SEAN WALSH
It should be mentioned more often than it is that the guy who wants the rest of us to refrigerate our homes with ‘heat’ pumps, or half-fill the kettle – Ed Miliband – has two kitchens in his own house, presumably in case he loses one. It’s a relevant point, isn’t it, that the people in charge of environmental policy get to do so with such fashionable North London hypocrisy?
The immiserating effects of the Government’s Net Zero obsession are well documented. Additionally, in fact worse, climate alarmism is generating more and more excuses for state incursions into what used to be the private space, orchestrated by people financially and culturally insulated from the whole madness.
It shouldn’t be like this. The end-of-rainbow quest for renewable energy is unnecessary. We have what we need right under our feet. To import it anyway, via supply chains which amplify the end-use cost, is frankly ridiculous.
It is hard to think of an analogy which does justice to the combination of incompetence and malice driving this wretchedness. The closest I can get is to suggest that Miliband has turned the UK into a thief who robs £10 to buy £5 even though he knows, along with the rest of us, that he has a crumpled wad of £20 notes in his back pocket.
The Government has swallowed a secular “nature religion” in which the planet exists for us in two arguably incompatible ways – we’re supposed to worship it while we experiment on it. It is perverse eschatology, a ghastly modern paganism.
Such wisdom as there is in the environmentalist cause will not survive the fetishistic attentions of the Net Zero maniacs, many of whom seem to be imposing their mid-life crises on the rest of us.
In Green Philosophy, Roger Scruton applies a general criticism of utilitarian ethics against its contemporary iteration as Leftist environmental activism. Utilitarianism makes the avoidance of harm central to morality but is never persuasive about what ‘harm’ actually is. It has nothing to say about human moral psychology.
The utilitarian mind lives in the present, is uninterested in the past and gets confused when thinking about the future. Hence the tendency of lanyard environmentalism to announce – correctly – that, for the sake of future generations, we have duties of care to the planet, without being able to articulate the nature of those obligations and, therefore, how they are to be translated into actual realistic – which is to say affordable – policy.
Scruton wrote that book as part of his attempt to reclaim environmentalism from the sharp-elbowed activists of the Left, who have seized and repurposed it to their own ends. Like transgenderism, Hamas fanboyism and anti-racism, it has become another fungible strand in a general, ubiquitous ideology of grievance.
The point of conservatism is to conserve. The contemporary green activist is like the religious convert who insists on evicting the steadfast regular attendees from the front pews so that he can take notes on how to modernise the liturgy. His intention is not conservation so much as revolution.
Green politics should be conservative politics because the traditional language of conservatism is best suited to explain our relationship to the planet and the duties to those yet-to-be-born which arise from it. Edmund Burke put it like this:
The purpose of politics… is not to rearrange society in the interests of some overarching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that erode our social and ecological inheritance. The goal is to pass on to future generations, and if possible to enhance, the order and equilibrium of which we are the temporary trustees.
The language of faithful, historical conservatism makes use of these concepts – stewardship, inheritance, intergenerational obligation – and it is from these that a new liturgy of ‘Right-wing’ environmentalism is begging to be formed. Were it to take up this work, the Conservative Party might remind itself of its younger and wiser self. It might even survive.
All this brings us (though you might not have realised it) to the issue of farming, and the current war against agricultural exceptionalism. If conservatism is to be revived then this will not happen in Davos, Westminster or even in the ARC conferences currently favoured by the Celebrity Right. It will happen in Wiltshire, Kent and Lancashire. It will happen when conservative thinkers follow Scruton’s example and become working farmers.
The tradition and practices of farming are examples of active environmentalism because they encourage the “vigilant resistance” Burke recommends. The farmer knows that the climate speaks to the soil, and he is therefore well-placed to hear what it has to say.
When you are alert to the demands of seasonality you develop a different sense of time, one in which the idea that we have obligations of an intergenerational sort seems both obvious and urgent.
The current climate activism is unattractive because for its high priests it is the activism, not the climate, that is the main point. If starting a farm is too big an ask, then conservatives should at least take time to reacquaint themselves with their intellectual legacy. Like the prodigal son, the environmental cause fell into bad company. Conservatives must get ready to welcome it back home.
This article (Saving Greenery From the Greens) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Sean Walsh
See Related Article Below
The nimby row engulfing the ‘two-faced’ Milibands
Dame Justine Thornton, the Energy Secretary’s wife, is among residents opposing Labour’s plans for a new housing development in north London
ELEANOR STEAFEL
If you were going into battle with developers wanting to build a five-storey block of flats on your street, you would imagine it might be helpful to have one or two celebrities living in the neighbourhood willing to throw their names behind the campaign. Better still if one of them is in the Government. It might become awkward, though, if that particular neighbour happens to be the Secretary of State with oversight of green energy development, whose party is theoretically on a mission to build 300,000 new homes a year.
A row has broken out in Dartmouth Park, an affluent north London enclave which is home to the actor Benedict Cumberbatch and Ed Miliband, about plans to build a block of flats. A developer has filed plans for a block containing a small number of apartments, claiming the project would bring new homes to a brownfield site.
