EU might ground UK planes ? Bring it on !

The airline industry and political remoaners have repeated stated that Brussels might ban British planes from flying to the EU post Brexit, accompanied by much wringing of hands at this threat.

If this is intended as a threat, it’s a pretty weak one – bring it on! If Europe doesn’t accept UK planes because they no longer have EU certification (just like a plane from the US!) , then the UK should do the same with theirs. It would be a rather odd stance, based on the notion that UK planes are safe today, but tomorrow they would seemingly threaten carnage as aircraft plummet onto French cities.

In this game of poker, the UK has got a pretty strong hand.

For example, British visitors dominate tourist statistics to Spain; twice as many as the next largest group, Germans. In Tenerife, 80% of their tourists – 3.2 million in 2016 – arrive from the UK. In this war, the Spanish would lose out big time, and they may as well shut Tenerife South airport.

On the mainland, the busiest route (for example) into Barcelona’s airport is – you guessed it – to the UK. Long live the stag party.

Meanwhile, the Turks, Tunisians, Jordanians and Israelis would no doubt be very happy to accommodate additional millions of money spending Brits; one sunny beach is much like another.

Brexit negotiators need a bit more spine and aggression. They talk of ‘our European friends’, but but that doesn’t tie with the language of Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief hatchet man.

It would be a test for Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister of Spain, as to where his interests might lie.Would these be with the collective will of the 27 to punish the UK, or to to contemplate the huge blow to the Spanish economy in freezing the Brits out ? He may well choose to have a word in Barnier’s ear if this irrational, foot shooting, idea takes off, so to speak.

Meanwhile, if it’s floated to the UK negotiator David Davis, he should fold his arms, call Barnier’s bluff, sit back, and say “Bring it on”.

Out of work ? Ask a farmer for a job

In 1999 ‘duty free’ shopping in entry to the UK came to an end. All manner of vested interests loudly vocalised the end of a £4.5b market and forecast mass redundancies in cross channel ferry companies and the like, and massive rises in fares to compensate.

None of this came to pass, but it highlights how organisations seek to leverage their vested interests by latching on some vaguely related topic in the news, in that case the EU.

According to the Guardian (09.02.2018) the National Farmers Union is using Brexit and the EU as a whipping boy to forecast a repeat of labour shortages last year, “with food left rotting in the fields”. Blaming brexit, and consequent uncertainties about whether EU citizens will be able to provide the necessary manpower, the NFU is citing a possible shortfall of 4,000 people.

Coincidentally, at around the same time, the Office of National Statistics published unemployment figures for Q4 2017, which were 1.4m.

The confluence of these two things is puzzling to Grumpy. Farmers have jobs to fill, and 1.4 million people are looking for jobs, and presumably drawing some benefit paid for by tax-payers whilst doing so. So the question arise why farmers, government agencies and those without work can’t join the dots here?

If less than 3% of those unemployed were to take up these jobs, there would be no problem. Instead, we have to ask why farmers would prefer to have the hassle of recruiting and managing foreign language speakers from Bulgaria and Romania to do this? Just how long does it take to train someone to pick fruit or other crop ?

Could it be anything to do with the fact that these immigrant workers would be happy to work hours which breach EU limits, live in tents or multi-bunkered sheds, and take less than the minimum wage for cash in hand?

None of this adds up, but whatever the equation is, the government ought to be asking why there is no-one in more than 97% of those unemployed – 1.36m people – able to provide this labour.

Governments are the biggest purveyor of Fake News

Grumpy gasped as he read the missive from the thought police who now figure in the Government, and their hapless leader, T May.

When he looks back to the lies told by Governments ranging from outright porkies (U2 incident, Windscale, first (non) UK H bomb etc., through to the endless stream of disingenuous, planned to deceive, spin from Blair, Cameron and now May, he is dumbstruck.

“We are living in an era of fake news and competing narratives,“said Mrs May’s spokesperson.

Governments are way the largest source of fake news, as defined by themselves.

Narratives are competitive because some objective fact is presented in multiple ways – just listen to any Prime Ministers Question Time for proof. (“We are putting more money than ever into the health Service – fact” (May) or “Funds in the NHS have been reduced in real terms – fact” (Corbyn). So will May’s apparatchiks be deleting Corbyn’s Blog ?

The same side-kick also stated that they would be creating a “dedicated national security communications unit” would be charged with “combating disinformation by state actors and others”.

Students take note – you are young, and you are being dragged into a security state without realising it, of which the Stasi (check it out) would have been immensely proud to have constructed. Get TOR and PGP, scrap Facebook and keep off the grid.

Footnote: The only glimmer of hope is that like most politicians in power, May has to respond to events, normally in an ill-considered, knee jerk way. They have to ‘Do Something” to avoid attack by the opposition and opprobrium by the masses.

