The Spectator - the far-right rag edited by Lord Michael Gove, the man who did more to destroy English education and create the crisis among young people alienated from education as Secretary of State for Education in David Cameron's government - said this in an email promoting its latest edition:
There is a problem with British politics, John Power and William Atkinson posit in this week's cover piece.
Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bankrolled to push a ruinous net-zero agenda. This is the story of the Dark Green lobby.
It added:
The European Climate Foundation spent €171 million last year in Europe, much of this funding research for British thinktanks. It also funds outlets tackling ‘net-zero misinformation' – in other words, science.
The Quadrature Climate Foundation spends money ‘greasing the wheels so we can accelerate the [net-zero] movement'.
One of the recipients of its generosity is Uplift, an organisation which has judicially reviewed the legality of the ongoing extraction of oil and gas from the Rosebank site in the North Sea.
Net zero has given the left a new means of controlling and constraining capitalism and growth. And now the darling of the Dark Green lobby, Ed Miliband, is on the verge of becoming the man controlling the economy. It is hard not to be impressed. And deeply depressed.
I was not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read this. The paranoia is deep. The dedication to the destruction of the planet, whatever the cost, is profound. The denial of the science is clear, as is the denial of the evidence of climate change all around us. The unbridled enthusiasm for neoliberalism is apparent. The sense of delusion runs deep.
But what is most staggering is the sheer prejudice in this. The fact that the Spectator can talk about these issues is because they are taking place in plain sight. At the same time, the takeover of British politics by wealth is happening behind a veil of opacity.
The Tufton Street think tanks will not disclose their funding.
Farage and Lowe seek to promote far-right politics in the UK using money from billionaires from outside it.
And everywhere, corporate lobbyists dominate the political agenda, subverting it to ensure that the will of the country's people is not met, which is why we have a political crisis in the UK at present.
With regard to all of this, the Spectator is in denial. The corruption, the failure, the subversion of democracy, and the contempt for the state are all ignored, as is the fact that we face a climate crisis.
What matters to Michael Gove and his crew is that neoliberalism, the cult of growth on a finite planet, and the perpetuation of rising wealth for the already wealthy, must continue.
No wonder we are in a mess. This is what we are up against. It is, not to put too fine a point upon it, the challenge of unreason that we face.
The unreasoned denial of evidence.
The unreasoned support for a failed political-economic system, whose remaining support comes only from those whose interest is their own unreasoned well-being, which they associate with wealth, even though it appears to make them thoroughly miserable.
The unreasoned vilification.
And all of this is backed by one thing, which is the money of the wealthy.
That is what we are up against.
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Gove is a contemptible d*ckhead, didn’t he once blather “we have had enough of experts” My question to him is, who do you ask for advice then? or if you needed say some dentistry done would you ask the bloke down the pub with a pair of pliers? As far as I can tell the man is a drivel monger.
John, you are being too kind to the man.
I cannot give my opinion because he might sue the blog.
There is a place for people like Mr Gove.
I believe he has a PHD in Enshitification.
Guv is a know-nothing, which is why he rose in politics and became a Lord and editor of a trash-rag. Instead of neurons, he has muscle-twitch with output that is both predictable and +/- contentless.
The ECF and assorted Bx-based NGOs are the other side of the “know-nothing” coin. Staffed by mostly liberal-arts graduates, they hold forth on subjects such as energy – where they have close to zero tech knowledge. They develop/promote various policies & hope the physics and engineering will follow. The current slo-mo destruction of energy intensive industry in Europe shows that the policies so keenly promoted by ECF et al don’t follow the physics and sure enough fail. Guv, an imbecile, never gets that far (policy) and in terms of output, is a parrot for the fossil-mafia. I will leave it to gentle readers to speculate if he is a Norwegian Blue – nailed to his perch & thus dead at least from the neck up.
Observations on the asylum within which we live.
PS: I have interacted with the ECF, FoE, etc etc. They don’t listen, because they lack the tech knowledge to process what I (& others) say. So they ignore us.
They try to make an issue of Quadrature Capital being the key source of funding for Quadrature Climate Foundation, noting that it has £170m (around $225m) invested in fossil fuel companies. With Assets Under Management of around $8.4bn, that’s around 2.6% in fossil fuels, looking like portfolio balance rather than favouring them.
Quadrature Capital reportedly pays its staff well, sharing profits more than most companies, and proudly links from their website to the Foundation. It’s not hidden. Rather than being ‘dark green’, other takes would be that it is either ‘greenwashing’ (seeking to shift focus from any harm caused by their contribution towards inequality or investments in fossil fuels or elsewhere towards pro-climate charitable contributions) or simply mitigating the harm done by those fossil fuel investments.
Either way, ‘dark green’ seems a particularly paranoid interpretation of a hugely profitable company giving grants to organisations that aim to reduce the impact of climate change.
BBC treat Gove as a lofty sage, despite his disastrous impact on this society , and despite him now being owned by equity fund Paul Marshal<p>
This means that BBC is also captured by the dark money forces under the ‘veil of opacity’- as Richard characterises it
Here’s what ChatGPT made of Gove’s email extract:
“A key problem with the extract is that it presents climate policy as the product of covert external influence, when in fact UK net zero policy has been openly designed and led by elected governments, including Conservative governments under Boris Johnson.
Far from being a “left project imposed on capitalism”, net zero was embedded in government strategy. Johnson’s administration reaffirmed the legally binding 2050 target under the Climate Change Act framework and made it central to economic policy. In 2020, the government launched the Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, committing £12 billion of public investment and projecting up to 250,000 jobs in sectors such as offshore wind, hydrogen, electric vehicles, and carbon capture. This was a flagship Downing Street policy, not an NGO agenda.
