That Greek referendum!

What a bolt from the blue! The Greek referendum promises to be a historic, whatever the outcome.

Open Europe cleverly headline their piece Democracy Is Coming Home. As we know, a recent poll showed that 59% of Greeks think the new package is “negative” or “probably negative” for Greece. But the same poll also found that 72.5% of Greeks want to stay in the eurozone.

So the feckless Greeks will now have to confront a real choice. They won't be able to vote to have their cake and eat it - though of course that's exactly what they want.

It should be a no brainer. The euro isn't going to bring them more money in their pockets any more - it will make them poorer, probably for several decades at least.

Repatriation of EU powers is nonsense

Government talk of repatriation of powers from the EU is just a typical Cameron fantasy cooked up for PR purposes.

1. The government has been blithely ceding new powers to Brussels. So even if the government were sincere, this would be a tactic, not a strategy.
2. The structure of the treaties is for Brussels to take more and more powers. Does the government even pretend they will try to reverse this? No. Because they (or their civil servant negotiators) don't care about it.
3. All members have to agree to the repatriation of any power. Dream on.
4. Even if 1, 2 and 3 weren't true, the government's ambition is tellingly pitiful - e.g. exemption from the agency work directive.
5. Oh yes, and the Lib Dems won't allow it, because they believe in more government from Brussels.

And we're expected to believe this tripe?

Who will rid us of this poisonous Huhne?

Huhne's latest contribution on shale is down with his usual gutter standards of honesty.

His case for so called renewables has to assume that serious AGW exists. Hm. As Fred Singer has pointed out, a recent study

reported that one-third [of weather stations] showed cooling — not warming. They covered ... "less than 30% of the Earth's surface" housing recording stations that are poorly distributed, mainly in the US and Western Europe. They state that 70% of US stations are badly sited and don't meet the standards set by government; the rest of the world is likely worse.

But unlike the land surface, the atmosphere has shown no warming trend, either over land or over ocean — according to satellites and independent data from weather balloons. This indicates to me that there is something very wrong with the land surface data. And did you know that climate models, run on super-computers, all insist that the atmosphere must warm faster than the surface? And so does theory.

And finally, we have non-thermometer temperature data from so-called "proxies": tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, stalagmites. They don't show any global warming since 1940!

What did happen after 1940? Jo Nova entertainingly points out that thermometers used to show cooling between 1940 and 1970. But not any more. What, she asks, could have caused both mercury and alcohol thermometers to malfunction simultaneously all over the world?

So all the stuff about carbon dioxide threatening future life on the earth as we know it is probably nonsense. Indeed, with the temperature data we have now, who would propose that as a new theory?

This means the environmental case for so called renewables collapses.

Let's now look at Huhne's comment on shale:

Unconventional gas has not yet lit a single room nor cooked a single roast dinner in the UK. Yet those who clamour loudest for "realistic" energy policies would have us hitch our wagon to shale alone.

This shows astonishing dishonesty even by Huhne's standards of intellectual depravity.

I have not heard anyone propose that UK energy policy should be based on shale alone. It should be based on reliability, cheapness, safety, public acceptability, and lack of subsidies. (Note that so called renewables fail all these tests. Not just some, all.)

Why should it be impossible to burn UK shale gas to make electricity, when the US manages that pretty well? It's important to Huhne's dishonesty that we ignore the dash for cheaper unconventional gas happening in many parts of the world. Poland, for instance, and little backwaters like China. They've chosen their path already.

“The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades,” said Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, a research publisher. “Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

Cheap gas (the US already has it, and it will come to the rest of the world) will be terrible for vile fanatics like the disgusting Huhne:

Expensive gas makes nuclear, renewables, CCS, off-shore wind, gas storage(!) and pipelines to nowhere like Nabucco seem if not cheap, then halfway workable. Cheap gas? That would be great for consumers, great for society and completely destroying for most energy models.

It's striking how often shale has been featuring in the press lately - The Express and The Telegraph for instance - but until Huhne's speech Westminster had been oddly silent about this boon which nature has given the UK. Cheaper energy? No thanks.

