Last Saturday, as I sat at my computer at about 11:30am, my aural senses were assaulted. It sounded, at first, like a mullah with a megaphone. But Muslim prayers don’t last more than a few minutes. And these noises carried on.
They were still going on through the afternoon and into the evening. There was lots of loud, rocky-poppy, not-very-tuneful music. Now, I live just round the corner from Charterhouse School; and they have a reputation for holding such shindigs. But the sound didn’t seem to be coming from that direction.
At about 6pm, somebody gave a speech. I couldn’t make out a single word; it sounded, more than anything else, like a rant by some crazed South American dictator. Then the music re-started. By 7:30pm, I had decided to take a walk around the district to find the source of the noise. It wasn’t Charterhouse; it seemed to be coming from down the hill. In some places, including my home, the sound was very distinct, even loud; in others, I couldn’t hear it at all.
As I walked down the hill, parties of mostly young, well-heeled-looking people were coming in the opposite direction. I had to walk well more than a mile, all the way down into the town, to find that a huge festival had taken over the town park. It had just finished, and vans and lorries were starting to cart away tents and other temporary fixtures. In the town centre, I saw signs to “Surrey Pride.” So now, I knew what the festival had been; the local Gay Pride parade and party. The Wetherspoon was chock full of happy looking people, mostly younger than the usual clientele. And the railway station was as busy as I’ve ever seen it.
When I researched it the next morning, I found that the big London Gay Pride parade had been cancelled again this year; apparently due to bureaucrats imposing COVID restrictions so stringently that the organizers could not meet them. Which meant that this gay event in Surrey, where the local council is a bit more accommodating, attracted far more people than normal. I heard that 7,500 came to the event; that’s a third of the population of the town!
The very next day, in the next town, was the final day of a nine-day “Great Big Green Week.” This was part of a national publicity event, under the aegis of the World Wildlife Fund, to try to soften people up for the upcoming “COP 26” meeting in Glasgow; at which the rogues that claim a right to run the country plan to drive yet another nail into the coffins of our prosperity and our freedoms. It was all about politicized green hooey, like “the journey to climate justice” and “the power we all have to take positive action on climate change” and “celebrating action for nature and the climate.” And that particular day had been declared a “car free day” in that town, with road closures all around the centre.
My brass band was playing on the bandstand near that town centre on that Sunday afternoon. As a principled and vocal opponent of the green movement and everything they stand for, I had withdrawn from the event as soon as I found out about the green week going on in the vicinity. Not to mention the difficulty of lugging a big, heavy, awkwardly shaped tuba from wherever I managed to park to the bandstand and back – and the town is hilly! Tubas and “car free days” don’t mix. So, I wasn’t there for any of the green events. But I find it difficult to believe that those who attended these events could have enjoyed themselves nearly as much as the gay people obviously did.
All this set me thinking: what are the similarities between gays and greens, and what are the differences? As to similarities, both are politically active, and both often express themselves in ways that those who are neither gay nor green find “woke.” But there the resemblance ends. For most gay people, their movement is about a feeling of community, and taking pride in being what they are. Whereas for greens, it is all about the agenda.
I cannot overstate the injustices to which gay people have been subjected over the decades. In the 1950s, the relentless hounding of seminal computer scientist Alan Turing by the UK state led to his suicide. That anyone could be convicted in court for an act, carried out by consenting adults, which neither harms anyone nor is intended to harm anyone, is an appalling indictment of the “justice” system of the time. That the victim was someone who had made an outstanding contribution to the war effort against the Nazis, yet could not get the recognition and the credit he deserved because he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, made the injustice worse. That it took until 2014 for him to receive a pardon (later followed by 75,000 others who were convicted of similar “offences”) testifies to the slowness with which government wheels grind when it comes to rectifying even the most blatant injustices.
I have no homosexual inclinations myself. But I have had a number of gay friends, and I appreciate that being gay is simply the way they are. I don’t see anything wrong in it, as long as the acts are carried out between consenting adults; and as an individualist, I find it churlish at the least to castigate people just because they are different. I don’t see why gay people should not have been allowed to marry each other, or to adopt children if they were otherwise suitable to do so, or even to serve in the armed forces. And I understand why gay people want to parade and to party, both among themselves and with non-gay people too.
I do, however, have strong objections to “hate crime” laws, that can make a small slip of the tongue into a “crime,” thus seriously damaging freedom of speech. And as a ratepayer, I am annoyed at being expected to pay for the construction and maintenance of things like “changing places” toilets. If gay people, or any other group, start to get politically aggressive and to demand things such as these, I am likely to reduce or even to withdraw my tolerance. But to those gay people who do not try to politicize the issue, I say: Take pride in yourselves, my friends; take pride in being human, take pride in what you are and in what you do.
