Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Reporting Heath's Treason (3)

In this instalment, Albert Burgess has something of a gloat at the expense of several police officers who had refused to progress his complaints of government-level treason in relation to joining the EEC in the 1970s. As with Private Eye's "Curse of Gnome", they have since met with professional misfortune. He assures me that the personal details are correct and in the public domain.

The campaign has widened to include more recent dealings with the EU - e.g. Maastricht - and other (in Albert's view) treasonable attempts to alter the British Constitution, such as Lord Berkeley's bill (covered on Broad Oak Magazine last month: "Removal of Royal veto and a fishy smell from Fowey", 17 September 2013).

Referring to the list of complaints below, Albert explains: "Number 4 is where Jack wrote to the police telling them [that] by recording the treason allegations and prosecuting ministers they would be helping themselves over the cut backs. The other allegations up to 12 are concerning allegations against Major, Hurd and Maude over the treason at Maastricht, and Blair, Cameron and Clegg over the changes to the House of Lords. 13 concerns a bill going through Parliament which removes from the Queen the Royal Assent and [proposes] the theft of the Duchy of Cornwall from Prince Charles".

I have said to him, "Re 4: doesn't Jack's suggestion go against the bit [in the police officer's oath] about "without favour, fear, malice or ill will"? I have also commented in some detail on the English Constitution Group's aims document, which if it stands will condemn the group to remain tiny and tarnished with allegations of xenophobia, bigotry etc. This would be a shame, as the core concerns about Common Law and the British Constitution seem to me entirely valid. The document is under review.

As I have said before, the prospects of these complaints actually resulting in court cases seem slim to me, since I suspect the Attorney General would declare prosecution not to be in the public interest; but the attempts underscore the real importance of the issues: freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

After DCI Howard and his skipper had left, I wrote to Sarah Thornton the Chief Constable to ask her why her force would not apply the law. I received a reply from a DCS Tighe basically telling me to go away; this I declined to do.

I then wrote to Assistant Commissioner John Yates at Scotland Yard and submitted allegations against Superintendent Trotman, DCI Howard, DCS Tighe, and CC Sarah Thornton for individually neglect of duty and Misprision of Treason at Common Law, and collectively for Compounding Treason at Common Law.

AC Yates declined to investigate so I wrote to his boss Sir Paul Stephenson who also refused to move. But wait, it gets better; I have long said God is an Englishman and that God and I are mates.

The first thing to happen was Superintendent Trotman, now promoted to Chief Superintendent, was arrested by his own force and charged with arson and insurance fraud. Mr Trotman was reported as having an affair with a Barrister’s wife and it was alleged he set fire to his own car near her house, and when the boys in blue arrived and asked if he knew who might have done this it was alleged he named the husband of his girlfriend. He was placed on trial and acquitted. However he was kept on suspension of other discipline charges and he no longer works for the police service.

Next to go was AC Yates; the newspapers called it “John Yates’ boob”. As a senior police officer, honest John Yates travelled the world at our expense to conferences on terrorism. Because of his rank he travelled business class, and received double air miles; these air miles are the property of the Metropolitan Police and are to be used to offset the cost of future travel. John Yates, who was also having an extramarital arrangement, was asked by his children to help them with their travel costs, which he did with the Met’s air miles. He was ordered to repay the money by Sir Paul Stephenson. But what John Yates had done was to fraudulently misappropriate air miles which equals tax payers’ money, and therefore it was stealing. So I submitted a formal allegation of fraudulent misappropriation of air miles. My sources told me John Yates was going around Scotland Yard complaining that some bastard had reported him. My allegation was not investigated but eventually John Yates resigned.

Next Sir Paul Stephenson was investigated for taking a £12,000 freebie and resigned shortly afterwards.

So three senior officers who had refused to investigate the government’s treason had all been forced to resign in disgrace. Like Crocodile Dundee, “Me and God, we be mates”.

Since then we have changed tack and started on more recent treasons and now the country’s police forces are starting to take us seriously. So join us in what is a numbers game. Report treason to your local force. At least take a look at us - www.englishconstitutiongroup.org and www.acasefortreason.org.uk - or email me at albertburgess@hotmail.com.

Police Crime Numbers for Reported Treason

As of 2 August 2013

1..Devon and Cornwall Police

Treason report recorded DCP/20120904/0473 and referred to the Met, whose reference is 6006001/12.

2. Bedfordshire Police

URN 184 dated 04/10/2012

3. Cambridge Police

Cambridge police referred the report of treason to the Met on 22 March 2012.

Crime Related Incident number CC-22032012-0170 and Met reference is 6006001/12.

4. Cheshire Police

Jack’s comments regarding police reopening past investigations about politicians’ paedophilia in return for Conservatives’ attack on police pensions, salaries and conditions. Given CRI 206 22/01/13

5. Durham Police

Crime Related Incident number DHM-01112012-0295 on 2 November 2012. (Maastricht Treason evidence).

6. Dyfed Powys Police

Treason report recorded and referred to the Met on 13 March as number MI/159/11.

Met reference as yet unknown. Dyfed Powys Police are currently uncommunicative on this.

7. Hertfordshire Police

Have logged this under CRI reference number URN356 of 03/10/12 and forwarded to the Met. Also logged under CRI number Hi, Chaps-05062013-0446 and forwarded to Met 12 June 2013.

8. Lancashire Police

Treason report recorded in August as number (still to hear back from them) and referred to the Met (whose reference is as yet unknown). Lancashire Police are currently uncommunicative on this.

9. Leicestershire Police

Reported by Paul Talbot-Jenkins that Leicestershire Police told him they’d forwarded his treason allegations to the Met. His email dated 20/02/2013.

10. Wiltshire Police

Recorded and referred to Home Office National Crime Registrar and the Crown Prosecution Service on 16 March 2012 as Crime Related Incident (CRI) number 5411010866. (Case reference numbers requested and as yet still unknown).

