How iron was the Iron Lady?

Both right-wing eulogisers and left-wing partiers are wrong

by Tim Black 

Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister between 1979 and 1990, died yesterday aged 87. But the myth of Margaret Thatcher, and the ersatz ideology named after her - Thatcherism - is still very much alive.

For the remnants of the right, especially dyed-blue Tories, the idea of Thatcher is predictably important. Her era, her electoral successes in 1979, 1983 and 1987, appears as something to be celebrated, a period of apparent success to be basked in. Once regarded as ‘the sick man of Europe’, awash with industrial conflict and a sense of inevitable post-colonial decline, Britain was said to be restored to health by Thatcher, runs the typical narrative. As current prime minister David Cameron put it: ’We have lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.’

But for many of those who today preen themselves as left-wing, the idea of Thatcher is arguably even more important. And that’s because she can be blamed for everything that is wrong today. She may have left office nearly a quarter of a century ago, but so potent was the ideology she apparently promulgated - Thatcherism - that we as a nation continue to be in thrall to it. As one prominent left-wing columnist stated yesterday: ‘Thatcherism lives on. Nothing to celebrate.’ Ex-London mayor ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone agreed: ‘In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact she was fundamentally wrong.’

Elsewhere, Johnathan Freedland at the liberalish-leftish Guardian joined the Thatcherism Lives chorus: ‘The country we live in remains Thatcher’s Britain. We still live in the land Margaret built.’ At the much-reported-upon, little-attended street parties in Brixton and Glasgow, staged in ironic honour of Thatcher’s passing, the belief that her ideas still walk among us was palpable. In the words of one 28-year-old student: ‘It is important to remember that Thatcherism isn’t dead and it is important that people get out on the street and not allow the government to whitewash what she did.’

Indeed, given the power, the brain-melding ideological force, with which Thatcher has been invested since her 1980s heyday, it is unsurprising perhaps that the Judy Garland song ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead’, from 1939 film musical The Wizard of Oz, is now being tipped for a No1 spot in the charts. For too many, Thatcher really has become a supernatural, witch-like figure, responsible for everything that is rotten in the world.

Is Divorcing An Abusive Spouse Ever Too Expensive?

The EU may soon face a Pyrrhic choice....

By John Mauldin

An old joke asks "why does a divorce cost you half your money?" with the answer being "because it’s worth it". After all, there is little worse than being stuck in a loveless, tense, or even downright hostile relationship. Which, of course, is what the eurozone has become, without even the excuse of keeping the show on the road for the kids’ benefit. In the eurozone’s loveless marriage, no-one dares to move out because the potential costs of that action are so unclear. However, with the news that French unemployment continues to scale record heights, that the Bank of Spain has just downgraded Spain’s growth forecasts from -0.5% to -1.5% and that Spanish unemployment will consequently rise for a sixth year in a row to a likely record high of 27%, that European car sales continue to plummet, etc... the question remains open as to how much abuse the various spouses are willing to take?

For now Cyprus clearly wins in the battered wife stakes: daily cash withdrawals from banks are limited to €300, time-deposits (even those below €100,000) are frozen until further notice, etc. And needless to say, like every abusive husband, the Troika offered up the usual contradictory messages of "Cyprus was looking for its beating" and "it will never happen again". And so the question now faced by Europe’s other, battered wives (i.e., investors in "fiscally-challenged" countries and other European Monetary Union bank depositors) is whether this abusive husband has seen the light? Or whether the next time the pressure boils, the Troika’s punches will again fly, thereby extinguishing any notion of European solidarity, any dream of banking union, and any hopes that eurozone nations will stop sleeping in separate rooms and instead jump in the same bed of a common fiscal union needed to live harmoniously under a common monetary roof?

The "good news" is that Europe’s battered wives may not have to wait that long to find out whether the Troika has turned a new leaf.

Why Are Workers Giving Up?

How long can one-half of America carry the other?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

That America created only 88,000 jobs in March, less than half the number anticipated, was jolting news, indicating the recovery that the White House has boasted about may not be at hand.

But in that March jobs report, there was more disturbing news.

While unemployment fell to 7.6 percent, the reason it fell is alarming.

Half a million U.S. workers (495,000) disappeared from the labor force. They dropped out. They are no longer even looking for a job.

