With my Manchester Climate Monthly hat on:

The group I am part of, Climate Emergency Manchester, did its best during the election campaign to get candidates to say yes or no to three simple climate pledges

Most Labour candidates studiously ignored CEM (and again, am writing in a personal capacity here) on Twitter, and ignored the registered post letters we sent. Some are beginning to Tweet about green stuff again.

One Labour candidate said no to all three.

A bunch of Labour candidates said yes to all three.

A couple of said yes to numbers two and three but no to number one because it couldn’t be implemented. This was, of course, bullshit, but not completely laughable (If you can’t even get your own councillors and officers to tell the truth about something as simple as this, why do you think it’s credible to promise a “zero-carbon by 2038” city? Srsly.

But today, there was a new wrinkle. A re-elected Labour councillor was asked about the first commitment. Their scarcely believable answers was in essence that, to paraphrase, it would exclude elected members from engaging in discussions about progress on the city’s carbon budget because many of them are unfamiliar with the technical language, metrics etc used to measure emissions. Basically it would be counter-productive because council members would be “afraid to get things wrong” and which would prevent them from engaging in meetings…

Deep breath. Deeeeep breeaaaathhh… And breeaaathe….

Ah, fuck it.

Seriously. If you as so dumb that you cannot understand

a) the concept of a budget (a carbon budget is no different from a household budget, a calorie diet ) and

b) that this budgetis being used up too quickly,

then (shouting again)

HOW ARE YOU ABLE TO GET SELECTED AS A LABOUR CANDIDATE?  Oh, I forgot, they like drooling morons because they are more obedient.

The councillor is flailing around for plausible sounding excuses, but failing in their flailing. What the councillor is saying, in essence, is “no, we should be allowed to spout convenient talking points and aspirational bollocks without fear of having to have those compared with grim reality. Anything else would be an infringement on our human rights to be drooling morons who do whatever we are told because we like it that way and/or it is good for our careers.”

We’re totally toast.