Mother Europe is watching you

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Mother Europe is watching you

It was always going to be the case that once they had the technology, we were all going to be placed under constant surveillance. And the nightmare is coming closer to reality.

According to The Guardian , our puppet government is backing an EU project to install a "communication box" in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe.

Needless to say, the scheme, known as the Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems is being sold on its 'elf 'n' safety benefits, with the kindly EU officials telling us that it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. 

However, as The Guardian points out, ministers are aware that the system could be seen as a "spy in the cab" and "may be regarded as draconian". Thus, the focus on the "more benign technology" is being used to "enable potential adverse public reaction to be better managed".

But behind the benign exterior is the true agenda – the system paves the way for national road tolling and, since the system is planned to send positional data to government control centres, it can be used for speed enforcement and other law enforcement purposes. 

Not stated by the paper, but evident in the EU documentation, is the other agenda. The system is to rely on the EU's Galileo satellite positioning system, providing an income stream for this vanity project which would otherwise be totally uneconomic.

By introducing a compulsory tracking system, fitted to every car, the EU will be able to recoup enough fees from member states to pay for the project. 

Our puppet government is currently denying that the system will be made compulsory, but the scheme developers envisage that it will be made mandatory "for safety reasons". The rest will follow, as night follows day and, once in place, every time you climb into a car, your movements will be tracked – and the bills will follow.

Currently, it is anticipated that the system could be introduced from 2012 onwards, which makes our only safeguard the probability that Galileo will not be up and running by then. But when it does eventually fly, it will take on an extra symbolism – the surveillance state will have finally arrived with a vengeance.

Mother Europe will be watching you.

COMMENT THREAD

Dear me

There is a rather confused story about of the party hosted by genial Tory Party Chairman Eric Pickles (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Peter Simple's character, 25 stone Alderman Foodbotham) getting a tad out of hand.

Two guests started an altercation, the police intervened, the officer was struck and CS gas was used on the two altercators, one of whom has been arrested.

CS gas seems a little excessive for what was clearly a drunken brawl of the kind the police elsewhere has to deal with routinely, as is all this talk about breaching security. The two men involved may not have had passes but they were clearly guests of the aforementionedAlderman Foodbotham Chairman Pickles.

The BBC thinks that the person arrested may have been a journalist. Letting journalists into the House of Commons may well constitute breach of security. The Speaker should look into it.

I understand Tim Montgomerie of ConHome was there at the party. He will most probably blog about it tomorrow.

COMMENT THREAD

Lord Dykes and Lord Malloch-Brown show their ability to debate

One of the most extraordinary aspects of the europhiliac case is that, apparently, it is watertight. There can be no rational arguments against Britain's membership of the European Union or, indeed, further integration of said body.

Yet, as soon as there is a debate, all we get is vicious personal abuse. TakeLord Dykes, for instance. (Well, OK, I'll take Lord Dykes.) For some reason the man, whose career prior to his entry to the Upper House has been unimpressive, to put it mildly, felt a great urge to intervene in the short debate that followed Lord Pearson of Rannoch’s Starred Question yesterday afternoon.

It was not a particularly complicated question. Lord Malloch-Brown, former SecGen Annan’s bag carrier, should have coped with it.

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their response to the analysis in The Great European Rip-off, published by the TaxPayers' Alliance, which maintains that United Kingdom membership of the European Union incurs an equivalent cost for each United Kingdom citizen of £2,000 per annum.

Sadly, this seemed too difficult for his lordship and he blathered about the benefits far outweighing the costs, which is, presumably, why HMG has never dared to do a cost/benefit analysis.

The figure of £2,000 cited by the TaxPayers’ Alliance seems to be largely based on estimates of the costs to the UK economy of regulation at the EU level, but that is not even half the story. Single market regulation has opened markets across Europe, and 3.5 million British jobs are linked to exports to the EU—and the benefits go still wider. The security of UK citizens is enhanced by co-operation with EU partners on terrorism, illegal migration and organised crime.

Yawn and double yawn. Those single market regulations may or may not have opened markets across Europe but they also apply to the vast majority of British business who do not trade with other European countries. And that market could have been opened by mere trade agreements.

As for those jobs – oh dear, could anyone with a spark of intelligence really use that argument any more? No, Lord Malloch-Brown, the jobs will not disappear if we are out of the EU because we shall go on trading with other EU countries, if that is what we want to do or we shall trade with other countries, which might be more advantageous. Duh!

And I sincerely hope that we co-operate with non-EU countries on terrorism, illegal migration and organised crime, not that the EU structures, which is what that body is interested in, have been particularly useful on, say, illegal migration.

