RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: If you thought the Bog Roll Bandits were bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet…Get ready to shiver, starve and make do and mend

When Mum died last March we were sorting through her stuff and stumbled across a book of petrol coupons, left over from the 1966 seamen’s strike.

I joked to my sister, Viv, that the way things were going they’d probably come in handy some day soon.

Mum belonged to the ‘make do and mend’ generation who survived the privations of World War II. Nothing was taken for granted.

By the time I came along in 1954, wartime rationing was still in force, almost nine years after the cessation of hostilities. It didn’t end until the summer of that year. A few months after I was born the last restrictions on how much food you were allowed to buy were finally lifted.

The instant gratification-on-demand society which today’s millennial snowflakes consider to be their birthright was still decades away, but my generation was brought up to believe things could only get better.

And, let’s be honest, by and large they have, certainly in material terms. There’s been the odd hiccup — Suez, the Sheikh Rattle’N’Roll Opec energy crisis of the early 1970s, assorted strikes by miners, the Winter of Discontent and the aforementioned National Union of Seamen’s strike. And the war in Ukraine, which weaponised Russia’s gas supplies, hasn’t helped.

But in the scheme of things we’ve been on the Up Escalator for the past seven decades.

Apart from the insane bog roll banditry and demented gangs of dried pasta plunderers during the first wave of Covid, stripping the shelves of Andrex and boil-in-the-bag spaghetti, we’ve gone short of very little. Rationing is a distant memory.

We confidently believed the days of Dad’s Army’s resident High Class Butcher Jack Jones telling Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly that she could only get two pork chops and a small lamb’s kidney to go with her upside-down cake this week were long gone.

But we hadn’t reckoned with the global warming zealots, who are determined to turn the clock back to 1943. These hair-shirt headbangers want to reverse the tide of human history as part of their crusade against climate change.

If it was up to them, trains and boats and planes would have died with Burt Bacharach. We’re being forced out of our efficient and increasingly clean internal-combustion cars and trucks and made to buy expensive electric alternatives, even though there is nowhere near the capacity to power them, nor any prospect of that happening in a hurry.

Left to true believers, we’d have to walk or cycle everywhere or run around in primitive foot-powered cars like The Flintstones.

Yabba dabba doo!

Supersonic air travel went out the window when the last Concorde was scrapped. And the cheap package holiday is already under threat.

Now a group of environmental ‘experts’ has come up with a plan to bring back rationing of everything from petrol and electricity to clothing and even meat to combat climate change.

‘We’re being forced out of our efficient and increasingly clean internal-combustion cars and trucks and made to buy expensive electric alternatives, even though there is nowhere near the capacity to power them, nor any prospect of that happening in a hurry’

Researchers at Leeds University want the Government to restrict the import of fossil fuels and ‘manage the scarcity’ of everyday essentials. We’d all be issued with ‘carbon cards’ to limit what we are permitted to buy. Laws would be introduced restricting our ability to take long-haul flights.

According to their study: ‘Governments could ration specifically selected goods. The concept of rationing could help, not only in the mitigation of climate change but also in reference to a variety of other social and political issues.’

Dr Rob Lawlor, who is described as a lecturer in inter-disciplinary ethics at Leeds, said: ‘There is a limit to how much we can emit if we are to reduce the catastrophic impacts of climate change. In this sense the scarcity is very real.’

Where do they find these people? And what on earth is a lecturer in inter-disciplinary ethics? Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. Never mind emissions, what there really is no limit to is the madness being put forward in the name of ‘combating climate change’.

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, ridiculous empty cycle lanes, ULEZ, 15-minute cities, you name it. Anything they can think of to make our lives more miserable and inconvenient.

And now they want to tell you how many sausages to eat and how many pairs of knickers you can buy each month.

What we are seeing is a quasi-religious fatwa to halt scientific and technological progress.

They won’t be happy until we are all queuing Soviet-style round the block for the last bowl of gruel in the shop. How long before ‘climate change’ fanatics come up with a plan to uninvent the wheel?

‘A group of environmental ‘experts’ has come up with a plan to bring back rationing of everything from petrol and electricity to clothing and even meat to combat climate change’

Soon we’ll all be wearing darned hand-me-down clothes from the Oxfam shop and young women will be forced to walk the streets dressed like the late Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

(Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be all bad.)

But the prospect of formidable fishwives fighting over the last rasher of strictly rationed streaky bacon in Corporal Jones’s butcher’s shop is not something which we should willingly contemplate.

Still, these days flat-Earth global warming dogma always takes priority over progress. So it’s probably only a matter of time before these insane Back To The Future proposals become official Government policy.

If you thought the Bog Roll Bandits were bad enough, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Get ready to shiver, starve and make do and mend.

Now where did I put Mum’s petrol coupons?

Source: Read Full Article