The Great Crested Newt

A charming fellow, I'm sure you'll agree.

They grow to about 15-18cm; average life as around ten years but they can live as long as 27 years in captivity (but would you want to?). I bet you're glad I'm here aren't you?

They're widespread across Europe, live in wetlands, are nocturnal and chill out for the days under leaves, rocks etc in wet areas, all over the country. In Spring the males develop an impressive crest along their backs and tails, don't we all?

They're also designated as a protected species under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. They're not daft. Touch, harm or damage one of these and you could receive a £5,000 fine.

If you're planning to build something - a railway line perhaps, or let's say 5,000 much-needed new homes, a couple of (five) primary schools and a secondary school, healthcare facilities, roads etc, on an urban extension perhaps (green field but on the edge of a tired town as part of a regeneration scheme to bring new homes, jobs, infrastructure, prosperity to the place), and you find one of these little chaps in say June, things can get a tad awkward.

Because under the act you cannot build anything at all within 500 metres of where you found him. Not without 'mitigation' at any rate. I now have the undivided attention of all prospective NIMBYs out there. But hell they all know this stuff. If you're a NIMBY and not cultivating these chaps ready to drop them quietly all over the place you're not worthy of the name!

And 'mitigation' doesn't mean building a pond somewhere else, oh no, you have to wait until next April and May, and employ grown adults to put on wellies and get on their hands and knees to find your newt and all his family, cousins, distant relatives (they have up to 300 offspring in a year, each), collect them up, gently, and move them to another suitable habitat. And to ensure that they don't return home (they're 'homing newts' presumably) you have to erect newt fences (this is no word of a lie) - here's proof -

to make sure they don't get back onto your site. Now if you could give them hard hats and high-viz vests... oh no they're quite shy.

The above image is genuinely of newt fences - you have probably seen them at the side of roads and wondered what they were? If not you will notice them now, and know what they are. You're welcome.

These surveys and collections and the rehousing process can only take place in April and May, by law, so you may have planning permission, have sold 'off plan' to Mr & Mrs Helptobuy, and have hundreds of builders, plumbers, sparkys, plasterers and decorators ready and willing to crack on, but you have to wait until next April and May for the survey, the collection, the re-visit, the follow-up survey etc. So August then when you found the little chap the June before last. And this is not just to appease Natural England (who administer the Act); oh no, the local planning authority cannot grant you permission to go ahead if there is an issue with Great Crested Newts. They come to all the planning meetings, but usually in disguise.  

Meanwhile Mr & Mrs Helptobuy are living in a lovely council B&B (not) with their new addition Marcie Helptokeepawakeatnight. But that's OK because the Great Crested Newt is protected by European law.

Because it's an endangered species. In Europe.

The thing is, it's not an endangered species in the UK. Far from it. Current estimates are that there are around 400,000 of the little chaps on 18,000 breeding sites in the UK all alive and well, and living in beautifully manicured new homes. Yes the bloody fences are a pain in the crest when you want to go to the shops for a bag of insects and some larvae and hummus perhaps, but they're doing really rather well. The population was in decline in the 70s but has now recovered and is thriving in the UK.

I wonder how many Great Crested Newts they're going to find along the route of the proposed HS2?

Still, that's conservation for you, EU style.

That's all from Newts at Ten.

Thanks for reading. 
 

If only I had the Energy

If you think switching to a different energy supplier is going to solve the problem of piss-taking profiteering by our crooked energy companies, you're quite wrong. All it's doing is creating a 'commission' opportunity for organisations like 'uswitch' and 'gocompare' against a back-drop of all of the energy suppliers raising prices, maximising their profits and essentially ripping us all off for the heating and power that we cannot comfortably live without.

What switching also does is lock you in to a tariff, like a fixed rate mortgage, so that if, as a guy at uswitch said to me earlier today; 'The Government pulls its finger out and does something about these high prices', might mean you're paying more than the 'going rate'. Yes you can get out of the contract but inevitably there will be a fee which will negate any immediate savings.  

I have been saying that Mr Davey & before him that nice upstanding Mr Huhne should do something about this ridiculously one-sided situation for three years now, so I'm not jumping on the Miliband wagon nor identifying a problem for the first time now that it is in the public domain. Energy prices are a massive problem for the UK and whilst Miliband does not, in my viw, have the right answer, he does, unlike Messrs Davey and Dave C (be honest?) he does at least have the right question: 

Anyway, maybe I should start from the beginning?

You've got to feel for these poor energy company Chief Executives. With wholesale energy prices going up and up all over the world and absolutely nothing that their parent companies, sorry the wholesale energy suppliers, can do about it, these poor guys are striving manfully to hold back price rises for us consumers.  It's getting to the point for some, like the top five senior executives at Centrica, that they're working so hard to keep prices down for us, that they hardly have time to spend the £16.4 million they received in pay & benefits for the last year. Indeed some of the poor bastards hadn't even yet had the time to spend their share of the £15 million they received the year before.  

They're doing everything they can. Almost single-handedly they're trying to hold back the tide so that our energy bills don't go up any more than they absolutely have to. They're also holding off on introducing price rises for as long as possible. These people are heroes. Clearly. We should be recognising their efforts in some way.

Time after time you hear them say how much they understand about high prices affecting household budgets. If you listen carefully you can almost hear a catch in their voices as they get overly emotional about it. These are truly people who understand. Who are on our side. Can't we arrange for them to get paid more than the frankly paltry £4.9 million received by Centrica CEO Sam Laidlaw last year?

Without these heroes we would be at the mercy of disreputable villains who would be using all kinds of subterfuge and deceit in order to trick us into paying more for a commodity that is extremely ineleastic in terms of demand (the price goes up, consumption doesn't fall very much because we cannot do without it). And that situation would be terrible. Imagine being at the mercy of crooks who could essentially charge us what they want for our gas and electricity? It would be madness.

Thank goodness we have an energy regulator in the form of ofgem to make sure consumers' interests come first and foremost and also, in the the Department for Energy and Climate Change, we have a government department that is also there to ensure we are not ripped off.

I have just the one small, almost inconsequential gripe about all this legislative protection we receive and all this striving for lower prices that is being done on our behalf by these unsung heroes. Minor to the point of insignificance. You'd probably not even notice it unless you looked quite closely.


My problem is, to be frank, that none of the above is either true or effective.

