Like the proverbial frog, we are gradually being cooked beyond the enervated state. Not for us, the cold shower.
Daily we are confronted by volumes of stories, each of which would have been front-page news only a few years ago.
Today they barely survive a firefly flash on our screens.
Without a trace, they disappear in the dark recesses of our inured minds.
Much is happening at ever tighter frequencies.
We implicitly know the wrongs accumulate but are too stunned to know how to react.
We do notice, however, our once great civilisation’s accelerating and seemingly unstoppable rate of decay. The heart breaks.
Ironically, that tidal flow of revelations acts as our officialdom’s best protective moat.
Out of reach, they work with gay abandon in feeding our inheritance to Nihilism’s hungry gods.
However, what we experience on our shores is being played out with noteworthy synchronicity across the European continent and beyond.
The stories are staggeringly similar, with only slight local variations.
In agriculture, industry and in the treatment of our freedoms, just to take a few important areas of our lives, they point the same way and, as we will see, for the same quasi-religious reason.
Farmers, in Holland, Ireland, Germany, France and now the UK, among others, have been targeted by their governments with unrecognisable tenacity over the last half-decade.
In all cases, environmental regulations, increasing taxation and uncompetitive energy costs have led the hard-working farmer into open conflict with their carefree political class.
The asset-heavy, cash-poor sector is being strangulated.
While the reasons vary in detail, Net Zero tilting-at-windmills targets lurk in the background like an unpleasantly trapped gaseous smell.
In Ireland, a country whose memory of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 used to be seared onto the consciousness of every Irishman, the Environmental Protection Agency wrote a report this year stating that half of the country’s livestock would need to be culled to “meet climate goals”.
Cows, unlike our politicians and our eco-warriors, produce too much gas.
Indeed, “methane-reducing additives” were in the early stage of implementation”.
In the UK, small farmers are being asked to pay a death tax on the assets with which they produce the food we eat, which is itself taxed and regulated to ever higher prices for ever smaller returns.
Reeves says it is to pay for the NHS, the 2024 budget of which is a slender £165bn. The treasury’s own figures think the inheritance tax law will raise £500m, or 0.3% of the total, leading most farmers and neutrals to fear the worst.
In waltzes the insouciant Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for (against?) Energy & Net Zero and owner of independent government renewable energy advisory firm NESO, whose Green Messianism frightens all but the most extreme eco-warriors, reassuring no one in the process.
In Holland, the government attacked the farmers for land pollution and the environment, leading to an eventual epochal change of government and the political victory of Geert Wilders.
In Germany, the Green-inspired government changed diesel tax laws, increasing the cost of production and making hyper-efficient Teutonic farms ever less competitive. The list goes on and on.
To reach abstract targets, our food producers are being driven out of business across the continent.
In the industrial sector, we observe a similar trend.
Germany, the former European industrial behemoth, is witnessing record-breaking levels of corporate bankruptcies and close to zero growth over the last five years. Without the German horse pulling the European cart along expect “another cold shower for optimists”, in the words of Carston Brzeski, senior economist at ING, a Dutch bank,
The industry needs cheap energy. Germany doesn’t have it and neither do most other European countries.
“Electricity prices in the EU are typically twice to three times higher than in the US”, remarked Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency earlier in the year.
And that is before Trump implements his “drill baby drill” fossil fuel policy. The reason is simply again one of targets.
“In 2019, the EU set out among the most ambitious climate goals in the world with a commitment to cut emissions by 55 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050” reported the Financial Times.
Europe is thus de-agriculturalising and de-industrialising simultaneously.
But to dismantle the twin-engine on which our Western civilisation powered itself for millennia, nothing is more fatal than gnawing at our ability to think and speak freely.
Without these freedoms, the future’s promise evaporates.
Truth is not an official pronouncement.
It is not for our political masters to determine what it is or for our police to intimidate a freeborn citizenry because its views do not fit into officialdom’s ever-changing understanding of the world.
In the UK, we are becoming disconcertingly used to people being prosecuted, arrested or intimidated for saying what is on their mind, especially when it is visibly true.
The authorities justify incremental totalitarianism by using inelegant phraseologies such as “spreading misinformation and disinformation” to stop challenges. Though they are often revealed, through our ability to speak and think, as the biggest spreaders of propagandised half-truths themselves.
Journalists, such as Allison Pearson, are being intimidated by police officers, who no longer know what we grew up to understand as Right and Wrong.
Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rainer, at PMQ’s, did all she could to warn us that more was to come.
On the topic of the persecution of journalists of a conservative bend, she did believe in free speech, she said, but of course “with that comes responsibility of those that do it”. Do what? Speak freely. In Germany, a few days ago, the home of pensioner Stefan Niehoff was raided at 6am by police officers.
The courts ordered his home and car to be searched as well as all his devices. It followed a criminal complaint made by Robert Habeck, Germany’s deputy Prime Minister because the senior citizen posted a meme on Twitter that called Habeck an approximately translated “soft-headed imbecile”.
Mr Niehoff’s Down Syndrome daughter was a helpless witness to her father’s humiliation.
Habeck’s Green Party colleague and Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock filed “1,300 criminal complaints”, mostly due to perceived offense taking online.
This is at a time when Jews among others are being told by Barbara Slowik, Berlin’s police chief, to hide their identity in areas with large Muslim populations after a post-October 7th 2023 surge in attacks against all and sundry. Making fun of politicians, though, is a crime in Germany, under a law introduced by Angela Merkel says Frederick Attenborough of the Free Speech Union.
It will soon be a crime in much of the Western World.
Indeed, Habeck and Baerbock both Greens are keen for the EU to censor social media to “protect democracy” and to “combat disinformation and misinformation”. With the Digital Services Act, the EU will be delighted to oblige. And for their part, the British, Australian and Canadian political class agree.
If Net zero is the aim, de-agriculturalisation, de-industrialisation and an inevitable brutish compelled speech infrastructure are the corollaries.
One exception in the Western World is Trumps America.
As Leonard Cohen used to sing: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”