Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Why I Hate Politicians

Apparently Tony Blair has just about caught up with the rest of humanity and declared that we "must act" to tackle climate change. Reading the news article, I was vaguely encouraged that politicians are slowly beginning to take this idea on board. However, I was also deeply depressed by certain other aspects of the article. We need to look no further than the first sentence, in fact:

The world will suffer irreversible economic damage without immediate action to combat climate change, the Prime Minister has said.

Notice the use of the word 'economic'. No mention of the destruction of the natural environment, or the loss of plant, animal and human life. No, if there's no money involved, it doesn't register on the political radar. This depresses me so much that it's truly beyond my power to put into words. After all, it's this political obsession with money, economic growth and so on, that has brought us to this crisis in the first place. I don't see us getting out of it by maintaining the same obsession. And the thing is, money is the biggest fiction, the least important thing in the world. I found this idea expressed admirably in a comment on the blog of David Miliband, Secretay of State for Environment. Someone signing himself as Mike Bennet writes as follows:

Hi David. I realise this is part of the upcoming announcement about new nuclear power stations to which I am totally opposed. I just wanted to make clear that there are two value systems going on here. Business and the Government work pretty much by money - if the case works financially then it's fine.

But the real world is far more complex than that - it doesn't recognise money at all in fact. And out here we citizens and our descendants are the ones who will bear the full effects of these decisions. And those effects are not financially measurable and are not included in your decisions really.

So I believe the starting point can't possibly really be public safety as you say - preparing for new nuclear power stations is not a path to go down if you truly value public safety.

David, you're in a good position to start to bring some honesty into politics - this would be a good place to start.

Incidentally, if anyone can help me out on this information, I'd been obliged. I saw Jeremy Paxman talking to some kind of government spokesman about the environment on Newsnight a week or two ago. I don't think it was David Miliband, strangely, though it's possible I just didn't recognise him. Anyway, the interview was fascinating, hilarious, depressing and scary. Basically, Paxman asked the spokesman, in view of Gordon Brown's statement that climate change is the biggest problem facing the planet, what exactly the government are doing to tackle that problem. The spokesman was completely unable to come up with anything that they were actually doing. He was really crumbling on camera. "So, climate change is the biggest problem facing the world. Can we therefore have a commitment from the government for some kind of action?" "Well, it's too early to talk about commitment." Blah blah blah. It also transpired that the respective figures for government spending on the environment and on the Iraq war were 100 million pounds (over one or four years, I can't remember) and five billion pounds. The most important problem in the world - 100 million pounds. Slaughtering a load of foreigners for reasons no longer intelligible to anyone - five billion pounds.

So, that's why I hate politicians.