The making of a myth - by Richard... Saturday, March 17, 2012

The making of a myth - by Richard... Saturday, March 17, 2012

What should have been a quick job this morning, to check a few facts about the Battle of Britain, turned out to be a marathon which has leached into the afternoon and involved much labour – hence keeping me away from the blog. Such are the fruits, however, that I thought I would share some of them with you.

What makes it worthwhile is the unexpected outcome, the finding of a review of a book published in 1945 by Guy Eden called a "Portrait of Churchill". The source of the review is the Worker, published in Brisbane on 29 October 1945, describing the book as "the latest and most fulsome of these panegyrics" that "purports to be a biography". "For far-fetched flights of fantasy", it adds, "it beats superman".

Although Winston Churchill is now out of office, the review continues, his barrackers are still busily engaged in building up legends of "Winnie the War-Winner". "Alone he did it", they cry. "He won the war single handed". Not since Bill Adams won the Battle of Waterloo all on his own, has so much been claimed for one man.

Most interestingly, deep within the review we are then told that the most impudent claim in Eden's book is that Churchill and his wife "worked out a plan" for giving Londoners safe and fairly comfortable air raid shelters in the railway tube stations.

This is entirely false, it says – as Douglas Reed (who was there at the time) points out in his book, "A Prophet at Home". The Chamberlain-Churchill Tory Government did nothing for the bombed Londoners beyond providing flimsy surface shelters.

We are then told that it was not until Labour Ministers entered the Government that "a plan was worked out" for providing two million bunks, and a system of booking them, in the tube stations. Two Labour Ministers — Herbert Morrison (Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security) and Miss Ellen Wilkinson — were responsible for the plan. All that Churchill had to do with the plan was approve it.

Still, in spite of the facts, the review concludes, the Churchill myths are being fostered and elaborated by interested parties of the Tory persuasion.

It will, it says, be Miss Wilkinson's duty to see that the true story of the war, and not the Tory fiction, is told in the British school text books; otherwise the rising generation will grow up in the belief that "Winnie the War-Winner" was a kind of demigod instead of a well-meaning old gentleman, rather self -conceited, and with a gift of bombast.

Clearly, Miss Wilkinson, who had been appointed education minister in the Attlee government, failed in her duty. The "Tory fiction" has become the received wisdom.

Remarkably though, Douglas Reed (latterly expunged from history for his "anti-Semitism") has his book, referred to in the review, published in its entirety on the internet and we have but have to go to pages 197 to 199 for the antidote to the Eden hagiography. Having explored the failure to furnish suitable shelters, and the "insuperable difficulties" in providing them, Reed tells us:

But nothing ever betrayed more vividly the total lack of understanding of the people's mind that prevailed in the haunts of officialdom. First and foremost, these harassed East Enders wanted to be quite safe, and they knew they could only find complete safety deep underground.

But apart from that, they wanted, if they were to take shelter at nights for months and years, to be able to sleep, and in those surface shelters the noise would not let you sleep. Apart from that again, they wanted, and had a right to, some minimum degree of comfort, and in these dark and narrow surface-dungeons, which the devil himself might have invented, there was no hope of any.

So, that day, we saw appalling sights. Though it was early morning, long queues of miserable people, clutching shapeless bundles, shivering in the rain, stood at the entrances to the underground stations, waiting for nightfall, when they would stream down into them.

The police, the world-famed London police ('Your police are marvellous!'), had been given no better task to do, in this, London's greatest ordeal since the Plague and the Great Fire, than to stop them from entering. But that was vain.

When night came the people bought the cheapest ticket they could and just stormed the stations. Nothing could have stopped them. Good, that the attempt was never more than half-heartedly made. The "insuperable difficulties" were quickly overcome.

Nothing survives in any of the official records that I have seen. But here again, we have confirmation of the accounts I record in The Many Not The Few that in the early days of the Blitz, police prevented people taking shelter in the Underground.

But what is also glossed over is that, when people were forced to make their own provision, in the absence of government planning, the conditions were appalling. Writes Reed, his book published in 1941:

For long enough, the scenes in these underground dens were beyond description by pen or portrayal by brush. A man might have put his hand over his eyes, rather than contemplate them. People lay huddled together, tiny children in their midst, on the platforms, under the railway arches, in the vaults. There was no food for them, unless some local priest militant foraged and found some and brought it to them. There was no heat or water. There was no place for them to relieve themselves in decency. There was no care for their health. Pestilence immediately began to crawl about and breed.

After the War, Churchill wrote in his own book, "Their Finest Hour", that he had been "deeply anxious about the life of the people in London". But not only do the War Cabinet minutes not support his claims, this review and the Reed book add to the already substantial evidence that the people of London were initially left to fend for themselves. "True, we were 'all in the front line' in this war", said Reed, "but the English front line had its first, second and third class compartment, like the English railways".

So it was then – and to a very great extent, so it is now. And government is not and never has been an organisation on which you can safely rely, any more than you can rely on the record telling you the truth of what happened, or is currently going on.

Robbing us blind - by Richard...

A total of £64 million was wasted by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in its abortive attempt to get built a demonstration carbon-capture and storage (CCS) plant up and running.

