A Change of Political Climate 169


I just watched a recording of Westminster yesterday where Tory Minister Amber Rudd announced the government was rapidly dropping the subsidy for solar energy down to zero. Yet the government has just agreed to pay to the nuclear industry a subsidy that will dwarf, in real terms, all the subsidies ever given to the coal and renewable industries combined, and what is more will be paid to the Chinese and the French. I am lost for words.

Nor am I in any way pleased to be proved instantly correct, that Western governments view terrorist incidents like that in Paris primarily as a means to enhance their power and social control. The French government has immediately seized on the pretext to ban all demonstrations at the forthcoming climate change summit in Paris. Yet they have not banned gatherings of large crowds generically, for example at football matches.

Cameron’s announcement of 15% budget and staff increases for the security services was made immediately after the Paris attacks, but was plainly not something thought up in a few hours. The plans for mass surveillance had already been announced, and would have to be staffed. This kind of sickening political opportunism is the true disrespect to the innocent dead.


Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

169 thoughts on “A Change of Political Climate

1 3 4 5 6
  • Tony M

    Cracks in graphite bricks and enclosures have affected all the UK AGR stations, this isn’t the first such discovery even at Hunterston B itself. In recall reading of a crack 5-feet long running top to bottom at an AGR in England and the decision was made to continue running, to ignore it. In 1999, after high winds twice interrupted Hunterston’s own power supply from the grid, and diesel generators and pumps could not be started, the whole station and with it much of the west of Scotland, and the Clyde were almost lost. An employee’s car and a set of jump leads were all that prevented meltdown. Diesel was requisitioned under armed escort from surrounding petrol stations to run emergency cooling pumps. The nuclear power station cannot in effect cold-boot without a significant off-site grid source, at one time Hunterston had the oil-powered station nearby, at Inverkip, for backup and failover supplies to the naval bases, but this was looted by privatisation and the hardly used Inverkip generators ended up in China. I have noticed now a small array of wind turbines up the hill at the back of Hunterston, to provide a limited low voltage emergency power reserve so expect lessons were learned from these incidents, the principal one though is that these things are unsafe, accidents and incidents are certainties, dangerous radiation releases constant phenomena even when operating ‘normally’.

    Jellyfish in a water intake almost destroyed Hunterston too.

    And then there was the CO2 fiasco when a tanker delivering the gas, instead left the station with more CO2 than it arrived with, potentially contaminated and then headed on to make other deliveries including to Jim Murphy’s favourite beverage maker.

  • RobG

    Tony M, one of the most important things to understand about nuclear fission is ‘neutron bombardment’. Neutron bombardment degrades steel and concrete over time…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_radiation#Effects_on_materials

    … which means that every single nuclear power station will start falling to bits from about +20 years old. This is well documented science, yet in the USA they keep re-licensing nuke plants for 40 year and even 60 year operation.

    And of course, no one knows what to do with the mountains of spent fuel, elements of which are totally lethal for geological time spans.

  • Jives

    Grant Shapps- or whatever he’s calling himself this week- seems to have employed Mark Clark,the Tory aide at the centre of very serious allegations of bullying,blackmail and the alleged suicide of young Tory activist Elliot Johnson.

    WTF is going on in this very dark world???

    Who exactly is the ever-changing Grant Shapps- or whatever he’s calling himself this week..?

    http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/nov/20/conservative-aide-bullying-claims-grant-shapps

  • Mary

    A GP who is not afraid to speak out about what is being done to OUR NHS. So far most people have not woken up to what is happening.

    ‘The connection between the junior doctors’ contract and the American corporate takeover of the NHS
    18/11/2015

    The connection between the junior doctors’ contract and the American corporate takeover of the NHS

    Dr Bob Gill (@DrBobGill) explains the unreported and sinister drive behind the push for changing junior doctors’ contracts.
    What is going on right now?

