tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53510724940672204352024-02-19T17:59:55.889-08:00Pete North Politics BlogPete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.comBlogger1746125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-46533245150628753942021-11-30T00:13:00.011-08:002021-11-30T00:46:35.485-08:00Only Ukip will stand up for womenKeir Starmer says it's wrong to say that only women have a cervix. He knows that isn't true. We know it isn't true. The whole of the Labour front bench knows it isn't true and so does every woman. Yet to avoid the wrath of the left, the Labour party, universities and public institutions have to pretend otherwise. <div><br /></div><div>This is not without consequence. The Lords says that transgender prisoners who identify as female and have been convicted of sexual offences should be housed in male prisons. Police forces are recording suspected and convicted rapists as female if they say they are. The official record will state the gender they chose to identify themselves as. </div><div><br /></div><div>Suddenly the crime statistics report a surge of sexual violence committed by women. Funny that. We're now at the point where it is an offence to refer to a man as a man, and local media reporting acts of male violence on women must refer to offenders as women if they say they are. To say otherwise invites a contempt charge. </div><div><br /></div><div>Let's not beat around the bush here. The British political class, having adopted transgender ideology, is putting women in danger. The safety of women and girls is subordinate to the sexual fetishes and narcissistic personality disorders of men. This is a disaster.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thankfully the tide is beginning to turn as arms of the state begin to disassociate themselves from embedded charities like Stonewall but there's a long way to go before the system has been fully disinfected. This toxic ideology is still doing harm to women and girls. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlekg5imwjQ&ab_channel=JohnAnderson" target="_blank">Impressionable teens</a> have fallen victim to this social contagion, not dissimilar to anorexia, and are turning to crowd funding sites to raise money for top surgery (the removal of perfectly healthy breasts).</div><div><br /></div><div>Mercifully the NHS is waking up to the junk science of puberty blockers and other voodoo treatments, but far too many young people have been pushed down that avenue without proper clinical process in the name of affirming their identity. There's a word for this. Evil.</div><div><br /></div><div>Every cloud, though, has a silver lining. Women everywhere are waking up to the threat this ideology poses. They are now realising that the fight for women's rights, even the basic right to protected private spaces for women, is never over. Feminism has been complacent but now women are back on the agenda.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the establishment parties, though, this is only skin deep. We saw the candlelit vigils for Sarah Everard (a pretty white girl) but that doesn't go as far as protecting the thousands of teenage girls exploited on our city streets. A decade on from the Rotherham scandal, crimes against girls are still not properly recorded and there's no reason to believe the practice of grooming has been brought under control. Yesterday a further 42 people were charged with CSE offences in Kirklees.</div><div><br /></div><div>As with Black Lives Matter, the virtue signalling doesn't translate into action. We supposedly care about black lives but still, a dozen black teenagers bleed to death in the gutter every month. Sarah Everard gets her vigil, but the victims of "honour offences" (male violence against women) are largely ignored because it's inconvenient to the "diversity makes us stronger" narrative. We've had endless commentary on Sarah Everard, but only a re-tread of a police press release regarding the apparent murder of Sarah Hussein, a young Muslim woman who was "found on fire" in Bury. </div><div><br /></div><div>We would posit that our largely open borders contribute to this hostile environment for women. It may not be politically correct to say so, but south asian men come from remote places where rape culture is the norm. Places where women are property to be used, abused and disposed of how men see fit. Our view is that men who commit these atrocities against women should be on the first plane out of Britain, but even Somali gang rapists get a free pass from human rights lawyers.</div><div><br /></div><div>To address these issues we have to be candid and admit that ethnicity and culture is a factor in the epidemic of sexual violence against women. You can't even begin to fix a problem unless you are able to precisely diagnose it, but our establishment is squeamish about offending sensibilities. Tangentially, if we are serious about helping the most vulnerable refugees, we should seek to safeguard women and children from sexual violence, but instead the RNLI goes out fishing for Muslim men of fighting age. </div><div><br /></div><div>When it comes to it, liberal feminists have a blindspot for violence visited on ethnic minority women, choosing to ignore FGM, forced marriage and honour killings. Teenage girls of Rotherham and Rochdale are too poor to matter. Stella Creasy is supposedly the champion of feminism on the left, but she's preoccupied with her childcare problems (despite taking home an £80k salary).</div><div><br /></div><div>You would think with more women in parliament than ever before that women's safety would get more of an airing, but being seen to be on message matters more. As much as rapists being housed in women's prisons is an outrage, we should be asking why so many women are in prison to begin with. Nobody should be in prison for failing to pay the BBC tax. Nobody should be in prison for defending themselves against their abuser. Most women in prison need help, not incarceration. </div><div><br /></div><div>In every respect women are an afterthought to our political class. We know very little about the effects of Covid vaccines on the menstrual cycle and women have reported irregular and heavy periods. Some post-menopausal women, and people taking hormones which stop their periods, have reported bleeding. Women's concerns are typically brushed off, and they're told not to worry. One wonders if there is even proper clinical surveilance of the effects on women. It is a mistake to assume medicine approvals have taken women <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/we-dont-have-enough-women-in-clinical-trials-why-thats-a-problem" target="_blank">properly into account</a>. You don't have to be an anti-vaxxer to know this matters.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is said that if you vote for Ukip then you let Labour in, but the weight of evidence suggests the Tories are no better than Labour when it comes to defending women. The toxic transgender ideology got a foothold in the highest levels of government on their watch. The PM's wife is whispering wokery in his ear, and he goes along with it for an easy life. </div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, every single promise to control our borders has been broken, the police are more troubled by "hate crime" than child rape, and the courts still uphold the idea that a woman is no more than a pair of breast implants and a surgically modified penis. Your local councils thinks it's "inclusive" to hold drag queen story hours and expose children to the fetishes of men.</div><div><br /></div><div>It goes without saying that Ukip won't put up with any of this. We've had enough. Ukip is the only party who will stand up for women and girls. If you call yourself a feminist it's time for you to part company with the establishment parties. They will will always sell women short because they're cowed by political correctness. That has never been Ukip's problem. </div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-8472201437366689642021-06-01T18:58:00.006-07:002021-07-27T14:04:46.380-07:00Street violence: Britain is now in a state of emergency. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5oTLh7R_Y9SLQnJyF5DZIfyvUT2TMKUug5LPWvIJnZQr5T7JT_aMw-iSgBt8awJXbTLHzl_6_8SGpK4Yb65n-NRBv6A9JxiGywahbd3ws1trQtYkwFuh79z_vrbYr_Ltfq6thT8e8WPo/s1484/point.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="1484" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5oTLh7R_Y9SLQnJyF5DZIfyvUT2TMKUug5LPWvIJnZQr5T7JT_aMw-iSgBt8awJXbTLHzl_6_8SGpK4Yb65n-NRBv6A9JxiGywahbd3ws1trQtYkwFuh79z_vrbYr_Ltfq6thT8e8WPo/w640-h302/point.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />Tonight I am furious. A young man has been rushed to hospital after he was stabbed repeatedly in Hyde Park, London. A large fight broke out with several youths armed with knives seen stabbing the man as he fell to the ground. I saw machetes. The only time I've seen similar footage is from Soweto in Sough Africa.<br /><br />From what I can see, and to the surprise of nobody, they were black. This, just a week after Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson was shot in the head by four black gunmen.<br /><br /><div>Beyond the fury I feel, it just break my heart because for this to happen in Hyde Park, London, in the fading daylight, we have fallen a long way. Britain is supposed to be better than this. It used to be better than this. This stuff is not supposed to happen in my fucking country. We have imported the third world thus we are becoming the third world.<br /><br /><div>And what saddens me most of all, this probably won't even register as a front page headline tomorrow. We are so used to knife crime that this no longer shocks us. This is just a particularly egregious example. <br /><br /><div>And I just know that tomorrow, Twitter will be a torrent of equivocation and denials if it even lasts in the news cycle past lunchtime. Just like when there is an outbreak of antisemitism, politicians have to qualify their condemnation with a concurrent mention of Islamophobia. The same will be true on this. Rather than speaking frankly we will skirt around the issue that this is black on black violence and it has nothing whatsoever to do with "systemic racism" or any other claptrap sociological fad. This is pure savagery.<br /><br /><div>I could talk about the drugs trade. I could talk about the lack of youth services and the lack of good male role models. I could talk about gang culture and its glamorisation in media. But it all seems like intellectual masturbation that isn't actually connected to anything because for all the endless debates and academic papers, it's getting worse and it's getting to a point of no return.<br /><br /><div>If we are now at Soweto levels of criminality then this is no longer a matter of being careful not to tread on race sensibilities. We need police out on the streets in large numbers and they need to be where the gangs are and they need to be stopping and searching people and cars, and they need to be putting these scumbags away for a very long time and where necessary, deportation.<br /><br /><div>We need the police to be able to get out there with the full support of the politicians, ignoring the shit stirrers and the race baiters and do what the majority demands. I am not interested in the bleating of David Lammy and Dawn Butler or the race relations industry. When third world savagery is brought to our streets we owe nobody any explanations for doing whatever is necessary to prevent and deter.<br /><br /></div><div>But then there is no long term resolution to this until such a time as we have an immigration system worthy of the name. It must act with prejudice with public safety as its primary driver. I'm not interested in lectures from leftists about racism when young black men are bleeding to death on the pavements. <div><br /></div><div>Yes we know not all blacks are like that. Yes we know not all Pakistanis are child molesters. But when you have your doors open to the armpits of the world, you have no chance of maintaining a civil society.</div><div><br />We have reached the sorry turning point precisely because we have listened to the equivocation and denials. If there is any chance of arresting the decline then Britain cannot be open to all comers and their extended families. It's not fair on anyone.<div><br />But then we all know this is not going to happen because our supposedly hard line "far right" Tory government is not going to lift a finger, and the odious scumbag mayor of London is going to sweep it under the carpet. The police will retreat every time there is a moral principle to uphold precisely because they cannot count on the backing of the politicians and because they will be smeared and slandered just for doing their jobs.<div><br />It therefore falls to the rest of us to voice our anger like never before and stop voting for all the parties who delivered this abject failure. We cannot allow it to slide off the news agenda and we cannot allow the media to distract us with yet more trivia. It is we who must set the agenda and demand better before there's nothing left to save. Enough is enough.</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-37693545015103236342021-04-26T03:46:00.004-07:002021-04-26T04:47:44.160-07:00Sorry, not sorry. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWdZ7LN8Viyk5smbY_N3dH3WYvGgCH4sqlEWDD-ieaeusq96Qfaob7g3aVmz_2AY7XRs9TUlTrygu3WRI1fwbAEjtXsQaHz8oFFLsSLZMN_knMotyv85JlY8N_YtF6GPKRDoYFrWFQER0/s551/outrage.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="551" data-original-width="550" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWdZ7LN8Viyk5smbY_N3dH3WYvGgCH4sqlEWDD-ieaeusq96Qfaob7g3aVmz_2AY7XRs9TUlTrygu3WRI1fwbAEjtXsQaHz8oFFLsSLZMN_knMotyv85JlY8N_YtF6GPKRDoYFrWFQER0/w399-h400/outrage.png" width="399" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>Wearing a yellow star at a protest, according to Twitter, is strictly off limits. No debate allowed.</p><p>I would agree that it's in very poor taste but groupthinkers will always declare contentious assertions to be in poor taste and off limits rather than engage with the substance. It's a highly effective way of discouraging people from airing contrary opinions. Whenever I'm at the centre of a Twitter storm, which is at least every three months, it's usually because the blue tickers of polite society have declared something I've said is far beyond the pale. I'm not just wrong... I'm evil.</p>I'm of the view, though, that if your protest isn't prickling the sensibilities of polite society then you might as well go home. Protests are meant to spark debate. It's not for blue tick luvvies to dictate what is and isn't offensive or off limits.<div><br />I suppose though, that if you are going to invoke the Holocaust, as the protesters did, they can expect a rough ride of it. Invoking one of the worst human rights atrocities of all time over what could be described as "first world problems" is crass.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then as free thinking adults we are able to park our revulsion and interrogate the assertion made. The protesters clearly think there are parallels, and it is for us to judge if they have a point. Of course the polite society mob is highly selective. As illustrated above, liberal progressives feel able to recruit the Holocaust in service of their anti-Brexit cause. </div><div><br /></div><div>In their minds, though, I can see why they think what they do. At the time we were negotiating a new legal status for EU citizens against a backdrop of rising "recorded hate incidents" (for whatever that's worth), and quasi-fascist propaganda from Arron Banks's Leave.EU. There are parallels with 1930's Germany but only if you rob the circumstances of any context or nuance, so they have to stretch a point to absurdity in order to make it.</div><div><br /></div><div>The more pedestrian truth is that a spike in recoded "hate incidents" is statistically meaningless and nobody in charge of delivering Brexit had any intention of formally discriminating against EU citizens beyond that which is commensurate with leaving the EU citizenship framework. Remainers then invoked Windrush as evidence of a racist agenda, but that's largely the dead hand of bureaucracy at the Home Office as it attempts to meet impossible targets on immigration.</div><div><br /></div><div>But this is hardly the first invocation of the Holocaust in reference to Brexit. Remainers repeatedly assert that our departure from the EU is the leading edge of a wave of right wing populism consuming the country, where even Theresa "field of wheat" May is cast as a fascist demon. Remainers have whipped themselves up into a frenzy of paranoia, and built up a web of ever more outlandish conspiracy theories ranging from Russian bots and shadowy computer algorithms through to outright vote rigging.</div><div><br /></div><div>This peddling of conspiracy theories in polite society raises no eyebrows, nor does anybody take responsibility for whipping up sweet little old dears who take to the streets wearing yellow stars. In fact, it's considered award winning journalism.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then I don't get prickly about the use of yellow stars. I'm hardly one to condemn for making a point in poor taste. It's a highly effective to make a point, hence the runaway success of South Park. And if we really do mean "never again" we always have to evaluate the slippery slopes in our politics to ensure we don't repeat mistakes of the past - and the Holocaust is certainly a relevant benchmark.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>In this the anti-lockdowners see their own parallels in events. And they're not conspiracy theories. What started out as a series of public precautions has mutated into an incoherent bidding war between politicians to see who can be the most draconian, contributing to a climate of fear and paranoia. What we're now seeing is aggressive demands for absolute conformity with the most absurd whims of these politicians. That's where the very frightening parallel is.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is nothing quite so casually brutal and dangerous as a mob imbued with the idea they are acting in the greater good when they take vigilante action against individuals. I've seen that zeal up close and it cannot be reasoned with. It is exactly the same fanaticism of the SS. Leaving aside the politics and the historical context, the behaviours on display are absolutely identical.</div><div><br /></div>Most Covid measures seem to make sense on paper but you can't help but notice that in real life, outside of the cities, it's just risible, indefensible bollocks. London imposes its stupid rules on the country yet the further from London you are, the less necessary they are. But Britain being what it is, the further north you go, the stricter the implementation and enforcement. So Easingwold is enforcing covid rules best confined to London and city public transport while London flouts the rules it sets. It's ridiculous.<br /><br />I'm fine with wearing a mask in our tiny low ceiling village co-op, but in a deserted Boroughbridge Morrisons at 10am on a Wednesday morning you can't help but notice that Covid controls strictly enforced by staff are just daffy. You'd like to think that people would use their common sense but it's actually not that common. Little Hitlers lurk behind every supermarket aisle, and with your average plod being <a href="https://twitter.com/HappyHarryMedia/status/1325014056198172672?s=20" target="_blank">thick as mince</a> you defy your own good judgement just for an easy life.<div><br /></div><div>And that's the danger. Nobody wants to risk a confrontation with a paranoid lunatic or end up on a police cell for talking back to a plod, so we comply. Nobody wants an argument so if a vaccine passport is demand, even by those who have no right to make such demands, we will simply show them our papers. Anyone who then doesn't have the right paperwork is a legal other, and a threat.</div><br />We all want to take sensible precautions but the British jobsworth mentality simply cannot be trusted with more powers. It enjoys being petty, and the most unhinged and paranoid among us are the enablers of it. If they can't allow themselves agency, they'll ensure nobody has it. <div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know where the off ramp for all this is, but I'm pretty sure we have to get off it now before it goes any further simply because it can and will deteriorate the long people are drip fed with a steady diet of scare stories even though we are not longer at the epicentre of the pandemic. It's summer, we have a vaccine, hospitals are now adept at treating Covid, and with it now being endemic, like it or not we now have to manage the risks. We can go into lockdowns to save granny but while we're saving granny, we're killing aunties, brothers and nephews waiting for cancer treatments, while we steal the best years from young people who should be living. </div><div><br /></div><div>If then we have to take to the streets and trample on the sensibilities of polite society and Twitter's blue tick luvvies then so be it. As it happens I am not anti-masks or anti-lockdown but we constant have to reassess and re-evaluate measures that were right at the time and ensure we are not building a prison for ourselves, losing liberties we will have to fight to reclaim. A lot of this stuff; masks, social distancing, the lockdowns felt on balance the right path, but that doesn't mean it feels at all necessary now and those saying so seem unable to assess and reassess a fluid situation.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the use of yellow stars by anti-lockdown protesters is condemned on Twitter, there is an attempt to misframe the argument as though it's just people whining about marginal inconveniences - and comparing it to genocide is simply unacceptable. This is an attempt to shut down the debate. There were Germans after WW2 who confessed to being able to see what was happening. It didn't happen overnight. It was done by small increments over time.</div><div><br /></div><div>At any point people could have spoken out but chose not to. Like anyone, they kept their mouths shut for a quiet life. Where the parallel falls apart, is that the consequences for speaking out are not quite the same. Speaking out against the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews would see you rounded up as one of them. Speaking out was too dangerous.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thank goodness, we are nowhere near that and for the most part we still have freedom of speech, but this is a country where making a quip on Twitter can see PCSOs knocking on your door, and you can be heavily fined for the crime of being "grossly offensive". We are drifting into a culture of censorship where by social media companies can and will shut you down for expressing an opinion counter to the groupthink, and forces on the left are working to ensure there are irrecoverable consequences for falling foul of their ever mutating framework of what is permissible to say in polite society.