Think about that one thing, apart from all the other disasters: "We leave this decade poorer than when we entered it." Heffer is at his best when he presents to us in clear terms the simple, unhappy truth. He's done that here.It is customary to find a sobriquet for a decade as it comes to a close – the Naughty Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties – but I can think of none to describe the Noughties that is fit for repetition in a respectable newspaper.
The commanding image of the decade remains, more than eight years after the event, that of the aircraft flying into the Twin Towers in Manhattan in September 2001. The battle of the civilised world against the lunacy of Islamic fundamentalism dominated and poisoned the rest of the decade.
However – and however callous it seems to say it – we should have been lucky if that had been all we had to worry about in the past 10 years.Sadly, it was not. Both away from the "global war on terror" and, most controversially, inherent in it, was a display of incompetence by a political class which it sought more and more to cover up by obfuscation, a retreat from democracy, and downright lies. We are reminded almost every day that lies were told to take us to war in Iraq, and that is probably so. Yet we hear less about the lies told to conceal the activities and identities of those responsible for the economic collapse in the developed world, which have done their own severe damage.
What happened to global prosperity in the Noughties was just as atrocious, in its way, as the conduct of terrorism and of some aspects of the battle against it. I wish we could have a proper public inquiry into the causes of that, with the persons responsible punished in an appropriately bankrupting way.
We leave this decade poorer than when we entered it. That is the result of having lived spectacularly beyond our means. We have, quite simply, not earned enough to afford the lifestyle we have chosen for ourselves: and now we are paying the price. Yet whose fault was that? Foolishly, many blame the bankers, easy scapegoats in a society driven by envy because of their champagne-stoked lifestyles and their vast bonuses. They also took idiotic decisions that imperilled the savings of their customers and the value of their shares – decisions that depleted the pension funds of millions of Britons.
But how were they allowed to do this? The answer is painfully simple. The same Government that refused to regulate the bankers properly also allowed an insane amount of liquidity to go into the economy, which gave them cheap material with which to play casino economics.
Labour's biggest lie is that America brought us the recession. The truth is that there, like here, the recession was brought to us by politicians, and Mr Brown is the prime culprit. This decade of debt is about to usher in a new one of hardship.
These failures were partly the cause of the advance of mediocrity. Around the world, too many leaders won office because they were good on television, or plausible con men. Too few reached the top because they were able and sensible. We are now all paying the price for being duped.
We shall be foolish if we don't learn a lesson from the enormous mistakes of the past 10 years. They are both social and economic. In the former sense, we must stand up for our right to a way of life as we desire it in this country, and as no one else has a right to dictate to us. Majorities have rights, too. Nor is there anything wrong with fighting to protect them, provided the battle is joined honestly and with democratic sanction.
And as for our economy: we have to close down large sections of the state. We have to get it out of our lives. We have to get our people off its payroll. We have to get our poor out of dependency upon it. In Britain, the decade ahead needs to be the decade of the individual. For it is we, the people, who will revive us, and not the state.
If Labour does pursue this futile line of attack on the Tories up to the General Election, they will be wiped out, possibly for good. People are sick of it, for one thing (Blair, for all his sins, knew that) and for another, it is perfectly clear to all but Brown and his henchmen that a massive proportion of the British public don't define themselves in these terms any more. They are not offended by money, as long as it is perceived to have been earned. So Cameron, Osborne and Boris Johnson will not be judged harshly by the electorate because of their backgrounds. Their parents were all hard working and successful and in that way, they are not what Labour thinks they are and desperately want us to think they are, namely, some sort of robber barons - and I don't mean in the metaphorical sense. It's the "flimsy caricaturing" I was talking about earlier and, quite simply, it won't work.Alan Johnson had a go at ‘public schoolboy millionaires’ yesterday in the Sunday Times. “The Conservatives are the party of inherited wealth, private education and conspicuous affluence, ” he said. “If they were to win the election, you would have a mayor of London, chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister all coming from a tiny clique who went out trashing restaurants and left large wodges of money to pay for the damage.”