Worse, this appears to be an inexorable trend. The participation rate of eligible workers in the United States has fallen to 63.3 percent, a level unseen since Jimmy Carter gave his malaise speech in 1979.

These folks, who have quit working and quit looking, who are they? How do they support themselves? What does this surging dropout rate from the workforce portend for America’s future?

Defending democracy from the demos

The political classes’ fear of right-wing populism is really a fear of volatile voters

by Baris Tufekci 

A few weeks after February’s Eastleigh by-election in the south of England, the centre-left, Labourite think tank Policy Network published a report titled Democratic Stress: The Populist Signal and Extremist Threat. It addresses the problem of ‘right-wing populism’. It argues that populist parties like the UK Independence Party (UKIP) are threatening, or ‘stressing’, liberal democracy in Western Europe and elsewhere because they are undermining the ‘political mainstream’ - that is, the realm of ‘parties who sit comfortably within the pragmatic, pluralistic and institutionally bounded traditions of Western liberal democracy’. If democratic wellbeing is to be secured, mainstream parties must change their relationship with the public, the report says.

Apparently there are three political approaches today ‘which are consequential in terms of real world outcomes: the mainstream, populism and extremism’. The parties of the mainstream – whether ‘centre-right’ or ‘centre-left’ – have common cause in opposing approaches to politics that are contrary to their own ‘style and content’. While populism currently tends to take right-wing forms (UKIP, the Tea Party in America, the French Front National), populist challenges to the mainstream can also emerge from the left, the report argues. And any approach to politics that runs counter to that of the ‘liberal democratic’ mainstream is suspect and a cause for concern.

The report says liberal democracy’s virtue lies in its array of checks and balances on majority rule. The ‘populists’, by contrast, demand a democracy in which ‘the will of the morally pure majority is enacted - without much if any obstacle’. By wanting to impose majority rule, the populists don’t appreciate ‘social complexity’. Nor do they accept that complex bureaucratic institutions like the EU should have the right to impede what individual states can achieve. Liberal democracy is sensitive to these limitations and it has a range of institutional constraints on majority decision-making that safeguard minority interests. À la Robert Dahl, the report champions liberal democracy as a kind of ‘polyarchy’, a form of ‘minorities’ rule’. Its aim is to protect minorities from a majority that would otherwise engulf, overpower and oppress them.

The Myth of Margaret Thatcher

Conservatives must come to grips with the noble failure of the Iron Lady

By PETER HITCHENS

“The Iron Lady,” the cruel motion picture about Margaret Thatcher, makes much of her decline into bemused old age. It arouses sympathy for her among the undecided, and passionate sympathy among those who already revere her. No wonder. I cannot think of any other living person who could have been treated in this fashion. In a way it is a compliment to her that, even in the lonely, desolate weakness of her final years, her enemies—the unintelligent, intolerant left—continue to hate her.

With such people attacking her, it is hard not to rally to her side. But what about those of us who have an uncomfortable and growing suspicion that she was not as good as she is made out to have been? I am one of them. I still cannot resist the feeling that her reputation is not just inflated but damaging to the conservative cause.

I last saw her some years ago at a London publisher’s party, terribly diminished, surrounded by fawning persons who did not seem to see that she was unhappy, lonely, and puzzled. I felt almost ashamed to be there.

For I had been a minor witness of her great days, as we then thought they were. I was sometimes among the traveling press crouched in the back of her majestic but obsolete Royal Air Force plane as she zipped frugally across the world, to be admired and to tell other people what to do.

It was not intimate contact, but we saw more of her than most people ever could. Sometimes we would be summoned to her cabin for interminable briefings which never yielded anything worth writing—for to us she was just the same in private as she was in public. What journalists want from close contact is indiscretion and mischief. She, being a real leader, who sought power to do what she thought was good, was simply not interested in that. She was not really a politician, but a real human being who had entered politics to do what she wanted.

Fyodor Dostoevsky Was a Prophet

Dostoevsky’s 6 Nightmare Prophecies That Came True in the 20th Century

By R.J. Moeller 

Few people in the last 200 years understood human nature and mankind’s fallen state quite like Dostoevsky. His uncanny abilities to dissect the pathology of a killer or the spiritual joy of a contented Russian peasant have inspired generations of writers, thinkers, and even psychologists for a century and a half.

