UK gas prices to soar if Russia cuts off supplies to Europe, National Grid warns

Newsnight’s Katz thinks this is important enough to Tweet a few times…

• Ian Katz ‏@iankatz1000 2 hrs2 hours ago

  Fmr Security Minister Lord West on Chinese Hinkley Pt deal: “How nice to have control of key areas of another country’s survival” #newsnight

Hmmm….where does so much of the petrol and diesel that fuels our economy come from?  Where does a lot of our gas come from?

And when the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg berates the Chinese president about human rights does she do so using a microphone made in China, does she have an iPhone in her pocket made in one of those alleged deadly sweat shops, just how much stuff in her home is imported from the hell hole that is China?

Not sure what hypocrisy smells like but I know what it looks like…see above.

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asks Lord Hall a difficult question….

“Why do you think members of the British public should be pleased to do more business with a BBC that is not democratic, is not transparent and has a deeply, deeply troubling attitude towards terrorism and Islamic conservatism?”

In relation to the last post that casts doubt on the Governor of the Bank of England’s impartiality, and the BBC’s of course, Fraser Nelson in the Spectator has come to the same conclusion….UK success comes from free trade and a flexible economic and financial system….neither requiring membership of the EU…the US coming to agreement with the EU on a free trade deal whilst remarkably not being a member of the EU……or indeed Vietnam….

Mark Carney may have unwittingly strengthened the case for leaving the EU

I supect that Mark Carney set out to strengthen the case for Britain staying in the European Union with his remarks in Oxford tonight, but his intervention may end up having the reverse effect. First, the Bank of England governor did not talk about the advantages of staying inside the EU. He spoke about the advantages of Britain being part of a free trade block; as Boris Johnson argues in the new Spectator this is still likely even if we vote to leave.

Here’s what he said:-

“Broadly speaking, the evidence suggests that the UK has successfully harnessed the benefits of openness afforded by its EU membership while avoiding some of the drawbacks of reduced flexibility from which some continental European economies suffer”.

In other words, the single market helped – and we didn’t join the Euro, thus avoiding what William Hague so aptly described as a “burning building with no exits.”

Carney added that the UK is “the leading beneficiary” of the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour enshrined in European treaties. But he did not suggest that this would be under threat were we to leave.

Spot the bit where he advises staying in the EU, rather than reneogtiate Norway-style country club membership? Me neither. That said, Carney is a rather political fellow – as we saw with his intervention in the Scottish independence referendum. His words were presented to suggest his intervening on the ‘in’ campaign. And this is his mistake.

The biggest danger facing the ‘in’ campaign is that it is seen as the combined voice of the British elite. If the Bank of England is positioning itself on the ‘in’ side, then this adds to this impression. As Sweden found out, when the entire establishment says ‘vote yes’ then the temptation to vote no can become irresistible.

 

Carney urges EU fiscal sovereignty

Bank of England governor Mark Carney has urged the eurozone to follow the example of the Union joining together the nations of the UK by making a “bold” move towards shared tax and spending arrangements.

He accused the 19-nation bloc of being “relatively timid” in some of the reforms needed to drag it out of stagnation and urged it to embrace “mechanisms to share fiscal sovereignty”.

Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, has made a pro-EU speech based upon a report by Sir Jon Cunliffe begun in May this year…the BBC thinks it gives the green light for the pro-EU camp to start cheering……

Analysis: Robert Peston, economics editor

Although the Bank does not use these precise words, EU membership has made the UK richer and more successful.

The Bank’s analysis concluded that the increased openness of the UK economy owing to EU membership “reinforces the dynamism of the UK economy.

Not sure how Peston comes to that conclusion when the speech actually tells us that the UK’s economy succeeded despite the EU and precisely because it was not integrated into the EU system…Carney himself babbles some double-speak claiming the we succeeded because of the EU and yet EU countries themselves, those in the Euro, suffer due to being in the EU……

“Broadly speaking, the evidence suggests the UK has successfully harnessed the benefits of openness afforded by its EU membership while avoiding some of the drawbacks of reduced flexibility from which some continental European economies suffer.”

What the BBC doesn’t mention is that both Carney and Cunliffe are very pro-EU integration and want the EU to become even more integrated with fiscal and political union….you can’t have one without the other.