Cheaper energy brings economic prosperity, but we don't want to give you that. We'd rather make you poorer, by spending your money (which by the way we're continuing to spend too much of) on giving the world "moral leadership" towards a "green" future of expensive and intermittent energy - a future that the rest of the world is rejecting.

Even if the CPS don't charge former euro-enthusiast Huhne, his electorate will surely boot him out at the next election, if not for lying to them over his family arrangements, then as a member of the increasingly unpopular Lib Dems. God only knows how much he will have cost the UK by then.

At least the political environment will be less polluted.

More NHS underperformance

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust only runs two hospitals.

The trust had among the highest complaints in England but their handling was “awful”, and many problems "were simply down to the abusive and neglectful attitude of staff".

It had been "on the radar" of NHS watchdogs for several years. The Trust's new chief executive makes the right noises, and even says that improvements are being made to stop patients feeling “frightened” about attending her hospitals.

Meanwhile a death rate analysis has identified hospitals where deaths are significantly above expectations. However, it's not clear how this differs from these measurements released last year.

Fortress NHS refuses information

It's claimed that NHS staff breached confidentiality rules more than 800 times over three years.

Big Brother Watch gathered the details from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request returned by 152 Trusts covering the period from July 2008 to July this year. Some of them are here.

So transparency rules?

A total of 44 NHS trusts of the 428 which were contacted failed to respond to the FOI request and 55 others refused to release all or some of the information requested.

Who do they think they are? Our masters, perhaps?

Did your NHS trust refuse to answer? Several said the information wasn't held centrally. How hard could it be to get it? Anyway, they're listed from page 107 of the document here. Have fun, the software isn't user-friendly.

Misinformation on flooding

A National Audit Office (NAO) report says the Environment Agency needs another £20m each year to protect against flooding, claims the BBC.

This would be an odd conclusion for an audit function to reach. So to the NAO's site, where its own summary says

The Agency estimates that, owing to climate change and ageing defences, an increase of £20 million is required on average each year between 2011 and 2035 to maintain the current level of flood protection.

My bold. Doubtless the element required to combat "global warming" is - ahem - highly speculative. They may have a point on ageing defences, but how much of the estimate was due to those? How much could be found from cutting or closing other programmes with a lower priority?

It's always easier to say instead that you need more taxpayers' money. Labour of course picks up the claim of the Labour head of the Public Accounts Committee:

By cutting too far too fast, the government will leave communities blighted, with homeowners unable to insure, mortgage or sell their homes after 2013, when Labour's deal with the insurance industry runs out.

Yes, you can never ever cut any spending.

The Environment Department say they will "give local people greater choice and control over protecting their community from flooding". This is not without problems, say the NAO.

Local knowledge of surface water flood risk is far less advanced than national information on risk of flooding from rivers and the sea. Local authorities are experiencing difficulty in recruiting and retaining appropriately qualified staff. Only 30 per cent of the local authorities the NAO spoke to thought they had the required technical expertise. Local decision-making is hampered by the need to cross-refer between nearly 20 different plans that affect local flood risk management. It is not yet clear how the Department and the Environment Agency will provide assurance nationally that arrangements are working.

Nearly 20 different plans!

Sounds like this devolution's going to be really cost effective.

The NAO also found that local bodies will be hard-pressed to plug any funding gap while under pressure to deliver a number of other newly devolved responsibilities. And, it adds,

The Department's plans to encourage more local funding could see some defence schemes that have attracted private or other funding going ahead in advance of schemes elsewhere that provide greater benefits.

That's localism for you. But the centre always knows best, doesn't it.

Back to Fortress NHS

The Daily Mail carries today's disgusting NHS story. Annette Townend has terminal bowel cancer. She spent £1,000 hiring private carers to go undercover and look after her dying elderly mother in Bradford Royal Infirmary because nurses were not giving her the attention she needed.

Because of her own condition she wasn't allowed into her mother's ward herself, but she

acted out of desperation after a doctor warned family members that 82-year-old Sheila Smith would be dead within days ‘if something wasn’t done’.

The great-grandmother’s liver and kidneys were failing because she had not been eating or drinking, and overworked nurses at Bradford Royal Infirmary did not have time to spend with her.

