Category Archives: News and Politics

Current affairs, madnesses of government, politics and politicians

May has failed

Recently, Grumpy wrote a post which contained mostly quotes from Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech, clearly setting our her goals for Brexit. (See Lancaster House tests )

The fact is, that no matter which way it is spun, whatever obfuscations are used, or however impassioned the speeches about ‘no other choice’ are, May has abjectly failed to deliver every goal she so clearly set out in that speech.

“take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain” – FAILED
“to strike the best trade deals around the world” (meaning not being in a customs union – her words) – FAILED
“protecting the common resources of our islands” (meaning being on control of our fishing waters – her words) – FAILED
“free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organisation” – FAILED
“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” (meaning having a time limit in the backstop – her words) – FAILED
“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 WILL FAIL.

The “national interest” threat should not cause leave MP’s to capitulate – this agreement should be rejected.

Fustian Hain

Peter Hain, a convicted criminal and incompetent manager of electoral donations, named Sir Philip Green as being the instigator of one or more Settlement Agreements under the ‘protection’ of parliamentary privilege. This doctrine was established in 1689, 328 years before #MeToo came on the scene.

The disclosure led to the usual culprits (Frank Field, Vince Cable and other ‘has beens’) raising the prospect of sanctions such as stripping his knighthood etc.

It’s still hard for Grumpy to assimilate just how far the whole #MeToo move to dismantle due process has travelled. Hain’s self-righteous and egotistical disclosure shames him, but the real issue is the shift towards the wish to destroy the lives and careers of people who have had no formal allegations, much less charges, made against them, and have not, unless and until found guilty in a court of law, committed any criminal offence

According to reports, some of the “serious” claims against Sir Philip include calling women ‘sweetheart’ or ‘love’ rather than using their names. This is simply unbelievable, and shows the southern and upper class nature of the ‘accusers’; they should go to Derbyshire where every shop assistant and bus conductor will call them, ‘duck’, ‘love’, ‘darling’ and so on.

So as a result of Criminal Hain’s action, Sir Philip will suffer public disapprobation and substantive cost when he has committed no offence other than to upset a few weak minded women incapable of managing their own lives, and trigger opportunistic attention seekers like Field to try and salvage their already dead careers.

If anyone had suggested to Grumpy 5 years ago that someone could go to jail for a wolf whistle, ogling a ‘hint of stocking’ of a secretary sunning herself on the grass, or calling someone ‘duck’, he would have considered it a parody. Not so – this is the madness of issue prioritisation into to which a society which sees 120+ stabbings a year in London has fallen.

Tourist piffle

Grumpy has written before about the European Tourism Association (a British entity in spite of its name) at http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/more-brexit-paranoia/ and their unsupportable Brexit paranoia projections.

They continue by now suggesting that post Brexit entry to (say) France would take 90 seconds per person longer than currently, and they extrapolate this to say that if there was just one customs officer at entry, it would take 5 hours extra to clear an aircraft landing 189 people.

It would be unusual for there to be just one officer on duty in most European countries for such an arrival, and normally the staff present vary with the expected plane schedules, so their example is (as before) scare-mongering by taking such an extreme example.

Lets assume that it takes 30 seconds to deal with an EU Citizen, then the total check time implied is 2 minutes per person. As a frequent traveller, Grumpy’s experience is that it has rarely taken 2 minutes or more in most countries he has travelled to to be cleared (with the possible exception of the USA, with all the fingerprinting and photographing, but that is not in prospect yet in Europe), so the Association’s projections rank with their previous doom-mongering.

Of course, if visas are involved, there would be extra time, but there is no suggestion that the EU intends to introduce these for Britons.

Of course Brussels may send out some edict to hold up Brits just to punish us, but holidaymakers will vote with their feet and go to Turkey, or Israel or wherever, where they will no doubt be sure to whisk these bearers of imported money through their borders quickly.

more #metoo whining

Jess Phillips MP raised the issue in Parliament (on 23/10/18) of the use of NDA’s by companies to “silence” victims (presumably female) of abuse from speaking out. The trigger for this was a High Court order preventing the Daily Telegraph from naming a businessman who was the focus of the case.

Phillips whined “It seems our laws allow rich and powerful men to do pretty much as they want as long as they can pay to keep it quiet.” This has been the whingeing moan of many ‘#MeToo’ victims, particularly in the US.

For example Zelda Perkins, a former Harvey Weinstein aide, moaned that it was it was ‘ridiculous’ that she was prevented from reporting the information covered by the NDA she signed.

Why ‘ridiculous’ ??? She gave a binding undertaking to not disclose material. This is bizarre, but particularly so in the case cited by Jess Phillips.

If someone signs an NDA (a common commercial document of which Grumpy has signed maybe a couple of hundred) they give an undertaking not to disclose material which is the focus of the NDA. To do that, to give an undertaking and then claim it is ridiculous to be bound by the undertaking they gave, shows that the moaner is either very dumb or has no integrity.

However, in spite of reporting by the Daily Mail, other reporting indicated that it was rather that victim signed what used to be called a Compromise Agreement and is now called a Settlement Agreement. This differs from a simple NDA in that (a) the document requires that the signatory has been instructed at no cost to them by a named lawyer independent of the other party as to the implications of signing, and (b) generally allows for payment to the signatory in exchange for waiving whatever rights are given up.

If this were the case, the victim was hardly bullied into signing; a lawyer had explained her options and the pros and cons thereof, and she accepted monies in exchange for giving an undertaking to be bound by the terms. This was hardly a gun to the head.

In such cases, what we have now is that the #MeToo set want to take money for giving an undertaking of confidentiality, and then whingeing about not being able to casually break this legally binding obligation for which they received an agreed recompense, and in spite of having being instructed by a lawyer as to the implications thereof.

Giving the drum banging that such people do about wishing the weight of the law to be brought down on an alleged abusers it is hypocritical in the extreme to simultaneously take money and ignore the legal agreement they freely entered into. Apart from wishing to extract public revenge, some of them presumably gain publicity and further monies – e.g. Stormy Daniels. This is moving towards the exploitative, which is so damaging for genuine victims that Jess Phillips rightly wants to protect.

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.