Pet Hates

I'm in the mood for a good rant, and quite a few things have irked me over the last few days. They are:

• The obsession with climate change, to the extent that politicians now barely talk about anything else. Yesterday the Conservative Party proposed that big out-of-town supermarkets should be forced to charge parking fees, which I think is a great way of levelling the playing field to help small local businesses, but which was only presented as a way of cutting CO2 emissions by discouraging people to drive. Politicians only seem to care about wooing Middle England, and because Middle England is a flock of sheep who've bought the climate change argument wholesale, the policiticans have to join in the 'baaing' wholeheartedly in order to grab votes. What happened to the idea that we should just be trying to make Britain a nice place to live in? Because that's the better argument for this scheme.
  
• The sections of the liberal left wing in this country who seem to actively want coalition troops to fail in Iraq, because if the whole thing is a disaster it will prove them right and they can use it for their political advantage. Yesterday Simon Jenkins wrote that the gains from the surge are 'worth nothing' because they won't be 'embedded politically'; I felt the urge to yell "Speak for yourself, mate!" - I know if I was living in Baghdad that, first things first, a reduction in car bombings and sectarian violence wouldn't be 'worth nothing' to me.
  
• The proposal that pregnant women should be given £200 by the government to encourage them to eat more healthily. Yes, you read that correctly: it is actually thought that by giving all pregnant women one-off cash payments they will buy healthier food. Leaving aside the sheer idiotic naivety of the scheme, what annoys me in particular is it feeds into this ridiculous myth that eating healthily costs more money than going to McDonald's every day. As if the only thing keeping an unhealthy-eating pregnant woman from going to the grocers is because it's prohibitively expensive. It isn't. Absurd. These people really do believe, you know, that if you just throw money at a problem it will go away.
  

Well, I feel better now. Something more sensible tomorrow, perhaps.