Life goes on

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/

Life goes on

Having rather neglected the wider world over the last few weeks, taking a quick peek away from the tragic drama being played out in Afghanistan, we find Booker writing in The Daily Mail on another constant obsession of ours, wind farms.

Wind farms, he writes, will be a monument to an age when our leaders went collectively off their heads. This is after the CBI warned that the government must abandon its crazy fixation with wind energy as a way of plugging the looming energy gap. 

There is nothing new in the piece, nothing Booker and I both have not written a hundred times before, all on the back of warnings that electricity bills are set to rise exponentially to meet the costs of this insanity. There again, nothing new.

John Sauven in The Guardian, however, attacks the CBI, prattling on about how the "renewables sector", against the backdrop of the worldwide economic downturn, "is one of the few success stories," It is "creating millions of new green jobs, increasing countries' energy independence and reducing climate-changing emissions." 

It is "scandalous", therefore, that the CBI should come out "attacking the prime minister and the climate change secretary Ed Miliband's commitment to boosting this industry in Britain just days before the launch of a fresh government initiative."

This is what passes for brains these days, and gets you printed in The Guardian - but the terrifying thing is that it is also the economic and political orthodoxy that drives government policy, fully supported by the two main opposition parties.

In the fullness of time, we will indeed come to see these windmills as a monument to a period of collective madness - as we now do the tower blocks that were the answer to the housing crisis - and Booker is right to tilt at the windmills. But, while the collective psyche is gripped by the madness, there is no moving it. It will have to play itself out in its own time, while we pay the bill, as our political masters indulge themselves in their fantasies.

And then we will shoot them.

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