Gone forever - by Richard... Monday, November 28, 2011

Gone forever - by Richard... Monday, November 28, 2011

David Rose in the Mail on Sunday writes a very useful piece on the relationship between the BBC and the warmist community, spelling out how closely knit the two had become.

There is nothing ,much new to those who have been following the climaye change issue closely but, as one of our forum members puts it, the biggest-selling Sunday fingers BBC as being dishonestly, systematically, intentionally, knowingly, ruthlessly, implacably biased against global warming sceptics.

One really does wonder how much further the BBC can go, now that the tide is turning against it. To come shortly is Booker's pamphlet for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on BBC bias, which will also get some MSM coverage, further reinforcing how untrustworthy the BBC has become.

This comes on top of Climategate II which, although not producing any fireworks, is triggering a steady flow of high quality comment, which is pointing up the warmists for what they are.

The revelations may have limited appeal, but if you compare the global warming hype of two years ago with what we are getting in the run-up to Durban, the contrast tells you everything.

We can but repeat that this is a scare that has run its course. The ersatz scientists will never again hold the global community in its thrall to the same extent, on this subject.

Nor indeed can the scientists expect rescue from the political community. That too is a devalued currency. Tellingly, a poll of sentiment on the chancellor and shadow chancellor demonstrates this amply.

Asked to describe them both using key words, 22 percent of respondents had Osborne as "smug", 22 percent put him down as "arrogant", 21 percent had him as "out of touch" and a similar proportion described him as "out of his depth".

When it came to the shadow chancellor, 20 percent chose "out of his depth", 19 percent opted for "arrogant", 17 percent as "smug" and 15 percent "out of touch".

It is unlikely that such sentiments are confined to just this pair. It is extremely unlikely, for instance, that Huhne would score any better, and many would share my personal views on Cameron. Politicians have destroyed their own authority and credibility.

In short, this is not a claque that rules with our consent or approval, nor one which has any moral authority. And the more they hitch their star to the jaded cause of global warming, the worse it will get for them.

Even now, there are some politicians out there whose limited brains permit them to understand that their surrender to the stupidity of the global warming scare has been instrumental in building the contempt with which they are near universally regarded.

Soon enough, in the interests of self-preservation, if nothing else, they too will be ditching their warmist friends. For the BBC though, there is no hope. But our contempt can reach even their lofty ivory towers. They may hold their line, but they will know that they have been called out and their authority has gone forever.

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The democratic iceberg - by Richard... Sunday, November 27, 2011

I may well have picked up this piece by Chris Montcrieff at the same time as Autonomous Mind, but for the moment I'm not as fast as I once was, having to do an amount of eyelid testing between blog posts.

That leaves me trailing in his wake, enabling me in part to compliment AM for a fine piece and echo his theme, that it is a shame that so few of the commentariat seem to understand what is going on with local authority finance.

We have seen how even Simon Jenkins and Philip Johnston have only a slender grasp of the intricacies of the additional charges imposed by local authorities, but at least they have some awareness of them. When it comes to Moncrieff, though, he displays no awareness of the issue at all, and thus focuses his whole commentary on the single issue of council tax.

Under discussion is the council tax freeze, announced by Massa George at the Tory conference, but as AM points out, this is smoke and mirrors. Councils which are buying into the "freeze" rhetoric are, by and large, simply increasing their direct charges and other income streams, to make up for the shortfall on the council tax account.

This year we will thus see history being made as income from sales, fees and charges, plus "other income", exceeds for the first time the income from council tax. And then, while these two categories of income are themselves substantial, they only account for less then forty percent of total income, the rest coming from government grants (last year, 64 percent).

With government grants also increasing up to press, we see a freeze only in one tiny corner of the income stream, making the rhetoric about local government "cuts" more than a bit dubious. Council tax may be frozen, but local authority income and spending is not. They are at a historic high.

Moncrieff, however, is not the only one taken in by the rhetoric, with JulianM of Orphans of Libertyalso being taken in by the spurious council tax freeze, complaining of Brighton and Hove that it is refusing to take government money and is forging its own line, increasing council tax by 3.5 percent in the coming year.

We do not know this to be the case, but it is quite possible that, by increasing council tax but holding off on some charges, the council could actually be costing its taxpayers less than some supposedly virtuous local authorities, which are falling into line with Osborne's "freeze" and holding down the headline rate.

