Jazz-Hands

Meet Tolmeia Gregory.

You may as well, you’re likely to hear a lot more about her over the next few years unfortunately.

She’s young, pretty, and unlike Greta Thunberg doesn’t look like a grumpy football with pigtails attached talking in a monotonous drone – which considering her time at Cheltenham College (one of Britain’s most prestigious, most expensive and most well connected schools) is hardly surprising.

She is, as the parlance would have it, ‘media ready’: just the ticket for today’s hacks at the BBC and those ephebophiliac brochialist creeps at Mod The Sims The Guardian (is there a difference?).

Already they’re inflating her status whilst ignoring the fact her concerns about the environment are shallower than a flea’s paddling pool.

According to the BBC, ‘Tolmeia Gregory is a sustainable and ethical fashion activist.’

As the BBC are so fond of doing, here’s the Reality Check:

Tolmeia’s a nice enough sort, but an atypical British teenager representative of her generation she most certainly is not.

It is pretty fair to say she’s someone who’s lived the life of Riley. Her family split their time between living in Cheltenham England (one of the most middle class cities since the 18th century, home to the spas and the famous Morton Ghost) and in France (it’s called ‘for tax reasons’ people – although with Brexit that may be heading in much the same direction as Incy Wincy Spider shortly).

She has been around the blogosphere since she was about eleven as one of those ‘wardrobe remixers’ – those for who their hobby is their clothes, which they go through faster than your local branch of M&S, Primark and Oxfam combined.

There’s a living to be made here since the days Jessica Quirk’s feud with Get Off My Internets first alerted the mainstream media both to those spending more time fashion blogging than working and those exasperated by a spiralling tidelwave of internet narcissism where everyone had delusions of being the next Cindy Crawford – or at least monetarising their site enough through adverts and endorsement packages to make a living from it rather than being a productive member of society.

In an age where the disparity of wealth between those at the top and everyone else has gone beyond obscenity, only a fool would forego the opportunity to earn far more and for far less sweat. Why not make the job the hobby, the hobby the job?

Except that Cindy Crawford, and all the other A-List demonstratees of how much salary was no longer commensurate with merit, had by now mated with others of their caste in their main breeding ranches of California, Florida and Kensington.

Now their little mini-mes are hard at work-it work it work it on the catwalk themselves; as the Beautiful People ranch puts the next generation of breeding stock out to wow the lumpen proletariat in frippery.

The internet’s long past peak Wardrobe Remixer, so unless you have some particular gimmick to offer such as an ailment to make you stand out from the rest you can forget it.

As noted earlier, Tolmeia’s been around for almost a decade – and ‘has been’ is perhaps the operative phrase. Her young age once made her a favourite for vacuous teen rags and a silly season duvet stuffer for the more upmarket press – since she had an upmarket first name which would easily grace Tatlers and the upmarket parents to match. It all helps.

But now she was the same age as most other wardrobe remixers only starting out: newer, prettier girls, in some cases already with modelling contracts and the extra internet attention this merited. The trouble with fashion is it’s as fickle with its people as it is in its spirit.

It’s hardly a coincidence Tolmeia had her eco-epiphany – consciously or unconsciously – at the same time she had become a distinctly no longer fashionable fashionista and the interest in her as an ‘influencer’ was fast drying up.

The problem with old Tolly Dolly is how much she simply doesn’t get it. Let’s provide you, dear reader with a few worked examples, starting with three days after her above ‘mission statement’ post of 9th January 2019.

A resusable waterbottle. Well done, have a cookie. Pity about the rather eco-hostile tablet.

Call in the first expert witness please!

Their verdict?

As Ethical Consumer say, ‘it is still the case that all of our tech requires minerals are mined in some of the most unstable and war-torn places on the planet.’

This is not news, this has been the case since the early days of the silicon chip falling into mainstream use, and the rise of the smartphone and tablet have grotesquely exacerbated the problem.