Are these executives at the big six suppliers of energy to the consumer really trying to keep prices down and for as long as possible? Are they fuck.

Is ofgem, which issues the operating licenses under which all gas and electricity companies must operate in the UK, really doing all it can, under its first principle of operation which is to put the consumer first, to keep prices down? Is it fuck.

Is the DECC doing all it can to help consumers and stop them being royally ripped off by these suppliers? Is it bollocks.

These companies claim that green tax subsidies (many of which apply to them so they receive these subsidies) are reasons for them to increase their prices. Erm so we have to pay more to subsidise their green operations (in order to make this fuckwit green windpower bollocks profitable even though it simply doesn't work by any realistic measure of efficiency or reliability) and for that privilege, they are also allowed to charge us more for our day-to-day power, erm so they can afford their investment in green operations? So we pay twice for this green bullshit?

The government claim that green taxes 'only' add about 11% to the average bill. Really? When these taxes are paying for the decommissioning of swathes of coal-fired power stations, subsidies to land-owners that would make a Rothschild wince, and operating subsidies including paying the wind-turbine operators to turn them off when the grid can't accept their power or when it's too windy? 11%? Are we sure about that? Does that include the benefits we have to pay for the 60-odd 'old energy' jobs that are lost for every single new green energy job created? We're also paying for the UK's biggest Drax power station to be converted to burn wood ('bio mass') instead of coal; wood that we're importing from Canadian forests. How green is that? Not very. Unless the massive freight ships being used are essentially giant pedaloes?

And the energy suppliers are saying that they're making a loss on energy transmission. That their profits in the consumer end of their businesses are only around 5% and that, poor things, they have to invest in new infrastructure in order to maintain supply. And they tell us, seemingly every year, that the price increases have to be (well) above inflation because they have to fund the investment in infrastructure. Shouldn't they be funding their investment in infrastructure out of the massive profits they make? Given that that infrastructure enables them to get their product to the consumer and thereby charge them handsomely and make those profits in the first place? Or are they just so used to it that they just assume we'll pay twice for it as we do for everything else they do these days?

Speaking of which, take a look at this (above) table. Yes it seems that the retail arms of these companies are making profits of (typically) less than 5% but you'll notice that their wholesale arms are making profits of over 20%. Now I'm not a bean-counter, but even I can tell you that you could, if your very highly paid CFO wanted to, put these profits into any area of the company you wanted, just a by a little - and perfectly legal - sleight of hand. So some of these companies are generating profits of over 20% on the energy they supply on a wholesale basis and then making profits of an additional 5% on that figure. So, again, we're paying twice. We're paying to give them an additional margin on the profit they're already charging us for.

These companies talk about 'world prices' going up, forcing them to put their prices up. Two things to note on this. First is that the media and the politicians seem just to accept this without any kind of investigation. 'World prices eh? Well nothing we can do about that, on you go guys.' These aren't world prices but the price fixing that's now possible because there are only 6 players and they are all both wholesale suppliers and retailers of energy. It's virtually a cartel that the government seems unable to stand up to.

The real 'world energy price' has only risen by 1.7% in the last 18 months as global demand weakens because of the global economic situation. So how can these companies justify 11% rises? They are taking the piss but sadly Ed Davey has been unable to act in the public's interest until the issue has become a crisis. And, sadly, until Mr Miliband raised the level of importance of energy prices at the Labour Party conference earlier this year.

Davey's job is to look out for the consumer when it comes to energy, all the time. Not just when he's forced to do so. The sooner he goes from office and we get a grown-up in place, the better. 

And ofgem knows all this - it must do surely? - and does the square route of fuck all about it. Consumers interests first? My arse.

 Here's a couple of recommendations put forward by a consultant to ofgem in 2011: Original house of commons report on energy company profits here.

And ofgem's response was to reject three out of five recommendations. Why? What possible damage could the provision and reporting of clearer information have done to the price being paid by the consumer? Or was there some kind of lobbying going on? Re item 4 above, how on earth could the supply of clear details about which elements of the organisations involved make the profits, compared with the risks involved, have done anything other than to clarify the fact that we're being ripped off by this financial subterfuge?

The fact is that these companies are there to make money for their shareholders. That is their primary concern - indeed until this morning when it changed its website, the SSE front page disclosed that the company has 'one strategic policy: to deliver sustained real dividend growth.'  The same could be said for them all, they're abut making money for their shareholders at the expense of a captive business and domestic audience whose protection is being provided (try not to laugh) by ofgem and DECC. More here - factcheck)

Let's look at these companies to get a quick measure of the cut of their jibs:

I've mentioned Centrica, UK-based and market leader, 14.8% profit margin on turnover of £12.3 billion (British Gas Trading Limited, year 2011) profits of almost £2 billion. And it's wholesale arm, Centrica averaged 7.3% profit between 2007 - 2011 on turnover of £22 billion. Dividend is up 5% year on year for 2012 and the company paid 75.5% of its profits before tax, to shareholders rather than investing in infrastructure.

French owned, UK turnover of around £15 billion; makes a loss on it's customer supply business but a very healthy profit on its generation business (it's just a matter of where you allocate the profit not necessarily an indication of who's paying for what, the consumer pays for everything these people do in the end). EDF paid 55% of its net income back to shareholders in 2012. Money it said it needed to invest in infrastructure? Leading the consortium which includes investment from China, in new UK nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset - DECC has given guarantees of future electricity prices (twice the current level and for 35 years - I wonder if Mr Davey ever fancies a game of poker?) in order to secure this investment. Not exactly going to help consumers then, what a surprise.

German shareholder-owned energy company, £16 billion UK turnover, profits of 7.2% (2011). Recently withdrew its 'Stay Warm' tariff for over 60s. Customers have automatically beeen moved to a more expensive tariff. Recently fined £1.7 million for overcharging customers for exit fees.