But more than simply being an insightful novelist on the human condition, Dostoevsky turned out to be a truly prophetic voice in his predictions of the dangerous and deadly places where certain ideologies and philosophies popular at the time would lead his beloved Russia in particular, and the modern Western world in general.

In the course of a number of his books – The Devils (aka The Possessed) and The Brothers Karamazov, for example – he foretold of the coming socioeconomic and geopolitical nightmares that awaited 20^th century societies that would adopt progressivism, nihilism, and socialism as their guiding principles. His words carry with them a deeper weight since Dostoevsky lived during his youth as a progressive ideologue eventually sentenced first to death and then, after a mock execution meant to “get his attention,” to four years of hard labor in Siberia.

He returned a deeply religious man and, after spending a few years in Europe investigating the teachings of leading Western intellectuals, a vehement anti-socialist.

In describing the underlying motivations of the young, radical, rabble-rousing character Peter Verkhovensky in The Devils, Dostoevsky said:

He’s a kind, well-meaning boy, and awfully sensitive…But let me tell you, the whole trouble stems from immaturity and sentimentality! It’s not the practical aspects of socialism that fascinate him, but its emotional appeal – its idealism –what we may call its mystical, religious aspect – its romanticism…and on top of that, he just parrots other people.

In the Army Now: Gangs, Nazis & the Mentally Ill

A new book chronicles how the War on Terror opened the ranks to risky recruits

By CLARK STOOKSBURY

Since the Vietnam War, America’s more successful interventions have been brief. That war engendered a legitimacy crisis in the United States military. Domestically, large numbers of young men resisted the draft or took advantage of deferments, but conscription still kept the armed forces supplied with men. In Vietnam, the military was riven by drug use, racial strife, and “fragging”—the assassination of unpopular officers by their troops. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 may be a model for a successful large-scale intervention post-Vietnam: the coalition allied with the United States dropped some bombs and sent an overwhelming ground force; Saddam capitulated while Lee Greenwood provided the soundtrack. If one ignores pesky issues such as the fate of Iraqi Kurds who were encouraged to rebel and the blowback from stationing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the first Gulf War was a big success.

The United States fares worse when our goals are more ambitious and the enemy doesn’t quickly fold. When a volunteer army becomes bogged down in an unpopular war, protesters don’t fill the streets the way they did in 1969, and soldiers don’t “frag” their officers—people simply stop joining the military. The quest to fill that enlistment gap is where the investigative work of English journalist Matt Kennard comes in. In Irregular Army, Kennard documents a series of disturbing trends in the military: lowered standards, inadequately treated mental-health and substance-abuse problems, and the enlistment and retention of white supremacists, Nazis, and gang members.

No Cant in Immanuel

He who seeks in manners anything other than manners themselves is destined for crudity

by Theodore Dalrymple 

My late friend, the development economist Peter Bauer, had the most beautiful manners: so beautiful that I took them for my model. Alas, I could never equal them for, though not particularly ill-mannered, I have always to remember to behave well. Just as style in prose should be imperceptible, as the uniquely perfect vehicle for what is said and indissoluble therefrom, so manners should be unconscious, not added to conduct but intrinsic to it. They should not arise from reflection but from a habit so deeply ingrained that, however much they might once have been instilled or learned, they are now entirely natural and normal to the person who has them. And since their purpose is to ease social intercourse and make it agreeable, they should not be carried to the point of making anyone uncomfortable, turning them into mere etiquette in order to distinguish those who know how to behave from those who do not.

Peter Bauer used to say that Mrs Thatcher had two great achievements to her name (and only two): that she destroyed the power of the trade unions and that she raised him to the peerage. It was a matter of pride to him, tinged by ironical amusement, that he, the son of a Budapest bookmaker, should now sit in the British House of Lords; but the fact that he did so confirmed one of his most deeply held convictions, that a class society was not at all the same thing as a closed society. Social hierarchy is perfectly compatible with social mobility, as the maliciously misunderstood history of his adopted country amply demonstrated.