The paper has the disgusting details. The central point is that there were 28 elderly patients on the ward, with about half suffering from dementia and unable to do anything for themselves. And there were usually about six nurses.

With the best will in the world, they could never have looked after their patients properly.

A spokesman for Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust steps forward with the nauseatingly feigned concern that these public sector weasels trot out on these all too frequent occasions:

We are sorry to learn of Mrs Townend’s concerns about her mother’s care.

We set high standards for ourselves and aim to get every patient’s treatment and care right, and in most cases we do.

No, you don't set high standards. Those twenty eight elderly patients could not be looked after properly by six nurses. It was impossible.

Who was the most senior person who knew this inevitable neglect was happening? Whose job was it in the structure to know?

Frankly, a mere sacking would be too mild a penalty for what these patients were put through. But in fortress NHS, you can bet no one in management will suffer.

Just the patients near the end of their days who have paid in to the NHS for most of their lives.

Nothing happening in Europe

This is from the BBC's Europe page.

The second story, about the clash between Dave and Sarko, happened yesterday. And as for the top story ... er ... Eastern Turkey is in Asia.

Now why would the BBC consider Turkey European...?

Tory MPs pick wrong issue at wrong time

Tory backbenchers have fastened on the EU referendum issue but their timing is wrong - wait till the eurozone starts to implode, wait till the pointless squeeze of southern europeans (pointless because it won't help them repay their debts) spills over into more disorder, wait till continental banks' need for more funds starts to hurt all over the eurozone. Let the disorder do the talking as the eurozone's governments drive their voters into an expensive cul-de-sac.

Mind you, the three line whip on the vote makes the worst of a bad job, with Hague describing demands for a referendum as 'graffiti', and Cameron expecting voters concerned about the EU to think that a promise to repatriate some powers has any political force.

It doesn't. That's firstly because the EU will continue to suck more powers into itself in a continuing process, so plucking back the odd one or two won't make any difference, and secondly because the other EU members won't vote unanimously to give us back the odd few marginal competencies which this cack-handed government would be likely to request.

So the timing's wrong. But what backbenchers should be standing up to ask is "Why are you being so feeble about my constituents' huge energy bills?" - an issue of far more immediate importance to far more of their constituents than an EU referendum.

There are several things government can do to cut energy bills:

1. Force every energy company to offer a transparent tariff based on current energy prices plus a mark up.If it takes Ofgem more than two months to draw on North American experience to produce a standard formulation, sack Ofgem. Once the new formulation has bedded in, they can probably cut 90% of Ofgem anyway.
2. Force every energy company to break out all "green" costs which make bills higher, sharpening public questioning.
3. Say shale gas is probably safe and could cut energy bills significantly, as well as saving jobs and creating new ones, so the government's stance is to welcome it, just as the UK welcomed North Sea oil.

But this dim government is supported by dim backbenchers. They supported Liam Fox - why can they not support lower energy bills?

There are lots more votes in lower energy bills than in an EU referendum.

P.S. Nick Grealy suggests shale gas could - on certain assumptions - cut the UK current account deficit by 14% and bring in additional corporation tax of £1.3bn a year. And that's before the dynamic effects of more jobs arising from cheaper energy.

Barnier and barmier

The Standard & Poor's ratings agency is to warn that a double-dip recession in Europe would imperil France's AAA rating and set off a string of downgrades across Southern Europe, says Ambrose.

And on the facing page in The Telegraph's printed edition Hella Ebrahimi tells us that

Europe could ban credit-rating agencies from giving their verdict on the finances of troubled EU countries under draft new laws set to be announced as early as next month.

Could these two reports by any chance be related? The rating agencies are, says this Frenchman, "one of the causes of the crisis due to mis-assessment of risk".

If this report is right, how does M Barmier plan to curb freedom of speech outside the EU as well as in it?

The excitable may think this would be like Gaddafi's henchmen trying to hide incriminating files when the rebels were at the gates of Tripoli - that is, utterly pointless.

The EU tried to bury bad news with their bank stress tests which weren't stressful enough. Now it seems they just want to ban bad news. It's what régimes do in their death throes.

Here's hoping.

A couple of recommended posts

A very British dude has posted an enjoyable background essay about Greece.

