In a ‘secret’ document revealed in today’s Daily Telegraph, Labour ministers are planning to slash the number of ships in the Royal Navy from 103 at present to 50 in 2027. While the purchase of two new carriers is confirmed, in others domains news are bleak to say the least. The numbers of frigates is scheduled to be reduced by 8 to just 9 units, of the present 13 submarines, up to 2 might not be replaced, the whole of the minesweeper fleet currently amounting to 16 units is due to be decommissioned and as far as the Auxiliary fleet is concerned, no less than 14 units will disappear.
In the present world climate, with the threat of Islamic terrorism, a resurgent Russia and an ambitious China, these cuts are ill advised to say the least. Before having a look at the offensive capabilities of the Royal Navy, it is also worth to remember that the Royal Navy must protect the home waters, but also waters around our overseas territories, the Falklands, Saint Helena, Pitcairn, Bermuda and twelve others places spread all around the globe. At present this task is devolved to our patrol ships, however since the 9 units are slated for removal by 2027 and perhaps much earlier, it is very fair to say that places like the Falklands will be defenceless by then. One of the reasons why Argentina attacked the islands back in 1982, was pencilled decommission of HMS Endurance, a patrol ship attached to the islands since 1967.
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Judging from the announcement of the East Coast railway franchise being awarded today to National Express plc, it seems that the DfT civil servants did not understood what happened earlier last year for this franchise. Indeed if the current operator GNER was forced to stand down, that was because they were unable to pay a premium of £1.3 billion over the course of their ten years franchise. The new agreement includes this time, a premium of £1.4 billion in the course of eight years.
Apparently, it is clear that the DfT does not understand how a business should be run. In fact with yearly revenues of £600 millions; this premium would amount to an operational margin of more than 15% since some of the profits must be kept by the company. It is worth noting that this kind of performance, is not even achieved by the majority of businesses, except perhaps for very specialized companies. On the top of that, the agreement includes plenty of ‘targets’ whom Labour loves so much and as usual the taxpayer is set to foot the bill through higher than inflation fares.
Surely the time to end such lunacy on the part of the DfT must come to an end. Normal businesses do not need any targets, if they fail then they go bankrupt and everybody looses, if they succeed then everybody wins, customer feedback, shareholders pressure and external pressures are enough and are much more efficient than any profit target set by civil servants. The same thing should applies for the railways, thence scrapping the existing system of franchises, complicated arrangements based on contracts, to replace them with a few or even a single integrated plc independent of any governmental interference is the way forward.
What Ruth Kelly and the DfT only deserve is another franchise failure. As learning is by repetition, they will perhaps understand after a few more high profile failures, (the next one could very well be First Great Western) that they have to change something in their ways. But, I have some doubts as whether this will be enough for them. Moreover, if this ‘something’ means even more regulation, then the costs for cleaning up the mess are going to be pretty high and, guess who will have to pay the bill then? The taxpayer as usual.
While I welcome most of the proposals outlined today by John Redwood, I have to say that I am a bit sceptical on some points. The painted picture of weak and a crumbling infrastructure is undoubtedly the right one as, are the failures of Labour policies in that respect. Yet I think that simply just simply relying on some ‘competition’ to solve these problems is, very immature.
It is perfectly fair to say that red tape needs to be eliminated concerning businesses and, that the taxes affecting businesses should be reduced if possible, without further complicating the existing tax system. Concerning railways, I have said numerous times that excessive control from the government is preventing healthy growth and creates waste in the process. But the truth is that, while massive investments are needed if we want to have a world class system. Some of the investment WILL have to come from the Treasury, this is particularly true if large scale modernisation projects are attempted. Since returns on such investments are only apparent after up to twenty years, private investment will always be limited in scope and it is very foolish to assume the contrary. On the others points highlighted by John Redwood, like the lack of technical innovation, vertically integrated railways are the solution, however ones has to acknowledge that this means regional monopolies, free of governmental influence (like during pre-BR times) and not competition.
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The changes in the United Kingdom economic structure, from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy are often the subject of debates and are most often considered as positive. However, before making any conclusion on this, it is very important to have an historical look at what happened, far away from sentences like ‘the Tories sold off our industries’.