This has gone down badly at City Hall, where Boris “I fear no man” J0hnson is preparing his riposte for when he comes to face to face with the Home Secretary at the “Johnson v Johnson” debate organised next month by Policy Exchange. The event is ostensibly about PR, with Vernon Bogdanor seconding Johnson A and Lord Norton of Louth assisting Johnson B. But like a row about whether to put the toilet seat up, it can very quickly be turned into something else. I’m told Hizzoner is itching to “put that man Johnson in his place”. So book your seats now: the class war is about to go live
George Friedrich/George Frideric Handel (1685 - 1759)Fantastic. But just in case that's a bit too expert for you (it is for me), and just in case you still doubt him (or me), here's a truly remarkable performance of part of his Royal Fireworks. If any more evidence were really needed of the depth of this utterly gifted musical revolutionary's talent, then this must be it. His music is still extraordinary, in the true sense of the term.Coming to the end of our time with the four great 09/59 composers, we come to arguably the greatest of them all, and certainly the most enduringly popular. Also, perhaps, the one who should not be bounded by national labels, being instead a true cosmopolitan - born in Magdeburg, trained in Florence and Venice, who from the age of 27 lived in London, spending much time in Dublin.Among French musicians at the turn of the twentieth century, it was a standing joke that the English had only ever had one great composer, and they managed that by stealing him from the Germans. Yet that is a gross over-simplification of the role of Handel in music, particularly English language music. Although there was a tradition of English opera, oratorio and popular song established by Purcell, it was the music crafted by Handel - opera, but most of all oratorio - that carried it forward.He also of course became involved in a very important English institution that was gradually extending itself into Scotland and therefore becoming British as well - the monarchy. In 1727 he was commissioned to write four anthems for the coronation of George II. By all accounts the coronation was rather chaotic, but the anthems stuck - all four remain readily available in print, and no. 3 especially, "The King Shall Rejoice", is a joy to perform. It's always rather overshadowed, however, by no. 1 - generally called "Zadok the Priest" after its opening line. So far has this slipped into the idea of the British monarchy - the British nation - that it is performed at every coronation, receiving its last outing for this purpose in 1953. Truly a remarkable achievement, even if I prefer the others musically.Details of his life are at once crowded and sketchy. His chronology is readily available, but little is known about his home life, or the reason he never married. Despite frequent financial crises caused by ill-advised ventures into opera management, or poor compositions (all composers produce a fair share of stinkers if they write any volume at all) he died worth £20,000, worth certainly many millions in today's terms (there is no precise way of calculating worth from that time to this, given the variables involved). Most of this went to his niece, who had remained in Germany - it is doubtful that he knew her well.In his music, he left all of us a much greater legacy. His operas fell into obscurity post mortem, but have recently enjoyed a modest revival. That is nothing, however, compared to the oratorios - popular at the time, and popular ever since. That said, most people just know the edited highlights of most of them. Anyone who has ever been to an Easter Day church service will surely have sung "Thine Be the Glory" - the tune, known as "Judas Maccabeus," was originally set to "See The Conquering Hero Comes," written first for Joshua and then added to Judas Maccabeus. Who has not heard the wonderful number "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba," from Solomon and Sheba, with its wonderful, flowing theme importing the grandeur of the occasion? I recommend it to all of my friends who get married as a processional piece - far better than Wagner's "Treulich Gefürht." For myself, I have always had a definite soft spot for the Solemn March from Joshua - I play it at Remembrance Day services, and at funerals where appropriate. It was originally written to measure the tramp of the Children of Israel as they marched around the Walls of Jericho, before the trumpets laid them flat in ruin.In the majority of his oratorios Handel created essentially an opera without the actions - a strong narrative, with almost enough for a staging of it as an opera. This is the classic format for an oratorio (Elijah being another good example). But in one, he broke that mould, and created a classic that remains perhaps the most performed work in all English music. I speak, of course, of Messiah.Messiah is, despite the title, very little concerned with the life and teachings of Jesus. Instead, it draws heavily on the prophecies of the Old Testament (especially Isaiah) and creates an interpretation of who He was, what He means, and what will come to pass, exploring the themes of the virgin birth, the Crucifixion and Resurrection - then continuing to show what that will mean at the Day of Judgement. Handel is said to have written the music in just 24 days - admittedly drawing massively on his earlier works for inspiration, but setting everything anew, painting the words with the music, and creating a work that nobody who calls themselves a singer should pass up a chance of singing.Originally purely secular and written for theatre, in the 19th century it became a staple of the church choir. With their decline since the 1960s, it continues to thrive as a popular number for choral societies. And of course, it is a much-performed work for charities, as a "come and sing" event - especially at the Albert Hall, where hundreds come to sing it every year. Handel's most popular work abounds with choruses - most famously, but not by any means most brilliantly, the Hallelujah Chorus. It is a measure of the work's quality that I at least consider that one of the weaker choruses. Handel gave us a genuine masterwork, one that I have no doubt will be performed as long as there are 50 people in four parts to sing it with an organist (or better yet, an orchestra) to play along.Therefore it may come as a surprise that I am closing, not with a piece from Messiah, but from Samson. I have a soft spot for both Joshua and Samson, the more so because I have never yet had a chance to perform either. Given the variety and quality of Handel's output, some very fine stuff tends to get overshadowed. Here, at the end of Act Two, the Israelites and the Philistines are quarrelling over who out of Jehovah and Dagon are "fixed in his everlasting seat" hence the continual echoes. Maybe one day I'll have a chance to perform it myself!But do not despair if you love Messiah! I have three more posts to come on this blog, and the last, the very last, will close with a little something from it. It feels like the right way to go out. Next week then: on Tuesday, the Welsh Blogosphere and blogging more generally: on Wednesday, the posts I personally liked best out of the 297 I have done so far: and on Thursday - well, a little something to finish. In the meanwhile, I give you Samson.
Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference from CFACT on Vimeo.
Hat tip: The Red Rag
Ah, life. So much to do, so little time to do it. But I can always find time to flag up another emerging revelation in the increasingly appalling (is that possible?) Climategate saga.
I've been watching the oil price with some interest over the past few weeks, not least because there has been some speculation that it is entering a very bearish period - for traders, that is, not for consumers - due to oversupply (Iraq is coming back into the equation, for instance, combined with the fact that many companies 'parked' huge quantities of crude offshore in tankers to keep the price artificially high during 2009 and that has added to the glut now, especially in the US where demand is still relatively weak). The NYMEX price fell for the eighth consecutive day today to hit $69.63 - and the trend is still downward, not least because of a stronger dollar.
HMS QE: casualty of Labour incompetence
Darling's Pre-budget nonsense represents the most appalling assault on the middle classes yet, who, as usual, are going to be squeezed dry to pay for useless Labour's economic bust. It also means that Brown Labour has now dropped any pretence that it cares about anything else other than its short term goal of somehow getting itself re-elected. In fact, though, it could be said that this dodgy dossier of Tory-bashing tribalism is so utterly awful that it amounts to a capitulation - at least by the feeble realist arm of Labour, possibly located at the Treasury. They can't win the next election based on an economic record as catastrophically terrible as Brown's, so the story goes, so why not use the remaining months of power to shore up the core vote and the heartlands? Limit the damage and bugger the country.Even before we’ve trawled through the small print on pensions and tax changes, the pre-Budget report has lived up to the billing. Scorched earth, poison pill, you can choose your metaphor but the key point is that this was a political statement designed to protect Labour’s sectional interests, boost its core vote and stuff the Tories at every turn. George Osborne will probably get the prize for offering the pithiest summary in his reply to Alistair Darling: the greatest golden rule of all is that you can’t trust a Labour government with your money.Excellent comment and that "you can't trust a Labour government with your money" is not just pithy from Osborne, but oh-so true, too. How much more evidence do people really need that this trainwreck regime is willing to take the entire country over the pricipice (which is what I assume Brogan means by his mountain metaphor) with it? As a reader of this blog said yesterday, this is not just as bad as 1979, it's much worse. At least Callaghan was a decent human being who understood, above and beyond the pettiness of tribal politics, that he and his government (especially Chancellor Denis Healey, but even he eventually put country before party and made, as David Hughes says, the "tough choices") had failed Britain.Every other line in the Chancellor’s statement was shaped to make a political point: ‘unemployment is never a price worth paying’, ‘government action has made a real difference’, ‘those who doubt the effectiveness of tax credits’, ‘when we could have chosen to do nothing’, all direct digs at the Tories. The ship is sinking under him but the captain blames the passengers.
The measures likewise: for example, a whacking great increase in the value of the state pension (2.5pc when inflation is negative?!), ditto other benefits, represents a gratuitous increase in the cost of entitlements, in the knowledge that the Conservatives need to review them downwards. Reckless, unaffordable, yet how can the Tories reasonably be expected to reverse that one? Such is the political craftiness of Gordon Brown. Or take the freezing of the threshold on the 40p rate: all attention is on bankers, but this is where senior nurses, policemen, middle managers will suddenly find themslelves dragged into the higher rate. Then there’s the 0.5pc increase in NICs, and the pension cap on public sector workers. Ditto the tax on bonuses: a paltry £500m in, but how many billions out as confidence ebbs away from the City. And there’s the business about taxing employer pension contributions: it hits those on above £130,000 – wealth creators they may be but how much sympathy will there be for them? Again, crafty.
