Author Archives: grumpy

UK should play tit for tat with Barnier

This is the first of a series of ‘tit for tat’ posts in which Grumpy plans to highlight how threats from EU bureaucrats seeking to influence the outcome of Brexit negotiations, can be turned round to be ‘foot shooting’ on their part. So here is one to start.

(UK) Officials have insisted that it was not the government’s intention for UK drivers to need IDPs in Europe, but in an EU notice issued last month, the European commission said: “A driving licence issued by the United Kingdom will no longer be recognised by the member states.”

Fine. There are about 2.9m EU nationals in the UK, and (tit for tat!!) they had better start applying for a UK driving licence if they don’t have one; right now they can use a licence from another EU member, but if the EU ceases to recognise a UK licence, two can play. There are about 900,000 uk nationals living permanently in the EU, so that’s 2 million more of their own get hit than UK citizens. To quote from “Startrek IV : the Voyage Home” in Spock’s words ‘ a double dumb ass on you’.

Visitors driving on either side will both need to get IDP’s ; fine. However the EU’s move is both pointless and spiteful, and David Davis needs to take a leaf from the Trump book here and play rough.

Lammy Paranoid

Home Secretary Sajid Javid was reported as saying that illegal immigrants would be subject to a ‘compliant environment’, which triggered David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, to erupt into a paroxysm of hyperbole and bizarre conflation which exceeded even his normal tendency to extreme interpretation of the English language. He replied by saying (according to the Huff Post)

“Slaves having to nod and smile when they were being whipped in a cotton field or a sugar cane field were compliant. Watching your partner being tied to a tree, beaten or raped, on a plantation, is compliance.”

What ? The various meanings of ‘compliance’ as per the OED can essentially be summarised as “The state or fact of according with or meeting rules or standards”

Grumpy lives in a compliant environment. If he breaks the speed limit and is caught the law applies sanctions for his non-compliance. Every citizen has to comply with the laws and rules of society without exception, including one assumes, David Lammy himself. But Grumpy doesn’t see this obligation (imposed as a social consensus to avoid anarchy) as somehow harking back to the days of the stocks and disembowelling, and those days of yore of English serfdom are not ‘written deep into our souls’. It was not passed down from our ancestors.

The Windrush immigrants – British citizens and legal immigrants – have been treated disgracefully, and that current wrong should be righted. But Savid Javid didn’t include these in his statement – he talked of illegal immigrants, which valid Windrush individuals are not.

What Lammy seems to be saying is that seeking to hold illegal immigrants – not to mince words, criminals – subject to the same the standards of compliance with the laws of the land as the indigenous population because of events which were abolished in the Empire in 1833 is somehow abhorrent. The guy is as harmless as he is ineffectual, but he does need to reign in the wilder excesses of his associations, or he simply looks stupid.

The Oxford English Dictionary has of ‘paranoia’ “.. mental condition characterised by delusions of persecution”. His hyperbolic, irrelevant and patently unsupportable statements seem to meet that definition well.

EU vacuum test

The picture shows the Nace HD14 Vacuum Cleaner, which Grumpy rather likes. It is sold by Walmart in the US, and presumably after the UK is free of the bonds of the EU, might conceivably be available in its UK subsidiary, ASDA.

Importantly, the (hypothetical) situation provides a key test for the post Brexit structures. If the UK decided that it was happy to have this imported (and why not?) and a ‘Customs Partnership’ applies. what would stop Grumpy from taking this over to the his holiday cottage in in Ballylickey, Eire, since there is no border ?

The issue here is that the HD14 has a 1000 watt motor, which is banned under EU legislation, so how is this anomaly to be resolved ?

The test for Brexit is whether we take back control of (amongst other things) our Laws and Borders. If the UK decided to allow 1000 watt cleaners, how could this possibly work? It’s clearly, to quote the Mogg, a ‘cretinous’ concept.

This could only be resolved by aligning UK standards with EU standards, over which parliament would have no control – and this doesn’t seem to pass the test. The likelihood is, however, that Theresa May has left this minor detail out of her rhetoric, and hopes to slide it in under the radar.

So, citizens, whatever comes out of the tedious discussions, the simple check to apply is whether they would be free to buy a product which didn’t comply with EU rules – the vacuum cleaner test. So far, it fails.

