Monthly Archives: August 2019

Hypocrite Rawnsley

I have no fixed opinion about Andrew Rawnsley, a Guardian writer, other than that he works for the Guardian, which rather positions him on the political spectrum. He gets a mention here because he recently repeated (The Guardian 11.08.19) a canard which is recently popular amongst remoaners and Labour politicians; referring to BoJo he said that the UK was being “driven down this perilous highway by a prime minister installed without reference to the country “.

This is both duplicitous and hypocritical, as Rawnsley (a highly intelligent man) knows. It is duplicitous because he is perfectly aware that Prime Ministers are not in their position as a result of a popular vote (the ‘country’), but he and his ilk use the expression because it supports a meme that Bojo has no authority to set and progress executive policy. It is a deceit, but one that plays well to those are ignorant of, or chose to ignore, the workings of UK politics.

With the exception of referenda, the populace at large vote for a local representative of a political party which has published a manifesto to which they on balance can subscribe to, not for a Prime Minister. There is no such vote. However, there is a well defined mechanism for appointing the holder of this office, and BoJo was elected by a majority of party MPs and then members of the Party which he represents. He holds office by virtue of having succeeded in a time honoured due process.

It is also appallingly hypocritical because Grumpy does not recall voting for Gordon Brown to be PM; that is because he was installed because he went through exactly the same process that installed BoJo in that role. In fact, he was elected unopposed; indeed, no Labour PM has ever been elected by party members. Blair was elected by the very same process in 1994.

In positing that there is something undemocratic in Johnson being Prime Minister without “reference to the country” Rawnsley knows full well this is a deceit and grossly dishonest as a piece of political comment.

However, he is merely exercising the norm for his trade. Political commentators, pundits and interviewers have the luxury of being able to level unfettered criticism at politicians and their policies, without ever having, as politicians have, the responsibility and burden of delivery. One might well invoke the words of Stanley Baldwin – “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.

Guarantee nonsense

For some reason, Grumpy has a ‘thing’ about Emma Barnett, a new(ish) BBC Newsnight presenter. No, not an ‘old man drooling’ thing, but that he finds her intensely irritating. For example, she asks a question to establish a context, and then moves on without allowing the interviewee to answer (e.g. with Matt Hancock, 03.06.19); an allegation without opportunity to refute. She (and she is not alone in female presenters – listen to Radio 4 Today) is also a serial interrupter.

However, the underlying source of Grumpy’s annoyance is that the questions she asks are mainly inane, biased to an assumption of her perception of the ‘desired ‘answer, and frankly, carping. Barnett seems merely to want to ‘get one over’ on her subjects to burnish her credentials as a tough presenter, whereas she actually comes across as a bullying harridan. Grumpy bemoans the rare presence of Andrew Neil on political programs because of his impeccably prepared research and generally neutral questioning.

However, the foregoing is a digression from the main point here , which is about the phrase’must never happen again’ and the word ‘guarantee’ (a favourite of the aforementioned lady) . Both are generally meaningless and annoying when applied to other than a small number of discrete and limited states of events, but doubly so when combined together and uttered by the logically and statistically challenged Barnett.

Now if she is referring to situations with an indeterminate set of out outcomes (the norm) which also include those over which the interviewee cannot possibly control, a binary outcome of a future state cannot be ‘guaranteed’. That’s merely statistics, which the logically and numerately challenged history graduate either cannot grasp or ignores. Indeed, Barnett uses this ploy as a win-win question, because a binary answer is not valid and anything else can be triumphantly picked over as a refusal to respond.

“Can you guarantee” she starts, “that this event will not happen again?” If the hapless interviewee seeks to inject some rationality into the response, Barnett jumps into gleeful action “It’s a yes or no, Mr X! Answer the question – can you guarantee it?” {It’s the equivalent of a witness in the dock being asked “Was the rope long or short? yes or no?” The offered choice of response has no meaning.]

Similarly, the hackneyed expression “this must never be allowed to happen again” where there is a continuous spectrum of possible outcomes is also meaningless. Of course it can (the option of a zero probability here being not valid if that spectrum remains unchanged), but it allows the opposition politician (for such it normally is) to score points, whilst praying that nothing similar happens on their watch.

