Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Ceutan and Melillan desperation.
- Maybe the Galicians have more than a point about their 'colonisation' of the uk and Ireland.
- Some official camino numbers for last year:-
- Camino Portugués: 68,000 - up 57% in 3 years.
As I recall, the total for the Portuguese Way in 2009 was around 5,000. The forecast for the special year of 2021 is 100,000. Note: I believe these are only those who register on arriving in Santiago and procure their Compostela. So the totals exclude irreligious people like me. Actual totals are even higher.
The UK
- More on the HS2 below. A taster: It is commuter railways, especially in the provinces, that are screaming for investment. The government’s obsession with another London-oriented mega-project is baffling.
- Private Eye's amusing take on gender correctness:-
Europe
- See the second article below on the mad world of carbon.
- Much of a surprise? Says the NY Times: Trump reportedly wrote off the Skripal novichok poisoning as business as usual among spies and was at first reluctant to expel 60 Russians, "Distasteful but within the bounds of espionage”, he felt. Fortunately, other Western leaders thought otherwise.
- Many millions have been promised for the reconstruction of Notre Dame. Even as an atheist, I have no problem with that. But you do have to wonder whether there aren't better philanthropic options for the surplus cash of billionaires. Medical research, for example. But less publicity, perhaps.
- Word of the Day: Sede.
- Odd Old Word: Life-arrow: 'An arrow carrying a line or cord, fired from a gun for the purpose of establishing communication between a vessel and the shore in case of ship-wreck'.
- Talking of the Camino Portugués . . .Yesterday - for the 4th or 5th time - I walked 13km of this, from Arcade to Pontevedra. The first time I did this, with old friends back in 2009, we saw about 7 people all week - a group of 4 Spanish ladies, a Japanese couple and a chap on his own. Yesterday, I started to count other 'pilgrims' as I left Arcade but gave up after 5 minutes, when I'd reached more than 30. And this was before I came upon 25-30 Portuguese scouts of all genders having a snack at the side of the path. In fact, I was never out of sight of another walker and I must have passed over 100 in the almost 3 hours it took to do the stretch. Admittedly it's a holiday week and there were plenty of (slow-walking) adults with kids but, even allowing for this, it's undeniable that walking this camino is a very different experience from 10 years ago. When, for example, there were no stalls in the middle of the woods, selling drinks, foodstuffs and knick-knacks.
1. This is a final chance to scrap HS2. What the north really needs is 'HS3'. Simon Jenkins, the Guardian.
David Cameron’s vanity rail project should be ditched in the upcoming review. It’s commuter journeys that need investment
Britain’s great vanity project is hanging by a thread. Reports that the treasury secretary, Liz Truss, has made HS2 a candidate for the autumn’s public spending review have rung alarm bells across Whitehall. The railway was previously thought a done deal; but last month, ministers quietly postponed the HS2 company’s “authority to proceed” with construction contracts by six months, until after the budget. Now Truss has declared her determination to “junk the white elephants”. HS2 is an elephant in a class of its own, as its cost heads from its supposed £56bn towards £80bn to £100bn. It is on its third chief executive and recently lost its chairman, Terry Morgan.
Truss is an outsider for the Tory leadership, or at least to be next chancellor. HS2 is hated by her department and has been sustained only by the past support of David Cameron and Theresa May. Cancellation would make a lot of Tories very happy, and show Truss as a strong and decisive minister, a rarity at present. The project’s sole surviving champion is transport secretary Chris Grayling, now playing a loyal Fool to May’s King Lear. Where will either be come the autumn?
HS2 was a dream of the 2000s. It was only adopted by David Cameron as a bizarre alternative to another Heathrow runway.
There are other straws in the wind. Insiders talking to Channel 4’s Dispatches team were virtually agreed it might not proceed beyond Birmingham, undermining its cost-benefit value. Parliament has still not been asked for statutory authority to proceed north of the Midlands. The Treasury’s former chief, Nick Macpherson, has dismissed the whole venture as Cameron’s “political vanity project”.
More serious is the loss of HS2’s most strident backers in the north, now favouring the Northern Powerhouse Rail project, dubbed HS3. Given the dire state of Transpennine rail links – probably the worst commuting services in Britain – Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, had declared west-east “the single highest transport investment priority in the country”. Britain’s rail passenger growth has ceased its recent rise, and forms just 2% of passenger journeys overall.
It is commuter railways, especially in the provinces, that are screaming for investment. The government’s obsession with another London-oriented mega-project is baffling.
HS2 would hardly be the first rail project to be abandoned. A century ago, Edward Watkin’s great scheme to drive a train from Manchester through the centre of London and on to Paris got no further than Marylebone – though he did start digging a Channel tunnel.
The HS2 project has not got that far. Despite delays, it has spent £4bn on “preparatory work”, including £600m on a consultancy gravy train. Site clearance has begun at Birmingham, Old Oak Common in west London, and Euston. Various fallback positions have been in the wind, of which the sanest would be to halt HS2 at Old Oak Common at the junction with London’s delayed Crossrail. This would at least save the exorbitant cost of tunnelling into an already overcrowded Euston.
For Truss, cancellation would combine fiscal prudence with serious political gain. Leaders of northern city councils – where the Tories’ plight is currently desperate – backed HS2 because it was the only transport investment in sight. Cancellation would enable Truss to press the go button on HS3, and produce instant ecstasy. She would be feted from the Humber to the Mersey.
