The Blame Game

It can’t have escaped your notice that there’s no such thing as an accident or bad luck any more. Someone else is always to blame. Everyone is responsible except the ‘victim’. They just want the right to be compensated, even by themselves through their own taxes. Daft, eh? 

Blame extends to societal as well as personal misfortunes. Often the blame is misplaced. Consider our national sewage system; it’s in crisis, but a big part of the overload is caused by excessive domestic waste, storm water gushing into sewers, and wet wipes clogging pipes and machinery. Yet all the blame is directed at the water companies, as if the executives have invaded 5 Acacia Avenue and are abluting in our bathrooms, slapping slabs over our salvias and plunging plastics down our pans. It’s not them. It’s us.

Indeed, the water companies are so loathed that they are in the firing line more often than climate change as a major source of our national ills, even though climate change (and Joe Public) is to blame for worsening our sewage treatment capacity. For example, a recent algal bloom on Lake Windermere was blamed, by the Twits, on sewage. Not so; it was because the water temperature was higher than normal, because of climate change.

Another industry many love to hate is banking. Banks have been blamed for compounding the cost-of-living crisis by being too quick to raise mortgage rates and too slow to reduce them. I remember things being much worse many moons ago. It wasn’t a problem for me and Hubby, because we hadn’t borrowed the max, had budgeted for possible rate rises and had forgone many luxuries to build up healthy rainy-day savings. Nowadays, too many people think it’s their right to have the house they want, the holidays they want, the cars they want, the clothes they want, and they want everything now, so they borrow as much as they can and have no savings. When their self-inflicted Ponzi-scheme comes crashing down, they blame the banks (or capitalism or the establishment or meritocracy or … you get the picture).

The poster boy of blame is, of course, Brexit, currently getting it in the neck for high inflation when, in truth, Covid and Ukraine, Fishy Rishi and Hunt the Dunce and their cack-handed fiscal policies, and the Bank of England’s ham-fisted monetary policy are the root causes. The recurring headline at the BBC and the Guardian might as well be ‘Nigel Farage ate my hamster.’

Just as the water companies are more hated than climate change, similarly Brexit and Farage are more hated than the banks. According to those who normally bash the banks when all they’re doing is banking, it isn’t Coutts’ fault that Farage was de-banked; he only has himself to blame because he’s a horrid person. Scourge of decency Emily Maitlis commented, “But the power of the populist is to somehow turn utter entitlement into victimhood.” I wait to hear how Tasteless Maitlis cuboids her ellipsoid now that it’s been reported that arch-remoaner and scourge of democracy, Gina Miller, had her monster raving loony party de-banked. She told the BBC, "We do not have a functioning democracy if you cannot access a bank account." For once, I agree with her. Her banking problems will probably be resolved because of Farage exposing the banks’ intolerance of free speech. I hope she says thank you. Publicly.

Maitlis and Miller’s hot air leads me nicely back to climate change and its blame for the forest fires in southern Europe and northern Africa. Ever see the film The Day After Tomorrow? The scary thing was not just the extent of the apocalyptic weather, but the speed with which it took hold. The burning of fossil fuels is indeed a major cause of climate change, but the industry shouldn’t shoulder the blame alone. It’s our demand for their products that is the ultimate blame. Still, the decision by British banks to wind down lending facilities for the oil and gas companies (O&G) for ‘moral’ not financial reasons is actually an attack on democracy. Our elected Government continues to support the O&G industry, but banks have taken it upon themselves to stop banking and undermine Government policy by playing the blame game according to their arbitrary set of values. Whatever you might think of the Government’s climate change policies, better they are enacted according to the democratic process and not by bankers in grey suits, pink lipstick and ivory towers.

While a direct causal relationship between burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 and climate change has been irrefutably established, the link between livestock and climate change is unsound, yet still we meat-eaters are blamed for hell on earth. I recently saw a debate on YouTube between definitely-not-Gorgeous George Monbiot, he of Guardian infamy, and Zimbabwean livestock farmer and visionary Allan Savory. Monbiot parroted the four-legs-bad mantra with as much grace as Animal Farm’s Napoleon, and he berated Savory for his supposedly unscientific thinking and ‘sorcery.’ He hung his hat on the scientific method producing all the evidence needed to support his claims that we should all go vegan. Savory on the other hand explained that a holistic, systems-based approach was more appropriate than the scientific method, because livestock, the climate, biodiversity and soil are meshed in a complex, iterative system whose constituent parts and variables can’t be isolated for examination and ‘scientific’ experimentation.

In other words, the scientific approach is not foolproof when it comes to investigating the systemic impacts of climate change, biodiversity, soil health and livestock. I was surprised to hear Monbiot’s unquestioning adherence to the traditional method, because he’s got a science degree (zoology) and should understand its limitations. I could blame his poor cognitive function on his meat-free diet, but it’s more likely that he and other vegans want to ramp up the PR for their dietary fascism and think that blaming climate change on eating animal products will do the trick.

As it happens, one person’s blame is another’s commendation. Some people blame Farage for Brexit, while others commend him. Some blame the water companies for polluting our rivers and coastlines, but others commend them for investing £190bn to pollute a lot less today than they did pre-privatisation. Some blame farmers for climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity; others commend them for putting food on our tables. Know what? I thought I was working up to a ‘you-don’t-share-my-values justification for discrimination, disrespect, dourness and unkindness’ versus a ‘live-and-let-live mindset’ but I think I’ve talked my way into comparing a glass-half-empty versus a glass-half-full approach to life. Whatever ‘moral of the story’ you want to read into yet another long and winding blog, please don’t blame me for having different values from the herd mentality, but commend me for being true to myself.