Wiltshire police HO and CPS contacts are :-

Steve Bond - Home Office National Crime Registrar, (tel. 0207 0350280)
Katie Waterman, Senior Policy Advisor, Strategy and Policy Directorate in the CPS.

11. West Mercia Police

Report of Maastricht Treason forwarded to West Mercia Police Legal Department on 8 October 2012

12. Warwickshire Police

Reported by Christopher Roswell to Chief Constable Andy Parker ref AP/DC/409-13 late July 1013. (Gueterbock Treason - Removal of Queen’s consent and Theft of Duchy of Cornwall)

13. Wiltshire Police

Reported by post to Wilts Chief Constable 31 August 2013. He told me to report it to the Met. I replied demanding he pass it to the Met. 27 September 2013. He passed it to the Met on 2 Oct under ref. 6548305/13 which went to the local Borough of Westminster. (See paper letter).

_________________________________

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Bad Science: Michael Eisen and sloppy peer review

The following is reposted with the kind permission of the author, Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. The original appeared on his blog on October 3 with the title "I confess, I wrote the Arsenic DNA paper to expose flaws in peer-review at subscription based journals."

The ease with which substandard research papers slip through the reviewing system and into publication is worrying in its implications, since (for example) we are in the middle of very expensive programs to tackle what many scientists are telling us is the threat of climate change. Clearly more work needs to be done in quality control if we are to retain our confidence in scientific expertise.

In 2011, after having read several really bad papers in the journal Science, I decided to explore just how slipshod their peer-review process is. I knew that their business depends on publishing “sexy” papers. So I created a manuscript that claimed something extraordinary - that I’d discovered a species of bacteria that uses arsenic in its DNA instead of phosphorus. But I made the science so egregiously bad that no competent peer reviewer would accept it. The approach was deeply flawed – there were poor or absent controls in every figure. I used ludicrously elaborate experiments where simple ones would have done. And I failed to include a simple, obvious experiment that would have definitively shown that arsenic was really in the bacteria’s DNA. I then submitted the paper to Science, punching up the impact the work would have on our understanding of extraterrestrials and the origins of life on Earth in the cover letter. And what do you know? They accepted it!

My sting exposed the seedy underside of “subscription-based” scholarly publishing, where some journals routinely lower their standards – in this case by sending the paper to reviewers they knew would be sympathetic - in order to pump up their impact factor and increase subscription revenue. Maybe there are journals out there who do subscription-based publishing right – but my experience should serve as a warning to people thinking about submitting their work to Science and other journals like it.

OK – this isn’t exactly what happened. I didn’t actually write the paper. Far more frighteningly, it was a real paper that contained all of the flaws described above that was actually accepted, and ultimately published, by Science.

I am dredging the arsenic DNA story up again, because today’s Science contains a story by reporter John Bohannon describing a “sting” he conducted into the peer review practices of open access journals. He created a deeply flawed paper about molecules from lichens that inhibit the growth of cancer cells, submitted it to 304 open access journals under assumed names, and recorded what happened. Of the 255 journals that rendered decisions, 157 accepted the paper, most with no discernible sign of having actually carried out peer review. (PLOS ONE, rejected the paper, and was one of the few to flag its ethical flaws).

The story is an interesting exploration of the ways peer review is, and isn’t, implemented in today’s biomedical publishing industry. Sadly, but predictably, Science spins this as a problem with open access. Here is their press release:

Spoof Paper Reveals the “Wild West” of Open-Access Publishing
A package of news stories related to this special issue of Science includes a detailed description of a sting operation — orchestrated by contributing news correspondent John Bohannon — that exposes the dark side of open-access publishing. Bohannon explains how he created a spoof scientific report, authored by made-up researchers from institutions that don’t actually exist, and submitted it to 304 peer-reviewed, open-access journals around the world. His hoax paper claimed that a particular molecule slowed the growth of cancer cells, and it was riddled with obvious errors and contradictions. Unfortunately, despite the paper’s flaws, more open-access journals accepted it for publication (157) than rejected it (98). In fact, only 36 of the journals solicited responded with substantive comments that recognized the report’s scientificproblems. (And, according to Bohannon, 16 of those journals eventually accepted the spoof paper despite their negative reviews.) The article reveals a “Wild West” landscape that’s emerging in academic publishing, where journals and their editorial staffs aren’t necessarily who or what they claim to be. With his sting operation, Bohannon exposes some of the unscrupulous journals that are clearly not based in the countries they claim, though he also identifies some journals that seem to be doing open-access right.

Although it comes as no surprise to anyone who is bombarded every day by solicitations from new “American” journals of such-and-such seeking papers and offering editorial positions to anyone with an email account, the formal exposure of hucksters out there looking to make a quick buck off of scientists’ desires to get their work published is valuable. It is unacceptable that there are publishers – several owned by big players in the subscription publishing world – who claim that they are carrying out peer review, and charging for it, but no doing it.

But it’s nuts to construe this as a problem unique to open access publishing, if for no other reason than the study, didn’t do the control of submitting the same paper to subscription-based publishers (UPDATE: The author, Bohannon emailed to say that, while his original intention was to look at all journals, practical constraints limited him to OA journals, and that Science played no role in this decision). We obviously don’t know what subscription journals would have done with this paper, but there is every reason to believe that a large number of them would also have accepted the paper (it has many features in common with the arsenic DNA paper afterall). Like OA journals, a lot of subscription-based journals have businesses based on accepting lots of papers with little regard to their importance or even validity. When Elsevier and other big commercial publishers pitch their “big deal”, the main thing they push is the number of papers they have in their collection. And one look at many of their journals shows that they also will accept almost anything.

