Saturday, 15 February 2025

Weekend Reading: Drax / Womens Rights vs Trans

Couple of worthwhile MSM press articles here - unusually good; and for the final one, an unusual source, too.

Drax - the papers are full of Drax at the moment as Miliband has partially caved in to the Starmer / Reeves growth-fixation.  OK, he's reduced the annual amount of subsidy for the Yorkshire tree-consuming monster, but he's extending our payments to undeserving Drax by another 4 years, on spurious grounds ("TINA": well, Ed, there are better alternatives), all for the sake of keeping options open for Drax to build a 'BECCS' plant, maybe, some time in the future of its own choosing, if it gets given even more £££, no commitments made at this time.  That's one helluva costly option, without any certainty of ultimate delivery.  Madness.

Several of the MPs taking a broadly anti-Drax line in Parliament of late, have actually screwed up in what they've said on this fairly technical topic; and the press have not been much better.  Even the FT is all-too-frequently disappointing in such BAU matters, silently and implicitly siding with, errr, BAU (and ad revenues?)  This, though not 100% accurate, is many times better than usual.  Oh, and quite a neat, perky little snipe from Nils Prately in the Graun, too.

Trans - also from the Graun is this, from the increasingly confident feminist pen of Sonia Sodha.  Here's a flavour (my emphasis): 

No woman should be forced to change her clothes in front of a male colleague... Peggie shared her account of what happened with the tribunal last week ... Dr Beth Upton, the [trans] male doctor in question, walked into the [changing] room while she was partially undressed... Upton put in a formal complaint, and Peggie was suspended for bullying and harassment... The greatest responsibility lies with Peggie’s employer, who, instead of making separate accommodations for Upton, expected female colleagues to ignore the fact he is male [sic!]... The attempted justification is that everyone must adopt the minority belief system that someone’s sex is not a scientific fact but a matter of their gender identity, or some sort of gendered soul.  As a personal worldview, that’s someone’s own business, but it is wrong – and, in a work context, unprofessional – to try to force it on others in relation to single-sex spaces, services and sports...

The idea that a man who identifies as female is literally a woman, and must without fail be treated as such, has become a cherished principle for some progressives. Politicians and women’s rights activists speaking against this have been excommunicated from the left. Slowly, but surely, this is starting to change ... Abandoning basic common sense for unpopular policies that put women at risk does not go well for the left.

'Misgendering' the doctor, by name, in print!  Go Sonia, Go Graun!

ND

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

US / Europe / Defence: some early thoughts

We had it coming.

1.  Trump's demand for increased European defence spending is (a) no surprise, and (b) totally reasonable.  So: what, in general terms, is Europe going to sacrifice, in order to move towards him on this?  Its freedom?  Because if Putin makes his next territorial move while Trump is in the job, that's what is at stake.  

I'm guessing it'll be Net Zero etc.  That particular policy desideratum is already proven to take second place to growth in most countries, when confronted directly with the trade-off.  I reckon it will come a poor third, when Russia actively raises dust in the Baltics / the Polish border / the Balkans.

2.  Bringing this issue home to a Parliament near you: will Starmer dare to continue holding back on his minimalist 2.5% GDP defence spending "aspiration"?  There's no timetable for that, beyond "by the end of the Parliament"; and thus far the MoD is in the firing line for Reeves' upcoming departmental cuts like all the rest.  

3.  Looking just a little further from home: when is the EU going to tell the Irish they need to pull their weight on defence??  They've been shamelessly free-riding forever, and some day it has to stop.  I know they have neutrality built into their Accession Treaty, but they can damn' well start paying cash for the defence they've been enjoying for free. 

Loads more to say, of course, so have at it BTL.  

We had it coming.

ND

Friday, 7 February 2025

War to the knife with Greens: Starmer going for broke

Going for growth?  There's every sign Starmer is going for broke - a slew of deeply controversial decisions either made already, or being readied, all in a rush.  Someone's told him it'll be a compelling, critical-mass message for all those would-be investors in UK plc that he's really open for business and will trample down all nay-sayers into the building-site dust.  (And presumably McSweeney has told him that 'all at once' is the best tactic.)

