purple scorpion

That money belongs to the people

2012-01-26T12:42:00.001Z

Open Europe reports on comments by europlastic George Eustice MP.

Writing in the Western Morning News, Camborne and Redruth MP George Eustice cites findings from Open Europe’s new report on EU structural funds, which found that if regional policy were devolved back to the UK government, Cornwall could receive an extra £207 million in funding over the next seven years. He argues that “a successful regional policy is incredibly important to the far South West because action is needed to create new industries and higher paid jobs…however we must also remember that there is no such thing as EU money… We simply get some of our own money back.” He concludes that while “some say they prefer the devil they know and are frightened of change… One idea is to put all the extra funding that Britain would have… into a second pillar of the Regional Growth Fund specifically targeted at areas like Cornwall but with less bureaucracy. It’s an interesting idea which could be right for the future.”

Leaving aside the curious notion of "devolving back", let's highlight Mr Eustice's dictum that

There is no such thing as EU money… We simply get some of our own money back.

It follows that there is no such thing as UK government money either. Remember that, George, every time you eat a subsidised meal at Westminster. That money belongs to the people, to your constituents.

That goes for every penny your government spends. That's one reason why they - and you - should practise austerity.

Round peg and all that

2012-01-24T13:15:00.000Z

Open Europe picks up that former European Commission President Jacques Santer, who in 1999 was forced to resign along with the entire Commission amid allegations of corruption and fraud, has been appointed as Head of the eurozone’s ‘Special Purpose Investment Vehicle’, which aims to raise billions of euros in funding to help deal with the eurozone crisis.

Yes, he'll be heading the SPIV.

Inside party leaders' minds

2012-01-23T19:01:00.000Z

It's a gruesome job, but someone has to go there.

Is Nick Clegg suffering from split personality or memory loss? He tells an interviewer that he & Cameron will have to take a view if Huhne is charged:

Of course, that is a very serious issue if that were to arise. We as a Government want the highest standards of probity to be in place in everything that is done by Cabinet members.

Message received. Then later Clegg says:

I would like to see David Laws back in government – not just because I admire him a lot and he is a close colleague and friend of mine – I just so happen to think he would be very good for the Government and good for Britain.

That would be Mr Laws the self-confessed expenses thief. Wasn't there something about standards of probity in government...?

Meanwhile, Mr Miliband has been demonstrating the hazard of spending too much time surrounded by other lefties. In his interview he says:

I think we can create jobs in the public sector. We can give help to the private sector too.

He is then asked whether he is backing an “increase in the size of the public sector”, and replies:

Well, we’re not short of things to do in our country. When we look around and we think about the jobs that could be created for our young people both in the public sector and the private sector – we’re not short of things to do.

What the Rubik genius is short of, though, is money. State debt under the coalition has continued spiralling upwards - but we don't want to talk about that. Let's take and more more money out of voters' pockets to do the things which our gifted masters have identified as the "things to do in our country"?

Why not go the whole hog and take all of everybody's earnings, and just give them enough back to feed and warm themselves? After all, money grows on trees, voters don't know what's good for them, we can trust the superior wisdom of people like Ed Balls and Peter Hain and the awful Mrs Balls. Those ghastly voters will only fritter the money away on lager and holidays and conservatories and their children. The philosopher geeks know best.

Mr Miliband has picked out the big political issue:

Intergenerational justice, intergenerational fairness and equality is going to be the issue of the next 10 or 15 years. Is this generation, my generation, going to do right by the younger generation?

By bequeathing them ever higher levels of debt, Ed? Those "intergenerational" tags just roll off the tongue, don't they.

What fun it must be at Primrose Hill dinner parties dreaming up ways to spend other people's money!

Lawyer gets 12 months for perverting the course of justice

2012-01-21T08:54:00.000Z

This man committed a driving offence but told lies to try to get off.

Sentencing him for 12 months at Lewes Crown Court yesterday, Judge Guy Anthony said: ‘I doubt a drink-drive conviction would have led to this but any conviction of perverting the course of justice is serious.’

That's what happens if you're caught telling lies to get off a driving charge.

The Scots are adults for goodness sake

2012-01-10T09:00:00.000Z

John Redwood writes a tortuous piece doing his best to support the UK government's line that "the UK Parliament should decide on when the referendum on Scottish independence is held, and what the question should be".

This government is wrong on big policy issues, such as cutting spending (it isn't), the EU (they're ceding more powers) and greenery (CO2 doesn't cause significant AGW, and they should be pushing for cheap shale energy). They're even poor at politics (privatising forests? planning reform?). Why do I continue to be astonished by the UK government's ability to pick the wrong battles and fight them badly?

A Scottish referendum was a manifesto commitment by the SNP to Scottish voters, was it not? In other contexts Tory MPs champion subsidiarity, do they not? If the Scots voted to secede, would an imperialist Westminster seriously consider refusing them permission?

To suggest that Westminster is capable of organising a referendum but Edinburgh isn't is patronising humbug. It's not even convincing humbug. Alex Salmond must be rubbing his hands with glee. The more the snooty Etonian continues to patronise them, the more likely the Scots are to vote to leave.

Independence may or may not be a mistaken policy, but the decision is for the Scots to make and they do not need the condescending permission of the English or anyone else.

As Norman Davies keeps saying in Vanished Kingdoms, constitutional arrangements come and go.

Abolish overseas aid tax

2012-01-05T20:21:00.000Z

The Select Committee on International Development wants to tinker with the overseas aid the government gives away. Aid given by the UK to countries with a history of fraud and corruption should be "conditional" on them improving their governance.

Not good enough.

Overseas aid shores up inefficient governments, which can then survive without reforming their countries.

In the spirit of the "great society", let individuals make their own decisions about what overseas aid they will send, and where.

Abolish overseas aid tax! We haven't got the money anyway.

The chimera of man-made global warming

2012-01-05T15:07:00.000Z

We know that previous warmings have not been caused by rises in atmospheric CO2 (yet they're not fully understood); we know about the lack of detailed correlation between the carbon dioxide and temperature records over the last 100 years; we know about the absence of the model-predicted temperature hotspot high in the tropical troposphere.

Now in a post on Watts Up With That "232 complete and unadjusted GHCN station records are analysed for step changes in the period 1960-2010", and it is argued that:

Abrupt changes in temperature linked with natural climate events may be widely responsible for the “global warming” during the second half of the 20th century
50% of sample stations have not experienced increased mean temperature (”warming”) for more than 18 years
70% of Europe stations have not experienced warming for more than 20 years.

In short, if the theory of CO2 induced AGW didn't exist and someone now proposed it, they'd be laughed out of court.

The politicians who pauperise us with their adherence to this out of date superstition deserve worse than our contempt and rage.

We need to tell them loudly and repeatedly that we are not fooled.

Shale v wind again

2012-01-05T14:28:00.000Z

The New Nostradamus of the North quotes Ronald Reagan saying

Don´t be afraid to see what you see.

He sees the world's biggest wind turbine manufacturer in trouble - that's those wind turbines that kill 440,000 birds each year in the US alone.

Unlike wind power, shale is not subsidised with money taken from taxpayers. The Marcellus shale is producing ethane, bringing the US the prospect of lower prices for auto parts, Styrofoam and other products.

As Nick Grealy writes:

Shale ripples through the economy as mega trend for the rest of the economy.

Next mega trend: Could the US disconnect from the rest of the world as global growth engine based on job creation in manufacturing? That story is six to twelve months away. Who would ever have seen that coming?

Note to the green boy and the Huhne loon: the days are past when our sources of information are limited to the BBC and the daily paper. We out here know this is going on.

Note to the Miliwimp: you could support shale in the interest of jobs and economic resurgence. You're paralysed by your political correctness.

Inside the Guardian ghetto

2012-01-05T00:01:00.005Z

In writing on the occasion of a William Beveridge anniversary, Liam Byrne isn't out to present a scholarly summary of the famous Beveridge White Paper, he's testing how a few new welfare themes might be received in today's political climate.

The Guardian has picked a few readers' letters commenting on his article. Their choice tells you how extreme is The Guardian's ethos, how far adrift of current political reality.

Lead letter writer Professor David Byrne is presumably no relation to Liam. The Prof has certainly decided to use personal rudeness to make his point. For instance

... his article is an insult to the memory of Beveridge and to those who today have no work because the capitalist economy has failed them. Mass unemployment is, as Beveridge put it in his first book in 1909, primarily a problem of industry, of the system, rather than a result of the deficiencies of the unemployed.

Oh yes, excellent practical politics. The next prof wants everyone to have "a basic universal income, so that people do not feel compelled to avoid unpaid occupations". This would be financed by a wealth tax. Hm. Suppose everyone opted for unpaid occupations then?

After the two leftie profs, the next writer says the "mass unemployment that threatens this country" is (will be?) caused by "a capitalist system gone feral". Her solution?

We have to share around the products of a wealthy society and ensure the gap between rich and poor is viewed as a problem to be solved, not the normal consequence of capitalism.

State enforced equality for everyone, then?

The next prof is warning us that soon people "will find that they must pay for their healthcare, as the private corporations involved in clinical commissioning groups decide what they will and will not offer". Hm. His Labour government must have been spending all that money on something. What, then?

The next writer challenges Liam Byrne to come up with a new housing policy, and seems to want rent control, comparing policy on housing in the different society of the late 1940s with policies today. The current housing minister, Grant Shapps, has his faults (he is a Friend of the Earth), but he is making useful reforms to housing policy which eluded his predecessors.

Eyelids drooping? We'll look at just one more letter, where the writer has hit on the simple solution:

Were pensioners paid a decent pension and were employees paid a decent wage, there would be no need for these subsidies and our welfare benefit budget would fall dramatically.

And who's going to pay for that?

The Guardian has chosen for publication letters pushing points I've outlined above - far outside any mainline political discourse.

Are these kneejerks what passes for thinking in the Guardian ghetto?

A consensus of idiots

2012-01-03T00:01:00.015Z

Cheap energy is one of the foundations for economic prosperity. A country with dear energy makes itself less likely to prosper in a world where competition is global.

Coalition energy policy is based on the discredited theory that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drives global warming.

Even if the science had been right ... even if we were seeing the warming in the troposphere that the theory predicts ... even if paleo-climate warming and cooling showed a correlation with CO2 (it does but the CO2 level reacts 800 years later) ... even if the science behind government policy had been right ... the policy was still rubbish.

As Ross McKitrick explains in his December evidence to the Canadian Senate, if all the Kyoto signatory governments had met their obligations, the level of CO2 expected in 2100 would have been postponed until ... 2105. The costs of the policy were too great for it to be implemented, its benefits would have been too small to measure.

It's this policy prescription that the coalition and the Huhne loon are following to make our energy more expensive. Are the rest of the world following this barmy lead? Well, no. It's the USA whose example is being followed - Argentina, China and Australia are among those pushing to exploit their shale deposits. Is Cyprus planning to mitigate use of its new gas discovery in favour of wind power? No. The field could make Cyprus self-sufficient in energy for decades or bring huge export revenues, and that's the way they want it.

Countries with expensive energy will suffer. Brazil's economy has just outgrown ours, and we will have to strain not to fall further down the global league table.

If - as some scientists suggest - global climate is greatly affected by the sun (who would have guessed it?), the world may be about to cool. Then we will need cheap energy if we are not to see even more of us plunged into fuel poverty.

Properly managed and encouraged, our shale deposits should bring us cheaper energy. DECC can't embrace that, though. Huhne's mantra, and the theme of its energy pathways report, is that energy is bound to get dearer, but government action will make it less dear than it would otherwise have been.

This manages to be a lie on several levels. Absent government mismanagement, energy will get cheaper again (see what's happened in the USA); someone always pays for government action, because governments have no money (the money belongs to the people); and expensive measures to cut use of energy which turns out to get cheaper will be bad value for money.

A policy that would be disastrous even if the science were right. Goodness knows how many billions this Westminster consensus is costing us.

Abolish the overseas aid tax

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000Z

France and Germany are lagging behind Britain on aid spending to poor countries, reports the Mail. Both countries have failed to hit EU targets and have barely increased their spending in recent months.

