Author Archives: grumpy

Not agreeable, May

Grumpy is not a lawyer. However, in his business life he negotiated a large number of individual and quite complex contracts, and over the years became familiar with some elements of sound drafting.

Often, there was a clash of ‘red lines’ of the parties and deadlock in the discussions. Both sides did have a motivation to ‘fill or kill’ and agreement, and there was always a temptation to defer facing down the core difficulties, in the hope that the situations surrounding them never occurred. It’s called wishing the problem away.

Bitter experience, however, soon evidenced that this was an illogical and very dumb approach. If the parties could not agree on something at the outset, they were unlikely to do so in the future, and the elephant in the room was likely to trample one of the parties at some point.

A classic fudge for deferment was to include in the contract an ‘agreement to agree’ at some point in the future should the circumstance causing the contention occur. This sounded plausible enough, whereby the parties would somehow sit round a table with coffee and digestive biscuits to act with good faith to resolve the issue they could not agree on before.

That the very illogicality of the notion was ever considered reflects the desperation the weaker side had to put ink on the contract.

Grumpy soon learned (aided by his excellent lawyers) never to even contemplate this. If the red lines were irreconcilable it was necessary to turn to an always available alternative to a negotiated agreement – walk out. He did so on more than one occasion, and never once regretted it.

Mrs May, along with the might of the legal capabilities of government and the civil service are potentially about to sign a document containing an ‘agreement to agree’. Nothing could be more indicative of May’s weakness, pusillanimity, hubris and stupidity on a matter which is so key to the country and its citizens. She should walk away.

Canting Chuka

Nice rack

As proof that grumpy does not level the accusation of hypocrisy only at the fairer sex, he highlights today a male candidate for focus.

In 2018, Chuka authored a paper entitled “Reciprocity at the top table : Progress boardroom pay”, in which he lambasted the high pay of company directors, especially in relation to the average minimum wage.

It was surprise then to learn of his accepting a role at the Progressive Centre (a second job, whereas some might feel that for 77 grand  a year MP’s should focus on doing better on representing their constituents), for which he was to be paid £5,420 per month for a stated 12 hours work.

The reader is left to do a few simple sums here, but assuming that a normal job might involve working for 1702 hours per year, that would leave someone on the minimum wage (currently £7.83 per hour) as earning circa £13,326 per year.

Much of the press focussed on the fact that he would be paid £65k per year, but that misses the point that only requires him to undertake 144 hours work for that sum. On equating the hourly rates (the only rational calculation) this shows that Labour MP, socialist, Chuka, is paid the equivalent of £767,600 per year, 57 times the minimum hourly rate.

It boggles the mind that, given his January paper on fat cats, he had the sheer bare faced gall to accept this role, if for no other reason than principle, if he had any. How does he square this to his voters ? On his very own analysis, it is an example of greed and excess.

Chuka has form in public utterances vs personal financial interest which reek of cant. according to Wikipedia, “Umunna was accused of hypocrisy for accepting a £20,000 gift from a gambling executive despite campaigning against the spread of betting shops in his constituency and promising new powers to limit them”

However, it’s merely an instance of a growing drift in politics between expectations of integrity standards  for the hoi polloi and those for the governing classes.

Repulsive Maria Miller

Although it may seem that Grumpy picks on women for criticism, this is not the case. They are in most cases perfectly capable of selecting themselves for comment. One time darling of David Cameron, Maria Miller recently  (16.10.2018) called for John Bercow to resign as Speaker over claims of wide spread bullying in the Westminster bubble, on the grounds that as ‘Chief Officer’ he should  presumably do the professional thing  and accept moral responsibility for  events by proxy.

This is the very same  Maria Miller, who after misappropriating tax payers money via expenses in 2014 to enrich herself and her family, refused calls for her to resign on the basis that she should take responsibility for these direct immoral, if not fraudulent, activities.

However,  she chose not to resign until political and public pressure forced her out after a grudging 30 second non-apology  ‘apology’ in the House. Such is the nature of the person that she was probably enraged by the injustice of it all.

Miller is Chair of a group of harpies, aka the Women and Equalities Select Committee. The problem with such groupings is that to justify their very existence they have to find evidence of malign wrong doings to maintain their sinecure (for such it is). It is hard to imagine them producing a report which concludes that, by and large, equality abounds, and that women are universally respected and well treated (nay, even privileged with token appointments and other  benefits of the supposedly oppressed).

This is  common structural flaw of all such single interest oversight groups.  [Grumpy hardly dare venture that he sometimes suspects that the daddy of all such groups, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suffers from the same syndrome. The simple fact is that  should democracy ever be extended to  the community of Meleagris Gallopavo (aka domestic Turkey) it’s a safe bet that they would not vote for Christmas. So it is with parliamentary committees.]

