Giving a speech in front of a room filled with people who no doubt think of themselves as conservatives, Liz Truss talked primarily about low taxes, personal responsibility, the “freedom to choose” — and just “freedom” more broadly. She also said that she would govern as a conservative, which instead makes one wonder: is governing as a conservative really all about freedom?
For fear of being accused a “squish” who relentlessly attacks Tory leaders while defending Sir Keir Starmer at every given opportunity, I ought to say that I really like Liz Truss; she understands that the free economy is the best vehicle for delivering economic growth and lifting people out of poverty, and that is certainly important. Important too are many of the traditional liberties which we all enjoy in Britain: the right to speak one’s mind freely, to worship in the manner one prefers and to enter into contracts without excessive state interference. However, does this mean that conservatism is all about freedom and not concerned with any other values at all?
My answer — and, indeed, the answer which conservatives used to give before our movement took on the heavily libertarian tone it now projects — is no. It is liberalism, not conservatism, which sees individual liberty as the end goal of politics; it is liberalism which starts from the position that individuals are by nature free and equal and that the role of the state is to protect that natural freedom and equality.
Conservatives start from an entirely different place. Per Aristotle, they recognise that man is a social and political animal. They look at the world and see that individuals are not born free: they are duty-bound to the families, communities and nations in which they find themselves in but never consciously choose. A child, for example, can never declare himself free of his parents; if he were to neglect his parents in their old age, shouting something or other about his natural freedom, he would rightly be seen as a moral monster. Nor can a person declare himself free of his nation, at least not on a whim. It is possible to emigrate, of course, as I have done — but it is not an option to spontaneously and arbitrarily assert your freedom from any allegiance to your country during a wartime draft.
It is also not the case that individuals are born “equal”; one can never, for instance, be equal to one’s parents, even if one enjoys a warm and friendly relationship with them — because the natural hierarchy between a child and a parent, which stems from the knowledge that the child would not exist if not for the parent, can never dissipate.
Conservatives believe that these natural loyalties and hierarchies are beneficial to human beings and conducive to their flourishing; without them, human beings would wander aimlessly through life, always reaching out for the key to happiness but never quite finding it. For this reason, it is authority, law and tradition that are at the heart of conservatism — not freedom — because, without direction, there is bound to be chaos in the public sphere; without tradition, a disorder in the private sphere; and, crucially, without authority, neither law nor tradition can be preserved.
This is not to say that conservatives do not value freedom. They are dearly fond of the ordered, civilised liberty which arises amidst the stability and security provided by law and tradition. What they reject is the Rousseauian notion that “man is born free but everywhere is in chains” due to the oppressive nature of our inherited social and political institutions, recognising instead that it is these very institutions that provide us with liberty which can actually be of use to us. What good, after all, is a notional “natural” liberty if your community is filled with criminals, hooligans and louts who make it impossible for you to go about your everyday activities in peace and with a smile? And, indeed, is it really an improvement to be liberated from the constraints of your traditional religious inheritance only to end up a slave to your own appetites, depedent on pornography and “light” drugs, as so many young men currently are? I rather think not.
I hope, therefore, that Liz Truss will focus not just on protecting freedom but on defending the institutions — from the Church to limited parliamentary government — which have shaped it, because that is what conservatism is truly all about.
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The Whitewash – A Review of ‘War on the West’ by Douglas Murray
To begin, it’s worth saying I owe something of a debt to Douglas Murray. He brought me to many of the positions I hold today, and while my overall impression of ‘War on the West’ was disinterest, it is only upon looking back at my own political journey I’m beginning to understand why I felt that way.
‘War on the West’ follows ‘The Madness of Crowds’ and the ‘Strange Death of Europe’ as Murray’s third book discussing the state of political affairs in the Western world. Murray’s thesis is best laid out by Murray himself:
“People began to talk of “equality”, but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism”, but they appeared deeply racist. They spoke of “justice” but they seemed to mean revenge.”
