The gospel according to St Huhne - by Richard... Sunday, October 30, 2011

The gospel according to St Huhne - by Richard... Sunday, October 30, 2011

At each stage, Huhne and his co-authors write, the opponents of the euro have forecast disasters which have in fact never happened and which always looked most unlikely … the Euro-sceptics constantly underestimated the competence of the Europeans and their ability to organise things properly.

If we join the euro, they wrote, "we shall over time achieve higher living standards . This is because we shall be full members of a huge single market, which can achieve the economies of scale and competitive excellence that a single currency has made possible in the US. From our greater wealth we shall be able to pay for the better hospitals, schools, houses and railways that we all aspire to".

"If we want the standard of hospitals, schools and railways that exists on the Continent, we have to join the euro. Otherwise we risk growing more slowly than the rest of Europe, which is precisely what happened when we refused to join the Common Market after the Second World War".

And this is the man to whom we should listen on energy?

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Contradiction in terms - by Richard...

Nick de Bois, Tory MP for Enfield North, said, according to The Observer: "I hope we have learned at least one thing from last week, that there is a growing need for and acceptance of the case for repatriation of powers from Europe".

The proposition is quite obviously absurd. Any idea that Tory MPs could actually learn anything is beyond the bounds of possibility.

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The writing on the wall - by Richard...

The US media is full of reports of a "freak" snow storm pounding Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, dumping over two feet of snow in some places. It left a trail of havoc behind it, two million people without power and at least three dead. Even as WUWT was forecasting earliest snow for NYC, since the American Civil War, Governors were declaring states of emergency in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York.

CNN offered an entertaining report, citing Alban Ajro of Watertown, Connecticut. As the impenetrable snow swirled around him, he informed viewers: "It's like a blizzard - you can't see far at all". Thus does the real world intrude on a tedious spat over the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) report, which purported to claim – as so many have done before it – that the science is settled.

But, with Mother Nature taking a hand – and making far more powerful statements – the debate over climate change is taking on a cliquish aspect. The various camps are now engaging in arguments which seem to have similarities with the disputes over angel demographics and pin dancing.

Far more significant, perhaps, is that the politicians are losing faith, evidenced by this leaked report, which suggests that the FIT for solar panels may be more than halved, following in the wake of Germany, which has done likewise. Considering that, in February last year, the Tories were pushing to increase the then government's micro-generation quota from 1.6 to a massive 15 percent - at huge cost - this is a considerable climbdown.

By the end of this winter – if it lives up to current billing – the climate change debate in the UK will be dead in the water, and politically dead as well. Simply, as the economy declines, there is no slack in the system to finance a climate scare. How long it will take then for local authorities to fire their sustainability co-ordinators and climate-change officers is another matter, but when that starts happening, we will know it is over. Nevertheless, the writing is already on the wall.

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It was always going to be - by Richard...

It helps, just occasionally, to stand back from the breathless reporting of events and remind ourselves that the euro – and ultimately the EU – was always going to fail. And that is what Booker does in his column this week, and if he is blowing our own trumpet.

We thus concluded, when we published The Great Deception, that two things would ultimately bring about the disintegration of the “project”. The first was the most reckless of all the moves it devised to weld the member states together: imposing on them a single currency without any of the preconditions to make it workable, above all a single economic government with the power to tax and to transfer vast resources from richer countries to poorer.

The project's other fatal flaw was what even its supporters came to call its “democratic deficit”. The more powerful the new system became, the more it alienated those in whose name it was erected, as they came to see how the direction of their lives had been handed to a remote and mysterious government over which they had no control.

Whatever the prattling of idle – and often ignorant – hack, therefore, the one clear lesson of recent events, and the total insolubility of the crisis engulfing the euro, is that the project is slowly heading for very messy and prolonged disintegration.

Everyone involved, it seems, is trapped, concludes Booker. The only way Britain will leave the EU is when it falls apart, around us and everyone else. Which is what it has, finally, begun to do.