Moby Dick

This, via Ross Douthat, is truly terrifying:

"The writers revere Melville's original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab's obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale's decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab's Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

"Our vision isn't your grandfather's 'Moby Dick,' " Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.""

At some point, someone will need to make this speech

Reagan made this speech in 1981, not long after becoming President. It strikes the right balance between confronting the challenges facing his new government and striking a tone of optimism about the possibility of doing so successfully. It is neither airy waffle nor dismal and dispiriting.

"A few days ago I was presented with a report I'd asked for, a comprehensive audit, if you will, of our economic condition. You won't like it. I didn't like it. But we have to face the truth and then go to work to turn things around. And make no mistake about it, we can turn them around.

I'm not going to subject you to the jumble of charts, figures, and economic jargon of that audit, but rather will try to explain where we are, how we got there, and how we can get back."

In recent years spending, taxes and regulation have all increased and the money has been wasted on unreformed public services, long standing weaknesses in our transport infrastructure have not been addressed and we face an energy capacity crunch. All that left us chronically vulnerable with structural deficits and ongoing economic weakness outside the remarkably resilient financial services industry. A downturn in that industry has left us in huge trouble, the only major economy the OECD expects to see go into a recession this year, and likely to face a mushrooming deficit.

Curbing the rapid growth of public spending, the most important step to start addressing our long term economic problems, is going to mean treading on some toes. There will be many vested interests attached to our big state and overcoming them will require having the public on board. Making the scale of the challenge clear to the public but, at the same time, having a clear resolution to do something about the situation could earn a politician a lot of respect.

Things you learn from watching the stats on a viral

One of the sites that has linked to the Brown Calculator is TheGrumble.Com.  A generalist site for people with some gripe about the modern world?

No.  A BBS for picture framers.  Its full title is The Picture Framers Grumble.

Try the Brown Calculator

We've been busy at the TPA:



The calculator is attached to a report which goes through area after area showing that Gordon Brown's economic record has been utterly dismal. It should illustrate the context to the economic gloom and the OECD's prediction that Britain is the only major economy that will experience a recession this year. Brown hasn't been the unlucky victim of international conditions but the author of his own demise.

Sharia shows its face in Britain

The Sunday Times reports that Sharia courts are now in effect and their judgements are being enacted in British law. This is utter injustice:

"Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.

The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.

In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations."

These are not the fuzzy sort of judgements that apologists for the Archbishop promised would be the only ones Sharia courts could make. These are women being denied a fair share in inheritances or not having their complaints of domestic abuse followed up (after they have been pressured into accepting that they are not victims of a crime deserving of punishment). Even if their choice to use these courts was free they are signing away their legal rights as these judgements become binding and are enforced by conventional courts.

We have now created a situation where British Muslim women have to choose between their British rights or their Muslim ones. Anyone who has read the vital "Crimes of the community" (PDF) report by the Centre for Social Cohesion will know that such a choice is often far from free.

Equality before the law is dead. We might step in if some troublesome soul won't take no for an answer but otherwise many Britons now live by a different legal code to the rest of us. Such an important principle didn't die because the British public stopped caring about it or were too apathetic to make their voices heard. They reacted with utter fury at the suggestion that Sharia should be admitted as a part of British law. I'm not aware of any party manifesto ever having proposed integrating Sharia into the British legal system or even of any significant politician endorsing the idea in public.

It just sort of happened. Just like the recognition of polygamous marriages or countless other surrenders of our values that the British people never endorsed. It came about thanks to a combination of a lack of proper scrutiny of laws, this clearly isn't what the Arbitration Act was intended for, and a feeble establishment desperate for the false sense of security that can be had by appeasing those demanding Sharia.

We need a democratic revival or Britain's most cherished values are at risk.

Everything we hold dear!

