The Angry Walrus

New Climategate File!

2011-11-22T13:22:00.001Z

Looks like our old friend FOIA has returned with a new file.

http://files.sinwt.ru/download.php?file=25FOIA2011.zip

The Readme is below:

All very interesting.

/// FOIA 2011 -- Background and Context ///

"Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day."

"Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes."

"One dollar can save a life" -- the opposite must also be true.

"Poverty is a death sentence."

"Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels."

Today's decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.

This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.

We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as...

/// The IPCC Process ///

<1939> Thorne/MetO:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]

<3066> Thorne:

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<1611> Carter:

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.

<2884> Wigley:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

<4755> Overpeck:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what's
included and what is left out.

<3456> Overpeck:

I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about
"Subsequent evidence" [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been
an increase in knowledge - more evidence. What is it?

<1104> Wanner/NCCR:

In my [IPCC-TAR] review [...] I crit[i]cized [...] the Mann hockey[s]tick [...]
My review was classified "unsignificant" even I inquired several times. Now the
internationally well known newspaper SPIEGEL got the information about these
early statements because I expressed my opinion in several talks, mainly in
Germany, in 2002 and 2003. I just refused to give an exclusive interview to
SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.

<0414> Coe:

Hence the AR4 Section 2.7.1.1.2 dismissal of the ACRIM composite to be
instrumental rather than solar in origin is a bit controversial. Similarly IPCC
in their discussion on solar RF since the Maunder Minimum are very dependent on
the paper by Wang et al (which I have been unable to access) in the decision to
reduce the solar RF significantly despite the many papers to the contrary in
the ISSI workshop. All this leaves the IPCC almost entirely dependent on CO2
for the explanation of current global temperatures as in Fig 2.23. since
methane CFCs and aerosols are not increasing.

<2009> Briffa:

I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of
all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!

<2775> Jones:

I too don't see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones
certainly will not as we're choosing the periods to show warming.

<1219> Trenberth:

[...] opposing some things said by people like Chris Landsea who has said all the
stuff going on is natural variability. In addition to the 4 hurricanes hitting
Florida, there has been a record number hit Japan 10?? and I saw a report
saying Japanese scientists had linked this to global warming. [...] I am leaning
toward the idea of getting a box on changes in hurricanes, perhaps written by a
Japanese.

<0890> Jones:

We can put a note in that something will be there in the next draft, or Kevin
or I will write something - it depends on whether and what we get from Japan.

<0170> Jones:

Kevin, Seems that this potential Nature paper may be worth citing, if it does
say that GW is having an effect on TC activity.

<0714> Jones:

Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital - hence my comment about
the tornadoes group.

<3205> Jones:

Useful ones [for IPCC] might be Baldwin, Benestad (written on the solar/cloud
issue - on the right side, i.e anti-Svensmark), Bohm, Brown, Christy (will be
have to involve him ?)

<4923> Stott/MetO:

My most immediate concern is to whether to leave this statement ["probably the
warmest of the last millennium"] in or whether I should remove it in the
anticipation that by the time of the 4th Assessment Report we'll have withdrawn
this statement - Chris Folland at least seems to think this is possible.

/// Communicating Climate Change ///

<2495> Humphrey/DEFRA:

I can't overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a
message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their
story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don't want to be made
to look foolish.

<0813> Fox/Environment Agency:

if we loose the chance to make climate change a reality to people in the
regions we will have missed a major trick in REGIS.

<4716> Adams:

Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely
complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and
that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.

<1790> Lorenzoni:

I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and
governmental opinion [...] 'climate change' needs to be present in people's
daily lives. They should be reminded that it is a continuously occurring and
evolving phenomenon

<3062> Jones:

We don't really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written
[...] We'll have to cut out some of his stuff.

<1485> Mann:

the important thing is to make sure they're loosing the PR battle. That's what
the site [Real Climate] is about.

<2428> Ashton/co2.org:

Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn
this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions - bad politics - to
one about the value of a stable climate - much better politics. [...] the most
valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as
possible

<3332> Kelly:

the current commitments, even with some strengthening, are little different
from what would have happened without a climate treaty.
[...] the way to pitch the analysis is to argue that precautionary action must be
taken now to protect reserves etc against the inevitable

<3655> Singer/WWF:

we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the
public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and
b) in order to get into the media the context between climate
extremes/desasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and
energy

<0445> Torok/CSIRO:

[...] idea of looking at the implications of climate change for what he termed
"global icons" [...] One of these suggested icons was the Great Barrier Reef [...]
It also became apparent that there was always a local "reason" for the
destruction - cyclones, starfish, fertilizers [...] A perception of an
"unchanging" environment leads people to generate local explanations for coral
loss based on transient phenomena, while not acknowledging the possibility of
systematic damage from long-term climatic/environmental change [...] Such a
project could do a lot to raise awareness of threats to the reef from climate
change

<4141> Minns/Tyndall Centre:

In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media

Kjellen:

I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming

Pierrehumbert:

What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That's the sort of thing we need to think about.

/// The Medieval Warm Period ///

<5111> Pollack:

But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.

<5039> Rahmstorf:

You chose to depict the one based on C14 solar data, which kind of stands out
in Medieval times. It would be much nicer to show the version driven by Be10
solar forcing

<5096> Cook:

A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability
during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the
"Medieval Climate Anomaly" or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly
in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have
seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the
MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.

/// The Settled Science ///

<0310> Warren:

The results for 400 ppm stabilization look odd in many cases [...] As it stands
we'll have to delete the results from the paper if it is to be published.

<1682> Wils:

[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They'll kill us probably [...]

<2267> Wilson:

Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially
since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models,
surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs.
[...] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the
models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from
the sun alone.

<5289> Hoskins:

If the tropical near surface specific humidity over tropical land has not gone
up (Fig 5) presumably that could explain why the expected amplification of the
warming in the tropics with height has not really been detected.

<5315> Jenkins/MetO:

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier
melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?

<2292> Jones:

[tropical glaciers] There is a small problem though with their retreat. They
have retreated a lot in the last 20 years yet the MSU2LT data would suggest
that temperatures haven't increased at these levels.

<1788> Jones:

There shouldn't be someone else at UEA with different views [from "recent
extreme weather is due to global warming"] - at least not a climatologist.

<4693> Crowley:

I am not convinced that the "truth" is always worth reaching if it is at the
cost of damaged personal relationships

<2967> Briffa:

Also there is much published evidence for Europe (and France in particular) of
increasing net primary productivity in natural and managed woodlands that may
be associated either with nitrogen or increasing CO2 or both. Contrast this
with the still controversial question of large-scale acid-rain-related forest
decline? To what extent is this issue now generally considered urgent, or even
real?

<2733> Crowley:

Phil, thanks for your thoughts - guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in
the open.

<2095> Steig:

He's skeptical that the warming is as great as we show in East Antarctica -- he
thinks the "right" answer is more like our detrended results in the
supplementary text. I cannot argue he is wrong.

<0953> Jones:

This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with
sulphates won't be quite as necessary.

<4944> Haimberger:

It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics
in all three plots, which I cannot explain. I believe it is spurious but it is
remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts.

<4262> Klein/LLNL:

Does anybody have an explanation why there is a relative minimum (and some
negative trends) between 500 and 700 hPa? No models with significant surface
warming do this

<2461> Osborn:

This is an excellent idea, Mike, IN PRINCIPLE at least. In practise, however,
it raises some interesting results [...] the analysis will not likely lie near to
the middle of the cloud of published series and explaining the reasons behind
this etc. will obscure the message of a short EOS piece.

<4470> Norwegian Meteorological Institute:

In Norway and Spitsbergen, it is possible to explain most of the warming after
the 1960s by changes in the atmospheric circulation. The warming prior to 1940
cannot be explained in this way.

/// The Urban Heat Effect ///

<4938> Jenkins/MetO:

By coincidence I also got recently a paper from Rob which says "London's UHI
has indeed become more intense since the 1960s esp during spring and summer".

<0896> Jones:

I think the urban-related warming should be smaller than this, but I can't
think of a good way to argue this. I am hopeful of finding something in the
data that makes by their Figure 3.

<0044> Rean:

[...] we found the [urban warming] effect is pretty big in the areas we analyzed.
This is a little different from the result you obtained in 1990.
[...] We have published a few of papers on this topic in Chinese. Unfortunately,
when we sent our comments to the IPCC AR4, they were mostly rejected.

<4789> Wigley:

there are some nitpicky jerks who have criticized the Jones et al. data sets --
we don't want one of those [EPRI/California Energy Commission meeting].

Jones:

The jerk you mention was called Good(e)rich who found urban warming at
all Californian sites.

<1601> Jones:

I think China is one of the few places that are affected [urban heat]. The
paper shows that London and Vienna (and also New York) are not affected in the
20th century.

<2939> Jones:

[...] every effort has been made to use data that are either rural and/or where
the urbanization effect has been removed as well as possible by statistical
means. There are 3 groups that have done this independently (CRU, NOAA and
GISS), and they end up with essentially the same results.
[...] Furthermore, the oceans have warmed at a rate consistent with the land.
There is no urban effect there.

/// Temperature Reconstructions ///

<1583> Wilson:

any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will
undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently
have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model
comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.

<4165> Jones:

what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene!
I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.

<3994> Mitchell/MetO

Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems
to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no

<4241> Wilson:

I thought I'd play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I
could 'reconstruct' northern hemisphere temperatures.
[...] The reconstructions clearly show a 'hockey-stick' trend. I guess this is
precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.

<3373> Bradley:

I'm sure you agree--the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should
never have been published. I don't want to be associated with that 2000 year
"reconstruction".

<4758> Osborn:

Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the
middle of his calibration, when we're throwing out all post-1960 data 'cos the
MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data
'cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it!

<0886> Esper:

Now, you Keith complain about the way we introduced our result, while saying it
is an important one. [...] the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to
missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by
dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together. So, why
don't you want to let the result into science?

<4369> Cook:

I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be
defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the
science move ahead.

<5055> Cook:

One problem is that he [Mann] will be using the RegEM method, which provides no
better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not
know where his estimates are coming from.

/// Science and Religion ///

<2132> Wigley:

I heard that Zichichi has links with the Vatican. A number of other greenhouse
skeptics have extreme religious views.

<4394> Houghton [MetO, IPCC co-chair]

[...] we dont take seriously enough our God-given responsibility to care for the
Earth [...] 500 million people are expected to watch The Day After Tomorrow. We
must pray that they pick up that message.

<0999> Hulme:

My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a
job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of
God's planet into research and action.

<3653> Hulme:

He [another Met scientist] is a Christian and would talk authoritatively about
the state of climate science from the sort of standpoint you are wanting.

/// Climate Models ///

<3111> Watson/UEA:

I'd agree probably 10 years away to go from weather forecasting to ~ annual
scale. But the "big climate picture" includes ocean feedbacks on all time
scales, carbon and other elemental cycles, etc. and it has to be several
decades before that is sorted out I would think. So I would guess that it will
not be models or theory, but observation that will provide the answer to the
question of how the climate will change in many decades time.

<5131> Shukla/IGES:

["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be
willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the
projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

<2423> Lanzante/NOAA:

While perhaps one could designate some subset of models as being poorer in a
lot of areas, there probably never will be a single universally superior model
or set of models. We should keep in mind that the climate system is complex, so
that it is difficult, if not impossible to define a metric that captures the
breath of physical processes relevant to even a narrow area of focus.

<1982> Santer:

there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor
tests we've applied.

<0850> Barnett:

[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the
modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer

<5066> Hegerl:

[IPCC AR5 models]
So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long
suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing
correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.

<4443> Jones:

Basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low
level clouds.

<4085> Jones:

GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be
correct.

/// The Cause ///

<3115> Mann:

By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year
reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that
reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

<3940> Mann:

They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic
example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted
upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a
bit.

<0810> Mann:

I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don't know what she think's she's
doing, but its not helping the cause

<3594> Berger:

Phil,
Many thanks for your paper and congratulations for reviving the global warming.

<0121> Jones:

[on temperature data adjustments] Upshot is that their trend will increase

<4184> Jones:

[to Hansen] Keep up the good work! [...] Even though it's been a mild winter in
the UK, much of the rest of the world seems coolish - expected though given the
La Nina. Roll on the next El Nino!

<5294> Schneider:

Even though I am virtually certain we shall lose on McCain-Lieberman, they are
forcing Senators to go on record for for against sensible climate policy

/// Freedom of Information ///

<2440> Jones:

I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself
and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the
process

<2094> Briffa:

UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails]
anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC
task.

<2459> Osborn:

Keith and I have just searched through our emails for anything containing
"David Holland". Everything we found was cc'd to you and/or Dave Palmer, which
you'll already have.

<1473> McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:

As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to
communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken
that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that
we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)

<1577> Jones:

[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get - and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (US
Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original
station data.

Olympic Ticket System Working Well

2011-06-24T11:03:00.002+01:00

Well, I didn't get any first round tickets (like nearly everyone else).

However, I did get invited to the second round.

So this morning I set an alarm for 0550, had my computer all ready to go, was logged in way before 0600. I listened carefully for the pips (and as backup, had a GMT count down linked to an atomic clock), pressed F5 (to refresh the options).

The session I wanted moved from "Not Available" to "Available", pressed Checkout then Submitted my details.

Because I'm not a cretin, I was able to read the rules, which said that your order was listed when you pressed "Submit", not when they were in your basket, so I didn't dick around with other stuff.

Apparently, shortly after this the site slowed down and people were unable to log in (I was one of them when I tried to log in again 15 minutes later). Well, maybe the idiots should have got out of bed earlier.

Of course, I'd also like to thank my exceptionally fast Gaming PC, LAN (rather than the laggy wifi) and my Virgin 50MBs cable Internet connection.

I'll let you all know if I was successful when I do. I figure the email confirming the order at 0601 is probably a good sign though!

Britain is a sexist country

2011-06-22T09:45:00.002+01:00

As you may have seen from my earlier post, I'm back! And, what better way to restart my budding blogging career than a nice piece of analysis.

Like many (well, most!) people who applied for Olympic tickets. I failed to get any. Sure, I only applied for the cheapest I could and for the most popular events but the end result was that I didn't get any.

Luckily, not all events were sold out in the first wave and there are some tickets on sale in a "first come, first served" fashion (Browsers to F5!). The organisers have put out a handy guide of all the events still available and it actually makes quite interesting reading.

It also leads you to the unmistakable conclusion that Britain is a fundamentally sexist country.

We've all been told, time and time again, that men are equal to women. Women's sports are just as worthy as Men's sports (Afterall, the Women's champion at Wimbledon will earn as much as Federer (Or Nadal)). The problem is that the country appears to disagree.

I've shown a typical sport below: Table Tennis! For your convenience, I've highlighted the Women's only days (and by logical implication, highlighted the Men's only days).

Nearly all the availability is in Women's only days. People seem far more keen to watch Men wave their tiny bats around than women.

Of course, there is an exception. I'm going to give you one guess what possible Olympic sport is more entertaining to watch women do than men... Go on..

Freestyle Wrestling?! OK, you'd think that if it came down to watching two sweaty people roll around on top of each other in a ring, it'd be a damnsight more fun to watch the ladies rather than the gents but no. As with almost every other sport, men's days are more sold out than women's.

No clue? Well, apparently the only sport where people want to watch women is Beach Volleyball! Imagine that, the one sport where women have maximum clothing requirements and suddenly everyone wants to go see skimpy dressed women.

Overall, there are 32 sets of events. Lots are completely sold out - of those that aren't: 11 have more availability for Women's events than the Men's events. Only Beach Volleyball is the other way around.

Clearly we live in a country populated by Sexists. The British appear to prefer seeing Men compete at the top level than women. Is this because the entertainment provided by the women athletes is less? Does this apply to other fields of life?

As always, please comment below.

I'm Back!

2011-06-22T08:17:00.002+01:00

OK.

It's been about a year now since I last blogged. I can't promise daily updates (work has been and remains hellish) but I'm going to try and resurrect this blog.

I'm going to stick to much the same topics as before:

Ridiculous government decisions, particularly on spending or defence,

Piss poor reporting in the media,

Bloody awful jokes,

and a few articles that are mainly aimed at winding someone up.

Why did I stop writing? Well, the election was won/lost simultaneously and it wasn't just as much fun laying into the Tories as it was Labour. I think that's why a lot of the right leaning bloggers faded gently over the last year.

Well, I re-read some of my old posts a few weeks back and rather enjoyed them. I also enjoyed writing them at the time, so I'm going to try and make a bit more time to re-start blogging.

Hope you enjoy the up-coming posts!

Who let the cat out of the bin?

2010-08-25T09:41:00.002+01:00

OK, so by now, pretty much everyone on the planet, including a tribe in the jungle in Peru who have had no contact with the wider world since a plane flew overhead in 1952, has seen this photo:

Yes! It's the woman who put a cat in a bin.

I know it's August and no one really has anything better to do, but since when was putting a cat in a rather large box the worst crime known to humanity? Some people have even called for the culprit to be put to death.

OK. Let me get something straight here. The animal was a cat. It wasn't a small child, it wasn't a 85 year old man, it wasn't an adult. It was a cat. A small furry cat. It might be cute, it might purr sweetly when lazing in the sun, but it's still only a cat.

This woman didn't kill 55 Mexicans. She didn't rape 150 women and small boys. She didn't kill an 8yr old girl.

She put a Cat. In a box. She didn't break any law.

For fucks-sake people, there are serious crimes committed by nasty people. This woman, bad though she may be, is not something we should be getting riled up about. If you run over a cat in your car, whilst you may feel bad about it, there is no need to report it, same as hitting a badger, rabbit, stoat or any other wild animal.

Let's focus on the big things, right?

Why the Defence Budget shouldn't be cut

2010-08-01T12:11:00.002+01:00

OK, it took a while, but I'm now getting angry again.

Despite all the good words from the Tory leadership about how Defence would become important in their new regime, it's pretty clear that they never actually intended to back these words up with anything useful.

The argument at the moment is that Defence isn't special and therefore should suffer the same 25%-40% cuts as the rest of the Government. KingofWrong makes the excellent point here that actually the MoD is a completely different beast to the other Government departments (though I did like his ideas about snipers in Whitehall. I'm actually going to argue that Defence shouldn't be cut from a completely different angle. In my usual style, I'm going to look at the money.

In 1997 the UK Spent £25 Billion on Defence. That sounds like quite a lot, it's even fairly impressive compared to the £41 Billion spent on Health, or £37 Billion spent on Education.

However, by 2009 the Health budget had grown to £110 Billion and the Education budget had grown to £80 Billion. These grew by 2.7 and 2.2 times respectively (For interest CPI has been about 1.2 over the same time frame).

Defence on the other hand has grown to £42 Billion, which is bigger, but only a growth of 1.7.

Let's assume that Defence grew by it's fair amount (compared to other departments - I'm going to go with 2.2 like Education). Defence would now be £55 Billion in 2009. We can then apply the 'fair' 25% cuts, which brings us back to about £42 Billion again (Had it grown like Health it would be over £50 Billion with the 25% cut).

The Defence Budget has in effect already been cut. It never benefited from the massive spending increasing across all the other government departments, so it shouldn't be punished in the same fashion.

The Tories need to back off from cutting Defence now. If they want to choose to cut the budget then they should pull us out of Afghanistan, hand the Falklands over to Argentina and re-role our forces as nothing more than a slightly tougher police force (like many of our European allies). We can then rely on the French and Americans for our Safety.

Or, they could cut those departments that grew out of control over the last 13 years (including Health) and accept that some money is better spent than others.

Sorry for my recent absence. I'll probably start writing more frequently again from now.

Just not very angry at the moment

2010-05-24T17:17:00.003+01:00

Sorry Chaps (and Chappettes, I have no idea if anyone reads this, let alone their gender).

I've not been posting much (at all?) recently, mainly due to being very busy all of a sudden. The other problem is I'm just not that angry at the moment.

There's a Tory government, cutting government spending and pushing through reform of a dazzling array of areas that were corrupted by the last administration.
England won the World Cup (in cricket, sure! But there's a reasonable chance we'll do OK in the somewhat less important Football tournament).
The sun is shining.
Generally, there just seems to be a bit of an air of optimism. Sure things are bad. The Euro might go tits up anytime soon (which really isn't very funny, quit laughing at the back!), but at least we're starting to do something about the incredibly crappy situation we're in.

So, why bother being angry today? There'll be plenty of time for that tomorrow.

What I meant was...

2010-05-12T10:25:00.002+01:00

Thoughts on PR and the Government we need

2010-05-10T10:32:00.004+01:00

This is now the fourth time I've started this Post. I've been trying to write a sensible, balanced post without descending into circular arguments or just half-witted swearing.

Essentially there are two interesting things going on at the moment. And they're connected. Actually, there are three things going on at the moment, but for now I'm going to put the the Eurozone Bailout (funded by us!) onto one side for a particularly sweary rant later.

Right, the two things I want to talk about are:

Electoral Reform
Lib Dem support to the future Government

And boy! are they connected.

The price of a stable Lib-Dem / Tory Coalition will almost certainly be some level of Electoral Reform. I don't know what form this will take but I do know what form I'd like it to take and what form hundreds of under-informed students are stridently demanding it will be.

What I would like to happen is a mature debate around the merits of exactly what sort of elections we should have; who should be elected and what we want the government to do. This is exactly the sort of problem that cannot be solved by a minority shouting loudly for what they want.