</div><div><br /></div><div>The convergence of this culture of censorship with growing demands for absolute conformity with the whims of politicians in their ham-fisted attempts to control Covid ought to alarm any lover of freedom. In respect of that, the Holocaust as a historical benchmark of tyranny cannot be off limits to public discourse - on this or any other matter. Every re-examining of the Holocaust not only informs our present day debate but also keeps those memories alive. As is our obligation to do so. </div></div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-75906934066385021112021-04-25T08:57:00.004-07:002021-04-25T15:11:47.450-07:00The Twitter mob is at it again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSeU9-5wT-LBbPRxTqucGR4Sc-68v4QCVJBLjPNf6gg2al_ll3fx7iDdGQFjlHaVwRlAHlzdpSAoM-C_Nd0JTw-lEfz3KwChQ5lSGa7Sf90csiFibWag8eU0aiZtoIIlH8RSZ_70DxnYU/s1280/vp.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSeU9-5wT-LBbPRxTqucGR4Sc-68v4QCVJBLjPNf6gg2al_ll3fx7iDdGQFjlHaVwRlAHlzdpSAoM-C_Nd0JTw-lEfz3KwChQ5lSGa7Sf90csiFibWag8eU0aiZtoIIlH8RSZ_70DxnYU/w640-h360/vp.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>I've stirred up a hornet's nest on Twitter. Again. This time regarding the people who showed up to the anti-lockdown protest wearing yellow star badges. <br /><br />Straight off the bat I said it was crude and "perhaps inappropriate" which is not unequivocal enough for Twitter so all the blue tickers have piled in to call me an antisemite for pointing out that there are certain parallels, assuming that the point pertains to vaccine passports.<br /><br /><div>Just for clarity, I have absolutely no animosity toward Jews or Israel except for the horrible paint job on their F15s which caused me no end of problems when I attempted to model it. <br /><br /><div>The thing about Nazi Germany, though, or indeed any authoritarian regime, is that it did not happen overnight. It happened by way of salami slices over time to which the public largely consented, or did not offer any outright opposition. Though the motivation comes from another place with Covid measures there are two similar patterns. One of casual acceptance and secondly, herd conformity.<br /><br /></div><div>The concern with vaccine passports is that they could be used as a mode of bureaucratic coercion, and as with masks, if you don't conform, you are then singled out and ostracised. <br /><br /><div>No vaccine passport? You can't shop here.<br />No vaccine passport, you can't come in this GP surgery.<br />No vaccine passport, you can't apply for x benefits.<br />No VP, you cant...<br />Where does it stop? <br /><br /><div>You then see individuals and mobs taking vigilante action against individuals, especially so in a climate of irrational fear - which is going to happen when the media is running lurid scare stories and the government is at it as well. When you formalise it by way of vaccine passports, essentially creating vaccine apartheid, you enable irrational prejudice. <br /><br /></div><div>The more pedestrian truth of the matter is that someone in a beer garden who isn't vaccinated or isn't wearing a mask in a beer garden is unlikely to kill you. Especially not with half the population vaccinated and in what we can essentially call summer. <br /><br /><div>At no point have I said it is directly comparable with the Holocaust, only that the exact same authoritarian human behaviours are on display. So that leaves the question of whether such parallels are proportionate. Perhaps not but do recall that we went from handwashing advice through to partial lockdowns through to politicians openly debating compulsory vaccination, curfews and putting soldiers on the streets. It could happen because politicians pander to the worst instincts of curtain twitchers unless there are enough people willing to speak out. <br /><br /><div>As ever, the reaction on Twitter largely confirms much of what I fear. Today I've been called everything but a child of god, with subsequent demands to simply "wear a mask" even though that's not actually what the debate was about. I'm not unequivocally anti-mask as you know. Or anti-lockdowns for that matter.<br /><br /><div>As usual people are piling in to register their disapproval and disgust. This isn't about safety. This is about their self-righteousness and a demand for conformity. And that really IS the point. They demand I obey, do not question, and insist that dissent is off limits and indeed debate is simply beyond the pale.<br /><br /><div>It is precisely that kind of herd conformity and thought policing that makes people hesitate to express a different opinion. In my case it doesn't matter because I've already been cast as an "actual nazi" for having expressed far right opinions such as joining Efta, increasing the foreign aid budget and clamping down on people smugglers. It's a wonder I'm tolerated in polite society at all.</div><div><br />But when you successfully silence people you are then free to take whatever freedoms you like, There were plenty of Germans who could have spoken up but didn't.<br /><br /><div>I am told this comparison is strictly off limits. Far beyond the pale and utterly offensive. But of course offence is subjective. The protesters have certainly highlighted the the issue and started a debate - which is what protests are supposed to do. No protest has ever succeeded by minding its manners, being careful not to tread on the sensibilities of polite society. I doubt I would have gone that far, but if there is a lesson from the Holocaust it is that things you didn't think were likely or possible in your country do happen, the people who think they're the most virtuous are usually accomplices to it, and it always happens with public consent.<br /><br /><div>I've seen for myself on Twitter multiple videos of individuals harassing people in shops for not wearing masks. When people are living in fear, their worst instincts take over. Ordinarily good, decent people will give way to their fears, and they will gang up on anyone they've been told is a threat. We therefore have to be very careful about any government measure that effectively codifies a basis for such prejudice.<div><br />It all comes down to how much you trust British jobsworth bureaucracy with your freedom. I'm not a Covid denier, nor especially a lockdown sceptic or an anti-masker, but I do think twice about lending government powers they are unlikely to return. That above all is the lesson from history.<div><div class="stjgntxs ni8dbmo4 l82x9zwi uo3d90p7 h905i5nu monazrh9" data-visualcompletion="ignore-dynamic" style="border-radius: 0px 0px 8px 8px; font-family: inherit; overflow: hidden;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="cwj9ozl2 tvmbv18p" style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 4px;"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-10445592195087521092021-04-25T01:51:00.000-07:002021-04-25T01:51:10.050-07:00Britain is at the end of its Covid tether<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN2t4VDxLzcrAiHHEkhwMJJ2A-O2dEJAZ3R2AfDW0cLAEEJeKzAexc-NCS04HshF7n_RrEAq_LXYtKMSYllS6dZsOjRAfvZd4MruEttCo8huljmqDUXc5WLjcn2OnNixdAiGH_n9tr6WU/s614/lock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="345" data-original-width="614" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN2t4VDxLzcrAiHHEkhwMJJ2A-O2dEJAZ3R2AfDW0cLAEEJeKzAexc-NCS04HshF7n_RrEAq_LXYtKMSYllS6dZsOjRAfvZd4MruEttCo8huljmqDUXc5WLjcn2OnNixdAiGH_n9tr6WU/w640-h360/lock.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />There was a huge anti-lockdown demonstration in London yesterday. About this time last year I was saying the people led us into lockdown and they will lead us out again when the time is right. I do not know for a fact if that time is now, but I generally trust the instinct of the crowd if not their arguments.<br /><br />The facts are that Covid is generally a winter virus. There is a vaccine the powers that be thinks is going to work, masks are of limited use, and people are fed up with it all.<div> <br />So is that latter factor reason enough to open up? To a point, yes. Government has to be by consent. A partial lifting of controls for many is no different to a complete lockdown. Particularly business owners. There is little merit in waiting for the young to be vaccinated. For the most part they don't need it.<br /><br /><div>The protest most certainly had its crank wing, and the civil liberties complaints do seem a little unhinged, and on balance I probably wouldn't have joined the protest, but I am glad they did it all the same if only as a gentle reminder that there is only so much we will take. I don't want to see vaccine passports and the sooner we can put our masks in the bin the better. <br /><br /><div>What one should note about the protest is the lack of silly face painting, SWP placards and Unison banners. This was no orchestrated middle class white whinge. This was 100% authentic. And it was massive. There were no rich lobbying organisations paying to bus people in like the so-called People's Vote marches. This is only going to grow and it's not going to ask for permission.<div><br />I think the government will likely take note of it and it will probably influence policy unless we see a new surge of the virus in which case we will probably see a continuation of current controls but no tighter restrictions. Anything over and above what is presently asked of us will likely see repeated demonstrations which could evolve into a yellow vest style movement across the country.<br />In the meantime we will no doubt see every "expert" and his dog chiming in to condemn it, but like Brexit, people will ignore the hectoring and come to their own conclusions.<div><br />My hunch is that it's all a bit premature and there is no room for complacency but by the same token, the government has had its window to get its act together and if it hasn't by now then it never will. The virus is now endemic, and to a point is controllable. The public cannot be asked to make further sacrifices to make up the shortfall of government competence. We're going to have to manage the risks.<br /><br /></div><div>Over the summer months I think we can afford to ditch social distancing, and masks in most instances save for public transport and small shops. Depending on what the numbers are doing in late October should inform the next move, but I'm inclined to think, given people's natural propensity to semi-hibernate over winter, further lockdowns are not required and cannot be sustained politically. The government is going to have to devise a coherent shielding policy if only for propaganda purposes.<br /><br /></div><div>We will likely see panic in some quarters as India and Brazil struggle to cope with a Covid surge but it should be recalled that it works globally the same way it does nationally as a series of outbreaks bubbling up all over concurrently. There are no "waves" as such. Just outbreaks of varying concentration and intensity.<div><br />As to whether we have now established a national "herd immunity" is well outside my capacity to comment, but it is reasonable to assume we have being that it has now swept through every town and village. The job of the government is now to ensure hospitals can cope with surges. With new established treatments and the vaccine, the rationale for further lockdowns looks weak. At this point it should be able to cope. If it can't then it's a management issue, not a medical issue.</div><div><br />I'm not quite ready to join them at the barricades just yet but I am certainly leaning in that direction. This is as much a political assessment as a medical one and on balance we have to consider the growing mental health crisis along with cancer backlogs. As a public health issue, we can no longer afford to give Covid the exclusive priority and the young need to live. We need to see from the government that the direction of travel is away from sledgehammer measures especially when it keeps missing the nut.<div><div class="stjgntxs ni8dbmo4 l82x9zwi uo3d90p7 h905i5nu monazrh9" data-visualcompletion="ignore-dynamic" style="border-radius: 0px 0px 8px 8px; font-family: inherit; overflow: hidden;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="cwj9ozl2 tvmbv18p" style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 4px;"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-75056656620139719512021-02-11T04:33:00.003-08:002021-02-11T04:36:48.757-08:00Brexit: customs in the digital domain<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTw4BG9ndd2hWDDWCnZKKzHmCxXA-Ss71PtZh0tVwZW5jnIO-l05rfARzkBvCjtJJw6oFjIRnnwZv60wT_NhigbUv-IiFNX3hOuIjf6y_E1p4_kixUcoRMq9DKMHDDmGkeqTQQYN9Dqe4/s640/loginpageslide1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="472" data-original-width="640" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTw4BG9ndd2hWDDWCnZKKzHmCxXA-Ss71PtZh0tVwZW5jnIO-l05rfARzkBvCjtJJw6oFjIRnnwZv60wT_NhigbUv-IiFNX3hOuIjf6y_E1p4_kixUcoRMq9DKMHDDmGkeqTQQYN9Dqe4/w640-h472/loginpageslide1.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />The media likes to talk about "customs paperwork" as though it were an insurmountable nightmare. It used to be but it's far simpler now than it ever has been. There are dozens of free-to-use online portals to create the necessary documentation. <br /><br />The forms themselves are designed to a UN standard - United Nations/Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (UN/EDIFACT), approved and published by UNECE. <br /><br />Every form, be it a certificate of origin (eCert) or SPS certificate, has its own XML schema which are now universal. There's about forty different types but for most exporters only three or four are required - depending on what you're exporting. <br /><br />Electronic customs data exchange is nothing particularly new, but UN/EDIFACT comprise a set of internationally agreed standards, directories, and guidelines for the electronic interchange of structured data, between independent computerized information systems. The data standards allowed developers to build form standards into their own software while more causal exporters can use third party online portals. <br /><br />This has been moving toward a single window system for some time where exporters log on to a portal to fill in and submit documents, and request the necessary electronic approvals from regulatory authorities. Your applications then get an electronic rubber stamp. Single windows mean standardised information will only need to be submitted once - and your transactions pre-authorised by a chamber of commerce. <br /><br />The electronic from standards and exchange protocols have been around for a long time, and in 2018, the EU built mandatory e-declarations into the Union Customs Code. The next step is to build in smart contracts to automate stakeholder compliance tasks. The aim is to eliminate all paper from the process, while creating a secure portal that contracting parties, regulatory and customs authorities can see, based on Blockchain. Data is then immutable thus eliminating the possibility of fraud and port corruption. Fans of The Wire will recall why this might be useful in container ports. <br /><br />As it stands the system is not all that onerous, particularly if you have a dedicated shipping manager responsible for customs formalities. Standard data exchange formats mean that business mainframes can automatically populate the certificates and central data repositories can do all the rules of origin maths from a data bank of trade preferences. <br /><br />The technology is already there, as is the methodology - and once a consignments loaded on to a truck and dispatched, if the system knows the registration of the lorry, the ANPR cameras as as good a means as any to notify ports and border authorities that goods have crossed a border. Though ANPR is probably antiquated now. <br /><br />Authorities can flag registration plates if they have any cause for concern and intercept. As per the TCA and UCC, Customs controls, other than random checks, "shall" primarily be based on risk analysis using electronic data-processing techniques. <br /><br />There is presently no real reason, short of a failure to invest, that Norwegian truckers passing into Sweden should have to queue in a portacabin to get their certificates stamped. That this was ever held up as an example of trade friction EEA members experienced was ridiculous. <br /><br />Similarly, there was never any reason to outright dismiss technological solutions as part of the solution for Northern Ireland. As we noted at the time, though, the regulatory checks were the larger problem and as yet there isn't a computer system that can stick a thermometer up a chicken's bum. <br /><br />As the Commission reminded us frequently during Article 50 talks, a customs union alone would have <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaOOTtWi1I7vZdreENeqmVkKh5y1G9GbZIncgxJHDUzpHhulTrUoKwD-HrziQVjJuIJLzcV8-JljOe35JWkmP3pmjaaiwzbm_Yhm9PMTlWAv0EXYFhGm1n2FQSLnDAofs2WpINBOtEutY/s1600/mongs.jpg">accomplished very little</a> and the the only value as such would be to reduce exposure to tariffs demanded by rules of origin - which would likely be of considerably smaller concern had we joined the PEM convention. <br /><br />The only problem with this is that single window as a concept is not fully mature - but had it been ready ten years earlier - or we'd have delayed leaving the customs union a while, we'd have eliminated a lot of tiresome arguments. Put simply, customs "paperwork" is going the way of the dinosaur, rendering customs unions all but obsolete in terms of "frictionless trade". <br /><br />What is surprising though, is how the trade fraternity have made absolutely no mention of this, or that the TCA explicitly says "Each Party shall endeavour to establish a single window that enables traders to submit documentation or data required for importation, exportation, or transit of goods through a single entry point to the participating authorities or agencies". It's happening. <br /><br />I'm unsure as to the extent of current HMRC software developments, and I highly doubt this much has been understood by MPs, so whatever replaces the current customs system maybe short-lived as single window renders it obsolete. The advantage to much of it being based on open standards is that a lot of it can happen in the private sector with government opting in as an when it is ready. <br /><br />As is gradually dawning on business just lately, the real headache is the third country controls and the loss of the right of establishment that goes with single market membership. More could have been done to reduce certification problems by investing in the technology but the regulatory barriers were always going to cause problems. Still, though, an incurious media continues to bleat about "customs red tape". <br /><br />One way or another single window will become the universal way of doing things. Based on global standards and adopted by the World Customs Organisation, and being central to new plurilateral <a href="https://www.bilaterals.org/?wto-plurilateral-ecommerce-draft">WTO eCommerce agreements</a>, we can expect to see rapid proliferation. It has become a central pillar of trade facilitation and new experimental value chains in Uganda are already using it. The first world is actually behind the curve. <br /><br />Though we have ended frictionless trade as we know it presently, there is actually no reason why ports can't establish efficient routines. Much of the chaos we have seen comes from a lack of familiarity with third country processes, a failure to prepare and widespread confusion as to what the TCA was going to contain. The lasting hit to business will be the inherent loss of single market particpation rights which will affect non-goods trade even harder. <br /><br />As regards trade in goods, as single window matures and regulatory processes are built into software protocols and automatically updated, linking in with things like RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) and authorisation systems, in a decade or so, much of this won't even register as a concern. Trade in goods has become an unfortunate distraction from more lucrative markets and the new frontier in trade is in the digital domain. <br /><br />Throughout Brexit, trade in goods has dominated because it's much more relatable than digital trade issues, Lorries on ferries is a tangible manifestation of trade whereas digital rights, privacy, data protection, intellectual property are not readily accessible. They are perhaps more important though. With homeworking taking off and businesses no longer limited to the locality for finding the best talent, digital rules will be key to creating and protecting jobs. <br /><br />These are the new global arguments ahead of us. We have recently seen the potential for harm of unchecked monopoly power among tech giants. We can't afford to be distracted by interminable rows about fish. Trade in goods may be getting simpler, but everything else is becoming a whole lot more complicated.<p></p>
<!--/wp:paragraph-->Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-48343590716358471312021-01-31T18:35:00.006-08:002021-01-31T18:45:36.685-08:00CPTPP: What do you mean by "comprehensive"?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJk6g13m44ihwFSmgCAEjcHJEYwKuIENwLZ4rrodpTuUCA6r6I9c7AOJPBXWkIhkLxhaYgAKoJVZPpMscPy1WOFW8mV2mWRYStz-58HX8EwXVtN0S-A9vpHCNIGobA-61QJd80ZdDHnxE/s740/optimize.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="740" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJk6g13m44ihwFSmgCAEjcHJEYwKuIENwLZ4rrodpTuUCA6r6I9c7AOJPBXWkIhkLxhaYgAKoJVZPpMscPy1WOFW8mV2mWRYStz-58HX8EwXVtN0S-A9vpHCNIGobA-61QJd80ZdDHnxE/w640-h370/optimize.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />While we're on the subject of CPTPP, I thought it interesting that the media's third favourite trade wonk, Hosuk Lee-Makiyama (and to my mind the only one ever saying anything worthwhile), should confirm much of what I had assumed. In an <a href="https://ifreetrade.org/pdfs/UK-CPTPP.pdf" target="_blank">older paper</a> written for Daniel Hannan's <i>Initiative for Free Trade </i>(IFT), Makiyama writes:<p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">First, CPTPP and other FTAs do not contain provisions that actually set regulatory standards, but
ensures the sovereigns regulate in the most non-discriminatory fashion possible. In other words,
CPTPP and other trade agreements voluntarily bind its members to refrain from certain, specific
discriminatory practices, like a rulebook against discrimination in national legislation – but do not
replace the national legislation itself. This is how CPTPP (and other FTA texts) deal with a
complex matter like food safety in just sixteen pages, while the national legislation often runs
several hundred pages long – the current UK law, implemented via EU regulation (Regulation No
882/2004) on feed and food runs 196 pages in the Official Journal.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Second, six members of the CPTPP have existing agreements with the EU. In order to ensure
consistency between agreements, these countries had to be certain that none of the
commitments in their bilateral FTAs with the EU could or would contradict potential TPP pledges.
