https://cliscep.com/2019/07/21/mark-maslins-plans-to-fix-democracy/
By Paul Matthews
I’ve written previously about Mark Maslin and his interest in trying to “fix” democracy. In that instance, a brown-nosing interview with Al Gore, it wasn’t very clear what was meant, beyond the point that fanatical extremists like him weren’t getting their way and therefore democracy was malfunctioning.
Well, it’s now becoming a little clearer how Maslin and his ilk want to corrupt and subvert democracy. He features prominently in a Guardian article, Britain’s first climate assembly: can it help fix democracy too?
The article claims that “In an airless library in north London, 56 people are trying to help fix not one global crisis but two.” Both crises are fictitious, one being the fake climate “emergency” (see for example this BBC article supposedly explaining what it is but not even attempting to do so, and this blog where a “professor of climate leadership” failed to answer the question I asked) and the other being an alleged but again undefined crisis in democracy.
The idea is to get a group of random people into a room, and then try to brainwash them:
Climate experts such as Prof Mark Maslin, of University College London, set out the indisputable science of the climate emergency. Participants have yellow and red cards to slow him down or stop him if they get lost. (“It’s the first time I’ve ever been red-carded during a presentation,” he says later.)
Well, yes, he should be sent off for foul play, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Perhaps the plan is to tell them a pack of lies about increasing floods and storms. Then, when these people have been suitably re-educated, they then convey Maslin’s their ideas to the council for implementation.
Things may not go entirely according to plan though:
And one juror, Neil Chappell, who works in construction, wonders who chose the experts and how they chose the facts. “The people they had talking were good at getting their agenda over but didn’t give us enough information to make informed decisions,” he said.
But enemies of the people like Neil Chappell who exhibit such wrongthink could presumably be dropped from the panel.
What I find disturbing about this is not just the dishonesty, and the Orwellianism of doing exactly the opposite of what you say you are doing, but that it is so blatant and brazen, with nobody (except perhaps Mr Chappell) seeing through it. MP Keir Starmer seems to think it’s a good idea, and that it will lead to a “different kind of political dialogue”, and the council members are apparently “enthusiastic about the process and adamant they will act on its recommendations”. Really? Adamant? One of the possible recommendations is to fit all the buildings in Camden with heat pumps and insulation, which would cost £1.3bn.
The climate assembly scheme is going national in the autumn, because Extremism Rebellion demanded it.
Update:
Jaime has found some documents and video clips from the Citizens Assembly from the Camden Council website.
It’s worse than we thought. There’s some introductory blurb form the leader of the council and Keir Starmer. There is a pdf of Maslin’s slides (and it’s very disappointing to see Tamsin Edwards’s name on there). Guy Callendar gets a mention, though his conclusion that “the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power”does not. Rather than showing a graph of London temperature, Maslin uses one of Ed Hawkins’s ridiculous stripes pictures. There is a blatant lie about the Paris Agreement – a claim that it aims to cut emissions to net zero. The slides confirm that the so-called ‘solutions’ that the Guardian presents as if they were suggestions form the citizens, were in fact dictated to them by Maslin.
In his talk, he starts off by saying “This is the bit where I sort of really make sure you’re depressed…”