Herein lies the problem with ‘War on the West’, and why I moved away from Murray in my own life: there is no examination of what equality is to mean, what anti-racism is to look like, or what kind of justice is to be enacted, if any. The primary objection Murray has to the armies waging a war on the West is that their vision is not a classically liberal one. Explicitly antagonising white people with terms like ‘white fragility’, ‘white tears’, or ‘white privilege’ is bad because it racialises things Murray believes to have been deracialised by the Civil Rights Movement and other changes that occurred between the 1950’s to early 2000s. In his previous work, Murray uses an analogy of a train of equality pulling into the station, only to careen off down the tracks at a greater speed than ever before without allowing its passengers to get off. Throughout Murray’s work is an unexamined liberalism, that at best, is only ever criticised for being too pure. Liberalism, by its nature, criticises social orders for creating barriers for individuals. The many freedoms the West has provided have always come at the expense of the social orders liberalism eroded. Freedom for women came with the erosion of a patriarchal social order, and took with it the benefits such a system provided – such as the ability to raise a family on one income, a high degree of social trust, and a defined relationship between the sexes. It was inevitable that liberalism would eventually critique itself, and many of the authors Murray cites, from Kendi to DiAngelo, often build on those drawing on Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno. The former was given money by the Rockefeller Foundation, and even worked for what would become the CIA. In many ways, it was Western liberalism with its free flow of capital and revolving door between the academy and influential roles of state that enabled these theories to promulgate.
In his interview with the Telegraph promoting the book, Murray states:
“As long as people are armed with the right facts and the right arguments, I just don’t see how the cultural revolutionaries can win. I don’t know about you, but I’m not spending the rest of my life cringing and being told I’m guilty of things I never did. Not doing it, not guilty.”
This really begs the question of how exactly we got to this position to begin with. What’s most striking about ‘War on the West’ is that it does read almost like a recap of a war. Battlefields are specified, different players and their decisions are named, and Lord knows there are a huge number of casualties in the culture wars Murray describes. But, were the people who permitted things to reach this stage simply incapable of posing arguments against it? In one chapter, Murray notes that claims that America is founded upon stolen land are self-refuting because the many tribes of America stole the land from one another. Are we to believe Americans are so ignorant of their own history that this argument has never been made? Murray himself notes in the conclusion that outlets such as MSNBC and the New York Times will deny that Critical Race Theory is taught in schools, but acknowledge that it exists when forced. There are no arguments that can be used against such a thing.
Left out of ‘War on the West’ is any truly systemic analysis of the problem. The aforementioned New York Times moved to a paywall model in 2011, and from that point forward, the focus on things like ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, and ‘transphobia’ increased many times over. Around this time, legacy media was dying slowly. So newspapers moved from selling papers to many people to selling stories to a niche audience. The niche audience of the New York Times is the kind of cosmopolitan liberal who is very interested in niche identitarian trends, and in pitching themselves as radical while at the heart of the very system they claim to dislike. Despite this being a veritable War on the West, according to Murray, the emergency powers of war are never called upon. There are no calls to take decisive action to halt or prevent these systemic changes that led to this point. And in the conclusion, he defends the same economic system of capitalism that gave the New York Times its power, and forced it to change its business model to appeal to a niche audience of people hostile to Western people.
This attachment to a liberal historiography, in which individuals are given The Arguments and Make The Case, with spontaneous and emergent bottom-up change coming about as a consequence blinds Murray to the economic and legal realities that influence and shape this War on the West. Multiple universities are stated as battlegrounds for this war, but there is not a single mention of the fact universities are public authorities under the Equality Act (2010). That they have an ‘equalities duty’ to publish routine equalities reports, and must legally keep permanent members of staff dedicated to pushing this anti-Western message.
The only law Murray appears to mention in this vein is the Civil Right Act, which he defends as an example of the kind of good equality that he desires. Yet it was the Civil Rights Act which created the Civil Rights Commission, which in 1973 wrote to the Civil Service Commission and had them drop the standards for algebra in order to allow them to hire more non-white civil servants. Similar acts can be found in the UK. The Race Relations Act of 1973 (which performed the same anti-discrimination function as the Civil Rights Act he praises) created the Commission for Racial Equality. Today, the Race Relations Act has been assimilated into the aforementioned Equalities Act, and the Commission for Racial Equality has become the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which forces compliance with the Equalities Duty. There is a clear through-line from the civil rights legislation both in the USA and the UK, to the situation we are in now. The back of ‘War on the West’ reads as follows:
“The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years. It is high time we revise them in turn …”
Fundamentally however, there isn’t much of a revision of dominant left-wing narratives within ‘War on the West’ at all. Instead, it seeks to remind leftists that their own heroes, from Marx, to Foucault are also not spotless figures. This can only go one of two ways: either they ignore this, and nothing changes, or they recognise this, and move away from those figures, and as a consequence have doubled down on their principles of removing any and all unsavoury figures from public life. Regardless, none of this is at all revisionary, nor does it fundamentally challenge the values and beliefs of the cultural revolutionaries. A truly revisionist view of things would challenge the dominant understanding of things like the Civil Rights Movement, which was not (as Murray describes) people ‘making the case’ for rights, that the American public was so blown away by that they accepted and endorsed. Academic studies like that done on Rosedale show the side of desegregation that was forced upon people, and came at the cost of schools, neighbourhoods, communities and lives. Rosedale was a segregated community, but desegregation and the tensions that came with it made it difficult for authorities to maintain peace. The result was that many of the former residents who didn’t move out of their homes, found themselves the victims of racial violence by those who moved into the area, and had no regard for the police, who stopped policing the area out of fear of creating tensions. When Brown v. The Board of Education ended the desegregation of schools in America, and people protested, the national guard was sent in to disperse the crowd at gunpoint.
