Wind Farms and the Tyranny of the Elites

Ceausescu would have loved 'em

By James Delingpole

Wind farms are like one of those frustratingly unripened boils: you know that you shouldn't keep squeezing but they're so noxious and irritating and hideous that you just can't resist. If you've got the same problem, then I heartily recommend you read this brilliant essay on the subject by Russell Taylor.

I love his dismissal of people who claim to find wind turbines beautiful:

  "….a sentiment I find as credible as a Soviet peasant admiring the Tiger tank that had just squashed his grandmother."

But what really grabbed me was his analysis at the end of wind turbines' totemic significance to the left. I've touched on this before myself. It's why I christened them "eco-crucifixes", because they're not really about viable energy or even saving the planet but rather, like "stranded" polar bears on melting ice floes, an emblem of the ubiquity and dominance of the new global religion. And it's why, in the past, I have likened them to the fortress-like cathedrals the Catholic church erected to crush the resistance of the Cathar 'heretics' in South West France.

Taylor has a cleverer take:

Wind turbines serve an additional purpose for the Left, similar to that performed by the tower blocks Ceausescu built in the middle of farmland, or the factories found on the horizon of Soviet rural scenes: they are statements of power. These steel sentinels remind country-dwellers that they are within the gravitational pull of the capital’s dark star, and that if they believe they are free to reject the beliefs of the metropolitan elite, they can think again.

The countryside has long been an object of suspicion for liberal townies, who consider it a viper’s nest of erroneous thought, inhabited by toffs, retired colonels, golf-playing Rotarians and other conservative bogeymen. The propensity of country folk to choose their own values, to observe age-old traditions and to rely on each other to get by puts them in conflict with everything the Left stands for. In the liberal worldview, you’re either one of them, one of their flock, or an enemy of the people whose way of life must be destroyed. First they banned fox hunting, then they ruined the landscape. What next? Collectivised farms? Internment camps for UKIP voters?

As a country-dweller myself I know exactly what he means. In the country, I've noticed, a lot of people go slightly mad. Not in a bad way, necessarily. Rather they acquire the endearing eccentricities of people who are untrammeled by the more restrictive conventions of life in the big city. Westminster and its antics seem much more remote from where I am now in Northants than they did in my South London days. Literally, obviously, but also metaphorically. It's one of the tensions Suzanne Collins got right in The Hunger Games (at least in the first book, before the trilogy went off): between the metropolitan elite who believe not only that they are born to rule but that we should feel grateful for it; and the rebels in the provinces who couldn't give a stuff for the effete townies with their fancy ways and their stupid laws.

The wind farm issue, in other words, is like one of those rows a chap sometimes has with his wife or girlfriend or daughter: it's not really about the thing it pretends to be about. Or at least, not mainly.

Sure there are lots of very obvious reasons why wind farms are wrong in every way, economically, environmentally, socially. There are excellent new examples every day: remember the Pitcairn wind turbine fiasco?

But these, important though they are, are surface details. The real reason, I believe, that wind turbines have such resonance for so many of us, is because of the emotional undercurrent – the more abstract problems they symbolise.

One of these is our impotence in the face of a remote, out-of-control, democratically unaccountable political class. The speech Ed Davey gave in Brussels last night affords an excellent example of this (and why we're all turning to Ukip)

“There will always be those with a vested interest in the status quo. Who seek to create doubt where there is certainty,” he said. “And you will always get crackpots and conspiracy theorists who will deny they have a nose on their face if it suits them.

“But the truth is this: while forecasts of the future rate at which the world will warm differ, and while many accept we will see periods when warming temporarily plateaus, all the scientific evidence is in one direction.

“And climate change’s long-term impact on the global economy? Well, we can be sure it will make current economic troubles look mild in comparison.”

Now either Davey knows this rubbish isn't true, in which case he's lying. Or he doesn't know it isn't true, in which case he's culpably out-of-touch and ill-briefed. Either way he is wholly unfit for public office – and the fact that he exerts such a position of power and that there's apparently nothing anyone can do stop his deranged ramblings and economically suicidal policies makes an utter mockery of democracy.