Wednesday 30 May 2012 Tuesday 29 May 2012 Tuesday 29 May 2012
Judge overturns wind farm plan on amenity grounds
Sea Land and Power, which made the original application on 8 September 2009, had argued that the need to meet renewable energy targets over-rode any environmental or amenity considerations, but Justice Lang disagreed.
The site had been identified by Great Yarmouth Council in its 2001 Borough Wide Local Plan as "landscape important to the broadland scene" and "landscape important to settlements", refusing the application on the grounds that the turbines would have "a significant adverse effect upon the landscape character".
In a planning inquiry in November 2010, the inspector stated that it was "inevitable" that the turbines "would create a degree of harm in this essentially rural location". He supported the refusal on the basis that the adverse impact was "so significant" that it outweighed the need for renewable energy.
Justice Lang, in her judgement handed down yesterday, has ruled that "as a matter of law" it was not correct to assert that the national policy promoting the use of renewable resources ... negated the local landscape policies or must be given "primacy" over them.
In thus upholding the planning inspector in rejecting the development, Laing has overturned a long-held precept that the need to meet renewables targets is paramount, and quite possibly opens the gates to a flood of rejections of onshore sites.
Slowly, gradually, but inexorably, the government's energy policy continues to crumble. By 2020, the renewable industry had hoped to have erected around 10,000 more onshore turbines, to add to the 3,500 already in place. But, with this decision, they haven't a chance.
Pic: another wind turbine overturned – but this one in Otterburn.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 30/05/2012 The crisi salutare: a currency without wings
Then we have the euro. As with the Airbus, Whittle asserts, it didn't suffer a catastrophic failure. Simply different countries are pulling in opposite directions. It can't be pulled out of the crisis and is being flown into the sea.
This is an intriguing thesis, cleverly put. But I think it's wrong. Using the Airbus analogy, what we have in the euro is an aircraft without wings and engines. It is that way because the makers rightly judged that the shareholders wouldn't fund a complete aeroplane. So they built what they could afford. They filled it with passengers, gave it a piggy-back ride to the upper atmosphere and cast it loose.
The theory was that, as it hurtled to the ground, the shareholders would see disaster looming and appreciate the folly of their parsimony. They would thus shell out for the missing wings and engines – so making the aircraft whole, and flyable, whence it would calmly resume its journey, untroubled by gravity.
No one knows more of this from direct experience than Ambrose Evans Pritchard, who was theTelegraph Europe correspondent during some of the formative years of the project. Therefore, I asked him whether he thought it likely that Delors, as claimed, had ever asserted that building the euro would rely on the beneficial crisis, and whether he would have called it a "benign" crisis.
Ambose recalled that he had been told of the "beneficial crisis" concept about ten years ago (2002-ish) by a Commission official who had worked with Delors pre-Maastricht. Whether Delors said it publicly, he could not remember, but the idea seemed to have wide currency in the early EMU days.
Then, said Ambrose, in an intriguing addition, "I think it was a Monnet term that lots of people used - mostly behind closed doors, though Prodi dropped his guard once famously". And the word he had been told was most definitely "beneficial", not "benign". It is a term, he said, that pre-dates this issue.Una Crisi Beneficia is the old term from Papal doctrine.
Here, Ambrose opens up a whole new line of inquiry, but not one that is straightforward. His "crisi beneficia", seems to be better recognised as Catalan, and is not widely used. But, that is not to say that the concept is not known. It is most certainly recognised by the Vatican, even finding its way into an encyclical letter from Pope Benedict XVI, in which a crisis becomes "an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future".
We can, for instance, see it in the work of Giulio Pullé, published in 1858 (La nostalgia; dramma in tre atti, di Riccardo Castelvecchio). It is used by Francesco de Sanctis, who lived from 1817-1883 and had a volume of his political writings published in 1900. We also find it used in the writings of Giustina Michiel, who published in 1829 (Origine delle feste veneziane).
