Comment
TONY PARSONS
It’s time Labour and the Tories give up on the green pipe dream of Net Zero and stop punishing ordinary folk
WHEN it comes to the great green pipe dream of Net Zero the public are being treated like suckers.
Yes, Labour is totally in thrall to the new green religion, wanting a total halt to oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Keep calm — that nice Mr Putin will look after us!
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But do you really believe the Tories are much better?
After the Tories clung on to Boris’s old seat in Uxbridge and South Ruislip by a paltry 495 votes, we were solemnly told that there is a lot of “rethinking” and “reflecting” going on at the top of British politics.
Labour did not win in Uxbridge — despite Bojo’s many sins, despite the Tories tanking in the polls — because working people heartily despise Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone tax on older vehicles.
After Uxbridge, Keir Starmer was said to be urging Khan to “reflect” on his expansion of ULEZ.
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Meanwhile, realising that green fanaticism is quite possibly polling booth poison, we are teased that Rishi Sunak is “reflecting” on his party’s lemming-like rush to net zero.
And these are all sweet nothings.
For all their alleged “reflecting” and “rethinking”, both major parties remain totally committed to extreme environmental policies that will inflict unimaginable hardship on the lives of millions of ordinary families.
“If people think that you are treating the cause of the environment as a religious crusade,” chirps Michael Gove, “then you alienate the support that you need for thoughtful environmentalism.”
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This is oh so true.
But that is exactly what the Tories are doing.
Gove’s wise words make it sound as though they have struck a healthy balance between our need to protect the planet and the need to protect our people.
You know, those folk who would quite like to take their children to school, and heat their homes, and earn a living.
Gove makes the Tories sound like they are the voice of eco-reason.
And they are emphatically not.
Our current Tory Prime Minister has pledged to ban the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 — five years before the European Union!
This is the same Tory PM who wants you to get shot of your gas-fired boiler for the dubious delights of a heat pump.
This is not green rhetoric.
This is actually happening.
A current policy — a Conservative policy! — is to ban even HYBRID cars by 2035, even if the infrastructure to charge electric cars does not exist.
And you can be damn sure it will not exist, unless you live in one of the more expensive areas of central London.
And it was a “greener than thou” Tory Prime Minister, Theresa May, who enshrined in law the pledge to reduce carbon emissions to nothing by 2050 — net zero.
Nobody wondered how catastrophic this act of national self-harm might be to the lives of what every politician calls “hard-working families”.
Don’t they get it?
We DO care about our air, our water and our planet.
We CAN feel the planet getting hotter.
We CAN taste the filth in the polluted air we breathe.
But we also want to live our lives without being constantly controlled, bullied and taxed by the high priests of the new green religion.
Workers in white vans need to be able to go to work without Sadiq Khan charging them £12.50 a day with his ULEZ tax.
Parents need to take their kids to school.
Not everybody wants — or can afford — an electric car.
Laughably wrong
And not everyone can afford — or wants — to abandon their reliable gas boiler for an expensive and temperamental heat pump.
We already know that politicians are capable of inflicting green self-harm.
I drive an old diesel car that I bought brand new when Labour’s Gordon Brown radically slashed tax on diesel in 2001, enthusiastically urging motorists to switch from petrol.
Bumbling Brown believed he was helping the planet because diesels produce lower carbon dioxide emissions than petrol cars.
Ah, yes — but diesel fumes also contain toxic nitrogen oxide. Duh!
And now, on the rare occasions I drive my old motor, Sadiq Khan chases me down the street demanding £12.50. But Labour told me to buy diesel!
Time has proved Gordon Brown to be well-intentioned — and laughably wrong.
So it will surely be with the current generation of preening politicians who want to replace all petrol and diesel cars with electric cars within the next seven years.
Plain British common sense tells us — no, no, no. But green fundamentalism is mainstream in our politics now.
I vow to slash my carbon emissions to zero at the next general election.
Because I will be staying home. And not voting for any of them.
THE youth culture explosion that began in the Sixties reached a landmark this week when Mick Jagger blew out 80 candles on his birthday cake.
And did it in one go.
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Keith Richards, rock’s eternal rebel, is widely seen as the true essence of the Rolling Stones.
But without Mick Jagger – shrewd and smart, fit and tough, as good in a business meeting as he is on a stadium stage – the Stones would have broken up not long after The Beatles.
MOVIES LEFT ME IN DARK
WE have remembered that cinema can give us something we can’t get sitting on the sofa with a remote in our hands.
I was in my local two-screen cinema last weekend and there was not one empty seat to see Barbie or Oppenheimer.
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Or Barbie AND Oppenheimer.
Because some folk are seeing them back to back – the Barbenheimer phenomenon.
I honestly don’t know how they do it.
Christopher Nolan’s film about the father of the atomic bomb ends (SPOILER ALERT) with a climatic conversation between Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, and Albert Einstein discussing humanity’s future in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.
After listening to that, I didn’t feel like watching Barbie.
I felt like laying down in a darkened room for a week.
POLICE IN DOCK AGAIN
DO the police sometimes strip search people as a form of punishment?
That we are even asking the question shows us how low the stock of the police has sunk in this country.
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Zayna Iman, 38, has waived her anonymity after she was held for 40 hours in a Manchester police cell.
Zayna claims she was drugged, stripped and sexually assaulted by cops.
She wants access to three hours of CCTV that she says has gone missing.
We used to boast that British police were the best in the world.
You don’t hear that so much these days, do you?
A real gem from Irina
“THERE’S this stereotype about Russian women,” says catwalk queen Irina Shayk.
“You know – they like diamonds and vodka!”
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I thought that was all women, Irina.
SINEAD LOSS SO TRAGIC
THE death of Sinead O’Connor at the age of 56 was beyond sad. It was tragic.
This was not the usual demise of a rock star, as established over the past 50 years.
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This was not the result of the self-destruction that Wendy Cobain, mother of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, memorably called “the stupid club”.
Sinead’s death was different.
Her death seems directly linked to the suicide of her son Shane, who took his own life at the age of 17 last year.
Sinead never got over .
Who would? Who could?
When news of her death came through, how strange it was to see that film of her singing Nothing Compares 2 U and realise that it had lost none of its emotional impact.
In the era of “I Want My MTV” and lavish promotional videos, O’Connor – a beautiful young woman with a shaven head – is filmed in extreme close-up, making one of Prince’s greatest songs her own.
It was said the tears she shed in the film were real. I believed it then, and I believe it now.
Nothing Compares 2 U was 33 years ago, and yet Sinead O’Connor feels like the first modern celebrity.
She had a genius for whipping up instant global controversy.
When she ripped up a photograph of the Pope on American TV, she did little to start a debate about child abuse within the Catholic church, as she hoped.
But she instantly made herself a pariah in the US. There was more controversy than hits.
She even fell out with Prince (the purple genius did not like it that Sinead swore in interviews).
She was booed at a Bob Dylan tribute in Madison Square Garden.
And the amazing thing is that Sinead O’Connor caused all this fuss decades before the Internet!
I hope the spats and scandal are eventually forgotten.
Let us remember her version of that Prince love song.
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And that close-up of a young woman’s face.
And her tears.
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