I wish I could be as kind to the greens. For 30 years and more, they have been politically aggressive to the point where they have instilled their agenda into the entire UK political class. And that agenda is one that is hostile to good people in general, and to me in particular. They are seeking to make driving cars so expensive, that the effect will be to take away the mobility of everyone but the rich and well connected. They are seeking to make affordable air travel a thing of the past. They are seeking to make heating our homes both more expensive and less efficient. Their schemes have already caused energy prices to skyrocket, and the UK electricity grid to become dangerously unstable. Groups that are all but terrorists have blocked motorways and dug up lawns. All this in the name of “reducing emissions” of carbon dioxide and other gases, purportedly to stop some amount of “global warming” that, so they claim, would have catastrophic consequences to the planet and to human civilization.
And yet, no-one has ever supplied any hard evidence that shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that all these expensive and freedom-killing measures would bring any benefits at all. No-one has even measured accurately how much of the warming that has taken place over the last 300+ years has been due to human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. No-one has proved beyond reasonable doubt that a moderate amount of warming – say 3 or even 5 degrees Celsius globally – would have a large negative effect on human civilization. In fact, historical evidence suggests the opposite; in past warm periods such as the Minoan, Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods, our civilizations have flourished. All the “evidence” our accusers have is computer models and hype.
Moreover, there’s a long and ugly backstory to the whole issue. The body that supposedly assembles the evidence on “global warming,” the IPCC, is a United Nations organization; and the UN has been the force driving the green agenda for more than 50 years. There have been more and more extreme green commitments made by successive UK governments, without ever allowing the people any opportunity to object. All the mainstream parties are in on the scam. There have been bad “science,” and data misrepresented to make it look scarier than it is. There have been attempts to suppress papers skeptical of the green narrative, and to persecute or to sack skeptical scientists. There has been a huge, concerted hype fest in the media; and the skeptical point of view is rarely, if ever, allowed to be put to the public.
Worse, the UK government has shown very bad faith, by doing at least two inexcusable things behind the scenes. Firstly, they re-wrote the “precautionary principle” so that, instead of “look before you leap” as it should be, it became in essence “If in doubt, government must act.” By this ruse, they abandoned all pretence of objective, impartial risk analysis, and of presuming us innocent until proven guilty. And they inverted the burden of proof, demanding that we, who are accused of causing catastrophic “global warming,” must prove that we are not causing any problem. Which, in general, is impossible. And most of all when we are not allowed to speak up for ourselves; nor to call witnesses, including experts, for our side.
Secondly, they dropped the use of the so called “social cost of carbon” in doing cost-benefit analyses on anything involving carbon dioxide emissions. This has made it impossible to do objective cost versus benefit assessments on these issues; and, in particular, has made it impossible to answer the question: “how much harm would CO2 emissions cause if we did nothing at all to reduce them?” Cynically paraphrased, their argument seems to have been: “We know we can’t do a credible cost-benefit analysis that justifies any political action on this. But we’re already committed to political action. So, we’ll make up numbers to match the commitments, and hope that no-one notices.”
Where gay people on the one hand show pride, greens on the other show prejudice. They are pre-judging us human beings, and our industrial civilization; they are pre-judging us guilty. Guilty without due process or the presumption of innocence, guilty without an impartial tribunal to judge the case, guilty without any hard evidence of any wrongdoing.
No, I cannot be kind to those that promote or support the green “net zero” agenda. Nor can I be kind to the politicians, bureaucrats, academics and hangers-on that have set out their stalls to impose on us green policies that will bring great harm to us personally, and enormous harm to Western civilization. I regard them all as traitors to humanity.
What I’d like to see is all those that have promoted or supported this “net zero” agenda made to live in a green enclave, where they will have to make their “net zero” dream into a reality. They will have to prove that a “net zero” economy is sustainable, in the true meaning of the word, “able to endure into the future.” Without any kind of subsidies from anyone, and most of all without anything from government. Meanwhile, we the good, ordinary people will carry on with our business as usual. And when reality strikes, and the lights and the heating in their enclave go out, permanently, we’ll laugh at them and say “good riddance.”
I came across a claim that the Great Big Green Week got 200,000 visitors. They seemed to think that was a lot. I don’t know whether that was one location or many, but that’s not a vast number of visitors for a large-scale event that lasted 9 days. In contrast, the 2019 London Gay Pride parade attracted 1,500,000 people. And even that parade last Saturday attracted fully a third of the population of the town it was held in.
It seems to me that, if the people of the UK could vote between the gays and the greens, the gays ought to win hands down. And deservedly so. Because no gay person I have known has ever tried to force me or anyone else to go gay; but the green agenda is all about forcing me and others to “go green” against our wills. Most gays are tolerant of others; but greens are intolerant of anyone who doesn’t agree with their extremist views. And, as Jane Austen might have said if she were alive today, where gays show pride, greens show prejudice.