Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Government Cost Benefit Analysis of Cost of EU Membership - But Not By Our Government
For many years various British governments, while asserting that EU membership is economically good for us, have refused to authorise a proper cost benefit analysis of it. Perhaps it is cynical to suggest they know the answer and that is why they won't ask the question.
For some time I have pointed out that the Scottish government could do one for Scotland but obviously they share Westminster's opinion about the benefits of not knowing.
However it turns out that Switzerland did do that analysis & this is the result:
Annual Cost to Switzerland of alternative relationships with EU:
2007-2013
Swiss francs millions Index
Continue Bilateral Agreements 557 million - £1.4bn
Join EEA 737 millon - £1.9 bn
Join EU (net contribution) 3400 million - £8.7 bn
Join EU (gross contribution) 4940 million - £12.7 bn
Converting from Swiss francs to £s (0.69 per £) and our GDP compared to theirs ($2,480bn to $666bn) the figure for Britain if all other things were equal would be 2.57 times higher in £s as shown in Block.
This is actually rather lower than the estimates of British contributions to the EU - usually about £15 bn financial costs. However Switzerland is entirely surrounded by EU countries and thus all its imports and exports, except air cargo, must pass through the EU whereas Britain is entirely surrounded by open sea and does not have that misfortune.
Of course this takes no account of the 5.5% of GNP (or probably much more now if only because of the extension of "climate change" Luddism) the EU "Enterprise" Commissioner said in 2007 was destroyed by economically destructive regulations. 5.5% is about £86 billion annually
For some time I have pointed out that the Scottish government could do one for Scotland but obviously they share Westminster's opinion about the benefits of not knowing.
However it turns out that Switzerland did do that analysis & this is the result:
Annual Cost to Switzerland of alternative relationships with EU:
2007-2013
Swiss francs millions Index
Continue Bilateral Agreements 557 million - £1.4bn
Join EEA 737 millon - £1.9 bn
Join EU (net contribution) 3400 million - £8.7 bn
Join EU (gross contribution) 4940 million - £12.7 bn
Converting from Swiss francs to £s (0.69 per £) and our GDP compared to theirs ($2,480bn to $666bn) the figure for Britain if all other things were equal would be 2.57 times higher in £s as shown in Block.
This is actually rather lower than the estimates of British contributions to the EU - usually about £15 bn financial costs. However Switzerland is entirely surrounded by EU countries and thus all its imports and exports, except air cargo, must pass through the EU whereas Britain is entirely surrounded by open sea and does not have that misfortune.
Of course this takes no account of the 5.5% of GNP (or probably much more now if only because of the extension of "climate change" Luddism) the EU "Enterprise" Commissioner said in 2007 was destroyed by economically destructive regulations. 5.5% is about £86 billion annually
Labels: British politics, EU, Scottish politics
Monday, January 16, 2012
Shale Gas Proves Coalition Claims To Want To End RecessionMerely The Highest Standard Of Honesty To Which These Thieving, Murdering Fascist Parasites Ever Aspire.
The US economy is back into growth, albeit unspectacular growth, because shale gas is allowing their energy prices to fall.
But in Britain we have already had one freeze in shale gas development caused by ecofascist claims to be afraid of "earthquakes" (actually earth tremors at least 500 times less powerful than quakes). A wholly false scare story.
The LudDim/Tory coalition claim they want to end the recession. That cannot honestly be denied as representing the very highest standard of honesty to which they aspire.
The very highest standard of honesty to which the LudDim and Tory parties ever aspire is to complete, total and absolute dishonesty in the cause of fascism, increasing poverty and extending their mass murder of 10s of thousands of pensioners, through fuel poverty, annually. That cannot be honestly denied either.
The era of cheap fossil fuels is over, we are told. But if new unconventional gas sources do to prices here what they have done in the US, that assumption is false. The natural gas price has halved in five years on the US market Nymex, to $3.14/mmBTU, down from a spike of $14 in 2007.
