David Cameron wins majority for Conservatives in Election 2015 victory
Britain’s Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey has lost his seat to the Conservative party, in an election night that has seen the Liberal Democrats presence in the House of Commons decimated. —The Mirror, 8 May 2015
David Cameron has won the general election with an outright majority after Labour was virtually wiped out in Scotland and the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed. Mr Cameron hailed the “sweetest victory” as his party secured the 323 seats needed to form a government without needing to go into coalition. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has resigned. Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor was the biggest scalp of the night, losing his Leeds seat to the Tories. —The Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2015
The Prime Minister has pledged to stop future government funding to windfarm projects including the delayed inquiry and to give local people the final say – if he is re-elected today. Mr Cameron pledged to stop the windfarm project and any other on-shore windfarms within Montgomeryshire if he was elected to take a second term in Government. He said: “I want to make it clear that if there is a Conservative Government in place we will remove all subsidy for on-shore wind and local people should have a greater say.” –Ben Goddard, County Times, 7 May 2015
Speculation is growing that energy and climate change department’s days of independence could be numbered. A government source said that if David Cameron is re-elected, he is likely to fold it into the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, where the government has more staff with commercial experience. –John Collingridge and Danny Fortson, The Sunday Times, 5 April 2015
New government will have to address capacity shortfalls to avoid blackouts. Avoiding a power blackout will be one of the first priorities for whoever forms the next government, a leading consultant has suggested. Critics argue that a focus on renewables has left Britain’s power network now dangerously short of spare capacity. –Andrew Critchlow, The Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2015
Thanks to Dr. Benny Peiser of The GWPF
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I looked over the articles on RealClearPolitics this morning and I’ve had a smile on my face since. Maybe people are starting to wake up and pay attention, and think for themselves
Add the improved vote for the UKIP who are fully opposed to CAGW and we see the mandate from the voters to scrap this nonsense..
The leader of the UKIP lost his seat and has resigned, and the UKIP won 1 seat – wow, that is indeed a mandate!
What is really interesting is how the proportional representation crowd will react to the result.
If the UK had proportional representation UKIP would have the same number of seats than the Lib Dems and the SNP party combined. Under first past the post SNP have 56, the Lib Dems have 8 and UKIP have 1 seat
Chris…… 4.000.000 voices said that they agree with UKIP. Add those to the Tories and you have your mandate. Hopefully they will follow it through
Chris, 12% of the votes went to UKIP, but they got 0.15 % of the seats. The UK has an ancient system of democracy that fails to address or represent an increasingly complicated and diverse society.
Chris, as has been pointed out. Scotland, with 4.2 million voters, has 56 seats in parliament. UKIP, with over 3 million voters, has just one. While they might not have the MPs, their voice cannot safely be ignored.
Chris. The leader of UKIP didn’t lose his seat as an MP, he has never had one.
Nigel and other UKIP people still have their MEP seats arrived at via a PR voting
system and that remains the case. If you take it that UKIP is a protest party that
pushes other larger parties to hold an EU referendum then job done,
The tories have pledged to do that.
As for this, 1 seat, it doesn’t, really relate to what actual UKIP GE voting numbers
were, which is 3rd.
General Election is FPTP.
If the GE was under PR Nigel would be leading an
80 plus force in the commons.
[Inserted “pre” html coding around table. .mod]
Did you blokes moaning about vote share, vote in the referendum on PR we had 4 and a bit years ago ??
The majority voted to keep First Past the Post, and I doubt that the voting system will be a topic of political debate for another 20 year at least.
It might also be worth remembering that the system as it stands, is the very one that All the established parties had to jump through in order to hit the big time. That includes the LibDems who went from 6 MP’s in the 70’s, up to nearly 60 in 2010, and now back to 11.
Its a game of Snakes and Ladders that is sure to eliminate parties representing short lived topics, and as such it works well.
Given that the Tories will have an In, Out, referendum on the EU in 2017, the raison d etre of UKIP will evaporate, and as their only other major platform concerns ‘Nasty Foreigners’ we may well give thanks for the snake that UKIP are about to slide down 🙂
Downside is that SNP now have a substantial say, and they are very pro-EU, which means they wil believe and support all of the CAGW propaganda. I’m kinda surprised that the Scots, proud to be different, are so willing to kowtow to a bunch of Edward Longshankses in Brussels.
Are we seeing a trend? Australia, Britain, who’s next?
USA
It hasn’t happened yet! Let’s wait & see who puts our money where his mouth is!
It already happened in the US, with a more complete reaping than in Australia or UK if you bother to look past the that over-reach guy in his corner of the 3-way power design plan of the Constitution.
Actually in Britain, our electoral system has produced the most unrepresentative result in the history of UK elections. The SNP are vastly over-represented, the Libdems, UKIP and Green Party vastly under-represented and the Conservatives have an absolute majority polling barely over 1/3 of votes cast and under 30% of those entitled to vote. The election will be presented globally as a benchmark of how First Past the Post electoral systems can destroy the concept of ‘voter representation’. There are 24% of voters who have 10 MPs out of 650 between them.
