Helping Them to Help Us Help Ourselves

It has emerged that New New Labour goes about the business of keeping the planet habitable in much the same way as it goes about the businesses of health, education, locking people up and snooping: the effect on human beings matters rather less than the money to be made. The Glorious Successor announced the "environmental transformation fund" six months ago, and apparently was "widely expected", by those who have not been living in Britain for the past ten years, to make "direct grants to countries experiencing extreme droughts, storms and sea level rise associated with climate change". Given that the effects of climate change are at least partly the responsibility of the sort of people who expand airports in the name of private profit, go to war for oil, encourage private car use while neglecting public transport, and so forth, it seemed only fair; which only adds to the mystery of why anyone should have expected New New Labour to do anything of the kind. Instead of direct grants, Britain will give "concessional loans", which countries like Bangladesh will have to repay with interest. According to a policy adviser with ActionAid, this means that "developing countries will have to pay twice, once for the emissions that caused the problems and then again to clean up the mess". This of course reflects New New Labour policy in other areas, whereby parents have to pay twice, once in moving to an area with a good school and then again to bribe the religious commissars that run it; or where taxpayers have to pay twice, once for the Government to pay contractors for public utilities and then again in inflated charges for an inefficient service; or where Iraqis have to pay twice, once in having their friends and relatives killed and once in having their country requisitioned for the benefit of Halliburton. Whatever Gordon's faults may be, possession of a reverse gear is evidently not one of them.