Conjure up three images that sum up Middle Britain. I can't think of a better three than these:

The Volvo estate, the tidy lawn and the Labrador. I'll grant that not all of the British middle class owns a Volvo, lawn and Labrador but they still play a vital role in making Middle England what it is. For as long as we've been able to afford it we've been buying them (or substitutes). Others have their ethnic dress or their culinary traditions, we have dogs and the gardens and cars needed to hold them.

Volvo estates are some of the hardest hit cars in the Government's Vehicle Excise Duty hike, Labradors are being turfed out of bed and breakfasts thanks to ludicrous EU food safety regulation and now Government reports are attacking our right to have gardens with lawns.

Our very identity is under attack.

A question of priorities

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins operations this week. It has drawn criticism from Sir David King:

"The project has drawn more down-to-Earth criticisms too. Sir David King, the government's former chief science adviser, believes it diverts top scientists away from tackling the more pressing issues of the time, such as climate change and how to decarbonise the economy. In total Britain has contributed more than £500m towards the LHC project."

Okay, let's compare what we're spending and what we're getting for our money with the LHC and just one of the Government's flagship policies aimed at 'decarbonising the economy'.

Our spending on the LHC has been around £500 million over more than ten years, making up around 10% of the programme's total budget. For that money we make a vital contribution to this project:

"Beneath the rural tranquillity of the Geneva countryside, where ramshackle sheds dot the wide-open fields, scientists are getting ready for a trip into the unknown. Here, under 100 metres of rock and sandstone, lies the biggest, most complex machine humans have ever built, and on Wednesday they will finally get to turn it on.

For Cern, the European nuclear research organisation, it will mark the end of a lengthy wait and the beginning of a new era of physics. Over the next 20 years or so, the $9bn (£5bn) machine will direct its formidable power towards some of the most enduring mysteries of the universe.

The machine will search for extra dimensions, which could be curled up into microscopic loops. It might produce "dark matter", the unknown substance that stretches through space like an invisible skeleton. And it will almost certainly discover the elusive Higgs boson, which helps explain the origin of mass, and is better known by its wince-inducing monicker, the God particle.

At least that is the hope. For the machine to work a dizzying number of electronic circuits, computer-controlled valves, airtight seals and superconducting magnets must all work in concert.

The machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and when working at full tilt it will drive two beams of particles in opposite directions around a 17 mile (27km) ring at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Every second each of the beams will complete 11,245 laps of the machine.

At four points around the ring the beams will be steered into head-on collisions, causing the particles to slam into one another with enough energy to recreate in a microcosm the violent fireball conditions that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang. Giant detectors, one of which is so enormous it sits in a cavern that could accommodate the nave of Westminster Abbey, will then scrutinise the shower of subatomic debris in the hope of finding something no one has ever seen before."

Absolutely remarkable. Up there with the Apollo programme and Concorde as one of the greatest technological achievements of mankind. Something that stands a good chance of providing vital insights into the nature of the universe and making possible huge technological advances.

By contrast, we spend around £1 billion every year on the Renewables Obligation (RO). A substantial burden on ordinary families paying their electricity bills. In return, we get unreliable windmills that contribute little to providing the generating capacity we need or reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as the quantity of power produced is so small and unreliable and back up capacity needs to get turned on and off, reducing its efficiency. The main effect of the RO is to turn ordinary people's money into bumper profits for the renewable energy companies.

Of course, this is just one part of the package of measures designed to reduce emissions. However, as a scheme which offers as expensive and poor value as the RO has been put in place the idea that greenhouse gas reduction policies are suffering because they aren't getting sufficient priority compared to the LHC seems somewhat absurd.

In terms of value for money, I'd take the Large Hadron Collider over the Renewables Obligation any day of the week.

