Baroness Scotland: a retrospective

Ah, Baroness Scotland—how we have missed your peculiar and brazen brand of corruption and general troughing! Truly, you are a paragon of the political class—utterly corrupt, but possessed of such a reassuring self-righteousness...

In a series tagged as the Scotland Files, Guido has been unveiling some of the recent financial excesses of this Peer of the Realm—and, now, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. Highlights include:

• extraordinarily highly-paid contracts for spinners, Matthew Doyle and Joe Phelan;
• waiving standard procurement processes in order to hire her mate, Lord Patel, to produce a £90,000 review of her organisation (despite official complaints)—a review that is, by all accounts, not worth the paper that it's written on;
• billing the taxpayer £450,000 to upgrade her grace-and-favour home in Mayfair—including:
  

  £5,000 for a new vanity unit in her bathroom. Her extravagant spending is reminiscent of the duck islands and moats of the expenses scandal. The cost plan shows how the taxpayer was provisionally billed £5,000 for Baroness Scotland’s vanity unit, £2,000 to tile her bathroom, £1,750 for new wallpaper in that room alone and £2,500 to fill in a window. Another £4,000 was spent on maintaining the decorative drapery over a window on the landing.

• with one of her cronies threatening to prosecute those who questioned this profligacy.

Whilst Guido delves further into this horrid harpy's venality, Baroness Scotland continues to lie...

Scotland said it is “untrue” she demanded £4,000 for a mirror-lined cupboard. Here is the cost plan showing her demand for a £4,000 mirror-lined cupboard.

She said there is “no chandelier”. Read the emails where her staff complain about her demands over an “extremely expensive chandelier” here.

She said the total cost would be the original budget “plus the fees plus things that would come up”. Read her staff complaining about how expensive those “things that would come up” are here.

Scotland said she followed all procurement rules to hire her friend Lord Patel on £30,000-a-month. Here is a memo showing procurement practices were waived.

She said her team she denied this all to journalists “again and again and again” before publication. Guido was in regular conversation with her press office until we asked about her Mayfair home. As soon as we started asking about this, they stopped replying. Given multiple opportunities, they did not deny any of these stories…

Now, we have found out that Patricia Scotland claimed "an educational allowance" for her grown-up children too (an obvious way in which to slip her more cash without having to justify it to the taxpayers).

Naturally, all of this has led to complaints from politicians in India and Antigua—countries in which £450,000 would be unimaginable wealth and whose taxpayers are, alongside you and I, paying for her posh paint and fancy chandeliers.

Whilst Guido is doing sterling work on this latest scandal, I thought that readers of The Kitchen might like to be reminded of the last time that we turned the spotlight onto Baroness Scotland—lest we forget...

• Baroness Scotland is no stranger to claiming huge expenses that she shouldn't: in 2009, it was revealed that she had claimed, allegedly, £170,000 that she simply was not entitled to.
• In the same year, it was also revealed that she had received a conviction for "careless driving"—when, as a Home Office lawyer, she had helped to draft laws to crack down on careless drivers.
• 2009 was not a good year for the Baroness. Most famously, of course, Patricia Scotland—may I call you "Patty"?—was one of the Home Office lawyers who drafted the laws concerned with cracking down on illegal immigrants: she then got caught employing an illegal immigrant—in contravention of the law that she helped to bring about.
• Patty maintained that she had seen all of the relevant documentation—although she had not, in contravention of her own law, taken any copies. This was rather embarrassing when the employee in question claimed that she had never been asked to show the relevant documents (because, being an illegal worker, she did not have any).
• Patty called it "a technical oversight" and was fined a mere £5,000 (half of the maximum).
• One of Baroness Scotland's defences was that she had paid the full PAYE taxes on her employee's salary—except that this wasn't true either.
• What a pity that "one of the few Black women in public life" is so obviously corrupt. Baroness Scotland's quite impressive record of lawlessness, hypocrisy, crime, fraud, troughing and sheer dishonesty would shame a Banana Republic dictator.

So, the question needs to be asked—who the fuck decided that Patricia Scotland should be appointed to the important post of Secretary-General of the Commonwealth?—always an important position, and even more so in these days of Brexit...

Bueller? Bueller...?

FFA or and bust

Following their remarkable win, the SNP is now pushing for Full Fiscal Autonomy (FFA) for Scotland. Broadly speaking, this means that Scotland runs its own economy—being able to spend cash and raise money as they please.

The supposed driver for this is that Scotland is a "more socialist" country, willing to pay more tax in order to stave off the tyranny of austerity. This narrative is, of course, bollocks: were it not, the SNP (also the dominant party in Holyrood) would already have used the tax-raising powers that the Parliament has—up to 3p in the pound extra in income tax, if I recall correctly.

Instead, when these powers were granted at devolution, the proposal to use them was attacked as "a Tartan tax". Indeed it may be but one that, if the SNP and other Scottish commentators are to be believed, one that would be welcomed by the austerity-loathing Scottish people.

The fact that the extra tax has not, actually, ever been levied leads one to re-examine that old economics truth of "revealed preferences", i.e. watch what people do, not what they say.

Of course, raising income tax by an extra 3% probably would do little to help the Scottish budget—the projected deficit under FFA is nearly £8 billion (around 10% of Scotland's GDP). In fact, most commentators think that Scotland's Full Fiscal Autonomy would be as disastrous as HP's adoption of Autonomy (yeah—that was a tech world joke (if an old one)).

So, why on earth are the SNP lobbying for FFA—a policy that will, as Alex Massie points out, surely lead to cuts in Scottish public spending that make "austerity" look like the most extravagant fiscal splurges of the more insane Roman emperors?

A clue to what the SNP might be thinking comes from SNP MP George Kerevan, in an article for The National [Emphasis mine—DK].

It is now inconceivable that David Cameron can reject Scottish demands for greater home rule, given that all three mainstream Westminster parties – Tory, Labour and Lib Dem alike – have minimal legitimate authority in Scotland in the wake of May 7. The general election was not a mandate for a second referendum – a point reiterated time after time by Nicola Sturgeon, whatever contrary hares are set running by the battered and bruised Westminster establishment. Nevertheless, the SNP’s electoral success is undoubtedly a mandate for going far beyond the hastily conceived ragbag of new powers contained in the Smith Commission documents.

The SNP maintains that the Smith Commission does not actually give Scotland enough powers (although many English people might argue that the Smith Commission gives the Scottish Parliament a great many powers, with very little responsibility). The Grauniad has summed up the main points, which I reproduce below.

• The Scottish parliament will have complete power to set income tax rates and bands.
• Holyrood will receive a proportion of the VAT raised in Scotland, amounting to the first 10 percentage points of the standard rate (ie with the current standard VAT rate of 20%, Scotland will 50% of the receipts), but cannot influence the UK’s overall UK rate.
• It will have increased borrowing powers, to be agreed with the UK government, to support capital investment and ensure budgetary stability.
• UK legislation will state that the Scottish parliament and Scottish government are permanent institutions. The parliament will also be given powers over how it is elected and run.
• Holyrood will have power to extend the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds, allowing them to vote in the 2016 Scottish parliamentary election.
• It will have control over a number of benefits including disability living allowance, the personal independence payment, winter fuel payments and the housing elements of universal credit, including the under-occupancy charge (bedroom tax).
• The Scottish parliament will also have new powers to make discretionary payments in any area of welfare without the need to obtain prior permission from department for work and pensions.
• It will have all powers of support for unemployed people through employment programmes, mainly delivered at present through the Work Programme.
• It will have control over air passenger duty charged on people flying from Scottish airports.
• Responsibility for the management of the crown estate’s economic assets in Scotland, including the crown estates’s seabed and mineral and fishing rights, and the revenue generated from these assets, will be transferred to the Scottish parliament.
• The licensing of onshore oil and gas extraction underlying Scotland will be devolved to the Scottish parliament.
• The Scottish government will have power to allow public sector operators to bid for rail franchises funded and specified by Scottish ministers.
• The block grant from the UK government to Scotland will continue to be determined via the operation of the Barnett formula. New rules to define how it will be adjusted at the point when powers are transferred and thereafter will be agreed by the Scottish and UK governments and put in place prior to the powers coming into force. These rules will ensure that neither the Scottish nor UK governments will lose or gain financially from the act of transferring a power.
• MPs representing constituencies across the whole of the UK will continue to decide the UK’s budget, including income tax.
• The Scottish and UK governments will draw up and agree a memorandum of understanding to ensure that devolution is not detrimental to UK-wide critical national infrastructure in relation to matters such as defence and security, oil and gas and energy.

