Author Archives: grumpy

Cabinet government disintegrates

Not so long ago, a Secretary of State publicly promulgating policy diametrically opposed to that articulated by a Prime Minister would have been immediately sacked.

Theresa May repeated stated that her policy was to oppose the notion of a second referendum on the EU issue, as in (for example) her statement that
“There has not yet been enough recognition of the way that a second referendum could damage social cohesion by undermining faith in our democracy” .

This is unambiguous. It was thus a surprise to Grumpy that perhaps the most senior of all Cabinet members, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, went on record this week as saying that a second referendum “deserves to be considered”.

Read that again – the Chancellor is actively giving tacit acceptance to an action which the Prime Minister has repeated claimed would damage both social cohesion and democracy.

Parliamentary government in the UK has now broken down. The Westminster TV channel is now more watchable than most of the now tired soaps, with intrigue, double dealing, the traducing centuries of tradition, and twists and turns that are hard to predict. The only element missing to make it an unmissable hit is the absence of surreptitious sex on the back row of the green benches – my suggestion would be rumpy pumpy between Anna Soubry and Jacob Rees-Mogg – come on, Anna !!

The country is coming apart, the whatever now happen with Brexit, it will end in tears, public disdain in politicians and damaging ploarisation in the electorate for years to come.

April reminder

After the unprecedented and extraordinary events in the House of Commons in the last few weeks, it was hard to keep track of what Brexit may or may not be. As a ‘backstop’ (intended use of words) consider the Conservative manifesto 2017. Mrs May had made her view of Brexit unambiguously clear at that point (via the Lancaster House speech) so voters could reject that approach at the time of the election – this WAS the second referendum on Brit.

Here are some excerpts from the two referenced texts.

  • “So we will take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain. Leaving the European Union will mean that our laws will be made in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. And those laws will be interpreted by judges not in Luxembourg but in courts across this country. Because we will not have truly left the European Union if we are not in control of our own laws. “
  • “But I want to be clear. What I am proposing cannot mean membership of the single market.   … a member of the single market would mean complying with the EU’s rules and regulations that implement those freedoms, without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. It would mean accepting a role for the European Court of Justice that would see it still having direct legal authority in our country. It would to all intents and purposes mean not leaving the EU at all. “
  • “But the message from the public before and during the referendum campaign was clear: Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe. And that is what we will deliver. “
  • “So we do not seek membership of the single market … And because we will no longer be members of the single market, we will not be required to contribute huge sums to the EU budget. “
  • “A Global Britain must be free to strike trade agreements with countries from outside the European Union too …  And I want Britain to be free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organisation, meaning we can reach new trade agreements not just with the European Union but with old friends and new allies from outside Europe too. “

How can anyone not have been clear about the intended goals of Brexit ? Those goals had implications, which have been becoming apparent as the agreements progressed, but they were NEVER to be part of the Customs Union or the Single Market.

Those in parliament seeking to sabotage Brexit – as defined by Mrs May and clear to all since January 2017 – could never be satisfied by any way by the targets she set herself. Grumpy’s off expressed irritation about Mrs May has never been about her policies ; rather it has been about her abject failure to deliver an agreement which was in accord with the very goals she set herself.

Let them eat … Magnums

Retailers have warned that no deal will lead to increases in food prices and empty shelves. This headline is a wonderful mixture of Project Fear (starvation, as well as the Civil unrest on a par with wartime Europe) and naked commercial opportunism, as Brexit represents a great opportunity for big retailers to hike prices and blame the government and Brexiteers.

In fact, 70% of food consumed in the UK does NOT come from Europe. Ironically, that which does, and is also the focus of empty shelves because of transport delays, is precisely the sort of food (fresh vegetables) the government tries to persuade the populace to eat more of, but which they resolutely resist doing so. [Incidentally, it’s not clear that why the shelves would have nothing on them at all (“empty”, remember?) when 50% of food is local.]

Grumpy would be pretty happy to eat just bread rolls and tinned soup for a few months (which he essentially does anyway) but to add variety he was heartened to learn that Unilever was stockpiling Magnum and “Ben and Jerrys” ice cream to maintain stocks in the case of no deal. This is not only welcome, but certainly more positive than the government’s recent assessment that the effect of no deal wold be similar to Europe wide war. [Surely the most extreme Project fear statement yet from May’s Civil Service – see Grumpy’s post on this pronouncement.]

