Guest essay by Eric Worrall

In 2015, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared himself to the fictional Wizard Gandalf, saying “In one form or another I will be here. Like Gandalf I will be I will be translated into some new form, more powerful than I can possibly imagine. I will be here and we will make sure that under the ultra-low emissions zone there will be no bus that goes through town that is not a hybrid with very low emissions”.

Delingpole: Net Zero Is the New Remain and It Will Destroy Boris’s Conservatives

Net Zero is going to destroy Boris Johnson’s administration in the way that Brexit destroyed David Cameron’s. None of Boris’s clever advisors and colleagues — not Dom Cummings, not Michael Gove — appears to have understood this yet. But others can see it coming a mile off.

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But the most gloriously damning analysis of the Conservatives’ looming catastrophe comes from Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs who says ‘the political storm over green targets will be even bigger than Brexit.’

She’s dead right.

Here are some of the highlights from her scorcher of a piece:

Beyond the Red Wall are rumblings of a new revolt, utterly unanticipated by No 10 and overlooked by a liberal media still shell-shocked by the election. With its drive to “green” the economy at any cost, the Tory party has seemingly decided to celebrate its populist landslide by bogging down the country in zero-carbon paternalism. And so we career towards another People vs Establishment conflict that could be more explosive even than that sparked by the referendum.

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It is becoming disturbingly apparent that the Government prizes green targets over “unleashing” Britain’s potential. The cast-iron case for a road-building revolution, for example, clangs a little too harshly against the hollowness of eco-politan sensibilities. Whitehall is genuinely convinced that Red Wall utopia is cycling to work from a rabbit hutch on the outskirts of Birmingham. They find the idea that people might actually aspire to drive to their downtown office from their semi-detached in Dudley, and at the weekends cruise, sunroof down, to the Bullring for shopping, completely ghastly.

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Read more: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/06/delingpole-net-zero-new-remain-it-will-destroy-boris-conservatives/

What exactly does “Gandalf” have in mind for post Brexit Britain? Boris must surely understand the consequences of his hardline climate policy initiatives.

I love Lord of the Rings, and the superb 2001-3 movie adaption, but LOTR is a rose tinted pre-industrial magical fantasy, not an economic guide book. LOTR is blatantly anti-technology, the only groups in LOTR who truly embraces modernity are bad guys; evil Orcs, felling forests, despoiling the landscape, mass producing foul weapons with their gigantic, smoke belching factories.

In the real world, it was the pre-industrial age which was the real nightmare. Fossil fuel and technology has liberated the overwhelming majority from a miserable life of ceaseless toil and an early death.

There is a reason peasants flocked to the dirty, smoke filled cities during the industrial revolution; despite all the pollution and hardship, life was better in the cities than back on the farm.

Nobody in their right mind would want to return to a brutal low carbon pre-industrial existence, unless perhaps they were utterly convinced someone else would be doing all the hard work. Boris Johnson’s attack on reliable energy and his prioritisation of green targets over prosperity is a big step in the wrong direction.

What about Boris Johnson’s reference to a personal “translation”? I don’t know the nature of Johnson’s 2015 “translation”, but Fictional Gandalf’s mystical journey occurred after he defeated the Balrog, a demon of fire and darkness which lurked in the ruins of an underground city. The Balrog had originally been unleashed by miners who “delved too greedily and too deep.”.