I am a great believer in democratic parties and leaders telling us clearly what their aims are, and explaining the principles or beliefs that will help guide them. I am a critic of the modern craze to govern by targets.
Letâs consider the target to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence. The aim should be to ensure our country is well defended and can make a good contribution to the NATO alliance. We need first to ask what forces we need, not how much we must spend. If GDP falls or grows slowly the target means we have less defence, whatever the need.
A similar set of objections relates to the target of spending 0.7% of GDP on oversea aid. When this was in place the U.K. ended up backing projects of questionable worth and giving large sums to the UN and EU to spend in ways we could not control.
Worst of all is the deeply damaging national CO 2 target. This is encouraging all 3 main parties in Parliament to back closing down energy and industry in the U.K. to hit our domestic CO 2 target, only to import fossil fuel and industrial products so more CO 2 is generated elsewhere than we save.
The governmentâs target of growing faster than any other G 7 country is a good aim. It however depends on what 7 other economies do which we do not control as well as on what we do. Were they all to go into recession or slowdown beating them does not give us much growth.
Setting  a target to get NHS waiting lists down a more sensible target as it is under government control and not relative to external events.  Even this has proved to be beyond the U.K. public sector to deliver despite record NHS funding.They cannot even collect and publish reliable and relevant figures on how many are waiting for what. If you want to manage something that is under your control it helps if you can measure it accurately and watch progress.
July 17, 2024
Good morning.
Yes, we all know about targets, and not meeting them. Just ask Rishi ‘The little usurper’ Sunak ? He set some targets. Didn’t meet a single one.
There is only one target I want to see met. The one that says; “We will not spend more than we earn.”
Shouldn’t be too difficult.
July 17, 2024
Treacherous May signed up to net zero without any debate. After the CCA probably the most ridiculous and ruinous policy ever adopted by any country
With Starmergeddon incharge and his little helper we are now charging full speed over the cliff face.
Come next year when Trump is incharge the folly of our actions will become obvious to everyone, possibly too late.
The rest of Europe are swiftly rowing back on their commitments whilst we accelerate to oblivion.
Already the reduction of immigrants is shelved as liebour needs imported staff to complete the deindustrialising of Britain so the ponzi scheme continues.
We’re doomed
July 17, 2024
Seems so. Starmerâs appointment of the net zero zealot Ed Miliband, the deluded Patrick Vallance, Chris Starkey and the dim, unpleasant, Trump hating race baiter David Lammy are all complete disasters.
The article yesterday was about opposition but the Tories under Sunak and Labour are all on the same side on almost single everything. The Tories in an act of economic vandalism even stopped the non dom status. Gove even wanted VAT on private school fees. They both want all the net zero lunacy.
July 17, 2024
City AM tells me that Starmer is very keen on the potty ideas of Mariana Mazzucato. She urges government to “confront it investment phobia to get the economy growing & to see the roll of public investment as investment and not a cost”. This a government that (like the last dire one) even thinks ÂŁtrillions pussed down the drain on net zero is “an investment” – god help us!
July 17, 2024
@Ian wragg +1
The World, the UK’s Competitor Nations did/has not set out to punish their People in the way May has done to the UK and its People and continued by the Conservative Government. Traitors to the UK, working for our competitors by ensuring our demise. Sunak rewarded that behaviour by sending the traitors to the HoL
July 17, 2024
@Mark B +1
âWe will not spend more than we earn.â!
July 17, 2024
And they werenât just targets, they were priority pledges
July 17, 2024
Agreed. Some of these targets, such as to reduce CO2, are in fact wholly misleading to the point of being infantile because mostly all it does is transfer it’s production to other countries. Targets which ignore whether capacity is available to deliver them or the cash to deliver them are just as stupid. But infantile and stupid unfortunately sums up what passes for too much UK political debate.