Kinnock is a byword for arrogance

Neil Kinnock has said that Jeremy Corbyn will commit a “serious evasion of duty” if he does not change course on his current Brexit policy. He also described anyone who did not agree with his views as being guilty of “infantile leftist illusion”.

In doing so, he joins a growing band of politicians, including Osborn, Cameron and others who, rather than present a rational argument, seek to close it down by attacking the intelligence or sanity of anyone who does not subscribe to their view of life – it’s an old ploy of ‘attack the man and not the ball’, perfected by the current incumbent of the White House (remember ‘little Marco’ ?). Apart from being an intellectually bankrupt approach, it displays breath-taking arrogance. Grumpy is of the view that, when politicians told the populace in the run up to the 2016 referendum that citizens would be stupid to vote leave, they went out and did just that out of sheer bloody mindedness.

His injection may have had more weight if Kinnock himself was not such a abject loser and serial failure. Remember, the man has never been in government, and presided over two defeats for his party (of which he was leader), and the 1992 conference in Sheffield demonstrated his tendency towards self-aggrandizement. He has no possible qualification to make such proclamations.

Following what should have been a humiliating experience in electoral defeats, he was appointed to various lucrative sinecure posts, and entered into the privileged and tax-payer funded European gravy train structures that he purported, in earlier times at least, to despise. However, he was presumably enjoying the excesses of the EU lifestyle too much to allow principles to stand in the way of taking the citizens shilling.

In 2005, he further demonstrated his lack of any principles when he was ‘elevated’ to the upper chamber, an institution of which he had been a critic for most of his life – he had said earlier in life “The House of Lords must go – not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.” Once asked to join the club, however, he grasped he daily allowance and subsidised lunches earnestly – hypocrisy incarnate.

Kinnock’s characterisation of those who disagree with his Brexit views as committing a serious breach of professional standards, and indeed, being ‘infantile’, shows his self-indulgent myopia. Given the intellect, experience, standing and dedication to public life of many in government of the opposite view, it is an insult Kinnock should be ashamed to voice.

However, he is not and if readers want to see “infantile left wing illusion”, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TOgB3Smvro at the Labour Party election convention, fittingly held on the 1st April 1992; he hasn’t changed.

EU needs a history lesson

The BBC reported that EU diplomats ‘demanded’ that the UK should adopt a ‘one state two systems’ approach with Northern Ireland – keeping the province in the customs union while the rest of the UK quits it. They said this would copy what happened in Hong Kong – which Margaret Thatcher agreed would be handed back to China on condition it kept its own institutions and laws. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901294

Setting aside the bizarre notion of the EU having any right to ‘demand’ how the UK treats its territories, they clearly need a history lesson.

Hong Kong and its hinterland were never part of the UK, China being invaded by the UK in a war asserting its ‘right’ to be a state heroin dealer. In spite of the ‘holier than thou’ position on most topics adopted by the British establishment, the UK was undoubtedly the largest state sponsored and supported drug dealer in history, causing misery to millions whilst generating wealth for the British aristocracy.

To the point : Although as part of the spoils of war Hong Kong island was ceded in perpetuity to the UK, the hinterland – the new territories – were not, and were leased for 99 years from China. When the lease expired, Chinese sovereignty had to be reinstated and as retaining the island as an entity without the hinterland was not viable, the UK was forced to abandon the agreement extracted by force and withdrew. Mrs Thatcher was in no position not to agree to its return, and was lucky to extract any concession from the Chinese at all. Whatever, she was probably overjoyed to be rid of the pompous and odious Chris Patten, Governor at the time.

Attempting to conflate this situation with Northern Ireland is pathetic, desperate and ignorant, and should be dismissed without discussion by David Davies.

Numbers that don’t add up

According to the Guardian newspaper (or more precisely Dr Frances Ryan opining therein)

“In 2018 Britain will be on the cusp of a new era of child poverty. As universal credit, “two-child limit” tax credits and child benefit freezes set in, the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts the next five years will see the number of children living in poverty soar to a staggering 5.2 million (or 37% of all children). That’s the highest percentage since modern records began.

