How melancholy to see the UK racing pell-mell down the various
paths of political correctness, with bizarre hate crimes laws that
are a frontal attack on free speech and freedom of religion, gun
control laws that would make Fidel Castro proud and contribute to
crime, a Home Office that requires police to play Mother May I with
local imams before enforcing any law in Muslim areas, the leeching
of all Englishness from school curricula in the name of
multiculturalism, the attempt to banish all religion from the
public square. Except Islam of course; they wouldn’t dare.
Clearly it’s time to change the words of the song. There won’t
always be an England. There’s barely one now.
In addition to the abominations listed above, the Brits have
fallen even further down the environmental rabbit hole than America
has. The fads and fetishes of the First Church of The End of the
World have taken greater hold in the land of the (formerly) stiff
upper lip than it has in the land of the still-relatively-free and
the home of the Atlanta Braves.
Reflecting Old Blighty’s sensitivity to manufactured
environmental alarums, New Labour PM Gordon Brown and Tory leader
David Cameron spend a good deal of their time trying to out-green
each other. This seems to play pretty well with the
candle-in-the-wind crowd.
One of the latest leftist social-engineering scams, designed to
save the sceptered isle from a real scam, global warming, is a
series of “eco-towns” Brown announced last summer. Town councils
and developers are invited to submit proposals for five
“environmentally-friendly” towns in the south-east of England
containing 100,000 new homes to be completed by 2020.
The eco-towns are to be “carbon-neutral,” meaning the
document-stampers who approve buildings in the town will react to
any use of fossil fuel the same way Count Dracula reacted to
sunlight and the True Cross. They’ll be powered, so the press
releases say, by “renewable energy sources” such as solar and wind.
Homes will be provided with biomass boilers that don’t use fossil
fuels.
These approaches are some of the favorite fantasies of enviros,
and will doubtless excite their erogenous zones. The only problem
is they almost certainly won’t work (anyone with even minimal
experience of English weather should have enough sense not to bank
much on solar), and will leave a lot of disgruntled bird-watchers
with only their granola to keep them warm in winter.
Developers have claimed the enviro-pure homes will cost about
40,000 pounds more than traditional homes. There’s some resistance
among conservative town councils. But in the finest tradition of
leftists who know what’s good for us, the government has threatened
that it will intervene and impose settlements if town councils
don’t come up with their own proposals.
Another nanny twist on eco-towns is that they will contribute to
physical fitness and health. Or at least according to the
headline-hungry politicians who are whooping them up. These planned
towns, nanny wet-dreams come true, are laid out with homes and
shops and schools and parks and other necessities within walking
distance of each other. This and biking lanes are to ensure that
residents will have little need for the dreaded automobile. This
not only saves pollution from autos, but all this walking, the
story goes, will lead to a more physically fit citizenry.
Health secretary Alan Johnson rode this hobby horse late last
month, plugging the towns as a weapon against obesity, which he
says is at crisis levels in England and getting worse. In remarks
with a slightly Orwellian odor to them, Johnson crooned that the
brave new towns, with their bike paths (Howard Dean take notice)
and fitness centers and large parks will “encourage” healthy life
styles. Children will be badgered (my word, not his) to play more
sports, eat less junk food, and even learn to cook.
Anytime socialists “encourage” certain lifestyles, it’s only a
matter of time before the laws and apparatchiks are in place to
enforce them. The most chilling hint of this certainty came when
Johnson said students in eco-towns will be “regularly weighed at
school” to make sure they aren’t porking up. We can already picture
the sorry scene, Comrade Teacher humiliating pudgy little Nigel who
is suspected of eating crisps and of not doing the
government-approved number of jumping jacks.
These command and control towns give further evidence, as if
more were needed, that George Orwell was right. He just got the
year wrong. I suggest the first “eco-town” be named Winston Smith
Village.
Perhaps another could be named Prince Charles Village. Many of
the crack-pot concepts involved in the eco-villages mirror the
ideas coming out of the Prince of Wales’ think-tank. Hey, when your
entire job description is to wear funny clothes and hang around,
you have a lot of time on your hands. And on the evidence of his
public remarks, Charles is only slightly brighter than his mother’s
corgis. So why should we be surprised that he comes up with a
phantasm like eco-villages?
The land of Magna Carta, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, the
Common Law, and some really good local ales deserves better than
this. And Americans need to pay attention too. Although politically
correct elites here would rather shove hot splinters under their
fingernails than admit it, America has inherited most of its
political institutions from England, the country that practically
invented civil liberties. And we’re the better for it. But we can
surely add eco-towns to the growing list of English political
abominations America is well advised not to import.