Spanish Iberdrola-owned energy company, £8 billion UK turnover, profits of 9% across the two elements of its business. Recently fined £8.5 million for misleading selling practices. Profits doubled between 2011 and 2012 (from £350m to £712m. The company also paid Iberdrola £890 million this year, again, when it should surely be spending this money on the infrastructure it so badly needs to invest in? Iberdrola, not surprisingly is struggling in many of its continental European markets and especially in Spain. Guess who's paying to bail them out, as usual?

npower, subsidiary of German RWE. £6.5 billion UK turnover, just increased prices by 11% (gas) and 9.3% electricity. Profit margin figures are opaque to say the least, I'm guessing that with 'renewables' you can offset just about every cent against losses or subsidies. However John Robertson MP (Lab Glasgow) who sits on the Energy Select Committee said, commenting on the npower prices rises and the Chief Exec's 'we feel your pain' bullshit (“I know that any increases to household bills are always unwelcome, and this is not a decision that we have taken lightly,”) said: “The CEO has come out all guns blazing, saying they only make 5 per cent profit. But he is trying to pull the wool over our eyes and make us forget about the shady shuffling of money around the company. Profits went up by 25 percent last year and it is clear Npower is simply taking advantage of customers and ripping them off.”

Finding myself agreeing with a Glasgow Labour MP as well as Caroline Flint and Owen Jones is a whole new experience for me I must say.

  

Perth-based formerly Scottish and Southern Energy, turnover of £28 billion, operating profit of £800 million. 'Sustained real dividend growth' and recently fined £10.5 million for prolonged and extensive miss-selling of contracts.

ofgem grants the licenses that allow these companies to operate in the UK energy market. And it's first principle is to protect the consumer. So what is it doing in light of the above facts?

Meters, clarity of information (yeah right) marketing practices (since so many are fined for miss-selling), notification of price changes and prevention of theft. So the square route of fuck all then. How will meters, smart, traditional or otherwise have any impact on prices? Telling us more clearly that we're being royally ripped off will not help us to pay the bills. Stopping miss-selling is fine but the whole fucking industry is currently miss-selling in that it is ripping us all off with the government's approval. And the only really important theft taht is occurring here is that of our money by these energy companies. ofgem is a fucking joke. But the only people laughing are the executives and shareholders of the energy companies.

And what is DECC doing? It's continuing to say that the UK must spend massively on green technology to reduce our CO2 emissions, when the rest of the world, including Germany, the US, Canada, Australia, Russia, China and India have turned away from this discredited scam. So we might eventually redce our CO2 emissions, which currently stand at 1.6% of the global total or, to put it another way, less than China's year-on-year increase in emissions. It's completely mad and will have absolutely no impact whatsoever on the planet, even if man-made global warming was real, which is isn't (more here if you're interested).

What Mr Davey is also doing is lining up stand-by diesel generators to come on-line to meet peak demand in the UK. So emergency generators that are owned and held in readiness for a power outage by organisations including supermarkets, major hotels, residential and office building complexes, distribution and storage facilities, hospitals(?), airports, are being connected up to the grid so that they can be called upon to meet peak demand when the wind isn't blowing (or is blowing to hard or in the wrong place). And the price paid to the owners of the generators will be massive, and sooner or later this practice will become the norm, the supermarkets et al will buy additional emergency generators for their own needs and will then be making mega bucks out of supplying the grid with massively over-priced energy because, sadly, Mr Davey couldn't run a piss-up at Carlsberg. 

Labour are massively to blame for the lack of investment and lack of strategic planning for our energy needs, as well as for the introduction of the Climate Change act that is crippling the UK. Many of the investments and problems we're looking at now should have been remedied ten year's ago. This fact has made the current situation worse, but not addressing it properly, not taking on the current piss-taking profiteering of energy companies when it has the powers to do so, is starting to put our power supply at risk, is starting to create the situation where people will be suffering severely, potentially to the point of losing their lives, and is starting to damage our economy and our government.

Mr Miliband's price freeze is not the answer and nor is Mr Major's windfall tax. Neither actually solves the problem. In order to solve it we need a regulator that has the powers (and it does already) to regulate. To find out where the profits are being made, to investigate the financial shenanigins that these companies are engaging in, and can take proper action. Start by kicking one of them out of the market. Then create a environment where these energy retailers cannot belong to a single wholesaler of energy. Get rid of barriers to entry in the marketplace.

In short, get off your arse Mr Davey and fucking do something man.

Thanks for reading.

Green energy - defined

No agenda here (much), just an attempt to explain what 'green energy' means in reality. There's no point in dismissing or embracing it unless you know what it means, in my opinion. It has become a political, global football but I think you need to know what it is before you decide on its merits. For what it's worth, I think sustainability - in the true sense of the term rather than the way in which it is being used to take control over people as part of the Agenda 21 nonsense (more here) - is a good thing.

But it's about balance, having a rounded approach to meeting our ever-growing energy needs and making use of the resources at our disposal. You wouldn't not eat some food today because people in 30 year's time would therefore not be able to eat it. In many ways that is what we're saying about fossil fuels: I know that they will not 'go off' or disappear like food would over that time period, but shutting down (for example) the coal industry including extraction and the power stations that burn the stuff makes it much more difficult and costly to ever go back and make use of it again.

We certainly shouldn't, in my opinion, do such things rashly or with a gun at our heads just because of some scaremongering and unproven science about man-made global warming (more here). That would just be plain stupid and as we are already seeing, vastly expensive and damaging to our current prosperity. If you close down a working coal mine, for example, even though there are usable (commercially viable) reserves available, and you stop maintaining the thing, pumping out the water etc., it quickly becomes flooded and extremely difficult if not impossible ever to bring it back on line. And, in that instance you have effectively 'sterilised' the works and lost the valuable resource. Which seems a pretty stupid thing to do in my view. The same is true of oil when we have the massively expensive infrastructure in place now, to enable us to make us of this valuable and extremely reliable source of energy.

Anyway some (layman's) details about green energy and the options and alternatives, just if you're interested.

Nuclear energy: Is essentially harnessing a chemical reaction which creates heat and power to drive turbines which turn that energy into usable electricity. It's clean, there are few if any emissions of CO2, but it is relatively expensive to harness, creates dangerous waste and is volatile and somewhat vulnerable to miss-use as it can create unhealthy by-products like bomb-making materials. It is also potentially vulnerable to the elements as we have seen in Japan and also, possibly, to acts of terrorism. But for reliable (and that is a key term in all of this debate) power supply it has to be part of a modern, joined-up energy policy. There are also some exciting new developments in nuclear technology such as Thorium reactors but you can google that. Nuclear fusion technology is also advancing and is perhaps the ultimate holy grail. A bit like perpetual motion. But a potential long term solution in my opinion. More here.

