More than a footnote - by Richard... Friday, November 19, 2010

More than a footnote - by Richard... Friday, November 19, 2010

This will win me no plaudits, but with the airwaves saturated with wailing Irish politicians, and a quota of lurid accountsfrom diverse media sources, we are really none the wiser, as to what is really going on.

In a way, this is classic Irish politics: "if you think you know what is going on, you haven't been listening". But a good place to start is with Ambrose, who might be close to identifying the real agenda, or part of it.

The European Central Bank, he says, has issued a clear warning that it will press ahead with plans to raise interest rates and withdraw lending support for banks despite the eurozone debt crisis, even if this risks pushing Ireland, Portugal and Spain into deeper trouble.

This is a short, newsy piece, though, lacking the detailed discussion that we usually get from Ambrose, so it looks more like work in progress. That apart, there are too many "actors" with agendas, there is too much theatre and too little hard information to work out what is really going on. But, when history comes to be written, the story of this week will, I suspect, be more than a footnote.

One thing though, the photo is rather funny: a Dublin beggar holds out a cup to Ajai Chopra, left, Deputy Director of the European Department of the IMF as he makes his way to talks with the Irish government in Dublin. I wonder who put him up to it.

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Winter Weather Awareness Week - by Richard... Thursday, November 18, 2010

In an almost perfect parody of themselves, the warmists are seriously telling us that colder winters could be a sign of global warming. This is just as well because the Scotsare being warned that this winter could be worse than last year's record-breaking cold snap.

Temperatures are expected to fall as low as -10C north of the Border this weekend and heavy snowfalls are predicted to leave large parts of the country bathed in white. Now experts have forecast the early onset of freezing weather in mid-November could be the start of a long, cold winter at least as severe as last year's.

Fortunately, the warmists are so closeted in their towers of unreality that they have not the first idea quite how stupid they look, or how their pronouncements are treated by ordinary mortals – mostly with derision. Still, it is Winter Weather Awareness Week in Alabama, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency offering tips on getting ready for winter weather. Perhaps Dr Mann and his cohorts ought to attend.

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Put them out to grass - by Richard...

In judging the merits of any press article, you have to look at who wrote it and the newspaper in which it appears. Thus judged, the MoD story currently being circulated has two handicaps – it is written by James Kirkup and is published by The Daily Telegraph. The latter is increasingly a very major handicap, but the former is almost invariably fatal. Trusting to that lightweight fool – a fool amongst fools, so to speak – is not the best of counsels.

Nevertheless, the lightweight Kirkup has clearly got hold of something, the importance of which he cannot entirely disguise, even if one would not expect him to understand its precise nature.

With that in mind, in the MoD memo on the strategic review that has come his way, we see that the MoD and the military was even less prepared and less well equipped for the process than even we suspected. Even if our military is now increasingly unable to fight successfully the wars with which it is changed with prosecuting, one might at least expect their Whitehall Warriors to possess some skills when it comes to beating up the politicians, especially when they are led by the baleful 13th Century Fox.

However, from what we can read of the memo, it would appear that the military are just as incompetent in fighting their corner in Whitehall as they are in fighting real wars, and have suffered a grievous defeat as a result. Despite having had several years warning that there was to be a strategic review, we learn that a consultation was carried out but responses were received "only as decisions were being taken and collated only as they were being confirmed". As if they could not have pre-empted the review and got their responses in earlier?

Crucially, so little had been done about force structures and equipment that another "six to nine months" was needed to develop "high-level military judgements", in order to decide which forces, weapons and equipment would be needed - even though it had been quite obvious for years that these matters were going to be at the centre of the review.

This perhaps is the most amazing finding of all as, despite all the warnings that they had had, the military was still no further forward in defining the kit it needed than it was during the Labour regime. One suspects that even "six to nine months", would not have been enough. It is pretty evident that the military now has lost the ability even to decide what it needs.

It is then becomes almost laughable to find that the MoD as a whole "did not fully understand – or accept" the scale of the cuts it was facing, and that the review should have started with "a more hard-nosed description of the financial challenges".

Actually, this is utterly bizarre. One can only think that the MoD and the military in general fell for the Tory rhetoric that Brown was the destroyer of the military and that they would be in good hands after the election. Too late have they remembered that all-important rule of politics: "never trust a Tory". I bet the little chaps and chapesses are now having second thoughts about voting for Dave.

But one thing which does not surprise me in the least is the observation that the Armed Forces had no "meaningful internal thinking" on how to deliver major cuts and effectively blocked "radical" options like restructuring the Army. As long as I have had any dealings with the MoD and the Armed Forces, I have been aware that these institutions have had no "meaningful internal thinking" on just about anything.

None of them ever "do" thinking in any meaningful way, or have any capacity so to do. This is why they are in the mess they're in and why, when push comes to shove, we need to think very hard about giving them anything serious like weapons, in case they hurt themselves - or anybody else.

I suppose there is just about enough intellect there to be able to plan and mount a ceremonial guard for wee willie's wedding, and organise a fly-past. They might even pass muster for an EU parade, if they can buy enough white wellies and gloves (to say nothing of the flags) but on current form, the sooner they are all put out to grass the better. If we are going to save money, we might as well do a proper job of it.

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A modern miracle - by Richard...

With the economy in the hands of the pampered child Osborne, we see that Britain has slumped into the red by another £10.3 billion last month "despite a leap in business tax and VAT revenues". So says The Independent, which tells us that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) records that public sector net borrowing in October set a record high for the month and marked an increase on the £10.1 billion seen a year earlier.

Given the increase in the tax take for the month, it looks as if those good ol' "Tory cuts" are really having an effect - another modern miracle at work.

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A stampede of groundhogs - by Richard...

North Sea fishermen are throwing away up to half of all the fish they catch every year in what campaigners say is a chronic waste of food, says The Independent.

It tells us that almost a million dead and dying fish are discarded at sea each year, according to a campaign calling for Europe's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to be comprehensively reformed. Most are tossed overboard because they are too small, of the wrong species or will take fishing boats over their quotas, making it illegal to land them.

And hey! Guess what! Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the food campaigner and celebrity chef, was so appalled at learning of the level of discards, describing it as an "insane waste", that he has launched a campaign to get the practice banned.

Well, well, well. Welcome to the world, Mr Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Next thing you know, he'll be talking to that nice Mr Cameron, and pointing him to a useful little report on the Tory website. There again, he might save his breath. Let someone else come back in other five year's time, andThe Independent can write yet another balls-aching story about reforming the CFP.

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