How is that democracy??
UKIP is now the third largest party, and that is from scratch. Daily Express pie chart for the rest of us:
https://twitter.com/Daily_Express/status/596702297603710976
Zeke … yes it would be ‘fair’ … but utterly useless. Trying to get a legislative agenda through with a PR system would be an absolute nightmare.
Yes sir. But nevertheless, credit must be given where credit is due. If it were not for Nigel Farage, who has succeeded (to the astonishment of all) in piercing through the thick media, the parties would offer no difference on membership in the EU, or on green energy.
Also, as Nigel Farage himself remarked,
…How is that democracy??…
It’s what FPTP is DESIGNED to do! It delivers a majority government, and saves us from continual coalition bickering.
Remember how scared we were when we thought we would have a hung parliament? That’s what FPTP saved us from…
Here in Oz we have preferential voting in each seat (State and Federal) and in the (Federal) Senate and still get notional ‘over representation’ say of the National Party ( a rural, conservative party that can go all agrarian socialist when the weather gets tough i.e. drought or flood). In Tasmania we have the Hare-Clark system of 5 members per electorate ( was 7 until 25 years or so ago) and preferential voting. That is due to them being concentrated in rural seats. SNP pretty much concentrated in Scotland with compelling local appeal.
Perhaps the Brits should dump the unelected House of Lords altogether or take it over to PR.
ALl that said I think the result is pretty clear and if they had preferential voting I think it would be downright emphatic. UKIP second preferences would have flowed to the Conservatives as would some Lib Dems. A 37% primary vote in Oz is a solid start if you get preference flows.
As a recipient of ‘proportional representation’ down here in South Africa, it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be! You do NOT have an MP, you have a party member who HAS to vote the way the party says – no room for conscience. And as far as making up coalitions goes – anyone seen what Israel has just had to go through to get a government?
The other, related problem with the party system is that it is an adversarial system not unlike a court of law – you are basically on one side or the other depending on which party you are in. Thus if no party has a clear majority then no work gets done in Westminster. If the party system were abolished and voting was on the merit of proposals insted of on ‘us and them’ tactics, then proportional representation would also be feasible.
peoples memories are so Short 🙂
At the 2010 election, had it have been conducted under a ‘Fair’ system, it would have seen representation by the BNP who at the time were on a roll.
As with the Majority of factoids opined by UKIP, they work well in isolation 🙂
Respectfully: In both UK and US elections “Members of the House” represent a “District” or “Constituency”. “Proportionate” to the individual District is what is accomplished. The issue is can London rule without the consent of the rest of the country? An aggressively ‘English” party would emerge to effectively enslave Scotland, Wales and NI. No system can do everything well.
The US has used this system since 1788. Several pre-independence “Colonies” used this system.Seems to work here even though there are often calls for “change”. Frankly, change usually means someone wants to rule others or avoid being ruled by others.
The point here is that the “Tories” may follow Science rather than Theology regarding climate and allow coal plants and cheap power. I say “Bravo!” to that.
Well it seems to me that the “stiff upper lip” Brits basically gave up at the end of WW-II (and tossed out Churchill); not unlike Obama did when he first got into the oval office.
But for Dame Thatcher, they haven’t had the stomach for being any kind of leader in world affairs.
Maybe, that lip is stiffening again. It’s a welcome sign anyway.
g
+1 on the first part of your comment, but unfortunately the UK is far from having a stiff upper lip anymore. I’d like to see us more like the French – agree to the EU rules, watch the Brits implement the rules and then say with a Gallic shrug “Non, pas pour nous vous remercions beaucoup”
No matter how hard you try, you just can’t believe something to be true that isn’t. You can fudge the climate numbers all you want, but sooner or later reality will come out and bite you on your butt.
Glad to see the general population of at least one western nation is finally starting to realize how much they are paying for what has to be one of the biggest scams in history.
Now I’m beginning to understand a bit more about British politics. It seems to me that the only reason the previous government supported bone-headed ‘green’ policies was because they had to form a coalition. Now that the Conservatives are free, they don’t have to compromise.
Am I right?
No. They all are true Greens.
The Tories have people like Letwin and Debben who are very influential and look down on even Greenpeace as soft on green issues. Cameron put a wind turbine on his roof (not just solar panels).
The Tory manifesto had more pages of environment policies than did the Labour Party.
They have not retracted their aim to be the greenest Government ever.
And there are other reasons why tax breaks for North Sea oil might be cut too.
The wind turbine you speak of was dismantled and was not on No.,10 the PM’s official residence. It was awfully small, and placed on the wrong angle and position and in 2007. The House of Lords is elected nowadays, rather than it was an automatic entry if one was a peer. The Tories got in because they are smarter than most, and also the promise of a referendum of Yes or No regarding the EU and employment of foreigners. If one is an Australian, New Zealander, Canadian one does not have any more rights to work than a Poles. Before Ozzies were welcomed, now one parent has to be born in UK. Or one has substantial financial assets. I’m OK, but my youngest son’s dad is Ozzie, and he was born in 1980, So in 1983, they extended this to mothers who were British citizens. Anyway too bloody cold there for me, and too many racial riots. Cheers.
