Category Archives: News and Politics

Current affairs, madnesses of government, politics and politicians

Gini in a bottle

What does the United States share with El Salvador, Rwanda, Bolivia and Zimbabwe ? The answer is a high Gini Index. The Gini Index is a measure of overall equality in a country, and values are compiled by a number of organisations, including, for example, the CIA.

In a society, if wealth flows to a small section of the society and the majority have an increasingly eroding quality of life, there become a point in a democracy where change takes place. At some point, in most democracies, the “have nots” can outvote the “haves”, and move to reverse the imbalance, whether by progressive tax laws or other means. Not so in the USA, where one man’s vote in Wyoming is very different to one man’s vote in California.

The 2020 election has brought this into sharp focus, where the US Senate will spend the next 4 years thwarting the popular vote by preventing Biden from implementing policies the population gave him the mandate to effect.

The issues are well known, and there is no point in Grumpy repeating them here, other than to note that in California 40m+ residents get the same number of senators (2) as some 700,000 in Wyoming. This has the potential – as the “have not” numbers grow – that huge unrest will be created because a Republican manjority is not only baked in, but they increasing perpetuate that by gerrymandering the voting constituencies.

Globalisation has added to the strains by allowing large corporates to export not only the jobs of low level workers, but their profits. From 1978 to 2019, the average salaries of CEOs grew by 1000% compared with just 12% for the average worker in that period,

The barriers to reform are insurmountable in the current structure, which means that pressure for change will build in society without any democratic means for release. Critically, in the next 15-20 years, America will see unprecedented change, in that the world will see played out the inevitable battle for supremacy between China and the USA. In many ways, the odds are probably against America; China has more than 4 times as many people, and the luxury of being able to plan ahead with a consistent strategy by virtue of the lack of constant political change and democratic constraints.

Niall Ferguson authored a book (“Empire”) on the growth and decline of British Empire, and “Colossus” which argued that the USA was heir to that mantle whether it declared it or not. More tellingly, as the aftermath of the first Trump reign closes, Ferguson noted in a conclusion that the history of empires shows that most collapsed in a generation or less, but – as the American inequality Gini escapes from its bottle – that collapse came not from opposing blocks, but from within the empire itself.

Hutton dogma

Journalist Will Hutton has a distinguished career, but in common with many journalists, communication with others is unidirectional. They write, they speak, they opine, and occasionally they debate. What they seemingly don’t have a lot experience with is negotiating.

Hutton was pontificating on the various interchanges with the EU in relation to final pattern of Brexit (a misnomer – we have left the EU and it’s over). He was highly critical of some form of agreement which approached anything like ‘no deal’, and lambasted David Frost and others for not concluding an agreement.

But no deal means, no deal. There are two parties and one of those parties cannot unilaterally effect a ‘deal’. No deal simply that means they can’t find common ground within their negotiating parameters. If all frameworks proposed violate the bottom lines of one or both parties, there can be no agreement.

Hutton, and most remainers don’t understand this simple business truth. You can always “agree” by capitulation. So If the EU said “you can have just 1% of fish from British waters or no deal – our final position” . Where is the negotiation? It’s not a failure of the negotiators if there is no agreement because the parties cannot agree within their solution constraints. Hutton would of course say “take it” ? The only logical outcome of Hutton’s approach – no deal is not acceptable – is that we accept whatever the EU decide if we want a deal. Negotiating principle 101 is broken – the determination to walk away from the table if real (as opposed to ‘ploy’) red lines are breached by some proposed agreement. Every negotiator needs a “walk away” scenario.

Whatever is decided with the EU now will have a generational effect on the UK. Do we in essence cede sovereignty to to the EU or not ? Do we have the some responsibilities of sovereign government delegated to France or Germany? Should disputes be resolved by a foreign court in which we have no participation? these are the stark choices for the UK.

The whole essence of negotiation is to have a bottom line – an “or else”. David Frost knows that if there no overlapping set of positions it’s their deal or no deal. NO businessman or government would or should accept that, and neither should UK Limited.

Law – what law ?

Labour (along with a motley assortment of remainers and of course the SNP) has predictably got into a flurry over the Internal Market Act and the assertion that it will ‘break international law’. Their feigned horror that the UK will become an international pariah in so doing is couched in words that imply (for the benefit of the casual listener or uninformed) that (a) there is some coherent codification of such global laws, and (b) that there is some body that might impose sanction on an ‘offender’.

Neither of these things appears to be the case. To quote Wikipedia, International Law operates “largely through consent, since there is no universally accepted authority to enforce it upon sovereign states“. Any enforcement authority is rather less defined than that of the local magistrate fining a drunk. Further, the claim that the UK will lose all international standing as a trustworthy party has a whiff of hypocrisy about it.

