Happy Easter: some music

Over at Sacker's blog, there's an interesting Good Friday post from 'JD': a religious procession in the Spanish town of Avilés, taking place to a somewhat syncopated drumbeat.  Somewhat disconcerting, too - take a look for yourself - in all that Inquisition garb, making the drumbeat even more sinister.  At least to Protestants like me.

It put me immediately in mind of another procession I've personally witnessed - in the oddly similarly-named Ávila‎, another Spanish town: in fact, a splendid walled city.  Their procession is in honour of St Teresa.  And the thing is, they also process to syncopated drumbeat - though not identical with the one in Sackers' post.  And no pointy hats, either.  Sadly, I haven't quickly been able to find it on youtube.

I wonder if all Spanish religious processions jive in the same manner - perhaps one of our readers knows?

Anyhow, here's some more fine Easter music - Wagner's Karfreitagszauber from Parsifal.  Not a Catholic, Wagner.

ND

PS: the other vid from JD's post - from Pergolesi's Stabat Mater - is worth listening to, as well.  Wiki mentions that Bach picked up on it: and to my ear, there's something there that Mozart must have picked up on too, for his mighty Requiem.

2024 Predictions Compo: Bankman-Fried Update

So we have an outcome on yet another of our 2024 predictions compo items: SB-F's sentence & fine.  The jail term is clear enough, the fine less so: he must "forfeit $11bn in assets".  Is that a fine?  Anyhow, it's financial - and a much bigger number than almost any of us guessed.  In fairness, we've still the appeal to be heard so let's wait up.

There seems also to be belated news on the UK's recessionary status in 4Q23, which might impact on the results of last year's compo.  Must look into that.

Some of you have been kind enough to note that my early intelligence on Putin's share of the vote turned out to be spot-on.  Yup, when the fix went in there were some communicative folks in the know who just couldn't contain themselves.  Russia is like that.

ND

UPDATE / PS:

SB-F features in this very illuminating article on soi-dissant 'Effective Altruism' -

https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/

Aspects of Russia's war on Ukraine: (3) Germany

In times gone by Germany as a whole, and most German businessmen I have met, liked to come across as the grown-ups of Europe.  Oh, their worldly wisdom!  How I remember the condescending post-Brexit lectures on the imminent departure of the whole of the City of London for Frankfurt ... [1]

Well, it didn't seem to get them very far when the custard hit the fan.  Their two aces - being deeply in bed with Russia, and exporting like crazy to China, didn't turn out quite the bankers they had assumed when Putin played his own hand: cue breast-beating and hand-wringing.  So what happened next in Germany?  Well, lots of things but I'll highlight a few:

• A typically dynamic German practical response: massive shift towards LNG to replace NS1 / NS2 gas - long before 'someone' exercised the Semtex option
• Hugely accelerated efforts on a large-scale shift to hydrogen fuel as the supposed saviour of German manufacturing (no tangible results yet, though)
• Meaningful slump in said manufacturing sector (whether this is permanent 'demand destruction' is yet to be established) with baleful economic repercussions
• Promises (as yet unfulfilled) of much more defence spending and a full-scale reorientation of policy
• Lame & abject 'followerism' as regards military aid for Ukraine: truly, pathetically demeaning

And now, the 'intercepted military telephone discussion' of a couple of weeks back.  WTF?  Afterwards, Scholz had the gall to suggest that everyone still has complete trust in Germany as a secure & reliable military ally.  Errr, no.  Hasn't been any for years before this incident; even less (if that's possible) now.  They don't get a look-in on anything of importance.

In short, from having a plausible case for being the grown-ups of Europe, Germany now looks like the over-sized, know-nothing teenager sulking in its bedroom and defying calls to come down for the family outing.  What and how long it takes for Germans to throw off this current malaise is not something I have a detailed view on, except that nobody should ever underestimate their ultimate capacity for hard work and self-sacrifice, whether in a good cause or a bad one.  Doesn't look as though it will be in time to be of much assistance to Ukraine, though.  I suppose keeping out of the way isn't nothing, in the circumstances.  It may be the best that can be hoped for.

While we all wait to learn the outcome of this surely-temporary impasse, there's a question lingering in my mind: did Mutti realise what she was doing all those years of 'drawing Russia into the fold', and how misconceived it was?  Obviously, the German polity embraced her always-implausible policy wholesale: as Nietzsche said, " 'Credo quia absurdus est': that is what the German spirit wants" [2].

Merkel mostly keeps her peace on the matter, and we can see why; but early on, there were some hints at remorse (- unlike the shameless Schröder, only too happy to draw his enormous Russian stipend: historical, ocean-going, world-scale treachery).  She, remember, was a prize-winning Russian student: fluent in the language, in communism - and surely also in the Russian mentality?  I don't have a tenth of her first-hand experience of Russia; and for a westerner the 'Mysterious Russian Soul' takes a bit of adjusting to.  But I still reckon to have more insight than she seems to have deployed.  When you've been systematically exposed to all things Russian (including the bully Putin personally - the man who maliciously enjoyed literally setting the dogs on her) as long as she has, it's pretty weird to misread them quite as badly as she did.  I don't consider her guilty of Schröder-sin, so I can only assume her neuro-wiring is extremely well geared for language-learning but not for reading human beings.  It happens out there on the autism spectrum.

This post hasn't been much centred on Ukraine (for which apologies).  It was the Russian invasion that triggered Germany's present regression, of course - but we must surely assess there was a major fault-line in the coherence and wisdom of German geo-economic policy and overall statescraft that would have become manifest eventually, one way or another.  What are the likely consequences - e.g. for the EU?  For NATO?  The West vis-à-vis China?   Etc etc.  Very much open to any insights and perspectives on this massive and rather important topic - lots of you [2] know Germany well.

ND 

_________

[1]  Frankfurt?!  Have you ever been there?  Would your wife be willing to live there?  Would anyone ever visit you there?

