The spin on the spin

There's been something of a triumph of spin on the EU's MFF share-out. Oh I don't mean the headlines, which we summarised last week, but the rationale. Spain and Italy get the biggest share for the next seven years because they have been hardest hit by Covid, the spin went. And hardly anyone said "Hold on - Covid hasn't gone. What if Poland goes down next year, or the Netherlands?"

Of course, as Rutte and Kurz know full well, Covid has been the cover for propping up the generous but unaffordable pension commitments in Spain and Italy. I told my old mate in the pub last night not to worry - Germany was paying for the mad Med pensions. He was just paying for Slovenia and Croatia. "What?

Austria pays €14bn into the MFF; Slovenia gets €1.2bn and Croatia €12.1bn. That's €1,580 from the purses of every Austrian and €2,969 into the wallets of every Croatian. "Croatia? Why do they need money? Have you seen the price of property there now? Their hotels cost the same as ours and are more fully booked, their trains are new, new stations, bridges - we paid for all that already".

I have my own suspicions - and they're around Tito's old nuclear power plant at Krško (say Crooshgo), shared between Croatia and Slovenia, due for decommissioning from 2023 but now extended for another twenty years. The EU insists it's safe, but our nuclear leak (and other civil emergencies) warning sirens are still tested every Saturday at 12 noon, and most folk have a 7-day course of Iodine pills in the first aid box.  More specifically, Croatia has a contractual obligation to take 50% of the nuclear waste by 2025, hasn't got anywhere to put it and Slovenia has run out of storage. That's my guess, anyhow.

That's the sort of thing that Covid is helping to hide. Don't tell the tourists headed for the Adriatic beaches that there's a nuclear waste dump behind the hotel, don't tell the punters hard at work in Munich that their taxes are being drunk by Luigi and Alphonse sitting in the sun outside their tavernas. Hey ho.

EU manages a deal that angers everyone

Just when you thought the farce that is the EU couldn't sink any lower, they've managed to agree a Covid recovery plan that has angered just about everyone. Spain and Italy are furious because they don't get enough, Germany Austria and the Netherlands furious because they're paying for what they are getting. The French are in a rage with Macron - who is hiding from them in his big gold palace; the Poles and Hungarians are ticked that any money is tied to changing their national mandates for Brussels' ones. The European Parliament is very cross with two of the EU's Presidents, VDL and Charles Michel. The Italians are incensed with Conte, the Dutch with Rutte. The Irish are demented that in Brexit year they will pay more and get less, and the Commission is vexed that Ireland has just won a tax fight against them. I've never known a deal be so successful in pitting so many of the EU's actors against eachother.

Unelected bureaucrats think they're happy because the deal has just ratcheted up federal power and authority, but at the cost of a big hit to public satisfaction, which will grow as the utter inadequacy of the MFF and Covid package becomes clear.

What's even more absurd is that they only got this deal because no-one wanted to go on record for this recent round being the longest ever European Council summit. It just beat the longest, we are told, by fifteen minutes. So glad. Pleased to see it's the PR merchants driving the talks not the national interests of 420m people and 27 nations.

The European Parliament, politico EU reports, wanted a deal €266bn bigger than Michel's starting point; instead they've got one about €130bn smaller.  Charles Michel's summary of the summit process - "Europe is united, Europe is present. We have demonstrated that the magic of the European project works because when we think that it is impossible, there is a spring in our step thanks to respect and cooperation." - must surely rank with Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Vietnam pledge that "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

Boy, aren't we glad we left. 

The fury of the scorned

Remainer fury yesterday was fierce, on the release by the Intelligence and Security Commission of the long-awaited Russia report. The fury on show extended to members of the committee itself. It was not, however, directed at the Russians, for having attempted to interfere in the 2014 Scots referendum, but at the entire Leave side, for the result of the 2016 referendum not having been subject to Russian interference.

They excoriated the security services for not finding something that wasn't there. They wanted, I bet, to excoriate the Russians for not having interfered. But most of all they were furious that the 52% won the referendum fair and square, when for four years FBPE stars  have tacitly supported suggestions that the Russians crooked the result. They failed even to find anything on Arron Banks, long the target of Russian smears. Brendan O'Neill has a piece in the Speccie hoping, I think naively, that this report will now end Russsian conspiracy whispers in relation to the referendum. I doubt it.

The report did however include one paragraph of note - but we have to read through the redactions -

One of the fundamental pillars of a free democracy, the integrity of the secret ballot, is largely safe - or it was when the committee took its evidence, and before the 2019 election.

What is safe is the process that involves stubby pencils on bits of string and collapsible hardboard voting booths, locked boxes being opened and votes counted in local town halls and sports centres. This, at least, Blair could not foul with his 'reforms'. However, I'll bet a pound to a pea that the redactions include reservations about the integrity of the postal voting system. It is this, rather than fantasies about the integrity of the 2016 referendum, that should now dominate the committee's concerns.

The 2019 general election saw the proportion of postal votes rise to 37%. At the same time, public confidence in the integrity of the postal vote process has fallen. Voters know what's going on, even if the Electoral Commission doesn't. What's extraordinary about the postal vote level in the 2019 election is that a 120-page report on the election by the Commons Research dept, a report that includes an analysis of everything from the weather on polling day to the numbers of spoiled ballots, makes not one mention of this extraordinary increase in postal votes.

Covid may mean great pressure to move to wholly postal voting, absent a vaccine. Before we acquiesce, we must be sure that the process is secure. Here is where members should turn their attention, not chasing remainer fantasies around the integrity of the 2016 referendum. 