All of these changes were not the natural unfolding of human progress. They came today as they did in the civil rights movement, through force. Eisenhower and the national guard did not make the case for desegregation in light of Brown, they imposed it down the barrel of a gun. Whether that was right or wrong is irrelevant, that fact alone disproves the notion Murray insists upon in his recent public life – that the train of equality was chugging along gently, and only recently got out of hand. Equality is not a train chugging along set tracks, it is an amorphous blob that seeks to desacralise everything and dissolve all boundaries between all things. It does not progress in one direction alone, like a train, but expands in all directions and infects all things, including our supposedly right wing public figures.
In light of this, I still see some utility in Douglas Murray. Challenging double standards and hypocrisy is a cheap tactic which ultimately will not defeat those Murray opposes. Yet it is often the first chink in the armour for many people. I know I first came to move away from liberal beliefs because I found them to be contradictory, it was only in time I rooted out my own inherently liberal views, and ultimately moved to the political views and positions I hold now. In this respect, Murray is useful – he can confirm people’s suspicions about the modern left, and give them comfort that there is a public figure who opposes these things. It’s incumbent upon people with more bravery and introspection to take that one step further, and marry it with a systemic analysis of the situation, and propose and action a plan to undo these things and institute something new in its place.
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The White Man’s Latest Burden
“Take up the White Man’s burden; Send forth the best ye breed; Go bind your sons to exile; To serve your captives’ need” – Rudyard Kipling, from The White Man’s Burden (1899).
The relationship between foreign policy and immigration is relatively straightforward, yet routinely overlooked and often manipulated. Since Hamas’ attack on Israel and the ensuing bombardment of Gaza – an act which has sparked widespread protest across the Western world, overwhelmingly constituted of migrants and their descendants – there have been calls amongst the neoconservative commentariat for Britain to “Stand Up for Israel”, which – for the uninitiated – means funnelling more money to the Middle East.
Once again, neoconservatives (a.k.a. leftist and liberal infiltrators of the right) are advocating military support to foreign countries and generally running defence for imprudent militarism, both of which increase the risk of mass migration to the West; contributing to the Islamification of the Western world and the retreat of Western liberalism within its own borders, a subject which neocons love to talk about.
Those of us on the paleoconservative right who oppose attempts at humanitarian intervention do so with the knowledge that such actions do risk creating more destabilising migration, disrupting the already very fragile state of Western countries; a fragility revealed by the imported ethnic tensions which have since exploded onto the streets, arising not from an investment in Britain’s national interest, but the interests of other nations.
As such, giving Israel a blank check to do whatever it wants shouldn’t be Britain’s top priority. Putting aside the evident bloodlust of the chickenhawks and the various ethical problems of taking the plea for “proportionality” to its logical conclusion, the idea that any allegedly right-leaning commentator should use their airtime to run defence for every decision the IDF makes, without considering the second-hand consequences for the British state, should be challenged whenever the opportunity arises.
I have no problem with a neighbour using self-defence when confronted with a late-night burglar, but if his idea of self-defence is to fire a nuke in the home invader’s general direction, people from the town over might have some concerns. Similarly, a government’s decision to start a war is its own, but to call ‘feign knights‘ immediately after attacking the enemy in an especially vulgar way is unlikely to win support from the right-minded member of society. This may seem a bit hyperbolic, but you get the general idea – Israel should not be allowed to use self-defence as an excuse to create another migrant fiasco and expect us to make-do.
