Who can forget Keir Starmer’s Six Milestones? Who can remember them? Were there even six?

It’s barely a fortnight since the latest Government Reset, and I’ve already forgotten what happened. It was a case of cold reboot and the start screen showing something substantially similar to what went on before: it was still broken.

If I had to take a stab, I’d have to say there were in fact six of the Milestones. One of them was “Cleanish” energy by 2030. The other five? I’m guessing that we had an NHS waiting list target. Stop the boats? Something on stop the boats? Net immigration in the “tens of thousands”? Fastest growth in the G7? An army? Less stab stab stab on the streets?

Nope, I’m going to have to check. According to Sky,

The milestones cover six policy areas – healthcare, policing, education, housebuilding, energy and the economy.

Here’s the list:

Raise living standards and aim at the highest growth in the G7.

A 92% target for a shorter than 18-week wait for NHS treatment.

1.5 million new homes.

“Cleanish” power by 2030.

More cops. 13,000.

75% of 5-year-olds ready to learn when they start school.

The first is what ought to be a trivial task in “ordinary” times. Two, three and four won’t happen. Five is trivial. Six is a joke.

Milestones come and go. Who can forget Rishi Sunak’s? Well, me for one. They’re not quite as faint a memory as the list of concessions that David Cameron came back from Europe with. Stop the boats! That’s the ticket. Actually, it’s the most expensive ferry to Britain you can take. Don’t worry, we don’t check your passport before embarkation.

Why is Jit rambling about milestones, you might wonder?

Well, it occurred to me that the UK might be in a doom loop. A doom loop is, or at least I think of it as, a damaging, indeed dooming, cycle in which actions taken to address a problem only make matters worse. A classic example is the fine British pub, which responds to a lack of customers by putting up the price of a pint of beer, resulting in fewer customers, and the need to raise prices further, unto doom, windows covered in oriented strand board, and eventually a couple of nice flats.

On the back of a fag packet – I don’t smoke, I just happened to have one handy – I wrote a list of what I decided to call “Starmer’s Millstones.” You see what I did there?

Starmer’s Millstones

Here is my list.

1. The green electricity crap.

2. The Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate.

3. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

4. Employer’s NI.

5. War on the rich.

6. Grocery tax.

Will these measures make things better for Britain?

1. The green electricity crap.

Aficionados of this site are well aware that if your electricity generator has to have three qualities – cheap, reliable, and no carbon dioxide emissions – it belongs in the pages of a book by Douglas Adams. It is quite obvious to everyone, except the people who matter, that pushing the UK into a renewables future is going to end up with electricity costing twice as much, or more, and finally going off with a sad little fizzle, probably permanently. It also has a number of other disadvantages, like the fact that carpeting good English land with solar panels means it cannot be used to grow crops, which will increasingly have to be imported. Oh, it also needs to compete with the fantasy-land 1.5 million houses that are (not) going to get built in the next 5 years. And having extension leads trailing all over the North Sea does wonders for energy security. Vlad probably doesn’t even want to sabotage offshore wind farms anyway. Why interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake? Doubling electricity bills? Make the poor, poorer. And from Vlad’s point of view, make it impossible for the UK to afford to have an armed forces to speak of. Of course, I should point out that the Government want to borrow on the open market to pay for all the green electricity crap. And the markets are just throwing money at the Government like guests hurling confetti over the bride and groom, knowing how much growth the green electricity crap is going to generate. Or are they? In fact, the numbers seem to show that our lenders think we are just going to burn the money. Which is probably fairly accurate.

2. The Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate.

If you wanted to boost the UK’s vehicle manufacturing industry – one of the few that remains here – then forcing manufacturers to build cars that they can’t sell is quite the doom loop move. And they will try to patch things together by making the better cars more expensive, or making the VED on older cars as much as they are worth. Making it harder to own or use a car… makes the poor, poorer.

3. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

I happened to notice that our carbon is leaking. Places around the world like to do things cheaply. Like growing crops with fertiliser made using methane. Of course, in the doom loop world, you have to raise a tax on imports of food grown in those conditions. So on the one hand we’re carving out chunks of farmland and using them for other purposes. Then we’re making food imports more expensive. This makes poor people poorer: everyone has to eat.

