Yon Scunner Santos

For ten years we all complained that Tony Blair thought he was President of the United Kingdom. But today's second-hand story from the new Secretary of State for Jockshire that Scunner Broon himself is "very keen" to join the campaign in Glenrothes is something else entirely; evidence, perhaps, that the Supreme Leader thinks he's running for President.

Despite the headlines, what Jim "I'm Secretary of State for a part of the UK that has a devolved assembly so my name has to be" Murphy actually said was;

"I think it would be a real benefit to Labour's campaign if the prime minister can attend, so we'll be talking about that... But I think most people in Glenrothes in truth would rather he was certain he was doing everything he could in the economic crisis. If he is able to do that and come to Glenrothes, I think he would be a great boost to our campaign, so I think it makes sense."

Or in other words, the Prime Minister would like to talk up how much he wants to be involved and how positive it would be for the campaign, but in reality his appearance would go down like an iron airship so he's going to set Cameron up for the fall when he has another go at him for not going to a by-election and he can pivot to looking strong and responsible on the economy.

It's all very well trying to set a trap for your opponents, but erecting a ten foot neon sign above it and standing next to it waving your arms isn't usually the best way to make it work.

Doing The WRU's Bidding

My love of sport and my politics collide relatively frequently, so much so that I'm occasionally tempted to start up a sports blog a la He Who Must Not Be Named. This week, however, they seem to be particularly intertwined. Which is fine, except that I'm now an Englishman representing a part of Wales, so some of those collisions can very easily get me into a lot of trouble, particularly where rugby is involved.

At club level, I feel I have a reasonable excuse, namely that I'm from Gloucester which means I bleed Cherry and White, especially when they face Cardiff Blues in the Heineken Cup later this year. I wish I could summon up the strength to support the Blues themselves, but as regionalisation is such an abomination I don't feel especially guilty about not cheering them on.

Internationally, the rift is perhaps even deeper because the country of my birth and the country of my home are represented by the RFU and WRU, who continue to fight a broad-fronted battle to see which of them can be the most incompetent bunch of useless morons (and trust me, that's the polite version...) I tend to support Italy and Argentina, because the future of the game depends far more on their success than the tribal battles of the M4 corridor.

Which leads us to the news that Wales has made two different bids to host the 2015 World Cup, in partnership with either England or Ireland and Scotland. Now let's be clear, I hope both those bids are irrelevant; after the corrupt way they were denied the 2011 World Cup, it is absolutely vital that Japan hosts in 2015 because, again, the game there needs the boost far more than the game in any of the home nations does.

Nevertheless, the bids are important, if only because they demonstrate that the WRU hasn't learnt the lessons of 1999. That World Cup was undoubtedly the worst in the tournament's history, not least because it only produced four games of any quality and none of those were in the host country (France beat Fiji 28-19 in the pool stage in Toulouse, Argentina beat Ireland 28-24 in the play-off in Lens, South Africa beat England 44-21 in the quarter-final in Paris and France beat New Zealand 43-31 in the semi-final at Twickenham).

By 2015, however, the factors that lead Wales to distribute the 1999 tournament to the four winds (lest we forget, in that tournament, Uruguay and Spain played in Galashiels!) will largely have disappeared. Instead of the mess of rickety old stadiums Wales had then, it will be packing;

• Millennium Stadium, Cardiff – 74,500 (1999)
  
• New Cardiff City Stadium, Cardiff – 26,500 (2009)
  
• Liberty Stadium, Swansea – 20,532 (2005)
  
• New Newport Stadium, Newport – 15,000 (c2010)
  
• Parc y Scarlets, Llanelli – 14,340 (2008)

That's half a World Cup on its own just in South Wales, and the immediate question has to be, why on Earth are you including Scotland in your bid? Ireland on its own offers;

• Lansdowne Road, Dublin – 50,000 (2010)
• Thomond Park, Limerick – 26,500 (2008)
• Ravenhill, Belfast – 19,100
• Musgrave Park, Cork – c17,000 (c2010)

Add in the Racecourse Ground in Wrexham for another 15,500 and that's a World Cup right there.

But the clever thing would be to have a bid that transcended national borders and dealt purely in rugby borders. In reality, Welsh rugby's heartland is South Wales and only South Wales, which is where the five new purpose-built stadia are. What's more, that heartland borders its English compatriot, which by 2015 will be able to offer;

• Sixways, Worcester – c20,000 (c2014)
  
• Kingsholm, Gloucester – 18,000 (c2011)
  
• Memorial Stadium, Bristol – 18,000 (c2010)

It may only be eight stadia and it lacks the second semi-final site that Lansdowne Road provides, but it's not so far away as to be ridiculous and it would be a fantastically rugby-focused tournament.

Whatever ends up happening, we can but hope that the WRU actually think about the quality of the tournament they're producing, instead of prostrating themselves before the business interests and scattering another World Cup to the winds. I'm not holding my breath though...

Failure To Dylan

Joe Otten's useful heads-up on Caroline Lucas and the dogma of the Church of EnvironMentalism reminds me of something I meant to blog about a while back but left alone largely to avoid overloading the world with energy stuff.

