I detect a distinct undercurrent of Daily Mail readership creeping into this forum! Yikes! I do, however, agree about the car scrappage scheme which is something the SMMT have been trying to get through parliament for years and finally managed it last year. A ludicrous waste of resources if ever there was one - we paid £300m of our tax money (in the first tranche alone - more later when it ran out, as the article I wrote at the start of it precisely predicted) to buy and crush cars that were only half way through their viable life (yeah - really environmentally friendly) and then encouraged people to buy new small cars that don't last as long and 80% of which are made abroad anyway. (We mostly make the larger cars here so we were effectively subsidising our competitors. How's that supposed to help, exactly?)
However, on the Millennium Bug, I'm exasperated that because there was no major disaster, people think the risk wasn't there. In reality, there were many well-documented instances at the time that were *fixed* (hence nothing to see on the day) that would have been genuinely disastrous if all the efforts hadn't been put in. In other words, it was a great success, not a failure! There was a documentary about this on radio 4 only a few months ago where they were interviewing people who had been involved and they were revealing everything that was done at the time.
Similarly, although I agree that the media does like to 'talk up' a good story (particularly some of the appallingly biased print media we have in the UK - the 'red tops' in particular - media for the 'hard of thinking'!), the idea that the recession was created by governments and the media is ludicrously naive. The problem was created by banks lending people money they could never afford to pay back simply so that the bankers could get their performance-related pay. It was 'pass the parcel' time and then the music stopped. I had been warning people about this several years before it happened and most simply didn't want to know. Indeed, some said that I "should stop thinking that way and it wouldn't then happen", as if simply thinking or talking about it would actually create it. It was evident to anyone who was prepared to think ahead that it was going to happen. Burying one's head, Ostrich-like, in the sand doesn't make the threat go away! The real warning that things were going to go pear-shaped was when the Baltic Dry Index went into a 94% freefall over a 6 month period, some time before everything else went down, yet still people didn't believe it was going to happen. (The BDI is a good indicator of global raw material demand ahead of production.)
Nonetheless, I feel for those of us not on rich bankers' bonuses who are now under threat. We are expecting around 300 redundancies where I work too and people in the public sector, providing much-needed services for everyone (and many of those being on lower than average salaries) are the ones paying for the unfettered rampant capitalism that stems back to Margaret Thatcher's de-regulation of The City on 27th October 1986 and the idea that a country can exist on service sector alone without any manufacturing. "Let the markets decide", she said. Well, they have - and look where it's got us! The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. I'm certainly not against private enterprise but there have to be limits on the banks. There is still a risk that they'll do it again at the moment as the regulation is still not properly in place. We also need a proper mixed economy - you can't create wealth if the entire nation just cuts each other's hair and takes in each other's washing!
The next thing to watch out for is inflation rising over the next few years as the effect of all the money 'created' by the Bank of England starts to be felt. If that happens, interest rates will rise sharply from their historic lows, which could in itself trigger lower growth - so we might see a return to stagflation. I hope not, however!
Oh yes, and on Climate Change, the trick is to go with the scientific *evidence*, not the opinion of those who stand to lose money if we switch fuel production. That's why Bush and Cheney & Co were so vocal about it over the last decade - they were oil men, remember! Vested interests? Oooh, no, no!
Remember also that, even irrespective of the issue of what's causing the change, the thing that those who deny Climate Change conveniently ignore is the fact that fossil fuel is running out, anyway. I remember, as a student some 25 years ago, doing power design projects on fuel supply and it was a hell of an eye-opener. *We* knew even then that there would be likely to be power cuts in the mid 2010-2020 decade if nothing was done yet still we had the 'dash for gas' in the late 1980s. This means that not only is our North Sea gas already running down (we are now a net importer, unlike then) but also we now use it to generate a lot of our electricity - a double whammy. That's another example where planning ahead (as the old CEGB used to do) has gone by the wayside to the utility companies (now many of them foreign-owned) whose only interest over the last 20 years has been how to make the fastest buck. If we don't do something about utilising alternative energy (and, indeed, it may already be too late to avoid this), we can expect power cuts within the next decade. It's not just the obvious power that will be affected either. You may not be aware that one of the reasons that the companies owning the trains in the UK (which lease them to the myriad train operating companies) have held back on ordering the latest batch of diesel multiple units is because they've said that the indications are that the diesel fuel will not be available at a sufficiently economic price over the life of the train (about 25 years) to make them viable, so that gives you an idea of what is to come and nearly everyone is trying to ignore it!
Even before the power cuts happen, the increasing demand for oil and gas (and electricity made from gas) will mean that the economics of production will change. The prices will rise significantly and will have a major effect on the economy, so failing to find alternatives is tantamount to being that Ostrich again, not only ecologically but also economically. Belief is one thing - scientific and mathematical evidence is another. *You* can *believe* the moon is made of green cheese if you want to. *I* trust evidence.
Posted: 24 Apr 2010, 14:18