I thus urge Mr Bercow to ignore these siren calls from this attention seeking Harridan who clearly does not have a shred of integrity, and who should be squirming with the weight of hypocrisy from her actions.  Sadly, however,  it is the nature of such people that they sleep easily  at night.

Jessica Eaton drivel

Jessica Eaton penned an article for the Guardian (17.10.18), which source immediately sets the scene for the pinko rubbish which it would inevitably contain; on reading, it did not disappoint on that score.

Eaton was defending the token woman sycophant MP Stella  Creasy, who has been campaigning to make misogyny  a crime. Some more rational soul in government suggested that logic and intrinsic fairness should dictate that misandry  should also be included in any bill.

However, Eaton argues that “The concept of misandry is dangerously vague in comparison to the reality of misogyny.” Turn to the Oxford English Dictionary and it defines the latter as “Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.” and the former as  “Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men “. These are the same, with gender inverted;  however, Eaton chooses to make up her own interpretation of English, which in reality simply highlights her own distorted world view.

There is a danger to fundamental concepts of law in this thinking, on which Grumpy has previously  pontificated. [ http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/distorting-law-stella-creasy/   and at http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/guilty_by_assumption/

Eaton has spent her whole career in the ‘victim industry’ , which has never been balanced in its approaches to the real challenges of domestic and sexual violence (against men as well as women). The old ‘1 in 4 women’ mantra is still being propagated years after the biased and naive research which led to this ‘statistic’ was originated, but it serves the PR purpose.

There is no doubt that society has a problem with violence, both physical and mental, perpetrated by a minority of individuals on unfortunate victims, and this needs to be addressed in a serious – and forceful – manner. But this should be done in a logical, balanced way regardless of the sex of perpetrator or victim, preferably without the depressing pscho-babble which too many of those involved in the area seem  incapable of communicating without  resorting to.

Should a reader dismiss Grumpy as a misogynist with no knowledge of the area at all, the fact is that he has probably  analysed more incidents of domestic violence than even most academics in the field have done (at least 15,000 domestic violence incidents) and hence he can at least claim to have some insight into the demographics and extent of such acts.

The May Tests

Is the end in sight ?

Theresa May has been receiving pressure because of her failure to implement Brexit properly . People should wait and judge her against her own words from Lancaster House; if she delivers an agreement which meets her own  stated criteria, it will be a success, and she can take a bow. We’ll see – tick or cross these off when the final deal is announced.

” take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain.”  (This is a yes or no – it’s done or not)

“empowering the UK as an open, trading nation to strike the best trade deals around the world” (This means we are not in some form of customs union)

“protecting the common resources of our islands” (We can determine our own fishing policy and exclude the French if we so choose)

“What I am proposing cannot mean membership of the Single Market” (This is a yes or no)

“free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organisation” (A simple test here)

“not mean that we will seek some form of unlimited transitional status, in which we find ourselves stuck forever in some kind of permanent political purgatory” (This means any backstop has to be time limited)

“want us to have reached an agreement about our future partnership by the time the two-year Article Fifty process has concluded” (Make a mark on your calendar)

Hypocrite Hodge

One of the recurrent themes on this site is the exaggerated terminology and projected moral outrage (not to mention ‘grandstanding’) of politicians progressing their influence in the Westminster bubble, and possibly their earning capability when thrown out by the electorate.

High on Grumpy’s vomit list is Dame Margaret Hodge, who wins the award, if there was one, for high minded, bombastic self-righteousness. A constant topic for Ms Hodge has been organisations and individuals not paying a “fair share of tax”.

Of course no-one (including our good Dame) has any generally accepted or definitive definition for what a “fair share” is. It seems to be a deliberately opaque (and hence indefensible) measure based on firstly (a) paying the maximum amount of tax the regulations might allow, whilst ignoring government granted allowances, plus (b) paying an additional amount until there is no left wing objector (Owen Jones?) to the figure actually paid.

Grumpy admits to being  a tax “avoider”, in that he uses ISA’s, pension funds and a few other things to avoid giving any more of  his meagre income than he is obliged to the government. Is he paying his fair share ?  He doesn’t  know.

What he does know is that he pays the amount mandated by tax legislation and no more. This is the  accepted principle as set out in 1936, when Lord Tomlin  ruled that: “Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attracted under the appropriate act is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax.”

This is exactly what Amazon, Google etc. do, which annoys Dame Margaret. They follow the law, as set out by politicians like Hodge. If there are ‘loopholes’, it is because of sloppy drafting of those laws.  The answer is simple – politicians made the laws, these companies follow them, and if Dame Hodge doesn’t like this then she should get her own sort to change them, not ask the companies to somehow donate an undefined  “fair share” or be pilloried. Politicians response to legislation they drew up having unforeseen aspects is to ‘name and shame’, rather than admit their drafting errors and fix them.

