I went along to a talk by the National Party’s climate change spokesperson, Todd Muller. Todd’s a plausible enough, air brushed bloke from Tauranga.  It was interesting to sit with the Nats with their assumptions of leadership based on supposed pragmatic compromise, designer shirts, polished shoes and good teeth, knowing wives and a venal willingness to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

Todd was here to help Maureen Pugh, the local list MP stir the West Coast pot of populism being created by the local business clique of miners, engineers and trucking companies; with the digger drivers and the farmers hovering. They own the councils and the newspapers and they do some charitable stuff for schools and St John. They go to church occasionally and holiday in Surfers, sometimes Bali, and they know which side their bread is buttered on. A local mythology is being re-energised, of the born and bred West Coaster (like the Aryan) having a genetic virtue; of there having been a golden time of economic boom created by extraction and now destroyed by the Greens (Jews) helped by a Labour government captured by Aucklanders and urban parasites more generally. Maureen Pugh actually spoke of dogs barking when a property is trespassed upon. ‘We’ll keep barking,’ she said. Unfortunately the metaphor has some problematic connotations: runaway slaves were chased by dogs, the SS were also into dogs. As for Abu Ghraib…

The local business cartel used to be balanced by the miners and their unions, plus a level of state ownership of economic infrastructure. But that’s gone. Only the Greens have unpragmatic ethics and they’re hated for that reason. The urban-based, identity-politics liberals led by Jacinda have seized power and the regions will get rid of them as fast as they can.  But then there’s Winston and Shane Jones, the other side of the populist coin, confusing things.

As well there’s the really big boy capitalists in the cities (and operating globally) who can sense the chaos that could ensue if the climate is not ameliorated, the smashing of infrastructure past profitable repair, the mad rush of refugees…; so there is tension between the feudal overlords and the local squirocracy. I am sure there’s historical precedence, somewhere around the time of Oliver Cromwell. It’s all very complex, messy and potentially dangerous. Out of these tensions, Trump arises.

Meanwhile an article sent to me by a fellow conspirator at the meeting, Richard Arlidge, describing the period when climate change might have been effectively tackled: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html