Political Crooks
Is it not about time the Crown Prosecution Service told us exactly where they are with senior politicians and their potential prosecution?
Eric Illsley, who did his bird said it was a ‘fair cop’, but what about all the others? Why has it gone so quiet?
Are people like Hunhe and MacShane ever going into the dock, and if not, why not?
Smart Meters and Stupid Ministers
Wind turbines are not the only stupid idea the coalition and the previous government have had. Amongst their £200 billion of stupid ideas is the idea of spending nearly £12 billion on so-called 'smart meters'. The idea is that the electricity companies will be able to switch off your appliances if the wind isn't blowing sufficiently fast to turn wind turbines to power the country.
It's like someone else having a remote control for your house. Poorer people, who can only afford to pay less for their bills, such as young working families, the elderly and the unwell, will have to endure more interruptions to their supply than their better off neighbours. People who want an uninterrupted power supply will have to pay more.
On top of the inconvenience they will cause, the privilege of having one of these devices installed in our homes is going to cost us each around £300. Yet smart meters may expose us all to attacks from hackers. After all, if our electricity supply can be remotely turned off for 'good' reasons, it can also be turned off for bad reasons. If computer hackers decide to switch off our electricity supply out of sheer malice, Britain may be plunged back into the Dark Ages. Imagine that, in the middle of winter.
There are many good reasons for rejecting these meters, whose only purpose seems to be to allow the green zealots in charge of the UK and EU's energy policies to roll out their preferred technologies, regardless of what the public desires. Luckily, not everyone in government and the media are as stupid and blinkered as DECC ministers, and the UK's green energy plans are at last facing some scrutiny. As the Daily Mail reported this week,
Consumer groups claim the £11billion plan will be a fiasco and have demanded it is halted and the independent National Audit Office has warned it could be an expensive flop. Now MPs on the public accounts committee predict the energy giants will not pass back their savings to customers.
The Public Accounts Committee report mentioned in the Mail article reported this week that,
1. Consumers will have to pay energy suppliers for the costs of installing smart meters through their energy bills, but many of the benefits will pass in the first instance to the energy suppliers. 2. The benefits of smart meters can only be fully realised if there is widespread take-up and consumers use them to reduce their energy bills, yet the role of suppliers in helping to achieve this remains undefined. 3. The benefits from smart meters may not reach vulnerable consumers, those on low incomes and those who use prepayment meters. 4. Trials so far have been inconclusive about consumers' willingness to cooperate with the installation process and to use smart meters to reduce their energy consumption. 5. The data communications service required to link smart meters to suppliers is a complex IT project that may cost as much as £3 billion. 6. The Department and energy suppliers face significant challenges to install smart meters in every home in the country.
This is all government-speak for 'they don't bloody work'.
Smart meters are being pushed by stupid ministers. (Either that, or they are simply bad). That's the problem with technology -- it doesn't matter how clever it is, in the hands of idiots it can be worse than the problem it intended to solve. Some technologies are fantastic. But 'smart meters' only allow politicians -- mad or bad -- to have greater control over our lives. There's nothing 'smart' about that.
The Great Big Gravy Train
‘Dave’ Cameron’s deep rooted hatred of the countryside continues apace. Not content with desecrating the landscape with wind turbines to line the pockets of his family and friends, he now intends to spend billions of tax payer’s money digging up areas of outstanding natural beauty in the Midlands with his fast train to Birmingham.
Quite what good moving a bunch of mobile telephone braying Brummy wide boys to London and back ½ hour quicker is going to do for us all is beyond me. Still knowing Cameron I suppose he will have a mate or two en route who will make a buck.
Tories Equals Turbines
I made a point of watching the irritating Country file programme last night. Irritating in so far as it is usually an illusory reflection of how TV people imagine the countryside to be. The sort of stuff that appeals to Holland Park dwellers who drive shiny new Range Rovers and wear hunter wellies and buy cottages in Dorset.
But back to last night. They actually did something worthwhile. They featured the beautiful Yorkshire Wolds with the magnificent David Hockney guiding those who did not already know on how to enjoy them. The colour variations are awesome. I follow the hunt with the Middleton occasionally so I know.
Watch the programme again here.
We then witnessed John Craven interview the Prime Minister, who made it more clear than ever his commitment to wind turbines. ‘But many people hate them’ said Craven bravely. Cameron ran his true colours up the mast. People hate them, because they are too stupid to appreciate them, according to the PM. No equivocation, no apology, no caveats. So, unless you live in the Cotswolds -- ‘Dave’ won’t have them there, which proves he is not as stupid as he always appears to be -- but everyone else can expect them.
There was no irony that they are proposed along the Wolds Way, the main subject of the programme. Craven, who knows this full well, missed the open goal by not asking if he felt the Wolds were an appropriate setting.
Will the Tory voting dumbbells in the shires understand once and for all a Tory vote means turbines. It doesn’t matter how nice that local MP is, it is his party’s policy.
Did viewers also spot in Cameron’s defence of his ‘localism bill’, his confirmation that it is designed to take away control by local people of their countryside. We might be allowed to ‘designate’ modest green areas but the presumption is the man in Whitehall (Bristol) will always have the last say.
So the desecration of the countryside marches on with the connivance of the deceitful Cameron and the support of the almost incredibly naive rural conservative voter.