Update
======
The report is also critical of the extent of Lords' interests in Russian money, and the Mail points out Peter Mandelson's shareholdings in Russian defence firm Sistema, and that he previously sat on the company's board. Peter's interests aren't just Russian, though - he's also President of both the Great Britain China Centre and the German British Forum.

The cost of the Chinese dollar

It's awkward for the left. Their liking for China's state communist regime and support for the autocracy's dictators, the dreadful old waxworks, has come under strain in recent months as the disguise has come off and the CCP has been revealed as the brutal and inhuman force driving the sino jackboot. If you haven't seen Marr interviewing the Chinese ambassador yesterday on the concentration camp transports, I recommend it. The wolf warrior's wax almost melted. He clearly hadn't expected questions such as this from a comrade of the red banner, a fellow-traveller on the lefty path. If China's behaviour has been so egregious that even the British left are deserting them, things must be serious.

After having promised extended UK citizenship rights to Hong Kong's 3m potential BNO passport holders (Brexitcorp™  need not worry - not even a tenth of that number are likely to want to come to the UK) Raab is expected to suspend the UK's extradition treaty with China later today. This, after Huawei, will encourage China to make it even more difficult for its citizens to come to the UK, either to shop or study. Whilst this may be good news for the folk living within coach-trip drop-off from Bicester Village, Covid and the Chinese hiatus are causing deep gloom in the worst of the woke re-education camps that badge themselves as 'universities' - and the Scots will be the hardest hit.

Confident of ever more money flowing from London to Scotland to pay for it, the SNP bravely offered free degrees to not only native Scots but to EU citizens. In reality, it's been the PRC that has been picking up much of the tab. The CCP clearly regards UK universities as outposts of their own ideology, safe spaces for PRC ideologues. Glasgow University depends on fees from Chinese students for 31% of its income, the Mail reports. Edinburgh is at 20%. And it's not just the re-education camps - the local student economy in everything from bedsits to Bok Choi will be hit.

Already in Scotland the free Uni thing is turning sour as native Scots are finding their access is severely limited due to the SNP's economic mismanagement. The re-education camps are going to have to downsize a few barracks blocks. And short of Wee Nippy announcing that Scotland will become a Special Administrative Region of the PRC if they vote for independence, changes must be made. I suspect EU students are about to be axed from the free access programme, with Sturgeon seeking to put the blame on London. 

Keep pushing the BBC - they're wobbling

I wouldn't wish redundancy on anyone who doesn't welcome it, so there is no rejoicing at the downsizing of some 520 news staff now starting at the BBC. But for those fortunate enough to keep a job at the woke behemoth, it's only the foretaste of the chill wind that will blow. I have a feeling in my bones that peak woke has passed, in the UK anyway, and we are now tentatively starting on the pushback.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph describes perfectly today how the BBC has become the enemy of the decent majority in the UK. Moore is old enough to remember a Fleet Street ruled by the tyranny of print unions that had 'captured' the nationals. In those pre-internet, four-channel days of warbling Trimphones the 'Sun' sold some three or four million copies daily - or it did when the chapels allowed it to be printed. Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher fought that battle. We now need to fight the same battle to end the woke tyranny spearheaded by the BBC - a tyranny that has spread like a plague

Nowhere is this alliance between militant wokery and management cowardice more obvious than in the civil service. Diversity is a tool of producer capture. It allows aeons of management time to be spent thinking about the composition of the workforce rather than the needs of the “consumer” – the Government and the voters who elect it.

I was recently informed that a concept called “reverse mentoring” has entered the civil service. Senior staff of 30 years’ experience are each assigned to a young employee in, say, IT, who observes them at work and reports on whether they exhibit “unconscious bias”, “micro-aggressions”, and other sins which cry to Heaven for vengeance.

The Spectator this week carried several pieces -  one by Stephen Daisley cuts to the heart of the BBC's vulnerability, that having abandoned impartiality it has forfeited its place in the institutional Pantheon

The BBC has a different role, one so important that we are compelled by law to fund it. Yes, it informs, educates and entertains but, as I have argued on CoffeeHouse before, its real service is to national unity. The Corporation cannot unite us while becoming a mouthpiece for one side of a culture war.

Douglas Murray pens a hard-hitting piece for the Speccie, which also featured the resignation letter from Bari Weiss, forced from her job at the New York Times.  Murray writes

Publications like the NYT, who profess to be most opposed to ‘fake news’, continuously turn out to have been the era’s biggest purveyors of the thing they complain of. And campaigning journalists, imagining that they are acting in the name of decency, turn out to behave so indecently that they bully out a minority, dissenting opinion from their ranks.

And indeed Charles Moore is amongst those that make direct comparisons between the NYT and the disgraceful witch-hunts at the BBC such as those championed by Emily Maitlis. Andrew Neil's position at PHG effectively makes him the Speccie's Chairman, a job that has no editorial control, but has nevertheless provoked ill-informed probing, which may have found ears within the woke echo-bubble that is W1A - for Neil's outstanding politics programme itself fell victim to the corporation's axe. 

Elsewhere, the TPA carries a piece on the BBC's appalling waste - a throwback to the Fleet Street printworks that carried hundreds of unnecessary printworkers when the job could be done by a few dozens, even printing three million papers a day. Which reminds me that I visited the Wapping works back in the 1980s one chill dark November night as the Sun was being printed and one thing that struck me, apart from the size of the rolls of paper, was how much machinery there was, and how few people.

Finally, the rapid growth, funding and public support for the #DefundTheBBC movement must be causing a few wobbles in W1A - Calvin Robinson in Spiked gives an inside view.

It seems the BBC has stumbled into the cardinal error for a news organisation - that of becoming the news, rather than reporting it.