Down and out in Paris

France’s beleaguered president

François Hollande can still resuscitate his presidency—but he must tell the French the truth

By The Economist

THE French are not known for their optimism, but recently their morosité has been plumbing new depths. The popularity rating of the Socialist president, François Hollande, has tumbled faster and further than that of any other president since the Fifth Republic began in 1958. The decline in his fortunes is a rebuke for his failure to honour his breezy campaign promises last year to scrap austerity and cut unemployment. A television appearance on March 28th that was supposed to relaunch his presidency did not go well.

Now a scandal over his former budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, is likely to damage him further. Mr Cahuzac has admitted lying about an illicit Swiss bank account. Mr Hollande hung on to him for too long, and many claim that he should have known sooner about his dodgy finances (seearticle). The president had promised that, unlike his right-wing predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, he would run an exemplary government with squeaky-clean ministers.

Sultan Erdogan

Turkey's Rebranding Into the New, Old Ottoman Empire

In the eyes of secularists, the Europe-facing, Western-dressing, cocktail-toasting modern nation-state is being replaced by a religiously conservative one, headscarf by headscarf.

By CINAR KIPER

The cities might not seem similar today, but one thing Tripoli and Thessaloniki, Basra and Beirut, Sarajevo and Sana'a all once had in common is that just a little over a century ago they were all part of the Ottoman Empire. A second thing they all have in common is that until just a few years ago they harbored a certain disdain for Turkey ... due in large part to the aforementioned empire.

Yet former rivals to the south, east, north and even west now attend Turkish business summits, watch Turkish shows, and purchase Turkish groceries. Interestingly and perhaps contrary to common sense, this recent shift seems to come not as a product of "time healing old wounds" but rather at a period when Turkey has embraced its Ottoman heritage to an unheard-of level.

The foreign media loves to toss around the term "neo-Ottoman" when discussing the transformation of 21^st century Turkey, particularly in reference to its increasingly assertive foreign policy and regional presence, much to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's chagrin.

This is a golden age of global growth

Yes, you read that right

By Arvind Subramanian

An unequal world is becoming less so, writes Arvind Subramanian

When the world’s policy makers meet in Washington this month, the travails of advanced countries will be the focus. Five years into the global financial crises, the economic landscape remains largely cheerless. A depressed eurozone is struggling with high and rising unemployment. The US recovery is fitful. The blistering pace of emerging market growth has cooled. But all this risks obscuring the good news: that the golden age of global economic growth, which began in the mid-to-late 1990s, has mostly survived. These continue to be the best of economic times.

Lant Pritchett of Harvard famously described the phenomenon whereby the living standards of a few countries pulled away from the rest in the aftermath of the industrial revolution as “divergence, big time”. My 2011 book, Eclipse , documented the converse: never had the living standards of so many poorer nations begun to “converge” or catch up with those of advanced countries. What we are seeing today, despite the crises, is convergence with a vengeance. An unequal world is becoming less so.

Convergence occurs when a country’s rate of economic growth per head exceeds that of the typical advanced country, say the US. Between 1960 and 2000, the US grew at about 2.5 per cent. About 20 poor countries (excluding oil exporters and small countries) grew faster than the US by 1.5 per cent on average, among them remarkable growth stories such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, China and India.

Rest in Peace Bebo

Bebo Valdés  - born Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro

(1918 – 2013)

Bebo Valdes, one of the leading figures of the golden age of Cuban music, passed away yesterday, at the ripe age of 94. His virtuoso piano playing and composition skills will be sorely missed by music lovers the world over.

In memory of the great man, whose career spanned a staggering eight decades, I leave you with one of his many brilliant music arrangements.

Still smoking? You must be mad

By linking cigarettes to mental illness, anti-smokers are reviving an old authoritarian tactic: pathologising deviants

by Patrick Hayes 

No matter how long and hard the anti-smoking lobby preaches, some dirty smokers just don’t listen. Despite countless attempts to bang the drum about the harm the filthy habit causes and anti-smokers’ successful attempts to attain ever-greater restrictions on where people can smoke, a sixth of the UK population still continues to light up. What must be going on in their heads? Are they mad?

This, it seems, is the conclusion that some in the anti-smoking lobby are rapidly arriving at. A number of reports, most recently one by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) published last week, have found that people with mental-health difficulties are twice as likely to smoke than the rest of the population. This follows a report earlier in the year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that one in three people with a mental illness smoke, compared to one in five for the population as a whole. Or, as the New York Times reported it, ‘People with mental illness are 70 per cent more likely to smoke cigarettes than people without mental illness’.

