Getting it so wrong

Yesterday, it was one of those relatively rare evenings when I watched the BBC television news, finding that the Petroplus story was lead item, with the hand-wavers hyperventilating about shortages of petrol and diesel. We got it right, I think, but if you want a greater authority, one can refer to the Wall Street Journal.

It cites a number of analysts saying that weak demand and over capacity in Europe's refining sector will likely cushion the impact in oil markets of the closure of one of Europe's largest refiners Petroplus Holdings AG.

Thus we have James Zhang, strategist at Standard Bank, saying The price of product futures barely registered the event", and: "The market reaction was quite muted". "European refinery utilisation rate is around 82 percent, so there's plenty of slack in the system to replace the lost capacity form Petroplus and distillate demand was around 250,000 barrels a day less in Europe in December because of the warm weather," he added.

The BBC story – in retailing its dire warnings of major shortages – was, therefore, totally off the wall, completely wrong in all its major aspects. Not once was there any mention of stock surpluses, weakness of demand, and over-capacity, all of which suggests that there will be no structural shortage of petroleum products.

Interestingly, the has now changed its focus to major on job losses (see illustration), although the broadcaster was by no means the only media outlet to get it so wrong.

One really does wonder though, what there agenda is here. The hacks and their editors cannot all be so stupid and ignorant that they cannot ascertain what is in fact a well-established situation in what is a long-running saga. It was reasons of over-capacity and weakness of demand that led BP to sell the Coryton plant in the first place.

As for the bigger picture, oil prices actually slipped yesterday "on revived concerns about the eurozone's debt problems and their potential to slow the global economy". But you would not have got any of that from the BBC – it would have spoiled the narrative.

The wonder is, then, that so many people still watch BBC news – and the MSM in general. Getting it wrong these days is what they do, so wrong so often that it is getting embarrassing.

COMMENT THREAD

A brain disconnect

On Sunday, Booker was telling us how Salmond is going to fiddle his hubristic pledge that 100 percent of Scotland's "gross electricity consumption" will come from renewable sources by 2020,

To become notionally self-sufficient in power supply, he will have to have built windmills roughly three times more plated capacity than is required for the notional maximum consumption, which means that at times Scotland will be producing more power than it needs.

The scam is, it would appear, that Salmond aims to sell this power to England, at up to three times the price of electricity produced with fossil fuel, while making up the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow enough – or at all – by buying in power from England, at fossil fuel prices. By this means, he hopes to make profits of billions of pounds.

But, in order to make this happen, a fortune must be spent on connecting the windmills to the grid, and then providing the interconnectors so that power can be pumped over the border, in both directions.

And lo and behold, Ofgem is to allow the two major Scottish utilities to add £7.7 billion to their charges for "modernisation" of the grid to enable this to happen. In terms of the Scottish population, that is over £1,500 for every man, woman and child.

Of course, Salmond thinks the Scots can get their money back from England. With the British government under-performing on its EU renewables quote, he thinks that it will have no option but to go for its one for the price three "blackmail" and cough up.

Whether he can pull it off is anyone's guess, but according to a commenter here, another £17.6 billion will be required for the National Grid and, with transmission losses of 10-15 percent just between Scotland and England, much of the money will be spent on heating up the atmosphere.

This happens to be George Wood, retired head of Technical and Economics, Balancing Services, National Grid. He simply does not understand this madness. It is "as though there has been a brain disconnect by our politicians", he says.

And who could possibly disagree?

COMMENT THREAD

Not enough

As government debt breaks the £1-trillion barrier, we have Dellers arguing that "we need to see where our tax money goes", an idea that was floated yesterday by Philip Johnston, and picked up by Whitterings from Witney. But it does not improve with re-telling.

Just giving us a "receipt" is not enough. What does it profit a man if (as indeed he will) he gets his Barclaycard statement, listing the excesses of his spendthrift wife? What we need is for government to be very clear on what it would wish to spend money, while we have the right to cut up the credit cards – exercising a veto on government spending plans.

We have to be able to stop the expenditure before the money is wasted. And until that happens, there is no democracy.

COMMENT THREAD

A permanent loss?

Much excitement and doom-mongering attends the closure of the Coryton refinery in Essex, as its Zurich-based owner Petroplus files for insolvency, after lenders put the company on notice to pay off its debts triggering a default on $1.75 billion of senior notes and convertible bonds.

In an interesting piece, Man in a Shed takes a pessimistic view, arguing that "the UK must not lose another refinery". However, in complete contrast, Christophe de Margerie, the CEO of Total says that he believes the current financial woes of Petroplus confirm the view that there is considerable overcapacity in Europe's refining sector. Far from being a disaster, Petroplus' demise could ease supply conditions and help boost margins.

Equally, competitors will be keen to jump into any gaps. "Essar's (ESSR.L) Stanlow refinery is operating as normal and if there are opportunities to fill gaps in the market caused by the absence of Coryton we would obviously look to do so," said a spokesman for the Indian energy group.

And indeed it is the case that there is refinery overcapacity - on a global scale. According to this source, this can be attributed to opposing trends: demand continues to fall while refining capacity is steadily increasing, despite generally unfavourable conditions. In 2008, surplus capacity stood at 2 MMbpd, while today it has risen to 7 MMbpd.

But what is fascinating is that the distribution of capacity (and changes in provisions) are by no means uniform. In the Asia-Pacific region, refining capacity has been largely unaffected by the slowing world economy. After a period when capacity rose only moderately, new capacity was created at a rapid pace in 2009 (+6.4%). At the same time, growth in demand for oil slowed to 1.3%, resulting in mild overcapacity (0.8 MMbpd).

In Europe and the developed world, however, we have seen the adoption of increasingly stringent emissions standards and product specifications, burdensome regulatory requirements for refineries (for combating local pollution and reducing greenhouse gas emissions), and stiffer competition from new fuels.

All of these structural factors are weakening the sector, making it more attractive to import the finished product from Asian refineries, where costs are lower and regulatory demands are less severe (and can be mitigated still further by well-placed bribes).