Alas, the British establishment prides itself on being the sharpest arrow in the United States’ increasingly spacious quiver; if Israel is America’s greatest ally, then Israel is Britain’s greatest ally as well.
Left-wing so-called ‘anti-imperialists’ (I use that phrase only half-seriously) are capitalising on the contradictions within neoconservatism, maintaining the West is simply facing the consequences of its actions. Palestinians shouldn’t suffer because of their government’s actions, but the British should. By portraying immigration as a mere component of a larger Western imperialist ratchet, leftists hope to depoliticise the issue of immigration. In turn, they hope to divert people’s concerns away from domestic policies they entirely condone, especially the concerns of traditional Labour voters and their longstanding opposition to mass immigration.
What’s that? Your daughter got molested by a Pakistani man who laughed about turning her into a kebab? Tut-tut. If only you’d opposed intervention in Kosovo, you could’ve prevented it! Guess you’ll just have to put up with things as they are. Don’t Look Back in Anger.
No matter how much that complain about them, it remains fact that leftists march in lockstep with liberals and centrists on immigration. To paraphrase a now legendary tweet, you can exist on the left and support some degree of privatisation (i.e., as a social democrat) but you can’t exist of the left and oppose immigration. Contemporary leftism isn’t about ‘material interests’ or whatever, it’s about anti-whiteness.
It would take a great deal of reform, but there is nothing stopping Britain from arming foreign nations and denying entrance to foreigners, refugee or not. However, that’s beside my point, and certainly beside the point of leftists trying to con people into ignoring the demise of their own communities.
Together, neoconservatives and leftists have reinvented the White Man’s Burden. The former has popularised the idea that the West has a moral responsibility to intervene when other parts of the world fall short of liberal democratic practice, whilst the latter insists it is the burden of the West – that is, an extension of its moral obligation to arbitrate the world – to import every person that tries to cross the border, despite what we know about the UK’s foreign-born population.
According to the 2021 Census, the three most common non-UK countries of birth are India, Poland, and Pakistan, quite similar to the results of the census 20 years prior. Contrast this with the targets of major Western interventions over the past 20 years, all of which are much further down the list: Iraq (40), Afghanistan (43), Syria (52). Non-Western countries with larger foreign-born diasporas in the UK include Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, Philippines, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Turkey and Somalia, all of which are in the top 30.
Of course, political events are reflected in the data. The Syria-born population of the UK grew considerably between 2001 and 2021, but this still implies Britain’s demographic complications aren’t primarily the result of Team America-style foreign escapades.
Rather, they are the result of an immensely stupid decision to liberalise border restrictions for the sake of Diversity – the official state dogma since the early noughties – to maintain a steady supply of cheap and flexible labour, and to keep the national Ponzi scheme – that is, the UK’s pension system – afloat until Islamists wipe out London with their DWP-funded nuclear arsenal. In short, foreign wars definitely haven’t helped, but they’re not the root cause.
Despite this, neoconservatives have tried to make the recent public displays of ethnonarcissism about the future of “Judeo-Christian” liberal values in the face of resurgent “Islamofascism”, whilst leftists have construed concerns about the protests as a deviation from the West’s need to demonstrate moral leadership – that is, to stand up for the downtrodden Palestinians and, of course, to import Infinity Migrants.
Liberals consider themselves above tribal notions of loyalty, insisting on a fundamental commitment to abstract ‘values’, whilst the socialist is a patriot – a patriot for every nation except his own.
And just when things couldn’t get any worse, Daftywaffen’s glorious leader has been allowed back on Twitter weeks before another mass protest in London on Remembrance Day – what a coincidence!
At a time when Britain is experiencing the inevitable fallout of the left-liberal immigration dogmas and neoconservative foreign policy, with hostility to the humanitarian ratchet at an all-time high, what the public needs to remember is the real threat to stability isn’t mass immigration but the FAR-RIGHT (!!!).
As we all know by now, protests are a milleniLOL ‘Generation Left’ pipedream. Remember when protesting British intervention in Iraq worked? Remember when a protest was allowed to occur that didn’t already have state backing? Me neither. Call me crazy, but I doubt Israel is going to take “proportional” action over a protest in London, just as I doubt a hundred-or-so people with British flags will stop our political class from wrecking the country.