In a new report this week PwC predicts US manufacturing will undergo a renaissance thanks to cheap energy, with shale gas saving industry $11.6bn in lower, not higher bills. By remaining wary of climate change mitigation policies, the US economy seems to have dodged a bullet.As is the rest of the world.
But in Britain we have already had one freeze in shale gas development caused by ecofascist claims to be afraid of "earthquakes" (actually earth tremors at least 500 times less powerful than quakes). A wholly false scare story.
Drilling for shale gas in the U.K. won’t cause dangerous earthquakes and poses little risk to the environment given appropriate safeguards, scientists said....
“Most geologists think this is a pretty safe activity,” Mike Stephenson, head of energy science at the British Geological Survey, said at a briefing in London yesterday. “We think the risk is pretty low and we have the scientific tools to tell if there is a problem.”....
More Than Iraq
The U.K. could have more shale gas the previously thought, Stephenson said. The British Geological Survey is reviewing its estimates for U.K. onshore shale gas resources. The survey originally estimated that there is about 150 billion cubic meters....
Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. says it’s found more natural gas trapped in the shale rock around Blackpool in northwest England than Iraq has in its entire reserves.
The rock drilled by Cuadrilla, the company that caused last year’s earthquakes, is similar to that found at the country’s major coal-mining sites, suggesting potential tremors will be of a similar or lesser magnitude, he said.
“There’s not an exact analogy to coal mining, but the seismicity is remarkably similar,” Styles said at the briefing organized by the Science Media Center. “If there are going to be others, they will be about this magnitude and because they’re of that magnitude they’re very unlikely to cause damage.”But our ecofascists need not worry. Britain's Energy and Climate change Minister Chris Huihne has guaranteed that he is going to prevent the development of this new technology in Britain. Not because he claims it is in any way harmful but the exact opposite. He has promised to stop it purely because it will provide us with cheaper energy and thus make his the government subsidised windmill "industry" even more uncompetitive than nature had previously done.
Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, said on Monday evening. “We will not consent so much gas plant so as to endanger our carbon dioxide goals,” he told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrats party conference in Birmingham.The LudDim/Tory coalition know how to get out of recession easily and absolutely refuse to do it. That obviously cannot be honestly denied.
The LudDim/Tory coalition claim they want to end the recession. That cannot honestly be denied as representing the very highest standard of honesty to which they aspire.
The very highest standard of honesty to which the LudDim and Tory parties ever aspire is to complete, total and absolute dishonesty in the cause of fascism, increasing poverty and extending their mass murder of 10s of thousands of pensioners, through fuel poverty, annually. That cannot be honestly denied either.
Labels: British politics, eco-fascism, Government parasitism
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Some Comments By Me on Other Blogs
Some comments from me on other sites which I think even more profound than usual*
On John Redwood's thread about the proposed new £33 billion (£45 bn says TPA) high speed railway.
In Norway over the last 2 decades they have cut 700 km of tunnels at a cost of about £4 million/km> Denmark has done something similar in the Faroe Islands, at a slightly higher cost but it is remote.
If we could match that price and if it has been done engineers can do it, then that would be about £5.5 billion for 2 track tunnels all the way to Scotland. In fact since we have economies of scale and no problems with undersea tunnels it should be much less than that.
What this proves is how enormously parasitic our public projects system is.
In FoIs I have been told that government projects have an inflation rate consistently 4% above everybody else’s and that this has been the case for over 50 years. This explains why British public projects cost around 8 times their engineering cost.
A further FoI elucidated the fact that the civil service’s only possible explanation for this was that in the early 2000s oil prices went up!!!
Clearly the real reason is some mixture of bureaucratic parasitism (like the £200 million mentioned without a spade being turned) and “preferred bidders” getting to charge whatever they want.
I don’t think the business case for this would be good anyway but certainly the best use of government time would be cutting costs to what real costs are rather than preparing to spend £10s of billions wastefully.