In other words, these countries have already scrubbed commitments which could cause
potential conflicts between the CPTPP text and the EU FTA template, as they have signed up to
both. In addition, Japan, New Zealand and Australia also had comprehensive mutual recognition
agreements (MRAs, based on conformity assessment) with the EU, even prior to their EPA/FTAs.
In highly regulated sectors, such as on motor vehicles, Japan and Australia have also unilaterally
accepted or incorporated European standards into their systems.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Evidently, as nothing in the CPTPP agreement precluded Japan and other CPTPP countries to
conclude a comprehensive FTA with the EU as well, the UK would in theory be able to pursue
both. However, in the opposite direction, whether the EU body of law in its entirety would pass
CPTPP commitments, is a different question that is discussed in the following sections.</p></blockquote><p>First off, one would note the disparity of language. The agreement is often described both deep and comprehensive, which it may well be through the narrow prism of tariffs, but by way of the above, it is neither deep nor comprehensive. What it confirms, though, is that in terms of standards and regulations, as discussed here yesterday, it does not go much further than the WTO baseline and merely reinforces WTO principles and ongoing trends in regulatory coherence initiatives.</p><p>It is also important to note that CPTPP remains a thin agreement precisely because key members prioritise deeper and more comprehensive agreements with the EU. This point has evidently escaped Daniel Hannan and the various luminaries behind the IFT. In particular, Korea has adopted the EU's REACH system for chemicals. This prioritisation of EU trade is an inherent expansion limit to CPTPP, and I suppose acts as a safeguard against it becoming anything more political. </p><p>What Makiyama doesn't say, is that the respective EU FTAs primarily adopt global regulations and not "EU standards". In the case of motor vehicle, all EU FTAs, including our own, adopt the full stack of UNECE regulations. This is becoming a curious blind spot in the trade fraternity.</p><p>Moreover, if the mutual recognition on conformity assessment within CPTPP is tailored so as not to offend the EU, then it doesn't present the obstacles I was imagining, but by the same token, it is not likely to be comprehensive, thus of limited value. That further substantiates my belief that CPTPP is not at all comprehensive. The only slam dunk argument I can see is that it simplifies and improves rules of origin among signatories, but that will very much depend on how it interacts with EU rules. They cannot be looked at in isolation when it comes to complex value chains. </p><p>As to food safety, Makiyama does indeed make the point that it is necessarily a complex area, and a territory upon which CPTPP fears to tread, thus it cannot be said that the agreement does very much at all for non-tariff barriers, and nothing beyond which the parities are already committed to via their own WTO rule based EU FTAs. Meanwhile, by way of geography, the UK's SPS regime will continue to be heavily influenced by the EU whether the government yet knows it or not.</p><p>More than anything, the UK's accession looks more like a dual-use move; to establish a diplomatic presence in Pacific trade conversations, and to broadcast our "Global Britain" credentials. It certainly won't live up to the hype, and so far as the consumer is concerned, against the unfolding consequences of leaving the single market, it is likely to make no noticeable difference.</p><p>As with Brexit, the CPTPP debate will largely concentrate on tariffs, ignoring services, and will completely neglect any consideration of non-tariff barriers. As per the discussions over the TCA, Geneva will remain the elephant in the room. That neither the media or its rent-a-quote trade wonks are remotely aware of it speaks volumes. </p><p style="text-align: left;"></p>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-8465662099024396692021-01-30T19:13:00.009-08:002021-01-30T19:24:13.021-08:00Actually, CPTPP isn't a bad idea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIE9tVWRNYY7s-ZsZvLkszmcOvBIJur4w4LrRqQJ0loxnE_Mm6Rm10JNpr73hCs9pN8pwRsTPSMAZAQ1UA_CbHTE3N9Y8pZiwp5ODDKAltlQrdvmLrKSqekxL9eryHe4BtmxggCdcB584/s976/truss.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIE9tVWRNYY7s-ZsZvLkszmcOvBIJur4w4LrRqQJ0loxnE_Mm6Rm10JNpr73hCs9pN8pwRsTPSMAZAQ1UA_CbHTE3N9Y8pZiwp5ODDKAltlQrdvmLrKSqekxL9eryHe4BtmxggCdcB584/w640-h360/truss.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />The UK is applying to join a free trade area made up of 11 Asia and Pacific nations, under its post-Brexit plans. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership - or CPTPP - includes Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand.<div><br /></div><div>Hitherto now I've been somewhat sceptical in that one wonders what value there is in joining a regional trade agreement on the other side of the planet comprising of members we already have comprehensive agreements with. Furthermore, it is not a regulatory union, and not all that deep in terms of regulatory cooperation. It largely builds on copy-outs from WTO agreements and GATT.</div><div><br /></div><div>Comprising of only 10% of our current exports, it's difficult to see what noticeable value it will have. It goes no way toward softening the impact of leaving the single market, America is unlikely to join it, and the rudimentary mutual recognition of conformity assessment within it doesn't really do much for us. More than likely it will complicate our remaining exports to the EU. The further we move away from a Europe first policy, the bigger the problems we have. But then since we seem to be hell bent on ruining most of our exports with the EU anyway, that's something of a moot point.</div><div><br /></div>From a trade point of view you could easily conclude that CPTPP isn't worth the bother. But in taking such a narrow view I'm falling into the trap of seeing relations only in terms of their more immediate material gains. More than likely the government is taking a more strategic view to strengthen trade and investment ties with the Asia Pacific region. The agreement itself doesn't appear to go very far on investment but it does have that potential, and though it is not a regulatory union, it does commit the members to working on regulatory coherence and standardisation. <div><br /></div><div>This pans out quite well for the UK in that it doesn't really require much of us. The UK is already at the global benchmark in most areas, while other CPTPP members have committed to reaching that bar by way of their deals with the EU. The UK, therefore, is well placed to consult on these matters. By driving forward the convergence agenda, the UK recruits more non-EU partners to its own initiatives, thereby counterbalancing EU clout in various international organisations.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ultimately the UK needs a presence in the region and it also needs to upscale its regulatory diplomacy operation, and CPTPP is as good a place to start as any. Though the EU and UK may have set the standards for trade in goods, areas such as digital trade and electronic commerce are still relatively virgin territory out in the big world. There are threats and opportunities on the horizon, and CPTPP, if nothing else, is a good early warning system. One might even argue that if the UK is going to rebuild its trade and diplomatic capabilities we can't afford not to join, and sitting alongside Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand, we are at least among friends and allies. </div><div><br /></div><div>Where there is genuine concern about CPTPP is the lack of transparency over the decision-making and the complete absence of public debate - and the debate that does exist in Westminster is a low information debate among politicians and journalists whose understanding of the issues has not meaningfully advanced since 2016. Meanwhile the government seems intent on avoiding all scrutiny.</div><div><br /></div><div>We will no doubt see a great deal of scaremongering over CPTPP, be it food standards or carve outs for the NHS, or ISDS, most of which will be irrelevant noise and party political gaming. It that respect, it wouldn't matter if there was a system for parliamentary scrutiny since MPs are usually distracted by the trivia, recycling the same old themes while utterly neglecting things like services and digital trade - and even if they were asking the right questions, they tend not to understand the answers. There likely are problems with CPTPP but we likely shan't know what they are until it's too late. But then that was true of the EEC, so we are at least consistent, I suppose. </div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-62371119453368783792021-01-22T05:57:00.003-08:002021-07-06T11:10:17.385-07:00Brexit: towards a new normal<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsE0xZRiCMpVvrRaVHI3Qm8wj4JQu3W2HLv23x6gqaWRbOvFlVvXjQLJo16od8gnNckX54dpRQytmtc3AXiawyd3mV9bwqRv49CtHgJ9e_dDLAop0FRoPJ4pj5yysYrdAaI0JQufQpMrk/s976/dover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsE0xZRiCMpVvrRaVHI3Qm8wj4JQu3W2HLv23x6gqaWRbOvFlVvXjQLJo16od8gnNckX54dpRQytmtc3AXiawyd3mV9bwqRv49CtHgJ9e_dDLAop0FRoPJ4pj5yysYrdAaI0JQufQpMrk/w640-h360/dover.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />Not because of Brexit, but because of decisions taken by the Conservative government, Britain is going to lose a substantial chunk of its trade. This will be single market based trade we've evolved since the mid-nineties. Trade that didn't really exist before and now we've lost those contracts will probably lose out to EU based competitors permanently. We're no longer part of those value chains. The red tape and the third country controls will see to that. <p></p><p>It is going to hurt more than it ever needed to because of a number of faulty assumptions during trade negotiations and because our preparations were wholly inadequate. Much of the system relies on software that simply isn't designed to cope with the number of declarations and submissions. We could have bought ourselves more time by extending the transition - which would also have led to a more comprehensive deal but Boris Johnson in infinite wisdom decided that wasn't necessary.</p><p>Worse still, the the EU has a fully developed system for handling third country interactions, the UK does not. We do not as yet hold the institutional expertise, nor have we established a routine. We are inexperienced in these matters. There isn't the capability to sort out the problems. Business is unprepared, government hasn't a clue, the infrastructure isn't ready and there are not enough trained or experienced people on the job. It's all building up to a perfect storm.</p><p>Sooner or later warehouse stockpiles will need replenishment, informal grace periods will expire, and the French will get up to speed with implementing third country controls. This will get messy. I do not think that we have seen the worst of it. Any Brexiteer who thought we got away with it is kidding themselves. </p><p>I do, though, think we should be able to sort it out. It is going to take a number of years. It's going to take a year at least to fully comprehend the causes of the bottlenecks and then a further two years of refinement followed by a process of installing a more permanent system. </p><p>The new system will be heavily influenced by the EU's Union Customs Code. The TCA compels both parties to harmonise their data requirements for import, export and other customs
procedures by implementing common standards and data elements in accordance with the
Customs Data Model of the WCO. From this we will see a proto-Single Window emerge, which was always the direction of travel, largely eliminating paper declarations and more can be done in terms of customs cooperation and trade facilitation to get the routine running smoothly. </p><p>It will likely never run quite as smoothly as it did before but we will arrive at something within tolerance. By this time, if I've understood the TCA, we will have Authorised Economic Operator systems in place so that regular exporters will have a much easier time of it and we will see improvements to the TCA in the fullness of time. </p><p>From this we arrive at a very different way of doing this where much of the activity moves from behind the border to the ports, and in many ways it will spur some much needed modernisation. The good news is that we are already seeing tech-startups utilising the respective data standards to help navigate complex procedures such as Rules of Origin. Ironically the UK could become a global leader in customs and trade facilitation technology and setting the standards worldwide through international organisations.</p><p>In this it is even conceivable that the end point could see a return of relatively "frictionless" trade. Frictionless trade is as much about routine and predictability. When we have the systems in place and trust is established, though the same third country controls will still exist we'll be a lot better at managing the impact. In this we should note that trade has it has existed is not frictionless as such. There is still a great deal of "red tape" only it is conducted elsewhere. Some sectors such as food and chemicals will continue to face obstacles, but anyone who wants to stay in business will adapt. The question is whether they can continue to compete.</p><p>Though the present mess is still a disaster for current exporters, especially those who have failed to prepare, it is conceivable that when we arrive at a new regime (likely five years from now, give or take a software procurement scandal) things will being to look normal to the casual observer. Being that businesses will continue to use ISO and UNECE standards, their main area of concern will be product authorisations and testing. Any future government will likely press the EU for mutual recognition of conformity assessment and seek equivalence agreements based on retained regulation. The EU is likely to play hardball but I wouldn't rule it out if it's in the EU's material interests. Both parties will have Covid recovery imperatives.</p><p>What we can say is that it's going to get substantially worse before it gets better and it's going to create serious problems for Ireland. Already Irish supply chains are breaking down but this does not register with the media to the same extent as the Dover-Calais route. The former is seen as more local news whereas Dover is the international gateway. That is also where the government will focus its main attentions, and being that UK-Ireland relations are not in good health, the Tories will likely treat Ireland with a degree of contempt. Every time the EU makes life difficult for the UK the UK will seek to pass on those difficulties.</p><p>This is motivated largely by a sense of Tory victimhood. On Brexiter Street, Ireland is seen to have cosied up to Brussels with a view to weaponing the Irish border leading to the unhappy NI protocol now in force. The Tories also believe they can bounce Ireland out of the EU by making life difficult for them. I don't think it's likely to succeed, but the difficulties Ireland faces could be interpreted as the EU failing to live up to its promise of solidarity. I do not think the politics are clear cut. </p><p>Though Ireland has made alternative arrangements to transfer freight from mainland Europe, the length of the voyage creates its own problems - particularly for Ireland's race horse sector. With an overall retraction of commerce from the British Isles, Brexit could end up hurting Ireland almost as much as the UK. Depending on what the UK does in the distant future, Ireland may be forced to rethink its relationships. In those stakes I don't see UK-Irish relations improving until Boris Johnson is gone.</p><p>In any case we've bought ourselves a decade of diplomatic and bureaucratic stress not entirely dissimilar to the process of joining the single market. Only this time the media will report it because it's politically useful to do so. We shall see no abatement of Brexit bickering but ultimately we just have to get on with it until we find our new normal. </p>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-90935179285780158012021-01-21T19:35:00.003-08:002021-01-21T19:38:57.018-08:00Brexit: time to get on with it<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3upw0ky3FgJzdADj2M9cYpt8CWIuX1hmMPmPF9OA8gVK2P78qUz5jAevEVJ2s934rzpp3odhLjMxDcWIyihxATMG45Yazt-4So3GzU3MD0KpahN6mxoGUteNwfCMCqWzXxMB_fu1O12c/s570/container.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="570" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3upw0ky3FgJzdADj2M9cYpt8CWIuX1hmMPmPF9OA8gVK2P78qUz5jAevEVJ2s934rzpp3odhLjMxDcWIyihxATMG45Yazt-4So3GzU3MD0KpahN6mxoGUteNwfCMCqWzXxMB_fu1O12c/w640-h426/container.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />I rather thought I was going to enjoy pulling the wings off ultra-Brexiteer types as their delusions were skewered by the encroachment of reality but it's turning out to be meagre pickings since many of them are too stupid to even realise there is a problem and the rest are unwilling to believe it has anything at all to do with that thing they campaigned so intensively for. <p></p><p>The other problem is with me. I just can't be bothered. There's no real sport in it if it's easy prey. And of course, it scarcely matters now. What's done is done. The fishing industry is mostly getting what it deserves and I don't have that much sympathy for British manufacturers either. Rules of Origin should not have caught them off guard. </p><p>Moreover, Just In Time supply chains are not necessarily about rapid transit, rather it is a matter of planning to ensure goods get to their destination precisely when they are needed while spending as little time in warehouses as possible. </p><p>Though the precise trade regime was not known until the last minute, the writing has been on the wall for some time that we would assume third country status and though government communications have been poor, there was nothing at all preventing them from doing their own groundwork - yet a great many of them sat on their hands. </p><p>Of course, nobody can say that the government has upheld its own part of the bargain. Customs software isn't up to scratch, the support isn't there and the trade deal itself is barely worth having for all the use it is. Brexit is done and we've made a pig's ear of it. </p><p>The energy, therefore, is better invested in thinking how we make the best of it. I do not believe that re-joining is likely, possible or even desirable, and if Efta EEA was a losing bet before then it is now for much the same reasons. The argument for remaining inside the EEA regulatory sphere was to maintain EU trade but by the time we re-joined it, our trade would already be a distant memory and would likely never be the same again. Our current value chains are the product of thirty years of evolution. </p><p>I will never stop beating remain MPs over the head with the fact they voted against EEA Efta, but for better or for worse the TCA is the foundation we must build on. It is now a fact of life that, for the time being, things are going to cost a bit more, we're going to export substantially less to the EU, and business will have to adapt or die. I don't like it but there it is.</p><p>Of course the remainers are going to whine for an eternity, particulary about any regulatory divergence. In their minds any divergence is bad, and any way that isn't the EU way is inferior. But that never has been true. Regulation has always been used by the EU as a tool of integration where it never particularly mattered if it was bad regulation just so long as it was uniform throughout. Though it gets improved over time, improvement is always a suboptimal compromise - and still more concerned with finding an acceptable average than tackling the problems regulation is notionally designed to solve.</p><p>There are aspects of environmental law and waste policy, only tangentially related to trade, that could now be reformed without that process of negotiation. Energy, water and waste policy is now up for grabs. Moreover, the UK is now, to a point, free to make its own decisions on product regulation. We have long been a dumping ground for substandard Chinese counterfeit output, which the EU system failed to prevent.</p><p>The EU's system has, in fact, encouraged corporate irresponsibility, instilling a culture of "plausible deniability", where retailers and their suppliers can plead that the "paperwork and procedures" were in order, thus dumping the blame for any failures on anonymous producers, largely keeping their own reputations intact.</p><p>While people were complaining about the opening of our borders to the inrush of immigrants from other EU member states, another revolution was taking place. Our borders were forcibly opened to a torrent of cheap, often substandard imports. And, as long as they carried the "magic talisman" of the CE mark and had the correct paperwork, local port inspectors were effectively prohibited from examining the goods.</p><p>What were termed "technical inspections" were condemned as "barriers to trade", on the basis of which the commission rigorously pursued their agenda of dismantling port controls. Furthermore, once in the shops, the official presumption is that goods bearing the CE mark are "safe", so that officials such as trading standards officers are actively dissuaded from carrying out spot sampling. And no longer do local authorities make budget allocations for routine tests. </p><p>That is a large part of the problem in UK governance. Across the board, adoption of EU regulation has weakened enforcement and lessons from enforcement are not fed back into the system - and where they are there is little reflection of it.</p><p>Among national politicians there is a presumption that technical governance of this nature does not require them to be familiar with it, being that it's an EU competence and the sharp end of it is handled by local authorities. Enforcement is then a matter of mere budget allocation rather than governing philosphy. This we have seen with the sweatshops in Leicester where there is no shortage of regulation on treatment of workers and health and safety, but what good is Rolls Royce regulation if enforcement is still British Leyland?</p><p>As much as there is an overreliance on the EU and international organisations to provide the regulation, there is a presumption that the system is self-maintaining without the direct involvement of our politicians. To a point that's true, but that's how we get to critical decision points like 2019 and the average MPs has no concept of what they're even debating.</p><p>Under the terms of the TCA it is unlikely we shall see that "bonfire of regulation" and suppliers to global corporates will still elect to follow international standards. Britain will still have to make its own representations to the global bodies where the rules are made, but over time the EU will lose interest in monitoring what the UK is doing internally, particularly as its attentions turn elsewhere, by which time there should be policy space to rethink how we do things.</p><p>Since we have already damaged our trade beyond repair we now have little to lose by experimentation and regulatory innovation. In terms of animal welfare and disease control there are obvious advantages to having a distinct system to the EU, and though we should still look to liberalise our trade, there is no reason why we should continue to allow China to <a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3118683/bribes-fake-factories-and-forged-documents-buccaneering">abuse the certification process</a> in order to keep dumping fraudulent goods on our market.