One body for enforcing law pan-nationally is the International Court of Justice (ICJ). A casual glance shows, for example, that their rulings went against the UK (on the Chagos Archipelago) and over the years the UK government has found every way to avoid complying with those rulings. Indeed, the UK rejected the ruling of the ICJ as having no authority in the matters at hand. The issue was rights of the indigenous islanders against Uncle Sams’s shilling for having the nuclear air base of Diego Garcia sited there. The labour party (in the shapes variously and particularly of Harold Wilson, JackStraw, David Milliband and Lord Falconer) and never seemed to bother about the injustices they heaped on the Chagos islanders in the face of ICJ rulings. So much for ‘International Law’ as far as Labour is concerned.

The Conservative party endorses these injustices. Not only did the UK reject the ruling of the ICJ, the UN overwhelmingly passed a motion that the UK should allow the islanders to return in 2019; the UK ignored this on the basis that it was non-binding. Consideration if morality or trustworthiness was certainly not raised over these matters by any of the current bleaters over BoJo’s move.

Another source of cross border treaty ‘enforcement’ is possibly the Vienna Convention on treaties, which MP’s said provided a framework for the validity of the EU/UK Withdrawal Agreement. Is this universally recognised? Well, no, because Iran and San Salvador are not signatories – as indeed is the position with the United States, which has never ratified it. So the world’s largest military and economic power sees no reason to even become a party to such structures to govern international treaties. [The US also withdrew as a signatory from the International Criminal Court, presumably on the basis that its military excesses might be held to account].

As to what the rest of the world might think about expedient breaking of treaty agreements, we just have to look westward at the USA’s view of treaties and enforcing organisations; one can list JCPOA, START, NAFTA, WHO and the Paris Accord to see that the USA feels it is perfectly ok to unilaterally pull the plug on something they signed with another country when it suits them. It is therefore all the more surprising (and irritating) that geriatric Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the House of US Representatives) has somehow forgotten all these acts when threatening the UK on trade if it signs an act in our sovereign parliament – one would have thought that she had enough troubles at home without criticising the UK about an agreement to which the USA is not a party, and none of their business, other than for political expediency with the Irish lobby.

{Of the many analyses of the Chagos situation, comprehensive references can be found in https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/decolonising-the-special-relationship-diego-garcia-the-chagossians-and-angloamerican-relations/258A631202B296843E1373A4A81CC444 ]

How to Improve school standards – cut classes

Improving academic A-Level standards over time has been a constant goal over the last few years, but it would seem that schools have been taking the wrong approach to achieve this.

Schools were closed by COVID from mid-March 2020 to the time of writing in August 2020, meaning that pupils missed a term and half of normal classroom teaching. Efforts were made to close this gap by ‘Zoom’ and similar mechanisms (but only for those with access to communications and equipment, and a place to study quietly at home – tough for kids in a ‘two up, two down’) but it would appear that, far from being disadvantaged by this, pupils’ attainments reached new heights.

In private schools, the more esoteric subjects like Latin and Greek saw a year on year improvement of 10% in the number of A/A* results – an unheard of jump. However, for more run of the mill subjects, the improvements of teacher assessed grades were, in the words of the regulator, Ofqual, ‘Implausibly high’. Based on the assessments, A level results generally improved overall by 12%; those attaining A/A* levels would increase to a new level – a breathtaking improvement in educational standards.

One of Ofquals tasks is to maintain consistency across years to allow (for example) in variability in the difficulty of question papers, and so it tweaks the pass percentages by grade band. However, this year this process was inadvertently more transparent, leading to the downgrading of many of the teacher estimated results. Inevitably, there were howls of protest from education liberals, teachers, Labour and of course, pupils.

Gavin Williamson, Secretary of State for Education, backed down in the face of the howls, and accepted the higher, subjective and inconsistent teacher assessments, learning yet again that if there is one thing worse that getting everything wrong, it’s admitting it and doing a U-turn, as you still get flak even having fixed the problem.

If we follow the logic of these attempts to square a logical circle with regard to results, the strategy next year should be to have classes in the latter half of the year and then let kids study at home (or in the park) and do a few Zoom lessons until spring, and then award results based on ‘implausibly optimistic’ teacher assessment.

In the event that some academically undeserving youngster does get a place on a degree course they have no realistic chance of completing, what happens then ? Make a 2.2 degree the lowest degree level? Fortunately, commerce is not subject to the constraints that politicians are, and ex-pupils – who have been done an immense disservice by these events – will learn the hard way with their P45 that their employer won’t be inflating their performance at work to keep them happy, and will show them the door.

