The flight of the cassowary
UKWatch.net - 29 Jun 2008
Pigs are winging through the atmosphere as I write. The Tories are not only back from the dead, not only headed to Downing Street, not only in the lead, but absolutely annihilating the once deadly New Labour electoral machine. For its part, New Labour is heading for a life-threatening crash in the ballots come the next general election. 20% behind in the latest polls and in fifth place in the Henley bye-election, Labour not only failed to keep its deposit last night, but was beaten by the Greens and the fascist BNP. Coming after a national meltdown and a humiliating loss in the heartland seat of Crewe and Nantwich, which miserably nasty campaign saw Labour swing to the right of the Tories, this result on a reasonably high turnout cannot be seen as anything but a sign of voters’ determination to hammer Labour. The government is idiotically pretending otherwise, but the raucous laughter in Millbank is audible from where I am sitting. A lot of the blame for this is being laid on Gordon Brown’s beefy shoulders, and as Roobin pointed out, polling for Unison suggests that about half of voters are less likely to vote Labour because of the performance since Brown took over. There is no question that Brown has seemed to flummox at every opportunity, from the ‘early election’ saga to the Northern Rock fiasco. He has talked tough on the ten pence tax rate only to retreat somewhat under pressure, but even the retreat was inadequate and left people dissatisfied. He backed down rather swiftly under pressure from truckers over fuel prices, but has produced nothing to anyone’s general satisfaction. They tried to talk about class in Crewe and Nantwich, but it was in the context of a risibly racist and authoritarian campaign, and it looked hypocritical coming from a party that has constantly assured us that the ‘old divisions’ are gone. There appears to be no sense of timing either: they have been consistently too late to recognise public outrage, too quick to dismiss opposition, hesitant and reluctant in their concessions. Brown’s administration, since October last year, has seemed increasingly distant from the real world. But even when the ‘Brown bounce’ (RIP) was with us, the discordant notes were already sounding, as when the sepulchral successor promised ‘British jobs for British workers’ in front of an audience of determinedly chipper conference-goers, who cheered. And Brown’s adoption of neoconservative shibboleths was one of his more bizarre introductions to the electorate. By and large, such ideas are extremely unpopular, even among a good chunk of Tories. And even the neocons in the Conservative Party aren’t being lippy about it – the big theme on the Tory website today, just above the celebration of the Henley result, is not patriotism, or war, or asylum seekers, or Muslims, or even clubbing the unions. It is celebrating the 60th birthday of the NHS. The reasoning guiding Brown’s series of misfires, however, is impeccably New Labour (except for the ‘early election’ business, which was classical Brownite procrastination). The government has always been at pains to seem tough, but it has always been as weak as it is nasty. For example, taking a million pounds from Bernie Ecclestone then giving it back and still letting him have the policy he wanted is precisely the sort of thing that was allowed to slide in the early Blair years because voters still expected some decent policies. It would be death to Brown today. Blair did much to court the right, successfully, in his early years. His meeting with Thatcher might have even seemed bold to them, a big two fingers to trade unionists and lefties. Brown’s meeting with Thatcher and his referencing of Gertrude Himmelfarb would have done little to woo a right that is convinced he is a taxaholic, red-tape wielding, red-flag hugging bureaucrat with secret socialist leanings, and it certainly came at a time when Labour voters were no longer biting their tongues and hoping for the worst to pass. The first years of Blairism were characterised by real-terms public spending cuts and ‘restraint’ in excess of what even the Tories would have opted for, but people forgave it because it was expected that compensatory policies of enhanced trade union rights, a minimum wage, slightly more local democracy and a big boost in public spending later on would make up for it. Today’s restraint targets the poorest just when they are suffering most, just when Labour appears to have no further palliation up its sleeves, and just when the erosion of the electoral base that began under Blair has come to seem career-threatening to Labour MPs. The abolition of the ten pence tax rate comes just as child poverty is rising again, pensioner poverty is rising, inequality soars to record levels, and the cost of core goods is soaring. That was not really new: Brown had previously abolished the winter fuel allowance, which hits harder when fuel costs so much more than it did when the allowance was introduced. And the strategy of cutting taxes for those slightly better off and raising them for the poor, in the hope that the former would reward the party with votes and the latter find nowhere else to go, was straight out of the school of ‘triangulation’ that the government has been practising since well before it was elected. It just happened to coincide with all the accumulated ills of previous years bearing fruit. What the Lebanon crisis was to Blair, the ten pence tax rate is to Brown (albeit Brown is not likely to be forced to resign just yet). There is of course the matter of Brown being knifed repeatedly by the ultra-Blairites who have not lost their killer instinct, (while Brown never really had one). But then, that was happening when Brown was in Number 11, and if he suffers a Caesarian death it will be because he had neither the ability nor the nous to change course. Tied to the political and fiscal strategies that he has embraced for more than a decade, he is also part of a party machine that is more or less impervious to the ‘grassroots’. Just because New Labour’s electoral coalition is finished doesn’t mean Brown or anyone around him knows how to build an alternative coalition. Instead, heading to the polls in horrible financial state and with nothing but bad news for the electorate, they’re going to spend their time trying to square that old circle of flattering businessmen and keeping the unions on board, just at the point when this seems a more distant goal than ever. New Labour is not dead, but everything that touches it is. No radical idea or movement in its orbit will survive the coming massacre. The lesson is, if you’re on the Left and you want to weather this storm, stay the hell away from the Labour Party.

