EU politics: Japan warns UK not to leave "Europe"
Sunday 21 July 2013
 The Japanese government, we are told, has issued "an extraordinary warning" against Britain leaving the EU, hinting that 130,000 British jobs could be at stake if the UK pulls out of the union. This is in a memorandum submitted to the FCO as part of the "balance of competences review". It warns that Japanese companies invest in the UK because they see it as a gateway to European markets.
Up to 1,300 Japanese firms with British outlets could review their position if Britain does not continue to play a "major role" in the EU. "The government of Japan expects the UK to maintain this favourable role", it says.
Tokyo says it is "committed to making its relationship with the EU stronger than ever before" and adds that, " it expects that the UK will maintain a strong voice and continue to play a major role in the EU", then saying: The UK, as a champion of free trade, is a reliable partner for Japan. More than 1,300 Japanese companies have invested in the UK, as part of the single market of the EU, and have created 130,000 jobs, more than anywhere else in Europe. This fact demonstrates that the advantage of the UK as a gateway to the European market has attracted Japanese investment.In a statement to the Sunday Times the Japanese embassy in London explained the intervention, saying: "We know some countries decided not to submit comments but as a non-EU nation and major investor in the UK we thought it was appropriate". Crucially, it then adds: "We have taken advantage of this occasion to express our expectations ... If the UK leaves the Single Market, countries investing in the UK and exporting to the EU would have to pay tariffs, and that is not good news". And there is the rub. In leaving the EU, the UK does not necessarily have to leave the Single Market. This membership can be maintained through membership of EFTA and the EEA. The Japanese position is ill-informed and its intervention ill-considered. It should know that this is the case. As an external country, therefore, it has absolutely no business interfering in a domestic issue which has absolutely no bearing on its own affairs. This is totally unacceptable behaviour. But so skewed is this debate that the Sunday Times, in reporting the Japanese intervention, forebears to point this out. Any informed, sensible commentator would do so. But here we are dealing with the British media: they are not capable of coherent, much less informed reporting on this issue. Once again, though, we see how important the "Norway Option" has become. It is absolutely key to the debate – and thereby is the one issue on which the media is silent. And that, once again, confirms what we need to know about the media. Given a chance, it will wreck any opportunity we ever had of leaving the EU. The media are not our friends. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 21/07/2013 |
Booker: all the news that's not fit to print
Sunday 21 July 2013
 For the rest, it is the PMOI – the Iranian refugee story that no one wants to know about, - and the stolen kids with an international dimension, another story that the media really doesn't want to know about. In fact, add the Bruges Group, and you have three tales that weren't going to find a home in any of the Sunday press, making the Booker column the obvious place for them. I suppose that makes the column the media's conscience, although the hacks wouldn't see it that way. They have all the really important stories to cover, and haven't room for the sort of dross Booker goes in for. Thus, you'll not have to waste too much time reading all the news that wasn't fit to print. It's not been done by the pack, so once you've read it in Booker, you won't be troubled by it elsewhere. One imagines though, if a "real" journalist had run any of the stories, they would have splashed it with "exclusive" tags, preening themselves on how clever they were. For Booker, it's just routine. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 21/07/2013 |
EU politics: joining the dots
Sunday 21 July 2013
 The answer, actually, is yes, if you are managing a €622 million aid budget. The real question, therefore, is should the EU have a €622 million aid budget for Mozambique? That is a more important question, but one which is neither asked nor answered. However, if you are going to spend public money, you need public servants to manage the expenditure. And, if anything, the programme in Mozambique is under-managed, especially compared with Barbados, where there are claimed to be 44 staff. There, in this tiny island of 270,000 inhabitants, the current aid programme is only €10 million, although the "Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol Countries" (AMSP) provided for more than €34 million for the period 2007-2010. What is taking the effort, though, is that the island plays a pivotal role in the regional integration efforts and relations between the Caribbean region as a whole, and the European Union. There is much work in hand towards establishing a Caribbean Common Market (CARICOM), with officials based in Barbados because it is the regional hub. Again, you can argue whether these activities are valid, and whether they should be done in our name. But, to the question does the EU really need 44 diplomats in Barbados, the answer is probably yes. Nevertheless, Lamont, complains that the EU's external action service adds up to a foreign service 3,400 strong — more than 1,400 staff in Brussels and more than 1,900 abroad. The EU has a large aid budget and Commission staff (another 3,400 in the delegations) involved in administering aid programmes, making a "staggering total" in the delegations of over 5,400 and a budget of €509 million. Yet, even in one instance, through the aegis of the EU, we are engaged in talks on an all-embracing trade deal with the US, the likes of which will need hundreds of staff to keep the negotiations going. How does Norman Lamont propose that this initiative should be staffed. By contrast, for 2011-12, the FCO employed 13,215 permanent staff: 4,530 of these were UK-based, and 8,685 were locally engaged, with an overall budget in the order of £1.5 billion. DFID, which handles the aid budget, had a staff of 2,384 – bringing the total to about 11,000. This is what really distresses (the polite word) me about the likes of the Spectator and the clever-dick Lamont. They always go for the cheap shot, without getting down to the real issues. The point is that the last Government endorsed the creation of the EEAS and the Coalition Government permits its continuation and expansion. If it is to perform its functions in accordance with the treaties, it needs the staff and the funding – which is by no means as lavish as the fading UK with more than double the bodies. You might ask why we need an FCO when the EU runs our foreign policy. There is, thus, no point in whingeing that the EEAS is a "vanity project which should be dismantled". If we don't like it, we should leave the EU and be done with it. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 21/07/2013 |
