Up in smoke (again)

When individuals are forced to pay taxes there is at least the vauge hope that some inkling of the purloined funds are spent on some noble cause. Relief for a charity case, some oldster getting heart surgery, troops being well-equipped in the field, etc. Reality has a way of shattering these myths:

One could not want a better vignette of the gulf that has opened up between our “political class” and the rest of us than a bizarre little item which emerged last week on an obscure part of the European Commission’s website. The British Government, as revealed by the EU’s Official Journal, has allocated £60 million of taxpayers’ money to be spent on buying carbon credits from the Third World for the use of government buildings and other official purposes – so that our civil servants can continue to benefit from the CO2 emissions needed to keep their offices warm and lit.

Our entire Government machine – politicians and civil servants alike – is now obsessively dedicated to the proposition that we must drastically cut our “carbon emissions” to save the planet, at virtually unlimited cost. But when it comes to the officials and politicians themselves having to make sacrifices, as our own fuel bills soar, they have quietly arranged for the rest of us to shell out £60 million to allow them to carry on much as before.

The story then becomes even more bizarre. The contracts with Barclays, J P   Morgan and co – who will retain up to £9 million in commissions – will be used to buy Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) credits under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

As with the theft of taxes used by MPs for their squalid system of expenses, one wonders how many families went without in order that this latest wasting of £60m could take place.

By the way, will the usual suspects bleat uncontrollably that the banks involved forced the government into these arrangements? Of course not, statists don't do consistency.