The measures on ‘gas-guzzling’ cars, policing of wheelie bins and surcharges on plastic bags are based on scientific fads and, often, the government’s greed for taxpayers’ money, says Rod Liddle. The Third World won’t pay the price, and nor will big business — but we will
For one weekend each year every beach in this peaceful part of the world is taken over by gypsies, and the locals (and the handful of Western tourists) steer well clear and lock up their possessions, daughters, etc. I wandered along the shoreline of one previously idyllic cove just as the pikeys were packing up to leave on Sunday evening. And I had a brief epiphany; one toothless old hag was scurrying from caravan to caravan picking up every bit of rubbish she could find — until, in the end, she was weighed down with a ton of plastic sheeting, carrier bags, cellophane wrappers, mysterious bits of rusted metal and the like, and made her way to the wheelie skip by the side of the road which the authorities install at this time every summer.
There you are, you bigoted pig, I muttered to myself — how’s that for the explosion of one of your nasty little stereotypes? Gypsies, or some of them, are no less environmentally aware than the best of us, I thought shamefacedly — you have just swallowed gallons of racist propaganda about travellers, so let this be a lesson, etc. And then, as I watched, the hag dragged herself past the skip, crossed the road and with one fantastically athletic heave, deposited her haul of junk in the wildlife conservation area which fringes the beach. Then — and I kid you not — she went back to her caravan and appeared moments later with a large refrigerator which with laborious effort and much grunting she dragged across the road and tipped into the very same place.
Come on — credit where it’s due. This woman had gone out of her way to confirm my — and almost everybody else’s — stereotypical view of gypsies, which was incredibly thoughtful of her. It would have been far easier to shove the rubbish in the skip — but this woman was committed, she was a radical. She gave me a beaming, gold-flecked smile and went back to her filthy caravan.
Green taxes are very much au courant, but I don’t suppose there would be much of an appetite among elected politicians for an International Green Pikey Tax. (Among the public it would be a different matter, of course.) The hag I saw, with her spluttering emphysemic late 1980s van and her fundamentalist fervour to despoil what- ever environment she chose, briefly, to make her home, must have had a carbon footprint the size of Albania. In the bigger scheme of things I would hazard that gypsies, travellers and so on, as a sector, are a long way from being the worst offenders — even if individually they are transgressors on an epic level. And that, we are continually told, is the point: as individuals we are enjoined to believe that we can make a difference by altering our lifestyles (i.e. making them less convenient for us) and by paying a little, here or there, as a sort of punishment levy for being alive. But not all of us, mind; not the Third World (which I suppose, by proxy, contains the gypsies) because they can’t afford it, and should not be deprived of their chance to enjoy the benefits of rapid industrialisation. Not the big corporations, either — the supermarkets, the car manufacturers, the airline companies. Just you and me; people who have somehow accepted that we have no moral case to object to our lives being more expensive and less convenient.
And so the measures taken against us increase almost by the week, become ever more punitive and costly and ever more difficult to justify in environmental terms. They seem much more like under-the-counter revenue-raising measures, or a means of saving our useless and profligate district councils money to spend on things which nobody wants or needs. Or worse than either of these things, a witless nod in the direction of a prevailing fashion — uncosted, unchallenged, a little like that fatuous wind turbine on the side of David Cameron’s house in Notting Hill, which will generate nothing whatsoever of consequence, except for a sort of inveterate loathing of the chap on my part. I suppose there must be a fourth criterion — green taxes which are fair and just and provide a legitimate recompense for the damage we have wrought. But the fuel levy excepted — these seem few and far between.
A little under a year ago an organisation called the TaxPayers’ Alliance commissioned a study which revealed that British taxpayers paid out ten billion pounds per year more than was the environmental cost of our carbon footprint — or, as they put it, every British family was overpaying four hundred pounds per year in green taxes. By ‘green’ taxes the organisation meant fuel levies, vehicle excise duty, landfill tax and the EU emissions programme. Now, OK, it’s a fair cop — I suppose you would not expect an organisation called the TaxPayers’ Alliance to commission a study which concluded that we should all pay more in tax of one kind or another. But still, I have not seen those figures convincingly rebutted anywhere. I suspect that they are impossible to rebut and that instead the answer will come that we have a duty to the world which well exceeds the damage we wreak upon it. Perhaps — but if so, then let’s say as much, clearly.