None of this will stop anti-open access campaigners (hello Scholarly Kitchen) from spinning this as a repudiation for enabling fraud. But the real story is that a fair number of journals who actually carried out peer review still accepted the paper, and the lesson people should take home from this story not that open access is bad, but that peer review is a joke. If a nakedly bogus paper is able to get through journals that actually peer reviewed it, think about how many legitimate, but deeply flawed, papers must also get through. Any scientist can quickly point to dozens of papers – including, and perhaps especially, in high impact journals – that are deeply, deeply flawed – the arsenic DNA story is one of many recent examples. As you probably know there has been a lot of smoke lately about the “reproducibility” problem in biomedical science, in which people have found that a majority of published papers report facts that turn out not to be true. This all adds up to showing that peer review simply doesn’t work.

And the real problem isn’t that some fly-by-night publishers hoping to make a quick buck aren’t even doing peer review (although that is a problem). While some fringe OA publishers are playing a short con, subscription publishers are seasoned grifters playing a long con. They fleece the research community of billions of dollars every year by convincing them of something manifestly false – that their journals and their “peer review” process are an essential part of science, and that we need them to filter out the good science – and the good scientists – from the bad. Like all good grifters playing the long con, they get us to believe they are doing something good for us – something we need. While they pocket our billions, with elegant sleight of hand, then get us to ignore the fact that crappy papers routinely get into high-profile journals simply because they deal with sexy topics.

But unlike the fly by night OA publishers who steal a little bit of money, the subscription publishers’ long con has far more serious consequences. Not only do they traffic in billions rather than thousands of dollars and denying the vast majority of people on Earth access to the findings of publicly funded research, the impact and glamour they sell us to make us willing participants in their grift has serious consequences. Every time they publish because it is sexy, and not because it is right, science is distorted. It distorts research. It distorts funding. And it often distorts public policy.

To suggest – as Science (though not Bohannon) are trying to do – that the problem with scientific publishing is that open access enables internet scamming is like saying that the problem with the international finance system is that it enables Nigerian wire transfer scams.

There are deep problems with science publishing. But the way to fix this is not to curtain open access publishing. It is to fix peer review.

First, and foremost, we need to get past the antiquated idea that the singular act of publication – or publication in a particular journal – should signal for all eternity that a paper is valid, let alone important. Even when people take peer review seriously, it is still just represents the views of 2 or 3 people at a fixed point in time. To invest the judgment of these people with so much meaning is nuts. And its far worse when the process is distorted – as it so often is – by the desire to publish sexy papers, or to publish more papers, or because the wrong reviewers were selected, or because they were just too busy to do a good job. If we had, instead, a system where the review process was transparent and persisted for the useful life of a work (as I’ve written about previously), none of the flaws exposed in Bohannon’s piece would matter.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Why we should switch to Land Value Taxation, by Mark Wadsworth

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania USA - the "Georgist" town is an LVT success story.

There are plenty of articles explaining why taxes on the rental value of urban land/location* are the best kind of taxes, some of them start with the underlying moral arguments – that land is a free gift of nature or that 95% of location values are created by the whole of society (“Location, location, location”) – and some skip straight to the positive outcomes (more efficient use and allocation of land, no deadweight costs).

(* Please note that agriculture measured by farm gate prices is only one per cent of the UK economy and the rental value of all farmland, three quarters of the UK by area is only one per cent of the total rental value of urban/developed land. It is barely worthwhile collecting taxes on the value of farmland, this is a non-issuer).

Just for a change let’s start in the middle and look at this from a purely pragmatic point of view and compare and contrast three basic kinds of tax in terms of these five headings:

i) assessability

ii) collectability

iii) dead weight costs

iv) ability to pay

v) willingness to pay

I’ll put numbers on all this in a later post – it is most illuminating if we assume that the government rolled all existing “taxes” (i.e. ignoring duties and rents in the narrower sense) into one single tax which would have to raise about £450 billion a year – this post is just to illustrate the principles.

Poll tax

i) These are easy to assess, it is simply the total tax revenue required divided by the number of adults obliged to pay it.

ii) Collectability is appalling, as we well know.

iii) Ignoring the enormous costs of chasing all the people who can’t afford to pay, poll taxes score well in terms of dead weight costs as they are not a tax on income, so they are an incentive to earn as much as you can rather than being a disincentive.

iv) They score appallingly on ability to pay, by definition, as there is no correlation between the tax and your assets or income.

v) Everybody hates paying tax. If the entire government were funded by a Poll Tax then the top third or quarter of people by assets or income would do well out of the system if everybody pays up, but they would have the same incentive to cheat as anybody else by e.g. claiming to be non-resident.

Further, there is no correlation between the amount you pay and the benefits you receive from society as a whole. S successful stockbroker who takes the subsidised train out to his four-bed detached house in the catchment area of a good state school in Surrey clearly receives far more benefits than an unemployed ex-steel worker in a council flat on Tyneside.

Taxes in turnover, employment, profits and income

These include Value Added Tax, National Insurance, corporation tax and income tax. Please note that VAT is not a harmless tax on “consumption”, it is a tax on gross profits of unfavoured productive businesses and is simply not applied to most profits derived from land ownership or banking.

i) Assessability is not impossible, as we know, but most businesses have to cope with four layers of tax on income and split up their turnover, expenses and residual payments out into VAT-able and exempt turnover (or expenses); into payments to employees and the self-employed and into taxable and non-taxable profits (reinvested profits are by definition matched by capital spending or capital allowances). Individuals have to go through the same rigmarole.

ii) Collectability. There is every incentive to avoid taxes. If it is simple evasion then economic activity still takes place, but the residual rates of tax have to be increased on those who are not in a position to hide their income (or who are just too honest for their own good). We know that even in the UK – which has quite a good record of compliance) there are huge amounts of evaded and unpaid taxes.

