Reynold's News - by Richard... Monday, February 27, 2012

Reynold's News - by Richard... Monday, February 27, 2012

I'm going to spend some time at Bradford University this afternoon, reading copies of Reynold's News from 1940. This important newspaper was, at the time, owned by the Co-operative Society, and reflected a strand of left-wing thought which is rarely given much of an airing today.

One of the reasons it has been airbrushed out of history is that there are only two complete collections in the country (and, therefore, the world). One is in Hendon, and the other in Bradford, on my doorstep. I hope thus to revive some of the material. Needless to say, I shall be out of play for a few hours.

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Winning the battles – losing the war - by Richard...

The Weekly Standard - much cited elsewhere, is running a piece telling us why the climate sceptics (or "deniers") are winning. And indeed, they probably are – they have never really recovered from Climategate 1, and all the other "gates" that piled in on top of it.

It is said of the British, however, that we tend to lose all our battles except that last, this winning the war. Climate sceptics, on the other hand, now seem to be in danger of reversing this process – winning battles but losing the war.

This these is tried out in an important piece by Autonomous Mind who notes that the battle over climate science is by-and-large meaningless. The climate agenda, he says, is but one front in a much broader campaign involving the centralisation of power, the erosion of democracy and liberty and the transfer of wealth.

Thus says AM, no matter what the "science" reveals and how much it is debunked, there will always be another line of attack from the sustainability playbook to further the political – and economic corporatist – agenda. On that front is where the battle needs to be fought, not in the theatre of carbon dioxide emissions, raw and adjusted data or fractions of a degree of temperature change.

Exactly the same sentiment is reflected in a report by Dennis Ambler.

Whilst the continual scientific rebuttals of the climate reports produced by the IPCC may make many people think that this charade cannot continue much longer, behind the scenes it is quite irrelevant, he writes. The long-term process marches relentlessly on as if there had never been any challenges at all. As the advocates throw in yet more spurious claims of the "hottest year on record", or record cold caused by CO2 emissions, they occupy the debate, and determine the daily agenda in the media, whilst those who know that the claims are spurious, are driven to waste time, effort and resources on refuting them.

Further evidence supporting this thesis comes from our continued trawl of the Hewlett Foundationgrant database (above). This throws us some interesting data about the Bipartisan Policy Center, which started in 2002 under the aegis of Senators Tom Daschle, Bob Dole, George Mitchell and Howard Baker.

Having evolved from the National Commission on Energy Policy, it claims to be a bipartisan group of twenty of the nation's leading energy experts representing the highest ranks of industry, government, academia, labour, consumer and environmental protection.

But what makes it so interesting is that it ranks amongst the beneficiaries of the Hewlett Foundation, as seeking to promote climate change policy - advising Congress, the Executive Branch, States and other policymakers regarding long-term US policy. For that, it has received $42.85 million, having in 2009 pushed strongly for climate change legislation, delivering a major report on the issue.
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But now, against the same agenda, the main pitch is not "climate" but "energy security". Like any good strategists, this power grouping is capable of shifting the schwerpunkt when it encounters resistance in any one sector. And by such means, the climate sceptics end up winning the argument, only to find that the opposition has moved on and is fighting (and winning) a different battle.

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Bad news - by Richard...

Mary Ellen Synon is giving up blogging, closing her blog with this piece. She has a message for the Scots, who need to learn from Ireland's experience how little influence a small member state has in the EU.

The good news is that ME is going to be doing more journalism – so we can still keep an eye on her sometimes penetrating and always entertaining work.

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Poor little Spain - by Richard...

Ambrose tells us that the Spanish are revolting (as well as the Greeks), with their new prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, refusing to go down the path of austerity and halve the eight percent budget deficit this year. We are also told that there is near unanimity across the political spectrum that drastic pro-cyclical tightening at this stage is unwarranted and dangerous.

An example is quoted of Josep Borrell, ex-president of the EU parliament. He is said to be the voice of Spain's pro-European establishment, and says such debt-deflation risks pushing the banking system over the edge. "To cut the deficit almost four points in one year would be a true depressionary shock for an anaemic economy, made worse by the requirement for banks to mark their real estate losses to market prices", he avers.

As we wipe away the tears, though, one also wonders whether this is the Spain with its rapacious commercial fishing fleet, equipped with generous EU grants, known for its plundering of British and African waters?

Is this also the Spain that is so poor that it has been one of the net beneficiaries of the EU budget,hoovering up around €60 billion in EU net payments in the eleven years from 2000-2010, yet which has had enough spare cash to buy up our banks and Heathrow airport?

And now that poor little Spain is feeling badly treated, it seems we are supposed to buy into the narrative that Germany is again "the overbearing enemy". Thus does apologist Borell "warn" that "an atmosphere of hostility is building up in a Continent divided between a rich and flourishing North and a South in danger of being reduced to a protectorate". Says the man, "If we carry on like this we are going to destroy the European project".