The Greeks were only in it for the money. Once they've (inevitably) defaulted, should we keep giving them more subsidies? It's only too clear where the money goes.

Donna Laframboise has published about the rottenness in the IPCC. A good introduction comes from Judith Curry, who mostly agrees with her important message, and provides a link to Amazon, which offers a preview of the early (short) chapters. Read the sample, and be appalled the IPCC's rottenness.

Our relationship with the EU

Much huffing and puffing from a few Tory MPs about their brave call for a referendum on EU membership ... or maybe the (impractical) repatriation of a few marginal powers ... at some time a few years off, safely in the future. As if a Tory government could be trusted to keep its promises on the EU. They want to alter the UK's "relationship" with the EU.

Or maybe they're more concerned by their relationship with their constituency associations:

The Indy's Andy Grice quotes a Tory source this morning pointing out that with boundary reviews triggering a raft of reselections, local associations are determined to keep their MPs honest on the issue of a referendum. Anyone who voted against one would be "cutting their own throats", the source said.

As Richard North wittily observed

We can no more have a relationship with the EU than can Tim Montgomerie have a relationship with his left foot – or vice-versa.

Let's put this in political terms. We only have “a relationship with the EU” in the sense that Scotland has “a relationship with" the UK – we’re part of it.

One difference, Tory MPs, is that our Parliament (yes, that’s you, you brave souls) is steadily reducing the extent of our devolved government. That's despite the alleged referendum lock. We didn't spot you standing up defiantly for England.

You have been bending the knee to our central government for years.

Tottering back from the green brink?

Via the GWPF (cos I'm not paying Murdoch for The Times online), we can read that

There was growing speculation last night that the Government is on the verge of cutting multibillion-pound financial incentives to build wind farms. It is believed that the Government could cut so-called ROC incentives for green energy projects as a means of keeping a lid on rising power prices....

Renewable energy leaders say that any cut in the incentive regime would be a disaster for the wind industry, which claims that it would not be able to afford to build commercially viable wind farms.

They're not commercially viable anyway! That's why we pay subsidies! (Nor are they "green", but that's another story.)

Did any politician mention shale? Thought not.

With a report guessing that 2,700 people might die through fuel poverty in a hard winter, and green policies having less and less public support, this would be another step back from what George Osborne has called "Labour's Climate Change Act" - as Richard North points out, the one he voted for.

Oh dear, once again the government comes late to a problem. Andrew Neil has also been rooting around:

Retail prices have risen again and are now above their 2008 peak. Despite lower wholesale prices compared with three years ago our fuel bills are higher than three years ago.

So, contrary to the Energy Secretary's position, higher fossil fuel prices cannot explain our current very high energy bills. And, contrary to the energy companies, they are not merely passing on the extra wholesale costs of energy.

And Huhne's electricity price reforms may not come into effect till 2013 (not that we were holding our breath).

Neil suggests that the energy market is not functioning like a proper competitive market, "otherwise retail prices would not just go up in line with wholesale prices but come down too". Well, that's oligopolies for you. But where's Ofgem, which costs a bundle of money and is proving ... well, useless.

Did any politician mention shale?

As we noted the other day, if the government want to simplify energy bills, the work's already been done for them. Evidently the norm in North America is to have transparent monthly pricing that goes up and down with wholesale markets. Energy firms would become the utilities they should be. Then Ofgem could be slashed or abolished.

Ironically, a major theme of Clegg during PMQs toward the end of the Labour government was ... fuel poverty. He's been noticeably quiet as government contemplates its green policies undermining manufacturing, raising fuel poverty, and making everyone - not just the rich, everyone - poorer. Quite an achievement.

So what has the invisible Huhne been up to? Neil suggests that

Maybe the Huhne green agenda, involving huge subsidies to wind generation, which end up on all our fuel bills, is much larger than we've been told.

So has Osborne been taking Huhne on behind the scenes, and asking Cameron whether he wants the greenest government ever, and more unemployment, and more fuel poverty (and notice that the big carbon capture project has been scrapped)? Especially as the inevitable fragmenting of the eurozone can only make things worse in the short term (but probably more briefly than the pundits suggest).

Heard about shale, by the way?