Yep, in theory! The Lim-Dems were as gree as gree can be because they are just wishy-washy!
That was their fig-leaf, so only time will tell; but don’t get your hopes up.
Not quite, Karim
In 2008 the then Labour Government passed the Climate Change Act. This binds all future UK Governments to reducing CO2 emissions by 80%, before 2050. This is now enacted in UK law and the new Government is bound by it.
When the act was originally passed in 2008, only 5 members (out of 650) voted against it. The act was introduced by Ed Miliband, who later became leader of the Labour Party. He has also resigned today following the shock election win by the Conservative Party.
So, because of this infamous Act, the Conservatives are not free to do anything sensible and, besides, they had previously promised ‘to be the greenest Government ever’.
Any act made by parliament can be unmade by parliament. Spain passed an act that cancelled contracts with solar electricity providers and hung them out to dry. Extreme Green madness is not a one way street.
Those that oppose the nonsense of CAGW are NOT against the rational protection of the environment. What they are opposed to is irresponsible taxes and legislation to support a theory begun by a 19th century crackpot and later picked up by Ozone Layer man..
+1
Watermelons love “bound by law” when it suits them. They forget “Repeal it”
@ur momisugly Crispin…that is true that Spain reneged on their subsidy agreements, but what choice did their bankrupt government have?
The Act can be repealed. http://repealtheact.org.uk/climate-change-act
Parliament means, in the mouth of a lawyer (though the word has often a different sense in conversation) The King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons: these three bodies acting together may be aptly described as the “King in Parliament”, and constitute Parliament. The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty mean neither more nor less than this, namely that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever: and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.
—A.V. Dicey Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885)
The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy may be summarised in three points:
Parliament can make laws concerning anything.
No Parliament can bind a future parliament (that is, it cannot pass a law that cannot be changed or reversed by a future Parliament).
A valid Act of Parliament cannot be questioned by the court. Parliament is the supreme lawmaker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
I would assume that, with a majority, they are free to do the sensible thing and rescind the Act.
“Watermelons love “bound by law” when it suits them.”
Unless the laws in question inconvenience them, in which case they are to be flouted. Often with complete impunity, when anyone else would be in court, were ‘climate change’ not the stock excuse.
Not so, Karim.
The Ca Moron fellow came to be Tory leader and prime minister pledging to be the Greenest party in history. And within weeks he had:
Changed the party logo to a stupid green tree.
Put a wind turbine on his roof.
Hugged some huskies in Norway.
Pledged more wind turbines than Denmark.
However, he is a Ca Moron by name and Ca Moron by nature. Having never worked, never been hungry, and never studied anything outside politics, the results of his first descisions were fairly predictable.
The stupid tree was and it widely hated.
The turbine produced enough energy to power an iPod – on a good day.
The turbine annoyed the f…. out of his neighbours, who forced him to take it down.
The huskies were so happy at being hugged, they neglected to protect some UK students who were eaten by a polar bear.
The wind turbines do not work and are hugely unpopular and expensive.
In other words, the small degree of common sense that Ca Moron is now exhibiting has been beaten into him by bitter experience, and did not come through education, rationality or natural common sense.
R
http://theboar.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/tory-logo.jpg
I … can’t …. even! That’s WONDERFUL! Hahaha!
Silver Ralph,
The fat-faced one has an ‘A’ Level [age-18 school-leaving qualification] in – Art.
[Well, per Wikipedia, the omniscient pluperfect source, that even I can edit – a couple of weeks or so ago.]
I think he has been playing green – although his father-in-law has a turbine stud-farm on his land!
Let’s see.
Auto – rather pleased that the fat-faced one can now govern without Ed Davey having to come to Cabinet meetings . . . .
Most times education from real life trumps pedantic knowledge. Having it beaten into him is a good thing.
>>Having it beaten into him is a good thing.
Yeah, but it took 5 years and £250 billion of our money, for Ca Moron to realise that he was wrong on all points. I would rather have had an intelligent and rational politician, who could have save the £250 billion and solved our power generation problem 5 years ago.
R
Cum arf it, matee. He’s a bleedin’ politician! Maybe after a while in office he realised that all the alarmist doctrines were a load of shite!.
It’s about damn time.
Once again we see that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.
And the one on leaving the EU.
And then the one on breaking up England and Scotland.
And then the one on Northern Ireland’s fate…
And then the civil war restarts.
This was the worst possible result for the UK.
…best for Scotland
“[i]This was the worst possible result for the UK.[/i]”
No, this is much better for the country and could have been so much better. Now the government can get on with the job without being pulled this way and that way by their political opponents aka ‘coalition partners’ that they had to do a deal with.
Thank goodness they are now free to do what they want. I genuinely hope that Fracking goes back on the agenda without the Lib-dems contaminating any debate with the dubious claims made by the anti frackers.