iii) Dead weight costs. These are enormous of course. These costs refer to the huge but invisible costs of all that economic activity which simply does not take place because of taxes. It is estimated that every 1% on VAT costs 100,000 jobs, for example, the impact of the other taxes in isolation is not quite as dramatic, but it all adds up. So businesses go out of business (or never get off the ground) and we end up with mass unemployment. The total deadweight costs are ten or fifteen per cent of GDP, i.e. between £100 and £200 billion a year (more than enough to eradicate our trade deficit and to turn it into a comfortable surplus).

iv) Ability to pay. These taxes score relatively well on that front, by definition. But remember that if you look at all these taxes in the round, the marginal rate for our median taxpayer (basic rate employee not entitled to tax credits working for a VATable business) is fifty per cent, with much higher rates for higher and additional rate taxpayers and the highest rates of all for those receiving means tested benefits. Again, the people who lose out most are those who pay little or nothing in cash terms – in other words all the failed businesses and the unemployed.

v) Willingness to pay. Although most people comply, this is only grudgingly –they are too honest to cheat and there is a vague understanding that somebody has to pay for all the things the government does. But there is absolutely no correlation between the amount of tax you pay and the benefits you receive from the government. If anything there is a negative correlation because the highest earners receive nothing in cash benefits and are more likely to pay extra for private security, private health insurance or private education.

Taxes on the rental value of land

Land Value Tax in all its guises scores well on all fronts and seem to combine the best aspects of the other two types:

i) Assessability. Is easy. As a layman, you cannot begin to guess how many adults live in a particular home, how much they earn or what the turnover and profits or a particular business are – it requires the force of law to make people disclose all these things.

But working out the rental value of each site is very easy; all you need to do is to know selling prices and rental values of a reasonably large sample of residential and commercial premises in each smaller defined area. You then subtract the rental value of similar premises in the cheapest area and the balance is the “site premium”, i.e. the “location, location, location” value which is generated by society as a whole.

ii) Collectability is also a doddle. Whoever is registered as the owner at HM Land Registry has to pay the tax each year. If that owner does not pay, then the arrears can easily be registered as a charge and once two or three years’ arrears have been built up, the title is auctioned off and the arrears withheld from the sales proceeds. For sure, some land owners are not yet registered at HM Land Registry, but that is far from saying that the land itself is not registered and this has never been a hindrance to collecting Council Tax or Business Rates, which have the highest collection rates of all taxes at 98% or so.

iii) Taxes on the rental value have zero dead weight costs – like a Poll Tax - as they are not related to private income or output. There is plenty of evidence to show that they tend to stimulate the economy because land and buildings will always be put to their most efficient use, in other words it would be too expensive to keep valuable urban sites out of use or to allow buildings to fall derelict. If taxes on land replace taxes on output and employment etc, then this would shed the economy of the existing dead weight costs.

iv) The traditional main argument against taxes on the rental value of land is “ability to pay”, the Poor Widow Bogey. They say that the tax would hit the “asset rich, cash poor”. This is a non-argument in practical terms because it would be easy to give such people discounts, exemptions or even better, the opportunity to defer and roll up the tax to be repaid on death.

It is also only a transitional issue and does not apply to the working population (the “wealth creators”) anyway. By and large, low-income people move into cheap houses and high-income people move into expensive houses. Each purchaser will take the tax into account when deciding which house he wants to buy and will reduce the amount he is prepared to take out as a mortgage accordingly, so in real terms, the tax costs him nothing. It is the same with business tenants – they work out how much premises are worth to them, subtract the Business Rates and pay the smaller balance as rent to the landlord.

v) Willingness to pay. Today’s land owners spit feathers about Business Rates and Council Tax, and we know that the banks and land owners (and their stooges in the press, Parliament and academia) have been are running a highly successful anti-LVT campaign for a century.

But look at in terms of tenants and the next generation of purchasers. Unlike taxes on income, there is a perfect correlation between what you pay and what you get. If you are willing and able to pay more, you get somewhere nicer, if you are unwilling or unable to pay, you get somewhere not so nice – but this is exactly the same allocation as under current rules whereby land/location values are collected privately by the current land owner when he rents or sells.

This is absolutely no different to owners of big cars paying much more in VAT on the new car, in fuel duty or road fund licence. If we go with the fiction that VAT is borne by the purchaser, does anybody complain that VAT on new cars is unfair, as it does not relate to “ability or willingness to pay”? Of course not – if you can afford a new BMW, you pay £10,000 in VAT and if you buy a run of the mill family saloon, you only pay £4,000 VAT. If you can only afford a second hand car, you pay little or nothing in VAT.

Summary

Land Value Tax has all the merits of a Poll Tax – it is easy to assess and has no dead weight costs, but beats it hands down in terms of collectability, ability and willingness to pay (there is a match between amount paid and benefits received).

Land Value Tax has all the merits of taxes on income as in the medium term as it relates to ability to pay (once everybody has “right sized”) but none of the disadvantages – it is easier to assess and collect and has no dead weight costs. It also beats it hands down in terms of “willingness to pay”.

So besides the moral or philosophical arguments and the fact that LVT leads to better outcomes (an LVT-only world works better than a world without government or taxes), it is quite simply the case that LVT beats all other forms of tax in a simple everyday pragmatic sense.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

A rant

Richard Murphy grits his teeth at the Daily Mail, which is fighting a rearguard action on its criticisms of Miliband père and has started a counterattack on the Guardian's Snowden releases.

Richard has done sterling work on tracking offshore capital and tax avoidance, but has fallen into the trap of political and newspaper tribalism. What Dacre and Rusbridger say about themselves, each other and their respective publications will just be talking their brief. But the DM is something of a bullyrag to people of certain convictions, and it seems (I hope to be proved wrong) that they can't help but respond entirely predictably.

For example, a comment from "Philip" says, among other things, "The DM may not represent the ‘centre ground’ of establishment ideology but they do represent its worst excesses, its dregs, its most toxic sludge. They are its gutter. Gutter press in the truest sense."

