Here is a confession: I wrote most of this post on January 17th, the day I read the Times article that I quote. Then something distracted me and I put it aside to finish later. It is now “later”, as in “250 days later”, and, having been reminded of the onrushing apocalypse by the reaction to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, I have finished it up and present it to you now.
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How’s your science fiction novel getting along? Oh. Sorry. Same here, I must admit.
Maybe we would be doing better if the government were paying us to write the stuff?
“Met Office forecasts a Britain of militia war, bartering and child labour”, the Times reports:
It is 2070 and Britain as we once knew it has vanished. The government has collapsed, the police and justice system no longer exists. Militias control feudal microstates within the UK, with people accepting severe restrictions on freedom in exchange for work and protection.
This is not the beginning of a sci-fi film but a report commissioned by the Met Office into how the UK might evolve over the next century.
The “Met Office” is the Meteorological Office, the UK’s national weather forecasting service.
The weather service is behind a “ground-breaking project” to explore five different paths the nation could take up to 2100, and show how it will be easier to mitigate and adapt to climate change in some versions of the future than others.
In one scenario, researchers explore what would happen if international tensions caused the UK to increase border controls and increase military spending. Political and social tensions would initially be spearheaded by “nationalistic public attitudes” that would support populist leaders who drive a breakdown in international relations. A lack of foreign trade would push the government to lift environmental regulations to focus economic growth on domestic manufacturing and intensive farming. Food safety and animal welfare standards would also be lowered.
By 2040, in this scenario, the four UK nations have become independent of one another, with strict border controls leading to the countries making use of their own resources. By the 2050s, the railway system, the NHS and universities will have collapsed, while “child labour re-emerges in connection to a widespread return to subsistence farming and bartering systems”. By the 2070s, the government has collapsed and militias enforce laws in microstates, while controlling resources and an illegal arms trade.
The scenario is one of five different outlooks called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, a UK-version of a framework used by international climate scientists and economists to examine how societies and economies might change over this century.
The Met Office report was carried out by Cambridge Econometrics, a consultancy firm, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and the universities of Edinburgh and Exeter. It was funded by the Met Office and UK Research and Innovation, a government-funded body.
There are a few more pessimistic scenarios, including one in which “a rich elite has privatised the NHS and introduced military conscription to deal with criminality and social unrest” (I could go with the first half of that) and then, shining softly in the darkness like your one permitted eco-friendly lightbulb, there’s the one where…
… the UK makes a “societal shift towards more environmentally sustainable systems”, researchers believe poverty will be “eliminated”. This would also involve rejoining a “progressive and expanded EU”.
They couldn’t resist.
In this outlook, the UK will have a “fully functional circular economy” as society quickly becomes more egalitarian, “leading to healthier lifestyles, improved well-being, sustainable use of natural resources, and more stable and fair international relations”.
Decades ago the U.S. Center for Disease Control got bored of doing its day job and decided to spend its time controlling guns instead. In vain did the Republicans add a rider to the 1996 omnibus spending bill telling ’em to stick to diseases; Obama repealed it. Turned out the CDC might indeed have been better employed doing what it said on the tin.
I hate to dash the dreams of fellow aspiring science fiction writers, but I think the same advice might apply to the Meteorological Office.
This sounds rather like the British Isles before Canute came in and civilized the place. Life in those days is often described as “nasty, brutish, and short”. If trends go on as they are now, we won’t have to wait until 2070 to find out.
I have read that Canute could be a ruthless Cnut on occasion – “The restored king swiftly led an army against Cnut, who fled with his army to Denmark, along the way mutilating the hostages they had taken and abandoning them on the beach at Sandwich in Kent” – but I always defend him against the charge that he actually believed that he could command the rising tide not to wet him. It was a gesture of humility and a rebuke to flattering courtiers.
As much as I’d like Washington DC and the surrounding area to simply be swallowed up by a giant sinkhole, I will say the National Weather Service (weather.gov) one of the few government entities that I actually use on a regular basis and appreciate their service.
The imagined Britain of 2070 – which, in their frothing at the gusset projected fantasy they will constitute this “rich elite” – would probably have difficulty feeding 5 million people.
In such feudal/medieval societies, the one thing these fantasist would be rulers seem to be unaware of is that the actual elites had to do their own dirty work. They had to be a warrior caste willing to pick up sword and wade in.
Don’t think there are many of them on facefuck or twatter.
We’re paying for this tripe!?
I’d imagine this isn’t covered in the organisations remit? In which case, people should lose their jobs for misuse of public funds.