No. I can’t think of a good outcome but Labour having anything to do with Government would be worse than what we’ve ended up with.
Mr Green Genes
May 8, 2015 at 12:09 pm
That is the only Plus from todays episode.
“And then the civil war restarts.”
Rubbish. Historically the wars have always been when Scotland or Wales has been illegally occupied by England. Likewise Ireland, where the dispute is over the Northern section which England doesn’t really have any right to.
Likewise, if the EU doesn’t stop dictating crazy regulations to member states there may eventually be civil unrest.
+1.
Being a resident of the U.S., my only source of information was the predictions from pollsters, and I was (pleasantly) surprised to read the headlines this morning.
This is probably rhetorical, but why is it that pollsters seem to consistently err on the side of liberalism? I read one pollster said people being polled responded one way but then voted another, but this doesn’t pass the common sense test for me. Either the pollsters are lying, have horribly inaccurate polling methods, or have adopted climate modelling techniques.
Because progressives / Liberal / Labor are “loud and proud” and love yelling their opinions at strangers; while conservatives tend to quiet thought and privacy so walk on by. Not all, but enough to skew results.
Polling and market research etc. are really difficult. People will make up any kind of crap they think will sound smart or virtuous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect It’s complicated. For sure you should always take any kind of poll or market research with a grain of salt.
Three recent elections turned out quite differently than the pollsters thought they would: Britain, Alberta, Israel. In fact, the polls will skew the outcome of elections by discouraging some voters and spurring on others.
Whenever you are tempted to believe anything said by a talking head on television just remember that they, almost universally, can’t predict anything better than chance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock
You omitted a further possibility: the ballot box is rigged.
If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
–Unknown, but usually attributed to Mark Twain. Apparently Emma Goldman said something similar.
Stevan Makarevich
You mistakenly suggest
No. The polls were accurate and their indications of national shares of the vote on the day prior to polling day nearly match the actual national shares of the votes cast on polling day.
The pollsters predicted that no Party would obtain a governing majority. A Party must win at least 326 seats to obtain a governing majority. But the Conservative Party did obtain a governing majority.
The results and shares of votes in the General Election are:
◾ The Conservative 331, Labour 232, the Lib Dems 8, the SNP 56, Plaid Cymru 3, UKIP 1, the Greens 1 and others 19.
◾The Conservatives got a 37% share of the national vote, Labour 31%, UKIP 13%, the Lib Dems 8%, the SNP 5%, the Green Party 4% and Plaid Cymru 1%.
The problem for the pollsters was that the national shares of the vote were not the same as the shares of the vote in different regions. And a seat is won by a Party obtaining the largest share of the vote in a constituency.
The effect of this problem is most clear in Scotland.
The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) won 5% of the national vote but won 56 seats because that 5% was all in the 59 Scottish constituencies and, therefore, it amounted to more than 50% of the share of the vote in most of those 59 constituencies.
The Conservative Party had very few seats in Scotland so the Labour Party lost almost all of the seats gained by the SNP. Hence, the SNP gains increased the difference between the numbers of seats won by the Conservative and Labour Parties.
The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won more than twice the share of the national vote of the SNP, but that larger share was spread over all the UK. Hence, UKIP won only one seat.
But that UKIP share of the vote provided the Conservative Party with a governing majority. The Labour and Conservative Parties each had similar national share of the vote but in most of England the swing to UKIP was greater for Labour than for the Conservative Party with the result that the Conservatives gained relative share of the vote and won most seats.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) lost share of the vote everywhere and, thus, lost over 40 seats. But that Lib Dem loss of its share of votes seems to have benefited both the Conservatives and Labour to provide no net effect.
The swing to UKIP did not occur in the North East (NE) of England nor in Wales. In the NE, Labour increased its majorities. In Wales Plaid Cymru retained 3 seats with 1% of the national vote while the Conservatives and Labour made gains from Lib Dem losses, but these gains cancelled each other.
The Green Party’s 1% of the national vote enabled it to retain its one seat.
In summation,
◾ the Conservative and Labour Parties did have similar national shares of the vote (37% and 31%, respectively) predicted by the opinion polls to within margins of error,
and
◾ the larger Conservative share would have provided more seats than Labour obtained,
but
◾ the distributions of the SNP and UKIP shares of the vote provided the Conservative Party with sufficient additional seats for the Conservative Party to have a governing majority.
Richard
People in the UK are constantly pummelled with the idea (principally by the overmighty BBC, the world masters at feining impartiality while promoting a left-wing values) that being left-wing is proof of personal virtue and voting Conservative or UKIP is shameful, which is bound to influence what they say to strangers who ask prying questions.
I found it highly ironic that the politicians being interviewed were complaining bitterly that the voters had lied to them. For a change #sarc.
commie bob
QUOTE
Whenever you are tempted to believe anything said by a talking head on television just remember that they, almost universally, can’t predict anything better than chance.
END QUOTE
Let me help.
