Six Ways

In these days of countries trying to do away with dirty fuels, spare a thought for this.

In October last year, Bloomberg reported the China had loosened the restrictions on imports to tackle its power crisis and that Indonesia supplies about two-thirds of China’s total imports and is China’s biggest overseas supplier, supplying 17 million tons of coal in August, and 21 million tons in September.

And now as the new year of 2022 comes in, Reuters reported that Indonesia, whose biggest customers for its coal are China, India, Japan and South Korea, has banned coal exports until it has evaluated whether it has enough for its own needs.

For comparison between China, Japan, and Korea, these are figure I have been able to pull out.

• In 2019, coal made up 58 percent of China’s energy use.
• In 2017, coal made up 24 percent of Japan’s energy use.
• In 2021, coal made up 28 percent of Korea’s energy use.

Plainly, of the three, China needs coal like no other country – whether supplied by Indonesia or from elsewhere.

Indonesia has a population of over 275 million, so its own needs are not insignificant on a world scale.

The USA has a population of 332 million, to give you a comparison.

And The Russian Federation that has a population of just 146 million.

Indonesia is going to look at how its reserves are coping at the end of January and then decide what to do next to make sure it can plan for enough reserves through to the end of 2022.

I didn’t include India in the listing – my oversight. The figures is 56 percent, but India has its own state-owned Coal India Ltd, which supplied 38 million tonnes in August 2021. So while it imports from Indonesia, I don’t know how ultimately reliant India is on imports.

Imagine

If we could fast forward to 2042, imagine if China had no coal and no way of making up the shortfall from other kinds of fuels. Indonesia is about 7,000 miles as the crow flies from Mainland China, so a task force to capture coal would stick out like a sore thumb. But China would be fighting for its life, so who knows. Pray that it doesn’t come to that.

Kathryn Stone is the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards of the House of Commons.

The Commissioner is an independent officer of the House of Commons, and the Commissioner’s remit is to investigate allegations that MPs have breached the rules found in paragraphs 11-18 of the House of Commons’ Code of Conduct for Members.

Once the investigation is concluded, the Commissioner reports to The Commons Select Committee On Standards.

In October 2021 the Commissioner found that Owen Paterson had breached the paid advocacy rules for making three approaches to the Food Standards Agency and four approaches to the Department for International Development in relation to Randox and seven approaches to the Food Standards Agency relating to Lynn’s Country Foods.

The Commissioner said Paterson had “repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, and that this has brought the house into disrepute” and that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of behaviour in failing to separate private and public interests”.

Acting on her report, The Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that Paterson be suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days. The Government decided they didn’t like that and voted to overturn the suspension. The uproar that followed resulted in Own Paterson resigning as an MP.

Before the uproar, the Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Sky News that he believed Kathryn Stone should review her position after her suspension of Owen Paterson was blocked by Parliament.

But here’s the thing. She didn’t suspend him. She reported to the Committee and they suspended him.

According to the Committees page of Parliament the current members of the Committee on Standards are:

Chris Bryant MP Labour Rhondda Commons Chair
Dr Arun Midha Lay Member
Mrs Jane Burgess Lay Member
Mr Paul Thorogood Lay Member
Mrs Rita Dexter Lay Member
Mrs Tammy Banks Lay Member
Dr Michael Maguire Lay Member
Mehmuda Mian Lay Member
Andy Carter MP Conservative Warrington South
Alberto Costa MP Conservative South Leicestershire
Allan Dorans MP Scottish National Party Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock
Mark Fletcher MP Conservative Bolsover
Yvonne Fovarque MP Labour Makerfield
Sir Bernard Jenkin MP Conservative Harwich and North Essex

How did they arrive at their decision on the penalty to impose on Mr Paterson? There are four Conservative MPs on the Committee. How did they vote?

Bearing in mind the Commissioner’s finding that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches” was as bad as Mr Paterson’s, it might have been more appropriate for the The Commons Select Committee on Standards to suspend Mr Paterson for the rest of the Parliament.

If Parliament had not voted to overturn the suspension, then Mr Paterson would not have resigned and he would have been suspended for 30 sitting days.

The Standing Orders of Parliament dictate the consequences of being suspended.

45. Members suspended, etc., to withdraw from precincts
    (1) Members who are ordered to withdraw under Standing Order No. 43 (Disorderly conduct) or who are suspended from the service of the House shall forthwith withdraw from the precincts of the House.
    (2) Suspension from the service of the House shall not exempt the Member so suspended from serving on any committee for the consideration of a private bill to which he may have been appointed before the suspension.

45A. Suspension of salary of Members suspended
The salary of a Member suspended from the service of the House shall be withheld for the duration of his suspension.

So there is a financial penalty, assuming ‘withheld’ means that it is never paid to the MP, rather than held back and paid later.