    The latest assault on the NHS involves the imposition of a new contract for junior doctors that will see their salaries slashed by 30% with a requirement for evening and Saturday work.

    The excuse used to justify this change is to provide a seven-day service and improve patient outcomes on weekends.

    The reality is that more qualified staff are being driven out in preparation for the de-skilling that is always part of healthcare privatisation and corporate takeover. For the UK, this is mapped out in the Five Year Forward View by Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England. Stevens used to be an executive of the US based private health care company, UnitedHealth.

    What all junior doctors – and the rest of us – need to know

    Many junior medics – which means all doctors not yet senior enough to work in consultant positions – have been stirred into action, but it is crucial for them to understand the context of their current predicament to mount an effective campaign to protect patients, restore decent treatment of staff and block the completion of the privatisation of the NHS.

    But first, a little history lesson…

    Conversion from the NHS model, a publicly funded, provided and universal system, to a private insurance model has been proposed for decades.

    In 1968 Arthur Seldon, later Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation policy adviser, produced a pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs called After the NHS, explaining the aspiration to “improve the NHS” by abolishing it so as to build profit opportunities insurance industry.

    Further incarnations of this same plan to enable the insurance industry to increase its profits in the UK by destroying the NHS surfaced in the 1980s. This included Health of Nations by the Adam Smith Institute and, in 1988, Britain’s Biggest Enterprise: Ideas for Radical Reform of the NHS, a version articulated by current Conservative Minister of State for Government Policy, Oliver Letwin MP in the NHS privatisation manifesto he wrote with John Redwood MP, published by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Thatcherite think-tank….”

    /..
    http://koshh.org/the-connection-between-the-junior-doctors-contract-and-the-american-corporate-takeover-of-the-nhs

  • Mary

    Another GP of 16 years standing writes. I for one knew nothing about this ‘consultation’. There are just four days left. The govt really does want to listen to your views!!

    ‘You’ve been asked to have your say on the NHS. You just don’t know about it
    Ann Robinson (A GP for 16 years)

    Jeremy Hunt has been uncharacteristically quiet about the public consultation on the health service.

    This is not just a PR exercise – they really do care, really. Look at how they’ve listened to junior doctors, 98% of whom have voted for strike action.

    “The government is apparently very keen to hear our views on the proposed NHS mandate. But you’d better be quick; you have until 23 November to comment. And if you’re wondering how you missed such an important opportunity to comment on the future of the NHS, you’re not alone. Critics say the Department of Health has deliberately kept it quiet, with little publicity and only a month for the public to comment since the launch in October.

    ARTICLE CONTD
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline?

    WAYS TO RESPOND TO GOVT https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/setting-the-mandate-to-nhs-england-for-2016-to-2017

  • Alcyone

    +1 Brian Fujisan….did you post that in your sleep, my friend?? Some kind of new telepathic mind-response imagery gadget, invented by Stephen Hawking?

    Pulling your leg, not his. His spirit is to be admired. Yours too, in terms of your sleep patterns. How do you do it?

    A complete emptying of the content of consciousness?

  • Alcyone

    ” Ideology Prevents Action

    The world is always close to catastrophe. But it seems to be closer now. Seeing this approaching catastrophe, most of us take shelter in idea. We think that this catastrophe, this crisis, can be solved by an ideology. Ideology is always an impediment to direct relationship, which prevents action. We want peace only as an idea, but not as an actuality. We want peace on the verbal level, which is only on the thinking level, though we proudly call it the intellectual level. But the word peace is not peace. Peace can only be when the confusion which you and another make ceases. We are attached to the world of ideas and not to peace. We search for new social and political patterns and not for peace; we are concerned with the reconciliation of effects and not in putting aside the cause of war. This search will bring only answers conditioned by the past. This conditioning is what we call knowledge, experience; and the new changing facts are translated, interpreted, according to this knowledge. So, there is conflict between what is and the experience that has been. The past, which is knowledge, must ever be in conflict with the fact, which is ever in the present. So, this will not solve the problem but will perpetuate the conditions that have created the problem.”

    http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-daily-quote/20151118.php

  • Mary

    That K rot about ‘peace’ from Villager follows his nasty little wasp sting on Brian, a decent and good human. What hypocrisy and how pointless.