The minority seem to be calling for Proportional Representation (or PR to its friends). This is very superficially appealing. The make-up of the House of Commons is decided purely by an exact ratio of the number of votes gained. The Lib Dems would get 23% of the seats, UKIP would get 3.1% and the BNP would get only 1.9%, or a mere 12 seats. As I've said in this piece pure, simple PR would lead to a nightmare situation. The constituency link would be broken and Party Politics would be even stronger than today.

The obvious solution is to say: "Well, sure! PR may not be right then, so let's work on another method". This could be something like the Scottish model, with a two tier parliament, partially composed of constituency MPs and the rest there to make the numbers balance. Admittedly this does use the d'Hondt method of assigning seats, which at least ensures that the smallest parties have to cross a threshold. It's argued that with some form of PR turnout would rise and the smaller, more extremist parties would be squeezed into irrelevance. This doesn't seem to be the case in Switzerland (54% turnout in the major elections. Though of course, much power there is devolved to the regions).

But all this misses the damn question. There are far more electoral problems than the mere method used to allocate seats. Why do Labour have more seats at this election than the Tories did last time, despite nowhere near the same share of the vote (And slightly tongue in cheek, where the hell were all the protesters when Labour 'won' with such a low share of the vote)? Should we have an elected House of Lords (I say no, but I can see how it could work)? Should the PM be elected directly?

Calling for Proportional Representation is just a lazy reflex response to perceived "unfairness". Voting for the Government isn't like ordering at a restaurant. You don't necessarily get what you want. You get what "the people" want. All the various voting systems try to do is work out from the mish-mash of actual votes what people actually wanted. Some reflect the people's will very closely, some lead to stable governments (Afterall, 300 years without a civil war is one of the best records in the World).

As DJPNZ said earlier: "PR will not cure our debt, or our social decay or underfunded armed forces" (he then bought up the possibility of a UK Federal system, bringing yet another possibility to be debated into the open). At the moment, we need to be cautious and have a mature, grown-up discussion about all the various things we need to do to improve the way we vote and what we're voting for.

The second interesting area is the possibility of a Lib-Con Coalition. On Friday morning I wrote a post suggesting that this could be exactly what the country needs for the future. There's a glorious possibility of two Parties coming together, losing their worst parts and becoming something greater than the sum of the parts.

I'd like to be optimistic and say that this is going to happen. It would probably be best for the country that it did. There's a lot of common ground between the Tories and the Lib Dems (despite the horror of some people on the left that perhaps politics isn't the simple right/left divide that they assume it is). The two parties both have good people and maybe could even do some good work together.

But, on the other hand, I can see this happening: The Lib Dems demand immediate, full PR. The Tories knowing this is a) suicide for them and b) bloody stupid (as outlined above) resist. Labour give Gordon Brown a revolver and a quiet room for the afternoon. Ed Millband (or Alan Johnson, or any of the various non-entities at the top of Labour) becomes the new PM. He then promises the Lib Dems a shared government, with both Parties having the same number of cabinet seats. Maybe the Lib Dems will get the seats which mean nothing to Labour, like Defence Secretary (which under Labour is the 23rd most important cabinet seat).

This coalition will be unable to do anything about the deficit (or stand firm on any other area) and the country will lurch forward another six months, teetering closer to the abyss (though unlike Greece, we don't have a $1,000 Bn bailout package set up for us). Eventually, probably on a minuscule point, the LabLib coalition will fall hard and a new election will be called. Odds are this would be before the coalition could push through PR, so it will be under FPTP again. Lib Dem voters would be demoralised and by then even Labour voters might be able to see the true face of their party. The Tories would win with a massive landslide and start taking the steps necessary to fix the country. They might be too late.

The latter situation would be best for the Tories as a party. They can watch the country burn whilst they wait for their moment in the electoral sun. Maybe we should all just be impressed that they actually seem to be trying to do what's right for all of us by pushing towards a stable Con-Lib coalition.

Are the Lib-Dems going to be able to put the country first as well? Or will they be seduced by Labours offer of anything they could possibly desire?

The Morning After

2010-05-07T11:33:00.003+01:00

Well, I guess I feel like a lot of people today. I'm tired and slightly frustrated. I went to bed around 0600 when it was pretty clear that there wasn't a clear mandate in one direction of another. Now we enter into horse-trading. Maybe it will all be sorted by the end of the day, I don't know at the moment.

The whole election feels somewhat farcical. There are reports of fairly large numbers of people unable to vote despite turning up to the polling station before 2200. To me this is pretty simple. 2200 should be the last time you can turn up to vote. The doors then close, if you arrive at the station at 2201, you get sent home. But, if you are there on time, then no matter how long the queue - you get to vote. How hard can it be to close the doors and just wait another 30 minutes until everyone inside has voted?

(Sure, polling stations might not be big enough, but essentially: If you're in the queue by 2200, you get to vote. No exceptions)

Right, onto the actual meat of the matter. I can't imagine many people are "Happy" with that result. All major parties are probably a little bit disappointed. Maybe Labours result wasn't as bad as it could have been. Maybe Lib Dems never thought they were going to win more seats. Personally, I think that none of the parties had a good night last night.

But I'm a little bit of an Optimist. Maybe this is actually a good thing. Maybe a strong coalition government will be the best way to cut the debt without any one party being blamed for making the cuts that we all know are needed.

Maybe the Lib Dems can join with the Tories to build a new type of government, one not defined by where you are on the political spectrum, but one built on the vast areas of common ground between the two parties.

I don't know what's going to happen, but I am reminded of the Chinese curse:

"May you live in interesting times"

Well, we're certainly in one now!

Decision Time

2010-05-05T09:29:00.002+01:00

My posts over the past few weeks have been mostly 'humourous' photos and slightly snide comments, but this one will be as serious as I can get. I make no apologies for that.

As you no doubt know, tomorrow is election day. At some point between 0700 and 2200 you'll be standing in a little cubicle, looking at a piece of paper and you'll have to make a decision.

Your mind may already be made up, and you'll stride confidently into the booth, stick a cross in the box next to your candidate, fold the paper, put it in the right box and stride out, sure that your civic duty has been assuaged for another five years.

However, your mind may be slightly wavering, and I'd like to talk you through the Choice you're going to have to make.

Firstly, I can see the attraction of voting for an independent like Old Holborn. He's making an alluring point about the general failure of politicians of all colours to solve our problems over the last few years and therefore you should protest by backing him or another minority candidate (I'd even include the BNP and the various other small parties in this bucket). Personally, I hope OH does well in Cambridge, I'd be very tempted to vote for him had he run during my university days. However, I can see that a vote for him, or any of the smaller parties is little other than a protest vote. Tomorrow may just be too important to risk a protest vote. Instead we should be voting for something.

Some of my friends and colleagues believe that this election should be characterised by a desire for electoral reform. They look at the polls and the projected results (in terms of seats) and wonder how a party can get so little of the vote and so much of the representation (and vice versa).

Rather than a protest vote, people want to vote for the Lib Dems because of their (wavering) commitment to electoral reform. Personally, I'm undecided on the benefits of Proportional Representation. I certainly think there are segments of the political spectrum who shouldn't be allowed a say. It's notable that only under PR systems do parties such as the Communists and the BNP (and they are much closer than either would admit) would gain any representation. We would also lose the constituency link as parties of all colours would stack their preferred candidates at the top of their lists, rather than a discreet set of people voting in their preferred candidate for each area. There's a strong risk that the ability to vote in a maverick, though party affiliated politician, would be severely reduced as the Party whips would be able to move them down their party's list of candidates. This would certainly be a more severe punishment than anything they can currently do to an MP, loved by their constituents, but who goes against the current party line.

However, I do believe that FPTP will need to change. I dislike the fact that the Lib Dems can get so many votes (but scattered across many regions) and win so few seats compared to Labour. I'm not sure what the optimum solution will be but I have no doubt that no matter what the result is tomorrow change will be coming to how we will vote in the future.

At least voting for the Lib Dems will be voting for something, but change is coming no matter who gets in. However, before voting Lib Dems, it's worth seeing what else you will be voting for. They have some desirable policies, I'd like to raise the taxation threshold to £10,000. I know that this will cost £17 Bn next year but it's still a relatively sensible policy. However, I can't agree with the Lib Dems position on the Euro, Crime and Punishment, Immigration or Defence.

They've talked about canceling our order for Typhoon Tranche 3, but when you look in their manifesto, they only mention Tranche 3B (Tranche 3 is now split into two parts, with the first ordered). They claim this will save £510m in a few years time, but without access to the contracts and the onerous penalty clauses, where does this figure come from? Also, wouldn't it make more sense to buy these aircraft and re-sell them onto the Omanis (who are very interested) and make a profit?

Their policy on the Trident Replacement is unfortunately not fully formed. Gordon made an excellent point that if the Lib Dems want to switch to a Air or Surface launched deterrent, they'll need to build many more warheads than we have at the moment, leading to more nuclear re-armament.

The immigration policy is massively un-costed and not fully explained. Afterall, if we don't know how many people are illegally in this country how can we check their claim they've been here for ten years? Let alone beginning to understand how much it will cost us to house these 'new' arrivals.

I can't in all good conscience suggest a vote for the Lib Dems. I actually hope they do very well in this election, move up to the official opposition and start understanding what being in power would require. I believe their policies would mature and they will one day soon be in a position to move into government. But not at this election.

I'm trying hard to keep the tone of this piece positive but with Labour it's increasingly difficult. I believe in the importance of benefits to those who need them. I believe that the NHS is an excellent system of health care (maybe not the best, but certainly a long way from the worst). I respect the increased share of government spending both Health and Education have received. I think in some areas there have been improvements. But these improvements need to be coloured with what they have done which hasn't work and what Labour have failed to do in the last 13 years.

I can't believe that of the £700 Bn of Government spending, there is nothing that can be cut. I can't believe Labour's position that the Government IS the economy. I get very angry about Labour's treatment of our incredible servicemen and women. Almost no matter what else Labour's failings, it has been their demand that the Forces do so much more with less funding and equipment that has rankled. As a result people have died. Almost nothing else a Government does will directly kill people. In this area Labour are unelectable.

However, they believe their strength is with the economy. And I can't fault them for bailing out the banks, the system needed to be propped up to ward off far worse events. Gordon talks of the dangers of removing the stimulus he's used to boost the economy. It comes to 0.1% of GDP. Other, more prudent countries have been able to stimulate their economies far more than that, because they saved money in the good times. Labour accuse the Tories of not understanding Keynesian Economics, but it is they who failed the first lesson: Spending is Counter-Cyclical. It doesn't just rise in the bad times, but has to fall in the good. Simply Labour ensured that when the worst recession in living memory came around, the UK was in the worst possible shape to deal with it.

Labour have had 13 years to shape the country as they see fit. A vote for them is a vote for a stagnant, government led economy. It's a vote for more dead servicemen and women. It's a vote for fear.

This, obviously, brings me to the last party on the list. Some would argue that the only reason to vote Tory is because the other parties, as shown above, are unelectable. I disagree. The Tories have actually run a campaign of hope, rather than fear. Sure, there were the broadsides at the risks of a Hung Parliament but these were the minority rather than the rule.

The Tories don't have a recent record that they can be judged on, unlike Labour. Their policies have to be workable and sensible, unlike the Lib Dems and the smaller parties. Their proposal to ensure that only the richest families pay the grossly unfair inheritance tax will cost the country roughly £500 m next year. This is about 0.3% of the total deficit, or 0.7% of our current debt repayments (Yes, thanks to Labour we are now spending £45 Bn on interest on our debt, much more than the Defence Budget).

The Tories haven't stated how they are going to cut the debt (not the deficit, that's just borrowing less, rather than starting to save). There's a very good reason for this. They're not actually in Government, they don't have access to the full Treasury. They don't know exactly where the Government are spending their £700 Bn. They can't say what they would cut or not, because they don't know where the Government isn't getting value for money. Labour do have access to this data and have refused to say what they would do. They know the Tories are going to have to cut, because they can see directly what a state the economy is in.

The Tories have indicated how they want to go about cutting the debt. They have proposed to not raise the rate of NI, a simple tax on jobs. Labour want to spend that money in Government, the Tories want to leave it in the economy. The Tories have said they'll put an end to this new culture of "Benefits for Life". I believe, based on the work at the Centre of Social Justice, that they'll succeed in reforming the Benefits system, delivering help to those who need it, but removing help from those who are just lazy. They'll change the system so that work is economically advantageous, rather than the situation at the moment where someone working more hours can lead to less money in their pocket. They'll change the fact that a couple can't live together more than 3 days a week to bring their children up together without losing some of their benefits.

There is a lot wrong with this country. There is a lot that's right with this country. The Tories have set out how they will protect and reinforce the things that are right, stepping back and letting teachers do their jobs; helping the NHS. They have set out where they will change what is wrong: Benefits Culture; Policemen fighting crime with one hand tied behind their back filling in forms.

There are a lot of reasons to vote against the Lib Dems and Labour tomorrow. But there are many reasons to vote for the Conservatives. A strong New Tory government will be in a position to start undoing some of the damage Labour has done, whilst protecting the things that are working in this country.

Tomorrow, you'll have to make a decision. Before you write that cross, hesitate for a moment and think abut what will be best for the country next week, next year and in the future. Good Luck.

Facepalm Mk II

2010-04-28T22:12:00.003+01:00

Actually, this one is funnier:

Brown makes Britain an international Laughing Stock

2010-04-28T16:37:00.004+01:00

I've had a look at what impact Brown has had in the International Press. Each of these images comes from the front web page of an international newspaper.

Thanks to Brown Britain is being mocked in Dubai, Italy, France, Argentina, the US and Singapore. And that's just the first six places I looked!

I've got no idea what "Un Disastro quella bigotta" means, but it sounds to sums up the situation perfectly!

Isn't The Mirror missing something?

2010-04-28T13:07:00.002+01:00

Image taken at 1300BST.

Dave winning on Twitter

2010-04-22T21:17:00.001+01:00

Current trends on Twitter, with ten minutes to go:

Spoiling Political Scrapbook's Attack on Shaun Bailey

2010-04-21T13:11:00.010+01:00

Political Scrapbook appears to be trying to attack My Generation/ a charity run by the Tory PPC for Hammersmith at the next election (A Mr Shaun Bailey).

The scope of their attack appears to be this annual report of the charity.

I assume at the moment, that this will take the form of the Charity receiving £35,110 from Gifts and Donations, with £10,904 spent on Management and Administration, with only £5,740 spent on Direct Charitable expenditure.

I've also had a look at the 2009 accounts which lists the following:

"Incoming resources from generated funds: Voluntary income: £58,572"
"Total Charitable Expenditure: £58,572"

EDIT (13:22 21/4/2010): This was only Restricted Funds, Total Charitable Spending was £116,000

Looks like once the Charity was set up, it got a lot more efficient at spending the donors money on actual Charity works.

I assume PS's attack is based in this very old post.

EDIT: (13:24 21/4/2010): I assume the attack will come through the "high" wages paid by the Charity, totaling £10,904 in 2007 and £52,199 in 2009. It appears this salary is paid to the Chief Operations Officer and the Operations Manager, along with the Part-Time Project Co-ordinator, Administrator and Youth Worker.

Assuming that this is 4.5 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) workers, that works out at less than £15k each, not exactly a high salary for people running a Charity.

For reference, the Salary of the CEO of WWF (another Charity) has salary and benefits of over $250,000.

EDIT: (16:17 21/4/2010) This whole thing was probably kicked off by this article in The Times. Basically, the Charity has donated £15,952 without any records of where it is. The tone of the article suggests it's a case of bad accounting (as you'd expect from a Charity that increases its donations nearly ten-fold in two years), rather than fraud. That article also mentions Joanne Cash in a similar context (she used the word "Charitable" to describe a social action project run and funded by her Conservative Association) but there doesn't seem to be any financial allegations.

EDIT: (10:44 22/4/2010) No sign of anything from Political Scrapbook. Maybe they've realised there's not actually much in the Annual Reports worth reporting on.

EDIT: (16:34 22/4/2010) Looks like Political Scrapbook have finally got around to releasing their attack . As expected they're claiming that the amounts used for administration are far too high. This is principally around the 2008 expenses, when £76,657 was spend on "Administration". Persumably, we're supposed to feel that this is money that has been creamed off into Shaun's pockets.

Well, let's have a look at exactly where that money was spent. This photo was taken directly from this annual report.

Despite their 'subtle' suggestion that Mr Bailey has been creaming money towards himself, it appears that the two biggest parts of the admin spend were "rent" at nearly £23k and salaries at £28k (Assuming this is split between the 3 FTEs identified in the report, they're pulling down a salary of £10k each). This doesn't seem to be gouging to me.

Ah ha! (you might say). But those nice people quoted a professor saying that Charities should only spend 15% of their income on Admin.

Charity Facts also says:

"What is an acceptable figure?
This is a difficult question to answer. The structure of the organisation, the nature of the work it undertakes and it's accounting conventions will all play a role in this. Also, good management typically costs more than poor management, so seeking to reduce costs in this area may ultimately be counter-productive as talented staff move on."

I'm sure also that a Charity pulling in £100k will have much higher overheads as a percentage than one pulling in £100 million.

There is another local Charity, which I have no reason to believe doesn't do sterling work, called The Hammersmith and Fulham Refugee Forum. In 2006 they recieved £83,492 in Grants (and £50 in Donations). They spent £87,099 on Administration (£47,570 on Salaries). (source)

NOTE: This is a work in progress, I'm going to react to Political Scrapbook's attacks as and when they actually happen (or, at the moment, before they do!)

Disclaimer: I don't know Shaun Bailey, I've never met him. I'm not a member of any poltical party. I'm not working in Conservative HQ (or anywhere else for that matter). I don't run a Charity, donate to anyone in particular. Any questions can be sent to the email address over there --->

Crap Photoshop of the Day Mk III

2010-04-14T14:09:00.004+01:00

Anyone wants to steal this, or any other images (and do them properly), please feel free. Minimal credit required on my part (though not none, i'm a vain, vain walrus).

Crap Photoshop of the Day MkII

2010-04-12T17:25:00.000+01:00

TeeHee...

Reading the Labour Manifesto - Chapter 1

2010-04-12T14:54:00.005+01:00

I decided to have a look at the Labour manifesto, to see if there was anything entertaining to see. Of course, looking at this election's would be pointless, so instead I thought I'd have a look what they said in 2005.

I've included a couple of pictures below I pulled from here:
As you can see, I didn't get very far into it before I started spotting some hilarious predictions.

Apparently, under Labour the country won't go "back to Boom and Bust". Where we were fourth in the world in terms of GDP, we've now slipped to 6th, behind both France and Germany (I could have sworn that we were "better placed" than them before this recession!).

It's now 2010 and Employment certainly isn't full, not even with Labour's "Economically Inactive" tricks.

Have a look at this next snippet:

Inflation at 2%? Over the past year it's varied from +5% to +1% and it's now back over +3%. That doesn't seem like something that Labour are doing so well on.

Even better is Labour promising to "Borrow only to invest" and keeping Net Debt at a stable and prudent level. Well, National Debt was £400Bn in 2005. It's now over £951Bn and rising by half a Billion pounds a day (Unfortunately I'm not joking, see my other posts for what else we could buy with this sort of money).

See here for a live tracker:

I'm only a few pages into their last manifesto and on these fairly basic promises Labour didn't just fail, they failed so catastrophically they've potentially ruined the countries finances for vast majority of the foreseeable future.

Would you really trust the man who set your house on fire to put the fire out?

£12m Labour donor's company sign the Tory NI pledge letter

2010-04-01T16:17:00.006+01:00

I was highly amused to read this post from Left Foot Forward.

Apparently, some of the people who signed the letter pointing out that Labour's planned NI rise might not be a good idea (not surprising, seeing as it will cost at least 140,000 jobs!) have donated to the Tories.

If you include their companies, this comes to the total of £2.5 million pounds.

However, one of the signatories was Justin King. He's the CEO of a small grocer called Sainsburys. One of his major shareholders is a chap called David Sainsbury, that's Lord David Sainsbury of Turville to you and I. Him and his family control about 15% of the company. Effectively, he's Justin King's boss!

Over the years he's been a great donor to Labour. If you trawl through the Electoral Commission's list of labour donors, you'll find he appears a few times.

In total, he's donated a phenomenal £12,582,808 to the Labour Party since 2002. Over £4 million of this was in 2008 and 2009. That's about 12% of Labour donations over those two years, much more than Lord Ashcroft has donated to the Tory party. Compared to this, the £2.5m donated to the Tories is just small change.

Why didn't Left Foot Forward mention this when they were castigating the Tory donors?

Even Labour's biggest donors know that this NI rise is bloody stupid.

Tory NI Tax Pledge - Protecting at least 150,000 jobs.

2010-03-31T13:25:00.006+01:00

Recently, we've heard that the Tories are not planning on putting through Labour's proposed NI tax increase if they win the election.

Somehow this has been portrayed by Labour as a "Tax Cut", although it's clearly not. Apparently, by "cutting taxes" the Tories have shown their true colours and are obviously trying to help their "Rich Friends in Business".

What they are actually trying to do is cut the cost of employing people.

National Insurance Tax isn't a nice fluffy way of sustaining the NHS, it's a direct tax on employment. And, like all things in life, if you make something more expensive (say, employing someone) the amount of that something that is bought drops.

