The Ineos Factory In Antwerp – But It’s Not Your Decision Matey

The great test of a society is “Who Decides?” Who decides how you or I live our lives? The more it is us who decides how we do so the more free and liberal that society is. The more it is other people who are able to impose their views upon us the more we are in an unfree and illiberal society.

Which brings us to Ineos, Sir Jim Radcliffe and his new chemicals plants in Antwerp. About which we are told this:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]But campaigners have questioned how the plants meet Belgium’s climate change commitments and ambitions to cut waste. “Every single angle – whether it is plastics, or the economic angle, or climate change – every single one, I have come to the conclusion that this factory is not good for Flanders or for Europe,” said Rob Buurman, director of the Recycling Network, which campaigns to reduce plastic waste. “We don’t really need this factory; for me the solution is not to start making more or cheaper plastics.”[/perfectpullquote]

Well bully for you matey. The thing is you don’t – or in a free and liberal society you shouldn’t – get to decide. Sir Jim gets to decide where to spend his money. And we out here, we consumers, get to decide whether we’d like to buy what he’s producing.

And the thing is, by shouting about how it should be banned you are, by definition, arguing that we do all want to buy what will be produced. Because if we didn’t want to buy it then it would either not be built – Sir Jim not being stupid – or would go bust soon after opening. The very insistence you are making that it will work, it will produce and be profitable, is all the proof needed that we out here desire it.

And that we desire it and you want to deny it to us is all the proof we need that you’re an illiberal little shit intent in imposing your desires upon us, isn’t it? At which point here’s an Anglo Saxon Wave and off you go, along with the horse you rode in on.

G’won, scat!