</p><p>Though trade metrics report of volumes and values, they don't give us an idea of the economic, health and social costs of a profligate society living for conveniences, always sacrificing quality for price. The mentality of the last forty years has been geared toward the maximisation of trade volumes but with scant regard for the wider implications. With Covid and geopolitical trends interrupting globalisation, we could certainly use a "great reset" in the way we think about trade and regulation. </p>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-48963696298659453392021-01-21T15:45:00.008-08:002021-01-21T15:49:35.018-08:00Wokeness: echoes of East Germany<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYNPyn8Slr6impU4E1F6EPknFUlXT7kgmzI1Jdyo60HwtFzwEgOpepnWYH3ld-S8sD6McpShokzVyQdU0muZIFQP9MlF7sGKp9RWhG0khzBS-VPfh0w_UgoxWO0NNbL4e2SPvdEwXRyuE/s1800/wall.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1800" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYNPyn8Slr6impU4E1F6EPknFUlXT7kgmzI1Jdyo60HwtFzwEgOpepnWYH3ld-S8sD6McpShokzVyQdU0muZIFQP9MlF7sGKp9RWhG0khzBS-VPfh0w_UgoxWO0NNbL4e2SPvdEwXRyuE/w640-h426/wall.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />We're having some technical problems on <i>Turbulent Times</i> tonight so I'm posting here <div><br /></div><div><br /> What have the woke left and the East German secret police got in common? Quite a lot as it happens - you won't be surprise to learn. A cornerstone of the contemporary leftist thinking is critical race theory. I must confess I'm no expert on it, but it appears to be a ranking system according to your victimhood credentials; a social grading system that determines whether your opinion has any right to exist. </div><div><br />A new California curriculum in the news this week uses racial distinctions to divide people into those who are considered white (and therefore privileged) and those who are non-white (and therefore oppressed); and in the case of Jews, it combines the two, pitting "Jews of color" against Jews who are tarred with "conditional whiteness" and its attendant "racial privilege".</div><div><br />This is essentially rhetorical weapons system designed to bake in discrimination. It comes as no surprise that the woke left puts Jews in their crosshairs first. The system is based on a ranking of what they term "privilege" which is based on all the old left wing bigotries and stereotypes, so it was only a matter of time before Jews became the target. And these people pretend to be "anti-fascists".</div><div><br />But it does fit with history. Communists have always defined themselves primarily as anti-fascist. GDR authorities officially referred to the Berlin Wall as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart. The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" from building a socialist state in East Germany.</div><div><br />Drawing from the work of Maoz Azaryahu, it's worth looking at East Germany. Following a period of direct military occupation by the victorious allies, in 1949 both West Germany (FRG) and East Germany (GDR) were founded as successor states to the German Reich. For both German states, the evaluation of the Nazi past was central to the construction of their respective national identities as German states that represent and embody a ‘new’ Germany. West German society was bent on forgetfulness and suppression of the inconvenient past, whereas antifascism became the founding ethos of GDR.</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">In communist East Germany, the commemoration of the Nazi past was designed in the framework of anti-fascism (‘anti-Fa’) as a state doctrine. The legacy of anti-fascism juxtaposed the fascists with their victims, but at its core was the celebration of communist resistance and martyrdom as well as the solidarity between communist and non-communist resisters, such as social democrats and clergymen. <br /></div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Significantly, communist resistance in Germany was construed as an aspect of the struggle led by the Soviet Union against fascism, and the Soviet victory was also the victory of East Germany over Nazi Germany. Especially in the 1950s and the 1960s, the designation ‘fascism’ also applied for West Germany, which according to the East German propaganda represented the continuation of fascism. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">As both a historical legacy and political argument, anti-fascism was an instrument to legitimize both the Communist state and the hegemonic role of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) in East Germany. Grounded in Marxist-Leninist interpretation, the East German doctrine of anti-fascism regarded Nazi Germany as the local context of a broader phenomenon, fascism, that expressed the crisis of ‘monopoly capitalism’. The Nazi extermination policy against the Jews was seen not in a German context, but as a result of the ostensibly criminal nature of ‘late capitalism’. The doctrine of anti-fascism absolved all East Germans – provided they supported the communist regime, and irrespective of their actual biographies – of sharing the burden of the Nazi past.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Having developed its founding ethos, it then needed its national heroes and founding mythology. According to the East German narrative, the liberation of Buchenwald on 11 April 1945 was a self-liberation by the communist-led underground organization that took control of the camp shortly before American troops of general Patton’s Third Army arrived. Celebrated as the victory of anti-fascist resistance, the ‘self-liberation’ of the camp belonged to the foundation narrative of the GDR as an anti-fascist state. </div><div><br /></div><div>Another important symbol of anti-fascism was the ‘Buchenwald Oath’, in which members of the underground organization, shortly after liberation, pledged their resolve to continue their struggle. In East Germany, the ‘Buchenwald Oath’ became a credo of the anti-Fa doctrine.<br />Buchenwald itself became part of the mythology, becoming the "museum of anti-fascist resistance", juxtaposing Nazi barbarism and anti-fascist resistance and martyrdom, while emphasizing that Nazi </div><div><br /></div><div>Germany was but an aspect of the general crisis of capitalism. In the wake of the collapse of the GDR, the narrative of heroic resistance and anti-fascist martyrdom lost both its credibility and authority on the revelation that between 1945 and 1950 the former concentration camp had served as a Soviet detention camp for Germans. This goes some way toward explaining holocaust denial on the left in that the reintegration of Buchenwald into a more accurate record of history discredited the heroic character of "anti-fascist resistance" mythology.</div><div><br />More broadly, GDR was famed for its suppression of speech, a ruthless secret police, mass state surveillance and military borders in order to keep people from leaving. Nobody was risking their lives to go and live in this socialist utopia.</div><div><br />Though my linkage to the modern woke left is not entirely serious, they both define themselves by what they're not and both rely on a rewriting of history. Their whole identity is fashioned on their opposition to fascism which in their minds makes them righteous by default. The authoritarian behaviour is similar because the foundation construct is so flimsy it depends on the policing of language and thought. The transgender lobby has attempted to appropriate Alan Turing as one of its martyrs in the same way that GDR incorporated the memory of Ernst Thälmann. In no way does this stand up to scrutiny but activists become immediately aggressive when challenged. As offensive as that is to me, so to is the attempt to write transgender people into the holocaust.</div><div><br />Though the left doesn't have a Stasi of its own to enforce these doctrines, it does employ doxing and by way of their capture of institutions, it's quite easy to have a sceptical academic removed from their post or a public official sacked - or a book withdrawn from publication.</div><div><br />Though America is not yet turning down that road, one can almost imagine the Antifa mobs of Portland settling the issue once and for all by replicating the Berlin wall around the city - assuming they can find any males who can work construction. Gender studies degrees are going to need a structural engineering module. The woke women will all be too busy in the HR jobs in Silicon Valley.</div><div><br />What particularly piqued my interest in Azaryahu's work, was the concept of "late capitalism" - a pillar of the communist dogma at the time. This have been revived of late, particularly through the medium of memes, and I never realised the significance. Nothing of the current leftist rhetorical construct is remotely original. </div><div><br />Whoever dreamed up the modern left's playbook and lexicon seems to have been almost exclusively inspired by the GDR. Everything about it is centred on indoctrinating its adherents into thinking that anything in the outside world is fascist - and to disagree is a moral failing.</div><div><br />The only thing original about this is the way in which this iteration of communism has infected the USA by donning the clothes of racial justice and gender equality. The murder of George Floyd last year gave it a window of opportunity and with the election of Biden, it now feels it has a foothold. If enough Americans see it for what it really is then reconciliation is impossible. Civil war may well be on the cards. Either way, unless it is defeated, the liberal democratic America we have known in our lifetimes is dead.</div>Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-70863885099825918672020-05-07T02:52:00.001-07:002020-05-07T05:09:39.039-07:00Wind down. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've slowed down on the blogging over the course of the lockdown. It's nice to have company in the house but I don't get anything like the same uninterrupted thinking time. A lot of the blogging process is reading and thinking in the quiet hours. Moreover, I think I've taken it as far as I can go with blogger. Hits are still showing a steady increase but growth is glacial and you know what they say about doing the same thing and expecting different results.<br />
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With that, and having moved past Brexit, we've also been having discussions about The Leave Alliance and EUreferendum.com. The Leave Alliance site has been more or less dormant for a few months and it has served its purpose but now it's just sitting there costing money. As to EUreferendum, we feel the name puts limits on exposure, especially with the referendum being a distant memory now.<br />
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This then presents the question of what next? Well, we've toyed with the idea of a multi-author site for some time. I was actually me who took some convincing, since we've attempted to bring in other writers before to find that good writing is something of a rarity and taking on the workload of editing as well as producing a daily blog is too much to ask. Now, though, I feel less inclined to blog daily since I'd rather produce less at a higher quality. Much of what is said on this blog is repetition, which is fine for a campaigning blog, but in my view it's getting a bit stale.<br />
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So with that, we are now moving to <a href="http://turbulenttimes.co.uk/">turbulenttimes.co.uk</a>. Himself has long complained that my ASP.net content management system was laborious, and not having my head fully in the programming game means even small edits is a major undertaking for which I seldom have the energy (or interest) so I'm finally giving up the ghost and moving to a Wordpress based system.<br />
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For the most part the website is ready but we've still some fine-tuning to do which will happen over the course of the next few weeks and eureferendum.com will gradually migrate. Rather than the big launch approach we're going to run it concurrently for a while to iron out the bugs and establish a presence. Once we're confident with it and have the routine down we will then look to take submissions from other bloggers.<br />
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I will keep this blog open and will post the occasional piece if it doesn't fit on the main site, but I'm done bashing my head against a brick wall. There are other subjects I'd like to write about and a new start is just what the doctor ordered. When we've migrated I will clean up eureferendum.com as an archive site. It will stay online but I'll be downgrading the hosting to save money.<br />
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With that I'd like to thank all of you who've supported this blog over the years, especially those of you who've donated. I try to to send thank you notes to each of you so apologies if I missed you. Being an introvert I struggle to make contact with people. It is, nonetheless, hugely appreciated and means more than I can say.<br />
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On that note, our new venture has cost us quite a bit to get going. I've paid a proper developer this time meaning we should have the full spectrum of functionality. If you would like to donate to the cause, you can do so <a href="https://paypal.me/PeteNorth">here</a>, but as ever, please keep up the retweets and shares etc. Migrating a site always means a slight dip in hits so your support matters now especially. As ever, thank you for reading, and see you over at the new digs.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-31475215862128119332020-05-04T18:58:00.001-07:002020-05-05T21:37:58.454-07:00Failing at every turn<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Twitter is not so much a website as a state of mind. When you're plugged into it, it is all consuming. It can be used productively to inform the debate if you have the time and the energy but it can suck you into the distorted Twitter brain state whereby you end up being distracted and absorbed by trivia. In respect of that this lockdown has been a welcome diversion. I've taken to my modelling bench in a big way, scarcely concerned with the outside world.<br /><br />Now that I'm outside the Twitter bubble looking in, I do wonder how it ever managed to consume so much of my time. Scarcely anything I scroll past is worth a nanosecond of my time. It tends to gravitate toward petty partisan bickering, neglecting the central issues almost entirely, to the point where its denizens have lost sight of what is actually important.<br /><br />Part of the problem with the national debate is that we are a nation of news junkies, always waiting for the next big thing which begets a media always trying to engineer the next big thing. Reality, though, is much less interesting. Things seldom happen in rapid succession. The Brexit saga was weeks of inactivity, speculation and churn, only periodically punctuated by something of actual consequence. That's partly why this blog has drifted away from the subject. I keep an eye on it, but there's nothing especially new that's worth a post.<br /><br />As it happens, Corona is unfolding in much the same way. There are milestone events with a cacophony of noise in between. More causal consumers of news rely on mainstream outlets such as the BBC trusting their judgement as to what is actually important. Consequently there is little hope of any kind of informed debate. The BBC is readily distracted by soap opera and lacks the capacity to do thorough and far reaching journalism. The important news stories will drift by unnoticed.<br /><br />As to the online debate, very few are actually interested in what's really going on, consuming media as ammunition for their own agendas. In aid of that people tend to prefer filtered narratives even if they have only a passing relationship with reality. Primarily it's about media consumers abusing news for personal entertainment.<br /><br />This is where Corona and Brexit have yet more interesting parallels. Whether or not the lockdown was the right thing to do, the more important debate is how we get out of it now that we are in it. Like the Brexit debate, people will churn over the former question for years on end rather than address themselves to the mechanics of the situation, largely because it requires a level of greater understanding and a much more objective outlook.<br />
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In these such situations you have to understand all of the moving parts - their history and function, and how we got where we are. The adjacent debates, though, are far more accessible, more popular, and more profitable if you're in the business of harvesting clicks and likes. The more I see of that dynamic, the less I want anything at all to do with it - especially since it isn't remotely productive in any sense. Twitter influence is not influence. If you are influential on there then chances are you are part of the problem.<br />
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With Corona I've been less able to analyse events not having any prior knowledge but my experience on the Brexit front lines has taught me that if there are answers out there, or at least better questions, then the media and their favoured prestige experts are of zero value and the people who rate them can't be persuaded of anything because they're wedded to a tribal narrative construct.<br />
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One such example is the trading of graphs on Twitter. Every single national epidemic curve graph on the internet is fiction. No exceptions. Every national epidemic curve chart is based on ropey data, but more importantly an aggregate curve gives you no clue as to what is happening in the country as a whole, or what will happen when the lockdown is relaxed. They have no epidemiological value in terms of trying to control the disease. A declining aggregate curve may simply represent one large area in decline while concealing a number of other areas with small outbreaks which are rapidly increasing.<br />
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We have to control this epidemic one infection at a time, one outbreak at a time. We are looking at several peaks so the notion we are "through the peak" of a fictional political construct is PR spin and should be disregarded as irrelevant. The decline we see is really only the result of the lockdown but the virus is still out there and there is no indication the government has understood or implemented the necessary toolset to avoid a second spike. There is simply no evidence that current government activity other than the lockdown has been in any way successful at controlling outbreaks - and it may even be counter-productive. </div>
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Then on a <a href="http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87598">deeper examination of the issues</a>, we find that there is a major missing element to our understanding of the virus where exposure alone is not enough to cause illness. If that turns out to be true then it will be used as a vindication by all those who said the lockdown was never necessary whether they too the time to understand or examine the issues or not. That's the other part of the problem. Media consumers seek vindication for their predispositions and validation. Information and understanding is optional. This is why much of the corporate media has abandoned its obligation to inform.</div>
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If there is indeed another dimension to the virus we have not yet understood then a great deal of the current controls are unnecessary, and most of the necessary controls are not being applied or <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-private-call-centres-will-run-new-contact-tracing-system-bjqnpsxqc?shareToken=b66079f8d450064cbaf11ead249594b8">applied incorrectly</a>. The contact tracing system crucial to hopes of easing lockdown will be outsourced to private call centre operators including Serco, The Times reports. This ought to be the sole domain of local authorities based on local knowledge and conducted by trained field operatives. This is just going through the motions. This should be the main story of the week but that's unlikely with our trivia addicted media.<br />
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As I understand it strategies do exist to control outbreaks based on high quality intelligence gathering, focussing resource where it is most likely to occur but instead the government is pegging its hopes on gimmicky contact tracing app for the general population - which from a technical perspective is problematic but highly questionable also in epidemiological terms. Standing back from the media noise, there is no apparent signal that anyone in the government has really grasped what we are dealing with or has any real idea what to do. Much like Brexit. </div>
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It seems the Downing Street machine is adept at spin, mobilising its supporters to cement narratives in the general population but it doesn't have the ability or institutional knowledge to handle anything of complexity and importance. That's something of a problem when the entire business of government deals with matters of complexity and importance. Our system simply isn't fit for purpose. and it's costing us a hefty price in blood and treasures. </div>
Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-40236109552663269092020-05-01T01:37:00.001-07:002020-05-01T01:37:46.199-07:00Games with numbers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At the moment I'm more cautious than usual about venturing an opinion. This epidemic has too many moving parts to understand exactly what is happening. There are plenty of forceful opinions about but not much in the way of useful or accurate data, and even if there were, data alone doesn't necessarily clarify anything, and a figure like daily deaths is a somewhat arbitrary statistic since it's an aggregation of multiple outbreaks in various states. <div>
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Particularly, there are a number of reporting irregularities while we also have a hidden epidemic where there is really no way to tell how severe it is. We're getting conflicting information where what is actually happening could be the exact opposite of what you might reasonably assume, all the while (much like the Brexit debate) the nation conversation is polluted by half-understood notions and alternative political narratives which again have no bearing on the real world. Time and again the same dynamic applies with cynical actors using events to stoke discord. The right are as bad as the left.<br /><br />As regards to the politics, it again mirrors Brexit where we have a poorly advised executive attempting something it doesn't understand while fending off a feral and largely ignorant media, leaving the rest of us in the dark, where the more you expose yourself to the daily soap opera, the less likely you are to get an an accurate picture.<br /><br />Meanwhile the lockdown argument continues to rage. Whatever the science says, the continuation of the lockdown is 100% a political decision. At some point it has to end simply because it is not economically sustainable and the public don't have the stamina or the means for a prolonged outage. </div>
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We are told we are through the peak, but the peak is a narrative construct based aggregated data. This tells you this government has no idea what it's doing. If they're looking at a national figure they're still treating it as a single outbreak rather than several concurrent outbreaks at various stages. The virus could easily become endemic and we simply have to adapt to living with a highly contagious deadly virus. That probably means sustained social distancing measures coupled with track and trace while treating Covid patients in separate facilities. It may be some time before anything close to normal is resumed.<div>
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What makes this virus especially problematic is that we know so little about it. Any easement of the lockdown is a political gamble that could see a second surge, and with country to country comparisons being next to worthless we have no yardstick. A worthwhile look at this appears in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/30/coronavirus-deaths-how-does-britain-compare-with-other-countries?fbclid=IwAR0erlZOjsmDluIGy2FhbfBQ220jMvz-9dZUgI27E71ccL6-flZVCxPPH7s">The Guardian</a>.</div>