Fortunately, most of it never turns into reality, when either they realise it won’t work, it’s too expensive or the public focus has moved on. Immigration in the tens of thousands ? £350m a week for the NHS ? , a 7 day GP service ? (Grumpy can wait 3-4 weeks for an appointment) less than 4 hours in A and E?

All headlines , the illusion of a plan, and all fail.

Yvette Cooper wishes to abdicate government responsibilities

Grumpy has previously made arguably unfair comments about Yvette Copper, who in spite of being very smart, makes proposals that might be viewed as both authoritarian and unworkable.

An example might be her current war (as Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee) with the social media companies.

YC effectively wants Facebook and their ilk to ‘police’ social media and remove (presumably) illegal content from their systems. By what right does she seek to abdicate the role of government and outsource policing to a private (and indeed, foreign) corporation ? It’s breathtaking in concept.

If something is ‘illegal’, it’s up to the police and the CPS to prosecute the publisher, not Mark Zuckerberg. Anyway, that’s down to Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and not YC. ‘Illegal’ means that something has been held to be such in a court of law, and not at the behest and judgement of Facebook.

When YC says that she doesn’t understand that some content (which she presumably believes breaches the law) has not been taken down, surely she should address that question to Ms Rudd, who seemingly is not doing her job.

YC asked a Facebook employee in Committee “I’m kind of wondering what we have to do. “We sat in this committee in a public hearing and raised a clearly vile anti-Semitic tweet with your organisation.”

Yvette, the issue is not whether you (or grumpy) thinks it is vile, but whether its publication broke the law. If is was illegal, report it to the police and the law of the land will take its course. If it was not illegal, and just upsetting to a class of the populace, that’s democracy and freedom of speech. People can and do say things with which others disagree and possibly find upsetting – but banning that is censorship, possibly by a minority and possibly by the Executive … and then we are in China, not the UK.

The whole approach raises many thorny issues, about which there needs to be an informed and not hysterical debate.

Is Facebook a ‘publisher’ or a communications company, like BT ? It moves data from a source to a destination, and generates no direct content.

There is a short step to seeking to remove content which cannot be held to be illegal in a court of law, but which which some entity (Facebook, or the government) doesn’t like. Maybe pro-Brexit content might be banned because it clearly (In YC’s view) harms the economy?

Like all politicians, YC loudly vocalises (generally topical) problems for political purposes, and proposes solutions which possibly sound convincing but have insurmountable technical or economic barriers, and generally potentially serious unexpected side-effects.

James Joyce in Ulysses had the expression for this … “all wind and piss”.

Mysogeny is ok

Caroline Lucas has had to retract a suggestion she had floated of an all women cabinet to somehow seize power and solve the Brexit problem. She wrote in the Guardian (where else?) “Why women? Because I believe women have shown they can bring a different perspective to crises, are able to reach out to those they disagree with and cooperate to find solutions.”

She had to retract this (12.08.19) not because of this blatant gender discrimination, but because there wasn’t a single BAME woman on the list, and the usual suspects (someone with the initial ‘DA’ for example) raised voices to point this out. She apologised for including only white women in her proposed female anti-Brexit cabinet, saying she should have “reached out further and thought more deeply”.

Note the state to which we have arrived. It’s ok to suggest that a group of women can solve problems , and it IS ok to exclude men on the basis of some purely gender based shortcoming.. That doesn’t seem to be very representative at all.

The key issue here is that Lucas used logic which differentiates between the sexes on the basis that one gender has materially different genetic characteristics in behavioural attitudes (and hence capabilities) to the other, to the extent that one gender should be excluded from consideration where those characteristics are required for some task. I.e., gender discrimination is fine – as long as it is men that are being excluded.

Or does that give the green light to an employer who thinks women are not suited to a particular task in his company the right to exclude them from consideration ? Such an employer may well be faced with the situation Lucas was in a while ago, being strong armed by Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

The fact is that women, exercising their seeming right to be illogical and scatty, are happy to bear down (if the expression can be excused) on men who even stray towards a misogynist bent, whilst exhibiting an overt misandry towards men.

This asymmetry in approach needs to be contained (a topic on which Grumpy has opined before, citing Yvette Cooper), but maybe the fact that the Cabinet Office doesn’t have the facilities to enable them all to go to the toilet together (a uniquely female trait in Grumpy’s experience) may rein in her future would-be Cabinet make up.

Blackout oddity

The UK suffered a significant power failure in August 2019, bringing considerable disruption to travel for thousands of commuters and other travellers, leaving some stranded overnight hundreds of miles from home. However, the Director of Operations at national Grid said on television that the systems “worked well” following a “rare event”. Huh?