HS2 was a dream of the 2000s. It was a rocket to the moon, a gas-guzzling Concorde on wheels. It was only adopted by Cameron as a bizarre alternative to another Heathrow runway, which he pledged not to build. It has been the state’s biggest land acquisition programme since the second world war. Cancellation would release thousands of acres for development, not least in downtown Birmingham. The benighted railway would be freed from the nightmare incubus of an elite train service that is no one’s current priority.
Truss will need courage to stand up to what is now a gold-plated, publicly funded, one-project lobby. But she has a last opportunity to take a brave but sensible decision. All mega-projects are ultimately about politics, where they are soon enmeshed in tribal rivalries. But when, as with HS2, enormous sums of money and disruption to the lives of thousands are at issue, the public has a right to second thoughts. On this as on all things.
2. Rocketing EU carbon prices spell big trouble for careless companies, and for coal: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Europe's carbon market is on fire. New rules and a shortage of permits have driven futures contracts to an 11-year high of €27 a tonne, with an extra twist from the vagaries of Brexit.
The contracts have jumped sixfold over the past two years and have been the hottest trade in the commodity universe.
The German bank Berenberg said prices are likely to double or triple again over coming months as companies bid up the contracts in a desperate scramble to avert fines for pollution.
The spike spells trouble for industrial companies and airlines across Europe that have run out of permits, or those that tried to play the market by selling their allowances in the hope of buying back contracts at a lower price later. This trade has blown up in their faces.
“Industry has been ignoring the carbon price issue and now they are going to face a really big surprise,” said Phil MacDonald from Sandbag, which monitors the carbon market.
The EU contract is the price that 11,000 power plants, steel foundries and factories – covering 45pc of Europe’s greenhouse emissions – must pay for each tonne of carbon emitted under the “polluter pays principle”.
Lawson Steele, Berenberg’s utility strategist, said a twist in the EU rules has led to a chronic deficit of allowances. “Companies should be trying to buy as many permits as they can to protect themselves but the level of knowledge in the industry is really low,” he said.
Mr Steele said it may ultimately take prices of €107 to clear the market. This is the penalty level for companies that fail to cover their C02 emissions.
British Steel has already had to request an emergency loan of £100m from the Government to avoid fines when the deadline expires this month, prompting sceptics to ask whether it tried to cash in its permits to create cash flow or to flatter its books.
“They sold their 2019 allowances to cover their 2018 emissions. They messed up,” said Mr MacDonald. The company’s allocated permits would be worth almost £140m at today’s prices.
He said a string of European companies in steel, chemicals and energy have been playing the same trick and are now in trouble.
The wise virgins such as German’s power utility RWE snapped up carbon contracts when they were going cheap and are now largely hedged into the early 2020s. The shake-out will produce a generation of winners and losers.
British Steel says it needs the emergency loan to manage the uncertainties of Brexit. Brussels has suspended the new allocation of permits this year for UK firms until the Withdrawal Agreement has passed.
Airlines are also under pressure because the growth of aviation has outstripped their permits, which they need for intra-EU flights.
Exeter-based Flybe said last October that carbon costs were part of its undoing. Lufthansa reported losses of €335m (£290m) for the first quarter. It blamed most of the damage on rising fuel costs but its short statement left many questions unanswered.
The carbon trading scheme is the spearhead of EU efforts to cut emissions by 40pc by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. It has so far been a rolling disaster, a byword for market illiteracy. It issued too many carbon permits, with no way of adjusting when industrial output collapsed during the Great Recession and again during the eurozone banking crisis. The carbon price collapsed. Coal use surged.
Brussels is now trying to restore sanity. A new structure launched this year empowers a market stability reserve (MSR) to soak up the glut of contracts. In theory it is supposed to operate like a central bank, tightening and loosening to keep the market in balance. In reality the scheme is lurching from one extreme to the other.
The price surge has become self-fulfilling. Industries with a stash of unused credits are hoarding them for gain rather than putting them up for auction.
What the new regime has achieved is to erode the cost advantage for coal, although it may take prices of €35 to €40 to force a full switch to natural gas. Wind and solar are gaining the edge even without subsidy. “We’re now at the tipping point where the cost of building new renewables is competitive with the running costs of existing coal and gas,” said Sandbag.
Britain has imposed an extra £18 a tonne on top of the EU carbon prices. This has already priced coal out of the UK market but it has also come at a competitive cost for heavy industries in the North that must compete with EU rivals.
The roles are now being reversed to some degree. The higher the price of EU carbon permits, the more it vindicates the UK’s huge investment in offshore wind and zero-carbon power. Green countries come out ahead. Laggards in Eastern Europe pay a penalty that reduces their cost advantage on wages.
The Government plans to keep Britain tied to the EU trading scheme after Brexit. However, if there is no deal, the EU’s carbon prices could suddenly plunge again. British companies would no longer be able to use their permits. They would sell them and flood the EU market.
The EU carbon price has now become a Brexit barometer. Every time the pendulum swings towards no deal the contracts surge: as it swings back to a softer Brexit the price falls again.
Perhaps it is time for Europe to find a better way to tax carbon.
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