The Sketch: What the world needs now is a green fascist
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Your support makes all the difference.Theresa May had a good idea. Mind your head on the sharp edges as you fall backwards. She asked for a debate on the cost of government reorganisations.
The last two NHS restructurings, she said, had cost £320m And then there were all those things the Government set up and then abolished. Strategic Rail Authorities, Police Authorities, Primary Care Trusts. And now there's a £2bn rehash of local government.
The NHS was going to put some money into prisons to treat psychotic criminals, but instead had to use the cash to change the signs on the Office of the Smoking Outreach Strategic Coordinator (now the Coordinating Outreach Smoking Strategy Office). First things first. Now then. Environment Questions.
Answer this. If the environment is the number one priority and the single crucial challenge to humanity, why is young David in charge of it? I have a feeling lurking around my depths that the next big political fashion - after this generation has satiated itself on liberal democracy - is going to be quite a familiar form of fascism.
Some environmental ruction may bring it about. After a generation of political-class faffing about with vast, abstract, ineffectual carbon trading schemes, people are going to want action. Cometh the hour, cometh the strong man.
I don't know why I say strong man. The last time history called, it was Margaret Thatcher who answered. She, of course, was very far from being a fascist, but that was then.
A perfectly sensible question came down from the Labour back bench. Consumers are given a tariff rate that penalises low consumption. The first units are sold to us at 15 pence, and past a threshold the price goes down to nine pence. The tremulous Ian Pearson told us that the Innovations element of the Energy Efficiency Commitment (Phase III) would be addressing that to see if it were feasible to change it by 2011.
I remember Mrs Thatcher's approach to have been more disruptive than this.
But that's what we're storing up for ourselves with this kind of talk, this kind of approach. We're storing up the energy for a phenomenal disruption.
The managerial Esperanto we hear in the Commons is a direct reflection of the world that the political class has made. It's harder and harder to do anything because of the processes, the authorities, the consents, the political institutions that have been structured and restructured. More carriages on trains? It sounds like a revolution. You can't open a school because it has to be inspected before pupils are allowed to apply. You can't turn off the lights at night in Defra because... Just because.
Our apparatchiks should be much less cautious. And a lot less abstract. Remember the Chindits' motto under Orde Wingate: "The boldest course is the safest". Yes, but again: that was then.
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