Send them vainglorious

What makes ministers tick? Probably a combination of vanity and ignorance.

They have thrown huge amounts of our money at nationalised schooling. But despite dumbing down, results haven't improved in proportion.

They have thrown huge amounts of our money at the nationalised health service. Yet we have plague hospitals run by managers who reject unfavourable information. The media report today that a quarter of hospital trusts in England are failing to meet new standards on infection control.

The state takes citizens' money and uses it to disempower us. The staff at Maidstone could not raise their voices about what was going on at their hospital, and it's hard to see how local people could have brought any pressure to bear.

Yet the Stalinist vanity of ministers knows no bounds. They also think they should tax us and hector us about global warming. That is even though

• It hasn't been happening lately. For example, the southern hemisphere had a cold winter.
• Even if the earth is warming, it's not clear it's caused by humanity.

Now Philip Stott has picked up a piece in The Times headed

China’s drive for wealth means end of our low-carbon dreams

Stott summarises the argument thus. China aims to make every citizen twice as rich by 2020. So it will need ever more raw materials, especially coal.

What does this mean? Put bluntly, it means that the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions is dead and so is any prospect of persuading Beijing to bind itself to other curbs on carbon emissions.

Our politicians' attempts to convert to a low carbon economy are

1. Pointless - "the UK accounts for only 2 per cent of world energy demand, a figure that will fall to around 1.4 per cent by 2020".
2. Threatening our future prosperity. China and other developing countries will need ever more oil, gas and coal, forcing their prices up. But we have no economic substitutes. "If the West weakens its investment in oil and gas, and fails to adopt a new generation of nuclear power, it will be in grave economic danger", or as the writer in The Times puts it, “The feeble intellectual response of Europe and America to this energy challenge is becoming a matter not of concern but alarm”.

The army, the schools, the hospitals, the floods, foot and mouth, drinking hours, road pricing - it's hard to think of something this lot has got right. But they still preen themselves that they can preach on green morality.

And their opponents are just as bad. There seems to be a politicians' mindset. Vainglory all round.