Thus, while we may see temporary and very localised shortages, mainly London and the Southeast, no great perturbations are expected from the demise of Petroplus – other than the loss of over 1,000 jobs at the Essex refinery.

Linda McCulloch, national officer at the Unite union, wants "joint action by the owners and government", to help secure the business, but one suspects this is not going to happen. The shutdown at the former BP-owned refinery - with a total capacity of 175,000 barrels of crude oil per day – looks as if it might be permanent.

And although it will never be said – especially by the likes of the BBC - the fingerprints of the EU are all over this. But the murder weapon has many different hands upon it, so the case will never go to court.

COMMENT THREAD

That referendum

England Expects points out that the Croatian referendum was heavily rigged, giving some of the detail of how it was done. Witterings from Witney then makes the obvious but necessary point that, should we ever be given a referendum on the EU, it too would be rigged.

That is the way the "colleagues" play the game in EU politics. We have to play smarter.

COMMENT THREAD

A global muddle

One minute we are the lambasting the media for not acknowledging the "elephant in the room", but the very next thing we see is the media fingering the EU for something that is not primarily its responsibility.

Up front are the Failygraph and the Daily Mail. They are complaining about "a draft directive of reforms to make banking safer and rules more uniform", the effect of which is to bring forward mortgage foreclosure proceedings from 180 days in the UK to 90 days.

It takes the Financial Times, however, to identify the legislation involved. It appears we are dealing with the capital requirements directive (CRD 4) "package", which aims "to improve bank safety by making it easier for investors to compare them and allow regulators to impose uniform capital requirements".

The specific proposal (one of several) was actually published in July last year, running to 154 pages, accompanied by a working paper, running to 226 pages, the proposed directive going under the fearsome title of:

Directive of the European Parliament and the Council on the access to the activity of credit institutions and the prudential supervision of credit institutions and investment firms and amending Directive 2002/87/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the supplementary supervision of credit institutions, insurance undertakings and investment firms in a financial conglomerate.

This is scheduled to go to the EU parliament committee in April and for its first reading in June, possibly to come into EU law by the end of the year.

But it is the documents which give the game away, telling us that the package implements the international Basel accord on banking supervision, the so-called Basel III agreement. The key objective of the proposal, we are told:

… is to address the shortcomings exposed during the financial crisis, to move towards a single rulebook regulating credit institutions in order to prevent recent problems from reoccurring in the future, and to ensure that risks linked to the issues of financial instability and pro-cyclicality are more effectively contained.

Unsaid is that many of those "shortcomings" were in the Basel II agreement, but the point relevant to this current rush of publicity is that we are not dealing primarily with EU law.

What we have here is an example of global government, about which we have written previously, specifically the secretive Bank for International Settlements in Basel, which hosts the equally secretive Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

It is this body - in which our own Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, plays a central role – which actually makes the rules. The members of the key sub-committees are not disclosed, the meeting are in private, the rules of procedure are not declared and the voting record is secret. By comparison, the EU is a model of transparency – except of course, that the EU is a major player in this committee, where the real power is held.

This situation, therefore, casts the EU in the role of middle man. It takes the "recommendations" from the Basel committee and processes them into actionable legislation – some as commission regulations and some as directives, for the member states to adopt into their own legislative codes.

The one thing the EU cannot do, however, is make any substantive changes. The rules have been decided on a global scale and the EU is now just the regional authority implementing them – a relationship not dissimilar to that between the EU and the IMO.

In this context, to blame the EU for the result is, to say the very least, otiose. But that is what the media does when it suits it. Possibly, the real reason though is that, like our own MPs and so many others, they no longer have a very clear idea of how we are governed or who actually governs us.

Fortified by their own ignorance, the hacks thus go for the easy shot – and none of us are better informed. Small wonder though that the powers that be are thinking of selling off the Houses of Parliament. If they do, there is certainly no need to replace them.

COMMENT THREAD

Going home from Nome

Icebreaker, Healy, and tanker Renda are on their way back from Nome, having successfully delivered 1.3 million gallons to the ice-bound port. Coast Guard spokesman Adam De Rocher says the vessels were about 100 miles south of Nome on Sunday. He says they left the town on Alaska's western coast on Friday.

Once the Renda hits open water (if such an unfortunate phrase can be used), it will head for Russia. The Healy will go to Dutch Harbour, Alaska, to drop off supplies before heading home to Seattle.

COMMENT THREAD

Where lies Greece?

The "colleagues" seem to have reached an agreement on oil sanctions for Iran. Although we haven't seen the small print, this would seem to be bad news for Greece, which is still having trouble resolving the price of haircuts.

Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing. Does the right hand even know what the right hand is doing?

COMMENT THREAD

A culture of denial

Breast implants are back in the news today, with a call for the banning of cosmetic surgery advertisements. This was picked up by the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

Noting that the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) was "calling for an outright ban on the advertising of all cosmetic surgery", it had Fazel Fatah, president of BAAPS, and Sally Taber, director of the Independent Healthcare Advisory Services (IHAS), which represents the cosmetic surgery industry, to "discuss the necessity of such a ban".

Needless to say, the "elephant" was not at all represented – even though the BBC is fully aware that such issues are the competence of the European Union, having in fact told us of EU involvement, the day before Booker went to press on the issue (below).

As regards the banning of cosmetic surgery advertisements, this cannot be done under EU law. There was a case on precisely this before the ECJ in January 2008, with a final ruling in July 2008 when it was ruled that prohibition of advertisements constituted "a restriction on freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services".

Nonetheless, the BBC reports on prof Sir Bruce Keogh, "who is leading a government review of the trade after the PIP breast implants scandal". The Great Man has said an insurance scheme for the sector, similar to that in the travel industry, could be introduced. The government is also considering the introduction of a breast implant registry to make a record of all cosmetic operations.

Ironically, it is these recommendation that are cosmetic, as these issues are also an EU competence. They are not within the power of the British government to implement. Furthermore, they have been under discussion by the EU since 2001.

