Stupid, malign idiot - by Richard... Thursday, June 09, 2011

Stupid, malign idiot - by Richard... Thursday, June 09, 2011

"Europe needs an elected president with a democratic mandate to drive sweeping reforms and give the European Union leadership on the world stage", says Tony Blair to the paywall Times.

The assumption that an elected office is "democratic" and confers a mandate is one of those schoolboy howlers which only LSE graduates should be making. But then Blair always did have a limited grasp of reality ... and now he is proving just how limited.

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Whaaaaaaaa? - by Richard...

I suppose this is what happens when you elect greens onto your council. All the freezing grannies will be delighted.

If you don't fancy Brighton, you would always become a "one planet manager" – although they don’t say which planet.

As long as you are a self-starter who is practical, experienced in sustainability, and can hit the ground running, then you could be the right person to drive forward a flagship programmes, balancing lots of different initiatives, generating exciting new ideas, supporting partners at the council and in the community, engaging stakeholders, and fundraising. For that, you get a six percent "ethical pension" as well.

If you prefer Hammersmith, you can be an Environmental Officer for £40k, as long as you have passion for leading, promoting and driving a sustainability agenda. Then, for forty grand, quite a lot of people could drum up a bit of passion, so there could be quite a bit of competition.

If you are tired of living, though, you can go and work in Manchester for £32 grand, sustaining a leading housing association and engaging with residents, partners, stakeholders and community representatives, secure funding grants for energy retrofit technologies and, amongst other things, providing energy advice and helping to reduce fuel poverty.

Of course, you could just not apply for the job, and ask for the £32k to be donated to freezing grannies ... but that would never do.

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Who's mugging whom? - by Richard... Wednesday, June 08, 2011

For sure, Scottish Power is a particularly odious company, but this is a typical reaction from a politician, thus attempting to obscure the destructive effect of the catastrophic failures in energy policy – and not just recently, but over decades. The mugging has been sequential and serial, and at the top of the food chain is the government, dumping more taxes and costs into the system.

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Where has he been? - by Richard...

Faced with another tranche of meaningless government figures, Ian Cowie writes in the Failygraphthat it is "No wonder people are beginning to lose faith in official statistics".

Simple-minded souls who believe the official handouts, he writes, might imagine that money is losing its real value or purchasing power at a modest rate of only 4.5pc – the current annual rate of change in the CPI. But that is less than a quarter of today’s gas and electricity shock, which follows double-digit increases in the cost of transport and many basic foods.

At this rate, viewers of BBC TV will begin to feel like Russian readers of the Soviet government newspapers Pravda – the Russian for "Truth" – or Izvestiya – Russian for "News" – who used to joke: "In the News there is no Truth and in the Truth there is no News".

Actually, we have been there for years. Mainly, it is only the simple-minded souls in the media, in politics and the claque that actually believe the BBC. Even fewer believe official government figures, or the analyses in the MSM. It is a testament to the British sense of humour that so many people keep watching the longest running political satire in history, known as the BBC News and the British press.

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