We are often reminded how windy Britain is and how much potential there is meant to be for wind generation. Heck, one Lib Dem blogger (who I will refrain from naming in order to save a fellow elected member from having their name and moron too closely associated in Google) even went so far as to say;

“It's a myth that renewables cannot provide baseload. There has never been a day on record when the wind has not blown somewhere in the UK. The point about baseload is that what you need is enough people in enough places producing electricity. The more you decentralise electricity generation the more secure the baseload becomes. “

Interestingly, two weeks before that was said, a useful little study of the actual potential of wind generation in Britain was published. Okay, most of you probably weren't reading The Telegraph when it was covered, but I would hope my constant plugs have started to focus everyone's minds on The Register, a far more sound source of technology news.

As our anonymous blogger rightly identifies, the great problem for wind has always been the difficult question of variability; that sooner or later, the wind will stop blowing. We as Lib Dems have never really worried about this because the answer, we're told, is our favourite word; decentralisation. Indeed, some have proposed that large scale wind investment should be accompanied by the establishment of a Europe-wide electricity grid, so that the areas with the best wind at any moment can sort everyone else out.

The study uses the existing Met Office wind speed database, as measured at weather stations across the country, to evaluate the nationwide wind potential over the decade from 1996 to 2005. In general terms, it finds the system susceptible to “large, rapid and frequent changes of power output.” Hardly the best of starts, but nothing like as bad as things get when we consider the extremes of Britain's energy needs.

Excluding specific events like deaths on Coronation Street and England reaching the semi-final of anything, the annual peak of electricity demand generally occurs on the coldest evening of the winter between five and six pm, as domestic demand rises after the school run faster than commercial demand tails off at close of business.

You might expect that the coldest events are associated with Arctic or Siberian winds blowing cold air into the country. What the report finds, however, is that the coldest period in any British winter occurs when a high pressure system takes up residency over the country for a period of days; the absence of cloud to insulate the nation being far more potent when it lasts for five days or more.

More importantly, however, high pressure systems not only bring no cloud, but no wind either. Perhaps the most shocking finding of the report is this; between five and six pm on February 2^nd, 2006 (the peak of the electricity demand that year) the total electricity output of the UK's wind turbines was less than zero, as demand from auxiliary systems in the turbines exceeded their output. And that isn't a number from the model; it's the actual result as measured by the National Grid! What's more, such examples really aren't unusual; a five day high pressure, low wind cold snap is an annual occurrence in the UK, while a ten day low wind cold snap is probably a once in twenty year event.

As for the Europe-wide grid, the report compared their modelled wind load factor for the UK against the large existing wind farm system in Germany and Denmark;

I'm sure you don't need my help reading that graph.

The message remains as clear as it has always been; the question of our future energy supply is absolutely not intuitive and it cannot be answered by reference to bland and uninformed generalisations. There is no issue for which that old chestnut the “informed debate” is more vital.

Call Them Out Early, Call Them Out Often

I wouldn't normally blog merely to post a link from a newspaper, and particularly not a link that I got from Matt Drudge, but everyone should take a look at this piece from the LA Times because it's the point where Gordon Brown's remaining economic credibility gets flushed firmly down the toilet. In the government's spin of the global financial crisis, the most consistent line from Numbers 10 and 11 has been that we are better placed than other similar economies to weather the storm.

That is, of course, utter bollocks.

Surely none of us needed the LA Times to point out to us that the global financial crisis is exactly that; financial. And in such circumstances, the only criteria for how well you can weather the storm is how big your financial sector is and and how exposed it is to everyone else's. You don't need to be an economist to know that by those criteria, the UK is fairly firmly screwed.

Now perhaps there is something to be said for not fanning the flames, for politicians to be calm and considered at this stage. But when the government's only response to economic catastrophe is to insult everyone's intelligence, they absolutely need to be called out on it, because it absolutely calls into question their own intelligence.

Africa's Mesic Moment

And so for we keen watchers of developing democracies, the moment of destiny draws unexpectedly nearer.

It's difficult to judge the truth of the situation in South Africa; did Mbeki try to use the courts to deal with a rival? Is Zuma serially corrupt? Either way, you can but conclude that if this sort of thing was happening to any other party in any other democratic country, they'd have poll ratings that would make Gordon Brown look beloved.

And yet, in the most recent poll I could find the ANC weren't registering any real loss of support. The damage to South Africa of such a result is obvious; though the criminal allegations are unproven, Mr Zuma has not exactly distinguished himself as a leader and promises, if anything, greater tribalism in South African politics. The potential damage to the rest of the continent, however, is far more severe.

The tale of South Africa now is, sadly, the tale of most of the rest of Africa; a strong resistance party emerges, forces the end of colonial or colonist power, sweeps to power in a democratic election and becomes the occupying power itself. What's more, after the Zimbabwe experience, we're used to the idea that the occupation of power is achieved by vote-rigging, intimidation and violence, but those are the strategies of the endgame, not the opening.

South Africa may to some extent be insulated from that process by its dependence on native corporate power and Mbeki's black middle class, but the longer it remains under ANC rule “just because”, the longer it takes for it to become the example and the leader we keep wanting it to be. If Mbeki's legacy does end up being a successful transition to a Zimbabwean democracy, it will be by luck more than judgement; he was never in a position to be a leader in that standoff because his ANC is what ZANU-PF once was.

While the ANC is there, insulated from its mistakes by overwhelming goodwill, it serves as the example to every entrenched African leader that they have the right to stay in the job. A peaceful, democratic transition of power in South Africa is vital to say to the rest of the continent, “this is the way to do it”. If the current mess can help bring that about by finally puncturing the ANC's hegemony, it may be the one good thing to come of it.