It was then that the commission announced it was "to propose tighter controls on the safety of breast implants, and reinforced mechanisms to check that these rules are observed", telling us that it would also "ask for an upgrade of the European standards for breast implants".

Ironically, in July 2002, the commission decided that, for medical devices, the regulatory framework was sound, but could be better implemented. Enterprise commissioner Erkki Liikanen then said: "Providing access to the best medical technology and devices, that meet the highest standards of safety and improve the quality of life, is a key objective of the Commission policy towards European citizens".

Having failed to ensure that the devices meet the highest standards of safety, the commission is at last admitting that reform is needed – which only it can decide upon. But that does not stop the British government, with the help of the BBC and the media in general, going through its elaborate charade, pretending it is doing something in the hope of convincing people that it is still in charge.

So the culture of denial continues where, strangely, those who are the most avid supporters of the EU seem to be those who are also keenest to deny its involvement in so many aspects of our lives.

COMMENT THREAD

And then there were 28?

Croatia voted yesterday in a referendum on joining the European Union, a move the government says offers the former Yugoslav republic its only chance of economic recovery despite the turmoil in the 27-state bloc.

Early results, with 51 percent of the vote counted, have 67 percent of those voted saying "yes". It is interesting how people are allowed to vote to join the EU … but not to get out of it … but the former seems to depend on them being willing to say yes.

With a population of 4.3 million, slightly less than that of Scotland, the result will no doubt be watched closely by Mr Salmond. There are, after all, some parallels, the state of Croatia having been formed after the break up of Yugoslavia, which Scotland – as a state – being forned (Mr Salmond hopes) with the break up of the United Kingdom.

Neither Croatia nor Scotland, however, are big enough to alter the destiny of the EU. One is about to – and the other hopes to – shackle itself to a corpse. The Guardian is triumphant. But it will have plenty of time to repent.

On the other hand, Your Freedom and Ours - coming in with an update - notes that it was not exactly an overwhelming vote.

About 31 percent were against, while the rest of the ballots were invalid. About 42 percent of eligible voters were estimated to have taken part in the referendum, illustrating voters' apathy toward the EU, she tells is.

For those Croatians who did not bother to turn out to vote against joining the EU if they did not feel that they were in favour, they will, no doubt complain vociferously when things go wrong.

COMMENT THREAD

Wake up judge!

Thus writes Peter Hitchens, who goes on to say:

Akulic, who, like you and me (though I'd much rather not be), is a citizen of the European Union, drifted unhindered into the Euro-region formerly known as Great Britain in 2010. Nobody cared that he had spent much of his adult life in prison for violence, or that he had once raped a seven-year-old girl.

As Lady Justice Hallett (of course) reduced his prison sentence on appeal last week, she asked in some astonishment: "Do we let in just anyone?" The answer, of course, is: "Yes, Judge".

Her spluttering amazement came after Akulic's lawyer explained that the Lithuanian rapist was an EU citizen, and so has as much right to be here as you and I – a simple point I have been trying to get across for years.

This is rather like the ship surveyor who doesn't realise that the EU is now in charge of ship safety – as appears to be the case from the comments on the Booker column.

We have here a whole generation of middle to upper class people living in denial, be they journalists, politicians, ship surveyors or judges – people who wilfully close their eyes to the steady encroachment of the EU on our lives.

Quite why this is the case is difficult to work out, but it is a very real and serious phenomenon. It is as if these people cannot cope with the idea that we are no longer an independent nation and are ruled by aliens – some of them British.

Hitchens is right, therefore, to call for the judge to wake up. But we need the whole nation to wake up. Pretending the EU takeover isn't happening won't make it go away.

COMMENT THREAD

The new Heath?

It is a good question to ask, but the Guardian is obviously incapable of sensible analysis. Larry Ellott also asks: whether the prime minister be another moderniser who arrives in power bouncing with optimism but for whom it all goes wrong? He goes on to say:

There are differences as well as similarities: Heath presided over a largely pro-European party and considered his greatest achievement to be Britain's entry into what was then the European Economic Community. Cameron leads an overwhelmingly Eurosceptic party and would like a less binding relationship with the European Union. Heath would have signed up to the euro without question; there is no earthly chance of Cameron taking Britain into the single currency.

These "left-wingers" just don't do subtlety. Theirs is a monochrome world of black and white. It is no wonder they are so ill-tempered – they must be bored witless.

Thus, to the average Guardian reader, Cameron is a right-wing eurosceptic leading an "overwhelmingly Eurosceptic party". Dialogue is impossible. There is no meeting point, or frame of reference from which we can start.

COMMENT THREAD

A man for all soundbites

Cameron is trying to pull as fast one over the ECHR in an attempt to defuse the anger over the recent decision over extremist Islamic cleric Abu Qatada. But he is mercilessly dissected by Autonomous Mind, who shows his posturing up for what it is – posturing.

COMMENT THREAD

British interests

Official figures, we are told, show that 45 percent of students from EU countries who were liable to start repaying loans had disappeared or were in arrears as of last April. Thus, the total outstanding debt liable to be repaid by EU borrowers at the end of 2009/10 was £47.4 million, according to the Department for Business (BIS), which published the figures.

But that means, according to Failygraph education correspondent Julie Henry, "If the thousands of students missing or in arrears never pay, more than £20 million would be lost to the Treasury". I am not sure I follow that line of reasoning. At the moment, the debt is already at £47.4 million and, if no more payments are made, more than £20 million will be lost? Technically, that may be correct, but it is an odd way of putting it.

However, flash back to February 2009 – nearly three years ago, and you will get a much better idea of what is going on from The Daily Mail. It correctly predicted this insult, then telling us that tens of thousands more from the EU were currently at university, having borrowed £124million to cover tuition fees, which then stood at £3,145-a-year.

With 45 percent of EU students who were liable to start repaying loans having now disappeared or in arrears as of last April, therefore, we are exposed to a sum well in excess of £60 million and, as the fees go up to £9,000 a year and more EU students are processed through the system, that sum can only increase.

