Swift takes aim at Adrian Ramsay MP, co-leader of the Greens. The party won four seats at the general election.
Readers and admirers – of whom Swift is one - of Orwell’s 1984 will be aware of the concept of ‘doublethink’ invented by that great man. If you are unsure, let Swift enlighten you.
In this superb paragraph, which merits being quoted in full, both for the content and for the expertly-handled syntax that holds your attention over many lines (not a word wasted! A single fluid sentence!) Orwell defines it thus:
‘To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.’
And now we have to use that old warhorse of cliché, and gallop from the sublime to the ridiculous.
In a recent BBC news piece the new Green Waveney Valley MP Adrian Ramsay – a co-leader of the party, no less - shows an adroit use of doublethink that Orwell would have identified at once.
Swift lives in East Anglia, so he is aware of the controversy over the building of pylons which National Grid plans to erect between Norwich and Tilbury (a section is underground, but not much). There have been many protests, community groups set up, legal challenges etc.
One can (sort of) understand this, although in Swift’s personal opinion once: ‘those pillars/Bare like nude giant girls’, in Spender’s evocative simile have been put up, the local residents will notice them once, and then tune them out of sight as happens in every other part of the country. The health arguments are a nonsense, the compensation offered to landowners generous, the consultation has been prolonged.
Then up pops Ramsay to object – or at least call for a ‘pause’.
Consider this: the pylons are conveying 50 gigawatts of electricity generated by offshore wind farms. Swift believed the Green Party is all for this sort of thing, but apparently its local councillors and MP come over all faint when they actually have to consider how to get this lovely renewable energy to the people who need it.
(We will put to one side the way in which the Net Zero target has pushed poor people into fuel poverty while sanctimonious virtue-signallers - like creepy political failure Ed Miliband - make mad decisions on oil and gas that will push up prices yet further and enable other countries to make a profit from us. A subject for another blog.)
Obviously ridiculous Ramsay knows he’s batting on the stickiest of sticky wickets here, because he is calling for a ‘pause’ – not a cancellation (renewables, see?), nor a go-ahead (voters): it is quintessential gesture politics.
Under normal circumstances Swift would not have wasted time and words on this buffoon. Until, later on in the same story, he came across the following statement from the man himself in respect of the end of the ban on on-shore wind farms: ‘That is welcome, yes, absolutely we need to see more renewable energy in the UK of various sorts, done in the right way, and so Labour have taken a step in the right direction with that.’
This is politely called chutzpah, on a par with the criminal who, having killed his parents, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
Less amusingly, it is is simply staggering hypocrisy. What do you consider to be most visually intrusive, O readers? Is it the comparatively diminutive lines of pylons we are all used to? Or the towering estates of wind turbines with their giant blades, often covering many acres?
Swift rests his case.
This is doublethink, right enough. It reveals once again the fatuity of the Greens, already demonstrated by the calls for a zero-growth economy = we all get poorer. But Green voters, predominantly middle-class, young, and/or terminally stupid will continue to plague us until the party grows up (possible but unlikely) or disappears (desirable).
In the meantime Ramsay the Risible can at least offer us some entertainment – but tinged with gloom. What a Parliament we have.
Photo Credit: Adrian Ramsay (cropped) - Bristol Green Party - Public Domain