Outrageous Demands for More Money
UKWatch.net - 29 Jun 2008
Last week (17th June) the Tories’ launched a major attack on Labour over the supposedly ?inadequate? funding of military equipment. Frederick Forsyth, the chairman of a Tory propaganda vehicle, accused Gordon Brown of personal responsibility for ?50 or 60? deaths caused by ?crap equipment?. However, the truth is that, apart from the USA, Britain spends more on military equipment than any other country in the world. The armed forces in most other countries do not report inadequacies in their equipment. So, any equipment problems our forces are experiencing are not due to a shortage of money, but due to the way that money is being spent. Vast sums of money are wasted due to incompetence, Lets take helicopters as an example. Dan Byles is another member of Forsyth’s propaganda organisation. In an article posted on the ?Conservative Home? website on 3rd September 2007 ( http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2007/09/dan-byles-the-g.html) he wrote: ?Defence spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen, even as the number of soldiers dying in the sand has been rising… in Afghanistan… Brown?s budget squeeze has left us with insufficient battlefield helicopters to do the job properly.? Actually one reason for the shortage of helicopters is “a gold-standard procurement cock-up”. That’s according to Edward Leigh, the Tory chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee. Leigh was speaking earlier this month about the findings of a National Audit Office report. Eight Chinook helicopters were ordered in 1995. They were delivered in 2001 but have since been confined to special air-conditioned hangars. This is due to a mistake in the original order and problems trying to fix it, The Tories were in power when the helicopters were ordered. The helicopters have so far cost in excess of 422m, and this looks lightly to increase even further. Byles says he was?a staff officer in the MOD during the Iraq invasion?, so perhaps he should’ve known that. Its also worth mentioning that under Labour military spending has risen in absolute terms, it just hasn’t risen as fast as GDP. The Tories have repeatedly said they want public spending to rise slower than GDP. Even worse than the incompetence is the fraud and corruption on UK military contracts. Transparency International’s index rates the arms industry as the second most corrupt industry in the world. The relationship between the arms industry and the Ministry of Defence is so close that, according to a report from the Campaign Against The Arms Industry, ?the existence of any real distinction has been questioned?. Key staff frequently move back and forth, in what is called ?revolving door corruption?. The MOD has even taken an active part in channelling secret payments to foreigners in return for arms export contracts. Politicians too seems to have an unhealthy relationship with the arms industry. Mark Thatcher was famously paid a secret 12 million ?commission? by British Aerospace after his mother helped the company secure the Al-Yamamah deal. Who knows how many other British politicians have family members who’ve benefited from such secret largess? Then there is the fact that former Defence ministers inevitably end up with lucrative sinecures in the arms industry. There is also scope for corruption through bribes to political parties. The Tories have used front organisations like the Scottish Industry Forum and the Midlands Industrial Council to hide the true source of donations. There’s no reason why Labour shouldn’t do the same thing. It is undeniable that government ministers from both parties have protected arms companies accused of fraud. In March 1988 Dale Campbell-Savours, a Labour member of the Public Accounts Committee, accused Marconi of using ?misleading Engineering Change Requests? to change the specification of the 1985 Firm Price BATES contract and overcharge for these changes. Labour minister Lord Gilbert, Tory minister Sir Tim Sainsbury, and Tory minister James Arbuthnot all lied to cover up the fact that there had been an enormous increase in the price due to changes (see http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/10/382700.html). Arbuthnot is the current Chairman of the Commons Defence Committee. BATES gained added significance in January 2004 when the former head of British Aerospace admitted that the company had regularly used changes to the specification to increase the price of contracts. When pressed for assurances this was not still happening, Kevin Tebbit, the top MOD civil servant, tried to blame it all on Cost Plus contracts. This was despite Chief of Defence Procurement Peter Levene admitting in 1988 that BATES was NOT a Cost Plus contract and that Campbell-Savours’ charges might be true. BATES was a Firm Price contract, which is the toughest form of contract the MOD can award. If it could have happened on BATES, it could happen on any MOD Equipment contract (see http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/05/399295.html). It is impossible to get an impartial criminal investigation into fraud and corruption on MOD equipment contracts. This is because the MOD has its own police force and other forces refuse to get involved. It would also be difficult to obtain an impartial prosecution. Blair lent on the supposedly independent Attorney General to block the prosecution of BAE Systems over the alleged Saudi Bribery scandal. In 1988 Labour MP Dale Campbell-Savours said that the Director of Public Prosecutions was refusing to prosecute any company for fraud on MOD contracts if it had overseas contracts too. Even if a company was prosecuted, the MOD would be in charge of the case and could sabotage it. Until it is possible to get impartial criminal investigations and prosecutions there should be no increase in the money spent on military equipment.