This event will no doubt be investigated by those who understand how the system should work and by politicians, who don’t understand, but who love to point fingers accusingly so they are seen to be ‘holding people to account’. Grumpy, from a uninformed position, found it rather odd.

Two power stations had problems, the combination of which resulted in huge disruption. One was at Little Barford, powered by two gas turbines generating 740MW in total. The other was the Hornsea wind array, which is under construction, but some turbines were connected to the grid in early 2019. It’s unclear from public sources what power was available, but only 28 out of 174 turbines slated for phase I of the project had been connected by May 2019. Since the maximum theoretical output of phase I is 1.2GW, on the generous side it might be concluded that Hornsea could have been adding around 195MW to the grid. The total from the two plants was thus a maximum of 740+195 = 935MW.

This needs to be put in context, as it implies that a loss of input of less that 1GW of capacity could severely disrupt the country. Peak UK demand varies between 55GW to 6oGW, so that’s just a loss of 1.6% of total generation capacity to cause huge disruption at substantial cost to individuals and business.

On the face of it, that seems like an incredibly narrow safety margin. Consider then, that a single typical coal fired station can generate 2GW, twice the loss of power for this incident.

The question which comes into Grumpy’s mind is whether this perilously small safety margin has been brought about by the rush to close coal fired stations in accordance with the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive, which is a death knell for such plants. Under this another 6GW will be taken out by 2020. Given that one sixth of that just stopped most transport in the Capital, it would seem both rash and premature.

Germany, on the other hand, has plants which still burn substantial quantities of even dirtier Lignite, and does not plan to close them all before 2038. Their government estimates that 40 billion euros will be paid to operators alone in compensation.

Given that the EU largest member is taking a more relaxed and pragmatic approach to complying, Grumpy suspects that the UK’s penchant for gold plating EU directives at an unwarranted cost to the economy has led to a situation where one of the most fundamental of all public utilities can be knocked out by lass than a 2% loss of generation capacity. Stock up on candles.

Why the gender pay debate is misguided and meaningless

The headline pay gap published by companies mandated by regulation is essentially meaningless. It is almost certainly misunderstood by the populace at large, and a depressing soapbox for a certain class of feminist MP harridans who make me groan whenever they appear on TV.

{See http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/gender-pay-gap-reporting/ Now imagine a company which employs 1000 female widget packers at £10 per hour and no men. The board however, is comprised of 5 men and 5 women who receive equal pay of £100 per hour. They all work the same full time hours. The average female wage under metric 1 of the regulations is £10.45, and the average male wage is £100 – enough to cause apoplexy; one can hear Caroline Harris, Welsh Labour MP repeating her tweet mantra ” This is astonishing and immoral. Shocking.” Well, Caroline, no it isn’t, they all get the same rate.}

However, Grumpy takes issue with the figures even when the goal of equal pay for equal job specifications is promoted. How does this make sense ? Just because a woman and a man get a different salary for the same role does not mean that this is either unfair or unequal.

This nonsense stems from the public sector, union supported concept of pay for a role, regardless of the capability of the role holder; it is a notion which fosters mediocrity and kills productivity.

Individual people in the same notional role can perform quite differently in both their output and contribution to team productivity. [Try sitting at the next desk to a mediocre moaner for 8 hours, supposedly doing the same ‘job’, and see how that pulls down all around them.] They may also have vastly different experience in the role, which may well justify differences.

When Grumpy used to set salaries, there could be several people with the same ‘role’ (job description, grade etc.) but each of whom made a markedly different contribution to the organisation. Since there were no ‘salary bands’, their salary was set on the basis of that contribution – and the gender was not a factor.

For those not performing, reviews and assistance sought to get them to improve, so there was a chance to do better, and receive better reward.

This also meant that people were rewarded and had a career path by doing what they were good at, rather than false promotions to some other task to which they were wholly unsuited, and being hemmed in by ‘role based’ salary bands.

Finally, if there is one thing guaranteed to motivate good people to start reading the job ads, it’s spending their days with unproductive, negative slackers who got the same pay as them; equal pay for different capabilities is bad for job retention.

Martin Schulze (SDP) gives the UK a no-cost exit route from the EU

The UK should root for Martin Schulz, Leader of the German SDP; if he gets his way, it would save us GBP 40 billion.

“I want a new constitutional treaty to establish the United States of Europe. A Europe that is no threat to its member states, but a beneficial addition.

A convention shall draft this treaty in close cooperation with the civil society and the people. Its results will then be submitted to all member states. Any state that won’t ratify this treaty will automatically leave the EU.”

Heh,we can get thrown out of the EU and won’t have to pay a penny.