Back in 2009, though, the Student Loans Company insisted that measures to identify and trace EU students would be in place by April 2010, when large numbers of EU students began to graduate.

Compare and contrast this with the statement today from Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, who says that non-repayment by overseas students is "inherent in the system." "Many EU students will never pay back their loans. We were never going to be able to recover loan debts from EU students to the same level as domestic students.

Back in 2009, we were remarking: "The real question, though, is why we are giving foreign students loans in the first place. And the answer is … EU rules. Under the non-discrimination provisions of the Treaties, whatever applies to UK nationals must also be given to any Jacques, Fritz or Toni who happens on these shores".

The writing was on the wall ever since the ECJ made a judgement on the issue in 2004, and now we are well and truly stuck.

Then, a spokesman for the Department for Universities, Innovation and Skills said trace agents are being used to hunt down students who failed to repay their loans. So, in the darkest regions of Naples, we suggested that, amid the mounds of rubbish, "we can be assured that British interests are being looked after".

Yeah, right! And so the pigs flew over in squadrons.

COMMENT THREAD

Booker on Concordia

The column takes a look at the Concordia capsize, picking up the EU element that we raised on this blog. His piece took account of this narrative on the ship's last-known movements, and explores some of the issues I raise in this piece.

Without having to speculate on the causes of this incident, it is possible to make the perfectly valid point that the sequence of events which led directly to the capsize is distinct from the sequence that led to the collision – and that the capsize was not necessarily an inevitable consequence of the hull rupture.

Here, it is necessary to make the distinction between "intact stability" and "damage stability", and it is also possible to assert with confidence that current legislation (EU and IMO) does not fully take into account (or at all) of the phenomena of multiple free surface effect and "transient flooding" in large cruise liners, which can play a significant part in causing ships to capsize.

It is thus valid to question whether the regulatory regime was (and is) adequate to deal with potential risks, and to ask whether the perceived inadequacies were in any way responsible for the capsize of the Concordia.

In most of such incidents, cause is quite often multi-factoral, in which context responsibility (and blame) must often rest on many shoulders. It would be a shame if the emphasis on the apparent failures of the ship's captain obscured any failings of the regulators, and allowed them to escape any blame that should otherwise accrue to them.

COMMENT THREAD

Home grown failures

The Daily Mail has today in its print edition a plaintive rejoinder from EU internal market commissioner Michel Barnier, who is insisting that Britain is free to ban foreign doctors if they cannot speak English or there are concerns about their professional ability (above).

He is responding (in the Failygraph) to claims from professor Norman Williams, president of the Royal College of Surgeons and Sir Richard Thompson, president of the Royal College of Physicians, who said recently (12 January) that "urgent action" was needed to combat "huge variations" in the quality and training of foreign doctors.

"European laws are putting the lives of British patients at risk by allowing incompetent and poorly trained foreign doctors to work in the NHS, two senior doctors warned today", the Daily Mail then reported (below).

However, someone should perhaps have asked these two esteemed gentlemen why they had not read the newspapers, and in particular the Daily Mail for 4 October 2011. This informed us that foreign doctors would be barred from treating patients unless they have a good grasp of English "under tough rules to be announced by Andrew Lansley today".

The Health Secretary would "pledge to end the scandal which has seen 23,000 doctors from Europe registered to work in the NHS – despite never having been asked if they can speak the language properly" (below).

And even if the good doctors haven't noticed this, the nurses certainly have. The Nursing Times acerbically noted on 6 October, 2011 that "Language tests for nurses less pressing than for doctors, says DH".

It reported that a ban on (central) language testing for nurses is to remain in force, even though the government is overturning that on doctors on the grounds that they pose more of a risk to patients.

The report thus confirmed the Daily Mail report, stating that the Department of Health had announced it would allow the General Medical Council to test the language skills of doctors from within the European Economic Area (EEA) who want to work in the UK.

And, in fact, it has always been the case that language skills of medical professionals have been amenable to testing. EU law does not prohibit it. What EU law does do though is prohibit a uniform ban on employment, by virtue of an inability to speak good (or any) English. Each case must be treated on its merits.

In practice, this meant that regulatory bodies like the Royal College of Nursing and the General Medical Council could no longer make language competency an exclusion criterion under the Professional Qualifications Directive (Directive 2005/36/EC). Instead, the onus was placed on the employer, to ascertain that individuals had suitable language skills for the specific jobs in which they were to be placed.

And therein seems to lie the problem. As late as 14 January, the Daily Mail was reporting that 90 percent of hospitals fail to check on nurses' English before letting them work on wards. Language problems, it said, only come to light when patients' requests were not understood

Then it told us that many hospital chiefs (despite their high pay) were "totally unaware that due to strict anti-discrimination rules imposed by Brussels, it is illegal for the Nursing and Midwifery Council regulator to check the English language skills of nurses trained in EU countries".

The Department of Health and the Royal College of Nursing, said the Mail have told hospitals it is their responsibility to make adequate checks but the guidance was not always passed on to managers in charge of recruitment.

So, we can rightly blame the EU for disrupting established systems, and requiring a cumbersome and expensive regime for individual employers, who now have to ascertain whether potential employees can actually speak and understand English to an acceptable level. But then what responsible employer does not check whether their employees can do the jobs for which they are hired?

We cannot, therefore, blame the EU for the incompetence of those employers who have not realised their own responsibilities, and taken the necessary measures to ensure their staff are capable of doing their jobs. Those failures, it would seem, are home-grown.

COMMENT THREAD

A picture with words

A picture may be worth a thousand words but, on occasions, a picture with words is worth a thousand pictures.

Meanwhile, "It's not a crisis of the euro. It's a case of euro-zone economies being in difficulty", says
financial markets commissioner Michel Barnier. Planet, which, on?

COMMENT THREAD

A sombre anniversary

The Wannsee Conference. I am surprised that the British media hasn't made something of it. Although Germany has risen to the occasion, with a report in Spiegel online.

