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Why do greens keep mentioning the war?
...In truth, as this new report demonstrates, there is no damage that could be done by climate change that would be as bad as that wrought by green policies themselves.

What did the Second World War bring to the people of Britain? Highlights in this new report include a 25 per cent cut in coal usage, an 11 per cent fall in food consumption, an 82 per cent fall in the use of electrical appliances, and a 95 per cent drop in the use of motor vehicles. Most people would see such declines in living standards as a disaster. The current recession has produced nothing like that scale of devastation. Yet The New Home Front describes these things as ‘achievements’.

‘Yes, times were hard’, writes Simms. ‘People suffered and endured for a greater good. They were all in it together.’ It must have been a great comfort to share in such misery.

Some of the public-information messages during the war sound like they could have come straight from the modern eco-catechism. ‘At this most important time, needless travel is a “crime”’, declared a railway poster, prefiguring the green demand to stop flying, driving or otherwise venturing any distance from home. ‘As part of your personal share in the Battle for Fuel’, read a wartime hotel bathroom sign, ‘you are asked NOT to exceed five inches of water in this bath. Make it a point of honour not to fill the bath above this level.’ Today, the Battle for Bathwater has become the War on the Power Shower....

...None of these ideas are new. Greens have been banging the drum for a revival of wartime poverty and the imposition of green policies by diktat for years (see Bali: no more jaw-jaw, this is climate war). Unable to convince us through modern arguments about the need to adopt their ideas, environmentalists seek to revive the spirit of the Last Time Britain Achieved Anything, which is how a lot of people see the Second World War.

Actually, those of us who have long loathed the anti-human, wealth-bashing tendencies of the green movement should warmly welcome The New Home Front - because it makes abundantly clear just what a bunch of comfort-hating nutters greens really are. If they had their way, as the report shows all too clearly, there would be ‘dark days ahead’ (probably literally, as we get forced to turn off the lights to save power)....