It’s a draft.

I will improve it. But it’s already on the table.

Now would anyone (serious) like to debate it?

It’s this plan he wants to debate.

I would happily do so. Neutral territory, neither my blog nor his. Comments to be controlled by neither of us.

I don’t think he’ll take me up on this though. For I have a funny feeling that because I’ve already shown my opinion of his theorising thus I’m not “serious”.

This is the speech which Richard has written about here:

Last evening I spoke at a meeting in St Helier, talking, seemingly to the audience’s pleasure for 30  minutes and taking questions for more than 75 minutes after that, the while thing only slightly delayed by local television interviews.

The text is here.

Now I’ve been sent an email which tells me that:

I hope this may amuse you. One thing the Channel TV piece you linked to neglected to mention: only six people turned up to his little talk, according to our local rag. I believe three of them were politicians from the “party” that invited him.

Now I have no way of checking this at all other than to ask anyone who did go to the meeting (or who can find the newspaper report) whether this is true or, as Richard himself says, attendance was better than that:

I guess about 100 came

Do we have any Jersey readers here (other than the one who emailed me)?Anyone with a link to the report in hte local rag?

Update from our correspondent in Jersey:

Good instincts on your part, as it seems I have made a bit of cock-up – for which I sincerely apologise. As Richard Murphy points out in the comments to that post, the attendance-of-six was a lecture he held for all States Members (53 in total), not the public meeting.

Via, we find out that Press TV’s bank account has been frozen.

What amuses is that one of my appearances on the channel was precisely to talk about the freezing of Interpal’s account.

Two years ago, the Palestinian charity Interpal suffered almost precisely just such a business attack. Interpal still has major banking problems because their account with Islamic Bank of Britain has no external clearing facilities. Basically, banks can pick and choose who they hold accounts for, and can close accounts without any reasons being given and with no right of appeal.

The reason being bandied about back then was that Interpal was, under US banking law, considered to be financing or aiding naughty stuff in some manner. Which meant that a UK bank which offered them an account could lose its US licence to operate.

I would assume, but have no real idea about it, that something similar has happened here. Perhaps some effect of US sanctions against Iran means that NatWest fears that providing Press TV with an account could threaten their USD interests.

I’d just go one step further and point out that insisting upon greater regulation of the banking system might not lead to results that all lefties devoutly desire.

Over the past few months I have become, and remain, deeply embedded in the student movement in the UK and Europe. Many of the young people who feature in the piece – on whose activities I’ve been keeping meticulous notes, and who are of a similar age and political attitude to myself – have since become as close to personal friends as observational subjects ever can be. It’s not so much a question of going native as finding that all the other natives have suddenly come out of the forest to take on the invaders. This has stretched my objectivity to its limits.

When the police report back on having done this sort of thing it’s an outrage. When a journalist does it’s umm, well, different.

And no, don’t even go there. We just don’t want to think about it, OK?

The threat of the Greenland ice sheet slipping ever faster into the sea because of warmer summers has been ruled out by a scientific study.

Until now, it was thought that increased melting could lubricate the ice sheet, causing it to sink ever faster into the sea. The issue was a key unknown in the landmark 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which pinned the blame for climate change firmly on greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.

….

Researchers had feared that more melting from the surface of the ice in hotter years would in turn provide more meltwater for a slippery film at the sheet’s base. More melting would mean more slippage and a greater rise in the sea level.

But they discovered that, above a certain threshold, the slipping began to slow. On-the-ground studies and work done on alpine glaciers suggest that higher volumes of meltwater form distinct channels under the ice, draining the water more efficiently and reducing the formation of a lubricating film.

The Greenland ice sheet studied by Shepherd’s team is up to 1,000m (3,280ft) thick. If the entire ice sheet melted, sea levels would rise by a catastrophic seven metres, but this is likely to take 3,000 years if warm air blowing over the ice is the only way in which the ice melts.

More evidence that what we face is not an immediate and catastrophic problem, but a chronic and long term one.