What is also missing from the BBC report is the fact that Cunliffe has been an EU mandarin deeply embedded in the system…..

BoE Appoints EU Diplomat Jon Cunliffe as Deputy Governor For Financial Stability

Cunliffe has been the UK’s permanent representative to the European Union since January 2012, covering policy issues including negotiations on the banking union and a number of financial services dossiers.

He was advising the prime minister on Europe and global economic issues between 2007 and 2011.

Cunliffe began his examination supposedly of the consequences of Brexit but which in fact turned into a pro-EU bit of cheerleading whilst refusing to say if a Brexit would be good or bad…

Mr Cunliffe declined to say whether a Brexit scenario, where the UK left the EU single market, would reverse some of those benefits. ‘That’s a counter factual which I can’t know,’ he said.

Well it’s counterfactual to claim we only succeeded because of our connection to the EU….if we hadn’t been so connected we may have been as successful if not more.

And do you know what…in January this year both Carney and Cunliffe made speeches that whilst curiously urging ‘more EU’ admitted that the stagnating EU wasn’t working and that the UK was succeeding despite the EU….

Here is Cunliffe…his first point shows that the conclusion in the latest report was already a foregone conclusion back in January….ie ‘dynamism’ of the UK economy was as a result of being in the EU…

The motivation to create a single, integrated, capital market in the EU is not new. As I have noted, the potential benefits to economic growth and “dynamism” at a time when growth in Europe was sluggish drove the efforts in the 1980s to liberalise capital accounts and create the single market in financial services. The reforms inspired in the 1990s by the Giovannini report aimed to create an integrated, well-functioning financial market to “help the EU economy by encouraging the right investments to be made in the right places” and so to “contribute to higher economic growth and employment.”

However he admits that it is really global regulation that is important not the EU…as shown in the last crash in 2008….

The UK is the home to financial firms and infrastructure that are truly global in their reach and activity. While much of this activity involves the EU, a very large amount does not. If EU regulation and internationally agreed standards diverge materially, it will both create barriers to that activity and opportunities for regulatory arbitrage making it more difficult to ensure UK financial stability.

Here is Carney in January…

Curious that whilst in his speech today he tells us that membership of the EU is the secret to economic success here he reveals that the EU is in fact itself a basket case due to its own policies…how then does the UK succeed?….

The challenges for monetary policy are much greater in the euro area than in the UK.
Since the crisis, euro area nominal GDP has increased by a mere 5% in almost seven years. Consumer
price inflation is already below zero. Core inflation has been running at or below 1% for over a year.

This is potentially dangerous. Low nominal growth is intensifying the euro area’s debt burden (Chart 4).15
The fear of stagnation is holding back spending and investment.

The good news is that European authorities recognise the need to re-found the euro area financial
union on the principle of risk sharing.

As the Presidents of the European Council, European Commission, Eurogroup and European Central Bank
argued in their report, European Monetary Union will not be complete until it builds mechanisms to share
fiscal sovereignty.

Here he compares the EU and the UK….the UK is better off…..

Consider the following comparison between the euro area and the UK.
In the euro area, the private sector continues to generate surplus savings of 3½% of GDP (Chart 7). Those
must be recycled effectively to generate an expansion. The UK no longer faces that challenge. Its private
sector is in balance.
The euro area unemployment rate of 11½% is twice that in the UK.
Gross general government debt in the euro area is roughly the same as in the UK and below the average of
advanced economies.
The weighted average yield on 10-year euro area sovereign debt is around 1%, compared to 1½% in the UK.

And yet, the euro area’s fiscal deficit is half that in the UK. It structural deficit, according to the IMF, is less
than one third as large.

Here Carney explains why the UK is succeeding…and you know what…it ain’t got nothing to do with being in the EU…precisely the opposite in fact……

How the UK is escaping its debt trap

In recent years, the UK economy has shown increasing signs of normalisation. Non-financial private debt has fallen by around 30% of GDP since its peak, the economy has grown consistently above trend, and

unemployment has fallen from a peak of 8.5% to less than 6% today.

This performance underscores several structural features necessary to escape a debt trap.

The first is an integrated financial system which channels savings from one part of the economy to investment in others. Since the near collapse of the UK banking system, bold steps have since been taken to shore up its resilience.

