Trillion Pound Man

                                                           "My God, they went for it!"

The hypocrisy was breath-taking.

Ed Miliband, when he was Britain’s first secretary of state for energy and climate change pushed through the Climate Change Act in 2008 which committed Britain to cutting 80% of CO² emissions by 2050.

In response to parliamentary questions, Ed Miliband’s own department admitted that the Climate Change Act would cost Britain the best part of a trillion pounds by 2050. Large as that number sounds it is only the government’s estimated cost of wrecking the British economy.

It doesn’t include the cost of shutting down the economy or in other words the lost production that will never be. The price of energy is a significant component of the cost of production. Miliband’s law relentlessly makes the productive economy less and less internationally competitive as more and more wind turbines are installed (the offshore ones produce power at three times the cost of a gas fired power station). By 2050 our industry and the working class with it will have been priced out of work and Britain will be paying its way through the likes of J K Rowling and its bankers.

That’s what the dream of a carbon free economy amounts to: a medieval economy. The Climate Change Act is Miliband’s final victory over the Industrial Revolution. Should it ever get fully implemented, Britain will become a land of Squire Miliband, Lady Rowling, Shylock the banker, and the rest of us, that is the peasants.

So how sincere is Miliband in his much lauded sympathy for the ordinary guy being crushed by energy prices. The department of energy estimates that his green imposts currently add about 17% to energy bills. And that’s the good news. That percentage is set to go up to between 30 and 44% by 2020.

So, Ed Miliband, now Labour leader, the man more responsible than anybody for skyrocketing energy prices  stands up at his Party's conference and promises to freeze gas and electricity bills for 20 months to punish the “profiteering energy firms”.

Bare-faced gall and stunning hypocrisy are inadequate words to describe the spectacle of the most prolifically wasteful politician in British history promising to steal further billions to bribe votes from his original victims.

All I can say is “Thank God we live in a democracy with a free press.”

This is one lying, thieving bastard politician that’s gone too far. Obviously, the media will eat him alive as a duplicitous fraud. Then within days, a week at most, his shell-shocked party will give this pathetic swindler the bum’s rush out of the leadership, the party, and even out of its recorded history.

That’s what would have happened if our democracy was functioning.

What actually happened was that most of the media followed the BBC’s lead in ignoring Ed’s star role in the climate change boondoggle and played up his "courage" in confronting the energy giants . Then the British people whose attention span didn’t stretch back as far as last Tuesday never mind 2008 eagerly swallowed the spin and salivated at the bribe. And Labour jumped in the polls with Ed Miliband’s personal popularity soaring.

When the biggest shyster in the land can get away with such a bare faced lie then democracy isn’t working.

And that’s a shame.

Because democracy is critical to stopping people like Miliband.

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Democracy is critical if you want to live in a free country of responsible citizens equal under the law.

The big strength of democracy is critical argument. By involving everybody in the debate democracy is a machine for resolving society’s problems. When one group dictates to the rest, society polarizes until open conflict between alienated groups becomes inevitable. It is no accident that all of the world’s most prosperous and stable countries are democracies.

But now one group is dictating to all the rest. All of the three main parties together with the civil service, education and media elites are in thrall to a suicidal “progressive” ideology that has become something akin to a religion. All rational dissent such as in the form of the rise of UKIP is overwhelmed by hysterical denunciations from all sides.

And shutting down the British economy is just one of progressivism’s four horses of the apocalypse. There’s also the demographic transformation of Britain through allowing in millions of inassimilable immigrants. There’s the one-per-cent-growth recovery Osborne is so proud of which has been bought by debasing the currency and impending bankruptcy. And finally there is the war on moral restraint and responsibility which makes recovery from the other horsemen’s depredations so unlikely.

Ed Miliband getting rewarded rather than being held to account for an obvious, gross offence against the truth is just one symptom that in Britain today democracy is on the critical list and its vital signs are getting weaker.

And when Miliband’s Climate Change Act finally cuts off the power to the life support systems, Britain as a modern democratic state will be dead.