We are mugs ...

Friday, June 26, 2009

We are mugs ...

Reuters piece, published in The Guardian- frustratingly short on detail – tells us that the EU commission has referred Italy to the ECJ "for failing to respect a ruling that the country must recover illegal state aid."

It turns out that Italy has failed to implement a 2004 ruling by the ECJ which confirmed an earlier decision by the commission, instructing it to recover €281 million. Five years later, only a very small part has been recovered.

"The Commission will take all necessary legal steps to ensure that member states comply with their obligations to recover illegal and incompatible state aid," says EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes.

And then what? It may take two years to get a ruling. The Italian government will mess about – perhaps recover a tiny fraction more and then do nothing, leaving the commission to go to the ECJ again ... and again ... and again.

Yet in this country, you only have to whisper "EU rules" and our government rolls over and does what it is told, double-quick time. We are serious mugs in all this. We should either play the game the way the Continentals do it, or get out – preferably the latter.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009

That road to starvation

Earlier this month we were reporting on the coming grain harvest, observing that while overall production was down, there was at least a bright spot with wheat.

That happy situation arose, in part, because of a bigger than expected yield from India which for the past two years has been prohibiting wheat exports to stave of shortages at home.

However, only a few later the prospects are no longer looking so rosy. The Indian Met Office is predicting that the 2009 monsoon may fail, delivering only 93 percent of the normal 19 inches of rain which falls during the season.

More worryingly, the grain bank of the country - north-west India, including Punjab and Haryana – is predicted to suffer the most, getting only 81 percent of the long-term average for the region. Add a possible error of eight percent and the rainfall for north-west India could be as low as 73 percent of normal, leading to drought conditions.

Most Indian farmers depend on the monsoon as only 40 percent of farmland is irrigated. They tend, therefore, to plant summer-sown crops such as wheat, rice, soybeans and sugarcane in the monsoon months of June and July.

Demonstrating how slender a thread on which we all rely, this current forecast is a significant "correction" from the mid-April statement when "near normal" rainfall was expected. At least this is an improvement on 2004 though, when drought conditions were last experienced. Then the Met Office missed the signals early enough to put out a warning.

Currently, up to yesterday, the country had received only 53 percent of normal rainfall, with central India getting only 25 percent. The government is shying away from declaring an emergency but the situation is undoubtedly of concern. 

The Times of India notes that nearly 70 per cent of Indians depend on agriculture, which represents around 17 percent of India's GDP. It has averaged nearly 4 percent growth over five years. The sector was expected to buoy India's overall growth, hit by the global crisis so a fall in farm production could not happen at a worse time.

With food prices are already high, they could hit the roof if the rains do not come, while food security could become an even more pressing issue. 

And then, just to add to the well of human happiness, scientists in Canada and around the world are racing to find a way to stop a destructive fungus that threatens to wipe out 80 percent of the world's wheat crop.

Officials say that the airborne fungus, known as Ug99, has so far proved unstoppable, making its way out of eastern Africa and into the Middle East and Central Asia. It is now threatening areas that account for more than one-third of the world's wheat production and scientists in North America say it's only a matter of time before the pest hits the breadbasket regions of North America, Russia and China.

Global warming, under the circumstances, is the least of our problems.

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Eurocorpse

Charles Grant, writing in The Prospect magazine (restricted access), is worried about the EU "unravelling", citing in particular the failures of the common foreign and the defence policies.

Had he read Gen Dannatt's speech before he had written his piece, he would have been even more worried. Buried deep within the script was one short paragraph, one sentence of which effectively buried the idea of a European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF).

Grant's worry would of course depend on his understanding what Dannatt was saying, which was not entirely transparent bearing in mind that the CGS – as is common with tribal groups – was speaking in a code impenetrable to normal people.