The competition, says the National Audit Office(NAO) in its latest report (pictured right), was launched in 2007 with insufficient planning and recognition of the commercial risks.

Four companies were invited to compete for funds but, by last year, there was only one left, Iberdrola SA (IBE). Developers including BP Plc and EON had shelved their projects. Then, in October, the final bid was scrapped in as Iberdrola was unable to build its proposed Scottish plant within the budget or agree to the contract terms.

"In the context of value for money, developing new technologies is an inherently risky undertaking. Taking calculated risks is perfectly acceptable if those risks are managed effectively; but in this case DECC, and its predecessor, took too long to get to grips with the significant technical, commercial and regulatory risks involved", the NAO adds.

But no one has been fired. No one has resigned. No one has lost so much as a ha'penny from their pensions. All we get from the NAO is the weak-as-dishwater comment that DECC "must learn from the failure of this project".

Actually, by comparison with the Ministry of Defence – which wasted more than £100 million on theVector project alone, this is small beer. And, at least on this project, no one died. Furthermore, if the project had gone ahead, with a budget of £1 billion, so we would have lost much more. In a sense, we (the taxpayers) have got off lightly.

But this is not the end of it. Unfortunately, it is not only DECC which is incompetent. The NAO is as well. Gulled by the propaganda, it has failed to look into the technicalities of the contract and appreciate that CCS is not technically feasible. Thus, it has not understood that the real reason why the £1 billion contract did not go ahead was because it could not work.

All the NAO does, therefore, is bitch that "Four years down the road, commercial scale carbon capture and storage technology has still to be developed". It is now standing aside as DECC prepares to make another bid to become a major-league money waster alongside the MoD.

Then, what can you expect from Mr Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office. Paid a miserable salary of £210,000 per annum, the poor man is so close to the breadline that he obviously cannot do better, preoccupied as he is with working out how to make ends meet.

But, if this £64 million had been his money, and it had been the very last £64 million he had, would he have been so relaxed? Would our MPs, who so glibly approved this lunatic scheme have been so keen on it, had the funding come from their own pockets?

And there we have it. As long as these mad, reckless creatures can raid our pockets, and the supposedly independent auditor stands by and does little but whinge about the detail, and as long as there are no personal consequences for grand theft, it will continue.

This is your government. For sure, it has not killed anyone this time – for which we should be grateful. But it is still robbing us blind.

An independent review - by Richard... Friday, March 16, 2012

For once, one can have a little bit of sympathy for the MSM hacks, today being confronted with the Hills Report on fuel poverty. Running to 237 pages including covers, the dense prose defies easy analysis. Thus the temptation to rely on theReuters report must be overwhelming.

From this source, the headline is that up to three million British households will be in fuel poverty in 2016, "showing that UK's goal of eradicating fuel poverty by then could be at risk".

The primary source though is Professor John Hills, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE. But examination ofhis website reveals multiple sets of figures, which don't always seem to match the Reutersoffering.

Nevertheless, the thrust of the report is that 7.8 million people in 2.7 mllion households were in the fuel poverty bracket in England in 2009, compared with 7.2 million people in 2.8 million households in 1996.

These households faced costs to keep warm that added up to £1.1 billion more than middle or higher income people with typical costs. This is defined as the "fuel poverty gap". It is already three-quarters higher than in 2003 and will rise by a further half, to £1.7 billion by 2016.

This means, according to Hills, that fuel poor households will face costs nearly £600 a year higher on average than better-off households with typical costs.

However, while the message being conveyed by the media is about the potential increase in fuel poverty, that isn't what the report is really about, as Reuters actually acknowledges.

What seems mainly to concern Hills, though, is that the current definition of fuel poverty misses out people who are fuel poor, while catching some people who aren't. He wants the definition to change and for there to be a new way of measuring fuel poverty. The end result is a new category of people known as the LIHCs – i.e., those with Low Incomes and High Costs.

Fortuitously, one might say, this has the effect of bringing down the number of households affected by what was once known as fuel poverty from around four million to the 2.7 million cited. This is the figure Hill has retrospectively calculated, using the new measure.

Using this new LHIC indicator and the "fuel poverty gap", we are told, the government can get a better "focus" on the scale of the problem, and the progress in tackling it. Thus armed, Hills suggests that the government – not just DECC but also other Departments – can then set out a renewed and ambitious strategy for tackling fuel poverty. This renewed and ambitious strategy should then reflect the challenges laid out by the Hills report.

And that's it. Actually, it is not quite it. By the time you get past the summary of recommendations, you still have 210 pages of report to read.

That shows that the best way to deal with fuel poverty is, rather conveniently, to improve the housing of those at risk, giving the plebs better insulation. That, we are told, is the most cost-effective way of tackling the problem, cutting energy waste, with large long-term benefits to society as a whole.

Even more conveniently, it seems, that exactly meshes with government policy. This is the way round increased costs of fuel and all those embarrassing issues such as subsidies to wind farms. All you have to do is improve insulation.

And that, of course, is from an entirely independent academic review. It really is quite amazing what those independent academics can do when they are fed with government money. With enough of it spread around, they can always be relied upon to find exactly what the government wants to hear.