Lookee here - by Richard... Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Lookee here - by Richard... Tuesday, April 05, 2011

You should not take the mick out of a poor child that is called Luciana Berger – she can't help it - except when she is shadow minister for climate change, is Labour and Co-operative MP for Liverpool Wavertree and writes total tosh for The Tribune.

Her drivel does serve a useful purpose, however, in underlining the unfortunate truth that there are things as bad in life as Tory MPs ... Labour MPs (we draw a discrete veil over the Lib-Dims). But how entertaining it is that this creature's piece has been recruited by the Referendum Campaign to advertise for people to sign the "pledge".

By ye friends shall ye be known.

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Money for gestures - by Richard...

This is what it comes down to when you are ruled by an alien élite which has neither sense nor wisdom: we see from the Evening Standard the headline, "Philip Hammond finds £5m to avoid EU pollution fines", hailing a story of how £5 million of our money is being given to the Greater London Authority to fix air quality measurements, so as to avoid fines from our supreme government of up to £300 million.

Please note: the money is not being used to improve air quality, per se. It is being used to reduce pollution around the air monitoring stations that we fund, in order to supply information to Brussels, so that it can check up on what we are doing, thus to reduce the recorded pollution and creep below the thresholds set by our masters.

And for those very few who might question the term "supreme government", what other term do you use when you have a minister of the Crown thrashing around with Boris Johnson, to fiddle the figures in order to avoid a fine (paid-for with our money)?

Quite how Johnson has acquired his reputation is beyond me, but here he is indistinguishable from the rest of the political classes who permit this gross abuse of our money and trust - the money certainly ain't coming out of Johnson's well-lined pocket. And sure, it is only £5 million – but try telling that to the people who go short because they have to pay the taxes to finance this madness.

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This is piece of theatre - by Richard...

"You're just carrying the water for Obama". Delicious - obtained via Zero Hedge and the forum. The piece has more sense in just short of seven minutes than any of the torrent of broadcast fluff from the BBC and its allies. As for the print media, it is impossible to take the output seriously, and especially the reports of that fool Cameron in Italy.

There is indeed a sense of unreality here. The British media, having treated the initial excursions with all the gravitas of a Boys Own comic, have consistently failed to understand the enormity of the error made by Cameron and his idiot ministers in dashing into a military venture for which he and his "allies" were ill-prepared and for which they had no end game.

Now, of course, the media are compromised, having in their own ways made themselves look as foolish as Cameron and his team. Thus, you are not going to get any rational analysis, or any intelligent discussion. They are all passengers of events which they do not understand and over which they have no control.

Needless to say, the political classes are the biggest failures of them all. On such a foolhardy venture, the Labour opposition should be voluble and highly critical, demanding of the joke that passes for our government an account of its stupidity. But, as is always the case now, opposition voices are muted and largely irrelevant.

The British public, therefore, bemused and badly informed, is left to pay the bill, and to deal with whatever the consequences that may accrue, without complaint of course, even if others are more strident. But, if that is on its way, the media and the politicians will not see it coming. And their mindless prattling will have so confused the issues that most people will have given up trying to follow it.

Come that time, this video, will stand out like a beacon. We, like the Americans, should not be there. We have no business being there - and we have neither the will nor the capabilities to bring the issue to a successful resolution. The only thing we have gained, and can gain, from this is further evidence - if any were needed - of the foolishness of the man masquerading as our prime minister.

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Too complicated to care? - by Richard...

What used to be a very useful and necessary industry has slid so far down the public's estimation that it is regarded as just another rip-off. This is the insurance industry, which has four of its representative bodies bitching to Brussels that proposed new rules are harmful.

Basically, we are talking about the so-called Solvency II capital-requirements regime, which the industry complains, contains parts that are "excessively conservative and prescriptive". The problem is that insurers are being forced into "overcapitalisation" due to fears of another financial crisis. Yet insurers say they are less risky compared with banks, but are being treated by regulators in the same manner.

Holding higher levels of capital, of course, means that insurance products are more expensive, and it also means less choice, as there will be fewer players in the market, as buckle under the regulatory burden, or decide there are better pickings elsewhere. The upshot of this is that we, as individuals take the hit, either in more expensive premiums, or through not being able to afford the products in the first place.

Where the particular damage will be caused, however, is in pensions products, where how long-dated liabilities such as annuities will be particularly badly hit – or so we are led to believe.

But the trouble is that the rules are so arcane, covering complex products in a complicated market, that you are not going to get a torrent of scandalised comment in the Sun, the Daily Mirror or even the Failygraph. And if the insurance companies are bitching, who is going to believe them anyway when they say the industry will be damaged – and who cares?

So it is that probably another vitally important issue is about to fall by the wayside. It is not that people don't care, but that the issue is too complicated to understand, and there is no one there in the popular media who will take the time out to explain why people should care.

Therein, though, lies a more deep seated problem. Likely, the only way of resolving this issue – which comes under QMV rules – will be to tell the EU to take a running jump. And since that is not going to happen, it doesn't really matter what we think, or whether we care. It is going to happen anyway.

No wonder people walk away from politics, but when they then have to pay the bills, the frustration builds up as people realise that, once again they have been had, and it is too late to do anything about it. But, as we keep asking, how long can this last, before there is a serious and uncontrolled backlash – or will such matters simply remain too complicated for people to care about?