[2] OK, this quote is a bit out of context but Nietzsche very much saw the Germans as being suckers for falling in behind a Grand Idea, whether or not having serious merit.  He blamed Bismarck for using his undoubted statesmanship and populism to build up "a monstrosity of imperial power"; and I don't think he'd have liked what Merkel did either. 

[3] Am greatly missing whatever would have been Mark Wadsworth's opinions on this: he thought widely & laterally, and was an excellent German speaker.

The refurbishment of Sidney Cotton's G-AFTL

By, er, popular demand:  a short account of the recent refurbishment of Sidney Cotton's legendary Lockheed Electra 12a, UK registration G-AFTL.  For more on why it's a legend, see these earlier posts.  Here, we're concerned mostly with the airframe.

Photo: IWM

G-AFTL was one of several (probably four) Electras acquired surreptitiously, just before WW2, on behalf of the British and French secret services.  Each was modified in different ways to facilitate its use for clandestine aerial photography.  Some were fitted with inconspicuous cameras - they wouldn't be noticed by a passenger.  Others carried cameras so big, nobody inside the cabin could possibly miss them.  The exact camera fit of G-AFTL is the subject of very careful current research, but I'm only covering it briefly here (see below).  Official records of the missions Cotton flew in it differ from his claims on the matter - he seemed to be conveniently and boastfully conflating missions by more than one plane and more than one pilot; and the claims of his personal role (made on his behalf via fawning biographers) are certainly exaggerated.  That doesn't really matter for our purposes here: the whole pre-war and early-war exploit was astonishing and very productive.

After many successful missions, G-AFTL was in a hangar at Heston (near today's LHR) when in September 1940 it suffered a direct hit by German bombing - a parachute mine.  Word was, it had been crushed - but in fact, it had quite miraculously escaped write-off damage, see photo below.  It seems that Cotton's MI6 handler, one F.W.Winterbotham (another James Bond character), gifted Cotton the plane for services rendered, and helped him get it back to Lockheed in Burbank, California (under a 1941 "export licence") to be fixed - not a trivial matter in wartime.  

Rumours of its demise had been exaggerated ...  photo: Tuttle

In any case, fixed it definitely was.  And there was a lot more work done on it in North America over the years, as would inevitably be the case for any aircraft that's been flying, on and off, for over 80 years  When recently the plane was stripped right down, evidence was found of several fairly major jobs done over the years.  The extra fuel tanks fitted by Cotton had been stripped out in the USA.  The damaged port wing and aileron were replaced by Boeing of Canada in 1942, using cannibalised parts from probably two other Lockheeds.

In 2022 the plane came back to Blighty from a prolonged period of semi-neglect in the USA, and was taken in hand at Sywell.  A very exhaustive (and costly) refurbishment followed, with a lot of research and detective work thereby facilitated on all manner of different aspects of the plane, its history, and Cotton's claims.  It turns out G-AFTL's cameras (no longer extant, but the fittings can be detected) must have been of the bulky non-covert type - and thus G-AFTL wasn't one of the planes that carried out recce actually within Germany during "commercial" visits (Cotton had business there).  Also, only one of this pair of large cameras benefited from one of Cotton's many genuine innovations - he was a serious inventor and holder of many patents - the diversion of hot engine air to play over the lens of the camera to stop it from freezing at altitude, a major issue for high-altitude aerial reconnaissance at the time.  Only the starboard engine had its air pipework modified, and the mods only reached the starboard aperture.  It is felt that the port camera may have been kept warm by virtue of its positioning in the body of the aircraft.

The undercarriage proved to be the most difficult thing to fix in the 14-month rebuild.  Painstaking efforts to find clues under the several layers of paintwork as to its pre-war livery have failed to come up with anything definitive, so the current 'restoration' paint scheme is speculative.  This is a bit of a shame because part of the Cotton legend is that he invented "CamoTint", a bluish paint job that made it very difficult to spot at high altitudes.  

Propellers of a different type to the original have been used for the reconditioned engines.  No example could be procured of the 'tear-drop' type of canopy extension that Cotton had fitted to at least the port side of the forward cockpit glazing to facilitate good 180 degree sideways visibility for the pilot - another 1939 innovation, though Cotton himself didn't hold the patent for that one.  The interior has been fitted out for passenger use (and rather sumptuously, too - the new owner probably knows his market) rather than in the necessarily spartan, ultra-utilitarian way Cotton converted it for his 1930's purposes. 

Photo: IWM

All this work culminated triumphantly in complete restoration to airworthiness, as you can see in that IWM film.

Hope that satisfies interest!

ND

Aspects of Russia's War on Ukraine: Part 2 - the air war

Having considered developments on the land, we now turn to the air.  Many months ago there was a period of serious debate around whether Russia was going to go down the tactical nuclear route.  I never thought it remotely likely, but offered two hypothetical scenarios where it might be more plausible: if Ukraine threatened (in believable terms) to be about to retake Crimea; and/or if Russia committed its airforce - it was very noticeably absent from the battle at that time - and it was shot out of the skies.  The first of those is somewhat obvious, but what was the reasoning on the latter?

Answer:  unlike any of its ground assets, Russia cannot replace its airforce.  So it's been largely withheld, although as Ukraine's limited and now dwindling AA assets have slowly been depleted, Putin has gradually been hazarding more of his aircraft. 

A-50:  looks smart - but not many left

Until a few weeks ago, that was: and then two A-50s were shot out of the sky (by whom, exactly, remains unclear: the Russians are curiously anxious to claim it was friendly fire).   These critical planes are used for directing air assets into forward positions - and Putin doesn't have very many of them left (fingers of one hand now).  The Chinese are highly unlikely to offer them any substitutes, and I'm not at all sure India will sell them any either.  And skilled crews are even harder to come by - essentially irreplaceable in the short term.  Nobody bales out of one of those.  So the Russian airforce once more takes a step backwards - and just when they were perfecting the use of their new glide bombs.  