Well done.

Got your fingers in your ears, Huhne?

2011-12-21T22:03:00.001Z

US gas prices are already well below Europe's. Some predict a further drop in 2012. Indeed

Adam Sieminski, Chief Energy Economist, Global Markets, at Deutsche Bank, questioned whether advances in shale and tight oil drilling, which are building on technology developed for natural gas shales, might open up so many new oil resources that they would upend everyone's expectations in a couple of years, as the technology did for gas.

Nick Grealy suggests that "the key word here is advances".

Shale is effectively a once in a generation game changer in energy, built not only on luck but also on technology. The increase in computing power of this century is what really made the technology possible. But those whose idea is of a future as model based, i.e. the future is simply a continutation of the past, are not able to handle inflection points.

We've been here before: Conventional energy wisdom is as relevant as Blockbuster Video, any Post Office in any country, bookstores, the music industry and any number of indestructible models that were too big to fail - but did thanks to technology.

Our industrial revolution depended on plentiful, cheap energy. China is pressing ahead with shale. So are large emerging economies. Opponents of shale have to ignore this international picture and pretend the shale issue concerns only the US and the EU. It doesn't.

Opponents of shale want to make us poorer while the rest of the world gets richer.

Government plans to spend taxpayers' money on insulating homes assume that gas will keep getting dearer (government of course plan on making things worse with their insane levies). It won't.

Government has this huge good news to offer us, but are trapped in the insular failed theory that carbon dioxide is triggering uncontrollable warming. (It isn't, and if it is the UK can do nothing about it at all.)

This is incompetence in politics and leadership of the highest order. Grealy predicts that "technology and geology will combine to make 2012 one amazing year for the US economy".

Suddenly Europeans are going to have to ask themselves what is happening to the US, and more to the point, why isn't it happening in Europe.

The EU gets more newsprint space

2011-12-20T08:59:00.000Z

A rallying cry yesterday from Ambrose to the EU's left: the austerity prescription cramps your freedom to tax and spend, and will cost jobs. Under the proposed compact "they cannot pursue their economic agenda ever again." He scouts political developments in several eurozone countries and concludes that

The question for today’s Left is whether it is in their interests to keep apologising for an EU monetary regime that has pushed the jobless rate for youth to 49pc in Spain, 45pc in Greece, 30pc in Portugal and Ireland, 29pc in Italy and 24pc in France – yet 8.9pc in undervalued Germany – and that offers no credible way out of the slump for the Southern half.

Today Ambrose has turned pessimistic about Spain. Several months ago he had been uncharacteristically lured into optimism for the country, after touring a few high tech companies there. No longer. Spain is destined for more cuts and austerity with unemployment already 22.8%. And the issue of Spanish provinces' debt has surfaced again. Valencia is relying on money from Madrid to keep it afloat, after a bond issue failed and one agency downgraded the region to BBB-. For sure Spain has worse to come.

Roger Bootle reviews the reasons why the UK joined the ~~European Union~~ Common Market, and accuses the pro-EU faction of "top table syndrome, sizism, and proximity fetishism" - out of date in an internet enabled world with new economic powers rising.

The pro-EU faction puts its case in a letter to The Telegraph which the paper bills on its front page, where the signatories are described as "a group of leading businessmen".

Hm, let's see. A former EU commissioner? Someone from Good Governance Group? Lord Jay? A former advisor to a Prime Minister on Europe?

And you may think that someone from a translation company and the CEO of Eurostar may conceivably have an axe to grind. The letter is a lot less important than the paper wants to pretend. Was this the best that Roland Rudd could cobble together?

The letter's power of analysis is shown by its contention that

it is in Britain’s interest that the euro survives and we therefore should do everything we can to ensure the necessary steps are taken to guarantee its viability.

"Everything we can"? Sorry, so called business leaders, but that statement is vacuous.

Maybe they should be more concerned by Philip Johnston's argument that "the Lords are right to consider a cost-benefit analysis of Britain’s EU membership". It's not the high level numbers he brings together that are striking - it's that the topic is edging into the mainstream.

Mind you, Chris Huhne's staff at DECC would probably submit a paper arguing that EU membership was essential to protect us against catastrophic global warming.

And another hospital

2011-12-19T20:39:00.000Z

Albert Buck, 84, lost eight stone in just two months at Darent Valley Hospital in Kent after being admitted with a fractured hip. His son said:

Dad was among the troops who liberated Belsen but died looking like one of the inmates, thanks to Darent Valley Hospital.

The Daily Mail adds that Darent Valley has one of the worst rates for patient deaths in the country and its A&E department is in the bottom 10, with low levels of weekend staffing.

Not that the local taxpayers will have any say about that.

A Facebook group exists called 'Darent Valley Hospital is the worst hospital ever'.

More failings in hospitals

2011-12-19T19:38:00.000Z

"Gross failures" by Milton Keynes Hospital contributed to the death of a five-year-old boy, a coroner has ruled. His family had waited since 2009 for the inquest to resume.

The medical director says they "have learned from this" (as they do), and have put in place measures which sound pretty basic common sense. Harry's mother says:

I did take the apology on oath as sincere, but I think it came from the wrong person, and very late.

The inquest process has been drawn out over more than two years, and as usual we hear of no one disciplined or sacked.

==========

Lawyers are planning a "class action" on behalf of 23 families who contacted them with "shocking" claims of indignities and the most basic failings in care. They believe the families who have contacted them so far about care at Alexandra Hospital, in Redditch, West Midlands, may represent "the tip of the iceberg". The Telegraph lists some of the complaints.

The legal action facing the trust comes after the Care Quality Commission (CQC) published the findings of spot check visits to 100 hospitals to inspect care of the elderly in October. Half were found to be failing basic standards.

France gets friendly

2011-12-15T17:27:00.000Z

French Prime Minister François Fillon has questioned why credit ratings firms haven't taken a closer look at their scores for the U.K., which he said is in a worse position than some of its neighbours, reports the Wall Street Journal:

Our British friends [my italics] have a higher deficit and more debt, and I would say that the ratings agencies have not yet noted that.

And Christian Noyer, a member of the European Central Bank's governing council as well as head of the Bank of France, has questioned the usefulness of rating firms, which "have now frankly become incomprehensible and irrational".

In other words, we don't like what they're saying.

A downgrade doesn't seem justified to me when you look at the economic fundamentals.

Or else a downgrade should come first for the U.K., which has a greater deficit, as much debt, more inflation, and less growth than us, and collapsing credit.

How we love our British friends. Are these French comments a sign of the much vaunted "European solidarity"?

L'exception francaise

2011-12-12T11:11:00.000Z

France is preparing for the possible loss of its prized triple A credit rating, Angelique Chrisafis tells us in The Guardian, "which the markets fear is possible despite last week's Brussels summit aimed at shoring up confidence in the eurozone".

Despite? It was another summit that solved nothing.

France, the second-biggest economy in the eurozone, was the only AAA country singled out for a possible two-notch credit downgrade because of growth predictions seen as too optimistic, the threat of recession, budget cuts judged to be inadequate and the exposure of its banks to the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain.

Just little local difficulties, then. A poll found that just over half of French people feared that a credit rating downgrade would have a big impact on their daily lives, we're told. Are we then to imagine that in the village bars and the rundown suburban estates the French shift uneasily and speak of little else?

Never mind, their budget minister, Valerie Pecresse, stepped up and "attempted to calm the mood". So it's serious then. She said a downgrade "would make things more difficult" and "wouldn't be positive". We're with you there, Valerie. However, it would not change the government's economic policy on how to lift the deeply indebted French government out of the red after more than 30 years without balancing a budget.

Hm, possibly that point about the 30 years was written by The Guardian rather than spelled out by Valerie. She went on:

We work for the French people, not for the ratings agencies.

Yes, yes.

No one doubts France's ability to pay back its debt.

So they won't downgrade you then?

Now, it's French policy that Southern Europe needs years of austerity to balance its budgets. But that's not for France. 'She said an austerity plan that was "too violent" would risk harming growth'. Well yes austerity does that. Which is exactly your policy for your southern neighbours.

She also denied the government would need to bail out its biggest banks. We'll see.

Meanwhile M de Villepin says he intends to stand for president, defending "a certain vision of France," that includes less dependence on market speculation.

Oh, going to start running a surplus, are we? Okay, maybe a balanced budget? Well, perhaps not:

I worry, that I see France is being humiliated by the law of the markets, this law that imposes austerity.

So it will be a policy which lessens dependence on the markets, but without austerity. Got that?

Mrs Thatcher famously used to say that you can't buck the market. France, it seems, is above that. No austerity for France, France is too grand ... that seems to command general agreement. In France.

Government should take less, not more

2011-12-11T12:41:00.000Z

It's easy to poke fun at Eric Pickles when he says he will he will make mandatory a requirement to hold a referendum, where any local council seeks to impose a Council Tax increase of more than 3.5%.

After all, he preaches localism. But, as he's explained, this means power for local voters, not power for local councils.

Richard North gets this exactly right when he calls it a good start. It plays into his referism meme, which at a local level I support.

Richard reminds us that council tax is a small and diminishing source of councils' overall income. So voters should really have the opportunity to pass verdicts on more than just their council tax demands.

Pickles is behind the times, though, when he implies that a 3.5% rise is acceptable. Why? Because disposable household incomes are projected to fall over the next few years - maybe quite a bit if the euro alarmists turn out to be right.

This raises the tricky question, Are we here for the councils' good, or should the councils be here for our good?

All right, it's a simple question with an obvious answer, but those questions can be the most powerful. And you can see why the local establishment doesn't want to face it, because the clearly right answer is uncomfortable for them.

For it leads to the question, If my disposable household income is going down, surely you, my council, should take less, not more? Not an increase limited to 3.5%, but no increase at all. In fact a reduction. It shouldn't be hard to set the referism question taking the projection for average household incomes as the baseline.

So Pickles' proposal may be a good start. But he's wrong to assume that government should always have more of its ~~subjects'~~ citizens' money.

To that extent it's fundamentally flawed.

Black reveals some of the bad news

2011-12-10T15:29:00.000Z

Having told us a few hours ago that the climate talks in Durban were heading to a deal - a claim undermined by his own report - BBC environmental cheerleader Richard Black is now reporting that "UN climate talks may be running out of time to make an agreement".

Many hours into an unscheduled extra day, some ministers have already left, and the South African hosts have yet to show a strategy for closing the deal.

The conference is ending with a whimper: not all delegates can change their flight bookings, the convention centre won't be available indefinitely, and there is even talk that the meeting could become inquorate. Furthermore

There are repeated mutterings about a lack of urgency and strategy from the hosts.

Hm. Could this perhaps be the hosts' strategy?

Strange how an ~~enthusiastic cheerleader~~ impartial reporter failed only a few hours ago to see which way the conference might be headed.

Very strange.

Still no word from Black of what terms of agreement were being touted. Could Black have had no idea? Oddly, Monckton claims he does know. How come Black didn't say?

Which is worse, to be a sincere but incompetent reporter, or arrantly biased? Either way, a proper news organisation would have only one course of action open to it.

Sack Black.

Classic BBC and Richard Black bias

2011-12-10T09:31:00.001Z

The UN climate talks are heading to a deal, Richard Black tells us - which to those of us outside the bubble is pretty surprising.

But "the new version does not specify a date from which the new agreement should come into force", so maybe it's not that big a deal. However, let us press on.

It gets vaguer. It turns out that this new draft which Richard Black is hymning hasn't got general agreement yet.

How the new version will be greeted by the BASIC group and the US is not yet clear.

Which is surely the big issue. Black then nails his colours to the mast, writing (my italics):

India has been accused of being one of the main countries blocking a progressive deal here, along with China and the US.

This is editorialising in a news report. Not only did Black feel relaxed about doing this, no alarm bells appear to have rung at the BBC about posting it on their "news" website - and that just after Booker's long analysis of BBC bias on greenery had cause to keep on naming Black as an offender.