Perhaps a Parliamentary question or committee enquiry into why our public projects cost so many multiples of their actual cost might be worthwhile.
--------------------------------------------
Redwood's on an independence referendum
My opinion (I should acknowledge I don’t want separation, at least so long as Scotland’s MSPs are running the country even worse than the UK’s MPs) is that we should have 2 referendums.
Firstly one held by Holyrood, which would be consultative, to authorise them beginning to negotiate the division of assets and liabilities. The UK Parliament should obviously decide that no Scottish MP could serve on their side of the negotiation. Then a binding referendum run, as the Scotland Act requires, by the British state.
Independence is a very serious and irreversible decision which should not be taken lightly and 2 referenda, at different times, one after the technical issues were thrashed out, would ensure that a decision for separation was our settled will. A single referendum with a 51% decision, held on the anniversary date of the Battle of Bannockburn and possibly a lower turnout than for a general election would not demonstrate “settled will” and be as much a fix as the original referendum by which we joined the EEC.
--------------------------------
Pointlessness - somebody who has listed my "how to get out of recession" e-petition as unworkable without, as my reply and his answer makes clear, actually reading it. He censored my follow ups.
----------------------------------
Censored by John Redwood from a thread of his Following Remembrance Day. The quote is from his article. -
“I still cannot accept the way the politicians and generals accepted death on such a huge scale. ”
Not that rare. After all throughout the cold war the politicians and generals accepted Mutual Assured destruction (MAD) which assumed deaths on a scale at least 10 times that of WW1. That was horrible and I think it was wrong because I do not believe the USSR ever wished to start and “win” a war – they just wanted to be left alone too. But if you accept that both the Soviets and the Kaiser were bent on world conquest, as were were told at the times, it is difficult to say we should not have accepted such casualties.
I used to be proud about how we stood against the horrors of Nazism but when we, merely to get German permission to opt out of the Euro, supported criminal regimes run by “ex-”Nazis in former Yugoslavia openly committed to the racial genocide of the Serbs I came to feel that our opposition to Hitler was more accidental and less principled than we are told. Certainly if our schools had taught the history of Nazi genocide against Soviets, Serbs and Gypsies instead of pretending the only victims were our Jewish allies I very much doubt if the British people would have supported our government’s promotion of atrocities against the Serbs more than matching Hitler’s in individual evil if not in pure numbers.
----------------------------
Al Fin on "peer review" being used to discipline "science"
There is an OECD report that found a negative correlation between government funding of science and achievement. Clearly peer review and established bureaucracies are a way by which those at the top can divert government money towards what we might consider the established ideas and thus reduce original research. Or sometimes, as with CAGW, government eliminates the middle man and decides what may be "discovered" by funding only the amenable.
However I do not conclude from that, as some do, that government should not fund any research - technological progress is so important to society that almost nothing else is more deserving of funding - but that such funding should, almost entirely, go through X-Prizes rather than through grants. Thus rewarding & encouraging achievement rather than box ticking.
I suspect the reason the state much prefers grants is that it gives them the power of patronage. The state's interests are not ours & vice versa.
--------------------------------
John Redwood on whether the bureaucrats are trying over the euro
The underlying problem is that when the country runs with people losing jobs for not towing the line but do not for getting it wrong, the country is being wrongly run.
-----------------------------
Douglas Carswell on the Bank of England control of credit.
Bubbles are created by investment money looking for something to invest in with maximum returns artificially pushing up the value of the property being invested in and creating a circle of growth, up until it bursts.
The best way of preventing bubbles is having something with real value to invest in. For over a decade Britain's governments have been preventing industries with genuine growth potential because they are genuinely capable of producing new wealth (nuclear power, GM foods, modular housing, space industrialisation) for purely Luddite reasons. The BofE went along with that that the real culprits are the politicians.
