The Disgusting Property Scam on Britain's Youth!

Watch the final part of the video on last Monday evening's Chancellors debate from the link below from the beginning until the start of the closing statements by the three confidence trickster prospective future Chancellors of the Exchequer: Note how none address the questioners second main point about being able to buy a house! Now watch from 1 minute into the debate from the clip below, where Osborne and Darling excruciatingly compete for the kudos of being father to the scheme to exempt first time buyers from stamp duty on homes worth below two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, that's right an incredible two hundred and fifty thousand pounds: An old rule of thumb for affordability of property owning for first time buyers was to first save a deposit of between five and ten per cent and then commit to a mortgage of 2.5 times the husbands salary with some consideration perhaps give to the wife's earnings. (My own first purchase was a so-called maisonette for 4250 pounds with a primary mortgage of 3400 and a higher rate top up to 4000, only just affordable on my then salary and savings given the purchase costs). Today average house prices appear to be around 160,000 pounds and average household income around 25,000 pounds. To return to sanity in the UK housing market young people would be unwise to invest in property, based on the above figures until either average house prices had fallen to 65,000 to 70,000 pounds or average annual incomes had risen in a static house price market to about the same level. Given the warnings of dire cuts in spending and coming tax increases, (watch along to 2 minutes 15 seconds in the second video clip above to hear Vince Cable laying out the facts on the coming decade of tax increases and spending cuts) neither seems a likely scenario although a middle way will necessarily have to be found. As if it were not bad enough that the three main parties were planning to saddle the nation's youth with such disastrous investments for the future, (presumably to selfishly protect their and their generations' own huge property equity holdings) consider also that all their other few announced policies for the coming decade will also serve to reduce the value of UK property prices. Allowing the national debt to massively increase and ring fencing the NHS and Foreign Aid will reduce the sums available for productive job creation, policing and education. All of which will further reduce the income earning abilities of the workforce, increase crime levels and undermine the security of the housing stock, itself an essential element in the enhancement of property values. Young people should, therefore, especially be ready to vote in the coming election and be particularly aware of the shameless characters of all those candidates in the three main parties who have destroyed the national economy in pursuit of their own financial gain - Not just by a disgraceful manipulation of the parliamentary expenses and pension arrangements BUT by a deliberate ramping-up of the property market, which they have now given clear notice, they will all continue. Eventually property prices must fall to a level at which they are affordable for individuals on a slightly above average salary. Remember that fact - for it is an essential economic reality!

Britain's three creepy prospective Chancellors

Three men were on view last evening, each pretending the country had emerged (or was emerging from the recession), each apparently believing that recovery involved a return to the situation prevailing before the crash - in other words the fool's paradise that caused the crash. Three men representing three corrupted parties, none of whom have the first idea as to how to remove Britain from the coming collapse. I commented on the two particular highlights of the so-called debate to the article on the topic in this morning's The Times, whether or not it will be published I cannot say, if it is I will paste it below. Meantime the link is here.

German Chancellor gets EU to go for Economic Go(u)vern(mente)ance!

Walkaway Mortgagees or Drowning Householders?

Yesterday in the USA the Federal Government unveiled a new fifty billion dollar plan to aid its underwater homeowners. One blog gives its views here. Moral hazard is the phrase much used elsewhere in the USA. In the UK we would describe those unfortunates with mortgages greater than their home values as having negative equity. Drowning seems much more apt. It is many, many months since this blog first warned of the dangers of negative equity being likely to result in Walkaway Mortgagees and likely anarchy to follow. Finally a respected member of the mainstream media has finally awoken to the dangers, read here. Earlier postings on this topic, together with my suggested solution, may be found by using the keywords "Walkaways" or "UK House Price Crash" in the search bar for this blog.

Open Europe

Open Europe's fortnightly bulletin of yesterday's date has the following paragraph: Gordon Brown has insisted that Britain will not have to pay for a Greek bailout. However as Britain is a contributor to the IMF, UK taxpayers' money would be used to aid Greece if the plan was put into practice. This is despite an opinion poll published by the French public opinion institute IFOP yesterday, showing that only 22% of UK voters are in favour of a bailout of Greece. Across Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK, 58% of voters disagreed with a bailout. (AFP, 26 March) The opinion poll quoted from an AFP report actually states "...personnes interrogées refusent que leur pays aide financièrement la Grèce "au nom de la solidarité européenne" in plain English they refuse to support funds being advanced in the name of that loathsome concept "european solidarity". Personally, I suspect along with many other UK citizens, I would have no objection to funds spent by the IMF on a bail out. After all, with our present politicians and EU commitments, will Britain not itself be soon knocking at the IMF's door. What percentage of Europeans would support funds for the UK, given its similarly sized deficit in percentage terms, but its non-membership of the Eurozone? Wake up Britain, Open Europe only the day before reported the following "The £6.4 billion (EU) cost this year is more than twice the £3.1billion contributed last year."

