On energy and the European Union, the UK follows the arc of David Cameron’s career as prime minister: from bright green to olive drab to out.
Cameron took office in 2010 proclaiming the start of “the greenest government ever.”
Promises like that win leaders access to executive washrooms at EU headquarters, that fortress of climate-change sanctimony.
By the end of 2013, however, Cameron was dismantling the subsidies and other favors his government had created for uncompetitive energy forms.
British voters, it turns out, dislike double-digit annual percentage increases in the price of electricity. Inevitably, as pain like that grows, popular support for climatological central planning shrinks.
Little has been reported about how this political evolution might relate to the UK’s historic vote on June 23 to quit the EU.
Supposedly expert observers attribute the surprising outcome to worry about immigration and general discontent with EU imperiousness.
But immigration is nothing new to the UK, where an influx of Middle Eastern refugees is certainly no greater a problem than it is on the European mainland. And officials in Brussels didn’t suddenly turn high-handed.
There had to be a catalyst—probably several.
In freedom-loving cultures, few catalysts act more powerfully than imposed cost. The British know that from historic experience.
And recent experience gives them reason to connect burdensome energy bills with a “greenest-ever” government once eager to show EU leaders how to do climate leadership.
Cameron didn’t resign as prime minister because his anticarbon energy program provoked an uprising, of course.
He quit because he wagered his job on a referendum about EU membership thinking voters would choose to stay.
And for the shock that proved him wrong and deflated his leadership, pundits offer analyses that make the British, perhaps the worldliest people in history, seem suddenly xenophobic.
There has to be a better explanation for Brexit. Part of it must be that Brits resent having their pockets picked from abroad for reasons with which they no longer agree.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted July 1, 2016; author’s e-mail: [email protected])