July 17, 2024
Why has parliament adopted the UN IPCC temperature target of 1.5degree âŠ..which has been introduce into our laws without any real analysis
July 17, 2024
The UK Parliament has never adopted the UN IPCC 1.5C temperature target into law as such. The only thing that was done is the UK being one of the 196 countries that adopted the December 2015 COP21 Paris agreement whose overarching goal is âto hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levelsâ and âpursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C ap-ilâ.
This later translated in June 2019 into UK environmental policies aiming at reducing the UK emissions to net zero by 2050.
* gov.uk 02/09/2021 âPolicy paper: Valuation of greenhouse gas emissions: For policy appraisal and evaluationâ.
* uk-air.defra.gov.uk 04/2023 âUK Greenhouse Gas Inventory, 1990 to 2021â, 601 pp.
* theccc.org.uk 06/2023 âProgress in reducing emissions: 2023 Report to Parliamentâ, 438 pp.
* gov.uk 06/02/2024 âUK first major economy to halve emissionsâ.
As for your âwithout any real analysisâ, Iâll let you go on with your lack of information or possibly understanding of what is happening around you. And for those who claim that an increase in CO2 concentration is good for plants, how does âthis potential improvementâ show if the soil is becoming too dry or is completely rain saturated and plants stop growing.
July 17, 2024
Hotter, colder, dryer, wetter…you’ve got it all covered eh hefner?
Must be some extreme weather somewhere…
July 17, 2024
How will you stop the sun shining @hef? For increased solar intensity has far greater effect than carbon.
In Winter the temperature is 20-30 degrees lower than the Summer and wetter Solar intensity.
July 18, 2024
“If” is doing a lot of work in your last sentence. The evidence from FAO is that global crop yields continue to grow.
July 19, 2024
Mark,
Most science papers announcing an increase in crop yield with increasing CO2 concentration were published before the 2010s.
I would love a recent reference for a FAO report showing continuing global crop yield increase with increasing CO2.
The 2008 FAO report âClimate change response strategies for agriculture: Challenges and opportunities for the 21st centuryâ, Discussion paper 42, fao.org was, at the time, much more cautious.
fao.org âClimate change, water and food securityâ, 2011 was also rather cautious in its conclusions.
Two more recent reports are somewhat more pessimistic:
nasa.gov, 03/05/2016 âRising carbon dioxide levels will help and hurt cropsâ.
climate,nasa.gov 02/11/2021 âGlobal climate change impact on crops expected within 10 years, NASA study showsâ is more pessimistic particularly regarding the differences between C3 and C4 crops.
July 17, 2024
Indeed and a bit more CO2 plant food is a net good anyway. Economic and environmental insanoty – & they call it “investment”!
July 17, 2024
In response to the larger issue of choosing the senior directors at regulators and watchdogs I believe that should be the job of the house of lords to vote for these people.
The reason for this is that the Lords are supposed to hold the Government to account for laws.
The fact the Lords are not democratically elected is a different issue that could be resolved later.
But the correct place to chose directors of regulators and watchdogs is the house of lords.
July 17, 2024
@ Javelin – perhaps, but you have seen the farcical circus that too often U.S. Senate confirmation hearings descend into when confirming appointments? And if we are to emulate that nonsense, why limit the exercise by excluding all other sernior civil servants?
July 17, 2024
Can the lords who appoint duff regulators be stripped of their peerages and assets? If so I think this is a good idea.
July 17, 2024
The US has a system of public confirmation hearings for key appointments. It has not prevented the appointment of people who are clearly incompetent such as Jennifer Granholm at Energy and Kimberly Cheatle at the Secret Service. Perhaps it is intentional.
July 17, 2024
GM SJR
I’d rather believe that target setting by bureaucrats and their political underlings are primarily psychological and emotional in nature. I don’t believe the financial ramifications of such spending decisions even register except maybe in the political realm.
Issues such as affordability or value for money are a mere inconvenience to political leaders who now treat scarce resources with an almost visceral contempt. We saw this fiscal vandalism under Sunak in relation to his Rwanda deportation scheme. This man should be held legally accountable for false representation and accounting irregularities.