It’s grim enough that a wealthy 21st-century nation has children diagnosed with rickets because they haven’t got enough to eat. But unless something is done this country will lose hard fought for gains: the IFS calculates that, as Conservative cuts set in, all the progress made over the past 20 years will be more than reversed”

However, the Guardian (in another article) states “On average, children are given a {phone} handset at the age of 11 but nearly one in 10 has a phone at less than half this age”, whilst according to the Daily Mail,

“… with 90 per cent of Brits aged 8-14 now owning a mobile phone. Nowadays, over half (52 per cent) of children under the age of 10 also have mobiles, with 10 being the average age that kids get their first phone“

These numbers plainly don’t square, unless a large number of children have an iPhone 7 in one hand and the crust they just foraged from a dustbin in the other.

The issue is almost certainly with on the one hand questionable definitions of poverty and on the other (in the case of phones) with what statisticians call ‘selection bias’. But the responsibility for determining this is left to the reader – the author sees no responsibility to do so in the determination to promote their subjective perspective.

The problem with reporting in most newspapers today is that objectivity, transparency and accuracy has been lost to conveying a message, inevitably spun to suit the biases of the author. Journalism is no longer about facts.

Lyin’ Gove and plastic bags

Loath though Grumpy is to borrow one of Mr Trump’s epithets, he feels that after a broadcast by Michael Gove on the Today Program on 19.04, “lyin'” is the only accurate description of certain of his statements in an interview.

Gove, whose career seems to have taken progressive steps downwards since the Department of Education, is probably bored at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA); the simple fact is that there is very little to do there, since more or less every aspect of its activities is determined in Brussels.

To give some illusion of usefulness, he has now announced a consultation (as opposed to action) on plastic drinking straws and other minor items (hardly world shaking stuff) , but the pinnacle of his political career at DEFRA thus far has concerned plastic shopping bags, in that it was an ‘action’ as opposed to a ‘consultation’ (oh, how managing such trivia must sting…). It is on this topic that this post is concerned.

To the point: Lyin’ Gove repeatedly stated in the interview (available on www.bbc.co.uk) that he had introduced a ban on plastic bags. In fact there is no ban on plastic bags; there is charge per bag in the UK levied by all shops with more than 250 employees, this charge going to the shop. It is inconceivable that the Minister in charge of DEFRA was somehow under the illusion that he had introduced a ban. Hence, it must be concluded that Gove deliberately lied repeatedly on National Radio, presumably with the goal of making himself sound more positive having just been lambasted by the interviewer for merely setting up a consultation (the old ‘long grass’ ploy) on straws.

What is galling is that Gove chose to make these untrue statements betting that they wouldn’t be picked up by either the interviewer or listener. To do that sort of lyin’ requires a certain type of arrogance and disdain for electors. ‘BAD!!!!’, as Trump would tweet.

The mystery of the non-selfie selfie

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘selfie’ as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media”. Although countless millions are taken every year, the ‘selfie’ is also a tool widely used by the internet self-publicists of the Kardashian variety.

The vast majority of these women (a significant proportion of which have what might be called a feminist bent) one imagines would typically empathise with #MeToo. However, the photographs invariably involve themselves in various states of undress, showing as much flesh as possible without showing anything which would otherwise require (in the US at least) a black blob of modesty.

This exhibitionist behaviour (can it be anything else??) is normally described by the actors as ’empowering’, whilst presumably they would simultaneously denounce any male slavering over them as the spawn of Weinstein. Anyhow, that inherent contradiction of the feminist agenda (about which Grumpy has previously pontificated) is not the purpose of this post.

Rather, the contradiction here is that these ‘selfies’ show the (invariably) woman holding the very device which – if it were truly a “selfie”- would be taking the picture. They thus cannot be selfies (as the camera would not be in shot), and rather than being the impromptu snap the taker wishes to convey, there is clearly a photographer invited into the lady’s bathroom (and it always seems to be bathroom or bedroom, possibly to rationalise the state of undress) to take the unashamedly self-promotion shot.

Although one has to admire the Kardashian women’s commercial acumen for making million of dollars for merely displaying their infeasibly large arses, it gives Grumpy some satisfaction to imagine the presence of the photographer is because these vacuous (and generally less than beautiful) women are too thick to operate the phone themselves.