So I say:

"Not sure the left vs right dichotomy is clear or helpful. On key issues both sides of Parliament appear to agree, e.g. on economic migration, though one suspects for different reasons (the Conservatives because importing cheap labour undercuts the working class' attempts to maintain and improve wage rates, New Labour because it "rubs the Right's nose in diversity" and - they hope - brings in fresh supporters for the Big State).

"The hegemony is that of coldly calculating careerist politicians and hangers-on who now know how to make the psephological machine work. Bear in mind that only one-third of MPs get 50%+ of the votes cast in a General Election (true in 2007 and 2010, for example), and look how they cooperated across the floor of the House to rubbish the Alternative Vote. Dum and Dee. I shall never forget seeing Cameron lead the applause for Blair as the latter parachuted out of Parliament and into the arms of JPM, and how only 4 MPs sat on their hands.

"I read the Daily Mail, just as Philip appears to read Karl Marx - critically (BTW - reference for the quotation, please?). This is something Radio 4 comedians and their obediently sniggering audiences don't seem to understand. When they slag off the DM, perhaps for the sake of balance they can remind their sycophantic listeners how the journalists in the Guardian newsroom watched the Twin Towers burn live on TV and said the Americans had it coming to them. As far as I'm concerned no paper and no TV station represents "pravda" or "izvestiya"."

And, by the way, as with Assange, I'm glad Snowden has made certain documents public. It's not the Russians that our lot want to hide it from, it's us. In recent years we've begun to understand what our own governments are like - they are, as Charles Lamb said, "as bad as they dare to be" (10 March 1798).

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Max Hastings' devastating revelation of right-wing American sexual practices!

"They want to reset the clock to around 1955, when... sex was kept in its proper place under the carpet." (In the Daily Mail today)

Reporting Heath's Treason (2)

(Pic source)

The adjective "superb" is often awarded too easily, but in this case it is fully justified. Last week, Albert Burgess recounted how he was shown classified documents that proved Edward Heath and others committed treason when they took us into the Common Market in the 1970s, and how he went straight to a police station in Oxford to report the crime. In today's instalment, he discomfits successive levels of police hierarchy by reminding them of their sworn duty to uphold the law.

Whether Albert will ever succeed in his primary aim is uncertain to say the least, but he feels morally bound, and the police are professionally required, to try. The greater issue revealed in this process is, on what does power in this country stand? If it is our constitution, laws, truth and logic, it seems Albert must prevail; if not, we have the dreadful prospect - some would say, a present reality - of arbitrary rule by tyrants.

A few days later I received a letter from one Superintendent Trotman saying he was not going to investigate, his reasons being it would be difficult to obtain evidence as all the witnesses were dead (not true), R vs. Commissioner of the Metropolis exparte Blackburn 1968 gave the police the right to decide which crimes they investigate and which they don't, and he was not prepared to allocate his resources.

I wrote him and told him that treason required him to investigate as a priority, that Blackburn was nonsense and that a lot of the people who worked with Heath were not only not dead but readily available.

A couple of days later a woman police officer who was Superintendent Trotman’s assistant phoned me and said, "What exactly do you want?"

I said, "I want to turn on the six o'clock news and see Douglas Hurd in handcuffs being helped into the back of a police car, and 10 months later I want to see him and others on trial for his life at the old Bailey."

She said, "I will put this through to Special Branch."

I said, "Give me their number so I can talk to them."

She said, “Hold on, he's just walked past my door, I’ll get him."

After a few seconds a Detective Inspector from Special Branch came on the phone. He said, "I know about this, and have allocated a woman detective constable to it, but she is very busy and will not get to you for three weeks."

I said. "Give her my number and tell her if I have not heard from her in five days I will submit a formal allegation of neglect of duty against her."

The following morning she phoned to tell me she had a two hour window and could come and see me. We arranged for her to come about noon and I phoned David Barnby to see if he wanted to be there; he did and he arrived about half an hour before two detectives. I explained what Heath had done and what the crimes were and handed over another set of documents, and then they left.

After a number of letters Superintendent Trotman wrote to say he was not going to conduct the investigation. So I submitted a formal allegation against him for neglect of duty under the police discipline codes and for Misprision of Treason at Common Law.

Two weeks later I had a knock on my door and a Chief Inspector Howard from the complaints department and his Sergeant were there. I invited them in and DCI Howard told me they had cleared the Superintendent.

I said "Did you read the documents?" He said, "I glanced at them." I said, "Did you read them?" He said, "I glanced at them." I said, "Without reading them and studying the treason laws, how can you clear him or convict him?" He said, "Well, we have because we don't want the Chief Constable’s photo on the front page of every newspaper as the Chief Constable investigating the government for treason." I said, "She hasn't got to be Chief Constable without having her picture taken, and I am not asking her to go topless on page 3."

Then he confirmed what I had been hoping they would not notice when he said, "The real reason we are not going to do this, is that if we get a conviction against any of Heath's people, which we probably could on the evidence you have supplied, we would have to go out and arrest every government minister for the last 35 years, and that we are not prepared to do." I said, "You are not allowed to make the decision on those grounds, you have to follow the evidence where it leads you."

He got up to leave and I said, "How do you like knowing I know you are a liar?" He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You took an oath to uphold the laws of this country without favour, fear, malice or ill will. You have just told me because it means arresting government ministers you are not going to do it. That makes you a liar."

He left in a huff.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Default Risk Zero

So the US government is having a little argument about the debt ceiling again. China and Japan have warned that a US default might be a little nasty and even the President himself has warned of financial Armageddon.

So why are the markets so sanguine? Where's the panic?

Well we all know there will be a last-minute deal, it's like those clichéd cop dramas where you know the protagonist is in no real danger. If there was any doubt in your mind take a look at the appointment of über dove Janet Yellen to the chair of the Federal Reserve. A sure signal that they plan to print to infinity.