Off piste for a moment but it was heartening to see Vance playing with Labour. I want to see Trump grab extremist Labour’s head and rub their nose in decency, morality and truth. Trump has one job, to destroy woke Socialism before it destroys the west
July 17, 2024
I agree with you on the politicians fiscal dyslexia.
While I am not defending Sunak, the Rwanda scheme was set up by Pritti Patel and yet her name seems to be kept out of most of the immigration damage done, as does Johnson’s.
Both of those had been around in politics long enough to know it would be vehemently attacked by the opposition, and both of them knew the civil service and media were full to the brim of left wing/liberal types.
Without clearing out the civil service first, or at least laying the law down to them as to what their job is, and taking the BBC etc. to task over their bias reporting, then any such scheme would be smothered at birth. In fact Patel increased the ‘diversity’ mantra at the Home Office.
Literally millions handed over for nothing, likewise millions to France for nothing.
Yes, Sunak should have taken it all by the scruff of the neck, but he had neither the will nor the wit to do so.
July 17, 2024
You’re correct, and this is probably the real reply to yesterday’s blog – let the US and Trump deal be the real deal opposition here, ably aided and abetted by Farage and even Johnson when he can speak some sense again. We need Lammy/Rayner types to be shown up. By all means invite them to Washington and show them the US as a growth economy and democracy, and how puerile their pea-brain mindset of floating silly balloons over London is. Get them to explain their silly ULEZ schemes which save nothing. Ask them why their country is sinking while the US is booming.
July 17, 2024
Could the govt. even remotely have hit its fiscal targets during the years of the plague?
Apparently some âmodificationâ is allowed and if not,as you suggest, hissy fits ensue.
Actually âtargetsâ are an extremely efficient way of not doing the day job.
July 17, 2024
I am broadly with you on this one.
On defense we should first define the threat and where it might come from. Then spend enough, and visibly, effectively to deter that threat. Make the cost to anyone who threatens too great to bear.
Spending on OA should be confined to disasters, advising on services to make better the lives of impoverished people around the Commonwealth in particular. Not doing the job for them and walking away. Definitely not allowing its use by the FCO to grease the lives of despots.
The CO2 scam should have its incubator switched off and all those in its ICU put to filling potholes. It is a false god.
An aim for economic growth is a good thing, but only if you understand its essential requirements and put them in place. There government involvement should end in what is essentially a private sector activity.
We know the target for the NHS, the creation of a healthy nation. The key is the means of achieving it. Emmulating best practise in other parts of the World and being pragmatic about the tenets of what has become a religion in NHS, UK would be a useful first step.
Targets like laws are not answers in themselves. If they have any passing use they have to be applied, assessed, and modified in use. Challenges like viruses are constantly changing.
July 17, 2024
Yes indeed.
UK Defence budget 2024/25 – ÂŁ57.1 B. House of Commons Library
NHS Budget 2024/25 – ÂŁ178 B. The kingsfund.org
Which one needs to be reviewed….
July 17, 2024
Why just one, and not both?
July 17, 2024
Labour’s intellectual capacity…….
July 17, 2024
Both for opposite reasons.
July 17, 2024
On overseas aid I would like to see the following . In simple terms if a country want tractors build them in UK and ship out. Water distribution pumps and pipes made here and shipped out and cost of laying and installing closely controlled. Only practical things considered
July 17, 2024
Correct …never give cash, only physical things built in the UK
July 17, 2024
You don’t mention an immigration target, SJR. Starmer and his Shadow Ministers recently floated ideas about controlling borders and bringing down net migration, in the months leading up to the election.
The Telegraph reports that no such initiative will appear in the Kingâs Speech. Evidently, they were no more serious about controlling immigration than Sunak and co., or for that matter Johnson & co.
July 17, 2024
I never knew we had an immigration target or upper ceiling âŠIâd always believed the policy was âmore the merrierâ
July 17, 2024
Setting targets often leads to short cuts and bad practice in order to reach them.
