From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
Well, Rodney, a conscience is fine, but business is business!!!
Money set aside for restoring nature is to be diverted into funding wage settlements in Scotland’s local authorities.
BBC Scotland News understands that ministers have written to councils telling them to divert the current year’s allocations from the Nature Restoration Fund to settle pay deals.
The fund is worth £29.2m although the cash is split between councils and the Scottish government’s nature agency Nature Scot.
The Scottish government said £5m was being redirected to fund the pay offer but added that it would be replaced in future years.
The Nature Restoration Fund is used to pay for local projects to tackle the nature emergency, ranging from tree planting to restoring waterways.
It is estimated that one in nine species in Scotland is under threat of extinction because of long-term habitat loss and ministers have said restoring biodiversity is “crucial” in tackling the climate crisis.
Last week Finance Secretary Shona Robison said that spending constraints were “unavoidable” because of the “spending challenges” being faced.
‘Desperately bad news’
Lang Banks, director of WWF Scotland, said: “It’s extremely frustrating when the small amounts of money which are allocated to climate and nature action come under further pressure.
“Scotland is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and it’s really important that we take steps now in order to begin to reverse that.
“Many of the actions that you can take to protect nature also deliver benefits for the public, whether by cutting carbon, cleaner air or helping to reduce flooding.
“So pulling money from this area is just storing up problems for the future.”
Mark Ruskell, the Scottish Greens’ environment spokesman, told BBC Scotland News: “We’re in a climate and nature emergency.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy7p2y1p1eo
When even the potty SNP realises there is no Corbynite Magic Money Tree, the Green Loonies really are in trouble!!
Paying people for doing work..
… instead of totally wasting it on petty and self-serving idiocies like wind and solar.
Seems like a great thing to do.
You can bet that Lang Banks and his cohorts wouldn’t never forego getting a big gratuitous, wasteful and hefty payment from the climate trough.
We’re talking about council staff here, that might be stretching it.
Careful. There’s a world of difference between the people on the council payrolls, and those who are on the councils.
When I was a lad in the 1960s I was asked this riddle
“What goes up the Glen Artney road in the morning comes down the Glen Artney road at night but never touches the Glen Artney road?”
Answer
“The road workers shovel”
Things haven’t really changed in the intervening 60 years!
When I was a lad in Galloway every parish had a “roadman” who had a shovel, a broom and a bicycle and every weekday he went round keeping the road drain gullies clear. He worked pretty much alone, no-one from the Council offices pestered him, he knew every birds nest and inhabitant in the parish and the roads were kept clear of puddles.
I guess Glen Artney was unlucky.
That’s the kind of job I’ve always liked- you know what to do, it’s real work but not super hard work- it’s outdoors in a mostly rural area. Probably doesn’t pay much but it’s low stress and healthy work- so you’ll most likely outlive the wealthier folks working in offices or industries.
Triggers broom
(no idea how to embed the video it never seems to work for me)
They have a reputation for poor productivity, from personal contacts, it is well-founded.
“Scotland is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”
And wind turbines are a HUGE factor in that.
Utter destruction of the whole avian and wilderness environment.
…one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world
🤣
Not even close! Not compared to Singapore or Taiwan, etc.
Grand Tour’s Scotland episodes show a beautiful, open place, outside the few cities. No where near being nature depleted.
But well over 14m trees have been chopped down in Scotland to make way for wind turbines.
You can bet “Grand Tours” avoids areas where wind turbines have scarred the landscape.
Now that the SNP has ditched the Scottish Greens and some of its insane policies, there are tentative moves back towards sensible policies in Scotland. Still a long way to go. The good news is that the Scottish Greens were so toxic in government that I cannot see any other Scottish party getting in bed with them again.
Is the Scottish Green Party one of the endangered species?
We can hope.
Local government finance in England is a complete mess. What would they do if they could not fleece vehicles, drivers and road transport in general. Parking, congestion, Ulez, road, bridge and tunnel tolls; with some coming in next year. Could they go bankrupt even with all that extra income?