4. Employer’s NI.

Not strictly a climate matter, but there is an angle here, and it’s a perfect example of a doom loop move. Not getting enough taxes in to pay for all those green crap intermittent power thingies? Slap a tax on jobs. That way, you’ll raise tonnes of dosh. Oh wait. No, you won’t. You’ll cause companies to fire employees because they can’t afford to keep them on. They won’t hire new employees. They’ll bang up their prices – just like the pub – and spiral down into the doom loop. As you know, all I know about economics I learnt from “Economics for Dummies.” But throttling the horse that you want to pull the cart has to be the dumbest move you can take as a government, unless you really want the doom loop. Those newly-unemployed people will need subsistence pay, enforcing yet another doom loop. People afraid of losing their jobs won’t change jobs. They won’t move house. They won’t spend money. They won’t buy a shiny new EV. If you want to boost the economy, this is stupid. Part-timers? Low paid? Your jobs are the first in line. It’s a great way to make the poor… even poorer.

5. War on the rich.

Tax the rich! That’ll show ’em. Will it? Will it really? Or will they just naff off elsewhere, and take their wealth-creation mojo with them? It will raise taxes! No, not if the rich have naffed off. It will reduce taxes. But at least Britain will be a fairer country? Yes, we’ll all be poorer together.

6. Grocery tax.

(Yes; this is a trivial example.) Taxing packaging is a seductive idea, except when you realise that supermarkets already try to minimise packaging – who wants to pay for something they don’t need? I look forward to the day that eggs are laid out loose, like apples used to be, when the UK still had orchards. (It is eminently possible to re-use egg boxes.) Can’t see any wastage going on there, can you? Who will pay this tax? Shoppers. Making poor people poorer.

Editorial

This is not a party-political point. Yes, Labour is awful. I can’t even think of a suitable adjective for how awful they are. But the Conservatives started this doom loop. They started Net Zero, and the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, and the Boiler Tax (which I haven’t even mentioned above!). They have only recently begun to whistle a slightly different tune. And that is as infuriating as anything else, because the obvious facts were right there under their noses, and all it took was for them to be booted out of power – to have the ability to do anything useful removed from them – for them to suddenly realise that they themselves had doggedly steered us down this ruinous path in defiance of all good sense, and in pursuit of the shallow appearance of virtue, that they had tipped the UK into a doom loop.

Conclusion

Everything is terrible, and it’s getting worse, and the worseness is getting worse faster and fasterer; in short, we’re in a doom loop.

A wise man once proposed to “cut the green crap.” If a government wanted to achieve something useful – like improving living standards – it would do well to heed that call. I think it might be a good shout for getting out of the doom loop, too.

I always warn against despair, but right now, rivers of hope are flowing out of the UK. We need to stem that flow.

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22 Comments

  1. May I suggest Mr E Miliband as another millstone? Try watching this to see just how unfortunate we are to have this man as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero:

    Liked by 4 people

  2. Jit

    I agree that various “doom loops” have become ubiquitous and their encroachment is increasing. Geert Wilders recently opined that “democracy” is now being kept safe from the voters by the top echelon of bureaucrats and entrenched politicians. Adding doom loops is the preferred method of doing that.

    The question that still hides any real answer from me, for over 30 years now as I’ve watched this wanton destruction grow and grow, is WHY ? Powerlust, money, sure – but there is a bloodymindedness about this that those standard motives leave a hollow area unexplained.

    What mid to longer term satisfaction can there be in destroying a civilisation from within that was many thousands of years in the making and that cost uncountable volumes of blood and treasure ? There is a hollow in the purpose of this trajectory that I cannot grasp. If there is no rational longer purpose (sadly, that seems the more likely), then it’s even more incomprehensively destructive.

    Anyway, I appreciate your courage in outlining the despair this causes.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Just dividing comparative “Renewables” costs by their annual productivity shows why bills will keep on going up with more and more “Renewables”.  Bare comparative values are available ignoring any advantageous subsides are available from the USA Energy Information Administration.