Energy: an invisible revolution
Saturday 20 July 2013
 In my time, I've done quite a bit of work for that paper, and it's worth doing, as they are generous payers. But, most usually, they come to me with an idea and I write to order. It is extremely difficult and therefore quite rare to get them to commission something we originate. The "not invented here" syndrome is alive and well. When the Mail didn't respond to my contacts, however, I talked to Dellers, who also had a project on the go, and he agreed talk to the paper, with a view to doing a joint piece. In the event, he was successful, although the response was a grudging 700-word commission. But, when the editorial staff saw the detail of what we had to offer, they immediately upgraded it to 1,200 words, with pics, making it the centre-piece of a two-page spread. If nothing else, that confirmed my original judgement that we were on to a powerful and important story. What puzzled me though was that, although Booker had also run the story as his lead item the previous week, and published a follow-up the week later – with the singular exception of Autonomous Mind, there was virtually no carry-over into other blogs or the media in general. The story has died. Looking for an explanation, there are probably several reasons. The first is that the story turned conventional wisdom on its head. With Ofgem seemingly reporting that we were looking possible blackouts in the near future, here was a piece of work which suggested that we were not, after all, on the brink of disaster. Here, it is worth noting that Ofgem did not state that we were going to experience blackouts. It was simply offering a number of scenarios, based on computer modelling. Here, the worst-case scenario, based on a number of assumptions that are not likely to happen, had a very tight supply situation in 2015, allowing for the possibility of blackouts. But there was no prediction, as such, that this scenario would come to pass. Why Ofgem allowed this scenario to take hold – without stepping in to cool the often frenetic media coverage – speaks more of industry politics than it does the likelihood of power cuts. Essentially, the industry has found a means of ensuring security of supply, but the cost is going to be huge. As Booker wrote, "our lights will stay on – but it will cost us a fortune". It is my belief that Ofgem is playing a dark game. By running up the "scare" flag – or allowing others to do so – it is conditioning public expectations. Once people are firmly convinced that they are about to lose their power supply, that leaves the way open for a solution "miraculously" to be found. In the ensuing relief, there will be little notice taken of the massive price tag which will accompany our salvation. What is happening, in other words, is that we are being set up for massive price increases. This is damage limitation prior to the event. And, against this background, people were not prepared for the sudden emergence of the STOR story, which completely confounded the scare narrative. As for a second possible reason, it could be that people simply do not or cannot believe the enormity of what they are being told. The clues for that are in some of the online responses to the original Booker article, some from claimed experts in the energy industry, who dismiss outright the idea that thousands of small, remote diesel generators can be hooked up to the national grid at a moment's notice, to provide meaningful amounts of power. This has been reinforced by personal e-mails saying much the same thing, some from recently retired power-plant managers who assert that it is simply not possible to synchronise large numbers of small generators with the grid, and get them online quickly. The thing about these people is that they are right – or, at least, they were right until very recently. Even a few years ago, what we have been describing would have been impossible. But, with therecent emergence of "cloud software", it is now possible to create what are now being called "virtual power plants". And what we can see from the link is the principle of "merging smaller local plants into a larger virtual power plant". By using online networks, energy providers can "react flexibly and quicker to energy surpluses or bottlenecks and can balance them out". And so says ABB and Deutsche Telecom, it is now possible "to compensate for the significant fluctuations in wind and solar energy production".  The technology is by no means confined to Europe. In fact, much of the pioneering work seems to have been done across the Atlantic. Here we see the concept deployed in Canada, where the virtual power plant is described specifically as a means of balancing wind energy, using the "smart grid". Much of this seems to be harnessed to renewable technology, as here in Germany, where a new virtual power plant provider is reported as going nationwide as recently as 10 July of this year. And, as we see here, the demand response system, which begets virtual power stations, is alive and kicking in New York. Only in the UK, however, has the implementation of the system been so secretive and so expensive for the consumer, and so reliant on small-scale diesel generation.
While companies such as Vattenfall are publishing glossy and misleading brochures about virtual power plants (see diagram above, which focuses mainly on CHP - click to enlarge), even the punditsare unaware of the extent to which system has been developed and its rationale. We have had an energy revolution under our very noses, and no-one outside a very specialist group has noticed. This is an invisible revolution.
There is possibly the third and main reason why the issue has died. This is a complex development which requires an understanding of the electricity supply system and of current developments. That is simply not there. And if the pundits don't understand something, they tend not to write about it, preferring instead to stay inside their comfort zones. Thus does an important issue stay off the agenda, while ignorance prevails and the blackout memecontinues to dominate. How ironic it is, therefore, that the Green Mr Lean is complaining about "killer diesels poisoning our air" – and all because the man loves his windmills. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 20/07/2013 |
Sunday, 21 July 2013
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