Heath in our time - by Richard... Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Heath in our time - by Richard... Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Well, not only is HMS Ark Royal to be scrapped but the Fleet Air Arm as well. In the meantime, the BBC has learned that "at least one" of the new carriers will be redesigned so that it can deploy normal fighter aircraft that do not need a Harrier-style vertical lift capability.

Dr Fox says that there would be "interoperability" so strike fighter aircraft from allies such as France could land on UK aircraft carriers, and vice versa. 

So what have we here? No British aircraft, an Anglo-French agreement on joint carrier operation and now a carrier design change that allows for the operation of French aircraft on the British carrier. Where did you read this first?

And as more and more details leak out, you can see the game – the Armed Forces are being stripped of capability to the point that they can no longer operate independently, even within the context of an alliance. We will have to look to "allies" for operational components just so that we can field our forces.

Well, the US Armed Forces don't work that way, so we will have to look elsewhere. Where do we think Cammy and his euroweenie chums are looking? Why does the phrase "sold out" come to mind? But then, this has been on the cards for a long time, and we said this was going to happen in January 2006.

That it should happen now, under a (partially) Tory government is not a surprise. Historically, the Tories have always been keenest on European military "co-operation" and the die was cast when Portillo signed the co-operation deal in 1996. Euro-Navy here we come, with the European Carrier Group as the flagship operation.

We are now simply seeing the end came of a process that has been under development for decades, and which started with Heath and his merry men.  Forget Thatcher (Blair and all the rest). Cameron is the true heir to Edward Heath. In the manner of Chamberlain and Munich, we now have "Heath in our time".

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Re-establish the connection - by Richard...

Whichever way you look at it, £1 billion is a lot of money. That is £1,000,000,000.00, and it is ourmoney – more money than you and I will ever see, or ever dream of earning. It is a sum of money that would buy 150,000 hip replacement operations. It would pay the energy bills for two million pensioners for a full year, or pay the university fees for 600,000 students. More specifically, and of some personal interest, it would pay for 100,000 life-saving heart operations.

Yet the f***wit pictured is going to take that amount of money from us to play around stripping plant food from coal-fired electricity generation and bury it deep in a hole in the ground.

This man, therefore, will - indirectly - be responsible for many deaths, lost in "opportunity costs". The money frittered away on this moronic enterprise cannot be spent on life-saving functions. And we do not have the money to spare. If we waste this money, it is not available for anything else. People will die because of this action.

It would thus be very easy to advance a moral case for saying this man should be killed. If I had a gun I would be strugging with the idea that I should not use it for the greater benefit of mankind. If I saw this man's corpse lying on the pavement, I would smile, step over it and continue on my way.

People such as him survive because they are insulated from the consequences of their folly. It is time the connection was re-established. If not, history tells us that there will come a time when the only option will be to kill them.

The French aristocracy learnt that lesson - the ones that survived. An English king forgot that lesson and it cost him his life. A Russian ruler and his family shared the same fate. What makes this ghastly creature think he is immune from the strictures of historical inevitability?

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The ultimate solution? - by Richard... Monday, October 18, 2010

The weekend news that 13th Century Fox is countenancing running the Navy's new carriers without aircraft seems, on the face of it, an admirable solution. Without the noise and disruption of these smelly jets, the new generation of sailors will be able to listen to their iPods in peace, while the MoD can rent the vessel out as a floating conference suite, complete with helipads and tennis courts with a 360° sea view.

But then an evil thought occurs. With the Kermits desperate to keep production going, and a nice training facility in place, what better way of securing Anglo-French cooperation than by having the UK provide the grey floaty thing and the Kermits supplying the toys to go with it?

You can just see this one coming. First, there is a "temporary arrangement", giving theRhacophorus some much needed deck practice and helping us work up our new playthings. Then, when the general public have got used to the idea, we buy some toys of our own, so that our boys and girls can play together with the Kermits when they are bored with their iPods.

As long as we don't do anything rash, like go out and fight anybody – which the euroweenies tend to be reluctant to do anyway – the arrangement should work perfectly. And just so there is no argument about whose flag we should fly, the Admiralty can invest in one of those pretty ones with yellow stars on a blue background. Then everybody, and especially little Dave, will be reely reely happy.

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Sixes and sevens - by Richard...

I do wish The Daily Telegraph would get its act together, and somehow try and understand the subject it is writing on.