“”Bankrupt Birmingham: Why the council went bust””
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-67053587
Even better was Thurrock council: There’s always the Sun…
“”A rogue businessman appears to have cheated a council in Essex out of as much as £130m and spent the money on a life of luxury in potentially the largest fraud ever committed against a UK local authority. Liam Kavanagh and his companies convinced Thurrock council to hand over the equivalent of almost its entire annual budget while inflating the value of a group of solar farms it had invested in””
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-07-31/the-sunshine-millionaire-how-one-man-took-130m-from-british-taxpayers/
Then we have the alleged climate crisis.
“”…full council meeting where councillors discussed the climate change action plan which is the first step in Wandsworth’s goal to become inner-London’s greenest borough and carbon-neutral by 2030.
…
…measures highlighted in the climate change action plan designed to reduce carbon emissions and tackle priority issues such as air quality. As a starting point, the £20m investment will fund measures around energy efficiency, air quality, urban greening, sustainable drainage and transport and cycling initiatives.””
https://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/news/18216490.wandsworth-council-announces-20m-climate-change-investment/
Some of our roads could be twinned with the Moon; not so much potholes, more like craters. The roads are in dire need of resurfacing – with a quality rather than a cheap job of it. No plans for that. In fact, they’re taking money away from other needs to signal their virtue – again.
“”London could get 30 more Low Traffic Neighbourhoods
TfL has put aside funding for councils across the city to create new LTNs””
https://www.timeout.com/london/news/london-could-get-30-more-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-073024
Believe me, the war on the car is only just getting started now that Labour is in the chair. Labour’s first fiscal act was predictable:
“”Labour scraps Winter Fuel Payments for millions of pensioners”” (who voted for Brexit…)
But even that money saved was nowhere near enough to cover the pay deals agreed with the brothers. So we have a new mythical black hole, invented [there is an Office of Budget Regulation with all the figures] as a distraction. But the [onside mass] media are happy to promote that shock angle.
“”Labour’s “wow, who knew that things were this bad” media blitz will have its first big day on Monday as the party “reveals” the existence of a £20bn black hole in the public finances …””
https://www.ft.com/content/7de5cd65-f8d6-4bd4-b02c-9340252d65f8
During the election were told unequivocally
“”Starmer Vows No Tax Surprises in Labour’s Election Offer””
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-08/starmer-vows-no-tax-surprises-in-labour-s-final-election-offer
When he knew all along he would – to fund the cronyist system – have to put taxes up and/or borrow more.
During the campaign Starmer said his father was working class and worked in a factory. He bigged that one right up. The truth?
“”Starmer has made a huge amount of his Dad working as a “toolmaker”. On Wednesday’s highly-watched Sky News Leaders Event he said: “I accept I earn a lot of money in the job I am now in. But when I grew up my dad was a toolmaker, he worked in a factory.”
…
In Volume 18, issue 3 of Barn Theatre News, printed in August 2014, Rod Starmer wrote about his son. He said that before university Keir took a year off: “The next 6 months were spent in my factory operating a production machine…
…
That should clear up any remaining doubt that Starmer’s father actually owned a toolmaking factory as opposed to just working in one. “”
https://order-order.com/2024/06/14/starmers-father-admitted-he-was-the-owner-of-toolmaking-factory/
Nullius in verba – seriously.
Why is Scotland short of money?
Gross misallocation of funds by the Scottish government.
How do they waste money in Scotland?
Dual fuel ferries currently 4 years late, duel fuelled to be Green but even with the ferries being 4 years late no LNG facilities are even planned yet alone built in the ports they will use. They will also be used on routes so short the engines will hardly have the time to get up to temperature to allow the switch from Diesel to LNG before going back to Diesel.
A combination of failed policies from the greens, utterly pointless and costly climate initiatives and mind boggling levels of incompetence. Listing all of the money wasted in Scotland would make this comment the size of a novel.
Scottish thrift is a myth! Their government wastes money and then blames the English because they haven’t enough.
Mismanagement and investment in the wrong things by a devolved government after mismanagement/lack of investment from Westminster.
Devolution has never worked in Scotland or Wales.
