The Sunday Quote -

''The big print giveth and the fine print taketh away''

J Fulton Sheen (1895-1979)

The green man

David Cmeron communing with his melting glacier

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"If I read another word about climate change, I shall go mad," writes Edward Celiz of Bodham Halt, Norfolk in today's Sunday Telegraph letters. in so doing, he echoes precisely the sentiment of this blog.

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If the Boy King (The Rt Hon David Cameron, MP Leader of Her Majesty's offocial and loyal opposition) ) mentions his 'green revolution', once more, we on this blog will all scream.

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"Edward Celiz's letter is preceded by one of slightly more weight, written as it is by 41 scientists who, according to the heading, "debunk global warming alert". All of them eminent in the climate field, they venture the opinion that "global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise'". They also note that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future".

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For anyone who cares to explore the subject, there is no end of sources that will confirm that view, the sum of which affirm that, far from being consensus, or the issue being fixed, the arguments over global warming are far from resolved and the issues are, in fact, highly contentious.

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In one positive development in an otherwise bleak landscape, Booker has been pulled out of semi-obscurity in the inside back page of the Sunday Telegraph, where we was consigned by the erstwhile, unlamented editor Sarah Sands.

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Mr Booker has been returned to his former glory by the new editor, Patience Wheatcroft, in what we hope will now be the start of the paper's reversion to a proper newspaper.

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In his column (which is essential reading for all attendees at the Bruges Group meeting on Tuesday evening) charts the damage John Prescott has done to British democracy, and also points up Defra's latest gaffe – a hilarious reporting error.

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A story in The Times yesterday, which reported the Boy King in trouble over his choice of car. No sooner was he back from Norway in his gas-guzzling private jet, having communed with his melting glacier, than the Greens were protesting that he had failed to pick the most environmentally-friendly option for his next chauffeur-driven car - to be provided at the taxpayers' expense, on top of the Boy's £125,000 salary.

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The Greens wanted Cameron to take a petrol-electric hybrid Toyota Prius but, instead, the leader of the opposition opted for a Lexus GS 450h.

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Cameron is going to regret he ever opened this can of worms.However, that has not stopped him prattling away in a vacuous opinion piece in the Sunday Telegraph, the centrepiece of which is his "radical agenda for greener cars" which he is to announce tomorrow.

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Cameron wants – or so he tells us – "Britain to be at the forefront of international efforts to build a new generation of motor vehicles that are much less environmentally damaging." Such a programme, he adds, "will include significant incentives to encourage the ownership of newer, greener vehicles."Unsurprisingly, these "international efforts" are remarkably similar to those set out by the EU last year, which rather proves ours and Booker's point. The Boy King has simply bought into the EU "green agenda" and, what is worse, he is now trying to pass it off as an expression of "traditional Conservative values".

Happy Brirthday Ma'am

A very Happy Birthday to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

on the occasion of her 80th Birthday

Cameron's gaffe

The Blog Editor, Peter Troy who as a former UKIP candidate awaits David Cameron's apology, above pictured in Scotland during the 2004 European Parlimament Elections.

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As fruitcake recipes are suddenly in vogue in certain offices in Brussels, the unsavoury joke doing the rounds at the moment, following the Boy King's (David Cameron) incredible UKIP gaffe yesterday, is that the next election-winning stunt planned by the Tories is to recruit a cadre of experienced suicide bombers to blow up central office.

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That at least would give tangible form to what effectively amounts to the slow electoral suicide being committed by the Conservative party as it insults the very voters it needs if it is to win at the next contest.
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That the Boy King's experiment in "modern compassionate conservatism" is failing is borne out by the latest Times Populus survey, taken over the weekend. It suggests that despite the Labour Party being in almost complete meltdown, its support is holding up in the polls, up one point since early March to 36 percent, while the not-the-conservative-party is down one point at 34 percent.
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When even the Telegraph turns against Cameron, you know he is in trouble. Its leader is headed, "UKIP deserves better", declaring that "if the Conservatives have a strategy to denigrate UKIP, in the hope of halting the erosion of their own vote, they should remember Michael Howard's blunder before the 2004 European elections."