Economists have a funky tool for measuring this effect, it's called Elasticity. Simply, this just reflects what the change in the number of units of something are sold if the price changes.

For an Elasticity of 1, a 5% increase in price leads to a 5% reduction in units sold.
For an Elasticity of 2, a 5% increase in price leads to a 10% reduction in units sold.

Take a tin of beans. Tesco are selling a 415g tin of beans for 64p. Assuming the Elasticity of Beans is 1.3, if they raise the price to 70p (a 9.4% increase) they will sell 12.2% fewer tins of beans than they did previously. Obviously, as volume is falling faster than the price is increasing, this will mean their revenues drop and their shareholders get very angry (Obviously, Tesco's shareholders are actually interested in profit, not revenue, which changes the picture somewhat. This is irrelevant when it comes to jobs though).

We can use this method to look at what happens when the wages a company has to pay for a given job change.

Obviously if wages increase, employment will decrease. Effectively, this Tax Increase says that employers have to pay more to each employee. This will lead to a reduction in employment, which even the Chancellor has admitted.

What is quite interesting is that he's completely failed to say how many people will be made unemployed by this Tax rise. However, we can use the calculation shown above to provide an estimate:

There are 28.86 million people employed in this country, according to the latest ONS figures.

If the Elasticity of Jobs is 1, then for each 1% rise we will lose 1% of the workforce. Darling says this is manageable. 1% of the workforce is 288,600 people. Over quarter of a million productive, tax paying workers will be fired. These people generate approximately £1,700 million in Income Tax, £700 million in National Insurance. Their companies pay just over £700 million to employ them. If they all sign up to Jobseekers Allowance, that's another £1,000 million each year to cover all these job losses. We're looking at a total of about £4 Billion pounds, just to pay for the fall-out of these Tax rises.

If the actual Elasticity is 0.5, we're looking at "only" 144,300 people unemployed and £2Bn of costs reflected in this. If the Elasticity is 2, it's double, with 577,200 people losing their jobs and £8Bn of costs.

The problem we have (and probably the reason Darling hasn't admitted to how many jobs will be lost) is that we don't actually know the Elasticity of Jobs. It's bloody hard to measure. It changes based on which country you're in (some are more likely to keep you around even if you cost more: Japan for example) or how much you earn (Those who earn the most turn out to be quite elastic).

Estimates vary from 0.5 to about 1.5 (looking at people who are highly paid).

What this means is that among the 288,600 people fired (assuming an Elasticity of 1) we'd actually expect a lot more of the high earners to lose their jobs (afterall, an additional £100 per year for someone earning £10,000 is a lot less than the £10,000 for someone earning £1m). This means the estimates above, which are driven by UK average wages, could even be too low.

But, in amongst all these figures, we're missing the important thing, the Human element. Even if we take the low-end estimate of an elasticity of 0.5, if Labour are re-elected they will then condemn nearly 150,000 people to lose their jobs. Do we think these will come from the Public Sector?

This means that the Tories have pledged to protect at least 150,000 productive, private sector jobs. Won't these be the exact people needed to drive the recovery?

A Future Fail for All

2010-03-27T13:37:00.000Z

What Labour's pledge card should have said...

Government Borrowing "falls" to £5,126 a second

2010-03-18T11:51:00.003Z

Good News Everybody!

The BBC are reporting that Government borrowing is "only" £12.4Bn in February. Apparently this "isn't as bad as some have feared".

Just to summarise this new debt being forced on us:

Every second in February, the Government borrowed £5,126
Every minute in February, the Government borrowed £307,540
Every hour in February, the Government borrowed £18,452,381 (yes, over £18 Million)
Every day in February, the Government borrowed £442,857,143

Let's assume that Lord Ashcroft decided that he should now pay UK tax on all his overseas earnings from his entire life (currently estimated at £125 million) then this will cover UK borrowing for less than seven hours!
If the latest UK winner of the Euromillions Lottery decided to give all their money (all £56 million of it), it would account for only three hours of borrowing!

At the bottom of the linked article, the BBC journo states that: "Moody's agency said the UK's top rating was secure."

Actually, what Moody's said was that: “On balance, we believe that the ratings of all large Aaa governments remain well positioned, although their ‘distance-to-downgrade’ has in all cases substantially diminished”

I.e.: The longer Labour are in power and continue to borrow our grandchildren's money, the more likely we're going to find ourselves stuck in a spiral of debt we'll be unable to control.

Labour Rats Abandoning the Sinking Ship

2010-03-17T12:16:00.004Z

Following on from the list here showing all Labour Donors (who've donated a total of more than £100k since 2001). I decided to have a look through and see how donations to Labour have changed over time.

The following graph shows donations in 2008 compared to 2009 from Trade Unions, Individuals and Companies.

Donations from Companies have fallen from over £1 million to just over £750k, a drop of 25%
Donations from Individuals have fallen off a cliff from £6.6m to £3.7m. This is a massive fall of 45%
Whilst Donations from Unions have risen by 4%, this is hardly enough to counteract this massive shortfall in Labour's funding

Whilst in 2008, private individuals may have supported Labour to the tune of nearly £7m, these people have all realised what the true chance of Labour winning the election is and have chosen to take their money elsewhere. Rats off a sinking ship, anyone?

Taxpayers are Bankrolling Labour!

2010-03-16T14:49:00.013Z

Following on from this list of Labour Donors, I noted how frequently Unions were appearing on the list.

Recently, a PQ has detailed the cash Unions have received from the Union Modernisation Fund, written about by Iain Dale here. I've decided to not just focus on Unite, but see how much each union has given Labour and see how much they've received.

Whilst these figures do not include FY06-07 where Unite apparently received over £4m they do provide a little colour to show how Taxpayers money is being given to the Unions, who hand it straight back to Labour.

(If the image is unreadable, just click on it for a larger version).

The RMT recieved £194k and managed to scrape together £276k to donate.
The Communication Workers Union donated £151k and were given £166k.
Even the Musicians Union (who donated £281k) got in on the act and were given £47k.

As we can see, the government have given these Unions nearly two million pounds over the last few years. These are the people who have provided a massive proportion of Labour's Finances. In effect, Millions of pounds of Taxpayers money has been directly channeled from the Treasury to Labour's pockets.

Does anyone really believe that if this money hadn't been given to the unions by the government, they wouldn't just have donated a little less to Labour?

EDIT: Updated 17th March to reflect error in donations - caused by not counting donations from Mid-2007

Sources: The above PQ for the union funding by year and the database of party donors from here

Resource: Labour Donors over £100k

2010-03-16T14:29:00.004Z

Donor	Number of Donations	Total Donations
Unison	1005	16,260,087
GMB	798	12,924,364
Union of Shop Distributive and Allied Workers	377	8,471,326
Amicus	450	8,386,751
Transport and General Workers Union	284	6,721,215
Lord David Sainsbury	5	6,061,808
Unite - AMICUS Section	258	5,258,720
Communication Workers Union (CWU)	534	5,193,968
Unite - TGWU Section	85	2,662,979
Lord Sainsbury of Turville	2	2,505,000
Nigel Doughty	9	2,305,201
Sir Ronald Cohen	10	2,300,000
AEEU	97	2,210,829
Lakshmi Mittal	2	2,125,000
Lord David Sainsbury of Turville	5	2,016,000
Lord Sainsbury	1	2,000,000
Lakshminiwas Mittal	1	2,000,000
TGWU	107	1,574,543
Unite - AMICUS	37	1,531,477
USDAW	74	1,396,824
UNITE - Transport and General Workers Union	13	1,329,160
Amicus AEEU	100	1,311,486
Lord Paul Drayson	2	1,005,000
Sir Christopher Ondaatje CBE	2	1,000,250
Lord Paul Hamlyn	2	1,000,000
Jon Aisbitt	4	1,000,000
Joanne Rowling	1	1,000,000
Mr William Haughey OBE	3	990,000
Communications Workers Union (CWU)	158	953,445
Community	102	891,462
Mahmoud Khayami	4	830,000
MSF	116	786,909
Union of construction Allied Trades & Technicians	68	742,057
Communications Workers Union	93	693,361
TBWA London Ltd	35	692,763
Sir Christopher Ondaatje	2	600,000
Graphical Paper & Media Union	56	587,454
Transport Salaried Staff Association	89	582,252
Sir David Garrard	2	552,278
The Co-operative Party	280	534,768
ISTC	88	503,696
Saatchi & Saatchi Group Limited	4	446,037
Sir Sigmund Sternberg	22	427,633
Derek Tullett CBE	3	400,000
UCATT	26	376,558
ASLEF	80	357,554
Co-operative Party	197	356,915
Amicus MSF	16	356,532
Communication Workers Union CWU	37	341,942
Sir Gulam Noon	6	323,826
KPMG LLP	23	314,266
Muslim Friends of Labour	8	312,000
Lord Sushantha Bhattacharyya	10	306,594
Transport & General Workers Union	11	303,591
Sir Frank Lowe	12	300,000
Mr Nigel Doughty	5	288,000
Musicians Union	62	280,719
Mr William Bollinger	3	260,725
Mr Michael Watt	2	260,000
William Bollinger	1	250,000
Ronald Cohen	1	250,000
GPMU	45	244,800
Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians	22	208,317
Sir Alan Sugar	1	200,000
Derek Tullet CBE	2	200,000
Bill Kenwright	1	200,000
Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP	2	184,193
Sir Maurice Hatter	3	176,000
Thompsons Solicitors	74	172,399
Unite - AMICUS Section - Sponsorship	22	171,207
Sterling Capitol Plc	1	160,000
Fire Brigades Union	46	158,948
RMT	18	154,655
The Co-operative Group	11	153,508
Mr David Abrahams (originally reported from John McCarthy)	4	152,125
Communication Workers Union	11	150,551
Mr Peter Coates	2	150,000
Mr Mahmoud Khayami - Sponsorship	1	150,000
Mr Derek Tullett CBE	2	150,000
Charles Peel	2	150,000
Bet365 Ltd	2	150,000
Mr David Abrahams (originally reported as from R. Ruddick)	4	147,850
Mr David Abrahams (originally reported as from Janet Kidd)	6	147,000
Picture Production Company Ltd	2	136,400
BECTU	29	135,395
KPMG UK Ltd	4	135,000
National Union of Mineworkers	54	132,129
The Video Meeting Company Limited	1	131,930
Tait Communications	9	131,112
Croydon Labour Group	30	126,960
Denise Gleeson	2	126,750
Communtiy	5	122,165
Steve Lazarides	1	121,600
Rail, Maritime, Transport	40	121,454
Peter Thompson OBE	2	120,000
Connect	22	117,660
Haringey Labour Group	34	111,114
Mr Amin Hemani	2	110,200
Gulam Noon	5	109,000
Transport and Salaried Staff Association	22	108,640
Ceramics & Allied Trades Union	20	105,359
River Front Properties Ltd	40	104,073
Mr Christopher Ondaatje	3	102,500
Vera Archer	1	100,000
Thomas Marsoner	1	100,000
Sir Gulam Noon MBE	1	100,000
Mr William Archer	1	100,000
Mr Tom Hunter	1	100,000
Mr Derek Tullett	1	100,000
Mr Charles Peel	1	100,000
Hillside (New Media) Limited	1	100,000
Dr Paul Drayson	2	100,000
Bob Murray CBE	1	100,000

Gordon is lying - again!

2010-03-11T10:57:00.006Z

I'm getting pissed off with Gordon constantly prattling on about how Defence Spending has risen under Labour. So I decided to have a look at the reality of his claims.

The best measure of Defence Spending has always been looking at total cash spend as a percentage of GDP. For the US and China this is quite high (some claim up to about 10% for the latter). For Belgium it's pretty damn low (about 1.3%). Countries that actually want to have an influence in world affairs tend to be spending more than 2.5% (which is what France spends).

So, lets have a look at how Defence Spending has changed under Labour.

To no-one's surprise Defence Spending has fallen dramatically for nearly every year Labour have been in power. The only occasion Defence Spending managed to actually rise was when they were simultaneously spending on a large war in Afghanistan whilst watching the economy tank (It's more a case of GDP falling than Defence Spending growing).

Ah ha! I hear you say! Gordon actually meant that Defence Spending has risen in "Real Terms". GDP is irrelevant, just look at how much the Defence budget was, correct for inflation and you'll see that Defence Spending has gone up in every year. Afterall, Gordon wouldn't lie to us!

Well, lets see what that gets us.
This picture looks much rosier. In real terms Defence Spending has generally risen . However, there have been four occasions since 1997 where Defence Spending has fallen in real terms. To make these clearer, I've coloured them red.

Gordon is clearly wrong when he says that the Defence Budget hasn't been cut whilst Labour has been in power (it's even been cut since he was PM). It has whether you're looking at percentage of GDP, or in terms of 2008 cash. Time for an apology to the house?

The interesting thing isn't actually that Gordon has been caught lying. Afterall, that can hardly shock anyone now. Look at the time of the two most recent cuts. These are in 2002-2003 and 2007-2008. This is where Brown's testimony to Chilcot was "disingenuous". As the military were gearing up for an inevitable war in Iraq (for all the "right reasons", remember) the core MoD budget was being cut in real terms. As our troops were increasing (remember, the initial deployment was only supposed to be less than 5,000. Now there's about 10,000 troops in theatre) involved in ever-escalating warfare in Afghanistan the budget was cut again.

Whilst Brown is factually incorrect to say that Defence Spending has consistently risen, it's the fact that he's chosen to slash Defence Budgets exactly when our troops need more funding that shows how he really views the Military.

EDIT: A reader has suggested I make it clear in this analysis that we're looking only at core Defence funding. Obviously, this does not include spending on wars, which should be funded entirely from the central reserve. This should also include all UORs, which are Brown's favorite counter-argument whenever Defence Spending is bought up. However, it should be noted from this PQ in March 2009 that even UORs are sometimes part of wholely funded from the core Budget:

"UORs are normally funded from the reserve and not subject to repayment. There are however occasions when an urgent capability will also bring long-term benefit to the MoD, and it is therefore appropriate for the MoD to contribute to the cost of the UOR. Equally, existing funded programmes in the MoD’s forward equipment plan may be brought forward for urgent operational reasons, and if reserve funding is provided to meet the urgent requirement, it may be subject to repayment. Exact proportions of any cost-share will vary according to the particular projects and final costs and are not held centrally. An exact breakdown of costs to the MoD and the reserve for all UORs could only be provided at disproportionate cost."

If the MoD are having to spend their core budget on UORs, then the effetive reductions we've seen above could be even larger than these figures above show.

Exclusive! Antique Photograph of Gordon Brown

2010-03-10T22:43:00.004Z

Today Gordon Brown has landed at Heston Aerodrome. He has with him a piece of paper, promising "No Return to Boom and Bust!"

We thank him from the bottom of our hearts!

Labour is talking bollocks on Crime!

2010-03-09T14:58:00.004Z

I've been pretty cheerful recently, so it's actually been quite hard to find something to get angry about. Luckily, with Labour in power, you never need to wait long until they do something so aggravating it should be added to the cost of running the NHS.

Today's entertaining ditty claims that the Tories are weak on Crime. This should be a fun one. Afterall, the Tories didn't start a policy of releasing convicted and sentenced criminals just because they needed the extra space. Let's not forget that this scheme released over 11,000 people who the law said should be behind bars in just the first four months.

Anyway, the point of Labour's new attack on the Tories isn't that they're Strong on Crime (which they're clearly not) but that the Tories are weak.

Alan Johnson's statement provides two key points.

Tories want to limit the use of DNA by the police
Tories have campaigned against CCTV

Clearly these Tories are mad! Everyone knows that CCTV and DNA are essential tools in fighting the crime waves we're facing!

Except, as we all know, Crime is actually pretty static (it's only fear of crime that's up and you can hardly say that Labour have reduced the need for 'fear' in this country). So let's just look at how effective CCTV and DNA actually have been.

DNA first. The Tories actually voted against proposals to introduce mandatory DNA collection for "Recordable Offences". Wikipedia tells me these include: "drunkenness, poaching, public order, begging, failing to provide a specimen of breath, and taking a pedal cycle without consent." Does anyone really think that these are the sort of offences that should dictate mandatory DNA capture? Are they really on a par with Rape, Murder or other more serious offences? It's worth noting that for Rape and Murder, crimes were DNA evidence should be a vital tool, the database was only able to solve less than 30% of cases where they already had a DNA match (source). That means even when they were able to find a match to the criminal on the database, they still only had a 30% chance of actually using that to solve the case!

In addition, there are 28,625 people on the database who volunteered their DNA. These people are mostly victims and third parties who could have been legitimately present at the crime scene. Once they have given consent for their DNA to be added to the database "it cannot then be withdrawn". Their data will be saved for 6 years. It was only with a serious fight this was reduced from 12 years! Even the bloody EU thinks this is illegal!

Currently there's over 5 million unique entries on the DNA database. Roughly that's one for each ten people in the country. Does anyone really believe that there are 5 million criminals in this country (and I mean real criminals, not people who drove at 33mph in a 30 zone)? Still, the size of the database is no reason to dismiss it. Maybe it is solving thousands of otherwise unsolvable crimes? Actually DNA helps (so, this includes many cases that would have been solved anyway) a mere 0.36% of crimes. Maybe it would solve more if everyone was on the database, but if that's the intention then Labour should be clear about this, rather than trying to get DNA records for every possible "crime". How long before speeding, or littering is added to the list of offences that require DNA capture?

CCTV is much easier to dismiss as a crime fighting weapon. This is even more useless than DNA evidence. We have over one million cameras in London. They were reported to require '1000' cameras to solve a single crime. Whilst the DNA database costs a 'mere' £4million or so. CCTV has had £500m "invested" into it nationwide. The cameras are nearly bloody useless and cost a fortune. At least the DNA database is relatively cheap!

Labour have picked DNA and CCTV as sticks to beat the Tory party with. Both of these solve very few crimes and have massive civil liberty issues attached to them. If I were a Labour voter I would be very concerned that a party that has traditionally stood up for Civil Rights is now doing it's best to trample these in the dust and is smearing any party that is trying to stand up to them.

In other news...

2010-03-04T10:09:00.002Z

Read this story this morning.

"The Ministry of Defence has been accused of giving "misleading" answers to MPs scrutinising its budget. ..."Witness denials at that time of the existence of such a gap now appear disingenuous." "

In other news this man is a Catholic!

Detailed spectrographic analysis has proven that when clear, the sky is blue!

The sea has been found by scientists to be overwhelmingly wet!
Many people are coming forward to claim that this man is a bully in the workplace:

OK, maybe that last one wasn't such a surprise..

Joke of the Day

2010-03-02T20:43:00.004Z

Sorry for the lack of posting - Have been quite busy recently. Shall attempt to resume previous behaviour shortly.

In the meantime, here's a joke:

An Aussie truckie walks into an outback cafe' with a full-grown emu behind him. The waitress asks them for their orders.

The truckie says, 'A hamburger, chips and a coke,' and turns to the emu, 'What's yours?' 'I'll have the same,' says the emu.

A short time later the waitress returns with the order 'That will be $9.40 please,' and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the exact change for payment..

The next day, the man and the emu come again and he says,'A hamburger, chips and a coke.'
The emu says, 'I'll have the same.' Again the truckie reaches into his pocket and pays with exact change.

This becomes routine until the two enter again. 'The usual?' asks the waitress.

'No, it's Friday night, so I'll have a steak, baked potato and a salad,' says the man. 'Same,' says the emu.

Shortly the waitress brings the order and says, 'That will be $32.62.'

Once again the man pulls the exact change out of his pocket and places it on the table.

The waitress cannot hold back her curiosity any longer. 'Excuse me, mate, how do you manage to always come up with the exact change in your pocket every time?'

'Well, love' says the truckie, 'a few years ago, I was cleaning out the back shed, and found an old lamp. When I rubbed it, a Genie appeared and offered me two wishes. My first wish was that if I ever had to pay for anything, I would just put my hand in my pocket and the right amount of money would always be there.'

'That's brilliant!' says the waitress. 'Most people would ask for a million dollars or something, but you'll always be as rich as you want for as long as you live!'

'That's right. Whether it's a gallon of milk or a Rolls Royce, the exact money is always there,' says the man. The waitress asks, 'What's with the bloody emu?'

The truckie sighs, pauses, and answers, 'My second wish was for a tall bird with a big arse and long legs, who agrees with everything I say.'

Labour spending on Advertising

2010-02-10T14:23:00.005Z

I read an article in the Evening Standard a few days ago, which on reflection was probably nicked from this article in Guardian.

It stated two things I found quite interesting, one that the Government was now the largest spender on advertising in the country, beating P&G. The other was that this spend had risen 43% in the last year.

I've seen a few of the adverts the Government has placed and often they appear to be doing little more than telling people what a great job the Government are doing. Is it any surprise that spending on this rises before an election?

I've had a look at Government spending on advertising thanks to the COI (Central Office of Information). The Mission Statement for the COI is:

"The aim of COI is to enable central government and public sector bodies to secure policy objectives through achieving maximum communication effectiveness and best value for money."

Ah, that old trick: If no-one sees you do anything, it doesn't actually happen. If you tell everyone you're doing a great job, then even if the act itself was a failure, you've achieved your 'policy objectives'.

Well, with some serious digging I was able to pull up a few Annual Reports for the COI (some were obvious, other required entering likely URLs) which I've used to produce the following simple graph showing total spend for the COI from everything from consultancy to traditional adverts.