Following the publication of the RCP’s report, Professor John Britton, chair of the RCP’s Tobacco Advisory Group, commented that, ‘as the prevalence of smoking in the UK falls, smoking is increasingly becoming the domain of the most disadvantaged in our society, and particularly those with mental disorders’.

Since fierce clash, Egypt's crisis takes new turn

The Battle of the Mountain

By MAGGIE MICHAEL and SARAH EL DEEB

It has come to be known as the "Battle of the Mountain": a ferocious fight between members of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents near the group's Cairo headquarters. In a country that has already seen crisis after crisis, it could mark a dangerous turning point in the political turmoil.

The aftermath of the fighting is raising worries that the confrontation between Islamists, who dominate power in the country, and their opponents is moving out of anyone's control.

The riot on March 22 revealed a new readiness of some in the anti-Brotherhood opposition to turn to violence, insisting they have no choice but to fight back against a group they accuse of using violence against them for months. The fight featured an unusual vengefulness. Young protesters were seen at one point pelting a Brotherhood member with firebombs and setting him aflame. Others chased anyone with a conservative Muslim beard, while Islamists set up checkpoints searching for protesters. Each side dragged opponents into mosques and beat them.

Since the fight, Islamists enraged by what they saw as aggression against their headquarters have for the past week hiked up calls for wider action against opponents - and the media in particular - accusing them of trying to overthrow Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Those calls may explain moves by the country's top prosecutor the past week: the questioning of a popular television comedian, Bassem Youssef, whose Jon Stewart-style satires of Morsi drive Islamists into knots of anger, the summoning of several other media personalities and the issuing of arrest warrants against five opposition activists on accusations of fomenting violence.

When The Government Goes Bankrupt

Should Americans yet unborn pay for all of this?

By Judge Andrew Napolitano

What happens when the government goes bankrupt? This question is one that sounds like a hypothetical exercise in a law school classroom from just a few years ago, where it might have been met with some derision. But today, it is a realistic and terrifying inquiry that many who have financial relationships with governments in America will need to make, and it will be answered with the gnashing of teeth.

Earlier this week, a federal judge accepted the bankruptcy petition of Stockton, Calif., a city of about 300,000 residents northeast of San Francisco, over the objections of those who had loaned money to the city. The lenders – called bondholders – and their insurers saw this coming when the city stopped paying interest on their loans – called bonds. In this connection, a bond is a loan made to a municipality, which pays the lender tax-free interest and returns the principal when it is due. Institutional lenders usually obtain insurance, which guarantees the repayment but puts the insurance carrier on the hook.

Looking for a disaster waiting to blow sky high? We have one right at hand.

El Economista reports 97% of pensions are invested in Spanish government debt in 2012

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

The Reserve Fund of Social Security in 2012 increased their holdings of Spanish debt to 97% of total assets, up from 90% who had in late 2011.

Over 70% of purchases are recorded in the second half of 2012, according to Bloomberg points, after the critical moment when ECB President Mario Draghi, undertook to do "whatever it takes" to defend the euro. A message that helped ease the constraints and helped drive Spanish debt.

In 2007, the money invested in financial assets were divided fairly (50%) between Spanish debt and foreign debt, but this proportion began to change in 2008.

In September 2012, for the first time in history the government had to dip into the reserve fund to pay the payroll to pensioners. A total of 3,063 million euros were drawn from this instrument, to which were added to the 3,530 million in November Moncloa needed to fund the pension increases.

Comparison to GM

This exactly reminds me of the stupidity of GM investing its assets in GM bonds. Expect similar results in Spain. 

The Moral Corruption of Fiat Money

Cautionary Tales for Minors

by Theodore Dalrymple

Never having read a textbook of economics in my life, I am at the mercy of newspapers for my knowledge of the dismal science. And by means of the intellectual equivalent of the Chinese water torture, I have come to the conclusion over many years that fiat money brings with it enormous psychological problems, not to say moral corruption. My conclusions are unoriginal, of course; I could have reached them in a few hours if only I had read a few texts. No doubt re-inventing the wheel is wasteful of time and effort, but it brings with it a certain pleasure not to be had from merely reading what others have invented before.

