So nice to know he cares

Monday, October 27, 2008

So nice to know he cares

Astute readers might have noticed that John Redwood MP gave us the benefit of his advice yesterday inThe Sunday Telegraph.

"We can all unite in condemning those senior bankers who expanded too much and paid themselves handsomely for the mistake," he writes. Warming to his theme, he tells us:

We need more action to stimulate the private sector, which is crashing downwards rapidly. It means working with the energy, water and transport industries to see which larger investment projects can be brought forward to provide some work for the construction industry. It means redoubling efforts to help people back into work who lose their jobs as the redundancies build up this winter. It means developing the packages designed by both main parties to ease and help company cash flow.

Mr Redwood would, of course, be quite interested in "company cash flow", and dead keen on "stimulating the private sector" - given his directorship in the investment company, Audley European Opportunities Master Fund Ltd and its feeder funds, to say nothing of his position as non-executive chairman of Evercore Pan-Asset Capital Management Ltd, an investment advisory company.

In that latter role, it is encouraging to learn that he was on the ball last Julywhen he was writing to his clients telling them that, while oil was widely expected to go up in value over the longer term, "this trend may soon be disturbed."

"Now was the right time to sell and take profits on oil," he said. "While the long term case is apparent, commodities rarely go up continuously in a straight line, and there are now some really good profits on oil. In the short term there are reasons to worry about the downside for energy prices."

Interestingly, that was just at the time we were commenting on the recent "eye-watering increases in gas (and electricity) prices," and the prospect of people going to jail because they could not pay their energy bills.

Still, now that Mr Redwood's clients – and himself no doubt – have happily taken their "really good profits" on oil, it is good to know that Mr Redwood himself has some time to spare to do his day job – for a small fee of course, paid by The Sunday Telegraph.

Surprisingly, while the paper was quick to tell us that John Redwood is chairman of the Conservative Party's economic competitiveness commission, it somehow omitted the small details of his other paid employment. 

Funny old world, isn't it?

COMMENT THREAD

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Give them a stick …

… and they will unfailingly grab the wrong end of it.

"Where have all the parliamentary orators gone?" asks Andrew Roberts in The Sunday Telegraph, complaining that: "Parliament used to be the best show in the West End," but was "No longer." In a lengthy dissertation, he then notes:

The fact that so many of our day-to-day laws come from Brussels today, rather than being originated at Westminster, has also impoverished political discourse. There is less of substance over which to argue, when the regulations by which we live cannot genuinely be affected by the outcome of our debates. As the Westminster parliament moves seemingly inexorably towards what the EU always intended it to be, a county council with Pugin architectural embellishments, so the quality of the debates held there declines.

To be brutally frank, who gives a flying tinker's %&*£<”$ about the oratory? What about the power?

As so often, we did it earlier, and better.

COMMENT THREAD

More on that elephant

From Helen over at the Bruges Group blog. Even our local government can't make up its mind.

Arctic ice melting "even in winter"

Yes, The Sunday Times did print this tosh as a headline. It even quoted Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, saying: "This is one of the most serious problems the world has ever faced."

This is the same Prof. Wadhams who told the Telegraph, last week: "The warmer temperatures will also take longer to dissipate, the autumn freeze will take longer, meaning thinner ice."

Booker, in this week's column has reported that the Arctic ice cover is 31 percent up on last year, while Anthony Watts reports "sea ice area approaching the edge of normal standard deviation".

But there is no end to the tosh these warmists and their fellow travellers dribble out. Two weeks ago, the girlie environment correspondent, Louise Gray was writing in The Daily Telegraph that a "Green Christmas [was] more likely than a white one".

"Christmas will be green, rather than white this year as changes in the climate mean that leaves are staying on the trees right into the winter," she drivelled. "In the 1940s traditional English trees used to shed their leaves in early November. But now they are keeping their greenery well into December."

Today, without so much as a blush, we get Richard Gray, science correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph telling us that, "Britain is experiencing its best display of autumn colours for years due to the ideal weather conditions."

Gray quotes Tony Kirkham, head of arboretum at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, who says the return to more typical autumn conditions was a relief as it would allow Britain's trees a chance to recover from the strains of growing and pests during the summer. He adds: "We are experiencing a return to the traditional British autumn. Cold nights and warm days are all conducive to good autumn colour."

Yet, a couple of years ago this same Mr Kirkham was telling us that the quintessential English garden was under threat from climate change.

Gardeners had to adapt or see their plots wither and die from the effects of hotter summers and dry winters. New types of drought-resistant Mediterranean plants, restricted water use and imaginative garden design would all have to become part of the gardens of the future.

Since then, of course, we have had two of the wettest summers on record which, according to the dismal little hacks, Nick Allen and Laura Clout of The Daily Telegraph, was also down to "global warming".

Not only do these people have no brains, they have no shame either.