There is a wonderful predictability about the smug political left. Its members always want you to do as they say – not as they do (controlling the world is what lefties think they do best after all). The Guardian is as good a place as any to find such socially progressive hypocrisy.
A recent podcast released by the paper contains a remarkable conversation about the evils of fossil fuel between editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and some adoring acolytes. See the excerpt below as they attempt to grapple with the question of what happens when the Guardian’s quest to drive other companies to divest themselves of oil company investments ‚Äì all in the name of saving the planet ‚Äì meets the harsh reality that they too are guilty of holding the same financial interests.
Amanda Michel: You know, there are big questions about asking people to do something that we ourselves have not done.
Aleks Krotoski: What Amanda is talking about is sorting out the Guardian’s own pots of money, their investments.
Amanda Michel: It will seem like hypocrisy.
Alan Rusbridger: We have about ¬£600 million invested at the moment, and I don’t think our fund managers could say exactly how much was invested in fossil fuel. But it is there, we haven’t said that it shouldn’t be, so we have got money invested. And so, if we’re going to be calling on people to divest, people are bound to ask “Well, is that what the Guardian’s going to do?”
Let me answer that last question for you in one word. No. The morally self-regarding Guardian will do absolutely nothing about its own investments in multinational oil and coal companies. It will admonish others for doing that, but at the Guardian they are a little more relaxed by the prospect of making pots of money from evil, filthy coal and oil.
All this, as the Guardian starts a campaign hectoring the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust by saying they “should commit to taking their money out of the companies that are driving global warming” while neglecting to do the same thing itself.
This sanctimony doesn’t come cheap but the Guardian can afford the tab; it funds its operations on the back of the Scott Trust Limited which handles in excess of ¬£850mn to underwrite the paper’s losses from here to eternity.
Doncha love it?