Britain created most of its current wealth thanks to manufacturing and, as most people know, the Industrial Revolution started here. The relative decline of manufacturing started much earlier than what is commonly thought. Indeed by the time of the First World War, Britain was outmatched by both Germany and the United States. The reasons for this decline are numerous, but the lack of technological investment was a major factor at the time. Real decline in the sense commonly understood, only started for good after the Second World War and accelerated once the seventies were reached.
Beyond statements like ‘Maggie destroyed our pits and our factories’, the truth is clearly not at the advantage of the ‘defenders of British industries’ namely, the Labour Party. One of the reasons of the decline, was the lack of properly trained workers. Indeed manufacturing requires skills which are very different from the ones required for white collar jobs, one of the aspects of the Tripartite system were Technical Secondary Schools. These schools very similar to the ones existing in Germany and to the French Lycées Techniques, had a very clear role, providing the engineers, scientists, machinists and technicians of tomorrow. They were nevertheless starved of cash by the Labour Party and its trade unionists cronies. Now let’s talk a bit about, the crazy mergers and then nationalisations made by Harold Wilson. Labour involvement in the motor industry had only one result, the creation of an unmanageable juggernaut, offering similar yet competing products whose dire fate was already sealed in the seventies, the same can be said for the steel making and the shipbuilding industry. Excessive taxation of profits and the free hand given to the trade unions, also did a very good job in wrecking what was working, in the few industries still in private hands.
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The recent actuality is full of news concerning UK’s air industry, whose symbol of Heathrow airport is again under the fire from critics. This time it’s almost look like everybody is guilty in the affair, BAA for its management failures especially since its recent takeover by the Spanish firm Ferroviara and British Airways for having an appalling record when it come to delivering luggage.
Yet behind the scenes the current government is also guilty in the affair. Guilty for not having a clear policy toward airport expansion, guilty for granting Heathrow terminal 5 planning permission a few years late, guilty for supporting the ‘ecologists’ arguments that air travel is bad for the environment; when in fact it only account for at best 2% of the UK’s carbon emissions.
While it is very easy to lambaste British Airways when it comes to the lost luggage, when an airport such as Heathrow is completely saturated, understaffed (clear failures from BAA here) and mismanaged. There are clearly other factors at play, undercapacity being one of them. Thence, since air travel WILL increase in the future no matter what the green lobby twats think, we need to plan future needs in advance.
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I recently completed the reading of Ed Husain’s book, the Islamist. With the recent events in Glasgow and London, terrorism is once again back in the news and as usual talks of ‘prevention’, ‘moderate Islam’ and the like were heard all over the medias.
The book written by a former Islamist, provide a concise yet clear and impassionate picture of what is happening in Britain’s mosques, Islamic societies and even in whole areas of our cities.
The methods used by Islamists groups, involving deception, an abusive use of the ‘moderate Muslims’ etiquette, the appropriations of issues like Palestine, Irak or Bosnia as legitimates causes for jihad, are described in detail. Following the journey of the writer, whose discovery of ‘written Islam’ starts with a book written by a ‘moderate scholar’, in fact a member of numerous organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and whose books are still used as teaching materials or children; which then gradually becomes a fully committed Islamist. Everybody who has dealt with Muslims associations controlled by such groups will recognise their tactics, of aggressive heckling, the use of propaganda on the lines of ‘Palestine today, Britain tomorrow’ and the use of ‘doctrinal destruction’ against any group perceived as ‘not enough Muslim’ (read too moderate). Their use of our own laws on freedom of speech against us, linking any refusal to racism and their own links with far left parties such as RESPECT are exposed in daylight.
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Yesterday, the Government announced that unclaimed money from ‘abandoned’ British bank accounts will be used to fund the building of ‘a youth centre in every town’.
The Government’s reasoning is that if they create a large number of very expensive youth centres, teenage thugs and ruffians will just suddenly stop causing trouble and enjoy using the new facilities instead.
Apparently many youths go out and cause ‘trouble’ (government speak for getting drunk, beating up other people, causing criminal damage to property, etc) because they have nothing to do. It’s not their fault you see. The fact that there are many other children who have ‘nothing’ to do and yet do not go around breaching the law does not seem to register as applicable to a government and a Labour party that just loves to waste your money on pointless and ineffective schemes.