MY QUOTE
Whenever you are tempted to believe anything said by a talking head on television just remember that they, almost universally, can’t predict anything better than chance or the Met Office.
END QUOTE
Now, that didn’t hurt too much – did it?
Auto
I have little idea of what the Liberal Democrats stand for, but I know what the Greens stand for, and I think they deserved nothing less than annihilation.
The UKIP should do better next time. If Monckton is a typical UKIP candidate, I think they’d do a superb job at managing their country.
Greens had 1 MP. They still have 1 MP.
UKIP had 2 MPs. They now have 1 MP. And no leader.
Despite receiving the 3rd highest vote nationally. Please educate some of us with sane electoral rules how exactly that happens.
But gathered about 3.5 million votes.
How did the total votes for each Party across the country compare? UKIP may not have had votes concentrated in areas to pick up seats, but they garnered far, far more votes than the Greens. They now have a very large political bloc. Other political parties will have to pander to their positions if they hope to peel off some of those votes in the future elections.
Phil: the UK (like the US) has a “first past the post” (FPTP) electoral system, in which the candidate with the highest vote in a single-member district (“constituency”, in British) wins the seat. Thus, results in terms of seats in the Commons may not reflect the overall vote; as jtom implies, a party that is second everywhere will win no seats, whilst a party that is first in a given constituency, but gets no votes elsewhere, will nonetheless win that constituency’s seat.
Here’s the breakdown of the votes cast/seat won:
SNP 26,444
CON 34,342
LAB 40,232
GRN 121,216
LD 289,262
UKIP 3,767,137
In short, they stand for Political Correctness in all its forms. Including mindless Greenery.
To be pedantic, the LDs weren’t ‘decimated’ ie losing 1 in 10 of their number; they were virtually annihilated.
I am delighted to read your correction over the meaning of decimate. I’m glad that I trawled throgh the comments in order to check that someone had not beaten me to it. I salute you Sir!
Yes, you would think that people would know the meaning of the word by now!
Rick,
Why do you think ‘decimate’ means to destroy 10%?
No linguist agrees with you and neither does the English-speaking world as a whole.
Your choice of “pedantic” to describe your comment is very apt, since it means excessively preoccupied with insignificant detail while vaunting one’s own academic prowess.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimate?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic
“The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population.Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed(not decimated) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.”
The UKIP should do better next time. If Monckton is a typical UKIP candidate, I think they’d do a superb job at managing their country.
__________________________________
Errr, not quite. Monckton may be a clever very fellow in some respects, but he is also a commited fundamentalist left-footer. And that does not go down well in UK politics.
So UKIP sent him to Scotland, where the 17th century wars of religion are still being fought every weekend on the football terraces – the very worst place to send him. The result was a predictable disaster that wrecked the entire Scottish UKIP party.
This is the problem with being a leader in politics. It is not all about intelligence and vision, one needs to be a consummate diplomat too. And not everyone can blend the two roles sufficiently well. I hope Farage comes back, because he was good at it.
R
‘a fundamentalist left footer’? Well, of course, you can get away with making offensive comments like that about Catholics because the Catholic Church is the last thing left about which people are allowed to be offensive. But as we heard at Mass today, Christ warned that his followers would be hated by the world because the world prefers to live in darkness and rejects the light. And the more offensive people are towards us the more we know that the Church is being loyal to Christ.
Incidentally, I know that Jim Murphy, leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, didn’t exactly do very well on Thursday but I don’t think that it had anything to do with him being a Catholic. Scottish people are, on the whole, more tolerant than you give them credit for.
I wonder how the Conservatives will deal with CAGW from the pole position? With so much downward pressure…will they tow the line? I’m thinking they’ll support CAGW
CAGW = Continuously Attenuating Global Warming?
I don’t know if they’ll tow it, but they may toe it.
I think they should tow the line – right back to 0% CO2 reduction by 2016 😉
Well, the losers can now go off and infect the UN like Tim Wirth did.
The first thing the new UK government must do is to cancel the ludicrous Swansea Tidal Lagoon which will cost over £1billion and only produce on average less than 60 MW of electricity. A nearby gas-fired power station cost about the same to construct and produces 2000MW.
Knuts
That is amazing. And when a wandering walrus gets stuck in the hole? When a big storm comes will the damage by 500m? I think tidal power is really cool and prefer it to gas plants, but it has to run all the time – i.e. holding pond pairs with continuous flow. It would be pointless to build Swansea TL and then have to put up a 60 MW gas fired plant right next to it to cover the gaps.
As Christopher Booker pointed out, the company who wants to build this nonsense gave their energy predictions in kilowatt hours per year, which is bizarre. Of course, the reason is obvious: it gives a nice big number that sounds impressive. Booker pointed out that it’s equivalent to about 57 MW. I checked his calculation and he’s perfectly correct. A billion pounds for 57 MW is about as mad as it gets. Oh yes, and it doesn’t even work when the tide is turning.