  • Support for Heathrow third runway (already signaled explicitly)
  • 'Nothing to stand in the way of new nukes' (yesterday)
  • 'Likely to grant Rosebank etc oil/gas production licences' (yesterday)
  • Extension of subsidies for Drax (Monday, by all accounts)

Everyone has their favourite 'hate' - mine is Drax; & I approve of Rosebank - and there is many a Green (and Red-Green) who hates them all with equal passion.  Perhaps there is someone other than Reeves who loves them all?  The construction industry, I guess, although they get nothing from the Drax announcement because Drax won't be committing to it's putative, ridiculous next-phase project "BECCS" in the near future - in fact, maybe never.

Wow.  Has McSweeney decided there'll be a month of massive sound & fury, followed by the usual amnesia?  Are the lefties who've just had the Whip restored so pathetically grateful, they'll take the required vow of silence?  Will the construction unions come swinging in with big support?

And Miliband ..?  Ah yes, we've mused about him several times.  He's swallowed LHR3.  He is in favour of nukes, and can probably swallow Drax (with much sophistry).  But Rosebank?  Lots of pundits are tipping him to quit over this, but I reckon otherwise: check his performance at the ESNZ Select Committee last month (linked to in an earlier post) - he very studiously repeated the exact wording of the Labour manifesto pledge: no new exploration licences.  Rosebank et al don't need an exploration licence, just a production permit.  I reckon he's swallowed it already, but we may soon find out.  His substantial cred with the greeny-lefties is going to be stretched to breaking-point soon.  What spectator sport this is!

Interestingly, only the nukes on that list above involve government money - and even that has (thus far) been limited to the ill-judged, probably ill-fated Sizewell C.  Everything else will either be private money and/or subsidies levied on energy bills.  So none of these 'announcements' is anything more than permissory.  Performative policy, on the cheap.  May never happen (aside from Drax grabbing the new subsidies with both hands, of course).

So:  let's see if there's a lasting political cost.  Maybe, maybe not.

ND

_________

Sorry, no links on this post - not easy from a 'phone.  You'll need to google it all yourselves!

Thursday, 6 February 2025

Wouldn't normally quote Jake Sullivan, but ...

The Biden administration didn't in any way distinguish itself on foreign & security matters (well, on anything really) but here's a great quotation from the outgoing National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. 

If I had told you three years ago that Joe Biden was going to announce a special military operation to take Ottawa in a week and three years later that he was in the wheat fields of Manitoba losing thousands of soldiers a month with inflation over 10% and interest rates in America over 20%, 600,000 Americans either dead or wounded, and we're inching out little Canadian town by little Canadian town, you wouldn't sit here saying, 'Wow, America's really winning this war in a big way, that’s great for America'. You would never say that. But somehow we're saying, 'oh the Russians there doing great'. They are not doing great:  They set out on a strategic objective … and they have failed in that.

It's from an interview here.  He wants to be careful not to give Trump any ideas ...

ND

Monday, 3 February 2025

Trump's trade war may give us a new data-point

Trump seems to have fired the first salvos of a new global trade war.  Does he imagine, as did Putin with his shooting war, that opponents will rapidly fold and it'll all be over in days or weeks?  Well, maybe.  But Colombia might not have set the pattern.

Old Pa Drew was in the international foodstuffs game and, having been a WW2 soldier in his time, brought me up to the slogan "trade is better than war": and I'm a free-trader.   Well, but it was never a cure-all, as I readily admit.

On the other side of the account, history records nations who viewed sea-faring merchant activity as the work of the devil, and sought to ban trading altogether.  Which is a debate we perennially return to here at C@W in rather more subtle form: what's the appropriate degree of dependency on trade, as opposed to national self sufficiency?  There's no scientific way of resolving this question, even though there are metrics one might try to deploy.  

In any event, some trade-dependencies are faut-de-mieux:  I was once posed a deliberately provocative question in a seminar by a Chinese energy economist, relating to Europe's dependency on cross-border electricity trade to keep our highly interconnected grids functioning: this was surely a major strategic weakness and a Very Bad Thing, she demanded.  I politely replied that, yes, sometimes import dependency can work against you, and that *ahem* some countries were dependent on imports for their oil ...

Anyhow: the rationale for trade is, of course, that it engenders efficiencies.  The Trump Trade War might just give us some hard data on just how costly are the inefficiencies his stymying of free-flow might bring about.

Then again, maybe everyone hastens to do his bidding...

Looking forward to hearing from some of you supporters of mercantilism and self-sufficiency out there.  (I'm caricaturing a bit, I know.)

ND