Beer, skittles, global warming and the redemption of the West

Forced by the suspension of the blog to find some other source of intellectual diversion, and having re-thumbed my entire stock of Chronicles back copies, I hit the TV remote before Sunday lunch and, for my pains, saw (turn away NOW, if you of a squeamish nature) the big, bland face of David Bloody Cameron.

He was being interviewed by John Sopel for the BBC’s Politics Show.  They were fencing with one another about the political flavour of the moment, the Stern Report on climate change.

Now, I readily acknowledge that climate change is the only issue bigger than the survival of Western Man, and I don’t seek to belittle it in any way.  But it wasn’t Cameron’s fine intentions and general planetary high-mindedness that piqued my interest.  It was his repeated refusal to identify holiday air travel as a frivolity that - “if ‘the polluter pays’ is to mean anything” - must shoulder its share of the CO2 burden.  He wouldn’t, he informed Sopel, be the one who told the common man that he can’t have his sun ‘n sangria.

In so doing Cameron revealed himself to be too much of a politician ever to be much of an environmentalist.  He also demonstrated that his abiding concerns are specifically voter-related rather than UK industry-related (ie flightwise, outbound rather than inbound).  In the Opposition’s perfectly understandable struggle to get elected frivolity, it seems, is more important than profits and jobs.  That’s probably a correct strategy.  These days, the economy is not a strong electoral card for the Conservatives and the generality of employment in UK tourism is, anyway, very poorly paid and far too frequently filled by Poles and Filipinos.

So it’s beer and skittles all across the cloudscape to sunny Espagne, and CO2 be damned.  And if the on-line tabloids are a good judge of their own audience, young master Cameron and his pet tarantula are right.

Today’s Daily Mail leads with a very boring transplant story and then the stultifying tale of a greying royal top.  However, columnist Melanie Phillips, the last-ditch neocon and fanatical Zionist, does tackle Stern.  She informs us, as any neocon must, that the science on global warming is less than uniform in its conclusions.  So why worry-schmorry?  Check the hourglass on the only flight hostess under forty, tighten the harness of your window seat and away we go for another two and half hours of soar-away CO2 emission.

The dear old Daily Express leads on Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who removed her Remembrance Poppy to appease her posh but ever-sensitive Islamic hosts in Pakistan (sorry, Daddy, for all those friends of yours who didn’t get away from the River Dyle.  Or Marsa Matruh.  But the FO says these Mohammedan wallahs are terribly important just now.)

The Mirror is the Labour Party house journal for supporters whose candle-power never reaches triple digits.  Inevitably, then, it leads with another royal story of ineffable insignificance.  Prince William lost his machine gun during firing practice at Sandhurst.  Shocking.  After that, though, we do get a climate story, albeit a puff piece produced by one of the Chancellor’s PR people.  Apparently, Brown’s Britain is going to lead the world - again - in the fight against, erm …  So that’s alright.  Salt of the earth Labour voters and their “hardworking” families can leave it to good old Gordon, and get back to the celeb stories and football and more football.  Lost a machine gun, he did.  What a clown!

The Sun, meanwhile, has never heard of global warming, much less Mr Stern.  When they cotton on to the implications for skimpy female attire and public nudity in general they will, I suppose, find a way to run a pictorial on it.  Until the next Ice Age kicks in!

Overall, one is brought back yet again to the appalling, depressing denseness of our tribe.  But let it be said that that is entirely complemented by the dishonesty and sheer power-interest of our politicians.  “Fill the pigs’ troughs with the wants of a coarse appetite,” one hears them say, “and they will not bind our hands, or dream of higher interests.”

Being a Conservative and a proponent of self-improvement, Cameron can at least legitimately indulge his electorate with dreams of a higher estate.  Such dreams properly include holidays abroad.  That fleeting, annual contact with a sunlit and romantic, untroubled other-world retains a certain echo of the elitism of a past that certainly lived on into the 1960s.

The left, however, is only comfortable with a static client-base to which it may apply its thaumaturgical powers.  For Labour, then, those coarse appetites translate into gambling online, gambling in casinos, gambling in super-casinos.  Always properly regulated, of course, by those for whom the desire to care for and protect their fellows is also the desire for more government control.

Taken in the round, all this is to be expected.  It is only what cognitive dissonance produces in a One Man One Vote democracy since, obviously, OMOV precludes all influence by interest groups with a traditional, moral claim on power - and into the vacuum has leapt a contemptuous oligarchy.

Our oligarchs need have little fear of contradiction precisely because of the electoral safety valve that is a safety valve for them, not for the electorate.  In the modern age elections serve no useful purpose for the people.  If then one is excluded from the invited, magic circle of NGO’s and special interests it is extraordinarily difficult to influence government at all.  Up to but just perhaps not including Stern, that has been the case irrespective of whether one’s activism lies in saving the planet or Western Man.

However, there are, in fact, some interesting parallels between these two great crises of the West, and one or two useful lessons to be got out of that.  They both exemplify a particular vision of human progress.  They both reflect the interests of governments and of capital.  They both ride on the wings of the self-interested individual.  They are both wars in which science is speaking for the side of change. They are both, it seems, partners in our destruction and it may yet be that redemption from one life of harm is the true precondition for redemption from the other.

In other words we, in our righteous desire to effect what we perceive to be the genuine, timeless interests of our own people, act in a way too limited and too unseeing to produce anything like the result we desire.  It is as though we have an uncertain grasp on one wheel of the cart.  But the other, quite beyond our reach, is also a driving wheel, and the axle – their connectedness as I have just described it - is locked.

So here’s a question to think about: what might happen to the corrosive effects of individualism upon our ethnic interests if, regardless of Mr Cameron, individualism itself must be curbed to ameliorate global warming?

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 11:45 AM in Environmentalism & Global Warming
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