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It was then that he called UKIP leaders "cranks and gadflies", whence their vote climbed appreciably. Given the commendable cussedness of the British, Mr Cameron's suggestion that party members are "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists" will almost certainly have the same effect.

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Commenting on the sincerely-held beliefs of UKIP supporters, the leader then concludes that "it is precisely this sneering indifference to people's passionate concerns that makes them so fed up with politics," adding that "the Tory leader should apologise."

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Of course, the Boy King will not apologise. What he said yesterday he holds to be self-evidently true and, if he runs to form, his view will be that, once again, the people – and the Telegraph – have failed to recognise this truth. That is their fault, not his.
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It is not so much, the "sneering indifference" that is the Boy King's problem, therefore. It is that he inhabits so different a planet from the rest of us that he cannot even begin to understand that he has made a mistake

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Such is his mindset that there should be a good job waiting for him in the EU commission, when his despairing colleagues finally throw him out. The only question now is whether that will be before or after the Conservatives lose the general election.

The chicken and the egg

State funding widens the gap between government and governed writes Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph today, in a cogent piece that argues that taxpayers’ cash will guarantee more party sleaze.

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To develop his thesis, he points to experience in Europe, where state funding is the norm and has neither bridged the divide between the ruling classes and the people nor cleaned up what Hannan rates as "the dirtiest political systems".

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Good as his piece is, however, what Hannan doesn't do is suggest an alternative to state funding, or even offer an analysis of why the political parties in this country have got themselves in such a mess over financing their activities.

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Arguably, though, the way out is the more important issue for, if the voters rebel at the thought of doshing out their hard-earned cash to keep the political classes in the luxury they palpably do not deserve, then alternative means of funding have to be found.

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Oddly enough, the answer is already there, in the Conservatives' own supposed manifesto, in which they laud the merits of localism. If they look to their own past, they will see that the formidable strength of the Tory electoral fighting machine was in its local constituency associations, which could collect money and turn out the troops to bring in the votes.

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But, as with politics in general, over the years we have seen massive centralisation in political parties, with elections and fund-raising being managed from central office, with the local associations being relegated to a bit-part role and the views and skills of local campaigners being largely ignored.

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To a very great extent, "Europe" – as they insist on calling the European Union – has played a great part in this. The constituencies are largely Eurosceptic, at odds with their own party hierarchy, to the extent that there are two Conservative parties, inhabiting entirely different planets.

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To rely on the constituencies and their funding means getting in touch with your grass roots, asking what people think, listening to them and then acting on what they say. In other words, the political classes have to respond to their own local parties, instead of running their own agendas.And it is this that the central office control freaks find so difficult to do. For them who want to dictate rather then respond, such reliance is an anathema. It is much easier, therefore, to tap up a few rich men and corporate sources, to enable them to run their own campaigns, sucking up to the Westminster media village (who are just as out of touch as the politicos) and laying down the law to the locals.

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Combine that with the inherent and almost insufferable arrogance of that group of people collectively known as "Tory boys", who labour (if I can use that word) under the impression that they have any value to society at all, and who insulate themselves so successfully from the real world that they feel the need to talk only to themselves, and you have a self-referential society that has lost the art of listening and responding.

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Thus, although we can take it from Hannan that state funding would widen the gap between government and governed, the real problem is that that gap already exists – it has already been created by the party machines and the current funding crisis is a symptom rather than a cause of the problem.

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Within that framework, all state funding would actually do is cement in the evils that already exist – the chicken that was there long before the egg.

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If the parties do seriously want to narrow the gap, then they have to revert to their own local associations, and rely on ordinary party activists to take up the slack. But, as that means listening to people and responding to them, that is unlikely to happen.

A dispatch from the bunker

Above, a Royal Obserever Corps Post Bunker - Huntingdon, Derbyshire. One of 1563 bunkers that were a part of the UK nuclear attack monitoring defence system of which the Editor of the blog was a serving member during the latter stages of the Cold War .

