The Day The Of Nitwits

Remember the Triffids? Well, the Green zealots are nearly as dangerous!

ARE we at the start of some huge and endless decline? Or is there really nothing to worry about? Our current state reminds me of John Wyndham’s brilliant novel The Day Of The Triffids, in which small, even silly or enjoyable, events turn out to be signs of an approaching nightmare.

Wyndham sets his story in a very normal modern Britain. At first, people laugh at the ridiculous walking plants on the newsreels. At first, they gaze happily at the spectacular meteor shower illuminating the night sky. Far too late they grasp that these were the beginnings of an utter transformation in their lives.

Of course there are no Triffids.

But think of them as a metaphor.

We seem to be complacent beyond belief as the signs of change multiply in our midst. Nothing works properly any more. Last week, this supposedly wealthy country experienced empty shelves in the shops. As far as I can discover, this is mainly the result of tax changes (IR35, since you ask), making work as an HGV driver less worthwhile. But it is made even worse by the growing feeling of those forced to stay at home by Covid precautions. Actually, they don’t much fancy ever going back to work. Well, we know who’s to blame for those things.

These worrying signs came just after we learned that nothing, apart from luck and prayer, stands between us and a shutdown of our power grid. Our gas reserves are almost gone. We have blown up our coal-fired power stations. We have failed to build new gas-powered plants that should have replaced them. Our ancient nuclear power system is fast wearing out.

So we must rest our hopes on wind that does not always blow and on foreign power that may not arrive when we need it.

Can we even begin to imagine what will happen to us if this all goes wrong? We are far more reliant on electricity than ever before. The computers that govern all we do cannot run on anything else, and if they crash cannot be instantly switched on again. In response, our allegedly conservative Prime Minister praises the green policies that have created this disaster, and pledges to continue them. And he is applauded for doing so.

We may not be facing The Day Of The Triffids, but we face the Day Of The Nitwits, when 30 years of relentless green zealotry send us spinning into the Third World. There, we’ll be the only Third World country with a submarinelaunched nuclear deterrent – Burkina Faso with rockets, as an old joke about the USSR went.

Once again, I saw this coming. Arguing with the Greta Thunberg lot is like arguing with the Spanish Inquisition. The only thing they want to hear from me is a full confession before they burn me at the stake, using carbon-free fuel.

So rather than contesting their faith, I suggested that our best future lies in non-polluting nuclear power. As long ago as 2006, I urged: ‘Building nuclear power stations, and making ourselves independent in energy, is at least as important as maintaining a nuclear bomb.’ I also pointed out, rather before this was fashionable, that ‘the Russian threat is to our energy’.

Now, I don’t fantasise about being Prime Minister. The job seems to me to be unrewarding, unhealthy, physically exhausting and surprisingly powerless. But on this occasion I have to say that if I could have seen this in 2006, so could the Government and the Civil Service.

And if serious action had been taken then, we could now have a fleet of modern nuclear power stations that would make us secure in energy, and probably turn us into a power exporter.

Instead, leaders of both parties chose the path of vanity, an unusable Cold War superpower weapon, maintained at impossible cost long after the Cold War ended, and even longer after we ceased to be a superpower. And they chose the pursuit of green policies – the most all-embracing, dimwit woodenheaded dogma since the death of Communism, without enough sense to take any precautions in case it did not work out.