Yes, it's carbon again

Political debate continually changes. David Miliband talked recently about carbon swipe cards, an issue we referred to in our piece about Any Questions.

Spiked ran a very readable piece yesterday about carbon swipe cards, too well written to summarise. Read and enjoy.

Carbon swipe cards seem to be the sort of idea that politicians play with when they sit around talking to each other and their sycophants, rather than getting out into the real world. What they never seem to suggest is that government should do less rather than more.

UKIP (I just knew they'd get into this piece somehow) could be the only party to oppose these cards. I doubt if Mr Green the Tory will dare rubbish them, and the idea feels so Lib Dem.

If you have worked through your political principles, you don't need months of policy gestation to produce a view. UKIP favours small government and lower taxes, so it's not hard to see that carbon swipe cards would not be a UKIP policy. This is not because of died in the wool bowler hatted political obscurantism, it's because the idea is bonkers.

Not all bad ideas start in Brussels. If you pretend they do, or only talk about the ones that start from there, you will be seen as a staring-eyed monomaniac who can only talk about one thing. Some people may come out and vote for you in Euro-elections with a shake of the head because those elections don't really matter, but that will be about it.

We can be more ambitious than that. So do we want to be a ghetto party, or join wider debates?