COMMENT THREAD

The last moments

Reconstruction of the Costa Concordia Tragedy, Narration by John Konrad from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

This site tells all. After the impact, he loses way, executes a turn hard to starboard and, as the speed washes off to less than one knot, he cuts in the bow thruster to bring the bow round. The current then brings him into shore, with the stern grounding first.

COMMENT THREAD

Blurring the chain of responsibility

Costa Cruises chief executive Pier Luigi Foschi seems to be rather keen to put distance between himself and his errant captain, Francesco Schettino. He has, according to Reuters, suspended Schettino and the company has declared itself an injured party. They were not aware of unsafe practices involving ships coming close to shore to give tourists a better view, they say.

But it could be that Foschi doth protest too much. Even the fact that Schettino steered his ship too close to the rocks may not be entirely his responsibility if, as is being alleged, the company did actually know of the practice of sailing close to the Tuscan island of Giglio and did nothing to stop it.

However, while the captain may have to take the ultimate responsibility for driving the Costa Concordia onto the rocks, it needs to be remembered that there are many separate and distinct phases to this incident. The collision with the rocks is one – the ship capsizing is entirely separate.

And while the company may succeed in distancing itself from the collision, it may have more difficulty disclaiming responsibility for the subsequent capsize. As set out in my earlier piece, there may be design flaws which caused the ship to capsize, making the disaster far worse than it should have been.

The issue here is that ship like the Costa Concordia are not supposed to capsize. Although they look top-heavy, they are in fact immensely stable. Thus, the regulatory philosophy is that the ship should remain intact and upright in all but the most extreme of incidents, allowing it to become – as the saying goes – its own lifeboat.

But the possibility of there being problems is evidenced by the fact of the capsize, and that the hole in the hull is sticking out of the water. It should be under the sea, a fact noted by professor Philip Wilson of Southampton University. "That is where the water came rushing in," he says. "In other words, the ship seems to be lying on the wrong side".

This possibility is further reinforced, perhaps unwittingly, by a statement on the Costa Concordia today by the EU Commission, a full week after the original incident. It reminds us that, despite new ship safety legislation having been promulgated in 2009 – viz Directive 2009/45/EC - the commission a year later set up another review on passenger ship safety, to ensure the legislation "keeps pace with the latest evolution in design, operational procedures and technology".

The question is immediately raised as to why such a review would be needed if there was any great confidence in the adequacy of current legislation, and suspicions that it might not be adequate are raised with today's statement.

Crucially, we find that the commission is stating that the review must now explore whether current stability rules on passenger ships need further updating. In particular, it says, this must be in relation to ships, damaged and/or exposed to bad weather conditions.

It is this issue of so-called "damage stability" in respect of large passenger ships that especially needs review as the current standards go back to IMO regulations from 1993, before the current work on damage stability had been undertaken.

The EU itself had the opportunity to update damage stability requirements in 2009, having regard to the research which it had funded. But such rules would only have applied to vessels flagged by EU member states and to vessels plying the waters of EU member states – leaving the rest of the world covered by the older and less demanding IMO code.

And what emerges from the legislative review is that the EU is reluctant to go further than the IMO standards, for fear of driving ships operated by EU member states into nations running flags of convenience.

But even without that, competition for the lucrative cruise market is global and ships forced to comply with more onerous EU law, plying the Mediterranean, would be at a trading disadvantage with US registered ships cruising the Caribbean. Customers are motivated as much by price as location.

The IMO has, in fact, been working on updating its own regulations since the year 2000 but has yet to address damage stability issues in large passenger ships.

It too seems to be treating the Costa Concordia incident as a wake-up call. ""IMO must not take this accident lightly", it says. "We should seriously consider the lessons to be learnt and, if necessary, re-examine the regulations on the safety of large passenger ships in the light of the findings of the casualty investigation", it adds, in its formal statement.

It would appear, therefore, that safety regulations are very far from being adequate, but the big question is whether the owners of the Costa Concordia knew this – or should have known.

As part of the Carnival Corporation - the world's largest cruise ship operator – it seems inconceivable that someone did not know. And given that that may be the case, we may still be seeing Pier Luigi Foschi in the dock – unless conformity with regulations is taken to be sufficient for absolution, blurring once again the chain of responsibility.

COMMENT THREAD

Not so much taking it

… as giving it. Justice is seen to be done?

COMMENT THREAD

A failure of reorganisation

People have short memories, forgetting that the "great leap forward" in the development of quangos came under Thatcher with the launch of "Next Step Agencies", and Major with his Regional Development Agencies.

The idea was to increase visibility and accountability of obscure government bodies, which could hide their spending within the accounts of their controlling departments, while the heads could hide behind the skirts of ministerial responsibility.

These new bodies were to become more like private sector firms, with their own boards of directors and chief executives, separate accounts and their own objectives and targets.

Following the establishment of the "Efficiency Unit" led by Lord Rayner in 1982 and the Ibbs Report in 1988, directly employed civil servants fell from 732,000 in 1979 to 500,000 in 1997, and by 1998, 75 percent of all civil servants worked for agencies or departments run on "Next Step" lines.

As it turned out, though, the only way the private sector was seriously emulated was in the rampant inflation in salaries for CEOs and the "quango queens" who joined the boards, while "accountability" became a farce, as ministers found they had no real control and the bodies were largely autonomous.

So the worm turned and this current administration has decided to claw back the powers of these bodies, which the media insist on calling "quangos", having launched the Public Bodies Reform Programme, run by the Cabinet Office, under the egregious Mr Letwin.

But, according to the National Audit Office, they can't even get this right. In a report issued today, the NAO accused the Cabinet Office of grossly under-estimating the transitional costs of reorganisation, rejecting the estimate of £425 million and suggesting that costs will be at least £830 million.

Furthermore, says the NAO, there is an "insufficient grasp of the ongoing costs of functions transferred to other parts of government", meaning that the government departments have failed to understand that if they absorb quango functions into their own departments, rather than abolish them altogether, they are still going to cost.

