In it, he suggests with a straight face (but tongue firmly in cheek) that the problems of poverty in Ireland could be solved by selling their children to the rich for food, and goes on to detail some tasty recipes.

Many people took Swift’s satirical work seriously. Three centuries on, substitute ‘poverty in Ireland’ for ‘climate change’, and The Register’s satirical suggestion is probably closer to being taken as a sensible proposal than one would care to admit.

essentially trying to evaluate moral issues using a gas molecule is completely barking

If Environmentalism is to some extent a secular religion then this must constitute part of its numerology

Given that I run a lot, and therefore eat a lot for calorie purposes (more than average certainly) and I also eat a lot of meat.

But I’m not fat at all (BMI of 22 for what its worth), does that make me a good or a bad person?

In Britain, the labour movement has seen massive decline since the 1970s. Since its reinvention as New Labour, the same constituency is not represented by any political party.

It would be hard to say that the Labour movement has been a decisive factor in the rise of environmentalism in the UK. It would be much easier, on the other hand, to argue that the rise of environmentalism owes something to the decline of the Labour movement. After all, it was after Thatcher’s defeat of the unions that the UK began to look at climate policies and sustainable development.

We may well say that New Labour are responsible for the creation of public-sector jobs, but it would be inaccurate to make equivalents of New Labour and the labour movement. New Labour are historically isolated from their traditional base, and from anything that can be reasonably described as a ‘movement’.

In the last quarter of 2008, there were 5,783,000 public sector jobs in the UK. When Labour came to power in 1997, there were 5,179,000. So we could say that, yes, New Labour created many public service jobs – around 600,000. But when Major began his role as PM after Thatcher, there were 5,983,000 public service jobs. So it cannot be argued that, historically speaking, New Labour, or the labour movement are responsible for creating more of these roles.

We do not disagree that New Labour has been the most toxic and micromanaging Government. But it would be a mistake, we believe, to imagine that the Conservatives or Liberals would have been, or will be any different.

As we have pointed out before, the Conservatives responded to Labour’s pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 60% by 2050 by upping the figure to 80%. After an ‘independent’ committee of scientists and economists was established to make recommendations to Parliament (the Climate Change Committee) the Conservatives target was implemented.

The point here is not to say one end of the political spectrum is less green than the other – because all parties are trying to prove themselves greener-than-them.

The point is that, just as union membership has fallen, so has interest in politics and membership of political parties, Right, Left, and Centre. People no longer engage with politics in the way that they did in previous eras. This has left all political parties with a massive problem: how to legitimise their roles, and how to generate policies with which to sell themselves to the public.

Accordingly, anything that looks like a plausible crisis can be milked for political capital, just by saying ‘look, here’s this crisis coming, that only our policies can save you from – the other parties will kill your kids’.

As the saying goes, if climate change didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it. Environmentalism, which has been around for many years, was able to assert itself in this era because it simply had conceived of the best crisis: thermageddon. It didn’t appeal to the public, but to the leaders of the atrophying Labour, Liberal, and Conservative parties, it has been a boon. It gives a framework from which to organise their policies, none of which are distinct in terms of their core ‘logic’, even if they differ slightly in style.

Bloated on their own self-importance, they create the basis on which authority can interfere with people’s lives while simultaneously relinquishing themselves of the responsibility for improving their conditions.

My hypothesis is that as manufacturing industries in Western countries (the main private-sector habitat of the labour movement) were ravaged by competition from low-wage countries, the labour movement became dominated by public-sector interests – this was accentuated in Britain by New Labour creating loads of (often useless) public-sector jobs to soak up the resulting unemployed workers.

These public-sector interests have a vested interest in having the government micromanage people’s lives – it means more jobs for them…