The elephant in the tunnel - by Richard... Sunday, January 15, 2012

The elephant in the tunnel - by Richard... Sunday, January 15, 2012

Booker spills the beans on HS2. In the on-line version the headline has it that: "The continent is the final destination for HS2", with the strap, "The London to Birmingham high-speed rail link is part of a Europe-wide scheme dreamed up Jacques Delors back in 1993".

It is important nevertheless to stress that there is no element of compulsion on the part of the EU, in requiring our politicians to implement the scheme - as we pointed out earlier. But, as Booker identifies, it is a political project, inspired by Delors' dream of an integrated Europe. And that is why our politicians and officials, under its spell, press on with it, regardless of common sense.

Only under the thrall of this spell could supposedly Conservative politicians countenance such damage, illustrating that, when it the EU is involved, anything goes – even electoral suicide.

COMMENT: "MINDSET CONSPIRACY" THREAD

Share

Print ready

Lucky to get away with it - by Richard... Saturday, January 14, 2012

To add to the questions already raised on the safety of the Costa Concordia, we read from the latest Reuters report that:

Passengers crowded into lifeboats, but the mainly Asian staff, few of them able to speak Italian, struggled to bring order to the evacuation. "It was complete panic. People were behaving like animals. We had to wait too long in the lifeboats", said 47-year-old Patrizia Perilli.

This is by no means the first time that there has been chaos reported during the evacuation of a stricken ship. Most famously, there was the tragedy when the liner City of Benares (see also news report – click to readable size) was torpedoed in the Atlantic on 18 September 1940. In total 260 of the 407 souls on board were lost, including 77 of the 90 child evacuees who were being taken to the safety of Canada.

Contemporary reports spoke of the crew rushing to the lifeboats, heedless of the safety of their passengers. In the last lifeboat to be recovered were approximately 30 Indian crewmen, a Polish merchant, several sailors, three passengers and only six evacuee boys.

In wartime Britain, there might be some excuse for hiring half-trained Asian crewmen to man ships, but in the supposedly affluent Europe of the 21st Century, one might expect safety-critical posts to be staffed by fully-trained and competent personnel.

There is a parallel here with hospitals, where foreign staff – sometimes with limited language skills- are put in charge of patients, giving rise to safety-critical communication problems, while indigenous personnel go unemployed.

Reports now indicate that the ship was four miles off course, and the captain and a crew memberhave been arrested. Yet, despite the reports of evacuation chaos, a spokesman for the Passenger Shipping Association tells us that, "Ships' crews undertake rigorous training, drills and scenarios for emergency situations including the evacuation of a vessel".

The corporates never change. With the Costa Concordia, though, one suspects that the operators have been lucky to get away with it. Had the challenge been more demanding, the casualty rate might have been considerably higher.

COMMENT: "LEFT FROM RIGHT" THREAD

Share

Print ready

Telling left from right - by Richard...

Already the comparisons are being made with the Titanic, as the Costa Concordia runs aground off the island of Giglio, on the Tuscan coast. Such comparisons are inevitable, as this is the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic sinking, it having collided with an iceberg on 14 April 1912.

The similarities, however, are only slight – particularly in terms of the casualty rate - although both ships sustained underwater damage to the beam. The Titanic suffered a gash of nearly 300 ft on the starboard side, but the damage to the Costa Concordia is reported to be more modest, on the port side.

This latter intelligence seems to be based on a report by Coast Guard Commander Francesco Paolillo, who says the vessel "hit an obstacle" - it wasn't clear if it might have hit a rocky reef in the waters off Giglio - "ripping a gash 50 meters (160 feet) across" on the left side of the ship, and started taking on water.

True to form, the Mail then religiously captions a picture (above), informing us that: "About half of the vessel on the left-hand side is underwater". The picture, however, shows the vessel with a substantial part of the starboard side submerged. Associated Press gets it right though. Unhappily, it reports 69 people missing.

Confusion in this case is understandable, especially as a Reuters photographs (immediately above and below), shows the damage to the exposed, seaward side.

Counter-intuitively, the vessel has listed to starboard – the opposite side of the damage, which says little for the integrity of the ship and the effectiveness of watertight bulkheads (unless there is additional, hidden damage). After the Titanic, one always assumed that design changes in ships meant this could not happen.

Thus, we are going to hear more of this episode – and you can be assured that it is only a matter of time before the EU is on the act, with proposals from improving the safety of cruise liners. The "colleagues" are not known for letting benefical crises go to waste.

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

Kermits' Kurrency Krunch - by Richard...

So, as widely forecast, the Kermits - struggling under the burden of a national debt in the order of £1.4 trillion - have lost their "gold-plated" AAA credit rating. Standard & Poor's (S&P) has chopped them one point to bring them down to a lowly AA.

Such is the latest instalment of the train wreck European economies, which also has Austria on the rack and Italy on its way down to a triple B. Of the 17 eurozone countries, only Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg now enjoy the top triple A rating.

For status-conscious France, however, the loss of its top rating is a severe blow, and especially for the Kermit-in-Chief, who has only months before a presidential election sweeps him into the history books.

This is not going to look good when he tries to convince the French electorate that he is the ideal custodian for the French economy. Thus, Sarkozy has called an emergency cabinet meeting for today.

Finance minister Francois Baroin is in damage limitation mode, claiming: "It's not good news, but it's not a catastrophe". France "must follow and amplify reforms", he adds, saying: "We must be bold. We must preserve employment" – thus contradicting himself within two sentences.

There are, however, broader implications. France is one of the major contributors to the European Financial Stability Facility (ESFS) and if as a result of its downgrading this fund also takes a hit, its lending power will be substantially cut.

The EFSF's €780 billion lending capacity, says Reuters is based on guarantees from eurozone governments. Even with six of the 17 contributor governments AAA-rated, all member states still had to provide over-guarantees to ensure that the fund remained AAA rated.

But, with only four holding on to their triple-A status, the overall impact will be to suck power from the EFSF and make it that much harder to scale up the resources that are already committed to the facility – and the borrowing more expensive.

The "colleagues" no doubt will have contingency plans in place, which include bringing forward the European Stability Mechanism, on top of which they hope their new treaty will begin to have an impact if they get it in place by March.

The direction of travel, though, is still all too evident, the expected outcome being a pile of wreckage and a fleet of ambulances queuing to take away the casualties. No one knows yet who will be paying for the petrol – or the medical bills.