Politicians and other useful idiots.

Politicians, Civil Servants and others of that ilk justify the high salaries they enjoy by relating them to what is on offer in the private sector.
Apart from those that fall into the category of what Lenin liked to call Useful Idiots, most of them would be virtually unemployable outside the Public Sector.. For the purposes of this particular argument, a useful idiot would be someone responsible for or close to the decision making processes in a major Ministry like the MOD. Into this category fall several erstwhile Prime Ministers, Health Secretaries and assorted Sir Humphreys and retired generals who are able to parlay their contacts and presumed insider knowledge into a consultancy role or a seat on the board of a defence contractor or energy supplier.
For the remainder, the residue who have enjoyed neither power nor any especial influence, the best they can hope for in the real world is occasional, low-level consultancy work.
Not to beat about the bush,politicians are useless at business.
Even back in the Thatcher era, when the cabinet was supposedly stuffed with first class business brains, officladom always got taken to the cleaners by the private sector. Take the trains. Once upon a time we had a national rail network and one train operator, British Rail. Since they provided a national service, they were paid from the national purse. However, this monopoly, we were told, could not provide the transport service required by a 20th Century nation. It was sclerotic, inefficient and did not deliver value for money.
Privatising the whole shooting match, we were assured, would enable us to get rid of subsidies, save stacks of money, lead to major improvements in service and give the country a rail network that would be the envy of the world. A few decades later, instead of a single national monopoly,what we actually have is a number of regional private monopolies operating their own services on discrete routes. Maintaining the tracks all of these companies rely on is the responsibility of a semi-nationalised company that does all the grunt work and which, despite privatisation, sucks in virtually the same levels of subsidy as when we, the nation, owned the whole shooting match.
There is a similar story when it comes to our major utilities. Where once we had national and local providers of gas, electricity, water and sewage whose assets were owned by their customers - that would be you and me - we now have a multiplicity of providers, many foreign owned, who operate effective monopolies in their geographic regions and use the profits generated by their UK operations to shield consumers in their home markets in France and Germany from rising energy prices.
In more recent times, the Blair adminsitration managed to enrich any number of foreign companies, civil servants and assorted advisors every time it sold another important national asset. This was ever so slightly at odds with the avowed inetntion which was, in each case, to realise asset values for the greater good and enrichment of the nation at large. Of these deals, the most lucrative for the purchasers, if not for us, has to have been the sale of DERA; the erstwhile Defence Research Agency. Dubbed the James Bond agency by the popular Press, thanks to its work on exotic weaponry, DERA in fact was the repository of some of the best and most valuable research in the world. I read somewhere that it held more patents on advanced materials and technology than any other body.
To cut a long story short, DERA`was sold to a US company and we were assured that the price was a true reflection of the company's market value. A couple of the senior Civil Servants who had been involved in the negotiationswere suddenly transmogrified into high-flying directors and pocketed huge salaries and bonuses when, 18 months after the sale, Quinetic as the new entity had become, was laucnhed on the UK stock market, achieving a launch valuation many millions higher than the original purchase price. This was one of several deals overseen by Gordon Brown, the man whose first venture into capitalism was to sell our gold reserves at jumble sale prices - and he was reckoned to be one of the more astute negotiators in the cabinet of the time.
Another of the deals whose consequences we are suffering even as I write was the sale of the, previously nationalised, British Airporsts Authority (BAA) to Ferrovia, a building and construction company from that repository of aviation history and knowledge, Spain.
To be fair, what attracted Ferrovia to the company was the giant shoping mall that we know as Heathrow Airport. The fact that it had two runways tacked onto the side and is the main conduit for trade into and out of UK and much of Europe was a minor consideration in the purchase. What really counted was the captive, albeit transitory, stream of shoppers that made its way into the collective maw of its shops and restaurants.
Which is why all of their focus was on maximising the returns from the retail side of the operation at the expense of the airport activities. Consequently, when snow fell on Heathrow, it was under-eqipped and under-staffed and failed to cope with the resulting chaos that ensued. Chaos that was transmitted via satellite to the tvs of every country in the world. What these images told the rest of the world was that our nation is inefficient, ill-equipped and, not to put too fine a point on it, incompetents. One message they did not convey is that the UK is open and eager for business..

