Sunday, 12 June 2011

Encore Rafale - by Richard... Sunday, June 12, 2011


So, our pilots learn Frog and the Kermits very kindly teach them how to fly Rafales. Does anyone seriously believe that we are not going to buy the Rafale for our new carrier? And does anyone have any doubts now about our direction of travel, apart from the moronic Gerald Howarth?

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Aren't you proud? - by Richard...


You bought this for this deserving gentleman. How lucky we are to have such a clear-thinking, liberal government, which is still able to borrow the money to pay for such important causes.

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The prattle of tiny brains - by Richard...


With a speed undiminished by an increasingly laden bandwagon, Booker takes on the energy crisisonce again, noting how politicians remain firmly locked in their little green bubble, oblivious to the practical implications of the measures they have set in train.

Sooner or later, he tells us, politicians must emerge with the sense and the courage to question this madness – as many other people are now beginning to do. But, he concludes, there is little sign of their emergence yet.

In fact, there is no sign at all, witness the infantile comments from the embattled Chris Huhne in today's Observer, blithely advising us that we should not accept the increases "lying down" but "hurt" their supplier by finding cheaper alternatives.

"Consumers don't have to take price increases lying down," he says. "If an energy company hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting with your feet."

Sadly – infuriatingly – though, we are not allowed to shop around for a new government and vote at all – with our feet or anything else. But it would make little difference if we could. As with the energy suppliers, the politicians are all indulging in common receptacle micturition (CRM).

And here, it is no good looking to the energy suppliers for salvation. As we see from Roger Carr chairman of Centrica, his thinking is constrained by the orthodoxy as he warns that steep energy price increases are inevitable.

Households, he says, should be prepared for further rises in their power bills of the magnitude of Scottish Power's 19 percent increase in gas prices and ten percent hike in electricity tariffs, blaming the pressure on wholesale prices.

"Moving wholesale prices have been very material, well over 20pc, in recent months," he says. "In those circumstances, it is just a commercial fact that those things convert into price increases".

Scottish Power, spreads the blame a little wider, talking about the combination of the wholesale price increases, rising transmission charges from National Grid and the cost of complying with the government's "carbon reduction" legislation introduced to combat climate change.

But what is not being acknowledged is that the reason we are so prone to fluctuations in energy prices – which translate almost immediately into price rises, but rarely price reductions – is a chronic and continuing failure of energy policy.

The desperate need for a coherent policy we noted in September 2008, but it was not to be. Thus while Booker finds the "most terrifying of all" problems is the way politicians are locked into the "green bubble", he is being too kind.

Perhaps the truly most terrifying of all problems is, at one, the long term failure of successive governments, going right back to the last war, to develop a coherent energy strategy, and then of this current administration – and before that the Conservative opposition – to recognise this as the key problem, and start working on urgent remedial action.

For sure, the "green bubble" is blinding our current crop of political dwarfs to the most effective solutions, but there is no indication that, even without their green-tinted spectacles, they would be able to do any better than their predecessors.

Individually and collectively, our political classes have lost the ability to create effective policy and now like pre-teens in a class without their teacher, all we hear is the prattle of tiny brains.

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Delusion bites back - by Richard...


The "grim official assessment" of the capabilities of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), says The Independent on Sunday is "a major blow" to the hopes of a troop withdrawal by 2014.

The fiction, of course, is that the ANSF will be able to start taking the lead in fighting the Taliban from next month. The commander of Nato's mission to train the ANSF has admitted the task will not be complete until at least 2016 – although that is almost certainly another fiction.

And this comes after a decade in which tens of billions of dollars have been spent building up the Afghan army and police. Then, when you have a policy based almost entirely on delusion, occasionally it will bite back.

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The story continues - by Richard...


An unremarkable piece of news, you might think, even if it is interesting enough in its own right. But it takes on an extra special significance when you recall one of the BBC's earlier efforts, published in January 2007, warning that the snow on the summit was going to disappear forever due to global warming.


But there was a lot of global warning scaremongering about that year, with the local paper pitching in, as the local assembly environment minister attended an exhibition showing photographs ten years apart, purporting to show a progressive decline in snow cover - despite reports of heavy snow in the winter of 2001.


In fact, though, they'd been at it for some years, witness this 2004 report by Richard Savill in theFailygraph, giving us the same message - the "snow" in Snowdon was on its way to oblivion.


Of course, early 2008, it had all changed, with late snow on the mountain, Picked up also by Booker, and by early 2009 the egregious Savill was having to report the unfortunate incident below.


By late November we were seeing early snows, after earlier complaints of 70 days lost to snow and bad weather, in constructing the new peak-top café. Then, as Booker informed us, we had snow over the winter of 2010, and it was "waist high" in snow in the December. Now we have snow in June. And in Yorkshire yesterday - and today - we had the central heating on.

Which brings us back to the egregious Richard Savill, with a weather report. How interesting it is that there is no mention of global warming or climate change ... just weather.


Terrible stuff, this "global warming" - it puts a special substance in the air (or water - no one really knows which), that turns journalists, politicians and many scientists into complete and utter fools.

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By special request - by Richard... Saturday, June 11, 2011


101 ways of getting rid of subsidy farms ... No. 2. Or, if you prefer, you can have the variation below:


Then, there's one for the Brown Jobs ...


And we mustn't forget the offshore subsidy farms ... good job we still have a Navy:


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Another day, another promise - by Richard...

... bites the dust. The government is to abandon its plan to make councils restore weekly bin collections. It concedes that it would be too expensive and would reduce recycling. Ministers will announce instead support for weekly collections of food waste, with millions…

That from the paywall Times, and many others. Not quite the same league as the EU referendum, but typical of our political classes – who say one thing in opposition – or in this case, on assuming office - and do another when their armoured ministerial limousines have been delivered - without, of course, telling us the real reason.

And they wonder why so many of us have nothing but contempt for them? Or do they even give a damn?

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The wheels groan on my wagon - by Richard...


"Why vote blue, go green doesn't sound quite so clever any more", is the headline under which the Great Charles Moore writes in the Failygraph today, telling us, "It is time for Britain to walk away from its ridiculously stringent renewable energy plan". I do love the smell of a bandwagon in the morning ... and it is so good to see the great and the good catching up, at last.

But the truth is, it never did sound clever to "vote blue, go green", and it was five years ago that we should have been talking about walking away from the ridiculously stringent renewable energy plan, instead of sucking up to the "green tosser", as so many, so aptly, call the Boy Cameron.

Still, I suppose it's better late than never – and this is what it needs to get the political worm turning. But permit me a wry smile, as the latest Johnny-come-lately comes piling onto the bandwagon. You can already hear the wheels groaning under the unaccustomed weight.


Perhaps, though, the writing is on the wall, as Rosehall residents in Sutherland have had enough of the industrialisation of their neighbourhood and have prevailed on the Highland Council to shut down the 23-turbine farm owned by Scottish and Southern Electricity – on noise grounds. The real noise is beginning to achieve what the "big noises" can only dream of.

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Posted by Britannia Radio at 22:36