The death of London - but not of the City

Allister Heath delivers the synapse-tingler this morning in the 'graph. The death of London. Of course one needs to remember what pre-war London was like to appreciate the possibilities - and understand the damage wrought by Patrick Abercrombie and the London County Council. 

London was not just an agglomeration of villages but of little towns. Domestic service remained widespread and food was distributed through local shops and markets via the huge food wholesale markets at Billingsgate, Smithfield and Covent Garden. London's docks brought sugar and produce from around the globe. Fresh milk was either from the few dairies still with herds of cows kept stalled in the heart of the city but more often by train from dairies such as Lord Rayleigh's in Chelmsford, built adjacent to rail lines to allow rapid transport of milk.

Light industry was spread evenly throughout the city and small workshops, factories, warehouses and ateliers were scattered everywhere - even up to the walls of the Tower, where a dock connected the Empire to the canal network. After the Blitz, the Abercrombie plan changed it all. Industry was banished to the outskirts, new road networks and warehousing hubs replaced rail, people were to be housed in suburbia and the dense inner terraces were to be flattened (those that the Germans hadn't already flattened, that is) to make way for new concrete office blocks. It was to become a Soviet planned City. But the LCC's planned changes were continued into the 21st century by further phases of more organic change driven by economics and unconnected local planning preferences that had a cumulative effect -

A few years ago, Bridget Rosewell, an economist, revealed how the capital lost 1 million, mostly manufacturing, jobs on radial routes in the suburbs over three decades and created 1 million, mostly high-value-added services jobs in central London. Suburban factories and offices became homes. Economic activity became hyper-concentrated in the centre. This model was seen globally as a triumph of renewal. There were risks: it was contingent on staving off urban decay, avoiding terrorism, making sure taxes were not hiked, ongoing vast subsidies to public transport, continued globalisation, containing property prices – and yes, avoiding pandemics.

As to the downsides: the rest of the UK failed to pull off its own transition, becoming addicted to transfers from London; and the capital’s culture shifted corrosively, becoming the epicentre of Remainia, Corbynite attitudes and intolerant illiberalism.

We have a London that is dangerously unbalanced, seeded with the cankers of disorder in the ugly post-war Abercrombie public housing estates, already drowning the city in a welter of teenage blood. Only the city's wealth and massive levels of public service provision have kept a lid on things. But all that is about to change -

The private sector, for its part, is facing gargantuan structural losses: the economics of offices and retail is predicated on mass commuting and tourism. The former won’t fully come back; the latter will take a year or two. The arts, luxury, fashion, transport, hospitality, restaurant and many service industries face decimation. It’s a full-on biotic crisis: London’s economic ecosystem is suffering an immense decline in diversity. Lower-paid jobs, in particular, are being culled; the population could fall, with tens of thousands returning to Europe.

As Sadiq Khan will shortly learn, there is no more money. This first lockdown has busted the bank.

But what of the City, the square mile, now with an offshoot in Docklands? Well, the City has always been independent of the LCC, the GLC and now the GLA and thus stands a good chance of making decisions to its own benefit. The concatenation of related expertise will keep London's place in the financial world. There may be a retreat from Canary Wharf - those vast towers may empty, along with the thousands of service jobs emptying the bins and flipping burgers for the thousands of clerks as the clerks get their P45s in September. However, the square mile, with its own police force and local authority, will tough it out. Heath is bullish - allow the change, take the hit

Boris Johnson must not seek to prop up bankrupt central London investors. Instead, he must allow the market to work, and encourage Tory heartlands – suburbia, exurbia and smaller cities – to hoover up London refugees, workers who no longer need to commute daily.

London saw house price rises of over 750% between 1995 and 2015. Anyone who hasn't already cashed-up will need to stick it out now - just batten down and wait a decade or two.

Public blunder - it's Crimea all over again

A tempest is blowing through the complacent hubristic corridors of power in Whitehall. They have been tested and have failed utterly and humiliatingly, and now they must face the gales of change.

NHS central procurement and NHS and PHE central testing, we were told yesterday, wasted £25bn due to incompetence, a confused commitment to central command and control, a concentration on fashionable management nostrums and jargonistic pabulums rather than on efficiency and effectiveness. It was the rule of dire and dismal senior managers with a focus on reducing sugar in breakfast cereal rather than saving lives. It is the grossest and most culpable mismanagement; indeed we have seen nothing like it since the debacle in the Crimea exposed the manifold failings of army management.

You may know how the media and the telegraph shone the disinfectant sunlight into the dark establishment corners of mismanagement, blunder and stupidity in Crimea. Medical and logistic failures. Troops with no tents or winter clothing, no means of preparing food hygienically, inadequate medical care, flogging at the wheel, a system of buying commissions that left the army in the command of idiots and fools. The British public at the time were outraged - but the establishment aristocrats who ran the army closed ranks and blocked all attempts at reform, for a while at least. It took Prussia's thrashing of the Kermits and an establishment panic that eventually allowed Cardwell's reforms of 1870 - 1881. Barely a generation short of powered flight and the cinema we stopped flogging servicemen.

The Whitehall establishment will make the same impassioned defence of their blunder, malfeasance and incompetence as did those cretin generals back in the 1850s. They are as far out of their depth now as they were at the time of Crimea. They have no place in office, no place in power, no place in control of our taxes and no place in a democracy with a government with a mandate to cleanse them.

Pre-Nightingale NHS hospital in Crimea - disease prevention by PHE

A new world

Well, we didn't expect that to happen so quickly.

