A Place to Stand

   While the BBC is still devoting most of its news to the hacking by News International journalists minor things like the pressure on the Italian membership of the Euro goes essentially unreported, at least to the people of Britain. If bailing out Greece, a second time, would be too expensive to do, bailing out Italy, an economy 10 times the seize, is beyond impossible. I believe it was Tim Worstall who once said that the only certain bet in finance is that when a country's currency is under attack you will never lose money by betting on it falling - you may not gain if it doesn't fall but it certainly won't rise. Italy is a poor long term investment because it has a rapidly aging population with few kids to grow up and pay the pensions - but then there are few EU countries that are good long term investments that way.

   Another thing which, even without the distraction our media wouldn't report, though Reuters do, is that just as even Chris Huhne is saying ""we need to take decisive action now to increase low-carbon electricity generation, including nuclear and renewable energy as well as carbon capture and storage".(nuclear to produce the power and windmills to suck up the money from doubling electricity prices) the delay and prevarication of his office is making the people who would do the actual work, ready to go elsewhere:

German utility companies RWE and E.ON (EONGn.DE: Quote) have all but abandoned their plans to build two nuclear power plants in Britain, Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Tuesday, citing company sources.
Plans to build new plants were increasingly unlikely to be carried out because investments could be too expensive, the German daily quoted a manager familiar with the project as saying.
Asked to comment on the report RWE and E.ON said it was up to the British government.
"We are awaiting next steps by the British government. There will be no decisions before that," an RWE spokesman said.
"There has been no change in plans regarding these projects," an E.ON spokesman said, also adding that no further steps would be taken before the British government was due to set regulatory conditions later this year.

The Horizon joint venture, launched in 2009 by German energy rivals RWE and EON, plans to build six gigawatts of new nuclear power capacity in Britain by 2025 and have a first nuclear reactor running by 2020

  Whether Huhne, whose opposition to nuclear before the coalition was formed was absolute, is deliberately delaying it and putting up regulatory barriers because he it would be a breach of the coalition agreement to officially prevent it, or whether he is simply totally incompetent may be questioned. Though the fact that he made himself a multimillionaire would tend to suggest deliberate dishonesty more likely. There is certainly a theoretical majority for nuclear in Parliament because almost all of the Tories and most of Labour recognise the necessity.

    So long as electricity prices are going up in real terms there is no possibility of getting out of recession I am sure every economically literate MP knows that (this includes Huhne). If the Tories, who have already wasted over a year doing nothing but put up taxes, don't get rid of Huhne, even if it means losing the Luddites and becoming a minority government, nobody is going to vote for them next time.

   But such things are too unimportant to report when the BBC is pushing a news story against their only competitor.

   When a German company is bemoaning a government's lack of commitment to nuclear you know it is serious.
  Also the BBC don't report that the government have given an extra £9 billion to the IMF (so that the IMF can bail out Greece since we are not committed to doing so through the EU), blowing apart their alleged deficit reduction strategy.
 
    After all real news is something that must be kept from the people. That is why I am on the Daily Mail side, when it turns out that they, not the NoTW, are far and away the most guilty of hacking - but they aren't a competitor to the BBC so that isn't "news" (except online where they cannot ignore their only real competition). I commented

I like the Mail which I regard as the only newspaper in Britain - the rest mostly just rewrite press releases from politicians, government departments, quangos and fakecharities. Doing so is obviously easier and safer but real journalism quite often involves finding out things those in charge don't want you to and may well involve some criminality. I fear that one effect of this will be to even more emasculate (I suppose that means cutting off both balls rather than one) the British media which is something we could do without. After them the blogphere?
However the targeting of this at NI and nobody else and the way the BBC have omitted almost all other news across the world to push this, proves, yet again, that it is really about preventing NI taking full control of Sky and giving the BBC some competition.

lights going out on media freedom

Labels: Fixing the economy, Media, nuclear