A Place to Stand

Last night I went to a hustings by Radio Ramadan. As might be expected the audience was mostly Moslem & as an indication of the size of its audience, the chairman seemed to know most of them. There were the normal range of questions on the lines of "can you guarantee to spend more on/raise less taxes/end recession" & number of purely Moslem ones.

I felt considerable sympathy for the LibDem representative, an inoffensive wee Moslem lassie who had joined the party during its opposition to the Iraq war (ie after my expulsion) when an Imamish looking nutter vituperatively attacked her from the audience as no longer a Moslem because she was appearing in public, or drinking water in the presence of Christians while being a woman or some similar incomprehensible reason. More reasonable sounding & thus perhaps more dangerous was a speaker who wanted some Sharia law superseding common law within the Moslem community "as the Jews have" (they don't) with an aside that he would actually like Sharia law everywhere but that is impossible. So special Sharia rules for Moslems but if the Moslems take over then no special rules for non-Moslems - the contradiction clearly caused no problem.

My question was

The average household now pays £1243 annually for electricity. This is 4 times the rate in France which means we are paying £900 unnecessarily. According to Ofgen this will rise over the next few years to by 60% to £2,000 meaning an extra cost of £1,700 for each household. This is far more than any token spending commitments or cuts any of the "official parties"* will promise & probably more than the tax rises they are going to produce.

Beyond that all the "official" parties have voted, unanimously, to cut our CO2 producing electricity capacity by 42% along with all nuclear which means cutting half our electricity supply & thus about half our national wealth to prevent the catastrophic warming of last winter. I would like to ask the candidates to say why they want us to be impoverished by Luddism

The chair said he would only put it to the SNP & Green spokesman because they were running short of time (& needed to get in an anti-Israeli question).

The SNP candidate who answered 2nd said that "renewables" were going to become cheap but didn't explain how or why.

More interestingly the Green candidate, Dr Martin Bartos, whom I don't think I have ever met said "I think the speaker is Neil Craig who has written letters in the Herald saying the same things & I don't think he would expect me to agree with him. There are technical difficulties with nuclear & the prices are questionable" (I interjected here & the chair said he would let me reply at the end).

My reply was "It is a matter of fact that the French generate their power at 1/4 the cost of ours. This is not a technicality it is money being taken, unnecessarily out of our pockets. End of." (with hindsight I should also have said that only about 30% of electricity is domestic so so that the damage to the entire economy was far greater & in the end we pay for it all).

Several people congratulated me on that & I think my question & the total failure of the candidates to answer it struck home.

However I am both surprised & gratified to see that I am held in such high regard by the eco-fascist community that they recognise my face in an audience. All the more gratifying as it is 11 months since the Herald last decided to publish a letter from me on eco subjects though they have done a couple on other subjects. Dr Martin looks inoffensive too & I'm sure would not participate in the "we know where you work, we know where you live, we are many" tactics which Greens recently decided to advertise as a substitute for discussion. The very fact that most Green groups have made it a policy never to engage in debate with sceptics proves 2 thing - (1) they know they are unlikely to win any fairly conducted debate & (2) that they know the government influenced & in large part government owned media will give them airtime & column inches to put their anti-human lies while denying scientific sceptics a word. So I am glad the question was, for once, at least asked if not answered.

* "Official parties" - only the Lab/Con/LD/SNP/Green coalition members had been invited - the Conservative didn't turn up
----------Errata------------

David Cameron has said that in demanding an electoral system in which results are in proportion to votes Nick Clegg engaged in "extortion" & "holding the country to ransom". Iain Dale has joined in. The sheer hypocrisy of that & the underlying implication that the Cons/Labs have an inherent right to rule which it is impertinent of voters for LDs or anybody else to try to change is staggering. I have said on Iain's blog

Well if making it a condition that we have a democratic electoral system is "putting party before country" as Iain says & "extortion" as Cameron says then that is a tacit admission of something.

That the insistence of the Conservatives, for nearly a century, that they would rather lose & see Labour with total control than change a corrupt electoral system that tended to give them power alternately has been the Conservatives "putting party before country" & "extortion" mounted against the British people by them for that century.

Every single time some Tory has said that voting LibDem or UKIP or indeed anybody else "risked letting Labour in", purely because of the corrupt fascist electoral system you support, was extorting votes.

May we expect an apology for all the Labour governments from their Conservative co-conspirators??

Some years ago I wrote to then leader IDS pointing out that the Conservatives could have guaranteed to win the then approaching election simply by adopting PR & making an electoral pact with the LDs. He obviously didn't reply. So lets not ever have any girning from the anti-democratic Tories that the system no longer works for them & that the public don't respect or trust them.

-----Eratatouille----------

I have been quote on Britblog Roundup's listing of the week regularly for some time however this week I would like to mention that my previous Scotsman letter was chosen & extensively quoted by this week's host Charles Crawford. Charles is a former British ambassador to Bosnia & Serbia & when the LibDems refused to defend themselves from the charge of participation in war crimes I genocide against the Serbs took up the challenge (I think unsuccessfully but may be biased). I have followed his blog, which is erudite on many other subjects particularly (natch) diplomatic since, & put this in reply to somebody who said he followed Charles' blog just because of my comments.

On the other hand Charles, whom I should not like but do, has just chosen to highlight something completely different I said on the britblog thread. It takes fine judgement to behave so to someone who has said quite harsh things about all those involved in that war which includes him. This is or at least used to be a very British virtue,

Now if only the people on Scottish Roundup thought I was as big a fish as the British site, but then since they put Bishop Hill, one of the world leading sites exposing warming as Scotland's 71st site their standards must be high.

Labels: British politics, eco-fascism, election, Yugoslavia