There is no hope

In the dim mists of days bygone, one used to read the leaders of the great broadsheets and nod in appreciation of their sagacity and wisdom, confident that, whatever else was wrong with the world, at least here were a group of writers that knew what they were talking about.

And yes, I know, this probably harps back to a time that never existed and I am looking back through rose-tinted mists to an era that fits alongside Bobbies who you could trust, red Routemasters that you could hop on and off, trains that ran on time … er …

All the same, just when you think the standards of our modern leader-writers could not get worse, they get worse – witness the utterly fatuous leader in The Daily Telegraph today (where else?) on Home Information Packs.

Headed, "High time to scrap Hips", the importunate writer intones that Hips have come to symbolise much that is wrong with this Government, going on to tell us that they were originally supposed to include a home-condition report but:

When it became apparent that buyers would not rely upon a survey produced by the vendor, the Government sought to give the scheme a spurious veneer of environmental legitimacy by insisting they contain information about energy-efficiency levels. Inevitably, those opposed to Hips are now denounced for being "anti-green".

As a certain Lady said, though: "No! No! No!"

The information about "energy-efficiency levels" – as everybody seems to know except this leader-writer - comes to us courtesy of Directive 2002/91/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2002 on the energy performance of buildings.

This was noted, amongst others by Christopher Booker, many times, not least in The Daily Mail last August when he wrote:

Last week, yet again, there were front-page headlines over the ongoing farce of Home Improvement Packs. Almost every housing expert in the land wants to see them scrapped.

But how often do ministers honestly admit to us that the reason they cannot abolish HIPs is because we must comply with an EU directive requiring all homes sold to have an "energy performance certificate" (an edict issued by Brussels five years ago to fight "global warming")?

Completely unconscious of the reality of our new government in Brussels, this airhead leader-writer then prattles on about, "A law that cannot be enforced is a bad law," noting that a joint report from the National Association of Estate Agents, the Law Society and the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors has called for fundamental changes to Hips. "Far better in our view," then says our leader-writer, "would be to get rid of them."

Far better, we might add, if we had leader writers who knew what they were talking about, but then that is probably asking too much.

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A nightmare comes true?

If there ever was received wisdom after the famous Irish "no" vote, it is that the "colleagues" – if they were to have another referendum – would want it before next year's euro-elections. They would be at pains, it was held, to avoid the contest becoming an unofficial, Europe-wide referendum on the constitutional Lisbon treaty.

Now, it seems – at least according to the Financial Times - that the colleagues' worst nightmare is about to come true.

This paper is reporting that the prospects of Ireland holding a second referendum on the treaty before the elections "are receding as differences emerged on Tuesday between parties supporting a 'yes' vote."

This stems from weekend comments by Dick Roche, Ireland's European affairs minister, who proclaimed that a second vote was "appropriate". But both the Greens, members of the Fianna Fáil-led coalition, and the conservative Fine Gael and Labour, the main opposition parties, ruled out the possibility of putting the question back to the people in the short term.

Until this week, says the FT the expectation was that the Irish would put the question, perhaps with a few political protocols attached to reflect Irish concerns, to a second vote. But Irish officials and some diplomats privately concede that it is more likely any second vote will now take place in late 2009.

This may give Declan Ganley, chairman of the "no" group Libertas, the opening he needs to set up his EU-wide political party to take on the treaty – a prospect trailed last July.

More recently, Ganley has been very quiet. He was due to speak at last weekend's summer school but he pulled out at the last minute, pleading "urgent commitments in the US", leaving Fine Gael Senator Eugene Regan to declaim him as "running scared".

If Ganley is not ready to step up to the plate, the prospect of an unofficial referendum in the UK certainly presents UKIP with an opportunity. It could galvanise the euro-elections, especially if the Tory party tries to fight on domestic issues and is unable or unwilling to clarify its position regarding the constitutional Lisbon treaty when or if it gets into power.

In what could be its saviour, UKIP's only nightmare would be Ganley coming up with some serious money and fielding a full slate in opposition to the UK's premier eurosceptic party.

There is, though, the outside chance that the Tories could get their act together and give UKIP a run for their money. On past performance though, their message will not convince enough voters to make the switch in a contest which is now regarded as UKIP's natural hunting ground.

The chance of registering disapproval of the constitutional Lisbon treaty may be so attractive that the electorate will be prepared to resist Tory invitations to make the contest a two-way joust between Conservatives and Labour, in a rehearsal for the electorally mandated reshuffle general election slated to take place the following year.

Time will tell, of course – it always does.

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The Great Freeze begins

The summer meltback in the Arctic has ended and the ice is on the march, confounding the alarmists who were predicting in June that the Pole would be ice-free this year. Currently, the ice area is some 600,000 square kilometres greater than it was at its minimum extent last year.

According to Cryosphere Today, the median (1979-present) annual sea ice minimum occurs on September 8, but the dates have ranged by nearly a month from as early as August 26 to as late as September 24.

This current minimum seems to put the end of the meltback into the early end of the range, adding to the anecdotal evidence that we are in for an early (and hard) winter.

Meanwhile, the constant flow of "climate change" stories continue unabated in the media, demonstrating nothing more or less than the inescapable fact that the MSM on this issue – as well as many others – is way behind the curve.

And, of course, the tranzies are in full flow with their UN climate talks in Accra, Ghana aimed at "defining the building blocks of a new UN global warming pact" meant to be agreed in Copenhagen by the end of 2009. This Accra meeting is the third session this year, working towards a plan to agree a broad new climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

By the time they have finished, we should be in the throes of a recognisable cooling cycle, the leading edge of which is now becoming apparent. But, with the bulk of legislators looking the other way, aided and abetted by their tranzie fellow travellers, there is no sign at all that they will be prepared for what is about to hit the world.

Central to the problems that will arise is the myth that "global warming" is harmful. In fact, higher temperatures give us longer growing seasons, greater agricultural productivity and reduced energy consumption. We have, in effect, been enjoying for the last few decades a "global warming dividend", which is now going to evaporate as fast as did the "Cold War dividend" – and the politicos are going to be just as unprepared.

That, in fact, is the real nightmare. The human species has an infinite capacity to adapt to climatic changes but when global policies are directed – as they so often are – at addressing the wrong problem, the consequences are very difficult to deal with.

As always, therefore, Mother Nature is not the real problem. It is the more prosaic and infinitely more dangerous problem of bad governance which has its own infinite capacity – to make a bad situation worse.

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A dose of reality?

Considering the speed and severity with which he took Gordon Brown to task on his blog last June for the heinous "crime" of referring to the "Second Parachute Regiment", you would think that Sean Rayment would take special care to ensure the accuracy of his own work. However, in a largely sympathetic piece ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Beyond the capability of mere mortals

The capacity for the great and the good of the tranzie world to get together and blather – usually at our expense – seems unending.

One of their latest gab-fests is "World Water Week", celebrated by the egregious Euractiv. It publishes an article which has scientists and experts from around the world warning that "global food wastage must be halved by 2025 to meet the challenges of feeding the rapidly-growing population and preserving global water supplies."

The event was also reported by AFP two days ago, not that I noticed, and it seems to have been ignored completely by the MSM. However, that report did usefully remind us that "as much as half the water used to grow food world-wide is lost due to waste," since "roughly fifty percent of the food that farmers grow is lost or wasted."

The outcome of the deliberations was that, "Weak policy, poor management, increasing waste and exploding water demands are pushing the planet towards the tipping point of global water crisis," with the meeting calling on governments "to place an effective water-saving strategy, requiring that food wastage be minimised, firmly on the political agenda."

All good stuff, of course, but what is missing entirely is a recognition that current policy initiatives, such as the EU's pesticide directive are set to make the situation immeasurably worse.

Despite this, the emphasis on waste is no bad thing. Far too often, the bulk of effort is directed at increasing production, heedless of the fact that, globally, half of that which is produced is then lost. Without devoting any more acreage to food production, the amount of produce that could be brought to market could be doubled if more attention was paid to disease and pest control, better storage and better distribution.

As much attention, though, needs to be given to perverse policy initiatives - for which the EU is justly famous - which actually create more problems than they solve. But then resolving these would require forcing the EU to act rationally, which is probably beyond the capability of mere mortals. Solving the world food crisis – or any other crisis for that matter – is child's play by comparison.

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A perfect storm

One of the (many) stories sitting on my files to do was an article picked up from the front page of The Yorkshire Post on Saturday, developing our own report last Thursday on the dire state of the UK wheat harvest.

Coincidentally, the story was picked up yesterday by the Mail on Sunday and thence by Watts up with that.

This invaluable blog, quite rightly, got excited by the headline to the Mail which proclaimed, "Awful August has delayed this year's harvest but global warming is not to blame" – a distinct contrast to The Daily Telegraph piece in early July which did indeed seek to pin the wet weather on global warming.

But, while we can rejoice in sense returning to at least one newspaper, behind both the stories of a bad harvest lies a disturbing picture that could have serious consequences for British arable farming – and thus the rest of us – amounting almost to a perfect storm.

The particular problem, as we pointed out in our last piece, is not so much quantity but quality, especially with the wheat crop which has deteriorated severely as a result of the bad weather.

As The Yorkshire Post reports, this means that much of the crop will be fit only for animal feed. Yorkshire farmers alone could take a "hit" of £10 million as their produce is downgraded.

If that gives temporary relief to hard-pressed livestock farmers, who have seen feed prices escalate to record levels, it is bad news for consumers as high protein wheat for bread-making will have to be imported in some quantity, at a premium of £20 per metric ton.

However, the problem for farmers may be even worse than the headlines suggest, as events elsewhere in the world take shape. Here, the situation in the Ukraine is of special interest. The region, on the one hand has enjoyed a record harvest, up to 43 million tons from 29.3 million last year, with expectations of exporting a surplus of 17.5 million tons during the coming year. On the other hand, the crop has suffered what is described as "insect-related" problems, which is forcing about 70 percent of it to be used for animal feed.

This surplus on the world market is expected to drive down prices of feed wheat, creating an abysmal situation for British farmers. At a time when input costs – from diesel and fertiliser to labour – are all rising, they are now reconciled to prices which are unlikely to cover the costs of producing the harvest.

Small wonder, the YP is retailing sentiment from farmers that many of them will drop out of wheat next season. Some experts are saying this could lead to a shortage next year.

It is here, of course, that an agricultural support system could make the difference. Where prices have been driven below the cost of production, there is a classic role for farming subsidies, if for no other reason than to ensure the availability of supplies in the following season and to take the edge of shortage-induced price increases.

However, now that the EU – which has sole competence over our agriculture policy – has opted out of production support and is looking to cut subsidies over the next budgetary period, farmers are on their own. They are looking at reduced prices, increased costs and less state support.

Perversely, the cut in support will not filter back into reduced EU contributions or lower taxes as the EU has siphoned off some of the subsidies to pay for its vanity project, the Galileo satellite navigation system, while it is also proposing to hand upwards of $1 billion to developing countries to promote farming there – reducing, incidentally, export opportunities for British farmers.

The net result of all this is that British consumers will still be paying huge sums for an agricultural support system, but one that no longer functions, while also paying inflated costs for their bread and other wheat-containing foods, costs which are set to go up even further next year.

Somehow, this is not quite what either farmers or consumers expected when we first joined the EEC but, as the implications of yet another failed policy sink in, one wonders whether the farmers will finally see the light and round against the EU, which is now doing nothing but add to their woes.

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Not only coal

As the celebrations over the success of "team GB" intensify, Michael Sheriden of The Sunday Times gives us another insight into the dark side of the Chinese Olympic "experience".

Thousands of farmers, he writes, face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.

Thus, while in the capital, foreign dignitaries have gushed over the millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights, just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.

This entirely man-made (or Chinese government-made) disaster is affecting about 31,000 people around Baoding, a city to the south of the capital. Many are said to have lost their homes or land.

In fact, Sheriden is late to the story. We reported in May that areas were being deprived of water to feed the Olympics. But the news agency Reuters was even further ahead of the game, running the story in January. It can still be found archived on The Daily Star (Kuwait edition) website.

Then the agency reported that "dusty villages far from China's capital are paying their own price for the government's plan to stage a postcardـperfect Olympic Games, enduring shrunken crops, drained wells and contention over lost land and homes."

China, at that time, was rushing to finish canals to pump 300 million cubic metres of "emergency" water to Beijing for its "green" Games, ensuring a lush, sparkling host city would greet the world in August. Works included 300 miles of channels (pictured) and pipes cut into Hebei province, to take water from farming country already beset by drought and environmental strains.

Thus, as we noted earlier, Chinese provinces are not only going short of coal and electricity - to say nothing of food – to feed the Olympics (something picked up by American Thinker after Obama's facile comments) but water as well.

Therefore, for those who believe that China has put on such a wonderful display, there are probably at least 30,000 Chinese who think otherwise – not that they matter when it comes to the huge ambitions of the IOC and its fellow travellers.

But for those who also believe that China is a great and growing economic power, the fact that it decided to deprive its own hinterland of water in order to stage the Games says something about its fragility. A nation that cannot even keep both its farmers and its swimming pools supplied with water is not one in which there can be any great long-term confidence.

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Joining up the dots …

Of all the terrible things happening in this world, it would be easy to forgive the view that the slow-motion disaster of our waste policy was one of the least important.

However, in the grown up world, there are connections between different policies, not least in terms of the expenditure implications. And where – as is the case – the massive cost of this disaster is draining wealth from the productive economy and adding to the burden of taxation, that has all sorts of implications for expenditure elsewhere.

To put it bluntly – and at its most simplistic – if we are spending billions unnecessarily on waste disposal, which indeed we are, then that money cannot be used to buy more armoured vehicles for our troops in Afghanistan, more day care for elderly people or drugs to treat cancer patients. The money can only be spent once.

So it is that what is happening to Britain's waste is important, something we pointed up in our piece in January 2006 and many times since in the forlorn but continued hope that somewhere, grown-up politicians might take up the issue and actually do something about it.

Traditionally, those grown-up politicians are mostly found in the House of Lords, in theory a repository of wisdom and common sense, where issues of the day are dissected and examined, from which sensible solutions are proposed. But no more.

If there was ever a good example of the decay in the fabric of our body politic, it is, as Booker points out today in his column, last week's report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Waste Reduction.

There was a time, writes Booker, when, if a Lords committee had been asked to investigate a massive policy failure, a scandal which continues to make daily headlines in the press, it might have made some effort to ask why things had gone so horrendously wrong. But, he says, when twelve peers last week reported on the shambles engulfing the way that Britain disposes of its rubbish, the result was 127 pages of such anodyne verbiage that no one ploughing through it would have any idea that we have a national crisis on our hands.

However, in the comments to his piece on the Telegraph website, Booker is taken to task for making such a broad-brush criticisms when the report ostensibly confines itself to one aspect of the waste policy, namely "waste reduction". But that the inquiry and report have been so tightly framed itself tells a story.

The point, of course, is that their Lordships themselves decide the scope of their own inquiries and, in this event, have focused on one small part of the issue without dealing with the larger problem.

But, from any reading of their report, what immediately becomes apparent is that many of the problems they isolate derive from the framing of the waste policy as a whole. They are a consequence of the broader policy and cannot be addressed without reviewing that policy. In that context, their Lordships are fiddling while Rome burns.

Specifically in terms of their inquiry, industry witnesses constantly refer to the tightness of the definition of waste within the meaning of the EU's waste framework directive. This means that millions of tons of materials which industry could rightly consider as by-products or raw materials becomes defined as waste. By this means – effectively by bureaucratic diktat these materials enter the waste stream, when any more rational policy would have excluded them.

