New King Coal

The prospects for our natural resources providing Britain with an almost unlimited amounts of energy seem to just get better and better. News of potentially huge discoveries of coal beneath the North Sea that could potentially power Britain for centuries (H/T our very own dear Roger Helmer's twitter feed).

Shale gas....Coal.....Oil...even Thorium...we have potentially a wonderful new age of secure, cheap energy at our fingertips. Properly managed and with bold local devolution of resource rights, we could use this to power an industrial renaissance and rebalance our economy away from London and the South East.

How depressing it is that we are stuck with our effete, blinkered and timid Political Class, still infected with all the sanctimonious hypocrisy of "green crap", busy masturbating their MetroLib egos and polishing their CV's as the opportunities continue to slip through our fingers.

How depressing that they lack the guts to devolve mineral rights to individuals or at least local councils who could use them to rebuild local economies far more effectively than a greedy Treasury who will see them all as a short term cash-cow and squander then as assuredly as they squandered North Sea oil.

How depressing that we are stuck in the EU, with it's vested interests in outdated Uranium nuclear technology, leaving Norway and China to go for the much safer and much more plentiful Thorium option.

We will never be free to fulfil our potential as a nation until this wretched Political Class is utterly destroyed. Let us redouble our efforts to do precisely that.

Can Shale Gas Revive Our Great Northern Cities?

Yesterday, the British Geological Survey issued the astonishing announcement  that the UK could host up to 1,700 cubic feet of shale gas - enough to heat up British homes for up to 1,500 years at current demand (£).

It's well known that in America the shale gas revolution is well under way, has vastly lowered gas prices and is expected to lead a re-industrialisation of the American economy, as firms "re-shore" energy-intensive production.

But this being Britain, our cautious technocrats are filled with negativity. "No game changer" says Sam Laidlaw of Centrica. Moreover, even if shale gas was exploited, we can't even expect lower gas prices.

Various reasons are cited for the lack of shale gas potential, such as land ownership in the US (there you, not the government, own the mineral rights,  incentivising exploration), no supply chain, too urbanised an environment, fear of earthquakes, etc.

All these (apart from the earthquake nonsense) may be legitimate arguments, but yet again what is striking is the total lack of political will to do anything about them.  It's hard not to think that the country is slowly but surely slipping back into the timidity, smallness and meanness of spirit which so characterised the 1970s, "led" as we are  by a cowardly, corporatist establishment. To add to our woes, the environmentalist lobby  has an instinctive hatred of anything that is not renewable, and our MetroLib political class has signed up pretty much wholesale to the fashionable green energy agenda.

The second very revealing - and equally depressing - fact is the whole Metropolitan tone of coverage of the issue. It is instructive that The Times article (£) cited above on the subject talked very much about the likely impact on heating bills rather than on the potential for re-industrialisation. Industry, you see, is something fashionable MetroLib types just don't do. It brings back images of rough, probably Northern (yuck) men is flat caps doing dirty and dangerous jobs.  It's hard to see a man as effete as Nick Clegg getting excited about reopening steel works or chemical plants.

Even if somehow despite official lack of enthusiasm shale gas did take off, we may never reap the benefits. Theodore Dalrymple argues depressingly but convincingly in Standpoint magazine that we would suffer a Resource Curse similar to many developing countries who have totally squandered mineral wealth. Namely our rent-seeking political class would just use the proceeds to feather the nests of their own client groups. The Labour Party, which in theory may be expected to welcome the prospect of a revitalised industrial North, would of course in fact much prefer that they remain sovietised and moribund, dependent on government largess.

UKIP's Opportunity

Which brings use to yet another opportunity for UKIP, and more importantly a moral mission. Currently, the party is engaged in a battle to win over Labour voters, who have largely been abandoned by what has become the party of the white collar public sector with a thoroughly Metropolitan leadership. In the short term we are focusing, correctly, on the likely impact Romanian and Bulgarian immigration will have on working class communities when entry restrictions are lifted in January 2014. However there is only so far a party can go on the politics of fear and negativity. Eventually people will, rightly, expect from us a positive vision of the future.