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"But, of course, people are not so interested in the numbers themselves – they want to say why they are so high, and ascribe blame. But if it’s difficult to rank this country, it’s even trickier to give reasons for our position. Covid-19 mainly harms the elderly, with the average age of deaths above 80, and its fatality rate doubles every seven years as a person ages. Italy’s population is elderly (it has a median age of 47), while Ireland’s is much younger (a median age of 37), so we would expect different effects. And Covid-19 is a disease of crowded areas – New York is rather different from Reykjavik. An obsessive comparison is being made between Norway and Sweden: Sweden’s more relaxed social distancing policies may or may not have been instrumental in their current death rate being 233 per million, compared with Norway’s 38.</blockquote>
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Even – if we can imagine it – we reach some sort of stable situation, will we ever know the direct and indirect health effects of the epidemic, taking into account reduced road accidents, the benefits of reduced pollution, the effects of recession and so on? Many studies will try to disentangle all these, but my cold, statistical approach is to wait until the end of the year, and the years after that, when we can count the excess deaths. Until then, this grim contest won’t produce any league tables we can rely on."</blockquote>
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For now we're having to make policy on the fly on the basis of assumption and guesswork, where only time will tell. Unhelpfully we'll remain in the dark as government continues to shift the statistical goalposts. So long as the party faithful submit to the narrative they can successfully distort the national debate to cover up a multitude of sins. With a lazy and incurious media failing to investigate, we may never know how it's unfolding.<br /><br />Ultimately the economics will be the decider. This lockdown is quite an expensive do for this government and there are no more rabbits in the hat. The various bailouts and funds to prop up businesses and individuals simply cannot be long term measures. This is cartoon physics. The coyote is over the cliff but hasn't yet looked down. The function of Corona funding is to keep the pilot light burning on the normal order of things, but the longer this goes on the less likely there is a normal to go back to. What is done is not so readily undone. The mantra will eventually shift from "save the NHS" to "save the economy".<br /><br />Thankfully the government is now displaying signs of having exhausted all the possible errors so unless they get creative they might just start getting a few things right. That, though, is going to take some time to come to fruition so we can reasonably assume the lockdown has to roll on a while longer. Having dismantled a great deal of local capability we are faced with rebuilding our response apparatus from scratch. No easy feat.<br /><br />In the early days of this epidemic we didn't have a clear idea what to expect. With only heavily redacted Chinese news to go on and Italy only just climbing the curve, we had to assume something approaching the worst case scenario. It doesn't appear to be as bad as expected in that it's not a movie style apocalypse, but that's no reason for complacency. This virus is still filling up morgues and we still have no idea what will happen in the near future. Those still claiming it's just the flu haven't grasped that the flu has a high degree of predictability. The unpredictability is what has authorities spooked, and it was politically impossible for any government to take a reckless gamble on the basis of unknowns.<br /><br />As it transpires, the inaction on the early days was because the government was following a plan to deal with a flu like epidemic. It's precisely because Covid isn't like the flu that our limited containment strategy never stood a chance of working. As to whether it's more deadly than the flu, we simply don't know being that our methodology for recording deaths from either is highly questionable. Ultimately all the "it's just the flu" brigade have succeeded in doing is convincing me to take the flu much more seriously. As a younger person it doesn't really feature in my regular concerns but it probably should. The danger here is that our response to Covid is so inept it simply becomes another mass killer that we all ignore until it affects us.<br /><br />I haven't looked at any news reports in any serious depth for a week now largely because I'm unconvinced that any of the headlines give us any real information. News from other countries is interesting but not especially useful, and the UK press is mostly toadying sycophancy or shrill, unhinged bleating which is even less useful except as a further marker in the decline of British political culture. That, in the long run, could be more deadly than Corona and more expensive than the lockdown.</div>
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Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-67724140400776803942020-04-29T21:14:00.000-07:002020-04-29T21:14:24.463-07:00Media: Better off without<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It has been a very very long time since I received any television channels. I don't feel I'm missing out on anything. It's certainly not useful for news or analysis and from what I see vomited on to Twitter, it gets worse all the times. I think the rot started when newsreaders exchanged their desks for sofas, losing any sense of seriousness or formality.<br />
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Particularly loathsome is the rise of the anchor person, spawning a new breed of A-lister lobby hacks and pundits who continually try to make themselves the centre of the story. They're smug, smarmy, condescending, out of touch and their output is inane.<br />
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There has long been a debate about media bias. I was once part of the anti-BBC crowd complaining of pro-EU bias. Undoubtedly there is an institutional pro-EU bias but that is born of its more serious metropolitan bias. As it happens I'm not that bothered by it anymore. You can take or leave it and I choose to leave it - and encourage others to do the same.<br />
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Where the media is most problematic is its inanity. I can tolerate the bias because I, like most, have my own system of critical faculties and my own opinions derived independently from book learning through to lived experience. What bothers me is the low quality. Instead of informed debate we get uninformed debate between the two polar extremes of any given issue where usually both sides are parroting carefully crafted slogans and factoids without challenge, largely because the interviewers tend to be empty vessels who have never worked outside of London and have never worked outside of media.<br />
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As much as the make up of the media is wrong, being largely Londoncentric, it wouldn't actually matter if you moved them all out to Manchester. They still exist within a bubble of their own making. The fundamental problem is their arrogance believing that viewers are incapable of grasping nuanced debates, and don't have the attention span to absorb in depth exploration of issues. Everything is fighting for a sliver of air time where we get only surface level discussion where they even manage to get the basics wrong.<br />
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What pisses me off the most, though, is that our A-list hacks are complete wastrels. By way of having privileged access to politicians they have repeated opportunities to ask intelligent, probing questions that could easily show the politicians up as being out of their depth, lacking a clue, and dishonest. Instead they play their own inane little "gotcha" games that the public are sick of, failing to add anything of value and leaving people no better informed for it.<br />
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We saw this during Brexit where the media was more interested in the soap opera than the actual issues. Journos didn't have the first idea what the difference between a customs union and the single market was, but had they even half a clue, they would have understood the implications of what they were being told which would have generated more and better questions that could have steered us to a viable, sustainable outcome.<br />
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With Corona we see more of the same, with the focus on PPE and human interest stories, unable to interrogate vents intelligently - when they could have asked why Corona was being allowed into hospitals when we had Nightingale hospitals up and running and ready to take patients. Effective media has the power to change government policy yet here we are some weeks into the lockdown and the government is only just getting to grips with the basics with the media lagging behind.<br />
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As it happens I don't think the media can be reformed. It cannot reclaim the seriousness it once had. With media now being an internet driven partisan battleground, and with a media unable to bring any depth to the issues, the media itself has become a participant in our politics but one that is largely concerned with its own brand prominence. It's not going to improve until news consumers vote with their feet.<br />
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But here we have a problem. There is presently some public pushback. It has not gone unnoticed that the media is dire over the course of Corona. But I don't think it's genuine. They'd be happy with a fawning and subservient media that told them what they like to hear. The right on Twitter seem to regard it impudent to question government at all. They are no more interested in an effective media than the media themselves.<br />
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I don't know if it's the lockdown that has changed my habits but lately I'm not even interested in Twitter news. Good analysis is rare as hen's teeth and the questions I have remain unanswered. If I want answers I'm going to have to get them myself. I certainly have no interest in the opinions of Twitter denizens and I'm not interested in playing by their rules in what is essentially a sordid popularity contest among insular tribes who are barely even aware of each other.<br />
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The only news yesterday of any particular interest to me was the release of a new set of Notices to Stakeholders, which I will revisit over the next week, but that came to me by way of a mailshot from the EU Commission. It seems I just don't need the media and I suspect a great many more don't either. We are better off without them. Whatever function it serves, it isn't news.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-26319078762579409682020-04-29T20:25:00.001-07:002020-04-29T20:25:25.361-07:00Further down the drain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you've debated Brexit at any point, you will have ended up crossing swords with a populist grunter who insists on trading on "WTO rules" who will most likely not have heard of the EU's Notices to Stakeholders, much less read them. Up to now they were a series of official legal positions on the standing of a third country in the event of no withdrawal agreement. They detail which markets the UK will be excluded from or will encounter regulatory barriers to participation. <div>
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Yesterday <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/info/european-union-and-united-kingdom-forging-new-partnership/future-partnership/getting-ready-end-transition-period_en">these were updated</a> to spell out the position in the event of an FTA or no FTA post-transition. As before they are split into sectors from air travel to medicinal products. If acknowledged they would likely dispel a great many of the misapprehension of Tory Brexiteers. Every notice carries the same health warning:</div>
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In particular, a free trade agreement does not provide for internal market concepts (in the area of goods
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a free trade agreement remove customs formalities and controls, including those concerning the origin
of goods and their input, as well as prohibitions and restrictions for imports and exports.</blockquote>
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Were that anybody were actually interested in the details there's enough set out in these notices to do a detailed impact analysis just on the basis of what happens in law, but with Corona absorbing the entire runtime of the media and the public, the only people still with their heads in the game are the headbangers and the policy wonks who have nothing at all new to say - and in many instances have regressed. </div>
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The upshot of that particular health warning is that the mish mash of misunderstood concepts the Tories believe are possible inside an FTA are, in fact, not possible. This is nothing at all new to anyone who was paying attention but it's good to have it spelled out in black and white. The functioning of the EU system is not up for negotiation - and certainly not to accommodate the UK. Corona has no bearing on it.</div>
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In more practical terms, so far as supply chains go, there is not a lot of functional difference between an FTA and no deal at all, and thus, if we are resigned to leaving the single market the "no deal" debate loses some of its urgency. There is also that small matter of the global pandemic. With Airbus facing a grave and possibly existential crisis, and Ford reporting slumping revenues, Brexit is looking like a sideshow. Corona's <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-pandemic-disrupts-global-value-chains/?fbclid=IwAR141ez_eHPmY5NYJOmvfPat0NwK615Aq0Ac7p68nW0BZI2MKSXi5JSg4MI">disruptive impact on supply chains</a> is a global concern.</div>
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As regards to extending the transition, I have argued that it makes more sense to defer, but to a point, Michael Gove is quite correct. It is entirely possible to conclude a threadbare FTA in a short time, and if this government doesn't see the need for a comprehensive deal, and is determined to inflict the maximum possible disruption, then it scarcely matters. Politically it is easier to mask the effects while Corona is running hot. </div>
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This to me is an absolutely foolish move that actually makes this Brexit worse than the original no deal in that we have a dog's dinner of a withdrawal agreement to contend with where Johnson has practically handed Northern Ireland to the EU. If there was a point in a withdrawal agreement it was to buy time to develop a working relationship with the EU but since we're rushing it through and the government has no intention of working toward a viable outcome, we might as well not have bothered at all. </div>
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What follows will be a torrent of propaganda, probably from the IEA shop on how Corona underscored the need for absolute regulatory sovereignty, glossing over the derogations the EU has already made, largely using Corona as a smokescreen to deregulate the way they have always wanted to - still misunderstanding the utility and value of regulation. They're still caught up in their decades old "red tape" narrative. </div>
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With so much else going on I don't see there being much in the way of political resistance. The Brexit saga was already exhausted with new twists providing only morsels of entertainment for the media whose audiences are bored stiff of it all after four years of intense and ill-natured bickering. The continuity remain campaign have even pivoted to become an anti-Boris movement, more concerned with the mismanagement of Corona - but as usual getting distracted by the trivia and having no sense of proportion. </div>
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Beyond Corona, it is difficult to imagine what the trade landscape then looks like. The price of oil provides some easement, but trade is sure to be more political than it has been in recent years with food and biosecurity taking centre stage and economic nationalism surging back. Corona will have brought about a number of changes in consumer behaviour, some of which will be here to stay. Buying locally produced goods may just become a necessity since shipping lines are on the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, we are going to miss a lucrative export market place in our own backyard.</div>
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As it happens, there is every reason to believe we won't strike a deal with the EU. They UK red lines are too out of kilter with the EU's trade methodology. The UK is resistant to level playing field instruments, failing to comprehend that as far as the EU is concerned, a level playing field is a the whole point of FTAs which are their principal instrument of regulatory hegemony and soft power. Between that and the gulf that exists on fishing, the Tories have the pretext for a walkout that will be hugely popular. The European question, therefore, will remain unresolved. No deal cannot stay no deal. </div>
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I would like to think that sooner or later the criminal negligence in their handling of Corona, and the botched exit from the EU will cost them later down the line. For the moment, the unpopularity of the media is giving the Tories a free ride, which they have skilfully weaponised by picking fights with A-list lobby hacks. It works for Trump and it will work here. The media is not doing itself any favours.</div>
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As regards to anything like coherent opposition, Keir Starmer brings no remedy to Labour's woes. Aside from being wooden and having all the charisma of septic tank, Labour still has an irreconcilable identity crisis to fathom while its factional infighting prevents Starmer from doing anything useful. He's no Blair and he's not even a Kinnock. But then, there is a deeper crisis in that they've forgotten how to effectively oppose. They take their agenda from the media and have no idea how to usefully exploit the mistakes made by Johnson. </div>
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For the time being government is just something that is done to us where public consent doesn't really come into it. There is a public debate of a sort but it doesn't influence anything. We simply have to endure a feral government with no means of correction until the next general election, where, as ever, the options will be unpalatable, unedifying and fatally uninspiring. Meanwhile <a href="http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87593">the media gets worse</a> so the government remains more popular than it has any right to be.</div>
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I've been writing solidly about politics for five years now. I got into it with the hope that we could change things, arrest the decline and give government the overhaul it desperately needs. I'm starting to think it may not be possible. We are ebbing further away from democracy all the time. It;s nothing to do with Corona either. Public debate focuses on the leader and all power gravitates to the centre. The media reinforces it by making the Prime Minister the central focus - the prism through which all events must be viewed. Politics has died a death and not even Brexit managed to resurrect it while Corona just makes it more tribal than ever. </div>
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Since Margaret Thatcher, each government has been more banal than the last as they choose to engage the public via the media. Politicians become bland sloganeers - evasive, dishonest and incurious. We have become so accustomed to manufactured scandal that real scandal no longer rates so conduct in politics declines. There is no price to pay for failure and no consequence for malfeasance. Since the public have been politically castrated they no longer care. Politics is now entertainment and they wouldn't have it any other way.</div>
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I've long felt that the public would have to feel tangible consequences for political indifference before they got angry. We were at least close to that with Brexit but with Corona being a cover all smokescreen we are even robbed of that. Government can continue to evade responsibility and people are all to happy to make excuses for it. I don't know how bad it has to get but it seems the answer is "worse than this". As if it wasn't depressing enough already. </div>
Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-32584521817173800282020-04-27T19:17:00.001-07:002020-05-04T19:00:50.816-07:00Corona: behind the learning curve<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Very early on in the Corona epidemic it was known that the virus was more than likely airborne. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-27/coronavirus-lingers-in-air-of-crowded-spaces-new-study-finds?fbclid=IwAR1li5ELzytAFl-uqkHZoc3tzrSy8uCYmSrNDkWORyYd3HLJ9asF9f7IUBg">A new study confirms this</a>. You didn't need to be an epidemiologist to see that cramming people on underground trains was going to spread the virus - but they carried on doing it.<br />
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Anyone with practical experience in outbreak control said we needed to treat this as several outbreaks rather than a single epidemic - which needed local coordination rather than the West Wing soap opera we have seen in recent weeks. The very basics of outbreak control says test and trace procedures are our best bet. This government didn't think so and stopped doing it early on. <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWPTCKqXYAEkieP?format=jpg&name=900x900">Only on Wednesday</a>, some weeks behind other countries, did it decide to recruit a test and trace task force.<br />
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Meanwhile some of us have been saying for weeks that the Nightingale hospitals should be used as primary treatment centres to keep the virus out of hospitals to prevent the re-seeding the virus. This they did not do, killing thousands of people in the process. Only now does the government consider a <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/nightingale-plan-to-keep-hospitals-free-from-coronavirus-6fsxr6kvb">change of policy</a>. This is all a bit like that saying about American foreign policy. They will always do the right thing - but only after they've tried everything else.<br />
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This is not a matter of 20:20 hindsight. This is the fundamentals of outbreak control where the government has abandoned all good practice in favour of its own hapless blundering - much like its handling of Brexit. Its Corona track record is a <a href="http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87591">litany of failures</a>. The decision to infect care homes ought to be something of a national scandal - and it would be were the media capable of concentrating on anything instead of producing valueless noise.<br />
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It would seem the current policy reversals are in preparation for an easement of the lockdown - which is about right. The public don't have the stamina for it, the economy cannot afford it, and politically it is unsustainable. If the government can get its act together with test and trace, and can shift the workflow away from hospitals and care homes then it is feasible to ease up. Some seem to think the issue is binary, but every policy has to be look at in conjunction with whatever other measures are in play.<br />
