The Department for the Extraction of Sunbeams from Cucumbers
Why is the technocrat in Number Ten promoting Net Zero lunacy?
By common consensus, Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak is the very antithesis of an ideologue. Indeed, his principal flaw is said to be that he is a technocrat with no vision at all of the society he wants to help create.
His government reshuffle has been criticised in similar vein as an exercise in merely moving the Whitehall departmental furniture around. This is in pursuit of his long term goal to turn Britain into a global scientific leader and boost growth and competitiveness. While eminently worthy, this seems perplexingly irrelevant to the immediate problems facing the country including the catastrophic cost of living, the disintegration of public services such as health care and policing, and uncontrolled and unsustainable rates of immigration.
However, in one respect at least his reshuffle is intensely and dismayingly ideological. This is the creation of the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The mangling of language in the new department’s title tells you everything. Net Zero is not an area of government responsibility such as health, education or housing. It’s a specific policy. It’s like having a Department for Education and Remedial Reading, or a Foreign Policy and Promotion of World Peace Office.
And it’s not just semantically incoherent but an oxymoron. Net Zero is the antithesis of energy policy, since Net Zero cripples the country’s ability to produce the energy it needs.
Jonathan Swift would have recognised this as akin to creating a Department for the Extraction of Sunbeams from Cucumbers.
And this when elsewhere in the world Net Zero is dead in the water — and when the evidence continues to pile up that the very basis of the policy has melted away faster than Arctic ice.
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