As you can see, total COI spend has risen from around £100m in 1997-1998 to over £500m this year. Yes, Labour are spending five times more on government propaganda now than they were at the beginning of their regime.

Does anyone really think that we should be wasting £500m just telling people what a good job the Government is doing? Couldn't that money be better spent, on Hospitals, Teachers, or Body Armour for our troops (As I pointed out here, this would be enough to buy over 300,000 sets of armour for our troops!)?

Another, possibly more pertinent point is looking at the timing of the spikes in spending. As mentioned above, spending has risen by 43% in the last year. On the graph I've marked on in black the years when elections took place. In every year before an election this Government's spending on advertising how good it is increased a lot before settling back down again the next year.

In 2000/2001 spending rose by 48%, more than even this incredible rise. The only reason this year is particularly obvious is that spending overall has risen by such an incredible level (16% year on year on average!).

Labour are not only wasting another vast pile of public money, they are actually using that vast pile of public money to promote themselves in the run up to elections! Is this actually legal?

Oh, if anyone wants the source data, drop me an email, address over there --> somewhere.

Labour has killed Manufacturing, not the Tories

2010-02-09T15:54:00.003Z

I'm getting increasingly confused by all the #changewesee tweets talking about how manufacturing is in such better hands when there is a Labour Government in power.

Because I'm not a pillock, I decided to check the facts behind this whole situation. The following graph shows what percentage of GDP manufacturing has made up. My source was the World Bank. The Blue line shows a Tory Government (1979 -1997) and the Red line shows the current Labour Government (1997 - current).

Between 1979 and 1996 Manufacturing's share fell from 26.7% to 21.2% of GDP. That's a fall of -21% (or a CAGR of -1.4% / year). There is clearly some truth that Manufacturing didn't do very well under those 17 years of Tory power.

However, between 1997 and 2005 (my last data point I'm afraid) manufacturing fell from 20.6% to 13.6%. That's a fall of -35% (a CAGR of 5.2%), significantly more than under the Tory Government and in a lot less time (as the CAGR shows).

Whilst the Tories may not be good for manufacturing, Labour are a damn sight worse.

Fox at RUSI: Do the Tories 'get' Defence?

2010-02-09T09:52:00.005Z

Yesterday, the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Defence gave a speech at RUSI laying out what the Conservatives are seeing for the future of Defence in the UK. The full text is available here, but I'll be pulling quotes that I feel are interesting.

This is a pretty important speech, as it gives us an opportunity to see how screwed the Armed Forces will be under a Tory government.

One of Foxy's earliest points is to point out that unlike the current governmental incumbents, he does not believe that the UK will always be fighting with allies. He states that:

"Second, we cannot accept the assumption in the Green Paper that Britain will always operate as part of an alliance. We have unique national interests and have to maintain the capability to act on our own if required."

Bravo that man! This is a fundamental tenet of the UK's armed forces. Sure, we're not the biggest, or the best equipped. But we should always be able to operate on our own, without missing any critical elements that we've relied on allies for (ISTAR, CAS, medevac, or anything else).

He even lines out a sensible structure for the upcoming Defence Review, which hopefully hasn't been too pre-judged by the Green Paper:

"As for the review itself, it must have a logical sequence. It must begin with our foreign policy priorities, outlining our national interests. We must then consider the threats which may affect our interests so that we can determine the defence strategy needed to respond to them. Only then can we determine the military capabilities we need to protect those interests in this threat environment.
Only then can we come to the equipment programmes that will make these capabilities a reality."

The traditional way of running a Defence Review has been to work out what equipment we can afford, then which threats that the equipment is capable of operating against, then whether we'd like to be able to meet those threats or not. Whilst at the moment, this process is just talk, it is at least the right sort of talk.

Foxy then moves onto some potentially unpopular (well, on Whitehall anyway) suggestions:

"We must be able to defend the UK against the threats posed to our interests within reasonably predictable limits...When required the Armed Forces must be able to augment and support civil emergency organisations during a time of crisis.

Defending the UK also means maintaining key strategic tasks like a continuous at sea submarine based minimum credible nuclear deterrent.

Secondly we must be able to defend our fourteen overseas territories and, of course, the main focus is on the Falklands.

Thirdly, when required, we must be able to come to the aid of NATO allies in a significant way under our Article V obligations.

Fourthly, we will need to be able to project power on a strategic level alongside the United States and France.

Fifthly, we will have to have the capacity to conduct extended stabilisation and nation building exercises

Sixthly... We will continue to work closely with countries with shared mutual interests and geo-strategic importance, like Norway and Turkey or Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States."

As before, this is all sounding remarkably sensible. I can't actually disagree with any of these points. This is sounding like a government who understands the point of actually having an effective Armed Forces. Foxy isn't talking in grey terms about "A Force for Good" but actually laying out the jobs he's expecting our servicemen and women to be doing.

He outlines an array threats, from the usual suspects (TERROR~~VISION~~ISM) to a few that are new but more likely and more threatening (Cyber-warfare, Nuclear proliferation, Piracy). He doesn't discount state-on-state warfare, whilst reiterating the importance of being able to operate as a counter-insurgency force. He even uses the phrase:

"This has led many to believe that we have to choose between fighting 'the war' or 'a war'-but this is a false dichotomy."

Bloody hell, that's one of the most sensible Defence comments I've heard since someone suggested that perhaps we should do something about this Hitler fellow.

He even mentions the Russian invasion of Georgia (is it me, or did the current government miss that game entirely?), drawing not just conclusions about the kinetic weapons employed, but also the broad range of information operations. Someone is clearly briefing him properly. And more spectacularly he is listening to them. This isn't something you normally expect to see amongst Defence focused politicians.

The next part of the speech is focusing on equipment. As mentioned above, this follows the structure for the Defence Review, first focus on threats, then what you buy to deal with them.

However, the good Doctor continues his sensible analysis. One phrase I saw was:

"In order to ensure we are able to respond to rapidly to changing threats we must have a vibrant defence industrial base. Without it we would have no operational sovereignty-thereby threatening our national sovereignty."

Is anyone else hearing the resurrection of DIS? Unusually for the Tories, with their previous focus on telling the Government they should have been buying American products, it sounds like they're actually starting to understand one of the basic rules: If you have no Defence Industry, you have no Defence.

Foxy then brings up and interesting and for Labour, distasteful point. Exports. He says both that: "The Conservative Party will use defence exports as a foreign policy tool and we will seek to increase Britain's share of the world defence market." and that new equipment programmes will: "have a high export demand". This is only common sense. A system that costs £1Bn a pop and can't be bought by anyone else is a lot less useful to our armed forces than a system that provides 90% of the capability for half the price AND can be sold to our allies, dropping the unit price further. Our constant gold-plating of pretty much anything we've built or bought has destroyed the ability for the UK Defence Industry to flog it.

Labour has talked at great length about how the Tories will turn their backs on Manufacturing. Here is a clear example that under the Tories, our largest manufacturing export industry will actually be encouraged, rather than seen as some dirty secret.

Brilliantly Foxy was even able to point out the truth that we've all known for some time: That under the current financial constraints operations aren't being fully funded from the Treasury Reserve as they should. Whilst this may be a complicated political point to the general public, it's a critical part of how our Armed Forces operates. The Budget only exists to give them the capability to go to war (the equipment, training and manpower required). To actually go to war (for example: replacing worn out equipment) the costs have to be funded by the Treasury. This hasn't been happening, so the Forces have been cannibalising training and equipment to fund the Government's war.

Foxy goes on to point out that financial constraints will provide a serious limitation (much of what he's quoted above is expensive) on the next Government to actually fund Defence properly. It will be very interesting to see how the Tories manage this problem over the next year. As he points out, the financial constraints may make it possible to drive through reform that would be impossible otherwise.

Right, my final thoughts on the speech. I think what he said was excellent. He sounds like a minister who has deeply understood the problems of his portfolio (one of the toughest available). He has detailed the threats that the Forces should be balanced to deal with and what capabilities are required (without demanding specific pieces of equipment). In fact, by staying away from equipment, he was able to keep the speech fairly force-neutral. He did mention both the Navy and the Army (with no mention of the RAF) but only both briefly and in the context of current threats. I imagine at the moment, he's steering fairly well clear of the minefield of inter-service rivalry. Maybe, with the upcoming review, he may be able to do something about it. From the intelligence contained in this speech it appears that he's smart enough to understand the value of some under-appreciated capabilities we have today, such as Fast Jets, ASW and heavy armoured units, which whilst not particularly useful against the Taliban have proved their worth time and time again.

To my mind, this is one of the best Defence speeches for some time. For all the talk that Brown has finally "got" defence there is no substitute for a minister who understands the issues and is able to eloquently defend his position. However, it is just a speech, it won't achieve anything on its own. I hope that it's merely the start of a sustained Tory understanding of the problems. Can Dave spare Defence from the worst of the cuts, listen to his minister and understand that there are votes in the UK being strong and able to stand with the rest of the world?

What are the Met Office playing at?

2010-02-08T13:32:00.006Z

OK, it's just after 1330 on Monday 8th February. I've just gone and picked up my lunch. To my surprise it was snowing pretty damn heavily.

I decided to swing by the BBC weather feed (direct from the Met Office) to see what they had to say. Surprisingly they'd decided that it wasn't actually snowing outside (See the image below).

This being somewhat contrary to my actual observations, I looked at another weather site (Accuweather, which is based in the US). For whatever reason, they were actually predicting snow today:
Who cares? I mean it's only weather forecasting, it's not actually a serious matter surely? Well, as I noted a few weeks ago the Met Office don't seem to actually be doing a very good job of Long Term forecasting and I suggested that their computer models (biased towards warming, as even the BBC picked up) were affecting their forecasts.

Well, it's been a pretty cold winter so far. Sure we've had a week or so of slightly warmer weather, but the Arctic Oscillation is heading negative again. It wouldn't take a Rocket Surgeon to assume some colder weather is en-route and perhaps the odd warning of snow would be useful.

The belief currently is that the Met Office has only screwed up their long-term forecasts with their increasing reliance on models. As today's results show, it looks like they may be getting the day by day forecasts wrong as well. If an American company based in Pennsylvania can predict our day-to-day weather better then surely the Met Office are doing something wrong.

Incidentally: this is that company's prediction for this January. This was made in November. Looks like the Met Office is pretty much the only people who thought it would be mild

Quick look at the Legg Report

2010-02-04T11:20:00.003Z

Had a quick glance through the Legg Report.

I've even had time to produce an extremely rough and ready bit of analysis on the results.

Of the major parties, Labour and Conservative are tied with about 60% Troughers, with the Lib Dems trailing on a pitiful 40% of their MPs caught stealing our money.

However, the Tories are able to easily top the money stolen stakes: On average each Tory thief was forced to return nearly £3,400. Lib Dems about £2,400 with Labour showing a lamentable lack of imagination with a paltry £2,100 each. Gordon Brown was found out for nearly£13,000, truely showing the Labour laggards where they've been going wrong. If that's not leading from the front, I don't know what is!

Over half of our MPs were caught stealing to some degree. 19 were billed more than £10,000 with Peter Lilley leading the pack with a spectacular £41,000 of repayments! In fact all of the top five were Tory.

In total, over 180 stole more than £1,000.

Hopefully most of them won't be coming back in June.

This is based on a seriously quick peice of analysis, it may not be 100% right. You try replicating this if you want to check it.

Flicking through the Defence Green Paper

2010-02-03T13:27:00.004Z

I've not read the new MoD Green Paper yet, I've only had time to flick through it.

However, I'm a great believer that you can get a really good idea for what the paper is saying by how it's presented. Each chapter is introduced with an image, showing our military doing what it does best. These are the sort of images to show the cool stuff you want your forces to be doing, they're supposed to blend into the overall impression this report is actually supposed to recommend.

I figure we can use these images to provide a fairly handy view of what the contents of the paper (and of course what the outcome of the Defence Review will actually be). Have a look at the picture below, which shows every single image through the entire report.

Let's have a look at what we've got here:

Intro: Soldiers carrying Afghan civilians - Army
1: Nuclear Deterrent - RN
2: Solders somewhere Dusty - Army
3: Looks like RN Sea Kings dropping off Marines - RN
4: Solider somewhere dusty AND helping civilians - Army
5: A Sailor - RN
6: You can almost imagine the problems with the sixth image. We've had three from the Army and three from the RN. Shit! We'll have to find an image from the RAF, but what can we possibly use? Typhoons look too expensive, VC10s and C17s are too busy to get a photo, Reaper is somewhere hot and sandy and everyone knows the RAF can't be there, so we'll have to use a photo of a Chinook. Besides, Gordon has announced that he's buying a few more, so lets stick a photo of that in.

Well, it looks like the future of defence has been decided. Lots of solders operating in sandy places. Submarines with plenty of nukes to keep the Russians / Chinese at bay and air-support only where it's directly transporting troops. Maybe a big ship or two (like HMS Ocean, a massive success) but nothing small and useful.

What's missing? A list of the top of my head would quickly include: ISTAR, Frigates, Armoured Ground Units (APCs would be useful and haven't we bought a huge number of those recently), anything that flies that's not a troop transport (so: CAS, AT, UCAVs, etc).

Can we use these images to come up with an idea of what the Defence Review will actually say? Of course not! It's several months away and under (hopefully) a different government.

Well, let's do it anyway. Afterall, if I'm completely wrong, I'll forget I ever wrote this post but if I'm right..

Looks like the Army have won the war between the services.
We're going to only be fighting in sandy places in the future - even the Marines are landing on somewhere sandy (though with some green trees in the background).
Lots of Hearts and Minds work in those sandy places, minimal focus on actually shooting anything
There will be no need for anything expensive, aside from maybe a big ship or two, particularly if they're built in Scotland (got to keep the Labour voters on-side)
Can the RAF, in fact can anything that's not directly related to keeping the soldiers on the ground happy. A2A is certainly right out, no-one has any advanced fighters any more and our friends the Russians would never sell the T-50 to anyone who doesn't like us anyway.

Generally, it looks like we're abandoning having balanced forces and any aim of being able to mount operations on our own.

I've gone through the "Partnership" part of the paper. It's quite short, only 1000 words long (so about my typical blog post).

NATO appears 6 times
Europe (or European) appears 6 times
EU appears 5 times
America appears once!
US appears once!

The exact quote for the last one is: "A robust EU role in crisis management will strengthen NATO. Playing a leading role at the heart of Europe will strengthen our relationship with the US."

So, let me get this straight, the best way of dealing with the Americans is rather than talking to them directly but instead hoping our European Allies let us talk to them occasionally in the context of a multinational EU defence force?

Guess the MoD is getting itself good and ready for massive budget cuts.
We should start getting ourselves ready for the day when we have to rely on France for our National Security.

Maybe this is the final act of Labour, finally screwing the economy so badly we can't even afford to defend ourselves any more.

8 Benchmarks and what the Tories should be saying

2010-02-02T19:58:00.003Z

I've been looking at Osbourne's 8 "Benchmarks for Britain" in this speech.

Well, first I had to actually find them, there was a lot of waffle in the speech and I'm still not sure I've got the right bits. I was always taught that when public speaking to use lists, rather than some ambiguous bollocks with an occasional point.

Anyway, as I understand them, here are the "Benchmarks", they're all taken as quotes from Georgie's speech with most of the waffle removed.

1: Cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain's credit rating.
2: Higher exports, higher business investment and higher saving as a share of GDP.
3: Lower youth unemployment.
4: Improve Britain's global rankings for tax competitiveness and business regulation
5: We will raise the private sector's share of the economy in all regions of the country.
6: Higher public sector productivity and better value for money.
7: Create a safer banking system that serves the needs of the economy.
8: We will see lower emissions and a rising global market share for low carbon technologies.

Lets go through them one by one and see what use they are.

1. "Cut the deficit more quickly" - what does he mean that 'more' quickly. Quicker than Labour, Quicker than it's been cut over the past few years? Whilst I applaud the intent to protect Britain's Credit Rating (which I've talked about here) and I'm sure that cutting the Deficit is the way to go, a little more detail would be nice.

2. Higher exports - good. Higher Business investment - good, but from whom? Higher Saving - Well, perhaps people might be saving if interest rates weren't unprecedentedly low? Again, these are all lovely ideas, but are somewhat lacking in substance. Also, all of these are pretty much at record lows at the moment, and any improvement will be "Higher". Again, where is the detail? Why not "Increase exports as a percentage of GDP by 15% over 5 years"? Still, on the bright side, if the Tories cut Government spending (currently 44% of GDP) by 10%, all of these will increase without any work done. Easy, but somewhat pointless.

3. Well, it's at a record high at the moment, can't see this one being too tricky. Just got to give one 18 year old girl a job and you've "lowered" youth unemployment.

4. This one I actually quite like. Sure, there's no detail and under Labour we've slide from 4th to about 85th on both these counts. Logically the only way is up but the intent is decent.

5. Raising the private sectors share of the economy in all regions is another good one. Areas such as Gordon Brown's constituency where 75% of households are partially or totally dependant on the state are a sign of a failed administration. Roughly two thirds of the whole of the North East are in the same boat. It's about time those situations are changed. A smaller public sector can only help the country as a whole.

6. Higher public sector productivity is a lovely idea. It's also fairly easy to achieve. Even Labour increased public sector productivity by 2% over the last decade or so. Of course, you have to compare that to the 30% increase in productivity the Private sector managed. An increase is easy! Some detail would be great, like: "Increase productivity by a minimum of 75% of private sector productivity improvement"!

7. Safer Banking System - well, it's meaningless bollocks that sounds good, I suppose.

8. Ah, the good old Low Emissions and Low Carbon Economy and Exports game. The Tories had better seriously hope we're not heading for another Dalton Minimum. If we do, they're going to look fucking stupid, hitching their election bandwagon to Climate Change. Their problem is that whilst their mates in Notting Hill all passionately believe in the religion of AGW, the rest of the country, particularly in areas where they need a serious swing, are far less certain. I'd bet nearly any sum of money that a policy of "We need to wait and see before committing Billions to fight a problem" will drive many more votes than spunking money on an increasingly ropey looking theory (for Christ's Sake, even the bloody Guardian is slagging off Climate "Scientists" these days!)

Overall rating - meh.

These points are the right ones, but the lack of detail makes the whole thing rather pointless. I'm guessing the Tories don't want to be nailed to a promise they can't keep, but it never hurt New Labour to miss pretty much every target they set themselves.

Over the last few weeks the Tories seem intent on throwing away this election. I don't quite understand why. All they need to be doing is building on some simple solid policies (none of this crappy Policy a Day bollocks, I mean Prison Ships, who cares?).

Why don't the Tories say something like these:

"We will encourage the economy to grow by reducing taxation and regulation on Businesses"

"We will be careful with your money, cutting government spending and improving Public Sector Productivity, and driving economic growth through our private sector policies"

"We will slow Labour's immigration, to focus public spending on our current population"

"We will fight for the rights of the Victim, not the criminal"

"We will put Teaching back in the hands of Teachers and Headteachers, not bureaucrats with clipboards"

These would probably do far more to drive confidence that they're actually trying to win this bloody election. It would provide a simple message for Ministers, MPs, PPCs and all the rest to say whenever they're interviewed. If you're worried about people going off-message, then your message is either way too complicated, or wrong.

Come on Tories, drop all the bollocks and start trying to win this election!

Pointless Graph of the Day: Mk II

2010-01-28T14:24:00.004Z

Today's graph is looking at Alcohol related deaths in England. Similar to yesterday, I'm looking at how these rates vary compared to voting patterns in the 2009 Euro Elections (where we showed that Labour voters are more likely to let their teenagers smoke).

As with yesterday, Red is Labour vote share, Blue represents the Tory vote share. Simple, right?

As with yesterday, we've got another pretty obvious conclusion.

It looks like Labour voters are more likely to be drinking themselves to death. Conservative voters are less likely to feel the need to drink so excessively.

Caveat: Yes, I know the stats behind those conclusions are shaky as hell. Hence the title - "Pointless Graph". However, just because it's somewhat simplistic, doesn't mean that there's a grain of truth in it. Yes, there's mostly likely another factor that makes people both drink themselves to death AND vote Labour. It's probably Thatcher, or something.

Pointless Graph of the Day

2010-01-27T17:48:00.004Z

Whilst the rest of the blogosphere is spellbound by the fact that tweetminster may not have done their sums correctly, I've been doing serious poltical research.

There's a new report out, looking (amongst other things) the rates of smoking amongst teenagers (11-15 year olds). As usual I decided to get into the details. Luckily these statistics are provide by a Government Office Region, which is exactly how the European Elections are counted.

I've produced a graph with two lines. The Red line shows how the Labour share of the vote changes by region. The Blue line shows the same for the Tory share of the vote. Note how generally the Tory vote was higher than Labour in all regions except the North-East.

The R-squared for each line isn't great (0.25 for Labour, 0.5 for Conservative) but enough to suggest that there's a certain correlation between these two factors. As Labour's share of the vote increases, so does the percentage of teenagers smoking. The opposite is true for the Tories, as their share of vote increases, the percentage of teenagers smoking falls.

Can we conclude that people who vote Labour are more likely to allow their children to smoke? Or is it the case that people who smoke (so, their children are as well) are more likely to vote Labour? Or, seeing as the Tory line is a better fit, is it that right-wing voters more likely to stop their kids from smoking?

Pointless, but fun.

Do men really earn more than women?

