Spot the difference

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Spot the difference

Bruno Waterfield invites us to get worked up about EU missing millions. And not only are they missing, the EU and UN have abandoned investigations into what happened to £60 million worth of funding for Kosovo, with allegation of serious fraud and corruption.

The funds for "economic reconstruction" to help rebuild a war-shattered Kosovo ten years ago were hit by at least 11 scandals involving 12 cases of alleged criminal activity and 27 examples of alleged breaches of rules on the awarding of contracts and nepotism.

The trouble is, no one is really going to get interested. There is nothing anyone can do about it. No one will be held responsible. No one is accountable. And the fact of life is that people have better things to do with their lives than rail over things over which they have no influence, the course of which they cannot change.

So we use what ever expletives that come to mind, shrug and move on. An MP whose partner has claimed £10 for a porn movie on parliamentary expenses? Ah! That's something we feel we have some influence over, and can change. So we get excited about that.

There lies the difference between national and EU politics. Nothing is going to change this. The only answer is that the EU has to be destroyed – before it destroys us.

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Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Different realities - 2

A further offering in our Afghan "season" is posted on Defence of the Realm. For as long as we can, we aim to put up at least one post a day on an aspect of the campaign.

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Something in the water?

On the same day that Max Hastings in The Daily Mail expresses his views so powerfully on the special relationship" (no longer), up pops Irwin Stelzer in The Daily Telegraphwith what seem to be some similar thoughts. Is there something in the water?

"Unable to afford being a first-rate power while expanding the welfare state," this government has chosen "to retreat from world influence, ceding increased power to the UN and other toothless international institutions," the man writes.

The focus of his attack, however, is "defence cuts", where he argues that there the obligation of the government on defence issues is clear: to provide the means to achieve the ends it selects.

Therein lies the problem, then argues Stelzer with something of a non sequitur, declaring that the government has not made it clear just what it thinks Britain's role in the world should be. That seems to be the primary problem, with the second-order handicap being that the choice is made more difficult because the nation is strapped for cash.

We are then asked to "consider the signals", but it is not clear (to me, anyway) whether those signals relate to the inability of the government to make clear our role, or our cash shortage.

The first "signal" is Gordon Brown ordering the military out of Basra, claiming that its mission is complete and that the maintenance of security has been turned over to the Iraqis. Like so much else of what comes out of No 10, writes Stelzer, this is not quite true: the handover was to the Americans. Britain's soldiers, once proud of their ability to translate to Iraq their experience in Northern Ireland, were ordered out, mission unaccomplished.

Then, he adds, there is Afghanistan, where the government deployed troops it was unwilling to support with the necessary kit. American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan tell tales of turning over used boots and other equipment to the brave British soldiers so sorely lacking in the proper equipment. The Government willed the ends, sort of (clarity of purpose was not a feature of policy). But it did not provide the means.

Eventually though, Stelzer seems to settle on the cash shortage. After the Second World War, the depleted state of the nation's finances required the famous retreat from empire. Now, he says, if the UK – for financial reasons – decided to abandon Trident and continued to pull-back from the war on terrorism, this would signal a further retreat down the league table of nations with a credible military capability. 

Here though lies the particular similarity of view with Hastings: "As a conversation with leading Pentagon figures makes clear, that credibility is already damaged." This means that America no longer counts on Britain as it once did, and is in the market for other allies who can and will assist it in the post-Bush age, when trouble strikes.

However, while Stelzer asserts the obvious, that "There is no question that Britain's weakened financial position makes the allocation of resources extraordinarily difficult," it is difficult to accept his underlying thesis that Britain's obvious retreat from the world stage is entirely due to funding difficulties. After all, in Afghanistan, military spending is set to double the level spent the year before last.

That said, what Stelzer is picking up seems real – that our presence on the world stage has diminished and may well diminish further. Hastings points to our lack of military prowess – our defeat in Iraq and our lacklustre performance in Afghanistan. There are many other reasons but whatever they are, the reality is certainly spelt out by Stelzer: "We shall miss Britain on the world stage. We did, after all, accomplish a great deal together." 

Reputations are hard to build and easy to destroy. Recovery is going to be extremely difficult.

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It's snowing all over the world

Ice in the Arctic is often twice as thick as expected, report surprised scientists who returned last week from a major scientific expedition. The scientists - a 20-member contingent from Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Italy - spent one month exploring the North Pole as well as never-before measured regions of the Arctic.

Among their findings: Rather than finding newly formed ice to be two metres thick, "we measured ice thickness up to four metres," stated a spokesperson for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research of the Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest scientific organisation.

Then we get this from the United States: "Sorry, Al Gore, but Public Cares About the Economy, Not Global Warming".

Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport says he sees no evidence that Al Gore's campaign against global warming is winning. "It's just not caught on," says Newport. "They have failed." Or, more bluntly: "Any measure that we look at shows Al Gore's losing at the moment. The public is just not that concerned." What the public is worried about: the economy. 

He adds: "As Al Gore I think would say, the greatest challenge facing humanity . . . has failed to show up in our data."

On the British front, we get reported by The Daily Mail, "Ed Miliband's global warming law 'could cost £20,000 per family'", with a report stating: "Laws aimed at tackling global warming could cost every family in Britain a staggering £20,000 - double the original forecast." 

This follows the Met Office forecast for a "warmer than average summer". It has been cold and wet ever since that report – we even had the central heating on here. And skiinfo.com reports, "It's snowing all over the world", even telling us: "Last week of winter in France, but it's still snowing", with the southern hemisphere ski season starting five weeks early.

Sooner or later, even our loathsome media are going to put two and two together. Then, those idiot politicians who have embraced the global warming scam are going to look even more stupid than they do already. The reckoning may be delayed, but it will come.

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NATO exercises in Georgia go ahead

Later today I shall try to write about what might or might not have happened in Georgia yesterday and the whole row about Russian diplomats and NATO. For the moment, it is worth noting that NATO exercises in Georgia are going ahead without the participation of four countries: Armenia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Serbia.

Moldova has the odd problem or two of its own at the moment and the other three, presumably, do not want to antagonize Russia.

One hates to be rude about supposed allies but one cannot help asking whether the absence of those particular ones is of any importance. Far more important is the fact that the exercises are being carried out at Georgia’s Vaziani military base, where they took place in mid-July of last year, three weeks before the Russo-Georgian war.

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