"A number of observers", we are told, "suggested that of the BASIC bloc, Brazil and South Africa were minded to move towards the EU/LDCs/Aosis position - and if China did likewise, India and the US would then come under intense pressure to give ground". And pigs might fly. Just who are these observers? If "a number of observers" suggested this, were "a number" of other observers less bullish? Was there perhaps some other point of view? Black declines to tell us, positioning himself as a cheerleader rather than a reporter.

He concludes his report with quotes from demonstrators and Greenpeace. As we know from Sir Anthony Jay's introduction to Booker's report, this is a classic trick of the propagandist, to leave the reader with the viewpoint you favour. Here is the conclusion of Black's piece:

Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo was among those escorted from the conference centre for leading the protest.

"The United States delegation is right now organising, line-by-line, the means by which United Nations member states will be eradicated from the map," he said.

"I ask the proud American people, in whose name this is being done, to take just a moment today to consider what they would do if they learned that a conference of powers was plotting to wipe their great nation off the map, because for low-lying islands that is the future they face."

Is there a case to be made against the views Black has chosen to quote? Not that you'd know, for Black has chosen not to refer to any counter-arguments at all, let alone quote anyone with opposing views.

This is not straight reporting - except, evidently, by the standards of the BBC.

Second class mind

2011-12-08T16:22:00.001Z

Time was when the height of Cameron's ambition was to go to EU heads of government and return with ... concessions on the working time directive. How we derided his poverty of aspiration. How we agreed with Iain Martin that Cameron had shown himself a manager who would never make history.

Now even that paltry objective has been abandoned, and it is The City that Cameron wants to protect.

As Damian Reece points out, this is another example of Britain seeking to defend an isolated position.

Row after political row over Europe and our relationship with the Continent have been exercises in the purely negative, without ever articulating what we do want.

What is the UK government's vision of the EU? What is its strategy to move us there? Or are we just tugging on eurocrats' coat tails to slow down integration in a bloc which we feel we have to belong to for reasons of trade, but whose political direction we abhor?

For the time being we are world's sixth largest economy. If we see ourselves as a global trading nation, says Reece:

We should be aiming to be a global hub, and therefore Europe's hub, for new technologies such as nano-technology, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, high-end manufacturing, research and development, education, design, entertainment, not forgetting financial services, volume car making, tourism and specialist engineering to name a few.

Let's hope this doesn't mean a return to the government picking ~~winners~~ losers. But a global hub requires good facilities:

Hong Kong's airport has been voted the world's number one transport hub seven times in 10 years. It has the world's third-largest container port. This sort of infrastructure is no accident. We could be Europe's trade hub again but our commercial arteries are too small and choked with traffic. Heathrow is a liability, not an asset.

It is a second class mind that tries to muddle along from one crisis to the next, picking at bits of the status quo to try to protect.

A first class government would articulate a vision of Britain's place in the world, and persuade the country that it is the right vision. Policies then are formed to realise the vision - actually an easier process than wandering around in a mental fog picking areas here and there to try to defend.

But Cameron has a second class mind.

Temperature changes in context

2011-12-07T14:29:00.000Z

Temperature change is looked at in context here. Read the points numbered 1 to 10.

Can we get on with something else now, please?

The Huhne and Clegg death toll

2011-12-02T14:36:00.000Z

In opposition Nick Clegg campaigned against fuel poverty (yes, he really did, for instance see here and here and here).

The Mail (h/t GWPF) is highlighting that "More than five million households in England alone are living in fuel poverty as incomes stagnate and energy bills soar", explaining that "fuel poverty is where a family spends more than 10 per cent of its income on energy".

Ministers are under increasing pressure to abandon green energy targets amid warnings that fuel surcharges will put the lives of the most vulnerable at risk as they struggle to pay bills.

The Government faces calls to tear up or delay plans to force through a £200billion shift to wind turbines, wave power and new nuclear power stations.

Prices to consumers rose, and now energy prices have fallen back. Time for price cuts? Don't hold your breath. The government better pray for some serious global warming this winter.

Still, as Nick Grealy points out, the new National Infrastructure Plan mandates Chris Huhne's department to

Seek to clarify the potential contribution of shale gas and other unconventional resources to indigenous gas supplies. While a potentially significant discovery has recently been made in Lancashire, the scale of possible production is unknown at present. The Government will aim to produce updated estimates of the resource by March 2012.

That won't be soon enough for the people whose cause Clegg adopted in opposition. I wonder how many people he and Huhne will be responsible for killing this winter.

A Government-commissioned study earlier this year warned that more than 2,700 people are dying each year in England and Wales because they cannot afford to keep their homes warm.

There are 736 MEPs

2011-12-02T13:21:00.000Z

How many turned up yesterday to hear a speech by the President of the ECB?

35

Well known truths that must be repeated over & over

2011-12-02T13:11:00.000Z

First

The tired old Foreign Office and Lib Dem line is we have to go along with what the EU wants for the trade.... We constantly hear the refrain that we have to pay the subscription to be in the trade club, you have to take some rough with the smooth, we have 3.5 million jobs dependent on EU trade.

It means we have to repeat the counter sound bites time and again.

The EU sells a lot more to us than we sell to them. They would not wish to risk that.

Whatever we do on renegotiation and membership, Germany will want to sell us her BMWs and France her wine.

If the rest of the EU did get protectionist with us, we could take them to the WTO and demand international action. Or we could propose a supertax on imported wine and imported cars here in the UK in retaliation....

The advocates of staying in on current terms have to answer this increasingly difficult question – isn’t the single market becoming a means of lumbering us with uncompetitive costs and rules which Chinese or US or other non EU companies do not face when selling into the EU market?

John Redwood

Second

Tom Wigley’s 1998 estimate [was] that even if Kyoto were to be 100% successful in meeting its targets, it would only have reduced temperatures by an estimated 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2050. Kyoto has been a crazy waste of money, Kyoto nations have spent billions and billions of dollars on the off-chance of cooling the earth by an amount too small to be measured....

The Kyoto Protocol, which was confidently forecast by its supporters to make an unmeasurably small difference in reducing temperature if it succeeded in reducing emissions, was also a failure at reducing emissions.... China by itself wiped out all the gains of the EU27, and all the gains of the US, and turned them all into a net increase. And that’s just China, doesn’t include Brazil and India and all the rest of the developing world....

The answer to “What didn’t Kyoto do?” is “It didn’t do anything but cost money”, but that will never stop its supporters.

Willis Eschenbach

The frenzied dance of the damned

2011-12-01T14:46:00.000Z

There will still be a eurozone in six months, but a much reduced eurozone. All EU taxpayers will be poorer as a result of their politicians' hubris.

Meanwhile there's amusement value to be got from Open Europe's daily press summaries. A German Economy Ministry document sets out what could potentially form part of EU Treaty changes to achieve greater eurozone budgetary integration, which include a 2% deficit limit for all members, the possibility of withholding structural funds from those who break the rules, and the creation of an independent ‘stability board’ to oversee the integration process.

Woah there! In what has been seen as a sign of France’s reluctance to give the EU institutions more powers to enforce budgetary discipline on eurozone countries, French Budget Minister Valérie Pécresse says

What we want is greater budgetary discipline, but a budgetary discipline enforced by the states, with a real participation by national parliaments. This question of sovereignty does not arise for us.

Is that clear then? The Germans want centrally enforced discipline, the French want ... hm, what do the French actually want? To have their cake and eat it, one suspects. I'd thought they would string it out some more before this disagreement became explicit.

They know what they don't want, anyway. The Socialist candidate in next year’s presidential elections, François Hollande, criticised German plans to allow the ECJ to impose sanctions on eurozone countries breaching EU deficit and debt rules: “I will never accept the fact that, in the name of control over national budgets…the ECJ can be judge of the expenses and revenues of a sovereign state.” This sounds like a Nein to any German-inspired central control. Indeed, it seems he'd want no change to the present arrangements, left winger though he is.

Former Dutch EU Commissioner Frits Bolkestein says a break-up of the euro is “unavoidable”, adding, “We constructed something that does not work in the long term”, while German economist Gustav Horn says “I think the euro has only three to six months left” if current policies remain unchanged.

"Given the severity of the eurozone crisis", the eurojelly sitting in No 10 "is prepared to forgo the chance of repatriating powers from Brussels, including added protection for the City of London from EU directives". They can do whatever they want and we get ... nothing. Well done.

It's all in vain anyway. Lucas Papademos is facing his first general strike and he hasn't even done anything yet. Don't tell me he didn't know about the hundreds of millions of disappeared euros at Proton Bank, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Italy will shortly become ungovernable.

There will still be a eurozone in six months, but a much reduced eurozone. All EU taxpayers will be poorer as a result of their politicians' hubris.

Temperature changes in context

2011-11-30T10:09:00.000Z

Buried in the comments on a Watts Up With That post are some thoughts from "crosspatch".

Temperatures are rising after the Little Ice Age (LIA) a few hundred years ago. How much of today’s temperature levels are natural recovery from the LIA and how much are due to human CO2 release, he asks. "They can’t even really quantify how much of the CO2 with the fossil fuel 'signature' is even actually released by human activity and how much is natural from such things as global coal seam and gas pit fires."

But why choose the LIA as their starting point anyway? There have been other cold periods and other recoveries. "There were cold periods during the Roman Empire that caused great migrations of people. Why did the Visigoths migrate South from Sweden? Why did the Vandals migrate South from the Baltic? Because it got too COLD there!"

Then he turns to the medieval warm period (MWP).

They would also claim the MWP doesn’t exist and say they can’t find the tree ring signal for it. We don’t NEED a tree ring signal, we have chronicles of the time that report what was being grown and where it was being grown. We know that in many places in the Alps, Scandinavia, Greenland, and other places, some things that were being grown in various locations can not be grown today because it is still too cold in those places.

“The Cause”, he says, would write this off to local circulation changes.

Problem is that we see evidence for the MWP in Alaska, the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin, South America, and Africa, too.

Now comes the crunch point. To top it all off, they have picked some arbitrary fairly recent period to represent “normal” temperatures when that recovery from the LIA might not even be complete yet.

It might even take the oceans another few hundred years to fully recover at depth and so they are going to be rising as the water undergoes thermal expansion and they will also release more CO2 as it warms at depth.

And, he concludes, "if word were to get around that maybe what we are seeing is a natural recovery of temperatures, what would happen to these people's careers?

Others have asked, if we really could engineer the global climate (ha ha) and keep it stable (ha ha), would we choose present temperature levels? The world might well be better off a few degrees warmer anyway.

Spanish and Italian voters just won't stand for this

2011-11-29T13:00:00.000Z

Open Europe's press summary reports that

A leaked European Commission report seen by Italian daily La Repubblica reveals that Italy is likely to be told at the end of today’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers that it needs to adopt a new package of savings worth at least €11bn as quickly as possible....

Separately, an article in El País reports that Spain’s incoming centre-right government may have to adopt austerity measures worth between €15bn and €30bn early next year, depending on what the country’s deficit at the end of 2011. Secretary-General of Spanish Partido Popular, María Dolores de Cospedal, yesterday confirmed that the new government will enter into office on 22 December.

Italian politicians and unions simply won't countenance cuts on this scale. Spanish voters seemed more cowed during the recent election, but there isn't even the level of grudging acceptance there that can be seen in Ireland. As for Italy, such proposals would simply make it ungovernable. And did anyone mention Greece?

But will the Irish want to stay in the eurozone anyway, Paul Hannon wonders.

Some years hence, it's possible that Ireland will be a member of a currency area that it believes requires too much surrender of sovereignty, but with a debt that is now much more manageable because a good chunk has been written off.

The Irish might then be tempted to consider whether they want to be in that kind of euro zone, a very different beast from the one they joined in 1999.

And Ireland isn't the only small nation that places a high value on its independence. It is possible that the treaty changes proposed by Germany, France and Italy to help save the euro zone from a hard breakup will lead over time to a soft fracture.

Fintan O'Toole seems to be suggesting Ireland should go ahead and default now (h/t Richard North).

Without hard cuts, southern Europe will default, probably quite soon. With action, southern Europe will be ungovernable.

Off limits for state spending

2011-11-28T10:51:00.000Z

Autonomous Mind focuses on a decision by Newcastle Council to give money to "good causes". As he says

This underlines the lack of accountability in our town halls.

