TONY Blair has made what legacy journalists excitedly called an ‘intervention’ over the government’s Net Zero idiocy. It was a masterclass in how to get something right by accident.
The former Prime Minister helpfully told us what real people know already – that this government’s cultist obsession with decarbonisation, and the immiserating strategies flowing from it, have left people ‘turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy’.
Interesting, incidentally, that he thinks the ‘solutions’ are at the proposed stage. This may not be clear from your energy bill, which I suspect reads like more of a demand for yet more money than a negotiating position or a suggested way forward.
Blair has twigged that the Net Zero project is niche North London fetishism, but he gets to this correct conclusion for the wrong reasons. When you look at his argument you find the familiar emphasis on pragmatism and electoral calculation. It is true that you and I are being forced to pay for Ed Miliband’s mid-life crisis, and Blair is right to notice that we’ve noticed that, but the problems with the Energy Secretary’s strategy are deeper than the merely political.
Net Zero evangelism is both logically self-defeating and morally contemptible. To import what we have already, but at greater cost, and via supply chains which originate in slave labour, is like stealing £10 to buy £5 even though you have a crumpled £20 note in your back pocket.
The Net Zero project manages to be simultaneously delusional in its conception and hyper-hypocritical in its execution. That’s quite the trick to pull off.
There is some wisdom attached to environmentalism, but that knowledge is fragile and unlikely to survive contact with the minds of human rights lawyers such as Blair. We receive the natural world in trust, as something to value, conserve and pass on. An authentic conservative philosophy, historically centred, and with an acknowledgement that we have duties not only to each other but to those who are yet to come, and those who came before, should be well placed to make this case. Green politics should be conservative politics.
This is what Blair is missing: the defenders of Net Zero insist that we have obligations to future generations but, being insensitive to or ignorant of the nature and philosophy of history they are unable to flesh out what these obligations comprise and how they should be met.
The former Prime Minister shares this intellectually crippling historical insensitivity, along with the chauvinistic instinct that the new is axiomatically better than the old. You need only consult his record in office to understand this. Blair brutalised the constitutional dispensation which was entrusted to him. He did so by replacing accountable political processes with judicial activism and government-by-quango.
All of this because he made the mistake – unforgivable in a statesman – of assuming that history is in the past. There is no ‘ahistorical’ way of understanding either the nature of Parliament or its role as the axis on which our fluid constitution turns.
Peter Hitchens has described Blair’s assault on our pre-1997 political arrangements as a ‘a slow-motion coup d’état’. I’d put it more strongly. To me it’s as if he used his time in Downing Street to plant judicial incendiary devices, equipped with staggered, long-delay timers, designed to blow up all those mechanisms of redress which used to protect the citizen from the rampaging State. These devices are still detonating today.
There is not a single problem that we face now – from the invasive migration for which we have no recourse to the violation of our children’s innocence by classroom sexualisation – that does not in some way lead back to Blair, and his intentional collapse of the political into the legal.
And yet there are some – people should know better – who look back on the Blair years nostalgically, fondly even. They were at it again last week. Whatever you say about Tony Blair, they lamented, at least he was a competent prime minister. As if competence in service of the truly awful is something to be lauded.
The Blairite programme of ‘modernisation’ entailed the insertion of an accountability firewall between the government and the governed, via the creation of classes of experts and specialists, indemnified by legal structures ordered to a globalist agenda.
The whole thing was, to put it at its simplest, all a bit un-British.
So, let’s not fall for the stupid idea that Blair stands for a lost era of more serious politics, because his deeper agenda is rolling out in real time. It’s all very well rewriting history, as long as you’re aware that this history is alive in the present – and will be for some time.