Let's just take a quick recap of the shifts in defence and security policy over the past few years. Reviews are now normally every five years; past reviews in 2010 and 2015 were typical dilettante Cameronian fudges; the future was supranational and international, UN good, NATO good, EU better. And we've ended up with a pair of carriers that were obsolete as soon as they rolled down the slipway, so vulnerable to a new generation of hypersonic missiles that they can't be let anywhere near a war zone. Possibly useful as a platform for fishing surveillance drones, though - anchored in the North Sea, bang in the middle of our EEZ, each housing a clutch of admirals. Unless we can persuade the EU Navy to buy one. Our Type 45's may be able to detect and shoot down a cricket ball travelling at the speed of sound, but that's not much use when the enemy are using missiles a lot faster than the speed of sound rather than fast cricket balls to sink our carriers.

Anyway, from 2017 Mark Sedwill was charged with conducting a run-up to the 2020 review, which needed to be broadened to include threats from State Actors. Tanks are out, deniable actions by unmarked troops are in. As Putin has shown in the Donbass, you can get away with it. And as the Salisbury poisonings and a score more GRU assassinations elsewhere have shown, even when they know it's you, what can they do, apart from ineffective sanctions and a handful of diplomatic expulsions? So long as Germany is dependent on Putin's gas, he has a get-out-of-jail-free card. China too has been a disruptor, using state cyber attacks on other nations' infrastructures as well as armies of hackers who infiltrate and disrupt social media. Iran's shipnapping in the gulf is open.

If Cameron was a dilettante, May was Queen of Chaos. She hadn't got a clue what she wanted, so long as she could keep it secret and keep the public, non-government experts and parliament away. Catastrophe May was a brainless ditherer, a dunderhead. On the basis that any plan was better than no plan, Sedwill acted in what he genuinely thought were the nation's best interests. He went to Washington to talk with those conducting Trump's review. He sent trusted civil servants to Brussels to tentatively commit the UK to EU defence plans. He invented the 'Fusion' strategy, allowing the UK to do everything at once with an Eton mess of defence, security, economic and other resources.

None of this made it through to what was scheduled to be the 2020 defence and security review. On taking office in 2019 Boris radically altered the terms of reference and downgraded Sedwill's role. Dominic Cummings had also long been a vocal critic of the UK's disastrous defence procurement regime. When Covid demonstrated that Whitehall's procurement systems couldn't even procure a few boxes of gowns and face masks, it was also an explicit admission that our mandarins couldn't be trusted with buying stuff like ships. Dom has written on his blog, bookmarked here, that utterly unfit Whitehall procurement "has continued to squander billions of pounds, enriching some of the worst corporate looters and corrupting public life via the revolving door of officials/lobbyists".

Champions for the MoD such as Michael Fallon and George Robertson have tried to not only hold the UK to our 2% of GDP commitment for defence but to increase this to 2.5% or even 3%. Defence interests - the admirals and generals - have done everything they can to ringfence 'their' 2% to tanks and ships and fast jets. Simply, their ideas are as redundant as the useless carriers we've just acquired.

The USMC has just junked all its tanks.

The decades to come will mean we must fight on the battlegrounds on which we are being attacked - green men, state assassins, cyber war. The ring-fencing that the men in medals want won't work. We need a mash-up of MoD, GCHQ, SIS and MI5, FCDO and the City. We need to throw into the pot the MoD's 2% of GDP, DfID's 0.7% and the billions of secret squirrel money. On the face of it, Sedwill's 'Fusion' idea was in the right direction - but the man had a 'reservation of mind' that meant interests other than the elected government's played a part in his delivery.

And Covid buggers everything. When GDP shrinks by 20%, 2% of that smaller pot will buy far fewer F35s or anti-cricket ball destroyers. Lord Frost will have exactly the right skill set, and will be able to put together exactly the right team to deal with that new reality. And my sincere hope is that Labour's front bench under Starmer can put a broad shoulder behind the UK's national defence and security strategy - after all, they may have to live with it from 2024.    

Wirecard - German corruption comes to bursting point

There's a magnificent lightning storm outside and thunder is roiling in the valley, I have a packed and frantic day ahead anyway and last night at about 9pm to cap it all the crew who had been working since dawn to get the hay in were standing abjectly at my front door. When wrapping the vast hay-balls in the flat field above my back meadow, one of the bales had taken off down the hill and smashed a corner off my barn roof. OK. I'll deal with that as dawn comes. But with regard to the Wirecard fraud story, I hope you'll forgive me for re-posting a 2019 post -

*******************************************************************

30th April 2019
The stench of corruption from Germany's businesses

Back in April 2018 we ran a fairly lengthy piece on German corruption. The German government had in effect encouraged widespread business corruption with law changes that made it easy to get away with - and for the past decade, it has been pervasive, deep and substantial. We quoted a report that found

A staggering 43 percent of German business executives polled by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) think bribery and corruption are fairly commonplace in Europe's economic powerhouse. That's a big jump from just 26 percent in 2015.

So who cares if most of German business is bent, the nation's judicial system ranks with Greece in terms of probity, shareholder protection is amongst the lowest in the developed world and there is little creditor protection? Who cares that courts and lawyers are beyond the reach of most victims, who must passively take the hits from German corrupt dealing?  Well, we wrote

This deep and endogenous German economic corruption will not play well in the rest of Europe. The UK, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations, with low levels of corruption and high scoring of commercial rectitude and probity, will be feeling fouled by contact with German corruption - and will now be adding up the commercial losses that German crookedness has cost them. The southern nations will be aggrieved that they have been bullied, coerced and hectored by a deeply crooked nation wearing a false disguise of moral superiority. And eastern nations such as Poland and Bulgaria, countries Germany has robbed of billions of Euros in corrupt complicity with Gazprom, will be looking at concrete measures to get their money back.