So - another period of relative impasse in the air: and I don't think this has been a 'pre-election' issue for Putin: he genuinely never wants to see his irreplaceable airforce seriously degraded.  This deprives Russia of one of the standard doctrinal components of what it needs to be doing to execute on its newly-revived 'Soviet' operational method (see earlier post), namely, the vital air contribution required towards the 'firepower' imperative.  My assessment that Putin dare not hazard his airforce stands - particularly in light of the crazy comments he lets his outriders make about taking on NATO in the foreseeable future.

For completeness, we should remember that Ukraine was similarly hobbled during its ill-fated 2023 offensive.  Supposedly planned initially on NATO lines, it was always missing the air component - which for NATO doctrine is even more critical than for Soviet.  'Ill-conceived' might be a better description.

What might break this current impasse?  A couple of things can be envisaged in terms of purely military considerations (i.e. putting aside some political stroke):

(1) Putin might decide to throw in the airforce anyway - if not right now, then perhaps in the expected Russian summer offensive.  Will Ukraine have received the currently-on-ice new package of US military aid by then?  If not, the Russian airforce might be expected to get away with fewer casualties than it would have at any time since Feb 24. 

(2) The Russians might come up with a novel work-around for the lack of A-50s.  The rapid and creative way technology is being adapted in this conflict by both sides, who knows?  I say 'adapted' because Russia has serious problems getting new Western electronic components for anything really advanced, albeit sanctions aren't remotely watertight.  

(3) The long-discussed F-16s might arrive in fair numbers on the other side.  If Ukranian pilots have been trained on the air-to-air mission, that really would keep the Russian aircraft at a distance.  But maybe they've been trained for close air support ... I just don't know.  The F-16 is versatile, but only in terms of how it's been fitted out and crewed: not every F-16 squadron can effectively taken on any role. 

Otherwise, this strange conflict will continue on its hybrid course for many more months to come.

In Part 3 we'll look at Germany's lamentable performance in all this.

ND

Sidney Cotton's Pirate War - revisited

A couple of years ago I ran a couple of posts on the piratical old rogue Sidney Cotton and his WW2 exploits in the famous Lockheed G-AFTL; and how it was returning to the UK to be refurbished.  Several of you said you enjoyed the tale.  But I hadn't updated the story for you: and now's the time.

I'm pleased to say the illustrious aircraft been restored to full flying glory (- in fact, possibly even 'better' than before because I can tell you the newly-installed interior is rather more sumptuous than it ever was).  Recently it's been a centrepiece in a big display at IWM Duxford, 'Spies in the Skies', on WW2 aerial reconnaissance.  I'm including the link here: it works right now but I suspect it'll be coming down in the near future as they draw stumps on the display.  But there will be other opportunities to see the Lockheed because it is flying perfectly well now. 

Also on offer from the IWM is this short film (click above) on the plane and a little of its history.  We need to be a bit cautious on the story, because Cotton was a serial liar - a shame, because the true story is riveting enough without his self-serving embellishments:  see those earlier blog posts.

On another aspect of the IWM display, they were also showing a short official film on Bomb Damage Assessment in WW2 - link here.  Different times:  the destruction of avowedly civilian targets being cheerfully discussed in the film would count as war crimes today.  O tempora, o mores ... 

ND

Budget: Open Thread

What has Hunt achieved?  A bit of stealing Labour's thunder?  A bit of tinkering?  The last budget by a Tory chancellor for a decade?

Well I never pretended to understand macroeconomics.  Over to you.

ND

3 Aspects of Russia's War on Ukraine: Part 1 - a strategy at last?

Lots to think about, and I hope we can do so without some of the inanities that have popped up BTL here over the past two years.  Is that overly-optimistic?  For the avoidance of doubt, nobody ever said Russia was about to run out of ammo / be terminally crippled in a couple of months by sanctions, etc etc etc ...

1.  Russia adopting an identifiable ground-war strategy

Russia has of course laboured under a good many strategies: for the raising of troops; for sourcing weapons from anyone who'd sell them; for sleeving oil abroad; for stirring up FSU countries from Estonia to Moldova, etc etc.  Some of this is coherent; some of it chaotic.  I'm not concerned with them here; nor Putin's Grand Strategy, nor his theory of victory.

So I'm looking at the ground war and Russia's current strategy to achieve what we might infer (from their actions) to be their 2024 objective: capture the whole of the four oblasts they've notionally annexed, to be poised for Odessa and Kharkiv next year.  And after two whole years since February 2022, they've at last come up with a strategy that - insofar as you'd draw it on a map - is informed by Soviet operational art.  That's after mounting an initial campaign that, to general astonishment, flew in the face of such well-developed doctrine: you'll perhaps recall my critiques of their conduct back in 2022 (e.g. here and here.)

Anyhow, the diligent analysts at ISW have recently come up with this: The Russian Winter-Spring 2024 Offensive Operation on the Kharkiv-Luhansk Axis.  Their analysis is not a work of genius (and certainly not of concision), but it's competent, and comes from genuine students of Soviet operational art.  Summarising: on a particular front, the Russians are seeking to advance along four axes that are (broadly) parallel and designed to be mutually supportive - see the second map in ISW's briefing.

And that, folks, is the essence of the geographical or configurational aspect of phase 1 of a Soviet frontal advance.  (Where was this in 2022?)  Think of a heavy wooden club with four long, parallel nails protruding.  It's to be whacked vigorously into the enemy, with the immediate aim of embedding nail-deep into his body of troops; breaking their front line; fixing them in position & denying them the ability to shift left, right or even backwards; and with various pre-ordained reactions planned for contingencies (like one of the nails running into hard resistance).  It's what the first few days are meant to look like, resulting in a punctured, badly injured, immobilised foe, who's to be finished off by what comes in phases 2 & 3, to yield a concrete territorial gain across a broad area.

But here's the thing: just forming units up in the right geographical disposition isn't enough.  I emphasised the above description as being the configurational aspect, because there are other pre-requisites laid down in the Soviet handbook.  As noted back in '22 (see links above), these are: speed, firepower and manoeuvre.