Come back, Andrew !

Mysogeny is ok

Caroline Lucas has had to retract a suggestion she had floated of an all women cabinet to somehow seize power and solve the Brexit problem. She wrote in the Guardian (where else?) “Why women? Because I believe women have shown they can bring a different perspective to crises, are able to reach out to those they disagree with and cooperate to find solutions.”

She had to retract this (12.08.19) not because of this blatant gender discrimination, but because there wasn’t a single BAME woman on the list, and the usual suspects (someone with the initial ‘DA’ for example) raised voices to point this out. She apologised for including only white women in her proposed female anti-Brexit cabinet, saying she should have “reached out further and thought more deeply”.

Note the state to which we have arrived. It’s ok to suggest that a group of women can solve problems , and it IS ok to exclude men on the basis of some purely gender based shortcoming.. That doesn’t seem to be very representative at all.

The key issue here is that Lucas used logic which differentiates between the sexes on the basis that one gender has materially different genetic characteristics in behavioural attitudes (and hence capabilities) to the other, to the extent that one gender should be excluded from consideration where those characteristics are required for some task. I.e., gender discrimination is fine – as long as it is men that are being excluded.

Or does that give the green light to an employer who thinks women are not suited to a particular task in his company the right to exclude them from consideration ? Such an employer may well be faced with the situation Lucas was in a while ago, being strong armed by Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

The fact is that women, exercising their seeming right to be illogical and scatty, are happy to bear down (if the expression can be excused) on men who even stray towards a misogynist bent, whilst exhibiting an overt misandry towards men.

This asymmetry in approach needs to be contained (a topic on which Grumpy has opined before, citing Yvette Cooper), but maybe the fact that the Cabinet Office doesn’t have the facilities to enable them all to go to the toilet together (a uniquely female trait in Grumpy’s experience) may rein in her future would-be Cabinet make up.

Blackout oddity

The UK suffered a significant power failure in August 2019, bringing considerable disruption to travel for thousands of commuters and other travellers, leaving some stranded overnight hundreds of miles from home. However, the Director of Operations at national Grid said on television that the systems “worked well” following a “rare event”. Huh?

This event will no doubt be investigated by those who understand how the system should work and by politicians, who don’t understand, but who love to point fingers accusingly so they are seen to be ‘holding people to account’. Grumpy, from a uninformed position, found it rather odd.

Two power stations had problems, the combination of which resulted in huge disruption. One was at Little Barford, powered by two gas turbines generating 740MW in total. The other was the Hornsea wind array, which is under construction, but some turbines were connected to the grid in early 2019. It’s unclear from public sources what power was available, but only 28 out of 174 turbines slated for phase I of the project had been connected by May 2019. Since the maximum theoretical output of phase I is 1.2GW, on the generous side it might be concluded that Hornsea could have been adding around 195MW to the grid. The total from the two plants was thus a maximum of 740+195 = 935MW.

This needs to be put in context, as it implies that a loss of input of less that 1GW of capacity could severely disrupt the country. Peak UK demand varies between 55GW to 6oGW, so that’s just a loss of 1.6% of total generation capacity to cause huge disruption at substantial cost to individuals and business.

On the face of it, that seems like an incredibly narrow safety margin. Consider then, that a single typical coal fired station can generate 2GW, twice the loss of power for this incident.

The question which comes into Grumpy’s mind is whether this perilously small safety margin has been brought about by the rush to close coal fired stations in accordance with the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive, which is a death knell for such plants. Under this another 6GW will be taken out by 2020. Given that one sixth of that just stopped most transport in the Capital, it would seem both rash and premature.

Germany, on the other hand, has plants which still burn substantial quantities of even dirtier Lignite, and does not plan to close them all before 2038. Their government estimates that 40 billion euros will be paid to operators alone in compensation.

Given that the EU largest member is taking a more relaxed and pragmatic approach to complying, Grumpy suspects that the UK’s penchant for gold plating EU directives at an unwarranted cost to the economy has led to a situation where one of the most fundamental of all public utilities can be knocked out by lass than a 2% loss of generation capacity. Stock up on candles.