Yesterday Matthew Lynn broke yet another tale of German corruption in the Telegraph. The latest scandal is fraud at Wirecard - a rapidly ascending start-up that replaced the moribund Commerzbank in Germany's DAX index. The Telegraph and the FT are reluctant to be too specific; one suspects m'learned friends are hovering, and even the linked piece in the Anti-Corruption Digest is careful. Lynn writes

We have an image of Germany as a very law-abiding country, and on one level that is certainly true. The streets are safe, and no one can pay a bribe to get out of a parking fine.... yet right at the top of the country’s biggest companies it is starting to look painfully obvious there is an honesty issue.

The Germans are fond of portraying themselves as the exemplars of responsible, socially conscious capitalism. In truth, however, the hypocrisy is starting to become nauseating. There is clearly something rotten within Germany’s business culture – and even worse, no one seems to want to do anything about it.

It is the sort of casual, 'who cares?' corruption that saw Martin Selmayr's crooked appointment to EU capo shrugged off and Germany's biggest industrial names reduced to international gutter reputations no better than bootlegging prohibition gangsters.

So don't be surprised that when the downturn begins to bite, the entire German commercial edifice comes tumbling down - and the German economy proves as much of a paper tiger as did Soviet military might in 1989.
*********************************************************************
Ends

Siemens, VW, DB and all the other past disgraces and now Wirecard. But why has it taken 14 months since Matthew Lynn broke the story (carefully) in the 'graph? Germany's business culture stinks like week-old Mackerel, and the Autumn will see an overflowing of the German bent business cesspit as the Covid recession bites far deeper than the bubble-bursting I was expecting when I penned that piece. You'll need your facemasks - the stench will reach every corner of Europe.

They must let Scotland go

No, no not the nation. The Blairite life-peer who has headed the Commonwealth secretariat for the last four years, and whose term is now coming to an end. We are about to embark into the world as a sovereign independent nation seeking trade deals, new relationships, a post-globalist and internationalist thrust, a re-orientation of perspective. What qualities would you look for in a Secretary-General?

Well they probably wouldn't be those displayed by Scotland. Hauteur. Extravagance. A dodgy contract awarded to her mate from Bradford. Some 50 breaches of procurement rules perhaps awarding contracts to other chums. An illegal Tongan maid. Scotland is a very grand lady indeed, and she seems to love the pomp and status that goes with the job, the Commonwealth less so. In response to what is seen as chaotic and potentially corrupt mismanagement of the Commonwealth secretariat, the UK suspended its £4.7m annual contribution earlier this year until acceptable financial controls are in place.

The UK is just a member amongst many, of course, but is amongst the Commonwealth's biggest players. One assumes the CW would therefore look to another of the big hitters - India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia - to provide the next Secretary General. So far, Canada, Guyana, Nigeria, New Zealand and India have already provided post-holders. So Malaysia remains a possibility, as does Australia - but counter forces are at play.

First, Patricia Scotland doesn't want to go and has mobilised one or two of her Caribbean chums to support her. Secondly, in an era of BLM, the CW will be looking for potential candidates from Africa or the Caribbean. However, the next four years will bring many changes and challenges for our Commonwealth, and we need someone other than Scotland at the helm - for the sake of the organisation's 2.4 billion citizens from 54 nations including us.

Postscript

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Don't discount Chinese dirty tricks for this appointment - they want to block India, Australia and independent Pacific rim states and promote their tame African politicians, their mouths stuffed with Belt-and-Road gold.

And don't discount that the government's opposition to Patricia Scotland may involve similar reasons to which we aren't privy. 

Sadiq Khan and Chief Dick - we're watching you

Policing a demonstration in modern times needs several things. It needs sections of coppers trained to work together, it needs a stock of fireproof overalls, helmets and protective equipment for them to wear, it needs live monitoring and surveillance of the crowds and above all it needs police managers and commanders of talent and ability.

The BLM march two weeks ago was a disaster for the Met. Officers in light summer patrol dress with soft caps faced a baying, vicious and violent mob, and turned, ran and abandoned our democratic heart to vandalism and graffiti. Command was chaotic, a counter plan unapparent. The Gold commander of that farce, whether straight or gay, male or female, black or white, must be removed from duty. We cannot pretend it was anything other than gross mismanagement.

Last week's protests were better commanded, with only two major lapses - the unmanned barriers and an open footway at King Charles St in the morning, and a failure to anticipate the clashes on the South Bank after 5pm.

Then there was the assault on the PM's car following PMQs this week. A group of more than six protesters was gathered in contravention of the law. Specifically, s.7 of the The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Regulations 2020,

7.—(1) During the emergency period, unless paragraph (2) applies, no person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place—

(a)outdoors, and consists of more than six persons

They were watched by a few bored plods who were watching the nice shiny cars coming out of the palace of Westminster rather the protesters around them. One of the mob ran at the PM's vehicle, there was an emergency stop and a collision. It could have been an Islamist with a sticky bomb. Fail.

Again tomorrow, thugs will gather in London to seek to break the law, vandalise and destroy the public realm and to create fear and disturbance. We expect nothing less from the Met than that they uphold the laws made by our Parliament, a Parliament we elected. We expect the Met to prevent and to disperse any illegal gatherings of more than 6. We expect the Met to enforce the provisions of the Public Order Act. We expect the Met to safeguard our democratic heart in SW1, and to prevent mob damage to our national monuments.

Sadiq Khan and Cressida Dick, the eyes of the entire nation are on you tomorrow. We're watching you. We're watching you very closely.

Unpoliced illegal gathering - Chief Dick, please note

Told ya ...

