Category: Current Affairs

Salon debunks today’s Telegraph panic-piece by noted hysteriac Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, where it is claimed that the Chinese government are about to dump the greenback, causing the US economy serious problems.

The odd website planningdisaster.co.uk is campaigning against the new Planning Bill, and specifically the idea that NIMBYs won’t be able to stand in the way of developments like places for disabled servicemen’s families to stay in. OK, like wind farms, roads and airports.

The website is supported among others by Friends of the Earth, the National Trust, and an organisation called EnoughIsEnough that seems (from its campaign material) to be a sockpuppet for the Green Party. It’s a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to see where new developments covered by the Planning Bill might go, from nuclear power plants to wind farms.

So FotE, Greenpeace and others are all supporting a website that gets people riled about new wind farms and tidal barrages. Either this is counter-productive campaigning (from their point of view) or they are assuming that wind farms do not face opposition from NIMBYs, which I think most people know is not the case.

The new EU treaty draft has been published – pdf available here.

This American-sounding statement caught my eye on page 5:

“The Union shall act only within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Treaties to attain the objectives set out therein. Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Treaties remain with the Member States. […] In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level.”

And another thing!

A few commenters on that same thread are going on about how this is much worse than cash for questions (back in the mid 90s), but the key thing to remember, and which is often forgotten, is that the cash for questions row was about MPs making a personal financial gain, whereas the allegations in cash for honours were about contributions to party funds.

Political debate and trust has sunk to such a low level in this country that several mouth-breathing contributors on Nick Robinson’s Newslog are saying things like “isn’t it convenient that the announcement of no charges in the cash-for-honours affair came as the polls closed in the two by-elections”, or “is it just coincidence that …”.

To these people I say: yes, you stupid bloody morons, it is a coincidence. Labour WON the by-elections, remember?

I also get the strong feeling that for many contributors nothing, short of God descending from heaven and personally exonerating Tony Blair, would have convinced them of his innocence. No charges? The CPS are Labour stooges. PM not arrested – obviously he’s had a word with the police. I would say people with that level of understanding shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but since they assume that the PM has god-like omnipotence to bend the nation to his will, I’m guessing they don’t bother.

An interesting article in today’s FT (here for those with FT.com subscriptions), which should be posted to every UKIP member in the country. In summary, it says that the EU is becoming an important rule-maker for the rest of the world, because of the size and influence of the EU’s single marketplace.

The EU’s emergence as a global rulemaker has been driven by a number of factors, but none more important than the sheer size and regulatory sophistication of the Union’s home market. The rapid expansion of the economic bloc to 27 nations with a total of more than 480m largely affluent consumers has turned the Union into the world’s biggest and most lucrative import market. At the same time, the drive to create a borderless pan-European market for goods, services, capital and labour has triggered a hugely ambitious programme of regulatory and legislative convergence among national regimes. […]

As Henrik Selin and Stacy VanDeveer, two US-based academics, point out in a recent paper that examines the global impact of three recent EU laws on chemicals, electronic waste and hazardous substances: “The EU is increasingly replacing the United States as the de facto setter of global product standards and the centre of much global regulatory standard setting is shifting from Washington DC to Brussels.”

If you want a notable example, Arnold Schwarzenegger is currently pursuing negotations on California joining the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, while Japan has copied a batch of EU environmental laws wholesale.

So the choice is, be in the EU and at the table while these rules are being drafted, or leave the EU and have to obey the rules anyway.

Congratulations to Shriti Vadera, Gordon Brown’s no-nonsense special advisor, who makes in into the Lords, and into a junior ministerial office at DfID.

Link. via Innocent Newsletter.

I don’t normally read the Daily Mail, or its website, but I had to go over and check out how it reported the research from Keele University (pdf) that showed an endemic disregard for the law among the soi-disant respectable middle class. The Daily Mail’s article is here, although I don’t know for how long, and the BBC report is here.

It’s hardly surprising that the Daily Mail doesn’t think to point the finger at itself – it’s a tabloid, after all, so it lives on spin – but I wonder whether any of the journalists recognised their habitual tone of spluttering outrage in this description:

The middle classes justify their [immoral] behaviour by treating it as a “revolt” against apparent injustice

And so the Daily Mail’s philippics against ‘rip-off Britain’, ‘corrupt’ politicians, high taxes and ‘scroungers’ have come round to destroy that very moral rectitude that they claim to be supporting.

Read the comments on the Mail piece to see some quality DM hypocrisy – the responses there at the moment can be paraphrased as either (a) “They aren’t really crimes, the real crimes are the ones committed by those evil people who aren’t us”, and, hilariously, (b) “it’s only because Blair is so evil that other people commit crimes”.

I thought the Olympic logo was bad enough, but a user on Metafilter points out:

[The] logo looks like Lisa Simpson giving someone a blow-job. Once you see it this way you will never be able to see it as being anything else.

Nooooooo!