Thus those happy with local food can also all indulge in an Almond Magnum as troops on the streets (invoked under a revised Civil Contingencies Act 2004) shoot hapless citizens found guilty of looting the last tub of Chabichou du Poitou from Tesco.

In fact, eliminating the malodorous French slime masquerading as ‘cheese’ would indeed be a welcome by-product of no deal.

Ill informed Thunberg

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish student, and sometime mouthpiece for the Extinction Rebellion movement (“XR”). She has been in London this week (April 20th 2019), and making speeches to a motley crew of politicians, celebrities and others who see hanging on to her coat-tails as a way to increase their public visibility quota, and get ‘green’ pixie points to boot.

XR has, as one of its three stated goals, a target of having the UK zero net carbon by 2025, of which more later, in a second instalment on this group of fantasists.. First, however, consider Greta’s credentials for holding forth on the topic, especially considering the short time in her life she has had to master the myriad of multi-disciplinary complexities – technical, financial and political – of managing climate change.

In a speech in Hyde Park (where nearby XR followers were idly disrupting the capital’s operation), Greta stated “nothing is being done to stop an ecological crisis despite all the beautiful words and promises”, and “politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything.” Well, look at that damning assertion of complete inaction on carbon reduction, and check it against facts on the ground.

The UK has the two largest offshore wind farms in the world. 9,702 turbines have been installed to date. The UK is the world’s 4th largest generator of wind based renewable power , with around 20 Gw capacity. In November 2018, renewable power in total exceeded that produced by fossil fuels for the first time, a total of 42 Gw., and which now accounts for 30% of total demand. (All of which comes at a cost to the poor consumer, BTW, through ‘green’ levies).

Read these statistics again; by what rational interpretation can this achievement be described as “nothing” ? Greta Thunberg is either clearly ignorant of the facts of the topic on which she pontificates, or she sets out to wilfully misrepresent the current position. Given the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) focus on ‘fake news’ and misleading data, young Ms Thunberg should be one of their primary targets for naming and shaming, which is how DCMS tends to spend its time.

Sadly, one side effect of this “child as a role model” trend is that it corrupts other children from having a balanced view of a subject which is undoubtedly going to have a hugely significant effect upon their lives. Look at the picture at the head this article and one sees two small children – who can have no real understanding of the issues – parroting this inaccurate propaganda; being used as newsworthy pawns for albeit a valid cause – which incidentally is now in danger of being hijacked by the far left and the ‘back to ox carts’ brigade.

IoD (Institute of Dummies)

Grumpy has to admit to still being a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, so he was slightly irritated to see this organisation falling into the propagandists trap of obfuscation and distortion (probably at the behest of political connections) to join Brexit Project Fear.

This was ably assisted by that home of journalists with an agenda, aka the Guardian newspaper. Its writers seem to have only a kindergarten grasp of statistics, and use that ignorance to distort and conflate data to promote their agenda. The headline in this case is a report that the IoD had announced that “one in three UK firms plan for a no deal Brexit relocation”.

A House of Commons briefing paper (06152) was (conveniently) published in December 2018 and gives a detailed breakdown of corporate UK. It reveals that there were 5.7 million business in the UK in 2018. Taking the IoD headlines, that implies that some 1.8 million businesses plan to up-sticks and relocate to an EU country in the case of no deal. Further, the Iod release also states that 1 in 10 businesses, or 570,000, had already set up operations overseas.

This is simply not credible, and the IoD must know it.

However, let’s be forgiving, and exclude ‘micro-businesses’ with 9 or less employees. The figures still imply that 85,000 businesses had moved, or plan to move, part of their business to the EU, and that 25,000 had already done so, driven solely by the threat of no deal.

