Loony Greens, led by their only MP Caroline Lucas, are campaigning to impose a meat tax on the UK. Because climate change — or some such nonsense.

Lucas, a sort of demonic pixie-creature spawned by Mother Gaia with the sole purpose of enabling the rich bunny-huggers and tofu-munchers in her expensive but super-woke Brighton constituency to parade their green virtue and annoy the rest of the country, also thinks that bacon and sausages are destroying lives and killing the National Health Service and that only higher taxes can save us.

As she argues in the leftist New Statesman:

“Experts […] found the price of bacon and sausages would have to increase by 80 per cent to cover their cost to our NHS and save nearly 6,000 lives a year.”

She was also given space to speak at a farming conference, of all places.

According to the Express:

Caroline Lucas told delegates at the Oxford Farming Conference an overhaul of Britain’s agri-industrial food system is needed because it is in “crisis” and is favouring consolidation at the expense of human health, ecology and the livelihoods of farmers. In a speech entitled ‘A radical new vision for British agriculture’ delivered on Friday, Ms Lucas set out her vision for farming which included greater attention to animal welfare, fewer pesticides, a reduction in food waste, and adopting a diet with less meat and dairy products. Half of all farmed animal emissions come from beef and lamb, according to research by scientists Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek. Ms Lucas referred to MP Claire Perry, who said if the Cabinet ate less beef to set an example it would lead to the introduction of a “nanny state”. Ms Lucas said: “At the risk of incurring the wrath of the energy secretary in particular who said recently that encouraging people to eat less meat would be ‘the worst sort of nanny state ever’, I’d add that we need serious consideration of measures like a meat tax, particularly for beef.

Quite how Lucas got away without being forcibly mulched or turned into low-grade pig swill by the delegates I cannot imagine.

No wait, I can. As Paul Homewood has noticed, even in the sensible, down-to-earth world of farming, there are plenty of dripping wet lettuces far too eager to endorse townie green pieties.

He cites two National Farmers’ Union spokesmen, quoted in the original Express article:

It would be helpful if the NFU and others stopped being a patsy for global warming dogma. For instance: “But NFU vice president Stuart Roberts hit back at her demands, tweeting: “We all share the ambition to address climate change but taxing isn’t the way. Earlier in the week, Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers’ Union called for zero farming emissions by 2040.”

Let’s remind ourselves: in party political terms, Caroline Lucas is in a minority of one — the only Green MP out of 650 MPs in Parliament. Therefore to take her witterings seriously grants her a power and significance she simply does not deserve.

Pretty much everyone in the country outside the seagull-infested, offshore wind-turbine-blighted Sodom and Gomorrah that is Lucas’s Brighton constituency well understands this.

Which is why most of us find it so offensive and nauseating and mystifying that Lucas is granted so much publicity, especially by the BBC, but by the media generally — even conservative newspapers.

I have nothing personally against vegetarians or vegans. Indeed, until quite recently — doctor’s orders — I was one of the latter myself. It caused my waist to shrink by two inches, it taught me the true meaning of boredom and it gave me an enduring taste for almond milk — which I love even more since learning that real greens hate it because it has such an enormous environmental footprint.

The problem with Greens like Lucas is that they want to weaponise people’s lifestyle choices in order to advance their political cause.

If people want to go vegetarian for health reasons or for moral reasons, that’s entirely their prerogative. Where it becomes a problem is when their lifestyle choice is used to threaten my lifestyle.

Lucas’s recent pronouncements are part of an irksome cultural trend, heavily promoted by a complicit mainstream media, the cultural Marxist BBC especially, to rebrand meat as at best a guilty pleasure, at worst a menace to the planet. Veganism, meanwhile, gets rammed down our throats at every opportunity as the hot new thing that all the groovy people are doing, and oh, by the way, here’s a plug masquerading as a news story about a forthcoming BBC vegan cookery programme.

The answer is not to give these proselytising, meat-shunning eco-loons the time of day and sweetly concede they may have a point.

The answer is to tell them exactly where they can shove their tofu burgers.