Democracy in name only

You will note that I seldom ever wade into the climate change debate anymore because it tends to be the domain of crashing bores on both sides, and is actually a long obsolete debate. It's over. The subsidies have been pulled for renewable energy because it is politically convenient to do so. Hardly anybody buys it anymore. It is only useful to those who have an underlying political agenda.

On the domestic front, it has very little traction. It actually cost David Cameron an outright victory in 2010. A Labour part lead by Gordon Brown should have resulted in Conservative landslide - but there was no way in hell I was going out to vote for a husky hugging eco-conservative. Now they've binned the green crap they've started winning elections again.

But that is not to say that damage is not still being done in its name. As you know, we've been looking in detail at the international bodies that produce much of what is believed to be EU regulation. As much as these organisations are made up of nation states, corporates and unions, they also have a large contingent of international NGO's who are largely accountable to nobody, often funded by the EU. The EU pays them to lobby for laws they themselves want.

It is hardly surprising that both India and Russia have taken robust measures to remove such NGO's from their countries. They don't take very kindly to meddlesome Western NGO's poking their noses where they are not wanted. In this, I have some sympathy.

This is actually as good a reason as any to leave the EU. The idea that a single penny of my money is channelled to Friends of the Earth is offensive. The chain of accountability is far too long, and the longer the chain, the more corrupt it is. On environmental concerns, we neither want or need the likes of Oxfam raising concerns and we need our own officials and ministers involved at that level because they are subject to freedom of information laws and of course answerable to the electorate.

There is no way that renewables targets were a legitimate decision and in fact all areas where statutory minimum spending and targets are set cannot possibly be democratically sound or legitimate in that they are often politically useful for virtue signalling according to whichever fad is en vogue. Had the public been consulted, there would be no statutory minimum on foreign aid spending.

Thus we need to make better use of referendums because the purpose of a referendum is to secure legitimacy for decisions where Parliament alone can not secure that legitimacy. It can't in these such instances. With only small mandates, themselves in hock to an SW1 bubble mentality, MPs cannot be trusted with such extraordinary decisions.

In fact, were such matters subject to public approval, such idiotic gestures would not even be proposed in the certain knowledge they would be rejected. This is why we have yet to see a local referendum on raising council tax by more than 2%.

The decade of global warming politics is over. We have begun to undo some of the infantile proposals it spawned and hopefully carbon capture as a notion will be put into the dustbin of history. But we have no mechanism for containing the vanity of the EU and thus, have no means of preventing them committing us to spending that we would otherwise reject.

In fact, were we to instruct our parliament to reject such spending, we would find ourselves in breach of EU treaty - and the British don't play it like that. Duplicitous conduct is very much how the French do it, but we still respect our international agreements thus in practice our parliament is not sovereign. Thus while EU members we are a democracy in name only - still subject to the political agendas of NGO's long since hijacked by Malthusian hard left NGO's who speak for nobody but themselves. This underscores why we need the Harrogate Agenda and why we must leave the EU in order to achieve it.

Globalisation is happening, but it is happening beyond the reach of democracy and it is subject to the same vanity and zealotry that brought the Euro currency into being. It very nearly brought disaster upon us. We cannot afford for these people to do this to us again.

Leaving the EU is a means to correct an historical mistake and to ensure that our voices are heard in the future. We need direct democracy too because while the EU did so much of this damage through its own vanity, it should not be forgotten that it was our parliament who let it.