Sometimes a person says things not because he believes or particularly cares about what he is saying but because enough other people are saying this thing that he has decided that it would be politic to also say the thing.
People may lie about what they believe to gain some advantage or because they feel pressure to conform to the views of certain significant others. They may not feel that they are lying at the time. But they also don’t feel particularly constrained to act accordingly. They may feel constrained to act in accordance with some other, contradictory thing that they find it politic to say they believe.
Ed Miliband
Such a one is Ed Miliband. The whole world knows Ed Miliband. As every schoolboy will tell you, he is, of course, the UK politician currently serving as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero who largely revealed his character by accepting a post with such a title.
Ed Miliband “thinks” it’s a good idea to decouple from China’s slave-labor-produced products. He or his job title also “thinks” it’s a good idea to get to something called “net zero,” net-zero emissions, which may or may not involve an end to any net increases in human-emitted carbon or other contributors to hotter global climate, service of this goal being mankind’s substitute for operating a worldwide weather machine. “Once global net zero is achieved,” explains Wikipedia, “further global warming is expected to stop.” (Even though the globe has been pummeled by many millions of years of climate variation before industrial civilization came along, but, whatever.)
Daily Mail headline: “Ed Miliband admits we’ll buy slave products for his solar panel splurge—despite saying UK must ‘diversify’ supply chains away from China” (January 22, 2026).
The Government’s Warm Homes Plan, announced on Tuesday, will see millions of families able to access solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and insulation which could reduce the amount they pay for energy….
But concerns have been raised about fitting five million British homes with China-sourced solar panels—which have been linked with slave labour abuses against Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province.
In April, the Government was forced to amend legislation requiring GB Energy, Britain’s state-owned energy company, to ensure slavery and human trafficking is not taking place within its supply chain.
But Ed Miliband on Wednesday refused to impose the same ban on solar panels purchased for its Warm Homes Plan—which could see five million homes fit with the technology—under questioning in the Commons Chamber.
When asked to confirm that ‘not a single aspect’ of the Warm Homes Plan would rely on slave labour supply chains, the Energy Secretary replied the Government has already ‘raised standards’ in GB Energy—and blamed the Tories for the ‘system’ Labour had inherited.
This comes despite Mr Miliband this morning saying the Government is working on ‘diversifying’ supply chains away from China, which produces 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels….
Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho said: ‘Ed Miliband has already been forced into banning Great British Energy from spending taxpayer’s money on solar panels made by Chinese slaves. He has serious questions to answer about why he’s not applying the same standard to solar panels bought through the Warm Homes Plan.’
No questions need to be answered. There’s no mystery. Miliband is all in favor, sort of, of not using Chinese products produced by slave labor except when it would be convenient to use them in order to advance his government’s socialist subzero plans.
