Thursday, 1 September 2011


Loot of the day - by Richard... Thursday, September 01, 2011


So that's alright then ... instead of looting £168,000 a year, plus bonuses and benefits, Ms Baileyonly gets to loot £157,205 – plus bonuses and benefits.

The choice, however is an exceptionally good one. Ms Bailey takes a personal interest in the alleviation of poverty, and now has a track record of success. She has entirely abolished her own ... as long as the bailiffs keep pulling in the money and the magistrates keep jailing the defaulters.

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Europlastics - by Richard...


At least we have a name for the enemy – the "licensed dissidents" within the Tory Party who believe they are eurosceptics. As we have seen in history says Autonomous Mind, from time to time words are hijacked by people with an agenda who change the meanings and understandings associated with them.

The term eurosceptic, he adds, is currently being hijacked in this way by people who wish the UK to remain firmly inside the EU while giving voters the impression they support the majority's wish to leave.

Actually, it is all of that but also more subtle than that. The Tories have a vision of a political Europe which has not changed in over seventy years when it was articulated to the War Cabinet on 20 July 1940 by Duff Cooper, the then information minister.

The bones of this was a "united Europe", a Europe "united by goodwill and in friendship, not by force and in terrors, a Europe based upon some federal system ... a Europe in which armaments will be pooled and trade barriers will be broken down, and in which each nation will be allowed to conduct its own affairs in its own way with the same kind of freedom as each state in the American Union possesses".

If you listen to the rhetoric of the likes of Helmer, Hannan, Redwood and George Eustace – and the outpourings of Open Europe - this is what they are still saying. None of these plastic people have come to terms with the fact that the Europeans had different ideas and have developed the European Union into something that is completely different, something foreign and altogether alien.

The europlastics are locked on a time warp, wishing for something that never was and is never going to be, but is something with which they feel comfortable and secure.

They can also be comfortable within the Tory party because their vision is the mainstream Tory view. There is no a fag-paper between Helmer and his pals, and Cameron. They all share that "vision", and that is what they mean by euroscepticism.

Nevertheless, they are not eurosceptics in any accepted meaning of the word, and AM has it in one, describing them as europlastics: cheap and nasty imitations of the genuine product. They are neither genuine supporters of European integration, nor genuine "outers" who would leave the continentals to their own fate. Instead, they occupy this fantasy no man's land, which exists only in their deluded minds.

The only thing we can give them is that their delusions are genuinely held, but never in a million years does that make them eurosceptics. They are genuine europlastics.

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Dark deeds and darker days - by Richard...


Anyone who says they completely understands the UK energy market is probably either lying or misinformed (or both). The great unknown, of course, is the effect of the loss of about 22GW of capacity, through the phase-out of the large combustion plants and obsolete nukes.

But, if the expectations are of an energy meltdown, it would appear that we can get some idea of what might happen from Germany, which is ahead of the game in shutting down a goodly proportion of its power industry.

As reported by the WSJ, this is the "accelerated exit from nuclear energy" and, according to the country's energy-network regulator, it has considerably increased the risk of power blackouts.

The Federal Network Agency, known as the Bundesnetzagentur, said bringing forward the country's planned gradual exit from all nuclear power to the end of 2022 -which includes the immediate and permanent closure of eight reactors - requires using all available power-production reserves to help balance power demand and supply to stabilise grids.

Bundesnetzagentur president Matthias Kurth and the country's power-transmission grid operators have warned the shutdown of nearly half of Germany's 17 reactors - or around 8.4 GW of generation capacity - could result in large-scale blackouts. Grid stability could be at risk especially in winter months, when demand is particularly high, Kurth says.

And if that is the result of 8.4GW dropping out of the system, we might have a torrid time with 22GW. And, as German experience indicates, the effects will not be uniform.

Southern Germany, which had relied heavily on nuclear power and where industrial energy demand is higher than in the north, is particularly prone to grid instability and blackouts. Not only is capacity going to need adjusting, but the grid is going to require considerable development to avoid network failures.

Despite this, Kurth remains optimistic that the situation is manageable, on the basis that several thermal-power plants can be operated as reserve capacity to bridge supply bottlenecks. This means coal, gas and oil-fired generation capacity – i.e., fossil fuels.

But what is of very great interest to us is that, without the nuclear capacity, the Germans are looking to allow some coal-fired power plants in western and central Germany to operate longer than previously planned. Now that may well bump up against the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, which is set to knock out better than 11GW from the British estate.

If the Germans are going to take on this directive, then there may be some hope that we can do likewise, which may relieve some of the pressure while we wait for our own nukes to be built. However, there is also much reliance on renewables, with all the system instability that that brings, which probably makes the German estimations rather optimistic. Even with plant extensions, power cuts seem almost inevitable.

But a darkened Germany, in the grip of prolonged power cuts will not be a happy place. As a result, the recent spate of car burning may be the least of their problems. And then it will be our turn.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 19:00