How to Introduce Rationing

Politicians and civil servants have never forgotten the thrill of total war and the power it gave them to direct all the goods and services in the entire economy.  They created artificial shortages to magnify the effects of war so that when rationing was introduced the public saw the coupons as smoothing out supply and accepted them.  It was the manipulation of perception.  

But that war is over.  Without a permanent enemy, how is one to impose a parallel currency such as carbon credits, or manufacture the warrant to reach right in to every household and dictate that they must use expensive complex light bulbs which are not very bright,  or to insist that some irrelevant jobsworth must write an energy performance certificate for every house when it is sold?  How is one to dominate civil society and bring it under central European control?

Easy. Make the effects of bad weather worse by deliberately mis-managing the landscape,  then call it Man Made Climate Change.  Then demand even more power to deal with it.

It may be that Environment Agency simply bungled the management of the Somerset Levels. It may be that the land was inadvertently flooded on the instructions of people who do not understand how waterlands work and that if you drown a newt in sewage, it is just as dead as if you had dried its habitat out.

But it may also be that a perfect disaster was set up deliberately, with the intention it would panic the middle-classes, who tend to live in the prettier parts, in to handing over all the power necessary to 'save' them.

Watts Up With That has been looking in to how bad weather was made worse by the Environment Agency. 

"The real issue has to do with the lack of flow capacity in the Kings Sedgemoor Drain, (gravity drain, not pumped) due to silting and vegetation encroachment, as well as similar issues in the River Parrett...."