This really is a miserable little government, with the exception of Gove and IDS, and possibly Pickles. They embrace intellectually bankrupt and politically impossible green policies, their NHS policy is incomprehensible, they want to blow money we haven't got on a high speed railway, their supposedly carefully crafted planning policy looks doomed, they seem in thrall to the EU, and they're taking flak for their claims that they're reining in government overspending when they're doing nothing of the sort.

Could anything else go wrong? Cameron's PMQ performance today was that of a man on the ropes.

Dale Farm gypsies defying eviction

In the end the legal decision goes against them. So the gypsies throw bricks at police.

Are we surprised?

The BBC reports electricity supplies have been cut.

Protesters wearing masks said this had turned off crucial medical equipment belonging to elderly residents.

Oh we're such victims. You knew the eviction was going to happen. If there are frail people there, move them out beforehand. But no, you preferred to use them for propaganda.

The BBC has a reporter inside the camp. Let's hope they are in a position to report any injuries to those enforcing the law.

Eurozone: not just a temporary debt problem

If France can get the eurozone and the IMF to divvy up to bail out its banks ("France is in the EU to take money out, not put it in"), will the eurozone problem go away? Is it just about France's banks? No.

Southern Europe won't be able to repay its debts, and the debt markets know it. Irwin Stelzer is pessimistic. We know by now Greece will never meet any target it signs up to. Greeks don't believe in paying their taxes, and Greece doesn't believe in paying its debts. Greece needs to have its own permanently devaluing currency. Will it get there before beggaring its economy? Will its corrupt democracy survive? Leaving the euro will be messy and expensive, but it's inevitable, so the sooner the better - unless as a Greek politician you think you can persuade frightened governments to lend you even more of their taxpayers' money which you know you won't repay.

Spain will not meet its deficit-reduction target, which Stelzer thinks is more likely to come in at 9% of GDP than the promised 6%. This is higher than recent predictions, which have been around the 6.6% mark. Stelzer's argument:

It has abandoned plans to sell its lottery and postponed plans to sell or lease its Madrid and Barcelona airports. The government says the market is putting too low a value on the lottery, and potential investors in the airports need time to get their financing in order. And it seems that the central government can't rein in the spending of regional governments, making it impossible to keep overall spending under control.

Nor will Portugal meet its target.

Tax receipts are lower than had been forecast only a short while ago, and a firmly entrenched mayor on the island of Madeira has pledged to continue his spendthrift ways, preventing Portugal from meeting its spending-reduction goals.

Besides, as in Spain, the government is about to be turfed out of office by the electorate, and sees no reason to antagonize voters even more with unpopular cuts and privatizations.

Italy's politicians, of course, have no will to do anything at all.

So these countries too face gradual or not so gradual ruin while they stay in the euro. They need their own weak currencies. And Spanish, Portuguese and Italian voters will ask: if Greece doesn't have to pay its debts, why should we struggle to pay ours?

The eurozone will fragment. Just let's not pay to bail out other countries' banks first.

Cameron hits new depths of hypocrisy

According to the BBC, the prime minister has said the government needs to work "harder and faster" to bring down energy bills. Huhne has been working to bring them down?

Oops. As a commentator has written

We cannot raise energy prices from 3.3 per cent of median household income in 2004 to 6 per cent today to 10 per cent in 2015 without creating a serious public and political backlash against current energy and climate change policies.

The hypocrite said they wanted to work out how to create a "trusted, simple and transparent" market.

As a start, what about stripping out the charges for renewables? Then consumers can see what government policy - supported by the Opposition - is costing us. Delivering the economic incentives for investors to commit £200bn into green electricity power systems and networks is unworkable.

If they really want to simplify energy bills, the work's already been done for them. It's agreed that

We need 100% transparency over the actual components of a utility bill. We need to make it simple: One is commodity cost of gas, two should be cost to serve. Cost to serve is a combination of the actual delivery and metering costs and any alleged taxes. Green taxes ... need to be highlighted.

But, as Grealy goes on to say, "we need 100% transparency over commodity costs". The norm in North America, he says, is to have transparent monthly pricing that goes up and down with wholesale markets.