This direction continued with the 2021 Net Zero Strategy, which set out how the UK would mobilise large-scale public and private investment to decarbonise transport, energy, and industry. Johnson also used the UK’s COP26 presidency to push for stronger international commitments on coal phase-down and clean energy transition, reinforcing net zero as a core state objective.
Claims of “dark money” are also overstated. Organisations like the European Climate Foundation and Quadrature Climate Foundation are philanthropic bodies that publicly report grants and fund policy research, advocacy, and analysis. One can disagree with their policy aims, but they are not covert political actors.
Likewise, legal challenges such as those involving Uplift and the Rosebank oil field reflect standard use of judicial review in UK law, which is available to many stakeholders, including industry.
Overall, climate policy in the UK is not externally controlled, but openly legislated, politically contested, and actively pursued across Conservative and Labour governments.”
I remember looking at a net zero plan published by a campaigning organisation that talked about using renewable energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons admittedly in small qualities as a back up but my immediate thought was ‘where is the technology?’
But……
We can continue to drill in the North Sea BUT there is as far as I can make out very little left
The sheer unmitigated gall of them, screaming about dark money from abroad. The cleansing sunlight of scrutiny has to be focused on their own sources of funding, no matter how loudly they shriek. In the Scottish Parliament, Ross Greer had the right idea when he proposed root and branch scrutiny of all political parties’ funding as part of a motion Labour tried to use as a stick for beating the SNP.
As the legend Chris Dean once said “keep on keepin on”..
The novelist G.K. Chesterton observed in 1908, ‘the poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all’.
I came across this in a book I am currently reading ‘The Asset Class’ by Hettie O’Brein. In the book she identifies (as covered also by this blog) many of the characters, Milton Friedman, Michael Jenson, William Simon, etc., that have played significant roles in bringing us to where we are today.
Goldsmith seems particularly odious. Their attitudes can only be discribe as pure predatory greed and complete disregard/contempt for society.
Much of what they have achieved seems to have been facilitated by high ranking members of various Goverments (PMs/Chancellors/senior civil servants) from Thatcher onwards, with lucrative revolving door setups with high finance.
Jonathan Blake’s pursauding of Norman Lamont to purposefully allow city fund managers vast payouts (carry) to be registered as capital gains rather than income for tax purposes seems like one lucrative rule for the few, to funnel money upwards to the already wealthy, and another rule for the struggling many.
Senior public figures appear to have acted more for their own benifit and the benefit of the predatory elite minority rather than the people who elected them. The general public are starting to see this cosy relationship, they certainly feel it, and I believe this is why the MSM and actors like Gove are trying to double down on an economic system/message that is loosing its lustre i.e., people are realising that what the are being told that glitters is not gold but fools gold.
A new way (along the lines of the ideas emerging on this site) to benefit the struggling many is what is needed to raise hope.
@ Tony H
Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”
Part of a longer paragraph on Anarchy.
“So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”
It’s a book I prefer to “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”, his other major political-fiction writing, but both are still resonant in our own time.
“The poor man really has a stake in the country.”
Much to agree with.
Read the full Spectator story yesterday on the “Dark Green lobby”.
I was stunned!
One of the perennial tools of propaganda is to accuse your opponent of doing the very thing you are doing yourself. And indeed sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt.
The climate disaster is the greatest opportunity ever for techno-fascist corporate greed. All that is required is to make sure that nothing is done to reverse it.
Climate scientists have become as active as they can be on social media. The response has been to complete flood the comments with AI bot farm generated jokes and trivia: “Hey guys, lighten up, it’s SUMMER FFS! (Sunglasses wearing smiley face thumbs up”. The effect is to kill off any engagement and spread despair.
Capitalise on the crisis by using all possible means: lobbyists, think tanks, AI generated social media content, all focussed on stressing how we have to invest in ADAPTING to it, rather than doing anything about it, that AI will come up with the solution, and investing in geo-engineering. Example: today on FB was a posting from DrMarcus(SIC) Robinson stressing the urgency of the situation. It was all very odd as, in the comments, “DrMarcus kept making replies which contained word-for-word repetitions from ‘his’ previous replies, such as “The idea of ‘reversing’ climate change belongs to an earlier era” and the oddly phrased: “We stop asking how to undo damage …” To their credit Meta’s AI had flagged the whole post as being AI generated.
I keep finding the assertion that it’s now to late and how only something like stimulating the effects of effectively everlasting continuous massive volcanic eruptions can save us – just as long as we all continue paying rent for the privilege of staying alive – until the Tech Bros have merged themselves with their creations, that is.
The National Audit Office has done a very moderate job of investigating a number of schemes in which Mr Gove had influence, by virtue of his position in public life.
This is also what we are up against Major Scottish pension fund is invested in Israeli ‘war bonds’ | The National
Mr Gove is quite right that “Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bankrolled “…..but it’s not some fictitious green lobby. It’s much closer to the Israeli Embassy.
What do they see as the long term goal or are they just obsessed with the short term accumulation of money. Irony alert – perhaps they will burn it to keep warm when hell freezes over.
Not paranoia, greed. Part of a cool plan.
The point is we should not restrict ourselves to this blog ( or whatever the correct term is) , get on your MP’s back. I do. Spend time researching, use Ai to assist with construction, validation if need be and argue like crazy. They work for us. Tell them, visit them, look at how they vote in Parliament. And point others to sources of common sense such this blog.I am lifted to read so many of the replies in response to the arguments published that make complete sense. Well done Prof. Murphy. Get in the trenches and give these so called representatives a good talking to. Such views are great here but so much more powerful out there. Thanks for the encouragement Prof. Thanks for the motivation.
Thank you