What does Climate Change mean for you? What does Net Zero mean for everybody? When does pollution become a critical problem?
Are you really sure?
On the face of it, the politicians who already represent us or wish to do so know what you think and more importantly, what you want. In fact, they are so confident of your concern about Climate Change, your commitment to Net Zero and when pollution matters, that they are making decisions for you, that are going to cost you, so that they can deliver whatever it is they know that you want.
But did they come to your door, talk to you and check that ULEZ, Low Traffic Neighborhoods and in fact any form of non-criminal fine implementation – or rather what we should more honestly call supplementary fundraising and do anything that confirmed it was what you want?
Conversely, I would like to bet that no political candidate or their representatives have EVER knocked on your door or put any leaflet, newsletter or manifesto through your letterbox at election time that has made the claim ‘Vote for me and MY party, so that we can do whatever the hell we want to make our lives easier in power and then get reelected’.
What do you Vote for?
The problem, for us, is that Politicians have been telling us, our parents and our grandparents before them, whatever they needed to when an election was coming, without making clear that unless most of the other politicians they are running with get elected too, the chances of them being able to do whatever they have promised you could easily be as much as nil.
And do please bear in mind that when politicians do get elected as part of a working majority of candidates – as this Government did in 2019 with an 80-Seat-Majority, when it was elected with Boris Johnson in No.10 – politicians have a very nasty habit of not even delivering on the commitments they have made to you, even then.
Regrettably, the non-democracy that we have in the UK (and across the Western World) means that Politicians have to create stories or what are called narratives, that will fool enough of us into believing what they say, so that the politicians can then create and implement public policies that aren’t really public focused policy at all. But policies that exist just to help them to stay in power, to further their own interests, to win and to keep winning.
The more emotive and fear-provoking the policy, the better. Because when you are scared of what could happen if the solution to the problem they have created isn’t achieved, the chances are that for you, the future will look very grim.
Because they told you so.
What is the con, and how long has the con been on?
Politicians have been doing this to all of us for a very long time. But they have never been doing it as comprehensively and effectively lying about everything in the way that they are doing so right now.
Now, before you get the idea that Climate Change isn’t real, please just hold that thought for a moment.
Climate Change is most certainly happening.
However, what even the scientists cannot be certain of, is how much of Climate Change, if any, is down to industrialisation and man-made pollution. Or how much of it is down to the natural cycles of change that have occurred on the Planet that is our home, probably from the moment that it came into being, whenever that was and however it occurred.
Either way, the biggest problem that isn’t talked about by politicians or the many large and often global companies that regularly sell you things, is that the real problems that we face come from the unnecessary overuse of natural resources, and the habits that we have all been conditioned to have.
Habits that become our truth, that make a few people very rich, make us believe we are happy, but are quickly making life unaffordable whilst destroying the quality of all the life-supporting functions of the World that we do have.
To put some perspective on this, if you live in a house with three other adults, does your household really need to run four cars?
It is important to consider this point. Because just as there is a truth about climate change that makes the whole political fear factory work, there is another truth that is very uncomfortable for all of us that rests on the reality that we don’t need all the things that we have, and we certainly don’t need to do all the things that we do.
Climate Change is a political Trojan Horse that hides the bigger truth hidden within
So then. Right now, we are all the guilty bastards. And that guilt is being used to help create the myth that we all must accept whatever the politicians do, whenever it comes to addressing Climate Change, implementing Net Zero, and yes, whatever else the politicians next tell us it is imperative for them to do.
What the politicians aren’t telling anyone very loudly – even though all the information and case history is out there in the public domain for us to see – is that the real reason for all of these urgent schemes to be implemented not comprehensively across the UK – but at very localised levels and in very area specific ways, is that they are all about raising sufficient revenue and additional funding, to prevent the government organisations or authorities from going bankrupt.
Because for one reason or another, these authorities have already spent all of their income – which is typically your Council Tax and then other money that comes from central government funds.
The solutions to worldwide problems aren’t only City-wide.
The problems and the depth they have reached are very localised too.
This is why we have a situation where the Labour Mayor of London has rolled out a much wider ULEZ scheme that can easily be linked to covering the costs of the London Transport bailout from the Government. All arguably given on the basis that Khan had to make the overall cost of what he is doing sustainable – which in our language doesn’t mean being ‘green’; it means making sure that whatever income he raises is actually enough to cover all the costs.
If you live in the London area that is now covered by the ULEZ, it really doesn’t matter what your politics is, or whether you voted for the election of Mayor Khan or not. The Climate and Pollution story he has been telling everyone is almost certain to be a fractional truth. But the bigger truth is that the ULEZ scheme is a device that the mayor is using to treat Residents, Businesses and Visitors as a cash cow.
And he needs the money that ULEZ fees and fines will give him, because he cannot cover the costs of poor management, with profligate and unnecessary spending across his administration in any other way.
Yes, the Truth can seem stranger than Fiction.
You may not believe this view, or you may not want to. But if the London Mayor were to be honest and say to you, ‘The only way I can keep you happy and make sure you keep voting for me is to spend, spend, spend and spend more of your money – because I don’t know how to run London in any other way’, Would you really be happy to reach into your pocket and allow him to charge you to cover those costs in a more open or transparent way?
All parts of Government are now a business. A business about power and keeping it, and it’s the powerless spectators who will be forced to pay the rising fees that provide less and less.
It may sound like I’m having a downer on Sadiq Kahn. I’m not. I don’t even know the guy, personally.
It’s not personal. He’s just gone out and asked for the People of London to trust him as Mayor, when he clearly cannot do the job that he asked to be trusted to do.
On the basis of the ULEZ debacle itself, it’s far from certain that Khan will be reelected, whenever the next London Mayoral Election race is run.
However, local authorities and the Westminster Parliament itself are filled to overflowing with thousands more politicians that think like him, who are going to use every myth, narrative and story that they can to justify passing the bill to you, on top of everything else that you already overpay.
The uncomfortable truths that we all have to face if we don’t want things to continue the same way.
What few realise and even fewer accept, is the role that we are all playing in this. And what changes WE need to make, if we want to be treated by government and by business as human beings, rather than the source of the income that allows just them to keep on doing whatever they want to do.
If we want public representatives to represent us, we cannot continue to allow the political parties to run a monopoly on government between them, that closes the door to good leaders, and allows the interests of the few to be prioritized above all others – often with costs attached for the victims that politicians will never understand.
We can all take part and vote very differently, if that’s what we genuinely want and that’s what we are all prepared to do.
However, it doesn’t stop there. We all have to start waking up to the realities of the unsustainable and care-free way of living we are indulging, that comes with a ridiculous level of cost to our health, our way of life, our communities and our future too.
The irony is that if we were not as obsessed with all the things we want and how everything looks, and learned to be happy buying and using only the foods, goods, equipment and services that we genuinely need, the Climate and ENIRONMENTAL problems that are part of the growing list of problems that EVERYONE’S behaviour has helped to create, would quickly be solved – and without useless politicians pretending they have helped in some way or done their part too.
Our behaviour is making it easy for charlatans to take power and use it to control our lives. You have the power to change all of this. What is the next thing you are going to do?
Adam Tugwell 