Let's give the Russians of 2024 the benefit of the doubt on firepower: they have probably assembled enough, though there's an important caveat below.  There's also the merest hint of a bit of maneouvre going on just now, although they've proved to be quite shockingly bad at that to date, and Ukraine's massed drones ain't making things any easier for them in that regard.

But what's really missing is the speed.  The Soviets didn't call their front line troops "shock armies" for nothing.  Their doctrine was designed, firstly against WW2 Germans and secondly Cold War Americans, both opponents that were quite masterful at logistics.  Everything depends upon speed, for reasons we could go into.  And speed has been lacking on the Russian side, more even than manoeuvre, in everything we saw after about Day 3 back in Feb two years ago.

The idea that a Soviet frontal attack strategy can be made to work in slow motion is ... well, it's something the Soviets never dreamed of.  Unless some genius has come up with an innovative hybrid - and where has he been all this time? - this ain't gonna work, provided Ukraine retains at least a modicum of military resources.  They have all the depth an army could ask for to fall back into, coupled with some very well-prepared, mutually-supporting defences (e.g. at Slovyansk and Kramatorsk), even stronger than those at Avdiivka** and much more so than at Bakhmut, both of which caused such losses for their Russian attackers.  And they are just as good at chess, which is what you get when everything slows down.

There's even a caveat to my generous concession above on the firepower dimension of all this.  Putin's airforce, long held back in this conflict, was just starting to get into its stride when it suffered a month of serious setbacks and seems to have been withdrawn from the very front line right now.  That's potentially big, and will be the subject of Part 2.

ND

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** Footnote: reliable figures are hard to come by, of course, but leaks from Russian sources (FWIIW) suggest they lost the equivalent of approximately three full divisions taking Avdiivka, in about 3 months, with total casualties far higher.  For context, that's like the entire British Army of the Rhine in the Cold War.  For one small town of limited (but, unlike Bakhmut, not zero) operational value.

Votes - and indoctrination - for politically suspect 16-year olds

There are quite a few on the 'progressive', lefty side of the divide who believe that votes for 16 year-olds is a guaranteed way to lock in a majority for evahh.  

Hmm.  The more rational actors are not so sure: I know for a fact that within Starmer's camp there are those who don't agree.  Maybe they've seen that chilling series of interviews conducted a few years ago by some brave lady in Israel, asking teenagers what they thought should be done with Palestine / Palestinians.  Progressive?  No, their views were not that way at all.  And you just know that a couple of weeks before a GE in any country with 16 year old voters, the progressives would be blind-sided by some virulent populist www-meme that would have who-knows-what consequences.  Even Trump fears the reach of Taylor Swift.

Which brings us to Andrew Tate and the Labour Party.  A friend of mine was recently asked to give a talk to a mixed high school.  On arrival, he was begged by the staff not to engage, if and when some of the boys raised the subject of Andrew Tate.  It's that bad.  

And the Labour Party knows it.  So what's the plan?  This is seriously horrific, as well as being seriously bonkers. 

Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny: Shadow education secretary says party would help schools train role models as ‘powerful counterbalance’

Labour would help schools to train young male influencers who can counter the negative impact of people like Andrew Tate ... [she] expressed hopes that some of the young men who became leaders in their schools could then reach more people by becoming online influencers themselves. “I would hope that the young male mentors involved would then also be able to share their experiences more widely, to kind of shift the discussion around what it is to be growing up as a young man today in modern Britain,” Phillipson said. Under the proposals, Labour would send “regional improvement teams” into schools to train staff on introducing the peer-to-peer mentoring programme.

OK, it's doomed from the start because stroppy kids ain't signing up for crap like this.  Generations of well-meaning priests and do-gooders have tried.  Unless you're willing to go the whole Jesuit hog at age 7, it ain't gonna work.  The idea that a Labour-appointed schoolboy "young male mentor" is about to become an online influencer could only have been devised by someone with (a) no teenage children of their own, or never even met one; and (b) with their head squarely up their backsides.  The poor lad is most likely to get a kicking.

But then ...  "regional improvement teams"?  Didn't Mao send them in, during the Cultural Revolution?  The fact that anyone even thinks these thoughts is pretty chilling.

That's 'progressives' in 2024, folks.  Culture War?  We ain't seen nothing yet.

ND

PS:  here's a (relatively) intelligent progressive (not quite an oxymoron) who's also deeply skeptical of this nonsense, sharing some of the above concerns and another of his own - he'd prefer Labour to be expending its energies on something more salient to the state we're in.  From about 30 minutes in.

2024 Predictions Compo: Putin Election Update

 One of the questions in this year's Predictions Compo is:

• Size of V. Putin's share of the Russian vote (as announced)

I have news from my quite-good-but-not-wholly-reliable Russian sources that the answer will be not unadjacent to 87%.

Just saying.

ND

Sacking the Generals

Recently Ukraine's President Zelensky caused a stir (rapidly overtaken by other news) when firing his fairly well-regarded Commander of Joint Forces Gen Zaluzhnyi.  Political machinations?  A sign of weakness?  Well, I don't have any specific insight into what's going on there.  But I do know that firing generals is a perfectly legitimate option when things are going wrong.  You just need to be sure you've picked the right ones for the right reasons, and are not just lashing out in some kind of random scapegoating or personal score-settling.

It immediately brought to mind a recent book on the firing - and non-firing - of US generals: The Generals - American military command from WW2 to today, by Thomas E Ricks.  The author's twofold thesis is that:

(a) when the chips are down, prompt and adroit dismissals are vital to ensure that failure is not rewarded and that the right talent gets to the top, as fast as possible.  The players need to take over from the gentlemen at the earliest possible juncture;

(b) this used to be the American Way in the good old days when George C. Marshall was Chief of Staff: but the the mighty US Army inexorably became bureaucratised thereafter, so that very bad generals have been left in place to wreak havoc in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well, the US system wasn't perfect - Marshall left Mark Clark, a truly awful general, in place.  But evidently he got through a lot of dead wood in pretty short order, as part of the vast expansion of the US Army in a very few years after 1940.  That's all the more remarkable because, in my experience of ultra-fast-growing organisations (I've worked in a couple), there's a tendency to feel that that hasty firings deplete the numbers just when every more-or-less able-bodied person is needed for the burgeoning task in hand.

