Respect! - by Richard... Sunday, February 12, 2012

Respect! - by Richard... Sunday, February 12, 2012

A very rude Scottish reaction to the hygiene polis closing down the local chippy. They're losing the battle for hearts and minds, methinks.

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Greek timetable - by Richard...

According to Reuters, the 300-seat parliament is due to begin debating the [austerity] bill at 2 pm (1200 GMT) before a vote expected late this evening.

Demonstrators have pledged to turn out in force at 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) on the main square in front of the parliament, although rainy weather may limit the numbers of protesters. Even if numbers are sparse, though, this still seems the most valuable investment opportunity.

Booker has a few observations on the issue.

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As I recall - by Richard...

In times gone past, Tim Montgomerie and his little friends over at Conservative Home were the principal cheer leaders for The Boy.

Anyone with but a hint of a disparaging word was definitely not wanted on passage. Links with EUReferendum disappeared from his site and we were cast into outer darkness. A real strain of nastiness emerged. Criticism was treated with savage disdain.

Never mind that Cameron never looked like a Tory. This was all part of a clever ploy to "detoxify" the party and to bring the Lib-Dim voters on board. As soon as he was elected, we were assured, the "true" David Cameron would emerge, more blue than dolly blue.

And now, as the scales begin to fall from his eyes, little Timmy whinges in The Mail on Sunday that things have not exactly gone to plan. "David Cameron's Government is very different from what so many Conservative activists had worked so hard to achieve", we are told.

Six years ago, during the first few weeks of his leadership of the Conservative Party, Timmy observes, he gave a long speech in which he described himself as a "liberal Conservative". He didn't talk about tax or crime or Europe or immigration. He talked about the environment, female candidates, civil liberties and other issues of importance to the Liberal Democrats. And how they all applauded.

At the time, many (including the gullible little Timmy) really did believe that this was "tactical", that Cameron "was attempting to broaden the party's appeal and that underneath he was still a true-blue Tory". But, as time goes by, the little lad now complains – for a fee - "it is clear that the authentic Cameron is the Cameron that laughs and smiles with Nick Clegg in the Downing Street rose garden".

Well, blow me down with a feather. We would never have guessed … er … except that some of ussaw right through him from day one, and then made the "mistake" of saying so.

Despite that, we still get little Timmy telling us that, "it's not too late for Cameron to rebuild confidence in his Government and achieve a majority at the next Election – but he must stop appeasing the Liberal Democrats and embrace real Conservatism". "Cameron", says Timmy, "needs to put away the PR man's handbook and his embarrassment over traditional Tory beliefs".

Well, have we got news for you. He ain't going to change – with The Boy, what you see is what you get. There is no "inner Tory", and you are not going to wake up one day and find that he has embraced your ideals. In short, Timmy, do please grow up. After six years of self-delusion, it is about time you realised you've been conned.

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The sins of Harrabin - by Richard...

It looks as if the sins of Harrabin are coming back to bite him, this time via the Mail on Sunday. His partisan approach to climate change has long been suspect, not least because of his financial relationship with the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to fund seminars run by an "ad hoc" partnership of himself and a friend.

But now, a study devised by Harrabin to test the accuracy of weather forecasts, called the "BBC Weather Test" - estimated to have cost tens of thousands of pounds of licence fee payers' money – seems to be falling apart.

Seven of the eight forecasters and bodies asked to take part have not agreed, with two blaming Mr Harrabin for undermining the study's credibility, claiming that his reputation is tarnished by his close links to green groups who believe in man-made climate change.

Harrabin, though, also has a reputation as an apologist for the Met Office, so he is the last person one could expect to front an independent evaluation of its performance.

Nevertheless, that is how the warmist claque operates, managing criticism by ensuring that performance reviews and inquiries are conducted by friends and allies. But now he is being socomprehensively outed, the lad is looking more than a little fragile. His friends may not be able to salvage his increasingly tattered reputation.

The only surprise is that it has lasted so long.

UPDATE: See also, further comment from Autonomous Mind.

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The child snatching dilemma - by Richard... Saturday, February 11, 2012

This from the Daily Mail, this from Raedwald and then this from Booker. In a much smaller way, I have confronted this dilemma a different breed of officials - meat inspectors.

Given a marginal, difficult to read condition, it is easy for them to take the view "better safe than sorry", and condemn a carcase as unfit. But if they do that, and the meat is not unfit, they are throwing away good food, and depriving someone of the income from the animal. Thus, one expects meat inspectors to apply professional judgement and get it right.

The principle is the same with social workers, only even more so. One expects them to get it right when dealing with children and considering whether to remove them from their parents.

Wrong decisions either way are likely to lead to blighted lives and considerable public expenditure. And with Booker's copious evidence, it is clear that they are not getting it right. It really is about time, therefore, that our children's minister, Tim Loughton, listened to what he and many others are saying.

He might, says Booker, learn how misinformed he is. But then, that is the huge problem we have with so many areas of our governance. Politicians have lost the ability to listen.

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Corporate speak - by Richard...

The five members of The Sun staff arrested, and now bailed, are thought to be deputy editor of the paper Geoff Webster, chief reporter John Kay, picture editor John Edwards, deputy news editor John Sturgis and chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker.

A Ministry of Defence employee and a member of the Armed Forces have also been bailed, to a date in May. One other journalist from the newspaper is still in custody over the probe into inappropriate payments to police and public officials.

Payments to police and officials for news "tips", however, go back to the dawn of time, and newspapers have a long tradition of paying their sources. Thus, whether this is any worse than what has always been remains to be established.

