliband said clean power provides "energy security, lower bills [and] the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st

Wrapping up a two-day summit on energy security in London, Mr Miliband said: "The critics need to know that if they want to fight about this, this government says 'bring it on'."

Bring it on? Strewth - whatever Weird Ed thinks he's fighting, it's rather bigger than he is and considerably more intractable than a bacon sandwich. 

It's not something he can defeat with clichés and finger-wagging either, reality doesn't pay attention to such things.

Britain's charity racket

Brian Monteith has a topical CAPX piece on what he calls Britain's charity racket.

Britain’s charity racket is taking over policy

• Today’s most influential lobbyists come in the form of not-for-profit entities
• NGOs aren't actually interested in solutions to the issues they campaign on
• Activist NGOs denude consumers of choice and businesses of their ability to make a profit

One of the most obvious causes of our country’s economic distress is rarely commented on. Yet if we just step back from the turmoil of ever-higher taxes, over-breeding regulations and now tariff turmoil, we will discover the blindingly obvious. Unelected, well-funded, self-appointed lobby groups wield enormous political power in our daily lives and exert outsized influence over government policy and decision making – yet they are accountable to no one but themselves.


Familiar to anyone paying attention, but the whole piece is well worth reading, because we in the UK don't have a Donald Trump exposing the problem.


The reputation of NGOs for impartiality is constantly validated by the media, which treats them as independent organisations which, by definition, are objective and therefore authoritative because they are not tainted by political interest.

Except NGOs have become profoundly intertwined with governments and politicians and are now vested interests themselves. Perversely, without the need to continue their fight for change their purpose would disappear. When did you hear of an NGO talking itself out of the funding and jobs that go with it? That’s why pilot studies or modest reforms are never enough for NGOs, they always demand more action.