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It’s very difficult not to laugh sometimes. Here we’ve got some Green politician arguing about the various different types of energy generation we could install.
This massive under-utilisation of our green resources is also reflected in job figures. According to government-sponsored research, the UK has, at very best, 26,000 jobs in renewable energy. By contrast, Germany has 250,000 jobs.
With the right investment, the UK has the wind resources to be a European green industry leader. As well as reducing carbon emissions and increasing energy security, wind power also creates a large number of jobs per TWh unit.
While nuclear produces 75 jobs per TWh per year, oil and gas around 250 jobs, wind produces up to 2,400 jobs.
She uses this as an argument in favour of wind power.
Which is simply blindingly stupid. “Creating” jobs is of course a cost of a scheme not a benefit of one. If you were running a business, something simple like a whelk stall, would you use the method of production that needed 2 people to run it or the method that used 200 people?
Quite, you’d use the two people method because you know that it’s very expensive indeed to employ 200 people.
That wind power needs 32 times as many people to set up and run it than nuclear does is of course exactly why we would like to have the nuclear system not the wind power one.
Really, you do have to laugh at these people sometimes, don’t you?
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Authorities in the UK and in the US are taking steps to regulate the way banks and speculators behave but while we have been tightening our belts here, ahead of tough times to come, bureaucrats in Brussels have just carried on spending.
The EU is in just as much need of regulation as the stock market. News that EU leaders plan to squander Euro cash on a museum and a satellite TV system is typical of their total disregard for the people they are supposed to serve.
Who in Britain today believes that we are getting value for money from Brussels?
The people who think there’s value for money in that spending are the people doing the spending of our money. Everyone else knows that it’s being wasted.
So how long before we take back the power to spend our own money and stop the waste?
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Want to know why cod and chips is now moving past £5 a portion? Why there’s almost no cod left in the sea?
Described by fishermen’s leaders as “a monumental moral disaster”, this is a direct and inescapable consequence of the EU’s idea of fisheries management which in this case has led to a “staggering total” of 12,000 metric tons of marketable cod, with a potential value of £25 million, being discarded.
These data come from marine scientists at the government’s Fisheries Research Service in Aberdeen. They show that, from a survey, carried out between January and June, 40 percent of landings of cod by weight are having to be discarded to prevent the fleet breaching the EU’s quota restrictions.
At least 90 per cent of the catches are above the minimum marketable landing size, yet the above quota fish are being thrown back dead.
Yes, because the EU insists that we throw dead fish back into the sea.
Can we leave yet?
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Following on from Tim Congdon yesterday we get Ambrose Evans Pritchard today.
Europe has embedded paralysis in its treaty law. Maastricht prohibits a Keynesian blitz. Budget deficits above 3pc of GDP are not allowed until an EU country is already in dire straits, and even then approval requires a committee vote by 27 states. So Ireland, Italy and France must now tighten fiscal policy into the downturn. There is no EU Treasury to back the euro, and therefore no Euro-Paulson with the powers and legitimacy to take sweeping steps in an emergency. By extension, there is no clear-cut lender of last resort either. Each country is on its own, yet none have the instruments of monetary policy to carry out a Paulson-type rescue with credible punch.
The European Central Bank stands aloof with Teutonic severity, as hawkish as the old Bundesbank - or the Reichsbank in 1931. It too is a prisoner of a rigid treaty mandate. There was a mad Wagnerian feel to its July rate rise. We now know that Euroland was already slipping into recession when it acted. Do the hawks mean to unleash Götterdämmerung on the peoples of Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, with all the dangers that must accompany a disintegration of EMU?
These are three of the problems that I fret over with the ECB, indeed the entire eurozone system.
The first is that by definition, with a single currency there has to be a single interest rate. So economies which are falling into recession have no ability to lower interest rates in order to minimise or even forestall problems.
The second, that the ECB itself seems to have not worked out what actually caused the Great Depression: it was the tightening of interest rates and the subsequent contraction of credit. So with a financial crisis like the one we have interest rates should indeed be going down.
The third is that there is in fact no lender of last resort in this system. There’s no “there” there.
All of these three individually and even more strongly all of them together mean that while we and the Americans might have a financial jolt and a downturn, we at least have the tools to deal with them while the eurozone simply doesn’t. Which doesn’t bode well for the severity of the downturn when it comes to that very eurozone.
