Down with the absurd HS2 vanity project

The Leader of Wakefield council (which is on the HS2 Leeds route) says the money could be better spent on other infrastructure.

This is a difficult argument for the government to rebut - as far as I'm aware, they've produced no opportunity cost analyses. Not that we have the money to spend on this absurd scheme with its dishonest business case anyway.

Virgin claim HS2 as presently planned could lead to cuts in services to Wolverhampton, Stoke, Stafford, Preston and Carlisle.

And the Express writes that HS2 will cost too much.

HS2 has all the hallmarks of a vanity project by a Government desperate for something to boast about.

It will mean misery for thousands of families whose homes will have to be demolished, inflict a monstrous scar on the countryside and cost double the £35billion estimate – all for the sake of cutting 20 minutes off the journey to Birmingham.

Yet, says the paper, patients are dying on trolleys in hospital corridors and desperate carers can’t cope.

Oh yes, and there's no money left anyway.

More journalistic whining

Oh here we go again. More bleating about the lack of female television presenters ... older television presenters ... and now black presenters.

This is all very metropolitan and right on.

Apparently there are "countless aspiring black female journalists and media professionals". And doubtless white female journalists. And no doubt countless males too. And older people. Not to mention Anna Ford. (No, let's not.)

If there are all these good people jostling for these jobs, then the jobs are overpaid.

The BBC is spending our money, so it should get its talent as cheaply as possible.

So draw up a long list of applicants who can do the job perfectly well - apparently it would be quite a long one. Then offer the job to them at (say) £25k a year, and keep upping the offered pay rate by £1k a year, until someone takes it. All contracts to be on one month's notice, in case things don't work out. If you don't like it, don't apply.

Let's balance supply and demand, and get best value for licence fee payers for a change. And the process can be age blind, gender blind, and colour blind.

NHS foundation trusts and whistleblowers

Sir David Nicholson (who of course should have been sacked over Mid Staffs) has privately said he cannot help whistleblowers speak out about foundation trusts because a ‘legal process’ had concluded foundation trusts are ‘separate legal bodies’ from the Department of Health.

Stand back a moment. First, standards and requirements will always be changing in the Nationalised Hospital Service. It's nonsensical and simply unacceptable if foundation trusts aren't required to keep up.

So a short letter should go out to all foundation trusts from the body in charge of them. It should ask all foundation trusts to write to it setting out their policy on whistleblowers. They should be provided with a standard letter to be signed and returned by the heads of the foundation trusts, who will be personally responsible for its implementation.

Any foundation trust which doesn't reply in those exact terms within one month should be named on the administrator's website, and the administrator should issue a statement to the trust's local press - repeatedly every month until the foundation trust comes into line.

If Sir David thinks he can't help a frustrated foundation trust whistleblower, who can? There should be a designated and publicised central point of contact.

"Separate legal bodies" they may be, but we taxpayers still pick up the bill, and we are entitled to the highest standards.

Tax funded bodies can never ever be a law unto themselves - whatever bureaucrat wimps think. Where there's a will there's a way.

But is there a will?

It's getting worse in Spain

It's nearly four months since we looked at Spain. The economic and social fabrics continue to flake and peel and crack.

Ambrose reports that the Catholic charity Caritas "is now helping 40,000 people in a province of 700,000, often with bags of food". Caritas has not received any of its usual subsidies from the Castilla-La Mancha government so far this year - governments are broke too.

A thousand people lose their homes each week - and in Spanish repossessions creditors can pursue debtors for all their assets and dock future income on tough terms even after bankruptcy. So people face long term ruin.

The region of Andalucia plans to block evictions by expropriating homes from banks but the European Commission has warned that this may violate the terms of Spain's EMU bank bail-out. "If that is so, it is not worth being part of Europe," said Jose Antonio Grinan, Andalucia's leader.