Your humble Devil submits that this is very close to FFA, whilst admitting that there are some constraints on how the Scottish Parliament may act. One might argue that a great many of these constraints are there to stop the Scottish Parliament bankrupting its country. Your mileage may vary.

However, the SNP is arguing for Full Fiscal Autonomy. That means that Scotland is entirely responsible for its own economy, right?

Well, you might think that: and now we'll return to George Kerevan's comment [Emphasis mine, again—DK]...

The constitutional ball is well and truly in David Cameron’s end of the field. Cameron’s opening gambit may well be to offer Scotland fiscal autonomy, in return for termination of the Barnett Formula (a mechanism that matches per capita spending changes across the UK constituent nations). We all know that in present UK economic circumstances a fiscally autonomous Scotland would face a significant budget deficit.

For Scotland to accept fiscal autonomy without inbuilt UK-wide fiscal balancing would be tantamount to economic suicide. However, all federal systems have mechanisms for cross subsidising regions in economic need by regions in surplus. To deny that to Scotland suggests a disingenuous Mr Cameron is hoping to derail any move to Scottish Hole Rule within the UK.

Wow. Yes, that's right: George Kerevan—and, we must assume, he is a proxy for the SNP—is seriously suggesting that Scotland be given Full Fiscal Autonomy except when it doesn't have the money to afford it.

Just sit back and admire the chutzpah—George is saying that the Scottish Parliament should be given free rein to run things as it likes. Except that when the Scots overspend, rack up debts, or just go batshit wild with the cheque book, the rest of England should have to bail them out. Kerevan is proposing that English taxpayers chuck another £7 billion a year at the Scots before they've even started turning on the spending taps (because who, genuinely, thinks that they won't?).

What the SNP are holding up—as an expectation—is a total lack of any responsibility. Kerevan is proposing is that no matter how much the Scottish government screws up—no matter how fecklessly Holyrood runs the national finances, or shamelessly its parties bribe their voters—the people of England should be expected to bail out the Scottish nation regardless.

There really is only one answer to this, and its very simple: fuck off.

David Cameron, in concert with Miliband and Clegg, has already betrayed England by his shameless capitulation—a.ka. "the promise"—to the Scots after the Independence Referendum: it is entirely possible that this spineless Buttered New Potato will sell us down the river by agreeing to this shit too.

If he does, we might finally see the anger of the English people burn hot enough to march down Whitehall—parading Cameron's massive, shiny head on a fucking stick.

And not before time, frankly.

UPDATE: have the SNP been monitoring the Kitchen for suggestions...?

Why state sector budgets rise every year

John Redwood gives us this handy cut-out-and-keep guide—from when he was a County Councillor—as to why public sector budgets rise year on year.

When I first entered the public sector as a County Councillor I was amazed at the extraordinary way the finances of a large public body were organised. It seemed designed to prevent sensible controls being placed on spending.

I joined the Finance Committee. I was working as a finance professional in my main job. I found the very long papers we were sent for each meeting also impossible to understand. They used all sorts of funny numbers to prevent you working out how much cash was being spent. They changed the year base for the budgets, they used inflation adjusted numbers without explaining properly how the inflation adjustment was judged, or where the future forecasts of inflation came from. They assumed that once an item had made it into a budget it would be rolled forward and augmented every year as an inescapable commitment. Figures were in “real terms” rather than cash.

Each year’s budget was an exercise in officer lobbying for more spending. Instead of showing you what was being spent and leaving you to decide what to delete and what to increase, they added all sorts of figures into the previous year’s budget to give you a “New base budget” for the following year. This added in sums for inflation, for “unavoidable commitments”, for “new functions required by Statute”, for “consequences of past decisions”, for “responsibility and age related pay allowances”, for “pension commitments” and the rest. By the time they has finished they normally reckoned that anything less than say a 7% increase would require “cuts”, as you were invited to assume the adjusted budget and then apply the knife at your peril if you were someone who clearly did not understand the remorseless arithmetic of more public spending. If you insisted on a lower budget they would then oblige with the parade of bleeding stumps, offering up a list of cuts that no sane person let alone a politician could possibly approve.

And a shorter guide on how to curb these sly and dishonest measures...

I asked for shorter cash budgets, with clear figures for the main spending heads so we could have an informed debate over what worked, what needed improving, and what could be removed. The officers called that “zero base budgets”, because we refused to accept that anything in the previous year’s budget automatically qualified for the following year. We also wanted to analyse all the so called unavoidable commitments, as these were often judgements or concealed “growth items” which otherwise appeared as a smaller different list for Councillor decision.

"You gotta ask yourself one question..."

Where I ever in such a position, I would announce that any civil servant bringing a first draft budget that was higher than the previous year's would be sacked instantly.

Said civil servant might, of course, calculate that no one would go through all of the trouble of fighting the inevitable union bollocks, and employment tribunals and suchlike.

On the other hand, perhaps they'd like to ask themselves one question...

A stirring speech...

Can you guess who said this recently...?

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

Good stuff, eh? I bet the answer will surprise you...

Refusal to see the irony

Sitting in Edinburgh airport, I have just watched a representative of the Dowler family [...]* earnestly telling BBC News reporters that this general furore has demonstrated "the power of the public can defeat an organisation, no matter how large" [from memory and thus possibly paraphrased].

And all of this delivered from in front of Number 10 Downing Street.

The righteous and totally hysterical attitude of people like this—when, let's face it, no one at the NotW actually murdered Milly Dowler or, indeed, anyone else—would be annoying enough.

But to deliver it from in front of what might be designated the effective headquarters to a "large" organisation that maintains its power through thuggery, extortion and violence—that derives its mandate from, quite frankly, mob rule.

Oh, and look...! Here's rent-a-gob Don Foster MP, telling us all that it is a "great testament to the power of the British people that they have forced Parliament to take the strong line that they have on this matter." [Again, from memory.]

And now Don Foster MP has just dropped a massive hint that Parliament thinks that, not only should NewsCorp not be allowed to buy the rest of BSkyB—through not being a "fit person"—but that the government should use the same excuse to steal the 39% that NewsCorp currently owns.

Thus neatly proving my points, above, about "mob rule", "thuggery, extortion and violence".

Thanks, Don, you fuckwit, for confirming that we should fear and loathe you and your endemically corrupt cronies even more than Murdoch.

* UPDATE 00.47 14/7/11: I have deleted the observation used here, since it detracts from the point of the post and some people got their knickers in a twist about it.

I would point out—as I have in the reply to the vicariously-outraged Anonymous—that the Dowlers have now made themselves into a political issue. Regardless of what happened to their daughter—which was (and I really shouldn't have to say this but, given the current hysteria, I must) really unpleasant—the Dowlers are using their situation and the accompanying media profile to drive some developments that I consider extremely dangerous to freedom in this country.