Several areas should be off limits for state spending. Here are two.

When companies reach an out of court settlement with a complainant who's threatening to sue them, they usually add a dollop to bribe the complainant keep the complaint private. (Think News of the World.) These confidentiality clauses cost money, as we know. The firm complained against then avoids bad publicity like this.

State bodies should be forbidden to include confidentiality clauses in settlements. This is partly for financial reasons (they cost taxpayers more money) but also for reasons of governance - complaints where a taxpayer-funded body has admitted liability should be out in the open.

It's grotesque that taxpayers should pay to shield managements and staff from scrutiny.

Another area off limits should be donations to charities. In a democracy, decisions about donations should be made by the people. The people should choose the causes and give the money. (Call it the Big Society if you must.) By the way, this includes overseas aid to ~~fund African despots~~ fight global warming in Africa. Councillors don't care which charities their voters would like to support. (OK, it's probably the RSPCA, but that's freedom for you.) Chris Huhne the messianic peacock gives not a fig for anyone's opinion.

So that's another test Newcastle Council failed.

It's not even as if local authorities are flush with our cash, as Richard North points out.

Shale in the news again

2011-11-27T18:06:00.000Z

Shale is in the news again. Good.

Andrew Gilligan has got half a page in The Sunday Telegraph to tell us that "bids for shale gas exploration licences are expected to surge" in a new licensing round next year.

He takes the opportunity to debunk some of the opponents' lies, telling us that

Fracking is not new and has been used without previous controversy since the 1940s. A spokesman for Cuadrilla said that an existing gas well at Elswick, near one of its sites in Lancashire, was fracked 20 years ago by its then owners, British Gas, in “almost exactly the same way” as at Cuadrilla’s shale sites now.

Even The Tyndall Centre doesn't buy the earthquakes argument.

Cuadrilla admits that its operations in Lancashire “triggered” two small earthquakes, one of 2.3 magnitude and the other of 1.5. Fracking has been suspended ever since. However, earthquakes of such magnitude occur in the UK almost every week, with six in the last month alone, according to the British Geological Survey.

Scientists investigating the Lancashire incident said the “maximum seismic event” from the fracking would be magnitude 3, described as “minor, often felt, but rarely causing damage” and said that coal mining had caused just as many such earthquakes in northern England in the past. Prof Anderson said that earthquakes were “not an argument we use against shale gas in any way”.

He prefers to focus on a claim that shale gas would “fundamentally undermine” Britain’s commitment to tackling climate change.

Repeat after me:

Global temperatures haven't risen over the past ten years.
Global temperatures are way out of line with the rising output of carbon dioxide.
There's increasing questioning of the IPCC's science, its methodology, and the morality of its leaders.
Even if carbon dioxide were driving global temperatures, economic suicide by a small country responsible for under 2% of carbon dioxide output would have no effect except to make its people poorer, while other countries pressed on with getting cheaper energy from their shale.

Nick Grealy has pointed out many errors in the (at best) careless Tyndall report. It does not deserve to become a point of reference.

The ineffable Huhne has only been dragged to acknowledge the physical existence of shale by repeated highlighting in the media. The coalition seemingly would prefer that we didn't have this energy bonanza beneath our feet at all, so that they could go on making us poorer by confiscating our money for those huge, expensive windmills that nobody wants.

The Duke makes more sense on this than anyone in The Commons. Charles Hendry, though, may be an honourable exception, as he continues to insist that permissions for shale will be treated in the same way as other sorts of energy.

Matt Ridley suggests:

To persist with a policy of pursuing subsidized renewable energy in the midst of a terrible recession, at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available is so perverse it borders on the insane. Nothing but
bureaucratic inertia and vested interest can explain it.

It's worse than that. It's messianic peacock vanity.

State policy is to make us even poorer

2011-11-24T09:29:00.000Z

We know we're going to get poorer. Petrol up, energy up, unemployment up, wages clamped, inflation up, and that's before interest rates start returning to realistic levels. Government is still spending more than it's getting in taxes, apparently intending this to go on for ever - though it can't.

But your state is going to do its bit to make you even poorer. Yes, this is the policy of your state, the people that you voted for.

Presumably hypocrite Huhne will eventually get charged with perverting the course of justice, but his policy is government policy, doubtless supported by the nasty vacuous greenie Cameron even as the standing of the IPCC falls even lower and even its own predictions forecast lower rises in temperatures - while emissions of carbon dioxide soar.

Government policy is that "families will pay £280 a year in ‘green taxes’ by 2020 to fund the shift to wind, solar and nuclear power.... Households currently pay £89 a year on their bills for the green energy drive".

So they're going to make you poorer in order to support this lunacy. Huhne's line is that

By 2020, we expect household bills to be 7 per cent – or £94 – lower than they would otherwise be without our policies.

Britain’s homes will be cheaper to heat and light than if we did nothing.

That assumes you will have cut your electricity use by a third and gas by 6%. However will you cut electricity use by a third?

(Actually gas prices will keep falling as more and more countries bring shale gas deposits on stream, making so called renewables even less economic. Money down the drain - or rather into the pockets of the foreign suppliers.)

Separately, up to a fifth of councils in England may not accept the government's offer to help pay for a freeze in council tax next year, suggests the BBC.

One finance director of a Conservative-controlled district [said] that the deal "financially makes no sense" and would result in a bigger-than-planned hike the following year.

They don't get it. We're already going to get poorer. Did you hear that? Poorer. And you want to grab even more of our money?

That's insane. Why are you not planning to take less?

Meanwhile Planet Brussels dreams

2011-11-24T08:33:00.000Z

Jeremy Warner explains that the Germans

demand limited treaty changes that will allow German fiscal disciplines to be imposed on miscreant nations, with sanctions for non-compliance.

Presumably they'd even apply to France next time round.

Bruno Waterfield has the story on just how "limited" these treaty changes might be.

The commission, he writes, proposes new powers to ensure that the servicing of eurobond debt always takes priority over other spending in national budgets.

Gracious. Enough already? No.

There would be the power "to grant extensive intrusive power at EU level in cases of severe financial distress, including the possibility to put the failing member state under some form of 'administration'".

Budgets would of course have to be submitted for vetting by the unelected Commission. Here we go.

The proposals give the commission the power to send in fiscal inspectors if it decides a member country is "experiencing severe difficulties", even if that country's government has not requested them. EU officials will be able to override a country's protests to "recommend" that it is placed in a Greek, Irish or Portuguese-style austerity programme, involving the loss of its fiscal sovereignty.

Countries that are placed under the control of the EU-IMF, such as Greece, Ireland or Greece, will be unable to regain sovereignty until they have paid back 75pc of their debts, meaning decades of administration from Brussels and Frankfurt.

And Planet Brussels expect the peoples of their subject nations to vote for this in referenda? To vote away their democracies and sovereignty?

Why is it not obvious that we should run a mile from dictators who dream such dreams?

The ideal common currency area?

2011-11-23T09:48:00.000Z

Italy has been ranked 87th in a World Bank report on the ease of doing businesses in 183 countries, reports The Telegraph. That's below Albania, Moldova, the Solomon Islands and Zambia. It has slipped four places in a year. So much for the Berlusconi years.

The only EU country below Italy was Greece, which came in at 100th. The UK was 7th.

The ungovernable south of Italy, much of it in the grip of mafia groups, has been slipping back. In 1998 southern Italy’s per capita GDP was 89% higher than the EU’s 20 poorest regions; now it is just 14% higher.

Spain's constitution does not allow the new government to take power until mid-December.

Portugal’s former finance minister has warned that it could need a further €25bn to top up its €78bn rescue funds.

And European officials were still refusing to disburse to Athens the €8bn tranche of its bail-out money. Opposition leader Antonis Samaras is refusing to commit to the austerity package. The Dutch Finance Minister said future financial aid for Greece will be terminated if Mr. Samaras doesn't support the reforms in writing. Greece would run out of money in about twenty days.

The euro zone wants the leaders to commit that whoever wins power in scheduled elections in February will carry on with the reforms.

"There is a major issue of mistrust towards Greece," said the EU diplomat. "So the usual promises from Athens that have been repeatedly broken won't suffice."

Have the EU economies achieved the "convergence" that advocates of the euro predicted? Of course not.

So what might happen over the next ten years? Niall Ferguson takes an amusing look.

How European countries' debt has risen

2011-11-23T07:34:00.000Z

The Slog has a link to an interesting graphic showing how European countries' debts have risen since 1980.

As he says, while you move the slider to the right, keep an eye on Belgium.

We are so badly governed

2011-11-22T10:10:00.000Z

Standards among officialdom are unacceptably low. We looked yesterday at the government's woefully inadequate attempt at bargaining with the EU (Fraser Nelson suggests Sir Jon Cunliffe is partly to blame).

Today John Redwood takes the MoD to task for the number of senior officer posts it has kept while reducing the number of soldiers. He concludes that

We have a pay bill of over £400 million for top management in the army, with a diminishing number of people to command. Is this cut to the bone?

The MoD should be made to justify the present numbers, or say what cuts it is going to make, and when.

Come on you MPs, do your job.

The winds of change

2011-11-22T09:43:00.000Z

Suddenly it's fashionable to have a go at windfarms. The Duke of Edinburgh, and now Jeremy Warner. Nothing new in his analysis but good to see it spelled out that

The idea that Britain can lead by example in fostering a low-carbon economy is just idealistic poppycock. Britain accounts for less than 2pc of emissions globally. Whatever it does is going to make next to no difference.

We can meet Blair's (erroneous) renewables targets using gas, which is going to get cheaper. Huhne is bound to lose the political battle against Osborne.

Also questionable is the notion that by spending so heavily on renewables, Britain will end up leading the world in green industries. Most of the wind turbines are at present imported, and in any case, no industry based almost entirely on subsidies for its viability is likely to be sustainable in the long term.

Warner makes his case on the basis that in straitened times we can't afford solutions more expensive than necessary, so his case stands whether or not you think there is a CO2 "problem" which needs a "solution" at all. This blog doesn't.

And Lord Leach, a Tory peer, has felt able to dismiss Sir David Attenborough's views on climate change as not "worth listening to". As far as we know, he has not yet been drummed out of polite society.

Another change on the way is the rising economic power of the BRIC economies. Jim O'Neill's new book on the subject, The Growth Road, is being promoted with extracts in The Telegraph. Today he demonstrates why you shouldn't bother with his book, arguing that

There could be a case for allowing Russia to eventually join the EU. If Russia is to achieve its potential, surely a positive minded Europe should seek to welcome the country into the EU. Of course, the same could be said of Turkey....

The case for the EU's existence rests largely on the amount of trade between member countries. If Russia remains as important in terms of trade and fulfils its BRIC potential, then including Russia inside the EU would make a great deal of economic sense.

If his grip on European affairs is that sound, forgive me if I distrust his analysis of more far-off places.

Woefully inadequate

2011-11-21T12:54:00.000Z

According to Open Europe, The Guardian reports that David Cameron and Angela Merkel have reached a compromise which would involve "examining the implementation of the EU’s Working Time Directive" (WTD) in return for UK support for changes to the EU Treaties, proposed by Germany.

The article notes that the UK will table two demands: first, maintaining the right to opt-out of the 48-hour working week. Second, reversing the European Court of Justice’s Simap and Jaeger rulings on rest periods and “on call” time, which have caused severe problems for the NHS. However, unlike Treaty negotiations, where every member state has a veto, the WTD is decided by qualified majority voting, which means that supporters of the directive, such as France, could form a “blocking minority” to challenge any attempts to reform.

This is beneath pathetic on two levels.

First, it seeks limited change in one delineated area in exchange for treaty changes which would open wide new vistas on EU economic governance. (If you want to go down that route, what about fisheries policy, for instance?)

So as a strategy it is pathetically unimaginative and timorous.

Second, on a tactical level, it seems to be handing over a concession in return for an area being examined. Blair made the same mistake with Sarkozy, giving concessions in return for reform to the Common Agricultural Policy being looked at - and nothing changed. Of course.

If this is our government's opening position, no wonder we're about to be stitched up again.