Let’s look at a couple of measures recently introduced and see if we can divine a motive for them. Let’s begin with the government’s original intention to whack up the tax on elderly ‘gas-guzzling’ cars, out of a stated wish to have us all driving modern, ‘clean’ cars. This was clearly a revenue raising measure because its actual effect would have been environmentally damaging in two key aspects. First, raising car tax on any car tends to lead people to use their car more often in order to get better value for money out of it. Further, those who traded in their old cars to buy a new one would leave a far-bigger footprint because the energy and thus emissions involved in constructing a new car far, far outweigh those expended in continuing to drive the old one. It is inconceivable that the government did not know this when the measure was unveiled by Alistair Darling — they simply thought they could get away with it because it came under the heading ‘green’. Fortunately, the public was not so stupid.
Then there’s the decision by supermarkets nobly to charge customers for plastic bags. I do not for a single moment understand why this involved any sort of sacrifice on behalf of our multinational supermarkets; it simply made shopping more expensive, or less convenient, for the customer. Most people, I suspect, pay about 60 pence extra for their shopping as a consequence, on top of the extortionate rise in basic food prices. If the supermarkets had decided to reduce their packaging by 80 per cent, abolish environmentally unsound buy-one-get-one-free deals, or the government decided to fine them for returning stock to farmers when the crop was not pristine and of uniform length and shape, slap a tax on out-of-town shopping centre car parks — all of those measures would be of greater benefit to the environment and less painful for the beleaguered consumer. But the consumer is not a terribly powerful lobby.
And here are a few more environmental non sequiturs. Fining residents more than 100 quid for overfilling their wheelie bins by three inches is not merely fatuous and vindictive, it is also un-green. Clearly, the more waste removed in a single operation, the more environmentally economic it is. And if residents think they’ll be fined for slightly overfilling their bins, they may well resort to fly-tipping or — and I accept that this is an attractive proposition, now I think about it — ramming it down the thr oat of one of the local council’s bin snoopers. And while we’re on the subject, I still haven’t seen a study which shows the incontestable benefit of recycling glass and aluminium. I’m not saying that there isn’t one; merely that I have yet to see good hard figures which prove the case.
Then there are the sudden dracon- ian measures introduced which will, in the end, be of as much environmental use as Cameron’s bloody wind turbine. Such as banning patio heaters. The emissions from these admittedly ugly things are so minuscule as to be almost unmeasurable — and don’t forget, we wouldn’t need them at all if the government had been a little bit more sensible in its decision to expunge smoking from the face of the earth. This is an example of the witless nod to fashion which will achieve nothing, apart from make the lives of a few million individuals slightly less pleasant.
Why are these proposed eco-towns called eco-towns when they are, in fact, the very opposite? The only ‘eco-town’ is one which isn’t built. You can’t pave over the whole of Oxfordshire and claim green credits for having done so, even if every house is that wholly fictitious thing, carbon neutral and full of disabled access ramps every five paces. And this brings us to what should be the central issue: overpopulation is way, way more damaging to the environment than any amount of carbon emissions (although it does of course, lead ineluctably to more carbon emissions). The more greenfield land that is built upon, the more egregiously our environment is damaged. This seems to me so obvious as to be scarcely worth stating — and yet the green lobby approaches the subject very gingerly, for reasons of political correctness. Our island is overcrowded, especially in the south; we have a housing shortage largely because we allow too many properties to remain empty in the hands of private landlords and because the cost of new houses was (and still is, despite the subprime crisis) unsustainably high. Address those issues before building 12 Sunderlands in the south-east of England. Incidentally, our birth rate is commendably low; the reason Britain has become horribly overcrowded to the extent that our infrastructure cannot cope is due solely to immigration — for which, once again, the ordinary taxpayer foots the bill.
There was an interesting study released a year or so back which ‘proved’ that it was more environmentally sound to drive your car to the shops than to walk there and back. This is because the amount of protein you would be required to consume before undertaking such a walk would exceed, in expenditure of energy (feeding all those cows, killing them, packaging them, dragging them to the supermarkets etc), the comparatively lowly amount required to drive a car a mile or two.
The truth is, I suspect, that you can ‘prove’ almost any old rubbish to be environmentally sound or otherwise — the science is so inexact and so open to manipulation. This isn’t an excuse for doing nothing, but it is a good reason for suspecting the motives of any and all politicians when they use the word ‘green’. It is beginning to be seen as a gigantic con perpetrated against the very people who can least afford it.
Offer ends in:
