Parliamentary outreach

The great irony in the stoods seeking to storm the Houses of Parliament building during their demo last week is that they retain some residual ideas that parliament still means anything. But the same fantasy also appears to afflict Speaker John Bercow.

This dire individual is spending £500,000 of our money on a "parliamentary outreach" project to promote Westminster, a self-appointed task that involves him taking part in more than 20 extremely expensive trips around the country. Such is the profligacy of a project originally costed at £165,000 that even some MPs are beginning to question it, not least Tory MP Brian Binley.

However, when the bovine MPs voted this ghastly man as speaker, they already knew exactly what he was like. It is a bit late now to be complaining that he is an oxygen thief. But then, he was also voted in as an MP at the general election by members of the public, so we rather get what we deserve.

That seems to be another dimension to the equation, where the most dismal of public figures, who should be led to the stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables, seem to have no difficulty getting elected to public office. If democracy is going to work at least tolerably well, then people must use their votes intelligently. There seems to be no sign of that happening.

Speaking of bovine MPs, we learn from elsewhere that a few (too few) Tory MPs are getting a tad hacked off with their leader, not least (but not exclusively) because of his enthusiasm for the warmist religion. These few seem to be on the point of rebellion, set to tell Euroslime Dave where to get off.

It would be nice to think that such a rebellion could actually amount to anything, but the rot has probably gone too far in what was once the Conservative Party for it to make any difference. We are going to have to indulge in our own form of outreach before a real message gets through.

In passing, though, it is worth recalling that the Daily Mail got all worked up about the damage done by the stoods on their demo costing about £500,000 – and here we have with a certain amount of symmetry the Speaker wasting £500,000. In terms, there is actually very little difference. In each case, we are half-a-million lighter. There are, it would seem, as many vandals inside Parliament as out.

COMMENT THREAD

Not waving but scrounging

The starkest fact of the week - according to Booker - is that, while the stoods are being stuffed for £2.9 billion to keep the education budget down, £2.9 billion is precisely the sum we are being forced to dole out to the jungle bunnies so that they can buy windmills, solar panels and new Mercedes cars for their rulers and their entourages.

Since all these stoods are dead keen on saving the planet and being nice to jungle bunnies, they surely can't possibly object to paying up to £9,000 a year for their degrees. They must, therefore, agree to the sacrifice if it means that they are making a contribution to slowing planetary heating to 3.2 degrees instead of the fantasmagorically super-critically dangerous four degrees that we would achieve otherwise - if Messrs Gore, Jones, Mann et al are to be believed.

But then, as Booker also points out, we are all going to have to sacrifice if we are to reach this massively important target, so we can hardly complain if that wonderful Lord Stern is inventing even more delicious ways of relieving us of our cash, while at the same time making sure that we save energy by having to sit in the dark for prolonged periods as the electricity runs out.

On the other hand, some of us might actually find this cash deprivation exercise as offensive as others find our use of the term "jungle bunnies". But then, I reckon that if we are being forced to contribute so heavily to their wealth and wellbeing, we have earned the right to label our beneficiaries as we please. Beggars can't be choosers.

If they want to stand on their dignity, and demand more "appropriate" descriptions, then they can buy their own damn windmills ... and limousines. Me, I'm just getting a little fed up with the idea that we have to smile sweetly and be ever-so-polite while the scroungers of the world unite to rip us off. Respect is a two-way street.

COMMENT THREAD

All deals are off

Very much as anticipated, the climate summit at Cancun in Mexico is not going well for the Greenies. The Wall Street Journal does a tolerably good job of reporting what is happening, telling us that the fate of the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty "appeared uncertain". The treaty on the issue has "stalled" amid a stalemate among the US, China, Japan and other nations.

This is reflected in The Guardian, which tells us that "Deadlock over Kyoto means Cancún talks have little to show after two weeks". It adds that: "Cancún climate talks turning into a never-ending global talking shop, say many of the ministers involved". A later report tells us that a $100 billion Jungle Bunny Bribe has been agreed - otherwise known as the "Green Climate Fund" - to be paid over by 2020. No doubt a goodly proportion will be be passed to the Mercedes dealers of the developing world to keep the ruling élites and their NGO pals in the comfort they most certainly do not deserve.

That, it seems, is about the only definitive agreement to emerge from the talks. Even then the idea of the fund is not new - that was agreed in principle at Copenhagen. Only the name of the fund seems to be newly minted, while everything else of substance seems to be on hold until the next summit. There is even a set-back for REDD, in that this has been firmly decoupled from carbon trading.

Around the edges, we also see that carbon capture has taken a hit, while investors are being forced to rethink renewable energy, all of which makes a complete nonsense of any British attempts to reduce CO2 emissions.

By any rational analysis, the global warming scare should be dead in the water – especially after the weather of last week – but we are not dealing with rationality here. The quasi religious aspects of this scare – and the opportunities afforded for creating new taxes and business opportunities – will continue to drive it, long after it should be dead and buried. Thus we find DECC and others working on a scheme to stitch us up with yet more costs on yet another half-baked scheme.

Interestingly, this mess is one of the things getting to Autonomous Mind. Like many of us, he sees that the rules of the game have changed. When our political élites have so lost touch with reality, where the future of our democracy, sovereignty and liberty is threatened and peaceful protest continues to have no effect, direct action is justified. What is good enough for the Greenies and the students must become grist to our mills.

The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, huffs and puffs about the right to be angry being "no excuse for violence", forgetting of course that the state is also a perpetrator of violence. Its excuse is that it is upholding the rule of law, but when the administration lacks legitimacy, that excuse is increasingly thin. Thus, while "being angry" may not justify violence, state indifference to the basic precepts of democracy is a different matter.



Ripping us off for increasingly large amounts of money to feed their global warming obsession is as near as it gets to a total breakdown of consent and while the current focus - of both the government and the media - is on the students and "yoof", they ain't seen nothing yet. They may be learning a few hard lessons about politics (above) but there is also a different kind of smouldering anger waiting to erupt. The clever-dick commentators may yet find they are looking in the wrong direction - as they so often do.

COMMENT THREAD

Why are they asking him?

"David Cameron called upon to stop climate change talks becoming a 'zombie conference'" – headlines The Daily Telegraph, over the immortal copy of Louise Gray.

In the article itself, the dreadful Huhne is being cited by the fair Louise, saying that the "knife-edge" talks in Mexico are in danger of becoming a "car crash" if countries cannot compromise. And she wants a zombie to move in and prevent that happening?

COMMENT: GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

Vintage Dellers

"Think of Dave as the secret love child of Mussolini and Ted Heath and you'll begin to understand what a heap of trouble this country is in".

He just gets better - even if I don't completely agree with him. And how boring would that be?

Somehow, I don't think Churchill would have been too upset at "Leninist scuzzballs" urinating on his statue. On the occasion of his first visit to the Rhine in 1945, the great man was seen to do precisely the same thing.

COMMENT: VIOLENCE THREAD

No monopoly of violence

One would like to think that those who attempted to trash Charlie's car last night were protesting against his green idiocy. We can all dream, but that one would be more of a fantasy. Several things do emerge from the incident, however – not least that so unprepared was the Prince that he had to be warned to wind up his window to stop attackers throwing things inside the car.

The man is probably so detached from reality that he probably thinks he shares the popularity of his grandma. One thing is for sure, being a Greenie hasn't done him any favours.

One also notes that there are questions being asked about the "intelligence" of the police in allowing the royal car down such a vulnerable route, although it has to be said that only politicians could be asking whether the police have any intelligence. The rest of us already know the answer.

As for the stoods ... they may or may not have been responsible for attempting to trash the royals, but in return they have been so royally screwed that they don't even begin to understand how badly.

Not least of the problems for so many is the destruction of the polytechnics and the conversion of so many well-founded technical and vocational courses into ersatz degree courses, which now attract tuition fees. The previous structures, flawed though they were, were far better than are available now, the current situation thus conforming with the standard public service paradigm – less for more (money).

What is interesting though is that some students are getting a real education out of all this – one for which there are no direct tuition fees. That lesson, of course, is that violence always pays. That is how you get the attention of the ruling élite. To say otherwise is to believe the establishment lie for, in the final analysis, the state relies on violence to get its way (try not paying your Council Tax and you'll find out for yourself).

Despite Scotland Yard condemning the "outrageous and increasing levels of violence", therefore (they would, wouldn't they), it is occasionally useful to remind those in power that they do not hold the monopoly of violence. If that means giving the heir to the throne and his wife a bit of a fright, that also is no bad thing.

Soon enough though, we are going to have to show the stoods how to do the big picture as well. Yesterday looks to have been amateurs' night out.

COMMENT THREAD

Reckless disclosure

Readers might have noticed that I've been keeping out of the WikiLeaks controversy. And now, Louis B Susman, the current US Ambassador to the UK has pronounced on the issue. He writes:

WikiLeaks styles itself a whistle blowing organisation. This is not whistle blowing. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people. There is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends ...

The need for confidential discussions is not unique to diplomacy. Lawyers, doctors and journalists (yes, journalists) all need a space of trust for important communications. But it is central to diplomacy, and this breach in confidentiality – even if it did not come from the state department – shows a disregard for the wellbeing of countless individuals.

The whole piece is worth reading – and there is a lot with which I could agree. Whistle blowing is justified when it exposes an egregious wrong, the extent of which is so serious as to warrant the breach of trust involved, AND the good done far exceeds any harm done by the disclosure.

Nothing so far revealed by the WikiLeaks cables would seem to justify the wholesale release of the material.  That's why I've not gone overboard about them.

COMMENT THREAD

Scraprod

Not the Nimrod MR4 any more, but £3.6 billions-worth of scrap. And who made this glorious cock-up? Well, the contract for the design, development and production of the Nimrod MR4 was signed in December 1996. That seems to have been on the Tory watch - Mr Portaloo, I believe.

COMMENT THREAD

Are they incompetent?

Or just incompetent? The choice is yours but, it turns out, that is the only one you get.

COMMENT THREAD

No way back

Doubtless, the focus of the London-based political wonks and media is currently the tuition fee controversy. But, in the long run, this will turn out to be of marginal and transitory importance. By far the more important issue is the weather and, in particular, the news that the Scottish government is considering calling in the Army to deal with the crisis.

This is after the recent snowfall in Edinburgh, the heaviest the city has seen for about 50 years, with temperatures expected to stay resolutely below freezing throughout Scotland - and elsewhere in England where we have just experienced the coldest period since records began in 1659.

The warmists may have an explanation for this which satisfies their own acolytes and which looks vaguely plausible from a scientific point of view. But most people are not scientists, and their trust in the warmist dogma has reached record lows, matched only by the low temperatures. It might be said that there are no atheists in the trenches, but there are certainly no warmists in the snowdrifts. And with Cancun also suffering record lows three days in a row, global warming as a credible concept is shot to pieces.

The politics and media wonks, however, have never really understood how intensely political warmist theology is. Obsessed with their own narrow concerns, they will therefore fail to recognise this turning point for what it is. But from this point onwards you will see a stiffening of resistance to the burdens imposed by the politicians in the name of saving the planet, together with increasing hostility to the warmist message and its supporters.

Thus, what we are seeing currently is not just bad weather but a uniquely political event, the effects of which will be as profound as they are unrecognised. Yet, even as one forecast suggests an intensification of conditions, we have that suicidal idiot Lord Stern wanting to levy an annual £15 billion Green Tax - costing an average £600 per household - to buy windmills and solar panels for jungle bunnies.

It is not going to go away in a hurry. There is too much money in the scare. But, with this sort of idiocy rampant, there is no way back for the warmists. We need "Dexter" on an industrial scale (a meaningless reference unless you've seen the series).

COMMENT: GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

A perfect storm

Scottish first minister Alex Salmond admitted his government had been "caught out" by a "perfect storm" of heavy snow and bitter cold.

But if Mr Salmond had spent a fraction of the time spent on his fatuous climate change agenda on cold weather contingency planning, he and his government perhaps would not have been caught out so badly. His problem, therefore, is this not so much a "perfect storm" of heavy snow and bitter cold as a "perfect storm" of stupidity.

And that is a perfect model for the broader policy issues. While he and his likes fritter away their time and our money on "saving the planet", our electricity supplies are allowed to deteriorate for want of intelligent planning.

COMMENT THREAD

A tale of two I-lands

Ambrose looks at the latest situation and offers this:

Yet the underlying tale of Ireland and Iceland, and the tale of the 1930s, is that a devaluation shock may cause a violent crisis – that looks and feels terrible while it happens – but the slow-burn of policy austerity and debt deflation does more damage in the end.

Did the prime minister of Iceland lose his job, and is Cowen still in power? Just. Does that explain anything?

COMMENT: IRISH THREAD

A winter of discontent

Workers at National Grid, we are told, will be voting today on whether to take industrial action in a row over pay. The result is due on 5 January. So far, they have rejected a three-year offer worth 2.5 percent from 1 July this year, and 2.25 percent for each of the following years. The starter sum, they say, is less half the inflation rate of 5.1 percent for 2010.

Says Emily Boase, national officer for Prospect – one of the three unions involved - "Members think that's unfair, since National Grid has seen a 12 percent increase in pre-tax profits and an eight percent increase in dividends. That's thanks to dedication and hard work by staff, who feel affronted to be so undervalued."

The clincher though is the treatment of National Grid's directors. Five of them five feature in the Labour Research Department's league table of the ten highest paid directors in the UK.

That this should be used as an excuse, though, is entirely unreasonable. Just because chief executive Steve Holliday took home a package worth £2.27 million for the year 2010, and the "five" took home between them £7.26 million is neither here nor there. The plebs should know their place.

COMMENT THREAD

Different planets

There is a sort of unreality about current politics – and just about everything else, especially what we see in the media which seems to belong to a completely different world.

The reality for millions of people in the UK is the global warming lying thick on the ground – in particular in Scotland. There, hundreds of thousands of people have gone through 24 hours of misery, so much so that Scottish politicians are bickering about the lack of preparedness, while the Met Office is trying to dodge the blame for getting its forecast wrong. That reality is expressed by a Guardian comment:

I'm really angry that they weren't better prepared for the snowfall. The roads hadn't been gritted and I never once saw a snowplough.

I was stuck on a bus from Glasgow to Hamilton. 3hrs queuing at the bus depot, then 9hrs on the bus with a three year old and a baby. We were told there were some delays, but no one thought to mention that it would be so long! Thankfully people on the bus had milk in their groceries and people were coming out there houses with biscuits handing them round cars. My couple hour trip into Glasgow turned into a 28hr trip in total.

People shouldn't have to sleep in their cars, go without food, water, or toilet facilities, because the roads weren't gritted.

The further reality is that the Daily Mail and others are warning that we can expect the global warming to move south by morning, where we are similarly unprepared. A lot of people are going to be trying to carry on with their lives, yet will be struggling to deal with the collapse in the transport infrastructure that happens every time the temperature falls.

Yet none of this registers on the political horizon – still less the prospect of massive energy bills being stacked up, with the UK drawing down record amounts of power, the system increasingly at risk of failure. As far as the politicians go, this makes no one whit of difference to what passes as their thinking as they sit idly by as we are poised to run us out of electricity and money. Their reality is the prattle in the press.

Also failing to register with the impact it deserves are the rumblings coming out of Germany about the euro, and the budget situation in Ireland. There, the Irish government has won the first parliament vote on its 2011 austerity budget, but the drama is far from over. It is going to be until Thursday evening before we see the shape of things to come and, according to some sources, the process is not expected to be wrapped up until early next year.

The distance between "our" reality and what the media and the politicians are trying to tell us are important is now so great that it is getting harder and harder to relate to what they are telling us. This is seriously and disturbingly bizarre.

COMMENT THREAD

Some would like to think

... that this was deliberate, where police officers on their way to an EDL demo "thought they were going to die" after eating contaminated chicken and tuna sandwiches.

But it can't have been that bad. From my recollection, in the first stage of Staph aureus food poisoning you are worried that you are going to die. But, in the next stage of a really bad dose, your real worry is that you're not. Better luck next time.

COMMENT THREAD

Dirty deeds

It looks as if we are in for interesting times with the Irish budget. Dirty deeds are afoot - and memories are long.

COMMENT: IRISH THREAD

Out of their tiny minds

Adair Turner and his climate change committee are offering recommendations (if one can thus dignify such insanity) on how to cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2030.

Not least of their effluvia, they want a substantial proportion of UK car fleet replaced with 11 million electric or hybrid vehicles. At the same time they are suggesting that their 60 percent emissions target is achievable at a cost of less than one percent of GDP.

Taking the cost of the Nissan Leaf – against, say the cost of a new Ford Focus, to replace the entire fleet would cost about £165,000,000,000 over and above the normal retail price of the conventional cars. By my estimation, that additional cost is well over ten percent of GDP.

That, of course, is only the start. For these vehicles to be "emission-free", the electricity they use must come from renewables or nuclear. And the Turner mob have not even begun to work out the price for doing that - but it would be additional to the cost of meeting the current base load.  Has anyone done the calculations - the cost of providing electric capacity to charge up 11 million vehicles?  Then there is the cost of the charging points.

More dangerous, though, are the committee's plans to rig the market for electricity, which don't even bear thinking about. Amusingly though, nothing of what they propose can be done without EU approval, and new EU legislation would be required, which would probably make it a non-starter.

Overall though, this illustrates once again the complete detachment of the ruling classes from reality. Huhne is planning formally to respond to the report in the Spring - instead of a snort of derision, which would have taken him five seconds. A Bronx Raspberry might have taken slightly longer. The latter, one suggests, should be the response to his endeavours.

COMMENT THREAD

Under-estimation

To add to their woes, areas of North Yorkshire underwent prolonged electricity blackouts yesterday evening, possibly reflecting a system under serious stress. National demand is considerably above expectations, reaching a peak of 60GW yesterday evening – with spot prices at £423 per MWh, compared with minimum cost level at less than £40.

What is also significant is the temperature graph (illustrated above). It shows estimates in three bands, with the actual out-turn also shown. The current low temperatures are well below the lowest band predicted – still more evidence that this cold weather has caught the authorities out.

Meanwhile, Scotland is taking another hit. Contacts in Dunfermline gave us precise depth measurements – 33 inches of snow to date (cumulative). Drifts, of course, are very much deeper.

The only compensation is the Ecologist (prop. Zac Goldsmith) squawking about "Big Oil" paying for the climate change exhibition in the Science Museum – something you read on this blog - while The Independent is lamenting the more "neutral" tone.

But if the warmists are now in disarray, it is only because they – like the authorities – are still failing to spot the signs. Even last year we were noting that "global warming" was coloured white and measured in inches. By the end of this current spell, it is going to be measured in feet. We should enjoy their discomfort.

COMMENT THREAD

Follow the money

"The misuse of CERs is undermining EU's credibility in its fight against climate change ... " says New Europe. That, of course, makes several assumptions, the first being that the EU has any credibility. But the more immediate issue is that the misuse of CERs is having any significant effect. It should. After all, this is a major scandal.

But, apart from Booker, neither the media nor the sceptic blogs seem right interested. So another billion-dollar fraud – like REDD – goes unchecked, while the warmists gear up to line their pockets with another scare. As always, follow that money ... there doth the slime reside.

COMMENT THREAD

A tidal wave of stupidity

The "hottest year" is a miasma. Yet the spending goes on, the regulation continues unchecked and the brown-soft-squidgy-stuff-for-brains MPs continue to sell us out from the luxury of their over-heated offices. And this happens as UK temperatures are set to plummet again. We are really starting to feel the cold, day-after-day, when even the central heating does not fully cope.

Completely oblivious to the piles of steaming ordure on his own doorstep, Gordon Brown is reinventing himself as the great statesman. The coming decade could witness ''the decline of the West'' if Britain and other Western powers fail to respond to the rise of Asian economies like China, he says. The thing about such pronouncements is – tested against similar profundities made throughout history – is that they are invariably wrong.

No end of brighter and far better informed people look at China and other Asian economies and see nothing but a highly unstable bubble. Yet, such is the power of the myth that the likes of Brown will continue with his own brand of warnings for as long as prattlers are prepared to listen.

The ultimate indictment, I suppose, is that under his very nose, the wealth of the working population declines, while the benefits-and-thieving classes prosper under the protection of the indolent and over-paid police. And, if the average guy in the street still can't see what is coming, the latest tax hike might help concentrate minds. Breath is not being held, however.

One small comfort is that the Met Office is admitting to being slightly wrong on some of its long-term climate projections – although it rushes to tell us that the rest of them, like their forecasts for this winter, are perfectly sound.

Interestingly enough they were concerned about "the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean's conveyor belt". What they should have been concerned about is the shutdown of their own brains – and noted that the coming issue is the shutdown of society. Above-the-line projections are most often wrong, but you usually find in history voices from the "little people" that have it right.

And they, on this freezing Monday morning, would have it that the tidal wave is coming, but it ain't water. As we see with the foolish Hancock, the greater threat is the tidal wave of stupidity – of which there is an endless supply.

COMMENT THREAD

Your average Lib-Dim

This is what you get when you vote Lib-Dim. This total, vain 64-year-old idiot takes on a 25-year-old glamorous Russian, gives her a job and parliamentary pass – handing her at least three years' access to official documents on defence policy. And now she is suspected of being a spy.

Writes The Guardian:

Its name means "the unravelling of the senses". And with its fine Alsace food and excellent wine, the L'Éveil des Sens restaurant in Strasbourg was the perfect place for a political meeting.

Four times a year members of the Council of Europe's liberal group gathered here on a Sunday evening to relax amid the frescoes and to discuss private business. Among their number was Mike Hancock, the flamboyant rebel Liberal Democrat MP from Portsmouth South. But while other delegates from the council's parliamentary assembly turned up alone, Hancock typically appeared with a glamorous young Russian woman, colleagues said. Sometimes he even brought two.

"They were all the same type: long-legged, good-looking blondes, never older than 25, fluent in French, English and often German, and with a higher education," Mátyás Eörsi, the former head of the European liberal group, which includes Nick Clegg's Lib Dems, said today.

"I've been in Strasbourg since 2004. I remember at least five of Mike's Russian female assistants," said another group member, who declined to be named.

What do these people do for brains?

COMMENT THREAD

Get out of the way

Peter Hitchens observes that "the eternal coalition" would be perfect for politicians and lousy for the rest of us.  He seems to be one of the few commentators who have not lost their way, especially with Peter Oborne having gone native, writing the most unbelievable tosh.

That man is now almost on a par with Matthew d'Ancona, whose low order garbage has long since ceased to be readable. Their outpouring are simply bubble-speak, the same disease that has overtaken ToryBoyDiary (which has gone from good to garbage in a series of short, but easy steps) and the Speccitwats.

Hitchens, though, also points to the outcome of a continued Cleggeron pact, which would then have the third party actually agreeing with it on almost everything. What a perfect outcome for the political class, he writes: two liberal parties in permanent power, pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, anti-marriage, warmist. And an Opposition that doesn't oppose.

To avoid this - as we suggested earlier - not only should the Not-The-Tory-Party and the Lib-Dims combine permanently, they should go further and take in Labour to form a single party. That is what is really needed, regularising a situation where the political classes have aligned with themselves against the people.

Once the bed-blockers have been cleared out of the way, space would be created for a genuine opposition party which, we suspect, would not remain in opposition very long.

Either way, we need to build a coherent opposition in the country. A situation where we are offered a choice between the Cleggerons and Ed Miliband's Labour is more than intolerable. It is a very sick joke. However, looking to the American Tea Party model is not going to work – certainly the name is not appropriate for the British.

On the other hand, a loose network of like-minded people could work – the Million Angry People concept. This would be a group prepared to support independent candidates and push past the current electoral stitch-up. The choice belongs to us. We either roll over (and get shafted like the Irish), letting them take over, or we can roll them over and take back what is ours.

It is time, methinks, for the latter. We need to be able to say: get out of the way - we're coming through.

COMMENT THREAD

It's the politics stoopid

I meant to put this link up from Dellers. He is taking exactly the right line, mocking the warmists unmercifully (seen above, at prayer). You cannot deal seriously with people who believe that all and any natural phenomena they observe are "climate impacts" and will attempt to argue that the current freezing weather is caused by global warming.

Even the old pornographer can see the writing on the wall. From Can'tcun, the Pachauri is saying: "... it's just a matter of time before the public realises what we're in for ... ". He's dead right. Perhaps he had been told what was going on in Malta, where they are not too keen on rival religions and have told Greenie demonstrators to get stuffed.

Soon enough, the whole shambolic belief system will collapse. Such systems always do. We are confronted with the scare dynamic, here. And scares, as a social phenomenon, have structures and obey rules. This one, the global warming scare, is running true to form.

The next problem we have – which has never been addressed properly in any scare – is how to deal with the regulatory overkill. That is always the final phase of a a scare, where the regulators move in to create a vast matrix of laws and controls to address the supposed problems identified.

It is invariably this phase which does the most damage – the regulatory costs, the restraints and distortions to economic activity, and the constraints on personal liberty. They linger on well past the initial phase of the scare and, so far, society has not found an easy means of dealing with them.

Here, the really interesting issue is how scares so easily become exploited by regulators to pursue their specific interests – in what we came to call the doctrine of the "beneficial crisis" - and how slow people are to recognise the dynamic. This, with huge amusement we see in a WUWT post, where there is this observation:

What really strikes us is the fact that all this Copenhagen/Cancun stuff has nothing to do with the Climate, or saving the World. It's about political positioning, money, and plain old fascism cult promotion.

Well, you don't say! And if this is not a recognition of "Ursine subarboreal toilet activity" of the type identified by Dellers, I don't know what is.

The odd thing though is that so many of the clever little politics wonks you meet don't understand the scare dynamic either. They either ignore the scares or take the so-called scientific agenda at face value. They rarely appreciate that the "scare" or "beneficial crisis" is a means of institutional queue-jumping, a means of by-passing institutional inertia and democratic processes.

As always, look at a scare and you will find that science is only the dressing. At the heart, you will find it's the politics stoopid. It always is.

COMMENT THREAD

The Climate Reich

What we are seeing here is one of the greatest collective flights from reality in the history of the human race. As western Europe shivers to a halt and our energy bills soar through the roof, the time has come when we should all start to get seriously angry with our politicians for being carried away by all this claptrap.

So writes Booker who asks why, when our public debt is still rising by £3 billion a week, do we allow our Government to ring-fence £2.9 billion of our money to help the developing world to build useless wind turbines and solar panels? He also asks why we tolerate a Parliament which blithely commits us to spending £18.3 billion every year for 40 years under the Climate Change Act, without having the faintest idea how we are going to keep our lights on?

The answer is because they are no longer afraid of us, and have stopped listening. We do need to get seriously angry.  But that is not enough. We need a Million Angry People out on the streets.

COMMENT THREAD

Yay!

I am sooooo sorrreeeee!

COMMENT THREAD

A benefit of the EU?

Kraft Foods is moving part of its newly acquired Cadbury business to Switzerland in order to reduce its UK tax bill. It is expected that Kraft will have completed this move by next year, relocating a small number of key management posts to its European headquarters in Zurich.

A spokesman for Kraft said: "Since 2006 we have been implementing our European model involving a (holding) company based in Zurich together with local companies in country markets."

Now, wasn't there something about being in the EU, with access to European markets and all that, which made all of this unnecessary? So how is it that a major US multi-national finds it a better option to run its business in Europe from a non-EU country?

COMMENT THREAD

It's not that he's stupid

... m'lud. He's just a Tory. In fact, he's one of that peculiar breed of High Tory that can think out half the story, but then come screeching to a halt because he can't cope with the consequences. That is Charles Moore for you, writing in a paper that deserves to be behind a paywall for its own protection.

At least with Moore's piece, though, you only have to read the strap to get the gist: "As the euro founders, Britain must make a bolder case for root-and-branch reform," we are told.

There you have it. After making the case that the EU is a profoundly dysfunctional organisation, he does the old Tory trick of arguing for "reform". How one would go about attaining that desirable state, however, is never specified. Further, when you challenge these people as to how they personally would seek to achieve it, there is either vague talk about "handbags" or silence and an embarrassed shuffling of feet.

That, actually, absolves the likes of Moore from being stupid. Although one seriously wonders. Amongst other things, the man calls for the EU to have a "policy of free trade". How many times does one have to remind these people that the EU is a customs union? This is the very antithesis of free trade – a status which is so fundamental that to change it would mean changing the very nature of the EU.

Whatever else, even if the charge of stupidity does not stick, this type of person is certainly dishonest. But it is a special kind of dishonesty that pretends to address popular concern about the EU when the intention is, in the final analysis, to do absolutely nothing. But then Moore is a Tory.

COMMENT THREAD

Oh, p-leeze!

For this blog, it is well-evident what the main news of the week has been – and hardly surprising, given the personal, political and economic impact of the bad weather. But, reading some reports, you really do wonder which planet some people inhabit. From The Independent, for instance, we have the comment that at 1pm yesterday, more than a quarter (28%) of rail services were not running. Of those able to operate only just over half (53%) were running on time.

But then we get the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) saying that services in south east England and Scotland were the hardest hit. This leads to ATOC chief executive Michael Roberts delivering these immortal words. He says: "We recognise that lessons can be learnt and, in particular, that the whole industry needs to get better at handling disruption."

This, to me seems the classic of the age. Public figures, utilities – you name it - make complete pigs' ears of the jobs they are paid to do and, when they go belly up, we get this trite, lame mantra: "We recognise that lessons can be learnt ... ".

For as long as I can remember, there have been complaints about the inability of the British rail system to handle bad weather. More recently (1991), we had that famous excuse of the wrong type of snow - now almost 20 years ago. Still they don't get their act together, treating bad weather as if it was some strange, rare act of God that is beyond the wit of man to deal with.

The only trouble is that these same people are endlessly inventive when it comes to reasons why we should pay them more for deteriorating services. In this topsy-turvy world, "learning lessons" is simply a means of fobbing us off with the hope that, in the distant, unspecified future, things might actually improve.

As always, though, we have allowed this to happen. My own "lessons learned" suggest that we definitely need a MAP – a Million Angry People – on the street. I guess that is a Road MAP ... but one with a difference. Until we can do this, the likes of Mr Michael Roberts will continue taking us for fools - and we will be the fools for letting them.

COMMENT THREAD

Fianna Fails

According to Reuters, citing a Red C/Irish Sun poll, support for Ireland's governing Fianna Fail has nosedived, dropping to 13 percent of first preference votes. This puts it fourth in the league table, behind Fine Gael, Labour and – for the first time – Sinn Fein.

Prime minister Brian Cowen sees his personal popularity plummet to an all-time low of eight percent.

COMMENT: IRISH THREAD

Now they decide

It is one of the coldest days of the year, so the local electricity morons decide that a fault that has existed for God knows how many years must urgently be fixed. So, having dug a hole, they disconnect us, leaving us without heating, computers and telephones - all with about half an hour's warning. Then the "workmen" piss off to have their sarnies and tea in their vans.

We are, now, back on ... at last. Mind you, it might have been a little bit earlier if the workmen had not had to recover their equipment and the contents of their toolboxes from the bottom of the trench. But there you go. Accidents do happen.

Talking of morons, I see that the oh-so-grand Roger Highfield has been drafted in to the Daily Scarygraph to do a spot of damage limitation – trying to convince us that, despite the freezing weather, "the World Meteorological Organisation announced that 2010 is almost certain to rank among the three warmest years since records began in 1850".

Also, it has long been accepted, writes the egregious Highfield, that one of the effects of climate change could be an increase in the frequency of harsher, Continental-style winters. Of course, one of the effects of a period of cooling could be an increase in the frequency of harsher, Continental-style winters. But that doesn't seem to have occurred to the Great Man.

One just wishes that the paper would hurry up and retreat behind its paywall, so we can forget all about it, just like the ... er ... the ... er ... whatever it was that suddenly disappeared. It is nice to see, however, that the Göbbels of climate change, Vicky Pope, is stuck in Gatwick, unable to get to Can'tcun to tell them how hot it is – because there is too much snow. Still, at least she is still alive - unlike some other poor souls.

One might hope that this stupid woman might actually learn something from the experience, but that is highly unlikely. She has too much money invested in being wrong to change tack right now. It will take cyanide and a pistol in a bunker before she manages to change what passes for a mind.

COMMENT THREAD

Prattling while the plebs freeze

Dellers is on fine form, stonking the climate change zealots, and drawing our attention to the Bastardi person who says we ain't seen nuttin' yet.

In any other circumstances, it would then be the height of comedy to learn that Prince Charles has descended from his fairy land to open the Science Museum's climate change gallery. This £4 million extravaganza is officially a "Climate Science" gallery, hastily renamed after "Climategate", prior to which it was going to be called the "climate change gallery" - which is, er ... exactly what it is being called, unofficially of course.

The huge fun here, of course, is that one of the main sponsors is Royal Dutch Shell, so it is "Big Oil" pushing the boat out - as it always has done, giving far more money to the lucrative climate change industry than it ever has the sceptics.

There was a time, of course, when the Science Museum did science, but now - as the sponsorship indicates - it is part of the corporate-govermental nexus, much approved by the BBC, up to its ears in EU money and networking, selling corporate dogma and belief systems.

And that is what it has come to, which is now clearer than ever as Britain freezes and the fools at Cancun prance. The good news there is that Japan has refused to extend the Kyoto agreement – a vhighly symbolic development, it having been the host to the original climate talks which spawned the agreement.

Needless to say, though, Louise Gray is out there with her daily scare, adding to the waves of derision greeting the increasingly fatuous Daily Telegraph, as the little girlie prattles about "ocean acidification". This is one of those classic science hoaxes which only a science-free newspaper could embrace without dissolving into laughter. Read this, by Dennis Ambler and it will tell you all you need to know.

But then, this isn't about science – it never has been. Like Dellers, we are gradually learning that the way to deal with it is to expose it for what it is – a series of mantras designed to support a belief system which in turn shores up a failed and increasingly oppressive power system, all sustained by fools and rent-seekers.

Small wonder that Prince Charles will waft through the snow today to open up the "climate change" gallery, with the BBC there to applaud, prattling while the plebs freeze.

COMMENT THREAD

The march of the incompetents

Yesterday saw the ultimate humiliation of that fool Cameron, who was unwise enough to allow himself to get involved in the England world cup bid. It is no business of a man who purports to be a prime minister of a once great nation to meddle in such issues, even without taking into account the very high risk of failure.

But then, the euroslime hasn't had a particularly good week of it, with Bruno Waterfield reporting that he has failed in his endeavour to cut back the EU framework budget for the next spending round.

The lad was trying to get a budget cut from the current level of 1.1 percent of Gross National Income to 0.85 percent – but even this modest reduction is something the "colleagues" have failed to agree on, leaving him high and dry.

Then, in a week where snow and freezing weather has brought the UK screeching – or slithering – to a halt, we now have good evidence that HMG has been unduly influenced by the Boy's global warming obsession - proof that they are under-estimating the extent to which we are in a cooling cycle.

It would appear that the Department of Work and Pensions has budgeted only £40 million for the whole winter, to cover cold weather payments. Yet the early bout of arctic weather has already triggered £100 million of extra benefits spending.

Of course, if energy prices had not been artificially inflated by a combination of government policy and incompetence – if there is a difference – there would be no need for cold weather payments, which kick in when temperatures are recorded as falling to freezing point over seven consecutive days.

And, given that last year's winter payment amounted to almost £300 million, and this year's winter is already colder, earlier, it looks as if Cameron and his little mates might have to find at least an equivalent sum, if not considerably more.

If the man had spent a little more time on evaluating policy areas for which he is responsible, if he listened to the right people, and then avoided the facile displacement activity in which he has so recently indulged, he might at least have saved himself (and us) some embarrassment - and possibly a few hundred million as well.

But then, that would actually require a degree of competence and political intelligence, neither of which we are likely to get out of this man.

Yet into Zurich went David Cameron, making promises of not only billions for an England World Cup but billions more to help FIFA spread the football gospel around the world.

And nor, for once, are we entirely on our own here, with Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail railing at our incompetents. He writes:

After the embarrassment which followed, our student protesters are entitled ask why the nigh-on £15 million squandered on this ill-begotten venture was not better spent on providing them with a university education. England never had a chance yet they carried on spending lavishly.

By the time they arrived in Zurich - bleating about the media - they were like a football team citing injuries and fatigue as their excuse in advance for losing. Shame on them ... From England yesterday it was a case of too much hot air. Too late.

What did we do to deserve these idiots and this shambles?

COMMENT THREAD

Public stupidity

When it comes to public services, one of the great myths is that there ever was a time when the public sector performed flawlessly and rose to whatever challenge it was confronted with. Generally speaking, at the first sign of stress, public services collapse – the above photograph, taken today as mute testimony. The bins were supposed to be collected Tuesday, before we got yesterday's fall of eight inches of snow.

What is different now – if anything – is that the public authorities are more "in your face", demanding more money while delivering less and less . Additionally, of course, with direct relevance to the current situation, they are spending huge amounts of time and our money on their fools' errand of "climate change", while the country grinds to a halt, and the transport system collapses.

Thus, we get Graham Dalton, the head of the Highways Agency - on a nice comfortable £160-165,000 a year (with the salaries of the executive board costing more than £1 million) - telling us to stay off the roads that we have paid for. Meanwhile, we learn that currently only "£160 million is earmarked to help the country deal with bad weather", a tiny fraction of the spend on "climate change".

It is time therefore to recall that fatuous idiot Dr David Viner who so gaily told us in The Independent ten years ago that "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past".  Then, Viner was a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, from which seat of learning he so cleverly informed us that within a few years winter snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event".

What is worse is that Viner is still on the public payroll, working for the British Council, where he is helping to spend the £2.9 billion of our money allocated by the British government as aid to assist developing countries in "adapting" to climate change – far more than is spent on dealing with the weather conditions here (below - the vista from south Bradford, where not even the bus routes are properly cleared and you don't even dream of seeing the pavements free from snow and slush).

If there was any sense or justice in this world, the likes of Viner would be stripped naked and forced to parade in the snow he so confidently predicted would become "a very rare and exciting event". Then he should be drummed out of office with neither pension nor compensation.

But as long as fools like Viner are rewarded, and we continue to pay for it, then the public stupidity will continue to prevail.  Yet, the existing political parties are not listening - and we cannot rely (and nor should we) on students to do our dirty work.  We need to put a million angry people on the streets.

COMMENT THREAD

Were they misled by the Met Office?

Dr Vicky Pope – the Göbbels of the Met Office - puts this current freezing weather down to "climate variability", telling us that our senses are deceiving us. If you look at the long term trends, we are in fact experiencing fewer freezing winters and more heatwaves, she says.

This follows suggestions from the self-same Met Office, offered at the end of October, that we should expect an "unusually dry and mild winter" – a prediction which famously relies on the same computer systems which produce the models for global warming projections.

Now, as Britain grinds to a halt, we hear that the government has ordered "an urgent audit of the country's snow-readiness". Amongst other things, transport secretary, Philip Hammond, says there is "no excuse" for poor communication with stranded motorists and passengers.

What might be more productive to investigate, however, is the degree to which the various authorities have been totally misled by the fools in the Met Office (again), and how much winter budgets have been trimmed as money is siphoned off into "climate change" projects.

COMMENT: MORE GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

What energy shortage?

When you read this, you begin to dream of imaginative and painful things to do with wind turbines. They are taking us for fools.

COMMENT THREAD

Bears poo in woods

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has come up with a stunning finding, that a lot of EU money is misspent and rather large amounts end up in the pockets of the Mafia.

I shouldn't be dismissive, but this is being carried out in conjunction with the Financial Times, which has always been a cheerleader for the project – and still is. Even to this day, they cannot get their heads round the idea that it is hard enough keeping track on our own crooks (aka politicians). When the money goes international, and the accountability and supervision weakens, then it is inevitable that public money will be misused.

The only remedy here, therefore, is to stop giving any money to the EU. That is the only answer, but one the FT is not yet able to deal with. Instead, it devotes its resources to telling us the bleedin' obvious. What will be really interesting is when it gets off the easy stuff and starts writing about the really big crooks.

COMMENT THREAD

More global warming

It continues ... counting the current precipitation (it snows as I write), this is the sixth consecutive fall we've had here since the current round of bad weather started. I do not recall ever experiencing persistent snow this early in the season – the weather is more like February than early December.

And it is not confined to the UK. Sweden is looking grim, while other parts of Europe, namely Switzerland and Germany, are having their own problems.

I hope those bloody fool warmists are proud of themselves. "Oh! It's weather," they shriek. Yeah ... right. They are not, though ... they're laughing all the way to the bank – and we, like the fools we are, are paying for it.

COMMENT THREAD

Open thread

The forum is very much part of the overall package on this blog, where readers provide the information in part of the mutual process of keeping informed. Thus, I am going to make a habit of putting up an open thread - the last one worked quite well, but it obviously needs refreshing now and again.

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Extending the paywall

The Register is suggesting that The Daily Telegraph is thinking of emulating The Times and retreating behind a paywall.

There was some hint of this in a recent online reader survey, where the paper seemed most interested in views on payment for online content. But, in the manner of government "consultation", this now seems to have been an exercise in confirming a decision already taken.

Such a development, should it happen, is one to be welcomed. It will make for one less derivative source to track, and remove a temptation to go for easy copy, requiring us bloggers to rely more on original material. That can only be good.

Needless to say, I will miss a few commentators like AE-P, but not enough to overcome idea of paying for Louise Gray's output. And there is the rub. I have no rooted objection to paying for good quality content – but the idea of paying to be ill-informed is an anathema. To make online payment work, the newspapers need to up their games but, since they all seem to be devoid of a "listening mode", I don't see that happening.

The great danger though is that we end up with an even more fractured society. It will be split between the ill-informed – the diminishing band of people who read, and largely believe newspapers – and the rest. In many ways, though, it is better to be uninformed than ill-informed. The newspapers seem to be doing their best to make that happen.

COMMENT THREAD

A perfect metaphor

On the one hand, we have billions being spent on "climate change", its mitigation and all the other fatuous schemes related to the global warming scare, controlled by people of diminishing brain and even less sense.

On the other hand, we have unseasonal cold and a light dusting of snow in London, and the public transport system falls apart, causing acute distress and inconvenience to millions of people.

Meanwhile, that unspeakable fool Cameron is prattling about football. For God's sake – the man is supposed to be prime minister of the United Kingdom. All you can do is shake your head and wonder how we managed to sink so low.

UPDATE: Reading the blatts this morning, one sees the headline, "Snow leaves commuters stranded".  It did no such thing of course - what left people stranded was a mixture of unpreparedness and incompetence.  Says David Greaves of RSA insurers, "Bad weather in the run-up to Christmas will have a major impact on the UK's economy ... we're looking at £1.2 billion [lost] every working day".

This is where public services and government - local and central - have their parts to play but, while they coinstantly have their hands out for our money, and have open cheque books when it comes to their global warming obsession, we see unremitting failure when it comes to the basics of keeping the roads open, the pavements treated and the public transport system running.

We are truly in the hands of fools and knaves.

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