Who should control the press? or The Madness of Green George

As a man who, for a few brief articles, looked like he might not be a total moron, one might have hoped that George Monbiot might not have been an utter arsehole about the current travails of the press—but no...

So what can be done?

I don't know, George—why don't you tell us...? Oh, wait, you're going to aren't you? This had better be good...

Because of the peculiar threat they present to democracy...

Um... I think that there are rather bigger threats to democracy, George. The European Union springs to mind, as does our own derisory system of "representative democracy".

But, OK, I'll humour you. What's your solution...?

... there’s a case to be made for breaking up all majority interests in media companies, and for a board of governors, appointed perhaps by Commons committee, to act as a counterweight to the shareholders’ business interests.

Aaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha! Aaaahaha!

You fucking what? This is a joke, right?

You think that the press should be—indeed, most definitely is (so much so that the shareholders' property should be appropriated)—a brake on the excesses of our lords and masters, and the people that you think should control the press are the fucking politicians?

Are you completely fucking INSANE...?

I would like to state this plainly, George: you seriously think that the people who should control what is published about our politicians should be our politicians?

I thought that you were on your way to some kind of Damascene conversion: it seems, instead, that all your recent articles were actually a slow-burning descent into raving lunacy.

So sad...

The art of letter-writing...

As Bishop Hill points out, someone submitted a partially successful FoI request for the Climategate emails of UAE Chancellor, Brandon Gough. There's not a massive amount of interesting stuff, but the following letter was—I thought—most amusing...

Dear Sir,

I am inquiring about the possibility of employment at the University.

I was recently sacked from my previous job for conspiring to distort company figures. Before that I was fired for gross incompetence and for losing critical corporate data; and before that for attempting to corrupt audits by getting my mates assigned to the role, and for attempting to cover-up my dishonesty by criminally inciting others to delete incriminating files and emails.

I was thinking maybe something in your Climate Research Unit, but I'm concerned I
may be over-qualified.

I also have two convictions for fraud. Is this enough?

Please advise soonest.

Yours Sincerely...

It's funny because it's true...

There is another option

Apparently councils are being told that they aren't going to get so much money from central government.

Now, when funding is being cut, there are two routes that organisations could take:

1. raise more money
2. stop spending so much money

Which route do you think that our local councils are going to take...?

That's right: they are going for the raise more money route. And one of the ideas that they have come up with is that private businesses should pay for any free parking that they supply to their employees.

Initially, the parking levy was seen as a way to tackle congestion and cut carbon emissions. Now, there is growing evidence it is also being seen as a source of extra cash. Nottingham City Council will be the first council to impose a £250 levy on local employers, from 2012. Within two years, the bill will rise to £350 and will target all companies with 11 or more parking spaces.

A Daily Telegraph investigation found many other councils are now preparing to follow suit.
Bristol City Council, for example, in its draft strategy, describes the levy as a "revenue stream" to help fund other transport initiatives.

Under proposals being considered by York City Council, the charge would be paid "by the employer or charged to the employee".

I absolutely cannot see how York City Council could possibly charge employees for parking on their employers' private land; sure, they could charge the employers, and the employers could pass that charge onto their employees, but that's not quite the same. But again, I don't really see how any council can be allowed to dictate the uses to which anyone puts their own, private land.

Hampshire County Council, meanwhile, is considering a "modest"—but unspecified—charge for the south of the region, including Southampton and Portsmouth, to, says a consultation document, "redress the imbalance between free commuter parking for some staff at office complexes" and "parking for other staff in public spaces where payment is required".

Yeah, well, the public spaces can be charged for by the council because the council owns the public spaces. It does not own private land.

Further, if Hampshire County Council really wanted to "redress the imbalance between free commuter parking for some staff at office complexes" and "parking for other staff in public spaces where payment is required", then it could simply stop charging for the public spaces, couldn't they?

But no, that wouldn't work, would it? For how else would councils be able to employ people to sit around on their arses all day, or go off sick for six months at a time?

Here, one employee for a large inner London authority lifts the lid on the culture of inertia and incompetence at his workplace. The Mail knows the true identity of the man - a graduate who has been a planning officer for eight years. But to protect his job, he is writing under an assumed name.

Monday morning, it's 10am and I'm late for work - but there's no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I'll be the first to arrive at the office.
...

Our department has 60 employees and—until last Tuesday—a budget of £22million.

I've been there for two years and in that period the only time I've ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.

At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen - she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months.

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.

In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.
But she's really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse: witchcraft. That's right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.

She has already been off for four months on full pay. I've no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day - the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced.
But having just eight weeks of full pay left won't be a problem for Doreen and the rest of the council's sickly staff - they'll simply return to work when the six months is up, put in a day or two's work and then go off sick for another six months on full pay again. Easy.
...

All credit to the bright-eyed young HR manager who, last year, wanted to dismiss a senior employee who had been off sick for three months.

The employee had still been using his company mobile phone, from Marbella.

However, the employee was able (with a little help from the mighty Unison union) to argue that there's no reason why 'sick' people can't rent villas in the Costa Del Sol.
...

Back to the day's business. Jerry is the next to arrive at 10.25am - before he takes his jacket off he performs his morning ritual of taking both his phones off the hook.

God forbid that any resident and council tax payer should be able to speak to him and get some of the advice he's paid £64k a year to dispense.

Jerry is 63 and two years from retirement. He is what is known in the civil service and local government as an 'untouchable' - he's been at the council for more than 40 years, does no work, but would cost an absolute fortune to get rid of.

So he's left alone to play online poker, Skype his daughter in Florida and take his two-hour daily snooze at his desk, no doubt dreaming of the day when his gold-plated public sector pension will kick in.

If you think Jerry's pay is generous, consider this: the head of my department is on an annual salary of £170k plus bonuses, his deputy nets £99k and even the office PAs are on a very respectable £38k - just two thousand less than I get.
...

Although it's two years since I started working for this authority I've also worked for two other London boroughs in various capacities over a period of 12 years. In that time I've never known anybody be sacked, no matter how inept and unprofessional they may be.
...

Next week there is a two-day course on 'letter writing skills' - I dearly hope that Jackie, our departmental PA, will attend this one. I've given up using her and now type my own correspondence and reports.

The last time she typed a letter for me (to an architect) she misspelt 'accommodation' and 'environment' throughout.

I gently pointed this out to her and asked her to redo the document. But she went sick for two weeks with stress, complaining that she was being bullied.

When my boss called me in to discuss this I, jokingly, said: 'Well I'll just let her misspell everything in future, shall I?' To which he replied: 'Yes, I think that's best for now.'
...

The cuts and pay freezes are desperately needed, but the one thing Mr Osborne will never be able to control is the culture of inertia and inefficiency that is rife throughout the public sector.

Of course, when I tell my friends in the private sector about my working conditions, they can scarcely believe it. As the recession bites, they consider themselves lucky to be holding on to their jobs, and are willing to work extra hours or take a pay freeze to ensure their firm's survival.

In the public sector, though, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to cuts costs or improve efficiency. Few genuinely fear for their job security, protected as they are by threats of union action every time the axe looks likely to fall.
...

In my authority's borough, the average householder pays £1,330 a year in council tax. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know that they're funding Jerry's internet gambling and Doreen's never-ending sick pay.

Indeed. And now anyone who parks at work will be paying extra for council workers to sit about and do fuck all.

I defy anyone to read the above-linked article (of which I have only quoted the highlights) and declare that councils have no room to cut budgets; they do and they could do so, if the people at the top were not just as corrupt, venal, lazy and stupid as their overpaid, ignorant, work-shy underlings.