“We take these decisions from a position of strength,” Mr Darling said, to howls of derision from the Tory side. The economy is crocked, the markets are pulling the plug on UK plc (bookies have just cut the odds on us losing that AAA rating), and those whose efforts are needed to get growth going again are going to have to pay a lot more, so what is he talking about? The strength that comes from being the party in power, free to use the forces of Government to its advantage. It is in office, so it is still strong. It can be outrageous, it can trash the place, it can do what it damn well pleases because it knows that the mess will be for the Tories to clean up. Labour is already waiting to be in Opposition, shrieking at any attempt to undo any of this. The civil service has been muscled aside, its warnings ignored, Labour now at the controls shouting ‘Gordon is great’ as it pushes the throttle down towards the mountain ahead.
Today, the international (and all-powerful) New York credit rating company, Moody's, warned that thanks to Gordon Brown's disastrous financial policies over the past decade, which has left our public finances in a catastrophic condition and still worsening, UK government debt could be tested in the very near future and downgraded from AAA to A1. This would make government bond sales - its out-of-control borrowing, in other words - much more expensive and, as a consequence, would put Britain firmly on the road to debt default. In terms of the long term future of the British economy, however, this prospect is a serious but minor detail when compared to the scale and the cynicism of Brown's scorched earth policy in his attempt to dupe the population into thinking there is some form of economic recovery in his attempt finally to get elected. He's willing to risk the downgrade - and will go on spending us into oblivion - just to secure a mandate.Moody’s AAA sovereign monitor was published today, and whilst the UK’s AAA status remains ‘resilient’ the situation is far from rosy. The report states:The need for a new Conservative government has never been more desperate - at least, not since 1979 and the last Labour economic implosion. Let us pray that Cameron knows how to make that case. But because he's now up against forces so cynical and so calculating, that job just became a lot tougher. Perhaps a credit downgrade, in the long run anyway, could end up being just the reality-checking medicine an electorate, still hoping against hope that Brown's crisis (if not Brown) will just magically go away, now requires.‘The UK economy entered the crisis in a vulnerable position, owing to the (overly) large size of its banking sector and the high level of household indebtedness. Both continue to weigh on economic performance. Net bank lending to the UK business sector has continued to contract through Q3 2009, and repairs to household balance sheets (i.e. the rising savings ratio) may weigh on demand for some time to come.The depth of the crisis has been mirrored by the ongoing deterioration of public finances (with gross debt/GDP having risen from 44% at the end of 2007 to an estimated 69% at the end of 2009). It also raises considerable challenges going forward, as the downward adjustment of potential output during the crisis will result in a recurrent shortfall in tax revenues, which, if not compensated by a parallel adjustment in expenditure, would leave the government with a permanent deficit.’
First into recession because of Brown’s profligacy, Britain’s recovery is stunted by continued spending and the government’s inability to address the credit freeze. Moody’s assert that Britain’s AAA status will be endangered unless fiscal retrenchment is implemented soon, something that global bond markets are relying upon too. Moody’s assert:
‘While assumed capacity for fiscal adjustment currently supports the maintenance of the Aaa rating of the UK government, this assumption will have to be validated by actions in the not-too-distant future to continue to provide support for the rating.’Britain cannot sustain this level of debt. We near an Ireland-style downgrading followed by an era of ruinously expensive borrowing. Labour’s political and economic strategy dictates that fiscal adjustments will not be undertaken until 2011. Tomorrow’s Pre Budget Report will contain time saving measures, in the form of further cheap, low yield gilts and perhaps more Quantitative Easing, to allow the government to execute its strategy, borrow cheaply and prepare for future retrenchment. Will the markets wait that long?
There's a film, too:Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.
A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).
Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.
And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!
