Back in the mid-noughties I attended a seminar on energy held at the French embassy, possibly a couple of years after the European heatwave of 2003. Over lunch I asked a French official how many of their inland nuclear power stations had to be closed down due to the lack of suitable cooling water drawn from adjacent rivers. He told me it was an official secret. In the wake of the north west American ‘heat dome’ heatwave I wonder if this unprecedented and unmodeled phenomenon might be causing a few jitters in the Élysée Palace? The latitude where the heat dome occurred is not much different to much of northern Europe. The temperature in British Columbia was not much short of 50 degrees centigrade. The pressure on water supplies must have been dramatic, and were this to last for any length of time the demands of agriculture for water would come into direct competition for more energy generation for all those air conditioners and cooling plants, if supplied by nuclear energy. How resilient is the French energy sector? And, should the need arise, would they switch of the three or four gigawatts of electricity they supply the UK? I think post-Brexit a French emergency would outbid any contracts we might rely on. But we wished Europe away, so there’s one more thing we won’t have to worry about.
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An iron law, which I have just invented, states that your power to interpret the rules operates in step with your control of them. A statement of the bleedin’ obvious really. So when Boris Johnson signs off on the Ministerial Code of Conduct, he is the ultimate authority on its interpretation, so when a minister egregiously breaks the code, Johnson can choose to simply ignore what everybody else thinks the code means. It’s not just the Tories of course who employ the ‘one rule for them and another for the rest of us’ principle. I was struck reading a letter that Bindmans solicitors have sent to David Evans, the Labour Party’s acting general secretary, on behalf of some members who have been ‘administratively suspended’ due to unspecified allegations of breaches of the party’s rules. Bindmans’ detailed letter ( 2020.12.23 Letter to LP re Instructions (v.4 - clean)_3768857_1.docx (jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk) shows how Evans has cast himself as the Great Interpreter of the party’s rule book. He seems to have found a clause which grants him powers to do pretty much what he wants, making it up as he goes along. With the right interpretation, rules and codes can be weaponised, stripping victims of their innocent faith in what they thought was set down in black and white.
A similar story emerges in the case of Craig Murray’s battle to clear his name of the charge of contempt of court arising from his blogged reportage of the Alex Salmond case. Courtrooms should settle what can justifiably be ‘interpreted’ - if we can’t rely on the courts, then what? - but an examination of the Murray case should strip away any pretensions on that front. (LETTER FROM LONDON: The Twisted Case of Craig Murray – Consortiumnews ) Might one detect the hand of Nicola Sturgeon in this matter? I wouldn’t be at all surprised, and of course Murray’s blog is the best place to read all about it. How can one exercise authority over the people who enjoy such latitude in the application of our supposedly rock-solid constitutional rights? Answers on a postcard, please. Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has just announced a new policy: ‘Buy British.’ By this is meant that the government should spend more on British goods and services. It’s actually an old idea, but something that never seemed to happen. This was partly due to the last Labour government’s allergy to the suggestion that it could ‘choose winners’ and had no place interfering with ‘market competition.’ This latter issue was also tied up with the New Labour vision of the benefits of globalisation, which meant a hands off policy towards anything the private sector did, including offshoring jobs to India or wherever. This was seen as a natural process, not to be prevented by ‘ideology.’ Now Ms Reeves is talking about supporting the onshoring of jobs. ‘Buy British’ of course has a nice ring to it, but previous patriotic appeals have generally fallen flat on their face, except in the category of foreign takeovers of British companies. The latest example is the Morrisons supermarket chain, now it seems the subject of competing venture capitalists bidding to acquire it. Of course, none of these vultures have any interest in selling off Morrisons’ real estate and loading the business with lease back deals and debt. Labour has been pretty quiet about this.
Labour’s relationship with business was much easier under New Labour when, with one or two exceptions, it was strictly leave ‘em to it, even when we had to rescue the banks, or should I say bankers’ bonuses. This may soon all change. The party’s acting general secretary David Evans is suggesting that local constituency parties establish a new officer position devoted to building local business relationships. I assume this new officer position will be promoted as being on a par with existing trade union liaison officers. Perhaps it could be followed up with local businesses being able to affiliate to the party, etc., etc. This could be a key part of Kier Starmer’s historical breakthrough moment, as with Blair and Clause Four. Perhaps we could be the first political party in the world in which people could (openly) buy shares. As with so many other organisations in the public realm, the title ’Chief Executive’ would replace communist-sounding titles like ’general secretary.’ How modern is that? Naturally, the new title would earn the post-holder generous bonuses unrelated to performance. |
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