But the proposed structure would stand taller than existing surrounding properties and, as a result, residents have deemed it an eyesore. Many consider it to be too big, too intrusive, and not in keeping with the style of properties in the area. Among those objecting is Dame Justine Thornton, Miliband’s wife, who voiced her concerns in a letter to Camden council. She described the proposal as “too tall, too bulky and too dense for its plot given the context of the surrounding houses and the wider conservation area”.
On a sunny weekday morning, it’s hard to imagine the residents of Dartmouth Park can have too many complaints about where they live. This is something of a middle-class utopia. There is a yoga studio, a deli, an organic wine shop, and an independent butchers on the Milibands’ and the Cumberbatches’ doorsteps, plus a pub that will do you a £25 ox cheek, and a contemporary rug shop with a sign on the door that urges you to “use colour to change space”. The housing stock mostly consists of well-maintained privately-owned period homes. Many of the houses on the street where the development has been proposed boast four floors and large gardens. There appears to be more wisteria than there is social housing.
Though the planning row might be a local issue, it’s sure to be of interest to Sir Keir Starmer – firstly because it falls in the Prime Minister’s constituency, but also because it rather goes against the Labour leader’s assertion that Britain needs to be less Nimby, more, as he would put it, “Yimby”.
Sir Keir’s plan for growth has long centred on his push for new homes. In 2023, he told the BBC his policy was very much “yes in my backyard”, saying he would “bulldoze” restrictive planning rules, overrule local MPs to build more homes, and restrict councils from stopping developments on under-used urban land. Labour would, he said, get the “balance right” between the need to build housing and local concerns about developments. Georgian-style townhouse blocks were to be the thing. “Gentle urban development” of four to five storeys. To give the developers of the Dartmouth Park site their dues, the design doesn’t look a million miles from that description. A futuristic interpretation of a Georgian townhouse, perhaps.
Earlier this year, the Prime Minister doubled down on his pledge, writing in The Times that he planned to put “the country’s future prosperity ahead of the whims of Nimbys who have been holding us back for too long”. Angela Rayner is now spearheading Sir Keir’s promise to build 1.5 million homes. The developers in Dartmouth Park argue their block would “deliver new housing on a brownfield site in an accessible location in line with national and local planning policy objectives”. They have said their plans are “in line with the priorities” of Labour’s updated planning guidance. The Government has said brownfield schemes “should be approved unless substantial harm would be caused”.
You can see, then, why Dame Justine’s intervention does seem to contradict Labour’s grand plans. Miliband himself has pledged to “take on the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists” who he deems to be standing in the way of his green energy development drive. But do the same rules apply when it comes to his own street?
The average house price in the borough is £810,000, while the council says there are currently more than 7,600 households on the social housing register. In the street where the development has been proposed, a property sold in January for £3.7 million.
Cumberbatch, who declined to comment, and his wife, Sophie Hunter, an opera director, said in a joint letter to the council that the development would “disrupt the aesthetic” of the neighbourhood. “The approval of this planning would set a precedent for the area,” they wrote.
When you speak to people on the street itself, it’s the height and heft of the planned block that seem to be at the centre of the issue. A little farther afield, the building’s purpose is the more pertinent problem. “There is vastly insufficient social housing in this area,” says one resident who has lived in the area for more than 30 years. For her, it isn’t the style of the building that troubles her so much as the likely make-up of any future residents.
“Camden needs far more social housing than it’s got. I would be very unhappy about any development that isn’t affordable. I want proper social housing.
“Now, people in this area won’t like that, because they’re all rich, but tough – we need it.”
Outside Truffles delicatessen, two long-time local residents, a retired librarian and a retired charity executive, who asked not to be named, are enjoying a coffee. Their concern, too, is the need to combat the borough’s housing problems. “Most people around here are Labour Left orientated, but come something like this happening…” she shrugs. Her friend chimes in: “Well, they’re champagne socialists,” he says. “We’ve got such a level of homelessness and yet renting and buying is still unachievable for people and no social housing is being built.”
A source close to Dame Justine, a High Court judge, has said that in her submission she “made clear she had no objection to the principle of new housing on the site. She was referring to a specific design”.
But critics of the Milibands have been quick to accuse the family of standing in the way of boosting Britain’s housing stock. (Miliband himself did not add his name to the objection submitted by his wife and has made no public comment on the proposed development.)
“Red Ed joins the not-at-all exclusive club of 14 other serving Cabinet ministers who have objected to housing developments in their areas,” Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow housing secretary, says.
“Incredibly, the Energy Secretary has pledged to ‘smash the Nimbys’ but, as ever with Labour, this is just another case of do as I say, not do as I do.”
The Telegraph: continue reading
*****
They Lost Their Minds
Total meltdown.
PAUL JOSEPH WATSON
The same people who bang on about the wonders of mass migration strangely choose to live as far away from its consequences as possible.
SOURCE: Modernity News
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