Greenland melting in full is now pencilled in for 5,010 AD*. Rather a lot of things will change by then: while I’ll not be around to see it of course I’d rather expect there to be a Space Elevator by then for example.

What amuses, I have to say though, is that they’ve reached this conclusion by noting that water flowing downhill, in quantity, seems to form streams and rivers rather than flowing as a sheet down the side of the hill.

You don’t say?

* I have a feeling that they’ve got that 3,000 wrong and that it might actually be 300 but it’s still not an immediate problem.

Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.

Note that it’s actually some are advancing rather than shrinking, not as the headline makes out, all.

And the amusment comes, not from whatever change this might make to climate science. I, as you know, don’t regard myself as competent to comment upon the details of something I know so little about.

No, the amusement comes from this:

Dr Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has remained silent on the matter since he was forced to admit his report’s claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was an error and had not been sourced from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It came from a World Wildlife Fund report.

He angered India’s environment minister and the country’s leading glaciologist when he attacked those who questioned his claim as purveyors of “voodoo science”.

The environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had cited research indicating some Himalayan glaciers were advancing in the face of the UN’s claim.

It’s always nice to see an international bureaucrat with egg on his face.

In her first counterblast Laurie says:

In recent years, both men and women have found that their working hours have increased

In the next paragraph she says:

Men do work longer hours in many industries – but only if you subscribe to the view that paid work is the only work that counts. Women’s unpaid caring, childrearing and domestic labour contributes tens of billions of pounds to this economy, and 35 years after the Equal Pay Act, women’s share of the domestic load remains close to double that of men.

So, quite clearly, Laurie thinks that we should be measuring both paid and unpaid, market and household production, hours, as being work.

Good, I both agree and approve of this.

But if we do do this, as we should, we find however that male and female working hours have been decreasing for the past century or more. For while female market working hours have been rising, male market working hours have been falling. And household production hours for both sexes have been falling: for women by more than market working hours have increased.

Thus by using the definition of working hours that Laurie urges us to use we cannot then say that working hours have increased, for that would be illogical.

Still as I never tire of pointing out, Laurie is the Germaine Greer of our days so it’s only another 40 years before she too will have a gardening column.

The City lads are worrying a bit about this report of uranium in the soil at Hinkley.

I’m not competent to judge the method that this would be Green MEP has used to do his calculations. But I’d just point to two things:

1) However, this value of 330Bq/kg is for high-uranium granite areas like Dartmoor and Aberdeen, so this statement is highly misleading. 330Bq/kg is far too high for normal soils (Eisenbud and Gesell 1997, NCRP94 1981). Data is available for background Uranium in the UK from the Environment Agency 2007 report (Beresford et al 2007), as the authors must have known. The range of Uranium activity given in that report for the area is 1.6 to 2mg/kg or about 18-24Bq/kg. The map of Uranium levels from Beresford et al 2007 is reproduced in Fig 2. High levels above 100Bq/kg are only indicated in the granite areas. We conclude (conservatively) that the levels of Uranium (below 0.4 m depth) in the EDF survey site are up to 40Bq/kg greater than expected.

That is, that if the contamination by enriched uranium is exactly as he’s calculated it to be, the power station has made one corner of Somerset as much as 10% more like another corner of Somerset: radiation levels at Hinkley Point have risen by 10% (ish) of the natural radiation levels on Dartmoor.

Decide for yourself how big a problem this is.

2) an increase of 40Bq/kg over the background natural uranium represents about 10 tonnes of uranium which must have been added from the historic releases

Again, if his calculations are correct, 10 tonnes of uranium has been deposited on the site.

Hmm.

A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could have an uncontrolled release of as much as 5.2 metric tons per year of uranium (containing 82 pounds (37 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 metric tons per year of thorium.^[17]

We’d have to play around a little with the numbers (note, he does not say 10 tonnes U235, he says 10 tonnes enriched uranium, and we don’t know what the level of enrichment with U 235 is) but it’s not immediately apparent that those releases from a nuclear power plant are higher than those from a coal fired one. for do note, those coal figures are annual ones and Hinkley B has been running for 34 years now.

