CentreRight

I was simply aghast as I read the comments on Tim's post over on ToryDiary about the Telegraph's battle with Nadine Dorries.  I wrote the following as a comment there, and I repeat it here for those followers of CentreRight who might not have scrolled through the tons of posts there.

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To me, it is quite unbelievable that people with a national newspaper on hand as their voice think it appropriate to react to an online blog in this way. Indeed, their newspaper has, for the last 16 days (and counting) demonstrated the power that it can wield in our political environment. If they feel that they've been wronged, have it out - trying to squash Nadine rather than debate her seems absurdly heavy-handed.

Moreover, I think that there is a great deal to be said for the airing of her comments about this business more generally, for example:

* I'm sure that there IS a "depths of despair" attitude amongst our parliamentarians at present, and I think it useful to have the insights she offers into it.

* I think it right that we should know that MPs think (or at least this MP thinks) that the Fees Office (or whoever) colluded with / encouraged MPs to enter large claims.

* I think it significant that MPs think (or at least this MP thinks) that the media knew about the "it's really just part of our pay" attitude held by many MPs and let it slide.

for these reasons, and for basic (and, it seems from this thread, hitherto undiscussed) reasons of freedom of speech, I deplore the shutting down of this outlet of information. We keep saying we want to know what MPs are thinking - one tells us, and gets shut down - why aren't we up in arms on her behalf?

And finally I have to say that I'm firmly on the side of those who find the online vitriol poured upon this passionate and determined member of our Party quite unbelievable.

One simple point in this apology-laden times.

An apology from people who, but for having been caught, would have continued in the course of conduct for which they are apologising, is of questionable worth.

That is all.

The Australian has the story:

"... while some ice-shelf melting is under way on the peninsula and in other parts of west Antarctica that may be related to global warming, ice shelves in east Antarctica remain intact.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica.

At the same time, the area of sea ice around the continent is expanding, with sea ice growth in east Antarctica and the Ross Sea more than compensating for losses in west Antarctica. Contrary to public perceptions, parts of Antarctica have been cooling.

The newspaper forced an embarrassing climb-down on the issue from erstwhile Midnight Oil frontman-turned-Labor-politician, Peter Garrett.

You really should read the whole thing.

One hopes that this helps to remove any doubt about where I stand on the man-made "climate change" absurdity.

Hat tip: SWMBO

The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times.

The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected.

A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.

So says Professor Ian Plimer in an important new book, flagged over on what I suppose is our sister site, Australian Conservative.  I do recommend a thorough purusal of that page and the links thereon.

I suppose the next question is, even if that is right, and that global warming and climate change etcetera are a crock of the proverbial, isn't the sensible thing (as a politician) to toe the line, at least in a lip service sense, given that the orthodoxy is so established?  You will get hissed at most public meetings if you express doubt on whether man is driving change in our climate - it's simply accepted without question by so many people and it puts you on the wrong side of a morality divide if you question that.  Such a position was very harmful for the Howard government in Oz.  So... perhaps "heads down" is the right approach on "climate change", even if one thinks the whole thing's a myth.

[Coda I love the countryside.  I strongly dislike pollution and litter and the waste of energy / anything else.  I just have grave doubts about whether mankind is affecting our climate, and in fact I think there's a strange bit of vanity in the notion that we are doing so / that turning the TV off from standby or driving a smaller car makes any difference.  Why can't the indoctrinated priests of climate change understand that?]

"They lumped us together with the US, which to me is a poison."

In the furore over McBride, this outrageous interview by Sadiq Khan for the Observer has been overlooked.

A minister of the crown has described being associated with our closest ally as a poison. It is quite unbelievable.

Hat tip: MC, MR.

Apropos of nothing very much really, here are three modest proposals for changes to the forms in which our currency circulates:

1) Switch to tough Australian-style notes.

2) Introduce a £5 coin.  The fiver gets worn out and grubby almost immediately.

3) Eliminate the penny.  They cluster in jars everywhere, with no real purpose.  What can you buy with them?  Inspired by this perhaps, but still a good idea.

These are of course not mutually exclusive; neither are they dependent upon one another.

Now I know that the McBride business is very serious indeed but this post by my old mucker Sadie Smith shows (1) that biting satire still lives in the 21st Century and (2) that the left does have a sense of humour, though often it's well hidden.  Enjoy.

Happy Easter.

People often complain that those of us who believe, as I do, that the BBC is remarkably politically biased, have few specific examples to point to.  As if Barbara Plett sobbing at Arafat's funeral weren't enough.

Anyway, I just caught the following gem on BBC News 24.