In the post-industrial landscape of the North, where of course most of the Labour heartlands reside, people have been bereft of a constructive vision of the future for a very long time. Various ideas have been tried, of course, but few if any have really resonated with proud working-class communities built on the toil of heavy industry. But what would resonate very deeply with them would be the return of skilled manual, masculine jobs in areas that desperately need them, in traditional industries that fit with Northern culture.

For this reason, UKIP should repeatedly and aggressively state our intention to explore every opportunity to see if cheap energy from shale gas could be used to re-industrialise our great Northern cities. For instance, if mineral rights are a problem for shale gas exploration, why not allow their privatisation by allowing landowners to buy them if they so wish? If infrastructure is a problem, wouldn't the money currently been squandered on the ruinous HS2 project be better spent here?

We shouldn't over-egg the pudding and build up false hopes of course, but at least by championing the issue of potential re-industralisation we would show that we alone genuinely care for the people and their passions and - most importantly of all - their future dignity in areas that our Metropolitan LibLabCon parties do not even wish to reminded of let alone understand. It may seem strange to Southern ears, but to at least partially rebuild the great industrial heartlands: the savage beauty of the steelworks of Sheffield, Newcastle and Hartlepool, the chemical plants of the Wirral and the ship-makers of the Tyne, is a deeply romantic one to those Northern cities who in the past thirty years feel they have lost their soul. And, in the end, a successful political vision does require a degree of romance.

Shale Gas Will Destroy Islamism

Three seemingly disparate stories to mull over:

1. Yet again sectarian violence flared at an EDL Demonstration in Walthamstowe.
2. John Hayes - a pro- shale gas MP, is appointed as Energy Minister
3. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports in the Daily Telegraph that Saudi Arabia may hit Peak Oil much sooner than expected.

So what connects them?

As many people know, the Saudis use their vast oil wealth to finance the spread of the ultra-puritan Wahabi strain of Islam, with new mosques and preachers being sent all over the world, not least to Western Europe, in order to radicalise the local Muslim population. Fears about rising Muslim demographics and Islamic radicalism  has created a reaction in the formation of Defence Leagues in several countries, of which the English Defence League was the first. Sectarianism, almost totally absent from England for hundreds of years, is very much on the rise and many of our cities appear to on the edge of being ulsterised. Meanwhile, our cosseted  Metropolitan Liberal elite simply turn a blind eye and pretend such events aren't really happening, and if even they are, don't form part of an escalating and very ominous trend.

Why then is there reason, in the long term, to be optimistic that Islamism will be defeated? Yes, the link between declining Saudi oil revenues and the ability to finance Wahabism is an obvious one, but what on Earth has that got to do with shale gas?

The answer lies in understanding mainstream Sunni Islam theology. Unlike Christianity, which (mostly) made its peace with science several hundred years ago, Sunni Islam completely rejects the laws of cause and effects that are the very basics of physics. Whereas Christianity is more or less happy with the concept that God created a rational universe for man bound by certain laws, in Sunni theology, Allah wills at any given moment what occurs*. The concept of fixed physical laws, and for that matter human Free Will, are considered serious blasphemy.

Hence the presence and extraction of huge quantities of oil in Saudi Arabia is seen as evidence of Allah's continued approval of Wahabism, as he wills its bounty from moment to moment.* Saudi oil therefore doesn't only finance the spread of militant Islam, but even more gives it a great deal of intellectual underpinning as well.

It follows that as the oil runs out in Saudi Arabia and vast shale gas reserves are exploited in the West, the theological rationale behind Islamism will be undermined.

Unless of course, radical Muslims interprete a causal relationship between the discovery of shale gas in Europe and the rapidly changing demographics in their favour.

Oh, hang on a minute....

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*For a fascinating discourse Sunni theological development, I would strongly recommend 'The Closing of the Muslim Mind' by Robert Reilly.