Maurice Cousins
@MDC12345678 • 5,013 subscribers
Campaign Director, @NetZeroWatch. Tweets in a personal capacity.
Videos
John Duffield 100%. Michael Howard warned about this new SW1 culture nearly 20 years ago on Newsnight. Under New Labour, standards were lowered, bullying and lying were normalised, and insiders endlessly rehabilitated. Mandelson is both an architect and a product of that system.
Maurice Cousins246,075 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Good video from Poppy Coburn. Net Zero perfectly illustrates how so-called “bullshit jobs” can exist inside the private sector while still be a product of government. The government creates a statutory target and then builds an entire reporting and compliance regime around it. Firms then hire people to do measurement, prepare disclosures, interpret regulations, manage political risk and engage with policymakers and “stakeholders”. In a previous life I saw how it changed the role of marketing and corporate communications. They are no longer used simply to explain products / services, build demand, win customers or defend their company’s long term commercial interests. Instead, they are used to make compliance look voluntary, turn statutory obligations into statements of corporate purpose and present alignment with official priorities as if it were a sincerely held corporate belief. These roles might sit inside the private sphere, but their “demand” ultimately comes from Net Zero’s regulatory framework rather than from consumers or clients voluntarily buying goods and services.
Maurice Cousins22,292 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
This John Bew interview is essential viewing. He understands how power really works. A historian of grand strategy and realpolitik, and a former adviser to four successive UK prime ministers. No one understands the current world order better than him. Pay very close attention. Bew warns that we’re at a "break glass moment" on a whole range of domestic issues, including energy. His warning to Westminster is very simple: if Britain wants to hold our own in a harder world, we must urgently rebuild the foundations of our hard power. In this new world order, productive force will prove to be decisive. As I have argued before, that means restoring Britain's domestic energy base, ditching Net Zero, rebuilding industrial capacity, and securing our supply chains. We are, he says, the last man left at the Davos bar. In my own view, we should have left it long ago. 2014 was when the illusion began to crack. 2022 was the final wake up call. Remaining at the bar in 2026 is unforgivable. The lights are off. The staff have gone home. The music has stopped. But Starmer, Miliband and Reeves are still nursing the same stale assumptions while the world outside hardens. A link to the full interview is posted below.
Maurice Cousins55,553 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Canada's Mark Carney is right. Keir Starmer and Ed Davey must take note. “The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied … the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. As a result, many countries … must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.” His Davos speech is a warning to Britain and Europe: the assumptions of the post Cold War order are no more, and interdependence is being turned into leverage by great powers. That has profound consequences for Net Zero. As he puts it: “But let’s be clear eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.” Yes, Carney has just struck a deal at the weekend with China that includes easing tariffs on Chinese EVs. But the point of his Davos speech is not “more Net Zero”. It is that the era of naïve multilateralism is over. And since taking office, he has also moved to expand domestic oil and gas. That is significant, not least given his previous high profile role in shaping the Net Zero consensus in Britain. But his Davos speech is the language of national sovereignty, energy security and industrial capacity. You cannot rebuild hard power while deindustrialising and driving up the cost of power. And you cannot defend the values you claim to hold - human rights, free trade and the rule of law - without the strength to protect them. Net Zero as a governing doctrine is starting to unravel.
Maurice Cousins22,947 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
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