2010-01-27T10:00:00.009Z

Everyone's favorite minister has today announced another Government sponsored report looking at Inequality (details here).

Shockingly, the report finds that women earn less than men. Luckily the Government is now forced to provide as much data as possible to back up their claims, so I was able to delve into that data and see if I could replicate some of their graphs.

As I'm not a complete idiot, I understand the necessity of only comparing like to like. So for this piece of analysis I'm only going to look at Full Time workers. There might be a gender disbalance for the ratio of part to full time workers, so I'm not going to bother correcting for that and rather than ignoring it, I'm excluding part-timers. Also (mainly because I'm lazy), I'm going to investigate Median earnings, as this is usually considered the best measure (it excludes the extremely high and the extremely low earners automatically).

Right. Headline figures:
Median Weekly Earnings for Men: £494
Median Weekly Earnings for Women: £386

Gender Pay Gap: Men earn 28% more than Women.

That's pretty clear , lets have a look at how that varies by age:

As we can see, even at 16-19 Women are earning less than Men. The gap widens all the way up to the 50s then slightly falls. At every age group the Median woman is earning less money every week than the Median man.

Then I had a look at how Hourly Wages compare:

Here the picture is subtly different. Whilst there's still a big pay gap between the ages of 35 - 59, at younger and older ages it's almost entirely vanished. In fact, the Median 25-29 year old woman has a higher hourly wage than the median man! It appears the massive pay gap we saw earlier has mostly vanished.

Of course, the obvious reason for that is that the hours worked by Men and Women are different (although both are working full time). So I worked out the inferred hours worked per week by our median man and woman (Are they a couple?).

Wow! At every single age group, men are working for longer hours than women. This increases as both get older. The median man (across all age groups) is working 4.5 hours a week longer than the median woman. A 65-69 year old median man is working over 5 hours a week longer than his female counterpart.

This is actually quite fun news, because it gives us something we can control for. We can increase the weekly earnings for women by assuming that they're all suddenly going to become 'hardworking' and work the same hours as the median men are doing. This gives us the following graph:

Our "Hardworking" woman are now much more in alignment with the male earnings. There is still a big gap, starting from around 30. Coincidentally, this is almost the average age a woman has her first baby.

What are the headline figures now?
Median Weekly Earnings for Men: £494 (the same as before)
Median Weekly Earnings for Women: £431 (higher due to more hours worked)
Gender Pay Gap: Men earn 14.5% more than Women.

The Gender Pay Gap has halved. Just by correcting for a single metric (hours worked) I've singlehandedly done more to enhance women's pay than the last 12 years of New Labour.

This still leaves us with about a 14.5% difference though. Can we explain why this would be? I'm certain that in the vast majority of industries Gender makes no difference to pay. I earn the same as my female colleagues at the same level and it's very hard for a company to do otherwise. Clearly there is another factor at play.

I actually mentioned what I believe it is above. Babies. The average woman has about two children, starting on average at 29.

I've built a very crude model. It assumes a man and a woman both start work on the same day and earn the same. Both get 5% pay rises each year until they retire. The man takes no Leave of Absences, so works flat out from 20 to 60, then retires (hopefully to a nice civil service pension). The woman does exactly the same, with one exception. She doesn't get a pay-rise for three years as she's taking maternity leave (knocking a minimum of six months out of each year) and takes time to get back up to speed in her old job.

Over his lifetime the man earns £1.3m. The woman earns: £1.1m.

The difference is 14%, almost exactly that actually found in the survey above (If you assume two years of no pay rises, then the difference is 10%).

Clearly most, if not all, of the current Gender Pay divide is actually down to women choosing to delay their careers and take materinity leave! If the government was serious about reducing the divide, then they should mandate equal paternity leave (as they do in some Scandinavian countries).

The one thing these figures show is that once you correct for women choosing to have babies and choosing to work shorter hourse, men and women earn almost exactly the same. Why then do we need further measures to ensure 'equality'?

Artificial Recovery?

2010-01-26T17:18:00.002Z

Lots of people today have blogged that the 'growth' we're now seeing in the economy is in fact only caused by the £378Bn or so of additional spending that has been forced into the economy (QE and Deficit spending). No doubt they're right but I'm looking at the factor that is artificially keeping large parts of the economy afloat.

The graph above shows both RPI (a measure of inflation which includes things like mortgages and oil) and the Bank of England Base Interest Rate. As you can see, over the past few years they've tracked each other pretty closely.

Actually, Interest rates have tracked Inflation rates as the BoE Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) tries to keep Inflation within various bounds, but basically it's pretty clear that they're connected.

As you can see, inflation fell massively recently. As a result, so did interest rates.

However, inflation is now back up again (RPI was at 2.6% in December, the February figure is an estimate assuming that growth rate continues). When RPI was last around 2.6% (back in late 2005) the BoE Base Rate was around 4.5%. Now, it's 0.5%.

Of course, the MPC wants to keep interest rates low, as this ensures that the banks are able to build healthy profits.

Sorry, you thought it was to ensure that people weren't suddenly priced out of their homes? That might be true if the retail banks were passing on the unprecedentedly low interest rates to their consumers, but the typical mortgage is somewhat higher. Nationwide, one of the "nice" mortgage providers out there is quoting 5.74% fixed for only two years for a piddling £200,000 mortgage with an 83% LTV. That's over 11 times the current BoE base-rate.

By holding the 'cost' for banks to borrow money artificially low, the banks can make some seriously healthy product margins. As borrowing is generally cheap, consumer and corporate spending should increase and the economy should head back to growth.

It actually appears to have nearly worked as well. Technically the economy is back in growth by 0.4% (annualised). The problem is that inflation is running at 2.6%, meaning despite this, we're actually in the hole by over 2%.

Inflation is likely to continue to rise. Not least because in January we'll have the 2.1% increase due to VAT rising. Oil prices are hardly stable and with the US (and in fact every country aside from us) getting back on their feet, we'll no doubt see another rise.

Sooner or later the BoE is going to have to raise the Interest Rate. Will that cripple the economy? Probably. It'll certainly fuck the housing market over.

It looks good for Labour. They get to leave office with the country in 'growth' thanks to their artificial boosts and then watch the economy fall into another hole just as the Tories get in.

Has Labour been worth it?

2010-01-22T11:05:00.003Z

The figures are out for December's public Debt. Once again we have a record!

Labour borrowed a mere £15.7 Billion in December. Just to give you a sense of scale around that, it's still over £500,000,000 a day and just under £6,000 a second.

Sure, once again I'm spouting figures that don't mean anything to anyone. Well, the average British male lasts 7.6 minutes during sex. So, assuming you have "average" sex (though I'm sure it's very satisfying for you) this country gets a further £2.7 Million pounds in debt. That's enough to buy your partner 8 large and perfect diamonds (like this one). That might even be more impressive than 7.6 minutes in the sack with you.

But anyway, on a serious note, this means that Public Debt has now risen to an all time high (shockingly) to £870 Billion. I thought I'd have a quick look at how public debt has risen over the last 13 years. Afterall, it's possible that those Evil Tories saddled this poor, sweet, innocent Labour Government with so much debt that they're still struggling to get the whole situation under control. Well, the graph below show how debt has varied since 1997 and makes quite interesting reading.

As we can see, initially Debt actually fell. This trend continued right up until 2001, when the then Chancellor, a Mr Brown (anyone know what happened to him?) decided that instead of following the Tory spending plans from the previous government, he would slightly increase spending on important things, like Laptops for Labour Voters (OK, OK, that bribe might have come a little bit later).

As soon as he abandoned sensible economic policies, the Debt began to rise, slowly at first, then picking up pace in recent years (the Bank Bailout). In 2010 we're expecting to have £1,015,000,000,000 of debt. That's only £658,000,000,000 more than when Labour came into power.

A few weeks ago I looked at what we could buy with the additional £500,000,000,000 of debt that Labour was building up over the next few years. 3,125 Boeing Jumbo Jets, 5 Apollo Programmes from scratch. That sort of thing.

But already over the last few years they've been in power, they've squandered more than that! Whilst my party piece is sizing massive numbers like these in simple easy to understand metrics I'm running out of things that I can think of that are expensive enough to give any sense of scale to the size of Labour's Debt!

OK, just for old times sake: A few years back the Queen Mary 2 was launched, one of the largest and most luxurious cruise liners ever built. She's capable of carrying over 3,000 passengers at a time. With Labour's current, not future debt, we could buy over 1,400 of these magnificent vessels. That's not a typo, that's really one thousand, four hundred QM2s. Those ships could carry simultaneously nearly 43 million passengers. Assuming we can train enough crew for all those ships, we'd be able to have the whole 60 million UK population heading out on a simultaneous cruise!

I'm not saying that buying enough hyper-luxury cruise ships (minimum of £9k for a round-the-world trip) would be a good use of all that money. I merely ask if we've had value for money fr this sheer spending. Is the NHS so much better? Are our schools producing better trained students? Do we have world-beating public transport?

I don't believe we have any of those. I know we have over 8 million "economically inactive" people (another record figure for Labour). I know that compared to other countries our education system is getting worse. I know that Labour have wasted billions on pointless and failed IT projects.

Over the last 13 years Labour has borrowed a amount. Because of their mis-management we've got nothing to show for this other than a population addicted to benefits and an ever-mounting interest bill.

My take on the DaveyC Poster

2010-01-20T21:23:00.003Z

Come on Labour!

Constantly referring to "Airbrushing" (policies, photographs, yadda yadda yadda).

The Tories might be evil. They might want to enslave the poor. But at least they're not fucking stupid.

Joke of the Day: New Security Levels

2010-01-18T14:11:00.002Z

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved."Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to a "Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588 whenthreatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let's get theBastards" They don't have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide". The only two higher levels in France are "Collaborate" and "Surrender." The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France 's white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country's military capability. It's not only the French who are on a heightened level of alert.

Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout loudly and excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing." Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

The Germans also increased their alert state from "Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs." They also have two higher levels: "Invade a Neighbor" and "Lose".

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Americans meanwhile and as usual are carrying out pre-emptive strikes, on all of their allies, just in case.

And in the southern hemisphere...

New Zealand has also raised its security levels - from "baaa" to"BAAAA!".
Due to continuing defense cutbacks (the air force being a squadron of spotty teenagers flying paper aeroplanes and the navy some toy boats inthe Prime Minister's bath), New Zealand only has one more level of escalation, which is "I hope Australia will come and rescue us".

Australia , meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No worries" to "She'll be right, mate". Three more escalation levels remain:"Crikey!', "I think we'll need to cancel the barbie this weekend" and"The barbie is canceled". So far no situation has ever warranted use of the final escalation level.

Pointless School League Tables

2010-01-13T13:09:00.005Z

The school league tables have been released today and as usual make for some interesting reading. I note with interest that my school is performing considerably better than it was in my day, though I hope that's not entirely down to my departure.

Still, these are the official government statistics, so will probably be manipulated in such a way to cover up the real positions (or more likely, the real failings of the state sector).

Let's have a look at the methodology.

The rules are detailed here and here, but I'll summarise the interesting bits:

GCSEs:

Schools are ranked by the percentage of pupils gaining at least five A* to C grades, including the key subjects of English and mathematics, which is the Government’s preferred measure of achievement.
In the event of a tiebreak, schools are ranked by the average GCSE points score per student. For the purpose of the table, a student with an A* gains 58 points, A = 52, B = 46, C = 40, D = 34, E = 28, F = 22, G = 16.

A Levels:

Institutions are ranked by the average points score per student. A student gaining an A grade scores 270 points, B = 240, C = 210, D = 180, E = 150.

The first rule there is clearly bloody useless for differentiating either good or bad schools. Sure, you can assume that a school with >95% of pupils getting 5 "good" GCSE passes is quite good, this doesn't give you any of the detail you need when selecting a school for your children. It is completely useless at showing you which school managed to get their children to 5 Cs and which pushed the children harder, until they all got 10 A*s.

Worse still, having this as the Official Government Measure of school success (at this level) means that state schools are severely hampered in their attempts to actually push excellent children to perform as well as they can. If you're an over-worked teacher, with highly limited time to pay attention to the 35 children in your class, are you going to spend your time helping the bright kids move from a B to an A*, or the thick children from a D to a C. Only the latter actually 'counts' as being worth-while in this Government's eyes.

This might explain why for A Levels, schools are graded on average points per pupil. One thing that confuses me as well, is why these point systems seem so different to that which I remember from my youth. As I recall, the old system gave you 10 points for an A and 2 points for an E (at A Level). This looks a lot different.

With the current rules for GCSE, a child who is able to get 2 Es has more points than one who only gets a single A. A D and and E outweigh an A*. The rules are similar for A Level, where again two Es outweigh a single A. A Child who gets 4 Cs is "worth" more to the government than one with 3 As. Under the old system, a child would have to gain 6 C grades to be in excess of another with 3 As. I for one would prefer my child to have 3 As at A Level than 4 Cs. I think most people would agree with that. Most people would , apart from the government.

The effect of this rule is similar to the 5 A*- C ranking. Once again teachers and schools are being pushed by the government into making teaching decisions that are less good for their charges. I have no doubt whatsoever that most teachers and schools do the best they can with the limited time and resources but there will always be cases where they know that it's "best" to persuade an average child to go for more exams, and get lower grades rather than specialise in one less exam and leave school with shining qualifications.

I'm ignoring the usual level of government meddling, such as removing IGCSEs from the rankings. Personally, if the schools that are universally acknowledged as the best in the country stopped taking my "official" exams in preference of another, more rigorous qualification, I wouldn't dismiss them as "fatuous". I would be much more inclined to learn why they dismiss the National Curriculum and what steps they suggest should be taken.

The thing that amazes me is that despite every effort made to boost the "performance" of under-performing children and schools the state sector still can't match the private sector on performance. I count only getting three state schools in the top 50 at A Level (all Grammars by the way) as a pretty miserable failure for the sector. I have no doubt that with rankings that were actually fair, the situation would appear even more dire.

Maybe if the tables were fair, and as a result the government rewarded excellent teaching rather than merely getting the most beneficial set of results the quality of the results from the state sector would improve. Maybe if teachers were able to teach in such a manner that ensured the best results for their pupils, rather than being pulled down to an "acceptable" performance across the board, then the rankings would rise.

As these tables stand the government is demonstrating once again why it has failed the country and excels only in promoting mediocrity.

Met Office Incompetence

2010-01-11T22:27:00.001Z

I actually started this post a few days ago, after shivering continuously on my walk into work. I was reminded of the Met Office's prediction of a mild winter and the fact that at the start of this cold period the weather forecast seemed to be far too warm compared to what I was actually feeling.

I've actually started using American weather forecasts for my daily life, as they appear to match my observations much more closely than the Official BBC / Met Office forecasts. I've actually been wondering why this is the case.

I swung by the Met Office website a few days back (Damn, I really should have taken a screen-shot!) and the News section was full of stories of "Climate Change". Not the snow. Not the inclement weather. But instead they were focusing on how much warmer it is.

I also had a look at their predictions for 2007, 2008,2009 ,2010. Each predicting, if not the hottest year of all time, then unusually hot weather. Think back over the past few years and tell me if you thought the weather was unusually warm. I doubt you'll find many people agreeing with these predictions.

I had a look at how they get to those predictions. One of the details is "Each January the Met Office, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, issues a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year." Well, call me a Cow Sucker and Spin me on a Stick, but aren't the temperature predictions from the CRU pretty much rubbished now? Using models that force warming trends from flat data might explain why you always end up predicting that it is just going to get warmer and warmer.

This actually got me to thinking (rare, I know). Is it possible that the Met Office doesn't just have warming on the brain, but actually in their short-term computer models (For short-term I mean 3-6 months, as opposed to 50-200 years for climate models)? Are they so obsessed with the "Warming Earth" that they are predicting milder Winters and hotter Summers despite all evidence to the contrary.

Of course, these predictions would be useless if you couldn't prove that they were right afterall.

Surprisingly, an alleged Met Office worker has explained how they calculate seasonal temperatures (quoted here and from here, though it's a little tricky to find in those comments)

I'll quote it, just to save you from opening a new tab:
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings. And not to reveal too much , the data does show that the average over those 15 readings will make it a very warm reading. You cannot accept that a weeks snow will affect the outcome.”

I'm astounded! I'm flabbergasted! There are so many holes in this "method" that I hardly know where to start. A quick run through and no doubt readers will be able to provide a few more:

November? Winter runs from the 21st December! Picking dates in November will probably mean you over-estimate by some measure
15 readings to represent some 90 days? Discarding over 80% of your dataset is hardly good science.
Highest readings?!? So we're now not only discarding almost all the data, but we're discarding the data that doesn't agree with our orthodoxy. This is sheer madness.
Being able to just use one month of data? Ignoring the points about small sample sizes and November not actually being IN winter, but you can't take your entire sample from one month. I wouldn't be surprised if under this method every Winter was represented by samples from November or March (Afterall, one or other is likely to be warm).
Weeks snow?! Even the bloody Guardian suggests that it's the coldest winter for 30 years.

Like I said, I'm sure there are more flaws with this method. But it demonstrates what more and more people are starting to suspect.

The Met Office is so addicted to the "Climate Change" orthodoxy that it is unable to produce usable predictions of future weather. I've got no problem with them producing whatever models they want to, as long as they can still do their bloody job, telling me what the weather is going to be!

Why are the Tories protecting the NHS?

2010-01-04T13:32:00.005Z

OK, let me lay my stall out here. I like the NHS. I think it was a fabulous concept and generally is staffed by exception people doing their best to provide a fantastic service.

However, I'm not blind to its faults or the faults that have been forced onto it in recent times. Dave has today announced (again) that the Tories will protect all NHS spending.

Maybe the Tories just don't have a bloody clue about how much the NHS budget has increased recently. Have a look at the graph below, showing how the budget has increased (I nicked it from Civitas and added a figure for 2009 from the NHS site and a figure for 2010 from government projections).

During the decade from 1998/99 to 2008/09 the NHS budget grew to over two and half time its initial value. In real terms that's more than a doubling! Can anyone seriously say that we've got value for money for this massive increase? Have waiting times genuinely fallen by half? Are people living twice as long?

The problem here is that Labour have just dumped a vast chunk of cash into the NHS and expected results. They've introduced a myriad of managers to monitor what's happening with the new money and define meaningless metrics to demonstrate "Value for Money". Well, what happens if you give someone a pile of money and tell them to spend it, or they won't get it again next year, is that they will spend it on whatever they can. Not necessarily what's needed, or what's the best value but whatever they can spunk the cash away on.

I find it impossible to believe that the NHS is as efficient this year as they were with half the budget ten years ago. Protecting the budget is pointless, the Tories should be protecting the important services.

Is it be possible to cut the NHS budget by 25% and maintain 95% of the services? Can that £25Bn be better spent elsewhere?

The Tories should be talking to all their smart Management Consultancy friends about where cuts need to be made. The can then present a fully costed view of their proposals (We cut 10% here, 25% here, saving £XBn, of which £YBn is fed into ABC, etc etc etc). This sort of proper planning is seriously overdue in Government Spending and would actually bring a sensible picture of what effects cuts (or investment) will have. In my blog I've shown pretty much every figure that the Government has quoted in terms of what else it will buy. If we know that a 25% cut in the NHS leads to the loss of two hospitals in oversubscribed areas, but enables us to open 120 schools in deprived areas then we'll actually be able to have a debate over which is better for the country.

Of course, at the moment, the Tories are too busy playing politics to actually lead the country. Pity.

£34Bn is less than £174Bn

2010-01-04T12:54:00.003Z

Was in the canteen for lunch earlier when a colleague remarked

"The Tories have a £34Bn blackhole? Well, that's got to be better than the £170Bn hole that Labour have got us into"

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. I've been on holiday and am finding it somewhat tricky to be angry. I'll try and find something I'm properly angry about to blog about soon!

Gordon: Another pointless political defence decision

2009-12-15T13:53:00.004Z

What the hell?

We're going to buy 22 more Chinooks? I know Gordon wants to demonstrate how he "gets" Defence all of a sudden (Hey, is there an election coming up?) but why the hell are we buying these?

Lets assume that we need them. If that's the case, we need them now. We need to get more helicopters out to Afghanistan as soon as possible. Instead we're buying these and getting them delivered in 2013. We're planning to start withdrawal next year. By 2013 we'll have much fewer troops in theatre and will probably have enough SH (Support Helicopter) assets in theatre to keep them all happy. Well, reasonably happy anyway. But these will not arrive in time to make the Military situation any better, all they will do is make Gordon look politically better.

But do we actually need them? I don't think so. I believe that Gordon is making a political decision that just demonstrates his complete lack of understanding of how the military works. He has been told that we don't have enough Helicopters in Afghanistan, so has decided to buy some more. Whilst this seems logical at first blush, it isn't. We don't have enough helicopters in Afghanistan because we don't have enough helicopters, it's because we don't have enough crews.

I'm told that you need roughly 5 crews to operate any given Chinook properly. That's 10 trained and qualified pilots for each airframe. We have 262 trained Chinook pilots. That means we can fly about 26 helicopters. We currently have about 46 Chinooks, of which 8 are being converted from the failed Mark 3 standard. We don't have anywhere near enough pilots to even run our current number of Chinooks. These airframes will sit in a hanger for most of their lives, unless we spend a hell of a lot of money quickly training up more pilots. Just to run these additional helicopters, we'll need about another 220 pilots, nearly the same number as we've already got trained. Where will the money come from to double the number of Chinook pilots? Where will the money come from to double the number of engineers and mechanics?