It would be entirely scurrilous of Grumpy to note that the highly moral Dame Margaret was a significant shareholder in a family business, the billion dollar company Stemcor , a private and secretive company based in a tax haven, which is now owned – wait for it – by a private equity fund. Billion dollar ? Tax haven ? Private equity? surely not the godly socialist  Margaret ???

It is illustrative of Dame Margaret’s singularly repulsive hypocrisy to quote from Stemcor’s own web site

“The Stemcor Group may optimise its tax position to maximise shareholder value … ” *

Pass the sick bag ….

  • https://www.stemcor.com/terms-conditions/tax-strategy/

 

 

 

Indian water mystery

Grumpy is often surprised by the frequency of news reports which appear to contain contradictory elements.

Reliable sources indicate that mobile phone penetration in India has reached over 85%, being some 1.1 billion users. Now smartphones contain a numbers of elements called ‘rare earths’, which are (as their name implies) scarce, and are also expensive and difficult to extract. For some of these elements, unless better recovery can be achieved by re-cycling, shortages might become critical in less than a decade.

The contradictory report in question was an article published by CNN which said that  India was ‘on the brink of crisis’ because of ‘extreme water shortage’, which was affecting 600 million people, amounting to some 46% of the population. It claimed that up to 200,000 people a year died as a result of shortage or contamination of water. Let’s assume that this report is correct, and hold that thought for a moment.

One fact needs to be made clear first; unlike rare earths, there is no shortage of water in the world as a compound – it covers 2/3 of the surface of the earth to a depth which can often be  measured in  kilometres. Furthermore, compared with just about every other compound extracted and used by man, it is very pure – for example, over 96% of seawater is plain H2O; it’s hard to think of any other industrial process which is as simple as extracting pure water from it.

So why is Grumpy puzzled by these figures ?

  • Shimla, one the  cities highlighted by CNN with a picture of the populace carrying buckets, has a significantly greater average annual rainfall then the UK. Many other cities and parts of India have vastly more rainfall. Overall, India has an average rainfall of 1168mm per year and  80% of the total area at least 740mm.
  • Nearly all major cities lie on the banks of rivers (which for the avoidance of doubt, have water in them) where ipso facto the majority of the population lives.
  • However, since 85% of the populace have mobile phones, and 46% are suffering ‘extreme shortage’, then people must be dying of thirst whilst clutching a mobile in their hand.  One must conclude that this is not a finance issue, since if someone can afford a mobile, then they should be able to afford water, if available.

So the CNN article is a best misleading. There is patently  no shortage of the compound water either globally or in India; however, there is a shortage of easily accessible potable water arising from lack of infrastructure, economic governmental  stupidity in commodity pricing, and lack of political will (and maybe pork barrel corruption) to address the issue. This is not how CNN portrayed it; the reality is any water shortage exists with the connivance of man, rather than being some state of nature.

This is not a technical challenge  –  you can distil water by boiling a kettle. India itself does not seem to be poor;  it is a country which is the world’s sixth largest economy, has the world’s second largest military, has developed nuclear weapons and launched a satellite, and yet it allows 200,000 citizens to die each year of thirst or disease for lack of action on what surely should be one of the primary obligations of a government – providing potable water for its populace. The problem here is not resource, but politicians, and their unwillingness or incapability to solve (relatively simple) problems. It just takes will and money – which had they not spent on nuclear weapons, could have been directed to save the population from cholera.

As a footnote, dear taxpayer, the UK provided India with over £150m in ‘development aid’  in 2015, to a country with clearly distorted priorities and weak  moral integrity.

 

Guilty by assumption

One law for males, another for females

From the writings of Justinian onwards the notion of an accused being innocent until proven guilty has been the bedrock of democratic civilisations. The situation relating to the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the US, in which he has been accused of sexual impropriety many years ago in his student days, seems to have spurred the #MeToo Harridans into ever more dangerous and irrational demands. Amazingly, CNN reported that a  poll found that “eight in ten Americans say that victims of sexual harassment should be given the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise”. This would be a reversal of the norms of justice which have stood for centuries.

Given the increasing list in Grumpy’s files of males who have been the victims of miscarriages of justice at the hands of females in the last 12 months alone (examples being Liam Allan, Isaac Itiary, and Conor Fitzgerald) this seems to widen the scope for injustice, given that police incompetence seems to bias cases against the accused from the outset. In the latter case of Fitzgerald, his accuser (who of course remained anonymous) deliberately set out to frame him, texting to a friend “I’m going to ruin his life, LOL” as punishment for breaking off a relationship. The plod even missed this clue (unbelievable!), so further help by an assumption  of guilt would seem to weigh the odds too far.

Grumpy feels that the time honoured approach of innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt is essential for a civilised society.