And supporting all of this waste and venality, of course, are the trade unions—most especially Unison. Who are, it seems, are continuing to be paid millions of pounds in "re-structuring" funds. This is, in itself, a very bad move for the Coalition: you don't make pacts with crooks, or try to buy off these devils—their power needs to be strangled and their funds destroyed.

Then, if anyone has the will, we can start going through these public bodies and sack 90% of the staff and whittle their responsibilities down to the bare essentials and nothing more.

Something, as they say, has got to be done. And that something does not involve levying yet more taxes on an already over-burdened population in order to piss it away on useless, feckless wastes of space.

IPSA crying shame

It seems that Tom Harris is having another moan about IPSA; once again, your humble Devil is having a really hard time giving a shit.

I am on a train to Coventry at the moment, so I am afraid that I am going to have to quote The Scary Clown rather than write something myself (my kingdom for an iPad!)...

That's exactly what 13 years of Labour government have made every occasion of dealing with the civil service like for the rest of us. It is exactly how life is for the rest of us, and it's like that for exactly the same reason: Labour, with an unassailable majority, introduced an endless sea of badly-drafted, badly-thought-through, knee-jerk law to cope with things because that's all they knew.

At the time, I said that I didn't think IPSA was going to be a good idea, because, like every other fucking thing you cunts did in power, it was a knee-jerk solution cobbled up by a couple of fuckwits who lived their lives in the political bubble. I was quite happy for you guys to claim legitimate expenses through the old system. You guys took the fucking piss and in a frantic fit of being seen to be doing something, this half-baked, fatuous cock-up was created.

This is exactly how every fucking law you cunts drafted turned out for us: driven by the need to have a soundbite, you rammed legislation through without debate and without thought while remaining entirely immune from the consequences.

Every time an MP whines about IPSA, my soul blooms a little. Because the exact same thing you did to us for the last 13 years has finally come to bite you useless fuckers on the arse. Perhaps now you can have the slightest taste of what every dealing with the government we have is like. And thanks to your insatiable lust for creating law, we now also have more frequent dealings with the fuckers.

I heartily recommend that you read the whole thing—it's a work of beauty...

Hands in the cookie jar

Via Old Holborn, it seems that the first expenses scandal of the new Parliament has already kicked off—and the perpetrator of the alleged crime is our very own Mad Nad.

NADINE DORRIES, the Conservative MP, faces the first expenses complaint of the new parliament after a row about a £10,000 claim she paid to a friend’s company.

Her former Commons researcher, Peter Hand, is writing to John Lyon, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, questioning whether the claim can be justified.

The complaint will undermine hopes that the expenses controversy can be consigned to the last parliament.

Dorries, who last week retained her mid-Bedfordshire seat, claimed the money for an annual report in 2007 on her performance as an MP, and consultancy services, but Hand said he never saw the report or worked on it. Dorries claimed a total of more than £40,000 in expenses for services provided by Marketing Management (Midlands), owned by her friend Lynn Elson. They live near each other in the Cotswolds.

They just can't help themselves, can they?

Oh wait, yes they fucking can—it's just that they choose not to.

It's a salutary reminder that these people hold us in utter contempt; as such, you can bet your last penny that—no matter what the outcome is of the backroom deals that are currently being undertaken—the resolution will have been arrived at not for our benefit, but theirs.

The idea of a hanged Parliament continues to look ever so attractive...

There's an easy solution to this...

Via EU Referendum, it seems that huge numbers of mysteriously coy adults have been appearing on the electoral role in certain areas of the country.

A dozen voters have been registered to the home of a Labour candidate in an East End of London borough where police are investigating allegations of electoral malpractice.

The number registered to vote at the home of Khales Uddin Ahmed, running to be a councillor in Tower Hamlets, has risen from five to twelve in recent weeks. But a neighbour said that only three people live in the maisonette on a council estate in Bromley-by-Bow.

It is one of several cases where new names have been suddenly added to the voting register as living at addresses occupied by Labour candidates in the borough, which has a history of allegations of voting irregularities.

The Times article goes on to detail numerous other suspected abuses. Whilst some have commented that this type of tactic seems to be most adopted by a certain ethicity, I would not dream of discriminating in any way.

All I would point out is that, for a short time, we had a mechanism that would have seriously reduced the incidence of this kind of... er... creative voter registration.

It was commonly known as the Poll Tax...

The hidden Conservative agenda

Perhaps it is because I haven't been monitoring the blogosphere too much recently (work, work!), but I have seen no comment on this piece at the Libertarian Alliance blog. It is Sean Gabb's summary—made as a diary entry on the same night in 2007—of a conversation with someone who "was at the time a person of some importance in the Conservative leadership".

Sean warns that this conversation is most certainly not verbatim—in reality, the discussion "went back on itself and over itself, and covered several other issues"—but Gabb assures us that the substance is entirely correct, and the conversation a reality. For what it is worth, Sean's reporting of his own words strikes me as being entirely authentic.

And a most interesting discussion it is. I urge you to go and read the whole post in full—for it outlines some of the circumstances concerning how the evening came about, as well as communicating some editorial notes—but I believe that the conversation is of sufficient importance that I should quote the meat of it, in full (lengthy though it is), below.

The Diary Entry

Meeting with XYZ, The Charing Cross Hotel, Monday the 5th March 2007.

[After some small talk irrelevant to this entry, XYZ moves to an explanation of the Conservative strategy]

XYZ—The central fact of this nation is that its political and media classes are rotten to the core. These classes are made up of ageing radicals who’ve spent the past 30 years marching through the institutions, and of younger apparatchiks who don’t fully believe, but who accept the framework within which they operate. And it’s worse than this. A fish rots from the head down, and the rot in this nation has spread deep into the body. Key parts of the electorate may not consciously have embraced the statist and green and politically correct ideologies of the Establishment. But they have been desensitised to them. They regard any alternative as eccentric or even alarming.

SIG—This is, of course, your fault. You did nothing when you were in office about the capture of ideological hegemony by these people. You have certainly been the only political force able to make any serious challenge to it since 1997. You have entirely failed to do this. We are now a couple of years from yet another election in which you will take part as outsiders.

XYZ—You may be right, but that doesn’t change things now. What matters is that a Conservative Party that talks openly about a conservative agenda will be ruined by the Establishment. It will also not be believed even by the uncorrupted parts of the electorate—these have been lied to too often. Our only option is to announce a superficial acceptance of the new order of things. We must become as politically correct as everyone else. We must embrace blacks and gays and the public sector. We must give the Establishment no excuse for destroying us. This has succeeded so far as the Conservatives are now accepted as the next Government.

SIG—And you suppose that lying your way into office will give you a mandate for radical change? If you run as “Blue Labour”, that is how everyone will expect you to behave in office. Besides, I’ve seen no evidence that your friends are as clever as you doubtless are. Very few people can consistently say one thing while believing something else. The problem with any hidden agenda is that it gets forgotten. I saw this with all those Tory Boy politicians who drifted through the libertarian movement in the 1980s. Perhaps they did believe all their early protestations of libertarian purity. Long before they’d crawled their way over broken glass into Parliament, they’d come to believe all the authoritarian platitudes that had been the price of success. I don’t believe what you are saying is a credible strategy for doing more than getting yourself and your friends back into office.

XYZ—I’m not talking about a political coup. The next Conservative Government may do some of the necessary work of restoration. It will do this by undoing much of the centralisation of the past quarter century. [He refers at this point to a deeply unpleasant argument we had over dinner in May 1989. He accepts the critique of the centralisation and constitutional vandalism of the Thatcher and Major Governments, but tries to justify all this as a failed but honourable Leninist strategy of trying to smash the left. He accepts that this strategy was a failure and that it needs to be reversed.]

