Brendan O’Neill is always a good writer but he’s excelled himself with his assessment of the COP26 shindig in Scotland.

In an article entitled: ‘The elites are laughing in our faces’ Mr O’Neill said:

COP26 is gearing up to be a grotesque spectacle. We are about to witness Versailles levels of extravagance and hypocrisy. The rich, the powerful and the full of puffed-up virtue will gather in Glasgow to pontificate to the rest of us about how much we are harming the planet with all our waste and hubris. They’ll arrive in their private jets to bemoan the scourge of air-industry emissions. They’ll tuck in to five-star meals in between wondering out loud if the little people should eat less meat. They’ll rest their weary, virtuous heads on plump, silk pillows after long days of discussing how to rein in the material aspirations of the masses. It promises to be one of most nauseating displays of oligarchical conceit of recent times.

Difficult to disagree with Mr O’Neill’s views on COP26. It’s a display of hypocritical aristocrats wanting to bend the world to their own will. In its effects it will crap on the working and middle classes of the world just as effectively as the Enclosure Acts and the Highland Clearances craped on the peasantry in the United Kingdom in the past.

I’m all for not wasting resources, it’s a point of view I inherited from my parents, but what’s going on in Glasgow is not about carefully husbanding resources, it’s about the aristocracy both old and new, garnering and gathering power for themselves. Green politics, I discovered long ago, is less about protecting the environment and much more to do with the mostly upper middle and upper class members of this movement, despising the idea of the working classes doing well for themselves and buying new stuff. The Green movement is inherently snobbish and worse still wedded to ideas of Malthusianism. All too often I’ve scratched a Green and found a red in tooth and claw follower of Malthus.