Solar: is plentiful, is probably the ultimate answer to our energy needs, but it is not efficient in the latitudes where the decisions are made and most efficient in areas of the planet where conflict and corruption abound. Distribution of solar power is a major issue - transporting the energy from Africa (for example) where it can be efficiently produced, to northern or southern areas where it is used, is a major issue. If we can crack this - and we must eventually - we'll have solved the world's energy problem forever, to a very large extent. 

Biomass: Is fuel crops essentially, growing plants that produce fuels that we can use (burn) for energy. What's not to like? We can grow our own petroleum and not rely on fossil fuels? From a green perspective the theory is that the plants consume CO2 and then release it when burned, in an environmentally balanced way. Wouldn't that be perfect? Except, unfortunately it doesn't stack up. The plants would have to grow for a hundred years or more in order to 'fix' the same amount of CO2 that burning them releases into the atmosphere in order to achieve a neutral balance. Whereas biomass cops are grown in a single season and then harvested, just like food crops. There are some good examples of trees being grown for biomass and in a sustainable way, but they are quite land-intensive and not really a major solution for that reason.

In many ways coal is biomass, just over a much longer time-frame: It's 'dirty' if you consider this issue in the short term, but the trees that became coal probably did, during their lifetimes, 'fix' the same amount of CO2 that burning them releases now, but that was millions of years ago. Coal is essentially biomass. But not fast enough for our current times.

The other thing about biomass is that we might be able to grow enough fuel crops to keep us warm, but there'll be nothing to eat because we've devoted our land to producing fuel instead of food. So it's not really a major long-term solution.

Wind energy. Not exactly a new thing - we have been using wind energy for centuries to grind corn into flour for our bread. Wind is a natural resource - essentially a free resource although harnessing it seems now to have a massive cost associated with it. On a relatively small and local scale it is a fantastic thing to harness. But it's not reliable enough to guarantee power at all times which is the way we need it these days. So it is a potentially valuable secondary source but difficult to control or rely on. Windmills of the scale we're now seeing kill birds and bats and take up massive areas of land for a relatively inefficient power source. The reliance we're currently placing upon wind power is quite mad in my opinion.

Water or 'Hydro': Is much more reliable than wind, but again costly to harness. But rivers do flow, tides ebb and flow and that movement can be harnessed to generate very reliable electricity. Funnily enough I spoke with someone today who was involved in the major hydro electric scheme at Niagra Falls in the 50s. As part of that scheme they used the power to pump water 'uphill' into storage during off peak times of the day and then released it for 're-use' during peak demand periods. That makes sense to me but you need big rivers and big storage reservoirs to make it commercially viable.

The proposed Severn Hydro scheme which was binned earlier this year would have cost less than HS2 (£30billion) and provided around 5% of the UK's current energy needs for 125 years (at least), but it would have been inconvenient for a few wading birds it seems. If only these birds had some way of travelling a couple of miles further upstream? If only they could fly..oh, wait.. Hydro should be a major part of the answer if we're serious about sustainable and reliable power.

Ground source, air source and geothermal energy: You may be aware of this stuff? Taking energy out of the ground or the air and making it available for our use? It's essentially about harnessing the differential between two places or 'states' in temperature, putting that differential through a heat exchanger and multiplying that difference into warmth - or cooling - depending upon what you want to achieve. It's good and it works. But it is basically about energy efficiency rather than renewable energy.

Many people talk about this technology in terms of 'geothermal' energy. It isn't. Unless you're lucky enough to be living next to a natural thermal 'spa' in Iceland or someplace similar where the earth's heat is bubbling up and you can tap into it, it is not 'geothermal'. What it is, is using the fact that if you dig down into the earth for about 1.5metres the temperature doesn't change much, whatever the weather is doing. There can be a hard frost on the ground (surface) but the temperature of the earth 1.5 metres down will be the same as it was in summer. And you can use that differential to draw the relative heat out of the earth, through a heat exchanger to multiply that differential, and deliver warmth into the building or your environment. You can, theoretically do the reverse and achieve cooling in the summer months.

But its not 'creating energy' it's using differentials to enhance what you have. And it takes significant amounts of electricity (to power the heat exchangers) to do so. So your gas bills go down considerably, but your electricity consumption goes up. It has a role to play in efficiency but is not a strictly 'renewable' solution.

Energy From Waste (EFW): This is, in theory, a very attractive option given that it helps to address two major issues - energy requirements and the massive amounts of waste we produce. Many landfill sites in the UK and around the world use gas engines to burn the methane produced and turn it into electricity. And that's very positive, but it is 'shitty' gas (technical term) and wreaks havoc with the massive and very expensive engines and shortens their effective life considerably.

Burning waste as a fuel is also a potentially positive option but no-one wants an incinerator near to where they live and there are some credible scare stores about the release of dioxins and carcinogens into the atmosphere. I think filtering could well make these things viable but they're very high on the NIMBY's 'no go' areas.

Anaerobic digestion is another option that is starting to gain some ground in the UK. This is the use of micro organisms to speed up the decaying process of carbon-based waste - food and garden waste generally speaking - in a sealed environment to produce gas which can be used as a fuel in the usual way (power station way rather than fuel-in-you-car way obviously). There are some (albeit fairly small) viable plants already operating in the UK.

Although not strictly 'green energy', energy efficiency also has a major part to play in all this, but not necessarily on an individual domestic basis. Yes you can insulate your home to the nth degree, install efficient boilers, combi boilers, condensing boilers etc; double glazing etc., although I'm personally not convinced that an hermetically sealed house is a particularly healthy environment, but hey ho, it's certainly less expensive to keep warm. And we should do (some of) this, but on a house-by-house basis it's relatively expensive when compared to the cost/energy savings achieved (with, typically a 25+ year payback period); it adds about £40,000 to the cost of a new build house (Eco Homes standard) and is considerably more expensive to achieve the same level for the retrofit of an existing house.

Much more economically viable are district heating schemes where electricity is generated locally and used across a largish housing, office or mixed use development. But it's not simple to achieve since you will have to install traditional boilers & systems into the first 1,000 or so homes until you reach the required scale for the district heating system to be viable. And then you have to persuade Mrs Smith (x 1,000) to give up her trusty boiler...

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is another potentially efficient option - using the heat produced in a manufacturing process (for example) to heat local homes and offices. Heat that would ordinarily just be voided to the atmosphere. But like many of these options it is fiendishly costly and difficult to retrofit and really needs a green field plan in order to design it in to the finished development.