Inflation: the poor pay More
UKWatch.net - 29 Jun 2008
The rising cost of living is leaving millions of workers in Britain in poverty. Spiralling food prices have pushed inflation to a 16-year high. Rises in the cost of food jacked up the official Consumer Price Index by 0.3 percentage points last month to 3.3 percent. The slightly more realistic Retail Price Index ? which includes some housing and other costs such as council tax ? has risen to 4.3 percent. The underlying reason for this is the spiralling cost of essentials. For instance, vegetable price rises almost doubled from 3.8 percent in April to 7.2 percent last month. A basic basket of a dozen essential items has soared by an average of 23 percent in the past year. For example, 12 eggs, which cost 2 last May, are now 2.92 ? a 46 percent leap. The price of a bag of rice has increased by 93 percent. A chicken costs 1.50 more than 12 months ago and bread is up 28 percent, butter 30 percent and milk 17 percent. Food prices across the board have risen by 6.6 percent in the last year, with the cost of staple foods soaring even faster. A typical family?s annual shopping bill has gone up by about 1,000 in the past year ? that?s an extra 2.70 every day. Figures also show gas and electricity were 11.2 percent more expensive last month than May 2007. They are set to go up by as much as 40 percent this year. This is another harsh blow for those who are already struggling with the average bill of more than 1,000 a year. The average price of a litre of unleaded petrol was 1.11 in May, up 16.8 percent in a year. Diesel was up 26 percent to 1.21. However, the truth about soaring prices is being systematically distorted. The reality is that the rate of inflation for ordinary people is rising twice as fast as the official figures show. Based on Office for National Statistics calculations, a family in the south west of England with a mortgage and two children faces an inflation rate of 6.5 percent. If they live in London it?s 7.3 percent. Pensioners are enduring even tougher times. One estimate shows they struggle with a real inflation rate of over 9 percent. Elderly people are hit hardest by inflation because they spend a larger proportion of their income than other groups on basic goods such as food and fuel. The official inflation rate is calculated on a basket of 650 goods. Some of the goods used are somewhat removed from most people?s reality ? chocolate biscuits were recently taken out of the basket and champagne added in. The Office for National Statistics also added fees for stabling horses to the basket of goods in spring this year. But the real problem is the weight given to different items. Utility bills are given similar importance to luxury goods, for instance. That means that falling prices for flatscreen televisions effectively cancel out rising gas bills in the figures. So for the affluent, prices might be falling. But the daily necessities that all of us are obliged to spend money on are subject to massive price rises.

The Era of Oil Wars
UKWatch.net - 29 Jun 2008
Gordon Brown meeting Britain’s oil chiefs to discuss higher North Sea output to bring down prices is prompted by oil prices hitting a record high of $135 a barrel, twice as high as a year ago and a staggering 12 times higher than a decade ago. The well-sourced website petrolprices.com is now predicting that petrol will reach 1.50 a litre by September, just 4 months away. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets is forecasting “oil prices almost doubling over the next five years”. That would mean $270 a barrel by 2013. It perhaps explains why the government is now strongly backing BP to get a big new slice of the oil drilling licences soon to be issued in Iraq, and ? astonishingly ? has now also made clear it intends to annex a third of a million square miles of the seabed off Antarctica to pre-empt any rights to the oil it may contain. The fight for oil has begun in earnest. But is there the oil to go round? The authoritative International Energy Agency foresees an oil supply crunch within 5 years forcing up prices to unprecedented levels and greatly increasing western dependence on Opec. And the oil industry itself in its own report Facing the Hard Truths about Energy, produced by 175 authorities including all the heads of the world’s big oil companies, for the first time predicted that oil and gas may run short by 2015. The geopolitical implications of this gathering crisis for world oil supply 2010-15 are immense. The risk of further military interventions and conflicts in the Middle East is clearly high. Total world oil reserves are estimated at 2.5-2.9 trillion barrels, of which half has now been already consumed, while half of the 51 oil-producing countries reported output declines in 2006. Non-Opec production is expected to peak and decline within the next five years, driven mainly by burgeoning demand from China and the US, together with restricted output from Iraq. Then in the following five years Opec’s diminishing spare capacity will probably become increasingly unable to accommodate short-term fluctuations, depending on how fast world demand grows and how extensively Opec invests in new capacity. The latter may well not raise production capacity high enough or quickly enough, whether for political reasons or because internal decision-making is too slow or the security environment too hostile. There are of course exits from this doom-stricken scenario, though none is at all credible. First, discovery of major new oilfields could alter the picture. However, though billions have been spent