Tyranny of Quangos

A new clerisy imposing Net Zero upon us is creating a dangerous pressure cooker.

Over the past months, this Substack has taken to task many official bodies for their promotion half-truths and lies about the Net Zero agenda. We have also looked at the truth of what Net Zero means for ordinary people in terms of home heating, travel and diet.

We pulled apart the big lie being told by the Government about the levelised cost of renewables in general and offshore wind in particular, where they claimed the levelised cost was £44/MWh (in 2021 prices). They then went on to discredit their own generation cost report by offering £102/MWh, for offshore wind (in 2024 prices) in the AR6 auction. We also exposed the hidden costs of renewables such as grid balancing which have made UK electricity amongst the most expensive in the developed world. Ofgem has also been exposed as keeping the price cap artificially high by assuming the price of gas and gas-fired electricity is far higher than the market is delivering.

Other official bodies have also been caught out promoting the “cheap renewables” lie such as the House of Commons Library. The Royal Society has also got in on the act with risible claims that a renewables plus hydrogen grid would be cheaper than the price of renewables today. The Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment also made ludicrous claims about the cost and deliverability of wind and solar power.

We even have trade bodies such as Energy UK and Renewable UK pushing the myth that renewables are cheap at the same time as demanding more subsidies. Websites such as Carbon Brief embarrass themselves by claiming wind power is nine times cheaper than gas and even win awards for this so-called journalism.

Even though the COP28 president said that phasing out of coal, oil and gas would send the world back into caves, it didn’t stop the meeting calling on countries to transition away from fossil fuels and set unachievable targets for renewables.

Even official bodies that should know better like the National Grid have produced fantasy energy scenarios that call for a halving of energy consumption by 2050 and resorted to producing propaganda in the Guardian to push their agenda.

The weaknesses in the Climate Change Committee models has also been covered as well as the massive behaviour changes being sought by the House of Lords Environment Committee and the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), including making our homes colder, eating less meat as well as flying and driving less. BIT make no secret of their objective to “edit the consumer choice environment” and exhort the Government to intervene in markets such as home heating and motor vehicles. Extremists such as UK FIRES, funded by taxpayers money from the UKRI, have even called for all flying and shipping to stop and for beef and lamb to be banned.

What we see is a vast array of official bodies promoting the Net Zero agenda and enforcing green ideology. We need a term to term to describe them and the results of their actions. Even though the organisations above are not all strictly quangos, a bit of artistic license has been used to lump them all together. My research could not turn up an official collective noun for quangos, but interestingly, I did come across several ideas for the collective noun for quango members, such as a “revolving door” and a “bloat.” Though my personal favourite that begins to get to the heart of the matter is a “nomenklatura” of quango members. In the absence of an official collective noun, I would like to propose a “tyranny of quangos.”

This may sound somewhat extreme, but if we think about it in terms of societal equilibrium, we can see that it is justified. Many ancient societies failed because they were ill-equipped to cope with shocks such as famine, war, earthquakes or floods. They might have achieved some sort of temporary unstable equilibrium, but when a shock happened, it all fell apart.

Over time, we learned to save a portion of good harvests so there was still food available if there was a bad year. In time, we also built rules and institutions to encode societal stability such as the Magna Carta, the rule of law and democracy. These elements brought us a stable equilibrium so that society was able to withstand shocks and continue to develop.

A stable equilibrium can also respond to internal demands for change by shifting from left to right or vice versa if the people decide to change Government through an election.

But what happens when the institutions act as a barrier to internal change instead of a bulwark against external shocks? What happens when there is barely a cigarette paper between the main political parties on fundamental issues? Sadly, we get tyranny, oppression and a new feudalism that takes more than votes to change. We might call this a “too-stable” equilibrium.

Here, no matter how large internal pressures for change become, everything stays the same. The institutions become so rigid they can no longer help respond to external shocks either and society becomes brittle. We can identify times through history when this has occurred, such as our own Civil War, which eventually led to Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament, the Boston Tea Party that led to the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I fear that we are approaching a similar set of circumstances now with Net Zero. All the main political parties are signed up to the Net Zero project which is enshrined in law by the Climate Change Act. The renewable energy industry harvests the lavish subsidies squandered on expensive, intermittent wind and solar power. As we saw above, the tyranny of quangos and other institutions promote and enforce this agenda, all the while claiming to be “progressive.”  Yet, Net Zero policies are leading to industrial decay and families suffering because energy is too expensive.

Even the legal system has been enlisted to enforce the Net Zero ideology. The European Court of Human Rights has weighed in and ruled that Switzerland’s climate policies violated human rights. This ruling came despite a 2021 referendum rejecting stronger climate measures. This judgement also sets a precedent for other countries, including the UK and effectively puts climate policy beyond the control of the ballot box. The recent High Court ruling that the Government’s carbon reduction plans were insufficient to comply with the Government’s own Net Zero strategy is another case in point. Effectively, the Government was castigated for not knowing how to deliver its own target. In fact, nobody knows how to deliver Net Zero; even the Climate Change Committee’s own budgets rely upon untested technologies and nearly 60% of emissions reductions rely upon mythical “behaviour change.” Yet, we have the ridiculous spectacle of the judiciary trying to force the Government to create an impossible plan. And what if we do not want to have our behaviour altered, are we too to be subject to judicial sanction? Net Zero is effectively beyond democratic control.

Tyrannies can only be sustained by oppression, which is why we see provisions in the Energy Act 2023 for central control of electric vehicle chargers, home heating, batteries, washing machines and dishwashers. There are even provisions for powers of forced entry to ensure appliances comply with central “load control” signals. As the Gilet Jaunes in France and protests from farmers across Europe have shown, the intransigence of the Net Zero agenda is creating a pressure cooker of anger. The pressure can build to dangerous levels if the ballot box cannot act as a relief valve.

Sadly, tyrannies rarely give up their power voluntarily which means we are entering a very hazardous period. There is limited time to change course before we head for catastrophe. We must learn from history rather than doom ourselves to repeat it.

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