So, they won't arrive early enough and we can't use them when we get them but are we at least going to get a decent deal. Recently I looked at the Canadian purchase of 15 Chinooks for $1.5Bn, with ~$2Bn of support costs for 25+ years.

We're looking to buy 22 Airframes for £1Bn, though the deal hasn't been done and I seriously doubt it will for that amount. The Canadians are paying £61m per airframe, or £143m with support costs. If we can get ours for the same price, we'll be looking to get 16 helicopters, or if we buy all 22, we'll be paying £1.35Bn, a mere 35% over what we're estimating now.

With support costs that rises to £3.15Bn, 315% more than we're estimating. And that's not including Pilots, Mechanics, Engineers, Loadies and the rest of the people we'll need to run them. They'll drive the price up even further.

So, to summarise, Gordon is buying something we won't get soon enough if we were able to use them, which we're not. And he's not even being honest about how much it's going to cost us.

Defence cuts? Not needed!

2009-12-14T11:43:00.002Z

I'm hearing increasing amounts of news about defence cuts recently, with some suggesting 16% cuts ahead. This will let the Government protect "Front-Line" services, such as the NHS and Education. I might be a little bit old-fashioned (in fact I almost certainly am!) but I'm pretty sure it doesn't get much more "Front-Line" than one of our troops in the mud with a gun.

So, it looks like Defence will be getting hit by ~£6Bn of cuts (more than an aircraft carrier). That's quite a lot of money. If only we had some other areas of spend that we cut first. Lets assume we have to continue to protect schools and hospitals. I'm just going to look at the spend commitments that most people will agree we don't need to be spending cash on.

Gordon has pledged £1.5Bn recently to combat climate change. Actually, what he means is that he wants to give this money to poor countries to help them deal with our post-~~colonial~~ carbon guilt. OK, that's over 3 years, but we're still looking at £500m each year, or as much as the Banker Tax will raise this year.

We could look at the Department for International Development, who in 2010 has a budget of £7.8Bn, up from £5.3Bn in 2008. From 2013 the government has pledged to increase the budget to 0.7% of Gross National Income, doubling from 2008 (so we're looking at the wrong side of £10Bn / year).

We could actually keep the budget where it was in 2008 (0.36% GNI) and use the £5Bn to help fill the hole in our defence budget.

Gordon has just returned from a trip to Afghanistan and there have been numerous stories recently about how he's finally "getting" Defence. Yet his plan is to cut Defence's budget by much the same amount he's raising our budget for international aid (Yes, the same aid that has sent roughly ~£1Bn to India, a country rich enough to launch their own rockets to the Moon).

Supporting poorer countries is important. But we can only afford to spank Billions around when the country is doing well. Surely the average person in the street would prefer Labour to focus on reducing the Debt (not just the deficit) and cutting the taxes that punish them for working than spending their money on other, increasingly rich countries?

Most of the £6Bn spent on Defence remains in this country, it flows from the government to the contractors then their workers, who spend it, boosting local and national economies and pay tax back to the government again. Can we say the same about International Aid?

How can Gordon justify boosting that budget whilst cutting Defence?

More Ratings Rantings

2009-12-11T10:56:00.003Z

Yesterday, Citi said that the UK should pretty much expect to have it's debt rating lowered from its current presitigious AAA rating. If that happens then the risk element of the interest we'll have to pay on our debt will go up to cover the risk of us defaulting. If we slide to a AA rating, it'll go up about 50%, if we go further to an A rating, it'll pretty much double.

Our current Debt was about £600Bn in 2008. Labour are planning on increase the debt by £500Bn over this year and the next two. Almost doubling the debt burden and taking us to well over One Trillion Pounds of debt. That's a number so big, I'm not even sure what I could use as a nice easy point of comparison.

For the year 2008 we paid about £31Bn in debt repayments (just interest on the debt). We're basically suggesting that will double (due to more debt) taking us to about £60Bn each year. If our rating goes, this will get even more expensive to service.

Ignoring the problem of our falling ratings, we should look at the clearest problem Labour is inflicting on us. Essentially, thanks to their massive, unprecedented increase in debt, they have taken £30Bn out of the economy every year in the future. That would have been enough to pay for vitually the entire Defence Budget!

But when the ratings start to fall, then £60Bn of interest repayments will look like a glorious deal, instead we'll be paying a lot more. The next government will be forced to slash public spending, just to meet our repayments. Citi are saying that a Hung Parliament will lead almost inevitably to a down-rating. That parliament then won't be able to make the decisions needed to meet the new debt repayments, further down-rating, more problems.

Essentially, voters will have a choice at the next election. Vote Tory, or the country gets it!

PBR: Labour borrowing enough for 3,125 Jumbo Jets

2009-12-09T15:18:00.003Z

Well, Darling has delivered the PBR and to quote a great thinker of our times: "We're Boned".

Let's have a look at his headline, one-off tax on bankers' bonuses. This is estimated to raise £500m. That is estimated by Darling of course, the man who suggested in April that the economy would shrink 3.5%. Today he's decided that in fact he was wrong and the economy has shrunk by 4.75%, over a third more. In 2008 he said that borrowing in 2009 would rise to a massive £43Bn, so looks like he missed that estimate as well (In case you've been dead for the last year, we're now borrowing £178Bn this year, over four times as much as estimated).

Anyway, let's assume that he's right this time. £500m is some pretty serious money. Even Lewis Page would have to admit that it buys at least one Typhoon.

However, to be honest, it's small change. This year we're borrowing £178Bn, next year £176Bn and then £140Bn the year after. I wish I was joking. That's basically £500Bn in borrowings over three years.

Darling would have to run this new tax for 1,000 years to match 3 years of borrowing.

The Tax is ultimately pointless, as "discovering" "efficiency" savings of £3Bn. I'm increasingly starting to believe that Labour are engaging in a Scorched Earth strategy, deliberately destroying the economy just to spite the Tories.

Anyway, just for entertainment, let's take out £500Bn and see what we could be doing with the money, rather than our current attempts at propping up banks and throwing ever larger amounts of benefits.

The Apollo programme, which put 10 men on the Moon and was about the most gloriously expensive thing Mankind has attempted cost about $25Bn in 1969. That was a long time ago. The spectre of inflation has kicked in. We're now looking at that being worth $150Bn in 2009 money. That's less than £100Bn. We could buy five Apollo programmes for three years deficit!

The country could buy every share traded of the following companies:
British American Tobacco, Rio Tinto Group, BHP Billiton, BG Group, Tesco, Xstrata, Anglo American, Diageo, SABMiller, Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, Imperial Tobacco Group, National Grid, Centrica, BAE Systems, Cadbury Plc, Scottish and Southern Energy, ENRC, BT Group, British Sky Broadcasting, Tullow Oil, Rolls-Royce Plc, Morrisons, Antofagasta, Compass Group, Associated British Foods, WPP Group, Pearson. I've avoided anything Financial, as we own enough of those anyway. At 3rd October prices, we could have all of those and still have about £10Bn left over. We could buy these 30 massive companies and also buy a crate of Champagne for every tax payer to celebrate!

We could buy 3,125 747 Jumbo Jets. Assuming they're fitted out in an all-economy configuration that's pushing 3,000,000 seats. We could buy enough planes to enable the whole country to emigrate in 20 trips!

If we could convert that to pennies, we'd have 178,000,000 Tonnes of the little bastards! Let's see the banks try bagging those up! If we melted them down, we've have a steel and copper cube over 5,000m along each axis.

We are not in "A position of strength". Labour are borrowing suicidal amounts of money. At least with the options presented above we'd have something to show for our investment, be that 50 people on the Moon (each group of 10 would start a new project up, using no data and knowledge from the previous one), the world's largest fleet of aircraft or a fun new modern art installation. After three years, Labour will have nothing to show for their staggering economic incompetence.

Climate News - What's actually important?

2009-12-07T10:54:00.003Z

On the news front, the argument is hotting up on every side. Ignoring ClimateGate, there have been many stories detailing how temperature records have been "modified". However, there is one story that should be shouted from the roof-tops:

The Climate Change bandwagon is based on the logic that what we're experiencing now is unprecedented and therefore caused by human emissions. Historical records, unfortunately, disagree. There are many records of what's called the Medieval Warm Period. This was commonly accepted wisdom until the Hockey Stick graph appeared, showing that temperatures have been flat for two thousand years. The Medieval Warm Period was quickly accepted as being a figment of people's imaginations, along with the Mini Ice Age (remember those paintings of Snow Fayres on the Thames?).

The Hockey Stick graphs were based on a few proxies, that weren't actually linked to temperature. This is why the "Nature Trick" was important. It didn't hide the decline in temperatures, it hid that the proxies used to show temperature were flawed. They were unable to show recent warming and were therefore also unable to show historic temperatures.

Actually, a recent paper (by the Nature Trick man himself) has rediscovered what Historians knew all along. There was a Medieval Warm Period, although they're not calling it that. The Romans had Vineyards pretty far north in England, Greenland was actually bloody Green. There's some debate over how warm it was. Some sources suggest that it was about 0.5c (roughly the rise we've had since the 1940s) warmer than 1997 (itself one of the hottest years ever due to an excessive El Nino effect).

Interestingly, there wasn't a great deal of CO2 emissions back in those days, so clearly something else was causing both the warming and then the cooling over the previous years. Also, the whole world wasn't under metres of water, so catastrophic sea level rises seem unlikely as well.

Maybe climate just changes? Looking at a graph of temperature for the last 400,000 years we can see that the warm bits (where we like it) are actually pretty short, usually interspersed with much longer periods of serious cold. We can see several occasions when the temperature was higher than today and the majority of the time where it was a lot lower. However, the times when it was as warm, or warmer are pretty short, before the world slips back into a natty ice coat for another 80,000 years.

Just looking at that graph, I'd suggest that we really shouldn't be worrying too much about the world being 1.1 degrees hotter in 2100, but focusing more on the ice. It's worth remembering that we're not talking about a bit of frost. During the last ice age, there was an ice sheet 3-4km (yes, 3,000m thick) on the UK. We're still recovering from it as the rock in Scotland slowly elastically expands from the sheer compression this much Ice caused.

I don't know about you, but I think I can cope with 1 degree hotter temperatures much better than I could with watching civilisation scrapped off large chunks of the Northern hemisphere.

"The most important conference the world has ever seen" - Bollocks!

2009-12-07T10:23:00.003Z

"The most important conference the world has ever seen" is opening today.

100 World Leaders are attending, from 192 countries. No, I've got no idea what happened to the 92 who aren't coming along. Maybe they figure that warmer temperatures will help their countries.

Still, these 100 leaders are so charismatic and competent that they require 15,000 delegates and officials to help them. That's a mere 150 per leader. And that's before we get to the 5,000 journos who will be "reporting the news".

So, roughly 20,000 people will be going, no doubt the vast majority will be flying in. Apparently the number of private jets and limos in Copenhagen are sky-rocketing as well, as leader after leader competes to show how hairy their shirt is.

The true reason for this conference is now starting to come out. There's a tiny note in that BBC article saying:

"At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world"

This conference has surprisingly little to do with Climate Change and a lot to do with moving money from "rich" countries to "poor" countries. The African Union are demanding billions of dollars and were threatening this morning to leave the conference if they don't get enough money. Indonesia is asking for "funds for forest conservation". Ecuador is looking to "get rich countries to pay $3.5 billion to keep 850 million barrels of its crude in the ground".

We are finally starting to see the effects of the fall of Communism, starting with the Berlin Wall falling just over 20 years ago. Simply, the Reds have become Greens. This international "money sharing" is exactly what they've been pushing for the last 50+ years. Now they've finally found a suitable tool to beat the Western democracies with.

Dauntless joins Daring!

2009-12-04T11:17:00.002Z

Another T45 has been delivered! We now have two excellent new destroyers, the first ships to join the RN for some time. Quentin Davies was quoted as saying:

"The six Type 45s will be the largest and most powerful destroyers ever operated by the Royal Navy. With the second of class now in the hands of the MOD, we are forging ahead to deliver an unparalleled air defence capability to the Royal Navy."

Well, largest is pretty much meaningless, Steel is cheap and Air is free. We could probably buy an old supertanker, stick a cannon on it and call it a Destroyer to get a "larger" vessel.
On that point, can anyone really see this ship performing Torpedo attacks on Enemy Ships of the Line? That's what a destroyer was originally supposed to do. Accurately, it's probably a cruiser, T45s are only 4m shorter than the Dido Class Anti-Air Cruisers and have a larger displacement. Actually, lets use the Dido Class as a point of comparison, they're built to do the same job and are about the same size.

The main armament on the Dido class was 10 5.25 inch, with 2 40mm Bofors and a couple of Vickers machine guns.

The main armament on the T45 is Sea Viper, with up to 48 missiles, 1 4.5 inch gun and 2 30mm Oerlikons.

The quote above talks about the T45 being the "most powerful". Well, at the moment, it doesn't appear that Sea Viper works.

So, what we have for our £1Bn is a ship that carries ten times less heavy weapons than a ship built before WWII. Sure, the Sea Viper System will work eventually, and I'm sure the C&C Capabilities of the T45 are excellent. In fact, they were even mentioned in the report:

"With the ability to integrate both land and air forces, HMS Dauntless truly is a joint asset and will carry out a wide range of operations, whilst remaining a highly effective air defence ship. Dauntless is a magnificent feat of engineering."

Wasn't the job of the T45 to guard the carriers we're now building? Won't they pretty much be in charge of integrating air operations? If Sea Viper is the answer to all our prayers, wouldn't it just have been cheaper and easier to put it on the carriers themselves? Afterall, they're going to have plenty of room, seeing as there won't be any planes on them.

I've no doubt that these ships will be excellent once they're up and running properly. I'm sure they'll do the job they're designed to do perfectly. I'm equally sure that they'll do the jobs they weren't designed to do pretty damn well, that's just what our Forces do.

However, I'm pissed off that we've gone from buying 12, to 8, to 6. I'm pissed off that the money isn't there to fit them out properly (Fitted for but not with Tomahawk, CIWS and god knows what else). I'm pissed off that we won't be able to export them to anyone, even we've not got the money to buy them. I'm pissed off that we didn't build something a quarter of the price, but with most of the capability and build more of them. I'm pissed off that we're spunking money on capabilities for them that probably won't be used.

The engineering and the equipment is no doubt top rate, the men and women on board will be equally so. But can't we sort out our procurement to get a bit more bang for our buck than one measly little popgun for £1Bn!

Joke of the Day Dec 2nd

2009-12-02T22:27:00.000Z

A platoon was marching in Helmand Province when they came upon a Taliban Insurgent, badly injured and unconscious.

On the opposite side of the road was a British soldier in a similar but less serious state.

The soldier was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men, the platoon commander asked the injured soldier what had happened.

The soldier reported, “I was moving north along the highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent. We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road.

I yelled to him that Mullah Mohammed Omar was a miserable, lowlife scum bag who will get what he deserves, and he yelled back that Gordon Brown is a fat fuck wit and a good-for-nothing, left wing half-blind Jock, and Lord Mandelson is a cross-dressing power mad idiot.

So I said that Osama Bin Laden dresses and acts like a frigid, mean-spirited lesbian.

He retaliated by yelling, “Oh yeah? Well, so does Harriet Harman!”

“And, there we were, in the middle of the road, shaking hands, when a bus hit us.”

Going to the Dogs

2009-12-01T17:10:00.003Z

I've been quite amused how long it has taken to ascertain the breed to dog in this story. There is so much sheer nastiness behind this story.

Why the hell would anyone breed dangerous illegal breeds? (ignoring the obvious for dog-fighting answer)
Why didn't the Police act when someone pointed out the whole "breeding illegal dogs" thing was going on? (too much like real crime?)
What sort of parents send their kids off to a breeding home for illegal dogs? (I can't seriously believe they didn't know what was going on, who cares if it's your Mother's home, it's still fucking dangerous!)
And finally: How the hell can it take days to work out if the Dog is illegal? It killed a small child, that's pretty much illegal behaviour in my book.

Why the hell has the government spent time and effort cataloguing the different types of dogs and deciding that Dog X is illegal and Dog Y is lovely. Wouldn't it just be far easier to identify illegal dogs by seeing if they do something illegal, like trying to eat a child?

What would they have done in this case if the dog had turned out to have enough Border-Collie genes to be legal? Just dismissed it as a tragic accident?

The breed of the dog should be irrelevant, it's the behaviour of the dog that should dictate whether there is a crime or not.

Is Brown starting to lose his grip on reality?

2009-11-30T16:38:00.003Z

I was quite amused to read this story with the stirring headline:

Find Osama Bin Laden, Gordon Brown urges Pakistan

Is the first reference GB has ever made to Bin Laden? I've not been able to find any but I certainly can't remember him talking about the chap in such direct terms before. Let's ignore for now the silly macho language of "taking out" (I assume he's suggesting assassination, rather than going on a date, but you never know) and see what he's talking about.

It appears that after several months of talking up the threat from "The Afghan/Pakistan Border Areas" Brown has noticed that we only have troops in the Afghanistan part of it. Well, about time the chaps on the other side pulled their weight! He presumably failed to notice the huge Pakistani offensive in the border regions some time ago.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Britain wanted Pakistan to "join us in upping our game" in tackling terrorism on its border with Afghanistan.

This is quite fun. We've just "upped our game" by sending an additional 500 troops out (at some point in the near future). Surely our partners in the T(he) W(ar) A(against) T(errorism) can step up and match our noble efforts? Well, for that recent offensive linked above the Pakistanis were able to mobilise 30,000 troops to fight the militants in the border areas.

How arrogant are this government that they believe that they are in a position to tell another country to "up their game" when the latter have thrown so much more effort at the problem?

Of course, this is not looking at the more general question of why do we want to be targeting the two leaders of Al-Qaeda in the first place? Luckily Gordon has some excellent points on that matter:

We want, after eight years, to see more progress in taking out these two people at the top of al-Qaeda, who have done so much damage and are clearly the brains behind many of the operations that have hit Britain"

Well, for over two of those eight years, Gordon Brown was our PM and if this was such a big deal, maybe he should have mentioned it somewhat sooner. Otherwise, he just sounds like someone flailing around for something to distract us all from the terrible situation we're in.

Still, lets ignore that and examine the quote more closely. I'll even assume that he knows something I don't about the volume of damage caused by these two men and just look at the last bit.

"Clearly the brains behind many of the operations that have hit Britain"

How many operations have "hit" Britain? Even including essential failures in the list, I can only think of three attacks that have actually "hit" Britain. The other 'attacks' I can think of don't actually seem to include any attacking.

Tube/Bus Bombings Mk I
Tube/Bus Bombings Mk II
Car Squibs and Airport Ram Raiders

The last two didn't even do any real damage! The closest either 2 or 3 got to doing damage was setting themselves on fire and falling onto Smeaton's fist a few times.

Where are these "many" operations that "hit" Britain? Is Brown living in a fantasy bunker, with plaster falling from the ceiling as Terrorist bombs explode around him? The bloody IRA was a damn sight more effective than this!

The 7/7 bombing was horrific. It has been tentatively linked with Al-Qaeda. Khan apparently spent some time in Pakistan and an informant (who luckily claims to have been telling the truth) saw him at a training camp which itself was linked to Al-Qaeda.

Even assuming that attack was perfectly linked to Al-Qaeda, are we really supposed to believe that Bin Laden was sat in a cave in Pakistan discussing which Tube stations would make the best targets?

The point is that a well designed Terrorist network like Al-Qaeda is supposed to be will show almost no effect if you "take out" the person running it. Does anyone believe that any of the senior Al-Qaeda command structure has actually had a hand in anything outside of Pakistan recently?

Gordon is supposed to be an educated, intelligent man. He should certainly have educated, intelligent advisers. Why the sudden demand to kill an essentially valueless target? All he will achieve is pissing off one of the few countries who have actually been showing a position of strength to the militants.

Perhaps Gordon is slipping further into the traditional Fuhrer Bunker fantasy and has now started ordering around imaginary armies!

Congratulations to the Merlin force

2009-11-30T11:53:00.004Z

Just a quick post to say congratulations to the Merlin Force in Afghanistan who are now operating and no doubt providing valuable support.

Whilst it'll still take some time to get the remaining 6 Merlins (assuming they've fixed the crashed one), it's good they're pushing ahead to get the ones in theatre up and running as soon as possible.

This does make me think that maybe they've worked so hard because more helicopters are so desperately needed, a fact understood by everyone except the government.

Why understanding climate science matters

2009-11-27T10:17:00.006Z

It's been a pretty fun week for climate followers. We're in the run up to Copenhagen, where our elected and unelected leaders will decide what changes we should make to our economy (including sending climate reparations to poor countries).

We've also had had a "hack" into the CRU computers (although there is a small amount of circumstantial evidence to suggest it was a leak) exposing a range of emails along with a few small chunks of code.

At the same time, we've had recent stories talking about the disaster that will befoul us all if we don't make some serious adjustments to our lifestyle (Yes, that last link does advocate killing 30% of our livestock).

And we've had stories showing how some of the datasets used to back up the "unprecedented" warming has been "Artificially Adjusted" from a flat line.

Recently we've found out that Copenhagen probably won't get a result, so smaller groups of countries are getting together to make their own deals (such as the Commonwealth plus a few other countries over this weekend).