In my experience, those who set the targets very often have little to no idea let alone experience in the actual complex workings of the thing they think can just be set a target.
Setting targets for ‘diversity/equality’ particularly in our armed forces will show that stupidity reigns supreme and no amount of money is going to put that right.
July 17, 2024
“Setting targets for âdiversity/equalityâ particularly in our armed forces” not just particularly in the armed forces but in anything at all – you need to recruit on merit – be it a football team, pilots, police, engineers, electrician, surgeons, cleaners, roofers, nurses. Anything else is blatant discrimination and often kills people too.
July 17, 2024
Left-wing bureaucrats love targets. They can create pretty coloured spreadsheets and league tables showing where the target has been met or missed and use them to demand more money so that they can throw it at a problem. There is seldom proper analysis of WHY the target has been missed which can be due to a multiplicity of reasons, possibly out of the control of the service deliverer. The most obvious example is the NHS, where funding has increased considerably whilst performance has continued to plummet.
Even if the Net Zero target wasn’t specifically designed to cripple the British economy, that is the effect it is having since the quickest and easiest way to “decarbonise” is to close down all the economic activities which produce carbon. That’s what our political class and bureaucrats have been doing and Labour is now about to put on steroids. It will do nothing to affect the global climate but that is ignored since hitting the target is all that matters to them.
The so-called Equality and Diversity targets don’t produce equality in opportunity. They identify groups of “special people” who are then treated differently in order to try and demonstrate that there IS equality of opportunity by hitting targets. What that means in practice is that some people who are not “the best person for the job” are placed in positions where they can do real harm in order to hit a target. And sometimes, as we have recently seen with the Post Office, they leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
July 17, 2024
The main thing is that they can fake âsuccessfully hitting the targetâ.
July 17, 2024
Pure evil, but Cameron, May, Boris, Suank all happily went along with it.
July 17, 2024
The biggest mistake by Government is to believe that more Government, more rules, more interference, and ever higher taxes and spending will improve matters.
Getting back to the basics of only spending less than you earn, or living within your means, seems to be a long forgotten discipline.
July 17, 2024
Government beyond a certain point is very similar to a malignant cancer feeding of the productive while slowly killing the geese that lay the golden eggs off. In the UK we are about three times past that point.
July 17, 2024
Targets spouted by politicians are meaningless virtue signalling unless they were brave enough to make failure a resignation issue, but of course they wonât.
As soon as they start to fail they change the rules. Another example of their total disconnect from the voters who donât believe them.
July 17, 2024
Sir John, you don’t consider who sets those targets. The UN has set a global ‘carbon neutral’ target for 2050, as well as an overseas aid spending target of 0.7% of GDP. The USA (in the guise of NATO) set a 2% military spending target in 2014. As long as we have to do what international organisations want, the British government is not fully in control of its policies or its spending. We have left the EU, we’re told, but I am not convinced this country is doing anything very different from what we would be doing if we had stayed in the EU.
Reply These global targets are not legally binding,and we do not have to incorporate them into U.K. law to make them binding. If governments want to hit them they can try to do so without a law.
July 17, 2024
@Reply – 100% agree. Who do we empower and pay as our Legislators? What accountability and responsibility does the UN etc. have – they are inventing importance.
July 17, 2024
Right to reply – We adopted into law the UN IPCC targets âŠ.and only 6 countries out of the entire world have set net-zero targets into their own laws âŠUK being one of them
July 17, 2024
Aims and targets are not necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes from the obfuscation that occurs in order to hit the targets, net-zero accounting being a poster boy for this strange practice.
Not meeting a target should offer an opportunity for reflection and improvement. Instead results are shoehorned in to make it look like the target has been met.
July 17, 2024
Targets all too often mean bonuses so shoehorning becomes an art form.
July 17, 2024
Shutting down the country and not seeing patients must be a very good way of reducing waiting lists.
Trying to achieve a target by totally ignoring the job in hand!
The âHidden Waiting Listâ.