Ricks' critique of several postwar US generals is unsparing.  Read it if this is your thing.  I'll just say that the book has told me stuff I hadn't known about the one I worked under (indirectly) - Norman Schwartzkopf - making me think I gave him too much credit in my thread on Desert Storm etc a few years back, which you can find here.  If what Ricks says is correct, I hadn't realised Stormin' Norman's first plan of attack was so lamentably wooden; (I was busy trying to figure out the other side's plans) nor that he so fundamentally misread what Ricks reckons were the strategic significances of the striking initiatives Saddam launched at the Battle of Khafji and his Scud campaign (posts 3 & 4 in my thread).  Colin Powell doesn't come out too well from the book, either.  I could offer a bit of a defence for both men, notwithstanding we all know they didn't manage to decapitate the Iraqi army when with perfect hindsight, we now know it might (possibly) have been achieved in 1991, saving the world a lot of bother twelve years later.  But nonetheless, they did achieve quite a lot.

And firing generals in the UK?  Well, Churchill fired a fair few.  Since WW2 I'm not sure we've been put to the test in quite the same way as the USA.  I once personally witnessed that irascible martinet Peter Inge, when a Lt General commanding 1(BR) Corps, publicly destroy an unlucky (and possibly incompetent) Brigadier in front of the whole Corps staff.  That didn't seem right then, and it still doesn't - and that's not to say the man shouldn't have been fired.  But there are ways and ways.  

I wonder how Zelensky's move will be seen in the years - or even the months - to come?

ND

The Sizewell C 'RAB' Abomination

A couple of weeks ago at Mr Wendland's prompting, I undertook to post on the putative Sizewell C contract, currently "under negotiation" with EDF and various financial parties.  I'd said it was worse than the Hinkley Point contract - hard to believe, but true.  We know it will be on a "Regulated Asset Base" footing, which has been used in the USA and elsewhere since time immemorial but in this SZC manifestation has some nasty new twists.  Other aspects are broadly known, but as with Hinkley, the final document will be secret, so there's always a limit as to what we'll get.  (There are aspects of Hinkley we only know because the EC published them.) 

Anyhow, I was duly working up a post; but this morning have been handsomely beaten to the punch by the redoubtable Citizens Advice in their response to a consultation.  Well, a very big hat-tip to them, and here's the link.  Adjusting for the fact that their language is naturally diplomatic, you can't do better than read this to get the full horror of what's being proposed.  It's only 16 pp - but if you're pushed for time, just the first 3 pages gives you the basics.

ND

AEP on 'Green Boom': not quite the full picture

As oft-noted here, Evans-Pritchard is often amusingly contrarian with an interesting point to make; and equally often just plain bonkers.  His latest DTel offering - fresh from his triumphant insistence that Labour should stick to its £28 billion pledge, hoho - straddles both characterisations. 

This is the year the world’s green juggernaut becomes unstoppable - the greatest economic growth story since the industrial revolution has crossed a critical threshold

Well, we read what he writes and we know what he means: but caveats need to be entered.

1.  2024 isn't the year: it was 2018-19, as explained here several times.  This was the window in time through which shone the dazzling light of expenditure on adaptation / resilience to climate change being classified by the UN as "green", & therefore qualifying for government subsidy / underwriting etc.  At this point, every traditional steel-n-concrete industry and their bankers realised this Green thing really had something in it for them - road repairs, sea defences, flood protection measures, reservoirs etc etc.  At which point - and that's 5 years ago now, Ambrose - the switch was thrown.

(Not all Greens are big fans of this development.  For one thing, dosh for adaptation diverts funds away from what they'd prefer to be spending money on; and for another, it can be portrayed as having given up on outright prevention of climate change, which many of them still cling to.)  

2.  There's a renewal in oil & gas, too.  More than one thing can be true at once, in this complicated world of ours.  The big O&G companies - and not just the Aramcos, ADNOCs & Petronas's of this world; it's Exxon, Shell, Total, BP and Equinor, too - have tracked the spending on renewables, modelled its impact, and noticed that the green trajectory lauded by AEP isn't going to eliminate the need for oil & gas for a very long time yet to come - the tobacco industry phenomenon I've written about before.  It might have been just the NOCs, the Chinese, and the piratical energy traders who benefitted: but now the IOCs have started to reorient.  

So, quietly at first (except Total**: their buccaneering CEO is made of stronger stuff), they've started on strategies that will allow them to carry on with their traditional businesses, while maintaining at least some kind of green front.  An ostentatious readiness to get stuck into the 'S' bit of CCS is one such wheeze; a bit of renewable investment of their own is also in the mix (except for Exxon, which started thinking that maybe it didn't need to change after all, a couple of years ahead of the others).

I'm not sure how the stock markets will handle this, or the pension funds.  But be in no doubt, however the spoils are shared and the shares are held, there's a long-term viable business still there.

ND

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** This may have awkward consequences for Total, because it has been identified as #1 Bad Guy by the greens who are willing to go violent, and they plan to target it.    

Gas industry and (shrinking) critical mass

It may seem quixotic to pick on any one highly suspect facet of the vague 'Net Zero' plans we, along with every other western nation, have to pay lip-service to these days.  But here's one that occurred to me recently: natural gas is essential for balancing the grid - but what if that's the only use it's wanted for?  Would the industry have critical mass in such a scenario?

The UK gas industry is huge (40% of our primary energy) and has been for a very long time, back into Victorian times.  We're really good at it.  Modern UK gas history starts with the first North Sea gas coming ashore in 1967, and the rapid (if chaotic) conversion of the nation's gas system from town gas to natural gas.  As production ramped up we started importing (from Norway, and a small amount of LNG) and have done ever since, although for a brief period - the absolute heyday of our own production - we were net exporters, the export routes being pipelines to Ireland (now horribly dependent on us as their own supplies dwindle) and the Continent**.  Meanwhile, gas had become an entirely new source of fuel for electricity generation (residential heating had previously dominated gas demand, and power generation using gas had been prohibited!); and in several phases the 'Dash(es) for Gas' brought about a substantial new sub-sector: gas-fired power, which systematically ate coal's lunch over a couple of decades, and still hasn't been squeezed out by burgeoning renewables.