No doubt the "iron inflexibility" – attributed to Germany and which Ambrose so deplores - is having a malign effect. But one cannot avoid pondering about the total lack of complaint from the Spanish when the good times rolled.

Germany, however, in its new-found role as the scapegoat of Europe, is putting the bailout deal to the Bunderstag today, with interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich suggesting that Greece should be "made an offer it can’t refuse" to leave the eurozone.

This coincides with almost two-thirds of Germans opposed to further assistance to Athens, according to a new poll by Emnid, a German polling firm, released on Sunday. This leads Friedrich to assert that the EU should "create incentives for an exit" by Greece.

Yet, even though an early exit is the best possible outcome for Greece, there are those who still insist on painting German as the bad man, even though – as ZeroHedge points out, the problem is the weight of sovereign debt. The cold hard fact Greece is facing is that it's now at the point where extraordinary losses need to be taken – and no one wants to take them.

Given current conditions, though, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has written to MPswarning that "this may not be the last time" they would be asked to extend Athens a financial lifeline. A third bailout may be needed to shore up the second.

Against this background, Mark Grant, managing director at Southwest Securities, comes late to the party, wondering if Europe really wants to bail Greece out or if Germany is not forcing so many conditions that they are trying to have them exit the euro on their own so the Germans are not seen as the Lord High Executioner.

By the same token, one wonders whether Schäuble is not trying to have his MPs vote down the second bailout, without being seen as responsible for the outcome of the second vote. And if that is the case, he is pushing at an open door. "At some point, you reach the end of the line because further liquidity isn't solving the problems," Rainer Brüderle, parliamentary chief for the government's junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats, says.

And with everyone conscious that, once (or if) the Greek issue is settled, waiting in the wings is poor little Spain, and the Germans are going to have to go through this all over again, you can see why they will want to cut their losses.

If the Germans are to be cast in the role of donning their jackboots and goose-stepping over the oppressed peoples of Europe, it might as well get its money's worth. Others, though, might be less than convinced by the "poor little Spain" meme, recalling that Franco was perhaps the only European leader to best Hitler in diplomatic negotiations.

After failing in late October 1940 to convince the Spanish dictator that he should join the war, the Führer famously confided with Mussolini that he would "rather have three or four teeth pulled" than go through another meeting with Franco. In dealing with the Spanish, nothing much may have changed. They are tough nuts.

However, nothing is going to change the fundamentals. At its root, Ambrose reminds me, the EMU crisis is a trade crisis - something Mervyn King is keen to tell us. The North has a chronic surplus and the South has a chronic deficit. You cannot close this gap simply by forcing the South to retrench.

Ambrose consistently argues that you will end up with a protracted depression, and that is exactly what they are getting. The problem is the euro itself. Germany is trying to deflect the blame onto the PIIGS rather than admit the Project is deformed. And that is why he is critical of Germany right now.

Those who defend the German narrative of this crisis, he says, are inadvertantly defending the Project. I am not so sure. I remain of the view that, in the end, it will be Germany cutting loose that will bring it down.

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Thrown to the wolves - by Richard... Sunday, February 26, 2012

Peter Hitchens has a go at our extradition agreement with the USA, which I thought left the issue rather unbalanced. It is all very well talking about Christopher Tappin, and how badly he is being treated - and I would not disagree with the points made. But what about the European Arrest Warrant?

Then, just for once, the Mail does the right thing, picking up on the case of Michael Turner and Jason McGoldrick who will be flown to Budapest today. There, they will be handed over to the Hungarian authorities on charges relating to a business venture that failed seven years ago.

Turner and McGoldrick have already spent four months held without charge in a notorious prison in Hungary after being handed over by the UK government in 2009. The pair were later released and allowed to return to Britain but now have to go back to face a fraud trial, over an issue which, in the UK, would usually be dealt with as a civil case.

Nevertheless, the issue, as always, is that British judges should have first bite of the cherry. There must, of course, be provision for extradition, but only after a British judge has decided there is a case to answer, and that a foreign trial is both necessary and without a reasonable alternative.

As Turner now observes though, "We feel let down by the British government for allowing us to be extradited on such flimsy evidence … When our extradition hearing was heard at the High Court a few years ago, the judge said he was being led by Brussels".

God help them though – and us – when they are represented by Tory MP Richard Drax, who is calling on the government urgently to "reform" the "European Extradition Treaty".

Drax, rightly says that Turner has been the victim of an outrageous injustice and that the system "is a judicial mess of scandalous proportions". We can even agree with him when he says, "It is quite understandable Michael's loss of faith in this country's ability to look after her own".

But then the fool wants to reform an unreformable system. That is the ultimate betrayal.