Predictions For UK Politics
To my mind, the most reasonable explanation for the behaviour of the UK government at present is that the leadership mostly understands the climate and nature crisis, but powerful elements within the government think it will continue, mostly unabated, and that there is little to no point in planning as if it will be solved by the global community in time to prevent runaway heating and collapse of biodiversity.
My sense is that these powerful individuals continue to think with the same kind of mind that creatively interpreted the science, and pursued herd immunity as COVID-19 began, whilst outwardly denying that they were doing so*. This belies relatively simplistic, adversarial thinking, working to gain a long-term advantage.
* I made a short video as the COVID-19 outbreak began in the UK, suggesting that the government were pursuing herd immunity, even though they said otherwise, because it seemed relatively apparent that this was the case.
Within this paradigm, the UK government will likely behave as follows:
- Build up wind power, hydrogen storage etc. and use this to masquerade as a green leader, but actually do so in order to make these islands energy independent.
- Electrify everything, not to reduce emissions but to minimise our dependence on Russian gas, Arabian oil etc.
- Quietly keep our local fossil fuel extraction and steel production active.
- Enforce incredibly strict immigration policy to ready inhabitants for a future in which we almost completely close the borders to anyone trying to get in from a collapsing mainland.
- Separate from the European community, to prevent Europe from forcing the UK to work with the mainland as the crisis deepens. (Not so much a prediction! But I think this will continue.)
- Take seriously expert recommendations for a more sustainable local food supply but do so not to slow down the global climate and nature crisis; rather to ensure the viability of up-keeping our own population.
- Re-industrialise, and move as much industry as possible back to the UK, reinvesting in the old industrial belts.
- Focus on supporting finance and technology companies able to provide services that people all around the world will still depend upon, even as the chaos deepens.
- Stockpile rare-earth metals and other materials necessary for the production of high-tech. components.
There are smart people in the British houses of power. If only they could come to fore and enable our government to have more vision and act with greater genius. Perhaps then our government could steer us and the global community onto a cooler trajectory and into a verdant, nature-rich future; uniting all people to work together to solve the greatest existential crisis in human history.
Addendum:
In times gone by, leaders didn’t have much information to go on. The best leaders were those who knew as much as they could about as many different things as possible, and were good at bringing together differing strands of information and making decisions through a combination of wise counsel and reckoning.
Nowadays we romanticise the leaders who got things right as being visionaries, but the truth is that, at the time, most were probably working on a great deal of guesswork.
In 2021, the world is different. This is the information age. There is so much information out there that extremely well-measured decisions can be made. However, there is also far more information than any non-augmented human could possibly ever know.
For politicians to keep making decisions based on their “reckoning” and “instinct” rather than the clear science is fantastical arrogance and foolishness.
