Breathe It In, Suck It Up

As the past few decades have shown, there are any number of ways to reduce unemployment without violating the sanctity of market forces: tactics range from the relatively sophisticated (discounting the victims of taxpayer-funded forced-labour schemes) to the simply fraudulent (letting Iain Duncan Smith loose on the statistics). In any case, it is the numbers that matter, irrespective of any relation which said numbers may or may not have towards the real world.

This approach has gone so swimmingly that the greenest government ever now wishes to use it in improving the environment as well. According to its own advisers, pollution from diesel engines and fossil-fuel power stations is killing almost thirty thousand people a year; but attempts to control or, worse yet, eradicate such pollution would mean falling in with European regulations, and are therefore entirely out of the question. Hence, rather than doing anything silly and foreign like trying to limit the pollution, the Government has decided to go straight to the heart of the problem and cut down on the air quality monitoring which generates all those annoying figures. The closure of the monitoring stations could save almost fifty million pounds over ten years; which obviously would go a long way towards compensating the wider economy for the sixteen thousand million which health services are spending on poisoned proles.

Having launched the usual post-decision consultation, conveniently timed for the summer holiday so as to avoid too much time-wasting argument, the Department for Emissions, Fracking, Radiation and Asthma has complained that the present régime for monitoring air quality is "diagnosis driven", which self-evidently goes against the faith-based approach now in fashion. Defra is also worried that "the level of local reporting can distract resources from air quality improvement", for which the Oldspeak translation appears to be that too much information about health risks to unimportant persons can lead to demand for resources that would be more profitably expended on tax breaks for Cuadrilla.