It’s true that there shouldn’t be such emissions. And it may be true (as I say, I don’t know) that our Green friend has shown that there are emissions which there shouldn’t be.

But by his own calculations, we can see that even if he is right, it’s not actually important, the level of contamination. Even if we reject hormesis and so on, he’s shown that the danger is around 10% of the danger of moving 30 miles to Dartmoor.

A leading tax specialist has warned Jersey’s finance system needs to be more open and transparent.

Richard Murphy, from Tax Research UK, says the system needs to be clearer to achieve a successful long-term future.

He says the current secrecy in the system is fuelling rumours of tax avoidance.

I wonder who it is spreading those rumours?

Interesting piece from Standard Chartered:

The third super-cycle started – in our view – in 2000. The period between the second and third super-cycles, from the early 1970s to 2000, was characterised by ongoing economic challenges in the West, a slowdown in Japan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, debt and currency crises in Latin America, and the relatively small size of China and India, both of which were in the early stages of opening up. There was no dynamic driver for the world economy. In 2000 the world economy was $32 trillion in size. Now, following the global recession and financial crisis, the world economy is almost twice the size of a decade ago. There was a significant contraction as a result of the crisis and global recession, but now the world is back to its pre-recession peak. Next year, based on conservative growth assumptions, this could rise to $64.7 trillion. Global trade has also recovered to pre-recession levels.

By 2030 – the time period for this analysis – we believe that the world economy, on the projections laid out here, would rise to $308 trillion, which would equate to $129 trillion in today’s prices and dollars, and would be $143 trillion, keeping prices constant but allowing for some emerging-market currency appreciation (see chart above).

The global economy expands at an average annual rate of about 3% to 2100, reaching around US$550 trillion (all dollar amounts herein are expressed in 1990 dollars, unless stated otherwise). This is approximately the same as average global growth since 1850, although the conditions that lead to this global growth in productivity and per capita incomes in the scenario are unparalleled in history. Global average income per capita reaches about US$21,000 by 2050.

My my:

However, it is probably good news that the pound fell on the GDP news. The recent rise in sterling, on the expectation of rate rises, has made life harder for exporters. And they are the only firms growing at the moment.

Amusing that it’s Larry Elliott who spots it…….

Polar bear swims for nine days.

This is now evidence that polar bears are threatened. When not all that long ago the thought that polar bears might have to swim 10 miles was evidence that they’re threatened.

This investigation into PFI contracts is fascinating:

PFI schools were introduced by the last Labour government as a way of getting new buildings without paying upfront. Hundreds of new schools were delivered. But the contracts, which typically last 30 years, require high annual payments throughout that time and must be honoured regardless of the effects of population change or parental choice on school rolls.

The new Bishops Park School, in Clacton, Essex, was open for only three years before closing after expected housing development failed to materialise.

The building has been taken over by another school, Clacton Coastal Academy, which is temporarily teaching some former Bishops Park pupils in it. However, the academy’s head teacher said he wanted to move them to its main site in Clacton town centre.

About £10 million has already been paid for the school but the PFI contract still requires payments of £1.8 million to be made for the building each year until 2035. In total, taxpayers will have to repay about £55 million for the school, more than twice what the building would be worth even if it was in full use.

In Brighton, the city council had to pay £4.6 million to buy out the contract for the Comart PFI school after it closed due to falling rolls. In County Down, Balmoral High School was closed but taxpayers must still pay the PFI contractor £370,000 a year for the empty building until 2027. Some of the classrooms are in temporary use by another school.

Leave aside the why it was done: Gordon Brown wanted to have lots of infrastructure but didn’t want to have to say he was paying for it. So get it financed off the books.

Leave aside the opposite point, that it isn’t as expensive as it seems, for it rolls together capital and maintenance costs in a way that other methods of budgeting don’t.

Think instead of what this shows us of the socialist (or if you prefer, plannerist) mindset that infest so much of UK society. No, this isn’t limited to the left it’s just more virulent there.