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Seventy years apart - by Richard... Monday, April 04, 2011

... but still a shambles. On this day in 1941, the headline speaks for itself as British Forces were settling down to another retreat. And seventy years to this day, the government was braced for another backlash as sweeping losses to Britain's military were announced.

What is getting considerably less publicity is the extent to which the United States has quietly withdrawn its air and sea assets from Libya, virtually ending the military intervention against Qaddafi's armed forces. Hence we now see a partial but pitifully inadequate addition to the British force of four extra Tornadoes, leaving Britain and France badly short of the air and sea capabilities necessary for the Libyan dictator's military adventures, and enforcing a no-fly zone.

The RAF bombers are supposed to be replacing USAF A-10 Thunderbolt and AC-130s, and as many as 100 American fighter-bombers which have been available in the Libyan arena. In consequence, the scale of Western coalition air attacks dropped abruptly by 80 percent.

In all though, even without the additional four Tornadoes, there are still 143 warplanes in action over Libya. However, less than half are combat-capable. The rest are used for surveillance aircraft and transports. And the number of combat aircraft is too small to police the no-fly policy over the entire country.

Qaddafi this appears to have taken advantage of coalition shortcomings to start deploying his considerable fleet of air transports, moving troop reinforcements and equipment to hotspots, enabling his forces to hold down the rebels. It also appears that some of those transports have also been sent outside the country.

According to some reports, they have been loading up at a number of African military air bases on ammunition and spare parts, which the Qaddafi regime purchased from Arab and African sources as well as arms traffickers.

Small wonder, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton had warned that the RAF will need to be in Libya for at least six months. At present rate, though, it looks to be having just as much success as our forces were having on this day seventy years ago.

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Below the line - AMENDED - by Richard...

Max Hastings in The Mail pontificates about the split in British society. But he puts the divide between the public sector and the taxpayer. And as always with the man - he's only half right and misses the main point.

What he miisses is that none of us have any problems with the front line public sector – the dustmen, the nurses and others who do useful jobs. And although many of them could be employed in the private sector, I have no great hang-ups about that either. Many of the corporates which would replace them are just as malign as the worst of the public sector. And I resent being ripped off by the corporate bureaucrats just as much as I do the public sector bureaucrats. There is little to choose between them.

So, the split is not where Hastings puts it. The big divide is elsewhere and you don't have to look hard to find it. It is between the political classes and the rest of us – The Great Man is far too grand, too close to the political classes, and far too much out of touch to understand that.

The thing is that, in recent the past (20th Century), the divide was vertical – with polarisation left and right. That is where Hasting's brain still resides. But he is twenty or thirty years out of date, the last time when he ever understood anything about politics.

Now, the line has moved. The division is horizontal again. That puts "us" below the line, and "them" above it. The division not only transcends the tradition of recent politics, it also crosses the divide between public and private sectors. The private/public line has become so blurred as to be barely discernable in many cases. Most certainly, it no longer so neatly corresponds with any political divide.

In many respects, the private sector is as bad, if not worse than publicly-owned enterprises. When the banks make profits, for instance, they keep them and award themselves bonuses. When they have financial difficulties, they become "too big to fail" and the losses are "socialised", i.e., we pay the debt.

You have water companies, who are profligate in their spending - and generous with their bonuses - yet can't supply the product at times. They simply increase their bills each year to cover up their grotesque inefficiencies. Are they private sector - or simply regional monopolies with a licence to print money? Then you have companies like BAE Systems, whose only customers are governments.

Others like Capita are effectively branches of government. Group 4, which runs prisons, is another one. There are the Housing Associations, which seem to be run for the benefit of their administrators. There are Foster Care providers - multi-million-pound businesses, which have local authority Social Services as their only customers. Yet these are all supposedly private sector.

There are also the multi-national conglomerates, such as the Ferrovial Group, which ownsHeathrow Airport ... and Tata Steel. Where is the accountablity there, and the response to public demand, which supposedly goes with the private sector?

The point is, as made, that the distinction is not about labour versus capital any more (not that it really ever was). But the old 1945 paradigm, which swept Labour into power with a landslide victory, has long gone. Some publicly owned enterprises behave more like the private sector, and vice versa. The distinction was destroyed by Thatcherism, and we will not get it back. And that leaves with the "corporates". Whether in public or private ownership, they are as bad as each other.

So we end up with the new, horizontal division. Actually, it is a return to the old days, before the Labour Movement emerged. When that movement emerged, we had the vertical division of Left and Right. The "left" represented the people (in theory), the "right" looked after the bosses (again, in theory). Its very existence tilted the line, from horizontal to vertical, and we got 20th Century politics. Now, the leaders of the Left have lost their way and joined the leaders of the Right. And as they have merged, the line has tilted back to the horizontal.

The horizontal split is typified by the days of Whigs and Tories, when the politicians had more in common with each other. Those were the days when they looked after themselves, and their own interests. Those were the days when the people were unrepresented. Just like now.

But, if we are returning to the old political model - the original class, or even feudal model - there is nevertheless a new certainty: us "below the liners" have had enough of the "above the liners". What swept out the decaying self-interest of the old systems must be done again. This time, though, we must do it right or, at least, get it wrong in a different way.