July 17, 2024
Debt interest is 8% of government spending. I don’t remember this being one of government’s targets. Perhaps the new government can tell us what their target is.
Money borrowed for as far as I can tell nothing to show for it. Wouldn’t that be a shot in the arm if at least some of this government spending could be invested in defence instead?
July 17, 2024
Setting targets is easy and requires absolutely no skills in analysis, planning, operations or management.
It is the sort of hot air people generate when they have no experience or have been educated to think that National Planning works.
July 17, 2024
The free energy harvested by onshore solar and onshore wind installations is far cheaper than energy produced by importing and burning hydrocarbons. ICE engines only convert 30% of the energy in the fuel to motion – the rest is “waste” heat; the best gas CCGT electricity generation plant can only reach 50% energy conversion.
What happens to the “waste” heat? It enters the atmosphere and along with the blanketing effect of all that extra CO2, adds to global heating.
Overwhelmingly, the electorate recognised the immutable laws of physics that govern the highly inefficient burning of hydrocarbons and voted for the three parties that oppose it on July 4th. Get over it, and let’s move on
Who wants the “flaring” of “excess” gas that will be produced as a side-product of the proposed new oil wells in the Surrey countryside? Let’s get real about this issue and look forward to the graceful, modern wind turbines that will soon be exporting electricity to the EU
July 17, 2024
It’s not free energy SG
Solar and wind generation costs loads of money.
They are nice but they provide little or no power when the wind doesn’t blow and when the sun doesn’t shine.
Fossil fuels are needed in this transition period to power trains, planes, ships, industry and act as a back up power.
Come on SG you know this.
July 17, 2024
If it’s “Free” why do the energy companies want so much money to provide it SG?
July 18, 2024
@ IanT
Because of Hunt and Schraps’ odious “Electricity Generator Levy” which is a blatant attempt to tax renewable energy production to eliminate the cost advantage over CCGT electricity
July 17, 2024
Sir John
âScrap the targetsâ in other words you are suggesting that our MPâs should be doing what is right for their Constituents and the Country. The very job they were empowered and paid by us to do.
The majority of the Country is full of responsible individuals that are seeking to move forward, ensure their and our safety and security, be self-reliant and resilient – willing to contribute equally for the whole. They would also want that for the Country, everyone equally.
We have a parliament of career politicians that are seeking personal self-gratification, with their extremely personal projects, that are bourn out of ideology and vindictiveness. It does not represent those that voted them in, it punishes and fights the people. It refuses to be the UKâs Legislators; it refuses to manage; it has become a destructive force. Their masters have become the Worlds Socialist cabal and not the People.
If you canât hear or listen those you are said to represent, how can you work for a future for all?
July 17, 2024
In introducing Laws to Punish Country and its People why, has there not been a fully costed outline produced. In off-shoring UK Industry how much did it cost the UK Taxpayer? Closing UK Steel how much has it cost the UK Taxpayer? So on, the double standards and hypocrisy from those that suggest they represent us.
A Conservative leader was chastised and ridiculed for what some was said by the disciples of orthodoxy to be an uncosted change of direction. Yet those bowing down seeking to punish the UK and its people don’t have to cost anything, just raise taxes, keep raising taxes and borrowing – total uncosted vindictiveness and ideology
July 17, 2024
Ian B
Indeed, and the constant demand for the redistribution of the so called extra individual wealth that prudent people have put aside or invested, for either a rainy day or some other future project or family expense, is now possibly being looked at as savings/investment income that can be raided by the Government to pay for their pie in the sky dreams.
What incentive is there to be prudent, or save and invest out of taxed income for the future, if it is likely to be either confiscated or TAXED AGAIN to pay for Political dogma or dreams.
And they want the economy to grow !!!!!!