The main reason the area of Africa from the Congos to Zimbabwe have remained genocidal hell holes is they remain as rich in valuable resources as in the days native blood ran as quickly as the rubber sap they toiled to tap.

In which case if like young Tolly you are running a computer and a tablet and a smartphone, you’ve little reason to be patting yourself in the back unless you intend using the same smartphone and tablet for years – which all statistics show are seldom the case. Recycling a bottle as your sweet succulent granny used to do back in the days of glass (still like paper the premium recycleable material) has long past being anything deserving a round of applause.

Eight days after this came what will be an all too familiar post to any Tolly Dolly fans – the holiday post.

The clothes may be recycled – pity about the gasoline spewing jet to take her from Italy. It would all be very well were such dichotomies between her eco-rhetoric and her actions were mere aberrations, but they’re the norm.

It would be easy to shrug one’s shoulders and dismiss her as another shallow youngster seeking easy celebrity ever since Andy Warhol promised the world fifteen minutes apiece.

But an equally shallow mainstream media – bewildered by their growing decline to newer platforms for their slice of determining the zeitgeist – are elevating her into their latest poster girl for today’s ‘concerned young generation’.

This is disastrous when seldom a day goes by without Tolly Dolly providing nuclear weapon grade ammunition to both eco-skeptics (seeing Marxism in every innovation) and that growing tide of elderly and poor retaliating against an increasingly hostile young which, reading between their rhetoric, appears to resent their very continued existences.

Nowhere is that more encapsulated than in Extinction Rebellion, which, predictably, she’s got mixed up in. When fashion is your real interest, you have to pick This Year’s Must Have fashionable politics to accessorise.

Extinction Rebellion: Exitus ācta probat – omne decretum diaboli!

The only thing recycled about them are their logo (from the far right) and their tactics (from every parapolitical squadist faction far left and far right post World War Two), who specialise in disrupting the everyday lives for the vast majority of people rather than those at the top of the resource pyramid whose choices and orders cause the very problems the eco-wankers of XR wish solved.

XR’s also rather fond of the idea of matters being taken out of the hands of representatives elected by secret democratic ballot and placed instead in the hands of ‘random but representative’ (a contradiction in terms in itself) ‘Citizen’s Juries’ – anyone familiar with the history of the communes or soviets will know how that tends to finish – or any other group of ideological or theological fanatics accountable to no one but themselves once they’ve tasted power.

The evil Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson were much in favour of these during their time in power where ‘Focus Groups’ ensured those in charge got to hear only what they wanted to hear in the first place. Iraq knows only too well where that all ended.

A number of British political parties – the Lib Dems, Greens and the Celtic nationalists – have shown their true colours lately by cheerleading these ‘rebels’ who one hundred years ago to the day appeared preaching much the same bullshit.

1. Forthcoming calamity for civilisation – check!

2. ‘People are just too stupid and selfish to realise this and act in time, you know …’ – check!

3. A vanguard needs to take charge to steer everyone back from the brink of the abyss – check!

Old as Aristotle it may be, but Hitler and Stalin are too recent for anyone to dismiss lightly the likely outcome were such thinking revisited.

Yes, there’s a climate emergency – except it’s been going on the last century (thank you mass industrialisation, mechanisation, a booming population and the nuclear nightmare!), and it’s not grown abruptly any worse. The issue is simply going through one of those peaks and troughs where currently it has become fashionable for people to care – especially a secularist youth in an age of political nihilism.

The frightening part is that XR appeals to many of today’s youngsters’ grotesque selfishness, not idealism or altuism.

‘Citizens juries’ to solve ‘complex problems’ appeal because elections ‘suck’ – old people are allowed to vote in them for stuff the kids don’t think are cool, which means Brexit, which means longer queues at the airport, texting costing more abroad, and the cost of one’s Starbucks or Pret ‘necessity of life’ going up in price without all that foreign wage-slave labour doing jobs once regarded as most youngsters first experience of work but now ‘beneath them’.

