OPINION
Ed Miliband has had another stupid idea (Image: PA)
Despite recent claims that the tide is turning against wokery, Britain continues to suffer immense damage from the ascendancy of this perverse dogma. In place of pragmatic policies that suit our national interests and the needs of the public, officialdom adopts disastrous forms of faddism.
Our nation is now used as a test bed for gigantic experiments in social engineering. Without any mandate from voters, radically-minded policy-makers now indulge their whims in border anarchy, environmental extremism and the transgender programme. It is as if key parts of our public sector have been infected by a kind of madness.
We are all paying a savage price for this politicised decadence, as typified by surging energy costs driven by the Labour Government’s neurotic attachment to net zero carbon emissions. Only this week it was announced that the energy price cap is to go up 6.4% in April to £1,849, the third hefty increase in a row.
Altogether energy bills have risen by no less than 18% since Labour came to power, making a mockery of the party’s pledge that its green approach would benefit businesses and consumers.
What makes Britain’s worsening crisis all the more mismanaged is the Government’s refusal to use the vast energy resources that we already have, like the huge shale gas field recently discovered in Lincolnshire, which could meet all our energy needs for a decade. Yet the sanctimonious Energy Secretary pronounced last week that he wants a permanent ban on .
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Britain is running into trouble in part because of Mr Miliband’s monstrous vanity. He seems to be on a global ego trip with the aim of being crowned the world’s leading environmental politician.
It should be remembered that his first ever job was with the radical Labour veteran Tony Benn and he has never entirely escaped the clutches of the destructive, irresponsible left. Miliband paved the way for the Marxist revolutionary Jeremy Corbyn to become his successor as leader in 2015 by devising a flawed membership scheme which contained no proper checks and could easily be exploited by Labour’s opponents, who flooded into its ranks.
In its spectacular leniency, Miliband’s membership scheme had a whiff of Britain’s shambolic immigration policy, which is transforming the fabric of our country, much to the delight of the social justice warriors and the dismay of many ordinary Britons who now feel like aliens in their own land.
“Diversity is our greatest strength” goes their favourite mantra. Diversity is also a sure route to higher debts and disappearing funds, given the high levels of welfare dependency among migrants from outside the EU, just 17% of whom come here to work.
According to new data from the Centre for Migration Control, around one million foreign nationals living here claim at least one benefit, at a huge cost of over £8 billion-a-year.
Woke’s warped values belong in puerile student unions, not in government offices. But nothing exposes the ugly absurdity of the woke creed more graphically than transgenderism, which involves a rejection not just of biology but also morality, women’s rights, and childhood innocence.
If our society survives this current period of institutionalised lunacy, future generations will look back with a shudder at this moment when people were regarded as bigots and even lost their jobs simply for holding to obvious truths like the fact that there are only two genders, that biological men – no matter how “feminine” they might feel – should stay out of women’s changing rooms, and that the removal of breasts from physically healthy young women amounts to a form of abuse, as does the trans lobby’s disturbing interest in childhood sexuality.
This crazy, repugnant attitude is encapsulated in a tweet from the pressure group Stonewall, an aggressive advocate of the hardline trans cause: “Research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity. Yet many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender.”
It is tragic that such activists have a major influence on public policy. Our society will only recover its integrity when this madness ends.