From Wednesday 6th May

I have no confidence at all that the tracing app being developed by Whitehall will work. If it's up to the abysmal standards of error, malfunction, delay and inadequacy that have characterised the rest of the actions of the Department of Health, it will collapse half an hour after release, the first week''s central data will be hacked, warning SMS messages will be sent to everyone by mistake and the bluetooth errors will destroy thousands of phones.

Ahem. 

Fish reality starts to sink-in

Remainer minds are remarkably resilient, and none more so than that of Jeremy Warner in the 'graph. The poor chap can simply not conceive that control of our 200 mile EEZ is more important to the nation than bankers' bonuses. Even now it takes more torque than dragging your granny away from Corrie to penetrate that kind of thinking. Again today Warner writes

If it is true that the EU is on the verge of conceding that Britain should have the same control over fishing rights as enjoyed by Norway, it seems reasonable to assume that there will be no concessions on equivalence. An economically hugely important sector is about to be sacrificed to the politics of an insignificant one.

Jeremy, sweetie, listen up.

It really is not a matter of the EU 'conceding' anything. From next year under international law the UK becomes an independent coastal state. The EU have absolutely no say in the matter, none at all. They cannot prevent it. It is a matter of immutable fact.

How has the EU managed to convince an otherwise sane and rational man against all the evidence, the law, the actuality, that they still have some sort of say over this happening? Incredible.

Bone-headed ain't in it.

And don't worry about the City. The timezone, the language, the judicial system and courts and above all the critical mass of analogous expertises in a world city of unparalleled attractions will mean dull, provincial little towns with a mime theatre and two massage parlours such as Frankfurt will never come close to being a threat.

Biden, champion of the tech giants?

1911 was a key year for Standard Oil. It was the year the US courts decided that the company had been misusing its size and market strength to restrict and distort competition, and the company was ordered to be broken up. Hence we got Esso and Mobil instead, joined a few decades later by BP, Shell, Chevron, Gulf Oil and Texaco, the 'Seven Sisters' that dominated the world petroleum market until the 1970s. Which was of greater benefit to the consumer, monopoly or oligopoly? The arguments rumble on.

It's worthwhile looking back at some of those earliest criticisms of Standard. In the UK and in the EU, we're hearing the same noises about the US tech giants, and like the opposition to standard oil, the arguments may appear to be about economics or (today) freedom of speech, but are also very much about human mistrust of large, powerful corporations that are not subject to local or democratic control. And this is where the proffered solutions expose the supranationalists and separate them from the anti-Globalists; if you want Facebook to be subject to UK regulation in the UK, you're likely an anti-Globalist. If you want some sort of over-riding international internet authority to have jurisdiction, you're a dangerous supranationalist.

This is more than just about who regulates your gran's baby pictures on FB. If Biden beats Trump this November, a requirement to accept US hegemony in the form of the tech giants may be a cost attached to a trade deal - remember, socialism is a Globalist construct. For the EU, distaste for the tech giants is also about an endogenous dislike of what they see as transatlantic cultural imperialism. It's been a long time growing; the first time back in the '80s when I watched Die straßen von San Francisco dubbed into German in an Amsterdam hotel room you could see the way things were going. There are simply no home-grown alternatives to Netflix and Amazon Prime anywhere in the EU, and it hurts.

It may be an uncomfortable realisation for both those in the UK and the EU who dislike the power of the tech giants, but their best hope lies in Trump's re-election in November. His recent spat with Twitter brought the revocation of a clause in a 1996 US law - 'Section 230' - into view. If he does so, it would cripple the power of the tech giants - and make many on this side of the Atlantic very happy. And this may just be the only policy aspect upon which Rejoiners and Brexiteers will ever agree.

Update
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The government clearly need to refine the 2m rule. Do they really think the British people are too thick to understand a more nuanced approach? Here's my suggestion - feel free to tear holes in it.

A few hundred thugs

I watched closely yesterday the live footage transmitted from the London protests on both You Tube and Periscope, and as I know the areas of the events intimately, had a decent appreciation of the geography of protest. Here's what I saw.

The Cenotaph incursion
The area permitted for the counter-demonstration was Parliament Square and Whitehall up to King Charles St - the street that separates the Treasury and Foreign Office. There was a double row of steel barriers across the road, but the footway on the south side was left open. Those gathered at about 10am were largely the peaceful ex-servicemen and the responsible early risers. The Whitehall barriers were staffed only by two bored police officers in patrol dress engaged in deep conversation. The counter protestors used their initiative in the absence of a police presence and surged over the barriers and up the footway to gather around the Cenotaph. Non violent.

Trafalgar Square
The march from the Dorchester was sparsely attended. BLM-UK had cancelled the official march so those that went straight to Trafalgar Square were unofficial and largely peaceful protesters. I saw animated protest but no violence.

The Thugs arrive
I can only assume the thugs on both sides are late sleepers, or maybe they preferred to get stoned or intoxicated away from the main protest areas, but it was about 1pm before the snide Chinese knock-offs of Hugo Boss leisure wear (oh the multiple ironies) began to be visible at the counter-protest and the hooded Antifa-cadets in Trafalgar Square.

There followed several provocative incidents initiated by the far-right thugs. They assaulted the police on the now-defended King Charles St barrier. A small group tried to invade the BLM protest in Trafalgar Square, and were cornered and beaten. The latter incident was carefully staged and filmed by the racists, who broadcast it on social media tagged as 'innocent' counter protesters going about their lawful business being set upon by black people. It was so transparently an attempt to incite violence as to be laughable.

5 pm
As the 5pm deadline for the end of the protests arrived, the police in Trafalgar square opened up exits to Charing Cross Road and the Strand, and at about 8 minutes past, the entire square emptied peacefully and in good order up the steps to the National Gallery and then towards St Martins.