---------------------------
John Redwood censors a reply to a reply to a comment of mine on a thread of his on the historic British policy in Europe being to oppose the strongest power
The Slovenians probably, by a somewhat greater margin than the Scots do but a smaller one that the Basques and Kurds do. The Croatians wanted a lot more than their own country – they wanted another people’s country – large areas of “Croatia” contained a Serb majority whose populations NATO carefully helped them to “purify” and exterminate. The majority of “Bosnians” never wanted and do not now want a Moslem dictatorship, since they are not Moslems – again the problem was not the separation which every NATO country which was not being racist was equally keen to go to war with Spain and Turkey over, but that they wanted to grab other people’s lands and get rid of the people.
The Albanians already have their own country. It is called Albanian and the current Albanian majority in Kosovo was created by Albanians deciding they did not want to live in Albania but some more prosperous country. I assume you would like to see NATO go to war to ensure the Mexicans get their own country too, in southern Texas and California?
-----------------------------
Douglas Carswell on the failure of the EU. The quoted bit is from him.
"the trade block we joined in the early 1970s which then accounted for 36 percent of world GDP, will account for less than 15 percent in 2020."
The current EU is much larger (Spain, Portugal, Sweden, East Germany, Eastern Europe, Malta, Cyprus, Finland, Baltic states) than the one we joined, which makes its economic failure the more egregious.
That alone is more than good enough reason to leave.
////////////////////////////////////
*As said by Dr Doom in the Superman/Spider-Man 2 comic by Jim Shooter
On John Redwood's thread about the proposed new £33 billion (£45 bn says TPA) high speed railway.
In Norway over the last 2 decades they have cut 700 km of tunnels at a cost of about £4 million/km> Denmark has done something similar in the Faroe Islands, at a slightly higher cost but it is remote.
If we could match that price and if it has been done engineers can do it, then that would be about £5.5 billion for 2 track tunnels all the way to Scotland. In fact since we have economies of scale and no problems with undersea tunnels it should be much less than that.
What this proves is how enormously parasitic our public projects system is.
In FoIs I have been told that government projects have an inflation rate consistently 4% above everybody else’s and that this has been the case for over 50 years. This explains why British public projects cost around 8 times their engineering cost.
A further FoI elucidated the fact that the civil service’s only possible explanation for this was that in the early 2000s oil prices went up!!!
Clearly the real reason is some mixture of bureaucratic parasitism (like the £200 million mentioned without a spade being turned) and “preferred bidders” getting to charge whatever they want.
I don’t think the business case for this would be good anyway but certainly the best use of government time would be cutting costs to what real costs are rather than preparing to spend £10s of billions wastefully.
Perhaps a Parliamentary question or committee enquiry into why our public projects cost so many multiples of their actual cost might be worthwhile.
--------------------------------------------
Redwood's on an independence referendum
My opinion (I should acknowledge I don’t want separation, at least so long as Scotland’s MSPs are running the country even worse than the UK’s MPs) is that we should have 2 referendums.
Firstly one held by Holyrood, which would be consultative, to authorise them beginning to negotiate the division of assets and liabilities. The UK Parliament should obviously decide that no Scottish MP could serve on their side of the negotiation. Then a binding referendum run, as the Scotland Act requires, by the British state.
Independence is a very serious and irreversible decision which should not be taken lightly and 2 referenda, at different times, one after the technical issues were thrashed out, would ensure that a decision for separation was our settled will. A single referendum with a 51% decision, held on the anniversary date of the Battle of Bannockburn and possibly a lower turnout than for a general election would not demonstrate “settled will” and be as much a fix as the original referendum by which we joined the EEC.
--------------------------------
Pointlessness - somebody who has listed my "how to get out of recession" e-petition as unworkable without, as my reply and his answer makes clear, actually reading it. He censored my follow ups.