If society rejects you and offers you nothing, why shouldn't you reject society? Unsurprisingly, immigrants are returning home. Unsurprisingly, squatting is becoming more widespread - and more organised:

Non-paying residents may damage properties and can take as long as three years to evict, making the homes unattractive to investors who have no way of calculating the time and cost required to get them in shape to rent or resell.

There's a comprehensive internet guide for squatters.

In return, banks are disabling elevators and tearing out stairwells in their apartment blocks to prevent entire buildings from being occupied. Yet there are 2 million empty homes.

This is civil war.

Spain's institutional infrastructure is creaky. Despite the big public projects (and many white elephants among them) it is scarcely a modern country. The immature Spanish democracy overspent, partly thanks to the temptations of its EU subsidies. But with EU membership comes the €uro. In defence of the €uro membership the Spanish economy is being slowed down and the Spanish social fabric is being torn.

It can't go on like this. Something will have to give. It'll probably be €uro membership. But how soon?

Subsidised Tony Bosworth lies and lies and lies

Liar Tony Bosworth from fake charity Friends of the Earth (Friends of the Earth Europe receives €1.2 million from the EU) lies today:

Fracking is dirty, unnecessary and a risk to our climate and environment.

Dirtier than other ways of extracting fossil fuels, which we need for reliable power supplies? No. Unnecessary? Only if you're happy to be priced out of world markets because dear energy is making your goods too expensive. A risk to our climate and environment? How would that work? For what it's worth, carbon dioxide emissions have fallen in the US, where most of the recent fracking has taken place.

Liar Tony Bosworth continues that "we should be investing in safe, clean energy from the wind, waves and sun". So is that reliable? No - they need backup from conventional power stations. Affordable? No, at least twice the price of power from fossil fuels - a price which will probably fall in the medium term.

Are voters happy with unnecessarily high energy bills? No. Are voters happy with the spread of wind turbines? No.

But liar Bosworth continues to peddle his moonshine, subsidised by taxpayers.

Cuadrilla's investigations near Balcombe will specifically not include fracking.

So why does the BBC's report of this frack-free project conclude by giving Bosworth three paragraphs to criticise ... fracking?

Could it be that the BBC we are forced to pay for is biased?

UKIP will rightly get more scrutiny

As Iain Martin remarks, UKIP is not a democracy. "It is 100 per cent Farage's party".

Farage evidently offered the disgusting Neil Hamilton the lead MEP position in the South West. Want an idea of how disgusting Neil Hamilton is? Look here. Not that that matters to Farage.

Douglas Carswell on energy pricing

As Douglas Carswell writes today

It is a disgrace that poorer families in my constituency are priced out of heating their homes so that rich people in London can feel good about themselves because they believe they are saving the planet. They aren't.

We are not alone.

The thrill of the new

Richard North is rightly arguing that planning for an EU referendum campaign has to start sooner rather than later.

He has also repeatedly argued that advocates of leaving the EU must offer voters a positive vision, not just a negative. Certainly the spirit quickly sags when you read the comments to Douglas Carswell's latest offering. You can bore people into accepting almost any status quo.

It's probably a positive - and an easily understood positive - that we could (given government competence, hm) control our own immigration again. No more surprises like the 500,000 Eastern European migrants that officials didn't know were here - so many entered UK that authorities lost track. No more MEPs saying that Roma gypsies should be guaranteed cash hand-outs and police protection. (Not that we can afford present levels of immigration anyway.)

Only today Diageo's new CEO is reported as wanting to put the company's emerging markets business at the heart of its strategy. New horizons aren't boring and grey, they are bracing and exciting. Yet they offer continuity with this country's traditionally outward looking attitude.

Farage needs to try to look forwards and not back. And probably the last person you'd want campaigning with you to leave the EU is Bill Cash.

