In his diary entry today (4 May), Sir John Redwood addresses the growth of government and the way the civil service, judiciary and politicians all seek to extend their remits,  taking control of more and more aspects of our lives. It’s never safe to extrapolate unquestioningly from now into the future, but the piling of regulation on top of law on top of guidance (whatever that means) bodes ill.

Although ‘tipping points’ are threatened in various aspects of our lives and never seem to turn up, it is perhaps time to think about where we are headed just in case – perhaps this time we really are approaching a break point between our gentle, rather lackadaisical past to a more authoritarian future. There are lots of straws in the wind brought into the harsh light of day by the response of our masters to Covid, wokery and Brexit: arbitrary application of law by the police and, worse, by the judiciary. Extreme interpretations of offence laws giving immense potential of damage to civil life and individuals by malign, ignorant, insane or attention seeking accusers. Lack of parliamentary scrutiny of imposed legislation; failure of the media to hold our rulers to account; ownership of a majority of the media and the journalistic class by big money or big ideology.

The silencing of unacceptable opinion is accepted by the very people who will, in the end, suffer most from this imposition. A protester with reportedly unpleasant views on race, whose campaigns against unmonitored immigration have highlighted failures in action and attitude by all the large political parties, attracts the ire of the judiciary and ends up being mistreated by the justice system: were this sort of partial justice observed in China or Iran by the bleeding heart liberals in the Guardian (to choose but one of the media outlets which is failing to uphold its professed humanitarian principles) there would be headlines about political prisoners or a politicised judiciary.

Is any of this sufficient to provoke a reaction, a tipping point? Possibly not, but a high profile case which presses the right buttons might do it. The Left, always ready to march and wave its banners, took umbrage about the death of a black man in the USA. It’s difficult to imagine a similar reaction from the other end of the political spectrum – the lack of a response to the wholesale exploitation of young Sikh and white girls in towns up and down the UK led to little protest from Left or Right — but if it comes it will be the extremists who start it with the potential to inflame the silent majority. Perhaps there is a tipping point there, and once tipped it would take extreme measures, a lot of money and a change in the attitudes of our rulers to push the see-saw back again.

There is another threat, another ideological illogicality, which is more likely to precipitate a fierce reaction to laws imposed with the best intentions but dire results: the anti-scientific dogma of climate change. It is obvious from our Covid experience that even the most eminent and well-meaning of experts are liable to produce computer models of the real world which are garbage in, garbage out – step forward Professor Neil Ferguson of ICL and his models for Covid. Here is Wikipedia’s take on his forecasting ability:

“In April 2020, The Spectator published an article entitled “Six questions that Neil Ferguson should be asked, which pointed out the inaccuracy of his estimated potential death tolls for bird flu (“around 200 million people probably”; the actual count was under 300), swine flu (up to 65,000; the reality was below 500), foot and mouth disease, BSE (up to 50,000; the known deaths total 177) and Covid-19 (quoting a Stanford University professor who considered Ferguson’s calculations “substantially inflated”).”

The proposed big threat to the planet and human civilisation is a warming rate of 1.4 deg C per century – that’s the measured value – or, if you believe the climate models it’s 4, 6, 7 deg C. Climate science has a modelling track record that makes Professor Ferguson look like Agnes Nutter, Terry Pratchett’s infallible witch. Thanks to the scientific illiteracy of our politicians and civil service the garbage has been swallowed, regurgitated, reabsorbed and re-emitted over and over again for twenty years. Deadlines come and go, ten years to save the oceans, fifty, no, twenty, no, five years to save the planet, all life in the oceans is being wiped out by… well, choose your poison. And no-one protests. No-one says that the Climate Emperor has no clothes. Worse, world leaders frantically virtue signal about how rapidly they are going to adopt impossible measures to tackle this possible problem. Make no mistake, Net Zero is going to make our lives colder, darker and shorter. It can only be reached within the reckless timescale proposed by Boris Johnson by destabilising the National Grid with too much wind and solar generation. Money that should be spent on defence, housing, the NHS, civil society will be thrown at a problem that, even if it were to real, is only 1% the fault of the UK. There is the possible tipping point: when the old, the poor and the sick begin to die because of our government’s and media’s unquestioning swallowing of garbage then all bets are off. That is the tipping point to fear.

Sometimes revolutions become inevitable. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there.

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