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There does, though, seem to be a unfounded air of optimism. Twitter is mostly useless but it does have moods and yesterday morning the mood was one of expectation in the belief that it was almost over. Between unused Nightingale hospitals and misleading statistics, there is a sense that this is all just a massive overreaction and we can return to the normal we knew. Even a government as crass as this one doesn't believe that. If there a plateau it's because the lockdown is working and a sudden end to the lockdown would see a flurry of activity that would set off a second wave. This is going to have to be managed over the long haul and it will take some time before easement measures are in place.<br />
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Though country to country comparisons are to be met with scepticism and suspicion, It seems that New Zealand did get it right in the early days. It brought in some of the toughest restrictions in the world when it only had a few dozen cases and closed its borders while enforcing quarantine of all arrivals. It brought in a stringent lockdown and an extensive test and trace regime. It is now <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52436658">presently Corona free</a>.<br />
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Obviously the UK and NZ are massively different countries with different topography, demographics and climate, and NZ is not host to a global city like London. The chances of containing it outright were slim. But had we gone back to first principles we might well have contained it outside of the capital and lockdown measures outside of cities may not have been necessary. This government has made every avoidable mistake in the book. We now prepare for the second act when the first was treated as a dress rehearsal. There's no question about it. This government is incompetent.</div>
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As explored previously this is the culmination of decades of maladministration, but cucually there is a talent drought at the top of government and no institutional knowledge of how to meet a biosecurity threat of this magnitude. It is now playing catch up, weeks behind the learning curve, and needlessly killing people as it goes. </div>
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This government has enjoyed a certain immunity in the polls thanks to the self-immolation of the opposition, and with the public largely not informed about the mechanics of trade, Johnson's Brexit bloviation has gone largely unpunished. The rap sheet on Corona, though, is growing longer by the day. The right has it that the media has misread the mood of the nation, and perhaps it did initially, but this is like driving through plague of locusts. Eventually the windscreen is covered, the wipers jammed, and the radiator gets gummed up. Tory drones can deflect and defuse, but the sheer ineptitude of Johnson's administration will soon overwhelm even their capacity for self-deception. There has to be a political price - and I suspect we shall not have to wait long to see it. </div>
Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-55763355302182721162020-04-27T18:26:00.002-07:002020-04-27T18:26:43.497-07:00A model for the future? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have been otherwise occupied. This F4 Phantom is my latest and, without a doubt, my best ever effort. It has now taken pride of place on the mantelpiece. I'm now working on a Canberra PR.9.<br />
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It's interesting, though, that when I look at my full shelf line up, I note that every jet I grew up with is now retired. Aviation geekery used to be an interest in the present and the future. Now it's nostalgia. The major advances in aerospace are in the civil domain and it no longer captures the public's imagination. I think with the passing of the Tornado from RAF service last year, we really did see the end of the cold war technologies. We are in more than one way in a whole new era. Between Brexit and Corona, the world I knew is gone.<br />
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There is, however, nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia. The political history of Britain's aviation industry is one worthy of study. Every post-war aircraft in RAF service was as much a political decision (or a consequence of one) as it was one of capability. The Jaguar was a stopgap, as was the Buccaneer and Phantom, as Britain was torn between the US and Europe, while trying to sustain its own aerospace exports.<br />
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As I understand it, while many get misty eyed about the VC10 and what could have been, and what a superbly capable aircraft it was (allegedly), the RAF had it foisted upon them in order to make the production line viable. For every supposedly world beating aircraft we had a half dozen failures while propping up a massively inefficient industry - not having a the first idea how people were to be otherwise employed. The only reason the Canberra bomber had a plywood fin was to give the craftsmen at De Havilland something to so when the writing on the wall for wooden aircraft was already faded.<br />
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To a point the remainers are quite right. Britain's self-image as pioneering player is somewhat trumped up. The one that really gets plane spotters misty-eyed is the TSR-2, which for its time probably was as good as they said, but there's a shed full of flops to get us to that point and it wasn't much over and above the North American A-5 Vigilante.<br />
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It didn't even improve when we went in on European collaboration to produce the Panavia Tornado. It took twenty years of concurrent development before it was a capable aircraft and the fighter variant, unfairly described as useless, wasn't nearly as capable as the F16/18 and in the end a good deal more expensive. We latterly repeated that mistake by going all in on the Eurofighter.<br />
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The Eurofighter, or Typhoon as we now call it, is undeniably an amazing machine for something that looks like Finger Mouse, but offers little over and above a later model F16 at a third of the price. It doesn't even represent European cooperation since the French went off and did their own thing with the Rafale. With the F35 we have probably seen the last European venture for some time. The atlantic pendulum swings again.<br />
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Where Corona makes things interesting is that it finally kills off the big four engined passenger jets. The ill-fated white elephant Airbus A380 will soon be making its way to the scrappers with no real interest in developing a feight version, bringing an end to another politically motivated project. Another era comes to a close - and with Brexit, very possibly the beginning of the end for aerospace manufacturing and in-service support at Filton.<br />
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In the tradition of obsolete and expensive ventures to keep people in the regions in decent jobs we now wait to see if the Tempest fighter programme comes to fruition, but Corona may see that hitting the buffers before the artists impressions are finalised. Once again the UK will have to choose between Europe and the USA is we can even afford to be in the game. Since any manned fighter is practically a museum piece at inception, and with Corona related defence cuts a near certainty, the UK has to think about whether it can even sustain an air force in the classic sense.<br />
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Between Brexit and Corona, bearing in mind that air travel demand has gone off the cliff, aerospace and defence is turning a corner. It may be that plastic aeroplanes out of a shipping container from Japan will become Britain's main aerospace interest. Not that I have a problem with that.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-14997749389628445822020-04-26T06:28:00.001-07:002020-04-26T06:28:12.824-07:00A milestone on the long road of British political decline<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Now that Brexit is over the line I'm considerably less emotionally invested in defending it which gives me a certain clarity I didn't have before. Or rather I don't feel the same obligation to defend it. There was a battle for ownership of Brexit and the hardliners won. I think probably that battle was lost early on, and though there were opportunities to reclaim it from the headbangers, Theresa May wasn't up to the job.<br />
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Being that in the eyes of Brexiteers I am not even worthy of the name leaver, despite having stood for UKIP in the early days (and having campaigned full time to leave, being a co-founder of an independent leave group, I am happy to concede the ground to them. I had long argued that Brexit wasn't a populist coup, wasn't isolationist, wasn't "europhobic" or "right wing". Or at least there's no reason why it should be, but ultimately that message couldn't cut through the noise of Johnny-come-lately leavers who saw Brexit as a vehicle for a wider culture war.<br />
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Since they have now cemented their victory not only over remain, but also any moderate voices, it is now theirs to defend. I am now at liberty to ask all the questions that demand answers. I keep asking and will ask again; with only a rushed threadbare EU FTA or no deal at all, and UK-US talks postponed indefinitely, what genius moves does this government have in mind to get us out of the Corona slump, bearing in mind the public wants shorter supply chains?<br />
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I know how I would go about it being that I have taken the time to explore trade and trade treaties in depth, but these questions are not for me to answer. I can't speak for Brexiteers because they would vehemently disagree with anything I proposed. They need to answer these questions and be judged on their answers (or the absence thereof). </div>
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Very occasionally a Brexiteer, usually with a poorly photoshopped campaign avatar, will take a stab at it, but it only goes to demonstrate that the average Brexit grunter doesn't have the first concept of what a modern FTA is, is not interested in finding out, and prefers the alternate reality constructed by the Daily Telegraph/Express to the one we live in.</div>
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At no point are we going to get coherent answers. It might be good to know from Richard Tice how we are to become "self-sufficient" in agriculture while unilaterally trashing our trade defences. How does the "buy British" shtick live side by side with being a "global free trade champion"? If we are abandoning EU state aid rules, what about those WTO state aid rules? And on that subject, how do they square calling for the abolition of the World Health Organisation when it is integral to the functioning of the four main WTO agreements?</div>
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Course we know the answer to all this. There is no consistency or coherence to be gleaned from their issue illiterate ranting, and the way in which they have so effortlessly turned from no-dealers to Coronavirus "it's just the flu" truthers tells you all you need to know. This is pure populism at work that pays no regard to facts. It's a malcontent movement of wreckers all too happy to destroy but offer nothing n terms of vision or what comes after.<br />
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The great pity of all this is that Brexit could have been a pivot point for British politics; an opportunity to convert the Brexit momentum into real and lasting democratic change. But in the end, they weren't interested in that. They are entirely happy with the elected dictatorship system just so long as it's their dictator and Boris Johnson is enough to placate them. That's the height of their limited ambition. They don't care what this government actually does just so long as it keeps grunting the right noises. The only outcome it will be measured by is if Brexit is Brexity enough for them. And, of course, no Brexit short of no deal will ever be enough.<br />
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There's no getting round it. Brexiteers are pretty shitty people and the leaders they have chosen to speak for them are thick as they come. They not even aware of their own inconsistencies let alone capable of intellectually addressing them. They've turned it into a giant popularity contest (something they can win with ease) and by way of having influence over the agenda, but no actual power, they never have to take responsibility for what happens, so they feel no real obligation to supply credible answers. Ultimately the Tories will have to carry the can.<br />
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But with Brexit now eclipsed by Corona, there is no day of vindication for anyone, least of all me. Any layoffs at Airbus or Rolls Royce will be put squarely at the feet of Corona. The industry will gradually rebuild but not with the UK in the picture. Brits will become poorer than before without ever realising what was done to them.<br />
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Brexiteers will argue that Corona has weakened the EU's trade clout, which to a point is true. The same cohesive bloc will not reassert itself for some time, if ever, but for as long as the EU does exist (and in my view it will survive) it calls the shots for the continent and is a power with which we must contend. Looking at it in the wider context, we are sure to see a pivot away from China, accelerating the near-shoring trend, meaning that our regional markets become all the more important.<br />
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But then, as this blog has long argued, it won't be the Tories who define the longer term relationship with the EU. Any FTA is just an empty bucket to be filled at a later date. With Tories may get their empty bucket but it is for others to fill it, and fill it they will full of obligations and commitments. This government will be judged on its performance during the Corona crisis (and public opinion gradually is turning against them), and it will be for others to decide how we climb out of the Corona slump and the shape of our relationship with the EU. The grunters will have had their day and squandered their opportunities.<br />
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With the Tories presiding over a Corona shambles, having infected care homes directly from hospitals, and with questions still to answer over their inaction in the early days, if the opposition gets their act together, there is no end of material to smack the government with at a time when events have surpassed the minuscule abilities of the prime minister. Add to that a bungled Brexit that sees us cut off from our most important export market, and a serious talent drought at the top of government, Johnson will fall in disgrace.<br />
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For all that, I still see nothing in the EU that persuades me we should wish to be members, Its lacklustre response to Corona reveals it to be the creaking and dysfunctional mess we always said it was, but Brexit is no longer a turning point. It's just another milestone on the long road of British political decline. Statecraft is dead - and having squandered the opportunities Brexit afforded us, we are likely looking at a slow plod toward associate membership with little opposition in the country thanks to the populists. They are not as popular as they think.<br />
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Much in the future now depends on the grim daily increment of Corona fatalities. There is an emerging public mood that we have seen the end of the beginning and can look forward to resuming a mode of normality in the not too distant future. With the official body count having surpassed the 20k benchmark of a "good outcome" with possibly as many more outside the hospital system and more to come, with another possible surge should there be an easement of restrictions, by the time we are done we could be looking at unthinkable numbers. At that point, the "it's just the flu" Brexit brigade will have to account for themselves. They can perhaps hide from the trade impacts but the body count is one statistic they can't walk away from. </div>
Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-35104664066714800592020-04-23T20:03:00.000-07:002020-04-25T22:33:01.377-07:00The rule of groupthink The populist grunters on Twitter are trotting out the line that lockdowns don't work, should be lifted as soon as possible and herd immunity is the only way to get through this. As ever they are not thinking. Before the government officially announced a series of measures over a number of days, a number of large venues were cancelling events while universities were already taking unilateral decisions to draw down face to face teaching.<br />
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At this point we didn't know much about the virus: how deadly or how infectious and had no reliable data and to a large extent we still don't. Had there not been a lockdown the media would have been screaming while employees would be bombarded with requests for leave as individuals took their own precautions. Any company choosing to remain open would have major PR problems and possibly even face vigilante attacks. No British government could be seen to be sitting on its hands as the death toll shot up which was always going to be severe in a city like London. Even the suggestion of herd immunity caused a wave of revulsion as people largely took it to mean what the government meant, ie let everyone catch it.<br />
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Within a couple of weeks we'd be seeing mass panic, especially since the government had elected not to do contact tracing. This mass panic would see a sizable proportion of the public going into voluntary lockdown, which of itself whacks profit margins. Then you'd have a rapidly overrun NHS adding to that panic where schools would close of their own volition, taking parents out of the workplace, and pretty soon you have half the country in self-isolation.<br />
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Anyone still defying the public mood would then be facing accusations of putting profit before safety, which would have the unions up in arms while the opposition has a field day. Not putting some form of lockdown in place is not politically viable. The government had to do it just to bring a sense of uniformity and coherence, slowing the spread somewhat, buying time to collect data, understand the issues and formulate a longer term strategy. Without that coherence it becomes as much a public order issue as it is a health issue.<br />
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As regards to herd immunity without a vaccine, with a virus we still don't fully understand, with all manner of lasting after effects, such a policy is highly reckless.<br />
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So what about Sweden? As explored previously, country comparisons is comparing apples and oranges. Every country needs its own approach befitting its culture. I can't speak about Sweden but the UK national debate is highly polarised, stoked by the media, and culturally we are risk averse. We have to look at how people behave in each set of circumstances. In any case, demographics, population density and topography make direct statistical comparisons meaningless and even inside the UK the figures are distorted by way of the huge cultural and economic disparities between London and the regions. As regards to the more liberal approach in Sweden, the jury is still out, but they are leaving it to chance. Sweden is likely to be the beneficiary of measures taken by its immediate neighbours.<br />
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As to lifting the lockdown as soon as possible, that will likely see a second surge requiring further lockdowns, unless we get good at containment by way of contact tracing and selective quarantines. This lockdown needs to last as long as it takes to deploy and refine a test and trace regime that has never before been attempted.<br />
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On the matter of the economy, there seems to be the belief that the do nothing "herd immunity" strategy is consequence free. It isn't. In any case, trade and movement restrictions stay in place between countries (particularly air freight) which causes supply chain problems that mean a lot of businesses can't operate normally anyway. Not particularly helped by panic buying either. In short it's a giant shit sandwich and we all have to take a bite.<br />
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In my view the lockdown could have been avoided had our planning and timing been up to scratch but since we missed the containment window, we don't have much of a choice until we can ease our way out of it. The populists argue that this virus is no more deadly than the flu. This is clearly not the case. We can all play cynical games with statistics but ultimately the nature of this virus means it has the potential to kill more than Ebola because it has a larger infection pool.<br />
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It's not surprising that the "herd immunity" grunters cross over with hardline no deal Brexiters. The populist mindset, addled with conspiracy and suspicion, spoofed toxic propaganda and fake news, continually believes there is a hidden agenda and that their "common sense" trumps expertise. For sure there is disagreement on how to proceed between experts, and the strategy is as much political as it is scientific, but right wing populists can always be counted on to dispute virtually anything for any reason if it suits their massive superiority complex. It's always grunty middle aged men and frumpy Tory women who continually assert that their total ignorance is equal or better than professional judgement.<br />
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To some extent our expert class has brought it upon themselves by way of their professional misconduct during Brexit, demanding that a constitutional issue was a purely technical question that ordinary people weren't equipped to consider, and couldn't be trusted to vote the right way. They themselves have brought expertise into disrepute. As with climate change they will always sing the song of their funders, meaning they are instinctively not trusted. Like the boy who cried wolf, now there is a wolf, nobody is listening. There is also the malign influence of the media which is a whole other essay.<br />
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There is then the politics of it when the progressive left favours the word of international bodies no matter how corrupt or incompetent, while the populist right mistrust all government but especially any entity above the nation state level. The populist right doesn't just want to leave the EU and UN, they actively seek to destroy them regardless of the consequences. Consequently they will disregard anything said by the WHO or EU, and the moment they see what their domestic political opponents are saying, they will automatically assume the extreme opposite narrative. This is not in any way driven by rationality on either side.<br />