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Allow me to welcome a guest blogger to our ‘umble abode. Tim Congdon, economist, businessman and of course, member of UKIP, on the eurozone:
American capitalism had a terrible shock last week. But Americans are right to believe their bank deposits are safe and that over the long run their financial institutions will deliver good investment returns to savers. The USA is a single nation with a single Federal government, and clear lines of responsibility from its central bank and official agencies to the private sector banking system. That is why the Federal rescue will work.
Compare that with Europe and the single currency ‘area’. Yes, ‘area’. The Eurozone is not a nation with one government and one central bank. Instead it is an ‘area’, which can vary in size as countries join (and leave, as Italy has threatened to do), which has 12 governments, 12 inferior national central banks, one superior central bank based in Frankfurt, and countless regulatory agencies with conflicting agendas. What would happen if a truly ‘European bank’ – a bank with shareholders in Germany, a headquarters in Paris, loans in Spain and deposits from all 12 member countries – were to face the sort of troubles that have affected Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers in the last few months. Which government would be responsible for helping it? And under which nation’s laws? And does anyone know whether the taxpayer, the national central banks or the Frankfurt-based ECB itself would organize the rescue attempt?
The European single currency experiment – and it is still an experiment – may be about to face its biggest test.
Tim Congdon CBE.
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Currently manufactuerers have to make their parts supply chain available to independent garages. The EU has decided to change this with the following effects.
The EU planned changes mean car manufacturers will no longer be forced to provide parts and computer codes to independent garages so they can carry out repairs on the vehicles.
Instead motorists will have to have their cars fixed at the manufacturer’s dealership workshops, where charges are up to 40 per cent more.
The average hourly charge at an independent garage is £55.63 compared to £94.70 at a dealership garage, according to recent figures.
That’s nice of them, isn’t it?
Can we leave yet?
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HI , thanks for adding the previous up coming meetings on the UKIP blog, i have some more here if you could do the same please , Thanks Josh
The SW Region are holding a strategy meeting hosted by Swindon UKIP. The venue is the Nightingale Hotel, Old Vicarage Lane, South Marston, Swindon SN3 4SH. It will start at 7pm on Tuesday 14th October.
Trevor Colman and another MEP candidate will be present. The meeting is to discuss our campaign for 2009 and all SW branches are asked to at least send a representative, and as many activists as you wish (the venue can hold 150).
Contact Bob Feal-Martinez
Chairman and PPC Swindon Branch
r.feal-martinez@btconnect.com
The next UKIP Wiltshire County Meeting will take place on Tuesday 30 September at 7:30pm. It will be held at the Lysley Arms on the A4 between Chippenham and Calne, in the Coach House.
With both the European and unitary authority elections looming next year, we need to step up preparations for both. At the meeting we will be able to update you on preparations in the South West, and how we can all help the campaigns. It would also be useful to run though the state of preparedness of each of the branches, particularly progress in choosing council candidates.
The meeting is open to committee members from each of the branches, with Chairmen, PPCs and council candidates particularly encouraged to attend.
Contact Richard Wright
North Wilts Branch
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In contrast to the story immediately below I thought this was really rather funny.
A BBC reporter who joined the Army to expose bullying may be sent to war, it emerged yesterday.
Russell Sharp, 25, did 15 weeks before lying so he could quit on “compassionate” grounds.
And last night after furious top brass found out who he was they threatened to haul him back to complete his training — and send him into action.
Senior officers hit the roof because Sharp, whose TV film Undercover Soldier was screened on Thursday, had only a week left of the 16-week course at Catterick, North Yorks, when he said his “girlfriend” was expecting.
She turned out to be a fellow undercover Beeb reporter who was NOT pregnant.
One of the officers demanding Sharp be held to the four-year stint he signed up for stormed: “It cost £19,000 to train him and now we are one soldier down. It would teach him a lesson.”
Unfortunately they’re not going to do it of course, but wouldn’t it be fun if they did? And wouldn’t you like to have been there when they told him what the actual legal situation is? That once you’ve signed up you’ve signed up Sonny. Taken the Queen’s shilling you have.
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A HERO soldier’s wife hit out last night after she was banned from adopting a cat because he is in the Army.
The charity Cats Protection told her it is their policy not to rehome moggies with service families.
Seriously, how did we end up with a society like this?
“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
And such rough men’s children are no longer able to adopt a kitten? We need something of a rethink here, don’t we?
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The Telegraph has reprinted Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech in all its glory. Here.
Reading through it you can see the hope that was there, that we could indeed turn the EU the way we wanted it.
20 years later of course we’ve found out the hard way that we can’t. It’s not reformable from within, which is of course why we’re members of the political party we are members of.
If we can’t reform it we’d better leave, hadn’t we?