But that is not really what this post is about. This post is about how the Government are attempting to legalise the theft of private money so that they can waste it on further unnecessary state projects, and unfortunately, this plan has been on the cards for sometime. With most British pension plans already pillaged and with government borrowing and taxation at unprecedented levels, Gordon Brown has been forced to pursue new ways of raising money for yet more unnecessary and wasteful government spending.
Currently the plan is to allow the Government to claim any money in any UK bank account, so long as it has remained dormant for fifteen years. Apparently there is £15bn of such money is stashed away in UK bank accounts. However, what individuals do with their own money is up to them. If they wish to keep money in an account for fifteen years or more, then that is their right. The Government should not be able to take an individual’s money whether they wish to make use of it or not. In the event that a person dies and leaves money in an account, then the bank should make efforts to trace the relatives of that person’s family and they should receive the money.
The government has plenty of other nasty ways of taking money which they have no right to – inheritance tax being a perfect example. Legalised theft from private accounts should not be another way.
The DfT recently published its transport strategy for the next 30 years in a tone quite similar to a similar strategy launched by John Prescott in 1999 for the next ten years, whose results were non-existent to say the least.
Rail is as expected at the heart of this strategy, calling for a 13% increase in capacity by 2014, when forecasts for the same period anticipates at least 20% of increase in passengers numbers. This single sentence already says everything, but wait there is more.
As most of newspapers already announced, commuters will bear the brunt of the planned ‘service improvements’, railway fares in Britain are already the most expensive in Europe, yet they are set to increase even more. Carbon emissions are also at the heart the agenda as one might imagine and while it perfectly possible to reduces the carbon footprint of railways even more, the ‘solutions’ proposed by the DfT bureaucrats are very optimistic at best. When cars are still not running on hydrogen, it seems possible for them to have trains running on hydrogen, biofuel is also mentioned, when in fact biofuel engines costs more to maintain than classical diesel engines. As far as capacity increases are concerned, there are mentions of a ‘new signalling system allowing a 50% increase in train paths’, the last time the government talked about installing a new signalling system on the network, the price was a few billions for almost nothing as a result.
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Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, was interviewed yesterday by ITV News and asked why he would not resign over revelations that the BBC had actively deceived the public in faked competition phone-ins.
His response stated that he would not be standing down because he wished to help re-establish the BBC’s code of conduct throughout the whole corporation, and that he had the full confidence of the BBC Board in this undertaking.
Where have we heard something similar to this before? Ah yes, that’s right, it’s exactly the same type of response elicited from Labour Ministers Charles Clarke and John Reid after successive Home Office scandals. They created or had a hand in the scandal and then claimed to be the solution to fix it. How convenient.
Well, it didn’t work out in the end for either Charles Clarke or John Reid, and I hope that it doesn’t for Mark Thompson either. However, if Thompson goes, the BBC Board will only bring in another equally inadept individual who won’t do anything but persist with the biased status quo of a corporation who continue to take the license fee far too much for granted, and with little regard for those who pay it.
Mark Thompson said that the BBC’s latest problem was down to only a small number of individual staff who did not take fairness, integrity and honesty to heart. But, in reality the BBC itself is the problem – not just any one part of it. The whole corporation is an unaccountable and uncontrollable mess, and until it is abolished or privatised the problems will only grow.
The occasion of Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister has been used by numerous commentators, either at home or abroad in order for some to praise Tony Blair’s legacy and for others in order to minimise it.
The former were unfortunately I may add more vocal than the later. Abroad things are even worse. Some continental medias are openly using the opportunity to brags about ‘Britain’s longest period of economic growth’, by at the same time highlighting ‘the corrections made to the damages caused by Thatcherism’.
Yet the real picture has numerous differences, with the one pictured by these commentators. If Britain was able to record its longest period of economic growth, it is mainly thanks to the reforms made by Margaret Thatcher and, by the often forgotten John Major. While it is fair to say that some mistakes were made during Thatcher’s years, Britain’s industries were already in decline by 1979 courtesy of Labour support to Arthur Scargill and, after ten years in power, the legacy of the Labour Party on social matters is nonexistent to say the least. True ‘billions were invested in order to catch up with other nations’ as people like Anthony Giddens like to say in the French newspaper Le Figaro. Yet the education system is falling apart, the NHS is even more bureaucratic than before and, Britain’s transport system is unable to meet the need of the future decades.
More than the failure of Blair’s legacy this also highlights another failure, the utter failure of the ‘Third Way model’ in Britain.
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