A Place to Stand

Dear David,
Your speech yesterday does contain worthwhile ideas.

You are quite right that it is dishonest of Brown to make new spending promises when he knows he can't fund what he is already spending & that he is increasing our debt by £500 million each day.

You are absolutely right about the need to "tear up the rulebook" of the Health&Safety bureaucracy. Since such rules cost society 20 times as much as they cost government to make this 200,000 strong bureaucracy destroys the productivity of 4 million workers.

Regarding the EU I agree with you that it is wrong of the Labour/LibDems to say "when it come to how you are governed, how your country is run you can't have a say". It is disgraceful that those parties, having made specific manifesto promises to support a referendum have proven their promises to be total & brazen lies. I understand your reticence in promising such a referendum in all circumstances while doing so would give the Czechs & Poles a reason for inaction. The corollary of that is that if the constitreaty is ratified before the election we will indeed be entitled to have a say.

I was very pleased to see you holding up the example of Germany cutting Corporation Tax by 9% as a good thing. For many years I have pointed out that Ireland's cut of that tax to 12.5% was the prime factor in it achieving 7% annual growth. If Britain cannot go beyond Germany's cut instantly I hope Mr Osbourne will promise that if the take on that tax rises, as the Laffer curve says it will, then we should keep cutting to Irish levels - that would certainly stimulate growth.

On education I agree entirely with Conservative policy of allowing schools to maintain discipline & of a voucher system. Labour's refusal to do both of these is a great cruelty to all those children deprived, because their teachers are prevented from teaching, of a good education.

I agree with you that young people should be able to aspire to their own house. Without government restrictions modular housing units could provide almost unlimited housing at 1/4 the current cost & I look forward to the Conservatives removing Labour's restrictions which alone are responsible for the shortage.

I agree that there is something seriously sick about a society which uses the welfare system to actively force 2 million people to avoid setting up as part of a family. Anything you do in this direction is to be applauded.

However I wish you to clarify what you said about climate change (previously known as global warming until the globe started cooling. You said

It doesn't matter whether you look at the snows of Kilimanjaro, or the melting Greenland ice sheet, or the fact that closer to home the Thames barrier meant to be lifted once every six years, is now being lifted six times a year.

This is a clear and present danger to our country.

This is simply untrue.

The reason for the retreat of the Kilimanjaro ice cap is because of deforestation around its base leaving less moisture in the air to settle on the cap. "“Although it’s tempting to blame the (Kilimanjaro) ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit.”

Forests at the base of Kilimanjaro have been steadily disappearing for decades. “Without the forests’ humidity,” Mason reports, “previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.”

Ice is coming off the edges of the Greenland ice sheet while new rainfall settles inland which in turn glacially slowly flows to the edges as it has been doing for at least 600,000 years. However there is not a substantial excess melting while ice is definitely increasing in Antarctic, where 90% of the world's ice is. "Scientists in the United Kingdom have produced a study which shows ice has grown by 100,000 square kilometres each decade in the past 30 years." while North pole ice is also "increasing at a record rate".

Finally far from the Thames Barrier being overwhelmed by rising sea levels such rising, or more properly the sinking of London, is actually much less than it was designed to counter. "London is less vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by global warming than experts realised, according to a new analysis.

Experts at the Environment Agency said the Thames Barrier will protect the city for decades longer than engineers thought, with a six-year study revealing that the barrier's original designs overestimated the threat from climate change.

Rather than becoming obsolete by 2030, as its designers thought, the barrier will not need to be replaced until 2070, the agency said today" according to the Guardian, not well known for scepticism on alleged catastrophic warming.

That being the case it is clear that you should issue a statement correcting these inaccuracies. If you, or your advisers, have any actual evidence of alleged catastrophic global warming I would certainly appreciate hearing of it. If your advisers do not but still say we should spend hundreds of billions fighting it you should arguably seek other advice. In either case I look forward to your response.

Since I am publishing these criticism on my blog I confirm that I will certainly be willing to publish your defence.

Neil Craig

Labels: British politics, Fear