July 17, 2024
You’re on the money today SirJ …..creating a KPI as a percentage alone without a quantifiable measurement, or under a certain set of conditions is pathetic ….you forget to include the biggy, the foreign aid budget 0.7%
July 17, 2024
Politicians dislike targets on outcomes of policies because when they fail to meet them it is very obvious and politically damaging. One example is Starmer’s promise to decarbonise the grid with a target date of 2030. This target is impossible to meet and so this will damage him. He has only set it because he and Milliband have no scientific knowledge at all and have simply believed the vested interests and lobbyists for the green industries who are going to make billions out of the futile attempts to meet this target. Follow the money.
July 17, 2024
Because our misguided electorate voted for Starmer, we are inevitably going to see vast sums of our money wasted on net zero, foreign aid, and much else besides. That’s always what you get with Labour.
In his haste to waste billions as quickly as possible, Miliband has already announced he is stopping every new oil and gas development he can, although the courts may have something to say about it.
This is probably not too different from what would happen under a Conservative government made up of too many Wets, who in reality are really Lib-Dims. Members of the party could well be presented with a choice of voting for a new leader, both of whom are from the left of the party. That is the point at which I will join Reform.
July 17, 2024
Setting and forcing through national targets is communism and weâve see the disastrous consequences with Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
If a UK government believes the country to be or wishes it to be seen as democratic then life changing national targets for all such as Net Zero and mass immigration should only be mandated by the people through referendums, particularly when a government, because of our FPTP system, manages to possess a massive Parliamentary majority despite obtaining less than 20% of available votes.
July 17, 2024
PS :
If a government legislates to force net zero CO2 emission targets for all our consumption by 2050 and electricity consumption by 2030 without any consideration or knowledge of how this will be achieved and hence also without a costing and with no mandate through a referendum for all the necessary energy, food and travel restrictions and falling living standards caused by the subsequent de-industrialisation then we will be experiencing Stalin type targets such as Collectivisation which didnât work, was hugely unpopular and led to a very large loss of life.
July 17, 2024
If they MUST have a CO2 target, make it a global target
July 17, 2024
Sir John, I am not in favour of simple targets either though at the lower levels of management that is a clear necessity.
I prefer the well tried and tested Continuous improvement strategy.
As my boss used to say, A little better every day makes for a vast improvement over the year.
July 17, 2024
It seems that effective management is a term that rarely applies in the UK these days.
Managers are reluctant to do their jobs and they don’t come up with real innovation to make things work better.
If we had effective management we wouldn’t now be threatened with meters to measure our consumption of water, gas and electricity. There would be no shortages of these resources if they were managed properly, simply an unwillingness to provide an adequate supply at a reasonable cost.
Meters are another plank of netzero, to force us to comply with false targets, but they wouldn’t be required if the quangos and managers concerned actually did their jobs.
July 17, 2024
As to the bad modern craze to govern by targets, the numerate will recall with delight Tony Blairâs target (for the UK, well before Brexit) to raise our health spending to the âEuropean averageâ.
July 17, 2024
There is a difference between: gathering measurements for observation to deduce the cause of change, good or bad; and having a target which causes change, typically by central-planning intervention, in the hope of altering the observed measurements to meet the target.
Observing is conservative: the system is complex so hard to predict.âTargets are liberal: things are so badly wrong that it’s time to try something in hope.
Then there’s choosing the target.âGo for a realistic one?âOr a stretch one, not expecting to meet it; looks bad politically?âOr a low target, easy to clear for political points but worth little?
July 17, 2024
I spent many years as a management consultant, project manager and interim manager. It is hard to believe all this needs to be explained. It is elementary. I do remember that during Blair’s premiership the Balanced Score Card (Robert Kaplan and David Norton) was applied to the NHS. It would be more accurate to say misapplied. The overall objective was to reduce waiting lists, a political rather than a heath objective. It proved easy to achieve simply by removing people who had not been attended to by the target time from the waiting list. There was no overall health outcome set as an objective, such as a reduction in accident & emergency fatalities, and no development of causal chains contributing to that objective so that appropriate operational targets could be assigned to critical points in the chain according to their contribution to that health objective.