The government will have only itself to blame.

The pain in Spain

2011-11-17T14:44:00.000Z

Spain likes shovelling debt under the carpet where it hopes no one will notice.

I've blogged before about the debts of Spanish provincial authorities (click the Spain label below). Now we learn that big power groups have recently stepped up pressure on the likely incoming Spanish government to tackle a deficit they accumulated by selling power at regulated tariffs too low to cover costs for 10 years. Ten years!

Spain deferred them by obliging utilities to hold these costs on their balance sheets as a state-backed debt known as the "tariff deficit", promising the consumer would repay this debt through gradual increases in electricity bills.

The Socialist government ... reached a deal with utilities companies last year to eliminate the tariff deficit.

How much are we talking about here? Hm, a mere 20 billion euros.

And this is a government whose costs of borrowing are rising, and which yesterday couldn't sell all the bonds it wanted to.

If this is the type of off balance sheet financing that Spanish governments like, what other debt have they parked in the Spanish economy? That's quite apart from what the provinces have been up to.

Hear Spain creak.

Who likes windfarms?

2011-11-17T14:24:00.001Z

Not the Welsh.

Not the Dutch either.

Of course, it's not even as if wind is cheap. Spain may have to axe subsidies for wind and solar power as the euro zone debt crisis makes funding very costly.

So why go for wind? As Matt Ridley says

To persist with a policy of pursuing subsidized renewable energy in the midst of a terrible recession, at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available is so perverse it borders on the insane. Nothing but bureaucratic inertia and vested interest can explain it.

Chris Huhne, take note. It is bad economics and bad politics. Windfarms are only going to get more unpopular, and if this blog can help a little to turn even one voter against them, then good.

The euro is doomed

2011-11-17T13:56:00.000Z

Ambrose reports Derek Heathcote-Amory on the euro crisis:

The Germans will pay up, accept eurobonds, and mobilise enormous firepower. They are not out of ammo yet.

But this won't save monetary union in the end because it is not a debt crisis. It is a currency crisis. The weaker states are uncompetitive and you cannot force them to deflate their way back to competitiveness by cutting wages 30pc. The EU elites won't admit it, but the euro experiment is over.

Already the Greek and Italian students are demonstrating. You cannot govern southern Europe as if it was northern Europe.

Inside some european minds

2011-11-15T09:37:00.000Z

You have to wonder what the Frankfurt Group were on when they thought parachuting in Papademos and Monti would make much difference.

First, the individuals. Papademos at the very least connived in the falsification of Greek statistics which allowed the country into the euro in the first place. If there's one man who can be relied on to pronounce his reforms a success even as they crumble like Greece's subsidised Olympic legacy, it must surely be him. And John Redwood coolly dissects Monti's record of missing the main point by giving something to everyone. Not great choices, then, even if they were the most acceptable available.

More importantly, these technocrats have to get their measures past fractious domestic politicians. But that's worthless if they don't stick. How could one man make unpopular measures effective in a chronically misgoverned country within the few months before another election?

Elected ministers have difficulty getting policies implemented, even in the UK. What chance, then, do Monti & Papademos have of making their policies stick?

None.

Next, an insight into the mind of a French eurocrat:

Countries that are being bailed-out could have their credit ratings suspended temporarily, said markets commissioner Michel Barnier, speaking on French radio.

He said that the ratings agencies "won't have the right, if the ESMA decides, to rate certain countries for a certain time that are receiving an international support programme from the IMF or European Union."

We'll have no inconvenient truths here, thank you. Freedom of speech is secondary to our policy goals, whatever they are. In our EU, you are only allowed to discuss what we allow you to discuss.

This wasn't a slip of the tongue, as it reiterates pronouncements over the past few days. Never mind that it couldn't be made to stick. It's a chilling insight into the EU mindset.

Against this background, Cameron's speech on the EU last night was contemptibly pathetic. He evidently knows no EU history, and his team can't read the papers. Like other British governments before him, he thinks he can divert the determined drive of the EU juggernaut by pleading from an offshore island for tiny reforms.

Ignorance, stupidity, or a pathetic attempt at guile? As an attempt to reframe UK political debate about the EU it fails on all levels, with all audiences.

Even the Dutch question the euro

2011-11-14T13:25:00.000Z

Open Europe reports in its press review:

A new poll shows that 32% of Dutch prefer a return to the Guilder, while 47% favours a Northern Euro, up from 38% six months ago. Meanwhile, Patrick Van Schie, the head of the think tank of the VVD, the party of Dutch PM Mark Rutte, has said that a Northern Euro, without France, should be considered and that a decision on a new currency is needed.

Dutch media report that, on Friday, Dutch politician Geert Wilders announced that his party, the PVV, will start an investigation into the costs and benefits of re-introducing the Guilder as the Netherlands’ national currency. Depending on the outcome of the investigation, Wilders is planning to propose a national referendum on whether the Netherlands should leave the eurozone.

And the euro issue hasn't even lifted off yet. Wait till they start really demonstrating and rioting in Greece and Italy when the cuts and reforms start to bite. Let alone when the technocrat interregnums expire and the mainstream politicians return to power. What then?

You can't govern southern Europe like northern Europe. It seems Dutch voters will be paying attention as this latest rubbish strategy collapses.

Ministerial responsibility: get it done

2011-11-14T09:33:00.000Z

John Redwood writes this morning on ministerial responsibility, working forward, as text books do, from the Crichel Down case.

More interesting is his over-politicised conclusion:

The case has served to highlight the dilemma of the Coaltion government. How can it implement its stated aims, when there are habits of working and assumptions amongst some officials based on the previous 13 years which point in the opposite direction to the Minister’s policy? Will Ministers now devote more time and enegry to supervising and following up once they have set out their general policy aims? As a rule of thumb, there needs to be three times as much follow up, analysis and chasing after the policy launch and press realease, than before when constructing it. If there is insufficient interest in the execution of policy more Ministers are going to be wasting time defending their actions and claiming that the policy was fine, it was just a pity about the implementation.

Strip out the special pleading about the problems of coalition. The problem is implementation of laid down policy.

An interesting regular at John's site, Mike Stallard, comments that

Over Free Schools I can tell you that it is the bureaucracy, not the Minister, who is calling the shots – successfully stopping the original reform in its tracks. I have personal experience of this.

(He adds some silly stuff about William Hague having "Eurosceptic credentials of the highest degree", but let's not be distracted by his politics either.)

John Redwood’s ratio of 3:1 feels about right. Chasing and checking policy implementation should be junior ministers’ job.

Make these functions public, so that people with Mike Stallard’s dilemma know who is the minister for unblockages. It will have to be someone in each department with a dogged and pugnacious nature, nipping at the heels of officials to get things done.

Contrary to one A. Campbell, the responsibility of ministers is not headlines. The responsibility of ministers is to get things done.

That's a team game. Every department needs at least one minister for implementation.

EU ratchets up centralised rule

2011-11-10T14:09:00.000Z

It's an undemocratic inner core calling the shots in the EU, says Fraser Nelson in his piece Europe's hit squad.

He concludes

Merkel and Sarkozy have both been fond of saying that they ‘will do everything necessary’ to save the eurozone. Neither Berlusconi or Papandreou would now doubt them. But a situation where even British officials talk about helping regime change in Italy is not one that can — or should — last long. Berlusconi’s demise marks the EU now entering its endgame. When empires collapse, they can do so very suddenly. David Cameron had better be ready.

The EU's problem is that none of this addresses the eurozone's central contradiction: southern eurozone countries have become uncompetitive with Germany at a fixed exchange rate, and their electorates won't accept the measures that would be needed to restore that competitiveness.

It’s no good anyone trying to govern southern Europe as if it were northern Europe – whether they’re domestic politicians or foreigners.

Greece & Italy are holding their breaths at the moment – wait till they get interim governments and the “reforms” start to bite. The streets will be lively. And neither country is likely to elect a government with a clear majority. Removing their heads of government brings them no nearer a solution.

A useful live blog summarising euro developments

2011-11-09T20:03:00.000Z

http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2011/11/09/live-blog-stakes-rise-in-italy/

How 3 Slovaks robbed us of over £0.5m

2011-11-07T13:04:00.002Z

It was this easy.

Scottish diehards in futile resistance

2011-11-06T13:16:00.000Z

Astonishing news from Scotland has provoked a small diehard group trying to hold back the tide into drastic action.

No, not the Scottish Tories' decision to choose as their new leader a young ex-BBC lesbian new to politics (no chance she's a double agent, then), confirming that Tory grassroots always choose the wrong person.

What the Scottish Tories do hardly qualifies as news any more. In passing, though, we can note that they have scarcely chosen Ruth for her political rhetoric or simple, down to earth communication:

A political party is not a leader, a political party is its membership and I want to bring our members at all levels much closer together in our party going forward and to take our party forward in unity.

David Cameron welcomed the party's choice, which shows an unexpected sense of humour.

Ruth puts her view on devolution this way:

She said the Scotland Bill to increase Holyrood's financial responsibility, currently going through Westminster, was "a line in the sand".

Now the point about lines in the sand, as any child or parent know, is that the tides wash most of them away. So Ruth's probably right. She is indeed a special talent.

No, I really didn't mean to talk about this provincial hiccup. Far more interesting is the news that a first licence for fracking has been granted in Scotland. Wasn't the Scottish economy to be based on so called "renewable" energy? Maybe Mr Salmond has read this and is hedging his bets.

The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) which granted the licence, says fracking is likely to become more widespread in Scotland in coming years.

However, what Scotland on Sunday chooses to call "other environmental groups" believe the process should be banned. This turns out to mean putting Friends of the Earth Scotland on the same level as Sepa. FoES (is that right?) say it is a "worry" to hear that a fracking licence has already been granted in Scotland.

Communities near fracking sites in the US can’t drink their tap water, but they can set it alight due to the amount of methane being leaked.

Not so, say those pesky science people:

Scientists believe the environmental consequences of fracking have been exaggerated. Quentin Fisher, professor of petroleum geoengineering at the University of Leeds, said some groups were “overly concerned”. “There isn’t actually any evidence to suggest water supplies have been contaminated due to hydraulic fracture formation,” he said.

“The examples of gas igniting from taps are probably caused by gas leakage along the casing of boreholes – not hydraulic fracturing.

To translate, Friends of the Earth Scotland are telling lies. Is this the best they can do? They try harder:

Now to add to these dangerous and disruptive impacts, it has been revealed that fracking also causes earth tremors. Scottish communities living near numerous identified fracking sites across the central belt will be rightly alarmed.

What's actually been revealed is that a couple of scarcely detectable tremors have been caused at one English site by the particular rock formation there. To deal with environmental concerns in the US, a new regulation régime is being standardised, but there is no question of prohibiting fracking of shale for gas (and potentially for oil).

For what has also been revealed is that the cost of gas in the US has tumbled, cutting household energy bills and bringing more jobs. Your energy bills may be shooting up - partly to support the expensive so called renewables we advocate - but we at Friends of the Earth Scotland would rather you stayed poor. Sorry, wasn't that in the quote we gave?

Happily these Scottish diehards seem to be hopelessly outnumbered.

Ladling it out to Greece

2011-11-06T10:24:00.000Z

In comments at John Redwood's site, FatBigot offers a perspective on the Greek protests with an appropriately culinary metaphor:

When people are offered a free lunch they tend to say yes, even though there is said to be no such thing. When they have been served what they perceive to be a free lunch for many years the idea that they should pay for the bread roll this year and the soup in two years time, with the cost of main course and pudding lurking in the future, is met with foreseeable resistance. Others have paid for it so far, so “they” must pay for it again.

But now the Greeks are, um, stuffed.

Hyprocisy and feeblemindedness

2011-11-06T08:43:00.000Z

Provoked by Freddy Forsyth in the Express, Richard North has set out in some detail why Mr Cameron's cry for repatriation of powers from the EU is sure to come to nothing.

Presumably Mr Cameron knows this and is guilty of political cynicism rather than blind ignorance?

Italy & Greece aren't governable by IMF or EU monitors. They could only live within their means and in the syle they choose by running a depreciating currency. That's a perfectly possible democratic choice of the type of society they want.