XYZ—Giving control of police forces to locally elected chiefs will ensure that some parts of the country will escape the political correctness of central government. There will be no scaling back of the police state, but it might be used more for its alleged purpose of fighting what everyone regards as actual crime. This means that safe Labour areas will continue their descent into the gutter. But places like Kent and Surrey will be allowed to save themselves to some extent.

XYZ—Taxes will be cut—but only by a division of the fruits of economic growth with continued high spending on health and education.

XYZ—All else will be done by engineering circumstances in which radical action will seem to have been forced on an unwilling Conservative Government. For example, the European issue will be settled by a strategy that beings with all the Majorite “heart of Europe” rhetoric. Our Government will make solidly Europhile noises, and will give way on matters that cause outrage within the wider Movement. However, we will then engineer a crisis in Brussels, where we are bullied into accepting what we say is unacceptable. The crisis will proceed to the point where we announce we have no choice but to call a referendum on continued membership. And there will be unacceptable demands from Brussels—that is how these things work. We can portray ourselves as forced by circumstances into actions that we find unwelcome but also unavoidable.

SIG—And suppose the people do not vote for withdrawal?

XYZ—Then we face facts. If we can’t engineer a vote for withdrawal—not even in our own carefully chosen circumstances—we’ve lost.

XYZ—We will tackle illegal immigration in the same way. Already, there are calls from within the Establishment for an amnesty of all the illegals. If granted, this will add at least ten million Labour voters to the electorate, and we shall be lost forever. In office, we will do nothing to check these calls. At last, we will give way to them—but only after calling a referendum. We will announce that a measure so bold and so unpredictable in its effect must be put to the people, not decided within the Establishment. We will then produce a ballot paper with a range of options. One of these will be for a complete amnesty. Another will be the rounding up and expulsion of all the illegals. Our Government will insist of having these options included on the ballot paper, and will then be scrupulously neutral during the campaign. We are sure that 80 per cent of the electorate will vote for expulsion. This will give the necessary mandate for getting them out. There will be room for exceptions so that the Establishment is not able to seize on the usual hard cases and discredit the whole policy. But that is our real policy on immigration.

XYZ—Again, we expect something like an 80 per cent vote for expulsion. That will give us the mandate to force the bureaucracy into ruthless action. It also gives us the excuse for ruthless action when the lefty complaints begin.

SIG—Even supposing I wanted any of this, I don’t believe a word you are saying. You forget everything Chris Tame and I were told in the 1980s about how the State could be scaled back by taking advantages of its own inner contradictions. All we got was a more efficient state. Why should I take any of what you are saying as more than self-delusion to lubricate a Tory sell-out to the ideological hegemony of the left?

XYZ—Look, it may fail. If, however, the next Conservative Government does nothing good, that still moves the argument forward. At the moment, most of our people are anaesthetised by a decade of prosperity and by the vague belief that all problems created by Labour can be sorted out by voting Conservative next time, or by voting UKIP. A Conservative failure will be a shot of cold water in the face. It will force people to make serious choices they don’t presently think are necessary.

SIG—The purpose of voting UKIP is mostly to put pressure on a Conservative leadership that understands no other argument than measuring the haemorrhage of its core vote. Indeed, it shows no sign of having understood that argument.

XYZ—Sean, UKIP has imploded. [He refers to an expenses dispute with the Electoral Commission that appeared set to bankrupt the UK Independence Party: this conversation took place two years before the UKIP victories in the 2009 European elections.] This attack was not wholly an outside job. The Electoral Commission bent over backwards to avoid taking the action it did. The problem is that the UKIP leadership is generally arrogant and shambolic. The party is not a serious alternative to the Tories—we never lose large numbers of votes to it in any election that matters. But the impending collapse of UKIP is to be welcomed in terms of short term electoral advantage. Our loss of votes to it is not critical, but is annoying. More importantly, that—plus your anticipated Tory failure in government—clears the way for what may be the next step in British politics.

SIG—This being another two decades of useless Conservative Governments?

XYZ—No. The UKIP collapse is good in the long term so far as it allows the BNP to move further into the political running. UKIP is a useful safety valve. But its leaders are too stupid—or too controlled—to present any serious threat to the Establishment. The [British National Party] is different. It can’t be smashed. The Establishment has tried and failed. Its leaders have known each other for decades, and are used to working together in ways the UKIP leadership and activists could never manage. It cannot advance far at the moment because the Conservatives stand in its way. If the next Conservative Government is the sort of failure you believe it will be, we shall be pushed aside, and the path will be clear for the BNP.

SIG—So that’s your argument. We keep our mouths shut while your people lie their way into office. If they mess up, the way is cleared for the BNP to do the job for you?

I do suggest that you read Sean's Comment, in which he expresses many of the misgivings that I also have—both about the desirability or the effectiveness of the strategy being espoused.

Sean and I do not see eye-to-eye on everything (although we probably share more than he might realise) but I think it is difficult to argue with his final conclusion.

All I can say now is that the Conservative leadership has spent the past three years of relentlessly accepting the present order of things. I think this conversation was before David Cameron’s embrace of Polly Toynbee. It was certainly before his announcements of – so far unrequited – love for the BBC and the National Health Service. This might really be the Conservative hidden agenda.

If, however, it is the hidden agenda, it is not working. As said, its principals may already have gone native: they may have come to believe their own propaganda. And it does seem that, even otherwise, it has failed. The proposed victims of the strategy have not been sufficiently lulled into acceptance of a Conservative victory; and the Conservative core vote has not held up in the manner required. The Conservatives are just over a week away from an election that they should win more convincingly than the Liberals won in 1906, and there is a serious chance that they will lose.

Why am I publishing this now? It may explain what the Conservatives are really about. Otherwise, though, the conversation did take place. XYZ was at the time a person of some importance in the Conservative leadership. This makes the conversation of some historical importance. I am not fully aware of the arguments that took place within the Conservative leadership before David Cameron had made himself entirely supreme. But, even if I cannot say anything of who was putting it or of its weight, what I recorded in 2007 may have been one of those arguments. Oh – and it may get me a footnote in one of the more scholarly histories of our age.

Indeed. If nothing else, it is an interesting insight into how some Tories might think—and, I must confess, some of its deviousness does appeal. In some ways, I would rather that events within our political Establishment were more akin to House of Cards than Yes, Minister, that the political class might have the conviction to attempt to manipulate the entire population rather than—as Matthew Parrish asserts is the case—kowtow before it.

At the same time, I am only too aware that such manipulation has—where one might have suspected it to have happened in the past—often been to the detriment of the British people. It is not something that I would condone, but there is always something rather splendid about a truly audacious plan—especially when it works.

Still. Ultimately, only time will tell whether any of Sean's conversation with XYZ is still relevant: if it is, it might make the political landscape more interesting—or (and, possibly, "and") more terrifying—than it has been in a long time...

And he's still employed... Why?

It seems that, a few days ago, a senior police officer—Ali Dizaei—was jailed for four years for abusing his powers as a police officer and using those powers to bully members of the public. In other words, he is an utter cunt who has brought the entirety of the police force into disrepute.

As such, I could hardly believe my ears when this headline was repeated on the radio news this evening.

Police chief Ali Dizaei faces the sack within weeks after receiving four-year term for framing an innocent man

You fucking what?

The man has just been convicted for corruption and he is still a member of the Metropolitan Police force? Why the fucking fuck hasn't he been sacked already? OK, he's innocent until proven guilty but he has now been proven guilty, so what's the fucking delay?

Instead he faces the sack "within weeks"—why the fuck wasn't the P45 posted off as soon as he was convicted?

