The most-respected No argument did not engage the question at all. It dismissed it as “on the verge of trolling”, and a vote that ended overwhelmingly against compensation was argued in much that spirit: impatient, often hostile, rarely patient.
The more developed No cases pointed elsewhere for the bill. “China can pay,” wrote one voter, and others named the USA and India too, or proposed that the UN draw funds from the countries still polluting. Another stressed that the UK produces “less than 1% of the world's emissions”. A further voter likened it to slavery reparations and called the whole business a grift.
A second strand put responsibility on Pakistan itself: one voter argued that planning, drainage and flood defences are for its own government, while humanitarian aid is a different matter. Some went further into the climate science itself, calling climate change natural, and some turned openly angry on migration and crime. The wording there was harsh.
The Yes side left a single argument, and it is the side's most-respected case. It conceded that unilateral payment is “pretty pointless” but argued for building international cooperation. One No voter came close to meeting it, saying they would vote Yes to a global scheme where the biggest polluters paid most. Nobody else answered it.
In the No voters' telling, the question was less about Pakistan than about who else should be paying.
78 Opinions
Some of these questions are awful, on the verge of trolling in my book. Who could seriously ever want to help Pakistan, a nuclear power?
China can pay. China has burned more fossil fuels and created more emissions in the last 20 years than the UK in its entire history.
We can compensate them for climate damage when they compensate us for the mass migration of rapists.
Getting fed up of all these 'causes' sticking their hands out to the UK for reparations and compensation, the UK is not a magic money tree, it's time the UK put the UK first, no more handouts, history is just that, history, leave it there.
An absurd notion.......newsflash ...climates have always changed. We should be giving them one thing and that is their criminals who live here.
What’s going on in Pakistan is not our fault. What’s going on in the UK is arguably theirs.
Pakistan et al have turned their own countries into the sheet holes that they are , the UK put them on to the path to prosperity before they took up independence, they choose to remain in the dark ages , giving tgem money wont change a thing
This is like the slavery reparations argument - we have to pay for historic industrial emissions even though we already bankrupted ourselves to stop it? No. Reparations is a grift and badging every disaster as climate change is a clear attempt to widen the scope of the climate grift. The grifting is over-reaching itself and will explode soon.
We produce less than 1% of the world's emissions. What a ridiculous suggestion.
Compensation, reparations, aide,on and on . Stop the lat. Charge Pakistan for railways we left. Imagine 1 rupee for every passenger since independence! .