Unfortunately, as we discover time after time, our politicians struggle to muster even half a brain between them when it comes to business Thus, Heathrow and other important airports were allowed to pass into foreign owership with no apparent strings attached in terms of expected levels of efficiency or performance and no sanctions agreed should performance fail to reach those standards
The parent company of BAA will bank around £1 billion in profits from its UK operation. Good fro them and their investors, not so good for the rest of us. Our global status has been undermined Many of the passengers forced to endure mediaeval conditions at Heathrow will think twice before flying. to the UK again. Some, understandably, will never return, preferring the certaities procided by competitive airports such as Schipol. Apparently, the official regulator has no powers to force BAA to make reparations for what has happened or to force it to equip itself properly against future adverse weather conditions. The best we can hope for is that passengers will group together to force the airport into paying compensation.
What should happen, as a matter of urgency, is that the Minister for Transport, Phillip Hammond, reads BAA the riot act, gives them a list of demands that they must comply with if they are to be given licence to continue running Heathrow, with the threat of re-nationalisation as the ultimate sanction.
What will proably happen is quite the opposite. The furore will melt away with the snow. The politicians and Civil Servants will breathe a sigh of relief and then get ready to be stitched up again when we come sell the Search and Rescue Services to a French-American consortium.

Real world politics

Members of our political elite operate on a completely different plane to the rest of us.
For the most part, we are preoccupied by the mundanities of life, such as feeding, clothing and housing ourselves. Any spare time we have, we devote to sports, hobbies, music and other pastimes. While so occupied we, perhaps naively, take it as read that our political and civil service masters will concern themselves with more serious matters such as the security and defence of our country and our collective health, education and.wealth. We regard it not merely as their job but, to use a somewhat devalued word, their duty. There exists, or should exist, a simple compact between us: we vote them into office and they place the welfare of this country and its people above all other considerations.
So, it's disconcerting to discover that compact is so one-sided. The things that concern the average person in this country are not necessarily highest on the to-do list of any aspiring modern politician. Our concerns are, predominantly, local. Theirs, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is personal vanity and ambition, are almost exclusively global. When they turn their attention to national issues they invariably do solely to silence local dissent, to placate some special interest group or lobby; or to burnish their own reputation .
Today, tribalism trumps national interest at every turn.
Consequently, it is a particular ideology or party line that governs their actions rather than any heightened awareness of the common national good.
Thus,at a time when Russia has been, correctly, labelled a gangster state and Putin is starting to rattle actual and metaphorical sabres; when Argentina is showing renewed interest in staking a claim on the Falklands thanks to the prospect of huge oil and gas reserves, the coalition has decided to scrap our only major aircraft carrier and the Harriers that fly from its decks.
Just as we learn that English schoolchildren are now among the most obese in the developed world, Michael Gove decides to cut funding for school sports.
And, despite almost daily warnings of the business challenges we face now and well into the future from China, India, Brazil and the rest of the emerging nations, the Government decides now is precisely the right time to increase University tuition fees.T
The potential savings provided by these economies are, by modern standards, pitiful, calculated in millions rather than billions.
Meanwhile, in sunny Cancun, Energy minister, Chris Huhne, and a cast of hundreds eanestly global warming while the rest of us endure one of the coldest starts to winter on record. So moved have they been by the undoubted seriousness of the situation that Huhne has, apparently, committed the UK to contributing £1.5 billion to help combat global warming in the Third World. Wow, and we thought that all the scrimping and saving we are being forced to do was to prevent the country going bust.
At home, beset by ice, sleet and snow, while the Cancun conference generates carbon emissions equivalent to those of a small African country, Lord Hutton has restated the commitment to invest in more wind turbines to meet our future energy needs. The last time I looked at the figures for this programme of energetic lunacy, the annual cost was projected to be between £20 to £30 billion. This despite the fact that all the evidence points to wind turbines being the biggest potential white elephants since the Sinclair C5 electric car..
Should Hutton require a change of profession, he would do worse than consider that of a professional mourner. His ability to keep a straight face while extolling the very dubious benefits of wind power would make him a priceless asset to any ambitious funeral parlour. The claims he makes for wind turbines fly in the face not just of logic but what is actually happening in the real world.
Here we are freezing our proverbials off. Every business and household faces their highest ever energy bills and Hutton is seriously suggesting that what we need are more windmills! Hasn't anyone in his team pointed out that, during the current freeze, the existing wind turbines have been as much use as tits on a bull?
What they need is neither breathy zephyrs nor gales but steady regular wind. What we have had over the last month has either been hurricane force winds during which the turbines have to be locked down, or no wind at all, in which case they remain static. In fact, some installations have had to draw power from the national grid to keep their blades turning and prevent them from freezing. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has spent more than a few winters in this country. Generally speaking, we get the steadiest winds in the summer and Autumn months. Winter winds are either raging gales or non-existent. No matter, Hutton and his henchpeople want to bet the house - or at least £30 billion per year of our money - on wind turbine technology as the answer to our energy needs.
He backs his spurious claims regarding the efficacy of wind turbines with even more misinformed drivel regarding the business and employment opportunities the new wind age will open up for the UK. Again, this flies very firmly in the face of logic.
The most technologically advanced countries in the world when it comes to wind energy are Scandinavian; more particularly Denmark and Sweden. They have been using wind energy for close to thirty years. Ergo, they have a thirty year lead over everybody else when it comes to designing and manufacturing wind turbine machines.
That is why 80% of the equipment used to build theThanet offshore wind farm that was opened in September was designed and built in Scandinavia. Even the cable that connects the wind farm to the national grid was laid by an Italian company. In fact, the whole installation has created a grand total of 22 permanent jobs for people in that area of Kent. These have been bought at an enormous cost, thanks to the £1.2 billions in subsidies pledged to the renewable energy companies over the anticipated 20 year life of the field.
Like any true modern politician, Hutton is never one to let anything as awkward as the truth intrude on his version of reality. According to him, wind turbines will not only give us unprecedented levels of virtually free energy, they will create a cornucopia of high tech opportunities for British industry.
While we wait for this bounty to fall into our laps, we have to endure energy costs that will rise, year on year, way above ordinary inflation levels; perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations being closed in order to meet some spurious EU mandated reductions in carbon emissions and the uplifting prospect of new nuclear capacity being created by French contractors because our own nuclear design and engineering skills were deemed to be redundant by a previous group of clueless politicians.
There is an upside to all of this, of course. Both Huhne and Hutton will earn some very valuable Brownie points with some influential Green lobbyists and pressure groups. And, with a fair wind so to speak, could parlay their energetic activities into valuable consultancy work or directorships once they have completed their respective stints at the trough of public service.