Italian would-be technocrats hoped governance by the EU would transform their country by providing the firm steer their own politicians couldn't give. But the EU waited for a useful crisis. The correction now needed is too sudden to be acceptable to Italian society.

John Redwood's question is still unanswered: the IMF wouldn't lend to California, so why would it lend to Greece? Or Italy. It would be more likely to get its money back from California, too.

But Mrs Merkel has decreed that the single-currency eurozone can't have a fully functional central bank, so it must be the world at large that funds its more feckless provinces, even though the world at large is poorer.

Two questions for Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne. If the Greek and Italian economies remain unreformed - which of course they will - how much will that have cost us in loan guarantees? And what are you negotiating in return for us assuming that risk?

Nothing that I've noticed so far.

How green democracy works

2011-11-05T16:49:00.000Z

In a rational debate, MPs discuss how shale gas extraction might be regulated. Tim Yeo commented that

This debate has shown Parliament absolutely at its best, which is probably why not a single word will be reported in the press or by the electronic media.

A pessimistic forecast - those of us who want Britain to become more prosperous again welcome this process, to which Tim Yeo is an important contributor.

Tom Greatrex remarked that

In the three weeks since I was appointed shadow Energy Minister, I have heard Lord Lawson describe shale gas as the biggest energy bonanza since the discovery of north sea oil, [and] the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) — I am surprised that she is not here today — say, “So what?” to the estimate of 200 trillion cubic feet of reserves under the Lancashire coast....

Did the Green MP prefer to avoid a rational discussion on shale?

Meanwhile, across the water the idea of a German euro referendum was criticised by Jürgen Trittin of Germany's Green party (Die Grünen), who said that:

To ask for referendums when they are against Europe is not democratic, but right wing populism.

So now we know. If you are a Green, democracy is just a tool to be used or laid aside, as benefits The Cause.

The eurozone crisis shows up Cameron and Osborne

2011-11-04T09:40:00.001Z

Greece veered last night from the democratic possibility of a referendum to the opposite extreme of a political conspiracy against their voters.

If we have consensus, then we don't need a referendum

said Mr Papandreou. How will that play out on the streets?

The Telegraph's lead story in its printed edition is worrying in its economic illiteracy. It's regrettable that the paper's political editor doesn't understand what's wrong with the eurozone; but alarming that this probably reflects what ministers and their flunkies are whispering in his ear.

President Obama makes the impossible statement that

The most important aspect of our task over the next few days is to resolve the financial crisis here in Europe.

Is this the mindset, that the great minds can resolve the crisis? This is not just wrong, it's too ridiculous to waste time on fisking.

The story starts by referring to "concerns that the EU plan to save the euro will not be enough to stabilise the world economy".

What? This too is lunacy land. There is no EU plan to "save" the euro (well, not for a few weeks), and even if there were, there's plenty of other stuff to destabilise the world economy.

But Cameron's seeming determination to push more UK money at the IMF makes sense only if he actually believes these statements. Otherwise it's weak-minded rank profligacy.

Later, the story claims

The cost of a full eurozone rescue has been estimated at almost £2trillion.

Leave aside the the "almost", ludicrous in its spurious precision, ludicrous in the breathlessness of the political editor's whisper of such privileged "information". Repeat after me: no amount of money can bring about "a full eurozone rescue" - unless it's enough to fund the debt requirements of the club med economies until the end of time. That's not going to happen, even under these bigheads. And if it did, why would countries outside the eurozone stump up the commitment, which they would only ever see increase?

It's one thing to stand outside the eurozone and advise ever closer union when it's not our money on the line. It's quite another when we volunteer a financial stake.

Mr Osborne said that taxpayers from around the world, including those in America and China, would be "exposed" under the plan.

If we are to be "exposed", we have to know the exposure makes economic and financial sense. It plainly doesn't.

The strongminded, with their feet on the ground, have worked out the basis for their position before they arrive. The weak are swept along by the presence of political celebrities.

This wouldn't matter if Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne were just pledging the fortunes of their rich families, like investors in the Lloyds insurance market. But it's our money - money we haven't got, by the way. We sign an IOU in support of a patently incoherent eurozone policy constructed by bullies who are hostile to us - and what do we get back in return for throwing our money away? Apparently nothing.

We are, indeed, all in it together - thanks to these weak fools.

UPDATE Richard North reminds us

As we see the world slip into a cooling cycle, the great tragedy is that we do not have the politicians with the wit and courage to admit they are wrong, and row back on the accumulated stupidity and waste which marks twenty years of policy failure.

Yes there's a pattern here.

No consequences in the state sector

2011-11-01T15:32:00.000Z

Three disgusting Tory MPs - Nadine Dorries, Steve Baker and Caroline Nokes - enjoyed a £25,000 junket to Equatorial Guinea this summer just weeks before a report concluded human rights violations in the country were 'trivial'. Ignorant, thick and venal.

Prescott has denied going on a credit card spending spree while Deputy Prime Minister, blaming card cloning.

Among the officials, luxury hotels, doughnuts, and even flying lessons are among the items paid for using Government credit cards since the coalition came to power. Examples here. But who was disciplined?

Another example. In Lincolnshire one fire officer spent £27,000 in two years on business class flights. This was one Mike Thomas, who took trips to the US, Canada, Japan and New Zealand to attend search and rescue training programmes on business class tickets - then charged them back to the council.

These costs were incurred "in his work with groups aiming to improve firefighter safety at an international level". Why did this fall to the taxpayers of Lincolnshire?

Still, at least Mr Thomas is applying the lessons he learned for the benefit of the taxpayers of Lincolnshire? Seems not - he is now former chief fire officer Mike Thomas. If all this overseas research was going to be worth while, why was it best to send someone just ending his career?

The council chief executive says the expenditure contravened council rules. Did the chief fire officer not know this? Did the person who signed the payments off not know this? If they didn't they should have done.

So who has suffered - apart from the taxpayers? Guess what. Mistakes have been made and steps have been taken to address them. And that's it, of course. Tough luck, taxpayers. Your money's gone.

The eurozone must shrink - and will

2011-11-01T14:58:00.000Z

If the architects of the euro planned it to fail, to make fiscal and fuller political union necessary, their imaginations failed them.

Why would any country welcome more integration when it was already in the grip of an economic squeeze? Especially as closer integration would bring the prospect of the squeeze continuing and tightening - with no effective way for the citizens to bring pressure on their masters to change it.

Eric Edmond explains how the economics point to the eurozone splitting in two, the northern part in a new 'mark zone', the southern part keeping a devalued euro. But "will it happen?" he asks. "I doubt it." For Ambrose, the two halves are locked together in a broken marriage.

Greece and Spain, for two, are already suffering. For ordinary Greeks the big bailout adds up to years of hardship, while Spain's jobless rate has reached 21.5%, and more and more jobless Spaniards are seeing their unemployment benefits expire - some 560,000 people have no support at all. If subsidies from the EU don't make up for individuals' worsening poverty - and no hope that it would be relieved in the short term - why would they vote for more of this?

Greece is a crooked economy, Spain is trying but is hamstrung by its regional governments, and Italy is probably incapable of any real economic reform at all. In Portugal real M1 deposits have fallen at an annualised rate of 21% over the past six months, buckling violently in September. Recession beckons. As Ambrose summarises:

Europe’s leaders are betting that a reduction of red tape and a radical shake-up of the labour markets will unleash growth in Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, a decade hence. In the meantime, the governments of these near helpless countries must soldier on with perma-slump, and riot gear, and pray for a miracle.

Democracy won't tolerate this - especially at the hands of unaccountable foreigners. So the eurozone in its present form is doomed.

Abolish government overseas aid

2011-11-01T11:50:00.000Z

The Spectator will be holding a debate about the overseas aid budget.

Dambisa Moyo in her book Dead Aid is persuasive on why perpetual aid is unlikely to work. However, the issue for the Spectator debate seems to be not that, but whether everyone should be forced to contribute, through taxation.

They shouldn't. In the localist Big Society, individuals make their own decisions about how much to give, and to what. The only remaining question: should these voluntary contributions be subject to tax relief, making taxpayers at large contribute anyway?

Of course politicians love doling out other people's money. But why should we let them dole out money we can't afford, when there's that more democratic alternative available?

The Department doesn't audit aid properly anyway, and some of it goes to bizarre causes. It has shown itself an unfit steward.

Stop compulsory aid and close the department.

A good move by the GMC

2011-11-01T10:17:00.001Z

The General Medical Council has drawn up new guidelines reminding doctors that their care goes beyond clinical treatment. The guidelines tell doctors they have a duty to take ‘prompt action’ whenever there are ‘problems with basic care for patients who are unable to drink, feed or clean themselves’.

Cue indignation from the usual suspects who huff and puff that this should be the norm anyway.

But it seems a good move. The GMC is surely sending a public message, on behalf of patients and doctors, to nurses and managements.

They are now on public notice to respond to doctors' concerns.

That Greek referendum!

2011-10-31T23:06:00.000Z

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

2011-10-29T18:01:00.001+01:00

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

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.
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.
All members have to agree to the repatriation of any power. Dream on.
Even if 1, 2 and 3 weren't true, the government's ambition is tellingly pitiful - e.g. exemption from the agency work directive.
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?

2011-10-28T12:43:00.001+01:00

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

2011-10-28T11:39:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-28T10:18:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-28T09:42:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-24T16:08:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-24T15:25:00.001+01:00

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

2011-10-24T12:44:00.001+01:00

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:

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.
Force every energy company to break out all "green" costs which make bills higher, sharpening public questioning.
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

2011-10-21T09:43:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-20T11:56:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-20T09:42:00.000+01:00

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?

2011-10-19T23:17:00.002+01:00

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

2011-10-19T08:08:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-17T09:10:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-17T07:25:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-14T21:52:00.001+01:00

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

2011-10-11T19:51:00.001+01:00

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?

2011-10-10T19:32:00.000+01:00

Nick Grealy thinks so.

Fox should be finished

2011-10-10T12:16:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-07T11:12:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-06T10:33:00.002+01:00

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

2011-10-01T10:25:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-01T09:33:00.000+01:00

"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.

Quote of the day

2011-09-26T09:31:00.000+01:00

Labour luvvies Eddie Izzard and Dame Jokewell will be performing a “three-hander” with the Labour leader at the conference in Liverpool on Wednesday afternoon.

Says Dame Jokewell:

The details have still to be worked out as it’s a bit of a last minute thing, but the idea is to show how spontaneous Ed can be.

Two days left to plan it.

A short guide to the euro crisis

2011-09-26T09:23:00.000+01:00

Ambrose explains.

The root of the euro crisis is a 30pc intra-EMU currency misalignment between North and South. That structural flaw cannot be solved with debt guarantees or bank rescues.

Nor can this gap in competitiveness be bridged by austerity alone, by pushing Club Med deeper into debt-deflation and perma-slump. Such a strategy must slowly eat away at Italian and Spanish society, undercutting the whole purpose of the EU Project. It would ultimately risk trapping them in a debt spiral as well, leading to colossal losses for Germany in the end.

We can already see what's happening to the society of the Greek liars. The two main political parties are draining popular support as Greek society whines at the withdrawal of the euroteet. As government seeks to cut the incomes of the lower paid, Greek society really is starting to seize up.

At a guess, Spanish society will go down before Italy's. Spanish local government is riddled with debt, and several places have already said they cannot afford to keep some basic local services running. (Don't forget Portugal's finances are probably just as rotten underneath.)

Italians are probably more inured to corruption and incompetence, so there is likely to be more acceptance there, despite the efforts of the Northern League.

With its usual arrogance, France will expect the IMF and (mainly) the eurozone to take on the burden of French banks with too much southern European debt. Let's see what the Finns and the Slovaks make of that.

Dale Farm neighbours not happy

2011-09-25T17:46:00.000+01:00

Villagers living near the UK's largest illegal travellers' site are considering staging a protest march if the planned eviction is delayed again.

Residents in Crays Hill, near Basildon, say they may also withhold council tax unless travellers are evicted from illegal plots at Dale Farm soon. They may also submit planning applications for building in their back gardens.