EU Economic Government or Governance?

The AFP press report puts it best, linked here:

EU's economic 'government' lost in translation

(AFP) – 7 hours ago

BRUSSELS — The German and French leaders exhorted their European colleagues to strengthen the eurozone with an "economic government" and they received the backing they wanted, in French at least.

The phrase "gouvernement economique" was duly included in the francophone version of the final deal formally released on Friday.

But with Britain leading the countries for whom such a term is anathema, something got lost in translation.

The very same statement by the 27 EU heads of state and government, following talks in Brussels, spoke only of the need to "improve the economic governance" of the European Union.

For a British spokeswoman there was no distinction. "Look up 'gouvernement' in a French-English dictionary and you will get a variety of options," she said.

Another EU diplomat told AFP that "we thought governance was a more useful word in English."

EU president Herman Van Rompuy told reporters this was an example of "assymetrical translation."

He assured that the apparent language gap "does not correspond to a fundamental difference in views, more a sensibility about the words."

As the great writer Voltaire once said "woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning."

Though he, of course, said it in French.

The Sun newspaper reports British dismay, but what did they expect, where else did they beilieve the federalists have been heading for the past fifty years? Read here.

Greece and the IMF

Article I of the founding principles of the IMF Paragraph V states the following: To give confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity. Were the Greek people made aware when joining the Euro currency that the EU Commission would seek to remove the protection provided by this provision from the Greek Nation and its people? Are the other troubled members of the Euro currency zone not concerned by the fact that this protection offered to 186 countries in the world is somehow deemed to be non-compatible with membership of the EU's dodgy currency? The statements made by the Heads of Government of the Eurozone members and the EU Commission President after today's crisis meeting of the non-democratic Council of Europe should be most entertaining! Read what I earlier posted on Greece and the IMF beginning last February starting here.

The poison from Political Parties.

Any rational person, watching the proceedings during Prime Minister Questions and the Budget Statement that immediately followed in the chamber of the House of Commons in Westminster yesterday afternoon, who was aware of the realities regarding the governance of the former nation of Great Britain and the true state of its economy, could only conclude that the only proper place for those participating in such a farcical scam would be jail. Party politics, as developed in the Constitutional Democracy that governed the independent sovereign state which was Great Britain and Northern Ireland, up until the enactment of the European Communities Act in 1972, delivered a form of alternating party democracy to the nation which served it well and thus compensated for the non-democratic features essential in a whipped parliamentary system. In the "post-democratic" era (a phrase tellingly now in frequent usage within the EU) the party system sends only corrupt individuals to Government or other positions of power, as no person with honour or integrity would demean themselves by joining the thoroughly rotten political parties who control all access to such positions of power, whether within Westminster or the EU. Only the electorate can address this problem by refusing to vote for any candidate from the three main parties in the forthcoming election. A system of direct democracy along Swiss lines might give hope that the deep sickness in Britain's system might eventually be turned around. Fragmentation or worldwide totalitarianism will be the alternative non-democratic outcomes.

Party politics in a powerless Parliament.

Have party politics, as they developed over the twentieth century, any useful role to play within a Parliament neutered by the EU following implementation of the Lisbon Treaty and its forerunners? The question seems particularly pertinent today following the Dispatches programme broadcast on Channel 4 last evening. I will be blogging in more detail on this in the coming days. In the iterim perhaps readers would like to consider the following question - Are individual MPs and Peers more corrupt than the Parties to which they belong and which were the first to become thus so thoroughly corrupted, the individuals or their Parties?

Climate Change

From the Subrosa Blog, linked here.

Climate Change IV - A THUMB (OR TWO) IN THE SCALES?

I was sent away to learn the corn trade to a firm called Lamprey & Son in Banbury. The old office and shop building still stands next to the town hall and looks much the same today although it has long been converted to other uses.