Jim Muir was reporting on Barack Obama's unannounced visit to Iraq.  Good for Obama, quite right too.  But he was then invited by the anchorman to compare Obama's reception with the reception received by President George W Bush in similar circumstances.  Regular readers will recall Tim's posts on this site showing rapturous receptions from troops in the field for their then Commander-in-Chief - I certainly do.  But instead, in a deliberate and cheap bit of right-bashing, Muir adopted a "we're all in this joke together" sneer and said

    "Well of course, the last time President Bush came here, he got a shoe thrown at him, so the

    contrast couldn't be clearer."

Of course, it wasn't the comparison he'd been invited to draw - a hostile press conference is a world away from a with-the-troops pep rally, the proper comparison, of which Bush had many - but why miss a cheap trick when it can be shoehorned into an otherwise respectable report?

Richard Fuller, the Conservative candidate for the "must win" seat of Bedford and Kempston has published a policy idea for action in the current economic crisis.  It's thought through and interesting.  He calls it a "Social Enterprise Fund" and you can read it here.  You might like to comparie it to the recent Brown and Obama announcements.

Amount spent annually by local authorities removing chewing gum from the street: £150 million.

That buys a lot of [insert public sector expenditure item of choice: text books, nurses' saleries, hip replacements, fire engines...]

Further to my last post on the so-called "protests" today, I note that there has been one actual result of the behaviour of the assorted louts today - the closure of Bank underground station. 

Well done!  What a result!  Because of course, the "fat cat" bankers you're allegedly protesting about use the tube all the time!

Of course, the only people you've really inconvenienced by this are the poor tourists and (ahem) some poor legal aid lawyers...  

Further to Tim's post "Don't dress like a banker for a few days", and Iain's response to it - I walked over Southwark Bridge just now, southwards, against the flow of the commuters.  I was the only person in a suit.  Every one of the commuters pounding towards me, every single one of them, it seemed, was dressed down.  You've never seen so much denim in your life - they looked like a Bay City Rollers fan convention.  Of course they looked pretty weird as, bar the clothes, they still looked like City workers - heads down, crisp shirts, smart - they looked like fish out of pinstriped water.  Anyway - my point is that these "protesters" have won without actually doing anything.

A: The Government.

It's a great (and awful) story from the Sunday Telegraph - the Govt overtook Proctor & Gamble in advertising spend this year, according to Nielson.  Remarkable.  I was meaning to put this up but didn't get to a computer yesterday.  It would seem, from the article, that the BBC's "It's all in the database" scareathon ad campaign isn't included in the figures, which would drive the Government's figure even higher.

Think I'm the first on this site to raise the subject of the remarkable hatchet job Dispatches aired last night on Boris Johnson.  Opinions, anyone?

The part that particularly struck me, no pun intended, was the part in which - as Dispatches told it - Boris seemed to be complicit in a "hit" on a fellow journalist being organised by an old friend of his.  Can't be true - can it?

There seems to be some doubt about our Party's position on Inheritance Tax. 

No doubt about mine.  Here's what I said in 2005:

Inheritance tax in the UK should be abolished altogether - as it is in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The US plans to phase it out at a federal level by 2010. It is unjust, it deters individuals from being financially responsible as they get older, and it obstructs them in trying to pass on to their loved ones the property and capital that they have, through their endeavours, accumulated during their lives.

Should you be of a mind to, you can read the whole thing.

My father is a retired teacher.  Like many retired teachers, he lives in an area in which schools need more teachers.  As a result, he is often asked to do some supply teaching.  Sometimes, he did so.  But he recently got a letter from HMRC saying that if he continued, his pension would be diminished.  So now he just says no.

Joined up government, eh..?

So says Tim.  For my part, I make no such promise, despite our Party's new-found enthusiasm for the Beeb and the TV Tax.  After all, there's such fruitful ground for criticism.  For example, the Today Show interviewed the Estate Agents' Ombudsman this week - perhaps you heard it.  The presenter ramped up the piece with an intro pointing out that sales have fallen 60% but complaints only 3% - which (wahey!  ho ho!) shows we all hate estate agents!  And then the Ombudsman, in his first sentence, said (I paraphrase) - "well, the complaints I deal with are the outcome of a process that takes about six months, so the ones I'm now dealing with come from before the crash."

Which, in all intellectual honesty, was the end of the Beeb's "story".  And yet it dragged on for another three excruciatingly embarrassing minutes.

Anyway - with such "reporting" I view it as most unwise to offer as a hostage to fortune a promise not to criticise the BBC for a whole week, no matter how well-intentioned the maker of said promise.