The predictions of economic and social (societal) collapse are quite likely to come to pass – but they will be nothing to do with British C02 emissions, indeed efforts to curb British CO2 emissions may be part (part) of what brings about such a terrible situation.
Stuart Noyes and others – the Meteorological Office (the Met Office) is indeed now a far left, indeed Totalitarian Collectivist, outfit – but then so is just about every institution, public and private.
This is not an accident – the education system was permeated (“infiltrated” sounds so harsh) by totalitarian collectivist ideas – and so the people in turns out have these ideas, and they go into every institution (public and private – Big Business Corporate Bureaucracy – not “just” the government bureaucracy).
It is the same with the United States – with the Pentagon, as a matter of course, producing reports that are saturated with political and philosophical assumptions that are the opposite of those of the Founders – the assumptions of the modern “educated” establishment are the opposite of those of the Constitution of the United States, and of modern documents.
Read, for example, the 1968 Constitution of Florida (1968 – not 1768 or 1868) the philosophical and political assumptions that document is based upon are the opposite of what the typical senior Civil Servant (American or British) or Corporate Manager now believes.
The “Met Office” has produced an insane totalitarian collectivist document – but they do NOT see that it way. To them it is “The Science” – such things as government control of every person (regardless of C02 emissions – that is just the latest justification) is “scientific”.
For example, “Nature” (the leading general scientific publication in the United States) produced articles in support of the proposed (and utterly demented) Constitution of Chile – that the people of Chile overwhelmingly rejected.
To “Nature” the totalitarian collectivist ravings of this proposed Constitution were “scientific”.
I can remember when people told me it was “just” the study of the humanities and social sciences that were being corrupted in schools and universities – but now it is clear that the study of the physical sciences (including medicine – see the smearing of Early Treatment for Covid 19 over the last two years, and the pushing of lunatic “lockdowns”, and the pushing of “safe and effective” injections) has also been corrupted.
Western civilisation is indeed in danger of collapse – but people such as the “Met Office” are not fighting that collapse, on the contrary the philosophical and political ideas they have been fed (under the false name of “science” – as in “scientific socialism”) are what is driving Western Civilisation over the cliff.
And this is not confined to one organisation – it is just about all of them, public and private.
John O’Sullivan (a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher) is correct – one cannot realistically hope for an apolitical establishment – if one does not educate the future establishment members with one’s own beliefs, then the enemy (the left) will do it.
Anything that is not “right wing” will inevitably become “left wing” – institutions that are “neutral” or “a political” do-not-last, the left takes them over because they, the people going into these institutions, are not trained in ideological opposition to the left.
After all, even the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, was taken over by the left (in 1966 if you want the formal date – that is when the Jesuits adopted the leftist definition of the word “justice” and committed themselves to this political objective) – because they studied Marxism (originally with the desire to OPPOSE this evil) without any ideological training as to why Marxism, and other forms of “Social Justice” (Collectivist Totalitarianism) are wrong. They became the very thing they set out to oppose.
Saturate people who have no training in why leftist ideas are wrong, with leftist ideas and you get leftists – some strong-minded people may resist the indoctrination, but most will go-with-the-flow – the same in the Met Office as in the Jesuits (and before you laugh – remember how many Jesuits were distinguished scholars of the natural sciences).
For all the “Orban is evil – boo-hiss” (and he is certainly no saint) the government of Hungary gets one thing right – a conservative cadre most be created who know WHY totalitarian collectivist “Social Justice” ideas are wrong, practically wrong and morally wrong.
One cannot rely on any institution, including in the natural sciences, being “a political” – in real life there is no such thing (as John O’Sullivan correctly points out), because there are no real “a political” individual human beings. Everyone has some sort of beliefs – and if they are not on our side, they will be on the other side.
Senator Roscoe Conkling was correct, way back in the 19th century, the very idea of a “scientific” “apolitical” Civil Service is nonsense – if people (including government officials) are not on one side, they are on the other side.
“Does this mean there are not objective truths in the physical sciences?” – no, there are objective truths in the physical sciences, but how government (or private) officials react to those truths (to those facts of the natural sciences) will depend on their philosophical and political (yes political) beliefs.
If you have government officials (or Big Business Corporate Managers) with Collectivist Totalitarian (“Social Justice”) beliefs, those are the policies they will push. Including in the Met Office – or anything else in the natural sciences.
And, yet again, looking for “a political” or “neutral” people is folly – utter folly.