But, whatever is wrong with modern journalism, the worst of it is that way the corporates have taken over. Thus, with The Sun staff caught with their hands in the cookie jar, the management come up with this immortal phrasing:

News Corporation remains committed to ensuring that unacceptable news-gathering practices by individuals in the past will not be repeated and last summer authorised the MSC (Management and Standards Committee) to co-operate with the relevant authorities.

These are no words any human being could utter. This is a breed of aliens that has taken over, without us noticing, the only clue to who they are being the way they speak. And as long as they exist, we are in very great peril.

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Referism works - by Richard...

Picked up by Witterings from Witney, from the website which calls itself Vox - "Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists" – is a paper entitled: "Direct democracy as a safeguard to limit public spending".

This looks at Swiss public spending over the last century and argues that one reason for its low debt may be its greater use of direct democracy. People vote on individual policies, as opposed to representative democracy, where people elect others to make decisions on their behalf.

The conclusion is that direct democracy indeed causes a decline in public spending. Voters are fiscally more conservative than elected politicians, and the tools of direct democracy help them to get their preferences better represented.

The work is carried out by two academics, Patricia Funk, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Christina Gathmann, Professor of Economics, University of Heidelberg, who thus provide direct evidence that the concept we have come to call Referism actually works.

They themselves call in aid several papers, including one by Feld and Matsusaka (2003), which compare data on post-war spending in states with more or less direct democracy – focusing on the United States and Switzerland, as the two countries which allow for direct democracy.

The empirical evidence, say Funk and Gathmann, points to a strong negative correlation between a region's spending level and the existence of direct democracy in both the United States and Switzerland, and they then are able to quantify the effect, finding a mandatory budget referendum reduces public spending by twelve percent.

Interestingly, they find that voter initiatives that allow citizens to propose new laws also lower public spending. For every one percent reduction in the signature requirement, public spending declines by 0.6 percent.

Furthermore, the constraints imposed by direct democracy at the state level do not result in more local spending. This result, they say, suggests that state politicians cannot avoid the disciplining effect of direct democracy by simply shifting responsibilities to lower levels of government.

If one then takes account of the effect of local referendums, where tax rises have been rejected when put to the people, the case builds for both local and national plebiscites to approve budgets.

Even more, these findings undermine the legitimacy of representative democracy. What might have once been necessary, in the period when it used to take four days by stagecoach to get to Edinburgh, is already rendered obsolete by modern communications and polling technology.

But this work shows that elected politicians are also completely out of step with the people they purport to represent. Their role, it would now seem, is to convey a false sense of legitimacy to the extraction of more money than the people would willingly give.

That says that representative democracy can no longer be considered democratic, without much greater involvement of the people. One can see a case where the executives (local and central) prepare budgets, which are then debated by elected representatives, who then make their recommendations, for the people to then accept or ignore.

We cannot continue, though, with the situation where governments decide how much we shall pay them, with no mechanism for the people to reject their imposts. That is not democracy. It is theft.

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Dynamite on the Danube - by Richard...

What might not be immediately obvious to the British, dependent as they are on road haulage as their primary mode for moving goods around the country, is the effect of the great European freeze on continental waterways, and in particular the Danube.

But, as the AP, via the Washington Post and AFP are reporting, European shippers are losing millions because a lengthy stretch of the Danube - one of Europe's key waterways - is stuck in the longest freeze in recent memory. The Danube flows for 1,785 miles through nine countries, starting in Germany's Black Forest, before passing through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine.

The river began to ice over in early February as temperatures plunged to minus 20°Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit). The freeze followed an autumn drought in which water levels had dropped so low that they were interfering with shipping along the international waterway.

By Friday, though, it was ice that had halted shipping on 440 miles of the Danube in Romania. The river forms the border between Romania and Bulgaria and six river crossings were also closed due to the ice. Upstream, the river was also iced over in parts in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Costache Constantin, manager of Europolis Shipping & Trading shipping company, said he'd never seen such a drawn-out freeze on the Danube since he began working in the industry in 1981. "This is costing millions of euros", he added. "The transportation of raw materials, coal, minerals, cereals ... are all affected, construction materials too".

An official from the Serbian economy ministry said the commercial repercussions "could be very bad", while infrastructure ministry official Pavle Galico said shipping would not resume for 10 days. Bulgarian authorities, who have banned all navigation on the river, reported 224 vessels stuck in ports, and Ukrainian rescuers in Croatia reached three crew members on a ship trapped in the ice since Friday.

As a result of the conditions generally, we have already seen a statement by Siim Kallas, EU transport commissioner, but it is too soon for the "colleagues" to take on board the most recent effects of the freeze which, so far, is said to have killed 460 people.

It is instructive though that, in 2003, shortly after the heat wave which caused so much grief in France, the EU parliament was right there, on 2 September, tabling a resolution "on the effects of the summer heat wave".

It interpreted the recent extreme weather conditions "as further evidence of the negative effects of climate change" which underlined "that these extreme weather conditions are another sign of the need for ambitious world action to halt climate change". Thus were the MEPs asked to consider that the EU "should continue to play a leading role in this process and reinforce its efforts in the key fields of environment, energy, transport, etc".

Now, as the cold sweeps Europe, we learn that the self-same Europe "stands ready to respond to severe weather conditions across the continent". But, we wonder, whether the EU parliament will be quite so quick to interpret these extreme weather conditions "as further evidence of the negative effects of climate change".

Now they will have to consider the "evidence" of the "Blue Danube", commemorated by Johann Strauss with a waltz of the same name. Rather than strains of music, what is being heard now is the boom of dynamite, which is being used to blow apart ice floes in a desperate attempt to prevent catastrophic flooding when the expected thaw comes.

Somehow, I think the MEPs might be more circumspect this time – although, as we all know, stupidity knows no frontiers and, like Monbiot, they may still try to argue that warmer means colder.