In Parliament Square, the peaceful counter-protesters and armed forces veterans also left, their stewards litter-picking the area, clearing the bottles and rubbish into bin sacks which were piled for the Council to collect. A hard core of BF/ NF / EDL / BNP far-right racist thugs remained, looking for opportunities for violence. The thug who pissed in the corner adjacent to Keith Palmer's memorial was one such.

Aftermath

This was an affair of the thugs of both sides seeking each other out. The BLM thugs crossed Waterloo Bridge headed for the station, the Britain First thugs Hungerford and Westminster bridges, and there were isolated violent incidents at Waterloo Station.

Patrick Hutchinson - a top bloke in so many ways - rescues a foolish man

Sadiq Khan
The events of the past two weekends, and his statements to the press, have demonstrated beyond doubt that Khan is simply unfit to be Mayor of London. A shifty little narcissist, uninspired, untalented and with an ability only to affect the standard Labour glottal stop that the comrades imagine makes them sound attractive to working people, the people of London deserve so much better. Much more on this as time goes on.

Overall, the day was one of peaceful protest, generally well managed policing with two serious lapses (the unguarded Whitehall barrier in the morning, the chaotic and responsive policing of the limited violent post-protest incidents on the South Bank) and not much to see. It was a victory for public order, and a fail for the few hundred violent thugs from both sides.

The truth is, there's some crap science out there

Looking back at the blog posts here in the week or so before the UK lockdown on 24th March, it is clear we all knew the likely risk of the Wuhan virus - roughly, a fatality rate of 1% and an R rate of around 2.3. That would give around 520,000 excess deaths if no action was taken. Those figures came as the median values from a large range of speculative figures from a host of scientists, and like a normal distribution curve there were some extreme outliers at either end of the bell curve. One of which, as the Speccie reports, is being touted by anti-government broadcaster Channel 4 - a silly forecast of over three times the median forecasts, with a potential 1.7m fatalities, from numpty scientists in a competing department at Imperial.

The posts also record, to be frank, in the days before lockdown, the scientific prediction that the measures would reduce the number of excess deaths to around 20,000. Well, they were way off with that one. We've already had 64,000 excess deaths.

In fact, as emerging evidence now suggests, everyone was already taking isolating measures a week before lockdown, again reported in the Speccie. We really aren't just sheep, and given the right information, we can make decisions for ourselves.

The confused but anti-government media are already making much of the testimony given by the discredited scientist Neil Ferguson to the Commons Science Select Committee. Testimony that is patently false given the probability that the disease had peaked a week before lockdown.

It seems that there is still a lot of crap science out there, and I have great sympathy for Boris and ministers who can't tell in advance who is a crap scientist and who is pukka, and even some sympathy for journalists who dropped all science in the fourth form in favour of arts and media subjects, and can't even add up a shopping bill let alone understand pandemic maths. The idiocy comes when, as Peston does, they then attempt to explain science they don't themselves understand.

Add to this the downright mendacity, distortion, omission and misrepresentation by scientific and government bodies when faced with scientific evidence they don't like, ably documented by both Dick Puddlecote and Christopher Snowdon. Some crap science is because they don't know better, some is because they refuse to listen. We need to be wary of both.

Bristol study from the Speccie - virus peaked a week before lockdown

Euro on path to crash and burn

The scenes of mob rule in our cities will I fear trickle on until George Floyd's funeral on Tuesday. I will refrain from comment today as the near-riots are still too fresh.  

It was AEP who nudged my thoughts. I take his column with a pinch of salt, but he is right to anticipate problems from our response to the crisis.  People are saving and paying down card debt, using the furlough splurge as an opportunity to retrench. Consumer demand is down, and the whole supply side constrained by the virus closures. In the autumn this will turn into full blown recession as unemployment will rise to maybe 10%. And all the while we're printing money by the tanker-load and pumping it into assets that are inflated like a Peking duck. The stock market should be crashing, so should property prices. Well, what do you think will happen when too much money chases too few goods?

It may of course be a cunning plan. There are three ways of dealing with debt; pay it down, inflate it away or default on it. Inflation of 5% - 10% a year for three or four years would certainly make a massive dent in the national debt, but would leave millions of ordinary folk in dire straits. The effect on the Euro nations would be the same, as AEP writes

Prof Polleit said the ECB is walking in the steps of the German Reichsbank in the early Twenties. “We’re not heading for hyperinflation of course but in some ways it is similar. The Reichsbank started buying a little, and then a bit more, until they realised that it was out of control,” he said.

Weimar inflation was a diabolic disturbance of the settled social order. Speculators made fortunes overnight. Diligent law-abiding citizens were pauperised, losing their bank savings and paper securities. The sense of injustice drained the Weimar Republic of its legitimacy.

So here's a question for you. If anyone has a few bob in the bank, what should they buy with it now, to ensure they're one of the speculators that does well, rather than one of the paupers?

Source: Zerohedge

Public order and disorder

Forget the silly copycat virtue signalling on the streets of London - I think this was merely our exuberant minority having a post-lockdown knees-up - but the riots in the US really do point to an endogenous problem in American policing. A comment to the post below reminded us that the opposite to love is not hate but indifference. It was indifference that gave us Bergen-Belsen and the casual murderous brutality of the Nazis; they simply didn't care enough even to feed or keep alive their victims. The worst crime in the eyes of these beasts was not to be Jewish or Communist but to be inconvenient. This I think is also the problem at the heart of US police violence - indifference.