After a bit of toing and froing about whether those figures by the Taxpayers' Alliance are exaggerated or not (and it is hard to tell as HMG will not produce a study of its own) we get Lord Dykes's notable contribution:

My Lords, does the Minister agree that he does not need to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pearson? He should be sympathetic because, having wrecked the Conservative Party, Stuart Wheeler is now moving his money to the UKIP. But it does not need it anyway because all the UKIP MEPs charge maximum expenses on a regular basis in Strasbourg and Brussels, which adds up to about £400,000 per Member.

I turn to the TaxPayers' Alliance. Does not its innocent-sounding title hide a rather sinister truth? Five years old now, it was formed by three or four dotty, extreme right-wing Conservatives who make the neo-cons in America look very moderate—Minford, Minogue and all the rest of them—and is now advocating deep hatred on a day-by-day basis; as Polly Toynbee said in the Guardian on 9 February, "insidious poison". Will the Minister treat this report with the contempt it deserves?

Well, if Polly Toynbee, that great sage of political thought, has said so, we may as well all pack up. I had better remove my copies of Plato's, Hobbes's, Locke's John Stuart Mill's, Edmund Burke's and assorted others' works and start collecting la Toynbee's efforts. What more can one need in life?

Setting aside the fact that Lord Dykes, in common with most British politicians and journalists has not the faintest idea of who the neo-cons are (they are not simply more conservative than the others) let us look at the rest of that spectacularly nasty outburst.

"Minford, Minogue and all the rest of them", presumably, refers to the highly regarded economist Professor Patrick Minford and the leading political philosopher (sans blague), Professor Kenneth Minogue. Remind me again, what has Lord Dykes achieved in his life?

One wonders why producing information about the amount of taxpayers' money that is wasted and mis-spent by our bloated officialdom is to be described as "advocating deep hatred on a day-by-day basis". This tells you something very interesting about the mentality of Lord Dykes, Polly Toynbee and the rest of that gang.

COMMENT THREAD

Monday, March 30, 2009

Crash and burn …

Now admitting the obvious, Thomas Enders, chief executive of EADS has conceded that the ill-fated Airbus A400M project may have to be scrapped. "The aircraft can't be built under the current conditions," he has told Der Spiegel. "It is better to put an end to the horror than have horror without end." 

This is brought to us courtesy of The Daily Telegraph tucked into a down-page piece in the business section, which in itself is remarkable. In any grown-up newspaper, such a story – with its massive political andstrategic implications should be front-page news.

But, after a diet of corporate bullshit from Airbus – which rivals even the "spin" from the height of the Blair era - we are finally getting to the crunch. Airbus has acknowledged that its A400M military transport venture has degenerated into a disaster. The aircraft is over-weight, its turbo-prop engines built by Rolls-Royce and France's Snecma are under-powered and there have been serious glitches in the software from MTU Aero Engines. 

That is what we know about, but there have also been rumours of serious problems with the navigation software. There have also been huge problems with production integration, with component mismatches between the different satellite manufacturing centres, and a lack of design co-ordination. In other words, there are not the normal "teething troubles" that you get with any new aeroplane. They are systemic problems which strike at the heart of this doomed project.

The final admission of defeat, when it comes, will cost EADS dear. An outright cancellation will mean that it will have to repay €5.7bn in advance fees to its customers, plus as yet unspecified non-delivery penalties.

Political ramification go even further. The A400M was always a political project, aimed at giving the putative European Army its own independent airlift capability, securing political and operational independence from the United States. To that effect, the euroweenies set up in 2001 their European Airlift Co-ordination Cell as an embryonic EU air force.

The eventual aim was to pool the transport fleets around the common airframe of the A400M, in what was intended to be the "European Air Transport Fleet". A formal 12-nation agreement, in the form of a declaration of intent, was signed in November 2008.

Without the A400M, the "colleagues" will have to go cap-in-hand to the US for new airframes. Those will be subject to US law which imposes restrictions on their deployment and access to technology. The great dream is about to crash and burn.

For the UK, however, this creates more immediate problems, as the lack of the A400M will create enormous stresses on an already over-burdened RAF. The Lord Pearson and Lord Moonie are already on the case, with a sheepish government telling us that, "we are considering our options with partner nations and the company."

It had better consider its options pretty damn quick, or all we will be able to do is despatch colour photographs of A400Ms – which are the only thing EADS has yet been able to supply. A little bird tells us that the Taleban may be less than impressed, as indeed will we at the crumbling of yet another vainglorious European project.

UPDATE: Reuters is now reporting that the MoD is considering a new order for C-17s. "We are naturally concerned by delays to the A400M programme and ... the MoD is considering various contingency plans including procuring additional assets for example C-17," an MoD spokesman says.