What are the Met Police afraid of, exactly...?

Curbing the lobbyists - but which ones?

(nb. I am not DK)

David Cameron's pledge to "curb the lobbying industry" has been widely welcomed by the pundits. Spam wants to shine “the light of transparency” on lobbying so that politics “comes clean about who is buying power and influence.” Sounds more like he's trying to divert the public's contempt away from politicians and onto those evil corporations but if it reduces bribery and keeps a few ex-ministers' snouts out of the trough, it can't be a bad thing. 

fakecharities.org has been shining the "light of transparency" on a certain type of lobbyist for some time. Unfortunately, it's not the state-funded pressure groups who are the target of the Tory purge, in fact they're delighted with the plan. Less access for business means more access for them.

David Miller of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency welcomed Mr Cameron’s admission that something needs to be done about lobbying.

But he added: “If they are serious about listening to ordinary people, the Conservative Party must pledge to introduce a mandatory register of lobbyists as soon as possible so that the public can see who is lobbying whom, and the extent to which national policies are being influenced by commercial forces.”

And what is the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency? A group of "ordinary people" trying to get their voice heard? Is it fuck. It's a coalition of predominantly windmill-worshipping, anti-capitalist lobby groups. They include War On Want, the Pesticide Action Network, Action Aid and Friends of the Earth, all of whom help create the illusion of public support for 'climate justice', big government and higher taxes. Just the kind of groups the political class like, then, and - with faith in the 'scientific consensus' dropping to a pathetic 26% - they need them more than ever. All four of them are, of course, funded by the European Commission.

The Alliance also includes Unlock Democracy (AKA Charter88) which is not even allowed to be a charity because of its campaigning activities, quite an achievement when you consider what the rest of them get up to. It includes the anarchist arseholes at Corporate Watch, as well as the mighty Greenpeace. And the whole thing is co-ordinated by Spinwatch, the blogging home of Andrew Rowell, the activist-journalist who wrote the non-peer reviewed article which resulted in Amazongate.

It is part of the wider Alliance for Lobbying Transparency & Ethics Regulation (Alter-EU), an organisation dominated by Friends of the Earth and other eco-campaigners, who monitor corporate lobbying and produce reports for the European Commission. The fox patrolling the chicken-coop, in other words. The EC, in turn, funds these groups to lobby itself:

In 2006 the EU gave more than 7.7m euros (£5.5m; $11.2m) to at least 40 environmental organisations to help them lobby in Brussels.

They included big campaign groups such as WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) and FoE Europe.

You have, then, unelected European Commissioners throwing money at unelected pressure groups to lobby for policies which have minimal support amongst the public. This is the type of nice, honest, transparent lobbying that the politicians would like to see replace those dodgy deals done in smoke-filled smokefree rooms - the corporate elite replaced by the political elite.

As long as this cosy relationship between the state and its army of activists remains, Dave is in no position to complain that "a tiny percentage of the population craft legislation that will apply to one hundred per cent of the population." Whatever the merits of reforming the lobbying system, if it results in more power resting in the hands of the political class and its favoured pressure groups, it will merely substitute one set of vested interests for another. 

Any clamp-down on corporate lobbying must be accompanied by a clear-out of the parasitic NGOs who have thrived for over a decade. Since not a single one of them has political views that are even vaguely of the right, there is no chance of Labour ever stripping them of their ill-gotten gains. For any Conservative government it should be a no-brainer.

The climate hots up

The pressure continues to pile on the IPCC with a whole raft of MSM and blog stories seeping through today. His Ecclesiastical Eminence resurrects his Climate Cuttings series to try to round up the events.

In a story running in parallel in the Sunday Times and EU Referendum, Raj Pachauri is linked directly to a new set of erroneous statements in the IPCC reports. This time it's African rainfall they've been misleading us about. Since Pachauri is the author of the relevant part of the report and has repeated the claims elsewhere, he will find it harder to absolve himself of responsibility this time. Commenters noted a recent study that found that there has been a massive recent greening of the Sahel, with temperature rises leading to higher rainfall.

EU Referendum has picked up on this last story and expanded on it.

No sooner is the Africagate piece up then Bishop Hill comments on it. That brings up further comments which identify this article from the National Geographic News.

Confirming the observations of the Tunisian government in its "initial national communication" (where it suggested that rainfall might increase), the National Geographic article is headed: "Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?"

It states that, contrary to the picture painted of "desertification, drought, and despair" by the IPCC, emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists, we are told, are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. Furthermore, it seems, this desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

Of course, climatology is not an exact science—which is just one of the reasons that the phrase "the science is settled" always worked me up into an incandescent rage. Added irritation was introduced because we knew damn well that not even the climatologists thought the science was settled—something that was confirmed by the CRU email conversations.

Haarsma now says that satellite confirms that during the last decade, the Sahel is indeed becoming more green. Nevertheless, as one might expect, climate scientists don't agree on how future climate change will affect the Sahel: Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall. "This issue is still rather uncertain," Haarsma says.

Max Planck's Claussen says North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modellers. Forecasting how global warming will affect the region is complicated by its vast size and the unpredictable influence of high-altitude winds that disperse monsoon rains, Claussen adds. "Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend."

There! How's that for settled science?

That precisely reflects the uncertainty projected by Professor Conway [PDF] and others, and completely contradicts the doom-laden certainty offered by Dr Pachauri and his IPCC colleagues. More to the point, since Haarsma was carrying out his studies in 2005, when the IPCC was in the throes of writing up the Fourth Assessment Report, it could or should have been aware of the work.

Instead, it relies on a secondary source written by an obscure Moroccan academic, and published by an advocacy group, which did not even accurately reflect its own primary sources.

Once again, the IPCC has been cherry-picking data in order to paint the blackest picture possible—in order, presumably, to scare the shit out of the politicians and to ensure that the great big Green money-go-round continues to drop manna into the lap of Pachauri and his corrupt cronnies.

But, to return to the science aspect, there is a wider point to be made here...

One of the most extraordinary claims of the CACC lobby is that warming will lead to disaster. In the Northern Hemisphere, all of the evidence points to warmer climes being a good thing: the Mediaeval Warm Period showed a massive increase of wealth and population supported, amongst other things, by far higher crop yields. It was only when the Little Ice Age hit that people started to starve by the thousand.

Mind you, we really need Ed Cook's words from one of the CRU emails illustrate the position. [Emphasis mine.]

Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

Let me just parse that for you: for anything outside the tropical Northern Hemisphere, the climatologists know "fuck-all" for anything over one hundred years ago. There just isn't that much data for the Southern Hemisphere because—should you go and examine a globe rather than a Mercator projection map—there's remarkably little land.

In any case, even my A Level science tells me one basic thing: if you heat up water, you get greater evaporation and thus, eventually, greater precipitation. The problem is, given the wind system and other chaotic factors (such as mountain ranges), where that precipitation eventually occurs.

It is also the case, however, that deserts are not caused simply by a lack of rain, but also by a lack of plants to hold the top soil, etc. This lack of plant life often contributes to a fall in precipitation and so it goes in a vicious spiral.

Anyway, the Sahara seems to be getting substantially greener—for whatever reasons—and this can only be a good thing. Let's hope that the people living there take advantage of this fact and act to increase that trend.

And now, in a piece reminiscent of the televisual news, your humble Devil presents the amusing and quirky "and finally" piece...

THE scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.

Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”.

This is the same Phil Jones who wrote, when sceptic John Daly died, 'In an odd way, this is cheering news!' Further, of course, one might point out that millions have gone hungry, and starved, and died, because of measures taken under the auspices of the lies and fabrications peddled by Phil Jones—with the doubling of basic food prices because of the land being turned over to biofuels being just one of those.