Back to sleep everyone, no story here.

However…

The US government have no option but default, the only question is when, but that my friend is another story.

A graphic tale

This is a wee story of days gone by, imparted to me in the seventies.

Once upon a time there was a small laboratory on the edge of the great unknown. Not too far from Birmingham to be more precise. This little laboratory carried out basic tests on waste water such as sewage effluent, including a test for ammonia.

A simple chemical test was used where a colour develops in the test cell, the intensity of colour indicating how much ammonia is present in the water sample. Light absorbed by the colour allows an ammonia concentration to be read off from a previously prepared calibration graph.

In this case the calibration graph was kept in a drawer where it had been stored for so long that it had become tatty and disreputable as laboratory paperwork usually did in those days. It had never been checked either, until that fatal day when some keen person decided to recalibrate the test and draw a brand new graph on a fresh sheet of graph paper.

Oh dear.

The old calibration graph turned out to be wrong by a factor of two. For years, ammonia concentrations in the effluent had been reported as twice what they actually were.

What to do?

During the following few months, the scientists concerned made a series of small adjustments to their calibration graph, eventually bringing it into line with reality. Nobody was any the wiser, although a welcome improvement in the ammonia levels of the effluent did not go unnoticed.

Not a typical episode in scientific history I should add. It took place in the sixties too. Not a reliable period, yet by analogy it provokes a question. Do climate modellers intend to do something similar if the climate continues to misbehave? Of course in a sense the Met Office already has.

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Dead Man's Fingers

Xylaria polymorpha or Dead Man's Fingers growing on a dead tree near Cromford in Derbyshire. Good name isn't it?

Monday, October 07, 2013

Lentil-knitters of the world, unite!

If you haven't seen it, there is a fascinating finding from the CERN CLOUD experiment about the possible effect of amines on cloud nucleation in the upper atmosphere.

Amines are atmospheric vapours closely related to ammonia, and are emitted both from human activities such as animal husbandry, and from natural sources. Amines are responsible for odours emanating from the decomposition of organic matter that contains proteins. For example, the smell of rotten fish is due to trimethylamine. The CLOUD experiment's unique ultra-clean chamber allowed the collaboration to demonstrate that the extremely low concentrations of amines typically found in the atmosphere - a few parts per trillion by volume - are sufficient to combine with sulphuric acid to form highly stable aerosol particles at high rate

Source : http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1033278

Animal husbandry eh? Maybe that's one small step for climate science, a giant leap for vegans.

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 17

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.

What do the 'Climategate' hacked CRU emails tell us?

Link to this page

What the science says...

Select a level...	Intermediate		Advanced
A number of independent investigations from different countries, universities and government bodies have investigated the stolen emails and found no evidence of wrong doing. Focusing on a few suggestive emails, taken out of context, merely serves to distract from the wealth of empirical evidence for man-made global warming.

Climate Myth...

Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy:

“[T]he 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. […] emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.” (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun)

In November 2009, the servers at the University of East Anglia in Britain were illegally hacked and emails were stolen. When a selection of emails between climate scientists were published on the internet, a few suggestive quotes were seized upon by many claiming global warming was all just a conspiracy. A number of independent enquiries have investigated the conduct of the scientists involved in the emails. All have cleared the scientists of any wrong doing:

In February 2010, the Pennsylvania State University released an Inquiry Report that investigated any 'Climategate' emails involving Dr Michael Mann, a Professor of Penn State's Department of Meteorology. They found that "there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data". On "Mike's Nature trick", they concluded "The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field."
In March 2010, the UK government's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report finding that the criticisms of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) were misplaced and that CRU’s "Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community".
In April 2010, the University of East Anglia set up an international Scientific Assessment Panel, in consultation with the Royal Society and chaired by Professor Ron Oxburgh. The Report of the International Panel assessed the integrity of the research published by the CRU and found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit".
In June 2010, the Pennsylvania State University published their Final Investigation Report, determining "there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann".
In July 2010, the University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report. They examined the emails to assess whether manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that "The scientists’ rigor and honesty are not in doubt".
In July 2010, the US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the emails and "found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets."
In September 2010, the UK Government responded to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report, chaired by Sir Muir Russell. On the issue of releasing data, they found "In the instance of the CRU, the scientists were not legally allowed to give out the data". On the issue of attempting to corrupt the peer-review process, they found "The evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers".
In February 2011, the Department of Commerce Inspector General conducted an independent review of the emails and found "no evidence in the CRU emails that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data".
In August 2011, the National Science Foundation concluded "Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed".

Just as there are many independent lines of evidence that humans are causing global warming, similarly a number of independent investigations have found no evidence of falsification or conspiracy by climate scientists.

"Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline"

The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.

The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem...

Trenberth's "travesty we can't account for the lack of warming"

The second most cited email is from climate scientist and IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth. The highlighted quote is this: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." This has been most commonly interpreted (among skeptics) as climate scientists secretly admitting amongst themselves that global warming really has stopped. Trenberth is actually discussing a paper he'd recently published that discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going (Trenberth 2009).

In Trenberth's paper, he discusses how we know the planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, surface temperature sometimes shows short term cooling periods. This is due to internal variability and Trenberth was lamenting that our observation systems can't comprehensively track all the energy flow through the climate system. More on Trenberth's travesty...

The full body of evidence for man-made global warming

An important point to realise is that the emails involve a handful of scientists discussing a few pieces of climate data. Even without this data, there is still an overwhelming and consistent body of evidence, painstakingly compiled by independent scientific teams from institutions across the world.

What do they find? The planet is steadily accumulating heat. When you add up all the heat building in the oceans, land and atmosphere plus the energy required to melt glaciers and ice sheets, the planet has been accumulating heat at a rate of 190,260 Gigawatts over the past 40 years (Murphy 2009). Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 Gigawatt, imagine over 190,000 power plants pouring their energy output directly into heating our land and oceans, melting ice and warming the air.

