From conservativewoman

By Philip Walling

‘NOBODY voted for this!’ The cry echoes up and down the land. And yet (albeit in decreasing numbers) people still vote for a political party they would like to believe is telling them the truth and has their interests at heart, because ‘we live in a democratic society’.

Yeah, right! What’s ‘democracy?’, I ask. To which it is hard to get a comprehensible answer. Most often the reply is something like, the right to vote. Vote for whom and for what? The choice is increasingly like having the right to vote for your death either by hanging, shooting or poisoning, when you really wanted to vote for living. And even if you vote for being shot, there’s no guarantee they’ll keep their promise. It’s more likely they will starve you to death – a proper sacrifice, because you’ll be doing it for the planet.

So it’s hardly surprising that Newcastle City Council, a cabal of over-mighty, third-rate windbags and busybodies, have blocked dozens of streets with bollards in a number of suburbs. Why? To save the planet, of course. If you don’t know there’s a ‘climate emergency’, you can’t have been listening, because the sage councillors and their handlers, the officials who know better than the people they purport to represent, have declared one.

And on that pretext the way is open for them to impose almost anything: in this case ‘low traffic neighbourhoods’. The three-quarters of a million people of Tyneside and the wider rural areas are to be forced, by those who know best, to suffer for the planet. Nothing is more important than ‘combating climate change’ and, oblivious to the irony, the bollards are, says the council, necessary ‘milestones on the journey to Net Zero’. See here. Although Newcastle isn’t unique in suffering this oppression, it is no less irksome to know others are being treated similarly.

The council openly admit they are involved in social engineering, trying to curb private car use and forcing people to walk, cycle or take public transport to ‘reduce carbon emissions’, whatever that means. But if ‘carbon emissions’ and clean air were really the purpose they would not be funnelling vehicles on to a few bigger roads to crawl along in jams, getting nowhere. Are the councillors and officials so blind that they can’t see these road closures are killing Newcastle? Or at least destroying independent businesses. One long-standing independent grocer and off-licence in Jesmond has lost so much trade in the last month that it will either have to close or move out.

If their latest scheme for the centre of the city is any guide, in a perfect example of the marriage between global business and government, the councillors show how little they regard independent business or the welfare of the people. They recently approved the building of a new HMRC headquarters on a prime site to accommodate 9,000 ‘civil servants’. HMRC has signed a 25-year lease (I couldn’t find out at what rent, but it will almost certainly be at a level that pays back the cost of building) with a company owned by the billionaire Reuben Brothers. We are not told how these 9,000 staff are going to get to work or if they will be able to park their cars.

The right to use the highway belongs to each of us as subjects of the Crown, guaranteed for centuries under English law. It is not in the gift of a few councillors and unelected officials. Talking to people, it soon becomes clear that many are outraged by the council’s high-handed actions, imposed after coming out with the usual platitudes about ‘listening to a wide range of views’ and holding ‘public consultations’ – in some cases after they had started to install the bollards. They even expect us to believe that these ‘low traffic’ measures are being ‘trialled’ for 18 months, without telling us how they will judge whether the trial has succeeded or failed. Notwithstanding the gross inconvenience and curtailment of what, until the month before last, was the liberty to pass along the King’s highway, it is dispiriting that apart from moaning, there seems little inclination to make a real fuss about it. Orwell observed, at a dance in Wigan, ‘the same sheeplike crowd . . . there is no turbulence left in England’. How much more accurate is that a century later.

The truth behind these road closures and other impositions is that the council is implementing global policies it has agreed with its international collaborators to inflict on the populace. Is it a coincidence that the Reuben Brothers’ development has all the hallmarks of such collaboration? The councillors like to give the impression they came up with these policies themselves. They dare not admit that they are acting in accordance with supra-national global interests that are sucking power from the local (and the national) and ceding it to a globalist network that intends to act as a world government. On the route to achieving it, an international association of cities has got together as the Urban 7 (U7) to put into effect, at a local level, what the G7 does at a supra-national level, to ‘localise globalism’ in the jargon, and to expand global government control from the bottom up.

To ensure participation of the local governments of the G7 countries, national associations of cities have also been created. In Britain it is Core Cities UK, an alliance of 11 city councils: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. These cities collaborate with the common goal of effecting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. These vague aspirations stem from the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio and are a call for one world government and abolition of national sovereignty in the name of ‘combating climate change’, ‘creating sustainable development’, ‘equality’ – both gender and social – and all the usual utopian slogans that feed and cloak a determined attempt at power.

Understanding this makes sense of the council’s actions and exposes the councillors’ failure to honour the function for which they were elected – to represent the people of the city and provide the services they need. They were not elected to involve themselves in partnership with the globalists and to implement their policies. Their authority derives from the people who elect them, not from those supra-national forces to whom they now do obeisance. But they can’t admit what interests they truly serve or where the real power lies. If they did, their irrelevance would become clear for all to see. And, although I wouldn’t bet on it, even the sheeple might clamour for a cull of councillors as the pointless waste of money they have allowed themselves to become.