Many aspects of the US are counter-intuitive. I love this map -

It shows the predominant ethnic origin of each county and the most common is ... German. Apart from Utah and the old states of the NE coast, the English are nowhere. So prevalent was German culture in the US that on the eve of the Great War, the country was ambivalent as to which side to support. This has nothing to do with the seats of the riots, the major conflagrations in LA, NY, Chicago, Atlanta and of course Minneapolis, but I throw it out as an explainer of a cultural difference between the UK and US that we sometimes cannot quite understand.

We have of course no equivalent of the National Guard either. The ease with which the US has used these armed citizens in the past decades, including for those who recall it the shooting dead of 13 students at Kent State University in 1970, is also utterly alien to British culture.

Our own most recent riots in 2011 proved the efficacy of the country's mass surveillance systems. Some 1,292 persons were jailed for a total of 1,800 years. This at least must prove some sort of disincentive to the anarchic inciters, even if it also poses civil liberties concerns for the rest of us.

David Lammy may be happy to be seen trying to start this disorder in the UK, but we really are very different nations. 

No-deal seems like a done deal

As the claims, accusations and counter claims bounce back and forth across the Channel this week between David Frost and M Barnier in advance of what is likely to be the final round of talks, at least in advance of an intervention by the Prime Minister with VDL, take comfort in considering that it is all just window dressing and that no-deal is now pretty much inevitable. As John Keiger writes in the Speccie

After Britain’s chief negotiator’s broadside of a letter a few weeks ago on the need for the EU negotiators to get real, David Frost added a further nail to the negotiation's coffin. On 27 May, he announced that a fishing deal with the EU would be ‘very difficult’. But in reality, each Brexit negotiator is merely going through the motions. The pointilliste dots of individual decisions made elsewhere clearly paint a no-deal Brexit picture.

Keiger lists the manifold factors that predicate against a deal. Liability for the EU €750bn bailout, markets so distorted by state-aid that the EU playing field now has the slope and contours of a Welsh village rugby pitch and the fact that business has already decided that a no-deal outcome is the one for which to plan. Not only is Nissan deserting Spain for the UK but the company may close their Renault plant in France also, and bring Micra production back to the UK. Macron, having just bunged Renault €5bn, is not happy.

Over the weekend we have had the opening salvos, summarised effectively by the Daily Express. First an 'ultimatum' from M Barnier that he will walk away from talks if the UK doesn't back down on our red lines, then our chaps saying the EU was being unrealistic. This public bombast will continue. In the past we've allowed the French to do all the histrionic shouting, considering somehow that it was beneath us, but a new age under Boris has brought a touch of the Twickenham bleachers to our approach, and we now shout back. If Keiger is right, it's actually about establishing in advance who is to blame. Not us.

Four weeks to go. The pressure of the global corporates and foreign interests on the UK press and media will continue. They're not helped by the tsunami of QE that is artificially inflating asset prices like the skin of  a Peking duck; once the air has been let out, there is actually very little flesh on those sparse bones, but today it's hard to argue that it's the prospect of a no-deal that is depressing share prices.

There remains a flash of amusement in the pro-globalist publicity offensive. In the Telegraph, which has bled readers as the Barclay Brothers have abandoned their pro-Brexit stance, it's Jeremy Warner who is today the prophet of gloom and despondency. I'm eagerly anticipating AEP's first ever bouncy and optimistic take on our economic prospects.

Their freedom - and ours

For any libertarian, the Chinese gangster regime is an anathema. Micro control of citizens, the extinguishing of democracy, suffocation of freedoms of thought, movement and expression, mass executions, organ harvesting, state-tolerated piracy, officially sponsored cyber crime, corruption, injustice and the endemic mendacity of one-party propaganda. And I can write that without a scintilla of hyperbole - we have actually grown to accept this monolithic behemoth and its manifold and hateful repression of the human spirit as normal.

Hong Kong is the possibly the first time in modern history that pro-democracy protesters have waved the Union flag not as a symbol of colonial oppression but as a symbol of hope and liberation, the symbol of every freedom that is hateful to the gangster regime in Beijing. There are some 300,000 BNO passport holders in HK and we must welcome the moves by the FCO to extend their rights to live and work in the UK from six months to a year, and to unlock for them an easy path to full citizenship and permanent residence. The success they have made of HK betokens their economic vitality, agility, tenacity and appetite for hard work and application. Our universities should be filled not with the products of the PRC and the financial control that has enslaved several Oxford colleges and Russell group institutions to Huawei, but with the children of the free entrepreneurs of HK. They would add immeasurably to the common wealth of our nation, strengthen the reach and status of the City of London and add dynamism, innovation and thrusting growth to our economy, in exactly the way as did the Ugandans expelled by Idi Amin.

Already Brexit is allowing us to return our view back to a perspective we had almost lost, to the Anglosphere. The joint UK / US / NZ and Australian approach to China's moves in HK is absolutely crucial - in effect the Five Eyes nations confirming their solidarity. Boris's thrown-out notion of a D10 - a group of ten democracies - formed of the G7 plus India, South Korea and Australia to challenge China on specifically 5G to start with but potentially much more, is a clever move to not only re-orient UK foreign policy away from Europe but to give Germany, France and Italy a thump to the head to divert their own focus away from their collective navels and out towards the world.

Above all we must rapidly re-engineer the economy to supplement or replace reliance on China for anything. Diversification. At a time when we will have, in six months, the capacity to allow British Internationalism to blossom - including our unilateral ability to impose sanctions, form treaties and alliances and so on, our place as the world's fifth largest economy will not be insubstantial. In diplomatic terms we already box above our weight, and that ability will grow and mature as the FCO learns for the first time in forty years to think for itself.

China's actions over HK could well blow-back at the gangster regime in more ways than one - and could be the dawn of a new era for a Britain free from the EU.