One day the boss showed me a really beautifully made, brass, Victorian pocket balance that fitted into a polished wooden case which would slip into your pocket. On one end of the beam was a small pot about as big as a good-sized egg cup. The other side of the beam was milled with serations and graduated with a sliding weight which moved along it. If you filled the pot up with a sample of grain and struck it off level, you could slide the weight along until it balanced with the contents of the pot and read off the bushel weight of the grain from the scale.

Bushel weight is a good indicator of quality. Plump, full grains weigh heavier than thin ones. A bushel of reasonable quality barley would weigh 4 stones (56 lb or half a hundredweight) and a bushel of good wheat 5 stones (70lb). So the little pot contained a very small part of a bushel. The sample might represent a parcel of grain which could be anything from 5 or 6 tonnes up to over 100.

The boss let me try this out and in two or three goes I was getting a very consistent reading. He then did the same with the same sample and got a considerably heavier bushel weight. Eventually he showed me the trick. The strike or straight edge, which was used to level off the contents of the pot, had two sides. One was like a ruler and the other had a piece of dowel along it. If you used the dowel side, it pressed a few more corns into the pot than the straight edge. With the effect of scale, this made the sample look considerably heavier and better quality. Even with a correctly drawn sample, a small change in procedure or instrumentation could significantly bias the result. “That's how they did it in the old days days, boy” he said with a wink “buying or selling, you see, boy”. I should add that this was shown to me as an antique curiosity and was not any part of the trading practices of the firm in my day!

The kit which is used to “sample” the temperature of the climate is remarkably unchanged and about the same vintage as that rather splendid little balance. It is called a Stevenson Screen and was actually designed by the father of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of “Treasure Island”. It is a standard sized wooden box with louvred sides to allow free circulation of the air around the instruments and keep them out of direct sunlight. Hence the expression “in the shade” when referring to temperature. The thermometer might be a traditional mercury maximum/minimum type or more modern sensors. Stevenson Screens were traditionally painted with whitewash.

It is doubtful whether a character like ANTHONY WATTS could exist in state-controlled Britain. He is an American meteorologist and weather forecaster for commercial TV and radio stations. For his living he depends upon his customers' satisfaction with the accuracy of his forecasts. He also supplies custom-built weather stations, TV graphics systems and video equipment to broadcasters all over the world. So he is an expert who makes his living from weather but is neither a civil servant (who can be made to toe an official line) nor dependent on tax-funded grants (which require applicants to be politically correct). So he has a certain independence of mind and demonstrates that rugged individualism and tenacity of purpose which used to be the stuff of all-American heroes in many films of my youth.

He noticed that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS – roughly equivalent to the UK Meteorological Office) had made a small change to its Stevenson Screens. He wondered whether this change would affect the temperatures recorded. Back in 1979 the NWS had stopped using whitewash and started painting the Stevenson Screens with white, semi gloss, latex paint. Whitewash essentially gave a coating of calcium carbonate whilst latex paint used the pigment titanium dioxide which has significantly different infra-red properties.

In 2007, having a little time on his hands, he set up a trial to see what the differences might be. He used three Stevenson Screens – one unpainted, one painted with the latex semi gloss used by the NWS and one painted with historically correct whitewash. He also used a modern stacked plate aspirated thermometer as an additional control. His results showed that the latex paint raised the maximum recorded temperature within the screen by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit and the minimum recorded temperature by 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit when compared with the whitewashed Stevenson Screen. So that is an average upward bias of 0.55 degrees Fahrenheit. Not very much, you might think but the whole scare about global warming is based on a claimed, observed temperature rise of only 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit in a century.

Anthony Watts then decided to have a look at the NWS's Stevenson Screens in his locality to see if they were being painted to the official specification. What he found was disquieting. In one case, heat-generating radio equipment had been installed inside the screen, near to the temperature sensors. In other cases the weather stations were near to the outlet vents of air conditioning systems or close to other heat sources – all of which would tend to bias the recorded temperatures upwards.

So he conducted further investigations, eventually recruiting a team of volunteers to observe and photograph as many of the 1221 weather stations as possible all over the United States. 865 of them were visited. NEARLY NINE OUT OF TEN WEATHER STATIONS PROVED TO BE OUTSIDE THE SPECIFICATIONS LAID DOWN BY THE U.S. AUTHORTIES THEMSELVES.