Overall, this makes a nonsense of the administration's claims on cost-savings. Originally claimed to be £2.6 billion, the civil service is going to have to find £3.5 billion if they are to meet the net savings target, after the higher costs of transition have been taken into account.

And, says the NAO, despite greater accountability being the programme's primary intended benefit, only one of the six departments examined had proposals for a well-defined, though basic, measure of success for it. In other words, the savings will not actually be anything like those claimed, and any improvements in accountability are likely to illusory.

There is a profound lesson to learn here. Mere reorganisation of government functions is unlikely ever to bring much in the way of improvements, either in costs or accountability, unless accompanied by a fundamental reappraisal of functions (with a strong emphasis on abolition).

There is a similar lesson in relation to our withdrawal from the EU. Just leaving the evil empire is unlikely to achieve anything, per se – and especially not in terms of cost savings - until or unless we rethink the way government is supposed to work and what it is supposed to do.

As for the "bonfire of quangos", it looks as if the great spectacle is, after all, going to be a damp squib. But then, I don't suppose anybody really expected otherwise.

COMMENT THREAD

The European project

An interesting tour de table from Theodore Dalrymple, getting back to basics.

Asked by a journalist whether nationalism was dangerous, he answers that the question, "implied that the choice before Europe was between the European Union and fascism: that all that stood between us and the ascension to power of new Mussolinis, Francos, and Hitlers were the free lunches of senior Eurocrats".

Nicely put.

COMMENT THREAD

A bitter taste

The past reaches out to bring back unwelcome memories, this time the fate of Acting Corporal Marcin Wojtak, who died on 1 October 2009 when his Pinzgauer Vector drove over a 40lb IED close to Camp Bastion, in Afghanistan.

An earlier report tells us that the Vector had been part of a three-vehicle convoy which had just left a wadi and moved onto higher ground, when it was blown up by the device, comprising "20-25 kilograms of home-made explosives buried about 40cm under the ground".

Now, over two years later, an inquest found yesterday, predictably, that Wojtak was "unlawfully killed", leading to a number of reports in the MSM.

Not untypical of the reports is the story in the Daily Mail which has Wojtak's mother accusing the Ministry of Defence of a "catastrophic failure". Vectors, says the paper (now – although not at the time) were notoriously vulnerable to roadside bombs because of a lack of armour on the underside, and the Government announced a "phased withdrawal" from front line service in May 2009.
.
But the inquest heard they were still being used five months later when the 24-year-old - who had complained in an email home to his father that he felt "exposed and at risk" patrolling in one - was killed.

In a tragic twist, the inquest was told he would have survived if he had been in the heavily-armoured replacement vehicle he was due to pick up the following morning. The replacement was the Mastiff, which, "when it initially went into theatre, soldiers didn't want to get in it because the feeling was that it was just a truck." But, "after a couple of months the lads knew they were safe as houses", and it became the vehicle of choice.

However, its popularity was not just due to the armour. As Ann Winterton had to remind the Telegraph yesterday, it was "because of its V-shaped hull which is designed to deflect rather than absorb blasts", something which the Vector lacked.

But what made the Vector uniquely dangerous was that the driver position was also over the front wheel, in the centre of the "cone of destruction" ensuring that, if the vehicle drove over a device, any explosion would be unsurvivable. In one of the heaviest mined regions of the world, a more unsuitable vehicle could hardly have been chosen, so obvious were its defects.

Yet Wojtak's mother is probably being a little unfair in blaming the Ministry of Defence, per se, for its deployment. Intended as a replacement for the vulnerable Snatch Land Rover, its particular champion was a famous general by the name of Richard Dannatt, who insisted on its purchase for Afghanistan, as his price for accepting the unwanted Mastiff into theatre in Iraq.

The full, ugly story is in my book. Nowhere else will you see the whole story told of the wasted lives and the waste of £100 million from an overstretched defence budget to buy a vehicle that was so dangerous that it had to be replaced, temporarily, by the Snatch Land Rover, up-armoured and re-named the Vixen.

There can be few other instances where a replacement vehicle was deemed so unsatisfactory that it was eventually replaced by the vehicle it was intended to replace, but that is the legacy of Richard Dannatt. And even to this day, it leaves a bitter taste.

COMMENT THREAD

Just a coincidence?

So, The Boy is coming out of the woodwork to tell us that he is going to do something about drug-driving. But road safety is, in fact, an EU competence, and the "colleagues" themselves have been showing a great interest in the subject, especially as dealing with this "menace" is part of the European Road Safety Action Programme.

However, while the EU is now responsible for legislating on road safety, drug-driving is, as yet, an "unoccupied field" – there is no specific Community law in place. Thus, with the permission of the EU commission, member states are still allowed to make their own law.

Any such law must, of course, be directed at achieving Community objectives, and be co-ordinated with other member states in this field, so it is interesting to observe that The Boy's initiative comes only months after the completion of a major EU-funded study on drug driving.

This clears the way for a new raft of "evidence-based" legislation, so one wonders whether it is at all a coincidence that Cameron should now pop up with "new" ideas on the issue, which just happen to conform with EU thinking, especially as Cyprus just happens to be following the same route (even if it is more honest about the EU link).

Whether good or bad though, what The Boy (and the media) carefully omits to tell us is that any new law can only be promulgated with the permission and approval of the EU commission. Even if it does not then bear the EU label, it will have the colleagues' fingerprints all over it.

Nevertheless, as long as the media doesn't blow the gaff, it gives The Boy plenty of opportunities for grandstanding, without him actually having to admit how little power is left to him.

COMMENT THREAD

Empty vessels

While The Boy was pretending that he could take action over the Costa Concordia capsize, a US congressional committee was announcing the launch of an investigation on the safety implications of the accident. It said US and international maritime organisations need to ensure standards are in place to protect passengers' safety on cruise ships.

"Although it is early in the investigatory process, it appears the Costa Concordia was a preventable tragedy," Rep Frank LoBiondo, the subcommittee chairman, said in a statement. "The committee and subcommittee will use this hearing to review current US laws and regulations in an effort to ensure a similar tragedy does not occur aboard vessels calling on American ports," he says.

