It's still there - by Richard... Monday, October 11, 2010

It's still there - by Richard... Monday, October 11, 2010

My cunning new strategy of ignoring it in the hope that it will go away and die clearly isn't working. It's still there and now we learn that energy chief Guenther Oettinger will be announcing some time soon that Europe needs to spend €1 trillion to bugger up its energy system.

There is a real problem about getting worked up about how much we pay into the EU. The amount of money they are costing us through their daft laws and schemes is so huge that the bit we have to give them directly is, by comparison, minuscule. Even so, when the "colleagues" start talking about trillions, that gets seriously scary. They mean to destroy us, and this is how they will do it!

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Savagely vindicated ... again - by Richard... Sunday, October 10, 2010

I first wrote about it on 28 July 2004, marking it down as "another blunder of Eurofighter proportions".

This is the £16 billion FRES programme, which I have consistently opposed, writing over 100 pieces about it. Yet I was almost a lone voice, stacked up against an indifferent and ignorant media, with only Booker for support in the media, and the tenacious Ann Winterton in Parliament.

On the other side of the divide, its greatest supporter has been General Sir Richard Dannatt, with the wholehearted approval of the Defence Committee and the Tory defence team.

But now we learn that FRES is dead in the water. "It's a dead duck. It is the definition of everything that is wrong with the MoD's procurement process," says a senior Ministry of Defence source. Actually, this isn't a procurement issue - it is a definition problem. The Army couldn't get its act together and make a coherent case for its future needs.

Fortunately, the project has not gone so far down the acquisition path that it is incapable of being cancelled. And, although I say it myself – because no one else will – that is in no small measure due to the opposition of this blog. Such was its reach and its sister blog DOTR, that we had the then procurement minister coming onto our forum to plead the case, after I had written this.

This I remarked at the time was when the blogosphere came of age. A blog was setting the agenda and forcing ministers to respond. We in turn responded with this - a case which was never satisfactorily countered. Few people know the effect that piece had on the defence establishment, and why. I do.

You can read much of the background in Ministry of Defeat, still the only book that gets near telling the story. It has a recent review here.

Yet it is the Gen Dannatt who is lauded as the great expert, doyen of The Daily Telegraph - the man who "knows". This is the man who would have lumbered us with that useless pile of junk called FRES, and its lifetime costs in excess of £60 billion. By contrast, this blog won't even get a look in, shunned by the great and the good for telling the inconvenient truths.

Even then, the media doesn't get it. That idiot political editor Patrick Hennessy, who writes the piece about FRES being ditched, states: "The decision will mean that the Army will be forced to fight in Afghanistan and in future conflicts with its existing fleet of ageing vehicles, some of which first entered service in the 1960s."

In his little Westminster bubble, the world passes him by. Has he not heard of the Mastiff, Ridgeback, Wolfhound, Ocelot? How you can be that ignorant and still be a journalist is one of those modern miracles. No wonder they think Dannatt is an expert.

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Deeply, darkly depressing - by Richard...

Those who have met him and tried to explain to him some of the simplest aspects of his former brief tend to agree on one thing – the man is thick. He betrays not the slightest understanding of the technicalities of global warming, or energy supply, despite having been secretary of state for both.

And, as Booker points out, Ed Miliband is also potentially the costliest politician in British history, after championing the 2008 Climate Change Act – his only significant achievement in his meteoric political career.

Given the fatuity of this legislation, its extraordinary expense and the damage it will do to the economy – to say nothing of the baleful effect on people's lives, you might think that this one and only achievement might disqualify the man from further high office, or any office at all apart from honorary, unpaid dogcatcher.

But not a bit of it. Signally missing from all the attempts to find any substance in the strangely two-dimensional figure who is now leader of the Labour Party has been any reference to this very achievement – the fact that he is potentially the most expensive politician in Britain's history.

The legislation commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to cutting its CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050, at a cost estimated, on the website of his old Department for Energy and Climate Change, at up to £18.3 billion every year for the next four decades.

In cash terms this amounts to £734 billion, making it far and away the most costly law ever put through Parliament. It will equate to more than £700 a year for every household in the land, as we pay for thousands more useless windmills and other quixotic gestures through fast-rising taxes, soaring electricity bills, draconian regulatory costs and heaven knows what else.

Furthermore, neither Mr Miliband himself, nor any of his Act's supporters, could begin to explain how that 80 percent target is to be attained without closing down virtually our entire economy.

Is the politician responsible for such a law, we might ask ourselves, fit to be considered as our future prime minister? Except that it was also enthusiastically voted for by virtually every MP present in the House, including of course David Cameron's Conservatives and the Lib Dems, with only three voting against.

Wherever we look, the lunatics are now firmly in charge of the asylum, and until enough politicians come to their senses and realise what a catastrophic blunder they have made, so it will remain.

For the meantime, says Booker, whenever we see or hear Mr Miliband, we may at least recall that claim to fame – the most expensive politician in history, responsible for a law that was not only the most costly ever put through Parliament but that will also be recognised, eventually, as the most insane.

And that is what is so deeply, darkly depressing – the idea that our MPs, many of them re-elected and still in the House, could be so utterly stupid, so crass and so devastatingly blind as to vote for this legislation, and thence to support either Miliband, Cameron or Clegg – all of whom support this ruinous imbecility.

With this and our continued membership of the EU – and many other insults – no person can have any dealings with these fools. By any measure, they have disqualified themselves from polite society.

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Snow business - by Richard... Saturday, October 09, 2010

It isn't quite as bad as it looks as the council is saying that it intends to keep the main routes clear – but it is encouraging "self-help" to deal with the minor routes.

Personally, I think people should as a matter of course clear the footpaths in front of their own properties, and especially commercial properties. In many countries this is either a tradition or required by law. We should not as a rule expect local authorities to be clearing snow on their own.

But what is especially interesting about this piece is the uncontested assumption that an "Arctic winter looms". The paper could be wrong, of course, but taking this line suggests that it is getting a strong line of information which gives the idea some plausibility – even if more snow is simply another sign of global warming.

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