A classic example it the treatment of pulverised fuel ash – the residue from coal burning in our power stations. Some 8 million tons of this is produced each year and it is widely used as a partial cement substitute in the manufacture of breeze blocks, with many other applications in the construction industry.

Yet, despite such uses – a fine example of one industry's waste becoming the raw material for another – it is caught in the EU's definition of waste, with its incumbent costs and bureaucracy.

As a result, contracts for producing grouting material, involving at least 500,000 tons, have been lost as manufacturers have turned to virgin material, the use of which avoids the mind-numbing paperwork and additional costs in dealing with the waste legislation.

Another example was cited by Booker in his column in March 2004. This involved Ross Donovan, the engineer who had developed a heating system fuelled by the used cardboard packaging that businesses generate in such quantities. More than £300,000 was put into proving its effectiveness, and at every step Mr Donovan consulted the Environment Agency to ensure that it complied fully with EU rules on waste and incineration.

Then at the last minute the agency took another look at the legislation and ruled that Mr Donovan's cardboard was not an "energy source" after all, but "waste", and he would have to fit his furnaces with costly monitoring equipment which would make them unviable. Yet the same fuel obtained directly from a packaging manufacturer would not be "waste", and the rules would not apply.

Once again, solely by bureaucratic diktat, material which would otherwise have had an economic use had been defined as "waste", thereby needlessly entering the waste stream.

Yet another example we gave recently, where the burden of bureaucratic controls had rendered the widespread use of anaerobic digesters uneconomic, thereby again causing - by now – millions on tons of material to enter the waste stream when it could have been used to generate heat or electricity, and produce high volumes of peat substitute for use by gardeners.

This is but one aspect which is glossed over by the Lords, a single facet of the waste policy which, if addressed, would have more impact than the whole of the recommendations they actually made.

Dealing with a report of 127 pages, however, we cannot in the space of one post, even begin to do justice to its fatuity – and, if we did, no one would read it. Nor indeed did the media read the report when it was published last week, relying instead – as usual – on the pre-digested press release which told them what to think.

Thus did the Lords get away with, as Booker puts it, babbling on about the need for "waste prevention to be integrated into sustainable business models", while they welcomed "the establishment of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement".

Even their suggestion that the government should lower VAT rates to "promote the development of sustainable products" passed by the media without critical comment. They don't even seem to know, Booker remarks, that VAT rates cannot be lowered without permission from our real government in Brussels - the one which set all this disaster in train in the first place.

Between our legislators and our gifted media, it seems there is no chance of us ever learning of the extent to which the EU has destroyed our systems of governance, nor what its depredations are costing us. And, if they are not prepared to do the job, who will?

COMMENT THREAD

Oppression begins at home

Courtesy of the Irish Times, we get some entertaining comments from businessman Ulick McEvaddy.

Chief executive of Omega Air, he is barely known outside his native Ireland but was a "big cheese" in the Irish "no" campaign. And yesterday he was holding forth at the Humbert summer school in Ballina, Co Mayo, where delegates were raking over the fate of the constitutional Lisbon treaty.

At this venue, we are told, he likened the EU commission to a Soviet-era politburo which attempted to enforce its rule over smaller states. "The orders come from Brussels rather than Moscow now. This is the kind of dictatorship we are talking about." He added: "The EU lacks the KGB, thankfully."

As to the treaty itself, McEvaddy called for it to be "slimmed down" to a mere 20 pages, unlike the current 500-page document. "The US constitution is a simple document, it covers 50 states, comes in a passport-size format and every US schoolchild is familiar with it," he said.

He then went on to say that the EU administration model was wrong from the start and successive treaties have tried unsuccessfully to correct it. "In Lisbon," he added, with a fine sense of style, "they were trying to correct it in an unintelligible drivel." Eurocrats, he opined, had "deliberately made the controversial charter unintelligible drivel so us peasants would not be able to understand it".