Trailing that idiot Huhne's "ambitious blueprint on Monday" to destroy transform Britain's power system over the next 40 years, the paper tells us that, "It is believed energy bills are likely to increase by at least £300 a year per household to fund financial support for the wind industry and other renewable projects."

Yet Booker does the maths in his column. Based on official projections, the outcome is that costs are likely to increase by £880 a year, with an extra £22 billion added to the cost of electricity generation.

Then there is Gilligan's recent piece which basically says that wind generation as an option is basically stuffed – which means that Huhne's ambitions of meeting the EU's renewables quota are basically moonshine.

One really does wonder how much further we have to go before the media wakes up to the reality – that our ministers are locked into an expensive and useless fantasy, which even in the process of not working is set to cost up billions.

However, it looks as if there is some small cheer, in that the plans for a 10 mile barrage across the Severn Estuary are being dumped. But this is not a sudden outbreak of common sense – simply that the project is so expensive that it cannot go ahead without public money and there is no money left in the kitty.

We are also told to expect good news on nuclear power, but why am I totally unconvinced an expected "go ahead to a new generation of eight nuclear power stations" is actually going to amount to anything.

The small print will tell us whether it can happen, but there is a strong suspicion that the continued uncertainties in the government position – not least its attitude to nuclear waste – will deter investment.

In other words, even after Huhne has finished tomorrow on energy policy, we will still be at sixes and sevens. But with a moron in charge of policy, reporting to a moron in charge of the government, there was never really any likelihood that it was going to be any different.

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Historical tides - by Richard... Sunday, October 17, 2010

When Merkel says it, she can get away with it ... just. And she has said it: "German multiculturalism has 'utterly failed'". She was speaking to a meeting of youth wing of her Christian Democratic Union party, and declared that the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily "side by side" did not work.

New arrivals to do more to integrate into German society, she thus says, a move that is seen to be courting "growing anti-immigrant opinion in Germany", which is home to around four million Muslims.

Furthermore, Merkel is not the first mainstream politician in recent time to break the taboo. Last week, Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria and a member of the Christian Social Union – part of Merkel's ruling coalition – called for a halt to Turkish and Arabic immigration.

Both politicians, though, are responding to pressure from within the CDU to take a harder line on immigrants who show resistance to being integrated into German society. And there can be little doubt that Muslims are the target.

In a recent opinion poll, the majority of Germans who responded (55 percent) believed that "Arabs" (aka Muslims) are "unpleasant people", compared with the 44 percent who held the opinion seven years ago. Another recent poll showed one-third of Germans believed the country was "overrun by foreigners" – aka Muslims.

Some of these people may have the sense to realise that they have outstayed their welcome, and get out of a country which has a lingering reputation for seeking final solutions to major problems. Once the tides of history start turning, they tend to develop an unstoppable momentum - and the difference this time is that we need to be alongside. You can abuse hospitality for only so long ... 

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The revolting revolt - by Richard...

It should not pass notice on this blog, which is supposed to be interested in such things, that the Kermits have been revolting – more than they usually are. Embroiled in a general strike, it appears that as many as a million of them hit the streets last week.

However, while it is being said in some quarters that this invokes the spirit of 68, that seems hardly the case when the core of the strike is public sector workers and their big beef is pension rights. Somehow, that does not have quite the same caché as manning the barricades (or storming them) in defence of liberté, égalité and fraternité.

Furthermore, this level of upset is nothing really new. If you want a really entertaining read, there is little better than Alexander Werth's account of the great Paris riot of 6 February 1934, published in 1935 in his book France in Ferment (you can still get it on Amazon!). Forget the "spirit of 68" - go for the spirit of '34.

(What I found so entertaining, amongst other things, was how the police and rioters shared the same public transport - buses, etc. - to get to and from the riots, and were perfectly cordial during the journeys. Also, being Kermits, they all stopped for lunch - both sides - and then picked up where they had left off.)

The target then, of course, was not Sarkozy but Daladier, who was being accused of giving "free rein to socialist anarchy" and, at the same time, supporting "Masonic crooks". But then, any more than now, who ever said rioters had to be consistent?

Those riots back in 1934 actually presaged a moral breakdown in the French ruling class. Six years later when the "Hun" came knocking at the door, the whole edifice collapsed with barely a fight. And that much 1934 and now have in common – a nation that has lost its way ... in a continent that has lost its way.

Then, however, there was the brooding Nazi presence in Germany. Now, the threats are more diffuse, but nonetheless real. And what of 1934? Six years later, the world had changed forever. Here in 2010, can we be certain that in 2016 we will not be saying the same thing?