Brexit: taking the power back

A Public Accounts Committee report this week says that household energy efficiency schemes put public money at risk and must not be repeated. The Committee's report concludes take up for the Government's Green Deal loans scheme was "woefully low" because the scheme was not adequately tested.

The forecast of demand for Green Deal loans was excessively optimistic, says the Committee, and "gave a completely misleading picture of the scheme's prospects to Parliament and other stakeholders". It raises concerns that while taxpayers provided £25 million - more than a third of the initial investment in the Green Deal Finance Company - to cover set-up and operational costs, the Department of Energy and Climate Change had no formal role in approving company expenditure or ensuring it achieved value for money.

And who is actually surprised by this? Who didn't think this was baloney from the beginning? The politicians, that's who. This is totemic of the Blair-Cameron regime; firehosing money at largely useless initiatives where the beneficiaries are mainly middle class homeowners at the expense of everyone else.

As much as it was totemic of the casual disregard for public money it is also an example of the political hubris that ultimately resulted in Brexit. Following the global financial crisis energy prices went through the roof. Meanwhile our politicians were signing up to new climate goals, and instead of axing wind turbines and other such fanciful schemes, Ed Davey and Chris Huhne took to the airwaves to tell the renting public to insulate their homes or switch providers at a time when there was virtually zero benefit in doing so.

Ultimately these are the people we rejected when we voted to leave and the EU is one of their vanity instruments. These are the same people who want to overturn the referendum. They whom we call "the establishment". Our politicians have been in thrall to a metro-liberal agenda that really has nothing to say to ordinary people struggling to pay the bills. When we hear of such initiatives we collectively roll our eyes knowing full well we're looking at a massive waste of public money and there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them. (See wind turbines).

And now that these people are in opposition having lost the referendum we see a new cross-party movement for progressive liberalism to endorse candidates in favour of the EU and immigration at the next election set up by politicians, celebrities and intellectuals. they ain't going quietly and will do whatever they can to overturn the referendum verdict.

The initiative has the support of Jonathon Porritt, the environmentalist, Caroline Criado-Perez, the feminist writer, and Luke Pritchard from the band Kooks, as a space for people who want a voice for openness and tolerance. It also has the backing of Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, and has been discussed across party lines at Westminster. All the very worst people with all the very worst regressive ideas.

Meanwhile, I'm sure you haven't been following UNCTAD14 this week because you all have a life unlike me. This is the fourteenth session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. It's where we send our PPE graduates as political functionaries. Leftists with a head full of climate change bilge a lot like the late Jo Cox. It links in closely with the WTO's Trade Facilitation agenda which exists to remove technical barriers to trade.

Now I am huge fan of trade facilitation. It's clever, it's super interesting and it's the part of globalisation that delivers for everybody. Until the UN gets its hands on it. UNCTAD exists to inject UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) into trade policy. That's where they basically screw everything up and make everybody poorer. It's the part of the global agenda that says people in poor countries must trade in their paraffin lamps for useless and cheap solar panels they can't get serviced and can't pay for. They tell people in flip flops made from cardboard that they must evolve their business models in carbon neutral ways.

Not all of it is bad in that nobody really objects to the loftier ideals of clean water for everyone but when those other goals interfere with the creation of infrastructure making it more expensive then we have a problem. Policies designed to eliminate poverty become so leaden that they have the absolute opposite effect. Kenya is pressuring thousands of expat NGO workers and volunteers to go home. A former British colony and one of the largest hubs in Africa for international charities and NGOs, manifestations of the so-called “White Savior complex” strike a particular chord in Kenya.

And it's interesting there should be a rejection of them in Kenya about the same time we have rejected those exact same people - New Labour liberal NGO types who have done pretty much to Kenya's poor what they did to ours. Impoverished them and made them dependents.

This is all the more reason why we need our seat back at the top table to drive them out of the UN circles as well. The Sustainable Development Goals agenda is working its way into global regulation and is becoming a rent seeker's paradise. It's turning African states away from trade facilitation like UNCTAD when it could be the silver bullet.

It is at this level of global politics where ex-prime ministers serve in an elite club exalting the virtues of UN SDG's. Gordon Brown especially. You can't get rid of them. And when it comes to global climate accords you get virtue signalling auctions where they attempt to outbid each other in a competition to see who can impose the most moronic and costly target on their own country.

And this is also why Labour has absolutely nothing to say to working class people because their stock of MPs, a lot like the loathsome Jo Cox have never worked outside of this system. They genuinely think that the baloney like "Fair Trade" (a 2003 idea if there ever was one) is the sort of thing that will win elections. That is why Labour is increasingly the domain of brattish trustafarian socialist types who will never have a real job so long as they live.

Those who succeed end up working at the UN or in some lefty think tank, the ones who don't end up working in a wildlife quango in Cambridge. Or worse, a local authority executive. Ultimately Brexit is the process of removing these virtue signalling narcissists from positions of power and influence and that is why even after Brexit, there is still much to do. These people don't listen to the public, won't be told anything and continue to nurture their vanity with our money.