Spoiled children

In certain parts of the anti-EU blogosphere, the demonstrations in Greece, Spain and elsewhere are being heralded as the first signs of popular uprisings against the tyranny of remote politicians.

On the streets of Athens on Monday, reports the Wall Street Journal, "thousands of demonstrators gathered for a sixth consecutive day outside the Greek parliament in a mass protest modeled on Spain's "Los Indignados" movement, which has occupied Madrid's central square for weeks".

Antonis Papaioannou, a 20-year old student studying mechanical engineering in Athens, says that the austerity measures have hit education. In the past year, spending cuts have led to power outages at his college, walkouts by professors that haven't been paid, and even shortages of printing paper for student computers.

"I'm indignant because all I see from the government and troika is how they are trying to squeeze the Greek people dry without spending any money on education," he said. "The Greek government represents big capital, not the Greek people."

Bully for Antonis. His politicians have been lying to their people for decades. Greece's euro entry, which their European Commissioner has hailed as a major achievement, was based on lies about the Greek economy.

What does Antonis, with his sense of entitlement, think should happen now? Does he think the foreign bankers should pay for his education? Or maybe the Germans, the Dutch, or the Finns? I don't think so.

Sooner or later Greece will have to stop living off other countries' taxpayers. If they are going to start reducing their debts, they will have to change the payment terms sharply. Which will close the money markets to them, and trigger penalty clauses in many debt contracts.

Leave the euro and devalue? That would help Greece's ongoing trade balance. But what about the outstanding debts? If they remained denominated in euros, any prospect of repayment would become even more unlikely.

What Antonis should know is that his parents' generation sponged off foreigners for decades. It's them he should blame.

Referism

Referism is the name the indefatigable Richard North gives to his outline political strategy.

This seems to be (maybe I have got it wrong) to try to shift public opinion in the direction of more direct control of the state pursestrings by the people, with less discretion for our governments, which are certainly out of our control.

This, then, is about changing the political climate in the direction of greater citizen participation.

It feels like a long term project, starting as it would from thirteen non-party blogs of individuals with not only different political interests, but also varied political points of view - though we would probably be united in a preference for small government.

Two questions immediately arise. First, how effective have previous initiatives been? What successes have been achieved by The Taxpayers' Alliance, or the book The Plan? To judge by this government's still increasing spending, they have had no noticeable effect in Whitehall.

Second, what appetite is there for citizen participation? Rather than any hunger for that, what we see in Britain is a willingness to be ruled, provided that government doesn't do anything uncomfortably radical.

There is even less appetite for even simple analysis of numbers and issues - an attitude pandered to by papers like The Telegraph.

Richard moves on to highlight the political effectiveness of creating geographical clusters of people willing to put their votes where their strong beliefs are. This isn't something that would be achieved by thirteen independent blogs in different parts of the country read mainly by people who already agree with their standpoints.

Nor do strong local clusters emerge without tactics and leadership, as the Greens have found.

Richard is still shaping his ideas, so it will be interesting to see what emerges.

UKIP's a busted flush - now what?

I'm sure readers here will be following Richard North's thoughts on What Is To Be Done.

If not, get over there and contribute!

Greek default edges nearer

Looks like Ms Lagarde may not get to the IMF in time to bend their rules as she bent the Lisbon treaty. Andrew Lilico notes

As of May 10, Belarus and Greece had the same credit rating. Less than a fortnight later, on May 23, Belarus devalued its currency overnight by around 55 per cent. The people of Belarus are now sweeping supermarket shelves clean and queuing outside currency exchanges.

Meanwhile, the IMF says it won’t give Greece its next tranche of funds unless the EU guarantees to finance Greece into 2012, but the Eurogroup president today said that Germany and Finland won’t accept that. A “Senior Western diplomat” has been quoted by Reuters as saying that the US regards a Greek restructuring as “100 per cent unavoidable”

And Eric Edmond notes a Telegraph story that Greeks with money have been getting it out of the country to invest in top end pied a terre flats in London as are those from Italy and Spain. These nationalities account for 36% of such flat purchase according to up market estate agents, Savills.

All the signs are pointing to a default.

Shale fracking not affecting water

Nick Grealy has been given a useful quote on the safety of careful shale drilling.

Washington, D.C.-Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today welcomed a statement given by Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in which she testified, "I'm not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water..."

As Nick says

Anyway, imagine if you will, the headlines if Lisa Jackson had said she had even one proven case of frackng affecting water. Which out of several tens of thousands of wells shouldn't be the end of the world, as people attempting to console Reverend Camping's church unwittingly pointed out.

But the head of the EPA getting up and saying in front of the US Senate that there are no proven cases of water contamination isn't news.

This is hardly surprising, given how much deeper the shale is than the water table.

Doubtless there will be another greenie scare along any minute. We can't have people getting cheaper energy.