This build-up of heat is causing ice loss across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at an accelerated rate (Velicogna 2009, ). Even East Antarctica, previously thought to be too cold and stable, is now losing ice mass (Chen 2009). Glacier shrinkage is accelerating. Arctic sea ice has fallen so sharply, observations exceed even the IPCC worst case scenario. The combination of warming oceans and melting ice has resulted in sea level rise tracking the upper limit of IPCC predictions.

Rising temperatures have impacted animal and plant species worldwide. The distribution of tree lines, plants and many species of animals are moving into cooler regions towards the poles. As the onset of spring is happening earlier each year, animal and plant species are responding to the shift in seasons. Scientists observe that frog breeding, bird nesting, flowering and migration patterns are all occurring earlier in the year (Parmeson 2003). There are many other physical signs of widespread warming. The height of the tropopause, a layer in our atmosphere, is rising (Santer 2003). Arctic permafrost, covering about 25% of Northern Hemisphere land, is warming and degrading (Walsh 2009). The tropical belt is widening (Seidel 2007). These results are all consistent with global warming.

What’s causing this heat build-up? Humans are emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - 29 billion tonnes in 2009 (CDIAC). Greenhouse theory predicts that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will trap heat energy as it escapes out to space. What do we observe? Carbon dioxide absorbs heat at certain wavelengths. Satellites over the past 40 years find less heat escaping to space at these wavelengths (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007). Where does the heat go? Surface measurements find more heat returning back to the Earth's surface (Philipona 2004). Tellingly, the increase occurs at those same carbon dioxide absorption wavelengths (Evans 2006). This is the human fingerprint in global warming.

There are multiple lines of empirical evidence that global warming is happening and human activity is the cause. A few suggestive emails may serve as a useful distraction for those wishing to avoid the physical realities of climate change. But they change nothing about our scientific understanding of humanity’s role in global warming.

Last updated on 18 March 2012 by dana1981. View Archives

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From money to weather to money

Martin Armstrong's latest post advertises Planalytics Inc, a company specialising on business-relevant weather forecasting. According to Armstrong, he was connected with its forerunner, Strategic Weather, and the system employs cyclical models that he claims are far more accurate than traditional forecasting methods.

Armstrong has been interested in cycles for over 40 years, having developed his own "Economic Confidence Model" for investment. It's based on an 8.6-year cycle that when multiplied by the number of days in the solar year (365.25) yields a number approximating to Pi (π), which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Why this number should be relevant to investment is a mystery to me, but it appears to work for Armstrong.

Anyhow, an approach that started with business is now applied to weather and then back to business - a cycle of its own.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Sunday, October 06, 2013

The bonds of behaviour

It seems to me that one of life’s little problems is conversation, or rather lack of conversation. How many people are there in your particular circle with whom you have meaty conversations. Serious conversations about the existence of God, life on other planets, climate change, political correctness, moral standards or whatever.

Is it related to this dumbing-down we keep hearing about? Maybe not, maybe it’s more fundamental. To my mind it has something to do with the fact, at least I think it’s a fact, that we are not encouraged to be analytical with respect to our own behaviour.

One of the oldest and most enduring social discoveries is the idea that we simply respond to a stimulus in a way that has previously been positive for us and avoid those which have been negative. It goes back at least as far as the pleasure/pain principle of Epicurus, although to my mind the word pleasure has too many physical connotations and peace is often better.

From Wikipedia

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends.

However we describe it, our lives are a record of positive and negative impacts and feedbacks and the way they made us what we are. It’s a simple enough philosophy and very powerful but we don’t make much direct use of it. Yet the rich and powerful have always used it as the primary method of social control. It is used today in mind-boggling detail and presumably always will be.

We don’t seem teach the pleasure/pain principle to children in any systematic way though, even though the idea is simple, suited to role playing and the value of it screamingly obvious. I wonder why?

Perhaps the whole idea is just too revealing?

The rich and powerful still need it as much as ever because they don’t have anything else. So they have to use it covertly, obliquely or at least keep it below the mainstream radar most of the time.

David Cameron’s reference to nudge theory is an obvious example of how the idea is still seen as politically unidirectional – from rulers to ruled. After all, anyone might reasonably ask how Cameron responds to nudges from the electorate. Maybe he responds to winks from his cronies instead.

Sip a cup of coffee and put it down because it is too hot. Stimulus and response – we are bound by it throughout our lives but rarely bring it into the open and admit the mechanical nature of much of what we do – much of what we are. Maybe there is anticipated pain which prevents us from knowing too much about ourselves.

A painful shattering of illusions perhaps?

Energy Policy: Omnibus Post

For most of the time we are all capable of sailing serenely on in ignorance of how fundamentally our world-views differ from those of others; but once in a while the chasm is illuminated by a bolt from the blue.

One such event happened when Miliband launched his 'energy price freeze' policy. I and many others in the 'sphere and MSM alike immediately clapped our hands to our heads and proclaimed, that's it ! - he's completely lost it, and shot himself in the vitals on prime-time TV to boot. We clearly thought the lunacy of it would be obvious to all.

But not a bit of it, because the reaction of other commentators was: a price freeze - so what ? No big deal, even if it's not something we particularly applaud; and anyhow, the energy companies had it coming.

In other words, there is no general consensus or shared understanding on some pretty basic energy market concepts. So here are some responses to the interesting exchanges between 'Timbo', 'BE' and 'BQ' on the comments thread to a recent C@W post. I'm going to focus on short- / medium-term, (say, out to 15 years hence) because the really long-term stuff is unknowable, thanks to technology shifts we can barely guess at. (In which latter category I place Timbo's fascinating comments on electricity storage, the Holy Grail of energy policy which would transform the landscape.)