And here, we see an interesting development with the local newspaper, The Argus, launching a referendum on how much council tax residents think they should be paying. Courtesy of the newspaper, therefore, we see the makings of real democracy, although it is difficult for readers to make an informed decision as they are being asked to judge without knowing the budget for the forthcoming year.

This is where the whole system starts to unravel. With less than twenty percent of the charging actually visible, local authority income is more like an iceberg, with the bulk of it out of sight. For there to be meaningful control, there must be visibility, and then accountability.

What we have at the moment, then, is a charade. And those that go along with it and take it seriously are playing games. We need root and branch reform of the way income is gathered and presented, and expenditure reported, before the system can get even close to being democratic.

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Empty vessel syndrome - by Richard...

We have observed before how many journalists, on picking up a long-running story, seem to have no history – and neither time, inclination (or even capability) properly to research the background. Thus, on lifting a single nugget, without understanding or context, fabricate a report which adds little or nothing to the corps of knowledge, and most often distort or confuse the issues.

So it is in the Independent on Sunday, where journalists Brian Brady and Jonathan Owen happen upon a report on "secret tests" carried out in 2005 on Snatch Land Rovers.

Amongst other things, the tests confirmed that the Snatch was "overmatched" by the then current array of IEDs ranged against it, and also "revealed" that even when soldiers wore body armour the Snatches provided little protection from IEDs.

The Independent acknowledges that official documents released to the Iraq inquiry last year revealed that ministers had been warned that Snatches needed to be replaced in 2006. That indeedwas the case, but the newspaper then seeks to shift the time frame to an earlier period.

Thus it tells us, in what amounts to the single, substantive new fact of the story, in a "vehicle protection presentation" held on 16 March 2005 – the second anniversary of the Iraq invasion – the defence technology company QinetiQ reported that "Snatch performs relatively poorly but in line with expectations when attacked by projectiles".

This, on the face of it, though, does not refer to IEDs – more likely to RPGs. But, whether or not QinetiQ then reported on the failings of the Snatch, the most serious shortcomings, in respect of dealing with the explosively formed projectile (EFP), could not have been known. That weapon was not deployed in a fatal attack until 1 May 2005, when Guardsmen Anthony Wakefield and Gary Alderson were killed.

By 6 June, however, an intact EFP array had been recovered and evaluated and it was from that point that it was clear that the Snatch was no match for the weapons being used against it. And when on 16 July in al Amarah, Lt Shearer and two others were killed in a Snatch following an EFP attack, there can have been no doubt.

Contrary to the impression given by the Independent story, therefore, there is nothing new about when knowledge of the new threat emerged, but the newspaper makes a big deal about the MoD withholding reports, claiming that "disclosure of such information could prejudice the safety of the armed forces".

That, of course, is one of the genuine reasons why the MoD might withhold such information. If your equipment suffers a fatal flaw, the last thing you are going to do it admit it to the enemy.

But, a year later, despite significant additional casualties, the vulnerability of the Snatch was becoming so evident that we were to pick it up on this blog, leading in August to a review of the vehicle by then defence secretary Des Browne, and its partial replacement by the Mastiff.

Here, journalists Brady and Owen get it completely wrong, reporting that an emergency review of the Snatch vehicles was not announced until 2008 – "after a tide of protests from the families of service personnel who had been killed or suffered horrific injuries in a series of IED attacks in Afghanistan".

The review was in 2006, and carried out after the issue was raised in this blog, and then in theSunday Telegraph and Sunday Times, at our instigation, followed by a spirited campaign in parliament, led by Lord Astor of Hever. This, as set out in Ministry of Defeat (pp110-122) is one of those instances when everything came together,.

Brady and Owen, though, insist on rewriting history. The immediate replacement for the Snatch was the Mastiff, later augmented by the smaller Ridgeback, but this ignorant pair fail to realise this. Instead, they get confused by the later long-term contract for the Foxhound, designed from scratch as the long-term replacement, complaining that this has not yet been delivered to theatre.