Grumpy has written before of Project Fear pronouncements which arguably suffer from lack of conditionality, sample selection bias, and unsupportable extrapolations from small samples, and these numbers strongly suggest that the IoD are guilty here. In fact they sampled a mere 4% of their own members for the base numbers, and presumably extrapolated the responses. [For the benefit of the analysts at the IoD 100 – 4 = 96, so 96% of their members had no input]

The press release read that “one in three British businesses are planning”. No, they are not. They may be planning, but to present as a statement of fact that they all are actually doing so is sheer sophistry, as well as being the sort of appalling journalism so common from the Guardian. (Grumpy has written several times about their writers presentation of assumption as fact.).

Further it’s extremely unlikely that the 30,000 IoD member firms are a properly representative sample of UK businesses as a whole, and yet the IoD PR people generate wording the veracity of which is not only highly suspect, it is knowingly so. The headlines should have been properly qualified as as ” a survey of less than one half of one percent of UK SME’s ..”, and even that would be hugely generous because of selection bias.

The fact is that a great many people read the headlines without any thoughtful analysis,and rely on the reputation of the source to ascribe levels of credibility to them. Worse, such headlines often get picked up by MPs and used to advance an agenda, such as the idiotic speech by MP Danielle Rowley on ‘Period Poverty’, about which Grumpy recent write.

Grumpy expected something more balanced from the IoD as an industry body.

Project Fear insanity and May’s gross failure

Project fear, driven directly by the government, has now reached a scarcely believable pitch.

A “Whitehall source” told the Sunday Times “the only thing that could be compared to a no-deal Brexit would be a major Europe-wide war” . Whether this source was credible or not, it’s staggering that the government and the ‘remainer’ Civil Service should let such stories appear in the press. They do so because it is their policy to deliberately create simply unprecedented levels of public concern around Brexit.

In WWI, military deaths in the European theatre were around 9 million. In WWII, which was the deadliest conflict in human history, direct and consequential deaths globally were estimated to be perhaps 10 times that figure. However, just in the European theatre, military deaths were at least 10m.

It is stunning, simply beyond belief, that any government of the day would conflate whatever might happen at Brexit with a conflict such as these European wide wars, and it is grossly irresponsible of this government to not correct such pronouncements from its own executive. However, the thought of troops on the street, rioters being shot against walls, and Irish civil war (having roped Irish Taoiseach Varadkar in as a useful idiot to suggest British troops on the border) actually suits this Conservative government.

How have we come to this as a country ?? Rather like accepting Trump as the new normal, we have to remind ourselves that this woman, May, has failed and vacillated at every turn. She had abandoned the referendum’s perspective of Brexit before the ink was dry on her Lancaster House Speech, and has spent the months since, hiding and can-kicking. This ineffectual, unimaginative and paralysed politician should reflect on the fact that she has, by the admission of her own executive, brought this country to a state equivalent to the worst catastrophes ever to befall the continent.

Pointless rebellion

It’s hard to know where to start with Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) proposals for ultra rapid transition to net carbon zero in the UK by 2025. However, merely browsing the links and references on their web site eases the need to spend much time reviewing it because it is patently not feasible – at least not without martial law, societal upheaval and unrest not seen for centuries. There is not the space here to provide an assessment of the claims and proposals made in any detail, but a flavour of the concepts are presented here.

The first issue, watching people with too much time in their hands disrupting the very economic activity to pay for the countless billions of government borrowing to fund their dreams, is that it is simply utterly pointless. Unless and until the USA, China and India make the same sort of commitments, if the UK didn’t emit a gram of CO2 from now on, the needle wouldn’t move on the global heat-o-meter. If you want to make changes, then you have to start with the most significant causes – and that means getting a President of the USA who has declared Climate Change to be a ‘Chinese Hoax’ to have a conversion which would make St Paul’s look insignificant. The simple and unavoidable truth is that it cannot happen by 2025, period.

