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In a ham-fisted—even by his standards— attempt to boost his very remote chances of winning reelection next year, David Cameron recently reshuffled his cabinet, purging the “pale, male and stale” and promoting a number of women in a manner so transparently tokenistic that it offended many more than it might have won over to the Tory cause. He also dumped his education minister, one of the brightest and most impressive members of the Conservative team (his reforms had offended too many in the education establishment) and freed at least potential threat—environment minister Owen Paterson—from the omertà that membership of the cabinet brings.
So now ex-minister Paterson is talking about how things work.
Here he was in the Sunday Telegraph last week:
I leave the post [as environment minister] with great misgivings about the power and irresponsibility of – to coin a phrase – the Green Blob.By this I mean the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm while profiting handsomely….
The Green Blob sprouts especially vigorously in Brussels. The European Commission website reveals that a staggering 150 million euros (£119 million) was paid to the top nine green NGOs from 2007-13.European Union officials give generous grants to green groups so that they will lobby it for regulations that then require large budgets to enforce. When I attended a council meeting of elected EU ministers on shale gas in Lithuania last year, we were lectured by a man using largely untrue clichés about the dangers of shale gas. We discovered that he was from the European Environment Bureau, an umbrella group for unelected, taxpayer-subsidised green lobby groups…
When I encouraged the search for affordable energy from shale gas to help grow the rural economy and lift people out of fuel poverty, I was opposed by a dress designer for whom energy bills are trivial concerns.When I championed brilliant scientists demonstrating genetic modifications to rice to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in developing countries, I was vilified by a luxury organic chocolate tycoon uninterested in the demonstrable environmental and humanitarian benefits of GM crops.
When faced with the flooding of the Somerset Levels I refused to make the popular and false excuse of blaming it on global warming, but set out to reverse the policy inherited from a Labour peeress and serial quangocrat who had expressed the wish to “place a limpet mine on every pumping station”, while deliberately allowing the silting up of drainage channels.
And no, none of this comes as a surprise, but it’s good to see it being said.
Published in General
Judging by Mr. Patterson and Mr. Gove, Cameron had assembled a rather more intelligent and principled cabinet than we are used to seeing in administrations on either side of the pond. Too bad Cameron deems an intelligent and principled cabinet an electoral liability.
Whose votes is Cameron playing for? For example, does he think he can gain more from the Lib. Dems. than he will lose to UKIP?
Any chance Messrs. Gove and Paterson (and others like them) would move to UKIP?
Michael Gove’s departure from cabinet is a major set back for education reform not only for the UK, but also for the whole Anglosphere.
I wonder what is it like to be promoted or hired or to get into school simply by virtue of being a woman or skin color?
One look at my avatar will prove that I’ll never know.
As Obama and Holder show, it often breeds bitterness.
After reading the article I have the impression that evil best grows in darkness, and in swamps.