No, Janan, the Tories may well be in trouble

The FT's Janan Ganesh tells the Tories to hold their nerve - but at the end of his piece it emerges that he astonishingly misreads present politics

The truth is that the three main parties are now all anti-immigration, criminal justice is tougher than a generation ago, the welfare consensus is over and a straight road to leaving the EU has been paved. Much of this is warranted. Politicians could make yet bigger concessions, but not responsibly. They have been chasing the populist vote so fleet-footedly there is little distance left to run.

Some reasons why this is wrong:

1. UKIP voters will point out that the crucial EU entry door for immigrants is not only still open but is about to swing wider open still. All three main parties support easing restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians next year without having the foggiest idea what the effects of their policy will be, and with no way to staunch the inflow if it's too large.
     
2. There is no straight road to leaving the EU. The LibDems, the Welfare Party, and Lord Snooty all want us to stay in. Cheated before, the country doesn't believe anything Lord Snooty says about an EU referendum - especially as we know he wants to stay in.
     
3. Most of the country would say criminal justice is still too soft - that includes welfare fraud by the way.
     
4. And what of the smaller state? And human rights? And energy made deliberately dearer because of a superstition about carbon dioxide?

The political consensus on these issues covers the three main parties. UKIP is outside it.

The future's bright - if it's not green

Peter Lilley is doing a great job on the Energy Select Committee and now has written excellently on shale, highlighting that

fracking is a tried-and-tested technology which has been used since the late Forties

and giving the scare stories the dissing they deserve.

Over 100,000 wells have been fracked in recent years.

Not a single person has been poisoned by contaminated water, he writes, nor a single building damaged by the almost undetectable seismic tremors sometimes released. If there was a systemic problem with fracking it would have been obvious by now.

The only point of disagreement is his assertion that Ed Davey "is a decent and honest minister". Presumably he writes this because he wants to keep contact open with him. Similarly, some commentators speculate that Mr Davey must have been seduced by those lobbyists touting the green spin of environmental activism - as if he was inherently reasonable.

He's not. Like most Lib Dems he's a greenie. He's delayed the new licensing round for shale prospects, he's delayed giving Cuadrilla permission to frack, and he's reportedly sent the British Geological Survey results back to be rewritten. This of course delays news which would be good for the country but unwelcome to Mr Greenie Davey.

In fact, with a few honourable exceptions, all MPs are greenies - an establishment consensus which makes a vote for insurgent UKIP look more attractive. Not for them Mr Lilley's good news that our shale reserves

may be on the scale that has boosted America’s economy by cutting gas prices to a third of the UK level, at the same time reviving their manufacturing industry, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and generating massive tax revenues.

The Tories need to pin the blame on the Lib Dems for denying people a chance to be better off.

The ever excellent Allister Heath thinks widely about a future with driverless cars. (Read his whole piece.) Well actually they're already here. Just as that great Satan the US brought us the internet and GPS and allowed fracking, so it is becoming open to self-driving cars.

Google’s vehicles have already driven more than 400,000 miles without an accident and are beginning to be legalised in US states.

Heath takes a thoughtful tour of possible economic and social consequences of driverless cars, which he suggests "are likely to go mainstream in 15 to 20 years' time". (I bet it won't take as long.)

This exciting vision confirms, of course that our government's HS2 rail scheme is a huge white elephant.

It is astonishing ... that nobody in the UK Government seems to be thinking seriously about the vast implications of this next phase of the technology revolution, including how to redesign cities, preferring to obsess instead about a rail scheme that will be obsolete before it is even completed.

Witheringly, he calls Cameron's embrace of £35bn taxpayer-financed HS2 "shockingly outdated, making him sound more like a French bureaucrat desperate to build monuments to himself than an enabler of US-style disruptive entrepreneurship".

Yes, another big sign that Lord Snooty and his mates aren't up to the job. The Lib Dems, of course, would have an attack of the vapours at the very thought of more cars, especially driverless (and especially gas-powered?), while the Welfare Party is too stuck in the past to embrace any new thinking.

Good grief, do we have to look to UKIP on this as well? They do seem to be the only ungreen party on offer.

The future's bright - if it's not green.