EU Referendum: an agenda to pursue
Sunday 30 June 2013
 That this corporate lobbyist should be treated to a news story about his views, and given space for along authored piece, says as much about the advertising sheet as it does the president of the CBI. This is the sheet which, apart from in the Booker column, has never intelligently explored the EU-US trade deal, yet has given pride of place to Kenneth Clarke to spread falsehoods about it. And now it is back again, spreading the most extraordinary disinformation in the service of its own agenda, a "full and far-reaching reform of our relationship with Brussels". As always, we get the thesis that the UK is better off at the table as a member of the EU, in determining global trade negotiations, rather than as an independent member of the top table, negotiating on our own behalf, alongside the rest of the international community. To bolster the corporate CBI pap, though, we also get a puff for europhile Business for New Europe, of which Rake is a member, complete with a renta-quote from Matthew Elliott, one-time bidder for the lead of the "out" campaign. "It is clear", says this trainee europhile, "that the [corporate] business community wants a better deal from the EU and a referendum to make sure the renegotiation will deliver on jobs and growth in Britain".
It is interesting that the Telegraph has never given any serious space to discussing the options for leaving, and keeps the debate tightly focused on the renegotiation agenda, offering endless space to the europhiles, vying with the Guardian in its love of the projet . It will nevertheless proclaim to anyone foolish enough to listen that it is a "eurosceptic" newspaper. But it is not.
The Telegraph is a propaganda sheet, supporting Britain's continued membership of the EU. It cannot be relied up to support the "out" position, and nor can it be relied upon for the accuracy of its news coverage. As we see here today, it has its own agenda. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 30/06/2013 |
Booker: scrapping the Act
Sunday 30 June 2013
 Then Booker turns to the energy issue, remarking that the Almighty must have a sense of humour when, on the very day headlines were filled with warnings that our electricity system is now in such a parlous state that we can soon expect power cuts and electricity "rationing", we were also told that Britain is now sitting on what has been called "by far the biggest shale gas basin in the world". Booker acknowledges that there may have been some journalistic licence in how the two reports from which these claims derived were written, and indeed there was. The media accounts of neither report really stack up, with the risk of power cuts exaggerated and while the potential bonanza from shale gas may have been overstated. Certainly, the chances of major blackouts look remote, and the BGS report writes of further exploration drilling and testing over an extended period being needed. Only then, and with the optimisation of the extraction process, will it be possible to determine whether the gas can be exploited commercially. The best case scenario is that the resource will be enough to meet all the UK's energy needs for many decades to come, but this does not change the barely credible shambles successive governments have made of our national energy policy, nor how ludicrously skewed it has become by their obsession with global warming and the delusion that, by cutting down our "carbon emissions", we can somehow change the Earth's climate. The Government's current policy, which Booker has repeatedly explored, is twofold. On one hand, it is based on building tens of thousands of useless and ludicrously expensive wind turbines, made possible only by forcing us to pay double or treble the normal cost of the pitiful amount of electricity they so unreliably produce. On the other, by taxes and regulations designed to make "renewables" seem competitive, they plan to double the cost of any power from other sources, whether fossil fuels or nuclear. In short, they want to make our electricity more expensive than anywhere else in the world. Then, says Booker, just as they have cobbled this crazy joke of a policy together, we discover that we are sitting on what is potentially the world's largest resource of a fuel so cheap that it has halved the price of gas across the Atlantic in just five years. The last time he observed that the Almighty must have a sense of humour was in October 2008 when, just as our MPs were voting almost unanimously for Ed Miliband's Climate Change Act, committing us to economic suicide by cutting CO2 emissions by 80 percent in 40 years, the first October snow was falling in London for 74 years. We will not see an end to this insanity, Booker concludes, until our politicians recover their senses, struggle back into the real world and strike that Act from the statute book. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 30/06/2013 |
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