Job done. Energy firms would become the utilities they should be.

In the longer term, government policy needs to make the UK less reliant on international prices.

A sea-change in the UK's energy market from virtual self-sufficiency to net imports over the last decade has exposed consumers to rising international oil and gas prices while sluggish income growth at home makes energy less affordable.

Last year the UK imported more gas than it produced, while in the second-quarter of this year shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exceeded pipeline imports for the first time.

The BBC quotes the Opposition, Which?, and Consumer Focus. They have nothing of substance to say.

The worst offender on the energy front is the government. And they know it. The government has an explicit policy to raise the cost of energy. The Opposition connives with it.

Energy companies should tell the government they are going to itemise renewables costs on consumers' bills. Government should do Ofgem's job for it and order companies to offer at least one tariff on the north american model. Then save money by slimming or abolishing Ofgem, which clearly hasn't done its job.

For the longer term, government needs a policy of getting the raw cost of energy down, not up. That means shale. Did you get that, speedy? Yes, shale.

Cheaper energy would be good for the economy, and good politics too.

Shale in context

British greenies are doing all they can to delay prospecting for shale in the UK.

Thus "while DECC and the Environment Agency are both convinced this will not affect local water supplies, campaigners like Louise Evans are sceptical", reports the BBC, majoring on this caravan park owner rather than the position of the Environment Agency and DECC.

"There's never going to be a guarantee it's safe, but it's a very new method and we're calling for a moratorium so that everyone can take a step back from it," she says.

But it's not just us and the US. In Europe we know France has banned fracking, while Poland sees its probably plentiful shale gas as an historical chance to break free of dependence on Russia.

China aims to produce 6.5 billion cubic meters of shale gas annually by 2015. The US has already made shale gas an important part of the world's energy mix, and a dash for shale by China will hugely increase that.

The Welsh caravan park campaigners don't want you to know that. They want you to think shale and fracking are some wild American practice.

Some commentators disparage Cuadrilla's estimate of gas in place on their Lancashire licence, which was far higher than expected. They question it on the basis that Cuadrilla isn't a publicly quoted company. Should they? Lord Browne ex-BP is prominently involved, and Cuadrilla have shown seismic suggesting their two wells have over 3,000 feet net shale thickness, whereas in the US, any shale thickness over 300 feet is rare.

So probably it's sitting there ready to provide us with far cheaper energy. Does Huhne want to hail this boon for voters? Does he hell, even though it's good politics.

Matt Ridley has written a cracking piece praising the gift of shale. Don't miss it.

Forget democracy, support the euro

The Slovak parliament has yet to vote on whether they should support the euro bailout fund even though they're the second poorest nation in the eurozone.

The SaS coalition party has said it will not vote, arguing that "one of the poorest members should not have to pay for the huge debts racked up by richer states like Greece or Italy". So the coalition government won't have enough votes.

What's an opposition to do?

"The social democrats in opposition are not going to vote for it - although they say they support it - because they want to bring the government down," explained Slovakian politics expert Karen Henderson.

"Whether they bring the eurozone down in the course of this doesn't really seem to bother them."

Naughty step for the opposition, then. Back to the SaS:

"The SaS should consider that it could trigger not just a collapse of the government, which is a secondary issue right now, but cause turbulences in Europe and on the markets," said Grigory Meseznikov director of the Institute for Public Affairs.

So seemingly they should ignore what seems to be a fundamental policy of theirs and vote for something they oppose?

Truly euro uber alles.

Update: the first vote has gone against the euro support facility, as expected.

Is Ofgem causing fuel poverty?

Nick Grealy thinks so.

Fox should be finished

No 10's problem is that an official enquiry will only investigate whether Fox broke the ministerial code. But the political side dwarfs that.

Why did Werrity & Fox become friends? Werrity was a health consultant while Fox held a health position, and a defence consultant when Fox got a defence post. The Telegraph's long account uses the word "coincidence" at least three times. Maybe that was at their lawyer's behest, but it starts to sound sarcastic.

The Mail asks a good question: what do the security services know about Werrity?

One could also ask: if Fox couldn't see what this was going to look like, why should we trust his judgement on anything else? He looked lightweight already.

