The FT's reported that:
The UK is poised to announce the sale of a large stake in the Green Investment Bank, set up by the former coalition government to invest in environmentally friendly infrastructure projects.
So, in another desperate one-off attempt to pretend that UK debt is being dealt with which no one will notice or care about the UK government is abandoning its role in creating our energy future.
It is very hard to make this sort of policy error up, but it is obvious that they will be a feature of the next few years.
I just have to hope someone in this government will at sometime realise that the very essence of government is to drive policy forward in ways that are necessary but where it is obvious that markets cannot or will not deliver by themselves.
Across Europe the need for new infrastructure spending on green energy is now widely appreciated, as I have documented on this blog, often. And yet it is not happening although it could provide the single biggest economic stimulus for the next decade or more that anyone could create. All that is needed is the finance to deliver on the potential (which will be a recurring theme in the run up to the Paris climate conference in December). That is what green quantitative easing is all about.
And the UK is selling out its one mechanism to deliver this change.
There is no logic to this, at all unless I use that which I described in the Courageous State of the cowardly politician (and they come from all the main parties), who sees a problem and then walks away from it believing that there is always, whatever the situation, a person in the private sector who might solve this better than the state ever could. That's pure dogmatic believe of the worst kind, of course. I think that's what is on display here.
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George Osbourne and a large % of this current Tory government are the Tea Party.
Sadly not. Whilst I might find TTP offensive they are fairly consistent in their “small state” beliefs. This Tory party doesn’t extend its approval for a small state to, say, saying that old people will have to fund their own old age care or survival.
Hence DC has vowed to keep increasing pensions & bear down on councils to provide care for the elderly, even though this is obviously unaffordable at current spending levels.
There is none of the rarefied, philosophical thought you might get from the (delusional of course) devotees of Ayn Rand around the cabinet table. It is more like the characters of Waugh or Wodehouse bereft of their creator’s wit & the question, simply, is how can we ensure that our sort of people get more & the oiks get less?
The most depressing thing about politics, I find, is how its practitioners not only openly see us as schmucks but laugh in our face for being so & THEN turn round & say “vote for me”.
DC came to power in 2010 promising to be the “greenest Govt ever”. He them gave environmental responsibility to Eric Pickles who has never seen a motorway he didn’t like.
In short order they’ve now made it easier for local people to complain about wind farms, made it virtually impossible for them to complain (legally) about fracking, withdrawn all renewable energy subsidies while tamping down those for nuclear fuel, withdrawn funding from the railways & promised to splurge on new roads.
TBoMK, no-one has said to DC “you lied in 2010 didn’t you?”
I appreciate that the great majority of people in this country literally couldn’t care less about the future of the planet & are so mind-washed by consumerism that they honestly think a rise in GDP is a fair swap for loss of clean air & water, but that doesn’t alter the simple point that DC didn’t say that in 2010. He lied!!! And nobody seems to care at all, except perhaps Michael Gove who might point out disapprovingly that I’ve just started a sentence with a preposition.