    Doing this simple sum gives a comparative cost of delivering a unit of power to the Grid.  

    When the last 10 years of achieved European productivity / capacity is taken into account the comparative costs as opposed to Gas-fired power generation are:

    Onshore Wind power is about 6 times more costly to install with ~22% productivity

    Offshore Wind power is about 18 times more costly to install with ~31% productivity

    Solar PV power is about 10 times more costly to install with ~11% productivity.

    “Renewables” policies require the replication of power generation installations with conventional generators underused but ~90% efficient, dispatchably operating 24/7 and adds in inefficient, (less than 20% productivity combined Wind and Solar power).  

    In 2023 the combined productivity of the whole installed ~520GW European “Renewables” fleet resulted in ~17.5% productivity. 

    As this calculation is on an annual basis, it ignores the short-term unreliability and intermittency of Renewables, which cause serious operational problems for the Grid, it thus gives a truly generous view of “Renewables” costs.

    When comparing with Gas-firing for power generation it should be noted that the CO2 output is half that of Coal-firing and almost a quarter of imported Biomass.  

    The use of fracked gas in the USA has reduced CO2 emissions by ~25% over the past ~20 years.  

    Gas-firing in the UK generating the same power ~9GW from the 45GW of all installed UK Weather-Dependent “Renewables” would have given saving of ~330 US$ billion. That is about the cost of banning Fracking in the UK. Across Europe the loss from the anti-fracking decision could be in the region of ~2.1 US$ trillion.

    These are not difficult sums, except for those with an obsessive view of the Climate Catastrophe as in the UK Department of Energy Security and Net Zero.  The numbers in some detail for the UK are here:

    https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/the-myth-of-cheap-renewable-power-in-the-uk/

    Liked by 4 people

  6. ianl – my assumption has always been that there are no nefarious motives, and that the politicians believe that these policies are going to work. It is obvious by now that they won’t work – I’m thinking particularly here of the weather-dependent grid – and yet there is no hint that the present lot will ever acknowledge that. And the last lot refused to acknowledge it until it could no longer cost them politically – and even now their conversion is very tentative: who knows what their policies are?

    Perhaps a Net Zero grid is like the NHS, social care, the disability benefits, immigration, the pension triple lock. Their trends are all unsustainable long term, but no-one in government dare say so. It’s the proverbial orchestra on the Titanic.

    I think Net Zero is easier to solve than any of these, because I don’t think the public are wedded to wind turbines like they are the NHS. You just commission a report, ensuring that you pick the right authors, who tell you that the Net Zero grid is too expensive and unstable and that the only rational choice is a renaissance of gas and a program of new nuclear. Far easier to admit that than to admit that the NHS model is also a doom loop.

    Liked by 4 people

  7. Ed, don’t forget that they tilt the table by including a “cost of carbon” as well as fuel costs in calculating which generators are cheaper. And naturally they ignore the whole system costs. I can’t find the link now, but I seem to remember that Claire Coutinho had asked officials to calculate whole system costs for different generation types, an approach which has now been binned by the new SoS.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. Ianl, you posed this, “The question that still hides any real answer from me, for over 30 years now as I’ve watched this wanton destruction grow and grow, is WHY ?” I would like to attempt a quick and dirty partial answer based upon three interacting (positive-feedback?) phenomena:-

    1. In his recent book [Ref. 1] John Gray writes, “Conservative thinkers are fond of talking of the suicide of the West. A spectacle of self-immolation, at once tragic and farcical, is being enacted; but suicide involves a measure of self-awareness of which the contemporary Western mind is incapable. An unconscious death-wish is at work.” Does this idea not hark back to Spengler about 100 years ago, and even (as Gray indicates) to Nietzsche in the late 19th century?
    2. The Western world is currently under the spell of green ideology as promoted most vigorously by the UN’s IPCC and its relentless message that the world is boiling due to heating from CO2 emitted by fossil fuel burning.
    3. When the UN and its agencies were set up at the end of WW2 (i.e. some 80 years ago) it was not realised the extent to which such bureaucracies could be redirected from their original purpose (i.e. suborned) from within by actors who have their own interests at heart rather than those of the wider community.