They were near to artificial heat sources, on top of concrete or tarmac surfaces, close to buildings, in the steamy warmth of sewage farms and so on. ALL OF THE OBSERVED FAULTS WOULD TEND TO RAISE THE RECORDED TEMPERATURES. It is a fascinating story of one man's determination to get at the truth and can be read in full at SurfaceStations.org . Anthony Watts also has a regularly updated blog wattsupwiththat.com which is one of the most widely read, independent sources of climate information. I particularly like the fact that contrary views are welcomed. Whilst they are vigorously debated, they are treated with respect and normal courtesy – unlike some blogs pushing the official line.

To return to my analogy of that corn merchant's balance – the few cubic feet of air inside a Stevenson Screen stand proxy for a huge amount of the earth's atmosphere. Weather stations are often hundreds of miles apart. So those few cubic feet are proportionately much smaller than that egg cupful of grain representing a parcel of some tons. Any change, such as a different coat of paint, a heat-radiating transformer inside the screen or a nearby heat source can have a disproportionate effect on a tiny sample which is claimed as representative of hundreds of cubic miles of atmosphere. Probably unintentionally, the official methods seem to have had an effect not unlike a thumb or two being pressed on the side of the scales indicating a warming, rather than a stable or cooling climate. Yet the taxpayer-funded “climate community” was not at all grateful to Anthony Watts for looking in to the basic data and the methods used to measure it. For them “the science is settled” is the whole of their faith. Forget accurate measurement. They have computer programs to adjust things in ways which only they can understand. Watts is a heretic and that's that.

HOW THE CANADIAN THERMOMETERS WERE “TAKEN OUT AND SHOT”

When the US authorities began monitoring surface temperatures of the earth's surface, the 1,221 US weather stations were part of a worldwide total of some 6,000. But something strange happened in the last few years. The number of stations used to record temperature dropped dramatically. Figures were still shown for all areas of the world but they were calculated by reference to far fewer actual observations. They were “adjusted” and “homogenised”. The Canadian blog, “Small Dead Animals” reported as follows on January 16 2010 under the heading “The Sound of Settled Science”.

“In Canada, the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above three thousand feet were reduced in half. Canada's semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating (don't you love the word!) from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING.

JUST 1 THERMOMETER REMAINS for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the high Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than other places in the Canadian Arctic”.

The same has happened to US thermometers, South of the Border. The computer expert E. Michael Smith joined forces with the Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo and appeared in a TV programme on www.kusi.com on 16 January 2010. They reported that the number of weather stations used as a starting point for the world's average temperature calculations had been reduced from around 6,000 in the Seventies to about 1,500 now. That leaves much of the world unaccounted for. The greatest losses were in areas where NOAA and other data centers claim the warming was greatest like Siberia and Canada”. D'Aleo added that “In these regions NOAA “estimates” temperatures based on stations that may be 700 miles away”.

Smith noted “When doing a benchmark test of the program, I found patterns in them input data... that looked like dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.......The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations, and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs....”

Even as a very new, trainee corn merchant I knew better than to draw a sample from only the best part of the bulk. It would lead to the actual delivery being rejected and to great extra expense to my boss. He never liked that sort of thing. There seems to be no similar sanction for scientists drawing bad samples of climate and temperature with equipment known to be faulty. If the results are what the politicians want to hear, they are fine. The enormous bill for remediating “climate change” will simply be passed to the taxpayer – even if it isn't actually happening.

Edward Spalton March 2010

Magna Carta confirmed as in force in England and Wales

Magna Carta
Question March 10th 2010.

Asked by Lord Tebbit

   To ask Her Majesty's Government which provisions of the Magna
Carta remain in force in Scotland. [HL2518]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord
Bach): The Magna Carta is a legal charter which
only applies to England and Wales.

Britain's Brutish Establishment

What kind of Society would send its orphans, the most vulnerable members in its charge, half way around the globe to be abused and exploited? What kind of Establishment would be allowed to permit such an outrage, issue a completely inadequate apology without further explanation while the Constitutional Monarch of both countries involved, who reigned during some of these enforced expulsions remains silent? Will the sheeple of Britain again re-elect those same political parties into power to repeat their self-serving misrule of the country (partly on the votes of those immigrants who replaced these lost citizens) and the handing over of of its last remaining assets to the EU? THE IMAGE ABOVE IS OF A STATUE IN TRIBUTE TO THE CHILD DEPORTEES FROM BRITAIN AND MALTA ON THE DOCKSIDE IN FREMANTLE, AUSTRALIA . ALONGSIDE ARE LISTED ROW AFTER ROW OF THEIR NAMES!