In contemporary works, we have evidence of Prodi in 2007 using the term, when he was Italian prime minister. And then, we have Delors himself, using the tem 2004, where he is cited, in an Italian language report, claiming that a "no" in the constitution referendum would not be "una crisi salutare".
Interestingly, we find it in Il Fatto in March 1999, a headline quote describing the affairs of the French socialists, under a picture of Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin (above). And, in the same year, we see Corriere Della Sera talk of "una crisi salutare" in relation to the collapse of the Santer commission.
Thus, it would seem that the concept of a beneficial crisis is well and long-established in Italian politics, the term openly used. The same could be said of France, where the term "crise salutaire" is also no stranger to the print media.
In the French press, there are multiple references to Delors in this context, who was quite obviously very familiar with the term, even if he never seems to use it directly in relation to the euro. But, familiar as he was with Catholic doctrine – as author of the subsidarity principle – he would have known exactly how to exploit the beneficial crisis to advance his cherished economic and monetary union.
Ambrose, therefore, is right – the "beneficial crisis" goes way back, but it also seems to be a very continental phenomenon. It is not clearly identified in Britain as an essential part of the political toolkit, and was virtually unknown in the UK until I wrote about it in my book Death of British Agriculture in 2001 and in The Great Deception in 2003, with multiple references from Booker in between.
Now, however, it is the driving force behind the most important issue in British politics today, dominating the European stage and threatening the entire global economy. And all because the "colleagues" thought they could build a currency without "wings" and glue them on later.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 29/05/2012 Economy too dire to contemplate, so media goes for "pasty tax"
Not least, Irish government 2020 bond yields have jumped more than 60 basis points to hit a four-month high of 7.62 percent, a strange if not sinister symmetry – 7.62 mm is the calibre of a rifle bullet. This may be needed when the €67.5 billion EU/IMF loans run out, with a likelihood that further loans will be needed.
Juergen Fitschen, Deutsche Bank's "designated co-CEO", meanwhile, has called Greece a "failed state", and, piling on the insults, "a corrupt state, corrupt as far as its political leadership is concerned and obviously other people had to be willing to support this".
As for Spain, Ambrose tells us it has run out of money and is looking for €20 billion or more from the debt markets. Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, in a monumental understatement, says the funding situation is "very difficult". Spanish banks are reported to need €100 billion recapitalisation, and retail sales have fallen 11.3 percent on the year - a record fall.
Back home, the Bank of England, preparing for the inevitable, has told us it is poised to cut interest rates or launch another round of quantitative easing if the euro collapses.
So what is the lead financial story in the British press? The pasty tax. Joy unto a nation where the greatest concern is the lifting of tax on cooling pasties. Fortunate is the opposition politician who can make this the centrepiece of their attack on the administration's financial policy.
But one can't avoid the impression that the media and politicians are indulging in their own version of a flight from reality. The real news is just too dire to contemplate so, while the sun shines – but not for very much longer – they rejoice in another Osborne climbdown.
For the next news of the day: Cameron has appointed a horse as his new chancellor, while the gay Samantha neighs "let them eat [cooling] pasties".
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 29/05/2012
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
A High Court judge in London has rejected on appeal a plan by Sea Land and Power Ltd to erect four 344ft wind turbines near Hemsby, Great Yarmouth, on the fringe of the Norfolk Broads.
This is the theory of the beneficial crisis, one which we explored once again when Dominic Lawsonattributed it to Jacques Delors, with the label "benign crisis". And since this one instrument has possibly done more damage to the economic system than any other, it was worth looking further into that claim.
This English translation may reflect the Latin, the form expediunt discrimine coming out as one of the options for "beneficial crisis". In modern Italian, it seems to have morphed into "crisi salutare" – translated literally as "healthy crisis". And here, not only is there a wealth of usage. It goes back well over a century.
With its vote on the fiscal pact on Thursday, Ireland is holding its breath while Reuters reports a sudden draining of confidence as Spain goes belly-up and the situation in Greece continues to deteriorate.
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