In Grumpy’s eyes,the standout individual in this saga is Angela Rayner, shadow First Secretary Of State. This woman, who left school pregnant at 16 without so much as Girl Guide badge as a qualification said just a few months ago that teacher predicted grades were not accurate and caused injustice. Now, with a U turn which makes Gavin Williamson’s look like a sideways glance, she was recently doing the rounds urging a return to teacher assessments. What changed ? Nothing, but it does illustrate that politicians with no obvious qualification to comment hope the electorate have short memories and that there are no bounds to the extent of their hypocrisy.

Foot shooting

Grumpy’s father had a litany of expressions with which he would precede some view of life or the world. One favourite started “what I don’t understand, and never will”… This expression came to mind recently when Grumpy was contemplating the tendency of government ministers to make pronouncements that were self-evidently hostages to (inevitable) fortune. The part that Grumpy doesn’t understand and never will is that any possible benefit from the proclamation was totally opaque; there was no rational reason to having taken the risk.

Grumpy got more than halfway through his rather mundane career before he learned the value of ‘shutting up’ in a business environment. People generally don’t like silence and they feel a strong compulsion to fill it by saying – well, something.

This is greatly amplified in politicians. Firstly, they tend to like to be the one talking and not listening (see Trump here as a perfect example); messages need to be got across. Secondly, they try to generate ‘soundbite’ or two, simple enough for even readers of the Daily Mail. Thirdly, they fear (quite wrongly) minimalism in communication will be equated with a vacancy of ideas by the electorate and press.

The issue is that normally they fall in to the trap of seeking to quantify the unquantifiable; of using numbers in their statements about outcomes when there is in fact not only huge uncertainty about same, but where they are mostly outwith their control.

David Cameron once made the rash statement that immigration would be limited to the “tens of thousands”. No doubt he had in his mind that 99,000 was within that limit and he had some leeway (wrong), but the opposition was no doubt sharpening their knives for anything remotely approaching that (‘tens’ is not ‘almost 100’). Although at least it should have been technically in his control, two factors did for him, namely the EU and lack of competent management.

However, Matt Hancock had absolutely no good reason for forecasting how many COVID tests would be done by what date ,or how many gowns would be delivered by when. There was a perfectly good and defensible “Sir Humphrey” statement that “an adequate number of tests / gowns would be available to prevent any shortages”. Instead he kept on quantifying that over which he had no control and each iteration of unknowable numbers was yet another target on his chest

Worse, it hard to imagine what drove Boris to declare all would be normal by Christmas. It’s a pure case wanting to hear himself say something positive, filling a silent gap, and looking for a soundbite.

The outcome is pretty near inevitable. It is extremely likely that things will not only not be back to normal at Christmas, they may be worse than the current state by virtue of winter flu. He must surely realise that this adds up to bad headlines and a ‘PM’s Question Time’ thrashing.

Why do they do it ? The impulse to shoot oneself in the foot like this is something that Grumpy doesn’t understand and never will.

Holding to account Part 1

The mantra so beloved of politicians (current and retired), organisations / ‘influencers’ with some focussed agenda, and ex-officers from public service is about holding an incumbent political party, organisation or agency ‘to account’.

There was a time when having oversight was positive for society, but that was in a era where any criticism was aimed at a policy, not individuals i.e. ‘the ball and not the man’; it was most valid and useful where those levelling such criticism were prepared to propose alternative courses of actions or strategies.

However, increasingly political environments have become much more polarised and hence divisive, and where there was valuable oversight, the emphasis now is to impugn the integrity, intellect and even physical characteristics of those with whom the protagonist disagrees, Nowhere has this been more evident that in the court of King Donald.

Politically, opposition has become completely focussed on looking for avenues to tarnish both man and ball as the end purpose in itself. This is no longer productive. The same trait applies through visible public life, whether by union leaders, TV interviewers, pundits, what the Daily Mail calls ‘experts’ and so on. The assumption is now that every decision or action of the opponent is flawed and self-evidently wrong, and those involved in decision making are mentally challenged, downright incompetent and probably corrupt adulterers too.

However, too often this is a shield for either having no credible alternative policies to voice, and more particularly the knowledge that any alternatives will be subject to the same vitriolic attacks from the erstwhile victims; consider, who knows what labour’s policy on Brexit was before the last election ?? Easier to slag off rather than propose.

In politics, religion, management and life there are those that believe (often passionately) A and those that (equally passionately) believe B. As society becomes more polarised, there is, more often that not, little common ground. Dissent and disagreement is baked in. But ultimately, either by war or elections, one or other side’s broad views prevail, albeit often with some compromise of their original position to maintain social stability.

Grumpy yearns for the days when ‘oversight’ had some value, and generally accepted by both targets and observers as valid comment; and, whether or not there was agreement, at least the sides generally showed civility and respect for each other. In the era of Trump, however, belittling, denigrating and the use of personal insults have become the new norms of politics, and it does not augur well for stability – and indeed fairness – in society.