One of these two knows what he's doingGordon Brown’s much heralded tripartite regulatory system failed the first time it was faced with a financial crisis, proof that taking away regulatory powers from the Bank of England was a massive mistake. Now, Ben Bernanke — who is trying to secure a second term as Fed Chairman and keep the Fed’s regulatory powers intact — is citing the Brown model as what not to do, telling the Senate banking committee:Very gently put by James Forsyth. In reality, what Bernanke is saying here is that Brown himself - personally - through his moronic regulatory mishmash, directly caused - not contributed to, mind, caused - the 'destructive run and the major problem for the British economy' we are all having to suffer through now. Namely, the worst peacetime recession in modern British history. That's how cognitively dissonant the Brown-Labour narrative is on the banking crisis and recession for which, I and many others maintain, Brown is directly responsible."[O]ver the past few years the government of Britain removed from the Bank of England most of its supervisory authorities. When the crisis hit - for example when the Northern Rock bank came under stress - the Bank of England was completely in the dark and unable to deal effectively with what turned out to be a destructive run and a major problem for the British economy.”As Paul Waugh points out, George Osborne and his team are rather pleased with this effective endorsement of their position by the Fed Chairman. Bernanke’s quote does rather show that Brown isn’t leading the world in quite the way that he likes to claim.
Lord Lawson is Andrew Neil’s guest on this week’s BBC Straight Talk and, among other topics, the former chancellor rebuffs Ed Miliband’s accusation of climate change heresy. Lawson said:Rod Liddle was doing the same thing last week, as I wrote at the time, namely, calling for some sort of reasoned debate without actually saying which side of that debate he would feel moved to support. And here we have it again. Ordinarily, you might think that that's all fine and dandy: people are right to keep an open mind, you might think, and that would be true - if that was what was really going on here. Only, it's not. What you are seeing is confusion as the MSB has to face up to something it had hitherto taken for granted. The people who run these uber-news sites (they're not really blogs) had swallowed the whole AGW thing hook, line and sinker, at least publicly. It was the way the wind was blowing, after all. However, they've been left in something of a quandary by the fact that almost their entire readership is taking a much, much harder line on the issue: the traffic is moving!“I hope that all parties…take a good hard look at this, we don’t want a sort of Stalinist monolithic line in everything. But I do think, because of the damage that will be done to the economy, that is why, and for very little good, if any, that is why we have got to take a good hard look at the fact that we can’t get a global agreement on this anyway, as will be seen in Copenhagen…So, I think you have got to go back to the drawing board and have a fresh approach. And that is why my think tank is the Global Warming Policy Foundation, it’s not the Global Warming Foundation, it’s the Global Warming Policy Foundation, because it is policy which is so damaging at the present time and threatening so much, and it doesn’t work and it can’t work, and that’s why we’ve got to think of another approach.”Lawson’s comments are aimed at Cameron as much as anyone else, but he is not ‘denying’ the science, though I am sure he’s sceptical, and rightly so. Like David Davis, Lawson challenges the political approach inspired by the Prophet Stern, which will endanger global growth and condemn billions in the developing world to a slow and grinding death in poverty. Ed Miliband’s “saboteur” jibe proves what Fraser says in this week’s magazine: climate change has morphed from debate to catechism. It is now an issue bereft of rationality. A debate on policy, not science, is an immediate necessity - I fear all Copenhagen will amount to is a joyless shindig.
(As if we didn't know.)Desperate.Look at the people who push global warming denialism: Fox News (enough said), The Telegraph (enough said), The Spectator (recently promoting AIDS denialism), Melanie Phillips (enough said), Christopher Booker (has anyone read his Wikipedia entry recently?), James Delingpole (enough said).
These are the kind of fuckwits (Delingpole, Richard North) who think there’s a conspiracy when their article doesn’t appear on Google News or use Google search hits as example of how big the story is.
Calling them ‘denialists’ is being too kind: they should be abused at every instance for the stupidity they churn out. They should be ridiculed, parodied, cussed, and constantly called out for the idiots they are because they deserve it.
Let the scientists do the science. But outside that world is a media full of bullshit artists who have vested interests in promoting ’scepticism’. The Spectator magazine’s hosting of the AIDS denialism film is just one small example. If we retreat on this war between ideologies by trying to be nice, while all they do is throw vitriol and propaganda, then we’ve already lost... There is no reason to take these people seriously or even off them an ounce of respect. If that means the political debate is charged – so be it.