And that's because ... it can't be!  At least, not if we're to enjoy electricity on demand, which most of us are quite keen on.  No other source has yet been devised which can so flexibly, easily, cleanly and at scale give us the balance of what we need when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, and the nukes and biomass aren't anywhere near enough to cover the rest.  Yes, there's pumped hydro and an ever growing army of batteries, and a bit of demand-side response: but gas it is, for as far into the future as anyone can credibly see (notwithstanding Ed Miliband's 'no gas-for-power by 2030' blather).

Right now, gas-for-power isn't only needed for 'peaking' - i.e. as a standby resource for days when wind is minimal, sometimes across the whole of northern Europe at the same time - it's needed for a material share of baseload, too.  If (a very big if) government plans for new nukes come to fruition, and the biomass farce is perpetuated, it's fair to say the baseload amounts needed from gas could diminish over time, as reflected in annual total numbers: that's certainly the 'intention' of both Tory and Labour policy-makers.  (I say 'could', but there are other policy-contingency scenarios I'll come to at the end.)   But let's suppose also that in parallel with the (gradual) big increase they all see in nuclear,  wind and solar power come to pass, they also somehow (gradually) manage to electrify home heating, the other massive demand for gas.  They'd still, like it or not, need gas for peaking, by which we mean, stepping into the breach for days at a time in winter.  Batteries just aren't credible for this at the necessary scale; nor (in this country) pumped hydro; nor imports; nor demand-side management.

Today, given the sheer scale of the routine business of meeting residential (and commercial & industrial) gas demand, the entire industry - from offshore production, pipeline and LNG import facilities, storage facilities, vast and flexible high-pressure grid and extensive distribution network, with engineers to match - can take on the task of providing reliable supplies for peaking in its stride.  But eliminate the regular demand for gas - by electrification, de-industrialisation, "conversion to hydrogen" etc - and it's a very different story.  Intuitively, it's not at all clear a rump gas industry maintained purely for the purpose of sitting on its arse for 300 days in the year, then periodically springing into really large-scale action at relatively short notice to cover a vast shortfall in power generation for maybe a week, is remotely viable.  That's an incredibly small small cost-base to sustain a hugely expensive, capital-intensive standby facility.

We've had a variant of this discussion before, in a very different context.  Yes, the UK is famed for the excellence of its Special Forces.  But many don't adequately recognise that this can only be maintained on the back of conventional forces of a certain critical mass.  Shrink the Army too far, and there'll be no SAS.   I contend that the same is true of the gas industry: without critical mass of day-to-day gas throughput for whatever uses, there'll be no peaking when kalte Dunkelflaute sweeps Europe.

What are the other scenarios I mentioned?  (i) Efforts to electrify home heating are a miserable failure.++  This both reduces power demand from the utopian scenarios, and retains critical mass in the gas industry (I disregard dreams of hydrogen entirely).  (ii)  Gas is still needed for baseload power because the nuke strategy comes to nothing, haha!  

Maybe these latter contingencies are so probable that we can rest easy on everything else I set out...

ND

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**When indigenous production decline started in earnest, as I've recounted before, the industry  invested in substantial new LNG import facilities and associated infrastructure in a timely fashion (spontaneously and without subsidy - hey, market mechanisms can work if you let them!); so that the production decline, and then the Putin-induced European gas supply crisis, were both managed rather well. 

++Nobody need doubt their ability to de-industrialise further, of course.

Reforming the Council Tax in Wales: good luck to them

Apparently the Welsh are intending to 'reform' the Council Tax.  Of the 3 options under consideration, one is feeble: simple revaluing all properties.  The 2nd changes the weighting within the 9 existing bands: lower weighting at the lower end, higher at the higher (i.e. slightly more progressive).  The 3rd is the most 'radical': move to 12 bands, also with a weighting shift.

To me, this third option is a real no-brainer and one Osborne should have done in that brief 2010 window when he could have done almost anything he chose and, quite appropriately, his slogan was "all in it together".  Clearly, from his deeds of commission and omission, he never meant that; and the opportunity was lost. 

I'd go further: extend the number of bands almost indefinitely.  We all know the Council Tax is a wealth tax, so anyone who proposes to have palpitations at the very thought of such a thing, can emigrate now on principle.  Ditto progressive taxation.  All these things are matters of degree.  Gratuitous regressivity is nothing to be proud of.

I am sure there are some complexities over estates of such massive dimensions that any proportionate Council Tax would be likely to wipe them out in cash-flow terms (as happened with the first efforts at Estate Duty more than a century ago, under governments a lot less liberal than any post-war government).  OK, then - just 20 bands.  The point remains the same: the current system is ludicrous (hey, it was thrown together by Michael Heseltine on the back of an envelope one weekend!): defensible in only the most weaselly terms.  As are many existing schemes when you look at the detail and the consequences, of course - that's life, that's politics.  No need to stay with them when there are easy fixes, though.  

It will be interesting to see how this goes for the Welsh.

ND

Government introduces its stellar defence procurement skills to energy sector!

+ + UPDATED + +   - see below

Defence projects are the bane of the taxpayer's existence.  (Along with NHS IT projects, PPS procurement etc etc etc).  Astonishing delays, budget over-runs, faulty products - all followed by rinse-and-repeat with exactly the same contractors.  Learn nothing; repeat; and get the same results.  Never fails.