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As with everything else the truth is somewhere in the murky middle, buried under a mountain of partisan propaganda, struggling to get an airing with audiences lacking the time, attention span or background to absorb what they need to know, so will instead look to persons of prestige as recommend by opinion gatekeepers in their own tribe. We therefore have a debate where nobody can be persuaded of anything because holding the party line always comes first. To do otherwise is to invite ostracism and since most people are cowards they'll do or say whatever is expected of them - even if it kills them, which in this case, might just do that.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-43916971492948354562020-04-21T21:20:00.001-07:002020-04-21T21:20:25.694-07:00You have the media you deserve<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I haven't been monitoring the UK Corona soap opera very closely. Hypocrisy is running wild and it's too much to bear. I'm tired of the partisan bickering on Twitter and I want no part of it. I'm not going to get sucked into arguing the toss over manufactured issues and I don't want to know Robert Peston or Piers Morgan think let alone debate their opinions. The issue is far bigger than our festering tribal politics. </div>
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My first thoughts when Corona hit were obviously related to trade and Brexit but then I started thinking about the global implications - chiefly what happens when Corona hits the slums of India and Pakistan and parts of Africa. We're not getting reliable data because they don't have sufficiently good governance to collect it and are probably not even testing, let alone treating in the worst affected areas. Moreover, I wouldn't place too much faith in the accuracy and honesty of data from these such places. We can see, though, that it is already causing tensions and political instability.<br />
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I have some confidence that the UK will eventually get a grip and we will somehow cope but the bigger picture, while we prat about, failing to control Covid-19, is that less developed countries which rely on us for trade are suffering from the economic downturn which we have precipitated. If Corona doesn't get them then famine and other diseases <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/22/coronavirus-live-news-un-warns-of-biblical-famine-as-white-house-prepares-immigration-halt">most likely will</a>.<br />
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The world is facing widespread famine “of biblical proportions” because of the coronavirus pandemic, the chief of the UN’s food relief agency has warned, with a short time to act before hundreds of millions starve. More than 30 countries in the developing world could experience widespread famine, and in 10 of those countries there are already more than 1 million people on the brink of starvation, said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme. “We are not talking about people going to bed hungry,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “We are talking about extreme conditions, emergency status – people literally marching to the brink of starvation. If we don’t get food to people, people will die.” </blockquote>
This has dangerous implications for Europe. We have already had a decade of death in the Mediterranean and a massive upsurge in migration to Europe which has had a profound influence on central and eastern European politics. They are already at breaking point in terms of how much they can absorb while feeling utterly abandoned by the EU. If the migration crisis then becomes a magnitude larger than it is now, we can expect to see conflict on the EU's borders and possibly massacres in the Balkan transit camps.<br />
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Being that the problem will be inconvenient to Western European nations, there's every chance they will look the other way. If the EU doesn't have an adequate response then we could see the Visegrad group going rogue. It is potentially an existential issue for the EU that makes Brexit little more than an irritating distraction. <br />
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Presently the Corona debate is divided into two camps. The do mores, and the do nothings. The do mores are failing to identify how we should proceed while the do nothings are not thinking beyond our own shores. Not controlling Corona is not an option. We need to resolve the epidemic in order to address the economic problems. The rest of the world doesn't have the luxury of waiting to get to grips with the problem - and if we don't then their problems become our problems.<br />
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I don't know exactly when the UK will get its act together, but an urgent global response is needed to tackle Coronavirus. It stands to throw everything into turmoil. I don't even rule out regional and possibly world war at this point. So much of the global order has been creaking and under sustained attack for years and it won't take much for stabilising mechanisms in geopolitics to fall over.<br />
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I am already of the view that there is no returning to normal. The normal we have enjoyed for so long is gone for good. What matters is what the world looks like when the music stops. This is why we need central government focussed on the international dimension rather than stepping in to do a poor job of the day to day management of the domestic crisis. This is why having toothless and de-skilled local government is so critically in need of correction.<br />
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If there is one thing I have noted, it's that if people barely took an interest in Brussels news, they take zero interest in British activities in Geneva. For all that we have seen a change of management in Downing Street, for our diplomatic corps, save for the occasional admin chores thrown up by Brexit, it's business as usual. It looks very much like it did prior to 2016.<br />
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This is as much to do with the fact that our own government take little interest in it either. It is used to conducting its international affairs through Brussels, but now we have withdrawn from that level of European politics we have seemingly abandoned any kind of global engagement, leaving our Geneva contingent to continue making bland and inconsequential statements which translate into no action at all.<br />
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At a time when there are calls to dismantle DfID and foreign aid, with populist calls to join Trump in defunding the WHO, we risk self-isolating at a time when global engagement has never been more urgent. The WHO rightly faces harsh criticism in how it has allowed itself to become an unwitting agent of China, but the UN system is still, by and large (though we don't realise it) the West's primary instrument of soft power.<br />
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Instead of realistic engagement, what we are seeing is a political and media class as insular as ever it was, continually distracted by trivia, unable to get serious. Here we are in the middle of a global pandemic and the Tories are trying to construct a trade treaty with the EU based on collapsing trade norms when we need every swinging dick turning their attention to fighting Corona at home and abroad.<br />
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At the best of times Brexit is no small undertaking, requiring a massive chunk of Whitehall's operating capability, yet we're now doing it when circumstances are changing faster than our ability to understand let alone respond. Not exactly ideal for negotiating a long term relationship - yet the media has all but dropped the issue while the government executes its Brexit agenda out of the spotlight.<br />
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The insularity of our political class though, is not an indictment on our politics. Our politics is only really a reflection of us. The right is presently complaining about the conduct of the media but they don't protest when it's spewing out Daily Express/Telegraph fiction. Ultimately the media's problems come from market saturation. There is plentiful demand for trivia and gossip and a universe of suppliers. There is plentiful lightweight toss for free so there is no real incentive to part with money for it. But then the media can't win. If they did produce quality content that required more than a nanosecond's attention span, that in any way conflicts with existing tribal narratives, few would actually read it.<br />
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For the last few years I have viewed politics through the prism of Twitter, where the more outlandishly crass the statement, the more popular it is. (See Tice, Richard/Grayling, AC). It has given rise to a new class of know-nothing punditry, preaching ideologies they have never read on or understood, reacting to events by way of trading insider gossip and prestige opinion. The rest of us are expected to follow it and debate it as passive consumers of politics where they set the agenda.<br />
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As such it is a top down relationship with politics in that nobody I know of has successfully set the agenda from outside the bubble. There were times when The Leave Alliance got close, but the Brexiteers circled the wagons.<br />
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If anything kills us in the masses or destroys everything we value, it won't be Corona. We'll be helpless passengers of events far beyond our control because we took no notice when it was necessary to do so. The Chinese navy could be moored off the coast of Kent and right wing Twitter would still be demanding Brexit talks stay on schedule while the left would be bleating about whatever nonsense takes their fancy on any given week. Disturbances to their regular political grazing habits are ignored unless there is a politically useful dimension. (See PPE)<br />
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Unless the public themselves are willing to step off, to stop being passive recipients of political narratives and engaging with celebrity journalist trivia, then our politics will remain in its comatose state. But instead of getting serious people prefer to remain in their comfort zone of whatever provides them with the validation they crave. Virtually nobody on Twitter is remotely interested in achieving something. They just don't know how to occupy their day otherwise without someone setting the agenda for them. It's actually worse than political disengagement and apathy because it sustains this corrosive dynamic.<br />
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As it happens, there is still worthy journalism out there. Quite a lot of relevant news comes from the Guardian World section which tweets under a different account (@guardianworld). It's the Guardian's equivalent of BBC World Service before it was cannibalised and downgraded. Bizarrely it doesn't get much in the way of retweets. It's the sort of news that's useful in constructing your own understanding, but that is not really what the market demands. They want neatly pre-packaged narratives they can deploy in their own petty little Twitter spats which accomplish nothing.<br />
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We saw this during the Brexit debate where chlorine washed chicken became a feature of the debate, sparking countless misconceived debates over whether it was safe to eat, completely missing the point that the issue is a flashpoint because it marks the differences between the regulatory philosophies of two trade giants, where pivoting our alignment has implications for our exports. Nobody in that argument was especially interested in trade (an inherently interesting subject). They were only interested as far as it was a useful scare to play petty partisan games. Four years on and it is still a recurrent theme where nothing whatsoever has been learned. There is no curiosity beyond the confines of a political bubble created for its inhabitants by the media.<br />
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Fast forward to today and we are having the same kind of inane debates about PPE in hospitals, which is really a logistics problem if it is a problem at all, but in any case is a situation that varies between health authorities - but it serves as a stick to beat the government regardless of what it actually achieves, whether it's relevant or not.<br />
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The right has it that the media should be getting behind the leader where it should be "fostering an atmosphere of national unity", which is fair to a point, but what they actually mean by that is it's bad form to criticise the government at all. The real failure on the part of the media, though, through its own intellectual debasement, is a failure to identify and prioritise the government's errors with a view to correcting them - which it couldn't manage even on the remotest chance it was inclined to do so. But why would they when there is so little demand?<br />
<br />I'm all for media bashing pretty much all of the time, but if you published or retweeted articles saying "We have nothing to fear from a no deal Brexit" or other such baseless propaganda you don't get to lecture anyone about the state of journalism. You're guilty of the same incuriosity and lack of integrity. Right now the government's mistakes are destroying our economy and the fabric of our society yet media consumers carry on as though it were just another theme in their regular news entertainment and whatever passes for political participation. Say what you like about the media, but you do get the media (and the government) you deserve - and it's going to cost you everything.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-67012546436574689052020-04-20T19:53:00.001-07:002020-04-21T10:24:59.184-07:00Corona: the slow march to authoritarianism. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It finally happened. A Tory MP tweets:<br />
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There is a very real risk that the savage media hunt for alleged scandals and scapegoats will distract the government from its coronavirus strategy. There will be time for analysis of performance later. Now is the time to support the war effort. </blockquote>
This is edging toward " It's unpatriotic to criticise government". Of course there is an element of that. The partisan attacks on the government in respect of PPE look more than a little strained and the remainer blob has seemingly taken up a position of opposition for its own sake, largley believing, or at leas proliferating, virtually anything that paints the government in a bad light. Then there is the clickbait media that makes a living demoralising and denigrating.<br />
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Being that Twitter is binary on just about every issue we now have two camps. Those with the government and those against, where again nuance disappears between the cracks. But of course it is entirely possible, and likely, and indeed demonstrable, that while the media is chucking the kitchen sink at the government to the point of losing public trust, the government is also making a complete hash of our response to Corona. </div>
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One thing the Twitter debate doesn't do is separate out the issues. To date I still get people accusing me of being a remainer largely because don't tweet anything in support of the government or any of its decisions pertaining to Brexit. It seems to support the proposition you also have to fall in line with the current execution. Twitter largely wants to be told what it wants to hear and to have its ego stroked. </div>
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As with Brexit, government loyalists can hold the line until it all starts falling part. And fall apart it will. All the foundations are there; poor preparation, inept strategising, weak leadership and a lamentable media. Though the lockdown appears to be having an impact on the overall death rate (so long as you discount the hidden epidemic in care homes), we have only really bought time. We can't stay locked down forever and unless the government has a credible containment plan then Corona is going to spread like wildfire when the lockdown is eased.</div>
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The government appears to have weathered the attack by the Sunday Times but it won't be the last of its kind. This time it didn't land a punch because it's not exactly news that the PM is lazy, indifferent and feckless. It doesn't seem to have any bearing on his approval ratings. It's all priced in and they'll keep making excuses for him. I do suspect, though, we are seeing cartoon physics in motion where the hapless coyote doesn't fall until he looks down.<br />
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From the very start, there has been only one thing that was going to get us out of this mess, and that was a programme of aggressive contact tracing and isolation. It still is essential, yet no-one seems to be able to focus on this. The media is all over the place, Twitter is up its own backside, and the BBC has developed a morbid fascination for sickness. As a nation, we've totally lost it. The media can play its little games and tribalists can have their little spats while the government spoonfeeds them propaganda, but there is a day in the not too distant future when the bill has to be paid in full.<br />
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This will be an itemised bill. There's a price to pay for dismantling local authority capabilities. There's a price to pay for inept pandemic planning. There's a price to pay for the lethargic response. There's a price to pay for having an insular, tribal public debate. There's a price to pay for BBC self-abasement. There's a price to pay for a self-regarding and useless media. There's a price to pay for the Corbyn experiment. There's price to pay for electing Boris Johnson. There is a long list contributing factors spanning a decade or more that leads us to this point. If it wasn't going to be Brexit that pulled the trigger then Corona will do the honours.<br />
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It can be argued that other countries have not fared much better, each having their own difficulties with their respective media highlighting many of the same problems, but the bottom line is this government is accountable to us and it must be asked why the government after several weeks is still dragging its heels on implementing the very basics of outbreak containment. It's not like we are a poor country reliant on the science of the EU or the WHO. As a first world country where local government is founded on the principles of public sanitation, we have to ask why this has become a <a href="http://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2020/04/corona-rot-at-top.html">West Wing soap opera</a> so badly disconnected from reality.<br />
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As remarked the other day, though, the right are now enforcing a <a href="https://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2020/04/corona-age-of-futility.html">political correctness</a> of their own. If it's now bad form to be looking for alleged scandals it won't be too long before any criticism is viewed as suspect. We've been here before in the early days of the WW2 where criticising the conduct of the war could cost you a week's pay. With the plod having a track record of making arrests for tweets, and suggesting they may monitor what people buy in supermarkets, with authoritarianism making a comeback, it's not unthinkable that the right may have its own list of thought crimes. We are soon about to see how much baloney all that "free speech" guff was during the pre-corona culture wars.<br />
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When Ukip stared bleating about the establishment all those years ago, lodging it as a concept in political discourse, it was a mistake to ever assume they were anti-establishment. We have just seen a ten year process of Ukip absorbing the Tory party to become the establishment. Now that their man is at the helm and his cabinet is singing their tune about immigration and foreign aid, they are not in the least bit troubled by all the same excesses of government and presentation politics.<br />
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To a very large extent Brexit has had zero impact on our politics. We still have elected dictatorships. The Sunday Times says "One day there will inevitably be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks" but as usual there will be no consequences for the guilty. They'll walk away richer. </div>
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Just as Tony Blair faced no consequences for Iraq, Boris Johnson will face no consequences for the mishandling of Brexit or Corona. All the while, elections are just as futile as ever with participation being every bit as fruitless. This government may make all the pleasing noises the mob likes to hear, but on the ground it looks to be business as usual; a command and control government playing a perpetual game of whack-a-mole where management of media matters more than managing the apparatus of government. </div>
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In more ways that one the whole country has become servile. The media largely retails what it is told by government without conducting its own research, having no expertise of its own, co-opting prestige opinion when it needs a counter-expert, but possess no cognitive ability to ascertain the truth.<br />
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Meanwhile the opposition party has become an elected lobbyist group where instead of using parliamentary resources to conduct their own investigations they meekly demand the government holds an inquiry. Worse still, instead of taking early action according to their own pandemic planning, local authorities largely sat on their hands and waited for instruction. We've been conditioned to accept rule from the centre.<br />
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The problem with this is that central government does not do technical governance - or much governance of any other kind. It is reactive and it is mostly political, so in times such as these (or any other for that matter) it is not going to know what it is doing, and its first concern will always be the optics. On that basis we are never going to have competent government.<br />
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It is not entirely the fault of Boris Johnson or his government that our response to Corona has been bungled from the beginning. For the most part having Boris Johnson as PM is a symptom of the political, cultural and media collapse. In that regard Britain has bigger problems than Corona.<br />
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As much as Corona will do a number on our economy, there is also that small matter of Brexit. Though Corona's effects on the economy are a magnitude worse than no deal, many effects of Brexit will be masked by the impact. So many issues are now a moot point given the destructive impact it has already had, but now we are tasked with climbing out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.<br />
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Thanks to Corona a fair bit of the Airbus estate has closed down and they've scaled back production, while demand in the interim will slow down. Any job losses that would happen as a result of Brexit will now be squarely blamed on Corona. The point for me, however, is that without a comprehensive deal, once those jobs are lost, they're not coming back. If the UK slams the door on an open process, the UK will be the very last priority for the EU, and as member states seek to rebuild their own economies they won't be keen on opening up aerospace to UK participation.<br />
