Marcus Brigstocke, comedian and propagandist

According to the comic‘s official website:

[BBC] Radio 4 has become a second home for Marcus.

Here‘s how he treats his audience (his emphasis, not mine), on the subject of climate change:

I could have written a two-hour stand-up show about climate change quite easily by now but there is absolutely no point because the only people who would come and see it already agree with me. So the approach I’ve taken is to drip feed it into everything that I do, whenever I’m on the radio or doing a stand-up show on any subject, to try and keep it in there just a little bit. People are on to me, it’s no sleight of hand — they know what to expect when I appear. In terms of creating comedy one of the easiest routes has been to mock the people who think that it’s not happening, because I find them easily mock-able. They will say a great deal but when questioned they haven’t read anything.

So, mouthy Marcus, drama degree dropout, reckons he‘s read and understood more relevant material than thousands of professional engineers who have had to understand the atmosphere in order to, you know, make things work (like me) and who happen to hold a contrary opinion (like me). Yeah, right! Still, our competing claims to expertise, and those of all others, are completely immaterial on any question of science: which is why the motto of the Royal Society is nullius in verba—roughly translated as “take nobody's word for it”.

The data is all that counts, and here's some, showing the global mean surface temperature (in so far as it can be calculated from a sparse set of thermometers), since 1995—during which time not a whole hell of a lot has happened. They won't tell you that on the British Biased Corporation. It’s more fun to let a smarmy smart-arse make fun of people who have a clue.

British Biased Corporation

Today I want to draw your attention to an article on the BBC website, by its environment correspondent, Richard Black. I could have chosen any of hundreds of similar articles by Black and his colleagues over the last few years: characterised by lazy repetition of press releases from interest groups, in the promotion of solar and wind power; against a backdrop (in this case, implicit) of unquestioning acceptance of the anthropogenic global warming meme.

This time, Black has been fed by the Church of England (wouldn't you know) and the National Trust. They're whinging about the proposed cut in the renewables feed-in tariff (currently struck down on a technicality by the courts) from 43p to 21p per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, operators of coal, gas and nuclear power stations sell their electricity for 2-3 p/kWh (see Figure 1, here), while a domestic user can buy electricity at around 13p/kWh and an industrial user at around 8p/kWh (see Tables 5.4.2 and 5.4.3 here). So, if the government gets its way, if you stick a solar panel on your roof, you'll still be paid 7-10 times the rates of the commercial generators (on whom we actually depend), rather than the 15-20 times currently. A prime example of why the presumption should always be against subsidising anything. Give someone a free gift and they'll bellyache if the next one is a little less generous.

Who pays? Every domestic consumer to the tune of 10% of their bill by 2020 and businesses to the tune of 0.47p/kWh right now. So everything anyone (rich and poor alike) needs to buy costs more and everyone (rich and poor alike) will pay more for their electricity bills; all to the benefit of people who can afford the capital investment required to install solar cells and especially to the manufacturers thereof. This at a time when one in five households are said to live in a state of "fuel poverty" and in 2009/10 there was an excess winter death rate of nine pensioners per hour. And this at a time, of course, when the country is flat broke.

Does Black question who pays—with their money or their life? Does he put the subsidies in any kind of economic context? Does he question why we bother, when the mean global temperature has essentially flatlined for a decade or more? Of course not. His ex-colleague Alex Kirby gave the game away in one of the Climategate 2.0 leaked emails, to Professor Jones of the University of East Anglia (my bold):

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats

Which makes me think of another subsidy, of £3.4 billion raised by a poll tax, that the British public might be told what to think.

More from the bishop

Regular readers will recall my letter to Christopher Hill, the Bishop of Guildford.

The Rt. Revd. Hill did me the courtesy of a reply, and we exchanged subsequent letters. He requested that I not publish the subsequent correspondence, so, of course, I won't.

In general though, the bishop is not averse to publicising his views. Of course, one would assume that was mandatory for a cleric of a proselytising religion; but my attention was drawn to a piece in the Church Times which is almost wholly political (God and Christ are mentioned once each in a final paragraph that it is not related to the thrust of the article, and appears almost as an afterthought).