And now we have HMG's pathetic attempts to get a new generation of nukes up and running.  I say 'new', but the EPR is by now a pile of discredited and distinctly old crap.  And yet, conned by EDF, stitched up by George Osborne, bullied by Francois Hollande and betrayed by her own personal weakness of character, in 2016 Theresa May signed up for the Hinkley Point 'C' contract, the exact terms of which we may never learn: but we know enough to say they are awful.  All the optionality - and it's very great indeed - lies with EDF.  What's more, EDF knows that if it huffs and puffs and lies a bit more, it can get unilateral, favourable changes to this one-sided contract that are even further in its favour.  For example, not long ago it obtained a three-year relaxation to the back-stop date for start-up, from 2033 to 2036.  That's for a project it initially said would start up by year-end 2017! (sic)

So after this week's update from EDF, where are we now?  Start-up-date maybe 2031 or 2032 ... cost, well anyone's guess really, but wildly higher than any number floated before.  And this just days after HMG put around £2.5 bn cash (that's c.a.s.h., upfront, not just a high HPC-type electricity price) into Sizewell 'C', the next monstrous would-be product of EDF's nuclear fantasy.  The big difference with SZC being that, unlike HPC where EDF has to swallow the over-runs, with SZC the taxpayer will do that because EDF has no intention of taking on any construction risk at all.  And Boris signed up for that (not just May, then, who's an airbrained git).  

Did I say EDF has to swallow the over-runs on HPC?  Well, thus far, that's what the contract says and that's how it looks.  But, lo!  The contract doesn't commit them to finish the project at all !  They just don't get to sell that pre-priced electricity if they don't.

However, we can all picture the scene.  It is 2034.  HPC looks sort-of finished, but beneath those big domes and concrete silos, vital bits are not yet ready - and EDF knows full-well they ain't gonna be finished by 2036.  So there will be no juicy, HMG-underwritten, 35-year electricity contract.  They've been cap-in-hand to President Le Pen for more money, but she's sent them away empty-handed.

They know what to do.  "Get Starmer in here" they shout, and he's duly brought in to hear their story.  

"Look here, Starmer, we've run out of money.  But you need the electricity really badly, right?  This HPC delay, and the parallel delay at SZC, have already scuppered your energy strategy, which assumed that BOTH plants would be up and running by 2030! (aside: hah!  that Ed Miliband, eh?  Sucker!!)  You've had three years of patchy blackouts already.  So: we need another, errr, let's say £4bn - well, make it £5bn, what's that between friends, hmm?  Now.  Cash.  And then - we PROMISE - we'll be up and running by Xmas 2037, just, errr, 20 years late.   And we'll have another little meeting - about SZC - next month.  Whadya say?  You don't really want to leave this thing standing here like a radioactive white elephant, do you??"

Watch and wait...

ND

UPDATE     ... but you won't be waiting for long!  See this story - published after I wrote the above post.  You (maybe) read it here first

Taxing English? - or taxing its beneficiaries!

Revanchism is generally understood in 20th century Leninist or Maoist terms: the capitalist / imperialist classes lashing out against their progressive tormentors.  But it might equally be applied to the thought-processes of those of the woke persuasion who see reparations as the appropriate form of justice against, well, anything they don't like.  This generally means lining up western white folks and seeking to empty their pockets on some spurious pretext or other.

Here's a really hilarious one that shows just how deep this nonsense runs: a writer in the Graun (where else?) who reckons that those brought up speaking English as their mother tongue enjoy unfair advantages in the world, which he is pleased to call "linguistic injustice".  He reports favourably on: 

"compensatory measures [to] help reduce global linguistic injustice. Philippe Van Parijs, of the University of Louvain, has, somewhat provocatively, proposed a linguistic tax on English-speaking countries to compensate for the costs of teaching English in other countries. This would involve establishing a global tax on countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a native language and distributing the revenue to countries where English is taught in schools as a foreign language"

Etc etc with further anti-English measures he likes the sound of.  He doesn't make it clear whether India and any African countries would fall into his net (Nigeria comes to mind, and SA of course) - in fact he doesn't mention India at all.  These omissions are rather cowardly, I feel.

It seems we shall have to put up with this increasingly insolent stuff forever.   It rather overlooks the bountiful innovations issuing forth from these islands and its colonies and former colonies over several centuries, a list too long to insert here - enjoyed today by most of the rest of the world in some degree or other.  The great Lee Kwan Yew used to speak in very much those tones, I recall.  We should therefore respond with a "gratitude tax" on all those billions who benefit from English and its associated cultural boons (e.g. trade under Common Law jurisdiction, to name but one): we could call it the Lee Levy in his honour.

ND

USA: withdrawing from world affairs?

It may seem perverse to wonder whether the USA is withdrawing into an isolationist shell only a couple of days after it has orchestrated a rather modest coalition[1] into military action against the Houthis.  World Policeman, or what?  Yet I can't help feeling this may be the reflex action of a former bruiser who was in the process of retreating from the fray ("leave it babe, he ain't wurf it") when somebody rushed up to take another swipe at him anyway.

Well, maybe that will persuade him to get stuck right back in there again.  People inside and outside America have been urging its government since the first few years of the Monroe Doctrine to disengage from the ROTW and concentrate on self-sufficiency and domestic affairs.  That long-lived policy saw American governments intervening all over the place, to no obvious good effect, for many years.  There was always a "leave it babe" faction advocating the opposite[2].  But overseas intervention is a hard habit to break.

But what would getting stuck right back in there entail, in a world of truculent Russians, increasingly confident & capable Turks, Iranians and N.Koreans, an out-of-control Netanyahu, and, errr, China?

For one thing, it would require military spending on an implausible scale.  The USA of Bush / Clinton / Bush / early-Obama not only operated with no serious Russian threat and only the early signs of Chinese (and Iranian) upsurgence, but also with far and away the biggest & best-equipped armed forces on the planet.  Not any more.  The Peace Dividend[3] has been taken in no uncertain terms, and the USA could no more fight the fabled "two big wars and one small one, all at the same time" than fly over the moon.  (And it's not very good at flying over the moon any more, either.)