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But then it goes far beyond Brexit and trade. In order to shore up the economy in the short term this government has taken unprecedented measures, going far beyond even a Corbyn government. It is seeking to keep business and families afloat until such time as we can all return to work. That, though, is not without significant implications (and may even prove pointless since it is not sustainable). We are about to learn a new definition of austerity which makes the old definition look like the partisan hyperbole it was.<br />
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It's easy to buy public confidence in the short term, but every single interventionist measure is sure to have blowback that may not even wait until the next general election. With a decimated care sector and the cupboard being bare the "dementia tax" that cost Theresa May a comfortable majority will have to come back along with cuts to universal entitlements. The welfare state we once knew, underpinned by taxation of a relatively thriving economy is never going to look the same again, in a country of children who've had it too good for too long.<br />
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Part of me suspects it might be a good thing in that the power of the centralised state it contingent on its capacity to provide. It buys power. If government can no longer provide things like childcare then parents are going to have to sort it out for themselves along with many other things, necessitating effective local government to coordinate social enterprises. It is perhaps by that means we shall see a return to localism. But since all my other hopes have been dashed in recent years it will more likely result in a hardening of state power, only a state that doesn't provide and keenly defends its monopoly on power.<br />
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Peter Hitchens has of late argued that the lockdown is a grave mistake, surrendering our liberties in such a way that we never recover them. I think, though, that we already surrendered the most essential component of our democracy when we gave up what little local control we had (the reason we are <a href="https://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2020/03/corona-britain-forgot-what-government.html">in this mess</a> to begin with). From there it wasn't much of a leap to go the rest of the way. That we have found this centralised dictatorship passably tolerable is because it made politics redundant so we could get on with indulging our whims.<br />
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Now that we are faced with a wholly different economy where luxury purchases we take for granted and good jobs thin on the ground, it seems entirely possible that we become more like Hungary; a poor country run by an authoritarian mob gradually in the process of dismantling liberty. Though the Tory mob will have no particular problem with it, the centuries long march toward genuine democracy will for the first time go into reverse. Let's just hope there's more defiance in the British public than can be found on Twitter these days. </div>
Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-13530383861310740242020-04-17T19:18:00.001-07:002020-04-17T19:18:04.151-07:00Corona: the rot at the top<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I would be surprised if many are still watching the daily press conferences. I'm not. I've tuned them out. It's the usual parade of evasiveness, sloganeering and inanity. The only thing worse than the government's performance is that of our media.<br />
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That we have them at all, though, is problematic. Central government has assumed too much responsibility over the management of the crisis, treating it as a single outbreak when what we are dealing with is multiple outbreaks across the country, where local authorities should be the focus. That the management of the epidemic has gravitated to Downing Street is symptomatic of a command and control mentality where the government enjoys playing West Wing in front of a media corps that turns everything into a soap opera.<br />
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I'm not exactly sure when the Union flag "batwings" appeared but these such press conferences are stage managed to the last detail to convey seriousness and authority, leaden with wood panels to give it gravitas. It puts Tony Blair, the master of spin, to shame. Meanwhile the government is now taking a Trumpian hostile line with the media, largely because the public are more fed up with the media than the government. Everything this government does is an exercise in power projection.<br />
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The problem, however, is that while it can create the illusion of power, and the illusion of competence (which certainly works on the Tory activist clan), all the indications on the ground suggest this government has no idea what it's doing. Matt Hancock's latest <a href="http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87581">tracing app wheeze</a> has echos of Brexit where having failed to understand the EU's legal position they insisted a vague array of technology would be sufficient.<br />
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The picture out on the front line is not looking encouraging with the hidden epidemic in care homes now penetrating the noise, and now there are indications that China concealed the true number of fatalities. We're talking about phasing out the lockdown when there is every reason to believe this could become a magnitude worse. On top of all the failures so far, the UK is not testing or quarantining travellers from overseas even as other world powers impose strict controls.<br /><br />Meanwhile, if the aim was to protect the NHS then we have already failed. As eureferendum.com pointed out yesterday, when confronted with an epidemic of a highly infectious disease, for which there was no known cure and no vaccine, the very last place patients should be taken is a busy district general hospital, full of ill people and staff, where they will be exposed to this infection. As long as the hospitals themselves are reservoirs of infection, they will keep the infection going, re-seeding the community (together with the care homes). <div>
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With the disease spreading to care homes - not least because infected patients have been discharged from NHS hospitals – these institutions are becoming death camps for the elderly, while care staff are dying in their dozens. The lockdown is necessary to protect us from the NHS, and until they sort out the hospitals and care homes, it will be unsafe to lift it. Therein lies the folly in using Nightingale hospitals as overspill capacity instead of primary treatment centres. They've turned the NHS into a National Covid Service, preventing patients from getting treatment they need which could lead to 60,000 additional deaths. </div>
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Eventually the consequences of a litany of failures will catch up with this government where even the slickest media management operation can't paper over the cracks. Soon there will come an array of policy reversals where even the dimmest of BBC hacks might see though their excuses. The problem them is that the system is so degraded that even if the government did have a coherent plan with the right methods, translating that into action is very probably beyond their abilities. </div>
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At the beginning of the outbreak the government responded to queries about volunteering, launching an NHS Volunteer Responder scheme. A volunteer army of 750,000 registered which to date has only been given 20,000 tasks. These things cannot be managed from the centre and the job should have been given to local authorities - but without a coherent plan it's doubtful councils would know what to usefully do with them.</div>
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The new style of presentation in Number Ten largely speaks to vacuity of British politics, where politicians like the role play it affords them along with the prestige that goes with it. Not for nothing is the PM's increasingly presidential. The top job is little more than play acting. </div>
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This, of course was well within tolerance when the big questions were settled by way of EU membership and everything else was run by a network of quangos ensuring ministers weren't allowed to touch anything, when policy was largely entrenched, but now we have a double whammy of uncertainty, Brexit and Corona, where we desperately need informed and responsive leadership and public institutions capable of mobilising in a civil emergency. The thing that government is notionally for.</div>
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What we find now is that central government is primarily geared for a different function, ie to ensure any government is re-elected. The various offices of state spend more time shoring up the reputation of the ruling party than they do fixing what is broken. Meanwhile the central functions of local government have been centralised, amalgamated, de-skilled and defunded til all that's left of local government is regional development and welfare agencies that have long since been robbed of any meaningful power.</div>
<br />Up to press the government had enjoyed a spell of untouchability. It's approach to Brexit is immune to evidence and too nebulous to be disproved. Only when we have formally left the transition does Brexit enters the realm of evidence. We can say the same of Corona. The government can plaster the internet with its half-baked propaganda to shore up its whimsical policy response, but sooner or later, as the full picture emerges and the bodies start to pile up, the government has to account for its failures. They'd better hope their spin machine has an ace up its sleeve or Johnson's approval ratings will plummet even faster than our GDP.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-35251184685826608502020-04-15T17:36:00.001-07:002020-04-16T04:40:30.757-07:00The nature of the beastToday we learned that the UK government as no public intention of postponing Brexit trade negotiations. Personally I'll believe it when I see it. For now the government must hold the line and it has a few more weeks before it must decide.<br />
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The view on Brexiter street seems to be that now is the best time to be conducting these negotiations in that the EU being under considerable stress with a looming Euro crisis to rival the last one, the UK has powerful leverage. I still think this misunderstands the nature of the EU and trade negotiations in general. We are not haggling over a commercial contract. This is about principles and procedure, where the goings on as regards to propping up the Euro exist in an entirely separate domain. The Brexiters, oddly, believe the EU will act rationally in its immediate self-interest.<br />
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When it comes down to it, for all that Corona is taking its toll on the functioning of the EU, the intent is to return to to a semblance of normality when the dust settles, and the political will exists to ensure the various mechanisms of the single market survive. It will not, therefore, take any action that may undermine it in the future even if that comes with a mid term economic cost.<br />
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They also misread the mood in Brussels. There is a sense of weary resignation where they will do all they can to facilitate a deal that satisfies their own criteria but will not allow itself to be messed around by the Johnson administration. The UK is no longer a political priority and Brexit is waaay down the list. If the UK chooses not to play silly buggers then it's a win-win but there is no patience for the UK's parlour games. The UK has some leverage, but not much, and not enough for the EU to compromise its fundamental principles any more than they are already compromised by Corona. They will let us walk if that's the game the UK is playing.<br />
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As regards to the practicalities, in a material sense it's not going to matter either way for the time being. There is a manpower shortage on the frontiers while all the normal customs and procedures have gone out of the window as governments prioritise getting supplies where they need to go. If there isn't a deal then eventually the EU will get round to adapting to our new third country status, but for the time being the single market is only a theoretical concept. If, however, we have a deal worth having then the EU is likely to look the other way for longer. It's all going to depend on political goodwill, of which there will be little if the UK chooses now of all times to pile on the distractions, diverting critical diplomatic resource.<br />
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The other factor driving Brexiteer belligerence is the belief that the EU is imminently going to collapse. But they always think that any time there is a diplomatic crisis of any kind, yet the EU continues to plod on in its own lumbering way. If it is going to collapse it won't be soon enough to do the Brexiteers any favours. As ever the headbangers have a bad case of wishful thinking.<br />
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Regardless of the many sensible arguments for delaying our exit from the transition, it's really a question of where we want to be when the dust settles. Do we want to be outside of the EU and the single market lobbying to restart the talks, having no formal trade relations, hoping the EU is feeling generous, or do we wish to maintain what trade we can within the current construct where the EU is obliged to conclude a deal? It ought to be a no brainer.<br />
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The problem with the Brexiteers is they never learned to think like a bureaucrat the same way I did which is why they persistently misread the beast. Moreover, having told themselves that Boris's tactics last time around were a roaring success, there is nothing to dissuade them that their methods are misconceived.<br />
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As to Corona, I am quite sure it will rewrite the script on trade but it's going to take a while for the politics to assimilate it and a while longer before the Brussels bureaucracy absorbs what has happened so for a time we are still going to be playing the old game by the old rules. Brussels reality seldom takes actual reality into account. It's the one thing it has in common with the Brexiteers. We therefore have to assume that we will be working toward a standard model comprehensive FTA where events in the real world have little bearing on the proceedings.<br />
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Wit that in mind, should we slam the door shut on the current process, we may find the bureaucracy has caught up with reality meaning that by the time we come to talk turkey, we are dealing with a very different animal; one that is not so accommodating and one bearing the scars of a disruptive exit at the worst possible time. Since the UK doesn't have a trade plan B, the EU can take its time while it clobbers us.<br />
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In many respects the Brexiter brain has fossilised. It has not adapted or taken on board anything new since 2015 and it isn't going to. The narrative is set in stone and the sea change in geopolitics just doesn't feature for Brexit fetishists. Though the majority now supports a delay, we are still held to ransom by the jihadists. It seems you can't reason people out of something they were never reasoned into.Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351072494067220435.post-16933888627041194622020-04-15T05:03:00.003-07:002020-04-15T05:03:27.392-07:00Now is not the time for reckless gambles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Much though I loathe Twitter, it at least lets you know what your enemies are up to. Today it would seem there is a <a href="https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/04/shanker-singham-brexit-and-why-the-transition-period-must-not-be-extended-beyond-december-this-year.html">concerted propaganda effort</a> in the Brexit blob to push against any extension to the transition.<br />
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Naturally the Brexit headbangers are behaving exactly as you would expect. We must be free of the shackles of the transition so we can dash off and sign FTAs with the rest of the world, right about the time when free traders are about as well received as a fart in a space suit and when the entire apparatus of governments the world over is directed at Corona fire-fighting. You have to wonder just how far gone you have to be for something like Corona to have zero impact on your political estimations.<br />
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Thanks to Corona the future is a great unknown. Most of the certainties underpinning the narratives of trade wonk land have evaporated. Hitherto now, trade had become uncoupled from geopolitics, with the underlying assumption that treating China as a market economy would lead to future liberalisation and democratisation, with global trade institutions steering us toward a peaceful era of global interdependence. An expansion of the EU mentality.<br />
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It's a good theory if you absolutely discount the threat posed by a global pandemic. Which is exactly what we all did. Now that everyone is scrambling for the same basic commodities that global interdependence and national specialisation model doesn't seem all that clever.<br />
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Of course this model will still have its defenders and there are still good arguments for maintaining free and fair trade on a level playing field with like-minded allies, but if Brexiteers tell us anything, it is that electorates are not likely to agree with them. The debate is too mired in legacy Brexit era dogma and too many misapprehensions as to what a free trade deal actually is.<br />
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As ever there are inherent contradictions to the dogma. On the one hand they tell us that we need to be agriculturally self-sufficient and buy British but at the same time advocate unilaterally dismantling trade protections against subsidised and mass produced meat produce. Richard Tice of the Brexit Party demands that we become self-sufficient - but one struggles to see how he reconciles that with being a "global free trade champion". How does that work exactly?<div>
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As with most populism it only works if you don't examine it too closely - but the mood is sure to be one of greater protectionism. The tide was already turning that way but Corona is sure to be an accelerant. All this seems to be in tune with <a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3018843/trade-war-deglobalisation-and-technology-can-container">existing deglobalisation trends</a>.</div>
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If, then, the geostrategic priority becomes divestment from China (with good reason) then our regional trade becomes all the more important. Being that Western consumers are hypocrites (their buying habits betray their politics) it will likely require similar levels of economic and technical integration with the EU but an extension of the regulatory sphere into North Africa to continue exploiting low wage economies. As we have seen from remainers, progressive ethics are all well and good but only so far as they don't interfere with the supply of off-season fruit and veg. </div>
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Essentially, if the "Global Britain" shtick wasn't flimsy before then it certainly is now. If we were smart we'd play it safe until the dust settles. Britain isn't the only country reassessing its supply chains and trade priorities. UK-US trade talks are on hold - as are most negotiations globally, with some at risk of never seeing the light of day again. It would be foolish then for the UK to slam the door shut on an ongoing process where the EU is is politically obliged to conclude a deal. Once slammed shut, that door may prove difficult to reopen - and the terms on offer won't be anything like as generous.</div>
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The one lasting impact of Corona will be to recouple trade with global politics. It will no longer be the sterile and exclusive domain of trade technocrats working behind the scenes. Every deal with have strategic implications and every deal will be looked at through a biosecurity and supply chain resilience prism. That suggests more local, more politically compatible trade partners and a shift away from fast fashion, cheap food and consumer technologies.</div>
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With that goes a societal shift, winding the clock back to the 1980's to a more austere, frugal and socially conservative culture. Not necessarily a bad thing if you like bad pop music and shoulder pads. Since we have a Romulan in government, Chancellor Sunak, it is perhaps a sign of things to come. </div>
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Britain's fate, though, will be decided in the next few weeks as we approach the deadline for extending. It is that decision alone that sets the backdrop for the next decade. We can either bide our time to ensure a viable and sustainable outcome to Brexit talks or we can rush it and find ourselves out in the cold and easy prey for various predators, necessitating greater state intervention in markets to fend off the vultures.</div>
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The likes of Tice, Redwood and the Brexit blob imagine a no deal Brexit to be the dawn of a buccaneering age of free trade and a renaissance of Thatcherism. Such fanciful thinking is for the birds - especially so now where the UK will necessarily have to revert to a mode of post-war socialism with all the borrowing and inefficiency that goes with it. How rapidly we climb out of it is really contingent on our export capabilities - which are not in any way improved isolating ourselves entirely from whatever remains of the single market.</div>
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The UK economy is already going to take a pasting. Brexit or no, the aerospace industry and air travel in general is going to take at least a decade to reassert any sense of normal. With that goes lucrative jobs in Airbus and Rolls Royce, and with inevitable defence cuts, a number of large employers in the regions will be shedding jobs. </div>
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Meanwhile, the auto industry is going to be similarly fragile as we move away from leasing and back into bangernomics. As to the sort of disposable income that facilitates an array of coffee shops, fuhgeddaboudit. We might wonder then what work is available for the steady influx of people. The current economic model is predicated on a ready supply of labour. Soon industry will be spoiled for choice. Demands to curb immigration are only going to get louder. Even the EU may need to rethink freedom of movement as member states count the cost of losing their brightest and best.</div>
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Until there is some clear indication of what the new normal looks like, the last thing we need is further disruption. We are looking at a year at least before we have Corona under control, and in the meantime, the norms of trade will keep collapsing. Before we leap we need to know what we are leaping into and what we are dealing with on the EU side of the Channel. It may be that a better deal is possible if we wait. Single market membership of a sort without freedom of movement may even be possible. If not, we can still hit the road if we want to. Now is not the time to be making big gambles though. We have enough on our plate. </div>
Pete Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04172420184509249126noreply@blogger.com0