Austerity at home

Douglas Carswell's talking some common sense.

£12.5 Billion to prop up the Euro.

£1 Billion on a half-hearted intervention in Libya.

A 70 percent hike in our net EU budget contribution this year alone.

An overseas aid budget ring-fenced, with large sums for Pakistan.

It looks to me like austerity only seems to apply at home.

IMF candidate glories in illegality

Much comment that a European should no longer be the automatic choice to head the IMF. This is in part because the BRICS have far more foreign exchange reserves than Europe, and partly because (spendthrift but comparatively well off) eurozone countries are likely to be among the biggest supplicants - and with no prospect of paying the IMF's loans back.

The case of Christine Lagarde is worse - she said last December

We violated all the rules because we wanted to close ranks and really rescue the euro zone…The Treaty of Lisbon was very straight-forward. No bailout.

Like a typical eurocrat, Christine Lagarde spits in the faces of european voters.

She is against democracy.

Fawning over Obama

The media have been fawning over the Obamas when he's the most anti-British US president ever.

He calls the Falklands the Malvinas, and BP British Petroleum.

Politicians have to fawn over powerful enemies, it's part of their job. The media don't have to, but the state visit provided nice pictures and easy column inches, so they did. And that's before the newsprint devoted to comparing the women's clothes. Oh please.

Outside the Westminster bubble, this isn't a big story and the self-abasement was distasteful.

You weren't welcome, Obama, and I'm glad you've gone.

More evidence that the NHS is unmanageable

The Care Quality Commission has published the first 12 results of 100 unannounced hospital inspections.

Three failed to meet legal standards for giving patients enough food and drink and treating them in a dignified way. There were serious concerns in another three. That makes six out of the twelve. The details are here and here.

It is inconceivable that a competent management would not have known about them. They all burble on about being disappointed and taking the findings seriously. But they haven't been doing their jobs, so why should we think they will when the spotlight moves on? People should be fired but they won't be.

Lansley burbles that

Where the inspections uncovered appalling levels of care, the CQC will be able to use its enforcement powers to ensure that real improvements are made.

This is treating the symptoms, rather than the underlying causes.

NHS units are unaccountable to the people they are supposed to serve. The NHS is too big to be managed centrally, and there are no effective sanctions when staff don't do their jobs, and kill people.

It has to be broken into smaller units where staff know their jobs are at risk when they don't do them properly. But it won't be, because Cameron and Lansley think they can manage it when no one else has been able to, and Clegg is just fluffy.

So taxpaying patients will still be mistreated.

Met Office model wrong again shock

Met Office projections had shown that almost all of Britain was due to be covered by a dense cloud of volcanic ash tomorrow.(Fri) But just as airports and airlines started drawing up contingency plans for the worst disruption since December’s arctic snap, updated forecasts indicated that the ash cloud would be far thinner than first thought.

So we need more data gathering.

The Government also moved to answer criticism from airlines over its failure to procure an aircraft capable of inspecting the ash at close quarters.

It borrowed planes from Ireland and Germany to examine the ash, with the latter aircraft being made available until Britain’s own dedicated plane enters service late next month.

British Airways and Easyjet provided data. The Met Office seem to be the weakest link. Again.

Of course Greece will default. What then?

Yes, yes, Greece will default, says Irwin Stelzer. Others will jump on the bandwagon.

The initial view that we are all in this together, that to save the euro and, indeed, the European Project, everyone must provide support for Club Med and Ireland, is less dominant than it once was. The only serious question now is what form the defaults should take.

Of course it suits eurozone governments if commentators keep writing inaccessible pieces asking whether something called defaults will happen, rather than starkly saying Yes they will happen, and what then.

Via Richard North, we discover that the economist Andrew Lilico has had a stab at it on his Telegraph blog. It's written as bullet points, so read it there. Most strikingly, Lilico writes that

Because the ECB has relatively little foreign currency-denominated exposure, it could in principle print its way out, but this is forbidden by its founding charter. On the other hand, the EU Treaty explicitly, and in terms, forbids the form of bailouts used for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, but a little thing like their being blatantly illegal hasn’t prevented that from happening, so it’s not intrinsically obvious that its being illegal for the ECB to print its way out will prove much of a hurdle.

If Greece left the eurozone, could Ireland and Portugal stay? Did someone mention Spain, which is probably on the economic rocks too?

He's written with commendably realistic cynicism. But (understandably) he doesn't consider the politics of these economic defaults.

Never mind the rioters in the indebted club med countries, which have been cushioned for far too long. (You can't keep living off foreign bankers for ever.) What about the politics in the donor countries when it can no longer be hidden from their voters how much their governments' connivance in propping up the vanity eurozone project has cost them?

Meanwhile, will the IMF keep funnelling other countries' money into this black hole? Probably.