I hope that a proper Conservative government will start to “cut the green crap”, as Cameron supposedly said some time ago. Our current climate change/energy policies are completely barking mad. I hope the new energy secretary will start to bring this madness to an end. But I’m not holding my breath. Until sanity returnes, and the Conservatives promise to scrap the Climate Change Act, I’ll continue to vote UKIP.
Ed Davey lost his seat. Unless I misheard, his number of votes was tiny. Perhaps there is justice after all….
Chris
Well there were enough green idiots in the Conservative Party as it was, the Lib Dumbs merely added a degree (no) pun intended of lunacy. Now they are gone we can live in hope.
Of course, where I live in Scotland, the rise of the Scottish Nannying Puritans (SNP) means that the worship of those spinning crucifixes will continue until we are all burning peat again to try to keep warm.
“Spinning crucifixes”
+1
Why is eliminating the wind farms a good thing? Just asking.
Why? Perhaps because they do not satisfy any of their objectives – except to enrich already wealthy men.
They are horribly expensive compared to other types of generating plants, do not provide a steady, reliable supply of power, create irritating noises to those living nearby, are an eyesore, and kill lots of birds and bats.
The question is, who on earth thought wind farms were a good idea?
jtom The answer is: environmentalists!
fossilsage May 8, 2015 at 7:26 am
Some so-called environmentalists support the whirligigs, but who do you think is pointing at the dead birds and bats, if not environmentalists?
Steve P
May 8, 2015 at 7:46 am
err NO-ONE ? Steve
jtom
who on earth thought wind farms were a good idea?
Well, hmmmm – folk who make bird-choppers – windmills; and watermelons, the control the populace, control the population, power-crazed trendies.
If you think you recognise recently defenestrated UK Secretaries of State, I humbly suggest that you might, possibly, be in error.
Auto.
Steve P – “who do you think is pointing at the dead birds and bats, if not environmentalists?“.
That is such a good question. Yes, of course they are environmentalists, not Environmentalists.
Because they have a negative return on energy invested and money invested and CO2 invested. As they are advertised as not having any of these three problems, they are yet another sign of the manifest cheating that underlies Big Green.
@LarryR
The death of many birds, especially raptors.
The death of bats, by which their lungs explode when encountering in the vicinity of turbines.( Bats, do not, I repeat, do not have to hit a blade to be killed, their lungs explode from pressure released from turbines)
The death of acres of food producing farm land.
The death of the rural population who can not tolerate the LFN emitted from turbines.
The death of freedom to be able to live healthy/ peacefully in a rural setting for many reasons.
The list goes on and on and on.
They could save and invest a boat load of money if they slashed the budgets of East Anglia University and the BBC. And at this juncture of solar costs, they could still allow more sensible solar at less government involvement if they bother to look.
Conservatives/Republicans in the USA should see this and run on the platform of undoing Obama’s EPA damage in the 2016 elections.
They’d get pummeled by the media. I think it’s going to take a few years of “necessarily skyrocket” to gather enough attention to be effective. Joe the Plumber can say I told you so, still nobody will listen.
Yep, the US conservatives are always under estimating the power the dems have over our media and pop-culture. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this is one I whole heartedly buy into.
A clear rejection of watermelon politics. We must make all political leaders take notice. GK
In the words of a great (past) PM (on another subject, I know – and here, MCourtney, cover your eyes 🙂 )
Aargghh!!!!
Seriously, the Yanks ought to be more worried about this.
The slow end of the UK was just endorsed. That loses the US a powerful friend in the EU, an ally on the UN security council and a home to economic institutions that balance the East.
A conservative majority is a disaster for the UK.
You’ll rue thus day.
A bit OTT, MCourtney, surely. When you consider, in a sober light, that the alternative to a Tory government was the two Eds controlling the state purse, and the great probability of a repeat of the Brown terrors.
The Global Economic crash didn’t start in the UK.
And Brown swung the last referendum on destroying the Union.
Cameron can’t do that.
MCourtney
I suspect you must follow the politics of your father. 🙂
A Conservative majority was beyond our wildest dreams, the destruction of the green lib dems a huge bonus , the dismemberment of the labour party a great relief and Ed Balls losing his seat the cherry on an enjoyable cake. All the Opposition parties seem to believe there is some giant money tree they can shake whenever they need funding for their pet projects..
Without the Lib Dems dragging them down the Conservatives will hopefully return to basic principles, one of which is the re-establishment of strong armed forces that can deal with some of the worrying threats currently facing all of us.
tonyb
tony b, if you want “re-establishment of strong armed forces” then you may be backing the wrong horse.
They aren’t cheap. They aren’t ring-fenced. And they aren’t going to be afforded with the higher level of cuts the Tories are planning. I know that interest rates are low right now so it’s time to invest but the Tories don’t believe in Government expenditure.
And where would you barrack these forces with a view to Sturgeon’s next attempt to breakaway? The country has other priorities. We are far weaker today than yesterday.