£140 billion of new bank capital has been raised in recent years, and banks’ performance in the recent UK stress test suggest growing confidence in the resilience of the system is merited.

Second, the UK’s fiscal policy framework helps insure against severe systemic shocks The UK had the space to allow its automatic stabilisers to cushion the impact of the recession.

Third, the UK economy is open and flexible.

With a high degree of openness – its imports and exports summing to 60% of GDP – and a flexible exchange rate, the UK has a safety valve that can be used to recycle surplus savings to the rest of the world without driving down domestic demand, wages and prices.

The UK labour market is also highly flexible. The fall in real incomes caused by the depreciation of sterling was absorbed by employees, effectively purchasing faster job creation.

In addition, large inflows of foreign capital – now financing a current account deficit of 6% of GDP – mean spending and investment are higher than would otherwise be possible. This underscores the value of the UK maintaining its attractiveness as an investment destination through a competitive tax system, deep human capital, a flexible economy and ready access to a wide range of markets.

Carney and Cunliffe both want the EU to become more financially integrated….and that can’t be done without political union as well, something that the pro-EU campaign and the BBC tend to avoid mentioning…..if the EU moves towards ever closer union how can the UK remain a partial member?  The UK would have to choose, fully in or out with the freedom to negotiate its trading deals with the EU….and to claim that suddenly we would be unable to trade with the EU is clearly a nonsense as we are also a huge market for the EU to sell to…and they want our goods as well.  If they put up barriers to trade it wouldn’t serve anyone’s proposes.

It is apparent that this ‘report’ by Cunliffe was nothing more than him putting down on paper what he already believed regardless of any other evidence or considerations.  Carney also seems to be very gung ho for the EU regardless of his previous admission that the UK was succeeding because it was outside the EU strait-jacket.

Shame the BBC doesn’t bother to look further than its own prejudices and bias and delve a bit more into the motivations behind Carney and Co’s pro-EU circus.

Middle of the week and I’m away on business so here’s a new one of these for you. This is where you detail the bias.

Nothing is too bonkers to be unthinkable these days.

Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t know when to stop digging….why would he possibly think a man like Shameless Milne, the Guardian troll, could bring the slightest bit of respect and credibility to his regime?

Harry’s Place tells us…

Jeremy Corbyn’s hapless PR has been noted. I don’t think it’s the real problem – the man is the nightmare, not his messaging.

But PR can make things even worse and today Corbyn has delivered a master stroke.

Here is Mr Milne “communicating” on behalf of the murderers of British troops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omZ4IgUXPwM

There’s plenty more in this blog’s archives and perhaps readers would like to add their own Milne “greatest hits”.

Like terrorists? Back Labour.

Of course Corbyn isn’t the only Labour grandee to back terrorist organisations…David Miliband would be happy to look the other way in the right circumstances…..

Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’

The BBC’s director of news, James Harding, has said there will be an extensive programme of training to educate BBC employees on how to report on issues surrounding the EU referendum impartially.  Can’t imagine why he would think this was at all necessary.

James Harding, the director of BBC News, told MPs that thousands of BBC reporters, including newsreaders and Today programme presenters, will be sent for mandatory retraining, as he admitted that the referendum, due before 2017, will “test perceptions of the BBC’s impartiality”.

“We know this will be a period really of great scrutiny of our coverage, so our view is that we should reinstate mandatory training of all BBC journalists, so that they are as well-informed as possible of the issues around the workings of the institutions of the EU and its relationship to the UK.”

Perhaps such a course could be implemented for those reporting on the Middle East as well where the BBC’s journalists display a stunning ignorance of history as well as a blatant disregard for any rules on impartiality and accuracy.

Not only will news and current affairs programmes be subject to such training but documentaries, drama and comedy, the BBC having a well known tendency to use its non-news programming as vehicles to deliver particular messages that the BBC thinks its audience needs to hear and absorb….

David Jordan, the corporation’s director of editorial policy, told MPs that dramas and comedy shows such as Radio 4’s News Quiz would also be covered by the corporation’s referendum impartiality rules. He said: “Referendum guidelines cover all BBC output, not just news. It includes drama and comedy.”