Another holier than thou BBC man

BBC Europe correspondent Matthew Price favours us with his comments on the demonstrations in Spain. Youth unemployment is high, he rightly says.

Europe's leaders have chosen, to a greater or lesser extent, to ignore the voices on the streets. Believing instead that austerity is the way out of the economic crisis.

And, so far, the protests across Europe have not grown into anything big enough to force them to change tack.

Just how would they change tack?

First, the demonstrators have no agreed programme. Second, the economies are up to their necks in debt. So what, Matthew, is the alternative to "austerity", aka trying to balance the books gradually so as not to need to borrow too much more from banks which are distressed enough already, thank you?

Yes, there is indeed an alternative, defaulting on debt repayments, and leaving the euro and devaluing. But this is probably not in Matthew's mind, any more than it's in the mind of the demonstrators whose countries have lived high on the hog for too long.

As we've mentioned before, there's also the small matter of Spanish local authorities' hidden debt. As the WSJ reports, changes to regional and municipal governments could lead to the discovery of piles of undeclared debt, as happened in Catalonia. "After moderate Catalan nationalists dislodged a Socialist government in the wealthy northeastern region in November, incoming officials said the local budget deficit was twice as big as previously thought."

Hidden-debt concerns played a central role in campaigning in regions like Castilla-La Mancha, where the PP and local business leaders said the region hasn't booked 90,000 unpaid invoices of around €1 billion ($1.42 billion). Maria Dolores de Cospedal, the PP's candidate for regional president, had pledged the first thing she will do if elected is commission an audit of Castilla-La Mancha's accounts.

So far from being able to spend more money, the Spanish government has no idea what total government debt is.

Got that, Matthew?

Afghan bank corrupt shock

Nearly $1bn vanished from one Afghan bank? Who knew?

Don't journalists remember reports from months back about Afghans buying plush pads in Dubai? And wads of currency being waved through Afghan customs?

One of the Indy's themes is that DFID are on top of this and had blocked a payment of nearly £80m in the wake of the corruption scandal until they are satisfied British taxpayers' money can be properly protected.

Do reporters not read the papers?

Vicky Price's speeding points "non motorway"

So says Channel 4. Wasn't the speeding supposed to have occurred at the southern end of the M11?

And would M11 speeding offences be dealt with by Southend magistrates?

Hard to see why Chris Huhne would have been driving in that area after arriving back at Stansted so late in the evening. What was Ms Price doing earlier that dday?

So here's the Sunday Herald cover

Over here in the States.

Huhne sucker punched

Huhne takes three punches in the Mail's piece today. First and most obviously about those speeding points.

Surely Southend Magistrates Court has a record of where and when the offence was supposed to have occurred?

The second punch was in November 2010, when someone hit Huhne in a family argument on the street in Clapham. Join the queue....

But my favourite punch is the one David Rose delivers to Huhne's carbon budget, calling it "strangely out of date" and based on failing science.

Stringent carbon dioxide targets would drive industry abroad.

Moreover, only two per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions emanate from Britain – far too little for our reduction to make a global impact.

Rose questions whether the science is "settled" and reports on a recent climate conference.

Phil Jones from UEA "has previously admitted that, in surprising contrast to what computer models were predicting 20 years ago, there has been ‘no statistically significant warming’ since 1995".

I raised this with Mr Mitchell, asking how long this would have to continue, despite uninterrupted increases in the level of CO2, before he would start to question the validity of the models and the theory of man-made warming that they underpin.

His answer sounded peculiarly unscientific, implying it would take a lot more than the absence of actual warming to shake his faith. ‘People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful,’ he said. ‘Our approach is not entirely empirical.’

Plimark reminded the conference that the world was often warmer before industrialisation. Why? If we can't explain that, how do we know industrialisation is to blame for the stalled warming we saw late in the last century?

One of the most striking contributions came from Professor Henrik Svensmark, director of climate research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. He argued that one of the key determinants of climate is the level of cosmic rays from outer space that hit the Earth: these high-energy particles ‘seed’ the clouds by forming what he termed ‘ultra-fine condensation nucleii’. More rays mean more clouds, and in turn, a cooler climate.

According to Prof Svensmark, quite small variations in the amount of cloud cover have a big effect on temperature, leaving man-made CO2 emissions with a small ‘residual’ role.

Rose concludes that the day as a whole had shown that the scientific disputes are pressing, urgent and real.

In the light of that, Mr Huhne’s determination to bankrupt Britain through unsustainable targets looks as ill-judged as his alleged attitude towards accepting responsibility for speeding.

Judges making themselves look ridiculous

No sensible politician will want to go anywhere near the Twitter and privacy debate. But Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, is unimaginative and has a crabbed mind. Who can tell where it will take him.

Meanwhile, the Mail has an amusing piece with lots of names blacked out. Holes in a sieve, anyone?

