One looks at the current plans for renovating Parliament, and understands why it will cost billions. White sepulchres will be built, clean sterile lines smothering the gothic facades. Classrooms filled with strange furniture will be fronted with the usual modernist travesties of glass and steel.
Apparently this is all necessary to fix the crumbling stones. Westminster is a fire hazard, and so the money men and shysters must penetrate the sanctum with their usual “innovations”.
This will take 60 years to complete.
Are our rulers sane?
To understand the scale of the madness, we must look at two things: Net Zero and Anti-Imperialism. Let’s start with everyone’s favourite enviro-fad.
The planet is heating up and humans are completely responsible. We are all damned to cook by virtue of our own carbon-spewing coal-powered greed. No solution is too painful- the peril is too existential for mere scruples. If we fail to deal with our carbon emissions, humanity, and all life in the known universe will go extinct!
So we build wind farms.
I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood. We’re building the most energy inefficient form of power generation outside of human treadmills. We are not undertaking compulsory purchase orders to buy land for nuclear power plants. We are not expediting Rolls Royce’s modular reactor designs. We are not looking to South Korea and begging them for their own brand of highly cost-effective reactors. Of course not! What might the public think about radiation from these advanced and efficient power generators should an accident occur? The world may be heating up, but we can’t have a little risk in our energy grid now can we?
There are over 600 nuclear reactors in the world (submarines included). 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Windscale. I’m sure there have been plenty of other nuclear near-misses, but when you compare the sheer number of reactors to the number of disasters, I think we can agree that well-maintained nuclear reactors do not pose a threat to human civilisation. 3 Mile Island is being recommissioned to power data centres. The area around Fukushima is being slowly opened up to human civilisation once again. Even built-like-a-bomb Chernobyl is surrounded by a sodding nature reserve.
So um, yes. The planet must be saved from perfidious deindustrialised Albion, so we build little sticks that spin around and kill birds. How heroic.
Now, let us come to anti-imperialism. I personally have some sympathy for that little band of lefty shreikers. Having read through enough imperial history to get the joke about Pratap Singh accidentally walking in front of a camera, I am well-aware of the mistakes of our home-grown brand of imperial do-gooders. Muscular liberalism in the East India Company ended the horrors of sati, thank goodness, but also overthrew allied princes and insulted loyal sepoys with their stupid obsessions with endless reform and modernisation (hmmm, plus ca change?). One does not have to be a rabid wokist to agree with outraged conservatives when they learned of the economic reforms that killed a million people in the 1866 Orissa Famine.
There were ways to ease liberal consciences without ripping the country apart. If the despotic character of modern Nigeria is due in part to imperialistic liberals dismantling apart Lord Lugard’s careful system of tribal governance under British overlordship, then efforts by Britain to educate Nigerians in their legal rights and to fund legal cases against the state would not be undue. If Jamaica’s lawlessness stems in part from the violent slaving system of the 18th century, then graduate and exchange schemes for our toughest policemen to help bring order to Caribbean chaos would both aid a fellow Commonwealth realm and toughen up our woke-infested police. Western commercial hunting denude Africa of wildebeest? Support conservation based hunting and give our youth the adventure of a life time. Sod “gap yaas” in Europe, break out the hunting rifles!
Heck, chuck some military aid to Taiwan as an apology for the Opium Wars. Reparations that benefit Britain could be so easy!
This is not what our liberal masters have done.
They instead looked the other way when hordes of imported Mirpuris raped and murdered both Sikh and white English girls. Couldn’t enforce the law against a small minority of men now could we? That would be racist. Besides, it was revenge for the empire. What were the lives of innocent women in the grand scheme of things? Better to rub the right’s nose in diversity and show them what it was like to be colonised!
I could cite the weird colonialism inherent in “giving back” Chagos to Mauritius and depriving the Chagossians of their homes. I could cite the kowtowing to imperial China or the bizarre worship of European Empire Union Regulations. Nothing comes close to the systematic and literal violation of the rights of the people that live here. Small colonies of aliens were allowed to hunt down and destroy people who’s crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You could quibble that this is a conflation of two issues- anti-racism and anti-colonialism, but I reject that outright. They are joined at the hip. The left’s lazy half-eaten view of decolonisation demands that specific groups are seen as victims and the rest left to hang. After all, they only came here because we destroyed their countries. It had nothing to do with the Pakistani government relocating people away from a dam they were building, honest! If the whites are at fault for everything, then left the whites have it!
(…and in this case the Sikhs…. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, no?)
I wonder if flooded African coastal communities appreciate our attempts to destroy our energy grid. Maybe some Indian Hindus feel we’ve atoned for the empire through our valiant sacrifice of English womanhood.
Such is the work of our sane and sensible rulers.