The Green critique of modernity's Faustian recklessness helps to make sense not only of capitalism but also the tragedies of state socialisms. For progressives, whose politics hover between the centre and the far left, this is decisive.See? Once a red loony, now a green loony - but still really a red loony, just daubed with lashings of green propaganda. There's no epiphany, just extreme vanity and extremism. In fact, this person and so many like her are just about as egomaniacal as it's possible for a human being to be without actually regressing fully into some form of narcissistic solipsism; a complete but ecstatic break from reality. But they cling on with their fingernails and the support of like-minded, wrongheaded individuals, who serve merely to service and reinforce their delusions.The communist states of the 20th century did for socialism. I was a dynastic communist – my parents were British Bolsheviks, they were good citizens, and became better when Khrushchev gave permission to criticise Stalinism. All that crashed with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They could not relinquish the Soviet Union, and thereafter our family rows were on the terrain of Russia. The worst insult my father could hurl was: "You're just a social democrat!"
I remained a communist until 1989, when it was all over. I was part of the anti-Stalinist, Euro-communist wing. We were clever, caused trouble, caught the imagination, but we lost. Or maybe we failed.
Green ideology represents the reconciliation of production and reproduction – that is what yields sustainability.
Excellent piece from the Renegade Economist today which traces some of Tony Blair's labyrinthine collection of funds, holding companies and legal entities that he's started since handing over his mandate to Gordon Brown. According to the Renegade, he's created a "complex web of structures involving 12 different legal entities handling the unprecedented millions he is receiving since he stepped down from office in 2007."So mystifying are the former prime minister’s financial structures – which involve highly specialised limited partnerships and parallel companies – that the Guardian today launches an open invitation to tax specialists and accountants to attempt to explain the motivation behind such structures. We have published the Companies House documents and other legal papers regarding the structure of the partnerships at guardian.co.uk and invite expert comment via our site at guardian.co.uk/politics/series/blair-mystery.
Thereis no suggestion Blair is doing anything illegal. But he refuses to explain the
purpose of the secretive partnerships.
Tax specialists say Blair could use these unusual arrangements at some point in the future to seek to transfer millions tax-free to his four children.
Blair denies, however, that the structures are such an inheritance tax avoidance scheme, known as a “family limited partnership”.
“Family limited partnerships” were being publicized to lawyers and accountants in November 2007 at the time Blair’s lawyers started to set up his structures.
Known in the trade as “Flips”, family limited partnerships are a way of getting round stricter inheritance tax rules in the 2006 budget, imposed by Gordon Brown while Blair was still prime minister.
The Guardian's chief political correspondent, Nicholas Watts, has launched a ludicrous attack on Rupert Murdoch on behalf of Peter Mandelson (who else?) that'll appear in tomorrow's edition. There are some extraordinary claims that suggest a distinct and burgeoning paranoia on the part of the Labour Party - (you remember them, the ones that sucked-up to, erm, Rupert Murdoch for 12 years); a familiar, hypocritical stench surrounding Mandelson; and typically ovine support for any old nonsense from his pet newspaper, the good ol' Graun.Lord Mandelson declared war on the Murdoch empire today when he accused News Corporation of maintaining an "iron grip" on pay television and warned that the company wants to import rightwing Fox News-style journalism to Britain.Um, what? I know News International's just announced that it no longer wants people like me nicking their stories (big deal - and fair enough, they don't belong to me, and they're usually naff anyway) but that hardly amounts to an 'iron grip'. As for wanting to 'import rightwing [sic] Fox News-style to Britain', well, no complaints here. It might at least break the monopoly of the biased BBC - and be interesting, to boot. Again, though, Watts doesn't feel the need to substantiate the claim.
In a sign that Murdoch also faces a fight in Britain, Mandelson turned his fire on a joint Tory-News Corp campaign to dismantle the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom.Again, no substantiation or evidence, just a repetition of an increasingly shrill Mandelson slur about a joint Tory-News Corp 'campaign'. This is the Guardian at its very, very worst in terms of journalistic standards. Have they seen any documents that support Mandelson's bizarre, shrill charges? Of course not. Do they care? Well, if Watts was a genuine journalist he would. But he doesn't so he's not. He's just a mouthpiece for mad Mandy.
Sorry folks, 'fraid not. For one thing, Cameron made his speech (about quangos) a month before Murdoch Jnr's machinegun assault on anything not Sky (which is sort of his job, after all - to make daddy proud). But still no 'evidence' there. Just more half-baked accusations and the flimsiest of flimsy circumstantial claptrap bordering on a waking dream. And anyway, James Murdoch was right, too! The burden of regulation on broadcasting generally in Britain is outrageous. Oh, unless you're the Beeb of course. Then you can do whatever they like, editorially and financially, despite being funded by a legally enforced tax.Cameron pledged to dismantle Ofcom during a speech in July devoted to "cutting back the quango state". The Tory leader said: "With a Conservative government, Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist."