So—with all due respect, i.e. none—why don't you just fuck off, Phil?

Yet more IPCC bollocks

This has been a good year so far, certainly in the opinion of your humble Devil. The decision to prosecute even some of the thieving MPs is a small victory for those of us who have long maintained that those fuckers were stealing our money.

But far greater vindication, as far as I am concerned, has come in the slow but steady collapse of the climate change alarmist camp; as someone who has been calling "bullshit" on this scam—in writing at least—for five years, watching the destruction started by the leak of the CRU documents has been a joy to behold.

Whilst some of us swarmed over the emails and the data—delighting at the revelations about dirty tricks and shoddy statistical analysis that revealed the truth of our suspicions—EUReferendum was leading the charge against the High Priest of the IPCC. As Richard North showed, Dr Rajendra K Pachauri has redefined the word "compromised"—his nexus of power and money inextricably bound up with his position as IPCC Chairman and entirely dependent on the alarmist AGW position.

It is really the kind of investigative journalism that Private Eye used to do so well: on this topic, however, the Eye has dropped the ball. Or, rather, as The Englishman points out, they never even picked it up.

If you will allow me to digress for a second, the Eye's refusal to acknowledge the existence of blogs—a blindness born of a hatred and contempt that borders on the pathological—has combined with its pathetic online presence (such as the lack of an online archive) and its fortnightly release to render the magazine increasingly irrelevent. It is rare, now, to find a story in Private Eye that has not already been substantially covered—often in a rather better and more interesting way—by blogs. Private Eye will continue to be bought by many, but it is becoming more and more of a luxury for political anoraks, rather than the necessity that it once was.

To return to the general subject of this post, EUReferendum's most valuable contribution has been in the revelations of "mistakes" in the IPCC reports themselves.

Because, whilst Pachauri himself might be hopelessly compromised, true believers of the climate change faith could still point out that the genial Indian did not actually, personally write the reports and that the "scientists" who did so nevertheless knew what they were talking about.

Or, to put it in terms that an idiot could understand because it was an idiot who wrote it, here's Sunny Hundal on why the IPCC is good.

The IPCC [sic] contains hundreds if not thousands of graphs and claims — and yet one or two slips were used as an excuse to rubbish the whole thing.

Wow! The "IPCC" has hundreds of graphs. Well, fuck me: they must be right, eh?

What Sunny hasn't grasped—or, rather, wilfully refuses to grasp—is that if one or more claims are suspect, then they are all suspect. As I pointed out in a longish post entitled A Credibility Gap, if the IPCC has been cooking the books, then the entire catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC) argument falls apart.

This kind of revelation strikes at the very heart of the CACC foundations because without the IPCC there is no catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
...

The trouble is that whilst climatologists might have a rather better overview of these studies than myself or Bishop Hill (who are, after all, merely amateurs with a day job to hold down), it is very unlikely that they have actually read all of these studies.

And the politicians certainly haven't.

All of these people rely on those at the IPCC whose day job is to study and collate these reports to draw the evidence together.
...

Think of the process as a massive inverted pyramid with the downward-facing point as the raw data and the ever-increasing mass on top as the multiplicity of reports based on said data. Obviously, if the data are wrong, so are all of the models, reports and prognostications based on them.

Similarly, the faith in CACC is based on the credibility of the IPCC simply because people do not have the time to do what the IPCC does, i.e. to collate and assess the many hundreds of reports on climate. And the IPCC is increasingly compromised.

It is not only that the IPCC has made "mistakes": as far as Glaciergate is concerned, it goes rather further than that.

Evidence is building that IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 was not only a deliberate fraud, but efforts were made to cover it up when the figure was challenged.

Some of the pieces of the jigsaw are already there in the public domain, starting with Ben Webster's piece in The Times on Saturday – which we analysed in this post. This made it clear that Rajendra Pachauri was appraised of what he now claims was a "mistake" by an Indian science journalist, last November.

But the story is taken further by Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times today, under the heading: "Panel ignored warnings on glacier error". There, he reports that the leaders of the IPCC had known for weeks and probably months about the "error" and had even convened private conferences to discuss it.

There is a lot more: your humble Devil has not been able to keep up with the pace of stories released by EUReferendum, but it appears that the IPCC knew that the claim was false, but it was kept in the reports in order to drive increasing levels of funding to Rajendra Pachauri's TERI Institute.

Further embarrassment for the IPCC has come in the form of Amazongate, again exposed by EUReferendum and enthusiastically taken up by the MSM.

From Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times we get an article headed: "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim," - one of several on climate change in today's edition

It tells us that a "startling report" in the IPCC report claiming that that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise."

This is "Amazongate" writ large, where the IPCC launched the scare story that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland – and the source turns out to be a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists.

They had based their "research" (Leake's quotations) on a study published in Nature which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

The detail is familiar to readers of this blog, and some might note a small addition at the end of the piece which says: "Research by Richard North", in what has been a fruitful partnership.

Indeed it has—and the revelations have come thick and fast. Essentially, vast swathes of the IPCC ARA4 seem to have been based not on properly researched, peer-reviewed scientific papers, but from deeply biased, unscientific and poorly presented reports by such notable organsiations as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an article in Climbing magazine and, in one case, from a Geography Student's degree thesis.

In other words, far from being the last word in science, the IPCC ARA4 is a collection of third-hand anecdotes and poorly researched reports from organisations with an axe to grind.

And tonight Richard has released another long report into another aspect of the IPCC ARA4 which has already been dubbed—with wearying inevitability—Africagate.

Following an investigation by this blog (and with the story also told in The Sunday Times), another major "mistake" in the IPCC's benchmark Fourth Assessment Report has emerged.

Similar in effect to the erroneous "2035" claim – the year the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt – in this instance we find that the IPCC has wrongly claimed that in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.

At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.

Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this "50 percent by 2020" claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.

In this lengthy post, we examine the nature and background of this latest debacle, which is now under investigation by IPCC scientists and officials.

It is a lengthy post—even by Richard's standards—but is well worth reading in full. Essentially, the IPCC and Pachauri have been cherry-picking data from various reports that are themselves not peer-reviewed—or in any way independently verified. Or, in some circumstances, unsubstantiated data from unreviewed reports have been used in the IPCC reports, which are then cited in similar reports and substantiated figures and then the IPCC uses those same successor reports to bolster the credibility of its own baseless "findings".

In short, the entire system is corrupt; evidence is being, effectively, fabricated; far from being the last work on the science of climate change, the UN's IPCC has been sticking to what that body knows best—corruption in the service of vested interests.

Still, in what seems to be a bit of a departure for UN staff, as least the bastards aren't pimping kids.

The process started with the confirmation of data corruption at the UEA, and the somewhat unorthodox practices of the CRU team; with The Club being so intimately involved with the IPCC, it was only a matter of time before interested parties followed the trail to Pachauri and the UN's climate body.

Now, the credibility of the IPCC, and its reports, is shot to pieces. Whilst true believers like Sunny Hundal continue to screech and wail, the evidence of corruption is swiftly overwhelming the anyway flimsy evidence for CACC.

You may take it from your humble Devil that vindication combined with Schadenfreude is one of the sweetest feelings in the world. Now, maybe, we can persuade our foolish politicians to get a grip and stop killing people with their environmental madness.

Although it might be quicker to hang them all and start again...

Charged!

It seems that charges of theft have been brought against three Labour MPs and one Tory Lord.

Former minister Elliot Morley, MP for Scunthorpe, will face two charges in relation to a total of £30,000 of mortgage interest claims on a property in Winterton, Lincolnshire between 2004 and 2007.