It hasn’t even got started in England.
The West Lothian question has yet to be answered.
Correct, and my local council wants in – but we don’t get a say in the decision
Well….
No University tuition fees
No medical prescription charges
Things we English have to pay for. One item on medical prescription costs just shy of £10. English hospitals rake in a fortune in parking charges, too.
They frittered it all away.
Few councils in the UK and none at all in Scotland have ever conducted a zero based (i.e. from scratch) budget. They basically add a percentage to the last year’s budget. That way many (though not all) opportunities for cost and staff reduction get missed. As currently in many parts of the UK councils no longer take on some sensible improvement unless the public pays more. No large company would budget that way so why not councils?
What a lot of strawmen waffle.
And you live where? Be honest…
Do you have much experience in budgeting, costing, management science, etc?
What the OP said actually makes a lot of sense to anyone who does.
The answer to the question he asked, BTW, is that nobody wants the aggro that would result from doing the job properly.
No University tuition fees
No medical prescription charges
And more
SNP policies. Government, not councils. Did that really need pointing out? It seems it did.
Give the Scots their independence.
Story Tip
[from the UK Telegraph,which seems to be getting more and more realistic about Net Zero, now that its being implemented by Labour….]
A German plan to charge more for using electricity on cloudy days has been dismissed as “crazy” by businesses.
The country is pushing the use of solar power and other forms of renewable energy, and as part of that has said people should pay more for electricity usage on days with no sun – a concept companies say will harm their competitiveness.
The economy ministry outlined its energy plans earlier this month in a project called “electricity market of the future”.
A key area involves varying electricity charges to discourage usage in dull weather.
The proposal, which has yet to be agreed upon by Olaf Scholz’s cabinet, would see transmission charges hiked at times when wind parks and solar panels are producing too little electricity.
Unlike most of its European neighbours, Germany has chosen to close down all its nuclear power plants and instead build a low-carbon energy system based around renewables.
Europe’s major economy currently produces more than half of its electricity from renewable sources and plans to raise this level to 80 per cent by the end of the decade.
Berlin insists that wind and solar are the future of cheap, reliable energy.
But critics worry that the system will be unstable and has massive hidden costs, such as the need for thousands of miles of new power lines and a back-up system on sunless days.
‘Devastating’ level of unpredictability
Germans pay some of the highest electricity bills in Europe, with transmission charges accounting for about a third of that price.
In its policy proposal, the economy ministry acknowledged that forcing demand to match supply was “essential” to ensuring that the new system works.
However, the plan has been ripped to shreds by industry representatives, who say that it would introduce a “devastating” level of unpredictability into their lives.
The plans amount to “totally crazy weather roulette”, Christoph Ahlhaus, the head of the lobby group for small and medium sized businesses BVMW, told the Bild newspaper.
He added that “machinery needs reliable electricity every hour of the day, every day of the year”.
Matching production to the weather “is either technically impossible or would lead to such low efficiency that we would be hopelessly outmatched by European competitors”, the Economic Council, a lobby group for more than 10,000 businesses, warned.
The plan is “an admission that a volatile system based on solar and wind can’t always match supply to demand”, the council claimed in a letter to the economy ministry reported on by Die Welt newspaper.
“The proposal, which has yet to be agreed upon by Olaf Scholz’s cabinet, would see transmission charges hiked at times when wind parks and solar panels are producing too little electricity.”
Isn’t that what happens now? The prices are hiked when wind and solar production fall off at some point and then conventional generation needs to be brought online to make up for the shortfall, or electricity needs to be imported, at exorbitant costs.
Cloudy days are already costing businesses money in Germany.
‘nature-depleted’. WTF does that mean?
Hollywood?
Hollowood.
Using public funds in a futile effort to control climate and nature is the epitome of ignorance, especially when the agenda is set by corrupt, self-aggrandizing environmental zealots who sell fictional doom and gloom to fund their lavish lifestyles.
I’ll bite. how does that work?
No matter how bad I say government is they can always find a way to get worse.
Classic SNP/left wing manipulation – just like the 70s.