on the search for new fields, discovery peaked in the mid-1960s and the last big ones were found in the 1970s. Only Iraq has undeveloped super-giant oilfields ? at West Qurna, Majnoon, and East Baghdad ? and the capacity to increase production rapidly to 8-10 million barrels a day; but ironically the US invasion, designed to produce this effect, has ruled out this outcome for a long way ahead. Already four-fifths of the world’s oil supply comes from fields discovered before 1970, and even finding a field as large as the world’s current biggest (Ghawar in Saudi Arabia) ? which is anyway almost inconceivable given the huge improvements in geological knowledge in the last 30 years ? would only meet global oil demand for another 10 years. Another option much touted is a large-scale shift to so-called unconventional oil ? the Athabascan tar sands (from Alberta, Canada), extra-heavy oil (from the Orinoco belt in Venezuela), oil shale, and mature source rocks. But the almost insurmountable problem is recoverability, whether poor quality oil (extra-heavy oil), poor quality reservoirs (oil from source rocks), or both (oil shale). Worse, production may be uneconomic because of a very low net energy gain, ie it requires almost as much energy to extract the oil as is made available for subsequent use. And the enormous hike in greenhouse gases generated could produce a turbo climate change effect that would wipe out any benefit from a global post-Kyoto agreement. But even if supply constraints are ineluctable as the explosion of Chinese growth coincides with falling non-Opec oil production and the beginnings of a slow but remorseless slippage in Opec capacity, the coming crisis could still be eased by significant demand restrictions. Clearly there is substantial room for energy-saving when half the energy generated every day is wasted and when propulsion of an average car is only about 20% efficient, heating of a standard oven only 25%, and electricity generated in some power stations only some 35%. The question, however, is whether improvement can be secured globally on the level and timescale required to push back the crisis more than a few years. Equally, taking the CO2 out of fossil fuels, especially coal, may be crucial, but a decade at least is needed even to test the carbon capture technology in pilot projects, let alone begin to mainstream it. But the most direct means of constraining world demand would be the proposed Rimini protocol, which prescribes that oil-importing countries cut their imports to match the world depletion rate (ie annual production as a percentage of remaining global reserves) now running at about 2% a year. Of course, the fundamental political problem remains that the most powerful oil-hungry countries will not agree. If not Kyoto, why Rimini? What is most disturbing of all is that the big powers, so far from seeking major adjustments of their energy policies on either the supply or demand fronts or making a major switch into renewables, are actually massively intensifying their competitive struggle short-term for the limited oil reserves left. Despite an unwinnable war in Iraq, the US is still constructing at least five large permanent military bases there in order, according to evidence given to a US Congressional Committee, to control access to Gulf oil, including in Saudi and Iran. As one neocon recently put it, “one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave”. The US is also trying to force through a new Iraqi oil law that would give western, primarily American, oil multinationals control of Iraqi oilfields for the next 30 years. The US maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries under cover of the “war on terror” to defend American economic interests, particularly access to oil. The principal objective for the continued existence and expansion of Nato post-cold war is the encirclement of Russia and the pre-emption of China dominating access to oil and gas in the Caspian Sea and Middle East regions. It is only the beginning of the unannounced titanic global resource struggle between the US and China, the world’s largest importers of oil (China overtook Japan in 2003). Islam has been dragged into this tussle because it is in the Islamic world where most of these resources lie, but Islam is only a secondary player. In the case of Russia, the recent pronounced stepping up of western attacks on Putin and claims he is undermining democracy are ultimately aimed at securing a pro-western government there, and access to Russian oil and gas when Russia has more of these two hydrocarbons together than any other country in the world. The struggle has also spilled over into West Africa, reckoned to hold some 66 billion barrels of oil typically low in sulphur and thus ideal for refining. In 2005 the US imported more oil from the Gulf of Guinea than from Saudi and Kuwait combined, and is expected over the next 10 years to import more oil from Africa than from the Middle East. In step with this, the Pentagon is setting up a new unified military command for the continent named Africom. Conversely, Angola is now China’s main supplier of crude oil, overtaking Saudi Arabia last year. There is no doubt that Africom, which will greatly increase the US military presence in Africa, is aimed at the growing conflict with China over oil supplies. As Joe Lieberman, former US presidential candidate, put it, efforts by the US and China to use imports to meet growing demand “may escalate competition for oil to something as hot and dangerous as the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union”.