I want you to know, trees, that we care

I think we can add these people to those who have had abortions, been sterilised or even turned vegan in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the 'driven insane by environmentalism' corner.  From David Thompson, via DK.

http://view.break.com/565864 - Watch more free videos

The energy crisis

The Renewable Energy Foundation are one of the most important organisations in politics today.  Their work sets out the scale of the challenge for energy policy clearly, no one has any excuse not to appreciate the trouble we're in.  How a decade of believing in the fantasy that a combination of gas and renewables can reliably deliver the power we need has created a serious danger of the lights going out.  A good introduction is an article (PDF) by their Director of Policy and Research, John Constable for Power UK.

Their Chief Executive, Campbell Dunford, has put out a response to Gordon Brown's speech to the CBI which sums up the political situation well:

"Campbell Dunford, a former international energy banker, now Chief Executive of the Renewable Energy Foundation, said:

“There are two parallel debates here. On the one hand the energy experts tearing their hair out with anxiety, and on the other the bland Westminster discussion typified by the Prime Minister’s empty and trivial gestures. This must change. Only courageous leadership can prepare us for the gathering storm. Will Mr Cameron speak up and confront the realities, or will the realities get there first?”

Why is it that the term “middle class” has such different meanings in the US and the UK?

Alexander Belenky, writing today at Comment is Free about struggling Americans watching TV programmes about the pampered rich, uses the term “have-nots” and “middle class” pretty much interchangeably. The alternative to “middle class” in the American discourse is invariably “rich”. Both left and right appeal to the middle class as their economic and cultural heartland, respectively. The caricature is that the middle class are bitterly clinging to god and guns and struggling to maintain a comfortable lifestyle while the rich, arugula-munching (that pretentious leaf, generally known as ‘rocket’ here in the UK, is a big deal in American politics) coastal elite enjoy greater incomes and are increasingly secular in their outlook.

By contrast, here when people attack Radio 4 for being too middle class they are arguing that it appeals to well-off Home Counties families who own Labradors, fill the best schools and quietly sidestep the social problems that afflict the troubled cities. When someone suggests that a political party is trying to appeal to the middle classes, they are suggesting that it wants to help the well-off. The alternative to being middle class is generally expected to be becoming part of the downtrodden poor underclass. The exceptions to this dichotomy are the numerically tiny but politically powerful urban elite – the closest analogy to America’s arugula class.

I think what the two middle classes have in common is that both the American and British middle classes are thought of as the backbones of their respective countries. The unassuming middle class in both countries gets on with things while the underclass is debilitated by social and economic ills. Also, in both countries the middle class are seen as culturally sensible or old-fashioned (depending on your perspective) compared with the urban/coastal elites.

Are the robust families that are the backbone of American society really poorer than their British counterparts?

The Renewables Stealth Tax

The Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation (NFFO) was introduced by the Conservatives to subsidise nuclear power.  It was replaced by the Renewables Obligation (RO), which excludes nuclear power but buries windmills and other renewables in money.  The Renewables Obligation, in particular, is rather complicated (I've got in trouble before trying to calculate its value) so the Government couldn't effect a neat transition from the NFFO to the RO.  As part of the transition the Government have wound up making a bit of a profit out of some old NFFO contracts.

The Guardian smell a scandal and reported the story today, with condemnation of the windfall from the Conservatives:

"Last night Charles Hendry, the Conservative shadow energy minister, accused the government of using the scheme as a "stealth tax" and warned it would further damage public confidence in environmental measures."

I think this rather misses the point.  The fact that the Government are putting some of the revenue into the general pot doesn't really affect whether it is a stealth tax at all.

The Renewables Obligation imposes a levy on electricity companies who have to buy Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) for a certain percentage of the power they generate.  It is a tax and a pretty hefty one.  It it worth just short of a billion at the moment, more than the Climate Change Levy.  It's just that the revenue is hypothecated and placed straight in the pockets of renewable energy companies.

The sums involved are staggering.  For comparison, in the United States the Energy Information Administration have revealed the subsidies provided to different types of power:  About 25 pence per MWh for coal and about 14 pence per MWh for gas.  Renewables are treated far more generously and receive around £13 per MWh.