And there you have it. Green Energy. Boring as fuck I'm sure you'll agree, but quite important to our future. Reliability is the key really. Which is why Nuclear, hydro-electric and EFW are key elements, used alongside our existing fossil fuels - why would you simply waste that fantastic resource we already have available to us when there is no credible evidence that CO2 emissions are causing harm to the planet? Reliability is also why wind is a bit-part player in the solution and will never replace other energy sources despite what Mr Davey et al are trying to tell you.

If we had a proper, intelligent, grown up and long-term energy policy that might help too. But heck you can't have everything. It might just stop us being royally ripped off by the piss-taking profiteering of our current energy industry too. More here. 

Ultimately it will all come down to solar - an inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun, which is, incidentally (but quite importantly) the thing that controls the temperature on our planet, not our CO2 emissions. How Canutesque of us to think it's us and even more absurd that we can control it! Madness.

So now you know.

Thanks for reading.

Calzone!

Years ago I went skiing with a group of mates to the Italian resort of Sauze d'Oulx. First ever skiing trip, 5 lads aged about 20. The extent of our preparation was an old guy showing us the rudiments of the snow plow in the pub the night before we left. We were, to a man, Franz Klammer.

 This is what we thought we looked like..

None of us felt we needed any kind of ski school so we went to the nursery slopes, fell over a great deal especially and, if it wasn't you, hilariously, whilst trying to get onto a drag lift (you don't sit down just brace yourself and let yourself be dragged up but the temptation to 'sit' was very strong at first). Then we went up in the chair lift to the top of the mountain, falling in a tangled heap as we tried to ski off the chair so that the whole system had to be stopped; and threw ourselves off the mountain.

And this..

'Battered and bruised' does not come close to describing how we were and felt at the end of that first day, but you bounce when you're 20 and get up again. I don't think I've ever laughed so much on any other day before or since. That first day's skiing, especially when you're all in the same boat (without a paddle or a clue) is the absolute best thing in the world in my opinion. Or close anyway.

 And this is what we actually looked like

Now Sauze is not exactly St Moritz or Aspen (both of which I've been massively fortunate enough to have skied since - St Moritz was a day trip, we didn't stay there, are you mad?), but when you're 20 with your best mates, it doesn't really matter where you are, you'll find a great time anyway. And we ate, almost to the exclusion of anything else for the whole week, a new kind of pizza that none of us had even heard of before. The Calzone. It's a kind of folded over pizza, obviously you all know that now but this was back in the late 1650s (it feels like anyway) and we were easily impressed - and on a budget. 

You can get them in Italian restaurants here of course these days but I don't think I've ever seen one in a supermarket to be cooked at home. They might exist but I've not seen them. Anyway, all that inane rambling leads me on to having cooked one this evening, two actually and if you want to have a go, here's how:

 You need to mix 4oz of strong bread flour with 1/3 of a teaspoon of dried yeast (it's 28p and easy to use) and 1/3 of a teaspoon of salt. Mix together with 100ml of lukewarm water into a dough.










Kneed the dough (I have declined the baker joke here you'll be pleased to note) for 5 minutes then put into the fridge for 40 minutes to 'rise'. When I say 'rise' it doesn't much. It's more 'prove' I think.
 
Then cut the thing in half and roll each piece out into a 7cm circle. 

Then add what you want to half of the circle - I used smoked ham, mozzerella cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes, basil and spinach. Fold over pinch the edges, put on a baking sheet in the middle of a hot oven (210 degrees) 

and in just 25 minutes you will have an almost inedible brick of a thing!

Actually I lie. It was really good. Cook some passata with basil & garlic to spoon over the top, serve with a nice salad and some red wine - Aussie Shiraz was my choice unless you can afford decent Italian stuff like a Barollo - and Bob is quite clearly your dad's brother.

Enjoy ;)



One word of advice if I may? Once you have eaten your Calzone, don't under any circumstances, go on to a small Italian bar where you can play table football and play 'spoof' for shots of Grappa. To the point where three of you drink a bottle and a half of the stuff before you leave. 

Trust me on this one OK? 

:)

Your EU referendum vote is going to be the biggest, most important thing you ever do on a ballot paper

Pro EU people like Messrs Heseltine and Clarke, Mandelson and Clegg are currently doing two things which from the outside, seem to be incompatible: They're telling the world - and a particularly receptive pro EU (and EU funded) BBC - that no-one is really interested in the EU referendum issue (because it's not very important), while at the same time saying that a UK exit would be a disaster for the UK's economy, for employment and prosperity. So, erm, it is important then?

It's a clever trick, but a trick nonetheless and it is what the EU has been doing for years in order to achieve its 'slice by slice' growth into controlling all aspects of our lives. It has welcomed, promoted even, the endless stupid laws and rules about straight bananas and the like in order to create the disinterest that has allowed it to grow its influence as people have been encouraged to see it as something of a joke, not to be taken too seriously.

So like the boy who cried 'wolf' when another, perhaps significant, maybe life-changing diktat comes out from the EU, we all ignore it and associate it with the meaningless crap that they have been making sure we focus upon. 

And the pro brigade has gone much further than this, labelling anyone who is anti EU as being also anti Europe. Little Englanders with a narrow view of the world and a jingoistic, small-minded, selfish, even racist outlook.

And so, just as the race card has been played to such an extent as to make any questioning of extreme Muslim behaviour in the UK unacceptable, any dissent on our membership of the EU is similarly dismissed.

Without any investigation of the reality or the truth.

There are a few things that should be understood as part of this whole EU debate in my opinion. Things which even people who want us to stay in the Eurozone would be hard pressed to deny, but which they will obviously not want to be raised publicly:

One is that if we stay in, we will be part of a single European state, with universal laws on issues including trade, employment, human rights, mobility of population. A single entity where there are no internal borders or barriers to accessing welfare, healthcare or unemployment benefits, regardless of contribution or 'paying in' to the system. And where most UK rules are set by bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg rather than by the people we vote for - or vote out - at our domestic elections.

Our sovereignty will be subsumed into the EU machine. And we will no longer have local, democratic control over our borders or our laws. Our trading agreements with the rest of the world will be decided on a pan-European basis and not in the interests of the UK as the distinct trading nation on which our country has been founded. We will also have a single defence force that is controlled by the EU and not by the MoD or our government.