EU bandwagon rolls on despite wobbly wheels

Richard North has picked up a stimulating commentary on Ireland's problems by an Irish economist. Ireland is heading for bankruptcy, which would be catastrophic for a country that trades on its reputation as a safe place to do business, he writes:

Irish politicians are too used to being rewarded by Brussels to start fighting against it, even if it is a matter of national survival. It is easier to be led along blindfold until the noose is slipped around our necks and we are kicked through the trapdoor into bankruptcy.

The destruction wrought by the bankruptcy will not just be economic but political. Just as the Lenihan bailout destroyed Fianna Fáil, so the Noonan bankruptcy will destroy Fine Gael and Labour, leaving them as reviled and mistrusted as their predecessors. And that will leave Ireland in the interesting situation where the economic crisis has chewed up and spat out all of the State’s constitutional parties. The last election was reassuringly dull and predictable but the next, after the trauma and chaos of the bankruptcy, will be anything but.

Oh, and Greece is on fire again. Fancy a relaxing break in Athens, which would help their economy along? Thought not. And if they get more money from EU taxpayers, that will only make Greek economic and political problems worse. No one has suggested a plausible view of how the Greeks could repay without defaulting.

Behind the rhetoric, it looks increasingly likely that the central eurozone are picking their time to ditch Greece and Ireland. Don't throw good money after bad, says the True Finns' Timo Soini.

This is not just about economics. People feel betrayed. In Ireland, the incoming parties to the new government promised to hold senior bondholders responsible, but under pressure they succumbed, leaving their voters with a sense of disenfranchisement. The elites in Brussels have said that Finland must honor its commitments to its European partners, but Brussels is silent on whether national politicians should honor their commitments to their own voters.

Despite these wobbly wheels, the EU Commission is apparently considering compulsory driving tests every two years for motorists aged 60 plus and annually for those 76 and over, in the interests of uniformity across the EU. You can really really see Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria implementing this....

Meanwhile, the Commission working on the spat between Italy and France over immigrants and borders. Schengen threatened? No problem. It can be another "useful crisis". Let's shoehorn into our review proposals to create a common EU asylum and immigration policy.

Mrs. Malmstrom proposed setting up centres outside the EU that would be authorized to grant visas valid for the entire union, and offering trade concessions and visas for skilled workers in countries like Tunisia in exchange for a tougher clampdown by their governments on outward migration.

You might think countries like Portugal, Spain and Ireland might not welcome more competitors for their dwindling supply of jobs. But the Brussels bandwagon powers on regardless.

It really is out of control.

Goodbye, UKIP

The Spectator's Coffee House blog reports on some EU-wide polling from last year about attitudes to the EU. What emerges is that in quite a few countries their EU membership has public support. But not in the UK.

• 29% of us think EU membership is "a good thing", with only Latvia lower (look out for support in the PIGS to fall)
• 31% of us think the country has benefited from EU membership (we're bottom)
• 20% of us trust the EU (bottom again)
• Bottom again for "net positive image of the EU" (-20%)
• And we're bottom again for the proportion who think the EU is best placed to regulate the financial markets (10%).

So why is UKIP so unsuccessful, most recently in this month's local elections? Richard North looks at this and cites some recommendations in the Raedwald blog for how UKIP might improve. But these are comically irrelevant, since the main purpose of UKIP is now to keep Nigel Farage in the style to which he has become accustomed. Bringing in good people to improve the party would threaten his position.

Eric Edmond is on the button, referring to "Farage's appalling spiteful leadership". It's "Farage, Farage and yet more of Farage". Cameron "won't lose any sleep over Farage and his bunch of third rate ex Tory failures".

Now look at the sordid talentless cabal around Farage running UKIP. Why are they there? Well anyone of any talent is perceived by Farage as a threat. They suffer from a torrent of anonymous untrue smears and either walk away or get kicked out on trumped up charges. The aim of all younger members of the cabal is to get on the EU gravy train and indeed many of them are already paid by EU funds.

UKIP's cause, he concludes, is always a poor third to Farage's next media appearance and indulgence.

Over the last decade, says Richard North, Farage

... has turned the party into his own personal plaything, dispensing patronage as mood takes him and holding back the party development. Thus, while the Greens prosper, the Farage Party is stuck in the doldrums.

... It looks very much as if he has abdicated his responsibility to create a viable Eurosceptic party. And if he cannot do the job – and clearly he has not so far – he needs to stand aside and make room for someone who can.

But he won't, because his livelihood is more important to him than UKIP's cause. And his hold on the party is secure.

So it's essential to move on from this mediocrity. Banging your head against the brick wall is pointless.

North has proposed annual referenda to confirm government budgets. There are practical problems with the idea (a subject for a future post), but we need fresh thinking like this.