At the last online, business to business, auction by e-ROC the average ROC price was £53.27.  A renewable energy company will get one ROC for every MWh they produce.  That £53 is a truly massive subsidy and isn't the only financial advantage renewables are given.  They also get exemptions under the Emissions Trading Scheme and the Climate Change Levy.

All this costs ordinary people a fortune.  Climate change policies constitute 14% of the average domestic electricity bill and 21% of the average business electricity bill.  How many people know that they're paying that much?  That the Government could cut electricity bills significantly overnight if they scrapped these policies?

Is the shocking stealth tax the relatively small amount that the Government are creaming off, where there is at least a small chance it will be spent on something worthwhile, or the huge amounts being pocketed by renewable companies?

Google Chrome

I installed it earlier and it is pretty cool.  Firefox always frustated me, it just seemed clumsy and not quite formed.  I reverted to Internet Explorer.  Explorer does some funny things, though.  It could never quite handle Google Mail reliably.

Google Chrome has a neat, sparse interface and so far it seems to run more cleanly than either of the major browsers.  Good stuff.

Nationalising mortgage lending

A few days back Chris Dillow asked whether mortgages should be nationalised.  After all, innovations in the market haven't exactly turned out well.

I think the missing component in his analysis is risk.  This means, in extremis, what happens when your state goes all Northern Rock?

Politicians and bureacrats are further from playing with their own money than company directors.  Beyond that, they have the taxpayers' pocketbook to play with which makes it less likely a crisis will be restricted to a small one when they are unable to finance attempts to buy themselves out of trouble.  Of course, it would be possible to try and set up the institutions to prevent this happening, by creating artificial little state mortgage companies or giving the power to councils perhaps, but those sorts of walls are always made of paper and collapse under the weight of political pressure.

The root of the current problems in the mortgage market is that those managing it bought their own hype that they had got so good at managing financial risk that they could lend incredibly aggresively.  They were massively over confident.  This is a problem that the public sector is entirely vulnerable to.  The Great Leap Forward is, perhaps, the apogee of lunatic belief that you have cracked some secret and can now ignore basic precautions against disaster.

It seems likely to me that nationalising mortgage lending would lead to fewer minor crises but more frequent complete catastrophes.

Some more reasons to dislike wind power

1.  EU Referendum welcomes a BBC report which goes some way towards acknowledging that Denmark's wind power experiment shouldn't be replicated, particularly in the UK where we aren't connected into other countries and, therefore, able to sell off excess wind energy (at a massive loss) like the Danes do.  Alas, it won't be possible for us to emulate their expensive and surprisingly high emission (primarily because they banned nuclear they emit more greenhouse gas per ton of oil equivalent) energy.

2.  Some great facts in this video, via Iain Murray:

It is a good video.  It sets out how utterly impractical the idea of generating all our power from wind is (the numbers are from the States but I think it scales pretty well).  Funnily enough, though, it actually chooses the standard most favourable to wind, the amount of power produced.

Unfortunately, we don't just need power, we need it when we want it.  Unless we're willing to accept the lights going out on a cold, still evening (and there are lots of those, see page 13 of this PDF).  In that regard wind is nearly completely useless.  So, unless you outsource the need to produce reliable power to other countries (like Denmark) or are prepared to accept the massive cost and reduction in efficiency that comes with maintaining huge quantities of back up power 

Increasing the stamp duty threshold

Well, it's here. The incredible economic package that is going to turn around the Government's electoral fortunes.

There are measures to help out some families facing repossession but the headline policy is that for a year the stamp duty threshold has been raised from £125,000 to £175,000. Stamp duty works on a slab basis so all this is meaningless for any home purchase outside that band (i.e. most homes in London and the South East). Putting this plan into action will cost around £600 million.

It won't do much to help the property market. There are too many other, much more important, variables at play. As Chris Dillow has shown Lamont's stamp duty holiday didn't do much for the market in 1992.