Hong Kong Hypocrisy

As Grumpy has written before, the history of the British in Hong Kong is not one which brings them any respect. Britain went to war with China twice to enforce their role as a state driven narcotics dealer, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Chinese citizens. Having acquired control of the territory by acts of war, its citizens were then subject to rule by a foreign power without any democratic participation.

So for a century and a half no Hong Kong citizen ever had the right to vote for those who ruled them. The British, in an extraordinary act of breathtaking hypocrisy, then sought at the end of their occupation to dictate to a state recovering its own lands that its citizens should have freedoms that they never had for 156 years under their British oppressors.

China is now the latest scapegoat rolled out by Donald Trump to avoid taking any responsibility for the deaths of 100,000 Americans. The US (and other countries) point to Beijing implementing by edict laws covering “treason, secession, sedition, subversion”, as being indicative of the sort of repressive laws that could be expected from a communist government. Grumpy is no apologist for China or communism, but the facts deserve to be stated in an balanced rather than Trumpian way.

1 Article 23 of the ‘Basic Law’ (essentially a constitution for Hong Kong) states that the HKSAR Legislative Council “… shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of
treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government
(CPG) …”. Critically, the UK government agreed this term in the hand over arrangements. However, the Legislative Council have failed to implement this agreed provision in Hong Kong Basic Law, so after 17 years of inaction Beijing has stepped in to implement the joint agreement.

2 The Basic Law also sets out in Articles 27 and 39 the freedoms that citizens would enjoy for 50 years, which are no less than the denizens of the UK or the USA have, bar universal suffrage. The lack of laws covering treason etc. (which every country has) was because the Basic Law supplanted the then PRC law, which is why Article 23 was included.

3 Trump and UK detractors have focused on the words of Article 23 as representing a repressive regime. Yet (for example) sedition remained a crime on the UK statute books until 2009, and treason remains a crime. In the US, the legal code in Chapter 115 covers “Treason Sedition and Subversive activities” , essentially identical to those proposed by Beijing. The man (to use his own words), seems to be “as dumb as a rock”.

4 The US and elements in the UK push a scenario where it was envisaged the end situation in Hong Kong from ‘one country, two systems’ would be universal suffrage. This is pure sophistry; surely no-one, including the last governor, Chris Patten, surely imagined that there would be universal suffrage in 2047. This is certainly not part of the Basic Law. Hong Kong is, and has been for 20 years, both ‘Chinese’ and ‘China’.

5 Britain retains a colonial mindset and an attitude of arrogance which should have gone with the ending of Empire. Perhaps it is because the transfer of Hong Kong was the last vestige of empire that approach this still lingers. The initial acquisition of Hong Kong was a shameful episode in a long list of acts of war undertaken to brutally subjugate foreign peoples for domestic commercial gain by both successive sovereigns and the aristocracy, albeit ennoblement was generally the result of such acts.

6 The UK, with little land and few natural physical resources and now no empire to pillage, must look to see its future evolve by the soft resource of intellect, where it has a history of which it can be proud.

Footnote : Lest the reader might venture that Grumpy had no knowledge of the region or of Chinese culture, he would note that he was a director of a Group headquartered in Hong Kong, and he travelled there frequently over the years. His general impression of the mindset of the Chinese staff was that they were less interested in politics than having a good job and the opportunity to earn high wages,

Kier’s odd appointment

Grumpy was surprised at the appointment by Kier Starmer of David Lammy as the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. Lammy’s ‘paper’ CV is fine (but not exceptional) but surely many will be questioning the wisdom of this decision.

Given the sensitive nature of the role, one would assume that the job specification calls for someone who is balanced in outlook, not divisive, cautious in public utterances, and capable of instilling confidence of their neutral and considered approach in the majority of the populace. These characteristics are surely crucial in maintaining respect of the law in the eyes of the bulk of citizens.

Grumpy does not need to list the many controversial pronouncements Lammy has made over the years – they are well documented. Suffice it to say that they indicate a person whose inherent characteristics would not meet the criteria listed above.

What, for example, is Mr Lammy’s view of the Supreme Court of the UK? 10 white, middle aged men and two women; 10 went to Oxbridge and two to other prestigous universities. They appear to represent the very antithesis of of his presumed views on the mechanisms for the discharge of justice. Will he be seeking change here ?

Will he control his tendency to promulgate unproven rumours and conspiracy theories (such a as police cover up of Grenfell deaths), but continue to avoid scrutiny by (borrowing from Donald Trump) substantiating them only by quoting dubious hearsay ?

Grumpy suspects that Starmer may well have cause to regret this choice as a result of the inevitable distractions his new Secretary’s utterings will surely bring.