29/12/2013
In his annual round-up, Booker
tells us of some of his Cassandra-like warnings that turned out to be true.
The lights will stay on
One story, not so much Cassandra-like, provided an odd twist to the usual fare. Just when everyone else had finally piled in to predict one particular disaster we had been warning of for years, Booker had to say, "Hang on, folks, you're all missing something. Maybe there isnât going to be a disaster after all.
It was back in 2002 that Booker first reported in his column on the madness of skewing our energy policy round building thousands of absurdly inefficient and expensive wind turbines. In 2006 he began warning that this might well lead to our lights going out, for the obvious reason that, the more wind farms we built, the more we would need conventional power stations to provide back-up for all the times when there was not enough wind â just at a time when so many of those proper, reliable power stations were heading towards closure.
But it was not until this year, after several more large coal-fired plants shut down, that an Ofgem report set off a general panic that this was so reducing the safety margin of the grid that we might soon face major power cuts.
What everyone was missing, as we noted, and Booker picked up in the column of 7 July, was Ofgem's claim that it nevertheless now had "the tools" available to keep the lights on. One reason for its confidence was that the National Grid had quietly been using new computer technology to hook up thousands of diesel generators, at colossal expense, to provide enough emergency power to compensate instantly for any loss of power from that ever-growing number of wind farms. So part of the answer to the central flaw in the drive to provide us with "zero-carbon" wind energy is to use dozens of "mini power plants", driven by diesel and pumping out CO2.
Meanwhile, Britain's energy bills continue to soar, largely due to the ever-rising cost of that "green energy" forced upon us by a Climate Change Act steered through Parliament by Ed Miliband, who now wants to halt price rises made inevitable by his own policy.
Global warming postponed
It was in 2007 that Booker first began reporting in the column that the greatest scare story of our time â the threat posed to the planet by "human-induced climate change" â was falling apart. The "science" promoted by the International Panel on Climate Change was being shamelessly fiddled. Its computer model projections â many derived from our own Met Office â were already being disproved by what was actually happening in the real world.
Politically, there was no more chance of getting countries such as China and India to agree to curb those "carbon emissions" than there had been at Kyoto in 1997, as was confirmed by the fiasco at Copenhagen in 2009.
In 2013, following years when the Met Officeâs predictions of "barbecue summers" and "warmer winters" had made it a laughing stock, the IPCC's latest mega-report, which claimed that the great global-warming disaster was more likely than ever, faded so fast from the headlines that it might not have bothered.
Yet still those "true believers" at the BBC continue to peddle their group-think delusions, as when the Today programme yet again last week wheeled on its tame snail expert, Prof Steve Jones, to repeat, unchallenged, his bizarre claim that the only mistake the BBC makes in its climate coverage is to insist that, whenever it interviews a "climate scientist" it must also give equal airtime to a "denier". How odd then, that, as usual,
Today didn't seem able to find a single "denier" â "clowns led by crooks" he called us â to argue for our belief, as he kindly put it, that "the Earth is flat".
The EU surges on, despite Mr Cameron's pledge
It has been argued in the column for so long that the British seem incapable of grasping the realities of the "European project", that it was hardly surprising when David Cameron came up with his pledge: that, after winning the next election, he will somehow persuade the EU to hand us back various unnamed powers of self-government, and then in 2017 lead the "Yes" campaign in an In/Out referendum.
As Booker has often pointed out, the only way Britain could hope to get the "new relationship" with the EU Cameron claims to want, while allowing us to continue trading freely in the Single Market, would be to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the exit clause. But this he has already ruled out.
Bang on cue, Brussels and Angela Merkel are now confirming that Mr Cameron is living in a "Little England" dream world. They do indeed have a new treaty in mind, due to be unveiled next year, not to accommodate his wishful thinking but to take the EU another major step towards becoming an all-powerful "government of Europe".
Under the rules, this process will require a full-scale "Convention", starting in 2015, followed by an Intergovernmental Conference, all of which will take us way past that 2017 deadline.
Whoever at that time is Britainâs prime minister will then by law have to hold a referendum on whether the British people accept a treaty which could well consign us to being just second-class, "associate members" of a club which none of our party leaders, apart from Nigel Farage, wishes us to leave. Yet again, our failure to understand the reality of what the EU is about will bring us rudely back to earth.
Opening up our secret family courts
It was in 2009 that Booker first began reporting on how the secrecy of our "child protection" system had allowed it to become corrupted into arguably the most disturbing scandal in Britain today, removing thousands of children from their parents for no good reason.
This year began with one High Court judge, Mr Justice Mostyn, threatening him with prison if he continued to mention a case where he believed he had been treating one mother with serious injustice. But as more families continued to be torn apart than ever before, 2013 ended with the enlightened new head of the family courts, Lord Justice Munby, issuing his most trenchant call yet for our child protection system to be opened up to "the glare of publicity".
This was after he had personally taken over the extraordinary case, first reported in the column but then publicised across the world, of the visiting Italian mother who, on the secret orders of Mr Justice Mostyn, had been forced to have her baby delivered by caesarean section, and then to be handed over to social workers without allowing her to know what was happening.
As Munby has now repeatedly made clear, it is the wall of secrecy the system has built around itself that has allowed so many abuses and injustices to flourish. In this respect, as in the continued disintegration of the scare over global warming and the increasing mess the European project is bringing on itself, as the failure of the euro drives it on to ever greater integration, 2013 has at least seen some progress. Glimmerings of reality are at last beginning to break in on some of the greater follies of our time.
And on that note, Booker wishes all his readers a rather happier New Year.
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