There is no particular reason why the Government should want to prop up house prices anyway. High prices that kept young people off the ladder were hardly a great social boon.

Does that mean pushing the threshold up is a bad idea?

Not really. This will, at a fairly low cost in the grand scheme of things, be a considerable boon to a lot of young families on the early rungs of the housing ladder. They will be able to keep £1,750 of their own money that the Government would otherwise have purloined. People in that situation often have a great many financial strains: taking care of a growing family or just furnishing their new home. £1,750 would make their lives significantly easier and helping them out is a legitimate social objective.

Nick Robinson asks "who pays?"

Well, at last year's budget public spending was increased by around £30 billion. There is a problem with the deficit but to ask "who pays?" about a puny little £0.6 billion tax cut when a spending rise that is around fifty times as large has been pushed through each year for the last five years clearly completely misses the point.

Some of that increased spending would be hard to avoid in an economic downturn, such as benefits, and inflation obviously pushes up spending as well. The main cause of increases in spending, though, is the decisions made in the various budgets and spending reviews. Those are the decisions that ate up economic growth and the proceeds of tax rises year after year and created the current deficits. Not the few shoddy tax cuts we've enjoyed. The Government can easily fund this tax cut if they stop growing public spending so quickly.

In the end, the problem with these tax cuts isn't that they won't do much to help the housing market or that they can't be funded. It's that this pissant tax cut doesn't even approach the kind of scale that would be needed to make a dent after a decade of rising taxes. That's the proper criticism of the proposal advanced today.

The National Consumer Council on supermarkets

The new National Consumer Council (NCC) report on supermarkets has a fatal contradiction at its heart.

It spends a lot of time discussing the amount of information offered to consumers. The NCC want more and clearer labelling setting out the amount of salt, sugar, fat and other unhealthy things in each product. That is a reasonable thing to lobby for and if you look at the report cards you'll see that most of the supermarkets are making progress in the area - either in their colour codes on the front or in the GDAs on the back.

The negative headline on the report comes from their other priority, which is that supermarkets should stop making unhealthy products generally alluring. For that reason, they are opposed to promotions for unhealthy products and stores that stock sweets at the counter. Many of the shops are doing worse on that measure. They keep having the temerity to offer me half price Coke and offer sweets at the till.

That is where the contradiction appears. If you think that labelling is important then you are assuming that people are good at making decisions about the kind of food they eat. That they care about their health and, if properly informed, know how to eat healthily. Or, you think that people should be free to decide for themselves how important healthy eating is to them. That's why you value giving them information, it allows them to make as much use of their remarkable ability to decide for themselves as possible.

By contrast, if you think that having sweets at the counter, or offering people discounts, will cause them to want things they shouldn't, and we should intervene to stop that happening, then you don't really respect their ability to decide for themselves at all. You think they're simpletons who can't possibly decide for themselves or are so pathetically vulnerable to pester power that they will be terrorised unless you hide the jelly babies in the corner. When Sainsburys take a pound off the price of my Coke they make me worse off.

The report tries to take both positions.

Despite this report being a mish-mash of contradictions and dismal, patronising paternalism I paid for it, so did you. It's a quango. Just like the equally awful energywatch. Why can't these bodies be scrapped? If anyone really wants this bilge to be produced they can fund it themselves

The Daily Mash calls the report just right:

"BRITAIN'S supermarkets were last night accused of stocking the products their customers want to buy.

The National Consumer Council claimed the stores are deliberately selling a range of items that are not only competitively priced but tasted lovely.

"Meanwhile they go around filling their fruit and veg aisles with thousands of deadly scorpions. Probably."

A spokesman for Asda said: "The National Consumer Council seems to have confused us with something that is not a business."

Beware the renewable energy fairy tale

Jeremy Leggett has an article up on Comment is Free urging people to "Beware the bear trap". Essentially, his case is that we need to pile on the renewable capacity in order to prevent Russia being able to use its fossil fuel resources as a weapon against us.