The second issue is that the numbers quoted by XR just don’t add up. The web site points to the document “One Million Climate Jobs” published by the Campaign for Climate Change, and endorsed by the usual suspect list of Unions. Climate Change for them is a gift from above to propose measures which, in the absence thereof, would be consigned to the ‘nutters’ end of the political spectrum, or had them locked up for insurrection. Most of the arguments are old and tired, but have been regurgitated after a wash and brush up. They include ideas such as (on taxing the ‘rich’) “If they paid 50% of their income in taxes we could raise £12 billion a year … We can think of it not as a punishment, but as an honour, and an opportunity for the privileged and affluent to help the planet. ” Of course, there are not enough ‘rich’ to raise the amounts required, and really they mean ‘middle class’. The problem is that the middle class have a vote (as Mrs Thatcher reminded us), and they may be reluctant to see as an honour guaranteeing £30k jobs to anyone made redundant by the green policies. The reader can get the general gist from the above, but it involves wealth taxes, robbing corporate (but not public sector) pensions, removal of saving incentives such as ISA’s, etc etc.

The third, and most unrealistic issue, is the time frame. The document mentioned in the prior paragraph acknowledges the size of the challenge, but at least gives a time frame of 20 years to effect (but which again doesn’t add up with the resources described). XR’s proposal implies (with a credibility testing 4 times rapidity) installing of the order of 150,000 new wind turbines, converting more than 30m homes from gas firing to electricity (at no cost to the home owner), insulating (including double glazing) up to 40m homes where needed, mammoth transportation infrastructure changes and so on – in 60 months. For comparison, it will have taken Crossrail almost 3 times as long to build). It omits to deal with the issue that electricity is 3-4 times more expensive than gas per KWH, and would still be so with the plan envisaged. Home bills would rocket, and the consequent social impact would be enormous.

16 year old Greta Thunberg, is fresh from lecturing Eurocrats and in particular British politicians on these goals. They (including, one hopes , Gove, who attended) will no doubt give it lip service to brighten their green credentials. But they know, and the Civil Servants behind them know, that it is a formula for hyperinflation, substantial, if not catastrophic, reduction in living standards, toxic for all but a portion of industry, and most of all, inherently dangerous to the stability and balance in civil society. It is a whimsical fantasy, and one which must be named for what it is, if our masters have the political courage.

Footnote 1 : To paraphrase Mrs Thatcher (“all hail Margaret”), such policies are fine “until other people’s money runs out”

Footnote 2: In December 2018, TfL reported that 140 tube drivers earned more than £80k per annum (some getting £100k), and the average pay was circa. £70k. Of course, they can retire at 60 on an inflation proofed, RPI (not CPI) linked, pension. The fact is that it’s no good taxing the few bankers that get £x million per year because there are not enough of them, and it’s likely the drivers would fall into the ambit of these plans. One has to wonder if the late Bob Crow would be honoured to see up to 50% of that go in tax.

May’s Brexit promises checklist

An issue with politicians is that they seek to shift goal posts gradually. We all remember Tony Blair trying to avoid humiliation by changing his Iraq words from ‘WMD’ to ‘WMD programs’, and thinking the populace would not notice the upcoming admission of failure.

Brxiteers have of course noticed the slow drip of wording change by May, Hammond , Gove, Rudd and others and seen the inevitable capitulation transpire.

It is often repeated by Remainers that the populace didn’t know what they were voting for when they ticked ‘leave’, and ipso facto that “they didn’t vote for <insert some guess words here presented as a fact>”. Grumpy did indeed vote in the 1975 referendum, and (for youngsters) the this was not about the EU – that didn’t exist then. It was about the ‘common market’, which was generally felt to be a good notion, but of course the Heath government had already joined the European Economic Community, so it was about whether to stay rather than join. The government of the day, however, deliberately sought to obscure the political integration goals, which were in fact well known to them, since it was a goal by European politicians from about 1946.

The fact is the citizens of the UK never ever voted to join what is now a political institution, the EU, and it was foisted on them; they probably would not have done so had they known what was to come. The obfuscation continued serially (Remember Keith Vaz and the “Beano” Lisbon Treaty ? – Brexiteers need no lessons from Remainers about lies and misrepresentations.)

However, the populace eventually got a comprehensive statement of the current politicians view of what Brexit would mean (other then being ‘Brexit’) when Theresa may set this out in detail in the Lancaster House speech. Grumpy has extracted a few snippets, as shown below, so to as to keep a track of how she does with this benchmark by the end of March. Grumpy harbours hopes, but fears there will not be many ticks in the right hand column cone exit day.