Moreover, while I can quite see the evils of fiat money, I am less good at imagining the harms of abandoning it, an important deficiency because life is usually the choice between different imperfections rather than between perfection and catastrophe. With some people it is otherwise: one could even propose a political typology composed of a two-dimensional grid, with the propensity vividly to perceive present good or evil along one axis, and that to perceive future good and evil along the other. Thus Pollyannas would vividly perceive both present and future goods; conservatives present goods but future evils; revolutionaries present evils but future goods; and nihilists both present and future evils. Temperamentally, I veer between conservatism and nihilism; but on the matter of fiat money, I am inclined to revolutionism.

Ignoring the real lessons of the riots

What kicked off the 2011 riots ?

by Neil Davenport 

The Lib-Con coalition government has been accused of failing to implement many of the recommendations proposed by the cross-party panel which reported on the August 2011 riots. But it is the broader environment of intervention by the state into everyday life that was the real root cause of the riots - and that intervention is increasing.

David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham in north London, found that the majority of the panel’s 63 recommendations have not been acted upon. These include providing greater support for families, tackling youth unemployment and fining schools at which pupils have poor levels of reading and writing. Eleven recommendations that have been accepted or implemented, however, including better identification of potential problem families and measures ‘to help youngsters to cope with the pressures of advertising and materialism’.

There is no doubt that the 2011 riots exposed serious faultlines in England’s inner cities, which is why the government’s re-examination of measures designed to prevent further disturbances is important. But it is perhaps more important to probe whether such recommendations are the right ones or whether they could in fact exacerbate existing problems.

The major problem with the official analysis of the riots is the assumption that the causes in 2011 were identical to the causes of the 1981 riots: youth unemployment, poverty and police harassment. Even those, such as Lammy himself, who started to question New Labour’s drive to ‘nationalise society’ – the tendency to find state solutions to informal, social problems - still fall back on poverty as a powerful determining factor in people’s behaviour.

Leviathan feeding on ever younger victims

Schools push a curriculum of propaganda

By George F. Will

The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic — now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers “instruction” synonymous with “propaganda,” which in the patois of progressivism is called “consciousness-raising.”

Wisconsin’s DPI, in collaboration with the Orwellian-named federal program VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America; the “volunteers” are paid), urged white students to wear white wristbands “as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband.” A flyer that was on the DPI Web site and distributed at a DPI-VISTA training class urged whites to “put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege,” to “make a daily list of the ways privilege played out” and to conduct an “internal dialogue” asking questions such as “How do I make myself comfortable with privilege?” and “What am I doing today to undo my privilege?”

After criticism erupted, the DPI removed the flyer from its Web site and posted a dishonest statement claiming that the wristbands were a hoax perpetrated by conservatives. But, again, the flyer DPI posted explicitly advocated the wristbands. And Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded indoctrination continues, funded by more than Wisconsin taxpayers.

It's weather, not climate

Variability matters more than trend

By Matt Ridley

The east wind could cut tungsten; the daffodils are weeks behind; the first chiffchaffs are late. It’s a cold spring and the two things everybody seems to agree upon are that there’s something weird about the weather, and it’s our fault. Both are almost certainly wrong.

On weird weather, it is true that the contrast with last year’s warm March is striking, as is the difference between the incessant rain of the last twelve months and the long drought that preceded it in most of England. In the last year, America’s had a heatwave, a superstorm and now a bitterly cold spring. Australia has just had an “angry summer”. And so on.

The government’s retiring chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, claimed this week that “we are seeing more variability”. Is he right? On the whole, no. Forget the anecdotes and examine the data.

Start with America. Professor Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado has documented that floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and east-coast winter storms have shown no increase since the 1950s, while droughts have shown a slight decrease. The only thing that has changed is the financial damage done by storms, but as he drily remarks “The actual reason for the increasing number of damaging tropical storms has to do with the reporting of damages.”

What about elsewhere in the world? There has been no trend in tropical cyclone intensity or frequency worldwide at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself, though heavily infiltrated by environmentalists in recent years, stated in a recent special report on climate extremes that over the coming two to three decades “signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability” (as Matthew Parris pointed out last week, don’t you hate this habit of making forecasts in the present tense?), and that “even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is [sic] uncertain”. Translated: the weather is just as likely to become less extreme as more extreme.