The climate emergency is more pressing because quack science and internet hysteria has told them there’s only twelve years to turn it around and nothing is being done – even though the event horizon of sustainable energy has passed (the majority of Britain’s energy has been powered by renewables for two years now, for example, and we’re miles behind the likes of Denmark and Ireland), an Israeli firm has unveiled the first viable commercial use aircraft flying solely on battery power, and we’re about to enter the third decade since the vast majority of the world banned the use of CFCs.

Whilst there must never be complacency, the tide of the environmental war has turned in the earth’s favour from the efforts of that very older generation the youth of XR so despise. You get the impression like the Suffragettes with the Suffragists of old they merely wish to steal the impending victory as uniquely their own for the sake of ego. Or because they have more sinister, non-environmental motives primarily.

‘Don’t do as I do, do as I say’

Back to Tolmeia, in April she took part with the thousands of other narcissistic nuisances in Extinction Rebellion’s disruptions up and down the country.

Her activities on her blog included helpful tips and advice wanting to come along and be a pain in the arse to those who had to make long detours around their hippy jam fest and mass vandalism in order to get home or to continue to be employed at their place of work.

You have to admire the sheer cheek of her holding a self made placard with the phrase ‘I’d still be broke’ on it, but let’s come again to that one later.

For those wanting to know the reality of her and her kind’s handiwork on Londoners, have a read of the following post on Reddit’s London section.

All that eco-protesting is hard work, so what better way to relax not long after than with a nice holiday to the U.S.A?

No nice holiday for Ms Geography Teacher of London, having to do a second night job to make ends meet, having to make up missed work time and still having a pile of homework to correct as secondary academia headed towards the frenzy of another exams season.

Indeed, for the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, being lectured to by the likes of Tolly Dolly about the evils of airports and jets destroying the planet would enrage them as much as if she was fingerwagging them Stacey Dooley style about the evils of the conditions of workers in foreign sunny climes to provide them with ‘cheap holidays’ or ‘cheap clothes’ which are out of their reach financially anyway.

That’s before losing it completely over someone like Tolly Dolly jetting to more foreign trips this year alone that most Britons have gone in their entire lives. Since ‘austerity’, most people’s concept of a holiday is snatching some weekend at some decaying seaside resort – if that!

It’s this crass unawareness of how ‘the other half live’ – indeed a complete couldn’t-care-less-ness – is what makes Tolmeia Gregory and her kind to be completely toxic to the environmentalist cause. She goes to charity shops to be more ‘ethical’. For the vast majority, it’s a matter of plain pragmatics – not about wanting to have a halo over one’s head.

 She is far from alone.

Today’s ‘ethically concerned’ are largely nothing more than selfish privileged brats whose true fear is the ‘unworthy’ using up planetary resources which the ‘better’ such as they deserve more. The sort who would like the planet’s resources to be rationed war time style – which experience teaches us mean the rich get everything they want by the black market, and their workers being make to work a lot harder to make them the money to pay for it. The world of ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’

They are the bloody problem, not the solution – the wealth sucking resource hoarding parasites wagging their fingers at how the swinish multitude need to stop using so much of what resources they can afford to buy to sustain their lives.

(Which means guess what stupid? Not as bloody ethical to buy because ethics costs bloody money bloody ethics does!)

‘How dare they mess up the planet, our tropical paradises and beautiful sunkissed beaches, with the detritus of their existence! I don’t care if it provides for my frequent holidays there and fashions to match. Can’t we get less resource using robots to do it all instead?’

Tolmeia ‘Tolly Dolly’ Gregory, Robin Boardman-Pattinson, Greta Thunberg are those for whom every day is Sims 3 Sunset Valley, carefree, fancy free and open to whatever self indulgence they like. Now they see you as a threat to it.

Be afraid of them as much as of climate change – these people are not your friends.