  • Pan

    Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)
    19 Nov, 2015 – 9:21 pm

    “I was brushing up my Spanish the other day when I suddenly thought “no one has mentioned President Nicolas Maduro Moros on CM for quite a while now”.

    How is the dear man getting on – can anyone give us a heads-up?”

    http://www.telesurtv.net/buscar.html

    Pone “Nicolas Maduro” en el campo marquado “Buscar”.

    ¡Informate!

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Three days left to respond to this extremely-poorly publicised ‘public’ consultation on the NHS:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/setting-the-mandate-to-nhs-england-for-2016-to-2017

    It’s total bollocks, of course. Written by PR professionals for mandarins and politicians, while abjectly failing to conceal the fact that the NHS is to be put under yet more pressure to deliver the undeliverable on a budget sufficient only to maintain the status quo

    Enjoy. Respond.

  • Pan

    Republicofscotland
    19 Nov, 2015 – 9:21 pm

    “Corbyn said one of the main ways to stop IS from functioning is to cut off its resources, suggesting the EU would also need to play a part in suffocating the organization.

    I couldn’t agree more lets start with the US Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia.”

    You are forgetting the unwritten (but strictly adhered to) law of inverse universality.

  • Mary

    I am on Ba’al’s Habbabreak thing hence his duplication of my previous posts on the NHS consultation (today) and Amena Saleem’s EI piece (yesterday) on Israel friendly changes in BBC headlines. Silly and a waste of space.

  • Pan

    19 Nov, 2015 – 10:10 pm
    Node

    (hail of bullets deliberately pumped into young Palestinian girl, already proven 100% harmless)

    Horrendous!

    And to think western police forces send officers to Israel for “training”! Now THAT’S scary!

  • Pan

    Dave Lawton
    19 Nov, 2015 – 10:34 pm

    “Most people who are not brainwashed and are reasonable intelligent can see the truth.”

    You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

  • Pan

    Republicofscotland
    19 Nov, 2015 – 10:42 pm

    (quoting Krishnamurti)

    “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

    Perhaps Philip K. Dick put it more humorously…

    “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

  • Alcyone

    ^ Nice take Pan^

    In addition to sanity, there is simply not enough of the energy of Love on this planet.

  • Alcyone

    Mary, the Queen of Sourpuss.

    I’ll clarify for the thickhead my comment to Brian was not a sting. But, you the eternal cynic would see it that way, understandably.

    Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve met another person so cynical and sour as you. How awful it must be to live in your skin. I pity your poor dog.

  • BrianFujisan

    Alcyone… Children.. DOTS………………You don’t Deserve the rest Do you want my Latest Haiku……………NO

  • BrianFujisan

    Do you want my Latest Haiku… IT………NO…fuck you……………….

    Homes turned To Dust
    Families emerging
    Dazed Children like Ghosts

  • jkick

    [ Mod: Caught in spam-filter, timestamp updated ]
    —-

    @alcyone

    Hawking’ spirit is indeed to be admired.

    Here’s a bloke that beat the odds, that is to say on average a person diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis survives 4 years. However,there have been examples of longer life span survivors, with one instance of over 20 years as far as I know.

    But Hawking survived 50 years what an acheivement.

    Or is it?

    Could the some devious folk keep is spirit alive by hiring imposters in the advent he died.

    Why?

    Maybe PR.

    Perhaps those clowns at NASA wanted a good salesman to pitch their explorational space travel jaunts.

    I’d imagine these jaunts are very costly to pull off.

