BY ALEX STORY
As Mr Sunak and Mrs Van Der Leyen shook hands on a “historic deal” that will still keep Northern Ireland in the European Union’s regulatory orbit and strip the United Kingdom of her territorial integrity, the facts are now beyond dispute.
Our politicians and bureaucrats, the former’s puppet masters, do not work for our common good.
In their minds, as we know so well, borders are meaningless, the law is subjective, sex is fluid, power is unaccountable, your hard work is their sinecure.
They are right, you are wrong.
As a result, while they spend your hard-earned money and life, mostly recklessly, your consent is no longer required.
You work, they spend.
This of course is true of much of the Western World.
While the structure of the world order post 1945 might still be recognisable, the trend is strong enough to tell us that the future is not ours.
Power is shifting East fast.
The crucial reason for this is simply that countries of the East tend to be serious. We are not.
Of course, the shift is not a foregone conclusion, but without an antidote to clear out the philosophical poison that has clouded our leaders’ minds, it is practically guaranteed.
During an interview on CNN, late last year, Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s current Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, fired a warning shot. He was asked whether it was morally right for India to be buying Russian natural resources by anchor Becky Anderson.
He brushed her line of questioning aside.
His reply was that India bought resources from around the world. What mattered to him was that energy and food were as cheap as they could possibly be.
He said, “so that there is no misunderstanding anywhere, we owe a moral duty to our consumers”.
“We have a 1.34 billion population, and we have to ensure that they are supplied with energy whether it’s petrol or diesel,” Mr Puri added.
Finally, he reminded Mrs Anderson that his priority was “feeding 800 million people three meals a day” and that energy and food prices are inextricably linked.
India needed to ensure “that prices at the petrol pump didn’t go up”.
When was the last time that we in Europe heard a politician in power or an administration, national or local, speak so clearly of “a moral duty” to do what is best for his people?
Unfortunately, our politicians put pseudo-moralistic principles ahead of practicalities, always and in everything.
The “climate” is more important to them, as a result, than our livelihoods.
Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of Mother Nature.
Energy and food supplies.
These two areas, including the defence of the realm, that is to say our borders and the integrity of our United Kingdom, should be the most pressing concern of our political masters.
But it isn’t.
They are sacrificing our energy and food security on the altar of fashionable experiments, regardless of the costs, such as Net Zero and Green New Deals.
To them nothing is sacred, apart from “the climate”.
Here at home, since the start of 2020, planning applications for large-scale solar developments on greenfield land have been submitted at 28 different sites covering a total of 3,500 acres in Hampshire alone.
The best and most versatile farmland is being sacrificed for mega-scale developments despite the fact, as comedian Konstantin Kisin so ably reminded his audience during a debate at the Oxford Union last month, that “if Britain was to sink into the sea right now it would make absolutely no difference to the issue of climate change”.
Britain, he reminded them, “is only responsible for two percent of global carbon emissions”.
It is not just our security that is compromised and sold down the river by a caste of leaders who no longer care, it is that our history is no longer worthy of being cherished and husbanded.
This type of cultural vandalism is now so common that it feels overwhelming and unstoppable.
As an example, planners for Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council in Hampshire have sold out its ancient Roman history in favour of a 210-acre solar farm between Bramley and Silchester in Hampshire.
Silchester’s Roman heritage goes back to the Roman conquest of AD 43 when it became the large and important town of Calleva Atrebatum. The town’s Roman walls are some of the best-preserved Roman town defences in England.
The council, it is said, completely ignored the town’s Roman heritage, deeming it not important enough to be a consideration in the planning process, in opposition to its own motion last year to give added protection to the nature and character of rural villages close to Basingstoke.
Additionally, a key access point joins a dangerous narrow country lane which Hampshire County Council Highways have already gone on record to say that Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council failed to consult them about this key access point. The Fire Service weren’t consulted either about ongoing access despite that fact that transformers and lithium batteries will be located in this part of the site.
This alone qualifies the proposed solar farm to go to a Judicial Review and to end this madness, which is happening all over the country.
But no, the local authority is set to rubberstamp the enormous solar farm, which will cover an area the size of 140 football pitches.
All this to accommodate solar panels, manufactured mainly in China using coal power.
And, as we all know, due to our geography and a relatively low amount of sunlight in the UK, our Chinese made solar panels will only operate at 10% of their nominal capacity over a year.
The future cannot be known. But we have witnessed enough from the priorities of our decision makers to know that the road we are on can only lead to energy and food price inflation, scarcity, and increased suffering.
As they work to make us less energy and food secure, the tectonic plates of real politics will shift ever faster to the East, where the national interest still counts for something.
Our state is working against our best interest and in so doing consigning us to visible and accelerating decline. We will all pay a high price for their delusion.
Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.