It was then left to former department of foreign affairs secretary general Noel Dorr, to put the case for the other side, his view being that the "no" result presented a problem for the EU as well as for Ireland. "The EU failed to communicate its message to the citizens in member states, especially in Ireland," Mr Dorr said.

Actually, Dorr is entirely wrong. The EU communicated its message perfectly to the "citizens" and, in Ireland at least, where they had an opportunity to cast a vote, they gave their verdict.

Entertaining though he is, McEvaddy is also wrong. Vile it is, but the EU commission cannot be compared with a Soviet-era politburo. The point about it attempting "to enforce its rule over smaller states" is entirely misplaced.

Time and time again, we have pointed out that the commission rules only through and with the permission of the parliaments of the member states, and with the connivance of their governments. It is not the brooding presence of a Soviet-style politburo but our own governments and MPs who conspire together to foist the rule of the EU upon us.

As for a politburo, the nearest thing is the much-misunderstood European Council, comprising the heads of states and governments of the member states. They are the people who hold this construct together and it is they who manipulate and exploit the system to circumvent our democratic structures and lines of accountability.

That is the message Mr McEvaddy should be broadcasting. Oppression, like charity, begins at home.

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A high water mark?

As Russia replaces its combat troops with "peacekeepers" in Georgia, thereby making a mockery of the international "community" and in particular M. Sarkozy who brokered what passes for the withdrawal deal, the commentators are picking over the bones of what is left of the EU's fabled common foreign policy.

Pre-eminent in this noble task is John O'Sullivan who notes how the conflict in Georgia has brought into focus the stark divisions in the political structure of the world, arguing that it "is really a three-way struggle between authoritarians, national democrats, and global legalists."

And, while one might expected the "global legalists" to have rushed to the barricades to defend the "international norms", the odd thing, writes O'Sullivan, is that when the crisis broke, it was the national democrats from whom the show of solidarity with the Georgians came.

Thus, he avers, the EU argument that pooling sovereignty leads to greater real power proved to be a sham - it led in practice to collective impotence and self-deception. This post-modern war has proved the limits of soft power and the emptiness of global legalism without roots in democratic support.

If the Georgian conflict has proved a blow to the self-esteem and ambitions of the "colleagues", however, already the camp followers are attempting to pick up the pieces.

In the Irish Times this weekend, John Palmer - founding political director of the European Policy Centre in Brussels and previously European editor of The Guardian - makes a case for a new post-conflict relationship between the EU and its eastern neighbours.

Amazingly, he argues for a "United Commonwealth of Europe", which would include Russia and the former Soviet satellites, within the framework of the Council of Europe. This, suggests, would replicate the EU's own arrangement for deciding issues of mutual interest "through both co-operation and a degree of sovereignty sharing."

Acknowledging that Russia under Putin's authoritarian rule "may neither qualify for nor be interested in membership" (how could he do otherwise - when did Russia ever "share" sovereignty?), Palmer still contends that this is a strategy which would attract Russian democrats who have always aspired to be part of "the European family".

But, at the heart of Palmer's piece is a lament that the European Union could play a more constructive role only "if it could overcome its own internal divisions," with that observation that "EU governments seem bereft of ideas for a long-term strategy to overcome a looming new division on the Eurasian continent."

Indeed, that is the reality. As my co-editor so often observes, there is no common interest between the 27 disparate states of the EU and without that, it is difficult to see how they can cobble together a coherent – or any – long-term strategy.

This, though, does not mean it will not continue trying to pull its mad edifice together and, come the autumn political season, we will see many pronouncements from the "colleagues" on the direction to take.

Nevertheless, more and more, it is becoming apparent that the EU is a wounded animal, stranded by its own unrealistic ambitions, compounded by its complete lack of ability to deliver. All the talk in the world will not fix this problem, which can only get worse as that inconvenient reality continues to intrude. In Georgia, therefore, we may just have seen the high-water mark of European ambitions.

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