    I say this because while reading a recent scientific paperfrom their employees, entitled “Antarctica Gaining More Ice Than Losing” I noticed the paper pointed out the difficulties in measuring the height of ice in Antarctica, saying that improved tools are needed to better perform the task.

    It just happens:

    “The US space agency is currently developing a new satellite capable of a more accurately measuring long-term changes in ice in Antarctica.”

    “ICESat-2, which will be able to “measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” is planned for launch in 2018, according to NASA glaciologist Tom Neumann”

    At a cost of?

    This from 2014:

    “Development of ICESat 2 was supposed to cost $559 million when NASA formally set a budget for the mission in 2012.

    Michael Freilich, head of NASA’s Earth science division, told an advisory committee May 28 that ICESat 2’s overrun was “on the order of $200 million.”

    So that be more like near on a billion dollars before it’s finished.

    However, turns out for a fraction of this cost a bunch of Inuit folk inform us.

    ” A new warning has come to NASA from the Inuits. They are warning that the change in climate is not due to global warming but rather, because of the Earth shifting a bit.”

    http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2015/04/earth-has-shifted-inuit-elders-issue.html?m=1

    Now this could be a ploy from those devious rich oil folk to divert, in so much it wouldn’t cost them a great deal to produce this script, it’s hardly on the scale of Paris.

    Cui bono

    Who knows, maybe Stephen Hawking?

  • fedup

    Just read the absolute bunkum in the Oligarch Owned Media!

    The 26-year-old daughter of a Moroccan immigrant had been under police surveillance because her name came up in a drug-trafficking case, said a police union official,

    Says DM

    Screams ft:

    Hard-drinking ‘cowgirl’ who became first female suicide bomber in Europe

    Then goes on:

    Aitboulahcen — according to court records, her Facebook page and local media reports — was a daughter of Moroccan immigrants who arrived in France in the early 1970s.

    She was born in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, to the north of Paris on August 12 1989 and lived in the immigrant-heavy Clichy-sous-Bois region to the north east of Paris for much of her life.

    The racist, tribal drivel abound there seems to be no acceptance of the fact that the girl was a French national born and bred in France!

    However the case for portraying these as outsiders and “immigrants” is far too compelling than to face the facts and actualities! Fact that an immigrant to Spain yes a British granny working in advertising and living in Spain sets up a “stop immigration to UK” petition and attracts half a million signatories all going unabated and none are prepared to entertain; Just when will the fucking native ever accept these “outsiders” whom have known no other country than their country of residence be it, France, UK, Belgium .. as bona fide nationals and citizens of these countries?

    There is a zionist lead assault on all things Islamic because of the incompetence of the zionists trying to set up a “country” and patently failing at it, as the basket case of apartheid zionistan is the proof if there ever was a need for one. As in evidence; zionistan has morally failed, economically failed, and ideologically failed a perfect trifecta of failure that in turn has resulted in contracting out its’; war on all things Islamic to the wider world and the vassals in charge of the Western governments.

    Hence the constant torrent of cock and bull yarns about “Islamists”, “Jihadis”, “terrorists”, …… Fact that the salafist extremists contracted in to fight the dirty war of US and to keep the chaos in the Mid Est current somehow is not ever pointed to and the Nazi fashion hatred of Jews is now diverted towards the Muslims, unabated. Whilst this form of vile racism has become to be so common place that none even discus or debate it!

    The orchestrated erosion of all liberties under the guise of war on terror is feeding on the bile of racism, without anyone of the haters noticing the consequences of such a tack on their own futures in this country and elsewhere.

    PS thanks Brian and Nevermind, also my thanks to Mods for deleting the bilge splattered around this thread.

  • fedup

    This is the power of the lobby!!!

    Jonathan Pollard is freed!

    The spy that ought to have been put to death, now is free to walk away and into the loving arms of zionists awaiting his heroic arrival in zionistan. After all without such an overt act of “looking after their own” the future spies for zionistan may experience cold feet.

1 3 4 5 6

Comments are closed.