That we should be planning the future: indeed we must. Failing entirely to understand that you simply cannot gather enough information in order to be able to plan the complexity for three decades out.

Sure, of course, you do need to be able to decide where and how large to build schools and you’d rather like them to have a decades long life as infrastucture. But it all needs to be a lot more flexible than deciding 30 years in advance who is going to, or even when they’re going to, repaint the walls.

And if we have this problem with schools, which we do, then imagine how much more difficult the planning of the production side of the economy is going to be? We might be able to make a good guess about what is going to be the hot new technological area in 2018. But anyone seriously predicting what it will be in 2035 (except in the most general terms, biopharma perhaps, or renewable energy) would and should be derided as entirely barking.

And yet we do still have those who would say it is both possible and desirable that we should, through politics and the bureaucracy, try to plan these things.

Even when we’ve the evidence that in something much more stable, schooling, the wheels come off such planning attempts after only a decade.

In short, it’s not just the way that PFI was financed. It’s the way that an attempt was made to plan in detail decades out. something that really just doesn’t work.

No, not as a result of the neoliberalism of the past 30 years. I’m afraid that those who want to say that there has been no improvement in living standards since the 1970s are simply wrong. But real wages are indeed falling:

“In 2011, real wages are likely to be no higher than they were in 2005,” he said. “One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years.

Capitalism does have its booms and busts and we’re in a bust now. We’ve given up all the gains of 6 years of economic growth. Or rather, a couple of years of growth and a few years of not growth have cancelled each other out.

Now yes, it’s true that we humans really don’t like giving up what we already have, valuing what we have much more highly than the equal amount that we could have had but didn’t. So a fall in real incomes is something we dislike much more than a rise that we could have but didn’t get.

But, here’s the crucial point about this capitalism/free market mix. It’s the only system we know of that gives us the booms, in which real wages advance, even at the cost of the busts. And on average over the decades, real wages do increase. Even at 2% (which is somewhere around the historical average) real wages double every 35 years, every generation. And we really haven’t found another system which does such. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t one out there, just that we haven’t found it yet.

Oh, and the real wages of 2005? Bach in 2005 they looked pretty good really, didn’t they? Highest ever?

While now may not be all that enjoyable for the above reasons, it’s rather difficult to say that because real wages are at 2005 levels, we’ve all been plunged into penury.

I have to admit that there’s a part of this ad which I really rather like.

It’s the first bit, naturally. Something falls from the skies with a resounding thump…..what could it be?

What but a fallen angel, quite.

Not really all that sure about the rest of it though: angels falling to earth and shattering their halos over a scruffy Italian kid and his deodorant?

Bit hard to believe really.

After all, we have it on the good authority of Gregory the Great that it’s the Angli who are the Angeli, don’t we?

1. Erol Erçağ,
2. Reşat Apak

Yes, the book, the book, it’s now well over a million!

That’s err, well over one million on the US Amazon’s best seller list.

Then again, it’s only been available from US Amazon for a day so far and they’ve only three left in stock, so get in early.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreased by 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared with an increase of 0.7 per cent in the previous quarter. The GDP estimate was significantly affected by the bad weather in December; more analysis is provided in the bulletin. The decline in the fourth quarter is due to decreases in two of the component aggregate series, namely services and construction.

Total services output decreased by 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter compared with a rise of 0.5 per cent in the previous quarter. The largest contribution to the decline in this quarter was from business services and finance.

How excellent! This is just what everyone wants, isn’t it!

Total production output rose 0.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared with an increase of 0.5 per cent in the third quarter. Manufacturing made the largest contribution to the growth, where output rose 1.4 per cent compared with an increase of 1.1 per cent in the previous quarter.

How glorious! All these people who have been telling us how we’ve got to shrink finance and increase manufacturing. It’s happening!

Isn’t this just wonderful? Ed Balls will greet these figures with glee of course, Mr. Murphy will just be hugging himself with excitement….what?

What?

This is what they’ve been saying we all need isn’t it?