The story's out - by Richard... Sunday, April 25, 2010

The story's out - by Richard... Sunday, April 25, 2010

While the girls and boys have been playing their games, others have been doing some serious work, charting the debacle of the closure of UK and European airspace for six days, in response to the Eyafjallajokull volcano.

As far as I am aware, there will be three newspapers today covering the events which led to the debacle (there may be more) but first out of the trap is Booker. He frames the story perfectly, pointing out that the closure of our airspace "casts a highly disturbing light on the way we are governed."

Before going any further, it is necessary to emphasise this point. The bottom line here is governance. Whatever the technical issues, the fact – and I do say fact – that British airspace was needlessly closed, at great cost and causing great distress, was down to a failure of government. This is the stuff of real politics, affecting real people and costing real money.

That said, such are the complexities of the events – those during the crisis and the years preceding it – that there is scope for emphasising different aspects of them, Booker choose to focus on the "striking parallels" with the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001.

Both episodes, he writes, involved a massive system failure in a complex new structure of supranational governance which was being put to the test for the first time, Both were made much worse by over-reliance on an inadequate computer model, which ended up causing unnecessary chaos and misery for hundreds of thousands of people and costing not millions but billions of pounds.

What turned a drama into a crisis was the central flaw in the international system for responding to such incidents, whereby the authorities were locked by international rules into a rigid bureaucratic system. Based on a computer model, which gave them no alternative but to close down air traffic for days longer than was justified. 

But, writes Booker, the real flaw in the system was that it made no provision for testing that crude computer model against actual real-life data, which could have shown that the computer was vastly exaggerating the risk.

Responsibility for responding to the Icelandic eruption lay with a bewildering hierarchy of national and international authorities, starting at the top with a UN body, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), working down through the European Commission and Eurocontrol (which is not part of the EU), to national agencies, such as our own Civil Aviation Authority, the National Air Traffic Service and, last but not least, the UK Met Office, owners of the relevant computer model.

Under guidelines issued by the ICAO last September, as soon as the Met Office's computer simulation of air flows around Europe indicates that a particular wind-borne dust cloud might theoretically be a danger, it automatically triggers an exclusion zone for air traffic. What the computer cannot show is the density of the dust, and whether it thus poses a genuine hazard.

A properly designed system should have allowed for immediate sampling and monitoring of the ash cloud to see whether it was at the danger level. As a spokesman for the International Advisory Committee on Flight Safety put it, "military and transport aircraft should have been sent straight up to determine the nature of the ash cloud. The density and the make-up of the cloud is what matters, and that information has just not been available."

Somehow the need for this had been completely overlooked by all the international officials involved in devising the new system (which was endorsed on our behalf by the European Commission). Because no one had been made officially responsible for carrying out the relevant sampling, it then turned out that there were very few aircraft left in Europe specially equipped to do it.

Booker thus picks up on the point made earlier on this blog, whence he notes the similarity with 2001, when our government tried to tackle the foot-and-mouth epidemic within a new straitjacket of EU directives. 

Instead of listening to those world experts who were urging it to contain the disease by vaccination, it handed over direction of the crisis to a computer modelling team with no experience of animal diseases, who came up with that truly disastrous policy of a "pre-emptive cull". The result was that millions of healthy animals were killed unnecessarily, the appalling damage inflicted on Britain's countryside was infinitely worse than it should have been, and the cost rose into billions.

It is especially ironic, Booker concluded, that a Met Office computer model was at the centre of this latest fiasco, and that, thanks to successive government cuts over the years, it no longer has any aircraft capable of testing whether its model's data are reliable.

Over the past 20 years, our Met Office has received some £250 million to allow its computer models to predict future climate change. If just a tiny fraction of that money had been spent on aircraft of the type that the Met Office used to have at its disposal to sample dust clouds, airlines and their customers might have been saved several times the sum the Met Office has frittered away on its obsession with global warming.

ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD

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Constitutional ignorance - by Richard... Saturday, April 24, 2010

Unelected prime ministers would be forced to hold a general election within six months of taking office, under proposals being announced by David Cameron today, or so says The Independent.

Given the lamentable lack of education in this country, I can quite understand that many people fall for this trap, but one would expect a putative prime minister to know better. As my colleague has said so many times, we do not elect prime ministers in this country. They are appointed by the Queen, after being selected by the majority party.

In the increasingly unlikely event that Cameron becomes prime minister, he will not have been elected to that post. He will have been elected MP for Witney, becoming prime minister because the foolish Conservatives have selected him as their leader.

And if you think about it, the utter stupidity of the premise becomes obvious. The only people given a chance to vote for Cameron are the electors of Witney. Why should they, and only they, be allowed to elect the prime minister?

Mind you, with this man and much of the nation being ignorant of our constitution, it is no wonder their poor little brains can't get to grips with the complexities of the EU. They don't even understand their own system.

Video via Witterings from Witney - who says "we're doomed".

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD

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Greece on the skids - by Richard...

It was not so long ago that I was writing that it had been suggested that when the spread between German and Greek bonds reached 450, we would be at crisis point.

Now, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is telling us that the spreads on 10-year Greek bonds have exploded to almost 600 basis points over German Bunds. Contagion, he writes, is spreading across Southern Europe and panic trading has pushed borrowing costs close to nine percent. Rates on two-year debt rose to 10.6 percent in "a market gone mad".

The cost of taking out insurance on Greek government bonds through credit default swaps suddenly surged by around a 10th, hitting 620 basis points. That means it now costs over $620,000 a year to insure $10 million of Greek sovereign debt for five years - some $70,000 more than it costs to insure similar debt issued by Ukraine.

The euro also plunged, extending earlier losses to hit a new low for the year against the dollar at $1.3257 and, to cap it all, as the European Union statistics office, Eurostat, raised its estimate of the already huge Greek budget deficit. ratings agency Moody's downgraded Greek debt.

If the British media hadn't gone mad, and could tear itself away from its love affair with the tawdry trio, this would be lead story in all the newspapers, especially when we have Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, saying the situation is "a very serious one." Basically, when the Frogs go in for understatement, we are in deepest doo doo. Or, as Strauss-Khan might have said, "C'est de la merde ce truc".

As a result, it comes as no surprise that Papandreou has gone rushing to the "colleagues" to pick up the dosh promised to him earlier this month.

The only slight problem he has (Brits can still do understatement as well) is that Germany has refused to put in place enabling legislation that will allow Merkel to put her euros in the pot. As with all participants behind the €30bn (£26bn) of eurozone loans, they will need to pass new laws from scratch before handing over any cash.

This, we are told, stretches the timeline into the second half of May before the "colleagues" can deliver, which is going to make it a close-run thing. The Greeks have bonds worth €11.6 billion maturing at the end of that month. They are going to have to rely on the IMF to bail them out.

But the big issue beginning to emerge is the increasing real prospect of "contagion" as Greece's €270 billion in sovereign debt looks more and more shaky. Portugal, Spain and Ireland are on the rack as well and, if there is a hung parliament, according to some pundits, the UK could be taking the heat as well.

Altogether, this is not exactly a happy picture, and we are still in uncharted territory. Not only is Greece in for a bumpy ride, but the euro is under threat, and the whole banking system could take a serious haircut. This, of course, will end up in the little people taking yet another hit. It may just be a good time to lay in a stock of baked beans.

GREEK THREAD