Look in the archives Mr Johnston - by Richard... Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Look in the archives Mr Johnston - by Richard... Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Philip Johnson – a journalist for whom I once had some time – is in his usual comment spot in The Daily Telegraph. This time he is whingeing about the EU budget, telling us that "MPs can't block the EU budget – but they could at least register a protest."

To put it bluntly, though, who gives a tinker's cuss whether that deadweight dross in Parliament registers anything? As Philip so neatly states, "For good or ill, we are in the EU and no mainstream political party is proposing that we leave." And he also tells us that, "Along with several other countries Britain argued unsuccessfully for a freeze in the budget but was outvoted at an EU summit a few weeks ago."

Put two and two together and all you have left is a bunch of expensive and impotent timewasters – along with Mr Johnston and his media friends, whose own inadequacies are far too numerous to mention.

But, if we stay with the print media, of which Johnston is part, a scan of today's paper with a critical eye immediately tells you the problem. As I noted with The Sunday Times recently, we are being (and have been for some time) short-changed. Typically, in The Telegraph, a page will give you three, or maybe four stories, a large picture and an advert. And, as so many of the stories are lightweight dross, a whole newspaper can contain no more than two or three (being generous) stories of interest and substance.

Compare and contrast the edition of The Yorkshire Post for 1 October 1940. You will see over 20 substantive stories on just the front page. The publishers are rationed to just six pages (something for our green "friends" to think about) but in those there is more information than you will get in a week's supply of the current newspaper.

So we return to Mr Johnston, who bleats from his sadly depleted corner, that the EU's spending "must be subject to the same rigorous scrutiny that we expect from domestic governments." 

Apart from the fact that it is a waste of time scrutinising that over which we have no control, the point that Johnston misses is that the media should play a huge part in the scrutiny process. But there is no adequate scrutiny even of domestic governments, as newspapers cut down their journalistic input and devote more and more of their space to tat. It is hardly likely, therefore, that the EU will get, or can get, sufficient attention.

That, of course, is where the blogs come in. A carefully selected range of well-written and informative blogs will give you far better coverage of events, with wider and more thought-provoking comment than the whole of the MSM.

No wonder Mr Marr is so vitriolic. He knows when he has been outclassed. But, for Mr Johnston, the answer to his "scrutiny" issue lies in the archives. When newspapers start looking like newspapers again, we might possibly be able to claw back some of the lost ground. It won't be sufficient, but it is probably necessary. In the meantime, the blogs have it and Marr can return his head to its rightful (and usual) place – up his own rear end ... and Johnston can carry on his ineffectual bleating.

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Christmas comes early - by Richard...

I discovered a new database yesterday which, for a relatively modest fee, gives me the wartime editions of the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror and The Yorkshire Post. As you can imagine, for me it is like Christmas came early, and I spent most of yesterday "unwrapping" my presents.

Actually, it was a crap day. There are some nights when, for no apparent reason, you cannot sleep. With an early start to give a BBC interview, I sort of dozed off by four in the morning and was up at seven. At my brightest I was not, so mechanical tasks was about it.

Perhaps being semi-comatose was just as well, which meant that the comments by that slimeAndrew Marr about blogging almost floated by – almost, but not quite. What a seriously low-grade shit that man is. 

Anyhow, yesterday was a day to forget. Today's another day ... and the treadmill awaits, as I daub my pimples, rub my cauliflower nose , inhale the damp in my mother's basement and contemplate the view that "... the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night"

What a total schmuck he really, really is. But at least I had my database to play with.

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A certain lack of proportion - by Richard... Monday, October 11, 2010

As an illustration of how the warmists lack any sense of proportion, we have today the dreadfulTim Yeo pontificating on how reducing current spending on "low carbon technology" would be "like cutting the budget for Spitfires in 1939".

This is the chairman of the Climate Change Select Committee, and he is anticipating next week's announcement on spending cuts. He is concerned the forthcoming spending review will see funding for carbon capture delayed "or worse", cash cut for upgrading ports to handle offshore wind farms, and green subsidies for small-scale renewables reduced.

Yeo says government needs to put more investment in areas such as renewable power, rather than less. Less money in these schemes could make the UK renewables sector too unpredictable to survive, he warns.

Then we get the money quote. "Cutting spending on low carbon technologies now would be like cutting the budget for Spitfires in 1939. The UK was running an even bigger deficit in the 1930s, but we would never have won the Battle of Britain if spending on defence had been sacrificed."

Yeo, is another of those Tory MPs who has made a career out of being amazingly thick, so it would not even begin to occur to him how fatuous his remarks are – and what an insult they are to the people who actually fought in the battle.

But it would also never occur to him to question the myth on which he relies. In the sense that he means it, there probably wasn't a "Battle of Britain" as such, with the gallant "few" saving the British nation from the Nazi hordes.

And in that very specific sense, it would not really have mattered whether we had had Spitfires or even whether we had cut the budget. As always, what matters is how you spend the money, and we most certainly could have got far more bangs for our bucks.

That, however, is an argument that Mr Yeo would not like to hear.

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It's still there - by Richard...

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!