Indeed, it is remarkable how literally every anti-British faction has developed a reason as to why the British people need to put their authentic convictions on the backburner and do exactly what they want at this exact moment.
If you want to stop the scourge of Islamism within British society, the foremost threat to our Western liberal-democratic values, you must place Israel first and foremost in your political considerations; our struggles in defence of Civilisation are one and the same.
Send forth the best ye breed (to the Middle East).
If you want to stand up for your nation’s monuments and armed forces, you need to rally around a man funded by pro-Israel think-tanks to counteract anti-Israel protests, even though people with similar convictions to yourself have been arrested for far less.
Go bind your sons to exile (for protesting with an English flag).
If you want to stop the systematic grooming of white girls, you need to suspend your opposition to immigration and support Palestine; you need to accept any wave of “asylum-seekers” which you created and won’t be allowed to deport, even if their application is denied under our very liberal laws.
To serve your captives’ need (by importing them to your native land).
Ultimately, it is not our burden to take up arms in defence of foreign states – overtly or covertly – or accept mass immigration. The Israel-Hamas War is simply not our fight. Middle England doesn’t care about Israel or Palestine. Middle England cares about England and the sooner a British government is prepared to place Britain at the heart of its foreign policy, rather than vague and destructive humanitarian ideals, the better.
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In Brussels, the Eurocrats are increasingly out of control
Earlier last month, it was announced that the European Commission wants to double the budget of the EU for North African countries to no less than 42 billion euros. It thereby also wants to extend the Erasmus programme for student exchanges to that region. One does not need to be a migration expert to understand that this will only exacerbate the current major migration challenges, and that public opinion may not be fully on board with this, to put it mildly. Things are really going from bad to worse with the European Commission, which is led by Ursula von der Leyen. Despite great unease with green policies and migration policies, and some minor adjustments, her EU Commission is trying to continue with business as usual.
In October, von der Leyen survived two votes in the European Parliament to topple her. Notable was how the French centre-right Les Républicains, which are part of the centrist European People’s Party (EPP), supported the motion of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally’s EP group to oust von der Leyen. Also, there is grumbling among the centre-left. German SPD MEP René Repasi even warned von der Leyen that she has six months to deliver on the promises she made to his centre-left group, or it could put forward its own censure motion.
Then, it would be wrong to expect the European Parliament to really show their teeth. One diplomat confided to Politico nobody needs to worry about an overly powerful European Parliament, stating: “I don’t believe in this new Parliament, sorry. (…) They can threaten, but when a leader picks up the phone, they always fall in line.” One example of that is how the socialist group recently went along with von der Leyen’s omnibus bill, a modest exercise in EU regulatory simplification, after Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez intervened.
A Hungarian scandal?
Developments within the European Commission may affect its stability more than whatever happens in the European Parliament. First, there has been Pfizergate, whereby the European Court of Justice ruled that the European Commission violated transparency rules by failing to grant access to text messages between Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of pharma giant Pfizer.
Secondly, there are now also allegations that the Hungarian government would have deployed intelligence officers to Brussels to gather information on EU institutions and to recruit an EU official. According to a number of media, Hungarian intelligence officers disguised as diplomats would have attempted to infiltrate EU institutions during the period when the current Hungarian European Commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi, served as Hungary’s ambassador to the EU.
Várhelyi has reportedly told President Ursula von der Leyen he was “not aware” of the alleged spying activities. Her spokesperson told media afterwards that “the president is pleased to have sat down with the Commissioner on this issue and the working group will continue its work on the subject.” In other words: von der Leyen is absolutely not keen to escalate this, and also other European governments will prefer not to engage into a direct diplomatic clash, if everything would be proven.
As I have been writing before, if it is serious about fighting cronyism, the EU should cut its EU transfers for all Member States, given how easy it is to otherwise accuse the EU of “double standards”. Stories about cronyism and executive control of the judiciary have been popping up all across other Central and Eastern European countries, like Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria. Obviously, similar problems have been evident in the old EU member states as well, not to mention Italy. In 2021, Professor Vince Musacchio, a renowned anti-corruption expert from the Rutgers Institute on Anti-Corruption Studies, has warned that between 2015 and 2020, the EU has allocated around €70bn to Italy in structural & investment funds. Half of these funds ended up in the hands of organised crime.”