It remains my view that the causal chain is the vital missing link in the NHS. The structure denies patients control of the flow and application of funds. This contrasts with various other systems with far better outcomes where patient control of the flow of funds is the vital distinction – far more significant than the overall public expenditure on health per capita of the population. But the NHS was founded on socialist principles and remains the proudest achievement of the socialst – labour movement in UK. Because it is free and paid for by the minority of the population who are net contributors, there will be massive resistance to change. It cannot be improved until that is changed and control of the flow of funding is removed from the supplier bureaucracy and given to patients.
July 17, 2024
Targets can be helpful in some areas but not in others. But targets are very socialist and communist. The only target a Government needs is not to spend more than it takes in from taxes. That means if Defence spending needs to go up, other spending must go down. We have had 25 years of Governments, Labour, Coalition, and Conservative, all spending beyond their means. How many run their personal finances like they run the UK!
Beyond that things like Net Zero should be properly researched and analysed. If they had done so, we would have none of this nonsense. Do our MPs think, research and study before making very expensive decisions?
CO2 is not a problem and never will be; how hard is it to find that out? It is not hard but seems to be beyond the capabilities of our MPs.
July 17, 2024
How many Arts graduates are involved in the administration of the NHS? Many countries have no use for Arts graduates in public administration at all and certainly not in medicine.
There is an air of dilettantism about these people as if the less they know about a subject, the easier it is to apply their favourite nostrums to solve its problems.
The warmonger Boris Johnson, Arts graduate, despite his lack of a legitimate political platform from which to speak, believes he can solve the problems of Ukraine by persuading Donald Trump to expend further US resources on a policy which has already led to mass emigration from Ukraine and the need to use press gangs to make up the losses already experienced in manpower whilst we as part of the US controlled NATO are expected to fund this war indefinitely.
July 17, 2024
“the target to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence”
Much mytholgy and misunderstanding surrounds this supposed target.
There is no such target in the NATO Treaties. It was originally intended as a rough means of comparing national defence budgets. But what NATO intended was that each member would spend according to its needs as determined by its capabilities, weaknesses, geography and the nature of the threat each faced directly. this was assumed to approximate what they would need collectively with a cohering infrastructure of command, control communications, some logistics, and standards to ensure interoperability. NATO also filled gaps in capability where nation could providede it themselves – such as the A400m transport aircraft. NATO has always respected national sovereignty and its corollary of national responsibility for members’ own defence capabilities – contrast with the EU.
2% only became a target, albeit an informal one, in 2014 by mutual agreement in response to Putin’s seizure of Crimea and Germany’s historic failure to shoulder what was seen as its due share of common defence. Germany’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been to vastly increase its defence budget. On present trends it will be a third higher than UK’s by 2030.
The so called NATO target is apolitical tool with which to beat up allies who are seen not to be pulling their weight. It has little dowoth sensibly derived levels of expenditure based on national requirements and threats. And, no Artiucle 5 does not require all members to go to war if one is attacked. Another myth. But it does provide legal cover should they wish to do so. NATO is a standing coalition of the willing and Art 5 simply formalises the same legality of a casus belli as that which underwrote the Allied coalitions of WW1 and WW2. That is all it does.
July 17, 2024
âWorst of all is the deeply damaging national CO 2 target.â
So powerful is this false CAGW lobby with so many people on very large salaries paid for by tax-payer subsidies that this target will not be ended or even amended until we have a very, very serious event and large loss of life caused by a lack of energy.
Weâre told that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 will cause extreme weather events, including severe winters. If we continue this transition to chaotically intermittent renewables without any plan for storage, which as yet doesnât exist, coupled with the electrification of heating and transport then a winter like that of 1963 will see severe hardship and an enormous loss of life. It doesnât have to be weather, a serious event could be caused by a hostile actor hacking into our national and local grids or destroying our undersea cables. Or even a Carrington eventâŠ
Electrification is an unstable, unexploded bomb under our civilisation and unnecessary as increasing the level of atmospheric CO2 produces negligible increases in GHG warming because there is already sufficient CO2 to absorb all the IR radiation emitted by the planet as defined by the planetâs Planck IR distribution curve and CO2âs IR absorption bands.