So how much is it? The basic annual salary of an MP in the House of Commons is £81,932, as of April 2020. How does a withholding of pay for a sitting day tie into that? The Commons Library records the number of Commons sitting days by session since 1945, and from the latest figures (2015-2016) there seems to be around 150 sitting days. So would Owen Paterson have forfeited 30 of 150 of £81,932, which would be £16,800?

Or would it be 30 of 365 of £81,932, which would be £6,700? Or something else?

The newspapers reported that Mr Paterson made something around four times his MP’s salary as a consultant. So having his name in the public eye associated with sleaze may have hurt him more than it did his pocket. Or perhaps not. Without knowing Mr Paterson, one cannot say.

All of which is blood under the bridge, because he resigned and lost all his pay. Who could have predicted that outcome? And bearing in mind the 80 seat majority that the Conservatives have in the Commons, what skin was it off their nose if one of their MPs was suspended for 30 days? It makes you wonder.

“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself … but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men.”

—George Bernanos

Quoted in ‘Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life’ by Marshall B. Rosenberg (pp. 21-22). PuddleDancer Press.

I am pretty sure that R D Laing would have agreed with that statement. He makes the point that ‘normal’ men in the 20th Century killed 100 million of their fellow humans. It was he whose writing caused me to think again about the relative value that I (and we as humans) place upon the life as lived vis a vis others, and the life of the imagination. All are forms of experience and all merit being accepted as valuable experiences.

The Feedback page in the 26 June 2021 edition of New Scientist mentions a quote from oceanographer Gregory Johnson, who described the increase in Earth’s heat imbalance from 2005 to 2019.

The heat imbalance is the difference between what the Earth receives from the Sun and what is lost to space.

Johnson said that difference over that period was the energy equivalent of four detonations per second of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once.

In The Week of 17 July 2021

‘To govern is to choose,’ said the London Evening Standard. And a key choice confronting ministers today is whether or not to risk alienating older voters by ending the triple lock on pensions. This is the policy that guarantees that the state pension rises each year by whichever is the highest out of average earnings, the inflation rate or 2.5%. The policy was introduced by David Cameron in 2010, and the Tories promised in their last election manifesto to maintain it. But the pandemic has complicated things.

Although earnings suffered a freak reduction and inflation rose by just 1% last year, pensions still grew by 2.5%. This year, the unwinding of the furlough scheme is expected to lead to a freak 8% increase In earnings, which – under the terms of the triple lock – means pensions would have to rise by the same, at a cost to the Exchequer of £3bn.

Critics claim this would be an outrageous gift to the relatively well-off elderly, said Andrew Fisher in The i Paper, but you have to put it in context.

In national spending terms, £3bn isn’t all that much: the 2021 Budget unveiled £25bn in corporate tax breaks over the next two years. And the UK has one of the least generous state pensions in Europe. It amounts to £137.60 per week for those who reached State Pension Age (SPA) before 6 6 April 2016, and £179.60 for those who reach SPA after that date. By comparison, single pensioners get £254 a week in the Netherlands and £366 in Denmark.

As for the idea that it is inter-generationally unfair, that’s nonsense. Young people are going to be even more reliant on state pensions than today’s pensioners, who are more likely to have worked in unionised workplaces with collectively negotiated pension provisions. They should be ‘fighting hard to defend the triple lock it will be the bedrock of their retirement’.

I doubt indebted students and those on universal credit who are about to lose their £20 a week Covid top-up would see an 8% pensions hike in those terms, said Will Hutton in The Observer. For them, it would just look like another undeserved bonus for the baby boomers. Chancellor Rishi Sunak “can read the runes, and he also needs that £3bn”. The signs are that he’ll water down the triple lock commitment by fixing it to a longer-term average of wage growth.

He needs to do something, said Chris Whiteside on Conservative Home. “It isn’t sustainable to permanently guarantee any section of society a relative income which can never get worse but can and ultimately will keep improving.” The triple lock initially made sense as a way of helping pensions catch up with wages. But the correction has gone far enough.

COVID Deaths

Then in the Letters To The Editor section is reported a letter to The Daily Telegraph on the subject of funding the triple lock

Your report on the pensions triple lock says that £3bn will be needed if pensions are to increase by 8.5%. Last year, it was reported that all the pensioner deaths would save the Government £3bn in unpaid pensions. Does one not equal the other? / Gerry Price, Granby, Nottinghamshire

Reported in The Week, 17 July 2021:

Taking aspirin alongside conventional treatments may reduce the risk of cancer patients dying by 20%, a new analysis has found. The researchers, at Cardiff University, also found that the painkiller appeared to reduce the risk of the cancer spreading within the body.

Their review covered 118 earlier studies, involving patients with 18 different cancers. The 250,000 patients who’d reported taking aspirin (as a supplement to other treatments) had a 20% reduced mortality rate.

“There is now a considerable body of evidence to suggest a significant reduction in mortality in patients who take aspirin, said lead author Professor Peter Elwood.