So what are the voices that will prevail, longer-term, in Washington?  There is certainly a bellicose "pivot to China" lobby, which thinks in terms of defending Taiwan and the South China Seas.  There's another modest coalition of nations behind this one, too (always us and the Aussies, eh?  Us with our two naked aircraft carriers and all.)  But drill down deeper, and the practical measures being advocated by all except the outright headbangers are a great deal less offensively-minded than in years gone by.  The talk is of porcupine defence, stand-off weapons, drone-swarms etc - not marine divisions storming up the beaches under 100% air-superiority.  Just as with the Roman Empire: when you trade in your stabbing sword for a long-sword, you're basically on the defensive, however widely you cast the perimeter. 

And that's the warlike lobby - many of whom would withdraw substantially from the Middle East, too - not to mention looking to Europe for the bulk of support for Ukraine.  The outright isolationists & Trumpists would cheerfully deal with China - perhaps in return for their taking N.Korea out of the equation.

And what will Starmer do then, poor thing?  Some, of course, think he'll rush to Rejoin.  There could conceivably be an intelligent offering from the EU on that score.  But, interestingly, his track record as DPP was of shameful, grovelling obeisance to Washington, which seems to be a deep instinct for him.  

He'd certainly keep the RAF busily bombing on whatever coordinates Biden dictates.  While old Joe is still slugging it out at the bar.

ND

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[1] What were we doing there?  The answer is obvious: the traditional combination of (a) the general policy of sticking with our biggest & most important ally, come what may (not entirely without merit, though Wilson never saw fit to gratify Johnson in Vietnam); and (b) the age-old tradition of us in these islands:  show us a good fight, and we're in!  (a.k.a. oi'll foight any t'ree of yuz!) 

[2] It's been argued that the only thrust under the Monroe Doctrine, broadly conceived, with genuinely strategic justification was the annexation of Hawaii in 1898.  The others, all over Latin America and even beyond, were generally deeply controversial within the USA itself

[3] What peace? - Ed

Competition: Predictions for 2024

So here we are, crystal balls at the ready, testing our predictive powers on the year ahead.  What will 2024 bring?  Some of the big unknowns for this year are rather obvious "known unknowns", of course, but please address yourselves nonetheless to the following questions:

• UK GE:  date (month);  and number of Labour MPs after the GE 
• US Presidency: who wins?
• Size of V. Putin's share of the Russian vote (as announced)
• By how much, and in what direction, will the FTSE100 change between midnight UK GE polling day and the end of 2024?
• Length of Sam B-F's gaol term upon sentencing (note: zero is a number).  Extra point for size of the fine in USD
• Where will Man Utd rank in the Prem at the end of the '23-4 season, and who will be manager?

Go for it!

ND

"What the Science Says"

For context, in philosophical terms I am (approximately) what is termed a scientific realist, meaning that (a) there are objective truths about the physical world, whether we know them or not - 'Realism' - and (b) science is our best tool for edging towards knowledge in that realm.  I say 'edging' because there's nothing linear, predictable, or even inevitable about how scientific knowledge advances.  Arguably, it sometimes even goes backwards.

There are complexities along the spectrum which we may identify as stretching from maths & formal logic at one end, to "social science" at the other.  Maths and logic advance ratchet-wise: since the late 19th C, what constitutes a proof is not in contention, and new results layer atop old ones in an ever-growing edifice built on firm foundations.  It's fair to say there are some philosophical challenges in figuring out the 'meaning' of some results in formal logic: but results they are.

At the far end of this continuum, use of inverted commas is essential: how much of "social science" really deserves the moniker?  Even linguistics has thus far disappointed, for all the claims that Chomsky's work is a science.  But formal logic sets the standard; physics and chemistry, at least, reckon to be bound by it, and I think we broadly know what we mean by (real) Science.

That said, professional scientists frequently let the side down in a big way, with weaknesses in several dimensions (not necessarily all at once):

• they tend to forget that, Newtonian physics having been well and truly shown to be in error (even though admirably and formidably consistent mathematically), almost any current theory is up for revision.  They sort-of know this, but often don't behave accordingly.
• many, if not most of them are cowards (i.e. 'just human'), and won't go against the prevailing dogma - whatever their own results and reasoning suggest.  The dominant dogma in question might be the current scientific paradigm, or some crazy political diktat, but they ain't gonna be the ones to rock the boat.  This makes their claims to objectivity and purity of method particularly galling.
• many are venal (i.e. 'just human') and money speaks very loudly, in science as elsewhere ...    

We are living in a ba-ad time for science, which betrays all of the above shortcomings aplenty.  Exhibit 'A' is "climate science", and I give you two concurrent headlines from the Graun today: 

Climate scientists hail 2023 as ‘beginning of the end’ for fossil fuel era 

World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say

OK, it's possible to force-fit a ropey kind of reconciliation onto these two statements.  Conversely, it's possible to retort they prove that scientists are indeed capable of disagreeing in public.  But what interests me more is how (i) "scientists say" can be enlisted to make any point that suits the writer; and thus (ii) how ridiculous it is for anyone to say that "we should follow the science", as if that would result in an unique course of action.

Personally, I strongly suspect that climate scientists (in inverted commas, if you prefer) are in agonies right now, not daring to admit that when they say "it's almost too late to save the world from ... [fill in favourite apocalyptic prediction here]", their own calculations - right or wrong - tell them it's actually wa-ay too late.  I say this with due respect for their earlier pronouncements - in fact, complete respect because, for the sake of argument, I accept them as valid.  My suspicion is a self-contained observation about those scientists' agonised state of mind, an observation that requires no judgement on, and makes no comment on, the Realist "right-or-wrong" aspect.  And why the agony?  Because they fear that if the world knew they really think the game's up, there wouldn't be quite as much appetite for their next project or policy proposal, be that an altruistic fear or one motivated by self-interest.

Exhibit 'B' is of course the disgraceful way in which many university biology departments are allowing themselves to be strong-armed into pernicious, arrant nonsense about sex and gender.  But that one's for another day.

Notwithstanding the foregoing ... Happy New Year!  The tradition 'NY predictions' compo to follow in a day or two.

ND