One villager said:

Why should I worry about inflaming any situations? I have been inflamed for 10 years.

UK to assist in French banks bailout?

2011-09-25T12:34:00.000+01:00

The Telegraph is reporting that

British taxpayers risk being caught up in a £1.75trillion deal aimed at saving the euro by allowing Greece to default on its massive debts.

Are we surprised that "German and French officials came up with the strategy"?

It would involve the bailing out those European banks - mostly French - most at risk from their massive lendings to tottering economies.

We would have to finance part of the IMF's contribution.

As usual, France would get the major benefit, and our europhile government probably won't even ask for anything in return. We'll need the likes of Slovakia and Finland to fight our corner. How pathetic are we.

Dale Farm gypsies on benefits

2011-09-23T07:25:00.000+01:00

Families at Dale Farm, Britain's biggest unauthorised gypsy camp, are still being paid housing benefits by the council trying to evict them – even though it has deemed their homes illegal.

Are we surprised?

Two conventional wisdoms - both wrong

2011-09-22T12:32:00.000+01:00

Pass over Oborne's attempt at an arresting opening when he writes

Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics.

In fact they were right about the euro, but they're losing the EU war.

The main merit in his Telegraph piece today with Frances Weaver is in documenting the way anti-euro campaigners were treated in the BBC, and the patronising abuse dumped on them by the great and the grand, who turned out to be wrong. And they should have known they were wrong, as the arguments against the euro were not just nostalgia for sterling but also reasoned basic economics that disparate economies in a currency union would not automatically "converge" (remember that?) and that therefore large fiscal transfers would have to follow. Somehow, we were told, the benefits from a larger market would overwhelm these problems.

How wrong were they - Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke, Charles Kennedy, Danny Alexander. Apologies? No, I hadn't noticed any.

When you read how the BBC treated those against the euro, keep in mind its role in the "global warming" debate, and wonder to yourself if the BBC is not - once again - seriously unbalancing this country's political debate by sucking up to the allegedly great and grand in their conventional wisdom.

Now let's look at what Nick Grealy is calling the black swan of Blackpool shale gas. Please indulge me, he writes, with a partial list of those who we haven't heard from in the press yet most likely due to their jaws being locked in an open position:

Chatham House and the Oxford Institute of Energy both wrote studies predicting that shale gas would not be a game changer for Europe for example. Alistair Buchanan of Ofgem said this time last year that shale gas would not have significant production until at least 2025. This morning we see Cuadrilla's plan predicts drilling activity will start in 2013 and peak in 2021. The British Geological Society told the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee their reserve estimations were for 150 billion cubic metres in the entire UK, a tenth of yesterday's figures from one small area not even considered prospective. Those opinions then mis-informed the press who naturally seek brand name opinion. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, simply that it has the brand.

So what should this mean for the UK? Grealy writes that the entire UK energy policy rests on the a priori assumption of natural gas as finite and insecure and therefore expensive enough to make every other generation technology competitive. But ...

Nuclear, clean coal and renewable generation are three obvious examples of industries totally disrupted by shale.

With shale gas probably available in huge quantity, from within the UK, we can see "significantly lower prices, significantly lower carbon emissions and a whole slew of positive economic impacts". (Not that the BBC website last night was giving the slightest clue about any economic benefits whatever, just a warning that shale gas wouldn't be "green", as I blogged.)

So this is a win for both the economy and the environment, says Grealy, "and the sooner the green movement re-align themselves with the new reality the better".

Maybe this time the great and the grand can focus on giving us the chance to be better off, and the BBC can content itself with presenting the arguments fairly on both sides.

Here's hoping, anyway. It really really should not be difficult.

Have you seen this man?

2011-09-21T19:41:00.001+01:00

Have you seen this man? No, he's not actually an Ayatollah, though he's just as fanatical and misguided. This is Phil Thornhill, of the Campaign against Climate Change, or CACC for short.

Yes, that's right, they are against climate change. They're also against your prosperity, and against you having reliable gas and electricity supplies. That's CACC.

So when Cuadrilla Resources announces it seems to have huge shale deposits in Lancashire, our Phil swings into action. The BBC strapline is not the strategic size of the resources, but that

An energy firm which has been test drilling for controversial shale gas in Lancashire has said it could create up to 5,600 jobs across the UK.

Good but not startling. As Nick Grealy explains

Cuadrilla revealed 200 TCF gas in place today. How big a number is that? Assume a conservative 20% recovery rate and this find is as big as the North Sea Troll super giant field. That's about 15 years of total UK demand. Or replacing ALL LNG imports for 40 years! There will be other challenges, but running out of gas will not be one of them. Cuadrilla also released figures showing the potential for £5 to 6 billion in tax revenues over 30 years.

But Phil is having none of that, thank you.

The BBC want to give less exposure to scientists who properly question the causes of global warming (which has stopped), but they're happy to quote this ~~Ayatollah~~ ecoloon.

"Those jobs could and should be in green energy. We need a revolution in the economy to really deal with climate change effectively", he says.

Despite his rantings, it would make not a bit of difference to global temperatures if Britain gave up all use of fossil fuels. Completely. For ever. Why? Because we're a small country with less than 2% of world output, and because bigger countries like China and India are producing more and more carbon dioxide all the time.

(That's not some obscure poison called 'carbon' by the way, that's carbon dioxide, the stuff which plants need to grow. Oh, and if they got more of it, they wouldn't be poisoned. They'd ... um ... grow faster.)

Now, economics being what it is, there would be more jobs in "green energy" if it paid. But it doesn't. Even though we subsidise it. A subsidy which is wholly pointless.

"They could create jobs in renewables", he whines, "if they put the investment there."

Just who is this anonymous, mysterious unfeeling "they"? Could it be that Phil wants taxpayers to pour even more subsidy into expensive and unreliable energy schemes?

Then taxpayers will be even poorer. And even if the wind turbines suddenly become reliable, economic, and attractive, they will make no difference to the air temperature at all. None. We will be poorer for no good reason.

Shale gas is changing the US economy. There's loads of it, all over the world. It's cheap and it can make us and our children and our children's children better off. The world will rely less on rogue nations for its fuel supplies, so it might even become more peaceful.

But the Climate Ayatollah is not interested in any of that. Britain can halt the runaway global warming we see all around us. Let us worship at the sacred flame, even as we shiver.

The BBC should surely be giving hardly any coverage to the rantings of this blinkered, ill informed ecoloon.

UPDATE The BBC have amended the page to strapline the resources:

An energy firm which has been test drilling for controversial "shale gas" in Lancashire has said it has found vast gas resources underground.

The page still stresses "green" issues, rather than energy security and cheapness.

Public Accounts Committee mice hold no one to account

2011-09-20T10:24:00.000+01:00

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) goes through the motions of indignation about the waste of taxpayers' money on the futile project to centralise fire brigade control rooms. "A minimum of £469 million" has been "wasted". That's so far. The government is to throw a further £84.8m at trying to retrieve some value from the mess.

Meanwhile

Eight of the purpose-built regional control centres remain empty and continue to cost the taxpayer £4 million per month to maintain.

£48m a year to maintain eight empty buildings? How can this be?

The PAC calls for people to be held to account. So who does it name in its summary, conclusions and recommendations for the media to expose?

No one. Not even the ministers responsible.

The committee satisfies itself by blaming the Department. Does it expect "the Department" to offer up names?

PAC members, we pay you, so do your job. Names must be named, or there will never be any consequences. If the PAC isn't going to name names, who will?

Are you mice or men?

Sarko pinned

2011-09-19T21:06:00.000+01:00

Irwin Stelzer is in enjoyably waspish form today, including this description of Sarko.

Nicolas Sarkozy ... continues his drive to forge a one-size-fits-all set of policies as part of his plan to establish centralized economic management of the euro zone and cripple Britain's financial sector and flexible labor market.

Don't write the EU off

2011-09-18T13:38:00.000+01:00

There's much dancing on the EU's grave. To be sure, its leaders have contrived to achieve very little, at great expense to their taxpayers. They fear the consequences of a Greek default, yet fear also the costs of preventing it.

Andrew Lilico for one paints a vivid picture of why collapse of the euro equals collapse of the EU. It would involve a recession on a scale beyond modern experience or comprehension in a Western democracy, he writes. "Let's not go there."

Hm. Instead, let's not underestimate the ability of businesses to devise quick workarounds after a week or so of economic disorder.

And let us not underestimate the wish of many on the continent to see the EU continue. Not just the former Soviet colonies, most of them cannily still outside the eurozone, who see the EU as providing them some security against Russia. For different reasons, many in southern and northern Europe don't want the EU to dissolve.

Well, not yet. Spain is reintroducing a wealth tax by decree, to go to the cash-strapped regional governments (click the Spain label at the end for more), even though some of them are opposed to it. This is a country where only some 7,000 people declare annual taxable income above €600,000, and where the number of hours teachers must spend in the classroom weekly is to shoot up from 18 to 20.

And Portugal is another economically rickety country on the Iberian peninsula. The autonomous region of Madeira island "failed to report" a mere €1.1 billion in debt from 2008 to 2010 related to agreements between the government of Madeira and construction companies. This unreported debt is in addition to a €568 million hole found this year related to expenditure on a financially troubled, regionally owned enterprise and the cost of an aborted joint public-private partnership contract.

We probably can't underestimate the readiness of the north europeans to continue bankrolling this fecklessness, especially if the voters ever discover just how much the support operations have cost them. But they seem firmly wedded to the concept of the EU. Just like the Spanish and Portuguese, though those countries are scarcely yet feeling the squeeze of the German economic vice on their flatulent economies. But all the signs are that they will want some sort of EU to continue in some form.

Nor let us underestimate the warmth of all the UK front benches for the EU, and their readiness to cede more powers to its unelected centre, for ever, ignoring the undoubted wish of UK electors.

And never underestimate the momentum of the Brussels engine, still seeking to extend its tentacles, for instance further into management of borders, or into EU-wide regulations for the extraction of shale gas.

Too soon to write the EU off. Way, way too soon. Sadly.

Stop bending over backwards for Dale Farm gipsies

2011-09-18T12:12:00.001+01:00

Excuses, excuses. Evicting them was going to be racist, and now it will affect their children's education.

The eviction at Dale Farm could force dozens of children out of education, their parents believe.

Thus report Sky News. I wonder how the locals will feel? You know, the ones who obey the law and pay their taxes?

There are 110 children on the register at the local Crays Hill Primary school. Of those, 107 are traveller children.

I think we can sense how the local people feel. But the gipsy mothers are seriously concerned about their children's education. Aren't they?

The school admits there is already an issue with low attendance levels.

I seem to recall government talk of increasing sanctions against parents whose children don't attend school. How is the truancy being handled here? The school say:

The parents endeavour to get their children into school, letting the school know when this isn't possible due to travelling.

My emphasis. In other words, they connive when these parents - suddenly so concerned by their children's education - choose to remove them from school:

The school will always keep places open for pupils when they are travelling rather than taking them off the roll.

When I last looked, it was illegal not to send your children to school. Why is it different for these people?

Yet all of a sudden these families who were choosing for their children not to be properly educated are now voicing fears that their children will grow up illiterate if they are forced back on the road. Forced? They've been taking off of their own accord during term times. And don't they like to call themselves travellers? When it suits them, apparently.

Anyway, Basildon Council Leader Tony Ball says: "Parents have been offered bricks and mortar accommodation near the school".

Enough with the special pleading. There are laws. These people should obey them.

More disobedience in fortress NHS

2011-09-15T09:44:00.000+01:00

The NHS is a fortress. Too big to be managed, too big to be accountable. And the unaccountable managers mismanage with impunity.

Thus we had the Daily Mail telling us that "family doctors have been ordered to ration the number of patients they send for life-saving cancer scans to save money".

Now, as the article explains, this contradicts government policy.

The cuts are being brought in despite Government pledges to give GPs better access to cancer tests in the hope of saving 5,000 lives a year.... But it has since emerged that a quarter of Primary Care Trusts are actively discouraging GPs from sending patients for these tests.

