Thursday
Jan242013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Eyefall
Jan 24, 2013 ;)
Isn't it interesting that when the UK energy industry was privatised, leading to sustained falls in costs to consumers, Private Eye felt able to print this cover lampooning the idea.
Now that governments are encouraging lunatic renewables schemes and really are making energy more expensive, Ian Hislop maintains a determined silence.
Funny that.
Reader Comments (35)
Deben and Hislop formed an enduring bond of trust at public school, no doubt.
Apparently Ian Hislop gets his climate change information direct from his buddy George Monbiot. Nuff said.
Lunatic renewables schemes. Like importing wind power from the Irish bogs.
Addendum. Peat that is.
In P-E issue 1330 I got a letter in about wind turbines versus gas generation.
In issue 1331 there was a riposte from a certain 'Flinlo Costain' - troll-like letter praising windfarms.
In issue 1332 Richard North's letter delivered a broadside to Mr Ffinlo and so far all I can see is an oil slick on the water.
Howeve the next issue may bring more.
Reading material which has been dumped over the last ten years:
The MSM in general - crap cut 'n' paste stuff from NGOs and assorted pressure groups, I scan them for free online now in the same way you gawp at a car crash
Skeptical Inquirer - used to be a great debunker of pseudo-science until it went (bizarrely) uncritically warmist
New Scientist - see final part of SI above
Private Eye - unease for a while at its "blind eye" to the CAGW machine then subscription cancelled following its Climategate silence
If I hadn't already known that cAGW was a CoS (BTW: C = Crock; no I don't mean the "c" in "cAGW"), Hislop's bland acceptance would have converted me. cAGW is a CoS.
Peter Cook must be spinning in his grave at what Hislop has done to PE.
I'm sure Derek and Clive would have had the word for him... In fact, I think I know what it would be.
Private Eye gave Paul Foot (nephew of Michael, former editor of the "Socialist Worker" newspaper a column for years under the name "Footnotes".
I believe a very similar column remains in the same slot after his death.
Private Eye might usefully be seen as an SWP publication.
". . . the UK energy industry was privatised, leading to sustained falls in costs to consumers"
Er, no. Non sequitur. Prices generally fell during the nineties in a long-term trend that happened to coincide with the aftermath of privatisation and reached its nadir in the price collapse that eventually put British Energy out of business. (That and legal shenanigans by Scottish suppliers aimed at bypassing the provisions of the 1989 act designed, rightly in my view, to protect the nuclear sector.)
The Dash for Gas was, of course, contributory but the notion that the cause of low prices in that period was solely or mostly the 1989 Act has to be demonstrated. (Remember that NETA was brought in to address allegations of price fixing.)
That said, there is no dispute that Hislop is a sanctimonious Numptie. Anything that regards the Moonbat as authoritative deserves all it gets. It's at its best on a Friday night long-past-sell-by-date TV show whose only remaining joke is that foreigners are awfully jolly funny.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4760766/Books-with-wonderfully-terrible-titles.html
Sorry couldn't resist it
Check out the 5th book down
From windless Irish bogs, Philip.
"Isn't it interesting that when the UK energy industry was privatised, leading to sustained falls in ....."
1. Investment in infrastructure
2. Research and Development of more energy-efficient utilisation
Mr Hislop values his BBC pay cheques too much.
Attn Snotrocket
Buy a large angle-grinder and a generator; do a circuit round the base of the tower with same and wait for a good Irish wind! Watch it fall. Let's pray it doesn't come to that!
Fight them on the beaches ... and in the bogs!
Occasionally PI does allow something off AGW message to slip through. In the Old Sparky column, issue 1325, entitled 'Keeping the Lights On', there is an article criticising the use of woodburning in the Drax power station instead of coal. Calling it a "crazy process".
Philip Foster - Jan 24, 2013 at 10:18 PM
High-yield det cord?
Joe Public
"Isn't it interesting that when the UK energy industry was privatised, leading to sustained falls in ....."
1. Investment in infrastructure
2. Research and Development of more energy-efficient utilisation"
The first is either apparently fine or so heavily regulated or subsidised that government has more say in the decisions than the companies. What business is the second of the energy industry?
@David Ashton
Archbishop 'islop would have an attack of the vapours if his HIGNIFY sinecure / comfy nonthreatening playpen was no longer there... The Hat Trick Productions gang seem to epitomize the mediocre metro-media crony liberal lefty rotating BBC door PC hypocrite stereotype (phew!) - no wonder they get to produce any old tosh that somebody can scam a budget for.
Hislop is the editor - and it's now obvious, very obvious indeed - that he's guiding content to avoid AGW / renewables - positively like The Plague.
I used to buy PE at the airport but it's beginning to read like a smaller version of The Daily Mail. They used to have a go, but now I suspect mortgages and pensions figure near the top of the decision matrix for a contentious story.
Oh, and I can tell you from personal experience that they are arithmetically challenged - I dropped a story with them a few years back about the local council claiming £23 value to the community for every £10 spent by a visitor to the county town - the council were unable to explain that assertion (or the swollen budget of the local
tentative victimtourist office) but PE scribbler thought it was a reasonable statement to make..
...
I have submitted a couple of short letters to them on global warming, none published. Considering all the shenanigans with the IPCC. climate gate and carbon credits etc, you would have though it was great subject for them to get their teeth into.
Hislop a paid BBC stooge that lives in that most fabulous of places the London bubble, some people need to get out in the real world some times, like the poor old bloke I meet in my local corner shop last ngiht that was differing over 2 pounds on his electric key or a loaf of bread and couple tins of beans. He got both as me and the shop owner (Nice bloke that was winding me up about the cricket) sorted him out.