July 17, 2024
I’ll use tbe word target on the likes of this.
We must rebuild our economy, and reverse the destruction of manufacturing. Leaders of all definitions, starting decades ago, decided that it did not matter. If things were wanted, they ought to be available now.
So they, and almost all of the Tory party, said lets invite foreign companies here. Help for our own businesses was abandoned. After all we had been made bankrupt by them so foreign money was nice, especially as City types made money for their own pockets quickly too this way.
July 17, 2024
And forgot to cover, ‘buy what we wanted from abroad’. It’s fashionable. And another fact, if we do make or grow what people abroad like, sell the business. In the case of English wine, the land has been sold to the French.
All this means our economy and identity, English of course, mean nothing, except to ordinary people who, of course, are ignored and considered stupid.
July 17, 2024
Sorry, comment on yesterday’s article. If we lived in anything resembling a democracy, questions at PMQs would be allocated on the basis of how many votes each party got. You can argue all you like about the alleged benefits of first past the post, but there is no reason why the number of questions should be based on the number of MPs. Much more sensible, and fairer, and more just, to base the number of questions on the number of votes received. FPTP does not have to skew EVERYTHING.
July 17, 2024
If you haven’t got a target, how do you know if you are doing well? Whilst taking the point about targets that are meaningless in context, there are, surely, plenty that are not. Like a target for public sector productivity. Or, as stated, a target for cancer treatment etc. Without targets the public sector would fall into an even deeper malaise.
July 17, 2024
Fully agreed, Iâve always thought % of GDP targets are absurd, but itâs amazing how many now set store by them. Apart from anything else they are open to all sorts of manipulation. The coalition govt lumped in Trident (previously accounted for separately I believe?) and included all sorts of pension and other non-military spending to boast about its defence spending, when in reality it left defence in a parlous state.
There needs to be much more focus on what spending actually buys for us.
July 17, 2024
Engineering and Technology August edition –
Copper mining cannot keep up with ramp-up of EVs.
A new study by University of Michigan on copper needed.
“The findings reveal that between 2018 and 2050 , the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all of history up until 2018 just to meet current copper needs without considering the green energy transition .”
“We are hoping this study gets picked up by policymakers who should consider copper as the limiting factor for the energy transition……………………”
July 17, 2024
Dr Demming who is a hero of mine was a big opponent of targets.
A good example of the unintended consequences of targets is the NHS
Someone in the Health Dept decreed that no one should wait more than X hours in any hospital A and E before being treated.
Sounds good doesn’t it.
This was achieved by keeping patients in the Ambulances outside the A and E as the clock didn’t start until you entered the A and E dept
Thus tying up most of the Ambulances desperately needed elsewhere, outside.
July 17, 2024
Donald Trump doesnât care whether a countryâs defence ministry can actually defend it or not, he only cares about the 2% of GDP figure. If the country doesnât want a beating I suggest it âs wise to focus on that.
July 23, 2024
The UK seems keen to put targets on spending, although spending is easy.
We don’t seem so good at earning, creating and billing with timely payment.
Every hospital that services more than 10% of patients without national insurance numbers should have an administration reception with a payment machine and a computer that works out the charge and payment in advance of treatment as they do in Spain, Italy, USA and everywhere else I’ve ever been on holiday, other than basic minimum saving life care that the International Communities do. How much is now billed to Europe, Australia, etc, in comparison to how much we pay them on the shared health cards? It’s pathetic that doctors seem to want more money from fewer actual paying clients and don’t want to take responsibility for making their units pay. Tie their bonus with results and payments.
What percentage of international students are getting their study paid by UK grants and scholarships? Everyone I know studying in the UK isn’t paying their own way! The only people I know fully paying their own way are my kids and their English-born friends. I’m very bitter about scholarships a very big spotlight needs shining on it and preferential work placements on graduation.