They will claim it is covered because projections / forecasting of social condition informs the risk calculations for assessing the risk and damages projected to be caused by long term climate change. Yes, forecasts of social conditions, forecasts of risks and damages of hypothetical future weather, forecasts of long term climate change all compounded together with the errors compounding right along; this is modern “science” to which we are all told to bow down. All by an organisation that can’t predict tomorrows weather with a high degree of confidence if the weather is any more dynamic than a dead calm.
I remember the Communist Party member of “SAGE”, the British government scientific advisory body, defending herself by saying that all the other members of SAGE, who were NOT members of the Communist Party had similar societal (political) objectives to herself – and I believed her. After all the Conservative party government never thought that a POLITICAL test would be important for membership of a scientific body. In reality such a political test is absolutely vital – as what advice, including what scientific and medical advice, people give you will be influenced (massively influenced) by their political beliefs – by what sort of society they wish there to be.
In short, in an American context, Senator Conkling was correct and President Garfield, with his desire for an “apolitical” “scientific” Civil Service, and a vast network of Federal government schools that would (supposedly) prevent black people becoming an “American peasantry” (why is being a small farmer a bad thing anyway?) was away with the elves and pixies.
Paul, you’re preaching to the choir and you’re rambling. Wouldn’t your efforts be more productively spent producing one or two really well researched leaflets that you can distribute to your ward?
Wouldn’t this be better stated without the citation? It’s not a particularly profound observation, I’m sure others have made it before. If the reader is positively inclined toward Margaret Thatcher they might possibly be primed to pay more attention, I suppose, but for every person so inclined you may have another who would reject the observation that the sky is blue if an advisor of Thatcher made such an observation.
Let’s break it down a little further: first you are taking it as an axiom that the Met Office is accepted as part of “the establishment” by a reader. That will not be so taken by many people including scientific advisors who feel they are ignored by the same “establishment”. Later you are asserting that “the left” is the enemy. You may well assume most people at Samizdata agree with this but if your hope is to persuade people perhaps consider that it is those on “the left” that you are attempting to reach (or should be).
Again you are here setting up the dichotomy of “left wing” and “right wing” which is not particularly useful in the current context (we have a government popularly imagined to be “right wing” which has not really behaved as such, if the term even has any currency), and again it’s parenthetical to your argument in any case; the statement would stand without the references to “right” and “left” you may state it as “Any institution that is neutral or apolitical will not remain so, it will be taken over by political activists because the staff is not trained for idealogical opposition to politicization”.
For the majority of people the Jesuits are little known, sad but true I think you will find. Therefore the revelation that they were politically infiltrated is not particularly informative. Now I know that you are particularly opposed to Marxism and its social justice variants like watermelon greens but imagine for a moment that there existed a group of greens not ideologically driven by Marxism but from some variant of conservatism, let’s say Christians for Ecological Conservation who take the stewardship argument to an utterly illogical extent. I imagine you would not want such a group to have undue influence in “the establishment” like, perhaps, the Met Office. I don’t think most people would want that either. What constitutes undue influence is one aspect but certainly political capture of a taxpayer funded organization by such a group would be distasteful to many people, I think. Imagine the Met Office put instructions to only eat fish in the weather forecast on Fridays, with a hint that this might be enforced by government nudges (like excessive taxation of other goods) in future. The point I am making is that the exact form of this political influence is actually rather irrelevant to most people; probably the majority might agree that there should not be excessive political influence in an institution that ostensibly exists to forecast the weather.
This is meaningless, it is a truism. Saturate people who have no training in resisting indoctrination with Islamic ideas, Christian ideas, Fascist ideas, Communist ideas, Hellenic ideas, and most people will go along with them to a point save some strong-minded people who resist indoctrination. In other words, you must recruit people who are resistant to indoctrination and reward efforts to resist groupthink. So perhaps that should be the public sector recruitment policy for n Party, and they would be worth voting for.
Parenthetical reference to ideologically distasteful government that will surely reduce your audience further still aside, this is perfectly true. Yet for all the virtual ink you spill in asserting totalitarian collectivist ideas are “wrong, practically wrong and morally wrong” you are a comparative spendthrift in writing why they are wrong. This is a domain in which your wide ranging knowledge might practically be put to use, rather than in parenthetically citing figures modern and historic in polemics perhaps you could produce a couple of really solid arguments showing lesser known examples of these ideas being followed, how they were resisted and what the practical and moral consequences were backed up with citations of verifiable fact rather than your usual citations of opinion.
