Go Green - Bash the Poor!

The ‘Green’ bandwagon continues to roll on. When will people wake up to the reality that this is just an easy way for governments throughout the world to impose ever more punitive taxes in the name of ‘Saving the Planet’? We aren’t responsible for global warming - it’s a totally natural, cyclical, phenomenon - but, despite massive evidence to the contrary, the media continues to spout the green line. I can’t believe that this is for any other reason than it makes good copy - nothing like a scare story to sell papers, and what’s better than ‘We’re all Doomed’ (thank you, Private Frazer)!

It seems that Bio-Diesel - that ‘Fuel of the Future’ - is now responsible for the recent rise in bread prices! Why? Because it is more profitable to grow crops for fuel than food. Now there’s a great idea. We’ll all starve, but we’ll save the planet!

I have to confess that I am not remotely left wing (is anybody any more? - we just have ‘centre’ parties in the UK), and I am vehemently opposed to punitive taxation on the ‘Rich’ (the latest loony idea from the Lib-Dems is to bash any household earning over £70k a year - an income level that would only allow you to buy rabbit hutch in London) but surely promoting policies that actually harm the poorer members of society in the name of ‘Saving the Planet’ is barmy! As well as the bio-diesel issue we have a proposal to massively increase stamp duty on houses that aren’t green. And who’s going to suffer from that? Not the rich, that’s for sure. It’s going to be all those people living on low incomes, who’ve struggled to buy their Victorian terraced council house, which whatever they do will never pass the ‘Green Police’ tests. Wong, wrong, wrong.

That former bastion of personal liberty, the Tory party, has also jumped on this bandwagon with a vengeance. Instead of focusing on making the Police Force work, cutting out the waste in public spending, addressing the mad tax system we have, tackling the huge abuse of the benefits system and generally making policy to help people control their own lives, without the massive nanny state imposed on us since 1997, they’ve now decided that their best way forward is to ban Plasma TVs because they wreck the planet! Get real! This is policy by public opinion. In fact, it’s not even that clever - it’s actually policy by media coverage. What mad planet do they live on where they think ordinary people are going to vote for them if they throw their weight behind ever more loony green policies? Welcome to a country with no government opposition.

Even BMW is playing the game, making big play of their new Hybrid version of the upcoming X6. This looks a very interesting car, but haven’t they looked at the actual environmental impact of hybrid cars? Probably, but the ‘green’ brownie points are more important so, until the media get real on this issue, it’s going to be a self-perpetuating cycle of green products.

Please - get real, before we all drown in a sea of tree-huggers, and go bust from massive green taxes.