Then to see EU Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi stepping down would perhaps not be the saddest of outcomes. He is responsible for health policy but has been telling MEPs that “new tobacco and nicotine products pose health risks comparable to traditional ones.” This is simply unscientific to the core and should disqualify him from this position. Channelling his inner nannycrat, Várhelyi has also been pushing for a taxation system on products high in sugar, fat, and salt to help finance public health during a meeting with the European Parliament’s health committee, thereby arguing some of those receipts should go to the EU budget. So much for the idea of “Orban’s man” standing up against Brussels.
American pressure
While internal European Commission trouble or pressure from the European Parliament may not change much, there is still the matter of US President Donald Trump.
So far, he has already forced the EU to abandon its plans for a digital tax, while the US has also obtained concessions regarding the EU’s planned climate tariff, CBAM, prompting countries such as South Africa to demand equal treatment. The new tariff is likely to deal a severe blow to African economies. South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission estimates that CBAM would reduce African exports to the EU by 30-35% by 2030, representing a value of €1.7 to €2.1 billion.
Despite the trade agreement reached between the EU and the US this summer, Trump has threatened new tariffs on the EU in response to the €2.95 billion fine imposed on Google. He warned: “We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies.”
The Trump administration also continues to challenge the EU’s new digital rules – the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act – which it calls ‘Orwellian’. In doing so, it accuses the EU of censorship. Apparently, the US is even considering sanctions in the form of visa restrictions against EU officials in connection with the DSA.
Equally strong is the Trump administration’s opposition to the EU’s green regulations adopted during Von der Leyen’s first term, the era of the ‘green deal’. It has for example been objecting to the upcoming EU anti-deforestation directive, which was in fact already challenged by the Biden administration. These new EU rules ban the import of goods if producers fail to prove that no forests were felled in their production. In September, the European Commission proposed to delay the implementation of the directive a second time, until 2027 instead of 2026, blaming an IT system issue. Not long after, it once again changed the timing of the delay, adding confusion for everyone.
According to one member state source, the Commission’s concessions may be due to US pressure, and unrelated to the closure of the EU-Indonesia trade deal, as others have alleged. Trading partners like Indonesia and Malaysia are large exporters of palm oil and thereby heavily affected by the new bureaucratic burdens that EUDR would impose. Malaysia considers it unfair that its imports are classified as “standard risk”, as opposed to the US classification of “low risk”, given that deforestation there has improved significantly, with NGOs recognising a reduction of 13 per cent last year. Just as South Africa complaints about US privileges in the context of CBAM, also here, the new two-tier system for trading partners is under fire. In this way, Trump does not only affect EU regulation, but also the EU’s trade relationship with the rest of the world.
Not only did the Trump administration manage to get a de facto opt-out from the EU’s bureaucratic new deforestation rules, it is pushing for more. With Qatar, the U.S. has been urged the European Union to scale back the EU’s corporate sustainability directive CSDDD – the EU tends to love Communist-sounding acronyms. Thereby, both have threatened that the rules risked disrupting liquefied natural gas trade with Europe.
Suicidal energy policies
Despite the ongoing developments, the EU Commission’s 2026 work programme for 2026 appears to offer “business as usual”, without major changes to EU policy, apart from a “simplification” exercise that leaves major EU measure that burden competitiveness, like its ETS climate taxation, most “green deal” regulations, the AI Act or GDPR untouched. The centre-right EPP is likely to get some concessions on the new 2040 climate target the EU Commission has been pushing forward, but the question in the first place is whether there should be yet another climate target at all.
Simplification is good, but it is not enough. The EU’s climate taxation scheme ETS should be abolished, so to drastically cut the price of energy for European industry. At the moment, this tax is almost twice as high as the total US natural gas price, which in itself is only about one fifth of the natural gas price in Europe. Major chemical company INEOS is now advocating scrapping carbon taxation, but it remains a political taboo, despite the fact that the US, which does not have such a tax system, has managed to reduce CO2 emissions per capita relatively more than the EU since 2005.
The situation is urgent. Europe’s chemical industry, which is the bedrock of all other industry, has been scrapping lots of investment and jobs this year.
On the contrary, the European Commission is however pushing hard to simply continue with its plans to expand the EU’s ETS climate tax. This “ETS2” scheme is estimated to cost families up to 650 euros extra per year in terms of extra costs for fuel and heating. The institution seems completely tone-deaf to reality.