James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp in Europe and Asia, accused Ofcom in August of imposing an "astonishing" burden of regulation on Sky.
Jame's Forsyth puts it rather well:The opinion polls are continuing to feed the story that the Tories are in trouble. Tonight’s Politics Home data which shows Cameron’s personal ratings dropping 15 points in the last 10 weeks follows a string of polls where the Tories have failed to break through the forty percent mark. Tory morale has been a bit shaken by these polls; Cameron could do with a decisive win at PMQs tomorrow to gee up the Parliamentary party. But turning these numbers around is, I suspect, going to require some policies that show us what David Cameron’s irreducible core is. Oddly enough, I don’t think these policies have to be particularly popular but they have to show the electorate that Cameron stands for something, that he isn’t just another say anything to win politician. Picking a fight on offering substantial recognition to marriage in the tax system might actually be a good strategy for Cameron in these circumstances. It would show that there are some things he will stand up for whatever the risks.Cameron already has my vote, not because I've been especially impressed by him recently, but because base camp for climbing the Everest of hope - hope of a possible recovery economically and socially in the UK after the damage mercilessly wrought for 13 years by the worst government it has ever had inflicted upon it - is to vote them out by voting him in.
Boy, that didn't take long, did it? The warmist propaganda machine is now going into overdrive to try somehow to repair the damage of Climategate on the eve of the Copenhagen Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of global warming, an important international study has concluded.Well at least the authors of this report had the sense to use the suitably hedging conditional "would" instead of the usual, hysterical 'will' of AGW fanatics. (And if the sun exploded, we'd all get pretty warm very quickly, right?) Mind you, they had little choice on that one, as this comment on a Telegraph blog (well known climate change activist's, Will Heaven...erm) points out:The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4 metres — twice that predicted two years ago.
Such a rise in sea levels would engulf island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific, devastate coastal cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka and force London, New York and Shanghai to spend billions on flood defences.
Even if the average global temperature increases by only 2C — the target set for next week’s Copenhagen summit — sea levels could still rise by 50cm, double previous forecasts, according to the report.
SCAR, a partnership of 35 of the world’s leading climate research institutions, made the prediction in the report Antarctic Climate Change and Climate. It far exceeds the 0.59 metre rise by the end of the century quoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. This was based on a “business as usual” approach by governments that allowed temperatures to rise by 4 degrees. It will underpin the negotiations in Copenhagen.
SCAR scientists said that the IPCC underestimated grossly how much the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets would contribute to total sea-level rises.
Sceptics seized upon his figures as further evidence of the unreliability of climate change predictions.I suppose they would call that balance, but the use of the warmist term of abuse "sceptics," (euphemistic codespeak for the vicious slur "denier" and/or the debate-killing "crank"), instead of the usual (and balanced) "critics" suggests to me that at the very least - and this is a generous conclusion - post-Climategate they simply don't know how to frame this issue any more.“It’s 50cm, 60cm, 100cm — 60m if you ask James Hansen from Nasa,” said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation . “The predictions come in thick and fast, but we take them all with a pinch of salt. We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming. We’re very concerned that 100-year policies are being made on the basis of these predictions”
jim king wrote:You what? This uber-hoon really seems to believe that someone - or something, perhaps - dropped a trillion trillion tons of ice on top of the sea at the polar ice caps. Mind you, she's probably an A-level Physics teacher (though fairly new to the profession - and the subject - it would seem) given that she appears to know more about all powerful space aliens that like to drop huge lumps of ice on unsuspecting, mostly harmless, planets, than Archimedes' principle.
"1. Put a large ice cube in a glass.
2.fill it to the brim with water.
3.The ice cube will protrude above the surface.
4.Wait till the ice cube melts
5. In the doomsday theory the scare mongers would have you believe the protruding ice that has now melted will over flow.
6.It never will because ice displaces it's own volume.
7. When water freezes it expands.
8. So the reverse happen's when it melts
9. Simple school boy facts."
Now do it with the ice on top of a column of concrete with the water level up to the top. Watch the water flow over the top when the ice melts.