The paramount fundamental is that electricity has staggering high 'utility value', i.e. people (in developed economies) will pay almost any price to get it. Second only to food, for most people. (Water comes third because you can generally makes your own arrangements, up to a point.) By this standard, as Timbo wrote, "...how cheap the grid is. It's dirt cheap". And when people will pay almost any price ... things can go horribly wrong.

Notwithstanding various developments in micro- and distributed-generation, and predictions of more to come, the kind of electricity and energy we all want - permanently available, in bulk, almost everywhere we go, and relatively cheap - requires centralised 'organisation' (grids, despatch and balancing systems), if not actually 20th-century style centralised generation. And this isn't just power for domestic use, schools and hospitals: as BQ said, "you can't run a blast furnace on wood". The saintly George Moonbat tried very hard to run a self-sufficient smallholding in Wales, and just about managed OK for a couple of years until he had a bad winter - after which he suddenly became a convert to nuclear power.

It used to be thought (and still is, in some dark quarters) that only centralised ownership, or at least centralised control, could deliver the goods: but this was comprehensively disproved in the UK and other regions with the advent of full bilateral (self-despatching) markets at the beginning of this century, which not only confounded the statists dirigistes by working at all, they worked better, and reduced electricity costs as their proponents (incl. yours truly) said they would. Even the Labour Party still signs up for this, (see Caroline Flint on Brillo's Sunday programme: and the changes that brought it about in in the UK 2001 were put through Parliament by Mandelson) so dissenters are up against it politically.

But there are problems. Firstly, bilateral market structures, though basically robust, are vulnerable to large-scale interference by the heavy-handed and dull-witted. This includes many politicians and almost all civil servants. In particular, there is a limit to how much ill-considered (indeed, sometimes actually infeasible) 'decarbonisation' policy can be loaded onto a market framework without it buckling. Of course, in this country the rot started under Miliband lui-même when in power - oh the irony - but has been further perpetrated here by t'Coalition (and on an even more manic scale in Germany).

(As an aside, the chronic state of our Heath-Robinson energy policy makes it very easy for any politician to score a few easy and populist points against it. That Miliband is the first one to do so on a grand scale, is just hilarious.)

The second point is that those bilateral market structures are relatively new and by no means perfected, even before they started to be messed with. In particular, (a) liquidity in some parts of the power markets, here and elsewhere, left quite a lot to be desired. Liquidity, for those who don't have an instinct for it (this includes many politicians and almost all civil servants ...) is absolutely vital for markets to deliver for consumers. Ofgem, which had this forcibly brought to their attention nearly a decade ago, has been farting around ineffectually on the issue ever since.

(b) A related point: the state of competition is unsatisfactory. There is no reason why the current UK 'supply' set-up - 6 massive players plus a host of lesser ones - shouldn't make for a competitive market. It is, in fact, more competitive than many people give it credit for. But there's a damaging, mutually reinforcing effect at work: unsatisfactory wholesale liquidity makes suppliers migrate towards vertical integration (i.e., becoming generators as well), which further reduces liquidity ... etc etc.

[To illustrate: Centrica set out in 1996 intending to be a capital-S Specialised Supplier (of gas and power), with no power generation at all and limited gas production of its own (the 'merchant', or 'Enron' model). But over the years, they found liquidity in the wholesale markets less than satisfactory. So they have slowly become more and more vertically integrated, to the point where now they have about 75% cover for their supply obligations from their own 'upstream' assets (power plants, gas fields and some large long-term purchases). This means that, where once they were trading in the wholesale markets for almost all their needs, they are now only trading for 25% (net) of their needs, plus some spec trading etc.]

Two dreadful policy decisions have gravely exacerbated this situation. The first was to allow large-scale vertical integration by acquisition. This was of course re-integration, because throughout the whole of the 1990's, Ofgas and Offer (the worthy predecessors of Ofgem) had been preoccupied with breaking up the old verticals (themselves the products of the two big privatisations of the 1980s). The worst examples of vertical integration by acquisition were (1) Powergen's purchase of Eastern Electricity and other UK assets, followed by E.on's subsequent purchases of both Powergen here and Ruhrgas in Germany; (2) EDF's purchase of British Energy. These should have been stopped by UK and EC regulators - not because vertical integration is intrinsically wicked, but because the markets weren't sufficiently liquid at the time. (In fact, truly liquid markets make vertical integration a very dubious commercial proposition - which is the virtuous-circle side of the liquidity picture. We are stuck with the vicious circle.)

The second disaster for the liquidity/competition downward spiral is the manner in which decarbonisation is being pursued. In the UK this means the ridiculous 'Electricity Market Reforms', which - take it from me - undermine liquidity still further, even as ministers and Ofgem continue to pay lip-service to the need for better liquidity. It's hugely perverse, because several critical aspects of EMR are wholly dependent on there being deeply liquid markets in existence. They will fail miserably, and piecemeal government interventions of the most grotesque kind will result - the civil servants can hardly contain their excitement at the prospect. And they will probably keep the lights on, because we can and will pay (see above) - almost any price.

Which brings us back to Miliband's 'price freeze'. I've banged on too long already to dissect this in detail. Suffice to repeat: it's bonkers, it's a cheap populist shot, and will have negative consequences far outweighing any limited relief it may deliver to consumers. Interestingly, in answer to Brillo's questions Caroline Flint (who, it must be said, was quite well briefed) quickly mentioned the really significant new Labour policy, which is to re-introduce something akin to the 'Pool market' (i.e. an end to the bilateral / self-despatch system) which was how things were run here in the 1990's. It wasn't a disaster, but it was definitely very inefficient. And - oh, how these things go full circle - it was dreamed up by Oliver sh*t-for-brains Letwin ! (Who still hankers after it, I can tell you, as do civil servants and all the old CEGB dinosaurs.)

This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.