I have to admit, I find you a strange cove, MCourtney. You write so many good things about the GW scam and demonstrate such with some extremely healthily sceptic points in your comments. But when it comes to politics you show that you have no scepticism. It’s as if, Left = good; Right = bad, with no possibility of magnanimity.
Would that be the govt with a 4 letter agency working hand in glove with our NSA to spy on all of us?…
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/nsa-watching/
but they say it is for our own good….
MCourtney said;
‘They aren’t ring-fenced. And they aren’t going to be afforded with the higher level of cuts the Tories are planning.’
Cuts? Don’t you mean a slow down in the rate of the increase? A bit like sea level rise and temperatures 🙂
tonyb
M Courtney, we need MORE cuts. We are still borrowing way too much.
http://www.debtbombshell.com/
I’m a Ukipper myself, but happy to see the Tories in. Labour would have been terrible for this country. We can now let the PEOPLE decide if they want in or out of the EU. Labour (and I suspect you) don’t want democracy (allowing the people to decide). Says it all, really.
I can concede that some Tory policies are good. The Northern Powerhouse idea is a good one, for instance.
But the idea that the UK is going bankrupt so we can’t invest in infrastructure, despite lending rates being so favourable at the moment – it’s just an excuse to reduce the welfare state. Nasty Party (as May said) making life Nasty brutal and short.
And the use of fear of Scotland to boost the Tory vote in England will have bad repercussions.
The end of the UK will be great for England. If England became independent now long term economic performance would be so much better that within a few decades England alone would probably have a larger economy than a continuing UK would with the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish millstones around England’s neck.
But that is all irrelevant anyway. The UK/England has less than 1% of the world population and must forget about being a global power and refocus on making life better for its own people. (It should actually have done so seventy years ago.)
The US should look to India as its key ally in the future.
M Courtney
May 8, 2015 at 7:41 am
Brown caused the crash in the UK by rescinding all bank controls
Stephen Richards
No! Thatcher caused the crash in the UK by her deliberate policy of switching the UK economic base from a diverse manufacturing sector to what she called “services” by which she meant financial services.
‘All eggs in one basket’ is risky. A hole in the basket would eventually occur.
A generation passed before the basket obtained a hole when banking was 40% of the UK economy and there were knock-on effects of a banking crisis in the USA.
Richard
M Courtney
QUOTE
And the use of fear of Scotland to boost the Tory vote in England will have bad repercussions.
END QUOTE
Unhappily, I agree.
I am glad we have a Tory government [although I suspect Ca Moron – aka the fat-face one – may not be very close to the centre of gravity of the 2015 Parliamentary Tory Party].
I would like to say I dreamt of better strategies – but that would be a dream.
There very likely will be bad repercussions . . .
Auto
About Scotland and the tory vote : My understanding is that the Scottish devolution vote would have been a clear “Yes” if the vote had been held in England. It was the Scots who voted to stay. David Cameron set up the referendum and let it take its course – a true democrat. I see the UK election result as a vote for democracy and sanity over authoritarianism and ideology. It will be interesting to see how Scotland fares over the next 5 years – I suspect that they will do pretty well.
M Courtney: Don’t fret too much. We have been through these votes enough times in Canada and Quebec is still here. Heck, they had separatists in the Province and in the Federal Government, and though there were a couple of close votes, they are still with us. I have heard many comparisons between our issues in Canada and those between the UK and Scotland. Scotland voted to stay (like Quebec). But they have representation in Parliament. Not necessarily a bad thing. But politics don’t always translate across the pond I suppose. “It is what it is.”
https://www.facebook.com/TheMasterShift/photos/a.132528563557104.29488.123685654441395/549171375226152/?type=1
Cameron is still essentially green and his energy policy utterly insane. Nevertheless, let’s be thankful for the removal of at least some idiots from the UK government.
He could still make better green energy decisions that make sense using basic low bidder and cost comparison methods. The cost per watt is falling rapidly in some areas of renewable energy but not others. Common sense is needed and concern for taxpayers, not Obama’s “We don’t pick winners” stupidity and corruption with insiders.
Well, he did promise during this election campaign to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act if he won a majority. We’ll have to see whether he keeps this promise…
Dreadnought
In what secret meeting did Camoron make that promise and how do you know of it?
Richard
Good God, I missed that one entirely as well – good for you Dreadnought: http://www.thegwpf.com/tories-place-energy-policy-at-heart-of-manifesto/
This should be followed closely. First session he said. Let’s see.
Umm. Dreadnought – did you manage to see the date on the original article? I missed it as well the first time. Turns out it was from April 1st. So embarrassed right now.
The solution to the BBC and EAU (CRU) is simple enough. Tell them that they must lead by example and give them a single grant each to convert their entire operations/campuses/facilities to 100% renewables and disconnect them from the grid. All you need do at that point is sit back and wait…
Tom G
They would generate far fewer errors, once off-grid. I call that a plus.
I’m confused.
No wonder we just started our own country.
How’s that working out for you?
We’ve got three ex leaders we could let them have, half price. Two on the left and one on the right so a leader for every taste.
tonyb
I’ve got internet access, obviously.