OK, as far as I see it, there are several camps. On one side we've got a bunch of people saying that the science is settled and if we don't make major changes to our way of life now, we'll be in trouble later. On the other we have some people disputing the maths behind the science and suggesting that it may be an idea until we can get a much better idea of what's actually happening before we commit ourselves to what is likely to be an extremely costly plan. And there's the many people in the middle who don't really care, but appear to lean towards scepticism.

Assuming the science is settled, as we've been told (not least by the BBC who decided that because of this, there's no reason to give both parties equal billing) then pretty much anyone should be able to reproduce a serious chunk of the work themselves. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be able to produce a seriously complex model describing the entire climate ecosystem, but we should certainly be able to look at a graph of CO2 and temperature and see clearly and visibly how they are linked.

At the moment pretty much every climate graph you see is either extremely long term (i.e. using the now discredited sediment and tree-core data) or from 1971. The latter is to hide the cooling period from 1940-1970 where CO2 increased and global temperatures dropped. We should be allowed to see all the information and make our own minds up.

The reason why the CRU data is vitally important is because they are the guys and girls who produce the Global Temperatures, both for recent years and historically. They produce the most critical part of the whole climate modelling. If this isn't right, nothing else will be.

I don't actually think the emails that have emerged are that important, despite the focus placed on them by the mainstream media. Sure, there's some bad wording but quite frankly, I wouldn't like my 'private' work emails to be publicly released. I'm sure I have used language that wouldn't show myself, or my work in the best possible light. The appearance of avoiding the FOI requests looks bad, but quite frankly has little impact on whether they're doing the right thing, despite making it hard to reproduce their work.

I actually found the code they've used to produce their global temperatures and the comments inside it much more interesting. There's actually a great file called HARRY_READ_ME.txt which appears to be describing the work done by some poor researcher as he tries to reproduce previous results and understand where they came from. It's fairly clear that someone with access to all the people, code and datasets used to produce the 'official' global temperatures (which I believe are available for pretty much anyone to have a look at) is pretty much unable to understand where these came from, when you look at the original 'raw' data from temperature monitoring stations. It appears that similar 'tricks' to that used in the New Zealand example linked above are being used on a global basis.

Basically, the database of global temperatures appears to have been built by discarding data that disagrees with the theory and enhancing the status of the data that does agree.

Why does this matter? If we can't even be sure that the historic temperatures we're using to drive our climate models are right, then we certainly can't be sure that the results of those models (Latest I've seen is 6 degrees of warming at the end of the century) are actually right. Hell, surely if the science was settled, we'd only have one model which matched historic results perfectly and was able to make predictions about coming years, which then come true.

The models we're using to make political and economic decisions at Copenhagen can't do this. Even CRU researchers admit that they are unable to explain the current 'decline in temperatures' with their modelling. This doesn't mean that their conclusions of massive global warming are wrong, it just doesn't mean that we've "proved" anything yet.

To my mind, we need to be pretty bloody sure before we gamble our future.

Disclosure: I am not a climate scientist. I am all for energy efficiency and where economically viable we should be using renewable energy. For a start, have you seen the torque of electrically driven vehicles? Energy efficiency is common sense, crippling our economy is not. For those suggesting that environmental policies could be economically advantageous, have a look here.

Is this how Labour tell the truth?

2009-11-26T16:03:00.004Z

I'm looking at Ed Balls today. A few months ago he wanted to be chancellor. Surely a man who wants to be chancellor must have some grasp of figures.

I'm even going to ignore the various exam fiascoes that have gone on under his watch and have a look at what he's been doing recently (aside from ignoring emails from his Tory counterpart). I'm actually only going to focus on what he's said about the budget for schools. Should be an area he can be pretty clear about.

He has just stated today that he wants schools to save £750m through cutting back on heating. I assume that is because he needs to reduce his budget just like every other government department. Afterall, every second in October the country became another £4k in debt.

Well, less than two weeks ago, shortly before the Queen's Speech, he was reported demanding an increase in his budget of £2.6Bn. Perhaps he's been persuaded since then of the need for cuts, explaining his most recent pronouncement.

However, in September he said that he was going to cut the school's budget by £2Bn. Mostly through cutting the numbers of headteachers and other senior staff. You know, the people who hold schools together and pretty much the only people in the entire business who are actually responsible for their school's performance.

Then again, in June, he was spouting off about he was going to increase the school budget. Now I'm getting really confused.

In the space of six months this man has said he will increase, then cut, then increase, then cut the school budget. There's probably even more I've not been able to find with a quick search online.

There's a reason why both government and opposition need to be honest about their plans. It means we can weigh up which is the lesser evil and decide who to vote for.

Is this the level of honesty that Labour think the British people deserve?

F35 Operational Sovereignty Buggered

2009-11-25T11:53:00.003Z

Today, a charming story comes across demonstrating the dangers of dealing with the Americans on Military procurement.

"US to withhold F-35 fighter software codes"

I was quite impressed a few years ago how the government made it pretty damn clear that the source codes to the software were required in order for us to continue with the F35 project. The Americans understood how important it was (afterall, we are a much higher tier partner than "Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Norway" mentioned in the linked article). Well, a deal was done at the time and everything was happy.

However, less than three years later (which is of course nothing in terms of Defence programmes) the Americans have announced that they're going to screw us. It's clearly not enough for them to force us to buy American missiles to fire off the aircraft and charge us incredible amounts to have our missiles cleared for carriage on it (There was a fun rumour that the weapons bay is exactly a few mm less than needed to carry Meteor, just to make us buy more AMRAAM).

A few years back we bought eight Chinooks at great expense. We hadn't agreed as part of the contract that Boeing should give us access to the source codes (Does this sound familiar to anyone?). As a result they've been sitting in a hanger unable to fly since 2002. Afterall, it's not like we've got any need of helicopters at the moment...

This story shows how we then paid another £150m to down-grade the helicopters to the same spec as the rest in service with the RAF. At least they'll be doing something useful soon.

There is frequently a drive to buy into American procurement programmes in order to buy our kit. There's a lot of logic behind that with bulk discounts and similar economies of scale. However, it's clear that time and time again, stretching from the Quebec Agreement that where possible the Americans will do their best to fuck us over.

Well, what should we do about this? Simple. Cancel our F35 buy. Don't put it on hold, or "consider our options". Cancel it completely.

We are a Tier One partner in this project. We've helped design huge chunks of it. We've reinvented our concept of RVL to ensure that the B variant will actually bloody work. Fuck them, we won't need this aircraft for a hell of a long time, certainly long enough to procure something else if needed. Or in time, we return to the table with a far stronger negotiating position than our current one, which appears to be modeled on the girls in the kind of porn Harman wouldn't like.

It's about time this country sent a strong message about it's willingness to stand up to bullies, whether they're Somalian Pirates, or the world's largest Superpower.

Banks or Body Armour

2009-11-24T10:31:00.003Z

Another day, another story about the government pumping more money into our Banking System.

Basically, Lloyds TSB are having a rights issue to raise money from existing shareholders. As the government owns a decent chunk of the shares another £5.7Bn of our money is heading into the black hole.

Well, I've thought of a new way of sizing this pile of cash. The new Osprey Assault Body Armour (and Mk 7 helmet) cost about £1,600 for each set (£16m contract for 10,000 sets).

So, with this particular bailout we could buy nearly 36 million sets of body armour, hilariously enough for every solider in Afghanistan to have one for every day of the year, with some left over for high days and holidays!

The military don't need as much cash as the banks are getting, but it would be nice if they could at least get the kit they need.

Tanks for the memories

2009-11-23T13:56:00.004Z

I came across this story this morning.

MoD spent £149m on tanks unfit for service

Shit! That's quite a lot of money. Sure, it's only 1.3% of October's debt, but still a decent slug of cash.

OK, first point, it's not a big one but it's the kind of thing that pisses me off. This story is not talking about tanks. There's a pretty big difference between an extremely heavily armed and armoured fighting device and a battlefield taxi that on a good day can stop an AK47 round (as long as it's not armour piercing).

This is a tank:

This is what we're talking about in this article:Yes, they both have caterpillar tracks, but then so does this and as far as I can tell, no-one thinks this is a tank:

Anyway, we've clearly demonstrated that these particular journalists have minimal idea what they're talking about when it comes to Military Equipment.

However, that doesn't mean their article has no point. It is important that there is oversight of MoD spend, maybe this is a good example of it. Let's have a look at what the work done was.

Well, it looks like they're referring to work that was done to upgrade 900 of the rather venerable FV432 vehicles with newer engines and brakes. Some of the vehicles were also up-armoured to help out in Iraq. The contract was completed in 2006. It also sounds like this contract was completed in pretty good time. In my experience "9 months" from contract to delivery may in fact be a record for the MoD (and BAE come to think of it!).

In fact, BAE did such a good job (well, we'll assume so anyway) that they got another contract to upgrade 400 more FV430s. Well, £85m for the first, £70m for the second (It's actually worth noting the second contract costs slightly more per vehicle, but nothing too outrageous by MoD standards).

OK, so we've now found the money. All £155m of it. Ah, bugger, should probably throw in the extra £15m for support for the first 500 and we can assume another £12m for the last 400.

So, the MoD actually spent £182 upgrading and supporting these "tanks", not "£149m". Well, either the MoD is playing loose with FOIs again, or the Journos forgot to do any research. Actually, there's a third option where BAE were able to deliver for less than asked, but I think we can all agree that's unlikely!

So, we've shown that this story is riddled with inaccuracies. However, the general point may be absolutely right - that we can't use these vehicles in Afghanistan due to the lack of roads and excessive volume of IEDs. Well, these contracts were placed some time ago, when various people still believed that Afghanistan could be fought with old equipment (with small upgrades). Obviously with the current threat levels out there, these tin cans would provide nowhere near the protection needed.

OK, so we can't use them in theatre, so obviously all that money was wasted. And £182m could buy a decent chunk of two Chinooks, or something otherwise useful. We've spent something like £200k per vehicle to keep them running for another 15+ years, we've now got a useful and sensibly sized fleet of armoured vehicles for training and for some support roles.

Basically, what has happened is that we spent an extremely small pile of cash in buying something that proved to be bloody useful in one theatre but useless in Afghanistan. This piece of equipment may not be vital now (but I'll bet that the training is appreciated) but it will save lives in the future.

We will not always be in Afghanistan. These vehicles work in a lot of theatres, recently they were working in Iraq. We cannot judge every single piece of equipment on how good it is in Helmand!

Yesterday was a very bad day for Democracy

2009-11-20T13:27:00.003Z

The EU has an estimated population of 499,794,855.

Last night 27 people voted for a new president. That's 0.0000054% of the population. That's not very democratic.

Well, how about we look at all the votes those 27 people have received when they were elected. Let's assume that we voted for them to make this choice (*cough* bullshit *cough*) and see how many of us chose them.

I've tried to get the best view possible of the number of people in each country who directly elected each leader (So, Gordon Brown was elected by 24,278 people, whereas Sarkozy was the first choice for 11,48,663 people).

In countries where the leader is merely the leader of the biggest party, I've taken the total number of votes for that party at the latest elections (which should massively overstate the actual number who directly voted for that character).

The details are at the bottom of this post. However, we can see that the 27 leaders of the EU, between them have the (roughly) direct support of 81,408,743 people. That feels pretty big. However, it corresponds to 16.3% of the total population. That's right, less than one in six of the EU even voted for the person who voted for our new President. Jan Fischer in the Czech Republic wasn't even elected, before becoming PM he was the head of the Czech Statistical Office.

We now have a democracy where the leaders of the EU between them are only directly supported by 16% of the population (and even if you included everyone who voted for Labour in the UK, you're still looking at a percentage of less than 20%).

If they had wanted to be democratic why not have an election? We're now in the terrifying situation where our politicians (with a mandate of less than one in six) are deciding who is going to be ruling us.

Yesterday was a very bad day for Democracy.

The curse of Jonah Brown - MkMCIV

2009-11-20T00:40:00.002Z

Pop quiz hotshots:

Where did Gordon Brown stay on holiday this summer?

Which part of the UK has just had "staggering " floods?

The Curse of Jonah Brown striking again?

Our record debt

2009-11-19T13:44:00.005Z

I'd like to start by saying "Hi" to all the people who came here yesterday after being linked by Tory Bear.

Anyway, another month another story about record debt.

£11.42Bn this time. This is apparently the highest since records began (The phrase "No shit?" rapidly comes to mind).

Well, I for one am starting to get a little bemused by the sheer scale of these figures that are bandied around with alarming regularity. Let's have a look and see how big £11.42Bn really is.

Time
This equates to £370 million pounds every day, or over £4000 every second. Yes, that's right. Every six seconds the country is more in debt to the tune of the Median UK salary. Hell, every 46 seconds we take out enough debt to pay for Gordon Brown for a year.

Commodities
£11.42Bn could buy us at today's prices 473 tonnes of gold (approx 20% of the total global gold production last year)
We could buy near 240 million barrels of oil, or roughly 20 days worth of the entire Saudi Oil production.

Stocks and Shares
We could buy over a third of Tesco, or a controlling share in Unilever. Or the whole of Cadbury, BT or Rolls-Royce (and probably still have plenty of change left over to through a decent party).

Military Hardware
Well, it's one of my standard measures, so I'd best include it. £11.42Bn could buy us about 100 Chinook helicopters. It'd pay for a fleet of about 4 fully fitted out aircraft carriers. We could buy about ten Astute submarines.

Houses
With the current average house price, we could buy 57,100 of these, or enough to give one house to every two people in Cambridge.

Previous UK Debts
Just as a point of comparison, the debt in October 2008 was £130m. That was too much then, going up by nearly two orders of magnitude is utter insanity.
The amount we had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for was £2.9Bn (in 1976 money). Now, unless my inflation estimates are way off, that's about £17Bn in current money.
Yes, that's right. Over the last two months Labour has borrowed much more money than we had to beg for last time they were in power.

Now here's a statement that you might find useful. Next year, when you're standing in the polling booth, every second that you spend making up your mind about where to put your cross, this government spends another £4000 of money the country doesn't have.

Labour PPB - Fighters and Believers - Depressing Messages

2009-11-18T11:39:00.005Z

I've just seen the new Labour Party Political Broadcast (video below)

It's still got the ominous threat at the end.

It's still got Bevan and Bevin confused.

Lots of new shots of Brown with Children, Brown with Obama (x3), Brown with Mandela.

There's a whole new shot of a large TV screen by some banks, complete with the following messages - bought to you by this Labour Government:

Economy to slow this year despite rate cuts

Who fucked the economy? That's right - Labour.

Mortgage approvals slump to record lows

Who allowed asset prices to bubble helping to put us in the shit we're in? Labour again.

Bank's Sentance says weak pound aggravating inflation pressures

The pound has weakened about 20%, this is inflation we'll soon be importing. Under whose stewardship did this happen? Again it was Labour.

You'd think they'd at least remove these depressing messages from their own broadcasts!

UK troops die at nearly twice the rate of US troops

2009-11-17T18:36:00.003Z

Just a quick thought:

UK Troops in Afghanistan - 9,500
US Troops in Afghanistan - 65,000
UK deaths to date - 234
US deaths to date- 920

I've assumed that both rotate troops into theatre at the same frequency and have been out there for the same time period (sure it's not exact, but it'll do).

The ratio between UK and US forces is 1:7 but the ratios of terminal casualties has been 1:4.

Does this seem right to you?

Merlins to Afghanistan

2009-11-17T14:36:00.006Z

Whoops! Someone pranged one of our Merlins which we're sending (very slowly) out to Afghanistan. Full story here.

The one rule of Helicopter crashes, sorry "Hard Landings", is that you really really want the damn thing to stay upright. It looks like this fell over after hitting the ground, which is hardly ideal. Breaking both legs hardly sounds comfortable.

Still, good that our troops have been training hard in Hot, "High" and Dusty conditions and backs up this story nicely.

£43m has been spent in modifying these relatively new helicopters for the conditions in Afghanistan, including new blades. Well, this crash, sorry "Hard Landing", has blown one of those sets. Hope someone's got the insurance documents!

Still, you've got to be pleased that these are finally getting out to Afghanistan. Sure, this particular helicopter will take 8 weeks to be assembled in field (It might have been faster to just shift the Yeoville factory out there instead) and we're still only expecting six more airframes to go out there.

These 6 are an increase of 25% on the existing fleet, so using a combination of science and alchemy I can infer that there are currently 24 Helicopters in theatre, ranging from the few Chinooks we've got left that haven't been shot down (about 5) to a few Pumas and Sea Kings.

Excellent. Times have changed, we now have 30 helicopters in theatre, people have worked bloody hard to get this far (and I've got no doubt getting to this level has required superhuman performance on the part of everyone involved).

Another way of looking at this figure is to compare it to the total number of helicopters we own. Afterall, we can't be using all of them for training or Christmas Trees.

Well, according to the RAF, we have 48 Chinooks (of which 8 are the SAS versions and thus useless). Assuming we have written off the two we lost recently, we're still looking at 5 in theatre from a pool of 38. Do we really need to have 7 airframes sitting around somewhere just to keep 1 airframe useable?

We have 28 Merlins, 22 initial buy (which we seem to have lost somewhere) and 6 we bought recently off the Danish - does that number sound familiar to anyone?

Pumas: 33 in service vs. the few we've got out there.

The RAF actually has a pretty decently sized SH fleet. We should be able to provide a decent level of support to our men and women on the ground. However, we do not.

The reasons for this are almost certainly down to two factors. Training and Spare Parts. The first fuck-up lies firmly at the door of the service - they have focused on training pilots for FJ and not for the SH mission. The second is a clear symptom of the mismanagement at DE&S. We are unable to put this helicopters where they are because someone didn't negotiate the contract for support properly (Yes, I know they're flying more hours than expected, that just means whoever did the original estimate was a pillock).

This leads to the problem that everyone, including those at the MoD, has had to work to get this small number out to theatre with both hands tied behind their back. I'm impressed at the work done but seriously dismayed that it takes this much work to wind up a fleet of six airframes when we have over 100 available.

46% below average shocker!

2009-11-16T09:35:00.002Z

I came across this story this morning. Just quoting the first two paragraphs gives us this gem:

"Many adults failed to discover their talents in the classroom because they were made to feel like failures at school, research suggested.
Almost half (46%) of adults said they were regarded as average or poor students, according to a poll of more than 2,000 people."

Well, it certainly shows that whoever put the findings of this survey together is clearly well into the bottom half of the population.

There's lots of other stats pulled from the research which are almost uniformly pointless. Take a gander at this little sequence (and bear in mind I'm pulling these off their press release)

"The findings show that of the 5% who said they were regarded as poor students, more than half (56%) ended up hating school, and feeling less confident (49%).
Half (53%) said they felt their school gave up on them, the survey found."

For one point, this shows that 41% of respondents thought they were considered to be average and more spectacularly that 54% of respondents thought that they were considered to be good. Far from discovering that people have been browbeaten at school, more than you would expect thought they were treated well.

Anyway, moving on from rubbishing the entire premise of the survey, lets look at that poor 5%. Half ended up hating school and half felt that their school gave up on them. Well, no shit! Unsurprisingly if a child is refusing to turn up from school, being generally unhelpful to the teachers, sooner or later their infinite patience will run dry.

Then at the bottom of the press release, we find the real reason behind all of this

"The poll was commissioned to mark the premiere of the new film We Are The People We've Been Waiting For.
The film, inspired by Lord Puttnam, looks at whether the current education system gives young people the opportunity to develop their talents properly."

Well, I'd bet that the film already knows what the results should be "Schools should make everyone feel like they are precious little flowers, so they can build their full potential". The research merely demonstrates that's pretty much bollocks.

Some people are thick, some children are little shits whose parents don't back up the teachers when they attempt to discipline them. Schools are a place of learning, if you are bad, or unable to do that, you're not going to enjoy it. Children should not be able to choose whether or not they "buy in" to the concept of schools. They are their to learn. Sometimes they should just shut the fuck up and get on with it (and that goes for the parents as well).

The Rules of Procurement

2009-11-13T15:43:00.004Z

Well, this blog has been running for over a week now. It looks like my more defence-based posts are more popular than my politics rants. I'd like to say "Hi" to the people who've swung by from the MoD. Hope you don't know who I am!

Anyway, enough preamble. I've had a hunt around for an interesting Defence story today.

I found this story quite interesting. It's certainly a pretty damn clear example of how the UK isn't the only country that can't do procurement in a sensible manner.

This particular contract demonstrates lots of the age-old procurement problems, that affect all countries pretty much equally.

It shows how the cool, sexy stuff like new Ships, Fighter Jets and Missiles are fairly easy to procure. The boring, staid stuff that wins you wars like ISTAR, AAR and anything logistics based is mostly ignored and felt that it can be pushed to the right for as long as wanted. The US is using currently using Stratotankers. The last of these was delivered in 1965, making the youngest and shiniest of this fleet a mere 44 years old. Sure, they also fly a few of the bigger, newer (and presumably shinier) KC-10s, but these are nearly outnumbered 10-1 by the Stratotankers.

OK, so it's pretty clear that despite this being a pretty boring capability, it's increasingly becoming an urgently required piece of kit.

Most people reading this will probably know that this contract was already awarded back in 2008. The Northrop / Airbus system, offering lots of manufacturing done in the South of the US managed to fairly comprehensively beat the Boeing system, which offered lots of manufacturing in the North-West of the US.

Well, this throws up another universal law of procurement. You can't spend all your time thinking about which system is the best, you've got to weigh up the relevant work-share.