----------------------------------
Censored by John Redwood from a thread of his Following Remembrance Day. The quote is from his article. -
“I still cannot accept the way the politicians and generals accepted death on such a huge scale. ”
Not that rare. After all throughout the cold war the politicians and generals accepted Mutual Assured destruction (MAD) which assumed deaths on a scale at least 10 times that of WW1. That was horrible and I think it was wrong because I do not believe the USSR ever wished to start and “win” a war – they just wanted to be left alone too. But if you accept that both the Soviets and the Kaiser were bent on world conquest, as were were told at the times, it is difficult to say we should not have accepted such casualties.
I used to be proud about how we stood against the horrors of Nazism but when we, merely to get German permission to opt out of the Euro, supported criminal regimes run by “ex-”Nazis in former Yugoslavia openly committed to the racial genocide of the Serbs I came to feel that our opposition to Hitler was more accidental and less principled than we are told. Certainly if our schools had taught the history of Nazi genocide against Soviets, Serbs and Gypsies instead of pretending the only victims were our Jewish allies I very much doubt if the British people would have supported our government’s promotion of atrocities against the Serbs more than matching Hitler’s in individual evil if not in pure numbers.
----------------------------
Al Fin on "peer review" being used to discipline "science"
There is an OECD report that found a negative correlation between government funding of science and achievement. Clearly peer review and established bureaucracies are a way by which those at the top can divert government money towards what we might consider the established ideas and thus reduce original research. Or sometimes, as with CAGW, government eliminates the middle man and decides what may be "discovered" by funding only the amenable.
However I do not conclude from that, as some do, that government should not fund any research - technological progress is so important to society that almost nothing else is more deserving of funding - but that such funding should, almost entirely, go through X-Prizes rather than through grants. Thus rewarding & encouraging achievement rather than box ticking.
I suspect the reason the state much prefers grants is that it gives them the power of patronage. The state's interests are not ours & vice versa.
--------------------------------
John Redwood on whether the bureaucrats are trying over the euro
The underlying problem is that when the country runs with people losing jobs for not towing the line but do not for getting it wrong, the country is being wrongly run.
-----------------------------
Douglas Carswell on the Bank of England control of credit.
Bubbles are created by investment money looking for something to invest in with maximum returns artificially pushing up the value of the property being invested in and creating a circle of growth, up until it bursts.
The best way of preventing bubbles is having something with real value to invest in. For over a decade Britain's governments have been preventing industries with genuine growth potential because they are genuinely capable of producing new wealth (nuclear power, GM foods, modular housing, space industrialisation) for purely Luddite reasons. The BofE went along with that that the real culprits are the politicians.
---------------------------
John Redwood censors a reply to a reply to a comment of mine on a thread of his on the historic British policy in Europe being to oppose the strongest power
The Slovenians probably, by a somewhat greater margin than the Scots do but a smaller one that the Basques and Kurds do. The Croatians wanted a lot more than their own country – they wanted another people’s country – large areas of “Croatia” contained a Serb majority whose populations NATO carefully helped them to “purify” and exterminate. The majority of “Bosnians” never wanted and do not now want a Moslem dictatorship, since they are not Moslems – again the problem was not the separation which every NATO country which was not being racist was equally keen to go to war with Spain and Turkey over, but that they wanted to grab other people’s lands and get rid of the people.
The Albanians already have their own country. It is called Albanian and the current Albanian majority in Kosovo was created by Albanians deciding they did not want to live in Albania but some more prosperous country. I assume you would like to see NATO go to war to ensure the Mexicans get their own country too, in southern Texas and California?
-----------------------------
Douglas Carswell on the failure of the EU. The quoted bit is from him.
"the trade block we joined in the early 1970s which then accounted for 36 percent of world GDP, will account for less than 15 percent in 2020."
The current EU is much larger (Spain, Portugal, Sweden, East Germany, Eastern Europe, Malta, Cyprus, Finland, Baltic states) than the one we joined, which makes its economic failure the more egregious.
That alone is more than good enough reason to leave.
////////////////////////////////////
*As said by Dr Doom in the Superman/Spider-Man 2 comic by Jim Shooter
Labels: British politics, Government parasitism, X-Prizes