In a new Conservative Government, before approving any project costing (say) over ten million pounds, the relevant minister should sign off on a front sheet attached to it, detailing some definitions:

• This project will have failed if (i) it takes longer than X to complete; (ii) it costs more than X
• The person responsible for this project is [name].

If this sounds familiar, perhaps it's because the source is known to you.

My one-time CCHQ colleague Rupert Darwall has an article with this title in today's Wall Street Journal, and bury him he certainly does:

Mr. Brown's refusal to acknowledge what is now plain has propelled him to develop an alternative explanation which absolves him of responsibility. What is to blame, he says, is the absence of an international system of early warning signals (although he had a domestic warning system which he ignored) and a global banking regulator. This is the message he took to Washington last week, and it will form a centerpiece of next month's G-20 meeting in London.

Yet a moment's reflection shows that these proposals would have made the problems even worse. International synchronicity is deepening the global downturn. What need strengthening are the circuit breakers and fire walls provided by national regulation. But anyway, that is to miss the point of the exercise -- which is to use the presence of international leaders in London as stage props in Mr. Brown's narrative of self-exculpation.

Go read the whole thing.

So says Allister Heath over at City AM (article not online).  I've linked to his work before but I thought this quite an eye-catching claim - so here's the article in full.

City banks have finally turned a corner

IT is not fashionable to say so but the UK banking system is past the worst. True, several institutions have been turned into pathetic state-owned zombies and the road ahead will be tough for all. But banking conditions are improving, the system has been stabilised, losses contained and some visibility restored. The outlook for the banking sector is far healthier than just six months ago, when it looked like the UK could be hit by several Lehman Brothers-style catastrophes. Such a doomsday scenario now fortunately seems remote.

Anyone else sick of the very frequent, dewy-eyed coverage of the anniversary of the Miners' Strike on the BBC?  Entirely one-sided, pro-miner, anti-"scab", Thatcher-bashing guff set to Hovis-advertesque music.  Once again, we're being forced to subsidise our enemies.  To my mind, yet another reason to break that awful organisation up in the fullness of time...

Senator Edward Kennedy is to receive an honorary knighthood.  I struggle to see why.  As she saw many aspects of his character, I wish I could ask Mary Jo Kopechne what she thinks.  But of course, I can't.  She can't do anything, thanks to Sir Teddy.  I can't see his corpulent face or hear his name without thinking of that poor girl.

So says the excellent Allister Heath in a very good editorial for CityAM this morning.  The article itself is not online as their website is still in development, but IMHO it deserves an e-existence so I paste some of the highlights here (my emphasis added):

January's public finances figures were disastrously poor.  At this rate, borrowing will hit £100 billion this year... And [Alistair Darling's] £118 billion deficit prediction for 2009-10 will turn out to be another gross underestimate...

The truth is that even without the banks our deficit and debt would already be catastrophically high.  Excluding RBS et al, Britain's public sector net debt has hit 47.8 per cent of GDP; with the gap between spending and revenues at close to 10 per cent of GDP, the national debt could soon reach 80 per cent of GDP before adding in the banks.  Without radical and urgent action, we will reach Italian or Greek debt levels within five years.  We also remain saddled with huge off balance sheet liabilities, including public sector pensions and private finance initiative projects.

Just as we got used to easy money, cheap credit and ever-rising asset prices during the boom years, we also grew accustomed to a public sector that was expanding by 7-8 per cent a year.  It was not just the City that was in the grip of a bubble: so was the state, especially after 1999...

Now that the economy has gone into reverse, it is clear that the government is spending far too much as a share of national income... If we don't want to end up with 1970s-style inflation and the public finances of a banana republic, we will urgently have to slam the brakes on spending and return to fiscal probity.

• Cost of the Democratic Congressional package, to supposedly turn the US economy around: $787 billion
• Notice given of the intent to pass the "plan": less than 48 hours
• Length of the package supposedly scrutinised in that time: 1,073 pages
• Cost of the bill with interest to US taxpayers, their children and their children's children: about $1.14 trillion. 
• New debt for each American household resulting from this: about $30,000

Just fills you with hope, doesn't it?

Source: Newt Gingrich, who knows a bit about Congressional spending plans.

In a piece in The Providence Journal this weekend I discussed the "special relationship" in the Obama / Brown era.  Here it is.  In sum:

[I]f President Obama is well advised, Brown’s desire to be seen as a close ally should not be reciprocated. Brown is in dire trouble politically and believes that being British cheerleader-in-chief for the ongoing Obamamania may be a route to popularity. But having overseen Britain’s finances for a decade as chancellor of the exchequer in the Labor government before becoming prime minister, Brown is indelibly associated with the economic crisis here, [whilst] Obama arrives in office free of any such stain.