So our defence policies will be decided with Greece, Portugal, Germany, France and 23 others, having a majority sway over our own domestic military interests and policies. In effect we could have a Greek or an Italian, a Frenchman or a Spaniard deciding the fate of British subjects living in Gibraltar or the Falklands. You might welcome that of course.

The second issue, and this hasn't been widely reported for obvious reasons, is that a UK exit from the EU would almost certainly bring the whole stinking edifice down with it: This is why the stakes are so high because this is not a referendum just about UK membership, but, in reality, about the entire future of the EU. It makes me smile when EU ministers dismiss the UK as a minor player, insulting our electorate and taking an arrogant approach to what we say and do. The fact is that without the second biggest contributor to the EU it will fail entirely, and quite quickly.

We know about the financial trials and tribulations of southern Europe and Ireland: They are essentially insolvent and, without being able to devalue their currencies, are trapped in an unending cycle of unemployment, recession and poverty. But France is also bust, even if they are trying to tell the world otherwise. The Netherlands is teetering on the brink of failure. Only Germany is booming and that is only because they are enjoying a massive (at least 30%) exchange rate advantage because their currency is tied to weaker nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy. It's all a sham and the British taxpayer is propping it up to the tune of £13billion a year (2010 figures).

Some 47% of the EU budget is spent on the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) - essentially propping up inefficient European farmers or making highly efficient UK & German farmers very rich indeed. It was designed, at the outset of the EU (and as a way of getting France on board), to enable the medieval French subsistence farming economy to continue in perpetuity and it's certainly doing that. 47% of what we pay goes to farmers. I'll leave you to decide whether that's a good thing, but bear in mind that this is on top of the massive tariffs that are charged to non-EU agricultural producers in Africa, for example, which preclude them from trading their way out of poverty by rigging the market against them.

So we perpetually have to send aid to feed their populations instead of allowing them to compete with our subsidised farmers and trade their way into the first world. We are, in the name of the EU, raping Africa. And the consequent wars and genocide means that we also then spend further £billions and lives, trying to sort out the mess that we are directly involved in creating.

The third issue is about accountability. The EU's accounts have not been signed off as being a true a fair record (and it spends £130 billion a year in our name and at our expense) (2010 figures) for the last 17 years. And the reason? 'non-compliance with the rules governing the spending, such as breaches of public procurement rules, ineligible or incorrect calculation of costs claimed to EU co-financed projects, or over-declaration of land by farmers'. (source ECA - European Court of Auditors). In layman's terms, this means 'corruption'.

Accountability also covers the people who wield this mega power over us. Whose decisions affect our daily lives in hundreds of ways. They take our tax money and decide how it is spent, but how accountable are they to we who fund this whole thing?

Herman Van Rompuy is President of the European Council. He was appointed on November 19th 2009 as the first such president at an 'informal' meeting of the council. There wasn't a vote. So even the people (MEPs) that we elect (but we don't really because no-one really gives a shit or knows who their MEP is) didn't get to vote on the issue. Let alone 'us' whose taxes pay for his office and the £130billion a year he spends in our name. He is effectively a glorified MEP voted in by a small, largely disinterested constituency in Belgium, who has some mates in the EU who rigged his election. Who we didn't vote for but who is effectively running Europe for us. How good of him.

He is paid £320,000 a year (2009 figures), has a staff of 60 plus 10 bodyguards, a travel budget of £4 million and an office budget of £22.3 million (same date figures).  Breaking (sorry) I've just learnt that he's now paid £520,000 (2013). Now that's austerity for you.

Manuel Barosso is President of the European Commission. He's a former president of Portugal and was appointed without a Europe-wide vote, by his mates in the European People's Party. You can google him as easily as I can so I'm not going to reproduce wiki stuff here. Let's just say that he's a corrupt fuckwit and be done with it. He is paid £363,000 a year plus yada yada yada.

More than 99% of the European population didn't vote for either of these people and yet they're spending our money and passing laws that affect all of our lives....

*******

The EU spends £130million a year just transporting the whole circus between Strasbourg and Brussels so as not to upset the French. Apart from haulage contractors and moving companies, there is not a single benefit to taxpayers to be gained from this ridiculous and unnecessary process. £130 million is small beer of course in the overall scheme of things, but it is, I think, a good indicator of the sheer, bare-faced unaccountability, untouchability and arrogance of these people.

You can google 'wasteful EU projects' as well as I can (and there are some big ones) so I'm not going to dwell on this too much. £5.25 million on chauffeur-driven cars to take Eurocrats around Strasbourg in a single year is perhaps worth a mention.

So these unelected people are enjoying salaries and benefits including pensions that render the term 'solid gold' completely redundant. They are enjoying benefits that would make Solomon blush and yet they're presiding over unprecedented levels of poverty, hardship, unemployment and despair, particularly in southern Europe, to an extent that we have not seen for decades, possibly centuries.

And these Eurocrats will do anything to preserve their cushy (in the extreme) way of life. Including selling out their own citizens. They have been (and are) stealing money out of the very banks that their fellow countrymen have put their life-savings into, in Cyprus and Greece - and don't think that this will stop there. It's not widely reported for obvious reasons, but legislation is now in place for so-called 'bail-ins' in the UK - where personal money can be taken by the EU to bail out failing banks. That's your hard-earned money. And it can be taken out of your bank account to pay for their fuck-ups. Without your consent.

I have blogged, here, here and here about what I call economic blitzkrieg; an end to democracy in Europe and the threat that the EU poses to our way of life and our ability to have any influence whatsoever on the way we are governed. Rather than re-stating my arguments in this piece, maybe you might have a read sometime?

I have also blogged here about whether our exit of the EU would have the disastrous effect on UK jobs and prosperity that Messrs Heseltine, Clarke, Mandelson and Clegg have suggested. The fact is that it wouldn't and it would free us up to be the global trading giant that we can still be. The fact is that we are still (just) a player on the world stage, but we won't be if we are consumed into this EU fiasco. Mr Putin might say (his official at any rate) that we are a small country, but he (they) would not even dignify Greece or Portugal or Albania (potential new joiners - and when will we see any benefit from Albania joining?) with even that status.

We currently have a balance of payments deficit with the Eurozone of £46 billion. That means we buy more from them than they do from us to the tune of £46 billion a year. So will we lose trade or jobs if we exit the EU? I'd say it's doubtful in the extreme. They may be a couple of audits short of  clean bill of financial health, but even the EU is not that stupid. If we go they would still need to trade with us or their current recession would be like a walk in the park by comparison. And, as I say in the blog (linked above) our membership of EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) would give us all the same trading rights and agreements that we have now, but without the ridiculous laws that are currently imposed upon us. (Although we are a founder member of EFTA we would have to re-join if we chose to leave the EU, but that would be a formality).

