Letters / The way of the Greens
Thank you for your fine coverage of Alex Armitage’s election canvassing day.
Yes, indeed. Given half a chance, he and the Greens will certainly bring “significant change to the UK economy”!
They will send energy costs soaring, wrecking industry and exporting jobs to the Far East, notably, China. We shall then re-import the same goods we could have made ourselves, only produced with higher CO2 emissions, using coal, and transported half-way round the world, using oil.
Ditto for oil and gas exploration bans (unnecessary tanker and liquefaction emissions).
Handing vast swathes of fishing grounds to offshore wind, and re-joining the EU/Common Fisheries Policy will be disastrous for those two great Shetland industries.
“Environmental benefits”? Look no farther than Aith, Nesting and Weisdale.
Then consider the effect of twenty Viking Energy wind farms on the seabed, offshore. This is “saving the planet”?
Surely, there’s a better way?
Armitage asserts: “I’m not going to stop talking about it [Rosebank] because I think I might lose a few votes, … It’s my principle, and we need to keep oil and gas in the ground…”
That’s the way of the Greens. They know best and will force us to live their way, e.g. “highly-protected marine areas”, and coercing homeowners, at great personal expense, to change oil and gas heating to heat pumps.
This anti-democratic tendency is embedded in their political DNA. Patrick Harvie, Lorna Slater, and Ariane Burgess have it in spades.
Fortunately, Humza Yousaf, making his best decision as First Minister, pressed the ‘eject’ button, sending the Greens tumbling out of government.
In 2020, Extinction Rebellion planned to disrupt Heathrow Airport indefinitely with drones until a third runway was ruled out. Around the same time, it emerged they were listed as “extremist” by counter-terrorism police.
The group avoids democratic elections. They would poll fewer votes than the late, ‘Lord David Sutch’.
Yet, to this day, Dr Armitage remains unrepentant of his involvement with them, making a climate alarmist video at his hospital workplace and blocking London roads, saying: “I think it’s right to do everything we can, both within and outwith electoral politics to make a change.”
Really? ‘Hasta la vista’, democracy!
There is a place for civil disobedience. However, this is not it.
All the democratically elected, main parties support near-identical climate policies. There is no excuse for usurping the democratic process and it ill behoves a prospective parliamentary candidate to advocate doing so.
MPs are elected to represent their community, in general, not to provide a platform for promoting their own, extremist views.
John Tulloch
Aberdeen