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Obervational dispatch

by Dr Richard North

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Things have come to a pretty pass when I actually agree with Simon Jenkins, but his piece today in the Sunday Times, headed "Desperate dispatches from the banana republic of Great Britain" is right on the button.

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He starts by recording the disastrous collapse of the single farm payment scheme, leaving England's 120,000 farmers begging for their subsidies. He then notes that although Margaret Beckett, Defra’s secretary of state had declared: "I take full responsibility," all she actually meant was that she had just sacked one of her officials, Johnston McNeill, so as to save the skin of her farm minister, an obscure Tony crony called Lord Bach. The latter had spent six months deriding critics of his scheme as "shoddy" and creating "unfounded alarm and uncertainty".

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The shambles at Defra, writes Jenkins, might win more publicity were a similar litany of woe not rising from every corner of Whitehall. He then goes on to record but a mere fraction of them which put together, speak of a nation, the administration of which is falling apart at the seams.

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Booker picks up on the single farm payments shambles, in the limited space afforded him, calling it "easily the worst administrative fiasco the government has created in farming since the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001", and notes that it is in part due to "the unique complexities of the system devised for England by Margaret Beckett, and the collapse of the computer system devised by Accenture (the same company that is responsible for the chaos engulfing a £6 billion computer system for the NHS)."He also notes that, while Johnston McNeill, as head of the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has been suspended, he continues to draw his £160,000 a year salary.

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Failure, it seems, is no bar to prosperity when you are in Blair’s public service. Jenkins notes that part of the trouble with the NHS is Hewitt’s extraordinary decision to proceed with Accenture’s £6 billion “choose-and-book” computer. This is an unnecessary machine, he writes, for which no health professional ever asked and which was sold to her predecessors by the smooth-talking salesmen now beating a path to the softest touch in global computer procurement, the British taxpayer.

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A leaked report in February suggested that the NHS computer may end up costing a mind-numbing £ 50 billion.The Sunday Times business section cites one public procurement expert saying the scheme had been "cretinously and ineptly procured… the reality is that the original deal was hammered through with very little real understanding of the consequences on either side. Some of the participants had no idea what they were taking on."

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Yet, as The Business reports, Accenture is now to bid for the contract to provide biometric technology for the UK's identity registry, which will underpin the government's identity card scheme.That, in a way is good news. If its efforts are at least as good as its work RPA and the NHS, Accenture will ensure that the identity card scheme will never actually function, but the one certainty is that even the LSE’s pessimistic forecast of £18 billion for the cost of the scheme will be a gross underestimate. Jenkins records that the cost is escalating past £12 billion towards, on one estimate, £30 billion.This is not public administration but public chaos Jenkins adds despairingly, but it is not only the administration which is going to wrack and ruin.

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Henry Porter in The Observer sets out the savage damage done to the constitution by New Labour, echoing a theme we have raised in this blog, with a call for a Bill of Rights. Porter’s thesis is that Labour's programme of legislation challenges the British constitution like no other administration before it.

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In a thousand tiny - and not so tiny - cuts Labour threatens our rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament. For the past two weeks he has been going through all the Labour legislation that has reduced our freedoms, compromised our rights and menaced the life of Parliament. He found it an extremely depressing experience, not least because he has now discovered that parliament – "your and my elected representatives" - has been sidelined. Welcome to the world, Porter.

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From the sublime to the ridiculous, though, Jeremy Clarkson takes us to his world, a world infested with speed cameras, the increase in numbers of which, he shows, exactly matches the slackening off in the rate of decline in road deaths. Commenting on those who have fallen foul of the reign of Gatso, he observes that he’s be willing to bet they'd trade Tony Blair's idea of a nation state for anything. Even the EU.

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We cannot agree, as things are hardly better there. For instance, The Business records in depth the total Horlicks that Peter Mandelson is making of EU trade policy while Allister Heath asks: "Is France ungovernable".

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However, Clarkson does have a point. Excuse me while I retreat to my bunker.