It appears that Rt. Revd. Hill chairs something called the House of Bishops' Europe Panel. The article follows David Cameron's refusal to cede parliamentary control of the British budget to European institutions, to allow a European tax on an industry that is predominantly situated in the UK, and to pay tens of billions of extra pounds to bail out eurozone banks and some eurozone countries (remembering, perhaps, that the eurozone taken as a whole is in a slightly better financial position than the sterling zone). The bishop opines "In the long term, it will be disastrous if we were actually isolated from the rest of Europe, economically and in terms of international relations", along with screeds of similar guff that I shan't repeat.

In other words, we should go along with whatever the leaders of France and Germany want, whether or not their own people want it, whether or not our people want it, whether or not we could ever recover our democracy, whether or not we are unfairly targeted for exactions, whether or not any of it will work on its own terms. And, as the argument goes, all to retain some "influence"—which the likes of Rt. Revd. Hill will always find reasons not to deploy.

The bishop makes no effort to suggest that his recommendations are those of which God would approve. His intervention seems wholly political. I am forced to the conclusion that monies placed on the collection plate subsidise prelates to push a political agenda that is not my own. And I'm afraid that thought trumps the blandishments in the bishop's private letters.

Johnny Euro plays catch up

At last: the European Central Bank has learned from the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England!

As I understand events of the last 48 hours, Euroland banks about to go bust have been allowed to borrow hundreds of billions from the European Central Bank at next-to-no interest. Of that, they'll use hundreds of millions for their top directors to buy mansions, ski lodges, private jets, champagne, hookers, etc. The rest they'll lend to Club Med governments, with no particular expectation of getting it back. The risk of non-repayment will be borne by the ECB (also known as: the German taxpayer).

Nice work if you can get it!

The wrong ring fence

The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, announced today that he intends to implement the main recommendations of the Vickers report; in particular, that banks should 'ring fence' retail banking operations from investment banking, which is perceived to be riskier. This is justified in the Vickers report by the claim that:

it would insulate vital banking services on which households and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) depend from problems elsewhere in the (global) financial system.

Of course, that would be laudable. We wouldn't want nefarious casino bankers frittering away the savings of thrifty British workers by placing losing bets on complex derivative functions of various obscure foreign assets; thus unable to provide mortgages to “hard-working families” (I apologise for reminding readers of one of Osborne's illustrious predecessors) or working capital to hard-pressed small businesses. There is only one flaw in this argument: the banks that went belly-up in the UK in 2008—Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley, Alliance & Leicester, HBOS, Lloyds, RBS—were exclusively or primarily retail banks; who were brought down by betting that they'd make a return on 125% self-certified mortgages (and the like) to Joe and Jane Public. So this particular ring fence would protect the bonuses of City wide-boys and fat cats from the delusions of overly-optimistic twenty-something house-buyers and whoever runs the computers that lend to them.

The terrifying thing about the 2008 crisis was the imminent threat that banks would conserve cash by halting payments to other banks representing normal commercial transactions, such as salary and trade payments; at which point everyone would be unemployed in short order. It is around the safe custody of money, and the transmission of money between safe-custody accounts, that a ring fence must be built. This is a low-risk, well-understood business with predictable costs.

On the other hand (or the other side of the fence), buying and holding financial assets, whether Joe Public's mortgage or Greek bonds or some derivative thereof, is inherently risky, especially under the fractional reserve system where my bank deposit might be used several times over to back such purchases. I'm very uneasy that money intended to pay housekeeping or wages or otherwise lubricate the wheels of commerce is used in these ways, without any explicit choice by the depositor. If I have spare money, which I want to bet on a risky venture, well and good, but it should be explicit, with my eyes open.

Of course, to erect such a fence, a very British sacred cow, standing in the way, will need to be slaughtered: the idea that banking should be free. If you want your money genuinely looked after (in a secure computer, in a vault), and not used as a poker chip by an anonymous gambler, I'm afraid it costs. So does moving it securely between vaults. And converting it to paper spewed out of a wall. I should know, because it's my business.

One other thing about Osborne's proposals: he wants them implemented by 2019. As Margaret Thatcher used to say to civil servants, World War Two was nearly lost and then won in less time. The nuclear bomb of Club Med default is almost certain to go off a lot sooner.