Now look at the Telegraph's two front page headlines: Fox on one side of the page, Huhne on the other ... both sleazy.

If things go badly for the government, today's front page may come to be seen as a landmark.

An intriguing analogy

Via Nostradamus of the North quoting one Robert Bryce

Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton and a skeptic about global climate change, recently wrote that the "contemporary 'climate crusade' has much in common with the medieval crusades." Indeed, politicians and pundits are hectored to adhere to the orthodoxy of the carbon-dioxide-is-the-only-climate-problem alarmists.

Meanwhile the GWPF highlights junior minister Greg Barker's comment that

I remain optimistic about the future of the green economy. But we need to be realistic about how it will generate wealth and not become a drag anchor on growth.

This has the look of a cautious political shuffle away from extreme greenery to gauge public reaction. Keep moving!

And Fraser Nelson picks apart the lack of economic and political logic behind the political establishment's green policy, which Osborne may be chipping away at. Worth reading in full.

Unlike the crusaders in medieval times, the modern crusaders do need the common people to keep believing in their quest for a green Jerusalem. In a cold winter, can they rely on us to sacrifice our comforts to a discredited doctrine?

No weekly rubbish collections for us

A "massive" cash injection has been snubbed by Welwyn Hatfield Council as it refused to go back to weekly bin collections, reports our local paper.

Mr Pickles urged voters to hit councils that don’t revert to weekly bin collections at the ballot box.

But the Conservative-controlled borough council has spurned the money and said the current system saves money for residents.

The council is saving £300,000 a year by collecting and recycling in alternate weeks "compared to weekly collections of refuse". Their spokeswoman said

To revert to weekly collections for all refuse and recycling would be of no benefit to householders.

That's debatable, but it's not what was on offer. The suggestion was that just the landfill refuse would be collected weekly.

We're recycling more in Welwyn Hatfield now. Leave aside that the recycling policy is driven by threats of EU fines; our increase in recycling happens to coincide with being able for the first time to recycle plastic, of which we have a lot. But let's skip evidence based policymaking.

In what our paper calls "a barbed aside", the council's spokeswoman for half truths added:

It would be preferable for the Government to use any spare funds that it has to restore some of the £2m grant money that has been reduced from the council over the last two years that could then be put towards wider services.

And this is the policy of a Conservative council. They support big government.

Have they not got it into their heads that government is spending money we haven't got?

You've still got the equivalent of £17,000 to your name as part of the public sector net debt. That goes for every man, woman and child in the country.

Next year it will grow to £18,896 as the public debt continues to expand thanks to next year's annual public sector overspend (deficit), forecast to be £101bn.... By 2015-16 your share of the public sector net debt will have grown to £22,061.

Message to my local council. You need to SPEND LESS. You could start by sacking Ms Barbed Aside.

Update: Richard North puts this local authority mindset in a wider perspective.

Promises, promises

William Hague should enter into negotiations with EU leaders to get powers handed back to Britain, says John Redwood. He asks:

What is he doing about it? Why won’t he get on with renegotiating the UK position?

Because he knows he'll come away empty handed. He is bound to fail and he knows it. Hague is like some superannuated stripper. The publicity promises much, but the goods are bound to disappoint. He knows he can't deliver from the EU, that cat-calls and derision are inevitable once his failure quickly becomes obvious.

So he has to keep tantalising with promises.

Look, the EU is not some club where you can ask nicely and they'll give you some powers back. The EU ethos is to regard its territories as one country. That's why we can't deport Romanian cash machine thieves, that's why people from other EU countries will have the same social security entitlements as the rest of us, that's why being part of the EU is a succession of rearguard actions, against the Commission and against France in particular.

That's why it's politically useful to promise repatriation of powers. But don't make the mistake of getting started, or the audience will quickly see that you can't deliver at all.

Recycling reduces credibility

"David Cameron promises today to slash red tape in an attempt to boost the faltering economy", reports The Mail.

I've heard of recycling but this is ridiculous. In fact the europhile greenie, whose father-in-law is raking it in at our expense from wind turbines, has been letting his government introduce additional regulations, such as the EU diktat on agency workers' rights.

Every time you repeat an empty promise, people believe you less.