The journalists thus miss the point. The crucial part of the story is not that the dangers were ignored, but why they were ignored, and long after they were known - and why the replacement was so long in coming. Here, it is not good enough simply to say that the MoD failed. There was a very specific and egregious failure, attributable not to officials but to senior officers in the Army. They not only ignored the shortcomings of the Snatch, but actively blocked replacement with better vehicles.

For those who understand the issues, the real reason was because Jackson and then Dannatt were committed to the FRES programme and feared that, if protected vehicles were bought, the money would come from the FRES budget. Thus, to protect the budget for their new toys, they were prepared to let soldiers die.

Such an assertion I have made many times, including it with great detail in my book, Ministry of Defeat. If it were not true, it would be libellous and wrongly damaging to the reputations of two of Britain's most senior generals. No one, however, has ever disputed the issues.

But now we can see in the evidence of Lord Drayson, then procurement minister, to the Iraq Inquiry, confirmation of the assertion. In his witness statement, he told the Inquiry:

The project to improve/replace SNATCH was always separate to FRES. The Generals stressed the urgent need to replace the ageing fleet of Army Fighting Vehicles as a whole when voicing their concerns over delays to FRES.

However SNATCH was a Protected Patrol Vehicle rather than an AFV, and was not an old vehicle. In terms of augmenting Protected Patrol Vehicles such as SNATCH the focus in early 2006 for the Army was on the VECTOR which in March 2006 I was told was General Dannatt’s highest priority as CinC LAND.

Progress on FRES and concerns about SNATCH Land Rovers should not have been connected in theory because the FRES project was designed to provide a different capability, i.e. AFVs not PPVs.

In reality however, I believe that the Army’s difficulty in deciding upon a replacement to SNATCH was in part caused by their concern over the likelihood of FRES budgets being cut to fund a SNATCH replacement vehicle.

Though this whole affair, therefore, we have seen the most egregious failure of the Army. But we now also see the continued failure of the media to understand and deal with the issues, missing the point again and again, always going for the cheap shots, without even beginning to understand what was involved.

Journalists have become empty vessels, to be filled on the day with plausible but inaccurate material, sufficient to fill space in a newspaper, but a travesty of the truth.

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The greatest delusion of them all - by Richard...

Booker devotes his entire column this week to the great global warming delusion, picking up on the back of Climategate II, four separate issues which, as he says, makes climate science into science no longer worthy of the name.

As he wrote when the first Climategate emails appeared in 2009, the global warming scare is far and away the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. When we then contemplate the insanity of the measures the politicians have imposed on us in consequence, we know we are looking at a collective flight from reality which has no precedent in the history of the world.

Of that flight from reality though, there can be no more spectacular than the government's quest for the "zero carbon" house, coming at a time when Cameron and Clegg are lamenting that house-building is at its lowest level since the 1920s.

Yet, when a whole generation of would-be first-time buyers are having to reconcile themselves to decades of renting properties, the government is phasing in a new set of Building Regulations which will require that, by 2016, all new homes must be "zero carbon" in terms of energy-use and emissions.

According to official estimates in the Code for Sustainable Homes, this will increase the cost of building a house by up to £37,793 or up to 66 percent in the case of a two-bedroomed starter flat of the type favoured by first-time buyers.

And if this is not bad enough, the government is also eliminating a special "concession" known as the "Fuel Factor", which relaxes the heating rules for new homes in places without access to the natural gas grid.

Instead of being allowed to install oil or gas cylinder-fired heating, they will have to rely biomass-fired boilers or "heat pumps" – both of dubious efficiency, adding a further cost of between £11,000 and £18,000, for a target market which is less able to afford low-end housing than their urban counterparts.

One could venture that, as so often, we have in government the classic example of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, as we see Cameron unveiling a £400 million plan to underwrite mortgages for first-timer buyers.

Yet, in all the guff written about this scheme, not once do we see any discussion of the government intent to increase the costs of starter homes by up to two-thirds, thus ensuring that, with or without mortgage assistance, they remain an unreachable aspiration for the majority.

And that seems to be the effect of the "great delusion" – it adds to public policy an air of unreality, destroying the sense and effectiveness of other policy initiatives, all in pursuit of a miasma which is unravelling as we speak.

How our politicians have allowed themselves to become so deluded is one of those modern mysteries, but one wonders whether the breed will ever recover any of its credibility after allowing itself to be so misled by such an obvious and expensive scare.