And five Primary Care Trusts have actually banned family doctors from sending patients directly for scans. These delays will doubtless kill some people.

As usual, the Department of Health didn't know what was going on inside the fortress it supposedly controls.

Now Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has ordered NHS chief executive David Nicholson to write to every single trust telling them they must not impose such ‘blanket restrictions’.

13% of GPs had been told to reduce the number of patients they sent for MRI and CT scans - commonly used to diagnose cancer.

Who gave these instructions in the first place? How many of them will be sacked?

Guess.

While we wait, there's more. New research shows that thousands of patients are being denied hip and knee replacements, cataract operations and IVF as PCTs try to save money.

A survey of 300 family doctors by Pulse magazine found that many had been told to ration certain procedures not deemed urgent, which also include hernia operations and blood-testing for diabetes.

How many of those anonymous, unaccountable managers will be hauled up and sacked?

Guess.

Our useless state

2011-09-15T09:10:00.001+01:00

The regulator Ofsted has been marking schools as outstanding even when their teaching isn't. Only one of 18 factors refers to "quality of teaching and learning".

Some 150 secondary schools were given the top rating by inspectors last year – even though they failed to score high marks for their teaching. And 260 primaries were similarly trumpeted after inspectors found their teaching was just ‘satisfactory’, or ‘good’.

So Mr Gove has called for the 18 criteria to be cut to four.

It's beyond obvious that a school can't be considered outstanding unless it has outstanding teaching. Effectiveness in tackling discrimination, for instance, can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If the teaching is graded 'good', the school shouldn't score higher than 'good' - though it could score less if some other aspects weren't up to standard.

The shameful over-inflation of hundreds of schools was also damned by former chief inspector of Ofsted, Christine Gilbert, before she stepped down in June.

This would be Christine Gilbert partner of expenses fiddler and former Labour MP Tony McNulty.

Well, dahling (and I'm being deliberately offensive because you deserve it), you were paid a lot of my money to get this right.

You didn't then. So now shut up. You had your chance and we set no store by your opinions.

In the NHS, the Care Quality Commission was given too little money to regulate effectively, and then decided to concentrate on bureaucracy rather than inspections, making a bad situation worse.

Did the head of the CQC stand up and proclaim that it couldn't do its job?

No she did not. Here's another one who took the money and fouled up. People got abused in care homes while the CQC ticked its boxes.

Two regulators going for the mushy options rather than stark policing. They are there to represent the consumer interest. (That's you and me.) Clearly they don't.

Ofsted and the CQC are unfit for purpose.

Mice or men?

2011-09-10T16:14:00.001+01:00

Civil servant bonuses topped £127million last year, the Government has admitted.

Well actually it was more than that, as some ministries think they needn't give a prompt answer to an FOI request.

Now, we're all supposed to be in this together. State employees get better pensions than the private sector, and they have greater job security.

They're paid to do a job. Did so many perform beyond the job requirements?

More than half of the DWP’s 117,000 employees picked up vouchers for High Street stores worth a combined £2.3million. It also gave bonuses to 97% of staff.

Why, for goodness sake? The amount lost to fraud and error went UP.

Close behind was the Ministry of Defence, where mandarins picked up about £49million in bonuses, even though thousands of servicemen are being laid off and our stock of military hardware is being slashed to cut costs.

Are our ministers mice or men? They couldn't run a whelk stall - like so many in the state sector.

Case for euro is based on dud history

2011-09-08T10:05:00.002+01:00

History has shown that countries with a common currency never wage war against one another, and that is why the euro is far more than just a currency. If the euro fails, Europe fails. It must not fail, and will not fail.

Who made this breathtakingly stupid remark? Van Rompuy maybe? Or perhaps some Lib Dem euroloon?

No, it was Frau Merkel.

How can someone who has clambered up the ladder of power be so stuck in the past, so blinkered, so wrong?

First, history teaches us that "countries with a common currency" aren't actually separate countries any more. The smaller countries are buffeted by the politics of their larger neighbours in the union - over which they have no control and minimal influence. They become mere provinces.

Second, Ms Merkel doesn't seem to have noticed that the times have long gone when some aristocrat could drop a glove, or some madman rant, and the peasantry would obediently take up arms and throw their lives away.

(One can also ask whether a common currency would have stopped Hitler annexing Austria, but we don't need to sustain that argument.

And The Boiling Frog adds: Didn't Yugoslavia have a common currency?)

Most European countries don't have big standing armies. The few that do can't afford them, and even smaller armed forces are being cut back. They can scarcely afford to drop a few bombs on exposed tanks in North Africa. Invading a european neighbour would cost vastly more.

Nor are the unemployed the potential pool of cannon fodder they once were. Soldiering is more technical than it was in the days of mass recruitment. And in any case the unemployed pool prefers its welfare benefits to bayoneting people in rain and mud while being strafed by their allies. Understandably.

But probably the biggest reason why european nations aren't going to start warring with each other is that their neighbours are no longer faraway nations of which their inhabitants know nothing. They have second homes there, they and their families go on holiday there, they had their stag do's there, they do lots of business there, they retire there.

War within the EU area isn't going to happen. That's most likely due to cheap flights, the internet, and welfare benefits.

It has nothing to do with whether those countries are in the EU. It certainly has nothing to do with a common currency. Does Frau Merkel think Germany is more likely to declare war against Britain than France, because France is in the eurozone and Britain isn't?

Do Germans feel more kindly disposed to Greece because Greece is in the eurozone? Little sign of that.

So now we know. The case for tossing away billions in taxpayers' money rests on historical reasoning which was duff fifty years ago, and takes no notice of how the world has changed.

Astonishing.

Squatters are some sort of social good?

2011-09-06T11:01:00.000+01:00

Judge Fiona Henderson is all over the papers for saying addresses of empty homes should be released to a squatters' organisation because squatting isn't a crime.

The Tribunal is satisfied that publication of this list would bring a proportion of the void properties back into use earlier than would otherwise be the case and that, consequently, this is a strong public interest in favour of disclosure.

The group publishes details of empty homes and a handbook showing how to take full advantage of housing laws.

Judge Henderson, reports The Mail, said she accepted that disclosure of the list would ‘facilitate squatting and associated crime’, that this would cost public money to prevent and that ‘the feeling of security of people living in neighbouring houses’ would be undermined. Camden Council pointed out that squatters are jumping the housing queue, but the judge wasn't interested.

Where does Judge Fiona Henderson live? Maybe that nice Mr Mulcaire could let us know.

Ambush Predator manages to stay calm enough to mock the ruling.

But fury is due on several fronts. First, because governments have delayed criminalising squatting for years. They're always considering it. Two fingers to the property owners who obey the law and pay their taxes. They don't kick up, so we don't have to look after their interests.

So what is the government going to do? Why, step up Labour's ‘empty dwelling management orders’. Oh good.

Second, this is another example of activism by the unelected judiciary. Government does nothing about that either. They expect taxpayers to shrug and put up with it.

Why should we?

Maybe most of all it's a condemnation of our spectacularly useless MPs. What are they for if not to push governments into speedily righting these wrongs?

Another of Blair's worthless opinions

2011-09-06T10:32:00.000+01:00

Stephen Fidler has written a gently amused piece about a number of former EU leaders who have put their name to a document calling for fiscal federalism now that they are out of the political firing line and wouldn't have to sell it to their voters. The document's conclusion is mere mush.

ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. The current crisis is a matter of the utmost urgency but at the same time an opportunity. Now European citizens expect their leaders to move from a day-to-day crisis management to taking charge and prepare the European Union for the challenges of the 21st century. Supporting European integration is not a matter of solidarity but of enlightened self-interest. It is time to address the big questions in order to preserve the unique European balance of individual freedoms, market economy and systems of social protection.

This is under the banner of something calling itself the Council for the Future of Europe. Who they?

We can ignore Blair's opinion, on the basis that he probably just scanned the document for 10 seconds before he signed up.

We also have such luminaries as Anthony Giddens. We should take no advice from him.

A pointless contribution to the debate - if contribution it is.

The eurozone "strategy" totters again

2011-09-06T10:07:00.000+01:00

The Speaker of the Slovak Parliament doesn't want to bring forward new legislation to widen the role of a euro-zone rescue fund, reports the WSJ.

He seems to have a way with words, saying that "it's not possible to solve a debt crisis by creating new debts", and the new bailout measures amount to "trying to put out a fire with a fan".

And he complains that Slovakia - the second poorest country in the Eurozone - is being asked to subsidise richer countries like Greece and Italy which flout the rules, while poorer Slovakia is forced to follow them.

Presumably in the USA it's usually richer states that subsidise poorer ones, not the other way round.

Commenters at the WSJ suggest that Slovakia is looking for a payoff from the Commission. Finland has already demanded collateral. Doubtless others will join the queue.

It's about German and French banks anyway. Oh, and probably British taxpayers too, when our state supported bank have to reveal how much dodgy eurozone sovereign debt is going to cost us.

The Slog thinks the inevitable Greek default may now come in days.

It's the economy

2011-09-05T09:39:00.000+01:00

The electoral drubbing of Angela Merkel's party in regional elections in her home state is worth comment - but it wasn't caused by the euro bailouts or the decision to phase out nuclear power rapidly.

If those were the reasons, why would the proportion of votes for the Greens and the Left have gone up?

This looks more likely:

The after-tax income of the average German, adjusted for inflation, fell sharply during the worst of the economic crisis in 2009, and it has been growing only moderately since. This measure — the growth-rate of real, per capita, disposable income — does a remarkably good job of predicting electoral outcomes in many countries, Germany included.

As an aside, what would that mean for a UK government which planned to add £300 to a household's annual energy bills? Especially as voters know.

Who do they think they are?

2011-09-05T09:17:00.000+01:00

The Wall Street Journal writes of the gradual disintegration of Belgian national identity. But they suggest Belgium isn't about to split apart: it would upset the debt markets, most Belgians "say they don't want the headache", and no one can agree how to divide Brussels.

Of more interest is the comment by the (unelected) European Commission.

On Thursday, the European Commission felt obliged to deny reports in a Belgian newspaper that it had formally warned Belgium that its no-government act has gone too far.

The Commission “has full confidence that the current caretaker government will take the necessary decisions in the current context,” the EU executive said.

Remarkably, the official chose to add:

The Commission also has confidence in the democratic process in Belgium.

What do they mean? That Belgian "democracy" is responsive and vibrant? Hardly. Not that the Commission would be likely to welcome that anyway. Look at Finland, keeping its electorate on side by demanding collateral for doomed lending to Greece - and getting it, thereby probably bringing forward chaos and writedowns for German and (especially) French banks.

Maybe the Commission just mean that Belgian "democracy" is so weak that the caretaker government will be compliant? Unlike some Irish governments. And we know how the Commission stamped on Irish displays of democracy.

To the unelected Commission, democracy is just a figleaf for their dictatorial powers. Why do they think we would accord their opinions on democracy any respect at all?

Spanish local government again

2011-08-21T18:33:00.000+01:00

I've been banging on from time to time about the dire financial state of Spanish local government (click the Spain label below). Today the Telegraph runs a very good piece by Harriet Alexander, misleadingly headlined in the print edition "Broke: the corner of Spain where the party is over".

Highlighting the small town of Moia, she tells us that

In Catalonia ten further councils are thought to be on the verge of financial collapse.

Indeed, the Federation for Municipalities and Provinces estimates that 40 per cent of Spain's local governments are in serious economic trouble.

Moia, population 5,800, owes €25m - nearly four times its annual budget. Some local businesses have been owed money since 2005.
Moratalla's two garages are owed €120,000 by the local authority and refuse to fill up municipal cars.
In Barbate, 180 tons of rubbish are accumulating on the streets after the council's workers went on strike, having not been paid since June.

One Spaniard tellingly says

The problem is that Spain in many ways is still a Third World country – we joke that Africa begins when you cross the Pyrenees. We should have been living within our means, renting houses, driving old cars, developing slowly and securely. But we went crazy.

Obviously central government is in no position to bail out local government across the country.

Maybe it won't be the international bond markets that bring Spain down. Maybe local governments' debts will bring Spain down from within.