So what does the EU do for us? In the 32 years that it has been in operation and despite Maggie's rebates, we have never once secured more money back than we have paid in to this project. So it has been a one-way street of us paying for stuff but arguably not really getting any benefit from it. For 32 years. That's quite a long-term investment for no discernible return. Especially when 47% has been paid to subsidise French farmers. Brie is fairly cheap I suppose.

Examples of EU benefits? (This was originally a 'note to self' to put some EU benefits in here as a way of providing some balance - I don't just throw these things together despite what you might think ;) ). But the awkward thing is that I'm really struggling to find any. And I'm not joking nor being cynically obtuse here, I really am struggling. This is quite an interesting piece from 2011 on this very subject. And here is the pro-EU BBC's take on the same thing from May this year.

Apart from the frankly bogus claims about economics, business/employment and our trading status, even the BBC can only come up with a couple of things that it sees as 'benefits' in the area of 'employment laws and social protections'. When we already have long-established laws of or own covering these issues. £13 billion a year is a hell of a lot to pay for a slight reinforcing of these things (when our own arrangements have worked perfectly well hitherto).

The bottom line in all this is whether we're better off in the EU or not. And I will make the case on this basis. But I would strongly argue that this is not just about the UK. I am vehemently anti the EU but I'm also very strongly pro Europe. I love Europe. I am a proud European. I have worked and have friends in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Holland, Belgium, Ireland. They are great places. They're not Germany (which I like and which has it's undoubted merits). They're not Brussels or Strasbourg.

They are real places with their own distinctive history, heritage, culture, food, music, ways of life. They are, broadly speaking, old countries, civilised and with a mature outlook and view of the world. They are wonderful places, rich in culture, history and lifestyle that we should be celebrating, protecting, enjoying and sharing, not trying to subsume them into some sort of homogeneous Germanic state.

They have been conned by the EU as have we. It was established as the 'Common Market' after the last unpleasantness (WW2) as a way of promoting free trade and better linkages across a local geographical area and, most importantly as a way of preserving nation states,  protecting them from oppression from bigger more powerful countries and preventing the seemingly endless conflict that afflicted Europe for the first 45 years of the last Century.

But the bureaucrats enjoyed their power, their perks and so the Common Market became the European Economic Community - a closer relationship - and then the European Community (so more than just economics) and finally, latterly, the European Union. A United States of Europe. Be in no doubt that this was always the plan and a push for a single 'state' is the real objective. You may of course see this as a good thing. A single trading block that can rival the US and China as a major economic power in the world.

And that is the only thing that I can (grudgingly) see as a possible benefit of the EU. But it's an advantage for the strong not the weak members. It gives Germany major benefits but leaves Greece, Spain and Italy floundering. German companies are currently buying up businesses in southern Europe like it's going out of fashion. It's a take-over of Europe by Germany via its puppets in Brussels and this prospect of a stronger presence in the world rings very hollow in Spain, for example, where 50% of 18-24 year-olds are out of work. These struggling countries are tied to the Euro so they have no prospect of devaluing their currencies and becoming competitive on the global stage again. So they have no prospect of prosperity or success or opportunity because of the EU. Far from eliminating the prospect of conflict, this situation is resulting in real hardship, a growth in membership of extreme parties (of left and right) and an increased likelihood of civil unrest and renewed conflict. And one could hardly blame them, given the way that they have been sold out by the EU.

And do we need this global strength in the UK? We trade with the US and have a so-called 'special relationship'. (certainly when they need someone to cover their backs in another meaningless war); we have the Commonwealth - Australia, Canada, India, parts of Africa. And we would certainly not lose our ability to trade with Europe if we opted out of the EU - because that would be economic suicide for them.

All-in-all, I really cannot see why we would be better off being part of a single European state. I simply do not see how laws being made in Brussels which reflect issues in Albania or Greece or Spain will improve upon laws made democratically here in the UK. I don't see how moving the seat of government further away from the people it is supposed to represent will be a positive thing for us. How people who may never have heard of your village or town or city will be able to address the issues you daily face? How people who you cannot vote out of office will have any need to have your interests, views, values at heart?

So it will be up to you in the referendum. The EU currently spends more than Coca Cola on advertising in Europe, trying to influence you to have a positive view of it. If it was a clear force for good in Europe, why would it need to do this? Clarke, Heseltine, Clegg and Mandelson all have EU pensions and all have a vested interest in the UK remaining part of the corrupt EU. The question you need to ask yourself (punk - sorry couldn't resist) is whether you will be better off, whether the vast majority of our fellow European citizens are better off in the EU. In my view the answer is clearly 'non'.

The question is whether you are British first and happily a European second. Whether you want to be able to have some say in how you are governed or not. You might, of course, want to relinquish your rights and identity, your influence, control and freedoms to unelected people to whom you are paying £millions in Brussels and who don't give a flying shit about you as they sit sipping Krug on their yachts in the Med. On the other hand you may not. It really is up to you in this coming referendum.

Whatever you decide, it will be the biggest and most important thing you ever do on a ballot paper.

Thanks for reading.

You know you've got them rattled when the insults start to fly

The only conclusion I can draw from the current spate of insults thrown at people who don't share some views, is that the approach must work. And I find this both a devastatingly sad reflection on our society and an overpoweringly scary prospect for the future.

It also makes me incandescent with rage, to the point where swear-words, expletives and blind vitriol are in danger of taking over from rational thought.

So, because I think some of the things that Mr Farage and UKIP have to say about uncontrolled immigration and having control of our own national destiny are good and worth thinking about rationally for the good of our country, I am labelled a swivel-eyed loon.

Because I think we'd be better off making our own rules, controlling our own borders and having some democratic connection with our elected government instead of handing over powers and our tax money to unelected bureaucrats in the EU, I am a 'little Englander' with no wider view of the world.

Because I think that climate change is something we cannot control, that the science is not clear or settled or even credible, I should be dismissed as an anti-science 'denier' when the so-called science and its predictions have failed to equate to any kind of reality...