Of course it’s a bit late for such conscientious impartiality when the BBC has spent years bashing the likes of UKIP as ‘racist little Englanders’ and produced films such as The Great European Disaster Movie…

The film was made by Bill Emmott, an ex-editor of the Economist, and Annalisa Piras, an Italian journalist who writes for the Guardian. Europhiles often portray their opponents as swivel-eyed fanatics who are impervious to reason, but The Great European Disaster Movie wasn’t exactly a model of dispassionate, evidence-based analysis. On the contrary, it was an example of the scaremongering often engaged in by pro-Europeans, except instead of merely claiming that Brexit would cause the economy to collapse, it threw in Western civilisation for good measure. As the Conservative MEP Dan Hannan pointed out, the only thing it left out of this apocalyptic scenario was flesh-eating zombies.

I am really looking forward to the next couple of years in the run up to the referendum. No, really.  A couple of years of claim and counter claim and all the time filtered through the likes of Andrew Marr who will be pretending to take it all so seriously as they discuss it all endlessly in ever-decreasing circles.

Can’t see the BBC really altering its engrained prejudice in favour of the EU…..when it came under scrutiny before when doing its own impartiality review it did change its behaviour for a short time but then reverted rapidly to type, so how long will the new look BBC last?  Weeks probably.

Personally I think the best solution would be to ban all talk of the European Union from the airwaves until the referendum is over and then ban it again when the result is in.

During the war there were so many American aircraft based on British soil that Britain was often referred to as America’s aircraft carrier.  The BBC seems to think that just like an aircraft carrier we can up anchor and sail away from Europe, presumably to somewhere nice and sunny.  Nigel Farage thinks the BBC’s strange concept of the British Isles is a plot to jerrymander the EU referendum….

BBC accused of ‘dishonesty’ and bias over EU referendum coverage

The BBC has been accused of “dishonesty” in its reporting of the EU referendum for using the word “Europe” in place of “European Union”.

In a letter to the corporation’s top bosses Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader and Leave.EU campaign backer, called on the broadcaster to stop using “Europe” as shorthand in discussions about the referendum, because it benefits the In campaign.

Private polling suggests that the phrase European Union is toxic to voters, the Telegraph understands, making it beneficial for pro-EU campaigners to use Europe instead of EU.

Mr Farage also cited an email from pro-EU campaigner Laura Sandys in which she called on supporters to “always talk about Europe rather than EU”.

In a letter delivered to the BBC Trust and Ofcom Mr Farage wrote: “In recent weeks and months it has become normal for many correspondents to use ‘Europe’ as shorthand for ‘the European Union’.

Speaking after the launch of the In campaign he said; “They [the pro-EU camp] know that the issue is the European Union, not Europe.

“Who could have a complaint with a continent? A land mass? But they also know that if they are honest, they will be defending the indefensible. So they start their campaign with an untruth.”

Arron Banks, founder of the group, said: “The question that the Electoral Commission has recommended in the forthcoming referendum is ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ Therefore we believe ALL reporting by the British media should reflect that.”

A BBC spokesperson said: “We report impartially using language that makes sense to our audience within the context of the story we’re covering and it would be wrong to suggest that this shows any pro or anti EU bias.”

Bizarre BBC reporting on Chinese leader’s visit to London….

From the Mail…..

TV star Kirstie Allsopp today accused the BBC’s royal correspondent of ‘loathing’ the royal family after he compared the Queen with the Chinese President.

The Location, Location, Location presenter, 44, turned on Peter Hunt after he described how ‘one party state’ leader Xi Jinping was staying in ‘the palace home of an unelected monarch’ while in London.

Describing the significance of the Chinese President’s visit to the UK Mr Hunt had said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘The President of a single party state which shed its imperial past more than a century has now taken up temporary residence in the palace home of an unelected monarch’.

The introduction left Ms Allsopp furious and she tweeted: ‘Get him off, please get him off @BBCr4today’.

She added: ‘Peter Hunt has paid his dues, please put him out of his misery & give the Royals to someone else, he clearly loathes them.

‘He was so down on “shooting” Prince William re ivory speech, but comparing “unelected” HM Queen & China Premier is too much’.

Of course that’ll be the unelected BBC presenter Peter Hunt who, along with his colleagues, thinks he runs the country or should do.