One bright spot in the programme, my old friend Mary Rook MFH won the Yorkshire Pudding contest. Mrs Rook has occasionally passed favourable comment on my puddings in the past, so praise indeed!
We need a better bishop
Does anyone else find the Archbishop of Canterbury as irritating as I do?
His New Year message about “giving up on young people” following the Bishop of London’s absurd interaction with St Paul’s ‘camping club’ was quite offensive.
I have spent a considerable amount of time and money over the years working with young people in the field of sport. Particularly rugby football, as do thousands of others across the country. We do help children who are prepared to help themselves.
What has the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London ever done? Where is their parish priest experience? What do they ever do except whinge and issue banalities from the comfort of their palaces?
What we need is some old fashioned leadership. Some muscular Christianity. Can I beg her Majesty next time around to insist on a new Archbishop with a track record of ‘hands on’ clerical work, rather than ‘hands wrung’.
Reliable evidence or Pharmaceutical Companies supporters club?
Apparently freed from all common sense and the application of rock-solid evidence, the EU Commissioners appear to be hell-bent on interfering in the Vitamin and Mineral Supplement business. Look out for more and more EU ‘revelations’ concerning, for example, the dire results following the consumption of more than 600 units of Vitamin D per day, for example. The mere fact that you can absorb tens of thousands of units of Vitamin D through the skin in an hour or two will not trouble the Commission.
There was not even one death caused in the USA by a vitamin supplement in 2010, according to the most recent information collected by the U.S. National Poison Data System.
The new 203-page annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, published online at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/Portals/0/2010%20NPDS%20Annual%20Report.pdf, shows zero deaths from multiple vitamins; zero deaths from any of the B vitamins; zero deaths from vitamins A, C, D, or E; and zero deaths from any other vitamin.
Additionally, there were no deaths whatsoever from any amino acid or dietary mineral supplement.
Three people died from non-supplement mineral poisoning: two from medical use of sodium and one from non-supplemental iron. On page 131, the AAPCC report specifically indicates that the iron fatality was not from a nutritional supplement.
This is even better news than it might seem at first. You see, the zero figure includes all those people assumed by the Commission to need protection from themselves. Such people, for example, as those who consume ridiculously high quantities of this or that vitamin or mineral in the mistaken belief that something wonderful will then happen to their health.
Of course, those who look after their own health by the informed use of supplements will be in less need of visits to the doctor, followed by prescriptions of products produced by pharmaceutical companies...
For a fuller picture see:- http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml and look at the December 28th 2011 news release.
Lord-a-Leaping (from Quango to Quango)
The deliciously Gilbertian, Lord Mucho-Pomposo Turner has retired from one of his more ludicrous benefit societies, the Committee on Climate Change.
Is it possible that Lord Turner's breathtaking advance through the Quangocracy to be become of the UK's wealthiest beneficiaries of tax payer funded salary and pensions, has been based on his extraordinary ability to get things wrong 100% of the time (known as the 'dependable record' by financial economists).
Some of us get something wrong but Turner manages to get absolutely everything wrong. In this respect, the noble Lord is even less useful than a stopped clock, which at least tells the right time, twice a day. Where will he pop up next? Does one suppose he and Will Hutton go on walking tours together to discuss how they can remain as the most absurd figures in modern Britain.
Greys, Greens & Blues.
Some interesting weekend nonsense...
Age UK -- another of those mysterious government funded charities which dabbles in politics but does bugger all for old folk -- are now spending a fortune on radio advertising, telling old people about cold weather. Worth a listen for those with a sense of the absurd. (Classic FM in the main).
They will send them a brochure to stop them sitting naked in the garden over Christmas. Of course 'old' means 'stupid' to the ‘busy’ middle class twits at these sort of organisations. What old people want is cheaper electricity, not much chance with loony Huhne at the helm of energy policy I fear.
‘Nice but dim’ ‘Dave’ Cameron is going to spend lots of public money on more middle class twits visiting ‘problem families’. Of course he doesn’t know anything about them. If he visits some of the estates in Grimsby or Hull he would know that the most effective and cheapest way to deal with them is a public flogging. But ‘Dave’ visits completely different sorts of estates at Christmas I suspect. His father in law’s for example, Sir Reginald Sheffield, “Pass the port, dear boy, it was paid for by old age pensioners in Lincolnshire via my wind turbines”. Vote blue, go green then throw up.
The Big EU Jobs Lie
We really must kill the absurd lie that 3 million jobs depend on the United Kingdom being at the ‘heart of Europe’ whatever that may mean. There has been a massive trade imbalance in Europe’s favour for nearly 30 years our percentage of GDP related to EU trade is about 11% swamped by the cost of complying with EU regulations for the other 89% of the economy.
The argument that political union is necessary to trade is economically illiterate. Such nonsense from Lord Brittain we expect, indeed he is paid to spout it under the terms of his EU pension arrangements (Still undeclared in the House of Lords as an interest) but the other signatories should know better.
Big Government & Big Wind
A significant number of appeals by the wind turbine lobby are being allowed. Even when all the elected representatives of the people, regardless of political allegiance have said no. The latest on my desk is Kelmarsh. Over turned by a Paul Griffiths, another loathsome lickspittle of big government.
I say again though folks, if you voted Tory/Lib Dem or Labour this is what they promised.