Of course, the US makes its own laws in this domain (including implementing IMO resolutions and recommendations), whereas the British government has outsourced maritime safety to Brussels. There would be no point in our toy parliament setting up its own inquiry, as the relevant executive body is the EU commission.

This is despite the fact that unresolved technical issues have been researched by British universities, although here, once again, the EU was the authority of record. It paid for the research – which it has since ignored.

Thus we get Quentin Letts prattling about the idleness of our MPs, without explaining why. As with medical device standards, the power has gone elsewhere, leaving our MPs as empty vessels. One wonders why they too do not capsize.

COMMENT: "DERELICTION OF DUTY" THREAD

Beyond surreal

When the history of current events comes to be written, this has to be deemed the point when the financial establishment lost all touch with reality.

As for the cash strapped UK having to borrow £19 billion - nearly eight week's worth of borrowing, paying market rates of interest, and then lending that amount of money to the IMF at a discounted interest rate, all to save the "colleagues'" blushes, this is beyond surreal.

The Grauniad reminds us that the Commons has already given the Treasury leeway to draw down an extra £10bn to give the IMF, but anything further would require a fresh vote in the Commons – and be likely to prompt a backbench Tory rebellion.

That would be an interesting development, although the Tory pussycats tend to talk the talk and then go AWOL when it comes to walking the walk. The issue will come to a head in the Spring, though, about the same time that Greece faces its nemesis, so we are in for an interesting time.

However, there may be a get-out clause, with the preposterous Osborne demanding (unspecified) EU "reform" as a condition of releasing the money. As we know that the eurozone is neither capable of reform, nor willing to dance to the Osborne tune, he could be on a safe bet.

Either way, though, this is funny money – it don't mean nuffink.

COMMENT THREAD

Misleading the House

I hadn't thought of it in that way, but I guess it is misleading the House. You should not be telling MPs that you will do things that you cannot do.

COMMENT THREAD

Who's this "we" Cameron?

At PMQs today, Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab) asked the man masquerading as our prime minister, the following question:

With the tragic accident involving the cruise ship Costa Concordia and the 50-plus liners of the same size or bigger that will visit Greenock dock on the Clyde in the coming months and year ahead, does the Prime Minister still think that it was the correct decision to close the Clyde coastguard station?

David Cameron gave him this answer

First, the case in Italy is clearly a tragic one, and our hearts should go out to the people who have lost loved-ones - people from countries right across the world. We need to wait and see what the exact cause of the accident was before we jump to conclusions about any changes to regulations or other things. However, if changes need to be made, including on the issue that the hon. Gentleman raises, of course we will make them.

One might think he was talking about the administration he leads, but considering ship safety is an exclusive EU competence, what does he actually mean by "we"?

Why is The Boy still pretending to have powers that have long since been given to Brussels? Is he ashamed to admit how much has been surrendered, or is it that he just doesn't know?

COMMENT: "DERILICTION OF DUTY" THREAD

On the march?

Today is the day for the Greeks, as the meetings with private bondholders resume. And to celebrate the event, thousands of protesters are on the march in Athens, although the LA Times, for one, isn't getting terribly excited about this. According to the Grauniad, today will be the second day of protests, with strikers out in the streets.

 But, rather than another day of precipice-hanging, some experts are saying that we will have to wait until March for Greece to default – if ever.

Meanwhile, a potentially more harmful (in the short-term) situation is developing in Hungary, with the EU commission launching legal action against the Fidesz government for violations of European Union treaty law and "erosion of democracy". One gets the impression that if the commission had troops they would at this moment be marching across the border.

And, according to my former co-editor, they are revolting in Romania. Yes, I know they are always revolting in Romania, but the current action is – in part – directed at the EU. There is hope yet, as the CSM tells us, "… protesters find voice after years of apathy".

Maybe, though, three out of 27 countries on the March isn't much to shout about, which is probably why the British media is playing the disruption low-key. When all 27 start, maybe they will take notice – and just report the British end, if I know anything.
.
COMMENT THREAD

A rather silly piece

Quentin Letts, one of the more entertaining parliamentary correspondents, writes a rather silly piece today, remarking on how quiet the House is. "A shortage of law-making?" he asks, adding: "We should rejoice, rejoice".

Of course, there is no shortage of law-making. That would indeed be a cause for rejoicing. The reason why it is so quiet is, as Booker remarked very recently (expanded by ourselves), that so much of our legislation has been outsourced to Brussels, making our MPs effectively redundant. They have nothing to do because the EU production line is doing the work for them.

Were things otherwise, we could have the MPs debating medical devices, and demanding new laws. But that is an EU competence. They could also take a look at passenger ship safety, except that that is also an EU competence. Maybe they could discuss occupational pensions? Er … that is an EU competence. How about an oil embargo on Iran? Forget it … also an EU competence.

That so much law is made in Brussels is a major constitution issue, and one of great concern to many people. How typical it is, therefore, that we should get in the Daily Wail such a silly article, that simply trivialises the whole issue. That is the MSM for you.

COMMENT THREAD

We did warn you

Reported today by The Independent, Brian Toft, professor of patient safety at Coventry University, warned ministers last July that the CE mark which certifies that a product such as a hip joint or breast implant reaches the European quality standard was seriously flawed and did not protect patients.

There were 113 alerts issued by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) about medical devices last year, ranging from hip joints to surgical instruments, but the agency has no power to check devices until a failure is reported. And that is effectively what we were saying last week on the blog, as repeated by the Booker column on Sunday.

Notably absent from the Independent piece, though, are the words "European Union" and "Single Market", with a similar absence noted when the BBC's Today programme ran the story this morning, until Toft came on. But that is what we are dealing with.

However, the situation is worse than stated. It is not that the MHRA has "no power" to check devices until a failure is reported. A fundamental characteristic of CE marking is that national regulatory agencies are specifically prohibited from carrying out routine checks on devices, that replicate the checks supposedly done by the certifying agency.