The real world really is full of nice people if you go out and talk to people, not that you'd know from the MSM or Private Eye.
If Ian's reading this (unlikely) he might like to look into the idiocy of the financing of the Irish Greenwire project referred to by PB near the top. You build your massive windmills in Ireland, don't connect them to the Irish grid, wheel the output across to Anglesey, and we pay them double ROCs because it's off-shore. Oh, and we fund the extra grid connections as well. If we're getting this balmy, what's to stop this model being applied to any other country? Then again, we've been paying the Climate Change Levy to small hydro stations as far away as southern France for the last decade.
The Eye's position baffled me for a long time; they've been pretty fearless in exposing dishonesty, manipulation, spin and cover-up at considerable risk for decades, but almost total silence on a set of interlinked scandals that could keep them in print for years.
At first I though it was remaining resolutely neutral for fear of accusations that Christopher Booker still wielded some sort of influence. But I think it's far more disappointing and prosaic - the cultural and media bubble as Shevva intimates, combined with a fear of outraging their readership and hurting circulation.
James Delingpole was onto Hislop a few months ago - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100182682/the-sad-death-of-private-eye/ - and pointed out another of Hislop's little "blind spots" a month or two later - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100191270/rotherham-hislop-common-purpose/ .
The days when I bought PE to read next week's / next month's news are long gone. Thanks to the internet, we don't need to read the Eye ("the Protocols of Ian"?) anymore, but in the spirit of the original Eye I'd rather have seen them sued out of business than just turn into the limp rag on offer now.
Sent this to Hislop,
"Richard Ingrams - 49, when he resigned as being to old!
Ian Hislop - 52, over the hill and far away or should be by now."
Didn't get published. VERY funny that
The turning of a 'blind eye ' to the goings on at CRU and the joke of investigations which normal would have been standard fair for the magazine , tells us that on this subject there very far from the ideals this publication was set up to support .
Sent this to Hislop,
"Richard Ingrams - 49, when he resigned as being to old!
Ian Hislop - 52, over the hill and far away or should be by now."
Didn't get published. VERY funny that
'I say, look - you Irish chappie. We're running out of landscape to ruin over here in Blighty - so us - how can I put this without sounding pompous - rather intelligent chaps in the UK government thought it would be a jolly good wheeze if we could bung a load of cash your way (or rather to your already rich landowners) to build some whopping wind turbines all over the middle of your island.. Don't worry about it not being the windiest bit - that's irrelevant - we've got them all over non-windy bits of the UK..
Let's face it - we only come over to play golf and get p*ssed in Dublin, so its not going to make a lot of difference to your little tourist industry...
Be in touch.. Tally ho..!'
Like Woodentop, I stopped taking the Eye after too long a silence on Climategate.
Ironic that the good Booker was one of its driving forces.
Hislop has joined the Establishment, and taken the magazine with him.
Capell 8:44 AM
Got any links / pointers as to the small hydro stuff in France you mention?
@Jeff Wood, 3:46PM: Yes, Climategate was a critical moment for all 'sceptical', 'anti-establishment' individuals / organisations. Ben Goldacre's 'coming out' as an unquestioning believer in the CAGW consensus* made a mockery of his 'Bad Science' stance, for example.
*I've noticed that the likes of Brian Cox have made it seem literally impossible to be rational and dispute CAGW, as if the scientific method was infallible. Who knew, it's really not, you know...
Jan 26, 2013 at 1:00 AM | DougieJ - Good points
I would like Prof Cox to explain a couple of things. The first is at what stage of his scientific training was he taught about t validity of consensus science. During my physics undergraduate days I was taught to question everything. One of the examples we were given as a warning against smugness was the position of classical physics immediately prior to the rise of quantum mechanics and relativity. If you don't know about this have a read. Within a very short space of time physicists went from thinking they only had a few loose ends to tie up to having their entire world view turned on its head. This happened because a few upstarts, albeit very clever ones, wouldn't accept the consensus of their esteemed superiors.
Another thing Prof Cox can explain is why he is so confident that we know enough about the Earth's atmosphere, and all its interactions, to be able to model it with such certainty. He will not be able to point to any other theory dealing with such a complex system that is accepted so uncritically. I actually think that he and most other champions of the cause know that and whince every time another piece of data contradicts their position. Worse still, they abuse their position as educators of the public by taking such a biased and unscientific stance. A sad time for science and one that I hope passes soon.
Hislop is blinkered leftist/totalirian. This explains both why
- Private Eye ceased being funny when he took over
- he is always on the side of more taxes and government
I don't know why this anti-eye nonsense has such legs. As Mactheknife wrote in the comments back in August, after a similar batch of know-nothing remarks:
"I'm afraid those commenting against Private Eye and then admitting they don't read it are silly. In their 'Old Sparky' column they are regularly critical of the renewable energy sector".
Which is exactly right, eg quoting from this weeks issue: ""Much sound and fury from the Commons public accounts committee as it learns that £17bn is being added to electricity bills to pay for transmission cables to bring electricity from offshore windfarms, with ‘extremely generous’ returns for the companies building them. The MPs should keep investigating because that isn’t the half of it…”
For those who never see the rag, a cursory glance at back-issues under 'Columnists' on the Eye's (rather lame) website, or google, will confirm. And this has been running for several years now.
He may be a late convert but Hislop has seen which way the wind is blowing!
They are only critical insofar as it relates to private sector companies getting big subsidies. They have no problem with the principle of building wind turbines all over the place and no interest in investigating whether or not they are worthwhile.
I think it is in the 50 years of PE book that a PE insider admits that they attack Conservative governments much harder than Labour for ideological reasons - presumably the Coalition is far enough to the left as to be OK in their book.