The first thing to note is that, while Western Europe is in an unenviable position relying on Russia for its gas, the Russian position isn't quite as strong as it looks. Each time oil and gas resources are used as a weapon they lose their impact. By making it clear that supplies aren't reliable you encourage your customer to put more effort into seeking alternatives or other sources of supply.

There is no doubt that recent Kremlin bolshiness has strengthened the case for Western Europe to revive its nuclear industry, for example, which could well mean threats to the gas supply are less potent next time around. We can only hope that there is someone in the European political elite with the basic strategic vision needed. Business, at least, will probably put more effort into exploiting alternative sources of hydrocarbons like Canadian tar sands.

The major problem with Leggett's article is that he sees renewables as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. In reality, one of the reasons why Britain is in such trouble is that over the last ten years we've had a Government with a fondness for airy, unrealistic fantasies that renewables can provide a substantial portion of the electricity we need. Our energy policy has been based, for a decade, on the ludicrous idea that a combination of gas and renewable energy can provide the stable, affordable and secure capacity we need.

While renewables can provide power, albeit often at great cost, their unreliability means they can't provide significant capacity when you need it (peak load capacity). The situation is stated pretty clearly in this REF report (PDF, pg. 94). As such, their contribution to energy security is negligible. If Russia were to cut off the gas all the wind power in the world would do pretty much nothing stop the lights going out on a cold evening. Other renewables have, at present, a limited ability to provide remotely affordable power. Unless unreliable or exceptionally expensive electricity is felt to be acceptable renewables can't deliver energy security.

So long as politicians listen to people like Jeremy Leggett, and his renewable energy fairy tales, serious solutions like Enhanced Oil Recovery in the North Sea and building coal and nuclear capacity won't get the attention they deserve. By the time we wake up, it might be too late.

The Burden of Green Taxes

Well, the reason this blog has been silenced over the last week and a bit is that I've been working hard on the green taxes report that we released today. The press release, full report (PDF) and database, with values for different local authority areas, can be found at the TaxPayers' Alliance website. I also wrote up the report, with some context, for CentreRight.Com.

The response to the study has generally been incredibly positive. However, there have been a few challenges on the blogs and on the media. I've responded to Friends of the Earth and the Treasury at the TPA website and to some critiques on CentreRight.Com on that website.

Lack of posts

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been very busy. Hopefully, it will become clear why tomorrow.

I was an anaerobic digester once...

Great post at EU Referendum on the anaerobic digesters that are going to eat our waste. They aren't addressing a shortage of landfill sites and the Government are proudly subsidising a technology when it was EU regulations that killed its development in the private sector:

"Read my lips: there is no shortage of landfill sites. There is a shortage of landfill capacity, which is a wholly different thing. And that is entirely because of the EU's landfill directive which imposes severe constraints on the use of landfill as a waste disposal option.

We actually dealt with this issue in an earlier piece, where we relied on another blogger who had done the maths, demonstrating unequivocally that landfill sites are actually being generated faster than we could fill them.

That lack of knowledge also pervades the rest of his story. He writes uncritically of the government being "so confident that anaerobic digesters offer a realistic means of dealing with food waste that earlier this year it offered £10 million in grants to encourage the construction of further demonstrator plants. Plans for at least 60 are under way in Britain."

This we dealt with in a story last January when I set out a dire tale about how private enterprises had embraced anaerobic digesters as an admirable solution to organic waste disposal, only to have the economics of their systems wrecked by the dead hand of the Environment Agency.

The EA insisted on classifying these systems as "scheduled processes" – under an EU directive – and then charging exorbitant "authorisation" and "subsistence" fees which, with the stultifying and time-consuming bureaucracy involved, ensured that few digesters were installed. Those that were quickly became disused simply because, under the burden of regulation, they were too expensive to operate.

So, now that the government has effectively priced the system out of the market, it is offering public money – our money – to encourage the use of a well-tried and working technology that it, itself, has hamstrung."