Such routine checks are deemed to be "additional controls", having the effect of non-tariff barriers, and have been addressed by a range of ECJ judgements going back to 1979 and the Cassis de Dijon case. Thus, the legislation setting out the rules for market surveillance (Regulation EC No 765/2008 of 9 July 2008) sternly warns that:

It is necessary to ensure that products benefiting from the free movement of goods within the Community fulfil requirements providing a high level of protection of public interests such as health and safety in general, health and safety at the workplace, protection of consumers, protection of the environment and security, while ensuring that the free movement of products is not restricted to any extent greater than that which is allowed under Community harmonisation legislation or any other relevant Community rules.

CE marking is a paper-based system and thus the regulations require that, "Where economic operators present test reports or certificates attesting conformity issued by an accredited conformity assessment body, market surveillance authorities shall take due account of such reports or certificates".

In other words, as long as the paperwork is in order, extra physical checks are not allowed – and therein lies the danger. If the background checks are not being properly done – or done at all – faulty products (as in breast implants) can slip through the cracks.

Effectively confirming this in a meeting with Simon Burns, the Health minister, on 13 September, Toft said CE marks were allocated to medical devices on the basis of "design specifications" without checks on whether the devices were "being made in the way they should be made".

In July, in a presentation to the Committee on the Safety of Devices, revealed by The Lancet, he warned that the CE mark "provides a smokescreen for faulty and dangerous devices that place patients at risk".

This is not an academic issue. Apart from the breast implants scandal, the Failygraph was recently reporting: "Deaths and serious injuries involving medical devices up 29 percent", with "The number of patients killed or seriously injured by medical devices rose by almost a third last year, according to official figures".

Yet CE marking is so central to Community trade that the Single Market could not operate without it. Hence we get the silence of ministers and Tory politicians, all of whom adore the Single Market and prattle endlessly about its benefits. By any measure, though, CE marking is not fit for purpose - right across the board. Like the EU itself, it is fundamentally flawed ... and killing people.

COMMENT THREAD

A dereliction of duty

Despite the reassurances from the egregious Janet Archer, and others, on the safety of large cruise liners in the wake of the capsize of the Costa Concordia, the design of this ship - and those like it - is probably unsafe.

This was the finding of EU-funded research into the effect of collision damage, carried out in Glasgow and Strathclyde universities nearly a decade ago. It tested three then current cruise ship designs, all of which complied with current regulations. In the research, 33 damage scenarios were tested, and in 16 cases the vessels capsized within two hours, sometimes rapidly.

In particular, a newly discovered phenomenon was tested, known as the multiple free surface (MFS) effect, where traditional calculation and testing cannot adequately describe the behaviour (and hence the destiny) of a damaged ship.

This is particularly a problem in cruise ships, which have complex watertight subdivision of internal spaces, a phenomenon which "substantially weakens or indeed leads to complete erosion of stability at any of the stages of flooding".

There is also the issue of so-called transient flooding. This has been described as a "mechanism of capsize" relevant to ships with complex watertight subdivision such as cruise ships:

As the hull is breached, water may rush through various compartments at different levels, substantially reducing stability even when the floodwater amount is relatively small. As a result the ship could heel to large angles, even for small damage openings, letting water into the upper decks that spreads rapidly through these spaces and may lead to rapid capsize.

Those questioning the stability of giant cruise ships such Costa Concordia are, therefore, missing the point. The issue is not stability, per se, but post-collision stability.

One of the latest into the general fray is Sky News, but it too is emollient. It cites Robert Ashdown, the European Cruise Council's technical, environment and operations director, who dismisses concerns saying cruise liners are "more stable than they have ever been".

"They can stand up to anything the weather can throw at them. They are designed to strict international standards," he says. In this, Ashdown is probably right, but what he projects is only part of the story - he is talking about the stability of the intact ship.

As to his reference to "strict international standards", he does not spell these out in detail. They do, however, encompass EU law, namely Directive 2009/45/EC of 6 May 2009 on safety rules and standards for passenger ships. Despite the closing comment in my earlier piece, ship safety is already an EU competence, with the EU commission also implementing international standards - in this case IMO (International Maritime Organisation) Assembly Resolution A.749(18) of 4 November 1993, as amended.

What is immediately striking about the EU law and the IMO standards is their relative age, the core IMO standard going back to 1993. And even the date of the EU's 2009 Directive is misleading. It is basically a recast of the Council Directive 98/18/EC of 17 March 1998.

Nothing in these standards, therefore, reflects the work on multiple free surface effect, or transient flooding, either of which could have been responsible for the Costa Concordia capsize, explaining why the ship listed away from the damaged side. Thus, the authors of the ground breaking British research describe the regulatory system as "stretched to breaking point".

However, despite the EU commission displaying a keen interest in safety at sea, its 2007 review ignored its own funded research, in producing the 2009 amended directive.

Further, a EU-funded Passenger Ship Safety Legislative Review, produced by the Milan consultancy Grimaldi e Associati and published in April 2011 fails in any way to address the damage survivability of cruise ships, dealing only with cruises engaged in polar areas.

Nor indeed are international standards bodies addressing the issue. The International Maritime Organisation is focusing on the so-called "return to port" philosophy as its primary safety paradigm.

It believes that the regulatory framework should place more emphasis on the prevention of a casualty from occurring in the first place and that future passenger ships should be designed for improved survivability so that, in the event of a casualty, persons can stay safely on board as the ship proceeds to port.

Such a philosophy is hardly going to work if, as we have seen with the Costa Concordia, the ship capsizes shortly after a collision. Yet, with neither the EU nor the IMO showing any signs of dealing with this phenomena which render current regulatory requirements inadequate, we can have no confidence that a repeat of the Costa Concordia incident will not occur some time in the future.

Thus, while the current focus is on Capatian Francesco Schettino and his dereliction of duty, perhaps more questions should be asked about why this relatively modern ship capsized, and about the regulators' dereliction of duty – why they have ignored post-collision stability problems in large cruise ships.

COMMENT THREAD