A Legitimate Role for the State

Those Conservatives of a modernising bent who fear for the continuity of our political administration will be reassured by the Government's latest demonstration of respect for local democracy. The Bullingdon Club's leftover token wog, Sajid Javid, has fended off his deportation for another few months by overruling Lancashire council to allow the fracking company Cuadrilla to start drilling under the hovels of the plebs. Shale gas causes economic growth and jobs and will make us less reliant on imports, unlike nasty old solar power which apparently has to be brought in from hot countries; and Javid evidently considers the people of Lancashire to be part of the privileged few, rather than part of the everybody in whose favour the present régime claims to be tilting the economy. For some reason, all this appears to have caused a degree of annoyance among the avocado-guzzling sandal-wearers infesting the Northern Powerhouse. Also relegated to the metropolitan élite are all the other signatories to the Paris climate agreement, which Her Majesty's Government is blithely tearing up along with the Human Rights Act, the rules on child protection and all those other scraps of paper.