In this case there was another fun element. I'm sure you've already spotted the convenience of the timing of the last 'decision' and the relevant political leanings of the two areas chosen for each companies' work. Well, Boeing threw their toys out of the pram, The USAF responded (Screw You)in a surprisingly robust manner.

Rule: You can't rely on being based in the same country as the person making the decision, sometimes you'll be beaten by a cheaper foreign product.

Eventually the selection process was restarted. This was then stopped, by Gates, to give the incoming administration a chance to redesign the selection process however they wanted.

Another Rule: Politicians will always demand their say. They'll also make the whole process take too long and simultaneously be unable to make a decision.

Well, the contest has now been redesigned. The 800 requirements that existed before have been pared down. Now some aren't even mandatory. Whenever I wrote requirements, I made damn sure that you had to have a bloody good reason to bend any.

Let me pull a quote from that article: "Northrop has argued that the Air Force's decision to pare the requirements to 373 mandatory ones and 93 non-mandatory ones puts significant issues like the fuel offload rate for the airplanes on the same level with less serious issues like the water flow rate in on-board toilets."

We're now back exactly where we were earlier. Before Boeing were bitching about the USAF picking the bigger plane, now the other side are bitching about their strengths being ignored (at the same time I'm also ignoring the amusing story about how the USAF were basically expecting Boeing to offer a 777 derivative, rather than try and use this deal to keep the 767 production line open. Fuck me, by the time this is finished, we'll have 787 derivatives on offer!)

Rule: Stupidity is not confined to the Military

Sure, it would be fun to point and laugh at the Americans. Normally the saying goes "Fast, Cheap, Capable: Pick Two". However, as they've taken so much time to make this decision (and no doubt pissing more money up the wall in the process) they'll manage to get into a situation where they don't hit any of those basic points.

But there's no point laughing. Are our people and processes really any better?

MoD PR and Mrs Bercow

2009-11-12T15:20:00.004Z

I read this heartwarming story earlier, confirming how the government and the MoD are finally sorting out the endemic accommodation issues that plague the Armed Forces.

I particularly liked this quote from Trainee Logistician William Boyes

"It's quieter at night because you don't have the constant snoring of other people and we no longer have 24 people fighting for four washing machines, because there is one per eight."

Well, I can deal with some 17 year old kid making a fuck-up like that. But is someone being paid to push out pointless PR fluff like this and not being able to spot that 1 washing machine for 6 people is less people per machine than 1 washing machine for 8 people.

Ye gods!

In other news Mrs Bercow is standing as a Labour MP at the next election. That's a fucking surprise. The only reason he was selected was to piss off the Tories before they got in, as he was clearly sliding left as far as his wife could take him. Sure the rules say he has to be impartial and say nothing about his wife. I wonder how well the Public sector would take things if the female CEO of Goldman Sachs was married to the head of the FSA?

What the Tories should do about defence

2009-11-10T09:58:00.007Z

OK, bear with me please. This is probably going to be a long post. The Tories sound like they have some good ideas about most of the difficulties they are going to inherit (such as new thoughts on the benefits structure, culling quangos, cutting the deficit). However, I've not heard much that's solid about defence. Sure, we've heard that they're willing to make cuts and that there will be a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) soon, but those are hardly solid policies.

Lets work out what the problems are.

The Defence Budget is screwed. The Equipment plan is running far too hot (though it has been for some time).
We've got the best part of 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. These guys are doing an incredibly difficult job and the lack of equipment suited for their task in that environment is getting them killed.
The Royal Navy's size has been slashed since 1997, we've lost a third of our surface and subsurface combatants.
The RAF haven't suffered as badly (to their eyes), losing ~1/5 of their fixed wing aircraft and gaining the important but catastrophically expensive Typhoon.

However, the one problem that over-rides all of these is that there is no money in the pot for defence. The Tories have committed to sustaining the NHS budget (which doubled under Labour. Can I have a show of hands of those who think the service is now twice as better as it was in 1997? No-one?! Strange that...) and more importantly, the country's balance sheet is fucked. We can't simply throw more money at Defence. And we can't even blame Labour for all of the cuts. Defence spending as a proportion of GDP fell mostly under the Tories (Of course, we can blame Labour for the shrinking GDP, but that's another story).

Let's try and envisage a near ideal world. Where everyone has almost everything they want. Well, who wants what?

The army want lots of soldiers, with plenty of support (helicopters, artillery, decent MRAPs to get them around, CAS)
The RN want their two nice shiny carriers. They should also want enough planes to fly off them and enough escorts to both keep the carriers safe and being doing something else useful. (Admittedly, they don't care about the last two but I'm going to assume they stop caring about the carriers to the exclusion of all else)
The RAF want lots of shiny fast aeroplanes they can use to show off to girls. They should also want a decent air-to-air refueling capability, plenty of logistics aircraft (C130s and up)
The MoD wants a nice big civilian staff so the PPS at the top can feel like he's got more power
Other things that would sure be useful: C4ISTAR in whatever form bloody works, Some form of nuclear deterrent (that actually does what it's supposed to), decent training budgets and enough fuel to keep everything running

Clearly not all of these can happen.

Right, I'm expecting someone reading this to say something along the lines of "But you've got to wait for the SDR, then we'll know what we need to do and we'll cut our cloth accordingly".

Well, to whoever said that, "Hi, Welcome to the blog, don't be daft"

SDRs are always a bottom up viewpoint. We decide what we can do, then lots of staff officers go ahead and work out scenarios that mean we've got exactly what we need. There's usually some cool stuff like "Go to a small island somewhere, drop off lots of troops and have plenty of aircover" but most of it will be wishywashy bollocks like "We want our armed forces to be a power for peace in the World and for flowers to grow wherever they go".

Basically, SDRs manage to be both bollocks and to push for just enough capability to do full scale expeditionary warfare from the sea.

At the moment, we have two schools of thought. One says that the Army should come first (afterall, they're the ones dying at the moment) and we should equip our armed forces for dusty places where ill-equipped men with beards are trying to kill us. The other says that we shouldn't plan for the "Last War" and should be building the best damn hi-tech equipment possible, just in case war starts with China. The SDR is more likely to lean towards this view-point than the former. Grunts just aren't sexy enough to get politicians excited.

Clearly both of these views are bollocks. Hopefully round about now, you're starting to realise why this is going to be a long piece. Pretty much every view on defence directly opposes another view. No-one can ever agree so nothing gets done. The three services bite and scratch each other for a slightly larger part of the ever-shrinking pie.

Hopefully the Tories will be smart (and strong) enough to be able to politically force the services to play nice together. In fact, my first recommendation would be to pick people for CAS, CNS, CGS and CDS who can work with the other services to a useful degree. It's entertaining that the military will need the Tories help to stop them getting shafted by the politicians but they've shown absolutely no capability to do it themselves. It doesn't actually matter which service does what, as long as the country has the capability it needs.

OK, we're going to need some money to play with. We're not going to be able to implement the suggestions in the Gray report without some cash and the equipment plan could do with an insertion of money now to stop everything else dying.

I'm actually with the Tories on this one, start by culling the civilian parts of the MoD. There's no way nearly 100,000 civvies are required to do those roles. Of course, this will require a strong and ballsy PPS, so good luck. However, this is not just doable, it's essential. To paraphrase someone famous "A Penny spent on defence that doesn't support the RAF, Royal Navy and The Army is a penny wasted". There is a hell of a lot being wasted in Main Building and elsewhere. Only one man has shown any chance of being even moderately capable in this field. Get Drayson in.

OK, hopefully we've now cut the civilian MoD down by about 25+%. Well, might as well share the pain. Redesign the promotional ranks in the services. We have far too many senior officers doing fuck all. We don't need to move all the way back to One Admiral per Fleet, but we currently have more Admirals than we have warships. I'm sure the case is the same in the Army and RAF. Dangle them a carrot - The Tories will sort out DE&S in exchange for serious cuts in senior ranks.

Excellent, we've now got some money to play with. Nowhere near enough to fix the equipment plan, of course, but perhaps enough to start making some decisions.

Trident replacement: I don't believe that a nuclear deterrent can work if it can be easily removed. However, I do believe a deterrent is essential. The arguments for Trident replacement usually include a few comments about keeping Submarine production in the UK (absolutely right, it's bloody hard to pick up skills once lost) and the general need for us to keep it to stay at the top table in the UN security council.

However, the costs bandied around for a full fleet of 3-4 Vanguard replacements (I don't like the idea of dropping below four due to the whole "whoops, we didn't have a boat at sea when they started threatening us") are pretty damn high. The obvious response has been to pack a small nuke warhead (we'll pick one off the yanks) into Storm Shadow and hope we've got a friendly airbase within a sensible distance of anyone we want to be able to deter. That clearly works, but not for an actual deterrent, making the exercise pointless.

It'd be cheaper to continue building more Asutes. We've cut the numbers of those anyway. We can build a larger fleet, continue not telling anyone where they are, buy a nuclearised Scalp-Navale / Tomahawk block IV and stick them on Asute. This can cut down on warhead numbers (for proliferation reasons) and save a bunch of cash. Whilst I'm aware that sticking a Scalp-Navale silo into an Asute would be tricky, these boats are modular, just build and stick an extra section in. All the benefits, lower costs.

Carriers - build both. We've already signed the contract and it'll keep the Scots and the Navy happy. Stick Sea Viper on them to give them both an ability to defend themselves without requiring half the fleet each. Look at buying some dirt cheap modular vessels like the Absalon class (~$250m each).

F35 - this is a tricky one, we've just announced we're only going to buy half the original order. I'd be tempted to cancel it entirely (aside from the three for evaluation, which we have to buy) and look at how much it'll cost to stick a steam generator into the Carriers. Then build some decent cats and buy an off-the-shelf naval AWACS plane. We all know the carriers will be ready before the F35 anyway, so put a note that you're going to buy those things at some point in the future (we're looking at least five years out before these damn things even float). Stick some Harriers on the carriers in the meantime and use them as somewhat sophisticated LHDs until we can afford cats and decent naval aircraft.

Ditch the A400M. It's pants, it's behind schedule and half of the reason for it was to carry FRES. Which is dead. And before it died was way to heavy to fit in anyway.

Somehow the C17 line is still running, offer to take a few of these off the Americans' hands. Haggle like crazy on the price (yes, Buy not Lease) and see if you can persuade them this is economic stimulus. Do not let the RAF change anything about them. They do not need to be anglofied, they work perfectly well in American trim.

Look at buying some more C130s. Don't let the RAF meddle in the design again.

Actually, have that as a new rule - No fucking meddling with designs. Plan it, design it, then build it. No constantly going back over the design over the years ahead driving costs up farther and farther. We all know why it happens. Some smart, ambitious, young officer turns up at DE&S. (S)He wants to make a name for himself. No-one will care if (s)he helps trim 1% off the cost of her/his project. (S)He's only there two/three years, there's no incentive to deliver anything in that time. But, if he can find a 'problem' with the specification as it stands.. (S)He can then be known as "That guy who figured out that our new MBT needed a GPMG pointing at 90 degrees to the main gun, to stop people flanking". Each of these adds up. The cost spirals, the 'problems' and 'needs' gets ever more ridiculous and someone dies because their piece of kit was delayed.

Fix DE&S. This should have been made abundantly clear earlier. Get some smart guys together (Drayson and his team?), give them incredible powers, cut the incredible amount of deadwood in that organisation. Ditch the siloing. If you're buying something, you have to go along and chat to the chap in charge of those sorts of things. He'll look at what we've already got, whether we can get most of what we need with that, what the other options are and how that will affect everyone else.

If it helps, make being a Procurement Officer a viable and worthwhile career for the military. Don't let them piss off after 2 years. Their name has to be permanently attached to that bit of kit.

Don't fall for PFI again. Airtanker was bloody stupid. We want tankers, so how about buying however many we need from the American procurement that's going on now. No matter how bad it is, it can't be worse than the Airtanker contract.

C4ISTAR is actually a pretty tricky one. Ditch MR4A, unless we can get a few more airframes for essentially nothing. Lots of UCAVs would be nice, but they all need Satcoms, which we barely have, despite our new shiny comsats up there. Taranis will be nice but is a long way out and doesn't quite fit the bill either. I'd basically suggest going cap in hand to the yanks and sticking a few more onto their production runs of Pred B or C. These aren't cheap, but they are bloody useful, at least when we're having to check the one road running from our FOB.

Basically, if there's one thing you can take from this: It is possible to keep our Defence capability without spending more. We just need to cut the bits which aren't working and focus on improving how we buy our kit.

Apologies for the length of this - I hope you're still reading and have had some good ideas as a result. I've presented this as a fait acompli of what should be done. In reality, it's no such thing. I just hope it can provide a bloody good start of what the Tories should be thinking about now. Let me know what you think!

How to bring up your kids

2009-11-09T11:45:00.004Z

I've been having a quick flick through this (pdf) this morning, after being listening to a somewhat unusual event on the Today programme this morning.

The smooth talking chap and the strident angry woman (How is it that they always seem to have the same two people on no matter what the problem is?) were both agreeing with each other!

Whatever it was they were talking about must have been so fundamentally obvious that even these two diametrically opposed views were perfectly capable of agreeing. This had a chance of being interesting.

Part of this is due to the entertaining media coverage around this report (BBC: Tough love 'is good for children'. Guardian: How tough love breeds smart children). A habit of mine is to read the report and see if there are any interesting outcomes that don't make the media.

There's a nice graph (page 39) showing that the children bought up by their natural parents, who are married are twice as likely to be in the top quintile for "Child Outcomes" than those who have single parents. Amazingly (particularly with a sample size of 9,000 families, which means we can discount that as a reason) this ratio is even higher when comparing to married, step couples. There's a fun one conclusion from that - Divorce is bad for your kids, even worse is to shack up with someone else.

(Though it's worth noting, if you do get remarried, your kids are slightly less likely to end up in the bottom quintile. Swings and Roundabouts, right?)

I originally started this piece with the intention of either going on a lovely rant about how the media spin the results of serious research or how serious research is often mind-numbingly obvious and utterly pointless.

Well, I'm not going to do either of those. Sure the media have over simplified the report but they are journos afterall, and the report does seem to be obvious to anyone.

However, research like this is useful. It does serve a purpose. In a world of "Science backed Policy" (OK, OK, this lot are bad at it, but hopefully the next lot will be better!) we need evidence like this before we can make some decent policy.

This report makes two essential points.

Bad Parents fuck up kids.
Good Parenting is more important than wodges of cash, though the two are often correlated

Maybe people just shouldn't be allowed to breed until they're mentally, physically and economically capable of dealing with it?

Quote from CEO of RBS

2009-11-06T08:25:00.003Z

The CEO of RBS just said on the Today programme something along the lines of:

"My job is to make sure that the government gets a return on its investment, think how many schools or hospitals we can buy then."

Or, you know we could just have spent the money on building schools and hospitals in the first bloody place and not pissed billions up the wall propping up an incompetent Scottish bank!

QE: The Great White Hope

2009-11-05T15:09:00.003Z

When QE kicked off, I remember that it was described as risky, noone knew whether it would work, but it was only £75Bn (1-2 entire Trident replacement programmes).

Today the BoW MPC has voted to increase QE to £200Bn (source). An increase of £25Bn (a mere 188 Chinooks then).

QE doesn't seem to be doing anything directly to help the economy. We're looking at at >3% fall in the GDP since it started. It doesn't seem to be doing anything to help the flow of credit (the vast majority seems to be locked into banks as capital). So why the hell are we extending it?

Well, every minute we're another £340k in debt.

Let me just check that figure, surely I've made a mistake in my calculations? Record borrowing in Sept was £14.8Bn (3 Aircraft Carriers). That's nearly £500m every single day. Fuck me!

That debt is going to be bloody expensive to pay off, even with our current AAA rating. If our rating falls, it'll get more expensive for us to get into debt. At the moment it's like we're borrowing on our authorised overdraft, if the rating falls, it'll be like borrowing off a credit card.

Up to now, the vast majority of QE has been spent buying government debt / gilts (I hear figures of 2% is spent on commercial paper, the rest UK gilts).

If the government are unable to sell their gilts, they'll have to expect their rating to fall. One of the mysteries of the last few months has been how we've managed to maintain a AAA rating when ramping debt up like a terminal cancer victim.

Simples. The BoE buys the debt, leaving a much smaller pie that has to be sold to real people. There's plenty of demand for the bits that are left, our debt rating stays high and the government can continue getting us into hock for the next three generations.

We're going to be completely fucked when the wheels come off. Bring on the election!

Brown responds to the resign petition

2009-11-04T18:14:00.000Z

I've been waiting for two weeks now for the Prime Minister to respond to this petition on the number 10 website.

I assumed that because it had been the largest open petition for some time and the 10th largest of all time there would be a well thought out and rounded response.

Well, we've now got a response. What could possibly have taken two weeks to create?

"The Prime Minister is completely focussed [sic - 2 weeks and no spell check?] on restoring the economy, getting people back to work and improving standards in public services. As the Prime Minister has consistently said, he is determined to build a stronger, fairer, better Britain for all." from here.

Are they fucking serious? Since this petition was created (22nd May I think) the following things have happened:

GDP has fallen by 3.5% - so much for 'restoring the economy'.
Unemployment has increased by 650 thousand - getting people back to work?! I'll agree that there is some increase of the public sector, but this can't seriously be the game-plan.

I'll agree with the sentiment that we want a 'stronger, fairer and better Britain'. If this was really what Brown wanted, rather than clinging to power with his fingernails, he should bloody resign. Like we asked him to six months ago.

House Prices - wtf?

2009-11-04T14:27:00.000Z

Another week, another story about how house prices are rising once more. Disaster has been averted! We can all go out and spend the free money that's being built up in our property! Recession over!

Wait a minute, as I remember, when prices started falling, this was a correction that would return the prices to historic levels. Now the prices are going up, everyone seems to have assumed this has happened.

I decided to pull some data (admittedly from Nationwide, rather than the Halifax quoted in the story above) and see what the situation looked like.

This first graph shows the Nationwide Affordability index over the past 16 years. I've shown the figures for UK and London (which is probably a special case, possibly due to all the MPs owning the most expensive properties they can get us to pay for).

We can see pretty clearly that during the mid-90s the market corrected down to an index of 40/50 (It's also interesting that it's only since this time that the London market has had an index of roughly 10 more than the UK as a whole). This data only goes up to Q2 2009 but you can see where the market has started to turn. This looks pretty close to the long term average (which includes two peaks, and only one dip, but I couldn't be arsed to correct for that). Perhaps the market has managed to perfectly hit this average and will stay there forever. Boom and Bust abolished! I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere.

I would argue that in a rational world (and don't worry, I'm under no pretence we're in one of those!) that house prices need to fall a long way further. And if the previous graph didn't convince you, check this one out comparing the price paid by first-time buyers to their income.

This leads me to ask: Why are house prices rising?

The obvious explanation is to look at the FTSE 100 and assume that both are pricing in future inflation and a falling Sterling.

Whilst I'd agree that this is rational for the FTSE 100 and I can see the logic in pricing in future growth into current house prices, I can't see any avenues to future growth for house prices.

There will be a nasty day ahead when the BoE base rate rises. This will drive up the cost of mortgage payments (remember, BoE base rate was about 5% before all of the recent unpleasantness). Unemployment is and will continue to rise for some time and these people will be unable to afford this rise in their mortgage payments. More defaulted mortgages (which will piss off the banks, but they should have enough of our money to cover themselves now) and more houses on the market at increasingly fire-sale prices.

There is pain ahead in the housing market that will make the last two years look like a trip to the Seychelles. The depressing thing is that I'm pretty sure that this will be the least of our problems.

Time to start stocking up on canned food?

Bank Bailout MkII

2009-11-03T19:18:00.000Z

I'm continually amazed by the size of the bank bailout and how easily these massive sums of money have passed everyone by.

This link shows that the government has decided to dump another £39.2Bn into a couple of banks. That is a seriously staggering amount of money!

One of my pet habits is referring to large sums of government money in terms of things that are simpler to understand, such as Chinook helicopters, which are desperately needed by our troops in the sandpit. Looking at the recent Canadian deal, they were able to procure 15
brand new Chinooks (including 20+ years of support and maintenance) for $3.4Bn. We could have bought (and supported) 300 heavy lift helicopters for the 'price' of this single bank-bailout. (OK, OK, add on pilot and training costs and you're probably down to 100, but this would be a capability equivalent to anyone in the world).

I remember Brown standing up in the HoC talking about how the number of helicopters has increased by 60% in recent months. This was an increase of Chinooks from 5 to 8. Of this 8, 2 have been shot down recently, putting us nearly back where we started.

I understand fully the need for a liquid and sustainable banking sector, really I do. However, when Brown claims there is nothing more that can be done to help our troops, he has to be lying.

"A penny spent on defence is a penny wasted" - Gordon Brown

Time to put my money where my tusks are...

2009-11-03T19:01:00.000Z

I have become an extremely angry walrus over the past few years. I've seen the same question come up time and time again across the various tubes of the interweb:

"Why is it that this country just seems to be shit at the moment?"

Well, I'm setting up this blog to try and do two things.

Highlight the areas that I feel are particularly leading the country into the shit.
Suggest what should be done differently.

If you're reading this, feel free to comment. I'm just one humble walrus, I have a feeling the country is so fucked we're going to need a lot of good ideas how to fix it again.