Referring to the structure and equipment of a future Army, Dannatt warned about being "seduced by elegant concepts that offer success from one particular medium," calling in aid the experience of WW2, Kosovo and the 2006 Lebanon war, which exposed the fallacy of Douhet's and Mitchell's overemphasis on air power.

Then came the "killer punch" when he observed that "those experiences also expose the sterile thinking of proponents of the Effects Based Approach and the Revolution in Military Affairs in the 90's."

One has to smile here because, until very recently, Dannatt was one of the staunchest proponents of the "Effects Based Approach" which was spawned by the Revolution in Military Affairs. To give its more familiar name, this is the Future Rapid Effects System or FRES.

It was this project that brought this blog into the military arena, when it became apparent that it was to be the core of the expeditionary concept, with light-weight airmobile platforms, and thus was to form the teeth of the ERRF.

That force, in accordance with the Helsinki Headline Goal, was supposed to be operational by 2010, which explains why Dannatt was so insistent on a 2010 in-service date for FRES. As it is, the grandiose Capability Improvement Chart of 2005 (shopping list) remains but a distant dream.

But, with FRES now dead in the water, and Dannatt contemptuously dismissing his love-child as "sterile thinking", the ERRF has nowhere to go. By next year, it may be European, but it will not be rapid, it will not be capable of reaction and it will not be a force.

Sadly for the "colleagues" though, the non-force was also reliant on the implementation by 2005 of the EU Strategic lift joint coordination, with a view to achieving by 2010 necessary capacity and full efficiency in strategic lift (air, land and sea) in support of anticipated operations.

With Airbus only able to produce computer graphics of the A400M, however, the only thing that approaches "full efficiency" in euroland is the flag-waving and parade department. As long as you don't want the euroweenies to go anywhere and actually do any serious (or any) fighting, they are just the people you need.

Then, to put a final cap on their ambitions, incoming CGS General Sir David Richards is making it clear that any future British military adventures of any scale with be conducted under an allied umbrella and those allies will be the Americans.

We hope now that little Charles Grant is weeping in his cups. All the "colleagues" have left is not so much Eurocorps as a eurocorpse.

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Must have forgotten

On Tuesday Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, another of the local council - House of Commons - House of Lords brigade, not to mention being a member of the Scottish Assembly as well, asked HMG the following question:

What is their forecast of the revenue lost to HM Treasury through the use of the Channel Islands for avoiding the payment of United Kingdom tax.

The debate that went on for about seven minutes was quite curious in that practically everything the question and immediate response to it implied, was incorrect.

All we managed to gather is that HMG, together with other states and governments that is anxious to destroy economic activity by extracting as much tax as they can manage, are trying to think of all sorts of schemes whereby "tax havens" will be shut down, even if that will mean the places in question going bankrupt and money being laundered some other way. For sure as eggs is eggs, the rich will find a method of keeping their spondulikins out of the various politicians' hands and who can blame them.

What was not mentioned was that there might actually be another solution to the problem and that is lower taxation. That, on the other hand, would undermine the assumption on which much of the debate was conducted: that, somehow, HMG (or any other government) has an undeniable right to people's earnings to do whatever they see fit to do with it.

Another unmentioned aspect was the curious fact that members of what is known as "Another Place", to wit the House of Commons, had, at various times, voted themselves substantial salary increases, which they called expenses in order not to pay taxes on them. Behaviour of that kind would be frowned upon if indulged in by the great unwashed.

There are, of course, no salaries except for Ministers, in the House of Lords, and the expenses are minimal. Lord Foulkes, one assumes, is paid as Member of the Scottish Parliament. For all of that, his was one of the few names in the Upper House that cropped up in the course of the recent unpleasantness, as Wikipedia unkindly mentions:

In 2008, Foulkes had been criticised for his expenses claims, which included around £45,000 over a period of two years for overnight subsistence to stay in a flat he had inherited. Between April 2007 and March 2008, Foulkes claimed £54,527 in expenses from the House of Lords.[13][1]

The words houses, glass and stones spring to mind.

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