Good-bye Ed Davey, I will not be able to use this rhyme again, – OK maybe once more for old times sake
We can’t keep on attacking Ed Davey,
It’s not his fault, at the end of the day;
He has children at school, takes holidays abroad,
And he has a mortgage to pay.
He’s one hundred and thirty seven thousand good reasons
To deceive us with political lies.
Well paid to make a fool of himself,
As the truth he tries to disguise.
If someone would pay me that money
To put the fear of God into you,
Then surely I’d become a believer,
I would be at the front of the queue.
A government car, an apartment in town,
To name but a few of his perks.
He needs to keep repeating the mantra,
That’s just how the system works.
A government priest in the new religion,
Sold his soul for a pocket of gold;
Now desperate to hang on to his lifestyle,
As the real truth begins to unfold.
The plight of Ed Davey is so common,
It has such a familiar ring;
Bought and paid for by a political agenda,
A puppet on the end of a string.
Read more : http://wp.me/P3KQlH-mw
You missed a verse about when Jeremey Paxman asked him if there was evidence for man-made climate change. His answer – “Of course, Sir John Beddington told me there’s some”. Tough to get that to rhyme, I know.
@philincalifornia
“Of course, Sir John, who sounded glum,
Told me that once he’d heard of some.”
Now, a rhyme for orange … 😉
You might have to explain that one to me, but I’ll have a go anyway:
Oranges and melons, said the bells of St. Clements
The funeral’s this morning, as the new day is dawning
RhymeAfterRhyme
I think you should develop your theme of “climate séance” further. That is a good picture you have.
Climate Séance-ists
Climate Séance-ology
Real Climate Séance
Skeptical Séance
Rather rich pickings I suspect.
The Libdems weren’t wiped out due to their Green policies as the Green Party increased its share of the vote significantly. They were actually wiped out in considerable part because they had prior to 2010 targeted voters who thought the Labour Party was too right wing and then they went into Coalition with the Tories. They told students that they would abolish tuition fees and then promptly increased them in Coalition. Finally, to work with Tories is a death knell for votes in Scotland currently, so they got wiped out on the mainland there too.
The Green stuff was really unimportant. Labour ex-leader Ed Miliband was the person who drove through the Climate Change Act when in Government and the Labour Party barely lost seats outside Scotland (where they were wiped out) despite supporting green energy.
I know this site is all about climate science, but you won’t do yourselves good making claims about Libdems which simply don’t stand up to scrutiny…….
Yes, the Tories have been displaying their green side in the past, but they are career politicians. They can see what direction the country has moved. Right up to the day of the voting, polls were giving Liberals the hope and belief that the voters still tilted toward green policies, and may want to be greener. They were wrong.
So now Cameron and his party will follow the age-old way of political leadership: find out which way the people are going and get out in front. I suspect green is gone from the UK until and unless there is a huge environmental disaster.
Not a chance, sadly. We are nowhere near out of the woods of green fundamentalism. Over 80% of the vote went to parties which support green orthodoxy (I include the organisation trading as the “Conservative” Party), and green fundamentalism still dominates the BBC (more powerful than every other media organisation in the UK put together), schools and universities, and the virtually the whole of the public sector.
Those of you who are thinking this election result was even in part to do with rejection of green energy policies are deluding themselves. The LibDems were smashed because their core support didn’t like them playing second fiddle to David Cameron in the Coalition government. And a lot of folks voted Labour because they couldn’t stand the idea of a second term for Cameron, and a lot more folks voted Conservative because they suddenly realised that if they didn’t, the unthinkable embarrassment of a Miliband premiership would become reality. The other parties got squeezed, including the only really sceptical Party- UKIP.
Nothing to do with Climate Change or anything like that.
True. Very true.
But also there was the Tory fear-mongering about ‘Scots under the Bed’ coming to rule over the poor weak English if Miliband won. That rejection of the centuries old partnership was a big factor.
And it will have a big impact going forwards.
mcourtney – how strange you are. Obviously intelligent and able to put together cogent arguments on GW nonsense.
But on the damage the two Ed’s would have done to Britain you seem to have a blind spot. The SNP flood was inevitable regardless of votes in England. Scots have become mad Socialist and nothing the UK can do will alter that.😄
And like all Socialists they look towards others to fund their lifestyle. The other in this case is Westminster.
And the Green party’s total rejection means nothing to you? I think these results clearly reject any AGW climate politics. Politicians will respond accordingly if they don’t want more of the same. GK
They got their highest ever share of the vote.
With all parties (except one) being as Green as Green can be they didn’t have a lot of space to fill.
Is this site censoring my comments?
I don’t know.
But they aren’t censoring mine and I’m way out there by the biases of this site.
So I doubt it.
The problem is, the government will be replaced by . . . government.
Quite so.
You can vote for Punch, or you can vote for Judy, or the dog, or the baby, or … but at the end of the day the same evil b#st#rd’s got his hands up the #rses of #ll of them.
“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes” – Disraeli