Because I am fearful of muslim communities being established in the UK and operating not within the laws of the land but their religion and thereby precluding some indiginous groups (gay men, women not covered up from head to toe, inoffensive revellers) from walking the streets in their own country, I am a racist?

This is England in 2013. And these insults are being thrown around not by radical groups but by the established government and the media and many of us are accepting them, being made to behave in a certain way by them. Is this really what we want for our country?

Are we all sheep?

Thanks for reading

Dave here's your chance. Try not to blow it this time

So Ed's taken a turn to the left. Yes perhaps under the auspices of his biggest donors the unions. His puppet-masters, the people who got him elected as leader. That does not mean those of us of a different political persuasion should dismiss this as some kind of minor coup or irrelevance.

In many ways this could be construed as the last desperate thrashings of the union movement, one which many of us thought Maggie - and subsequently Mr Blair - had seen off. We may think that the unions are now dinosaurs whose day has been and gone and that this particular argument has been decisively won.

Those of us who remember the dark days of the 70s;
the strikes, the three-day week, power blackouts, unions holding the government (of both political persuasions) to ransom, might be forgiven for thinking that those bleak times were well behind us.

But are you sure about it?

The thing is that if you didn't live through those desperate times (and they were desperate) and haven't experienced this brand of union-driven socialism in action, you might well have been lulled into the belief that it has some merit. That it's about fairness, redistribution of wealth, taking from the 'haves' and giving to the 'have nots'. Tackling greed and giving to the poor. Giving the people who work for a living much more of a say in society compared to the 'bosses'. Except it now seems to be about those people who don't work for a living, or can't find work - and that's an issue that needs to be addressed too of course.

It (Socialism viewed in isolation, in theory rather than reality) is a potentially attractive proposition. And if you don't remember as far back as 1978 which was the last time that this scenario was in action (a group which includes a large proportion of the current electorate) then you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a valid way in which the UK can go forward.

And in the intervening years the 'sleepers' who hold this view of the world, many of whom are in the teaching profession (rather than the 'real' world) and, therefore, in an ideal position to influence the considerable (perhaps electorally decisive) numbers of young people, who have since become adults and 'voters', have been quietly doing their thing.

I should just say, at this point that I am not some rabid right-wing propagandist. I think the banks should have been allowed to fail. I think that some of the bonuses and salaries of top bosses are obscene and that we currently have a culture that is completely and unforgivably skewed towards people who don't give a shit about anyone else and are purely 'in it' for themselves. I think people who ripped off others should be prosecuted and given severe prison terms instead of their employers being fined and the individuals being allowed to carry on their disgusting practises knowing that if they fuck up, they will be bailed out by the taxpayer.

I think that politicians of all persuasions are corrupt, that the vast majority do not give a toss abut the people they supposedly represent and that the entire system is irredeemably flawed. Fat cats paying lip-service to everyone else so long as they get their hands on completely unjustifiable levels of reward in the form of salaries and solid gold pensions, expenses and other benefits.

Drawing up the ladder is what seems to me to be happening at the moment and we must do something about this. Globalisation seems to me to be creating a small number of mega corporations that are so powerful that they discourage any kind of new entry, competition or opportunity. It was probably ever thus, but the problem has become more acute in recent times. We're not just competing against the next village or town or city, but against the whole wide world and if you don't 'make it' in an industry here, it's no longer the case that you can use your skills and experience in the same industry somewhere else. Because the 'industry' is now a single all-powerful 'company' and if they reject you, you're essentially fucked (technical term).

So if you're a specialist in a certain industry but the company has its own experts in that role, what choices are open to you? Retraining? Starting again in middle age? Stacking shelves? Competing for an hourly-rate job against people who don't have your experience, skills or work ethic perhaps, but who are cheap and will 'do the job'.

But - and this is a big 'but' - going back to 1978 is not the answer. Socialism's 'equality' is not about raising everyone up to a level, but bringing everyone down to a level. It is the politics of envy and not of aspiration. It is about making everyone suffer and encouraging the achievement of the lowest common denominator. Everyone equal in misery rather than the celebration of achievement which then allows others to prosper and thrive.

Going back to a situation where the unions rule: Where the people (unions) holding the power are much more concerned about pay packets this week than the viability of the employer in months, years, decades to come, is not the way forward. Combined with the inequalities described above, it would be the death knell of the UK as a place in which to live, wok and bring up a family. We're not in Leicester competing with equally 'entitled', 'uncaring' and essentially 'lazy' rivals in Nottingham, with a global monopoly on textiles or footwear any more. We're competing with efficient, highly motivated, union-protected but not union-driven companies in Germany, the US and Japan - and more significantly, with low wage economies around the world.

So here's your chance Dave. You need to do something about this ridiculous 'fuck you' UK economy and you need to remind people how disastrous going back to a 70s Socialist agenda would be. And you have to do both.

A 'land of opportunity' is not about opportunity for the few at the top but nor is it about allowing the unions to make opportunity impossible.

So you can make a start Dave by making capitalism work for the many and not the few and setting out a clear - not just lip service - agenda to achieve that. It will have to be painful for many who are in cushy jobs, particularly in the public sector. It is of course much more difficult to make changes in the private sector, but private utilities who are currently making piss-taking levels of profit and then passing on the costs of investing in renewing infrastructure to their customers in addition to maintaining their profit levels (when they justified price rises on the basis of needing to invest) is in your gift and would be a good place to start. And 'Green taxes' are just stupid in the extreme and costing us all. You can change this very easily. (Tell Mr Davey not to slam the door on his way out). More on this here.

And you have to do something about the banks and financial services sector. They are currently running rings round all of us. They can still be competitive with a UK base but at the moment they are not 'playing fair' and this will bring you down if you don't do something about it.

 And if that happens we are left with Red Ed and his union puppeteers running the place. And that way lies complete and utter disaster for this country.

So you have to win the argument all over again, because many (most?) voters simply have not experienced the shambles and negativity of a socialist government in their lifetimes. And the chances are, currently, that Labour will win the next election. The stakes are very high Dave, not just for you and your party but for the whole country. But you have the chance to win and to do so in a way which can take this country forward positively again. I think, and hope that this will be outside of the 'socialist' EU and I think and hope that you will find some way to unite the majority 'right' behind you. If that means doing a deal with UKIP when the time comes, so be it. The alternative to a few people swallowing their pride and egos, is much much worse.

You have a chance, an opportunity, Dave. Don't blow it.

Thanks for reading.