    Reference

    1. John Gray, “The New Leviathans. Thoughts after Liberalism”, Penguin, 2024, page 155. Regards, John C.

    Liked by 3 people

  10. Jit: thank you for composing and posting this outstanding article – a wonderful combination of the humorous and the deadly serious.

    You say: ‘I think Net Zero is easier to solve than any of these, because I don’t think the public are wedded to wind turbines like they are the NHS.’

    I agree – the NHS is surely a lost cause? But opinion polls indicate that, unlike the NHS, support for Net Zero is wafer thin. Of course nearly everyone has a vague feeling that something must be done to ‘combat climate change’ – after all that’s been a background theme for over 20 years. But it’s nowhere near the top of peoples’ priority list and, as soon as it actually threatens living standards, support disappears. But I don’t think commissioning a report is the answer: an independent report wouldn’t get the necessary publicity and, in any case, would be denigrated by the Establishment. And a Government commissioned report ain’t gonna happen. So what is the answer? I think it’s patience. The direct impact on ordinary people gets stronger almost every day: huge job losses, the despoliation of the countryside, threats to overseas holidays, restrictions on car purchases, absurd speed limits … etc.

    With some Tories admitting they got it wrong and Reform getting a lot of attention, it might still be just possible to stem that flow.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. Robin, I understand your argument but am not convinced that patience is the answer because we have the CAN bill coming up in the next few days. If the bill is lost then patience may indeed be a virtue; but if the bill succeeds then things will likely deteriorate very quickly with much damage done to the economy (and people’s jobs) in short order. The anger on the streets at the time of the Poll Tax may seem as nothing in comparison. This is truly, as David Turver’s Eigenvalues substack describes it, Year Zero type legislation

    I have written to my MP but otherwise feel totally powerless. I just hope there are enough MPs to realise the danger they and we are in. Regards, John C.

    Liked by 4 people

  13. Robin, I meant that this fantasy report of mine could be used as cover for the U-turn. Who has to believe it? I don’t know. But I am sure that a fair report – unlike the “independent” Net Zero review of exactly two years ago – would lay bare the ruinous course we are on.

    I fear that a groundswell of opposition may not materialise, because everything is blamed on climate change, and there is not enough pushback against that, despite the absurd levels it has reached. They will try to badge failures as due to climate change, or due to our reliance on fossil fuels, whether that be punishing power prices, or actual blackouts. The draconian measures meted out against normal folk? Necessary to “tackle climate change”, a threat against which our small problems, such as no longer being able to afford home heating, are as naught.

    Somehow the elastic has to snap, and for people to realise that our problems are not due to climate change, but rather climate change policies. How this could happen and what could spur it, I don’t know. It could happen suddenly – or it may not happen at all.

    Liked by 3 people

  14. John: I suggest patience applies whatever the CAT bill outcome. If it fails (surely most likely) patience may as you say be a virtue. If it succeeds, patience will be rewarded almost immediately when people see for themselves the damaging results of ‘combating climate change’.

    Jit: I disagree. As I said, support for Net Zero is wafer thin and has low priority. Given punishing power prices and/or actual blackouts I believe it will disappear entirely. I think the elastic could snap surprisingly quickly.

    Liked by 2 people

  15. Jit, thank you.

    Those 6 millstones , as in Atlas Shrugged, likely to lead the productive and

    creative individuals in the oppressive economic environment to choose to

    withdraw their talents from the scene.

    Like

  19. While the headline says, “Slash Civil Service over all other government cuts…“, in the small print, there is a very encouraging stat, regarding the elastic snapping.

    The Deltapoll survey of 1,500 adults, carried out from Jan 17 to 20, found that the next most popular option was “climate change initiatives”, selected by 34 per cent of people, followed by local government, with 28 per cent, and welfare and benefits, with 24 per cent.

    34% is a large enough chunk of people that the pain caused by Net Zero must be being more widely recognised than before.

    Liked by 2 people

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