The charges allege he made claims "in excess of that to which he was entitled" and - for part of the period when "there was no longer a mortgage on that property".

David Chaytor, MP for Bury North, is accused of "dishonestly claiming" £1,950 for IT services and further sums of £12, 925 and £5,425 relating to rent claims on properties which he and his mother allegedly owned.

Livingston MP Jim Devine is accused of "dishonestly claiming" money for cleaning services and for stationery using false invoices.
...

Essex County Council leader Paul White - the Conservative peer Lord Hanningfield - is accused of "dishonestly" submitting claims "for expenses to which he knew he was not entitled" - including overnight stays in London.

So, four thieving, troughing little piggies have been charged—and one case is still under consideration. I think that I feel much the same as The Nameless Libertarian...

The time for rage and ranting is over – at least for me. My anger on this issue is spent. I’ve moved towards acceptance: acceptance that we have been rinsed by a bunch of troughing fucks who…

Wait, hold up, I’m drifting back to anger. Enough.

But this scandal shouldn’t end with the repayments and the charges. We have an election this year, and we should remember the frauds committed by our elected representatives when we go to the ballot box. A fundamental question that needs to be applied to each candidate is whether we feel they will act as a public servant, rather than just serving themselves from the public purse. As the actions of many of those in this parliament have shown, that is almost as important as agreeing with their ideologies.

I think that we should all bear in mind that these four men were not the only ones who stole our money—MPs have been ordered to repay £1.1 million more. It is simply the case that the Fraudulent Four happen to have been selected, and sufficient evidence collated, to be charged.

This does not alter the fact that we know that almost every other cunt in Parliament is a thieving shitbag with the morals of an alleycat.

So, it's a victory—but we have only won the battle, not the war.

IPCC: corrupt to its core

The IPCC is a political institution—which means that it is utterly corrupt. Worse, it is part of the UN, a body which is basically only good for one thing—pimping children.

As such, the IPCC is a body that has been set up by an institution that, by its inaction, encourages the sexual exploitation of children by its officers, is paid for by governments (with taxpayers' money and without those taxpayers' consent) in order to lobby those same governments.

It would be institutionally corrupt, even without what we know of its operatives' methods.

However, the row escalating over "Glaciergate" (dear god, why?) is threatening to unseat the evil Pachauri and seriously destabilise the IPCC. The latter is, of course, a good thing: the former is not—for, with the hopelessly compromised Pachauri at the helm, the IPCC's destruction would be ever more ensured.

Sweeping statements? Yes, sure. Because these people are deceiving us, and expecting us to pay for their fortunes. You think the bankers are bad? They've got nothing on this lot.

I'm sorry, we've missed a bit. Let me expand...

As regular readers will recall, the IPCC was recently caught out in a total fabrication surrounding the Himalayan glaciers. Essentially, the ARA4 had reported—as scientific fact—the idea that the Himalayan glaciers would entirely disappear by 2035.

This information came from a New Scientist article that had merely reported a "speculative" view from an scientist in a conversation. This NS article was the only evidence for such an assertion—a forecast that was rejected by all of the scientist's peers.

As we now know—for NS was being very coy—that scientist was a man named "Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi."

After this story broke, multi-millionaire businessman and chair of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, maintained that an Indian scientific study proving the falsity of Hasnain's claims was "voodoo science".

The IPCC has tried to defend itself, by claiming that the man in charge of the glaciers section of the ARA4, Professor Murari Lal, admits that he knows little about glaciers and that the whole incident was a mistake and an oversight—presumably of the sort that Catholic priests or UN inspectors make when they continuously protect and hide child molesters.

Of course, all of this was slightly undermined when EUReferendum revealed that Pachauri's TERI Institute actually employs Syed Hasnain—and has done for some years.

At the time of the announcement and for nearly two years, Dr Hasnain – the originator of the 2035 claim – had been working for Dr Pachauri and was to lead the TERI glaciology unit implementing the EU-funded research.

TERI had already been awarded a major part of a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, also to research the effects of melting glaciers, although this was not to be formally announced until 15 January this year.

As with the EU project, reference was made to Dr Hasnain's claim, with the grant award citation reading: "One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region “will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming…resulting in widespread water shortages." Again, as with the EU project, Dr Hasnain was to lead the research programme.

The issue of Pachauri using IPPC claims as a means of attracting funding to investigate melting glaciers was first raised by this blog on 17 December, his financial interest largely explaining his hostile reaction to criticism of Dr Hasnain's claim retailed by his own report.

Since the extent of the funding has become clearer, and the link with Hasnain have fully emerged, the response from both Pachauri and Hasnain has been denial and contradiction.

Now, with two heavyweight newspapers pitching in, the pair may find it harder to sustain their denials of what is very clearly documented evidence of conflict of interest and, on Dr Pachauri's part, a misuse of public office. His refusal to resign looks thinner by the minute.

Indeed. To your humble Devil, it seems vanishingly unlikely that—having employed Hasnain for some years—Pachauri was unaware that Hasnain's claim about the glaciers was totally "speculative". Or, as I like to put it, a lie.

But it gets worse—you'll remember Murai Lal, whose ignorance apparently allowed Hasnain's comment to be reported in the IPCC ARA4? Yep, he's now come out with a statement which is analysed by Richard North...

One can hardly admit surprise at the report in the Mail on Sunday which has the scientist "behind the bogus claim" on melting Himalayan admitted that the offending section "was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders."

This is from Dr Murari Lal, the lead author of 4AR's chapter on Asia. He also said he was well aware the statement did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. "It related to several countries in this region and their water sources," he says. Thus: "We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action ... It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in."

Lal, in making this admission confirms that which we have known, and asserted, for a long time – that the IPCC is not a scientific body. It is political institution, dedicated to delivering a highly political message in single-minded pursuit of its global warming agenda.

What we learn, therefore, ties in perfectly with the report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which sets out in detail the attempts to modify the Himalayas section, and the blank refusal of Lal to make any changes.

As such, the 2035 claim can hardly be called a mistake – or even representing of failure of the IPCC processes. Lal did what he was supposed to do, and then defended his work to the hilt, as indeed did Pachauri until forced to concede the "error".

And this is the crucial thing—the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 was not a mistake. It was an entirely deliberate fabrication by an employee of Pachauri, bolstered by Pachauri and his associates, and sponsored by the baby-fuckers of the UN.

And why?

Well, it would hardly do for me to replicate Richard North's series of posts in their entirety—indeed, it would take many hours to do so—but one of the key drivers is most certainly money. And the commercial imperative is also being embraced by Western companies.

In fact, there is little to go on, a yet, but already it is clear that the driver behind this particular scam is as much financial as it is political. And behind that is the lucrative re-insurance industry which sees in "climate change" several business opportunities.

One is the ability to dump its liabilities for what are defined as "climate related events", drawing instead on a newly-created global catastrophe insurance fund underwritten by the governments of the developed states. Another – already up and running – is the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), a World Bank-backed scheme designed to allow developing countries to take out insurance against "the increased risk of climate-change related storms and extreme weather events."

The business agenda is scarcely concealed in the eagerness of Munich Re to talk up the effects of climate change and its heavy investment in research into insurance-related aspects of climate change.

Make no mistake, there is a lot of money to be made in the whole AGW market—and not only through the Carbon Credits market (worth £31 billion last year, and up to $2 trillion by 2020).

In the meantime, you and I are being stitched up by governments and multi-nationals in some kind of hideous, world-wide corporatist Armageddon.

It is in our interest to bring down this attempt at the comprehensive arse-fucking of ordinary people: we aren't going to fry but, if we are not very careful, we are going to be absolutely fucking screwed.