Conned and lied to.

Are all politicians naturally venal?
Given the performance thus far of the main players in the new government, it looks very much as if they are.
Getting rid of Gordon Brown and his Labour cronies provided the same sense of relief as a good burp. It released unwanted and debilitating flatulence and thus cleared the way for something we hoped would be altogether more edifying. That sense of a new beginning lasted what, a couple of months? It has dissipated as rapidly as the main election pledges made by the Conservatives and their allies in the new Lib Con alliance. Notice I refer to an alliance rather than a coalition. The only noticeable coalescing so far seems to have occurred between Dave and Nick. The rest of the motley crew involved in governing us seem to be paddling their own canoes up creeks of their own choosing. Thus, there seems to be a much more natural affinity between Dave and Nick than between, let's say, Dave and Kenneth Clarke or either of those two and Ian Duncan Smith. On the LibDem side, Nick Clegg looks much more comfortable with Dave than, say, Vince Cable.
Not that it's unusual in any team - whether sporting or managerial - to find disparate personalities with little in common with each other outside of their work. It would just be so much more reassuring to feel that those charged with running the country were looking at the same hymn book, let alone singing from it.
Naturally, there has to be some give and take to make the alliance work. The problem is, all of this compromising is being done without any reference to the people that matter - the electorate. So far, the Conservatives have reneged on pledges relating to Europe, immigration, crime ( and suitable punishment) and repeal of the Human Rights Act; basically all of the key points they based their campaign on. For their part, the LbDems have backtracked on Tuition fees, softened their die-hard commitment to Europe and accepted the need for some hardening of attitudes to welfare and benefits. If you believe in the essential goodness of human nature, you might excuse this all as the kind of pragmatic compromise needed to enable them to focus on the real problem, the economy. That won't wash either, though. Not now that George Osborne has committed us to lending 7 billion Euros or more to Ireland - thus wiping out any potential savings accrued by way of his austerity measures - simply to please and appease his masters in Brussels.
Basically, what we have wished upon ourselves is another coven of self-serving chancers whose only real interest is the pursuit of power for its own sake and who, quite clearly, are just as prepared as their Labour predecessors to lie and cheat to attain and retain it,