Apolitical is usually written “apolitical” in the same way as “agnostic” i.e. without γνῶσις (gnosis) or sans knowledge; or amoral i.e. without morals. This is a grammatical structure derived from ancient Greek called (from Roman times onward) the alpha privativum, which inverts the meaning of the subsequent term. Being a grammar school boy I know such things; I usually ignore such grammatical errors after all I certainly make them from time to time, but I can do excessive asides too. It’s not particularly effective at persuading people though, it makes one look a prick. Repetition of your argument ad nauseam has a similar effect, repetition is rhetorically used three times and no more as a rule, and the more subtlety in which it is done the more effective is the general consensus.
Generally speaking citing a historic figure is usually used to add weight to ones argument by association. It isn’t a rhetorical device I particularly like because it is lazy and insults the intelligence of the reader, and it can also be sometimes rather weaselly i.e. did the cited person believe this to be true? However citing a long dead senator who most people probably haven’t heard of doesn’t even have that rhetorical effect going for it. So Conkling opposed an apolitical civil service, did he? Well, having looked up the man I can see he is not well loved even by his political descendents. He is generally seen as someone who wanted to continue a system of spoils. Is this really what you’re using to advance the argument that we must not allow ideological capture of the civil service by the radical left? Or is it your argument that no civil service body can ever be trusted because they will be ideologically captured in any case. Does it then follow that you are suggesting we might as well allow people to buy a post as a senior civil servant as per Conkling?
Another truism, you may say the same of clergy, the armed forces, retired minicab drivers or the general public at large. What is the substance of your argument? That we must resist ideological capture or that ideological capture is inevitable?
Correct, which is why most people I think would want people who are not in thrall to any particular ideology. Is this realistic, perhaps not but you’ve not really presented any argument that people can never act against their beliefs. Many people do that quite often. There are Christians who must reconcile their beliefs with practices they may personally disapprove of but must do to keep their jobs. The BBC was famous for achieving a certain level of balance, whether this was true or not is debatable but given how naked their politics has become in recent years it follows that they previously did a good job of at least hiding their ideological capture if not actually being balanced. We ask a jury to put aside their personal beliefs when sitting in a case. If it is your assertion that people can never overcome their personal politics does this mean a republican should never sit in a jury for a case in which a gun was used, or someone who has campaigned for racial equality cannot be trusted to be fair in a trial of black person?
Steven R writes of the US National Weather Service that it is “one of the few government entities that I actually use on a regular basis and appreciate their service.”
Same here in the UK. When the Met Office sticks to its day job, it is actually rather good at it.
On June 6th 2004 (blimey, that makes me feel old – but pleased that I had remembered it so well) the late Brian Micklethwait wrote a post for Samizdata called “Weather forecasts are up there with dentistry” in which he started by recounting the Met Office’s most famous triumph, getting the forecast right for D-Day, and then went on to say:
He then talked about why there is this island of State competence amid an ocean of State incompetence.
That may have been the case historically but it certainly isn’t recently. In my locality the Met Office frequently predicts rain that doesn’t arrive (at all, not merely late), gets the temperature wildly wrong (-/+ 5℃), says it’s cloudy when it’s sunny, sunny when it’s cloudy. For instance right now it’s supposed to be 15℃ and cloudy, but it’s 19℃ and sunny. Yesterday evening it was a 10% chance of precipitation, it was raining heavily with thick black clouds. I remarked to my farmer friend that it was going to rain shortly, he said it’ll pass over because the news forecast had said it would (it starting raining even as we said goodbye, and was coming down heavily as I got home 5 minutes later).
During the hot weather in the summer the Met Office forecast (which I follow closely, for amusement as much as anything else) was frequently several degrees hotter than what actually transpired. There was nothing to cause this divergence between forecast and reality; it wasn’t as though clouds arrived or showers of rain to cool the parched ground. No, it remained cloudless and without the merest of breeze in the long summer days of July and August but the exaggerated temperatures forecast by the Met Office failed to arrive (it was, however, pretty hot). I’m basing this assertion on my own outdoors thermometer as well as observations from nearby private weather stations and from the official Met Office stations that are nearest, all of which lined up much more closely with each other than with the forecast. No surprise there, you may well say but why did they not adjust the next forecast inline with what the evidence was telling them – you can’t have more than 100% sun, and humidity was low due to the drought; one day was not going to be much different than the next in such conditions, a rarity in the UK.
I’m not in the Outer Hebrides (sadly), I’m in the South West of England with a local climate that has become quite predictable.